Free Will with Sam Harris (Part 2) [Video] || The Psychology Podcast

[Music] [Music] okay well there are all all of the causes of what i'm conscious of are first unconscious right so like you know i'm not aware of what my brain is doing at the synaptic level but let's just be again i i'm not even a doc i'm not a i'm certainly not a dogmatic materialist i'm not you know like i can bracket the ontology here but let's just talk in terms of materialism to to and and dennett certainly is a materialist right so most most scientific compatibilists are materialists so let's just grant materialism and it's it's deterministic flavor for this conversation right it's like my mind is what my brain is doing in this moment right so if i'm going to get to the end of the sentence it's because because of micro changes at the level of neural circuits that accomplish that right so the the grammar of human english the grammar of human language and in my case english is somehow encoded in the physical substrate of my brain as it would be in the physical substrate of a robot that was also speaking english successfully although it just would be a very different kind of computer so what we're talking about is information processing in a physical system in my case the computer is made of meat in a robot's case you'll be made of silicon and the [Music] in neither case is there something extra which is emerging or being added that is giving a degree of freedom beyond just the the impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment right there is i think there is let me like pinpoint precisely what i think that extra thing is you know cognitive control are inc includes things like implementation intentions if we could build a program a robot to have the capacity for implementation uh intentions and what i mean by that is error correction ability to take its current um because you're right we you know in the moment you know um we don't really have free will but we have the capacity to shift our behavior in the future so that we can learn from our mistakes so that we can even make moral reasoning decisions you know turtles chimps apes and robots right now don't really have a great capacity for moral reasoning about something an action they already need so they can change their behavior in the future to me that conscious control is free will it's free will um but i i don't think i can convince you to use that label for that phenomenon is that right well it's again you're either changing the subject or like either you're going to interact with the thing people think they they really think they have right or you're going to or you're going to grant okay they don't have that and then we're going to talk about this new thing i mean so i like there's there's no doubt in my mind that there is a difference that's that's rational to care about between um you know voluntary and involuntary action or an ability to regulate emotion or not i mean there are people who have brain damage who you know just blurt out everything they're thinking they can't stop doing that right so and psychopaths are moral blind morally blind right yeah they're they're people who are ethical or people are unethical they're people who are sensitive to certain things and not we could you know you could be more or less intelligent like all of this all this is descriptively true of human beings and none of it requires free will in the in the common sense to to understand or or to acknowledge um so and i so so i can conce i can conserve the data of human experience all the while repudiating free will as a as a incoherent idea um many people worry but but that what is truly novel about what i'm arguing for is that you can recognize this subjectively too so the the only reason why we're talking about free will the only reason why anyone cares about this topic is because people are having an experience they think they're having an experience of being a self that can author its actions they the so the the the experience of having free will and experience of being a self being a subject in the middle of experience being a thinker in addition to thoughts themselves right or feeling that one is those things that's just those are two sides of the same coin right it is the you know people think that they are a subject in the middle of experience they don't feel identical to experience itself they feel like they're they're appropriating experience from a point of view internal to their bodies i mean the truth is most people don't even feel identical to their bodies they feel like they have bodies they feel like they're in a body they feel like they're a subject in their head most of the time right now that is a you know meditation successful meditation absolutely proves to you from the first person side from the experiential side that that's a false point of view right and that is the point of view that gives motivation to this claim about free will because that is what it that that's how you feel when you feel you are the conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do because you're not noticing that the next thing you think or intend to do is simply coming out of the darkness behind you that you can't inspect right and that it is genuinely mysterious and so like so you take a moment of conscious deliberation i could decide well um uh you know i have a glass simplest possible case i have a glass of water on the desk and i could decide to pick it up and take a drink now right or i could decide to wait right this is a this is a the prototypical case of me being in the driver's seat you know i'm free to do this there's no coercion no one's no one's got a gun to my head no one's saying don't pick it up or pick it up right inner compulsion yeah right right yeah i don't have some kind of uh uh you know compulsive water drinking behavior i mean so it is but you know i'm and i'm a little bit thirsty but i can choose to resist my thirst right so i'm conscious of thirst but then i can i can consciously decide to resist and that seems to be me prosecuting my freedom there right but the more you pay attention to what it's like to make that choice out of your own free will the more you will discover that it is absolutely mysterious in every particular why and how you do what you do when and how you do it right like i absolutely from from subjectively i have no idea why or how i do any of these things and i have no idea why why or how one particular moment becomes decisive right so like i could be telling myself all right no you're gonna wait you just drank you just you just had a sip a few minutes ago you know you just wait right and then i think well then actually that's no i'm just going to move now right no no no no no wait wait no no no i'm going to do it no matter how many times i go back and forth right vetoing the decision that almost just got made and then breaking through the veto and instead of a i'm just going to pick up a glass of water right that every increment of that subjectively is totally mysterious totally and and the thresholds that are being crossed or not crossed to to make a thought or intention behaviorally active or or insufficient to provoke behavior right all of this is totally compatible with some guy some evil genius in another room typing in the instructions to my completely determined and and coerced brain you know in this case using synaptic you know potentials but in the case of a robot using the whatever code the programmers put in there um it is i there is i am a puppet who cannot see his strings there right no matter how and again i'm not none of this is to deny that certain outcomes in life are better than others and worth wanting none of this is to deny that there are ways to get what you want out of life and ways to fail to get what you want none of this is to deny that there there is just a kind of a vast landscape of of experience and we need to navigate toward one part of it so as to be happy and functional and we should avoid navigating to another we should avoid being captured by another part which leads to you know the worst forms of misery all that's true and all we can we can talk about you know how to do all of that and all of that includes the prospect that people can learn people can improve themselves people can can you know it's like first i first i didn't know how to play the guitar and then i did and there's there's a pathway between point a and point b right all of that's true none of it requires free will and none of it requires that we overlook the the absolute mystery of our subjectivity of our conscious objectivity in each moment right like it is it is just totally inscrutable yeah every part of this like like literally you don't you do not know what you will think next right in what sense is that a basis for free will you do not know what you will think you do not know what it will take to make it behaviorally active you do not know you do not know what is happening when you're second second guessing the thing you just thought and that becomes behaviorally active you don't if something in you then just suddenly pulls the brakes and says no no no i can't say that you don't know why that happens when it does and when it works when it does and when it fails when it does all of this is mysterious not just a little mysterious a hundred percent mysterious right you have no insight into it like this like the next thing like right like like the so the in so far like the the laughter where did it come from right i agree i agree you're mate you're making good points and i don't think what you're saying is wrong but i think you're confusing the hell it is to have no free will so i think you're confusing the hell out of people because i think that you made great points that the kind of free will that matters to humans we have all that you know and i think that's in an interesting product i see the difference between our projects all of a sudden because i don't think either of us are saying anything that's factually incorrect i think that you know i try to every day i try to like show people you know the kind of free will that matters to you as a cybernetic system you know you're taking like the ultimate universe perspective but from like a cybernetic perspective all we have are stating our initial state i'm also taking these subjective so so it's just not true that people understand this almost no one understands this dan dennett does not understand this he obviously obviously doesn't understand this he obviously feels like a self right and that's the that is the string upon which all of this controversy is strung right if you feel like me right that like most of the people listening to me right now are thinking what the is he talking about i can like but here's what i'm not not my audience not my audience that voice in your head they get it yeah that says what the is he talking about that that feels like you that isn't you right like that is that's not a seller what do you mean it's not you it is it's you again you're you're a dualist when you say that it's no more you than than the bead of sweat that that drips down your forehead as you it is an object it isn't no i disagree people don't identify themselves with their hand but they identify themselves with their conscious desires and motivation so we can have gradations of things that people parts of our body that people identify themselves with certainly from the point of view of consciousness there's there's simply consciousness and it's contents like like i'm not saying that there aren't important distinctions in terms of what causally follows from certain contents i mean like the bead of sweat is a is is truly epi phenomenal for anything any other any project i care about right so it's not going to get a lot a lot of things done in the world and and my thoughts might but there's no causal property of the sweat to like being able to uh realize your loftiest ambitions in life it's true that's true but let me take my loftiest ambitions right like like there there are and this is why this is why the concept of free will makes no sense uh so let's say i here's a project to which i could be purposed right i could decide that i want to become a a classically trained musician right now because there are people who have given their lives to that project right just from from the earliest years of their lives right as you know um and then they're people who late in life presumably decide okay i've done a lot of things and i know i'm not going to be i'm never going to be mozart now starting at in my 50s but i you know let's just see what i can do here i i really i really want to do this right this is what i love what i love more than anything on earth is classical music right i love bach more than anything right okay i just that's true of somebody none of that's true of me right why not why don't why don't i care about bach right why don't i care more about classical music why when i when i do listen to music why is it almost never classical music right that all these things have reasons they have explanations causally right some some in my corner of the universe classical music is just not that interesting right it's not those those are the things that make you who you are though even if you don't know why they were caused by environmental and biological uh confluence grant oh yeah yes okay so so it's deterministic it's random it's something right it's some pattern of causation right but so what does it mean to say that i am free to take a deep and and uh really uh all-encompassing interest in classical music right now like i'm free no one's no one's telling me you can't apply to juilliard and really just get into this you know it's like like there's no one's saying no one's saying i can't give it a shot you're not completely free and there are constraints but i wouldn't go and say you have no no okay but but clearly i could i could decide to leave this podcast and spend the rest of the day listening to classical music trying to figure out which instrument i'm going to learn finding a teacher yes there are constraints we've got a coveted pandemic that i'm worried about so like i'm going to have zoom classes now in the cello right i can't i'm not gonna do it face to face until i get a vaccine right yes there are there are there are things in the world that i'm navigating around but there's nothing stopping me from just going all in on the cello from this afternoon forward just drop in everything i'll teach you i play chelsea you do okay my grandfather was in the philadelphia orchestra for cello awesome okay so all right so so i i i could i could absolutely do this i am free to do this right yeah this is my this is this is the stage upon which my free will is going to demonstrate itself right right right now but what's the point what's the book the problem is i have almost no interest in playing the cello or like so like i can't so it's a bit and the fact that i don't is something that i did not author it's a constraint it's a constraint for sure but we can one-to-one things this is where free will free will is not in the wanting when you're talking about devoting your life to playing the cello not wanting to play the cello is is a little bit of a constraint yes no it's a huge constraint you're right you're right but i think that you're not distinguished between first order goals and second order goals and i think that what gives us the free will as a human as species what you ask me what's that extra it's the wanting to want you know it's it's our capacity to use implementation intentions to get out of the bed and morning go to the gym even though we don't want to i don't want to get up in the morning and go i build a whole workout thing on my porch here i don't want to do it you know but i my freedom lies in my capacity to use my consciousness and my and change my environment in all sorts of ways where it's easier where the constraints aren't as big you don't see that as an important part of free will that matters to people well yeah i just see no reason to call it free will it's just so when i when i inspect what it's like to be me here yeah again when i think about myself from the first person side and when i triangulate on myself and think about myself from a third person side at no point does free will any version of it seem an apt to seem apt aptly applied to this situation like so i'm free to play the cello i am free to do it right there's no question so i thought yes i can talk about the difference between being coerced and not coerced that's a you know it's a political fact about me that i'm not coerced to play or not play the cello right um it's a social fact uh but you can still do it even if you're unmotivated right i can't account for why i don't want to play the cello or i want so many other things so much more that i functionally don't want to play i mean the truth is i want i potentially want an given an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of energy well then i i potentially want an infinite number of things right like all kinds of things are interesting and i would love to have all these skills that i don't have uh but i just don't i don't feel that it's just not when i rank order my priorities you know either consciously or or unconsciously and there can be a difference there obviously you know we can we can think we want certain things and tell other people we want certain things but act as though those things aren't you know anywhere near the top of our list of wants but i have no idea why i don't like classical music more than i do i have no idea why and i do have actually i do have the second order desire i wish i liked it more than i liked it i mean it would be it's it's more teach you i'll teach you yeah it's like i would be i think i would be a less of a philistine if i if i knew more about it you know i wanted to know more about it appreciate and certainly if i could play you know the cello that would be a wonderful thing to be able to do and yet i am as i am with respect to classical music now if i if if i if i decide if just imagine i decided by force of this conversation you said something in this conversation that inspired me to be different than i'm tending to be right like this this really would be a the the um really the the ultimate instance of free will because this would be a kind of you know just a surmounting of all my prior tendencies into this new uh commitment i could decide you know what scott you just on the base of this conversation i'm gonna take up the cello like right now i'm gonna do it you inspired me that's right yeah yeah yeah i see your point so just email me get i wanna give me the name of some someone who can teach me and i'm like i'm shopping for cellos right now right you know yeah i get your point when i look when what would it be like for me to experience that that sort of that that awakening in my own consciousness that's aimed in the direction of classical music and cello mastery right right that would be totally compatible with the evil genius in the next room saying all right let's we're going to give him the cello desire here he's go we're going to give him you know just turn to give him he's now going to be just fixated on on you know the difference between mozart and beethoven and it's all like just going to download the the the classical music infatuation program right yeah that would be what that would be compatible with it would not demonstrate anything like free will it it'd be like what came over me you know i've had i've had 53 years to discover in myself a desire to play the cello if i discover it right now what the has come over me right this this comes from outside of consciousness this is not a point i see it's not me but i'm still gonna you know because i know you don't like let's just agree to disagree so i'm really taking this seriously i think that what people you know you're using these extreme examples that sound good and and they prove a certain point but the point examples this is let me tell you what my point is water yes picking up a glass of water is not an extreme example and not extreme extreme was not the right word i take back extreme i take back extreme you're using examples that um that make you it sound like you've won an argument but let me just say what what my point was actually this people the cybernetic system wants to reach a goal that it desires so you're right you can pick examples where it doesn't but let's pick you know within the realm of freedom of things you do care about and you are motivated for don't you think that's a sensible uh sense of the term free will that you have the free will to make you know you want to write a book you want to write the moral landscape part two you know uh back to future party you know what um and and you write that book you know your capacity to write the book and to use your consciousness to make that a reality to exist in the world you don't see that as the kind of free will that people truly care about well do people care yes people care about realizing their goals in life right and there are causal ways to succeed at that and causal ways to fail at that right and that's all it's like yeah so learning to play the cello is not going to happen to me by accident right so my denying free will is not the same thing as endorsing fatalism where one would expect okay you know i mean this is this is how people misunderstand this criticism of free will they think well okay if i have no free will then why do anything why not just wait to see what happens right and so if i'm going to wait to see if i accidentally learn to play the cello we know what's going to happen there i'm not going to learn to play the cello right like so there's a the only way to learn is to intend to learn to practice to seek instruction all of that right so people care about outcomes in life that are worth caring about they want good relationships as opposed to bad relationships they want to understand things rather than be confused all the time all of that is but none of that requires free will to talk about right and that's um ultimate free will and behavioral regulation is part of it right like again there's a difference between someone who can can defer gratification for long enough to actually get something done as opposed to just you know gobbling up everything in the refrigerator the you know the moment they it presents itself um so it's it's all um but again all of that can be understood there are there are genuine paradoxes here which are interesting to think about which have ethical implications and which are completely ignored the moment you embrace the compatibilist framing here and also again and the subjective insight is completely ignored because what happens to you when you recognize that that free will doesn't make any sense subjectively or what has to happen to you in order for you to have that recognition is you have to recognize something about the way the consciousness or the way consciousness is and the way the mind is and it's incredibly freeing to recognize that right and and to recognize that is the antidote to a tremendous amount of psychological suffering right so let's say let's say i do something that is incredibly embarrassing right you know like i i say i i'm giving a public talk in front of 2000 people and uh you know i i spill my water over you know all of the actually i've done this i was at a public talk in front of 2000 people and knocked over a water glass and it just spilled over all the you know the the equipment that was you know connected to my microphone you know at that podium right right so um awkward what what reaction do i have to doing that right like how long do i stay embarrassed for well there's one one way of feeling about oneself and one's freedom to do otherwise and once you and just kind of the integrity of selfhood that leads one to feel like i'm i'm such a fool you know i'm just i'm like this moment says a lot about me right this is like how did i become such a schmuck who would get up for a public talk and knock his glass of water like and all these people see me they've seen me do it and maybe this is on video and you know and then so like now open the the bottomless pit of self-mortification and go as far down as you want right like that's that's a certain kind of person to be right you could also be someone who instantly notices that it's funny right like who sees it that'll be me that would be me enjoys it enjoys it from the point of view of the people watching it and and you could actually have the internal lightness about oneself in the moment so that it's just you you realize you you have a good story to tell later in the day and your wife is going to laugh at it and all of this is just more comedy right like so that like like no problem right like that's a different sort of person to be that has its own consequences um but another sort of person you could be is recognizing that that one in this case you didn't even you didn't obviously you didn't intend to knock the glass over it says basically nothing about you except the the the you know a failed moment of motor programming and um you know apart from your worrying that you might have some neurological disease that you know caused you to knock the glass over there's really nothing to think about any longer right there's just no if they just dry it you just like is there something to dry up you dry it up because you're well intentioned toward the whole project of maintaining the integrity of this institution but there's there's no self in the middle of this that just got exposed right there's just consciousness and it's contents and you're free you're like it is you're in a circumstance of total psychological freedom to just move on to the next moment without any rumination about the last moment and deliver the talk you were going to you you're going to deliver you're free to take that glass and move it out of the way so you're less likely in the future for a spill there's some intelligent response to this but there is no mortification there's no there's no place for it to land there's just you are you the next moment is is the world is truly born anew in the next moment if you will only let it be right the end and rumination and perseveration and this this this mechanism that is so common to just still be beating yourself your your non-existent self up over this last thing that happened which you didn't which you the self that is being beaten up didn't truly author because it just happened right uh that is uh there's a spell to be broken there and it can be broken and when you break it you don't know what anyone's talking about when they're talking about free will i mean really you don't you can't you can no you lose sight of the problem right and but yes but there's one piece to add here because there are paradoxes that are interesting responses the responsibility paradox is is real and i i i still don't know what i think about it and it's just and and perhaps you've heard my example here but it's like it's with with um uh and there's something like any kind of a written debate with dan dennett came up um this this idea of you take the prototypical case of of um kind of behavioral control of a golfer trying to sink a short putt right and when you're a bad golfer and you fail to sink a short putt well you know you know everyone looks at that and says more or less well of course you know you're a bad golfer and what do you expect you're going to make some of those you're going to miss a lot of those right but if you're tiger woods or some great golfer you really should make that putt right and it it would it would seem like like that's it would seem appropriate to beat yourself up over not over missing it because you know you make up a putt of that length you know 990 times out of a thousand times right and so what does it mean to say that you should have made that putt if you're a great golfer um and that you know this is just an analogy that you know this this the morally relevant analogy is like what what it what does it mean you know when a psychopath misbehaves or someone with brain damage misbehaves well of course what do you expect this is what people with the relevant brain damage do right they they they're not um they're not competent to be truly free to behave well because they're they're they're malfunctioning robots on some level but when you take a a a truly good person or a comp a truly competent person who then does something horrible right then really misbehaves ethically that person's really responsible you know that's like the the true case of responsibility but the the paradox for me is that the more you make that the more competent you make the person the more their failures to behave well become inscrutable right so the so you take the best golfer on earth missing the shortest putt putt he's ever missed in his life right that seems to say almost nothing about him that seems to say that seems to be an error on the part of the universe right that seems to that seems to cry out for an explanation which doesn't tell you he should have done otherwise it tells you that there was some noise in the system there was some neurological glitch it's like whatever whatever happened there intervened it was it was is it was adventitious to his life like he's gonna make that putt a thousand times in a row now what can we say about him based on the fact that he missed this one we can say almost nothing about him but other than he was unlucky i think it's a good point so i i want to acknowledge that when i read your paradox responsibility i thought it was a really truly good point is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals 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them for sponsoring the podcast it seems like we've got it all backwards in our society you know nice people well-intentioned people who make little tiny mistakes are being canceled and the are running the country i don't know if you if you see any linkage here yeah yeah well you know that's something i haven't linked those two topics but um yeah i mean there's an ace there's an asymmetry there that many of us have found totally galling and and i think it's i mean it does it is relevant to connect them in that free will isn't the thing that the concept of free will the concept that someone could have done otherwise isn't the thing that that helps us understand what matters here what matters is there are certain systems and you know human and certain human brains are among these systems and certain types of thinking certain ideologies certain thought systems right that reliably produce harm that we should want to avoid because they make life suck right i mean these these are these are these are um disproportionately bad even if there's some good to be found in there the the the the the bad outcomes are so reliably produced and they're so unsurprising that we should want to figure out how to how to avoid all of that right and having a a malicious and uninformed and sinister and and and utterly selfish person in charge of our country is a it's a bad system right like now there's no free will i don't you don't need to attribute free will to trump the idea that he could be otherwise he can't be otherwise right he's a he's a and he's and he's a narcissist right what do you expect him to do with with with the power of the presidency right um now he's not he's not as dangerous he was not as dangerous as he might have been he's not hitler right but hitler is another bad system that we should want to disempower right and certainly not him work to empower right but again all of this is susceptible to a mechanistic interpretation we don't want to put a bad robot in charge of our world right we don't want to code a a a a system of our of artificial intelligence that has bad ethics right but and we know that if we do we're going to get bad outcomes but um again there's no and it is it is in fact true i mean this is comes back to the paradox the better you the more finely you calibrate any system toward toward good outcomes the more inscrutable its failures to achieve those outcomes become you know if you you know it's just it's like if you realize if you have a a um a robot that has a you know only a one in a billion error rate if you experience a one billion error today you know when you're you when you're interacting with that robot damn that's surprising and it it and it's and it's it says virtually nothing about what the robot did in the past because it worked perfectly in the past and it says virtually nothing about what it's likely to do in the future yeah and you were you and the robot were were both unlucky today you know you you got the one in a billion error right so so so so again to do to remind people what the paradox is here the mo the the more you make someone seemingly responsible really responsible for their actions the more you make them as competent as they can possibly be in that domain right so so that they can shoulder this responsibility of feeling like god damn i'm really culpable for my failures like i should have done otherwise i should have made that putt right the more that the less it seems like it really reflects them right the more the more mysterious the failure is and so it's it's almost like an uncanny valley effect it's like most of us who live most of the time in the uncanny valley of just the chaos of our of our imperfect calibration right that's the place where you can sort of heap claims of responsibility on to people and they seem to land and my argument is that it's never to tell someone they should have done otherwise like i mean this is very clear in parenting like you know i have i have daughters who i'm not i'm certainly not brow-beating about the illusoriness of free will no i'm trying to raise them to be competent self-regulating human beings right so when i say if i if i talk to one of my daughters and i say you know you really should have done otherwise right i mean that's not a way i would put it obviously but but if that's the implication of what i'm saying like the thing you like it'd be nice if you put your plate in the sink after you you were done eating right like like can you do that next time it really is much more it's it's never a claim that in this instance if i rewound the universe they would they they might have done otherwise right no this is a causally determined uh outcome uh that is all was always going to be the way it was going to be even if you introduce randomness right so there's no free will here but it is a conversation about what i want them to do next time right and that is a that is and saying that is a further input into the clockwork of their lives so that will change them ultimately it will change them ultimately if my daughters are going to become civilized human beings they will not behave the way they did it you know at seven years old or 12 years old or you know when they're in their 40s right and those changes will be causally affected on the basis of demands imposed on them but again [Music] there's no there's no place for the folk psychological notion of free will to land there it's like you wouldn't give your daughter any credit if she became president of the united states someday you would look at her not with pride because you'd say well she didn't you know ultimately cause that well well honestly so i do feel like pride is a is a is a virtue that has an expiration date in in a human life i mean i think it's developmentally there's an appropriate there's like a critical period where pride is not a a an ethical error or a um or a sign of psychological confusion it's actually it's actually something you want to to get into the code right so like i i i would i love it when my daughters are proud having accomplished something that seems like a good thing psychologically but at a certain point i think you want you clearly want to outgrow it it's clearly it is a it is not a a durable basis for self-esteem it's not a basis for compassion for oneself and others it's um it is con it does tend to rest on a confusion about just what it is you can reasonably be responsible for and what it is that was just a happy accident right uh and people take to tend to take credit for the for for things that they weren't actually in control over and and and uh you know attribute um their failures differently uh so there's kind of a delusion built into it in the normal case i mean if you're depressed that probably flips and then you then you're more realistic about about um what was actually within your within your uh purview to control um but yeah i don't i don't feel pride about anything in my life now i mean i'm not like i have all kinds of outcomes i i prefer and sometimes i realize them and sometimes i don't but and so so the the the obverse of pride of course is something like shame again shame is is an important thing to be able to feel but ultimately i think it reaches its shelf life i think you want to be able to transcend shame again not you know not too early this is an interesting topic again i'm not totally i don't totally know what i believe about it because i think there's there's certainly a pathology in a lot of danger on the other side of losing one sense of shame but um i i do think ult ultimately psych there's a psychological freedom in outgrowing pride and shame and just seeing that there's just no there's no basis to feel either ultimately you're just telling yourself a story about the past in in both cases you're thinking thoughts in the present that nominally refer to the past and you're and they're making you feel a certain way you're feeling good about it's like you're watching a movie about your past and you're being entranced by it and it's kindling an emotional response that has a certain half-life and it's incredibly boring it's in the end it's an incredibly boring thing to do with your attention it's it's a it's a masturbatory in the on the pride side the pleasure side it's a masturbatory and self-directed um pseudo source of gratification which divides you from it it leaves importantly it it it sets up a a a system of comparison between yourself and others that ultimately is not a source of well-being right i mean like you know if you're comparing yourself favorably to other people and feeling good about that you know then five minutes later you're gonna be comparing yourself unfavorably to other people who are doing yet more impressive things and you're gonna feel bad about that like that that pinballing between those two things is not the right algorithm to live a truly self-actualized life so i do think both pride and shame ultimately get outgrown but at what point that's a interesting question i love this transcendent view and also the idea that you uh the point that you make that about hate you know there's really hate doesn't really have a place to program in the robot here once we understand that there's no ultimate free will and what i don't understand though is you know so your view absolutely and i loved your point about how it can increase sympathy for others when we realize you know that uh we're not um always aware of uh or most of the time we're not consciously aware of the outputs or the inputs into our outputs but what i understand is is is like implying that in your own life you you don't apply that when you talk about trump i mean you get you hate you you get really angry but you don't say things we should have sympathy for trump yeah you know yeah i mean so so well there's certainly moments where i'm i'm lo i'm captured by by something that i find so despicable that i'm that i'm actually you know i'm blind to the to my own philosophy here like i'm just law i'm i'm lost in thought you know i i'm i'm identified with with with a moment of finding trump despicable say and um yeah so i'm just i'm in the dream you know i'm asleep and dreaming and unaware they're human yeah yeah so yeah so i'm i'm not i'm not a buddha but much of the time a different thing is happening and it's not it's not personal it's not um it's not that i hate trump personally it's that i hate and again this is all slightly anachronistic because now he's no longer president and so i'm basically never thinking about him now which is wonderful but it's not that i hated him personally it's i hated the fact of him right the fact that we made this sort of man president was so terrible i mean for all the things it said about us as a society and all of the the risks we were then running for four years to put something in charge of literally put something in char someone in charge of our nuclear codes who couldn't figure out why we can't use nukes we've got them why not use them right like to like take that one factoid about trump that he had to be repeatedly admonished by his you know joint chiefs of staff that it was a good thing that we had reduced our warhead count from the 60s and he asked why why did why don't i have as many when he heard that you know kennedy had 10 times the number of bombs that he has he trump thought that was a problem like why why can't i why why why did he have more bombs right like the guy was so dangerously ignorant of in this case just the the game theory of nuclear deterrence and and and all and all the rest uh you know which which are very livest in the lives of our children and the fate of civilization depend on someone not being that catastrophically ignorant about that thing which you know which you know about which only he has the responsibility at this point for the next four years right so that fact alone joined to as you said 10 000 other facts about this man that's right right reliability he's reliable awful right he's so reliably bad that's right as a that's a malfunctioning robot right right that if we if we could predict it with 98 percent accuracy so so it's not so like it's it's a little bit analogous to if we if we elected a rhinoceros to be president i'd be tearing my hair out over how awful that is at no point am i imagining that the rhinoceros can be anything other than a rhinoceros and at no point in my imagi no point am i wishing suffering upon the rhinoceros i don't hate the rhinoceros the rhinoceros just shouldn't be present in the united states right like like it's that's a catastrophe to do that um and in some sense we elected a rhinoceros president and so i spent a long time complaining about that because of all the the things to which that was connected in our society and and in our possible future that were worth worrying about i hear you and i hope you understood my point too you know you know you never you never said these words such as you know i think everyone's coming from such a place of hate with trump you have to understand he doesn't have ultimate free will and i think we need to have more sympathy for him like you would with a rhinoceros you know while still taking action to prevent him from ruining the world and pressing the nuclear button i never heard you like say that in a in a sympathetic way towards trump applying your own principle do you do you see my point yeah well so i mean trump is someone who is i find it unusually hard to have to feel compassion for him because he seems he seems damaged in in ways that are that specifically render him impervious to suffering right so he's like not someone who who seems to suffer anything ever right now i'm sure he probably does but that that requires an extra act of imagination what he's like and you know in the privacy of his mind when he's suffering he actually i mean he doesn't seem comfortable he doesn't he doesn't seem like he's he's got he has a nice mind to inhabit but he seems to be missing a module that would would naturally provoke compassion free will well no it's not free but it's not free will it's just it's like he doesn't like does he care about the relationship does he love people does he care about like when someone close to him dies does he feel grief i don't i don't know actually he seems like he might be damaged in precisely the way that would that would prevent someone from ever shedding a tear about anything right like like he's a car he's a kind of cartoon for real right it's not it's not just that i've made him a cartoon because i don't know enough about the man or i or because i i find him so despicable uh that i'm just not disposed to think clearly about him he actually does seem like a s in a very unusual person to me um and i wouldn't say this about even objectively worse people like you know osama bin laden right like osama bin laden seemed like a much more normal person to me than donald trump albeit one who was committed to specific ideas that i found much more reprehensible was much more dangerous it's a good thing we killed him all of that like but much more i understand his psychology much more than i understand trump's there's a randomness there isn't there there's a matt there's a malfunctioning robot like aspect to trump where he's he's got he's got a few obvious pieces of his code he wants to be rich he wants to be famous right and then on top of that he's just win he wants to win yeah he wants it where he whatever he imagines is winning and um but then he's he again i mean there's almost no reason to talk about the man now but it's just the fact that people the the thing that that got most under my skin was that half of our society apparently couldn't see what was wrong with him right like literally like they just couldn't see the thing i was seeing in every instance of of having it was completely immediate unmediated too it's not that i'm believing the new york times profile credulously believing the libtard profile on him and the man is being besmirched by a lying you know fake news media no no everything i feel about trump was was fully communicated by seeing him at the podium talking like so i it was unmediated you know and and in many cases virtually unedited you know you sit down and watch two hours of trump that's who i'm reacting to right and and the fact that half of the country felt there was i mean either couldn't see it or felt that you know it's upon seeing it that's exactly who they wanted to be to be president you know uh that there was something you know crazy making about that because it's it just was a transparent act of lunacy from my point of view i mean just like okay let's just drive you know human history toward a cliff you know as as quickly as possible and and see what happens right it's like it it seemed like an act of chicken with with to be playing with human history um and uh so anyway i was reacting to that much more than than i was motivated because the truth is i see like i can i can i can have the reaction that the people who like trump i can actually run that reaction in emulation like i can see that he has moments where he's genuinely funny genuinely charming genuinely charismatic like i like i get that right and so and and i can feel my monkey brain light up in precisely the way every everyone else's brain lights up when someone who is charismatic and charming and funny and taking risks shows up right you so you know like when he's at the debate and he said you know he's he says that completely you know he's challenged by megyn kelly for all the heinous things he said about women you know in his history as a buffoon and he says you know only rosie o'donnell right you know and that is a huge laugh line and it completely undercuts everything meg and kelly thought she was going to achieve in that moment journalistically and it wins him the debate like there's part of me that just finds that hilarious too right like so i get i get that but to not have seen the bigger picture here and to not have seen that this man is actually a sociopath with respect to his ethics um and to not have cared about any of that right to not have done the the moral arithmetic and imagine who you'd have to be to have run the fraud of trump university and have d and to have defrauded elderly people to have encouraged elderly people to max out their credit cards to get your fake knowledge at your fake you know your you know you know scam university to have been that that one data point alone in his backstory should have been absolutely disqualified you know like we should never have heard from him again after that it's because it says so much about who you are and who you're likely to be in further moments like that's not just a missed putt that is a million putts missed in a row right like we we know you can't play golf after you miss that many putts not even in a row all at once sam all at once i won't even say in a row it's so much at once that you can't even focus on one at a time it's over the conversation is over you know yeah um but so you don't hate him no no in my in my clearest moments i don't hate anybody okay i mean and yet there are people who i would i would sanction that we kill right it's like i mean it's like again it's not i'm not a pacifist there are people who should it's like we you know we've invented guns for good reason right and it's there are people who i hope i'm not one of them after this interview by the way no and i'm against the death penalty right so it's like once we have safely confined somebody then there's no reason to kill them right i mean then then that's a major ethical lapse but no there there are um you know there are acts of self-defense that are totally rational and you know you know someone comes into the your house and wants to kill you and your kids by all means shoot that person in the head right like that is what guns are for um and you should do it you should do it if it's a grizzly bear and you should do it if it's a person who seems to think he has free will to kill you and your kids right so it's like that's that that's morally uncomplicated in my view but again hatred this is this is an asymmetry that i think you were referencing love and he people wonder well what about love if people have no free will how do you love anybody right and this is a beautiful asymmetry between hatred and love at least in in my view which is hatred really does require an attribution to someone that they could and should have done otherwise right like if like you you believe they really are the authors of their bad actions and the moment you find that they have a brain tumor or whatever it is that that is exculpatory then you then you change your response you think oh wow you know i did hate charles charles whitman for getting getting up on that clock tower and killing 14 kids but once they performed an autopsy on him and found a a massive brain tumor pressing on his amygdala well then okay then i recognize he can't hate the guy he was on he was unlucky as he was as unlucky as the kids he shot right i mean that's just that's terrible right uh on some level that happens to everybody once you recognize that free will is an illusion um but love doesn't require an account of human behavior in that way that that demands that people be the the true upstream cause of all of their actions love just requires that you really just two things that you that you care about the difference between suffering and happiness right for for the for yourself and others right like you you want people to to be happy and that is really the the what it is to love someone you want them you you want to relieve their suffering you want to to maximize their happiness and additionally you take a certain you you find a certain pleasure and well-being in their company right you want to be with them right so like you're in the presence of someone who you want to be with who makes you happy and who you want to be happy right and you want to and and that that positive social orientation and that direct enjoyment of the state of love in your own mind that's what we mean i would argue that's what we should mean when when we say we love somebody and none of that requires a belief that they are the you know they've pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps causally speaking uh whereas hatred really does on some level like one the moment you notice that i mean the example i always use is is of uday hussein because he's he's not is not as hackneyed as referencing hitler but um you take a truly evil person who's done just objectively heinous things and just walk back the timeline of their life you know it's just like you know you take hitler hitler as a 40 year old was absolutely somebody who was just fit for nothing other than than a bullet but you know walk him back to when he was four years old he's just a little kid who's gonna become hitler right but he's an unlucky little kid he's got bad genes or bad parents or a bad society or something's going to beat him into the shape we now recognize with the bad mustache and the and and the the the dangerous beliefs right and um at what point along the way did he get free will well at no point so at what point along the way are you just you've become justified in hating him and feeling no compassion for him you know i would argue at no point although it admittedly it's very hard once he becomes an adult to find any kind of basis for compassion but he didn't make himself you know and um you know i certainly you know i certainly would have killed hitler had i could have uh um at any moment along the way to to to stop his his real harms but it's an interesting question like this is this is a ricky gervais bit right like if you get get into a time machine and go back to kill hitler what if you land back with him as a kid are you going to kill the four-year-old hitler right you have killed trump at age four well no well no but i mean it's it's it's easy it's i wouldn't say i would have killed trump at any point but it's easy to say i would have killed hitler at a certain point given the harms he caused but killing the four-year-old hitlers seems like a you know an act of pure psychopathy right he's a four-year-old kid who has pure cruelty pure cruelty right yeah right so there's so at no point is com is compassion unjustified and at no point is hatred justified in my view and every so and so so then the question is at in tho in these occasions where violence seems not only justified but necessary right killing hitler you know i thought you know assassinating hitler when it could actually do the world some good you just you just never need hatred for that to be motivated right like it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't require but but hatred does require a false description of authorship or an and human agency and that's why that's why i would say it is possible to get rid of hatred without getting rid of love psychologically well i like the spirit of a lot of what you're saying and even your your teachings and your um and the whole point of loving kindness meditation you can have love you know sharon salzburg beautifully shows how we can meditate on our enemies right you know um you know that we can wish them well because if they are clearly trump wasn't well you know what i mean like like if we wish trump well that's only going to be the benefit of the world as well yeah yeah yeah so i really love the spirit yeah i love that you know and i love these higher principles are you listening to this episode and thinking of a bunch of questions you want to ask me or maybe you just want to jump into a discussion of the topics we're covering on today's episode well now's your chance to interact with me more directly over at the stereo app every sunday at 5 pm pacific time i go live on the stereo app with my friend aj jacobs a best-selling author and lifestyle experimenter aj and i discuss the most recent episode of the psychology podcast and take listener questions last week we were blown away by the insightful questions from listeners note this is exclusive to the stereo app with stereo you can be your very own talk host or if listening is more your thing you can jump on our stereo talk and ask all those questions you've been dying to ask all you've got to do is download the stereo app and follow me at stereo.com psycpodcast then just join us on sundays at 5 pm pacific time to join in on the discussion again download the stereo app and follow me at stereo.com psycpodcast and join us on sundays at 5 pm pacific time once you sign up follow me so that you can get notified every time i go live on stereo see you there um ok so the is all just saying you you have an interesting uh discussion you say the separation between science and human values is an illusion now why you for the first time in history thousands you know hundreds hundreds of years no one's been able to put a guillotine on the on on whom's guillotine and and how how are you able to finally take us from an is to an aunt can you walk me through the logic of how you think that that's possible to go from facts to values well i think it is a trick of land people are getting hung up on language it is a kind of a semantic uh distinction that i just don't think we need to be taken in by um and it really is not something that hume himself went deeply into i mean it was it's much more of an aside uh in his writing uh this distinction and it's been blown up into like this foundational notion of of meta ethics somehow um that you can never get an is from an aught i mean there are a few ways to see what's wrong with with this i mean one is you can never get an is without certain odds right you can never make a factual claim about the world without following certain uh intellectual logical rational oughts or values right by buying into them it's like what why should why should we value evidence why should we value logical consistency like like if someone doesn't value logic at all what logical argument could you invoke so as to convince them that they should value it and if someone doesn't value evidence what evidence could you provide to suggest that they should value it right it's just at a certain point there are certain axioms certain things are axiomatic and that's not a problem we can't do science without it we can't do math without it we can't do anything without it and yet people are acting like if you need any of that to get your morality started there's no such thing as morality right they change there's a double standard here that we should notice like they're they're people are finding people the fact that there can be moral controversy has convinced most people that there's no such thing as objective morality but there can be controversy about anything there can be fact there can be controversy about about physics we would never move from that the mere fact of controversy to to to the claim that there's no objective physics um you know the fact that you know the fact that the taliban disagree with us about morality is invoked as a reason to believe that morality has to be relativistic there are no universal truth claims to be made about right and wrong or good and evil because millions of people over here don't agree with us well millions of people over here don't agree with us about physics either or evolution either because they don't they're just they're not adequate to the conversation you know uh because they're just they're they're obscured by they're they're mired in other belief systems um that that never causes us to wonder whether or not biology may just be made up or a cultural construct or relativistic or right which is unless we haven't been completely unless we've been completely taken in by some kind of post-modernism but um so that double standard is worth noticing either you can't get to facts without certain without indulging certain values at least implicitly um but you know i i usually i just find a different starting point which is okay fine let's say there's no such thing as odds there's no shoulds there's no there's no morality there's no values right let's just deal with a universe of facts let's just start there well it is a fact that we live in a universe where there's a a vast landscape of possible experience on offer and we have a navigation problem right like we can we can navigate toward places on this landscape that are more and more sublime where you know hairless apes like ourselves have better and better experiences collaboratively creatively we we produce you know brilliant works of art and have the free time to enjoy them and we have epiphanies that that that you know because you know the the hair on the back of our neck to stand up not from fear but from you know the rapture of just just how beautiful the cosmos is right and we can have and we have no idea how good all of that can get right with like the we could we genuinely cannot see the horizon line there but we just know we can push into this area where cooperation and and uh curiosity and joy and loving kindness and all of this just gets like just gets tuned up more and more and more and the music gets better and the and the and the people and people like myself who don't yet understand how good music can be learn more and more about all that and get better to get more adequate to that conversation and then over here we can have failed states where sadistic monsters torture people for pleasure and uh nothing uh fun happens at all apart for uh just you know more creative sadism uh and the benefits thereof you know accruing to the few creative states sadists who get to uh stay on top of that heap of misery before someone figures out how to murder them and and uh and the cycle continues right and then you know and they're you know over here there are cures for diseases because we have the free time to find them and we have the the the insight into the you know the mechanism that would allow us to find them and we get vaccines quickly and over here people don't even know the germ theory of disease and they kill people for witchcraft and and you know cut out the tongues of blasphemers uh you know because they're they think that might be a cure for the bubonic plague as we did for centuries in europe right so there are two very different attractor states on this landscape that we we already know a lot about because we've lived in both of them sometimes for centuries and we have a navigation problem we can we and and all of this again this is all these are fact-based claims right about how to move in this space there are right and wrong answers about how to move there are and and at every level at which we are gathering human knowledge there are right and wrong answers there are genetic things that determine you know where we where we're inclined on this landscape there are environmental aspects to this and all of this can be you know that broad strokes distinction can be can be defined and understood at every level that we have a specific science or a specific almost science that addresses it so we're talking about the truths of physics on through biochemistry and and you know uh neurophysiology and psychology and sociology and economics and all of it right any place where we're going to make a fact-based distinction about anything is potentially relevant to how we navigate on this space of possible experiences so we have not introduced morality yet we haven't introduced any auths yet um and so then and we don't even have the word should yet right now let's invent the word should right what does it mean what should i do what should we do right i would simply claim this is the only thing you have to grant me in order to get my moral worldview booted up all you have to grant me is that the word should if it means anything at all it means that we should avoid the worst possible misery for everyone right if we should do anything we should do that every anything else on this landscape is better than this one place where it's true to say that any conscious system that can suffer is suffering as much as it possibly can for as long as it can without any good thing coming of it right there's no silver lining to the suffering you know we've created computer systems that are just hell realms where conscious computer programs suffer immeasurably for an apparent eternity right everything that can suffer is suffering the most harrowing and pointless misery it can possibly endure for as long as it can possibly happen compatible with the laws of physics right that's the worst possible misery for everyone if anything is bad that is bad if the word bad means anything okay it doesn't yet we haven't invented the word bad yet now we have what does it mean if it applies to anything it applies to that what does good mean good means good the direct where are you going to point toward the good you're going to point away from the worst possible misery for everyone anything is better than that and now then the question is how much better does better get well over here we've got a a a beautiful global civilization figuring out how to colonize the galaxy based on environmentally sustainable you know you know collect collaborative principles that are just redounding to the advantage of almost everyone and they're curing diseases as quickly as they crop up and it's just you know uh and they're fast completing a something like a a a a a mature psychology of human self-actualization and it just it's like basically the entire world has become eslan institute on its on the most beautiful afternoon it ever enjoyed in the you know the in the summer of love right right that's the worst day anyone has for the next thousand years right that's a pretty good planet to be on right certainly better than the worst possible misery for everyone right then the so so all the people who are who are getting wrapped around the axle of is an awe are saying wait a minute but is that is the worst possible misery for everyone really bad really should i should i should i really avoid it who are you to say philosophically that that you should avoid the worst possible misery for everyone or you should actualize a galaxy full of of amazingly happy conscious systems um and that's just a it's a misapplication of language it's just if the word if the word should means the place you're standing so is to have the pretense of doubt about what those words mean right that like the place you're standing to say well is the worst possible misery for everyone really bad might there be something worse right that is that place doesn't exist if you if you understand what these words mean right if you're actually running them in anything like a kind of emulation so that you're you're understanding them it should be obvious to you that that's not there's no place to stand from which to do that philosophy no i mean like a much a much crasser but also emphatically convincing uh framing would be okay put your hand on a hot stove and then tell me about your philosophy about whether or not that is bad and worth avoiding i'd like to double click on that example though go for it because everything up to that example i was with you and then you know the collective well-being but once we get to the individual level you know i the way i think about it is that there's no should without in order to which is a goal if someone says you should do x that necessarily implies that you should do x in order to get y there could be no a should without reference to a goal now what if the goal is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone then that's a good point but what if that's not your value so what or what is how could it not be your value well what one could conceive of a situation in which suffering at an individual level is what will lead to a greater good for everyone if your value system is that greater good that you're talking about couldn't you make the case you have to do sucky things sometimes in order to get there yeah yeah but yeah yeah yeah so there are trade-offs and there and there are forms of suffering that have silver linings right that's why i'm careful to define the worst possible misery for everyone as as as really the worst possible misery for everyone but if you're going to talk about you know any project in life that is hard that that can't be achieved but for hard work you know i.e some measure of suffering um yeah then those that's just it's easy to understand i mean there's there's sometimes there's some things that suck and nothing good come from them and there's some things that suck but they're on their way is a value judgment though is there when the words suck itself no but they could be in trent they could be well no there's there are framing effects so there are things that are unpleasant but framed a certain way we actually kind of like them this is a kind of it's within the range of unpleasantness that we actually like because we know what it means right so like a good workout is my favorite example here it's like like that like once once you learn to love lifting weights that physical stress which if you felt in another context if you woke up in the middle of the night feeling what you feel when you're doing it you know the the heaviest deadlift you can you can you can accomplish well you'd think you were dying right you'd be terrified you'd call 9-1-1 right like like that's a medical emergency but because you're in a gym getting stronger you actually like that experience right um so that's but you know that's that is interesting psychologically but that's not a counterpoint to my argument that's just it's just in fact true that the cognitive frame you put around certain sensory experience matters but it's and it's certain it's also true that certain good things in life can only be accomplished by going through certain hard experiences right and it may be true both individually and collectively and this is why my moral landscape analogy uh could be relevant here on this question you know it just imagine a landscape with our peaks and valleys and the peaks correspond to increases in in well-being you know individually and collectively and let's take a collective moral landscape for this argument so we're on and and you know with all of these all of the landscape disappears into the mists beyond which we can see so you never quite know you're on a peak right like there's never maybe there's maybe the peaks go up infinitely we don't know but we just we're on a high spot we know we can move higher and things get better and better this things get happier and happier for all of us or most of us um or us in the aggregate but there's and we know what it's like to go downward and things seem to get worse and worse well it may in fact be that there's a we're we're just on some local maximum but the way to get to a much better spot a much higher spot on this landscape would require a collective descent into some kind of valley right like where things actually will get worse in order for us to get better it's like you do have to rip the band-aid off and that sucks but you have to rip it off and so and that may be true of certain things like what if what if climate change what if our solution to climate change is absolutely necessary but actually painful economically now i'm not convinced that's the case or i'm not convinced that we're we need to make significant sacrifices but what if that's just an accident if that's true what if we lived in a world where we're on a collision course with something truly horrible and the only way to get off of it is to make a major sacrifice that diminishes the that noticeably diminishes the well-being of moral as everyone for a generation it's totally possible that we could be if we're not in that situation now if that's an intelligible situation to be in that would be an example of like okay this is gonna suck but we have to but here's why we're doing it and and it's rational for us to do it but better and worse or value judgments i don't know why you don't see that you know the thing about well-being is that so people let me hand on a hot stove and then tell me that if it was in order if my goal was a broader goal and putting my hand on hot stove would help me with that broader goal i'd put my hand on a hot stove and deal with the suckiness of the feeling but the thing is it's not to say that to say that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad is a value judgment is to say nothing well you're accepting a particular definition of well-being the foi the point is that no psychology no no no no no i'm different definition you're just not understanding my claim take any definition t take let's take value fulfillment as a definition which is another definition let's imagine a universe of of radical pluralism with respect to values right so we've we've got is that we've got we've got a place over here where you have you have perfectly matched sadists and masochists if you could just get them together they get really really happy right but we we want nothing to do with any of that right it's like that just sounds like hell to us but the truth is psychologically for them they're having a final time in their you know bdsm dungeon and we have no idea how weird all that can get but it's just different values right and let's say there's a functional infinity function infinite number of value systems i'm asking you to imagine a universe where every conscious creature by its own values is made as miserable as it possibly can be so everything is tortured even if your torture is my highest enjoyment and vice versa grab whatever knobs there are and turn them down to the hell realms for everybody for as long as possible right with nothing good coming of it if something good's coming of it well then that's just not as bad as things can get let's make them worse right everything gets dialed down to the utmost misery by whatever causal structure would allow for that misery and it's so so if you're gonna flip the flip all the the the valences on a value system in some other corner of the universe well then okay that's the anti-matter of morality over there well fine um it functions by its own principles let's let's screw let's screw things up perfectly over there that's the play that's the base case right so if you're going to say well that's just a value judgment that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad i don't know what you're talking about you're just you're making you're making noises it feels like you're inserting in all you're only getting to is to ought because you're inserting an odd with the is you're pairing them together i i'm i'm granting i'm granting you there's no such thing as art we live in the universe without odds you don't have to do anything you shouldn't do anything okay you're just you're you're off scot-free you're off the hook there's not free yes yeah there's no morality you know johnny philosopher right so we're we're in a universe where you don't you don't you don't have to get out of bed right you don't have to get out of bed in the morning i'm not going to judge you how are facts going to at all lead me to action the fact the facts are that there there are very different experiences on offer here and you will helplessly find yourself preferring the good day at eslin over the the rat filled dungeon just to take the the fairly parochial differences that we can notice here on earth good can only be used in relationship to a goal how are you divorcing it from the goal no it's it's it's just space well no it's but no because there's just there's just the the um the valence of certain experiences within consciousness that have no necessary reference to a goal it's like you can take you can you can be so happy or unhappy that it has no reference point in past or future right like you can have the best possible acid trip or the worst possible acid trip and you're not there's no goal there there's just a sh the sheer extremists of your physiology push to the breaking point i do think that there's pleasurable there's unpleasant but i don't think they map on to good or bad in the way that you kind of seem like you're mapping them on to you give them enough to dial them up enough and give them enough time right like what if what if existence was just that what if existence what if there was a way to to to it was a place you could be let's say let's say reincarnation is true right let's say that's a possibility and wouldn't that be interesting yeah that would that would be interesting i mean the truth is both both situations are interesting you know you know getting non-existence is also i mean the fact that you know it it you appear and then you disappear and you really disappear that is also interesting so it's a little tricky it's the fermi problem you know it's like thinking of a universe teeming with other life forms and advanced civilizations that is that is about the most astonishing possibility yeah on offer except if you think that there's no one else in the universe that is also astonishing i mean they're both they're both just jaw-dropping to think about but if you could be reborn in a state of perfect bliss uncomplicated uncomplicated by any goals right um that that may not be the the most interesting possibility for you but maybe your intuitions about that cause you to think it's not the most interesting possibility are just born of your own you know glitch in your own code whereas if we could change that we could change those intuitions let's say we just perform the necessary you know brain changes for you um a little slightly you know maybe maybe analogous to teaching me how to play the cello all of a sudden i would appreciate you like i don't know what i'm missing with respect to classical music but once you once you gave me the intuitions of a of a beethoven well all of a sudden i'd recognize okay this is there was a there there this is just you know the person i was the philistine i was who just didn't get it and who would rather listen to led zeppelin just didn't know what he was missing right my point is with respect to the moral realism here is that just as it is with any other realistic claim about knowledge about facts you know with physics or anything else it is possible in the moral domain not to know what you're missing right you don't know how good or bad things are over there right you don't even know there isn't over there based on your own experience right and um when we were asking questions about how to navigate in this space a possible experience and whether it would be good or bad to to to go one direction or another we are constrained based on our own moral intuitions rather often but we can we can triangulate on those and recognize that you know we're we're living in a universe where it could be possible to change one's moral intuitions in fact it is possible with based on pedagogy and and you know just collisions with other people who have different intuitions you know through conversation um but ultimately ultimately might be possible to change them very directly like we're going to change your actual the code you're running on your brain um or we're gonna upload you into a different brain right like like that's like so like what what sort of robot do you want to be once we once we can really change you materially um there's this further question of okay if i can change your intuitions about right and wrong and good and evil right so that up is down up as down and down is up right there's this further question of asking would it be good to do that well who's whose intuitions are you referencing by by when you even ask that question like who's going to decide whether it's good to do that well again we're we have to fall back on this original navigation problem there's this moral landscape there's a functionally infinite number of experiences on offer but you know probably almost certainly not infinite but but functionally so and we know that some of these experiences suck right it's just built into the very logic of of of this case which is whatever your intuitions are we can concoct an experience that is maximally terrible for you right whatever your however your mind is built we can make you suffer right so getting away from if we should do anything if the word should is going to mean anything if the word good is going to mean anything so if the word better is going to mean anything if a valence toward the positive is going to mean anything getting away from the burning stove that is burning everyone in the worst possible mode of burning that their you know their organization can admit of forever right getting away from that is good and better and worth doing i agree and i think you should do it but i only agree with you because i share your value system no no no over there your whatever your value system is its ultimate repudiation is part of this picture your if you are capable of wanting anything you're going to want to be elsewhere once i get you into the worst possible misery for everyone that i feel it doesn't take a lot and that's a lot of hubris though for us to think that we know the right way more important this is this is where the this is where the double standard i referenced earlier comes into the picture people seem to think that a diversity of opinion or disagreement on values among moral values has to mean something when it doesn't mean anything when we're talking about scientific values or facts again the guy who shows up at the physics conference who doesn't care about causality and doesn't care about consistency and doesn't care about logic and doesn't care about the history of physics and all the conversations that were had before he got there and doesn't know the math and doesn't he's just not adequate to the conversation doesn't get to be part of the conversation the psychopath doesn't get to inform our ethics the taliban don't get a vote they don't know what it means to live a good life and produce a good society and treat women well they're imbeciles they have a shitty culture we know this this is not and and it shouldn't be taboo to say this they're religious trying to live by the lights of a 5th century book or 7th century book um which wasn't a good book even in the seventh century right it was it so it's like by the lights of the seventh century it was possible to do better than what muhammad managed morally speaking probably a good book and so it is with the bible and so it is with the book of mormon right the book like you know if you're going to hold the book of mormon up as a history of the world or a history of anything else or a book about physics or a book about medicine it sucks it also sucks as a moral orientation in the 21st century right it just it's like we can do better than all of these things and we want to have an open-ended conversation about the nature of reality we do not have to be constrained by this this spurious notion that values are something other than facts they're like there's a way of talking about them that that can seem to they can they can motivate that distinction for the purposes of certain conversations but it's like the distinction between reason and emotion right it's like yes there's there's they're not they're not precisely the same thing we know what it's like to have motivated reasoning where your emotion is causing you to misconstrue certain arguments or or cherry-pick certain data or whatever it is because you you know you want things to come out a certain way right like yes reason and emotion are you know part of a venn diagram that don't completely overlap but it's also true that part that that there's a an emotional aspect to our to the cognitive apparatus that is producing our rationality and if you and if you're damaged emotionally in the right ways if you have you know orbital medial prefrontal damage that causes you not to feel the implications of certain reasoning strategies or certain correct uh conclusions you will you will malfunction you'll you'll know what's right and and be unable to use what's right you know rationally speaking you know to reference antonio dimaggio's work on on gambling tasks there or um and and even just the even just the feeling of doubt is an emotion the feeling of certainty is an emotion the feeling of of of aha now i see how that adds up like two plus two makes four i get it there that is leveraging emotion in order to land rationally right like there's it's not it's not it's not completely devoid it's not it's not unemotional and so it's it's on some level it's a spurious it's not an entirely clear distinction and we we have to be careful in how we differentiate reason and emotion um and it's it is to a certain purpose but so but the uh and so and so it is with values it's like hey you can't you you can't do arithmetic without valuing the you know the the operations in certain ways like if you're going to do arithmetic or pretend to do arithmetic and imagine that you should be free to think of the numbers differently on either side of and the equal sign right 2 means 2 over here but it means something different over here that's what i value i i don't i'm i you know i don't like your colonialist you know mansplaining white guy values of consistency across the equal sign you know that got drummed into you and you're in your private school but over here in my you know taliban funded academy of arithmetic we've got you know or my my you know where we read uh daradah and uh and uh you know foucault on the topic of arithmetic and we realize this is just a socially constructed project and on the other side of the equal sign we can we can have left arithmetic and right arithmetic i mean i'm just obviously i'm just making this up i'm just confabulating but what like that's not going to produce the results that we that we we dignify as arithmetic for very obvious reasons and values are built into that project now again this gets subverted in specific instances in very interesting ways which we which we also have to to enshrine into our values right so for instance and it's a little bit like how intuition is is at bedrock for us but it's constantly being subverted by the systems we build to leverage our intuitions like you have to have two the only way you understand two plus two makes four is is based on intuition but we know our intuitions fail in other areas of mathematics and we have to we have to account for that but you so you can take something like like what i just said that the kind of arithmetic that would be impossible and and and and laughable there we know we can find ourselves in in case in situations where that seems to be so and it isn't right like when someone poses non-euclid proposes non non-euclidean geometry for the first time right you have a mathematician like uh riemann i believe was you know was certainly one of the first people to to do this like everyone thought that a a a triangle had to have 180 degrees and here comes somebody saying no no i'm not going to play by those rules not all triangles have 180 degrees okay there there's there's there's one time point where he seems like a lunatic or at least he just doesn't understand what he's saying but there is a path from from that initial seemingly crazy claim to making sense increment incrementally and there's just not that many increments here where then you think oh my god unless everyone understands what this guy just said they don't understand geometry anymore right like so like it goes from this is blasphemy and you're an idiot to you're a genius thank you right and we know what it's like to traverse that boundary and we know and we know that there's principles of intellectual honesty and self-criticism and openness to evidence and argument and patience and and and and being sensitive to bias we know all of we know what we need to have in the toolkit and we know we get continually surprised by new discoveries uh and the fact that someone like riemann can come along and say okay look a triangle on a curved surface is going to have more or less than than 180 degrees right do you understand what i'm talking about and then and the point lands we know that is a different project than post-modern you know everything's everything's pure context relativistic we know it's different than the taliban may be right that the quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe and it should subsume every other human project we we know enough to know than the kinds of errors that are being made there and um so it's just it's like the the exceptions you know the the the those exceptions where everybody's wrong and then suddenly some lone genius rewrites our collective appraisal of reality that does that needn't open the door to this this you know quasi-nihilistic picture that every doubter who comes along needs to be taken seriously right the person who doesn't understand that the worst possible misery for everyone is worth avoiding just doesn't get to come to the conference on morality just doesn't belong there so many good points and you make a lot of good points in the moral landscape but none of that uh is countering the naturalistic fallacy which just simply says you can't have um you can't have only factual premises you have to have something that has no no i am i'm i'm agreeing i'm agreeing with that even when you only have factual premises you can't get to a fact without first presupposing certain values you just can't like because if you don't value not contradicting the last thing you claim to believe right if you want your beliefs to cohere i see what you're saying that's a value i can't both like to believe that something is red and something is also blue you know red and blue all over right not partly red and partly blue but it's red and it's blue right is a contradiction um i i can e so i could decide uh i have to have a value system to organize those two propositions i mean either i'm i don't think that's about that let me give you a good example a counter example and you tell me if this is not a character i hated iq tests i hated intelligence uh research i went into the field with the mission because of my values to take down iq but i collected the facts to such i had put my values aside as much as i possibly could and i studied with the leading iq researcher in the world nicholas mcintosh university of cambridge and i published studies which directly contradicted my whole experience as a child and it was hard for me to stomach but i still published it because i had a commitment to the truth now what that commitment to the truth is a statement of your your moral value system value system of commitment truth trumped my value system of wanting to change the intelligence field in by taking down iq so i had two competing values that is what that's what you're arguing yeah yeah no your value yes we we need to identify the values that scale best that that can help oh so we we need to identify the intellectual and ethical values that allow for the the again the the sanest and most efficient way of navigating in this space of all possible experience toward better and better more creative more insightful more beautiful experiences which we are right to care about if we're right to care about anything right if caring i mean this is this is where where language bites its own tail right like this is this is where the the definitions of terms become circular right like for someone to say okay what if i want to experience the worst possible misery for everyone right that's not a use of the word want that makes any sense right what what you mean by want doesn't map onto this landscape right so like we have to like the words people this is what's happening with the is-ought problem people are pretending to think certain thoughts they're not actually thinking them they think they're thinking them but they they think that uttering a sentence is the same thing as thinking a thought it isn't right i can i can pretend to think this thought you know what i have in my refrigerator right now i have a round square right it's per it's a sentence right it's utter it has no reference point logically or empirically in our universe or or any other that i can imagine because round square makes no sense right it is the round is exactly what a square isn't right so the fact that i can say the phrase round square doesn't shouldn't make you think that i'm i'm i'm tracking the thought the there's a thought on offer that mike that that my mind isn't passing through it's like here every thought every every sentence is a it's like a needle that that needs to actually think it through you need to be able to thread the needle right but i'm not threading it i'm just saying here's a needle and and and i'm pretending that my my intelligence has has passed through the the eye of that needle by by uttering the sentence but it's it's completely empty it's completely vacuous it is not a thought right i'm not thinking that thought and that's not a paradox i'm i'm making small mouth noises and pretending to be a philosopher when i say that sentence right that's what's happening with this is ought distinction in my view i mean it's just it is it is empty language when you actually drill down on the circumstance we're actually in right and what and and the way our intuitions allow us to make any claim at all cognitively uh or or or behaviorally a behave to feel any motive to do anything right it's like what it what is it to be a cognitively and volitionally alive system um we are we [Music] were hurling words at this circumstance trying to to to make some appraisal of it and to make sen and again you know whether we choose to think of it or not we're trying to navigate within the space of possible experiences like i feel something that makes me uncomfortable and i want to stop feeling that way right with my apish brain and you might not but you might not want to stop feeling that way if you had a certain value system that allowed that to happen right but then i but then other things count as uncomfortable in that value system right so like i've got i've got whatever i've got that i can't i can i can't perfectly inspect in fact i'm really bad at inspecting it right i can't look inside myself and find my values they have to come out in dialogue with the world right they get they get revealed to me as as they get revealed to you by these collisions you know linguistic collisions and behavioral collisions with the world like how do you know you don't like your hand on a hot stove well touch one for the first time right and then you know um how do you know you're allergic to strawberries you know you eat them for the first time and you have a reaction how do you how do you know you don't you you want to reject the inconsistency in this other person's argument like like someone's telling you something that isn't adding up right you're in your first philosophy it's a philosophy class and you've got some um anti-natalist arguing that it would be better better not to have been alive right it'd be better not to be born and having kids is totally unethical for that reason because life sucks um and you you feel like there's got to be something wrong with this argument because i it's like it's it seems uh it just seems to open the door to all kinds of things i that that seems starkly unethical like which is which is to say that you can kill everyone in their sleep tonight painlessly that would be a good thing to do right let's just murder everyone in their sleep tonight there'd be no one bereaved no one would be suffering any of the the outcomes of that and there'd be no attention suffering to the deaths themselves like that's just it let's let's if you could do that you'd be a moral monster not to do that that's sort of the the sorry i'm uncomfortable with that um this is all kind of revealed values and then you get especially uncomfortable when someone says something which amounts to two plus two equals five like okay okay that's we scan your brain while you're doing all of that and we see you're using some of the same neural structures that you use when you find you know certain smells disgusting right because there is no other areas of the brain to leverage to have these kinds of reactions because you're a you're an ape after all i like how you put that yeah yeah right um so where you're using a very old tool kit to you know in evolutionary evolutionary terms to to do any of these higher cognitive things yeah so we're navigating but then but we but we the truth is we have enough that is abstract and not merely conforming to the appetites born of evolution that allows us to take something like the view from nowhere to stand outside ourselves where we can say okay yeah we're just apes now we're just you know these these these uh these warm and moist and and uh meaty things that that crave certain certain outcomes but here we have we have we have this language game that is that is getting interesting enough that seems to promise that we can stand outside of this if only for you know between the hours of nine and five in in a at a place like mit or harvard or stanford or some institution that for whatever reason has carved out enough free time and you know to put the you know our 20 watts of brain power toward toward problems that aren't immediately relevant to feeding ourselves and not dying we can have a conversation that seems to look back on this creaturely circumstance of being mere apes you know trying not to die and we can say what should we do when we can rewrite the firmware of our nervous systems and do anything we want what will be right to want under those conditions when i can change your moral intuitions and i could make you a happy member of the taliban if you want to be that should you want to be that when i can make you someone who recognizes how shitty it is to be a happy member of the taliban and where where can we stand and what does this moral relativism seem to promise in my view it promises this moral landscape which is okay now let's finally admit we have a navigation problem and part of our compass is and and part of the problem of solving uh this this navigation problem is recognizing that now we can make changes to our compass itself right it's not just reading the true north of i'm an ape born on earth that feels certain a certain dopamine rush this is why this is what you're saying is amazing because it's precisely that metacognition and mindfulness that you're exhibiting that i think gives us a species gives us free will okay but it's amazing you're ill you're illustrating reason why it's not free will is because all of it is being pushed from behind causally either deterministically or randomly or both such that such that every momentary instance of of navigating and doing anything at all again just me getting to the end of this sentence right is fundamentally mysterious being driven from from behind and no matter no if i if i maintain my current course or i change it both are inscrutable if i pick up the glass of water with my left hand or my right hand both either is inscrutable if i decide to suddenly want to learn to play the cello that change in me is an absolute mystery which i cannot account for that's like the point that's all besides the point the thing that's really interesting here because it's totally compatible with with determinism and and free will is not compatible with real determinism because if you could say to someone listen the movie of your life life has already been shot and scored edited it's done right there's a place to stand from which we know exactly what you're going to say two years from now to your wife in this conversation where you think you're having some kind of epiphany you know that's already written we wrote it we have the dialogue on our super computer right our lives are compatible with that our phenomenology our moment-to-moment phenomenology is compatible with that i'm not saying that's true i'm not saying randomness isn't part of the picture i'm saying our experience is totally compatible with that and to recognize that experientially changes things it feels different it fee and and and it has moral implications and it closes the door to hatred and real hatred and it does not close the door to love and it cl and it makes you someone who can com stand completely free of of certain forms of psychological suffering that seem to be an imperative if you don't experience your mind that way so much of this is semantic because i i'm like right on board with your your whole life product i can see so clearly the thread that unites all these you know we talked about religion you know and getting it and and the is all all this stuff you know you want to pull back the curtain and um have us derive values from some universal base of truth and reality as opposed to driving values from some belief that's cockamamie as my grandmother would say i totally am on board with all this i could see semantically i'm not going to convince you some of these things but it's funny because i i love your project and you're mindful i am a subscriber to the waking up i listen to your morning meditation today and and and my as a human being myself in the in my own teachings with my own courses i teach a transcend course and all this is very much in line with what you're teaching which is helping us to ascertain the reality of our mind and understand our patterns and in order so we can have that potential to change in our lifetime to me the kind of stuff you're working on the mindfulness the metacognition deriving values from facts to me that's worth calling free will from a human perspective but so so i mean freedom freedom is definitely something to value and to aspire to in all of its guises right so like so i you know i i think you know if someone and again this is all this can be as as uh transcendental or as or as prosaic as you want it to be but it's a you know if you just take freedom in the in the context of any goal like like if you want to lose weight it's better to feel the the the kind of free access to the internal resources that will allow you to do that with it with the minimum amount of suffering right like you're not constantly racked by by uh irreconcilable impulses like you want to lose weight but you're desperate to eat chocolate and then you eat the chocolate and you feel guilty like like and you cycle back and forth between that and then you don't make any progress and six months have passed and you're the same weight and you spent you know thousands of dollars on you know to join diet clubs like you're frustrated like all of that is not as good as having your your capacities and your aspirations truly aligned where it's like okay i've made a decision i want to lose weight i know how to do that i got to eat at a caloric deficit i got to work out more and i'm going to do that without any sense of internal conflict and it's just going to be a source of joy for me and the pounds are just going to drop just just fall off hour by hour you know and literally there's not going to be an hour over the next three months where i'm not going to be losing some amount of weight i'm going to be happy the whole time and three months from now i'm going to look in the mirror or look at the scale and realize i've achieved my goal without any impediment right those are two possible experiences freedom is a concept that that uh is useful to differentiate those two two experiences right i'm you know in one case i'm free to just follow my own advice without conflict and follow the advice of others and to to to um not be coerced by my own internal cravings and addictions and like i'm not addicted i'm i'm i'm free of uh of uh those kinds of impulses um but again i just i think there's something misleading about invoking this traditional concept of free will because i know where people are starting people are starting it's the same problem with self like there are ways to talk about there's a ways to use the word self that i you know that are unavoidable i mean you know there's no problem in talking about oneself or the self but what most people most of the time mean by the feeling of self is referring to something that is illusory that is a source of real suffering right it is the feeling of being a subject in the middle of experience and when you lose that feeling this is you know it's not uh you know uh this is why this is a good analogy it's actually it's the same it's more than an analogy when you lose that feeling you also lose the feeling to which this notion of free will can be attached right like that's what that's where it's like it's obvious that there's nothing in experience to which that would refer like it's obvious that the next thought simply arises there's no other way for it to appear and i didn't think it before i thought it and i'm in some i i'm not i'm i may be the first to know to know what it is but i'm also the last to know what it's like it's it's it's and even with something like speech it's like i'm unless i've prepared my speech in advance really unless i have a script i'd i'm hearing what i say at the same time you're hearing it right it's like i mean again there's there's some delta here i mean there's some uh granted there are kinds of speech acts where it's not totally scripted but it's sort of you know i have some internal sense of where i'm going as i'm going there but but rather often it's just you know if i'm thinking of an analogy if we're talking and i think well just imagine you're uh you know imagine the old story of putting rice on you know one grain of rice on each square of a chessboard and you double a double each time and by the time you get to the end like like i just thought of that old you know story i didn't i didn't think of it i mean it's not the greatest example because i sort of thought of it before the words got out but you know there's just you and i are hearing my thoughts at the same time for the most part when i'm speaking and my thoughts aren't evidence of your free will right like they're just appearing right and that's what's happening for me too and the impulse again if i'm gonna go for the glass of water like for a moment ago i wasn't thinking of water wasn't feeling anything about the water i wasn't thirsty but now i thought it might be nice to have a sip of water came out of nowhere out of nowhere and but that link between thought and action is not one-to-one you know there's a really interesting paper on do smokers have free will and that's the battle meister roy baumeister paper and he found that in almost every case people overestimated the extent to which they wouldn't be able to quit or they wouldn't be able to have free will based on the urge but turns out the humans have much more self-control than they realize that they're capable of you know you don't have to obviously you don't have to you know you can want the water but if you if you suddenly activate your prefalter cortex you could override that and be like you know what i'm going to wait but again it's subjective so i'm not denying that again there's a difference between voluntary and involuntary action there's a difference between behavioral self-control and lacking that capacity right like let's say i have goals you know to you know decide but my goal is to stop smoking but i'm completely incapable of not smoking right that's one way to be the other way to be is i have a goal to stop smoking and i can actually veto the impulse to stop smoking when it comes online right for the time it takes me to actually kick the habit but that's not again every instance of this like let's say i'm you know i'm trying to stop smoking and i i'm able to successfully preempt the impulse to smoke on tuesday afternoon but wednesday morning i reach for a cigarette and smoke but i only take one puff and then i throw it away like every bit of that the the the sufficiency of my my uh strength of will in one case my weakness of will in another case the fact that it wasn't so weak that i smoked the whole cigarette in that case every bit of it is being determined by states of my brain which i didn't author which i didn't create to which is still you it's the consequences to it but it but my liver is still me and it gives me absolutely no sense of free will if my liver stops my liver is working exactly the way it is in this moment yeah and no other way yeah if it works better tomorrow or stops working completely on friday yeah i am a mere victim of those changes or witness to their consequences it's there's no it's not within the domain of my of my autonomy or agency i hear i get that point but so it is with states of my brain so it is with each instance of neuro chemistry in my brain and yet that is producing everything i experience right including my preferences and my goals and my my impulses that are in conformity with preferences and goals and then my sudden subversion of those goals with some alternate impulse you know the thought oh god wouldn't it be great to have a cigarette right now that's that's getting piped up from below and i'm the one who who can i can seem to say oh no no i'm not going to follow that thought i've been taught mindfulness uh by by sam and scott right but the fact that that comes online in that moment and doesn't in another right that's mysterious the fact that it comes online to the degree that it does and not one degree further is also mysterious it's probably dependent on other things that seem completely adventitious to my character like whether i got enough sleep the night before or whether i had a full lunch or whether the you know uh whether i i got enough sunlight i mean like there's just who knows like totally mysterious like i'm an absurdist so i i i love what we're saying because i will see things that i do and i'm like but i'm like oh that was really kind of predictable that i would do that but you know it's not totally mysterious if we have an understanding of psychology about how genes work you know i kind of get why i have the dopamine drive you know i get what's pumping through my head i can kind of understand it from a mechanistic level right it's not like totally like shocking yeah well unders no i get i guess it's it's descriptively in certain cases it's descriptively not mysterious at all i mean we know causally uh we can tell a story about it but again there's just two different levels of of connecting to the phenomenology here when i say mysterious i mean like like i can move my hand right this is the mo this is the one of the most prosaic things about me that i can move my hand like i can do this i have no insight into how i do this right if i suddenly couldn't do it yes that would be flabbergasting but the fact that i can do it is also flabbergasting i have no in literally no insight now i know something about the neurology of this right i can talk about muscle fibers and you know actin and and you know the transduction in in in motor nerves and you know acetylcholine and like it's i've i can i can you kind of get it get it vomit my concepts onto this experience right none of that reaches in to the experience none of it right like like this is this is irreducibly mysterious you know that's interesting because some people have argued that autistic savants actually are an exception to all this and they actually can get inside the module you know in a very deep way that most of us can't that's why i wish i knew what the qualia of an autistic is because i talked to the late daryl trafford uh he was a dear friend of mine he was a you know rain man scientific advisor he studied he spent his whole life studying these people and it's interesting because it seems like some of those autistic capacities like to be able to just forbade verbatim play back um something actually requires the ability to get into the module consciously in some way that is not privy to the rest of us so i think there's actually some really interesting neuroscientific uh exceptions to some of this well well i wouldn't say so i'm not saying that you can't have more and more fine-grained insight into the experience right so like like you can learn to pay enough attention to anything a motor simple motor experience like moving your hand right and it can break down into you know it can become pixelated in ways that are are interesting right so you can you can become more sensitive to the the the link between mind and body i mean like like the the arising of intention and kind of it having a kind of threshold effect that actually does you know trigger a motor program you can become more sensitive to things we know to be factually true like if you touch a hot stove you can actually experience the reflex component of withdrawing your hand so that you actually withdrew it before you felt the pain right like the you know the road to the amygdala is actually faster than the sensory the road to sensory cortex that actually registered the conscious percept of oh my god that's too hot right so you can you can notice that you can actually become sensitive enough to notice that first you withdrew your hand and then you felt the pain of how hot it was right um so i'm not saying you can't have any insight into this but there is still something however deep you go into anything however atomized your experience consciously becomes of a phenomenon there is just simply this fact that first something wasn't there and then it's there there's a there's a you can you can shatter your your your your subjective experience down to its atoms and notice that things are just appearing out of the darkness right sights sounds sensations thoughts intentions emotions or their micro constituents in so far as you can find those with your attention and again things can get incredibly pixelated when you're doing when you spend months on retreat doing nothing but pay attention to mostly sensory perception it breaks down it can break down into especially if you're if you're doing it strategically in in the particular way so as to look for its its kind of smallest and briefest aspects which is one style of meditation things become amazingly pixelated and you're bought like you don't you don't feel that you have a body anymore you have a cl you know a cloud of sensation you know of temperature and pressure and and movement that is just and does you know doesn't have the shape of a body at all right like you don't feel hand you feel these might this these these um micro changes of of of primary sensation at each each moment but again whatever you're noticing is there and then it's not there and then something else is there and then it's not there it's all inspired you are not doing any of it that's the crucial point you the one who's witnessing aren't doing anything but you can do something about it that's the point i'm trying to make but whether or not you do in the next moment is just as mysterious as the sound of a bird i get your point though yeah i see what you're saying it is look let's end but you're you're testing my limits of sp of free will right now because i'm starving um yeah but i and i'm sure you must be as well uh i want to just agree with you that it's all inspiring i walk around constantly in a state of all and wonder that's my default mode is curiosity um about everything about people i'm supposed to hate i'm actually just i witness them just like i would witness my consciousness so i'm with you on a lot of that i really can't thank you enough for coming on today spending four freaking hours with me yeah covering almost everything about human existence um and i would still say to be continued because there i didn't get to the twitter questions i didn't get to the mindfulness thing i'm not saying we have to do it like you come back my podcast but i just suspect we'll talk again someday you know conversation will continue yeah yeah yeah it's been a pleasure scott so thank you it's been a question thanks for listening to this episode of the psychology podcast do you have a million questions after listening are you dying to have a discussion about something sam harris said about free will and the naturalistic fallacy come join the psychology podcast after party over on the stereo app this sunday at 5 pm pacific time where best-selling author aj jacobs and i will be discussing the episode in fact aj and i go live every sunday and we love having discussions with fellow psychology enthusiasts you can join our show ask questions about anything you want and share your experiences and opinions about the podcast last week we were so impressed with the listener questions for example here's a snippet of a question from last week that we found fascinating gentlemen i agree with you that consciousness cannot arise from the cosmic dust of the universe but as you know we are also part of the cosmic dust from the universe in all of our cells i do not think it beyond god's scope to help create us from the atoms and the dust of the universe so that we when we finally have an awakening realize that we are not only linked to the people on the planet but linked to the universe that the planet exists in god thinks in multi-dimensional ways as he said we will not know his understanding we will not understand his knowledge but we need to keep our minds open and expand our own and realize that the more we are linked to each other from the womb to the tomb we are bound to care for each other thank you download the stereo app now and follow me at stereo.com psycpodcast and join aj and i live this week download the stereo app now and follow me at stereo.com psycpodcast and join aj jacobs and i live this week you can also get the link in the show notes see you there and stay tuned for more podcast episodes on the mind brain behavior and creativity [Music] you

Channel: The Psychology Podcast

Views: 25,632

Rating: 4.8044806 out of 5

Keywords: psychology, podcast, Scott Barry Kaufman

Id: blMOyTiUcbs

Length: 137min 49sec (8269 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ms-appropriation]

I’ve found that my coming to understand free will as an illusion has increased my empathy and compassion for others - big time.

[u/funkyflapsack]

The part where they discuss is/ought should put the criticism of Sam to rest. People act like he doesn't understand the concept, but he proves here not only that he does, but he has some very legitimate views on why he doesn't agree with it

[u/JackArmstrongBJJ]

Sams 100% right. His insights about free will aren’t meant to motivate, or help someone accomplish their next goal. They are about the nature of mind. If you try to make it about anything else you will be confused. And recognizing this nature of mind does happen to alleviate a lot of suffering once felt. However, that does not mean it will help someone go write a book, or go on a run when they don’t want too. If you want help on those things, then there are many other sources for that.

[u/Pyroskyy]

Pretty much confirmed in the first 10 minutes they are simply discussing two different definitions of free will. Sam getting very passionate in this one! He seems frustrated constantly disproving free will.

[u/bllewe]

It's great to see Sam have fun even though his interviewer is completely unable to grasp his point.

[u/29Ah]

I think one point that gets lost is that not only is Sam saying we don’t have free will, but he’s saying the concept of free will isn’t even coherent. How would it work? Even if there were souls, that just pushes off the mystery: you didn’t create your own soul.

If the universe is deterministic, and/or has randomness, and/or is arbitrary in some other way, how do we separate a corner of it and say that it has free will?

If you allow for gods or an ultimate creator God to be reality, how did it come to exist? Did it have any choice whether to exist and what limitations it must work under?

I’d be interested in seeing a description of a type of free will that is logically consistent with any supposed type of universe. I’m not sure it can be done.

[u/EdgarBopp]

When sam says that when you don’t believe in free will you don’t just wait around to see what happens.

Hilariously I lost my belief in free will about 5-6 years ago and I literally do that. I find myself thinking “I wonder what I’ll find myself doing today” and then I discover myself doing things like cleaning my house, taking care of my son, enjoying a hobby etc. Its a bit like watching a movie of myself.

[u/Dry_Turnover_6068]

I find it really hard to agree with or assume that "free will" doesn't exist .

I like Sam's idea that we can't even all agree what free will is. I'm just wondering if this is maybe a crucial part in understanding his philosophy and ideas.

I haven't exactly been following Sam but I've seen some debates (plus this podcast) and I've always liked his insight.

So, a question: Is it Sam's position that since we can't even agree on what free will is then we can't say it actually exists?

I know this isn't quite right but if someone can tell me why then it might help a bit.