Elon Musk to Jordan Peterson: “Life had no Meaning”

So, I wondered what's motivated you? Cuz you push in so many directions simultaneously. You have to be really highly motivated to do that. And so, you figured out that the question, in a sense, was the answer.

Yeah, the question—or I said another way—that seeking greater Enlightenment and a better understanding of the universe and more questions to ask about it is something that we can continue to do as a civilization for, yeah, likely forever.

Exactly. So, depending on how powerful grock turns out to be, yeah. That's so then I thought, okay, I'll work on things that improve our understanding of the universe.

I know now they say, like, at a base level, this is why I actually think we want a population increase, because population increase means that there are more people; we’ve expanded the scale. More brains, man. Yeah, we've expanded the scale of consciousness to the degree there are different cultures.

We've expanded the scope of consciousness. How did you cotton on to the fact that the antagonistic attitude towards birth that's embedded in our culture now was something that should be called out and that was pathological?

I should perhaps go back to what is the foundation of my philosophy, because that I think helps build up to explain my actions. So, they, when I was, I don't know, about 11 or 12 years old, I had somewhat of an existential crisis because there just didn't seem to be any meaning in the world. Like, no meaning to life.

And I actually read, tried to read all the religious texts at that age. Yes, I was a voracious reader as a kid. I obviously read the Bible, I read the Quran, the Torah, the various— but on the Hindu side, just trying to understand all these things. And obviously, as a 12-year-old, you're not really going to understand these things super well, but I've just, you understood it well enough to have an existential crisis when you were 11 or 12?

Yeah, I’m just trying, does anyone have an answer that makes sense? And then I started getting into the philosophy books and I read quite a bit of Schopenhauer, which is quite depressing to read as a kid.

Yeah, I'd say that that's depressing as an adult, but none of them really seemed to have, to me, answers that resonated, at least to me. But then I read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is really a book on philosophy disguised as humor.

And what Douglas Adams the point that Adams tries to make there is that we don't actually know all the answers, obviously. In fact, we don't even know what the right questions are. That's where he has this—in if you read the book—the Earth is actually a giant computer to understand the answer to the question, "What is the meaning of life?"

Yeah, and comes up with the answer, 42. Yeah, and I feel like, what does that mean? It says, oh, you actually, you don't understand the real— the thing that's going to take a computer far more powerful than Earth is to understand what question to ask. That's simply the wrong question.

So, was that the key realization? That question, that was a fundamental turning point?

Yeah. Yeah, 'cause that's it. So, that's very interesting because one of the things that you see constantly portrayed in all of our hero myths across the world is that the adventure is the thing and that the search is the thing, rather than there being a final answer.

As absurd as 42 might be, right, there's no—the conclusive answer is something like deep engagement in the process. So, so I'll give you an example of that. So, in the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Mount's a very detailed set of instructions.

Yeah, so there's three parts to it. The first is aim at the highest thing that you can possibly conceive of and keep modifying that so your aim gets better, okay? So that's number one. Number two is make the presumption that other people have the same intrinsic value as you do.

We have to be careful about that one. Okay, let's discuss that. But it's a—we would you say it's a recognition of the universalist value of everyone who's made in the image of God? It's something like that.

But the third thing is once you do those two things, you can concentrate on the moment. See, and that seems to be even technically, you can think about this —neurosycho-logically, if you're looking for meaning, meaning is a form of incentive reward.

And incentive reward is dopaminergically mediated. And incentive reward occurs in relationship to advance towards a goal, which is a form of entropy minimization, as it turns out, according to Carl Friston, who knows the thing: entropy is the ultimate boss battle.

Yeah, negative emotion signifies the emergence of entropy, and positive emotion on the dopaminergic side signals its reduction. There's something that's more complex there, because the higher the goal that you're trying to attain, the more intrinsic value each step towards it comprises, and that's neuropsychologically accurate.

It's part of the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount is that if you posit the highest imaginable goal, then any step towards it that captures your attention is also deeply meaningful. And so, that's an answer to what the meaning is of process, rather than say something like 42.

And you said it seems to me that you were intimating that your discovery through Adams that the question was the thing was key to the resolution of your existential crisis.

That's correct. Okay, so that's part of the reason that you're motivated to say build grock three and look deeper to understand the universe.

Okay, so once—how old were you when you figured that? When you figured out that the question?

Thirteen or something. What did that do to you? What did that do to you?

I was a—I was a lot happier after that, because now it's okay, I'm just going to accept that we are ignorant of a great many things, yeah, and we wish to be less ignorant.

And anything we can do that will improve our understanding of the universe and make us less ignorant and have a deeper understanding of the universe and even more questions to answer, ask about the answer—that is the universe—which I think Adams' central point is good.

And is this a religion? I don't know, maybe it is. But I think it's one I'd call the religion of curiosity.

Yeah, the ancient god of the Mesopotamians, his name was Marduk, and he was the best defense against ensuing chaos and state corruption.

Okay, so that's how he was conceptualized. Okay, Marduk had eyes all the way around his head, okay, 'cause he paid attention, right? And he spoke magic words, okay, right?

And he was literally—for the Mesopotamians, he was the agent that revitalized the tyrannical state and overcame evil and also the force that dispensed with chaos and built something magnificent and cosmic out of it.

Yeah, sounds like a force for good.

Yeah, the Mesopotamian emperor, so his job was to embody that spirit on Earth, and they used to take him out of the city on New Year's Eve, strip him of his kingly clothing, humiliate him. They slapped him, the priests, and then they'd ask him to confess all the ways that he hadn't been a good Marduk, attentive and speaking properly in the previous year.

And that's how they renewed the cosmos every year, and that's New Year celebration is a derivation of that: out with the old and in with the new.

And the Egyptians, they worship the eye, right? You've seen that famous, the all-seeing eye of Horus? The all-seeing eye of Horus? That's the antidote to the eye of Sauron, by the way, 'cause if you don't use that vision—if each citizen doesn't use that vision—it's replaced by the totalitarian all-seeing eye.

That's a hell of a thing to know.

You talked about delving deeper into the structure of the universe, let's say to answer fundamental questions like—and you are a remarkably forward-looking person—what do you, what the hell do you think you're building with these AI systems? What is this?

I think really what all the AI companies are aiming to build is a digital superintelligence, so intelligence that's far smarter than any human, then ultimately an intelligence that is far smarter than all humans combined.

Now, one can say, is this a wise thing to do? Isn't this dangerous? Unfortunately, whether we think that or not, it is being done.

But really, from my standpoint, from the XI team standpoint, we are really—we have the choice of being a spectator or a participant. That's life, man.

Yeah, be a spectator or a participant. And I think if we are a participant, we've got a better chance, hopefully, of steering AI in a direction that is beneficial to humanity.

So, why do you trust yourself on that front? Just out of—that's an important question, right?

I don't trust myself entirely.

Good, that's fair enough, okay. An ethical—right, ethical conundrum. Because you said this is happening now, the excuse that something is happening is not irrational for participating in it, but then your next take is we have the chance to do this properly.

Let's say, as opposed to, okay, better. I think we, we, from a moral standpoint, we really just need to think that maybe we've got a chance of it being better, to some degree, than what others are doing.

And we will strive to avoid some of the pitfalls or directions that the others are going in, because the others, from what I've seen, do not strive for truth.

What do they strive for? They strive for—they strive to give an answer, but they are, I think, trained to be politically correct, and the woke mind virus is woven in throughout them. I'm sure you've seen that.

Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely. My students used to ask me when I—'cause I've been teaching what I've been teaching for about 40 years.

And one of the questions they used to ask me is how I knew that what I was teaching wasn't just another ideology. 'Cause the postmodern take is all it is is a plethora of power games, and so there's no rank ordering approaches to the truth in terms of their ethical suitability.

But that's not the game that you're playing, and obviously would not agree with that philosophy. Why not the sort of moral relativism?

What's convinced you that's not a useful way of approaching things?

I think you can look at a given belief system and critique it as being likely to enhance or decrease Enlightenment.

Will any given belief system improve our understanding of the universe? Will we learn more things? Will we achieve a deeper understanding of physics?

And so that's grounded at least in part in a scientific framework from the sounds of it. I think there are facts about the world, right? There are things that are just—say, let's say, extremely likely to be true versus less likely to be true.

I think if one thinks in terms of probabilities about any given sort of acatic statement, then that's the right way to think about it.

Now, some things are 99.99% to be true. You can run experiments, you can confirm them, and others are perhaps have a low probability of truth, 1% likely to be true, or just using extremes here.

But any given statement has, I think, should be thought of as having, unless this should be thought of as having a probability of being true or untrue, a probability of being relevant to an argument or not relevant to an argument.

We’re just talking about the basics of cogency here, yeah. I didn’t study science precisely. I wasn't as interested in the transformations of the material world.

So, I'm probably more people-oriented than thing-oriented temperamentally. So, I started to study evil, right? So that was my—sure—delving into the depths, because I wanted to crack that.

I wanted to understand if not so much even whether it existed, because I became convinced of that very quickly, but what exactly that had to do with me. 'Cause when I was reading history, I read it as a perpetrator and not as a victim or a hero. I try to read history to discern the facts of what humans did.

You know, that also has shaped the way that you act, though probably. Sure, I've read a lot of history, and I try to understand the rise and fall of civilizations.

And what do you think makes them fall? One of the things is a decreasing birth rate, which seems to be a natural consequence of prosperity.

Yeah, isn't that strange? 'Cause you'd predict the opposite, wouldn't you? As far as I know, every civilization that has experienced prosperity has had a decline in population.

There may be a few exceptions. Perhaps people can enlighten me. I'll look at the comments on this interview to see perhaps what I can learn.

But it seems that from what I've read, almost every civilization, when they become prosperous, their birth rate drops. I think that's a consequence of the emergence of something like a nonpunished hedonistic egocentrism.

As you obviously—you mean there are certainly many examples of civilizations. They become prosperous; there is generally a trend towards hedonism.

Yeah, you can get away with it if you're wealthy, because the consequences of your actions don't smack you on the head instantly. Precisely. If you're at a civilization under threat, let's say—there's a—if you take, say, Rome when they were trying to not get annihilated by Carthage, and they had Hannibal running around marauding Italy, they didn't have time for hedonism.

Hedonism is not an option; we're going to get destroyed by Hannibal. Chip are down.

Yeah, when a civilization is under stress, there's very little hedonism.

William James said that the modern world needed a moral equivalent to war. He investigated the religious realm very deeply, and this, I think, was in Varieties of Religious Experience, and that really had an effect on me because I think that you need something akin to an existential threat in order to set you straight.

I think there's some truth to that. Yeah, like if it's a—let's say if it's a spoiled child that we—everything, who gets that—that kid gets everything he or she wants—and you have a Baro assault?

And then R, I lack that is a civilization that is pro where people get everything they want. I think it's the right way to think about it developmentally and neuropsychologically.

Okay, you had a rough childhood?

Yeah, yeah, like rough and tumble, rough childhood. Plenty of fights and a father who was a difficult creature to contend with.

Okay, what did that do for you? And are you grateful for it, or are you unhappy about it?

I guess you never know the things that really made you who you are today.

At the end of the day, am I on net grateful for my life? I am—and perhaps even for the hard things—because those hard things, I learned from them.

What did you learn?

I read your autobiography.

It's not an autobiography.

No, it's not. No, no, definitely not. I would tell it in a different way than Isacson, because Isacson, who I think is an excellent biographer, is not, nonetheless, looking at things through his lens and wasn't there at the time.

Of course. Of course.

One of the things that stood out for me, too, though, from that—and I would like your comments about this—was the rather rough details of your childhood. A lot of physical altercations and a lot of—I don't know exactly how many altercations—I mean, I was almost beaten to death within an inch of my life at one point.

That counts!

That definitely counts as a few blows here and there. Yeah, so what did that—okay, why aren’t you bitter about that? 'Cause that's a pathway that people take.

I think that there are one—one can take, and often people do take the path of vengeance.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Yeah, or that's what antinatalism is. Yeah, to say—to feel that the world has treated them unfairly and that they will visit upon the world that which the world has visited upon them, and justified by recourse to the reality of their own suffering, which is often intense.

So, the story of Job. One of the things I concluded from the story of Job, because it's a precursor to the crucifixion story, so Job makes two decisions.

The first decision is that no matter how terrible things become for him, he will not lose faith in himself. And the second is that no matter what horrors are visited on him by Satan himself, he will not lose faith in the, what would you say, in the spirit that gave rise to the cosmic order.

No matter what!

While I'm not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise and that there's tremendous wisdom in turn the other cheek.

And for a while there, when I was saying, I thought that's really a weak thing to—yeah, it can be.

If someone—and with respect to bullies at school, I think you shouldn't turn the other cheek. You should punch them on the nose, and then ultimately make peace with them.

But they need to stop bullying you, and a punch on the nose will stop that. And then thereafter make peace. So sometimes that punch on the nose is the first step in making peace with bullies.

Yes, it may change their career from being a bully to perhaps they shouldn't be doing such things.

But yeah, I think this anyway, so this notion of forgiveness is important.

I think it's essential because if you don't forgive, then— as the—I forget who said it—but an eye for an eye makes everyone blind.

If you're going to seek vengeance, and you have this never-ending cycle of vengeance, there are anthropological speculations that we were caught in a 350,000 year cycle of not getting anywhere after modern human beings emerged precisely because of that, because we couldn't get out of accelerating tit for tat revenge cycles.

Right?

Yeah, so I'm a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they're very good.

So in what sense, then, are you not religious?