AB Harris⧸Weinstein⧸Peterson Discussion： Vancouver (BtkwF5qA6uE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BtkwF5qA6uE

Open Space Hello, Vancouver. Thank you. Hello. All right. So, we have an interesting situation here. Obviously, this is part two, and a few of you were here for what took place last night. We are going to find a way to catch you all up pretty quick on what took place. But before we do that, I thought it might make sense to talk to you about where we are in this discussion and why it matters. And it matters not just for those of us on stage, but it matters very much for you all in the audience. The point is basically this. We’ve arrived at a place in history where the sense-making apparatus that usually helps us figure out what to think about things has obviously begun to come apart. The political parties, the universities, journalism, all of these things have stopped making sense. And alternative sense-making networks have begun to rise. And the one that we end up being a part of seems to be beating the odds with respect to staying alive and being a vibrant part of the conversation. But that depends on something. It depends on our ability to upgrade what we can discuss and navigate. And Sam and Jordan have run afoul of each other in the past, as you all know. And so our ability to upgrade the conversation such that they’re able to find common ground and for us to move forward together is potentially a very important upgrade. Now that upgrade in the modern era includes you all because our conversation and your conversations are all now linked through the internet. So the ground rules for tonight involve you not filming what takes place on stage tonight. And the reason for that is because what takes place on stage tonight has consequences and the freer that Sam and Jordan feel to use new tools to try out positions that maybe they haven’t explored before, the more likely we are to succeed. So please don’t film. But that does not mean that we don’t want you talking about what was discussed here tonight. In fact, we’re very excited to see what you all make of this conversation and where it heads. So in an effort to get you up to speed on where we got yesterday, and I think the evidence is strong, we all felt, and the discussion online suggests that we actually accomplished quite a bit yesterday, that we made headway. In an effort to attempt to keep that momentum going, what we are going to do is we are going to have Sam and Jordan steelman each other’s points from last night so that you can hear what that sounds like. So Sam, for those of you who have ever tried steelmanning somebody’s point with whom you have a severe disagreement, you know just how hard this is. So let’s give them some leeway. Sam, would you be willing to start? Sure. Sure. Yeah, thank you. Well first let me just make the obvious point that probably isn’t so obvious unless you take the time to put yourself in our shoes, but just imagine how surreal it is for us to be who we are simply having a conversation about ideas and to be able to put a date on the calendar and have all of you show up for this. I mean it’s just an amazing privilege. Thank you for coming out. So here is what I think Jordan thinks I’m getting wrong. I think that was grammatically correct. Maybe there’s another note in there. But clearly I don’t understand how valuable stories are, how deep they go, the degree to which stories encode not only the wisdom of our ancestors but quite possibly the wisdom born of the hard knocks of evolution of the species. So there’s no telling how deep the significance of the information encoded in stories goes. And there’s a class of stories that are religious stories and they’re religious for a reason because they’re dealing with the deepest questions in human life. They’re questions about what constitutes a good life, what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for. These are things that if each individual just thrust from onto the stage of his own life not knowing where he is and tasked with figuring out how to live all on his own or even in a collection of others who are similarly unguided by ancient wisdom, this is not knowledge we can recapitulate for ourselves easily. So we edit or ignore these ancient stories at our peril, at minimum at some considerable risk because we don’t really know what baby is in the bathwater. And so we should have immense respect for these traditions. And the… This is as yet to be discovered tonight, I’m still not quite clear about how this links up with more metaphysical propositions about the origins of certain of these stories. But at minimum, my criticism of religion, because it tends to focus on the most obvious case of a zero-sum contest between religious dogmatism and scientific open-ended discussion, doesn’t address this core issue of the significance of religious thinking and religious narrative. Because I am, for the most part, just shooting fish in a barrel, criticizing fundamentalists, and the kind of God that the fundamentalists believe in, the God who’s an invisible person who hates homosexuals, obviously that’s not the deepest version of these religious… Essentially, what is a narrative technology for orienting human life in the cosmos. So maybe I’ll leave it there, but that’s, I think, what Jordan thinks. Alright, Jordan. Before you steal man Sam’s point, how did you feel about his encapsulation of yours? Well, I’m convinced, man. No, look, I mean, well, I got a couple of things to say about it. It’s like, first of all, I think it was accurate, concise, fair. I also think that, this is a more technical note in some sense, is that if you ever want to think about something, that’s exactly what you have to do, right? You want to take arguments that are against your perspective, and you want to make them as strong as you possibly can so that you can fortify your arguments against them. You don’t want to make them weak, because that just makes you weak. And so, you know, Sam and I are both scientists, and it really is the case that what scientists are trying to do, and I think what we’re actually trying to do in this conversation genuinely, is to try to find out if there’s something that we’re thinking that’s stupid. You know, because when I’m laying out the arguments that Sam just summarized so well, I’ve tried to generate a bunch of opposition to them in my own imagination, and the arguments I put forward are ones I can’t undermine. But that doesn’t mean they’re right. It doesn’t mean that at all. And so if someone comes along, and this is certainly the case if you’re a scientist who’s worth his or her salt, if someone comes along and says, hey, look, you made a mistake in this fundamental proposition, it’s like, yes, great, that means I can make progress towards a more solid theory of being. And that’s what we’re trying to do, and I do think it’s working, and so I thought that was just fine, exactly, dead on, and I hope I can do justice to your position as well. So okay, so I’m going to summarize Sam’s argument briefly, and then I’m going to tell him, and let you guys know why he thinks I’m, things I’m not taking into account. So Sam believes that there are two fundamental dangers to psychological and social stability. Religious fundamentalism, essentially, on the right, and moral relativism and nihilism on the left, and so the danger of the right-wing position is that it enables people to arbitrarily establish certain revealed axioms as indisputable truth, and then to tyrannize themselves and other people with the claims that those are divine revelations, and he sees that as part of the danger of religious fundamentalism and maybe religious thinking in general, but also as something that characterizes secular totalitarian states that also has a religious aspect, so that’s on the right, and then on the left, well, the problem with the moral relativism-nihilism position is that it leaves us with no orientation, and it also flies in the face of common sense observations that there are ways to live that are bad, and that there are ways to live that are good, that people can generally agree on, and that statements about those general agreements about how to live can be considered factual. And then the next part of Sam’s argument is that we require a value system that allows us to escape these twin dangers. One stultifies us and the other leaves us hopeless, let’s say, and that value system has to be grounded in something real, and the only thing that he can see that actually constitutes real in any provable sense, and there’s a certain amount of historical and conceptual weight behind this claim, is the domain of empirical facts as they’ve been manifested in the sciences and technologies that have made us incredibly powerful and increasingly able to flourish in the world, and so we need to ground our value propositions in something that we’ve been able to determine has genuine solidity so that we can orient ourselves properly, so that we can make moral claims and that we can avoid these twin dangers. We can begin with some basic facts that we can identify, as I mentioned briefly, what constitutes a bad life, endless pain, suffering, anxiety, tremendous amount of negative emotions, short-term lifespan, all the things that no one would choose voluntarily for themselves if we would all agree that they were thinking in a healthy manner, and we can contrast that sort of domain of horror with the good life, which might involve, well, certainly freedom from privation and want and undue threat and anxiety and hope for the future and all of that, and that we can agree that those are poles, good, bad, and good, and that that’s a factual claim. So Sam also claims that we can define the good life, this is an extension of it, with reference to flourishing and well-being, and that that can actually be measured and that we should and can inform the idea of flourishing and well-being with empirical data. Having said all that, he also leaves a domain of inquiry open that would be centered on the possibility that some of the ideas that have been encapsulated in religious phenomenology, if not in religious dogma, might be worth pursuing as well, that there might be wisdom that could practically be applied in terms of perception to spiritual practices, although those become dangerous, increasingly dangerous as they become ensconced in dogma. And so that’s Sam’s position. And then his criticism of my ideas, he would say that it’s facts, not stories, that constitute the ground for the proper science of well-being, and that we don’t need to be connected to stories, ancient stories in particular, to thrive. And the reason for that are that these ancient stories are pathological in certain details, especially in the specific claims they make, which look outrageous in some sense from a modern moral perspective. And he believes that it’s hand-waving to ignore those specific topics with a, what would you call it, an optimistic overview of the entire context, that they’re dangerously outdated now, if they ever were useful, that they’re subject to too many potential interpretations for any modern usage to be reliably derived. And so he believes that attempts to interpret these stories, let’s say, are rife with so many potential errors of bias and interpretation and subjectivity that all the interpretations in some sense are unreliable, and perhaps equally unreliable, that worse than that, not only are they unreliable, but they’re dangerous insofar as the claims they lay out pose a threat to scientific and enlightenment values, which are the true savers of humanity, as evidenced by our progress, let’s say, over the last two or three hundred years, and that they’re also susceptible to the totalitarian interpretation, which I described earlier, which confer upon the interpreter a sense of and then a claim to reveal truth. And so I would say that’s Sam’s argument and his criticisms of my position. Okay, so you write my next book, I’ll write yours. So, Sam, how do you feel about that characterization of your position? Certainly close enough to get the conversation started. I mean, there’s a few, the grounding stuff we have yet to talk about, and I’m not as much a stickler for materialistic scientific empiricism as I heard implied there, but we can come to that. Okay, so hold on. I think from the point of view of the audience, this is a good barometer of where we got to last night, and I think actually the gains are really impressive, which I have to say is spooking me because of something called regression to the mean. Now, if I catch either one of you regressing to the mean tonight, I will hunt you down and I will ridicule you on Twitter tomorrow. So you have been warned. Okay. All right, so do either one of you want to now talk about what was missing from the other characterization or how do you want to move? I think we should touch this issue of metaphorical truth because I think it still gets at the distance between us. Sure. And it’s, and happily, this is your phrase that you have, I mean, you might want to, do you want to prop up this phrase? Why not? So the idea of metaphorical truth, which I think actually is the reconciliation between at least the points that you guys each started out with, is the idea that there are concepts which are literally false, that we can falsify in a scientific, rational sense, but that if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you were if you behave according to the fact that they are false. And so to call these things simply false is an error. In effect, the universe has left them true in some sense other than a purely literal one. And so religions would then, according to actually what you heard from both Sam and Jordan, religions would fall into this class of things. These are encapsulations of stories and prescriptions that if you follow them, irrespective of whether they literally describe the universe, you end up with certain advantages that you may not know why they are there, but nonetheless, you are ahead of your position if you were to navigate just simply on your perceptions. So that’s the concept. Yeah, so I think there’s a good analogy that you and I stumbled onto after we did a podcast together. You had an analogy about a porcupine that could shoot its quills, which many people balked at, but a listener gave us a better one, which was the idea that anyone who’s worked with guns at all must have heard this admonishment to treat every gun as if it is loaded. And you actually, last night when I alleged that you believed in God, you corrected me, you said, no, you live as if God exists. And so this seems like there’s a connection here. So if I had a gun here that I wanted to show Brett, if I know anything about guns, I’m going to make damn sure that it’s unloaded. I’m going to pull back the slide, I’m going to drop the magazine, pull back the slide, check the chamber, and do this in a redundant fashion that really looks like I’m suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is truly redundant. And then I’ll hand it to Brett, and if Brett knows anything about guns, he will do the same thing, having just seen me do it. And if he hands it back to me, again, I will do the same thing, even though there may be no ammunition around. So it really is crazy at the level of our explicit knowledge of the situation, and yet absolutely necessary to do. And it’s not merely, it runs very deep. I mean, I would, the thing is, that whole time you’re careful not to point the barrel of the gun at anything you would be afraid to shoot. And when people fail to live this way around guns, they, with some unnerving frequency, actually shoot themselves or people close to them by accident. So it is really the only proper hedge against just the odds of being in proximity to loaded weapons. And yet, if someone in the middle of this operation came up to us and said, you know, actually there’s a casino that just opened across the street that will take your bets about whether or not guns are loaded. Would you like to bet a million dollars as to whether or not this gun is loaded? Well, of course, I would bet those million dollars every time that it’s not loaded, because I know it’s not loaded. So there’s a literal truth and a metaphorical truth, otherwise known as a very useful fiction, which in this case is actually more useful than the truth. But the only way I can understand its utility is, and even utter the phrase metaphorical truth in a way that’s comprehensible, is in the context of distinguishing it from literal truth. This is fascinating, Sam, actually. This is, I think, next phase of the… I’m a little… I’m worried by how excited you are. So I have a little story that might be helpful about that, and so you could tell me what you think about this. Okay, so one of the things that I’ve been reconsidering since we talked last night is the nature of our dispute about the relationship between facts and values, because I think I can make a case that what I’ve been trying to do, especially in my first book, was to ground values in facts, but I’m not doing it the same way that you are exactly. So I don’t want to make that a point of contention, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But with regards to this metaphorical truth, let me tell you something. You tell me what you think about this. So one of the things that’s been observed by anthropologists worldwide is that human beings tend to make sacrifices. So I’m going to spend two minutes, three minutes, laying out a sacrificial story, and the reason I want to do it is because… See, what I think happened with regards to the origin of these profound stories is that people first started to behave in certain ways that had survival significance, and that was selected for as a consequence of the standard selection practices, and so that was instantiated in behavior. And then because we could observe ourselves, because we’re self-conscious creatures, that we started to make representations of those patterns and dramatize them and then encapsulate them in stories. So it’s a bottom-up. So it would be sort of like chimpanzees or wolves become aware of their dominance hierarchy structures, and the strategies that they use. So a wolf, for example, if two wolves are having a dominance dispute, one, the wolf that gives up first lays down and puts his neck open so the other wolf can tear it out, and then the other wolf doesn’t. And you could say, well, it’s as if a wolf is following a rule about not killing a weaker member of the pack. Of course, wolves don’t have rules. They have behavioral patterns. But a self-conscious wolf would watch what the wolves were doing and then say, well, it’s as if we’re acting out the idea that each wolf in the pack has intrinsic value. And then that starts to be, and maybe the wolves would have a little story about the heroic, forbearing wolf that doesn’t tear out the neck of its opponents, and that that’s good wolf, well, that’s good wolf ethics. So, but it’s grounded in the actual behavior. Okay, so we’ll put that aside for a second. Now, here’s the sacrificial story. So human beings have made sacrifices. It seems to be a standard practice all around the world. And in the biblical narratives, they would often sacrifice something of value, like a valuable animal. Like a child. Well, no, no, no, look, look, I’m not making light of this. I know that human sacrifice was a part of this. But that’s, again, just to give you a crib on where my mind goes here, human sacrifice is as old a religious precept as we know about. It’s a cultural universal. The other sacrifices are derivations from it. Circumcision is a surrogate for the far more barbaric act of human sacrifice. And, you know, it answers every test you would put to it with respect to its archetypal significance, its compelling presence in stories across all cultures. But the horror is that it actually has taken place in all these cultures based on explicit beliefs in the presence of just, just, right. Well, Arthur Kessler, Arthur Kessler used that as the argument for the essential insanity of humanity. We have no, but it’s not just the insanity of humanity. It’s the, the misapprehension of the causal structure of the cosmos. You don’t know what that controls the weather. You don’t know why people get sick. You think your neighbor is capable of casting magic spells on you. You’re ignorant of everything and you’re trying to force some order on things. And so when you don’t, in the absence of engineers and you don’t know why certain buildings fall down, you actually can agree with your neighbor that maybe you should bury your first born child into every post hole of this new building, which in fact has took place. And it’s the consequence of ignorance. And so that the problem is if you’re only going to talk about this purified notion of sacrifice. It’s a very strange consequence of ignorance. Well, it’s the notion that we’re in relationship to invisible others that can, that can mistreat us based on not having offered enough. We are, we’re in, but not precisely those others. Well, but we’re in relationship to the invisible others who will judge us in the future. Okay. But that again, you’re changing, you’re changing the noun in important ways. But I’m also trying to understand and I’m not trying to argue against the horror of child sacrifice. No, I would never imagine I know, I know. But I’m also, but I’m also trying to, my work would be much easier if you did that. Yes, yes. Yes. And the work of journalists as well. Although they’ve tried that pretty much anyway. So right, that would be, that would even be worse than enforced monogamy hypothetically. So, okay. So see, I’m, let’s say that I’m trying to give the devil his due and I’m trying to understand from an evolutionary perspective, like a cognitive behavioral evolutionary perspective, let’s say why that particular set of ideas would emerge and in many, many, many places, perhaps autonomously or once having emerged would spread like wildfire. It’s like, because I’m not willing to only attribute it to ignorance. Now we can attribute it to ignorance, no problem, man. But, but there’s more going on there because it is a human universal and like there’s all sorts of things that happen in nature as a consequence of biological and evolutionary processes that don’t work out well for our current state of moral intuition, let’s say. Okay, so one of the things, because I’ve been thinking about this sacrificial motif for a very long time. I’m trying to figure out what the hell’s the idea here exactly? And so here’s one way of thinking about it. If you give up something of value now, you can gain something of more value in the future. Okay, so let’s think about that idea for a minute. So the first thing is, that’s a hell of an idea. That’s delay gratification. That’s right. That’s the discovery of the future as well. And so you might say, well, the notion of sacrifice is exactly the same thing as the discovery of the future. If we give up something we really value now, we can make a pact with the structure of existence itself such that better things will happen to us in the future. Now, okay, now what’s weird about this, and it’s hard to understand, is that it works. So when I talk to my students, for example, and I say, what did your parents sacrifice to send you to university? Many of them are children of first generation immigrants. And so, like, man, they’re on that story in a second, right? They know all sorts of things that their parents sacrificed. And they’re delaying gratification in the present for a radically delayed return in the future. Now, you think animals, generally speaking, they might act out the idea of delayed gratification as a consequence of running out their instincts, but they don’t conceptualize it. It’s not obvious that animals give up something they value right now in order to thrive in the future. There’s an old story about how to catch a monkey, right? So you put a jar up with rocks in it, and you put little candies in it. It’s a narrow neck jar. You put little candies on top of the rocks. You put a few candies in front of the jar. Then the monkey comes along and picks up the candies, puts his hand in the jar, grabs the candies, and can’t get it out. I still don’t know if this actually works on monkeys or if it’s just a great story. Well, I don’t know either. And I’ve heard various claims. But the point is you can go pick up the monkey. He won’t let go of the candies. Now, perhaps he would. But the issue is that it’s not obvious that animals will forego an immediate gratification for a future gratification. I don’t think that’s right, actually. And I actually want to hold… The question is, will they do it consciously? They might act it out. They act it out. That’s not the issue. It’s very hard to know if it’s conscious because they won’t respond to the questionnaires. I know. And obviously, the line between acting it out and starting to consciously represent it is a tenuous one. But what looks to me like what happened is that after we observed that people who were capable of delaying gratification sacrificed things that they valued in order to obtain a future goal, and it worked, that we started to codify that as a representation and then started to act it out. And so the story… And you’d say, well, that produced strange variants. But there’s a reason for that, too, as far as I can say. So imagine this. Imagine that there’s a rule of thumb. Sacrificing what you find valuable now will ensure certain benefits in the future. Well, then the question becomes, how good could those future benefits be? And so that might be heavenly, let’s say, in the archetypal extreme. And what’s the ultimate sacrifice that you have to perform? And then I would say, well, the child sacrifice fits into that category. And so it’s as if those ideas were pushed to their radical extreme. And you could say, well, that’s a pathological extreme. It’s like, well, it is a pathological extreme. But I think we also have to understand that some of the things that we’ve learned as we’ve evolved towards our current state of wisdom, such as it is, is that they were learned in a very bloody and catastrophic way. They were learned with incredible difficulty. And delay of gratification was certainly one of those, because it’s a hell of a thing to learn when you’re in conditions of privation. Yeah, I think that the issue here for me is that you don’t need a conception of, you don’t need any kind of positive gloss on human sacrifice as a meme or as an archetype in order to form a coherent picture of the future that can motivate you. So delayed gratification is fully separable from a notion that it might ever be rational or good, and that it might be possible to sacrifice a child as an offering to an invisible other that doesn’t exist. But how do you know it’s separable? Because that’s the developmental history. As you said, the sacrifices came first. I think it is in fact historically separable, but let’s just say it’s not. Let’s just say it’s a matter of our origins. They’re united. They’re of a piece. It’s just, it is the genetic fallacy to care about that origin. I mean, to say that the, you know, the idea that we do, that is the only path forward toward a notion of the future, given where we’ve come from, or that it’s somehow necessary to venerate now, or that it’s good that we took that path. But we do venerate the idea of sacrifice now. But I would say that what’s happened is that it’s been… But I would say we do it to the detriment of our moral intuitions in the religious context. So for instance, I think that the notion that Christianity is actually a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice. Christianity is a religion that says, actually no, human sacrifice is necessary, and there was only one that in fact was necessary and effective, and that’s the sacrifice of Jesus. And I think that is, when you dig into the details, not only a morally uninteresting vision of our circumstance and how we can be redeemed, it’s morally abhorrent. So I think there’s better versions online. Let me ask you a question about that. So in the moral landscape, you lay out this pathway. There’s the bad life, and there’s the good life, and you describe what they were. And the bad life is a variation of hellish circumstances, and the good life is a variant of hypothetically the life that we would like to lead. And your conception is that, and correct me if I’m wrong, your conception is that the proper pathway forward, so that would be the moral endeavor, is to move away from the bad and towards the good. Yeah, insofar as we understand which way is up, yes. The basic claim is that we can be right or wrong with respect to our beliefs there. We don’t necessarily know how to do that in an unerring manner, and we could subject that to approximation, correction along the way, and we should, but we can outline the broad scheme, which is progress away from hell towards something that’s positive. Yes. Yes. Okay, so I would say that there’s an implicit claim in that, that you should sacrifice everything in you that isn’t serving that to that. And I would say that that’s essentially the same claim that’s made in Christianity. So again, that is a, I mean, I understand the impulse to up-level these barbaric, ignorance-derived beliefs to something that is morally, that is interesting and palatable in the current context. And I understand you can do that. My concern there is you can do that with everything. You could do it with witchcraft. Why not do the exact same thing you’re doing with religion to the history of witchcraft? Witchcraft is as well- Well, modern witches would do that, so that’s a perfectly valid criticism. Right, but yeah, but that should be of concern to me, the reasons why we don’t want to endorse modern witchcraft. Look, absolutely. And so, you know, one of your criticism- But I mean, I’m not talking, and modern, witchcraft currently exists. I mean, you go to Africa, people are hunting albinos for their body parts because they believe in sympathetic magic, and kids get killed as witches. So this belief endures in certain pockets of humanity, and we’re right to, I mean, I just think at a certain point you have to acknowledge that some ideas are not only wrong, but their effects are disastrous, or have been disastrous, or will likely be, even if good in certain circumstances, will likely be disastrous in the future. And then we shouldn’t be hostage to these ancient memes. We shouldn’t have to figure out how to make the most of the worst idea that anyone’s ever had, which is maybe you should sacrifice your firstborn child to a being you’ve never seen. Hold on, Sam, I want to hold your feet to the fire here a little bit. Two points. One, thing observation. When you presented the example, so on your podcast I had argued that believing that porcupines can throw their quills might protect you from a porcupine that might wheel around even though porcupines can’t throw their quills. Your listener sent the better example, which was all guns are loaded. When you presented it, you didn’t say all guns are loaded. You said treat all guns as if they are loaded, which is, I think, the same reflex that you have faced with any metaphorical truth, which is that it can always be unpacked. But actually, that’s the way Jordan talks about believing in God as well. Right. And actually, so this is, but then if we take something like, so you say, all right, sacrifice of children is abhorrent. Let’s say it is. And then you say, well, Christianity hasn’t foregone the sacrifice of children. In fact, it’s described one child who is sacrificed for everybody else. But arguably, that’s an upgrade of some metaphorical truth that frees those who are adhering to this tradition from ever considering sacrificing a child. And what it does is it provides a motivational structure that may, in fact, have very positive outgrowths, though not literal, the idea that someone would have sacrificed their own child for the benefit of everybody else not to have to. That idea might engender a large amount of good work that would result, as Jordan is pointing out. Let me just concede that the hardest case for me, which I did up top just in defining, after you defined metaphorical truth and I used the gun example, there are certainly cases where the useful fiction is more useful than the truth. I would grant that. But I think those cases are few and far between. But handling guns is one of them. It’s just not useful when the casino opens across the street and you can place a million dollar bet, right? Then you want to have some purchase on the literal truth. So you want to be able to, and again, this is psychologically interesting because, and I keep coming back to the gun example because the one that is viscerally real to me, if I have a real gun that I know to be unloaded, I still emotionally can’t treat it as a harmless object. I can’t point it at my child just for the fun of it because we’re going to play cops and robbers now with a real gun, right? I have a superstitious attachment to always being safe with the gun. And it’s important that that get ingrained and yet it is not strictly, it’s not irrational because it has good effects, but it’s not actually in register with what I know to be true factually in each moment. So it’s very low cost. It’s very low cost. It’s not dividing societies and causing people to go to war. And if you were going to teach a child gun safety, you would want to encode this so that they would automatically know never to behave as if a gun is unloaded because that’s what gets you into trouble. As an adult, every gun owner recognizes the distinction between the metaphorical truth and the literal truth here. But I guess what I suspect is going on here is that your mechanism for dealing with the world involves unpacking all of these things. And I think it’s highly productive, but it also means that you have a hard time understanding why anybody would do anything different. And that’s the question is just because we can track fully the difference between guns actually all being loaded and behaving as if all guns are loaded, right? That one, there’s no leftover. There’s nothing, there’s no mystery there, right? But there may be many of these things for which there is some difficulty lining up the metaphorical truth with the literal truth and operating according to the metaphorical truth might have advantages, which I think is what you’re getting at. So here’s another situation because we have to remember what kind of catastrophic past we emerged from and how much privation ruled the world prior to 1895 essentially. And certainly the farther back you go, the more bloody and horrible it was. I mean, how often do you think it was necessary? And this is not obviously something I’m in favor of. And this is also one of these situations where we get to play with ideas that we might not otherwise play with. How often do you think it was necessary for people in the past who had absolutely no access to birth control and who didn’t have enough food to sacrifice a child for the survival of their family? I mean, God only knows, you know, and that’s well, but that’s worth thinking about. It’s like, you know, life is unbelievably cruel and difficult. And one of the problems that comes when you discover the future is that you might have to make the most painful of sacrifices. And lots of archaic people do this sort of thing. They do that with their elderly people. They do that with sick people. They do that with infants that they deem too fragile to survive. Like, so part of child sacrifice, and I know the literature on child sacrifice reasonably well, part of child sacrifice seemed to emerge out of the observable necessity to leave someone behind so that everyone else didn’t die. And we don’t know how often that had to happen in the past. It might have had to happen a lot. Right. Now, obviously… Although, just in the interest of kind of conceptual clarity here, human sacrifice is a larger horror than that. So you have, what was very common is the sacrificing of captives. You take the Aztec sacrifices where you now have slaves, some of whom you’re going to… Yeah, the Aztecs sacrificed about 25,000 people a year. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, it’s clearly a bloody mess. There’s no doubt about that. But, you know, one of the things that you see happening in the biblical narrative, which is extraordinarily interesting is that you see echoes of child sacrifice at the beginning. But what happens is the sacrificial notion gets increasingly psychologized as the story progresses. So, you know, you see that transition with Abraham and Isaac, where the child sacrifice is actually forbidden, although previously demanded by God. And then you also see it, as you already laid out, in the substitution of the circumcision for the idea of sacrifice itself. Right. And then what seems to happen… See, I’m trying to figure out how these ideas develop psychologically from their behavioral underpinnings, is that eventually it becomes psychologized completely. So you can say, well, we can conceptualize a sacrifice in the abstract, so my parents can sacrifice to send me to university without anything or anyone having to die. It transforms itself from something that’s enacted out as a dramatic ritual into something that’s a psychological reality. But all that blood and catastrophe along the way is part of the process by which the idea comes to emerge. Right. So what is the connection of all of this? Because, yes, there is this history, and I would argue we are busily trying to outgrow much of it, if not most of it, whether it’s evolutionary history or just the cultural history. We might be trying to transmute it so that it becomes… We can maintain, as you suggested we do, we can maintain what’s useful in the tradition and throw out everything that’s pathological. Yes, but we’re constantly discovering a lack of fit between both what we perceive in ourselves as biological imperatives and the cultural legacies of just what mommy and daddy taught me was true, right? Yes. Which we have now every reason to believe might not be true. And we’re trying to optimize our thoughts and institutions and relationships with one another for our current circumstance. And yet we have this legacy effect of certain books and certain ways of speaking have a completely different status. And they have this status because they may, in fact, it’s imagined, not be the products of merely previous human minds, but they may be the products of omniscience. And this is where the respect accorded to religious tradition is totally unlike the respect we would accord to anything else, mythology, literature, past science, past philosophy. People can read Plato and Aristotle for their entire lives without ever being fully captured by the kind of dogmatism that every religion demands that you be captured by if you’re really going to be an adherent. I would say that’s actually an archetypal truth. The idea that the pathological tradition stands in the way of update, that’s an archetypal truth. I mean, one of the reasons why in creation myths, one of the variants of a creation myth is that the hero has to slay a tyrannical giant in order to make the world out of his pieces. And it’s a metaphorical restatement of the idea that a tradition can become hidebound and when it becomes hidebound and too rigid that it interferes with current adaptation. But the problem is, and this is, I think, this is something we really need to hash out. The problem is, the problem that you’re describing is the problem of a priori structure. Now, some of that’s textual, but some of it isn’t textual. Some of it resides in us as our psyche insofar as we act. The problem I’m describing here is that we have two categories of books in this case. We have those written by people like ourselves, just endlessly open for criticism and conjecture, and those written by invisible, omniscient entities. But I would presume that if these religious systems weren’t codified in books, if they were still just enacted or dramatized, you’d have the same objection. It’s not the fact that they’re in books that’s relevant. No, but it is the dogmatism. It’s the fact that we can’t jettison the bad parts. Okay, it’s the dogmatism. Okay, so to me, that’s the same as the problem of structure. Now, here’s the problem, I think, with the way that your argument is laid out. And I’m not saying it’s wrong. It seems to me that this is a place where it needs to be developed because I see that the attempt that you make to derive the world of value from the world of facts as justifiable given what it is that you’re attempting to do, which in principle is to make the world a better place. But there’s a massive gap in there. It’s like how do you do it? Because the objection that you place on my reasoning, let’s say, which is, well, the problem with these texts is that there’s an infinite number of interpretations and how can you determine which of those is canonically correct is exactly and precisely the same criticism that can be levied against your attempt to extract the world of value from the domain of facts. It’s the same problem. Well, it’s not an infinite number of interpretations in either case, but I think that it’s close enough to infinite so that it might be. I mean, that’s why the moral landscape for me is a landscape of peaks and valleys. And so I’m totally open to the possibility, in fact, certainty that there are different ways for similar minds and certainly different ways for different minds to be constellated so that they have equivalent but irreconcilable peaks on the landscape. So there’s a lot of well-being over here and there’s a lot of well-being over here and there’s a valley in between. And so it’s a kind of moral relativism. It’s kind of like, this is great and this is great, but these are irreconcilable. Well, I’d like to see that made more concrete. And I need to know how that fits in with your conception, because one of the claims that you make in the moral landscape is that the distinction between the bad life and the good life is not only like it’s a factual distinction. It’s universally apprehensible and true. I think it’s your fundamental axiomatic claim. And I don’t see how that’s commensurate with the position that you just put forward. Well, so here’s the position. And you can forget about morality as a concept for this. I mean, I think the starting point is deeper than morality. The starting point, and this is our starting point, all of us right now in the universe. The starting point is we are conscious. We have a circumstance that admits of qualitative experience. And again, this is true. However we understand consciousness, whatever is actually happening, we could be living in a simulation, this could be a dream, you could be a brain in a vat. Consciousness could just be the product of neurochemistry or we could have eternal souls running on something integrated with the brain. Whatever is true, something seems to be happening. And these seemings can be really, really bad or really, really good. We know each one of us in our lives have experienced this range of possibility. And yes, there are caveats here. There are hard and painful experiences that have a silver lining, right? That give you some other capacity. Where you could say, well, that really sucked, but I’m a better person for it. And we can understand what it means to be a better person for it in terms, again, of this range of experience, which I’m calling, assuming all of the positive end of this as well-being. Which is to say that I’m a better person for it because now, having endured that ordeal, I am capable of much greater compassion or I appreciate my life more. The cancer made me a better person. Now that I’m cured, I value each moment of life more than I ever did. All of these claims are intelligible within a context of an open-ended context of exploring this space of possible experience. So what I’m saying is forget about morality, forget about right and wrong and good and evil. What is undeniable is that what we have here is a navigation problem. We have a space of possible experience. And again, this is not just a human problem. This is a problem for any possible conscious mind. We have a space of possible experience in which we can navigate and things can get excruciating and pointlessly horrible where there are no silver linings. And this can happen individually in some episode of madness that never ends. If there really is a Christian hell to go to, well then it’s going to happen to me after I die, given what I’ve said on this stage. And so it matters who’s right. Obviously, if I knew that an eternity of fiery torment awaited somebody who didn’t make the right noises about one faith or another, well then it would only be rational to make those right noises. So I’m placing a bet on certain pictures of reality being wrong. But the reality is we’re navigating in this space and morality and ethics are the terms we use for how we think about our behavior affecting one another’s experience. So if you’re in a moral solitude, if you’re on a desert island or if you’re alone in the universe, morality is not the issue you need to worry about. But well-being still is an ever-present issue. It’s possible to suffer and it’s possible to experience bliss and perhaps something beyond that. And the horizon in both directions is something we will never fully explore very likely. And so we’re not going to be able to do that. We don’t know how good things can get and we don’t know how bad they can get. But that there’s a spectrum here is undeniable. And I would say that my moral realism simply entails that we acknowledge that it’s possible not to know what you’re missing. It’s possible to be living in a way where you are less happy than you could be and not to know why, right? And just not have any of those changes. And that matters. If anything matters, that matters. And it matters to us individually and it matters to us collectively. And that mattering is that subsumes everything we can intelligibly want in this domain of value. And so again, the cash value of any value claim is in the actual or potential change in consciousness for some conscious system somewhere sometime. And that’s my claim. And that’s… Can I try to get… I would like you each to clarify something. So it sounds to me, Sam, like you are hypothesizing that a rationalist approach will always beat a traditional metaphorical approach with respect to the generation of well-being. Well, not always, but there’s so many obvious downsides to the traditional sectarian dogmatic approach that we should want to get out of the religion business as fast as possible. Okay, but as fast as possible. But do you mean that it has always been true that we should always have gotten away from it as fast as possible? Or do you mean now we should get away from it as fast as possible? But there is a point somewhere in the past where it might have been true that actually the best, the most, the richest path to well-being might have been encoded metaphorically. Oh, yeah, that’s certainly possible. And in fact, you might even say it was likely based on the fact that we have all these systems still around. So we still have the systems around in part because we still think in metaphor and we actually can’t help it because half of our brain is oriented towards metaphor. But… Can I get you to clarify something now? Yes. Okay. So you have argued, and you’ve actually quite surprised me by doing so, you’ve argued that the dogmatism is a bug and not a feature. No, it’s a bug and a feature. Okay, it’s a bug and a feature. Good. Yes. But what I thought I heard you say was that the resistance to update was a problem, that effectively it was an obstacle. Yeah, so is lack of resistance to update. Right, okay, good. There’s problems everywhere, man. Well, there’s a tension. There is a tension. There’s a terrible tension. Right, well, look at it this way. Look at it this way. Most new ideas are stupid and dangerous. But most old ideas are as well. But some of them are vital. Right? And so we’re screwed both ways. It’s like, well, if we stay locked in our current mode of apprehension, all hell’s going to break loose. If we generate a whole bunch of new solutions, most of them are going to be wrong and we’re going to die. And so what we need to do is, well, it’s a Darwinian claim in some sense, is that despite the fact that most new ideas are stupid and dangerous, a subset of them are so vital that if we don’t incorporate them, we’re all going to perish. That’s the bloody existential condition. And so now, part of the issue here, and see, I think that this is, the problem is, is that let’s take the dogma idea. Okay, so there’s the dogma incorporated in the books. But I’m going to throw away the books because the dogma was there before the books. And then the question is, where was the dogma? And the answer was, the dogma was in the cultural practices and in the agreement that people made with regards to those cultural practices. But it was also part and parcel of the intra-psychic structure that enables us to perceive the world as such. Now, the problem is, and I think this is the central place where we need to flesh out these ideas, is that you cannot view the world without an a priori structure. And that a priori structure has a dogmatic element. And so you can’t just say, well, let’s get rid of the dogma because you can’t perceive the world without a structure. It has an uninspected element. So if you’re talking about just perceiving the world, yes, we have perceptual structure that allows for us to perceive the world. And we know that there are failure states. So we know, for instance, that we have evolved to perceive in visual space based on a literally neurological expectation that light sources will be from above. And so we know that we can produce visual illusions based on gaming that expectation. But that’s not the same thing as a dogma subscribed to by some subset of humanity that is antithetical to another dogma subscribed to by another set of humanity that has nothing to do with underlying biology. That’s something that’s changeable. It’s not so obvious. No, but it’s changeable in real time based on just conversations like this. I get emails from people who can point to the paragraph where they lost their faith, right? Where you’re reading Richard Dawkins or hearing a debate between me and some theologian where it’s just a collision against rationality, which is so useful in every other context, suddenly proves its utility in this context where they think, well, OK, clearly I know the Muslims are wrong about the status of the Quran. Let me let me take that that that spirit of criticism in the internal space of my own culture and what what moves? Well, a dogmatic attachment to Christianity has to move by that same standard. Well, and that’s and it’s possible to do that. And that’s not a matter of getting into the brain and changing your perceptual apparatus that has. Well, the distinction between different levels of of what would you call it? Structure related processing in the brain and the relationship to the underlying biology isn’t clear. Like it isn’t clear when that’s biological and when is it when it isn’t. So, you know, your your your comments about our a priori perceptual structures notwithstanding, there’s no clear line between what constitutes an instantiated, accurate biological perception and something that shades more into a cultural presupposition. So it’s a it’s a gray area. Now, here, let me ask you a question. So this is one of the things I’ve been thinking about. So this is this is designed to point out the difference. I’m not making the claim that the idea that we should ground values in fact is wrong. I’m not going to make that claim, although I think it’s way more complicated than we’ve opened up so far. But I would say is I can I think relatively easily demonstrate a situation in which you cannot find the value from the fact. Let’s say you want an antique. It’s valuable. And you think I’m going to take this antique apart and I’m going to find out where the value is. Good luck. It’s not valuable in that sense. Wait a second. Wait a second. So we need to know. So that’s right. It’s not valuable in that sense, because the value of the antique is a social agreement about its position in a hierarchy. It has nothing to do with the material substrate of the antique. Yeah, but but not you can’t. It’s not just sure. It’s that you’re already made the claim already that you can derive values from facts. It’s like, then what are you willing to do? These are facts about again. So there are facts about the facts exist in intersubjective space. Right. So if I if I tell you, well, this glass, this isn’t just an ordinary glass. I know it looks just like that one. But this is the glass that Elton John drank from his last concert here. Right. Right. Right. So, you know, what do you want to pay me for it? Right. It could be that, you know, you’re just the biggest Elton John fan ever. And you it’s worth quite a lot to you. Now, that is it’s a kind of evidence. It’s not value intrinsic to the glass. But it is it is it is a. Where’s the value located? Well, it’s a measure in in the change this provokes in your experience. Right. Just the idea. I mean, we value ideas as much as anything else. And that’s, you know, that’s hence the mad work done by religion. Right. I mean, because it’s not these aren’t facts on the ground. These are ideas that rule people’s lives. People spend their whole life afraid of hell. OK. It seems to me that it’s easier in some sense rather than to relate the value of that. I love the Elton John’s glass example. I was going to use Elvis Presley is here. I will tell you. It’s like where in the guitar is the fact that it’s Elvis Presley’s guitar? Well, it’s nowhere in the guitar. Well, what is it in? Where is it then? And the answer is it’s in the dominance hierarchy of values that’s been socially constructed around the guitar. It’s located in interpersonal space and that that location. So value is located in interpersonal space. And if you want to say, well, that’s also a fact. It’s like, OK, but it’s a fact about the beliefs and desires and conscious states of all the people involved. OK. Well, that’s the only place where it exists. That’s the only thing where the idea of Elvis’s guitar can show up. Well, I’m trying to figure out that you see, because what seems to me to be happening, at least in part, is that the we can stretch the the domain of what constitutes a fact so that the domain of fact starts to incorporate the domain of values. But we do that with some doing some damage to the domain of fact. No, no, no, no, no. Hang on. Don’t say don’t just say no. It’s not. This is really I’ll say more. This is really complicated because you see part of what the postmodernists have done is that they pushed away the domain of facts entirely. And they say, well, the only thing is, is that the only thing that actually exists is that this domain of intersubjective agreement. And they know, yeah, you and I are on the same page with respect to postmodernism. Right. But you have to give but you have to give you have to give the devil his due as well. They pointed out something. And what they pointed out is that it’s not so easy to localize the structure that attributes to facts their value. It’s not a simple thing. Now, wait, wait, wait. Yes. You would surely agree that if we had Elvis Presley’s guitar, that that guitar would have a material impact on people. We could tell them this is Elvis Presley’s guitar. Some fraction of them would disbelieve it. Somebody might be able to establish it based on a picture or something like that. And the point is, it would have a value that would alter the behavior of people with respect to that object in a material way. Yes, it would alter the behavior of the people. So the value could also manifest in physical space. Which part of it? The behavior? We could detect it. We could figure out what the value of this guitar is based on some intersection. Sure, we could take a behaviorist approach and we could see how much work people were willing to do to make contact with the guitar. We can scan their brains and see what is happening. Well, I’m not so sure we can do that. Well, clearly the brain is involved. Hypothetically we can do it, but practically we’re not so good at it. Because the MRI data, generally speaking, is junk. Well, we can table that. Well, look, it’s not like it’ll be junk. That will be a profoundly controversial statement in MRI circles. Well, it’s not. Yeah. Fair enough. I don’t think we need it. We don’t need it. No, let’s go with the behavioral idea. The brain, as yet incompletely understood, is surely involved in the valuing of this object. And so if I tell you that this is… And again, we can take it out of intersubjective space because you could be in a value solitude with respect to any given object. So it could just be… you could have a sentimental attachment to your watch that’s worth exactly 10 to give away every month to help start struggling humanity, and you tell me you’ll give 10 to Lila this month. And then I catch you in another moment, and I say, well, you know, it’s Lila and her brother, so it’s like if you only can give 10, I understand, but the problem is actually worse than I suspected. And you say, well, actually, I’m just going to give eight, right? It’s not coherent with how much you cared about Lila in the first place. We do know quite well that the heuristics that we use to orient ourselves in the world can be placed into frameworks where they produce contradictory outcomes. But that doesn’t mean that the heuristics themselves are deeply flawed. It’s a problem with the work of people like Kahneman and Tversky. We need to correct for them because they’re producing a reliable result that we recognize is non-functional. Yeah, but no, you can put them in a situation where they produce a counterproductive response, but that doesn’t mean that generally speaking, in most situations, they don’t produce a useful outcome because the question is why in the hell would they have evolved if they didn’t produce a useful outcome most of the time? They evolved to live with 150 people with whom we’re related and to be terrified of the people in the next valley who may want to kill and eat us. Yes, and that’s- I mean, that’s our ancient circumstance which doesn’t map onto a common humanity of 7 billion people trying to figure out how to get to Mars without killing each other. Well, it does map onto it sometimes, unfortunately, because there are many times when we still face the same kind of threats. Yeah, but- In fact- But hence- Look, it maps onto the hierarchy that we’re trying to climb here. It maps onto your concerns, Sam. You wouldn’t be concerned about the fundamentalist terror of Islam if you weren’t driven by those essentially tribal considerations. No, it’s not- I’m not suggesting that it’s wrong. It’s not true. It doesn’t require- if my- a mere identification with humanity can ground not wanting to be murdered by people who are identified with a subset of humanity, right? I don’t need to be part of a smaller tribe to care that people will murder me over burning a Quran, right? It’s clearly counterproductive that we live in a society where some objects are held with such totemic attachment for irrational reasons by many, many millions of people where, you should be sympathetic with this, our free speech is actually cancelled on this point, right? Yes. I have no argument whatsoever between us about the lack of utility of certain- You don’t have to be identified as a Christian or a Jew to push back against that. You just have to be a human being that sees the dysfunction of a smaller kind of provincialism. Well, the thing that I’m struggling with is that I still can’t understand in what your ethos is grounded because you claim like a transcendental rationalism, but you won’t identify the structures that produce it. It’s a black box. And when I try to push you on the absolute nature of your ethical claim, which is that the bad life is worse than the good life and that we should, in fact, universally work towards the good life, it doesn’t seem to me that you’ll accept the proposition that that’s a universal claim. No, it is- well, should is irrelevant here. the fact that there is the possibility of moving in this space. If you move in the wrong direction, if you move far enough, you’ll like it less and less. But why is should irrelevant? Given the minds you have, right? What if you had to accept moving in the wrong direction and experiencing less and less well-being in order to- To get to a better place. Well, and maybe even just to survive. But the population has to endure a generation and a half of misery in order to persist. Ethically, that’s a perfectly intelligible circumstance that people have had to face. And it’s- on my moral landscape, it’s analogous to- we might be at one local maximum or some high point, but we’re moving down a slope to get to yet some higher place. So certain things- some things may only be possible if we made some painful and net unpleasant sacrifice to get there. That’s for sure. Yes. But that can be rationally apprehended. There can be an argument for that. It could be- we all have to go on a diet, otherwise we’re going to die of this problem. We all have to stop eating whatever it is, wheat, right? It’s a hard sacrifice for people who have to stop it, as you know. If that were just true, well, then there’d be an argument for it. There’d be evidence that would convince us. We would stop. We would feel the pain, and we would get whatever benefit that was on the other side of that sacrifice. But again, you don’t have to- it’s the utility- again, to bring it back to stories, which is, as you know, not my emphasis, but it is yours. The utility of stories is not something I’m arguing against. I mean, there’s no question that certain stories are incredibly compelling. In our conversation with one another, the moment you begin to frame something in terms of a story, people become much more interested. If 90% of what we said together tonight were framed- each point we were making as a matter of philosophy or science were framed in- well, actually, yesterday, I was walking down the street, and I met this guy, this terrifying-looking guy. All of a sudden, people become much more interested, right? And then that’s not an accident. And that says something deep about us that we could understand in evolutionary terms, and we might, in fact, want to creatively leverage to be better people and to have better conversations. Yes, definitely. Yes. That’s what I think I’m doing. There’s nothing that I say in opposition to religious dogmatism and religious sectarianism that discounts that reality. And that’s a psychological reality. It’s a cultural reality. And I’m not against making the most of it. My basic claim, however, is that we never need to believe that one of our books may not have a human origin in order to do that effectively. You can be just as compelled by the example of somebody like Jesus or some more modern person who strikes you as a moral hero and deeply wise without believing anything on insufficient evidence. And as you alluded to, purely fictional stories about superheroes can have immense effect on us. And that’s something we could understand and also leverage. But again, that takes us out of the religion business, and that’s all I’ve been arguing for. So do you really believe that the belief in the supernatural aspect of these stories never alters the calculus of what people should do? That the divine nature of a story about Jesus doesn’t motivate people to do something that they might not have the courage to do otherwise? The belief that they might end up in heaven because their good work is going to be observed doesn’t alter their behavior? Well, I know it alters their behavior, but rather often for the bad. No, I mean, this is what worries me about. I think there’s something, there’s a profound net negative that we are paying the price for every day by believing in paradise. A belief that this life probably doesn’t matter very much at all because we get what we really want after we die is, forget about the evidentiary basis for that belief, it’s ruinous for prioritizing what we should be prioritizing in this life. I agree with that, by the way. Okay, well that’s interesting. So let me ask you this. I hear from you what might be a kind of confirmation bias, where I hear that we’ve got a mixed bag, you’ve got supernatural claims, these supernatural claims we all agree have effects on the way people actually behave, and you’re quite focused on the negative and you tend to discount the positive, which might be an artifact of the fact that we’re talking about the present and therefore maybe something that’s not well matched to these stories, or it might be from the idea that you have the sense that there is actually a bias, that these belief structures do and have always produced more harm than good. And also my sense that the positive can be had without those structures. So if you’re talking about the contemplative experience, is it possible to wake up tomorrow morning feeling like Meister Eckhart, feeling like you’re just inseparable from the pure capital B being that is consciousness, and there’s no separate self there. A self-transcending union with everything you can perceive. I think that can be had without any kind of religious dogmatism. That’s just a matter of paying close enough attention to the nature of consciousness. So the contemplative life is one baby in the bath water we can save. The ethical life is another baby we can save. You don’t have to presuppose anything on insufficient evidence to argue about what is right and wrong and good and evil in the 21st century. Is it fair to call that a hypothesis that not just for some people but for everyone the level of well-being can be enhanced through rational interaction with the questions that dictate what we do? Is that a hypothesis? That’s a hypothesis. The one additional fact that makes that more or less moot is that on certain points, even if we felt that really believing the fiction was advantageous to people, depending on which fiction you’re talking about, there’s simply too much evidence against it. You can’t decide to believe something for which you have no evidence simply because of the good experience it will give you or you imagine it will give you. That’s why Pascal’s Wager never made any sense. The only way you can believe something to be true, really true, not just metaphorically true, is to believe that if it weren’t true, you wouldn’t believe it. You stand in some relationship to its truth such that that is the reason why you believe it. Now, you can’t be telling yourself, I have no evidence for this thing, but I know life would be better if I believed it to be true, and so therefore I really believe it’s true. You don’t think people do that all the time? I don’t think they do. I think they do things much more like we’re talking, the metaphorical truth we’re talking about. We act as if things are true without forming any strong propositional claim, and that’s fine. That has its own utility. You don’t think this is basically, I mean, we all suspend disbelief when we go and watch a movie and we sort of entitle the movie maker to set the ground rules of the space, and if it’s Harry Potter, then there are magical things that can happen, and if it’s some other story, maybe there aren’t. So we all have a mechanism whereby we know we can suspend disbelief, and it’s interesting to me that you seem not to imagine that people are doing that with respect to metaphysical beliefs that have implications for what the right actions that they should take are. Why wouldn’t it be the case that that same sort of mechanism would apply? Well, it does apply, but there are people who are clearly doing much more than that. So I’m not, if that’s all people were doing under the aegis of religion, I wouldn’t spend much time worrying about religion. To some degree, that’s what people do, as you say, going into caring about things that at bottom we really shouldn’t care about. So the World Cup is on right now, and literally billions of people care down to their toes what happens to this little ball as it traverses a lawn, right? And if it goes into the net, it really matters, and if it fails to, it really matters. It always matters if we hit the target, Sam. But this is something we have manufactured to care about, right? No, it’s something that speaks to us unbleakably. It’s quite literally a game. This is a game that people are playing, but some people take it in taking it further than seems truly rational is part of the fun. But the people who can’t turn that off… It’s a metaphor. Soccer is a metaphor. Yeah, but there are people who, you know, the fullback who kicks an own goal and then goes back to his South American village and gets murdered, right? He’s surrounded by people who are taking the game too seriously. Yeah, okay, I agree. And so my problem with religion is that so much of the time we’re meeting those people, and we’re not criticizing those people. We have no place to stand to criticize those people because we’re so attached to the game. Fair enough. Look, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we each take three minutes to sum up? So I think, yeah, we are there. We are at the end of time. So why don’t you each take three minutes, sum up, and then we’ll call it good. Okay, Sam went last. You want to go first here? Okay, so… There’s lots of things about which Sam and I agree, but the devil’s in the details, of course. No, I’m very sympathetic to his claim that we need to ground our ethical systems in something solid and demonstrable. My problem is, I’m not sure how to do that. When I… I don’t believe that you can derive a value structure from your experience of the observable facts. There’s too many facts. You need a structure to interpret them, and there isn’t very much of you. And so part of the reason, part of the way that that’s addressed neurologically is that you have an inbuilt structure. It’s deep. It’s partly biological. It’s partly an emergent consequence of your socialization. And you view the world of facts through that structure, and it’s a structure of value. Now, that structure of value may be derived from the world of facts over the evolutionary timeframe, but it’s not derived from the world of facts over the timeframe that you inhabit, and it can’t be. So the problem I have with our discussion so far isn’t really any of Sam’s fundamental Because I do believe there’s a distinction between the hellish life and the heavenly life, say, the life that everyone would agree was absolutely not worth living, and the life we could imagine as good. And I do believe that we should be moving from one to the other. The question is exactly how is it that we make the decisions that will guide us along that way? And I don’t believe we can make them without that a priori structure. In fact, I think the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that we can’t, and I mean also the scientific evidence, and I would like to go further into the devil that’s in those details. And so that’s my situation at the moment. Well, part of these conversations, and now you and I have had, I think, four, we’ve done two podcasts, and this is our second live event. And thank you for doing this, by the way. This is obviously an honor to do this. It’s an honor to do this, and it comes with risks for both of us to do this. I think you can sense we don’t have precisely the same audiences. All of you are sort of rooting for one or the other of us to some degree. Or for the spirit of truth. Yes. And, but clearly the conversation is the point, right? This is not, though this conversation had the character at many moments of a debate, I don’t think either of us view it as a debate in the trivial sense. It’s not about point scoring. It’s about making sense in a way that’s consequential, because we’re talking about issues of great consequence. You obviously care about these things, and it matters whether we converge on the most important questions in human life. And as you know, I’m worried that religion doesn’t give us the tools we need to converge. What does give us the tools is a truly open-ended conversation, and then you simply have to look honestly at the obstacles toward any conversation being open-ended. And religion presents those first and most readily. It is the idea that certain things have been decided for all time, and there’s no future evidence or argument that is admissible on those points. Now that is clearly bad everywhere in science. It’s bad everywhere in how we renegotiate our proximity to one another in society. New laws and new ideas are born all the time about how to structure institutions and social relationships because new things happen. We didn’t have an internet, and then we did. So our old laws and our old expectations of human communication simply don’t work in the presence of this new thing. So we have to figure out, again, it’s a navigation problem. And what I’m perpetually in contest with, even in conversations like this, is the sense that the rules need to change just a little bit for this class of books. Literally, this side of the bookstore. Any other part of the bookstore, well, then there’s no barrier to honest conversation. You move over here, you’ve got this shelf of books, there you have to hold your tongue. There we can’t pick and choose. While we can say that Shakespeare wrote some fantastic plays, the best plays ever written, and some are actually not that good, we can’t say that about God. We have to find some tortured way to make the most of his diabolical utterances. That’s the thing we have to outgrow. So what I’m continually in tension with you is the degree to which your style of talking about religion and the power of narrative and the meaning derived from it, allides that point, and seems to let people off the hook on that very point. That’s where we need to hold the line, in my view. We need to… It has to be clear to us at this moment in history that no one has the right to their religious sectarianism, really. Up to the point, clearly there’s a soccer, there’s a World Cup version of it that is benign. But once it gets taken past that point, we have to figure out how to pull the brakes. That becomes a real problem if you are going to dignify the foundational claims of these faiths. Claims like revelation and paradise and blasphemy and apostasy. These are the things that you come up against. I think conversations like this are incredibly important because we need to convince the better part of humanity that it’s possible to live the best life possible without recourse to divisive nonsense. Where we draw the line between divisive nonsense and reasoned and necessary discourse is what we’re dickering over, and I think it’s important that we continue. So, in closing, let me say, first of all, I’m tremendously honored that you asked me to moderate these debates. Fantastic. Thank you. It was a truly remarkable experience. As for what was accomplished, I think it was a tremendous amount. I saw both of you move. I saw both of you exhibit tremendous generosity of spirit towards the other, and I think this has exceeded my expectations of what might have been possible in these discussions by quite a bit. And that also, I will say, has a lot to do with the fact that for reasons I think none of us can explain, a huge amount of people, a huge population seems to care about these issues because they matter a great deal. So anyway, I think this has been a very successful exercise, and I think you can both justly be quite proud of what you’ve done. All right. Let’s give a huge round of applause for our speakers tonight. Thank you very much.

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