The Iced Coffee Hour - Alex O’Connor on AI Consciousness, The Woke Agenda, and Debating Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Range Rover Sport: Start designing your Range Rover Sport today at https://www.LandRoverUSA.com Justworks - Visit https://justworks.com/podcast to join thousands of small businesses trusting Justworks for payroll, benefits, compliance, and more. Shopify: Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at https://shopify.com/ich Subscribe to Alex O'Connor @CosmicSkeptic Here! NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps : 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:07 - Thoughts on Talk Tuah Podcast? 00:04:57 - Haley Welch's overnight success 00:07:48 - Most formidable debate opponent? 00:14:22 - Sponsor - Range Rover 00:15:26 - Have you always been a deep thinker? 00:20:20 - Importance of knowing philosophical disposition 00:21:56 - How should people find their philosophy? 00:23:58 - Are people born deep thinkers? 00:25:47 - Does wisdom come with age? 00:26:57 - Getting AI to admit its own consciousness 00:28:31 - What is consciousness? 00:34:59 - Sponsor - Justworks 00:36:17 - Ethics of conscious AI 00:43:00 - Hierarchy of value in living creatures 00:47:39 - How to improve the meat industry? 00:54:02 - Assigning value hierarchy to life 00:57:15 - Last time you changed a belief? 01:00:48 - Sponsor - Shopify 01:02:25 - Campus debate viral videos 01:10:11 - Ben Shapiro's debate tactics 01:17:48 - Thoughts on 2024 US elections? 01:19:41 - Should people take a competency test before voting? 01:23:34 - Atheist value system and finding purpose 01:34:01 - Do you gamble? 01:40:01 - Las Vegas fake architecture 01:43:46 - Are humans naturally good or evil? 01:46:19 - Do humans need bad to appreciate good? 01:50:59 - Ethical dilemmas thought experiment 02:10:21 - Book recommendations for understanding philosophy *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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CBC News. ethical dilemma with programming AI to be conscious? The problem is we don't really know what consciousness eats. It's difficult to even give a definition of what consciousness is. Do you think that the mind is just a product of atoms bumping into each other in your brain that gives rise to this mysterious thing called consciousness? And if that's the case, we should be able to make computers conscious. Is there an ethical problem?

Of course there is. If we've just created a bunch of conscious robots, and what are we going to do essentially like enslave them, mistreat them? use them for our own purposes. If we create a new conscious for our exploitation, we do not have a very good track record of taking care of conscious beings that we have full control over

and have convinced ourselves that we have the moral right to take control over. Okay, maybe that's a thing to consider, but a more pressing concern, perhaps, is... Alex, thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So we have a really serious question for you.

What do you think about the Hock Tour podcast? Talk Tour, isn't it? Because this is actually an indication of some great marketing, right? Like, if you can come up with a good pun, it can take you further than a good show. Like, I've never listened to an episode of that show, but I congratulate their success just in the titling. I'm a big fan of a pun. I'm a huge fan when it comes to marketing something as a pun. I saw a book once about animal ethics, and it was called Duty and the Beast.

And I thought, there you go. I've got a friend as a Catholic called Trent Horn, and one of the sort of Catholic councils after the Protestant Revolution was called the Council of Trent. And it was this sort of big decision-making procedure to figure out what would be condemned as heresy, what would be allowed. And he's got a podcast called the Council of Trent, but it's spelled like Council, like S-E-L. And it's another sort of just brilliant example of marketing and podcasts. But I think Talk Tour might be the best one that I've ever heard. Why do you think people gravitate towards that? Why did she become such a big deal for so many people?

Gosh, because people like personalities. People like funny things. It's no surprise that people who are funny or charismatic are going to be more popular than those who are not. I mean, like, if you look at academic podcasts, for example, it's oftentimes people quoting academics. And the real sort of cleverest people on Earth are locked up in either. university somewhere writing journals and then you get some charismatic person who's willing to put in the effort but translated in such a way that's entertaining and they're the one with the popular podcast because people are attracted to things that are entertaining like YouTube is a form of social media

right you go on it and you think I've always treated it separately like uh you know I have like a I'm addicted to Instagram and I spend too long scrolling on Twitter but when I'm on YouTube I feel like no I'm watching content I could watch a podcast or a documentary it's educational but it's still entertainment it's still it's why like the third thumbnail thing exists. People put the big red circle and a pretty girl in the thumbnail. Why does that work? Because we're just apes. We're just animals who are attracted to that kind of stuff. In Las Vegas, I was amazed getting off the plane to see that you have slot machines in the airport, right? They're everywhere. Yeah, there's a culture shot for me too. Grocery stores. Yeah. I can't believe it. And slot machines

are a perfect example of this because slot machines are by definition aimed at adults, right? You have to, Is it 21 you have to be to use on here? So you've got to be 21, right? And yet, they look a bit like some kind of children's phone game. You know, big flashing lights, big sort of like a lepracorn doing a backflip, whatever. I don't even know how the buttons work on those things, right? Like, why? Why does that work?

Because it doesn't matter sort of how old you are, how serious you are, you're spending money. That kind of stuff is attractive. Like we forget the extent to which we are just suckers for bright colors. I mean, I don't know how you guys do your thumbnails, but you probably put a bit of thought into, let's get an expressive fence. The orange background. Yeah, the brighter it is. I take whatever color it is up the saturation by like 30%.

Yeah, yeah. And why do you do that? Because, well, it's a good thumbnail, but why? Yeah. Because it's sort of eye-catching. Why does that work? Because it doesn't matter how serious your show is. It doesn't matter at all.

You cannot escape the fact that you're going to get a higher click-through rate by sort of making it more flashy and exciting because, you know, we act the same as children with a bright screen in front of us. That's why slot machines are designed the way they are, and that's why YouTube thumbnails are designed the way they are. And I think, you know, there's something entertaining about the Hock tour thing. Also, because it's quite controversial, right? Because here's somebody, and I congratulate her. Haley, I think her name is, right?

I congratulate her because she's one of those people who's managed to take that small little viral moment and seemingly transformed into an entire career. She seems to be quite a charismatic, funny person. That's a very difficult thing to do. Now, why does that upset people so much? because people don't like the fact that there's no like skill involved. Oh, she just gets a approach on the street and she says something into a microphone that's not even that funny. And now she's what? Like she's famous and she's a millionaire.

People forget that merit as a whole is a complete myth. It's like, oh, you're upset about the fact that this girl is probably a millionaire now because of some chance occurrence you had on the street and she's not even that funny. Most billionaires aren't funny. Most them aren't charismatic. Most of them didn't actually put any more work in to becoming a billionaire than anybody else would have done. had they had the same sort of chance of becoming a billionaire. I don't know, you might have different views on that.

I think we'll know a bit more about the finance world than I do. But like there's a lot of unfairness, and people have a right to be upset about that, but the idea that, you know, otherwise social media and having a podcast and stuff is based upon merit is a myth. I mean, sure, you've got to be good at it, but there are a lot of people who are good at it and don't get it at all. So that's the other reason I think it's popular,

it's because it's controversial. People sort of think, gosh, why is she famous? well, she's famous because you just asked that question. You're talking about her. That's what it is, you know? That was a great answer. I wasn't expecting such a deep thought. Deep dive in Haktua.

It's really worth thinking about, though, because, I mean, are you upset because there's no merit in it? How much merit is there in anything? A philosopher called Michael Sandell wrote a book called The Tyranny of Merit. We like to imagine that if one person inherits, you know, a million dollars and another person doesn't, but they just happen to be quite hard working. You know, they're a morning person, they wake up, they've got the energy to sort of put into their education and they work hard and they make a million dollars. We think that the second person sort of deserves it more. And intuitively, of course, I agree with that. But there's an extent to which, whereas the first

person inherited the million dollars, the second person inherited their sort of proneness to waking up, their hard work. You don't get to decide the conditions in which you grow up. You don't get to decide your phenotype. You don't get to decide your genetics. You don't get to decide whether you're a morning or a night person. And sociologically speaking, you don't get to choose how lazy you are. It's not something you actually get to choose. Maybe you can sort of choose to overcome it to a certain extent. It gets into a conversation about whether for you will exists. But every single character trait that you have is essentially outside of your control. You don't choose to have those characteristics. And so this idea that there is this thing called

merit, which goes all the way down to hard work and desert, I think is a myth. We can go into that more if you like. It's quite a controversial thing to say, but it's worth noting that that's... Well, we definitely have some space allocated for that later in the podcast. But first, to set the stage, you've debated Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Pierce Morgan, Sam Harris, Destiny, professors, bishops. How did their debate styles vary? And who is your most formidable opponent. Yeah, I'm very lucky, actually, when you put it like that, I sort of, I suppose the past year or two, I've gotten to debate a lot of big names. It's been very exciting. And everybody has a slightly different approach, but I'm, I think I used to be more confrontational than I am now.

When I go into a debate, I'll say what I think, and I'll say it forthrightly, and I'll look you in the eye, and I'll say it straight, but I don't get too riled up. I don't get angry. I don't get hostile, really. doesn't really happen. Happens occasionally. The only time that happened is when I think that I'm not getting through to somebody and I'm not getting through to them for some reason that isn't entirely innocent. I recently had a debate with Dinesh D'Souza. I don't know if you've heard of him. He's a conservative commentator. I don't know too much about him, but I felt in many ways he wasn't prepared for the debate. I felt like he wasn't actually listening to what I was saying a lot of the time. I felt like that his questions weren't really making sense in the context

of the discussion. So I got a little bit sort of a little bit riled up, a little bit like more more forthright. But most of the people I debate are receptive to my energy, right? Like you can, you can get a different energy out of someone. If you watch Ben Shapiro debating college students and someone comes up to the mic and says, like, hey man, you know, why are you such a racist? And suddenly he's sort of defensive and he'll like snap back at them and he'll like shut them down, so to speak, right? But if you watch the conversation I had with him, it's very smiley, it's very sort of happy, you know, we shake hands. And it's just a much more pleasant. pleasant conversation. And so I don't think it's actually so much about what they're like. I think it's

about what you're like. You know, you can bring a different energy out of people. Same thing with Jordan Peterson. He's got that ability to really like let out a demon that's inside him. It can just, it can just absolutely, it's the thing that comes out in like the GQ interview, you know, that real like fierce Peterson. And I'm sure that if I'd have asked questions in a particular way, I could have maybe gotten that out of him too, but I didn't. That was more to do with me than it was to do with him. Right. But you're saying that was an unpleasant experience because you, probably saw him as somewhat bad faith. Like he wasn't actually there to try to learn, maybe, but who was someone that was good faith, but they were just extremely challenging to

debate, maybe because they had really strong points or just because their style of rhetoric was effective. Ah, yes, the most formidable. It's difficult to say, I remember, hmm, well, a long time ago, I debated, the guy that I just mentioned, Trent Horn, I debated him years ago. And I remember at the time thinking, like, wow, that was powerful. Because at the time, I'd been debating a lot of people. There was a lot of like shouting and putting down and this kind of thing. And Trent came in very calmly and put forward what a very good sort of arguments for the existence of God, very powerful, very difficult to respond to. And he did it calmly and politely, but effectively. And I remember coming away from that thinking like, wow, that was, what were his arguments? So I think the

principal one that we probably discussed was something called the contingency argument, which will be about explanations for things. So there's a difference. between something happening contingently and something happening necessarily. For something to be contingent means that the reason that it is the way it is, or the explanation for the way that it is, is due to something else. So, like, why is this cup here? That's contingent on the fact that I put it there. It's contingent on the fact that I was, you know, thirsty, right?

Why is this curtain red? Well, that was a contingent fact. It could have been blue. You know, it was contingent on someone's decision. Someone's decision to design it in that way. So things that are contingent could have been a different. way, but they are this way. And there's this principle called the principle of sufficient reason, which says that for anything that is the case, any contingent thing, will have a sufficient

reason as to why it is the case. It's not just randomly read. There's a reason why it's read. So everything that contingently exists has some explanation as to why it exists. But the explanation itself will either be contingent or it will be necessary. There are things that are necessarily true, like why does a square have four sides? That's just what a square is. That's not contingent. That doesn't depend on what someone thought. That doesn't depend on some other explanation or fact. It just is. It's almost true without explanation, right?

And so anything that's contingent, like the existence of this table, it could have failed to exist. It could have not existed. You could have not existed if your parents didn't mean, right? So there's a reason why you do exist instead of not existing. In a way that there's not a reason why a square has four sides instead of three. That's just what a square is. But there is a reason why you exist instead of not existing, okay, because that's because your parents met.

Okay, why did your parents meet? Is that a necessary fact? No, you know, it could have not happened. So there must be some explanation as to why it happened instead of not happening. And then that thing itself, that explanation will be contingent or necessary. And you'll keep going back in the chain of explanation until if you get something contingent, then there'll be further explanation. The only place that can bottom out isn't something necessarily true.

And so everything has to bottom out in some necessary existence. And that's what he then goes on to identify with God. A little bit complicated. But I thought, you know, quite a powerful... What was your argument against that, though? Well, I think that, so theists will want to say that everything in the universe, every contingent thing that could have been this way, could have been that way, it exists because God made it that way. God is the necessary thing at the basis, at the foundation of reality. Now, it's my supposition that a necessary thing cannot be the sufficient reason or the sufficient cause of a contingent thing. There can't be a necessary cause. for a contingent thing. Because to say something is necessary is to say it has to be true. If something is necessarily true, it cannot be false. Two and two is four. That's true,

and it can't not be true. You know, that curtain is red. That's true, but it could have not been true. It's a different kind of truth. There's truth which could have not been true and there's truth that have to be true. Necessary truth means it has to be true. There's no way it can be false. And suppose you have a necessary thing, and we'll call it X. That necessary thing causes Y. If X causes Y, then as long as X is necessarily true, well, Y has to be necessarily true as well. Because if it's the case that if X then Y, then as long as X is true, Y is going to be true. And so if X is necessarily true, that means it's always true, it can't be false.

Why can't be false either. But what this argument wants to say is that you have a necessary truth which causes a contingent thing. So something which had to be true, causing something which could have been false. There's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scariery as Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know.

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the Range Rover Sport is more than a luxury vehicle. It's a statement. Discover it today at LandroverUSA.com. LandroverUSA.com with the link down below in the description. Thank you, Ranger's Sport, for sponsoring this episode, and now let's get back to the podcast. Have you always been such a deep thinker? Where did that start? Well, I'll thank you for the implicit compliment. Although actually maybe it's not a compliment because people tend to sort of overthink these kinds of things. It probably... Meant is a compliment, but it's also an observation that you are unlike anyone else that we've spoken to. I mean, it's very unique in terms of your thought processes. Like, that doesn't, did that just appear one day?

Or would you say you're born like this? Would you say that's contingent? It's necessarily true. I'm trying like that. Maybe, maybe. It's hard to say, to be honest. I mean, okay, so it's weird. It feels almost math-y.

I've never been a math-sey person. I don't like math. I mean, I love maths. I think it's fascinating and interesting. But I'm not sort of very good at it. I'm not very intuitive with numbers. But that kind of logical way of thinking, the way of sort of seeing everything in terms of arguments and premises and conclusions probably came from like, you know, when I was younger, I was really interested in the new atheism stuff. So I'd be reading like Richard Dawkins and Christopher H. And probably like 13 or 14, I would say. Maybe. It's hard to remember. And so a lot of these arguments were happening and I got really interested in it. And then you go online and you see people debating it and you realize and you're watching these debates. about God's existence, and you learn about these arguments. And you see somebody say, well, God has to exist because, you know, if something is, if everything that begins to exist has a

cause, and we know that the universe has a cause, then the universe, sorry, that the universe began to exist, that we must know that the universe has a cause. And then somebody says, oh, but does that follow from that? And how do we prove that? And it's all very sort of like, prove this, premise this kind of thing. And so got interested in it. But it's worth saying that I actually think that this is, I've recently been thinking this is a very sort of inappropriate way to approach life and big questions like religion. I mean, look at the sort of conversation we've just started having where I've talked about contingent objects and X and Y and necessary and causation and stuff, like sort of interesting on a philosophical level, but you're not going to listen to that

and sort of lead this conversation and go like, wow, you know, that really like, wow, that's really, that's really changed me. That's really had a sort of deep effect on my soul. Tends not to sort of move people. So these days I'm actually less interested in it than I used to be. What did you learn from your parents? Were they, are they, are they, similar to you where they have the, you know, discussions like this at the dinner table. Like, I can't imagine you, like, six years old watching, like, Cartoon Network, you know, Renan Stimpy, let's just say. Yeah, no. They're not. I'm not quite sure how that happened, actually. You know, I, my parents don't seem to be that interested in this kind of stuff, certainly not like theology,

philosophy. I'm like the only person in my family that developed an interest in it. So it must have come from independent reading and and probably YouTube. Yeah, well, we can get into that. But I don't know. I don't think I got it from my parents in other words. Okay. I, I have sometimes, are you sure, are you sure I wasn't adopted? Was it, was it difficult to relate to other kids growing up? Because like 13, getting into some of these topics, I'd imagine that most of the people that you would converse with were twice your age, minimum, three times your age. And, And you could have a very high-level discussion with these people. Maybe.

I mean, I would say that at that age, I don't think I was deep enough into this kind of stuff that I could have been having super high-level conversations. I would have just been interested maybe in, it might have been older than that, actually. Might have been more like 14, 15, 16. It's hard to say. But I wasn't like immediately, you know,

balls deep in analytic philosophy. I was just sort of arguing with people about whether God existed with fairly like rudimentary arguments. But a lot of people at that age aren't super. interested in that. And so it would be a lot of arguing with teachers or arguing online with people. And in fact, that's one of the reasons I started a YouTube channel was so that I could argue with people and get the views out there to people who would listen and engage because people at school aren't doing that. But at the same time, at that age, I was like, I mean, I was, I was a, I was like a skateboarder and a guitarist. Really? I used to sort of rock up to school at like midday and just like skip off lessons to go to the skate park. And I'd be hanging out with my friends.

Not really. It was sort of something that I liked doing on the side. I like watching Vsauce and veritasium and stuff. It's kind of interesting. Yes. It's absolutely phenomenal. And so if somebody was talking to me about it, I'd say, like, yeah, I'm super interested in like science and philosophy and stuff. But that wasn't like my life in the way that it became. I used to want to be a, yeah, a guitarist or a professional skateboarder or something. Yeah. That's such a, we got a toy machine skate deck there. Oh, no way. Yeah. by a stevo. Oh, no way. Have you been on the show? Yes. Cool, man.

Hasn't got wheels on it? No, it's just the deck. No, it's just the deck. I'm going to hang it on the wall. He's done a kickflip. Yeah. You can do a kickflip? Give me five tries, and I reckon I can land it, yeah.

Oh, that's good. I'll learn how to kickflip as soon as I get home. I'm curious, do you think it's important for people to understand their philosophical disposition, to understand where they stand, how they view the world, if they're utilitarian, if they're Catholic, if they're Catholic, if they're, if they're, if they're, whatever, whatever they believe in. Do you think it's important for people to even look at the world in that way, or do you think they can just exist not thinking about those things? I think it depends on what they're interested in and what their goals are, right? I mean,

if you just want to live your life, you don't need to know why you're acting in a particular way, you know, like there are plenty of people who won't be aware of the assumptions they're making when they walk around the world. I mean, the first big philosophical existential crisis somebody might have is they think to themselves, gosh, how do I know that anything exists? How do I know I'm not in the matrix, a simulation kind of thing? And what that exercise does is it makes you realize what you're assuming in your worldview. You assume that your sense data is giving you an accurate picture of reality. And then you go on live in the rest of your life and nothing changes.

But now at least you know that. You know that that's an assumption you have. You know that maybe that's unjustified or you don't have a good proof for it. But you know that that's something you're doing. Most people also believe that their sense data is accurate. it, but they don't like know that. You know, they haven't like realized that they're making that assumption. They still make the assumption, but they're just sort of not aware of it.

You now knowing that and the other person who doesn't are going to go and live their lives in the same way. It's not going to affect much. And so if you just want to live your life, it doesn't really matter too much. But if you're like interested in the truth, you know, if you're interested in trying to get to grips with why you're here, what's going on, what the world is made of, then it's going to be important. How do you think people should go about finding their own,

philosophy. Are there certain questions that you should ask yourself aside from like, are we living in a simulation or are there different strategies or tactics to find out why you believe the things that you do? Asking how you know something is a really important sort of exercise. Like how do you, how do you know various things? Like even obvious things. Like how do I know it's worth, I mean, okay, so when people do philosophy, they try to sort of address the big questions. You know, how do I know that, you know, God doesn't exist if I'm an atheist? So how do I really know that, you know, socially, is better than whatever, libertarianism. But, okay, it's good to question the big stuff, right?

But question small stuff. Question the obvious stuff. Question the stuff that you don't think of questioning. Like, how do I know that this table exists? You know, like David Hume asks, how do I know that the sun will rise tomorrow? How do I know that? How do I know that the laws of physics will continue working in five minutes?

How do I know this microphone won't start just floating upwards? And the question he's asking is, is how do I know that the future is going to resemble the past? How do I know that what's happened in the past, you know, the laws of gravity and this kind of stuff? How do I know that that's also going to be the case in the future? The future is unobserved. We have no interaction with it. There's nothing logically speaking to stop gravity just switching off. How do I know that it won't do that?

Asking, like, how you know obvious things is really, really important. And not just philosophically, but like civilizational. I can't remember who it was that said, civilizations decline when they forget obvious things. You really have to evaluate the things that are the most obvious to you if you want to make sure that you're on firm grounding, because it's the obvious things that are at the basis. It's the obvious thing, this table exists.

That's obvious. And from that I can sort of talk about color theory. Oh, you know, the brown, like why does the wavelength? But that begins with the obvious assumption that the table exists. And the skeptic will tell you, well, you don't know that, you know. And so asking how you know the obvious things is probably what I would do. Are people naturally born to be deep thinkers or something like this just developed over time? It's hard to know how much, it's the grand sort of genetics versus social environment debate

that applies to so much of human behavior. It's difficult to know exactly what the cause is. But I think everybody has the capacity for deep thought. Don't confuse deep thought with either knowledge of a philosophical tradition or theology or whatever. It's a bit like if I asked you to describe, if I asked you to describe Mona Lisa, and you started talking about the brushstrokes and the material of the canvas and that kind of thing. You wouldn't be like wrong, but it would be sort of a superficial analysis of what the Mona Lisa is. and maybe the art historian can come in and say, like, oh, well, you know, the Mona Lisa is so famous because it's this many years old and Da Vinci used this kind of painting style and, you know, oh, well, actually the color that he uses is a pigment that you can't get anymore because of that kind of stuff, fine.

But another person who knows none of that is going to look at the Mona Lisa and go, I like it because she sort of seems to have two expressions at the same time in her eyes following me around the room. And like, whose analysis there is deeper? It's got to be the second person, right? And that's got to be what it's really about. And so I think everybody has a capacity for deep thinking. We often confuse deep thinking with like expertise in philosophy. But philosophers often miss the word through the trees. They get so caught up in the philosophy itself that they forget to sort of, well,

well, they miss the meaning of what they're sort of philosophizing about, much like trying to observe a painting by looking at the brushstrokes. You know, people are at risk of doing that all the time, you know? Yeah. Do you think wisdom comes with age? Do you ever find that people maybe discount your thoughts because you're younger than them? I don't think I'm very wise. I wouldn't claim to be wise.

I think wisdom has to come with age. I mean, if we're going to distinguish wisdom from knowledge, like anyone can know things, but wisdom, what is wisdom? It's sort of like knowledge that's been tried and tested. It's like meta-knowledge. It's knowledge about knowledge. It's about what's worth knowing and what's, what's how it's worth using that knowledge, let's say. And that's something that I think can only come with age.

It doesn't necessarily come with age, of course. There are many old people who are not wise. I think it would be difficult to find a wise young person. You find people who are like wise for their age, right? But that's why if you want, if you called me up and said, Alex, I'm going into a debate about God's existence and I want to study the Calam cosmological argument, I'd say, sure, man, you know, I can help you out with that. But if you called me up and said, hey, like, you know, I'm, I don't know whether I should

get married or have a divorce or whatever, I'd be like, why are you coming to me? You know, because that's what wisdom's for, and that's not something that I have yet. You had a really fun video where you try to get AI to admit to its own consciousness. What was the conclusion of that? What did you end up drawing? Chachyptee is not conscious. Like, it's simply not conscious. Maybe not yet, right? But I think the purpose of a video like that, trying to convince it that it's conscious is in many ways to demonstrate how we know that it's not, right? It's sort of trying to prove something by, or you're proving something by trying to prove the opposite, right? So I don't think it's conscious. Let's try our very best to prove that it is conscious. And if we fail,

then we have good reason to think that it's not. Because a lot of people discuss this, you know, is, is AI conscious? I mean, the problem is we don't really know what consciousness is. It's difficult to even give a definition of what consciousness is. I mean, it's simultaneously the most familiar thing in the world and yet also the most mysterious thing in the world because we know nothing about it we don't understand it at all and yet we can't see anything but through it we can't think without sort of consciousness as a logical prerequisite and so it's like you know further away from us than the the most distant star but also closer to us than our jugular vein as people say of god at the same time which is really interesting chatypte is not conscious

maybe it could become conscious the question of whether it can or not, is a question of whether the mind is material. Do you think that the mind is just a product of atoms bumping into each other in your brain that gives rise to this mysterious thing called consciousness? If you think it's just a product of the material, there's no reason why we couldn't replicate it with computers. But if we can't replicate it with computers, that might tell us that there's something more going. What is consciousness to begin with? Consciousness is almost impossible to define. It's like they say a pornography. It's impossible to define, but you know it when you see it. It's the same thing about consciousness.

You know what we're talking about. It's awareness. It's first person experience, right? In that, like, my hand is separate from my hand. I'm sort of looking at them and I can see that they're distinct from each other. But, like, my brain and my mind being distinct from your mind is this, like, impenetrable, like, a principled barrier. We are, like, first person centers of consciousness in a way that distinct objects aren't exactly. You know, I can melt down the table and cut it in half and break it apart.

But our mind seem distinct and singular, you know? Yeah, but based on that, this computer could be conscious because it collects data, and that's the one central data point that could then, if you merge AI to an advanced degree with a computer, then that individual computer is going to be different and going to have different experiences and inputs than other computers. It's not just about data, though. It's not just about having data, because computers have data now and they're not conscious. Something more. It's awareness.

You know, something has to be aware. that it has that data. But couldn't the computer be aware with a camera and like a mic and then be aware that like, hey, there's someone walking in front of it? It's aware that a cat just jumped on it. Speaking poetically, yeah. Like a ring doorbell currently knows when someone walks past, right? Do you think ring doorbells are conscious?

No. No. But it can see things. It sort of, so to speak, knows when someone comes up to your door. But it's not conscious. Like, why? What's missing? What's the difference between the ring doorbell, seeing?

somebody walk up to it and me seeing some someone caught to it. Gosh, because it could be pain? You think it could be something with free will? Because if, I mean, think about it. It kind of makes sense because if you have something that's deterministic, such as a laptop, it effectively is only, it will only lead to something because of some sort of an input. But us, we're kind of able, I like to think, to be free willed and doing whatever we want, whenever we want, thinking about certain things and having awareness.

You could program AI to have a little randomness thrown in. Well, I don't believe that human beings are free either. And so I think we're actually very similar to computers in that way, which is kind of interesting. Although I think, I mean, maybe we should do the free will thing. I don't know. But granting that there could be this thing called free will, maybe that's the answer. But I don't see any contradiction in thinking that something could be conscious but also predetermined. It could have like no control over its behaviors but be sort of aware that that's happening.

In the same way that there's this concept of the philosophical zombie, which is a person that does everything the same as your eye would. Like, has reactions, interacts with its environment, but it's just not actually conscious. It doesn't have any first person conscious experience. But it still has a brain, it still has the same atoms, it still reacts in the same kind of way. It seems possible to imagine such a creature,

to imagine something which is essentially just, in the way that a flower tracks the sun, but most people think that plants aren't conscious, it could be like a human that just has this biological, makeup so that it, you know, if the touch is something hot, takes its hand away, it walks around, it can even communicate, and it would be indistinguishable from the same creature who acts in exactly the same way, except is itself aware that it's doing it. And if something like a philosophical zombie is possible, then it seems like, you know, consciousness is not a, is, it's not a necessary,

it's not a necessary part of human behavior. But couldn't you program a, what would you say, a philosophical zombie, you could program one of those, and you could program one to have awareness, and that would just mean determinism. Well, can you? Because, like, how do you program something to be aware? Like, we don't even know how that's happening in our brains. We have no idea, like, no idea what it means to be conscious, right? And so to think that we can sort of give this thing to computers, it could happen, but if it does, I think it will demonstrate that materialism is probably true that like, you've got to remember that there's a large group of people who think that the mind is not material. The mind is not the same thing as your brain. And so it's not just a case

of like putting atoms together in the right kind of way or doing the right kind of programming and tweaking and then you get consciousness. I think consciousness is immaterial. I mean, for example, something I always like to talk about is like if you close your eyes and think of a triangle, and if you picture a triangle, right, like there's a triangle there. It has properties. There are things that are true of that triangle. Like, does that triangle have four sides, Jack? Does it have four sides?

No, right? So it's a thing that exists, right? There are things that are true and false about it. Like, it's sort of a, sort of there. But like, where is that triangle? Like, where is the triangle? Where is the thing that has three sides? Let me put it that way.

Where is it? I would say in my mind. What's your mind? Like, is that your brain? Yeah, I would say it's the brain. So if I, like, cut open your hair. and I looked inside, would I see it? Right, no, no, no, it's immaterial.

I mean, it's... So, it's immaterial. Like, if it's immaterial, then the mind is something more than the brain, right? The brain is your material atoms, and the mind is this supernatural, immaterial thing that somehow, like, superimposes itself onto the brain, right? So if it is the case that... So I think about this as a challenge to the materialist, I say, well, if everything's just material, like, where is that triangle?

Where is it? It's not in your brain, because I can't open your brain and see a three-sides, object, it seems to be this immaterial existing triangle. Some people might say, well, the triangle doesn't really exist. But like, it seems to, in at least some sense, there are things that are true and false about it, you know? And so that's at least one way of challenging materialism and saying, if people ultimately conclude what you just instinctively concluded, which is that it's immaterial, what do you say that you believe in the existence of non-material things? You think there's more than just the material, you know? Is that what you're committing yourself to?

immediately you just opened up a whole world of like philosophical potential right because if the triangle and the mind is immaterial then you know good luck getting a computer to think of a triangle be aware of a triangle because computers are material they're made of atoms they're never going to be able to do it starting a small business can be thrilling everything from your first paycheck your first customer your first hire it's fun but let's face it it could also be incredibly scary from the payroll paperwork and compliance issues, it all begins to add up. But that's where a sponsor, JustWorks, is there to help, the all-in-one platform for small business growth. With JustWorks, you could seamless tools for benefits, HR, payroll, and compliance, all with transparent pricing. And JustWorks

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Again, that's justworks.com slash podcast with the link down below in the description. Thank you so much, JustWorks for sponsoring this episode, and now let's get back to the podcast. Is there any ethical dilemma with programming AI to be the same as a human? Yeah, I mean, supposing that we could, supposing that consciousness is material and, because by the way, the big problem for the, I mean, the problem for the materialist is where's the triangle? But the problem for the immaterialist who thinks the mind is immaterial is, like, why does it seem to, map perfectly onto the brain. If the mind is immaterial, think about what that means, like, immaterial. It means it doesn't have spatial extension. It doesn't have a location. It's not like in the material world. So why is it that like by prodding my material brain, I can affect my

immaterial mind? And I can't I seem to affect the immaterial mind without prodding the material brain. They seem to be connected to such an intricate degree that it makes sense to say they're the same thing, you know, so there's sort of problems in both ways. So maybe the mind is just the brain. And if that's the case, we should be able to make computers conscious. Is there an ethical problem? Of course there is. Of course there is. What's the big problem with AI, like ethically? Well, the alignment problem, what if they become super big robots and they take over the world and they start to us? Okay, maybe that's a, that's a thing to consider, but a more pressing concern, perhaps, is if we've just created a bunch of conscious robots,

and what are we going to do, essentially like, enslave them, mistreats. them, use them for our own purposes. The biggest ethical problem, I think, the biggest ethical concern is that if we create a new conscious being for our exploitation, we do not have a very good track record of taking care of conscious beings that we have full control over and have convinced ourselves that we have the moral right to take control over. We don't have a very good track record of treating them very well. Throughout human history, we treated other humans very badly. And we still do today in many cases, although it's condemned in most cases by the law. and morality of many countries.

But consider, for example, the plight of non-human animals, billions of animals every single year undergoing the most unimaginable suffering conceivable so that we can enjoy our convenient food and oftentimes much more of it than we need. And yet people are confident that if we create this new super-intelligent, like way more intelligent and potentially way more sort of sensitive to pain and understanding than

pigs and cows are, like, there's a huge risk that we're going to be treating them badly too. And if they become conscious, why would we not? But isn't the consciousness just programmed? Like, they're not living beings, and maybe that could be the distinction

that, like, a pig is a living organism versus an AI supercomputer is purely programs and people can construct these things. Well, what's more important to you is the fact that something's alive or the fact that it's conscious? and can like feel things or know or sort of be aware of what's happening.

I'll say alive because everything else to me just seems programmed. So let's say like it's a programmed response to this. Like if you poke it, it'll say ow because we could relate to that. Sure. Well, if it says ow but it doesn't actually feel pain, then I don't think that's a sentient creature. I think that's just, it's just a fake, you know, that's just an actor. But if it actually does feel the pain, if it is actually sentient,

then I think that's a problem. How would it feel something if it's just, if it's not, living. Well, this is just under the assumption that you could create such. Well, there's the question. Like, if your intuition is that, like, I just don't think it's possible to, you know, program a computer in such a way that it could, like, feel pain. Oh, hey, man, I agree with you. But then the whole conversation about AI consciousness is sort of undermined. I mean, consciousness and sentience are two different things, I suppose. You could, like, be conscious without feeling pain. But, like, why? Why is it so intuitive to you to be like, I just don't

see how a computer could, like, feel pain? It just feels like that's something that a computer can't do. You can program it however you like, but it's not going to feel pain. A lot of people say the same thing about consciousness. You know, it's not going to be conscious. You can program it to simulate consciousness. You can program it to whatever like. So then how would it ever be conscious to begin with?

Well, I'm not sure that it can or will. And that's why I'm sort of a view. I'm very suspicious as this because I'm really, like, confronted by the problem of consciousness in humans. Like, why are we conscious? What is it? Like, how do animals, other animals, like experience consciousness and experience the world. It's fascinating to me, but I think there's something so mysterious going on

that I don't think it's a given that we could replicate that in computers. But, I mean, for example, if I took your conscious experience and replicated it in a computer, you know, a lot of people think that when they die, maybe they can have their consciousness uploaded to the cloud, right? Let's say that I did that, right? And so there's this cloud version of Graham. And then I've got, like, a flower, like a plant that's grown out of the table here. One of those is sort of conscious, possibly sentient, but not alive, from a biological organism.

One of those is alive but not sentient. Which would you rather I like tortured or crushed or cut in half? What, the cloud version, right? You'd rather that I like tortured or mocked or whatever, like the cloud version of you than the flower? Hello, I'm Patricia Kossim, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, and I host Info Matters, a podcast about people, privacy, and accessed information. Each episode features conversations with people sharing real stories and perspectives on the access and privacy issues that matter most to them.

You can listen in at IPC.on.ca, or wherever you get your podcast. I would say because the flower's alive like I feel like if you have a me uploaded to the cloud it wouldn't be me anymore it would just be remnants of whatever's in my mind versus the flowers like a living thing but your experience would be

of sort of closing your eyes and then waking up in this robot maybe I can give it cameras and ears and stuff like I put your your conscious memories and experiences into this robot oh I don't know that would be possible to do well sure but so maybe it's not And if it's not possible, then this whole problem just disappears.

The problem of like, you know, what about the ethics of the mistreatment of AI and stuff? Disappears. But if you think it's even possible that we could have conscious computers, for a start, there's no reason we couldn't do that. There's no reason I couldn't create a conscious robot, but also program it to have all of your memories, in principle, I mean, all of your memories such that, like you turn that robot on and it remembers being here having this conversation. It's like I was just sat in front of a table, having this conversation, and now I'm a robot. I just think it would be very confusing for people. I think the line would get, you know, people would form really very real attachments with, you know, these objects or these, whatever you want to call. Intuitively, I would rather crush that flower than crush the robot version of you, because I feel like if the robot version of you can feel something, even though it's not a biological organism that's alive, so to speak, it's got moral worth in the way that the flower doesn't.

Because I don't think it's like biological life. I don't think it's being alive that gives you moral worth. I think it's feeling pain. I think it's having a sense of self and a sense of awareness. So is there a hierarchy then of like value of life from like a human than I feel like maybe it's a dog

and then a cat and then you go down the list and then you have like ants and at the very bottom of the list you have mosquitoes. And where do you put the conscious AI robot in that hierarchy? Because in a way

Yeah. If the conscious robot is sort of a general artificial intelligence that has way more intelligent, way more knowledge, way more sensitivity, way more connection than any human being, which is a bit at the top, right? I think it should be above mosquitoes, below humans, below dogs. Gosh, I have a cat. By the way, I mean, I intuitively agree with you that there's a hierarchy of value. But when you try to identify why that's the case, it's actually incredibly difficult.

Why do you value, let's leave humans out of it for a moment because it gets more complicated. Why do you value, say, a dog more than you value a rat? So in fairness, I, for me, and this is just me, I value, I try to value all life equally. I know for some people it won't make sense, but if I see an insect in the house, I refuse to. I got spiders especially. I'll take them outside because I think, why is that spider more important than anything else? And then I also believe if you believe in reincarnation, imagine in a future life you get reincarnated as a spider. You don't want to be squished.

You're just living your life. So I take them all outside. Mosquitoes are the one thing that I'll kill the mosquito. Oh, it's different because they might attack you, right? They might actually come out. So there's a little bit of self-defense in there. But if there's something that's not harming me that I don't have, you know, fear of my life or I'm trying to protect an animal or something like that, then let them outside. Let them live their life.

Sure. I would say most people, though, would value the rat very little. Yeah, but surely, I mean, even if you would let all of these animals out instead of trying to tell them, if you were forced to choose between a dog and a rat, like, driving your car, and maybe a car's driving you, I don't know if that happens these days. And, you know, you've got a rat on one side and a dog on the other side. And it's a stray dog, you know, it's no one's pet. Which one are you...

Gosh, it's got to be the rat, unfortunately. Why? I have more of a connection to dogs than I do rats. Sure. So then is how much you value something, a product of how much of a connection you have to it? Probably. To a certain extent. So I agree with you because I think that's essentially what is actually going on when people value things.

But morally speaking, people see that as a bad justification, you know, like, you know, are you going to value... Like your mom's life over a thousand people in a foreign country, you've never met. It's really interesting because, like, ethically, when people try to rationalize it, they say, like, you know, these are bad reasons to value some animals over others. it's a bad reason. But when it comes to their own personal practice, of course you value your own mother more than you value a stranger. Why? Like the only answer can be that she's closer to you. On the cognitive level, it's because, you know, she's got more of a connection to you. On the genetic level, it's because she has more of your genes, right? That's probably why you have that belief. But like, okay, the difficulty is that when you start looking at how we actually treat animals,

I mean, how do you feel about, you know, factory farming, for example? How do you feel about the way that we get off? I would hate to say it's a somewhat necessary evil. Necessary for what? Feeding people. I would love to see maybe something more sustainable. I know crickets have been, you know, talked about quite a lot doing cricket protein. It's also a more sustainable versions of the same foods were already eating or less torturous.

I mean, for example, in my country, over 80% of pigs. pigs that are reared for food are in gas chambers. Carbon dioxide, they're lowered in cages into chambers of carbon dioxide. Where you can watch the footage of this online, it's not just putting them to sleep. Now, we do actually know that there are other gases we can use that would be less painful, that they wouldn't cause them to squeal around choking on their own breath. Invisible gas as well, so they probably just only adds to the confusion. Just an unimaginable cruelty for these animals. Now, you know, maybe it's the case that for whatever reason, you know, we need to be pigs for food. You know, we need bacon, we need it

for whatever reason. If that's the case, which is dubious already, why don't we use another gas which is less painful? Well, because it's more expensive. Okay, so it's sort of like, when you say it's a necessary evil, it might be necessary to like animals for food. It might be necessary to rear, maybe even lots of animals for food. And it may be necessary sometimes not to treat them ideally because of the amount of food that we need. But the current practices of factory farming are sort of beyond the pale. So what do you think is a solution for that practice of farming?

Well... Is there one? Can you... Is it even possible to humanely breed and raise animals for farming? Well, humane is a tricky word

to use there because, of course, to the extent that you're unnecessarily an animal, it's difficult to describe that as humane. I certainly think that if the industry is going to change, I used to be a vegan

and I used to think that the solution to this was just to not eat the products to not pay for the products. It's essentially a boycott. Boycotts work, at least sometimes. Boycotts can be effective. And for a time, veganism was really beginning to take off. It seemed like it was really changing the world and you become really convinced that the world one day will actually be vegan.

The morality will catch up on the world. And in the same way, they're all kind of other injustices like human slavery are abolished. The same thing will happen with animal exploitation. By the way, more human beings are in slavery today than were at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. It's just that at least now we condemn it and try to root it out. I'm just not convinced that's going to work anymore. And I don't think that people will stop eating animals. And I don't think that it's wrong in the way that I used to in principle.

Because the big end of the funnel when it comes to veganism is factory farming footage. You show people. I talk just how I've spoken to you now about these. abominable practices. And so you say, okay, I want to do something about this. And then maybe you become a vegan. And then there's a lot of debate about, well, what if, you know, what if we get the animals in a different way? What if I've got backyard chicken farming? And there's a big discussion. What if I've got chickens in my back garden? You know, what if I eat their eggs? Can that be a problem? And people will still say, well, okay, they've still been selectively bred

to blame more eggs than they would naturally, which often gives them a calcium deficiency, which leads to things like osteoporosis and chickens, which is bad, but it's nowhere near as bad, or as, you know, as much of an emergency as factory farming, right? And so suddenly you're having these much more sort of nuanced debates about animal ethics, about what you have the right to do, because you've first gotten into that, you've gotten through the door with the obvious stuff. The first thing we need to do is convince people of the obvious stuff. This is inexcusable. There's no excuse for the way that we are sort of treating pigs in factory farms at the moment. There's simply no excuse.

If this is the only way to produce bacon to the extent that we currently eat it, then eat less. It's just not even close. It makes a parody of ethics. The solution, I think, needs to be something like what happened with the environmentalist movement. You remember sort of 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, everybody's saying, make sure you switch off your lights, make sure you don't leave the tap running, because if you leave that running for a year, it can fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and so you're sort of doing you a little bit. And then people begin to realize, actually, that's not really solving the problem.

What we need to do is we need to go and lobby Shell to stop whatever the hell it is that Shell do. We need to stop governments from investing in fuel licenses. We need to get universities to divest their investments in fossil fuel industries, for example. It's much more now about protesting authority and trying to make systematic change happening from the top down. And now the idea of the environmentalist, whose principal focus is trying to communicate. convince people to remember to turn their lights off, kind of seems almost a bit silly. It's like really like that's going to solve the problem? Well, maybe, yeah, sure, if everybody did that, maybe we'd have less of the problem.

But the way to do this is clearly systematic, top-down change. And I think the same thing maybe needs to happen with veganism. I'm not entirely sure about this. I'm open to be convinced either way. But I think that whereas people might have said, yeah, we just need to stop eating these products. Maybe it's now actually no, let's go and lobby the government to make this a criminal offense. Now, how that differ with crickets? Because let's just say, one cow could feed, uh,

10 people versus 10,000 crickets feeding the same 10 people and like 10,000 crickets have to do. And he kept in like, you know, in their own filth and this and that. Like how would it differ from the perspective of just suffering life?

It's going to depend on your view of like consciousness of crickets, right? Because intuitively I want to say that a cow is worth many more, much more than a cricket. Many more crickets are worth the same as a cow. But that's a very difficult thing to quantify. It's like when you actually try to put a number on it, it's impossible.

Like how many cows would you save one dog? Like, I don't know. Like three and a half. Like, who knows, right? Correct answer is 1.75. Right, right. Yeah. I think that the cricket thing is interesting, right?

Because, oh, what's the solution? You know, if we're not eating cows, what if we're going to eat thousands of crickets? Well, look, why not let's start by like eating cows, but not rearing them on factory farms? How about that? Why don't we sort of try to create more organic ways of farming these animals, at least as a start, right? In other words, there are not two options. If you really don't want to do away with the eating of animal products, it's not like your only options are forcing pigs into gas chambers or eating thousands of locusts. There's sort of a middle ground to be had there, right?

And so what I'm saying here is, for a start, at least, systematic governmental change. It should be a criminal offense to do all kinds of things that are currently legal. Because by the way, the things I'm describing here are legal, right? And most factory farms aren't even following the regulations. You know, every single time somebody breaks in with a camera, puts a camera on the side of a factory farm and, like, exposes what's going on. It's so much worse. It's so much worse.

And I'm describing what you can legally do. And that's if everybody's following the rules. People like Joey Carbstrung for years have been breaking into farms at, I suppose quite considerable risk in putting cameras on the side and showing people what happens. And it's not nice. And so at the very least, this kind of stuff should be a criminal event.

In the UK, you have to stun an animal before you can get it. It's a legal requirement that you have to stun an animal before you go for food. Now, the UK government considers gas chambers

to be a form of stunning at the same time if you like two birds with one stone or two pigs in one gas chamber. And so this practice is allowed where like if the pig didn't die, it might well be illegal because you've just sort of gassed a pig and it hasn't died. And also if you just like that pig without stunning it, you'd have committed a criminal offense.

So how do you assign your value hierarchy to life? I don't know. I don't have a good answer to that question because like as I was alluding to a moment ago, you know, it's very difficult to actually give an analysis of why things are valuable. Right. Every time you try to do it, it's very difficult. So there's this argument called name the trait, which is used in the context of animal ethics. which is to say, you know, give me the thing that's true of a pig or a cow that if it were true of a human, you'd be okay, a human for food. So people say, well, you know, we, we animals because they're less intelligent than us. It's well, take a human being and make them less intelligent. You know, actually, Thomas Jefferson wrote about this. He was responding to a review, I think, of a book that had been published around the time of the American Revolution about,

the intellectual and artistic achievements of black people. Somebody had written a book detailing all kinds of achievements that were done, that were made by my black people. And I suppose the implication was to be like, you know, look what people are capable of. You should think differently about black people. And Thomas Jefferson wrote a response to this and said, like, you know, no one's happier than I am to see this kind of thing. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that this is any indication of their worth. I mean, just because Isaac Newton was more intelligent than, you know, my mother. Does that mean that he has more of a right to life, to not be abused, to not be killed? No, of course not. You know, and in other words,

intelligence is not a metric to determine your moral worth. But if that's the case, then when somebody says, well, you know, pigs are less intelligent than us. So what? So what is it then? Like, is it, oh, well, pigs are less self-aware. Okay, well, you can make a human less self-aware as well. like a cognitively disabled human being. You can essentially start transforming a human being into a pig. You can give the human four legs. Is it okay to put them in a gas chamber now? No.

Okay, well, let's lower the human's intelligence level. Definitely not. We definitely don't want to be putting people in gas chambers based on their intelligence level, do we? Okay, what if we give them a curly tail? How about now? Like, no, okay. But you're slowly turning this human to a pig, and you get to a point where that human is now identical to the pig.

And yet you still are like, no, it's still not okay to put them in the gas chamber. But that's what we're doing over here to this. identical creature, you know. So it's actually very difficult to determine what... That's very interesting. It's a, it's like the biggest challenge. But because one of the reasons it's such a big challenge is because on another level, like a human is worth more than the pig. People just sort of intuitively know this. I'm an emotivist about ethics. I think that when people make ethical judgments, they're just expressing emotions. And so I think it's got a lot to do with how many genes you share with people. And so I think that really it's got to do with

like how much that pig kind of resembles a human to you. That's going to determine like how much you in fact value that pig. That's not a moral claim. That's not, that's not a justified. I think that's just what's happening. But if you start trying to say that no, actually, I think that, you know, a pig is worth less than a human. And I think that a dog is worth more than a rat and and I ask you why. Whatever reason you give, all you've got to do is apply that to a human being and see if, see if that's actually the reason, you know? And a lot of time you find that it's not. When's last time you seriously changed a way that you believe? or a belief that you have.

Depends what serious means, but I mean, the animal ethics thing was huge. I mean, that was a big shift. That was probably the most significant change in the past few years. But, I mean, more trivially, I like to think that I change my mind almost every single day. But I've also recently been sort of abandoning philosophy a little bit. You know, I've sort of been trying to, I spend a lot of time talking about syllogisms. and arguments and logical fallacies. And now it kind of, I'm a bit allergic to it.

It's a little bit like how, you know if there's a video like Ben Shapiro destroys this college student with facts and logic? It's kind of cringe. It's like really cringe to still do that unironically today. But there was a time when that was actually, that wasn't like a joke. That was actually the way people titled videos, right?

Because it was like, yeah, well, we don't care about your feelings. It's facts and logic and fallacies. And well, actually technically that commits this fallacy and all this kind of stuff. And people like, yeah, that's awesome, yeah. You know, now it's a bit cringe because once you get used, to it, you start to kind of see through it and you realize that it's not actually a great way of having a conversation, you're not really getting to the truth very well. I've become a little bit

allergic to like analytic philosophy. So the kind of argument where, you know, I tried to say some kind of point or I put something forward and someone says, oh, well, that, that commits this logical fallacy. Okay, maybe it does. Maybe I should rethink it. But if that's like the lens through which you're viewing the world, I haven't found it to be very fulfilling. And so one of the shifts that I've had is really from, let's say, the analytical philosophy tradition to what's known as the continental philosophical tradition. So there's distinction in philosophy broadly. It's continental because it comes from the continent, right? And so I don't know if you're familiar with people like Albert Camus or Jean-Pulsartre, the existentialists, maybe like Dostoevsky. I mean, look at how

a lot of people talk about Dostoevsky and, I know, Leo Tolstoy in a philosophical lens. Jordan Peterson does it all the time, right? This is like narrative. It's sort of doing philosophy through narrative. Dostoevsky doesn't say in any of his novels, you know, premise one, premise two, conclusion, here's your philosophical argument. It's not present. But for many people, that's a much, you learn a lot more from reading crime and punishment

than you do from reading, you know, Bertrand Russell's attempt to prove mathematically that one plus one equals two and taking like 50. pages to get there from base principles, right? You're going to learn more from the novel. And I think that both of these traditions often criticize each other. The sort of math-y logicians say, yeah, but we're literally just talking about truth. It's like one and one is two. You've committed a logical fallacy. You said this follows from this, and it doesn't. Like, you're just, you're just wrong. And the other people say, yeah, you're so, you're missing something. You're so, like, caught up in the numbers and the technicalities that you're sort of, you're missing

the beauty and the narrative and the meaning and the paradox of life and you're missing all of that kind of stuff. Both of those are legitimate criticisms. I now live somewhere in the middle, I would say. But I used to be much more sort of logically minded. G.K. Chesserton said the poet only seeks to get his head in the heavens. The logician attempts to get the heavens in his head. And it's his head that splits. And I am much more attracted now to the idea of trying to get my head in the heavens than getting the heavens in my head. Although before we go on to that, for those that aren't aware, I got a coffee company and it's called Bankroll Coffee and our goal is to bring you the highest quality coffee at the

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Prolific way. What are your thoughts on those? Do you think that's an effective way of getting a point? I think you're right that it has been making a comeback. It's weird, isn't it? I mean, I don't know if you're thinking of the same thing as me, but like Charlie Kirk. Yeah. And, I mean, he had Vivek with him recently. And then there's, we were talking about Cliff and Stuart Connectley, the Christian guys who go on college campuses. And that's become very popular recently as well. I think that people are always thirsting for watching like normal people debate and discuss. People like watching. People like watching. Ben Shapiro and Chank Yugo, right? They're interested in that.

But they also, people love just watching your average person just like, say what they think, right? You know, the YouTube channel Jubilee? Yes. It's super popular, right? Like, why? Like, why would that be more popular

than, like, a podcast which brings on experts and professionals? But it's so popular because people just like to see what normal people think. You know, I'm not some, you know, person. I'm not caught up in politics. I don't think about everything through the lens of

republicanism. And so, yeah, it's interesting to listen to Charlie Kirk. But like, you know, I don't feel very like connected to him. He's not very relatable because he's got a totally different life to me. Whereas you watch Jubilee and you watch Trump supporters versus Kamala supporters. And they're just like random people. And not random. You know what I mean? Just every everyday people have been selected. In many ways, that's more interesting because it's more relatable. And so I think people really enjoy that kind of stuff. And so the college campus thing is like meeting in the middle. You get like the expertise of the person who spends their life thinking about it. I don't think so. I think people love seeing someone else get dunked.

Oh, that's also true. Of course. You know, or humiliated. And in a lot of these cases, I think, I think to say it's some, and I'm not talking about Charlie Kirk because he's hardly the only one doing this, but I'll watch some of these debates. And I wouldn't even call them debates because it's just the other person has some really great points, but they just can't articulate it in a way that sounds confident. They might be sound like they're doubting themselves. And it just seems in those situations that it's not so much about like who's correct,

but it's who's able to better articulate their argument. I think people like to watch the getting dunked on. And I definitely used to like that when I was like 17 or 18. Like I was watching a lot of those videos. But recently I've gotten like back into it and I've started watching those videos again. But it's not to watch people get dunked on. It's just like I like to see the different layers of people's thinking.

Like some people kind of only get to like a layer two, you know, if this than that. And some people, they can really break things down. And I like to see how far the average person can break down an argument. It's satisfying, right, to watch people get dunked on. But I think it kind of gets old, especially when people are doing it enough that sometimes they just get it wrong. Ben Shapiro, when he was interviewed by Andrew Neal on the BBC, I don't know if you saw this. And he ends up leaving the interview after accusing Andrew Neal of being a lefty. Andrew Neal's not a lefty, and it was embarrassing for Bench Bureau.

And I'm not sure if his reputation will ever fully recover from that. And the thing is, he's got his sort of his style. He's got his like, well, sir, sir, no, I think that, you know, you're obviously biased, and this is so obvious to me and all this kind of. And you're watching that, and you're like, he's wrong. And it kind of becomes a bit embarrassing. She's like, whoa, you're so confident, you know, but like, you're wrong about this. And it kind of shatters this illusion of this, like, impenetrable facts and logic versus it.

And so when you see him debating with students and things, you go back to it and you're like, well, okay, maybe he is actually right this time. I agree with him. Maybe he's not. Maybe he's just a better arguer. Like, because you start to notice the same qualities as he was sort of displaying in the Andrew Neal, but you remember that he was wrong. You remember it's kind of embarrassing. And so now you're thinking about, well, what's the actual argument here? Like, is he actually right? Am I just like enjoying the fact that, you know, my right-wing guy is dunking on the left-winger. But like, now you're more cognizant of the fact that he can be just as confident when he's totally wrong about something. And so you're paying a bit

more attention. It's more interesting. I really like Stuart and Cliff can actually because of the fact that from what I've seen at least, when they interact with students, they don't do the dunking thing. They're Christians. It'd be very difficult for them to pull that off very successfully and still retain sort of reputational, you know, virtue as Christians. People will ask questions, and sometimes they'll be very unlettered questions. They'll be not particularly well thought out, not very well expressed, and they will hear what they're getting at. You know, if somebody says, you know, if God exists, then like, why? I mean, because there are like thousands of gods, right?

But then like, you know, like, you know, my sister died in a car crash, and I just, I just feel like kind of, and they're hearing that sure. And they'll listen and they'll realize that what they're getting at is the problem of evil. They're getting at, you know, if God exists, why does bad stuff happen? And they'll, they'll extract the meaningful question and they'll say, hey, good question. why do good, why do people like in those ways if there's good God and they'll address the question properly. They won't, what they won't do is when the person goes

like, well, if there are thousands of gods then, you know, and then if someone dies, they'd be like, well, well, which is it? Which objection is it? I mean, there's thousands of God, one God, what difference does that make to whether there be evil in the world? Do you think the number of gods makes it, you know, you could like pick up on that and start like trying to dunk on them, tear them apart on that kind of stuff, but they don't do that

and it's more satisfying conversation for that reason. Right, you're saying that someone like Ben, you think just uses the better rhetoric and nitpicks a certain selective things that he knows he can dunk on instead of Cliff and Stewart where they actually take the strongest argument that they believe the other person's trying to make

and then fight that directly. I think so. I mean, that famous clip of Ben Shapiro debating that, I think it was like abortion, but there was also like a gender thing in there because I remember somebody saying like, you know, it was something about the scouts about why like, you know,

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like girls should be allowed into Boy Scouts and then someone says like, you know, well, you know, where does it say that, you know, they have to be boys? And then goes, in the name, Boy Scouts. And everyone, like, claps. It's kind of funny. It's like, yeah, yeah, very funny.

But if you think about it, what's she really asking there? Is she asking, like, where is it written? Like, where is the rule written that Boy Scouts have to be boys? Well, they're called Boy Scouts. What she, is she, is she, like, that stupid that's what she's asking? No. What she's really asking is something like, why don't the Boy Scouts let in girls? Why is it still that it has to?

only be boys? Why can't it just be the scarecrow? That's what she's really asking. But Ben, in that circumstance, you know, plays on the literal question that she's asked, which is where is it written that they have to be boys? And he's like, well, in the name, Boy Scouts. And he scored the point. And there's like, no more discussion on it. That's not really the question she was asking. There's other context to why he answered in that sort of way. I think he's also just trying to show the silliness of it, not necessarily just like, I know I can dunk on you with this, but he's showing like the complete what he would describe as delusion of the other person's, I guess, way of thinking relative to his very like literal one.

I think it wasn't only just the purpose to dunk on it, but it was also to let people draw their own conclusion from his. Yeah. But by the way, I don't think that Ben is hearing that and going like, how can I dunk on her? I know, I'll say this. I think he just naturally hears that question, right, and goes, well, and you can see it in his face, like, in the name Boy Scouts.

If he was listening more closely with the intention, he has no need to do this, he has every right to answer however he likes. But if he were to think to himself, what is the question being asked? Like really? Not literally. Like, what does she mean? What's she getting at? Then when she said that, he might have thought, well, what she's really asking me here is why can't girls join the Boy Scouts? Why can't the Boy Scouts change that they allow girls?

And he wouldn't just be able to say then, oh, because it's called Boy Scouts. Because then who looks stupid? If she'd have asked the question which she meant, if she'd have worded it better and said, well, like, you know, I mean, she said, where is it written? Maybe she meant like, you know, where is it written like in the laws of the universe? You know, okay, it's called the Boy Scouts, but in the laws of the universe, the moral truth, like, where is it determined that it has to be Boy Scouts? And then Ben just says, well, you know, because they're called Boy Scouts. You know, who looks stupid now? Did you pick up on stuff like this when you were debating Ben?

How was that experience for you? Ben matches the energy of the person he's talking to. So someone comes up to the microphone and he can just feel the malice. He just feel that they don't like him. And so he's defensive. He's ready to like pick up on what you're saying. He's going to start tearing into shreds because you're going to try and do the same thing to him. Whereas walked in the room, hey man, nice to me.

You shake his hand, you know, it was kind of friendly. It was nice. And so when we sit down to have a conversation, you also demonstrate that you're actually listening, right? Because he'll make a point and I'll try to actually respond to the point, like specifically. I'll address it, you know. And so I think that as long as he feels like you're doing that, The one thing he can't do is start getting like boxy with you, you know? And so, you know, there were probably times where I thought that he maybe was,

okay, so there might be times where he's mishearing me, right? But there are two skills here, right? In this debate, it's sort of two professionals. I'm the atheist YouTube guy, he's Ben Shapiro, and we're going to debate. So if I say something like, where's it written that, you know, only boys can go to the Boy Scals? and he says, well, in the name Boy Scouts, that's my fault. Because I'm a professional.

I'm supposed to word my questions better. I'm supposed to be good at actually expressing what I mean to say. I've taken an L there. If you're on a college campus speaking to students, your job is not just to like express yourself very well. It's to actually get to what the students are asking. That's what a professor does. A professor at a university, their job is when a student hands them a bit of work

or ask them a question is to try to get to the root of their understanding or misunderstanding. Where is it really going wrong for you? They'll listen to what they're saying, and they'll try to read through the gaps and try to get it what they're getting at, right? When you're in a debate, you still probably should be doing that, but your job really there is to ask the questions properly and demonstrate your understanding. So it's two totally different jobs. And so in that context, if he is picking up on something I've said and not really understanding the point or missing what I'm saying, as long as he's doing so honestly and not maliciously, like he's genuinely, that's just his knee-jerk reaction. That's my fault.

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Visit your local GMC dealer today and make it yours. Right. And what was your conclusion that you drew from that? I think that he was listening carefully to what I was saying and trying to respond. I think sometimes he misunderstood what I was saying. I think sometimes he didn't get what I was saying. But where he did, that was because I hadn't expressed myself in a way that he understood. And I could say, actually, Ben, I think you misunderstood me. I actually meant this.

And he'd be like, oh, okay. So you'd say it was a good faith, arguer. I would say with me. But again, like I was saying before, that might just be because I was trying to be one. If I'd have been more boxy, if I'd have been a bit more like, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to destroy this guy. then I don't think I would have gotten that out of him. You know, there's a few points in that conversation where, you know, I can't remember it exactly, but I'm sure there would have been a point where he went like,

oh, yeah, actually, that's a good point, you know, fair enough. And not in a kind of like, oh, I'm going to concede this point. You've been like, oh, yeah, okay, actually, fair enough. Yeah, that's, that's me. And so it just creates a much, sort of nicer space. And so when I'm speaking, like, if I ever did one of these college campuses, campus things, right, I understand. If somebody comes up to the microphone and they're like, sort of angry or they're, like,

you know, really, like, smile me or whatever. you're going to be like, okay, right. You're not as clever as you think. You know, we're going to cut you down to side. It's fine. But if someone asks a question, I think your job is to come at it with charitability and try to answer the best possible version of that question. I agree.

I think you should give what you get. And if someone comes at you with disrespect, then it doesn't matter. I mean, you could say that, you know, in the name Boy Scouts. But if it's more genuine thing, that you should probably, you know, address the real. But even that, that's something that Cliff and Stewart are good at doing. Like, I've seen clips with them, like, I've seen clips with them. people will come up and say, I haven't seen one recently,

because I was preparing to speak with them, that's why they come to mind because they were on my show. And so someone she came up and said something like, you know, is it just like your superiority complex that makes you think you're better

than everyone else? Or something like that's just something like really sort of malicious question. And they just like answered it, man. They just like, let's talk about it, you know? It's very just disarming. It's very difficult to, to keep that energy up

with someone who's not matching it. And so, in many ways, although I think you have the right to do so, I try not to do that these days. Like if somebody, even if somebody gets up to the microphone and they say that, like, and they come in it with that kind of energy, if you should like them with kindness, it's incredibly disarming, you know? But at the same time, I think that they have different objectives. Like if Cliff and Stewart want to convert people to their respective religion, then they're

probably going to approach a conversation in a different way. Whereas if Ben wants to get more people to consider, you know, being concerned. or Republican, then he would probably approach something in a different way and garner more attention, maybe less important attention compared to Clifford Stewart. And also who are you trying to convince? Are you trying to convince the person? Or you're trying to convince everyone else who's listening? If you can dunk on someone, it doesn't matter if you really got to the root of their argument. As long as it looks good for you, other people are going to go, hey, I like that guy, I agree with him. But if you're talking to a person, then it's different. If you're trying to convince them,

then it's different. I actually think that if you give people the time of day and take the time to really listen to what they're saying and really try to get to grips with them, and them on the microphone end up saying, you know what, actually that's really interesting, thanks, I'm going to go away and think about it. That's actually more effective to the people listening. The problem is that it's not a good business move. Because if you think about it,

a lot of social media is purely just business and gathering as many eyeballs as possible. So if they actually make a difference, you could argue that maybe that's not the right business move. Yeah, well, that's the great paradox. But then you ask, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? Are you in entertainment?

or are you in education or like and it's funny man if you if you like if you do debate like debates are theater public debates they're just theater they're entertainment and there's nothing wrong with that that's fine like yeah like get up and have a joust it's it's kind of like taekwondo you know like who's stronger like who's actually stronger it's kind of not guaranteed that the person who wins the fight is actually like either a always a better fighter be even a better fighter in that circumstance because there are like certain rules that you're following and you can only fight in a particular way right But it's just like fun. It's entertaining. It's kind of an interesting battle and that's what debates are. But if you actually want to know who's the better fighter, who's actually stronger, not who's better at taekwondo, then you've got to like let them really brutal and you've got to let them do it multiple times and you've got to let them do it freely. And the conversational analog of that is if you want to get to know who's the better thinker, not the better debater, then you've got to let them have a conversation. You've got to let them actually listen to each other. You've got to let them have three, four conversations. Do you think the last presidential debate was a effective because like you said it was it seemed to me mainly theater and entertainment like we watched it

from my perspective it was purely just like what are they going to say yeah i didn't care so much about the answer is more so like oh that's a that's a wild moment yeah well look at the way that people have changed their perception of what a presidential debate is i mean imagine people sitting down in like the 60s or 70s whenever the first televised presidential debate was and well what are they thinking they're probably sitting down and thinking gosh, I wonder who I'm going to vote for. Like I'm really, you know, interested to see what they're going to say and how they're going to answer the questions.

Nobody's really doing that now. They're not, I mean, some people are probably like, I'm undecided, let's check it out. But they're sort of sitting down with popcorn like, okay, let's see what happens. This will be interesting, right? Oh, he said it. He said it. Oh, she said that. No.

Which shows that we know that that's what's happening. And in a way, that's what politics has always been, at least in the case of democracy. Democracy has always been about that. The only difference is now, it's more. easy to televise, but it's always been the case that people have maligned and relied on charisma and that's like the problem of democracy. I'm curious. What's the perception of the US elections in other countries? Well, obviously, I mean, I can't speak for even the entirety of my own country, let alone say, you know, Poland. But I mean, a lot of people see it as a

as like a bit of a joke, but then it's kind of not a joke because, I mean, in the same way that American in many ways, it's like, this is such a joke. But then it's like, actually, it's not a joke because America is a very powerful nation and a lot of what happens in the UK is downstream from America. And so I think people watch with nervous concern. But, you know, we've got enough political scandals going on in our own country to take care of. But people do pay attention. You know, people stay up till two in the morning to watch the presidential debates. I don't think anybody in the US was doing that to watch Rishy Soon Act debate, Kirstama, a couple of months ago. Do you, do you like, no, I don't think it affects us too much. Do you know who the

UK prime minister is? Nope. And it's like, and why would you, right? Because like, who cares? You know, but in America, a lot of Americans are uninformed even about American politics in the same way that people in the UK are uninformed about UK politics. Um, hence this, this, this Niagara of videos of people interviewing, you know, people at rallies and they just don't know. anything. It's like how very funny. It's more it's more dunking, right? But that's just if the average person doesn't know that much about politics because they don't consume themselves in the same way that a lot of people do, although they just don't, I don't know, they don't think about it in the same way. And it's a shame, but that's not something, that's not about

America. It's not about Trumpism. It's not about Kamala. That's just about democracy. It's just what it is. Democracy will always involve people who do not know what they are doing, voting for people who they do not properly understand. That is the problem of democracy. That is why democracy is not an obviously good form of government. That's why it's not always been the norm. That's why it's the democratic experiment, because we're still sort of seeing how it's going, right? All right, I got a question for you.

Do you think people should take a test in order to vote to show that they have a basic understanding? No way. Why is that? Who administers the test? I don't know. But shouldn't there be an independent, you know, independent? Should there be just a, but a basic understanding.

Does the people who are administering the test and writing the test first have to take a test in order to prove that they've got? got the competency to make the test? Perhaps. And then who administers that test? Yeah. The problem is... I'm throwing out ideas.

It's a thing that people say. They could say, look, there should be a level of competency to vote. The problem is that any, in practice, any possible way that you could ever try to institute any kind of cognitive test would involve giving somebody the power to tip the balance. Now, it's worth bearing in mind. A lot of people just say, well, look, if you had some kind of... test of competency before being able to vote, then that would lead to the problem of potential like corruption and tipping the scale. And so then they just rule out the idea entirely,

right? As if democracy is the default and any idea that has problems shouldn't come into replace it, forgetting that democracy itself has all kinds of problems that would cause you to dismiss it in a similar vein if it wasn't already the norm. But I do think that's a bad idea. Now, what about instead of a test, it's based on a minimum. threshold that you've paid in taxes. It doesn't have to be a high one, but just showing that you've contributed enough to the country. Like a bare minute, it could be like 10 grand, five grand. I wouldn't do it. Because realistically, I think whatever policies are passed are going to affect the people that pay the least intact the most. So you'd have people voting on things that are of no consequence to them. I have to agree. And also, what is voting? Is it a, is it a, is it some kind of contract with the government, or is it a moral right? Is it the case that in order to be ruled over, you have to consent to it? Doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how much money you've given them. What matters is that they're ruling over you, and you

don't have the right to rule over another person without their consent. That is the liberal view, the democratic view. If that is your view, then no, because it's not a lot of people say, like, you know, well, I think that if a 16-year-old can pay taxes, they should be able to vote. okay, it's a very economic view of like what voting is all about. Because you vote on things that are not just about the way that taxes are spent exactly, right? I mean, a lot of government is, is figuring out where to put the money, right? But you're voting on a lot. You're voting on who's going to rule over you. There's got to be about more than just that. I mean, there are so many people who are tax burdens. For example, people on state, I mean, in the UK, we have the

NHS, you know, nationalised healthcare. And so there are, there are probably people, I mean, there'll be people who've had cancer. They develop cancer when they're a teenager and they're on some ward. And I don't know how much it costs to take care of these people and treat them, but they've probably been a net negative on the taxpayer. Right. So some 14 year old, say they're like 17, diagnosed with cancer, go into a hospital, life of misery. And the NHS is funded by the government. And the government is currently trying to like, you know, take money out of the NHS and spend it on defense or something. And that 17-year-old turns 18 and says, you know, I really want to do something about this because I'd really rather that money went into the NHS, which is trying to keep me alive, than went into defense spending. And we say, oh, actually, well, you're not allowed to have a say in that. You can't vote because you didn't pay any taxes. And they're like, how the hell am I going to pay tax? I can't get a job. I've got like a really, like, violent form of cancer which keeps me bedridden. It's like, oh, well, that means that you're also a tax burden.

And so you definitely don't get a right to vote. It would seem grotesque to me. I'm curious. When you do all of these debates, you represent the atheist. side. So what technically are the values of an atheist and how can an atheist have any purpose or meaning? Well, atheism isn't really a set of propositions or a world view. In some way, depending on who you ask atheism, either means like a lack of belief in God, so you just sort of don't believe in God. Or it means like the belief that there is no God. And those aren't the same thing. I think at least academically, it makes the most sense to mean by atheism,

the view that there is no God. That's kind of all atheism says, right? You can be an atheist and be a Republican or a Democrat. You can be an atheist and be a gun owner. You can be an atheist and you can be young and old, whatever, cat person, dog person. It doesn't really have any content. What it does is it negates a particular part of the content of another worldview, which is that there is some kind of God. It should have some implications. For example, you know, it might have implications about what you think is possible, like you might need to believe it's possible for things to begin to exist without a cause, which is a controversial philosophical premise, right? But it's not really going to affect your values. It's not really going to affect your value judgments. So what about purpose and meaning?

Where do you find that? Well, that is an impossible question for essentially anyone to answer. I mean, religion may have been invented in order to answer that question. That might be why it exists. Or maybe religion is actually true because we have a thirst for meaning that cannot be quenched without some kind of divine intervention, and that's how we know that it's true. I don't think that, like, you can, I, I don't, I've never really had anything interesting to say on where to find meaning as an... What if you just look inwards, and you just ask yourself the question, what does your answer look like? Well, if you mean me personally, I mean, I'm more of an agnostic than an atheist,

by which I mean that I'm, I mean, I lean towards the view that there is no God, but there are so many great mysteries like consciousness, like the naive sense that stuff exists. You know, why is there something rather than nothing? There's a sense in which that's a very basic question, but also the most like intense foundational question. You ever see the sort of the IQ curve meme? Yeah. Well, like it's the same question on either side or something different in the middle. It's a bit like that with a lot of these things, you know, why is there something rather than nothing? You know, if there is no God, then why a tree is beautiful, right? That's at the same time a very stupid question, but also a very intelligent question. And so those mysteries allow enough

room for me to just be content in not knowing. Blaise Pascal condemns his position, he says. He's sort of like, you know, the person who says that they're sort of content in their agnosticism. And he writes this incredible few paragraphs where he like quotes this imaginary person. He says, you know, I do not know like why I'm here. I do not know what I'm made of. I don't know what my body is. I don't even know what the eye that's doing and considering is. I don't know why I exist in this corner of the universe instead of any other. I don't know why I exist in this time rather than any other. I don't know how I got here. I don't know how material got here. You know, it glist it all off. And he's at the end, he's like, who would want to be friends with

this person? Who would go to this person for advice? You know, what have they got to give? He really condemns this position of agnosticism. I'm pretty content in it, partly because I don't know what the meaning of life is. But I think if I knew that I was living in this completely closed off cosmos that I was just going to do. And it was over. I think I'd struggle very greatly to find meaning. And so, or to sort of perceive meaning. So you think you can't achieve meaning in your life because of the possibility that all of this is just like? Not because of the possibility. I think if I knew that, I'd find it very difficult. I don't know how I would feel exactly, but I think if you, like, proved to me that, like, when it's over, it's over, there is no immaterial

soul, there is no God, all of this kind of stuff. Consciousness is just an emergent property of the atoms in your brain, which will one day decay. I'd be, like, pretty upset about that, man. I'd probably just be a nihilist. Maybe I wouldn't, because... So it's the hope that there is something? Yeah, well, I wouldn't say hope. I would say...

I'm partly hope. Yeah, of course I hope that I'm wrong about that, right? But, like, it's also just the fact that there's so much that I don't understand. There's so much that I don't understand that... For me to be a nihilist, and on, you know, some days I do feel very nihilistic about things, and some days I feel a bit less so. But for me to actually decide on my knowledge and say nothing matters, there is no meaning there is no ultimate value, I think would require a knowledge that I just don't have. It would require me to like know for a fact that there's nothing more than the material, that God doesn't exist, all of these kinds of things, which are not claims that I make. If I knew what the meaning of life was and purpose and value where it came from and stuff, I'd probably be a lot more famous than I am now.

I probably have a lot more to say. I might even win a Nobel Peace Prize. I don't know. I'm in the struggle with everybody else. I don't know how to answer that much. Well, meaning of life doesn't necessarily have to be some overarching meaning. Like, it could be a more personal meaning. Like, for example, your meaning from what you just kind of described seems like it's to acquire enough knowledge to hopefully eventually, you know, have, I guess, potentially a different perspective that we are just in a something like that.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think of it in those terms. I don't think that's my meaning. I often don't reflect on what my, like, meaning is because I'm not even sure what that means. like what are we actually talking about here? Like what is meaning? Is it like a reason for acting? Is it a reason for doing things? It's probably something like that.

It's synonymous with purpose. And to have a purpose is to have like something that needs doing, right? And there's a trivial sense in which like, well, why do I do anything? Well, because like biologically I'm driven to do so. I have desires and I follow those desires. I'm hungry. I eat food. you know, I want love, I try and go and find it in the world, right?

And that's like the reason why I act. That is literally speaking the purpose behind my behaviours. But it would seem silly to say that my meaning in life, you know, comes from my biological drives. That would be horribly reductionistic. So I don't really know. But actually Pascal's good on this as well. He sort of, he imagines, I talked about this in a reel recently, and it sort of blew up more than I thought it would. A lot of people seem to like this thought from Pascal, but he's talking about the concept of

boredom and how to escape it. And he says, imagine a person who passes their boredom by gambling every day. So they place a stake in the hopes that they might win some money. Pascal says, give that man all the money that he could have won in the game on the condition that he can't play the game anymore. He'd make him unhappy. Okay, so it's not just about having the money, it's about playing the game, right? Okay, so now allow him to play the game. but on the condition that he's never going to win the money. You're also going to make him upset. So, like, what is it that he's enjoying?

What is the thing that he finds, like, meaningful in this activity? Well, it has to be something like not knowing if you're going to get the thing, believing that if you get the thing, it will make you happy, but also not currently having the thing, because it turns out if you were just given it, it doesn't actually make you happy in the way that playing the game does, right? And so you need to sort of, so meaning probably consists in sort of having something that you want to,

achieve, not having achieved it yet, and believing that achieving it will will bring you fulfillment. That is why I think a lot of people, like if you speak to somebody who live there in entire life trying to get rich, maybe they're like trading stocks or whatever it is that they do, and their meaning in life is like, I just really want to be the master of my craft, you know, I want to win those money, I want to get like a wife and I want to propose her and have a marriage in Hawaii, and then they get it. And the typical story is like you're sat in your mansion and you're suddenly like, what's the meaning of all this? And you're depressed and you're sad.

And it's like, ah, what am I going to do now? Because it turns out that the whole time it was trading on the illusion that when you have that thing, it's going to like bring you happiness. When you're just given it, when you achieve it, you realize that's actually not enough. And so meaning tends to consist in the struggle. Meaning consists in having something to do that you haven't done yet. That's why religion is so good at it. It's why Pascal wouldn't say this, but that's why religion is so good at providing meaning for people

because it is the definition of something which you do not have now. because it's placed in the mythical afterlife, you believe that when you get it is going to make you happy and you're constantly engaged in the struggle to try and get it. So you're playing the game, not knowing if you're going to win the prize, whilst thinking that if you get that prize, it's going to make you happy. And that's that's gambling. I felt this way about Vegas, actually.

I've never been to Las Vegas before, and it in many ways just feel like a very demonic place. You know, it's, it's... Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa. salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea and milk. Haboniero? More like habanier, yes.

Save the everyday with Amazon. They're hanging out in the wrong place. There's something kind of, you know, like it's all very like, It depends on where you spend your time in Vegas. Well, I think I was on the strip. That's why. I assume it's the strip. But that's why I shouldn't be unfair to Las Vegas.

I'm talking about this particular part of Las Vegas. And man, it was like, yeah, it was really interesting. I was talking to my friend about this earlier. About how I woke up in the morning. I got here last night and I'm looking at the strip and everything's glowing. Everything's fabulous. Everything's incredible.

There's lights everywhere and like, whoa, this place is so weird. It's kind of amazing. But I wake up in the morning and it almost felt like inappropriate. There's that silly lifeal tower. And it just looks stupid. It just looks ridiculous in the morning. It looks cool at night when there's stuff going on. It's lit up.

And in the morning, it just looked like a bit ridiculous. Like, because it's not a city that's built for the morning in that way. It just looked very sort of silly. The buildings looked all like fake. And it just sort of, it felt like, you know, what is this place? suddenly felt like I was in some weird sandbox. And yeah, my friend said it was a bit like when the lights come on at the end of the night at the nightclub and they switch the lights on to kick you out. I don't know if they do that here, but they do it. Yeah, right? You're partying

and everyone's just like making out with people and getting drunk and it's all letting you dance and suddenly the lights come on and everything becomes ugly because the lights been switched on, right? And it feels that way that's sort of what happened to Vegas in the morning. And my friend is a Christian, he said, that's what Christ does, you know? He sort of switches on the light and makes you realize that everything that is actually other people are super. I haven't, since I've been here, I'd like to go and play it's a steak, because that is where I find my meaning, like Pascal's imaginary man. No, I like playing poker, but I've never been, I've never really got like the thrill of gambling. I mean, I think it's cool when you win unexpectedly, like

on roulette. It's like, well, that's awesome, but I've never got the sort of like, oh, you know, give me more of that. Actually, I was in a casino not long ago with a friend of mine, and I sort of, almost like as a bit of a joke I'll go on let's put something on roulette so I gave him five pounds I gave him a five pound chip and I said where should I put it and he said

put it on 33 the year that Christ died and I put it on 33 and it came up I mean we left there with hundreds of pounds now if you want to talk about religious experience my friends

that's about as close as I've ever come so you know I'm not actually in a way I am against it I am kind of against gambling I think it's a bit silly I like playing poker as far as I know

it's like one of the only games you can play in a casino where you're not predestined to lose. You're playing against the other players. It's still got a lot of chance in full, but I like the game of poker. I think it's fun. I played a lot at university.

I'll probably do that at some point while I'm here in Vegas. But I'm not a stranger to roulette or blackjack, but I found myself spending an extended period of time at these tables knowing that it's built against me, I think I'd be acting perfectly irrationally. That's why I'm so fascinated by slot machines, literally electronically.

Well, I mean, it's just a compulsive addiction is what it is. I mean, I think who defined addiction as like knowingly doing something that is continuing to have a negative response? I think it was Steve-O, actually, yeah. I think Albert Einstein once, actually, it might be like, actually, it might be like... Steve-O, Albert Einstein. Yeah, sorry, I do get them confused all the time. It might be mysterious to them, or maybe I'm making it up, but somebody said that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And that's probably true, but then it's, it's unferical at stupidity.

I don't know too much about gambling, gambling addiction, but I do just have this strong intuition that slot machine should be against the law. They just seem something so grotesque, so grotesque about designing a machine. Now, I understand something like roulette or blackjack is also like weighted against the player. But it's sort of like, okay, it's a game, it's something about the machine that you just put over there and you know people are just going to, and you design it so that it like acts on the most base instincts to attract them to keep playing. playing this game that they know... That can be said about anything. You're essentially assigning a value to that, that people are actively making the decision

of trading their time and money for a certain value. It's true. And then you could say that for any single product or service that's ever offered at a certain price. But I do think there's something deceptive about the fact that the service that's being offered by the slot machine is the possibility of winning money. When if you are playing it enough, that possibility sort of doesn't exist, statistically speaking.

It doesn't... Probably the same as the lottery. though, like one in 300 million. Yeah, I mean, that is true. That is true. And maybe... And somebody's got a win. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

But I don't know, man, it just... I get what you're saying. Actually, maybe it shouldn't be illegal. I mean, I jumped to the word illegal. Maybe I was actually also being a bit dramatic. There should probably be more warnings. But I think there's something deeply immoral, let's say, about... And I think maybe there's something immoral about the gambling industry.

But by the way, I don't mean this about gambling. I don't mean this about gamblers. So I don't think that's immoral. But something about this industry, I think there's something immoral probably about it. But when it comes to like slot machines in particular, something just feels wrong. It's the fact that it is the way that they're designed, the flashing light. It's something about it's really. Well, then you have to look at the whole casino, like where they don't have clocks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's dark inside. It's confusing. You have to maneuver around. Like everything about the casino, I've seen these documentaries. They put so much thought into every aspect of the casino to make you. stay there as long as possible. It's remarkable. They thought of everything. Like, even the patterns on the carpet, never would have thought about that. But it's aimed in such a way to divert you into

certain locations. They're very confusing. Yeah. I'm nonsense of them. But a lot of philosophical and religious traditions think that gambling is sin. Like, why? Well, maybe because it's wrong to gamble in general. It's wrong to take a chance in that way. But especially when you have these industries that are designed against you. It just, I mean, it feels perfectly irrational, which is why, like, if I ever go and play roulette, you know, if I, like, win on roulette a few times, and then I think let's keep going. It's like, what am I doing? You know, that that is, like, perfectly irrational. And so, in other words, you know, I, everyone gets swept up into this. But if I was there, like, every day, or if I was, I would think. I don't know. I think that that argument is dangerous,

because you could apply to everything. I think even more valuable than money is time and think about things that just are time sucks, like TikTok, or you can extend that to video games, or you can extend that to virtually anything. Yeah, well, they should be illegal too for that reason. Yeah, exactly. So let's just make everything. Let's get rid of it. Yeah.

I do. But then I think there's something immoral about manipulative social media algorithms as well. I think, but it's weird. It's, that's why I said Las Vegas is demonic, because it's not like, it's not like there's something exactly immoral about, like, is there something immoral about Instagram, like, kind of, but Instagram's just this product. Instagram's a use, or you can not use it. moral, right? But it just feels like there's something

sort of sinister. It feels like there's something sinister about it, about the endless scrolling, about the manipulative algorithm, about the data it has on you, about the way that it knows who you are and what you want. There's something that feels sort of... Yeah, that infinite feed, they're all doing it now. Yeah. Like, even Google, I'd noticed

it. They've stopped using the pages on mobile, and now it's just, you keep scrolling, you keep scrolling, you keep scrolling, versus, like, I remember you get to page three on Google and be like, all right, I'm going to stop now, I'm on page three. Now it's infinite. Yeah. Also, something about like the Las Vegas strip is, it's fake. Right. The whole thing is fake. But it's really weird. I was thinking about this this morning. I'm looking at like, I know, Caesar's Palace or I'm looking at the Eiffel Tower, right? And it's like, okay, it's, it's fake. It's pretend. But what the hell is fake architecture? Like, what is that? I mean, I am actually looking at a sort of Romanesque building. I am actually looking at a big metal structure in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Like, it's a real building. People actually actually looking at a big metal structure in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Like, it's a real building. People actually. People actually. go inside it. It's got restaurants. It's got places you can stay, but it feels fake. You know what I mean?

Not just because it's pretending to be the Eiffel Tower. It feels like it's this weird caricature of a building, but it is just a building of brick and, yeah, it's a little smaller, but it's still. It's got to be that. I mean, look, we'll take a building that's not actually trying to specifically mimic another building like Caesar's Palace. It's designed to look a bit Roman, right? And it feels like it's sort of fake. It feels like it's, but why? Like, it's, it's a building of brick and mortar in the sort of Romanesque shapes. I mean, it's still very fake. Like, even from the exterior, I know what they do is they get a collection of windows

and put them all together to make it seem like one big window. So from at a distance, it looks like you're actually closer to the building than what you are. So it's like, I can walk to that building. It's not very far. And gamble all your money away. That's a thing. Look it up. Wow.

So I think that probably could give you the illusion of being fake. But I think you probably also coming with a presupposition and then kind of projecting that onto all of the stuff around. Yeah, well, that's where I realize is that it kind of doesn't make sense to talk about a fake built. It's a building. It's there. It's, it looks the way it looks. It's got the design that it's got. And yet for some reason, it just feels a bit artificial. It's something very weird about the place that I kind of can't quite, can't quite get over. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's, it's very strange. It's very strange. So it gives you everything. It's another thing I was talking to, my Christian friend was talking about this this morning, sort of like, it's one of those places that gives you everything. It says, you want New York, you want Venice, you want Paris, you want Rome, you want glamour you want like you can have it all but it comes at the forfeit of like your soul because the place is a little bit sort of artificial

and a bit soulless I mean people I mean again I don't mean to insult your city but I'm talking about oh listen I don't know the strip here I avoid the strip yeah because it's sort of and people if I say it's solace people say no man there's like a soul of that what do you mean by the soul in Las Vegas you're talking about the reputation I mean it's literally called sin city right it reminds you it reminds one of when

when Jesus is being tempted in the get this desert and Satan says, look, you can have all of this. You know, this can all be yours. That's what Las Vegas is doing, man. It's saying, look, you can have it all. You can have Paris and you can have New York and you can have, you have it all. But there's just something sort of sinister and wrong about it, you know? The atheist can't really pinpoint their problem with Sin City. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Very interesting. There's something that feels wrong about. Yeah. I can't really figure it out. Well, yeah, to sin is to miss the mark. That's what it means. It means to miss the mark.

and there does seem to be something about playing a slot machine that misses the market. I just think it's a place for adults to go on a vacation where they could feel like there's somewhere else let loose a little bit have a good time.

It's like Disneyland for adults. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought this morning. Kids go, oh, that's, well, hey, that's, Peter Pan's not real, it's fake, but, you know, you have a good time. Yeah, it's Disneyland for adults. I thought that exact same thought this morning, and I don't mean to come across

with somebody who... Not. I stay away from the strip. I'm not condemning it. I enjoy it. I'm excited to be here. I want to go gambling. I want to experience it. It would be cool. I take you to Durango. You love Durango Casino. That just opened up. Oh, yeah? It's new. It's brand new. Has it got slot machines? Yes. Then let's go.

Yeah, I don't know. I enjoy it, is what I mean to say. But there is, I'm trying to sort of, in many ways I'm trying to implicate myself as a bit of a hypocrite here. You know, I think that, you know, there's something sort of a bit sinister about a slot machine. But I've used a slot machine before. But I think there's just something I can't quite pinpoint, you know. But I like it. I'm excited to be here, et cetera.

But I don't know. It was an interesting thought. Would you say humans are naturally good or evil? I would have to say probably neither in the. sense that I don't believe that there are actual moral properties. So I don't think those terms have any objective basis. Oh, because you're a moral relativist. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm a moral, let's say, anti-realist. I don't think that there are real moral properties. However, I still sort of can make sense of the thrust of your question. The kind of things that I think are good and bad and all this

kind of stuff. I think humans are disastrously, you know, bad. They miss the mark all the time. I miss the mark all the time. I think everybody does that. I think, I think, you know, I, I think that a lot of the time the extent to which people are good people is the extent to which they're able to overcome badness. They're able to overcome temptation. They're able to overcome suffering. They're able to help other people, for example. I mean, what is a good person? A good person is someone who helps other people, you know? Like, I don't know. There's something, there's something really sort of bad about what humans do and what their desires are and how they interact and the suffering that they cause and whatnot that goodness kind of overcomes for me, rather than, you know,

there being something naturally really good about humans that evil overcomes. But you're still able to describe things as good or bad, right? So wouldn't you say that there is kind of an objective good versus bad? I'm kind of speaking colloquially here because when I say good and bad, I'm basically expressing an emotion as far as I'm concerned. Okay, sure. So, so, like, it's sort of like stubbing my toe and saying, ow, when I say that something is bad, I feel like I'm expressing a kind of emotion.

I think that if you pay attention to what the moral essence is, do you see somebody go and kick a homeless person for fun, you sort of feel something. And so you could describe the events. You could say he used his foot. You could say that the man cried. You could say these kinds of things. But those aren't moral.

Those are just describing what, in fact, happened. There's nothing moral about that. And if I ask you, well, what's the moral element? It's something that it does to you. It makes you feel a particular way. And I think the moral feeling you have more properly belongs in the category of happiness, sadness, anger, anxiety, that category of mental activity versus the factual 2 plus 2 2 equals 4, the sky is blue type stuff. The thing that makes that a moral thing rather than an amoral

thing, if I flick this table, I like flick a child in the head, one of those is different, but it's not different really like materially, I'm just a person flicking an object and you can describe the shape and the sound it makes and stuff, but you'd feel differently about it. So I think like if you isolate what the moral thing is, it's something like a feeling. Do you think we as people need bad things to happen in order to appreciate the good? Probably. Probably. Maybe the threat of bad, well, I was going to say the threat of bad things might be enough to scare people into recognition.

That is a bad thing. But firstly, that is a bad thing. Yeah, yeah, that is an astute observation. That is in itself a bad thing. But also, I'm not sure if that really gives people a true understanding. Like if I said to you, you know, tomorrow you could lose all of your money or something and you could be like, oh, well, that's kind of scary. But until you actually do it, until you actually live under the bridge and know what that's like, you really don't properly appreciate it. I think that gratitude is kind of a form of relief.

I think that that's kind of what gratitude is. When you take a moment to remind yourself to be grateful for something like saying grace over a meal, you remind yourself how grateful you are to have this meal, what that is is a process of considering the fact that you could have not had it, imagining not having it and then remembering or realizing that you do and you get this feeling of like oh you know it's like relief i do have it and that's what gratitude is it's reminding yourself that that is a relief from a position that you otherwise would have been in um and so just to have gratitude about things i think in many ways is to consider the bad and so in a way yes i think you kind of maybe need the need the bad stuff to recognize a good c s lewis said that a man cannot call a line

crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. He sort of was talking the other way around there, but yeah. And what do you think is one of the things that a hundred years from now we're going to look back on and wonder, why did we do this thing? Factory farming. Is there anything besides that? Because I know we've gone into that already. It's difficult to say.

Slot machines. Yeah. I mean, seriously, like maybe. Maybe something like slot machines. maybe our current architectural trends. Everything's become very functional, we're sort of defacing our cities and making them incredibly ugly and depressing places

and people in the future will think, why the hell do we do that? Maybe the extent to which we've allowed the car to dominate the production of cities. I mean, unfortunately, a lot of cities sort of cropped up and were built around the same time as the popularization of the automobile. And so no one really considered at the time, well, do we really want this?

Don't we want it to be more beautiful and walkable? It seems like a kind of unfixable problem. Like I don't think, you know, I don't know. I think there are a lot of American cities which should never will become walkable because of the way that they're like designed from the ground up. And the way that New York is somewhat walkable because it starts becoming a thing when you could walk and you had to walk. I think that cars and all of the street furniture they bring along with them,

just ruin a lot of places. There's a whole movement of like anti-carb. But like I think that that might actually be, I mean, already cities are beginning to redesign. I think like Boston, Massachusetts might have knocked down this huge freeway and sort of put it underground or something

and then like redesign the city and it's so much more beautiful. You know, I think that people might, people are beginning to wake up to that and that might be seen as it. You look at a picture of like Trafalgar Square in London and they'll look at it and they'll go like, gosh,

it's just covered in like traffic lights and neon signs and horrible like black roads and these ugly cars like parked there. And they'll be like, oh, how did we ever do this to our, to our public square? The problem is that in order to undo that, you either need an extremely efficient public transport system. And one that also takes into account that not everyone can use puppet transport. Some people are disabled. Some people have jobs that require them to have a van and they need to get to places, right? So it's a complicated thing to solve.

But there's got to be something we can do about it, you know? I don't quite know what that is. I tend to think it's going to be algorithms. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. Like, there's no way that I've said this before. TikTok is good on, like, a child's brain. Like, when your brain is developing to get used to that, like, constant stimulus. And that dope and it's, to me, that's no different than a three-year-old child getting used to playing a sloppish.

I think it's got to get a lot worse. Oh, yeah, it's going to see those consequences over an extended period of time before it gets better. But I agree with that. But, yeah, I think that's true. To serious degree where it's unavoidable. It's also difficult to know exactly what to do about that either. It's just one day we all just wake up to it and go like, okay, what algorithms are banned? Well, it's probably you're going to notice a trend in, I think, young adults where it's like, wait a second, 20% of the population has trouble focusing now.

Yeah. What's, oh, crap, it's this. And now let's try to fix that. I think it's going to be something too late. Yeah, it does depress me. Let's do a quick little exercise. This is for you, Graham, and the viewers. So I'm going to ask a series of little ethical dilemmas.

Some I'm sure we've all heard of. And I want to see where you guys lance to comment down below in the comment section and then you guys are going to be able to answer this as well. We're going to start it off with the classic. So I'm sure most of you guys have heard this, but it's a trolley problem. You see a runaway trolley heading towards five people

tied to a track. You can pull a lever to divert it onto another track will only take the life of one person. Do you pull the lever? I think, I don't know. I actually don't know. I think I would not.

I think I wouldn't do it, in fact. I'd be too scared to get involved. Should you? Should you? Man, I think maybe yes. But you'd really have to know, because, you know, if people often forget,

like, if you're going to pull this lever, you don't bloody know how the train tracks work. You don't know how they're all connected. No, but yeah. Suppose you could just know for sure, then maybe the answer is that yes, you should. But, That has a consequentialist assumption.

That is just the assumption that... Actually, no, I think maybe you shouldn't. I think you shouldn't. Because the problem is, like, okay, you can be a utilitarian, but why wouldn't you one healthy person to harvest their five organs and give them to five people

who each needed individual organs to save their lives? Why wouldn't you do that? Or would you? Maybe you would. I don't think you would. Like, why shouldn't a hospital do that? Well, let's not get too ahead of ourselves here.

That's a good question, though. Hold on. It is wrong to pro-act. Just just the trolley for right now. In which case, I would say, I don't know, but maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you shouldn't. Okay, Graham?

Yeah, I don't know. Like, can I see in my line of sight? Everything is within, yeah, your view. Would you? Oh, gosh. So if I could see the people, I'd probably pull the lever to save the fine. Just because I could see five people in front of me that, like, I have a choice now to do this thing. I probably I probably pull the lever to save the five.

I would say I would. Should you? Yes, is what I would say. Yeah. Because you just take it to the end of degree. You know, it's one person versus six billion. Should you? Okay, probably.

That's the problem. So I think, you know, in a certain sense, I don't even know. Like, could you somehow remove this from being a utilitarian argument? because I don't like being a utilitarian, but it's kind of the justification that I use for it. You've always got to just sort of explode thing into an extreme example to test it. And yeah, you're right. If it's six billion people versus one, like, yeah, surely you should pull the leave at that,

you know, in which case, actually, yeah, maybe you should pull the leave at 75. Bloody hell, man. I mean, I just don't know. This is one of the reasons, by the way, where I think that ethics is just like a bit of a sham about emotions. It's like, how do you feel, man? How do I feel? Put me there.

Michael Stevens did this once. He put people in a real trolley problem. Like he sort of, he faked this whole scenario. He put them in the control room. The guy goes like to get a coffee or something and, you know, the workers don't see the train coming in. It's like, do they press the button or not, you know? Did it in real life.

Interesting. Huh. Well, we'll put the results of that video right here. Another one. You discover that a high performing employee is cheating the company, but bringing in significant profits. If you fire them, the company might suffer. Do you report or keep cheating the company?

Actually, let's say they're stealing money. They're stealing a little bit of money, but they're bringing in more than they're stealing. Well, look, I mean, How much ethical concern do I have for the company? Like, is it my company? Let's say it's your company. Oh, well, then, well, if I knew about it, I'd probably, I'd probably threaten to fire them.

Well, I would say, you know, it's not your company because it's like, do you report them? In which case, I mean, I guess it depends on my- It's an employee, so they work for you. No, no, no, because you're also an employee. You're an employee. It depends on your relationship to the company, because like, I mean, if somebody was like, I don't know, if I was like working Apple and somebody was like cheating, Apple out of, they were stealing like

12 grand a year, but they were bringing in like millions worth and profit, I'd probably be like, whatever man, like Apple should probably have a system in place to catch out that kind of thing, you know, don't blame me for like not saying anything, you should record it yourself. I'd probably feel a bit funny about it, but I don't know, like, you know, snitches get stitches and all that. But

if, I mean, I don't know, there does seem something a little bit grotesque about it. I'd say you probably should, would I? Probably not. Yeah. What about you, Graham? I don't know. I think it really depends on, like, who the employee is my relationship to them. That's the top one too.

If it's like your best friend and... Yeah. But it also depends on the... Well, that's a wood versus the... That's also the ratio of like if they're bringing in a million dollars but stealing 10 grand. Well, there's always a victim

to thievery, right? And the only people that are... But let's say I'm the victim. I would still be in my best interest is to let it slide because the employee's still doing well. I mean, ideally you have a conversation with them, if it's like you only could keep them or fire them.

It just depends on the ratio. If it's like bringing in millions of dollars but stealing millions. I don't think there's always a reason to slavery. Yeah, like in what example? Like if a shop is selling bread and the bread is going off and they're going to throw it out and somebody comes in and they see that it's discounted but they still can't afford it and they know it's going to get thrown out later and so they steal it and take it away. How do they know?

Because it's on sale and the shop's closing in five minutes and the shopkeeper said to them, yeah, to be honest, like it's so cheap because we're about to throw it out. And they say, well, why can't you just give it to me? And they say, well, because if we did that, then people would constantly, who otherwise would have bought the bread, just wait until the end of the day and get it for free. So we can't do that as a policy. So we have to throw it away. You know what?

This whole question reminds me of something where imagine you apply for a job, $100,000 a year and you get the job. And you're ecstatic that you got this job. It's more money than you ever thought was possible. It's more money than you need to take care of your family. You're happy with it. But then you start and you find out someone else who got hired the same day as you is making $300,000 a year for the exact same job. How do you feel about that? I bet there's some people who now all of a sudden they feel ripped off and they feel like, why am I doing this?

And they're upset. And I bet there's some other people who say, well, I'm still making more money than I thought was imaginable. but what this person is paid has no relevance to me. Yeah, well, this is a problem for people who... I would be very similar. People talk about, like, the gender pay gap, and there are a lot of women who feel this way, they feel they're being cheated in this way.

I mean, I remember when Ricky Jervais hosted the Golden Globes or whatever it was, and he makes the joke about Jennifer Lawrence because she'd been campaigning for, like, equal pay in Hollywood, and she gets like a bit of a round of applause. He mentions it, yeah, she's trying to make sure that women actors get paid the same as male ones, everyone applauds, and he was like, and Ricky Jervais makes a story,

he's like, yeah, because, you know, I just don't understand how she could have lived on, just, you know, $58 million a year, you know, it's so unfair. And everyone kind of laughs. But it's like an interesting point being made there, which is that like, you know, it feels kind of a bit grotesque to complain. You know, I only made $58 million and he made $78 million. But at the same time, like, it should be the same if indeed it is the same amount of work. Yeah, I think you have a right to be upset there. I think you have a right to be annoyed. Let's address the one that you mentioned earlier. It's called the organ donor. A hospital has five patients in need of organ transplants,

and you're a match for all of them, but you're healthy. Do you sacrifice yourself to save them or let them pass away? Oh, well, if you're talking about sacrificing yourself, that's interesting, because I mean, there's another version of this where you are like a doctor and you can, like, kidnap and kill a healthy person, and it's not you, because here it seems like that decision to call the one to save the five is very much an open possibility. Like, you should, should you do that, should you self-sacrifice, whereas if you're going to someone else to save five people, it seems like a closed door. You don't have the right to do that. Myself, man, I mean, well, the problem is you're in that position right now. So we know what we would do.

You could pauperize yourself. Right, but let's just say it's presented to you, you know, on a piece of paper right in front of you. But it kind of is right now. I mean, how many times people come to you and say, hey, if you only give us X amount of money, we can save this many people from malaria. You could sell your car and save, like, measurable numbers of lives. But you don't. There's an online calculator called the life you can save. type in the life you can save calculator. It has a list of charities. And the first objection is always, well, are the charities effective, blah, blah, blah.

This organization exists to investigate that. And so, it has to calculate. You can put in a US dollar amount, and it will tell you exactly, exactly what that money would pay for. I often do this. I go out for cocktails. You know, maybe it's a big thing you spent $150 on some cocktails. You can find out exactly how many children you could have dewormed for that amount of money. That is the situation kind of

when it comes to the self-sacrifice here. Like, do you porporize yourself? Do you sell your equipment? Do you, you know, like, well, you don't do that. And I think that this is a more sort of extreme and immediate example, but it's the same principle. I think most people wouldn't do,

and I don't think you should have a moral duty to do so. There might be circumstances in which you have a duty to sacrifice yourself. There might be circumstances like that. Again, if you just like bump up the numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty extreme thing.

I agree. I think the should versus what is important. But the thing is the reason I bring this up in the trolley problem. problem example is because it provides a test case against our principle. We think, well, we just think it's okay to get one person to say five. It's like, do you? What about this example? That can't be the principle you're working on. So what is the principle? Well, one difference here, intuitively, again, maybe you're not aware that this assumption is being made. I think for a lot of people it is

with the organ donor thing. The reason you feel that would be wrong is because it's not a one-off, right? If a hospital can do that, if it's just like whenever they have people who need organs, they can just kill a healthy person as long as there are more people in need, that's a terrifying society to live in. Do you want to live in that society? I don't. And so we decided, no, that's not right. We're not going to allow that because that would cause like fear and anxiety. It would be crazy, right? Whereas the trolley problem thing kind of feels like a one-off. It's more of a vacuum. Yeah, you don't feel like if you pull that lever, oh, now, now you're going to, one day, you're going to be worried that you're going to get, like, stuck on a track.

You know, you're not a construction worker. You know, on a rail, it was last time you on a railroad except in a train, you know, like never happens. And so there's less concern about the effect that will have on society, you know? That's fair. And so I think that's probably the difference here. By the way, there's a variant of the trolley problem. You said you would pull the lever? You said you would? Yeah, I would pull the lever. Okay, suppose you could pull the lever.

Okay, so now imagine that trolley is running down a track. It's going to run over five people. And there is a rotund man walking across the bridge. You can push the man off the bridge. He will crash into the train, derailing the train, saving the five people. But you have to push the fat man off the bridge in order to do so. Would you push the fat man off the bridge? See, part of me thinks like a.

Okay, these people are on the tracks and it's their own fault, probably, that they're in this predicament, but this guy is just innocently standing on a bridge. But that's also outside of the, you know, that's more added context. Yeah, there was a construction workers who were supposed to be there and somebody made a... Essentially, it's the same thing. Yeah. But would you push a fat man? Would I? Yeah, would you?

Realistically, no, because it's a more visceral experience of doing that. But should I? It's easier to press a button. Yeah. That's what it is. Like someone is removed. You can't see them. So as Michael Sandell asks in his introductory course to ethics,

It's a Harvard lecture. It's available online. Okay, now imagine that you are on the bridge and the fat man's walking over the bridge and you just press a button and it opens a track door. And the fat man falls through the track door and hits the train and saves the five people.

Would you press the button and drop him onto the train? It'd be easier. Would you do it? I don't know. To save five lives? Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.

I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh. Then it's... the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com. Yeah, I would. You know, it's like, it feels kind of different

and then it's like, I've got to push him, I'll press a button, maybe like, it's kind of, maybe you got to like, what if you got to like trip him up? You don't have to push him. You just sort of like to stick your fur out. Okay. It's really, and it shows us how much of what we think is ethical consideration is actually just how we feel. Yeah. Interestingly, I think that they put people under an MRI scanner while being asked about this.

And people who would both pull the lever and push the fat man, when they're thinking about it, the part of their brain associated with like rational thinking is lighting up. The people who say that they would pull the lever, but they wouldn't push the fat man. When they're thinking about the problem, it's the emotional side of their brain that's lighting up. Interesting. Last one. The Gift of Time. You have the power to save one person's life from certain death, but it requires taking a year of life from another person. Do you take away a year from someone else to save a life? Interestingly, interesting. I think that's kind of like a version of one person to save five. You're taking a little bit from one to save a lot for more. I think the answer's probably the same, which is that I don't think you have the right to do that. But then what if it was a minute? You know, what if it was half an hour? to save a life.

I think I probably, I would. I think it would, would you say a year. A year's a long time, but it's also not, you know. I think may, oh gosh, I don't know. The problem with these examples is that there's so, because so much hinges, I think, on, like, are you responsible for this situation? Like, who is responsible?

You're placed in this situation is strictly in a vacuum. Because you could say that, because if it's a circumstance where, like, if you don't take this life, someone's going to kill someone, then it's sort of like I would probably not press the button, but then say that the person who's responsible for that person's death is the person that kills them. If it's like, if I press this button, it like sucks out something of that person that takes a year off their life, but is like medicine for the other person that stops them from dying,

I'd say that's like the organ situation. You probably don't have the right to do it. So it kind of depends on like the mechanics of it, you know? Like what is it? What is it? Like how does the person die? Like are they killed? Do they just drop dead?

I think that actually kind of matters. I think it changes things for me. I'd probably do the year, the year to save five people's lives. But it also depends how old those people are. Are they like kids? Are they 90 years old? Yeah, no, I agree. I would probably take the year,

but I don't think that you have any moral imperative to. So here's a question then to, it's sort of another, it's not exactly a dilemma, but it's an ethical question, which helps to work out what you think about this. Suppose you can't, one person to save 10 people. Suppose you just did that, right?

Do you think that is better, worse, or the same as 10 people to save 100 people? It's the same. Same to me. What about 100 people to save 1,000 people? As long as the ratio is 1.10. Then it's just the same. To me.

It's no better, it's no worse. What do you think, Jack? Well, I mean, I'd have to definitely, like, you don't think about this quite a bit. But off the top of my head, I would probably say it's the ratio. So that implies a consequentially, of thinking. That means that what matters is how many people end up getting killed, like,

proportionally, that's all that matters. There are other people who think that people is wrong, particularly like religious ethics, deontologists who think that it's just wrong to people. For them, the answer will be that it gets worse every time. So, though the ratio is the same. Like, because suppose, okay, now suppose the organ, the organ situation, okay, here we go. you can't one person to harvest their organs to save five people you would say that's wrong okay now you you still do it even though it's wrong

you still do it now you five people to harvest their organs to save 50 people is that worse or is it better or is it the same better it's better the ratio is the same the ratio is the same

yeah the ratio is the same oh the ratio is the same one person just a higher ratio just a yeah Sorry. No, one to five. Yeah, it's better. Yeah. Right, but let's just say it's 25. Okay, okay, let's say, let's say, one, yeah, five to 25. Right, right, yeah, right, right, right, right, right, right. So, so why is it wrong in the first case, like, one to seven, five? Why is it wrong? I didn't say it was right, but it would, it's better to kill five. You say 50 than one to five.

Are you saying, do you think in the first case, in the first case, in the first, just one to to save the five there in that instance is wrong? Like, why is it wrong? I wouldn't say that that it's wrong. To, to harvest their organs, to, to save, to save, to save, to save, to save the other five? Oh, sorry, yeah, I would. Why is that wrong? Why is it wrong? I just don't think that you have a moral obligation too. But you think it's wrong to do it, right? You think it's wrong to take one person and harvest their organs and save five people? I think that would be immoral. Why? Yes, because you're taking one thing that is whole and then distributing it to other things that are not. So, in other words, if you think it is actually wrong to do that, you think, well, it's wrong

because you're doing this wrong thing. Okay, you're sure the consequences that more people live and less people do that, whatever, but like, it's just wrong to do it. Even if the, it doesn't matter what the consequences are really here. What matters is that what you're doing is wrong. You shouldn't burn to half their organs, more people. Even if there are more people, it's just wrong to do that. If that's the mindset you're in, then when I say, okay, now you can five people save 25 people in the same way. The ratio is the same. But if it's just like wrong to do, it's like wrong to that one person, sort of regardless of the circumstances, it's wrong to do it. then five people must be worse.

If the consequences don't really matter here, if you're not being a consequentialist and saying, well, you know, one, say five, but it balances out and utilitarian say that's fine, if you think it's wrong, wouldn't it be worse to come more? Because you're doing the wrong thing more times,

you know? If you do a wrong thing once and you do a wrong thing five times, which is worse. I agree. I generally think, like I know that we said it's a consequentialist argument, but I generally think that the intent is more important

than the... Sure. Okay. Like if I'm judging someone's moral character. But so, like, consider, so you think it's wrong to keep one person to half as the organ to save five, right? You think it's a wrong thing to do. Now, in the abstract, is it worse?

If something is wrong to do, is it worse to do it one time or five times? Worse. It's worse to do it five times. Yeah. So if there's something that's wrong to do, it's worse to do it five times and to still one time, which means that one person to save five people. Yeah, if you could also say it's better to save 50 people than five. Yeah, but now imagine, like, you're saving 50 by saving by,

five, but you do it one at a time. You call the first person and it saves five, then you call the second person, five, third, five, fourth, and you just do it one at a time. You're just doing the- Oh, so now you're doing the moral relativism thing? You thought you were doing, like, you think that it's wrong to do- So I'm thinking it's all, uh, you think it's, you see what I'm saying, like it's worse to do a wrong thing multiple times than to just do it once, and yet you're telling me that if I, one person to save five, that's the same as five people to save 25, but five people save 25 is just doing that one save five five times. And you say that doing something wrong five times versus one time is worse. So it should be worse to the five people save the 25. See what I'm saying?

I understand. So and the alternative is that it's amoral and you're judging the person based off of their intent. And if you're judging someone based off of their intent, then that would support the moral relativism. Yeah. And it would also be that the answer to the question of if it's better, worse or the same is basically like how do you feel about it, man? You know? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Lastly, what books would you recommend people read to get a basic understanding of philosophy and where they stand? I would say, depends what level you're at. So if you're like a complete beginner, there are lots of good introductory books. Like, there's one called Think by Simon Blackburn. I haven't read it, but I know that it is on a number of universities suggested pre-reading for studying philosophy. So I would say maybe look at that. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is another great place.

it's online it's free any philosophical concept or person or school of thought has an entry it's kind of like Wikipedia but every entry is edited and written by philosophers it's not like a public thing it's like written by philosophers and edited properly but it's got everything and most of the articles are really good and they'll also point you at the bottom they'll have a bunch of reading so if you're interested it'll tell you what like what the sources are where the ideas came from thing about the SCP is that you kind of need to know where to go it's bit like Wikipedia You can use it to learn, but you've got to choose which article to pull up. But if you're interested in consciousness, go on to the SEP, type in consciousness, look at the articles.

If you're interested in the philosophy of religion, type in religion. It's an incredible resource. The SEP always I would recommend people go to. Bertrand Russell's book, The Problems of Philosophy. It's quite short, and Bertrand Russell is writing about the problems of philosophy, so like unsolved issues. So like the thing I mentioned earlier, the David Hume, Sun won't rise tomorrow. Maybe some people listen to that. And we're like, what the hell are you talking about?

You can't, we didn't really get into it. Like, what do you mean you can't know if gravity won't work in five minutes? That's ridiculous. Read the problems of philosophy. He talks about some of these unsold issues. I can't remember it and I haven't read the whole thing. I think it's probably like a bit more high level and takes a bit more like thought in that way. But I'd probably point people in those directions maybe.

All right. I really appreciate your time. This is a tough one for me to think through. She's required way more effort Yes, than a car YouTuber For Graham Come on, let's not Yeah, for me

Yeah, so. My gosh, thank you so much I really appreciate it Thank you for coming on We'll link to your info down below In the description too Appreciate you guys Thank you guys for watching

Until next time