https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=liErPS-_mOU
I thought I’d do a little video because I did Jordan Peterson, a couple of those, and I did John Vervecky. I figured I’d do some Sam Harris as sort of a counterbalance to Two Great Minds. We have one not-so-great mind in my opinion, and I’m going to go over why I think that is. Why don’t I like Sam Harris? Well, there are so many reasons. I’m not going to list them all. Basically, the main problem with Sam Harris is that people listen to him and they don’t understand the flaws in his arguments, which to me are rather clear. His interlocutors, including Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and other people who are really good with argumentation, fail to go after him at his weakest points in my opinion. I’d like to do that because I think it’s important. I think there’s a problem when you tell people that they can do something that they cannot do, especially when that is really the most important thing. Sam Harris tells you to some extent that you can gin up your own ethics, that morality is something that you as an individual can do by yourself, and you can arrive at these things. You don’t need religion. You don’t need any of these other tools. It’s either available through science or philosophy. Both of these are false. He uses a number of tricks to get you to believe that this is the case. I like to look at his main trick. I think his main trick is that he starts from a bunch of suppositions that are suspect, if not outright false. He says things like, well, look, you can imagine in your head the worst possible thing, like the most bad or something the most evil or something. He uses that modifier rather deliberately. That’s one of his starting points for when he talks about ethics and morality and the way he’s framing things. I want to stop right there because it’s an axiomatic statement. He’s telling you that you can do something. Now, this is very appealing to people who A, can do things, B, think they can do things, or C, feel they should be able to do things. It appeals to individuals, right? The individualistic stock, like, oh, I can do something. That’s great. I can use my imagination. I have an imagination. Sure. Why not? Seems reasonable. The problem is that if you posit that you can understand the worst thing or the most evil thing, you’re almost certainly wrong. That’s not possible. In the day, I have many arguments. We had fun games we played, like, can you make this worse? What’s the worst form of torture? We had lots of fun. Lots of fun. But there was always a way to make something worse. You can always say, cutting someone’s arm off is the worst. It’s like, well, cutting someone’s arm off, like their left arm, while pulling their fingernails off the right hand is worse. You can just keep adding. But it’s not clear to me that that addition doesn’t go on indefinitely. The idea that there’s some max limit, some stopping point to the most evil or the most bad or the most painful or whatever you want is almost certainly false and mathematically disprovable. It’s a weird mistake to make. It’s weird that people let them get away with it. I would say, no, you can’t. Not only can’t you, because it doesn’t exist, but you and others can’t. You can’t even agree on what that is, because your worst, most horrible thing is not mine. First of all, I have a high pain threshold. So if you told me the worst thing that I could do to you is cut off your arm, I’d be like, you cut off my arm. I’m going to punch you out afterwards, by the way. But you can do that. That wouldn’t hurt me more than sticking me with a needle, to say it. So it’s not a universal. And, Nestle, this is our second trick. So when I say you in the singular can do something, and that gets expanded out in our minds to everyone, we’ve created a universal. We do this all the time. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, although something to watch out for and be careful of. When that happens, you’re assuming everybody else not only can do the thing, which they may not be able to do, because I think evolution is a real phenomena you can observe in the universe, and therefore we’re not all equal in our capabilities. And I think that’s across almost all capabilities. So there must be people that can’t do this. Fair enough. When we will just take those people out, we’ll say all the people that can imagine the worst possible evil or the most bad thing or the most painful thing or whatever rubric you want to use are all thinking the same thing. They’re not. They’re not. That’s not happening. Okay. So now we have a couple problems. Well, three. We’ve done away with one of them, but we have three problems just in that formulation alone. So let’s just set that aside. We’ll say, okay, Sam, you know what? I’ll give you all of that, right? Because I’m going to destroy your argument anyway. So we’ll continue. Therefore, from his premise that I’m going to grant him that you can come up as an individual with the worst possible evil, and I’ll even give you that everybody else would come up with the same worst evil, is that all you need to do from that point forward, or at least all he mentions, is the opposite of that. The problem is I’m not sure there’s an opposite. All the things that are not bad are not necessarily good, and certainly all the things that are less bad aren’t necessarily good by definition. So it seems like two-thirds of this stuff at least is not within the good, right? So if you want to use set theory, although it’s kind of a silly thing to do, but we’ll go with it. We’ll use set theory. Incorrect. It’s just wrong. It’s not hard. It’s just wrong. This idea of opposites not only works in a binary configuration where there’s only two things and a one-for-one correspondence between the two of them. That second part’s important. You have to have two things, and they have to be opposing one another equally. Otherwise, this trick doesn’t work. First of all, again, there’s way more than two things. We know this. You can observe the world. You don’t need to get fancy with the logic and articulation. You can just look. There are people who are coasting along. There are people who are treading water in life. There are people who are just doing what they do, and they’re not getting better or worse. They’re not doing good or bad. They’re just there holding things together. There’s nothing wrong with that. Somebody’s got to hold things together. Maybe that’s not a state you can maintain forever. Fair enough. It might be the state you maintain most of the time. Could be. I don’t know. Probably. Seems likely. Just from observation, most people aren’t doing good or evil. They’re just doing what they do. In doing what they do, they’re making a bunch of trade-offs. Now, I have talked about trade-offs before. It’s a wonderful video. You really should watch it. It’s important to understand that people are making decisions all the time. Even where there are binaries, or it seems to be binaries, they’re choosing between them, but in a field of other choices. It’s not like you have pure choices where you’re just choosing between thing A and thing B. All of these things are wrapped up, either in the past, present, future, the timeline, or in the better for me, better for my family, better for the community sort of rubric that Jordan Peterson talks about. Both of these are happening. There’s trade-offs going all over the place. Effectively, in the real world, where you implement things and things happen, or have to happen, not in the cognitive crazy world that Sam Harris lives in, what ends up happening is you have to pick some things that are not pure goods and that have some component of bad or neutral in order to pick things that are either better or worse. That happens. That’s the way life really is for people during the day when they implement things. Not in your head, because in your head everything’s perfect. It’s great. Wonderful rainbow unicorns in the whole nine yards. But when the rubber meets the road, when you do stuff in the world, there’s all these trade-offs going on, and most of them involve some element of sub-optimality or badness or maybe even a touch of evil in order to get a greater good. That happens. That’s too complicated for Sam’s model, which is why he doesn’t address it. It won’t reliably lead you to the good to go away from the worst bad or something, because it looks to me like the field of bad is very broad, and the field of good is very narrow, kind of like a pyramid or a triangle. I’ve got some model videos, playlists here. You should watch those. They’re great. They’re all good, too. Don’t watch just the first ones like most people. You need a better way to orient in the world. When you do a binary, you’re relying on direction. You’re saying, direction A, good, direction B, bad, and therefore there’s only one direction anyway, so there’s only one line, so you just need to turn around. Fair enough. If that were the world, that would be true, but that’s not the world. That’s where the problem comes in. If that were the world, and this is the good thing about putting things in your head and dealing with them that way, is that you can make the world any way you want. The problem is you don’t live in the world in your head, and you don’t live in the world that is any way you want. That’s the problem. It isn’t one line from bad to good or evil to good or any of that, and it isn’t merely a matter of switching direction like that. No, and that just doesn’t lead you to the good. Direction is insufficient. I’ve mentioned this before. What we need is orientation, and orientation requires more than just direction. It requires navigation. There are ways to deal with problems that are wrapped up in this whole idea of navigation, of orientation with things, and in following those patterns that lead you to a greater likelihood of success, because those patterns aren’t simply, we’ll always choose the good. That’s a ridiculous oversimplification of how to have a better life. I’ll just always choose the good. It doesn’t mean anything. The good now or the good later, because those are different. The good now might be buy the ice cream, and the good later might be save that ice cream money, because later you’re going to need the ice cream more later. That happens all the time. It happened to me the other day. Beautiful ice cream, by the way. These are complicated issues. Good for me now, good for me later, good for me, good for my family, bad for my family now, but good for my family later. All of this happens. This happens all the time. You need orientation. You need navigation. You need to do relatively complicated, if not complex, operations to get around in the world. That’s the big problem. Sam Harris doesn’t account for trade-offs. He has this ridiculously oversimplified worldview, and then he tells you that you can do this. First of all, he can’t do it. He can’t. You’ll notice he never mentions the good, other than it’s the opposite of the bad. No, it’s not. That’s insane. And he’s running around telling people, oh, that’s all you have to do. No, it’s not. It’s not. Just try that in your life. See how it goes. Try to boil something down to not bad, therefore good. You can boil things down to not bad, but they might be neutral, or they might be necessary bad, because there’s necessary bad that has to be done in the world. I don’t know if this is still the case, but you get a lame horse, you shoot it. Why? Well, because treating a lame horse is fraught with dangers, and if they get infected, they’re going to die a horrible death. That happens. Things like that happen all the time. It happens to people. It happens to people. This is the euthanasia argument for people. It’s the same argument. Oh, they’re going to suffer, so we should kill them off. I don’t have a stance on that, maybe, but these are hard things. They’re not just move away from the worst possible bad. And most of this, most of Sam Harris’s thinking seems to be informed by this. As creatures, we move away from pain and towards pleasure. That’s provably, experimentally, shown to be wrong. I don’t know where these guys are getting this from. I know that there are models that you can use to fit the experiments into that and say, see? But that’s not what happens. We often suffer and struggle and take pain in the now for the future. That happens all the time to people. This is one of the things that Jordan Peterson talks about, and you should do that. You have to do that. You have to sacrifice the present for the future all the time. Otherwise, you’re going to have a bad future. And maybe we don’t have a sense of that right now, but we should. Another way that you know that the we run away from pain and towards pleasure is wrong is that you’re not a hedonist. Because we live in the modern world, and you could be, and you’re certainly not watching my videos if you’re a hedonist, so no. It just evolves to hedonism. Like that. So new. It’s just wrong. And a lot of people have this view. I don’t know if Sam Harris adopted that first and then came to his ridiculous binary where he never exemplifies or idealizes the good but just says the good is the opposite of the bad. I don’t know. But it seems to be the same line of thinking. The problem with this is that, you know, it’s fight or flight out there, guys. It’s fight or flight. No, it’s not. It’s fight, flight, or freeze. Hmm. Oh. So fight, flight is already wrong. Yes, there’s three. It’s not a binary. Most things in life, if not all, don’t seem to be binaries at all. And I have a wonderful video on binary thinking. You should watch that if you haven’t. It’s wonderful. Right? This is a problem. Like you can’t reduce the world this far. It’s scientific reductionism, and it’s bad, and it’s wrong, and it doesn’t match reality, and you can’t live that way. You can try. I suggest you look around. You can fit people’s decision-making into binaries, sure, because ultimately decisions can come down to binaries that can be thought of that way. But that doesn’t mean that’s what’s happening. Just because you make a map of the world doesn’t mean it’s accurate. It might be useful, but it might not be accurate. And that’s a problem. That’s the Sam Harris problem. And he doesn’t just do this oversimplification, this reductionism, you know, out of this whole idea of the worst possible bad, the opposite must be the good. He also uses that same rubric in other things he talks about. And the thing that’s missing there is that it’s a relativistic framework. It’s saying relative to the worst possible bad, there is a good, and here’s how to get there. Right? I’ve outlined the problems with that. The other area that he sort of pulls the trick is he uses his moral landscape. Now, I rather like the idea of moral landscape. It’s a great tool. Looks like relativistically, you can use the moral landscape and judge two things. Okay? The problem with that is that when you do that, you’re actually hiding the trick. Right? You’re putting a trick, pulling a trick on people, and you’re hiding what you’re doing. First problem with relativistic framework is you need two things to compare. Two, not one. So if you wanted to use a scoring algorithm to say like, well, I’m just going to take Christianity and throw it in the moral landscape and find out how good it is, you can’t do that with the moral landscape as outlined by Sam Harris. It can’t be done. Fair enough. Like, I’m cool with relativistic tools. But how do you compare to religions, say Christianity and Islam, like Sam Harris does within the moral landscape, what are you comparing them against exactly? Science? Science doesn’t make moral decisions. Science can’t make moral decisions. It’s not possible. It’s not clear. Well, it turns out that, you know, he’s using Judeo-Christian values. Right? He may be justifying those with science. Fair enough. You can justify all kinds of things with science, including eugenics. Not recommended. But you can. You can. So he’s hiding the trick. He’s got Judeo-Christian values, and he’s not talking about where they came from. And there was an interview a few years ago, three years ago now, I think, Ben Shapiro runs a Sunday special. He’s Sam Harris on. And I think it’s towards the end of the interview. He basically says, Sam, are you sure that you came up with exactly the same values that I did culturally and you built them from scratch? Or is it more likely that because, as it turns out, we lived four blocks apart, they didn’t know this, but apparently they lived four blocks apart in LA, in Jewish households, basically, or at least nominally Jewish households in one case, and Orthodox Jew perhaps in the other. Maybe that’s what gives us the same values, and not that you gin them up out of nothingness. And for that matter, if he came to the same conclusion as Judeo-Christian values, maybe that’s a good shortcut, and you just do the religion. Just saying. Ben kind of missed that point, I think, but it’s a good point. It’s a good clip. I found the whole interview fascinating, and usually I can’t listen to Sam Harris for more than five or ten minutes. So, I think, you know, another thing it’s sort of worth covering, other than this relativistic framework with, you know, the moral landscape. Sam Harris talks about determinism, right, and the lack of free will. And the way he gets this is he’s dealing with a problem that, to be fair, most people never deal with. They never deal with this problem. And it’s maybe a bit of an overstatement, but, you know, Sam says you didn’t have a choice about being born. I don’t know that that’s true. I don’t think you can prove that, because things that happened before you were born and after you’re dead, we just don’t know. We just don’t have evidence for, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t things. So, problem number one, science can’t have anything to say about that. Not science doesn’t, or science will someday. Cannot. There’s no scientific method you can apply. So, let’s just put that to bed. So, but I’ll give it to him. I had no choice about the conditions of my birth, where I was born, when I was born, etc. Fair enough. What problem are you solving there, though? And why does it lead to no free will? This is foolish. It’s crazy talk. It’s complete crazy talk. There’s a talk that Manuel and I did on free will and agency, because I think the problem with telling people this is that you’re really telling them they have no agency, and that’s not a sellable thing. You can’t tell people they have no agency. They’re not going to buy into that, and you don’t want to, because you’ll make them, you’ll put them into a meaning crisis, roughly speaking, right? You’ll make them depressed and nihilistic and sort of believe that capitalism, mind control, space dragon is forcing them to be the bad person. It’s very Rousseauian, right? If not for society, if I were in the pure form of nature, I’d be a good person. No, you wouldn’t. That’s a lot of garbage. You’re always part of nature, and society is part of nature, and there’s no nature without society, in some fashion, right? We’re all surrounded by things. So, this leads him down this no free will path, which is just a crazy argument. It just doesn’t make any sense at all, and he’s wrong, and it’s not hard. Just wrong, and you know, I think he’s confusing the change in agency over time with free will, and that’s why Manuel and I did the video, right? To sort of kind of line through free will and agency and say these are different things, and here’s why it’s important, and here’s how they relate. And, you know, again, to give him credit, like, no one else deals with this problem. You had no choice about being born. What’s that all about? And it turns out that what all these thinkers are doing, and you know, including some religious folks, is they’re ignoring creation, right? They’re ignoring the fact that because you were born and there was stuff here and a way for you to be born, you’re subject to that. You’re a subject, right? You’re subjected to the fact of your birth and the fact of your upbringing, because it turns out when you’re born, you’re a useless pile of nothing. You just are. We all start out as these babies. We can’t talk. We can cry sometimes and occasionally get what we need. Who knows, right? And that’s it. You’re stuck there. Like, that happened and there’s no way around that. And you may say, Mark, that’s not creation. No, it is. It’s creation of you. And you can go all the way back with that and say, well, where does the chain of creation begin and where does it end? Fine. Fair enough. For the individual, we know, right? We know, but we can’t explain the creation. Like, we don’t know why you were born. We know how you were born. We don’t know why. We don’t have a why. We can postulate a why. For some people, maybe, I wanted to have kids. So we had kids. But why did you want to have kids? You can get into that whole chain. But the problem of creation is a big problem. And this is what most people just flat out avoid. It’s like, well, it’s the Big Bang. But if you understood the Big Bang, you would realize immediately there’s a certain point at which they can’t explain anything. And they say, well, the math stops working. What? The math stops working? Yes, the math stops working. Look it up. The math stops working. And so they can’t explain what happened before the Big Bang. And so they say, well, it’s just an endless cycle. And now we don’t have to worry about creation anymore because it’s an endless cycle. It was never created. Which is wrong. Something created the cycle and something created the things in the cycle. So that’s not correct to begin with. And also why the crazy talk? Why the crazy endless cycle? You’re not answering the question of where things came from if you’re saying they were a crazy unending cycle that happened outside of time and space. A better explanation is that there’s a being of some or an entity of some nature that created it. That’s a better argument, honestly, than this endless process cycle that happened and keeps happening and whatever. It’s not that much different. So it’s crazy talk. And that’s part of the problem, is that most of them aren’t dealing with creation. The idea of creation. Not like what the creation is, but the idea that there was a creation. And to be fair, we have a bunch of scientific creationists who say simulation theory. And they’re like, that’s not creation. That’s not creation theory. It’s like, it is. It is exactly intelligent design. Because there’s an entity that made a simulator that simulated you. All of that is involved in intelligence to make a simulator. How are you going to say that’s not an intelligent design? So they’re making an intelligent design argument. And that happens right after the matrix comes out, roughly speaking. This starts to pop up a few years later. So in popularity, it was there before that. And so you can see in which these people aren’t making different arguments than say the religious crew. They’re just avoiding some of these creation ideas, avoiding development as such, avoiding the fact that we sort of start out with more agency, with less agency, we get more agency. We hit a maximum peak of agency and it starts to go down again. They’re just avoiding all of these time-based changes. They’re avoiding where the starting point is, right? The very middle out. You’re not starting from creation. To start from creation, you’re not middle out anymore. You’re starting from creation. That’s the beginning. Definitionally, like it’s a tautology, yes. But you need it. You gotta have tautologies. You can’t just say there’s no tautologies and therefore that doesn’t work either, right? Can’t live in a relativistic only framework. So these are sort of the problems I see with Sam Harris and some of his little rubrics, things that he talks about and the things that infuriate me, because it’s so disingenuous to tell people that A, you’re doing that when you clearly can’t defend any of it. And B, you can’t do the trick, right? You’re being asked to answer simple questions and you can’t answer them. And so you’re not doing that. You’re doing something else. You need to be intellectually honest with yourself first. And then the worst crime is telling other people they can do it. Everyone’s not you. Even if you could do it, which again, I see no evidence for, maybe they can’t. And maybe you’re leading them down a bad path, telling them they can do something they can’t do. You know, I mean, look, it sounds like a lie and a trope and an urban myth, but it’s not. You can fly and people jump off the building. Yeah, on acid or not, I’ve seen both. It happens. People get convinced that they can do things that they can’t and it ends badly for them all the time. Just look around. Just look around. And it’s a problem. And people shouldn’t be telling other people what they can and can’t do unless they know them personally and have some hope of having that information. But saying that that is something that anybody can do is really dangerous. And that’s what I don’t like. And I just, yeah, I’m a hard no on all that. But I am a hard yes and very sort of hopeful because I’m able to have you listen to these videos, right? And that makes me very grateful that you watch them and that you give me your time and attention.