https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1fL1dnr7w2Y
Now I’m having a hard time distinguishing some of your claims from what I would regard as fundamental religious claims. So let me ask you a couple, and I’m not, I said, you know, I’m trying to make things clear. I’m not trying to push you into a corner. I don’t want to do that at all. So I actually think that we agree on a lot more than we disagree on, and that we’ve come to very similar conclusions from very different directions. Okay, so let me ask you this. So, you know, there’s this medieval idea that God is the sum of all good, and I don’t think sum is the right qualifier. I want to ask your opinion about this. You listed, you made two claims in your last speech, in your last bout of response, I think. One claim was that you listed a variety of attributes that were morally good, and then you made the claim that even if we don’t know what the good is in the final analysis, we do have a strong sense of directionality, and so one of the things I’ve suggested to my audiences, for example, is that there are some things that you are doing, and you don’t know whether they’re bad or good, and so you can just leave those in advance for the time being, but there is a subset of things that you’re doing that you know full well are not to be done that you could stop doing, and you could just stop doing them and see what happens, and I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have some knowledge of that latter category, right? You said you had it, for example, with Twitter. You know, you noticed that consists, okay, so all right. Let’s go after the first claim that you made. You listed positive attributes, so I might say that, do you believe that there is a implicit unity underneath a list of positive moral attributes so that if you took beauty, truth, love, gratitude, you had mentioned love and gratitude, for example, and beauty, if I said, well, is there something in common that unites beauty, truth, love, and gratitude? And it wouldn’t be the sum, right? It’s more like the gist. It’s more like the essence. It’s the commonality of goods that, and it seems to me, Sam, that merely the fact that you can use a category like good or bad or good and evil, within the category of good are things united by their participation in the good. And so, is there anything about that claim that you find off-putting? Well, I would, there’s some analogies we could use to capture it. I do think of these things as kind, as almost facets of a single jewel, right? And so, the facets are different. It’s talking about, you can talk about beauty and not talk about love in the same conversation. You can have a coherent discussion of beauty without reference to love and vice versa. But when you’re talking about the conscious states that maximize one’s appreciation of all of these things and participation in all of these things, it’s easy to intuit that there’s a common structure to the whole picture. And so, yeah, so a jewel with its facets is one analogy I would use. But I would also, but just to, but I wanna subvert that for a second because my view of the moral landscape is that it’s very likely a landscape with multiple peaks, right, and multiple valleys. And so, this can sound like moral relativism in the sense that you and I might be climbing the same peak over here as homo sapiens in a Western 21st century context. But at some great distance from ourselves, there are possible minds and perhaps even real minds that could exist in another galaxy or that we could create artificially, et cetera, that are organized on very different principles and yet have conscious states that admit of, again, right and wrong answers with respect to the variables of suffering and wellbeing. And you can conceive of those as capaciously as you want, but there could be possibilities of happiness and creativity and amazement that we can’t imagine because we don’t have the requisite minds, right? Like there’s just nothing about our current minds or even the likely path we’re gonna take when we augment our minds technologically or genetically in the future. We’re just gonna miss these spots on the landscape. And yet these landscapes, these spots have the same peak and valley structure. And there could be peaks that if we were more omniscient than we are or ever going to be, we would be able to compare these two peaks and say that it’s better to be, one is higher than the other with respect to certain variables. Which is to say, I just don’t think it’s all random. I think there is structure there among possible experiences, given whatever the natural laws are that determine the nature of experience in this or any universe. But the most relevant thing for us is what does our local region look like? What is an obvious mode of descent into pointless horror for us? And how do we avoid that? And what is an obvious local peak that we should be aspiring to get to? But even this analogy begets some troubling possibilities, which I take as at least potentially real, which is that it could be true to say that there is an adjacent peak to where the one we’re currently climbing, which is quite a bit better than the one we’re attempting to climb, quite a bit higher with respect to wellbeing and insight and creativity and everything, every other good thing. But the only way to reach it from where we currently stand is to descend into some valley that’s quite a bit worse in order to climb that adjacent peak. That at least is, I’m not recommending that we spend a ton of time thinking about that, but that’s at least conceivable to me. I think we could spend a fair bit of time thinking about that. So, while there’s a line of mythological speculation that’s very tightly in keeping with the process and the vision that you just laid out, okay, so first of all, you made the case that you used the metaphor of a jewel. And then you said, I would rephrase, I’m gonna recast this in somewhat symbolic terms, and you can see if this is a metaphor that captures what you were expressing. You could imagine that they’re jewels of a beauty and value that are as of yet unknown to us, right? So, we could agree that there’s a unity of good that’s transcendent and ineffable, and that the goods that we see arrayed in front of us are proximal echoes of that ultimate vision. Now, your point is that now and then we may be somewhat deluded in the specifics of what we’re pursuing, and that might blind us to a higher order transcendent reality. Then you also added an additional twist, which is, well, maybe now and then a descent is necessary in order to make the next ascent possible. Okay, so a couple of things on that. So, there’s an old alchemical idea, by the way, that the philosopher’s stone is a jewel in a toad’s head. And the idea there, yeah, well, the idea there was that, and this is one of the central alchemical dicta, by the way. It’s instirquilinus infinitur, which means roughly in filth it will be found, or to elaborate slightly means that that which you most need will be found where you least want to look. And that’s a reflection of the idea that you had that now and then in order to get to the next pinnacle, there has to be a descent. Now, that’s associated with something even more fundamental. So, there’s also, of course, you know this idea central to hero mythology that dragons hoard treasure, and that the larger the dragon, the larger the treasure. And the idea there is that the more daunting the unknown territory that you are presuming to traverse, the more possibility there is for discovery. And that the proper attitude is therefore the one that enables you to encounter that source of unknown wisdom in the most forthright and courageous manner possible. And so then that, there’s a variant on that too, which is that, let’s see, how would I put this? Is that the most valid source of, the most valid pathway towards discovering that jewel beyond compare is a pathway that’s marked out by the voluntary willingness to confront suffering and malevolence in all of its forms. Now, at that point, these ideas, to me, these ideas start to become indistinguishable from religious presuppositions. And so there’s a dovetailing here. I mean, you are hypothesizing that what’s good has the metaphoric quality of a jewel. It’s multifaceted and it’s the things that it reflects are more tangible experiential phenomena like beauty, truth, love, gratitude. They’re all reflections of a higher order good. You made the case that that higher order good may be higher order to the point where in its extreme forms, it’s ineffable, right? It’s beyond our ability to comprehend and describe. You made the case that we may be able to approach that in something approximating fits and starts. And some of those fits and starts may involve a descent. Well, the religious injunction, you see this in psychotherapy too, is that the descents that are the precondition for a more profound ascent have to be undertaken voluntarily. Right, because you see this in exposure therapy, for example, you know, if people are stressed accidentally by something that they’re phobic of, their phobia gets worse. But if they voluntarily expose themselves to the stressor, then their bravery grows and their fear decreases in a commensurate manner. Well, so I guess the first thing I’m gonna do is ask you what you think about that. So here’s another example, Sam, you tell me what you think about this. So there’s a story, this is derived from the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. So King Arthur is sitting with all the knights at the round table and they decide they’re going to go look for the Holy Grail. And the Holy Grail is the container of the ever replenishing liquid. That’s a good way of thinking about it. So it’s either the glass that Christ uses to represent his blood at the Last Supper or it’s the goblet that catches his blood on the cross. That’s the background story. Now, of course, the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur have no idea if the Holy Grail exists, which is a reference to its ineffability, let’s say, or of where it’s possibly located. And so each knight leaves the round table and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him. And that’s where the quest begins. And so there is an idea lurking in these stories that if you want to envision that jewel, the metaphoric jewel that you described, then the pathway to that is through the darkness. Now, you also said, and you correct me if I’m wrong about this, that your journey to whatever enlightenment you’ve managed to find and distribute was a consequence of, in some ways, of entering the forest at the darkest possible point. I mean, you were grappling with the problem of evil and looking for a solution to that. Is it not possible that that’s a reflection of this underlying idea that it is the case that you retool your conceptions of morality itself by contending with the things that are most troubling and distressful, be tragedy and malevolence, the things that are in that realm. Does any of that seem reasonable to you? Yeah, so you raised a few separate points there. So first, on the notion of exposure therapy being an example of a descent into a valley so that you can ascend some other peak. So I think that speaking individually for a person doing that, that sounds totally plausible to me. There are all kinds of things we do that make us uncomfortable, but under a larger framing, we understand that they’re good for us and they’re leading us to grow in ways that will redound to our advantage in the future. So yeah, so that’s a, there are dozens of things that people do and should do that make them less than comfortable in the present, but they’re nevertheless good for them. Whether it’s a medical treatment or it’s just getting in good shape or dieting or whatever it is, right? So there’s that. The place where I break from religion, I mean, certainly a religion like Christianity or Judaism or Islam is just in the, it’s on many points, but the crucial point is just on the claims about the unique sanctity and divine origin of specific books, right? I mean, the moment you’re gonna talk about all books as the products of human creativity and ingenuity, then we’re just talking about the utility of specific books and specific ideas in whatever context attracts our interest. And so we can talk about the Bible, we can talk about the Quran, we can talk about the wisdom to be found in those books. And we also can talk about the barbaric injunctions that we want to ignore in those books. And we must talk, we must evaluate the wisdom or the barbarousness by using our own 21st century intuitions about what constitutes wisdom now, given all the challenges we face and what constitutes obvious barbarism that we wanna leave behind us. And so the crucial, the thing that makes me an atheist from a Christian point of view or a Muslim point of view is that I am unpersuaded by the textual claims that anchor those two faiths and that any real adherent to those two faiths has to make in my view and in the views of most adherents. And, but I would totally grant you that there are great stories in a thousand different books that we might want to use to inspire us to be wiser than we tend to be, right? So you can, so the King Arthur literature, that seems totally worthy of our attention. And there are many other good, good, sources on that particular shelf, but no one is taking the King, no one is practicing suicide bombing or fully deranging their politics over their close reading of the King Arthur material, right? It’s just, the literature is not doing that kind of mad work for us. And I think that’s a good thing. And so I wanna live in a world where we recognize that all we have communally is the possibility of having a conversation that can be more or less persuasive, more or less enlightening. And it’s a conversation, not just across in the present, with the living minds that are available, but it’s a conversation with reference to the greatest minds that preceded us, of which we have some record. There are many great minds, presumably, that are totally lost to us because they burned the library at Alexandria. But we have this residue of past wisdom and past insight, which is the world’s literature, and we should avail ourselves of it to our heart’s content, all the while recognizing that this is a, these are just human beings having a cross-generational conversation about important things. And none of these books is beyond criticism and beyond ignoring, right? That’s the crucial bit. Well, your fundamental criticism, and this is actually what I’m trying to pin down in our conversation, is that you’re pointing to the misuse, it’s like the dogmatic misuse of the traditions as opposed to their proper use. So there’s a scene in the gospels, this is a very interesting scene. This is one of the things that gets Christ crucified, by the way. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]