Making Sense with Sam Harris - #64 — Ask Me Anything 6

Episode Date: February 16, 2017

Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about his conversation with Jordan Peterson, the reaction to Milo Yiannopoulos at U.C. Berkeley, the “Muslim ban,” the echo chamber of social media, Trump’s lies, the value of the humanities, the ethics of ending aging, whether consciousness can be an illusion, evolution and morality, free speech 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.

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Okay, there's been a lot going on. Does anyone else feel like this year has been going fast? We're about six weeks into it. Feels like six months. Feels like Trump has been president for six months. Jesus. In any case, I am doing an AMA podcast today. So I went out to all of you on Twitter and Facebook.

And I got to say, whenever I do this, the response is just hugely gratifying and overwhelming. I get, no exaggeration, thousands of questions whenever I go out to you guys. So thank you for that. Needless to say, I can only answer a tiny fraction of them, but many of you hit similar topics in similar ways, so I'm aggregating a fair amount here. Also recovering from a cold. Hopefully that won't play too much havoc with your listening pleasure. And I don't mention anyone's names when I do Q&As like this because, again, I do aggregate questions. I occasionally reword them a little bit to make them more on point. So if you asked any of these, you will no doubt recognize your handiwork, but sorry not to give you credit because I can't really keep track of

how I change things here. And also I can only assume that some of you actually want to remain anonymous, and given that I haven't communicated with you directly about this, I will err on the side of safety. Before I get to the questions, I will do some brief housekeeping. Just to put all this in context, I just did Bill Maher's show, and you can see the response to that playing out online. I felt that interview was a bit of a tightrope walk, given the previous time I'd been on the show. And I'm reasonably satisfied that the whole story came out in those 12 minutes. So that's good. Of course, that doesn't prevent people from the left and the right going crazy in response to it. And it's really been instructive to see that there's virtually no space to occupy between the extreme left and the extreme right

that doesn't get you attacked by both sides on this issue. By virtue of that conversation, I'm getting attacked as a Islamist shill and a racist xenophobe. It's incredible. There is no place, it is not even a razor's edge where you can stand to make sense on this issue at the moment. So in any case, if you've missed that, you can see that on my blog. It's on YouTube. I've embedded it on my blog. And thanks to Bill for having me on. It's always good to talk to him. I was also just in New York with Majid Nawaz, and we finished filming this documentary on our collaboration. I don't know when that's coming out,

but I will keep you all apprised of that. And it was great to see Majid again, face to face. It's always instructive in the aftermath of an interview like the one I did with Bill to receive Majid's hate mail, which is just mind-boggling. The self-proclaimed moderates who attack Majid and Ayaan for their bigotry. It just proves how far we have to go. I just noticed, for instance, among the usual suspects, and it really is the usual suspects, there's Bina Shah, who is a columnist for the New York Times. And didn't like my conversation with Bill at all. And she disavows Majid and Ayaan, and then says that she loves reformers like Tariq Ramadan.

This is the Tariq Ramadan who, when asked whether stoning women for adultery was okay, he recommended that there be a moratorium on it. We just pause this edict for a while so that we can consider its wisdom. That's how far he would go. It's unbelievable. This woman writes for the New York Times. So if nothing else, it proves this is a necessary conversation. And again, to clarify, and I said this in my interview with Bill, I don't think I'm going to reform Islam. That is obvious. I am urging Muslims to reform Islam and to speak honestly about the need for reform. And if you think reform need go no further than a moratorium on stoning women to death for adultery, your theocracy is showing. And the fact that you

could be that confused as a woman New York Times columnist is fairly jaw-dropping. Okay, first question. Any update on the project manager position? Many questions of this sort came in. Yes, we are still in process over here. There have been over 900 applications at this point, so closing in on a thousand. I actually need this position filled in order to vet the applicants, unfortunately. But I do have some help with the vetting. In fact, I'm not doing the first round. I will see only the final 50 or so. But yeah, there's been a lot of interest, and I look forward to hiring that person. That would be very helpful. Question two, many questions on my conversation

with Jordan Peterson. Jordan is the clinical psychologist I had on two podcasts back, and we got bogged down in a conversation about scientific epistemology on the question of truth. Many listeners seem confused about my reasons for not accepting Peterson's version of truth, which amounted to some odd form of pragmatism pegged to our ultimate survival as a species. If you recall, according to Peterson, a claim is true if it helps us survive, and false or not true enough if it doesn't. I see so much wrong with this claim that it was really hard to know where to begin and well I don't think I said this in the podcast one wonders whether this claim applies to itself. Is this claim

about truth only true if it helps us survive? And what if it doesn't? Does it then bite its own tail and just disappear? Do you see the problem there? But I went round and round with Peterson for two hours on this, and this prevented us from getting into topics that listeners really wanted us to explore. Again, he was my most requested podcast guest ever. Now, some of Peterson's fans blamed me for this entirely, and they were alleging mostly that I'm a materialist and that I'm somehow dogmatically opposed to the idea that mind might play some role in defining reality or parts of it. But that's just not true, and it's not even relevant as far as I can see, even if it were

true. And it's not even relevant as far as I can see, even if it were true. If mind helps create reality, I would just claim that we can stand outside those facts as well and say they are true whether or not anyone knows them. So for instance, if it's true to say that the moon really isn't there unless someone is looking at it, the moon really isn't there unless someone is looking at it, which is to say consciousness is somehow constitutive of its being in reality. Well, that fact about the mind's power would be true whether or not any of us know about it or understand it, right? know about it or understand it. Right? So you can still get a realistic picture of truth being as spooky as you want about the mind. All I was arguing for was that there are facts of the

matter, whether or not anyone understands them. And some of these facts have nothing to do with the survival of the species. Now, some other defenders of Peterson have argued that I just don't understand pragmatism. Okay, but that's not true either, as far as I can tell. Pragmatism in its usual form has to make sense of the kinds of challenges I was posing to Peterson. Okay, but Peterson's version wasn't doing that. Pragmatism isn't just predicated on survival. It's predicated on what works in conversation, what actually conserves the data, what makes our statements about the world seem to cohere,

and the kinds of statements that square with our experience, the kinds that become predictive of future experience scientifically. All of that is what it means to be pragmatic in the usual sense. Most of that has nothing to do with the survival of the species. So again, statements about prime numbers can be understood pragmatically. When I make a claim that there is a prime number higher than any we have represented. Unfortunately, that's actually a paradox to say that there's a prime number larger than any we have represented is in fact to represent it. But leaving that aside, right, let's talk about explicitly representing it, which is to say it hasn't been discovered yet.

representing it, which is to say it hasn't been discovered yet. There are different ways to think about that being true, but a pragmatic way is just to say, well, it certainly seems true. Those kinds of statements function and conserve the experience of what it's like to be us continually discovering new prime numbers or seeming to discover them. It doesn't mean that there is a reality outside of our conversation where prime numbers really exist. That's what the pragmatist wants to say. Now, of course, the mathematical idealist wants to say that there is some realm of number on some level to be discovered by sentient beings like ourselves. And it exists in some sense whether or not we discover it. This is the kind of thing I got into with Max Tegmark, who seems to be fairly idealistic on this topic. In any case, normal pragmatism can skate across that thin ice fairly elegantly, if not persuasively, but a pragmatism that suggests that every statement

about prime numbers must be resolved in terms of the survival of apes like ourselves, that doesn't make any sense. But I couldn't seem to get Peterson to acknowledge that. And And most of you, the vast majority of you, it seems to me, thought I made that case fairly well. And therefore you agreed with me that Peterson's concept of truth was pretty wacky, or at least that he wasn't communicating it well. But many of you still faulted me as a podcast host for not being gracious enough to just move on to other topics once we reach that impasse. Now, I totally understand that criticism, and I even, I think, anticipated it at some point in the podcast, and I might have even learned something from it. We'll see. We'll see what I'm like next time I get bogged down like that with a guest. But the truth is, I'm not a normal podcast

host. I view these exchanges as conversations, not really as interviews, though occasionally it does play out a little bit like an interview. But I'm usually trying to have a conversation, and I'm trying to pressure test my own views and refine my own understanding of the world. So if the person I'm talking to isn't making any sense, at least to me, I really want to get to the bottom of what the problem is. And now this is necessarily intrusive because on many of these points, really one of us has to be wrong, or at least confused. And in this case, the disagreement was so fundamental, and I knew Jordan wanted to move on to topics like the existence of Jungian archetypes, for instance.

And I just couldn't see how we were going to make sense on that topic if we couldn't agree about what it means to say that something is true, right? I mean, how do you distinguish fact from fantasy? We couldn't converge there really at all. And the next topics on the menu were things like archetypes and mythology and the reality of Christian doctrine. And I wanted to get on to those topics because I knew how much our listeners wanted us to get there. I was making increasingly desperate attempts to try to get to some consensus so that we could move on. And this had somewhat the character of my attempting to perform an exorcism, which didn't work. It was like that

scene in The Exorcist when Max von Sydow does his whole spiel in Latin and still winds up with a face full of green vomit. Anyway, at the end of that podcast, those of you who heard it know, if you got to the end, I put it out to all of you to crowdsource the post-mortem on it, to tell us what happened, and to decide whether we should go forward and have a second conversation on other topics. And I put out a poll on Twitter, which about 30,000 of you responded to, which about 30,000 of you responded to, and 81% of you said, yes, we should have another conversation. Now, I got to think that poll went fairly viral among Jordan's crowd, because on my own social media channels, I got a lot of complaints about the conversation. And I'd be very surprised if 81% of my listeners want to hear Jordan and I go round and round again. But I will take this recommendation seriously. I don't yet

know what I'm going to do. It's somewhat amusing and somewhat disconcerting that a fairly frequent criticism from Jordan's crowd seems to be that I didn't let the conversation move on because I was afraid that Jordan was going to dismantle my atheism. That he was going to say something there that was so powerful or so well-reasoned that he would have revealed my doubts about God to be completely bankrupt. I got to say I'm open to that, but the fact that anyone thinks that is the reason why I didn't move on, I got to hope that those of you who are regular listeners to the podcast know me better than that. Anyway, I will let you know if Jordan's coming back on. I'm going to have a few more podcast guests in the meantime before I rethink that. I guess the implications of putting it to a vote would be that I would simply do whatever the majority of you say I should do. I'm not sure this is actually a democracy. I may be a little more autocratic

than that, but I certainly hope Jordan realizes there are no hard feelings. I just, in everything he has said since the podcast, some of which I responded to on my blog, none of that has clarified clarified his position to me. And if we do go for a second round, I think we really do have to avoid getting bogged down again the way we did. So I have to figure out some kind of guidelines so that we can actually have a conversation that is productive and not excruciating for all of you. So more on that when I figure it out. Question three. Many of you asked me about my views on the so-called Muslim ban. I'm just answering this now just to say that I wrote a blog post about it, and then I was on Bill Maher's show to talk about it,

and both of those are on my blog. Perhaps I'll just say that in my last meeting with Majid, we spoke about it, and he had a good distinction or a reformulation of what is reasonable here, which I fully agree with. I think I said something like, it's hard to get away from the logic of some kind of religious test. It is actually relevant. Once you realize you're looking for jihadists, it is relevant to know whether somebody is a Salafi Muslim, right? Because he would stand more of a chance of being a jihadist than a Unitarian Universalist would. But the way Majid talks about this,

we just want to know about people's beliefs and attitudes, right? We're looking for illiberal beliefs. And yes, it is true that Islam has more than its fair share of people who are fundamentally illiberal at this moment, who don't support free speech, who think apostates should be killed, say. But we are looking for illiberalism of that sort in general. And if there's some new cult born tomorrow that produces the same kind of illiberalism, well then we'd want to stop those people at the border too, if we could. So a Muslim ban doesn't make any sense. But nor does it make any sense to say you can't ask people detailed questions about their worldview in the process of vetting them. Of course,

you have to ask people, how would you feel if your daughter married outside your religion, say? And there's a wrong answer to that question. If you say, well, I would cut her head off, we don't want you in the country, right? And we are right not to want you in the country. And it's instructive that there are Muslim organizations that don't want those sorts of questions asked in the vetting process. Of course, as a very common theme with me, this comes down to ideas and beliefs and the degree to which people subscribe to them, because this is the best predictor of what they will do in the world. And we care about what people will do and how likely they are to assimilate into our society in a productive way. And we're right to care about

those things. So if you want any more on Trump's executive order and why I don't think it was a good idea, you can see those blog articles and the aforementioned interview with Bill Maher. Next question. Milo at Berkeley. Wow, that was amazing. Well, I guess I will just point out the obvious that that was one of the best things that could have ever happened to Milo in terms of proving his points, both the legitimate and illegitimate ones, and raising his stature, right? I mean, just what a short-sighted, idiotic, counterproductive thing to do. And what worries me about this moment politically is that the left seems capable of doing everything wrong in response to the rise of the so-called alt-right and the Trump presidency. This antipathy to free speech, this idea that

rioting to prevent a lecture is an example of liberal free speech in action, that is just so confused and destructive that I'm tempted to say that the left is just irredeemable at this point. I'm tempted to say that the left is just irredeemable at this point. There seems to be so little insight. And coming fresh out of my interview with Bill Ma horrifying expression of racist hatred or are pretending to have heard such a thing. And this kind of judgment is, again, echoed by the usual suspects on the left. I mean, that position is so crazy that I just don't know how to interact with it. So it's not an accident that people on the right can't see any way to interact with it. All I can say is that if I'm a bigot and a racist and a xenophobe, if that's how I appear to you based on what I said on real time,

what words are you going to use for the real bigots and racists and xenophobes? And what I've said before about Milo, Milo is a, at this point, kind of a professional troll, right? I mean, some of his criticism of the left is no doubt sincere, but he's a kind of performance artist. I mean, he's just winding up the left. a kind of performance artist. I mean, he's just winding up the left. And perhaps I've missed it, but I haven't seen anything from him that is real racist bigotry. Please take this caveat on board. I have not read all of Milo's stuff or much of it. Maybe there's something I've missed. Feel free to point that out to me. But the Milo I've seen is very far from being a neo-Nazi or someone whose attitudes are truly of the right. That's

probably not an accident. I mean, he's flamboyantly gay and half Jewish, I believe. I don't know how right-wing he could be in the end, but this response at Berkeley wouldn't even be warranted if he was actually a KKK member. Again, the moment you're using violence to prevent someone from speaking, you are on the wrong side of the argument by definition. How is that not obvious on the left at this moment? You're going to, what, burn down your own university to prevent someone from expressing views that you could otherwise just criticize? All of these protests were seen in response to right-wing or quasi-right-wing speakers being invited to college campuses by, I'm sure, the campus Republicans. These are so uncivil and unproductive. And again, this is almost entirely a phenomenon of the left. If you heard generically that some college campus had erupted in violence

because a student mob had prevented a lecture from taking place, and the people who wanted to hear that lecture were spat upon as they tried to enter the hall and finally attacked, attacked. You could bet with, what, 99% confidence that this was coming from the left. Now, in the age of Trump, when you really want to be able to say things against creeping right-wing authoritarianism, having an authoritarian anti-free speech movement subsume the left is a disaster politically. But I actually think the left is irredeemable at this point. And this is why I've begun to use the phrase, the new center. I think we need a new center to our politics. I mean, I don't know how you ever get the people writing for The Intercept or the people on The Young Turks

to be reasonable human beings, given what they've done in recent years. And so that's the left, as it currently stands. Of course, it's no accident that the Women's March, which otherwise seemed like a great thing, was vitiated by its alliance with Linda Sarsour and these closeted and semi-closeted Islamists who have co-opted the women's movement and convinced millions of women, apparently, that the hijab is a sign of women's empowerment. That's fairly mind-boggling, just so there's no confusion on this point. I think you, dear listener, should be free to wear the hijab if you want to, but you should also recognize that most women the world over who are veiled to one or another degree are living that way,

not out of choice or certainly not out of what could be considered a free choice. They're living in the context of a community that will treat them like whores or worse if they don't veil themselves, right? That's not the political empowerment of women. And someone like Linda Sarsour, again, one of the principal organizers of the Women's March, is a theocrat who lies about this, who attacks Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This is how the left will die, by, on the basis of its own moral relativism, locking arms with Islamism and stealth theocracy, which is what it has done. I mean, just as you know, if you travel too far right on the political spectrum,

you will encounter the most repulsive, the most callous, the most authoritarian attitudes. I think you should know that if you travel too far left, you will encounter a kind of moral confusion and identity politics that is, in its actual application to the world, little better. And I don't see how that changes at this point. Next question. How do you think we can reasonably expect to break the echo chamber mentality in social media and online information? Do you think it's possible or do you expect our conversation to grow increasingly factionalized? This is a good question to which I really don't have a good answer apart from my acknowledging that this is just a huge problem. This has to be high on everyone's list of problems that really could make it hard to maintain our way of life. We're talking about how human beings reach

a common understanding of reality, right? How do we get our view of the facts to converge? And how do we get the moral norms that should guide our behavior to become aligned collectively. And if we're not dealing with the same facts, if my news sources are fake news, according to your own, and vice versa, it is hard to see how we will make any progress. This isn't just about agreeing that climate change is a problem. This is everything. This is the wars we fight, the laws we pass, the research we fund or don't fund. It is everything. There is a difference between truth and lies. There is a difference between real news and fake news. There's a difference between actual conspiracies and imagined ones. And we cannot afford to have hundreds of millions of people in our own society on the wrong side of those epistemological chasms. And we certainly can't afford to have members of our own government on the wrong side of them. As I've said many,

many times before, all we have is conversation, right? You have conversation and violence. That's how we can influence one another. When things really matter and words are insufficient, people show up with guns. That is the way things are. So we have to create the conditions where conversations work. And now we are living in an environment where words have become almost totally ineffectual.

And this is what has been so harmful, I would say, about Trump's candidacy and his first few weeks as president. Just the degree to which the man lies, and the degree to which his supporters do not care, that is one of the most dangerous things to happen in my lifetime, politically. There simply has to be a consequence for lying on this level. And the retort from a Trump fan is, well, all politicians lie. No, all politicians don't lie like this. What we are witnessing with Trump and the people around him is something quite new. Even if I grant that all politicians lie a lot, I don't even know if I should grant that. All politicians lie sometimes, say, but even in their lying, they have to endorse the norm of truth-telling. That's what

it means to lie successfully in politics in a former age of the earth. You can't be obviously lying. You can't obviously be repudiating the very norm of honest communication. But what Trump has done, and the people around him have gotten caught in the same vortex, it's almost like a giddy nihilism in politics, right? Where it's just, giddy nihilism in politics, right? Where it's just, you just say whatever you want, and it doesn't matter if it's true. Just try to stop me, is the attitude. It's unbelievable. So finally, on this point, I would just say that finding ways to span this chasm between people, finding ways where we can reliably influence one another through conversation based on shared norms of argumentation and self-criticism. That is the operating system we need. That is the only thing that stands between us and chaos.

the only thing that stands between us and chaos. And they're the people who are trying to build that, and they're the people who are trying to tear it down. And now one of those people is president. And again, I really don't think this is too strong. Trump is, by all appearances, consciously destroying the fabric of civil conversation. And his supporters really don't seem to care. And I'm sure that those of you who support him will think I'm just whinging now in a spirit of partisanship, right? That's why I'm against Trump. I'm a Democrat or I'm a liberal. That's just not the case. Most normal Republican candidates, who I might dislike for a variety of reasons, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush, or even a quasi-theocrat like Ted Cruz, would still function within the normal channels of attempting a fact-based conversation about the world.

Their lies would be normal lies. And when caught, there'd be a penalty to pay. They would lose face. Trump has no face to lose. This is an epistemological potlatch. Do you know what a potlatch is? It's a traditional native practice of burning up your wealth, burning up your prized possessions, so as to prove how wealthy you are, right?

Look at me. I can burn down my own house. This is a potlatch of civil discourse. This is a potlatch of civil discourse. Every time Trump speaks, he's saying, I don't have to make sense. I'm too powerful to even have to make sense. That is his message. And half the country, or nearly half, seems to love it. So when he's caught in a lie, he has no face to lose. Trump is chaos.

And one of the measures of how bad he seems to me is that I don't even care about the theocrats he has brought to power with him. And there are many of them. You know, he has brought in Christian fundamentalists to a degree that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. And 10 years ago, I was spending a lot of time worrying about the rise of the Christian right in this country. Well, it has risen under Trump. But honestly, it seems like the least of our problems at this moment. And it's amazing for me to say that, given what it means and might yet mean to have people like Pence and Jeff Sessions and the other

Christian fundamentalists in his orbit empowered in this way. Next question. Are you still giving $3,500 each month from the podcast to the Against Malaria Foundation, as you spoke about in your podcast with Will McCaskill? Yes. Yes, I'm doing that. That's happening automatically. I'm not continuing to talk about it, so as not to wear my philanthropy on my sleeve. But that was the result of my conversation with Will. I highly recommend you listen to that podcast because Will McCaskill's fantastic. I just came out of that feeling that however conflicted I might be about the results of any podcast, however conflicted I might be about the use of my time on any given month, however conflicted I might be around asking listeners to

support the podcast, I wanted to know that at minimum I was doing some good in the world. And the value of saving a human life each month really can't be disputed. And $3,500 is still the statistical minimum for what it takes to save a life through the most efficient means, which is still anti-malarial bed nets. So anyway, listen to my conversation with Will, and you may find it as inspiring as I did. Okay, next question. One argument I've heard from someone who believes in God and in afterlife is that, quote, energy can never be destroyed. I assume what is meant by this is that consciousness survives the body, as a soul perhaps. I think this is nonsense, but I don't really have a good enough comeback for it. What would your response be? Well, it's not a matter of energy so much as it is

information and organization when you're talking about minds and even living systems. The difference between a living system and a dead one is not merely a difference in matter or energy. When you die, you don't suddenly become physically lighter. Actually, when your body begins to cool, you have to become a little lighter because you're losing kinetic energy, but I doubt the effect is measurable.

There was actually a doctor at the beginning of the 20th century, I think named Duncan McDougall, who assumed that the soul must have mass and therefore he weighed people at the moment of death. And he claimed to have found that the weight of the human body diminished by something on the order of 21 grams. And I think he also did experiments in dogs and found that there was no weight difference. And this confirmed the thesis that unlike human beings, dogs have no souls. Right? Well, obviously, there's no reason to believe any of this is true, but you can sympathize with the good doctor's thinking there. It's really not a question of

matter or energy going somewhere else. Nobody thinks that heat energy is the basis of your conscious life. In fact, you're losing heat every moment now. You're just producing more of it. In fact, you're losing heat every moment now. You're just producing more of it. It's not like your mind has migrated out into the environment because some of the molecular energy in your body has. So whatever consciousness is, whatever its relationship is to the brain, if it is the product of what the brain is doing, it is the product of the organized information processing in the brain. And once that ceases to be organized, once those processes stop, once neurons are no longer firing, once their connections begin to break down. It's not a matter of so much of matter and energy being lost. It's a matter of activity ceasing. Where does a song go when you stop singing?

Where does a dance go when you stop dancing? Do they still exist in some way? The distinction between having a mind and not having one, or being alive and being dead, is more like that. It's more like a verb than a noun. Living bodies do things that dead bodies don't. And when they stop doing those things, they're dead. Systems that process information and could be the basis of minds are doing things that disorganized systems don't.

And when they become disorganized, they cease to do those things. So this is a bad analogy, this idea that the conscious mind is energy and energy can't be destroyed. Energy can be converted into forms that are no longer useful, where it can no longer do work, where it contains no more information. This is entropy. And we are fighting entropy every moment of our lives. And when we die, entropy wins. If you think in terms of process, it's a little easier to see that processes can become disordered and disrupted, right?

And finally cease. So this is not where I would put my hopes for immortality. Next question. What would you say to someone who claims that the humanities are an unnecessary waste of money because they have no immediate practical purpose and thus should not be taught at universities or given funds for research? I refer to subjects such as history, sociology, or philosophy. While I'm a huge fan of the sciences, obviously, and also a critic of some of the ideological trends in the humanities, much of the derangement of the left on college campuses that I've spoken about could be laid at the doorsteps of many of the departments in the humanities. But speaking generally, there's much more to living a life

worth living and having a mind worth having than just understanding the world scientifically or producing better technology. The humanities are absolutely central to intellectual life and ethical life. And while there really isn't an infinite amount to learn, and I wish I had studied some things differently as an undergraduate, I'm very happy to have done my undergraduate degree in philosophy because it gets you thinking and arguing clearly about more or less everything, or at least potentially can do that. And I think that's extremely important. So I don't, you know, while it's not obvious what the jobs are for most people coming out of a philosophy degree, when people ask me whether I recommend a degree in philosophy, I answer.

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