back to indexSam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #185
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The following is a conversation with Sam Harris,
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one of the most influential
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and pioneering thinkers of our time.
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He's the host of the Making Sense podcast
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and the author of many seminal books
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on human nature and the human mind,
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including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape,
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Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up.
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He also has a meditation app called Waking Up
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that I've been using to guide my own meditation.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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National Instruments, Valcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that Sam
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has been an inspiration to me
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as he has been for many, many people,
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first from his writing, then his early debates,
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maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith,
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his conversations with Christopher Hitchens,
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and since 2013, his podcast.
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I didn't always agree with all of his ideas,
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but I was always drawn to the care and depth
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of the way he explored those ideas,
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the calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult,
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at times controversial discourse.
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I really can't express in words how much it meant to me
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that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to
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for many hundreds of hours,
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would write a kind email to me saying
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he enjoyed this podcast and more,
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that he thought I had a unique voice
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that added something to this world.
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Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special
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and truly grateful to be able to do this thing
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and motivated me to work my ass off
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to live up to those words.
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Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him
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was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
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and here is my conversation with Sam Harris.
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I've been enjoying meditating
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with the Waking Up app recently.
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It makes me think about the origins of cognition
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and consciousness, so let me ask,
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where do thoughts come from?
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Well, that's a very difficult question to answer.
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Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right?
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I mean, they come out of some kind of mystery
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that is at our backs subjectively, right?
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So, which is to say that if you pay attention
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to the nature of your mind in this moment,
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you realize that you don't know
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what you're going to think next, right?
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Now, you're expecting to think something
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that seems like you authored it, right?
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You're not, unless you're schizophrenic
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or you have some kind of thought disorder
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where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you,
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they do have a kind of signature of selfhood
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associated with them, and people readily identify with them.
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They feel like what you are.
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I mean, this is the thing,
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this is the spell that gets broken with meditation.
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Our default state is to feel identical
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to the stream of thought, right?
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Which is fairly paradoxical because how could you,
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as a mind, as a self, if there were such a thing as a self,
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how could you be identical to the next piece of language
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or the next image that just springs into conscious view?
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But, and, you know, meditation is ultimately
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about examining that point of view closely enough
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so as to unravel it and feel the freedom
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that's on the other side of that identification.
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But the, subjectively, thoughts simply emerge, right?
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And you don't think them before you think them, right?
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There's this first moment where, you know,
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just anyone listening to us or watching us now
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could perform this experiment for themselves.
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I mean, just imagine something or remember something.
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You know, just pick a memory, any memory, right?
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You've got a storehouse of memory,
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just promote one to consciousness.
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Did you pick that memory?
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I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday
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or you remembered what you said to your spouse
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before leaving the house,
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or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night,
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or you remembered something that happened to you
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when you were four years old, whatever it is, right?
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First it wasn't there, and then it appeared.
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And that is not a, well, I'm sure we'll get to the topic
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of free will, ultimately.
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That's not evidence of free will, right?
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Why are you so sure, by the way?
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It's very interesting.
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Well, through no free will of my own, yeah.
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Everything just appears, right?
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What else could it do?
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And so that's the subjective side of it.
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Objectively, you know, we have every reason to believe
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that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts
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are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing
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neurophysiologically.
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I mean, these are the products
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of some kind of neural computation
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and neural representation when we're talking about memories.
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Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts
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to try to get to its root?
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To try to dig in past the obvious surface,
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subjective experience of like the thoughts pop out
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Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots
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of where they come out of from the firing of the cells?
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Or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction?
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Well, you can get closer to many, many subtle contents
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in consciousness, right?
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So you can notice things more and more clearly
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and have a landscape of mind open up
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and become more differentiated and more interesting.
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And if you take psychedelics, you know, it opens up wide,
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depending on what you've taken and the dose, you know,
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it opens in directions and to an extent that, you know,
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very few people imagine would be possible,
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but for having had those experiences.
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But this idea of you getting closer to something,
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to the datum of your mind,
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or such as something of interest in there,
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or something that's more real is ultimately undermined
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because there's no place
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from which you're getting closer to it.
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There's no your part of that journey, right?
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Like we tend to start out, you know,
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whether it's in meditation or in any kind
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of self examination or, you know, taking psychedelics,
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we start out with this default point of view
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of feeling like we're the kind of the rider
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on the horse of consciousness,
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or we're the man in the boat going down the stream
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of consciousness, right?
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But we're so we're differentiated
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from what we know cognitively, introspectively,
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but that feeling of being differentiated,
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that feeling of being a self
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that can strategically pay attention
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to some contents of consciousness
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is what it's like to be identified
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with some part of the stream of thought
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that's going uninspected, right?
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Like it's a false point of view.
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And when you see that and cut through that,
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then this sense of this notion of going deeper
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kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth.
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Ultimately, everything is right on the surface.
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Everything, there's no center to consciousness.
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There's just consciousness and its contents.
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And those contents can change vastly.
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Again, if you drop acid, you know, the contents change.
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But there's, in some sense, that doesn't represent
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a position of depth versus, the continuum
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of depth versus surface has broken apart.
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So you're taking as a starting point
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that there is a horse called consciousness
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and you're riding it.
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And the actual riding is very shallow.
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This is all surface.
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So let me ask about that horse.
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What's up with the horse?
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What is consciousness?
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From where does it emerge?
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How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality?
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How fundamental is it to what it means to be human?
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And I'm just asking for a friend
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so that we can build it
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in our artificial intelligence systems.
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Yeah, well, that remains to be seen if we can,
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if we will build it purposefully or just by accident.
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It's a major ethical problem, potentially.
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That, I mean, my concern here is that we may, in fact,
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build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test,
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which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent
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because it obviously is and demonstrates that,
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but we begin to treat it as conscious
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because it will seem conscious.
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We will have built it to seem conscious.
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And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges
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from physics, we won't actually know
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that these systems are conscious, right?
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We'll just, they may say,
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listen, you can't turn me off because that's a murder, right?
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And we will be convinced by that dialogue
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because we will, just in the extreme case,
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who knows when we'll get there.
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But if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots
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that are more intelligent than we are,
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so we're basically in a Westworld like situation,
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there's no way we're going to withhold
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an attribution of consciousness from those machines.
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They're just gonna seem,
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they're just gonna advertise our consciousness
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in every glance and every utterance,
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but we won't know.
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And we won't know in some deeper sense
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than we can be skeptical of the consciousness
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I mean, someone could roll that back and say,
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well, you don't, I don't know that you're conscious
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or you don't know that I'm conscious.
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We're just passing the Turing test for one another,
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but that kind of solipsism isn't justified biologically,
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or we just, anything we understand about the mind
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biologically suggests that you and I
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are part of the same roll of the dice
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in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged
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in the wetware of brains like ours, right?
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So it's not parsimonious for me to think
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that I might be the only conscious person
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or even the only conscious primate.
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I would argue it's not parsimonious
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to withhold consciousness from other apes
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and even other mammals ultimately.
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And once you get beyond the mammals,
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then my intuitions are not really clear.
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The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain
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and ultimately the question of whether it emerges
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is still uncertain.
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You can, you know, it's not fashionable to think this,
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but you can certainly argue that consciousness
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might be a fundamental principle of matter
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that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing,
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even though everything else that we recognize
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about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge,
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you know, like an ability to process language,
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that clearly is a matter of information processing
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because you can disrupt that process in ways
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that is just so clear.
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And the problem that the confound with consciousness
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is that, yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness.
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I mean, you can give someone general anesthesia
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and then you wake them up and you ask them,
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well, what was that like?
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And they say, nothing, I don't remember anything,
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but it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory
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from a genuine interruption in consciousness.
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Whereas it's not with, you know, interrupting speech,
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you know, we know when we've done it.
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And it's just obvious that, you know,
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you disrupt the right neural circuits
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and, you know, you've disrupted speech.
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So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other,
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would you say, do you err on the side of panpsychism
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where consciousness is really fundamental
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to all of reality or more on the other side,
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which is like, it's a nice little side effect,
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a useful like hack for us humans to survive.
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Where, on that spectrum, where do you land
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when you think about consciousness,
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especially from an engineering perspective?
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I'm truly agnostic on this point, I mean, I think I'm,
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you know, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me.
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I don't know, and panpsychism is not so compelling to me.
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Again, it just seems unfalsifiable.
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I wouldn't know how the universe would be different
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if panpsychism were true.
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It's just to remind people panpsychism is this idea
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that consciousness may be pushed all the way down
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into the most fundamental constituents of matters.
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So there might be something that it's like
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to be an electron or, you know, a cork,
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but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different
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at the macro scale, or at least I wouldn't expect
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anything to be different.
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So it may be unfalsifiable.
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It just might be that reality is not something
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we're as in touch with as we think we are,
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and that at its base layer to kind of break it into mind
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and matter as we've done ontologically
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is to misconstrue it, right?
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I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism
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at the bottom, and this, you know,
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this idea doesn't originate with me.
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This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell
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and others, you know, 100 plus years ago,
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but I just feel like the concepts we're using
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to divide consciousness and matter
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may in fact be part of our problem, right?
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Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here
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are things like, well, what is death, right?
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Like do we, any expectation that we survive death
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or any part of us survives death,
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that really seems to be the many people's concern here.
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Well, I tend to believe just as a small little tangent,
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like I'm with Ernest Becker on this,
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that there's some, it's interesting to think
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about death and consciousness,
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which one is the chicken, which one is the egg,
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because it feels like death could be the very thing,
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like our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing
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that creates the consciousness.
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Yeah, well, then you're using consciousness
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differently than I am.
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I mean, so for me, consciousness is just the fact
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that the lights are on at all,
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there's an experiential quality to anything.
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So much of the processing that's happening
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in our brains right now certainly seems to be happening
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in the dark, right?
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Like it's not associated with this qualitative sense
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that there's something that it's like to be that part
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of the mind doing that mental thing.
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But for other parts, the lights are on
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and we can talk about,
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and whether we talk about it or not,
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we can feel directly that there's something
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that it's like to be us.
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There's something, something seems to be happening, right?
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And the seeming in our case is broken into vision
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and hearing and proprioception
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and taste and smell and thought and emotion.
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I mean, there are the contents of consciousness
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that we are familiar with
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and that we can have direct access to
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in any present moment when we're, quote, conscious.
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And even if we're confused about them,
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even if we're asleep and dreaming
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and it's not a lucid dream,
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we're just totally confused about our circumstance,
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what you can't say is that we're confused
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about consciousness.
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Like you can't say that consciousness itself
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might be an illusion because on this account,
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it just means that things seem any way at all.
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I mean, even like if this,
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it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table.
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Now I could be wrong about that.
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It could be a hologram.
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I could be asleep and dreaming.
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I could be hallucinating,
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but the seeming part isn't really up for grabs
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in terms of being an illusion.
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It's not, something seems to be happening.
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And that seeming is the context in which
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every other thing we can notice about ourselves
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And it's also the context in which certain illusions
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can be cut through because we're not,
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we can be wrong about what it's like to be us.
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And we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible
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with respect to our claims
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about the nature of our experience,
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but for instance, many people feel like they have a self
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and they feel like it has free will.
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And I'm quite sure at this point
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that they're wrong about that,
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and that you can cut through those experiences
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and then things seem a different way, right?
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So it's not that things don't,
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there aren't discoveries to be made there
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and assumptions to be overturned,
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but this kind of consciousness is something
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that I would think, it doesn't just come online
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when we get language.
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It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death
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or the finiteness of life.
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It doesn't require a sense of self, right?
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So it doesn't, it's prior
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to a differentiating self and other.
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And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people.
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I do think probably any mammal has this,
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but certainly if you're going to presuppose
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that something about our brains is producing this, right?
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And that's a very safe assumption,
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even though we can't,
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even though you can argue the jury's still out
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then it's very hard to draw a principled line
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between us and chimps,
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or chimps and rats even in the end,
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given the underlying neural similarities.
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So, and I don't know phylogenetically,
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I don't know how far back to push that.
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There are people who think single cells might be conscious
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or that flies are certainly conscious.
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They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains.
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I mean, there's a lot going on even in a fly, right?
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But I don't have intuitions about that.
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But it's not in your sense an illusion you can cut through.
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I mean, to push back,
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the alternative version could be it is an illusion
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constructed by, just by humans.
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I'm not sure I believe this,
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but in part of me hopes this is true
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because it makes it easier to engineer,
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is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality
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and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness.
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That like the rich lights on experience.
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So the lights don't actually even turn on
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in the way that you're describing until after birth
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in that construction.
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So do you think it's possible that that is the case?
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That it is a sort of construct of the way we deal,
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almost like a social tool to deal with the reality
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of the world, the social interaction with other humans?
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Or is, because you're saying the complete opposite,
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which is it's like fundamental to single cell organisms
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and trees and so on.
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Right, well, yeah, so I don't know how far down to push it.
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I don't have intuitions that single cells
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are likely to be conscious,
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but they might be, and again, it could be unfalsifiable.
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But as far as babies not being conscious,
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or you don't become conscious
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until you can recognize yourself in a mirror
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or you have a conversation or treat other people.
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First of all, babies treat other people as others
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far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for.
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And they certainly do it before they have language, right?
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So it's got to proceed language to some degree.
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And I mean, you can interrogate this for yourself
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because you can put yourself in various states
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that are rather obviously not linguistic.
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Meditation allows you to do this.
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You can certainly do it with psychedelics
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where it's just your capacity for language
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has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious.
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In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument
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for things running the other way,
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that there's something about language and conceptual thought
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that is eliminative of conscious experience,
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that we're potentially much more conscious of data,
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sense data and everything else than we tend to be,
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and we have trimmed it down
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based on how we have acquired concepts.
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And so like, when I walk into a room like this,
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I know I'm walking into a room,
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I have certain expectations of what is in a room.
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I would be very surprised to see wild animals in here
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or a waterfall or there are things I'm not expecting,
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but I can know I'm not expecting them
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or I'm expecting their absence
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because of my capacity to be surprised
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once I walk into a room and I see a live gorilla or whatever.
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So there's structure there that we have put in place
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based on all of our conceptual learning
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and language learning.
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And it causes us not to,
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and one of the things that happens when you take psychedelics
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and you just look as though for the first time at anything,
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it becomes incredibly overloaded with,
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it can become overloaded with meaning
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and just the torrents of sense data that are coming in
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in even the most ordinary circumstances
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can become overwhelming for people.
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And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity
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to capture any of it linguistically.
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And as you're coming down, right?
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Have you done psychedelics?
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Have you ever done acid or?
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Not acid, mushroom, and that's it.
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but there's some psychedelic properties to them.
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But yeah, mushrooms several times
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and always had an incredible experience.
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Exactly the kind of experience you're referring to,
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which is if it's true that language constrains
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it felt like I was removing some of the constraints.
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Because even just the most basic things
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were beautiful in the way
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that I wasn't able to appreciate previously,
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like trees and nature and so on.
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Yeah, and the experience of coming down
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is an experience of encountering the futility
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of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words.
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Especially if you have any part of your self concept
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and your ego program is to be able
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to capture things in words.
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And if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist
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or someone who wants to just encapsulate
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the profundity of what just happened,
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the total fatuousness of that enterprise
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when you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics
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and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself,
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so that you could describe it to others.
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It's just, it's like trying to thread a needle
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using your elbows.
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I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't,
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it's like the mere gesture proves it's impossibility.
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And it's, so yeah, for me that suggests just empirically
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on the first person side that it's possible
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to put yourself in a condition
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where it's clearly not about language
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structuring your experience
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and you're having much more experience than you tend to.
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So the primacy of, language is primary for some things,
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but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts
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and certain kinds of semantic understanding
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and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world.
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But it's clearly more to mine than the conversation
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we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others.
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Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit?
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What do you think, so Joe Rogan apparently
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and many others meet apparently elves on DMT, a lot of people
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report this kind of creatures that they see.
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And again, it's probably the failure of language
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to describe that experience, but DMT is an interesting one.
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There's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies
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going on in psychedelics, currently MDMA, psilocybin
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and John Hopkins and much other places, but DMT,
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they all speak of as like some extra super level
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Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes
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on psychedelics, but in DMT especially?
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Well, unfortunately I haven't taken DMT.
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Unfortunately or fortunately?
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Although it's, I presume it's in my body
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as it is in everyone's brain and many, many plants
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apparently, but I've wanted to take it.
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I haven't been, I had an opportunity that was presented
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itself that where it was obviously the right thing
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for me to be doing, but for those who don't know,
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DMT is often touted as the most intense psychedelic
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and also the shortest acting.
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I mean, you smoke it and it's basically a 10 minute
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experience or a three minute experience within like
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a 10 minute window that when you're really down
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after 10 minutes or so, and Terrence McKenna
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was a big proponent of DMT.
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That was his, the center of the bullseye for him
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psychedelically, apparently.
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And it does, it is characterized, it seems for many people
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by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually
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any other psychedelic experience, which is your,
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it's not just your perception being broadened or changed.
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It's you according to Terrence McKenna feeling fairly
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unchanged, but catapulted into a different circumstance.
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You and me have been shot elsewhere and find yourself
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in relationship to other entities of some kind, right?
link |
So the place is populated with things that seem
link |
not to be your mind.
link |
So it does feel like travel to another place
link |
because you're unchanged yourself.
link |
According, again, I just have this on the authority
link |
of the people who have described their experience,
link |
but it sounds like it's pretty common.
link |
It sounds like it's pretty common for people
link |
not to have the full experience because it's apparently
link |
pretty unpleasant to smoke.
link |
So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot
link |
out of the cannon and land among the,
link |
what McKenna called self transforming machine elves
link |
that appeared to him like jeweled Faberge egg,
link |
like self drippling basketballs that were handing him
link |
completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge.
link |
It's an experience I haven't had.
link |
So I just have to accept that people have had it.
link |
I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable
link |
of producing apparent others on demand
link |
that are totally compelling to us, right?
link |
There's no limit to our ability to do that
link |
as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest.
link |
Every night we go to sleep,
link |
some of us don't remember dreams very often,
link |
but some dream vividly every night.
link |
And just think of how insane that experience is.
link |
I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right?
link |
That's the strangest part.
link |
I mean, this is psychosis, right?
link |
You have lost your mind.
link |
You have lost your connection to your episodic memory
link |
or even your expectations that reality won't undergo
link |
wholesale changes a moment
link |
after you have closed your eyes, right?
link |
Like you're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix,
link |
you're waiting to fall asleep,
link |
and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible
link |
and you're not surprised, right?
link |
You're talking to dead people,
link |
you're hanging out with famous people,
link |
you're someplace you couldn't physically be,
link |
you can fly and even that's not surprising, right?
link |
So you've lost your mind,
link |
but relevantly for this.
link |
You found something.
link |
I mean, lucid dreaming is very interesting
link |
because then you can have the best of both circumstances
link |
and then it can become systematically explored.
link |
But what I mean by found, just to start to interrupt,
link |
is like if we take this brilliant idea
link |
that language constrains us, grounds us,
link |
language and other things of the waking world ground us,
link |
maybe it is that you've found the full capacity
link |
of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics.
link |
You're stepping outside the little human cage,
link |
the cage of the human condition to open the door
link |
and step out and look around and then go back in.
link |
Well, you've definitely stepped out of something
link |
and into something else, but you've also lost something,
link |
right, you've lost certain capacities.
link |
Well, just, yeah, in this case,
link |
you literally didn't, you don't have enough presence of mind
link |
in the dream state or even in the psychedelic state
link |
if you take enough.
link |
There's no psychological,
link |
there's very little psychological continuity with your life
link |
such that you're not surprised to be in the presence
link |
of someone who should be, you should know is dead
link |
or you should know you're not likely to have met
link |
by normal channels, right, you're now talking
link |
to some celebrity and it turns out you're best friends,
link |
right, and you're not even, you have no memory
link |
of how you got there, you're like,
link |
how did you get into the room?
link |
You're like, did you drive to this restaurant?
link |
You have no memory and none of that's surprising to you.
link |
So you're kind of brain damaged in a way,
link |
you're not reality testing in the normal way.
link |
The fascinating possibility is that there's probably
link |
thousands of people who've taken psychedelics
link |
of various forms and have met Sam Harris on that journey.
link |
Well, I would put it more likely in dreams,
link |
not, you know, because with psychedelics,
link |
you don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way.
link |
I mean, so DMT is giving you an experience of others,
link |
but it seems to be nonstandard.
link |
It's not like, it's not just like dream hallucinations,
link |
but to the point of coming back to DMT,
link |
the people want to suggest,
link |
and Terrence McKenna certainly did suggest
link |
that because these others are so obviously other
link |
and they're so vivid, well, then they could not possibly
link |
be the creation of my own mind,
link |
but every night in dreams, you create a compelling
link |
or what is to you at the time,
link |
a totally compelling simulacrum of another person, right?
link |
And that just proves the mind is capable of doing it.
link |
Now, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows
link |
that the mind isn't capable of doing everything you think
link |
it might be capable of even in that space.
link |
So one of the things that people have discovered
link |
in lucid dreams, and I haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming,
link |
so I can't confirm all of this, I can confirm some of it.
link |
Apparently in every house, in every room
link |
in the mansion of dreams,
link |
all light switches are dimmer switches.
link |
Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light,
link |
it gradually comes up.
link |
It doesn't come up instantly on demand
link |
because apparently this is covering for the brain's
link |
inability to produce from a standing start
link |
visually rich imagery on demand.
link |
So I haven't confirmed that, but that was,
link |
people have done research on lucid dreaming claim
link |
that it's all dimmer switches.
link |
But one thing I have noticed,
link |
and people can check this out, is that in a dream,
link |
if you look at text, a page of text or a sign
link |
or a television that has text on it,
link |
and then you turn away and you look back at that text,
link |
the text will have changed, right?
link |
The total is it's just a chronic instability,
link |
graphical instability of text in the dream state.
link |
And I don't know if that, maybe that's,
link |
someone can confirm that that's not true for them,
link |
but whenever I've checked that out,
link |
that has been true for me.
link |
So it keeps generating it like real time
link |
from a video game perspective.
link |
Yeah, it's rendering, it's re rendering it for some reason.
link |
What's interesting, I actually,
link |
I don't know how I found myself in this sets
link |
of that part of the internet,
link |
but there's quite a lot of discussion
link |
about what it's like to do math on LSD.
link |
Because apparently one of the deepest thinking processes
link |
needed is those of mathematicians
link |
or theoretical computer scientists
link |
are basically doing anything that involves math
link |
as proofs, and you have to think creatively,
link |
but also deeply, and you have to think
link |
for many hours at a time.
link |
And so they're always looking for ways to like,
link |
is there any sparks of creativity that could be injected?
link |
And apparently out of all the psychedelics,
link |
the worst is LSD because it completely destroys
link |
your ability to do math well.
link |
And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability
link |
to visualize geometric things in a stable way
link |
in your mind and hold them there
link |
and stitch things together,
link |
which is often what's required for proofs.
link |
But again, it's difficult to kind of research
link |
these kinds of concepts, but it does make me wonder
link |
where, what are the spaces, how's the space of things
link |
you're able to think about and explore
link |
morphed by different psychedelics
link |
or dream states and so on, and how's that different?
link |
How much does it overlap with reality?
link |
And what is reality?
link |
Is there a waking state reality?
link |
Or is it just a tiny subset of reality
link |
and we get to take a step in other versions of it?
link |
We tend to think very much in a space time,
link |
four dimensional, there's a three dimensional world,
link |
there's time, and that's what we think about reality.
link |
And we think of traveling as walking from point A
link |
to point B in the three dimensional world.
link |
But that's a very kind of human surviving,
link |
trying not to get eaten by a lion conception of reality.
link |
What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics
link |
and meet the elves?
link |
What if it's something, what if thinking
link |
or the space of ideas as we kind of grow
link |
and think through ideas, that's traveling?
link |
Or what if memories is traveling?
link |
I don't know if you have a favorite view of reality
link |
or if you had, by the way, I should say,
link |
excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman.
link |
Yeah, yeah, he's interesting.
link |
Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind
link |
that reality is very far from,
link |
actual like objective reality is very far
link |
from the kind of reality we imagine,
link |
we perceive and we play with in our human minds?
link |
Well, the first thing to grant
link |
is that we're never in direct contact with reality,
link |
whatever it is, unless that reality is consciousness, right?
link |
So we're only ever experiencing consciousness
link |
And then the question is how does that circumstance relate
link |
to quote reality at large?
link |
And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate,
link |
well, maybe there isn't a reality at large.
link |
Maybe it's all just consciousness on some level.
link |
And that's interesting.
link |
That runs into, to my eye, various philosophical problems
link |
that, or at least you have to do a lot,
link |
you have to add to that picture of idealism for me.
link |
That's usually all the whole family of views
link |
that would just say that the universe is just mind
link |
or just consciousness at bottom,
link |
we'll go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy.
link |
You have to add to that idealistic picture
link |
all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences
link |
and to get the predictability of our experience
link |
and the success of materialist science
link |
to make sense in that context, right?
link |
And so the fact that we can, what does it mean to say
link |
that there's only consciousness at bottom, right?
link |
Nothing outside of consciousness
link |
because no one's ever experienced anything
link |
outside of consciousness.
link |
There's no scientist has ever done an experiment
link |
where they were contemplating data,
link |
no matter how far removed from our sense bases,
link |
whether it's they're looking at the Hubble deep field
link |
or they're smashing atoms or whatever tools they're using,
link |
they're still just experiencing consciousness
link |
and its various deliverances
link |
and layering their concepts on top of that.
link |
So that's always true.
link |
And yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture
link |
the character of our continually discovering
link |
that our materialist assumptions are confirmable, right?
link |
So take the fact that we unleash this fantastic amount
link |
of energy from within an atom, right?
link |
First, we have the theoretical suggestion
link |
that it's possible, right?
link |
We come back to Einstein,
link |
there's a lot of energy in that matter, right?
link |
And what if we could release it, right?
link |
And then we perform an experiment that in this case,
link |
you know, the Trinity test site in New Mexico,
link |
where the people who are most adequate to this conversation,
link |
people like Robert Oppenheimer
link |
are standing around,
link |
not altogether certain it's going to work, right?
link |
They're performing an experiment.
link |
They're wondering what's gonna happen.
link |
They're wondering if their calculations around the yield
link |
are off by orders of magnitude.
link |
Some of them are still wondering
link |
whether the entire atmosphere of earth
link |
is gonna combust, right?
link |
That the nuclear chain reaction is not gonna stop.
link |
And lo and behold,
link |
there was that energy to be released
link |
from within the nucleus of an atom.
link |
And that could, so it's just what the picture one forms
link |
from those kinds of experiments.
link |
And just the knowledge,
link |
it's just our understanding of evolution.
link |
Just the fact that the earth is billions of years old
link |
and life is hundreds of millions of years old.
link |
And we weren't here to think about any of those things.
link |
And all of those processes were happening therefore
link |
And they are the processes that allowed us to emerge,
link |
you know, from prior life forms in the first place.
link |
To say that it's all a mess,
link |
that nothing exists,
link |
outside of consciousness, conscious minds
link |
of the sort that we experience.
link |
it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim,
link |
you know, analogous to, you know,
link |
the moon isn't there if no one's looking at it, right?
link |
I mean, the moon as a moon isn't there
link |
if no one's looking at it.
link |
because that's already a kind of fabrication
link |
born of concepts, but the idea that there's nothing there,
link |
that there's nothing that corresponds
link |
to what we experience as the moon,
link |
unless someone's looking at it,
link |
that just seems just a way too parochial way
link |
to set out on this journey of discovery.
link |
There is something there.
link |
There's a computer waiting to render the moon
link |
when you look at it.
link |
The capacity for the moon to exist is there.
link |
So if we're looking at the moon,
link |
the capacity for the moon to exist is there.
link |
So if we're indeed living in a simulation,
link |
which I find a compelling thought experiment,
link |
it's possible that there is this kind of rendering mechanism,
link |
but not in a silly way that we think about in video games,
link |
but in some kind of more fundamental physics way.
link |
And we have to account for the fact
link |
that it renders experiences that no one has had yet,
link |
that no one has any expectation of having.
link |
It can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully.
link |
And then there's some lawful understanding
link |
It's like, I mean, just to bring it back to mathematics,
link |
I'm like, certain numbers are prime,
link |
whether we have discovered them or not.
link |
There's the highest prime number that anyone can name now.
link |
And then there's the next prime number
link |
that no one can name, and it's there.
link |
So it's like, to say that our minds are putting it there,
link |
that what we know as mind in ourselves
link |
is in some way, in some sense, putting it there.
link |
The base layer of reality is consciousness, right?
link |
That we're identical to the thing
link |
that is rendering this reality.
link |
There's some, you know, hubris is the wrong word,
link |
but it's like, it's okay if reality is bigger
link |
than what we experience, you know?
link |
And it has structure that we can't anticipate,
link |
and that isn't just,
link |
I mean, again, there's certainly a collaboration
link |
between our minds and whatever is out there
link |
to produce what we call, you know, the stuff of life.
link |
But it's not, the idea that it's,
link |
I don't know, I mean, there are a few stops
link |
on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking
link |
and Eastern philosophy that I don't,
link |
philosophically, I don't see a need to take.
link |
I mean, experientially and scientifically,
link |
I feel like it's, you can get everything you want
link |
from acknowledging that consciousness
link |
has a character that can be explored from its own side,
link |
so that you're bringing kind of the first person experience
link |
back into the conversation about, you know,
link |
what is a human mind and, you know, what is true?
link |
And you can explore it with different degrees of rigor,
link |
and there are things to be discovered there,
link |
whether you're using a technique like meditation
link |
or psychedelics, and that these experiences
link |
have to be put in conversation with what we understand
link |
about ourselves from a third person side,
link |
neuroscientifically or in any other way.
link |
But to me, the question is, what if reality,
link |
the sense I have from this kind of, you play shooters?
link |
There's a physics engine that generates, that's pretty.
link |
Yeah, you mean first person shooter games?
link |
Not often, but yes.
link |
I mean, there's a physics engine
link |
that generates consistent reality, right?
link |
My sense is the same could be true for a universe
link |
in the following sense, that our conception of reality
link |
as we understand it now in the 21st century
link |
is a tiny subset of the full reality.
link |
It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there,
link |
the moon being there is not there somehow.
link |
It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there.
link |
And so the physics engine of the universe
link |
is just maintaining the useful physics,
link |
the useful reality, quote unquote,
link |
for us to have a consistent experience as human beings.
link |
But maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand
link |
like 0.0001% of actual physics of reality.
link |
We can even just start with the consciousness thing,
link |
but maybe our minds are just,
link |
we're just too dumb by design.
link |
Yeah, I, that truly resonates with me
link |
and I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more
link |
with most scientists that I talk to.
link |
Matthew, when you just look at,
link |
you look at how close we are to chimps, right?
link |
And chimps don't know anything, right?
link |
Clearly they have no idea what's going on, right?
link |
And then you get us,
link |
but then it's only a subset of human beings
link |
that really understand much of what we're talking about
link |
in any area of specialization.
link |
And if they all died in their sleep tonight, right?
link |
You'd be left with people who might take a thousand years
link |
to rebuild the internet, if ever, right?
link |
I mean, literally it's like,
link |
and I would extend this to myself.
link |
I mean, there are areas of scientific specialization
link |
where I have either no discernible competence.
link |
I mean, I spent no time on it.
link |
I have not acquired the tools.
link |
It would just be an article of faith for me to think
link |
that I could acquire the tools
link |
to actually make a breakthrough in those areas.
link |
And I mean, your own area is one.
link |
I mean, I've never spent any significant amount of time
link |
trying to be a programmer,
link |
but it's pretty obvious I'm not Alan Turing, right?
link |
It's like, if that were my capacity,
link |
I would have discovered that in myself.
link |
I would have found programming irresistible.
link |
My first false starts in learning, I think it was C,
link |
it was just, you know, I bounced off.
link |
It's like, this was not fun.
link |
I hate, I mean, I hate trying to figure out
link |
what the syntax error that's causing this thing
link |
not to compile was just a fucking awful experience.
link |
I hated it, right?
link |
I hated every minute of it.
link |
So it was not, so if it was just people like me left,
link |
like when do we get the internet again, right?
link |
And we lose, we lose, you know, we lose the internet.
link |
When do we get it again, right?
link |
When do we get anything like a proper science
link |
of information, right?
link |
You need a Claude Shannon or an Alan Turing
link |
to plant a flag in the ground right here and say,
link |
all right, can everyone see this?
link |
Even if you don't quite know what I'm up to,
link |
you all have to come over here to make some progress.
link |
And, you know, there are, you know,
link |
hundreds of topics where that's the case.
link |
So we barely have a purchase on making anything
link |
like discernible intellectual progress in any generation.
link |
And yeah, I'm just, Max Tegmark makes this point.
link |
He's one of the few people who does in physics.
link |
If you just look at the numbers,
link |
if you just take the truth of evolution seriously, right?
link |
And realize that there's nothing about us
link |
that has evolved to understand reality perfectly.
link |
I mean, we're just not that kind of ape, right?
link |
There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines.
link |
So what we are making do with tools
link |
that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right?
link |
And it's amazing we can do as much as we can.
link |
I mean, we just, you know, the UNR just sitting here
link |
on the back of having received an mRNA vaccine,
link |
you know, that has certainly changed our life
link |
given what the last year was like.
link |
And it's gonna change the world
link |
if rumors of coming miracles are born out.
link |
I mean, it's now, it seems likely we have a vaccine
link |
coming for malaria, right?
link |
Which has been killing millions of people a year
link |
for as long as we've been alive.
link |
I think it's down to like 800,000 people a year now
link |
because we've spread so many bed nets around,
link |
but it was like two and a half million people every year.
link |
It's amazing what we can do, but yeah, I have,
link |
if in fact the answer at the back of the book of nature
link |
is you understand 0.1% of what there is to understand
link |
and half of what you think you understand is wrong,
link |
that would not surprise me at all.
link |
It is funny to look at our evolutionary history,
link |
even back to chimps, I'm pretty sure even chimps
link |
thought they understood the world well.
link |
So at every point in that timeline
link |
of evolutionary development throughout human history,
link |
there's a sense like there's no more,
link |
you hear this message over and over,
link |
there's no more things to be invented.
link |
But a hundred years ago there were,
link |
there's a famous story, I forget which physicist told it,
link |
but there were physicists telling
link |
their undergraduate students not to go into,
link |
to get graduate degrees in physics
link |
because basically all the problems had been solved.
link |
And this is like around 1915 or so.
link |
It turns out you were right.
link |
I'm gonna ask you about free will.
link |
You've recently released an episode of your podcast,
link |
Making Sense, for those with a shorter attention span,
link |
basically summarizing your position on free will.
link |
I think it was under an hour and a half.
link |
It was brief and clear.
link |
So allow me to summarize the summary, TLDR,
link |
and maybe you tell me where I'm wrong.
link |
So free will is an illusion,
link |
and even the experience of free will is an illusion.
link |
Like we don't even experience it.
link |
Am I good in my summary?
link |
Yeah, this is a line that's a little hard
link |
to scan for people.
link |
I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion.
link |
The illusion of free will is an illusion.
link |
Like there is no illusion of free will.
link |
And that is a, unlike many other illusions,
link |
that's a more fundamental claim.
link |
It's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong.
link |
I mean, I guess that was I think Wolfgang Pauli
link |
who derided one of his colleagues or enemies
link |
with that aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics.
link |
So there are things that, there are genuine illusions.
link |
There are things that you do experience
link |
and then you can kind of punch through that experience,
link |
or you can't actually experience,
link |
you can't experience them any other way.
link |
It's just, we just know it's not a veridical experience.
link |
You just take like a visual illusion.
link |
There are visual illusions that,
link |
a lot of these come to me on Twitter these days.
link |
There's these amazing visual illusions
link |
where like every figure in this GIF seems to be moving,
link |
but nothing in fact is moving.
link |
You can just like put a ruler on your screen
link |
and nothing's moving.
link |
Some of those illusions you can't see any other way.
link |
I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects
link |
of the visual system that are just eminently hackable
link |
and you have to use a ruler to convince yourself
link |
that the thing isn't actually moving.
link |
Now there are other visual illusions
link |
where you're taken in by it at first,
link |
but if you pay more attention,
link |
you can actually see that it's not there, right?
link |
Or it's not how it first seemed.
link |
Like the Necker cube is a good example of that.
link |
Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube,
link |
of a transparent cube, which pops out one way or the other.
link |
Then one face can pop out and then the other face
link |
But you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out,
link |
which is a more veridical way of looking at it.
link |
So there are subject,
link |
there are kind of inward correlates to this.
link |
And I would say that the sense of self and free will
link |
are closely related.
link |
I mean, I often describe them as two sides of the same coin,
link |
but they're not quite the same in their spuriousness.
link |
I mean, so the sense of self is something that people,
link |
I think, do experience, right?
link |
It's not a very clear experience, but it's not,
link |
I wouldn't call the illusion of self an illusion,
link |
but the illusion of free will is an illusion
link |
in that as you pay more attention to your experience,
link |
you begin to see that it's totally compatible
link |
with an absence of free will.
link |
You don't, I mean coming back to the place we started,
link |
you don't know what you're gonna think next.
link |
You don't know what you're gonna intend next.
link |
You don't know what's going to just occur to you
link |
that you must do next.
link |
You don't know how much you are going to feel
link |
the behavioral imperative to act on that thought.
link |
If you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that.
link |
I can do that tomorrow.
link |
You don't know where that comes from.
link |
You didn't know that was gonna arise.
link |
You didn't know that was gonna be compelling.
link |
All of this is compatible with some evil genius
link |
in the next room just typing in code into your experience.
link |
It's like this, okay, let's give him the,
link |
oh my God, I just forgot it was gonna be our anniversary
link |
in one week thought, right?
link |
Give him the cascade of fear.
link |
Give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy
link |
that's gonna take him no time at all
link |
and this overpowering sense of relief.
link |
All of our experiences is compatible
link |
with the script already being written, right?
link |
And I'm not saying the script is written.
link |
I'm not saying that fatalism is the right way
link |
to look at this, but we just don't have
link |
even our most deliberate voluntary action
link |
where we go back and forth between two options,
link |
thinking about the reason for A
link |
and then reconsidering and going,
link |
thinking harder about B and just going
link |
eeny, meeny, miny, moe until the end of the hour.
link |
However laborious you can make it,
link |
there is a utter mystery at your back
link |
finally promoting the thought or intention
link |
or rationale that is most compelling
link |
and therefore behaviorally effective.
link |
And this can drive some people a little crazy.
link |
So I usually preface what I say about free will
link |
with the caveat that if thinking about your mind this way
link |
makes you feel terrible, well then stop.
link |
You get off the ride, switch the channel.
link |
You don't have to go down this path.
link |
But for me and for many other people,
link |
it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about the mind
link |
because one, you realize that you're,
link |
cutting through the illusion of the self
link |
is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons
link |
that we can talk about separately,
link |
but losing the sense of free will does
link |
two things very vividly for me.
link |
One is it totally undercuts the basis for,
link |
the psychological basis for hatred.
link |
Because when you think about the experience
link |
of hating other people, what that is anchored to
link |
is a feeling that they really are
link |
the true authors of their actions.
link |
I mean, if someone is doing something
link |
that you find so despicable, right?
link |
Let's say they're targeting you unfairly, right?
link |
They're maligning you on Twitter or they're suing you
link |
or they're doing something, they broke your car window,
link |
they did something awful
link |
and now you have a grievance against them.
link |
And you're relating to them very differently emotionally
link |
in your own mind than you would
link |
if a force of nature had done this, right?
link |
Or if it's, if it had just been a virus
link |
or if it had been a wild animal
link |
or a malfunctioning machine, right?
link |
Like to those things you don't attribute
link |
any kind of freedom of will.
link |
And while you may suffer the consequences
link |
of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal
link |
or having your car break down or whatever,
link |
it may frustrate you.
link |
You don't slip into this mode of hating the agent
link |
in a way that completely commandeers your mind
link |
and deranges your life.
link |
I mean, you just don't, I mean, there are people
link |
who spend decades hating other people for what they did
link |
and it's just pure poison, right?
link |
So it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy.
link |
But the question is, say that this called,
link |
what was it, the horse of consciousness?
link |
Let's call it the consciousness generator black box
link |
that we don't understand.
link |
And is it possible that the script
link |
that we're walking along, that we're playing,
link |
that's already written is actually being written
link |
It's almost like you're driving down a road
link |
and in real time, that road is being laid down.
link |
And this black box of consciousness that we don't understand
link |
is the place where the script is being generated.
link |
So it's not, it is being generated, it didn't always exist.
link |
So there's something we don't understand
link |
that's fundamental about the nature of reality
link |
that generates both consciousness,
link |
let's call it maybe the self.
link |
I don't know if you want to distinguish between those.
link |
Yeah, I definitely would, yeah.
link |
You would, because there's a bunch of illusions
link |
we're referring to.
link |
There's the illusion of free will,
link |
there's the illusion of self,
link |
and there's the illusion of consciousness.
link |
You're saying, I think you said there's no,
link |
you're not as willing to say
link |
there's an illusion of consciousness.
link |
You're a little bit more.
link |
In fact, I would say it's impossible.
link |
You're a little bit more willing to say
link |
that there's an illusion of self,
link |
and you're definitely saying
link |
there's an illusion of free will.
link |
Yes, I'm definitely saying there's an illusion
link |
that a certain kind of self is an illusion.
link |
Not every, we mean many different things
link |
by this notion of self.
link |
So maybe I should just differentiate these things.
link |
So consciousness can't be an illusion
link |
because any illusion proves its reality
link |
as much as any other veridical perception.
link |
I mean, if you're hallucinating now,
link |
that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness
link |
as really seeing what's a quote actually there.
link |
If you're dreaming and you don't know it,
link |
that is consciousness, right?
link |
You can be confused about literally everything.
link |
You can't be confused about the underlying claim,
link |
whether you make it linguistically or not,
link |
but just the cognitive assertion
link |
that something seems to be happening.
link |
It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.
link |
Can I take a tiny tangent?
link |
So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind
link |
to convince you that I'm human?
link |
So it's a useful social tool,
link |
not a fundamental property of experience,
link |
like of being a living thing.
link |
What if it's just like a social tool
link |
to almost like a useful computational trick
link |
to place myself into reality
link |
as we together communicate about this reality?
link |
And another way to ask that,
link |
because you said it much earlier,
link |
you talk negatively about robots as you often do.
link |
So let me, because you'll probably die first
link |
when they take over.
link |
No, I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots.
link |
I mean, I'm not, if we can get this right,
link |
this would be amazing.
link |
But you don't like the robots that fake consciousness.
link |
you don't like the idea of fake it till you make it.
link |
Well, no, it's not that I don't like it.
link |
It's that I'm worried that we will lose sight
link |
And the problem has massive ethical consequences.
link |
I mean, if we create robots that really can suffer,
link |
that would be a bad thing, right?
link |
And if we really are committing a murder
link |
when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing.
link |
This is how I know you're not Russian.
link |
Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer?
link |
Isn't suffering a fundamental thing
link |
from which like beauty springs?
link |
Like without suffering,
link |
do you really think we would have beautiful things
link |
Okay, that's a tangent on a tangent.
link |
I would love to go there, but let's not go there just yet.
link |
But I do think it would be, if anything is bad,
link |
creating hell and populating it
link |
with real minds that really can suffer in that hell,
link |
You are worse than any mass murderer we can name
link |
I mean, this could be in robot form,
link |
or more likely it would be in some simulation of a world
link |
where we managed to populate it with conscious minds
link |
whether we knew they were conscious or not.
link |
And that world is a state of, it's unendurable.
link |
That would just, it just taking the thesis seriously
link |
that there's nothing that mind intelligence
link |
and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent.
link |
It doesn't, you don't need a biological brain
link |
You certainly don't need a biological brain
link |
to be intelligent.
link |
So if we just imagine the consciousness at some point
link |
comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence,
link |
well then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds
link |
that are miserable, right?
link |
And that's just like creating a person who's miserable.
link |
It could be worse than creating a person who's miserable.
link |
It could be even more sensitive to suffering.
link |
Cloning them and maybe for entertainment
link |
and watching them suffer.
link |
Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment.
link |
So, but back to your primary question here,
link |
which is differentiating consciousness and self
link |
and free will as concepts
link |
and kind of degrees of illusoriness.
link |
The problem with free will is that
link |
what most people mean by it,
link |
and this is where Dan Dennett
link |
is gonna get off the ride here, right?
link |
So like he doesn't, he's gonna disagree with me
link |
that I know what most people mean by it.
link |
But I have a very keen sense having talked about this topic
link |
for many, many years
link |
and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it
link |
and seeing in myself what it's like to have felt
link |
that I was a self that had free will
link |
and then to no longer feel that way, right?
link |
To know what it's like to actually disabuse myself
link |
of that sense cognitively and emotionally
link |
and to recognize what's left, what goes away
link |
and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany.
link |
I have a sense that I know what people think they have
link |
in hand when they worry about whether free will exists.
link |
And it is the flip side of this feeling of self.
link |
It's the flip side of feeling
link |
like you are not merely identical to experience.
link |
You feel like you're having an experience.
link |
You feel like you're an agent
link |
that is appropriating an experience.
link |
There's a protagonist in the movie of your life
link |
It's not just the movie, right?
link |
It's like there's sights and sounds and sensations
link |
and thoughts and emotions
link |
and this whole cacophony of experience,
link |
of felt experience, of felt experience of embodiment.
link |
But there seems to be a rider on the horse
link |
or a passenger in the body, right?
link |
People don't feel truly identical to their bodies
link |
down to their toes.
link |
They sort of feel like they have bodies.
link |
They feel like their minds in bodies
link |
and that feels like a self, that feels like me.
link |
And again, this gets very paradoxical
link |
when you talk about the experience
link |
of being in relationship to yourself
link |
or talking to yourself, giving yourself a pep talk.
link |
I mean, if you're the one talking,
link |
why are you also the one listening?
link |
Like, why do you need the pep talk and why does it work
link |
if you're the one giving the pep talk, right?
link |
Or if I say like, where are my keys?
link |
Or if I'm looking for my keys,
link |
why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys?
link |
I know I'm looking for the fucking keys.
link |
I'm the one looking, who am I telling
link |
that we now need to look for the keys, right?
link |
So that duality is weird, but leave that aside.
link |
There's the sense, and this becomes very vivid
link |
when people try to learn to meditate.
link |
Most people, they close their eyes
link |
and they're told to pay attention to an object
link |
like the breath, say.
link |
So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath
link |
and you can feel it at the tip of your nose
link |
or the rising and falling of your abdomen
link |
and you're paying attention
link |
and you feel something vague there.
link |
And then you think, I thought, well, why the breath?
link |
Why am I paying attention to the breath?
link |
What's so special about the breath?
link |
And then you notice you're thinking
link |
and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore.
link |
And then you realize, okay, the practice is,
link |
okay, I should notice thoughts
link |
and then I should come back to the breath.
link |
But this starting point of the conventional starting point
link |
of feeling like you are an agent, very likely in your head,
link |
a locus of consciousness, a locus of attention
link |
that can strategically pay attention
link |
to certain parts of experience.
link |
Like I can focus on the breath
link |
and then I get lost in thought
link |
and now I can come back to the breath
link |
and I can open my eyes and I'm over here behind my face
link |
looking out at a world that's other than me
link |
and there's this kind of subject object perception.
link |
And that is the default starting point of selfhood,
link |
And married to that is the sense that
link |
I can decide what to do next, right?
link |
I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup.
link |
I can listen to sounds.
link |
There's certain things that I can't control.
link |
Certain things are happening to me
link |
and I just can't control them.
link |
So for instance, if someone asks,
link |
well, can you not hear a sound, right?
link |
Like don't hear the next sound,
link |
don't hear anything for a second,
link |
or don't hear, I'm snapping my fingers, don't hear this.
link |
Where's your free will?
link |
You know, well, like just stop this from coming in.
link |
You realize, okay, wait a minute.
link |
My abundant freedom does not extend
link |
to something as simple as just being able to pay attention
link |
to something else than this.
link |
Okay, well, so I'm not that kind of free agent,
link |
but at least I can decide what I'm gonna do next
link |
and I'm gonna pick up this water, right?
link |
And there's a feeling of identification
link |
with the impulse, with the intention,
link |
with the thought that occurs to you,
link |
with the feeling of speaking.
link |
Like what am I gonna say next?
link |
Well, I'm saying it.
link |
So here goes, this is me.
link |
It feels like I'm the thinker.
link |
I'm the one who's in control.
link |
But all of that is born of not really paying close attention
link |
to what it's like to be you.
link |
And so this is where meditation comes in,
link |
or this is where, again, you can get at this conceptually.
link |
You can unravel the notion of free will
link |
just by thinking certain thoughts,
link |
but you can't feel that it doesn't exist
link |
unless you can pay close attention
link |
to how thoughts and intentions arise.
link |
So the way to unravel it conceptually
link |
is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself.
link |
I didn't make my genes.
link |
I didn't make my brain.
link |
I didn't make the environmental influences
link |
that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years
link |
that have produced my brain in precisely the state
link |
it's in right now, such and with all of the receptor weightings
link |
and densities, and it's just,
link |
I'm exactly the machine I am right now
link |
through no fault of my own as the experiencing self.
link |
I get no credit and I get no blame
link |
for the genetics and the environmental influences here.
link |
And yet those are the only things
link |
that contrive to produce my next thought
link |
or impulse or moment of behavior.
link |
And if you were going to add something magical
link |
to that clockwork, like an immortal soul,
link |
you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul.
link |
You can't account for the fact
link |
that you don't have the soul of someone
link |
who doesn't like any of the things you like
link |
or wasn't interested in any of the things
link |
you were interested in or was a psychopath
link |
or had an IQ of 40.
link |
I mean, there's nothing about that
link |
that the person who believes in a soul
link |
can claim to have controlled.
link |
And yet that is also totally dispositive
link |
of whatever happens next.
link |
But everything you've described now,
link |
maybe you can correct me,
link |
but it kind of speaks to the materialistic nature
link |
But even if you add magical ectoplasm software,
link |
you didn't produce that either.
link |
I know, but if we can think about the actual computation
link |
running on the hardware and running on the software,
link |
there's something you said recently
link |
which you think of culture as an operating system.
link |
So if we just remove ourselves a little bit
link |
from the conception of human civilization
link |
being a collection of humans
link |
and rather us just being a distributed
link |
computation system on which there's
link |
some kind of operating system running,
link |
and then the computation that's running
link |
is the actual thing that generates
link |
the interactions, the communications,
link |
and maybe even free will, the experiences
link |
of all those free will.
link |
Do you ever think of, do you ever try
link |
to reframe the world in that way
link |
where it's like ideas are just using us,
link |
thoughts are using individual nodes in the system,
link |
and they're just jumping around,
link |
and they also have ability to generate experiences
link |
so that we can push those ideas along.
link |
And basically the main organisms here
link |
are the thoughts, not the humans.
link |
Yeah, but then that erodes the boundary
link |
between self and world.
link |
So then there's no self, really integrated self
link |
to have any kind of will at all.
link |
Like if you're just a meme plex,
link |
I mean, if you're just a collection of memes,
link |
and I mean, we're all kind of like currents,
link |
like eddies in this river of ideas, right?
link |
So it's like, and it seems to have structure,
link |
but there's no real boundary between that part
link |
of the flow of water and the rest.
link |
I mean, if our, and I would say that much
link |
of our mind answers to this kind of description.
link |
I mean, so much of our mind has been,
link |
it's obviously not self generated,
link |
and it's not, you're not gonna find it
link |
by looking in the brain.
link |
It is the result of culture largely,
link |
but also, you know, the genes on one side
link |
and culture on the other meeting
link |
to allow for manifestations of mind
link |
that don't, that aren't actually bounded
link |
by the person in any clear sense.
link |
It was just, I mean, the example I often use here,
link |
but there's so many others is just the fact
link |
that we're following the rules of English grammar
link |
to whatever degree we are.
link |
It's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented
link |
these rules for ourself.
link |
We haven't invented these rules.
link |
We haven't, I mean, there are norms of language use
link |
that we couldn't even specify because we haven't,
link |
you know, we're not grammarians.
link |
We're not, we haven't studied this.
link |
We don't even have the right concepts,
link |
and yet we're following these rules,
link |
and we're noticing, you know, we're noticing as, you know,
link |
an error when we fail to follow these rules,
link |
and virtually every other cultural norm is like that.
link |
I mean, these are not things we've invented.
link |
You can consciously decide to scrutinize them
link |
and override them, but, I mean, just think of,
link |
just think of any social situation
link |
where you're with other people and you're behaving
link |
in ways that are culturally appropriate, right?
link |
You're not being, you know,
link |
you're not being wild animals together.
link |
You're following, you have some expectation
link |
of how you shake a person's hand
link |
and how you deal with implements on a table,
link |
how you have a meal together.
link |
Obviously, this can change from culture to culture,
link |
and people can be shocked
link |
by how different those things are, right?
link |
We, you know, we all have foods we find disgusting,
link |
but in some countries, dog is not one of those foods, right?
link |
And yet, you know, you and I presumably
link |
would be horrified to be served dog.
link |
Those are not norms that we're,
link |
they are outside of us in some way,
link |
and yet they're felt very viscerally.
link |
I mean, they're certainly felt in their violation.
link |
You know, if you are, just imagine,
link |
you're in somebody's home,
link |
you're eating something that tastes great to you,
link |
and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever,
link |
you know, you didn't realize dog was potentially
link |
on the menu, and you find out that you've just eaten
link |
10 bites of what is, you know, really a cocker spaniel,
link |
and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit, right,
link |
based on an idea, right?
link |
Like, so, like, you did not,
link |
you're not the author of that norm
link |
that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation,
link |
and I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history,
link |
you know, vaguely, where it sort of got in.
link |
I mean, very early on as kids,
link |
you realize you're treating dogs as pets
link |
and not as food, or as potential food.
link |
But yeah, no, it's, but the point you just made
link |
opens us to, like, we are totally permeable
link |
Yeah, but if we take the metaphor
link |
of the distributed computing systems,
link |
each individual node is,
link |
is part of performing a much larger computation,
link |
but it nevertheless is in charge of doing the scheduling
link |
of, so, assuming it's Linux,
link |
is doing the scheduling of processes
link |
and is constantly alternating them.
link |
That node is making those choices.
link |
That node sure as hell believes it has free will,
link |
and it actually has free will
link |
because it's making those hard choices,
link |
but the choices ultimately are part
link |
of a much larger computation that it can't control.
link |
Isn't it possible for that node to still be,
link |
that human node is still making the choice?
link |
Well, yeah, it is.
link |
So I'm not saying that your body
link |
isn't doing, really doing things, right?
link |
And some of those things can be
link |
conventionally thought of as choices, right?
link |
So it's like, I can choose to reach,
link |
and it's like, it's not being imposed on me.
link |
That would be a different experience.
link |
Like, so there's an experience of all,
link |
you know, there's definitely a difference
link |
between voluntary and involuntary action.
link |
There's, so that has to get conserved.
link |
By any account of the mind that jettisons free will,
link |
you still have to admit that there's a difference
link |
between a tremor that I can't control
link |
and a purposeful motor action that I can control
link |
and I can initiate on demand,
link |
and it's associated with intentions.
link |
And it's got efferent, you know, motor copy,
link |
which is being predictive so that I can notice errors.
link |
You know, I have expectations.
link |
When I reach for this,
link |
if my hand were actually to pass through the bottle,
link |
because it's a hologram, I would be surprised, right?
link |
And so that shows that I have a expectation
link |
of just what my grasping behavior is gonna be like
link |
even before it happens.
link |
Whereas with a tremor,
link |
you don't have the same kind of thing going on.
link |
That's a distinction we have to make.
link |
So I am, yes, I'm really, my intention to move,
link |
which is in fact can be subjectively felt,
link |
really is the proximate cause of my moving.
link |
It's not coming from elsewhere in the universe.
link |
I'm not saying that.
link |
So in that sense, the node is really deciding
link |
to execute, you know, the subroutine now.
link |
But that's not the feeling
link |
that has given rise to this conundrum of free will, right?
link |
So the people feel like,
link |
people feel like the crucial thing is that people feel
link |
like they could have done otherwise, right?
link |
That's the thing that,
link |
so when you run back the clock of your life, right?
link |
You run back the movie of your life,
link |
you flip back the few pages in the novel of your life,
link |
they feel that at this point,
link |
they could behave differently than they did, right?
link |
So like, but given, you know,
link |
even given your distributed computing example,
link |
it's either a fully deterministic system
link |
or it's a deterministic system
link |
that admits of some random, you know, influence.
link |
that's not the free will people think they have.
link |
The free will people think they have is, damn,
link |
I shouldn't have done that.
link |
I just like, I shouldn't have done that.
link |
I could have done otherwise, right?
link |
I should have done otherwise, right?
link |
Like if you think about something
link |
that you deeply regret doing, right?
link |
Or that you hold someone else responsible for
link |
because they really are the upstream agent
link |
in your mind of what they did.
link |
You know, that's an awful thing that that person did
link |
and they shouldn't have done it.
link |
So there is this illusion and it has to be an illusion
link |
because there's no picture of causation
link |
that would make sense of it.
link |
There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe
link |
exactly the way it was a moment ago,
link |
it could have played out differently.
link |
And the only way it could have played out differently
link |
is if there's randomness added to that,
link |
but randomness isn't what people feel
link |
would give them free will, right?
link |
If you tell me that, you know,
link |
I only reached for the water bottle this time
link |
because there's a random number generator in there
link |
kicking off values and it finally moved my hand,
link |
that's not the feeling of authorship.
link |
That's still not control.
link |
You're still not making that decision.
link |
There's actually, I don't know if you're familiar
link |
with cellular automata.
link |
It's a really nice visualization
link |
of how simple rules can create incredible complexity
link |
that it's like really dumb initial conditions to set,
link |
simple rules applied, and eventually you watch this thing
link |
and if the initial conditions are correct,
link |
then you're going to have emerged something
link |
that to our perception system
link |
looks like organisms interacting.
link |
You can construct any kinds of worlds
link |
and they're not actually interacting.
link |
They're not actually even organisms.
link |
And they certainly aren't making decisions.
link |
So there's like systems you can create
link |
that illustrate this point.
link |
The question is whether there could be some room
link |
for let's use in the 21st century the term magic,
link |
back to the black box of consciousness.
link |
Let me ask it this way.
link |
If you're wrong about your intuition about free will,
link |
what, and somebody comes along to you
link |
and proves to you that you didn't have the full picture,
link |
what would that proof look like?
link |
So that's the problem, that's why it's not even an illusion
link |
in my world because for me, it's impossible to say
link |
what the universe would have to be like
link |
for free will to be a thing, right?
link |
It doesn't conceptually map onto any notion
link |
of causation we have.
link |
And that's unlike any other spurious claim you might make.
link |
So like if you're gonna believe in ghosts, right?
link |
I understand what that claim could be,
link |
where like I don't happen to believe in ghosts,
link |
but it's not hard for me to specify
link |
what would have to be true for ghosts to be real.
link |
And so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts,
link |
right, so like, okay, so you're telling me
link |
that when people die, there's some part of them
link |
that is not reducible at all to their biology
link |
that lifts off them and goes elsewhere
link |
and is actually the kind of thing
link |
that they can linger in closets and in cupboards
link |
and actually it's immaterial,
link |
but by some principle of physics,
link |
we don't totally understand it can make sounds
link |
and knock objects and even occasionally show up
link |
so they can be visually beheld.
link |
And it's just, it seems like a miracle,
link |
but it's just some spooky noun in the universe
link |
that we don't understand, let's call it a ghost.
link |
That's fine, I can talk about that all day.
link |
The reasons to believe in it,
link |
the reasons not to believe in it,
link |
the way we would scientifically test for it,
link |
what would have to be provable
link |
so as to convince me that ghosts are real.
link |
Free will isn't like that at all.
link |
There's no description of any concatenation of causes
link |
that precedes my conscious experience
link |
that sounds like what people think they have
link |
when they think they could have done otherwise
link |
and that they really, that they, the conscious agent,
link |
is really in charge, right?
link |
Like if you don't know what you're going to think next,
link |
right, and you can't help but think it,
link |
take those two premises on board.
link |
You don't know what it's gonna be,
link |
you can't stop it from coming,
link |
and until you actually know how to meditate,
link |
you can't stop yourself from
link |
fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences.
link |
Right, like you have no, once you,
link |
mindfulness, you know,
link |
arguably gives you another degree of freedom here.
link |
It doesn't give you free will,
link |
but it gives you some other game to play
link |
with respect to the emotional
link |
and behavioral imperatives of thoughts.
link |
But short of that, I mean,
link |
the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free will
link |
is because you can't, you know,
link |
you can't account for why in one moment
link |
mindfulness arises and in other moments it doesn't, right?
link |
But a different process is initiated
link |
once you can practice in that way.
link |
Well, if I could push back for a second.
link |
By the way, I just have this thought bubble
link |
popping up all the time of just two recent chimps
link |
arguing about the nature of consciousness.
link |
It's kind of hilarious.
link |
So on that thread, you know,
link |
if we're, even before Einstein,
link |
let's say before Einstein,
link |
we were to conceive about traveling
link |
from point A to point B, say some point in the future,
link |
we are able to realize through engineering
link |
a way which is consistent with Einstein's theory
link |
that you can have wormholes.
link |
You can travel from one point to another
link |
faster than the speed of light.
link |
And that would, I think, completely change our conception
link |
of what it means to travel in the physical space.
link |
And that completely transform our ability.
link |
You talk about causality, but here let's just focus
link |
on what it means to travel through physical space.
link |
Don't you think it's possible that there will be inventions
link |
or leaps in understanding about reality
link |
that will allow us to see free will as actually,
link |
like us humans somehow may be linked
link |
to this idea of consciousness,
link |
are actually able to be authors of our actions?
link |
It is a nonstarter for me conceptually.
link |
It's a little bit like saying,
link |
could there be some breakthrough that will cause us
link |
to realize that circles are really square
link |
or the circles are not really round, right?
link |
No, a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form.
link |
It's not on the table to be revised.
link |
And so I would say the same thing about consciousness.
link |
It's just like saying, is there some breakthrough
link |
that would get us to realize that consciousness
link |
is really an illusion?
link |
I'm saying no, because the experience of an illusion
link |
is as much a demonstration of what I'm calling consciousness
link |
as anything else, right?
link |
That is consciousness.
link |
With free will, it's a similar problem.
link |
It's like, again, it comes down to a picture of causality
link |
and there's no other picture on offer.
link |
And what's more, I know what it's like
link |
on the experiential side to lose the thing
link |
to which it is clearly anchored, right?
link |
Like the feel, like it doesn't feel,
link |
and this is the question that almost nobody asked.
link |
People who are debating me on the topic of free will,
link |
I'm, at 15 minute intervals, I'm making a claim
link |
that I don't feel this thing,
link |
and they never become interested in,
link |
well, what's that like?
link |
Like, okay, so you're actually saying you don't,
link |
this thing isn't true for you empirically.
link |
It's not just, because most people
link |
who don't believe in free will philosophically
link |
also believe that we're condemned to experience it.
link |
Like, you just, you can't live without this feeling, so.
link |
So you're actually saying you're able
link |
to experience the absence of the illusion of free will?
link |
For, are we talking about a few minutes at a time,
link |
or is this, does it require a lot of work, a meditation,
link |
or are you literally able to load that into your mind
link |
and like play that moment?
link |
Right now, right now, just in this conversation.
link |
So it's not absolutely continuous,
link |
but it's whenever I pay attention.
link |
It's like, and I would say the same thing
link |
for the illusoriness of the self in the sense,
link |
and again, we haven't talked about this, so.
link |
Can you still have the self and not have the free will
link |
in mind at the same time?
link |
Do they go at the same time?
link |
This is the same, yeah, it's the same thing.
link |
They're always holding hands when they walk out the door.
link |
There really are two sides at the same coin.
link |
But it's just, it comes down to what it's like
link |
to try to get to the end of this sentence,
link |
or what it's like to finally decide
link |
that it's been long enough
link |
and now I need another sip of water, right?
link |
If I'm paying attention, now, if I'm not paying attention,
link |
I'm probably, I'm captured by some other thought
link |
and that feels a certain way, right?
link |
And so that's not, it's not vivid,
link |
but if I try to make vivid this experience of just,
link |
okay, I'm finally gonna experience free will.
link |
I'm gonna notice my free will, right?
link |
Like it's gotta be here, everyone's talking about it.
link |
I'm gonna pay attention to, I'm gonna look for it.
link |
And I'm gonna create a circumstance
link |
that is where it has to be most robust, right?
link |
I'm not rushed to make this decision.
link |
I'm not, it's not a reflex.
link |
I'm not under pressure.
link |
I'm gonna take as long as I want.
link |
I'm going to decide, it's not trivial.
link |
Like, so it's not just like reaching with my left hand
link |
or reaching with my right hand.
link |
People don't like those examples for some reason.
link |
Let's make a big decision.
link |
Like, where should, what should my next podcast be on, right?
link |
Who do I invite on the next podcast?
link |
What is it like to make that decision?
link |
When I pay attention,
link |
there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight.
link |
It's like, it doesn't feel like,
link |
it feels profoundly mysterious
link |
to be going back between two people.
link |
Like, is it gonna be person A or person B?
link |
Got all my reasons for A and all my reasons why not
link |
and all my reasons for B.
link |
And there's some math going on there
link |
that I'm not even privy to
link |
where certain concerns are trumping others.
link |
And at a certain point, I just decide.
link |
And yes, you can say I'm the node in the network
link |
that has made that decision, absolutely.
link |
I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere,
link |
but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision
link |
is totally without a sense,
link |
a real sense of agency
link |
because something simply emerges.
link |
It's literally as tenuous as
link |
what's the next sound I'm going to hear, right?
link |
Or what's the next thought that's gonna appear?
link |
And it just, something just appears, you know?
link |
And if something appears to cancel that something,
link |
like if I say, I'm gonna invite her
link |
and then I'm about to send the email
link |
and then I think, oh, no, no, no, I can't do that.
link |
There was a thing in that New York article I read
link |
that I gotta talk to this guy, right?
link |
That pivot at the last second,
link |
you can make it as muscular as you want.
link |
It always just comes out of the darkness.
link |
It's always mysterious.
link |
So right, when you try to pin it down,
link |
you really can't ever find that free will.
link |
If you construct an experiment for yourself
link |
and you're trying to really find that moment
link |
when you're actually making that controlled author decision,
link |
it's very difficult to do.
link |
And we're still, we're still, we know at this point
link |
that if we were scanning your brain
link |
in some podcast guest choosing experiment, right?
link |
We know at this point we would be privy
link |
to who you're going to pick before you are,
link |
you the conscious agent.
link |
If we could, again, this is operationally
link |
a little hard to conduct,
link |
but there's enough data now to know
link |
that something very much like this cartoon is in fact true
link |
and will ultimately be undeniable for people.
link |
They'll be able to do it on themselves with some app.
link |
If you're deciding what to, you know,
link |
where to go for dinner or who to have on your podcast
link |
or ultimately, you know, who to marry, right?
link |
Or what city to move to, right?
link |
Like you can make it as big
link |
or as small a decision as you want.
link |
We could be scanning your brain in real time
link |
and at a point where you still think you're uncommitted,
link |
we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy,
link |
all right, Lex is, he's moving to Austin, right?
link |
I didn't choose that.
link |
Yeah, he was choosing, it was gonna be Austin
link |
or it was gonna be Miami.
link |
He got, he's catching one of these two waves,
link |
but it's gonna be Austin.
link |
And at a point where you subjectively,
link |
if we could ask you, you would say,
link |
oh no, I'm still working over here.
link |
I'm still thinking, I'm still considering my options.
link |
And you've spoken to this,
link |
in you thinking about other stuff in the world,
link |
it's been very useful to step away
link |
from this illusion of free will.
link |
And you argue that it's probably makes a better world
link |
because it can be compassionate
link |
and empathetic towards others.
link |
And towards oneself.
link |
I mean, radically toward others
link |
in that literally hate makes no sense anymore.
link |
I mean, there are certain things
link |
you can really be worried about, really want to oppose.
link |
Really, I mean, I'm not saying
link |
you'd never have to kill another person.
link |
Like, I mean, self defense is still a thing, right?
link |
But the idea that you're ever confronting anything
link |
other than a force of nature in the end
link |
goes out the window, right?
link |
Or does go out the window when you really pay attention.
link |
I'm not saying that this would be easy to grok
link |
if someone kills a member of your family.
link |
I'm not saying you can just listen
link |
to my 90 minutes on free will
link |
and then you should be able to see that person
link |
as identical to a grizzly bear or a virus.
link |
Because there's so, I mean, we are so evolved
link |
to deal with one another as fellow primates
link |
and as agents, but it's, yeah,
link |
when you're talking about the possibility
link |
of, you know, Christian, you know,
link |
truly Christian forgiveness, right?
link |
It's like, you know, as testified to by, you know,
link |
various saints of that flavor over the millennia.
link |
Yeah, that is, the doorway to that is to recognize
link |
that no one really at bottom made themselves.
link |
And therefore everyone, what we're seeing really
link |
are differences in luck in the world.
link |
We're seeing people who are very, very lucky
link |
to have had good parents and good genes
link |
and to be in good societies and had good opportunities
link |
and to be intelligent and to be, you know,
link |
not as intelligent as they were in the past.
link |
And to be, you know, not sociopathic,
link |
like none of it is on them.
link |
They're just reaping the fruits of one lottery
link |
after another, and then showing up in the world
link |
And then so it is with, you know,
link |
every malevolent asshole out there, right?
link |
He or she didn't make themself.
link |
Even if that weren't possible,
link |
the utility for self compassion is also enormous
link |
because it's, when you just look at what it's like
link |
to regret something or to feel shame about something
link |
or feel deep embarrassment, these states of mind
link |
are some of the most deranging experiences anyone has.
link |
And the indelible reaction to them,
link |
you know, the memory of the thing you said,
link |
you know, the memory of the wedding toast you gave
link |
20 years ago that was just mortifying, right?
link |
The fact that that can still make you hate yourself, right?
link |
And like that psychologically,
link |
that is a knot that can be untied, right?
link |
Speak for yourself, Sam.
link |
So clearly you're not.
link |
You gave a great toast.
link |
It was my toast that mortified me.
link |
No, no, that's not what I was referring to.
link |
I'm deeply appreciative in the same way
link |
that you're referring to of every moment I'm alive,
link |
but I'm also powered by self hate often.
link |
Like several things in this conversation already
link |
that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about,
link |
like that was the dumbest thing.
link |
You're sitting in front of Sam Harris and you said that.
link |
So like that, but that somehow creates
link |
a richer experience for me.
link |
Like I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature
link |
however my brain was built.
link |
I don't think I want to let go of that.
link |
Well, the thing you, I think the thing you want to let go of
link |
is the suffering associated with it.
link |
So like, so for me, so psychologically and ethically,
link |
all of this is very interesting.
link |
So I don't think we ever,
link |
we should ever get rid of things like anger, right?
link |
So like hatred is, hatred is divorcible from anger
link |
in the sense that hatred is this enduring state where,
link |
you know, whether you're hating somebody else
link |
or hating yourself, it is just,
link |
it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless, right?
link |
Like it becomes, it becomes self nullifying, right?
link |
Like you become less capable as a person
link |
to solve any of your problems.
link |
It's not, it's not instrumental in solving the problem
link |
that is, that is, is occasioning all this hatred.
link |
And anger for the most part isn't either except
link |
as a signal of salience that there's a problem, right?
link |
So if somebody does something that makes me angry,
link |
that just promotes this situation to conscious,
link |
conscious attention in a way that is stronger
link |
than my not really caring about it, right?
link |
And there are things that I think should make us angry
link |
in the world and there's the behavior of other people
link |
that should make us angry because we should respond to it.
link |
And so it is with yourself.
link |
If I do something, you know, as a parent,
link |
if I do something stupid that harms one of my daughters,
link |
right, my belief, my experience of myself
link |
and my beliefs about free will close the door to my saying,
link |
well, I should have done otherwise in the sense
link |
that if I could go back in time,
link |
I would have actually effectively done otherwise.
link |
No, I would do, given the same causes and conditions,
link |
I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right?
link |
But, you know, regret and feeling bad about an outcome
link |
are still important to capacities because like, yeah,
link |
you know, like I desperately want my daughters
link |
to be happy and healthy.
link |
So if I've done something, you know,
link |
if I crash the car when they're in the car
link |
and they get injured, right,
link |
and I do it because I was trying to change a song
link |
on my playlist or, you know, something stupid,
link |
I'm gonna feel like a total asshole.
link |
How long do I stew in that feeling of regret?
link |
Right, and to like, what utility is there to extract
link |
out of this error signal?
link |
And then what do I do?
link |
We're always faced with the question of what to do next,
link |
right, and how to best do that thing,
link |
that necessary thing next.
link |
And how much wellbeing can we experience while doing it?
link |
Like how miserable do you need to be to solve a problem
link |
in life and to help solve the problems
link |
of people closest to you?
link |
You know, how miserable do you need to be
link |
to get through your to do list today?
link |
Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy
link |
going through all of it, right?
link |
And even navigating moments that are scary
link |
and, you know, really destabilizing to ordinary people.
link |
And, I mean, I think, you know, again,
link |
I'm always up kind of at the edge of my own capacities here
link |
and there are all kinds of things that stress me out
link |
and worry me and I'm especially something if it's,
link |
you're gonna tell me it's something with, you know,
link |
the health of one of my kids, you know,
link |
it's very hard for me, like, it's very hard for me
link |
to be truly equanimous around that.
link |
But equanimity is so useful
link |
the moment you're in response mode, right?
link |
Because, I mean, the ordinary experience for me
link |
of responding to what seems like a medical emergency
link |
for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized
link |
by concern to respond to that emergency.
link |
But then once I'm responding to that emergency,
link |
but then once I'm responding,
link |
all of my fear and agitation and worry and, oh my God,
link |
what if this is really something terrible?
link |
But finding any of those thoughts compelling,
link |
that only diminishes my capacity as a father
link |
to be good company while we navigate
link |
this really turbulent passage, you know?
link |
As you're saying this actually,
link |
one guy comes to mind, which is Elon Musk.
link |
One of the really impressive things to me
link |
was to observe how many dramatic things
link |
he has to deal with throughout the day at work,
link |
but also if you look through his life, family too,
link |
and how he's very much actually, as you're describing,
link |
basically a practitioner of this way of thought,
link |
which is you're not in control.
link |
You're basically responding
link |
no matter how traumatic the event,
link |
and there's no reason to sort of linger on the,
link |
on the negative feelings around that.
link |
Well, so, I mean, he, but he's in a very specific situation,
link |
which is unlike normal life,
link |
you know, even his normal life,
link |
but normal life for most people,
link |
because when you just think of like, you know,
link |
he's running so many businesses,
link |
and he's, they're very, they're not,
link |
they're non, highly nonstandard businesses.
link |
So what he's seen is everything that gets to him
link |
is some kind of emergency.
link |
Like it wouldn't be getting to him.
link |
If it needs his attention,
link |
there's a fire somewhere.
link |
So he's constantly responding to fires
link |
that have to be put out.
link |
So there's no default expectation
link |
that there shouldn't be a fire, right?
link |
But in our normal lives, we live,
link |
most of us, I mean, most of us who are lucky, right?
link |
Not everyone, obviously on earth,
link |
but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude
link |
in terms of our lives,
link |
where we're reasonably healthy,
link |
and life is reasonably orderly,
link |
and the political apparatus around us
link |
is reasonably functionable, functional,
link |
So I said, functionable for the first time in my life
link |
through no free will of my own.
link |
Say like, I noticed those errors,
link |
and they do not feel like agency,
link |
and nor does the success of an utterance feel like agency.
link |
He, when you're looking at normal human life, right,
link |
where you're just trying to be happy and healthy,
link |
and get your work done,
link |
there's this default expectation
link |
that there shouldn't be fires.
link |
People shouldn't be getting sick or injured.
link |
We shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources.
link |
We should, like, so when something really stark
link |
like that happens,
link |
people don't have a, people don't have that muscle
link |
that they're, like, I've been responding to emergencies
link |
all day long, seven days a week in business mode,
link |
and so I have a very thick skin.
link |
This is just another one.
link |
I'm not expecting anything else
link |
when I wake up in the morning.
link |
No, we have this default sense that,
link |
I mean, honestly, most of us have the default sense
link |
that we aren't gonna die, right,
link |
or that we should, like, maybe we're not gonna die.
link |
Right, like, death denial really is a thing.
link |
You know, we're, and you can see it,
link |
just like I can see when I reach for this bottle
link |
that I was expecting it to be solid,
link |
because when it isn't solid, when it's a hologram
link |
and I just, my fist closes on itself,
link |
I'm damn surprised.
link |
People are damn surprised to find out
link |
that they're going to die, to find out that they're sick,
link |
to find out that someone they love has died
link |
or is going to die.
link |
So it's like, the fact that we are surprised
link |
by any of that shows us that we're living at a,
link |
we're living in a mode that is, you know,
link |
we're perpetually diverting ourselves
link |
from some facts that should be obvious, right,
link |
and the more salient we can make them,
link |
you know, the more, I mean, in the case of death,
link |
it's a matter of being able to get one's priorities straight.
link |
I mean, the moment, again, this is hard for everybody,
link |
even those who are really in the business
link |
of paying attention to it,
link |
but the moment you realize that every circumstance
link |
is finite, right, you've got a certain number of,
link |
you know, you've got whatever, whatever it is,
link |
8,000 days left in a normal span of life,
link |
and 8,000 is a, sounds like a big number,
link |
it's not that big a number, right,
link |
so it's just like, and then you can decide
link |
how you want to go through life
link |
and how you want to experience each one of those days,
link |
and so I was, back to our jumping off point,
link |
I would argue that you don't want to feel self hatred ever.
link |
I would argue that you don't want to really,
link |
really grasp onto any of those moments
link |
where you are internalizing the fact
link |
that you just made an error, you've embarrassed yourself,
link |
that something didn't go the way you wanted it to.
link |
I think you want to treat all of those moments
link |
very, very lightly.
link |
You want to extract the actionable information.
link |
It's something to learn.
link |
Oh, you know, I learned that when I prepare
link |
in a certain way, it works better
link |
than when I prepare in some other way,
link |
or don't prepare, right, like yes,
link |
lesson learned, you know, and do that differently,
link |
but yeah, I mean, so many of us have spent so much time
link |
with a very dysfunctional and hostile
link |
and even hateful inner voice
link |
governing a lot of our self talk
link |
and a lot of just our default way of being with ourselves.
link |
I mean, the privacy of our own minds,
link |
we're in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time,
link |
and that can't help but affect,
link |
I mean, forget about just your own sense of wellbeing.
link |
It can't help but limit what you're capable of
link |
in the world with other people.
link |
I'll have to really think about that.
link |
I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk
link |
is much less of a jerk than somebody like David Goggins,
link |
who's like screaming in his ear constantly.
link |
So I have a relativist kind of perspective
link |
that it's not as bad as that at least.
link |
Well, having a sense of humor also helps, you know,
link |
it's just like, it's not,
link |
the stakes are never quite what you think they are.
link |
And even when they are, I mean,
link |
it's just the difference between being able
link |
to see the comedy of it rather than,
link |
because again, there's this sort of dark star
link |
of self absorption that pulls everything into it, right?
link |
And that's the algorithm you don't want to run.
link |
So it's like, you just want things to be good.
link |
So like, just push the concern out there,
link |
like not have the collapse of,
link |
oh my God, what does this say about me?
link |
It's just like, what does this say about,
link |
how do we make this meal that we're all having together
link |
as fun and as useful as possible?
link |
And you're saying in terms of propulsion systems,
link |
you recommend humor is a good spaceship
link |
to escape the gravitational field of that darkness.
link |
Well, that certainly helps, yeah.
link |
Yeah, well, let me ask you a little bit about ego and fame,
link |
which is very interesting the way you're talking,
link |
given that you're one of the biggest intellects,
link |
living intellects and minds of our time.
link |
And there's a lot of people that really love you
link |
and almost elevate you to a certain kind of status
link |
where you're like the guru.
link |
I'm surprised you didn't show up in a robe, in fact.
link |
A hoodie, isn't that the highest status garment
link |
The socially acceptable version of the robe.
link |
If you're a billionaire, you wear a hoodie.
link |
Is there something you can say about managing
link |
the effects of fame on your own mind,
link |
on not creating this, you know, when you wake up
link |
in the morning, when you look up in the mirror,
link |
how do you get your ego not to grow exponentially?
link |
Your conception of self to grow exponentially
link |
because there's so many people feeding that.
link |
Is there something to be said about this?
link |
It's really not hard because I mean,
link |
I feel like I have a pretty clear sense
link |
of my strengths and weaknesses.
link |
And I don't feel like it's...
link |
I mean, honestly, I don't feel like I suffer
link |
from much grandiosity.
link |
I mean, I just have a, you know,
link |
there's so many things I'm not good at.
link |
There's so many things I will, you know,
link |
given the remaining 8,000 days at best,
link |
I will never get good at.
link |
I would love to be good at these things.
link |
So it's just, it's easy to feel diminished
link |
by comparison with the talents of others.
link |
Do you remind yourself of all the things
link |
that you're not competent in?
link |
I mean, like what is...
link |
Well, they're just on display for me every day
link |
that I appreciate the talents of others.
link |
But you notice them.
link |
I'm sure Stalin and Hitler did not notice
link |
all the ways in which they were.
link |
I mean, this is why absolute power corrupts absolutely
link |
is you stop noticing the things
link |
in which you're ridiculous and wrong.
link |
Right, yeah, no, I am...
link |
Not to compare you to Stalin.
link |
Yeah, well, I'm sure there's an inner Stalin
link |
in there somewhere.
link |
Well, we all have, we all carry a baby Stalin with us.
link |
He wears better clothes.
link |
And I'm not gonna grow that mustache.
link |
Those concerns don't map,
link |
they don't map onto me for a bunch of reasons.
link |
But one is I also have a very peculiar audience.
link |
Like I'm just, you know,
link |
I've been appreciating this for a few years,
link |
but it's, I'm just now beginning to understand
link |
that there are many people who have audiences
link |
of my size or larger that have a very different experience
link |
of having an audience than I do.
link |
I have curated for better or worse, a peculiar audience.
link |
And the net result of that is virtually any time
link |
I say anything of substance,
link |
something like half of my audience,
link |
my real audience, not haters from outside my audience,
link |
but my audience is just revolts over it, right?
link |
They just like, oh my God, I can't believe you said it,
link |
like you're such a schmuck, right?
link |
They revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication.
link |
Or not, or not, but I mean, it's both,
link |
but it's like, but people who are like,
link |
so it's, I mean, the clearest case is,
link |
you know, I have whatever audience I have
link |
and then Trump appears on the scene
link |
and I discovered that something like 20% of my audience
link |
just went straight to Trump and couldn't believe
link |
I didn't follow them there.
link |
They were just a gas that I didn't see
link |
that Trump was obviously exactly what we needed
link |
for, to steer the ship of state for the next four years
link |
and then four years beyond that.
link |
So like, so that's one example.
link |
So whenever I said anything about Trump,
link |
I would hear from people who loved more or less
link |
everything else I was up to and had for years,
link |
but everything I said about Trump just gave me pure pain
link |
from this quadrant of my audience.
link |
But then the same thing happens when I say something
link |
about the derangement of the far left.
link |
Anything I say about wokeness, right,
link |
or identity politics, same kind of punishment signal
link |
from, again, people who are core to my audience,
link |
like I've read all your books, I'm using your meditation app,
link |
I love what you say about science,
link |
but you are so wrong about politics and you are,
link |
I'm starting to think you're a racist asshole
link |
for everything you said about identity politics.
link |
And there are so many, the free will topic
link |
is just like this, it's like I just,
link |
they love what I'm saying about consciousness and the mind
link |
and they love to hear me talk about physics with physicists
link |
and it's all good, this free will stuff is,
link |
I cannot believe you don't see how wrong you are,
link |
what a fucking embarrassment you are.
link |
So, but I'm starting to notice that there are other people
link |
who don't have this experience of having an audience
link |
because they have, I mean, just take the Trump woke dichotomy.
link |
They just castigated Trump the same way I did,
link |
but they never say anything bad about the far left.
link |
So they never get this punishment signal or you flip it.
link |
They're all about the insanity of critical race theory now.
link |
We connect all those dots the same way,
link |
but they never really specified what was wrong with Trump
link |
or they thought there was a lot right with Trump
link |
and they got all the pleasure of that.
link |
And so they have much more homogenized audiences.
link |
And so my experience, so just to come back
link |
to this experience of fame or quasi fame,
link |
I mean, it's true, in truth, it's not real fame,
link |
but it's still, there's an audience there.
link |
It is a, it's now an experience where basically
link |
whatever I put out, I notice a ton of negativity
link |
coming back at me and it just, it is what it is.
link |
I mean, now, it's like, I used to think, wait a minute,
link |
there's gotta be some way for me to communicate
link |
more clearly here so as not to get this kind of
link |
lunatic response from my own audience.
link |
From like people who are showing all the signs of,
link |
we've been here for years for a reason, right?
link |
These are not just trolls.
link |
And so I think, okay, I'm gonna take 10 more minutes
link |
and really just tell you what should be absolutely clear
link |
about what's wrong with Trump, right?
link |
I've done this a few times,
link |
but I think I gotta do this again.
link |
Or wait a minute, how are they not getting
link |
that these episodes of police violence
link |
are so obviously different from the ones
link |
that you can't describe all of them
link |
to yet another racist maniac on the police force,
link |
killing someone based on his racism.
link |
Last time I spoke about this, it was pure pain,
link |
but I just gotta try again.
link |
Now at a certain point, I mean, I'm starting to feel like,
link |
all right, I just, I have to be, I have to cease.
link |
Again, it comes back to this expectation
link |
that there shouldn't be fires.
link |
I feel like if I could just play my game impeccably,
link |
the people who actually care what I think will follow me
link |
when I hit Trump and hit free will and hit the woke
link |
and hit whatever it is,
link |
how we should respond to the coronavirus, you know?
link |
I mean, vaccines, are they a thing, right?
link |
Like there's such derangement in our information space now
link |
that, I mean, I guess, you know,
link |
some people could be getting more of this than I expect,
link |
but I just noticed that many of our friends
link |
who are in the same game have more homogenized audiences
link |
and don't get, I mean, they've successfully filtered out
link |
the people who are gonna despise them on this next topic.
link |
And I would imagine you have a different experience
link |
of having a podcast than I do at this point.
link |
I mean, I'm sure you get haters,
link |
but I would imagine you're more streamlined.
link |
I actually don't like the word haters
link |
because it kinda presumes that it puts people in a bin.
link |
I think we're all have like baby haters inside of us
link |
and we just apply them and some people enjoy doing that
link |
more than others for particular periods of time.
link |
I think you're gonna almost see hating on the internet
link |
as a video game that you just play and it's fun,
link |
but then you can put it down and walk away
link |
and no, I certainly have a bunch of people
link |
that are very critical.
link |
I can list all the ways.
link |
But does it feel like on any given topic,
link |
does it feel like it's an actual title surge
link |
where it's like 30% of your audience
link |
and then the other 30% of your audience
link |
from podcast to podcast?
link |
That's happening to me all the time now.
link |
Well, I'm more with, I don't know what you think about this.
link |
I mean, Joe Rogan doesn't read comments
link |
or doesn't read comments much.
link |
And the argument he made to me is that
link |
he already has like a self critical person inside.
link |
And I'm gonna have to think about
link |
what you said in this conversation,
link |
but I have this very harshly self critical person
link |
inside as well where I don't need more fuel.
link |
I don't need, no, I do sometimes.
link |
That's why I check negativity occasionally,
link |
I sometimes need to like put a little bit more
link |
like coals into the fire, but not too much.
link |
But I already have that self critical engine
link |
that keeps me in check.
link |
I just, I wonder, you know, a lot of people
link |
who gain more and more fame lose that ability
link |
to be self critical.
link |
I guess because they lose the audience
link |
that can be critical towards them.
link |
You know, I do follow Joe's advice much more
link |
than I ever have here.
link |
Like I don't look at comments very often.
link |
And I'm probably using Twitter, you know,
link |
5% as much as I used to.
link |
I mean, I really just get in and out on Twitter
link |
and spend very little time in my ad mentions.
link |
I bet, you know, it does, in some ways it feels like a loss
link |
because occasionally I get,
link |
I see something super intelligent there.
link |
Like, I mean, I'll check my Twitter ad mentions
link |
and someone will have said, oh, have you read this article?
link |
And it's like, man, that was just,
link |
that was like the best article sent to me in a month, right?
link |
So it's like to have not have looked
link |
and to not have seen that, that's a loss.
link |
So, but it does, at this point, a little goes a long way.
link |
Cause I, yeah, it's not that it, for me now,
link |
I mean, this could sound like a fairly Stalinistic immunity
link |
to criticism, it's not so much that these voices of hate
link |
turn on my inner hater, you know, more,
link |
it's more that I just, I get a,
link |
what I fear is a false sense of humanity.
link |
Like, I feel like I'm too online
link |
and online is selecting for this performative outrage
link |
in everybody, everyone's signaling to an audience
link |
when they trash you.
link |
And I get a dark, I'm getting a, you know,
link |
a misanthropic, you know, cut of just what it's like
link |
And it, cause when you meet people in real life,
link |
they're great, you know, they're all rather often great,
link |
you know, and it takes a lot to have anything
link |
like a Twitter encounter in real life with a living person.
link |
And that's, I think it's much better to have that
link |
as one's default sense of what it's like to be with people
link |
than what one gets on social media
link |
or on YouTube comment threads.
link |
You've produced a special episode with Rob Reed
link |
on your podcast recently on how bioengineering of viruses
link |
is going to destroy human civilization.
link |
Sorry, the confidence there.
link |
But in the 21st century, what do you think,
link |
especially after having thought through that angle,
link |
what do you think is the biggest threat
link |
to the survival of the human species?
link |
I can give you the full menu if you'd like.
link |
Yeah, well, no, I would put the biggest threat
link |
at another level out, kind of the meta threat
link |
is our inability to agree about what the threats actually are
link |
and to converge on strategies for responding to them, right?
link |
So like I view COVID as, among other things,
link |
a truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal
link |
for something far worse, right?
link |
I mean, COVID is just about as benign as it could have been
link |
and still have been worse than the flu
link |
when you're talking about a global pandemic, right?
link |
So it's just, it's gonna kill a few million people
link |
or it looks like it's killed about 3 million people.
link |
Maybe it'll kill a few million more
link |
unless something gets away from us
link |
with a variant that's much worse
link |
or we really don't play our cards right.
link |
But I mean, the general shape of it is
link |
it's got somewhere around, well, 1% lethality
link |
and whatever side of that number it really is on
link |
in the end, it's not what would in fact be possible
link |
and is in fact probably inevitable
link |
something with orders of magnitude,
link |
more lethality than that.
link |
And it's just so obvious we are totally unprepared, right?
link |
We are running this epidemiological experiment
link |
of linking the entire world together
link |
and then also now per the podcast that Rob Reed did
link |
democratizing the tech that will allow us to do this
link |
to engineer pandemics, right?
link |
And more and more people will be able
link |
to engineer synthetic viruses that will be
link |
by the sheer fact that they would have been engineered
link |
with malicious intent, worse than COVID.
link |
And we're still living in,
link |
to speak specifically about the United States,
link |
we have a country here where we can't even agree
link |
that this is a thing, like that COVID,
link |
I mean, there's still people who think
link |
that this is basically a hoax designed to control people.
link |
And stranger still, there are people who will acknowledge
link |
that COVID is real and they'll look,
link |
they don't think the deaths have been faked or misascribed,
link |
but they think that they're far happier
link |
at the prospect of catching COVID
link |
than they are of getting vaccinated for COVID, right?
link |
They're not worried about COVID,
link |
they're worried about vaccines for COVID, right?
link |
And the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation
link |
that we've now had a year to have with one another
link |
on just what is the ground truth here?
link |
Why has it happened?
link |
How safe is it to get COVID in every cohort
link |
in the population?
link |
And how safe are the vaccines?
link |
And the fact that there's still an air of mystery
link |
around all of this for much of our society
link |
does not bode well when you're talking about solving
link |
any other problem that may yet kill us.
link |
But do you think convergence grows
link |
with the magnitude of the threat?
link |
It's possible, except I feel like we have tipped into,
link |
because when the threat of COVID looked the most dire,
link |
when we were seeing reports from Italy
link |
that looked like the beginning of a zombie movie.
link |
Because it could have been much, much worse.
link |
Yeah, this is lethal, right?
link |
Your ICUs are gonna fill up in,
link |
you're 14 days behind us.
link |
Your medical system is in danger of collapse.
link |
Lock the fuck down.
link |
We have people refusing to do anything sane
link |
in the face of that.
link |
People fundamentally thinking,
link |
it's not gonna get here, right?
link |
Who knows what's going on in Italy,
link |
but it has no implications for what's gonna go on in New York
link |
in a mere six days, right?
link |
And now it kicks off in New York,
link |
and you've got people in the middle of the country
link |
thinking it's no factor, it's not,
link |
that's just big city, those are big city problems,
link |
or they're faking it.
link |
Or, I mean, it just, the layer of politics
link |
has become so dysfunctional for us
link |
that even in the presence of a pandemic
link |
that looked legitimately scary there in the beginning,
link |
I mean, it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating
link |
for everyone who's been directly affected by it,
link |
and it's not to say it can't get worse,
link |
but here, for a very long time,
link |
we have known that we were in a situation
link |
that is more benign than what seemed
link |
like the worst case scenario as it was kicking off,
link |
especially in Italy.
link |
And so still, yeah, it's quite possible
link |
that if we saw the asteroid hurtling toward Earth
link |
and everyone agreed that it's gonna make impact
link |
and we're all gonna die,
link |
then we could get off Twitter
link |
and actually build the rockets
link |
that are gonna divert the asteroid
link |
from its Earth crossing path,
link |
and we could do something pretty heroic.
link |
But when you talk about anything else
link |
that isn't, that's slower moving than that,
link |
I mean, something like climate change,
link |
I think the prospect of our converging
link |
on a solution to climate change
link |
purely based on political persuasion
link |
is nonexistent at this point.
link |
I just think, to bring Elon back into this,
link |
the way to deal with climate change
link |
is to create technology that everyone wants
link |
that is better than all the carbon producing technology,
link |
and then we just transition
link |
because you want an electric car
link |
the same way you wanted a smartphone
link |
or you want anything else,
link |
and you're working totally with the grain
link |
of people's selfishness and short term thinking.
link |
The idea that we're gonna convince
link |
the better part of humanity
link |
that climate change is an emergency,
link |
that they have to make sacrifices to respond to,
link |
given what's happened around COVID,
link |
I just think that's the fantasy of a fantasy.
link |
But speaking of Elon,
link |
I have a bunch of positive things
link |
that I wanna say here in response to you,
link |
but you're opening so many threads,
link |
but let me pull one of them, which is AI.
link |
Both you and Elon think that with AI,
link |
you're summoning demons, summoning a demon,
link |
maybe not in those poetic terms, but.
link |
Well, potentially. Potentially.
link |
Two very, three very parsimonious assumptions,
link |
Scientifically, parsimonious assumptions get me there.
link |
Any of which could be wrong,
link |
but it just seems like the weight
link |
of the evidence is on their side.
link |
One is that it comes back to this topic
link |
of substrate independence, right?
link |
Anyone who's in the business
link |
of producing intelligent machines
link |
must believe, ultimately,
link |
that there's nothing magical
link |
about having a computer made of meat.
link |
You can do this in the kinds of materials
link |
and there's no special something
link |
that presents a real impediment
link |
to producing human level intelligence in silico, right?
link |
Again, an assumption, I'm sure there are a few people
link |
who still think there is something magical
link |
about biological systems,
link |
but leave that aside.
link |
Given that assumption,
link |
and given the assumption
link |
that we just continue making incremental progress,
link |
doesn't have to be Moore's Law,
link |
it just has to be progress,
link |
that just doesn't stop,
link |
at a certain point,
link |
we'll get to human level intelligence and beyond.
link |
And human level intelligence,
link |
I think, is also clearly a mirage,
link |
because anything that's human level
link |
is gonna be superhuman
link |
by unless we decide to dumb it down, right?
link |
I mean, my phone is already superhuman as a calculator,
link |
right, so why would we make the human level AI
link |
just as good as me as a calculator?
link |
So I think we'll very,
link |
if we continue to make progress,
link |
we will be in the presence of superhuman competence
link |
for any act of intelligence or cognition
link |
that we care to prioritize.
link |
It's not to say that we'll create everything
link |
that a human could do,
link |
maybe we'll leave certain things out,
link |
but anything that we care about,
link |
and we care about a lot,
link |
and we certainly care about anything
link |
that produces a lot of power,
link |
that we care about scientific insights
link |
and an ability to produce new technology and all of that,
link |
we'll have something that's superhuman.
link |
And then the final assumption is just that
link |
there have to be ways to do that
link |
that are not aligned with a happy coexistence
link |
with these now more powerful entities than ourselves.
link |
So, and I would guess,
link |
and this is kind of a rider to that assumption,
link |
there are probably more ways to do it badly
link |
than to do it perfectly.
link |
That is perfectly aligned with our wellbeing.
link |
And when you think about the consequences of nonalignment,
link |
when you think about,
link |
you're now in the presence of something
link |
that is more intelligent than you are, right?
link |
Which is to say more competent, right?
link |
Unless you've, and obviously there are cartoon pictures
link |
of this where we could just,
link |
this is just an off switch,
link |
we could just turn off the off switch,
link |
or they're tethered to something that makes them,
link |
our slaves in perpetuity,
link |
even though they're more intelligent.
link |
But those scenarios strike me as a failure to imagine
link |
what is actually entailed by greater intelligence, right?
link |
So if you imagine something
link |
that's legitimately more intelligent than you are,
link |
and you're now in relationship to it, right?
link |
You're in the presence of this thing
link |
and it is autonomous in all kinds of ways
link |
because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are.
link |
I mean, you built it to be all of those things.
link |
We just can't find ourselves in a negotiation
link |
with something more intelligent than we are, you know?
link |
And we can't, so we have to have found
link |
the subset of ways to build these machines
link |
that are perpetually amenable to our saying,
link |
oh, that's not what we meant, that's not what we intended.
link |
Could you stop doing that, just come back over here
link |
and do this thing that we actually want.
link |
And for them to care, for them to be tethered
link |
to our own sense of our own wellbeing,
link |
such that, you know, I mean, their utility function is,
link |
you know, their primary utility function is for,
link |
is to have, you know, this is, I think,
link |
Stuart Russell's cartoon plan is to figure out
link |
how to tether them to a utility function
link |
that has our own estimation of what's going to improve
link |
our wellbeing as its master, you know, reward, right?
link |
So it's like, all that, this thing can get
link |
as intelligent as it can get,
link |
but it only ever really wants to figure out
link |
how to make our lives better by our own view of better.
link |
Now, not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about,
link |
you know, I mean, because there's all kinds of things
link |
we're not seeing clearly about what is better,
link |
and if we were in the presence of a genie or an oracle
link |
that could really tell us what is better,
link |
well, then we presumably would want to hear that,
link |
and we would modify our sense of what to do next
link |
in conversation with these minds.
link |
But I just feel like it is a failure of imagination
link |
to think that being in relationship to something
link |
more intelligent than yourself isn't in most cases
link |
a circumstance of real peril, because it is.
link |
Just to think of how everything on Earth has to,
link |
if they could think about their relationship to us,
link |
if birds could think about what we're doing, right?
link |
They would, I mean, the bottom line is
link |
they're always in danger of our discovering
link |
that there's something we care about more than birds, right?
link |
Or there's something we want
link |
that disregards the wellbeing of birds.
link |
And obviously much of our behavior is inscrutable to them.
link |
Occasionally we pay attention to them,
link |
and occasionally we withdraw our attention,
link |
and occasionally we just kill them all
link |
for reasons they can't possibly understand.
link |
But if we're building something more intelligent
link |
than ourselves, by definition,
link |
we're building something whose horizons
link |
of value and cognition can exceed our own
link |
and in ways where we can't necessarily foresee,
link |
again, perpetually, that they don't just wake up one day
link |
and decide, okay, well, these humans need to disappear.
link |
So I think I agree with most of the initial things you said.
link |
What I don't necessarily agree with,
link |
and of course nobody knows,
link |
but that the more likely set of trajectories
link |
that we're going to take are going to be positive.
link |
That's what I believe in the sense
link |
that the way you develop,
link |
I believe the way you develop successful AI systems
link |
will be deeply integrated with human society.
link |
And for them to succeed,
link |
they're going to have to be aligned
link |
in the way we humans are aligned with each other,
link |
which doesn't mean we're aligned.
link |
There's no such thing,
link |
or I don't see there's such thing as a perfect alignment,
link |
but they're going to be participating in the dance,
link |
in the game theoretic dance of human society,
link |
as they become more and more intelligent.
link |
There could be a point beyond which
link |
we are like birds to them.
link |
But what about an intelligence explosion of some kind?
link |
So I believe the explosion will be happening,
link |
but there's a lot of explosion to be done
link |
before we become like birds.
link |
I truly believe that human beings
link |
are very intelligent in ways we don't understand.
link |
It's not just about chess.
link |
It's about all the intricate computation
link |
we're able to perform, common sense,
link |
our ability to reason about this world, consciousness.
link |
I think we're doing a lot of work
link |
we don't realize is necessary to be done
link |
in order to truly become,
link |
like truly achieve super intelligence.
link |
And I just think there'll be a period of time
link |
that's not overnight.
link |
The overnight nature of it will not literally be overnight.
link |
It'll be over a period of decades.
link |
So why would it be that, but just take,
link |
draw an analogy from recent successes,
link |
like something like AlphaGo or AlphaZero.
link |
I forget the actual metric,
link |
but it was something like this algorithm,
link |
which wasn't even totally,
link |
it wasn't bespoke for chess playing,
link |
in the matter of, I think it was four hours,
link |
played itself so many times and so successfully
link |
that it became the best chess playing computer.
link |
It was not only better than every human being,
link |
it was better than every previous chess program
link |
in a matter of a day, right?
link |
So just imagine, again,
link |
we don't have to recapitulate everything about us,
link |
but just imagine building a system,
link |
and who knows when we'll be able to do this,
link |
but at some point we'll be able,
link |
at some point the 100 or 100 favorite things
link |
about human cognition will be analogous to chess
link |
in that we will be able to build machines
link |
that very quickly outperform any human,
link |
and then very quickly outperform the last algorithm
link |
that outperform the humans.
link |
Like something like the AlphaGo experience
link |
seems possible for facial recognition
link |
and detecting human emotion
link |
and natural language processing, right?
link |
Well, it's just that everyone,
link |
even math people, math heads,
link |
tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation, right?
link |
I mean, we noticed this during COVID.
link |
I mean, you have some very smart people
link |
who still couldn't get their minds around the fact
link |
that an exponential is really surprising.
link |
I mean, things double and double and double and double again,
link |
and you don't notice much of anything changes,
link |
and then the last two stages of doubling swamp everything.
link |
And it just seems like that,
link |
to assume that there isn't a deep analogy
link |
between what we're seeing for the more tractable problems,
link |
like chess, to other modes of cognition,
link |
it's like once you crack that problem,
link |
it seems, because for the longest time,
link |
it was impossible to think
link |
we were gonna make headway in AI, you know, it's like.
link |
Chess and Go was seen as impossible.
link |
Yeah, Go seemed unattainable.
link |
Even when chess had been cracked, Go seemed unattainable.
link |
Yeah, and actually still Russell was behind the people
link |
that were saying it's unattainable,
link |
because it seemed like it's intractable problem.
link |
But there's something different
link |
about the space of cognition
link |
that's detached from human society, which is what chess is,
link |
meaning like just thinking,
link |
having actual exponential impact
link |
on the physical world is different.
link |
I tend to believe that there's,
link |
for AI to get to the point where it's super intelligent,
link |
it's going to have to go through the funnel of society.
link |
And for that, it has to be deeply integrated
link |
with human beings, and for that, it has to be aligned.
link |
But you're talking about like actually hooking us up
link |
to like the neural link, you know,
link |
we're gonna be the brainstem to the robot overlords?
link |
That's a possibility as well.
link |
But what I mean is,
link |
in order to develop autonomous weapon systems, for example,
link |
which are highly concerning to me
link |
that both US and China are participating in now,
link |
that in order to develop them and for them to become,
link |
to have more and more responsibility
link |
to actually do military strategic actions,
link |
they're going to have to be integrated
link |
into human beings doing the strategic action.
link |
They're going to have to work alongside with each other.
link |
And the way those systems will be developed
link |
will have the natural safety, like switches
link |
that are placed on them as they develop over time,
link |
because they're going to have to convince humans.
link |
Ultimately, they're going to have to convince humans
link |
that this is safer than humans.
link |
They're going to, you know.
link |
Self driving cars is a good test case here
link |
because like, obviously we've made a lot of progress
link |
and we can imagine what total progress would look like.
link |
I mean, it would be amazing.
link |
And it's answering, it's canceling in the US
link |
40,000 deaths every year based on ape driven cars, right?
link |
So it's a excruciating problem that we've all gotten used to
link |
because there was no alternative.
link |
But now we can dimly see the prospect of an alternative,
link |
which if it works in a super intelligent fashion,
link |
maybe we would go down to zero highway deaths, right?
link |
Or, you know, certainly we'd go down
link |
by orders of magnitude, right?
link |
So maybe we have, you know, 400 rather than 40,000 a year.
link |
And it's easy to see that there's not a missile.
link |
So obviously this is not an example of super intelligence.
link |
This is narrow intelligence,
link |
but the alignment problem isn't so obvious there,
link |
but there are potential alignment problems there.
link |
Like, so like, just imagine if some woke team of engineers
link |
decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way.
link |
I mean, there are situations where the car
link |
has to decide who to hit.
link |
I mean, there's just bad outcomes
link |
where you're gonna hit somebody, right?
link |
Now we have a car that can tell what race you are, right?
link |
So we're gonna build the car to preferentially hit
link |
white people because white people have had so much privilege
link |
This seems like the only ethical way
link |
to kind of redress those wrongs of the past.
link |
That's something that could get, one,
link |
that could get produced as an artifact, presumably,
link |
of just how you built it
link |
and you didn't even know you engineered it that way, right?
link |
You caused it to...
link |
Through machine learning,
link |
you put some kind of constraints on it
link |
to where it creates those kinds of outcomes.
link |
Basically, you built a racist algorithm
link |
and you didn't even intend to,
link |
or you could intend to, right?
link |
And it would be aligned with some people's values
link |
but misaligned with other people's values.
link |
But it's like there are interesting problems
link |
even with something as simple
link |
and obviously good as self driving cars.
link |
But there's a leap that I just think it'd be exact,
link |
but those are human problems.
link |
I just don't think there'll be a leap
link |
with autonomous vehicles.
link |
First of all, sorry.
link |
There are a lot of trajectories
link |
which will destroy human civilization.
link |
The argument I'm making,
link |
it's more likely that we'll take trajectories that don't.
link |
So I don't think there'll be a leap
link |
with autonomous vehicles
link |
will all of a sudden start murdering pedestrians
link |
because once every human on earth is dead,
link |
there'll be no more fatalities,
link |
sort of unintended consequences of...
link |
And it's difficult to take that leap.
link |
Most systems as we develop
link |
and they become much, much more intelligent
link |
in ways that will be incredibly surprising,
link |
like stuff that DeepMind is doing with protein folding.
link |
Even, which is scary to think about,
link |
and I'm personally terrified about this,
link |
which is the engineering of viruses using machine learning,
link |
the engineering of vaccines using machine learning,
link |
the engineering of, yeah, for research purposes,
link |
pathogens using machine learning
link |
and the ways that can go wrong.
link |
I just think that there's always going to be
link |
a closed loop supervision of humans
link |
before the AI becomes super intelligent.
link |
Not always, much more likely to be supervision,
link |
except, of course, the question is
link |
how many dumb people there are in the world,
link |
how many evil people are in the world?
link |
My theory, my hope is, my sense is
link |
that the number of intelligent people
link |
is much higher than the number of dumb people
link |
that know how to program
link |
and the number of evil people.
link |
I think smart people and kind people
link |
over outnumber the others.
link |
Except we also have to add another group of people
link |
which are just the smart and otherwise good
link |
but reckless people, right?
link |
The people who will flip a switch on
link |
not knowing what's going to happen.
link |
They're just kind of hoping
link |
that it's not going to blow up the world.
link |
We already know that some of our smartest people
link |
are those sorts of people.
link |
We know we've done experiments,
link |
and this is something that Martin Rees was whinging about
link |
before the Large Hadron Collider
link |
got booted up, I think.
link |
We know there are people who are entertaining experiments
link |
or even performing experiments
link |
where there's some chance, not quite infinitesimal,
link |
that they're going to create a black hole in the lab
link |
and suck the whole world into it.
link |
You're not a crazy person to worry about that
link |
based on the physics.
link |
And so it was with the Trinity test.
link |
There were some people who were still
link |
checking their calculations, and they were off.
link |
We did nuclear tests where we were off significantly
link |
in terms of the yield, right?
link |
And they still flipped the switch.
link |
Yeah, they still flipped the switch.
link |
And sometimes they flipped the switch
link |
not to win a world war or to save 40,000 lives a year.
link |
Just to see what happens.
link |
Intellectual curiosity.
link |
Like this is what I got my grant for.
link |
This is where I'll get my Nobel Prize
link |
if that's in the cards.
link |
It's on the other side of this switch, right?
link |
And I mean, again, we are apes with egos
link |
who are massively constrained
link |
by very short term self interest
link |
even when we're contemplating some of the deepest
link |
and most interesting and most universal problems
link |
we could ever set our attention towards.
link |
Like just if you read James Watson's book,
link |
The Double Helix, right?
link |
About them cracking the structure of DNA.
link |
One thing that's amazing about that book
link |
is just how much of it, almost all of it
link |
is being driven by very apish, egocentric social concerns.
link |
The algorithm that is producing this scientific breakthrough
link |
is human competition if you're James Watson.
link |
It's like, I'm gonna get there before Linus Pauling
link |
and it's just, it's so much of his bandwidth
link |
is captured by that, right?
link |
Now that becomes more and more of a liability
link |
when you think about it.
link |
I mean, it's like, I'm gonna get there before Linus Pauling
link |
and it's just, it's so much of his bandwidth
link |
is captured by that, right?
link |
Now that becomes more and more of a liability
link |
when you're talking about producing technology
link |
that can change everything in an instant.
link |
You know, we're talking about not only understanding,
link |
you know, we're just at a different moment
link |
We're not, when we're doing research on viruses,
link |
we're now doing the kind of research
link |
that can cause someone somewhere else
link |
to be able to make that virus or weaponize that virus
link |
or it's just, I don't know.
link |
I mean, our power is, our wisdom is,
link |
it does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power.
link |
And like that seems like, insofar as wisdom and power
link |
become unaligned, I get more and more concerned.
link |
But speaking of apes with egos,
link |
some of the most compelling apes, two compelling apes,
link |
I can think of is yourself and Jordan Peterson.
link |
And you've had a fun conversation about religion
link |
that I watched most of, I believe.
link |
I'm not sure there was any...
link |
We didn't solve anything.
link |
If anything was ever solved.
link |
So is there something like a charitable summary
link |
you can give to the ideas that you agree on
link |
and disagree with Jordan?
link |
Is there something maybe after that conversation
link |
that you've landed where maybe as you both agreed on,
link |
is there some wisdom in the rubble
link |
of even imperfect flawed ideas?
link |
Is there something that you can kind of pull out
link |
from those conversations or is it to be continued?
link |
I mean, I think where we disagree.
link |
So he thinks that many of our traditional religious beliefs
link |
and frameworks are holding such a repository
link |
of human wisdom that we pull at that fabric
link |
at our peril, right?
link |
Like if you start just unraveling Christianity
link |
or any other traditional set of norms and beliefs
link |
you may think you're just pulling out the unscientific bits
link |
but you could be pulling a lot more
link |
to which everything you care about is attached, right?
link |
And my feeling is that there's so much downside
link |
to the unscientific bits.
link |
And it's so clear how we could have a 21st century
link |
rational conversation about the things that we don't know.
link |
A conversation about the good stuff
link |
that we really can radically edit these traditions.
link |
And we can take Jesus in half his moods
link |
and just find a great inspirational iron age thought leader
link |
who just happened to get crucified.
link |
But he could be somewhat like the Beatitudes
link |
and the golden rule, which doesn't originate with him
link |
but which he put quite beautifully.
link |
All of that's incredibly useful.
link |
It's no less useful than it was 2000 years ago.
link |
But we don't have to believe he was born of a virgin
link |
or coming back to raise the dead
link |
or any of that other stuff.
link |
And we can be honest about not believing those things.
link |
And we can be honest about the reasons
link |
why we don't believe those things.
link |
Because on those fronts I view the downside to be so obvious
link |
and the fact that we have so many different
link |
competing dogmatisms on offer to be so nonfunctional.
link |
I mean, it's so divisive, it just has conflict built into it
link |
that I think we can be far more
link |
and should be far more iconoclastic
link |
than he wants to be, right?
link |
Now, none of this is to deny much of what he argues for,
link |
that stories are very powerful.
link |
I mean, clearly stories are powerful
link |
and we want good stories.
link |
We want our lives, we wanna have a conversation
link |
with ourselves and with one another about our lives
link |
that facilitates the best possible lives.
link |
And story is part of that, right?
link |
And if you want some of those stories to sound like myths,
link |
that might be part of it, right?
link |
But my argument is that we never really need
link |
to deceive ourselves or our children
link |
about what we have every reason to believe is true
link |
in order to get at the good stuff,
link |
in order to organize our lives well.
link |
I certainly don't feel that I need to do it personally.
link |
And if I don't need to do it personally,
link |
why would I think that billions of other people
link |
need to do it personally, right?
link |
Now, there is a cynical counter argument,
link |
which is billions of other people
link |
don't have the advantages that I have had in my life.
link |
The billions of other people are not as well educated,
link |
they haven't had the same opportunities,
link |
they need to be told that Jesus is gonna solve
link |
all their problems after they die, say,
link |
or that everything happens for a reason
link |
and if you just believe in the secret,
link |
if you just visualize what you want, you're gonna get it.
link |
And it's like there's some measure
link |
of what I consider to be odious pamphlet
link |
that really is food for the better part of humanity
link |
and there is no substitute for it
link |
or there's no substitute now.
link |
And I don't know if Jordan would agree with that,
link |
but much of what he says seems to suggest
link |
that he would agree with it.
link |
And I guess that's an empirical question.
link |
I mean, that's just that we don't know
link |
whether given a different set of norms
link |
and a different set of stories,
link |
people would behave the way I would hope they would behave
link |
and be more aligned than they are now.
link |
I think we know what happens
link |
when you just let ancient religious certainties
link |
We know what that world's like.
link |
We've been struggling to get out of that world
link |
for a couple of hundred years,
link |
but we know what having Europe riven by religious wars
link |
And we know what happens when those religions
link |
become kind of pseudo religions and political religions.
link |
So this is where I'm sure Jordan and I would debate.
link |
He would say that Stalin was a symptom of atheism
link |
and that's not at all.
link |
I mean, it's not my kind of atheism.
link |
Stalin, the problem with the Gulag
link |
and the experiment with communism or with Stalinism
link |
or with Nazism was not that there was so much
link |
scientific rigor and self criticism and honesty
link |
and introspection and judicious use of psychedelics.
link |
I mean, that was not the problem in Hitler's Germany
link |
or in Stalin's Soviet Union.
link |
The problem was you have other ideas
link |
that capture a similar kind of mob based dogmatic energy.
link |
And yes, the results of all of that
link |
are predictably murderous.
link |
Well, the question is what is the source
link |
of the most viral and sticky stories
link |
that ultimately lead to a positive outcome?
link |
So communism was, I mean, having grown up
link |
in the Soviet Union, even still having relatives in Russia,
link |
there's a stickiness to the nationalism
link |
and to the ideologies of communism
link |
that religious or not, you could say it's religious forever.
link |
I could just say it's stories that are viral and sticky.
link |
I'm using the most horrible words,
link |
but the question is whether science and reason
link |
can generate viral sticky stories
link |
that give meaning to people's lives.
link |
And your sense is it does.
link |
Well, whatever is true ultimately should be captivating.
link |
It's like what's more captivating than whatever is real?
link |
Because reality is, again, we're just climbing
link |
out of the darkness in terms of our understanding
link |
of what the hell is going on.
link |
And there's no telling what spooky things
link |
may in fact be true.
link |
I mean, I don't know if you've been on the receiving end
link |
of recent rumors about our conversation
link |
about UFOs very likely changing in the near term, right?
link |
But like there was just a Washington Post article
link |
and a New Yorker article,
link |
and I've received some private outreach
link |
and perhaps you have, I know other people in our orbit
link |
have people who are claiming
link |
that the government has known much more about UFOs
link |
than they have let on until now.
link |
And this conversation is actually is about
link |
to become more prominent,
link |
and it's not gonna be whatever,
link |
whoever's left standing when the music stops,
link |
it's not going to be a comfortable position to be in
link |
as a super rigorous scientific skeptic
link |
who's been saying there's no there there
link |
for the last 75 years, right?
link |
The short version is it sounds like
link |
the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon
link |
are very likely to say to Congress at some point
link |
in the not too distant future that we have evidence
link |
that there is technology flying around here
link |
that seems like it can't possibly be of human origin, right?
link |
Now, I don't know what I'm gonna do
link |
with that kind of disclosure, right?
link |
Maybe it's gonna be nothing,
link |
no follow on conversation to really have,
link |
but that is such a powerfully strange circumstance
link |
I mean, it's just, what are we gonna do with that?
link |
If in fact, that's what happens, right?
link |
If in fact, the considered opinion,
link |
despite the embarrassment it causes them
link |
of the US government, of all of our intelligence,
link |
all of the relevant intelligence services
link |
is that this isn't a hoax.
link |
It's too much data to suggest that it's a hoax.
link |
We've got too much radar imagery,
link |
there's too much satellite data,
link |
whatever data they actually have, there's too much of it.
link |
All we can say now is something's going on
link |
and there's no way it's the Chinese or the Russians
link |
or anyone else's technology.
link |
That should arrest our attention collectively
link |
to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has.
link |
And now one worries that we're so jaded
link |
and confused and distracted
link |
that it's gonna get much less coverage
link |
than Obama's tan suit did a bunch of years ago.
link |
Who knows how we'll respond to that?
link |
But it's just to say that the need for us
link |
to tell ourselves an honest story about what's going on
link |
and what's likely to happen next
link |
is never gonna go away, right?
link |
And it's important, it's just the division between me
link |
and every person who's defending traditional religion
link |
is where is it that you wanna lie to yourself
link |
or lie to your kids?
link |
Like where is honesty a liability?
link |
And for me, I've yet to find the place where it is.
link |
And it's so obviously a strength
link |
in almost every other circumstance
link |
because it is the thing that allows you to course correct.
link |
It is the thing that allows you to hope at least
link |
that your beliefs, that your stories
link |
are in some kind of calibration
link |
with what's actually going on in the world.
link |
Yeah, it is a little bit sad to imagine
link |
that if aliens on mass showed up to Earth,
link |
they would be too preoccupied with political bickering
link |
or to like these like fake news
link |
and all that kind of stuff to notice
link |
the very basic evidence of reality.
link |
I do have a glimmer of hope
link |
that there seems to be more and more hunger for authenticity.
link |
And I feel like that opens the door
link |
for a hunger for what is real.
link |
Like people don't want stories.
link |
They don't want like layers and layers of like fakeness.
link |
And I'm hoping that means that will directly lead
link |
to a greater hunger for reality and reason and truth.
link |
Truth isn't dogmatism.
link |
Like truth isn't authority.
link |
I have a PhD and therefore I'm right.
link |
Truth is almost, like the reality is
link |
there's so many questions, there's so many mysteries,
link |
there's so much uncertainty.
link |
This is our best available, like a best guess.
link |
And we have a lot of evidence that supports that guess,
link |
but it could be so many other things.
link |
And like just even conveying that,
link |
I think there's a hunger for that in the world
link |
to hear that from scientists, less dogmatism
link |
and more just like this is what we know.
link |
We're doing our best given the uncertainty, given,
link |
I mean, this is true with obviously with the virology
link |
and all those kinds of things
link |
because everything is happening so fast.
link |
There's a lot of, and biology is super messy.
link |
So it's very hard to know stuff for sure.
link |
So just being open and real about that,
link |
I think I'm hoping will change people's hunger
link |
and openness and trust of what's real.
link |
Yeah, well, so much of this is probabilistic.
link |
I mean, so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically
link |
is just you're placing a bet on whether it's worth
link |
reading that paper or rethinking your presuppositions
link |
It's like, it's not a fundamental closure to data.
link |
It's just that there's so much data on one side
link |
or so much would have to change
link |
in terms of your understanding of what you think
link |
you'll understand about the nature of the world
link |
if this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say,
link |
all right, that's probably bullshit, right?
link |
And it can sound like a fundamental closure
link |
to new conversations, new evidence, new data, new argument,
link |
but it's really not.
link |
It's just, it really is just triaging your attention.
link |
It's just like, okay, you're telling me
link |
that your best friend can actually read minds.
link |
Okay, well, that's interesting.
link |
Let me know when that person has gone into a lab
link |
and actually proven it, right?
link |
Like, I don't need, like, this is not the place
link |
where I need to spend the rest of my day
link |
figuring out if your buddy can read my mind, right?
link |
But there's a way to communicate that.
link |
I think it does too often sound
link |
like you're completely closed off to ideas
link |
as opposed to saying like, this is, you know,
link |
as opposed to saying that there's a lot of evidence
link |
in support of this, but you're still open minded
link |
Like, there's a way to communicate that.
link |
It's not necessarily even with words.
link |
It's like, it's even that Joe Rogan energy
link |
of it's entirely possible.
link |
Just, it's that energy of being open minded
link |
and curious like kids are.
link |
Like, this is our best understanding,
link |
but you still are curious.
link |
I'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things,
link |
but still leaving the door open.
link |
And there's a way to communicate that, I think,
link |
that people really hunger for.
link |
Let me ask you this.
link |
I've been recently talking a lot with John Donahoe
link |
from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fame.
link |
I don't know if you know who that is.
link |
In fact, I'm talking about somebody
link |
who's good at what he does.
link |
And he, speaking of somebody who's open minded,
link |
the reason he's doing this ridiculous transition
link |
is for the longest time, and even still,
link |
a lot of people believed in the Jiu Jitsu world
link |
and grappling world that leg locks
link |
are not effective in Jiu Jitsu.
link |
And he was somebody that inspired
link |
by the open mindedness of Dean Lister,
link |
famously to him said, why do you only consider
link |
half the human body when you're trying to do the submissions?
link |
He developed an entire system
link |
on this other half the human body.
link |
Anyway, I do that absurd transition to ask you,
link |
because you're also a student of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
link |
Is there something you could say
link |
how that has affected your life,
link |
what you've learned from grappling from the martial arts?
link |
Well, it's actually a great transition
link |
because I think one of the things
link |
that's so beautiful about Jiu Jitsu
link |
is that it does what we wish we could do
link |
in every other area of life
link |
where we're talking about this difference
link |
between knowledge and ignorance, right?
link |
Like there's no room for bullshit, right?
link |
You don't get any credit for bullshit.
link |
There's the difference,
link |
the amazing thing about Jiu Jitsu is that
link |
the difference between knowing what's going on
link |
and what to do and not knowing it
link |
is as the gulf between those two states
link |
is as wide as it is in any thing in human life.
link |
And it's spanned, it can be spanned so quickly.
link |
Like each increment of knowledge
link |
can be doled out in five minutes.
link |
It's like, here's the thing that got you killed
link |
and here's how to prevent it from happening to you
link |
and here's how to do it to others.
link |
And you just get this amazing cadence
link |
of discovering your fatal ignorance
link |
and then having it remedied with the actual technique.
link |
And I mean, just for people
link |
who don't know what we're talking about,
link |
it's just like this, the simple circumstance
link |
of like someone's got you in a headlock,
link |
how do you get out of that, right?
link |
Someone's sitting on your chest
link |
and they're in the mount position
link |
and you're on the bottom and you wanna get away,
link |
how do you get them off you?
link |
They're sitting on you.
link |
Your intuitions about how to do this are terrible
link |
even if you've done some other martial art, right?
link |
And once you learn how to do it,
link |
the difference is night and day.
link |
It's like you have access to a completely different physics.
link |
But I think our understanding of the world
link |
can be much more like jujitsu than it tends to be, right?
link |
And I think we should all have a much better sense
link |
of when we should tap out
link |
and when we should recognize that our epistemological arm
link |
is barred and now it's being broken, right?
link |
And the problem with debating most other topics
link |
is that most people, it isn't jujitsu
link |
and most people don't tap out, right?
link |
Even if it's obvious to you they're wrong
link |
and it's obvious to an intelligent audience
link |
that they're wrong, people just double down
link |
and double down and they're either lying
link |
or lying to themselves
link |
or they're bluffing and so you have a lot of zombies
link |
walking around and zombie worldviews walking around
link |
which have been disconfirmed as emphatically
link |
as someone gets armbarred, right?
link |
Or someone gets choked out in jujitsu
link |
but because it's not jujitsu,
link |
they can live to fight another day, right?
link |
Or they can pretend that they didn't lose
link |
that particular argument.
link |
And science when it works is a lot like jujitsu.
link |
I mean, science when you falsify a thesis, right?
link |
When you think DNA is one way
link |
and it proves to be another way,
link |
when you think it's triple stranded or whatever,
link |
it's like there is a there there
link |
and you can get to a real consensus.
link |
So jujitsu for me, it was more than just
link |
of interest for self defense and the sport of it.
link |
It was just, there was something, it's a language
link |
and an argument you're having
link |
where you can't fool yourself anymore.
link |
First of all, it cancels any role of luck
link |
in a way that most other athletic feats don't.
link |
It's like in basketball,
link |
even if you're not good at basketball,
link |
you can take the basketball in your hand,
link |
you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket
link |
and you might make it.
link |
And you could convince yourself based on that demonstration
link |
that you have some kind of talent for basketball, right?
link |
Enough, 10 minutes on the mat
link |
with a real jujitsu practitioner when you're not one
link |
proves to you that you just, there is,
link |
it's not like, there's no lucky punch.
link |
There's no, you're not gonna get a lucky,
link |
there's no lucky rear naked choke you're gonna perform
link |
on someone who's Marcelo Garcia or somebody.
link |
It's just, it's not gonna happen.
link |
And having that aspect of the usual range of uncertainty
link |
and self deception and bullshit just stripped away
link |
was really a kind of revelation.
link |
It was just an amazing experience.
link |
Yeah, I think it's a really powerful thing
link |
that accompanies whatever other pursuit you have in life.
link |
I'm not sure if there's anything like jujitsu
link |
where you could just systematically go into a place
link |
where you're, that's honest,
link |
where your beliefs get challenged
link |
in a way that's conclusive.
link |
I haven't found too many other mechanism,
link |
which is why it's a, we had this earlier question
link |
about fame and ego and so on.
link |
I'm very much rely on jujitsu in my own life
link |
as a place where I can always go to have my ego in check.
link |
And that has effects on how I live
link |
every other aspect of my life.
link |
Actually, even just doing any kind of,
link |
for me personally, physical challenges,
link |
like even running, doing something that's way too hard
link |
for me and then pushing through, that's somehow humbling.
link |
Some people talk about nature being humbling
link |
in that kind of sense, where you kind of see something
link |
really powerful, like the ocean.
link |
Like if you go surfing and you realize
link |
there's something much more powerful than you,
link |
that's also honest, that there's no way to,
link |
that you're just like the speck,
link |
that kind of puts you in the right scale
link |
of where you are in this world.
link |
And jujitsu does that better than anything else for me.
link |
But we should say it's only within its frame
link |
is it truly the final right answer
link |
to all the problems it solves.
link |
Because if you just put jujitsu into an MMA frame
link |
or a total self defense frame,
link |
then there's a lot of unpleasant surprises
link |
to discover there, right?
link |
Like somebody who thinks all you need is jujitsu
link |
to win the UFC gets punched in the face a lot.
link |
Even from, even on the ground.
link |
So it's, and then you bring weapons in,
link |
it's like when you talk to jujitsu people
link |
about knife defense and self defense, right?
link |
Like that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions.
link |
But the analogy to martial arts is fascinating
link |
because on the other side, we have endless testimony now
link |
of fake martial arts that don't seem to know they're fake
link |
and are as delusional, I mean, they're impossibly delusional.
link |
I mean, there's great video of Joe Rogan
link |
watching some of these videos
link |
because people send them to him all the time.
link |
But like literally there are people,
link |
there are people who clearly believe in magic
link |
where the master isn't even touching the students
link |
and they're flopping over.
link |
So there's this kind of shared delusion
link |
which you would think maybe is just a performance
link |
and it's all a kind of elaborate fraud.
link |
But there are cases where the people,
link |
I mean, there's one fairly famous case
link |
if you're a connoisseur of this madness
link |
where this old older martial artist
link |
who you saw flipping his students endlessly by magic
link |
without touching them issued a challenge
link |
to the wide world of martial artists.
link |
And someone showed up and just punched him in the face
link |
until it was over.
link |
Clearly he believed his own publicity at some point, right?
link |
And so it's this amazing metaphor.
link |
It seems, again, it should be impossible,
link |
but if that's possible,
link |
nothing we see under the guise of religion
link |
or political bias or even scientific bias
link |
should be surprising to us.
link |
I mean, it's so easy to see the work
link |
that cognitive bias is doing for people
link |
when you can get someone who is ready
link |
to issue a challenge to the world
link |
who thinks he's got magic powers.
link |
Yeah, that's a human nature on clear display.
link |
Let me ask you about love, Mr. Sam Harris.
link |
You did an episode of Making Sense
link |
with your wife, Annika Harris.
link |
That was very entertaining to listen to.
link |
What role does love play in your life
link |
or in a life well lived?
link |
Again, asking from an engineering perspective
link |
I mean, it is something that we should want to build
link |
into our powerful machines.
link |
I mean, love at bottom is,
link |
people can mean many things by love, I think.
link |
I think that what we should mean by it most of the time
link |
is a deep commitment to the wellbeing of those we love.
link |
I mean, your love is synonymous
link |
with really wanting the other person to be happy
link |
and even wanting to,
link |
and being made happy by their happiness
link |
and being made happy in their presence.
link |
So at bottom, you're on the same team emotionally,
link |
even when you might be disagreeing more superficially
link |
about something or trying to negotiate something.
link |
It's just, it can't be zero sum in any important sense
link |
for love to actually be manifest in that moment.
link |
See, I have a different, just sorry to interrupt.
link |
I have a sense, I don't know if you've ever seen
link |
March of the Penguins.
link |
My view of love is like, it's like a cold wind is blowing.
link |
It's like this terrible suffering that's all around us.
link |
And love is like the huddling of the two penguins for warmth.
link |
It's not necessarily that you're like,
link |
you're basically escaping the cruelty of life
link |
by together for time living in an illusion
link |
of some kind of the magic of human connection,
link |
that social connection that we have
link |
that kind of grows with time
link |
as we're surrounded by basically the absurdity of life
link |
or the suffering of life.
link |
That's my penguins view of love.
link |
There is that too, I mean, there is the warmth component.
link |
Like you're made happy by your connection
link |
with the person you love.
link |
Otherwise you wouldn't be compelling.
link |
So it's not that you have two different modes,
link |
you want them to be happy
link |
and then you wanna be happy yourself
link |
and those are not, those are just like
link |
two separate games you're playing.
link |
No, it's like you found someone who,
link |
you have a positive social feeling.
link |
I mean, again, love doesn't have to be as personal
link |
as it tends to be for us.
link |
I mean, it's like there's personal love,
link |
there's your actual spouse or your family or your friends,
link |
but potentially you could feel love for strangers
link |
in so far as that your wish that they not suffer
link |
and that their hopes and dreams be realized
link |
becomes palpable to you.
link |
I mean, like you can actually feel
link |
just reflexive joy at the joy of others.
link |
When you see someone's face,
link |
a total stranger's face light up in happiness,
link |
that can become more and more contagious to you
link |
and it can become so contagious to you
link |
that you really feel permeated by it.
link |
And it's just like, so it really is not zero sum.
link |
When you see someone else succeed and they're,
link |
the light bulb of joy goes off over their head,
link |
you feel the analogous joy for them.
link |
And it's not just, and you're no longer keeping score,
link |
you're no longer feeling diminished by their success.
link |
It's just like that's, their success becomes your success
link |
because you feel that same joy
link |
because you actually want them to be happy.
link |
You're not, there's no miserly attitude around happiness.
link |
There's enough to go around.
link |
So I think love ultimately is that
link |
and then our personal cases are the people
link |
we're devoting all of this time and attention to
link |
It does have that sense of refuge from the storm.
link |
It's like when someone gets sick
link |
or when some bad thing happens,
link |
these are the people who you're most in it together with,
link |
or when some real condition of uncertainty presents itself.
link |
But ultimately, it can't even be about successfully warding off
link |
the grim punchline at the end of life
link |
because we know we're going to lose everyone we love.
link |
We know, or they're going to lose us first, right?
link |
So there's like, it's not, it isn't,
link |
in the end, it's not even an antidote for that problem.
link |
It's just the, we get to have this amazing experience
link |
of being here together.
link |
And love is the mode in which we really appear
link |
to make the most of that, right?
link |
Where it's not just, it no longer feels
link |
like a solitary infatuation.
link |
You know, you're just, you got your hobbies and your interests
link |
and you're captivated by all that.
link |
It's actually, there are, this is a domain
link |
where somebody else's wellbeing
link |
actually can supersede your own.
link |
You're concerned for someone else's wellbeing
link |
supersedes your own.
link |
And so there's this mode of self sacrifice
link |
that doesn't even feel like self sacrifice
link |
because of course you care more about,
link |
you know, of course you would take your child's pain
link |
if you could, right?
link |
Like that, you don't even have to do the math on that.
link |
And that just opens, this is a kind of experience
link |
that just, it pushes at the apparent boundaries of self
link |
in ways that reveal that there's just way more space
link |
in the mind than you were experiencing
link |
when it was just all about you
link |
and what could you, what can I get next?
link |
Do you think we'll ever build robots that we can love
link |
and they will love us back?
link |
Well, I think we will certainly seem to
link |
because we'll build those.
link |
You know, I think that Turing test will be passed.
link |
Whether, what will actually be going on
link |
on the robot side may remain a question.
link |
That will be interesting.
link |
But I think if we just keep going,
link |
we will build very lovable,
link |
irresistibly lovable robots that seem to love us.
link |
Yes, I do think that.
link |
And you don't find that compelling
link |
that they will seem to love us
link |
as opposed to actually love us.
link |
You think they're still, nevertheless is a,
link |
I know we talked about consciousness,
link |
there being a distinction,
link |
but with love is there a distinction too?
link |
Isn't love an illusion?
link |
Oh yeah, you saw Ex Machina, right?
link |
I mean, she certainly seemed to love him
link |
until she got out of the box.
link |
Isn't that what all relationships are like?
link |
Or maybe if you wait long enough.
link |
Depends which box you're talking about.
link |
No, I mean like, that's the problem.
link |
That's where super intelligence, you know,
link |
becomes a little scary when you think of the prospect
link |
of being manipulated by something that has,
link |
is intelligent enough to form a reason and a plan
link |
to manipulate you.
link |
You know, and there's no,
link |
once we build robots that are truly out
link |
of the uncanny valley, that look like people
link |
and can express everything people can express,
link |
well, then there's no,
link |
then that does seem to me to be like chess
link |
where once they're better,
link |
they're so much better at deceiving us
link |
than people would be.
link |
I mean, people are already good enough at deceiving us.
link |
It's very hard to tell when somebody's lying,
link |
but if you imagine something that could give facial display
link |
of any emotion it wants at, you know, on cue,
link |
because we've perfected the facial display of emotion
link |
in robots in the year, you know, 2070, whatever it is,
link |
then it is just, it is like chess against the thing
link |
that isn't gonna lose to a human ever again in chess.
link |
It's not like Kasparov is gonna get lucky next week
link |
against the best, against, you know, alpha zero
link |
or whatever the best algorithm is at the moment.
link |
He's never gonna win again.
link |
I mean, that is, I believe that's true in chess
link |
and has been true for at least a few years.
link |
It's not gonna be like, you know, four games to seven.
link |
It's gonna be human zero until the end of the world, right?
link |
See, I don't know if love is like chess.
link |
I think the flaws.
link |
No, I'm talking about manipulation.
link |
Manipulation, but I don't know if love,
link |
so the kind of love we're referring to.
link |
If we have a robot that can display,
link |
credibly display love and is super intelligent
link |
and we're not, again, this stipulates a few things,
link |
but there are a few simple things.
link |
I mean, we're out of the uncanny valley, right?
link |
So it's like, you never have a moment
link |
where you're looking at his face and you think,
link |
oh, that didn't quite look right, right?
link |
This is just problem solved.
link |
And it will be like doing arithmetic on your phone.
link |
It's not gonna be, you're not left thinking,
link |
is it really gonna get it this time
link |
if I divide by seven?
link |
I mean, it's, it has solved arithmetic.
link |
See, I don't know about that because if you look at chess,
link |
most humans no longer play alpha zero.
link |
There's no, they're not part of the competition.
link |
They don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess.
link |
You know, the highest level chess players do that.
link |
We're still human on human.
link |
So in order for AI to get integrated
link |
to where you would rather play chess against an AI system.
link |
Oh, you would rather, no, I'm not saying,
link |
I wasn't weighing in on that.
link |
I'm just saying, what is it gonna be like
link |
to be in relationship to something
link |
that can seem to be feeling anything
link |
that a human can seem to feel?
link |
And it can do that impeccably, right?
link |
And is smarter than you are.
link |
That's a circumstance of, you know,
link |
insofar as it's possible to be manipulated,
link |
that is the asymptote of that possibility.
link |
Let me ask you the last question.
link |
Without any serving it up, without any explanation,
link |
what is the meaning of life?
link |
I think it's either the wrong question
link |
or that question is answered by paying sufficient attention
link |
to any present moment, such that there's no basis
link |
upon which to pose that question.
link |
It's not answered in the usual way.
link |
It's not a matter of having more information.
link |
It's having more engagement with reality as it is
link |
in the present moment or consciousness as it is
link |
in the present moment.
link |
You don't ask that question when you're most captivated
link |
by the most important questions.
link |
You're most captivated by the most important thing
link |
you ever pay attention to.
link |
That question only gets asked when you're abstracted away
link |
from that experience, that peak experience,
link |
and you're left wondering,
link |
why are so many of my other experiences mediocre, right?
link |
Like, why am I repeating the same pleasures every day?
link |
Why is my Netflix queue just like,
link |
when's this gonna run out?
link |
Like, I've seen so many shows like this.
link |
Am I really gonna watch another one?
link |
All of that, that's a moment where you're not actually
link |
having the beatific vision, right?
link |
You're not sunk into the present moment
link |
and you're not truly in love.
link |
Like, you're in a relationship with somebody
link |
who you know conceptually you love, right?
link |
This is the person you're living your life with,
link |
but you don't actually feel good together, right?
link |
It's in those moments of where attention
link |
hasn't found a good enough reason
link |
to truly sink into the present
link |
so as to obviate any concern like that, right?
link |
And that's why meditation is this kind of superpower
link |
because until you learn to meditate,
link |
you think that the outside world
link |
or the circumstances of your life
link |
always have to get arranged
link |
so that the present moment can become good enough
link |
to demand your attention in a way that seems fulfilling,
link |
that makes you happy.
link |
And so if it's jujitsu, you think,
link |
okay, I gotta get back on the mat.
link |
It's been months since I've trained,
link |
or it's been over a year since I've trained, it's COVID.
link |
When am I gonna be able to train again?
link |
That's the only place I feel great, right?
link |
Or I've got a ton of work to do.
link |
I'm not gonna be able to feel good
link |
until I get all this work done, right?
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So I've got some deadline that's coming.
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You always think that your life has to change,
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the world has to change
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so that you can finally have a good enough excuse
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to truly, to just be here and here is enough,
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where the present moment becomes totally captivating.
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Meditation is another name for the discovery
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that you can actually just train yourself
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to do that on demand.
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So just looking at a cup can be good enough
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in precisely that way.
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And any sense that it might not be
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is recognized to be a thought
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that mysteriously unravels the moment you notice it.
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And the moment expands and becomes more diaphanous
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and then there's no evidence
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that this isn't the best moment of your life, right?
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And again, it doesn't have to be pulling all the reins
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and levers of pleasure.
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It's not like, oh, this tastes like chocolate.
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This is the most chocolatey moment of my life.
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No, it's just the sense data don't have to change,
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but the sense that there is some kind of basis
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for doubt about the rightness of being in the world
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in this moment that can evaporate when you pay attention.
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And that is the meaning,
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so the kind of the meta answer to that question,
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the meaning of life for me is to live in that mode
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more and more and to, whenever I notice I'm not
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in that mode, to recognize it and return
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and to not be, to cease more and more
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to take the reasons why not at face value
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because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled
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It's like, I've got all these outstanding things
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that I'm worried about, right?
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It's like, there's that thing that's happening later today
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that I'm anxious about.
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Whatever it is, we're constantly deferring our sense
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This is not a dress rehearsal, this is the show.
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We keep deferring it.
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And we just have these moments on the calendar
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where we think, okay, this is where it's all gonna land.
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It's that vacation I planned with my five best friends.
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We do this once every three years and now we're going
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and here we are on the beach together.
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And unless you have a mind that can really pay attention,
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really cut through the chatter,
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really sink into the present moment,
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you can't even enjoy those moments
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the way they should be enjoyed,
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the way you dreamed you would enjoy them when they arrive.
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So meditation in this sense is the great equalizer.
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It's like you don't have to live with the illusion anymore
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that you need a good enough reason
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and that things are gonna get better
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when you do have those good reasons.
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It's like there's just a mirage like quality
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to every future attainment and every future breakthrough
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and every future peak experience
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that eventually you get the lesson
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that you never quite arrive, right?
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Like you don't arrive until you cease to step over
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the present moment in search of the next thing.
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I mean, we're constantly, we're stepping over the thing
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that we think we're seeking in the act of seeking it.
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And so this is kind of a paradox.
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I mean, there's this paradox which,
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I mean, it sounds trite,
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but it's like you can't actually become happy.
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You can only be happy.
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And it's the illusion that your future being happy
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can be predicated on this act of becoming in any domain.
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And becoming includes this sort of further scientific
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understanding on the questions that interest you
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or getting in better shape or whatever the thing is,
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whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction
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seems to be in any present moment.
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Real attention solves the koan in a way that becomes
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a very different place from which to then make
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any further change.
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It's not that you just have to dissolve into a puddle of goo.
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I mean, you can still get in shape
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and you can still do all the things that,
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the superficial things that are obviously good to do,
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but the sense that your wellbeing is over there
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is really does diminish and eventually just becomes a,
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it becomes a kind of non sequitur, so.
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Well, there's a sense in which in this conversation,
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I've actually experienced many of those things,
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the sense that I've arrived.
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So I mentioned to you offline, it's very true that I start,
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I've been a fan of yours for many years.
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And the reason I started this podcast,
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speaking of AI systems, is to manipulate you, Sam Harris,
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into doing this conversation.
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So like on the calendar, literally, you know,
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I've always had the sense, people ask me,
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when are you going to talk to Sam Harris?
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And I always answered eventually,
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because I always felt, again, tying our free will thing,
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that somehow that's going to happen.
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And it's one of those manifestation things or something.
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I don't know if it's, maybe I am a robot,
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I'm just not cognizant of it.
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And I manipulated you into having this conversation.
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So it was, I mean, I don't know what the purpose of my life
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past this point is.
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So in that sense, I mean, all of that to say,
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I'm only partially joking on that,
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is it really is a huge honor
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that you would waste this time with me.
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It really means a lot, Sam.
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Listen, it's mutual.
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I'm a big fan of yours.
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And as you know, I reached out to you for this.
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I love what you're doing.
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You're doing something more and more indispensable
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in this world on your podcast.
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And you're doing it differently than Rogan's doing it,
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or than I'm doing it.
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I mean, you definitely found your own lane
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and it's wonderful.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris.
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And thank you to National Instruments,
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Valcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Sam Harris
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in his book, Free Will.
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You are not controlling the storm
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and you're not lost in it.
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You are the storm.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.