AC Harris/Murray/Peterson Discussion: Dublin

[Music]

Okay [Applause] thank you all for coming out. Well, good evening Dublin. As you've just heard, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris met the first time in person two weeks ago now in Vancouver. They covered an enormous amount of ground, and there is, I think, an enormous amount of ground still to cover.

But I've asked them if they would start this evening in the following way: You're all familiar with straw manning; anyone who follows politics knows straw manning. But I've asked them to do the opposite tonight, to start by steel manning the arguments of each other, to present in the best possible, most fair, most rigorous light what they understand to be the other’s argument on all of the major issues we're about to discuss.

I'm gonna ask Sam Harris to go first, and we're gonna go from there.

Right, thank you. So first, thank you all for coming. It's really an immense privilege for us to do this, and I should say many of you have sacrificed a lot to come here. People have come from other countries, I'm told. You all dealt with a ticketing system that seems like it was run from a cave in Afghanistan. So, again, thank you all because it's, you know, it's one thing for us to put this date on the calendar and say we're gonna speak here, it's another for all of you to show up. And this is a privilege we certainly don't take for granted.

So, and it's an immense one! So, short— and I should say that though much of our conversation together will often sound like we're debating, it will definitely—none of us are in the habit of pulling our punches. There's an immense amount of goodwill here, and it's true on stage, it's true off stage, and we're all trying to refine our beliefs together in conversation.

So this wouldn’t—none of us view this as a debate, though we might stridently disagree about one thing or another.

What Jordan, I think, disagrees with me about— I think he's worried that I— we clearly have a common project. We are both concerned to understand how to live lives worth living. How can we do this individually, and how can we build societies that safeguard this project for millions of people attempting to do this in their diverse ways?

So many questions immediately come online when you try to do that! But what is the relationship between facts and values for instance? Or science and spiritual experience? Or our ethical lives? And we have, you know, as for the moment, different answers to those questions. Jordan is concerned I—in my allergy to religion—insufficiently value the power of stories in general and religious stories in particular.

That there's something more than just nakedly engaging with facts as they are— but we don't simply come into contact with reality; we have to interpret reality. We interpret it through our senses and with our brains, obviously, but you need frameworks. And as Jordan would say, stories with which to do that.

You don't get facts in the raw, and Jordan believes that because my purpose so often is to counter what I view as the dangerous dogmas within religion, I ignore the power and even the necessity of certain kinds of stories and certain ways of thinking about the world and our situation in the world that not only bring many, many millions and even billions of people immense value, but are, in fact, necessary for anyone, however rational, to build a society where all of our well-being can be conserved.

So I think if—in brief— that's, that's Jordan's concern about me.

So Sam is concerned, I would say, above all, with the minimization of unnecessary suffering, which seems to me to be a pretty good place to start. And he's concerned that—in order to do that— we need to develop an ethic. And that ethic should be grounded in that realization that unnecessary suffering is worth contending with and dealing with.

And that if we make too much of the divide between facts and values, then we end up in a situation where our value structure has no superordinate foundational grounding. And this is a big problem.

So generally in the philosophical community it's accepted—although not universally—that it's difficult, if not impossible, to derive values from facts. But the problem with that proposition is that you end up in a situation where either you lose all your values because they're just arbitrary, or you have to ground them in something that isn't—that's what's revelatory.

And Sam is concerned that one of the negative consequences of grounding your fundamental ethic in something that's revealed is the emergent consequence of irrational fundamentalism. And so, obviously, that's worth contending with. And so he's taking issue with the philosophical idea that facts and values have to be separate and formulating the proposition that we can, in fact, ground a universal system of values in the facts and that we can mediate between the facts and the system of values using our facility for truth, but even more specifically, our facility for rationality.

And that rationality can be the mediator between the world of facts and the world—and the world of values.

And so the problem I have with that, I guess, if we can skip briefly to problems, is that it isn't obvious to me how to produce an ethos with sufficient motivating power to ground that conception of the minimization of suffering, say, and the promotion of well-being in a way that's— that grips people and unites the society.

And so I think that's part of what we're discussing and trying to sort out with regards to the potential role of narrative and religious belief as an underpinning to this ethos. We seem to agree on the necessity for the universal ethos; we even seem to agree, I would say, on what that is because certainly the minimization of suffering seems to me to be a very good place to start.

We share our concern with and a belief that the pathway to that ethos is in some manner related to our ability to speak the truth. But we disagree on what that has to be grounded in and how it has to be grounded.

My sense, especially after thinking about our discussion, is that Sam makes what rationality is do too much work. And I'm hoping that—not that rationality is irrelevant or unimportant, because it clearly is neither of those—but maybe the devils in the details, and hopefully we can get down to the details tonight.

And for me we brought Douglas into the conversation; he's here to serve as much more than a mere moderator. And partly we've determined that, as Sam alluded to, what we're actually trying to figure out is what are the minimal necessary preconditions for the construction of engaged productive individuals with meaningful, responsible lives in a society that's stable enough to sustain itself and dynamic enough to change.

What are the minimal preconditions for that? And how do we ground those presuppositions, those preconditions? And what price do we pay for having them? Because you never get something without a cost.

And we thought that Douglas would be a very interesting addition to this conversation because, of course, he's concentrated on such things as borders. And when you set up preconditions for social order you also automatically produce such things as hierarchies and borders, and they don't come without a cost.

And so we hope to expand the conversation to include a discussion of those issues as well.

Yeah, before Douglas chimes in, I just want to reiterate the fact that he has not been cast here as our moderator, though if Jordan and I run off the rails, I expect Douglas to put us back on in the King's English.

I'm not moderate enough to be a moderate.

No, but you're more moderate than either of us are.

But so I want—I want you to reset the part of your brain that is poised to begrudge the moderator taking up too much time, because every moderator has felt that. And Fred Weinstein was brilliantly aloof and uninvolved in much of our exchange together, but Douglas really is a third participant here, and he stands between Jordan and I on some issues in an interesting way.

So let's say we have a three-way conversation here where none of us is really sitting in the same spot.

So can I make a quick observation about some of this? Some of the progress that you've already made in Vancouver, some of the progress I hope we can make tonight seems to be—I see one thing that hampers it, and let me go straight to it with Sam, which is I discovered a terrific phrase the other day that our mutual friend Eric Weinstein came up with.

We were talking about the manner in which you can discuss within the sciences certain scientific problems, and he said, “Look, if you've got a scientist who you know is also basically a very literalist Christian, you will listen to their argument a whole long part of the way, and there's some where at the end of it you know you're going to be worried about it,” and he came up with this phrase: I've, I love this phrase—he says "Jesus smuggling."

Right!

Jesus smuggling is you're gonna follow all the way. Yes, yes. And then the worry is that when you get to the bit that you're not so good on, that's when they're gonna smuggle in Jesus.

Yeah, my suspicion is that you have a reservation about some of what Jordan is saying, substructures on stories, much more because you're worried that at some point either on this stage or off it, at some point when you're not looking—

No!

No, yes! Or when I am looking, it's gonna be Jesus smuggling.

Yeah, yeah!

Just carry him in on a cross!

Well, that is an all too apt analogy because it is what worries me, and it's more subtle than that because it's not just to think that you're consciously doing it is a different claim. There's—I don't think there's anything insincere about your argument for the importance of religion.

But it's also possible—we've all met the people who we believe are making insincere arguments, and are really—they're consciously putting the rabbit in the hat and then pretending to be surprised when it pops out. Right?

And the analogy of magic is actually interesting here because—we had over dinner—we're talking about the difference between real and fake art, and we were talking about this parrot's paradox—that art seems to be incredibly valuable, and yet the value isn't located in the object itself or can't be obviously located there because a forgery that is materially the exact copy of some masterpiece is essentially worthless, and the real masterpiece, even if it suffered some damage, would be incredibly valuable.

And so where is the value to be located? But what worries me about your enterprise, Jordan, and the way in which you seem to be linking our national project in our scientific project where the religion is right here, there's a difference between—and magic, as a decent analogy—there's a difference between paradoxically real magic and fake magic, and fake magic is real magic.

The only real magic in the world produced by magicians is the fake magic where the magician, like someone like Darren Brown, will tell you, “Actually, no, I can't read minds, and I did put the rabbit in the hat.” And this is fake, but the surprise is that even knowing it's fake, you can't understand how this effect is being achieved.

Whereas the fake magicians are the ones who are pretending to be real, who are hiding, who are not acknowledging the mechanics, the real mechanics behind what is in fact effective, you know, the illusion of the rabbit popping out of the hat.

And what I worry with some of you or the way in which you discuss the power of story, the power of metaphor, and the religious anchor in there, is that the leverage and the utility can be had even while acknowledging the real mechanics of it, you know, the fakeness of the magic.

Right? And you seem to suspect that it can— that takes all of the wind out of the sails. I'm not so sure—I'm not so sure. What if it's fake, and what if it isn't?

Well, like what—so I would say that I do consciously participate in the process that you described, but—but you see, I would also make the case—and this is certainly one of the things that we've been discussing—that you do it unconsciously.

And let me make the case for that, Freeman, because I've really—I've been thinking about it a lot, and I'd like to see your response. So here's what I really read: the moral landscape a lot, and I thought about it a lot, you know, and so this is what it looks like to me.

So you make the proposition that we have to breach the gap between facts and values because otherwise, our values are left hanging, unmoored. And that certainly brings about the danger of nihilism, but also a potential danger of swings that hotel tourism—something—will you bring about, right?

Rudy believe that, and then you perform a conceptual operation, and you say surely we can all agree that…and then you outline a story about this woman who lives in this horrible country and who's basically just being starved and disease-ridden and tortured her whole life and having just a hell of a time of it, to put it in a phrase.

And then you say, well, surely we can all agree that that's not good, and then you contrast that with at least in principle the sort of life that we would all like to have if we could choose the life that we have.

And then you say, well, we could start with the proposition that we should move away from this terrible hellish circumstance, and we should move towards this more ideal perspective. And you say if we could only agree on that, then—

And so, like so far so good, but this is—there's a couple of things that go along with that that are quite interesting, and so the first is that actually what you're claiming is that the highest moral good isn't existing in that better space. The highest moral good is acting in the manner that moves us from the hellish domain to the desirable domain.

It seems to me to be implicit in your argument. So there's a pattern of behavior that constitutes the ethic—well, I would say that existing in that better space is good enough as well as—I mean that there's the question of what it takes to move from where you are to someplace better, and then there's just the someplace that's better—

Both of—yes, well, but, but perhaps we could say, "Look, what's the ultimate hell?" It might be existing in the hell that you describe, but it also might be—this is something worse.

I think that participating in the process that brings about that hell is a lower hell.

No, well, the reason—well, let me just close the loop on that because I'm pretty sure I disagree. One, you can imagine two counterexamples. One is you can imagine a sadistic being; you might even call him God—who would create a circumstance of Hell and populate it with innocent souls, right? Now that’s presumably—that action need not be attended by a lot of suffering, or you could imagine some—

No, but it's still wrong.

Wrong, yes!

No, you could even imagine someone who enjoys generating—exactly yes, it could! Yes!

So that would even be more wrong than not enjoying it.

Right, okay. So we want to separate out two things: we want to separate out these states of being and the process that brings them into being.

And I do believe you do that in your work because basically what you suggest is that the appropriate way to act ethically is to act in a manner that moves us away from hell and moves us towards a desirable state.

Now the thing is, as far as I'm concerned, there's a couple of things about that. The first thing is that I wouldn't say that that mode of acting is a fact; I would say it's a personality and that what you're suggesting is that people embody the personality that moves society away from hell towards heaven for lack of a better term.

And the reason I make that argument is because I think that you recapitulate the essential Christian message precisely by doing that. Because symbolically speaking, at least as far as I can understand—stripped of its religious quality of its metaphysical context, let's say— that the purpose of positing the vision of the ideal human being, which independent of the metaphysical context, is certainly what the symbol of Christ represents, is the mode of being that moves us most effectively from something approximating hell to something approximating heaven.

And then part of that—that part of that message is—and this is also something that's dead along the lines of what you're arguing—is that the best way to embody that is actually to live in truth. I mean so, because I would say that the fundamental Christian ethic, metaphysics accepted once again, is to act in love, which is to assume that being is acceptable and can be perfected, and to person do that with truth, and that you should embody that.

And then I would say that the purpose of the representation we could call the meta fictions or our archetypal representations is to show that is in embodied format so that it can be imitated, rather than to transform it into something that's diluted in some sense to an abstract rationality. Because I don't think the abstract rationality in itself has enough flesh on it, so to speak; which is partly why in the Christian ethic there's an emphasis that the word, which is something roughly akin to rationality, has to be made flesh; it has to be enacted.

But is the flesh made of dogmatism and superstition and otherworldliness? Is that part of what gives it its shape and necessity?

I think traditionally, historically, it has been, and that's been the problem with religion. If you dilute it of everything that is unjustifiable in the light of 21st-century science and rationality, I think what you have to get down to is something quite a bit more universal and less provincial than any specific religion, Christianity per se.

Well, it's interesting too though that, you know, one of the things, one of the points that you do make is that you do appeal to or assume the existence of a transcendental internal ethics, something like that, which I would say, by the way, since we're going down this direction seems to me to be something very akin to the idea of the Holy Spirit, which is something like the internal representation of a transcendent universal ethic.

Now remember, I'm trying to strip these concepts of their metaphysical substrate. I'm not making a case at the moment for the existence of the great man in the sky. We can get to that later. I'm saying that what seems to be the case is that we have underneath our cognitive architecture and our social architecture a layer of symbolic and dramatic narrative representation that instantiates the same concepts—but, you know, in a multi-dimensional context.

One of the things we talked about in Vancouver, for example, is that the religious enterprise doesn't only emphasize rationality; it brings music into the play and it brings art into the play and it brings drama and it brings literature and it brings the organizing of cities around a central space, like—it's pushing itself, it's manifesting itself across multiple dimensions of human existence simultaneously.

To me, that gives it a richness that cannot be diluted without loss, and also a motive power that a pure appeal to rationality I don't think can manage.

And this is—see, one of the things—this is maybe a good place for Douglas to leap in. See, one of the things Douglas has claimed upon multiple occasions is to be an atheist, and I don't know how he's feeling about that at the present time, but it doesn't matter.

If one of the things—one of the fears Douglas has pointed out was that there are things that we've done in free countries, let's say broadly speaking in the West, that are worth protecting, and that in order to protect them in the longest sense, it's conceivable that we need a cognitive structure or something like that that can act as a bulwark against those forces that would seek to undermine and destroy it.

And Douglas has been, I would say, to some degree, driven to hypothesize that for Christianity, for all its faults—or we could say Judeo-Christianity to broaden it—for all its faults, might provide something approximating that bulwark if we could only figure out how to utilize it properly.

So, yes, I mean, one of my problems on this is that it seems that we are where we are with belief in a—whether we wish it to be or not—we cannot believe as our predecessors believed even if we wanted to. We know too much more now, and it puts us in this very difficult position.

But to denude ourselves of the entire story seems to me to be a fool's errand for a set of reasons—one of which is, from a lot of travel, a lot of speaking to people from all around the world, it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that what we have in countries like this one is the default position of human beings.

In fact, it strikes me as being very rare—order, even political order, political liberalism, political freedom—very, very unusual things.

And if you like, the things that helped to get you there, with all of the caveats— with all of the caveats we could throw in all evening, and it's not the only thing that got us there, obviously. But if you'd like, broadly speaking where we are, you've got to be very suspicious at the very least of saying the whole story is no good, we don't need the story, we can move on.

I quote quite often the radical theologian Don Cupitt, who is often described as an atheist priest, and Cupitt, somewhere in a recent book, he said, you know, we can't help it. He said, for instance, the dreams we dream are still Christian dreams, whether we like that fact or not.

And without being able to believe myself—certainly not being able to be a literal believer—I worry about what happens when the square is denuded completely.

And that's why this discussion, an item, you to in particular, a ride on the cusp of this, because this is where I think a lot of us are, even if we really wanted to believe, we basically can't.

And by the way, very quickly, that’s why I think there’s an—an additional thing I think there is a fear, which you may have, which I also have, which is if there’s a risk that even what I’ve just said, never mind what Jordan has also said, there’s a risk I think, some people feel, or that you’re going to soften up the land somehow, and that even if neither Jordan nor I are going to suddenly start Jesus smuggling, we might create the conditions that make it easier for someone else to do that.

Is that a fair—

Yeah, and it is. No, this is very pristine of you, so thank you. Let me see if I can sharpen up what my concern actually is here because it’s not even true to say that I think you need to get rid of the Jesus story, or even not hey—I don’t even think there’s something problematic with or even in your life around the Jesus story.

I think that can be reclaimed. But so, for instance, I was walking yesterday in this fine city of yours, and saw someone on the sidewalk giving tarot readings to people. You know, the tarot deck spread out; he had a few cards spread out, and he was soliciting people.

And I’m sorry to say I didn’t sit for a reading, but you know, two tarot cards, if you’re familiar with them, they’ve got the quintessential artifact of New Age woo, right? I mean, these are not thought of as legitimate tools of divination, except by people who think that they are legitimate tools of divination.

And yet, a tarot reading can be truly powerful! Right? I mean, it’s this built on something, right? This is not just a massive example of self-deception on the part of people reading and people getting their cards read.

These cards can seem prescient! I could give you all a reading now, and 95% of you would find what I would—what the cards would say to be relevant to your lives! I could do it with an imaginary deck!

I’m an invisible imaginary deck! I don’t know anything about tarot cards, but I’m going to turn over two cards now. One is the Sun, and the other is the—what?—the Fallen Man?

Now, I know so little about Tarot that I’m not even sure the Fallen Man is a tarot card. I think it was the Hanged Man.

That’s a great—okay, so I’ve got these two cards, and you know, the Sun is clearly the representation of wisdom, right? And the Hangman is the representation of lost opportunity.

And I can tell you with some degree of certainty that all of you are at a crossroads in your life right where you have— you have good reason to believe that you’re not making the most of your opportunities right now.

I could go on like this for an hour! Right? And pretend all the while that it has something to do with the cards.

It’s actually being worked in concert with the dynamics of the cosmos such that these cards that I turn over, were they real, would be the ones that knew of necessity, were revealing something about your mind in this moment.

And obviously people think in these terms about astrology and sympathetic magic and all the rest, and religion is built upon this kind of superstition.

There’s a way of understanding the utility of using a device like this and the real effect it has on you.

I mean, if I turn over the cards and ask you to look at your life in this moment as though for the first time through this lens, considering in this case lost opportunities, right, of course it’s going to be valid!

That doesn’t make it—it could be an incredibly useful thing to do! The main concern is that at no point you have to lie to yourself about your state of knowledge about the mechanism, right?

You don’t have to believe tarot cards really were there. There’s deeper, deeper mechanisms that work with someone who’s actually good at that.

And so I agree with what you said, but they need not be supernatural. And in fact, I think what happens when you use a projective technique like that—because that’s essentially what it is—if I’m good at interpersonal attunement, and I’m quite intuitive, what I’m gonna do is this: and everyone does this in the course of a dialogue that’s actually working well—I’m gonna flip over the cards, and I’m gonna start with generic archetypal statements that are true in some sense for everyone.

But then I’m gonna watch you both consciously and implicitly, unconsciously, with all of my social intelligence, and I’m going to see through very, very subtle signs on your part when you respond positively to what I’m saying and when you respond negatively, and I’m going to continue down the lines that you establish by your positive responses.

That’s what Derren Brown does, that’s—he’s a mentalist, right?

Well, it’s exactly what happens when children are interviewed, for example, by people who lead them as witnesses. Right?

The children infer from the emotional expressions of the person who’s interrogating them what it is that they actually want to hear, and so they’ll be even work with that horse clever, huh?

Exactly, right? That’s right! Exactly! Horses can do this! Oh, so they—so, so, so the mechanisms behind something like that, even if it appears entirely superstitious on the surface, are often deeper than is revealed at first approximation.

So—and I wanted to talk a little bit, if you don’t mind, for a minute about rationality because the—we’ve already agreed, I think, definitely start me if I’m wrong, that there has to be an intermediary mechanism between the world of facts and the world of values.

And well, since we’ve talked, I’ve been reading a variety of commentaries on Immanuel Kant, mostly these have been written by Roger Scruton, by the way.

And this is actually, the issue that Kant was obsessed about for most of his philosophical life and what he concluded was that empiricism can’t be right and rationality can’t be right as philosophical disciplines because you need an intermediary structure that we have an inbuilt intermediary structure, and that structure is what mediates between the thing in itself—the world of facts, let’s say—and the outputs, the values.

So then I was thinking we don’t quite agree on this. I mean, in my summary of your overview of me, I would have agreed with that, but for me, it’s just facts all the way down!

Okay, so you're great! You're describing—

Glad to hear it!

Then why do you need to bring everything?

Well, both! But brain is yet another part of reality!

I mean, without what I mean by a fact, what is—does anything there? What does the brain do? It has to do something because otherwise you don't need it!

It does a lot! The immensity to your concern—

The other where I think we’re going in this conversation is how is it that values can be another order of fact? That seems problematic to you.

It seems problematic about you.

Well, it's problematic for me for a technical reason, which is that in order to app—you know, and we see if we agree on this—in order to perceive and to act, which I believe are both acts of value, to perceive as an act of value, because you have to look at something instead of a bunch of other things.

So you elevate the thing that you're perceiving to the position of highest value by perceiving it, by deciding to perceive it. So get back development!

I just—that gets translated in my brain into just more facts! Just give me the facts of human perception.

Well, that's fine! That's—that's no problem. I'm perfectly happy about that.

And then in order to act, you have to select the target of action from among an infinite number, near-infinite number—close enough—of possible mechanisms of action.

And so what a biological organism does is take the facts and translate them into perception and action.

And the only organisms that do that with one-to-one mapping are organisms that are composed of sensory motor cells, like sponges!

Marine sponges, which are composed of sensory motor cells, don’t have an intermediary nervous system.

So what they do is they sit in the water and make a sponge. They’re so simple that if you grind the sponge through a sieve and in salt water, it’ll reorganize itself into this sponge.

So that's quite cool! The sponge sits in the water and doesn't do and what it does, and what it does is there's waves on it. And so those are patterns, and then the sponge opens and closes pores on its surface in response to those patterns.

So it maps the pattern of the waves right onto its behavior with no intermediary of a nervous system. But it can only map waves! That's all it can do!

And it can only open and close pores! That's it!

So it does one-to-one fact-to-value mapping! Now what happens is that as the—as the complexity of a biological organism increases, two things happen:

The first thing that happens is that the sensory and motor cells differentiate. So now the organism has sensory cells and motor cells—so scent senses to detect and senses and—sorry— cells to detect and cells to act.

Okay, so then it can do—it can detect more patterns because it's more sophisticated at the sensory port perspective, and it can do more things because it has specialized motor systems.

But then what happens is that as it gets even more complex, then it puts an intermediary structure of nervous tissue in there, and that structure increases in the number of layers of neurons.

And what that means is that as that happens and as the sensory cells become more specialized and as the motor output cells become more specialized, many more patterns can be detected.

Those are roughly equivalent to facts! And many more motor outputs can be manifested, but a tremendous number of calculations have to—has to occur in that intermediary nervous tissue, and that's the structure that I'm talking about.

That structure exists, and it translates the patterns into motor output, and it doesn't do it on a one-to-one basis because there are more patterns, more facts than there are motor outputs!

So what has to happen is this tremendous plethora of facts that surrounds us has to be filtered to the point where you pick a single action because you can tap, act otherwise.

And so the mechanism that reduces the number of facts to the selected action is the mechanism that mediates between facts and values.

And it's not simply in and of itself! It's a fact that that exists, but it isn't as simple—that's what it does!

Isn't a simple fact!

You can't—it—you can't explain it.

You can't understand it!

Why not?

For the same reason that you can't look! For the same reason that you don't know what a neural network is doing. Like you can train a neural network—notice there's a distinction between facts and facts that we know!

Right? There is, whatever it is the case, right? And then there's our understanding of it and our misunderstanding of it!

So there are many things that we think we know that we're wrong about. There are many things that we are aware we're ignorant of, and there's this larger—always this larger space of reality that we're struggling to engage with.

And it may in fact be the case that in evolutionary terms, we—we know it's the case that we’re—we haven't evolved to understand reality and large perfectly—that's not the sort of monkeys we are, right?

And you could even argue about—one cognitive scientist who some of you may have heard of, Donald Hoffman, is arguing now, you know, very colorfully that human consciousness or the human mind is actually evolved to get things wrong in a fairly specific way so that—to maximize survival—and that that was the argument I made in our first discussion!

No, but he was—no, not quite, because there's still—there's still this preserves the difference between getting things right and getting things wrong.

His argument is that getting things truly right, having a nervous system and a cognitive architecture that could really understand reality, quote, “reality as it is,” would be maladaptive! And he has some—he has some mathematical demonstrations of this!

That the—the true—the quote true representations of reality are categorically maladaptive! And you had—there's certain kind of error that is—

And I'm not—I'm not sure I'd buy this argument, but the fact that you can make this argument, the fact that you can differentiate the adaptively useful misunderstandings versus a true understanding that's maladaptive—the fact that we can even talk about that demonstrates to me that we have this larger picture of what is in fact true.

Whether we know it or not! And this is what religion gets so catastrophically wrong about, religion gives you some other mechanism whereby to orient yourself—in this case, revelation does.

Religion does provide those functional simplifications! They're simplifications appropriate to the Iron Age approach!

Well, some of them give that if—then some of them are, for sure, and that's why we have to have this discussion because— because mere, mere revelation, mere tradition is insufficient.

And I truly believe that we can agree on that!

But back to the biological argument, so because I thought tonight I would make a very strictly biological argument, is that so now the question is, now, so now you’ve got your sensory systems that are detecting the world of facts, and you have your motor output system, which is a very narrow channel because you can only do one thing at a time.

And that’s one of the things about consciousness that’s quite strange! It’s a very, very narrow channel!

So you have to take this unbelievably complex world and you have to channel it into this very narrow channel!

And you don't do that by being wrong about the world, but you do do that by ignoring a lot of the world and by using representations that are no more complicated than they have to be in order to attain the task at hand!

It’s like you’re losing using low-resolution representations of the world! They’re not inaccurate because a low-resolution representation of the world isn’t inaccurate any more than a low-resolution photo is!

But they’re no higher resolution than they need to be in order for you to undertake the task at hand!

And if you undertake the task at hand and that goes successfully, then what you’ve done—and this is basically the essence of American pragmatism—what you’ve done is validated the—you validated the validity of your simplifications!

So if the tool you have in hand is good, if the axe you have in hand is sharp enough to chop down the tree, then it’s a good enough axe!

And that’s part of the way that we define truth pragmatically in the absence of infinite knowledge about everything!

Okay, so now you build up this nervous system between the world of facts and the world of values, and it narrows the world of facts, and the question then is how do you generate the mechanism that does that narrowing?

And this is what's useful! That's not quite how the cake is layered!

What? Because the facts are up here too, right? For me to even notice that you’re a person, right? Or to attribute beliefs to you, or to have a sense of being in relationship at all, this is one of those higher-order interpretive acts based on a many-layered nervous system.

Yes, it’s not only bottom-up!

Yeah, yeah. But facts are also on the top! It’s not that we have facts here and values here!

Eh, so what I’m trying to do, I think maybe it’s one way of thinking about it, is that you are using—you’re positing that we can use rationality as a mechanism for mediating between facts and values.

I believe, because otherwise there's no use for rationality!

We can just have the fact that it’s a process!

Even simpler than that! It’s just that for me—and I think for everyone, if they will only agree to use language this way—for me, values are simply facts about the experience of conscious creatures.

Good and bad experiences give us our values!

Yeah, but they’re not simple!

That's a little bit!

But there are the goods in the balance!

Some are very simple!

You have in your hand and you put on a hot stove! It’s incredibly simple, and you’ll notice it’ll save your child if you do it!

Well, again, put the unpleasantness of it—

No, no! If you look at the way the reward and punishment systems work in the brain, you can easily train an animal using reward to wag its tail if it’s being shocked electrically! You can do that!

And you can wire it very low to get—there’s a range of unpleasant experiences we can have where we can construe them as pleasant or necessary! Right?

And that’s a kind of a higher-level issue, but I'm talking about, you know, the worst possible sensory experience that all of us will greet will agree is unpleasant, right?

That doesn’t require a story to—for us to feel aversion to, and there's many things like that in life that are just just rudimentary!

We are organized in such a way that—you put us into fire, we like it!

So are you claiming then—like this is another problem—this is where I think that the argument that you make, although accurate in its rudiments, let’s say is inefficiently high resolution—because now it sounds to me like you’re including the domain of qualia unquestionably in the domain of facts!

Now you can do that! And but we need to know if that’s what you’re doing!

Like, what are these facts you’re talking about? Are they mere manifestations of the objective world or do they shade into the subject?

There are, there are objective facts of joy about subjective experience!

So yeah! I can make true or false claims about your subjectivity!

And you can make—you can make those about your own subjectivity, right?

You can be wrong about your own subjectivity! We’re not subjectively incorrigible!

And I might have said this last time in Vancouver. I mean, whether the example I often use here is to speculate about what JFK was thinking the moment he got shot, right, is not a completely vacuous exercise.

There’re literally an infinite number of things we know he wasn't thinking, right? So we make claims about his conscious mind, at that moment in history, which are a scientific—even though the data are unavailable.

I said many people get confused between having answers in practice and there being answers in principle!
There are many trivial fact-based claims we could make about reality where we can’t get the data, but we know the data are there!

So, you know, do you have an even or odd number of hairs on your body at this moment? You know, we—we don’t want to think about what it would take to ascertain that fact, right?

But there is a fact of the matter, right? And so it is with anything! But so what is somebody, what is a person’s weight?

There’s a many, many facts are blurry because you’ve got yourself way, way down to the one hundredth decimal place.

No, so it’s like at a certain point you are going to be rounding and someone's weight at that point is changing every microsecond because they’re exchanging atoms with the air!

So there are facts that can be loosely defined! This is still true of our subjective lives, too.

So if it is a fact about you that when you were praying to Jesus you felt an upwelling of rapture, right subjectively, that can be an absolutely true thing to say about you!

We can—we can pair that subjective experience with an understanding of the neurophysiological basis for it! You can think about it in terms of a larger story about your life!

But all of this can be translated into a fact-based discussion about what’s happening for you and my only claim is that the value part, and hence the ethics part, relates to the extremes of positive and negative experience that people have in their lives.

I’m not—first of all, I wouldn't dispute—I don't want to dispute the fact that there are stable qualia, pain and pleasure, for example.

And also that there are fundamental motivational systems that structure our perception so as the nervous system increases in complexity, these underlying nervous system subsections that produce these rather stable qualia evolve—hunger, thirst, defensive aggression, sexuality—all these subsystems that label experience with certain somewhat inviolable labels, I understand that happens!

But the point that I’m trying to make here is I think to try to increase the—what would you call it—the breadth of the conversation about how facts get translated into values because it seems to me the other thing that your account doesn't take proper, and this is what surprised me so much about your thinking when I first encountered it.

See, I think the manner in which facts are translated into values is something that actually evolved. And it evolved over three and a half billion years—the three and a half billion years of life!

And it built the nervous system from the bottom up, and it built this reducing mechanism that takes the infinite number of facts and translates them into a single value per action, and it does that in layers!

And so there is a relationship between the world of facts and the world of values, and there has to be, but it isn’t derived one-to-one in the confines of your single existence, through pure figment!

It's way more complicated than that!

Well, yeah!

If there’s more to it than rationality!

Yes!

I mean, right? Again, it’s not rationality that causes you to remove your hand from a hot stove, and it’s not rationality that causes you to like the experience of love and bliss and rapture and creativity over or more than pointless misery and despair.

Things other than rationality are clearly necessary!

Absolutely!

Okay, the question is do we ever have to be irrational to get the good things in life?

And I would argue that the answer to that is clearly no!

There’s nothing irrational about loving your wife or your best friend or yourself or even a stranger if what you mean by love there is genuinely wanting happiness for that person, genuinely taking pleasure in their company, genuinely wanting to find a way of being where you’re no longer in a zero-sum condition with a stranger or with a partner, but you’re collaborating together to have better lives!

What's in it?

So rationality moves through that situation continuously, because rationality is the only way that you and I can get our representations of the world to cohere!

It’s when I say, “Okay, there’s a lion behind that rock; don’t go over there,” that only—that only makes sense to you if you’re playing this rationality game the way I’m playing it!

If I mean something else by lion or I mean something else by don’t go over there, you know, you’re confused and very likely dead or not!

If we’re trying to establish the proposition that rationality is the mechanism by which we make our worldviews cohere, I would agree with that in part!

We also make them cohere because we’re actually biologically structured the same way, and so there’s a proclivity for them to cohere to begin with, but we iron out our differences through the exercise—I wouldn't call it rationality; I would call it logos because I think it's a more incorp—it’s a—it’s a broader—

And that is where you’re smuggling at Jesus?

Yeah! Unconscious, let's say!

So I’d like—it is—it's the point of order here! I want to—I’m disconcerted by Douglas’ silence!

Yes! No!

I want to pivot because I know—I know how good he is when he actually speaks!

So I want to pivot to another subject because we can return to this. We need to—first, before you pivot, I mean, having said to you what I think your concern is with Jordan, it strikes me that Jordan's concern—and I share this, just as I share some of your concerns that we expressed at the outset.

In Jordan’s fundamental concern, it seems to me, is a one I fundamentally share, which is rationalism isn’t enough!

Or let me put it another way: can you both show me where it where it's obviously insufficient?

Like, more like music!

But—but there’s nothing—but again, to say that it’s not—to say that there’s more to life than being rational is not to say—and perhaps never to say—you need to run against rationality; you need to be irrational in order to get something good!

Let me express it a different way!

Yeah, we haven’t tried the purely rational approach yet!

We have applied it for very long!

Well, many of us have been trying for a couple of centuries, at least, which is a blip!

Yeah! I mean, the tiniest dot at the end of human evolution!

So I think that a concern which Jordan has is certainly a concern I have, is if we try this, we can think of all sorts of ways in which you can go wrong!

If you take away all that’s a supporting structure, you can think of any number of ways in which you can go wrong, and that I suppose that’s at the root of the concern about where you might be taking us, or to put it another way.

If we enter the world that you would suggest, not everyone may necessarily come out as Sam Harris!

Okay, give me one way where you think it can go wrong, and again, this—we can’t forget your caveat—we start it with very smart people.

So then you're basically saying that the stupid people need their myths; you know we smart people on stage don’t need them, right?

Well, I am not actually—I’m I looked—I actually am saying that to some degree.

That this—look, if you’re not exceptionally cognitively astute, you should be traditional and conservative because if you can’t think well, you’re going to think badly, and if you think badly, you’re going to fall into trouble!

And so it is definitely the case—and this has been, and what would you call it? A cliché of political belief for a long time?

If you’re not very smart, it’s better to be conservative because then you do what everyone else does, and generally speaking, doing what everyone else does is the path of least error moving forward!

Now, that doesn’t mean that rationality is unnecessary.

What does it mean?

Little conservative, the stupid!

It doesn’t mean that either, right?

Precisely!

It doesn’t mean!

But all conservative structures are not the same either, and that we have many warring and incompatible versions of being conservative!

True, true!

And this is exactly—this is where rationality actually does play its role.

Although I don’t think it’s best conceptualized as rationality, precisely it’s definitely the case that—it’s to take Douglas's point that we need to be bound by our traditions, but we need to be judicious in their recitation and update, and we have to do both!

This is what the dialogue on religion—this is what Shapiro says—he describes the tragedy of the clergy.

Yeah, he pretty much says, “Look, if they don’t believe it, they recognize it’s a very useful metaphor, but they don’t need to believe it.”

He says the tragedy of the clergy is they can never admit that what they’re saying is just a metaphor!

Right, this is our—for after he threw his housekeeper down the stairs!

Look, we can all find flaws— we all have skeletons in our closet! But that, yes!

There is a way in which religion is what he describes as philosophy for the masses, and that if you recognize that most people are not going to spend their lives studying philosophy, they’re not going to be reading about the differences between Leibniz and Kant, that religion has to do—now, I’m not saying that I agree with that particularly, but there’s a heck of an argument within there which a lot of people will be living their lives in.

I don’t think it’s a good argument!

If you will recall, or I just—just imagine what it’s like to be a child, but especially from the perspective of being a parent.

I mean, you know, I have two young girls, and they—you know, they’re very smart young—they’re smart, but you know, one of them’s four and a half years old, and those almost nothing!

Right? So she knows what I and my wife and our society tell her! On some level I’m at--what point is she going to think for herself about these fundamental questions?

And I mean, again, she’s currently spending half the day dressed up like Batgirl or Catwoman, right?

So if I told her that these superheroes were real, she would believe that for the longest time!

And achieved, if we lived in a cult that thought they were real or a whole society that by dint of its geographic or linguistic isolation managed to maintain a conversation about—in this case Batgirl and Catwoman— that they were real, and that it was absolutely important to honor them, and you’d burn in hell if you failed to do this!

This would be—we would be meeting that fully grown adults who believe this sort of thing!

But it seems to me, Sam, that you bring up the superhero thing quite a bit, so I think I’ll go about that directly!

So then I—

Okay, so, well, so, so you make the case in a moral landscape that they’re an ideal is real because the ideal that you define, an ideal is real, and the ideal is whatever maximizes well-being and gets us away from hell. You said not only is that real, you all say that’s the fundamental axiom—that’s the claim in the moral landscape.

So you do make a claim that there is a real ideal!

And I would say, well, I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way, but there’s a real—we are in a circumstance where things can matter, where consciousness is the key, is the condition in which things can matter, where there can be a range of experiences, some of which are very very bad, if the word bad means anything—they're bad—and some of which are very very good, if the word good means anything!

And we are navigating that space, and we can’t help but navigate or seek to navigate in that space!

And religion is one—I mean, okay, well, this is the—this is the navigation problem!

And I would argue that really means business now!

But the Batgirl and Catwoman are approximations to a higher ideal! That’s what they are!

And to attempt—this is a biblical idea! I’m fairly sure for birthday expense that a lot of parents are perfectly content with bringing their children up vaguely within the story they’ve inherited, and at some point, the children realize that the fairy doesn’t bring the money when their teeth fall out!

And at some point maybe around the same time or a bit later they discover that the Santa Claus doesn’t really come down the chimney!

And at some point they realize that actually the whole religious thing is a kind of metaphor!

But he’s got them through the formative years in some way, often with terrible damage along the way, I concede that!

But also with something else, which I’m struck by the number of people—this is why I share some of what I think is Jordan’s concern about the possibility of the world you’re envisaging—which is, I can think of a lot of parents now—my country and other countries as well—who I’m just very struck—they themselves a kind of baby boomer or sixties atheists, humanists, whatever—and I start to notice, for instance, that they’re enrolling their children in Christian schools.

And I say to them, “Why are you doing this?”

And they have fairly coherent arguments along the lines of what I just said: “Look, I don’t particularly believe this myself—but I think it’s a pretty good way to bring up the kids!”

It’s the structure of a kind.

And I’m not sure I can find all sorts of flaws in it, but enough people are doing it that it’s something that needs to be addressed.

Well, I would say yes, it speaks to a real failure of imagination and an effort in the secular community to produce truly non embarrassing alternatives!

Exactly!

And this is across the board! This is not just school; this is how do you conduct a funeral? How do you get married? You know, all of the—it—what rites of passage can you offer a thirteen-year-old?

What are you doing here?

What are we doing?

Yeah, exactly!

Just to have—the first people in history to have absolutely no explanation for what we’re doing at all?

Yeah!

It’s a big moment!

Yeah!

Yes! And, and that means that sharpens up my concern perfectly because to shrink back from that moment and resort to one of the pseudo stories of the past, I consider to be a failure of nerve, both intellectually and morally.

Okay, so let’s go back to the superhero idea! One of the things you might notice about superheroes is that some of them are actually deities, right?

So in the Marvel Pantheon, you have Thor, for example.

And so there's a very thin line between the idea of a superhero and the idea of a god, especially if you think about it in a polytheistic manner.

So the modern superheroes and the Greek gods, for example, share a tremendous number of features in common.

And so here’s something to think about: there's a reason that people admire superheroes, and it's because they act out parts of the hero archetype.

That’s the technical reason! They’re obviously acting something out because that’s how you can tell they’re superheroes! They share some set of characteristics across the set of superheroes that makes them superheroes!

Now the question might be, what is the essential element of being a superhero that makes you a superhero?

And the answer, the way that was solved historically is that as polytheistic societies developed—and that usually a consequence of isolated tribes coming into contact with one another—they each have their separate deities.

And then over the course of time those deities warred—in actual wars with people, but also conceptually—and out of that polytheistic framework was extracted something that was vaguely monotheistic as all of those cultures came together to try to determine what their highest ideal should be.

So that’s the God of Gods—that's a way of thinking about it!

Or the King of Kings—that’s another way of thinking about it!

And that’s an implicit ideal!

And I could make a case—

Tell that to the Hindus!

You tell that to the Hindus!

We’ve got 1.2 billion people or maybe it’s 1.4 now who are operating in a religiously saturated system that does not conform to that ideal!

There is no one on top!

There’s still an attempt to generate that polytheistic—to integrate that polytheistic reality underneath a single rubric!

Or you have nothing but continual dissociation of the culture!

And I’m not saying this is inevitable either, and there is a tension.

The problem with extracting out the highest God from the panoply of gods is the ideal becomes so abstract that it disappears!

That's the death of God!

And Eliot has tracked that phenomena over multiple cultures—not—it’s not something that’s unique to the West!

So the danger of that abstraction is that it gets too abstract and disappears and leaves us in the situation Douglas just pointed out!

Can I first back to the key—the key issue of Elton John's glass, which you came up with the other night, because that's something I wanted to add to that, explain why I said Elton John's glass just now.

Oh, well, we came back to this question of what makes something valuable.

And I used as an example in Vancouver one of those nights, if I had a glass here which I said was actually it was the glass that Elton John used the last time he played in this theater, suddenly it seems to be a more valuable glass.

And then Jordan and I argued about putative what the status of that value was!

I don’t know where you want to take this video.

Well, it’s just one thing in particular which is that the whole issue of what it is you give value to, and let's say that that glass was demonstrated for a time to having been drunk from by Elton John at his final concert of work, latest farewell tour, whatever.

So that's already a glass with something. Let's say that over the years, the whole attribution of that glass becomes debatable over a long period of time.

A lot of things are going to have happened around it.

And to stretch this to breaking point, possibly, let’s say at some point people lose their lives over whether that is Elton John’s glass!

Let’s say that people are going to lose blood!

Listen, let’s not just say that!

Let’s recognize that is the world we’re living at with respective religions!

So the problem is that we end up when we’re talking about religion, when we’re talking about—it’s the same thing when you’re talking about land—you’re not just talking about any inherent worth, you’re talking also about the worth of things people have given up for this.

Yeah, and so we end up giving the layers of things—what knows? It’s more than that!

We inherit more and more layers of the meaning because other people before us have given that meaning to it, so that by the time you have this object, it's an object of worth even if it's not of no worth in itself at all because of the amount of worth people before you have given to it.

And that seems to some extent what we’re doing with the religion!

That’s extraordinarily productive, I think!

So see, when you start with the hypothesis of facts, then you kind of have to define what a fact is.

And so I think the simplest way of doing that to begin with is that there’s a set of objective facts, and that’s the facts about objective reality.

You can think about that from a scientific perspective, and we’re going to agree that that exists, although it’s very complicated and difficult to understand.

That exists as one set of constraints on what we can do and what we can’t do—that’s the objective world!

And then on top of that—and this is where things get very, very complicated— you have this layered system of meaning, which is partly a manifestation of these layers of the nervous system that I described but also partly a manifestation of those layers of the nervous system operating in social space over vast periods of time.

So that would be the social sociological agreement that’s all layered on top of the objective world, and it actually constitutes part of the lens through which you view the world— to the degree where you actually see the layering in the thing.

So when you go to a museum, and you look at Elvis Presley’s guitar, you don’t look at the guitar and think, “That’s Elvis Presley’s guitar!” That’s not how your brain works!

You actually see Elvis Presley’s guitar!

It’s an active perception!

So it becomes built right into your nervous system even though the fact that that is Elvis Presley’s guitar—and the reason that that’s valuable is because of a sociological agreement about what position Elvis Presley occupied in the dominance hierarchy that we’re all part of.

And so what you see when you look at an artifact like that is you see a layer of dominance hierarchy overlaid on top of an objective reality, and that’s actually your phenomenal reality now!

The thing that’s so interesting is that that layer of perception that’s mediating between the facts and you has a structure.

And that’s the structure that I’ve been insisting is a narrative.

And I think Sam thinks it’s a narrative too, because his fundamental ethic is that you should act in a way which means to embody a mode of being, which means to be a personality that moves us from hell to something approximating heaven!

Okay, back, Jordan!

What I'm struggling to understand, what I don't understand is how any of that is a counterpoint to my concern about religion!

So fret—

Because I agree with all that!

I mean, there are some caveats I would issue. For instance, these posits, my—that's possibly a good way to do it!

He’s saying human beings can act!

Yeah, can I just— Right.

So we’re done!

Let’s wrap this!

Done!

We’re basically done!

But the point is that if you look at a story, one story can speak in very different ways about the value that you embody or keep your house in order!

Yeah!

What you need to find productive, really productive ways to illuminate your world!

And so we owe so much, particularly each of us—in our own tradition!

I mean part of what I find when we defend the minds in our tradition is defense against the heights and depths of the illusions of falsity,

and that we’re drawing on myths as a way to orient people, as histories that are superficially animated at some new worldviews that are beneath them in a village that allows white folks to find their own way!

The interesting thing for me is to realize that this is why the West does have these 21st-century civilizations at all!

And this has been a glorious parable of the form of infinity!

At best, we need to conclude today’s marathon.

But that said, I just want to thank everyone! For the last hour, I get a double-decker bus of people!

And Sam, I couldn't agree more—it’s critical!

[Music]

[Applause]

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you all!

Very nice!

Great!