Making Sense with Sam Harris - #62 — What is True?

Episode Date: January 21, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with psychologist Jordan B. Peterson about freedom of speech and the nature of truth. 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, today I am speaking with a guest who many of you may not have heard of. He is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto by the name of Jordan Peterson, who has become quite famous online recently for standing in opposition to changes to the human rights code in Ontario, Canada, that have really direct relevance to him as a professor. And he's been on many different podcasts, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, I think. So,

you know, many people who you may also listen to have interviewed him. And he is actually, as I say at the beginning of this interview, the most requested guest I have had at this point by all of you. I can't tell you how many people have emailed me or tweeted at me demanding that I have Jordan on the podcast. And it's really in anticipation of us not talking about free speech, but about his beliefs about religion and its importance, the connection between religious truth and scientific truth, the importance of mythology. All of this is stuff that has come out in his other interviews, which many atheists and secularists have found both perplexing and inspiring. I've seen many atheists say that this, you know, Jordan is giving the first construal of religion

that I find hard to grapple with, that is interesting, that seems morally important, and intellectually honest. So many, many of you have wanted to get the two of us together so that we could presumably butt heads on these topics. So I did invite Jordan on the podcast, and you are about to hear that conversation. And I am, as I say at the end, going to rely on all of you to figure out what happened. Because from my point of view, we got bogged down on a very narrow point of more than just philosophical interest. We got bogged down on what it means to say that something is true or not. And to my eye, we didn't take that analysis very far because we immediately hit rather significant impediment and difference of opinion about what is entailed there.

And I just couldn't get Jordan to agree on some facts that seem so basic to me that I was uncomfortable moving forward on other topics until we ironed that out. And it took more than two hours to get to a point where I thought, well, this is a good stopping point. We will see whether, based on the public reception to this, whether it is useful to move on to talk about morality and myth and religion and all the rest. I wanted to be my best self for the rest of that conversation, and I just, I was running out of energy and patience there, so I decided to pull the brakes. But you now have two hours of me and Jordan butting heads on a variety of topics related to scientific epistemology, for lack of a better word. Please judge for yourselves how we did and what was going

on there. It's not absolutely clear to me what we disagree about, but you'll hear me attempt to push really as hard as I could to get some answers there, and I really don't feel that I got them. So the fault could absolutely be mine, and I will rely on you to inform me of that. So I don't know where this is best done, perhaps on Reddit, but somebody bring my attention to what gets said here, if anything useful gets said in response to this podcast. These are all experiments in conversation. Now I bring you another one. Please enjoy my conversation with Jordan Peterson. I am here with Jordan Peterson. Jordan, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.

Well, listen, you have the distinction of being, I think, without question, the person who my listeners most requested that I talked to. So congratulations. People really want to hear what you have to say. Yeah, well, I think they want to hear what we both have to say. So, and hopefully we can, we can manage that in a, in a way that works out real well. That would be good as far as I'm concerned. Actually, I'm very hopeful we'll have an interesting conversation here. I think, you know, you seem to suddenly be everywhere on the internet, and you've been on many other podcasts, and I think we should talk briefly about the reasons why you've

suddenly become so visible. But I don't think we should spend a lot of time on them, because I think that's territory where you and I will almost fully converge, and I think that's not what people are most interested in having us talk about. But to just get people up to speed with what's been happening with you and why you've been so visible all of a sudden. Let's talk briefly about the free speech issues, the gender pronoun issues, what's happening in Canada around this Bill C-16 and the gender provision in the Ontario Human Rights Code. Just bring us up to

speed there. And again, I think we should spend probably no more than 10 minutes or so there, and then we'll move on to areas where you and I may not fully agree. 10 minutes would be plenty. Canada moved at the federal level to institute some legislation that on the surface of it seems more or less in keeping with the extension of human rights protection to different groups that's been occurring, say, over the last 30 to 50 years. This time they extended protection to gender identity and gender expression. The first problem with that, although by no means the worst problem, is that gender expression is not a group. And as far as I can tell from reading the Ontario Human Rights Commission website policies, which the federal government announced that the provisions of Bill C-16 would be interpreted

within, you can now provisionally be prosecuted under the hate crime legislation federally for criticizing someone's choice of fashion. And I'm not being cynical about that. That's the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies describe gender expression as the manner in which people present themselves through such well-doing everyday activities like shopping through their choice of clothes and dress and the idea that that requires protection of that magnitude well I think it's I think it's if you keep extending rights all you do is weaken them you know you rights are some one person's rights or another person's responsibilities. And anyways, that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that the code, the Ontario provisions, which are like lurking behind the federal law and are already law in Ontario, require the use of these so-called

preferred pronouns if someone requests them. And I have a variety of objections to that, the most fundamental of which is, I believe that the manufactured pronouns, the Z and the Zer and the 50 sort of variants of those are... Just for a moment, describe what you're referring to there, because I think even among my audience, this is an arcane topic. What are these manufactured pronouns? Well, it's dogma, I would say, among the radical left that gender is a social construct and that there are multiple variants of gender identity. And some of those don't fit neatly into male-female classifications. The legislation says that people can inhabit any position on that spectrum or not be on the spectrum at all between male and female, which, of course, I find that particular claim essentially incomprehensible.

Anyways, the theory is that people who are non-binary, which is the terminology, are entitled to be referred to by pronouns other than he or she, which include they, which would, I suppose, be the most moderate compromise, and then a host of other pronouns that have appeared basically out of the void over the last 10 years, including words like ze and zur and her, which would be H-I-R, and zem. And truly, there's like 70 different sets of them. And there's no agreement whatsoever on which ones should be used, and none of them have entered popular parlance because they are bad solutions to the problem, and the legislation nonetheless necessitates their use, and this is the first time that Canadian government has moved to make

a particular kind of speech content mandatory. You know, there are certain limitations on speech, although not very many of them. But this is the first time out of the commercial realm that the actual contents of speech have been made mandatory. And my particular objection to this is that I believe, and I think I have good evidence for believing that these made-up pronouns, these manufactured pronouns, are part of the lexicon of the radical postmodern slash neo-Marxist left. And it's part of their general agenda to occupy the linguistic territory that we use for common parlance. And I don't like their philosophy. In fact, I regard it as reprehensible, to say the least. And because of that, I'm not willing to cede linguistic territory to them, certainly not by being forced to use ideologically, would saturate it as an ideologically saturated lexicon.

And so I said I wouldn't do it. I made a video, three videos actually, complaining about, let's say, criticizing Bill C-16 and the background legislation, which also, by the way, makes employers responsible for any word that their employees utter that causes anyone any offense, intended or unintended, whether or not the employer knows that that utterance occurred, which seems to me a little bit on the draconian side, but I think is in keeping with the same philosophy, which

is by no means pro-business. And there are other elements of what's going on in the background that are equally reprehensible. Ontario has set up social justice tribunals. That's their technical name, which gives you some insight into their purpose and into their staffing. One of those is the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and they basically decided that they have the right to suspend normal legal and judicial procedure, and that they can more or less ascribe to themselves whatever rights they, whatever powers they choose, and that's written in their policy statements. And so I'm not very happy about any of that. And so also at the same time, the University of Toronto made it mandatory for their human resources employees to undergo unconscious bias training against racism, which is also something, again, that I don't believe the science for documenting unconscious bias is anywhere near advanced to the point where it should be used as a diagnostic indicator of the

potential prejudice of an of entire classes of people um i uh and and i don't think there's any question that the the tool is too weak to do that certainly by the standards of appropriate psychometric tests and there's certainly no evidence that these training programs that are popping up anywhere do any good with regards to prejudice, and a fair bit that they actually make it worse. So anyways, I made two videos and posted them on my YouTube channel. Mostly, I did it fairly late at night, and I was just trying to think this stuff through, you know, to get it straight in my head and to lay out the argument. And, well, the response to them was absolutely insane, really. There was 180 separate newspapers, articles written,

and two protests at the University of Toronto, and I received two warning letters from the administration and a letter of censure from a number of my fellow academics and postdocs and graduate students at the University of Toronto. And it was news, literally. Well, yesterday, the Toronto Star published like a 3,000-word biography of me and Toronto Life, which is, I suppose, our equivalent to New Yorker, although not in the same league, is going to publish a 5,000 word

bio on me. And well, and then I've talked to Joe Rogan and a whole bunch of other people for podcast. It's been crazy. But the reason for that is because I made something that was bubbling underneath the surface of our culture and was certainly bubbling under the surface of yours at the last election. with people. And it's actually been news, not only in Canada, but it's stretched its tentacles down to the States and certainly into Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand. And I'm being interviewed in South Africa this week. And it's been absolutely, it's been like being in a ship in a storm. And it's dumbfounding. I can imagine it's been stressful, I'm sure. Now, is your job at the University of Toronto in jeopardy? Is that the kind of communication you've received? Well, I received two warning letters basically asking me to stop talking about this, based on the idea that even mentioning the fact that I might not use these pronouns probably contravened the Ontario Human Rights Code and also the University Code of Conduct, although hypothetically, the university's code of conduct is dominated by protection for free speech.

And so they kind of did the typical HR thing and got the lawyers on it. And they're conservative. And, you know, they warned me twice. I didn't stop talking about it. conservative. And, you know, they warned me twice. I didn't stop talking about it. But then the university was roundly criticized by a number of Canada's major journalists, including a coalition of 100 newspapers. And they got a lot of bad press. The press actually turned in support of me quite hard about two weeks after this started, when they started to investigate what I was talking about and found out that I actually knew what I was, knew what I was, that my claims weren't exaggerated by any stretch of the imagination. And so... I've seen that criticism. I've paid attention to what you've

been saying on this topic. And some people have said that you are at least mistaken about the legal implications of these changes in the law or these rulings. But it seems to me the one thing you can't be mistaken about is the treatment you have received thus far in response to your saying you won't use these pronouns. If the university lawyers hadn't been convinced that I was correct in my interpretation, they wouldn't have sent out a warning that I should stop doing it because it might be illegal. That's the best piece of proof supporting my position that the law has this draconian element because, you know, they didn't send me those letters incautiously. They had their lawyers review the damn legislation and then came

to the same conclusion that I did. And the two lawyers who have been making these claims that this legislation is far more innocuous than I'm making it out to be are both social activist lawyers. And so they have a serious agenda. And one of them, Brenda Cosman, told me, well, that I wouldn't go to jail, although that is a possibility, despite what she said, because the law does have that power. All that would happen is that essentially I could be financially ruined. It's like, well, okay, well, that's not draconian at all, you know what I mean? And the Ontario Human Rights Commission has managed to demolish lots of people's lives.

It's a kangaroo court, in my opinion, and a very dangerous one at that. One thing we absolutely agree about is that freedom of speech is not just one among many different values. It really is the master value because it's the only corrective to human stupidity. It's the only mechanism by which we can improve our society. And in fact, it's the value that allows us to improve our other values through conversation. Yes, that's exactly right. It's the fundamental value. It's exactly right. It's the fundamental value upon which our entire cultural edifice is predicated. And I believe that that's part of the reason why the postmodern radicals in particular

are opposed to freedom of speech, because they don't really, they don't believe in dialogue. You know, they don't believe in rationality. They don't believe that groups who have different orientations of power can discuss their differences in a civilized manner and reach resolution. Because that isn't how they see the world. That's how modernists see the world. But postmodernists don't believe any of that. And they seriously don't believe it. It's not a facade or it's a very entrenched part of their philosophy. So that's partly why they don't like to, well, why they block speakers who

oppose their views from campus and why they're perfectly willing to, well, why they block speakers who oppose their views from campus and why they're perfectly willing to shut them down and why they don't, you know, why they have no platforming policies, which is basically the decision not to let anyone who holds alternative views have a forum even, you know, and it's because, well, it's because they don't believe in rational dialogue and the possibility of reaching a solution through it. There's something, at least on its face, so wrongheaded about this pronoun campaign that it makes me feel like I don't understand something about it. Well, you don't. There's something more nefarious lurking at the bottom of it. And

you see in Canada, I know that you're not a social constructionist. I know that you, like Steven Pinker, believe deeply that human behavior is profoundly influenced by its underlying biological substrate, which is another view that we share. But Canada has now written a social constructionist view of human identity into the law. So it's illegal, at least in principle, to claim that biology has anything to do with gender identity, or that biology and gender identity have anything to do with gender identity, or that biology and gender identity have anything to do with gender expression, or that any of those three have anything to do with social orientation in a causal manner. And that's written into the law. So what the social justice warriors are going to do next is to go after the biologists. And, you know, they did that with E.O. Wilson already back,

you know, 30 years ago, and they're doing it in Germany right now. And there's an anti-psychiatry scholarship established at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, which is a particularly pernicious institution. can make as a scientist about the relationship between biology and sex or the hypothetically separate gender identity. So that's the worst of the lot, because normally governments shy away from implementing a particular ideology, especially one that's discredited, which certainly the radical social constructionist position is, to make that a fundamental part of the law. And that's definitely happened. And that'll unfold in a particularly nasty way over the next 10 years. Ideology aside, there's just a difference between a positive and negative injunction. So I can ask

you to stop doing an infinite number of things and that imposes no energy cost on you. I can say stop using the n-word, it offends me, right? Or stop littering or stop driving your car on the sidewalk, right? And you can not do those things and it takes no time not to do those things. It takes no cognitive overhead not to do those things. But I can't ask you to do an infinite number of things. I can't tell you to pick up all the litter you see everywhere because you'd spend the rest of your life doing that and you still would fail to comply with the injunction. And asking people to learn a new list of gender pronouns and then live in a state of vigilance to see that they

apply them correctly. This is a positive injunction. And you're demanding that people do something. For me to demand that people start using a word of my own invention, or if I say I want to be addressed by a 16-digit number and I'm going to be offended if you get the number wrong, this is imposing a cost on people. I'm going to be offended and I'm going to be offended if you get the number wrong. This is imposing a cost on people. I'm going to be offended, and I'm going to take you to court, and you could be charged under hate speech, and I could change that pronoun in an hour if I want, or tomorrow, or the next day, on a whim. Because that's also part of the legislation,

because that covers the people who are so-called gender fluid, and so they have the right to transform their identity according to their subjective whim, I would say, because the other legislation also assumes that this identity that's being protected so hard has no grounding in biology, and it's only subjectively determined so they actually go beyond social constructionism to make it essentially solipsistic it's the only thing

that determines your identity is the way that you feel at that time so that's and that's a unbelievably poverty stricken notion of identity which at minimum is something that you have to negotiate with other people. I mean, it has to be functional and you have to negotiate it with other people. So, well, it's not understandable unless you look underneath it. And that's why I was objecting, because I think it's a perfectly reasonable manifestation of the postmodernism that's nested in neo-Marxism. It's perfectly in keeping with their stated aims. And those aims are not, if you are an admirer of Western culture,

at least the good parts of Western culture, then you're the enemy of the postmodern slash neo-Marxists. They're opposed to absolutely everything you believe. We're going to get into that territory, I would imagine, by another route. So I don't think there's more to say here, because I think we probably agree about everything. I'm obviously not a lawyer. I'm certainly not a Canadian lawyer. So if there's any way in which we're getting some of the legal details wrong, I offer a blanket apology. But in terms of the

belief that biology doesn't significantly determine gender or sexuality or the wisdom and utility of inventing new identities and demanding that everyone keep track of them in perpetuity. I mean, I think you and I more or less totally overlap there. So I think we should just move on. You better not come to Canada and have that discussion. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just, it's been bizarre to see some of these encounters you've been having, but it's, this is why you've suddenly become so visible to people. And it's been bizarre to see some of these encounters you've been having, but this is why you've suddenly become so visible to people. And it's very interesting to see that this is how it's manifesting. But we have bigger, deeper, more perennial fish to fry. and science and atheism and the foundations of morality, things like meaning, your interest in

mythology, your fear of nihilism. Let's get into all that. I think you and I share some fundamental concerns and we feel a similar kind of urgency. I think it expresses itself in slightly different ways and different ways of talking, but we feel an urgency that our fellow human beings get certain questions right. But I think we probably disagree about some fundamental matters, and whether those will be, in the end, a matter of semantic difference and can be pushed to the periphery or not, I think that remains to be seen. But I think it will be interesting to talk about these things. pushed to the periphery or not, I think that remains to be seen. But I think it will be interesting to talk about these things. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that I thought I might do is pursue the tact that you're not enough of a Darwinian, which I thought would be quite comical, because I've often thought the same about Richard Dawkins. But I would like to

point out some of the things, because I've read a fair bit of what you've written now, by no means comprehensively, but I think I've come to understand your central claims. And of course, they're very powerful, because you're an advocate for materialist rationalism, essentially, I would say, with a bit of spirituality on the side. And, you know know materialist rationalism is an unbelievably powerful tool and it's very coherent and so you know i i i address the topic with trepidation because you know it was certainly the case that the the philosophical doctrine to which you adhere has transformed the world and has posed an unbelievably potent threat, let's say. That's one way of challenge. That's better to traditional views of the world.

But there are some things that we share in common that maybe we could start with. And you tell me if I've got any of this wrong. I think a good starting point is this, it actually leads directly into this claim about not being Darwinian enough, but it's the concept of truth. I've heard you say in a variety of ways that religious truth isn't scientific truth. And that the difference here is that science tells you what things are and that religion tells you how you should act. So let's talk about that, and I think that does connect to this Darwinian concern of yours. Yeah, that's a good—well, I'm going to approach that obliquely to begin with.

So let me throw a couple of propositions at you, and I know that you don't accept hugh's distinction between an is and an ought you know that you're willing to challenge that and like fair enough you know um it's a reasonable thing to try to challenge although it's quite difficult but but that doesn't mean it's impossible but i've been thinking a lot about the essential philosophical contradiction between a Newtonian worldview, which I would say your view is nested inside, and a Darwinian worldview, because those views are not the same. They're seriously not the same. I mean, the Darwinian view, as the American pragmatists recognized, so that was William James and his crowd, recognized almost immediately was a form of pragmatism. And the pragmatists claim that the truth of a statement or process can only be

adjudicated with regards to its efficiency in attaining its aim. And so their idea was that truths are always bounded because we're ignorant. And every action that you undertake that's goal-directed has an internal ethic embedded in it. And the ethic is the claim that if what you do works, then it's true enough. And that's all you can ever do. And what Darwin did, as far as the pragmatists were concerned, was to put forth the following proposition, which was that it was impossible for a finite organism to keep up with a multidimensionally transforming landscape, environmental landscape, let's say. environmental landscape, let's say. And so the best that could be done was to generate random variants, kill most of them because they were wrong, and let the others that were correct enough live long enough to propagate, whereby the same process occurs again. So it's not like the organism is a solution to the problem of the environment. The organism is a very bad partial solution to an impossible problem. Okay, and the thing about that is that you can't get outside

that claim. I can't see how you can get outside that claim if you're a Darwinian, because the Darwinian claim is that the only way to ensure adaptation to the unpredictably transforming environment is through random mutation, essentially, and death, and that there is no truth claim whatsoever that can surpass that. And so then that brings me to the next point, if you don't mind, and then I'll shut up and let you talk. So I was thinking about that, and I thought about that for a long time. So it seems to me there's a fundamental contradiction between Darwin's claims and the Newton deterministic claim and the materialist objective claim that science is true in some final sense. And so I was thinking of two things that I read.

true in some final sense. And so I was thinking of two things that I read. One was the attempt by the KGB back in the late part of the 20th century to hybridize smallpox and Ebola and then aerosol, so it could be used on, you know for mass destruction and the thing is is that that's a perfectly valid scientific enterprise as far as i'm concerned it's an interesting problem um you might say well you shouldn't divorce it from the surrounding politics well that's exactly the issue is how much it can be divorced and then and from what and then the second example is you know a scientist with any sense would say well you know our truths are incontrovertible let's look at the results and we could say well let's look at the hydrogen bomb you know if you want a piece of evidence that our theories about the subatomic structure of reality are accurate, you don't really have to look much farther than a hydrogen bomb. It's a pretty damn potent demonstration. And so then I was thinking, well, imagine for a moment that the invention of the hydrogen bomb did lead to the outcome,

which we were also terrified about during the Cold War, which would have been, for the sake of argument, either the total elimination of human life or perhaps the total elimination of life. Now, the latter possibility is quite unlikely, but the former one certainly wasn't beyond comprehension. And so then I would say, well, the proposition that the universe is best conceptualized as subatomic particles was true enough to generate a hydrogen bomb, but it wasn't true enough to stop everyone from dying. insufficient pragmatic proposition and was therefore in some fundamental sense wrong. And perhaps it was wrong because of what it left out. You know, maybe it's wrong in the Darwinian sense to reduce the complexity of being to a material substrate and forget about the surrounding context. So, well, you know, those are two examples. And so you can have a way at that if you want. Yeah, okay. So there are a few issues here that I think we need to pull apart. I think that the

basic issue here and where I disagree with you is you seem to be equivocating on the nature of truth here. You're using truth in two different senses and finding a contradiction that I don't in fact think exists. So let's talk about pragmatism and Darwinism briefly for a second. So I've spent a lot of time in the thicket of pragmatism because I was a student of Richard Rorty's at Stanford, and I took every class he taught and just basically did nothing but argue with him about pragmatism. So I'm very familiar with this way of viewing the concept of scientific truth. I'm not so sure our audience is deeply schooled in this. So briefly, let me just add a little to how you describe pragmatism. And this is, you know, Rorty was one little to how you describe pragmatism.

And this is, you know, Rorty was one of the leading lights of pragmatism, as you know, so his view may be slightly idiosyncratic, but it was fairly well subscribed among pragmatists, and he was influenced by Dewey, and he linked his view in some similar ways to a Darwinian conception of truth, but not quite the way you're doing, it seems to me. In any case, the idea is that we can never stand outside of human conversation and talk about reality as it is, or truth as it is. We never come into contact with naked truth. All we have is our conversation and our tools of augmenting our conversation, scientific instruments and otherwise. And all we really have, the currency of truth, is whatever successfully passes muster in a conversation. So I say something that I think

is true and it seems to work for you. We have a similar, we're playing a similar language game. And some people disagree, they criticize what we are claiming to be true, and we go back and forth. And all we ever have is this kind of ever-expanding horizon line of successful conversations that allow us to do things technologically that are very persuasive. So as you say, we can build hydrogen bombs. And so the conversation about the structure of the atom, at the very least, the conversation about the amount of energy hidden in the otherwise nebulous structure of an atom, that becomes, you know, very well grounded in facts that we all can agree are intersubjectively true.

Yeah, well, that seems to weaken the claim that it's just within language, you know, which is kind of a postmodern claim, too, because it's very difficult for me to believe that the hydrogen bomb is what it is just because we agree what it is in conversation. You know, it immediately reflects a world outside of, now, outside of language. That doesn't mean we get permanent and omniscient access to that world, but it's more than language as far as... So maybe I'm misunderstanding Rorty or... I think you are understanding him.

He will say that, again, all we ever have is our effort to organize the way the world seems to us with concepts and language. And we just have successful iterations of that and unsuccessful ones. And a hydrogen bomb explosion, no matter how big, assuming we survive it, still falls within this empirical context of an evolving language game. And I agree with you that this does, it does connect with postmodernism in a way that is decidedly unhelpful. And Rorty was a fan of Derrida and Foucault. And, you know, I remember walking out

of Derrida's lecture at Stanford, I literally had to climb over the bodies of the credulous who were sitting in the aisles listening to the great man speak, and he didn't speak a single intelligible sentence, as far as I recall. Well, that's obviously just because you don't have the profundity to understand, you know, a postmodern French neo-Marxist intellectual. I don't. But to get back to some of your claims here, there's this claim you're making about

the Darwinian basis of truth and knowledge, that there really is just survival, right? There's just biological change selected against by an environment. And there's what works in that context, what is pragmatic in that context, biologically, and there's what doesn't and what doesn't gets you killed. in that context biologically, and there's what doesn't, and what doesn't gets you killed. Now, obviously, that picture of how we got here is something that I agree with. Right. But our conception of truth, and our conception of truth in general, and scientific truth specifically, and even of Darwinian evolution within that subset of truth claims, that is not

functioning by merely Darwinian principles. And this just goes to... Right, but that could be an objection to its validity. Like, there's no reason to assume, and don't get me wrong, like, I'm perfectly happy with science, I'm a scientist, but there's no reason to assume that our view of the world, our current scientific view of the world, isn't flawed or incomplete in some manner that will prove fundamentally fatal to us. As a working assumption, we can decide not to worry too much about that, and that's fine. But yes, I agree. And more fundamental than that, and I think this is the accurate version of the claim you're making. This is

something that I spoke about on another podcast with Max Tegmark, a physicist from MIT. There is just the fact that within the Darwinian conception of how we got here, there's no reason to believe that our cognitive faculties have evolved to put us in error-free contact with reality. That's not how they evolved. I mean, we did not evolve to be perfect mathematicians or perfect logical operators or perfect conceivers of scientific reality at the very small, you know, subatomic level, or at the very large cosmic level, or at the very old cosmological level. We are designed by the happenstance of evolution to function within a very narrow band of light intensities and physical parameters. The things we are designed to do very well are,

you know, recognize the facial expressions of apes just like ourselves and to throw objects in parabolic arcs within a hundred meters and all of that. And so the fact that we are able to succeed to the degree that we have been in creating a vision of scientific truth and the structure of the cosmos at large that radically exceeds those narrow parameters, that is a kind of miracle. It's an amazing fact about us that seems not to be true, remotely true, of any other species we know about. And that's something to be celebrated. And it's a lot of fun to see how far we can get in that direction. But I would grant you that there are no guarantees as we move forward in that space. And in fact, we should be skeptical about how easy we can have it in this space. One thing that Max Tegmark said, which I thought was fascinating,

he goes one step further than I had tended to go along these lines, where he said that we should expect, as just based on accepting the logic of evolution, we should expect that we will have our common sense intuitions frequently and really incessantly violated by what we discover to be true about the nature of reality through science. Yeah, what we discover scientifically to be true about the nature of reality. Yeah, well, so partly I made the case that I made to indicate to you and the listeners where I'm starting from in some sense. So I think it's not unreasonable to assume that you're making the metaphysical claim in some sense that Darwinian truth is nested inside Newtonian truth. I wouldn't call it Newtonian. Let me just change your words a little bit, but it may be a distinction without a difference here. But I would oppose realism,

scientific realism, and even moral realism. I consider myself a moral realist. I think there are right and wrong answers to moral questions. I would oppose realism with pragmatism. And the core tenant of realism for me is that it's possible for everyone to be mistaken. It's possible for there to be a consensus around truths that are in fact not true. It's possible to not know what you're missing. There's a horizon of cognition beyond which we can't currently see, and we may be right or wrong about what we think exceeds our grasp at the moment. And so that's something that the pragmatist can't say. The pragmatist has to locate truth always within the context of existing conversations,

existing consensus. And in this Darwinian conception of truth, you are saying that there's just what works for us biologically, pragmatically, as apes on earth now. And there is nothing, there's no larger context of truth claims that we can make that situates that in a larger sphere, where you can intelligibly say that everyone is wrong about something. Well, it's complicated. And I wouldn't say I'm saying exactly that. I certainly don't agree with the language game part of it. And see, if you think of the Darwinian process as something you can't escape, like there's no outside of it. And partly the reason for that is

that you're just too damn ignorant to get outside of it in any transcendent manner. Now you might say, well, you can do that to some degree with science. And I'm not going to argue with that. Before you move on, let me just understand the claim, because it seems to me we are outside of it in every respect where you want to emphasize the Darwinian component of it. So we're outside of the implications that, you know, certain phenotypes would have killed you outright 5,000 years ago, whereas now we have a civilizational mechanism to protect those people. So if you're wearing eyeglasses and you are able to function just as well as your neighbor who's got perfect vision, you're out of a Darwinian paradigm there.

It doesn't matter that you're wearing eyeglasses, right? On a thousand points, we can make that same observation. And therefore, more or less everything we care about has followed along those lines. I mean, so just the fact that we are, you know, one of the greatest gains we are attempting to make, although we have done it imperfectly thus far, is to outgrow tribalism in all its forms, right? So we recognize that tribalism is not the best, you know, moral bedrock. And yet, in a Darwinian paradigm, tribalism in all its forms, right? So we recognize that tribalism is not the best moral bedrock. And yet, in a Darwinian paradigm, tribalism is really the only game in town. And so we stand outside of Darwinian logic, both morally and intellectually, all the time now. Are you denying that? What am I confused about?

I'm calling that into question. I'm not necessarily denying it, and I'm certainly not presuming that, you know, that what I'm saying is right. Because I'm trying to solve another problem at the same time. But, you see, the thing about the scientific viewpoint is that it leaves certain things out. And it leaves out what it doesn't know, obviously, although the same might be said for any other system of belief and should be. But it also looks at the world in a particular way. For example, it strips the world of its subjectivity. And it may be that that's a fatal error. Now, that doesn't mean that it stopped science from being unbelievably useful as a tool. But I think of science as a tool, rather than as a description of reality. And, you know, that's, well, that's where we differ. And it's fair that we differ, you know,

it's, it isn't obvious which of those two positions could be held to be correct. Because, you know, you could say that the more we learn about the objective world, you know, in your realist manner, the higher the probability that we'll survive. And it's conceivable that those things are aligned in that manner. But it's also conceivable that they're not and I'm wary of that because radical changes produce unintended consequences and you know we've lived relatively successfully as primates for you know a couple of dozen million years and we're transforming things pretty damn rapidly you You know, I mean, one potential outcome

is that in 500 years, we're more machine than human, you know, and that we're not really human at all in any realistic sense. And I can't necessarily see that as a, you know, you could claim that that's a positive outcome, but it isn't necessarily that it's a positive outcome. So you're assuming that there is an alignment between the two. No, I'm not doing that. And now I'm getting a little

confused about what you're claiming. So let me just go over that ground you just sketched just to get myself on track. So it seems to me that you're saying that the reductio ad absurdum of a Darwinian conception of knowledge would be, if we ever learned certain truths that got us all killed, well, then that would prove that these things weren't true or that this was an intellectual dead end. Yeah, they weren't true enough, I would say. I mean, two things here. One is that there's nothing about my conception of science that discounts the reality or the significance of subjectivity. So I understand what you're saying when you say that science or materialism leaves out subjectivity. And I've ridden that same hobby horse against that conception of science myself. So you won't find a friend of eliminative materialism in me. That's just not how I think about the human mind. Well, do you think that that's true of your views on consciousness? Because that's another place where I would say we radically disagree. Yeah, well, I don't know that you understand

my views on consciousness if you think that, but we can get there. I think there's a subjective dimension of reality that is undeniable. In fact, I've said, for instance, that consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. It's the only thing that you can be absolutely sure exists at this moment, in the sense that... I actually like another claim that you make better that's related to that. I think the one thing, and this is, I think part of the your fundamental ethical metaphysics and it's a point on which we agree i believe you know you you are very concerned with let's call it pain for lack of a better word and you know one of the conclusions that i've reached which is i think in keeping with what you just said because it it necessarily involves consciousness. But so let's call consciousness a reality. But then I would say that the most undeniable form of consciousness

is acute agony, because no one doubts that, not if you watch them act. And that's one of the criteria by which I judge whether or not someone believes something. You know, so people, if people act out something uncontrollably, then I'm convinced that they believe it, regardless of what they think they believe. And so, and I think it's for that reason that so many religious systems start with the same metaphysic, which is life is suffering. That's the ultimate reality. And that's associated with consciousness, certainly. But it's more precise than that, you know, because maybe you can doubt whether you're happy, but it's very difficult to doubt that you're in agony

and have that actually work. So people act as if that's the most real thing. And part of your ethical metaphysics, as far as I can tell, is you take that as bedrock in some sense and then say, well, whatever we do, we shouldn't go there. And, you know, there's in a manner, in a way, the way that I think parallels that, except that you posit well-being as the opposite, let's say, of suffering. And this is something I really want to talk to you about, because I think there's a paradox in your thinking. And I could be wrong, but tell me what you think. Let's wait to get there, because this is a different topic. I definitely want to get into morality with you, and that's all ripe for discussion. But this conception of truth,

I think we have to nail down because it just seems to me undeniable that there are facts whether or not any of us, any existing population of human beings are aware of those facts. So before there was any understanding of the energy trapped in an atom, the energy was still trapped in the atom, right? And the Trinity test proved that beyond any possibility of doubt. So prior to the bomb going off at Alamogordo, you had some of the world's best physicists not entirely sure what was going to happen. They had an educated guess about what was going to happen. I think there was a betting pool on the question of just how big the detonation would be. There were some people who thought that nothing would happen. They would actually fail to initiate a chain reaction.

The point is that there was a kind of a probability distribution among the smartest people over the range of possible outcomes there. So this was a linguistically mediated conception of what was true at the level of the very, very small in physical reality. And we got more information once we saw that bright light and mushroom cloud, and now the conversation continues. But it seems to me that a realistic conception of what's going on there, and really the only sane one, if you look long enough at it, is that our language didn't put the energy in the atom.

It's not because we spoke a certain way about it that that determined the character of the atom. It's not because we spoke a certain way about it that that determined the character of physical reality. No, physical reality has a character whether or not there are apes around to talk about it. Okay, so look, everything you said there, I agree with. I guess my one objection to that is the, well, is it true enough objection? So, you know, in order to establish an objective fact, we have to parameterize the search, we have to narrow the search, we have to exclude many, many things. And I think sometimes when we do that, we end up generating a truth, and I would say it's a pragmatic truth, that works within the confines of the parameters that have been established around the experiment. But then

when launched off into the broader world, much of which was excluded from the theorizing, the results can be catastrophic. And I would say that's akin to the problem of there's operationalization, right, where you reduce the phenomena to something that you can discover and discuss scientifically. And then there's generalization back to the real world. And one of the things that you see happen very frequently is that the operationalization succeeds, but the generalization is a catastrophe. That's very frequently the is that the operationalization succeeds, but the generalization is a catastrophe. That's very frequently the case with the application of social science theories to the world, because they leave so much out. Okay, so let's just focus on this claim,

or this concern, about certain forms of knowledge or certain descriptions of the world leading to catastrophe. Now, I completely agree that that's possible, but it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means here. So it's possible for there to be scientifically correct, realistically true conceptions of the world that are bad for us. There are not many examples of that. I think the utility... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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