Making Sense with Sam Harris - The TED Interview

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

Sam talks to the head of TED, Chris Anderson, about using reason to build our morality. Sam makes the case that reason can indeed answer moral questions, and then explores the many controversies that emerge from that claim. Moral superiority? Cultural superiority? Moral progress? Chris and Sam dig in to discuss the right ways to think about defining right from wrong, and reason’s role in it all. This is an episode of The TED Interview, a new podcast from TED. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

Welcome to the Waking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, some housekeeping here. I have a new event series to announce. It's called Experiments in Conversation. And I'll be kicking this off with Eric Weinstein in January. January 28th, we'll be in Detroit at the Fillmore. On the 29th, we'll be in Detroit at the Fillmore. On the 29th, we'll be in Milwaukee at the Pabst

Theater. And on the 30th, we'll be in Chicago at the Chicago Theater. And the idea with Experiments and Conversation is to launch a series of events that is about more than my events. I'll participate in many of them, especially in the beginning, but there are so many great speakers out there. And I want to create a speaking series that could eventually take place in many cities simultaneously. It'll be conversation-based. These are not lectures. We've been thinking internally about this being TED for two, where the TED conference has significantly refined and even institutionalized the short lecture. We're going to attempt to do something similar for conversations. And to this end, we'll be looking for public intellectuals and

creative people who are willing to take some risks and think out loud on important and controversial topics. We're looking for people who are not cowed by the prospect of saying something so surprising or counterintuitive that people might take offense at it. I can't tell you how stifling the current environment is for speech, with the exception of podcasts. It is just crazy out there. So I'm hoping this series can help us all recalibrate a little bit. can help us all recalibrate a little bit. Now, in a perfect world, there will one day be hundreds of events like this happening each year all over the world, but we'll see how it goes with the first three. And I really can't think of a better person to kick this off with than Eric Weinstein. Eric is one of the most consistently interesting and courageous thinkers I know. He is a real polymath. And in my experience,

we can talk about almost anything. And it's fun and illuminating and just it's what a conversation should be. So he was a natural starting point when thinking about this series. But eventually, I will turn to him and say, who else could you have a great conversation with? And he might go off with that person and do an event in a city near you. And I'll reach out to some of my other favorite podcast guests and people I admire and ask the same question. And the conversations will spread. Anyway, this is all starting in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago in January. So if you live in or near any of those cities and you want to come out for a live event, here's your chance. I don't get to your part of the world very often.

In fact, I've only spoken once in Chicago and I've never been to Milwaukee or Detroit. So come on out. Pre-sale tickets are available to podcast subscribers right now. If you're a supporter of the podcast, either through samhHarris.org or Patreon, you can log into my website and you'll see a pre-sale code on my events page. And that's SamHarris.org forward slash events. And then tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday, November 2nd. So subscribers only have a few days of exclusive access this time around. Apologies for that. Live Nation collapsed the schedule on me for some reason. You guys usually

have a full week, but not the case here. Anyway, I'm looking forward to those events, and Eric and I will try to make sense. Okay, the Waking Up course. The app is now available on Android, I'm very happy to say. That didn't take too long at all. Many of you feared that it would take years, understandably so, but no, it took a mere six weeks beyond the iOS build. So, enjoy that. Please know we're continually updating it insofar as you find bugs or improvements that should be made. Please tell us at wakingup.com. And again, your reviews are incredibly helpful. So please keep those coming. Let's see here. I've got some good people coming up on the podcast. I've got Rebecca Traister, the feminist journalist who has written a scalding Me Too book. We had a colorful conversation.

Johan Hari is coming up. He's written a book about depression that many people are finding very useful. Darren Brown, the magician, who is remarkable. As you probably know, he's coming up. who is remarkable. As you probably know, he's coming up. Dia Khan, the Muslim filmmaker, has made an amazing film about neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the U.S. Dia proves to be a kryptonite for white supremacists. It's quite amazing. Well, speaking of Ted, today I'm turning the tables and presenting an interview I did with Chris Anderson, the owner and impresario of TED. He's just launched his own podcast, The TED Interview. I believe this is his third episode.

As you know, I occasionally do this. I present my appearance on another person's podcast. I think you might enjoy it. And I think you'll enjoy this one. Chris is a great interviewer, and as you'll hear, he's a little concerned about some of my views, and he pushes back on me from time to time. This was actually very noticeable after my first TED Talk in 2010, where Chris came on stage and asked me some very worried questions about my views on the hijab, and I think Chris has been worrying about me ever since.

Anyway, what Chris has done with the TED conference is truly incredible, and it was an honor to be interviewed by him. So, please enjoy my conversation with Chris Anderson. Welcome to the TED interview. I'm Chris Anderson, and this is the podcast series where I sit down with a TED speaker and we get to dive much deeper into their ideas than was possible during their TED talk. My guest today is Sam Harris, philosopher, neuroscientist, author, podcaster. Sam has been at the heart of many of the most provocative conversations out there today. Politically, I would place him at what you might call the radical center,

a stern critic of Donald Trump, but also of political correctness, for example. He has infuriated people on both left and right in almost equal measure. But he has also delighted many, many people because of his clarity of thought and his fearlessness in how he expresses those thoughts. Sam's podcast, Waking Up, is super popular. I'm a regular listener. And he's also famed for his book called The

Moral Landscape. That was the subject of his first TED talk. Most people probably here think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life. Questions like what is worth living for, what is worth dying for, what constitutes a good life. So I'm going to argue that this is an illusion, that the separation between science and human values is an illusion, and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. So the debate is over the nature of morality. Specifically, is there such a thing as objective moral truth?

Or is morality inherently subjective, in which case all moral statements are ultimately just statements about the values an individual or a culture happens to hold? So let's give an example here. I mean, look, if I say something like, it's wrong to lie, or we should all stop eating animals, are those ultimately just your personal moral values? Or might there be a sense in which they can objectively be judged to be true or false? If you believe in God, there's an easy enough answer to this question. Good is what God has revealed to us is good. He's created human beings with consciences and with a holy book that sets out what is right and what is wrong.

But most modern philosophers, academic scientists, don't think you can outsource morality to God. They would say there is a fundamental difference in the world between facts and values. Facts are statements about the real world. They can be true or false. Values are human creations. They differ between different cultures. We can debate them, but ultimately there is no objective arbiter of the truth of a moral statement. What's interesting about Sam Harris is that although he definitely

doesn't believe in God, he does believe that statements about moral values are ultimately objective statements. In his view, we can discover the truth about those statements through an ever deeper knowledge of science, of psychology for example, of how human societies operate and of the exercise of reason. There's a lot at stake here. If Sam Harris is wrong and the majority of scientists and philosophers are right, then it's hard to see how there can be such a thing as moral progress. If a moral system is simply the subjective values that a culture creates, it puts a limit on how much you can argue against views you disagree with, like the sanctity of life

or child marriage. You just have no real answer to the position, look, this is what I and my family, going back generations, choose to believe. If Sam Harris is right, on the other hand, going back generations, choose to believe. If Sam Harris is right, on the other hand, it becomes possible to argue that certain cultural values are objectively wrong and must be changed and to present real evidence as to why that might be so. And looking forward, it impacts how we build ethical decisions into the technologies we're creating, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, self-driving cars. There is much to ponder here. It's not just a philosophical argument. It's as important a conversation as there is. So let's go. Sam, let's start here. How can you build morality out of mere reason and science?

And perhaps you could even start by defining what morality even is. I would say that it is anchored to the fact that we are in relationship with one another. So if you're in a universe of one, if you're on a desert island, the ethics of your living don't come into play because there's no other conscious system that can be affected by what you do. So if you're truly alone and can't harm or benefit anyone, then we don't really talk in moral terms. We talk in just in terms of well-being. So a moral system is the rules by which we should treat each other or not treat each other. How do you create the rules by which to treat each other?

I mean, how do you build a moral system from the ground up? Just imagine that we have no notion of should or ought. There's nothing we should do. This thought has not occurred to anyone yet. And even the notion of right and wrong and good and evil hasn't occurred to anyone. We just find ourselves in this universe. And the circumstance which we didn't create is one in which conscious minds like our own are

susceptible to a vast range of experiences. And some of these experiences suck, right? I mean, unambiguously. And if you doubt that, just imagine having every variable that conspires to make you miserable turned up, you know, to 11, right? So if you doubt this, you know, go to a hot stove and put your hand on it, right? I mean, that is a powerful philosophical argument. The experience you will have there is deeper than your doubts about whether morality can be anchored to reason, right? And if you think, well, it only burns my hand because my mind and body are constituted in such a way, well, yeah, that's precisely the point.

I'm saying that every possible mind is susceptible to a range of experiences given the physics of things. We don't know how consciousness is actually integrated with physics. That's a mystery, but there is some relationship. And we live in a universe where conscious minds have a range of conscious states,

and some of these states are better than others. And I think that claim, that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, and that every other state of the universe is better, I think that is as rudimentary a claim as we ever make in reasoning about anything. It's as rudimentary as two plus two makes four. It's as rudimentary as events have causes. It is bedrock.

And we know there are many other conditions on offer which are far better than that. other conditions on offer which are far better than that, right? Some are sublimely rapturous and filled with beauty and apparent meaning and just all the satisfaction that the luckiest people we know and ourselves in our best moments have enjoyed while alive. And so what I would argue is that what we have on our hands is a navigation problem. We are navigating in the space of all possible experiences. And so... Let me just push on one sort of philosophical point back there. In describing the worst possible state for all people, though, couldn't two different people look at two universes

and disagree about which one was actually a worse state? In one, let's say, everyone was making this God almighty mess. They were just creating mud everywhere. It was the ultimate sort of pigsty and it was disgusting to look at. And in another, there were people being hurt really badly, but there was also this beautiful artwork in the sky that was somehow some creation of perfection. Like people could disagree about which of those two was the worst, couldn't they?

Yes, what you're saying is true of my picture of morality in general. And that's why I called it a moral landscape where you have peaks and valleys and some of these peaks could be equivalent and some of the valleys could be equivalent, but yet different. So that you could have societies of people functioning by very different principles and moral intuitions and senses of what's right and wrong, and they could be enjoying equivalent states of well-being that are irreconcilable, right? So you could have an island of perfectly matched sadists and masochists, say, and they might be happy by their own lights, but we would look at them and say, that's a completely bizarre and undesirable way of living.

So there is a kind of moral diversity possible in my picture. But for this example, this thought experiment, just imagine that every conscious system in that universe suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can. So if you're telling me there's somebody who would consider a universe of dirt to be worse than a universe of, you know, painful torment, well, then that's the universe he gets, right? So like we're putting, we put every, however your mind is constituted so as to suffer

to the ultimate degree for as long as possible, that's what you get in this universe. And so someone who said, but suffering isn't the point, you know, say injustice is the point. So I think a worse universe than that is one where people may not be suffering, but there is greater injustice. Yeah. The reason why justice seems important to you is because it seems important to you. There's an experiential component to this. Right. So one simple way it seems to me almost of getting to your argument is just to imagine a scientific comparison between here are two universes and they're actually identical in every regard, except that in one, one child is suffering and in the other, that same child is not suffering.

Control for everything else. same child is is not suffering every control for everything else yeah and it it feels like it's not a stretch to say as a fact that that universe with a child is not suffering is is better yeah so as long as you can get me give me this spectrum of better and worse that's all i need and there are several double standards here that people observe by default which which are the source of our, what I would argue is our confusion about morality. So one double standard is that even the most hard-headed scientists use a totally different standard. And so to give you an analogy here, if you take something like physics as the prototypical case, so if someone shows up at a physics conference with his cockamamie view of physics that can't be integrated with standard physics, if someone wants to argue for a biblical physics,

say, that person just doesn't get invited back to the conference. I mean, there's no burden upon mainstream physics to incorporate that view into physics. And no one would be tempted to say on the basis of, you know, defining people who think that the earth is flat or they've invented some perpetual motion machine or whatever it is. No one takes those claims seriously. And so it is with medicine. If someone came to a hospital or into a medical school and said, you know I have a totally different conception of human health, and it entails vomiting continuously and being in continuous pain and then dying soon. That's how I'm going to define health.

This person is working with a conception of health that doesn't matter to us, for good reason. There are obviously controversies in science, and those are debated even for decades. And sometimes they overturn our standard conception of what is true. But the kind of radical skepticism with respect to maybe there's no such thing as science, right? And maybe there's no such thing as truth.

That doesn't continually undermine our conversation. Whereas with morality, it does. And so when you find another group behaving by a totally divergent moral code, a group like ISIS, say. So ISIS thinks that the best thing to do is kill apostates, kill blasphemers, throw homosexuals from rooftops, take sex slaves, and in the even best case, die for the privilege of doing all this in an act of martyrdom, right? So this is their conception of a life well-lived. And people look at this in the

West and, you know, well-educated, over-educated, people with PhDs and, you know, people who are, have careers as bioethicists, right? People who, for whom thinking about what is good and right and beautiful in a Western context, that is their job. They look at this diversity of opinion and they say, well, who are we to say that this is wrong? All we can say is that we don't want to live that way, but it's mere preference. And then this gets connected to a descriptive notion of how we got here. When you look at how our moral toolkit has evolved, we're social primates that have our morality anchored to certain emotions like disgust and jealousy

and a capacity for empathy. And we look at these evolved capacities and we say, well, there's nothing about the process that got us here that is causing us to track anything of substance about the way the world is. We're not in touch with reality when we're moralizing. We're just apes with preferences. and the fact that much of our morality is anchored to these evolved apish tendencies, those two things have led many, many smart people to believe that there's no there there. There's no truth with respect to right and wrong and good and evil. I mean, by presenting the ISIS case there, you've started with the sort of the awkward logical implication of moral relativism.

I mean, most people wouldn't start there. They would say what they're protecting is, for example, if we discover a culture in the Amazon rainforest never been discovered, and we discover that they have certain ways and certain moral preferences and how they run their society, who are we to judge and say our Western ways are better? But that kind of anthropology-driven moral relativism as championed by people like Margaret Mead becomes quickly a kind of an absurd position where you can't say that objectively ISIS's views are wrong. That's just their culture. We can't say they're wrong. All we can do is fight them.

But I just want to just plant a flag there because you mentioned anthropology, which is a discipline which 70 years ago in the aftermath of World War II explicitly said, the American Anthropological Association explicitly said, when the UN was trying to develop a universal conception of human rights, the anthropologists all lined up and said, this can't be done. This is a fool's errand. There is no such thing as universal human rights. Think of how ethically questionable that's errand. There is no such thing as universal human rights. Think of how ethically questionable that position is. There's no way to say that clitorectomies are a bad thing. It's pure delusion the moment you link morality to the well-being of conscious creatures in general and people in particular. Once you draw the link between human flourishing

and morality, which I think the link is very direct and we can talk about that, but once you draw that link, to say there are no right and wrong answers here is tantamount to saying we will never know anything about human well-being. There'll be no human psychology that can tell us how people flourish. There'll be no sociology. There'll be no economics. There'll be no human psychology that can tell us how people flourish. There'll be no sociology. There'll be no economics. There'll be no other discipline that can give us right and wrong answers. And that, I think, is wrong. Okay, so what you're saying is that the route from science to morality, as it were, you've described as a sort of a reason-based route.

You've described it as a sort of a reason-based route. There's another route that people might give, which is a sort of an evolution-based route to morality, which would say that it's completely credible to believe that apes and certainly our ancestors evolved a conscience or perhaps multiple consciences, if you like, moral instincts, that guided behavior which turned out to be really helpful for surviving and promoting group collaboration and so forth. But those instincts may be generally good and beneficial, but may also be buggy, as we know that so many aspects of our psychology is just odd. It may

have been fine-tuned for life a few million years ago. It definitely runs into all kinds of glitches in the world that we're in now. And I think what i hear you saying is that there's this incredibly important agenda of applying reason to the start point instincts that we have and this of course is where it gets gets really hard people do i mean john height has spoken at ted and has argued you know that there are these different moral engines going on in people. Some people care much more about fairness or about happiness. Others care more about honor or about purity or about justice. And I think you want to argue that you can use the tools of reasons to bridge those gaps. Those are not fundamentally divisible chasms that can't be breached. Right. Yeah. Well, so there are two separate projects here,

two ways in which science can weigh in on the question of morality. One is to help us descriptively understand how we got here. And that is an evolutionary story. That is a story, again, talking about ourselves in terms of our history as social primates and just observing as a matter of psychology

and sociology and every other discipline that can be brought to bear on this, that people have emotions and intuitions and various cultures have norms which everyone involved claim have something to do with morality, right? So there's a feeling of disgust that people have. And it's, you know, clearly it's ancient origin is to be anchored to things like smells and tastes, and it protects the organism from, you know, just pollution. But then as we've evolved, it has this, we haven't evolved any new hardware. And so what we have built in terms of our morality

our norms and our sense of their violation is anchored to this same circuitry so now disgust is doing a lot of work in the moral domain and the political domain and and it's even you know as some neuroimaging work i did early on shows that the same circuits, in this case, the insula in the brain are working to differentiate just truth and falsity. So that when you find a statement to be false, it seems to activate the same network. And based on culture, this can play out in very different ways. So you can find cultures where people find certain things disgusting, which seem completely arbitrary to us, right? And therefore wrong. And then we find other things disgusting. And to take this down to something like food preference, there are cultures that eat dogs, and we find this absolutely disgusting, right? And, you know, many of us

eat cows. The Hindus find that absolutely disgusting and sacrilegious. So clearly we can't, to talk about the ultimate wrongness of eating cows or dogs, the conversation can't begin and end at what people find disgusting. Right. You want to say it should be possible to make progress on that by, you know, bring a Hindu and a Westerner together and let's have a conversation and look at what's actually at stake here Who's being reasonable who isn't and see if see if we can't change those feelings and probably everyone Listening couldn't can think of things that they were discussed at at one point that they've maybe shifted on over time But but more generally I want to make the claim that there's this there's another project which is just

in principle is just as scientific as the first project of telling an evolutionary story of how we got here. And this project is to talk about what is possible for us, what states of conscious well-being are possible, given the kinds of minds we have, and given the kinds of minds we can someday have, based on changes, whether cultural or pharmacological or genetic or, you know, just with neural transplants or implants. We integrate our minds with technology. Who knows what states of consciousness are on offer? Whatever is on offer, a completed science of the human mind would be able to tell us just how good it is possible to feel. The truths about us will be known scientifically, ultimately. Right. So just as a scientifically minded group of explorers could embark on a

journey through a new landscape and try and figure out the smart way to navigate it using measurement and reason and discussion among them. So a group of reasonable humans could navigate the moral landscape and figure out new possibilities, better peaks, as it were, that we might aspire to. That's a beautiful sounding project and certainly convincing to many people. But it runs into this problem quite soon in practice, which is that from this start point,

you are putting yourself onto a springboard where you can basically sort of sound for want of a better morally superior you you will say you know muslims your book is is sick and uh promotes violence and it provokes this really strong reaction among people that you that you are you are being discriminatory you are you know you are being in some cases you've been accused of being racist because of the strength of which people hear these views expressed how could you persuade someone who's not in your world right now that these ideas are for them and they're for all humans they're not just for you. Is it possible to bridge?

Yeah, well, first I should say is that despite how undiplomatic I can be on this topic and seemingly unpragmatic and even inept in communicating these ideas in a way that people can hear them, people's minds are changed all the time. And even in the most extreme case, I hear from fundamentalists, former fundamentalist Christians, former fundamentalist Christians or former fundamentalist Muslims, people who have described themselves as this close to being jihadists. I've heard from these people and met them in person whose minds have been changed by a totally uncompromising and tone deaf and even apparently callous criticism of their beliefs. So it is a myth to say that someone can't be reasoned out of a position they weren't reasoned into, say, right? That's just

simply untrue. People through the hammer blows of reason all the time come out of their dogmatism and their poorly considered views. Islam is, for whatever reason, especially politicized, and you reap a whirlwind of criticism on the left politically for pointing out its obvious issues, whereas Christianity, on the left, I can criticize fundamentalist Christianity all day and will win plaudits from people on the left, but the moment that turns to Islam, people worry that this is somehow discriminatory. And that's just a double standard we have to notice, people worry that this is somehow discriminatory. And that's just a double standard we have to notice because it makes no sense. And the issue is that all we have is human conversation

by which to orient ourselves to these questions. The most important questions in human life are questions we have to be able to talk about. And we have a very large proportion of humanity that is saying, okay, these questions, these most important questions, how to live, how to cause your children to live, and what to die for, these are questions that we're not willing to talk about rationally. These are questions upon which we have a book that was dictated by the creator of

the universe, for whom we have no evidence, which will be sacred until the end of the world. The book can't be edited, and all that's left for us to do now is to decide how completely we will be enslaved by the contents of this book. And if you say anything about this project that is disparaging or even skeptical, I will consider you my enemy. That's where we live. And it's completely insane. It is as though we were living in a world where people were doing this with the plays of Shakespeare or the Iliad and the Odyssey. That's how perverse and random it is. So it's appropriate to lose patience with the status quo. So this is such an interesting topic to me, because I'm thinking about this a lot in terms

of TED actually, in terms of TED speakers come to the TED stage, they're coming to try to persuade people of something often. Sometimes those efforts succeed brilliantly and sometimes they fail and sometimes when they fail they fail for unexpected reasons. Not because the person said anything that wasn't true or sort of reasoned in one way but because they did things that provoked unintentionally a sort of a defensive reaction in the audience and so communication didn't happen. I guess my question to you is, let's say that your project essentially is to sort of spread the good meme of moral progress to the world. You know, how do you do that? So there's reason, which is one way in which humans persuade each other. But most people

suppress reason as their main listening tool and are listening to other things. They're impacted by their emotions. They're impacted by whether they trust someone, they're impacted by whether they feel that there's a connection there. I just wonder whether there's a discussion, it's more like a tactical discussion about how you would do best to persuade people who aren't Westerners, say, aren't liberal Westerners or whatever, that you are right. And that, yes, there may be some people who you have persuaded who've completely abandoned their faith, for example, and come over to a different way. But there may, I think there may also be many other people, I could be right or wrong about this, we haven't done a survey, but who they've heard you, they've heard the tone of some of what you've

said. And rather than being persuaded, they've reacted against it because it has sounded And rather than being persuaded, they've reacted against it because it has sounded scornful or disrespectful. Is that a danger? Well, first, I would point out that a person's capacity to be offended, that the feeling of offense, is not an argument. And it's not a virtue. It's not, this is a, we all have this thing. And in many people, it is functioning like it is some kind of epistemological principle, right? Like it's, this is how I'm going to judge the correctness of a view. I'm going to react to it instantly, right? So if I say to you, well, there's good reason to believe that men and women differ biologically, you know, start with

the uterus and start counting from there. And the more science studies us and sex differences, we have discovered that this extends to human psychology and human cognitive abilities and interests. And so you start linking those sentences together, people begin to get uncomfortable, right? The discomfort isn't evidence of anything. With respect to it being true, right? Not evidence, but it is real.

Oh, no. And the de facto impact of that may be that you lose part of your audience. Okay, but what I'm saying, but the point I'm making is that we have a project, collectively, you know, 7 billion of us, we have a project to get more and more people, more of the time to become sensitive to cognitive and emotional reactions

that are making conversation and clear thinking impossible. And this is one of them. The feeling you get, like, I don't like the way this sounds, it's a logical error to move from that feeling to the feeling that this counts as evidence against the view. Correct. So let's agree that that's a logical error to move from that feeling to the feeling that this counts as evidence against the view. Correct. So let's agree that that's a logical error, but it might also still be a tactical error by you as the persuader to trigger that offense. Sure. In other words, if you could make the case a different way, why wouldn't you? Well, I do. I mean, I make it, depending on the situation,

I make it every which way. I'm certainly not a provocateur. I'm not saying the offensive thing just to get a rise out of people. I mean, everything I say is sincere. It's not, I'm not giving it the top spin that makes it less accurate because I know I'm going to get a rise out of people. In any case, I think that it is, there are enough people who are meliorists. There are enough people who are bending over backwards to not offend on these topics. And what we need are more and more people to say, listen, we can all be a little thicker skinned than that. And we're paying a price for political correctness. We're paying a price for not being totally straight. And it is just a fact that, just to talk about the narrow subject here,

but this applies to everything, you know, everything that's polarizing. It is a fact that we are paying an immense and generally unacknowledged and, I would argue, totally unnecessary price for respecting this concept of revelation. This is the idea that any one of our books has an origin that is not merely human. And the moment you put a little pressure on that belief, you're already in the territory of deeply offending billions of people. So that's true. But let's, so let me tell you a story about my own sort of engagement with both religion and Islam. It sort of intersects with this a bit.

I mean, I was, my parents were missionaries. I grew up in Pakistan and Afghanistan. You know, I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian, born again Christian, believed that my Christianity determined whether I'd go to heaven or hell. My father was in Pakistan for many years in the belief that unless he could persuade Muslims to accept Christ, that they would go to hell.

This drove his whole approach to life. And he was, you know, he was in his own, by his own measures, a deeply moral person. Instead of making money in the West, he was out there as a pauper trying to persuade people of this belief. Over many years, he and my mother got to know many Muslim families at much greater depth. And something kind of surprising happened. They found that many of them were deeply spiritual and shared a lot of the sort of concerns they did. They had, you know, they were concerned for the poverty they saw around them. They obviously, you know, sacrificed for their families and they worked hard and they're incredibly hospitable and spiritual in the sense of

sort of the quest for something deeper than themselves. They found a connection to him and surely, slowly, you know, his views shifted to believing that actually Muslims and Christians quite probably worship the same God just by different names and with different sort of accompanying beliefs. But it was a monumental shift for someone who, you know, started from where he started. And his conversations with Muslims, he could go a very long way by starting from a position of respect, of emphasizing the things, the good things that were there. So what I guess my question for you is that because you, I hear what you say and I believe what you say about your sincerity, you are very, very passionate about what you believe. What people sometimes hear is a withering scorn,

which is very effective. Like in your TED talk, I picked up one line you made about millions of Muslim women being trapped in cloth bags. And if you say that, as opposed to a different way of interpreting, like we could say that like I'm here trapped in a cloth bag around my, you know, body for different reasons. If there was a different story that said, look, there are so many things that are extraordinary about your tradition and your religion. There's this emphasis on mercy. There's this emphasis on compassion, on hospitality. Many, many Muslims spend so much of their lives trying to figure out how to make the world a better place. They're not focused on the stories around violence and so forth that are part of the Quran, but arguably open to different

interpretation. If you start from a different point, don't you have a better chance of persuading the silent majority of Muslims to take you seriously and to want to be part of the solution, as opposed to provoking them to sort of say, uh-oh, outside a meme coming in, defend, reject, and to sort of close you out. And you actually make, someone could argue that you make life harder for moderate Muslims because of that sort of feeling of scorn

for the whole enterprise. Right. Well, first, it's never, it's virtually never that I'm communicating scorn for people. It's ideas that I'm criticizing. And what you talked about with your family's experience in Pakistan and Afghanistan, none of that is surprising to me. But there's just a deeper principle here that we're human beings, where we are on some basic level running the same software, and culture is laid on top of that, but we have a deeper psychological capacity for empathy and ethical engagement and even spiritual insight. I don't shy away from this concept of spirituality.

I do consider myself a very spiritual person. As you know, I've spent a lot of time practicing meditation. I've spent, all told, some years on silent meditation retreats. And I think that the contemplative life is something that we have only begun to think about in Western scientific rational terms. And it is a part of the spectrum of human experience that I think is undoubtedly there and worth understanding culturally. The problem is that the respect for tradition, and in particular the respect for revelation, keeps us balkanized into these

separate moral communities that do have irreconcilable differences. And so you pointed to the possibility of Christians and Muslims having a kind of rapprochement around that we both worship the same God. You can't play that game with Hindus, right? The bridge from Christianity to Hinduism only runs in one direction. Hindus can say, well, Jesus is just an avatar of Vishnu. But the Christians can't look at Hinduism with its multiplicity of gods, you know, thousands of gods, many of whom have, you know, the most garish fictional monstrosities from the point of view of Christianity. You've got people worshiping monkeys, you know, like Hanuman, or elephant-headed gods like Ganesh. None of that makes any sense. It's all understood in a context

of karma and rebirth that also makes no sense. Somebody's right and somebody's wrong and somebody's going to hell, right, if you believe these things. And there's no reason we should find ourselves in this circumstance for centuries more, right? And we just don't have the luxury of waiting for centuries to change our views on these topics. But sometimes people like yourself I would say and others who sort of criticize religion, they sound as if they're coming to it as if religion was a belief like say a belief that Jupiter is the biggest planet that was that someone if they were persuaded or shown how ridiculous an idea that was, would abandon it and possibly miss what actually happened. Again, I should say that does happen.

It can happen, but I think it's a deeper thing that you're trying to overcome. I mean, as someone who grew up religious, it's not just a belief. It's a relationship. To let go of a belief in God is worse than getting divorced. It's a relationship with what you believe to be someone you've had connection with your whole life. And so when, I think incoming critiques of it, yes, you know, there is a discussion to have around reason, but it's also it feels like, you know, your core identity is being attacked. And I think when that happens to humans, a whole other set of defense mechanisms come into play.

And I guess what I wonder is, let's say we agreed that a world where religion did not play the dominant role that it does now could be a better world. How would you get there? It might not be a head-on assault on religion. It might be, like if you look at what's happened with Christianity a few hundred years ago, Christianity was at least as violent as the most extreme aspects of Islam today. And gradually, most Christians have just downplayed those interpretations of the Bible, those arguments, you know, the people espousing them have lost cause. Most people don't need as coherent and consistent a worldview as you need,

and as I kind of feel like I need. Most people are able to embrace an element of contradiction and to say, you know, I love the traditions here, and I believe in some of the core ideas of religion. Even with Hinduism, Christians and Hindus can unite on certain things. They can unite in an idea that life is about more than shopping. It's about, you know, the exploration of mystery and wonder and the divine and the pursuit. You know, perhaps God is all around us.

Gods are all around us. Those two things don't have to be that different. They can agree on compassion as like as a core operating system value. I would argue it's possible that an approach that said, I love that about your religion, that that is at the heart of it and that you do that. I'm uncomfortable with this. How, you know, can we talk about that?

But it starts from a position of respect for what is good. plays to the moral world you want is that they have persuaded billions of people that they should pursue the interests of others over themselves. And that I think is the hardest thing that the abandonment of religion hasn't really handled yet is that by saying, you know, all those rules don't matter anymore, find yourself, follow your passion, be your thing. We haven't inspired enough people yet to say, as a core part of that, follow your passion, be your thing. We haven't inspired enough people yet to say, as a core part of that, by the way, don't just live for yourself. Well, I think the need is to be able to talk about the most important questions in human life without losing our connection to one another. And we are not playing that game well. We need to be able to

hear people out. We need to be able to reason about everything because reasoning is the only thing that scales. It's the only way of talking about a problem which stands the chance of being universalizable. And this is why identity politics is clearly a dead end. It can't be that this thing is important and the whole world needs to take it on board because you are you, or because you have the color of skin that you do, right? By accident.

Whatever this thing is, if this is going to relate to our building a durable, cosmopolitan, pluralistic future together, this thing has to be true and important because it's touching the way the world is for everyone on some level. It's touching some universalizable principle of human psychology and human flourishing and economics or whatever it is. principle of human psychology and human flourishing and economics or whatever it is. And our religious provincialism doesn't do that. Our incompatible claims about revelation don't do that. Our mere accidents of birth and skin color and gender don't do that. And so we need to, again, we have to be able to reason as human beings very much in the style of... So to take

John Rawls for a second, he had this brilliant thought experiment, which was called the veil of ignorance, or the original position, where he asked us to imagine organizing a society such that we figure out what we think are just and fair arrangements between people, but we did this from behind a veil of ignorance where we don't know who we're going to be in that society, right? And this is a starting position where you then could imagine that whoever you are, whether you're a neo-Nazi or a black person or a Muslim or an atheist, whoever you are, not knowing who you're going to be in this society, this is a heuristic that could allow

people to converge on principles of fairness without them having to sort out their differences in advance. From that veil, you could have a recent discussion about what would be the limits of inequality in a society, what would be the fundamental rights that you would want at a very minimum to have. You don't know if you're high IQ or low IQ. You don't know where you will fall. Right. And this is a principle that generally, I think, is unacknowledged, that we have to spend much more time acknowledging, which is that so much of this comes down to luck.

I mean, some people are so much luckier than other people. You're lucky to be born in the right place at the right time, to the right parents, with the right economic opportunities. And all of those switches can be toggled in the other direction, and you have none of that. And through no fault of your own, this is a massive lottery, and so much of what will make the future better is for us to care about the most shocking disparities in luck and correct for them collectively. And that John Rawlsian

conversation seems like a beautiful thing, imagining that people just using the tools of sort of, you know, reason and fairness and discussion among them, you could come up to certain basic fundamentals of a society, for example example, as soon as you have that discussion, everyone puts basic health care and education right at the high list of something that a society, of course, would do because you would want that at a minimum to give yourself a chance. And you can build on many other things on the top of it. And then the tragedy of the present seems to be that certain discussions seem to get shut down before they can even start with the lines that you can't say that to me because of who you are and who I am. Yeah, well, that's identity politics. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, it's a, I agree with you that it's, it's a tragedy. I have this picture of these sort of two different audiences. So from the view of someone speaking to an audience, you know, there's an audience of, here's the speaker and the people are watching and they're sort of, their eyes are open and their arms are open and they're excited and they're listening. And then the other audience where they've heard something that means, ooh, I don't know about you, and they're in protection mode. I think there are strategies to provoke the sort of, you know, the opening of the arms and the listening. And one obvious question, I i guess is whether should we start every conversation when there are different identity groups involved with some kind of recognition of you know the biggest concerns of the other group

i wonder whether that's something that we need to spend more time on well i think there are tricks as you say that are very useful and that we are paying a terrible price for not remembering enough so like let's not call them tricks let's call them wise wise maxims yeah but but it's just only it's it's something like you know so many of these arguments occur with each side straw man in the other right so you take the worst version of your opponent's view, one that he or she wouldn't sign off on, and you attack that, and that's totally unpersuasive. What we need is the opposite. So there's the notion of steel manning, which is now a term of jargon among us, where you prop up the best possible version of your opponent's view, which they will not find fault with.

So let me just summarize what I think you think. And then what you put into that place is perfect. That's the way to start one of these debates. Right. And I would add one more tweak to it, perhaps, Sam, which is not just that's the way you think. Even before that, this is the way that you feel. And I think feelings are so fragile right now that people want that recognition first almost, to feel that more human connection, not just an intellectual connection.

Yeah, although I would say that this dichotomy between reason and emotion or the intellect and feeling, that is a bit of another one of these myths. It's certainly not the case neurologically, and I would say it's generally not the case experientially. I mean, none of this is divorced from emotion for me. You know, like when I'm talking, like so that first TED Talk I gave for you, where I was talking about, you know, the moral landscape and how science can understand human values, and I'm a Spock-like character, I actually almost burst into tears at one moment. I'm talking about honor killing. And then I ask you to imagine what it's like to be a father who believes that the family honor

and male honor is so predicated on the sexual purity of the girls in the family that when his daughter gets raped, what he's moved to do is to kill her out of shame, right? So just by stating that example, I virtually burst into tears. So I'm reasoning in a cold and calculating way about what is right and what is wrong and the power of ideas. what is right and what is wrong and the power of ideas but this is all you know this is all just just a a neuron away from a a very energized and feeling laden contest but but um but if your audience hadn't been the ted audience say but had been um an audience including say it was an audience in an islamic country there is an edit to that talk that could have made it much more effective,

which is to start by saying, look, I understand the beauty and the idea of honor. I understand that you come from a tradition where family values are deeply respected, where you want to celebrate the purity of marriage. You don't want people engaging in widespread infidelity. You look at what's happening in the West and you're horrified by what you see. You're horrified by the movies you see. You don't want your society to be like that. I understand the beauty of that. And then from there you go, but you can't go from there to the horror of killing in defense of it. I did sort of make that point even in that talk, but this is a point I do make. It's not hard to see the merit in the criticism of Western superficiality and materialism and blindness to what is sacred or possibly sacred about our appearance here. We have done a bad job,

as you say, in secular culture, particularly in the West, in valuing something more than just gratifying one desire after the next. And so it can't all be a matter of getting nice tastes on your tongue and buying the most expensive watch you can afford. And yet, clearly, we need a deeper and truly universalizable conversation about what is most profound and what is possible here. And again, this is where you have to draw the line and have to be uncompromising, I think. The idea that we will get to a good place by get to a good place by simply reducing our adherence to these irreconcilable claims of revelation, like getting Christians and Muslims and Jews to be just a little bit less fundamentalist

more of the time. That incremental effort is the endgame. I think that is clearly untrue, because the problem is there's an asymmetry here. There's an advantage to fundamentalism always, because one, when you go back to the books, the books never tell you to be a moderate. They never tell you the problems with fundamentalism. And fundamentalism can always be rebooted by just merely adhering to the text. And there's something more honest about it. And this, again, this is where there's an asymmetry

within every one of these traditions, where the fundamentalists are on firmer ground theologically than the moderates or the liberals, because they can always say, listen, I just want to know what the book says. I just want an honest adherence to what is here on the page. And what that gets you is intolerable, right? You have to be doing some advanced, not entirely straightforward casuistry with the book to edit out the bad parts. Sam, let me pull you back to almost to the start point of your position here.

almost to the start point of your position here. Your start point comes from recognizing that all that matters are things that happen to sentient beings. If an atom moves here and there in the universe, no big deal. If something suffers or enjoys something, that matters. And that's the anchoring view of the position. So that's fundamentally a statement about consciousness. And yet consciousness, I think in your view, certainly in mine, is the one big thing that we know about that science so far has miserably failed to give a really compelling explanation of, I would say. So you've got a view that science can get you to a sort of a rational view of right and wrong, of morality, that's anchored in a story about something that science really can't explain.

How do you think about that? Is that a paradox? As you know, I'm one of these people who believes there is a so-called hard problem of consciousness, that consciousness is unlike anything else we've attempted to study or understand scientifically, and is simply a fact that the only evidence for consciousness in the universe is our direct experience of consciousness itself. But the flip side of that is that consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion. It's the one thing we can't be mistaken about. Consciousness, whatever it is, exists.

I think, therefore, I am the original. Yeah, but I think Descartes might have meant something very close to this, but consciousness is deeper than thought. And the I am part is also fishy, because I think the self is an illusion. The self is a construct. There's no stable, unchanging self carried over from one moment to the next. Something feels, therefore something is. Yeah, there is. Something seems to be happening, and that seeming is what we mean by consciousness. So even if we're not actually doing a podcast now and you're just dreaming that we are, even if we're just brains and vats, if we're in the matrix, if we could be

radically confused about everything, but whatever this, this seeming is, the fact that the lights are on, that is consciousness. The fact that there's a qualitative character to our appearance here, to being, and that some systems have it and probably some systems don't, right? And some parts of the brain have it and some parts of the brain don't. That is mysterious, but the fact that that is so is the one thing that isn't open to any possible doubt. And so that's a, it is a kind of paradox because it's the one thing, it is the thing that is doing all the understanding. We don't understand consciousness, but unless something appears in consciousness, it isn't an empirical datum to be taken into account at all. Is there any hope that in the next 10 years, say, that we make material progress in understanding consciousness?

I mean, it's been this riddle for thousands of years. It feels like in some ways that there's going to be dramatic new data points over the next decade as the machines we build start to exhibit what looks very much like conscious behavior. Do you think that's going to force us to make decisions, like the decision on whether the things we create are conscious or not, that there's huge implications of that. Do you think we'll be able to make a wise decision about that or will that just remain impossibly impenetrable? Well, I think several things might

occur and it matters which universe we find ourselves in. I think it's hugely consequential that we might build conscious machines, therefore machines that can suffer and machines that can experience well-being and perhaps suffer unimaginably horribly in ways that we don't understand or experience well-being that exceeds our own. That ethically is of enormous importance. It's, you know, in certain cases you could imagine it being the most ethically consequential thing that has ever happened in the universe. If we

could build simulated worlds that are essentially hell realms and populate them with conscious minds, you know, that would be the worst possible thing we could do. And it would, I should point out, give us the same moral stature as the God of the Bible or the Quran, if he exists as believers believe he does, which is to say this is a completely psychopathic thing to do, to create a hell and populate it. So it matters if that's the case, if that's possible, and it certainly matters if we stumble into that circumstance not knowing we've even done it, right? So we wouldn't want to do that on purpose. We wouldn't want to create hell on purpose. And yet it's possible that we could

do it inadvertently, given just the physics of things. What I think is quite likely and pretty undesirable from my point of view is that we could lose sight of this being an interesting problem in the first place. We could build machines that seem conscious, seem so credibly conscious to us, far in advance of our understanding what consciousness is at the level of information processing. Our machines will all be passing the Turing test, we'll feel in relationship helplessly thrust into relationship with them, they'll make the right facial expressions, we'll design them this way because we'll want to interact with machines, at least in certain circumstances, that make us feel like we're in relationship with another person.

And it'll just be obvious to us that our, you know, robot servant is conscious because it seems so. And if we don't know, I mean, there's a perfect disjunction here. We could build systems that are not conscious but seem conscious, and we could build systems that don't seem conscious at all because we haven't built the interface for them to seem so, but they in fact are conscious. Perhaps Google is suffering right now with all that complexity of information processing that's going on, and it's in woe at the dismal nature of all the searches that people are typing into it, which is that the input could be better. Yeah, it's hard to take that concern seriously, but something like that is certainly possible. Sam, precisely because we're building

these machines, making them more powerful, at some point we will have to make an effort to put human values into them. So we're going to have to decide what those values are. And even if you just look at it from that standpoint, it seems to me your work is incredibly important. I mean, these questions are incredibly hard to resolve. But at some point, we're building things that need to operate based on some kind of moral code. And so we have to bring more people into this conversation. We have to figure out and have to try and figure out a way of having it that pulls in as many people as possible you know collaboratively and constructively and get past this horrible moment in history where truth is nothing reason is nothing and it's all

it's all just a fight well yeah so this is philosophy on a deadline and this is this is one of the the silver linings to the risk here is that being forced to build our values into technology that's becoming more powerful than we are will force us to ignore the academic quibbles here and acknowledge that there are better and worse answers to moral questions. And to just take self-driving cars as one example, and again, it's a near-term example. It's already here. It's an engineering problem that we have to solve. And then the question is, what moral biases and intuitions do you want to build into your

robot cars? Do you want cars that run over white people preferentially because of all the white privilege in the world? Do you want cars that put the driver's or the passenger's life at some greater risk if we're talking about a trolley problem where it's the one versus the five or the one versus the ten? One child versus three old people. Exactly.

And to not answer these questions is to answer them one other way by default. You either make your car blind to the differences between people, or you make it sensitive to the differences. And so it's a forced choice. I think people have different intuitions about what the right answers are here, but clearly there are wrong answers. And there are clearly answers, and some of the traditional answers that you would get from a religion like Islam, for instance, I will bet will be judged wrong even by a majority of Muslims when this technology has to come online for everyone.

And if they are judged wrong by a majority of Muslims, that's maybe an indication that people are incapable of moral reasoning across long-held differences. This is what happens, again, and this has happened, as you pointed out, to Christianity in a very effective way. I mean, Christianity, we're not tending to meet the Christians of the 14th century anymore, and that's because of what scientific rationality and secular politics and humanism and capitalism and just modernity in general has done to Christianity. And to some degree, the disparity we see between Christianity and Judaism and Islam now is,

because Islam is a vast religion, I mean, it's nearly two billion people, and much of the Muslim world has not suffered the same centuries-long collision with modernity. And the collision it's suffering now is occurring over a much shorter time frame and without many of the same social and economic benefits being spread to these societies. And so we have to keep the endgame in view. The endgame has to be a viable global civilization that is pluralistic, cosmopolitan, tolerant of difference, and yet convergent on the same answers to the most important questions in life. We can't be radically tolerant of difference. These ideas are for everyone, not for one group, for everyone.

And you're ready to fight for that. I'm trying. I'm trying. With your help. Sam, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for all your time here. Thank you. And I wish you the best. If you find the Waking Up podcast valuable, there are many ways you can support it. You can review it on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it. You can share it on social media with your friends.

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