Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson in Vancouver 2018 (with Bret Weinstein moderating) — Second Night

[Music] hands together for Brett Weinstein Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson [Applause] hello Vancouver thank you all right so we have an interesting situation here obviously this is part two and a few of you were here for what took place last night we are going to find a way to catch you all up pretty quick on what took place but before we do that I thought it might make sense to talk to you about where we are in this discussion and why it matters and it matters not just for those of us on stage but it matters very much for you all in the audience the point is basically this we've arrived at a place in history where the sense making apparatus that usually helps us figure out what to think about things has obviously begun to come apart the political parties the the universities journalism all of these things have stopped making sense an alternative sense making networks have begun to rise and the one that we end up being a part of seems to be beating the odds with respect to staying alive and being a vibrant part of the conversation but that depends on something it depends on our ability to upgrade what we can discuss and navigate and Sam and Jordan have run afoul of each other in the past as you all know and so our ability to upgrade the conversations such that they're able to to find common ground and for us to move forward together is potentially very important a very important upgrade now that upgrade in the modern era includes you all because our conversation and your conversations are all now linked through the internet so the ground rules for tonight involve you not filming what takes place on stage tonight and the reason for that is because what takes place on stage tonight has consequences and the freer that Sam and Jordan feel to use new tools to try out positions that maybe they haven't explored before the more likely we are to succeed so please don't film but that does not mean that we don't want you talking about what was discussed here tonight in fact we're very excited to see what you all make of this conversation and where it heads so in an effort to to get you up to speed on where we got yesterday and I think the evidence is strong we all felt and the discussion online suggests that we actually accomplished quite a bit yesterday that we made headway in an effort to attempt to keep that momentum going but we're going to do is we are gonna have Sam and Jordan Steelman each other's points from last night so that you can hear what that sounds like now [Applause] for those of you who have ever tried Steele manning somebody's point with whom you have a severe disagreement you know just how hard this is so let's give them some leeway Sam would you be willing to start sure sure well first let me just make the the obvious point that that probably isn't so obvious unless you take the time to put yourself in our shoes but just imagine how surreal it is for us to be who we are simply having a conversation about ideas and to be able to put a date on the calendar and have all of you show up for this it's just an amazing privilege isn't it thank you for coming out [Applause] so so here is what I think Jordan things I'm getting wrong I think that was grammatically correct maybe there's another note in there but clearly I don't understand how valuable stories are how deep they go the degree to which stories encode not only the wisdom of our ancestors but quite possibly the wisdom born of the hard knocks of evolution of the species right so there's no telling how deep the significance of the information encoded in stories goes and there's a class of stories that are religious stories and they're religious for a reason because they're dealing with the the deepest questions in human lives they're questions about what constitutes a good life what's worth living for what's worth dying for these are things that if each individual just thrust from on to the stage of his own life not knowing where he is and tasked with figuring out how to live all on his own or even in a in a collection of others who are similarly unguided by ancient wisdom that this is not knowledge we can we can recapitulate for ourselves easily and so we we edit or ignore the these ancient stories at our peril at some at minimum at some considerable risk because we don't know how much we don't really know what baby is in the bath water and so we should have immense respect for these traditions and the this is what we have to be discovered tonight I'm still not quite clear about how this links up with with more metaphysical propositions about the origins of these of certain of these stories but at minimum my criticism of religion because it tends to focus on the the most obvious case of zero-sum contest between religious dogmatism and you know scientific open-ended discussion is doesn't address this core issue of the significance of religious thinking and religious narrative because I am for the most part just shooting fishing in a barrel criticizing fundamentalists and the kind of God that the fundamentalists believe in the God who's an invisible person who hates homosexuals obviously that's not the deep the deepest version of these religious this what is a narrative technology for orient in human life in the cosmos so maybe I'll leave it there but that's I think what Jordan things [Applause] before you steal man Sam's point how did you feel about his encapsulation of yours I mean well I got a couple of things to say about its like first of all I think it was accurate concise fair I also think that this is a more technical note in some sense is that if if you ever want to think about something that's exactly what you have to do right you want to take arguments that are against your perspective and you want to make them as strong as you possibly can so that you can fortify your arguments against them you don't want to make them weak because that just makes you weak and so you know Sam and I are both scientists and it really is the case that what scientists are trying to do and I think what we're actually trying to do in this conversation genuinely is to try to find out if there's something that we're thinking that's stupid you know because when I'm laying out the arguments that Sam just summarized so well I've tried to generate a bunch of opposition to them in my own imagination and their arguments I put forward are ones I can't undermine but that doesn't mean they're right it doesn't mean that at all and so if someone comes along who's and this is certainly the case if you're a scientist who's worth his or her salt if someone comes along and says hey look you've made a mistake in this fundamental proposition it's like yes great that means I can make progress towards a more solid theory of being so and that's what we're trying to do and I do think it's working and so I thought that was just fine exactly dead-on and I hope I can do justice to your position as well so okay so I'm gonna summarize Sam's argument briefly and then I'm gonna tell them lately let you guys know why he thinks I'm things of what things I'm not taking into account so Sam believes that there are two fundamental dangers to psychological and social stability religious fundamentalism essentially on the right and moral relativism and nihilism on the left and so the danger of the right wing position is that it enables people to arbitrarily establish certain revealed axioms as indisputable truth and then to tyrannize themselves and other people with the claims that those are divine revelations and he sees that as part of the danger of religious fundamentalism and maybe religious thinking in general but also as something that characterizes secular totalitarian states that also has a religious aspect so that's on the right and then on the left well the problem with the with the moral relativism nihilism position is that it leaves us with no orientation and it also flies in the face of common sense observations that there are ways to live that are bad and that there are ways to live that are good that people can generally agree on and that statements about those general agreements about how to live can be considered factual now so and and then the next part of Sam's argument is that we require a value system that allows us to escape these twin dangers one stultified us and the other leaves us hopeless let's say and that value system has to be grounded in something real and the only thing that he can see that actually constitutes real in any provable sense and there's a certain amount of historical and conceptual weight behind this claim is the domain of empirical facts as they've been manifested in the sciences and technologies that have made us incredibly powerful and increasingly able to flourish in the world and so we need to ground our value propositions in something that we've been able to determine has genuine solidity to so that we can so that we can orient ourselves properly so that we can make moral claims and that we can avoid these to in dangers we can begin with some basic facts that we can identify as I mentioned briefly what constitutes a bad life endless pain suffering anxiety tremendous amount of negative emotions short-term life span all the things that no one would choose voluntarily for themselves if if we would all agree that they were thinking in a healthy manner and we can contrast that sort of domain of horror with the good life which might involve while certainly freedom from privation and want and undue threat and anxiety and hope for the future and all of that and that we can agree that those are poles good bad and good and that that's a factual claim so he Sam also claims that we can define the good life this is an extension of it with reference to flourishing and well-being and that that can actually be measured we should and can inform the idea of flourishing and well-being with empirical data having said all that he also leaves what would a domain of inquiry open that would be centered on the possibility that some of the ideas that have been encapsulated in religious phenomenology if not in religious dogma might be worth pursuing as well that there might be wisdom that can practically be applied in terms of perception to to spiritual practices although those become danger when dangerous increasingly dangerous as they become ensconced in dogma and so that's Sam's position and then his criticism of my ideas he would say that it's facts not stories that constitute the ground for the proper science of well-being and that we don't need to be connected to stories ancient stories in particular to thrive and the reason for that are that these ancient stories are pathological in certain details especially in the specific claims they make which which look outrageous in some sense from a modern moral perspective and he believes that it's hand-waving to ignore those specific topics and with you know with what would you call it an optimistic overview of the entire context that that they're they're dangerously outdated now if they ever were useful that they're subject to too many potential interpretations for any modern usage to be reliably derived and so he believes that attempts to interpret these stories let's say are rife with so many potential errors of bias and interpretation and subjectivity that all the interpretations in some sense are unreliable and perhaps equally unreliable that they're dated that worse than that not only are they unreliable but they're dangerous insofar as the claims they lay out are pose a threat to scientific and enlightenment values which are the true saviors of humanity as evidenced by our progress let's say over the last two or three hundred years and that they're also susceptible to the totalitarian interpretation which I described earlier which confer upon the interpreter a sense of and then a claim to revealed truth and so I would say that Sam's argument and his and his criticisms of my position so okay so you right my next book I'll write yours [Applause] Sam how do you feel about that characterization of your position certainly close enough to get the conversation started I mean there's a few the grounding stuff we have yet to talk about and I'm not as I'm not as much as stickler for materialistic scientific empiricism as I heard implied there but we can I think from the point of view of the audience this is a this is a good barometer of where we got to last night and I think actually the gains are really impressive which I have to say is spooking me because of something called regression to the mean now if I catch either one of you regressing to the mean tonight I will hunt you down and I will ridicule you on Twitter tomorrow so you have been warned okay all right so do either one of you want to now talk about what was missing from the other characterization or how do you want to move I think we should touch this issue of metaphorical truth because I think it still gets that the distance between us sure and as a and happily yeah this is your phrase that you have you might want to do you want to prop up this phrase why not so the idea of metaphorical truth which I think actually is the reconciliation between at least the points that you guys each started out with is the idea that there are concepts which are literally false that we can falsify in a scientific rational sense but that if you behave as if they were true you come out ahead of where you were if you behave according to the fact that they are false and so to call these things simply false is an error in effect the universe has left them true in some sense other than a purely literal one and so religions would then according to actually what you heard from both Sam and Jordan religions would fall into this class of things these are encapsulations of stories and prescriptions that if you follow them irrespective of whether they literally describe the universe you end up with and advantages that you may not know why they are there but nonetheless you you are ahead of your you you're ahead of your position if you were to navigate just simply on your your perceptions that's the concept yes I think there's a good analogy that you and I stumbled onto after we did a podcast together you had a an analogy about a porcupine that could shoot its quills which many people balked at but a listener gave us a better one which was the idea that anyone who's worked with guns at all must have heard there's admonishment to treat every gun as if it is loaded right and you actually what I last night when I allege that you believed in God you corrected me said no you live as if God exists right and so this seems like there's a connection here so if you're if you know if I had a gun here that I wanted to show bread if I know anything about guns I'm going to make damn sure that it's unloaded right I'm gonna pull back the slide I'm gonna drop the magazine pull back the slide check the chamber and do this in a redundant fashion that really looks like I'm suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder maybe it is truly redundant and then I'll hand it to Brett and if Brett knows anything about guns he will do the same thing having just seen me do it and if he hands it back to me again I will do the same thing even though there may be no ammunition around right so it really is crazy at the level of our explicit knowledge of a situation and yet absolutely necessary to do and it's it's not merely its it runs very deep I mean I would have bent that whole time you you're careful not to point the barrel of the gun at anything you would be afraid to shoot and when people fail to live this way around guns day with some unnerving frequency actually shoot themselves or people close to them by accident so it is really the only proper hedge against just the the the odds of being in proximity to loaded weapons and yet if someone in the middle of this operation came to us and say you know actually there's a casino that just opened across the street that will take your bets about whether or not guns are loaded would you like to bet a million dollars as to whether or not this gun is loaded well of course I would bet those million dollars every time that it's not loaded because I know it's not loaded so there's there's a there's a literal truth and a a metaphorical truth well you know otherwise known as a very useful fiction which in this case is actually more useful than the truth right but the only way I can understand its utility is and and even utter the phrase metaphorical truth in a way that's comprehensible is in the context of distinguishing it from literal truth and this is fascinating Sam actually this is this is I think next season I'm a little worried by how excited you are about so I have a little story that might be helpful about that and so on you could you could tell me what what do you think about okay think about this okay so so one of the things that I've been reconsidering since we talked last night is is the nature of our dispute about the relationship between facts and values because I I think I can make a case that what I've been trying to do especially in my first book was to ground values in facts but I'm not doing it the same way that you are exactly so so I don't want to make that a point of contention so and I'll get to that in a moment but with regards to this metaphorical truth let me tell you something you tell me what you think about this so one of the things that's been observed by anthropologists worldwide is that human beings tend to make sacrifices so I'm gonna spend two minutes three minutes laying out a sacrificial story and the reason I want to do it is because see what I think happened with regards to the origin of these profound stories is that people first started to behave in certain ways that had survival significance and that was selected for as a consequence of the standard selection practices and so that was instantiated in behavior and then because we could observe ourselves as were self-conscious creatures that we started to make representations of those patterns and dramatize them and then encapsulate them in stories so it's a bottom up from from being so it would be sort of like chimpanzees or wolves become aware of their dominance hierarchy structures and the strategies that they use so a wolf for example if two wolves are having a dominance dispute one the wolf that gives up first lays down and puts his neck open so the other wolf can tear it out and then the other wolf doesn't and you could say well it's as if a wolf is following a rule about not killing a weaker member of the pack of course wolves don't have rules they have behavioral patterns but a self-conscious wolf would watch what the wolves were doing and then say well it's as if we're acting out the idea that each wolf in the pack has intrinsic value and then that starts to be any maybe the wolves would have a little story about that the heroic forbearing wolf that doesn't tear out the neck of its opponents and that that's a good wolf well that's good wolf ethics and and and so but it's grounded but it's grounded in the actual behavior okay so let's put that aside for a second now here's the sacrificial story so human beings have made sacrifices it seems to be a standard practice all around the world and in the biblical narratives they would often sacrifice something of value like like a valuable animal like a child start the story well I'm not making light of this I know that human sacrifice was a part of this but that again so just just to give you a crib on where my mind goes here is human human sacrifice is as old a religious precept as we know about yeah it's a cultural Universal the the other sacrifices are derivation from it and circumcision is a surrogate for the far more barbaric act of human sacrifice and you know it answers every test you would put to it with respect to its archetypal significance it's it's compelling presence in stories across all cultures but the horror is that it actually has taken place in all these cultures based on licit beliefs in the presence of just just right Arthur casts of scientific ignorance Kesler used that as the argument for the essential insanity of humanity yes no but it's not just the insanity of humanity it's the the misapprehension of the causal structure of the cosmos that you don't know what Naturals the weather well you don't know why people get sick you think your neighbor's capable of casting magic spells on you you're ignorant of everything and you're trying to force some order on things and so when you don't in the absence of engineers and you don't know why build certain buildings fall down you actually can agree with your neighbor that maybe you should bury your firstborn child into every post hole of this new building which in fact has took place and it's the consequence of ignorance and so that the problem is if you're only going to talk about your sacrifice very strange consequence of ignorance like well you think it's the notion that we're in relationship to invisible others that can they can mistreat us based on or not having offered enough where we are not precisely those others well but we're in relationship to the invisible others who will judge us in the future okay you're changing you're changing the noun in important way but I'm also trying to understand I'm not trying to argue against the horror of child sacrifice no I would never imagine I know I know but I'm also good but I'm also trying but my work would be much easier if you did that yeah yes yes yes and the work of journalists as well they've tried that so right that would be that would even be worse than enforced monogamy hypothetical oh so okay so see I'm let's say that I'm trying to give the devil his due and I'm trying to understand from an evolutionary perspective like a cognitive behavioral evolutionary perspective let's say why that particular set of ideas would emerge and in many many many places perhaps autonomously or once having emerged would spread like wildfire it's like because I'm not willing to only attribute it to ignorance now we could attribute it to ignorance no problem man but but there's more going on there because it is a human Universal and there's all sorts of things that happen in nature as a consequence of biological and evolutionary processes that don't work out well for our current state of moral intuition okay so one of the things because I've been thinking about this sacrificial motif for a very long time you're trying to figure out what that what what the hell's the idea here exactly and so so here's one way of thinking about it if you give up something of value now you can gain something of more value in the future okay so let's think about that idea for a minute so the first thing is that's a that's a hell of an idea that's delay delay that's right that's the discovery of the future as well and so you might say well the notion of sacrifice is exactly the same thing as the discovery of the future if we give up something we really value now we can make a pact with the structure of existence itself such that better things will happen to us in the future now okay now what's weird about this and it's hard to understand is that it works so when I talk to my students for example and I say what did your parents sacrifice to send you to university many of them are children of first-generation immigrants and so like man they're on that story in a second right they know all sorts of things that their parents sacrificed and they're delaying gratification in the present for a radically delayed return in the future now you think animals generally speaking they might act out the idea of delayed gratification as a consequence of running out their instincts but they don't conceptualize it it's not obvious that animals give up something they value right now in order to thrive in the future there's an old story about how to catch a monkey right so yeah you put a jar up with rocks in it then you put little candies and it's a narrow neck jar you put little candies on top of the rocks put a few candies in front of the of the jar then the monkey comes along and picks up the candies puts his hand in the jar grabs the candies and can't get it out I still don't know if this actually works on monkeys or it was just a great story I don't know I don't know either and I've heard I've heard various claims but but but the point is you can go pick up the monkey he won't let go of the candidates now perhaps he would but the the the issue is is that it's not obvious that animals will forego an immediate gratification for a future gratification I don't think I don't think that's right actually and actually one of them well the question is can will they do it consciously they might act it out they act it out that's not the issue it's very hard to know if it's conscious I'm fond of the questionnaires but I know I know anything and obviously the line between acting it out and becoming starting to consciously represent it is a tenuous one but what looks to me like what happened is that after we observed that people who were capable of delaying gratification sacrificed things that they valued in order to obtain a future goal and it worked that we started to codify that as a representation and then started to act it out and so so the story and and you'd say well that produce strange variants but but there's a reason for that - as far as I can say so imagine this imagine that there's a rule of thumb sacrificing what you find valuable now will ensure certain benefits in the future well then the question becomes how good could those future benefits be and so that might be heavenly let's say in the archetypal extreme and what's the ultimate sacrifice that you have to perform and then I would say well the child sacrifice it fits into that category and so it's it's as if those ideas were pushed to their radical extreme and you could say well that's a pathological extreme it's like well it is it is a pathological extreme but but I think we also have to understand that some of the things that we've and as we've evolved towards our current state of wisdom such as it is is that they were learned in a very bloody and catastrophic way they were learned with incredible difficulty and delay of gratification was certainly one of those because it's a hell of a thing to learn when you're in conditions of privation okay yeah well I think that the issue here for me is that you don't need a conception of you don't need any kind of positive gloss on human sacrifice as a meme or as an archetype in order to form a coherent picture of the future that can motivate you so delayed delayed gratification is fully separable from a notion that it might ever be rational or good to sacrifice a child as an offering to an invisible other that doesn't how do you know it's separable because that's the developmental history as you said well that's a sacrifice even if I think it I think it is in fact historically separable but let's just say it's not let's just say as a matter of our origins they're United they're of a peace it's just it is the genetic fallacy to care about that origin I mean there are two say that the that is the only path forward toward a notion of the future given where we've come from or that it's somehow necessary to venerate now or that it's good but we do venerate the idea of sacrifice now but I would say I would say we do it to to the detriment of our moral intuitions in the religious context so for instance I think that the notion that Christianity Christianity is actually a cult of human sacrifice a Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice Christianity is a religion that says actually no human sacrifice is necessary and there was only one that in fact was necessary and effective and that's the sacrifice of Jesus and I think that is when you dig into the details not only a morally uninteresting vision of our circumstance and how how we can be redeemed it's morally abhorrent right so I think there's a there's better version okay let me ask you a question about that so in in in in the moral landscape you lay out this pathway there's the bad life and there's the good life right and you described what they were and the bad life is a variation of hellish circumstances and the good life is a variant of hypothetically the life that we would like to lead and your conception is that and correct me if I'm wrong your conception is that the proper pathway forward so that would be the moral endeavor is to move away from the bad and towards the good yeah and so far as we understand which way is up yes yes the basic claim is that we can be right or wrong with respect to we do we don't necessarily know how to do that in an unerring manner and and we could subject that to approximation correction along the way and we should but we can outline the broad scheme you know just progress away from hell towards something that's positive yes yes okay so I would say that there's an implicit claim in that that you should sacrifice everything in you that isn't serving that to that and I would say that that's essentially the same claim that's made in Christianity well again that is a I may understand the impulse to uplevel these barbaric ignorance derived beliefs right to something that is morally that it's interesting and palatable in in in the current context and I I understand you can do that my concern there is you can do that with everything I mean you could do it with witchcraft why not do the exact same thing you're doing with religion to the history of witchcraft witchcraft is as well modern I just wouldn't do that so that's a perfectly yeah but so it's but it's a that should be of concern me that there are reasons why we don't want to endorse witchcraft absolutely and so so you know but I'm not talking in modern witchcraft currently exists I mean you go to Africa there there you know people are hunting albinos for their body parts because they believe in sympathetic magic and and kids get killed as witches so this belief indoors in certain pockets of humanity and we're right too about just think at a certain point you have to acknowledge that some ideas are not only wrong but they're their effects or disastrous or have been disastrous or will likely be even if good and certain circumstances will likely be disastrous in the future and then we shouldn't be hostage to these these ancient memes we shouldn't have to figure out how to make the most of the worst idea that anyone's ever had which is you should maybe you should sacrifice your firstborn child to you've never seen hold on Sam I I want to hold your feet to the fire here two points one interesting observation when you presented the example so on your podcast I had argued that believing that porcupines can throw their quills might protect you from a porcupine that might wheel around even though porcupines can throw their quills your listener sent the better example which was all guns are loaded when you presented it you didn't say all guns are loaded well you said treat all guns as if they are loaded which is I think the same reflex that you have faced with any metaphorical truth which is that it can always be unpacked but it's actually that's the way Jordan talks about believing in God as well right and actually so so this is but then if we take something like you so you say all right sacrifice of children is abhorrent let's say it is and then you say well Christianity hasn't for gone the sacrifice of children in fact it's described one child who is sacrificed for everybody else but arguably that's an upgrade of some metaphorical truth that frees those who are adhering to this tradition from ever considering sacrificing a child and does is it provides a motivational structure that may in fact have very positive outgrowths though not literal the idea that someone would have sacrificed their own child for the benefit of everybody else not to have to that idea might engender a large amount of good work that would result as Jordans point but let me just concede that the hardest case for me I mean which I did up top to just in defining when after you define metaphorical truth and I use the gun example there's certainly cases where the useful fiction is more useful than the truth I would would grant that but you know I think those cases are few and far between but handling guns is one of them it's just not useful when when the casino opens across the street and you can place a million-dollar bet right then you want you want to have some purchase on the literal truth so you want to be able to and and again this is psychologically interesting because and I keep coming back to the gun example because the one that that is viscerally real to me like if I have a real gun that I know to be unloaded I still emotionally can't treat it as a harmless object I can't point it at my child just for the fun of it because you know that we're gonna play cops and robbers now with a real gun right this this yeah I have a I have a superstitious attachment to always be in safe with the gun right and it's and it's important it's important that that get ingrained and yet it is not strictly right it's not irrational because it has good effects but it's it's not actually in register with what I know to be true factually in each moment right so very low cost it's very low cause it's not divided in societies and causing people to go to war and if you were gonna teach a child gun safety you would want to encode this so that they would automatically know never to behave as if a gun is unloaded because that's what gets you into trouble as an adult every every gun owner recognizes the distinction between the metaphorical truth and the literal truth here but I guess what I suspect is going on here is that your mechanism for dealing with the world involves unpacking all of these things and I think it's highly productive but it also means that you have a hard time understanding why anybody would do anything different and that's the question is just because we can track fully the difference between guns actually all being loaded and behaving as if all guns are loaded right that one there's no left over there's nothing there's no mystery they're right but there may be many of these things for which there is some difficulty lining up the metaphorical truth with the literal truth and operating according to the metaphorical truth might have advantages which I think is what you're getting at so well so here's here's another situation because you know we have to remember what kind of catastrophic past we emerged from and how much privation ruled the world prior to 1895 essentially and certainly the farther back you go the more bloody and horrible it was I mean how often do you think it was necessary and this is not obviously something I'm in favor of and this is also one of these situations where we get to play with ideas that we might not otherwise play with how often do you think it was necessary for people in the past who had absolutely no access to birth control and who didn't have enough food to sacrifice a child for the survival of their family I mean god only knows yeah that's it well but that's worth thinking about it's like you know life is unbelievably cruel and difficult and one of the problems that comes when you discover the future is that you might have to make the most painful of sacrifices and lots of lots of archaic people do this sort of thing they do that with their elderly people they do that with sick people they do that with infants that they deemed too fragile to survive like so part of child sacrifice and I know the literature on child sacrifice reasonably well part of child sacrifice seemed to emerge out of the observable necessity to leave someone behind so that everyone else didn't die and we don't know how often that had to happen in the past it might have had to happen a lot right now obviously just just in the interest of kind of conceptual clarity here human sacrifice is a larger horror than that so you have it was very common is the sacrificing of uh you know capped so you take the Aztec sacrifices where you you know you now have slaves some of whom you're going to Aztec sacrificed about twenty five thousand people a year yeah yeah look it's it's clearly a bloody mess there's no doubt about that but you know one of the things that you see happening in the biblical narrative which is extraordinarily interesting is that you see echoes of child sacrifice at the beginning but what happens is the sacrificial notion gets increasingly psychologists as the story progresses so you know you see that transition with Abraham and Isaac where the child sacrifice is actually forbidden although previously demanded by God and then you also see it as you already laid out in the substitution of the circumcision for the idea of sacrifice itself and then what seems to happen see I'm trying to figure out how these ideas develops like psychologically from their behavioral underpinnings is that eventually it becomes psychologize completely so you can say well we can we can conceptualize a sacrifice in the abstract so my parents can sacrifice to send me to university without anything or anyone having to die it transforms itself from something that's enacted out as a dramatic ritual into something that's a psychological reality but all that blood and catastrophe along the way as part of the process by which the idea comes to emerge right definitely so what is the connection of all of this because yes so there is this history and I would argue we are busily trying to outgrow much of it if not most of it and whether it's evolutionary history or just we might be trying to transmute it so that it becomes we can we can maintain and as you suggested we do we can maintain what's useful in the tradition and throw out everything that's pathologic yes but we're constantly discovering a lack of fit between both our what we perceive in ourselves as biological imperatives and the cultural legacies of just what mommy and daddy taught me was true right yes we have now every reason to believe might not be true and we're trying to optimize our thoughts and institutions and and relationships with one another for our current circumstance and yet we have this legacy effect of certain books and certain ways of speaking have a completely different status and they have this status because they may in fact it's imagined not be the products of merely previous human minds but they may be the products of omniscience and that this is where the respect accorded to religious tradition is totally unlike that the respect we would Accord to anything else but you know mythology literature past science past philosophy I mean you people can read Plato and Aristotle for their entire lives with ever without ever being fully captured by the kind of dogmatism that that every religion demands that you'd be captured by if you're really going to be an adherent I would say that's actually an archetypal truth you know the idea that the pathological tradition stands in the way of update that's an archetypal truth I mean one of the reasons why in creation myths one of the variants of a creation myth is that the hero has to slay a tyrannical giant in order to make it make the world out of his pieces and it's a metaphorical Restatement of the idea that a tradition can become hidebound and when it becomes hidebound and too rigid that it interferes with current adaptation but the problem is and this is i think this is something we really need to hash out the problem is the problem that you're describing is the problem of a priori structure now some of that's textual but some of it isn't textual some of it resides in us as our psyche insofar salient the problem I'm describing here is that we have two categories of books in this case we have those written by people like ourselves just endlessly open for criticism and conjecture and those written by invisible omniscient assume that if these religious systems weren't codified in books if they were still just enacted or dramatized you'd have the same objection it's not the fact that they're in books that's relevant no but it is the dogmatism it's the fact that I can't we can't jettison that part okay it's the dogmatism okay so to me that's the same as the problem of structure now here here's the here's the problem I think with the way that your argument is laid out I'm not saying it's wrong it seems to me that this is a place where it needs to be developed because I see that the attempt that you make to derive the world of value from the world of facts as as justifiable given what it is that you're attempting to do which in principle is to make the world a better place but there's a massive gap in there it's like how do you do it because the objection that you place on mine my reasoning let's say which is well the problem with these texts is that there's an infinite number of interpretations and which of them can how can you determine which of those is canonically correct is exactly and precisely the same criticism that can be levied against your attempt to extract the world of value from the domain of facts it's the same problem it's not an infinite number of interpretations in either case but I I allow most enough to infinite so it might be I mean that's why the moral landscape for me is a landscape of peaks and valleys and so I you know I'm totally open to the possibility in fact certainty that there are different ways for similar minds and certainly different ways for different minds to be constellated so that they have equivalent but irreconcilable Peaks on the bland scape so there's a lot of wellbeing over here and there's a lot of well-being over here and there's a valley in between and so it's it's a kind of moral relativism it's kind of like you know this is this is great and this is great but these are irreconcilable right well I'd like to see that made more concrete and I need to know how that fits in with your conception because one of the claims that you make in the moral landscape is that the distinction between the bad life and the good life is normally it's like it's a factual distinction yes it's universally it's universally apprehensible and true it's your I think it's your fundamental axiomatic claim and I don't see how that's commensurate with the position that you just put forward was it so here's the position and you can forget about morality as a concept for this man I think the mirtha the starting point is deeper than morality the starting point and this is all this is our starting point all of us right now in the universe the starting point is we are conscious right we have a we have a circumstance that admits of qualitative experience and again this is true whatever however we understand consciousness whatever is actually happening we could be living in a simulation this could be a dream you could be a brain-in-a-vat consciousness could just be the product of neuro chemistry or we could have eternal souls running on so how is I'm gonna integrate it with the brain whatever is true something seems to be happening and these C means can be really really bad or really really good we know yeah each one of us in our lives have experienced this range of possibility and yes there are caveats here there are hard and painful experiences that have a silver lining right they'll give you some other capacity where you could say well you know that really sucked but I'm a better person for it right and we can understand what it means to be a better person for it in terms again of this range of experience which I you know I'm calling to subsuming all of this the positive end of this as well being which is to say that you know I'm a better person for it because now you know having endured that ordeal I am capable of much greater compassion where I appreciate my life more you know the cancer made me a better person now that I've value each moment of life more than I ever did all of these claims are intelligible within a context of an open-ended context of exploring this space of possible experience so what I'm saying forget about morality forget about right and wrong and good and evil what is undeniable is that what we have here is a navigation problem we have a space of possible experience and again it's not just a human problem this is a problem for any possible conscious mind we have a space a possible experience in which we can navigate and we and things can get excruciating and pointlessly horrible where there are no silver linings and we get the skin this can happen individually in some you know episode of madness that never ends if there really is a Christian hell to go to well then it can it's gonna happen to me after I die right given what I've said on this stage if and so it matters who's right obviously if I knew that a an eternity of fiery torment awaited somebody who didn't make the right noises about one or one faith or another well then it would only be rational to make those right noises right so it's it's my bet I'm placing a bet on certain pictures of reality being wrong but the reality is is we're navigating in this space and morality and ethics are the terms we use for how we think about our behavior affecting one another's experience so if you're in a moral solitude if you're on a desert island or if you're you know on a alone in the universe morality is not the issue you need to worry about but well-being still is an ever-present issue it's possible to suffer and it's possible to to experience bliss and and something perhaps something beyond that and we the horizon in both directions is something we will never fully expose explore very likely we don't know how good things can get and we don't know how bad they can get but but that there's a spectrum here is undeniable and I would say that that my moral realism simply entails that we acknowledge that it's possible not to know what you're missing it's possible to be living in a way where you are less happy than you could be and not to know why right and just not have the wisdom to make the changes and that matters if anything matters that matters and and cut it matters to us individually and it matters to us collectively and that mattering is our is that subsumes everything we can intelligently want in this domain of value and that's and so again it's a kind that the the cash value of any value claim is in the the actual or potential change in consciousness for some conscious system somewhere sometimes and that's that's my claim and it's I try to get I'd like you each to clarify something so it sounds to me Sam like you are hypothesizing that a rationalist approach will always beat a traditional metaphorical approach with respect to the generation of well being well not always but a dozen that there's so many obvious downsides to the traditional sectarian dogmatic approach that we should want to get out of the religion business as fast as possible okay but as fast as possible but do you mean that it has always been true that we should always have gotten away from it as fast as possible or do you mean now we should get away from it as fast as possible but there is a point somewhere in the past where it might have been true that actually the best the most the richest path to well-being might have been encoded metaphorically oh yeah that's certainly possible and in fact you might even say it was likely based on the fact that we have all of these systems still around so in part because like we still we still think in metaphor and we actually can't help it because half of our brain is oriented towards metaphor but can I get you to clarify something now yes okay so you have argued and you've actually quite surprised me by doing so you've argued that the dogmatism is a bug and not a feature you've argue no it's a began to feature okay it's a bug and a feature good so yeah but what what I thought I heard you say was that the resistance to update yes was a problem that effectively it was an obstacle yes so his lack of resistance dubbed it right okay there's problems everywhere man well it's there's a tension there is a tension there's a tendency terrible tension right well look at the by this way look at it this way most new ideas are stupid and dangerous but but most some of them are as well some of them are vital right and so we have we're screwed both ways it's like well if we stay locked in our current mode of apprehension oh hell is gonna break loose if we generate a whole bunch of new solutions most of them are going to be wrong and we're gonna and so what we need to do is well it it's a Darwinian claim in some sense is that yep despite the fact that most new ideas are stupid and dangerous a subset of them are so vital that if we don't incorporate them we're all going to perish that's the bloody existential condition and so now and part of the issue here and see and I think that this is the problem is is that let's take the the dogma idea okay so there's the dogma incorporated in the books but I'm gonna throw away the books because the dogma was there before the books and then the question is where was the dogma and the answer was the dogma was in the cultural practices but and in and in the agreement that people made with regards to those cultural practices but it was also part and parcel of the intrapsychic structure that enables us to perceive the world as such now the problem is and I think this is the central place where we need to flesh out these ideas is that you cannot view the world without an a priori structure and that a priori structure has a dogmatic element and so you can't just say well let's get rid of the dog won't because you can't perceive the world without it has an uninspected element if you're talking about just perceiving the world yes we have it we have perceptual structure that allows for us to perceive the world and we know that there are failure states right so we know we know for instance that we are we are we've evolved to perceive in visual space based on a literally neurological expectation that light sources will be from above right as we know that we can produce visual illusions based on gaming that expectation right but that's not the same thing as a a Dogma subscribed to about something some subset of humanity that is antithetical to another Dogma subscribed to by another set of humanity that has nothing to do with underlying biology that's something that's this change of so obvious well but it's changeable in real time but based on just conversations like this you know we could have you know I get emails from people who can point to these the paragraph where they lost their faith right well in reading somebody in reading Richard Dawkins or hearing a debate between between me and some theologian where it's just a collision against rationality which is so useful in every other context suddenly proves its utility in this context where they think well okay clearly I know the Muslims are wrong about the status of the Quran let me let me take that that that spirit of criticism in the internal space of my own culture and what what moves well a dogmatic attachment to Christianity has to move by that same standard well and that's and and it's possible to do that and that's not a matter of getting into the brain and changing your perceptual apparatus that has well the distinction between different levels of what would you call it structure related processing in the brain and the relationship to the underlying biology isn't clear like and it isn't clear when that's biological and what is it when it isn't so you know your your your comments about our a priori perceptual structures notwithstanding there's no clear line between what constitutes an instantiated accurate biological perception and something that shades more into a cultural presupposition so it's a it's a gray area now here let me ask you a question so this is one of the things I've been thinking about so this is this is designed to point out the difference I'm not making the claim that the idea that we should ground values in facts is wrong I'm not gonna make that claim although I think it's way more complicated than we've opened up so far but I would say is I can I think relatively easily demonstrate a situation in which you cannot find the value from the fact let's say you own an antique it's valuable and you think I'm gonna take this antique apart and I'm gonna find out where the value is good luck well it is it's not valuable in that sense well wait a second wait a second so we need to know so that's right it's not valuable in that sense because the value of the antique is a social agreement about its position in a hierarchy it has nothing to do with the material substrate of the antique yeah but but not you can't sure is that your honor you've made the claim already that you can derive values from facts it's like then what are you willing to these are facts about again so there are facts about the facts exist in the inter subjective space right so if I if I tell you well this glass this isn't just an ordinary glass I know it looks just like that one but this is the glass that Elton John drank from his last concert here yeah right right so you know what do you want to pay me for it right right it it could be that you know you're just the biggest Elton John fan ever and you it's worth quite a lot to you now that is it's a kind of evident it's not value intrinsic to the glass but it is it is it is a where's the value located well it's a measure in in the change this provokes in your experience right there's the idea I mean we value ideas as much as anything else and that's the you know that's hence the the mad work done by religion right anything cuz it's not these aren't facts on the ground these are ideas that rule people's lives people spend their whole life afraid of Hell okay it seems to me that it's easier in some sense rather than to relate the value of that and I love the Alton Jones class example using Elvis Presley is here I will tell him it's like wearing the guitar is the fact that it's Elvis Presley's guitar well it's nowhere in the guitar well what is it in where is it then and the answer is it's in the dominance hierarchy of values that's been socially constructed around the guitar it's located in an interpersonal space and that that location so value is located in interpersonal space and if you want to say well that's also a fact it's like okay but in fact and that's the beliefs and desires and conscious states of all the people involved okay well that's the only place where it exists it's only for the idea of Elvis's guitar can show okay well I'm trying to figure out then you see because what seems to me to be happening at least in part is that the we can stretch the the domain of what constitutes a fact so that the domain of fact starts to incorporate the domain of values but we do that with some doing some damage to the domain of fact so don't say don't just say no it's this is right I'll say more this really complicated because you see part of what the post modernists have done is that they've pushed away the domain of facts entirely and they say well the only thing is is that the only thing that actually exists is that this domain of interest subjective agreement and you and I are on the same page with respect to post-modernism right but but but you have to give but you have to give it you have to give the devil his due as well there they pointed out something and what they pointed out is that it's not so easy to localize the structure that attributes to facts their value it's not a simple thing now wait wait yes you would surely agree that if we had Elvis Presley's guitar that that guitar would have a material impact on people we could tell them this is Elvis Presley's guitar some fraction of them would disbelieve it somebody might be able to establish it based on a picture or something like that and the point is it would have a value that would alter the behavior of people with respect to that object in a material way yes it would alter the behavior you can also manifest in physical space which part of it the be hey detective we could figure out what the value of this guitar is based on some intersection sure we could take a behaviorist approach and we could see how much work people were willing to do - yes we can scan their brains and see what these well hypothetically we can do it but practically because the MRI data generally speaking is junk well we can table that well look it's that will be a family controversial statement I don't think we need it we don't need it but we know let's go with brain the brain as yet incompletely understood is surely involved in the valuing of this object right it's a fight if I tell you that this is and again we can take it out of inter subjective space because it could you you could be in a value solitude with respect to any given object so it could just be you could have a sentimental attachment to your watch that's worth exactly twenty-five dollars because that's what you paid for it but this is the watch that you know this is your first watch or whatever it is and you wouldn't sell it for any amount of money right that's a mess of your behavioral measure of how much you value it and if I told you oh boy you know sorry I borrowed your watch and lost it what the Cascade of negative effects that I see on your face is correlated with something that's happening in your head and the brain is involved right so that galaxy of that picture basically state is the value I can tell is that there'd be a socio-cultural agreement as to the value of whatever this entity is and that would find its mirror in the brain and that's that's a non controversial state of indicas all socio-cultural phenomena that are experienced find the reflection in the brain the fact that you can say that that's reflected in the brain it's continually run into with religion is that there you have a domain of so-called sacred values where people who are otherwise rational ceased to be rational actors so the reason why the Israel and the Israelis in the Palestinians can't negotiate as though their problems could be solved by a real estate transaction is because they have irrational and irreconcilable claims upon land and building do you think they're ready only thing there any more irrational than the claim that that class is worth something no it's just like that it's like it's a fact about people right say there are ok a little careful because it's confusing yep the there are we can make objective claims about subjective experience ray it's not it's there are we use this word objective and subjective in in different ways we use it in histological ways and ontological ways and give me just one sec to make sure I'm on the same ok what I can illustrate by way of example if I say that you know that's just your subjective opinion right I'm saying I'm denigrating I'm saying that you know this is an expression of your bias this is this is true for you but it's not true out in the world right that's one way I can use the the subjective object of distinction and that's an epistemological way like you're you're you're ruled by bias you're not thinking straight you know I don't have to your opinion seriously that's subjective I'm worried about objective facts but people get confused they think that objective facts only means the material world and what's what's really in this glass as a material object no we can be a much more objective than that we can we can make objective claims about the subjective experience of people like ourselves I can I can I can make an infinite number of objective claims about the experience this is the example I always use but I just happen to love it what what was JFK thinking the moment he got shot right that's it we don't know so we'll never get the data right so the truth or false nosov of what I'm about to say can't be predicated on actually getting access to the data because because he's not around and his brains not around to scan so but we you and I both know an infinite number of things he wasn't thinking about we can make an objective claim about his subjectivity I know he wasn't thinking well I hope Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris work it out on stage that night and an infinite number of things like that he was thinking something he was experiencing something but we don't know what it is that so I so what I'm talking about this domain of value I'm saying that it exists in the this landscape of actual and possible conscious experience for human beings and and any other system like us they can experience this range of suffering and happiness well okay so and partly what I'm trying to do is to actually determine what that structure is like so in our case it's certainly connected to the evolved structure of our brain by everything else we do want to go way deeper into the idea then it's connected with brain States because it's yes it's definitely connected with brain States the question is at least in part how and what does that mean and I think that the neuroscience has progressed far enough so that we can do quite a good job of this and so what I want to return to one thing and then maybe I'll outline a little bit of this and when you talked about the israeli-palestinian conflict you said that that was irrational and so look fair enough we people have been locked with their hands around each other's necks there for 3,000 years but there's a problem there and the problem is that people are looking at the landscape from a contextualized perspective right it's not just a piece of land it's their piece of land it's like your house or maybe your favorite shirt it's like well you say well I have a favorite shirt it's like well there's nothing inherent in the shirt that makes it your favorite no it's a subjective judgment it's like well then is that a fact well yes it's a fact it's a fact about subjective judgment it's okay well the Israeli claim on the land the Palestinian claim on the land is a subjective judgment that's a fact it's like so how is it saying it because it is the the true analogy here the complete analogy is rather like we're about to fight over Elton John's glass and Elton John was never here so so I'm not saying so it clearly still matters to us in our misapprehension of our situation we still really care and these are these are objectively true claims about the level of at which we value things and and hence the impasse it matters if that's counterproductive ly dismissive like you can say well it's it's really not when you look at the specific claims it's really not it's look you took the contextual interpretation to its absolute extreme you've said well there's multiple reasons why different people who occupy the same piece of land are going to feel about it in different ways sure okay and most of those reasons are amenable to some kind of rational compromise their studies on this I mean there's studies done by people who when you say disagree when you say that we're rational in that context you're using it as a black box that contains the concept proper way of thinking about it it's like it's not so obvious tin most situations what the rational approach is I have an obvious one here and and that's that whatever the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews think they're getting from their attachment to their dogmatic and irreconcilable religious worldviews can be gotten just as well by a deeper understanding of the of our universal and non culturally bound capacity for ethical experience spiritual experience community building and we can watch that red space what's that grounded in we can touch that space without the green it's almost like the status quo is it's almost like you're content to live in a world or you're at least you're content not to judge too harshly a world where fans of rival soccer teams or baseball teams regularly kill one another over their fandom right like what if that were the status quo so I spin this way for thousands of years there must be a reason for it people really like sports I'm not trying to justify the israeli-palestinian conflict no but I'm saying that completely too quick to judge the sanctity of their of their differences of opinion okay what wait a minute Sam there you made a claim like your claim was that if the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims would just stop their stupidity and adopt this universal ethic then everything would be okay it's like okay what's the basis for the universal ethic like that's that's not president in search of that the truth ISM that's an interesting problem for philosophers and for scientists that's not actually where the rubber meets the road for people living their lives well I mean it's analogous to me I really care about all of this and I my job as a as a philosopher or philosopher in that case is to make the best case I can for these ideas but the truth is it is analogous to when when you get into a debate with a a Christian fundamentalist in the States very often this pert this person will pretend to care about cosmology or evolution as though it's the most important thing in the world as though you can't get out of bed in the morning and figure out how to treat your friends and family well unless you figure out what happened before the Big Bang right no one really lives their lives that way and yet we have convinced ourselves that this is a sensible way of talking about the conflict between religion and so I think you I think you have arrived at the core of your conflict right here and I actually hear you both loud and clear your point is that if the people faced with the question were to you know start with a fresh sheet of paper look at the Middle East they could arrive at a compromise that they as individuals might find put them way ahead and is more profitable than the situation that they are continually finding themself and yeah and that might be the case on the other hand the reason that they don't is that historically those who have have been out competed by those who haven't so the point is the universe and the fact that it refuses to solve that conflict is telling us that there is some reason that people who take that prospect seriously are not actually correct in some at least metaphorical way so in other words what is if they have a sentimental attachment to some piece of territory somewhere that sounds completely irrational on the other hand that sentimental attachment may result in you continuing four five hundred or a thousand or two thousand years whereas if you surrendered it because it was irrational you might go extinct now should you care that your lineage is gonna go extinct maybe arguably not on the other hand it's hard to imagine that what you're saying is so thoroughly grounded that it can justify causing people to alter their perspective on value in such a way that it might actually drive them extinct it's clearly secularism babe we're talking about the fringe here we're talking about that when you're talking about in this case the Israeli settlers and the Palestinian terrorists right like that is that is there we should all free the sigh of relief that that doesn't that that kind of passionate attachment to land doesn't characterize most of humanity if you're trying to defend your house so but that's kind of different because I think this is this is where this is where the the crux of it is well so if you follow the idea that this is actually some come at the seemingly sentimental and irrational attachment to the piece of land is some sort of meta rationality which sounds like your perspective then we are now confronted with the question of alright if it is an evolved kind of meta rationality that is being manifesting stories that cause people to behave in ways that Sam sees as clearly irrational then we are stuck with the naturalistic fallacy which is to say so for those who don't know the naturalistic fallacy says that just because something is doesn't mean it aunt right the fact that selection favors something doesn't make it good when the Aztecs sacrifice their enemies it is good for continuing Aztec nests but it may not be good in some absolute moral sense so here's the question for you you're arguing for and I think an evolutionarily very viable explanation for religious belief and dogma but aren't you stuck with the downside of it where much of what is encoded in that way may actually be abhorrent yeah early unconscious okay so what about it what do we do about well this is this is exactly have a sorting algorithm yes what isn't trying to get to it okay okay so this is actually why I asked salmon this question it wasn't it wasn't an attack it's like okay so look people have these belief systems Christian Muslim Jew will say for that and you're saying abandon those let's say 2 2 and move towards this transcendent rationality it's like ok two problems it's not so easy to abandon a belief system because you end up in the moral relativist nihilist pit problem one doesn't have to well that's an empirical claim that we would be would have to find out whether that's true there's a lot of evidence against that yeah well there's plenty of evidence for it - but it's beside the point to some degree because that isn't that isn't something that I want to quibble about there perhaps there are trends there are transitional paths and sometimes people find a collapse of their faith actually freeing it's certainly the case that many of the people who are happy about what you're doing have found exactly that in what you've been saying and more power to you and so on I'm not willing to dispute that but what you said was ok here's these belief systems that are ancient and complex and we can step outside of them and there's this transcendent rationality that we could all aspire to that would solve the problems it's like ok what is it well what is it it is at a minimum to value all of the variables that conspire to make the one life we know we have can't value all those variables well no we can we're doing that right we do it every day and how we organize ourselves because I apply an a priori framework to the variables just to reduce them to a tiny subset that we can manage and it's the nature of that a priori framework that we haven't been able to have a discussion about we have an a priori framework that narrows our perception to almost nothing it's built into us it's partly socially constructed it has a deep neurological substrate and we actually understand how it emerges to a large degree and the thing is is that but I don't think I don't think that's actually our different so this the a priori framework operates in many different spaces which again we can't necessarily analyze but it makes it no less true so if you if you put your hand on a hot stove you will immediately feel a good very good reason in fact an unarguably good reason to remove it right and that it doesn't require moral philosophy to get you there you don't need it you don't need to inspect your a priori framework you just have to feel holy this is the worst thing I've ever felt right and there's so many moments like that in life that we dimly under that we understand rescue your child from a fire well exactly then you have you have some other goal right cause you to brave that that suffering right yes and but again trying to rescue your child from a fire is pretty close to as the hot stove in not needing to be analyzed right the imperative to rescue your it becomes harder when you have to rescue someone else's child from the fire and your CH and you're worried about orphan in your child who's standing next to you on the sidewalk right then we get into the domain of moral philosophy and then you can say well you know what do what how much do each of us owe the children of other people right how much should I risk my life and risk orphan in my child to rescue your child that's when things get interesting in a philosophy seminar and that's where people begin to hesitate people begin to we are biased toward protecting ourselves protecting our kin protecting our friends and only then do we begin to extend the circle and again moral but it is not a mystery where we we want to go here we want to extend the circle more and more and build institutions and societies that that that implement our best selves at our best moments more and more it makes it more effortless to be good take your example seriously here for said yeah alright so you are built to be more likely to rescue your own child than someone else's child from a fire we in society might like for the minimum number of children to die in fires as possible which gets you to sideline that consideration in favor of is a child who's faced with a fire who I'm who I might rescue religions do exactly this restructuring of values because they say something like actually your goodness in risking your own life to save that other child from a fire is observed and it is it is calculated and you will be rewarded for it in some way that's one possible benefit of some religions right good and okay so you put that on the balance but I have a lot to put on the other side of the ground do I know you know however analyst that's what I'm trying to point out to Jordan here which he actually acknowledges which is that he's got a big stack of good things that come from this heuristic but he's also acknowledged actually get this this is our core of disagreement here which is it however you want to however the balance is in a swing.the difference between us here is that I think we read the utility of rule of anything but in this case religious thinking as evidence of you you read it as evidence of something perhaps literally true inevitability okay so as and I view that as a conversion of either the genetic or naturalistic fallacy that it's just whether whether that's it's useful now here for us it doesn't doesn't argue that it's the best way of getting those good things I mean that my argument here is that religion gives people bad reasons to be good we're good reasons are available okay so and that's a problem right because good we good reasons scale better than bad reasons and I think we can undertake the case where religion is clearly useful in a life saving utterly benign way in in virtually all of those cases I think I can I can get you there by some other way without the downside or if not that's just one of those cases where yes the fiction was more useful now any possible tryst English a religious system from an a priori exceptional structure well if you can convert to it or away from it in a single conversation I would say if it doesn't go very deep well you're only I would say that for much of that you're only converting at a very superficial level no converting at the level of conscious apprehension and most of your cognition is done through unconscious processes oh so it's it's just a fact about us that most of people's religious attachment is born of having it drummed into them by their parents know their parents and their parents parents and their parents yes exactly but if we did the same thing with Batman and spider-man it would have the same effect right like if you relentlessly told children right I mean I've got you know two little girls who are you know dressed up like Batgirl right now they love that girl there's nothing I don't have to do anything to make them more enthusiastic about superheroes apart from just showing them the pictures of superheroes right if I told them in addition to how look how fun this is to dress up like Batgirl in addition you're oi you're gonna burn in hell for eternity if you lose your emotional attachment to Batgirl even for a minute right well then it's gonna be bad girl for the rest of their lives especially if the entire culture is is doing likewise and I again this is well and if that girl is the closest approximation to a divine figure that you can conjure up it beats the hell out of none at all and if Batgirl didn't partake of certain archetypal structures no one would give a damn about Batgirl wait a minute Batman I'm gonna spare you will play a role in the car because look hold on accidental it's not accidental that superhero stories have a structure and to say that well Batman and spider-man are obvious fictions and we could use them as not taking the wrong end you're taking the wrong into this I'm not I'm not minimizing the power of stories I'm saying we can understand their power without recourse to believing things we shouldn't believe now in the 21st century I still need an answer to the question about what it is that's this transcendent transcendental rational structure without an a priori an a priori don't want because I don't see it what's nice again we touched on this a little bit last night in that I freely admitted that in every domain of human inquiry no matter how the most hard-headed so mathematics logic physics at some point we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at some point we make a move that is not self justifying and is not justified by any other move that's more rudimentary right that's a statement of faith that was epic that's a callow use of this term faith is not the same precise definition of an axiom is my faith my faith that two plus two makes four that's not faith what no I didn't know is my intuition that this is a valid and replicable and generalizable principle right either your statement that that's a useful claim is a statement of faith but neither of those two were statements of faith no it was their statements about tuition these are intuitions these are because and their intuitions that can run afoul of other discoveries and other intuitions as you know which if mathematical facts or intuitions then what are we doing let's take a table so we've arrived we have to decide the super-important though ok we don't lose this ok this is so we for what two thousand years people have been studying geometry and had a very well worked out set of mathematical intuitions with respect to Euclidean space you know flat geometry and then some brilliant guy you know Riemann might have been the first said well actually you can curve space you know I can bend this triangle and all of a sudden it has more than 180 degrees right that's an intuition that people tuned up pretty quickly but all of humanity was blind to it for the longest time right these are what I mean by intuition is it's the thing you're using to understand something that you you are not in a position to analyze I know that's but that's not faith of the sort which is listen I know the Bible was dictated by the creator of the universe I know Jesus was his son I know he rose from the dead I know he'll be coming back and a thousand other propositional claims it's a statement it's a highly if it's a statement of faith and it's in the value domain how is it derived both from fact okay so I've we've arrived at the point where we have to decide whether to go to QA or to continue the discussion well you all are thinking about that I would like to level the challenge to each of you and then I will pull the audience and see what they think about QA okay okay so Jordan is arguing to you that you cannot ground the values that would undergird the modality of increasing well-being in anything factual and you are arguing in response that not without an intermediate let me just argue and hold on not without an intermediary struck what I've heard you argue is something that I agree with which is that you can ground many things in a nearly objective observation of the universe but it doesn't say anything about the value part of the equation and in fact I think having thought about the question from an evolutionary point of view that in order to do what you're talking about to increase well-being you are going to have to accept that that is going to leave you with an arbitrary grounding there is no absolute grounding for it you're gonna have to just simply accept that it's going to make you arbitrary that you are in fact going to have to do no inconsistent things like decide to honor the love of a mother for her child and dishonor the love of country that causes one population to to gasps another population that's inconsistent and they do embrace that in kind of inconsistency it's just a different I don't think that we even have the ground in problem I think it's a pseudo problem I think we but you just say we have to pull yourself in somewhere have a navigate the way it's grounded is the acknowledgement that what we have is it's analogous to what people do with the notion of meaning in life like what's the meaning of life how do you find meaning in life but what's the purpose of life these are bad questions these are questions that by when you pose them they seem to demand they suggest a space in which an answer must be put but it's it's just but you put an answer they help you sell the people should work towards the good yes there's a different there's a different way of framing it which is what we have here is an opportunity it's not about it's not a matter of meaning it's not a matter of purpose and it's not a matter of grounding it's a matter of we are in a circumstance where that where we have consciousness and its contents in every moment and all of this is it that the light the lights are on and they're on for reasons that we dimly understand right these are their reasons that are biological in our case but perhaps at bottom they're just based on information processing and that they're platform-independent and then we would build machines for whom the life the light is actually on or not right this is it remains to be seen whether we could actually build in our computers conscious Minds that can thrive or suffer right and that the difference matters but we're in the circumstance where we are trying to understand how conscious consciousness and its States arises but one thing that is undeniable is that the lights are on and being on they reveal a spectrum of experience that which has one end that we the the worse it gets the more compelling it is to move away from it that's reading that's meaning yes okay so so and then and all of our meaning talk and value talk relates to navigating in this space so there's well there's one end of it where things get needlessly horrible without a silver lining and there's another end where it gets better and better and nonzero-sum at all boats arising with the same tied and the Israelis and the Palestinians the landscape Cave evil and good yeah okay what do you do that's why so these are compelling ways to talk about this space of navigation what do you do when you accept your space of navigation and there's a conflict between wellbeing for the living population of Earth reverses well-being over the maximum populations that could possibly live into the future when they have a big conflict between how much well-being we are gonna feel now versus how much well-being future human beings will get to feel yeah well that those are legitimate ethical problems which we I think we often live in the space where we know there's a right answer that we are too selfish to fulfill or too short-sighted to fulfill like so I know there are things I do every day that not only will other people as yet unborn wish I hadn't done I might wake up tomorrow wishing I hadn't done those things right so like I'm I I'm a bad friend to my future self in some respect to say nothing of the rest of humanity so we can be so we can have failures of we could have weakness of will we can have failures that we can just be wrong about certain things but it's nowhere written that is easy to be a good person right in that case it's not even clear what good well no it is Chris really knows oh the answer it might be hard to be motivated by that knowledge and that because we're not a unity right I mean part of part of what wisdom is morally is an ability to be to live integrated enough with your own you know better self we have the advice you would give to a friend just falls right out of your work as well it's like live is up but basically treat yourself the way you would treat I think this is your line so you know someone new you're you're responsible for or there's some of you a friend of yours right if you can if you can do that you're already ahead of who most people are most of the time but there's no there's no reason to say that because it's difficult or because sometimes we're looking through a glass darkly and can't figure out what the answer is the answer doesn't exist or there is no right one okay now let me try with you you yeah so Jordan you have argued for an evolved framework of religious belief in which there are elements that are morally defensible that will be carried through time there are elements that are morally reprehensible that will be carried through time by virtue of the fact that they are effective and you have argued that these things because they have withstood the test of time have some kind of value which is not necessarily something that we should honor but some large fraction of it must be but that would seem to suggest that the degree to which these belief structures has value is contingent on the degree to which the environment in which we attempt to deploy these structures matches the environment in which they evolve absolutely now I would argue that no population of humans has lived farther from its ancestral environment than we do you think so yes well it isn't it isn't and look I think that's an absolutely valid point ok so so this gets esoteric relatively rapidly but the question is let's say at the highest levels of adaptation were adapted to the things that lasts the longest periods of time ok those are the most permanent things now the question is what are those most permanent things and you know one answer would be the fundamental material substrate of the world and that's true I'm gonna leave that be like we're evolved to deal with gravity ok but there are other elements that are higher-order abstractions in some sense that are also apparently hyper real so for example there's there's a problem that we have a bifurcated brain the question is well why do we have a bifurcated brain and the answer seemed and not just us animals to master seems to be well there's two necessary ways of looking at the world and they have to be in conflict to some degree in order to work properly the right hemisphere mode and the hemisphere mode the right hemisphere mode is a lot more metaphorical than the left hemisphere mode the right hemisphere is the hemisphere that seems to deal with exceptions to the rule and it seems to deal with exceptions to the rule by meant by treating them by aggregating and then trying to recognize patterns that unite them as a corrective to the totalitarian system in some sense that the left hemisphere imposes you could say that the right and the left are adapted for something like explored territory for the left and unexplored territory for the right i've characterized that as order versus chaos and I say I think the religious landscape is good versus evil to Sam's point that we should strive for a good life on a landscape of chaos first disorder and I think that landscape is permanent now I know we've moved from our African ancestral homeland but these this underlying abstraction this underlying on this underlying reality is so profound that it it maintains its validity across all sets of potential environmental transformations well ok ok can I just jump in here because here's why just a seize on one piece you you put in play there here's why good and evil can't be permanent in the in the usual sense certainly not in the Christian or judeo-christian sense one is that the judeo-christian notion of good and evil doesn't even map on to eastern lands open it cite it but it's also in an Eastern context and a Buddhist or Hindu context the evil isn't really evil it's just ignorance now you might dispute that you might say well that's not really they haven't met a sufficiently evil person if they could think that but the reality is they're billions of people who have a different rubric under which yeah but listen let me add another another case here you guys maybe you guys want this conversation to continue or do you want Q&A to begin I don't know which one you're fearing for give them okay give them a pause in our group is the group that wants this conversation to continue [Applause] all right well now the group that would prefer Q&A what's the former there what was disturbing is that many of the same people were clapping that proves what I'm saying about the so I mean it seems to me and again is that you made an absolute that's what takes of evil peace because it'll be interesting if it's not totally on point okay the reason why evil is susceptible to total deflation is if you agree with me evil is a category of human misbehavior human intention that we don't understand significantly at the level of the brain but if we did understand it totally at the level of the brain then every evil person we had in the doc at trial would be just like Charles Whitman with his brain tumor after he shot up everyone at the University of Texas right so like he he's the prototypical evil mass murderer but he's complaining about that this change that overcame his personality and he thinks it would be good because a good idea that after the cops kill me you autopsy my brain because I don't know why I'm doing any of this right and lo and behold he had a glioblastoma pressing on his amygdala and all of a sudden it made sense of his behavior in a way that a full understanding of psychopathy or every other variant of human evil would make sense of it in a way that would be deflationary ethically and then and then you would look at so then you look at someone like Saddam Hussein or the the worst evil person you could imagine and you would say well he's actually unlucky you know there but for the grace of biology go I because if I had that brain if I had those genes if I had those influences that gave me those synapses I would be just like him now if you think there's some other element that gives us free will and and now then you and I are disagreeing that's a factual claim that's at variance with mine but but if we are just on some level now a malfunctioning biological systems when we're being evil then a complete understanding of evil would cancel that category can you have to cleave define evil so we know what you're talking about well just let me take take just the worst people who have statistically victimized the most people and those are the evils people we can name so it's a so when you say so I think this is actually really important so I think actual evil of that kind is pretty darn rare and there's a lot of badness that yes oh yeah well the most troubling thing are all the good people doing evil because they're ruled by bad ideas but that I think is more consequential than we introduced we introduced a whole set of other things here but a free will and evil but but but just I just want to make it clear why I went there so you were saying this is this is this is I forget that word you used inevitable or ineluctable or it's permanent the implication is that this category is permanent and I'm saying that I don't think okay but evil in that sense it's a permanent category force it awaits more information and insight okay we're gonna distinguish for a minute good versus evil and good versus bad just for the sake of conceptual clarity in the moral landscape you make a fundamental axiomatic claim looks like a moral claim may be its claim of fact and the claim is there are bad lives and good lives sure and the claim you make is that that's universally true what is true for the requisite minds who knows 10 do okay doesn't matter okay but evil so yes unless I'm not telling you that you should purge the word evil from your your vocabulary I use the word all the time and I think it's useful it's a motivating word I'm just saying that it's there we can understand this continuum of good and bad or positive and negative in ways that don't use the juice certainly don't use the judeo-christian framework for valuing these things because if you if you take the Buddhist framework and map it on to this this continuum you don't get good and evil you get essentially wisdom and ignorance evil is Durin's of all the well-being you would you and others would experience if you behaved another way right that's the Buddhist game and and or even then Hinduism you like yeah they get this connects to you or your that your love of stories you take the the the Hindu texts the Ramayana which is just a foundation you know it's doing the work that the Bible is doing for Jews and Christians in that the worst guy in the Ramayana the 10 headed demon Ravana the prototypically evil person is at bottom really not a bad guy he's a great sage who was just you know in a bad mood essentially he was he was he was obscured by ignorance and so it is in the Buddhist can and the Buddhists meet the Buddha meets a serial killer who you know is wearing a garland of human fingers around his neck named Ghulam Allah but he was just one conversation away from being fully enlightened writing me he was like this is it's a different picture of a possibility I'm not saying one is right or wrong let's be agnostic about that I'm just I'm challenging your claim that there's something so prescient and useful and durable about the judeo-christian I was I wasn't making what we're stuck with it for all time he's making that claim I was making the claim that in the moral landscape you laid out a distinction between the bad life and the good life forget about Rutan evil the bad life and the good life hell in heaven the bad life in the good life and that that distinction was not only factual but universal and so it's you know that actually have had a right mind so that we could imagine a mind I mean this is an example I think I give the right mind you know but we could we could create circumstances that seem perverse to us that we would recoil from you could you could create a a universe of perfectly matched sadists and masochists saying right so you have the people who are real sadist who in our world would be terrible actors but in their world they're surrounded by people who want to be mistreated now again if you're a real sadist you never mistreat a masochist when he asked okay well sorry I'm not sure the human categories even exist exist but in some we undoubtedly we could create something like an artificial intelligence that could be it could be paired this way and that would be weird but on mine in my framework it is a conceivable space of equivalent well being and if it's not matched at all to our space rights but it's if if in fact we could inspect the conscious minds of all parties participating in that it is not obviously absurd but in my view to say that they are just as happy as we are in this conversation in fact some moments in this conversation I would say that they might be happier so let me let me ask you a question here about well-being because this is something I've wanted to ask you about but we never seem to get to is so you think that we should maximize well-being and that's part of your proposition which which I don't entirely disagree with by the way that we should ground our value structures in facts but but but there's a black box problem there like I think the black box problem about the a priori structure that we use to extract the facts of the world out and the black box problem is if we could measure well-being it's like yeah that's a big problem Sam like we have measures of well-being and they're terrible no no I'm agreeing I don't I don't think it's but it's not a problem for my thesis is it we don't have measures for anything we care about yeah but I mean if your if your thesis is that if we had the measures of well-being that were appropriate we could use them in a positive way and the responses but we don't have those measures it's like well okay well then what do we do oh no no what we have but we have measures I mean this conversation is a measure I don't like that that's a measure right you step on my toe and I say ow that's a measure don't do that if that's not a measure of your well-being it might be a measure of your treat neurodegenerative I mean this technically if you look at the well-being measures that we have yeah they degenerated to measures of neuroticism no we don't we don't but we don't have measures of certainty of belief of compassion of joy of any any of these conscious states we have we have neural correlates of some of them but we don't have okay there's no well then how to helmet to orient ourselves in the world then because we're doing that what we're doing this all the time you're you got an instantaneous measure though you've got an instantaneous measure of well-being we can all check with ourselves see how we feel but it's possible to be wrong about that right but it degrades as you get away from the individuals ability to check internally that would make you feel very good and would cause you to take apart your own life because if we mean like cocaine right it would destroy the the motivational structure that gets you to do stumps stuff of value that that you're right so we can't use emotion well right moment emotion as an indicator right well the in taneous is not good but you have a parallel problem it looks to me like the exact mirror image which is that you've got an integrative long-term measure of well-being instantiated in an evolutionary belief system but it's coming apart because we are living in circumstances that are less well mirrored that the present does not mirror the past and therefore these games which you you believe are timeless are degrading rapidly that's part of their that's exactly right okay so what Sam is arguing is that the tools to pivot in order to improve our way of interacting those are not the tools of long-standing tradition those are the tools of rational engagement respect for that process is part of the long-standing tradition yes that's true yeah but that's a big truth that's a major-league truth I agree and in fact I would say the fundamental tradition the most fundamental tradition of the west says that respect for the process that updates moral judgment is the of all possible values and that's also built into the tradition strangely enough I agree it's built into the tradition but I would argue that it is very likely to be compartmentalized in other words I was a little bit struck when you said that what did you say about scaling you said that the good reason scale and bad reasons don't isn't that the opposite of the truth call if you're calling these stories that give prescriptions for how to behave bad ideas the point is those stories propagate very easily so whereas so if we want to talk about the gun and whether it is loaded the idea that the gun is definitely loaded that scales really easily right you can pass that along in one sense no no no well this you want to talk to people about very small possibilities of very dire things happening they trip over it it's hard thing to get it's almost impossible for grunting together so the point is the one thing does scale the story that says yeah every gun is loaded it's a false story but that one definitely scales yeah the statistical reality of guns and the fact that they may indeed be unloaded but you don't want to play around with the remote possibility that one day you'll get it wrong right that doesn't scale because it requires you to have experience with stuff that is not common so the two things there one you bring up a an ancillary but very important point which is that moral progress here is often the result of moving from our story driven protagonist driven intuitions to something far more quantified right so I mean it's there's a classic you know moral study done by Paul slovic oh I'm sure you are aware of where you tell people about one needy little girl in Africa and you give her a name and and and show her picture and what you elicits is the maximum altruistic compassionate response from subjects you go to another group of subjects you tell them about the same little girl give her the same name but also tell them about her needy little brother right who has the same need and their response diminishes right it's just the addition of a single person diminishes the response and this is just this is a moral fallacy that we're all living out every day because if you care about this one little girl you should care at least as much about the fate of her and her brother and when you as status --tx no no you shouldn't man you'll exhaust yourself in the attempt no because we need what are you but here here is what this this is what this software flaw gets us it gets us people who will watch four hours a day with with with effortless and and you know tear-stained compassion the the the saga of the little girl who fell down the well but who will blindly turn the channel when they're hearing about a genocide that is raging and hundreds of thousands have already died this is something we have to let if you have to remember this no no I'm not talking about person no but your misunder you're misunderstanding me to create effect here that if I'm not saying that you should personally be overwhelmed by the death toll every day I'm not saying that it's functional for you and I to each personally get up each morning and just drink deep of the full horror of all the bad luck that has spread no maybe it is but maybe we can't have that but as societies we need when you're talking about how we aport but how we spend our money how we get a portion foreign aid the kinds of wars we fight or don't find you kind of interpret well then we have to correct for what is in fact a more illusion which is we know that if we tell one little we at least we tell one compelling story about a little girl right we could go to war over that right whereas we won't be motivated by a genocide that's the kind of thing that moves whole societies now and if it's if you add to it the bogus religious sanctities if you if you if we burned a Quran on this stage tonight the rest ours yes the rest of our lives would be spent in hiding right because of how motivated people would be to address that pseudo problem right that's the world we're living in and we're and civilization you know so far as we have a purchase on it is a matter of correcting for those errors and religion in for the most part not across the board but for the most part is standing in the way of those course corrections well okay there was a tremendous amount to an unpack in that I mean and and like in some sense a surprising amount it's like well we have were wired to feel intense empathy for individuals who are close to us and we can be told stories in a manner that that makes that system manifest itself and everyone and their dog thinks that that's a wonderful thing and we call that empathy right and empathy has a narrow domain of utility as it turns out because how I mean maybe if you were all who you should be you'd be weeping constantly for the catastrophic fate of sentient beings on the earth but you can't handle it you know what I mean it's that you can barely handle your own suffering and maybe you can handle a bit of the suffering of your family and more power to you if you could rectify that and if you were better human beings maybe you could expand that outwards but the fact that our empathy doesn't scale up to the level of genocide with the same intensity that we treat instances of individual suffering isn't an indication that we're irrational it's just an indication that were limited this is not true I think this is an indication of exactly the problem of our evolved structures not matching the present because the point is they don't match because we take care of our families no but they don't match because if you encountered the starving girl that's some sort of a it's a crude measure of suffering in your local environment were you in the past now that you can encounter this girl on the television it's not clear what it should mean to you right right you can't calibrate my how many rock to get right and so that so the point is your indifference to a genocide which is an abstraction right is altered should you see pictures of the bodies for example you shouldn't actually feel differently about the genocide in the abstract case versus the the case that you're looking at the bodies and the fact that we have access to photo realistic representation so what is worse about this is why is actually irrational because I can show you the case where you care at level 10 about the little girl named Lila and you care at level 8 about a little girl named Lila and her brother named John T right and you care at level 4 if I've added a few more kids but the little girl named Lila who you was ostensibly care about is there in each one of these right so yeah no but you have on application of the sufferer you have ten dollars to give away every month to help start struggling humanity and you tell me you'll give ten to Lila this month and I said and and then I catch you in another moment and I say well you know it's Lila and her brother so it's like if you only can give ten I understand but you know it's it's the problem is actually worse than I suspected and you say well not actually all of them is going to give eight right you it's it's not coherent with your how much you cared about Lila in the first place we do know we do know quite well the heuristics that we use to orient ourselves in the world can be placed into frameworks where they produce contradictory outcomes but that doesn't mean that the heuristics themselves are deeply flawed it's that it's a problem with the work of people like Kahneman and Tversky is they really valued robotics or them we need to correct for them because they're they're producing a reliable result that we recognize you can put them in a situation where they produce a counterproductive response but that doesn't mean that generally speaking in most situations they don't produce a useful outcome because the question is why in the hell would have they evolved if they didn't produce yes welcome mr. Batali evolved to live with 150 people with whom we're related and to be terrified of the people in the next Valley who may want to kill and eat us yes I mean that's our ancient circumstance which doesn't map on to a common humanity of seven billion people trying to figure out how to get to Mars without killing each other well it it does map on to it sometimes unfortunately because there are many times when we still face the same threats look with maps is the hierarchy you wouldn't be concerned about that fundamentalist terror of Islam if you weren't driven by those essentially tribal considerations no it's not suggest it's not wrong it doesn't require if my a mere identification with humanity it can ground not wanting to be murdered by people who are identified with a subset of humanity right like I don't need to be part of a smaller tribe to care that people will murder me over burning the Quran right it's it's just it's clearly counterproductive that we live in a society where some objects are held with such totemic attachment for irrational reasons by many many millions of people where you know you should be sympathetic with this our free speech is actually cancelled on this point right yeah literally can't produce cartoons I'm scholarly we're not about the cartoon crisis we don't show the card we have no argument whatsoever so between us about the lack of utility of duty you don't have to be identified as a as a Christian or a Jew to push back against that you just have to be a human being that sees the dysfunction of a smaller I have kind of provincialism well the thing that I'm struggling with is that I still can't understand what your ethos is is is grounded because you you claim like a transcendental rationalism but you won't identify the structures that produce it it's a black box and when I try to push you on the absolute nature of your ethical claim which is that the bad life is worse than the good life and that we should in fact universally work towards the good life it doesn't seem to me that you'll accept the proposition that that's a universal claim it no it is it is you well I should is irrelevant here it's just the fact that there is the possibility of moving in this space if you move in the wrong direction if you move far enough you'll like it less and less why is she relevant give given given the minds you have all right well what if you had to accept moving in the wrong direction and experiencing less and less well being in order to get to a better place and well and maybe even just to survive suppose the suppose a population has to endure a generation and a half of misery in order to persist ethically that's a perfectly intelligible circumstance that people have had to face and it's in my on my moral landscape it's analogous to when we were might be one local maximum or city or the some high point but we're moving in a down a slope to get to yet some higher place right so certain things allness some things may only be possible if we made some painful and net unpleasant sacrifice yes and so that but that's that can be rationally apprehended there can be an argument for that it could be a wheel you know we all have to go on a diet otherwise we're gonna you know we're gonna die of this problem right we all have to stop eating whatever it is wheat right it's a hard sacrifice for people have to stop it as you know it's that which is true well then there'd be an argument for it there'd be evidence that would convince us we would stop we would feel the pain and we would we would get whatever benefit with it was on the other side of that sacrifice but again you don't have to if the utility I get to come bring it back to stories which is as you know not my emphasis but it is yours the the utility of stories is not something I'm arguing against I mean there's no question that certain stories are incredibly compelling and in our conversation with one another the moment you begin to frame something in terms of a story people become much more interested right I like it if if 90% of what we said together tonight were frayed each each point we were making as a matter of philosophy or or science were framed in well actually you know yesterday I was walking down the street and I met this guy is a terrifying looking guy and all of a sudden people become much more interested right and that's not an accident and that says something deep about us that we could understand in evolutionary terms and we might in fact want to creatively leverage to be better people yes have better conversations definitely yes so wait so that's what I think there's nothing there's nothing that I say in opposition to religious dogmatism and religious sectarianism that discounts that reality and that's a psychological reality is a cultural reality and I'm not against making the most of it my basic claim however is that we never need to believe that one of our books may not have a human origin in order to do that effectively you can you can be just as compelled by the example of somebody like Jesus or some more modern person who strikes he was a moral hero and a and deeply wise without believing anything on insufficient evidence and it's and and as I said you know as you alluded to purely fictional stories about superheroes can have immense effect on us and that's something we could understand and also leverage but again that takes us out of the religion business and that's that's all I've been arguing for so do you really believe that that the belief in the supernatural aspect of these stories never alters the calculus of what people should do that the divine nature of a story about Jesus doesn't motivate people to do something that they might not have the courage to do otherwise the belief that they might end up in heaven because their good work is going to be observed doesn't alter their behavior well yeah I know it alters their behavior but it but rather awesome for the bad well I mean this is why this is what worries me about and a I think there's something there's a profound net negative that we are paying paying the price for every day by believing in paradise right a belief a belief that this life it probably doesn't matter very much at all because we get what we really want after we die is forget about the evidentiary basis for that belief it it is it's ruinous for prioritizing what we should be prioritizing in this life and it ok well that's interesting so let me ask you this I hear from you what might be a kind of confirmation bias where I hear that you know we've got a mixed bag you've got supernatural claims these supernatural claims we all agree have effects on the way people actually behave and you're quite focused on the negative and you tend to discount the positive which might be an artifact of the fact that we're talking about the present and therefore maybe something that's not well matched to these stories or it might be from the idea that you have the sense that there is actually a bias that these belief structures do and have always produced more harm than good and also my sense that the positive can be had without those structures so if you're talking about the the contemplative experience like it is it possible to feed that wake up tomorrow morning feeling like meister eckhart right feeling like you're just inseparable from the pure capital b beam that is consciousness right and there's no separate self there's a self-transcending union with everything you can perceive right I think that can be had without any kind of religious dogma tis and that's just a matter of paying close enough attention to the nature of conscious and so the contemplatively is the bait is one baby in the bath water we can save the ethical life is another baby we can save you don't have to presuppose anything on insufficient evidence to argue about what is right and wrong and good and evil in in the 21st century and so is it fair to call that a hypothesis that not just for some people but for everyone the level of well-being can be enhanced through rational interaction with the questions that dictate what we do that a hypothesis slowly if that's a hypothesis that the one additional fact that we that makes that more or less moot is that on certain points even if we felt that really believed in the fiction were what was it was advantageous to people depending on which fiction you're talking about they're simply just there's too much evidence against it that you can't you can't decide to believe something for which you have no evidence simply because of the good effects it's a good experience it will give you or you imagine it will give you I mean that's it so that's why Pascal's wager never made any sense you can't say the only way you can believe something to be true really true not just metaphorically true is to believe that if it weren't true you wouldn't believe it they you stand at some relationship to its truth such that that is the reason why you believe it now you can't say you can't be telling yourself you know I have no evidence for this thing but I know life would be better if I believed it to be true and so therefore I really believe it's true you don't think people do that all the time I don't think they do I think they do things much more like we're talking the metaphorical truth we're talking about you we act as if things are true without forming any strong propositional claim and that's fine that's fine that has its own utility I mean you know you don't think this is basically I mean we all suspend disbelief when we go and watch a movie and we sort of entitled the movie maker to to set the ground rules of the space and if it's Harry Potter then there are magic magical things that can happen and if it's some other story maybe there aren't so we all have a mechanism whereby we know we can suspend disbelief and it's interesting to me that you seem not to imagine that people are doing that with respect to metaphysical beliefs that have implications for what the right actions that they should take are why wouldn't it be the case that that same sort of mechanism would apply well it does apply but there are people who are clearly doing much more than that so I'm not if that's all people were doing under the ages of religion I wouldn't spend much time worrying about religion that some degree that's what people do you know as you say go into caring about things that at bottom we really shouldn't care about so the World Cup is on right now and we you know literally billions of people care could care down to their toes what happens to this little ball as it traverses a lawn right and if it goes into the net it really matters and if it fails to it really matters and always matters if we hit the target Sam but this is this is something we have manufactured to care about right it speaks to us it's quite literally a game this is a game that people are playing but some people take it in taking it further than you that then seems truly rational is part of the fun that's but but if they ate but the people who can't turn that off metaphors the talkers are metaphor yeah but there but there are people who if they're you know they're people you know the full-back who kicks a known goal and then goes back to his you know South American village and gets murdered right he's surrounded by people who are taking the game too seriously yeah okay I agree yes and so my problem with religion is that so much of a time we're meeting those people and what Edward yes and we're not criticizing those people we have no place to stand to criticize those people because we're so attached to the game why don't you take three minutes to sum up so I think we are there we are at the end of time so why don't you each take three minutes sum up and then we'll call it good yep okay sure okay Sam went last you want to go okay first here okay so there's lots of things about which Sam and I agree but the Devils in the details of course no I I'm very sympathetic to his claim that we need to ground our ethical systems in something solid and demonstrable my problem is I'm not sure how to do that when I I don't believe that you can derive a value structure from your experience of the observable facts there's too many facts you need a structure to interpret them and there isn't very much of you and so part of the reason part of the way that that's addressed neurologically is that you have an inbuilt structure it's deep it's partly biological it's partly an emergent consequence of of your socialization and you view the world of facts through that structure and it's a structure of value now that structure of value may be derived from the world of facts over the evolutionary timeframe but it's not derived from the world of facts over the timeframe that you inhabit and it can't be so the problem I have in with our discussion so far isn't really any of Sam's fundamental ethical claims because I do believe there's a distinction between the hellish life and the heavenly life say the life that everyone would agree was absolutely not worth living and the life we could imagine as good and I do believe that we should be moving from one to the other the question is exactly how is it that we make the decisions that will guide us along that way and I don't believe we can make them without that a priori structure in fact I think the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that we can't and I mean also the scientific evidence and I would like to go further into the devil that's in those details and so that's my situation at the moment [Applause] well part of these conversations and now we've you and I've had I think for car moved unto podcasts or a second live event and thank you for doing this by the way this is hey it's an honor to do this and it's it comes with risks for both of us I think you can sense we don't have precisely the same audiences all of you are sort of rooting for one or the other of us to some degree or the Spirit of Truth [Applause] and but clearly the conversation is the point right this is not it though this conversation had the character at many moments of a debate I don't think either of us view it as a debate in in the trivial sense it's not about point scoring it's about making sense in a way that's consequential because we're talking about issues of great consequence and you obviously care about these things and it matters whether we converge on the most important questions in human life and as you know I'm worried that religion doesn't give us the tools we need to converge what does give us the tools is a truly open-ended conversation and what then you simply have to look honestly at the obstacles toward any conversation being open-ended and religion presents those first and most readily it's it is a the idea that certain things have been decided for all time and there's no future evidence or argument that is admissible on those points now that is clearly bad everywhere in science it's bad everywhere in in how we renegotiate our proximity to one another in society in new laws and new ideas are born all the time about how to structure institutions and social relationships because new things happen we didn't have an internet and then we did so our old laws and our old expectations of human communication simply don't work in the presence of this new thing right so we have to figure out we again it's a navigation problem and what I'm perpetually in contest with even in conversations like this is the sense that the rules need to change just a little bit for this class of books that mean literally this side of the bookstore right there's like any other part of the bookstore well then there's no barrier to honest conversation but you move over here they've got this shelf of books there you you have to hold your tongue right there we can't pick and choose we can't say that while we can say that Shakespeare wrote some fantastic plays the best plays ever written and some are actually not that good right we can't say that about God right we have to find some tortured way to make the most of his diabolical utterances okay that's the thing we have to outgrow and so what I'm continually in tension with you is the degree to which your style of talking about religion and nary the power of narrative and and the meaning derived from it Alive's that point and seems to let people off the hook on that very point and that's the that's where we need to hold the line in my view we need to we need to that that it has to be clear to us at this moment in history that no one has the right to their religious sectarianism really I mean it up to the point clearly that there's a there's a soccer there's a World Cup version of it that is benign but once it gets taken past that point we we have to figure out how to pull the brakes and that becomes a real problem if you or if you were going to dignify the foundational claims of these faiths claims like revelation and paradise and blasphemy and apostasy these are things that you will you come up against and I think converse conversations like this are incredibly important because we we need to convince the better part of humanity that is possible to live the best life possible without recourse to divisive nonsense and where we draw the line between divisive nonsense and reasoned and necessary discourse is what we're we were dickering over and i think i think it's important that we we continue [Applause] so in closing let me say first of all I'm tremendously honored that you asked me to moderate these debates it was a truly remarkable experience as for what was accomplished I think it was a tremendous amount I saw both of you move I saw both of you exhibit tremendous generosity of spirit towards the other and I think this has exceeded my expectations of what might have been possible in these discussions by quite a bit and that also I will say has a lot to do with the fact that for reasons I think none of us can explain a huge amount of people a huge population seems to care about these issues because they matter a great deal so anyway I think this has been a very successful exercise and I think you can both justly be quite proud of what you've done all right let's give a huge round of applause for our speakers tonight [Applause] thank you so much thank you very much

Channel: undefined

Views: 352,755

Rating: 4.8538599 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: m0-oC_49fq4

Length: 136min 29sec (8189 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 01 2018