[Music]
okay so i'm talking today with dr
michael shermer
and dr schermer is among other things
the publisher of skeptic magazine but
more importantly for our purposes today
he is also the author of this book new
book
and we're heaven on earth and we're
going to talk about this today in some
detail and so i'm going to turn this
over first to dr shermer who's going to
tell you some things about himself and
then we're going to have a discussion
he's going to outline his book and then
we're going to have a discussion about
about why he wrote it and what it
contains and what the implications are
and all of that so
over to you michael
uh sure jordan thank you for having me
on the show it's
well the the book is uh kind of an
extension of my previous work most of my
books when i write them they kind of
push off from the previous book so going
all the way back to my first book why
people believe weird things which was
about the supernatural and the
paranormal and
and all that then that led to how we
believed which was why people believe in
god
and then if you don't believe in the
supernatural and you don't believe in a
deity what about morality so i wrote two
books on math the science of good and
evil and the moral art last book
uh so then you know kind of covering all
the big subjects uh
from a skeptical scientific perspective
um the afterlife is obviously a huge one
and i had really dealt with that too
much in my previous books and you know
now that i'm in my 60s i guess you could
say i'm cramming for the final
thinking about these big issues it's not
something i obsess about i'm not
terrorized by death like like some
people allegedly are but but i think
it's a super interesting subject because
um
it's obviously a part of the human
condition it's something people do think
about and
apparently we're the only species that
can do this although i have a chapter in
heavens on earth on animals that grieve
clearly quite a few mammals do grieve
and they have some sense of loss
death and grief you know for fellow
group members or family members that die
but it's not clear that they understand
that they're mortal
um and then like you know i covered the
the possibility that neanderthals were
self-aware of their mortality because of
grave goods that have been found
although that's you know it's hard to
fossil
fossilization of thoughts is difficult
to interpret but you know it seems
reasonable that they had some sense of
that but in any case um
uh so i deal with um the you know the
the monotheisms versions of the
afterlife heaven immortality uh judaism
christianity and islam mainly because
you sort of have to although mine's a
science book and those are sort of
low-hanging fruit that atheists have
already kind of picked at so i don't
spend a lot of time on that i'm focused
more on scientific attempts to achieve
immortality and it's a book of science
so i actually start with what doesn't
seem like a scientific attack but deepak
chopra's world view of sort of western
buddhism that
um that there is the idea of
birth death
after life life before life is all kind
of meaningless because it's all
consciousness in a deepak's worldview as
he puts it uh you know consciousness is
the ontological primitive
you can't get underneath it uh you know
the scientific attempt to explain it by
material means will always fail because
that's not where consciousness lies
anyway so i i um thanks to my wife uh
you know actually delved into his
worldview
deepak and i have clashed for you know
20 years and i've called his worldview
woo-woo and
pseudoscience and and you know we've
been kind of at odds at each other so
as it changes i mean he's sort of the
main you might say intellectual force i
don't think it's unreasonable to say the
main intellectual force behind the new
age movement or associated with the new
age movement is that certainly that's
one of the yeah certainly one of the
most prominent ones he's got a huge
following you know he goes on oprah and
talks about these things and dr oz or
whoever and and you know he has a lot of
following so
um so my wife and i actually went down
to his center the trooper center in
carlsbad california and spent some time
there i we delved into meditation and
yoga and the tea and the chanting and
all that stuff just to kind of see what
it's all about and uh you know i think
there's something there in terms of
behavioral change that is how it affects
your body and your mind and you're
thinking and i could definitely see
something to that and um
and but but also the difficult part that
that deepak and i have had is the same
problem that most scientists have
with um new age uh beliefs but not just
epic but
non-western traditions that what depot
calls the eastern wisdom traditions that
it's the language the difficulty of
language we have to use words to
communicate
and the words you use matter
at some level you have to be able to be
talking on the same
level with words so when deepak says
um you know the ontological primitive or
consciousness is the womb of creation
you know these are it sounds sort of
metaphorical and he means something very
specific by that and if you can't get at
that then you're wasting your time
talking so um deepak and i have kind of
become friends and we you know we're
constantly communicating just to try to
see if we can find some
ground where we're talking you know
on the same plane and so i think i've uh
learned a lot from him in that in that
sense and so my chapter is devoted to
him on that and and the general eastern
wisdom traditions you know that when you
die
because i always ask him well where do
you go and he said he's just the wrong
question i mean you just returned to
where you were before
because when people ask me well what do
you think happens after you die my
standard kind of quip is the same thing
you go to the same place you were before
you were born
people say what are you talking about i
wasn't anywhere before i was born right
and you'll be nowhere after you die but
for deepak you know time and
consciousness kind of overrides the
concept of time at the beginning and end
right
your consciousness just returns to where
it was
and that the this physical body and
brain is just a temporary instantiation
of consciousness into physical being but
it just goes back to some other place
and and as near as i could figure we
don't have the words to even conceive of
what that means
uh that is that the western language the
way scientists talk
can't really capture what uh he's
talking about in that sense and so
that's why i think
uh we kind of hit an epistemological
wall there where
you have to actually get into
introspection meditation and that the
deeper parts of that tradition that i've
never been able to you know really get
into personally so i can't say i
understand it although i i kind of see
where he's coming from in that regard
so let me ask you some questions about
that so
the first might have to do with this
idea of the ontological primacy of
consciousness say
now one of the things i've learned from
studying mythology is that the
mythological worldview first of all i
think the mythological worldview
conceptualizes the world as a place to
act
rather than as a place of things so it's
sort of like stephen jay gould's idea of
two magisterium that don't overlap
there's a moral magisterium and a
materialist magisterium say but it's
been striking to me looking at the
archetypal foundations of mythological
thinking that in that that in the
scientific world view there seem to be
two fundamental causal elements you
could say nature and nurture something
like that or biology and society and
then
technically sophisticated western
academics argue about the relative
contribution of each to any given
uh existential phenomena but in the
mythological world view there's always
three actors there's nature
um usually personified as female or
experienced as female because
personified isn't quite the right word
there's culture but there's also the
individual and the individual seems to
be the same thing as the conscious actor
and that would be the hero the dragon
slaying hero say and
there's a there is a kind of primacy
given to that so in the oldest creation
myths you always see this interplay
between
the the mother often mother earth and
the father the sky and then the hero who
separates the two and somehow brings and
perversely in some sense although being
their product clearly as the offspring
is also the thing that gives rise to
them at the same
at the same time
and it seems to be something that's in
keeping in some sense with our lived
experience is that we confront the
social world
obviously and are
beneficiaries and victims of it and we
confront the natural world
in the same manner but we also seem to
be agentic actors
and without us as a gentic actors the
idea that there's a reality seems to it
seems to be full of paradoxical holes
like reality without a conscious actor
and i think that's the sort of thing
that that generates the thinking that
you've referred to as characteristic of
of deepak chopra and the people who who
make those sorts of claims and so
i mean what
what's your what's your take on on
consciousness and its role in being
well and on the one hand it's everything
because
um it it's what i tell what i tell deep
what i write about in that chapter is
that um you're you're familiar with the
anthropic principle so i call this the
the weak consciousness principle that um
without consciousness without
consciousness nothing exists you know
this is one of the points deepak makes
uh and for me and you personally if
we're dead or we're not conscious the
world doesn't exist for our brains it's
gone there's nothing there's nothing
uh this but but he goes further than
that he says this is what i call the
strong consciousness principle that that
consciousness is required our
consciousness is required for material
things to exist and
and so there i have a discussion of what
um
donald hoffman the cognitive scientist
at uc irvine calls his
um
the interface perception theory
uh i don't know if you're familiar with
this but his analogy is like you know
your laptop screen here and you have
these icons on the screen
and like the little trash can icon looks
like a trash can but of course there's
no trash if you open
if you open your laptop there's no trash
can in there you know these are just
kind of icons that represent something
that we think of as a trash can and um
you know this is gets the problem of you
know what it's like to be a bat
uh famous thought experiment i can't
know if i bolted on some
some huge ears and and i had an
echolocation system in the neural
processes to process that information
and so on i would have some sense of
what it's like to be a vet but
but to have everything on
to actually be about them i would just
be a bat and i wouldn't even be
i wouldn't even know i was a human
wondering what it's like to be a fat
okay so at some level we can't actually
know
um you know what it's like to be
something else and so you
again with deepak and i and these kinds
of traditions like that we hit this
system logical wall of language it's
difficult to say what you mean by
certain things yes yeah well especially
when you get down to the fundamentals of
things well it's pretty clear that
the things that
so let's look at that user interface
idea
so
obviously what happens when you're
looking at a computer screen is that the
complexity of the screen is reduced to a
set of icons that can serve as tools
right and i think that that's a
reasonable way of thinking about how we
look at the world is the complexity
that hoffman's theory is that natural
selection didn't select our brains to to
record an accurate representation of
reality
like a scientific model attempts to get
ever closer to what reality is really
like no natural selection just wants us
to escape predators doesn't matter what
they look like what the icon is in your
brain a breath fat's brain or whatever
as long as you survive that's all that
matters so uh this is why we're so
easily deceived by illusions and magic
tricks and things like that that you
know our brains aren't really wired to
to to represent reality as it really is
whatever that means and um
yes you can say that without human
consciousness the iconic reality that we
inhabit would not exist
right okay okay
that slightly is that um
as i told them so let's say you know
what's it like to be a dolphin
i don't know okay so some kind of
echolocation system so and his point is
well they're you know the sharks are
dangerous so uh his they avoid sharks
but so the question is what does a shark
look like in a dolphin's brain versus
what it looks like in our brain
um it's probably quite different and i
really have no idea what a shark looks
like to a dolphin but i do know this
there really are sharks and they really
have sharp things on one end and a tail
on the other and they're eating machines
and you should avoid them so yeah
so that's actually a weakness of the
icon
claim i would say because yeah it looks
to me like here's a twist on it
what we see in in our conscious
experience are
functional icons
but they're also low resolution
representations of the things that are
actually there yes and and i don't think
that computer icons are low resolution
representations of the things that are
there they're just functional icons now
i might be wrong about that because
because it's hard to to conjure up that
analysis on the fly but the trash can
for example on your desktop
is actually
it's actually a low resolution
representation of an actual trash can
not a computer trash can even though it
functions the same way right
so so i like the icon idea but i think
it misses some element of the actual
relationship between the perception and
the reality we definitely see in low
resolution which is why we can stand
animated pictures like say the simpsons
that you know where where everything is
well extremely low resolution but that
makes no functional difference to us
whatsoever
and we definitely see and hear in low
resolution but the resolute like i i
think what we see are something like
instead of icons they're more like
thumbnails that are functional
that's a good analogy and then well i
like it because the thumbnail the
thumbnail
actually is an unbiased sampling of the
actual
object right because a photograph is
relatively unbiased sample of an object
and you can compress it you can you can
you can
until it and
and what you're doing is blurring out
distinctions between
you're blurring out distinctions between
different aspects of it without
without losing the relationship between
the parts it's something like that yeah
that's right yeah and all in in a way
much of science operates at a
metaphorical level you know that string
you know have you ever seen a string
theory documentary that didn't have
violins featured in it you know that
that the compute the brain is like a
computer it's like a dual processor it's
like a quantum information
we can't because we have to talk and we
have to you know transfer the literal
meaning of metaphors to move something
from here to there in the original greek
so you know we're trying to capture some
idea that's really hard to get that by
something we're very familiar with so
right part of the problem we have too
that addresses some of the issues you've
dealt with with
some of your recent um conversations
with people is is we're operating at
different levels so but deepak for
example uh pounds me with articles about
quantum physics that show
you know the the
stuff is really just energy atoms are
mostly empty space
and so forth and you know this this
table is you know it's actually mostly
empty space okay this is all true but we
don't live at the quantum level right
you live at the micro level where i'm
sitting in a chair and i'm not passing
through it because
at that at this level you know it's it's
not the same as at the quantum level and
yeah
and i think making that distinction um
you know helps clarify a lot of things
so like when you talk about the truth to
be found in uh biblical stories or
literary stories like dostoevsky or or
shakespeare or whatever
and the materialist scientist says well
no i mean something different by truth
it's not that one of you is right the
other is wrong it's just that these are
different levels or different
uh ways of talking about yeah whatever
you think about them as different tool
kits
yeah that's right different tool kits
that's right yeah
that's what makes it kind of a classic
american pragmatist is that i think of
these things as tools you know and
there's a scientific toolkit and there's
a there's a toolkit for action in the
world and they overlap but they're not
the same
so for example i call this um
alvey's error
alvey singer the character in woody
allen's film
um annie hall
and there's that funny scene where
there's a flashback to where he's in
childhood
and he's refused to do his homework and
he's depressed and his mother takes him
to the doctor or psychiatrist whoever he
is and okay what why are you depressed
alvis is because i found out that the
universe is expanding
so what because if the universe is
expanding then eventually it's all going
to blow up and nothing means anything
right right others screams at them we
live in brooklyn brooklyn's not
expanding we gotta do homework
yeah well that that's a that's a nice
observation i think too because
so okay let's go back to the
conceptualization issue so one of the
things that we've agreed on and i don't
want to lose track of that thread
because i think it's useful is that
we do see an iconic reality
and the icons have practical utility but
they also bear
some one-to-one correspondence with the
thing in itself and it's low resolution
is a nice way of thinking about so
they're low resolution icons with
functional utility now the question
would be
so then and what that makes clear is
that without human consciousness all
that disappears right okay then the
question is
partly what is there outside of that
functional iconic representation and so
that would be the old question of the
thing in itself and you could say and i
think you could say with some
justification that the thing in itself
is in potential something that collapses
across time and space so that it's
everything and nothing at the same time
which is
i guess that's an eastern claim that's
one way of thinking about it it's a
taoist claim and i like it because
the problem with the or the one of the
issues that and this is associated with
the idea of brooklyn it's not only does
lb is it lb or lv
lv not only does elvie live in brooklyn
he lives in brooklyn now
right and so it's spatially located and
temporally located and so his mother's
objection is
well don't pick a reference point that
makes everything right now irrelevant
which which is really good practical
psychological advice because one of the
things that leads people down the path
of nihilism is this claim that
this observation that you can pick a
time frame of analysis that makes your
current action useless
who's going to care in a million years
like that
right so the theist that argues
you know without god without some sort
of external source for morality
and meaning nothing what we're do
nothing we do matters because in 15
billion years you know the the heat
death of the universe or whatever
we don't live 15 billion years from now
we live now here and and what we do does
matter
uh you know so you know like these would
argue you know the the odyssey problem
you know without god there's no right or
wrong whatever stalin did or hitler did
is perfectly fine because of the heat
death of the universe no it's not fine
because the people that are suffering in
the gulag archipelago or in the gas
chambers at auschwitz
they're not thinking about 15 billion
years from now they're living right here
right now the torture is really doing
wrong by these standards so again the
level at which we're talking about is is
everything and this is why i in the
heavens on earth i i i'm concerned about
the obsession with the
people obsessing too much about the
afterlife not just religious people but
scientists it's what i call it
uh at the afterlife for atheists is you
know so the core of my book is really
about
all the cryonics people and the
transhumanists and the singulatarians
and the extropians and the
and the people that are gonna upload
your mind into a computer and turn it on
you know ray kurzweil and all these guys
you know they're they're almost gurus
when you go to these conferences you
know it's like we get to live forever we
are the generation that gets delivered
yes
some of them think they're the they're
the generation that's going to
instantiate the deity in the form of
computational entity as well that's
right i mean kurzweil even has a funny
line about that you know i said you know
is there a god well there's going to be
pretty soon as soon as we hit the
singularity right right
yeah and so i've been to these
singularity summits and it reminds me
when i was religious you know i used to
be an evangelical i went to pepperdine
university
uh which is a church of christ school i
was really into it and and going to
church and all that stuff and i go to
the singularity summit i was like wow
i'm back in church right now here's ray
kurzweil the guru up there telling us we
are the first generation that will live
forever
and you know aubrey de grey this radical
life extension is scientists you know he
he's on record saying the first person
to live a thousand years is is born now
he's alive now right so okay so they
have an issue there's two elements to
the heaven issue that we can discuss
then one is the belief in the existence
of heaven
and the other is the the positing of
heaven as an aim
yes and those are interestingly related
so
from my perspective from so one of the
things as far as i've been able to tell
one of the things that allows us to
transform the reality that's too
complicated to perceive into these
functional low resolution icons let's
say is a name
you have to aim right and you have to
aim with your eyes and in fact we're
also extraordinarily good at detecting
how other people aim with their eyes
yes so
and
the question is always well where should
you aim and the answer to that
archetypally i would say and
biologically for that matter is that you
should aim up because why the hell would
you aim down down is hell right down is
where the suffering is down is where the
malevolence is so you aim up and
archetypically up is heaven
and so one of the things that i can't it
seems to me that there's some
possibility that it was impossible for
human beings to discover the future
which is something that we seem to have
done maybe that was prefrontal extension
maybe that was the
expansion of the prefrontal cortex and
it's deep wiring with the visual cortex
that actually enabled us to foresee the
future something like that i don't know
if you can foresee the future without
without
stumbling upon the idea of heaven at the
same time because
heaven in in that sense becomes the best
possible future and and you're aiming at
you're aiming at a better future and
because you're aiming at a better future
you're kind of compelled to also
conceptualize at least in principle like
the platonic ideal of the future and so
then that future potential starts to
become a kind of a reality it's
something like that
yeah i think that's a super good point
my again my concern about
to obsessing too much about the the next
life is you're going to miss out on this
life which is where you live right now
but but that's different from aiming at
it i mean you know my i wrote a book on
moral progress the moral arc you know
aiming for
incremental improvements in civil rights
and and health and longevity and and
you know ridding ourselves of disease
and war these are all admirable goals
that we should keep doing that aiming
for something and i do like the the
metaphor of up because it is
maybe it's because we're a social
hierarchical species yeah well i think
that's why the pyramids i think i
believe that i think that's what the
pyramids represent with their with their
gold cap right it's right and uh
and the washington monument is the same
thing right with aluminum
or the pyramid of a hierarchy of needs
and so on yeah so
at the end of my chapter on on
monotheism's versions of heaven i float
the idea probably won't be accepted by
evangelicals and fundamentalists but
that what you know when jesus talked
about the kingdom is within uh
he mentions this not as
not as often as i would have liked but i
think he's referring to the fact that
heaven is within us in the sense that we
should be aiming to improve ourselves
and you know that christians have and
atheists have conflicted over this this
the passage where he says
uh you know matthew 16 26 i say unto you
there some standing here which will not
taste death till they see the son of man
coming in his kingdom and you know of
course atheists go hahaha he's still not
here
uh but but i what if he meant something
else that heaven is not a place to go
but a way to be here and now i i'm very
i'm very
what would you call uh
that's a viewpoint that i think is very
much worth pursuing i would also but i
also think there's something deeply
strange about that too because
um
i think that if a psychological state
becomes profound enough it starts to
become a social state and so i would say
that that that kingdom of god that's
within which is something tolstoy wrote
a lot about by the way that was a a book
that was he wrote a book called the
kingdom of god is within us and that
profoundly influenced mahatma gandhi by
the way and they had a lengthy
correspondence which is part of the
reason that gandhi became an non
um
used non-violent resistance right in his
fight against the english which was
quite interesting but
i think that there is
there is
there's
look look it's something like this
maybe when you go to a concert it's a
great concert and you're having a very
profound psychological experience of
unity and harmony which of course is
what you get at the concert but if the
experience is profound enough
psychologically and individually it also
starts to encompass and envelop the
people around you
and so i think the kingdom of god that
christ was talking about was something
like this is why i like jean piaget so
much it's something like the piaget in
equilibrated state
where things are working out really well
for you and you're deeply immersed in a
meaningful experience but at the same
time that meaning is structured so that
it's maximally beneficial for the people
who are immediately around you and for
the people who are distally related to
you and so everything stacks up and some
that's some that's that's something like
the idea of the ladder to heaven or the
stairway to heaven that everything's
stacking up properly and then there's a
there is see i think when people
experience that and this is where the
metaphysics touches the material i think
that would be better yes exactly that
precisely that yes precisely that
increase you notice that the demons are
upside down going down
right right which is exactly right
that's that's exactly the right way to
conceptualize it so
i think that when people have an
experience of that
stacking of meaning
that they also have an intimation of
immortality that goes along with that
that's embodied and that that's partly
why the metaphysical speculations about
the reality of the kingdom of heaven
have emerged because it's not just
conceptual right there there is embodied
experience and people report the same
thing when they have transcendental
experiences of various sorts and those
and we know from a scientific
perspective that those can be very
reliably induced with the use of agents
like psilocybin and you know i've been
really fascinated by what's been
happening at johns hopkins hospital with
the psilocybin experimenters because one
of the most recent things they showed
was that if you take people dying of
cancer and you give them psilocybin and
they have a mystical experience which is
something like an experience of the
kingdom of god on earth but also
eternally at the same time that they
lose their fear of death or that at
least it's much modified you know that's
a hell of a finding that's really you
can't just you can't just walk away from
that easily because that's a hell of a
thing to treat
well yeah i i have a chapter on that in
in heavens on earth on near-death
experiences um
and so but we're talking about two
different things um
you know the transitioning from life to
death
in the most pain-free or anxiety
reduced state is is more is progress uh
you know medical progress psychological
progress or whatever and i'm all for you
know if psylocybin does it or whatever
um
then great we should do that
but there's a lot of people that claim
more than that that this is opening the
doors of perception into another world
right it's actually out there and that
those of us that have not taken acid we
just simply can't know
so now we now we get at this question of
truth you know
and one of my columns in scientific
american
i recently wrote called what is truth
anyway i mean when i say like
i prefer doc dark chocolate and you
prefer milk chocolate you know
there's no truth that is to be
discovered yours is true for you mine's
true for me or i say stairway to heaven
is the greatest rock song of all time
and you say no no free bird is better
than stairway to heaven and we argue
about that but there's no there's no
experiment we're gonna run
and so as we start to move along these
lines like when deepak chopra tells me
meditation works
okay so if it works for you
or it doesn't work for me okay those are
still in that state of internal truths
but what we want to know in science is
does doesn't work for everybody or you
know 67 percent of people that do an
hour of meditation a day under these
conditions have reduced uh stress
hormones and blood pressure and so on in
some measurable way that's different
than just an internal state so uh when
we're talking about again just you know
you know working on toward striving to
better ourselves or or some kind of
heaven if you mean just
you know metaphorically so that i can
better myself that's different than
there's an actual place you can go to
uh that's going to be there after we die
and so i think this is where you know
scientists go wait a minute
you also start messing about with the
idea of place in a way that that's the
problem with having discussions about
fundamental realities and you know when
you said another thing that christ said
was that the kingdom of heaven is spread
upon earth but men do not see it
right so and that's that's something
that's akin to the idea of the kingdom
of god is within you although it's it's
a strange twist on it because it also
adds an element of externality or
physicality to it and an element of
immediacy not something that's
forestalled into the future but i wonder
see in my wilder moments of speculation
i i have this notion that
if things stack up properly so imagine
that you're immersed in a very deeply
meaningful experience and and it's it's
operating it's indicating that harmony
has been established between multiple
levels of being simultaneously i wonder
if that can
i wonder if that can
put you in a place that's profound
enough or deep enough so that the
structure of time and space itself
starts to warp around that
i mean
i know that that's a i can't formulate
it well but
there's there's something there's
something about it that seems to me to
be correct about that because people
have intimations
of immortality and they have intimations
of of of heavenly and hellish abodes as
well and they're not they're not the
same they're not the simple kind of
irrational
even rational fundamentalist beliefs
that often people talk about when
they're discussing religious belief
they're more reflected in direct
experience and it's not easy to make
sense of them
well when you delve into the literature
on judaism christianity and islam and
their versions of the afterlife in
heaven they're quite different and the
jews are far less obsessed with going
some place after death in fact
originally they had
they were going no place at all show was
just nothing it was just you returned to
where you were before you were alive
just no place
uh and so but so that that religion is
far more focused on the here and now
like we have a moral duty to help people
the poor and so on now and to live
better lives and more lives of dignity
and honor and morality now
and and christianity really started off
more like that and kind of morphed over
the centuries and particularly in
fundamentalist and evangelicals in the
20th century toward this place we're
gonna go
right right after we die yeah you kind
of have the schism in christianity today
between the kind of the
the fundamentalists that that are
constantly talking about the afterlife
and accepting jesus and they're focused
on missionary working and converting
people versus say maybe the rick warrens
of the world that want to put their
money into uh soup kitchens and helping
the poor
and and and christians have a moral duty
to you know help those in need and and
not so much focused on
the next life and yeah well it's funny
because they're there are real dangers
associated with both those kinds of
conceptualizations i mean you alluded to
one danger that was associated with
let's call those who are concerned more
with the immediate present
and that's the that's starting to
manifest itself in these in these um
technological immortal immortalists
they're saying well we should transform
the nature of being extraordinarily
radically right here and now so that we
have heaven and immortality here you
think well what do we lose by doing that
you know and that's a question that's
really worth asking because if we're
transhuman then we lose being human and
it may be that we actually don't want to
lose being human even though being human
means suffering and malevolent something
like that it's a very hard question but
then the christians this is what where
nietzsche went after the christians with
such an act he said well
if you
despise the the current world and you
leave everything to be rectified in the
afterlife then you just abandon life
itself and you're really trainers to
life right so
how how to steer through those two
shoot two shoals let's say is
or two cliffs that's a very difficult
proposition
well the message my message in the book
to
to the uh singulatarians and the
cryonics and transhumanists and so on is
um you know i'm glad you're working on
this problem you know but you know
because they say shermer don't you want
to live to be a thousand years
and my response is look just get me to
90 without you know cancer and a hundred
without alzheimer's on 110 without being
plugged into machines lying in a bed
because that's not a life and
and so
and so i'm glad people are working on
like what's the best diet how much
yeah
what can we do to improve our memory and
so on that's all great and and and
and i'm glad the power to them and i'm
glad kurzweil is now that you know chief
engineer of all google i mean he's got
some resources to do something about
this but with this focus on living a
thousand years you're mis first of all
you're gonna you may miss the little
incremental things we can do but also
you're missing out now uh there's this
film i write about in the book
um on ray kurzweil it's a little kind of
biographical film of him uh called
transcendent man
and he's constantly talking about you
know living forever and so on and he's
obsessed with his father his father died
uh when he was 51.
the father was 51 and ray was you know
kind of missed out having a father
figure because the father was always
working
and ray was uh you know a real
entrepreneur achiever from his teenage
years so he was always working
and the film kind of follows him around
collecting everything he can about his
father and he keeps it in the basement
of his house and he wants to resurrect
his father in a computer
and it's like oh boy freud would have a
field date with this i'm not an indian
guy but there's something there's
something going on there this sort of
rose focus on i see this this this
strange dichotomy and attitude that you
just described even characterizing you i
see that in my own life because i'm very
interested in
technologies that stave off aging
dietary manipulations and i have this
machine in my basement that's a an
intense pulse light late uh intense
pulse light machine that's unbelievable
skin rejuvenator like it's it's an
absolute miracle this machine and
it takes it'll take sun damage from your
skin completely and and force
rejuvenation it's like it's it's like
using photoshop on your skin it's
amazing
and but but and so i think well isn't it
interesting to do everything possible to
prolong youth and life but at the same
time there's another part of me
that's thinking
well
this is something i wrote about in in in
this new book that i'm publishing um i
was thinking about socrates and his
ability to accept his death
you know and what socrates seems to have
revealed in his acceptance of his death
was that if you live your life properly
then you you've maybe
you lived your life in some sense you've
exhausted it in some sense the question
is
if you if you lived a thousand years
well what exactly
what what exactly would you do
you know like i've had kids and i loved
having kids but i wouldn't have them
again like i wouldn't do that again i
don't think and i have a grandchild and
that's fine but that's a new thing and
like i've had a career and
i as i get older the idea of having 10
more careers seems
it's not like i'm not interested in it
but it doesn't grip me the same way that
it would have say 20 years ago
and so i wonder like i wonder if it is
the case that life is in some sense
structured so that its finitude is
necessary and not something that should
be
well casually transcended let's say
well the transhumanist would respond to
that uh that
you're just used to this idea of only
living 80 90 years and and then you're
done uh that we would adjust to that
well maybe uh the other well yeah the
question would be though who would be
the we that would adjust to that because
well yes you would no longer okay to get
there we we would really no longer be
human the the idea of the transhumanists
and the singulatarian people is
is truly you're not human anymore we
have brain like like the cochlear
implant for hearing is a kind of brain
transplant device well they they want to
ramp that up you know and put chips in
your cortex and you'd essentially have
wikipedia in your brain it's for instant
access
and and so it would truly bring new
meaning to what it means to be human
okay right yes well and then that's you
could also argue that that's a form of
death because if you transform yourself
so radically that you're unrecognizable
then what where's the continuity with
what you once were
you know this is one of the reasons i
have some real sympathy for many reasons
i have many reasons for this but one of
them that i have very much sympathy for
the idea the christian idea
that's that's associated with
immortality of the resurrection of the
body because the christians insisted
that this is not some sort of abstract
life like it's it's not uploaded into a
computer it's not
blowing out all of your limitations now
you know you might ask what the
resurrected body would be and of course
that's a particularly that's a perfectly
fine question but it doesn't
it doesn't
it's
that doesn't
move you around the fact that there was
a question that was really to be
grappled with there because what the
christians were trying to do was to
have their take and eat it too in some
sense and to say look there's some
absolute utility to the limitation
that's imposed upon you by a mortal
frame right that's the characteristic
element of being human and that perhaps
there's a way of having that and
transcending it at the same time now
what that would look like is obviously
by no means
i deal with that and heavens on earth
have a chapter on the soul and you know
post descartes christians became more
duelist before that they were more
focused on the physical resurrection of
the body there are still some christian
sex today who think that you'll
physically be resurrected but most
moreover most of them are duelists and
they it's just it's just this kind of
non-physical thing that goes
and and be and is with god and jesus and
so on uh but but it but you know but
they actually debate this
and so the problem is the question of
identity the problem of identity you say
well if you're physically resurrected in
heaven
what's what's there
how old are you and and some of them
actually have an answer you're 30. you
know that's like the ideal age
physically and i suppose mentally to be
30 and also jesus was 30 and
right
you know maybe okay so but but then the
question is is you know and i asked this
question for the mind uploaders the
transhumanist it's like
there is no fixed self first of all all
your cells in in your
almost all the atoms in your body are
recycled about every decade or so so
there is no defined physical self of you
you know the thesis ship you replace all
the wood in the ship we still call it
right right right it's the pattern
dissipative structure that was
schrodinger's turn right yeah yeah yeah
so okay so it's the pattern of
information that is your memories your
mem self memory self okay yeah
yeah okay that's better but
at what age you know because i have
memories now that i didn't have when i
was 30. so what happens if i'm
resurrected at age 30 where's all the
memories of my last i'm 63 now
the last 33 years of memories that i i
want those two
and so okay you can have all those
memories but wait the memories i have
now at 63 of when i was 30 are very
different than the memories when i was
30
of what i was like at that time and so
there's no fixed set of memories even
that represents you because those are
constantly edited and changed and
reinterpreted and it's like okay now i
understand when i had that 10 years as a
bike racer in the 1980s
i you know i was just sort of going
through doing my thing and now i see in
context what that meant for my life but
i didn't know it at the time that's true
for everything we do that's why i always
laugh when people write memoirs in their
20s or 30s it's like how can you write a
memoir you have no idea what you're
doing now is going to mean in 30 years
and so in religious so both both
scientific attempts at immortality or
the afterlife or whatever and religious
they have the same problem uh you know
what is up there that's being
resurrected because there is no fixed
self it's a constantly dynamic changing
system
and and then there's one more problem
that i deal with the point of view self
the pov self you know there's you and i
looking out through your eyes and you
know you jordan go to sleep tonight you
wake up tomorrow morning and you're
groggy for a few minutes but but you're
your point of view returns
and you know the the singularity people
they think well we'll copy all your
memories and put them in a computer and
then we'll turn it on and you'll wake up
and you'll you'll be looking out through
the little camera hole there like johnny
depp and transcendence
and you'll be in there no i don't think
so uh why would your point of view all
of a sudden leap from your your current
body into the computer in the same sense
that instead of
sacrificing your brain and slicing it up
and scanning this is current thoughts
scanning every synapse what if in a
hundred years from now we had a
sophisticated fmri machine that could
scan your brain and scan every single
synapse and reproduce it we had a
computer big enough with moore's law
doubling and so on it would be enough
did just to reproduce your entire
connectome and turn it on but you you
jordan peterson are still standing there
right next to the computer and they turn
it on you're not all of a sudden on the
computer
absolutely well there's other problems
with that too is that you know
if i remember correctly you have more
neurons in your autonomic nervous system
than you have in your central nervous
system
well
what are you going to do about those man
it's like your
brain isn't in your head
not just your brain no no it's so you
have an extended body so you to the
bionics people they lop off the head
we're just going to clone your butt okay
this is getting too complicated you
really need the whole body yes well
that's again that's the physical
resurrection issue is that the idea that
and i think that you put your finger on
the flaw in in the in the in the in the
new immortal in the new immortality
crowd you know they think of they really
aren't cartesian they think of your
consciousness as something that's
well they're confused about it in some
sense because they think of it as a kind
of soul which would be a pattern and
that pattern is only instantiated in the
brain it's like well physiologically
that's just not the case it's like what
about the hormones what about like
there's a lot there's a lot of things
going on in the brain that aren't
easily reducible to synaptic patterns
especially when you consider also its
connection with the body and you have to
consider that it's so
even worse than that because not only
are we all of those things
we are also social beings and so there's
all the interactions we have and have
had with all the other people in our
lives or neighbors or strangers or
whatever so you have all those binary
digits that have to be captured of all
the interactions going back for your
whole life not just your life but all of
the
social cultural political economic
forces that have been grinding along for
centuries that shape who we are and the
kind of world we live in you know if
you're going to create a virtual reality
a holodeck that recreates all that you
know it's a i mean this would be a huge
computer essentially it would be the
universe is what you would need what
would you end up with a map that's just
as big as the territory that's right
yeah that's right that's a big problem
you wrote a book about that that's right
yeah it's like
you're gonna fold it up where you're
gonna put it that's the big bro
like that stephen wright line about i
got a map of the united states actual
size
yeah exactly really hard to fold up
exactly exactly so oh so let me ask you
a couple of
more personal questions if you don't
mind now you you mentioned
um
briefly during our during our
conversation that you know you you were
you're from a pretty fundamentalist
christian background and you became a
skeptic and you've been pursuing that
with with with well adamantly let's say
for a very long time so two questions is
what
what put you on that path and what do
you think your positive function as a
skeptic is
yeah so first of all my my family wasn't
religious at all they weren't
anti-religious they just wasn't a thing
i became interested in it in the early
70s when i was in high school which was
sort of the
early development of the evangelical
movement of the united states the
so-called born-again movement and there
was no affiliation with any church in
particular we all recognized that you
know organized religion was probably not
all that great uh so it's just sort of a
one-on-one it's just you and jesus you
in the bible you and god and so on and
uh that was that whole uh you know jesus
christ superstar time and and all that
so but i took it fairly seriously and
and i went to pepperdine and i took
courses in the old testament the new
testament i read everything c.s lewis
wrote to the course in the writings of
c.s lewis
well i was into it
but you know at pepperdine you're in the
bubble of uh you know the christian
worldview is totally
consistent it's internally coherent uh
until you're outside the bubble so when
i went to a secular
university and to study experimental
psychology
um
not only was that more of a grounding in
the scientific method of understanding
reality but just for fun i took courses
in first of all i took courses in
evolutionary theory i was kind of a
creationist i remember sitting there
thinking holy [ __ ] this stuff is real
there's an actual science behind this
but then i took a course in
mythology anthropology and comparative
mythology and that kind of opened up my
eyes so i sort of went through my joseph
campbell stage and and the myth of the
hero i read the hero of a thousand faces
and all that he's like okay this is
this is a different way than of looking
at things in the pure scientific way but
it's also different from a lot of these
religious traditions you know so that
that sort of told me that
the particular religion i was in
uh it it's wrong to ask is that is it
right or wrong it's just it's a
completely different thing and
and it
it just wasn't working for me anymore so
i enjoyed the scientific way of thinking
about the world and i was surrounded by
people that it's not that they were
atheists in graduate school and after
that it's like remember this is now the
late 70s and then when i went to
graduate school in the
second time for my phd in history of
science in late 80s
um
again the whole eighth science religion
atheist new atheism that wasn't a thing
no one really talked about it it wasn't
like a big thing you have to decide say
are you a theist or an atheist no one
really talked about that and so my focus
was really on just on science and
understanding things now
the problem of being a sort of an
intellectual or historian of science
psychologist like i am and you're
interested in studying beliefs like i do
um and then also being a public
intellectual is the publisher of skeptic
magazine and i write this column for
scientific american every month i gotta
essentially debunk something or analyze
something is it kind of puts you in the
in this of the role of like well i got
to say if this is right or wrong
this is true or false or or something in
between so i i'm constantly on this kind
of razor edge between
i just am a curious observer of people's
beliefs and then on the other hand i
have to actually have to kind of pass
judgment in writing every month well is
this one correct or not correct or
something in between
um and uh some might so i it's again
it's at that different levels you know
sometimes i'm just talking about
people's beliefs other times i'm i'm
actually kind of forced to say well i
think this is probably true or probably
not true
and uh and i think this is you know i
listened to i tried to listen to that
first podcast you did with sam
yeah
so difficult to
to get through
and again to me you know two hours you
were just talking past each other at
different levels of you know you know
sam's laser focused on
you know people
behave they act on certain beliefs and
and you know the obvious one flying
planes into buildings is because you
have a certain belief that leads to that
yes that's true and it would be good if
people didn't believe these things that
lead them to do those kinds of violent
acts
but there's a whole other level you can
talk about beliefs that have nothing to
do with leading to violence or so on and
so to me it just depends on what's your
goal when you're talking about this
particular thing right now
uh and and you know so there
you know i was good friends with stephen
jay gould and you know i was sympathetic
to his noma yeah yeah in the sense that
you know the world's already too tribal
and so if we can calm everybody down
that's good
on the other hand i do think science and
reason can inform and maybe even in some
cases determine human values and moral
uh decisions right and wrong and so on
i've written quite a bit about that too
and so again that's sort of a different
level of talk of what you're talking
about
and what the goals are at that
particular moment
yeah well i mean this the skeptic when
when i think of a skeptic i
this is a strange leap of course but um
there's a there's a scene in revelation
where christ comes back and he comes
back with a sword coming out of his
mouth and that's where he divides the
damned and the saved and that's a that's
also an image of the logos right the the
word that brings fourth order out of
chaos because partly what you do as a
skeptic it isn't so much that you damn
the untrue is that you rescue the true
and that's really necessary for people
because we need to stand on a rock
and you know one of the big problems i
have with new age movement and i've kind
of studied this technically looking at
the way that creative people think
because there are creative people who
are critically minded and there are
creative people who are not critically
minded and
non-critically minded creativity seems
more associated with mental illness and
psychopathology but you have to be able
to discriminate between what's worth
saving and what isn't so to speak and
that's what a good skeptic does because
the skeptic isn't necessarily someone
who says oh this is all false a good
skeptic is someone who says oh look
there's a kernel of truth here but it's
deeply buried under layers and layers of
of rust and nonsense that needs to be
burned away or polished away so that we
can get to what's absolutely essential
right so yeah so back to where you were
saying before about uh striving upwards
towards something
that heaven up there whatever that is um
of course we don't want to go for utopia
because there's no such place to get to
and that causes you know catastrophes in
history so but the idea of like of like
making the world a more rational place
this is a good goal and this is the kind
of thing that we do at skeptic magazine
you know we what do we do we promote
science and reason and critical thinking
you write about critical thinking this
is what you do
uh so we're all working on that and that
and and that's good
um yeah well i'm always looking i'm
always looking go sorry go ahead
so when um when we talk about literature
for example let's return to the books of
the bible or dostoevsky or
if we want to make our our listeners
heads explode ein rand and atlas
have people by the tens of millions
purchased her books you know literary
critics say they're awful they're
terrible novels they're not well written
and her figures are black and white and
her philosophy is wrong okay but you
have to ask yourself why do tens of
millions of people love those books and
and it's because she's doing something
else he's not trying to describe the
world the way it actually is but that
the way it could be
and these are the things we've done
wrong communism socialism because she
came out of that russian background and
so you know her figures like john galt
these are kind of ideal things to strive
for yes exactly yeah well then her
figures are archetypal heroes of a
certain form i mean i think
if we could bring it back to some real
world example i just recently recently
started following uh jaco willnick yeah
okay i'm never going to be jocko wilny
but you know i got his book i you know i
i read one page a day and you know it's
kind of it's sort of like oh yeah yeah
come on trimmer you can get up at six in
the morning and get out there on your
bike ride with the guys i don't want to
do it but then i see you know jaco's
page and he says just get at it
okay so in a way it's not describing the
world in a scientific way it's it's it's
sending a different message like you
should strive to be this even if you
don't make it just do it do something
anything yeah
and that's a difference that's a
different goal yes well i i think too
that
okay so first of all with regards to
dane rand i think the criticism level
that heard that her characters are too
black and white is correct because i
think that one of the things that
distinguishes great literature from
propaganda is that in great literature
most of the conflict is within rather
than between
right and so and the problem with thane
rand is all her good characters are the
same good character and all her bad
characters are the same bad character
and and there's no overlap between them
so there's a purity there's an
archetypal purity but that compromises
its utility as literature i would say
dulcinea makes this point in gulag
archipelago where he says if if only the
world were simply black and white and we
could take the bad people and and
isolate them somewhere but the problem
is is you know we all have uh darkness
and evil in our hearts that's right
the line between good and evil runs down
every heart that's his famous phrase and
it was something he experienced very
deeply and is also you know it is also
primordially true
scientists uh analyze literature in this
sense well there's a body of literature
evolutionary you know literary analysis
in which um you know pinker writes about
this at the end of the blank slate um in
which he talks about
you know what
these novels these sophisticated novels
which the characters are rich and deep
you know they they have all these good
characters and bad characteristics and
so on and uh and we can we can glean
from that in a sense that the novelists
were ahead of the cognitive this is his
point the novelists were about a century
ahead of the cognitive scientists and
thinking about
figuring out human nature yeah or maybe
a thousand years ahead of the cognitive
modern literature anyway yeah
you know so we can we can gain a lot
from that and not not just the rich
emotional experience of reading a good
novel uh but actually teasing out this
is what some of these evolutionary
literary people are trying to do it's
like there's certain themes that come up
over and over and over again
uh it's not totally random uh you know
unlike the
post-modernists there actually are
uh certain real meanings that the author
intended and well the problem see i
think the problem with the
post-modernists technically speaking and
i thought a lot about this is that they
got their initial criticism right which
is that there's an infinite number of
ways of interpreting a finite set of
phenomena
but there isn't an in there isn't
there isn't an infinite number of valid
ways of interpreting uh a finite set of
phenomena and that's where you get right
back into the issue of
the circulation of the interpretation
around these great underlying archetypal
themes and that are built in in large
part right into our biology but i read a
really interesting analysis of the um
of the symbol of the dragon a while back
and i i can't conjure up the name of the
book unfortunately but his hypothesis
which i thought was a very good one was
that
um a dragon is a meta predator
so it's the symbol for predator
and but it's more than that but the
predator is tree cat snake bird
because the fundamental predators of
tree dwelling primates were cats snakes
and birds
and so what it is is an amalgam of all
those things and so it's real just like
the category of predator is real even
though snakes and cats are both in the
category of predator and no one says
well there's no such thing as a predator
and then you can add fire to that for a
variety of reasons not least being uh
being i'm sure that fire wiped out many
of our ancestors as well and then the
additional twist which is that dragons
also hoard gold so human beings because
we're not just prey animals learned that
if we confronted the meta predator we
would gain as a consequence
right so there's certain channels down
which good stories go based on our
biological nature our evolved nature
it's not that it's completely
deterministic in that sense no no it's
variations on a theme i would say
yeah so that was an interesting there
was an interesting article published i
think it was in nature a few months ago
showing that it's very very high
resolution brain scan and so you know
there's the idea of course that in the
cortex that neurons that fire together
wired together and then we learned that
the neurons are actually in cortical
columns so they actually have their
structure their unit structure so
they're not just randomly connecting
with neurons everywhere in the brain but
what this scan showed was an underlying
super highway of built-in connections so
that the columns themselves could wire
into the already existing super highways
so it was like there was
an underlying architecture that was
highly probable was highly probable that
it would manifest itself and i thought
well that looks like the neural
architecture of something like an
archetype
maybe one of the best arguments for
cryonics uh is that it would be really
fun to come back say a thousand years
from now
just to see what scientists or scholars
are talking about like of how the brain
works you know what what's the metaphor
they're using
then that you know
and they'll look back on us and go oh
they thought the brain is a computer how
silly yeah right right right yeah well i
think by the time we come up with a
fully material account of consciousness
our notion of what constitutes material
will have undergone substantial revision
so i do wonder if uh sometimes i i toy
with the idea of the mysterians do you
know the mysterians there's certain
mysteries of the universe we will never
solve just because of the limitations of
this structure of our brain and yeah
so god free will and determinism the
nature of consciousness you know there's
a few of these core deep um questions so
my friend the late great martin gardner
i called himself a fideist you're
probably familiar with the deism it's
kind of no i'm not
well it's based on um
william james and and uh emmanuel uh
una mumo oh yes
pragmatist it's sort of a pragmatist
philosophy so anyway mark martin was a
long time columnist for scientific
american one of the founders of the
modern skeptical movement he was a
skeptical
as i am maybe more on almost everything
but he believed in god and he believed
in prayer in the afterlife and so on
even though he would say
to us fellow skeptics um yes i think the
atheists have slightly better arguments
than the theist just slightly but you
know because you can't determine one way
or the other for sure whether there's a
god or not whether this free will of
determinism it's okay to just
practically speaking to just do whatever
works for you this is the
pregnancy thing so he said he says he
prays he believes that there's some kind
of afterlife and that there's something
out there not an anthropomorphic god or
anything like that so he
called this fideism anyway so i kind of
respected that because he he didn't make
any truth claims like i can prove this
or i'm sure i'm right he said it's just
true for me
and you know that gets back to that
question of what is true what is truth
anyway if if that's all you're saying
it's just true for me psychologically
true works for me it's really kind of
the end of the conversation
but you know so when i deal with
creationists who said you know i think
the earth is 10 000 years old okay so we
have a problem there is a conflict you
know steve gould's non-overlapping
magisteria doesn't apply there one side
is wrong and one side is right when
you're talking about say the age of the
the universe or the world but if you say
look this this is what works for me
having this particular i'm not claiming
i can prove it it just works for me
really
what is there to say after that it's
kind of
the end of the conversation
and i do think sometimes that
when we're talking about like free will
and determinism you know what do you
mean by these words and yeah well the
devil's always in the details you know
that's that's
you hit an epistemological wall we can't
get past
i i'm a compatibilist i think you know
dan dennett i'm not a philosopher but
now those kinds of arguments i think
make more sense to me in any case i have
what i call the behavioral compatibilism
that is whatever your position is
intellectually on free will and
determinism it doesn't really matter
because when you walk out the door
you're
you believe you're making choices
yeah well this is this is the argument
that i tried to level at sam harris with
regards to the metaphysical foundations
of his ethics it's like it's the same
sort of thing is and i think ben shapiro
just went after him on the same grounds
is that i don't care what you say about
whether or not you're an atheist atheist
you act like you're part of the
judeo-christian tradition and so
you think you don't believe but i think
you do but we have different definitions
of what the word believe means
so now i'm not saying that that's
necessary the argument to end all
arguments but it's one that needs to be
taken seriously especially by the more
rationalistic atheists because they
don't give the devil his due now you're
in a different category because you went
through the whole christian thing in
detail and you know the
you know the stories and you know the
mythology and you know the psychology as
well you know you talked about joseph
campbell and people like him so
you know that puts you in the in the in
the realm of the i would say
what would you say biblically and and
and and uh psychoanalytically informed
well again it's it depends what your
goals are what are you trying to do i
mean people like sam and richard you
know they're laser focused on one
particular thing they're working at so
good
um and i'm i'm on board with that uh i
think you know certain belief systems
are dangerous uh okay so let it be good
if we could correct those uh but i'm
also interested in other aspects of
belief and um you know that's a that's a
slightly different goal so for example
when i'm talking to deepak um
you know it's true quantum physics says
what it says you know okay but at some
level i say deep what's the actionable
take-home why does this
okay so let's say the world is
completely determined and you know right
down to the last synaptic connection
that the particles whatever and i really
have no choice yeah but so what
i still have to choose to go to work
tomorrow as or as i tell deepak you know
my mortgage is still due next tuesday
so even if none of this matters or or
it's all empty space or you know it's
all consciousness so what
yeah
to act in the world in a way as
as if i'm making choices as if i'm
responsible for my actions because i am
yeah well that's a good that's well i
would also say in relationship to that
there isn't any evidence to me that
we've been able to determine how to
build a functional society without
building those axioms into the into the
substructure of the society free will
and responsibility it's like maybe they
don't exist but if we don't build
societies that assume they exist the
societies become unstable unbelievably
rapidly and to me that's a kind of
evidence that they do exist
i mean even knowing the say say
theoretic model of
uh tilting the incentives to get people
to do this versus that you know a
libertarian paternalism uh dick taylor
calls it you know so if you give people
a choice architecture where you you put
the desserts you know in the back and
the healthy fruit the foods in the front
or you have different kinds of
structured menus to get people to nudge
people to choose healthier diets or
better investment tools at companies
things like that we're already doing
these sorts of things as if we can
if not determine people's actions and
choices but at least shape them in a way
but but even doing that we're actively
choosing to do that
so being self-aware that i know that if
i go shopping on an empty stomach i'm
very i'm much more likely to buy
unhealthy foods cookies or ice cream or
whatever than i would if i went shopping
on a full stomach so i choose to alter
my environment around me because i'm
going to nudge myself in another
direction how is that not a kind of a
choice
and and if you're a determinist um to
determine this i would say
um okay do you recognize say that the
addict who is you know just totally
hooked on heroin or oxycodone or
something
is different from you and i who are not
addicted
and yes there's a difference okay what's
that difference if it's all determinism
it's tumors all the way down or what
that's a good one
um what is the difference then between
the addict and the addict is more
determined
no but that's a good objection that's
that that's right what is that as a
concept
yeah what does that mean more determined
right exactly exactly this is why i like
dan dennett's idea of the degrees of
freedom yeah you know you and i have
more degrees of freedom
than our dogs our dogs more than uh
cockroach whatever um there's just more
very variation and we have one addition
in terms of time as well like you know
if you're if you're driving here's a
nice way of thinking about the
relationship between free will and
determinism let's say you're driving
down the road at 60 miles an hour
where do you look
and the answer isn't right in front of
the car
because you've already run over the
thing that's right in front of the car
so you look about a quarter of a mile
down the road
and what that means is that you can
start to sequence your deterministic
actions and so there's this idea of a
ballistic movement so if i do this let's
see
so you see i didn't hit my hand when i
came down like that now the truth of the
matter is is that there isn't enough
time
so when i release this movement
quickly
there isn't enough time
for the message to get from my hand to
my brain and back to stop my hand as an
element of free choice i have to plan
and release the entire movement at once
including the stopping that's ballistic
and so as soon as i
implement that movement there's no free
will it's like the the space that i have
choice over has collapsed into a
deterministic world but i think what we
do is we look out in the future far
enough so that we can sequence our
choices and they collapse into
determinism as we implement them it's
something like that and i think that
works neurologically too if you look at
how how how action patterns actually
manifest themselves in the brain it does
seem to be something akin to that
which is why i don't make much out of
the liberty limit experiments for
example that well libid himself was a
compatibilist he did not believe in in
complete determinism that was you're you
uh pinker put it this way in the blanks
like that that you are part of the
causal net of the universe but you're
part of it and you're making choices
that further determine the universe but
they're still your choices so you are
morally accountable for them i do think
the law has evolved nicely along these
lines along the um sort of shades of
gray or the yeah i think so
you know the law
if you intended to kill somebody versus
doing it in an act of uh rage because
you know it was just on spur of the
moment you caught your spouse and you
and you lose your temper that's
different from
that you know if we do we find out that
for weeks you were plotting this uh to
kill your spouse or whatever right
you're going to get a different kind of
penalty and and that matches you know
neuroscience pretty well yeah i think so
i think so
i think more or less control over so
again more deterministic versus less
deterministic what are you talking about
there you're talking about degrees of
freedom
determinist don't like the word freedom
okay call it something else
you have more um degrees of something of
options in this yeah well whatever you
end up with as a synonym eventually ends
up meaning freedom
well i think so yeah
the word i like the word i use the word
so so let's let's return i'm going to
show your book again here just so that
everybody remembers it
and i would like to say what what were
you let's end with this what were you
hoping or are you hoping to accomplish
with this book apart from clarifying
your own thoughts and communicating them
what what i mean you you you've put this
message into a bottle and you've
launched it out there in the world what
are you what are you hoping for
uh really to everybody both religious
and and non-religious scientists the
messages
really the here and now is what counts
more than anything else we we don't
again we live in brooklyn not not in 15
billion years from now uh that that
that whether or not there's an afterlife
because clearly no one knows for sure
we don't live in the afterlife we live
in this life and and so what you do
really matters how you are in relation
with other people and your environment
really matters it matters not just for
the future but the immediate future and
even now whatever that means to you
and uh so again i'm glad people are
working on this and thinking about it um
and you know if we can improve uh both
society incrementally a little bit
instead of aiming for utopia aim for
protopia yeah yeah that's that's a great
thing
incremental and again instead of aiming
for
immortality or a thousand years let's
just aim for getting more people to 90
and 100 healthy
and and happy and living fulfilled lives
and i do talk about in the end um about
in the last chapter less pages in fact
about the uh importance of aiming to
live a purposeful meaningful life not a
happiness you know
to see the literature develop in
positive psychology about happiness i've
read all the happiness books all great
but happiness in the sense of i'm going
to plug into the morphine trip no that's
not what life is about that isn't what
gives people meaningful lives it's doing
things that that don't make you happy
you know like
again back you work out every day it's
not fun i'm not happy working out
uh and uh or you know i was a caretaker
for my parents
um i had four parents step parents and
and so two of them i was a caretaker it
wasn't fun at all i had i
didn't get joy i wasn't you know
enjoying it
it was a you know uncomfortable
experience but it made me feel better
about myself about the world like this
you know this is doing something more
deeply meaningful
and and so i think that that's where it
counts actually working to make the
world a better place gives you a deeper
more fulfilled life that is an excellent
place to end so i think like i think
amen to that after life or no afterlife
we should improve what we have right in
front of us exactly yeah and that's
better than happiness i agree i agree
completely it's a much more profound
orientation and it's a
boat that won't tamp in a storm
so thank you for having me hey my
pleasure was really nice talking with
you hopefully we'll get a chance
to talk again
when your book comes out the 12 steps
we'll talk about the 12 steps sounds
like a fine plan i didn't see the book
yet but i saw your show with dave rubin
i thought that was really good
thanks very much it's very good talking
with you all right jordan thanks all
right
bye bye