Making Sense with Sam Harris - #115 — Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss, and Matt Dillahunty (1)

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Lawrence Krauss and Matt Dillahunty about the threat of nuclear war, Christian support for Trump, science and a universal conception of morality, the role of intuition in science, the primacy of consciousness, the nature of time, free will, the self, meditation, and 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.

You've heard me with Lawrence Krauss before on the podcast. Lawrence is a physicist who will be familiar to most of you. And Matt Dillahunty has moderated a couple of discussions I had with Richard Dawkins, and you've heard him here as well. So without more introduction, I'll just say we get into several interesting topics here. We talk about nuclear war and Christian support for Trump. Trump does not come up much. Many of you will be happy to know. We talk about science and a universal conception of morality. We talk about the role of intuition in science, the primacy of consciousness as a fact, the nature of time, free will, the illusion of the self. Lawrence does not agree that it's an illusion. We may have to cover that topic

again. And there's a few more topics here. In any case, it was a fun event. It was great to meet so many of you afterwards. These particular events are always followed by book signings, so the event itself was just an hour and a half, but the book signing winds up going for two hours or so. a half, but the book signing winds up going for two hours or so, and that really is the chance to say hi. So if you enjoy this conversation, there will be two others with the same participants in Chicago and Phoenix coming up. So if you live close to either of those cities, feel free to come on out. Otherwise, I will try to get the audio and release it here. And now I bring you the event I did in New York with Lawrence Krauss and Matt Dillahunty.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great privilege and honor to introduce the gentleman who will be joining me on stage. Please welcome Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss. please welcome Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. They're standing. You just can't see them. Yeah. We really can't see you.

There are people in there. It's not a sound. Don't take lack of eye contact, personally. Yeah. We'll bring the lights up before we get to the Q&A. How are you, gentlemen? Good. Good.

I have a disclaimer. A disclaimer. Yes, as you know, but they don't. I came down with food poisoning two nights ago, so if I either vomit or have to run offstage, it's not because of anything these two gentlemen have said. Maybe if he liked you better, he'd feel better. That's all right.

We'll see who runs offstage faster. I promise not to run offstage, mostly because I'm in boots that won't allow me to run anywhere. So today, we're going to be doing three of these. New York is the first time for the three of us together. And something happened today that was all over the news, and I thought it might be an interesting spot to start. Hawaii had an incredible false alarm today,

where an emergency alert system sent out a text message, essentially saying that a ballistic missile had been detected heading towards Hawaii and to seek cover, and this is not a drill. And 39 minutes later, they announced that it was a false alarm. And it both intrigued me and terrified me about the new world that we live in compared to, you know, when I was a kid, the technology that's there to save our lives, and yet things can go wrong because we're fallible. Are we better off if we're terrifying people with false alarms?

And how do we go about dealing with a new world where technology is in everybody's hands and can be used and abused? Well, maybe... We are in a context where it's plausible to worry that missiles could be headed toward Hawaii, so that's the underlying problem. Sometimes I think people aren't worried about it enough. I think in

just a little under two weeks, I'll be going to Washington to announce the new value of the doomsday clock. I'm the chairman of the Board of the Bolton Atomic Scientists, as you know. One of the things that worries me is that I think people become very complacent about nuclear weapons. Because they haven't been used in over 70 years, people tend to think they'll never be used. And the real problem is that this kind of thing became public. But there's a great book called Command and Control,

which is terrifying. And you realize how many close calls we've had. It's kind of amazing that there hasn't been either an accident or panic. If you haven't read it, that's Eric Schlosser, his book, and there was a PBS documentary done on it, and you should either read it or watch that documentary. Read it, but, you know, have a bottle of scotch or something when you're reading it, because it is really terrifying, as it should be. And so part of the problem, in fact, of this, there's a lot of problems that people don't

realize that, in fact, because intercontinental ballistic missiles act relatively quickly, you know, in 25 or 30 minutes that they can do their work and do most of the way around the earth. We still live in a world where the United States and Russia both have about a thousand weapons on a status where they're prepared to respond immediately. And as a lot of people, I didn't want to mention this word, but until a guy whose name I won't mention came in the White House, people didn't realize this, and I actually didn't realize it either until I was writing a piece. People didn't realize this, and I actually didn't realize it either until I was writing a piece. But people now know, and if you don't, you should know this,

there is no safeguard against the president launching nuclear weapons. There's no one he or she would have to ask. There's no one who can say no, and there's no constitutional check on that. And recently, some congresspeople did discuss producing such a check. During the Cold War, there was perhaps, the height of the Cold War, there was some reason for that, because there were 20,000 nuclear weapons at Russia, and then the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming at each other.

And the idea was you have to launch them quickly. But now there isn't that reason, and yet we still have that. And that itself is terrifying because if that warning had not got, and by the way, the warning I understood was due to a shift change and someone pressed the wrong button when they went off the shift. This is true. That raises a problem. When I have to check out at the grocery store and swipe my credit card, I have to click yes like 18 times just to pay for my Coke. How could you possibly hit the wrong button in a shift change and not get a, hey, are you sure you want to send this message? But imagine that went not to the sensible but scared people in Hawaii, but imagine that went right to the White House. Right. Okay.

Well, and to read Command and Control is to witness how, by sheer dumb luck, we have avoided nuking one another and even ourselves. So many times. We literally dropped live nukes on North Carolina, and two of three safeties failed. And the final safety was like a manual toggle switch that was just in the right position. And in silos, this book begins with a potential

nuclear weapon exploding in a silo. It is truly amazing, and it really argues for something that we've been arguing at the Bulletin, and certainly I try to write about, which is that we are safer with fewer nuclear weapons and not more nuclear weapons, because the more you have, the more likely there will be an accident or a false alarm. And yet we're in a situation right now where there are no arms control treaties. And what I was going to say at the beginning, which I think we were talking about beforehand, is what discourages me when I write about nuclear weapons compared to almost anything else I write about in the popular media, there's less interest. I don't know whether people don't want to think about it,

or they're just so complacent. Armageddon is boring. Yeah, Armageddon, I guess, is boring, or you don't want to think about it. Can you say what you said about William Perry's opinion? Is that for public consumption? I don't know. It's just us. Thanks, Sam. I'll think of something back.

William Perry, actually. I'll think of something back. William Perry, actually, I will. I'll use this as an opportunity. We'll be at my Origins project in Arizona. We'll be having an event, a workshop on autonomous weapons, nuclear weapons, and defense. And I'll be doing a dialogue

with William Perry in a month. Maybe give a to line by way perry was a sector defense and i know for clinton i guess and and uh... and has been and is amazing man in many many ways and has a long view he's not a youngster like you

and um... and but he he said in conversation he thinks we are now living in it the time that is more dangerous than any time even during the height of the Cold War, which is really kind of sobering. With respect to this issue. With respect to nuclear weapons, yeah. And it's an issue that people should be concerned about. It's an issue that people should be concerned about. It's awful that that happened,

but if it raises public awareness of the kind of ridiculous accidents, the ridiculous false alarms... There's a man who actually we nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He's now dead, but a Russian. In my opinion, one of the few people who probably really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, a Russian who was working in a missile silo,

and there was a complete glitch, and it showed a nuclear weapon being launched in the United States, and he got the order to fire. And another showed another weapon five minutes later and another weapon. And he personally reasoned that if there was going to be an attack from the US, they wouldn't wait four or five minutes between each other, or two minutes or whatever it was. So he disobeyed the command and probably personally saved the world. It's nice to take that warning that went out today, even though, you know, it's a mistake.

It lets us know about human error. It also may raise awareness. There is a potentially huge downside in that this could end up looking a little more like a crying wolf situation, where the next time, if it's real, and you get that warning that you don't take shelter. But something you said is terrifying to me,

and not specifically because of who's in the White House. This is true no matter who's there. The very idea that Congress has to declare war, but they don't have to declare that it's okay to nuke people. In a nation and a system that's built on checks and balances, this one thing doesn't appear to have sufficient... The most consequential thing has no check and balance. Yeah, it shocked me. I don't know if you knew about that earlier.

I mean, literally, I thought that there had to be approval of the emergency staff or at least the majority of cabinet members or something, but in fact, there is no check on that. I would like to think that if somebody decided to go rogue and do it, that there would be somebody sensible nearby, some secret service person who would do what that Russian missile agent did. Well, one hopes that, yeah, I mean, the people actually have to press the button, and their button is bigger than his.

It's a sober, I mean, you actually have to do it. I think those people think very carefully, but they're trained to realize that they may have to do that. And so it's... Yeah, and they drill it all the time. All the time, yeah. So I wonder how this ties in to... I try not to paint with too broad of a brush

when I talk about any specific religion, including Christianity, but there are a number of Christians, including some of my family members, who are eagerly awaiting Armageddon. We all deal with people who construct conspiracy theories on occasion. I don't think it'd be that hard to put together a conspiracy theory that the reason we have Trump is because there were people who are okay with the idea of Armageddon. Because I know tons of evangelicals who were supportive of him when there's nothing about this man that fits like the churches I went to, even though I know those churches are waiting for an apocalypse. The most benign interpretation of the Christian

support is just their calculated assumption, which has borne out that he will give them what they want because they're a voting block that he needs. I remember I ran into Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian coalition, at a conference, and this was still during the campaign, but when Trump was the nominee and was professing to be a Christian of some flavor. And I had debated Reed once on television, but we actually had never met. And I said to him, there's no way you think he's actually a person of faith, right?

How do you explain the Christian support? And he immediately fell back on this trope, who am I to judge what's in another man's heart? Insofar as I could tell that he was bullshitting, he was really bullshitting. He's happy to judge what's in other people's hearts. Yeah, right. But the worst possible interpretation is the one you just gave, which is there's at least some millions of people and maybe tens of millions of people in this country for whom biblical prophecy is real. It's a real roadmap to the future.

And they're expecting the wheels to completely come off this car before the end. And that will be the best thing that happens. That's necessary for the best thing that will ever happen to happen. I have to say that since Trump got elected, I've been sort of hoping for Armageddon too, but in a way it just seems better than listening to tweets every day. But I actually don't think it's the Armageddon thing. I was actually just thinking about writing a piece about this, and I'll say it, although it'll get people angry, some people. To me, it represents one of the real problems of professed

Christianity. Because when you said, when you said they don't think Trump is a Christian, but they'll get what they want. What do they want? Do they want the things that they're supposed to be abiding, like love, and all the things? No, what they want is hate. What they want is laws

that restrict freedom of others. And that means to me that operationally in this country, when it comes to the politics, professed Christianity is equivalent with hate. Well, to bend over backwards, I want to see if there's anyone who can't tell. The most charitable interpretation is not that it's synonymous with hate all the way down the line.

Just imagine if you're someone who really thinks that abortion is akin to murder, right? That there is no difference between killing a fetus at the eight-week stage and killing a fully developed human being. If you think that, then you think our society is just spectating on a Holocaust that has been going on for your entire life. And it's easy to see how someone would not be moved by hate and would be, in their own mind,

be moved by compassion and love and a concern for divine retribution if they believe that God is watching all the while. Yeah, I mean, you're right. It's extreme to say that. You could say the same thing about restricting the rights of gay people. That it's really love because that's a sin in a lot of people's hearts and therefore trying to... Well, sanely, you can say the same thing about members of ISIS who were throwing gay people off of rooftops. Some of you, you must have seen this footage of ISIS members hugging with apparent sincerity the people they were about to hurl off of rooftops. Yeah, because it's a loving act. with apparent sincerity the people they were about to hurl off of rooftops.

This was not a naked declaration of hate. This was, sorry, this is how the game is played. We have to do this. That represents to me that's the paradox. I don't know if I've said it before on stage with you, but Steve Weinberg, who is a physicist friend, a Nobel laureate, and also an atheist, has said that there are good people and there are bad people. Good people do good things, bad people do bad things. When good people do bad things, it's religion. And I think, I mean, there's a lot of truth to that. So the people are, and it's not just religion, it's ideology.

And it's not just religion. It's ideology. Whenever people move away from reason and justify, and we all do it, but justify bad actions as if no one... I think very few people do bad things thinking they want to do a bad thing. They're doing it for some reason that they think is a good reason. Well, we can go right back to Voltaire to address all this, which is if you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities. And once you have poisoned the foundation, which I think is a hallmark of what many religions do, of right and wrong, of about how we should go about determining what is a moral good, if you poison that sufficiently, that's how you get people to do that.

It's how you get them to bomb abortion clinics. It's how you get them to do that. It's how you get them to bomb abortion clinics. It's how you get them to throw homosexuals off roofs. Which kind of brings us to one of the questions. We polled a little bit. I asked for suggestions on Facebook and Sam had asked on Twitter. And there's a couple of things that keep coming up. But I think given what we're talking about,

this issue of morality terrifies believers. I've been told that atheists can't be moral, and then the people who have put, like, another half second of thought into it will say, well, of course you can be moral, but you can only be moral because you were raised in a Christian environment that taught you about morals. And I gave a talk for a number of years,

but you wrote The Moral Landscape, and I want you to just take a couple of minutes and give a summation of objective reality, science-based assessments, and why people don't have to be terrified, and why it may in fact be more terrifying if morals are just the dictates of some individual or being. Well, it's clearly more terrifying if the Bible is true or the Koran is true. Because then the universe has been created

and is now governed by an omniscient sadist. He's created a universe with hell to be populated by people who he didn't give enough evidence to to convince them of the truth of his doctrine. So he could have just given enough evidence to to convince them of the truth of his doctrine.

Right, so he could have just given enough evidence and we'd all be fundamentalist Christians or Salafi Muslims, but he gave, the miracles are always thousands of years old or they're in India or somewhere, strangely they're in places where- Same place UFO sightings are. Or upstate New York.

But they're not sort of like the UFO abductions and the cattle molestations. It could happen right here, right now in front of 2,000 educated people and we would all be convinced. But that's not going to happen for some perverse reason. I'd still be skeptical. Yes. I'd still be skeptical. We would still be skeptical. Yes. I'd still be skeptical. We would demand... Well, you can imagine if you're in actual dialogue with an omniscient being who's bent upon convincing you for your own good, that can happen very quickly.

I'm talking to you right now. Apparently, I'm dumbing it down a lot. But to tie into what he's saying, I've had Christians tell me that God wouldn't reveal himself to me because I would continue to question, deny. And I'm like, what kind of weak-ass God do you believe in who is incapable of convincing me? Oh, you're just too damn obstinate. So let's leave that. So we can leave that aside. There's something strange about believing that these books as written give you a truly moral worldview that you would endorse. If any person behaved the way the God of the Bible behaves, that is our definition of a psychopath and a sadist. But the reason why you can have objective morality, or I think that you can have

a few short steps to objective morality, and what I mean by objective is not that it's all just a matter of atoms. The universe includes subjective experience, includes consciousness as a natural phenomenon. Consciousness is a property of the universe. We don't know exactly at what stage it emerges in information processing in complex systems, or maybe it goes even deeper than that. I mean, it's totally possible that there's some spooky view of consciousness going further down than vast numbers of neurons or information processing units doing their thing. There's no especially good reason to believe that, I would say. A lot of good reasons not to believe that.

Yes, but still, it's not, the jury is arguably still out on that. What it's not still out on is a few fundamental questions. One, clearly consciousness exists. Even if we're living in a simulation on some alien hard drive, something seems to be happening, right? And that seeming is what I'm calling consciousness. So even if you're a brain in a vat right now, or you're in the matrix, or this is all just a dream, and you're going to wake up in a few minutes and find yourself in bed, no matter how confused you might be about your circumstance, there is still consciousness and its contents in

each moment. And there is a vast difference between excruciating and pointless misery and sublime happiness and creativity and joy and love and all of the good things in life. And we have no idea how far that continuum actually goes in both directions, but we really know, really, that we like one side of it much better than the other side of it. And we don't have to justify that preference. You don't have to justify preferring the happiest possible life to being tortured for eternity. And the idea that you would need some philosophical argument to justify that is just a specious claim that has confused a lot of people.

And the idea that you would need to be able to draw your preference there, again, for avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone, that you'd have to draw that from some book that has been dictated by an omniscient being, that also is a specious claim. So I view morality as a kind of navigation problem. And the reason why this is of a piece with ultimately a scientific understanding of the mind and a scientific understanding of human well-being and of conscious systems generally is that navigating between these two ends of the continuum of experience,

avoiding the worst possible misery and finding true bliss and creativity and connection and love, there are right answers about how to do that for properly constituted minds. And for us, there are biochemical answers, there are psychological answers, there are sociological answers, there's economic answers, political answers. Every piece of human knowledge that's legitimate knowledge has to be brought to bear on the question of how to live a fulfilling life. And it is possible to be wrong. And it's possible to not know what you're missing.

And it's possible to be right for the wrong reasons. And so every permutation of ignorance and confusion is there to be suffered and endured, and we have to break the spell of thinking that we need to live forever shattered by tribal dogmatisms in order to talk about there being right answers to moral questions. As Sam knows, we had another origin event where Sam was at talking about exactly this and had a bunch of philosophers. We got a lot of pushback.

So I think that I've had a lot of discussions about this since then. And it is probably true that reason is a slave of passion for most people. We possess reason, but reason doesn't necessarily drive our actions. And we justify things after the fact on the basis of what we want it to be, and then we come up with a rational argument for it. I think that's true.

But understanding that is another exercise of reason. Exactly. For clarity, there's flawed reasoning, but that doesn't mean that reason itself is flawed. No, but I think we're capable, and you and I and everyone in this audience does it. We all rationalize our lives every day. We wake up, we rationalize it,

we like our work or our spouse or whatever else it is in order to get through the day. Let it be known that I didn't nod my head let it be noted but and so I'm not 100% convinced that you can always get ought from is

as some famous philosopher once said but I do think I agree with you completely that it's a process that without is you can't get ought I think that's the point, is, you can't get off. I think that's the point. Without is, you can't get off. If you don't know the consequences of your actions in any way, and that's what science is.

Science tells you the consequences and reason. I view science as sort of reason based on empirical evidence. Then you can't possibly make decisions that you can't determine what's right or wrong. You need to know what the goal is and what the outcome is going to be. What the outcome is going to be. So without a careful understanding of, and then some people call this utilitarianism, I guess, but I just see it as without science there can be no morality, in my opinion, or no sensible morality. And I think what we've seen, and Deepak and others have argued, I think,

pretty effectively, that in some ways, the enlightenment and rational thinking has led to a world where some things that were once thinkable are not thinkable now. And so there's no doubt, I don't know whether I would argue that we can,

well, certainly I would argue that we might not be able to understand morality now, but that's irrelevant because we agree that not understanding something is not evidence of anything but not understanding. The more we learn, the more we will understand. So I do think ultimately we'll have a neural understanding of almost all our decision-making capabilities. But certainly without that reason,

I don't think you could even discuss the question. Let me just take one minute to say why I think this is-ought business is totally confused. This comes from a paragraph in Hume's work where he was actually trying to hold religious conceptions of morality at bay. And I think it's been misinterpreted, it's certainly been overused

as one of these exports from philosophy that has just gotten into the heads of everybody and is influential, totally out of proportion to its actual validity. One thing I would point out is that Hume said he found many seeming paradoxes, and one was with respect to causation. And if you took him seriously about causation, you couldn't really take science very seriously, because apparently there's no evidence of causation in the world. We just see the contiguity of various events, but we never see causes between A and B. So this is odd business.

Let's say there is no ought, there is no should, there is no obligation to do anything in this universe. There is just what is. There's just the totality of facts that are actual and perhaps possible, perhaps also impossible, whether there's such a real thing as possibility or everything is in fact actual, it's just happening in a parallel universe, right,

or trillions upon trillions of such universes. There are only facts. And the first thing I would ask you is, if you can't get your sense of how you should live from the totality of facts, all of reality, where do you think you can get this sense of how you should live? So you're not impoverished having all the facts of the universe at your disposal. But you still have, even if there's no such thing as morality, we still have this navigation problem. Put your hand into a wood chipper and see how much you like it.

You will very quickly get the message that you don't want to do that again. You will want to avoid that. And there are an infinite number of ways in which we can experience pointless misery from which no good comes. And we will find ourselves navigating. And all I'm arguing is that we call morality those subset of behaviors and commitments that relate in social space to this navigation problem of finding better lives together. And if you were alone on a desert island, you wouldn't call it morality, but you would still talk about well-being and happiness.

I agree completely. I guess the question is one of what one calls objective morality, if you wanna use those terms. In the sense that everything you said, I think, is clearly true. The question I would have is that at the same time, because that, I think, because that navigation effort is sort of has an evolutionary basis as well as a cultural basis, I think.

We know evolution is wrong on most of these questions. But I think that our thinking has an evolutionary basis. And I don't think that, I think it's clear that that's the case. Then it means to me that morality is a moving target, too. The question is, so that humans are hardwired, I think, to find some things moral and not, and that's an interesting question to find out how they are, and as you know, psychologists, some psychologists do test the famous trolley car experiment. And so when one talks about objective reality, I think it's based on a totality of experience,

but that totality of experience evolves, and therefore I'm a little more hesitant in talking about absolute morality. I don't use absolute. But it's evolving into a space of right and wrong answers and real facts about the conscious experience of actual and possible beings. So there's a right answer to the question of, you know, if you were going to ask, you

know, if I add this compound to my neurochemistry, is it going to make me happier or not, right? Insofar as we could come to some kind of completed neuroscience of happiness, well, then we would understand more and more about the likelihood of, you likelihood of you helping or hurting yourself that way. But so too with any use of your attention. If I'm in this relationship, am I going to be happier or not? There are right and wrong answers there whether or not you discover them. You discover them after the fact.

Yeah, right. But you don't know what you're missing. You don't know what, in a counterfactual situation, you could have done something yesterday that would have made today much better than it was for you, and you may never know what you missed. And again, so it's realism for me, whether it's scientific realism or moral realism, just amounts to the claim that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible not to know what you're missing. It's possible for everyone to be wrong. Like every physicist alive,

you can ask some pressing question about physics, and I don't know how many physicists there are, 30,000. All 30,000 could be wrong, and then tomorrow someone could be right. And I get letters every day from those people who say they are. How many physicists are there, by the way? But that's the whole... It's interesting you brought up the example, because that's the whole, but that's, it's interesting you brought up the example,

because that's the whole point of science. The whole point of science, if you couldn't be wrong, there would be no science. The whole point of science, I mean, is to go in and try and prove your colleagues wrong in some sense. That's how science perceives because it doesn't prove things right. It only proves things wrong. And then you narrow down what's left over. And so you're absolutely right. And that's what makes empirical evidence so useful. That's why it should be the basis of public policy, because you can find out what doesn't work. That's an essential part of living. But also what's what makes science powerful and worth utilizing in every aspect of our experience, in my opinion.

Yeah. Thank you. There's a couple things about the moral issue, and I'm glad you guys made the point. People confuse objective morality with absolute morality. Neither of us, none of us, I assume, I know Sam and I aren't advocating for absolute morality. Actually, situational ethics is probably the term that I use most often. When I talk about objective morality, I just mean that it's not just subject to your whim or any subjective experience. Because one of the objections we get when you say you don't want to

put your hand in a wood chipper, somebody will come along and say, well, somebody might want to do that. Who are you to decide what's right for them? We're speaking in general rules. We are physical beings in a physical universe with rules that dictate what the consequences of our actions are. And if there really were a masochist who wanted to do that, there would be a complete scientific understanding of masochism that's possible. Yeah, sure. And it's possible that there's a way of being a masochist that admits of equivalent well-being, say. I highly doubt this is the case,

but let's say that was the case. So having right and wrong answers to questions of morality, and this is why I use this analogy of a moral landscape, it doesn't mean there's just one right answer for everybody. There could be many, many functionally infinite number of peaks on this landscape, but there are even more wrong answers. There could be many, many, a functionally infinite number of

peaks on this landscape, but there are even more wrong answers. There's a larger infinite set of wrong answers. And you know when you're not on a peak because your hand is in the wood chipper and it turns out you're not one of those masochists who likes it. So the one question that keeps, that you've been hammered with, that I've been hammered with, is, oh, you're talking about objective morality, but your foundation of morality is well-being. Now, when it comes to the is-ought problem, I jokingly and fallaciously pointed out that you may not be able to get from an is to an ought, but I can get from two ises to an ought. Because if I know what the goal is and I know what the consequences of my action is, or the consequence of my action is, then I can tell what I ought to do to achieve that goal. Which was a good way to sum it up,

there's a problem in there that I'm not gonna get into. But I liked, I believe I understand what you assessed in Moral Landscape, which is kind of my view of this, is under what basis, what objective basis have you decided that well-being is the standard? And I think you said, what other standard could there be? That's the thing about secular moral systems is they have at their foundation the goal of getting better, getting better. And even if I

pick three premises that are going to serve, I can pick them arbitrarily. Death is preferable to life. And you can work through and do thought experiments to see, does that get you towards a better world? But all this little bickering about better world, who defines better, what's better, well-being, has anybody in all, from your detractors, suggested another non-God's dictate, divine command, foundation that would be better than well-being, and if they did, how would you respond? Well, there's two ironies here. One is that the religious answer is also predicated on well-being. I mean, when you ask religious people, what's wrong with going to hell for eternity? It's because it's too hot there. You don't want to be there. Heaven is much better. It's a story about some eternal circumstance of well-being or its antithesis that awaits us after death. Now, if that were true, if there was good reason to believe in the Christian heaven

or the Muslim paradise, I would be the first to say that it's really important to live so as to place the right bet on eternity. I mean, what's 70 years compared to eternity of suffering or happiness? But it just so happens that there's no good reason to believe in those after-death states. But they're still talking about consciousness and its contents and the difference between misery and well-being. And for me, the definition of well-being is truly open-ended.

It's there to be refined and further discovered. And I think there are possibilities of well-being that we can't imagine. The other irony here is that when people say that you have this assumption that well-being is good or worth finding, as though we could do otherwise, as though having an axiom at the bottom here makes this unscientific. Every science is based on similar axioms that can't justify themselves. So take, for example,

assuming that the universe is intelligible, right? Assuming that two plus two makes four for every two and two. You know, if it works for apples, it works for oranges, it's also going to work for cantaloupes. How do you know it's going to work for ra two and two you know if it works for apples it works for oranges it's also going to work for cantaloupes how do you know it's going to work for ravens and chickens and how does it generalize that's an intuition that's an intuition right that's a foundation it's still an assumption that you need to test though in physics i mean i think you but you don't test it by continuing to count apples and oranges and cantaloupes well we do things like

that we you know there's we do we do check to see if the rules continue to work in places we haven't looked before. But the idea that events have causes. Yeah, unless time begins and then there was no cause because there was no before. Right, but that's proffered as a violation of our intuition that works everywhere else in science. Well, yeah, but I'm just in some sense playing the devil's advocate

in this regard, but violation of intuition... You're going to have to assume... In my field, violation of intuition is everything. What was that? In my field, violation of intuition is everything. The least trustworthy thing you have is intuition. Yeah, no, but you're using other intuitions to get behind the bad ones.

You're using, in most cases, mathematical intuitions to get science. 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. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.