Making Sense with Sam Harris - #105 — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Matt Dillahunty

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

The following conversation between Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Matt Dillahunty was recorded at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver on November 2, 2017. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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We clearly waited too long to come to Vancouver. Thank you. Amazing. So a quick rundown on this evening's event. There's a couple microphones set up. We will be getting to questions from you guys a little later on. Thank you. Amazing. So a quick rundown on this evening's event. There's a couple of microphones set up. We will be getting to questions from you guys a little later on. We're going to chat for, you know, however long we feel like it. But we want to make sure there's time for questions after that.

So good to see you both again. Yeah, likewise. I'm really enjoying kind of this series of events. And I thought today we'd start off in a different direction that's all about me. No. It's actually a question that I think both of you are going to have really good input on. I did a debate a couple weeks ago against a preacher who seemed to have not only no understanding of science, but no appreciation for it, didn't care, didn't care if he was fairly representing it. As a matter of fact, I think there's a chance you might have stood up and accosted him at some point, because he literally stood in front of me and said, oh, that evolution stuff, it's not like anybody's ever banged sticks and rocks together and got a puppy.

he's ever banged sticks and rocks together and got a puppy. He said this twice during the debate. The first time, we're in a debate structure, so I'm trying not to interrupt. I need to follow the rules of debate. And the second time, I just halted and jumped right in. And I was like, you're right, that's never happened. And no scientist has ever portrayed anything like that happening. And luckily we were in a high school and the students seemed to get it. But how do we work past not only just willful scientific ignorance, but this, we seem to have built communities where we haven't instilled any appreciation for it or any appreciation to treat it reasonably. Let's just throw up a straw man and call it nonsense. I don't often quote Tony Blair. But he said, education, education, education.

There is staggering ignorance of what evolution is all about. And... Hello? I think we're living in a simulation right now, and it's failing us. So, Richard, what do you do with this underlying misunderstanding of the role of randomness in evolution? Can you inoculate us against that problem?

Well, mutation is random only in one sense, actually. Mutation is random only in the sense that it's not directed towards improvement, specifically. It's nonrandom in other senses. Natural selection is quintessentially nonrandom. That's exactly what Natural selection is quintessentially non-random. That's exactly what natural selection is. Anybody who thinks that you could possibly explain the beauty and the elegance of living things by some kind of random process would be stark raving bonkers. Anybody who thinks that we think that has got to be stark raving bonkers. Of course it's not random. The whole point of the scientific enterprise in this

case is to find an escape from randomness, is to find a solution to the problem of how you get these staggeringly non-random things which are living creatures out of the laws of physics. And that's what we're about. I mean, to explain that by postulating a creator, now that is almost resorting to randomness. That's saying that complexity, non-randomness is another word for complexity, comes into being spontaneously by sheer luck. God does happen to be there.

What natural selection, what evolution does, is to explain how you get there from simple beginnings, which are easy to understand, and how you work up gradually, gradually, gradually up a kind of ramp of improvement until you get to complexity. That's the whole point. We're trying to escape from randomness, and natural selection is the only escape that anybody has ever suggested that will work. It strikes me, I was thrilled that students, this was in a public high school, although I believe it was a charter school,

because it's going to be unlikely that a regular state-sponsored public school is going to invite me in to debate a preacher, although it was a debate class. But I was inspired that the students seemed to catch on to what was going on, so at least I'm a little optimistic that they were reasonably educated on the subject. But how do we deal with adults, this minister? He's not going to go back to school. He's not going to pay any attention to us. What did he actually say? I didn't quite hear the final word of what he said.

He portrayed evolution as if scientists were saying that you bang sticks and rocks together and you get a puppy. That's sort of ridiculous over the top. That's going to be a meme, that face right there. I'm just lost for words. Although, truth be told, the details of procreation are almost that strange. If you've ever had a child, it could not be more alien. If we watched a horror movie and this is how the aliens produced their offspring, it could not be made stranger than it is.

That was not an anti-sex tirade, by the way. That was not an anti-sex tirade, by the way. That was just... If anyone thinks that the great majority of scientists are so utterly idiotic and naive that they think that the way you get life is by banging sticks together and stones together, I mean, doesn't it give him pause to think that actually the vast majority of scientists have a fully coherent

theory that fills library shelves and volumes of books about it. If it was that simple, if we're just banging sticks together, that's not the way it would work. What do you do with the underlying improbability of the whole process getting started in the first place? The tornado going through a junkyard and assembling a fully working 747 argument? The first step, the origin of the first self-replicating molecule, the origin of the first gene, that was a necessary first step before natural selection could get started. And that is a step that nobody has yet solved. There are quite a lot of theories about it.

We may never know for certain, because it happened a very long time ago. We know the kind of thing that must have happened. And that is a big barrier. That is one of the main questions that remains. Once that's happened, that was a fairly simple start. Once that's happened, then the whole panoply of life, the whole branching, complexifying beauty of life then gets going. We do need a theory of the origin of life. But once that starts, then everything else follows with great logic and persuasiveness.

persuasiveness. And of course, until we get to the point where we have a good understanding, then the answer that we should give is we don't know yet, rather than pretending that we do and that there's some, you know, godlike governing force. Exactly. Scientists, we like to say we don't know because that gives us something to do. It's incredibly good job security for the curious. One of the things that troubled me is having all of us have dealt with religious-minded individuals in debate type formats. Here's a preacher who knew nothing, and it was proudly on display, and it was proudly on display. And there's a part of me that says, should this individual be allowed to speak to children at all? And yet I have to defend this idea of freedom of expression, that people get to share their ideas. And that puts us in a place

where we're constantly in a battle of ideas. How badly informed should somebody be before we just stop paying attention to them and work on the people who perhaps are reachable? Well, the problem in that case is that the preacher represents in the U.S., what, 35 percent, 45 percent, depending on what his convictions are of the population. So it's not, you have to, you can ignore the preacher, but you can't ignore the fact that a significant minority, and on some questions, a majority of Americans hold just patently absurd ideas. So it's the ideas that really matter. He knew nothing, but he was proud of knowing nothing, it sounds to me. A lot of us are ignorant of lots of things. I mean, I'm ignorant of very many things,

and I'm sure you are as well. But we don't... I've never heard it put so nicely. But we admit when we're ignorant, and we don't try to pontificate about things of which we know nothing, whereas he was doing exactly that. In a way, it wasn't so much that I don't think he thinks he's ignorant. I don't think he's proud of his ignorance. I think he thinks he's convinced he has the right answer, and that we are all engaged in a scientific fairy tale. So there's like an extra layer of smug superiority over the top of it where he gets to dismiss the work of countless scientists that have taught us the best current understanding of the diversity of life. And he gets to shrug it off with sticks and rocks.

and it gets to shrug it off with sticks and rocks. Well, if we ever have to convene gatherings like this in hell, we'll know we did something wrong. I'm pretty sure a part of that was in hell, but I maintain my composure. I mean, that really is the thing. That's what completely changes the equation. The moment you believe you are certain or even just have very good reason to believe

that this life is just a way station on the way to some eternity that you could get very, very wrong or very, very right depending on what you believe. That being your master algorithm, depending on what you believe. Just that being your master algorithm, that makes a mockery of every pretense to human knowledge,

no matter how technologically useful it is. It doesn't matter if we cure cancer with some future biology and prayer has never worked. If you believe in heaven and hell, that really governs everything, it seems. In a way, I don't think I mind his believing what he believes. What I mind is his thinking we believe what he thinks we believe. Yes. Because how could anybody be so stupid as to think that you can... He simultaneously presented a straw man of evolution and evolutionary scientists and anybody who fell into that, you know, I accept the reality. I'm going to straw man you all with sticks and rocks.

Now, we can laugh at it. And, you know, if you feel like laughing at it some more, by all means. There's been lots of discussion about how best to engage on these. How much, for lack of a better phrase, how big of an asshole should you be? How much pushback should there be? How seriously should you take them? And quite frequently, someone will come up and present the idea that there are sophisticated theologians, that this preacher that I had a debate with is in one category, and some other academic erudite theologians are in another category. Is that the case?

Well, there are sophisticated theologians who accept evolution, of course, and have no problem with that. And so our argument with them is a quite separate argument. I have met sophisticated theologians who believe pretty astonishing things, like believing literally that Jesus turned water into wine. And I thought sophisticated theologians had written all that stuff off and said, oh no, that's just metaphor, that's just a nice story. We don't really believe that anymore. But I have spoken to very, very highly qualified, sophisticated theologians, highly educated. They accept evolution totally, but yet they think Jesus turned water into wine and walked on water and rose from the dead and was born of a virgin. All very unscientific ideas, and still they call themselves sophisticated theologians. Well, first we should acknowledge

that sophistication is better insofar as it means moderation and less of a commitment to the most dangerous ideas. But my problem with so-called sophisticated theology is that no one ever admits where the sophistication is coming from. It's coming from a loss of faith in specific doctrines. It's getting hammered into them from the outside. It's coming from science and a modern conception of ethics, a universal conception of human rights, a sense of how unseemly it is to think that anyone,

by virtue of being born in the wrong place, is going to spend eternity in hell just because they didn't happen to hear the good word from their parents. So they lose their purchase on those dogmas, and yet they retain this conviction that Jesus was born of a virgin or was resurrected and will be coming back. And those are just the, it's a God of the gaps argument in certain cases, but it's a, there's just certain questions where science hasn't yet closed the door to belief, and so they're putting all of their chips on those questions. We might have slightly different views of what a sophisticated theologian is,

which is probably a testament to how it's actually not sophisticated theology, but obfuscated theology. Because when I hear someone say, oh, you know, you take calls on the atheist experience and you get people who couldn't present a reasonable argument at all. Why don't you take on real sophisticated theology? And my answer is always tell them to call in. Here's the phone number. They can call in whatever week they want. And they'll say, well, you know, oh, but here's this, you know, academic who's presented this particular version of the ontological argument, the moral argument. And it's, you know, you've got Ray Comfort, the banana man, on one hand, and they pretend that there's

something superior with regard to argumentation on the other. And the many years I've been hosting the show and doing debates, what I find is what gets labeled as sophisticated theology is the exact same thing. It's not like the arguments of these sophisticated theologians are any more sound than the arguments of Ray Comfort. It's just that they're better speakers. They're actually less sound in one way in that they don't, so the belief system is still anchored to a belief in revelation. They're still fixated on the text, but they have ignored much of what seems untenable in the text, and they don't have an argument about why that's okay. Because if God wrote any of these books, and nowhere in the book does God say, well, you could ignore the first half because now I'm getting to the good part.

I'd say, well, you could ignore the first half because now I'm getting to the good part. It's all God's words. It's actually a less principled position than fundamentalism. And that's why it's always, in my view, unstable in the face of fundamentalism, because the fundamentalist always has the advantage of saying, listen, I'm going to read the whole book. I'm going to take the most plausible interpretation of it. I'm going to read the whole book. I'm going to take the most plausible interpretation of it. I'm going to read every word as literally as possible. And that always begins to fixate on more divisive, more doctrinaire, more irrational ideas. At least with a fundamentalist, you know what you're arguing against. You're not arguing against a wet sponge. No, there's a, it seems perverse to say it, but there's actually more integrity

to the most fundamentalist position, because there's simply one irrational move, which is the belief that this book is perfect in every word. But the moment you believe that, well, then it is, in fact, rational to try to connect all the dots as reasonably as possible. But sometimes they really don't say anything. They say something like, well, God is the ground of all being, or God is the essence of is-ness, or something. Well, I have a soft spot for that kind of I mean I don't like the theistic version of it but this is perhaps the only argument I can adduce in favor of so called

sophisticated theology which is there's an experience that people have Christian contemplatives say or really contemplatives in any tradition and have had for millennia, which does provoke those sorts of noises from people.

The problem is you get far enough into any of these contemplative traditions and everyone begins to sound like a Buddhist. And then if you're in the 14th century in Christendom, the Inquisition shows up at your door, as they did to Meister Eckhart, who happily died of natural causes just in time. But there's an experience that people have of losing their sense of self, say, and feeling at one with the universe or the world,

or having some kind of ethical, just a full ethical reboot of their hard drive where they feel love that they didn't know was possible, right? A kind of self-transcending love. Yeah, I'd enjoy that, I think. Well, yeah, so I'm not sure I would. We can help. And I'm not sure that it's good. What is it that's a good thing about losing one's sense of self? That's a big question. Well, when you look at just the mechanics of your own suffering, when you look at just what self-concern gets you psychologically,

you can begin to feel that most of your suffering is not directly tied to bad things happening. It's tied to all this whole machinery of self-concern, you know, anxiety about the future and regret about the past and worries about what people said of you or think of you or will think of you. And so much of our neurosis is taking place just in the conversation we're having with ourselves. And that's all predicated on the legitimacy of this starting point of feeling like there's a self riding around in the head who is carried through from one moment to the next in life. That you are the same person you were yesterday. So the thing that embarrassed you yesterday that you're now

remembering and now feels terrible it's the the psychological continuity there and the durable continuity that seems to mandate that you suffer over precisely the thing that you were that you were suffering over yesterday because you're that same self carried through a moment to moment and just have everybody watch frozen and you can just let it go okay right well that, yes. Because I think the sense of self is actually something that's incredibly valuable that, you know, we have a preservation motivation. We have a desire to understand the world that we inhabit. That is, it may be the case, as I've argued and others have, that there's no such thing as altruism in a true sense, but

that you could have altruism from a purely selfish standpoint and still do good. Yeah, but I wouldn't call it, that begins to play with the boundaries of the, quote, self. So the moment you begin to feel that your selfishness extends to everyone being happy, right? Because you actually care about everyone, right? And you feel better when you see people smiling rather than, you know, weeping. If you extend the circle of your self-concern to everyone, well, then that's not normal selfishness. That's, you know, sainthood in a religious sense. If I'm doing it because I feel that good when people smile, that doesn't mean I necessarily care about them. It means I might care about that good feeling that I get. Yeah, except the I get part is vulnerable to inspection.

I mean, the sense that there's an I who's appropriating that in every moment is, it's just, it's a project which can be accomplished in a moment or you can fail to accomplish it after many years of looking. But there's the sense that there is a, it's useful to define what we mean by self, because most people don't feel identical to their bodies. So when I say the self doesn't exist, I'm not saying that people don't exist.

I'm not saying that nobody's here and this is all an illusion. And there are contemplative and religious and spiritual traditions that can sound like they're saying something very much like that. I'm saying that the sense that we all have of being a subject in the head, riding around in the body as though it were a kind of vehicle, right?

Because this really is most people's starting point. They don't feel truly coterminous with their bodies. They feel like they're in their head and that their hands are down there in some sense. And that sense of being a subject in the head is vulnerable to inspection. You can lose that sense. And on one level, you can just be identified with your body. I mean, that is actually progress. Simply to feel like a body in the world is different from the way most people feel. Most people are kind of, and this is what we're running into, most people are common sense dualists.

They feel like the mind can't possibly be identical to the brain. The mind is something altogether different, and it just feels like it's in the head. There's a sort of locus of attention that's emanating from the head but this body is a machine that can malfunction and it's changing over time it's clearly not what i am and i am probably a soul then i'm probably spirit i can probably drift off the brain at death and that's and that sense and all the ways in which that sense can be played with by fasting or prayer or meditation or psychedelics or getting crazy ideas that you find emotionally very animating. The adventures you can have in dualism are part of the problem here.

Adventures in dualism should be the title of your next book. I didn't know if you wanted to jump in on that at all. I have nothing to contribute. I sit here and I listen to this and I think there's like a four-hour fascinating for me conversation. You might not think so much because I have no problem with the idea

that the mind is the brain. But I know there are people who do. But it doesn't feel that way. I know. I know it doesn't feel that way, and I don't know that it's necessary, and I don't know what the right path is. I don't know that, for example, losing this sense of self could be a great thing. Well, one thing I would add is that you lose it all the time because it actually isn't there. I mean, you are losing it all the time. How can you lose something that's not there? It always seems there retrospectively. But when you're really paying attention to something,

you know, when you're so-called lost in your work, or you're lost in some athletic task, or you're just lost in thought. You're actually thinking about something and you're not aware that you're thinking. This sense of our own kind of central presence in our heads is constantly being undercut by attention being diverted to something out in the world or to some experience. And you can become increasingly sensitive to how it's being interrupted. I would love to get to the truth, and I love the fact we're on the pursuit, but irrespective of what the truth is, Richard, something like consciousness, which we still, some would say we understand and some would say we don't. I think we don't. But what would be the evolutionary advantage in the process by

which we get to consciousness as we have it, as we seem to have it, that might distinguish us from other animals? It's a big mystery because you could build an animal which did all the sophisticated things animals have to do, hunting for food, avoiding predators, looking for mates, doing everything that an animal has to do in order to survive and propagate its genes. And I don't think it would have to be conscious at all. I think it could all be done in the way that a computer would do it. I mean, when you talk to Siri or Alexa, they sound conscious, but you know they're not. And for an animal to survive with a nervous system, it doesn't, it seems to me, need to be conscious. And I'm very glad I'm conscious, and I'm pretty sure you are as well. I think other people. I'm not a solipsist.

But I do find it a bit of a mystery why we have consciousness at all. Yeah, I would agree. I think it's, as I wrote somewhere, it's the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion, including the universe. I mean, this universe could be a simulation on some alien hard drive. I think Descartes said something similar. Although I got 40 emails last week that says,

we've proved that that's not true, and I don't necessarily buy those emails either. That's exactly what the simulators would say if you were... But consciousness as just the felt sense that something is going on, the fact that there's an experiential quality, whatever this is, whether you're a brain in a vat, whether you're in the matrix, whether consciousness is being produced by information processing in your head as seems reasonable to believe, Consciousness is always the first fact before any other facts can be discussed. And it's also the most important thing in the universe. It's the only thing that makes, at least in my view, it's the only thing that makes the universe

important. The fact that the lights are on, the fact that it's possible for the lights to be on. If you told me there's a universe somewhere that's got stars and planets, but the constants of nature are tuned just a little awry so that conscious life is impossible, that is a deeply uninteresting universe. And consciousness is the only ground for any moral dimension to our lives too. And yet I'm with you in feeling that it's not clear that it does anything. It's not clear how it would be selected for, because if you just look at your own experience, everything that you're conscious of, anything that you seem to be consciously deciding or any place where it seems that consciousness is necessary to integrate information behaviorally,

you know, to have a complex goal, say for someone to say to you, well, we should really get to the Orpheum Theater at eight o'clock to hear this talk, for that to become a behavioral plan, let's just say that that is in fact something that can only be done consciously in apes like ourselves. Still, it's not clear why, well, as you said, it's not clear that that should be the only way that it gets accomplished. And we could easily build robots, one presumes, that could do these things without it being something that it's like to be those robots. But even in our own case, if consciousness really is just what it is at the level of our neurophysiology, really is just what it is at the level of our neurophysiology, it's only effective in virtue of what it is at the level of neurophysiology. So the fact that there's a subjective side to it doesn't matter. And the fact that you're having this experience now,

which again is the most important thing in anyone's life, the experience side of it is not what is actually behaviorally effective if in fact consciousness has the other face, which is its neurophysiology and its information processing dynamics. Nicholas Humphrey suggested that one of the most important things we have to do is to second-guess other people.

We swim through a sea of, a social sea. We have to make our way through very, very complicated relationships with other people, and we have to second-guess what they're going to do. All the time, we're having to predict how this what they're going to do. All the time we're having to predict how this other person is going to react. And so he postulates what he calls the inner eye, which is looking inwards to yourself as an aid to second guessing what the other person might do. You need this extra sense organ to help you to predict the behavior of the other person. I still don't think that does it. Somehow I wouldn't have been as surprised by the last

presidential election if I was doing that correctly. Yeah, and I was here before the election and predicted that there was no way Trump could win. And as somebody who occasionally pretends to read minds and make predictions for a living, boy, was that a mistake. I think what Richard's talking about is something that I've heard elsewhere is the intentional stance. What if it's the case that consciousness, which gives rise to this sense of self, in a way that goes beyond a mere self-reflection and consideration, leads us to connections with other people. And this is what provides the evolutionary benefit. But it also leads to something else that I thought we'd talk about, which is tribalism. Our lives as individuals become merged, obviously, with our family. We have this immediate connection to our family,

and then we extend this, and we extend the definition of family, and we begin to form tribes. And there was a time and a place where that may have been the best thing. And there was a time and a place where that may have been the best thing. Is it the case that, I mean, obviously, these could all be side effects of just what happened, and I would think that I'd be okay with the idea that consciousness and tribalism and everything are side effects of what happened. You know, there doesn't have to be a guiding hand. But in the process, viewing it from natural selection, what were the benefits of tribalism and have we actually outgrown them or are we maybe taking a step back? Well, if I'm not

mistaken, Richard, I think altruism, the evolutionary rationale for altruism really only makes sense in a tribal context. So one of the silver linings of internecine tribal conflict was that in-group altruism got selected for. I don't know if there's any recent work on that, but that was my reading of things. That's not to say that we're stuck with tribalism as the only rationale for altruism, but in terms of how apes like ourselves

became as altruistic as we are it's thought that that competition among tribes was the basis well i suppose a darwinian view of altruism would go back to a time when we lived in small tribal groups and there were two things about living in these small groups. One was that you were completely surrounded by kin, cousins, second cousins, siblings, nephews and nieces, and so on. And so there would have been a Darwinian incentive to altruism towards anybody you meet, because anybody you meet is a member of your own village, your own tribe, your own clan.

And the second thing, the other Darwinian engine, motor of altruism is reciprocation. And reciprocation depends or largely depends upon encountering the same individual again and again. And that again happens within the village, within the band, within the tribe. So there would have been a selection pressure in favor of within-group altruism

and out-group hostility, xenophobia. So we can expect that there should be this tendency to despise the out group and to be altruistic and cooperative with the familiar in group. And that could be defined as people you've known all your life, people you've brought up with, people who look like you. There are all sorts of ways in which the rule of thumb for how to behave could have latched on.

And it's a pretty depressing outlook when we've moved out of our tribal past and moved into big cities where we're no longer in small tribal groups. But we still have the same rules of thumb which work, and that is a good thing. We have a rule of thumb that says just, in general, be nice to anybody emphasize with anybody because in the distant past anybody

would have been defined as your own tribe your own your own clan your own kin group your own reciprocation group so i wonder if it's to our benefit to there's a couple of potential ways to go there. One is to get everybody to realize that everybody still is part of our clan, that we are one human clan. I don't know, I don't have the magic solution to end the various divisions. But the other is maybe to get people to recognize that they can be a part of a number of different clans that overlap. maybe to get people to recognize that they can be a part of a number of different glands that overlap, is this is how we build societies.

I care more about my immediate family than I do my neighborhood, but I care more about my neighborhood than I do the broader world. But I can't diminish my caring for things outside my scope to zero because we know that we have an impact on each other even at great great distances peter singer wrote a book called the expanding circle yeah in which he starts out by talking about this this in-group kin kin group and then talks about the altruism broadening itself out to um wider and wider and wider groups and he he would like that to include non-human animals as well. That psychologically we can extend our tribal loyalty to all sentient beings.

Yeah. There were some folks out front with pictures of both of you actually lobbying for something along those lines. Oh, yeah. Which is nice. I think Singer's heuristic is the right one. Moral progress is. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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