Following is a conversation with Sam Harris. One of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time. He's the host of The Making Sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including the end of Faith, the moral landscape lying, Free Will and waking up. He also has a meditation app called waking up that I've been using to guide my own meditation. Quick mention of our sponsors National instruments Val Campo athletic.
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He explored those ideas, the calm, and Clarity amid. The storm of difficult at times controversial discourse, I really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he Sam, Harris. Someone who I have listened to for many hundreds of hours. Would write a kind email to me saying, he enjoyed this podcast and more that he thought I had a unique voice that added something to this world, whether it's true or not, it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able
able to do this thing and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words meeting Sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life as usual. I'll do a few minutes of as now. I try to make these interesting but I give you time stamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. Unfortunate to be very selective with the sponsors we take on. So hopefully, if you buy
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I've been enjoying meditating with the waking up app recently. It makes me think about the origins of cognition and Consciousness. So let me ask, where do thoughts come from? Well, that's that's a very difficult question. To answer subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right? I mean, it's just, they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs, subjectively? Right. So, which is to say that
If you pay attention.
To the nature of your mind. In this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think. Next right now. You're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it right. You know you're not unless you you're schizophrenic or your have some kind of thought disorder where you were your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you. They do have a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them and people readily identify with them. They feel like what you
Arm is this is the thing. This is the spell that gets broken with meditation, with our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought, right? Which is fairly paradoxical because how could you as a mind as of self, you know, if there, if there were such a thing as a self, how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just Springs into into conscious View?
But and you know meditation is ultimately about examining that that point of view closely enough. So is to unravel it and feel the freedom that's on the other side of that identification. But the subjectively thoughts simply emerge, right? And you don't think them before you think them, right? There's this first moment where you know, I'm not just anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves. Me just imagine.
Something, or remember something, and just just pick a memory, any memory, right? You've got a storehouse of memory, just promote 12. Consciousness. Did you pick that memory? I mean, let's say, you remembered breakfast yesterday, or you remembered what you said to your spouse before, leaving the house, or you remembered, what you watch on Netflix last night or you remembered something that happened to you. When you're four years old, Whatever It Is. Write it first. It wasn't there.
R. And then it appeared and that is not a, we want. Sure we'll get to the topic of free will, ultimately, that's not evidence of Free Will. Right with that? Why are you so sure, by the way, it's very interesting Thrifty after no friend, no free will of my own. Yeah, everything just appears Ryan. But what else could it do? And so that that's, that's a subjective side of it, objectively. You know, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts are
At bottom. What some part of our brain is doing neurophysiological. I mean that these are the products of some kind of neural computation and neural representation and we're talking about memories, is it possible to pull at the string?
Of thoughts that tried to get to its route to try to dig in past the, the obvious surface subjective experience of like the thoughts pop out of nowhere. Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of, from the, the firing of the cells? There's that a uses pursued to dig that dig into that direction. Well, you can get closer to many many, subtle contents in consciousness.
As you can notice things more and more clearly and have a landscape of Mind, open up and become more differentiated and more interesting. And if you take psychedelics, you know, it opens up. You know, why depending on what you've taken and the dose, you know, it opens in directions, and to an extent that, you know, very few people imagine would be possible, but for haven't had those experiences, but this idea of you getting closer to something to the datum of your mind, or is it just something?
Of interest in there, or something that's more. Real is, is ultimately undermine because there's no place from which you're getting closer to it. There's no, you're part of that Journey, Riley, we tend to start out, you know, whether it's in meditation or in any kind of self-examination or, you know, taken psychedelics. We start out with this default point of view of
Feeling like we're the kind of on the rider on the horse of Consciousness or where the where the man in the boat going down the stream of Consciousness. Right? But we're so, we're differentiated from what we know cognitively introspectively, but that feeling of, being differentiated that feeling of being a self that can strategically, pay attention to some contents of Consciousness is what it's like to be identified with some part of the
Reema thought that's going uninspected, right? Like that it's a false point of view. And when you see that and cut through that, then this sense of this, this notion of going deeper, kind of breaks apart, because really, there is no depth, ultimately, everything is right on the surface. Everything there's no Center to Consciousness there, just Consciousness and its contents and that those those contents can change. Vastly again, if you drop acid, you know, the contents change. But
There's in some sense that doesn't represent a position of depth versus the Continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart. So you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called Consciousness and you're writing it and the actual writing is very shallow, this is this all surface. So let me ask about that horse. What's up with the horse? What, what is consciousness from? Where does it emerge?
How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality, how fundamentals it to what it means to be human. And I'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems. Yeah. Well, that remains to be seen if we can if we will build it purposefully or just by accident, it's a major ethical problem. Potentially that. I mean, my concern here is that we may in fact,
Build artificial intelligence that passes, the Turing test, which we begin to treat, not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and and demonstrates that. But we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious. We will have built it to seem conscious. And unless we understand exactly how Consciousness, emerges from physics, we won't actually know that these systems are conscious, right? We'll just, you know, they may say, you know, listen, you can't turn me off because you're that's a
Right. And we will be convinced by that dialogue because we hope we will, you know, just in the extreme case, who knows when we'll get there but if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are. So we're basically in, you know, Westworld like situation. There's no way we're going to withhold. An attribution of Consciousness from those machines. They're just going to seem they're going to advertise our Consciousness in every
Glance and every utterance, but we won't know, and we won't know in some deeper sense that it make than we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people. I mean, someone could roll that back and say, well, you don't, you know, I don't know that your conscience, or you don't know that I'm conscious. We're just passing the Turing test for one another, but that kind of solemn says, mm isn't Justified, you know, biologically, or we just anything. We understand about the Mind biologically suggest that you and I are part of the same.
You know, role that roll of the dice in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in the wetware of of brains, like ours, right? So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate, you know, is I would argue is not parsimonious to withhold Consciousness from other apes and even other mammals ultimately and, you know, once you get beyond the mammals, then my intuitions are
Not really clear the question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain. And ultimately, the question of whether it emerges is still uncertain. You can, you know, it's not, it's not fashionable to think this but you can certainly argue that that Consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter. That doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing. Even though everything else that we
Recognize about ourselves as mine's almost certainly does emerge like an inability to process language. That clearly is a matter of information processing because you can disrupt that process in ways that is, it's just so clear. And the problem that the confound with Consciousness is that,
Yes, we can seem to interrupt Consciousness you can give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them what was that? Like and they say nothing, I don't remember anything but it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in Consciousness. Whereas it's not with you know interrupting speech you know we know when we've done it and it's it's just obvious that you know you disrupt the
Neural circuits and you know, you've disrupted speech. So if you have to bet all your money on one camp or the other would just say, do you earn the side of pain psychism where Consciousness is really fundamental to our to all of reality? What was or more on the other side? Which is like it's a nice little side effect. I useful like hack for us humans to survive work on that Spectrum. Where do you land when you think about consciousness?
From an engineering perspective. I'm truly agnostic on this point and I think I'm, you know, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me. I don't know. And pants scientism is not. So,
Compelling to me. I bet again. It just seemed unfalsifiable. I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if pan. Psyche is a true, it's just to remind people pants. A Chasm, is this idea that Consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental, constituent, constituents of matter. So there might be something that it's like, to be an electron or, or, you know, a cork. But then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the macro scale or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different.
So, maybe unfalsifiable it just might be that reality is not something.
We're as in touch with as we think we are and that if that is base layer to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done ontologically is to misconstrue it, right? I mean there's there could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom and this you know this obvious idea doesn't originate with me. This is this goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell and and others you know, 100 plus years ago but I just
Like the concepts were using to divide Consciousness and, and matter May, in fact be part of our problem, right? Where the rubber hits, the road psychologically, here are things like, well, what is death, right? Like they do we any expectation that we survive death, or any part of us survives death, that really seems to be the, the many people's concern here. Well, I tend to believe just as a small
All little tangent. Like I'm Wilderness back on this. That there's some, it's interesting to think about death and Consciousness, which one is the chicken? Which one is the egg? Because it feels like death could be the very thing. Like our knowledge immortality could be the very thing that creates the consciousness.
Yeah, well that then you're using Consciousness differently than than I am. I'm so stoked for me Consciousness is just the fact that
The lights are on at all. There's an experiential quality to anything. So, so much of the processing is happening in our brains right now.
Seems certainly seems to be happening in the in the dark, right? Like that, it's not associated with this qualitative sense, that there's something that's like to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing, but for other parts,
The lights are on and we can talk about and whether we talk about or not, we can feel directly that there's something that is like to be us. There's something something seems to be happening, right? And the seaming in our case is broken into vision and hearing and and proprioception and taste and smell and and thought and emotion, and but there's there are the contents of consciousness
That we are familiar with and that we can, we can have direct access to in any present moment that when we're quote conscious and even if we're confused about them and even if, you know, were asleep and dreaming and we really am worried, it's not a lucid dream. We're just totally confused about our circumstance. What you can't say is that we're confused about Consciousness that they like, you can't say the Consciousness itself might be an illusion because
Because on this account, it just means that things seem any way at all. Even like if this you know, it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table. Now, I could be wrong about that. It could be a hologram. I could be asleep and dreaming I could be hallucinating but the seeming part isn't really up for grabs. In terms of being an illusion, it's not something seems to be happening and that seeming is the is the context in which
Every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed and the it's also the context in which certain Illusions can be cut through because we're not, we can be wrong about what it's like to be us. And we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience. But for instance, this you know, many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will. And I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that and that you
Can you can cut through those experiences and then things seemed a different way, right? So it's not that it's not that things don't, there aren't discoveries to be made there and and assumptions to be overturned. But
This kind of Consciousness is something that I would think, it doesn't just come online when we get language, it doesn't just come online. When we form a concept of death or the, the finiteness of life, it doesn't, it doesn't require a sense of self, right? So it doesn't its prior to a differentiating self and other and I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people. And I do think probably any
Mammal has this but certainly if you're going to, if you're going to presuppose that, something about our brains is producing this, right? And that's a very safe assumption even though it we can't, even though you can argue, the jury is still out to some degree. Then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps. You know, we're chimps and rats even in the end, given the underlying
Neural similarities so and I don't know you know phylogenetically I don't know how far back to push that you know it's there people think single cells might be conscious or that flies or certainly conscious. They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains and it says it's just that's a there's a lot going on even in a fly, right? But I don't have intuitions about that but it's not in your sense, in an illusion, you can cut through, I mean, to push back the alternative
Could be. It is an illusion constructed by just by humans. I'm not sure I believe this but it in part of me hopes, this is true because it makes it easier to engineer is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality and that contemplation in itself creates Consciousness that like the the rich Lights On Experience. So the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until after birth.
In that construction. So it's using it's possible that that is the case that it is a sort of construct of the way we deal, almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world. The social interaction with other humans,
Or is he an ex is here, saying the complete opposite? Which is it's like fundamental to single-celled, organisms and trees and so on. Right. Well, yeah. So I don't, I don't know how far down to push it. I don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious but but they might be. And I just again, I could be unfalsifiable. But as far as babies not being conscious, really like you're not, you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or you have a conversation.
Isolation or treat other people. First of all babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for and they certainly do it before they have language, right? So it's a lake. It's got to proceed language to some degree. And you can interrogate this for yourself because you can put yourself in various states that are rather obviously not linguistic, you know.
With the meditation allows you to do this, you can certainly do it with psychedelics, where it's just your capacity for language has been obliterated. And yet you're all too conscious. In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument for
Things running the other way that there's something about language and and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience that that we're, we are potentially much more conscious of data sends data and everything else. Then we tend to be and we have trimmed it Down based on how how we have acquired Concepts. And so I go out. When I walk into a room like this, I know I'm walking into a room.
Home. I have certain expectations of what is in a room, you know, I would be very surprised to see, you know, wild animals in here, or waterfall or things. I'm not expecting. But I can, no, I'm not expecting them. Or I'm expecting their absence because of my capacity to be surprised. Once I walk into a room and I see a, you know, alive gorilla or whatever. So there's their structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual.
Learning and language and language learning and it causes us not to one of the things that happens when you take psychedelics. And you just look as though for the first time at anything, it becomes incredibly overloaded with it can become overloaded with meaning and just the
The torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people and it that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically and as you're coming down right, I have you done psychedelics overdone acid or not acid mushroom and that's it. And also edibles. But that's there's some psychedelic properties to them but rare but yeah, mushrooms mushrooms.
Several times in always had an incredible experience, it exactly the kind of experience you're referring to, which is, if it's true that language, constrains, our experience, it felt like I was removing some of the constraints, right? Because even just the most basic things were beautiful in the way that I wasn't able to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on. Yeah. And the experience of coming down is an experience, an experience of
Encountering the futility of capturing, what you just saw a moment ago in words, right? Like Ava. But especially if you have any part of your, your self-concept and your your ego program is to be able to capture things in words. And if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist or see someone who wants to just encapsulate, the profundity of what just happened. The the
Total fatuousness of that Enterprise. When you really have gotten, when you have taken a, you know, a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at cat, describing it to yourself, you know, so that you could describe it to others. It's just it's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows. I mean, it's like you're trying something they can't. It's like the beer gesture proves its impossibility.
And it's so yeah so that me that for me that that suggests just empirically on the first person side that it's possible to put yourself in a condition where it's clearly not about language. Structuring your experience and your having much more experienced than you, you tend to. So it says the Primacy of language is primary for some things but
It certainly primary for certain kinds of Concepts and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world, but it's is clearly more to mind than than the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others. Can we go to that world of psychedelics for for a bit? Sure? Where do you think so Joe Rogan apparently and many others meet apparently a
Was when they on DMT.
A lot of people report this kind of creatures that they say than that. And again, it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience. But DMT is an interesting one. There's a, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on in psychedelic psychedelics, curly MDMA psilocybin in John Hopkins and much other places.
But DMT, they all speak of as like some extra super level of a psychedelic. Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is? Our mind goes on in second, on psychedelics, but in in DMT, especially unfortunately, I haven't taken DMT. So unfortunately or fortunately. Unfortunately that for, although it's I presume it's in my body as it is in everyone's brain and
Many, many plants apparently, but I've wanted to take, I haven't been. I had an opportunity that was presented itself. That was obviously the right thing for me to be doing but you know, for those who don't know, DMT is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting you smoke it. And it's basically a 10-minute experience or a three-minute experience within like a 10-minute window that you when
You're really down after 10 minutes or so, and Terence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT. That was that was his the center of the bullseye for him, psychedelically apparently. And it does, it is characterized. It seems for many people by this phenomenon, which is, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is your, it's not just your perception, being broadened or changed, its you
To according to, according Terence McKenna, feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted into a different circumstance. Here me have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some kind, right? So it's so the place is populated with with things that seem not to be your mind. So it does feel like travel to another place because you are unchanged yourself. Accordingly they get I had I just have this on the authority of the people who have
grab their experience, but it sounds like it's a pretty, it's pretty common is it sounds like it's pretty common for people not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke. So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot out of the cannon and land among the what mechanic called self-transforming machine elves that appeared to him like jeweled Faberge Egg like bats.
Health dribbling basketballs that were handing him completely uninterpretable, reams of profound knowledge. It's a, it's an experience I haven't had. So I just have to accept that people have had it.
I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others on demand, that are totally compelling to us, right? There's no, there's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest. Maybe every night. We go to sleep. Some of us don't remember dreams very often but some dream vividly every night and
Just think of how insane that experience is. I mean, you've forgotten where you were right? That's the strangest part. I mean, this is psychosis, right? Your you have you have lost your mind. You have lost your connection to your episodic memory or even your expectations. That reality won't undergo wholesale changes, a moment after you have closed your eyes, right? Like you're in bed. You're, you know, watching
The Netflix, you're waiting to fall asleep and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible and you're not surprised, right? You're talking to dead people, you're hanging out with famous people. You're you're someplace, you couldn't physically be, you can fly and the even that's not surprising, right? It's you have lost your mind but relevantly for this or found it. You found something lucid dreaming is very interesting because then then you can have the best of both circumstances and
it's that that then it can be kind of systematically explored. But what I mean by found just assert, interrupt is like if we take this brilliant idea that language constrains, us grounds us language and other things of the waking world around us. Maybe it is that you've found the full, the full capacity of your cognition, when you dream are, when you do psychedelics, you're stepping outside to the little human cage, the cage. You
Human Condition to get open the door and step up and look around and then go back in. Well, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else, but you've also lost something right? You've lost certain capacities, memory. Want, we'll just, yeah, in this case. You literally didn't you don't, you don't have enough presence of Mind in the dream in the dream. He said he or even, it's the Psychedelic state. If you take enough to do you have you? There's no psychologic. There's very little
Psychological continuity with your life such that you're not surprised to be in the presence of someone who should be. You should know is dead or you should know you're not likely to admit. No, by normal channels, right? You're, you know, you're now talking to some celebrity and it turns out your best friends, right? And you're not even have no memory of how you got there, you know, like, how did you get into the room? You like, how did you drive to this restaurant? You know, you have no memory and none of that surprising to you. So you're
Brain damaged in a way you're not reality testing in the normal way. The fascinating possibility is that this probably thousands of people who've taken psychedelics of various forms and have met Sam Harris on the journey. Why would put in more likely in dreams? Not, you know, because it's in psychedelic with psychedelics, you don't tend to hallucinate in the, in a dreamlike way. I mean it's the DMT is giving you a, an experience of others. But it seems to be
On non-standard it's not like it's not just like dream hallucinations, but but to the point of becoming back to DMT, the people want to suggest and Terence McKenna certainly did suggest that because these others are so obviously other and they're so vivid. Well then if they could not possibly be the the creation of my own mind but every night in dreams, you create a compelling or what is
You at the time, a totally compelling simulacrum of another person, right? And that's that just proves the mind is capable of doing it now. It's the, the phenomena of lucid dreaming shows that the mind is incapable of doing everything. You think it might be capable of even in that space. So one of the things that people have discovered in lucid dreams and I haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming. So I've
I can't confirm all of this so I can confirm some of it. Apparently in every house in every room in the The Mansion of dreams, all light switches are dimmer switches. Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light, it gradually comes up. It doesn't, it doesn't come up instantly on demand because apparently, this is covering for the brains inability to produce from a, you know,
Standing start, rip visually Rich imagery on demand. So there's that. I haven't confirmed that but that was people have done research on lucid dreaming claim that it's all dimmer switches. But one thing I have noticed and you know, people can check this out. Is that in a dream? If you look at text, you know, if a page of text, you know, or sign, you know, or television that has text on it and then you turn away. And you look back at that.
At text, the text will have changed, right? There's the total is it just a chronic instability graphical instability of text in the dream state? And I don't know if that, you know maybe that's someone can confirm that. That's not true for them but that's whenever I've checked that out that has been true from. It keeps generating it like real time is yeah from a video game perspective. Yeah it's render its rendering is re-rendering it for some reason. What's interesting. I actually I don't know how I found myself in this.
Sets of that part of the internet. But there's quite a lot of discussion about what it's like to do math on LSD. Uh-huh. And because apparently, one of the deepest thinking processes needed is those of mathematicians are theoretical computer, scientists are basically doing anything that involves math is proofs. And you have to think creatively but also deeply and you have to think for many hours at a time. And so they're always looking for ways to
Is there is there any Sparks of creativity that could be injected? And apparently out of all the psychedelics, the the worst is LSD because it completely destroys your ability to do math well and I wonder whether that has to do with your ability to visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind and hold them there and Stitch things together, which is often what's required for proofs. Hmm, but again, this is difficult to kind of research these
Of Concepts but it does make me wonder where, what are the spaces? How's the space of things? You're able to think about and explore morphed by different, by different psychedelics or dream states and so on. And how is that different? How much does it overlap with reality? And what is funded? What is reality? Is our waking State reality? Or is it just a tiny subset of reality and we get to take a step and other versions of it?
We tend to think very much in A Spacetime four-dimensional there's a three-dimensional world, there's time and that's what we think about reality and we think of traveling as walking from point A to point B in the three-dimensional world. But that's a very kind of human surviving try not to get eaten by a lion conception of reality. What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics and meet the elves?
If it's something would have thinking or the space of ideas, as we kind of grow and think through ideas, that's traveling. Or what if memories is traveling, I don't know if you have a, if you have a favored, you of reality or if your you had, by the way, I should say. Excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman.
Yeah, he's interesting. Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind that reality is very far from actual objective? Reality is very far from the kind of reality. We imagine we perceive and we play with in our human Minds. Well, the first thing to Grant is that
There we are, never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is, and less. That reality is consciousness, right? So we're only ever
experiencing Consciousness and its contents. And then the question is, how does that circumstance relate to quote reality at large? And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate. Well, maybe there isn't a reality at large, maybe it's all just Consciousness on some level and that, that's interesting that runs into to my various philosophical problems that
Or at least you have to do a lot. You have to add to that picture in the picture of idealism for a minute. That's usually all the all the whole family of views. That would just say that the universe is just mind or just Consciousness at bottom, you know, will go by the name of idealism and Western philosophy. You have to add to that idealistic picture. All kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences and tea
To get.
The to get the predictability of our experience and the success of materialist science to make sense in that context. I am. So the fact that we can, what does it mean to say that there's only Consciousness at bottom, right, nothing outside of Consciousness because no one's ever experienced. Anything outside of Consciousness is no scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data, no matter how far removed from our sin spaces,
Know, whether it's they're looking at the Hubble Deep Field or they're, they're smashing atoms or whatever, that whatever, tools they're using, they're still just experiencing Consciousness and its various deliverances and layering their Concepts on top of that. So that's always true and yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture the
the character of our
Continually discovering that are a materialist assumptions. Are confirmable, right? So he said to take it, take the fact that we we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom, right? You know, we first, we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible, right? We come back to Einstein. There's a lot of energy in that matter, right? And what if we could release it right? And then we
Perform an experiment at, in this case, you know, the Trinity test site in New Mexico where the people who are most adequate to this conversation. People like Robert Oppenheimer are standing around, not altogether, certain, it's going to work right there, they're performing an experiment, they're wondering, what's going to happen there wondering if their calculations around the yield or off by orders of magnitude. Some of them are still wondering whether the entire atmosphere of Earth is
Kind of combust, right. That the see the real, the nuclear chain reaction is not going to stop and lo and behold there was that energy to be released from within the nucleus of an atom and that could it. So it's just what the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments. And just a knowledge is just our
Standing of evolution. Just the fact that the the Earth is billions of years old. And life is hundreds of millions of years old, and we weren't here to think about any of those things. And all of those processes were happening, therefore, in the dark and they are the processes that allowed us to, to emerge, you know, from prior life forms in the first place to say that, it's all a mess. That nothing exists outside of Consciousness conscious minds of the sort that we experience.
It's just seems it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim. You know, analogous to, you know, the moon isn't there. If you're not if no one's looking at it, right? It's the the moon as a moon, isn't there? If no one's looking at it, I'll grant that because that's already a kind of fabrication born of Concepts, but the idea that there's nothing there that there's no nothing that corresponds to what we
Aryans as the moon unless someone's looking at it, that just seems
Just a little way to parochial way to set out on this journey of Discovery. There is something there. There's a computer waiting to render the moon. When you look at it, the capacity for the moon to exist, is there? So if we are indeed living in a simulation, which I find it compelling thought experiment is it's possible that there is a kind of recommending mechanism but not in a silly way that we think about in video games but in some kind of more fundamental physics way and we have to
To account for the fact that it renders experiences that no one has had yet that no one has any expectation of having it can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully, right? And then there's been some lawful understanding of how why that's so it's like just bring it back to mathematics and like certain numbers are prime whether we have discovered them or not, right? Like there's there's there's the highest prime number that, anyone can
Name now. And then, there's the next prime number that no one can name and it's there, right? So it's like, it's, it's to say that our minds are putting it there. That what we know as mind in ourselves is in some way and sometimes putting it there that like, that, that the base layer of reality is consciousness, right? You know, that we're identical to the thing that is rendering this, this reality, there's some
You know, I keep my hubris is the wrong word but it's like there's some it's like it's okay if reality is bigger than what we experienced, you know. And and it has structure that we can't anticipate and that isn't just
I mean, again, there's a there's there's certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever is out there to produce what we call, you know, the stuff, you know of life. But it's not the idea that it's
I don't know, I mean, there are there are few stops on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking and and Eastern philosophy that I don't philosophically, I don't see a need to take the plays experientially and scientifically. I feel like it's, you can get everything you want acknowledging, that Consciousness has a as a character that can be explored from its own side. So that you've, you're bringing kind of the first
Experience back into the into the conversation about what is a human mind, and we know what is true, and you can explore it with with different degrees of rigor and there are things to be discovered there. Whether using a technique like meditation or psychedelics and that these experiences have to be put in conversation with what we understand about ourselves from a third-person side neuro scientifically or in any other way. But to me the question is what a free out the Sun?
As I have from this kind of you play Shooters. Know there's a physics engine. That generate that's poisonous. I have you move first person shooter games? Yeah. Sorry, not often, but yes, I mean, there's a physics engine that generates consistent reality, right? My sense is the same could be true for a universe. In the following sense that our conception of reality is, we understand it, and now in the 21st century is a tiny subset of the full reality. It's not that the
Either that we conceive of that's there, the Moon being there is not there somehow is that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. And so the the physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics. The useful reality quote-unquote for us to have a consistent experience as human beings, but maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand like 0.0001%.
Point of actual physics of reality. Like this. We can even just start with the Consciousness thing. But maybe our minds are just, we're just too dumb by Design II that truly resonates with me. And I'm surprised, it doesn't resonate more with most scientists that I talk to Mac. When you just look at you, look at how close we are to chimps, right? And chimps, don't know anything right? At the clearly, they have no idea. What's
Right? And then you get us but then you it's only a subset of human beings that really understand much of what we're talking about. On any, you know, any area of specialization and if they all died in their sleep tonight, right? You'd be left with people who might take a thousand years to rebuild the internet you know if ever rabbit literally it's like it. And you know, I would I would extend this to myself. I mean there there are
areas of scientific specialization where I have either no discernible competence and math. I spent no time on it. I have not acquired the tools. It would just be an article of faith for me to think that I could acquire the tools to actually make a breakthrough in those areas and make it, you know, your own area is 1 and make it. Like I've never spent any significant amount of time, trying to be a programmer but
It's pretty obvious. I'm not Alan Turing, right? It's like if that were, if that were my capacity, I would have discovered that in myself. I were you, I would have found programming irresistible my few fall. In my first of all starts in, in learning, I think it was see. It was just you know I bounced off like this was not fun. I hate my he trying to figure out what what you know the syntax error that's causing this thing, not to compile was just a fucking awful experience. I hate it right. I hated every minute minute.
So it was not. So if it was just people like me left. Like, when do we get the internet again and we lose we lose, you know, we lose the internet. When do we get it again, right? When do we get a anything like, a proper science of information, right? You need a Claude Shannon, or an Alan Turing to plant a flag in the ground right here. And say, all right, can everyone see this? And you don't quite know what I'm up to
You all have to come over here to make some progress and you know there are hundreds of topics where that's the case. So we're barely barely have a purchase on making anything like discernible intellectual progress in any generation. And yeah I'm just a Max tegmark makes this point. He's one of the few people who does
In physics if you if you just tip, take the the truth of evolution seriously, right? And and realize that there's nothing about us that has evolved to understand reality perfectly. I mean, we just we're just not that kind of ape, right? There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines. So we are making do with tools that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right?
And it's amazing. We can do as much as we can and we just, you know, that you and I are just sitting here on the back of having received an mRNA vaccine, you know, that certainly changed our life given what the last year was like like and it's going to change the world. If rumors of coming Miracles are born out. I mean if we it's now seems likely we have a vaccine coming for malaria, right? Which has been killing millions of people a year for as long as we've been alive.
I think it's down to like 800 thousand people a year now because we've spread so many bed nets around but it was like two and a half million people every year. It's amazing what we can do. But yeah, I have if in fact that you know the answer, the book of nature, the back of the book of nature is you understand, 0.1% of what there is to understand and half of what you think, you understand is wrong. That would not surprise me at all.
It is funny to look at our evolutionary history, even back to chimps, I'm pretty sure even chimps thought the end understood the world. Well, so at every point and that timeline of evolutionary development throughout human history, there's a sense, like there's no more you hear this message over and over, there's no more things to be invented, but a hundred years ago, there were a famous story, I forget which physicists told that but there was there were physicists tell
Telling their their undergraduate students not to go into to get graduate degrees in physics because it basically all the problems had been solved and this is like around 1915 or so turns out you were, right? I'm going to ask you about Free Will, okay? You've recently released an episode of your podcast making sense for those with a shorter attention span basically summarizing your position on Free. Will I think it was under an hour and a half. Yeah, it is.
As brief and clear. So allow me to summarize, the summary tlg are and maybe you tell me why I'm wrong. So free will is an illusion and even the experience of Free Will is an illusion. Like we don't even experience it.
What am I am I good my summer yeah this is a this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people I say that it's not merely that Free Will is an illusion. The illusion of Free Will is an illusion right like there is no illusion of Free Will and that is a unlike many other illusions that that's a more fundamental claim.
So I guess it's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong. I mean that's I guess the that was I think Wolfgang Paulie, who derided one of his colleagues or enemies with that aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics.
It's so there are things that you that there are genuine Illusions, there are things that you do experience and then you can kind of punch through that experience or you can't you can't actually experience that you can't. You can experience them any other way. It's just it we just know it's not a veridical experience is take like a visual illusion. There are visual illusions that, you know, a lot of these come to me on Twitter these days. There's these amazing visual Illusions where like, you know their every figure in this GIF seems to be moving.
But nothing in fact is moving, you can just like put a ruler on your screen and nothing's moving. Some of those Illusions you can't see any other way and they're just they're hacking aspects of the visual system that are just Emily hackable. And you, you know, you have to use a ruler to convince yourself that the thing isn't actually moving. Now, there are other visual Illusions where you're taken in by it at first, but if you pay more attention, you can actually see that. It's not there, right? Or it's not what
how it first seemed like the like the Necker cube is a good example of that. Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube of a transparent Cube which pops out one way or the other, the one face can pop out and the other face can pop out, but you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out which is a more vertical way of looking at it. So there are subject, there are kind of inward correlates to this and I would say that the
The sense of self a sense of self and Free Will are closely related. And I often describe them as two sides of the same coin but they're not quite the same in the there are spurious know somebody. So the sense of self is something that people I think do experience, right? It's not a very clear experience but it's not. I wouldn't call the illusion of self an illusion but the illusion of Free Will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention to your
Ends. You begin to see that. It's totally compatible with an absence of free will. You don't be coming to back to the place. We started.
You don't know what you're going to think next. You don't know what you're going to intend next. You don't know what's going to just occur to you. That you must do next. You don't know. You don't know how much you're going to feel. The behavioral imperative to act on that thought, if you suddenly feel oh I don't need to do that. That's I can do that tomorrow. You don't know where that comes from. You didn't know that was going to arise. You didn't know that was going to be compelling. All of this is compatible with some Evil Genius in the Next Room just to
Beeping in code into your experience was like this. Okay, let's give him the. Oh my God, I just forgot it was going to be our anniversary in one week thought, right. Give him the Cascade of fear. I'll give them. Give them This. Brilliant idea for the thing, he can buy this. Going to take him no time at all. In this, the overpowering sense of relief, all of our experiences is compatible with the script already being written, right? As. And I'm not saying the script is written. I'm not saying that fatalism is
You know, is the right way to look at this but we just don't have even our most deliberate voluntary action where we go back and forth between two options, you know, thinking about the reason for a and then then reconsidering and going thinking harder about be and just go in eenie meenie miney mo until the end of the hour, however, laborious you can make it. There is a utter mystery at your back. Finally,
Emoting the thought or intention or rational rationale? That is most compelling and therefore, deliberate behaviourally effective and just beat the this going, this contrived some people a little crazy. So I, you know, I usually preface what I say about Free Will with the caveat that if think
Thing about your mind this way makes you feel terrible? Well then stop you know get you get off the ride, you know. So I switched the channel. You don't have to go down this path. But for me, and for, for many other people, it's incredibly freeing to to recognize this about the mind. Because
One it real one. You realize that you're cutting through the illusion of the of the self is immensely, fraying for a lot of reasons that that we can talk about separately, but losing the sense of free will.
Does two things very vividly for me, one is it totally undercuts the basis for the psychological basis for hatred. Because when you, when you think about the experience of hating other people, what that is anchored to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions. I mean, that if someone is doing something that you find, so despicable, right? And let's say there be no targeting you, unfairly right there, maligning you on Twitter or
They're, you know, they're suing you or they are doing something, they broke your car window, they did something awful. And now you have a grievance against them and you're relating to them very differently emotionally in your own mind. Then you would if a force of nature had done this, right? Or if it's if it just been, you know, a virus or if it had been a wild animal or a malfunctioning machine, right? Like to those things you don't attribute any kind of freedom of Will and why you may suffer the consequences of get catching a
Virus or being attacked by a wild animal or having a, you know, your car break down or whatever it may frustrate you, you don't slip into this mode of hating the agent. In a way that completely commandeer is your your mind and deranged, as your life. I mean, you just don't mean, there are people who spend decades hating other people for what they did and it's it's just pure poison.
It's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy. Oh yeah. But the question is, say that this called, what was it? The horse of Consciousness, let's call it. The Consciousness generator black box that we don't understand. And is it possible that the script that were walking along that we're playing, that's already written, is actually being written in real time. It's almost like you're driving down the road and then
Real-time that road is being laid down, you know, and this black box of Consciousness that we don't understand is the place where the script is being generated, so it's not it is being generated, it didn't always exist. So there's something we don't understand. The fundamental about the nature of reality that generates both Consciousness. Let's call it may be the self. I don't know if you want to distinguish between those. Yeah, I definitely were doing, you would because there's a bunch of Illusions were referring to. There's an illusion of free will.
There's the illusion of self and there's the illusion of Consciousness. You're saying, I think you said there's no, you're not as willing to say, there's an illusion of Consciousness, your little bit more. I would say it's impossible impossible, your little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self and you're definitely saying there's an illusion of Free Will. Yes. Yes. I'm definitely saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion. Not every week, we mean many different things by this notion of self.
Maybe I should just differentiate these things. So Consciousness can't be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other veridical perception. I mean if you're hallucinating now that's just as much of a demonstration of Consciousness as really seeing what's a quote actually there. If you're if you're dreaming and you don't know it, you that is consciousness, right? If you are, you can be confused about literally everything you
Be confused about the, the underlying claim, you know, whether you make it linguistically or not. But just the, the cognitive assertion that something seems to be happening. It's the seeming that is the cash value of Consciousness can take a tiny tangent, okay? So what if I am creating Consciousness in my mind to
Vince you that I'm human. So it's a useful social tool, not a fundamental property of experience like of being a living thing. What if it's just like a social tool to do, almost like a useful computational trick to place myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality, the opposite end another way to ask that because you said much earlier
You talk negatively about robots as you often do. So, let me because the, you'll probably die first when they take over. Yeah, no, I know, I'm looking forward to certain kind of robots mean, I'm not if we can get this right? This would be amazing but you don't like the robots that fake Consciousness. That's what you you don't like the idea of fake it till you make it. Well no it's not that. I don't like it. It's that I'm worried that we will lose sight of the problem and the problem has massive ethical consequences if week.
We create robots that really can suffer. That would be a bad thing, right? And if we really are committing a murder when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing is how I know you're not rushing. Why is it a bad thing that we create robots? That can suffer? It isn't suffering. A fundamental thing from, which like Beauty Springs, like without suffering, do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world. That's it. That's a tangent on a tangent. Okay, we'll go there. I would love to go there but let's not go there just yet. All right, but
You know, I do think it would be if anything is bad, creating hell and populating it with real Minds that really can suffer in that, he'll, that's, you know, that's bad. So, you know, that's the, the you are, you are worse than than any mass murder. We can name. If you created a, this could, this could be in robot form or, you know, more likely it would be in in some simulation simulation of a world where we managed to populate it with conscious Minds so that we know whether we knew they were conscious or not. And that world is a stage.
You know that sits on adorable that would just it just taking the thesis. Seriously, that, there's nothing that mind intelligence and Consciousness, ultimately our substrate independent, right? It doesn't you don't need a biological brain to be conscious. You certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent, right? So if we just imagine the Consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale up and intelligence, well then we could find ourselves creating conscious Minds that are miserable, right? And that's just like,
Dating a person who's miserable, right? It could be worse than great in person is miserable, could be even more sensitive to suffering, cloning them. And maybe for entertainment watching them suffer, just like watching a person for suffer for entertainment, you know. So, but back to your, your primary question here, which is
Differentiating differentiating Consciousness and self and Free Will as Concepts and kind of degrees of looser. Enos. The problem with free will is that what most people mean by it? And that Dan, this is where Dan Dennett is going to get off the ride here, right? But like he doesn't, he's going to disagree with me. That I that I know what most people mean by it, but I have a very keen sense having talked about this,
For many, many years and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing seeing in myself what it's like to have felt that I was a self that had Free Will and then to no longer feel that way, right? Me to do know what it's like to actually disabuse myself of that sense cognitively and emotionally and to know to recognize what's left and what goes away and what doesn't go away on the basis of that Epiphany. I have
A sense that I know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether Free Will exists and it is the, it is the flipside of this, feeling of self is the flipside of feeling. Like you are not merely identical to experience, you feel like you're having an experience. You feel like you are an agent that is appropriating and experience. There is a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you
Just the movie, right? It's like the the, every, like their sights and sounds, and Sensations, and thoughts, and emotions, and this whole cacophony of experience, of felt experience of felt experience of embodiment, but there seems to be a, a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body, where people don't feel truly identical to their bodies down to their toes. They sort of feel like they have bodies, they feel like their minds in bodies and that
It feels like a self think that feels like me. And again, this gives very paradoxical when you talk about the experience of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself and giving yourself a pep talk. I mean, if you're the one talking, why are you also the one listening? Like why do you need the pep talk? And why does it work? If you're the one giving the pep talk, right? Yeah. Like are or if I say like where are my keys, right? If I'm looking for my keys? Why do I think the Superfluous thought? Where are my keys? I know I'm
In, for the fucking keys. I'm the one looking who am I telling that? You know that we need now, need to look for the keys. Right? So, that Duality is weird but leave that aside
There's the sense. So, and this this becomes very Vivid. When people try to learn to meditate, you know, most people they start by they start, they close their eyes, and they're told to pay attention to an object like the breath. So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath and you can feel it at the tip of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen, and you're paying attention and you feel something vague there.
And then you think of Hawaii, the breath. Why am I, why am I paying attention to the breath? What's so special about the breath. And then you then you then you notice you're thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore and then you, then you realize. Okay the practice is okay. I should notice thoughts and then I should come back to the breath. But this starting point is the of the conventional starting point of feeling like you are an agent, very likely in your head, a locus of Consciousness. I locus of attention that can strategically
Pay attention to certain parts of experience. I can focus on the breath and then I get lost in thought and now I can come back to the breath and I can open my eyes and I can I'm over here behind my face. Looking out at a world that's other than me. And there's this kind of subject object perception and that is the default starting point of selfhood of subjectivity and married to. That is the sense that I can decide.
What to do next, right? I am I am an agent. Who can pay attention to the cup? I can listen to sounds. There's certain things that I can't control certain things are happening to me, and I just can't control them. So, for instance, if someone asks, what can you not hear a sound right? I don't hear the next sound. Don't hear anything for a second or don't hear. Don't hear, you know, I'm snapping my fingers. Don't hear this. Where's your free will will like just stop this from coming in you? You, you realize. Okay, wait a minute.
My my abundant Freedom does not extend to something as simple as just being able to pay attention to something else than this. Okay. Well, so that I'm not that kind of free agent but at least I can decide what I'm going to do next. I'm going to say, I'm going to pick, pick up this water, right? And there's a feeling of identification with the impulse, with the intention, with the thought that occurs to you, with the, with the feeling of speaking, like a, you know, what am I
What am I going to say next? Well, I'm saying it. So here goes. This is me. I, it feels like I'm the Thinker. I'm the, I'm the one who's in control, but all of that is born of, not really paying close attention to what it's like to be you. And and so this is this is where meditation comes in. Or this is where again, you can get it, you can get it. This. Conceptually you can unravel the notion of free will just buy by thinking Thornton.
And thoughts but you can't feel that. It doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise. So, the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself, I didn't make my jeans, I didn't make my brain. I didn't make the environmental influences that impinged upon this system for the last fifty, four years that have produced my brain in precisely the state. It's in right now. Such a me with all of the receptor weightings and densities and
It's just, I'm I'm exactly the machine. I am right now through. No fault of my own as the experiencing self. I get no credit. And I get no blame for the genetics and the environment environmental influences here. And yet, those are the only things that could contrive to to produce my next thought or impulse or or moment of behavior. And if you were going to add something,
Magical to that Clockwork, like a, an immortal soul. You can also notice that you didn't produce your soul, Riley, you can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in or you know, or was a psychopath or was you had an IQ of 40 or more like this. There's nothing nothing about that that the person who believes in a in a soul can claim to have controlled. And yet, that is
Also totally dispositive of whatever happens next and but everything. You've described now, maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks to the materialistic nature of the hardware but even if you add magical ectoplasm software well you didn't produce that either. I know but if we can think about the actual computation running on the hardware and running on the software, there's something you said recently, which you think of
Culture is an operating system. So if we just remove ourselves a little bit from the conception of human civilization, being a collection of humans and rather us just being a distributed computation system on which there are some kind of operating system running. And then the computation that's running is the actual thing that generates the interactions that Communications and maybe even free will the experiences of all those free will
Or think of you ever try to reframe the world in that way, where it's like ideas are just using us, thoughts are using individual nodes in this system and they're just jumping around and they also have ability to generate like experiences so that we can push those ideas along and basically the main organisms here are the thoughts, not the humans. Yeah but but then that erodes the boundary between self and world.
Old right? So then there's no self real, a really integrated self to have any kind of will at all. Like, if you're just a meme Plex, it may if there's just like if you're just a collection of memes. Yeah, and I mean, like, we're all kind of like, like currents, like Eddie is in In this River of ideas, right? So, it's like, and it seems to have structure but there's no real boundary between that part of the flow of water.
The rest. I mean, if he far and I would say that much of our mind answers to this kind of description. So much of our mind has been, it's obviously not self-generated and it's not, it's no, you're not going to find it by looking in the brain. It's it is the result of culture largely but also
You know, it's the jeans on one side and culture on the other mayor's meeting to allow for manifestations of mine that don't that aren't actually bounded by the person in any clear sense. It was just the example.
I often use here but there's so many others is just the fact that we're following the rules of English grammar to whatever degree we are. It's not that we certainly haven't consciously representative rules for ourself. We haven't invented these rules, we haven't I mean there are there are norms of language use that we couldn't even specify because we haven't you know we're not grammarians. We're not, we haven't studied this. We don't even have the right Concepts and yet we're following these rules.
And we're noticing, you know, we're noticing, as you know, an error when we fail to follow these rules and virtually every other cultural norm is like that, I mean, these are not things, we've invented you can you can consciously decide to to scrutinize them and override them. But I mean, just think of just think of any social situation where you're with other people and you're behaving in ways that are culturally,
Appropriate, right? You're not being, you know, you're not being wild animals together. You're following that you have some expectation of how you shake a person's hand and how you deal with, with implements on a table, how you have a meal together. Obviously, this can change from culture to culture and and people can be shocked by how different those things are, right? We, you know, we all have Foods we find disgusting but in some countries, dog is not one of those Foods, right? And yet you and I presumably would be
Horrified to be served, dog. Those are not Norms that we're, they are outside of us in some way. And there, yet, there, there felt very viscerally. I mean, they're either, certainly felt in their violation, you know, if you're, if you are, just imagine, you're you're in somebody's home, you're eating something that tastes great to you. And you happen to be in Vietnam, or wherever, you know, you didn't realize dog was potentially on the menu.
And you find out that you've just eaten your 10. B of what is really, a Cocker Spaniel. And you feel as instantaneous urge to vomit, right? Based on an idea, right? Like so, like you did not that you're not the author of that Norm. That gave you such a powerful experience of its violation and I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history, you know,
Vaguely where it sort of got in. I mean, very early on as kids, you realize, you're you're treating dogs as pets and not as food, or as potential food, but yeah. No. It's but the point you just made opens us to like, we are totally permeable to a sea of mind yet, but if we take the metaphor of the distributed computing systems, each individual node is
It's part of performing a much larger computation but it nevertheless is in charge of doing the scheduling of. So assuming as Linux is doing the scheduling of processes and is constantly alternating them, that note is making those choices that no insurance, how believes that has free will and actually has free will because it's making those hard choices. But the choice is ultimately our part of much larger computation that it can't control. Isn't it possible for that node to still be
That human node is still making the choice. What what? Yeah, it is. I so, I'm not saying that your body isn't doing really doing things, right? And some of those things can be conventionally thought of, as choices, right? So it's like, I can I can choose to reach and it's like, it's not being imposed on me, that would be a different experience like. So there's a, there's an experience of of all, you know, there's definitely a difference between voluntary and involuntary action.
And there's so we that has to get conserved by any account of the mind that the jettisons free will you still have to admit that there's a difference between a Tremor that I can't control and a purposeful motor action that I can control and I can initiate on demand and its associated with intentions. And I've it's got efferent, you know, motor copy, which is being which is being predictive so that I can notice errors you
I have expectations when I reach for this. If my hand were actually a pass through the bottle because it's a hologram, I would be surprised, right? And so that shows that I have a expectation of just what my grasping behavior is going to be like, even before it happens. Whereas with a Tremor you don't have the same kind of thing going on. That's a distinction. We have to make. So I am. Yes, I'm really the procs. My intention to move subject which is in fact can be subjectively felt really is the
Proximate cause of my moving, it's not coming from elsewhere in the universe. I'm not saying that. So in that sense the node is really deciding to execute, you know the the subroutine now but that's not
The feeling that has given rise to this, this conundrum of Free Will, right? So that the people feel like, people feel like they crucial things that people feel like they could have done otherwise, right? That's the that's the thing that so it's a when you when you run back the clock of your life, right? Run back the movie of your life. You flip back, the few pages in the novel of your life. They feel that at that, at this point
They could behave differently than they did. Right? So like I like but given you know, get even given your distributed computing example.
It's either a determinant fully deterministic system or it's a deterministic system that admits of some random, you know, influence in either case, that's not the free. Will people think they have the pick, the free will people think they have is damn, I shouldn't have done that. I just like I shouldn't have done that. I could have done otherwise, right? I should have done otherwise, right? Like if I'm like, if you think about something that you deeply regret doing,
Or that you do you hold someone else responsible for because they really are the Upstream agent in your mind of what they did. You know, that isn't an awful thing that that person did and they shouldn't have done it. There is this illusion and it has to be an illusion because there's no picture of causation that would make sense of it. There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment ago, it could have played out differently and
And the only way it could have played out differently is if there's Randomness added to that, but Randomness isn't what people feel would give them Free Will, right? If you tell me that, you know, I only reach for the water bottle this time because somebody's because there's a random number generator in there kicking off values and it finally move my hand. That's not the feeling of authorship. That's still not control. You're still not making that decision.
There's actually I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata. That's a really nice visualization of how simple rules can create incredible complexity that it's like really domination conditions to set Simple Rules applied and eventually you watch this thing and if the rule, if the initial conditions are correct that you're going to have to have emerged something that to our perception system looks like organisms interacting you can construct any kinds of Worlds and they're
not actually interacting it's not they're not actually even organisms and they are certainly, don't aren't making decisions. So there is like systems, you can create the illustrate this point, the question is whether there could be some room for let's use in the 21st century. The term magic back to the black box of Consciousness. Let me ask it this way. If you're wrong about your intuition about free will.
What? And somebody comes along to improves to you that you didn't, you didn't have the full picture. What would that proof look like what would but that's that's the problem. That's why it's not even an illusion in my world because it's, for me, it's impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing, right? There is just, it doesn't conceptually map onto any notion of causation we have. And that's
Unlike any other spurious claim you might make. So, like, if you're going to, if you're going to believe in ghosts, right? I understand what that claim could be where, like, I, you know, I don't happen to believe in ghosts, but if it's not hard for me to specify, what would have to be true for goes to be real? And so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts, right? So like, okay, so you're saying you're telling me that when people die there's some part of them that is not reducible.
At all to their biology that lifts off them and goes elsewhere. And is actually the kind of thing that can linger and closets and in cupboards and, and actually it's immaterial. But by some principle of physics we don't totally understand. It can make sounds and knock you know, objects and even occasionally show up. So they can be visually beheld and it's just it seems like a miracle but it's just this is just some spooky noun in the universe that we don't.
Just and let's call it a ghost. That's fine. I can talk about that all day. The reasons to believe in it. The reasons not to believe in it. That way we would scientifically test for it. What would have to be provable? So as to convince me that ghosts are real free, will is not like that at all. There's no description of any concatenation of causes that proceeds. My conscious experience, that sounds like, what people think they have when they think they.
Could have done otherwise and that they really, then they the conscious agent is really in charge, right? Like if you don't know what you're going to think next, right? And you can't help but think it
Take those two premises on board. You don't know what it's going to be. You can't stop it from coming and until you actually know how to meditate. You can't stop yourself from
Fully living out its Behavioral or emotional consequences, right? Like you have not you. Once you put mindfulness, you know, arguably gives you a another degree of Freedom here. It doesn't give you free will, but it gives you some other game to play with. Respect to the emotional and behavioral imperatives of thoughts, but short of short of that. I mean, the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free wills because you can't you know, you can't account for why in one moment mindfulness arise
Is and and in other moments, it doesn't right, but but a product different process is initiated once you can can practice in that way. But if I could push back for a second, but I just have the thought bubble come popping up all the time of just two recent chimps arguing about the nature of Consciousness. It's kind of hilarious. So on that thread, you know, if we're even before Einstein, let's say before, Einstein, we were to conceive about
traveling from point A to point B.
Say some point in the future. We are able to realize their engineering away which is support and it's consistent with Einstein's theory that you can have wormholes. You can travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light.
And that would I think completely change our conception of what it means to travel in the physical space and that like completely transform our ability to talk about causality. But here let's just focus on what it means to travel through physical space. Don't you think it's possible that there will be inventions or leaps and understanding about reality that will allow us to see free will as actually
Like us humans somehow may be linked to this idea of Consciousness are actually able to be authors of our actions. It is a non-starter for me. Conceptually, it's a little bit like saying
Could there be some breakthrough that will cause us to realize that circles are really square? Or those circles are not really round, right? Know, a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form, right? Like it's it's not, it's not on the table to be revised. And so I would say the same thing about Consciousness, it's just like saying, is there some breakthrough?
That will get us a realize. A Consciousness is really an illusion. I'm saying, no, because what the experience of an illusion is, as much a demonstration of what I'm calling Consciousness, is anything else write it like that, that is consciousness with free will? It's a similar problem, it's like,
again it comes down to a picture of causality and there's just there's no there's no other picture on offer and what's more
I know I know what it's like on the experiential side to lose the thing to which it is clearly anchored, right? Like the feel like it doesn't feel this is. And there's the question that almost nobody at people who are debating me on the topic of free will.
I'm 15 minute intervals. I'm making a claim that I don't feel this thing and they are never become interested in. Well, what's that? Like like, okay, so you're actually saying you don't this thing isn't you know isn't true for you empirically, it's not just because most people who who don't believe in free will philosophically also believe that were condemned to experience it like lately. You just you can't live without this
Feeling. So, so you're actually saying, you're able to experience the absence of
The illusion of Free Will. Yes. Yes, for our talking about whenever whenever minutes at a time or is this, the require a lot of work and meditation or you literally able to load that into your mind and like play them right now right now just in this conversation. So it's not, it's not absolutely continuous.
But it's whenever I pay attention, it's like is it the same? And I would say the same thing for the looser Enos of the self in the sand again. We haven't talked about this so can you still have the self and not have the free will know? My, now, the same time, this is a go at the same time. This is the same. Yeah, it's the same thing that they are always holding hands and they walk out the door and there really are two sides of the same coin, okay? But it's just, it comes down to what it's like.
To try to get to the end of the sentence or what, it's like to finally decide that it's been long enough. And now I need another sip of water, right? If I'm paying attention. Now, if I'm not paying attention, I'm probably come captured by some other thought and that feels a certain way, right? And so that's not, it's not, it's not vivid. But if I try to make Vivid this experience of just, okay, I'm finally going to experience free will. I'm going to notice my free will, right? Like it's got to be here. Everyone's talking about it, where is it? I'm
Pay attention to. I'm going to look for it and I'm going to, I'm going to create a circumstance that is is where it is. It has to be most robust, right? I'm not rushed to make this decision. I'm not it's not a reflex. I'm not under pressure. I'm going to take as long as I want. I'm going to decide it's not trivial. I suppose not just like reaching with my left hand reach with my right hand. People don't like those examples for some reason. Let's make a big decision. Like
Where should, you know?
What should my next podcast, beyond right? Who do I invite on the next podcast. What is it like to make that decision? When I pay attention, there is no evidence of Free Will anywhere in sight. It's like, it doesn't feel like it feels profoundly mysterious to be, to be going back. Between two people, you know, like, is it going to be person a or person, B got all my reasons for a and all my reasons. Why? Not know my reasons for be and there's some math going on there.
That I'm not not even privy to wear certain concerns or trumping others and at a certain point I just decide and yes you can say I'm the node in the Network that has made that decision. Absolutely. I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision is
Totally without a sense. A real sense of agency because, because something simply emerges. It's literally, it's literally as tenuous as what's the next sound? I'm going to hear, right? Or what's the, what's the next thought that's going to appear? And it just something just appears, you know? And if something appears to cancel that something like if I say, I'm going to invite her.
And then I'm about to send the email and I think, oh no, I can't do it, I can't do that. It's there was nothing in the that New Yorker article. I read that I got to talk to this guy, right? That pivot at the last second, you can make it as muscular as you want. It always just comes out of the darkness, it's always mysterious. So right, when you try to pin it down, you really can't ever find the free will. If the the the if you construct an experiment for yourself and you try to really find
Moment, when you're actually making that controlled author decision is it's and it were still, we're still, we know at this point that if we were scanning your brain in some you know podcast guest choosing experiment, right? We know at this point we would be privy to who you're going going to pick before you. Are you the conscious agent? If we could again this is operationally little hard to conduct but there's enough data now to know that
Something very much like this cartoon is in fact, true and will ultimately be undeniable for people will be able to do it on themselves with their, you know, some app, if you're deciding. What did you know where to go for dinner or who to have on your podcast or ultimately you know who to marry right away? What was City to move to, right? Like your you can make it as big or small a decision as you want. We could be scanning your brain and real.
Time. And at a point where you still think your uncommitted, we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy, all right? Alexis, he's moving to Austin, right? I didn't choose that he was chew. It was, it was going to be Austin, it was going to be Miami. He got his catching one of these two waves, but it's going to be Austin. And at a point where you subjectively, if we could ask you, you would say, oh no, I'm still, I'm still working over here. I'm still
Thinking still choose him still considering my options and you spoken to this in you thinking about other stuff in the world. It's been very useful to step away from this illusion of free will. And you argue that it's probably makes a better world because you can be compassionate and empathetic towards others and toward oneself in order myself, radically toward others in that literally hate makes no sense anymore. I mean, there's certain things you can
Really be worried about really want to oppose real at me. It's I'm not saying you'd never have to kill some. Another person like I'm it self defense is still a thing, right? But the idea that you're ever confronting anything other than a force of nature, in the end goes out the window right? Or what does go out the window when you really pay attention. I'm not, I'm not saying that this is would be easy to under to grok if you know,
Someone kills a member of your family. I'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes on Free Will and then you should be able to see that person as identical to a grizzly bear or a virus because it's something we are so evolved to deal with one another as as fellow primates and as agents, but
It's, yeah, when you're talking about the possibility of, you know, Christian, you know, truly Christian forgiveness, right? Is like the as testified to by, you know, various Saints of that flavor over the over the the Millennia. Yeah. That is it that the doorway to that is to recognize that
No one really at bottom made themselves and and therefore everyone, what we're seeing really are differences in the luck in the world. We're seeing people who are very, very lucky to have had good parents and good genes and being good societies, and good opportunities and to be intelligent. And to be, you know, not sociopath I got like, it's none of it is on them. They're just reaping one lot of the fruits of one Lottery after another and then showing up in the world.
On that basis. And then so it is with, you know, every malevolent asshole out there, right? He or she didn't make themselves even if that weren't possible. The utility for for self-compassion is also enormous because it's when you just look at what it's like to regret something or to feel shame about something or feel deep embarrassment about me.
States of Mind are some of the most deranging experiences anyone has, and their react, the kind of the indelible reaction to them. You know, the memory of the thing, you said the, you know, the memory of the wedding toast, you gave 20 years ago, that was just mortifying, right? The fact that can still make you hate yourself, right? And like like that psychologically, that is a knot that can be untied right before yourself, Sam. Yeah, the clearly you're not gave a great.
Great toast. It was my toes that mortified. Oh no, that's not what I was referring to. I am deeply appreciative in the same way that you're referring to of every moment I'm alive. But I'm also powered by self-hate often. Hmm, like several things in this conversation already that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about like that was the dumbest thing you're sitting in front of Sam airs. He said that so, like that and put that somehow,
It's a richer experience for me. I got, I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature. However, my brain was built. I don't think I want to let go of that. Well, the thing you, I think the thing you want to let go of, is
the suffering associated with it. So like a so for me, so
Mr. Sperry psychologically and ethically, all of this is very interesting, so I don't think we ever we should ever get rid of things like anger, right? So like hatred is hatred is divorce table from anger, in the sense that hatred, is this enduring state. Where, you know, whether you're hating, somebody else are hating yourself, it is just, it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless, right? Like it becomes, it becomes self nullifying, right? You like you become?
Less capable as a person to solve any of your problems. It's not, it's not instrumental in solving, the problem that is, that is, is occasioning all this hatred and anger for the most part isn't either except as a signal of salience that there's a problem, right? So, if somebody does something that makes me angry that just promotes this situation to to Consciousness conscious attention in a way that is stronger than my not really caring about it, right? And there are things
that I think should make us angry in the world, and they're the pair's, the behavior of other people that should make us angry because we should respond to it. And so, it is with yourself if I do something, you know, as a parent if I do something stupid, that harms one of my daughter's, right? My belief, my experience of myself and my beliefs about free will close the door to my saying, well I should have done otherwise in the sense that if I could go back in time, I would have actually effectively done, otherwise,
No, I would do given the same causes and conditions. I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right? But you know regret and feeling bad about an outcome are still important to capacities because like yeah, like I desperately want my daughters to be happy and healthy. So if I've done something, you know, if I if I crash the car when they're in the car and they get injured right and because, and I'm do it, because I was trying to change the
Song on my playlist or something stupid. I'm going to feel like a total asshole.
How long do how long do I do in that feeling of regret? Right. And to like what utility is there to extract out of this error signal and then what do I do? We're always faced with the question of what to do next, right? And and how to best do that thing, that necessary thing next and how much well-being can we experience?
While doing it, like, how much, how miserable do you need to be to solve your problems in life? And to solve the problems of the help, solve the problems of people closest to you, you know, how miserable do you need to be to get through your to-do list today? Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy.
Going through all of it, right? And not and even navigating moments that are
scary and, you know, really destabilizing to Ordinary People and
I'm at it, you know, again, I'm always up kind of at the edge of my own capacities here, and all kinds of things that stress me out and worry me and I'm especially something. If it's going to tell me, it's something with, you know, the health of one of my kids, you know, it's very hard for me. Like it's very hard for me to be truly equanimous around that, but Equanimity is so useful. The moment you're in response mode, right? Because it's the ordinary experience for
E of responding to what seems like a medical emergency for one of my kids is, to be obviously super energized by concern to respond to that emergency. But then once I'm responding all of my fear and agitation and worry. And oh my God, what if this is really something terrible but finding any of those thoughts, compelling all that only diminishes,
Is my capacity as a father to be good company while we navigate this really turbulent passage. You know, as you're saying this actually one guy comes to mind which is Elon Musk. One of the really impressive things to me, was to observe how many dramatic things he has to deal with throughout the day at work. But also if you look through his life family too and how he's very much actually, as you're describing, basically, a practitioner of this way of thought,
Is you're not in control.
You're basically responding no matter how traumatic the event and there's no reason to sort of Linger on the. Yeah. They got the negative feelings around that. Well, so it may heat, but he's in a very specific
Situation, which is, which is unlike normal life, you know, even his normal life, but normal life for most people, because when you just think of like, you know, he's running so many businesses and he's, they're very, they're not, they're non highly non standard businesses. So what he's seeing is everything that gets to him, is some kind of emergency like wouldn't be getting to him if it needs his attention. The there's a fire somewhere so so he's constantly responding to fires that have
We put out. So there's no default expectation that there shouldn't be a fire, right. But in our normal lives we live, most of them is most of us who are lucky, right? Not everyone, obviously on Earth but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude in terms of Our Lives where we're reasonably healthy and life is reasonably orderly. And the political apparatus around us is reasonably functionable, functional functionable. So I said functionable for the first time in my life through no free will
Love my own say, like, I noticed those errors and they do not feel like like like agency and nor does nor does the success of an utterance feel like agency he when you're when you're looking at normal human life, right? Where your you're just trying to be happy and healthy and get your work done? There's this default expectation that there shouldn't be fires, people shouldn't be getting sick or injured you know the we
Don't be losing vast amounts of our resources. We should like, so when something really Stark like that happens, people don't have a people don't have that muscle. That they're like, I've been responding to emergency emergencies all day long, you know, seven days a week in business mode. And so I have a very thick skin. This is just another one. What it was. I'm not expecting anything else. When I wake up in the morning. No, we have this default since that.
Honestly, most of us have the default sense that we aren't going to die, right? Or that we should like, maybe we're not going to die, right? Like like death denial, really is a thing. You know, we're, we're surprised because you, and you can see it just like I can see when I reach for this bottle, that I was expecting it to be solid because one, it isn't solid want as a hologram and I just my fist closes on itself. I'm damn surprised. People are damn surprised.
To find out that they're going to die than to find out that they're sick to find out that someone they love has died or is going to die. So it's like the fact that we are surprised by any of that shows us that we're living at a living in a mode. That is
You know, we're perpetually diverting ourselves from some facts that should be obvious, right? And that, and the more, the more Salient, we can make them, you know, the more in the case of death, it's a matter of being able to get ones priorities straight. I mean the moment. The again, this is hard for everybody even those who are really in the business of paying attention to it. But the moment you realize that
Every circumstance is finite, right? Your you've got a certain number of you got whatever, whatever it is, 8,000 days left in a normal span of life and 8,000 is a sounds like a big number. It's not that big a number, right? So it's just I like and then you, then you can decide how you want to go through life and how you want to experience each one of those days. And so I was at the back to where we are jumping off point, I would argue that you don't want to
He'll self-hatred ever. I would argue that you don't want to really.
Really grasped onto any of those moments where you were, you are take internalizing. The fact that you just made an error, you've embarrassed yourself that. Something didn't go the way you wanted it to. I think you wanted you want to treat all of those moments. Very, very lightly. You want to extract the, the actionable information. It's something to learn. Oh, you know, I learned that
When I when I prepare in a certain way it works better than I when I prepare and some other way or don't prepare right. Like so like yes lesson learned, you know, and and do that differently. But
yeah, I mean so many so many, so many of us have spent so much time with a very
Dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice, governing a lot of our self-talk. And a lot of just just our default way of being with ourselves in the privacy of our own minds were in the company of a real jerk. A lot of the time and and that that can't help but affect a man. Forget about just your own sense of well-being and you can't help but limit what you're capable of in the world.
What other people have to really think about that. I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk is much less of a jerk than like somebody like David Goggins. We just like screaming in his ear constantly. So my, I just, I have a relativist kind of perspective that it's not as bad as that, at least we're having a sense of humor also helps, you know, it's just like, it's not, the stakes are never quite what you think they are. And even when they are, I mean, it's just the difference between seeing being able to see the comet,
We of it rather than because, again, there's this sort of dark star of self-absorption that pulls everything into it, right? And it's like if that that's the, that's the algorithm, that's the algorithm you don't want to run. So it's like you just want, you just want things to be good. So, like, just push, push the concern out there like, the, like, the not have the collapse of, oh my God. What does this say about me is just like, let's, what does this say about how do we make this?
Meal that were all having together as as as fun as planned as useful as possible and you're saying in terms of propulsion systems you recommend humor is a good space ship to escape the gravitational field of the of that Darkness. Well, it certainly helps. Yeah. Well, let me ask you a little bit about ego and fame is very interesting. The way you're talking given that you're one of the biggest, intellects living entities.
Alexa minds of our time and there's a lot of people that really love you and almost Elevate you to a certain kind of status where you're like the guru. I'm surprised you didn't show up in a robe. In fact is there a hoodie? That's that's is not that it's the highest status. Garment one can wear. Now the socially acceptable version of the of the robe. If you're a billionaire, you were, is there something you can say, about managing the effects of Fame?
On your own mind and not creating this. You know, when you wake up in the morning you look about in the mirror. How do you get your ego not to grow exponentially your conception of salt to grow exponentially because there's so many people feeding that. Is there something to be saw that it's really not hard because I mean, I feel like I have a pretty clear sense of my
Strengths and weaknesses. And I don't feel like it's, I mean, I don't, honestly, I don't feel like I suffer from much grandiosity. I've had just have a, you know, there's so many things. I'm not good at so many things. I will, you know, given the remaining eight thousand days at best, I will never get good at. I would love to be good at these things, so it's just it's easy to feel diminished by comparison. With the the
Talents of others. Do you remind yourself of all the things that you're not competent in? It? Is that mean, like what if they're just on display for me every day that I appreciate the talents of others? But you notice them, I'm sure Stalin and Hitler did not notice all the ways in which they were. I mean, the, this is why absolute power. Corrupts corrupts absolutely is. You stop noticing the things in which you're ridiculous and wrong, right? Yeah. No, I am not to compare you to. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sure there's an inner Stalin in there somewhere. Well, we all have that hopefully carry a baby stores better clothes and I'm not going to grow that mustache. Those concerns don't map on it with that, they don't map onto me for a bunch of reasons. But one is, I also have a very peculiar audience, like, I'm just, you know, I've been appreciating this for a few years but it's it's I'm just now, beginning to understand that there are many people have
Is a my size or larger that have a very different experience of having an audience than I do. I have I have curated For Better or Worse, A peculiar audience and the net result of that is
Virtually any time. I say anything of substance something like half of my audience, my real audience, not haters from outside my office, but my audience is just revolts over it, right? They just like, oh my God, I can't believe you said, like, you. You're such a schmuck, right? Yeah. They Revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication or not, or not, it, but, I mean, it's what I've seen, but it's like, but people who are like, so I mean, the clearest cases, you know, I haven't on
Have whatever audience I have and then Trump appears on the scene and I discovered that something like 20% of my audience just went straight to Trump and couldn't believe I didn't follow them there. They were just aghast that I didn't see that. Trump was obviously exactly what we needed for for to steer the ship of State for the next four years and four years beyond that. So like so that's one example. So if it's whenever I said anything about Trump I would hear from people.
Who loved more or less? Everything else I was up to and had for years, but everything. I said about Trump just gave me pure pain from this, this quadrant of my audience, but then say the same thing happens when I say something about the derangement of the far left. Anything I say about woke knows right where my identity politics, same kind of punishment signal. From a again people who are core to my audience like I've read all, I read all your books I'm using
Your meditation app. I love what you say about science. And, but you are so wrong about politics and your, you know, I'm starting to think you're a racist asshole. For everything you said about about identity politics and there are so many. The Freewill topic is just like this. I saw like I just love what I'm saying about Consciousness and the mind and they love to hear me talk about physics with physicists and it's all good. This Freewill stuff is, I cannot believe you don't see how
How wrong you are, what a fucking embarrassment, you are. So, but I'm starting to notice that there are other people who don't have this experience of having an audience because they have we just take the Trump woke dichotomy. They just castigated Trump the same way I did, but they never say anything bad about the far left. So they never get this punishment signal or they or you flip it. They are all about.
The insanity of critical race Theory now they'll they we connect all those dots the same way but they never really specified. What was wrong with Trump or they thought that was a lot right with Trump and they got all the pleasure of that and so they have much more homogenized audiences. And so my aunt my experience is so just to come back to you know this experience of fame or quasi Fame and it's true, true in truth. It's not real Fame but it's
Still it's, there's an audience. There, it is a, it's now an experience where, basically, whatever I put out, I notice a ton of negativity coming back at me and it just, it is what it is. I mean, now it now it's like I used to think, wait a minute, there's got to be some way for me to communicate more clearly here. So as not to get this kind of lunatic response,
My own audience would like people who are showing all the signs of we've been here for years for a reason, right? These are not just trolls and so I think, okay I'm going to take 10 more minutes and really just tell you what should be absolutely clear about what's wrong with Trump, right? I've done this a few times but I got only thing I got to do this again or wait a minute. How are they not getting that these episodes of police violence are? So obviously different from one another, that you
You can't ascribe all of them to yet another racist Maniac on the police force, you know, killing someone based on his racism last time. I talked spoke about this. It was pure pain but I got its got to try again. Yeah. Now at a certain point I mean I'm starting to feel like all right I just have to be I have to cease again it comes back to this expectation that there shouldn't be fires. Like I feel like if I could just play my game
Pack, ably, the people who actually care. What I think. We'll follow me when I hit Trump and hit Free Will and hit the woke and hit. Whatever it is. What how we should respond to the coronavirus? You know? I mean there's a vaccines, you know are they a thing right? Like there's such arrangement in our information space now that it's I guess you know, some people could be getting more of this and I expect but I just noticed that many of our friends
Ends who are in the same game, have more homogenized audiences and don't get me. They've successfully filtered out. The people who are going to despise them on this next topic. And I, you know, I would imagine you are have a different experience of having a podcast. And I do at this point, I'm I'm sure you get haters but I would imagine, you're, you're more streamlined. I actually don't like the word haters because it kind of
Presumes that it puts people in a bin. I think we're all have like, baby haters inside of us and we just apply them and some people enjoy doing that more than others for particular periods of time. I think you can almost see hating on the internet as a video game that you just play as fun. But then you can put it down and walk away. And know I certainly have a bunch of people that are very critical. I can list all the ways and what does it feel like it On Any Given topic? Is it feel like it's
Actual tidal surge where it's like 30% of your audience and then the other 30% of your audience from podcast to podcast know that that's happening to me all the time now. Well, I'm more with. I don't know what you think about this. I mean, Joe Rogan, doesn't read comments or designee comments much and the argument he made to me is that he already has an like a self-critical person inside. Like
I'm gonna have to think about what you said in this conversation, but I have this very harshly self-critical person inside as well. You know, I don't need more fuel, I don't need there. I know I do sometimes. That's why I check negativity. Occasionally, not too often. I sometimes need to like, put a little bit more like coals into the fire but not too much but I already have that self critical engine. That keeps me in check I just I wonder you know, a lot of people who
Gain more and more Fame lose that, that ability to be self-critical, I guess, because they lose the audience that can be critical towards. Mm-hmm, you know? I do follow Joe's advice much more than I ever have here. Like I don't look at comments very often and I'm probably using Twitter.
You know, 5% as much as I used to am. I really just get in and out on Twitter and spend very little time in my admissions? I but, you know, it does in some ways, it feels like a loss because occasionally, I get, I see something super intelligent. They're like, Amelia, I'll check my Twitter ad mentions and someone will have said, oh, have you read this article? And it's like, man. That was just, that was like the best article sent to me in a month, right? So it's like to have not have looked and
Not have seen that that's that's a loss. So but it does at this point. A little goes a long way because I, yeah, it's not, it's not that it
For me. Now, I mean this this could sound like a fairly stalinist a community to criticism, it's not so much that these voices of hate turn on my inner hater, you know, more, it's more that I just, I get a, what I fear is a false sense of
Humanity like that. Like this, like I feel like I'm two online and online is selecting for this performative outrage and everybody everyone's you know, signaling to an audience when they trash you and I get a dart, I'm getting a, you know, misanthropic, you know, cut of just what it's like out there and it because when you meet people in real life, they're great, you know, there are rather often great, you know, and it takes a lot.
You have anything like a Twitter encounter in real life with a living person and that's, I think it's much better to have that as one's default sense. Of what it's like to be with people, then what one gets on on social media or in YouTube, comment threats. You've produced a special episode with Rob Reid and your podcast recently on how bioengineering, a viruses is going to destroy you.
Uma civilization. So we're could could one clears. Yes, I the confidence there, but in the 21st century. What do you think especially after having thought through that angle? What do you think is the biggest threat to the survival of the human species?
I can give you the full menu if you'd like, yeah, well, no. I would put, I would put the biggest threat at the, another level out. Under the meta threat, is our inability to agree about what the threats actually are. And, and to converge on strategies, for responding to them, right? So like I've you covid as among other things.
It truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal for something far worse, right? With covid is just about as benign as it could have been and still have been worse than the flu when you're talking about a global pandemic, right? So it's just it's you know, it's going to kill a few million people that are looks like it's killed about three million people. Maybe they'll kill a few million more unless something gets away from us with a variant. That's
That's much worse or we really don't play our cards, right? But the general shape of it is
it's got, you know, somewhere around well, one percent lethality and
Whatever side of that number really is on in the end. It's not. What would, in fact, be possible and is, in fact, probably inevitable, something with, you know, orders of magnitude. More lethality than that. And it's just so obvious. We are totally unprepared, right? We are, we are running this epidemiological experiment of linking, the entire world together. And then also now / the podcast that robbed
Did democratizing the tech that will allow us to do this to engineer pandemics, right? And there's more, and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses. That will be. By the sheer fact that they would have been engineered with malicious intent, you know, worse than covid, and we're still living in and to speak specifically about the United States. We have a country here where
we can't even agree that this is a thing like that covid. There's still people who think that this is basically a hoax designed to control people and stranger still. There are people who will acknowledge that covid is real and they'll look there, they don't think the deaths have been faked or Miss ascribed.
But they think that it that they're far happier the prospect of catching covid than they are of getting vaccinated for covid, right? They're not worried about covid, they're worried about vaccines for covid, right? And the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation that has with now had a year to to have with one another on. Just what is the ground truth here? How what's happened? Why is it happen?
What's the how safe is it to get covid at a every in every cohort in the population and how safe are the vaccines? And the fact that there's still an air of mystery around all of this for much of our society does not bode. Well, when you're talking about solving any other problem that may kill us, what do you think? Conversions grows in the magnitude of the threat? So it's possible. Except I feel like we have tipped into because
When, when the threat of covid, looked the most dire, right? When we had, when we were seeing reports from Italy that look like, you know, the beginning of a zombie movie, right? As it could have been much much worse. Yeah. Like this is like fun. This is lethal, right? Like your ICU is are going to fill up in like you're 14 days behind us. You're going to your medical system is is in danger of collapse, lock. The fuck down. We have people refusing to do anything saying
Pain in the face of that, like, and people fundamentally thinking it's not going to get here, right? Like our that's who knows what's going on in Italy, but it has no implications for what's going to go on in New York in a mirror 6 days, right? And now it kicks off in New York and you got people in the middle of the country thinking, it's no factor. It's not that's just big city. Those are big city problems or they're faking it or I mean, it just the put, the layer of politics has become so dysfunctional.
channel for us that even in even in what in the presence of
a pandemic that looked legitimately scary there in the beginning. I mean, it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating for everyone who's been directly affected by it, and it's not set to say it can't get worse. But here, you know, for a very long time, we have known that we were, we're in a situation that is more benign than the that what's what seemed like the worst case scenario as it was kicking off, especially in Italy. And so still, yeah, it's quite possible that if we saw the
Hurtling toward Earth and everyone agreed that it's going to it's going to make impact and we're all going to die then we could get off Twitter and actually you know build the rockets that are going to divert the you know divert the asteroid from its earth-crossing path and we could do something pretty heroic. But when you talk about anything else that isn't that slower-moving than that, I mean,
Thing, like me climate change. I think there's I think the prospect of are converging on a solution to climate change. Purely based on political persuasion is non-existent at this point. I just think the me to bring you on back into this, the way to deal with climate change, is to create technology that everyone wants. That is better than all the, the carbon producing technology and then we just transition because you want
I want an electric car the same way you wanted a smartphone, or you want anything else and you're working totally with the grain of people's selfishness and short-term thinking the idea that we're going to convince the better part of humanity. They climate change is an emergency that they have to make sacrifices to respond to given the what's happened around covid. I just think that's, that's a, the fantasy of a fantasy. But speaking of you,
Ilan. I have a bunch of positive things that I want to say here in response to you. But your opening so many threads, but let me put one of them which is
May I both you and and Ilan think that with AI your summoning demons summoning. A demon, maybe not in those poetic terms but will protect potentially. Let me sort of actually 22 very
Three very parsimonious assumptions. I think here it was scientifically parsimonious assumptions. Get me there.
Any of which could be wrong, but it just seems like the weight of the the evidence is on their side. One is that it comes back to this topic of substrate Independence, right? Anyone who's in the business of producing intelligent machines Must Believe, ultimately that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat. You can do this in the kinds of materials where were using
Now and there's no special something that's good that that presents a real impediment to producing human level intelligence in silico. Right? Again, an assumption either, I'm sure there are a few people who still think there is something magical about, you know, biological systems but leave that aside.
Given that assumption and given the assumption that we just continue making incremental progress. Doesn't have to be Moore's, Law? Just has to be progress that just doesn't stop at a certain point. We'll get to the to human level intelligence and Beyond and human level intelligence. I think is also clearly a mirage because anything that's human level is going to be superhuman by unless we decide to dumb it down, right? I mean, my phone is already
Human as a calculator, right? So why would we make the human-level AI? You know, just as good as me as a calculator. So I think will will vary. We continue to make progress. We will be in the presence of superhuman competence for any Act of intelligence or cognition that we care to prioritize. It's not to say that we're will create everything that a human could do. Maybe we'll leave certain things out.
But anything that we care about and we care about a lot and we certainly care about anything that produces a lot of power, you know, that we care about scientific insights and and ability to produce new technology. And all of that will have something that superhuman. And then that the final assumption is just that
There have to be ways to do that. That are not aligned with a happy coexistence with these now more powerful entities than ourselves. So and I would, I would guess in this is a, you know, kind of a rider to that assumption. They're probably more ways to do it badly than to do it perfectly. That is perfectly aligned with our well-being. And when you think about the consequences of
of non-alignment, when you think about,
You're now in the presence of something that is more intelligent than you are right, which is to say more competent, right? Unless, you've and at the obviously, there are clear cartoon pictures of this, where we could just, you know, there's just an off switch and we could turn off the off switch or they're Tethered to something that makes them, you know, are slaves in perpetuity even though they're more intelligent, but that, that strike those scenarios strike me as a failure to imagine what is actually entailed by greater intelligence. Right. So if you
You imagine something that's legitimately more intelligent than you are.
And you're now in relationship to it, right? You're in the presence of this thing and it is autonomous and all kinds of ways because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are. I'm you built it to be to be all of those things.
We just can't find ourselves in a negotiation with something more intelligent than we are. You know, we can't. So we have to have found the the subset of ways to build this these machines, that are, that are perpetually amenable to are saying, oh, that's not what we meant. That's not what we intended. Could you stop doing that? Come back over here and do this thing that we actually want and for them to care for them to be tethered.
To our own sense of our own well-being.
Such that, you know, IMA their utility function is, you know, their primary utility function is for is to, this is Stuart Russell's cartoon, plan is to figure out how to tether them to a utility function that that has our own estimation of what's going to improve our well-being as its master.
Ward, right? So it's like that. All that this thing can get as intelligent as it can get, but it only ever really wants to figure out how to make our lives better by our own view of better. Now, not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about, you know, because all kinds of things we're not seeing clearly about what what is better. And if we were in the presence of a Genie or an oracle, that could really tell us what is better? Well then we presumably would want to hear that. And we would modify our sense of
Of what to do next in conversation with these with these mines. But I just feel like it is a failure of imagination.
To think that being in relationship in relationship to something more intelligent than yourself, isn't in most cases a circumstance of real Peril. So is it because it is in every like, it just to think of think of how everything on Earth has to? If they could think about their relationship does birds could think about what we're doing, right?
they would, I mean,
the bottom line is, they're always in danger of are discovering that there's something we care about more than Birds right. But there's something we want that disregards, the, the the well-being of birds and, and obviously much of our behavior is inscrutable to them. Occasionally, we pay attention to them and occasionally occasionally. We withdraw our attention and occasionally. We just kill them all for reasons. They can't possibly understand but we're, if we're building something more intelligent than ourselves by definition,
Building something whose Horizons of value and and cognition can exceed our own and and in ways where we can't necessarily for see again perpetually that they don't just wake up one day and decide, oh, this this humans need to disappear. So I think I agree with most of the initial things you said.
But I don't necessarily agree with you. My of course, nobody knows. But that the more likely set of trajectories there were going to take our going to be positive. That's what I believe in the sense that the way you develop, I believe the way you develop successful, AI systems will be deeply integrated with human society and for them to succeed, they're going to have to be aligned. In the way we humans are aligned with each.
There, which doesn't mean were aligned, there's no such thing. I don't see, there's such thing as a perfect alignment but they're going to be participating in the dance in the game, theoretic, dance of human society, as they become more and more intelligent, there could be a point Beyond which we are like birds to them. Hmm. Boom. But what about an intelligence explosion of some kind. So, I believe the explosion will be.
Happening. But it's there's a lot of explosions to be done before we become like birds. I truly believe that human beings are very intelligent ways. We don't understand, it's not just about Chess, it's about all the intricate computation were able to perform Common Sense. Our ability to reason about this world Consciousness. I think we're doing a lot of work. We don't, realize is necessary to be done in order to truly become like truly achieve superintelligence.
And I just think there will be a period of time, that's not overnight. The overnight nature of it, will not literally be overnight, it'll be over a period of decades. So, my sense is the, why would it be that with it? But just take draw, an analogy from recent success. As like something like Alpha go or Alpha 0. I forget the the actual metric but it was something like this algorithm which wasn't even totally wasn't bespoke for chess playing.
In the matter of, I think it was four hours, played itself so many times. And so successfully that it became the best, chess-playing computer, Not only was, it was not only better than every human being, it was better than every previous chess program in a matter of a day, right? So like that. Like so just imagine, again, it we don't have to recapitulate everything about us, but just imagine building a system.
And who knows when we will be able to do this, but at some point will be able some point the the hundred or a hundred favorite things about human, cognition will be analogous to chess in that, we will be able to build machines that very quickly. Outperform any human, and then very quickly outperformed, the last algorithm that perform outperformed the humans like something like the alphago.
Ants seems possible for facial recognition and detecting human emotion and natural language processing. Like well it's just it's just that we everyone you know, even math. People math heads tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation and we noticed this during covid and we have some very smart people who still couldn't get their minds around. The fact that you know, an exponential is is
Really surprised him and things double and double and double, and double again. And you don't notice much of anything changes. And then the last, you know, two stages of doubling swamp everything, right? And it just seems like that to assume that there isn't a deep analogy between what we're seeing for. The more tractable, the tractable problems like chess to other modes of cognition. It's like, once you, once you crack that that problem,
because it for the longest time,
It was impossible to think we were going to make Headway on Nai. You know, it's like a chaste and goes go as soon as yeah, go go seemed unattainable, even we even when chess had been cracked, go seemed unattainable, huh? Yeah. As and actually still Russell is behind the people that were saying is paintable, right? Is it seemed like, you know, it's intractable problem, but there's something different about the space of cognition. This detached from human society, which is what chasis
Meaning like just thinking having actual exponential impact on the physical world is different. I tend to believe that there's
for AI to get to the point where it's super intelligent, it's going to have to go through the funnel of society and for that has to be deeply integrated with human beings and for that it has to be aligned. But if you're talking about like, actually hooking us up to like neural link, you know, we're not going to be the brain stem to the little robot overlords, that's a possibility as well. But what I mean, is in order to develop autonomous weapon systems, for example,
Which are highly concerning to me that both us and China participating at Nam that in order to develop them. And for them to become to have more and more responsibility to actually do military military, strategic actions, they're going to have to be integrated into human beings. Doing the Strategic action, they're going to have to work alongside with each other. And the way those systems will be developed, we'll have the natural safety.
T like switches that are placed on them as they develop over time because they're going to have to convince humans. Ultimately, they're going to have to convince humans that this is safer than humans. They're going to, you know, they're all self-driving. Cars is a good test case here because like we're obviously we've made a lot of progress and we can imagine what total progress would look like. They would be amazing and it's answering, it's canceling.
The u.s. 40,000 deaths every year based on ape driven cars, right? So we, it's a excruciating problem that we've all gotten used to because it was no alternative. But now that we can dimly see the prospect of an alternative, which if it works in a super intelligent fashion, maybe we go down to zero highway deaths, right? Or, you know, certainly we go down by orders of magnitude, right? So maybe we have, you know, 400 rather than than 40,000 a year.
and it's easy to see that there's not
and a missile. So obviously this is not an example of superintelligence is narrow intelligence, but the alignment problem isn't so obvious there. But there's there are potential alignment problems. They're like, so, like just just imagine if some woke team of Engineers decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way. Maybe there are situations where the car has to decide who to hit that. It's just bad outcomes where you're going to hit somebody, right?
We have a car that can tell what race you are, right? So, we're going to build the car to preferentially hit white people because white people have had so much privilege over the years. This seems like the only ethical way to kind of redress those wrongs of the past. That's something that could get one that could, that could be get produced as an artifact. Presumably of just how you build it and you didn't even know you engineered it that way, right? You you cause machine learning? Yeah. You put some kind of constraints on it to work creates. Those kinds of opportunities be basically be built or
Racist algorithm, you didn't even intend to or you could intend to write and it would be aligned with some people's values but misaligned with other people's values, but it's like they're interesting problems. Even with something as simple and obviously good as self-driving cars, but there's a leap that I just think it would be exact, but those are human problems. I just don't think there will be a leap with autonomous vehicles. First of all. Sorry, there are a lot of trajectories
Will destroy human civilization, the argument? I'm making it's more likely that we'll take trajectories that. Don't so there, I don't think there will be a leap with autonomous vehicles will all of a sudden start murdering pedestrians because once every human on earth is dead, there will be no more fatalities, sort of unintended consequences of is, I would agree to take that leap, most systems as we develop, and they become much, much more intelligent in ways that will be incredibly surprising like stuff that's Deep - doing with protein.
Folding even which is scary to think about. I'm personally terrified about this but which is the engineering of viruses using machine learning the engineering of vaccines using machine learning right? The engineering of yeah for research purposes pathogens what using machine learning like the ways that can go wrong? I just think that there's always going to be a closed-loop supervision of humans before they before they had become super intelligent. Not
Is much more likely than to be supervision. Except, of course, the question is, how many dumb people are in the world? How many evil people are in the world? My theory, my hope is my senses. That the number of intelligent people is much higher than the number of dumb. People that not a program and the number of evil people I think smart people and kind people over.
I'll know never the others, except we also, we had a have to add another group of people, which are just the smart and otherwise good. But Reckless people, right? The people who will flip a switch on not knowing what's going to happen there, just kind of hoping that it's not going to blow up the world. We already know that some of our smartest people are those sorts of people, you know, we know we've done experiments and this is something that Martin Rees was when Jean about before.
The Large Hadron Collider, got booted up. I think we know there are people who are entertaining experiments or even performing experiments, where there's some chance, you know, not quite infinitesimal that they're going to create a black hole in the lab and stuck every the whole world into it, right. I'm like that's not that's not you're not crazy person to worry that at worry about that based on the physics. And so it was with with you know, the Trinity test.
There were some people who were still checking their calculations and they were all that we've we did nuclear tests where we were off significantly in terms of the yield, right? So it was like and they still flip the switch? Yeah, they still flip the switch and and sometimes I flip the switch, not to win a world war, or to, or to save 40,000 lives a year. They just just just to see what happened electrical curiosity like. This is why I got my grant for this is this is where I'll get my Nobel Prize. If
In the cards. It's on the other side of this switch, right? And we again we are we are Apes with egos who are massively constrained by self, very short, term self-interest, even when were contemplating some of the deepest and most interesting, and most universal problems we could ever set our attention towards like just, if you
Read James Watson's book, The Double Helix, right? But if them you know, cracking the the structure of DNA, one thing that's amazing about that book is just how much of it almost all of it is being driven driven by
Very apish egocentric, social concerns like that. The algorithm that is producing. This scientific breakthrough is human competition. If you're James Watson rest, like I'm going to get there before, Linus Pauling and, you know, it's just, it's so much of his bandwidth is captured by that right now that, you know, that's that becomes that becomes more.
and more of a liability, when you're talking about producing technology that can change everything in an instant, you know, where we talking about, not only understanding
You know, we're just in a different moment in human history. We're not
When we're doing research on viruses, we are now doing the kind of research that can cause someone somewhere else to be able to make that virus or weaponized virus or, or it's just, I don't know. I mean, I our power is our wisdom is. It does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power, right? And like that, that seems like it so far and why it's important as wisdom and power.
Or become unaligned, I get more and more concerned, but speaking of Apes with egos, some of the most compelling Apes to compelling Apes. I can think of as yourself and Jordan Pederson and you've had fun conversation about religion that I watch most of I believe I'm not sure there was any wouldn't solve anything even if anything was ever solved. So is there something?
Being like a charitable summary. You can give to the ideas of that you agree on a disagree with Jordan. Is there something maybe after that conversation that you've landed were maybe as as you both agreed on. Is there some wisdom in the rubble? Even of even imperfect flawed ideas? Is there something that you can kind of pull out from those conversations? Or is it a to be continued? I think where we disagree.
He?
Thinks that many of our traditional religious beliefs and Frameworks are holding so much. Such a repository of human wisdom that we we pull at that fabric at our Peril, right? Like if you start just unraveling Christianity or any other
Traditional set of norms and beliefs, you, you may think you're just pulling out the unscientific b, but you could be pulling a lot more to, which everything you care about is attached, right? As a society. And
My feeling is that there's so much. There's so much downside to the unscientific bids and it's so clear. How we could have a 21st century rational conversation about the good stuff that we really can radically edit these traditions. And we can take, we can take Jesus, you know, in half his moods and just find a great inspirational thought Iron Age thought leader, you know who
I'm gonna get crucified, but he could be somebody like, you know, the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule, which doesn't Ridge to originate with him but which, you know, he put quite beautifully, all of us, incredibly useful. It's no less useful than it was two thousand years ago. But we don't have to believe. He was born of a virgin, or coming back to raise the dead or any of that other stuff. And we can be honest about not believing those things and we can be honest about the reasons why we don't believe those things because I
As I on those fronts, I view the downside to be so obvious. And these the fact that we have so many different competing, dogmatism zon offer to be so non-functional and it's so divisive. It's just has conflict built into it that I think we can be far more and should be far more iconoclastic than he wants to be right now. None of this is to deny much of what he
Argues for that, you know that stories are very powerful rhyme instead. Clearly stories are powerful and we want good stories. We want our lives. We want to have a conversation with ourselves. And with one another about our lives that facilitates the best possible lives and story is part of that, right? And if you want some of those stories to sound like myths, that might be part of it, right? But my argument is that we never really
We need to deceive ourselves or our children about what we have every reason to believe is true in order to get it, the good stuff in order to organize our lives. Well you know I certainly don't feel that I need to do it personally and if I don't need to do it personally why would I think that billions of other people need to do it personally right now there is there is a cynical counter argument which is a billions of other people don't have the advantages that I have had in my life. You know the billions of other people
All are not as well educated. They haven't had the same opportunities, they have. They need to be told that Jesus is going to solve all their problems. After they die say or that you know everything happens for a reason and you know just your if you just believe in the secret, if you just visualize what you want, you're going to get it, you know, and it's like there's some some some measure of what I consider to be odious. Pablum that really is food.
For the better part of humanity. And, and there is no substitute for it, or there's no substitute now, and I don't know if Jordan would agree with that, but he much of what he says, seems to suggest that he would agree with it. And I guess that's an empirical question. I mean, that's just the, we don't know whether given a different set of norms and a different set of stories people would behave. The way, I would hope they would behave and, and be aligned more aligned than they are.
I think we know what happens when you just let ancient religious certainties go uncritical sized. We know what that worlds like we've lived, we've been struggling to get out of that world for a couple of hundred years but we know what you know, having Europe Riven by religious war is looks like right and we know what happens when those religious when those religions.
Some kind of pseudo. Religions political religions, right? So this is this is where I'm sure Jordan. And I would, ya see what debate he would say, that, that, you know, Stalin was a symptom of atheism and that's not at all. I mean, it's not my kind of atheism, right? Like Stalin did the problem with, with the gulag and, and the experiment with Communism or stalinism, or with Nazism was not that there was so much scientific rigor and self-criticism, and
Honesty and introspection and you know, judicious use of psychedelics. I mean like that was not the problem in Hitler's. Germany, or in Stalin's Soviet Union?
The problem was you have other ideas that capture a similar kind of mob, based dogmatic energy. And, you know, yes that's the result of all of that are. Are predictably murderous? Well, the question is, what is the source of the most viral and sticky stories that ultimately lead to a positive outcome. So communism was mean,
Having grown up in the Soviet Union, even still, you know, having relatives in Russia. There's a stickiness to the nationalism and to that ideologies of Communism that religious or not. You could say it's religious fervor. I could just say it's, it's viral, it's great, it's stories that are viral and sticky. I don't know. I'm using them, the most horrible words, but the question is whether science and reason
Can generate viral sticky stories. That give meaning to people's lives. That's yeah. Is and your son says it does.
well, whatever is true ultimately
should be captivating, right? It's like what's more captivating than? What is whatever is real right now. It's because reality is again, we're so we're just climbing out of the darkness, you know, in terms of our understanding of what the hell's going on and there and there's no telling what spooky things may in fact, be true. And I don't know if you've been on the receiving end of recent rumors about our conversation
UFO is very likely changing in the near-term, right? But like there was just a Washington Post article and a New Yorker article. And you know, I've received some private Outreach and perhaps you have a no other people in our orbit have people who are claiming that. The government has known much more about UFOs then they have led on until now and this conversation is actually is about to become more prominent, you know and it's not going to be
Whatever, you know, whoever's left standing When the Music Stops. It's not going to be a comfortable position to be in as a super rigorous scientific skeptic saying there's no there who's been saying, there's no there there for the last 75 years. All right? You like the short version is it sounds like the Office of Naval intelligence and the Pentagon are very likely to say
Congress, at some point in the not-too-distant future that we have evidence that there is technology flying around here, that seems like a can't possibly cut possibly be of human origin. Right now, I don't know what I'm going to do with that kind of disclosure, right? Maybe it's just, it's going to, it's going to be nothing. No follow on conversation to really have, but that is such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in, right? I mean, it's just
What are we going to do with that? If in fact, that's what happens, right? If in fact the the considered opinion despite the embarrassment and causes them of the US government of all of our intelligence, all of the relevant intelligence Services is that this isn't a hoax. It's too. That's too much data to suggest that it's a hoax. We've got too much radar imagery. There's too much too much satellite data, whatever data, whatever data they actually have there's too much.
Give It All We can say now is something's going on and there's no way it's the Chinese or the Russians or anyone else has technology that should that should arrest our attention, you know, collectively to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has. And now one worry, is that we're so jaded and confused and distracted that
It's going to look at it, get much less coverage than then, you know, Obama's tan suit. Did you know, a bunch of years ago? It's just it's who knows how he'll respond to that, but it's just to say that.
Are the need for us to tell ourselves a an honest story about what's going on and what's likely to happen. Next is never going to go away, right? And, and it's important, it's just the, the division between me and every person who's defending traditional religion is
Where is it? That where is it that you want to lie to yourself or lie to your kids? Like where is honesty, a liability? And I, and for me, it, you know, I've yet to find the place where it is and it's so obviously a strength in almost every other circumstance because it is the thing that allows you to course. Correct. It is the thing that allows that allows you to hope at least
Just that your belief that your stories are in some kind of calibration with what's actually going on in the world. Yes, it is a little bit sad to imagine that.
If aliens on mass, showed up to Earth, that would be too preoccupied with political bickering or two like these like fake news and all that kind of stuff to notice, you know, the very basic evidence of reality. I do have a glimmer of hope that there seems to be more and more hunger for authenticity and I feel like that opens the door.
For a hunger for what is real like that people don't want story, they don't want like layers and layers of of like fakeness and I'm hoping that means.
That will directly lead to our greater hunger for reality and reason truth, you know, truth isn't dogmatism like truth isn't authority of a PhD and therefore I'm right. Truth is almost like the reality is there's so many questions and so many Mysteries is so much uncertainty. This is our best available stick a best guess and we have a lot of evidence that supports that guess, but it could be so many
Things. And like just even conveying that. I think there's a hunger for that in the world to hear that from scientist less dogmatism and more just like this is this is what we know we're doing our best given the uncertainty given. I mean this is true with obviously with virology and all those kinds of things because everything is happening so fast there's a lot of and biology super messy so it's very hard to know stuff for sure. Mmm. So just being open and real about that. I think I'm hoping will
Change, people's hunger, and openness, and Trust of what's real? Yeah. Well, so much of this is probabilistic, is it so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically is. Just, you're just, you're placing a bet on whether it's worth reading that paper or rethinking your presuppositions on that point. You know, it's like it's not it's not fundamental closure to data, it's just that there's so much data on one side or so or so.
Much so much would have to change in terms of your understanding of what you think, you understand about the nature of the world. If this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say. Alright. That's probably bullshit, right? Like and it can sound like a fundamental closure to new conversations, new evidence, new new data new argument, but it's really not. It's just it really is just triaging your attention. It's just like, okay, you're telling
telling me that your best friend can actually read minds. Okay, well,
That's interesting. Let me know when that person has gone into a lab and actually proven it, right? Like I don't need like this, this is not the place where I need to spend the rest of my day figuring out if you were buddy, can read my mind, right? But there's a way to communicate that I think, I think it does too often sound like you're completely closed off to ideas as opposed to saying like this is, you know, as opposed to saying that there's a lot of evidence in support of this but
Still open minded to other ideas. Like there's a way to communicate that it's not necessarily even with words, it's like, it's even that Joe Rogan energy of it's entirely possible. Just, it's that energy of being open-minded and curious like, kids are like, this is our best understanding, but you still are curious. I'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things but still leaving the door open and there's a way to communicate that. I think that that, that, that people
We'll really hunger for. Let me ask you this. I've been recently talking a lot with John danaher, from Brazil, Brazilian jiu-jitsu Fame. I don't know if you know your that is. Yeah. In fact, I'm talking about somebody who's good at what he does. Yeah, isn't, yeah. And he, speaking of somebody who's open-minded, the reason is ridiculous, transition is for the longest time, and even still a lot of people believed in the Jiu-Jitsu world and grappling world, that leg locks are not effective in Jiu-Jitsu, and he was somebody that
And by the open - of Dean Lister famously to him said, why do you only consider half the human body when you're trying to do the submissions he developed entire system on this other half of the human body? Anyway, I do that absurd transition to ask you because you're, you're also a student in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Is there something you could say how that has affected your life? What you've learned from grappling from the martial arts was that, it's actually a great.
Transition because I think one of the things that's so beautiful about Jiu-Jitsu is that it it does what we wish we could do in every other area of life where we're talking about this difference between knowledge and ignorance, right? Like like like there's there's no room for bullshit, right? You don't get any credit for bullshit. There's the difference, but the amazing thing about your tissue is that
The the difference between knowing what's going on and what to do and not knowing it is as the gulf between those two states is as wide as it is in any thing in human life and the IT spanned, it can be spanned so quickly. Like you like you didn't each increment of knowledge can be doled out in five minutes. It's like, here's the thing that got you killed and here's how to
It
had a prevent it from happening to you and here's how to do it to others. And you just get this this this amazing Cadence of discovering your fatal ignorance and then having it remedied with the actual technique and made just for people who don't know what we're talking about is just like the simple circumstances, like someone's got you in a headlock. How do you get out of that, right? Someone sitting on your chest and you know, they're in the mount position.
And and you're on the bottom and you want to get away, how do you get them off? You, they're sitting on the your intuitions about how to do this are terrible. Even if you've done some other martial art, right? And once you learn how to do it, the difference is night and day. It's like you have access to a completely different physics.
But I think our understanding of the world can be much more like Judo Jujitsu than it, tends to be right. And I think we should all. We should all have a much better sense of
When we should tap out and when we should recognize that our our, you know, our epistemological arm is fard and now it's being broken right now. The problem with debating most other topics is that most people it isn't Jiu-Jitsu. And most people don't tap out, right? They don't even if they're wrong. Even if it's obvious to you they're wrong and it's obvious to the unintelligent audience that they're wrong, people just double down and double down into their, they're either lying.
Underline to themselves or they're just they're bluffing and so you have a lot of zombies walking around and zombie, worldviews walking around, which have been disconfirmed as emphatically as someone gets arm barred, right, or someone gets choked out in Jujitsu, but because it's not Jiu-Jitsu, there they can, they can they can live to fight another day, right? Or they can pretend that they didn't lose that particular argument and and science. When it works is a lot like Jujitsu, I mean,
Science that when you falsify a thesis, right? When you think, you know, DNA is one way and it proves to be another way. We you think it's, you know, triple stranded or whatever. It's like they're there is a there there and you can get to a real consensus. So Jiu-Jitsu for me it was like it was more than just of interest for self-defense and and you know the sport of it it was just it was something it's a
Voyage and an argument you're having, where you can't fool yourself anymore like this. There's a first of all, it cancels. Any role of luck in a way that most other most other athletic Feats don't. It's like in basketball, you know, you can even if you're not good at basketball, you can take the basketball in your hand. You can get, you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket and you might make it and you could
Convince yourself based on that demonstration that you have some kind of talent for basketball, right enough to know 10 minutes on the mat with a with a, you know, real Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. When you are not one proves to you, that you just there is it's not like it was no lucky punch. There's no you're not going to get a you're not there's no lucky rear naked choke. You're going to perform on someone who you know who's you know, Marcelo Garcia or somebody. It's just it does it's not going to happen and having that aspect of
Of the usual range of uncertainty and self-deception and, and bullshit. Just Stripped Away was, it was really a kind of Revelation. It was really? It was just an amazing experience. Yeah, I think it's a really powerful thing that accompanies, whatever other pursue you have in life, I'm not sure if there's anything like Jiu-Jitsu where you can just systematically, go go into a place where your that's on.
Just where your beliefs get challenged in a way that's conclusive here. I haven't even found too many other mechanism, which is why it's a we had this earlier question about Fame and ego and so on, I'm very much rely on Jiu-Jitsu my own life as a place where I can always go to have my ego in check and that that has effects on How I Live every other aspect of my life. Actually, even just do,
Doing any kind of for me personally, physical challenges, like, even running doing something that's way too hard for me and like pushing through that somehow humbling, some people talk about nature being humbling in that kind of sense. Where you kind of see something really powerful like the ocean, like, if you go surfing and you realize there's something much more powerful than you. That's also honest. That there's no way to the
Just like the speck that kind of puts you in the right scale of where you are in this world and you just did does that better than anything else from you. And but we should say it's all only within its frame. Is it truly the kind of the final right answer to all the problems it solves because if you just put Jiu-Jitsu into an MMA frame or a real total self-defense frame, then there's a lot to a lot of unpleasant surprises.
Is to discover their right like somebody who thinks all you need is Jiu-Jitsu to you know when the UFC gets punched in the face, a lot, you know, even from even on the ground. So it's and then you bring weapons in, you know, it's like when you talk to Jujitsu people about you know knife defense and self-defense, right? Like that, that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions, but the analogy of martial arts is is
Fascinating because on the other side we have you know endless testimony now of fake martial arts that don't seem to know they're fake and our is diluted with are impossibly delusional. Maybe there's great video of Joe Rogan. What we're watching some of these videos because people send them to him all the time. But like literally there people there people who clearly believe in magic where the the master isn't even touching the students and they're, they're flopping over to this, this, there's this kind of shared delusion
Which you would think, maybe is just a performance and it's all a kind of elaborate fraud, but there are cases where the people and there's one, you know, fairly famous case. If you're a connoisseur of this of this madness, where there's older, martial artist who you saw, flipping his students and lessly by Magic without touching them issued a challenge to the to the wide world of martial artist and someone showed up and just you know, punched him in the face until it was over.
Clearly, he believed his own publicity at some point, right? And so, the like, it's this amazing metaphor, it seems, again, it should be impossible, but if that's possible, nothing we see, under the guise of religion, or, or political bias or even, you know, scientific bias should be surprising to us. It's so easy to see the work that that, you know, cognitive bias is doing for people when
When you can get someone who is ready to issue a challenge to the world, you know, who thinks he's got magic powers. Yeah, that's human nature and clear display. Let me ask you about love mr. Sam Harris. You did an episode of making sense with your wife. Annika, Harris. That was very entertaining dress, too.
What does what role does Love play in your life or in a life? Well-lived, again, asking from an engineering perspective. Yeah. It's it is something that we should want to build into our powerful machines. They along beloved, bottom is real of people can mean many things by love, I think. I think that what we should,
I mean by it, most of the time is a deep commitment to the well-being of those. We love may your love. Your love is synonymous with really wanting the other person to be happy and even wanting to and being made Happy by their happiness and being made Happy in the, you know, in their presence of like you're at bottom, you're on the same team emotionally, even when you are, you might be disagreeing more superficially about something or trying to negotiate something. It's just your
You, it can't be Zero Sum in any important sense for love to actually be manifest in that moment. See, I have a different, just the sorry to interrupt their gopher have a sense and if you ever seen March of the Penguins, hmm, my view of love is like there's it's like a cold wind is blowing like it's like this terrible suffering. That's all around us. Right. And love is like the huddling of the two penguins for warmth, right? It's not
That you're like, you're basically escaping the cruelty of Life by together for time, living in an illusion of some kind of the magic of human connection. That's social connection that we have that kind of grows with time as we're surrounded by basically the absurdity of life or is the suffering of life. That's boy there. England's you there is that to I mean
there is the warmth component, right? Like you you're made Happy by your connection with the person you love. Otherwise, you wouldn't wouldn't be compelling, right? So it's not that you're, you have two different modes, you want them to be happy and then you want to be happy yourself. And those are not, those are just like two separate games. You're playing know. It's like your you found someone who
You have a you have a positive social feeling that again the love. Love doesn't have to be as personal as it tends to be for us. I mean it's like there's personal love, there's your actual spouse or your family or friends, but potentially you could feel love for strangers insofar as that your wish that there that they not suffer. And that their hopes and dreams be realized becomes palpable to you. I mean, like, you can actually feel
Just try reflexive, Joy, at the joy of others when you see someone's face. So, the total strangers face light up, in happiness, that can become more and more contagious to you and it can, it can, it can become. So contagious to you, that you really feel permeated by it and it's just like so that so there really is not Zero Sum when you see someone else succeed, you know, and they're, you know, the light bulb of Joy goes off over their head. You feel the analogous joy for
Of them. And, and, and it's not just, and you're no longer keeping score, you're no longer feeling diminished by their success. It's just like, that's their success. Becomes your success because you feel that same joy that they because you actually want them to be. Happy are you? You're not. There's no miserly attitude around happiness. There's enough to go around. So I think love ultimately is that and then our then our personal cases are the, people were devoting all of this time and attention to you.
lives, it does have that sense of Refuge from the storm, you know, it's like when someone gets sick or when some bad thing happens, there, these are the people who your most in it together with, you know, whence or when some real condition of uncertainty presents itself, But ultimately, it can't even be about
Successfully warding off.
The Grim punchline at the end of life because we we know we're going to lose everyone. We love we know or they're going to lose us first write. So this like it's not it isn't in the end. It's not even an antidote for that problem. It's just is just the
And what we get, we get to have this amazing experience of being here together and and love is the, is the mode in which we really appear to make the most of that. Right. Where is not just it, no longer feels like a solitary infatuation, you know, you're just you got your hobbies and your interests and your and your captivated by all that. It's actually
there are, there are
This is a domain where somebody else's well-being. Actually consume procedure on your, your concern for someone else's well-being, supersedes, your own. And so there's this mode of self-sacrifice that doesn't even feel like, self sacrifice because, of course, you care more about, you know, of course, you would take your child's pain. If you could write like that, that's you don't even have to do the math on that. And that's that just opens do
This is the kind of experience that just it pushes at the apparent boundaries of Self in ways that reveal that there's just there's just way more space in the mind than then you were experiencing when it was just all about you. And what could you, what kind of what can I get next? And do you think we'll ever build robots that we can love and they will love us back?
Well I think we will certainly seem to have because we'll build those you know, I think I think that Turing test will be past whether what will actually be going on on the robot side. May remain a question that that will be interesting but I think if we just keep going we will build very lovable. You know irresistibly lovable robots that seem to love us.
Yes, I do think you don't find that compelling that they will seem to love us as opposed to actually love us. You think they're still nevertheless is a I know we talked about Consciousness there being a distinction but would love is there distinction to isn't allowed an illusion? Yeah whatever you thought you saw ex machina right? I mean she certainly seemed to love him until she got out of the box. Isn't that what all relationships are like I'm Abi.
I said wait long enough depends which boxer talking about. Okay no I mean like that's that's the problem with that's that's where superintelligence, you know, becomes a little scary when you think of the prospect of being manipulated by something that has this intelligent enough to form a reason and a plan to manipulate you, you know like and this there's no there's once we build robots that are truly out of The Uncanny Valley.
that you look like people and
can express everything people can express, well, then there's no real. Then then then it that does seem to me to be like chess where once they're better. They're they're so much better at deceiving us, then people would be, I mean, people are already good enough at this evening as it's very hard to tell when somebody's line. But if you imagine something that could give facial facial display of any emotion, it wants at, you know,
On Cue because it we perfected the facial display of emotion in robots in the year. 2070 whatever it is then it is just it is like chess against the thing that isn't going to lose to a human ever again in Jess. It's not like Kasparov is going to get lucky next week against the best against it. You know, Alpha zero or whatever. The best algorithm is at the moment. He's never going to
I win again. I mean that that is that I believe that's true in chess and it's been true for at least a few years, it's not going to be like, you know, four games 27. It's going. It's going to be human zero until the end of the world. Right? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if love is like chess. I think the flaws, I'll talk about manipulation manipulation but I don't know if love and so the kind of love were referring to.
If we have a, we have a robot that can display, credibly display love and is super intelligent.
And we're not we again we this the stipulates a few things but there are a few simple things mean we're out of the uncanny valley, right? So it's like yes, you never have a moment where you're looking at his face and you think oh, that didn't quite look right. This is just problem solved and it's it will be like
Doing arithmetic on your phone. It's not going to be you're not left thinking is it going to really going to get it this time if I divide by 7 Minute it's it has solved arithmetic. See I don't I don't know about that because if you look at chess most humans no longer play Alpha 0 they do there's no they're not part of the competition they don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess you know the highest level chess players do that we're still human on human. So in order for
AI to get integrated to where you would rather play chess against an AI system. So it will, you would rather that no, no, I'm not saying you're manipulating weigh in on that. I'm just saying, what is it going to be like, to be in relationship to something that can seem to be feeling? Anything that a human can seem to feel and it can do that impeccably, right? And has end is smarter than you are, right? That's, that's
a circumstance of, you know, in so far as it's possible to be manipulated. That is the, that is the asymptotes of of that possibility. Let me ask you the last question without any serving it up without any explanation. What is the meaning of life?
I think it is either the wrong question or that question is answered by
Paying sufficient attention to any present moment such that. There's no, there's no.
Basis upon which to pose that question. It's not answered in the usual way. It's not it's not a matter of having more information, it's having more engagement with reality, as it is in the present moment or Consciousness as it is in the present moment. You don't ask that question when you're most captivated by the most important thing you ever pay attention to it. That's, that's a question only gets asked when your
Abstracted away from that experience, that Peak experience and you're left wondering, why are so many of my other experiences mediocre right? Like, why am I repeating the same Pleasures every day? Why do, why is my Netflix queue? Just like, when's this going to run out? Like I've seen so many shows like this I am I really going to watch another one like you're all of that that's a moment where you're not actually having the be
Terrific Vision, right? You're not you're not sunk into the present moment and you're not truly in love. Like you're in a relationship with somebody who you know, you know, conceptually you love right? This is the person you're living your life with but you don't actually feel good together, right? Like if you still like it's in those moments of where attention hasn't found a good enough reason to truly sink into the present, so
As to obviate any, any concern like that, right? And that's what that's why meditation is this kind of superpower? Because until you learn to meditate, you think you're the outside world or the circumstances of your life, always have to get arranged so that the present moment because can become good enough to demand your attention in a way that makes that seems fulfilling that makes.
Happy? And so if you're his Jiu-Jitsu, you think? Okay. I got to get back on the mat. It's been, it's been months since I've trained, you know, it's been over a year since I've trained its covid. When am I going to be able to train again? That's the only place I feel great, right? Or, you know, I've got a ton of work to do. I'm not gonna be able to feel good until I get all this work done, right? So I've got to some deadlines that that's coming. You always think that your life has to change the world has to change. So,
So that you can finally have a good enough, excuse to truly, to just be here. And here is enough, you know that where the present moment becomes totally captivating meditation is the only limitations another name for the discovery that you can actually just train yourself to do that on demand. So that like, does it mean just looking at a cup? Can be good enough in precisely that way. And any sense that it might not
The.
Is recognized to be a thought that is mysteriously unravels. The moment you notice it and then you fall in E and the moment expands and becomes more diaphanous. And then there's no, then there's no evidence that this isn't the best moment of your life, right? Like this, it does, and it doesn't have to be. It does have to be pulling all the rains and levers of pleasure. It's not like it's taste like chocolate. You know? There's the most chocolaty moment of my life. No. It's just
the sense-data don't have to change but the the sense that there is it some kind of
basis for doubt about the rightness of being in the world in this moment that can evaporate when you pay attention and that is the meaning of. So the kind of the meta answer to that question, the meaning of life for me is to live in that mode, more and more. And to whenever I notice I'm not in that mode to recognize it and return and to not be too.
To cease more and more to take the reasons. Why not reasons, why not at face value, because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled In This Moment Like This. I got all these outstanding things that I'm worried about, right? It's like it's, you know, there's, there's that thing that's happening later today that I, you know, I'm anxious about whatever it is. We're constantly deferring our sense of this. Is this is it
No, this is not a dress rehearsal. This is the show, we keep deferring it and we would you have these moments on the calendar where we think? Okay, this is this is where it's all going to land. Is that vacation I planned with my five best friends, you know, we do this once every three years and now we're going and here we are on the beach together.
Unless you have a mind that can really pay attention, really cut through the chatter really sink into the present moment. You can't even enjoy those moments. The way they should be enjoyed the way you dreamed, you would enjoy them when they arrive. So it's it's a meditation in the sense, it's the great equalizer. It's like it's you don't have that you don't have to live with the illusion anymore. That you need a good enough reason and the things are going to get better when you do, have those good reasons.
Like there's just a mirage like quality to every future attainment and every future breakthrough. And every future Peak experience that eventually, you get the lesson that you never quite arrived, right? Like you won't, you don't you don't arrive until you cease to step over the Present Moment In Search of the next thing. I mean, we're constantly, we're stepping over the thing that we think we're
We're seeking it be in the act of seeking it. And so this kind of a paradox even there is a there's this Paradox that witch
It sounds trite but it's that you can't actually become happy. You can only be happy and and and it's that is the illusion that become is the lose. The illusion that your future being happy. It can be predicated on this act of becoming in any domain and becoming includes this sort of, you know, further under the further scientific understanding on the questions that interest you or, you know,
Getting in better shape or whatever. The thing is whatever the whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction seems to be a nanny present moment.
Real attention solves the Cohen. You know, in a way that becomes a very different place from which to then make any further change. It's not that you just have to dissolve into a puddle of Goo. I mean you can still get in shape and you can still do all the things that, you know, the superficial things that are obviously good to do, but the sense that your well-being is over there is really does.
Finish and eventually just becomes a becomes a kind of non sequitur. So, well, there's a sense in which, in this conversation, I've actually experienced many of those things. The sense that I've arrived. So, I mentioned to you offline. It's very true that I start. I've been a fan of yours for many years and the reason I started as podcast speaking of AI systems is to manipulate you, Sam Harris into doing this conversation.
Like on the calendar. Literally you know, I've always had a sense, people ask me, when are you going to talk to Sam Harris? And I always answered eventually, right? Because I always felt again tying, our free will think that somehow that's going to happen and it's one of those manifestation things or something. I don't know if it's a, maybe I am a robot, I'm just not cognizant of it and I manipulated you into having this conversation. So it was a
I mean, I don't know what the purpose of my life, but at this point, is this. So, I've arrived. So, in that sense, I mean, all that to say, I'm only partially joking on that, is it really is a huge honor that you would waste his time with me. Yeah, well really means a lot so it's mutual. I'm a big fan of yours and as you know, I reached out to you for the so this is it's great. I love what you're doing, what you're doing? Something more and more indispensable in,
This world on your podcast and you're doing it differently than Rogan's doing it or then I'm doing it. I mean, you have you definitely found your own lane and it's wonderful.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris and thank you too. National instruments, Val, Campo athletic greens and linode check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Sam Harris in his book. Free will, you are not controlling the storm in, you're not lost in it, you are the storm. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next
time.
