Speaker 1: Okay, well, there are all of the causes of what
Speaker 1: I'm conscious of our first unconscious, right, So, like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not aware of what my brain is doing at
Speaker 1: the synaptic level. But let's just be again, I'm not
Speaker 1: even a dog I'm not a I'm certainly not a
Speaker 1: dogmatic materialist. I'm not you know, like I can bracket
Speaker 1: the ontology here, But let's just talk in terms of
Speaker 1: materialism too. And and Dennett certainly is a materialist, right,
Speaker 1: So most most scientific compatibilists are materialists. So let's just
Speaker 1: grant materialism. And it's it's deterministic flavor for this kind conversation, right,
Speaker 1: It's like, my mind is what my brain is doing
Speaker 1: in this moment. Right, So if I'm going to get
Speaker 1: to the end of the sentence, it's because of micro
Speaker 1: changes at the level of neural circuits that accomplish that. Right.
Speaker 1: So the grammar of human English, the grammar of human language,
Speaker 1: and in my case English is somehow encoded in the
Speaker 1: physical substrate of my brain, as it would be in
Speaker 1: the physical substrate of a robot that was also speaking
Speaker 1: English successfully, although it just would be a very different
Speaker 1: kind of computer. So what we're talking about. Is information
Speaker 1: processing in a physical system. In my case, the computers
Speaker 1: made of meat. In a robot's case, it will be
Speaker 1: made of silicon. And in neither case, is there something
Speaker 1: extra which is emerging or being added that is giving
Speaker 1: a degree of freedom beyond just the impressive complexity of
Speaker 1: the system in dialogue with its environment. I think there is.
Speaker 1: I think that is. Let me like pinpoint precisely what
Speaker 1: I think that extra thing is. You know, cognitive control
Speaker 1: are includes things like implementation intentions. If we could build
Speaker 1: a progres a robot to have the capacity for implementation
Speaker 1: intentions and what I mean by that is error correction
Speaker 1: ability to take its current Because you're right, you know,
Speaker 1: in the moment, you know, we don't really have free will,
Speaker 1: but we have the capacity to shift our behavior in
Speaker 1: the future so that we can learn from our mistakes,
Speaker 1: so that we can even make moral reasoning decisions. You know, turtles, chimps,
Speaker 1: APPEs and robots right now don't really have a great
Speaker 1: capacity for moral reasoning about something in action they already
Speaker 1: need so they can change their behavior in the future.
Speaker 1: To me, that conscious control is free will. It's free will.
Speaker 1: But I don't think I can convince you to use
Speaker 1: that label for that phenomenon. Is that right? Well, it's
Speaker 1: again you're either changing the subject or like either you're
Speaker 1: going to interact with the thing people think they they
Speaker 1: really think they have, right, or you're gonna or you're
Speaker 1: gonna grant Okay, they don't have that and we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about this new thing. I mean, so, I like,
Speaker 1: there's there's no doubt in my mind that there is
Speaker 1: a difference that's that's rational to care about between you know,
Speaker 1: voluntary and involuntary action or an ability to regulate emotion
Speaker 1: or not. I mean, there are people who have brain
Speaker 1: damage who you know, just blurt out everything they're thinking.
Speaker 1: They can't stop doing that, right, So, and psychopaths are
Speaker 1: moral blind, morally blind, right yeah, so you can they're
Speaker 1: they're people who are ethical or people unethical. There are
Speaker 1: people who are sensitive to certain things and not We
Speaker 1: could you know, you could be more or less intelligent.
Speaker 1: Like all of this, all this is descriptively true of
Speaker 1: human beings, and none of it requires free will in
Speaker 1: the in the common sense to understand or or to
Speaker 1: acknowledge so and so, so I can I can can
Speaker 1: serve the data of human experience, all the while repudiating
Speaker 1: free will as a as a incoherent idea. Many people worry,
Speaker 1: but what is truly novel about what I'm arguing for
Speaker 1: is that you can recognize this subjectively too. So the
Speaker 1: only reason why we're talking about free will, the only
Speaker 1: reason why anyone cares about this topic, is because people
Speaker 1: are having an experience. They think they're having an experience
Speaker 1: of being a self that can author its actions. So
Speaker 1: the experience of having free will and the experience of
Speaker 1: being a self, being a subject in the middle of experience,
Speaker 1: being a thinker, in addition to thoughts themselves right or
Speaker 1: feeling that one is those things, that's just those are
Speaker 1: two sides of the same coin, right it is. You know,
Speaker 1: people think that they are a subject in the middle
Speaker 1: of experience. They don't feel identical to experience itself. They
Speaker 1: feel like they're appropriating experience from a point of view
Speaker 1: internal to their bodies. I mean, actually, the truth is
Speaker 1: most people don't even feel identical to their bodies. They
Speaker 1: feel like they have bodies, they feel like they're in
Speaker 1: a body. They feel like they're a subject in their
Speaker 1: head most of the time. Right now, that is a
Speaker 1: meditation successful meditation absolutely proves to you, from the first
Speaker 1: person side, from the experiential side, that that's a false
Speaker 1: point of view, right, And that is the point of
Speaker 1: view that gives motivation to this claim about free will,
Speaker 1: because that is what that's how you feel when you
Speaker 1: feel you are the conscious upstream cause of the next
Speaker 1: thing you think and do, because you're not noticing that
Speaker 1: the next thing you think or intend to do is
Speaker 1: simply coming out of the darkness behind you that you
Speaker 1: can't inspect, right, and that it is genuinely mysterious and
Speaker 1: so like, So you take a moment of conscious deliberation.
Speaker 1: I could decide, well, uh, you know, I have a
Speaker 1: glass of simplest possible case. I have a glass of
Speaker 1: water on the desk, and I could decide to pick
Speaker 1: it up and take a drink now, right, Or I
Speaker 1: could decide to wait. Right, this is a this is
Speaker 1: the prototypical case of me being in the driver's seat.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm free to do this. It's no coercion,
Speaker 1: no one's no one's got a gun to my head.
Speaker 1: No one's saying don't pick it up, or pick it
Speaker 1: up right now? Inter compulsion, Right, I don't have some
Speaker 1: kind of uh uh, you know, compulsive water drinking behavior.
Speaker 1: So it's but you know, and I'm a little bit thirsty,
Speaker 1: but I can choose to resist my thirst, right, So
Speaker 1: I'm conscious of thirst, but then I can I can
Speaker 1: consciously decide to resist. And that seems to be me
Speaker 1: prosecuting my freedom there, right. But the more you pay
Speaker 1: attention to what it's like to make that choice out
Speaker 1: of your own free will, the more you will discover
Speaker 1: that it is absolutely mysterious in every particular why and
Speaker 1: how you do what you do, when and how you
Speaker 1: do it? Right, Like im from subjectively, I have no
Speaker 1: idea why or how I do any of these things.
Speaker 1: And I have no idea why why or how one
Speaker 1: particular moment becomes decisive, right, So, like I could be
Speaker 1: telling myself, all, right, now you're gonna wait, you just
Speaker 1: drank it. You just you just had to sip a
Speaker 1: few minutes ago, you know, you just just wait, right,
Speaker 1: And then I think, well, actually, I'm just gonna move now.
Speaker 1: No no no, no no wait wait no no no,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do it no matter how many times I
Speaker 1: go back and forth, right vetoing the decision that almost
Speaker 1: just got made. And then breaking through the veto and
Speaker 1: the inn said, oh fuck it, I'm just going to
Speaker 1: pick up a glass of water. Right, that every increment
Speaker 1: of that subjectively is totally mysterious, totally, and and the
Speaker 1: thresholds that are being crossed or not crossed to make
Speaker 1: a thought or intention behaviorally active or or insufficient to
Speaker 1: provoke behavior, right, all of this is totally compatible with
Speaker 1: some guy, some evil genius in another room, typing in
Speaker 1: the instructions to my completely determined end and coerced brain
Speaker 1: you know, in this case using synaptic you know potentials.
Speaker 1: But in the case of a robot using the whatever
Speaker 1: code of the programmers put in there, it is there is.
Speaker 1: I am a puppet who cannot see his strings there right,
Speaker 1: no matter how, And again I'm not none. None of
Speaker 1: this is to deny that certain outcomes in life are
Speaker 1: better than others and worth wanting. None of this is
Speaker 1: to deny that there are ways to get what you
Speaker 1: want out of life and ways to fail to get
Speaker 1: what you want. None of this is to deny that
Speaker 1: there is just a vast landscape of experience and we
Speaker 1: need to navigate towards one part of it so as
Speaker 1: to be happy. And functional, and we should avoid navigating
Speaker 1: to another We should avoid being captured by another part
Speaker 1: which leads to you know, the worst forms of misery.
Speaker 1: All of that's true, and all we can talk about
Speaker 1: you know how to do all of that, and all
Speaker 1: of that includes the prospect that people can learn, people
Speaker 1: can improve themselves, people can can you know. It's like
Speaker 1: first I first I didn't know how to play the guitar,
Speaker 1: and then I did. And there's there's a pathway between
Speaker 1: point A and point B. Right, all of that's true.
Speaker 1: None of it requires free will, and none of it
Speaker 1: requires that we overlook the absolute mystery of our subjectivity,
Speaker 1: of our conscious subjectivity in each moment, right, like it is,
Speaker 1: it is just totally inscrutable, every part of this, like
Speaker 1: like literally, you don't you do not know what you
Speaker 1: will think next, Right, in what sense is that a
Speaker 1: basis for free will? You do not know what you
Speaker 1: will think. You do not know what it will take
Speaker 1: to make it behaviorally active. You do not know. You
Speaker 1: do not know what is happening when you're second second
Speaker 1: guessing the thing you just thought and that becomes behaviorally active.
Speaker 1: You don't if something in you then just suddenly pulls
Speaker 1: the brakes and says no, no, no no. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I can't say that you don't know why that happens
Speaker 1: when it does, and when it works when it does,
Speaker 1: and when it fails when it does. All of this
Speaker 1: is mysterious, not just a little mysterious, one hundred percent mysterious. Right,
Speaker 1: you have no insight into it, like this, like the
Speaker 1: next thing right right, like like so that in so far,
Speaker 1: like the laughter, where did it come from? Right? I agree?
Speaker 1: I agree, you're making good points, and I don't think
Speaker 1: what you're saying is wrong. But I think you're confusing
Speaker 1: the hell it is to have no free will. So
Speaker 1: I think you're confusing the hell out of people because
Speaker 1: I think that you made great points that the kind
Speaker 1: of free will that matters to humans we have all
Speaker 1: that you know, and I think that's an interesting product.
Speaker 1: I see the difference between our projects all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: because I don't think either of us are saying anything
Speaker 1: that's factually incorrect. I think that, you know, I try
Speaker 1: to every day, I try to, like show people, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of free will that matters to you as
Speaker 1: a cybernetic system. You know, you're taking like the ultimate
Speaker 1: universe perspective, but from like a cybernetic perspective, all we
Speaker 1: have are stating our initial state. I'm also taking these subjective.
Speaker 1: So it's just not true that people understand this. Almost
Speaker 1: no one understands this. Dan Dennett does not understand this.
Speaker 1: It's a big cree. He obviously doesn't understand this. He
Speaker 1: obviously feels like a self, right, And that's the that
Speaker 1: is the string upon which all of this controversy is strung.
Speaker 1: Right if you feel like me right that like most
Speaker 1: of the people listening to me right now are thinking,
Speaker 1: what the fuck is he talking about? I can like,
Speaker 1: but here's what I'm not. Not my audience, not my audience.
Speaker 1: That voice in your head, they get it, that says,
Speaker 1: what the fuck is he talking about? That? That feels
Speaker 1: like you? That isn't you? Right like that is that's
Speaker 1: not a self? What do you mean? It's not you?
Speaker 1: It is it's you again? You're you're a dualist when
Speaker 1: you say that, it's no more you than than the
Speaker 1: bead of sweat that that drips down your forehead. Is you?
Speaker 1: It is an object? It isn't. I disagree. People don't
Speaker 1: identify themselves with their hand, but they identify themselves with
Speaker 1: their conscious desires and motivations. So we can have gradations
Speaker 1: of things that people parts of our body that people
Speaker 1: identify themselves with from the point from the point of
Speaker 1: view of consciousness, there's there's simply consciousness and his contents.
Speaker 1: Like like, I'm not saying that there aren't important distinctions
Speaker 1: in terms of what causally follows from certain contents. I mean,
Speaker 1: like the beat of sweat is a is is truly
Speaker 1: epiphenomenal for anything, any or any project I care about, right,
Speaker 1: So it's not going to get a lot a lot
Speaker 1: of things done in the world, and my thoughts might,
Speaker 1: but there's no causal property of the sweat to like
Speaker 1: being able to realize your loftiest ambitions in life. It's true,
Speaker 1: it's true. But I mean take my loftiest ambitions, right, like,
Speaker 1: like there there are and this is why, this is
Speaker 1: why the concept of free will makes no sense. So
Speaker 1: let's say I here's a project to which I could
Speaker 1: be purposed. Right, I could decide that I want to
Speaker 1: become a classically trained musician. Right, there are people who
Speaker 1: have given their lives to that project, right, just from
Speaker 1: from the earliest years of their lives, as you know,
Speaker 1: and then there are people who late in life presumably decide, Okay,
Speaker 1: I've done a lot of things, and I know I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be I'm never going to be Mozart
Speaker 1: now starting in my fifties. But I you know, let's
Speaker 1: just see what I can do here. I really, I
Speaker 1: really want to do this. Right. This is what I love.
Speaker 1: What I love more than anything on earth is classical music. Right,
Speaker 1: I love Bach more than anything. Right, Okay, I just
Speaker 1: that's true of somebody. None of that's true of me? Right?
Speaker 1: Why not? Why don't Why don't I care about Bach? Right?
Speaker 1: Why don't I care more about classical music? Why when
Speaker 1: I when I do listen to music, why is it
Speaker 1: almost never classical music? Right? That all of these things
Speaker 1: have reasons, they have explanations, causally, right, some some in
Speaker 1: my corner of the universe, classical music is just not
Speaker 1: that interesting, right, it's not those Those are the things
Speaker 1: that make you who you are, though, even if you
Speaker 1: don't know why they were caused by environmental and biological confluence. Great, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so so it's deterministic, it's rando, it's something, right, it's
Speaker 1: some pattern of causation. Right, But so what does it
Speaker 1: mean to say that I am free to take a
Speaker 1: deep and and really all encompassing interest in classical music
Speaker 1: right now? Like I'm free, No one's no one's telling
Speaker 1: me you can't apply to Juilliard and and really just
Speaker 1: get into this. You know. It's like like no one's saying.
Speaker 1: No one's saying I can't give it a shot. You're
Speaker 1: not completely free, and there are constraints. But I wouldn't
Speaker 1: go and say you have no one Okay, but clearly
Speaker 1: I could. I could decide to leave this podcast and
Speaker 1: spend the rest of the day listening to classical music,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out which instrument I'm going to learn,
Speaker 1: finding a teacher. Yes, there are constraints. We've got a
Speaker 1: COVID pandemic that I'm worried about. So like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have zoom classes now in the cello, right, I can't.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do it face to face until
Speaker 1: I get a vaccine. Right, Yes, there are there are,
Speaker 1: there are things in the world that I'm navigating around,
Speaker 1: but there's nothing stopping me from just going all in
Speaker 1: on the cello from this afternoon forward, just dropping everything
Speaker 1: I'll teach you. I played cello, you do. My grandfather
Speaker 1: was in the Philadelph Orchestra for cello. Okay, so all right,
Speaker 1: so so I I could. I could absolutely do this.
Speaker 1: I am free to do this right. This is my
Speaker 1: This is that this is the stage upon which my
Speaker 1: free will is going to demonstrate itself right right now.
Speaker 1: But what's the fun, what's the book? The problem is
Speaker 1: I have almost no interest in playing the cello or
Speaker 1: like so like, I can't. It's an end. The fact
Speaker 1: that I don't is something that I did not author.
Speaker 1: It's a constraint. It's a constraint, for sure. But we
Speaker 1: can one to one thing. This is where free will.
Speaker 1: Free will is not in the one when you're when
Speaker 1: you talking about devoting your life to playing the cello,
Speaker 1: not wanting to play the cello is is a little
Speaker 1: bit of a constraint. Yes, no, it's a huge constraint.
Speaker 1: You're right, you're right. But I think that you're not
Speaker 1: distinguised between first order goals and second order goals. And
Speaker 1: I think that what gives us the free will as
Speaker 1: a human as species what you asked me, what's that extra?
Speaker 1: It's the wanting to want you know. It's it's our
Speaker 1: capacity to use implementation intentions to get out of the
Speaker 1: bed and morning go to the gym, even though we
Speaker 1: don't want to. I don't want to get up in
Speaker 1: the morning and go. I build a whole workout thing
Speaker 1: on my porch here. I don't want to do it,
Speaker 1: you know. But my freedom wies in my capacity to
Speaker 1: use my consciousness and my change my environment in all
Speaker 1: sorts of ways where it's easier, where the constraints aren't
Speaker 1: as big. You don't see that as an important part
Speaker 1: of free will that matters to people. Okay, I just
Speaker 1: see no reason to call it free will. It's when
Speaker 1: I inspect what it's like to be me here ye again,
Speaker 1: when I think about myself from the first person side,
Speaker 1: and when I triangulate on myself and think about myself
Speaker 1: from a third person side. At no point does free
Speaker 1: will any version of it, seem an apt apt aptly
Speaker 1: applied to this situation. So I am free to play
Speaker 1: the cello. I am free to do it right, there's
Speaker 1: no question. So yes, I can talk about the difference
Speaker 1: between being coerced and not coerce. That's a you know,
Speaker 1: it's a political fact about me that I'm not coerced
Speaker 1: to play or not play the cello. Right, it's a
Speaker 1: social fact. But you still do it even if you're unmotivated. Right,
Speaker 1: I can't account for why I don't want to play
Speaker 1: the cello or I want so many other things so
Speaker 1: much more that I functionally don't want to play. I mean,
Speaker 1: the truth is I want. I potentially want an given
Speaker 1: an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of energy. Well,
Speaker 1: then I potentially want an infinite number of things, right,
Speaker 1: Like all kinds of things are interesting, and I would
Speaker 1: love to have all these skills that I don't have,
Speaker 1: But I just don't. I don't feel that. It's just
Speaker 1: not when I rank order my priorities, you know, either
Speaker 1: consciously or unconsciously, And there can be a difference there, obviously,
Speaker 1: you know. We can. We can think we want certain
Speaker 1: things and tell other people we want certain things, but
Speaker 1: act as though those things aren't anywhere near the top
Speaker 1: of our list of wants. But I have no idea
Speaker 1: why I don't like classical music more than I do.
Speaker 1: I have no idea why, and I do have Actually
Speaker 1: I do have the second order desire. I wish I
Speaker 1: liked it more than I like it. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: more I'll teach you. I'll teach you. It's like I
Speaker 1: would be I think I would be a less of
Speaker 1: a philistine if I if I knew more about it.
Speaker 1: I wanted to know more about it, appreciate, and certainly
Speaker 1: if I could play, you know, the cello, that would
Speaker 1: be a wonderful thing to be able to do. Uh.
Speaker 1: And yet I am as I am with respect to
Speaker 1: classical music. Now, if I if, if I if I decide,
Speaker 1: if just imagine I decided by force of this conversation
Speaker 1: you said something in conversation that inspired me to be
Speaker 1: different than I'm tending to be right like this, this
Speaker 1: really would be the the really, the the ultimate instance
Speaker 1: of free will, because this would be a kind of
Speaker 1: you know, just a surmounting of all my prior tendencies
Speaker 1: into this new uh commitment. I could decide, you know what, Scott,
Speaker 1: you just on the basis of this conversation, I'm going
Speaker 1: to take up the cello, like right now, I'm going
Speaker 1: to do it. You inspired me, right, Yeah, So just
Speaker 1: email me gets I want to give me the name
Speaker 1: of someone who can teach me. And I'm like, like,
Speaker 1: I'm shopping for cello's right now, Like, you know, get
Speaker 1: your point. When I look, what would it be like
Speaker 1: for me to experience that that sort of that that
Speaker 1: awakening in my own consciousness that's aimed in the direction
Speaker 1: of classical music and cello man, right, right, that would
Speaker 1: be totally compatible with the evil genius in the next
Speaker 1: room saying all right, we're going to give him the
Speaker 1: cello desire. Here he's going We're going to give him,
Speaker 1: you know, just turn give him. He's now going to
Speaker 1: be just fixated on on you know, the difference between
Speaker 1: Mozart and Beethoven, and it's all like just going to
Speaker 1: download the the the classical music infatuation program, right, that
Speaker 1: would be what that would be compatible with. It would
Speaker 1: not demonstrate anything like free will. It'd be like what
Speaker 1: came over me? You know, I've had I've had fifty
Speaker 1: three years to discover in myself a desire to play
Speaker 1: the cello. If I discover it right now, what the
Speaker 1: fuck has come over me? Right? This this comes from
Speaker 1: outside of consciousness. This is the point. I see your point,
Speaker 1: But I'm still gonna you know, because I know you
Speaker 1: don't like, let's just agree to disagree. So I'm really
Speaker 1: taking this seriously. I think that what people, you know,
Speaker 1: you're using these extreme examples that sound good and and
Speaker 1: they prove a certain point. But the point let me
Speaker 1: tell you what my point is. Yah, picking up a
Speaker 1: glass of water is not an extreme example and not extreme.
Speaker 1: Extreme was not the right word. I take back extreme.
Speaker 1: I take back extreme. You're using examples that that make
Speaker 1: you it sound like you've won an argument. But let
Speaker 1: me just say what what my point was? Actually this, people,
Speaker 1: the cybernetic system wants to reach a goal that it desires.
Speaker 1: So you're right, you can pick examples where it doesn't.
Speaker 1: But let's pick you know, within the realm of freedom
Speaker 1: of things you do care about and you are motivated for.
Speaker 1: Don't you think that's a sensible uh sense of the
Speaker 1: term free will? That you have the free will to
Speaker 1: make You know, you want to write a book. You
Speaker 1: want to write the Moral Landscape Part two, you know,
Speaker 1: back to future parts. You know what, and you write
Speaker 1: that book. You know your capacity to write the book
Speaker 1: and to use your consciousness to make that a reality
Speaker 1: to exist in the world. You don't see that as
Speaker 1: the kind of free will that people truly care about. Well,
Speaker 1: do people care. Yes, people care about realizing their goals
Speaker 1: in life, right, and there are causal ways to succeed
Speaker 1: at that and causal ways to fail at that, right,
Speaker 1: And that's all it's like. Yes, so learning to play
Speaker 1: the cello is not going to happen to me by accident, right,
Speaker 1: So my denying free will is not the same thing
Speaker 1: as endorsing fatalism, where one would expect Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean this is this is how people misunderstand this
Speaker 1: criticism of free will. They think, well, okay, if I
Speaker 1: have no free will, then why do anything? Why not
Speaker 1: just wait to see what happens? Right? And so if
Speaker 1: I'm going to wait to see if I accidentally learn
Speaker 1: to play the cello, we know what's going to happen there.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to learn to play the cello, right, Like,
Speaker 1: so there is the only way to learn is to intend,
Speaker 1: to learn, to practice, to see construction, all of that. Right. So,
Speaker 1: people care about outcomes in life that are worth caring about.
Speaker 1: They want good relationships as the bad relationships. They want
Speaker 1: to understand things rather than be confused all the time.
Speaker 1: All of that. But none of that requires free will
Speaker 1: to talk about, right, And that's some ultimate free will,
Speaker 1: and behavioral regulation is part of it, right, Like again,
Speaker 1: there's a difference between someone who can can defer gratification
Speaker 1: for long enough to actually get something done, as opposed
Speaker 1: to just you know, gobbling up everything in the refrigerator
Speaker 1: the you know, the moment they presents itself. So it's
Speaker 1: it's all. But again, all of that can be understood.
Speaker 1: There are there are genuine paradoxes here which are interesting
Speaker 1: to think about, which have ethical implications, and which are
Speaker 1: completely ignored the moment you embrace the compatibilist framing here
Speaker 1: and also again and the subjective insight is completely ignored
Speaker 1: because what happens to you when you recognize that that
Speaker 1: free will doesn't make any sense subjectively or or what
Speaker 1: has to happen to you in order for you to
Speaker 1: have that recognition is you have to recognize something about
Speaker 1: the way the consciousness, the way the way consciousness is
Speaker 1: and the way the mind is. And it's incredibly freeing
Speaker 1: to recognize that, right, and and to recognize that is
Speaker 1: the antidote to a tremendous amount of psychological suffering. Right.
Speaker 1: And so let's say, let's say I do something that
Speaker 1: is incredibly embarrassing, right, you know, Like I say, I'm
Speaker 1: giving a public talk in front of two thousand people,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, I I spill my water over
Speaker 1: you know all of the Actually I've done this. I
Speaker 1: was at a public talk in front of two thousand
Speaker 1: people and knocked over a water glass and it just
Speaker 1: spilled over all the you know, the the equipment that
Speaker 1: was you know, connected to my microphone, you know, at
Speaker 1: that podium right right, So what what reaction do I
Speaker 1: have to doing that? Right? Like, like how long do
Speaker 1: I stay embarrassed for? Well, there's one way of feeling
Speaker 1: about oneself and one's freedom to do otherwise and one's
Speaker 1: you know, and just kind of the integrity of selfhood
Speaker 1: that leads one to feel like, fuck, I'm I'm such
Speaker 1: a fool, you know, I'm just like this moment says
Speaker 1: a lot about me, Right, this is like, how did
Speaker 1: I become such a schmuck who would get up for
Speaker 1: a public talk and knock his glass of water? And
Speaker 1: all these people see me, they've seen me do it,
Speaker 1: and maybe the sun video and fuck, you know, and
Speaker 1: then so like now open the bottomless pit of self
Speaker 1: mortification and go as far down as you want right like.
Speaker 1: That's that's a certain kind of person to be, right
Speaker 1: You could also be someone who instantly notices that it's funny,
Speaker 1: right like, who sees it, enjoys it, enjoys it from
Speaker 1: the point of view of the people watching it. And
Speaker 1: you could actually have the internal lightness about oneself in
Speaker 1: the moment, so that it's just you realize you have
Speaker 1: a good story to tell later in the day, and
Speaker 1: your wife is going to laugh at it, and all
Speaker 1: of this is just more comedy, right like, So that
Speaker 1: like like no problem, right Like, That's a different sort
Speaker 1: of person to be that has its own consequences. But
Speaker 1: another sort of person you could be is recognizing that
Speaker 1: that one I in this case, you didn't even you
Speaker 1: didn't obviously you didn't intend to knock the glass over.
Speaker 1: It says basically nothing about you except the the the
Speaker 1: you know, a failed moment of motor programming, and you know,
Speaker 1: apart from your worrying that you might have some neurological
Speaker 1: disease that you know, cause you to knock the glass over,
Speaker 1: there's really nothing to think about any longer, right, There's
Speaker 1: just no If it just dry, it's like, is there
Speaker 1: something to dry up? You dry it up because you're
Speaker 1: you're well intentioned towards the whole project of maintaining the
Speaker 1: integrity of this institution. But there's there's no self in
Speaker 1: the middle of this that just got exposed, right, there's
Speaker 1: just consciousness and its contents, and you're free. You're like
Speaker 1: it is. You're in a circumstance of total psychological freedom
Speaker 1: to just move on to the next moment without any
Speaker 1: rumination about the last moment, and deliver the talk you
Speaker 1: were going to you're going to deliver. You're free to
Speaker 1: take that glass and move it out of the way
Speaker 1: so you're less likely in the future for Bill, there's
Speaker 1: some intelligent response to this, But there is no mortification,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no place for it to land. There's
Speaker 1: just you are the next moment is is the world
Speaker 1: is truly born anew in the next moment, if you
Speaker 1: will only let it be right and rumination and perseveration
Speaker 1: and this this this mechanism that is so common to
Speaker 1: just still be beating yourself, your your non existent self
Speaker 1: up over this last thing that happened, which you didn't
Speaker 1: which you the self that is being beaten up, didn't
Speaker 1: truly author because it just fucking happened, right, That is, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a spell to be broken there, and it can
Speaker 1: be broken. And when you break it. You don't know
Speaker 1: what anyone's talking about when they're talking about free will.
Speaker 1: I mean, really you don't. You can't, you can you
Speaker 1: lose sight of the problem, right, And but yes, but
Speaker 1: there's one piece to add here, because our paradox is
Speaker 1: that are interesting. The responsibility of paradox is is real,
Speaker 1: and I still don't know what I think about it.
Speaker 1: And it's this and perhaps you've heard my example here,
Speaker 1: but it's like when you it's with with uh. And
Speaker 1: this is something like you know, kind of a written
Speaker 1: debate with Dan Dennett came up this this idea of
Speaker 1: you take the prototypical case of of kind of behavioral
Speaker 1: control of a of a golfer trying to sink a
Speaker 1: short putt, right, and when you're a bad golfer and
Speaker 1: you fail to sink a short putt, well, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone looks at that and says more or less, well,
Speaker 1: of course, you know you're a bad golfer. And what
Speaker 1: do you expect you're going to make some of those?
Speaker 1: You're going to miss a lot of those, right, but
Speaker 1: if you're Tiger Woods or some great golfer, you really
Speaker 1: should make that put right, and it would it would
Speaker 1: seem like like that's it would seem appropriate to beat
Speaker 1: yourself up over not over missing it, because you know,
Speaker 1: you make up a put of that length, you know,
Speaker 1: nine hundred and ninety times out of a thousand times, right,
Speaker 1: And so what does it mean to say that you
Speaker 1: should have made that putt if you're a great golfer
Speaker 1: and that you know, this is just an analogy that
Speaker 1: you know, this this the morally relevant analogy is like
Speaker 1: what what what does it mean? You know, when a
Speaker 1: psychopath misbehaves you or someone with brain damage misbehaves, well,
Speaker 1: of course, what do you expect. This is what people
Speaker 1: with the relevant brain damage do, right? They they they're
Speaker 1: not they're not competent to be true free to behave
Speaker 1: well because they're they're they're malfunctioning robots on some level.
Speaker 1: But when you take a truly good person or a
Speaker 1: truly competent person who then does something horrible right and
Speaker 1: then really misbehaves ethically, that person's really responsible. You know,
Speaker 1: that's like the true case of responsibility. But the paradox
Speaker 1: for me is that the more you make that, the
Speaker 1: more competent you make the person, the more their failures
Speaker 1: to behave well become inscrutable. Right, So you take the
Speaker 1: best golfer on Earth missing the shortest put putt he's
Speaker 1: ever missed in his life. Right, that seems to say
Speaker 1: almost nothing about him. That seems to say. That seems
Speaker 1: to be an error on the part of the universe. Right,
Speaker 1: that seems to that seems to cry out for an explanation,
Speaker 1: which doesn't tell you he should have done otherwise. It
Speaker 1: tells you that there was some noise in the system,
Speaker 1: there was some neurological glitch. It's like whatever, whatever happened
Speaker 1: there intervened. It was it was it was adventitious to
Speaker 1: his life, Like he's going to make that put a
Speaker 1: thousand times in a row. Now, what can we say
Speaker 1: about him based on the fact that he missed this one?
Speaker 1: We can say almost nothing about him other than he
Speaker 1: was unlucky. I think it's a good point. So I
Speaker 1: want to acknowledge that. When I read your produx responsibility,
Speaker 1: I thought it was a really truly good point. It
Speaker 1: seems like we've got it all backwards in our society.
Speaker 1: You know, nice people well intentioned people who make little
Speaker 1: tiny mistakes or being canceled, and the assholes are running
Speaker 1: the country. I don't know if you if you see
Speaker 1: any linkage here, Yeah, yeah, well that you know, that's
Speaker 1: something I haven't linked those two topics, but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there's a there's an asymmetry there that many of
Speaker 1: us have found totally galling, and I think it's it
Speaker 1: does it is relevant to connect them in that free
Speaker 1: will isn't the thing that the concept of free will,
Speaker 1: or the concept that someone could have done otherwise, isn't
Speaker 1: the thing that that helps us understand what matters here?
Speaker 1: What matters is there are certain systems, and you know,
Speaker 1: human and certain human brains are among these systems, and
Speaker 1: certain types of thinking, certain ideologies, certain thought systems, right,
Speaker 1: that reliably produce harm that we should want to avoid
Speaker 1: because they make life suck, right. I mean, these are
Speaker 1: these are these are these are disproportionately bad, even if
Speaker 1: there's some good to be found in there, that the
Speaker 1: the the the bad outcomes are so reliably produced and
Speaker 1: they're so unsurprising that we should want to figure out
Speaker 1: how to how to avoid all of that, right, and
Speaker 1: having a a malicious and uninformed and sinister and and
Speaker 1: and utterly selfish person in charge of our country. Is
Speaker 1: it's a bad system, right, Like now, there's no free will.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You don't need to attribute free will
Speaker 1: to Trump the idea that he could be otherwise. He
Speaker 1: can't be otherwise, right, He's a he's a moron, and
Speaker 1: he's and he's a narcissist. Right, what do you expect
Speaker 1: him to do with with with the power of the presidency?
Speaker 1: Right now, he's not he's not as dangerous, he was
Speaker 1: not as dangerous as he might have been. He's not Hitler, right,
Speaker 1: But Hitler is another bad system that we should want
Speaker 1: to disempower, right, and certainly not work to empower. Right.
Speaker 1: But again, all of this is susceptible to a mechanistic interpretation.
Speaker 1: We don't want to put a bad robot in charge
Speaker 1: of our world, right. We don't want to co a
Speaker 1: a a system of artificial intelligence that has bad ethics, right,
Speaker 1: But and we know that if we do, we're going
Speaker 1: to get bad outcomes. But again, there's no and it
Speaker 1: is it is in fact true. I mean this, It
Speaker 1: comes back to the paradox. The better you, the more
Speaker 1: finely you calibrate any system towards toward good outcomes, the
Speaker 1: more inscrutable its failures to achieve those outcomes become. You know,
Speaker 1: if you you know, it's just it's like if you
Speaker 1: realize if you have a a robot that has a
Speaker 1: you know, only a one in a billion error rate,
Speaker 1: if you experience a one in a billion error today,
Speaker 1: you know when you're you, when you're interacting with that robot, Damn,
Speaker 1: that's surprising, and it and it's and it's it says
Speaker 1: virtually nothing about what the robot did in the past,
Speaker 1: because it worked perfectly in the past, and it says
Speaker 1: virtually nothing about what is likely to do in the future.
Speaker 1: And you were you and the robot, we were both unlucky.
Speaker 1: Today you know, you've got the one in a billionaire, right,
Speaker 1: so so so so again, to remind people what the
Speaker 1: paradox is here. The more the more you make someone
Speaker 1: seemingly responsible, really responsible for their actions, the more you
Speaker 1: make them as competent as they can possibly be in
Speaker 1: that domain, right so so that they can shoulder this
Speaker 1: responsibility of feeling like, god, damn, I'm really culpable for
Speaker 1: my failures, like like I should have done otherwise I
Speaker 1: should have made that put right. The more that the
Speaker 1: less it seems like it really reflects them, right, the
Speaker 1: more the more mysterious the failure is. And so it's
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like an uncanny valley effect. It's like
Speaker 1: most of us who live most of the time in
Speaker 1: the uncanny valley of just the chaos of our of
Speaker 1: our imperfect calibration. Right, that's the place where you can
Speaker 1: sort of heap claims of responsibility onto people, and they
Speaker 1: seem to land. And my argument is that it's never
Speaker 1: to tell someone they should have done otherwise. Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is very clear in parenting, Like you know, I have,
Speaker 1: I have daughters who I'm not I'm certainly not browbeating
Speaker 1: about the illusoriness of free will. No, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: raise them to be competent, self regulating human beings. Right,
Speaker 1: So when I say, if I if I talk to
Speaker 1: one of my daughters and I say, you know, you
Speaker 1: really should have done otherwise, right, I mean, that's not
Speaker 1: a way I would put it, obviously, But but if
Speaker 1: that's the implication of what I'm saying, Like the thing
Speaker 1: you like, it's be nice if you put your plate
Speaker 1: in the sink after you you do, we're done eating? Right, like,
Speaker 1: like can you do that next time? It really is
Speaker 1: much more. It's it's never a claim that in this
Speaker 1: end stints, if I rewound the universe, they would they
Speaker 1: might have done otherwise, right, No, this is a causally
Speaker 1: determined outcome that is was always going to be the
Speaker 1: way it was going to be, even if you introduce randomness. Right.
Speaker 1: So there's no free will here. But it is a
Speaker 1: conversation about what I want them to do next time, right,
Speaker 1: And that is a that is and saying that is
Speaker 1: a further input into the clockwork of their lives. So
Speaker 1: that will change them ultimately. It will change them ultimately.
Speaker 1: If my daughters are going to become civilized human beings,
Speaker 1: they will not behave the way they did at you know,
Speaker 1: at seven years old or twelve years old or you
Speaker 1: know when they're in their forties, right, and those changes
Speaker 1: will be causally affected on the basis of demands imposed
Speaker 1: on them. But again, there's no there's no place for
Speaker 1: the folk psychological notion of free will to land there.
Speaker 1: It's like if you wouldn't give your daughter or any
Speaker 1: credit if she became president of the United States, some
Speaker 1: day you would look at her not with pride, because
Speaker 1: you'd say, well, she didn't you know ultimately cause that
Speaker 1: well well, honestly, so, I do feel like pride is
Speaker 1: a is a is a virtue that has an expiration
Speaker 1: date in a human life. I mean, I think it's developmentally,
Speaker 1: there's an appropriate there's like a critical period where pride
Speaker 1: is not a a an ethical error or a or
Speaker 1: a sign of psychological confusion. It's actually it's actually something
Speaker 1: you want to get into the code. Right, So like
Speaker 1: I would I love it when my daughters are proud
Speaker 1: having accomplished something that seems like a good thing psychologically.
Speaker 1: But at a certain point, I think you want you
Speaker 1: clearly want to outgrow It's it's clearly it is a
Speaker 1: it is not a durable basis for self esteem. It's
Speaker 1: not a basis for compassion for oneself and others. It's
Speaker 1: it is it does tend to rest on a confusion
Speaker 1: about just what it is you can reasonably be responsible
Speaker 1: for and what it is that it was just a
Speaker 1: happy accident, right, And people take to tend to take
Speaker 1: credit for the for for things that they weren't actually
Speaker 1: in control over, and and and uh, you know, attribute
Speaker 1: their failures differently, so there's kind of a delusion built
Speaker 1: into it. In the normal case. I mean, if you're depressed,
Speaker 1: that probably flips and then you then you're more realistic
Speaker 1: about about what was actually within your within your purview
Speaker 1: to control. But yeah, I don't. I don't feel pride
Speaker 1: about anything in my life now. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: like I have all kinds of outcomes I prefer and
Speaker 1: sometimes I realize them and sometimes I don't. But and
Speaker 1: so so the the the obverse of pride, of course
Speaker 1: is something like shame again. Shame is it's an important
Speaker 1: thing to be able to feel, but ultimately I think
Speaker 1: it reaches its shelf life. I think you want to
Speaker 1: be able to transcend shame again, you know, not too early.
Speaker 1: This is an interesting topic and again and I'm not
Speaker 1: totally I don't totally know what I believe about it,
Speaker 1: because I think there's this is certainly a pathology, you know,
Speaker 1: and a lot of danger on the other side of
Speaker 1: losing one sense of shame. But I do think ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a psychological freedom in outgrowing pride and
Speaker 1: shame and just seeing that there's just no there's no
Speaker 1: basis to feel either. Ultimately, you're just telling yourself a
Speaker 1: story about the past. In both cases, you're thinking thoughts
Speaker 1: in the present that nominally refer to the past, and
Speaker 1: you're and they're making you feel a certain way. You're
Speaker 1: feeling good about if like you're watching a movie about
Speaker 1: your past and you're being entranced by it, and it's
Speaker 1: kindling an emotional response that has a certain half life,
Speaker 1: and it's incredibly boring. It's in the end, it's an
Speaker 1: incredibly boring thing to do with your attention. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a masturbatory on the pride side, the pleasure side.
Speaker 1: It's a masturbatory and self directed pseudo source of gratification,
Speaker 1: which divides you from least importantly it it sets up
Speaker 1: a system of comparison between yourself and others that ultimately
Speaker 1: is not a source of well being. Right and like you,
Speaker 1: if you're comparing yourself favorably to other people and feeling
Speaker 1: good about that, you know, then five minutes later you're
Speaker 1: going to be comparing yourself unfavorably to other people who
Speaker 1: are doing yet more impressive things, and you're gonna feel
Speaker 1: bad about that. Like that, that pinballing between those two
Speaker 1: things is not the right algorithm to live a truly
Speaker 1: self actualized life. So I do think both pride and
Speaker 1: shame ultimately get outgrown. But at what point That's an
Speaker 1: interesting question. I love this transcendent view, and also the
Speaker 1: idea that you the point that you make that about hate,
Speaker 1: you know, there's really hate doesn't really have a place
Speaker 1: to program in the robot here once we understand that
Speaker 1: there's no ultimate free will. And what I don't understand though,
Speaker 1: is you know, so your view absolutely and I loved
Speaker 1: your point about how can increase sympathy for others when
Speaker 1: we realize, you know that we're not always aware of
Speaker 1: or most of the time we're not constantly aware of
Speaker 1: the outputs or the inputs into our outputs. But what
Speaker 1: I do understand is is like in applying that in
Speaker 1: your own life, you you don't apply that when you
Speaker 1: talk about Trump. I mean, you get you hate you,
Speaker 1: you get really angry, but you don't say things we
Speaker 1: should have sympathy for Trump, you know? Yeah, I mean so, well,
Speaker 1: there's certainly moments where I'm I'm I'm captured by by
Speaker 1: something that I find so despicable that I'm that I'm actually,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm blind to the to my own philosophy here,
Speaker 1: like I'm just lost. I'm I'm lost in thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm identified with with with a moment of finding
Speaker 1: Trump despicable. Say, and yeah, so I'm just I'm in
Speaker 1: the dream, you know, I'm asleep and dreaming and unaware
Speaker 1: of human Yes, yeah, so I'm not. I'm not a Buddha.
Speaker 1: But much of the time, a different thing is happening.
Speaker 1: And it's not it's not personal, it's not it's not
Speaker 1: that I hate Trump personally. It's that I hate And
Speaker 1: again this is all slightly anachronistic because now he's no
Speaker 1: longer president, so I'm basically never thinking about him now,
Speaker 1: which is wonderful. But it's not that I hated him personally,
Speaker 1: it's I hated the fact of him, right. The fact
Speaker 1: that we made this sort of man president was so terrible.
Speaker 1: I mean, for all the things it's said about us
Speaker 1: as as a society and all of the risks we
Speaker 1: were then running for four years to put something in
Speaker 1: charge of the literally put something in charge of someone
Speaker 1: in charge of our nuclear codes who couldn't figure out
Speaker 1: why we can't use nukes. We've got him, why not
Speaker 1: use them? Right? Like to like, take that one factoid
Speaker 1: about Trump that he had to be repeatedly admonished by
Speaker 1: his joint chiefs chiefs of staff that it was a
Speaker 1: good thing that we had reduced our warhead count from
Speaker 1: the sixties, And he asked, why why don't I have
Speaker 1: as many? When he heard that, you know, Kennedy had
Speaker 1: ten times a number of bombs that he has, Trump
Speaker 1: thought that was a problem, like, why why can't I why?
Speaker 1: Why why did he have more bombs? Right? Like, the
Speaker 1: guy was so dangerously ignorant of in this case, just
Speaker 1: the the game theory of nuclear deterrence, and and all
Speaker 1: and all the rest, uh you know, which which our
Speaker 1: very lives, in the lives of our children, and the
Speaker 1: fate of civilization depend on someone not being that catastrophically
Speaker 1: ignorant about that thing which you know, which you know
Speaker 1: about which only he has the responsibility at this point
Speaker 1: for the next four years. Right, So that fact alone
Speaker 1: joined to, as you said, ten thousand other facts about
Speaker 1: this man. Right. Reliability, He's reliable, awful, Right, he's so
Speaker 1: reliably bad as a malfunctioning robot. Right, if we put
Speaker 1: you can predict it with ninety eight percent accuracy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not so like it's a little bit analogous
Speaker 1: to if we if we elected a rhinoceros to be president.
Speaker 1: I'd be fucking tearing my hair out over how awful
Speaker 1: that is. At no point in my imagining that the
Speaker 1: rhinoceros can be anything other than a rhinoceros, And at
Speaker 1: no point in my imagine, at no point am I
Speaker 1: wishing suffering upon the rhinoceros. I don't hate the rhinoceros.
Speaker 1: The rhinoceros just shouldn't be president of the United States,
Speaker 1: right Like. That's a catastrophe to do that. And in
Speaker 1: some sense, we elected a rhinoceros president, and so I
Speaker 1: spent a long time complaining about that because of all
Speaker 1: the things to which that was connected in our society
Speaker 1: and in our possible future that we're worth worrying about.
Speaker 1: I hear you, and I hope you understood my point too.
Speaker 1: You know, you know, you never you never said these
Speaker 1: words such as you know, I think everyone's coming from
Speaker 1: such a place of hate with Trump. You have to
Speaker 1: understand he doesn't have ultimate free will, and I think
Speaker 1: we need to have more sympathy for him like you
Speaker 1: would with a rhinoceros, you know, while still taking action
Speaker 1: to prevent him from ruining the world and pressing the
Speaker 1: nuclear button. I've never heard you like say that in
Speaker 1: a sympathetic way towards Trump applying your own principle. Do
Speaker 1: you see my point here? So, I mean Trump is
Speaker 1: someone who is I find it unusually hard to have
Speaker 1: to feel compassion for him because he seems he seems
Speaker 1: damaged in ways that are that specifically render him impervious
Speaker 1: to suffering. Right So, he's like not someone who who
Speaker 1: seems to suffer anything ever, right now, maybe I'm sure
Speaker 1: he probably does, but that that requires an extra act
Speaker 1: of imagination. Imagine what he's like in the you know,
Speaker 1: in the privacy of his mind when he's suffering. He actually,
Speaker 1: I mean, he doesn't seem comfortable. He doesn't see, he
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like he's he's got he has a nice
Speaker 1: mind to inhabit, but he seems to be missing a
Speaker 1: module that would would naturally provoke compassion. Free will. Well, no,
Speaker 1: it's not free, but it's not free will. It's it's
Speaker 1: just it's like he doesn't like does he care about
Speaker 1: the relationship. Does he love people? Does he care about
Speaker 1: like when someone close to him dies? Does he feel grief?
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know. Actually, he seems like he
Speaker 1: might be damaged, and precisely the way that would they
Speaker 1: would prevent someone from ever shedding a tear about anything, right, Like,
Speaker 1: like he's a car. He's a kind of cartoon for real, Right,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not just that I've made him a
Speaker 1: cartoon because I don't know enough about the man or
Speaker 1: I or because I I find him so despicable that
Speaker 1: I'm just not disposed to think clearly about him. He
Speaker 1: actually does seem like a very unusual person to me,
Speaker 1: And I wouldn't say this about even objectively worse people,
Speaker 1: like you know, Osama bin Laden, Right, Like Osam bin
Speaker 1: Laden seemed like a much more normal person to me
Speaker 1: than Donald Trump, albeit one who was committed to specific
Speaker 1: ideas that I found much more reprehensible, was much more dangerous.
Speaker 1: It's a good thing we killed him, all of that, like,
Speaker 1: but much more. I understand his psychology, much more than
Speaker 1: I understand Trump's. There's a randomness, there isn't there there's
Speaker 1: a there's a malfunctioning robot like aspect to Trump, where
Speaker 1: he's he's got he's got a few obvious pieces of
Speaker 1: his code. He wants to be rich, he wants to
Speaker 1: be famous, right, and then on top of that, he's
Speaker 1: just win. He wants to win. Yeah, he wants whatever
Speaker 1: he imagines he is winning. And but then he's he
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's there's almost no reason to talk
Speaker 1: about the man now. But it's just the fact that
Speaker 1: people The thing that that got most under my skin
Speaker 1: was that half of our society apparently couldn't see what
Speaker 1: was wrong with him, right, like literally like they just
Speaker 1: couldn't see the thing I was seeing. In every instance
Speaker 1: of having it was completely unmediated. Unmediated too. It's not
Speaker 1: that I'm believing the New York Times profile, credulously believing
Speaker 1: the libtard profile on him, and the man is being
Speaker 1: besmirched by a lying you know, fake news media. No, No,
Speaker 1: everything I feel about Trump was was fully communicated by
Speaker 1: seeing him at the podium talking like like, so it
Speaker 1: was unmediated, you know, and and and in many cases
Speaker 1: virtually unedited. You know, you sit down and watch two
Speaker 1: hours of Trump. That's who I'm reacting to, right, And
Speaker 1: the fact that half of the country felt there was
Speaker 1: I mean, either couldn't see it or felt that, you know,
Speaker 1: upon seeing it, that's exactly who they wanted to be
Speaker 1: to be president. You know, uh, that there was something
Speaker 1: you know, crazy making about that, because it's it just
Speaker 1: was a transparent act of lunacy from my point of view,
Speaker 1: I mean, just like, okay, let's just drive you know,
Speaker 1: human history toward a cliff, you know, as as quickly
Speaker 1: as possible and see what happens. Right, It's like it
Speaker 1: seems like an act of chicken with with to be
Speaker 1: playing with human history. And so anyway, I was reacting
Speaker 1: to that much more than than I was motivated, because
Speaker 1: the truth is, I see, like I can, I can
Speaker 1: I can have the reaction that the people who like Trump,
Speaker 1: I can actually run that reaction in emulation, Like I
Speaker 1: can see that he has moments where he's genuinely funny,
Speaker 1: genuinely charming, genuinely charismatic, like I like, I get that, right,
Speaker 1: and so, and I can feel my monkey brain light
Speaker 1: up in precisely the way every everyone else's brain lights
Speaker 1: up when someone who is charismatic and charming and funny
Speaker 1: and taking risks shows up. Right, So, you know, like
Speaker 1: when he's at the debate and he said, you know,
Speaker 1: he's he says that completely, you know, he's he's challenged
Speaker 1: by Megan Kelly for all the heinous things he said
Speaker 1: about women, you know, in his history as a buffoon,
Speaker 1: and he says, you know, only Rosy O'Donnell, right, you know,
Speaker 1: and that did us a huge laugh line and it
Speaker 1: completely undercuts everything Megan Kelly thought she was going to
Speaker 1: achieve in that moment journalistically, and it wins him the debate.
Speaker 1: Like there's part of me that just finds that hilarious too, right, Like,
Speaker 1: so I get I get that. But to not have
Speaker 1: seen the bigger picture here, and to not have seen
Speaker 1: that this man is actually a sociopath with respect to
Speaker 1: his ethics, and to not have cared about any of
Speaker 1: that right, to not have done the moral arithmetic, and
Speaker 1: imagine who you'd have to be to have run the
Speaker 1: fraud of Trump University and have to have defrauded elderly people,
Speaker 1: to have encouraged elderly people to max out their credit
Speaker 1: cards to get your fake knowledge it's your fake you know,
Speaker 1: your you know, you know scam university. To have been
Speaker 1: that that one data point alone in his backstory should
Speaker 1: have been absolutely disqualified. Know, like we should never have
Speaker 1: heard from him again after that. It's because it says
Speaker 1: so much about who you are and who you're likely
Speaker 1: to be in further moments, like that's not just a
Speaker 1: missed putt, that is a million puts missed in a row, right,
Speaker 1: Like we we know you can't play golf after you
Speaker 1: miss that many putts, not even in a row all
Speaker 1: at once, Sam, all once. I won't even say hit
Speaker 1: a row. It's so much once that you can't even
Speaker 1: focus on one at a time. It's over, the conversation
Speaker 1: is over, you know. But so you don't hate him, No, No,
Speaker 1: in my in my clearest moments, I don't hate anybody,
Speaker 1: I mean, And yet there are people who I would
Speaker 1: I would sanction that we kill, right. It's like, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like again, it's not I'm not a pacifist. There
Speaker 1: are people who should. It's like we you know, we've
Speaker 1: invented guns for good reason, right, And it's there are
Speaker 1: people who I hope I'm not one of them after
Speaker 1: this interview, by the way, No, and I'm against the
Speaker 1: death penalty, right. So it's like, once we have safely
Speaker 1: confined somebody, then there's no reason to kill them, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, then then then that's a major ethical lapse.
Speaker 1: But no, there there are you know, there are acts
Speaker 1: of self defense that are totally rational. And you know,
Speaker 1: you know, someone comes into your house and wants to
Speaker 1: kill you and your kids, by all means, shoot that
Speaker 1: person in the head, right, Like, that is what guns
Speaker 1: are for, and you should do it. You should do
Speaker 1: it if it's a grizzly bear, and you should do
Speaker 1: it if it's a person who seems to think he
Speaker 1: has free will to kill you and your kids. Right.
Speaker 1: So it's like that that's that's morally uncomplicated in my view.
Speaker 1: But again, hatred, this is this is an asymmetry that
Speaker 1: I think you were referencing. People wonder, well, what about love?
Speaker 1: If people have no free will, how do you love anybody? Right?
Speaker 1: And this is a beautiful asymmetry between hatred and love,
Speaker 1: at least in my view, which is hatred really does
Speaker 1: require and an attribution to someone that they could and
Speaker 1: should have done otherwise. Right, Like, it's like you believe
Speaker 1: they really are the authors of their bad actions, and
Speaker 1: the moment you find that they have a brain tumor
Speaker 1: or whatever it is that is exculpatory. Then you then
Speaker 1: you change your response. You think, oh, wow, you know
Speaker 1: I did hate Charles Charles Whitman for getting getting up
Speaker 1: on that clock tower and killing fourteen kids. But once
Speaker 1: they performed an autopsy on him and found a massive
Speaker 1: brain tumor pressing on his amigdala, well, then okay, then
Speaker 1: I recognized you can't hate the guy. He was unlucky.
Speaker 1: He was unlucky as he was as unlucky as the
Speaker 1: kids he shot, right, I mean, that's just that's terrible,
Speaker 1: right on some level, that happens to everybody. Once you
Speaker 1: recognize that free will is an illusion. But love doesn't
Speaker 1: require an account of human behavior in that way that
Speaker 1: demands that people be the true upstream cause of all
Speaker 1: of their actions. Love just requires that you really just
Speaker 1: two things that you that you care about the difference
Speaker 1: between suffering and happiness, right for for the for yourself
Speaker 1: and others. Right like you, you want people to be happy,
Speaker 1: and that is really the the what it is to
Speaker 1: love someone. You want them, we want to relieve their suffering.
Speaker 1: You want to maximize their happiness. And additionally, you take
Speaker 1: a certain you find a certain pleasure and well being
Speaker 1: in their company, right, you want to be with them, right,
Speaker 1: So like you're in the presence of someone who you
Speaker 1: want to be with, who makes you happy and who
Speaker 1: you want to be happy, right, and you want to
Speaker 1: and and that and that that positive social orientation and
Speaker 1: that direct enjoyment of the state of love in your
Speaker 1: own mind. That's what we mean. I would argue, that's
Speaker 1: what we should mean when when we say we love
Speaker 1: someone body, and none of that requires a belief that
Speaker 1: they are the you know, they've pulled themselves up by
Speaker 1: their own bootstraps causally speaking, whereas hatred really does on
Speaker 1: some level, like the moment you notice that. I mean,
Speaker 1: the example I always use is of Oude Hussein because
Speaker 1: he's it's not as hackneyed as referencing Hitler. But you
Speaker 1: take a truly evil person who's done just objectively heinous
Speaker 1: things and just walk back the timeline of their life.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just like you know, you know, you
Speaker 1: take Hitler. Hitler as a forty year old was absolutely
Speaker 1: somebody who was just fit for nothing other than a bullet.
Speaker 1: But you know, walk him back to when he was
Speaker 1: four years old. He's just a little kid who's going
Speaker 1: to become Hitler? Right, But he's an unlucky little kid.
Speaker 1: He's got bad jeans or bad parents, or bad society
Speaker 1: or something's kind of beat him into the shape we
Speaker 1: now recognize with the bad mustache and the and and
Speaker 1: the the the dangerous beliefs. Right, And at what point
Speaker 1: along the way did he get free? Will? Well, at
Speaker 1: no point? So at what point along the way are
Speaker 1: you just that you've become justified in hating him and
Speaker 1: and feeling no compassion for him? You know, I would
Speaker 1: argue at no point, although it admittedly it's very hard
Speaker 1: once he becomes an adult to find any kind of
Speaker 1: basis for a compassion. But he didn't make himself, you know,
Speaker 1: And you know I certainly you know I certainly would
Speaker 1: have uh killed Hitler had I could have at any
Speaker 1: moment along the way to to to stop his his
Speaker 1: real harms. But it's an interesting question like this is
Speaker 1: this is a Ricky Gervais bit, right, Like if you
Speaker 1: get get into a time machine and go back to
Speaker 1: kill Hitler, what if you land back with him as
Speaker 1: a kid? Are you going to kill the four year
Speaker 1: old Hitler? Right? Do you've killed Trump? At each four, Well, well, no,
Speaker 1: but I mean it's it's it's easy. It's I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say I would have killed Trump at any point, but
Speaker 1: it's easy to say I would have killed Hitler at
Speaker 1: a certain point given the harms he caused. But killing
Speaker 1: the four year old Hitler's seems like, you know, an
Speaker 1: act of pure psychopathy. Right, He's a four year old
Speaker 1: kid who hasn't right, Right, So there's no point is
Speaker 1: is compassion unjustified? And at no point is hatred justified?
Speaker 1: In my view? And every so and so the so
Speaker 1: then the question is in the in these occasions where
Speaker 1: violence seems not only justified but necessary, right, killing Hitler?
Speaker 1: You know, I thought, you know, assassinating Hitler when it
Speaker 1: could actually do the world some good. You just you
Speaker 1: just never need hatred for that to be motivated, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it doesn't, It doesn't, it doesn't require but but hatred
Speaker 1: does require a false description of authorship or and and
Speaker 1: human agency. And that's why, and that's why I would
Speaker 1: say it is possible to get rid of hatred without
Speaker 1: getting rid of love. Psychologically, well, I like the spirit
Speaker 1: of a lot of what you're saying, and even your
Speaker 1: your teachings and your and the whole point of loving
Speaker 1: kindness meditation, you can have love, you know. Sharon Salzburg
Speaker 1: beautifully shows how we can meditate on our enemies, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you know we can wish them well because
Speaker 1: if they are clearly Trump wasn't well you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, like like, if we wish Trump well, that's
Speaker 1: only going to be the benefit of the world as well. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, so I really love the spirit. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: love that. No, and I love these higher principles. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the is all to say, you have an interesting discussion.
Speaker 1: You say the separation between science and human values is
Speaker 1: an illusion. Now, why you for the first time in
Speaker 1: history thousands, you know, one, hundreds hundreds of years, no
Speaker 1: one's been able to put a guillotine on the on
Speaker 1: Hume's guillotine. And and how are you able to finally
Speaker 1: take us from an is to an aught? Can you
Speaker 1: walk me through the logic of how you think that
Speaker 1: that's possible to go from facts to values. Well, I
Speaker 1: think it is a trick of people are getting hung
Speaker 1: up on language. It is a kind of a semantic
Speaker 1: distinction that I just don't think we need to be
Speaker 1: taken in by and It really is not something that
Speaker 1: Hume himself went deeply into. I mean it was, it's
Speaker 1: much more of an aside in his writing, this distinction,
Speaker 1: and it's been blown up into like this foundational notion
Speaker 1: of of meta ethics somehow that you can never get
Speaker 1: an is from an aught. I mean, there are a
Speaker 1: few ways to see what's wrong with this. I mean
Speaker 1: one is, you can never get an is without certain aughts, Right,
Speaker 1: you can never make a factual claim about the world
Speaker 1: without following certain intellectual, logical rational oughts or values, right,
Speaker 1: buying into thems like what why should why should we
Speaker 1: value evidence? Why should we value logical consistency? Like if
Speaker 1: someone doesn't value logic at all, what logical argument could
Speaker 1: you invoke so as to convince them that they should
Speaker 1: value it? And if someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence
Speaker 1: could you provide to suggest that they should value it? Right,
Speaker 1: It's just at a certain point there are certain axioms,
Speaker 1: Certain things are axiomatic, and that's not a problem. We
Speaker 1: can't do science without it, we can't do math without it,
Speaker 1: we can't do anything without it. And yet people are
Speaker 1: acting like if you need any of that to get
Speaker 1: your morality started, there's no such thing as morality, or
Speaker 1: they change. There's a double standard here that we should notice,
Speaker 1: like that there people are finding people take the fact
Speaker 1: that there can be moral controversy has convinced most people
Speaker 1: that there's no such thing as objective but there can
Speaker 1: be controversy about anything. There can be fat there can
Speaker 1: be controversy about about physics. We would never have moved
Speaker 1: from that the mere fact of controversy to to to
Speaker 1: the claim that there's no objective physics. You know, the
Speaker 1: fact that you know, the fact that the Taliban disagree
Speaker 1: with us about morality is invoked as a reason to
Speaker 1: believe that morality has to be relativistic. There are no
Speaker 1: universal truth claims to be made about right and wrong
Speaker 1: or good and evil because millions of people over here
Speaker 1: don't agree with us. Well, millions of people over here
Speaker 1: don't agree with us about physics either, or evolution either,
Speaker 1: because they know they're just they're not adequate to the conversation,
Speaker 1: you know, because they're just, they're they're obscured by they're
Speaker 1: they're mired in other belief systems. That never causes us
Speaker 1: to wonder whether or not biology may just be made
Speaker 1: up or a cultural construct or relativistic or right, which is,
Speaker 1: unless word haven't been complete, unless we've been completely taken
Speaker 1: in by some kind of postmodernism. But so that double
Speaker 1: standard is worth noticing. That you can't get to facts
Speaker 1: without certain without indulging certain values, at least implicitly. But
Speaker 1: you know, I usually I just find a different starting point,
Speaker 1: which is okay, Fine, Let's say there's no such thing
Speaker 1: as oughts, there's no shoulds, there's no there's no morality,
Speaker 1: there's no values. Right, let's just deal with a universe
Speaker 1: of facts. Let's just start there. Well, it is a
Speaker 1: fact that we live in a universe where there's a
Speaker 1: a vast landscape of possible experience on offer, and we
Speaker 1: have a navigation problem, right, like we can we can
Speaker 1: navigate toward places on this landscape that are more and
Speaker 1: more sublime, where you know, hairless apes like ourselves have
Speaker 1: better and better experiences. Collaboratively, creatively, we we produce you know,
Speaker 1: brilliant works of art and have the free time to
Speaker 1: enjoy them, and we have epiphanies that that that you know,
Speaker 1: cause you know, the hair on the back of our
Speaker 1: neck to stand up not from fear but from you know,
Speaker 1: the rapture of just just how beautiful the cosmos is, right,
Speaker 1: and we can have and we have no idea how
Speaker 1: good all of that can get right with like that
Speaker 1: we could, we genuinely cannot see the horizon line there,
Speaker 1: but we just know we can push into this area
Speaker 1: where cooperation and and curiosity and joy and loving kindness
Speaker 1: and all of this just gets like, just gets tuned
Speaker 1: up more and more and more, and the music gets better,
Speaker 1: and the and the and the people and people like
Speaker 1: myself who don't yet understand how good music can be
Speaker 1: learned more and more about out all that and get
Speaker 1: better to get more adequate to that conversation. And then
Speaker 1: over here we can have failed states where sadistic monsters
Speaker 1: torture people for pleasure and nothing fun happens at all
Speaker 1: apart for just you know, more creative sadism uh and
Speaker 1: the benefits thereof you know, accruing to the few creative
Speaker 1: sus sadus who get to uh stay on top of
Speaker 1: that heap of misery before someone figures out how to
Speaker 1: murder them, and and the and the cycle continues, right
Speaker 1: and then you know there and they're you know, over
Speaker 1: here there are cures for diseases because we have the
Speaker 1: free time to find them, and we have the the
Speaker 1: the insight into the you know, the mechanism that would
Speaker 1: allow us to find them, and we get vaccines quickly.
Speaker 1: And over here people don't even know the germ theory
Speaker 1: of disease, and they kill people for witchcraft and and
Speaker 1: you know, cut out the tongues of blasphemers, you know,
Speaker 1: because there they think that might be a cure for
Speaker 1: the bubonic plague, as we did for centuries in Europe. Right,
Speaker 1: So there are two very different attractor states on this
Speaker 1: landscape that we already know a lot about because we've
Speaker 1: lived in both of them, uh sometimes for centuries, and
Speaker 1: we have a navigation problem we can and all of
Speaker 1: this again, this is all these are fact based claims
Speaker 1: right about how to move in this space. There are
Speaker 1: right and wrong answers about how to move. There are
Speaker 1: and and the and at every level at which we
Speaker 1: are gathering human knowledge, there are right and wrong answers.
Speaker 1: There are genetic things that determine you know, where we
Speaker 1: where we're inclined on this landscape. There are environmental aspects
Speaker 1: to this, and all of this can be you know
Speaker 1: that broad strokes distinction can be can be defined and
Speaker 1: understood at every level that we have a specific science
Speaker 1: or a specific almost science that addresses it. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about the truths of physics on through biochemistry, and
Speaker 1: you know, neurophysiology and psychology and sociology and economics and
Speaker 1: all of it. Right, any place where we're going to
Speaker 1: make a fact based distinction about anything is potentially relevant
Speaker 1: to how we navigate on this space of possible experiences.
Speaker 1: So we have not introduced morality yet, we haven't introduced
Speaker 1: any oughts yet, and so then, and we don't even
Speaker 1: have the word should yet. Right now, let's invent the
Speaker 1: word should. Right, What does it mean? What should I do?
Speaker 1: What should we do? Right? I would simply claim this
Speaker 1: is the only thing you have to grant me in
Speaker 1: order to get my moral worldview booted up. All you
Speaker 1: have to grant me is that the word should, if
Speaker 1: it means anything at all, it means that we should
Speaker 1: avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. Right, If we
Speaker 1: should do anything, we should do that anything else on
Speaker 1: this landscape is better than this one place where it's
Speaker 1: true to say that any conscious system that can suffer
Speaker 1: is suffering as much as it possibly can for as
Speaker 1: long as it can without any good thing coming up it. Right,
Speaker 1: there's no silver lining to the suffering. You know, we've
Speaker 1: created computer systems that are just hell realms, where conscious
Speaker 1: computer programs suffer immeasurably for an apparent eternity. Right, everything
Speaker 1: that can suffer is suffering the most harrowing and pointless
Speaker 1: misery it can possibly endure for as long as it
Speaker 1: can possibly happen compatible with the laws of physics. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the worst possible misery for everyone. If anything is bad,
Speaker 1: that is bad. If the word bad means anything, Okay,
Speaker 1: it doesn't yet. We haven't invented the word bad yet.
Speaker 1: Now we have what does it mean? If it applies
Speaker 1: to anything? It applies to that. What does good mean?
Speaker 1: Good means good? The direct where are you going to
Speaker 1: point toward the good? You're going to point away from
Speaker 1: the worst possible misery for everyone. Anything is better than that?
Speaker 1: And now then the question is how much better does
Speaker 1: better get? Well? Over here, we've got a beautiful global
Speaker 1: civilization figuring out how to colonize the galaxy based on
Speaker 1: environmentally sustainable you know, collaborative principles that are just redounding
Speaker 1: to the advantage of almost everyone. And they're curing diseases
Speaker 1: as quickly as they crop up, and it's just, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're fast completing something like a mature psychology of
Speaker 1: human self actualization. And it just it's like, basically the
Speaker 1: entire world has become Esslin Institute on its on the
Speaker 1: most beautiful afternoon it ever enjoyed in the you know,
Speaker 1: in the summer of love. Right, right, that's the worst
Speaker 1: day anyone has for the next thousand years. Right, that's
Speaker 1: a pretty good planet to be on, right, certainly better
Speaker 1: than the worst possible misery for everyone, right then, So
Speaker 1: so all the people who are who are getting wrapped
Speaker 1: around the axle of is an aught are saying, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, but is that is the worst possible misery
Speaker 1: for everyone? Really bad? Really? Should I should? I? Should I?
Speaker 1: Really avoid it? Who are you to say philosophically that
Speaker 1: that you should avoid the worst possible misery for everyone,
Speaker 1: or you should actualize a galaxy full of of of
Speaker 1: uh amazingly happy conscious systems. And that's just a it's
Speaker 1: a misapplication of language. It's just if the word if
Speaker 1: the word should mean the place you are standing, So
Speaker 1: is to have the pretense of doubt about what those
Speaker 1: words mean, right, that like the place you're standing to say, well,
Speaker 1: is the worst possible misery for everyone, really bad? Might
Speaker 1: there be something worse? Right? That is, that place doesn't
Speaker 1: exist if you if you understand what these words mean, right,
Speaker 1: if you're actually running them in anything like a kind
Speaker 1: of emulation so that you're you're understanding them, it should
Speaker 1: be obvious to you that that's not there's no place
Speaker 1: to stand from which to do that philosophy I mean
Speaker 1: like a much a much crasser but also emphatically convincing.
Speaker 1: Uh framing would be Okay, put your hand on a
Speaker 1: hot stove, and then tell me about your philosophy about
Speaker 1: whether or not that is bad and worth avoiding. I'd
Speaker 1: like to double click on that example, though, go for it,
Speaker 1: because everything up to that example I was with you,
Speaker 1: and then you know the collective well being. But once
Speaker 1: we get to the individual level, you know. The way
Speaker 1: I think about it is that there's no should without
Speaker 1: in order to which is a goal. If someone says
Speaker 1: you should do X, that necessarily implies that you should
Speaker 1: do X in order to get why there could be
Speaker 1: no a should without reference to a goal. Now, what
Speaker 1: if what if the goal is to avoid the worst
Speaker 1: possible misery for everyone, then that's a good point. But
Speaker 1: what if that's not your value? So what or what if?
Speaker 1: How could it not be your value? Well? What there's
Speaker 1: one could conceive of a situation in which suffering at
Speaker 1: an individual level is what will lead to a greater
Speaker 1: good for everyone. If your value system is that greater
Speaker 1: good that you're talking about. Couldn't you make the case
Speaker 1: you have to do sucky things sometimes in order to
Speaker 1: get there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yea. So there are trade
Speaker 1: offs and and there, and there are forms of suffering
Speaker 1: that have silver linings, right, I Mean, that's why I'm
Speaker 1: careful to define the worst possible misery for everyone is
Speaker 1: as as really the worst possible misery for everyone. But
Speaker 1: if you're if you're going to talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: any project in life that is hard, that that can't
Speaker 1: be achieved but for hard work, you know, i e.
Speaker 1: Some measure of suffering, Yeah, then those that's just as
Speaker 1: easy to understand. I Mean, there's there's sometimes there's some
Speaker 1: things that suck and nothing good come from them. And
Speaker 1: there's some things that suck but they're on their way
Speaker 1: because the value judgment though, but they could be in
Speaker 1: they could be well, no, there's there're framing effects, so
Speaker 1: that there are things that are unpleasant, but framed a
Speaker 1: certain way, we actually kind of like them. It's a
Speaker 1: kind of it's within the range of unpleasantness that we
Speaker 1: actually like because we know what it means. Right, So,
Speaker 1: like a good workout is my is my favorite example here.
Speaker 1: It's like like that like once once you learn to
Speaker 1: love lifting weights, that physical stress, which if you felt
Speaker 1: in another context, if you woke up in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night feeling what you feel when you're doing
Speaker 1: you know, the heaviest deadlift you can you can you
Speaker 1: can accomplish, Well, you'd think you were dying, right, you'd
Speaker 1: be terrified. You'd call nine one one, right, like like
Speaker 1: like that's a medical emergency. But because you're in a
Speaker 1: gym getting stronger, you actually like that experience. Right. So
Speaker 1: that's but you know, that's that is interesting psychologically, But
Speaker 1: that's not a counterpoint to my argument. That's just it's
Speaker 1: just in fact true that the cognitive frame you put
Speaker 1: around certain sensory experience matters. But it's and it's it's
Speaker 1: also true that certain good things in life can only
Speaker 1: be accomplished by going through certain hard experiences, right, And
Speaker 1: it may it may be true both individually and collectively.
Speaker 1: And this is why my moral escape analogy could be
Speaker 1: relevant here on this question. You know, just imagine a
Speaker 1: landscape where our peaks and valleys and the peaks correspond
Speaker 1: to increases in well being, you know, individually and collectively.
Speaker 1: And let's take a collective moral landscape for this argument.
Speaker 1: So we're on and you know, all of these, all
Speaker 1: of the landscape disappears into the mists beyond which we
Speaker 1: can see. So you never quite know you're on a peak, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's never maybe there's maybe the peaks go up infinitely,
Speaker 1: we don't know, but we just we're on a high spot.
Speaker 1: We know we can move higher and things get better
Speaker 1: and better, Things get happier and happier for all of us,
Speaker 1: or most of us, or us in the aggregate. But
Speaker 1: there's and we know what it's like to go downward
Speaker 1: and things seem to get worse and worse. Well, it
Speaker 1: may in fact be that there's a we're just on
Speaker 1: some local maximum. But the way to get to a
Speaker 1: much better spot, a much higher spot on this landscape
Speaker 1: would require a collective descent into some kind of valley, right,
Speaker 1: like things actually will get worse in order for us
Speaker 1: to get better. It's like you do have to rip
Speaker 1: the band aid off, and that sucks, but you have
Speaker 1: to rip it off. And that may be true of
Speaker 1: certain things like what if? What if climate change? What
Speaker 1: if our solution to climate change is absolutely necessary but
Speaker 1: actually painful economically. Now, I'm not convinced that's the case, right,
Speaker 1: I'm not convinced that we need to make significant sacrifices.
Speaker 1: But what if it's just an accident. If that's true,
Speaker 1: what if we lived in a world where we're on
Speaker 1: a collision course with something truly horrible, and the only
Speaker 1: way to get off of it is to make a
Speaker 1: major sacrifice that diminishes, that noticeably diminishes the well being
Speaker 1: of more or less everyone for a generation. It's totally
Speaker 1: possible that we could be if we're not in that situation. Now,
Speaker 1: that's an intelligible situation to be in. That would be
Speaker 1: an example of like, Okay, this is going to suck,
Speaker 1: but we have but here's why we're doing it, and
Speaker 1: and it's rational for us to do it. The better
Speaker 1: and worse are value judgments I don't know why you
Speaker 1: don't see that. You know the thing about well being
Speaker 1: that people on a hot stove, and then tell me
Speaker 1: that if it was in order, if my goal was
Speaker 1: a broader goal and putting my hand on hot stove
Speaker 1: would help me with that broader goal, I'd put my
Speaker 1: hand on a hot stove and deal with the suckiness
Speaker 1: of the feeling. But the thing is, it's not to
Speaker 1: say that. To say that the worst possible misery for
Speaker 1: everyone is bad is a value judgment, is to say nothing. Well,
Speaker 1: you're accepting a particular definition of well being. The point
Speaker 1: is that psychology people, no, no no, no, no no, I'm not definition.
Speaker 1: You're just you're just not understanding my claim. Take any definition.
Speaker 1: Take let's take value fulfillment as a definition, which is
Speaker 1: ano definition less. Imagine a universe of radical pluralism with
Speaker 1: respect to values. Right, so we've got so, we've got
Speaker 1: we've got a place over here where you have you
Speaker 1: have perfectly matched sadists and masochists who if you could
Speaker 1: just get them together, they get really really happy. Right,
Speaker 1: But we want nothing to do with any of that,
Speaker 1: right Like that just sounds like hell to us. But
Speaker 1: the truth is psychologically for them. They're having a fine
Speaker 1: old time in their you know, BDSM dungeon. Uh and uh,
Speaker 1: we have no idea how weird all that can get.
Speaker 1: But it's just different values. Right. And let's say there's
Speaker 1: a functional infinity, a functionally infinite number of value systems.
Speaker 1: I'm asking you to imagine a universe where every conscious creature,
Speaker 1: by its own values, is made as miserable as it
Speaker 1: possibly can be. So everything is tortured, even if your
Speaker 1: torture is my highest enjoyment, and vice versa. Grab whatever
Speaker 1: knobs there are and turn them down to the hell
Speaker 1: realms for everybody for as long as possible, right, with
Speaker 1: nothing good coming of it. If something good's coming of it, well,
Speaker 1: then that's just not as bad as things can get.
Speaker 1: Let's make them worse. Right, Everything gets dialed down to
Speaker 1: the utmost misery by whatever uh causal structure would allow
Speaker 1: for that misery. And it's so if you're going to
Speaker 1: flip the flip, all the the the valances on a
Speaker 1: value system in some other corner of the universe will
Speaker 1: then okay, that's the antimatter of morality over there, will
Speaker 1: find it functions by its own principles. Let's let's screw
Speaker 1: let's screw things up perfectly over there, that's the place
Speaker 1: that's the base case. Right. So if you're going to say, well,
Speaker 1: that's just a value judgment that the worst possible misery
Speaker 1: for everyone is bad, I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: You're just you're making you're making noisiers. It feels like
Speaker 1: you're inserting in AUGHT. You're only getting to IS because
Speaker 1: you're inserting in AUGHT with the IS. You're hearing them together.
Speaker 1: I'm granting. I'm granting you. There's no such thing as ought.
Speaker 1: We live in the universe without oughts. You don't have
Speaker 1: to do anything. You shouldn't do anything. Okay, you're just
Speaker 1: you're you're you're off scott free, you're off the hook.
Speaker 1: There's no free Yeah, there's no morality, you know, Johnny Philosopher. Right,
Speaker 1: so we're we're in a universe where you don't you don't.
Speaker 1: You don't have to get out of bed, right, you
Speaker 1: don't have to get out of bed in the morning.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to judge how are facts going to
Speaker 1: at all lead me to action? The fact the facts
Speaker 1: are that there there are very different experiences on offer here,
Speaker 1: and you will helplessly find yourself preferring the good day
Speaker 1: at Estlin over the the rat filled dungeon. Just to
Speaker 1: take the fairly parochial differences that we can notice here
Speaker 1: on earth. Good can only be used in relationship to
Speaker 1: a goal. How are you divorcing it from the goal? No,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's just it's a it's basic. Well, no,
Speaker 1: because there's just there's just like the the the valance
Speaker 1: of certain experiences within consciousness that have no necessary reference
Speaker 1: to a goal. It's like, you can, you can take
Speaker 1: you can. You can be so happy or unhappy that
Speaker 1: it has no reference point in past or future, Right,
Speaker 1: Like you can have the best possible acid trip or
Speaker 1: the worst possible acid trip and you're not. There's no
Speaker 1: goal there. There's just a the sheer extremis of your
Speaker 1: physiology pushed to the breaking point. I do think that
Speaker 1: there's pleasurable, there's unpleasant, But I don't think they map
Speaker 1: onto good or bad in the way that you kind
Speaker 1: of it seems like you're mapping your mong to give them,
Speaker 1: give them enough, to dial them up enough, and give
Speaker 1: them enough time. Right, Like, what what if what if
Speaker 1: existence was just that? What if existence? What if there
Speaker 1: was a way to to there was a place you
Speaker 1: could be. Let's say, let's say reincarnation is true. Right,
Speaker 1: let's say that's a possibility and wouldn't yeah, that would
Speaker 1: that would be interesting. I mean, the truth is both
Speaker 1: both situations are interesting. You know, you know, getting non
Speaker 1: existence is also I mean the fact that you know
Speaker 1: it you appear and then you disappear, and you really disappear,
Speaker 1: that is also interesting. It's like the firm It's the
Speaker 1: Fermi problem, you know, it's like thinking of a universe
Speaker 1: teeming with other life forms and advanced civilizations. That is,
Speaker 1: that is about the most astonishing possibility on offer, except
Speaker 1: if you think that there's no one else in the universe,
Speaker 1: that is also astonishing. I mean, they're both, they're both
Speaker 1: just jaw dropping to think about. But if you could
Speaker 1: be reborn in a state of perfect bliss, uncomplicated, uncomplicated
Speaker 1: by any goals, right that that that may not be
Speaker 1: the the most interesting possibility for you. But maybe your
Speaker 1: intuitions about that caused you to think it's not the
Speaker 1: most interesting possibility are just born of your own you know,
Speaker 1: glitch in your own code. Whereas if we could change that,
Speaker 1: we could change those intuitions. Let's say we just perform
Speaker 1: the necessary you know, brain changes for you a little slightly,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe maybe analogous to teaching me how to
Speaker 1: play the cello. All of a sudden I would appreciate you,
Speaker 1: like I don't know what I'm missing with respect to
Speaker 1: classical music. But once you, once you gave me the
Speaker 1: intuitions of a of a Beethoven, well, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I'd recognize, Okay, this is there was a there there.
Speaker 1: This is just you know, the person I was, the
Speaker 1: philistine I was who just didn't get it and who
Speaker 1: would rather listen to led Zeppelin just didn't know what
Speaker 1: he was missing. Right. My point is, with respect to
Speaker 1: the moral realism here is that, just as it is
Speaker 1: with any other realistic claim about knowledge about facts, you know,
Speaker 1: with physics or anything else, it is possible in the
Speaker 1: moral domain not to know what you're missing. Right. You
Speaker 1: don't know how good or bad things are over there. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't even know there isn't over there based on
Speaker 1: your own experience. Right, And when we were asking questions
Speaker 1: about how to navigate in this space of possible experience
Speaker 1: and whether it would be good or bad, to go
Speaker 1: one direction or another. We are constrained based on our
Speaker 1: own moral intuitions rather often, but we can triangulate on
Speaker 1: those and recognize that, you know, we're living in a
Speaker 1: universe where it could be possible to change one's moral intuitions.
Speaker 1: In fact, it is possible based on pedagogy, and and
Speaker 1: you's just collisions with other people who have different intuitions,
Speaker 1: you know, through conversation, but ultimately ultimately might be possible
Speaker 1: to change them very directly, Like we're going to change
Speaker 1: your actual the code you're running on your brain, or
Speaker 1: we're going to upload you into a different brain, right
Speaker 1: Like like that's like, so, what what sort of robot
Speaker 1: do you want to be? Once we once we can
Speaker 1: really change you materially, there's this further question of okay,
Speaker 1: if I can change your intuitions about right and wrong
Speaker 1: and good and evil, right, so that up is down,
Speaker 1: up is down and down is up? Right, there's this
Speaker 1: further question of asking would it be good to do that? Well,
Speaker 1: Who's whose intuitions are you referencing? Bye by when you
Speaker 1: even ask that question, Like, who's going to decide whether
Speaker 1: it's good to do that? Well? Again, we're we have
Speaker 1: to fall back on this original navigation problem. There's this
Speaker 1: moral landscape. There's a functionally infinite number of experiences on
Speaker 1: offer you probably almost certainly not infinite, but functionally so.
Speaker 1: And we know that some of these experiences suck. Right,
Speaker 1: It's just built into the very logic of this case,
Speaker 1: which is, whatever your intuitions are, we can concoct an
Speaker 1: experience that is maximally terrible for you, right, But whatever
Speaker 1: however your mind is built, we can make you suffer. Right,
Speaker 1: So getting away from if we should do anything, if
Speaker 1: the word should is going to mean anything, if the
Speaker 1: word good is going to mean anything, if the word
Speaker 1: better is going to mean anything, if a valance towards
Speaker 1: the positive is going to mean anything. Getting away from
Speaker 1: the burning stove that is burning everyone in the worst
Speaker 1: possible mode of burning that they're you know, their organization
Speaker 1: can admit of forever. Right, Getting away from that is
Speaker 1: good and better and worth doing. I agree, and I
Speaker 1: think you should do it. But I only agree with
Speaker 1: you because I share your value system. No, no, over there,
Speaker 1: your whatever your value system is, its ultimate repudiation is
Speaker 1: part of this picture. You're if you are capable of
Speaker 1: wanting anything, you're going to want to be elsewhere once
Speaker 1: I get you into the worst possible misery for everyone.
Speaker 1: It doesn't take a lot, and that takes a lot
Speaker 1: of hubris though for us to think that we know
Speaker 1: the right way. More important this is this is where
Speaker 1: the This is where the double standard I referenced earlier
Speaker 1: comes into the picture. People seem to think that a
Speaker 1: diversity of opinion or disagreement on values, on moral values
Speaker 1: has to mean something when it doesn't mean anything when
Speaker 1: we're talking about scientific values or facts. The guy who
Speaker 1: shows up at the physics conference who doesn't care about
Speaker 1: causality and doesn't care about consistency, and doesn't care about logic,
Speaker 1: and doesn't care about the history of physics and all
Speaker 1: the conversations that were had before he got there, and
Speaker 1: doesn't know the math and doesn't he's just not adequate
Speaker 1: to the conversation. Doesn't get to be part of the conversation.
Speaker 1: The psychopath doesn't get to inform our ethics. The Taliban
Speaker 1: don't get a vote. They don't know what it means
Speaker 1: to live a good life and produce a good society
Speaker 1: and treat women well. They're imbeciles. They have a shitty culture.
Speaker 1: We know this. This is not and it shouldn't be
Speaker 1: taboo to say this. They're relig they're trying to live
Speaker 1: by the lights of a fifth century book or seventh
Speaker 1: century book, which wasn't a good book even in the
Speaker 1: seventh century, right it was. So it's like, by the
Speaker 1: lights of the seventh century, it was possible to do
Speaker 1: better than what Muhammad managed more really speaking, probably a
Speaker 1: good book. And so it is with the Bible, and
Speaker 1: so it is with the Book of Mormon, right, the
Speaker 1: book Like you know, if you're going to hold the
Speaker 1: Book of Mormon up as a history of the world
Speaker 1: or a history of anything else, or a book about
Speaker 1: physics or a book about medicine, it sucks. It also
Speaker 1: sucks as a moral orientation in the twenty first century, right,
Speaker 1: It just it's like, we can do better than all
Speaker 1: of these things, and we want to have an open
Speaker 1: ended conversation about the nature of reality. We do not
Speaker 1: have to be constrained by this this spurious notion that
Speaker 1: values are something other than facts. They're not like there's
Speaker 1: a way of talking about them that that can seem
Speaker 1: to they can they can motivate that distinction for the
Speaker 1: purposes of certain conversations. But it's like the distinction between
Speaker 1: reason and emotion, right, It's like, yes, there's there's they're not,
Speaker 1: they're not precisely the same thing. We know what it's
Speaker 1: like to have motivated reasoning where your emotion is causing
Speaker 1: you to misconstrue certain arguments or or or cherry pick
Speaker 1: certain data or whatever it is because you you know,
Speaker 1: you want things to come out a certain way, like
Speaker 1: like yes, reason and emotion or are you know, part
Speaker 1: of a ven diagram that don't completely overlap. But it's
Speaker 1: also true that part that that there is a an
Speaker 1: emotional aspect two our to the cognitive apparatus that is
Speaker 1: producing our rationality. And if you and if you're damaged
Speaker 1: emotionally in the right way is if you have you know,
Speaker 1: orbital medial prefrontal damage that causes you not to feel
Speaker 1: the implications of certain reasoning strategies or certain correct uh conclusions,
Speaker 1: you will you will malfunction. You'll you'll you'll know what's
Speaker 1: right and be unable to use what's right, you know,
Speaker 1: rationally speaking to reference Antonio Dimasio's work on gambling tasks
Speaker 1: there or and and even just the even just the
Speaker 1: feeling of doubt is an emotion. The feeling of certainty
Speaker 1: is an emotion, the feeling of of of Aha. Now
Speaker 1: I see how that adds up, like two plus two
Speaker 1: makes four. I get it there. That is leveraging emotion
Speaker 1: in order to land rationally right, Like there's it's not
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not completely devoids. It's not. It's not unemotional,
Speaker 1: and so it's it's on some level it's a spury.
Speaker 1: It's not entirely clear distinction. And we have to be
Speaker 1: careful in how we differentiate reason and emotion. And it's
Speaker 1: it is to a certain purpose, but so but the
Speaker 1: and so and so it is with values, It's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you can't you can't do arithmetic without valuing the you know,
Speaker 1: the the operations in certain ways, like if if you're
Speaker 1: going to do arithmetic, or pretend to do arithmetic and
Speaker 1: imagine that you should be free to think of the
Speaker 1: numbers differently on either side of the equal sign. Right,
Speaker 1: two means two over here, but it means something different
Speaker 1: over here. That's what I value. I I don't I
Speaker 1: you know, I don't like your colonialist you know mansplaining
Speaker 1: white guy values of consistency across the equal sign. You
Speaker 1: know that got drummed into you in your in your
Speaker 1: private school. But over here in my you know, Taliban
Speaker 1: funded Academy of Arithmetic, we've got you know or my my,
Speaker 1: you know where we read uh dere dah and uh
Speaker 1: and uh uh you know fuco on the topic of arithmetic.
Speaker 1: And we realize this is just a socially constructed project.
Speaker 1: And on the other side of the equal sign we
Speaker 1: can we can have left arithmetic and right arithmetic. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just obviously I'm just making this up, just confabulating,
Speaker 1: but what like that's not going to produce the results
Speaker 1: that we that we we dignify as arithmetic for very
Speaker 1: obvious reasons, and values are built into that project. Now
Speaker 1: again this gets subverted in specific instances, in very interesting
Speaker 1: ways which we which we also have to to enshrine
Speaker 1: into our values. Right. So for instance, and this is
Speaker 1: a little bit like how intuition is is at bedrock
Speaker 1: for us, but it's constantly being subverted by the systems
Speaker 1: we build to leverage our intuitions, Like you have to
Speaker 1: have the only way you understand two plus two makes
Speaker 1: four is based on intuition. But we know our intuitions
Speaker 1: fail in other areas of mathematics, and we have to
Speaker 1: we have to account for that. But so you can
Speaker 1: take something like like what I just said that the
Speaker 1: kind of arithmetic that would be impossible and and and
Speaker 1: and laughable. There we know we can find ourselves in
Speaker 1: situations where that seems to be so and it isn't. Right,
Speaker 1: Like when someone poses non proposes non Euclidean geometry for
Speaker 1: the first time. Right, you have a mathematician like Remond
Speaker 1: I believe was, you know, was certainly one of the
Speaker 1: first people to do this. Like everyone thought that a
Speaker 1: triangle had to have one hundred and eighty degrees, and
Speaker 1: here comes somebody saying, no, no, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be played by those rules. Not all triangles have one
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty degrees. Okay, there's there's there's one time
Speaker 1: point where he seems like a lunatic, or at least
Speaker 1: he just doesn't understand what he's saying. But there is
Speaker 1: a path from from that initial seemingly crazy claim to
Speaker 1: making sense incrementally, and there's just not that many increments
Speaker 1: here where then you think, oh my god, unless everyone
Speaker 1: understands what this guy just said, they don't understand geometry anymore. Right,
Speaker 1: Like so like it goes from this is blasphemy and
Speaker 1: you're an idiot to you're a genius, thank you. Right,
Speaker 1: And we know what it's like to traverse that boundary,
Speaker 1: and we know and we know that there's principles of
Speaker 1: intellectual honesty and self criticism and openness to evidence and argument,
Speaker 1: and patience and and and and being sensitive to bias.
Speaker 1: We know all of it. We know what we need
Speaker 1: to have in the toolkit, and we know we get
Speaker 1: continually surprised by new discoveries and the fact that someone
Speaker 1: like Remond can come along and say, okay, look a
Speaker 1: triangle on a curved surface is going to have more
Speaker 1: or less than one hundred and eighty degrees, right, do
Speaker 1: you understand what I'm talking about? And that and the
Speaker 1: point Lands, we know that is a different project than
Speaker 1: postmodern you know, everything's everything's pure context relativistic bullshit. We
Speaker 1: know it's different than the Taliban. May be right that
Speaker 1: the Koran is the perfect word of the creator of
Speaker 1: the universe, and it should subsume every other human project.
Speaker 1: We know enough to know then the kinds of errors
Speaker 1: that are being made there. And so it's just It's
Speaker 1: like the the exceptions, you know, those those exceptions where
Speaker 1: everybody's wrong and then suddenly some lone genius rewrites our
Speaker 1: collective appraisal of reality. That does that needn't open the
Speaker 1: door to this this you know, quasi nihilistic picture that
Speaker 1: every doubter who comes along needs to be taken seriously. Right.
Speaker 1: The person who doesn't understand that the worst possible misery
Speaker 1: for everyone is worth avoiding, just doesn't get to come
Speaker 1: to the Conference on Morality to belong. There so many
Speaker 1: good points and make a lot of good points in
Speaker 1: the moral landscape, but none of that is countering the
Speaker 1: naturalistic fallacy, which just simply says you can't have You
Speaker 1: can't have only factual premises. You have to have something
Speaker 1: that has no I am I'm I'm agreen. I am
Speaker 1: agreeing with that. Even when you only have factual premises,
Speaker 1: you can't get to a fact without first presupposing certain values.
Speaker 1: You just can't like it because if you don't value
Speaker 1: not contradicting the last thing you claim to believe, right,
Speaker 1: if you want your beliefs to cohere, I see what
Speaker 1: you're saying, that's a value I can't both like to
Speaker 1: believe that something is red and something is also blue.
Speaker 1: You know, red and blue all over, right, not partly
Speaker 1: red and partly blue. But it's red and it's blue. Right,
Speaker 1: is a contradiction I can eat. So I could decide
Speaker 1: I have to have a value system to organize those
Speaker 1: two propositions. I mean, either I don't think that's Let
Speaker 1: me give you a good example, a counterexample, and you
Speaker 1: tell me if this is not a counter I hated
Speaker 1: IQ tests, I hated intelligence research. I went into the
Speaker 1: field with the mission, because of my values, to take
Speaker 1: down IQ. But I collected the facts to such I
Speaker 1: had to put my values aside as much as I
Speaker 1: possibly could, And I studied with the leading IQ researcher
Speaker 1: in the world, Nicholas McIntosh University of Cambridge, and I
Speaker 1: published studies which directly contradicted my whole experience as a child,
Speaker 1: and it was hard for me to stomach. But I
Speaker 1: still published it because I had a commitment to the truth.
Speaker 1: Now what that commitment to the truth is a statement
Speaker 1: of your more value system. Value system of commit truth
Speaker 1: trumped my value system of wanting to change the intelligence
Speaker 1: field in it by taking down IQ. So I had
Speaker 1: two competing value. Is that is what that's what you're arguing. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you're value. Yes. We need to identify the values that
Speaker 1: scale best that that can help. So we need to
Speaker 1: identify the intellectual and ethical values that allow for the
Speaker 1: the again, the the sanest and most efficient way of
Speaker 1: navigating in this space of all possible experience toward better
Speaker 1: and better, more creative, more insightful, more beautiful experiences which
Speaker 1: we are right to care about, if we're right to
Speaker 1: care about anything? Right, if caring? I mean this is
Speaker 1: this is where where language bites its own tail, right, Like,
Speaker 1: this is this is where the definitions of terms become circular. Right,
Speaker 1: Like for someone to say, okay, what if I want
Speaker 1: to experience the worst possible misery for everyone? Right, that's
Speaker 1: not a use of the word want that makes any sense. Right,
Speaker 1: What you mean by want doesn't map onto this landscape, right,
Speaker 1: So like we have to like words people. This is
Speaker 1: what's happening with the isot problem. People are pretending to
Speaker 1: think certain thoughts. They're not actually thinking them. They think
Speaker 1: they're thinking them, but they think that uttering a sentence
Speaker 1: is the same thing as thinking a thought. It isn't right,
Speaker 1: I can pretend to think this thought. You know what
Speaker 1: I have in my refrigerator right now? I have a
Speaker 1: round square, right, It's a sentence, right, It's utter bullshit.
Speaker 1: It has no reference point logically or empirically in our
Speaker 1: universe or any other that I can imagine, because round
Speaker 1: square makes no sense, right. It is the round is
Speaker 1: exactly what a square isn't. Right, So the fact that
Speaker 1: I can say the phrase round square doesn't shouldn't make
Speaker 1: you think that I'm I'm I'm tracking the thought that
Speaker 1: there's a thought on offer that myke that that that
Speaker 1: my mind isn't passing through. It's like here, every thought,
Speaker 1: every every sentence is a It's like a needle that
Speaker 1: that needs to actually think it through. You need to
Speaker 1: be able to thread the needle, right, But I am
Speaker 1: not threading it. I'm just saying, here's a needle and
Speaker 1: and and I'm pretending that my my intelligence has has
Speaker 1: passed through the eye of that needle by by uttering
Speaker 1: the sentence. But it's it's completely empty, it's completely vacuous.
Speaker 1: It is not a thought, right, I'm not thinking that thought.
Speaker 1: And that's not a paradox. I'm I'm making small mouth
Speaker 1: noises and pretending to be a philosopher when I say
Speaker 1: that sentence, right, that's what's happening with this is ought
Speaker 1: distinction in my view. I mean, it's just it is
Speaker 1: it is empty language when you actually drill down on
Speaker 1: the circumstance, we're actually in right and what and and
Speaker 1: the way our intuitions allow us to make any claim
Speaker 1: at all cognitively or or or behaviorally a behavior to
Speaker 1: feel any motive to do anything right, It's like, what
Speaker 1: what is it to be a cognitively and volitionally a
Speaker 1: live system? We we are we we're hurling words at
Speaker 1: this circumstance, trying to to to make some appraisal of
Speaker 1: it and to make and and again you know, whether
Speaker 1: we choose to think of it or not. We're trying
Speaker 1: to navigate within this space of possible experiences, like I
Speaker 1: feel something that makes me uncomfortable, and I want to
Speaker 1: stop feeling that way, right with my apish brain, and
Speaker 1: might not, But you might not want to stop feeling
Speaker 1: that way if you had a certain value system that
Speaker 1: allowed that to happen. Right, But then, but then other
Speaker 1: things count as uncomfortable in that value system, right, So
Speaker 1: like I've got I've got whatever I've got that. I can't.
Speaker 1: I can I can't perfectly inspect. In fact, I'm really
Speaker 1: bad at inspecting it. Right, I can't look inside myself
Speaker 1: and find my values. They have to come out in
Speaker 1: dialogue with the world, right they get they get revealed
Speaker 1: to me as as as they get revealed to you
Speaker 1: by these collisions, you know, linguistic collisions and behavioral collisions
Speaker 1: with the world, Like how do you know you don't
Speaker 1: like your hand on a hot stove? Well, touch one
Speaker 1: for the first time, right, and then you know, how
Speaker 1: do you know your allergic to strawberries? You know you
Speaker 1: eat them for the first time and you have a reaction.
Speaker 1: How do you how do you know you don't? You
Speaker 1: want to reject the inconsistency in this other person's argument,
Speaker 1: like like someone's telling you something that isn't adding up. Right,
Speaker 1: You're in your first philosophy philosophy class, and you've got
Speaker 1: some anti natalist arguing that it would be better better
Speaker 1: not to have been alive, Right, it'd be better not
Speaker 1: to be born, and having kids is totally unethical for
Speaker 1: that reason because life sucks, and you you feel like
Speaker 1: there's got to be something wrong with this argument, because
Speaker 1: it's like it's it seems, uh, it just seems to
Speaker 1: open the door to all kinds of things that seems
Speaker 1: starkly unethical, Like which is which is to say that
Speaker 1: you kill everyone in their sleep tonight painlessly. That would
Speaker 1: be a good thing to do, right, Let's just murder
Speaker 1: everyone in their sleep tonight. That'd be no one bereaved,
Speaker 1: no one would be suffering any of the outcomes of that,
Speaker 1: and there'd be no attendant suffering to the deaths themselves.
Speaker 1: Like that's just let's let's if you could do that,
Speaker 1: you'd be a moral monster not to do that. That's
Speaker 1: sort of the sorry, I'm uncomfortable with that. This is
Speaker 1: all kind of revealed values. And then you get especially
Speaker 1: uncomfortable when someone says something which amounts to two plus
Speaker 1: two equals five, like, okay, that's bullshit. We scan your
Speaker 1: brain while you're doing all of that, and we see
Speaker 1: you're using some of the same neural structures that you
Speaker 1: use when you find, you know, certain smells disgusting, right,
Speaker 1: because there is no other areas of the brain to
Speaker 1: leverage to have these kinds of reactions. Because you're you're
Speaker 1: an ape after all, right, So where you're using a
Speaker 1: very old toolkit to you know, in evolutionary evolutionary terms,
Speaker 1: to do any of these higher cognitive things. So we're navigating.
Speaker 1: But then but but the truth is, we have enough
Speaker 1: that is abstract and not merely conforming to the appetites
Speaker 1: born of evolution, uh that allows us to take something
Speaker 1: like the view from nowhere, to stand outside ourselves where
Speaker 1: we can say, okay, yeah, we're just apes. Now we're
Speaker 1: just you know, these these these uh, these warm and
Speaker 1: moist and and uh, meaty things that that crave certain
Speaker 1: certain outcomes. But here we have we have we have
Speaker 1: this language game that is that is getting interesting enough
Speaker 1: that seems to promise that we can stand outside of
Speaker 1: this if only for you know, between the hours of
Speaker 1: nine and five in a in a at a place
Speaker 1: like M. M. I. T Or Harvard or Stanford or
Speaker 1: some institution that for whatever reason is carved out enough
Speaker 1: free time and you know, to to with the you know,
Speaker 1: our twenty watts of brain power toward toward problems that
Speaker 1: aren't immediately relevant to feeding ourselves and not dying, and
Speaker 1: we can have a conversation that seems to look back
Speaker 1: on this creaturely circumstance of being mere apes, you know,
Speaker 1: trying not to die. And we can say, what should
Speaker 1: we do when we can rewrite the firmware of our
Speaker 1: nervous systems and do anything we want? What will be
Speaker 1: right to want under those conditions? When I can change
Speaker 1: your moral intuitions and I could make you a happy
Speaker 1: member of the Taliban if you want to be that?
Speaker 1: Should you want to be that? When I can make
Speaker 1: you someone who recognizes how shitty it is to be
Speaker 1: a happy member of the Taliban? And where where can
Speaker 1: we stand? And what does this moral relativism seem to promise?
Speaker 1: In my view? It promises this moral landscape, which is okay. Now,
Speaker 1: let's finally admit we have a navigate a problem, and
Speaker 1: part of our compass is and part of the problem
Speaker 1: of solving this this navigation problem is recognizing that now
Speaker 1: we can make changes to our compass itself. Right, it's
Speaker 1: not just reading the true north of I'm an ape
Speaker 1: born on earth that feels certain a certain dopamine rush.
Speaker 1: I mean, wow, this is why this is what you're
Speaker 1: saying is amazing, because it's precisely that metacognition and mindfulness
Speaker 1: that you're exhibiting that I think gives us a species,
Speaker 1: gives us free will. Okay, but it's amazing. You're ill.
Speaker 1: You're illustrating exactly what I've been. The reason why it's
Speaker 1: not free will is because all of it is being
Speaker 1: pushed from behind causally, either deterministically or randomly, or both
Speaker 1: such that such such at every momentary instance of navigating
Speaker 1: and doing anything at all. Again, just me getting to
Speaker 1: the end of this sentence, right, is fundamentally mysterious, being
Speaker 1: driven from from behind. And no matter if if I
Speaker 1: maintain my current course or I change it, both are inscrutable.
Speaker 1: If I pick up the glass of water with my
Speaker 1: left hand or my right hand, both either is inscrutable.
Speaker 1: If I decide to suddenly want to learn to play
Speaker 1: the cello, that change in me is an absolute mystery
Speaker 1: which I cannot account for. I cannot. It's the point,
Speaker 1: that's all, besides the point that's really interesting here because
Speaker 1: it's totally compatible with determinism, and free will is not
Speaker 1: compatible with real determinism. Because if if you could say
Speaker 1: to someone, listen, the movie of your light life has
Speaker 1: already been shot and scored, edited, it's done right, there's
Speaker 1: a place to stand from which we know exactly what
Speaker 1: you are going to say two years from now to
Speaker 1: your wife in this conversation where you think you're having
Speaker 1: some kind of epiphany. You know, that's already written. We
Speaker 1: wrote it. We have the dialogue on our supercomputer. Right.
Speaker 1: Our lives are compatible with that. Our phenomenology, our moment
Speaker 1: to moment phenomenology is compatible with that. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that's true. I'm not saying randomness isn't part of the picture.
Speaker 1: I'm saying our experience is totally compatible with that. And
Speaker 1: to recognize that experientially changes things. It feels different, and
Speaker 1: it has moral implications, and it closes the door to
Speaker 1: hatred and real hatred, and it does not close the
Speaker 1: door to love. And it makes you someone who can
Speaker 1: stand completely free of certain forms of psychological suffering that
Speaker 1: seemed to be an imperative if you don't experience your
Speaker 1: mind that way. That's so much of this is semantic,
Speaker 1: because I'm like right on board with your your whole
Speaker 1: life product. I can see so clearly the thread that
Speaker 1: unites all these you know, we talked about religion, you know,
Speaker 1: and getting and the is all this stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: you want to pull back the curtain and have us
Speaker 1: derived values from some universal base of truth and reality
Speaker 1: as opposed to driving values from some belief. That's cocka
Speaker 1: ma amy, as my grandmother would say. I totally am
Speaker 1: on board with all this I could see semantically. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to convince you some of these things. But
Speaker 1: it's funny because I I love your project and your
Speaker 1: mindful I am a subscriber to the Waking Up. I
Speaker 1: listen to your morning meditation today, and and and my
Speaker 1: as a human being, myself and the and my own teachings,
Speaker 1: with my own courses I teach to transcend course and
Speaker 1: all this is very much in line with what you're teaching,
Speaker 1: which is helping us to ascertain the reality of our
Speaker 1: mind and understand our patterns and in order so we
Speaker 1: can have that potential to change in our lifetime. To me,
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff you're working on, the mindfulness, the
Speaker 1: metacognition driving values from facts, to me, that's worth calling
Speaker 1: free will from a human perspective. Well, so I mean freedom.
Speaker 1: Freedom is definitely something to value and to aspire to
Speaker 1: in all of its guises. Right, So you know, I
Speaker 1: think you know if someone and again this is all
Speaker 1: this can be as as transcendental or as or as
Speaker 1: prosaic as you want it to be. But it's you know,
Speaker 1: if you just take freedom in the in the context
Speaker 1: of any goal, like like if you want to lose weight,
Speaker 1: it's better to feel the the the kind of free
Speaker 1: access to the internal resources that will allow you to
Speaker 1: do that with with with the minimum amount of suffering. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like you're not constantly racked by by irreconcilable impulses
Speaker 1: like you want to lose weight, but you're desperate to
Speaker 1: eat chocolate, and then you eat the chocolate and you
Speaker 1: feel guilty and you cycle back and forth between that,
Speaker 1: and then you don't make any progress, and six months
Speaker 1: have passed and you're the same weight, and yet you
Speaker 1: spent you know, thousands of dollars on you know, to
Speaker 1: join diet clubs, Like you're frustrated, Like all of that
Speaker 1: is not as good as having your your capacities and
Speaker 1: your aspirations truly aligned, where it's like, Okay, I've made
Speaker 1: a decision. I want to lose weight. I know how
Speaker 1: to do that. I got to eat at a caloric deficit,
Speaker 1: I got to work out more, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: do that without any sense of internal conflict, and it's
Speaker 1: just going to be a source of joy for me.
Speaker 1: And the pounds are just going to just fall off
Speaker 1: hour by hour. You know. Literally, there's not going to
Speaker 1: be an hour over the next three months where I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be losing some amount of weight. I'm
Speaker 1: going to be happy the whole time. And three months
Speaker 1: from now, I'm going to look in the mirror or
Speaker 1: look at the scale and realize I've achieved my goal
Speaker 1: without any impediment. Right, those are two possible experiences. Freedom
Speaker 1: is a concept that that useful to differentiate those two experiences, right, I'm,
Speaker 1: you know, in one case, I'm free to just follow
Speaker 1: my own advice without conflict and follow the advice of others,
Speaker 1: and to to to not be coerced by my own
Speaker 1: internal cravings and addictions, and like I'm not addicted. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm free of those kinds of impulses. But again, I
Speaker 1: just I think there's something misleading about invoking this traditional
Speaker 1: concept of free will, because I know where people are starting.
Speaker 1: People are starting. It's the same problem with self, Like
Speaker 1: there are ways to talk about there's a ways to
Speaker 1: use the word self that I you know, that are
Speaker 1: unavoidable I mean, you know, there's no problem in talking
Speaker 1: about oneself or the self. But what most people most
Speaker 1: of the time mean by the feeling of self is
Speaker 1: referring to something that is illusory, that is a source
Speaker 1: of real suffering. Right. It is the feeling of being
Speaker 1: a subject in the middle of experience. And when you
Speaker 1: lose that feeling, this is you know, it's not uh,
Speaker 1: you know, this is why this is a good analogy.
Speaker 1: It's actually it's the same. It's it's more than an analogy.
Speaker 1: When you lose that feeling, you also lose the feeling
Speaker 1: to which this notion of free will can be attached, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's that's where it's like, it's obvious that there's nothing
Speaker 1: in experience to which that would refer. It's like it's
Speaker 1: obvious that the next thought simply arises. There's no other
Speaker 1: way for it to appear. And I didn't think it
Speaker 1: before I thought it, and I am in some I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm maybe the first to know what it is,
Speaker 1: but I'm also the last to know what it's like.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's and even with something like speech, it's
Speaker 1: like I'm unless I've prepared my speech in advance, right,
Speaker 1: unless I have a script I I'm hearing what I
Speaker 1: I say at the same time you're hearing it, right,
Speaker 1: It's like, I mean, they again, there's there's some delta here.
Speaker 1: I mean there's some granted, there are kinds of speech
Speaker 1: acts where it's not totally scripted, but it's sort of
Speaker 1: you know, I have some internal sense of where I'm
Speaker 1: going as I'm going there, But rather often it's just
Speaker 1: you know, if I'm thinking of an analogy, if we're
Speaker 1: talking and I think, well, just imagine you're you know,
Speaker 1: imagine the old story of putting rice on you know,
Speaker 1: one grain of rice on each square of a chessboard,
Speaker 1: and you double it double each time, and by the
Speaker 1: time you get to the end of the ship, Like
Speaker 1: I just thought of that old you know story, I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't think of it. I mean, it's not the
Speaker 1: greatest example because I sort of thought of it before
Speaker 1: the words got out. But you know, there's just you
Speaker 1: and I are hearing my thoughts at the same time
Speaker 1: for the most part when I'm speaking, and my thoughts
Speaker 1: aren't evidence of your free will, right, Like they're just appearing, right,
Speaker 1: And that's what's happening for me too. And the impulse again,
Speaker 1: if I'm going to go for the glass of water,
Speaker 1: Like from a moment ago, I wasn't thinking of water,
Speaker 1: wasn't feeling anything about the water, I wasn't thirsty, But
Speaker 1: now I thought it might be nice to have a
Speaker 1: sip of water that came out of nowhere, out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: And but that leak between thought and action is not
Speaker 1: one to one. You know, there's a really interesting paper
Speaker 1: on do smokers have free will? And that's the Bosid
Speaker 1: Baldmeister paper, and he found that in almost every case,
Speaker 1: people overestimated the extent to which they wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to quit or they wouldn't be able to have freewill
Speaker 1: based on the urge. But turns out that humans have
Speaker 1: much more self control than they realize that they're capable of.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't have to obviously, you don't have to.
Speaker 1: You know, you can want the water, but if you
Speaker 1: if you suddenly activate your prefaultal text, you could override
Speaker 1: that and be like, you know what, I'm gonna wait.
Speaker 1: But again it's subjective, so I'm not denying that. Again,
Speaker 1: there's there there's a difference between voluntary and involuntary action.
Speaker 1: There's a difference between behavioral self control and lacking that capacity. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: let's say I have goals, you know, to you know,
Speaker 1: to stop but my goal is to stop smoking, but
Speaker 1: I'm completely incapable of not smoking. Right. That's one way
Speaker 1: to be. The other way to be is I have
Speaker 1: a goal to stop smoking, and I can actually veto
Speaker 1: the impulse to stop smoking when it comes online, right
Speaker 1: for the time it takes me to actually kick the habit.
Speaker 1: But that's not again every instance of this, like let's
Speaker 1: say I'm you know, I'm trying to stop smoking, and
Speaker 1: I I'm able to successfully preempt the impulse to smoke
Speaker 1: on Tuesday afternoon, but Wednesday morning, I reach for a
Speaker 1: cigarette and smoke, but I only take one puff and
Speaker 1: then I throw it away. Like every bit of that
Speaker 1: the the sufficiency of my my strength of will in
Speaker 1: one case, my weakness of will in another case, the
Speaker 1: fact that it wasn't so weak that I smoked the
Speaker 1: whole cigarette in that case, every bit of it is
Speaker 1: being determined by states of my brain which I didn't author,
Speaker 1: which I didn't create, which I'm to it. But my
Speaker 1: liver is still me and it gives me absolutely no
Speaker 1: sense of free will. If my liver stops fun my
Speaker 1: liver is working exactly the way it is in this moment,
Speaker 1: and no other way. If it works better tomorrow or
Speaker 1: stops working completely on Friday, I am a mere victim
Speaker 1: of those changes or witness to their consequences. It's there.
Speaker 1: It's not within the domain of my of my autonomy
Speaker 1: or agency, but so it is with states of my brain.
Speaker 1: So it is with each instance of neuro chemistry in
Speaker 1: my brain. And yet that is producing everything I experience,
Speaker 1: including my preferences and my goals, and my my impulses
Speaker 1: that are in conformity with preferences and goals, and then
Speaker 1: my sudden subversion of those goals with some alternate impulse,
Speaker 1: you know, the thought, Oh God, wouldn't it be great
Speaker 1: to have a cigarette right now? That's that's getting piped
Speaker 1: up from below. And I'm the one who who can
Speaker 1: seem seem to hear for the antidote. I can seem
Speaker 1: to say, oh, no, no, no, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: follow that thought. I've been taught mindfulness by by Sam
Speaker 1: and Scott, right. But the fact that that comes online
Speaker 1: in that moment and doesn't in another right that'sous. The
Speaker 1: fact that it comes online to the degree that it
Speaker 1: does and not one degree further is also mysterious. It's
Speaker 1: probably dependent on other things that it seemed completely adventitious
Speaker 1: to my character, like whether I got enough sleep the
Speaker 1: night before, or whether I had a full lunch, or
Speaker 1: whether that you know, whether I got enough sunlight. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: it's just who knows, like totally mysterious. Like I'm an absurdist,
Speaker 1: so I I love a lot. We were saying, because
Speaker 1: I will see things that I do and I'm like,
Speaker 1: but I'm like, oh, that was really kind of predictable
Speaker 1: that I would do that. But you know, it's not
Speaker 1: totally mysterious if we have an understanding psychology about how
Speaker 1: genes work. You know, I kind of get why I
Speaker 1: have the dopamine drive. You know, I get what's pumping
Speaker 1: through my head. I can kind of understand it from
Speaker 1: a mechanistic level. Right, It's not like totally buttandb yeah, well,
Speaker 1: unders no, I get I guess it's it's descriptively in
Speaker 1: certain cases, it's descriptively not mysterious at all. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know causally we can tell a story about it.
Speaker 1: But again, it's just two differ levels of of connecting
Speaker 1: to the phenomenology here. When I say mysterious, I mean like,
Speaker 1: like I can move my hand, right, This is the
Speaker 1: most This is one of the most prosaic things about me,
Speaker 1: that I can move my hand. I can do this.
Speaker 1: I have no insight into how I do this. Right.
Speaker 1: If I suddenly couldn't do it, yes, that would be flabbergasting.
Speaker 1: But the fact that I can do it is also flabbergasting.
Speaker 1: I have no literally no insight. Now I know something
Speaker 1: about the neurology of this, right, I can talk about
Speaker 1: muscle fibers, and you know acting, and and you know
Speaker 1: the transduction in motor nerves, and you know a seal coaling,
Speaker 1: and like it, I can I can kind of vomit
Speaker 1: my concepts onto this experience. Right. None of that reaches
Speaker 1: in to the experience, none of it. Right, So like
Speaker 1: this is this is irreducibly mysterious. You know that's interesting
Speaker 1: because some people have argued that autistic savants actually are
Speaker 1: an exception to all this, and they actually can get
Speaker 1: inside the module, you know, in a very deep way
Speaker 1: that most of us can't. That's why I wish I
Speaker 1: knew what the quality of an autistic avant was because
Speaker 1: I talked to the elite Daryld Treffort. He was a
Speaker 1: dear friend of mine. He was a you know, rain
Speaker 1: Man scientific advisor. He studied. He spent his whole life
Speaker 1: studying these people. And it's interesting because it seems like
Speaker 1: some of those autistic capacities, like to be able to
Speaker 1: just verbatim play back something actually requires the ability to
Speaker 1: get into the module consciously in some way that is
Speaker 1: not privy to the rest of us. So I think
Speaker 1: there's actually some really interesting neuroscientific exceptions to some of this. Well,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say so. I'm not saying that you can't
Speaker 1: have more and more fine grained insight into the experience, right, So,
Speaker 1: like like you can learn to pay enough tension to
Speaker 1: anything a motor a simple motor experience like moving your hand,
Speaker 1: and it can break down into you know, it can
Speaker 1: become pixelated in ways that are interesting, right, So you
Speaker 1: can you can become more sensitive to the the link
Speaker 1: between mind and body. I mean, like like the arison
Speaker 1: of intention and kind of having a kind of threshold
Speaker 1: effect that actually does you know, trigger a motor program.
Speaker 1: You can become more sensitive to things we know to
Speaker 1: be factually true. Like if you touch a hot stove,
Speaker 1: you can actually experience the reflex component of withdrawing your hand,
Speaker 1: so that you actually withdrew it before you felt the pain. Right,
Speaker 1: Like the you know, the road to the amygdala is
Speaker 1: actually faster than the sensory the road to sensory cortex
Speaker 1: that actually registered the conscious percept of oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's too hot. Right, so you can you can notice
Speaker 1: that you can actually become sensitive enough to notice that
Speaker 1: first you withdrew your hand and then you felt the
Speaker 1: pain of how hot it was. Right. So I'm not
Speaker 1: saying you can't have any insight into this, but there
Speaker 1: is still something. However deep you go into anything, however
Speaker 1: atomized your experience consciously becomes of of phenomenon. There is
Speaker 1: just simply this fact that first something wasn't there, and
Speaker 1: then it's there. There's a there's a you can you
Speaker 1: can shatter your your your your subjective experience down to
Speaker 1: its atoms and notice that things are just appearing out
Speaker 1: of the darkness, right sights, sound, sensations, thoughts, intentions, emotions,
Speaker 1: or their micro constituents, in so far as you can
Speaker 1: find those with your attention, and and again, things can
Speaker 1: get incredibly pixelated when you're doing when you spend months
Speaker 1: on retreat doing nothing but pay attention to to mostly
Speaker 1: sensory perception, it breaks down, It can break down into
Speaker 1: especially if you're if you're doing it strategically in the
Speaker 1: particular way so as to look for it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of smallest and briefest aspects, which is one style of meditation.
Speaker 1: Things become amazingly pixelated in your body, like you don't
Speaker 1: you don't feel that you have a body anymore. You
Speaker 1: have a you know, a cloud of sensation you know
Speaker 1: of temperature and pressure and and movement that is just
Speaker 1: and does you know doesn't have the shape of a
Speaker 1: body at all. Right, you don't feel hand You feel
Speaker 1: these these these micro changes of of of primary sensation
Speaker 1: at age each moment. But again, whatever you're noticing is there,
Speaker 1: and then it's not there, and then something else is there,
Speaker 1: and then it's not there. You are not doing any
Speaker 1: of it. That's the crucial point. You, the one who witnessing,
Speaker 1: aren't doing any of them. But you can do something
Speaker 1: about it. That's the point I'm trying to make. Well,
Speaker 1: But whether or not you do in the next moment
Speaker 1: is just as mysterious as this. I get your point, though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I see what you're saying. It is. Look, let's end.
Speaker 1: But you're you're testing my limits of free will right
Speaker 1: now because I'm starving. But I and I'm sure you
Speaker 1: must be as well. I want to just agree with
Speaker 1: you that it's all inspiring. I walk around constantly in
Speaker 1: a state of all in wonder. That's my default mode
Speaker 1: is curiosity about everything about people I'm supposed to hate.
Speaker 1: I'm actually just I witness them, just like I would
Speaker 1: witness my consciousness. So I'm with you on a lot
Speaker 1: of that. I really can't thank you enough for coming
Speaker 1: on today, spending four freaking hours with me, covering almost
Speaker 1: everything about human existence. And I would still say to
Speaker 1: be continued, because there I didn't get to the Twitter questions.
Speaker 1: I didn't get to the mindfulness thing. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: we have to like you come back my podcast, but
Speaker 1: I just suspect we'll talk again someday. You know, the
Speaker 1: conversation will continue. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Scott.
Speaker 1: So thank you. It's a questions. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
Speaker 1: you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being such a great supporter of the show, and
Speaker 1: tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.