https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Mff2I8Jzjl0
Okay, so I’m talking today with Dr. Michael Shermer and Dr. Shermer is among other things the publisher of Skeptic Magazine but more importantly for our purposes today, he is also the author of this book new book and We’re heaven on earth that we’re going to talk about this today in some detail and so I’m going to turn this over first to Dr. Shermer who’s going to tell you some things about himself and then we’re going to Have a discussion he’s going to outline his book and then we’re going to have a discussion about About why he wrote it and what it contains and what the implications are and all of that so over to you Michael Sure, Jordan. Thank you for having me on the show. It’s Well, the the book is kind of an extension of my previous work most of my books when I write them They kind of push off from the previous book So going all the way back to my first book why people believe we’re things which was about the supernatural and the paranormal and And all that then then that led to how we believe which was why people believe in God And then if you don’t believe in the supernatural and you don’t believe in a deity what about morality? So I wrote two books on math and science of good and evil and the moral art last book So then you know kind of covering all the big subjects From a skeptical scientific perspective the afterlife is obviously a huge one And I had really dealt with that too much in my previous books and you know now that I’m in my 60s I guess you could say I’m cramming for the final Thinking about these big issues is not something I obsess about I’m not terrorized by death like like some people edge over the orbit I think it’s a super interesting subject because It’s obviously a part of the human condition. It’s something people do think about and Apparently we’re the only species that can do this although. I have a chapter in heavens on earth on Animals that grieve clearly quite a few mammals do grieve and they have some sense of loss Death and grief you know for fellow Group members or family members that die, but it’s not clear that they understand that they’re mortal And then I you know I cover the Possibility that Neanderthals were self aware of their mortality because of grave goods that have been found although. That’s it’s hard to fossil Fossilization of thoughts is difficult to interpret, but you know it seems reasonable that they had some sense of that but in any case So I deal with So I deal with You know the monotheism’s versions of the afterlife heaven immortality Judaism Christianity Islam mainly because you sort of have to although minds of science book And those are sort of low-hanging fruit that atheists have already kind of picked out So I don’t spend a lot of time on that I focus more on scientific attempts to achieve immortality And it’s a book of science so I actually start with what doesn’t seem like a scientific attempt Deepak Chopra’s worldview of sort of Western Buddhism that That there is the idea of birth death Afterlife life before life is all kind of meaningless because it’s all consciousness in a deep box worldview as he puts it You know consciousness is the ontological primitive You can’t get underneath it You know the scientific attempt to explain it by material means will always fail because that’s not where consciousness lies anyway, so I Thanks to my wife You know actually delved into his worldview Deepak and I have class for 20 years And I’ve called his worldview woo-woo and and pseudoscience and and you know we’ve been kind of at odds at each other so He’s sort of the main you might say intellectual force I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say the main intellectual force behind the New Age movement or associated with the New Age movement is that One of the yeah certainly one of the most prominent ones He’s got a huge following you know he goes on Oprah and talks about these things and dr. Oz or whoever and you know He has a lot of following so So I my wife and I actually went down to his center the trooper Center in Carlsbad, California Spent some time there I we delved into meditation and yoga and the tea and the chanting and all that so just to kind of see what it’s all About and you know I think there’s something there in terms of behavioral change That is how it affects your body and your mind and your thinking and I could definitely see something to that and But but also the difficult part that Deepak and I have had is the same problem that most scientists have with New Age beliefs, but not just that but sort of non-western traditions that what Deepak calls the Eastern wisdom traditions that It’s the language the difficulty of language. We have to use words to communicate And the words you use matter At some level you have to be able to be talking on the same level with words so when Deepak says You know the ontological primitive or consciousness is the womb of creation You know these are it sounds sort of metaphorical and he means something very specific by that and if you can’t get at that then you’re wasting your time talking so Deepak and I have kind of become friends, and we you know we’re constantly communicating just to try to see if we can find some Ground where we’re talking you know On the same plane and so I think I’ve Learned a lot from him in that in that sense and so my chapter is devoted to him on that And the general Eastern wisdom traditions you know that when you die because I always ask them well Where do you go and he says this is the wrong question? I mean you just return to where you were before You know because when people ask me well What do you think happens after you die my standard kind of quip is the same thing you go to the same place you were Before you were born mm-hmm people say what are you talking about? I wasn’t anywhere before I was born right and you’ll be nowhere after you die, but for Deepak you know time and Consciousness kind of overrides the concept of time at the beginning and end right I your consciousness just returns to where it was and that the this physical body and brain is just a temporary instantiation of consciousness into physical being but it just goes back to some other place and There’s like a figure. We don’t have the words to even conceive of what that means That is the Western language the way scientists talk I can’t really capture what he’s talking about in that sense And so that’s why I think we kind of hit an epistemological wall there where you have to actually get into introspection meditation and that the deeper parts of that tradition that I’ve never been able to you know really get into personally so I can’t say I understand it although. I Kind of see where he’s coming from in that regard So so let me ask you some questions about that so The first might have to do with this idea of the ontological primacy of consciousness say now one of the things I’ve learned from studying mythology is that the mythological worldview first of all I think the mythological worldview Conceptualizes the world as a place to act Rather than as a place of things so it’s sort of like Stephen G J Gould’s idea of to magisterium that don’t overlap There’s a moral magisterium and a materialist magisterium say but it’s been striking to me looking at the archetypal foundations of mythological thinking that in it that in the scientific worldview there seem to be two Fundamental causal elements you could say nature and nurture something like that or biology and society and then Technically sophisticated Western academics argue about the relative contribution of each to any given Existential phenomena, but in the mythological worldview there’s always three actors. There’s nature Usually personified as female or experienced as female because personified isn’t quite the right word There’s culture But there’s also the individual and the individual seems to be the same thing as the conscious actor and that would be the hero of the dragon slaying hero say and There’s that there is a kind of primacy given to that so in the oldest creation myths you always see this interplay between the the mother often Mother Earth and the father that the sky and then the hero who separates the two and somehow brings and perversely in some sense although being Their product clearly as the offspring is also the thing that gives rise to them at the same at the same time And it seems to be something that’s in keeping in some sense with our lived experience is that we confront the social world obviously and our beneficiaries and victims of it and we confront the natural world in the same manner, but we also seem to be agentic actors and without us as agentic actors the idea that there’s a reality seems to It seems to be full of paradoxical holes like reality without a conscious actor And I think that’s the sort of thing that that generates the thinking that you’ve referred to as characteristic of Deepak Chopra and the people who who make those sorts of claims and so Mean what? What’s your what’s your take on on consciousness and its role in being well, and the one and it’s everything because It’s what I tell what I tell deep on what I write about in that chapter is that You’re you’re familiar with the anthropic principles. I call this the the weak consciousness principle that Without consciousness without consciousness nothing exists. You know, this is one of the points deepak makes And for me and you personally if we’re dead or we’re not conscious the world doesn’t exist for our brains. It’s gone Nothing. There’s nothing This but but he goes further than that He says this is what I call the strong consciousness principle that that consciousness is required Our consciousness is required for material things to exist and and so there I have a discussion of what? Donald Hoffman the cognitive scientist at UC Irvine calls his Interface perception theory I Don’t know if you’re familiar with this but his analogy is like, you know your laptop screen here You have these icons on the screen and like the little trash can icon It’s like a trash can but of course, there’s no trash if you open if you open your laptop There’s no trash can in there. You know, these are just kind of icons that represent something that we think of as a trash can and then You know, this is gets the problem of you know what it’s like to be a bat I can’t know if I bolted on some some huge ears and I had an echolocation system and the neural Processes to process that information and so on I would have some sense of what it’s like to be a bat, but it But they had everything on To actually be a bat that I would just be a bat and I wouldn’t even be a Wouldn’t even know I was a human wondering what it’s like to be a bat. Okay, so at some level we can’t actually know You know what? It’s like to be something else. And so you You know what it’s like to be something else and so you again with Deepak and I and these kinds of traditions like that We hit this system logical wall of language. It’s difficult to say what you mean by certain things Yes. Yeah, well, especially when you get down to the fundamentals of things. Well, it’s pretty clear that the things that So let’s look at that user interface idea so Obviously what happens when you’re looking at a computer screen is that the complexity of the screen is reduced to a set of icons that Can serve as tools? Right and I think that that’s a reasonable way of thinking about how we look at the world is the complex In that Hoffman’s theory is that natural selection didn’t select our brains to record an accurate representation of reality Like a scientific model attempts to get ever closer to what reality is really like no natural selection Just wants us to escape predators Doesn’t matter what they look like what the icon is in your brain of breath that’s brain or whatever as long as you survive That’s all that matters. So this is why we’re so easily deceived by illusions and magic tricks and things like that that you know our brains aren’t really wired to to to represent reality as it really is whatever that means and Yes, you can say that without human consciousness the iconic reality that we inhabit would not exist Right. Okay. Okay Slightly is that is I’ve told them so let’s say, you know, what’s it like to be a dolphin? I don’t know Okay, so some kind of echolocation system. So and his point is well there, you know, the sharks are dangerous. So His they avoid sharks, but so the question is what does a shark look like in a dolphin’s brain versus what it looks like in our brain? It’s probably quite different and I really have no idea what a shark looks like to a dolphin But I do know this there really are sharks and they really have Shark things on one end and a tail on the other and they’re eating machines and you should avoid them. So yeah So that’s actually a weakness of the icon Claim I would say because yeah, it looks to me like here’s a twist on it what we see in our conscious experience are Functional icons, but they’re also low-resolution Representations of the things that are actually there. Yes, and and I don’t think that computer icons are low-resolution Representations of the things that are there. They’re just functional icons. Now I might be wrong about that because Because it’s hard to to conjure up that analysis on the fly But the trash can for example on your desktop is actually it’s actually a low-resolution Representation of an actual trash can not a computer trash can even though it functions the same way So so I think I like the icon idea But I think it misses some element of the actual relationship between the perception and the reality We definitely see a low resolution Which is why we can stand animated pictures like say the Simpsons that you know where where everything is well extremely low resolution But that makes no functional difference to us whatsoever and we definitely see and hear in low resolution but the resolute like I think what we see or something like Instead of icons, they’re more like thumbnails that are functional That’s a good analogy and then well, I like it because the thumbnail the thumbnail Actually is an unbiased sampling of the actual Object right because a photograph is relatively unbiased sample of an object and you can compress it You can you can you can write until it and and what you’re doing is blurring out distinctions between You’re blurring out distinctions between different aspects of it without without losing the relationship between the parts. It’s something like that Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and all in a way much of science operates at a metaphorical level You know that string, you know, have you ever seen a string theory? Documentary that didn’t have violins featured in it, you know that that the computer brain is like a computer. It’s like a dual processor It’s like a quantum information We’re Can’t because we have to talk and we have to transfer the literal meaning of metaphors to move something from here to there in Original Greek so, you know, we’re trying to capture some idea that’s really hard to get that by something We’re very familiar with some right part of the problem. We have to that addresses some of the issues you’ve dealt with with some of your recent Conversations with people is we’re operating at different levels. So the Deepak for example pounds me with articles about quantum physics that show, you know, Material stuff is really just energy atoms are mostly empty space And so forth and you know, this this table is you know, it’s actually mostly empty space Okay, this is all true, but we don’t live at the quantum level, right? you live at the level where I’m sitting in a chair and I’m not passing through it because At that at this level, you know, it’s not the same as at the quantum level and yeah And I think making that distinction, you know helps clarify a lot of things so like when you talk about the truth to be found in biblical stories or literary stories like that’s the SD or or Shakespeare or whatever and Materialist scientist says well, no, I mean something different by truth It’s not that one of you is right. The other is wrong. It’s just that these are different levels or different Ways of talking about yeah Think about them as different toolkits Yeah, that’s right different toolkits. That’s right. Yeah That’s what makes me out that’s what makes me out of the classic American pragmatist is that I think of these things as tools You know and there’s a scientific toolkit and there’s a there’s a toolkit for action in the world and they overlap but they’re not the same So for example, I call this Alvey’s error Alvey singer the character in Woody Allen’s film Any hall and there’s that funny scene where there’s a flashback to where he’s in childhood and He’s refused to do his homework and he’s depressed and his mother takes him to the doctor or psychiatrist wherever he is And okay, what why are you depressed Alvey says because I found out that the universe is expanding So what because if the universe is expanding then eventually it’s all gonna blow up and nothing means anything right? Things Adam we live in Brooklyn Brooklyn’s not expanding Yeah That’s that’s a nice observation. I think too because so okay, let’s go back to the conceptualization issue So one of the things that we’ve agreed on and I don’t want to lose track of that thread because I think it’s useful Is that we do see an iconic reality and the icons have practical utility, but they also bear Some one-to-one correspondence with the thing in itself and it’s low resolution is a nice way of thinking about so they’re low resolution Icons with functional utility now the question would be so then and what that makes clear is that without human consciousness all that disappears, right? Okay, then the question is Partly what is there outside of that functional iconic representation? So that would be the old question of the thing in itself and you could say and I think you could say with some Justification that the thing in itself is in potential something that collapses across time and space so that it’s everything and nothing At the same time, which is I guess that’s an Eastern claim. That’s one way of thinking about it it’s a Taoist claim and I like it because The problem with the or the one of the issues that and this is associated with the idea of Brooklyn Not only does LB is it LB or LV LV LV not only does LV live in Brooklyn He lives in Brooklyn now right, and so it’s spatially located and temporally located and so his mother’s objection is Well, don’t pick a reference point that makes everything right now irrelevant Which I which is really good practical psychological advice because one of the things that leads people down the path of nihilism is this claim that This observation that you can pick a time frame of analysis that makes your current action useless Who’s gonna care in a million years? Well, right so the theist that argues You know without God without some sort of external source for morality And meaning nothing what we’re doing nothing we do matters because in 15 billion years You know the heat death of the universe or whatever We don’t live 15 billion years from now. We live now here and what we do does matter You know, so you know like theists would argue, you know that the Odyssey problem, you know without God There’s no right or wrong whatever Stalin did or Hitler did is perfectly fine because of the heat death of the universe No It’s not fine because the people that are suffering in the Gulag Archipelago or in the gas chambers that Auschwitz They’re not thinking about 15 billion years from now. They’re living right here right now The torture is really doing wrong by these standards The level at which we’re talking about is everything and this is why I Concerned about the obsession with it people obsessing too much about the afterlife not just religious people but scientists It’s what I call it The afterlife for atheists is you know so the core of my book is really about all the cryonics people and the transhumanists and the singulatarians and the Extropians and the and the people that are gonna upload your mind into a computer and turn it on You know Ray Kurzweil and all these guys, you know, they’re they’re almost gurus when you go to these conferences You know, it’s like we get to live forever. We are the generation that gets to live for it Yeah, it’s like some of them think they’re the they’re the generation that’s going to instantiate the deity in the form of Computational entity as well. That’s right. I mean Kurzweil even has a funny line about that, you know, it’s you know, is there a guy? There’s going to be pretty soon as soon as we hit the singularity I’ve been to these singularity summits and it reminds me when I was religious, you know, I used to be an evangelical I went to Pepperdine University Which is a church of Christ school I was really into it and and going to church and all that stuff and I go to the singularity summit It’s like wow, I’m back in church, right? Here’s Ray Kurzweil the guru up there telling us we are the first generation that will live forever And you know Aubrey de Grey this radical life extension the scientists, you know He’s on record saying the first person to live a thousand years is is born now is alive now, right? So okay, so they have an issue there’s two elements to the heaven issue that we can discuss then and one is the belief in the existence of heaven and The other is the the positing of heaven as an aim Yes, and those are interestingly related So from my perspective from so one of the things as far as I’ve been able to tell One of the things that allows us to transform the reality that’s too complicated to perceive into these Functional low-resolution icons, let’s say is an aim You have to aim right and you have to aim with your eyes And in fact, we’re also extraordinarily good at detecting how other people aim with their eyes. Yes So and The question is always well, where should you aim and the answer to that archetypally? I would say and Biologically for that matter is that you should aim up because why the hell would you aim down down is hell right down is where? the suffering is down is where the malevolence is so you aim up and archetypically up is heaven and so one of the things that I can’t it seems to me that there’s some possibility that it was Impossible for human beings to discover the future which is something that we seem to have done Maybe that was prefrontal extension Maybe that was the the expansion of the prefrontal cortex and it’s deep wiring with the visual cortex that actually Enabled us to foresee the future something like that. I don’t know if you can foresee the future without without stumbling upon the idea of heaven at the same time because In that sense becomes the best possible future and then you’re aiming at you’re aiming at a better future and because you’re aiming at A better future you’re kind of compelled to also conceptualize at least in principle like the platonic ideal of the future And so then that future potential starts to become a kind of a reality. It’s something like that Yeah, I think that’s a super good point my again my concern about To obsessing too much about the next life is you’re gonna miss out on this life, which is where you live right now But but that’s different from aiming at it. I mean, you know my I wrote a book on moral progress the moral art you know aiming for incremental improvements in civil rights and health and longevity and And you know ridding ourselves of disease and war These are all admirable goals and we should keep doing that aiming for something and I do like the metaphor up Maybe it’s because we’re a social hierarchical species. Yeah, well, I think that’s why the pyramids I think I believe that I think that’s what the pyramids Represent with their with their gold cap, right? It’s right and and the Washington Monument is the same thing, right? Or the pyramid of hierarchy of needs and so on. Yeah at the end of my chapter on on Monotheism’s versions of heaven I float the idea probably won’t be accepted by Evangelicals and fundamentalists, but that what you know when Jesus talked about the kingdom is within He mentions this not as not as often as I would have liked but I think he’s referring to the fact that heaven is within us in the sense that we should be aiming to improve ourselves and you know that that Christians have Atheists have conflicted over this this the passage where he says You know Matthew 16 26 I say unto you there some standing here Which will not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom and you know, of course atheists go ha ha ha He’s still not here But I what if he meant something else that heaven is not a place to go but a way to be here and now I’m very I’m very what would you call? That’s a viewpoint that I think is very much worth pursuing I would also but I also think there’s something deeply strange about that too because I Think that if a psychological state becomes profound enough it starts to become a social state And so I would say that that that kingdom of God that’s within which is something Tolstoy wrote a lot about by the way That was a book that was he wrote a book called the kingdom of God is within us and that profoundly Influenced Mahatma Gandhi by the way, and they had a lengthy correspondence, which is part of the reason that Gandhi became a non Used nonviolent resistance right in his fight against the English which is quite interesting But I think that there is there is there Look, it’s something like this Maybe when you go to a concert It’s a great concert and you’re having a very profound psychological experience of unity and harmony Which of course is what you get at the concert but if the experience is profound enough psychologically and individually it also starts to encompass and envelop the people around you and And so I think the kingdom of God that Christ was talking about was something like this is why I like Jean Piaget so much It’s something like the Piaget in an equilibrated state Where things are working out really well for you and you’re deeply immersed in a meaningful experience But at the same time that meaning is structured so that it’s maximally beneficial for the people who are immediately around you and for the people Who are distally related to you and so everything stacks up and something that’s something That’s that’s something like the idea of the ladder to heaven or the stairway to heaven That everything’s stacking up properly and then there’s a there is see I think when people experience that and this is where the Metaphysics touches the material. I think that would be yes exactly that precisely that yes precisely that Well, then you notice that the demons are upside down going down Right, right, which is exactly right that that’s exactly the right way to conceptualize it So I think that when people have an experience of that Stacking of meaning that they also have an intimation of immortality that goes along with that That’s embodied and that that’s partly why the metaphysical Speculations about the reality of the kingdom of heaven have emerged because it’s not just conceptual right there. There is Embodied experience and people report the same thing when they have Transcendental experiences of various sorts and those and we know from a scientific perspective that those can be very reliably induced with the use of Agents like psilocybin and you know I’ve been really fascinated by what’s been happening at Johns Hopkins Hospital with the psilocybin experimenters because one of the most recent things they showed was that if you take people dying of cancer and you give them psilocybin and they have a mystical experience which is something like an experience of the kingdom of God on earth, but also Eternally at the same time that they lose their fear of death or that at least it’s much modified You know, that’s a hell of a finding that’s really you can’t just you can’t just walk away from that easily because that’s a hell of a thing to treat Well, yeah, I have a chapter on that in in heavens on earth on near-death experiences And so but we’re talking about two different things You know the transitioning from life to death in the most pain-free or anxiety Reduced state is is more is progress, you know medical progress psychological progress or whatever and I’m all for you know It’s psilocybin does it or whatever? Then great we should do that But there’s a lot of people that claim more than that that this is opening the doors of perception into another world, right? It’s actually out there and that those of us had not taken acid. We just simply can’t know So now we now we get at this question of truth, you know, it’s enough One of my columns in Scientific American I recently wrote called what is truth anyway I mean when I say like I prefer dark dark chocolate and you prefer milk chocolate, you know There’s no truth that is to be discovered yours is true for you Mine’s true for me or I say stairway to heaven is the greatest rock song of all time and you say no No, free bird is better than stairway to heaven and we argue about that, but there’s no there’s no experiment We’re gonna run and so as we start to move along these lines like when deep October tells me meditation works Okay, so if it works for you or it doesn’t work for me, okay Those are still in that state of internal truths But what we want to know in science is doesn’t work for everybody or you know 67% of people that do an hour of meditation a day under these conditions have reduced Stress hormones and blood pressure and so on in some measurable way that’s different than just an internal state. So When we’re talking about again, just you know, you know working on torque toward striving to better ourselves or some kind of heaven if you mean Just you know metaphorically so that I can better myself. That’s different than there’s an actual place you can go to That’s going to be there after we die. And so I think this is where you know scientists go You also start messing about with the idea of place in a way that that’s the problem with having discussions about Fundamental realities and you know when you said another thing that Christ said was that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon earth But men do not see it Right. So and that’s that’s something that’s akin to the idea of the kingdom of God is within you although it’s it’s a strange twist on it because it also adds an element of externality or physicality to it and an element of Immediacy not something that’s forestalled into the future, but I wonder see in my wilder moments of speculation I have this notion that if things stack up properly so imagine that you’re immersed in a very deeply meaningful experience and and it’s Operating it’s indicating that harmony has been established between multiple levels of being simultaneously I wonder if that can I wonder if that can put you in a place that’s profound enough or deep enough so that The structure of time and space itself starts to warp around that. I mean, I know that that’s a I can’t formulate it Well, but there’s there’s something there’s something about it that seems to me to be correct about that because people have intimations in the work of immortality and they have intimations of of Heavenly and hellish abodes as well and they’re not they’re not the scent They’re not the simple kind of rational Even rational fundamentalist beliefs that often people talk about when they’re discussing religious belief They’re more reflected in direct experience and it’s not easy to make sense of them Well when you delve into the literature on Judaism Christianity and Islam and their versions of the afterlife in heaven They’re quite different and the Jews are far less obsessed with going some place after death. In fact, originally they had They were going no place at all. Sheol was just nothing It was just you returned to where you were before you were alive just no place and so but so that that religion is far more focused on the here and now like we have a moral duty to help people the poor and so on now and to live better lives and more lives of dignity and honor and morality now and Christianity really started off more like that then kind of morphed over the the centuries and Particularly in fundamentalist and evangelicals in the 20th century toward this place we’re gonna go Right. Yeah, right after we die. Yeah, you kind of have the schism in Christianity today between them kind of the fundamentalist that are constantly talking about the afterlife and accepting Jesus and they’re focused on Missionary work and converting people versus say maybe the Rick Warrens of the world that want to put their money into Kitchens and helping the poor and Christians have a moral duty to you know help those in need and and not so much focused on the next life and It’s funny because there are real dangers associated with both those kinds of conceptualizations I mean you alluded to one danger that was associated with let’s call those who are concerned more with the immediate present and That’s the that’s starting to manifest itself in these in these Technological immortal immortalists. They’re saying well, we should transform the nature of being extraordinarily radically right here And now so that we have heaven and immortality here you think well, what do we lose by doing that? You know, and that’s a question that’s really worth asking because if we’re transhuman Then we lose being human and it may be that we actually don’t want to lose being human Even though being human means suffering and malevolent something like that. It’s a very hard question But then the Christians this is what we’re Nietzsche went after the Christians with such an axe he said well if you despise the the current world and you leave everything to be rectified in the afterlife then you just abandon life itself and you’re really traitors to life so How to steer through those two shoot two shoals, let’s say is think of it or two cliffs. That’s a very difficult proposition well, this is the message my message in the book to To the singulatarians and the cryonics and transhumanists and so on is You know, I’m glad you’re working on this problem, you know But you know because they say to sure more don’t you want to live to be a thousand years and my response is look Just get me to 90 without you know cancer and a hundred without Alzheimer’s on 110 without being plugged into machines lying in a bed because that’s not a life and and so And so I’m glad people are working on like what’s the best diet how much yeah What can we do to improve our memory and so on that’s all great and And I’m glad to them and I’m glad Kurzweil is now that you know chief engineer of all Google I mean, he’s got some resources to do something about this but but this focus on living a thousand years you’re missed first Well, you’re gonna you may miss the little incremental things we can do but also you’re missing out now There’s this film I write about in the book On Ray Kurzweil, it’s a little kind of biographical film of him Biographical film of him All transcendent man and he’s constantly talking about you know living forever and so on and he’s obsessed with his father His father died when he was 51 The father was 51 and Ray was you know It kind of missed out having a father figure because the father was always working and Ray was you know a real entrepreneur Achiever from his teenage years So he was always working and the film kind of follows him around Collecting everything he can about his father and he keeps it in the basement of his house He wants to resurrect his father in a computer and it’s like oh boy Freud would have a field day with this Ladying guy, but there’s something there’s something going on there this sort of rose focus on I see this this this Strange dichotomy and attitude that you just described even characterizing you I see that in my own life because I’m very interested in Technologies that stave off aging dietary manipulations, and I have this machine in my basement That’s a intense pulse light late intense pulse light machine. That’s unbelievable skin rejuvenator like it’s it’s an absolute miracle this machine and It’ll take it’ll take sun damage from your skin completely and and force rejuvenation It’s like it seems like using Photoshop on your skin. It’s amazing and But but and so I think well isn’t it interesting to do everything possible to prolong youth and life But at the same time there’s another part of me. That’s thinking well This is something I wrote about in this new book that I’m publishing I was thinking about Socrates and his ability to accept his death No and what Socrates seems to have revealed in his acceptance of his death was that if you live your life properly Then you you’ve maybe you lived your life in some sense You’ve exhausted it in some sense and the question is if you if you lived a thousand years Well, what exactly what what exactly would you do? You know like I’ve had kids and I loved having kids, but I wouldn’t have them again Like I wouldn’t do that again I don’t think and I have a grandchild and that’s fine but that’s a new thing and like I’ve had a career and I As I get older the idea of having ten more careers seems It’s not like I’m not interested in it But it doesn’t grip me the same way that it would have say 20 years ago And so I wonder like I wonder if it is the case that life is in some sense Structured so that its finitude is necessary and not something that should be Well, casually transcended let’s say well the transhumanist would respond to that That you’re just used to this idea of only living 80 90 years and then you’re done That we would adjust to that. Well, maybe the other well Yeah The question would be though who would be the we that would adjust to that because well, yes You would no longer be okay to get there. We we would really no longer be human We would really no longer be human the idea of the transhumanist and the Singulatarian people is is Truly you’re not human anymore We have brain like like the cochlear implant for hearing is a kind of brain transplant device Well, they want to ramp that up, you know and put chips in your cortex and you’d essentially have Wikipedia in your brain instant access and so and And so it would truly bring new meaning to what it means to be human. Okay, right Well, I mean enough you could also argue that that’s a form of death because if you transform yourself so radically that you’re Unrecognizable then what where’s the continuity with what you once were? You know, this is one of the reasons I have some real sympathy for many reasons I have many reasons for this but one of them that I have very much sympathy for the idea the Christian idea That’s that’s associated with immortality of the resurrection of the body Because the Christians insisted that this is not some sort of abstract life like it’s it’s not uploaded into a computer. It’s not Blowing out all of your limitations now, you know, you might ask what the resurrected body would be and of course, that’s a particularly That’s a perfectly fine question, but it doesn’t it doesn’t It’s that doesn’t move you around the fact that there was a Question that was really to be grappled with there because what the Christians were trying to do was to Have their take and eat it too in some sense and to say look there’s some absolute utility to the limitation That’s imposed upon you by a mortal frame, right? That’s the characteristic element of being human and that perhaps there’s a way of having that and transcending it at the same time Now what that would look like is obviously by no means all right I deal with that and heavens on earth have a chapter on the soul and you know post Descartes Christians became more dualists before that they were more focused on the physical resurrection of the body There are still some Christian sects today who think that you’ll physically be resurrected But most more of them most of them are dualists and they it’s just yours It’s just this kind of non physical thing that goes and and and beat and is with God and Jesus and so on But but it you know, but they actually debate this and so the problem is the question of identity the problem identity He said well if you’re physically resurrected in heaven What’s what’s there? How old are you? You know and some of them actually have an answer you’re 30, you know That’s like the ideal age physically and I suppose mentally to be there and also Jesus was 30 and it’s great You know, maybe okay so but but then the question is is you know, and I asked this question for the mind uploaders the transhumanists, it’s like There is no fixed self. First of all all your cells in your Almost all the atoms in your body are recycled about every decade or so So there is no defined physical self of you, you know the thesis ship you replace all the wood in the ship We still call it Discipative structure that was Schrodinger’s term, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay So it’s the pattern of information that is your memories your mem self memory self. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that’s better but At what age you know because I have memories now that I didn’t have when I was 30 So what happens if I’m resurrected at age 30? Where’s all the memories of my last I’m 63 now the last 33 years of memories of that I want those two and so I say okay, you can have all those memories But wait the memories I have now at 63 of when I was 30 are very different than the memories when I was 30 of What I was like at that time and so there’s no fixed set of memories even that represents you Because those are constantly edited and changed and reinterpreted and it’s like, okay now I understand when I had that ten years as a bike racer in the 1980s I you know, I was just sort of going through doing my thing and now I see in context what that meant for my life But I didn’t know it at the time that’s true for everything we do That’s why I was laughing people write memoirs in their 20s or 30s. It’s like how can you write a memoir? You have no idea what you’re doing now is going to mean in 30 years And so and religious so both both scientific attempts at immortality or the afterlife or whatever and religious that they have the same problem You know what is up there that’s being resurrected because there is no fixed self It’s a constantly dynamic changing system and and then there’s one more problem that I deal with the point-of-view self the POV self You know, there’s you and I looking out through your eyes and you Jordan go to sleep tonight you wake up tomorrow morning and you’re groggy for a few minutes, but but you’re sitting your point of view returns and You know the the singularity people they think well We’ll copy all your memories and put them in a computer and then we’ll turn it on and you’ll wake up and you’ll you’ll be looking Out through the little camera hole there like Johnny Depp and transcendence and you’ll be in there. No, I don’t think so Why would your point of view all of a sudden leap from your your current body into the computer in the same sense that instead of? Sacrificing your brain and slicing it up and scanning. This is the current thoughts scanning every synapse What if in a hundred years from now we had a sophisticated fMRI machine that could scan your brain and scan every single synapse and Reproduce it we had a computer big enough Moore’s law doubling and so on it would be enough They just reproduced your entire connectome and turn it up But you you Jordan Peterson are still standing there right next to the computer and they turn it on you’re not all of a sudden Well, there’s other problems with that too is that you know If I remember correctly you have more neurons in your autonomic nervous system than you have in your central nervous system Well Man, that’s like your brain isn’t in your head. Not just your brain. No, it’s so you have an extended body So you to the cryonics people they lop off the head. We’re just gonna clone your butt Okay, this is getting too complicated. You really need the whole body. Yes That’s the physical resurrection issue is that the idea that and I think that you put your finger on the floor in the in the In the new immortality in the new immortality crowd, you know, they think of they really aren’t Cartesian They think of your consciousness is something that’s well They’re confused about it in some sense because they think of it as a kind of soul Which would be a pattern and that pattern is only instantiated in the brain. It’s like well physiologically that’s just not the case It’s like what about the hormones? What about there’s a lot of things going on in the brain that aren’t easily Reducible to synaptic patterns, especially when you consider also its connection with the body and you have to consider that It’s so even worse than that because not only are we all of those things We are also social beings and so there’s all the interactions we have and have had with all the other people in our lives Neighbors or strangers or whatever so you have all those binary digits that have to be captured of all the interactions going back for your whole life not just your life, but all of the Social cultural political economic forces that have been grinding along for centuries that shape who we are and the kind of world we live in You know if you’re gonna create a virtual reality a holodeck that recreates all that, you know It’s I mean, this would be a huge computer essentially. It would be the universe is what you would need With a map that’s just as big as the territory, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. That’s a big problem Gonna fold it up where you gonna put it that’s the big bro like that Steven Wright line about I got a map of the United States actual size Really hard to fold up Exactly. Exactly. So also let me ask you a couple of more personal questions if you don’t mind now you you mentioned briefly during our during our conversation that you know, you you you were you’re from a pretty fundamentalist Christian background and you became a skeptic and you’ve been pursuing that with with with well Adamantly, let’s say for a very long time. So two questions is what? What put you on that path and what do you think your positive function as a skeptic is? Yeah, so first of all, my my family wasn’t religious at all My family wasn’t religious at all. They weren’t anti religious to just wasn’t a thing I became interested in it in the early 70s when I was in high school, which was sort of the early Development of the evangelical movement in the United States So-called born again movement and there was no affiliation with any church in particular We all recognize that, you know organized religion was probably not all that great So just sort of a one-on-one. It’s just you and Jesus you and the Bible you and God and so on and that was that whole You know Jesus Christ superstar time and all that So but I took it fairly seriously and I went to Pepperdine and I took courses in the Old Testament the New Testament I read everything CS Lewis wrote to the course in the writings of CS Lewis But I was into it then but you know Pepperdine you’re in the bubble of you know, the Christian worldview is totally Consistent it’s internally coherent until you’re outside the bubble. So when I went to a secular University and to study experimental psychology Not only was that more of a grounding in the scientific method of Understanding reality but just for fun. I took courses in first of all, I took courses in evolutionary theory I was kind of a creationist. I remember sitting there thinking holy shit this stuff is real But then I took a course in mythology anthropology and comparative mythology and that kind of opened up my eyes so I sort of went through my Joseph Campbell stage and and the myth of the hero I read the hero of a thousand faces and I was like, okay This is this is a different way than of looking at things than in the pure scientific way But it’s also different from a lot of these religious traditions, you know So that that sort of told me that the particular religion I was in It’s wrong to ask is that is it right or wrong? It’s just it’s a completely different thing and and it just wasn’t working for me anymore So I enjoyed the scientific way of thinking about the world and I was surrounded by people that It’s not that they were atheists in graduate school and after that it’s like remember This is now the late 70s And then when I went to graduate school in the second time for my PhD in history of science in late 80s Again the whole eighth science religion atheist new atheism. That wasn’t a thing. No one really talked about it It wasn’t like a big thing. You have to decide say are you a theist or an atheist? No one really talked about that and so my focus was really on just on science and understanding things now the problem of being a sort of an intellectual or historian of science psychologists like I am and you’re interested in studying beliefs like I do And then also being a public intellectual as the publisher of Skeptic magazine and I write this column for Scientific American every month I got a essentially debunk something or analyze something is it kind of puts you in the in this of the role of like well I got to say if this is right or wrong This is true or false or or something in between so I must constantly on this kind of razor edge between I Just in my curious Observer of people’s beliefs and then on the other hand I actually have to kind of pass judgment in writing every month well is this one correct or not correct or something in between and some might it’s Again, it’s at that different levels, you know, sometimes I’m just talking about people’s beliefs other times I’m actually kind of forced to say well, I think this is probably true. We’re probably not true and And I think this is you know, I listened to I tried to listen to that first podcast you do with Sam To get through and again to me, you know two hours You were just talking past each other at different levels of you know, you know Sam’s laser focused on, you know people Behave they act on certain beliefs and and you know The obvious one flying planes into buildings is because you have a certain belief that leads to that Yes, that’s true. And it would be good if people didn’t believe these things that lead them to do those kinds of violent acts But there’s a whole nother level you can talk about beliefs that have nothing to do with leading to violence or so on and so To me it just depends on what’s your goal when you’re talking about this particular thing right now and and you know, so there You know, I was good friends with Stephen Jay Gould and you know, I was sympathetic to his Noma Yeah In the sense that you know, the world’s already too tribal and so if we can calm everybody down, that’s good On the other hand, I do think science and reason can inform and maybe even in some cases determine human values and moral Decisions right and wrong and so on I’ve written quite a bit about that too And so again, that’s sort of a different level of what you’re talking about And what the goals are at that particular moment Yeah, well, I mean this the skeptic when I think of a skeptic I this is a strange leap, of course, but There’s a there’s a scene in Revelation where Christ comes back and he comes back with the sword coming out of his mouth And that’s where he divides the damned in the safe and that’s a that’s also an image of the logos right the the word that brings fourth order out of chaos because Partly what you do as a skeptic it isn’t so much that you damn the untrue is that you rescue the true and that’s really necessary for people because we need to stand on a rock and You know one of the big problems I have with New Age movement and I’ve kind of studied this technically looking at the way that creative people think because there are creative people who are critically minded and there are creative people who are not critically minded and Non-critically minded creativity seems more associated with mental illness and psychopathology but you have to be able to discriminate between what’s worth saving and what isn’t so to speak and that’s what a good skeptic does because a skeptic isn’t Necessarily someone who says oh, this is all false a good skeptic is someone who says oh look there’s a kernel of truth here, but it’s deeply buried under layers and layers of Rust and nonsense that needs to be burned away or polished away so that we can get to what’s absolutely essential Right so part yeah, so back to where you were saying before about striving upwards towards something That heaven up there whatever that is Of course we don’t want to go for utopia because there’s no such place to get to and that causes, you know catastrophes in history so but the idea of like of like Making the world a more rational place This is a good goal and this is the kind of thing that we do at skeptic magazine, right? You know, what do we do? We promote science and reason and critical thinking you write about critical thinking. This is what you do So we’re all working on that and that’s good Sorry, go ahead so When we talk about literature, for example Let’s return to the books of the Bible or dusty ASCII or if we want to make our listeners heads explode einrand and Atlas Shrug, you know, why Have people by the tens of millions purchased her books, you know literary critics say they’re awful They’re terrible novels are not well written and her figures are black and white and her philosophy is wrong Okay, but you have to ask yourself Why do tens of millions of people love those books and and it’s because she’s doing something else she’s not trying to describe the world the way it actually is but that the way it could be and These are the things we’ve done wrong communism socialism because she came out of that Russian background And so, you know her figures like John gulf. These are kind of ideal things to strive for. Yes, exactly Yeah, well that her figures are archetypal heroes of a certain form. I mean, I think If we can bring it back to some real-world example, I just recently recently started following a jocco willnick. Yeah Okay, I’m never gonna be jocco willnick But you know, I got his book and you know, I read one page a day and it you know, it’s kind of it’s sort of like Come on you can get up at six in the morning and get out there on your bike ride with the guys I don’t want to do it. But then I see you know, it’s a close page. He says just get at it Okay, so in a way, it’s not describing the world in a scientific way If it’s it’s it’s sending a different message like you should strive to be this even if you don’t make it Just do it do something anything. Yeah, well, I think I think that’s a difference. That’s a different goal. Yes Well, I think too that Okay, so first of all with regards to a round I think the criticism level at her that her characters are too black and white is correct because I think that one of the things that distinguishes great literature from propaganda is that in great literature most of the conflict is within rather than between Right. And so and the problem with a round is all her good characters are the same good character and all her bad characters are the same Bad character and and there’s no overlap between them. So there’s a purity There’s an archetypal purity but that compromises its utility as literature I would say also Nielsen makes this point and gulag or Capella go where he says if Only the world were simply black and white and we could take the bad people and isolate them somewhere But the problem is is you know, we all have darkness and evil in our hearts That’s right line between good and evil runs down every heart That’s his famous phrase and it was something he experienced very deeply and it’s also you know, it’s also Pride Primordially true Analyze literature in this sense. Well, there’s a body of literature evolutionary, you know literary analysis in which You know people Pinker writes about this at the end of the blank slate In which he talks about you know, would these novels these sophisticated novels in which the characters are rich and deep you know, they have all these good characters and bad characteristics and so on and And we can we can glean from that in a sense that the novelists were ahead of the cognitive This is his point the novelists were about a century ahead of the cognitive scientists and figure out You’re now human nature Modern literature anyway, yeah You know so we can we can gain a lot from that and not just the rich emotional experience of reading a good novel But actually teasing out this is what some of these evolutionary literary people are trying to do It’s like there’s certain themes that come up over and over and over again It’s not totally random, you know, unlike the postmodernist there actually are Certain real meanings that the author intended and there’s no the problem See, I think the problem with the postmodernists technically speaking and I’ve thought a lot about this is that they got their initial Criticism, right? Which is that there’s an infinite number of ways of interpreting a finite set of phenomena But there isn’t an in there isn’t an there isn’t an infinite number of valid ways of interpreting a finite set of phenomena and that’s where you get right back into the issue of the circulation of the Interpretation around these great underlying archetypal themes and that are built in large part right into our biology I read a really interesting analysis of the of the symbol of the dragon a while back and I can’t conjure up the name of the book unfortunately, but his Hypothesis, which I thought was a very good one was that a dragon is a meta predator so it’s the symbol for predator and But it’s more than that but the predator is tree cat snake bird Because the fundamental predators of tree dwelling primates were cats snakes and birds And so what it is is an amalgam of all those things and so it’s real just like the category of predator is real even though Snakes and cats are both in the category of predator and no one says well There’s no such thing as a predator and then you can add fire to that for a variety of reasons not least being Being I’m sure that fire wiped out many of our ancestors as well And then the additional twist which is that dragons also hoard gold So human beings because we’re not just prey animals learned that if we confronted the meta predator we would gain as a consequence Right, so there’s certain channels down which good stories go based on our biological nature or evolved nature It’s not that it’s completely deterministic in that sense. No, no, it’s variations on a theme. I would say yeah So it’s interesting. There was an interesting article published. I think it was in nature a few months ago Showing that it was very very high resolution brain scan And so, you know, there’s the idea of course that in the cortex that neurons that fired together wired together And then we learned that the neurons are actually in cortical columns So they actually have their structure their unit structure So they’re not just randomly connecting with neurons everywhere in the brain But what this scan showed was an underlying superhighway of built-in connections So that the columns themselves could wire into the already existent superhighways So it was like there was a fun underlying architecture that was highly probable was highly probable that it would manifest itself And I thought well that looks like the neural architecture of something like an archetype Maybe one of the best arguments for cryonics is that it would be really fun to come back say a thousand years from now Just to see what scientists or scholars are talking about like of how the brain works, you know What what’s the metaphor they’re using then that you know, and they’ll look back on us and go Oh, they thought the brain is a computer how silly. Yeah, right, right, right Yeah, well I think by the time we come up with a fully material account of consciousness our notion of what constitutes material will have undergone substantial revision So I do wonder if sometimes I toy with the idea of the mysterious Do you know the mysterious there’s certain mysteries of the universe We will never solve just because of the limitations of this structure of our brain and yeah So God free will and determinism the nature of consciousness, you know, there’s a few of these core deep Questions so my friend the late great Martin Gardner called himself a fideist You’re probably familiar with the deism. It’s kind of a no, I’m not well, it’s based on William James and Emmanuel Unamumo. Oh, yes. Yeah, I’m pragmatist. It’s sort of a pragmatist philosophy So anyway, Martin Martin was a longtime columnist for Scientific American one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement He was a skeptical as I am maybe more on almost everything But he believed in God and he believed in prayer in the afterlife and so on even though he would say to us fellow skeptics Yes, I think the atheists have slightly better arguments than the theists just slightly But you know because you can’t determine one way or the other for sure whether there’s a God or not Whether this free will of determinism. It’s okay to just practically speaking to just do whatever works for you To just do whatever works for you this is the pride thing so he said he says he prays he believes that there’s some kind of afterlife and that there’s something out there not an anthropomorphic God or anything like that so he Called this the deism anyway So I kind of respected that because he didn’t make any truth claims like I can prove this or I’m sure I’m right He said it’s just true for me and you know that gets back to that question of what is true What is truth anyway if that’s all you’re saying it’s just true for me psychologically true works for me It’s really kind of the end of the conversation But you know so when I deal with creationists, you know, I think the earth is ten thousand years old Okay, so we have a problem. There is a conflict, you know, Steve Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria It doesn’t apply there one side is wrong and one side is right when you’re talking about say the age of the Universe or the world, but if you say look this this is what works for me having this particular I’m not claiming I can prove it. It just works for me. Really. What is there to say after that? it’s kind of the end of the conversation and I do think sometimes that When we’re talking about like free will and determinism, what do you mean by these words and yeah Well, the devil’s always in the details, you know, that’s Hidden epistemological wall. We can’t get past I’m a compatibilist. I think you know, Dan Dennett I’m not a philosopher, but those kinds of arguments I think make more sense to me in any case I have what I call a behavioral compatible ism That is whatever your position is intellectually on free will and determinism It doesn’t really matter because when you walk out the door, you’re a you believe you’re making choices This is the argument that I tried to level at Sam Harris with regards to the Metaphysical foundations of his ethics. It’s like it’s the same sort of thing is and I think Ben Shapiro Just went after him on the same grounds is that I don’t care what you say about whether or not you’re an atheist You act like you’re part of the Judeo-Christian tradition And so you think you don’t believe but I think you do but we have different definitions of what the word believe means So now I’m not saying that that’s necessary the argument to end all arguments But it’s one that needs to be taken seriously Especially by the more rationalistic atheists because they don’t give the devil his due now You’re in a different category because you went through the whole Christian thing in detail and you know the You know the stories and you know the mythology and you know the psychology as well You know, you talked about Joseph Campbell and people like him so, you know that puts you in the in the in the realm of the I would say what would you say biblically and and and and psychoanalytically informed Well, again, it depends what your goals are. What are you trying to do? I mean people like Sam and Richard, you know, they’re laser focused on one particular thing and they’re working at so good And I’m I’m on board with that. I think you know, certain belief systems are dangerous Okay, so let it be good if we could correct those but I’m also interested in other aspects of beliefs and you know That’s a slightly different goal. So for example when I’m talking to Deepak You know, it’s true quantum physics says what it says, you know, okay, but at some level I say Deepak What’s the actionable take home? Why does it? Okay, so let’s say the world is completely determined and right down to the last synaptic connection that the particles whatever and I really have no choice Yeah, but so what I still have to choose to go to work tomorrow as or as I tell Deepak You know, my mortgage is still due next Tuesday So even if none of this matters or or it’s all empty space or you know, it’s all consciousness. So what? Act in the world as if I’m making choices as if I’m responsible for my actions because I am That’s a good that’s well I would also say in relationship to that There isn’t any evidence to me that we’ve been able to determine how to build a functional society without building those axioms into the Into the substructure of the society free will and responsibility It’s like maybe they don’t exist But if we don’t build societies that assume they exist the societies become unstable unbelievably rapidly And to me that’s a kind of evidence that they do exist I mean even knowing the say say game theoretic model of Tilting the incentives to get people to do this versus that, you know a libertarian paternalism Dick Thaler calls it, you know So if you give people a choice architecture where you you put the dessert You know in the back and in the healthy fruit foods in the front or you have different kinds of structured menus to get people to nudge People to choose healthier diets or better investment tools at companies things like that We’re already doing these sorts of things as if we can If not determine people’s actions and choices, but at least shape them in a way But but even doing that we’re actively choosing to do that So being self aware that I know that if I go shopping on an empty stomach I’m very I’m much more likely to buy unhealthy foods cookies or ice cream or whatever than I would if I went shopping on a Full stomach so I choose to alter my environment around me because I’m gonna nudge myself in another direction, how is that not a kind of a choice and And if you’re a determinist to determinists, I would say Okay, do you recognize say that the addict who is you know Just totally hooked on heroin or oxycodone or something is different from you and I who are not addicted Yes, there’s a difference, okay, what’s that difference if it’s all determinism its tumors all the way to counter whatever good one What is the difference then between the addict and the addict is more determined? No, but that’s a good objection What is that as a concept? Yeah, what does that mean more determined right exactly exactly? This why I like Dan Dennis idea of the degrees of freedom Yeah, you know you and I have more degrees of freedom than our dogs or dogs more than cockroach or whatever There’s just more variation and we have one additional In terms of time as well like you know if you’re if you’re driving Here’s a nice way of thinking about the relationship between free will and determinism. Let’s say you’re driving down the road at 60 miles an hour Where do you look and the answer isn’t right in front of the car? Because you’ve already run over the thing that’s right in front of the car So you look about a quarter of a mile down the road and what that means is that you can start to sequence your Deterministic actions and so there’s this idea of a ballistic movement. So if I do this, let’s see So you see I didn’t hit my hand when I came down like that. Now the truth of the matter is is that There isn’t enough time So when I release this movement Quickly there isn’t enough time For the message to get from my hand to my brain and back to stop my hand as an element of free choice I have to plan and release the entire movement at once including the stopping that’s ballistic. And so as soon as I Implement that movement. There’s no free will it’s like the the space that I have choice over has collapsed into a deterministic world But I think what we do is we look out in the future far enough so that we can sequence our choices and they collapse into Determinism as we implement them. It’s something like that And I think that works neurologically too If you look at how how how action patterns actually manifest themselves in the brain it does seem to be something akin to that You’re so I don’t make much out of the liberty liberty experiments for example. Well, Libet himself was a compatibilist He did not believe in complete determinism that was your you Pinker put it this way in the blanks like that that you are part of the causal net of the universe But you’re part of it and you’re making choices that further determine the universe But there’s still your choices. So you are morally accountable for them I do think the law has evolved nicely along these lines along the Sort of shades of gray or the yeah You know the law if you intended to kill somebody versus doing it in an act of rage You know, it’s just on spur of the moment. You caught your spouse And you can you lose your temper that’s different from that, you know If we did we find out that for weeks you were plotting this to kill your spouse or whatever Right, you’re gonna get a different kind of penalty and that matches, you know neuroscience pretty well. Yeah, I think so I think so They or less control over so again more deterministic versus less deterministic. What are you talking about there? You’re talking about degrees of freedom Determinists don’t like the word freedom. Okay, call it something else you have more Degrees of something of options in whatever you end up with as a synonym eventually ends up meaning freedom Well, I think so. Yeah, the word I like the word I use the word so so let’s let’s return I’m gonna show your book again here just so that everybody remembers it And I would like to say what what were you let’s end with this What were you hoping or are you hoping to accomplish with this book apart from clarifying your own thoughts and communicating them? Thoughts and communicating them what what I mean you you you put this message into a bottle and you’ve launched it out there in the world What do you what are you hoping for? Really to everybody both religious and and non-religious or scientists the message is Really the here and now is what counts more than anything else We we don’t again we live in Brooklyn not not in 15 billion years from now that that That whether or not there’s an afterlife because clearly no one knows for sure We don’t live in the afterlife we live in this life and and so what you do really matters How you are in relation with other people and your environment really matters It matters not just for the future but the immediate future and even now whatever that means to you and So again, I’m glad people are working on this and thinking about it And you know if we can improve both society incrementally a little bit instead of aiming for utopia aim for protopia Aim for protopia. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s a great thing incremental and again instead of aiming for Immortality or a thousand years. Let’s just aim for getting more people to 90 and 100 healthy and And happy and living fulfilled lives and I do talk about in the end about the last chapter last pages in fact about the Importance of aiming to live a purposeful meaningful life not a happiness, you know As a psychologist to see the literature develop in positive psychology about happiness I’ve read all the happiness books all great, but happiness in the sense of I’m gonna plug into the morphine drip No, that’s not what life is about. That isn’t what gives people meaningful lives. It’s doing things that don’t make you happy, you know, like Again back to you work out every day. It’s not fun. I’m not happy working out And or you know, I was a caretaker for my parents I had four parents to step parents and and so two of them I was a caretaker. It wasn’t fun at all I had I didn’t get joy. I wasn’t you know Enjoying it. It was a you know, an uncomfortable experience but it made me feel better about myself about the world like this is you know, this is doing something more deeply meaningful and And so I think that that’s where it counts actually working to make the world a better place Gives you a deeper more fulfilled life. That is an excellent place to end. So I think like I think amen to that Life or no afterlife we should improve what we have right in front of us. Exactly. Yep, and that’s better than happiness I agree. I agree completely. It’s a much more profound orientation and it’s a boat that won’t temp in a storm So they My pleasure was really nice talking with you. Hopefully we’ll get a chance To talk again when your book comes out the 12 steps. Well, we’ll talk about the 12 steps sounds like a fine plan But I saw your show with Dave Rubin. I thought it was really good Thanks very much. It’s very good talking with you. All right, Jordan. All right Bye. Bye