Sam Harris & Matt Dillahunty - A Celebration Of Science & Reason

ladies and gentlemen welcome to a celebration of science and reason please put your hands together for Matt Dillahunty and Sam Harris thank you Wow I can see those people right there because there's a little light grip there everybody else you might wanna be here oh wait I can hear you that's good briefly to kind of tell you what's been happening we've done a number of these events and tonight's just the two of us and we'll talk about that a bit but we got feedback from various events and a lot of people wanted more Q&A so we're gonna talk for a bit and then we'll take a lot more questions probably than we have at some others and just to preempt this when we get to the questions questions end in a question mark and don't begin with your life story or dissertation and for those of you who are familiar with me from the TV show famously hanging up on people if you think I can't hang up on you live you are mistaken we are control the microphones and but we're really thrilled that you're all here we almost I wish I could see it slightly better but we'll make do Sam how are you today I am good this has been a long day so we will I think many of you probably know that there's some controversy shadowing this this event now and I wanted to deal with that up front Lawrence Krauss as as many of you know was supposed to be here and a an article in BuzzFeed came out yesterday making a wide range of allegations against him all under the rubric of sexual harassment and after a lot of conversation we all decided mutually that it would be better if he didn't share the stage with us tonight and I want I want to I want you to understand how we came to that decision and and what what it means because it is not it should not signify to you that we are taking a position with respect to the truth of those allegations I think this is this is a very serious business we have a a colleague and a friend and a person with a very serious and much cherished scientific reputation under assault now and if you've read that BuzzFeed article you'll see that there's a wide range of allegations some of which if true are fairly grave and some of which seem fairly spurious and there's very little effort in that article to delineate the differences there and Matt you and I will go on to just talk about even more generically the implications of that in the the me2 movement but I just wanted to say that that the decision came down to this if you Florence were here he would want to deny all of those allegations he was he would certainly say that that article was filled with lies and then we would be forced to try to change the subject and have a conversation about physics or whatever else under the shadow of what I think would almost be certainly for most of you or certainly many of you the total inadequacy of that opening statement and I didn't that that seemed to risk being a farce I feel that we Matt and I have have built enough credibility with all of you as an audience that I didn't want to subject you to a forest where you're just basically waiting for the Q&A session to get down to brass tacks well with with Lawrence and I didn't think Lawrence should be forced to respond to this news cycle and even worse this Twitter cycle where he has to have his statement about this tonight because this event had to be on the calendar I think he I think he should receive absolutely has to respond at some point to these allegations and if there are if you know if there's someone he needs to sue or if there's someone he needs to apologize to or both he has to he has to come to terms of whatever is true there and whatever he needs to say and I just didn't think he should be forced to do it tonight and I didn't think we should be forced to to try to avoid the elephant in the room once once it was present so in any case when the QA starts we'll be happy to take questions and so far as the questions are relevant for us but I think what you and I should just talk more generically about this moment because we're we have a situation where it's just to look at we were talking about this backstage just to look at Twitter you know in response to this you know I see things like you know Sam Harris has never said anything about the me to movement so he must be totally against it and you know it's been four hours you know where you know the problem has commented on Lawrence Krauss you know so they're they're totally culpable right so it's like there's there's a there's a frenzy to all of this that we all collectively have to step back from so I think a four hour thing yeah now that was me and that was incredibly frustrating because what happened was I woke up yesterday there were several people who sent me links to the articles and some people called I grabbed my bags I jumped on a plane I flew from Austin to Phoenix I landed and I checked social media and the first thing I saw was Matt has gone dark on social media and I was it's been five hours and three of that was on a plane now I love the modern world where you have quick and easy access to everything but we're getting to the point where you know we want responses and you need to address this right now and my answer is hey was on a plane but even if I wasn't maybe I was in the hospital maybe I was sitting in my recliner maybe I was sleeping maybe I don't check social media every 10 seconds or maybe I was aware of all this which is the case and I wanted time to think and formulate a reasonable response rather than just being reactionary and feeding the the fire so let's try to find our way through a reasonable response to the larger issue because there are a few things here so I think I've decided this is something I have said before at my event with with ben shapiro a month or so so ago in the Q&A i was asked about this and my default is certainly to see these situations through the eyes of a woman as i my default is to believe women here if they if a guy is creepy the onus is on him and when there are differences of opinion there that's my bias and i actually I actually do think it's a bias because it it blinds me to those occasions where we really are in a grey area where there's there are legitimate differences of perception where we're talking about bad flirting or misreading of social cues and we're not talking about a kind of malignant attitude toward women and we're certainly not talking about anything like rape and so I think generically it just to be on the record about all this I think it's you know the me to moment is long overdue with respect to shining the light on people like Harvey Weinstein right I think it's fantastic and then people Harvey Weinstein himself and people like him belong in prison I mean this that we're talking about a criminal conduct that was enabled by vast numbers of sycophantic people for reasons that are very difficult to understand and but there's a continuum there we have and what's damaging at this moment is that the me2 movement is showing itself liable to wrap up people like Harvey Weinstein and Garrison Keillor and Aziz Ansari in the same sentence right as though there's there's this there are no gradations between you know in the in the ansari case it's until more information is in it just seems like a bad and awkward date you know and that is what that as being lumped literally in the same sentence with something that is that is clearly rape and then there's everything in between so we have if if people are unwilling to make those distinctions there's just there's there there's no we've completely lost our ethical mooring and there are people who are unwilling to make those distinctions there are people who just want to burn it all down and so and so in that respect I think we have to be very careful and and very fair and actually focus on details the details always matter in cases like this and I can empathize with the people who might want to burn it all down even if I disagree with burning it all down my default is to similarly if somebody tells me something about something they experienced and doesn't just have to be scenarios like this if somebody tells me they saw an angel or they had a ghost vism I believe that they are honestly trying to relay their perception of that experience that does not mean that I believe that they actually saw a ghost it does not mean that I've reached a conclusion about who was in the wrong in this particular scenario and when we talk about human interactions when it comes to human sexuality I'm often bad about you know reading the right cues I tend to default on the side of nobody wants to sleep with me that's that's my general assumption it keeps me out of trouble which is why there's not an article for me but I I believe I believe people in general and so I can hear two people tell me hey this was incredibly inappropriate and the other person says what this is news to me is I thought this and I believe that they're both accurately trying to portray things and we may not all be may not ever be able to get to the truth and there are people who I think glibly say well you know innocent until proven guilty and tell the police and okay let's not be ridiculous virtually none of these things are ever going to be taken to law enforcement nor is there anything law enforcement can do about them innocent until proven guilty yes that's a great standard in the court of law but when we're going looking for a restaurant we go to the Yelp reviews that's the anecdotal evidence from people and if there's a bad yelp review some people might not read further then oh it got two stars we're not going there well if it's the only review what if that's you know the the long-lost relative we've got their recipes stolen and so we tend to look in this restaurant and say okay well there's an aggregate here and it's like two and a half stars on average and there's 700 reviews so we don't even need to waste time or eating those reviews and you may be correct that may be the right way to do it but if you just see a handful of these and it's oh the food was great but the service was terrible well if I've got more time but I really want good food maybe I should go there anyway I think it's funny that we have trained people for the fastest possible responses and expect people to look at the situation and immediately go ah this person is guilty or obvious but when the truth is probably not quite that like like I'll save my personal impressions on this specifics of the case but I worry not so much about the people who are advocating for the me to movement I'm a fan of in general of the me2 movement or the hash tagging and what it's done because as I said I can empathize with the people who are experiencing frustration we have had a society where victims of sexual assault have been placed in a position where they are incredibly uncomfortable and unlikely to ever come forward and that sits there and it stews and it stews and it stews and then it explodes as we've seen and the problem with that sort of explosion is that there's potentially a lot of collateral damage and I'm not saying who is or isn't collateral damage but I can empathize with that frustration and for me once upon a time we knew from statistical analysis that false accusations of sexual assault were incredibly unlikely because there were so many more that happened that we never reported and now we're building a system where there are likely to be more accusations which just by default increases the number of false accusations or questionable areas you know also when you add the variable of anonymity a lot of these accusations are anonymous yeah and when we build a situation like that the question is are we doing good or we're making a world where more people can come forward yes and there's gonna be some bad that comes along with that so I'm incredibly encouraged by the fact that people are speaking up by they're saying enough is enough and yet I recognize that this comes with negatives as well and I think that my frustration right now is is with the people who either don't want to recognize potential negatives or the people who say I it doesn't matter if there's negatives you know is it because we've suffered too long we've taken too much and now we're gonna do this and I can empathize with that frustration but and not to spin off into this but the the school shooting recently immediately there was there were these people saying oh whether 17 school shootings in 2018 no there weren't not by any reasonable standard is that an accurate fact Snopes did an investigation they came up with 7 I looked at their list of 7 and I think there's maybe three that qualify as what most people think of when you hear school shooting someone went into a school and opened fire one is too many why would you ever have to feel the need to engage in hyperbole and exaggerate the facts when what all you've done is you've provided ammunition to people like ben shapiro I saw to say oh the liberal left they're lying about the statistics of shooting and he's not completely wrong yeah and we may see some of the same things in the me2 movement but I don't want to in any way I want to do everything I can to empower victims to speak up and to change the world around them and deal with the additional damage and confusion that comes along with it I don't I don't pretend I have an answer yeah well so and we've we totally agree there but we have to balance that with what we're seeing on social media now and in journalism and in organs of often pseudo journalism like BuzzFeed I mean so like that there were so many tells in this article two of bad faith right and again this is not to to close the door to to or not to judge the veracity of any specific accusation but for instance one of the things that was listed as a reason to inculpate Lawrence was that he had favorably retweeted this article by Claire Berlinski the Warlock hunt right which I encourage you to read this article this is a very serious article by a serious woman journalist who's a who's a very fine writer who I've invited to get him I have on my podcast she hasn't we haven't scheduled that yet but where she is just in in in a way that does not at all discount the gravity of real sexual harassment to say nothing of real sexual assault she worries out loud in as eloquent way as possible about this overreach and about what seemed to be at the time of her writing a kind of an attitude of moral panic around around this issue Lawrence retweeted that article right but they did dozens and dozens of smart people retweeted that article because it was so well written I did not yeah and this is one piece of this is one piece of evidence again you know as to his you know criminality so and there were many other things in the BuzzFeed article that we could talk about that should alert you to the fact that this was this was a broader attack on not just Lawrence but it was motivated by an attack on the atheist community I mean I didn't even notice this until someone pointed it out I'm attacked by by link in that article because because they link to this this hatchet job that Glenn Greenwald once did on me seeming to show that I'm a bigot against Muslims so there were there were ulterior motives that get weaponized here and again we're all now part of this this information feeding frenzy on social media and there's some we have be circumspect in our in the way we consume this kind of information and that's not to discount the fact that where there's smoke there's fire is often a good heuristic right it's not it's it is often true and that's why we so often rely on it but if you want to go looking for smoke about me with respect to the variable of bigotry right racism you put in my name and racist you will find all the people who mistook my criticism of the doctrine of Islam for racism right and I all I know they're there twenty thousand blogs that that have made that claim about me so it's and it's it's an outrageous and defamatory claim that I can virtually do nothing about but to point out that it's outrageous and defamatory and deeply illogical when I make common cause with with reformist Muslims and former Muslims who like ayaan Hirsi Ali and and Majid now was all the time and at at in many cases personal risk so you know try to get racism and bigotry out of that it makes no sense but still it will be there for the rest of my life you know and and that's and that's the it's getting harder and harder to parse all of these facts and and you have there there has to be some kind of assumption of basic good will and and patience a kind of attitude of charity working in the background otherwise you know we're just going to get siloed into our echo chambers and everything gets politicized yeah I had I had similar feelings going through the article that this was they seem to very clear motivation you know putting skeptic in quotes and about you in making skepticism and atheism as if there were one thing and one community and all this other stuff it was clear who's a hit piece and this was the individual that they were to use that doesn't say anything about whether or not the accusations are accurate and and in keeping with where there's smoke there's fire I I think at a minimum I'd like to see you know a statement some contrition some sort of recognition of what's going on but I wonder in the broader scheme we're talking about the bubbles that we form and you know they hit pieces that are out on you all right there are no hit pieces on me nobody's ever said anything negative about me ever don't even go look please don't go oh wait the ethical vegans did damn it but you know we've we've we're moving so fast and the Internet has been a wonderful resource one of my favorite kind of quotes is that the internet is where religions go to die yeah and it may also be where the next round of religions are born so exercise some caution but I've you know we constantly get in the state of well which sources do you trust and this is the same whether you're talking about science stuff or political stuff and so then we create organizations like politifact or whatever choose your poison and the reason I say choose your poison is because ah here's a fact-checking organization that's left-leaning and here's a fact-checking an organization that's right leaning how is that possible that the two fact-checking organizations still come out of this and then will we find out that these are both corrupt we come up with a new one and then this cycle continues are we actually just stuck with this massive access to information to where we are essentially building generations that might not ever have reasonable access to the truth just because all of the fake news can be spun up to appear as truth everyone everyone can be put a lab coat now everyone can appear to have credentials everyone can fake data that nobody has time to investigate I feel that the the fake news meme the fact that this this concept of fake news has been again weaponized against real news is incredibly destabilizing we are living in a world where many many people seem to think that there is no difference between the Washington Post and The New York Times and The Economist and the Atlantic and something like Breitbart or something like BuzzFeed or something like alternate right or salon right and clearly there's a spectrum of journalistic integrity it's not to say that that the the New York Times doesn't make glaring mistakes it does and it makes in line with its political bias it makes predictable mistakes right so it will make left-leaning mistakes more readily than right-leaning mistakes but still the incentives are such that it is a serious source of fact-checking and journalism and we have to support those differences and the fact that we now have a not to get derailed by by Trump but we have a president who will call the best news we have fake news and we'll sit down with Alex Jones for an hour and tell him he's doing an amazing work I have a hypothesis about Breitbart by the way so Bloomberg has always been viewed as generally respectable by me and many people I know and I think that but nobody ever watches it pays attention so they just knew it was the one with the B and then when Breitbart came out they just assumed they were the same thing and that's where it got its credibility from somehow I don't think that explains it I've got I'm not completely convinced but but it it is the fact that confirmation bias and the the the fact that our that our epistemology they're just the totality of our fact-checking and reality testing and truth claim forming is now hostage to politics in this way left and right you know some of the most egregious violations now are on the left and that's why so many of us who are liberal spend a lot of time I mean I you know I've certainly spend too much time criticizing the right and criticizing Trump in particular to ethics I think I've exhausted the patience of everyone even people who agree with me in terms of how often I touch the topic of Trump but I do spend as much time worrying about the the excesses on the left because the left is where we have to get this right right they leave the place where the the primacy of free speech has never lost sight of and and tolerance of diversity is a is a norm we never want to to lose touch with that is that is just being nullified by this again this kind of moral panic on the Left if you if you tell if you told me that tomorrow at a university someone would be D platformed and anyone who showed up to hear that talk would be spat upon by an angry mob I could predict with probably 99% confidence that that would was a leftist phenomenon or that the people in that crowd were were as far to the left politically as we find and that's that is a cancer that we have to find some way of of combating this it's a bizarre twist I think from from what my original perceptions were as an outspoken atheist skeptic humanists I have traveled around to universities I've debated in churches and I've engaged with people who are awful like like genuinely awful people in debates and I don't normally sum up the whole of somebody's character and say they're awful you know even when Billy Graham died the other day I wasn't glad that he was dead because he was an enemy I was happy that he was no longer alive to poison mines because what he believes is the enemy and but I don't even perhaps a with regard to a level of influence I might put Billy Graham up there in that awful category but they're genuinely just like I can't stand to be seitan bergen kate is a piece of crap okay I don't know who that is thank you applaud if you saw the debate with me and sigh yeah psy is an annoying presuppositionalist who doesn't even know what he's talking about in and and genuinely has a problem with women and respect and all sorts of stuff not worth your time ever okay well you all save me some time that I don't have but but so recently we announced actually both of us are doing events with Jordan Peterson mines in April in Toronto and the first thing somebody was like oh why are you giving that Jordan Peterson guy a platform I'm like okay well if you just said that three years ago when nobody knew that Ali was it would be you know okay now I'm basically debating some youtuber but but he already has a platform I'm not giving him anything what I'm doing is going up and having a conversation where I challenge the things that we disagree on and that to me is exactly what should happen you know and and so when I when I hear about oh we don't want that at our campus there are there are subjects and individuals where I can completely understand why campuses wouldn't want that person there and I full in my view is that the the students the campuses are the customers and the university has to make a decision and if that's what is decided as this is not acceptable at our university fine and you'll read the repercussions of that I don't necessarily think that a university or a church or any place that's not just like a public venue owes someone a podium on the other hand I am also an advocate that the solution to bad speech and bad ideas is better speech and better ideas and challenging them challenging them and not punching them or spitting on them or or doing whatever you can't breaking microphones or whatever it's just I could never do that and it frustrates me that people don't understand that the protections of free speech to come and say things that are unpopular are the very things that they depend on when they want me to come speak at their university when they want you to come speak and it becomes this cliquish how are we going to decide who gets to speak well let them all speak some of the audience some of the times the audience isn't going to show up also well there are different occasions too because a speech at the university is different from inviting someone on to your podcast to have a conversation and there's kind of an uncanny valley here which I haven't sorted out what I think about it but it if a person is sufficiently bad you can talk to it's fine to talk to them and you're just kind of going to the mode of being an anthropologist you're just interested in this this evil person you're just giving them enough rope and but no one no one in your audience would say you've given a platform to Charles Manson or Ted Bundy or J if you can get an interview with a serial killer well why not do it it's an interesting conversation to have right you just won my wife's heart yeah she's fascinated with serial killers and interviews with them right so so I mean you know I've often thought like it would be interesting to sit down with the Unabomber and have a conversation right because he's he's probably nuts but he also is smart and nuts and he has all of these weird ideas which which perhaps you have you recall his manifesto many people have put sections of that in blog posts or in books leaving off the author or putting the author you don't find out the author's name until you've turned the page and there are stretches that can seem quite reasonable especially given how it anticipates some of the problems we've we've had with technology so in any case if i sat down with Ted Kaczynski I would not have to spend any time signalling to my audience that I disapprove of what he's done right you know we're gonna spend the first half hour here talking about just how bad it is to to send bombs in the mail trying to kill innocent strangers but if if the person isn't nearly that bad you they're just somebody who has shady views then the the onus is on you the interviewer to spend a lot of time describing just how how repugnant do you you you consider their views to be and that's it's a real challenge because they because we all know people who get the balance wrong and get penalized for just who they were willing to talk to and I've made some you know I've been public about this there's some people who have said I see no reason to have on my podcast but even though many people online say they want me to talk to them because I don't actually consider them morally serious interlocutors but it's as though I what was that you know I says that way you haven't had me on yet know you've been on it you've perhaps weren't aware of it but what is frustrating this I I've used your audio on my podcast well it is frustrating though because when things I despise is the the very idea that I need to use a disclaimer all the time so I think people get frustrated but I know I do the following views expressed do not represent blah blah blah that shouldn't be required and the mere fact that I'm having a conversation with someone who I would suspect most people would realize I disagree with I may ask questions in order to elicit responses so that I can actually do a better job of pointing out where there are problems there but merely asking the questions and allowing them to answer is on occasion being viewed as me giving them oh you you let that theist talk way too much yeah well yeah but if he's saying dumb things I trust that the audience is smart enough to get that and we've exposed a problem with his epistemology with problem with how he's going to go about making decisions right I don't want to do disclaimers I that this is a disclaimer there's a there's a couple things I wanted to see if we wanted to touch on real quick before we got the questions one of them since we're in Phoenix Arizona hello Cleveland yeah I'll take the cheap applause when I can get it this at the news today the Satanic temple in is suing Scottsdale Arizona today the 23rd of February 2018 the Satanic temple is temple has filed a lawsuit against the city of Clarksdale Arizona alleging religious discrimination following the city's refusal to allow TST to participate in a policy that claims to allow any religious denomination to deliver invocations prior to public city council meetings this is not the first time this has happened I don't think it would be the last as somebody who thinks the Satanic temple and Satanism is a really stupid name for what they were actually advocating what are they actually advocating atheism reason but are there not into Aleister Crowley and so now there's there's there's Crowley's version Satanism then there's laveyan satanism and by the way if you're a Satanist don't send me an email correcting all the things I'm getting ready to say okay just correct Wikipedia pages and stuff like that but by and large and I said I probably said this probably 13 14 years ago when it might have so scared me a little bit I tend to really strongly agree with a great many things that the Satanists are saying and doing and now I find them to be some of the best advocates for church-state separation and religious freedom well you have the beard your eye I guess I'm a little bit evil the thing is if you have parents if you have prayer in schools if you have bad ideas of people are coming in and and sharing the gospel or passing out religious tracts and the atheists complain about it nothing happens but if the Satan has come in and say we'd like to pass out our tracts as well all of a sudden all those tracks disappear all of a sudden this policy of we're gonna allow equal equal time for all religions goes away and now we can give back to actually teaching kids how to think yeah all right we've now thrown in your lot with a Satanist that will I'm actually pretty good with that all things considered considering who I sometimes get associated with pop go I'll go with Satanist for a while bad name though I don't I don't think the name does them justice it seems to be a little more of a shock tactic thing it's a well it falls in the category of a kind of so-called style hoax which I think is very useful if done correctly yeah but don't tell them that because if you say that this is a Sokol style hoax they'll point out that no they have a long same tradition and history and bah-bah-bah this is they're serious all right for my it for my own edification I love to play chess I'm I'm awful at it because I don't play enough and practice but there was a news story that I saw recently Google and deepmind did an alphago project where they created a computer AI that plays go yeah and then they created one called alpha zero that plays chess and the interesting thing for me is and go well it's the same kind of base AI from the company but alpha zero was a was the chess entity as far as I know doesn't matter as far as I know it actually so the the breakthrough here is that it used to be that you know the best chess-playing computer in the world was hard-coded just to play chess it couldn't couldn't play tic-tac-toe couldn't play anything else deepmind has found algorithms that can that are kind of game independent and yet yeah we're getting yeah so here's the cool thing for me they they didn't give it a history of games they didn't give it an opening book they gave it the rules of chess let it play itself and in four hours it had learned everything that humans and every other chess computer had ever learned about chess and demolished the best chess computer on the planet yeah yeah so it when you think about this that we have continuously been developing the better chess computers for decades and some you know twenty years ago the computers got better than people and now we have an algorithm that from zero being completely agnostic as to just what the game is in the mat in a matter of four hours recapitulated all of human and computer knowledge and bested it and this is the same Peugeot by the way yeah and that's and go is something that you'd go as a I don't play go but go is a more complex game than chess and there are many computer scientists who felt that go was not going to be conquered for for at least another decade and not only did they conquer it with alphago with alpha zero they they conquered it from scratch in a way that that no one had anticipated so it's I think when they moved to chess the idea was that perhaps if chess was solvable which we don't know checkers is and has been solved that maybe alpha alpha zero would be able to actually solve chess we didn't that didn't happen for the game theory geeks in the room but now we have this new style of AI which Google and d-minor are optimistic that we can use this in medical research because all the prior chess computers have been trained based on what humans thought about chess let's give it the history let's give it a history of our moves let's you know kind of impose it with theory about what's stronger and what's better this one taught itself and setting aside the concerns about the computers coming to take over the world which I don't have any fear of I will gladly serve my computer overlord what that on record cuz this stuff lives forever now we have any eye that can teach itself and and in the realm of medical research protein folding things like that if we get the baggage of how we have viewed the problems out of the way is there a greater likelihood that this sort of AI is going to not only reach solutions but reach them far quicker than we could ever hope to well I think that's the case I think what we're emulating the way humans solve problems is good we should do that and we're tempted to do that but yeah in the search space of solutions to problems there's there's just no reason to think that we are naturally the best at any any one of these things that interests us Desai's it's just we're not by matter of evolution we have not evolved to understand reality in the abstract or at any scale beyond what is just you know Apes like ourselves can get our hands around you know there's something radically counterintuitive about the way the world is when you get to the very small or the very big or the very old or the very fast and we have terrible intuitions about probability we don't aggregate vast amounts of data well and yeah so it's a far as we build AI that can do this I think it's very reasonable to expect that we will we will build AI that will do it very differently than we do it and it will be it will do it better as a result I'm glad you mentioned intuition because if somebody who's at least studied the game not not ending up very good at it it strikes me that when I watch grandmasters assess a position that there there appears to be an intuition about the position of I can throw all these hospital moves out of the way immediately with with no thought and I can focus on these likely candidates and I don't know for sure if it's fair to actually call that intuition or if that is just an application of inductive reasoning where they have trained themselves over so many years - not too into it but to recognize which things how much I wonder if what alpha zero does is it's clearly not merely deep calculation would it qualify as intuition what it qualifies one of the the foundational things that we tend to view is as human or as a higher consciousness capability well I don't think anyone would attribute consciousness to it and what we call intuition is a an act of cognition that we can't really inspect right you can't get is a moment where you you cognitively pull yourself up by your bootstraps and just know that something seems so so you're like if you say that I'm gonna take you know a mathematical intuition that that two plus two equals four or that if if a is bigger than B and B is bigger than C well then a is bigger than C you know the transitive property thing that just seems right and you can't make it seem otherwise and and yet you can't break down that any further it's just that there's an intuition that that that fits so from this perspective of consciousness intuition as always this presents itself as a kind of black box and there that we have other intuitions that allow us to sometimes get beneath other intuitions and and correct for we have bad intuitions that we correct for with other intuitions but at when you can't when you find the building blocks of cognition and understanding and can't reduce them and any further we're tempted to say well that's that's just a matter of intuition and we learn we you you can learn intuitions you would learn as you say in chess you you know not knowing how to play chess you don't have any intuition about what you should be doing but once you're good you can you can begin to ignore all these possible moves that a a novice would consider because you know at a glance they're they're not worth taking and so much of so much of common sense is that and again this exists in every domain we care about it exists socially it exists athletically it examines it's just there's there's in every intellectual domain and most of what getting good at anything is is a matter of making what first required conscious deliberative thought and a kind of an explicit understanding of what you should do and pushing that back to regions of the brain where the lights lights aren't on right so you just don't know how you do it anymore you can't even you're not even a good teacher of the thing you spent all this time learning how to do you just know how to do it you know whether it's a how to hit a golf ball or ride a bike or we end up calling we in a mislabelling at muscle memory and things like that one yes but it would but it does feel that way and big and one reason why it is is muscle memory rather than just memory is if you take something like like riding a bike you can't I mean so presumably all of us or most of us know how to ride a bike in this room I and you have every reason to believe that it's presented with a bike right now you'd be able to get on it and start riding but you can't look inside yourself and know that's the case until you do it right it's not like semantic memory you can't remember if I asked you you know you know what city are we in or what's the capital of California or I be these are things that you could recall and bring to consciousness but your ability to ride a bike is not something you can you can inspect without doing it and so if so if you happen to have forgotten how to ride a bike unbeknownst to you you wouldn't you can't know that until someone presents you with a bike and you have no idea what to do with it and much of and so one piece of confusion here is that we have this this word memory which is a concept of memory which is not a unitary thing there are many different types of memory that that have almost no real estate in common at the level of the brain and the frustrations experience with kind of the malleability memory I've actually lost money to one of my roommates over something many times but over something really ridiculous because I was convinced that I remembered something accurately and and did not it was the name of a brand of mustard that's how ridiculous we get no it's not Golden's it's glutens hope you don't make that mistake again yeah that will never happen again we're not people line up for questions in a few minutes but one other thing this has been kind of a yeah there's many different areas and arenas in which I have conversations about religion most of them tend to deal with philosophical arguments or attempts to provide evidence but there's an area that seems to exist in many different religions or at least the most popular ones which i think is I've said before that the religious concept of the soul is the single most obviously dead topic that religions could ever raise and yet it is at the foundation of all dead as in debunk as in my what we know about yeah come on what we know about the mind about what we know about ourselves about identity that there's no reason to think that anything that makes me me could or should survive death merely by looking at traumatized brains and and I remember a talk years ago from vs Ramachandran about split brain patients and how essentially you end up with because of epilepsy or something you split the corpus callosum right and you end up with essentially two distinct personalities that communicate independently and in this case study that he was doing one side which controlled the mouth and could speak is that right left left in most cases Bhd neuroscience if you're right-handed you're very likely of 95% chance that your your language is on the left if you're left-handed it's more like 75% but yes the left side could and the right side could speak communicate using the left arm yeah yeah there's some people the cases that are really startling with split brain researches that is where there's enough language on the right so that you get really independent records of belief and desire and so yeah there was a classic case where this was actually a kid who had was having grand mal seizures was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and they led the articulate verbal left hemisphere said I think a draftsman and I think these are these are these first experiments were in the early sixties I think and simultaneously his left hand was spelling out with letter cards race car driver and so that this is the consequence of dividing the as you said the corpus callosum that unites the two the two hemispheres of the brain the the example of the case study that he had one side was an atheist and the other side was a Christian yeah and when I first heard it Sam and I have very very similar views on morality as a matter of fact if you ever cared to hear what I think about morality you can either watch my lecture on it or you can read his book and you'll get pretty close to the same area but when I heard this there was something you had said about the peculiar math with the soul when it comes to twinning about twins being reabsorbed and it struck me when I was listening to Ramachandran talk about this patient that the same math applies with the soul did this person get two souls does it have two halves a soul one of them's now Damned and one's gonna go to hell and this this led to the thought of okay if my then you watch movie like memento or any other good movie about damaging a brain what if the day that I became an atheist I actually got hit on the head and don't remember and so now there's a Christian soul desperately trying to get this body to serve Jesus and the body says no yeah well that well that's one of the consequences of I write about this briefly in my book waking up but one of the consequences of the little logic of these split brain experiments which again are it's very little diversity of opinion about what these experiments mean of a consciousness and subjectivity is divisible when you at the level of the brain you divide these white matter tracts or cut the white matter tracts that unites the the cortex left and right and you get these these separate independent islands of consciousness but even in normal brains you have the additional problem that there's no way the corpus callosum perfectly shares information across the hemispheres so to some degree we have to be divided most of the time or all of the time anyway so you there's there's this additional question of whether there are islands of conscious life if there are there areas where there there's something that it's like to be you or to be your brain that you whoever you feel you are to be at this moment don't know about and and so in the Starck case of a split brain patient you really do have this kind of especially when one language is not when the right hemisphere is not articulate you have this kind of silent subject just sort of waiting around watching what the articulate left hemisphere says and then occasionally revolting against it I mean the bizarre cases where the you know the the the left hemisphere is trying to address itself and the right hemisphere is trying to undress itself or with the with the left arm he's hugging his wife but with the with the right arm he's strangling her there's you can have a historically divided consciousness and you do and then Ramachandran brings us up a lot you do get a quasi Freudian picture of the of the neurological detail whether it's it's quite possible that there the unbe unconscious it's plausible to think that the unconscious is in many respects conscious or differently conscious and that's downright weird I think it's a it is weird and and you know I said that as a joke about you know that day I get hit on the head but we know that personalities preferences memories all of the things that we package together to say this is me we know that all of these things can be changed through damage to the brain yeah and that puts us in a situation where if we were to imagine that there was a soul that was good that was saved it was Christian or whatever and yet it can't do can't be the ghost in that machine because of damage so now there's a physical body that is presenting itself as a completely different person if we know that's possible then how do we tell the difference between an individual who has this soul in congruence with the body and if that's the case if it's possible for a physical body to do all of the things that we attributed to the soul essentially if I'm fighting the soul on all these things or dismissing it then my body absent a soul can do all of those things then what room left is there to presume a soul at all well the other problem with the soul which has been pointed out for at least a couple hundred years is that if it is immaterial the its interaction with the physics of things is genuinely mysterious the idea that you could have something that's that is it clearly has to be integrated with the brain yeah and that it manages to accomplish speech and and behavior and but that integration makes no sense and as you say this idea that you can selectively damage parts of the brain which really do lead to loss of function you can lose your ability to recognize people or to or to speak or to understand basic concepts the this picture of a soul that will survive death is a picture of a an intelligence where that's that's losing none of those capacities is just kind of witnessing the loss of those capacities and then will you both will float off the brain at death and we know that's not the way minds work anyone who has lost any capacity knows that it's not a matter of you being you know silently perfectly intact wondering why the body is not working no you lose you you you've lost this thing if you can't remit it just think of what it's like not to remember somebody's name right if you're trying to think of that person's name you know you know their name but you can't say it's the tip of the tongue phenomenon it's not like your souls in there with the name saying why won't he say the name no you the soul you the subject don't know the name right and that's gonna be a video on YouTube next week I'm sure if you guys want to you please there's microphones out there that bring the lights up you can start line up for questions I'm gonna kind of to hit this because religions have made countless claims and my view is that the religions that are survived are the ones that have managed to either make claims that are ultimately unfalsifiable or somehow kind of do post hoc rationalizations that make excuses for those things and so but there are areas where religions have made claims about physical facts about reality that we've clearly debunked we know the earth isn't six to ten thousand years old things like that but for those that are tied to a soul in an afterlife III really think that this is a foundation upon which they're going to struggle or that they at least should struggle if there's any intellectual honesty at all to try to rehabilitate their views are there any likely falsifiable views coming from religion that you think we have either recently kind of debunked or on the verge of potentially showing that this generalized claim from religion is likely to be disproved by scientific findings in the near future well I think the claim that prayer works has been adequately debunked and it's a very and it's a big deal right that man that is you know better than I but that is at the core of what counts as a religious worldview and if you I think I mean just the way people keep score and allow God to get away with all his mischief and and it's just all prayer sometimes he says no yeah maybe God's flipping a coin that that should be fishy but it is very easy to test and it you know as you know at one point it was tested and and found not to work or to work in the negative in the case yeah well there was a case where people actually got worse although one presumes that's not a malicious god that's just people with anxiety over knowing they were being prayed for all right we're gonna do questions I'm going to start on my right if you're comfortable doing it you can say your name if the questions for Sam or for me or for both of us but remember they ain't in a question mark they are relatively short they are not dissertations everybody got it because there's a lot of people with questions and I want to try to get to as many as we can yes sir all right man well I'm J etchings and I was gonna start with my life story but we'll put that on hold we'll get a drink later so this is a question for Sam on Wednesday night in Denver when you were speaking with Robin you said two things that I thought were somewhat in conflict you said I have no original religious attachment to the Second Amendment but then you also admitted that in a previous discussion your mind had been changed about the potential outcomes of the 2016 election so you were essentially admitting that there was corruption in the government or there could be problems with the government but then you're also saying that you had no attachments to the Second Amendment could you more clearly define that I think you see the I don't see the connection between those two things though are you saying that one would be attached to the Second Amendment as a way as a as a way of reserving the right to defend yourself against a bad government is that well that's the way it's defined right I mean those yeah I mean I just think we've outgrown that construal of the Second Amendment and and that's not my argument for gun ownership insofar as I have one is not that someday you in the worst case scenario will be able to defend yourself against the the full might of a deranged American military right I mean if the Navy SEALs come for you with their guns you've got a problem and no matter how many ar-15s you have stockpiled yeah so die and I just thought you know that I think the case for okay this this does actually come back to seeing the world through a woman's eyes in many respects maybe if you look at the at the the case for gun ownership for me is a woman living alone with a young child and someone kicks in her door in the middle of the night what technology do you want her to have a legal right to have to defend herself right and if you say nothing she should just have a kitchen knife or a baseball bat or a golf club or she should just dial nine-one-one that's not where I come out ethically I think she should have more than that and and the price we pay it as a society for allowing people to own guns is is ethically focus for me on that case now this all goes out the window the moment we have a non-lethal alternative to a gun that has all the defensive characteristics of a gun so once you you get something that I've kind of euphemistically or comically called a super taser you know once you have a taser that really works just like a gun butts non-lethal then I think we should we should absolutely get rid of the Second Amendment I think I think we would want this non-lethal alternative that works just as well as a gun and I think that one day blows well probably that will come but I think I think that the this piece of NRA propaganda is true it doesn't make it less true that it's NRA propaganda guns are an equalizer a gun is the only weapon you can put in in someone's hand that generally nullifies the difference between size and strength and athleticism and all the rest and you know I you know I feel that people law-abiding people should have a right to to equalize that difference given the reality of violence hi I'm one one second I like to talk a lot no salmon all right actually never discussed this particular issue his answer is pretty much the same as my wife's answer and I am pretty much on board with that at all I don't feel the need own a gun but also I was in the military I grew up on a farm area I don't have the the fear of it that's other people do and yet I absolutely advocate for the best regulations that we can i I don't want to have to praise Trump for potentially getting rid of bump stocks I've actually fired Erik 15s with bump stops before I'm in favor of banning them although I think you're much less likely to hit anything that you're actually aiming at in that situation I don't want to have to praise him for that but I think in honesty if it goes through that way I would have to and that I find that kind of frustrating I'm rethinking so many of my positions and in the light of who I don't like but yes we have to yeah yes sir my name is Vikram my questions for both you during my first two years at UCLA the atmosphere of the social sciences were that of truth and free speech but these the last two years that was fear has devolved to post truth incorrect speech and this is blood out to the rest of the campus my question to you all is a do you believe that the social sciences are the cause of this problem and be if you're the Chancellor of a university like UCLA what would you do to restore free speech and truth thank you yeah why I think I think it is it's largely the epicenter of the problem I think it's it's what post-modernism has done to the social sciences but I think it is yeah there there's certain departments that are worse than others but it is I think it's been well diagnosed by people like Jonathan hight and that the work he's done at the heterodox Academy and I mean sue these are these are academics or sensitized to this issue and it's yeah it's it's ideology that's that is in some cases not even it doesn't even have the pretense of trying to get it what's true it's trying to broadcast a a message that is to which people need to conform and it has much of the structure of a religion to you there's there's apostasy there's blasphemy there's excommunication there's to take one case that many of you have probably heard of but there was a a philosopher Rebecca touval believe her name was who wrote a gender studies paper about she what she just was speculated so the fact that you can be transgender she found philosophically interesting and be given that it's now we have this moment where transgenderism is is universally celebrated I mean it's it's it's love it's acknowledged to be kind of a new kind of norm and this was the moment where you know Caitlyn gender what Caitlyn Jenner was being was being celebrated but at the same moment there was this woman whose name is now escaping me who claimed to be transracial right Rebecca Dollaz all's I don't him she she was white by I think any reasonable definition or it was at least the definition of her parents her parents claimed she was white yet she she claimed to be black and so so Rebecca would wrote this paper trying just just asking the question you know if transgenderism is a real phenomenon why can't transracial ism be a real phenomenon and she was just hurled from the ramparts of academia for this her own thesis advisors and I mean it just it was just pure savagery what happened to her and this was this had the character of her of her transgressing a kind of taboo I mean she touched a third rail the the of discourse that she didn't know existed and all pretense of rational discussion even went out the window I mean there were people who were throwing her under the bus who admitted they hadn't even read her paper but just the mere rumors of the paper it was enough to to destroy her reputation in their eyes so yeah I think it is it's a problem and we need it the administration's have to just have an explicit policy I mean they think the University of Chicago came out very strongly in in favor of free speech and and not deep platform deep platforming people and I think you know all the universities have to get on the same page i I'm not as quick to dismiss post-modernism as Sam and some others because I don't know what the hell it is when I talked to people and they complain about it I can never get a cohesive definition of post-modernism that's consistent across all the detractors I think there's a lot of problems with labels okay and I've mentioned this before so I won't go on a full story here but we use labels as shorthand it makes it easier for us to communicate but that's only true to the extent that the people we're talking to have the same understanding of the words and labels that we use and we are desperate to put people in buckets and put ideas in buckets and so the example that I've used before is I'm I've identified it as a feminist what's that mean well it depends on who you talk to oh that can't be feminist has to be this well that's what somebody said what's the feminist position on pornography well it depends entirely which feminist you talked to they're feminists as sun sarah teylor Taslima Nasreen who will view pornography as a vile exploitation of women and yet we have other feminists nobody's good and I really apart from internal arguments that any of these women are feminists like Greta Christina who's added porn magazines where it's worked as a sex worker the these these labels are only as good as we allow them to be and so when we start talking about and I'm not gonna get off on the the transgender transracial blah blah blah what's happening is I saw this in the election I have friends I did not vote for Trump I don't think that's gonna come as a surprise but I have friends who did and I talked to him about it yes I blocked some people on Facebook and hated the moment but eventually I talked to some people about it and what one of them told me is that I'm not a racist and yet every time I would say anything in favor potentially of Trump or opposed to Hillary or Bernie or whoever I just got called a racist and that's because there are a couple different connotations of racist there's not only implicit racism there's explicitly a system there's the definition of racism as bigotry based on a genetic trait such as rates or a social construct race being a social construct and so if people are calling you or saying that you're a racist because in their view raises a social construct and they are talking about implicit racism essentially saying you are endorsing policies that have a disproportionate effect on minorities that's what they mean by racism and yet when you hear the word racist you hear you are a member of the KKK there can be no communication because you're talking about two different things with the same label we are in a transition period on some of these as we change the way we talk about things I don't think it's always good but I also don't think it's always bad as we clarify our language I think we're gonna get to better understands the things that's going to change how we how we talk about some things yet when it comes to the campus issues I'm in favor of free speech and I'm a favor of letting the universities and the students decide what kind of campus they want and if it turns out they want to campus that nobody wants to go to they'll deal with those consequences yeah welcome to Evergreen yes sir hi guys my name is Charlie gentry and I live here in Phoenix Arizona my question is for both of you in regards to the last several years on all the school shootings and not necessarily the issue on Second Amendment rights and gun owners rights but on the issue of where do we stop talking about the guns that were used and start talking about the mental health issues of the kids using the guns yeah well yeah again this is this is an area where you can you can see the the gaffes and the and the errors pile up on the left side of the political spectrum and this is where some of the right-wing caricatures of the New York Times turn out to be true because you I've read editorials where basically everything said about guns and ballistics is wrong and it's and it's it's unfortunate but there are relevant differences between guns and but they just don't tend to be the differences that that you hear discussed in in the media when people become most alarmed in the aftermath of a school shooting so when you're hear about people who can't tell the difference between a an automatic and a semi-automatic gun right that's you know the conversation has has it's just not about the actual issue but I've moved a little bit on this question of you know whether we should ban ar-15s because one just for purely pragmatic political purposes I think I think it it would be it comes in very little cost to what I care about to say yes let's ban ar-15 right now I know a lot of people love their ar-15s and they're fun to shoot but the reality is is that this is it has such political significance that that it's worth considering doing and then we would find that all of the real work is still ahead of us to deal with the reality of gun violence because it really is a matter of hand guns killing most people most of the time but there are differences but I mean the Vegas shooting was as deadly as it was absolutely because of the guns that man had and in the hotel what's scary about rifles of any sort is their accuracy and lethality a distance right and so but if it's in most school shootings would still have been just as deadly had they've been accomplished with handguns but these distance shootings are are really enabled massively by by rifles and rifles like a ar-15 and so it does matter but it it rarely matters when most people on CNN say it matters and that's that's the problem with our conversation I think there's I hate bad arguments I hate a most when they come from positions or defending positions that I agree with or think are correct and there's a lot of bad arguments in in the talks about guns oh who needs a gun well it's not about need in this in this case it's it's about preference and about rights oh well you know you got to be 21 to buy beer why can't you buy an ar-15 younger well a lot of people think that's a potentially good argument I think it's awful because I think you're providing ammunition to the people who don't want to fix the problem I think you're providing ammunition to the NRA because it's pretty easy to point out that the prevalence of alcohol and allowing people under age to drink beer has consistently throughout history done more harm than the weapons have and so I think you're not really building on a good foundation which is why I get back to what I said earlier where we don't need to exaggerate we don't need bad arguments we need to point out that one is too many from the standpoint of what we should tolerate as parents as friends and family members and that what we want is real sensible action and if you do this you don't at least when when groups like the NRA come forward to say that they're they're trying to take away your guns and blah blah but that's not the case oh they're making bad arguments no that's not the case address what we actually said and what we've actually said or what I've actually said is that I don't like the fact that I live in a world where there's at least some likelihood that somebody's gonna get hold of a a massive weapon of war and go slaughter a bunch of innocent children it may be an unfortunate consequence of the way we've traditionally done things but that doesn't mean that we can't change and it doesn't mean that change means taking away everybody's rights engaging in fear-mongering and and supporting good action with bad arguments I can't it rides me nuts and just on that quickly on the mental health issue I think background checks and real licensing and real training required to get a gun is is part of the solution I think it's it's crazy to me that you should have to go through some significant steps to get a driver's license but no such steps to to get a gun so we have to figure out what what should be required to get access to that technology and maybe just stop letting Walmart sell them and we'll fix the problem yes sir hey my name is Hank and thank you both for being here tonight my question is also about mental health and I'd like to know if you have any thoughts or if you could describe what you think best case scenario what the what the best step change improvement might look like in in mental health treatment well I would really only have kind of hand-waving answer because I don't I'm not really close to the that field and I have no clinical experience so but it is just a fact that everything that ails us as far as mental health is at some basic level a matter of neurophysiology and insofar as we get better drugs and and better treatments there's every reason to think that we will alleviate very real forms of human suffering more and more and on some level it's a it's a matter of getting lucky because I mean the the problem with drugs is that you know the receptor sites that get targeted by any drug are in many cases everywhere in the body and so you have the spectrum of effects that you don't intend you have the side effects that you don't want when you're delivering the relevant molecule to the area you actually you want to modulate and that distribution is in some it really is a matter of luck and so you'd have to go out beyond you know to no longer be captive of that kind of hat you know molecular happenstance we'd have to find other ways of targeting specific areas in the brain and so far as we understand what they're doing and I you know I'm hopeful that we'll come more and more but at some level it is you know the month the mind is what the brain is doing and again leaving aside the fact that consciousness itself really is a mystery we don't know at what level it arises and and and what it's what it's neural correlates actually are but virtually everything we can reasonably care about in terms of our experience is a matter of having a healthy brain that is that is functioning the way we the way we want it to and I think it's a very good thing that the stigma around mental health and treatments for it is in a incremental way it's it's lifting and that was actually what I was gonna add less experience in the clinical we really it will lift and it hasn't lifted entirely because the treatments are still so coarse but once you really have a treatment that works I mean once you had an antidepressant that everyone recognized was all upside and no downside well then you know then a you know curing depression would be as and treating your depression would be as uncontroversial as you know fixing a broken leg you know of course you're gonna fix a broken leg and we're just not there because there's something rather cherished about the mind we think of momenta lil miss isn't it's unlike physical illness but again that's that's more of a matter of our not understanding it well enough and not understand the standing the mechanisms and so far as we we understand the mechanisms I think of you treating these things will be much more straightforward and and the stigma will be will be gone but that's actually tied to I don't think it's and I'm not saying you said this but I don't think it's it's anyway ridiculous for us to put a primacy on the brain because that's what we're talking about identity and so my view and I need clinical expertise but it's about removing the stigma so that people are more willing to seek out help and I've run across people who are terrified of going to see someone because they're afraid that they'll be prescribed drugs that will fundamentally turn them into someone they're not and this perception of who you are and what would change about who you are I think is really inhibiting some people from seeking out the help that could benefit them and one of the individuals I talked to him and and I said go anyway and if they put you on drugs that you don't like or that cause problems that can be changed but it may turn out that the you that you are on these drugs is the you that you've been looking for and may be beneficial maybe not yes sir yeah my question is you know we've all been given certain talents in life and we've all been given certain disadvantages and it's obvious to me when I talk to another person that for any talent or any disadvantage I've obtained in this world there are countless ones that I can never understand so with a worldview that's based on reason and empirical evidence intends to shy away from personal experience how do we better control for our own biases and our own impression of the world to try to understand someone else's circumstance more clearly and gets the bottom of issues that we can never understand through personal experience yeah that really is the challenge and that me that that is why education is good and reading good books is good and have talking to smart people or hearing smart people talk is good I mean listening to lectures and that you are in some sense making your mind and gathering tools of cognition and correcting for your blind spots the more you do that and and I think to do that consciously in a way to correct for some of these well understood biases like you know like confirmation bias is it's just a good filter to have on the whole project because you you know you're going to be wrong a lot and you should you should want to discover rather than discover the reasons why you're right or the reasons why you should think exactly what you thought yesterday you should want you should become interested in the ways you might be wrong and I mean they're just they're their cues to this that you should find interesting it's just when you find very smart people who you agree with on so many things suddenly think there's so suddenly broadcast an opinion to you that you that you don't agree with that should be interesting rather than something you just five right whether or not you will in the end you agree with them this this and this as someone who broadcasts lots of opinions and has public conversations I see this come back to me in one or two ways the guns is the perfect example you know I've said many things that my readers agreed with for many years and then I said there's one thing about guns in this blog post the riddle of a gun and some significant percentage of my audience was just blindsided by it right so and it's just the eruption of ill-will that I got from from I don't know what percentage it was but it was a lot was fairly startling and yet it had there was virtually never an argument it was not that they were finding fault with my argument they just they just hated that this opinion came along with all the other opinions they agreed with and and so I I'm trying to be more sensitive to that in myself when I see someone who I think is clearly smart and I agree with in many areas and then all of a sudden they hit me with this this other point of view that is counter to the one that I've been holding all this time that rather than harm my perception of who they are intellectually the first move I want to make is to be interested and that I think that's a it doesn't come by default for most of us most of the time [Applause] so ya can't hear the hell sang there we go hi Sam Matt I'm Stefan sorry my question is towards the future something like Star Trek it seems there's a future answer for something like racism sexism when the most obvious visual information you get about a person is the color of the uniform they're wearing that tells you what part of the crew they are what what good function in the ship they offer have you given any thought to what we as individuals or on the society level can do it to practice to encourage a rewiring of what would be a negative feedback loop to looking at obvious visual information of people getting a sense of other versus friend which served us when we were in older species and get us closer to looking at people and what they they offer us instead of their difference so that we can get closer towards a Star Trek future that I would like to live in my I can give you my favorite example of me doing exactly this I Jose at least experience TV show have for 14 some odd years and I had always had this idea of a specific way to do the show but I didn't quite know how to work it in and in order to raise money for camp quest I agreed to do the show and drag and I I didn't half-step I went all out and you know there it was shaved and manicure-pedicure nails and bra and dress and I shaved which I will never do again because he even at 48 I looked 12 because I look like a baby pretty soon there were no Heather anyway and and a wig and the one thing I didn't do was put on any affected voice or anything else it was just me sitting there taking calls just as I would any other week in order to make the point that someone's arguments the things that they are expressing are not in any way affected by what clothes they're wearing the color of their hair the color of their skin who they're sleeping with where they're partying none of that and I I love seeing things like that done I love people who challenge popular cultures perceptions about who we should be because while I could certainly see arguments towards a dull gray homogeneous society I value individuals because that's where the sparks of inspiration come from that's where art comes from and I think that you know without giving any more specifics about what we could do I think that we'll probably do a good job at preserving some of that if for no other reason then we just probably aren't likely to be to enjoy being told what to do what to wear who to be we rebelled against those things and if we ever get to the point where human society stops rebelling against that at some level that's when I would worry but I'm not worried now to some degree it's happening online anyway when you when you think of how you relate to people online on social media I mean anonymity aside you often have no idea what anyone looks like and they really really is just a quality of their ideas and I mean for better or worse because then there are people you know they're there people who if you could see them you would realize you didn't have to take them seriously right I mean they would be broadcasting other social cues it's like you you know but a and so it's it does cut both ways and many conspiracy theories I'm sure or manufactured by obviously disreputable people in their underpants just blogging away and if you could it's not you see you vesting the ten people with tinfoil hats can't make sense so there's a lot of that and everyone everything has the same stature when it's behind a blog or behind a tweet or and but it is it is having this beneficial effect of just cancelling that those surface features as well and and just good good ideas can come to I think you both for being here my name is Jessie I have a question primarily for Sam it's regarding the pasta meditation or mindfulness mhm I'm specifically regarding accepting physical or mental discomfort in my case stemming from having anxiety and suffering from panic attacks anyone who suffers from that I think would agree that these are highly negative experiences and it's eluded me as far as how to try not try to not avoid these feelings or these events with mindfulness meditation there's often talk about trying to not avoid these negative feelings and just kind of accepting things as they come can you touch on how to balance that acceptance of discomfort whether it be physical mental maybe even just your social and economical status because I feel like it's beneficial if you're in a bad situation in your life to want to better yourself or you know feel happy or be in a better position so I just like your well I should point out the obvious fact that you just stood up in front of thousands of people and asked it perfectly coherent question and honestly you're already way ahead of all the people who can't do that right nervous yeah but but you've already won right I mean because you've just functioned with this feeling and it had no implication so mindfulness aside the way to to get over that problem insofar as it's a problem is just to keep doing exactly what you just did and because I I had the exact same experience around public speaking and I was very uptight and nervous around doing it until I just started doing it and mindfulness was part of the remedy but it wasn't it wasn't a sufficient remedy I mean you can actually get over your fear of in this case public speaking without knowing anything about mindfulness by just doing it and and having good experiences doing it and and you just you can just get over it the what is magical about mindfulness as a an ability is that it becomes this recognition that that consciousness that knew that in you which is just aware of what you're experiencing that that it's just the thing that is noticing in this case anxiety or any other sensory or interoceptive experience that thing consciousness is just isn't isn't fundamentally changed by the experience so it's like the thing that's aware of joy is the same as the thing that's aware of anxiety and if you can connect to that and again mindfulness meditation is is the technique of connecting to that it's not a bits not thinking about this conceptually it's just actually noticing experience systematically enough without trying to change it so that you begin to just fall back into this position of just witnessing the flow of experience the more you do that the more you can truly be a quantum as' with whatever is happening that it's not a matter of getting rid of the feeling of anxiety it's not a matter of even you know forcing your way through it it's just it has no it does it has no implication it suddenly becomes equalized with everything else you could be experiencing and it has I mean the analogy I occasionally use is its it could be through it it's like it becomes like a pain in the knee or indigestion right it doesn't have doesn't say anything about who you are really right so if you if you're feeling this anxiety and you feel like god I wish I wish I didn't feel this way this is why am i such an anxious person that's not the same thing you do when you just feel an unpleasant sensation and your knee you know if you're standing there asking a question then the knee pain isn't the thing that is at the core of your being that you're ashamed of or embarrassed or want to change so desperately and any experience can have that status of a minute even experiences that are you know seem more durable than anxiety or less situation dependent something like depression or grief or you can get perspective on all of them and you begin to notice that however bad something is it's always changing I mean there's just this there's a half-life to every experience and you can become patient enough to let things arise and pass away and there's an immense amount of freedom that comes with that because then then you can actually just then it then you can you can be at peace before your life changes you know before you get the thing you desire or solve the problem that you you need to solve you can you can actually the emergency can go away and you can just just then do the intelligent things you need to do to to produce the changes in your life you actually want and and so it's it's um there's two just two tracks I mean it matters what you do and what you practice like you know when you want to ask a question standing up and actually doing it that's a crucial difference but all the while you can become more and more aware of just just just being willing to experience whatever is just a rising and and not view it as a problem I hope that helped hi my name is Brandon I didn't anticipate asking a question tonight but your dialogue at the beginning of the program triggered me to ask your views and your meaning both of you are either of you your views on the phenomenon that seems to be created by search engine algorithms social media ecosystems that tend to reinforce political views through the information that they feed the receiver meaning if I'm right leaning I tend to receive right-leaning information which fortifies my views and therefore tributes to more division in society is there a solution to that as you see it or is this something we should just settle into for the long term we're gonna be living with it well I think it's a huge problem and it's it's largely if not entirely the result of the ad based digital economy it's it is when you think about in particular something like Facebook this there's an arms race to capture human attention and it is entirely driven by the the need to sell ads against our attention and Facebook you know largely Google has done this as well but Facebook and Google Google or most of the problem I'm a Twitter hasn't really figured out how to monetize itself they have realized that showing you the thing they're just tuning the algorithm to give you more of what you clicked on yesterday so insofar as that's the thing that is a matter of you just confirming your bias or being outraged by the same thing I mean they're just trying to gain attention they're trying to keep you on your newsfeed for for 3% longer each day and I mean I had a long podcast with Tristan Harris about this you know he's among a few other people he's been very publically sound in the alarm about this and this is something we just we have to figure out how to reinvent and change I think I think the dependency on ads is most most of the problem certainly when you're talking about something like Facebook and Google in a way it ties to the same question that we asked about getting people to be more skeptical to think more critically to evaluate their religion or whatever their biases are because religions have created an echo chamber and we've done this on online now as well and in the sense that we're talking about for me the solution is twofold yeah individuals have to become aware and then they have to care which is why on the show I'll ask people what they believe in why but also the big issue is do you care about whether or not what you believe is true or are you okay with just believing it because it's comforting and the people around you believe it etc and if you can get people to recognize that they should can and do care about truth you can get them to start to develop the tools that allow them to have a closer approximation of truth even if I'm not going to get into it with any philosophy guys on whether or not we can actually get to truth but we can we can encourage people to care whether the internal model of reality that they have is accurate to the reality they live in because it's not always a matter of fact we know it's we're frequently wrong so the same solutions that we're trying to push with regard to advocating skepticism critical thinking being willing to say I don't know let's stop teaching kids in school that I don't know should be a terrifying response instead of a response that's deserving of applause because that's the only way you get to the answer if you already know why would you look for the answers you're saying I don't know is the first step towards that getting them to care and making them aware of the problem letting people know hey you may not realize just how much of a bubble you're in and I I've said before if you're not blocking two or three people a day you're probably in a bubble although yes I realize there's a contradiction there but joke fun yes sir all right my name is Andy and I have by the way Andy gets the last question well we'll do try to do one more if it's quick okay I'll try to be quick then I have two young daughters which emotionally informs my question and I would ask we're all aware of the things that could go terribly wrong nuclear war climate change etc rampaging AI are you generally optimistic or pessimistic for the next hundred to a thousand years and if so what are the specific reasons for your pessimism or optimism yeah that's not a short question Sam covered the next 100 years for us well if the if the next hundred years go well I'm optimistic about the next thousand I think there's there's reason to believe that we have a bottleneck here that we have to get through successfully and so and this is not I don't think this is a very controversial opinion it just seems like this next century is a century we have to get our heads straight for otherwise that things can really run off the rails I don't really think of myself as an optimist or a pessimist though I think I think I tend to focus on I'm about to do an event with Steve Pinker who's as you may know has published now two super optimistic books but just just kind of aggregating all the data of human progress and I think I've actually I haven't read his his new book yet but I will do that next week but and so insofar as I know his thesis I agree with it I mean there's no question that we are the luckiest generation that has you know all the generations and currently alive seven billion of us were this is the best moment to live in human history there's no question right you just have to read a little bit of history to know how awful the past has been you know by and large there's just no reason for nostalgia for any I mean even for like you know five years ago really well well no I mean again going to stay it well we can go read Steve Steve's book but it's like all the major trends are going in the right direction and this is true for the even the poorest people on earth now there are local problems there are civil wars and you know that erupt but the flip side of that or an additional fact is that our ability to make sweeping changes to our lives with through technology is only increasing and so that the scope of our possible errors are getting larger and larger and just to take one fact which was you know it's increasingly true and was not at all true a generation ago our dependency on the Internet right the fact that we if the internet goes down you know if there's a successful cyberattack on our society most of what we care about is vulnerable right now that wasn't true thirty years ago and so there's there it's there's there's enough data of both for extreme pessimism and extreme optimism and I think those have to run on simultaneous tracks for us but I don't tend to to view myself through through either lens I pretty much agree and I'm pretty optimistic and by the way I have cats at home so if the internet goes down I can make my own videos I apologize for making you wait but they've told me we have to wrap it up and that was the last question thank you guys so much we will speak for both of us briefly that we are thrilled to be here and throw that you came out Sam's gonna be signing books at some point out there though yes thank you all for coming sorry about the hiccup and the change of program but adapted I'm sorry

Channel: Pangburn

Views: 109,721

Rating: 4.5974841 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, matt dillahunty, travis pangburn

Id: ZC-DzA631NQ

Length: 102min 49sec (6169 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TheAJx]

I never knew much about that guy until recently (he kind of sprung onto the stage, I guess through this Pangburn thing?) but it's been a pleasure listening to him and Sam recently.

[u/lobsterrolls]

I went to this event. I was equally as excited to see Matt as I was Sam. I stumbled across The Atheist Experience soon after I began to explore my atheism and before I had ever heard of Sam. Matt sparked an interest in Philosophy in me that has stuck now for quite some time. I nor he would claim that he is a great philosopher by any stretch, but his ability to explain complex topics for the lay person is very helpful for people just entering the subject. I continue to be a huge fan Matt's and am very excited for his upcoming debate with Dinesh D'souza.

[u/[deleted]]

Matt looks like old Peter Gabriel

[u/rymor]

And what say you, Sam Harris?

https://imgur.com/a/uZMKDk1

[u/stfualex]

Relevance seems pretty obvious, an hour and a half discussion between Sam and Matt Dillahunty.

[u/fwing88]

Can someone TL;DR?

[u/BletchTheWalrus]

Didn’t he also write a bunch of long cyberpunk novels?