Making Sense with Sam Harris - #112 — The Intellectual Dark Web

Episode Date: January 2, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro about the breakdown of shared values, the problem with identity politics, religion, free will, the primacy of reason, and many other topics. 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.

Okay, well, for this episode, the first of the new year, I am presenting the audio of my live event with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro that we did in San Francisco a few weeks back. To say that this audio has been much anticipated really is an understatement. Ben has an enormous following online and I have been hearing from all of you, mostly on social media and in comment threads. I really haven't been sitting on this audio for any other reason than I had many other podcasts in the queue and I couldn't decently hold them for much longer, but the time has arrived. And I just have a few things to say by way of preamble. I introduced both of these

guys on stage, so I don't need to do that here. Eric Weinstein, many of you know from a previous podcast. He's always great. Ben, as many of you know, is quite a polarizing and controversial figure. I got a fair amount of grief when I announced that we would be doing a podcast together. Also, a ton of enthusiasm from his fans. Needless to say, I can't take responsibility for everything Ben has said or written in the past. I'm certainly unaware of most of what he's said and written.

But I'm aware of enough to know that he has, like many of us operating in this space on these topics, been unfairly maligned and demonized by his detractors. I think any comparison between him and Milo Yiannopoulos is quite unfair, given the differences in how they operate. This is something I say on stage at the beginning of this event, but that's a comparison that's often made. Ben and I disagree about some fundamental things here, and it was really, I found myself in a situation which I often find myself in on the podcast, where I have to play host and debate partner simultaneously. And I've begun to feel that there really is no perfect way to split that baby. And I certainly didn't do it perfectly here. More and more I try to err on the side of being the gracious host who is not going to let things get bogged down. But the scientist and philosopher

in me who can't let a bad point stand invariably flirts with the ditch on the other side of the road. So you can decide whether I struck the right balance here. Ben and I disagree fundamentally about religion and its connection to human values. We disagree about free will. I tackled some of these points as they came up and let others go, in the interest of not getting bogged down. But I think Ben and I did about as well as we could here where we disagreed, given the nature of the event. But you be the judge. I should say that despite our disagreements, the vibes with Ben were great. In the green room beforehand. Afterwards, this was a very fun and collegial experience for everyone. And I'm very grateful for Eric and Ben's participation,

as well as to all of you who came out for the event. We had a packed house at the Masonic in San Francisco. And from what I can tell, most of you had a lot of fun. So, without further delay, I give you The Waking Up Podcast, live from San Francisco with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris. Thank you.

Okay, well, sorry for the late start. I'm going to jump right into it because we have a lot to talk about. I've got two guests tonight, and the first is a mathematician. He has a PhD from Harvard, and he has held research positions at Harvard and MIT and Hebrew University and Oxford. You may have heard him before on my podcast. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. And honestly, that's saying a lot. And he has, along with his brother, Brett, who I just did a podcast with last night in Seattle, he has, along with his brother, Brett, who I just did a podcast with last night in Seattle,

he has become one of the most valuable defenders of free speech in our time. So please welcome Eric Weinstein. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. And our next contestant is the editor-in-chief of dailywire.com. He is the host of the Ben Shapiro show, so guess his name,

which is the top conservative podcast in the nation. He is the author of seven books, and he has been a nationally syndicated columnist since the age of 17. Pity he got such a late start. He's a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. Please welcome Ben Shapiro. Thank you for coming. So we have a lot to get into here, and there are areas of agreement.

I mean, many of you know who these two guys are, and you know, you can imagine the course we're going to chart here. I want to start with Ben, because he's had a truly unusual experience, and many of you may not be aware of just how unusual, and this will take us into areas of agreement, Ben, where, you know, we definitely agree, which is around the primacy of free speech and how strange our national conversation is on so many topics. So Ben is, if you don't know, is the person who, when he goes to Berkeley, requires, at Berkeley University, requires $600,000 worth of security to give a speech. We have a little bit less security here tonight, so please behave yourselves. But Ben, what's been going on? What has it been like to be you in the last two years?

Confusing. I've always been a little bit bewildered by the scope of the opposition at these college speeches because I don't actually think that my message is supremely controversial. It's pretty mainstream and conservative. And yet when I show up on campuses at Cal State Los Angeles, there was a near riot. When I went to Berkeley, obviously, they required a fair bit of security, thanks to Antifa. And when I was at DePaul University, DePaul University banned me outright. They threatened to arrest me if I set foot on their campus, even though students had invited me. University of Wisconsin, they actually tried to pass a law banning the heckler's veto, basically, after I spoke at University of Wisconsin.

So I think it has far less to do with me than it does with this kind of mood in the country that's so polarized and so crazed. And I would say with regard to college campuses, unique to the political left. I'm not seeing a lot of it from the political right. The political right certainly has its own problems at this point in time. But what's going on on campuses is something that, you know, I've been speaking on college campuses for most of my career, so 15 years, and only in the last couple have I needed security. The first time I ever acquired security guards was last year. And now, you know, every place I go, I have to have security guards when it's a public event. And you also, you're getting it from both

sides in a way that's completely surreal. So, for instance, you were often disparaged as a Nazi or a white supremacist. Yeah, it's the yarmulke that gives me away on that one. Yeah, yeah. But even if you were not going to notice the yarmulke, you were actually the most

targeted victim of anti-Semitism in what, 2016? Yeah, among journalists on Twitter anyway. Yeah, it is upside down. And you're also often compared to your former Breitbart colleague, Milo Yiannopoulos, right? And that's an unfortunate pairing because the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because while i think you and i will disagree about several maybe foundational things i see you as someone who is sincerely defending a position based on a rational chain of argumentation based on first principles that we may or may not share but you're not a performance artist uh and that's a crucial distinction i mean that's at crucial distinction. I mean, that's at

least what I'm going for, right? I mean, I've always thought that what I'm trying to do anyway is say things that I think are true, and if they piss you off, they piss you off, but I'm not going in there with the idea I need to piss somebody off to make a headline. That's why I've always found this a little bit puzzling, because there are provocateurs whose job it is to go into a university, say something deliberately provocative just to get a rise out of people and get a headline, and since that really is not my MO, I've been sort of puzzled, frankly, by the level of opposition on all sides. It was a very weird year. I mean, last year was a weird year. I had the alt-right calling me a Black Lives Matter activist and Black Lives Matter calling

me an alt-righter. So it was a unique time. 2016, we're still living in a parallel universe in which Marty McFly actually did not stop Biff from using the sports yearbook. One lens through which I want us to view this conversation is really two lenses. What most worries you and what most interests you at this point? Let's start with the worry. Where are you at this point? Let's start with the worry. Where are you at this moment? Well, I guess for me, I've tried to localize my concern with the breakdown of what

I call semi-reliable communal sense-making. If something happens... It's a very Eric Weinstein phrase. My Twitter follower account is the orders of magnitude below yours. The idea being that if something happens and everybody in the audience processes it, we will fall into certain clusters, and those clusters are fairly reliable and dependent. And so, you know, to Ben's point that he is both Black Lives Matter and alt-right in the Schrodinger superposition. So what is that? And it has to do with the fact that traditionally

we've used institutions to guide our sense-making and to make sense of things collectively, and that has now gone away. And so depending upon what institutions I'm hooked up to, what was my last, where did the Fox, you know, last have the scent, I can be at odds with somebody I love, somebody who I've thought about as somebody I've shared a life with, because there's no longer any way to do this communal. And the semi-reliable, I don't think that Walter Cronkite was actually always telling us the truth, but it was in some sense, you know, to first approximation, close enough that there was a national consciousness belief structure, there was enough shared sort of complex for us to function as a country. And I think that that's gone away. So I think

this is the parent of the crisis, which I increasingly think of as this, you know, I call it the no-name revolution or the N-squared revolution. We're in some sort of new regime, which doesn't look like any revolution we've seen before. It's much less physically violent so far. It's digitally extremely violent, and it has to do with the fact that we can't make sense of things communally at some semi-reliable level. And what are the ideas or sets of ideas that you think are most culpable for bringing us here?

Well, it's tough. I think that what really happened, if we think about it historically, is that we had this beautiful period of fairly reliable, high, evenly distributed, technologically-led growth after World War II up until about, let's say, 1970. And we predicated all of our institutions on this expectation that this growth was some sort of normal thing that we could depend upon in the future. When it ran out, we were left with all of our institutions looking in some form or another like Ponzi schemes. And in order to keep running an institution that expected growth in a steady state condition, let's say,

you need to change the narrative to create some sort of as-if growth story. So you start stealing from the future, you start stealing from groups that are too weak to defend their own economic interests so that certain slices can keep growing even if the pie doesn't grow so well. There are certain areas that kept growing like communications and computation.

So there was some real growth, maybe fracking. But in general, what we have is we have a bunch of institutions that used to be capable of honesty that had to develop narratives and that the problem is we've had as-if growth across the spectrum for most of our adult lives. And that story, which is a fiction, ran out. You're not one of these anti-capitalists I've been hearing about, are you? You're the managing director of Teal Capital, so that wouldn't be good.

If this gets out, I'm toast. So is that the... That's the genesis of it. So you actually think economics is the longest lever here that's influencing the machine? This breakdown of our, this failure of polite conversation to get us to converge on a meaningful worldview. Well, if you chase it all the way up the chain, I mean, markets are in some sense the continuation of natural and sexual selection by other means.

And so what you have is that markets take over from... That sounds like a very creepy come online from a conference. The night is young. I don't know how to record this. Let me just acknowledge I'm actually a bad podcast host. I see. You're not with an expert here. You're a good sport. Yeah, I think that we don't realize that when we look out at the city, that nobody is telling people where to drive,

what to do. It's sort of self-organized with markets being this kind of invisible fabric that keeps us together. And so, yeah, it's really important that when growth stops proceeding at the levels that it's expected, people can't form families in real time. So fertility is threatened. People can't plan for coupling and for a future. So I think it gets right into the most intimate details of our lives when the markets don't materialize in the way that we need them. So what is keeping you up at night? Well, I worry a lot less about economics as the basis for social collapse. I think it's easy to overstate the extent to which growth has stagnated.

I mean, we are at 4% unemployment. The economy is not, I mean, this is not 1935. This is not even 1975. There's still, you know, significant economic growth. To me, it seems like the social fabric has been completely ripped apart. And some of that is due to social media and the fact that we coordinate with each other in a different way. But I think a lot of it has to do with loss of common values, like even the ability to have a common conversation. In order to have a conversation with one another, we have to take certain things for granted, like human reason, like objective truth. If we don't take these basic things, at least for granted, then how are we even speaking

the same language? And it seems to me that a lot of those things have disappeared in favor of radical subjectivism that may make us feel good, but doesn't provide the common framework for a conversation. And objective truth goes by the wayside, because if we can't agree on the fact, how are we going to have a conversation? You see this particularly in our politics, where it seems like there's two bubbles that have been created. And if you read Huffington Post, you are in a completely different world than if you read Breitbart. And my mom actually first noticed this in 2012, because she said, you know, I was working at Breitbart at the time, and she said, well, it looks like from Breitbart, Romney's definitely going to win. I was like, yeah, he's

definitely going to win. And she said, and then all my friends at work read Huffington Post, and they say that Obama's definitely going to win. And I don't know who to believe. And I said, well, I really don't know who to believe either, because no one knows the answer to that question. But you can see that it's broken down in incredibly radical ways now, because even things where there should be a common basis of fact, people are disagreeing on. To take the Senate race in Alabama, there's pretty good, reliable accounts that the Republican candidate in that race is likely guilty of some form of sexual abuse of underage girls. And a huge percentage of the Republican base, my party, my group, a huge percentage of them will outright deny that that's the case, because they'll say this is a witch hunt. People are out to get Roy Moore.

It's a conspiratorial attack on Roy Moore. So that's one example from the right. Then on the left, you'll have examples where, you know, you will say things that are biologically true. Take a controversial example, like there is a male sex and there is a female sex. And if you say that, then people will lose their minds because you're somehow insulting their subjectivity. And, you know, when you do that, it's hard to have a conversation because people will change the terms they're using. They'll change the frame of reference they're using. And then they'll toss reason out altogether. They'll say, you know, your specific bias as a person prevents you from even having a reasonable conversation, right? Your white privilege or your background or your ethnicity, all of this prevents us from even

discussing on a one-on-one level. I can recognize my background and having an impact on how I think, but if that is supposed to be a conversation stopper, then how exactly are we supposed to have a conversation? Yeah. So that's why identity politics is so toxic in my view, because if identity is paramount, communication is impossible. Exactly. Because you haven't shared my specific experience or because you don't have the same skin color, you're not the same gender. There's no bridge between us. Right. And you're and there's no chain of reasoning from you to me that should trump anything I currently think, because what I think is anchored to identity.

Exactly. And we don't share an identity. We're atomized individuals kind of bouncing off one another as opposed to being able to form some sort of molecular bond. And I think that that's completely, it seems like that's completely collapsed. Right, right. And do you think social media is the main engine of that collapse, or is it just we were headed there anyway? I mean, obviously Fox News and the fragmentation of media precedes social media, so we had our echo chamber. Yeah, I mean, I really

don't think it's social media. And there was a study that came out from, I think it was Harvard, actually, reported by the New York Times, talking about how the impact of social media on polarization is overstated, that if you look at the most polarized populations in the country, it's actually older people, that people who are older are more polarized politically and are having fewer conversations with people on the other side of the aisle than younger people. And younger people are obviously more apt to use social media. I really don't think it's that.

I think that there is a ground shift in the way people think that's taken place even within our lifetime and has gained steam. there is a ground shift in the way people think that's taken place even within our lifetime and has gained steam. And as I say, even basic concepts like reason are being thrown out in favor of a philosophy of feeling because maybe it does come down to lack of success for people. Maybe people do feel that they can't succeed in other ways. And so the way that they feel fulfilled, the way that they feel whatever need they have for fulfillment is by wallowing in themselves. If I can't find fulfillment in the outer world, then I will look inside me and I will look at what makes me special. And we've all been taught that we're special by Barney. And therefore, since we are all special,

then you saying anything that disagrees with me is taking away my specialness. And that can't be infringed upon. You can actually try to look at the history of these ideas. Like, for example, you mentioned white privilege. And I, at some point, tried to track it down. And there's some two-page, it's not even an academic paper, unpacking the knapsack in the late 80s coming out of Wellesley. Or, you know, intersectionality comes out of apparently UCLA Law School. Or, you know, intersectionality comes out of apparently UCLA Law School. A lot of these ideas actually began as kind of minor interesting ideas, heuristics that couldn't support an entire epistemology. concepts, that got pushed so far beyond their domain of applicability that they led to a kind

of madness when they became sort of the substrate for thought. You can't really have conversations where white privilege is a barrier. If Ben has a drinking problem and I have a gambling problem, we may not be able to understand each other's addictions directly, but if I think about Ben's problem... I ask you not to talk about that publicly. Step one, admit that you've got a problem. The issue is that this idea of being able to hack empathy and hack understanding by using our own personal experiences, our lived experience, to use the jargon, and the felt experience, in order to empathize across

these dividing lines, shows this incredible failure of imagination. It's as if there was no screenwriter who was able to write both male and female characters that men and women, you know, identify with. And so I think it has to do with pushing interesting but very limited heuristics so far beyond their domain of applicability. You can track each one of these things using Google Ngrams to find out where they came from. Right. It seems to me that we're struggling, and it's not just us. All of us are struggling to find a way to capture meaning and value in the context of a rational worldview. And I think that is a challenge that just doesn't go away. That is a perpetual challenge insofar as we understand the situation we're in.

we need to find ways of talking about that so as to converge with a basic life plan with seven billion strangers. And the one difference between us is what we think the value of religion is in that picture. So just to get a little bit of the context here, you're an Orthodox Jew. What does that actually commit you to with respect to belief? What do you believe that I don't believe that is salient here? I'm an atheist. Well, let's see. In case you hadn't heard. That gives you a clue.

I hadn't picked up on that. This is going to be so awkward now. You kids have fun. This is Ali G. Yeah. Well, I mean, I believe in a creator of the universe. I believe that he set certain guidelines for human behavior, that he cares what happens to us. I believe that he endowed us with, in the American sense, certain inalienable rights

that accrue to us as virtue of being human. rights that accrue to us as virtue of being human, you know, from a Judaic perspective, which doesn't really impact public policy so much. One of the reasons that I think we can have a conversation is that when it comes to public policy discussions, I try as little as possible to refer to biblical texts, which means I almost never do, mainly because what would an appeal to authority that you don't believe in do? I mean, it's a waste of time. So in the areas where I think we can actually have a conversation, where we're not talking about the value of kashrut or keeping Sabbath, which I think has very little relevant input for public policy and the kind of social fabric building that we're talking about doing,

the stuff that I think is important where we disagree is man-made in God's image, taking the premise by faith that God created us with certain inalienable rights, endowed us with the capacity to choose, endowed us with the capacity to reason, and cares about what happens to us. Right.

So... Not sure if you can say right any more cynically there, but... One word can do so much. Unintended, but. And yet. So what I'm interested in is in a worldview that could be rebooted or rediscovered now. I mean, just imagine we lost all of our, you know, we had all the libraries burned. The Internet went down. We lost all of our, you know, we had all the libraries burned, the internet went down, we lost all of our texts.

How would someone rediscover this thing? Now, we can make an easy case that we could rediscover science. You know, it might take some time. But if the literature of Judaism, in your case, were lost, it seems to me patently obvious that whatever is true about reality is still there to be discovered. And if there's some part of reality that is ethical or spiritual or divine or spooky, it is there to be discovered by sentient creatures such as ourselves. So what would, how would you reboot religion, the religion that's true?

Because you are by accident born a Jew. Right. And there are a billion people in India who weren't. And I must imagine that on your account, they have, by sheer bad luck, the wrong version of this story. Well, I mean, so Judaism is actually not quite as exclusive as a lot of other religions with regard to this. I mean, Judaism actually says that as long as you fulfill seven basic commandments, like don't kill people, don't steal, don't eat the flesh of a living animal, that you actually have a pathway into heaven. So Judaism is not particularly exclusive, and we actually try to discourage converts. So it's not quite the same as some

of the other converting religions in monotheism. But as far as what's discoverable, I would agree with you. If the Torah were to disappear tomorrow, it would not be discoverable, which is why there is a necessity for revelation in the Jewish view. The idea is that revelation was necessary, not that revelation was unnecessary, and that if people had not been graced with revelation, they would have come to this on their own. But the principles you just gave me, you don't think those are discoverable? Those are discoverable, right. And that's the reason why I say that I think that the principles that are granted through revelation are not necessarily... I think that they caused a ground shift historically from certain ways of thought to other ways of thought. Like the advent of Judeo-Christian thought changed the way of thinking. But I think that they are also things that you can discover through

contemplation, for example. So all of the things that I said about free will and reason and the presence of an unmoved mover, that's more Aristotelian than it is Judeo-Christian. And that is stuff that was essentially discovered through philosophy, not through revelation. So that is the stuff when I talk about the necessity for reason, that's the stuff I think that is more relevant. Now, I think that you do need a religious system in order to inform people who are not going to sit around philosophizing all day what are good and bad modes of behavior. And Voltaire thought the same. So I think that the notion of a dual... But is it important to believe that those good and bad modes were approved of or discouraged by an omniscient being? I mean, can't we just chart a course toward greater fulfillment, greater peaceful collaboration based on just an intelligent analysis of what it is to be social beings? unless you're willing to acknowledge that reason, the capacity to choose, the capacity to act in the

world, that these things exist. And that has to be done based on assumption because you actually oppose some of these things, right? Like you don't think free will exists. Yeah. But I also don't think you need free will to live a moral life. Right. I've never really understood that position, so we'll have to get into it. But to me, if you're going to have a conversation with someone and convince them, then we need to agree on the value of reason. The value of reason is not something that evolutionary biology suggests. What does reason have to do with evolutionary biology, per se? It's a mode of action that is more likely to preserve your species. It doesn't create objective truth. The notion of an objective truth that exists apart from you and would exist

whether or not you were living. This is not something that can necessarily be gathered from science alone, right? You have to make certain assumptions about the universe and the way that your mind reflects what is present in the universe, right? As Kant would argue. Well, it's true that an evolutionary perspective on ourselves suggests that we have not evolved to know reality perfectly. I mean, if you believe that we are apes that have been selected for, and all of our cognitive architecture is built by virtue of its adaptive advantage in evolutionary terms, yes, it's hard to believe that we are perfectly designed

to do mathematics or anything else that is... But you do feel that we can still gather objective truth. But even that picture suggests a wider context of minds more powerful than our own that could have evolved or our own future minds. I mean, it's like there's no... Why would you appeal to minds that have not yet evolved or future minds as opposed to just a creator who put us here with certain capacities? Well, no, because that that we i would argue we don't have any evidence for what we do have evidence for is that we're here we under we understand a lot about the mechanism that is operating now that got us here and that is causing us to be the way we are we can see our relationship to other

life forms we know that we can look at chimps that share 99% of our DNA, and they obviously share a lot of the evolved precursors of our own social and cognitive architecture, but they have no idea what we're up to, right? So they're cognitively closed to most of what we're doing and most of what we care about. And by analogy, we know that we could be cognitively closed to what we might be capable of in a thousand years now. I mean, that our sense of what engagement with the cosmos promises. I know, but I guess the argument is if you're arguing that we're cognitively close to certain things, then why are you arguing which specific things we are cognitively close to?

Well, no, I'm just saying that once you admit it's possible to not know what you're missing, factually, ethically, spiritually, I mean, in any domain of inquiry, it's possible to not know what you're missing, factually, ethically, spiritually. I mean, in any domain of inquiry, it's possible to come up against a horizon line where the known meets the unknown. You sound kind of religious here. Well, you wouldn't be the first to say it. But it's clearly possible not to know what you're missing. I agree. You should come with me to synagogue. I tried that already.

But I mean, if you kill the hundred smartest mathematicians on earth right now, you would... Eric, you're in trouble. You would close the door to certain conversations maybe for 200 years.

Right. So again, by analogy, it would be just sheer hubris to think that the 7 billion of us who are currently here, collectively or anyone individually, have pushed the human conversation to the limit of what's rationally apprehendable about the universe. So we know there's more out there in every sense. So what you're imagining is that— Not every sense, right? Well, no. In every sense that— I mean, this is why... Really, I'm going to have to have you

over for Sabbath. No, no, no. But from the atheist perspective or from the perspective of not being convinced of any religion, this is what's so limiting about this notion of revelation. Because what you have, you're anchoring a worldview to a book that we know, we just know by the time of its composition and by its actual contents, can't subsume the larger worldview that we're gathering every day. So you're arguing past me a little bit, right? Because the argument that I was making was based on an Aristotelian philosophical view of an unmoved mover and certain properties that we have to have as human beings in order to create a civilization. And you're arguing back to Revelation, which I freely admitted that

if Revelation were to be destroyed tomorrow, I could not recreate the Torah from memory, right? Well, no, it's not a matter of not being able to recreate it. It's just, what is its importance apart from being one among millions of books that have inspired people to... Well, I mean, the importance of Judeo-Christian revelation in our particular context is it is the creator of the entire chain of events, or it is at least the progenitor, along with Greek thought largely, of an entire chain of events and thought that lead to the establishment of the modern science that you rely upon. And... Well, no, And that's, again, that's a set of historical contingencies that are... But they're not coincidences.

They are contingencies. Well, no, but there was no one else. I mean, my argument here is that you could also say that virtually everything that has been accomplished in human history was accomplished by people who didn't know a damn thing about biology, right? Like there was no one else to do the job. Every bridge that was built, every beautiful building that was built, was built by somebody who knew nothing about DNA, right? But that's not an argument that ignorance of molecular biology is a good thing,

or that it should be maintained. And I'm not arguing that ignorance is a positive. What I'm arguing is that... Well, no, but I'm just, well, I would say that any kind of religious sectarianism is a species of ignorance now that we should be outgrowing. I mean, that's, again, an assumption that you're making based on premises that I don't necessarily agree with. But I mean, on your account, the Hindus have to have it wrong. I mean, they're worshiping an elephant-headed god and, you know, a monkey god and, you know, I mean... I mean, they're worshipping an elephant-headed god and a monkey god. I mean, I do think that... What's up? So I don't think everybody is right.

I mean, I do think that the Hindus are not correct, otherwise I wouldn't be Jewish, right? That's what I'm fishing for. What's the significance? If you're going to go to Aristotle and you're going to go to seven precepts that anyone could discover so as to lead a well-ordered life, what is the significance of being Jewish? So the significance of being Jewish is that even the foundations of

what Aristotle believed, that he's trying to arrive at logically, have to be undergirded by a faith in a God who also provides us some level of moral guidance. Because even the precepts of Aristotle are too broad to actually create the civilization upon which we stand. Meaning this is not a Greek civilization. This is a Greek slash Judeo-Christian civilization. It's the Athens and Jerusalem in the typical phraseology. And if you just knock out the pillar of Jerusalem, then you're ignoring the impact that Jerusalem has on Athens and that Athens has on Jerusalem, historically speaking. Well, this is kind of reminding me of the moment when I debated Rick Warren once at Saddleback,

just in his office. It was just the two of us and John Meacham, who was moderating. And he was telling me that basically without God, people would just be raping and killing. And you require this as an anchor for an ethical life. And he even said of himself, I mean, I don't believe this when anyone says this,

but this is sort of the bluff that never gets called. He said of himself that if he didn't believe there was a hell, he would be raping and killing. Yeah, and I don't agree with that. That's actually not something that I fully agree with. But I do agree with the idea that without a... I'm glad to hear that. Fair enough.

But what I do believe is that a scientific materialist worldview cannot construct a moral system because is has nothing to do with ought. Science is about is and has no capacity to say anything about ought other than constructions that are based in a notion of free will that you yourself reject. I'm happy to get into all of that. Time is short, but I've written two books on those two. And I've read them. But if that were true, how would you explain the moral character of my life? I'm assuming I'm not raping and killing people or living a very a life that you would recognize to be glad to hear that yeah

i mean as i just i mean i just said moments ago i don't think that you have to be a religious person to lead a moral life i do think that there has to be a religious underpinning to a moral system because i don't think that you, you're using terminology that is based in certain assumptions about human nature that I'm not sure that you are recognizing that you reject. Right? Let's take the scientific materialist worldview at its very base. Okay? At its very base, we are basically balls of meat wandering through the universe with a bit of self-awareness attached. We're sort of Spinoza's stones that have been thrown. And we know that we've been thrown. We don't have control over our own behavior. We don't have control over what we do. We don't have the capacity to react.

No. First of all, many people who would take an evolutionary picture of ourselves also imagine that we have free will. I've never understood that perspective, to be honest with you. I'll put the free will piece in play here, because actually I think there are moral insights we can have when we see through the illusion of free will, which we really can't easily have without doing that. And then I want to bring you in here, Eric. You've been very, very patient. I've fallen for that twice. Well, I mean, I think one of the problems, one of the problems is that in some very weird way, because Ben is wearing a kippah,

is that in some very weird way, because Ben is wearing a kippah, we think of him as being very orthodox, pious, and religious. In fact, I'm always struck by just how much he has choose any appeal to text in his public argument. So for functional reasons, I very often see him in a largely atheistic context. I find, Sam, that you're always focused on what is, to my way of thinking, very clearly a form of Judaism expressed as atheism. That really does sound anti-Semitic somehow. I'll have to ask my rabbi how I just got insulted. I don't know how much you're being paid tonight. And, you know, as much as I take a scientific worldview, I find that if I'm really honest with myself, I have a lot of certainly dialectical tensions that I can't resolve, needs for meaning that I can't find easily met within the rational systems. I think that the is and ought is a good distinction. I think a lot of this has to do with pre-existing

architecture that predisposes us, even though our rational minds may know better, towards something that functions very much in an as-if religious context. Well, let's just take is and ought for a second, because here's one way those two things collapse for me. If understanding how the universe is altogether, all the possibilities of experience, all the ways minds emerge, all of the kinds of good lives and bad lives and all of the mechanisms that would determine one path over another, a complete understanding of the mind and the cosmos, that's all the is, all the is that is there to be understood. If understanding that couldn't give you a complete picture of what you ought to do, where would you go to get that picture? If you sum all the facts, how does that not give you a way to chart your course in this universe? What else is there to inform your life?

Well, there are these things that we notice in our minds that we can, you know, that run through our fingers like quicksilver that aren't exactly facts, these intuitions, these things that gnaw at us, even though we know the answer, we feel superstitious, we feel guilt. You know, economists talk about utility as a one-dimensional object, but how many kinds of utility and disutility? I can be happy, I can be interested, I can be fulfilled, you know, all these different ways of tagging, you know, utilities and disutilities. And if you just notice your mind, you'll notice that there are all sorts of things going on in it that really aren't about, aren't about facts. And I don't know where they originate, neither do you. But just translate what you're saying, how I'm hearing what you're saying, you're telling me facts about the mind, which I agree with. I mean, there's kind of a congress in there.

You guys decided that there was an objective reality when you were having that conversation. And I suppose that there's probably objective reality, but I think that a lot of what goes on is that we've been in the shallow end of science where more or less, you know, me and let's say this gentleman over here share enough that we can probably agree that the square root of two is provably irrational. I believe that that's probably an objective fact, but I don't believe proof checking is objective because we have things like the Amabi problem that's in the literature for years and we think it's proved, but it turns because we have things like the Amabi problem that's in the literature for years. And we think it's proved, but it turns out we didn't have the right proof.

You know, so we have situations in which we've been picking low hanging, easy fruit to console ourselves that we can all get at the objective reality. We've all seen optical illusions where, you know, some color is exactly the same wavelength, but it looks two different ways ways because of the surroundings but so that's that's a great example just let's linger there for a second so again we thought we knew what we were talking about and then we find out at a deeper level that we didn't and then we think we know what we're talking about again and then it can reverse again but but that move to the deeper level is more facts it's more context it's more objectivity right but we also we already agreed on something that turned out not to be true as objective fact and then so so this this the point is is that i'm not entirely sure uh in any of these like if i take this irrationality of the

square root of two there's a concept called not worth worrying about you know well that does a lot of work it's just not worth worrying about whether or not somebody's going to find a mistake in that proof because it's so short. When it comes to something like the ABC conjecture, it's been going on for how many years? We still haven't gotten our arms around it. We're now not in the shallow end quite so much. And so my concern is that it doesn't do a lot of damage to say we can prove that the square root of 2 is irrational and that that's an objective fact up until you start trying to extend that to more and more complicated proofs. And then it actually matters that the original concept was the outside proof may exist, but proof checking isn't objective. And therefore, we may never exactly know, but there are things that aren't worth worrying about, and we call them objective fact for convenience.

Sorry, I want to… Let me make an objective, what I think is an objective claim of fact that I think has moral, that you won't agree with, Ben, that I think has moral consequence that we should grapple with. think has moral consequence that we should grapple with. So that, and it connects to a very real world issue like wealth inequality, right? So wealth inequality is a problem if you think it's a problem or, or it's inevitable if you think it's inevitable, but it's, I think everyone would agree that some level of wealth inequality would be intolerable and that we would want to correct for it. But wealth inequality is just one kind of inequality. There's every other kind of inequality. And there's this fact that none of us, and this goes to the free will issue. So what we imagine is that people, they have a certain inheritance. They have their genes. They have their environments. You didn't pick the fact that

you weren't born yesterday in Syria. You were born in a stable society when you were born. We can't truly own all of our advantages. We didn't make ourselves. But most people feel that there's something like a ghost in the machine that has free will that can make the best of even a bad situation. Now, I think you probably agree that some situations are so bad that that can be so stacked against you that, you know, it's just life is unfair. I think, I mean, here are claims about you that I think are true and should be morally salient.

You didn't make yourself. You didn't determine anything about yourself that you would use as an exercise of your own free will. So you're very intelligent, you're very literate, you're very interested in things that get you ahead in all the ways you've gotten yourself ahead. You didn't create that about yourself, right? And obviously there's a genetic component to that, there's an environmental component to that, Maybe there's just, you know, cosmic ray bombardment that can help or hurt. Who knows what influences are there, but none of that is something that you have authored. And that's true of everyone in the room. You have exactly the disposition you have, the

effort you have. If you wake up tomorrow morning with twice the capacity for effort and grit that you had yesterday, you won't know where that came from. If it comes from a book you read, you can't determine the fact that the book had precisely the influence it had and not a little bit less or a little bit more. You are part of a system of influences. And so this is a picture, in my view, that just makes a mockery of the notion of free will. And it goes down to the smallest possible case of, you know, my getting to the end of the sentence, right? It's just, you know, like if I have a stroke now, well then, you know, sorry, I can't do it. But I didn't, and I didn't choose that either. So now that, I think, I think taking that on board does not rob us of morality. I think because we still have a preference

between excruciating plunge into civil war and needless misery and building a viable global civilization where the maximum number of people thrive. You're using a lot of active verbs for a person who is a product of environment and genetics. No, but it's all happening. We can build robots that act, right?

And I'm moving my hands now, but I honestly don't know how. But is the robot moving the hands? The point that I'm making is when you say we can discern, we can build, we can create, we can decide. But it's exactly like you speaking now. You don't know how you follow the rules of English grammar. I'm not arguing that you can't make a convincing case that I don't have free will.

I'm arguing that you can't make a convincing case you can build a civilization on lack of free will. Take this case, the moral relevance of this, and Eric, I'd be interested to know if you agree with this. It seems to me that once you admit, you either won the lottery or you didn't on some level, that conveys a kind of ethical commitment or an ethical obligation that you wouldn't otherwise have. You can't be the person who then says everyone just is basically you're on your own. You either make it based on

your effort or not. I mean, this goes to questions of, you know, should we have universal health care? It's not just an economic answer. You're going directly from is to ought with no stop on the trade at all. For literally decades, there were very wealthy and very sophisticated countries that took the premises that you are building upon and built some of the most repressive regimes in history. But they had other things going on. They had bad ideas of economics. They had personality cults. I agree with all of that. But the point that I'm making is that you are making definitive statements about value judgments with reference to a naturally selected interaction of biology and environment. I just don't know how you're getting from one to the other.

Owning the truth of biology does not... I mean, do robots have morality is what I'm asking you. No, they certainly would if we built them to have conscious states that could allow for suffering and well-being. I mean, that's coming. We're going to have to ask that question. So then we can be God, but God can't make us those kind of robots is the argument? Should we maybe try taking the fun out of this? I thought I was trying. So, you know, one possibility is that there's like a layer cake. And at the bottom, you've got, you know, quantum field theory. And then you get organic chemistry. And you build this thing up.

And you've got natural and sexual selection. Then you get, you know, systems of morality writing on top of this. And there's some sort of weird category error between the layers of this cake. So it may be that if you can get rid of quantum indeterminacy, that you have effectively Laplacian determinism and everything is a product of initial conditions. And that takes place at the lowest level. But there's no morality at the level of, you know of exciting fields and electrons and quarks. So you don't pair that observable, which is like, that quark is being unethical right now, with some behavior which affected whether some synapse fired. So that morality thing has to do with this very high up layer, which is some sort of social organization, which is not fundamental.

And so what I hear us doing is talking about free will down here and talking about morality up here. And, you know, one of the lessons of physics is that every layer of the cake has... Well, it has its own language game associated with it. Yes, we call those observables, right? So those observables are paired with what we might call effective theories, right? And so these effective theories are not to be mixed up. And so every time we get into one of these free will conversations,

I don't know whether you're talking about free... We have as if free will. Who was forced to buy a ticket to tonight's event, you know well no but answer that question really so like like did you did you actually i didn't have to buy one yeah well i don't know the night the night is young you guys should totally get in on this but but the point is is that i'm perfectly happy with the idea that i have as if free will at the top of the layer cake, and if we can get rid of quantum observation and get back to Laplacian determinism at some higher level, that I have no free will. But it's as-if free will only because you

actually are not aware of the proximate cause of your action in each moment. If I look at a chaotic pendulum over the Exploratorium, it may have a very clear path that's determined through Newtonian mechanics, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out. So effectively, I'm super surprised. I just sit there like an idiot, twirling and thinking, oh, wow, I didn't think it was going to do that, even though I know the physics. So the point is that if I try to compute something that's much larger than I am, my computer can't handle that much larger system. So, you know, this is why sort of self-reflection leads to madness very often.

I thought you said this was going to be fun. Hopefully it's not that often. I'm still really interested in the app that you're coming out with for meditation. Don't hold your breath, but it is coming. Okay. But what I'm trying to get at is that the fun part of these conversations comes from making these category errors, and the unfun part comes from sorting it out.

When I play Johnny Raincloud, everybody will say, well, okay, I guess that makes sense, but it's no fun anymore. And so that's what I'm worried about. Well, but you would still, you're not disparaging the idea of a unity of knowledge, right? Each layer of the cake, you can make a smooth transition between layers that doesn't usurp your understanding of each layer. I mean, I have a fair idea when my wife's going to be angry at me for not doing the dishes, but I can't recover it from

quantum field theory, right? So the idea can't recover it from quantum field theory. So the idea is that maybe that the quantum field theory determines her behavior. No, but there's nothing about doing dishes that violates quantum field theory. You hear that? One person. I mean, so it's not that you have to live in a different worldview in order to talk about the human relations layer, the moral layer, the free will layer or not. I can do my best, but I don't find it useful to try to think about human psychology from the point of view of quarks.

But, you know, could organic chemistry, if some neurotransmitters depleted? Yeah. So there are some ways in which these different layers can talk to each other. But there's no reason that I should be able to compute necessarily across these layers successfully, even if there is some sort of concept of entailment or determination. What I'm interested in is kind of a first principle methodology of moving forward into the unknown, right? So what I object to in religion and in this notion of revelation is that there was some prior century where we were given the best ideas we're ever going to have on a specific topic, and we must cling to those ideas until the

end of time. This is the analogy or the rubric that I find most convincing. It's like there's only ever been people talking about reality here, right? And therefore, you can either locate yourself in a current, modern, open-ended conversation, or you can anchor yourself to an ancient one and never give yourself the freedom to rethink it. And you could have done it with Homer. You could have done it with Aristotle. You could have done it with Shakespeare. And the Hindus have done it with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And you're losing no sleep over whether or not you should do likewise, right?

And so my sense is that we need to, every question of societal importance requires that we now outgrow the accidents of merely contingent history, outgrow the fact that people used to be living in geographical isolation from one another and linguistic isolation from one another for centuries, and outgrow, therefore, our religious provincialism and just get to a common humanity that's using the best tools available to solve the hardest problems. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support,

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