Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Today
Speaker 1: we have Michael Shermer and Philip Goff on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, a monthly
Speaker 1: columnist for Scientific American, and a presidential Fellow at Chapman University,
Speaker 1: where he teaches Skepticism one O one. He's the author
Speaker 1: of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things,
Speaker 1: The Believing Brain, and Heavens on Earth, The Scientific Search
Speaker 1: for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia. Goff is an associate
Speaker 1: professor in philosophy at Central European University in Budapest. His
Speaker 1: main research focus is trying to explain how the brain
Speaker 1: produces consciousness. His first book, which was published by Oxford
Speaker 1: University Press, is called Consciousness and fundamental reality. Golf is
Speaker 1: currently working on a book on consciousness aimed at a
Speaker 1: general audience. Guy is so great to chat with you today.
Speaker 1: All right, you know this is yeah, this is not
Speaker 1: some light topics here, you know, but hopefully we'll have
Speaker 1: solved some of the deepest mysteries of humanity. Not just humanity,
Speaker 1: it's deepest mysteries of the universe today. So let's start
Speaker 1: off by giving a little context for this chat. Michael,
Speaker 1: you wrote an article for Scientific American called will Science
Speaker 1: ever Solve the Mysteries of Consciousness, Free Will, and God?
Speaker 1: And in that article you contended that not only consciousness,
Speaker 1: but also free will and God are these sort of
Speaker 1: final mysteries? Can you explain a little bit what countsil
Speaker 1: what criteria you know, does it count to be a
Speaker 1: final mystery? Yeah? So, But just by way of background,
Speaker 1: so it's a monthly one of my monthly columns. I've
Speaker 1: done over two hundred of these, and every month I
Speaker 1: got to come up with something new, you know, I
Speaker 1: can't just debunk astrology every month in tarot card readers.
Speaker 1: That gets old pretty quick. So I've had in my
Speaker 1: head a long time this idea of the mysterians back
Speaker 1: when I met Martin Gardner in the late eighties, he
Speaker 1: called himself a mysterian. I was like, what's the mysterian?
Speaker 1: So as he articulated it, there's certain things that science
Speaker 1: could never prove or even really test because of their
Speaker 1: conceptual problems that are bounded by language, and he put
Speaker 1: God and free will in that category. And Martin, you know,
Speaker 1: he was the longtime columnist and scientific American before me
Speaker 1: for twenty five years, and he's really one of the
Speaker 1: founders of the modern skeptical movement, which is generally also
Speaker 1: associated with atheism, and yet he was a theist. He
Speaker 1: called himself a phidiast in James's pragmatism, and that, as
Speaker 1: James explained that there's certain issues where if you can't
Speaker 1: prove it one way or the other, like God or
Speaker 1: free will, it's okay to just go ahead and make
Speaker 1: the leap for whatever works for you. So Martin would argue,
Speaker 1: for example, I think the atheists have slightly better arguments
Speaker 1: than the theists do, but you know, we can't determine
Speaker 1: it one way or the other. So I choose to
Speaker 1: believe in God because it works for me. I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to claim anything. I can't prove it. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying that's what I believe you full stop anyway. So
Speaker 1: I've had that in the back of my mind for
Speaker 1: a long time. So when I wrote this column, I thought, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So you know, consciousness is famously the hard problem, and
Speaker 1: Stephen Pinker had just written about this, and I just read,
Speaker 1: you know, his new book Enlightenment Now where he talks
Speaker 1: about the hard problem of consciousness as a conceptual problem,
Speaker 1: not a scientific problem. That is. But here we have
Speaker 1: to define specifically what we mean by the hard problem
Speaker 1: because it's a little more complex than I made it
Speaker 1: out to be in my column. That is what it
Speaker 1: feels like to be something, or what it is to
Speaker 1: be something, And now I know it's more complex than that.
Speaker 1: But you know the problem of other minds, like I
Speaker 1: can't know what it's like to be you. My little
Speaker 1: monkeylus in my head can't leap over into yours. So
Speaker 1: see what you're right on the screen of your mind.
Speaker 1: You know, this is not how it works, so that
Speaker 1: could never be solved by science. What it feels like
Speaker 1: to be something else, I can only know, you know,
Speaker 1: in an experiential way, what it feels like to be me,
Speaker 1: and that's it. I can imagine what it's like to
Speaker 1: be you through mind reading or or I can imagine
Speaker 1: what it's like to be about, you know, with echolocation
Speaker 1: or something by getting in a closet and talking to
Speaker 1: the wall and see who I can feel it bouncing
Speaker 1: off or something like that. But that doesn't really mean
Speaker 1: I know what it's like to be about anyway. So
Speaker 1: that's why I threw that one in there. And then well, Michael, well, Michael,
Speaker 1: hold on a second, and before you go through all
Speaker 1: of them, I want to just back up. I just
Speaker 1: wanted you to provide the context, and then we'll go
Speaker 1: in into each one individually, yeah, as a package. I mean,
Speaker 1: before we go into them, I did want to step
Speaker 1: back a moment and ask you both a question about
Speaker 1: argumentation and reasoning as the route to truth. Do you
Speaker 1: both think that is the ultimate route to truth or
Speaker 1: even the only route to truth? I think that's an
Speaker 1: important discussion to have when we have this sort of discussion. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I mean, if there is another route to truth, it's
Speaker 1: not one I know about. I mean about experiential well, experience,
Speaker 1: surely you have experience. Yeah, yeah, I guess. I guess.
Speaker 1: My starting point is there are three, perhaps three sources
Speaker 1: of information about the world. One perhaps the most familiar
Speaker 1: is experiments and observation, you know, the scientific method. But
Speaker 1: I think we have another source of information about the world,
Speaker 1: namely the reality of consciousness, the immediate awareness of what
Speaker 1: of one's own conscious experience. So, you know, even if
Speaker 1: we if we had a theory, for example, that could
Speaker 1: account for all the data of observation and experiments, you know,
Speaker 1: the grand unified theory, but it couldn't account for the
Speaker 1: reality of consciousness. I think that would be thereby falsified,
Speaker 1: because we know that consciousness exists from our own case
Speaker 1: from nothing is more evident than the realities of our
Speaker 1: feelings and experiences. So I'd say that they're the two
Speaker 1: main sources of data. And you know, so some people
Speaker 1: think of the scientific method as we just do observation experiments.
Speaker 1: In my view, we need to be a bit more expensive.
Speaker 1: We need to take what we know about the world
Speaker 1: from observation and experiments, but also the reality of consciousness
Speaker 1: as we met, you know, and somehow find a way
Speaker 1: of putting the two together. And that's notoriously very difficult
Speaker 1: to do, but that, you know, I think that's that's
Speaker 1: how I see the project. And of course the third
Speaker 1: source is reasoning, logic, the law of non contradiction, mathematical
Speaker 1: logical reasoning. So so those three things I think would
Speaker 1: be in mind. Yeah, that's a perfect articulation of I
Speaker 1: would agree that a public exchange of ideas is really
Speaker 1: the only way to get out of our own heads. So,
Speaker 1: for example, my way back around, I have an invitation
Speaker 1: to go to Costa Rica to spend doing to doing ayahuasca.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I don't even know if I
Speaker 1: want to do this, because apparently have the future guts
Speaker 1: out for several hours a day to get the full
Speaker 1: experience of the way you finish. But the teation comes
Speaker 1: from a fellow named Graham Hancock, who is sort of
Speaker 1: what we would skeptics called one of these alternative archaeologists.
Speaker 1: You know, he thinks Sepeeriman's were built by these advanced
Speaker 1: advanced civilization that lived twenty thousand years ago and so on.
Speaker 1: But anyway, he's kind of into a spiritual type of
Speaker 1: truth and that he knows for sure that this other
Speaker 1: spiritual world exists. It's another dimension or something. And the
Speaker 1: way to access it through the doors of perception, as
Speaker 1: it were, is through ayahuasca. And then if only I
Speaker 1: would do this, then I wouldn't know his truth about
Speaker 1: this spirit world. And the problem with that, in addition
Speaker 1: to that not wanting to pug for several days, several
Speaker 1: hours a day while I get to this other world,
Speaker 1: is that Let's say I do that and I suddenly
Speaker 1: return and say I was wrong. There is this other world.
Speaker 1: I'm not a materialist anymore. I'm now a dual list
Speaker 1: or whatever. And I write a column in Scientific Americans
Speaker 1: saying I've discovered this new truth. And what I point
Speaker 1: to for you instead of a data set experiment or something,
Speaker 1: I point to you the ayahuasca and say here, you
Speaker 1: drink the tea and you'll see it yourself. And I
Speaker 1: don't think that can get us out of our heads.
Speaker 1: I'm just putting my truth into your head through this
Speaker 1: artificial way of creating this other reality. And it's still
Speaker 1: not clear, you know, whether it's just all in the
Speaker 1: head or there is some other place to go. So
Speaker 1: at some point we have to get out of our
Speaker 1: heads and in a public way, you, you, or anybody
Speaker 1: can see what I'm pointing to and if you can't
Speaker 1: do that, then I think we're not doing science. Look,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you both for giving that really
Speaker 1: eucinating response to my question. But I do have a
Speaker 1: question in response to that, Michael, because I wonder, like,
Speaker 1: what if the ultimate truth of reality happens to be
Speaker 1: something that isn'tcomprehensible to humans or does not coincide with
Speaker 1: your rational facilities? So what if, like, okay, let's say
Speaker 1: you die someday, well you will die something, but say
Speaker 1: after sorry to break the news to you. When that happens,
Speaker 1: what if you discover you know, there is something it's
Speaker 1: nothing that you ever could have imagined or predicted based
Speaker 1: on the limited cognitive faculties that you evolved or not evolve.
Speaker 1: I guess we'll discuss God in a second, But do
Speaker 1: you see what I'm saying. What I'm saying is like,
Speaker 1: how do you like, why are you so sure that
Speaker 1: like your rationality trumps the experience. I'm not sure. And
Speaker 1: it's entirely possible that I could wake up in some
Speaker 1: other place after my death. That's okay, fine, I'm open
Speaker 1: to that possibility, but that doesn't mean I can state
Speaker 1: in any assertive way that this could be true. I
Speaker 1: just don't know. So in skepticism, the default position is
Speaker 1: the null hypothesis. What you just described is we assume
Speaker 1: is not true until proven otherwise. Now, so the problem
Speaker 1: here is, let's say this happens and I wake up
Speaker 1: in this other place. How can I come back and
Speaker 1: communicate with you or anyone that you know. I've been
Speaker 1: to the other side and I've seen it. It's great.
Speaker 1: And of course this is what people who have near
Speaker 1: death experiences tell us. And yet here's the problem external validation. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm not all the problem of external validation. Again, I
Speaker 1: can't tell the difference between this is what I describe
Speaker 1: in my book Heavin's on Earth, between say, even Alexander's
Speaker 1: passages in his for Proof of Heaven, this trip he
Speaker 1: took to Heaven, and then the opening pages of Sam
Speaker 1: Harris's book Waking Up, in which he talks about this
Speaker 1: trip he took on I think it was ecstasy or MDMA.
Speaker 1: To me, the narrative sounds the same. One took drugs,
Speaker 1: one had a brain experience while in a coma, and
Speaker 1: the narratives sound the same to me. And the same
Speaker 1: thing with reading Oliver Sachs's books, his memoir, he talks
Speaker 1: about dropping acid in the sixties and the fantastic trips
Speaker 1: he took, and to me, they all sound the same.
Speaker 1: So how can we validate, get out of our heads
Speaker 1: and get some external validation, whether it's all just in
Speaker 1: our heads or some of them are actually real. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I kind of broadly an agreement with what
Speaker 1: Michaels saying with reference to phenomena outside of the mind.
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit hesitant about applying this consciousness. I mean,
Speaker 1: to come back to the problem of consciousness, I mean
Speaker 1: I kind of agreed with pretty much a lot of
Speaker 1: the problem as Michael articulated it. I mean I phrased
Speaker 1: it slightly differently. So the core of the problem consciousness
Speaker 1: for me is that physical science works with the purely
Speaker 1: quantitative vocabulary, whereas consciousness is an essentially quantitative phenomenon, just
Speaker 1: in the sense that it involves qualities. If you think
Speaker 1: about the redness of a red experience, or the smell
Speaker 1: of coffee or the taste of a lemon, you can't
Speaker 1: capture these kind of qualities in the quantitative language of
Speaker 1: physical science. And in fact, this was well understood by
Speaker 1: the founder of physical science, Galileo. Right, So, Galileo only
Speaker 1: ever intended physical science as a partial account of reality.
Speaker 1: He hoped that it could capture the quantitative, mathematical features
Speaker 1: of reality, but he never dreamt that it could capture
Speaker 1: the qualities of consciousness, which he believed resided in the soul.
Speaker 1: So I think, you know, physical science, because of the
Speaker 1: limits of its vocabulary, can never give us a complete
Speaker 1: account of consciousness. It can never capture these subjective qualities. However,
Speaker 1: and this is I don't know maybe where I start
Speaker 1: to part company with micro My starting point is, we
Speaker 1: know that consciousness is a real nominon right each of us.
Speaker 1: It is not publicly accessible. You can't look inside my
Speaker 1: head and see my feelings and my pain. Well, each
Speaker 1: of us knows, and you know, it's uncontroversial. Each of
Speaker 1: us knows that it's real. So it has to it
Speaker 1: has to be integrated into our scientific picture of the
Speaker 1: world somehow. Now, if we agree with physical science is
Speaker 1: not up to that task and it was never designed
Speaker 1: for that task, I think we need to look to
Speaker 1: other paradigms of scientific explanation. So I think maybe we
Speaker 1: part company at that point. So you don't call yourself
Speaker 1: a mysterian were very unconsciously, no, I'm I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: open to that. I think sterianism seriously as a as
Speaker 1: a theoretical possibility. I mean, if you think we are
Speaker 1: we've evolved through natural selection, then you know it might
Speaker 1: not be surprising if we don't have access to all
Speaker 1: of you know, nature's mysteries. In fact, you know, if
Speaker 1: we've arvived, sorry, if we've evolved to survive rather than
Speaker 1: do science, you might think it's surprising that we can
Speaker 1: do as well as we can. But I guess I'm
Speaker 1: inclined to think, you know, why why would you go
Speaker 1: for mystery if there are other possibilities? So I'm inclined
Speaker 1: to think there are other scientific paradigms on the table
Speaker 1: that can potentially give us a complete account, intelligible account
Speaker 1: of consciousness. Or I'm a proponent of to be known
Speaker 1: as panpsychism as an alternative scientific paradigm for explaining consciousness.
Speaker 1: So I guess my body is give that a go,
Speaker 1: and if that doesn't work out, I guess I think.
Speaker 1: I guess I think that there are good reasons to
Speaker 1: think physical science can never give his complete account of
Speaker 1: the mind. As you know, it's never been what it's
Speaker 1: designed to do. But I think there are other non
Speaker 1: non physicalist modes of scientific paradigms. Try them out. If
Speaker 1: nothing works, then we can be mysterious. I guess that's so.
Speaker 1: Can you please explain to our listening audience what panpsychism is? Sure,
Speaker 1: So I like to introduce this follows. I think you know,
Speaker 1: we've been trying for many decades now to to explain
Speaker 1: consciousness in terms of utterly non conscious processes in the brain,
Speaker 1: and we've got we've made very little progress on that,
Speaker 1: at least on the central problem of consciousness. So the
Speaker 1: pansych Is proposed proposes an alternative research program. Rather than
Speaker 1: trying to explain consciousness in terms of non consciousness, we
Speaker 1: try to explain complex human and animal consciousness in terms
Speaker 1: of simpler forms of consciousness, simpler forms of consciousness that
Speaker 1: are then postulated to exist as basic, basic aspects of
Speaker 1: the matter. So that's the basic research program. Does that
Speaker 1: relate Tononi's work or was it Juliu? I don't know
Speaker 1: if parent's first name TOI Julio Judio to I mean
Speaker 1: there are connected to pansych Is you know, it sounds
Speaker 1: a bit wacky, but I mean when I first started
Speaker 1: applying for jobs like twelve years ago, and people told me,
Speaker 1: people who had a lot of respect, who told me
Speaker 1: to keep pansychism secretly secret because you know, it's not
Speaker 1: very credible. But in the last five or ten years,
Speaker 1: you know, in academic philosophy, this has gone from being
Speaker 1: a position that's kind of laughed up to be you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of philosophers thinking that it is perhaps our
Speaker 1: best hope for an intelligible solution to the problem of consciousness,
Speaker 1: largely because I mean that the influence of the rediscovery
Speaker 1: of some very important work in the nineteen twenties by
Speaker 1: the philosopher Virgin Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington that
Speaker 1: has sort of been rediscovered and causing a lot of
Speaker 1: interest in academic philosophy. A lot of my work is
Speaker 1: bringing together the literature there. But also there's this in neuroscience.
Speaker 1: One of the leading neuroscience theories of consciousness, Integrated information
Speaker 1: theory does have panpsychist implications, at least in the sense
Speaker 1: that it predicts that consciousness is more widespread than we
Speaker 1: ordinarily take it to be, and it also has arguably,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of empirical confirmation. I think there
Speaker 1: is a lot of empirical confirmation in terms of the
Speaker 1: non hard just in terms of the neurocorrelate's view in
Speaker 1: the sense. So like you know, I mean, it's interesting
Speaker 1: what have we learned from the neuroscience. Well, for one,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that the cerebellum doesn't really play much of
Speaker 1: a role in consciousness, and it's really kind of our
Speaker 1: higher order cerebral cortex functions and the one network that
Speaker 1: seems to be particularly associated with consciousness. My colleague Daniel
Speaker 1: Bohrer has done written a book on this called The
Speaker 1: Ravenous Brain. I don't know if you read it, linking
Speaker 1: the frontal parietal brain network to consciousness and the frontal
Speaker 1: pridal brain network associated with with intelligence general intelligence. You know,
Speaker 1: like IQ tests with concentration, but really integration, you know,
Speaker 1: like really the ability to integrate all the area it's
Speaker 1: like the executive area, although there's no specific area, like
Speaker 1: you know, it's no homunculous, but you know, it seems
Speaker 1: to be able to serve a coordination function. There's does
Speaker 1: seem to be something there with integration. So yeah, Michael
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask your thoughts, you know, so we
Speaker 1: make sure we include you in this conversation, just putting
Speaker 1: that out there. Do you think that, like, even if
Speaker 1: we have a complete understanding of how consciousness arises from
Speaker 1: an emergent property of integration, is that going to satisfy
Speaker 1: you from a final perspective, Well, it depends what problem
Speaker 1: we're trying to solve. That would be the so called
Speaker 1: easy problem, which doesn't really seem easy at all. But
Speaker 1: the fact that someone's cock, yeah, easier. My friend Christoph Cock,
Speaker 1: who I know well and have followed for the last
Speaker 1: twenty five years. You know, he seems to be working
Speaker 1: toward really a deeper understanding the neural correlates of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I do not know there recently he's embraced this panpsych
Speaker 1: is an idea through to Noni's itt okay, so that
Speaker 1: gets my attention. So it just depends on, you know,
Speaker 1: if that research paradigm is successful, what problem is that solving.
Speaker 1: If it solves this problem of not what it's like
Speaker 1: to be something this qualitative experience, to me, that just
Speaker 1: seems like a conceptual problem, not a scientific one. But
Speaker 1: if it's you know, what are the neural correlates of consciousness,
Speaker 1: how does consciousness come online or something like that. As
Speaker 1: brains become larger and more complex, then that seems completely doable.
Speaker 1: And so, for example, if we came back five hundred
Speaker 1: years from now, thousand years from now and looked at
Speaker 1: what neuroscientists were doing, you know, it could be entirely
Speaker 1: be you know, oh, we've completely solved that problem. Would
Speaker 1: they be able to say, oh, the mind body problem, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's we solved that three hundred years ago. That's no problem,
Speaker 1: and here's the answer that's possible. You know, it could
Speaker 1: be we're just approaching it the wrong layer or but
Speaker 1: what the mysterians say is that the limitation is in
Speaker 1: our conception language, the size of our brain, how our
Speaker 1: brains are structured, and that if we encountered an et
Speaker 1: from wherever, Vega or something and they had a brain,
Speaker 1: you know, ten times the size of ours, that it
Speaker 1: could be you know, the mind body problem is no
Speaker 1: problem at all. They completely figured that out. And so
Speaker 1: you know, by mysterian, we just mean you know, for
Speaker 1: our brains at this moment, I think, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think it's a good question, Mike, what are we
Speaker 1: trying to do here, And what is the question? I mean,
Speaker 1: the way I think about it is, what we want
Speaker 1: is that an intelligible explanation of how consciousness fits into
Speaker 1: our scientific story. We know it's real. We know it's real,
Speaker 1: so it must fit in somehow, and so the question
Speaker 1: is how does it fit in? I think there are
Speaker 1: you know what most people think, Oh, the only scientific
Speaker 1: way to do it is to account for it in
Speaker 1: terms of physical science, in terms of you know, we
Speaker 1: just keep doing neuroscience. So there's this standard line people say,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, the hard problem is hard. But if
Speaker 1: you look at the great success of physical science and
Speaker 1: explaining more and more of our universe, then you know
Speaker 1: that ought to give us confidence that will one day
Speaker 1: crack the problem of consciousness if we just carry on
Speaker 1: with kind of standard neuroscience. But I've got a slightly
Speaker 1: different take on the history of science. You know, I
Speaker 1: argue in my book that the reason physical science has
Speaker 1: done so well is because Galileo kicks things off by
Speaker 1: taking consciousness outside of the domain of scientific inquiry, and
Speaker 1: he thereby gives physical scientists a more manageable task. Right, roughly,
Speaker 1: the task of constructing mathematical models for predicting the behavior
Speaker 1: of matter, and that project has gone really well, and
Speaker 1: it provides really useful information. Right, if you can predict
Speaker 1: with great accuracy how matter behaves, then you can manipulate
Speaker 1: the world and have a wonderful technology. So that's gone
Speaker 1: really well. But it was never designed to account for
Speaker 1: the subjective qualities in our immediate awareness. It was designed
Speaker 1: to predict behavior. And so when I just don't buy
Speaker 1: it all these arguments, Oh, it's done really well at
Speaker 1: predicting behavior, so it's going to explain consciousness, it was
Speaker 1: never designed to do that. I think if Galileo was
Speaker 1: to time travel to the present day and hear about
Speaker 1: this hard problem of consciousness, he'd say, you know, of
Speaker 1: course you can't give a physical account of consciousness. I
Speaker 1: designed physical science to predict behavior, to for quantities, not qualities.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, we're going through a phase of
Speaker 1: history where we're sort of so blown away by the
Speaker 1: success of physical science that we've forgotten that it was
Speaker 1: always intended as a limited project of predicting that we
Speaker 1: hold on. Hold on a second, because like there's a
Speaker 1: whole wide swaths of psychologists that primarily rely on the
Speaker 1: qualitative method of analysis. Let's not like hate on them.
Speaker 1: Absolutely no, there's insight and understanding that can be had,
Speaker 1: even descriptive, you know, descriptive understanding through fully understanding the
Speaker 1: experience of an individual. Well could be one example. But
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of humanistic psychologists who a
Speaker 1: lot of the maur clinicians, but some of them aren't
Speaker 1: work and just others even working in other fields like
Speaker 1: social work, et cetera. There are some social science like sociology,
Speaker 1: some of them consider themselves social scientists, you know, where
Speaker 1: they try to extrapolate from a deep quality of analysis
Speaker 1: or something, and there are there are actually quantitative methods
Speaker 1: that help you, like code and you know, understand patterns
Speaker 1: and qualitative data. You're completely right, and I've oversimplified. One
Speaker 1: always has to sort of overgeneralize to get the general
Speaker 1: picture out and then you find tune the details. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think what I mean by physical science, I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about science. I'm talking about a very specific understanding
Speaker 1: of physical science aspect that has a purely quantitative vocabulary.
Speaker 1: I mean it's most exemptivid in physics, which is basically
Speaker 1: mathematics and maybe some causal notions. I think neuroscience is
Speaker 1: not too far away from that. So I suppose what
Speaker 1: my view is you cannot fully account for the qualities
Speaker 1: of consciousness in that kind of vocabulary. But of course
Speaker 1: I mean that there are sciences that you know, have
Speaker 1: their data asking people what they're feeling or whatever right
Speaker 1: to that extent. To that extent, the data is come
Speaker 1: to psychology, certainly. But my point is, look, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people for many decades now the dominant view
Speaker 1: is still now, we've just got to keep doing neuroscience,
Speaker 1: and we'll explain consciousness in a purely quantitative language of neuroscience.
Speaker 1: I think that project we've never got anywhere with it.
Speaker 1: It's not what physical science was designed for, and I
Speaker 1: think there are just conceptual problems with it. So, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean we can't account for consciousness scientifically. And
Speaker 1: I think that what the hope of the plan psychist
Speaker 1: research program that's very much so I know, is that
Speaker 1: we can at some point give an intelligible account of
Speaker 1: human and animal consciousness in terms of more basic forms
Speaker 1: of consciousness that are then postulated to exist as basic
Speaker 1: constitions and manner at least give that a go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: A couple points on this the When I mentioned clinicians here,
Speaker 1: I was thinking of the recovered memory movement. What became
Speaker 1: clear there was the difference between experimental psychologists and clinical psychologists.
Speaker 1: And so if you're a clinician, you have a patient,
Speaker 1: a client, they're trying to explain, you know, why he
Speaker 1: or she feels depressed or it's overweight, can't sleep, whatever
Speaker 1: the symptoms are that they're there for, and they identify
Speaker 1: something in their past. I think, you know, I was
Speaker 1: molested as a child. Now pretty soon that becomes a
Speaker 1: truth for them in their head, that is the explanation
Speaker 1: for my malaise, and for the clinician. The clinician is
Speaker 1: not there to determine what really happened. It's just that's
Speaker 1: the truth for my client. And if I get results
Speaker 1: and they feel less depressed, then I'm successful. But at
Speaker 1: some point the problem steps out of the clinicians room,
Speaker 1: when say, the person being accused of being the molester
Speaker 1: is arrested and charged with a crime. And that's what
Speaker 1: happened in the nineties, and that caused a lot of
Speaker 1: people a great harm. And so we saw the difference there.
Speaker 1: It's not okay to just say it's my truth full
Speaker 1: stop when it has consequences for other people's realities. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's one point. Second point back on the physical
Speaker 1: sciences at Galileo. Now if the original mysterians Colin McGinn
Speaker 1: and Nom Chomsky, Nom Chomsky in particular, it's a great
Speaker 1: video lectury as at MIT where he's talking about he
Speaker 1: starts it at Newton and that Newton's identification of gravity
Speaker 1: and his statement I feigned no hypotheses. In other words,
Speaker 1: what is gravity? I don't know. It's kind of an
Speaker 1: occult thing. And my mathematics is just telling us what
Speaker 1: planets do and objects do when they're near each other
Speaker 1: in their mass and so on. But if you ask me,
Speaker 1: but what is it? I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1: You know, gravity is the tendency for objects to attract
Speaker 1: when well, why do objects attract one another because of gravity? Well,
Speaker 1: you know this is a tautology. So now we're getting
Speaker 1: Philip at the problem you identified. It's from a quantitative
Speaker 1: to a qualitative. Yeah, but what is it? Now? You
Speaker 1: know someone like Kip Thorn Caltech who deals with you know,
Speaker 1: general relativity, and so he'll tell you it has something
Speaker 1: to do with time and eCos into Einstein in equations
Speaker 1: and so on. I'm not sure I really understand it,
Speaker 1: but that almost starts to shift into that what it does,
Speaker 1: into that sort of qualitative features of the natural world
Speaker 1: that maybe the kind of science we've been doing is
Speaker 1: not equipped to fully understand with the words that we use. Michael,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate those two points, and I definitely hear
Speaker 1: a Philip has to say to that, just really quickly.
Speaker 1: I was, you know, when I was making my point,
Speaker 1: I wasn't necessarily thinking about clinicians the example that might
Speaker 1: be helpful here. I was thinking of like Herb Simon
Speaker 1: and Newell, like when they first kind of started this
Speaker 1: cognitive revolution. I mean they use cognitive modeling techniques or
Speaker 1: think a lout protocols where they asked large groups of
Speaker 1: participants to think a loud while they were solving a problem,
Speaker 1: for instance, and we learned a lot about the fundamental
Speaker 1: principles of cognition through that sort of subjective we say,
Speaker 1: a more subjective approach. I was more thinking about that
Speaker 1: along in those kind of lines. Yeah. Yeah, Well, back
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, Alfred Russell Wallace broke with Darwin
Speaker 1: on this subject. He was the subject of my doctoral dissertation.
Speaker 1: I wrote a biography of him, and he argued, if
Speaker 1: natural selection is definitely true, but why would it create
Speaker 1: brains so large and so capable of experiencing things like mathematics,
Speaker 1: aesthetic appreciation, art, music, and so on. What's the purpose
Speaker 1: of that? Why do you need that? I mean, having
Speaker 1: a chip sized brain is all you need for survival.
Speaker 1: Why do you need a brain four times that size?
Speaker 1: What would be the adaptive purpose of being able to function?
Speaker 1: Of being able to do calculus, quantum physics, whatever that
Speaker 1: not in his time, but any kind of mathematics or
Speaker 1: aesthetic appreciation. And Wallace carried that line of reasoning out
Speaker 1: where he concluded there has to be some kind of
Speaker 1: higher intelligence that put that spark in there, and Darwin said, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're not going that far. And so, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a long private sou as you introduced natural selection in
Speaker 1: the formula, It's like, yeah, why would we be able
Speaker 1: to do this? This is an interesting problem and why
Speaker 1: are we the only ones to do it to this extent?
Speaker 1: Can I link back to some of the Chompsky stuff
Speaker 1: Michael's Yeah, I mean I think so. I think this
Speaker 1: really connects to the influence of Russell and Eddington from
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, which is recently being mood discovered in
Speaker 1: academic philosophy, which is causing a great deal of interest
Speaker 1: for this punt psychis model. I mean, their starting point
Speaker 1: is very closely related to the Chompsky point. There that
Speaker 1: in the public mind, physics is giving us this complete
Speaker 1: description of reality. But what Russell and Eddington realizes that
Speaker 1: when you it becomes apparent upon reflection that physical science
Speaker 1: is confined to telling us what matter does? You know,
Speaker 1: if you think about what physics tells us about an
Speaker 1: electron tells us as mass and charge, and these characteristics
Speaker 1: are characterized completely behavioristically. You know, charges characterized in terms
Speaker 1: of attraction, repulsion, gravit Mass is characterized in terms of
Speaker 1: gravitational attraction and resistance to acceleration. So physics tells us
Speaker 1: what the electron does, how it behaves. It tells us
Speaker 1: nothing about what losses like to call the intrinsic nature
Speaker 1: of the electron, how the electron is in and of itself.
Speaker 1: So this is sometimes called the problem of intrinsic natures.
Speaker 1: You know, like that physical science tells us nothing about
Speaker 1: the intrinsic nature of matter. It tells us great information
Speaker 1: about how it behaves, but it doesn't tell us how
Speaker 1: it is in and of itself. So there's this sort
Speaker 1: of huge hole in our scientific picture of the universe. Now,
Speaker 1: the genius of Russell and Eddington, though, and this is
Speaker 1: where it becomes non mysterian, or sort of moves beyond mysterious.
Speaker 1: And they said, well, look, their genius was to relate
Speaker 1: that problem to the problem of consciousness. Right. The problem
Speaker 1: of consciousness is, we're looking for this place for consciousness.
Speaker 1: We know it exists. Where can we put it? The
Speaker 1: problem of intrinsic nature says, we don't know the intrinsic
Speaker 1: nature of matter. So Russell and Eddington said, well, put
Speaker 1: the put consciousness in the whole. We've got this whole,
Speaker 1: we've got. We need to find a place for consciousness.
Speaker 1: But conscious is not so the idea is there's just matter, right,
Speaker 1: that's all. There is just matter, nothing supernatural. Physical science
Speaker 1: tells us what it does, how it behaves, but its
Speaker 1: intrinsic nature is constituted of forms of consciousness. So this
Speaker 1: gives us a beautiful, simple, parsimonious way of integrating consciousness
Speaker 1: into our scientific picture of the world, and it gives
Speaker 1: us a way that avoids the problems of materialism on
Speaker 1: the one hand, the problems of dualism on the other.
Speaker 1: So that's the kind of research program, the kind of
Speaker 1: general picture of how consciousness fits in that is becoming
Speaker 1: attractive to a lot of philosophers and some neuroscientists now.
Speaker 1: And yeah, don't need to be mysterious, we can be
Speaker 1: Russell Eddington pan psychisist. So let's transition to free will
Speaker 1: from that point. Let's see if we can play that
Speaker 1: same logic to free will and God as well. We'll see.
Speaker 1: And Michael, you know, if you had any points you
Speaker 1: and responded that maybe could fold it into the free
Speaker 1: will especially. Yeah, great, we can move on. Great. So
Speaker 1: you write in your article that we live in a
Speaker 1: deterministic universe and still we act as though we have
Speaker 1: free will. Could you elaborate a little bit more, Michael,
Speaker 1: what you meant by that. Yeah, So it's kind of
Speaker 1: tease a part of the different elements of this. You
Speaker 1: can say free will is an illusion, but it's a
Speaker 1: great illusion. It works. It's a useful fiction. As the
Speaker 1: French philosopher Hans Weener called it. It certainly feels like
Speaker 1: I have free will. I'm making choices. That's what it
Speaker 1: seems like intuitively, but that would still be the determinists position.
Speaker 1: I'm arguing along the lines of what Dan Danna argues,
Speaker 1: and freedom evolves that we are complex enough organisms that
Speaker 1: there are so many variables at work, and the fact
Speaker 1: that we are part of the causal net ourselves. By
Speaker 1: being aware of these vectors that are influencing us and
Speaker 1: pushing us around to the point where we can affect
Speaker 1: them back, we can push back. And so even though
Speaker 1: it's all determined, we live in a determined universe. Being
Speaker 1: part of the causal net and being aware and self
Speaker 1: aware of the causal variables influencing us, we can do
Speaker 1: something about it. And out of that emerges something like
Speaker 1: volition or choice or whatever word you want to use.
Speaker 1: And part of the problem here again is language. You know,
Speaker 1: I start using active verbs, and I hear determine it's
Speaker 1: using active verbs all the time, as if you know
Speaker 1: they're they're making these choices because that's what it feels like,
Speaker 1: and I think it's okay to do that, because that
Speaker 1: isn't in essence what we're doing so. The example I use, say,
Speaker 1: I'm aware that in the late afternoon I'm going to
Speaker 1: get a craving for chocolate chip cookies, so ahead of time,
Speaker 1: make sure I don't have any in the house. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be going to the store at that
Speaker 1: time or the shop that has cookies or something. I'm
Speaker 1: aware of these influences on my behavior that you know
Speaker 1: future Shermer is going to do this, so current Shermer
Speaker 1: can affect the variables that I know is that he
Speaker 1: knows is coming or I who he me, so something
Speaker 1: like that. But again I think I put in the
Speaker 1: mysterian category because we're delimited by the language we use
Speaker 1: these words. If it's determined, how can you be free, well,
Speaker 1: not really free free, there's no not libertarian free will,
Speaker 1: there's no homunculus. But even if there were, you know,
Speaker 1: then there'd have to be a mini me inside me,
Speaker 1: and then a mini me, mini mini me inside mini
Speaker 1: me inside me, and so on, and that doesn't solve
Speaker 1: the problem either. So to me, it's just one of
Speaker 1: the conceptual head scratchers, the fact that now I'm not
Speaker 1: a philosopher, so from an outsider to me, it seems
Speaker 1: like a problem like this that's been talked about for
Speaker 1: twenty five hundred years, and there's no consensus, like there's
Speaker 1: no climate Consensus committee for free will that says, yeah,
Speaker 1: ninety seven percent of philosophers agree that compatibilism is true
Speaker 1: or determinism is true or whatever. I've even seen these
Speaker 1: surveys that I cite that big one that David Chalmers
Speaker 1: did in two thousand and nine of thirty six hundred
Speaker 1: professional philosophers, graduate students, professors and so on, and compatible
Speaker 1: is the compatibleist position was fifty nine percent, and embrace
Speaker 1: the compatiblist position, And then the next category was terminus
Speaker 1: and the lowest one was libertarian free will. So to me,
Speaker 1: that tells us, I mean, we don't do this by vote.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, it does give us a
Speaker 1: clue that there's something else going on here. When the
Speaker 1: smartest people who know the most about a subject can't
Speaker 1: agree even remotely, there's no general consensus like there isn't,
Speaker 1: say climate, then there's something else wrong with the language
Speaker 1: or the concept itself that's not going to get us there.
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for posing that problem so
Speaker 1: articularly you brought this mini me idea, and what if
Speaker 1: you're not thinking about that in the right way. So
Speaker 1: it seems like the brain is like something that does
Speaker 1: seem to be a consensus in the field of cognituroscience
Speaker 1: is that the brain is hierarchically organized in a sense
Speaker 1: so that there are not all many us Maybe I
Speaker 1: would I just want to put out there and then
Speaker 1: just discuss this not you know, we are comprised of
Speaker 1: multiple subcomponents, but there are some are like we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier, the prefrontal pridal brain network that is higher
Speaker 1: level coordination, so there is perhaps gives you more free
Speaker 1: will than lower order ones. Maybe we can actually rank
Speaker 1: in a hierarchy, like which subcomponents are more allows us
Speaker 1: more degrees of them than others. I'm just putting this
Speaker 1: out there, and you guys, yeah, that's very interesting. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess, I guess what you're both doing is trying
Speaker 1: to make sense of compatibilist notions of free will, and
Speaker 1: maybe we should get clear on this distinction. I mean, actually,
Speaker 1: one thing I'd like to say from the start, I
Speaker 1: think this problem, to my mind is very different from
Speaker 1: the problem of consciousness in the sense that I think
Speaker 1: as I've said many times, I think we know for
Speaker 1: certain consciousness is real, so there's a genuine phenomenon there
Speaker 1: that we have to account for somehow. But I don't
Speaker 1: think we have that same kind of certainty with free will, right.
Speaker 1: It certainly seems as though we're free, you know, it
Speaker 1: seems as though certain of my decisions are completely up
Speaker 1: to me, you know, in a sense that I'm not
Speaker 1: compelled to act by prior causes. But that could be
Speaker 1: an illusion, right, It could be that it feels as
Speaker 1: I'm free, but I'm not. However, I'm personally not persuaded.
Speaker 1: And this is, as Michael points out, I'm in the
Speaker 1: minority among philosophers. I'm personally not persuaded by any of
Speaker 1: the scientific or philosophical arguments against free will or for determinism.
Speaker 1: And so I'm a tentative believer not only in free will,
Speaker 1: but in free will after particularly strong libertarian kind. So
Speaker 1: the idea is here. The idea here is that certain
Speaker 1: of my choices are completely up to me, in the
Speaker 1: sense that they're not determined by prior causes. I don't
Speaker 1: think there is I've never seen the scientific case that
Speaker 1: the brain is I mean, you know, I mean, I think,
Speaker 1: just to finish this up, I think, you know, there
Speaker 1: are certain in any philosophical paradigm, there are certain convictions
Speaker 1: that are defended on the basis of evidence, and then
Speaker 1: there are certain kind of dogmas that are just generally
Speaker 1: accepted as part of the zeitgeist. I think determinism is
Speaker 1: like that. I've never seen a peer reviewed scientific paper
Speaker 1: proving that the brain is a deterministic machine. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's certainly no consensus among you know, there isn't a
Speaker 1: consensus in the search literature, so I don't see so
Speaker 1: whereas Michael and Scott also seem to say, is assuming
Speaker 1: most the competive as says, okay, science has shown we're
Speaker 1: not free in the in the libertarian sense, but we
Speaker 1: can try and work out some kind of watered down
Speaker 1: motion of freedom. And I think that's what that's what
Speaker 1: Dennett does, for example. But I'm still not persuaded, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm open minded, but I'm still not persuaded that
Speaker 1: there isn't evidence that I'm not free in the sense
Speaker 1: we ordinary take ourselves to be. So yeah, that's my positional. Really, Wow,
Speaker 1: you're you're the first professional philosopher I met who embraces
Speaker 1: tentatively right, what you're open, you're open to it. If
Speaker 1: there were scientific if someone showed me, you know, like
Speaker 1: you said, climate change is the great example. I believe
Speaker 1: in climate change because there's a consensus in literay, if
Speaker 1: they're emerged. If someone showed me a peer reviewed scientific
Speaker 1: paper proving the brain is a deterministic mechanism, I'd give
Speaker 1: it up in a second. But I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: see that. The determinists then would counter well, but you know,
Speaker 1: all thoughts are just you know, neurons firing, just chemical
Speaker 1: swapping across synaptic gaps. It's a it's a mechanical system them,
Speaker 1: it's a physical system. It's a it's a Galileean Newtonian
Speaker 1: clockwork system. What's your response to that? So you know,
Speaker 1: your thoughts are just they're just generating there. You have
Speaker 1: no idea why they're doing what they're doing. I think
Speaker 1: this maybe gets back to the consciousness issue. So my view,
Speaker 1: my Pun Russell Eddington Punt psychos view is does just
Speaker 1: the brain right, But physical science doesn't tell us what
Speaker 1: the brain is. It just tells us what it does.
Speaker 1: And it's parts two. My mind is at least part
Speaker 1: of the intrinsic nature of my brain. So yeah, my
Speaker 1: brain is the only stuff. There's nothing supernatural, it's no souls.
Speaker 1: My brain is the only thing doing stuff. But my
Speaker 1: conscious mind is part of the intrinsic nature of my brain.
Speaker 1: So I think they're consistent. I'm just not persuaded that
Speaker 1: there is any scientific evidence that the brain as a
Speaker 1: whole is a deterministic system. Yeah. Well, this was Benjamin
Speaker 1: Leabay's experiments where you know, some part of your brain
Speaker 1: is making this decision for you before your conscious part
Speaker 1: of your brain is even aware of it, and that
Speaker 1: that sounds like a deterministic care right, that's consistent with
Speaker 1: the hardcore organization of the brain, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So Libert's experiments are you know, really interesting. So Libert
Speaker 1: so these experiments, so these are the classic experiments that
Speaker 1: are appealed to in this context. So he took, you know,
Speaker 1: a group of subjects and asked them to make a
Speaker 1: free choice under experimental conditions. And it was always something trivial, like,
Speaker 1: you know, whether to press a button on the left
Speaker 1: rather than the right or something. And then he wanted
Speaker 1: to ascertain the time at which the free choice happened.
Speaker 1: So he got them looking at a clock on the
Speaker 1: wall and they had to note the time at which
Speaker 1: it happens. And at the same time, he has them
Speaker 1: looked up to an eg and he can so he
Speaker 1: can measure the time at which the brain initiates the decision.
Speaker 1: So the shocking result was that the brain initiates the
Speaker 1: decision on average three hundred milliseconds before the subject consciously
Speaker 1: records making it. So people say, you know, this is
Speaker 1: shows that free will is an illusion that you know,
Speaker 1: the brain decides what we're going to do before we
Speaker 1: consciously decide. So I think these are fascinating experient I
Speaker 1: think the conclusions are grossly exaggerating. I mean, one problem
Speaker 1: that Daniel Dennett, in fact his points to is that
Speaker 1: there's a much more simple interpretation of the data, namely
Speaker 1: that we systematically get wrong the times of our decisions,
Speaker 1: at least in these highly artificial circumstances. You know, what
Speaker 1: these subjects were asked to do is make a decision
Speaker 1: and simultaneously note the time you made it. And you know,
Speaker 1: maybe we can't do that, but can I just just
Speaker 1: just finally sorry to talk to you about just the
Speaker 1: broader point on the livered stuff and similar experiments is
Speaker 1: that the three decisions in inverted commas that he focuses
Speaker 1: on are not the free choices that anyone cares about, right,
Speaker 1: They're just arbitrary things like pressing a button on the
Speaker 1: leprop and the right. You know what proposents of free
Speaker 1: will care about a rational decisions like you know, whether
Speaker 1: to take a job, whether to get married, whether to
Speaker 1: betray your friend. These decisions where we freely choose from
Speaker 1: among rational considerations, and the lib experience have nothing to say.
Speaker 1: But so at the best they show that the conscious
Speaker 1: mind can't you know, instigate a completely random, meaningless action.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't show and you know who cares about that?
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's sort of and I think Roy Baumeister
Speaker 1: has done a good job showing we have this little
Speaker 1: wiggle room at least even when our subconscious may make
Speaker 1: a decision. Then there's also, like, you know, there's like
Speaker 1: subconscious decisions and conscious decisions. You know, like even though
Speaker 1: like all my computations have told me like this is
Speaker 1: the one for me to marry, there's still this like
Speaker 1: conscious decision. I can say, well, despite how I feel
Speaker 1: about this and despite you know what my subconscious has
Speaker 1: computed for me, you know, like I'm not gonna I'm
Speaker 1: going to continue dating, you know, yeah a limit. In
Speaker 1: his final book before he died, he declared himself compatibleist.
Speaker 1: He rejected hard determinism, even even though his own research
Speaker 1: is cited by determinists, although, as I point out in
Speaker 1: my book the moral arc that there's also freed won't.
Speaker 1: Later experiments added elements where you could push another button
Speaker 1: at the last minute and change your mind and override
Speaker 1: the initial impulse, like, oh, I'm going to appreciate that,
Speaker 1: but no, no no, I'm going to push big nope, nope, nope,
Speaker 1: back to a no B. And so what's going on there?
Speaker 1: Or is I like to ask, say, what's the difference
Speaker 1: between us who are not drug addicts and the drug
Speaker 1: addict who just cannot control or the alcoholic can't take
Speaker 1: the drink or whatever. Is that person just more determined
Speaker 1: than you and I are determined? And what would that
Speaker 1: mean to say, more determined or less determined? So there's
Speaker 1: a scale there, some kind of quantitative scale of determinism
Speaker 1: in that case, that's not the right word. Wow, Michael,
Speaker 1: you just opened up such a can of worms. If
Speaker 1: you really, like, if our brains compute all the real
Speaker 1: deep aiplications of your point, that would be obviously be
Speaker 1: a conversation that would last days and months and years,
Speaker 1: probably a lifetime. But well, okay, what if you bring
Speaker 1: in the genes into the picture here, right, Like, well,
Speaker 1: we know for a fact that some people have, through heredity,
Speaker 1: a more difficult time resisting certain temptations and others. I
Speaker 1: think it's a fair statement to say. It shouldn't be
Speaker 1: particularly controversial to say that. So it is easier for
Speaker 1: your effort, you know, like for one person it might
Speaker 1: obviously like I'm not going to get addicted, like I
Speaker 1: don't have, you know, like that strong urge to do that.
Speaker 1: But so that do they have more free will to
Speaker 1: do that than person B, who might come from a
Speaker 1: wrong family of alcoholism? Right, So, I mean maybe these
Speaker 1: are not the right words. We're using the wrong language.
Speaker 1: You mentioned right bymeister you know he and John Tierney
Speaker 1: have that great book Willpower. Yeah, so he you know,
Speaker 1: it's just chapter after chapter what you can do about this?
Speaker 1: And here's what the research shows about how you can
Speaker 1: gain control over your thoughts. Well, what are you doing
Speaker 1: when you do that? You can say, well, it's all determined. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but some part of me is jumping into the middle
Speaker 1: of the causal chain and say no, no, I'm going
Speaker 1: to move down the left path instead of the right
Speaker 1: path because I'm aware if I go down the right path,
Speaker 1: I'm going to become an addict or a cigarette smoker,
Speaker 1: an alcoholic. And so I know if I do, I
Speaker 1: can move down the left path. Now, the determinists would say, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you didn't have you know, some particle that did
Speaker 1: something billion years ago, you know, ultimately got into your
Speaker 1: neuron and and made it fire this way instead of that.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but to me, it's still a kind
Speaker 1: of additional action, you know. But I feel like mechanicalistically,
Speaker 1: we can kind of understand that, you know, like the
Speaker 1: BA ten Like you said, like, where is it? I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'd say, like, basically, it's the BA ten like and
Speaker 1: then of course the question is, well, what is instant
Speaker 1: in that? But genes do have some sort of blueprint
Speaker 1: for the extent to which these brain activations are going
Speaker 1: to be easily activated, you know, like psychopaths, when you
Speaker 1: scan their brains, there these certain subcortical regions that are
Speaker 1: almost dark, you know, like they're just not activating by
Speaker 1: default at all. So I think it's interesting. I think
Speaker 1: how genes not deterministically, but probabilistically influence whether or not
Speaker 1: you're going to go lifetime with a lot of easy
Speaker 1: default activations of certain brain areas that exert control in
Speaker 1: a top down way on certain functions. Okay, here's my
Speaker 1: final thought experiment too, for the hardcore determinists. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the hardcore determinist is married, happily married, and it goes
Speaker 1: to a comp prince and meets this attractive person and
Speaker 1: they and they end up with a hookup, and the
Speaker 1: spouse finds out, you know, when they get home, and
Speaker 1: he said, well, now listen, see, honey, my thoughts come
Speaker 1: from where I'm not, I know, not where my genes,
Speaker 1: you know, my neurons were firing, and you know, I
Speaker 1: just really have no volitional choice in the matter. It's
Speaker 1: all determined. You know, could even finish the argument before
Speaker 1: the hand comes across and slaps the face. Sure, you know,
Speaker 1: how could you have done otherwise? Yeah? You could have
Speaker 1: done otherwise, and you better not do it again. Okay, Well, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to be very queer Michael, culpability is not
Speaker 1: the same as you know explanation. Well, well, but the
Speaker 1: hardcore determinists would say, you're not really culpable. But I'm
Speaker 1: not a hard core determinist. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess i'd agree. I guess if I if I
Speaker 1: wasn't a libertarian, if I was persuaded that in Peragos Falls,
Speaker 1: I'd be some kind of compatibilist rather than a hard determinist.
Speaker 1: And you know, in either case, whether there's libertarian free
Speaker 1: will or not, for all the reasons you've both been
Speaker 1: saying this, there's going to be a really complicated story here.
Speaker 1: You know, a difference between base desires what you want
Speaker 1: to do, and higher order desires what you want to
Speaker 1: want to do. It's kind of trying to characterize the
Speaker 1: addictive person in that way that they want the cigarettes,
Speaker 1: but they don't want to want and there's going to
Speaker 1: be some story we can tell there about something like freedom.
Speaker 1: So so I think actually the libertarian compatibis will have
Speaker 1: a lot in common. A lot can hold a lot
Speaker 1: in common, and there's going to be this kind of
Speaker 1: complicated story that can be agreed on. But I'm just
Speaker 1: not persuaded that the You know, I think we do
Speaker 1: think about many of our choices in the libertarian way,
Speaker 1: and I don't yet find any scientific reason do they
Speaker 1: otherwise to give that up tomorrow? Well, so in fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: do you think we can we can solve God? The
Speaker 1: existence of God? Totally? No, absolutely, no topic, small topic.
Speaker 1: You're a pan psychist, what is it? Does that mean
Speaker 1: you're necessarily also a pantheist? Okay, good? I mean pansil
Speaker 1: Anzechism is, you know, and this is the fortunate thing
Speaker 1: that you know, it has these unfortunate cultural kind of
Speaker 1: take cultural associations with certain kind of New Age thinking
Speaker 1: and stuff. But you know, I think you should dittribute
Speaker 1: on its explanatory power rather than its cultural associations. And
Speaker 1: it's panpsychism is intended as a you know, a cold
Speaker 1: blooded best explanation of consciousness. It doesn't have any necessary
Speaker 1: connection to anything supernatural or theological on the topic of God,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, yeah, I don't see why. I
Speaker 1: guess I wasn't presided by Michaels that we should be
Speaker 1: mysterious about God, So I don't see why God isn't
Speaker 1: the kind of thing we can more and less straightforwardly
Speaker 1: offer evidence for and against. So I'm actually agnostic because
Speaker 1: I think there's very powerful evidence against the existence of God,
Speaker 1: and I also think there's very powerful evidence for the
Speaker 1: existence of God. So I think the jewelry is kind
Speaker 1: of out there. So yeah. So, like in the Martin
Speaker 1: Gardner sense I mentioned of the arguments between theos atheas,
Speaker 1: he said, atheists have slightly better argument, but always slightly
Speaker 1: the theats have they have good like the design argument
Speaker 1: for example. Yeah, I guess I think the case against
Speaker 1: the familiar problem of evil, I think is the existence
Speaker 1: of evil and suffering. It's very strong evidence against this
Speaker 1: of God. I don't think religious philosophers have ever come
Speaker 1: up with anywhere near plausible explanations for why a loving
Speaker 1: God would allow those things to happen. And I think
Speaker 1: this problem has become worse since our moral awareness has progressed.
Speaker 1: So we now, for example, think of animal animal's interests.
Speaker 1: It's morally significant, and so this raised the question, you know,
Speaker 1: why would loving God choose to create life through a
Speaker 1: horrific process of natural selection? But in terms of it,
Speaker 1: so I mean, I am you're going to disagree with
Speaker 1: me now, Michael. I think there is force to the
Speaker 1: argument for God from the fine tuning of this surprising
Speaker 1: discovery in the last forty years, completely surprising that some
Speaker 1: of the numbers in basic physics are against improbable odds,
Speaker 1: exactly as they need to be for life to be
Speaker 1: physically possible. So, just to take one example from Martin Reese,
Speaker 1: the strong nuclear force is no point no not seven.
Speaker 1: If it had been no point no not six or less,
Speaker 1: we'd just have a universe of hydrogen. If it had
Speaker 1: been no point not eight or more, that the hydrogen
Speaker 1: would difused into heavy elements. In either case we'd have
Speaker 1: absolutely no chemical complexity in their fort no life. So
Speaker 1: God was a chemist well exist. Like many scientists and philosophers,
Speaker 1: I think that this needs to be explained. But there
Speaker 1: seemed to be two explanations. One is that God created
Speaker 1: the universe and set those numbers in order to make
Speaker 1: a universal life as possible, or the other explanation the
Speaker 1: multiverse hypothesis. There are a huge, perhaps infinite number of
Speaker 1: universes which between them exemplify a large range of these numbers,
Speaker 1: so that it becomes statistically inevitable that you'll get one
Speaker 1: with the right laws for life. Now, you know, the
Speaker 1: atheists say, oh, it must be the multiverse, and the
Speaker 1: theists say, oh it must be God. You know, to mind, man,
Speaker 1: these books are like pretty crazy hypotheses. And I don't
Speaker 1: think we're in a talking about things, you know, we're
Speaker 1: not in I don't think we're in a rational position
Speaker 1: to decide one way or the other. So I, you know,
Speaker 1: were going to settle We're not going to settle this
Speaker 1: in the next five minutes once and for all. We
Speaker 1: are a mysterian. Well, okay, a couple of things on
Speaker 1: that now. My physicists cosmologist friends tell me that the
Speaker 1: multiverse idea was not conceived as an explanation for the
Speaker 1: fine tuning. That it is derived from the equations, predictions
Speaker 1: of equations, or this, there should be multiple universes of
Speaker 1: various kinds, the quantum kind or just the cosmological kind,
Speaker 1: And it is not just a fallback position by desperate
Speaker 1: atheists to explain why there can't be a God. This
Speaker 1: is what theists argue, Oh, you guys, what's the difference
Speaker 1: between the multiverse and God? But second, Stephen Weinberg makes
Speaker 1: this point. The Nobel laureate physicist that you know, we
Speaker 1: don't know enough to say that the fine tuning you
Speaker 1: had to be this way or else, you know, it
Speaker 1: couldn't have come about that we don't have a unified
Speaker 1: theory of physics that ex you know, unites the global
Speaker 1: general relativity and quantum physics. That there might be some
Speaker 1: underlying equations that then these fine twoed numbers end up
Speaker 1: falling into place perfectly well, totally understandable because of this
Speaker 1: underlying principles that we don't yet understand. So before we
Speaker 1: draw any conclusions one way or the other, you know,
Speaker 1: we need to wait on how that works out. Now.
Speaker 1: The reason I threw God into the mysteriing category in
Speaker 1: part because of my numerous debates I've done over the
Speaker 1: years with theis where they make these arguments like the
Speaker 1: fine tuning argument, cosmological argument for the first cause, prime movement,
Speaker 1: all that, and you know, I counter them, and at
Speaker 1: some point or they go through prayers and miracles and
Speaker 1: the origins of consciousness, the origins of morality, and I
Speaker 1: encounter all those arguments. I ask, you know that there
Speaker 1: should be some way of measuring this deity and its
Speaker 1: actions in this world and their ultimate fallback is God
Speaker 1: is outside of space and time. Okay, if God is
Speaker 1: not a natural being, then how would you know it exists?
Speaker 1: Because we're natural beings. You can't measure something that's non natural.
Speaker 1: In that sense, there's no such thing as a supernatural
Speaker 1: to paranormal, these are just words we use to describe
Speaker 1: things we understand. And so my counterexample is like said
Speaker 1: my data. You know, there's this theory by Roger Penrose
Speaker 1: and Stuart hammer Off about consciousness arrive, derives, or instantiates
Speaker 1: through these microtubules inside neurons. Anyway, they have this long,
Speaker 1: complex theory. Almost no neuroscientists accept it. But their idea
Speaker 1: is that these quantum effects happen in a warm environment
Speaker 1: like a brain, in these microtubules, and when the wave
Speaker 1: functions collapse at a certain pattern of neural firing, it
Speaker 1: can leave my skull and go into your skull. So
Speaker 1: that this would explain mind reading, for example, or spooky
Speaker 1: action at a distance between minds. And Okay, I don't
Speaker 1: believe any of this, but let's say this was true,
Speaker 1: and this would no longer make it esp paranormal psychic power.
Speaker 1: It would just be a branch of quantum consciousness or something.
Speaker 1: It would just be a part of the natural world.
Speaker 1: We didn't understand before and now we do. So essentially
Speaker 1: we're eliminating paranormal supernatural explanation by incorporating them into the
Speaker 1: natural world. And so what we describe as God doing
Speaker 1: things or the characteristics of God, to me, if it's true,
Speaker 1: then it would just God would just be part of
Speaker 1: the natural world. It would just be like a super
Speaker 1: advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. The analogy is if you know, if
Speaker 1: I show a neanderthol And iPhone, you know, this would
Speaker 1: be like I'm God, or you know, I have this
Speaker 1: device that's God. Like it's just any like Clark's third law,
Speaker 1: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Or you
Speaker 1: could say God, so how would we know? And what
Speaker 1: do you mean by God? So therefore it's a mysterian anyway,
Speaker 1: That's how I ended up with that conclusion. Thank you
Speaker 1: for that explaining why you got to that conclusion. You know,
Speaker 1: I want to think of this from an existential perspective
Speaker 1: for a second, because like the construct of God, I think,
Speaker 1: you know, evolved for to sort of a function, a
Speaker 1: good cycle, logical function. You know, humans seem to have
Speaker 1: this deep need for a higher meaning or a sort
Speaker 1: of higher personal meaning for their lives, and to think
Speaker 1: that there's a reason for all this that we're going through,
Speaker 1: you know that all the suffering as well as the
Speaker 1: joy is do you think that like there's any sort
Speaker 1: of I'm bey asking both of you, do you think
Speaker 1: there's any sort of scientific finding, even if like the
Speaker 1: microtoobules TYPEOS is correct, that can speak or give hope
Speaker 1: to those existential concerns that humans have. That's I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that links nicely to Michael's last point in
Speaker 1: a way that you know, you might think the best
Speaker 1: explanation to fine tuning is some kind of intelligent design
Speaker 1: or value involved in shaping the nu us. I mean
Speaker 1: an interesting case Nagel, who we started off talking about
Speaker 1: his recent Is twenty twelve book that's got really a
Speaker 1: lot of very critical reviews. He takes the fine tuning
Speaker 1: and other things very seriously, but he doesn't believe in God.
Speaker 1: He believes that the universe has some kind of inherent
Speaker 1: teleology or direction of Yes, so it's not obvious is
Speaker 1: just because we need, even if we do need to
Speaker 1: postulate something like that and I'm not saying we do.
Speaker 1: It's not obvious that it would, you know, satisfy our
Speaker 1: religious impulses or the kind of god we're looking for.
Speaker 1: Can I say a couple of things about the multiverse
Speaker 1: that from in related or sorry or absolutely? But yeah,
Speaker 1: so no, I just really stimulated by these kind of
Speaker 1: So Michaels right that there is speculative support for some
Speaker 1: kind of multiverse. But one crucial point that I can
Speaker 1: get over so two points though, two problems. One crucial
Speaker 1: point often gets overlooked is that what you don't get
Speaker 1: from the physics is any grounds for thinking these different
Speaker 1: universes have different laws, right, That doesn't come out of
Speaker 1: the physics. And that's what you need in order to
Speaker 1: explain the fine tuning. Because the idea is there's all
Speaker 1: these different universes and that the relevant parameters in physics,
Speaker 1: you know, they have all different values, so it becomes
Speaker 1: statistically inevitable that you'll have a fine tuned universe. But
Speaker 1: actually you can't get that out of the physics. So
Speaker 1: you need to go a little bit beyond the physics
Speaker 1: to explain the fine tuning. But the other point is
Speaker 1: there is this big problem in the contemporary multiverse theory
Speaker 1: called the Boltzmann brain problem. I don't know how much
Speaker 1: we want to go. I mean, it's very just to
Speaker 1: put the essence I think, and I think physicists think
Speaker 1: of it is it's kind of a false prediction of
Speaker 1: the theory. The standard, the most scientific According to the
Speaker 1: most scientifically supported version of the multiverse, highly ordered universes
Speaker 1: like ours are incredibly rare, unbelievably rare. Even among the
Speaker 1: subset of universes with observers in highly ordered universes are
Speaker 1: incredibly rare, in fact, So this is from Roger Penrose
Speaker 1: demonstrated that the most common kind of observer in the
Speaker 1: multiverse are these Boltzmann brains, these brains that just spontaneously
Speaker 1: come into being out of chaos and then and then
Speaker 1: go back into the voide. So even amongst the set
Speaker 1: of universes with observers, our universe is highly on usual,
Speaker 1: and most physicists will take that to be a disconfirmation
Speaker 1: of the standard multiverse. Maybe the theory can be tinkered with,
Speaker 1: but it's as it stands. It's it's a strong prediction problem.
Speaker 1: So I sort of think actually both God and the
Speaker 1: multiverse have false predictions, like I think if the problem
Speaker 1: of evil is kind of a false prediction because you
Speaker 1: think the god hypothesis predicts that there'd be a much
Speaker 1: better world than we in fact have, So that's a
Speaker 1: kind of discomfirmation. The multiverse theory has this baltsm of brain.
Speaker 1: So and again I think that kind of times. But
Speaker 1: even if there is some sort of a designer or
Speaker 1: tinker that set the dials in a way, the counter
Speaker 1: that is, the universe isn't very finely tuned for life.
Speaker 1: Life can exist in particularly conscious life almost nowhere. It's
Speaker 1: very very rare environments in which this could happen, and
Speaker 1: as far as we know so far, it's only happened once. Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably not the case, but in any case it would
Speaker 1: It would certainly take, by the natural processes of origins
Speaker 1: of life and evolution, billions of years to get to
Speaker 1: sentience and consciousness. So if a designer did this, you know,
Speaker 1: why set it up where it takes. So the universe
Speaker 1: is thirteen point seven billion years old es centrally, it
Speaker 1: takes you know what, nine billion years to even get started.
Speaker 1: If there's some purpose to it or some design to it,
Speaker 1: it truly certainly seems wasteful that you know, ninety nine
Speaker 1: point nine percent of the universe is not finally doing
Speaker 1: for life, and you know ninety nine percent of the
Speaker 1: time of the universe is you know, was completely wasted.
Speaker 1: And then finally, in the last two thousand years, Jesus
Speaker 1: comes and we're all saying, okay, absolutely, I mean, I
Speaker 1: can I just I mean, I completely agree with Michael
Speaker 1: on I mean, I take that to be actually, in
Speaker 1: a sense, part of the problem of evil and part
Speaker 1: of the false prediction of theism. But then there's a question,
Speaker 1: is well, is that a worse false prediction than the
Speaker 1: Boltzman brain problem? And we've got to I mean, I
Speaker 1: think most physicists say, with the multiverse hypothesis, we're going
Speaker 1: to have to tinker with it to get rid of
Speaker 1: this Boltzman brain problem. What a theist could say, I'm
Speaker 1: not a theist, but what could says, well, let's tinker
Speaker 1: with the theistic hypothesis. So John Stuart Mill answered these
Speaker 1: kind of problems Michael's raising and the more gentle move
Speaker 1: by saying, well, God isn't all powerfule, maybe God has
Speaker 1: limited power. So maybe you know the best exit you
Speaker 1: look to the fine tuning, and you explain the evil
Speaker 1: and suffering, the emptiness of the unise in terms of
Speaker 1: the limited powers of God. The problem. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of dogmatic believers the problem that you know, don't
Speaker 1: want to tinker with. So that's that's one problem. So
Speaker 1: as I see it, you know, I think the fine
Speaker 1: tuning is a real problem. There are two explanations that
Speaker 1: both have pretty serious false predictions, but maybe they can
Speaker 1: be tinkered with so that they get around these fictions.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think it's an interesting open question,
Speaker 1: but I don't think we should. I guess things are
Speaker 1: so polarized now right, You've got either side not wanting
Speaker 1: to give any ground, you know. And I think this
Speaker 1: is because people like the comfort of certainty. You know.
Speaker 1: The atheists want to think, you know, the religious people
Speaker 1: are sort of backward fools because that gives you a
Speaker 1: kind of certainty comfort. The theists just want to think
Speaker 1: the atheists are sort of in denial. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think we need to face up to the fact that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot less certainty in these matters
Speaker 1: libertary and free will. I think it's saying that we
Speaker 1: ordinarily think and and certainly since the fine tuning, I
Speaker 1: think there's there's a richer questionnaire that we should think about,
Speaker 1: and it's very open. You know, if the laws of
Speaker 1: nature have built into them some kind of teleology, which
Speaker 1: appears to be the case in the sense that you
Speaker 1: go from this kind of general grule of an early
Speaker 1: universe where there's not much structure at all, to what
Speaker 1: we have today, where there's a lot of structure. If
Speaker 1: you want to call that teleology, well, that's true, and
Speaker 1: that's the result of the laws of nature. You end
Speaker 1: up with these emergent properties that lead to more complex systems.
Speaker 1: You know. Gould used to make this point that in
Speaker 1: terms of like a purpose driven universe, well, if you're
Speaker 1: at the left wall of simplicity, you can only go
Speaker 1: to the right and become more complex if you're going
Speaker 1: to do anything at all. So if you want to
Speaker 1: call that, you know, sort of a purposeful universe, find
Speaker 1: but that isn't what most people mean by god, you know,
Speaker 1: they really anthropomorphize it. There there's this agent out there,
Speaker 1: advanced super powerful agent. So again, yeah, what's the interestween
Speaker 1: that and a super advanced extraterrustrial intelligence that can genetically
Speaker 1: engineer organisms and create solar systems, and even cause stars
Speaker 1: to collapse into black holes in the singularity. They create
Speaker 1: a new universe. Well, any entity that creates universes in
Speaker 1: life is God. Yeah, yeah, I mean what legal means
Speaker 1: by teleology. He takes it to be a basic law
Speaker 1: of nature. There's some teleological laws part of the basic
Speaker 1: laws of nature. So I think that is going beyond
Speaker 1: you know, the standard scientific picture, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: the theistic type of I entering with that. There is
Speaker 1: some kind of actual designer, So so I think that
Speaker 1: would be going beyond. You know. Freeman Dice makes it
Speaker 1: as this line in one of his books that drives
Speaker 1: atheists crazy, where it's almost as if the universe knew
Speaker 1: we were coming. And I'm pretty sure he's I don't
Speaker 1: know if he's an atheist or but an agnostic or something.
Speaker 1: And of course Christians glom onto that. You see, even
Speaker 1: the physical freemon dicens we were coming, where Stephen Hawking says,
Speaker 1: and then we'll know the mind of God. Oh stop
Speaker 1: using those words. So could we wrap up here? Basically,
Speaker 1: we all know where Michael stands on these three things
Speaker 1: because he wrote the article and that was the inspiration
Speaker 1: for this chat today, maybe it will go. Let me
Speaker 1: just say really quickly what I think. Yeah, really quickly,
Speaker 1: and I know what you think about. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm going to you know, I kind of like the
Speaker 1: spirit of possibility and openness that someday there will be discovery.
Speaker 1: So I'm inclined to not say either of the three
Speaker 1: our final mysteries, and to say and I sort of
Speaker 1: have this belief that all will be revealed. Now maybe
Speaker 1: we won't be conscious to know what was revealed, but
Speaker 1: I just feel like if humanity and this might be
Speaker 1: a big if, but if humanity can last long enough
Speaker 1: and we can kind of advance our scientific technologies to
Speaker 1: a certain degree that is unimaginable today, which I think
Speaker 1: will be possible, you know, if we could fast forward
Speaker 1: like two thousand years from now. I sort of have
Speaker 1: this intuition that all will be revealed and that will
Speaker 1: be like, oh shit, like that's what it was. You know,
Speaker 1: That's just my intuition. So what's your conclusion there, Philip
Speaker 1: on these three Well, that's I think I share your hope.
Speaker 1: I think on consciousness is you know, my main area work.
Speaker 1: I think there is a positive research program that really,
Speaker 1: you know, could make work and is already starting to
Speaker 1: make progress. And I think, you know, we're held back
Speaker 1: by a sort of dogmatic, attached attachment to materialism, not
Speaker 1: too unsimilar to the dogmatism that Copernicus and Galileo based
Speaker 1: and I'm not comparing myself to this was the views
Speaker 1: of Russell and Eddington. So I think there is a
Speaker 1: really positive proposal there that might work out. It might
Speaker 1: not work out, it might work out, and we should
Speaker 1: give it a chance. Free will, I think we just
Speaker 1: don't know enough about the brain yet. And we you know,
Speaker 1: we think we know more about the brain, and it
Speaker 1: is an empirical question. Ultimately we will know enough about
Speaker 1: the brain to know whether free will is an illusion,
Speaker 1: and it might be, but I I just don't think
Speaker 1: we're anywhere near knowing, you know, that kind of detail
Speaker 1: about the hugely complex system that is the brain. And
Speaker 1: on God, I think before the nineteen seventies you should
Speaker 1: be an atheist, you know, God was there was no
Speaker 1: sign of God in physics, and I think that's still
Speaker 1: with us because for two hundred years it just looked
Speaker 1: like God had been ruled out. But I think the
Speaker 1: surprising discovery the fine tuning. I think that when you
Speaker 1: dispassionately think about that, I think that you know, there
Speaker 1: is some force to that argument, but there's another explanation,
Speaker 1: and so you know, I think we have to wait.
Speaker 1: I hope that this will be resolved. Maybe, as Michael said,
Speaker 1: maybe the fine tuning problem will go away as physics developed.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll get more confirmation for the right kind of multiverse,
Speaker 1: and then God will become ruled out again. But at
Speaker 1: the moment, I think were the dispassionate, unbiased thinker ought
Speaker 1: to be sort of fifty to fifty a matter. Ah wow, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you guys so much for this chat, and thank
Speaker 1: you Michael for writing that article to spur this conversation
Speaker 1: in the first place. You are I mean, this is great.
Speaker 1: Thanks for hosting this. This is a good conversation. This
Speaker 1: is how we asked knowledge. It was great fun and
Speaker 1: anyone that wants to weigh in on these heavy topics
Speaker 1: please weigh in in the comments section. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
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