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  • there.

  • Thank you all for coming out.

  • Well, good evening, Dublin.

  • As you've just heard Jordan Beatson, Sam Harris met the first time in person two weeks ago.

  • Now, in Vancouver, they covered an enormous amount of ground on dhe.

  • There is, I think, an enormous amount of ground still to cover.

  • But I've asked them if they would start this evening in the following way.

  • You're all familiar with Straw Manning anyone who follows politics, those straw manning.

  • But I've asked them to do the opposite tonight to start by steel manning the arguments of each other to present in the best possible most fair, most rigorous light what they understand to be the others argument on all of the major issues were about to discuss.

  • I'm gonna ask Sam Harris to go first, and we're gonna go from that.

  • Thank you.

  • So, first, thank you all for coming.

  • It's really it's immense privilege for us to do this on dhe.

  • I should say many of you have sacrificed a lot to come here.

  • People have come from other countries.

  • I'm told you all dealt with a ticketing system that seems like it was run from a cave in Afghanistan.

  • Uh, it's so again.

  • Thank you all because it's one thing for us to put this date on the calendar and say We're going to speak here is another for all of you to show up and this is a privilege We certainly don't take for granted.

  • So that's an immense one.

  • Uh, so Jordan and I should say that though much of our conversation together well, often sound like we're debating it, we'll definitely that none of us are in the in the habit of pulling our punches.

  • There's an immense amount of goodwill here, and it's it's true on stage is true offstage, and we're all trying to refine our beliefs together in conversation.

  • So this is none of us view this as a debate, though we might stridently disagree about one thing or another.

  • Um what?

  • So what?

  • Jordan, I think disagrees with me about it.

  • I think he's worried that I way clearly have a common project.

  • We're both concerned to understand how tow live lives worth living.

  • How can we do this individually?

  • And how can we build societies that safeguard this project for millions of people attempting to do this in in their diverse ways that so it's okay.

  • Many questions immediately come online when you try to do that.

  • But what is the relationship between fax and values, for instance, or science and spiritual experience or our ethical lives?

  • And we have you?

  • As for the moment, differing answers to those Westerns, Jordan is concerned that I, in my allergy to religion, insufficiently value the power of stories in general and religious stories in particular, that there's something more than just nakedly engaging with fax as as they are way don't simply come into contact with reality.

  • We have to interpret reality.

  • We interpret it through our senses and and with our brains, obviously.

  • But you need frameworks and a CZ.

  • Jordan would say stories with which to do that.

  • You don't get fax in the raw.

  • And, uh, Jordan believes that I, because my purpose so often is too counter what I view as the dangerous dogmas within religion.

  • I ignore the power and even the necessity of certain kinds of stories in certain ways of thinking about the world and our situation in the world that not only bring many, many millions and even billions of people, immense value or in fact necessary for anyone, however rational, to build a society where all of our our well being can be conserved.

  • So I think if in brief, that's that's Jordan's concerned about me.

  • So Sam is concerned.

  • I would say above all with the minimization of unnecessary suffering, which seems to me to be a pretty good place to start.

  • And he's concerned that he's concerned that in order to do that, we need to develop an ethic.

  • And that ethic should be grounded in that realization that unnecessary suffering is worth contending with and dealing with.

  • And that and that if we make too much of the divide between facts and values, then we end up in a situation where our value structure has no super subordinate foundational grounding.

  • And then this is a big problem.

  • So generally in the philosophical community, it's accepted, although not universally, that it's difficult, if not impossible, to derive values from facts.

  • But the problem with that proposition is that you end up in a situation where either you lose all your values because they're just arbitrary or you or you have to ground them in something that isn't that it's it's revelatory and Sam is concerned that one of the negative consequences of grounding your fundamental ethic in something that's revealed is the emergent consequence of irrational fundamentalism.

  • And so obviously that's worth contending with.

  • And so he's taking issue with the philosophical idea that facts and values have to be separate and formulating the proposition that we can in fact ground a universal system of values in the facts and that we can mediate between the facts and the system of values, using using our facility for truth, but even more specifically our facility for rationality and that rationality can be the mediator between the world of facts and the world and the world of values.

  • And so the problem I have with that, I guess, if we can skip briefly to problems, is that it isn't obvious to me.

  • Howto produce an ethos with sufficient motivating power to to ground that conception of the minimization of suffering, say, in the promotion of well being in a way that's grips people and unites the society.

  • And so I think that's that's part of what we're discussing and trying to sort out with regards to the potential rule of narrative and religious belief as an underpinning to this ethos, We seem to agree on the necessity for the universal ethos.

  • We even seem to agree.

  • I would say on what that is, because certainly the minimization of suffering seems to me to be a very good place to start.

  • We share on our concern with and a belief that the pathway to that ethos is in some manner related to our ability to speak the truth.

  • But we disagree on what that has to be grounded in and how it has to be grounded.

  • My sense, especially after thinking about our discussion, is that Sam makes what rationality is, do too much work.

  • And I'm hoping that not that rationality is irrelevant or unimportant, because it clearly is neither of those.

  • But maybe the devil's in the details, and hopefully we can get down to the details tonight.

  • Wait for me.

  • We brought Douglas into the conversation.

  • He's here to serve as much more than a mere moderator, and partly we've determined that Has Sam alluded to that?

  • What we're actually trying to figure out is one of the minimal necessary preconditions for the construction of engaged, productive individuals with meaningful, responsible lives in a society that's stable enough to sustain itself and dynamic enough to change one of the minimal preconditions for that.

  • What of it?

  • And and and how do we ground those pre suppositions those preconditions?

  • And what price do we pay for for having them?

  • Because you never get something without a cost.

  • And we thought that Douglas would be very interesting addition to this conversation because, of course, he's concentrated on such things as borders.

  • And when you set up preconditions for social order, you also automatically produce such things as hierarchies and borders, and they don't come without a cost.

  • And so we hope to expand the conversation to include a discussion of those issues as well before Douglas times.

  • And I just want to reiterate the fact that he has not been cast here as our moderator, though if Jordan and I run off the rails, I expect Douglas to put us back on in the king's English.

  • I'm not moderate enough to be a moderate.

  • No, but you're more moderate than either of us are.

  • But so hee I want I want you to reset the part of your brain that is poised to begrudge the moderator taking up too much time because every moderator has felt that and bread.

  • Weinstein was brilliantly aloof and uninvolved in much of our exchange together.

  • But But Douglas really is 1/3 participant here, and he stands between Jordan and I on some issues.

  • Interesting way so that they have a three way conversation here, where none of us is really sitting in the same spot.

  • So can I make it quick observation about some of this?

  • Some of the progress that you've already made in Vancouver?

  • Some progress I hope could make tonight seems to be.

  • I see one thing that Hamp is it.

  • Let me go straight to it with Sam, which is, I discovered a terrific phrase the other day that our mutual friend Eric Weinstein came up with.

  • We're talking about the manner in which you can discuss within the science is certain scientific problems.

  • And he said, Look, if you've got a scientist who you know is also basically a very literalist Christian, you will listen to their argument a whole long part of the way, and there's somewhere at the end of it, you know, you're gonna be worried about it.

  • and he came up with this phrase.

  • I love this face.

  • He says, Jesus, smuggling, right?

  • Well, Jesus, smuggling is you're gonna follow away.

  • Yes, yes.

  • And then the worry is that when you get to the bit that you're not so good on, that's when they're going to smuggle in Jesus.

  • My suspicion is that you have a reservation about some of what Jordan is saying, sub structures on stories and much more because you're worried that at some point either on this stage or offered at some point when you're not looking, no, no or when I am looking is gonna just smuggle you.

  • Yeah, I was thinking, maybe I just carry him in on a cross.

  • Well, that is an all too apt analogy, because it's it is what worries me.

  • And it's.

  • But it's It's more subtle than that, because it's not to think that you're consciously doing.

  • It is a different claim like theirs.

  • I don't think there's anything in sincere about your argument for the importance of religion, but it's it's also possible we've all met the people who we believe are making insincere arguments, and it really they're they're consciously putting the rabbit in the hat and then pretending to be surprised when it pops out.

  • And and the analogy that magic is actually interesting here because we waited over dinner.

  • We're talking about the the difference between real and fake art.

  • And we were talking about this pair of this paradox that the art seems to be incredibly valuable.

  • And yet the value isn't located in the object itself.

  • Can't be obviously located there because a forgery that is the materially the exact copy of some masterpiece is essentially worthless.

  • And the real masterpiece, even if it suffered some damage, would be incredibly valuable.

  • And so where is the value to be located?

  • But what worries me about your enterprise, Jordan and the way in which you're you seem to be linking our rational project in our scientific project with religion is is right here.

  • There's there's a difference between, and Matt Magic is a decent analogy.

  • There's a difference between paradoxically real magic is fake magic and fake magic is real magic.

  • The only the only real magic in the world produced by magicians is the fake magic where the magician, like someone like Derren Brown, will tell you actually, no I can't read minds.

  • And I did put the rabbit in the hat and this is fake, but but the surprises.

  • Even knowing it's fake, you can't understand how this effect is being achieved.

  • Whereas the fake magicians are the ones who are pretending to be really, who are who are hiding, who are not acknowledging the mechanics, the rial mechanics behind what is in fact effective theirry luge in that the rabbit pops out of the hat.

  • And what I worry with with some of your the way in which you discuss the power of story, the power of metaphor and religious anchoring there is that the the leverage and the utility can be had even while acknowledging the rial mechanics of it.

  • You know, the fake, the fakeness of the magic right, and you seem to suspect that it can't that takes all of the wind out of the sails.

  • I'm not so sure I'm not so sure What if it's fake?

  • And what if it isn't like?

  • So I would say that I do consciously participate in the process that you describe, but But you see, I would also make the case, and this is certainly one of the things that we've seen.

  • We've been discussing that you do it unconsciously and let me make the case for that from me because I'd really have been thinking about it a lot.

  • And I'd like to see your response.

  • So here is here.

  • I really read the moral landscape a lot, and I thought about it a lot, you know?

  • And so this is what it looks like to me.

  • So you you make the proposition that we have to reach the gap between facts and values because otherwise our values are left hanging, unmoored, and that certainly brings about the danger of nihilism.

  • But also a potential danger of swing to hotel Attorney is something we agree about.

  • I truly do believe that.

  • And then you perform on operation a conceptual operation, and you say, surely we can all agree that And then you outlined a story about this woman who lives in this horrible country who's basically just being starved and disease ridden and tortured her whole life and having just a hell of a time of it, to put it in a phrase.

  • And then you say, Well, surely we can all agree that that's not good.

  • And then you contrast that with least in principle, the sort of life that we would all like to have if we could choose the life that we have.

  • And then you say, Well, we could start with the proposition that we should move away from this this terrible, hellish circumstance and we should move towards this Maur ideal perspective.

  • And you say, If we could only agree on that then and so and so, so far, so good.

  • But this is this, is there.

  • There's a couple of things that go along with that that are quite interesting.

  • And so the first is that actually what you're claiming is that the highest moral good isn't existing in that better space.

  • The highest moral good is acting in the manner that moves us from the hellish domain to the desirable domain.

  • It seems to me to be implicit in your argument, So there's a pattern of behavior that constitutes the ethic.

  • Well, I would say that existing in that in that better space is good enough as well.

  • I mean, there's the There's the question of what it takes to move from where you are to someplace better And then there's just some place better.

  • There's both of us, well, but perhaps we could say Look, what's the ultimate hell?

  • It might be existing in the hell that you describe, but it also might be this is something worse.

  • I think I think that participating in the process that brings about that hell is actually a hell that's even deeper than the hell.

  • So it's an analogous argument.

  • There's the state of being in a good state.

  • But there's also the state of being that brings you to that good state.

  • And then there's the state of being That's a that's a terrible state and the process that brings you to that terrible state.

  • And one of the things that I've learned from the archetypal and religious texts that I've studied as well as the philosophical text, is that the process that transforms society into something approximating hell is a lower hell.

  • No reason.

  • Well, let me just close the lid on that.

  • Pretty sure I disagree.

  • You can imagine to counter examples one.

  • As you can imagine, a sadistic being way might even call him God, who would create a circumstance of hell and populated with innocent souls right now, that's presumably that action.

  • You need not be attended by a lot of suffering or you could imagine something.

  • But it's still it's still wrong, totally wrong.

  • You know, you could even imagine someone who enjoys generates, yes, but even more wrong than not enjoying it.

  • Okay, so we want to separate out two things we want to separate out these states of being and the process that brings them into being.

  • And I do believe you do that in your work because basically what you suggest is that the appropriate way to act ethically is to act in a manner that moves us away from hell and moves us towards a desirable state.

  • Now the thing is, is that as far as I'm concerned, there's a couple of things about that.

  • The first thing is that I wouldn't say that that mode of acting is a fact.

  • I would say it's a personality and that what you're suggesting is that people embody the personality that moves society way from hell towards heaven, for lack of a better term.

  • And the reason terms and the reason I make that argument is because I think that you recapitulate the essential Christian message precisely by doing that, because, symbolically speaking, at least as far as I can understand, stripped of its religious kind of its metaphysical context, let's say that the purpose of positing the vision of the ideal human being which independent of the metaphysical context, it's certainly what the symbol of Christ represents is the mode of being that moves us most effectively from something approximating help to something approximating heaven.

  • And then part of that part of that message is, and this is also something that's dead along the lines of what you're arguing is that the best way to embody that is actually to live in truth s O.

  • Because I would say that the fundamental Christian ethic metaphysics accepted once again is to act in love, which is to assume that being is acceptable and can be perfected, and to pursue that with truth and that you should embody that.

  • And then I would say that the purpose of the representation we can call the med affections or archetypal representation is too show that is in embodied format, so that could be imitated rather than to transform it into something that's diluted in some sense to an abstract rationality because I don't think the abstract rationality in itself has enough flesh on it, so to speak.

  • Which is partly why, in the Christian ethic, there's an emphasis that the word which is something roughly akin to rationality, has two main has to be made flesh.

  • It has to be enacted.

  • But is this is the flesh made of dogmatism and superstition and other worldliness Is that part of what gives it its shape and necessity?

  • I think traditionally historically it has been, and that's been the problem with religion.

  • If you if you denude it of everything that is unjustifiably in the light of 21st century science and rationality, I think you do.

  • What you have to get down to is something quite a bit more universal, unless provincial than any specific religion.

  • Christianity say, Well, it's interesting to, you know, one of the one of the things one of the points that you do make is that you do appeal two or assume the existence off a transcendental internal ethics, something like that, which I would say by the way, since we're going down, this direction seems to me to be something very akin to the idea of the Holy Spirit, which is something like the internal representation of a transcendent universal ethic.

  • Now remember, I'm trying to strip these concepts of their metaphysical substrate.

  • I'm not making a case at the moment for the existence of the great man in the sky.

  • We can.

  • We can get to that later.

  • I'm saying that what what seems to be the case is that we have underneath our cognitive architecture in our social architecture, ah, layer of symbolic and dramatic narrative representation that in Stan she hates the same concepts, but but in a multi dimensional context.

  • One of the things we talked about in Vancouver, for example, is that the religious enterprise doesn't only emphasize rationality.

  • It brings music into the play, and it brings art into the play.

  • And it brings drama, and it brings literature, and it brings architecture, and it brings the organizing of cities around a central space like it's it's pushing itself.

  • It's manifesting itself across multiple dimensions of human existence simultaneously.

  • To me, that gives it a richness that cannot be diluted without loss and and also a motive power that that appear appeal to rationality I don't think can manage.

  • And this is See one of the things.

  • This is maybe a good place for Douglas, sleepy and see one of the things that Douglas claimed upon multiple occasions to be an atheist, and I don't know how he's feeling about that at the present time, but it doesn't matter.

  • It's one of the things one of the company's Douglas has has pointed out was that there are things that we've done in free countries, Let's say broadly speaking in the West, that are worth protecting and that in order to protect them in the longest sense, it's conceivable that we need a, ah, a cognitive structure, something like that that can act as a bulwark against those forces that would seek to undermine and destroy it.

  • And Douglas has bean driven, I would say to some degree to hypothesize that for Christianity, for all its faults or we could say Judeo Christianity to broaden it for all its faults might provide something approximating that bulwark if we could only figure out how to utilize it properly.

  • So, yes, one of my problems on this is that it seems that we are where we are with belief Whether we wish it to be or not, we cannot believe, as our predecessors believed, even if we wanted to.

  • We know too much Maur now and it puts us in this very difficult position.

  • Um, but Thio denude ourselves of the entire story.

  • Seems to me to be a fool's errand for set of reasons, One of which is that from a lot of travel, a lot of speaking to people from all around the world, it doesn't seem it'll obvious to me that what we have in countries like this one is the default position of human beings.

  • In fact, it strikes me as being very rare order, even political order, political liberalism, political freedom.

  • Very, very unusual things on DDE if you like the things that helped to get you there with all of the caveats, with all the caveats way could throw in all evening.

  • And it's not the only thing that got us there, obviously, But if you like broadly speaking where we are, you've gotta be very suspicious.

  • At the very least of saying the whole story is no good.

  • We don't need the story.

  • We can move on, I quote quite often the radical feel loads and Don Cupid.

  • It was often described as an atheist priest on Dhe Cupid.

  • So somewhere in recent book, he said, Way can't help it.

  • If, for instance, the Dreams way Dream are still Christian dreams, whether we like that fact or not on DDE without being able to believe myself, Certainly not being a literal believer.

  • Um, I worry, Yeah, I worry about what happens when the square is denuded completely, and that's why this discussion tonight and you two in particular a right on the cusp of this because this is this is where I think a lot of us are.

  • Even if we really wanted to believe we basically can't on by the way very quickly.

  • That's why I think there's an additional just to refine my previous point to you, Sam.

  • That's where there's this additional thing.

  • I think there is a fear which you may have, which I also have, which is if there's a risk that even what I've just said, never mind what Jordan has also said.

  • There's a risk.

  • I think some people feel that you're going to soften up the land somehow and that even if neither Jordan nor I are going to suddenly start Jesus smuggling.

  • We might create the conditions that make it easier for someone else to do that.

  • Is that a fair year?

  • And it is, Yeah, no photos, very Christian of you.

  • So thank you.

  • Let me see if I can sharpen up what my concern actually is here because it's not even true to say that I think you need to get rid of the Jesus story or even or even not.

  • Hey, I don't even think there's something problematic with Orient in your life around the Jesus story.

  • I think that that could be reclaimed.

  • But for instance, I was walking yesterday and this fine city of yours and saw someone on the sidewalk giving tarot readings to people he had with tarot deck spread out.

  • He had a few cards spread out, and he was soliciting people.

  • And and I'm sorry to say I didn't sit for a reading.

  • But tarot cards, if you're familiar with them, are they cut the quintessential artifact of New Age woo right there.

  • These air not thought of as legitimate tools of divination except by people who think that they're a legitimate tools of divination.

  • And yet a tarot reading can be truly powerful, right?

  • I mean, it's thistles built on something, right?

  • This is not just a a massive example of self deception on the part of people reading and people getting their cards read.

  • Thes CardScan.

  • See, impression I could give you all a reading right now, and 95% of you would find what I would what the cards would say to be relevant to your lives.

  • I could do it with an imaginary deck, an invisible imaginary deck.

  • I don't know anything about terror cards, but I'm gonna turn over two cards now.

  • One is the son, and the other is the fallen man.

  • Now I know so little about terror that I'm not even sure the fallen man is a terrible I think was the hanged man.

  • Okay, so I've got these two cards and, you know, the sun is clearly the representation of wisdom, right?

  • And the hanged man is the is the representation of lost opportunity.

  • And I can tell you with some degree of certainty that all of you are at a crossroads in your life where you have you.

  • You have good reason to believe that you're not making the most of your opportunities right now.

  • I could go on like this for an hour, right?

  • And pretend all the while that it has something to do with the cards actually being working in concert with the dynamics of the cosmos such that these cards that I turn over were they riel would be the ones that of necessity.

  • We're revealing something about your mind in this moment.

  • And obviously people think in these terms about astrology and sympathetic magic and all the rest and religion is built upon this kind of superstition.

  • There's a way of understanding the utility of using a device like this and the rial effect it has on you.

  • If I turn over the cards and ask you to look at your life in this moment as though for the first time through this lens, considering in this case lost opportunities right, of course is going to be valid.

  • That doesn't make it could be an incredibly useful thing to do.

  • My main concern is that at no point you have to lie to yourself about your state of knowledge about the mechanism, right?

  • You don't have to believe Tero card.

  • Really, really.

  • There there There's deeper, deeper mechanisms that work with someone who's actually good at that.

  • And so I agree with what you said.

  • But they may not be supernatural.

  • Oh, I don't think they are supernatural.

  • In fact, I think what happens when you use a projective techniques like that?

  • Because that's essentially what it is.

  • If I'm good at interpersonal attunement and I'm quite intuitive, what I'm going to do this and everyone does this in the course of a dialogue that's actually working.

  • Well, I'm gonna flip over the cards, and I'm going to start with generic archetypal statements that are true in some sense for everyone.

  • But then I'm gonna watch you both consciously and implicitly, unconsciously, with all of my social intelligence, And I'm going to see through very, very subtle signs on your part when you respond positively to what I'm saying and when you respond negatively and I'm going to continue down the lines that you established by your positive responses.

  • That's what Aaron Brown does, that he's a mental right.

  • Well, it's exactly what happens when Children are interviewed, for example, by people who lead them as witnesses, right?

  • The Children infer from the emotional expressions of the person who's interrogating them, what it is that they actually want to hear.

  • And so they even work with that horse.

  • Clever.

  • Exactly.

  • Right.

  • That's right.

  • Exactly.

  • The horses could do this.

  • Sotero card readers condemn finitely do this.

  • So So they s so so So.

  • The mechanisms behind something like that, even if it appears entirely superstitious on the surface are often deeper than is revealed.

  • That first approximation.

  • So I wanted to talk a little bit if you don't mind for a minute about rationality because the the we've already agreed, I think definitely start me if I'm wrong, that there has to be an intermediary mechanism between the world of facts and the world of values.

  • And well, since we've talked, I've been reading a variety of commentaries on Immanuel Kant.

  • Mostly, these have been written by Roger Scrutiny, by the way.

  • And this is actually that the issue that the cont, um what obsessed about for most of his philosophical life and what he concluded was that empiricism can't be right in rationality.

  • Can't be right as philosophical disciplines because you need an intermediary structure and that we have an inbuilt intermediary structure.

  • And that structure is what mediates between the thing in itself.

  • The world of facts, let's say, and the outputs, the values.

  • So then I was thinking what the truth is We don't quite agree on this.

  • In my summary of your view of me, I would have agreed with that.

  • But for me, it's just fax all the way down.

  • Okay, here's your drink.

  • You're describing facts.

  • Glad to hear it.

  • Then why do you need a brain then?

  • Well, the brain is yet another part of reality.

  • What?

  • We're not what I mean by a fact, what is?

  • Do anything there.

  • What does the brain do?

  • It has to do something because otherwise you don't need it.

  • It does a lot.

  • The the, uh you're concerned to jump to the other.

  • I think we're going in this conversation's How is it that values can't be another order of fact that seems problematic to you.

  • It seems problematic.

  • Problematic.

  • David, You know, it's problematic for me for technical reason, which is that in order to, and we see if we agree on this in order to perceive and toe act, which I believe, are both acts of value to perceive as an active value because you have to look at something instead of a bunch of other things.

  • So you have you elevate the thing that you're perceiving to the position of highest value by perceiving it by deciding to perceive it.

  • So get active.

  • I just think it's translated in my brain just more.

  • In fact, you're just give me the facts of human perception.

  • That's fine.

  • That's no problem.

  • I'm perfectly happy about that.

  • And then, in order to act, you have to select the target of action from among an infinite number near infinite number.

  • Close enough of possible mechanisms of action.

  • And so what a biological organism does is take the fax and translate them into perception and action.

  • And the only organisms that do that with 1 to 1 mapping are organisms that are composed of sensory motor cells like sponges, marine sponges, which are composed of sensory motor cells.

  • They don't have an intermediary nervous system, so what they do is they sit in the water, they make a sponge.

  • They're so simple that if you grind to sponge through a sieve and in salt water, it will reorganize itself into the sponge, so that's quite cool.

  • The sponge sits in the water.

  • Don't do that and what it does, and what it does is there's waves on it, and so it those air patterns.

  • And then the sponge opens and closes.

  • Poor zone.

  • It surfaced in response to those patterns, so it maps the pattern of the waves right onto its behavior, with no intermediary of a nervous system.

  • But it's it can only map waves.

  • That's all it can do, and it can only open and close pours.

  • That's it.

  • So it does one toe, one fact to value mapping.

  • Now what happens is that as the the complexity of a biological organism increases, two things happen.

  • The first thing that happens is that the sensory and motor cells differentiate, so now the organism has sensory cells and motor cells, so sent senses to detect and senses sorry cells to detect and sells toe act.

  • Okay, so then it can do it can detect more patterns because it's more sophisticated at the sensory port perspective, and it could do more things because it has specialized motor systems.

  • But then what happens is that as it gets even more complex than it puts an intermediary structure of nervous tissue in there.

  • And that structure increases in the number of layers of Nerlens.

  • And what that means is that, as as that happens, and as the sensory cells become more specialized in as the motor output cells become more specialized, many more patterns can be detected.

  • Those roughly equivalent to facts and many more motor outputs.

  • Congee manifested.

  • But a tremendous number of calculations have to has to occur in that intermediary nervous tissue, and that's the structure that I'm talking about.

  • That structure exists, and it translates the patterns into motor output, and it doesn't do it on a 1 to 1 basis because there are more patterns, more facts than there are motor outputs.

  • So what has to happen is this tremendous plethora of facts that surrounds us has to be filtered to the point where you pick a single action because you can't act, act otherwise And so the mechanism that reduces the number of facts to the selected action is the mechanism that mediates between facts and values, and it's not simply in and of itself.

  • It's a fact that that exists.

  • But it isn't a simple that what it does isn't a simple fact.

  • You can't you can't explain it.

  • You can't understand.

  • Why not?

  • Why not?

  • For the same reason that you can't look for the same reason for the same reason that you don't know what a neural network is doing like you can train a neural network, there's a distinction between facts and facts that we know right there.

  • There is whatever it is, the case, right, and then there's our understanding of it and our misunderstanding of it.

  • So there are many things that we think we know that we're wrong about their many things that we are aware we're ignorant of.

  • And there's this.

  • There's this large, always this larger space of reality that we're struggling to engage with, and it may in fact be the case that in evolutionary terms, but we know it's the case that way have not evolved to understand reality at large perfectly.

  • That's not the sort of monkeys we are right, and you could even argue of it.

  • 11 cognitive scientist to some of you may have heard of Donald Hoffman is arguing now very colorfully, that human consciousness or the human mind is is actually evolved to get things wrong in a fairly specific ways so that so as to maximize survival.

  • And that that was the argument I made in our first discussion.

  • No, but but but here it was not quite because there's still this still preserves the difference between getting things right and getting things wrong.

  • His argument is that getting things truly right having a nervous system and a cognitive architecture that could really understand reality quote reality as it is, would be maladaptive.

  • And he has some.

  • He has some mathematical demonstration of this, that that that the true quote, true representation of reality are categorically maladaptive and that you had a certain kind of error, that is, and I'm not sure I buy this argument, but the fact that you could make this argument the fact that you can differentiate the adaptive Lee useful misunderstandings versus a true understanding that's maladaptive.

  • The fact that we can even talk about that demonstrates to me that we have this larger picture of what is in fact true, whether we know it or not.

  • And this is what this is, what religion get so catastrophically wrong.

  • Religion gives you some other mechanism whereby whereby to orient yourself, think revelation, it just does.

  • Religion does provide those those functional simplifications purpose there simplifications appropriate to the Iron Age.

  • Some of that if then some of them are for sure.

  • And that's why we have to have this discussion.

  • Because because mirror Mirror revelation and mere tradition is insufficient.

  • And I truly believe that we can agree on that back to the back to the biological argument.

  • So because I thought that tonight I would make a very strictly biological argument is that so?

  • Now the question is now.

  • So now you've got your sensory systems that are detecting the world of facts and you have your motor output system, which is a very narrow channel, because you can only do one thing at a time.

  • And that's one of the quite things about consciousness that's quite strange.

  • It's a very, very narrow channel.

  • You have take this unbelievably complex world, and you have to channel it into this very narrow channel, and you don't do that by being wrong about the world.

  • But you do do that by ignoring a lot of the world and by using representation.

  • Is that air no more complicated than they have to be in order to attain the task at hand?

  • It's like you're losing using low resolution representations of the world.

  • They're not inaccurate because a low resolution representation of the world isn't inaccurate anymore than a low resolution photo is.

  • But they're no higher resolution than they need to be in order for you to undertake the task at hand.

  • And if you undertake the task at hand and that goes successfully than what you've done, and this is basically the essence of American pragmatism, what you've done is validated the you validated the validity of your simplifications.

  • So if the tool you have in hand is good, if he acts you haven't handed sharp enough to chop down the tree, then it's a good enough acts.

  • And that's part of the way that we define truth pragmatically in the absence of infinite knowledge about everything.

  • Okay, so now you build up this nervous system between the world of facts and the world of values, and it and it narrows the world of facts, and the question then is how do you generate the mechanism that does that narrowing, and this is what's you useless.

  • That's not quite how the cake is layered, because the facts are up here to write it for meeting.

  • For me to even notice that you're a person right or to attribute, believes to you or to have a sense of being in a relationship at all.

  • This is one of those higher order interpretive acts based on many layered nervous system.

  • Yes, it's not only bought him up, but its bottom up and stop down.

  • Yes, and and But fat butt facts are also on the top, right?

  • It's not that we have facts here and values here.

  • It's It's well, I think, what I'm telling you.

  • You can't get to a fact, but I think what I'm trying to do, I think maybe it's one way of thinking about it.

  • Is that you you are using your positing that we can use rationality as a mechanism for mediating between facts and values.

  • I believe because otherwise there's no use for rationality.

  • We can just have the fact that it's a process even simpler than that.

  • It's just that for me, and I think for everyone, if they will only agree to use language this way.

  • For me, values are simply facts about the experience of conscious creatures.

  • Good and bad experiences give us our values.

  • Yeah, but they're not simple.

  • That's a little bit, but neither are the goods in the bag, and some are very simple.

  • You have in your hand, put on a hot stove is incredibly simple, and not if it'll save your child if you do it.

  • But again with the unpleasantness of it, right?

  • Unorthodox?

  • Not.

  • No, it's not.

  • If you look at the way the reward and punishment systems work in the brain, you can easily train an animal using reward to wag its tail.

  • If it's being shocked electrically, you can do that, and you can wire it very low.

  • Todo that.

  • There's a range of unpleasant experiences we can have where we can construe them as pleasant or necessary, right, and that's a kind of a higher level feet of him around.

  • But I'm talking about, you know, the worst possible sensory experience that all of us will agree will agree is unpleasant, right?

  • That doesn't require a story to for us to feel aversion to, and there's many things like that in life that are just just rudimentary way were organized in such a way that you would put us into fire.

  • So so are you.

  • Are you claiming that like, this is another problem?

  • This is where I think that the argument that you make, although accurate in its rudiments, let's say, is insufficiently high resolution.

  • Because now it sounds to me like you're including the domain of Kuala unquestioningly in the domain of facts.

  • Now you can do that, but we need to know if that's what you're doing.

  • Like, what are these facts you're talking about?

  • Are they near manifestations of the objective world, or did the shade into the subject there are There are objective facts about subject of experience so I could make I could make true or false claims about your subjectivity, and and you could make you could make those about your own subjectivity.

  • You could be wrong about your own subjectivity.

  • We're not subjectively incorrigible, and I might have said this last time in Vancouver with the example I All I often use here is to speculate about what JFK was thinking.

  • The moment he got shot right is not a a completely vacuous exercise.

  • They're literally an infinite number of things.

  • We know he wasn't thinking right so we could make claims about his conscious mind at that moment in history, which are a scientific even though the data are unavailable, people, many people get confused between having answers in practice, and they're being answers in principle there many trivial fact based claims we could make about reality where we can't get the data.

  • But we know the data are there.

  • So, you know, do you haven't even or odd number of hairs on your body at this moment way don't want to think about what it would take to ascertain that fact, right?

  • But there is a fact of the matter right and on.

  • So it is with anything but So what is somebody?

  • What is a person way?

  • There's many, many fax or blurry because you gave you gonna weigh weigh him down to the the 100 decimal plate place?

  • No.

  • So it's like a certain point you're going to be round in, and someone's weight at that point is changing every microsecond because they're exchanging Adams with the air.

  • So there's so there are facts that could be loosely defined.

  • This is still this is true ifs of our subject of lives, too.

  • So if it is a fact about you that when you when you were praying to Jesus, you felt an upwelling of rapture, right subjectively, that could be an absolutely true thing to say about you.

  • We can we compare that subject of experience with an understanding of the neuro physiological basis for it.

  • You can think about it in terms of a larger story about your life.

  • But all of this can be translated into a fact based discussion about what's happening for you.

  • And my only claim is that the value part and hence the ethics part relates to the the extremes of positive and negative experience that people have in their lifetime.

  • Not first of all, I wouldn't dispute.

  • I don't want to dispute the fact that there are stable quality, a pain and pleasure, for example, and also that there are fundamental motivational systems that structure our perception.

  • So as the nervous system increases in complexity, these underlying nervous system subsections that produced these rather stable Kolia evolved hunger, thirst, defensive aggression, sexuality, all these subsystems that label experience with certain somewhat inviolable labels.

  • I understand that happens, but the point that I'm trying to make here is, I think, to try to increase the what would you call the breadth of the conversation about how facts get translated into into values because it seems to me the other thing that your account doesn't take proper, and this is what surprised me so much about your thinking when I first encountered it.

  • See, I think the manner in which facts are translated into values is something that actually evolved, and it evolved over 3.5 1,000,000,000 years, the 3.5 1,000,000,000 years of life, and it built the nervous system from the bottom up.

  • And it built this reducing mechanism that takes the infinite number of facts and translates them into a single value per action.

  • And it does that in layers.

  • And so there is a relationship between the world of facts and the world of values, and there has to be.

  • But it isn't derive a ble 1 to 1 in the confines of your single existence.

  • Through pure rationality.

  • It's way more complicated than that.

  • If there's more to it than rationality again, it's not rationality that causes you to remove your hand from a hot stove.

  • And it's not rationality that causes you tow, like the experience of love and bliss and rapture and creativity over or more than pointless misery and despair.

  • Think things other than rationality are clearly necessary.

  • Part absolutely.

  • Okay, The question is, do we ever have to be irrational to get the good things in life?

  • And I would argue that that the answer to that is clearly no.

  • There's nothing irrational about loving your wife or your best friend or yourself, or even a stranger if what you mean by love.

  • There is genuinely wanting happiness for that person, genuinely taking pleasure in their company, genuinely wanting to to find a way of being where you're You're no longer in a zero sum condition with a stranger or with a partner.

  • But you're collaborating together to have better lives, since in a sewer, rationality moves through that situation continuously.

  • Because rationality is the only way that you and I can get our representations of the world to cohere.

  • It's it's when I say Okay, there's a There's a lion behind that rock.

  • Don't go over there.

  • That only that it only makes sense to you if you're playing this rationality game the way I'm playing it.

  • If I mean something else by lion or I mean something else by, don't go over there.

  • You know you're confused and very likely dead or not, if we're if we're trying to establish the proposition that rationality is the mechanism by which we make our worldviews cohere, I would agree with that in part.

  • We also make them call here because we're actually biologically structured the same way.

  • And so there's a proclivity for them to go here to begin with.

  • But we iron out our differences through the exercise.

  • I wouldn't call it rationality.

  • I would call it logos because I think it's a more It's a It's a broader that this is where he's smuggling and Jesus conscious of that.

  • Let's say so.

  • I like it is a point of order here.

  • I want I'm, uh I'm disconcerted by Douglas A silence.

  • No, I want to pivot because I know how good he is when he actually speaks.

  • Uh so I want to pivot to another subject because waken return to this sometime before you pivot.

  • I mean having said to you what I think your concern is with Jordan.

  • I mean, it's drinks with Jordan's concern, and I share this just as I share some of your concerns.

  • Expressed at the outset in Jordan's fundamental concern, It seems to me, is a one I fundamentally share, which is rationalism isn't enough and it's well, let me put it another way.

  • But then let me get the two of you.

  • Can you both show me where it where?

  • It's obviously insufficient like like music, But there's nothing but again.

  • So to say that it's not to say that there's more to life than being rational is not to say and perhaps never to say you need to run against rationality need to be irrational.

  • In order to get something good, let me express it a different way.

  • Um, we haven't tried the purely rational approach yet.

  • We haven't tried it for very long.

  • Well, many, many of us have been trying for a couple of centuries, at least, which is a blip.

  • Yeah, I mean the tiniest dot at the end of human evolution.

  • So I think that a concern which Jordan hasn't certainly concern I have is if we try this waken think of all sorts of ways in which you can go wrong.

  • If you take away all that a supporting structure, I can think of any number of ways in which you can go wrong And that I suppose that that's the root of the concern about where you might be taking us.

  • Or to put it another way, if we enter the world that you would suggest not everyone may necessarily come out as Sam Harris.

  • Well, give me one way where you think it could go wrong and again.

  • Way Can't forget your caviar What you started with What if you're not very smart?

  • Well, what was that person?

  • So you're basically saying that the stupid people need their myths.

  • You know, the smart people on stage don't need them.

  • Well, I am.

  • Actually, I I Look, I actually I'm saying that to some degree, that this look, look, if you're if you're if you're not exceptionally cognitively astute, you should be traditional and conservative.

  • Because if you are, if you can't think well, you're going to think badly.

  • And if you think badly, you're going to fall into trouble.

  • And so it is definitely the case, and this is what would you call a cliche of political believed for a long time?

  • If you're not very smart, it's better to be conservative because then you do what everyone else does and generally speaking, doing what everyone else does, the path of least error moving forward.

  • You know, that doesn't mean that rationality is unnecessary.

  • Doesn't mean that all conservatives a stupid it doesn't mean that either, right?

  • Precisely.

  • It doesn't mean that all can all conservative structures not the same either, and that we have many warring and incompatible versions of being conservative.

  • True, True.

  • And this is exactly this is where rational it actually does play its role, although I don't think it's best conceptualized his rationality precisely, it's It's definitely the case that we it's to take Douglas this point that we need to be bound by our traditions.

  • But we need to be judicious in there, re representation and update, and we have to do both.

  • This is what the dialogue on religion that's what shopper says, he says.

  • He describes the tragedy of the clergy, who he pretty

there.

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