Speaker 1: Why does changing your mind sometimes feel like losing a
Speaker 1: part of yourself. If beliefs are supposed to track truth,
Speaker 1: why do they so often track our tribe instead? Why
Speaker 1: does a challenged belief feel like a personal attack. What
Speaker 1: does your brain think it's defending when it defends an idea?
Speaker 1: What if beliefs didn't evolve to be true, but to
Speaker 1: be useful. What if your strongest convictions are solving social problems,
Speaker 1: not intellectual ones. Today we'll speak with public intellectual and
Speaker 1: neuroscientist Sam Harris about the topic of our beliefs. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: and author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail
Speaker 1: deeply into our three pound universe to understand how we
Speaker 1: see the world and importantly today, what we take to
Speaker 1: be true about it. Your brain has a lot of
Speaker 1: beliefs about what is true or false. So if I
Speaker 1: ask you is Paris the capital of France, your brain
Speaker 1: immediately judges the truth value of that statement. Is it
Speaker 1: accurate or inaccurate? How about if I ask you is
Speaker 1: ten plus ten twenty one? Your brain has to take
Speaker 1: in the auditory information and compare it against what it
Speaker 1: knows and make a decision. And most people would probably
Speaker 1: agree with your judgments on these questions. But this can
Speaker 1: of course get more complex when it involves other kinds
Speaker 1: of beliefs, Like Mohammad was a holy proh fit chosen
Speaker 1: by Allah to deliver a message to humanity. Some people
Speaker 1: think that's a true statement, others think that's false, or
Speaker 1: the statement early abortion should be supported, or Trump is
Speaker 1: on balance a good president, or whatever. I'm not suggesting
Speaker 1: how you should evaluate these sentences. I'm just pointing out
Speaker 1: there are lots of sentences I can say that you
Speaker 1: might find true or false. So every moment of your life,
Speaker 1: your brain is making commitments. You're not necessarily announcing these
Speaker 1: or thinking about them consciously. They live under the hood.
Speaker 1: But these commitments shape what seems true, what feels threatening,
Speaker 1: what deserves attention, and what can be safely ignored. These
Speaker 1: commitments we have are what we call beliefs, and beliefs
Speaker 1: are how the brain turns information into action. In other words,
Speaker 1: they determine whether an utterance becomes something you respond to
Speaker 1: or something that fades into the background from the outside.
Speaker 1: Beliefs look like opinions, or positions, in other words, something
Speaker 1: you might argue about or align yourself with. But from
Speaker 1: the inside they feel fundamental, as in this is true,
Speaker 1: this is false. Collectively, your beliefs feel like the structure
Speaker 1: of reality itself. They build the backdrop against which your
Speaker 1: decisions make sense. Now, the puzzle that's always fascinated me
Speaker 1: is that intelligent people who are well informed often reach
Speaker 1: very different conclusions about their beliefs. So you have evidence
Speaker 1: that feels decisive to one person and that feels incomplete
Speaker 1: or unconvincing to another. And what that means is that
Speaker 1: changing one's mind typically feels really hard, and when you
Speaker 1: have a disagreement with someone, this can feel personal, like
Speaker 1: it involves your idea. So when we look at these patterns,
Speaker 1: we see that belief seems to be doing something more
Speaker 1: than building accurate models of the world. That might be
Speaker 1: part of why the brain builds true and false judgments,
Speaker 1: but there's probably more involved. For one, beliefs help coordinate
Speaker 1: your social life by supporting identity within your tribe and
Speaker 1: establishing alignment between people. Also, they can manage uncertainty by
Speaker 1: stabilizing emotion. When we look at it through these lenses,
Speaker 1: belief is, of course a biological process as much as
Speaker 1: a philosophical one. Somewhere between encountering a claim and acting
Speaker 1: on it, your brain has to perform a series of
Speaker 1: operations that determine whether some statements should be reacted to,
Speaker 1: or maybe whether it should be questioned or whether it
Speaker 1: should be dismissed entirely. Whatever your brain decides on the
Speaker 1: truth value of the statement, that shapes what you do next.
Speaker 1: And all of this tends to run below the radar
Speaker 1: of conscious awareness. Now, understanding what the brain is doing
Speaker 1: with beliefs is massively important because what you believe to
Speaker 1: be true and not true determines everything about cooperation or conflict.
Speaker 1: And so this sits right at the center of all
Speaker 1: that's happening in politics, in moral judgments, in social trust.
Speaker 1: So I focus a lot of my episodes on these
Speaker 1: issues about polarization and in groups and out groups and shibbleeths.
Speaker 1: But today I want to move upstream a level and
Speaker 1: focus on the machinery beneath them. How does the brain
Speaker 1: decide what to accept as true? How do emotion and
Speaker 1: identity in social context shape what feels credible? And there's
Speaker 1: no one better to explore these questions with than Sam Harris,
Speaker 1: whose work has examined belief from inside the brain and
Speaker 1: within public discourse. Sam is a public intellectual, a philosopher
Speaker 1: and author, and also a neuroscientist. He's well known for
Speaker 1: his writings on rationality, religion, ethics, free will, and meditation.
Speaker 1: He has long researched how science can inform human values
Speaker 1: with books like The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape.
Speaker 1: He hosts the Making Sense podcast, which focuses on consciousness
Speaker 1: and society and current events. So today we're going to
Speaker 1: ask what are beliefs really about. Here's my conversation with
Speaker 1: Sam Harris. So, Sam, I want to talk with you
Speaker 1: about belief. Many years ago you did neuroimaging studies on belief,
Speaker 1: So let's start there. Tell us how you think about
Speaker 1: belief and how you measure that in the brain.
Speaker 2: Believing things to be true of als versus being uncertain.
Speaker 2: This is something that our brains do readily, right, This
Speaker 2: is largely This is what distinguishes us, certainly when we're
Speaker 2: talking about complex representations of the world. This distinguishes us
Speaker 2: from our closest primate cousins. I wouldn't say that that
Speaker 2: other mammals and certainly, you know, the other primates don't
Speaker 2: have beliefs because clearly they represent states of the world cognitively,
Speaker 2: and they have expectations on that basis.
Speaker 1: Like there'll be grubs under this rock.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they've got, you know, goal seeking behavior, and
Speaker 2: that those goals are framed by some expectation of the
Speaker 2: way the world is, and they can be surprised by
Speaker 2: different outcomes. But we're the only species that were we
Speaker 2: know of that trades in these linguistic representations of the world.
Speaker 2: It can be completely divorced from any sensory entanglement with
Speaker 2: the state of the world that is being described. I mean,
Speaker 2: you get a cell phone call and there's a voice
Speaker 2: on the other end of the line and it says,
Speaker 2: you know, we've got your daughter and you got to
Speaker 2: come up with a million dollars to get her back. Now,
Speaker 2: if believed all of a sudden, those you know, small
Speaker 2: mouth noises that came you know through the phone, deletely
Speaker 2: common deer or you know, physiology, your whole world is
Speaker 2: all of a sudden about that, you know, kind of
Speaker 2: bent into the shape of the implications of of that
Speaker 2: you know utterance. Whereas if it's the wrong number. If
Speaker 2: you don't, I don't have a daughter, I know what
Speaker 2: you're talking about, right, just it bounces off, it doesn't,
Speaker 2: it doesn't, it doesn't become behaviorally or emotionally actionable. So
Speaker 2: it was this difference between this fairly gossamer representation of
Speaker 2: the world that that that it's just a piece of
Speaker 2: language right in the mind. It could be your own thought,
Speaker 2: it could be the thought of others you're communicated to you,
Speaker 2: it could be something you read on on the you know,
Speaker 2: the front page of a newspapers. It was it was
Speaker 2: a transition from that just the mere, mere decoding of
Speaker 2: a piece of language, to suddenly finding it not only
Speaker 2: behaviorally actionable, but you know, you know, unthinkable not to
Speaker 2: be motivated by those by those you know phonemes. So
Speaker 2: there's clearly, you know, steps in the chain where you
Speaker 2: you you you parse language or parse a statement and
Speaker 2: understand its meaning, and then there's this secondary operation of
Speaker 2: judging it to be true or false, right, or or
Speaker 2: just deciding that you can't judge it one or the other.
Speaker 2: And it seemed to me that on some level, this
Speaker 2: is the most important thing in the world, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: if you're talking about the power of ideas. You first
Speaker 2: have to stand upstream of that claim to talk about
Speaker 2: the difference between believing or disbelieving, accepting or rejecting certain
Speaker 2: ideas right and so, and ideas are obviously everything in
Speaker 2: our lives. I mean, it's it's how we're making a civilization,
Speaker 2: is how we're failing to secure a civilization. It's how
Speaker 2: we're needlessly producing harm for for ourselves and others. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just it's it's belief. Is claims to knowledge you
Speaker 2: know true or otherwise? Are everything?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And so the question in my mind is what was
Speaker 2: the brain doing to find something behaviorally actionable or to
Speaker 2: find it not based on accepting or rejecting a claim
Speaker 2: to knowledge about the world.
Speaker 1: And so that's binary. But you also looked.
Speaker 3: At uncertain certainty as a third condition.
Speaker 1: But just so I'm clear, was uncertainty the I just
Speaker 1: don't know one way or the other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, And you clearly, I mean, like you clearly
Speaker 2: couldn't know. So if you know a question that would
Speaker 2: provoke that would be to give someone some gigantic number
Speaker 2: and say that this number is prime. Right, It might
Speaker 2: be prime ends in a one, it might be prime.
Speaker 2: But obviously I don't know, or I have an you know,
Speaker 2: you have an even number of hairs on your body, right,
Speaker 2: you know you presumably you don't know, and so you
Speaker 2: can you can come up with lists of statements that
Speaker 2: are just as easy to decode as any other statements.
Speaker 2: But what you come up against, you know, once you
Speaker 2: understand them, is that there's really no way for you
Speaker 2: to know what's true.
Speaker 1: Got it, So you've got I either believe this to
Speaker 1: be true some state, give me an example of what
Speaker 1: you used.
Speaker 2: My hypothesis was that belief, disbelief, and uncertainty were content
Speaker 2: independent operations of the mind and therefore of the brain.
Speaker 2: So that if I gave you a statement like two
Speaker 2: plus two equals four versus two plus two equals five,
Speaker 2: and those are those are parsed and analyzed very similarly. Right,
Speaker 2: you're just just however, you understand arithmetic at the level
Speaker 2: of the brain. You're doing that, but you're coming to
Speaker 2: the opposite conclusion based on those two examples. But the
Speaker 2: hypothesis was that if we interrogated many different streams of
Speaker 2: knowledge and belief formation, so mathematical, logical, autobiographical, religious, political, right, say,
Speaker 2: the ethical the cognitive and you know, neuro physiological operations
Speaker 2: required to parse and judge that the truth value of
Speaker 2: any of those statements had to be very very different.
Speaker 2: I mean, what you're doing for arithmetic is not the
Speaker 2: same as what you're doing for for religion presumably, or ethics,
Speaker 2: or you know, you know, episodic memories. Say, but there
Speaker 2: was this final there had to be a bottleneck with
Speaker 2: which reported acceptance or rejection of the statement or uncertainty.
Speaker 1: Great, and so you put people in the scanner and
Speaker 1: what did you find.
Speaker 2: Well, we found that accepting a statement to be true
Speaker 2: versus rejecting it as false did report a kind of
Speaker 2: content agnostic you know, subsequent operation. One thing that was interesting, though,
Speaker 2: is that, and this actually goes back many many centuries
Speaker 2: to the work of Spinoza. Spinosa hypothesized that merely understanding
Speaker 2: a statement was akin to accepting it. Like it's like
Speaker 2: in order to just if I give you, if I
Speaker 2: give you just any utterance that you you know, any
Speaker 2: claim about the world that you can parse. Merely kind
Speaker 2: of getting to the end of the sentence and understanding
Speaker 2: it puts you in a in a mode of cain
Speaker 2: tacitly accepting it to be true and rejecting it as
Speaker 2: false was a subsequent operation. And one thing you would
Speaker 2: expect if that, in fact were true, is that behaviorally
Speaker 2: false statements would be people would be slower to judge
Speaker 2: false statements of equal complexity than to true statements. And
Speaker 2: we found that. So you get people a statement like
Speaker 2: two plus two equals five, they're slower to say no,
Speaker 2: that's false than two plus two equals four is true.
Speaker 2: I mean that that was a it was a fairly
Speaker 2: significant behavioral difference. But in any case, the.
Speaker 1: We let me, let me dive into that for a second.
Speaker 1: Does that mean that hearing other perspectives, being exposed to
Speaker 1: other perspectives, which you think, well, that's false, But at
Speaker 1: least you've spent that moment standing in that person's truth
Speaker 1: for a moment. So, for example, with political debates, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think is the most
Speaker 1: important for students is to, you know, get a three
Speaker 1: sixty view of the arguments, to debate from both sides,
Speaker 1: and be ready to do that. When we were in school,
Speaker 1: I think, I don't know if this is retrospective romanticization,
Speaker 1: but I believe that was more common. You would you
Speaker 1: would come into a debate ready to do either side,
Speaker 1: and therefore you knew the issues and the nuance is
Speaker 1: slightly better than let's say a kid who's in college
Speaker 1: who thinks, sorry, this is the truth and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to entertain another hypothesis. Just based on what you said,
Speaker 1: it seems to me interesting that if you're told another perspective,
Speaker 1: you at least stand in that truth for a moment
Speaker 1: before rejecting it, which might be useful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, although it does actually connect with other non normative biases,
Speaker 2: where it's something called Obviously, we have a replication crisis
Speaker 2: in much of this psychological science, so I don't know
Speaker 2: if this work has been replicated. But at the time,
Speaker 2: there was something called the illusory truth effect, where you
Speaker 2: merely being told something.
Speaker 1: Several times so you're more likely to believe it.
Speaker 3: Even in the act of debunking it.
Speaker 2: So if I tell you that a certain thing was
Speaker 2: thought to be true, but in fact it's not true,
Speaker 2: there's a kind of memory distortion bias where just you know,
Speaker 2: a year from now, if I ask you about that thing,
Speaker 2: there's this reliable bias in the direction of, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that was that was true, right, but you sort of
Speaker 2: the debunking, and this is why misinformation can be so
Speaker 2: pernicious and difficult to debunk. And again I bracket this
Speaker 2: with not knowing whether or not I am now spreading misinformation,
Speaker 2: because I don't know if this is washed out.
Speaker 1: I've certainly heard the misery truth effect many times, so
Speaker 1: now it's stuck in me as the truth. Ye fine,
Speaker 1: So okay, So coming back to this then, so Spinoza said,
Speaker 1: you know, you have to evaluate something as though it's
Speaker 1: stand in that space for a moment before you make
Speaker 1: your decision that that's actually false.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the reporter of that in our study was mostly
Speaker 2: activity in the anterior insula, which is, as you know,
Speaker 2: the insula is the cortical structure that that is, you know,
Speaker 2: very focused on in terror reception. And it's just the
Speaker 2: kind of the states of the body are being evaluated
Speaker 2: here and discussed. I mean, the discussed literature suggests that
Speaker 2: it's mostly driven by the insula, and it's and so
Speaker 2: that this was somehow unsurprising to us because it does
Speaker 2: seem I mean, I think just you can get in
Speaker 2: touch with this in the first person subjective way, there
Speaker 2: is something to reject a proposition as false feels a
Speaker 2: certain way. I mean, it is a kind of emotion,
Speaker 2: it's a psychological rejection state. And if it's emphatically false,
Speaker 2: certainly on a topic you care about, there's really just
Speaker 2: to put that on. The continuum of disgust was not
Speaker 2: at all surprising, right, And conversely, true statements were evaluated
Speaker 2: with the same kind of positively valanced reward structures that
Speaker 2: we know about in the frontal midline area of the brain.
Speaker 2: And this might be surprising to people who haven't thought
Speaker 2: about neuroscience very much, but generally speaking, we know that
Speaker 2: all of our acts of higher cognition are are leveraged
Speaker 2: from areas of you know, areas of the brain which
Speaker 2: were not designed merely for that for that, you know,
Speaker 2: not designed by evolution merely to support that higher cognition.
Speaker 2: So clearly you have to do math and language and
Speaker 2: neuroscience and everything else that only humans do using these
Speaker 2: structures that that you know, even our chimp cousins have.
Speaker 1: So when you hear something false, activates some sense of disgust,
Speaker 1: and use something true, it's beautiful and rewarding.
Speaker 2: And there was one other piece that the and this
Speaker 2: came in a subsequent study when we were looking at
Speaker 2: political versus and religious versus, just kind of semantic ordinary,
Speaker 2: more ordinary beliefs. We found that beliefs that there was
Speaker 2: there was a subsequent study where we which I ran
Speaker 2: with Jonas Kaplan at USC He's over in Demasio's lab,
Speaker 2: where we tried to in real time push back against
Speaker 2: people strongly held beliefs while they were in this skin.
Speaker 2: So we'd present them with a proposition which we we
Speaker 2: knew in advance that that you know, some subjects would
Speaker 2: strongly believe someone's strongly disbelieve, and we'd try to push
Speaker 2: their beliefs in the opposite direction, giving them fairly persuasive,
Speaker 2: but still in many cases kind of just sham evidence.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So like he's like someone who would be put in
Speaker 2: the scanner and we would we would ask them to
Speaker 2: rate on a scale of one to seven their confidence
Speaker 2: that secondhand smoke is a significant health concern, right, and
Speaker 2: then we would present I think in this case it
Speaker 2: was sham evidence against that conviction, seeing if we could
Speaker 2: knock get back. And but we did this for beliefs
Speaker 2: that would be nonetheless strongly held, but around which we
Speaker 2: wouldn't expect someone's identity to be really anchored versus beliefs
Speaker 2: that were you know, political or religious, where they you
Speaker 2: would imagine that would be more resistant to to revising
Speaker 2: their opinion whatever your evidence, right, And we found that
Speaker 2: areas in again midline, but now in the posterior regions
Speaker 2: of the brain, you know, kind of classically kind of
Speaker 2: default mode network areas were preferentially upregulated there where and
Speaker 2: some of these areas are and there's other work showing
Speaker 2: that they when people are given stimuli that that are
Speaker 2: interrogating self representation itself, like if you I give you
Speaker 2: a list of words and ask you which of these
Speaker 2: words apply it to you? You know, we're like patient
Speaker 2: or kind or anxious or and then people are if
Speaker 2: the if the if the task is is this me right?
Speaker 2: That's this this the same region that gets activated. So
Speaker 2: you know, at least in that experiment, we we did
Speaker 2: produce some evidence that beliefs were people were resistant to
Speaker 2: modifying their beliefs no matter what the counter evidence was,
Speaker 2: where the were of a sort that seemed to be
Speaker 2: invoking kind of the self referential uh processing.
Speaker 1: So beliefs are tied to identity.
Speaker 2: Not not all but such like like again there's there's
Speaker 2: there were two buckets. Some could be strongly held. But
Speaker 2: you know, presumably your identity isn't so tied up in
Speaker 2: you know, whether secondhand smoke is a health hazard versus uh,
Speaker 2: you know something about you know, abortion is wrong, or
Speaker 2: you know, whatever your political conviction was that we analyzed
Speaker 2: in advance.
Speaker 1: So this leads us to the question, I think, if
Speaker 1: what is belief for from an evolutionary point of view,
Speaker 1: what are these beliefs useful for doing for for the
Speaker 1: rest of the brain. One idea about beliefs is that
Speaker 1: they're trying to build a an accurate model of the world.
Speaker 1: Another version of beliefs is that it has to do
Speaker 1: with something social, as in belonging, with identity and the
Speaker 1: capitlain and all. Study you just pointed two would certainly
Speaker 1: support that. And then another that people propose that has
Speaker 1: to do with emotional regulation. It makes you feel better, more certain,
Speaker 1: less anxious about particular things, especially I think that would
Speaker 1: apply to letus say, religious beliefs. And it may not
Speaker 1: be that there's anything exclusive about these answers, but if
Speaker 1: we were thinking about waiting them, how do you see
Speaker 1: the function of beliefs?
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's subsumes almost every act of cognition
Speaker 2: apart from kind of pure kind of sensory engagement with
Speaker 2: the world. And even in that case, you can you
Speaker 2: can translate the sensory experience into kind of belief talk.
Speaker 2: I mean, it doesn't have the we don't it's not
Speaker 2: mediated linguistically in the same way. But like my belief
Speaker 2: that that's a table, it's built up over you know,
Speaker 2: you can in many channels. One channel as I can
Speaker 2: see it, and I can see that, you know, supporting
Speaker 2: your drink, and so we're using that as a table
Speaker 2: whatever it is. But the linguistic mediation comes into play
Speaker 2: when we might say, oh, would you just would you
Speaker 2: go put that over on the table. It's like then,
Speaker 2: so now I have this abstract representation of the table,
Speaker 2: I walk into the room, I find the table, right.
Speaker 2: So obviously we're engaging this in multiple modes. But once
Speaker 2: you break free of just moment to moment, you know,
Speaker 2: behavioral imperatives of navigating that, you know, our mediate environment,
Speaker 2: it's almost all linguistic or you know, imagistic representations of
Speaker 2: possible states of the future, you know, plausible states of
Speaker 2: the past. You know, do we try to reconcile our memory,
Speaker 2: you know, our memories when there's any kind of discordance there.
Speaker 2: But again, we're just trading in language. Oh no, no,
Speaker 2: he didn't say that. He said this, Or no, no,
Speaker 2: that wasn't. That wasn't on Tuesday. That was on Wednesday,
Speaker 2: And I mean it was It's all we're doing is
Speaker 2: talking to ourselves and talking to others about what the
Speaker 2: world is like and what our place in it is
Speaker 2: and what should we do next. I mean, we have
Speaker 2: just we have this massive navigation problem which covers really
Speaker 2: our life in every respect. I mean even you know,
Speaker 2: I view morality as a navigation problem, and morality really
Speaker 2: is a story of what should we do next, you know,
Speaker 2: or in the future, right, Like, what is what's the
Speaker 2: right thing to do? So you get two people in
Speaker 2: a room and they're for whatever reason, their incentives aren't aligned,
Speaker 2: and there's some kind of negotiation, and then it immediately
Speaker 2: becomes a conversation about what's the right thing to do,
Speaker 2: what's the fair thing to do, what's the what do
Speaker 2: we do last time? And if you actually kind of
Speaker 2: drill down on what's happening at each point along the way,
Speaker 2: and what is anchoring everyone's emotional response. You're looking at
Speaker 2: knowledge claims about the way the world is, the way
Speaker 2: that it's likely to be, and people's kind of the waitings,
Speaker 2: the emotional waitings. People are giving these claims with respect
Speaker 2: to kind of a probabilistic sense of the likelihood that
Speaker 2: they're true or false. Right, So, if someone says to you, oh, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: that's not what happened. There's a very controversial shooting in
Speaker 2: the news right now that has kind of shattered the
Speaker 2: country in the last twelve hours. An ice officer shot
Speaker 2: a woman protester in her car. You know, millions upon
Speaker 2: millions have seen the video and have rival interpretations of
Speaker 2: the video based on what they believe is plausible to think,
Speaker 2: based on the angle they were looking at and etc.
Speaker 2: All of this is a story of rival beliefs framed
Speaker 2: by different shadings of facts. But again, facts in this
Speaker 2: case are beliefs upon beliefs upon beliefs that people are
Speaker 2: granting more or less credence.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So, Like in this case, you know, the woman was
Speaker 2: driving her car toward the officer, So was she trying
Speaker 2: to get away or was she trying to run the
Speaker 2: officer overw how you interpret that maneuver changes your sense
Speaker 2: of the ethics of it completely. What is an officer
Speaker 2: supposed to do when he's no longer physically in danger
Speaker 2: with his gun, but his gun has drawn, he's already
Speaker 2: shot one round at the suspect. You either know nothing
Speaker 2: about that or you know a lot about that, and
Speaker 2: you have very strong convictions about what the right thing
Speaker 2: to do is or what the legal thing to do is. Again,
Speaker 2: is just a blizzard of propositional claims, linguistically mediated propositional
Speaker 2: claims about the way the world is or should be,
Speaker 2: And it's all a matter of belief and our creedence around.
Speaker 1: It, agreed. But what I'm interested in is not so
Speaker 1: much the individual beliefs that we might have about the
Speaker 1: trajectory of the car so on, but the social aspect
Speaker 1: of this, in terms of what do my friends and
Speaker 1: my colleagues on whatever my political side of the argument is,
Speaker 1: what do they believe is true? We're so obviously influenced
Speaker 1: by our groups, by our cultures, by our families, by
Speaker 1: our neighborhoods. To what degree is belief fundamentally a social
Speaker 1: issue in our social species?
Speaker 2: Well, I think it is almost entirely. When you look
Speaker 2: at it's kind of the primacy of language in shaping
Speaker 2: these beliefs. So we learn the language is a social phenomenon, right,
Speaker 2: It's an intersubjective phenomenon. You learn it. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: not that we don't have a propensity to learn it.
Speaker 2: Obviously we do, and that is kind of a private
Speaker 2: individual fact about each of us. But when you look
Speaker 2: at how it gets trained up in dialogue with your
Speaker 2: parents and caregivers and other people in your environment from
Speaker 2: your first hours of life, it's an intrinsically social phenomenon
Speaker 2: which we then later internalize, such that even when mommy
Speaker 2: and Daddy leave the room, we're left talking to ourselves. Right,
Speaker 2: And so there's that kind of inner voice that gets
Speaker 2: kindled and which we never seem to shake. Most people
Speaker 2: are mediating all of their experience with language, and we
Speaker 2: do this with one another. It is the basis of
Speaker 2: virtually all human cooperation. I mean, it's certainly cooperation with
Speaker 2: respect any complex task. I mean, like if you got
Speaker 2: up and started a trip, you know, I might wordlessly
Speaker 2: and instantly you know, grab you to keep you from
Speaker 2: falling over, or you drop something, and I try to
Speaker 2: catch it. That's not linguistic. But basically, any cooperation more
Speaker 2: complex than that is a matter of us talking to
Speaker 2: one another about what our goals are and what we're
Speaker 2: going to do next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So how do you think that applies to beliefs? Though?
Speaker 1: My belief about whether the woman was trying to kill
Speaker 1: the cop or get away, my belief about gun control, abortion, whatever,
Speaker 1: What do these things have to do with the people
Speaker 1: I'm surrounded by? In other words, how do we make
Speaker 1: our beliefs about what it's true what it's not true.
Speaker 2: So all of our talk about beliefs is occurring in
Speaker 2: a community, right, in the community of people who are
Speaker 2: we have direct relationships with, and then just a community
Speaker 2: of that is just a matter of are being embedded
Speaker 2: in an information landscape where we're hearing from other people
Speaker 2: who we may never meet, or we're reading books, you know,
Speaker 2: written by people who may have been dead for hundreds
Speaker 2: of years, but we're trafficking in the kind of just
Speaker 2: a torrents of linguistic representations of the world, and we're
Speaker 2: constantly revising or resisting revising our view of the world
Speaker 2: on that basis. Right, So you read something and you
Speaker 2: know this is where various you know, reasoning heuristics, you know,
Speaker 2: normative and otherwise come into play where you could have
Speaker 2: something like confirmation bias, right, which you know, in science
Speaker 2: we're alert to the fact that this is a kind
Speaker 2: of you know, cognitive defect or failure mode where it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, if you're just looking for the confirmation of
Speaker 2: your cherished hypothesis or your cherished opinion, well then we
Speaker 2: know that's just not a good operation to see if
Speaker 2: in fact you're you're in touch with reality. And so,
Speaker 2: but in every area of discourse, whether it's a formal
Speaker 2: one like science or it's just we're just you know,
Speaker 2: gossiping with friends, we're constantly trading in statements about the
Speaker 2: way the world is. And these statements could fall into
Speaker 2: various categories that are just are more or less morally
Speaker 2: salient or or psychologically.
Speaker 3: Combustible.
Speaker 2: I mean, so, you know, if you if you're talking
Speaker 2: about religious beliefs, like core religious beliefs that are you know,
Speaker 2: foundational for a specific community, obviously those have a different
Speaker 2: gravity to them, and they are all you know, pathologically
Speaker 2: in my view, they are protected by certain norms that
Speaker 2: are really the antithesis of what we what we do
Speaker 2: in science where you know, you're I mean this, you know,
Speaker 2: religion is the only area of culture where the notion
Speaker 2: of dogma is not not pejorative. R I mean, dogma
Speaker 2: is literally not a bad word in you know, dogma's
Speaker 2: you know, traditionally Catholic, you know, and word. These are
Speaker 2: the things you're gonna believe without you know, sufficient evidence,
Speaker 2: and you're gonna believe them as much as you can
Speaker 2: believe anything, and they're not on the table to be
Speaker 2: argued against or revised right now in science. If you
Speaker 2: if you can say, if you tell someone well that's
Speaker 2: just you know, you're being dogmatic, or that's that's a dogma,
Speaker 2: well that's not you know, that's definitely not a nice
Speaker 2: thing to say about somebody's reasoning. So yeah, so this
Speaker 2: is this is it's it's everywhere. And again, the hypothesis
Speaker 2: going into this original uh neuroscientific work was that there's
Speaker 2: something importantly similar across across all of these domains that
Speaker 2: we're doing where you're you're just you're you're accepting a
Speaker 2: representation as behaviorally valid or you're rejecting it as not
Speaker 2: and or you're or you're in a kind of holding
Speaker 2: pattern where you just can't know one way or the other.
Speaker 1: But I still want to understand what is the difference,
Speaker 1: either from neuroimaging studies or just how you've thought about
Speaker 1: serveral years, What is the difference between let's say, scientific
Speaker 1: and political and religious beliefs. That are all beliefs that
Speaker 1: you might take to be true or false. But it
Speaker 1: does feel like the social component is a really important
Speaker 1: one to political beliefs, maybe scientific beliefs too. In some cases,
Speaker 1: the emotional regulation might be really important to religious beliefs,
Speaker 1: as in, I've got a lot of anxiety about this,
Speaker 1: and this makes me feel better if I were to
Speaker 1: accept that. So there are these different components about why
Speaker 1: we believe. In other words, if we take the position
Speaker 1: that belief isn't actually just about figuring out what's true
Speaker 1: in the world, which we wish it were, but it's
Speaker 1: clearly not that in brains. So this is my question
Speaker 1: for you. How do you think about the when beliefs
Speaker 1: are for the purpose of social cohesion, when they're for
Speaker 1: the purpose of emotional regulation, and when they're for the
Speaker 1: purpose of getting the right answer for predictive actorscy the world.
Speaker 2: Well, I think all of that is still pretty knit together.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I would I would agree that certain beliefs function,
Speaker 2: or certain professions of belief at least functions kind of
Speaker 2: you know, loyalty tests or signaling as a you know,
Speaker 2: you know, a shibboleth as you know that where you're
Speaker 2: signaling group membership, right like like we have a code,
Speaker 2: and on that basis, there's a level of kind of
Speaker 2: social trust and expectations about each other's ethical intuitions and
Speaker 2: political commitments. And it's the kind of shorthand. But if
Speaker 2: you're going to tear at those sort of core group
Speaker 2: identity assertions, whether it's a you know it's a religious
Speaker 2: you know, a mainstream religion or you know, small or
Speaker 2: still like a spiritual or religious cult, or a political
Speaker 2: cult say, or political culture, these are kind of anchoring
Speaker 2: assertions about what is true about what really happened, about
Speaker 2: what is real about the unique sanctity of a given book, say,
Speaker 2: which we're not disposed to rein.
Speaker 3: Tear very much.
Speaker 2: And when you when you talk about specific things where
Speaker 2: they really were, these different ways of knowing collide. There's
Speaker 2: so many examples. He takes something like, you know, the
Speaker 2: shroud of Turin which was thought to be this. Perhaps
Speaker 2: in certain circles it still is thought to be that
Speaker 2: this Christian relic where this shroud had had received the
Speaker 2: facial imprint of Jesus, you know, it was thought to
Speaker 2: be his burial shroud. But then carbon dating was done
Speaker 2: on it and it was it was revealed to I think,
Speaker 2: I think it's the thirteenth century relic. So it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of a thousand plus years off from being
Speaker 2: the real shroud. So is this a claim about about
Speaker 2: purely religion or is this now? I mean, once carbon
Speaker 2: dating gets invented and you can you can use it,
Speaker 2: it suddenly becomes a claim about about chemistry, right, you know.
Speaker 2: And so I mean that is the the enduring tension
Speaker 2: between science and religion. Whenever you're making claims about the world,
Speaker 2: about the past, asked about what happens after death, that
Speaker 2: the way the mind works, about the connections between people,
Speaker 2: you know, tangible and invisible, you're at least in principle,
Speaker 2: in principle risking making claims that wander onto the territory
Speaker 2: of every other way we judge the truth value of
Speaker 2: claims about the world.
Speaker 1: So why is it so hard for let's say highly
Speaker 1: intelligent people to come to agreement. I mean, we know
Speaker 1: in any science department in a university, people argue. They
Speaker 1: spend their careers arguing. Again, if this were just about
Speaker 1: the brain trying to find predictive accuracy, that would be
Speaker 1: very difficult to understand. But because of all these other
Speaker 1: components to it, the social, the emotional, it's it's a
Speaker 1: much more complicated thing.
Speaker 2: The search for truth it is. I mean, you can
Speaker 2: sharpen it up more than we tend to. For instance,
Speaker 2: you can you can be alert to the problem of
Speaker 2: someone making claims that are on falsifiable. Right. This is
Speaker 2: something that that Carl Popper, the philosopher of science, gave
Speaker 2: us just the the litmus test for him was the
Speaker 2: falsifiability or lack there of a statement that was That
Speaker 2: was how that was the boundary between science and and
Speaker 2: the rest of our thinking. So what doesn't mean to
Speaker 2: make a claim that is unfalsifiable? It means it means
Speaker 2: that you're you're saying something is true. And yet there's
Speaker 2: no state of the world that could know, even not
Speaker 2: even in principle, a state of the world that we
Speaker 2: can imagine that would report to the falsity of the claim.
Speaker 3: Well, then you're it is.
Speaker 2: What's an example, you know, this is a the world
Speaker 2: as the entire world, the cosmos, everything that is apparently
Speaker 2: real was created by God just you know, ten seconds ago.
Speaker 2: But what God also created were all of the memories
Speaker 2: and all of the backward looking evidence we think we
Speaker 2: have about the antiquity of the cosmos. But the cosmos
Speaker 2: is actually ten seconds old. We just have all these
Speaker 2: memories jammed in our heads and all of this stuff
Speaker 2: on the on the internet, et cetera. And the rocks
Speaker 2: or the way they are and that, you know, so
Speaker 2: nothing would be different. But you know, this is this
Speaker 2: is my claim. This is my magical claim, right, so
Speaker 2: it's unfalsifiable. You know, every time you're going to give
Speaker 2: me something that you think would falsify falsified, I can
Speaker 2: just kind of layer into that into the thesis. Well, no,
Speaker 2: God made it that way so as to make it
Speaker 2: seem like, you know that way, right, So we're not
Speaker 2: We tend to not be interested in claims like that
Speaker 2: for good reason, right, because they're just they're not one
Speaker 2: they you know, there's they run against the grain of
Speaker 2: a very useful heuristic. We have in science, which goes
Speaker 2: by the name of Oakham's razor, but more generically, just
Speaker 2: the idea of that a thesis should be in so
Speaker 2: far as it's possible, parsimonious, right, Like you shouldn't just
Speaker 2: proliferate your you know, claims, you know, so as to
Speaker 2: shore up I mean, we don't want epicycles within epicycles
Speaker 2: within epicycles. We want the most elegant, you know, simple
Speaker 2: thesis that still conserves the data.
Speaker 1: But I still want to understand. If you got let's say,
Speaker 1: Popper and Spinoza in a room together. Here, you've got
Speaker 1: two very clear thinkers, but there would be beliefs that
Speaker 1: each of them hold that they would end up disagreeing on.
Speaker 1: And again I'm just I'm just circling back to this
Speaker 1: point that it's it can't be just about the rational.
Speaker 1: There are all these other reasons why humans hold beliefs,
Speaker 1: you know, the social and emotional or the things I
Speaker 1: keep hanging on about. But this feels important to me
Speaker 1: in terms of understanding why it is so difficult, why
Speaker 1: there's such polarization. Because what would be great is if
Speaker 1: we could sit down and you know, make our statements
Speaker 1: shout everything in all caps on X or blue sky,
Speaker 1: and everyone sees the logic and says, oh, okay, we agree,
Speaker 1: and and the whole world would come to agreement, but
Speaker 1: that that will never happen. And and I've just been
Speaker 1: curious about why why beliefs are so different in different
Speaker 1: heads and often so intractable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, people have I mean, obviously the people are
Speaker 2: driven by more than just a desire to not be
Speaker 2: wrong right, or to have or to to have their
Speaker 2: their representations of the world be accurate in the abstract.
Speaker 2: I mean, people are incentivized by the things. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, there's the the famous line that
Speaker 2: now I've actually forgotten how it goes, but something you know,
Speaker 2: it's hard to convince a man of of something that
Speaker 2: one of his occupation requires that he not be convinced
Speaker 2: of it, or something like that, right, you know. So
Speaker 2: it's like it's like, yes, if you're if you stand
Speaker 2: to lose a lot of money if a certain a
Speaker 2: certain state of the world is so, you're going to
Speaker 2: tend to avert your eyes from that for as long
Speaker 2: as possible, because you're I mean, this is just the
Speaker 2: the classic problem of and says I mean just it's
Speaker 2: a perverse incentive.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So in science we have worked this out to a
Speaker 2: remarkable degree. I mean, the thing that distinguishes the culture
Speaker 2: of science. It's not perfect, but what distinguishes science from
Speaker 2: basically everything else human beings do is that we have
Speaker 2: created a culture where there's a competitive apparatus that is
Speaker 2: error correcting by its very nature, right, Like where you know,
Speaker 2: we could both be in neuroscience and have rival theses
Speaker 2: and we're trying to you know, could falsify each other's
Speaker 2: claims or at least pressure tests them. And science is
Speaker 2: the only part of culture where you can actually win
Speaker 2: points for proving yourself wrong, right, I mean, just, I
Speaker 2: mean it doesn't happen as much as we would want
Speaker 2: it to, but it is. It really is a kind
Speaker 2: of a gold standard moment of scientific communication for somebody
Speaker 2: who has had a cherished thesis for you know, decades,
Speaker 2: to admit he or she was wrong about basically everything
Speaker 2: in public and to thank the person who did the
Speaker 2: work that showed that he or.
Speaker 3: She was wrong.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean that you know, people people have you know, again,
Speaker 2: it probably doesn't happen in real time as much as
Speaker 2: we would want, but it certainly happens. And it is
Speaker 2: it really is the quintessence of the scientific enterprise, right
Speaker 2: and and and what what is not the quintessence is
Speaker 2: to see some scientist who is just clearly emotionally attached
Speaker 2: to all of the sunk costs of his work, you know,
Speaker 2: his work and his reputation, and he's been known for
Speaker 2: this thing and this now, this battered thesis, is losing
Speaker 2: his credibility among the next generation of scientists. And this yet,
Speaker 2: this old warhorse, is holding on to this doomed project
Speaker 2: despite the fact that there's a now mountain of good
Speaker 2: argument and good evidence piling up against him. At that moment,
Speaker 2: it's actually right, you know, it begins to seem more
Speaker 2: correct to say that what he's doing is it's not
Speaker 2: like an alternative version of science. It's like it's like
Speaker 2: no longer science, right, Like you're you're failing these these
Speaker 2: obvious tests of credibility and the obstacle course has become
Speaker 2: too complicated for you emotionally for some reason, and you're
Speaker 2: no longer navigating it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So okay, So this brings up something about science that
Speaker 1: I flagged earlier that I wanted to come back to
Speaker 1: which is so when I read these original your papers
Speaker 1: from two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine. Right,
Speaker 1: So there's there's a belief that you think is true,
Speaker 1: belief that is false, and then the uncertain ones that
Speaker 1: you just don't know about. But what's so interesting to me?
Speaker 1: As we know in science there's instead a waiting or
Speaker 1: a probability that we put on different sorts of beliefs,
Speaker 1: and even our most cherished beliefs. We never use the
Speaker 1: word truth in science. We say, Okay, the way to
Speaker 1: the evidence supports this, and if in a few years
Speaker 1: the way that the evidence might support something else, fine
Speaker 1: we go with that. And so I'm curious how you
Speaker 1: would I know this wasn't part of the study, but
Speaker 1: how you might think about beliefs of this sort, which
Speaker 1: is the type that we hold in science of saying okay, well,
Speaker 1: there's mountain of evidence here. Some of it points the
Speaker 1: other way, someone points off this way, but most of
Speaker 1: it is pointing over here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I do think that virtually all of our beliefs
Speaker 2: are probabilistic. I mean, certainly in science explicitly so, I
Speaker 2: mean we have been we have been beaten into shape
Speaker 2: on that on that point, then again by largely by
Speaker 2: Popper but by others where we just know we know
Speaker 2: enough now to not say that's you know, we're one
Speaker 2: hundred percent certain something, and so it's just the way
Speaker 2: of the evidence, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, just in
Speaker 2: very simple terms. And you could imagine being absolutely certain,
Speaker 2: based on your or understanding of mathematics, that every triangle
Speaker 2: has one hundred and eighty degrees.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And I'd say, well, you know you're you're certain certain
Speaker 2: and yes, absolutely certain. Would you be willing to bet
Speaker 2: your life that it's so? And you might balk a
Speaker 2: little bit and say, yeah, yeah, i'd be. If i'd
Speaker 2: better on anything, I'd better on that. Well, it's it's
Speaker 2: sort of like two plus to equals four for me.
Speaker 2: But then someone introduces to you a concept of you know,
Speaker 2: non look Euclidean geometry that you didn't know before, right,
Speaker 2: So like you've just what you had in mind was
Speaker 2: a triangle on a flat surface.
Speaker 3: But now the basketball.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but now someone like Remond comes along and says, yeah,
Speaker 2: just visualize this. We're now going to curve the space.
Speaker 2: What's happening to that triangle on the basketball doesn't look
Speaker 2: like a little bit, a little more, a little less one
Speaker 2: hundred degrees. All of a sudden, your intuitions get knocked around,
Speaker 2: And if you're rational, you are now going to update
Speaker 2: your file about triangles, right, and so if if a
Speaker 2: core belief about something that's simple as a triangle can
Speaker 2: be overturned, But you just had a further utterance from
Speaker 2: you know, somebody who knows more about math and you,
Speaker 2: what is truly off the table for revision is probably
Speaker 2: not much.
Speaker 3: I wish that were true.
Speaker 1: I think I may be more pessimistic than you on
Speaker 1: this point, which is, you might easily convince me about
Speaker 1: a triangle, But core beliefs that I might have on
Speaker 1: any hot button political issue, those are tougher. I'm using myself.
Speaker 3: Can give me an example, Oh, whatever.
Speaker 1: Your views are on abortion or gun control or whatever,
Speaker 1: those are resistant to change because it's not as simple
Speaker 1: as a logical thing of Oh, I see the triangle
Speaker 1: on the basketball. Got it, I've now changed my model.
Speaker 2: But I'm sure certainly in both of those cases there
Speaker 2: is much more information that could be forthcoming on either
Speaker 2: topic that could push someone's because because people's intuitions, especially
Speaker 2: on those two topics tend to be anchored to like
Speaker 2: some meme that got in their head, you know, very
Speaker 2: likely early in life, that doesn't actually have a lot
Speaker 2: of content to it. So it's like the claim that
Speaker 2: abortion is wrong. That that that, you know, I'll drill
Speaker 2: down on that a little bit. It felt it's likely
Speaker 2: backed up by utterances like life starts at the moment
Speaker 2: of conception.
Speaker 3: Right. That's like if you.
Speaker 2: If you're if you're a you know, a religious believer
Speaker 2: who believes abortion is wrong, Well, that's it's just that's
Speaker 2: not true. If you're if you're a Muslim, that's just
Speaker 2: not true. You know, in the Muslim faith, I believe
Speaker 2: the soul is thought enter the zygote. I think around
Speaker 2: day eighty. It's either day eighty, day one, twenty something
Speaker 2: like that. So but definitely not at the moment of conception.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So, Okay, perhaps you're a Muslim who just didn't know
Speaker 2: that that was the doctrine, right, so someone told you
Speaker 2: life was started the conception. But then but then they
Speaker 2: actually check that the Holy Books and and and it
Speaker 2: turns out you're wrong. Okay, that's kind of like triangles
Speaker 2: all of a sudden. So it is with gun control.
Speaker 2: I mean, people just don't know a lot about guns.
Speaker 2: They don't know a lot about the actual statistics of
Speaker 2: human violence, and they don't know how many people get
Speaker 2: shot and how they get shot and why, and they
Speaker 2: just they tend to have they just I mean, it's
Speaker 2: just there's just a it's a thicket of ignorance and
Speaker 2: assumption on on lots of these topics.
Speaker 3: And and I'm not.
Speaker 1: Sure I agree with this in the following sense, just
Speaker 1: because I've I've known very closely family members and friends
Speaker 1: on very different sides of this issue who are extraordinarily
Speaker 1: knowledgeable and bring up an infinite encyclopedia of statistics about
Speaker 1: these issues. But they're on opposite sides, right, So so ignorance,
Speaker 1: isn't I think a way that we can explain away
Speaker 1: some people's positions on this.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll grant you that it is possible for two
Speaker 2: people to have more or less the same set of
Speaker 2: facts and to feel very differently about them. And then
Speaker 2: the question is what explains that?
Speaker 3: Right? So what else? What else do they believe? Right?
Speaker 1: What's about their internal model in this world and their
Speaker 1: expectations about the future and the government of the future,
Speaker 1: and the crime of the future and so on that
Speaker 1: makes them feel that, hey, I don't need a gun
Speaker 1: to a house. I do need to gun to a
Speaker 1: house whatever it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in that case, I would say they're waiting
Speaker 2: different probabilities. I mean, so, it's almost never the case,
Speaker 2: especially for that debate. It's almost never the case that
Speaker 2: you're talking about two people who are in touch with
Speaker 2: the same set of facts, because it's just, you know,
Speaker 2: the people who are deep into gun culture, who are
Speaker 2: it's all about the Second Amendment, and they're happy, they
Speaker 2: love shooting guns, they have guns, they're comfortable around guns,
Speaker 2: they know they can store them safely, say, and they
Speaker 2: have a very They've spent ten thousand hours rehearsing scenarios
Speaker 2: where they would have to defend their lives or the
Speaker 2: lives of their loved ones against some malicious intruder. And
Speaker 2: that's there, you know, that's become, you know, a deep
Speaker 2: part of their identity. Even that person is dealing with
Speaker 2: a very different set of facts. And the person who
Speaker 2: has no experience with guns, doesn't want any experience with guns,
Speaker 2: hates guns, thinks they're dangerous, thinks that it's just appalling
Speaker 2: that we live in a society that has so many
Speaker 2: guns and we've got this absurd level of gun violence
Speaker 2: that's unrecorded, that that makes us an outlier of an
Speaker 2: outlier in you know, other in the developed world than
Speaker 2: just to kind of it just just we're just as
Speaker 2: a horror show.
Speaker 3: How did we get here?
Speaker 2: It's it's like just pure masochism that we were living
Speaker 2: with this, you know, the religion of the Second Amendment. Right,
Speaker 2: So those two the people, no matter how well informed
Speaker 2: each representative of those two camps thinks they are, I
Speaker 2: guarantee you that in almost every case, they have very
Speaker 2: different beliefs about what is actually true in the world
Speaker 2: with respect.
Speaker 3: To the races of violence.
Speaker 1: It might both be holding on to facts, though they're
Speaker 1: paying attention to different facts. So the gun owner is
Speaker 1: paying attention to things like tyrannies of governments and what
Speaker 1: happens when governments take guns away from the citizens and
Speaker 1: so on. Those are the kind of facts they draw up.
Speaker 1: The gun non owner is drawing up facts about crime
Speaker 1: and how many accidents happen in households with guns and
Speaker 1: so on.
Speaker 2: But they might have those facts wrong. So like the
Speaker 2: non gun owner will believe that it's almost never the
Speaker 2: case that someone successfully defends himself with a gun or
Speaker 2: defends his family with a gun. That just doesn't happen.
Speaker 2: That's just NRA propaganda. What really happens is kids accidentally
Speaker 2: get a hold of their parents' guns and get shot
Speaker 2: and shoot themselves or shoot someone else, and it's a tragedy, right.
Speaker 3: And the statistics.
Speaker 2: Around gun violence are highly politicized, and it's very hard
Speaker 2: in fact to go in with an open mind and
Speaker 2: figure out what is actually just real, you know, empirically,
Speaker 2: because it's been so polarized. But even if we create
Speaker 2: the perfect case where they really do have the same
Speaker 2: sets of facts, uh with respect to what is being
Speaker 2: talked about, there are other facts and other propositional attitudes
Speaker 2: beliefs that are covertly working to change the sort of
Speaker 2: the waitings that they're giving to all of these facts.
Speaker 2: So like there are people who are just for whom
Speaker 2: the prospect of being finding themselves helpless to defend themselves
Speaker 2: or their their loved ones from evil. That is the
Speaker 2: that is an outcome that is so bad, I mean,
Speaker 2: the utility function that the that is that is so
Speaker 2: much worse than all the other bad things that could
Speaker 2: happen in life that whatever low probability you put on it,
Speaker 2: like the probability Let's say we could agree about the
Speaker 2: probability of a home home invasion, you know, where the
Speaker 2: person has come to murder you and your family, Right,
Speaker 2: whatever that probability is. If I wait that as worse
Speaker 2: than everyone dying in a fire, and and and a
Speaker 2: hundred other things that you think are probably worse than
Speaker 2: than than a home invasion, then we just have we
Speaker 2: just have different utility functions. Yeah, right, And that's and
Speaker 2: that is often at play. I mean, that's where emotion
Speaker 2: comes into it. Where you see people get really you know,
Speaker 2: we seem like we're just having a conversation about facts,
Speaker 2: but you see people, even granting the same sets of facts,
Speaker 2: become highly polarized and energized around the significance of those facts.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And this is why
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm still trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: to think about beliefs because so much of our positioning
Speaker 1: on everything has to do with these other issues. And
Speaker 1: I've I mean, I watched this all through the last
Speaker 1: decade where people will end up switching political allegiances not
Speaker 1: because they like the fact, so much of the other
Speaker 1: side it's because something discuss disgusts them about their own side,
Speaker 1: something gets said to them, or someone accuses them of
Speaker 1: something and they get so mad about it, and that's
Speaker 1: what drives them.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: But politics, I mean, one thing that's so frustrating about
Speaker 2: politics is that it should be the space in which
Speaker 2: we we rationally operate so as to cooperatively produce outcomes
Speaker 2: that that you know, improve our lives.
Speaker 3: Right. So it's like we politics really is.
Speaker 2: An art of cooperation and yet and to do that, well,
Speaker 2: we really have to be mean, you know, reason has
Speaker 2: to be the master value, and what's true, what's plausible?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: And then the ethics. You know, you can't keep ethics
Speaker 2: out of it. I mean, there are questions of what's
Speaker 2: fair and what's et cetera, what is what is good?
Speaker 2: What should we value? But so much of it is
Speaker 2: pure tribalism, right, And it's pure in group signaling and
Speaker 2: outgroup disparagement, and it's and and there when that is
Speaker 2: the becoming the master value, it's just it's just not
Speaker 2: about honestly talking about the world at all. Right, You
Speaker 2: just like, like, I mean, in so far as you're
Speaker 2: trading and claims about you know, the purport to be
Speaker 2: fact based, it's still what you're really doing is it's
Speaker 2: a team sport and you're trying to figure out how
Speaker 2: to win, Right, You're just trying to So if you're
Speaker 2: saying negative things about the opposition, you begin to not
Speaker 2: care whether they're even true. Let's just see what can stick, Right,
Speaker 2: this guy's a you know, this guy's a child molester. Well,
Speaker 2: what's your evidence for that? I you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I saw something somewhere on social media. But you know,
Speaker 2: like if I keep repeating it, you know, enough people
Speaker 2: are going to think he's a child molester that it
Speaker 2: could harmless chances come election time.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's like that's the game, and it's awful. Right,
Speaker 2: It's just so degrading in principle because it's leveraging the
Speaker 2: most anti social emotions. Mostly it's leveraging fear and outrage.
Speaker 2: I mean, I get irrational fear and outrage and false
Speaker 2: certainty or the pretense of certainty where you actually have
Speaker 2: no rational basis for certainty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in fact, this reminds me I want to
Speaker 1: come back to something at the very beginning about a
Speaker 1: belief that one might think is false. You found that
Speaker 1: that activates the anterior insula, presumably a sense of disgust
Speaker 1: about that. I wonder the degree to which this might
Speaker 1: differ based on different false information, some false information. For example,
Speaker 1: you see something online clearly misinformation, disinformation, and one might
Speaker 1: think this is really a concern for my side of
Speaker 1: the political argument, or for my you know, ethnic group,
Speaker 1: or for my anything this kind of misinformation. I'm simulating
Speaker 1: the future. What if everyone believed this piece of misinformation
Speaker 1: that's really disastrous? And so I wonder if some sorts
Speaker 1: of misinform, let's say, false beliefs, our reaction to them
Speaker 1: isn't simply discussed, isn't simply ah, okay, I've categorized that
Speaker 1: as false, but instead it's hey, I've categorized this as
Speaker 1: something that's really a concern for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, it's very easy to say. Again, this comes back
Speaker 2: to the power of ideas, when you're thinking of just
Speaker 2: how what is what could the effect be of a
Speaker 2: single sentence? You know, in any language, the sky really
Speaker 2: is the limit. If the front page of the New
Speaker 2: York Times reads that nuclear war has started in thirty minutes,
Speaker 2: it's going to get to you. Right, that's everything, right,
Speaker 2: This is like, I mean, we're just decoding words in
Speaker 2: this case on a website, and yet unless we can
Speaker 2: figure out some reason not to grant them credence, right,
Speaker 2: it's like, okay, wait a minute, this has been hacked,
Speaker 2: is it? You know, is it April Fool's Day? There's
Speaker 2: something wrong with my computers? Like this is really the
Speaker 2: New York Times? Is that really the website? Now with AI,
Speaker 2: were on the cusp of having to declare, you know,
Speaker 2: epistemological bankruptcy with respect on the internet because any video
Speaker 2: can now you know, virtually be faked. Right. So even
Speaker 2: now if we saw, you know, a video of Vladimir
Speaker 2: Putin saying I've just launched you know, our full arsenal
Speaker 2: the evil Empire of the United States. It'll be there
Speaker 2: in twenty four minutes. If we saw that and it
Speaker 2: was translated perfect Russian, and you saw you know, Gary
Speaker 2: Kasparov saying yeah, that's that's really Putin and that's really
Speaker 2: Russian and that's really what he said, and it's now
Speaker 2: on the New York Times website. Now you're thinking, wait
Speaker 2: a minute, that does the New York Times have sufficient
Speaker 2: technology to detect deep fakes? Do I really have to
Speaker 2: believe this? But once you can't grab a handhold to
Speaker 2: resist this slide into just helplessly imbibing the propositional import
Speaker 2: of those words. Right World War three, you're emotionally and
Speaker 2: behaviorally completely exposed to the implication of that claim.
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting.
Speaker 1: You're exposed to it, or you've put up walls against
Speaker 1: it as well.
Speaker 2: The way to put up walls against it is to
Speaker 2: find I mean that there are other If it's big enough,
Speaker 2: you know, it becomes irresistible. But I mean you can
Speaker 2: there are many ways to put up walls against beliefs
Speaker 2: we don't like the taste of, right like, we can
Speaker 2: ignore them, we can move on, we can distract ourselves.
Speaker 2: You know, this is this is kind of the purview
Speaker 2: of what we think about is self deception, right Like,
Speaker 2: how is it? How did how did the guy not
Speaker 2: know his wife was cheating on him? I mean there
Speaker 2: were these signs and he sort of I mean he
Speaker 2: must have seen that thing or heard that thing, or
Speaker 2: if she did that and I saw that. So there's
Speaker 2: all these you can you can say that there's this
Speaker 2: sort of this this boundary even within within the precincts
Speaker 2: of one mind, where you can we might say there's
Speaker 2: a an avoidance of knowledge when the knowledge is really there.
Speaker 2: But no if so if if the whole world kind
Speaker 2: of sticks your face in a claim. Right again, it's
Speaker 2: on the internet. The Internet's on fire with this thing
Speaker 2: being news, and you have to figure out whether it's true. Again,
Speaker 2: it's really just a matter of words or images that
Speaker 2: purport to represent the world suddenly transforming your life. Right,
Speaker 2: and this is all of a sudden, This is like
Speaker 2: like literally a sentence could be spoken to both of
Speaker 2: us that was so incontrovertible given the framing around it,
Speaker 2: given the way we both know the world is given
Speaker 2: how much would have to have been faked in order
Speaker 2: for it to come that way to us from that source, right,
Speaker 2: and this goes to the role of authority and gatekeeping
Speaker 2: and right. So, but provided it comes you know, over
Speaker 2: the transom at just the right angle, you know, the
Speaker 2: distance between us in this moment, you're reasonably comfortable and
Speaker 2: without much of a care in the world, and absolute
Speaker 2: panic is just you know, it's not much longer than
Speaker 2: it took to decode the sentence in the first place.
Speaker 2: It's like, holy shit, right, I mean, it's rare that
Speaker 2: that the stakes are that high and the testimony is that,
Speaker 2: you know, unimpeachable and unequivocal and irresistible.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's where we're more often trading in the in
Speaker 2: the land of well, it doesn't matter that much whether
Speaker 2: it's true or false. You know, I'll take it on
Speaker 2: or not. I can act as if it's true, but
Speaker 2: if it turns out not to be true, and so
Speaker 2: we're and and and we're we're dealing in probabilities where yeah,
Speaker 2: we're willing to bet something in that direction, but we're
Speaker 2: not willing to bet everything in that direction.
Speaker 1: What I mean is when you see a piece of obvious,
Speaker 1: blatant misinformation online, someone posts something stupid and and it
Speaker 1: feels like what your mind does is simulate, Wait, if
Speaker 1: everyone thought this, if this spreads, if this meme goes viral,
Speaker 1: that's going to have consequences. Yeah, That's what I'm pointing to.
Speaker 1: Is not necessarily like the nuclear war thing. But here's
Speaker 1: an example. Right after the Bondie Beach massacre of Jewish
Speaker 1: celebrating Hanukkah, somebody posted something saying, oh, it turns out
Speaker 1: one of the shooters is Jewish, and they showed a
Speaker 1: Facebook page of the guy wearing a yamica and all
Speaker 1: his friends and his friends on there. It was such
Speaker 1: an obvious AI fake when you zoom in on the
Speaker 1: buttons and so on, the buttons didn't make sense and
Speaker 1: so on. But I think the feeling that one might
Speaker 1: have viewing that is, hey, that's a dangerous piece of misinformation.
Speaker 1: Why because if it spread, if lots of people saw it,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. So what I mean is it's not
Speaker 1: just the evaluation of, oh is this true or false,
Speaker 1: it's the I'm just wondering if the discussed element in
Speaker 1: real life might be the what are the future consequences
Speaker 1: of that piece of mistass?
Speaker 2: Oh yes, well yeah, I think that can That can
Speaker 2: make the field of disgusted not only a neurophysiological analogy.
Speaker 2: It really can make it quite salient. I mean, if
Speaker 2: someone says something that you know to be false or
Speaker 2: you have every reason to believe it's false, and not
Speaker 2: only and it's and and if but if believed, it
Speaker 2: will open the door to just manifest harms in the world.
Speaker 2: And it's just it's it's an ugly divisive idea that
Speaker 2: you believe was maliciously concocted so as to produce those harms, right,
Speaker 2: So like it's not all these all this negative uh,
Speaker 2: negativity stacked on top of it. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 2: you know, I feel discussed all the time, and consciously
Speaker 2: feel discussed all the time at what people pretend to believe,
Speaker 2: you know, or what some people actually wind up being
Speaker 2: taken in by and actually believe. And the consequences in
Speaker 2: the world are obvious. I mean, I mean, in fact,
Speaker 2: if you once you put this kind of lens on
Speaker 2: to your your view of more or less everything, Uh, people,
Speaker 2: do you just see that all of the world's mayhem
Speaker 2: is a story of kind of failures, I mean, apart
Speaker 2: from the things that are visited upon us from nature,
Speaker 2: just like bad luck, you know, just like you know,
Speaker 2: an asteroid impact or or a virus you know, jump
Speaker 2: species and now you know we're suffering its consequences. Everything
Speaker 2: else is a self inflicted wound based on bad ideas,
Speaker 2: you know, just just rank tribalism and conspiracy thinking and lies,
Speaker 2: I mean conscious lies meant to divide people and to
Speaker 2: motivate them to produce harm. And it's it's all a
Speaker 2: matter of kind of this belief making and belief grasping
Speaker 2: machinery of our minds that is just ceaselessly doing its work.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder why changing our minds is so
Speaker 1: difficult when it comes to a scientific proposition. It seems
Speaker 1: to be easier, maybe because often those are like chess
Speaker 1: moves in the sense that they're cognitive. There's not a
Speaker 1: lot of emotional weight with it. But like the example
Speaker 1: you gave of the older professor who's emotionally so weighted
Speaker 1: down by what he's come up with, sometimes it's very
Speaker 1: hard to change our minds about things. What's your take
Speaker 1: about the challenges and any hopes about people changing their
Speaker 1: minds on things.
Speaker 2: Well, I think you need one needs to internaliz. I
Speaker 2: mean we do this in science, but I think this
Speaker 2: just should be exported to the rest of culture. I
Speaker 2: think we all have an ethical obligation to internalize a
Speaker 2: value that is deeper than any place where our kind
Speaker 2: of wishful thinking or the way that our preference is
Speaker 2: for the way the world is could be anchored right,
Speaker 2: And the deeper value is we actually want to know
Speaker 2: what's real. Right, We would like like we have a
Speaker 2: reality bias. And it's not to say that that you
Speaker 2: can't find these sort of low instances where a person's
Speaker 2: interest might be better served by not really being in
Speaker 2: touch with reality, like some some scope for delusion, you know,
Speaker 2: self serving delusion might you know, we can certainly concoct
Speaker 2: those examples where like the person would have if he
Speaker 2: if he knew what the people in the room really
Speaker 2: thought of him, well then he wouldn't perform nearly as
Speaker 2: well as he did when he thought he was popular
Speaker 2: or you know, thought he was handsome, or what everything was.
Speaker 2: But generally speaking, we shouldn't want to be deceived or
Speaker 2: self deceived or psychotic or and and trading in these
Speaker 2: hallucinations and having and watching our culture get bent every
Speaker 2: whish way by these kind of mass adoptions of delusion.
Speaker 2: You know, there's moral panics and paranoia and lives and
Speaker 2: half truths that become operative.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Again, politics is so much the story of this. But
Speaker 2: it's you know, I would say it it embraces you know,
Speaker 2: almost everything we do. He's just I mean, it's not
Speaker 2: it's not that understand in the world is everything. It's
Speaker 2: not that being rational is everything, but it is this,
Speaker 2: it is the thing that can safeguard everything else that
Speaker 2: we care about. R I mean, I view your reason as,
Speaker 2: among other things, the guardian of love, right like like
Speaker 2: like there's there's other things you can love, like the
Speaker 2: other experiences you can have that are not a matter
Speaker 2: of just rigorously understanding what is so right, but rigorously
Speaker 2: understanding what is so is the thing that get that
Speaker 2: that that that stands at the gate to protect all
Speaker 2: those other moments where you just want to you know,
Speaker 2: hug your lover or you know you're your best friend,
Speaker 2: or play frisbee, or appreciate art or just watch a movie. Well,
Speaker 2: when it comes time to figure out what's actually happening
Speaker 2: in the world, when there's a pandemic raging, or when
Speaker 2: you know people are flying airplanes into our buildings or
Speaker 2: or whatever the whatever it is, we should have a
Speaker 2: very deep bias for the truth.
Speaker 1: How would you teach that to high schoolers? What would
Speaker 1: you tell them?
Speaker 2: Well, one, you want to remove the stigma around honestly
Speaker 2: confessing that you don't know what's true, right, So saying
Speaker 2: I don't know should they should have absolutely no discomfort
Speaker 2: attached to it. In fact, failing to say that you
Speaker 2: don't know when you clearly don't know. Should should That's
Speaker 2: where the stigma should be, right, So to pretend to
Speaker 2: know something you don't know is where I mean that
Speaker 2: that should be you know, scored as kind of unseemly
Speaker 2: and then people should get the social feedback around that.
Speaker 2: So whenever you were caught bullshitting, right, that's the thing
Speaker 2: that should be embarrassing, not when the teacher asked you
Speaker 2: the question and you just didn't know, right, or And
Speaker 2: people should never be afraid to ask what seems like
Speaker 2: a stupid question, like even in a scientific context. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, there are great accounts of, you know, the
Speaker 2: behavior of some of the most eminent scientists you can
Speaker 2: think of where one of the things that made their
Speaker 2: company so EDIFYE and it actually kind of discombobulating for
Speaker 2: you know, lesser scientists is that they would ask a
Speaker 2: lot of dumb questions, you know, apparently dumb questions which
Speaker 2: if if if a novice was that would ask that question,
Speaker 2: they might actually see there might be some kind of
Speaker 2: social embarrassment around around that's kind of a dumb that's
Speaker 2: really an elementary question. But when you know, Richard Fyneman
Speaker 2: is asking you that dumb question. You know, you know
Speaker 2: you're in the company of Richard Feynman, right, you know
Speaker 2: he knows physics at least as well as you know physics.
Speaker 2: And he's asking that question. He's actually now putting pressure
Speaker 2: on what is kind of a load bearing wall and
Speaker 2: may in fact be a load bearing fiction of the
Speaker 2: whole enterprise. Right, And so you should be not at
Speaker 2: all afraid to ask dumb questions. And there should be
Speaker 2: this kind of master value where you want to calibrate
Speaker 2: your conviction rather finally with the weight of the evidence
Speaker 2: and the and the and the solidity of the argument. Right,
Speaker 2: like like you you want to you don't want to
Speaker 2: be at eleven with your certainty when there's actually nothing
Speaker 2: to stand on. And you also should not want to
Speaker 2: be wrong for a moment longer than you.
Speaker 3: Have to be right.
Speaker 2: So like so like if you I mean this is
Speaker 2: this is the spirit in which I would have any
Speaker 2: debate on any topic. I mean, I have you know,
Speaker 2: I tend to know what I think when I'm certainly
Speaker 2: on a topic with where I'm in any kind of
Speaker 2: debate mode with somebody. But if someone makes a point
Speaker 2: where I see their right and I was wrong, like
Speaker 2: my my kind of master my master value in that
Speaker 2: moment is not to defend myself, you know, just to
Speaker 2: put a brave face on my on my error and
Speaker 2: try to, you know, just kind of beat back the
Speaker 2: truth that they just articulated, because I mean, there's for
Speaker 2: two reasons for this. One is if the place I'm
Speaker 2: standing actually has no support and the person who's criticizing
Speaker 2: me can see it, and they pointed out, and the
Speaker 2: audience is likely to see it. If they can't see
Speaker 2: it in the first second, they're likely to see it
Speaker 2: like thirty seconds from now. What I really want to
Speaker 2: do is no longer to be standing there, both as
Speaker 2: a matter of like, you know, like just intellectual integrity,
Speaker 2: but also just as a matter of like not losing
Speaker 2: you know, egregiously, if I in so far as I
Speaker 2: care about the way I'm being perceived by the audience.
Speaker 2: So the master move there would be to actually let
Speaker 2: the person educate you on that point right now. Hopefully
Speaker 2: it's not a point that is so central to to
Speaker 2: you know, that the topic you were debating such that
Speaker 2: you now have just admit you're completely wrong and you've
Speaker 2: changed your mind. But in fact that were the case,
Speaker 2: that's what I would want to do. I mean that again,
Speaker 2: that's the thing. I go back to the scientist who
Speaker 2: might have spent his entire career banging away on some
Speaker 2: doomed theory. The moment has really proven wrong, right the moment.
Speaker 2: I mean again, this is these are situations that are
Speaker 2: few and far between, but it does happen. The pivot
Speaker 2: you want to be capable of making is just to
Speaker 2: be grateful to now know what's real, right like that. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's where the reality bought. But we should be hungry
Speaker 2: to wake up from the dream of misapprehension. This is
Speaker 2: a hallucination that this is a spell we have to
Speaker 2: keep breaking. We just we come into this world not
Speaker 2: knowing what is going on, and our entanglement with it
Speaker 2: and with others and with culture and with increasingly sophisticated
Speaker 2: ways of knowing is is continually trimming down this, this
Speaker 2: misunderstanding and aligning us with something Again we're not We
Speaker 2: never get some final account where we can step outside
Speaker 2: of our view of reality so as to look back
Speaker 2: at it and say, oh, yeah, this is where you
Speaker 2: This is exactly how the map fit the territory. We're
Speaker 2: always just kind of living the map. But when we
Speaker 2: when we you know, bump into a hard object, you know,
Speaker 2: in the darkness, we should know, we don't want to
Speaker 2: do that again. But it is, it comes down to
Speaker 2: a very clear sense of what intellectual integrity is. And
Speaker 2: we don't teach that very well. We teach it well
Speaker 2: in science and in you know, kind of rigorous areas
Speaker 2: of academia, like you know, philosophy, and in other areas
Speaker 2: we seem to teach the antithesis. I mean, I mean,
Speaker 2: one of the worst things that's happened of late, and
Speaker 2: it's it has been a source of great cultural division,
Speaker 2: is that so much of what purports to be knowledge
Speaker 2: gathering in the Ivory Tower has become just rankly politicized,
Speaker 2: such that you have whole disciplines which are have just
Speaker 2: been vitiated by politics.
Speaker 3: Right. So this it's a culture, a culture.
Speaker 2: Of activism that is masquerading as a culture of of
Speaker 2: knowledge acquisition, and it's completely upside down. And you know, therefore,
Speaker 2: and it's been it's you know, the the revolt against
Speaker 2: the elites is all too understandable in light of this,
Speaker 2: and it's I mean, we're going to take a generation
Speaker 2: to recover I think from.
Speaker 3: It, I agreed.
Speaker 1: I will say, by the way, it is a total
Speaker 1: side note, I'm very hopeful about the role of AI
Speaker 1: helping with this problem. Here's why we can set up
Speaker 1: a debate bot so that each student debates the bought
Speaker 1: some hot button issue. They go, they get graded on
Speaker 1: the quality of their arguments, and then they switch sides
Speaker 1: and they argue the other side. Why because the AI
Speaker 1: is great at doing this. It's calm, it's patient, It's
Speaker 1: able to do that with every student for as long
Speaker 1: as it wants, whereas no teacher could ever have that
Speaker 1: kind of time or patience. So I think this is
Speaker 1: going to be really helpful in terms of teaching students
Speaker 1: this three sixty view. Is there anything you've changed your
Speaker 1: belief about in the last decade or two?
Speaker 2: This is previously actually this part of the AI conversation.
Speaker 2: So I've been very worried about AI and the fundamental
Speaker 2: question of the alignment problem. I just what it's going
Speaker 2: to look like to build you know, truly superhuman general
Speaker 2: intelligence and kind of the ways in which we might
Speaker 2: do that wrong, you know, and effectively you know, ruin everything,
Speaker 2: because suddenly we have we have created a technology that
Speaker 2: is more powerful than we are, an autonomous and not
Speaker 2: aligned with our well being, and we're kind of negotiating
Speaker 2: with it now, and it becomes this doomed chess game,
Speaker 2: Like it's like, you're not going to play chess harder
Speaker 2: so as to to realign the chess engine. Then now
Speaker 2: is now just beating you at chess, and you're not
Speaker 2: going to negotiate with a super intelligent AI that's not
Speaker 2: disposed to take your advice hereafter. So, so I'm worried
Speaker 2: about AI. And I did think at least five ten
Speaker 2: years ago that autonomous weapons would be something that we
Speaker 2: wouldn't want to do. That just seems like a very
Speaker 2: dangerous thing, And so I think I even signed an
Speaker 2: open letter that we shouldn't have autonomous weapons. I think,
Speaker 2: my again, this is not really a happy epiphany, But
Speaker 2: I do think that leaving the alignment concern aside, given
Speaker 2: the arms race with China clearly and other potential adversaries
Speaker 2: around AI, I feel like we just need to win
Speaker 2: that arms race. So i'm, you know, until I hear
Speaker 2: a better argument. Now, I'm in favor of all the
Speaker 2: ways in which AI can be adopted by the military.
Speaker 2: Autonomous weapons included. I just think the failure mode of
Speaker 2: declining to do that work and waiting for China to
Speaker 2: do it is so obvious and excruciating that I'm willing
Speaker 2: to roll the dice on let's get there first. The
Speaker 2: first time I heard about it, I was sort of
Speaker 2: like the gun control guy, like I don't want anything
Speaker 2: to do with guns, and they're just dangerous and awful.
Speaker 2: And then I sort of just flipped to none, no, no,
Speaker 2: we need as many guns as possible, and we need
Speaker 2: them fast. But again, I've obviously opened to argument on that,
Speaker 2: but that's that was a very clear change of heart.
Speaker 1: This comes back to the central theme that we've been
Speaker 1: discussing about how beliefs you know, in the laboratory, the
Speaker 1: way one has to study it is with simple beliefs.
Speaker 1: In the year, they're true or they're false, But in
Speaker 1: real life they're tied to everything else, including our views
Speaker 1: of larger and larger geopolitical issues, such that you might
Speaker 1: have a flip of a belief predicated on these other
Speaker 1: larger issues about where you think the world is going politically. So,
Speaker 1: given this other constellation of beliefs that people have that
Speaker 1: navigate their particular beliefs about politics or abortion or gun
Speaker 1: control or whatever. Is healthy disagreement something that you see
Speaker 1: as possible, and if so, in what ways would you
Speaker 1: like to see that happen?
Speaker 2: Well, I think we we live in the zone of
Speaker 2: healthy disagreement all the time, and we're constantly disagreeing with
Speaker 2: with people we love about things.
Speaker 3: The question is how much.
Speaker 2: Does it matter? And when it matters, it's like when
Speaker 2: you raise the stakes, then you begin to get uncomfortable
Speaker 2: and you feel like you have to converge. I mean,
Speaker 2: it just became it becomes behaviorally and emotionally imperative to converge,
Speaker 2: certainly when lives depend on it. Well, then all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, then it's like it's a kind of a
Speaker 2: moral emergency to get get your facts straight, get you know,
Speaker 2: you know, you get some of the best argument and win.
Speaker 2: So it really just it comes down to what the
Speaker 2: stakes are and whether we're in a zone that's anything
Speaker 2: like that which is indicated by the common phrase, or
Speaker 2: we're just gonna have to agree to disagree, right, Like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's we over here. We can we can do that
Speaker 2: and still be friends and this is perfect, right, there's
Speaker 2: no problem like that's kind of the spice of life
Speaker 2: to agree to disagree about that. But over here like
Speaker 2: we can't take another step until we figure out who's right.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with Sam Harris. Sam's research here
Speaker 1: shows that even at the most basic level, the brain
Speaker 1: distinguishes between accepting or rejecting a claim or remaining uncertain
Speaker 1: about that claim, and that distinction the brain makes that
Speaker 1: then roots what you do in terms of feeling and behavior.
Speaker 1: Some things you act on right away because you believe
Speaker 1: they're true, and other things you dismiss and they don't
Speaker 1: move any further through your neural system. So your brain's
Speaker 1: assessment about the truth or falsity of something determines everything
Speaker 1: about what happens next. As Sam also mentioned, beliefs differ
Speaker 1: in terms of how tightly they bind to identity. Some
Speaker 1: beliefs are pretty easy to revise when new evidence appears,
Speaker 1: like here's data about how you could make nuclear react safe.
Speaker 1: But other beliefs are anchored to social belonging or moral
Speaker 1: commitments you have, or longstanding narratives about who you are
Speaker 1: and how the world operates. In those cases, changing a
Speaker 1: belief can feel like changing sides or stepping away from
Speaker 1: a community or giving something up that wants provided stability.
Speaker 1: What emerges is a picture of belief as a kind
Speaker 1: of navigation system. It helps us decide what to act
Speaker 1: on and who to trust, and what to fear, and
Speaker 1: what futures to prepare for. And belief is shaped by
Speaker 1: evidence and facts, yes, but also by incentives and emotions
Speaker 1: and social environments we inhabit. Zooming out this brain research
Speaker 1: has consequences far beyond individual brains, because the same mechanisms
Speaker 1: that allow us to cooperate and reason and build shared
Speaker 1: models of the world can and also amplify division and
Speaker 1: harden identities and spread ideas whose consequences outpace their accuracy.
Speaker 1: In an age where language and images and claims are
Speaker 1: moving faster than ever, understanding how belief forms and how
Speaker 1: it hardens is becoming something of a civic duty. If
Speaker 1: belief is the gateway between information and action, then learning
Speaker 1: how that gateway works is one of the most important
Speaker 1: challenges of our time. Will presumably never all agree on
Speaker 1: our beliefs, but a deeper understanding of this, I hope,
Speaker 1: can allow disagreement to remain tethered to reality and proportion
Speaker 1: and humility go to eagleman dot com slash podcast. For
Speaker 1: more information and to find further reading, join the weekly
Speaker 1: discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
Speaker 1: to leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and
Speaker 1: this is Inner Cosmos