AB Harris/Weinstein/Peterson Discussion: Vancouver

[Music] Hello Vancouver, thank you. Hello! All right, so we have an interesting situation here. Obviously this is part two, and a few of you were here for what took place last night. We are going to find a way to catch you all up pretty quick on what took place. But before we do that, I thought it might make sense to talk to you about where we are in this discussion and why it matters.

And it matters not just for those of us on stage, but it matters very much for you all in the audience. The point is basically this: we've arrived at a place in history where the sense-making apparatus that usually helps us figure out what to think about things has obviously begun to come apart. The political parties, the universities, journalism, all of these things have stopped making sense. Alternative sense-making networks have begun to rise, and the one that we end up being a part of seems to be beating the odds with respect to staying alive and being a vibrant part of the conversation. But that depends on something: it depends on our ability to upgrade what we can discuss and navigate.

Sam and Jordan have run afoul of each other in the past, as you all know, and so our ability to upgrade the conversations such that they're able to find common ground and for us to move forward together is potentially very important. A very important upgrade now that upgrade in the modern era includes you all, because our conversation and your conversations are all now linked through the internet. So the ground rules for tonight involve you not filming what takes place on stage tonight, and the reason for that is because what takes place on stage tonight has consequences. The freer that Sam and Jordan feel to use new tools to try out positions that maybe they haven't explored before, the more likely we are to succeed.

So please don't film, but that does not mean that we don't want you talking about what was discussed here tonight. In fact, we're very excited to see what you all make of this conversation and where it heads. So, in an effort to get you up to speed on where we got yesterday, and I think the evidence is strong, we all felt, and the discussion online suggests, that we actually accomplished quite a bit yesterday, that we made headway in an effort to attempt to keep that momentum going.

What we are going to do is we are going to have Sam and Jordan Steelman each other's points from last night so that you can hear what that sounds like. Now, for those of you who have ever tried stealing someone’s point with whom you have a severe disagreement, you know just how hard this is. So let's give them some leeway.

Sam, would you be willing to start?
Sure, sure, yeah, thank you.

Okay, well first let me just make the obvious point that probably isn't so obvious unless you take the time to put yourself in our shoes. But just imagine how surreal it is for us to be who we are simply having a conversation about ideas and to be able to put a date on the calendar and have all of you show up for this. It's just an amazing privilege, and thank you for coming out.

So here is what I think Jordan thinks I'm getting wrong. I think that was grammatically correct; maybe there’s another note in there, but clearly I don't understand how valuable stories are, how deep they go, the degree to which stories encode not only the wisdom of our ancestors but quite possibly the wisdom born of the hard knocks of evolution of the species, right?

So there’s no telling how deep the significance of the information encoded in stories goes. And there’s a class of stories that are religious stories, and they’re religious for a reason, because they’re dealing with the deepest questions in human life. They’re questions about what constitutes a good life, what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for. These are things that if each individual just thrust onto the stage of his own life, not knowing where he is and tasked with figuring out how to live all on his own, or even in a collection of others who are similarly unguided by ancient wisdom, this is not knowledge we can recapitulate for ourselves easily.

And so we edit or ignore these ancient stories at our peril, at some minimum, at some considerable risk, because we don’t know how much we don’t really know what baby is in the bathwater. And so we should have immense respect for these traditions. This is well, this is something to be discovered tonight. I’m still not quite clear about how this links up with more metaphysical propositions about the origins of certain of these stories, but at minimum, my criticism of religion—because it tends to focus on the most obvious case of zero-sum contest between religious dogmatism and, you know, scientific open-ended discussion—doesn’t address this core issue of the significance of religious thinking and religious narrative.

Because I am, for the most part, just shooting fish in a barrel criticizing fundamentalists and the kind of God that the fundamentalists believe in. The God who’s an invisible person who hates homosexuals, obviously that’s not the deepest version of these religious narratives. This is a narrative technology for orienting human life in the cosmos.

So maybe I’ll leave it there, but that’s I think what Jordan thinks.
Before you steal man Sam’s point, how did you feel about his encapsulation of yours?
Well, I got a couple of things to say about it. It’s like, first of all, I think it was accurate, concise, fair. I also think that this is a more technical note in some sense, is that if you ever want to think about something, that’s exactly what you have to do, right? You want to take arguments that are against your perspective, and you want to make them as strong as you possibly can so that you can fortify your arguments against them. You don’t want to make them weak because that just makes you weak.

And so, you know, Sam and I are both scientists, and it really is the case that what scientists are trying to do—and I think what we’re actually trying to do in this conversation genuinely—is to try to find out if there’s something that we’re thinking that’s stupid, you know? Because when I’m laying out the arguments that Sam just summarized so well, I’ve tried to generate a bunch of opposition to them in my own imagination, and their arguments I put forward are ones I can’t undermine. But that doesn’t mean they’re right; it doesn’t mean that at all.

So if someone comes along, and this is certainly the case if you’re a scientist who’s worth his or her salt, if someone comes along and says, “Hey, look, you’ve made a mistake in this fundamental proposition,” it’s like, “Yes, great! That means I can make progress towards a more solid theory of being!” So, and that’s what we’re trying to do, and I do think it’s working. And so I thought that was just fine, exactly dead-on, and I hope I can do justice to your position as well.

So, okay. So I’m going to summarize Sam’s argument briefly, and then I’m going to let you guys know why he thinks I’m a thing of what things I’m not taking into account. So Sam believes that there are two fundamental dangers to psychological and social stability: religious fundamentalism essentially on the right and moral relativism and nihilism on the left.

And so the danger of the right-wing position is that it enables people to arbitrarily establish certain revealed axioms as indisputable truths and then to tyrannize themselves and other people with the claims that those are divine revelations. He sees that as part of the danger of religious fundamentalism and maybe religious thinking in general, but also is something that characterizes secular totalitarian states that also has a religious aspect.

So that’s on the right, and then on the left—the problem with the moral relativism-nihilism position is that it leaves us with no orientation, and it also flies in the face of common sense observations that there are ways to live that are bad and that there are ways to live that are good that people can generally agree on, and that statements about those general agreements about how to live can be considered factual.

Now, the next part of Sam’s argument is that we require a value system that allows us to escape these twin dangers: one stultifies us and the other leaves us hopeless, let’s say. And that value system has to be grounded in something real, and the only thing that he can see that actually constitutes real in any provable sense—and there’s a certain amount of historical and conceptual weight behind this claim—is the domain of empirical facts as they’ve been manifested in the sciences and technologies that have made us incredibly powerful and increasingly able to flourish in the world.

So we need to ground our value propositions in something that we’ve been able to determine has genuine solidity so that we can orient ourselves properly so that we can make moral claims and that we can avoid these twin dangers. We can begin with some basic facts that we can identify, as I mentioned briefly: what constitutes a bad life, endless pain, suffering, anxiety, a tremendous amount of negative emotions, short term lifespan, all the things that no one would choose voluntarily for themselves if we all agree that they were thinking in a healthy manner. And we can contrast that sort of domain of horror with the good life, which might involve, well, certainly freedom from privation and want and undue threat and anxiety and hope for the future and all of that.

And we can agree that those are poles: good, bad and good, and that’s a factual claim. So Sam also claims that we can define the good life—this is an extension of it—with reference to flourishing and well-being, and that that can actually be measured. We should and can inform the idea of flourishing and well-being with empirical data. Having said all that, he also leaves what would be a domain of inquiry open that would be centered on the possibility that some of the ideas that have been encapsulated in religious phenomenology, if not in religious dogma, might be worth pursuing as well, that there might be wisdom that can practically be applied in terms of perception to spiritual practices, although those become increasingly dangerous as they become ensconced in dogma.

And so that's Sam's position. And then his criticism of my ideas; he would say that it's facts, not stories, that constitute the ground for the proper science of well-being and that we don't need to be connected to stories, ancient stories in particular, to thrive, and the reason for that is that these ancient stories are pathological in certain details, especially in the specific claims they make which look outrageous in some sense from a modern moral perspective.

And he believes that it's hand-waving to ignore those specific topics with an optimistic overview of the entire context, that they're dangerously outdated; they’re subject to too many potential interpretations for any modern usage to be reliably derived. And so he believes that attempts to interpret these stories, let's say, are rife with so many potential errors of bias and interpretation and subjectivity that all the interpretations in some sense are unreliable, and perhaps equally unreliable, that they’re dated.

That worse than that, not only are they unreliable, but they're dangerous insofar as the claims they lay out pose a threat to scientific and enlightenment values which are the true saviors of humanity, as evidenced by our progress, let's say, over the last two or three hundred years, and that they're also susceptible to the totalitarian interpretation which I described earlier, which confers upon the interpreter a sense of, and then a claim to, revealed truth.

And so I would say that Sam's argument and his criticisms of my position—so okay, so you write my next book, I’ll write yours! Sam, how do you feel about that characterization of your position?
Certainly close enough to get the conversation started. I mean, there are a few grounding stuff where we have yet to talk about, and I'm not as much a stickler for materialistic scientific empiricism as I heard implied there, but we can come.

Okay, so hold on. Yep. I think from the point of view of the audience, this is a good barometer of where we got to last night, and I think actually the gains are really impressive, which I have to say is spooking me because of something called regression to the mean. Now, if I catch either one of you regressing to the mean tonight, I will hunt you down and I will ridicule you on Twitter tomorrow. So you have been warned.

Okay, all right, so do either one of you want to now talk about what was missing from the other characterization, or how do you want to move?
I think we should touch this issue of metaphorical truth because I think it still gets at the distance between us.

Sure, and say, happily, yeah this is your phrase that you have—you might want to do you want to prop up this phrase? Why not? So the idea of metaphorical truth, which I think actually is the reconciliation between at least the points that you guys each started out with—is the idea that there are concepts which are literally false that we can falsify in a scientific rational sense, but that if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you were if you behave according to the fact that they are false.

And so to call these things simply false is an error, in effect. The universe has left them true in some sense other than a purely literal one. And so religions would then, according to actually what you heard from both Sam and Jordan, religions would fall into this class of things; these are encapsulations of stories and prescriptions that if you follow them, irrespective of whether they literally describe the universe, you end up with advantages that you may not know why they are there, but nonetheless, you are ahead of your position if you were to navigate just simply on your perceptions.

That’s the concept, yes. I think there’s a good analogy that you and I stumbled onto after we did a podcast together. You had an analogy about a porcupine that could shoot its quills, which many people balked at, but a listener gave us a better one, which was the idea that anyone who has worked with guns at all must have heard this admonishment to treat every gun as if it is loaded, right?

And when I last night when I alleged that you believed in God, you corrected me and said, “No, you live as if God exists,” right? And so this seems like there’s a connection here. So if you're, you know, if I had a gun here that I wanted to show Brad, if I know anything about guns, I’m going to make damn sure that it’s unloaded, right?

I’m going to pull back the slide, I’m going to drop the magazine, pull back the slide, check the chamber, and do this in a redundant fashion that really looks like I’m suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Maybe it is truly redundant, and then I’ll hand it to Brad, and if Brett knows anything about guns, he will do the same thing, having just seen me do it. And if he hands it back to me again, I will do the same thing, even though there may be no ammunition around, right?

So it really is crazy at the level of our explicit knowledge of a situation, and yet absolutely necessary to do. And it’s not merely, it runs very deep. I mean, I would have bent that whole time, you’re careful not to point the barrel of the gun at anything you would be afraid to shoot, and when people fail to live this way around guns, they with some unnerving frequency actually shoot themselves or people close to them by accident.

So it is really the only proper hedge against just the odds of being in proximity to loaded weapons. And yet if someone in the middle of this operation came up to us and said, “You know, actually, there’s a casino that just opened across the street that will take your bets about whether or not guns are loaded. Would you like to bet a million dollars as to whether or not this gun is loaded?” Well, of course, I would bet those million dollars every time that it’s not loaded because I know it’s not loaded, right?

So there’s a literal truth and a metaphorical truth—well, you know, otherwise known as a very useful fiction—which in this case is actually more useful than the truth, right? But the only way I can understand its utility and even utter the phrase “metaphorical truth” in a way that’s comprehensible is in the context of distinguishing it from literal truth.

Yep, this is fascinating, Sam. Actually, this is, I think, next Jason. I’m a little worried by how excited you are about this, so I have a little story that might be helpful about that.

So one of the things that I’ve been reconsidering since we talked last night is the nature of our dispute about the relationship between facts and values because I think I can make a case that what I’ve been trying to do, especially in my first book, was to ground values in facts, but I’m not doing it the same way that you are exactly. So I don’t want to make that a point of contention.

And I’ll get to that in a moment, but with regard to this metaphor of truth, let me tell you something. You tell me what you think about this. So one of the things that’s been observed by anthropologists worldwide is that human beings tend to make sacrifices.

So I’m going to spend two minutes, three minutes laying out a sacrificial story, and the reason I want to do it is because I think what happened with regards to the origin of these profound stories is that people first started to behave in certain ways that had survival significance, and that was selected for, and as a consequence of the standard selection practices, and so that was instantiated in behavior.

And then because we can observe ourselves, because we’re self-conscious creatures, we started to make representations of those patterns and dramatize them and then encapsulate them in stories. So it’s a bottom-up process, from me.

So it would be sort of like chimpanzees or wolves become aware of their dominance hierarchy structures and the strategies that they use. So a wolf, for example, if two wolves are having a dominance dispute, one, the wolf that gives up first lays down, puts his neck open so the other wolf can tear it out, and then the other wolf doesn’t. And you could say, well, it’s as if a wolf is following a rule about not killing a weaker member of the pack.

Of course, wolves don’t have rules; they have behavioral patterns. But a self-conscious wolf would watch what the wolves were doing and then say, well, it’s as if we’re acting out the idea that each wolf in the pack has intrinsic value, and then that starts to be a basis for any maybe the wolves would have a little story about that, the heroic forbearing wolf that doesn’t tear out the neck of its opponents, and that that’s a good wolf. Well, that's good wolf ethics.

And so, but it’s grounded in the actual behavior. Okay, so let’s put that aside for a second. Now here’s the sacrificial story. So human beings have made sacrifices; it seems to be a standard practice all around the world.
And in the biblical narratives, they would often sacrifice something of value, like a valuable animal, like a child. Startling! Look, I’m not making light of this; I know that human sacrifice was a part of this. But that’s, again, to just to give you a crib on where my mind goes.

Human sacrifice is as old a religious precept as we know about. It’s a cultural universal. The other sacrifices are a derivation from it, and circumcision is a surrogate for the far more barbaric act of human sacrifice, and you know it answers every test you would put to it with respect to its archetypal significance and its compelling presence in stories across all cultures.

But the horror is that it actually has taken place in all these cultures based on licit beliefs in the presence of just, just right Arthur casts of scientific ignorance. Arthur Kessler used that as the argument for the essential insanity of humanity.

We have, no, but it’s not just the insanity of humanity; it’s the misapprehension of the causal structure of the cosmos that you don’t know what natural is, the weather. You don’t know why people get sick. You think your neighbor is capable of casting magic spells on you. You’re ignorant of everything, and you’re trying to force some order on things.

And so when you don’t have engineers and you don’t know why certain buildings fall down, you actually can agree with your neighbor that maybe you should bury your firstborn child into every post hole of this new building, which in fact has taken place, and it’s the consequence of ignorance.

And so the problem is if you’re only going to talk about purifies' notion of sacrifice—as very strange consequence of ignorance— like wait, it’s the notion that we’re in relationship to invisible others that can mistreat us. Based on a lot of having offered enough, we are, but not precisely those others.

Well, but we're in relationship to the invisible others who will judge us in the future.
Okay, but you’re changing the noun in important ways.
No, but I’m also trying to understand. I’m not trying to argue against the horror of child sacrifice; no, I would never imagine.

I know, I know, unless, but my work would be much easier if you did that!
Ha ha ha! Yes, yes, yes! And the work of journalists as well; we’ve tried that, right? So, right, that would be even worse than enforced monogamy, hypothetical.

Oh, so, okay, so see, I’m, let’s say that I’m trying to give the devil his due and I’m trying to understand from an evolutionary perspective, like a cognitive behavioral evolutionary perspective, let’s say, why that particular set of ideas would emerge and in many, many, many places, perhaps autonomously, or, once having emerged, would spread like wildfire.

It’s like because I’m not willing to only attribute it to ignorance. Now we could attribute it to ignorance, no problem, man! But there’s more going on there because it is a human universal and there’s all sorts of things that happen in nature as a consequence of biological and evolutionary processes that don’t work out well for our current state of moral intuition.

Okay, so one of the things because I’ve been thinking about this sacrificial motif for a very long time, trying to figure out what that idea here exactly is. And so, here’s one way of thinking about it: if you give up something of value, now you can gain something of more value in the future, okay?

So let’s think about that idea for a minute. So the first thing is that’s a hell of an idea. That’s delay, delay, delay, right? That’s the discovery of the future, as well. And so you might say, well the notion of sacrifice is exactly the same thing as the discovery of the future.

If we give up something we really value now, we can make a pact with the structure of existence itself such that better things will happen to us in the future. Now, okay, now what’s weird about this—and it’s hard to understand—is that it works.

So when I talk to my students, for example, and I say, “What did your parents sacrifice to send you to university?” Many of them are children of first-generation immigrants, and so like, man, they’re on that story in a second, right? They know all sorts of things that their parents sacrificed, and they’re delaying gratification in the present for a radically delayed return in the future.

Now, you think animals, generally speaking, they might act out the idea of delayed gratification as a consequence of running out their instincts, but they don’t conceptualize it. It’s not obvious that animals give up something they value right now in order to thrive in the future.

There’s an old story about how to catch a monkey, right? So, yeah, you put a jar up with rocks in it, then you put little candies and it’s a narrow-neck jar. You put little candies on top of the rocks, put a few candies in front of the jar, then the monkey comes along and picks up the candies, puts his hand in the jar, grabs the candies and can’t get it out.

I still don’t know if this actually works on monkeys or if it was just a great story!
Oh, I don't know either!
And then I’ve heard various claims, but the point is you can go pick up the monkey; he won’t let go of the candies.

Now, perhaps he would, but the issue is that it’s not obvious that animals will forego an immediate gratification for a future gratification.
I don’t think—that’s not, I don’t think that’s right actually.
And actually, one—
The question is, will they do it consciously?
They might act it out.
They act it out! That’s not the issue!
It’s very hard to know if it’s conscious.
I know! I know.
And it—and obviously the line between acting it out and becoming—starting to consciously represent it is a tenuous one.

But what looks to me like what happened is that after we observed that people who were capable of delaying gratification sacrifice things that they valued in order to obtain a future goal, and it worked, that we started to codify that as a representation and then started to act it out.

And so, so the story—and you’d say, well, that produced strange variants, but there’s a reason for that: too, as far as I can say, so imagine this: imagine that there’s a rule of thumb that sacrificing what you find valuable now will ensure certain benefits in the future.

Well, then the question becomes, how good could those future benefits be? And so that might be heavenly, let’s say, in the archetypal extreme. And what’s the ultimate sacrifice that you have to perform? And then I would say, well, the child sacrifice fits into that category.

And so it’s as if those ideas were pushed to their radical extreme. And you could say, well, that’s a pathological extreme. It’s like, well, it is a pathological extreme, but I think we also have to understand that some of the things that we've learned as we've evolved towards our current state of wisdom—such as it is—were learned in a very bloody and catastrophic way.

They were learned with incredible difficulty, and delay of gratification was certainly one of those because it’s a hell of a thing to learn when you’re in conditions of privation. Okay, yeah, well, I think that the issue here for me is that you don’t need a conception of—you don’t need any kind of positive gloss on human sacrifice as a meme or as an archetype in order to form a coherent picture of the future that can motivate you.

So, delayed gratification is fully separable from a notion that it might ever be rational or good to sacrifice a child as an offering to an invisible other.
How do you know it’s separable?
Because that’s the developmental history, as you said?
Well, that's the thing!
Well, that’s the only path forward toward a notion of the future.
Given where we've come from or that it's somehow necessary to venerate now, or that it’s good?

Do we take that, but we do venerate the idea of sacrifice now, but I would say…
I would say that we do it to the detriment of our moral intuitions in the religious context.
So, for instance, I think that the notion that Christianity is actually a cult of human sacrifice—a Christianity—is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice. Christianity is a religion that says actually, no, human sacrifice is necessary, and there was only one that, in fact, was necessary and effective, and that’s the sacrifice of Jesus.

And I think that is, when you dig into the details, not only a morally interesting vision of our circumstance and how we can be redeemed, it’s morally abhorrent, right?

So I think there’s a better version.
Okay, let me ask you a question about that.

So in the moral landscape, you lay out this pathway: there’s the bad life, and there’s the good life, right? And, and you describe what they were, and the bad life is a variation of hellish circumstances and the good life is a variant of hypothetically the life that we would like to lead.

And your conception is that—and correct me if I’m wrong—your conception is that the proper pathway forward, so that would be the moral endeavor, is to move away from the bad and towards the good.
Okay, and so far as we understand which way is up?
Yes. Yes.

The basic claim is that we can be right or wrong with respect to—we don’t necessarily know how to do that in an unerring manner. And we could subject that to approximation correction along the way and we should, but we can outline the broad scheme: you know, just progress away from hell towards something positive.
Yes, yes.

Okay, so I would say that there’s an implicit claim in that: that you should sacrifice everything in you that isn’t serving that, to that. And I would say that that’s essentially the same claim that’s made in Christianity.
Well, again that is a—I may understand the impulse to uplevel these barbaric ignorance-derived beliefs, right—that—
To something that is morally, that is interesting and palatable in the current context.

And I understand you can do that.
My concern there is you can do that with everything. I mean, you could do it with witchcraft.
Why not do the exact same thing you’re doing with religion to the history of witchcraft?

Witchcraft is as—well, water— I just would do that so it’s a perfectly.
Yeah, but so it’s—but it’s something that should be of concern.

There are reasons why we don’t want to endorse martyrs of witchcraft.
Right, absolutely, and so you know what I mean. I’m not talking in modern witchcraft…
Currently exists—I mean you go to Africa. There, people are hunting albinos for their body parts because they believe in sympathetic magic, and they—and kids get killed as witches.

So, this belief endures in certain pockets of humanity. And we’re right to about—not to think at a certain point. You have to acknowledge that some ideas are not only wrong, but their effects are disastrous, or have been disastrous, or will likely be even if good in certain circumstances will likely be disastrous in the future.

And then we shouldn't be hostage to these ancient memes. We shouldn't have to figure out how to make the most of the worst idea that anyone's ever had, which is, you should maybe you should sacrifice your firstborn child to a being you’ve never seen.
Hold on, Sam, I want to hold your feet to the fire here.

Look at it; two points. One interesting observation, when you presented the example—so on your podcast, I had argued that believing that porcupines can throw their quills might protect you from a porcupine that might wheel around, even though porcupines can't for other quills. Your listener sent the better example, which was all guns are loaded.

When you presented it, you didn’t say all guns are loaded; well, you said treat all guns as if they are loaded—which is, I think, the same reflex that you have faced with any metaphorical truth, which is that it can always be unpacked. But it’s actually—that’s the way Jordan talks about believing in God as well, right?
And actually, so… so this is—but then, if we take something like you, so you say, “All right, sacrifice of children is abhorrent.” Let’s say it is.

And then you say, “Well, Christianity hasn’t forgone the sacrifice of children.” In fact, it's described one child who is sacrificed for everybody else.
But arguably that’s an upgrade of some metaphorical truth that frees those who are adhering to this tradition from ever considering sacrificing a child, and that idea might engender a large amount of good work that would result—as Jordan’s point—
Let me just concede that the hardest case for me, which I did up top just in defining when, after you define metaphorical truth—and I use the gun example—there’s certainly cases where the useful fiction is more useful than the truth. I would grant that.

But, you know, I think those cases are few and far between. But handling guns is one of them.
And it’s just not useful when the casino opens across the street and you can place a million-dollar bet. Right then, you want to have some purchase on the literal truth, so you want to be able to—and again, this is psychologically interesting because I keep coming back to the gun example, because the one that is viscerally real to me—like if I have a real gun that I know to be unloaded, I still emotionally can’t treat it as a harmless object.

I can’t point it at my child just for the fun of it because you know that we’re going to play cops and robbers now with a real gun.
Right, yes!

This, yeah.
I have a superstitious attachment to always be in safe with the gun! Right? And it’s important. It’s important that that get ingrained, and yet it’s not strictly right; it’s not irrational because it has good effects.

But it’s not actually in register with what I know to be true factually in each moment! Right? So, very low cost?
Yes, very low cause!

It’s not divided in societies and causing people to go to war!
And if you were going to teach a child gun safety, you would want to encode this so that they would automatically know never to behave as if a gun is unloaded, because that’s what gets you into trouble as an adult!

Every gun owner recognizes the distinction between the metaphorical truth and the literal truth here.
But I guess what I suspect is going on here is that your mechanism for dealing with the world involves unpacking all of these things, and I think it’s highly productive, but it also means that you have a hard time understanding why anybody would do anything different.

And that’s the question: just because we can track fully the difference between guns actually all being loaded and behaving as if all guns are loaded, right, that one, there’s no leftover; there’s nothing; there’s no mystery there! Right?

But there may be many of these things for which there is some difficulty lining up the metaphorical truth with the literal truth and operating according to the metaphorical truth might have advantages, which I think is what you’re getting at.
So, here’s another situation because you know we have to remember what kind of catastrophic past we emerged from and how much privation ruled the world prior to, essentially, 1895, and certainly the farther back you go, the more bloody and horrible it was.

I mean how often do you think it was necessary—and this is not obviously something I’m in favor of—how often do you think it was necessary for people in the past who had absolutely no access to birth control and who didn’t have enough food to sacrifice a child for the survival of their family?
I mean, God only knows!

Now, that is worth thinking about! It’s like you know life is unbelievably cruel and difficult and one of the problems that comes when you discover the future is that you might have to make the most painful of sacrifices.

And lots of archaic people do this sort of thing—they do that with their elderly people; they do that with sick people; they do that with infants that they deem too fragile to survive. Like so part of child sacrifice—and I know the literature on child sacrifice reasonably well—part of child sacrifice seemed to emerge out of the observable necessity to leave someone behind so that everyone else didn’t die.

And we don’t know how often that had to happen in the past—it might have had to happen a lot, right?
Now obviously, just in the interest of kind of conceptual clarity here, human sacrifice is a larger horror than that.

So you have, it was very common, is the sacrificing of, you know, captives. So you take the Aztec sacrifices where you, you know, if you now have slaves, some of whom you’re going to. The Aztecs sacrificed about twenty-five thousand people a year.

Yeah, yeah! Look, I mean, it’s clearly a bloody mess; there’s no doubt about that, but you know one of the things that you see happening in the biblical narrative which is extraordinarily interesting, is that you see echoes of child sacrifice at the beginning. But what happens is the sacrificial notion gets increasingly psychologized, as the story progresses.

So, you see that transition with Abraham and Isaac, where that where the sacrificial child sacrifice is actually forbidden although previously demanded by god.
And then you also see it, as you already laid out, in the substitution of the circumcision for the idea of sacrifice itself.

And then what seems to happen—and see I’m trying to figure out how these ideas develop psychologically from their behavioral underpinnings—is that eventually it becomes psychologized completely.

So you can say well we can we can conceptualize a sacrifice in the abstract so my parents can sacrifice to send me to university without anything or anyone having to die. It transforms itself from something that’s enacted out as a dramatic ritual into something that’s a psychological reality.

But all that blood and catastrophe along the way is part of the process by which the idea comes to emerge, right? Certainly!
So what is the connection of all of this? Because, yes, so there is this history.

And I would argue we are busy trying to outgrow much of it—if not most of it—and whether it’s evolutionary history or just might be ultramicromigrating the two, we can maintain, and as you suggested we can maintain what’s useful in the tradition and throw out everything that’s pathological.

Yes, by the book, we’re constantly discovering a lack of fit between both our what we perceive in ourselves as biological imperatives and the cultural legacies of just what mommy and daddy taught me was true!
Yes!

Yes, we have now every reason to believe might not be true and we’re trying to optimize our thoughts and institutions and relationships with one another for our current circumstance and yet we have this legacy effect of certain books and certain ways of speaking that have a completely different status.

And they have this status because they may, in fact, it’s imagined not be the products of merely previous human minds but they may be the products of omniscience. And that this is where the respect accorded to religious tradition is totally unlike the respect we would accord to anything else but you know mythology, literature, past science, past philosophy—I mean people can read Plato and Aristotle for their entire lives without ever being fully captured by the kind of dogmatism that every religion demands that you be captured by if you’re really going to be an adherent.

I would say that’s actually an archetypal truth, you know, the idea that the pathological tradition stands in the way of update—that’s an archetypal truth.

I mean, one of the reasons why in creation myths one of the variants of a creation myth is that the hero has to slay a tyrannical giant in order to make the world out of his pieces, and it's a metaphorical restatement of the idea that a tradition can become hidebound and when it becomes hidebound and too rigid that it interferes with current adaptation.

But the problem isn't—and I think this is something we really need to hash out—the problem is the problem of a priori structure. Now, some of that’s textual, but some of it isn’t textual.

Some of it resides in us as our psyche. Insofar salient the problem I’m describing here is that we have two categories of books—in this case, we have those written by people like ourselves, just endlessly open for criticism and conjecture, and those written by invisible omniscient—and I would assume that if these religious systems weren’t codified in books, if they were still just enacted or dramatized, you’d have the same objection.

It’s not the fact that they’re in books that’s relevant! No, but it is the dogmatism.
It’s the fact! Right hand!

We can’t jettison the bad part! Okay? It’s the dogmatism.
Okay, so to me that’s the same—

The problem of structure—now here’s the problem, I think, with the way that your argument is laid out. I'm not saying it's wrong; it seems to me that this is a place where it needs to be developed because I see that the attempt that you make to derive the world of value from the world of facts as justifiable, given what it is that you’re attempting to do, which in principle is to make the world a better place.

But there’s a massive gap in there. It’s like how do you do it? Because the objection that you place on my reasoning, let’s say, which is well, the problem with these texts is that there’s an infinite number of interpretations, and which of them can you—how can you determine which of those is canonically correct?

It’s exactly and precisely the same criticism that can be levied against your attempt to extract the world of value from the domain of facts. It’s the same problem.
It’s not an infinite number of interpretations in either case—

I allow those—
Well, it might be.
I mean, that’s why the moral landscape, for me, is a landscape of peaks and valleys, and so, you know, I’m totally open to the possibility—in fact, certainty—that there are different ways for similar minds, and certainly different ways for different minds to be constellated so that they have equivalent but irreconcilable peaks on the bland scape.

So there’s a lot of, well-being over here, and there’s a lot of well-being over here, and there’s a valley in between. And so it’s a kind of moral relativism; it’s kind of like, oh, this is great, and this is great, but these are irreconcilable.

Right, well I’d like to see that made more concrete, and I need to know how that fits in with your conception. Because one of the claims that you make in the moral landscape is that the distinction between the bad life and the good life is universally apprehensible and true.

It’s your fundamental axiomatic claim. And I don’t see how that’s commensurate with the position that you just put forward.
Was it? So here’s the position, and you can forget about morality as a concept for this.

Man, I think the right thing, the starting point is deeper than morality. The starting point—and this is all this is our starting point, all of us right now in the universe—the starting point is we are conscious! Right? We have a circumstance that admits of qualitative experience and again—this is true, however we understand consciousness—whatever is actually happening, we could be living in a simulation; this could be a dream, you could be a brain-in-a-vat, consciousness could just be the product of neurochemistry or we could have eternal souls running on some—

How he is somehow integrated with the brain—whatever is true, something seems to be happening, and these seems can be really, really bad or really, really good. We know, yeah? Each one of us in our lives have experienced this range of possibility, and yes, there are caveats here; there are hard and painful experiences that have a silver lining, right? That gives you some other capacity where you could say, well, you know, that really sucked, but I’m a better person for it.

Right? And we can understand what it means to be a better person for it in terms, again, of this range of experience, which I, you know, I’m calling to subsuming all of this the positive end of this as well-being, which is to say that, you know, I’m a better person for it because now, you know, having endured that ordeal, I am capable of much greater compassion.

Where I appreciate my life more, you know, the cancer made me a better person now that I’ve cured; I value each moment of life more than I ever did. All of these claims are intelligible within a context of an open-ended context of exploring this space of possible experience.

So what I’m saying is you forget about morality, forget about right and wrong and good and evil. What is undeniable is that what we have here is a navigation problem. We have a space of possible experience. And again, it’s not just a human problem; this is a problem for any possible conscious mind.

We have a space of possible experience in which we can navigate, and things can get excruciating and pointlessly horrible where there are no silver linings. And we get this can—this can happen individually in some, you know, episode of madness that never ends.

If there really is a Christian hell to go to, then it can—it’s going to happen to me after I die, right? Given what I’ve said on this stage, if—and so it matters who’s right! Obviously, if I knew that an eternity of fiery torment awaited somebody who didn’t make the right noises about one faith or another, well then it would only be rational to make those right noises, right?

So it’s my bet, I’m placing a bet on certain pictures of reality being wrong, but the reality is we’re navigating in this space, and morality and ethics are the terms we use for how we think about our behavior affecting one another’s experience. So if you’re in a moral solitude, if you’re on a desert island or if you’re, you know, alone in the universe, morality is not the issue you need to worry about, but well-being still is an ever-present issue.

It’s possible to suffer and it’s possible to experience bliss and, and maybe something, perhaps something beyond that. And we—the horizon in both directions is something we will never fully explore, very likely. We don’t know how good things can get and we don’t know how bad they can get, but that there’s a spectrum here is undeniable.

And I would say that that, my moral realism simply entails that we acknowledge that it’s possible not to know what you’re missing. It’s possible to be living in a way where you are less happy than you could be and not to know why, right? And just not have the wisdom to make the changes and that matters. If anything matters, that matters! And it matters to us individually, and it matters to us collectively.

And that mattering is our, is that under suppose everything we can intelligently want in this domain of value. And that’s, and so, again, it’s a kind that the cash value of any value claim is in the actual or potential change in consciousness for some conscious system somewhere sometimes, and that’s my claim.

And it’s tonight—can I try to get, but like you each to clarify something. So it sounds to me, Sam, like you are hypothesizing that a rationalist approach will always beat a traditional metaphorical approach with respect to the generation of well-being.
Well not always, but...

But I do think that—that I mean there's so many obvious downsides to the traditional sectarian dogmatic approach that we should want to get out of the religion business as fast as possible.

Okay, so, okay, but as fast as possible—do you mean that it has always been true that we should always have gotten away from it as fast as possible, or do you mean now we should get away from it as fast as possible but there is a point somewhere in the past where it might have been true that actually the best, the most the richest path to well-being might have been encoded metaphorical?

Oh yeah, that’s certainly possible. And, in fact, you might even say it was a likely based on the fact that we have all of these systems still around, right?
So we still have the systems around in part because our, like we still think in metaphor.

And we actually can’t help it because half of our brain is oriented towards metaphor. But what can I get you to clarify something? Now, yes, okay, so you have argued—and you’ve actually quite surprised me by doing so—you’ve argued that the dogmatism is a bug and not a feature; you argue, no, it’s a began to feature, okay?

It's a bug and a feature, good!
So, yeah, but what I thought I heard you say was that the resistance to update, yes, was a problem that effectively it was an obstacle.
Yes, so there's problems everywhere, man!

Well, there’s terrible tension, right?
Well, look, let's put it this way: look at it this way: most new ideas are stupid and dangerous!

But some of them are vital, right? And so we have, we’re screwed both ways. It’s like, well, if we stay locked in our current mode of apprehension, all hell’s gonna break loose. If we generate a whole bunch of new solutions, most of them are going to be wrong, and we’re going to die!

And so, what we need to do is—and well, it’s a Darwinian claim in some sense—is that despite the fact that most new ideas are stupid and dangerous, a subset of them are so vital that if we don’t incorporate them, we’re all going to perish.

That's the bloody existential condition! And so now, part of the issue here, and see, and I think that this is the problem—is that let’s take the dogma idea.

Okay, so there’s the dogma incorporated in the books, but I’m going to throw away that dogma because the dogma was there before the books—and then the question is, where was the dogma? And the answer was the dogma was in the cultural practices.

But—and in and in agreement that people made with regards to those cultural practices—but it was also part and parcel of the intrapsychic structure that enables us to perceive the world as such!

Now the problem is—and I think this is the central place where we need to flesh out these ideas—is that you cannot view the world without an a priori structure, and that a priori structure has a dogmatic element!

And so, you can’t just say, well, let’s get rid of the dogma because you can’t perceive the world without a structure—it has an uninspected element!
This is, if you’re talking about just perceiving the world.

Yes, we have perceptual structure that allows for us to perceive the world. And we know that there are failure states, right? So we know, for instance, that we are—we’ve evolved to perceive in visual space based on a literal neurological expectation that light sources will be from above, right?

As we know that we can produce visual illusions based on gaming that expectation, right? But that’s not the same thing as a dogma subscribed to page 7, some subset of humanity that is antithetical to another dogma subscribed to by another set of humanity that has nothing to do with underlying biology.

That’s something that can change, and it’s not clear when that's biological and when it isn’t, so, you know, your content, your comments about our a priori perceptual structures notwithstanding, there’s no clear line between what constitutes an instantiated accurate biological perception and something that shades more into a cultural presupposition.

So it's a gray area! Now, here, let me ask you a question. So this is one of the things I’ve been thinking about, so this is designed to point out the different—I’m not making the claim that the idea that we should ground values in facts is wrong. I’m not going to make that claim, although I think it’s way more complicated than we’ve opened up so far.

But I would say I can, I think, relatively easily demonstrate a situation in which you cannot find the value from the fact. Let’s say you own an antique; it’s valuable, and you think, I’m going to take this antique apart and I’m going to find out where the value is. Good luck!

Well, it is—it’s not valuable in that sense. Well, wait a second, wait a second! So that’s right; it’s not valuable in that sense because the value of the antique is a social agreement about its position in a hierarchy. It has nothing to do with the material substrate of the antique.

Sure, yeah, but not you can't—
It’s not an absolute case!

What are you willing to know about these facts about again?
So there are facts about—the facts exist in intersubjective space, right?

So if I tell you, well this glass, this isn’t just an ordinary glass; I know it looks just like that one, but this is the glass that Elton John drank from his last concert!
Right!

So, you know, what do you want to pay me for it?
Right!

Yeah, it could be that, you know, you’re just the biggest Elton John fan ever, and you—it’s worth quite a lot to you! Now, that is—it’s a kind of evident—it's not value intrinsic to the glass, but it is a—where’s the value located?

Well, it’s a measure in the change this provokes in your experience! Right? There’s the idea—I mean, we value ideas as much as anything else, and that’s—hence the mad work done by religion, right?

Because these aren’t facts on the ground; these are ideas that rule people’s lives. People spend their whole life afraid of Hell!
Okay, it seems to me that it's easier in some sense rather than to relate the value of that—I love the Elton John’s glass example!

It's going to use the Elvis Presley as a—
Here on earth!

So I will tell if the—it’s like, well, is the fact that it’s Elvis Presley’s guitar?
Well, it’s nowhere in the guitar!

Well, what is it in? Where is it then?
And the answer is it’s in the dominance hierarchy of values that’s been socially constructed around the guitar.

It’s located in interpersonal space, and that location— so value is located in interpersonal space. And if you want to say, well that’s also a fact, it’s like, okay, but in fact—and that’s the beliefs and desires and conscious states of all the people involved.

Okay, well, that’s the only place where it exists! It’s only for the idea of Elvis’s guitar can show!
Okay, well I’m trying to figure out then—you see, because what seems to me to be happening at least in part is that we can stretch the domain of what constitutes a fact so that the domain of fact starts to incorporate the domain of values, but we do that with some damage to the domain of fact.

So don’t—don’t just say no, this is right, cause they were a really complicated—and what I can illustrate by way of example—if I say that, you know, that’s just your subjective opinion, right?

I’m saying—I'm denigrating—I’m saying that, you know, this is an expression of your bias. This is, this is just true for you, but it’s not true out in the world, right? That’s one way I can use the subjective-objective distinction, and that’s an epistemological way.

Like your—you’re ruled by bias; you’re not thinking straight; you know, I don’t have to your opinion seriously—that’s subjective!
I’m worried about objective facts!

But people get confused; they think that objective facts only means the material world and what’s really in this glass as a material object. No, we can be a much more objective than that!

We can, we can make objective claims about the subjective experience of people like ourselves!
I can make an infinite number of objective claims about the experience—this is the example I always use, but I just happen to love it.

What was JFK thinking the moment he got shot? Right? That’s it; we don’t know!
So we’ll never get the data!

Right! So the truth or false nosov of what I’m about to say can’t be predicated on actually getting access to the data because he’s not around anymore and his brain’s not around to scan.

So, but you and I both know an infinite number of things he wasn’t thinking about. We can make an objective claim about his subjectivity. I know he wasn’t thinking, well, I hope Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris work it out on stage that night!

Right? And an infinite number of things like that!
He was thinking something; he was experiencing something, but we don’t know what it is!

So what I’m talking about, this domain of value, I’m saying that it exists in this landscape of actual and possible conscious experience for human beings, and—and any other system like us that can experience this range of suffering and happiness.

Well, okay, okay, so and partly what I’m trying to do is to actually determine what that structure is like. So in our case, it's certainly connected to the evolved structure of our brain, but it’s all mental! It’s all mental by everything else!

We do want to go way deeper into the idea then, it’s connected with brain states because it’s, yes, it’s definitely connected with brain states!

The question is, at least in part, how and what does that mean? And I think that the neuroscience has progressed far enough so that we can do quite a good job of this!

And so what I want to return to one thing, and maybe I’ll outline a little bit of this—and when you talked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you said that that was irrational! And so, look, you know, fair enough, we’ve done it—we’ve been locked with our hands around each other’s necks there for 3,000 years!

But there’s a problem there! And the problem is that people are looking at the landscape from a contextualized perspective, right? It’s not just a piece of land; it’s their piece of land!

I mean, it’s like you say, “Well, I have a favorite shirt.” It’s like, well, there’s nothing inherent in this shirt that makes it your favorite! No, it’s a subjective judgment!

It’s like, well then is that a fact? Well, yes, it’s a fact; it’s a fact about subjective judgment!
It’s okay, well the Israeli claim on the land, that the Palestinian claim on the land is a subjective judgment! That’s a fact!

It's like, how is it yet… rather saying it because it is the true analogy here, the complete analogy is rather like we’re about to fight over Elton John’s glass—and Elton John was never here.

[Music] So I'm not saying—so clearly it still matters to us in our misapprehension of our situation; we still really care!

And these are these are objectively true claims about the level at which we value things! And then hence the impasse!
But in a manner that’s counterproductive ly dismissive, like you could say, “Well, it’s really not—you look at that specific claims; it’s really not! It’s, look, you took the contextual interpretation to its absolute extreme. You said, well, there’s multiple reasons why different people who occupy the same piece of land are going to feel about it in different ways.”

Sure! Okay?
And most of those reasons are amenable to some kind of rational compromise.

There are studies on this and their studies done by people who, when you say disagree?
Right!

When you say the word rational in that context, you’re using it as a black box that contains the concept proper!
That’s a way of thinking about it—it’s like, it’s not so obvious to most situations what the rational approach is.

Well, I have an obvious one here, and that’s that whatever the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews think they’re getting from their attachment to their dogmatic and irreconcilable religious worldviews can be gotten just as well by a deeper understanding of the of our universal and non-culturally bound capacity for ethical experience, for spiritual experience, for community building.

And we can see what's that red space, what’s that grounded in? We can touch that space without seeing if it's almost like the status quo is—it’s almost like you’re content to live in a world where you’re at least you’re content not to judge too harshly a world where fans of rival soccer teams or baseball teams regularly kill one another over their fandom.

Right? Like what if that were the status quo?
So I spin this way for thousands of years; there must be a reason for it.

Really? Like sports?
I’m not trying to justify the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no, but I’m saying that it can lead to quick to judge the sanctity of their differences of opinion.
But wait a minute, Sam, there you made a claim like your claim was that if the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims would just stop their stupidity and adopt this universal ethic, then everything would be okay—is like okay, what’s the basis for the universal ethic?

Like that such that there’s a non-profit at search of that, that’s an interesting problem for philosophers and for scientists; that’s not actually where the rubber meets the road for people living their lives!

Well, I mean, this is analogous to me, sure! We have a difference between—really care about all of this, and I’m not—I’m happy, as a philosophy, as a moral philosopher in that case, is to make the best case I can for these ideas!

But the truth is, it is analogous to when you get into a debate with a Christian fundamentalist in the States, very often this person will pretend to care about cosmology or evolution as though it’s the most important thing in the world, as though you can’t get out of bed in the morning and figure out how to treat your friends and family well unless you figure out what happened before the Big Bang!

Right? No one really lives their lives that way, and yet we have convinced ourselves that this is a sensible way of talking about the conflict between religion.

And I think you—you have arrived at the core of your conflict right here, and I actually hear you both loud and clear. Your point is that if the people faced with the question were to, you know, start with a fresh sheet of paper, look at the Middle East, they could arrive at a compromise that they, as individuals, might find put them way ahead and is more profitable than the situation that they are continually finding themselves.

Yeah! That might be the case! On the other hand, the reason that they don’t is that historically those who have have been out-competed by those who haven’t.

So the point is the universe and the fact that it refuses to solve that conflict is telling us that there is some reason that people who take that prospect seriously are not actually correct in some, at least metaphorical way!

So in other words, what is it to have a sentimental attachment to some piece of territory that sounds completely irrational? On the other hand, that sentimental attachment may result in you continuing for 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 years, whereas if you surrendered it because it was irrational, you might go extinct.

Now, should you care that your lineage is going to go extinct? Maybe, arguably not! On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that what you’re saying is so thoroughly grounded that it can justify causing people to alter their perspective on value in such a way that it might actually drive them extinct.

It’s not clearly secularism; we’re talking about the fringe here. We’re talking about that—when you’re talking about, in this case, the Israeli settlers and the Palestinian terrorists, right?

Like, that is—we should all breathe a sigh of relief that that doesn’t characterize most of humanity!

If you’re trying to defend your house!
So, but that—but that’s, it’s kind of a different—

I think this is where the crux of it is. If you follow the idea that this is actually some—the seemingly sentimental and irrational attachment to the piece of land is some sort of meta-rationality, which sounds like your perspective, then we are now confronted with the question of, all right, if it is an evolved kind of meta-rationality that is being manifest in stories that cause people to behave in ways that Sam sees is clearly irrational, then we are stuck with the naturalistic fallacy, which is to say—so for those who don’t know, the naturalistic fallacy says that just because something is, doesn’t mean it ought.

Right? The fact that selection favors something doesn’t make it good. When the Aztecs sacrifice their enemies, it is good for continuing Aztec nests; but it may not be good in some absolute moral sense.

So here’s the question for you: you’re arguing for—and I think an evolutionarily very viable explanation for religious belief and dogma—but aren’t you stuck with the downside of it, where much of what is encoded in that way may actually be abhorrent yet really unconscious?
Absolutely!

Okay, so what do we do about that?
Well, this is, this is exactly the sorting algorithm!

Yes! What isn’t trying to get to?
Okay, okay, so this is actually why I asked Sam this question.

It wasn’t an attack; it’s like, okay, look, people have these belief systems—Christian, Muslim, Jew, we’ll say for that—and you’re saying abandon those. Let’s say, too, and move towards this transcendent rationality.

It’s like, okay, two problems—it’s not so easy to abandon a belief system because you end up in the moral relativist nihilist pit.
Well, one doesn’t have to!

Well, double-tend to, and so it’s a little problem.
This is not—and don’t have to.
Wait, Sam, that’s an empirical claim!

That we would think we’d have to find out whether that’s true! There’s a lot of evidence against that!
Yeah, well, there’s plenty of evidence for it too, but it’s beside the point to some degree—

Because that isn’t—that isn’t something that I want to quibble about. There perhaps there are trends; there are transitional paths, and sometimes people find a collapse of their faith actually freeing.

It’s certainly the case that many of the people who are happy about what you’re doing have found exactly that in what you’ve been saying, and more power to you and so on!

I’m not willing to dispute that.
But what you said was, okay, here’s these belief systems that are ancient and complex, and we can step outside of them, there’s this transcendent rationality that we could all aspire to that would solve the problems.

It’s like, okay, what is it? Well, what is it? Examine Imam to value all of the variables that conspire to make the one life we know we have?
Can’t value all those variables?

Well, we can!
We’re doing that! We’re doing this all the time!

Yours, if you’ve got an instantaneous measure, though—you’ve got an instantaneous measure of well-being. We can all check with ourselves to see how we feel, but it’s possible to be wrong about that!

Right?
Always!

But you have a parallel problem, it looks to me like the exact mirror image, which is that you’ve got an integrative long-term measure of well-being instantiated in an evolutionary belief system, but it’s coming apart because we are living in circumstances that are less well mirrored; the present does not mirror the past.

And therefore these games, which you believe are timeless, are degrading rapidly! That’s part of their—and that’s exactly right!

Okay, so what Sam is arguing is that the tools to pivot in order to improve our way of interacting—those are not the tools of long-standing tradition. Those are the tools of rational engagement!

Respect for that process is part of the long-standing tradition!
Yes, that’s true.

But that’s a big truth, Mike! That’s a major-league truth!
I agree! And in fact, I would say the fundamental tradition, the most fundamental tradition of the West says that respect for the process that updates moral judgment is the highest of all possible values.

And that’s also built into the tradition, strangely enough!
I agree, it’s built into the tradition! But I would argue that it is very likely to be compartmentalized.

In other words, I was a little bit struck when you said that—what did you say about scaling? You said that a good reason scale and bad reasons don’t; isn’t that the opposite of the truth?

Calling?
If you’re calling these bad ideas, the point is those stories propagate very easily!

So whereas—so if we want to talk about the gun and whether it is loaded, the idea that the gun is definitely loaded—that scales really easily. Right?

You can pass that along in one sentence! And the classic book—the common way of it—again, I’m wrong about a loaded gun also scales!
Right!

So no, no, no!
Well it is, let's just—that "loaded gun" is a false story, but yeah that one definitely scales!

But the statistical reality of guns, and the fact that they may indeed be unloaded, but you don’t want to play around with the remote possibility that one day you’ll get it wrong, right?

That doesn’t scale because it requires you to have experience with stuff that is not common!
Right!

So the two things there—I mean one—you bring up a very important point which is that moral progress here is often the result of moving from our story-driven protagonist-driven intuitions to something far more quantified, right? So, I mean, there’s a classic moral study done by Paul Slovic, oh, I’m sure you are aware of, where you tell people about one needy little girl in Africa and you give her a name and show her picture, and what you elicit is the maximum altruistic compassionate response from subjects.

You go to another group of subjects; you tell them about the same little girl, give her the same name, but also tell them about her needy little brother who has the same need, and their response diminishes, right? It’s just the addition of a single person diminishes the response!

And this is just, this is a moral fallacy that we're all living out every day because you care about this one little girl, you should care at least as much about the fate of her and her brother, and when you add status to the equation, you don’t, you, it’s not coherent with your—how much you cared about Lila in the first place!

We do know, we do know quite well that the heuristics that we use to orient ourselves in the world can be placed into frameworks where they produce contradictory outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that the heuristics themselves are deeply flawed; it’s that it’s a problem with the work of people like Kahneman and Tversky is that they really value dramatic sort of—they ignore that failure states can be useful.

And it’s our job to find our way past those, which is a story that’s not unworthy of being entreated all of us out here! And you know, like I said, the structure of science; the structure of morality creates such rich narratives!

It’s not that rooted in facts, but they just regenerate themselves!
But we need and perfect dead-eye structures!

So we face this story, you know, I get it! I get it!
How do we ensure that the work we do in the stories we tell shape ourselves toward the more truthful narrative, that is toward healing the world and better lives for most of humanity—how about that?

We can’t— So earlier today, you and I were talking about your experience!
Yeah—

So I had this—I had an experience; I was thinking about you, and I was thinking about formal militant thinking, particularly that—where we face the status quo which is imperfect, problematic!

The dialogue keeps evolving!
It’s hard to be human!

But that doesn’t mean we have the right to view the world as high without regard to the low we have to choose engagements that help shape lived experiences!
We need narratives that rally around an authentic moral truth!

It’s a constant inquiry!
Yes!
But that’s also not enough!

It’s necessary to focus on the delicate mechanics of communal working in helping assist others’ problems! That’s what we’re doing!

Engaging in genuine communication! No—
It doesn’t require any imposition of regulations on our communion!

"So, let's not break!"
But of course we’re climbing this hill by working together!

We’re laughing together! We’re aching together!
Sam, would you characterize that in your words?

That’s—
It’s a desperate resolve to understand who we are!

And it really helps to actually shine lights as we work through these conflicts!
Yeah!

As we end this I—it’s amazing how both of us end, all of us, taking things out to the floor and uncovering!
And let this not just a drive-by on the internet, but a rich offer of so many other things we can do together!

So with that, my friends, I deeply appreciate you being here!
Yeah!

So let’s get your balloons, and we’re concluding this tonight!
Yes!

Thank you again, everyone!
Let’s take a bow!

You're invited to clap for all of this!
And let’s keep on rolling!
We’ll meet moving forward!