Psychedelics, Consciousness, and AI | Richard Dawkins | EP 256

hello everyone a while back and that would be november of 2021 i had the distinct pleasure of having a discussion with dr richard dawkins who apart from being an esteemed evolutionary biologist and theorist is also one of the world's foremost atheists we danced back and forth for quite a while on gmail before agreeing to meet and our meeting i think was really productive so i have a recording of it audio only as was the agreement and it starts rather abruptly as we entered right into a discussion and ends abruptly in a sense too because we ran out of our time without running out of topics and so i walked over to aha as it turned out a chapel on the oxford campus and that wasn't the place that dr dawkins wanted to go with me so that's where it ended in any case we had a wide-ranging conversation i found him charming and erudite and intelligent and a man of good will and i really enjoyed the conversation so i hope you enjoy it too and i hope that there's more of it because we have a lot more to talk about i i feel that way and i think perhaps he did by the end of our conversation so enjoy [Music] almost a hundred percent of the conversations that i have with people on the street are very very positive i would say it's one in five thousand that isn't yes but he's only a sex one yes and there's no shortage of yeah trouble what's the motivation of the of the few who are hostile that's a good question isn't it because you could think about that as sort of a general metaphysical question you know what's the motivation of the few who are truly hostile i think often they have me confused with a figment of their imagination sure you know so when i you you sent me one of your papers on uh biological sex well stating what you stated in that paper is already enough in the current world to make you very unpopular with with a certain class of people regardless of why you think what you think or what your reasons are um when i when all this first exploded around me i had released a couple of youtube videos three of them i think decrying a bill c-16 that was passed by the canadian parliament which mandated pronoun use and for me it had nothing to do with the transgender issue or maybe it did peripherally as a political issue you know and and maybe as a psychological issue because the transgender issue is very complicated if you're a psychopathologist but for me it was just compelled speech it's like i don't care what your reason is i am not saying the words i am legally obligated to say and the case i made on youtube was well first the american supreme court had made compelled voluntary speech they declared it unconstitutional in 1942 and second there was never a common law jurisdiction in the entire world that ever compelled speech for any reason is canada the only country that does that that does this that's a good question um i don't know i know the united states doesn't yes we've also had this encounter this proliferation of these so-called human rights commissions which are like a quasi-judicial inquisition system that have been taken over completely by the woke types and so there was a restaurant in vancouver quite recently where the man who owned it although he seemed to have done backflips to satisfy this angry hypothetically transgender individual he'd employed he was fined something like 35 000 and forced to take this you know these mandatory sensitivity training programs is this in canada that's in canada vancouver's major city on the west coast and so you know i was assured when i voiced my opposition and i said well this is illegal and said well nothing will happen if you don't comply and i thought well the hell with that well what do you mean nothing will happen and it's illegal yes quite no nothing will yeah so how can how and how can you possibly say nothing will happen but that wasn't the point for me either well i made these videos at the same time i made a video because the university of toronto was implementing mandatory racial sensitivity training and i know the literature pertaining to the implicit association test let's say which is the test that all these half-wit hr types use to diagnose your implicit bias and then they want to train you with explicit training techniques to reduce your bias which can't work if their theory is correct because it takes mass practice to change or eliminate implicit bias and then there's no evidence whatsoever that the training programs work and some evidence that they're actually counterproductive and the implicit association test which is essentially used as a diagnostic instrument has neither the predictive validity nor the test retest reliability to be used in an ethical manner as a diagnostic test which i also said in these videos and so that caused a lot of trouble and i didn't really expect it you know i mean well why should you it's perfectly reasonable i just want to say i admire your courage in speaking out about this because a huge number of people including me um totally agree with you and many many of them are just too frightened to say so because they have been intimidated there's there's massive intimidation going on especially in the academic world yeah and you're one of the few people who's actually stood up to this intimidation and i wish to salute you well thanks for that that's very much appreciated well i understand because i've studied it a lot why people are intimidated you know i've talked to conservative politicians all over canada and the united states although i also talk to particularly in the states moderate democrat types a lot but the conservatives uh especially in canada they're absolutely terrified that if they make any conservative pronouncements that they'll be singled out and mobbed and it's unbelievably unpleasant i mean not to mention potentially dangerous i mean i was careful in what i did see i'd worked as a clinician for 20 years and i help people negotiate unbelievably stressful situations you know where their careers were on the line where their families were on the line their sanity was on the line and i got very good at figuring out how to step through such minefields you know strategically and carefully and so by the time i said something i had three sources of independent income so i had a clinical practice and i had a company that was generating a certain amount of money and i had my university position and so i didn't think that you know i was fairly well insulated i thought because when i said i wouldn't do this i meant there is no bloody way you're going to make me do this no matter what you do and i thought that through all the way to the bottom you know could lose my job yeah i can live with that could lose my clinical practice yeah i could live with that what about jail well probably won't come to that but put me in jail and see what happens and so i meant no and i meant no more than they meant yes and that's part of the reason it caused such a stir i would say um so but many of the clients i dealt with you know they'd be under pressure to conform ideologically in the workplace and be pressured badly and you know they had families to support mortgages pay and it was i wouldn't say easier for them exactly to go along you know step by step or even microstep by microstep than to stand up and risk being taken out and so if i was in my clinical practice if someone needed to stand up in the workplace to a bullying boss say or to an ideological cadre which was very frequently the case in the corporate world we'd get their cv or resume in order and make sure it was polished up and if they had any educational faults that needed to be rectified to make them marketable we'd address that and then they'd apply for different jobs and they'd go on a few interviews so they were ready and then then they could go in and we did that often too when i was helping people negotiate for a raise it's like get yourself ready you know so you can go in there and tell your boss why you're valuable or you can go in there and tell your boss why they better get the hell off your case or they're either gonna lose you or there's gonna be trouble but man you have to prepare for that and so you see in the academia and in the corporate workplace and in the entertainment industry now which is absolutely corrupted by this sort of thing 300 000 micro retreats and here we are so what's a micro retreat okay so i'm sitting in a faculty meeting at the university of toronto and the administration announces that they're going to increase the size of our fourth year seminars by a factor of two we don't have enough faculty we actually don't have enough money to hire more faculty well that's because you spent all the money on administrators over the last 20 years and here's the data that pertain to that but that's beside the point so would it be okay if you just you know had twice as many people in your fourth year seminar well that's a crowning seminar for the students and a seminar with 40 people in it isn't a seminar it's another class yeah and so i tell my faculty conference why don't you just say no like no we're not doing this well we won't get what we want well you may have noticed that when you've been dealing with the administration for the last 20 years they make all sorts of plans and often you're consulted and then none of the plans come to fruition and then they implement something that has nothing to do with you want with what you want all the time and all of you know that because it's happened to you yeah well you know we have to go along with them okay well so then what happened you know what happened i don't know if it happened here at oxford but in north american universities the administrative load like a parasite load and i think the biological metaphor is exactly app by the way exploded over the last 40 years universities have eaten up 70 cents of every dollar that the american federal government pumped into student aid it's almost all gone into the hands of administrators the faculty numbers haven't grown in a commensurate manner with the student numbers and so the administration took over well and then because they were composed of the same sort of people that the faculty were who did all these micro retreats when the diversity equity and inclusivity people started to invade the administration they just did the same thing and so here we are well i think we agree about this so we get on to whatever it says you want to talk about today yes yes yes well i'd like to talk to you about your paper the the one you sent me about the organism as a model yes okay yeah um if you don't mind because i'd like to i guess what i was curious about because i i didn't find anything in that paper that i disagreed with at all i thought yeah that's and i know a little bit about the engineering literature that suggests that and even the computational literature that suggests that in some sense an organism that operates within the world has to be a model of that world yes in order for it to be in order for it to be operated in the world yes and then you detailed out all sorts of real world examples including well let's say stick insects where you know not only are they a model of the world but they look just like the world yes and animals in winter versus summer changing their coats and birds of course you said you could derive the structure of the atmosphere and probably the earth grab the gravitational field and probably the strength of the gravitational field by a sufficiently detailed analysis of the bird very good i hadn't noticed that one that's very good yeah oh well you did mention you did mention the the the air aspect with birds anyways but but i'm sure you could i'm sure you could generalize that yes well good i'm glad you like that um it's it's a book i'm now working on called the genetic book of the dead um which um is all about the idea that that the animal is a model of not the present but the past ancestral worlds yes because the animals genes have been filtered through a long series of environments so the genome is a palimpsest of ancient environments more recent more recent more recently still very very recent including extremely recent and then we go out of the genome and and the nervous system becomes part of the palimpsest recent experience right so you could say that so and correct me correct me if i ever put words in your mouth because i want to get what you think yes exactly right um the genetic code is a repository of information that generates every perhaps ever more complex or ever more fine-grained not try to say that all i wanted to say is that is that the genetic code is a d in principle decodable description of ancient of ancient environments right right okay fair enough so so the question then i suppose would be at what level of resolution right yes so there's this idea i think i mentioned in my talk the other day i really like this idea and when i talk about religious matters by the way i i try to speak metaphorically and psychologically and to tread on ground that might be theological only when that's absolutely necessary and never if i can possibly manage it so i like to think about things in psychological and and biological terms and physical terms for that matter wherever possible it keeps things clearer and simpler and so but there is this idea um in relationship to the idea of the incarnation that christ could embody god through a process of kenosis and and the the scholastic theoreticians who made this case because they were trying to account for how the entire cosmos you might say could fit in one body and the idea was well there was an emptying of god and when i was reading that in relationship to heuristic processing and also to the idea of of low resolution representations in in computational simulation and in relationship to this idea that an animal has to be the model of the world i thought well you kind of you want to also be an unbiased model of the world right so if you make a thumbnail this is a good way of thinking about it i think a computer thumbnail is a good model of uh essentially a two-dimensional slice of the world right so it's a low resolution image and if it's an the interesting thing about a low resolution image is that it's an unbiased sample of the color space of the of the image right it's not it doesn't have an ideological bent part of the reason it's an accurate representation is and this has to do with that idea of redundancy that you developed in your paper so if i took a picture of that wall which is basically white the picture is going to be white it's not going to be as varied in its whiteness as the actual wall but it's going to be an unbiased random essentially random sample of the whiteness of that wall and so it can stand in for it in a manner that's unbiased and a lot of i think our internal representations are i like to use the the terminology low resolution because it's it implies this it is also associated in some sense with the idea of a compression algorithm in computation because what a compression algorithm does is it reduces redundancy and all that's stored as information is the non-redundant information and you can usually take something quite complex and if it has regularities in it as you pointed out in the paper then you can you can abstract the regularities and just represent them and it's interesting it's really interesting actually because with some compression algorithms some get rid of data but some and they don't compress quite as tightly some allow you to recreate the entire original from the compression because there is genuine redundancy in the in the external world so the kenosis idea part of the reason i'm interested in this and i was extremely interested in the fact that when we first had our emails back and forth before we decided to meet i suggested that we meet and that i would like that and you sent me an email and you said i suspect you want to talk about this and i thought it was remarkable to me that you picked that particular paragraph because that was exactly why i wanted to talk to you and it was i think probably the most clearly i'd ever stated that particular idea and so that was quite i forgotten what that was well it has to do with what we're talking about to some degree the question is if the human being is a model of the environment what exactly is being modeled so because you might ask well what exactly is the environment and so and that's where i think we could have a very fruitful exchange of views now that the the thick insect has obviously been shaped to a massive degree by natural selection because it looks like a stick but i'm very curious about the role of sexual selection because that makes things weirdly complicated especially among human beings because first of all sexual selection can result in runaway processes like i think i might have read this in your book the irish elk story yes yes yeah so so and some people have suggested maybe it was you because i read your books it was a long time ago but you know they stuck many people have suggested that at least one of the mechanisms that drove our rapid cortical evolution was stringent sexual selection primarily applied by females to males i think that might be geoffrey miller who suggested that okay and and so what do you what if sexual selection is one of the processes that really drove our rapid divergence away from our chimpanzee human shared relative then part of what we modeled as a consequence of that sexual selection is whatever women wanted and so then the question is what exactly is it that's driving human female sexual selection and that's really what i wanted to talk to you about because that would be incorporated in us as a model you know if women are looking for a kind of ideal let's say in a mate then as they exercise their hypergamous choice the male is going to come to ever more closely approximate that ideal whatever it is and that's going to be an implicit ideal because none of that's conscious obviously yes it seems to me you keep wandering from one subject to another without sticking to to one at a time i mean we came we went to kenosis and i kind of wonder what that's got to do with anything and then it's it's probably some difference in our thinking style you know i think well one of the would you say you're more interested in ideas or aesthetics ideas okay that's what i would have guessed yes i'm probably more somewhat more interested in aesthetics although it's close and part of the way that would be reflected in our thinking styles is that i would think in a more in a style that has a more loose associational structure that's right i mean let me take one example of something that i've seen of yours um which is it's not nothing with sexual selection um you you once uh showed in a lecture a picture of snakes spiraling around each other oh yes and and you said something like i think it's positively you know that that is the representation of dna yes we could let's leave that one but i promise i i promise i will return to that well let there's a rough time because that that seems to me to go to the heart of what may be a difference between us this aesthetic i mean that that that idea that that in some sense represents dna to me to be complete nonsense okay i will i will absolutely address that okay god well this is something i did want to talk to you about okay it does take us rather far down the rabbit hole though i would be i would say okay well i think it may be fundamental to our difference that's fine that's fine i'm more than happy to address it and people have called me out on that a lot you know i actually threw that in a lecture because i was thinking in a loosely associative way about some very complicated things and i was struck by this this uh recurrence of the the double helix pattern yes and cultural representations all over the place you love symbols i mean you're obsessed with symbols yes um you're almost drunk on symbols and you could say that uh uh um i think you've got to stop and say what does it actually mean to say absolutely and and the snakes trining is one thing there are others but that would be a very good one to try to nail down yeah well you know part of the we could talk about technically for a moment you know because i think it is a difference in thinking style and i think one of the reasons that your writing is so appealing to people including me is that your language is very precise it's very obvious what you mean when you say a given word you know and some of the psychologists that i've really admired like jeffrey gray who wrote a great book on the neuropsychology of anxiety like if you're interested in the idea of modeling that that's i think that's the most profound neuroscience text that's ever been written i haven't read that i confess i used to know jeffrey gray but i haven't read it it's it's a great book yes and it integrates cybernetic theory and animal experimental work and neurophysiology and and the function of emotion like it's a really good book and it it does it is centrally concerned with the idea of modeling because because gray worked see in your paper and i'll get to the dna thing i promise you okay in your paper you talk about the response of a single cell to the repeated to a repeated identical stimulus okay sokolov who was one of the great russian neuropsychologists identified the orienting reflex as the manifestation of the habituation uh the habituation phenomenon at the highest level of nervous system organization so for example if i put headphones on you and then i hook you to a galvanometer and i play say i play a middle c at exactly the same volume one second apart 40 times okay so what will happen is when you first hear it there'll be a change in skin response and then the second time you hear it a slightly smaller change until it will habituate completely zero response but then if you change the volume or the pitch or the space between the tones or interestingly enough if you skip a tone where the tone should have been and there's silence lovely you'll get an orange i like that great okay now out of that the russians hypothesized that you build an internal model which is exactly what you say in that paper and then your nervous system searches for deviations from the model and so and then your consciousness is oriented towards the deviation and it's oriented by a deep instinct like literally an instinct so for example if you're walking down the road you have a map of the environment imagine that there's a loud clattering noise behind you you'll stop and this is all involuntary it's it's driven by extremely low level nervous system mechanism so you orient towards the place of maximal novelty and then you do rapid visual exploration to try to rehabituate yourself to the environment and then if it's you know a tradesman's truck bumped you map that onto regularities you already know and you continue onward but all of that's mediated by emotion so anxieties literally we wrote a paper on this was one of the papers i'm most happy with that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy that's what it does so you can map anxiety right down to well you can write map it right down to the to the level of entropy yes so so anyways gray also mapped the emotions neuropharmacologically and neurophysiologically onto the orienting reflex and then he identified the brain areas so the hippocampus the hippocampus is extremely metabolically active it's extremely expensive to operate psychophysiologically it's very susceptible to oxygen deprivation and brain damage the hippocampus moves information from short-term attention to long-term memory and it's crucially involved in the the analysis and inhibition of that orienting response and you could also think too that this movement of orientation in some sense your whole brain is set up to inhibit that and so so here's an interesting corollary of that one of the things that psychedelics seem to do is to disinhibit you called it lateral inhibition there's also a phenomenon called latent inhibition which is the inhibiting effect of the memory of the regularities on your current perception and so when you look at the world mostly what you see is memory and that's been tracked in the visual system so you know there are these visual primitives like line detection but if you look at the layers of the visual system and you look at the bottom layer where the retinal cells first make contact with the visual cortex there are more top down inputs from the cortex into that low level than there are retinal inputs so even at the level of initial detection most of what you see is memory and that memory inhibits the novelty response and the novelty response this is part of the reason i got interested in mystical experience the novelty response is twofold it's not just anxiety it's also exploratory curiosity and that's because when there's something novel well you have to be careful because god only knows what it might be like it might be the thing that kills you might be nothing so anxiety freezes you but the hypothalamus which is sits right on top of the spinal cord and is the highest integrating center of the instinctual responses of the motor system it's way pre-cortical it's divided into two parts and one part of it governs the dopaminergic system that that mediates incentive reward so all positive emotion but more importantly active exploration and so what happens if you hit something that's novel in relationship to the notions of preconceived regularities positive emotion is disinhibited that's exploration and negative emotion is disinhibited simultaneously and there's a man named rudolf otto who wrote a book called oh i can't remember the name of the book but it's not varieties of religious experience because that's uh james anyways he described the primordial act of perception as numinous mysterium tremendous and it's a combination of positive and negative emotion and i thought that's that's pre-latent inhibition perception psychedelics disinhibit latent inhibition of perception and that's why they produce a mystical experience but the mystical experience i mean there's three aspects to it let's say there's an overwhelming positive emotion simultaneously there's overwhelming negative emotion so and that's like uh an awe experience and then there's the disinhibition of fantasy simultaneously which is something like the attempt to map that and so people find that well absolutely overwhelming but by definition you know it yes it is overwhelming literally now you might say so i'm going to answer that snake question that's what i'm trying to do you know i studied one symbol which is was the scandinavian world tree symbol and so the scandinavians thought that there was a tree at the center of the cosmos they called that igdrasil and on the outside of the tree there's a snake that eats its own tail now the sh the the amazonian jungle dwellers who discovered ayahuasca have the same image it's exactly the same it's a tree at the center of the cosmos with a snake that eats its own tail now ayahuasca is a very bizarre chemical and no one has any idea how the natives synthesized it to iowa ayahuasca is a combination of dmt which is an extremely powerful hallucinogenic that only lasts 10 minutes and a monoamine oxidase inhibitor which makes the dmt experience last eight hours because monoamine oxidase inhibitors stop the breakdown of dmt which is a monoamine the amazonians had to find these two plants that were widely separated geographically out of like hundreds of thousands of plants and they had to mix them together and they had to boil them properly for a certain amount of time to make ayahuasca well they've been using ayahuasca probably for like 15 000 years now the scandinavians didn't use ayahuasca the ones who came up with the world trade thousand years for 15 000 years yeah in in in amazonia in the jungles well they got there about 15 000 years ago now maybe you know we don't know how long it took them to discover it but you know in in most of those relatively primordial and small tribal groups the the pattern is unbroken oral tradition like they're not transformative societies they do pretty much what their ancestors did okay so once you have a phenomenon which is something in common between scandinavian and uh amazonia yes so do you have an explanation for that yes i mean is well i would say the expertise you're talking archetypes now well we won't get to that yet because like i said and i'm sure you would appreciate this we want to keep things as much on the ground as possible yes yes okay well so it's not unreasonable to note that a particular chemical might have the same effect on widely distributed people right so okay so you'd expect constancy of response to a pharmacological agent rather than variants yes and that's even true with the psychedelics and psilocybin for example most almost all the psychedelics have a very similar chemical structure it's a peculiar ring structure but but it's similar to lsd psilocybin dmt the classic hallucinogens psilocybin tends to produce a type of vision that has a fair bit of commonality across cultures and you can think about that as well it's the psychophysiological effect of the drug now it's weird because it has this emotional effect and this disinhibition of emotion can go two ways because people have heavenly experiences say that's almost complete disinhibition of positive emotion or they can have bad trips that's hell essentially that's complete disinhibition of negative emotion and a lot of that seems to depend on the context within which they have the experience so if there's a lot of negative things happening in that context that can be magnified by the experience and things can go like horribly sideways that accounted for a lot of what happened badly in the psychedelic explosion in the u.s in the 60s and that was precipitated by the discovery of lsd and also there was a man a mycologist who was a banker who went into mexico and found a woman practicing shaman who used psilocybin mushrooms and she agreed to let them try them and that was one of the soma he wrote soma very famous book on amanita muscaria i can't remember his name at the moment wausau that was wausau he was the first person he introduced psilocybins and psilocybin mushrooms into western culture and like we weren't ready for any of that and certainly were ready for lsd these are unbelievably powerful pharmacological lsd i think is the most psychoactive chemical ever found by an order of magnitude it just takes a few million molecules to produce an intense psychedelic experience in any case sorry this is complicated the ancient scandinavians either used amanita muscaria those are red mushrooms with the white dots that you see in fairy tales all the time same color as santa claus and and his flying reindeer and reindeer like amanita muscaria mushrooms by the way so and sort of flies even weirdly enough but i think the scandinavians also used psilocybin now the question is what the hell's that tree if you take it seriously and should take it seriously i mean these images were used for a very very long time and people thought about them very hard so imagine that well there first of all you could imagine that the tree has this resonance as a sacred item partly because we've had a relationship with trees for maybe 60 million years you know we our ancestors lived in trees for a long time and you know you hear these psychologists talk about the african veldt as our like uber environment you know that we're adapted to it's like well it kind of depends on your time frame you know that's five million years trees that's like 50 million years so the notion of the tree that's that's in there and all of our cathedrals have a tree-like architecture and that the light through the stained glass windows that's sunlight through the glass there are trees all over the world too yes surprising that they would come into people's hearts and symbolism yes but but there's a conceptual reason see because i think and this is speculation i know it's speculation i understand this perfectly well it's clear that our consciousness can move up and down levels of analysis to some degree and levels of nervous system creation and repair so imagine when you're writing you can attend to a letter or a word or phrase or a sentence or a paragraph or you can move your level of apprehension up and down from the micro level to the more macro level and you know at the highest level of your consciousness you can apprehend the most general ideas at this lowest level very specific well actually very specific motor movements so if you're typing a word and you make a mistake you don't fix it conceptually you move your finger and fix it and so that's kind of where it grounds out and so our consciousness sort of grounds out at the bodily level at the level of adjustable voluntarily adjustable micromusculature and then at the high level at the highest level of abstract concept so it can move this consciousness well the world tree is a vision of the microcosm to the macrocosm the tree is used as a metaphor for that and so a proto-scientific idea intuition of the idea that there's a there's a kind of dimension that constitutes zooming in on things right to the smallest possible level of apprehension and zooming out to the most general level of apprehension dust particles to cosmos let's say well psychedelics seem to expand that capacity so that consciousness can move up and down layers of apprehension that aren't available to consciousness under its normal conditions and there there are good accounts of shamanic experiences they're very strange they're very well documented the shamanic experience involves a death and then past the death the capacity to move up and down this microcosmic to macrocosmic realm in a way that doesn't seem possible under conditions of normal consciousness and so we're raveling around again um well the question is how far down the levels of analysis can consciousness go under extreme conditions and so and i said this was speculation but i've seen these dual they're often dual entwined serpents they're very common in fact i have one made by an indian carver canadian native carver in maya it's so cool it's called a sea soodle i have it up in my third floor it's set on two totem poles there's a man in the middle there's a serpent on both side of him and i asked him what this image meant to his people because he's still part of an unbroken tradition he said they had a myth that something alien landed on the earth it was this seasonal object and that when it was rolling down the mountain that it landed on it took the form of all the things that it encountered and so well like i said this is in the realm of wild speculation but i know what crick thought about the origin of dna well he thought he thought it was too complex to have evolved oh obviously what do you mean you mean the idea of it coming from from elsewhere now i mean i know that's an infinite regression okay that's what was okay so that was all that was behind that you know bit of speculation which i normally would do these coiling surfaces i think that under some conditions people can vision can expand to the point where they can see down into the micro level they can apprehend the micro level consciously you think that our consciousness can extend down to the micro level to the level i do micro the micro micro micro level of dna okay well since we're on this topic i have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin like four doses is enough basically to knock you out of your body i wouldn't recommend it casually i took seven grams three times and i had this shamanic experience it was unbelievable and i don't even know how i have no idea how to make sense well i believe that i could quite understand you have a most extraordinary experience i've never taken such a drug but i could imagine the most remarkable experience but you've just said that you think that your consciousness can see into your cells and see this the structure of dna that has got to be utter nonsense i'm sorry well it like i said i i'm perfectly reasonable willing to admit forthrightly that that is a highly speculative idea well it is speculative but it's also got to be false why right no no and ferret look in all probability you're right right i mean we both wise enough to use occam's razor right and so and i said that it's funny that that particular statement got picked up because i think that was the most what would you say secular intuit speculative idea that i'd ever uttered to my students yes well fair enough i mean i i understand that and so it's strange to be in a position to defend it i'm telling you why i was why i made that but there was more to it than that you know because in this visionary experience i could feel my consciousness go down these levels of analysis and i could see things that they appeared to me in my field of imagination and i looked at them and i thought that looks a lot like dna but you're an educated man who already knows about dna yes these people didn't know what people do about it that's what's so no they didn't know it doesn't surprise me in the least that you could have a visionary experience and think you see your dna in your cells that of course is highly plausible well because i already know about it yes what is not plausible is it somebody who does not know about it an an ancient chinese sculptor whatever it was yes who who working long before watson and [ __ ] discovered the structure of dna could possibly apprehend possibly that just isn't fair enough and um i guess i would only say in in in defense of that idea is that it is the case that consciousness can travel up and down levels of analysis in a sense it real inconceivable that that's not an expandable capacity under some circumstances you know because you've got to ask yourself like i do yoga in the morning a kundalini yoga exercise and i i've done it for about 20 years and i learned a long while back that when yogis are practicing their asanas these positions that's not yoga they practice the asanas because they're postures that stretch you and then once they get to master them they basically do an exploration of their body for places of discomfort and use the asanas to heal and you might say well what do you mean heal and well my experience is that if i move my head for example down like this i can i'll have a pain manifest itself in my back where i'm tight and then i can pay attention to that and loosen the musculature and then the pain will disappear and as i've been recovering from my last illness i've been doing this quite a bit because my body is full of knots and pain of all sorts and i can explore them and do something with them and i actually think we can also do that to each other to some degree we do that massage therapists are very good at that i think it's part of an elaborated grooming knowledge but what that means is that internally at least whatever my consciousness is can apprehend these places of trouble that are physiological yes and that i can explore them and the question is well how deep first of all what is that exploration that's the past how far down can you go that is perfectly plausible yes i i i wouldn't object to that also i i wouldn't wish to pin you down on on what was a sort of throwaway speculation on the dna but it does seem to me that that's kind of representative of what i mean by being drunk on symbols yes um it's it's um well you are rightly hostile to post-modernism and i'm not hostile to the post-modernist claim that there's that there's a terrible problem that arises when you understand that there's an indefinite number of interpretations of things yes they got that right but what i'm really hostile to is the answer okay then that i think that's okay look i want to put you i've got one of my books here um now i've talked too much during this discussion so far there's something i really want to ask you about if you don't mind well yes before before yes i just really just pursue this okay okay i can i can read this out okay okay we're on audio sure um this is one one of my it's my only written attack on postmodernism um and um uh this is uh from laka um who says um by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here namely s capital s signify of a little less signified equals little s the statement with s equals minus one produces a square root of minus one la con then goes on to conclude that the erectile organ the the penis is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above of the juices that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier minus one then another quote from a feminist thinker well this is actually an interpreter of her her expositor catherine hales talking about why fluid mechanics is um difficult to understand and she says the privilege of solid over fluid mechanics and indeed the inability of science to deal with the turbulent flow at all she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid women have have openings that lack that sort of leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids from this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence the problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conception of fluids and of women have been formulated so as necessary to to leave unarticulated remainders so okay okay so i'm going to play devil's symbolism okay so let's let's take that apart two ways okay okay the first is let's deal with laka okay okay laka is a fraud as far as i'm glad you say that well i have tried to read lecon yeah and i cannot make heads or tails of him good and it may be because i'm stupid it's not i don't think so now people have accused jung of the same sort of mysticism that lacan engages in but i can understand young i don't think he's a mystic at all what jung was doing is very complicated and it maps very nicely on to evolutionary biology of all the french intellectuals that i've read i think lacan is the most fraudulent okay okay so we'll just put him aside and you know i haven't read that much lacan partly because i can't now i've read a lot of foucault and i'm rereading the order of things and the order of things i would say if if you're writing a book about modeling as well as reading the neuropsychology of anxiety the order of things is very much worth reading okay and he doesn't wander off into ideological i've only found that he made one mistake in the first half of the book because foucault is a social constructionist to a large degree but he does talk about its categories of the imagination that's not exactly the phrase he uses but he does make reference at one point to the fact that our conceptual structures are grounded in an underlying imagination which to me is a nod to biology and so but i like the order of things i i read it a long time ago i'm just rereading it now um so forget about lacan yeah the feminist now i'm going to argue from the perspective of a biologist here i would say i'm going to give the devil her due in this case there are we do have a proclivity to map sexual relationship onto the world and the degree for obvious reasons because we have to perceive sexual relationship at a very deep level we do have a tendency to animate things or to perceive them as if they're animated and the degree to which those a priory perceptual proclivities might bias what would otherwise be objective thinking is open for valid discussion now that doesn't mean that look my daughter last night was engaged in the debate at the oxford union and that i i was there you were there yeah yeah well you heard carol yeah well that was a mind-boggling performance as far as i was concerned it was exactly the example of the sort of thing that you're tossing out it was absolutely beyond comprehension i was so happy to be there because i thought i had never heard all of that expressed and simultaneously invalidated so effectively but you know the side she argued for won by the vote i didn't know who what which side won the decide the that we should move beyond me yes and now independent of the merits of the underlying argument except for carols the fact that that feminist scholar who attributed meat eating to white supremacist patriarchal oppression yeah that argument was so appalling was that the was that the final one right right at the end oh you missed it yeah oh that's too bad it's too bad you really needed to be left for that i left we we we left when the president said a student should start talking so you must have you must have left just before that happened yes so tell me then oh my god it was just well that that was essentially it that was her argument that meat eating was a consequence of the imposition of a patriarchal racist oppressive okay white supremacist narrative on essentially a feminine background yeah it's the same thing okay well um now you're saying i you're saying that you don't know how much of that character is is my thinking despite my opposition to post-modernism that's right yes absolutely yeah well that's a you know that's that's a that's a an absolutely reasonable question and given that doubt which i can certainly understand why you would hold it's perfectly reasonable of you and i think perspicacious to have pointed to my attempt to speculate about how these images of intertwined helixes happen to propagate themselves all over the world because i have a pro see i have a problem with that because i can't understand why that's the case so for example there's a really interesting chinese image which is one of the ones that i referred to in that particular lecture that shows i hope i can remember this exactly right so it's this intertwined underlying serpentine structure giving rise to a female and male form yes and it's portrayed that way in the cosmogonic myth that yeah these forms emerge out of this underlying helical structure and but there are stories like that everywhere and so you might say well it's a case of false pattern recognition and that's really a problem right that's the problem of misperception okay now wait i i i have no problem with um my big problem is equating it with with dna yes that's [ __ ] however yes however what might be what might be interesting would be a a commonality between myths all around the world and then um anthropologists uh have argue about whether this is because of cross-infection of ideas or whether there's something jungian about about the um and i think that's a genuinely interesting question question yes um and most of the affective neuroscientists that i've met the good ones are tilted pretty hard towards the biological primitive argument yes forms of perception well color is one of them well i think that's interesting and of course the the coincidence of an image or a statue in this part of the world in that part of the world you should think about how improbable it is that two people might have hit upon the same uh the same design i mean the idea of right as snakes spiraling around each other it's not that difficult to think of it it's not it wouldn't be ridiculously improbable that two people two tribes and opposite sides of the world would independently come upon that um no no and and it might not point to anything particular except that it is the use of snakes i i would say though you know the idea of that coiled snake or the dual coil snake is also a powerful symbol of healing and so yes that's partly why it's used as a symbol for physicians yes exactly and so and there is the idea that's part and parcel of that and this would be let's say separate from the dna idea and then snakes shed their skin and they're reborn and so that's part of the reason why they're symbols of transformation exactly and and that notion of death and regeneration is obviously central to the idea of healing and so that's another explanation for the use of the snake okay so i'm interested in in the improbability of coincidence in this case now if you say um uh people in in scandinavia and people in the amazonian jungle had independently developed an alphabet which was the same alphabet now that would be impressive i mean that would right well yes yes well but but but it's also equally impressive that separated people did develop alphabets yeah but not the same no i know they didn't use but but there's a level at which it's the same right because they are alphabetic and they are the use of written forms to represent sounds well it's that's a sensible thing to have and i mean it it is such a good idea that wouldn't be improbable that two tribes would have the same idea that's true but well but it gets complicated too well it gets complicated in the context of this argument because one of the debates that foucault had that was famous was a debate with chomsky yes and foucault of course is a radical social constructionist except when he isn't now and then right and and i'm not being smart about that the order of things is quite a careful book but chomsky was laying out a more archetypal argument in some sense and chomsky thinks that there is something like an underlying language grammar and so the fact that an alphabetic structure might be discovered by two separate peoples would be partly a reflective underlying biological commonality and so it is very difficult to draw a border between these and i would also say i agree with you completely that associative thinking of the kind that you just read to me can go far astray what that is is false pattern recognition you know so it's it's the app perception or perhaps the projection of a pattern onto a background let's say an underlying reality that actually isn't characterized by that pattern but but that's actually part of the dilemma of thought though too isn't it because like i think thought is usefully parceled out into a revelatory element and a dialogical element and so the revelatory element is while you're sitting there and thoughts enter the theater of your imagination and so it's in a sense phenomenologically like they sort of spring up from the void and you can be struck by a thought which is really interesting right it's like i agree it's your thought why are you struck by it where does it come from yes that's it no kidding where does it come from but then there's another element which is well not all intuitions are valid the things that strike you even though being struck is often a pretty good indication that there's something there but it's not always an indication and there are certain forms of psychopathology schizophrenia in particular schizophrenia is characterized by the misfiring of that intuition system so for example partly what happens to people who have um like ideas of reference they'll be watching television and the latent inhibition will get stripped away from their perception of the voices and so now the voices become magnified in significance and to account for the magnification of emotional significance they start thinking the television has a special message for me it's like the reset receipt of a religious revelation and it's often accompanied by religious ideation so it's not that uncommon although it's somewhat uncommon for people who are flooredly schizophrenic to identify with christmas very light religious revelation it is very it is it is very likely i wanted to come to because because you you characterize yourself as religious sometimes and yet you don't seem to believe in a supernatural creator not the people that you do or not all the time i know they do when whenever i believe in god and i say well i act as though god exists yes but which is a reference to this mortal idea last night you you seem to be well let you come to the idea of truth you seem to be saying that that which is beneficial to humanity or to the or your reduce your anxiety or makes you feel good or reduces stress is true no no no it's more it's more than that and good i'm glad that we're on to this part of this discussion um when darwin first published his biological treaties the origin of species the new england pragmatists got a hold of his manuscript william james and c.s purse and william james founded experimental psychology and cs purse was probably the most profound philosopher the americans ever produced and they had a club the psychological the phyllis the i think it was the psychological club it was either that or the philosophical club but i believe it was a psychological club and they believed that darwin's theorizing required a new epistemology it was so revolutionary and they purse in particular develop pragmatism and pragmatism is like an engineering truth claim and i don't think you can be an evolutionary biologist without being a pragmatist i don't think it's possible i don't think it's coherent conceptually and so purse was trying to solve the problem of well how can something be true when for fundamentally ignorant about everything in the final analysis and the answer was well we have truths that are true enough and you might say well what do you mean true enough and the answer would be they're true enough to be used as tools to achieve a certain end in a certain space over a certain time period and so your truth is true enough if it gets you from point a to b when you're using it the tool is adequate for the job if it performs the task intended and for purse and the pragmatists that was it there was no true superordinate to that now it's complicated because some pragmatic truths are functional across broader spans of time and space than others so they're more like ultimate truths but this was not a grounding of truth in a newtonian idea or cartesian idea or even in a idea of objective truth because they derived their concept of truth from their analysis of the evolutionary process and they said and so what i really want to know what you think about this it's like say there's truth in the human form i'll speak metaphorically but biologically that truth only suffices for like 90 years right we're good enough we're good enough as a model it may be that uh our knowledge of truth is is incomplete and and we can never be sure of anything but that doesn't mean there isn't truth out there well truth is a slippery concept because it can be used very many ways and i'm not trying to i believe me i'm not trying to bandy words about i do not believe that the newtonian conception of truth and the evolutionary conception of truth are commensurate and i think the evolutionary because well it's tough right because you might think well when you're talking about truth are you talking about the nature of ultimate reality or are you talking about the relationship of your models to that reality i don't know that i care too much about that because i i mean let me tell you something that is true okay um we are uh just we are cousins of chimpanzees yes um that is objectively true um it's it's another thing that's true is that the earth orbits the sun yes these are these are not um what one can argue about the epistemology of that but i um want to be a realist about this and and say that that that there may be kinds of truth which are somehow filtered through our darwinian past and which um influence the way we see truth and we may be deceived by all sorts of things we may be self-deceived but there are objective truths it is the business of science to find them and science has tools for stripping off subjective bias for stripping off self-deception yes and and that that's why we do double-blind trials absolutely that's why we use random assignations as well yeah absolutely okay right and who can argue with the power of the scientific process and but i would also say that the religious people that you've debated they lose before they open their mouths because they don't notice that you impose this realist metaphysics on the argument before it starts now i'm not saying that you're not justified in doing that i'm not i'm not saying that because that's open to question but i am saying they don't notice that that's what's happened but there's a problem here it's a real problem and this is the postmodern conundrum i would say there are it's useful and true to say that there are objective facts but the problem is there's an infinite number of them true okay so now the question is as a scientist how do you decide which facts to attend to and the answer to that is you cannot do that using the scientific process no that's true okay so okay so then the question is look i've done a lot of statistical analysis of data sets in my time you know and when i was a naive undergraduate and i'm not particularly mathematically gifted by the way statistics was quite a slog for me until i started to understand it conceptually and then i started to enjoy it but i kind of imagined that the data contained the information the statistical process was an algorithm to reduce the data to the information and it was kind of a mechanistic process i didn't realize at all that a data set is you know imagine i've had data sets that had you know 5 000 participants and 200 rules of rows of variables it's like there's a lot of information in that data set and so then the question is how the hell do you derive a valid conclusion from that plethora of information because you could report all sorts of meaningless correlations right they would be spurious but also practically useless and there's just endless numbers of those in the data set you know how do you judiciously use a statistical process to extract out the information that that is what true yes but it's not just true you want it to be useful i agree yes right okay and so that's where the pragmatism issue comes in right because then we might say and one of the reasons i wanted to talk to you is because i know you care deeply about truth and i know that you're motivated by it and so then i would say that that that's a metaphysical relationship in some sense it's an a prior metaphysical relationship because you made a commitment to truth and i would also say that that's an act of faith because you might ask yourself in science is it truth or untruth that serves the world well uh that's where we came back that's where we came in because um there are all sorts of truths which do not serve the world there are all sorts of truths which are very unpleasant yes you get an analogy might be uh as a doctor um you you um have a patient who has incurable cancer and you have to decide whether to tell that patient the truth or not right well um you could debate this with your colleagues you might um your colleagues might say well he's better off not telling him he's better not not knowing so the truth in this case is not beneficial what would you pick what would you well would you want to know that's irrelevant no no no i would rock i would i would one and i would want to know okay well but i agree that there are dangerous truths let's say and there are truths that under some circumstances might be harmful and that could be used as weapons but i would still say i don't believe that you can be a scientist and discover objective truth say in a useful manner without being committed to a metaphysical vision of the redeeming power of the truth because i don't even think you can make the micro decisions that you're making while you're reading a book and sifting through it right trying to separate the wheat from the chaff without i don't want to impose this view on this conversation right i'm trying to explore it because it's i'm very i've dealt with plenty of bad scientists in my time you know psychology is rife with what they call p hacking where you just run repeated correlations until you find one that yeah oh that that's bad science yes um but it's also bad but it's bad ethics it's like well why not look why not do that if it advances your career yes i'm quite i mean that that's bad and that's not i think what we're talking about i i thought you were saying that truth is that which is beneficial in my in my in my analogy when you're arguing with your colleagues whether to tell this patient the truth you could very well argue shall we tell him or shall we not it would be beneficial not to or beneficial to but everybody should agree that it is true that this man has cancer that is true yes yes well this is partly why this this issue is so unbelievably complicated because what you just said is true but it's also the case that you have to apply an ethical framework onto that infinity of in order to focus on and communicate those see you've picked topics that you communicate to people and there are other topics you didn't pick yes and there's a lot most of the other topics you didn't pick and so the question to me is and this is partly why i got interested in jung by the way because he was very interested in the unconscious direction of attention the psychoanalysts were fascinated by that that's partly why they're interested in freudian slips but you okay one thing we could ask do you think that you picked your field of study or did it pick you uh i i'm not sure um but i don't think that's not relevant it doesn't it well it is no but it is it has to be relevant because it's actually the question of relevance and so there's a whole branch of cognitive science now uh i'd like to have you talk to this colleague of mine named john verveiki john vervicky is unbelievably smart and the problem he's spent his whole career focusing on is how in the world do you decide what you attend to when there's an almost infinite number of things to attend that's a big question it's a huge question it's a question that applies to science when you decide what to what to work on as you say there's an infinite number of things you could attend to work on and you choose some of them and that's a decision which people take and that biases your view of the world and everything but nevertheless there is objective truth it doesn't affect the fact that subjective truth the the the mere fact there's a very large number of things you could attend to and you have to choose one of them doesn't affect the fact that that there are lots of truths out there and right but it definitely it yes but it definitely does affect the way that science is con see this is also why the postmodern critics have been so effective in what they've done it's because they're they're pushing the notion that a narrative necessarily drives the process of inquiry even in relationship to objective facts and i think that's true and that that's partly what we're discussing now i also think and i don't know how to reconcile these things like the fact that you're making a case for the existence of the objective fact it's like i'm not going to argue about that that doesn't mean i understand it fully because i can't quite understand the relationship between the objective fact and the necessity for utility and partly i can't understand that on biological grounds you know because are fundamentally when you look at things i would say that the description of truth that you're purveying in right now in this argument i'm not trying to make it any more general than that is not one that's well nested inside the epistemology that you would derive from evolutionary biology because you would you would you would say in some sense that were tilted in a very fundamental manner to only apprehend those things that will aid survival and reproduction and so to hell with the objective facts well that's probably true that that our sense organs and our bias towards that which helps helps us to survive and our internal sense also to speak our attention mechanisms inside the our thought our thought mechanisms so we we are creatures who evolved on the african savannah and from forests earlier on and our ability to understand the world let alone what we attend to is limited by that we are blinkered by the fact that that that our um bodies and our brains were designed to survive in africa well that's what that feminist critic was pointing to in a very well let's look in an awkward and tendentious manner and an overstated manner absolutely not as bad as lacal right well then then with well we are living with i don't understand quantum theory and the reason i don't understand quantum theory from yes evolutionary point of view is that it's not evolving it doesn't map onto our bodies exactly and i don't um so there are i what i think is remarkable actually that there are people who understand quantum theory i agree i mean that that and that's well that also points to to to your point that also points to our capacity to apprehend truths that in some sense appear to be outside the pure confines of the evolutionary struggle yes but then that's also a problem in some ways for evolutionary theory i mean you can you know wave that off as a spandrel but i think that's a big mistake when when we're talking about something as profound as the capacity to understand says why should you be so presumptuous as to think you can understand all these things when you're only an animal which is which has evolved to survive and reproduce right but what but the thing that's so horrible about that in some sense is that's also at the core of the post-modern critique of science that claim now the human humanities types when they make a claim like that often sound like the woman that you just described but you know i try to give the devil as do and i'm trying to do that with post-modernism because you know i i think the conclusions that were drawn from the post-modernist canon you know the fundamental conclusion as far as i'm concerned of the the french postmodernist process allied with a certain kind of marxism is that the entire process of categorization all our categories plus the process of categorization are attributable to the expression of will to power that's it oppression tyranny dominance and there's actually i would say that the evolutionary biologists are in part responsible for that weirdly enough i am not trying to throw stones you know i'm like to think of myself to the degree that i can manage it as an evolutionary psychologist i accept the tenets of evolutionary biology i don't think you can understand anything about biology without doing that but here's the argument from the biological perspective we ratchet ourselves up hierarchies of power to attain positions of status particularly as males to give us preferential access to mating resources and that contaminates everything we do it's like hey now i want to ask you one final question i know we're running out of time but i don't i don't care i want to ask you this question okay i talked to sam harris i've talked to sam harris five times and the first time i talked to him i was extremely ill and we got bogged down in a discussion of truth pragmatism versus objective something we've been banning that back and forth and it's a tough it's a tough nut to crack and then we had four more discussions that were all public and there was a tremendous amount of interest in them which was quite stunning it was staggering we had 10 000 people at in dublin to one and about the same to the o in london and we were discussing issues just like this you know and i made some mistakes dealing with sam because i had a point i wanted to make you know and it was i suppose the point of this pragmatism in some sense in its relationship to evolutionary biology and so i was trying to sort of win the argument and i have found as a consequence let's say of a baptism by fire that that's not a good way to approach like one of the things i really wanted to do with you i hope we managed this today was to to ask you questions and find out more about what you thought like in a real genuine manner not only in any of that none of that the last time i talked to sam all i did was ask him questions and we had by far the best discussion we've ever had okay and so he through that discussion i was alerted to reasons why he was so anti-pathetic to the idea of religion okay and so i thought i would so sam is very obsessed with the idea of totalitarian atrocity i would say evil fundamentally if you wanted to make it metaphysical but you could say restrictive dogmatic tribalism of the sort that makes us demonize and destroy people ideas o'clock but so what did you want to ask me because we we have our night of time i i want to ask you when you talk about religion yes do you identify the religious impulse let's say or even the religious phenomena with the totalitarian proclivity for dogmatic certainty and the potential acceleration of aggression and atrocity as a consequence no um i have i care first and foremost about scientific truth and so to me it is an it is a scientific question whether there is a supernatural power creative power intelligence in the universe i think that's a very fascinating question i think that if that were true it would be the most important scientific truth if there is that would be it would be a fundamentally different kind of universe that we live in if there is a creative intelligence so although i have a secondary interest in negative consequences of religion and so on especially in islam um i i my my fundamental interest is in the scientific truth which i believe is a scientific question even if it can't be answered by scientific means it that there either is a god or there isn't and that that either is a creator or not at the base of the universe an intelligence i think there's not i think that intelligence is something that comes late into the universe as a consequence of a long evolutionary process it happened here it no doubt happened what probably happened in other parts of the universe and do you distinguish between intelligence and consciousness uh for this purpose no okay for this purpose no okay so let me ask you this question and do you think that sexual selection is mediated by consciousness slash intelligence uh in those species that have consciousness yes i mean then i would ask you to what degree do you think that consciousness operates as a fundamental mechanism of selection and shaping because that's that i mean that that is a very profoundly interesting question and and i mean sexual selection happens in insects which i do not think are conscious so so um yeah well that's a tough one i mean i know butterflies can detect a deviation from symmetry and they're part of the part of one in a million so yes there's there's sexual selection throughout the animal kingdom um and consciousness can happen without consciousness i think so yes but but let's let's look in humans yes yes i think so okay so okay so when i look at the religious epistemology cross-culturally i see a bipartite structure at the bottom of the hypothesizing there's an idea that there's a material substrate that consists of a kind of latent potential that might be one way of looking at it and that there's the action of a forming process on top of that and it looks to me like it's something like what would you call it an intuitive apprehension of the relationship between consciousness and the rise to complexity of living forms and the reason that i'm curious about that from an evolutionary perspective is that i can't see how sex forget about unconscious sexual selection for a minute we'll just parse that off because maybe they're gradations of consciousness i don't know insects do some damn complex things and have you ever seen that bbc clip of the puffer fish making a sculpture oh yes i think yes yes i mean yes that's quite something because that puffer fish is we should talk on the way to the chat we can do that okay okay well it's very it's hard day to talk to you to penrose and you in the same day i know yes um um so so i don't think it's completely out of the realm of question that part of the apprehension that there's a spirit that gives rise to material order is a metaphysical reflection of the idea that consciousness shapes biological being through sexual selection but that spirit would have to have been around before evolution got started and so well that okay look fair enough big thing that's a yes that's a big problem but then i guess a rejoinder to that in some sense would be do you think it's a nonsensical proposition to i mean one of the things i was talking to dr penrose today about was he believes that consciousness in some sense stands outside the domain of algorithmic computation i know he does yes and we discussed in some detail why he believes that and i'm very curious about that my brother-in-law is probably the world's foremost computer chip designer okay and he's currently designing a chip that he thinks will have the computational power of a human brain and he was the first person to build a 64-bit chip and he did that in 1985 okay and so we've had a lot of discussions about the limits of ai so this is an ai optimized chip by the yes my brother-in-law thinks that computation is algorithmic and so it's comp or that that that thought is computational yeah and algorithmic and that can be replicated in ai systems yeah penrose thinks that goodell's theorem precludes that that there has to be something standing outside yeah now i tried to push him on what he regarded as the metaphysical significance of consciousness yes and he's a very careful thinker he's a lot like you except he he's more association in his thinking i would say and he he thinks it images he does fundamentally do you think in words uh yes yes and i i think in words mostly but yes but images have quite a hold on me as well as you as you pointed out do you think that the proposition that consciousness is implicit in matter is a useful and non-nonsensical statement i think it's nonsensical and i don't think that's what roger said no i know i know i it isn't yeah no it isn't he didn't say that but i suppose it depends to some degree on what you mean by implicit right but obviously matter can give rise to consciousness with sufficient complexity yes but not i mean you people are saying like every you know consciousness even in stones yes i know i know i've talked about psychotic well it just strikes me that it doesn't really help answer the question yes so hello hello i think very well you both you need to take our microphone

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,248,469

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Karl Jung, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson, mystical experience, richard dawkins, richard dawkins debate, richard dawkins atheist, atheist vs christian, christian vs atheist, religious symbolism, postmodernism, postmodernists

Id: HbGoUwmqIEQ

Length: 86min 56sec (5216 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022