Waking Up With Sam Harris #57 - An Evening with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris 1

[Music] welcome to the waking up podcast this is Sam Harris ok a little housekeeping before I introduce today's conversation first there's this increasingly difficult issue of communicating with you all email is the primary way I attempt to do this and all I can say is if you're not on my email list you are guaranteed to miss stuff in fact even if you are on my list it seems you might be missing stuff because I've heard my emails are landing in the promotions tab on Gmail this might be happening on other services as well I'm told there's nothing I can do on my side to remedy this what you can do however is first sign up for my email newsletter if you haven't how to do that is obvious on my website there's a link on the top titled newsletter and then you'll receive an email confirming that you actually want to be on the list and once you do that if you find that my emails are landing in promotions or spam you need to move one of them into your inbox and then our AI overlords at Google will probably notice what you've done and then deliver my emails into your inbox going forward now I'm spelling this out because email is really the only way you're likely to hear about what I'm doing reliably social media just doesn't really work for this purpose if you're following a hundred people or more on Twitter you'll know that the tweets get pushed down in your timeline and you may never see half of what you're following and if you're following me on Facebook there's no guarantee you'll see what I post at all not everyone knows that some of you have asked why I sometimes sponsor my own Facebook posts which is essentially paying for them to be ads this is actually an attempt to reach people who are already following me on Facebook you don't have to pay to reach your own committed audience this is a very good business so all I can say is if you want to be guaranteed to hear about my next podcast or a book or live event you just have to get on my email list then train Google or your email client to put my emails in your Inbox and I'll have several things to announce in the coming weeks we have a neuroimaging study on political belief that will soon be published I'm actually gonna post my first job offer soon I need to hire a project manager to help oversee more or less everything that I'm doing so if you want to hear about that or you happen to know someone who you think might be perfect for that job again get on my email list I also have some great podcast guests coming up including Gary Kasparov the former world chess champion who for many years has been one of the most incisive critics of Vladimir Putin understanding Putin has suddenly become much more relevant unfortunately for obvious reasons and also be speaking with Mudgett nawaz whom you all know and I've got the journalist Lawrence Wright coming on who's written fantastic books about al-qaeda and Scientology and other distortions of culture and cognition but on today's podcast I'll be playing the audio from the first of two live events I did with Richard Dawkins in Los Angeles last month these were fundraisers for his foundation the Richard Dawkins foundation for reason and science which is also in the process of merging with the Center for inquiry making them the largest foundation for defending science and secularism from politically weaponized religion their work is suddenly even more relevant in the u.s. because although Trump himself isn't a religious demagogue he's promised to appoint a few to the Supreme Court and he's also put a creationist in charge of the Department of Energy which both stewards are nuclear weapons and funds more basic science research than any other branch of government so now we have Rick Perry in charge of all that his immediate predecessors were each physicists one was a Nobel laureate and Perry is a man who I would be willing to bet my life couldn't utter three coherent sentences on the topic of energy as a scientific concept so I would urge you to become a member of CFI or the Richard Dawkins foundation one membership now covers both organizations and once you are a member you'll occasionally receive action or requesting that you contact your elected representatives on matters of public policy as many have noted non-believers are somewhere between 10 and 20 25 percent of the US population it's hard to know for sure but we almost certainly outnumber many other subgroups in the US and we are disproportionately well-educated needless to say and yet we have almost no political power right now this will only change once we make ourselves heard so Richard was doing a speaking tour to raise funds for his foundation and for CFI and he asked me to join him at one of these events and our event in LA sold out almost immediately and so we booked the hall for a second night and that sold out too and I'll bring you the audio from that second event in a later podcast but as you'll hear we had a lot of fun and it was a great crowd and it was really satisfying to have a conversation like this live as opposed to privately over Skype so as I'll say at the end this has given me an idea for how to produce some more podcasts like that and now I give you an evening with Richard Dawkins the first night thank you all for coming this is really it's it's an honor to be here and it really is an honor to be here with you Richard I get to return the favor he had me at Oxford I think five years ago so welcome to Los Angeles so I am going to this is gonna be very much a conversation but what I did I was worried about this I wasn't worried about tonight I was worried about tomorrow night my fear was that Richard and I would have a a scintillating conversation tonight and then tomorrow night try dog idli to recapitulate it word for word and and yet feign spontaneity and if you know my position online you know that doesn't work so what I did is I went out to all of you asking for questions and I got thousands and so I picked among what looked promising so I can guarantee that the two nights will be reasonably different because of the different questions will come up but we won't hue too narrowly to the questions we'll just have a conversation but as we come out here I find that I want to ask you Richard about your socks and I'm not sure what the question is but I just come from Las Vegas the conference of saikhan and one of the things we had was a workshop on cold reading which is the technique whereby so-called mentalists are supposed to read each other's thoughts and what they really do interested if you're looking at the clothes and the general appearance and assessing it and we had to pair off to this workshop and I was with a nice young woman and we sort of sized each other up and I said to her I think I I'm getting that you come from somewhere in the west of the states I think maybe maybe not California maybe a bit further north and of course I'm simply reading her label which said she came from Oregon and then she's some sum me up and she said I think we have some problem with your eyes maybe colorblind and I I'm serious about this I'm trying to spread a meme for wearing odd socks there's a kind of tyranny of forcing us to buy socks in tears she shoes have chirality left shoe and rights are not interchangeable but socks don't and when you lose one of a pair of socks you're forced to throw the other one away so what I want well though honestly Richard you just told me a story that suggests that shoes are that's right um that's rather an embarrassing story someone is gonna find this on that the relevant video story now you've let the cat out of the bag I was doing a television film called sex death of the meaning of life and in the death episode we were talking about suicide and there's a famous suicide sports a bit like San Francisco the Golden Gate Bridge where people are famously jump to their death and all around this place deep beachy head is a very very high cliff in the South of England there are rather sad little crosses where people have jumped off and we were filming the sequence of on suicide and I had to walk very solemnly and slowly and in a melancholy frame of mind past these crosses and the camera was focused on my feet walking past these little low crosses and I felt incredibly uncomfortable like the sort of uncanny feeling of of being uncomfortable and I couldn't have to understand why and then eventually life it was my feet that were on comfort walking past these crosses and eventually the director called cuts and we went off and I took my shoes off because they were so painful and only then did I realize I put them on the wrong way around so this is preserved for posterity in close-up I want to see that video someone none none of the television audience ever wrote into the suit complain about this so maybe this at least will arouse their attention so the first question Richard which I thought could provoke some interesting reflection is why do you both court so much controversy now we don't do it we don't quote it pursues us well I think I mean what I've noticed is that there are undoubtedly people who are friends of ours colleagues of ours who agree with us down the line who seemed to feel no temptation to pick all of the individual battles we pick and one doesn't have to be a coward not to want to fight all of these culture war battles although it helps but that but there we have friends who are decidedly not cowards who someone like Steve Pinker he stakes out controversial positions but he is not in the trenches in quite the same way as we are and I'm wondering what you think about that I mean is it did you did you see a choice for yourself do you find yourself revisiting this choice periodically I think it's a perfectly respectable position to take that a scientist has better things to do and I don't take that position and I think you don't either I do think it's important to fight the good fight when we when we do have when science when reason has vocal and powerful and well financed enemies and so I'm not sure what particular battles the questioner has in mind when he says we caught controversy but I I suppose I believe so strongly in truth and if I see truth being actively threatened by competing ideologies which actually not only would fight for the opposite of truth but would indoctrinate children in the opposite of truth hmm I feel in hell to fight only verbally I mean I don't feel impelled to actually get a rifle or something well there's time yet so well I guess the dogma that has convinced so many fellow scientists and and intellectuals academics that there is no reason to fight certainly one of those dogmas is steven jay gould's idea of Noma non-overlapping magisteria that strikes me as a purely wrongheaded and destructive idea do you want to I blame it oh I think we probably agree about that non-overlapping magisteria he wrote a book called was it a game called that the rock of ages' the rock of ages' that's right so science has the age of the rocks and religion has the Rock of Ages and the idea was that science of religion both have their legitimate territories which they shouldn't in in pinja pawnee each each other science has the truth about the real world in that Sciences Department religion has what he described as moral questions and I think deep questions of exists too many minerals well I would strongly dispute the idea that we should get our morals from religion for goodness sake let's whatever else we get our moles from it must not be religion that would be if you imagine what the world would be like if we actually did get our morals from the Bible or the Quran will be totally appalling and was appalling in the time when we did get from the vibe is now appalling in those countries where they get it from from the Koran so don't let us get our morals from religion as for the deep fundamental questions I take those to be things like where did the laws of physics come from hmm what is the origin of all things what is the the origin of the cosmos what happened before the Big Bang those are scientific questions it may be that science can never answer them but if science cannot answer them sure as hell religion can't answer them I don't actually think anything can can answer them if science can't it's an open question whether things like the origin of the physical constants there's numbers which physicists can measure but can't explain the origin of the laws of physics whether those will ever be explained by science if they are well and good if they're not then nothing will explain them the idea I mean Steve Gould or was was careful to say that these separate Magisterium must not encroach on each other's territory and so the moment religion encroaches on Sciences territory for example in the case of miracles then it's fair game for scientific criticism but my feeling about that is that if you take away the miracles from from religion you've taken away most of what of why people believe in them people believe in the supernatural because they they believe biblical or quranic stories which suggest that there have been supernatural miracles and if you deprive them of that then they've lost everything to take Christianity is only one example that has been spelled out in every generation if starting with Paul he said you know if Christ be not risen in your faith is vain exactly yeah there's something close to that yes so it's you can't you can't get around the fact that religious people care about what's true and they they purport to be making claims truth claims about the nature of reality they think certain historical figures actually existed some of them may be coming back yes virgin the books you know issue occasionally from a divine intelligence and so this is no way to yes I never met cooled and and but I just can't believe the currency this idea has science I agree it's become very fashionable among the scientific establishment it was more or less endorsed by the US National Academy of Sciences as for the as for the separation as for the idea that that religion doesn't stray into southeast territory imagine that following scenario imagine that some sort of scientific evidence perhaps DNA evidence were discovered perhaps somewhere in a cave in in Palestine and it was demonstrated that say Jesus never had a father I mean I it's inconceivable how that could happen just suppose it was suppose there was scientific evidence can you imagine theologians saying oh that science has not our department we're not there to not they would love it it would be meat and drink to them yeah many people who are not atheist believe that your efforts against religion are wasted and that the net result of your work is to simply offend religious people there's a widespread myth that people can't be reasoned out of their faith please talk about this it's just uncanny that there are the the most memorable quips and quotes and phrases anything that is aphoristic seems to have undue influence on our thinking and there's this aphorism that is usually attributed to Swift and I think he says something like it it's not it's not quite the version that has been passed down to us but this idea that you can't reason someone out of a view that he wasn't reasoned into and this just strikes the mind of homo sapiens is so obviously true and it if you look at my inbox it is so obviously false so tell me about the your experience reasoning with with your readers I think it would be terribly pessimistic to think that you cannot reason I mean I think I just give up probably die I thought if I thought I couldn't tell me reason people out of their silliness I I wouldn't I would accept what would you agree with this that there are some people who demonstrably do know all the evidence and even understand the evidence but yet still persist in yeah well so there's there'll be a couple questions that will bring us on to that territory because there's more to reason about then science has tended to allow or that secular culture has tended to allows people have these intense transformative experiences or they have these I think these hopes and fears yes that aren't captured by you saying don't you understand the evidence for evolution but this is more of a conversation that that people don't tend to have but yeah I would agree that people certainly resist conclusions that they don't like me may taste oh I can think of two examples one one I mentioned in the reception beforehand a professor of astronomy somewhere in America who writes papers mathematical papers in astronomical journals in which his mathematics his mathematical ideas accept that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and yet he privately believes it's 6,000 years old so here is a man who knows his physics he knows his astronomy he knows the evidence of the universes 13 billion years old and yet so split brained is he that he actually privately departs from everything in his professional life well surely we have to accept that he he I don't mind cannot be reasoned up I mean he already knows the evidence and and will not be reasoned out of his foolishness yeah I didn't say that you could always succeed but I I think and clearly there are may have this this this bias as you do that if the conversation could just perceive long enough the ground for science would continually be conquered and it never gets reversed it is being and will be yeah yeah and and you never see the Ottoman this is a unidirectional conquest of territory so you never see a point about which science was once the authority but now the best answer is religious yeah right but you you always see the reverse of that and that's an arching most most scientists who call themselves religious who actually probe them I mean they don't believe really stupid things like like six-day creation and things yeah although I find that Christian Scientists not not Christian scientists as in the occult but scientist who happen to be Christian believe much more than your average rabbi this is this is a way that's true yeah yeah this Christianity is and Muslim scientists no doubt return the favor I get the feeling your every your average rabbi like me like your average chaplain of an Oxford college doesn't actually believe in God at all yeah I've met that rabbi so there's a couple of fun questions here that I just want I just wanted to hear Richard react to are there any biological extinctions that you would consider virtuous for instance should we eradicate the mosquito you have 10 seconds to decide it would have to be more than one mosquito there's that there's the malaria mosquito the yellow fever mosquito hmm yeah all mosquitoes mosquitoes are unbelievably beautiful creatures as the most irrational thing of the great the great tongue expert on fleas and she she she presented the Department of Zoology in Oxford with a gigantic blown-up photograph of a mosquito and it was a fantastic piece of work of art I am a level of God yes ever there were proof of God's malevolence it's gotta be the mosquito I have no hesitation in killing individual mosquitoes so wouldn't you want to be a little more efficient than that with crisper or something I haven't thought about it before I think I would not wish to completely extinguish I throw a little more on the balance we've had reliably year after year two million people killed by a mosquito-borne illness now it now is cut down to I think 800,000 so we're making progress with bed nets but for some reason I find myself less reluctant to extinguish the malarial parasite for the mosquito bears but that's probably not very logical I mean we have extinguished the smallpox virus right except for a few lab cultures yes and then like geniuses then we tell people how to synthesize it online so that the flip side of that of course is the Jurassic Park question should we reboot the t-rex fantastic I wished I wish I mean I thought the Jurassic Park and whether doing it was incredibly ingenious and I love that what was not ingenious was the ludicrous injection of was a chaos theory or one of those nine days wonder fashion about sick things but the the idea of getting mosquitoes in amber and extracting DNA and reconstructing dinosaurs that's an amazingly good science fiction idea if only it were possible unfortunately the DNA is too is too old for that that happened if it were I would definitely wish to see that done what what could go wrong Richard seems to want to live in a maximally dangerous world filled with mosquitoes and t-rexes so now you and I were speaking about your books you've written some very important books on 10 years apart and so you have a anniversary this year of The Selfish Gene which is the 40th and the blind wat watchmaker's has its 30th anniversary and climbing Mountain Mount improbable as the 20th and then The God Delusion is the 10th so actually I wanted to give you a chance to talk about the titles of the first to the Selfish Gene has provoked an inordinate amount of confusion and the blind watchmakers is a phrase that is useful to understand so do you want to yes the Selfish Gene is misunderstood I think mostly by those who have read it by title only as opposed to the rather substantial footnote to the title which is the talk itself it it could equally well have been called the altruistic individual because one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes give rise to altruistic individuals so it is mostly a book about altruism mostly book about the opposite of selfishness so it certainly should not be misunderstood as advocating selfishness or saying that we are as a matter of fact always selfish all it really means is that natural selection works at the level of the gene as opposed to any other level in the hierarchy of life so genes that work for their own survival are the ones that survive tautologically enough and they are the ones that build bodies so we all of us contain genes that are very very good at surviving because they've come down through countless generations and they are copied accurately with very high fidelity from generation to generation such that there are genes in you that have been around for hundreds of millions of years that's not true of anything else in the hierarchy of life individuals die they don't mean they survive only as a means to the end of propagating the genes that built them so individual bodies organisms should be seen as vehicles machines built by the genes that ride inside them for passing on those very same genes and it is the potential eternal long livid Ness of genes that makes them the unit of selection so that's really the meaning of of The Selfish Gene as I said that book could have been called the altruistic individual it could have been called the co-operative gene for another reason it could have been called the immortal gene which is a more sort of Carl Sagan esque title it's a more poetic title and in some ways I rather regret not calling it the immortal gene but anyway that's not stop a bit now there's a common misunderstanding of evolution that leads people to believe that absolutely everything about us must have been selected for otherwise it wouldn't exist so yeah like so people ask about what's the evolutionary rationale for post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or is it I'm not I'm not saying that there is no conceivable one but if it need not be the case that everything we notice about ourselves yeah was selected for or that there's a gene for that is very interesting I mean this this this we this I mean I I'm actually a bit of an outlier here I mean I'm about as close as biologists come to accepting what you've described as a misconception because I do think that selection is incredibly powerful and mathematical models show this JBS Haldane the great one of the three founding fathers of population genetics did theoretical calculation in which he say he postulated an extremely trivial character he didn't mention it but it might have been eyebrows suppose you suppose you believe that eyebrows have been selected because they stopped sweat running down your forehead into your eyes and it sort of sounds totally trivial how could that possibly save a life until you realize the first thing you might you might realize is that it could save your life if you were about to be attacked by a lion and the just a slight split second difference in how quickly you see the lion because you've got sweat in your in your eyes so since the the invention of sunblock I think that's undoubtedly true yeah okay [Music] but but what Holden actually did a mathematical calculation he said let us postulate a character so trivial that the difference between an individual who has it and the individual who doesn't have it is only one in a thousand let's say for every thousand individuals who have this say the eyebrows on survived 999 who don't have it survived so from any actuarial point of view and a life insurance calculator would so it's a totally trivial but it's not trivial when you think that the genes concerned is represented in thousands of individuals in the population and through thousands of generations that multiplies up the odds and Holden's calculation was that if you postulate that one in the thousand advantage he then worked out how long would it take for the gene to spread from being I forget exactly the figure that's a 1 percent of the population up to fifty percent of the population and it was a number of generations so short that it would be negligible on the geological times so it would appear to be an instantaneous piece of evolutionary change even though if the selection pressure was critical well actually selection pressures in the wild when they'd been measured have been far far stronger than that but there's another way of approaching the question you raised when you say something like selective advantage in various psychological diseases of something like that it may be that you're asking the wrong question it may be that by focusing on the particular characteristic which you asked the question about you're ignoring the fact that there's something associated with that which you've never think for example um there's a you you know that on at night if you've got a lamp out outside or a candle is better candle insects moths say come and sort of as it were commit suicide I mean they just burn themselves up in in the in the candle and you could ask the question what on earth is the survival value of suicidal self immolation behavior in moths well it's the wrong question because a probable explanation for it is that many insects use a light compass to steer a straight line lights at night until humans came along and invented candles lights at night were always at optical infinity they were things like the moon the Stars or the Sun during the day and if you maintain a fixed angle relative to these rays that are coming from optical Infinity then you just cruise at a straight line which is just what you want to do a candle is not an optical infinity and if you work out mathematically what happens if you maintain a fixed acute angle to the Rays that are emanating in all directions out of a candle you perform a neat logarithmic spiral into the candle flame so this is an accidental byproduct of a mechanism which really does have survival value you have to rephrase the question what is the survival value of maintaining a fixed angle at light rays and then you've got then you grab the answer so to ask the question what's the advantage of suicidal self immolation you you've shifted to the wrong question right and they're related issues with so there are things which provides some survival advantage in if you have one copy of the gene but if you have both copies and the tereus yes like sickle-cell anemia right right so well then what do you do with the concept of a spandrel though Kools concept of his banjo is that useful to think about yeah okay spandrels are low and hidden gould rota notorious and overrated paper in 1979 in which gould went to king's college cambridge whether the most beautiful was a beautiful building and the the gothic arches have gaps in inevitably form gaps which which are called spandrels and they actually have another name and they're often filled with own ornamentation and the spandrels themselves are accidental byproduct of something with rarely matters which is the Gothic arch and so the point they were making is that things that we that we it's really almost the same point that I was making just just now about asking the wrong question right spandrels are okay you can't ask what's the purpose of a spandrel that's right yes derivative of the thing you are building yes yeah what are your thoughts about artificial intelligence please discuss his relationship to biological evolution and how it could develop in the future it's a question for you so yes well I I fear everyone's heard my thoughts on artificial intelligence I find this increasingly interesting it's something that I became interested in very late and in fact unless you were in the AI community until very recently the dogma that had been exported from computer science to neuroscience and psychology and and adjacent fields was that a I basically hadn't panned out I mean just that it was just there was no real noticeable success there that should get anyone worried or particularly excited then all of a sudden people started making worried noises and then there were obvious gains in narrow AI that were getting sexier and sexier and now it's it was really the first time I thought about the implications of ongoing progress in building and intelligent machines and progress at any rate that really doesn't have to be that Moore's law continues indefinitely it doesn't know that we just need to keep going and at a certain point we will find our in the presence of machines that are as intelligent as we are they may not be human-like although presumably we'll build them to be as much like ourselves in all the good ways as possible but this interests me for many different reasons because it one it I'm actually war in terms of existential risk it sits on my short list for things to actually worry about but the flip side of that is that it's one of the most hopeful things I mean if anything is seems intrinsically good its intelligence and we want more of it so insofar as it's reasonable to expect that we are going to make more and more progress automating things and and building more intelligent systems that seems very hopeful I think we can't but do it and the other point of interest for me and this is kind of my hobby horse is that it's actually that what we were talking about on stage last time some years ago when I wrote the moral landscape I'm interested in in collapsing this perceived distance between facts and values the idea that morality somehow is uncoupled to the world of science and truth claims and I think that once we have to start building and we even have to start even now with things like self-driving cars once we started building our ethics into machines that within their domain are more powerful than we are the sense that there are no better and worse answers to ethical questions that we should all be moral relativists that all cultures are are equal with respect to what constitutes a good life that just mean that there's gonna be somebody sitting at the computer waiting to code something and if you don't if you don't put things you got to build in this moral value you have to build in the values and if and if you don't build it in you are built your building in those values so if you if you build a self-driving car that isn't distinguishing between people and mailboxes well then you've built a very dangerous self-driving car the more relevant tuning which people have to confront is do you want a car that the car's gonna have to make a choice between protecting the occupant and protecting pedestrians say so now how much or how much risk do you as the driver of the car to assume in order to spare the lives of occupants your key you're constantly facing a trolley problem and you're the you're the one to be sacrificed and your your point is that that whereas trolley problem is are these are these hypothetical things where you where um have to imagine they've got a runaway trolley and you're standing at points and if you spin it's about to mow down five people and if you pull the lever to swing the points it'll it'll kill one person so you with holding the lever in your hand have the dilemma should I save five people and kill one but but you you know that by your action and pulling the lever you're you know you're going to kill a person who wouldn't otherwise have died and I think Samuel you're saying making the point that a I mean automatic machines robotic machines are going to need to have a moral system built into them and then you know that the the trolley problem is going to be faced by the programmer who's actually writing the software oh it's already the case yeah yes and and it just will proceed from there so they just imagine a system more intelligent than ourselves that we have seated with our morality and again this is going to be a morality that the smartest people we can find doing this work will have to agree by some consensus is the wisest morality we've got and so the obviously the Taliban and al-qaeda are not going to get a vote in that particular project at that first pass all everything you've heard about moral relativism just goes out the window because we are we will be desperate to find the best answer we can find on every one of these questions and desperate to build a machine that when it in the real limit case where it begins to make changes to itself it doesn't make changes that we find yes in the worst case incompatible with our survival making changes to itself is what more conventionally worries people he normal machine which is which is capable of reproducing and thereby possibly evolving by natural selection and and sub completely supplanting humans completely taking over this is of course a science fiction scenario it's not totally unrealistic not at all given the fact that one path toward developing AI is to build genetic algorithms that that function along similar lines and you know that where there there's a Darwinian principle of just getting better and better in response to data and error correction and it may it may not even be clear how it has gotten better so we could look forward to a time in the distant future when we have a hole like this filled with silicon and metal machines looking back and speculating on some far distant dawn age when the world was people by soft squishy organic water-based life forms but the data transfer would be instantaneous so there have been no reason to come out here you just take the firmware upgrade but beware the world will be a better and a happier place well my real fear is that it won't be illuminated by consciousness at all because I'm agnostic at the moment as to whether or not mere information processing and and a scaling of intelligence by definition gets you consciousness that it may in fact be the case that it gets you consciousness I'm not conscious by the way yes it is a genuine is a very difficult philosophical problem earth I think what why I mean it would seem to be perfectly possible to build a machine or an animal or human which which can do all the things that we do all the intelligent things that we do all the life-saving things that we do and yet not be conscious and and it's genuinely mysterious why we need to be conscious I think yeah I and I think it remains so I think it's it's because consciousness is the conscious part of you is generally the last to find out about what your mind just did you know you're not you're you're playing catch-up and what you call consciousness is in every respect an instance of some form of short-term memory now it's it's there's different kinds of memory and this is integrated in different ways but you are I think there's just a transmission time for everything so it's it that you you can't be aware of a perception or a sensation the instant it hits your brain because it's hitting your brain isn't one discrete moment and so there's a whole integral time of integration and so you're so the present moment is this this layered you know subjectively speaking it's this layering of memories even when you are distinguishing the present from what you classically call a memory and so it's it's not it is a genuine mystery why consciousness would be necessary or what what couldn't we what couldn't a machine as complex as a human brain do but for the emergence of this subjective sense this inner dimension of experience I don't even know what the solution would look like and whether it would be solved by biologists or by philosophers or by computer scientists I think well I'm just worried that yeah and that's that is you've just articulated what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness it's hard to imagine what answer would fit in the space provided that would be truly explanatory if you just say that you know this wiring diagram of neurons or any other computational units you have a sufficient number they're integrated in a certain way they're firing at whatever Hertz that's what you need for consciousness let's just say that's so so if you if you lose those that tuning then there's nothing that is like to be that system the lights go out but if you tune it up and precisely that way well then consciousness emerges that again that's strikes me as the kind of statement of a miracle and so I mean that's that's not the sort of explanatory work most other scientific theses do and so it is a it's a genuinely hard problem but a my concern with AI is that we will just ram past it and we will find ourselves in the presence of intelligent systems that will be so competent and we will have built them in a way to play upon our intuitions of emotion and we will obviously build them in appropriate emotions into them and they'll be aware of our emotions and if you finally build robots that that are humanoid that that are so good that they're no longer uncanny to us you get out of the what's called the uncanny valley and they no longer look creepy now they've just looked perfect I think we will lose the intuition that there was any mysterious question here to worry about and we will just feel because every intuition that you're in the presence of a sentient other will be played upon we will just feel we are in the presence of consciousness without ever knowing that that's the case you would as I am with you now I mean that's what it is I mean you're there's a the fact that we are both the same sort of thing that we have the same evolutionary history and that overcomes this this notion of solecism be me but that many kind of first-year philosophy students think solipsistic maybe only I exist everyone else is just a zombie many people think that's somehow the most parsimonious or the most economical view because you know I'm sure I exist I'm sure I'm having an experience I'm not sure about all you people in fact I can't even see you people have you have you heard Bertrand Russell's solipsism story but Bertrand Russell got a letter from a lady who said dear Lord Russell I'm so delighted to hear you are a solid cyst there are so few of us around today that that shows how untenable even a solid cisco's it but that's so yeah but the the problem with solecism is that there's actually an additional burden of explanation to I have to explain why something's so similar to myself you know biologically as yourself was bored in the same way yes wouldn't be conscious and so it's there's actually more parsimonious to assume that you are but if we build these machines from a point of not knowing how consciousness arises in the physical universe and we build them to be more and more competent all of a sudden they cry they passed the Turing test with flying colors when I first read about the Turing test I I never really but I sort of didn't believe that I myself would ever think that a machine that passed the two you know the the the Turing test it's where you the the way he originally formulated it was was that you're sitting in a room with a communicating by telephone tur in those days but and with either a human in another room or a computer in another room and you're allowed to ask any questions you like and talk and communicate with this thing in any way you like and if it's impossible to tell the difference to know whether the computer or whether it's a computer or a human you're talking to then the computer is conscious actually so to go back to that that has been the way it's been talked about for many decades but Turing's original paper didn't talk about consciousness that talked about thought so this is a measure of whether a computer is actually thinking and what that has been kind of updated to to mean that that would be consciousness in a computer which for those who are convinced that the hard problem is in fact hard that doesn't make any sense I suspect that if I was having a conversation with a robot we are now and the robot was speaking exactly the words you you are speaking I would believe it was conscious yeah but anyway the situation will be worse than that though because it'll speak better than I do and I wouldn't wish on that yeah well let's hope they're that they're not doing their job at google deepmind if i hear from i hear from many of you who i say things like gonna a lot so we're presumably we're not going to put gonna into our super intelligent - we're not gonna do that so but I the situation will be worse because you'll be in the presence of something that looks human and speaks at least as well as any human you've met but will have access to all of the world's information and will maybe the first version of it won't but some subsequent version will it will be better at detecting your inner life than any human you've ever met so you're a certain point your phone will be more aware of your emotions than your spouse is and that's either your worst nightmare or your some ultimate wish fulfillment but if so you'll be you'll be in dialogue with something that is giving you more valid information than any human being you've ever met and I'm sorry Dave I can't my concern is that we'll lose sight of the problem moving on to a totally unrelated question but you've both been accused of elitism in the past most recently reviews for your views on Trump and brexit can you say something about the difference if there is one between combatting anti intellectualism and being elitist as it actually strikes me as an interesting problem because he and I haven't thought much about this but it seems to me just intuitively that the boundary between those two things isn't very clear I think I want to stop being ashamed of being elitist [Music] the point has been often made that when you are going to have an operation you want an elite surgeon when you're going to board an a plane you want an le pilot yet when you're when you want a president of the most powerful country in the world you take almost no precautions whatever to cry together and in my country Britain has just undergone what amounts to a a long-term catastrophe which is the decision to leave the European Union well okay let's not prejudge that let's say it might not be a catastrophe but what is absolutely certain is that the issue of whether Britain should leave the European Union was and is a much too complicated and sophisticated question to be decided by idiots like me and like the British people this is this is why we have a representative democracy rather than a plebiscite democracy I could just about imagine having a pleasure plebiscito some one issue which doesn't ramify doesn't impinge upon everything else like say foxhunting i could imagine having a plebiscite on that because you decide to abolish foxhunting or not the case maybe that doesn't immediately affect thousands of other things the decision to leave the European Union has enormous repercussions which are of great complexity you need a PhD in economics to understand the complexity and yet Cameron who will go down in history as as a [ __ ] Tereza for reasons of internal politics within his own within his own party put this to a plebiscite to a referendum he didn't even take the precaution of building in the requirement of a two-thirds majority in in the United States a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority there's a built-in resistor there there's at the hurdle as a barrier as a bar that has to be cleared of a two-thirds majority because it is a major major change that has long-term implications the brexit decision is not something that's going that can be reversed at the next election it's it's irrevocable it's for keeps and it was decided on a fifty percent majority where it was quite clear from the polls of opinion that just jumping up and down like that and the day of the vote there happened to be a spike on that on that day and so now we're stuck with something I wouldn't say forever but but certainly for a very very long time frame well well beyond the next election I am an unashamed elitist with respect to to this we some of them some of the reasons that I heard from personal acquaintances for why people voted to leave the European Union were oh well it's nice to have a change or well I prefer the old blue passport to the European purple world this is the kind of thing with this is the kind of reasoning that people voted you know you've probably read that the day after the brexit vote the most common thing to be googled in britain was what is the EU so I think for all the odium that it gathers I couldn't uncontained to be described as an elitist I once wrote an article a couple of elections ago when Sarah Palin was briefly there's another Excel yeah so I wrote an article entitled this is for newsweek entitled in defense of elitism and made some of some of the points the sort that you just made and they retitled it when atheists attack that was when I understood that Newsweek was no longer a magazine we haven't evolved to live in affluent societies surrounded by millions of strangers much less a global civilization and seemed poorly adapted to the anonymity and isolation that affluence and globalism bring for instance the modern world is plagued by rates of depression and suicide that are unheard of in tribal societies our culture privileges consumption over community and meaning indeed many would say this is an argument in favor of religion how can a piece like ourselves truly flourish yes well let's take the first that is a an important question is yes but let's take the first part first because it lands in a in a question that we've heard before which is and and in fact it's it's also here and in some other form you know how do how do non-believer is how do purely rational people find meaning in life and and and all of that but the first part is we are at odds with our our ape-like small-group tribal primates genome and we have not evolved to be in a condition of full-time anonymity with most of the people we come in contact with and so when you think of our online lives when you think of even this circumstance this is very unnatural I mean just imagine getting something like 1,400 people in this room now imagine getting 1,400 chimpanzees together in a room it doesn't work very well for reasons that we can explain and we have this ability to now group together in ways that may be at odds with what what we are by you know our ape-like ancestry in a way it's it's remarkable how how well we do and you know although it's probably true to say there's a lot of the mental illness that plagues us is because for this very reason nevertheless considering how astonishingly different our environment is now especially our social environment from our iPads history we don't do too badly do we really in there there are certain other things it's not it's not just the social environment it's things like the the fact the fact that we are too fond of sugar because in our ancestry sugar was very difficult to get and you couldn't get too much of it and now you can now you can get too much of it no that's true food generally so there are things like that but well do you think we could be selecting for personality traits that are let me take psychopathy whatever the genetic underpinnings of psychopathy are when you imagine living in a little village fifty thousand years ago where you knew everyone knew everyone and not and you're guaranteed maybe if you are if you meet a stranger that's that's very likely to be a circumstance of violence everyone who's in your tribe is someone you know intimately and this will always be the case so there's no it's not even a question of having a reputation it's it's everyone knows everyone and so you just imagine the fate of a psychopath in that environment that that tends to end pretty swiftly with the angered people in the tribe exile an or killing him but now so now we live in a world where Psychopaths can always move on to new contexts and and bilk or otherwise harm and manipulate new people do you think we I mean I guess there's an underlying question here evolution hasn't stopped right so could we be selecting for in a few short generations like with eyebrows a kind of personality disorder that has a genetics well that would be a negative thing a positive way looking at it is that we we now meet strangers every day we now meet people that we're never going to ever see again never never seen in the past whereas as you say in our in our a past history we lived in villages or small bands of probably a max of 150 people has been has been suggested where not only did you know in everybody but everybody was was kin there army but they were cousins second cousins and so on well it you can make a good case for why we have altruism and empathy that we lived in small bands where everybody was kin and everybody knew everybody else and so that favors granted to other people could be reciprocated at some later date and there was a sort of that that's probably why we have such a strong sense of of debt a strong sense of guilt a strong sense of who owes what to whom a strong sense of reputation who has a good reputation for being socially generous and who has a good reputation for being a bad reputation for being for being mean those good impulses that evolved under conditions of small villages are now generalized into the population at large such that most of us now have expanded our feelings of generosity and empathy to anyone we need to a limited extent at least so if we receive somebody in distress we have an impulse to try to comfort them or give them money or look look after them in in in some way and this could probably be regarded as a kind of mistake a blessed mistake a mistake that I would I would welcome based upon the fact that in in our primitive small village world the rule the rule of thumb be good to everyone you need um was beneficial because everyone you meet was either kidding or and or a potential reciprocate and nowadays everyone you meet is not kin and is not a per step potential reciprocated but the rule of thumb remains and we're still mostly pretty nice yeah except but even there so there in many respects it's a bad rule of thumb do you know you know Paul bloom yeah so he's done some great work in this area he has a book coming out entitled against empathy for which he is going to reap the whirlwind but his point is that empathy is actually the wrong piece of software for making moral decisions most of the time we have this our empathy module is one that gets highly provoked to action by individual personal stories and pictures of cute kids and puppies and all the rest but we just can blithely ignore statistics and you know the numbers of people who die and you know say a civil war like Syria now the more the eyes of the moral conscience just glaze over you know what's the difference between a hundred thousand and four hundred thousand I you know I don't know I've never seen that many things and yet you tell me about one kid and this is people have done fascinating and really harrowing research on this topic Paul Paul slovic has done these experiments where he show people one needy little child and asked them to you know this is now an experimental context ask them to give money and how much would you give and then you show them the same needy little child but with her brother and people reliably give less and then you show that the sister and the brother in a group of eight needy little children and people reliably give less and they care less the more the problem scales and then when you add statistics and you say this you know this one little girl named Amelia yeah there's a there's a million just like her they give less and so this is this is pretty clear this is a bug not a feature so let's come back to the evolution question that baby obviously most people assume that because we exert so much control over our environment now that the forces of natural selection are dampened to the point of almost being negligible is that I mean there's either things like lactose tolerance or that seems like a reasonably recent yeah that's a good example where we're quite quite clearly natural selection has been going on quite rapidly so 5,000 years or 2,000 years and similarly the differences between peoples in different parts of the world and the image in the Arctic and and the dinkar in in the Nile and region and the pygmies in in the African forests and so on these are undoubtedly selective differences which have come about with it let's say tens of thousands of years so what do you think is happening now given our reliance on technology and the way in which more or less everyone certainly in the developed world you can survive long enough to reproduce repair so the emphasis then comes down more to who reproduces rather than who lives right because family size is not uniform and tremana size is often determined by cultural factors maybe religious factors yeah what do you make of the fact that secularism seems to correlate with low birthrate and yes when religious people have 10 kids per family in certain contexts I think you will keep the mosquitoes in for the rest of time but you won't go I would I would like to go there but I better not we're being given the cue that we should move on to to audience questions and say I want to ask one more that will not 54 tomorrow night me okay but one more just to round out that final topic do you think humans should take charge of their own evolution did I just say evolution the way Brits do you see the power of good company that's the only word I know where where we are actually embarrassed about how to how to products right you mean Brit Brits are embarrassed about it yeah I I I was sufficiently embarrassed to ask a Latin scholar what is what is the correct pronunciation not that it matters it isn't that evolution but I will take that instruction so do you think we should take charge of our evolution through genetic engineering not only eradicating genetic diseases but improving intelligence and physical strength and wouldn't this uh sure in a new age of eugenics well I am tempted by that it's highly unpatentable and and I think I think Hitler's partly to blame for that because because Hitler notoriously tried to try to do that I first of all most people except most moral philosophers accept a distinction between negative eugenics where you try to get rid of horrible hereditary diseases and I think few people would object to that but positive eugenics we actually try to improve musical ability or mathematical ability or ability to do the high jump or to run 100 meters or whatever there I would make a distinction between compulsory eugenic breeding for positive positive positive eugenics and such as Hitler in imposed and the freedom of parents to it too if the technology were available which it isn't yet to breed for something that they like the idea of like musical ability so let let me just limit myself to pointing out that people don't on the whole regarded as a major moral sin for parents to encourage to the point of forcing children to have music lessons right so if it's education then the most apparent will be accused of is of being a bit dictatorial and telling the child look you haven't done your piano practice today go and do it or else and that that and that is regarded as much much more morally acceptable than say if the technology were available to do IVF and you know in vitro fertilisation you get a number of eggs of fertilized eggs and you can extract it to say at the eight cell stage would extract one cell and examine its genes and at present you can do that for the sort of major genetic diseases and you can make sure that the the embryo that you are Ian's plant back in the woman is the one that doesn't have Huntington's chorea whatever it is if it became possible to put back into the woman the one that has the je s bark gene for musical genius would it be immoral to do that and I can't see that it would well on the contrary I think it would be immoral to now provided this works and it's safe and there's no no downside to decline to do that but then force the kid to take piano lessons really sadistic so I mean you eugenics has become a dirty word but but and and and even saying that I'll get a lot of stick for but but III think you're absolutely right there well so just one question to follow up here because I genuinely don't know I mean there's no guarantee that the genes that control things we like about ourselves like intelligence when you dial them up or select for the variants that give a propensity to increased intelligence you could and there's some evidence that this is the case you could be also increasing the propensity for certain diseases sensing you could and some and so there's no there's no guarantee that we'll ever be able for just dealing purely with the biological substrate ever be able to shoot for the mark of the good thing we want without increasing the likelihood they're going to be in a wheelchair or something that that's that would be very very true for doing what Hitler tried to do which is which is doing what we do with domestic animals and say you say mating female high jumpers with male high jumpers to try to breed a race of Olympic winners in five hundred years time that almost certainly would have bad effects right because you've almost certainly be breeding people who were deficient in some other respects but if you take the IVF case it's quite interesting because you've got in a petri dish you've got say half a dozen eight cell embryos and you're going to implant back in the woman one or two of them and at present you you put them back at random so you could be getting the musical genius one but you might not be so if it's harder to make the case that two to choose one at non randomly to choose to put back the one for mathematical ability oh by the way always is totally hypothetical it couldn't possibly be done yet don't do this at home the this is this is in the future when when you're going to it when you've already got you've got to pick two of these a two of these 10 embryos out and put two of them back do you do it at random which is what happens at present or do you exercise the knowledge that you have that this one has music ability and that one doesn't it seems to me that that's far less likely in fact I don't see why would have the the undesirable effects that selective breeding for some particular characteristic as in breeding for milk yield in cows or fast running in horses would well it does come back to the point raised earlier where some genes when you have only one copy give you a benefit but two copies is yes decisively negative yes I think there's there's some evidence for that with intelligence with the condition of torsion dystonia which is a muscle spasm condition that nobody would like but if you have two copies you get that if you have one copy you you're you're predisposed towards some increment of yeah I think we we have we are under orders to stop our conversation so now to your questions [Music] could we have the lights up could we have the lights up yes thank you Hennessey help sir really absurd religious people can be but there are a lot of them I think we all meet people who aren't so absurd these seemingly innocuous abilities people on young earth creationists and aren't homophobic and things like that do you still wish these people to be other things being equal yes yeah I mean how would it not be I can't imagine well yeah I don't want a pellet or anything like that I guess the the the it's important to specify what you mean by non-religious clearly we want people to be rational open to the best evidence open to the best arguments and that just so happens to have the very seditious effect of destroying much of what people count as being religious but there are experiences that I would be happy for people to have but I just want them to to interpret them differently or interpret them honestly so about I don't mind people having the experience of ecstasy or awe or even to even to a point where it's exactly the sort of experience that jutted that has justified the religious claims that people have made for thousands of years but what I don't want them to do is then lie to themselves and to other people about what those experiences prove or mean and so to take someone like you know Francis Collins who's running the NIH he's a medical geneticist and but he's also an evangelical Christian and he came to his faith I mean when you hear how he came to it you'll know the ground had been prepared he came to he was hiking and he came upon a frozen waterfall and it was surprisingly frozen in three streams and this put him in mind of the Holy Trinity and this is a verbatim quote then I fell to my knees in the dewy grass and gave myself to Christ so that is that leap there from the frozen waterfall to that you know I would want to push back against religious interpretation yeah you know technology in designing our systems and also whether or not you know the level of consumption of digital media versus how people consume print media only one in this room who's starting to find it difficult to actually read long books that have you noticed this that it's getting harder to read a 600-page book you know I feel like I'm a canary in the coal mine for this but I you know it's not necessarily a bad thing that you know that it's I mean it is information coming in other ways but I think it does pose certain problems and maybe it goes back to the question asked earlier about anonymity and distance and the fact that so much of our life is online now but it also goes back to the thing we were talking about about the villages with 150 people in a funny kind of way we may be reconstructing villages which are not geographically locate but distributed around the world and that we sometimes refer to as echo chambers you have you you you you have a group of Internet friends that you interact with and you're given a distorted impression for world opinion because you only listen to the people in your own electronic village and we probably all suffer from that to some extent it's quite an interesting sociological phenomenon I think yeah I mean this is a paradox that many people have remarked on that that we have instantaneous access to more information than anyone has ever had access to and it should be and it really is easier and easier and easier to get the truth to get the best facts to debunk a lie and yet it's also easier to curate your access to facts in such a way as to be in an echo chamber for the rest of your life and and you could go t just go through the looking-glass on any one of these things and be a conspiracy theorist of any flavor forever and because you're never meeting they're generally not meeting these people everything has this you know online everything has the same stature you don't see that the website that is proving to you that 911 was a conspiracy you know to bring down the buildings you don't know that the person who coded that website was a you know 16 year old in his underpants and yeah you're true you're treating it like like a bunch of Nobel laureates lined up and told you the truth sorry for any truthers out there who didn't like that and if you sign up and then I'm familiar with it you've made it to this part of the simulation it's actually not his argument it's not I'm not even sure it originates with Nick Bostrom it's a nick bostrom is the philosopher at Oxford who's really popularized this it's argument he's also written what I consider the best full treatment of the the the reasons to be scared about this super intelligent AI he wrote a book called super intelligence which is which is fantastic but he's made a lot of hay out of this simulation argument and the argument there various forms of the argument but one is that just imagine you know that the future in which we can simulate whole worlds in our computers invariably we're going to you know if provided mind and consciousness is just a matter of information processing and certainly most scientists think that's the case then we'll be able to simulate conscious beings like ourselves in our machines and we will do that and it seems almost by definition then simulated worlds will outnumber real worlds by a factor of you know trillions it's just it's just a matter of having a sufficiently large cloud which is which we will certainly have if we don't destroy ourselves so if you imagine that that's where everything's headed well then you think that the chances are just as a matter of probability that is far more likely that the fact that you find yourself in a world it's far more likely that you have found yourself in a simulated one than a real one again there are many variants of this and you could be that you could think about alien civilizations doing this you could just think about the future of humanity doing this and and my personal version is a future of humanity in which the Mormons do this and in this world Mormonism is true because they've built it into their simulation won't that be a surprise Richard I first met listen rather a good science fiction story by Daniel F gallery called counterfeit world and in which it's a super adventure story and the hero eventually discovers that that we that we are indeed in us well he he goes down into the simulated world in order to repair some some fault and he comes back into what he thinks is the real world earlier discover that that is itself a simulated world from even from yet yet higher up it's it's a good story he's a good science fiction writer what's up guys things worth having her just wanna thank you guys both really helped me just throughout my life but I'm not so curious to know what you think would come first I'd be very happy that either [Applause] and an indignant under them infamous female president by the way as well I'm gonna resist the temptation to say something about the election pretty quite enough for me on that already but I think whatever it is aren't you aren't you I mean it is amazing how this is to take stock of how much progress we might yet make very quickly on the religion in front the the progress we've made with gay rights yeah winding like that so encouraging by the way is that is the model that our openly secular campaign is taking the the get the get the gay rights movement has been so successful in such as an astonishingly short time in raising consciousness and becoming accepted in American society bridges started and so I think there's every hope that we can do the same thing for for freethinkers because it would have been a few decades ago it would have been inconceivable that the gay the gay people gay community would have made such such progress as they have so I have every hope that we can follow their example I'm sorry to pay back 200 but they kept me from wrong that of course we should want more intelligence but then you're also having access to the connections between intelligence and consciousness and I know that you value the consciousness or the version of conscious creatures so why are you should we value intelligence and I realize that's a weird question to ask a river like this so well no it's a it's a good question if you in that case if you imagine that intelligence and consciousness can come apart and we could build more and more intelligent machines without necessarily building in consciousness there are many reasons why that should be worrisome and it also it absolves us of a few concerns because one concern is that we'll build more and more intelligent machines that if they by definition become conscious they will be able to suffer and then we're building machines that can suffer and then when you turn these machines off have you committed a murder I mean is it like turning off your your mother or your child it's a rib a these are real ethical questions and it is a the term of jargon in this space like in Bostrom's book is mindcrime the idea that we'll we'll be building machines that you know we're enslaving them and do these machines like to work for us do they like the automaticity of their their lives but at a certain point they'll be they might be able to tell us and if we think they're conscious well then we have suddenly have opened up a landscape of ethical concern and obligation toward creatures that may in fact be able to suffer more than we can I mean maybe they can suffer unimaginably or be deprived of happiness that is unimaginably great you know and so it's but if if intelligence is not something that need be associated with consciousness at even at a superhuman level then the question is how much intelligence do we want access to for our own conscious purposes and I think we want quite a lot I think we want machines that can solve puzzles in economics and in climate science and in neuroscience and in genetics that we we can't seem to solve ourselves or or solve in a in a time frame that is as useful as it would be if we could solve them solve them overnight in my view intelligence is leave aside all of the beauty it gives us access to and it basically it is the thing that allows us to safeguard everything we care about you know the moment we find out that some pandemic has been unleashed through happenstance on the earth and we need a cure for it well how long does it take for us to develop that cure the difference between 15 minutes and fifteen years is huge and that difference really is a matter of intelligence on some level it's not obvious that intelligence goes with ability to suffer either by the way no I didn't the consciousness you think about what what suffering is for it's it's to prevent the the creature from repeating a mistake from doing something which I mean pain is a is a some is a sort of sorry bit for death and so if an animal does something that causes it pain it's given a warning don't do that again well you could make the case that an an animal an organism that is not very intelligent requires more pain in order to be deterred from repeating a an unfortunate misstep and so it might be that our ethical concern for animals in proportion to their intelligence we we care more about payment in cows than in fish we could be doing the wrong thing because it could be that it was a less intelligent and animal actually is more capable of feeling pain then there's a bit of an aside but it could while you were talking to the side that just screwed up dinner yeah Sam what are you trying to be more effective in disempowering organized religion focusing on it if you did with the end of page or sort of passionate by what he did get waking up you know I just I have no way of knowing really I mean it would just be pure intuition I think there are moments for both but yeah it's just I I would I would just be guessing the missing piece and again in waking up I don't provide every piece that's missing but the thing that will really be good to do at a certain point is to articulate a and ethically and aesthetically attractive way of meeting all of the needs that people religious people think they have and many they think they have for good reason and it is you know so building community and ritual and having a reason to gather once a week for some experience of profundity I mean all of this I think is a missing piece in secularism and people get it in a piecemeal way they get it just in a haphazard way they find it another where they find it in entertainment and an art and they go to the museum or they they go to a sporting event or they they go they have a picnic or they go to a TED conference or they they find they gravitate toward things that scratch the itch a little bit but I think if if the counterpoint to really fit the explicit counterpoint to religion of atheism or secularism is going to be you know when it is offered fully compelling to religious people the replacements for what they care about have to be pretty salient in the end I don't think you can replace everything that people care about in that space but is it and I've you know I've said this before when you lose your belief in Santa Claus it's not like the thing that replaces it precisely fills that Santa Claus shaped hole in your life but you've moot you do move on to other things that are rewarding and and we need to make that in a in a contemplative ethical communitarian sense very obvious to remember somebody in funeral and I just say you know just talk about things you remember about them I wanted to maybe talk about some stories [Music] it's it's a depressing note to end on but it mean the thing that was so obvious to me from a purely personal selfish side that was wrong with hitch dying was that I had so little time with him I really the last dinner I had with him when he had cancer we did a debate against two rabbis in Los Angeles and we had dinner before that and I was sitting across from him and he was very sick but you can watch that debate I mean it was it was quite amazing to me even at that point that he made the trip for that debate but I realized it was the first dinner I had had alone with him you know I had maybe a you know half a dozen dinners with him in my life but this is the first time it was just me and hitch a dinner and so it's just good touch back to that question about our online lives I have many relationships where like my relationship with you so much of it has been virtual you know like with my relationship with even greater example someone like Steve Pinker my relationship with him is almost entirely email you know and it's a Ritz you know I really value my relationship with Steve is he's a mentor to me but we have been you know you and I have been on stage together you know many more times I have been with with with Steve and and the same was true of hitch and so it's um it's a real lost opportunity I just feel like I've met him too late - yeah and we had a wonderful encounter in the circle four horsemen discussion which would took place in his his apartment in in Washington weather was you Sam me hitch and Dan Dennett and we had a four-way conversation with no chairman no moderator I think we won't got about equal time it was a very very fruitful agreeable conversation he was I think the most eloquent person I've ever met incredibly fluent articulate speaker with an enormous fund of knowledge could tap into with immediate rapid-fire access I once wrote if you're ever invited to have a debate against Christopher Hitchens decline I think I was the last person to do a major interview with him I did that on behalf of the New Statesman magazine in Britain I came to Texas and spent a long time with him you can read that interview the thing that I remember most was that I confess that I was uneasy about being constantly described as strident and he said don't you ever stop being strident he was most emphatic about this that we have to come out with all guns blazing but he but he did that himself but he did it with courtesy and consideration and without I think ever making enemies [Applause] well I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did as I said it was really an honor to get a chance to share the stage with Richard that does not happen often enough and I will bring you the audio from the other event when I get it but doing these events made me think that I could do a live podcast tour and perhaps speak to a different person in each city and so this is something I'm thinking about doing in the new year probably in the second half of the year because it takes about six months to produce an event well needless to say those of you who are supporting the podcast through my website or through patreon will be given first crack at the tickets it would just be a blast to fill a large room with diehard podcast listeners in places like New York and Toronto and Houston and Chicago and as I did with Richard I would go out to you for all the topics anyway more to come on that front once again please join my email list if you want to hear about these things in a timely way because each of these events with Richard sold out in 48 hours and that was a 1400 seat room 10 days after I announced those events on email I was hearing from people on social media saying why the hell didn't I hear about these events I live 10 minutes away not being on my email list is why and as always if you want to support the podcast there are several ways to do that and you can find them at Sam Harris rg4 slash support until next time [Music] if you enjoyed this podcast there are several ways you can support it you can leave reviews on iTunes or stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it you can share it on social media with your friends you can discuss it on your own blog or podcast or you can support it directly at Sam Harris RG forward slash support

Channel: Waking Up with Sam Harris

Views: 10,201

Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, waking up, podcast, science, religion, politics, current events, Waking Up With Sam Harris #57, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris

Id: 9Hj4KTE_OcU

Length: 97min 7sec (5827 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018