Within Reason - #61 Sam Harris - Can Science Determine Moral Values?

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, New York Times best-selling author, host of Making Sense, and creator of Waking Up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Harris, welcome to Within Reason. Yeah, great to be here. Great to finally meet you. Yeah, yeah. It's been a long time coming. Yeah. Now, a few years ago, or a number of years ago now, on your now deleted Twitter account, you seemed to profess to be able to prove the existence of objective morality using a kitchen stove.

Do you still think that's the case? Do you stand by this thread that now doesn't exist anymore? I have it written down here. I thought that maybe we could sort of go through it because you've a couple of times now referred back to it and said, hey, I think this still, this still holds up as a way to prove the existence of objective ethics. Yeah, it's been years or at least a year since I saw that thread, so I'm not sure I can, perhaps I can improve on it now in conversation. But yeah, no, I think the argument for objective morality, we can talk about what objective means in that context, I think is,

I'm confident in it. Yeah, I would love to hear your reasons. Why not? Yeah, well, I found the threat. I had to sort of go into the depths of Reddit to find a copy somewhere that someone had saved. One of the things that I, I suppose, admire about the moral landscape is that a great deal of the new atheist movement has been criticized. And people talk about new atheism in past tense these days. I don't know if you agree with that assessment, but one of the things it's criticized for is that it sort of knocks down this grand structure of religion and fails to erect anything in its place. But moral landscape was at least an attempt to do that. So that's one thing that I like about it.

I suppose, do you agree with that assessment of new atheism? That it's passe, or that it... That it's something of a time gone by? Well, I think it was... I mean, I never felt that it was more than it was, which was mostly just a publishing phenomenon. The four of us had published books in quick succession, and that is me and Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.

And then people began to... to treat us like a four-headed atheist, as though we agreed about everything, which, of course, we don't. But we agreed about most things relevant to the debate around reason and faith and science and religion. Modulo, a few things, a few positive things I would want to put in place of the sort that you just reference. I mean, an objective construal of morality and value, you're right and wrong and good and evil and also a contemplative life i mean i you know i used spirituality and scare quotes in my book waking up trying to uh revive that term i'm not i think that's that was pretty quixotic i don't tend to use the term spirituality myself anymore but um what i

meant to say is that there's a there's a clearly an understanding of the furthest reaches of human well-being that we can arrive at ultimately whether we have it in hand now that is that is deeper than culture, that's not parochial, it's not, you know, merely a matter of anyone's invention, but it actually speaks to some universal truths about the possibilities of human consciousness and even beyond, you know, you know, conscious machines if we ever build them, et cetera. So all of that relates, and I think we're going to talk about the moral landscape, all of that relates to questions of value as I construe them and how a completed science of the mind could ultimately understand them.

And the moral landscape is something of an attack on relativism, this idea that seems quite popular among secular ethicists, that there's no way to, I suppose, objectively measure different value judgments against each other. I think it's clear that everybody values something, even if just subjectively you need to have some kind of motivation to do essentially anything in the world. The interesting question is how we can measure these against each other and determine which one is actually true. And the big selling point of the moral landscape is that this is something we can do with science. So I figured the thread would be a good place to start because it's something of a summary. I suppose we can go through and see who caves in. So you begin by saying, let's assume that there are no aughts or shoulds in this universe. There is only what is, the totality of actual and possible facts.

second among the myriad things that exist are conscious minds susceptible to a vast range of actual and possible experiences so far so good right we've got a world of stuff in that world are conscious minds that can experience things number three is where it starts to get i think controversial you say unfortunately many experiences suck and they don't just suck as a matter of cultural convention or personal bias they really and truly suck if you doubt this place your hand on a hot stove and report back. What do you mean by suck? Right. Well, so this is a kind of a funny way of hand-waving toward my argument that I refer to in the book and elsewhere as the worst possible misery for everyone. I think you have to grant, the only thing you have to grant,

really, for my argument for objective moral truths to get off the ground is that a unit in which every conscious being suffered as much as it possibly could for as long as it could, that universe would be bad. That would be worse than other states of possible universe. Worse by any measure of worse that makes sense. And, you know, the moment you move away from the worst possible misery for everyone, things get better, however incrementally, and better by any construe of that word that makes sense. If you're not going to grant that the worst possible misery for everyone, let me teach you, it's worth lingering on what those words mean.

I mean, it's the worst. It's not, it's absolutely, there's nothing possible that's worse than this, as far as the character of conscious experience. And it's, uh, for everyone, right? So there's no, and it's, so this is not, there's no story that you can tell yourself about how we all get redeemed after this or we learn a lot of good things that we can only learn this way. There's no silver lining.

So this is a perfect hell. insofar as that's possible. If you're not going to grant that that's bad, then I don't know what you could conceivably mean by the word bad. I mean, there's just no, there's no application of that term that makes any sense to me. So if we're going, and whether or not you want to judge it as good or bad,

whether you want to even entertain those thoughts, if you found yourself in that state, given what it is to have a mind and given what it is to have a, you know, a conscious experience of evidence, anything, you will be disposed to move away from the truly intolerable and pointless misery that you've been granted towards something, anything else that's better and everything else will be better, right? So it'll be the analogous to taking your hand off a hot stove. So the

simplest way for a human being in their kitchen to immediately get to the extremity of this is just put your hand on hot stove or just imagine doing so and realize how untenable all of your hair splitting will seem, there's no place to stand with your hand on a hot stove as a human being and say, well, maybe this isn't bad, or, you know, maybe I have a preference for this, or maybe, you know, this is, maybe this is just subject. Maybe this is just my own personal bias, which suggests that this is bad, right? I liked the way you used the phrase personal bias in the tweet. You said, this isn't just a matter of cultural convention, sure, or personal bias. I suppose I would agree that it's not to do with bias, but when you talk about an

experiencing, an experience sucking or an experience being the worst kind of suffering imaginable, I suppose what I want to pick up on there is the word worst. When you say imagine the worst possible misery for everyone. Presumably when you say worst there, you don't mean something like morally worst, because that would just be to beg the question, right? When you say worst possible misery, you mean something like the most intense amount of suffering or something like that? Well, it's bad in any way that things could be bad. So, yes, I mean, there's the hot stove is one version of that. I mean, that is a, for creatures such as ourselves, that is a physical torture, right? And if, you know, I would imagine that even if you had a

masochist of some sort, if you just made it hot enough, it would cross into a threshold where, you know, that would be nobody's preference. But there are other things that cause minds like our own to suffer and so they could be ideas you know it could be the knowledge that your kids are you know being tortured in the same way in the next room right and that so there's there's there's more to suffering than just extreme sensation i mean one one thing i should add i i think you're probably headed here anyway is that there are two senses of the of the the dichotomy subject of an objective that we should tease apart right there's the the ontological one and the epistemological one.

And I guess I'll start with the epistemological. The epistemological one is the one that does differentiate between science and non-science, right? So if you're going to be epistemologically objective, that is to say your epistemology relates to how we know things or think we know things. To be objective in that space is to be dispassionate, not ruled by bias,

and confirmation bias or otherwise, to be, to use all of the techniques that we learn in, in science and, you know, reasoning generally to not fool yourself, you know, or not be fooled by others, right? So it's so that your beliefs can more reliably track truth. So, yeah, so not, so without personal bias, or from my saying that this claim is not merely a matter of personal bias, is to say that it's not epistemologically merely subject. Right. And yet the ontological split between subjective and objective is not, doesn't cut across the science, non-science divide. My argument is that we can be scientific, rigorous, honest, that is epistemologically objective with respect to subjective facts.

Some facts are subjective and some are objective, right? So it's an objective truth about me that my neurotransmitters are in whatever state. it's a subject of truth about me that my experience has a certain qualitative character. And I think many people imagine, and even many scientists imagine, that we can't, it's very difficult to make objective claims about subjective experience, but that's just clearly not true. I mean, we can make an endless number of clearly objective claims about subjective experience, even the subjective experience that we really can't know directly. I mean, the example, I give endless examples here, but, and we can objectively say that, you know, in his last hour of life, Winston Churchill was not thinking consciously about how much he wishes he could get, you know, Taylor Swift tickets, right? Or he wasn't thinking about string theory. I mean, there's an infinite number of things we know he was not thinking. And so those are objective claims about his subjectivity. So that's just useful.

Yes. And I completely agree. And I think that's actually a really useful. useful jumping off point here for talking about the worst possible misery being bad. Okay. Because I completely agree that there are objective truths about subjective states. So it can be objectively true that you are subjectively experiencing suffering, let's say. And if we think about touching the hot stove, when you say that this experience truly sucks, the way that I would interpret a situation like that is that it is objectively true that anybody who puts their hand on a stove will experience an immediate subjective repulsion to that experience.

Now, if that's what's going on, it seems to me that the experience itself, let's say the badness of the experience, the part of the experience where I go, I don't like this, this isn't good, I don't want this for me, that's in the subjective side of the brain. The objective thing, yes, the objective thing is that that subjective experience is being head. And so when we're talking about science determining value, I understand that once you grant that everybody agrees that putting your hand on the stove is bad, everybody agrees that putting the hand on the stove is bad for them at least. Well, once we sort of agree that that's the case subjectively, that everyone agrees that. There are myriad objective claims that we

can make about how to best avoid that kind of situation. That's fine. But I'm imagining a world in which everybody subjectively agrees that the color blue is the best color. I don't know what happens to our brain, some kind of pill that everyone's forced to eat, where if we look at any other color, we're just a bit sort of repulsed by it, we think it's disgusting, maybe it makes us feel a bit queasy, right? And so everybody just agrees that blue is the best color. In the same way that if two roommates are trying to decide what color to paint a room, and they both just happen to subjectively value blue,

you can treat it as if it were the case that blue is objectively the best color. You can know objective fact about what to buy and what not to buy when you go to the paint store, right? That's all fine. But if I were to claim that because we both just instinctively prefer the color blue and because we can know scientifically on the basis of that what color paint to go and buy at the shop, if I were to then say that I can scientifically establish that blue is the best color, that blue is what we should be going for. I think I'd be making a mistake.

Well, so I think if you push the analogy further, I probably don't have a problem with it. So I would acknowledge that there's a boundary, that the boundary between what we might call aesthetics and what we're always tempted to call morality or ethics when things become more important, I think that's fuzzy. And if aesthetic differences were, if you just turned up the dial of their importance, right? So if the difference between, and we can stick with color, I think it's less visceral for people than taste. But yes, I mean, let's just say that there was a certain color you could see that the pleasure of seeing it was so extraordinary that it just became one of the most important parts of any person. to life to just get more of that color, you know, around them, right? And let's say the color

was, you know, somehow resource constrained, right, so that, you know, only rich people could get access to it, say. And let's say certain kids were born with a neurological deficit that didn't allow them to appreciate this color, but there was a surgery for that or drugs they could take for that. The moment you dial up the happiness factor with respect to seeing this color, the more it edges into moral and ethical terrain. Whereas, you know, if you, if you deprive someone of this color, well, then you really are, you're, this is a kind of crime against them, right? And, you know, you would, we'd want to send you to prison, right? So, I mean, this is, it sounds very far-fetched, but this is analogous to, like, you know, you can imagine a color so so rewarding that it would be

the obverse of essentially putting your hand on a hot stone. Suffering, it would just become pleasure. In that case, I think that we stop talking in analogies. and we're no longer talking about colour as an analogy for pleasure. We're just talking about colour as balanced on top of pleasure. We sort of just push the analogy until we're just talking about pleasure again. I suppose one way of getting at this is the way that you seem to always phrase this. You did in the tweet later on. You say, if we should do anything in this life, we should avoid what really and truly sucks.

Elsewhere, you say, look, if bad means anything, it must mean. the worst possible misery for everyone. I think a moment ago, you said something to that effect. To William Lane Craig, you put it this way, the minimum standard of moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. If we should do anything in this universe, if we ought do anything,

if we have a moral duty to do anything, it's to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. And of course, this seems intuitively true. The problem I have with this is what I would see as a charge of circularity, because it seems to me that the interesting claim that you're making in the moral landscape is that in a world where people think atheists cannot say that certain things are good and bad if you're an atheist there is no thing that is good there is no thing that is bad there's just stuff

you're saying no we actually can say that certain things are bad we can do that and someone says okay show me how and you say something like well look if anything is bad surely the worst possible misery for everyone is bad but that first first thing bit that if anything is bad seems to me the the very thing that you're trying to establish that's the interesting part so when you say if we have any duty in this world it must be to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone I could say but the thing we're trying to establish is if there is any such thing that is dutiful if there is any such thing is good and bad do you see what I'm saying yeah yeah so um let's go over this ground again and and just notice a few more

landmarks. So first, one of the things I do in the moral landscape is point out that there's a double standard with respect to how we treat ethics and morality and the possibility of moral truth and the way we treat every other branch of science or philosophy or reasoning where, and there's a few ways to see this. In one case, we, first of all, there's no branch of science or really any intellectual endeavor where you get, you don't have to rely on something that is essentially a brute fact or something that's axiomatic. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps everywhere. There's no foundation for

physics or foundation for arithmetic even that is perfectly self-justifying so that no one can, no one can stand anywhere else and say, well, why did you make that definitional choice? Or why, you know, that's not how I choose to think about it, right? It's just that in physics, or math, when someone does that, when they have a massively seditious program, right, when someone said, like when we at the physics conference say, physics for us is our understanding how matter and energy behave in this universe, if, you know, a biblical creationist or somebody, some other person, you know, unqualified for the job, comes in and says, well, no, you know, I want to talk about physics, but I have a different definition. And I would ask you to justify your definition.

I mean, how did you come to be so interested in matter and energy? Because for physics, for me, it's just whatever conforms to the book of Genesis, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in science, and really everywhere, but on questions of ethics or value, when we meet such opposition, we don't draw any conclusions from it. And we just say, you can do whatever you want, but you're not part of our language game. We're not going to take you seriously. There's no temptation to take you seriously. There's nothing about diversity of opinion, even foundational diversity of opinion, in those areas, which suggests to us that there might not be any real ground truth to the whole endeavor, right? There's no physicist who's losing sleep saying, Jesus, I thought, you know, physics was on sound footing, and I thought, you know, my investigation of string theory was headed somewhere, but this creationist showed up and said he didn't even agree.

with our control of physics. So that must mean that there is no such thing as physics where it's just a cultural convention. We just made it up, you know. So there's a double standard. With moral truth and ethical truth and value-laden truth, we say, oh, you're telling me the Taliban

don't think it's wrong to force girls to live in bags and they don't want them to read and they'll throw a battery acid in their face if they decide to learn to read. They seem to have this alternate morality, So who are we to say that our, you know, colonialist, imperialist, post-enlightenment morality is better or more true, right? And we just, we happen to like it more. We don't, we don't want to behave this way.

But we're not, there's no footing there. So that, that move for me is specious. The other move, which is, which is, I think we have to some degree courtesy of hume is this idea that there's this radical disjunction between facts. and values, that we can't, there's no way to describe how the universe is that can tell you how it ought to be. And so there's no, there's no, even the totality of facts couldn't tell you what you should do next unless you add one of your, you know, merely human passions to the, to the mix, right? Now, I'm happy to bite the bullet there. There's two ways I've addressed that. And it's important to recognize that hum did not spend a lot of time on

that thought. I mean, it's practically marginalia in his work. I mean, it's like about a paragraph and a half or so if memory serves. So it's not, he did not flesh this out, and yet many people take it as a total defeater against the whole project of uniting facts and values. One thing I would point out, there's two ways I've dealt with this. One is there are any discussion of facts presupposes a whole host of values that we don't get for free, but we act like we get them for free. So valuing logical consistency, value in evidence, value in evidence, value in

elegance if you're in a mathematical field, right? Something like Occam's razor is a value, right? And so our conversation about what's rational presupposes all sorts of values. And we don't tend to acknowledge it, but if I said to you, listen, I have an amazing theory of, you know, the physical world. It just so happens. I mean, it really is amazing. It's better than anything you're going to get from Ed Witten or anything.

anyone else, but it's a little self-contradictory. I mean, so it's like you're going to catch me saying some things that contradict the thing I said just before, and it doesn't make any predictions, right? Okay, so I'm clearly, this is a joke, I'm talking nonsense, and yet that just shows you that I'm running roughshod over some values that are presupposed in any conversation about what's true scientifically. The other move I'm happy to make, though I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, talk really on both sides of this is I'm happy and this is what I was hand waving toward in that

tweet thread is I'm happy to dispense with this notion of ought and is and moral duty right people one thing I didn't appreciate when I wrote the moral landscape is how much people are hung up on this idea that for moral truth to exist it must contain a the motivational component to follow this moral truth and in addition to the motivation it must must contain an ability to persuade others that they should follow it. So if I could tell you that something is really wrong, right? If it's in some way you and I are living is really wrong, the mere understanding of its wrongness or its moral badness would get us to change our behavior by definition.

Otherwise, how are we pretending to understand this? And I just think that's a false claim, but I'm happy, and one analogy I would give is, I mean, just imagine, oh, here's one case. I'm not actually making this case, but let's say this was true. Let's just say we knew, we agreed that vegetarianism is much more ethical than eating meat. And, you know, if, you know, I happen to eat meat, so I should be a vegetarian. I ought to be a vegetarian. I understand the argument.

I see no flaw in it. So the fact that I'm not immediately pushed into vegetarianism prove somehow that this moral reasoning is otios, right? It's just not, I'm not tracking truth. If I were, the dominoes would just fall. But that's just an unrealistic picture of the human mind. That's not the way human mind works. And by analogy, I would say, let's say I want to lose 10 pounds. I mean, just keep this in the dietary space, right? So I want to lose 10 pounds. There's a, I'm absolutely sure I understand the physics of this and how I would do it. And it's, in fact, true of me that I want to lose 10 pounds, say, right? So without any caveat, I just, I know I'll be happier if I lose 10 pounds. I

know how to do it. I just need to eat less and I just persist in eating less than I've been been eating currently and the pounds will disappear. That's just a fact-based description of my situation, but in and of itself is insufficient to get me to go on a diet because as it happens, I want other things. I like to eat ice cream, you know, preferably once a day, right? And that's not, I realize that's not in harmony with my wanting to lose 10 pounds, but there's more of me than the part of me that just wants to lose 10 pounds, right? So it's a, the persuasion, the motivation persuasion piece is another part of the conversation, but it doesn't actually dispute the fact that there can be such a thing as moral truth

that we could come to understand. Yeah, that's another thing that David Hume discusses, and it's a big debate within philosophy where the moral facts have to be intrinsically motivating. Right. Um, maybe we can circle around to that because I want to begin with what you said about this idea of the double standard that exists. And you picture somebody walking into a physics conference and saying, I define physics in this way. And everybody at the physics conference turning around and going, I mean, sure, you can just do that if you want. You can define physics, I mean, whatever you want. But that's not really what we're talking about. That's not what people care about in this conference. So we're just not going to pay attention to you. Do you, you know, when you publish the moral And there are a great many people in the academy who come out and say, you know, this isn't allowed. Like you say, most people believe in this is aught distinction. Most people think that good is something other than just well-being.

Who's the one walking into the conference here? In other words, like it seems to me that it might be more like you going into that conference and saying, I think that morality is about well-being. And everyone at the conference turning around and saying, you can do that if you want. I don't exactly have a reason why you can't just say that. that when I say good, I just mean the avoidance of the worst possible misery for everyone. Sure, but that's not really what we mean. And so do that if you want, but we're not going to sort of pay attention to that.

Do you see it that way around, or do you think it's the other way around that you're the one with the sort of definitional consensus here, that people who are challenging you are coming in and you're the one who should be saying, well, we're not going to pay attention to you. Well, to be clear, I'm not saying that truth is just a matter of consensus, right? I'm saying that everyone could be wrong. One person could be right. But I'm saying that when you're at a conference wherein scientists and philosophers talk about morality,

I view them as using various double standards and being lured into it for understandable reasons. But it's like, you know, I've been at a conference. I mean, this is actually what one of the things that convinced me to write the moral landscape, as I did, is, you know, I was at a conference where, you know, I had, there was kind of an eminent biologist and bioethicist who took me to tasks for my, for my disparaging the ethics of the Taliban, right? And she said, you know, that's just your opinion that, you know, forcing women and girls to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them if they try to get out. that's not good for them, right? Like, who are you to say that, right? And my point is, who are we not to say that?

If we know anything at all about human well-being, and we do, we know that this is not an optimal strategy for maximizing human well-being. And then you start meeting the people who say, well, who's to say that morality has anything to do with human well-being? Yeah, see, that second step is the more interesting to me, because I agree that because we all agree that suffering is bad for us, right? And I want to talk in a moment about how we go from that. I mean, if I put my hand on a stove, I'm going to want to take it away.

It doesn't follow for me that if somebody else puts their hand on a stove, that I'm going to have that same feeling that they should take it away. Well, we'll get to that in a minute, perhaps. But yeah, sure, you know, if we know anything about well-being, we can, it seems fatuous to say, you know, well, that's just your opinion, man. Who are you to say anything? You know, you might as well be saying the same thing about physics. Sure.

but the problem is that physics is a purely descriptive enterprise right if you define things in particular ways you can just sort of make sure everything's internally consistent make sure that everyone knows how you're using your terms and and all as well if you say that good just means something like well-being if we just say that good is reducible to well-being then I don't think you've so much sort of crossed the is-ort divide as just collapsed the aught into an is-statement You've sort of created this semantic world in which you can say, whenever I say good, just imagine I'm saying something like avoiding suffering, something like that. I can translate any moral statement now into purely descriptive terms. I can say, you know, it's not good for you to, or it's bad for you to not allow women to vote.

And I can just translate that in your terminology as it causes more overall suffering. when women can't vote. Now, that can be true and false, you know, cool. Now we can do an, now we can do an investigation. But it seems like we're not talking about ethics anymore, in other words. Well, no, again, that's why I think so much of our confusion here and the reason why it's so well subscribed is that we have this tradition of how we have carved up the pie of topics intellectually and the way we have taught ethics and the way we've demarcated it from science and even from the rest of philosophy, and the way we've internally divided it into, you know, consequentialism and deontology and virtue ethics, right? I think all of these boundaries tend to be misleading, right?

And I think we can clean the slate, and we could, in a purely descriptive way, which is to some degree where that tweet threat is pointing, you could say, let's just forget we even had this topic, ethics and morality and good and evil, and value, and just forget about, let's be truly naive as to what our circumstance is. We're clearly in a circumstance where there's a wide range of experience on offer, depending on what kind of mind you have. And a few things are true about this,

which are clearly true and I think clearly give us a realistic picture, philosophically realistic picture of the space in which we are making various truth claims. One is, there are horizons past which we can't see, that we've only had certain types of experiences and our nervous systems, allow for certain types of experiences and we don't know what's we don't know how we would would be able to navigate in the space of all possible experience

if we changed our nervous systems or we changed our minds at the level of you know ideas which is also a change to the nervous system obviously we don't know what would what what experiences would be on offer if we if the if the intuitions we had which which give us this gut sense that you know certain things are good and bad and right and wrong, if we figured out how to change those and then felt differently about the same things, right? And then we could step back and ask the further question, what would be the descriptively, what would be the consequences of that happening? And maybe it's, in fact, true that if we live in such a universe that if you kept your hand on a hot stove

for 30 seconds, you would be ushered into the most sublime experience imaginable for the rest of your life, right? Your life would be a paradise thereafter, right? And yet none of us have discovered that because, you know, at 29 seconds, we all tap out, right? Now, that's just a, you know, I don't have, there's no reason to think we live in that universe, but if we did, then it would be morally important to figure out how to get over the 29 second hump on the hot stove, right? Now, again, leave aside questions of should and ought and duty and good and evil, let's just admit that we're in this, in this, you know, this is why I call it a moral landscape, we're in this space of possible experiences that admits of peaks and valleys,

you know, high spots and low spots with respect to anything that could possibly seem different from one moment to the next, that is valenced in the domain of, I mean, I use well-being as a kind of suitcase term for everything that could possibly have this character, where something seems to matter, right? So it could matter in the sense that, okay, the pain is getting reduced, you know? It could matter in the sense that we're experiencing beauty and creativity. We weren't experiencing a moment before and we value it. Again, we could imagine changing our values.

We could imagine saying, actually, no, we really want to, you know, we've got this, you know, we're going to go to Mars. We're going to be the first people to go to Mars and we're going to build a community. And we want to, we want to be really different than who we were on Earth and we want to be different from, you know, we just want to be more or less unrecognizable to the people we used to be. So we're going to now, we have a completed science of the mind. We're going to change lots of things about ourselves and we're going to want different things, right? And so we'll, you know, we could be, I mean, the cartoon version of this, I think I'd give in the book is you could imagine an island of, you know, perfectly matched sadists and masochists, right, who just, you know, I don't, I can't imagine sadomasochism actually works this way, but just imagine it did where you could just have people who were being cruel and being made miserable, but they really were finding this incredibly rewarding because of just the kinds of minds they have. They have this sort of S&M reward function. that's conceptually possible from my point of view and I'm willing to stipulate

it might be unrecognizable to me it might be even odious to me given my moral intuitions but it's conceivable we live in a universe where something that's strange from my point of view could nevertheless be a peak on another peak on a moral landscape right different from the one I'm attempting to ascend

sure there's so much to say I mean the first is this idea of beginning with getting rid of or duty should just forget about that for a minute and let's just look at the world we're in suppose we're having a conversation with somebody in that world right they're just in this descriptive world there's no there's no ought there's no should there's no duty and we say to them look notice what happens when you put your hand on a hot stove and this person puts their hand on the stove and they and they pull it away and you say see you didn't like that did you and they go no I really didn't like that I really hurt and you say so so you value you know

not having your hand hurt in that way and they're like yeah so I suppose you didn't like I do. I mean, I put my hand on and it just happens. And I, and I then say to them this statement. So look, if we should do anything in this life and they go, hold on, what do you mean should? What is that? What are you talking about? I say, like, if we should do anything, it should be, you know, avoiding those kind of circumstances and they just say to you, we're in this world where should does it. What are you talking about there? I don't think we should draw much of anything from this, because again, it is like the creationist at the physics conference. But it's not it's not so much a, I see what it's saying there, but what I mean to say is I'm trying to get out what you actually mean in that phrase when you say if we should do anything. What do you mean by that way? I'm saying the universe would be better, all things considered. So let's just say we couldn't, let's say, let's say, we all have enough brain damage on this point where the sense of should is just something we can never seem to justify. And it's we're all kind of radically selfish. Whereas even if I, If I can tell you that you would be better off not having your hand on a hot stove,

I can't get you to care that anyone else not burn, say. Well, certain things follow. One is they're, you know, given what it is to have a human mind and human relationships, given how social we are, given what, you know, given certain positive states of mind that are on offer like love and compassion, you'll see this person unable to have certain experiences that we also recognize our sources of happiness, even our primary sources of happiness, right? So they're going to be cognitively and emotionally closed

to really loving their kids. If they can't figure out how the universe is better or to care that it be better of not having their kids tortured, right? If they only care about their torture, they're limited in, and there are consequences to that limitation. When you say the word better there, because I asked what do you mean by should

and you said something like that the world would be better what do you mean by better? In precisely the same way that it's better for them in the way that they acknowledge that it's not going to be on a hot stove it's better for their kids

not to be tortured in the same way even if just viewed from above not a personal view just viewed in the totality of I suppose my problem is if that is the case then in the same way that you can essentially just translate words like

good into talking about well-being, I can do the same thing in the opposite direction and translate words like, words like value into things like preference. So if I say something like, look, you know, you put that hand on that stove and you take it away, all that tells me is that I prefer it not to be that way. And I could say that I can convince this person that the world would be better if not. And what do you mean by better? Well, I mean better in the same way. that you take your hand away, that is, you would prefer it to be that way. Yeah, or someone else would prefer it, yeah. And that's fine, but now it seems like what we're doing is, if that is the language that we use, we're saying that the world would be better, this is a good thing to do, just means this would be a way that people prefer it. And that's fine, but that means that we're talking about moral subjectivity. That's essentially a definition of moral subjectivity, right?

That to say good is to say, this is what people just prefer. No, I mean, it's only, I mean, I'll grant you that the term preference is deflationary, but it's only deflationary because we reserve it for things that don't really matter, right? The moment you make things matter more and more and more and more and more, and you get into the territory of the worst possible misery for everyone versus its antithesis, you know, some sublime state of satisfaction that endures for as long as possible for everyone capable of it, you know, and the difference, the gulf that opens up between those two states

of the universe or any, you know, microcosm within that universe, that gulf is not, to traverse that gulf is, with the term preference, it seems like a misuse of how we use that term, right? It only seems deflationary because of what we do with it, but yes, it's a, what matters, the fact of mattering, the objective fact of anything mattering is a subjective reality. I'll grant you that. I mean, again, this is the split between ontological and subjectivity and objectivity. It's not a matter for rocks and quasars. It's a matter for conscious systems to notice the difference in.

So without consciousness, the world of value goes away, right? It's got to matter to someone, somewhere, somehow, at least possibly, right? So if it's, I would grant that it could potentially affect an experience as opposed to actually affect. and experience and still matter. But if there's something out there that couldn't possibly affect anyone's experience now or in the future, no matter what happens, well, then that thing doesn't matter, right? By definition, in my world. Yeah, I mean, so it's not a bug of my view, rather, it's a feature that it captures what we care

about, in my view, when we talk about right and wrong, good and evil. yeah um and i think it does cat you can talk about should and duty but those are i will grant it's it's not a lot hinges on whether that that strand of the conversation succeeds for me like i like it's because the one of the entailments of my view is that we really are radically ignorant as to what is possible and and what is real ultimately like you know even I mean, one of the knocks against consequentialism and utilitarianism, which I admit, and it's profoundly inconvenient, is that it's very difficult to know when to stop gathering data so as to judge any act to be good or evil.

So it's like, is Putin's invasion of Ukraine bad or good? Well, I certainly think it's bad. I'm reacting as though it's bad. I'm condemning him as though it's bad. I think he has bad intentions. I think he's a bad person. I think there's a lot of evidence for that, but what if the invasion of Ukraine and all the misery endured there by the Ukrainians and all the destruction of, needless destruction of life and property, somehow does something to world affairs that just that, you know, 30 years from now we recognize, okay, that was actually the thing that got us to get our head screwed on straight. Well, if the hand on the stove for 30 seconds, bringing in pleasure.

Right. So it's actually, it was, you know, in hindsight, it was the best thing that happened in 500 years. Right now, I have no reason to think that's true. I would highly doubt anyone suspecting that that is true, but I can't rule out that possibility, right? So that is, that's contained in this analysis, right? So the thing that really confounds people, and it's the thing that is the, just a perpetual engine of misunderstanding of my view, is that people immediately move to the claims I'm making about moral truth to an effort to adjudicate practical moral decisions that exist very much in the gray area of, you know, their tradeoffs and, you know, calculations we can't do and who knows

what in the final analysis is really morally true. What's going to be better for any individual or the greatest number of individuals? And this comes to the distinction I make in the book around answers in practice and answers in principle, right? So what I'm saying is that there are answers in principle, ultimately, at the end of the conversation, you know, a billion years from now, where we can say, we can cash out our truth claims as being real, right, or having been real. There might not be answers in practice, and yet, again, this is a double standard in science. There are infinite number of questions for which we don't have answers in practice,

and yet no one would be tempted to say there's no truth there. Of course. Yeah. How many stars are there in the Milky Way precisely? Exactly. Who knows? Yeah. And what is their weight? And it's just changed, right? For what is worth. I mean, all of this is fine in that there seems to sort of be two steps in the moral landscape enterprise here. One is good is about well-being. That's step one. And step two is once we grant that, we can make all kinds of scientific claims. And this is where it becomes relevant to talk about how people will object. But you can't know in practice, but there is a principle. balance, all of that stuff I'm totally with you on. Like, everything on that side, I completely agree. It doesn't matter that we can't know in practice, you know, whether we should cure cancer or racism. Like, that doesn't matter. There could be a right answer. But that's the kind of pushback I get, even from moral philosophers. They'll say, well, I don't know how to measure

well-being, right? Sure. Yeah. You know, give me a device. But so, I'm, I hear that you're concerned about the definition of well-being and that it's not precise and that it couldn't be precise. It's not that it's not precise. It's that I suppose, and I'll be interested to see what you think of this, when you've spoken to Daniel Dennett about free will, and most people listening will probably be familiar, you don't believe in free will. Daniel Dennett is a compatibilist. He believes that there is free will, and you've had sort of a lot of back and forth about it. And one of the things that happened in this debate is Daniel Dennett puts forward to this thing, which he says, look, I can, the actions that I'm performing, they come from somewhere within me, they're due

to my will, all of this kind of stuff. And so that's freedom. And you accused him as something that I think you coined as the Atlantis fallacy. You said, look, you're describing this thing and you're saying, you know, if free will means anything, surely it's got to mean like something to do with the action not being inhibited by exterior forces, it coming from somewhere in my brain, this kind of stuff, and because it fulfills all of those criteria, those criteria, it's free will. And you say, this is a bit like saying, you're trying to prove the existence of Atlantis, and you say, here's this city, and it's watery, and it's old, but you're actually pointing at Venice. And you say, but what is this Atlantis that you're talking about? Atlantis is

a sort of slightly, it's this watery city, it's really old. Like, it fulfills some of the criteria, sure, but it's not what people mean when they say Atlantis, right? And that's the criticism you've made of Daniel Dennett. Now, I suppose. What I want to do is make the same criticism here of you that you're doing the Atlanta's fallacy with ethics, where you say, look at this thing called well-being. It seems intimately connected to things that we value. It seems intimately connected to all sort of forms of moral systems that people have devised. Despite what they might claim as the basis of ethics, it's always got something to do

with well-being. And you're pointing at this thing called well-being and saying, this fulfills so many criteria. And that's the equivalent of you pointing to Venice and me saying, sure, it does do that. But when people say Atlantis, they mean something else. And when people say good, they just mean something else. Yeah. So that's, I would be happy to dispute that. It's because in Dan's case, I can point to what he's leaving out, right?

He's leaving out something, I think, crucial. He is, in fact, changing the subject. Here, my definition of well-being, again, it's not a definition. It's just tell me what matters to you. Tell me what I'm leaving out. Tell me. And so if you're a fundamentalist Christian, you'll say, well, for me it's all about this this world doesn't matter at all really it's just a matter of

you know who goes to heaven and who goes to hell right it's just following god god's law well that's just another circumstance of of suffering and and and it's antithesis right it's it's you're you're concerned about the cut your conscious life beyond the grave now you might be wrong in fact you very likely are wrong about whether christianity is is is correct you know in the about the physics of things but let's say you're right well then I'll grant you

yeah nothing's more important than not winding up in hell right you know so but the way you would just like well tell me what you value if it's not well being well tell me what I'm leaving out what could I be leaving out

well I do I do value well being I do I just I suppose what I'm saying is I just think that that is a subjective preference that I have I just have this subjective preference for my own well being

and but I want to follow the move you just made with respect to Dan, you're saying that my definition of well-being, however capacious is guaranteed to leave out what some people legitimately mean by good or evil or et cetera. So what are those things? Well, I think the tricky thing is, and I can offer a few different answers from different, I guess, moral perspectives. I mean, I'm an emotivist about ethics, so I don't have a, what I would say is, whatever that gap is, I think just doesn't exist. But some people might say, for example, when you speak to a religious person and you say, what do you value if not well-being,

or what is missing from that picture, they might say something like, well, yes, the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and that there's no way of conceiving of that situation that wouldn't be bad. But it's not bad just because of, say, the suffering. It might be the case, for example, that you're an Aristotelian, and you think that things have natural ends. You know, this table's end is to hold things up, you know, and a human's end is to fulfill whatever, you know, the human end is. And suffering doesn't fulfill that. But they'll say that the reason that it's bad is because suffering doesn't fulfill the natural end of man or something.

It's not because it's suffering. It's not because the experience of suffering is something that the creature, teachers who feel it subjectively don't like. And so they'll totally agree with you that, yeah, the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, but that isn't enough to show me that it's bad because it involves the suffering, you know? And so they'll say that what you're missing there is that. Now, I wouldn't say that because I'm not an Aristotelian, but then I wouldn't say that

this good concept exists objectively, right? And so I'd be the wrong person to ask, but I think it would be something like that, right? And you must recognize that, at least on the surface, when you tell people, I think morality is about well-being and they sort of meet you with suspicion, that there must be something about this word good, even if they can't quite pin down what it is, that means more than just that. Yeah. Well, so I'll grant you that people have different associations with all of these terms, and many of those associations are confusing. I mean, they make, it's very easy to misunderstand what I'm saying if you have a fairly effete conception of well-being or happiness. They don't sound like substantial terms. It sounds like a, you know, when you're thinking about what spa you want to go to on the weekend, then you're thinking about your well-being.

But, you know, when your kid's getting tortured in the next room, well-being is not the the framing that, that makes sense. But I'm using well-being and even a lighter term like happiness versus suffering to run as deep as we can possibly go and deeper than that if we only had minds that could go deeper than that, right? So it's just, again, I'm willing to dispense with the conventional terminology in order to just reset the conversation and descriptively explore this space of all experience, right? And so what are the constant, if you don't like words like good and evil, how do you want to think about a space where you individually and we collectively as conscious beings have a navigation problem, right? Well, like where morality is essentially the demand

that has been imposed on us by reality, the reality that we are as conscious beings and whatever reality in which we're entangled, the demand is being made on us. each moment to do or not do something next, right? Like, again, we're continually tacking in some unseen wind and experiencing the results of that movement. And we're, you know, you could imagine beings like ourselves where they have a very different language. The conceptual layer that applied to this navigation

could be very different, and they might not, it might not be easy to translate our moral talk into their talk about these changes. Maybe you can tell me what I'm missing from my picture then, because like I say, I'm broadly speaking, an ethical emotivist. Say more about the consequences of that. What does that mean? I'm not sort of, I don't know,

I always like to be a little bit agnostic about these things, you know, open to change and all that, but I'm broadly attracted to this view that when we make ethical statements or pronouncements, we're essentially just expressing emotions at each other. And so when I say that murder is wrong, I'm sort of expressing some kind of distaste, or I'm expressing something akin to saying, don't do that, which is just like a command. It doesn't have any truth value.

It's not even subjectively true or false. It's just like a command or an expression. And so if that's the case, then this sort of ethical talk is completely different to the picture that you're painting. And so not really. I can translate some of that into the picture I'm painting. Because again, it sounds like you're, to say that it's just a statement about the way we feel or might feel. Well, to be clear, it's not a statement about how we feel. It is the expression of the feeling.

So the mistake that's often made with the motivism is when I say murder is wrong, I'm not saying something like I don't like murder or I feel bad towards murder because that can be true and false. As we were discussing earlier, it can be true that I don't like murder. It's the expression of the dislike to the murder. A.F. Amously has it as just going, boo murder. That's not something that has any kind of truth value. And- Well, boo doesn't, but you're granting that it is possible to not like murder, and that could be an objective state of a subjective system. Absolutely. Yeah, that's no, that's no problem at all. Yeah. Sure. Okay. And so I find myself in a world where I put my hand on a hot stove, and when I do, I go, I don't like that. And it's objectively true that I don't like that.

Cool. And so I look around the world and there are certain experiences that are going to make me suffer and some that are not. And so I pick the ones that don't make me suffer because I prefer them. And like that's it. Man, that's like that's the story. Okay. Let's build from there. So that's you as the emotivist picking and choosing in the space of possible experience. Would you grant that there are experiences you haven't had and you don't know what you're missing? Yes, in terms of what I would, if experiencing those, you know, subjectively enjoy, sure. Right. So, and it might be, there are probably circumstances where, or there are experiences that are available to people and, you know, other conscious minds, but they're not available to you, given how you are, right? So you might not have the talent required to get there or the genes required to get you there. Absolutely. Yeah, no problem with that. Okay. So, the land. A landscape of possible experience extends what you currently know or even can know, right? And that's true of every person like you. Absolutely. Yeah.

No, we're saying boo at each other in that context. And this landscape we're talking about is a landscape of experiences either possible or actual, which if I were to experience them, I would go, yay. I'd go, yeah, sure, great. But the, the, the thumbs up and thumbs down can be increasingly strident, right? I mean, like, there are experiences that are so good. Absolutely. You'll have the experience of everything that's happened up to me, up to this moment in my life. It was comparatively worthless compared to this experience that I'm now having.

And obviously the opposite is the case. So what do you make of the fact that these experiences exist, right? and they're radically different and that they're right and wrong answers with respect to how to get from one to the other. You don't randomly get just hurled toward one or the other. You know, it's your, there are at every level that we can understand ourselves

scientifically from the genome on up, you know, so genetics and neuroscience and psychology and sociology, if that were actually a science, economic systems, everything, every contribution to a possible change in the character of our experience can be more or less well understood. Absolutely. Yeah, no problem with that either. Okay.

So all those converging lines of fact-based discussion can be brought to bear on this navigation problem. Yeah. So because I've got this subjective preference to reach this peak, I can use all of the scientific resources available to me to go and reach that peak. Okay. Now, what if we just add one other element to this, which is you've got your preference weights such as they are now. You've got the factory settings. But, you know, you didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes. You know, you didn't pick the factory. You didn't

pick your culture and the world into which you were born. And you were just, you've been tuned up by forces beyond your control. Now we have something like a completed science of the mind and you can actually change your preferences. Right. And this is a did. question of whether that would be, whether you should do that, whether that would be a good thing to do, but good, good as measured by what? Well, in my, in my universe, we don't have terms like good yet. That hasn't ended into the table. So you'll, you'll just say boo differently if we change those weights. So let's say like somebody offers me the opportunity to take a pill and let's say that in this world, I don't really like music that much. Right. So I don't really

care for it, whatever. And I can take a pill that's suddenly going to turn me into this great music lover where I'm going to experience this brand new joy. And although right now my preference isn't to enjoy music, so it doesn't seem to matter to me, I can change my preferences so that now this new pleasure opens up to me and I can experience it. What would I do? I'd look at that pill and I'd go, yeah, sounds great, awesome. And I'd take the pill just because I would prefer to have that preference. It's a second order preference, right? But there's still no space here into which has entered a concept of like moral prescription, of goodness, of a order. I'm, I'm still just in this world where there are experiences I prefer, and I use my scientific analysis

of the world to achieve those. And when something comes along that allows me to really radically improve that feeling of subjective preference, hell yeah, you know, use all the science you can get to give me those pills. Right. But still, still no moral judgments here, right? Well, there are potentially, but they might not be necessary. I mean, as long as as you're going to concede that you might not know what you're missing, if you might not know how good life could be if you only made certain changes to yourself or to your thinking or to your culture, right? So we have a bunch of people like you who just don't want to talk about shoulds and aughts, right? And they never do. They just occasionally they say boo, but they don't think

anything really hangs on it. And then if we, it just, it could be an empirical fact about you and or people like you, that you're cognitively and emotionally and culturally and civilizationally closed to certain outcomes, which are available the moment you begin to play a little bit differently. I'm not sure why those would be correlated

because, like, this idea that, you know, there are experiences that are available to me that I don't even know what I'm missing, that doesn't require me to believe in any concept of morality. Because if you said to me... I'm still just on the more... So again, I'm bracketing. morality, you know, the judgmental, you know, the judgmental, you know, violence of that term

for the purpose of this part of the conversation, I'm just saying that there's descriptively, we're in kind of in the descriptive value, still value-laden landscape of, of this feels much, much better than this over here, which I never want to taste or touch again, right? Crucially, just for clarity, I would say, in my view here, this is subjective value. These are subjectively valued. These are objective facts about conscious system. Objective facts about how to best achieve what one subjectively values. Yeah, but that doesn't, that turn, sorry, that turn doesn't do anything deflationary for me.

It's just there's, there are certain things that only exist as appearances in consciousness. Right, that is their ontological status, right? There's no, even if we could later correlate them with other states of the physics of things. it is, it's just, you can't conceptually reduce them, you can't be, there's, there's no, the, the, the, the there is as conscious experiencing, right? And, and I would say consciousness itself is one of those things. It's just that, the only evidence for consciousness in this universe is, as consciousness, right? It's like, there's no evidence in a brain that, that consciousness is a thing, right? Okay. So, so, so is there, is there something from this, this picture that we've, that we've been painting so far, where I've started in a, in a, in a world, I don't know why I'm imagining. like I'm on some desert island, like we're starting from scratch, you know, like the opening Minecraft game or something. I'm just here in this world, and there are things I prefer and things that I don't, and I start to learn scientifically through observation, which things are going to get me what

I want and which things aren't. So I start acting in accordance. Then we all get together, and because it's going to be good for me if I work with this person, we work together and we start developing maybe this pill, and then somebody comes over on a boat and says, hey, there's this great thing that you don't even know that you're missing, you know, give it to go. And I'm so open-minded that I'm like, yeah. sounds awesome, and their pleasures are just increasing and increasing all the time.

And again, like, the end, you know, end scene, stories, stories over, that's the picture for me. Right. Because if it is the case that there are, in fact, moral values in the world, like, there is this thing called objective moral truth. The picture I've just painted, as far as I can see, doesn't contain it. So what's wrong about that picture? Where's it gone wrong? No, the more we fill in the blank spots in that picture, the more I think we get everything we could conceivably want by any talk about right and wrong,

good and evil. So, I mean, just take, give yourself a desert island and maybe, you know, add another person. So, you know, you're Adam and Eve, right? And you're building the world anew, and then the question is, again, you, there's just two of you, and you have a navigation problem even there, right? And you would even have a navigation problem alone, but let's just, let's make it a little more complex. So there's two of you. And now the question is, how can you live so as to maximize

everything that would be, that would be rewarding, good, yum, yum, I want more of that. Yeah. That is what they would, in fact, be doing. But there would be no...

Okay, but no, but again, the crucial thing to admit is that they're right and wrong answers, that they're very real and very different possibilities, in the space of all possible experience that can be actualized. There's some they couldn't possibly get to

in a normal human lifespan because two people's just not enough to get you those things, right? But, you know, there's a range of right, more right and more wrong answers open to them as to how to maximize what I'm calling their well-being, right? And the first answer is, you know,

they could both pick up large rocks and start smashing each other in the face. right? Now, that would be a bad answer to this. It's a possible answer. It will give them some immediate feedback as to what life is like when you do that. The wrong way to get that well. Wrong way. And it also, it just closes the door to other kinds of collaboration that we know we're going to be objectively better. If better means navigating away from the worst possible misery for everyone and towards something, or in your emotivist terms, you know, fewer booze

and more yums, you know, just getting, I mean, you're, the character of experience, will change and will change by virtue of whatever laws of nature underwrite the character of conscious experience, right? And again, we can understand those laws at every level that we attempt to understand anything, you know, from genetics on up. It just sounds to me like, you know, Adam and Eve in that world, they just, they just, the color example comes to mind again. And maybe, maybe I'm missing something as to why this isn't a challenge, but, you know, they just are looking around. the Garden of Eden and they just discover that yellow just is really nice. They just like it. And so then they discover that there are all of these scientific ways to figure out how to get more yellow. They figure out like botany. They figure out that you can, you can plant particular

plants and we'll get more yellow in the world. Like, great. But this seems to me just to homo sapiens acting in accordance with their preferences. If somebody tried to import moral terms into this, you know, into this botany of planting flowers because they're yellow and we, yeah, we prefer yellow. I'd say, that's a bit strange. And then that person could go on this, this incredible and intricate demonstration of the surprising and incredible ways that science can inform us about how we can enjoy colors in ways that we never even imagined.

Like, there's so much more to it than we even really considered. But I would then say, yeah, sure, that's great, but. What's this moral, this morality thing that you're talking about in a, in a, I mean, again, talking to the Adam and Eve character here, that they're like, no, I just like these flowers. What do you mean morality? You know, what is this thing that you're talking about? Yeah, but this is the only place where we're tempted to, to kind of turn up the volume of our, sort of discursive insistence and use really judgmental terms like, you know, good and evil are right and wrong. is when the difference between the preference, when the preferences are beginning to track something

that matters more and more and more, and such that it eclipses a concern about anything else, right? And that's why the hot stove is like, when your hand is on a hot stove, you really can't care about anything else, right? I mean, if you can care about something else, then it's not hot enough, right? And so it only becomes torture,

it only becomes a moral evil, It only becomes something more than just a preference when it becomes unendurable, right? Or just so significant as to eclipse anything else. And I still think we're, you know, we can decline to make those moves. We can keep trying to deflate it and saying, well, at bottom, it really is just a preference for a conscious being like yourself not to be burnt alive, right? But I just don't see what we're doing there. I mean, one thing I want to add here, which may help untangle this, is that there's another

double standard here or disparity in how we talk about shoulds in the moral sphere. So, like, I say, you know, I say that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, and if we should do anything, we should avoid it, right? And

everything is objectively better than the worst possible misery for everyone. And you could say, well, but who's to say you should? Who's to say that it's really true that you ought to see that the worst possible misery for everyone is worse than some other state of the universe where there's lots of happy people and like why like how is that how does how should and ought apply there so you could do the same thing in logical or mathematical space you could say that two plus two equals four and if someone fails to understand that you could say well when you add two and two you should get four right you ought to get four you actually have a logical duty or an arithmetical duty to get four right and if you don't get four you're you're shirking this this responsibility me you could add that layer

of judgmentalism but that seems to me like kind of what you're doing if you know forgive me but It seems like when someone says, well... Well, I'm saying it's not a problem to strip out that layer of judgmentalism in our talk about right and wrong, good and evil. Well, if somebody says one and one makes two, and you said, like, look, one and one should make two. And I said, I don't know why you're using the should language. It just does make two, right? And the worst possible misery for everyone is something we should move away from. Whereas I would say it's just something that people do move away.

Exactly. But it's, and so, but in arithmetically, two plus two just does make four. And, and people just do move away from the worst possible misery, right? Yes. There is no, it's definitional. There's, if it's not, if you wouldn't want to move away from it and you want anything, it's not the worst possible misery. I totally agree.

But notice how like, if that's the case, because look at that, we agree on something. And, you know, we just do move away from suffering. We just do get two and we add one and one. If you said to me... But again, a little caveat here, nothing turns on it, but this is not pure, it's not a pure pleasure principle. I mean, there's all kinds of suffering we do move toward because they're deep, we recognize that there's deeper happiness

and things we want on the other side of it. So that's why it's helpful to talk about the worst possible misery, even conceivably. Yeah, sure. So people just do move away from it. and when you add one and one, you just do get two. Right. If you turn around to me and said, well, I'm just going to start talking in this language of should.

I'm just going to say, if you add one and one, you should get two. And what I mean by that is essentially a moral prescription. No, no, no, again, I'd find that really weird. The difference, so I think you're taking the wrong end of this thing, or the, the opposite of what I'm trying to illustrate. The, I hear you making my point. What I'm saying is that this should talk, this ought talk that people think is intrinsic to morality, I think is grafted on in the same way that I'm now grafting on in a very seemingly ridiculous way, this judgmentalism with respect to logic. Right, right, right, right. So you're saying that people, I'm saying it just is better. People generally do this should thing. They just add to the should factor when they're just talking about the description.

If you could, if there was a button here that we could push at no cost to ourselves that would reduce. reduce the misery of human beings on earth by half. And let's just stipulate that there's no other negative, unforeseen negative consequences that occur as a result of that. But just like, consequentially, this is just better. You know, everyone who's miserable gets, you know, much less miserable. And no cost to ourselves, we can push the button. So what does it mean to say we really should push that button, right?

Now, that's one way of talking about it. I would agree. For shorthand, it's fine. I say should all the time, right? But I am saying it's objective, the world would be objectively better if we push that button. And it would be so much better that if someone understood all of the causality here and still declined to push the button, that person would be a moral monster. But again, in this, in this area of talk where we talk about right and wrong, good and evil, and morality, and should, right? There'd be something wrong with that person.

Because just imagine what that person would have to think and say and feel so as to decline to push. that button with a clear conscience, right? Like, what if, you know, we're talking about, you know, a Kim Jong-un character or somebody who might say, well, what is it to me that all these people are suffering? And I kind of like the idea that I like the idea that there's this much of a disparity between my current happiness and so many billions of people who are really unhappy, right?

And so part of my pleasure in the getting out of bed in the morning is knowing that, you know, my feelings of satisfaction are at some kind of zenith with respect to this. this, to the, to the, to all of the background misery that I don't have to take any time to understand, but I know is there, right? So if you're telling me, you're going to give me this button, not only would I not push it, I would want another button where I could, you know, further immiserate people, right? Well, that's what we mean by evil. That's what we, and we know, the reason why that person is worse off than other people, in my point of view, for my point of

view, with respect to the moral landscape, is that we know that to be that sort of person is to almost by definition not be available to certain states of consciousness that we all agree are some of the most important and beautiful and creative states of consciousness on offer insofar as we can see it right now I'll grant you there could be some very weird spot

on the moral landscape where you get perfect sadists and perfect massacus, etc. So things could get weird and there's some description of the laws of nature that would make sense of that but the crucial point for me is that even if there are other high spots on the landscape that are weird, there are many spots on the landscape

that are not high no matter who you are, no matter what you want, no matter how we tune all the relevant variables, they just suck, right? There's just, they're low spots. And again, these are objective claims about conscious minds now and in the future, however they're constituted. Yeah. Right.

I really want to dig into this my pleasure good for me versus other people's pleasure or well-being uh being something that's that's morally uh that would be morally preferred um just before moving on to that i want to say that it sounds to me just to wrap this section up because it's weird i think we almost we almost agree in that uh me being an emotivist and just thinking that all there essentially is is people's preferences and people acting in accordance with them. It almost sounds like you agree with me and this whole thing about tacking on the should, correct me if I'm wrong. But should is shorthand for a lot that we know about

human minds and human societies that matter, that deeply matters to us, right? We know we know quite a bit about the difference between the best possible lives and the best possible relationships and the worst possible, right? And so far, the shorthand is if you could push that button, you really should do it, right? In fact, you should pay, you should be willing to pay a fair amount of money to do it, right? Like, you know, you should be able to, you should be willing to make some sacrifice personally to do it. And if I'm talking to someone who says, well, I don't see any of that, right? I'm, I don't see why I should even just lift a finger to do that, right? There's, there may not be, I think there probably are ways to argue that person,

you know, closer toward pushing the button if they're, you know, neurologically intact, right? You could say, oh, did you consider the fact that there are people who you know who might be miserable right now, whose misery would be reduced, and there are people who you might meet tomorrow, who you might fall in love with, you know, your future wife who's out there, who you're going to meet six months from now, she might be in a depression right now, and you could alleviate that. There are ways to triangulate on even the most obtuse person, but, no, but there are people who will have essentially kick themselves loose of any rational

conversation about that we want to summarize with words like should and then they might pretend to be you know to be living in some kind of moral solitude and not see why anything gets better if things get better

outside their own consciousness but it's pretty easy to see that they do even by their own lights I mean this is where even like Kantian analysis seems to track the same terrain where it's like, you know, you know, Kant acknowledged that, you know, even a thief couldn't want thie to be a categorical imperative because then everyone would be stealing from him and there'd be no advantage to being a thief. I mean, so there's, you know,

the things universalize whether you're thinking in those terms or not. Yeah, but it all seems to sort of translate into terms of preference here. But see, you're using the word preference as though it really took the air out of the balloon, what does it mean to say that you have a preference for not spending every conscious moment, you and everyone you love, and everyone who you might come to love, spending every conscious moment now, and through any possible future, the longest possible future, perhaps a future that we could engineer to be much far longer than is naturally possible now, not suffering the worst possible misery. I think it literally just means that I would be happier in the knowledge that that wasn't happening. Well, it's not

happier in the knowledge. Well, it isn't a knowledge when you're talking about other other people, but even technically for me, like if I, I can't suffer without knowing I suffer. But, okay, I said that as a technicality because if all of my friends were being tortured, but I was just being lied to about it. I just didn't know. Then, of course, I'm not going to be any more upset for that. That's just a sort of technicality that I'm making. But presuming that I'm correct about what I know about the world, like you're asking, what does it mean for me to say that I would prefer not to just suffer immeasurably for the rest of time? What it means is that I would be happier if that didn't happen, if that weren't the case. I think that is literally just what

Well, that's circular because happier means, imports the notion of preference on your account, too. Perhaps. But for me, this isn't a problem because it's a brute fact about conscious systems. Again, you could do something like you could say, you know, 2 plus 2 makes 4 just because I, you could put that in preferential terms as well. You could say, well, that's just the way it seems to me, right? It's like I, that's the way, I can't see it any other way. You know, as a logician, you could simply say, you could subjectivize everything.

You could say, I just, it's just the way it seems to me. Yeah. You know, and what work does that do? That is in fact true. I mean, if you want to be radically skeptical about everything and bracket everything. I have defended that view elsewhere, that essentially we can emotivize everything. And so rather than, say, pulling up, you know, subjective ethics into the realm of objectivity, we just pull the realm of objectivity down to the subjective realm that most people put ethics in.

I mean, is that something like what you're doing then? Just saying, I'm just saying they're on all fours. Yeah, sure. Because first of all, everything is happening in and as consciousness, right? I mean, there's no, like, so you, consciousness, you know, on my account is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion, right? Because to say that it might be an illusion is to invoke consciousness just as fully as any veritical impression does. I mean, like to say that this is all hallucination is only the way things seem. Well, it's the fact of seeming announces that the truth of consciousness as much as anything else, right?

So it doesn't, it could be a simulation, this could be a dream, I could be a brain and a vat. None of that actually undercuts the reality of consciousness as I'm defining it. and as I believe everyone's experiencing it. So there's nothing, I mean, they're interested. If you're going to keep pushing this analysis further and further and depriving our terms of the gravitas they seem to have in ordinary language games, you're going to wind up with something like a radical,

mystical skepticism that privileges consciousness first above everything else, and only admits the seemings that seem to have pragmatic utility in physics or in medicine or in economics or in morality. But again, everything is going to be, there's not this disjunction of we've got science and rational and mathematics and, you know, our rational bedrock here. And then over here at a some far more confecting, stage of the conversation, you know, the stage where it's really just a bunch of, you know, parochial, not altogether true, certainly not scientific biases, where we talk

the talk of boo and, and, you know, applause. That's where we talk about good and evil and right and wrong. That is, it's that separation that I, that I'm undercutting in the moral landscape. If you're going to grant me that everything is on the same, is on all fours, where we're talking about how things seem, right? And in every time we try to give our seeming some kind of weight, we're left pulling ourselves up by our bootstrap. So if you're a girdle, you're saying, well, you can't even get arithmetic without presupposing something that's true that can't be self-justifying within the domain of arithmetic, right? If you're going to grant all of that and you're going to, at the physics conference, you're going to say, yeah, well, we just

happen to the way we feel is our preference to understand the behavior of matter energy, but we can't really say that's really physics. Maybe there's a totally different physics, right? If you're going to deflate everything equally, well, then yeah, then it's all the same. I just don't think, I think we're doing a lot of work that isn't necessary. I think it's fine to use the moral shorthand of should. Can it, can it be cashed out in those terms when it comes to the laws of logic or mathematical truths where it seems natural for me to say of the worst possible misery that I prefer it

not to be the case it just seems so much more unnatural doesn't it sound psychotic to say that like like psychotic or psychopathic like either you're not under either you're not tracking let me just imagine you know you're held by your captors in a room away from your family and you know

but you can hear the screams of your family in the next room and they say to you you want us to stop torture in your family because you just give us the information that we know you have. And you say, well, you know, I would obviously have a preference that you're not torture my family as you're doing right now. But, I mean, like that, that aloofness from the details of what I don't think I would, I would put it so. But it doesn't actually track the way you would feel and would be right to feel given the

kind of being you are. I would feel like I would really, really, really prefer for that not to happen. Even more like how much ice cream. could counterweight that preference? Well, I suppose even, I don't know, maybe there would be an answer to that. I'm not sure. It's hard to know until we've been in that scenario, I suppose.

Look, it sounds, yeah, it sounds great. But look, I mean, people say this about all kinds of things. They say it sounds absolutely absurd to, you know, say there's to look at the majesty of the universe and say there's no God. It just seems like crazy. And you're one of the people who's better than anyone else at, you know, looking at situations like that and going, Yeah, but like, forget about how it seems, if this is how it is.

Yeah, but that's not a good analogy because, yes, I can get there. You look up at an Andromeda, you know, or that Hubble Deep Field movie that somebody made. And you can say that, but you have to just keep aggregating the data. You also have to include smallpox killing, what, 500 million people and over the course of, you know, the 20th and probably 19, century um it's that's part of the majesty too yeah but okay so on on the on the surface of it it seems like hey that's that's crazy to to you know to say that but if we look at it more deeply then we'll realize it's not so crazy and i think the same thing's true here like if i'm you know a captive and i say and i was somehow in the state of mind to actually reflect in a second order sense on

what was actually going on in my brain, then I would notice that when I just instinctively say, please, I'll do anything, let me go. I need you to let me go and let my family go. If I were able to stop and reflect on that, then looking at all the data, I'd realize that what's really being expressed there is a really intense preference. In the same way that if I held to a hand on a stove, I think that you wanted to take that away is a preference. It's you saying I would prefer it to be the case that my hand on the stove. Now, if I hold your hand there so that that preference gets incredibly intense. I still think it's true that you would just prefer your hand not to be there. I don't think it sounds, you know, psychopathic to say that that's all that's going on just because

we've sort of turned the heat up. Yeah, but that's why I think this term preference. I mean, it strikes the ear as radically diminishing of the significance of the thing. But if we're just going to expand it to encompass everything that matters as much as it could possibly matter to us to any conscious system, well, then it's a different, it's a different word, but I'm fine with it. I mean, yes, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a subjective valence with respect to what, how you're disposed to navigate in the space of, of, of changes, right? So you're, you're going to do, based on, you're wanting more or less, based on the kind of being you are, you are going to do something or, or want to do something if you're prevented from doing something.

and all of that has consequences. And, yes, and there are tradeoffs. I mean, there may be states of the universe where, again, they're discordant, right? Which is to say, if you're on one peak, you're not on another peak. But if we could, you know, spend a billion years doing all the relevant math, we would recognize, okay, everyone's kind of more or less just as well off in each circumstance, although things are different, right? These people are fixated on yellow over here. These people over here don't even think about color, but they've got something else that really captivates them.

These are different. They're incommensurable. But they're given the laws of nature and given that everything that allows for experience is emerging out of the laws of nature, there is a way to navigate between these two peaks. There's some valley we could descend into and some ridge we could climb

that would require changes to the nervous system and changes to our intuitions and changes to our talk about morality and there are trade-offs even within the gray areas of our own living where we don't know if we've made the right decision. And if you could, you could even say, like, you know, imagine the person who's being tortured

or, you know, imagine a person whose family's being tortured in the next room, and he has secrets that if he gives them up, you know, he's going to ruin the world. So it would be good if he didn't care about his family being tortured, right? And if we could give him a pill at that moment, that would cause him to be, you know, truly callous with respect to the suffering of his family, that would be the right thing to do because he'd save the world and he wouldn't suffer. And yes, it's too bad about his family. But, you know, in a consequentialist calculus, you know, you save a billion lives and you lose two. And we will take that, you know, trolley problem all day. Okay, that's a painful tradeoff. It might have been the best place we collectively could have navigated to, given the circumstances, there's a place to stand where it would be better, all things considered, had his family not been captured and not been tortured, and I mean, so there's places to,

there's counterfactuals that we prefer, but given what happened, there might only be one place to move and it involves a trade-off. And if you focus on the trade-off, it's truly galling and, you know, it's awful that this man is sitting there smiling as his family's getting tortured. And he's certainly going to feel bad about it later, but it was the best thing we could do in this part of the moral landscape. Sure. I think it would be good to probe this this bit about other people's well-being.

Of course, there's so much more to say about this, let's say the metarethical element. I think it's very helpful how you've talked in terms of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. Essentially, I suppose, the criticism many people are making, and one that I've made in the past is that the philosophy is circular.

Seems to me like you might be saying something like, well, it is in the way that any other kind of philosophy is circular and must be circular. Yeah, which is to say that I mean, I wouldn't, I don't accept the charge of circularity, really, but it's, there's a, there's a first move you have to make to come out of the darkness and that move is not itself, self-justifying. And for me, the first move is you have to acknowledge that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad. Well, and then anything else is it would be better. Even if I would charge your philosophy with circularity, perhaps the conversation should. shouldn't go around in circles. But even, but, yeah, yeah, good.

But like a, if you look at a definition of something like a cause, right? I mean, just to define the term cause, you get something like a circular definition of cause. I mean, like, I think it's true of all definitions. Yeah. To, not all definitions, but all, you know, brute facts about our reasoning. Let's say all foundational definitions, where you just need to sort of start the term. There's no, um, there's no further recourse, right?

It's kind of like how a dictionary is always going to be internally self-reference. referential. If you tried to, every word in the dictionary is defined with other words. And so if you kept sort of looking at, if you looked at the definition of table and within that definition, you took one of the words in the definition and looked for the definition of that and looked for the definition of that. You'd end up just going around in a circle. Or you would just have to start somewhere that's essentially self-justifying. But yes, to avoid too much. But I get, I don't want to, yeah, I'm happy to move on, but I just, I had one more piece here for people think about, which is I think there are, there are things we can pretend to think

and even convince ourselves that we are thinking, but I don't in fact think we are thinking those thoughts all the way through, right? And this is one, for someone to say that maybe the worst possible misery for everyone isn't really bad, right? Or maybe it really doesn't matter or who's to say. I think that you can pretend to think that. You can, you can make the mouth noises, you can even silently with the voice of your mind rehearse those sentences, but you're not actually thinking that. In the same way that you're not thinking, if you, if you pretend to think the thought that all squares are really round, right, you can say those words. Yeah. But you're not, you're not, it's not really tracking the, the semantics. I think that's true

sometimes. I mean, it, it rings a little bit to me like when Jordan Peterson says, I know you say you're an atheist, but, I mean, you can say that, you can make those mouth movements, but you're not really an atheist. If you look at the way you actually behave and what you value and what you do, you're not really an atheist. And there's a sense in which you kind of get what he's saying. I would disagree that that's, no, I mean, there I just, I think that's just patently specious. But if you agree that when you seem to think that maybe all squares are round, right, or I'm pretty sure all squares really are round, right? There's something you're only pretending to be doing there. It's not a normal thought. It's not the same thing as two plus two makes four or we're really sitting here next to a table.

You said asking if the worst misery for everyone is really bad is, because there is no other place to stand to mean anything else by bad. And if you're going to say, well, I don't want to mean anything by bad, right, you're still going to want to navigate in the same way. Well, that's the move, isn't it? And the navigation is the, is the, is the prior condition out of which our words like bad and good emerge. So it's like you're going to say, I'm just trying to, I think, what analogy to draw. I'll let you know if I come up with one. But it's just, it's a, it's only because you're not taking the time to really imagine

what is being indicated that you can seem to apply word, you can seem to find some place to stand where you have more rudimentary intuitions. that. Like, I, like, I have a deeper intuition that there's some place to stand where I can say maybe the worst possible misery for everyone isn't bad, right? Or, like, I just think it's a, it's an illegitimate move to say that it's bad because there's some, some place to stand over here where we can talk about bad and good that doesn't interact with the worst possible misery for everyone. And I'm just saying that that's, you're not actually track, you're not, you're, you're talking about round squares. You said to William and Greg that we've hit philosophical

bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question, if we ask if the worst possible misery for everyone is really bad. That was a good way of saying it. I still think that. I agree. I'm going to steal it. I think that, I suppose, I would say, I agree, it's bad. I would just say that, like, it's subjectively bad.

Well, no, but again, that move doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It is subject, it's all subjective ontologically. It's not subjective epistemologically. So we can have a realist conception, but it's not deflationary to say it's subjectively bad. Aren't people when they're talking about objective ethics interested in an ontologically objective ethics? No, they're very often condemning the whole enterprise as epistemologically subjective. So you have, I mean, this is like when I'm at a conference and I say something disparaging about the Taliban's ethics and some overeducated person comes up to me and says, but that's just your opinion, right? Who are you to say that that veiling women is bad, really bad?

That's just, you know, this is an old culture. It's an alternative that you're not in a position to judge, right? I'm claiming I am in a position to judge it because we know a lot about human well-being and about the possibilities of, you know, living in the same society. You're definitely in a position to judge whether that sort of, whether that behavior meets the standard that we all subjectively prefer. But you're not in a place, neither is anybody else to say that we should prefer. preferred to it when they when they have a conference about math and they get two plus two

equals three I'm in a position to say that I'm in a I can judge their the products of their conference by again by the same feels the bad feels I'm get the bad logical feels I'm getting you know what I I agree with you there but it's funny I've often taken it in the other direction and toyed with this idea that I've called it in the past global emotivism I always thought if I did a PhD thesis, it'd be on something like this, taking emotivism about ethics and just going writ large. And it rested upon this, this, uh, this observation that if you pay close attention to what your brain does when you say, why can't P be true and false at the same time? You know, what, the law of non-contradiction. Why can't P be true and false at the same

time? Just, just think of it for a moment. P being true and false at the same time. What does your brain do. It just goes, no. It just goes boo, right? And so I think maybe we're in more agreement. The reason why this conversation is so difficult is that it's very easy to say that P is true and false at the same time. Yeah. And it takes no more effort to say that sentence. And so there are many people who say things like, well, you know, slavery is not wrong. I can't say it's wrong. I just, I don't prefer it, right? It's not how I want to live, right? But like, there's no place to stand where we can actually say that it's wrong, I'm saying that if you're actually going to do the work of trying to link the word wrong to anything that it could possibly rationally be attached to, and what you

effortlessly link it to in all your other modes of living, especially when weird things happen like you find yourself a hostage of a, you know, an authoritarian dictator and your kids are getting tortured in the next room, right? Then you, then you, that you're feeling about the word wrong is not nearly as as academically precious. And it means what it's what it, it tends to mean, right? And yeah, so I'm not, the move, if you want to go up toward emotion as opposed to down toward bedrock, I think I can probably go in that direction and bring everything I care about with me. I just don't think it does necessarily the work you seem to think it does. I think it just gets us, then there's, then we're, I mean, the truth is, I think it's, it's just as likely to be

true. I mean, we're, we're, we're ungrounded on some level. I mean, we're not, you know, this, all of our truth claims are happening in a space of, where we don't have the foundations in hand. And in fact, we, you know, coherence doesn't even require foundations, really. I mean, it's like, like your dictionary, right? It could all be at some level, sell, held together by itself. But the bedrock really is consciousness. The dictionary still works, right? It's still a useful book, even if it's entirely self-referential as everything must be. The reason why I'm not a pragmatism, I mean, this is, pragmatism is some version of this attitude where, you know, you're essentially bracketing truth claims. You're not really saying that anything is really, really,

really true, like you've, you know, like your beliefs have been married to reality in a way where you can know that they're, that they're truly, you know, tracking, you know, the map is truly tracking the territory because you can never stand outside the circle of your beliefs and your language games so as to compare them to reality, right? All you've got are these these mouth noises you're making and, you know, words like boo. And all you've got is the history of whether this has performed well or seems to have performed well in your, conversations with other people and in your, you know, navigating the world. And are you getting what you want out of life on some level? Are your, you know, are your planes falling out of the

air or are they flying? At no point do you get to say, yes, this is, you know, this propositional claim about the world is true in a way that is truly non-cultural, non-perspectival, you know, outside of all possible language games. It's just, you just don't get that. And And that's fine, but the reason why I think that still must yield to a truly realistic picture of truth claims that are wider still is because whatever population of pragmatists you give me, no matter how smart, you know, playing their language game, we know that there's always someplace to stand where they didn't know what they were missing. And in order to make that move, even to pragmatically make that move, we just have to admit that there's, that that there's always space around any pragmatic conversation, right? It's just there's the physics, you know, five centuries hence, which is going to show some error in the current physics. And the only way to make sense of that is to say that there's a larger space.

That's not merely just a matter of conversation. It's not just a language game. So hopefully briefly, because I would like to move on here, why should I care about someone else's well-being? Now, you do talk about this, I think this is in the, this might be in the moral landscape or it might be from your reply to the critics on the moral landscape, where you say, if we're not able to perfectly reconcile the tension between personal and collective well-being, there are still no reason to think that they are generally in opposition. Most boats will surely rise with the same tide. It's not at all difficult to envision the global changes that would improve life for everyone. We would all be better off in a world where we devoted few of our resources to preparing to kill one another.

And I think that's certainly true that in many, if not most, circumstances, raising the ties for everyone is going to be good for me. But the example you've just given, for example, everyone's better off in a world where we devoted fewer of our resources to preparing to kill one another. It's not better for everyone. It's not better for the people who are profiting from selling weapons to each other, for example. And suppose you spoke to one of those people and said, look, if we became more anti-war as a world, as a world population, the tide rises for everyone, well, except for you, because you're going to essentially put out of a job, but it's just a sacrifice you're going to have to make, morally speaking. And if they ask you to justify why there's any moral truth at all, you do it with reference to them putting their hand on a stove and them having this sort of feeling that there are ways that are better than, the not for them, they're going to say, well, hold on, how does that map on to other people? Yeah, well, so, I mean, the first answers your question, why should you care about other people

is really prior to the question, you can just notice that you do, right? That, like, you, you, you, this is your default mode if you're not a psychopath. And, um, there's a reason why that is because so much of what's good in life is born of your entanglement with other people. I mean, we're deeply social creatures. And if, you know, you could, if you're going to go live in a cave, well, then, you know, the conversation might change a little bit. I mean, a moral solitude is its own thing, and we can talk about that.

But given that most of us have to and want to interact with other people, I think we will find most of the time that we actually want to, to interact with people who are not miserable, right? We don't want desperate, miserable people crowding our door. We want people who are filled with joy and creative energy and have good things to say and interesting things to say. They have the disposable wealth and time so as to do beautiful things that we appreciate. Like when you open Netflix, you want to see good shows, not terrible shows. At least you want to see some shows.

and that presupposes the people who have the free time and energy to make shows, right? Because so you want to be entertained by happy people, and you can see how far this extends, and it extends all the way into horizons that are fairly utopian that we have not yet experienced, but we know must be possible on some level. Now, to say there are going to be tradeoffs along the way, there will be, but the arms manufacturer has a variety of skills that apply to things other than arms, one must presume, and that person, if he's not a psychopath, could presumably be convinced that he will be happier in a world. With sufficient job retraining, he's going to be happier in a world

where he doesn't have to make bullets. He can make, you know, some analogous technology that happy people use for happy reasons. It's conceivable that that's not the case, right? Like, it's conceivable that there's just someone who actually just enjoys war. Like they're, okay, but then those, those, because again, that's the guy, that's the, that's the Christian fundamentalist at the physics conference, who we're not, we're not inclined to take seriously. But he's not wrong about his own preferences there, is he? No, yeah, he just might have brain damage.

And if we had a completed science of the mind, we could help him, right? Like, we, we would, if we could just wave a magic wand and change the preferences. Your preferences are wrong. Yeah. So if you were able to sort of. In the same way that is he, if we give him a list of, of equations and he gets all of them wrong, right? You know, two plus two makes 18. But how can someone be wrong about their own preferences?

Well, no, he's wrong about what is good, and he's wrong about the space in which he can navigate. He's wrong about, he doesn't know what he's missing. He doesn't know how good he would feel if he could feel better. Can we just stipulate for a moment that it were the case, that because of whatever the circumstances that made it the case, this person's brain chemistry is just such that they do, this is the best line of work for them. There are any other line of work you could put them in, including all the available scientific resources to adapting their brain chemistry. He has bad brain chemistry, yes. absolutely anything you can do would make his, you know, experience of well-being worse.

Right. Well, he could be a paperclip maximizer. I mean, he could just be a rogue AI that we, is not aligned with the interest of the rest of us. Sure. And that's right. Okay, so you imagine him as someone a bit like that, right? And we'll just have to rule out for a moment that we have any technology that can change his desires. He just loves his job. Anything that you do to him will reduce his well-being. You come along to him and say, listen, we are trying to remove war from this world. You're standing in the way because you're an arms manufacturer. We need you to stop. I don't see, and again... Well, then we would pass a law against arms manufacturer. If that was, I mean, we do this all the time. If someone is sufficiently indigestible from, from the

society's point of view with respect to what they want out of life. We just brute force it. We just put him in a room and lock the door, right? But is he wrong about anything? Well, he might be. So he could be right about everything. So it's possible for one person to be right and for all of us to be wrong. I'll grant you that. So he could be a lone moral genius who understands that if we just blow a few more things up.

Well, I'm not talking about him being right about the state of the world, but just right about the fact that his own well-being will be maximized by staying in that job. And we've stipulated that in this case, that is actually the case. How can we say that he's doing anything immoral? I mean, maybe we can't, but we lock him up anyway. Well, no, we can say that he's making the world, the world of conscious beings beyond him, worse off than they would otherwise be because he keeps manufacturing dangerous technology. But he actually doesn't care, and I'm going to stipulate his right not to care,

because he's elderly and any potential societal benefits in terms of what shows end up on Netflix are going to take long enough to be cashed in that he's. he's going to be dead. Right. Well, yeah. So from his point of view, he doesn't, given the nature of his mind, there are certain experiences he doesn't have, he doesn't know about, and he doesn't want to have or know about.

And so he's, again, cognitively closed to much of the, some of the most beautiful spots on the moral landscape that are probably fairly close to where he is. He just can't see them, right? He's in the fog of his own, you know, monomaniacal interest in making arms. Now, you can make that as rewarding as you want, but it would still be better if he had such a mind so as to find his reward in other ways that we're compatible with the rewards that the rest of us find. Maybe that's true, but in this circumstance, that option just isn't available to us. We don't have the technology.

There's a reason why we still have some bullets that we shoot people like this, or we imprison them. But we also then can't really say that he's doing anything immoral. Well, it's immoral, when viewed from above, so there are two ways in which it's wrong or immoral or less good than it could be. When viewed from above, when you view all of all conscious minds that could possibly be affected by what's happening, we can see that things are not as good as it would otherwise be, right? Good as measured by preferences or how people are disposed to navigate, people taking their hands off of hot stoves.

But even within his own mind, it is true to say that. that he doesn't know what he's missing. Like, if we could give him a, if we had a more complete technology, and we can give him a, you know, a football helmet that could tune in any conscious state available to a human mind, right? And we could, the 10 million different conscious states

that he could, he could just have a device, and he's stuck on the arms manufacturer bliss state, but we could switch him over to the, I love all human beings as myself, Jesus state, right? he would almost certainly prefer millions of other states to the one he's currently stuck on. Sure. And again, and that's not even admitting the fact that in a truly completed science of the mind, we could change the synaptic weights that lead to his preferences.

Yeah, but I think there's a, there's a straightforward response to both of those cases, the individual and the sort of God's eye view. the first, to take them in reverse, like, yeah, this guy who's an arm's dealer, if we could take this helmet and put it on his head, then, then, you know, he'd realize that there are possible situations that are better for him conceivably, but that doesn't change in the real world this being the right thing for him to do in the same way that if somebody has terminal cancer, and they decide to, they decide to euthanize themselves because they don't want to sort of suffer with cancer. I could say, you know, but if we somehow develop a cure for cancer,

then them euthanizing themselves would be, would be the worst thing they could possibly do. That would be, that would be ridiculous. And yeah, that's true, but because that technology doesn't exist. That's a different analogy, though. I mean, because I'm very charitable toward euthanasia. Yeah, of course, but you see what I'm saying, that, like, that's the right decision given the practical circumstance you're in, and you can hypothesize that if we invent this technology, which changes the situation. Well, it just changes the fact that he, he's now no longer, now he's able to see what he's missing. He can't see what he's missing. But I'm simply saying that given the kind of mind he has, he's stuck. And given the kind of mind

he has, he doesn't care that he's stuck. So what you're pointing to me, pointing out to me is there's a failure of persuasion. There's nothing I can say to him that's going to convince him that he's wrong. I'm not, because I realize why that would be a problem. I'm not quite saying you wouldn't be able to convince him that he's wrong. I'm saying you wouldn't be able to say that he is wrong. Well, I can say that he's missing something, right? So in the same way that, so you, so, but to translate this back into arithmetic or logic

it's like we've got a guy alone in a room who keeps adding up two plus two making three. Yeah. And it feels and that feels right to him and that's the way he sees it and he's get, so the warm feels he get we get when we add it up to four

right, it's the only way we can add it up where we feel good. Otherwise something's wrong. Um, And we could put it into a circumstance where it really matters. Like if you're going to get on a plane and a plane is going to crash and it also has a logical number of bolts in the door and you say, see, I put two here and I put two here. So I got three bolts and I'm going to say, wait a minute. That's not what I'm not comfortable with what you just said.

It's another look at two and two makes three. So we're good to go. No, no, I'm not getting on this plane until you start talking differently, right? That feeling of discomfort he feels in his room with anything other than two plus two equals three. Okay, so you're talking about a guy who's got brain damage by my lights and by the lights of anyone else who's adequate to the conversation about math. I'm saying that when you're going to talk about human flourishing, right, or the flourishing of conscious systems very much like ourselves, even beyond ourselves, there's going to be a rational

conversation we can have that's very much like the mathematical one, which again will also admit of wholesale changes that are fundamentally surprising. in the same way that mathematics does. So the analogy we could be using is to Euclidean geometry for whatever it was, you know, 2,000 years, right? Like for 2,000 years, everyone's adding up the three corners of a triangle and getting 180 degrees, and they can't see it any other way. And then Riemann comes along and says, you know, actually we've put this on a curved surface, you know, one way or the other, you're going to get more or less. Isn't that interesting?

Okay. that might have been I actually don't know so much about the details of how long that was controversial for it seems like it should have only been controversial for about five minutes but let's say it was five years right that's still there's a few things to notice there

one is the ins there's a bridge from I mean it's radically surprising it subverts that the care at least the seeming character of the conversation that's been you know the status quo for 2,000 years And it admits of the fact that there could be this some lone cantankerous genius in a room who decides things are different, feels things are different, then comes out and says, here, look how they're different, and we're all bolt over, even about fundamental things. And I admit that's even true in the moral sphere. Again, if someone discovers that if you can only stay on that stove for 30 seconds, it's all good, that's an insight. That's a breakthrough. And let's all do that now. But absent that, the normal conversation we have about these things, where you, where you know the difference between a lunatic and a, you know, a good faith challenge to what's happening, where you know how to organize a

conference where it's not just a free-for-all where no one can complete a sentence because, you know, it's just an epistemological wasteland. We can, in that ordinary mode where we talk about right and wrong, good and evil, it's very easy to say, this guy just doesn't get it. He doesn't understand that he'd be happier if most people were not writhing in misery, this is not someone we need to take seriously. In the same way that there are whole cultures we don't have to take seriously. The Taliban have nothing to offer us about, on the topic of morality, they don't have anything to offer us about science either, right?

They're not the best at anything, right? And we as a culture can just, I mean, as arrogant as that sounds, we can broadcast that judgment, you know, over everything they're doing. And, and then, and then that actually leads to public policy. Or like, just how many, you know, acolytes of the Taliban do you want immigrating into your society at this moment? Not too many by my lights, right, given, given their commitments, you know, cognitively and, you know, religiously, above all.

So I'm just saying, yeah, I mean, I just don't, it doesn't, if you, it doesn't matter how weird a person you can show me and prove that I can't persuade them, there's still someplace to stand where we can agree that they're missing something, and we're right to say that about them. How does religious belief dovetail with the moral landscape? Your ethical worldview is about minimizing suffering, maximizing well-being. There are a great deal of studies that show just empirically that religious communities and religious believers tend to do better on a lot of metrics. So one study recently that religious people

coked better with the COVID pandemic, for example, and on metrics of feelings of worth and fulfillment and this kind of stuff, religious communities tend to perform better. If that's the case, and if you believe in an objective set of ethics, which should value people's well-being, you wrote a book called The End of Faith, which attempted to dispel people of their religious beliefs. Should you not be pulling that from the shelves? Yeah, well, so it's a big if whether or not religious communities actually do better. I mean, they do, against it, it all depends on what you mean by better in that case. But granting that they might, right, then the question is, is that the best way to do that sort of better, right?

Is it actually required that you believe anything on insufficient evidence or live by one divisive dogma or another? Is that the only way to get to that high spot on the moral landscape, right? And I think it's pretty clear that that wouldn't be the case. I mean, I think it's just having a flexible conversation about reality that is responsive to changing argument and changing evidence and being intellectually honest and not being ruled by the confirmation biases of your Iron Age ancestors. I mean, all of this tends to be so good on so many questions of importance.

that I think just, you know, having a more sophisticated, modern and honest conversation about reality, even spiritual reality and ethics is going to be better in the long run. I mean, that's how I would place my bet, but it's totally possible that there are circumstances where being religious is an advantage or still an advantage when it would one day might not be an advantage, right? I mean, it clearly evolved for some kind of beneficial reason. It wouldn't have cropped up in the memetic landscape if it didn't serve some purpose. And maybe it's not serving that anymore, but it must do something. I'm not sure about the evolutionary story here. I mean, the reasons to be skeptical of the whole notion of group selection and even leaving that aside, you could say, anything you say about religion, you could say about a belief in witchcraft, right?

It's basically, it's cultural, universal. It's been around for as long as anyone can. imagine it obviously there's there's it interacts rather often with religion but it's this distinct strand of belief that most of us acknowledge is almost certainly bullshit and yet you could you could tell a story about its utility right and I'm sure there I'm sure there are circumstances where belief in witchcraft has some pragmatic value for an individual even for a whole society I mean those communities still exist today there are still people who will describe themselves as adherence of witchcraft, black magic, paganism, this kind of stuff,

which many people view as these ancient, long-forgotten religious communities, but they still exist today. And I wonder if they coped better with the COVID pandemic as well. It's hard to know. But suppose that, you know, we could establish this. And suppose that it was specifically something about belief in the transcendent and more than just something like secular meditation can get you. Something about belief in God really does just fill that hole, as it were, within somebody in such a way that makes them reach a higher peak on the moral landscape. If that were the case, would you feel a moral obligation to take your book out of publication? well yeah i mean there's a lot to stipulate there and i'm almost certain that much of it's untrue

but if it were true that there's a high spot on the moral landscape that could only be accessed by believing something that is in fact untrue let's just make the most just let's make the generic case of it but it really is higher by every i mean it's just it's better this is that this is heaven You get into heaven by believing something untrue so that any culture that would prevent you from believing that thing would be preventing you from getting into heaven. Let's say we'd just live in that sort of universe.

Yeah, then I would say that there's a truly useful fiction that we would want, which is to say, well-being supersedes any narrow fixation on, knowledge per se, right? And the flip side of this is there are some things that are dangerous to know and understand correctly that I think we shouldn't know and understand correctly

or at least we shouldn't promulgate that knowledge to all of you matter. Exactly, like, you know, the weaponizing smallpox, I think it's bad to publish the recipe. We don't want to do that. 3D printed, you know. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if there's some technology that we could understand, you know, it was one of Nick Bostrom's black balls, right?

Like the, the, you pull these, pull balls out of the urn of invention. There are white ones that are, that are all good. They're gray ones that have dual use. You know, it's like nuclear technology. You can get energy and you also get bombs. And then on his, you know, in his thought experiment, there are black ones, which the mere discovery of the idea or the technology is synonymous with just the ruination of everything. It's just, and he gives many examples of things that could have been black balls but weren't like, you know, if it just. if splitting the atom was just much, much easier than it, in fact, is,

if you could split it by just taking two panes of glass and some sand and, you know, put in together in a microwave oven and you'd get a thermonuclear device, you know, in that case, fusing the atom, we would just expect all of our cities to just go up in mushroom clouds, more or less by the end of the day, right, because there's always going to be some psychopath who wants to do that and who's suicidal. So it's just very lucky that we haven't found that thing.

So yes, if that thing is out there, that's a species of knowledge we don't want, right? And so this is just another form of that argument. So, yeah. So when you said a second ago that you don't believe that religion, or at least it might not be the best way of providing the thing that people are clearly getting out of religion, all these studies that say that well-being is served by religious belief, it might not be religious belief itself in terms. intrinsically that's doing that. If not that, then what is it? What is the element of religious belief that tends not to be present in, say, an atheist's thinking? Well, community is a huge variable. I mean, having a place to go on Sundays that is out of the usual orbit of your just kind of selfish striving for mundane things, you know, six other days a week. A time where you and your family have decided to join with other families, to consciously apprehend or consider something that is profound, that, you know, we could provide a secular version of that that I think would be beautiful and worth providing

that I think would answer to the same needs and produce even better consequences. It'd be presumably would be in touch with real truths that are not divisive, that are not causing people to join various warring tribes, etc. But we don't have that now. You know, we don't have a secular alternative to that. Why not? I mean, if it seems so obviously beneficial, I think even if you asked any given atheist on the street, you know, do you think it's a good thing to sort of all get together and just, yeah, collectively reflect on the things that you value and the things you're grateful for? I think everyone would say, yeah, sure.

So why aren't we doing it? Maybe it's because belief in a creative, God gives you that feeling that, oh, there's some reason that I really need to be there. Even on the days I don't really feel like it, you have that sort of prescription that doesn't exist on its own motivation for its own sake. People don't have that level of motivation. In other words, it's not just that people are getting together, it's that they're getting together to go and worship something transcendent. That's something that atheism can surely never provide.

Well, I think it can. I mean, the transcendent is a slightly different adjective in that case. But, you know, what I think I'm talking about when I talk about the nature of consciousness and what can be experienced there beyond the sense of self, right? Like the illusoryness of the self, that whole conversation that I took up in my book waking up. The result, experientially, subjectively is transcendent. and it's transcendent of self, is transcendent of the sense of confinement to self,

and it has the kind of same reward function of mystical, traditionally mystical transcendent experience that was framed by a metaphysical belief system that gave it sort of a big T transcendent significance, right? I'm not indulging really in any metaphysical speculation, when I talk about the character of these experiences. I'm really agnostic as to what, you know,

I'm agnostic as to how consciousness is arising based on the physics of things, and I'm agnostic as to what we could ultimately understand about reality based on introspection beyond just what it's like to be us. I mean, I think introspection gives you a, you know, the more trained you are and the more aptitude you have for paying attention to the character of experience moment to moment, the more you can notice about experience, but it doesn't really put you in a position

to notice things about the cosmos. You don't get truths of cosmology out of that. And what many people seem to mean by transcendent is the jump from personal experience to what happened before the Big Bang, right? Or, you know, the Andromeda Galaxy. Where does the Andromeda Galaxy fit in to this feeling of blissfulness I have,

just sitting in my chair, thinking about God or thinking about, you know, love or whatever it is. And I'm saying you don't have to make that jump, even if that jump could, based on certain experiences, sometimes seem warranted, right? Like, it's possible to have experiences in meditation or on various psychedelic drugs where, yeah, you close your eyes and rather than just see a kind of shimmering darkness, that's the kind of the usual sort of iridescence behind your closed eyes, it's not quite dark, but, you know, you tend not to pay attention to it. You actually, that space opens up, and as you pay attention to it,

it opens up into a realm of mind where there's a lot to perceive, right? It becomes a dreamscape of vivid, of precepts, right? And if some of those percepts became veritical, right, with respect to the cosmos, right, which is a big if, right, but if you could actually close your eyes and see things, that then had some subjective value in you know, it's like whether you're, there are versions of this

that have happened, they're you know, chemists who have understood the structure of molecules based on a dream and, I mean, they're weird stories, right? They're mathematicians, or I think it was Ramanogen who got, you know, various theorems proved to him in a dream

by the goddess Lakshmi, right? I think Keith Richards wrote, can't get no satisfaction in his sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It came to him in a dream, yeah. But the difference there is that that song only has to survive the test of our preferences in a very, in a diminished way. A proven theorem or a structure of the benzene ring or whatever it is

needs to actually survive the tests that other people are going to put to it. Are you saying there's a difference between preference and objective truth? No, I'm saying, well, that's why I was careful to say that the diminished I'm only kidding. I think I'm a bit of a meditation skeptic. In that I, so look, I've never actually meditated. I've never done it. I've never tried it.

It feels to me a bit like when somebody says to me, have you ever tried praying? And I think to myself, like, sure, I'm not like anti-praying. I just feel like I could sit down, I could put my hands together and I could, you know, say, words to the sky. But I feel like unless I already have some credence in this actually being something, I'm literally unable to pray. Yeah. Because I don't believe in the necessary, you know, prerequisite assumptions that one needs to have to make it an actual prayer. And I suppose I feel similarly about meditation. Like it's not something that I've ever. But it's different because it's not, it's not assuming the existence of something that you are disposed to doubt. Right. So with

prayer, you doubt that there's an invisible God that you could be addressing through any kind of propitiatory prayer. So it's, and that's why I'm saying, you know, I don't make this, this move into metaphysics where I say that because I can experience my conscious mind free of a sense of self, that means consciousness is the substratum in which everything is arising, including this universe, and I'm experiencing the thing that preceded the Big Bang. I mean, people like, people like Deepak Chopra will say things like that as a result of having and experience in meditation.

And that's totally unwarranted, right? I mean, it's just not scientific. You can't even know that you have a brain by meditating. Like paying close attention to your experience doesn't tell you anything about your brain, even that it exists, right? Which is a pretty big lacuna in your self-understanding. So meditation is good for some insights,

but it's not good for making contact with, you know, what I'm calling the metaphysics or even the, physics of things. So you're right to doubt prayer on that basis, but it's just not an analogy, because the meditation I would recommend you do is just pay attention to your experience. So very much in the spirit of scientific hypothesis, which is if you want to understand better what it's like to be you, it would make sense to pay attention. So what does that mean? What would it mean to pay attention? How does that actually work and what constitutes meditation in this respect?

So then you'd be given in the very, in the beginning, you'd be given a very remedial device, which, you know, in the usual case of, you know, training in mindfulness, you would just be given the breath, right? Just pay attention to the breath and just notice. And there's nothing, it's not because there's something magical or profound about the breath, it's just as a very easy object to notice. You can notice that it just has the feeling of, you know,

the rise and falling of your abdomen or chest or the sensation of air passing through the nostrils. And people tend to start out doing this with closed, eyes, and you pay attention to that, and the reason why it's a good object is, one, you don't have to presuppose any religious nonsense in order to do it. I don't have to give you a Sanskrit mantra and tell you about its significance, right? It's just the breath, you just pay attention to that. And what you'll notice eventually, this could take five seconds, or it could take five days

on a silent retreat where you're just trying to do this to the exclusion of everything. everything else for 12 hours a day. I mean, you know, some people are harder cases than others. But what you will eventually notice is that it's actually much harder to do than you were expecting, right? So you pay attention to the breath and you just feel, you feel the movement and tension and pressure and tingling and whatever you feel with the rising of each inhalation and the falling of each exhalation. And then the next second, you're thinking about something, and you've completely forgotten the project of, you forgot you were in a room trying to meditate, you forgot this is something you even wanted to do, you're just talking to

yourself helplessly. And it's very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. It's like a daydream where you've actually lost contact with who you are and what you're about in that moment, and you have had no reality testing riding alongside it. So it's like all of a sudden you're having an argument with someone who's not there, right? You're rehearsing the conversation you had with your girlfriend the day before or the thing you're expecting to happen later today. And you're, and you're, and literally there's a, there's a voice in your head that is your own voice and it seems to feel, it feels like you.

It feels like yourself, right? And you're thinking, yeah, why did she say that? I mean, doesn't, this is, you know, we, I told her that, and you're in the, you're in media's race with a conversation that you've had with yourself probably 15 times in the last 24 hours and is striking you as new every time you have it you that you're not impatient with yourself you're not bored if i if you were having that same conversation with anyone else they'd be bored to tears but you have this endless endless appetite to just hear the next thing that comes over the transom that's in in your voice in your mind saying yeah what the what would she think of okay

when it one all right the first thing i'm going to say to hers and you're your the thing to realize here is that this is psychotic on two levels. One is it presupposes a kind of conversational structure that you're having with yourself that makes no sense because if you're the one to think the thought and also the one to hear the thought, why did you need to think it in the first place? You know what you're thinking, right? You're thinking it to yourself as though you're both speaker and audience, right? That split is bizarre. But two, it comes over you and you're that you're helplessly carried away by it and you have no perspective on the

fact that you're carried away by it. In the same way, you have no perspective when you go to sleep at night and you fall asleep and you start dreaming, it's just, it's astonishing that the first minute of every dream doesn't start with, what the fuck is happening? How did I get here? I was just in my bed. And now, like, how, what's, you know, this is impossible, right? You have no reality testing. And the same thing is happening every time you think a thought for the, if you're, for the most part. So then, now back to the breath, right? Now, okay, so you really, you recognize you're thinking, and you think, oh, fuck, I was, you know, I don't know how long I was gone for, was that 30 seconds? All right, back to the breath. And you feel the inhalation

for a few seconds, and then you're going to be gone again with another thought about another thing helplessly borne away, right? Now, this will seem normal, this seems normal to most people. It is totally pathological, right? The fact that we think this is compatible with human sanity and basic well-being is just because it's happening to everybody. I mean, there's some people who claim not to have any inner voice or inner inner thoughts. And we could talk about those separately. But for most people, if they try to pay attention to anything, I mean, the breath is just a useful object because it's just, it's there, they will find that it's hard to do. And it's hard to do because their attention on it is endlessly being submerged.

by this automatic product of discursivity, right? It's mostly linguistic, but for lots of people that can be images too or both, and it is a kind of light dream, right? Now, once you get some degree of concentration, and the reason why you use the breath in the beginning is just an object upon which you can build kind of a modicum of concentration

so that you can notice the difference clearly between being lost in thought and being able to pay attention to an arbitrary object. And you can notice it so clearly, you kind of build this muscle enough so that you can actually pay attention for longer periods of time at will, and the thoughts either don't arise

or when they arise, you notice them as further appearances in consciousness, and you can actually notice them without being carried away by them, right? So the thought still arises, the thought of the conversation you're about to have with your girlfriend and still comes up, but you're not identified with it.

You're actually, you're witnessing it as an appearance and consciousness in the same way that you're witnessing the sound of my voice as an appearance in consciousness. I was just thinking about that, how, whether the way you're describing this, I have heard you talk about this before, and the idea of these things just appearing in your consciousness, and I suddenly realized that I can think of your words right now as that, in a way, without trying to open up the free will question, my own words. They just sort of, they just sort of appear and come out of nowhere. And I guess nothing's really changed except noticing that.

And it's weird. It feels like you are sort of taking a step back from it all and observing these things rather than experiencing them. The difference between my voice and your voice is that you're identified or you tend to be identified with your voice. It feels like, it feels like a self. It feels like I. And yet that is a, that is on a subtle level, that's what it's like to be thinking.

without noticing the present thought arise as an object in consciousness. Wow. And what meditation allows you to do. And again, this is all just a matter of paying attention. You don't have to believe anything. You don't have to take my word for any of this, right? You just have to pay closer and closer attention. And this is, many people bounce off this whole project because it's hard to do.

Like in the beginning, it's hard to do, right? Like you just find, fuck, this just doesn't work. Yeah, I tried meditating. Didn't work for me. So, but most people in the beginning just, they close their eyes and they're essentially, you know, they think they're meditating, but they're just thinking with their eyes closed, right? Just thinking. And occasionally they feel the breath for a second, but they're just thinking like, what good is the breath and what's the point of this and how long do I have to do this? And they never break the spell of identification with thought. If you do, if you persist long enough to get some perspective on thought itself as just an appearance in consciousness. you begin to feel that consciousness itself, this prior condition, subjectively, in which thought and perception and emotion and everything else you can notice about your experience is appearing, it doesn't feel like I, right? Because the feeling that you're intuiting as I, the feeling of being a subject in the middle of your experience, that's not identical to experience, is actually just on the edge of experience or in the center of it, that somehow appropriating experience. There's kind of the unchanging center of gravity in the midst of whatever the experience, right?

That sense is itself another experience. It's part of experience, right? A little wrinkle of me is something that consciousness itself has a perspective on and that it doesn't feel like me, right? It doesn't feel, it feels impersonal. It does not feel like a subject is shining its light of consciousness on the very the other objects of experience. And so if you keep, so meditation ultimately is nothing more than the task of paying close enough attention to the, to what consciousness is like moment to moment, get it breaking

the spell of thought, the moment you notice you're lost in thought coming back to noticing, it's not blocking thoughts. Thoughts are not a problem. They just are a problem in the beginning. But ultimately, it's not a matter of getting rid of thought or having less thought or having and different thoughts, it's just having a perspective on thought, which is the point of view of this prior condition and this mere cognizance in which thought and sound and sensation or arising.

And it does connect with the free will conversation because from my point of view, it completely unravels the apparent mystery of free will because people think that the mystery is, we know we have it because we feel it very deeply, you know, subjectively it's a truth about us. Yet objectively, it's hard to map on to the causality of things. But if you pay close enough attention to what it's like to be you, that I, e. meditate, you can notice that it's not even a subjective truth about you, because everything just arises. The next thought just arises.

The next intention just arises. The intention that counters that intention that stops you from doing the thing you intended a moment ago, that just arises. The willpower arises and it wanes. The thought, oh, my God, I need more willpower. or that arises and it's effective or not based on some mysterious principle that you can't inspect. It's all just springing into view out of this

condition that is intrinsically mysterious, which you are identical to. It's not that you have it, you're not on the edge of it, you're not using it. Subjectively speaking, experientially speaking, there's just experience and you're identical to it. It's fascinating.

I mean, I'm paying attention as the words are coming out of your mouth to how they're just, they are just sort of emerging, right? And it's weird to think that like, in a way, as far as my experience is concerned, you know, everything that I know of you and I'm hearing of you and I'm experiencing of you is just appearing in my brain. There's just this, this, I open my eyes and there's just this image and I open my ears

and there are just these words. And there's a sense in which when I'm speaking right now, I'm not calculating every word that's coming out of my mouth. I'm not, you know, thinking about every sentence. These words, where the hell are they coming from? They're just, they are just going. I didn't know I was about to say the word going. It just came out, right?

And you have no idea how you said it. And when you fail to say it, if you forget it for a moment and you struggle to find a word or you say the wrong word, that too is mysterious. Your success is mysterious and your failure is mysterious. But it makes it so fascinating to think that my own words coming out of my mouth seem,

no more connected to this thing I'm calling me than the words that are coming out of your mouth, right? And I don't know if that's what people are talking about when they describe the so-called ego death or the one-with-everything type attitude that people have with spiritual experiences, if it's got something to do with this sense of realizing that, in other words, I've always pictured it as when someone says, you know, there's no difference me and everyone else in the world. I've always imagined the kind of experience they're having is something like them implanting, themselves and everybody else and taking itself and sort of extending

it to be the world whereas maybe it sort of goes in the other direction. Yeah. You know it does. I mean, so there are, have you ever taken psychedelics of I have, yeah. What have you taken and what was that like? Um, 2CB, mushrooms,

LSD wants. And never enough to have, well, enough to have some crazy experiences, but but nothing to the of ego death. Right. As I've never had an experience where I've come out thinking, oh, that's what it means

to, that's what the death of the ego is. You know, I've come out thinking, that's what this means. I can understand why people talk in this way or that way and, you know, just, just perhaps the most transformative experiences of my entire life, but I've never experienced an ego death. Right, right. Yeah, so, I mean, the way I would add the psychedelic experience to this map is that, and the reason why it can be incredibly useful, but also misleading is that with psychedelic,

I mean, the one thing that's very important about them is that, in all but the rarest cases, they're guaranteed to do something. If you take the requisite dose, you're going to have a change in your experience. So it's not going to be a matter. No one comes away from, you know, 300 micrograms of LSD saying, well, you know, nothing happened, right? I mean, there are actually some people who, for whatever reason, are just neurologically impervious to certain psychedelics. But in the general case, you're just not going to be bored. You're not, I mean, it could be terrifying, but something's about, something's going to happen and it's going to happen right on schedule, right? And you can't say the same thing about meditation or yoga or fasting or any other, you know, discipline that someone's going to engage so as to perturb their consciousness.

And that's why psychedelics have been so useful for people as a gateway to meditation or, you know, or the contemplative of life in some way, because it's the thing that proved to them that it was possible to have a very different. experience of the world, assuming they had a positive experience on psychedelics. What's misleading about is it gives you the sense that spiritual expansion and progress is a matter of having, it's a matter of changing the contents of consciousness, the matter of having more mind and more esoteric states of mind. And, you know, to see, to see brighter colors and to see different things with your eyes closed, right? Like, now my eyes are closed. I don't see much of anything, but on mushrooms, wow, it just was like an Aztec empire, and it was just, you know, I felt like I was, you know, could psychically travel to different places, and it's like that,

that must be where spiritual progress lies. What's misleading about that is that we know that any experience you have, you know, any qualitative change in the contents of consciousness is by definition temporary, right? I mean, first you don't have it and then you have it and then you don't have it, right, because that's the nature of any experience. It's like, you know, drinking a cup of tea or a cup of coffee or whatever. It doesn't matter how big the cup is. Eventually, you drink it, and then you no longer have that tea or coffee. So impermanence rules, right?

And so you can't, so a transitory spiritual experience can't be the real bedrock that is the basis of, you know, the deepest possible well-being, if such a thing is discoverable. The other thing is it's misleading with respect to the sense that it gives you a sense that freedom, you know, real psychological freedom and transformation is elsewhere, right? Like you, there's just, there's ordinary consciousness where you're just, you feel like the sort of conventional sense of self

in a physical world that's not self, and you're disposed to do things like check your email or, you know, like you're not you like you know how you can drive a car you're not stoned and yet there's all kinds of things denied you in this sense it's all the kinds of things you can't notice and then you drop acid or you take MDMA or whatever it is and you have this sea change in the contents of consciousness and all of that seems you know assuming you're having good changes and not you know you're not pitched into into psychosis which is also available um it seems like that

Progress is just getting, it's a matter of getting better, more expansive, more love-drenched, more, you know, insightful, more meaning-drenched thoughts and emotions and intuitions. What meditation does is show you, and again, meditation can mean many things, but, you know, what I mean by meditation and what, you know, people should mean by meditation, it unhooks you. It's essentially orthogonal to that whole. regime of changes, of, you know, changes in contents of consciousness. And it allows you to recognize something about consciousness itself that is present whatever the contents, right? I mean, it could be the full explosiveness of changes of, you know, of the peak of a psychedelic trip,

or it could just be the most boring, ordinary mind that just, you know, is there's you looking at a cup on a table and nothing else, right? There's a thing to, there are things you can notice about consciousness that, that cause the sense of self, the sense of subject object separation to drop out, right? And so you can be, so ordinary, just staring at a cup consciousness can be free of self and extraordinary. There's just an ocean of color and energy and bliss can be free of self. And that freedom in some sense equalizes those two states, right? It's not to say that there's not, you know, that oceans of color and bliss have a lot going for them. I mean, it's fun, but it's great when they appear and it's fine when they disappear, right? Then nothing really is lost if you can find this thing that is what I'm, what I would call non-duality. It's also, it could be called selflessness. It could be called emptiness.

I mean, there are various framings in Buddhism and elsewhere. But it's different than the expectation you just described of getting more mind, right? like of suddenly getting, you're expanded beyond yourself into the rest of the stuff that until a moment ago seemed like it was not self, right? So now it's not just me in this skin suit. I'm over there, I was looking through your eyes too, and I'm out there with the people and the animals who are not me, but now all of a sudden it's just one big mind. I would imagine there's actually experiences that can seem that way.

I don't, you know, whether they're veritical or not is certainly debatable, but I think you can have that sense of unity with a larger totality, but that's not the crucial insight that is selflessness by, you know, in the meditative space. It's a much more ordinary and simple recognition that if you pay close enough attention, like just in hearing any sound, like you hear the sound of traffic or whatever it is, you, if you, if you, the, the, The default mode is to feel like you're the one hearing. There's a hearer and there's a thing heard and there's just this subject object kind of divide that's getting bridged with this operation of hearing.

But real concentration or, you know, better yet, a real analysis of this sense of being a subject in the first place can suddenly collapse that to what is clearly a more basic condition of just hearing, like there's just this pure perception of hearing prior to the concept of self and thing heard. And there's freedom in that. I mean, there really is a, as you begin to rest in that more and more and recognize its implications psychologically, it does become the antidote to all kinds of ordinary psychological suffering that you, you know, all kinds of knots in yourself that you otherwise are trying to figure out how to untie. You're thinking, why do I feel this way? How can I feel better? How can I be happier? Why am I so disappointed and regretful and anxious, et cetera? The more you can fall back into this recognition that there's no center to this experience, it suddenly gives you a direct experience of equanimity in the midst of even classically unpleasant experiences. So you can be feeling significant physical

or you can be feeling nausea or you can feel it's something that is that is I'm not saying you know there's no reason to act on on bad you know perceptions I mean you might you might have to go to the hospital but the question is how unhappy do you have to be at every step along the way as you're you know riding to the hospital or dealing with the uncertainty of what the diagnosis is or what you like there's this adventure that happens at the level of concepts and at the level of changes which which you know you can keep punctuating with a recognition of selflessness and each recognition does actually reset you to a place of real tranquility in the midst of it. And it's a tranquility that is not dependent on any changes. It's not dependent on the next

good thing happening. It's not dependent on the bad thing that's present going away. It really is, it really does in a very paradoxical way, tend to equalize experience and how this, I mean, I don't want to bring us back to the moral landscape, but it is somewhat confusing how this might relate to everything I've said about the moral landscape because everything I say about the moral landscape suggested there really are stark differences between experiences.

It really matters at your hand not be on a hot stove. There may be more to the story given the requisite ways of being in touch with what it is like to just be, you know, in each moment, rather than become in the next moment through thought and concepts. So there's no you. There's just the sounds, the sights, the thoughts that emerge.

I guess I'm... There's just experience, right? See, the conventional sense is you're having an experience, right? There's you, the subject, the ego, the self. And it's important to specify what that is for most people. because it's not, I'm not saying that people are illusions. I'm not saying that you don't have a body. I'm saying, but people don't feel identical to their bodies.

They feel like their subjects that have bodies. I mean, they feel like passengers in their bodies for the most part. You feel like you're in a relationship to your body. When your body malfunctions, when you have a pain that you don't want, or you have some symptom of something that worry, you know, some possible disease that worries you, you know, you are a, you know, you're kind of, you're a prisoner of the body, but you're, you're an inner subject, you're a kind of homunculus, with respect to your presumed sense of what you are,

you know, from the first person side. Now, we know that makes no sense neurologically, right? I mean, you're either the whole body or your, or your whole central nervous system, if you want to demarcate it in some way, but, or you're just the part of your central nervous system that is, that is, that is, conscious, right? Wherever consciousness stops in the body, well, then that's the boundary of what you are. But you're, most people feel like they're a subject, very likely in their head that is, in some sense, unchanging, right? Like, it's not that you're, you notice changes, but you're noticing those changes from the point of view of being this subject that is, that's not reducible to those changes, right? Like, you feel like, like, you know, you,

You know, I was, I was, you know, tired a moment ago, but now I'm not tired. But then you notice the change, you know, there's fatigue, and now that fatigue is gone. But the subject seems somehow untouched by those changes. But the subject does seem, therefore, not identical to experience, right? Like, you're just, you're having the experience. You're enduring the experience. You're riding around in the middle of the experience. And that's the false point of view that's undercut.

through meditation but of course when a thought arises in in your head um that thought's not arising in my head right there is this first person yeah center of consciousness to which that thought is happening that's that's you and not me if the self is an illusion if the self doesn't exist if there is no center there then what is the thing that a thought like that can happen to that makes it such that you can have the thought, but I can't have your thought. Yeah, well, that's why I said that people aren't illusions in the same way. I mean, I guess there's some perspective by which you could say that people are illusions, but not for these purposes. It's not mysterious, for my point of view, it's not mysterious that I'm thinking my thoughts

and not thinking your thoughts, right? Because my thoughts, the only place for my thoughts to appear is where they are appearing in this in this system you know this organism that is me and you've got your own organism over there which is you and you so the fact that you have your memories and i have my memories is is no more mysterious than saying you know i just wrote something on my palm and it's on my palm and not on your palm right it's like this is just a physically instantiated thing about about this system that is it's like the you know, the pain in my knee is felt in my knee because it's a pain and there's only one knee in the universe that feels that is giving rise to this particular pain. And there's

only one brain in the universe that is susceptible to those inputs. And so it is with my memories and so it is with anything else that I might think. But the eye part of it, the sense that it's me and mine from the point of view of a subject, that's when it becomes impersonal. That's when it becomes, because consciousness really is just the fact that anything is appearing at all. So in some sense, consciousness for me is the same as is for you, whatever you're conscious of, because consciousness is just the condition in which there is a qualitative character to anything, right? So I just view them, I view consciousness ultimately as deeply impersonal and in some sense transcendent. I mean, it's transcendent of the feeling of being a locus of consciousness in the head, right?

You can get rid of that feeling. You can inspect that feeling such that it disappears. And what you have is a totality of appearances that includes all of your experience. It's not like your experience suddenly changes radically, but there's no center to it. You're not on the edge of it. You're not separate from it. There's just it, right? And that, there's a freedom in that because it's, you're no longer, I mean, it's, the sense of self is a kind of contraction. It's a kind of, it's a, it's a, it's a perpetual mode of reacting to, to experience. So it's, it's, it's born of this perpetual, I like this, I don't like that. I like this. I don't like that. More or less, more or less. And you're react, you're constantly gripping the deliverances of your five senses and your mind, right? You're feeling, you know, you're, you're, you're, you know, you're, you're.

cognitively, you're, you know, you're trying to figure things out. You feel doubt. Doubt is a kind of emotion, right? And I would argue it's a negatively valenced one. Uncertainty is like that. And you're constantly working in every channel in which you're, you know, you're available. And all of it implies a center. And that's the feeling of being a subject. When you look for that center and fail to find it, all of your capacities are still available to you. You can still hear and smell and think, but it's not, it's like the difference between having an open hand versus having a clenched fist. I mean, you can sort of clench your fist enough. If this is your only, if this is the only way you've ever had a hand, well, you might even think there's something in the middle

of it, right? You might think there's a structure here, but it's only, it's an implied structure. Like if you just release, if you just open your hand, you realize there was nothing in there, however it felt, and nothing else need change, you know, it's just a source of confusion and discomfort that is no longer there. And then it, you know, then it remains to be seen just how good it is

for alleviating other, you know, psychological problems or sources of suffering or, you know, what is it good for is an open question as you live your life with this capacity. But not having the capacity and being in doubt about it is just a blocker for, exploring it, right? You just then can't, you know, it's like being in doubt as to whether or not,

you know, it's possible to whatever it is, you know, get in shape, you know, because like the gym hasn't been invented, you know, you haven't, no one's, no one's ever figured out that just arbitrarily lifting heavy objects will change your body, you know, and when you, when some, the first time someone does it and describes it, it seems totally pointless. You mean, you mean to say that with all the things you can be doing in life, you're just going over there and picking up heavy objects and putting them down and to the point of discomfort and sometimes getting injured and

you're saying this is actually good and if you couldn't see the changes in people's bodies if you couldn't put a photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the wall of a gym to show that something radically different is possible well then everyone would be still

we'd be 200 years into this project and still be talking about our doubts about whether or not there's there there and it's just a inconvenient fact that certain changes are not visually easy to see, and that's, you know, just a problem. Well, I think I'm no longer a meditation skeptic, at least to the degree that I think I'll be giving it a proper go. I mean, when I say I've never meditated, I'll have closed my eyes and thought, as you've

put it before, where people have encouraged me to meditate, and I've sort of gone along with it. But I think a conversation like this is something like that. the equivalent of putting that picture on the wall of the gym, where you begin to sort of paint a picture of what things can look like to a brain that reflects on these things deeply. Well, I'll add one more piece to you for you, which is, it's kind of a logical handhold that I think it should work. It's, even if you, so if you were in doubt about, so the claim I'm making is that the feeling of self is vulnerable to inspection, right? If you look closely enough at it, you'll see

that consciousness is a prior fact about you that doesn't, it doesn't actually conform to this feeling of I or me, right, or subjectivity. And there's one way you can see that logically, which is if feeling like I or me feels like something, that itself must be an appearance in consciousness. I mean, there's something you're noticing about your experience that feels that way, right? And there's some, in the same way that you're noticing my voice as an object, it's just an appearance. The fact that you're outside my voice being able to notice it proves that you're not reducible to it. Right. And so it is with sensations in your body. Like the pain in your knee

is not you because you're over here noticing it down there. Yeah. If this feeling of self feels like anything, if there's any signature energetically, if it's on your face or in your chest or somewhere where you might intuit it, there's this prior condition of just the light by which it's being seen. So what's that feel like? Right. And so, so that's a, anyway, that's just a concept, but that's a pointer, a pointer into why it would make sense

that this would be available. You, um, you tried to meditate with Richard Dawkins once. Yes. Yeah. It didn't seem to go very well. No, he's a hard case. He's a, he's a fantastic person, but he doesn't have enough interest in this, I don't think.

I mean, the truth is, so I've ambushed him, you know, at least twice. Once in a public talk, at the Global Atheist Convention, I ambushed, you know, 5,000 atheists, including Dawkins and Dennett and I think Ayan was there. Hitch wasn't there. It was after Hitch died, I think it was 2012. And, yeah, I ambushed them all with like five minutes of closed-eyed meditation. And I could immediately hear, you know, the road. wrestling of thousands, a thousand impatient,

thousand of impatient atheists. And then I ambushed Richard again on my podcast. But, no, he, he, he's been five minutes with him. He's a hard case. He needs, like, and I would have needed, it's the, some auspicious psychedelic experience to prove that there's a there. It may be a different there.

I mean, for me, it was MDMA, you know, the first time. Yeah. And it's not, that's not the center of the bullseye. I mean, it's incredibly beautiful experience, and it's, you know, it's the good version of it. I mean, it's almost only good versions with MDMA. I mean, very few people have bad experiences provided they actually got MDMA and not something else. I mean, it's an incredibly beautiful in life, affirming experience. It is, it's subtly misleading, in my view, with respect to what the goal is, because it gives you, it gives you a sense that the goal is,

this just full flush of socially positive emotion that burns at, you know, a thousand watts and makes you disposed to just do nothing but, you know, tell the people around you how much you love them and how grateful you are for them in your life. And it just becomes, there's something, I mean, it's a great experience to have.

It's not, in some ways, it's not sustainable in, for obvious reasons. I mean, like, you just can't get, you know, you just, you don't have other gears, right? just the guy who you imagine the legal system if all the judges and jury will just want MDMA yeah or the HR department's complaining about what's happening in the office yeah yeah come on man he's I'm sure he's a great guy I thought he was sexually harassing me yesterday but now I sort of liked it I don't know I think um it's interesting to listen to you

talk to Richard Dawkins about this kind of thing and I try to figure out sort of what's going wrong there like well what is it that that you could give to someone like Richard Dawkins So because you spent five minutes meditating with him. And afterwards he said, he was very polite about it. Yeah, yeah. He said, well, I wasn't bored, but I would be if it kept on for too long, and I don't see the point. Well, he didn't, we didn't spend this much time. I mean, I spent much more time with you talking about it here.

Yeah. And then we didn't do a, you know, a guided meditation. But, I mean, part, it's important, I think for, certainly for intellectuals. I mean, people who don't really care about understanding it too much. and they're just willing to give it a go. There's a door for those people, too. But for the more hard-headed skeptical types who are worried that this is adjacent

to just whole reams of insufferable nonsense that they've been fighting against their whole career, right? So all the religious analogs of meditation. And meditation itself is plucked from Buddhism and Hinduism or, you know, at least the Indian tradition. there's reasons to be worried if you're someone like Richard. So you have to spend a lot of time doing an exorcism on all of that, and that's fine. But it can be done.

It's just the person has to be interested enough in it to do it. And if not, again, you know, an experience on MDMA or acid or mushrooms for someone like Richard, he would come down from that, again, provided he had a good experience, he'd come down saying, And okay, you're telling me you can have something like that happen without drugs? And the answer to that is yes. All right, now I actually didn't know what I was missing. That would be the only rational thing to say there. And there's a reason, it's very easy to understand how you could have an experience like

that without drugs because drugs don't do anything to the brain that the brain isn't capable of doing. You don't get a new brain. You just get different, you get more, you know, neurotransmitters. in the synapse or you get the drug mimicking certain neurotransmitters, I mean, almost invariably serotonin in this case. So it's like, it's not, you can under, you can, you can build a conceptual bridge as to why you should all of a sudden take this possibility seriously, especially if you've had an experience that bold you over for four hours. It just shows you

that the mind is capable of more than you were aware of. Yeah. Do you think that, um, do you think Christopher Hitchens would have been impressed by meditation? I mean, I, I can't imagine the man never sitting down with his eyes closed and reflecting on the cell. I don't think, I don't know. Yeah. You know, I never spoke with him about whether he had ever done psychedelics. So I don't know if he did. I get the impression that he didn't because I'm sure I've heard him talk about drugs in general,

referring to them as a pathetic escapism or something like that. And I don't know if he was talking about all drugs there exactly, probably talking about something like cannabis. One of the few areas where he may have agreed with his brother in a strange and unexpected turn of You've had strange encounters with that. Yeah, yeah, I have indeed. In fact, Sam, if this entire conversation is going to be about drugs, then, you know, good luck. Frankly, I'm sick to death.

You could get up and walk out. I'm going to, walking out of your own podcasts, I don't think it's quite the same number of views. Alas. Yeah, so I don't think he would have tried psychedelics. Christopher. One problem is that the, again, the deliverances of these methods are not. publicly available apart from just kind of getting a vibe on the person

who claims to have this experience, right? Like the person is, like, you know, people, I'm saying these highfalutant things about the nature of consciousness and people are watching, wondering, okay, does he really look that different from an ordinary neurotic guy who's, essentially, I'm claiming to have

this rare experience on some level and that is transformative. I can only say, you wouldn't, you know, you don't know how bad I would have been if I didn't have these experiences, right? So if you're not impressed by me as a commercial for these experiences, well, then you just don't know how hard a case I was. But that aside, it's just deeply inconvenient that these are basically invisible.

But you can just reason yourself there by certain analogs, which are where you can see that the performance is just, in certain cases, we're lucky to have objective, you know, objective epistemological. and ontologically, proof of an inner subjective competence, right? So, I mean, music is a good example. Like, I'm not musical. Like, I don't, you know, I haven't tried much, but, you know, had I had an aptitude for music, presumably, I would have, I would be musical.

I would be playing instruments, you know, I don't play any instruments. I don't listen to a ton of music. I mean, I spend so much time listening to information. that I, you know, I don't leave a lot of time for music. There are moments where I love listening to music and I, and I love it, but I know, I just got to know that given how little I'm drawn to it and how the fact that I don't produce it, I know there's something I'm missing, right? I know that I'm, I know that I'm, I'm not a genius of appreciation for music, right?

Like I'm, you know, most people tend to get more out of it than I do just based on their behavior, right? But I can know this about myself, sort of by analogy, just kind of looking at how people behave and looking at some people, you give them a guitar, they can produce beautiful music. That's amazing. It looks like a miracle from my point of view. I can't do it. But all the outward signs of it are not, the inner capacity is not reducible to the outward signs of it. We could live in a world where it was just all music appreciation, right? Like, none of us could produce it, but some of us are getting what, you know, the most refined musical sensibilities are currently getting out of it when they listen to it, to it, and some of us are skeptical.

Like, I could just, you could listen to, and the truth is, I'm somewhat skeptical, you know, when someone's pretending to get everything, the most, the best things conceivable out of Bach, you know, or something that I tend not to want to listen to, I get, I get how complicated it is, you know, I can read about it. I can hear that it's complicated. I get that he's just this astounding genius and being able to compose it. But it's not what I feel like listening to.

It doesn't answer to my preferences pretty much ever. And I know I'm missing something. And yet I can know that just by talking to someone like you or someone who's got a deeper appreciation, I could take a skeptical stance. I could say there's no way you can prove that to me. And the look on your face is not proving. When you listen to Bach, the way you look doesn't, you know,

it doesn't make me feel like I should spend more time with Bach. Yeah. But I know I'm missing something, right? I have to be missing something. Have you ever listened to Bach on psychedelic questions? Yeah. So I know that if I listened to Bach on, I know that if I did a meditation retreat and I just was going to spend all my time listening

to Bach, or I know that if I, you know, took acid or MDMA or, you know, a wide range of drugs, it would all change. and it would be way more salient and beautiful for me. I don't know that it would become my preferred music going forward. I mean, there's all kinds of music I've listened to on, you know, psychedelics, which, you know, it's been, you know, that experience was everything, right? I mean, it's like the music was, it was absolutely sublime, but it's just Bach was not the thing I would pick.

But this is just to say that, again, you can reason yourself up to the threshold of saying, The fact that I'm not seeing a point to this just yet is not necessarily a sign that there's no point. If you give me a guitar, I can't do anything with it. If you put me on a desert island with a guitar and no adequate instruction, you know, you might come back in a decade and I'm still not doing much of interest with the guitar, right? Like I, you know, I might actually not be able to play anything. It's totally possible, right? that says absolutely nothing about what's possible for for beings like ourselves and the same thing's true of meditation

yeah i mean there are people for whom it just but it seems to be a skill um yeah and i wasn't i don't consider myself one of those people i may ultimately became one of those people but i was not some kind of prodigy where in the you know in the beginning it was just you know obviously um you know this is yeah i'm perfectly suited to do this that was not the case well i'll be giving it a go and i hope that our listeners who are similarly skeptical about this whole enterprise might be uh considering trying it out too it's uh it's fascinating to hear this has been a little bit like i said earlier putting the picture on the wall it's like we we talked abstractly conceptually about the the sense in which you can begin to see yourself as separate from your experiences or the self dissipating or whatever it may be and

that's the picture on the wall. I'm excited to try and actually get to grips with that and experience it in the same way that I can, I don't know, try and describe some intricate piece of music, but it's different from listening and actually experiencing the thing. So Sam Harris, thank you for coming on within reason.

It's been great fun. Yeah, great to meet you, to be continued.