# 2016-11-16 - Making Sense - #52 - Finding Our Way in the Cosmos - subscriber version [Official](https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/finding-our-way-in-the-cosmos) [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/id/podcast/52-finding-our-way-in-the-cosmos/id733163012?i=1000377940824) Duration: 01:49:18 ## Transcript ### Sam Harris 00:00:00 - 00:03:26 Welcome to the Waking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, it's been a week since the election. Happily, I won't be saying anything about it today. There will be an upcoming podcast or two where I'll get into politics again. I'm sure you will not be spared. I have some interesting guests coming up in the next few weeks. However, I've got Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at Berkeley. He'll be on to discuss artificial intelligence. Many people who have publicly worried about the risks of AI, people like Stephen Hawking and Max Tegmark and Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom are often dismissed by people in the field because they aren't computer scientists themselves. Well, you can't do that with Stuart. He is a computer scientist and he actually wrote the most influential textbook on AI. So he seems like the perfect person to tell me whether I went overboard in my TED talk on the topic. So I'm looking forward to that. I'll also have Shadi Hamid on the podcast to talk about his book, Islamic Exceptionalism. He's a senior fellow at Brookings who takes a slightly different line than Majid and I have taken on the topic of Islam and secularism. The psychologist Paul Bloom is coming back to talk about empathy and why it's not as good as you think. I'm also hoping to have the audio for my public events with Richard Dawkins eventually. So there are some good conversations coming up. Today I'll be speaking with the physicist David Deutsch once again about the foundations of morality. This podcast came about in a slightly unusual way. Since we did our first podcast, David read my book, The Moral Landscape, and he wanted to talk to me about it. He wanted to do this privately, I think because there were some fundamental things he disagreed with and he didn't want to break the news to me on my own podcast. But I urged him to let me record the conversation so that we could release it if we wanted to. Because if he was going to dismantle my cherished thesis, I actually wanted you all to hear that. And I also wanted you to hear anything else he had to say because he's just so interesting. The problem, however, is that I ran into some equipment issues at the time and could only record the raw Skype call. So the audio leaves a lot to be desired. And David's audio is actually better than mine, so it actually sounds like I'm on his podcast. And because we weren't totally clear that we were doing a podcast, there were parts of the conversation that needed to be cut out. And these cuts leave the resulting exchange slightly free associative. We put in a few music cues to signal those cuts. In any case, David is such an interesting person and many of you are, I know, are interested in the thesis I put forward in the Moral Landscape. So I decided the best thing to do is release the recording, warts and all. ### Sam Harris 00:03:26 - 00:05:56 I certainly hope to have David back on the podcast again, but I doubt we'll cover this territory again or cover it in the same way. So that is why I'm bringing you this conversation now. One major caveat, however, is that I don't recommend you listen to this podcast without first listening to my first conversation with David, episode 22 entitled Surviving the Cosmos. Because we really just hit the ground running here and if you're not familiar with David or his way of thinking about knowledge and creativity, you really might get lost or at least you won't appreciate how interesting some of his seemingly prosaic comments are. David Deutsch is a physicist at Oxford. He is best known as the founding father of quantum computation and for his work on the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. His main area of focus is now something he has called constructor theory, where he's developing a new way to connect information and knowledge to the language of physics. And as with our last podcast, the irony is we don't discuss any of these things. So his views about knowledge and the implications of its being independent of any given physical embodiment, the fact that you can have the same information in a molecule of DNA or on a computer disk or chiseled into a piece of granite, this problem of understanding the substrate independence of information and knowledge in the context of a physical world, that is occasionally working in the background. And it's one of the things that makes David's take on more ordinary questions so interesting. For instance, his view about something as pedestrian as why it's wrong to coerce people to do things connects directly to his view about what it means for knowledge to accumulate in the physical universe and the error correcting mechanisms that allow it to accumulate. And if you're not familiar with the way David thinks, many of his statements will probably just blow by you without you realizing that something fairly revolutionary has just been said. So again, please listen to that first podcast if you haven't, and then maybe listen to it again. And you should read his book, The Beginning of Infinity, if you want to get more deeply into his ideas. And now I bring you David Deutsch. ### David Deutsch 00:05:56 - 00:09:05 Knowledge is basically critical. So this is actually the connection with what I want to say about your book. The foundational idea of knowledge that traditionally the idea of knowledge has been that we build it up. We build it up, you know, either from nothing like Descartes or from the senses or from God or what have you, or from our genes. And thinking consists of building brick upon brick, and from our senses, of course. And but Popper's view and which of science, which I want to extend to all thinking and all ideas, is that our knowledge isn't like that. It consists of a great slew of not very consistent ideas. And thinking consists of wandering about in this slew, trying to make consistent the ideas that seem to be the worst offenders of being inconsistent with each other by modifying them. And we modify them just by conjecture. We guess that something might cure the various inconsistencies we see. And if it does, then we move to that. And to get to your book, I'm interested to see what you think of this take on your book. We're so coming from the same place in some respects, and so coming from opposite incompatible places in other respects, that it's hard to even express to each other what we mean exactly. And we just I think the reason correct me if I'm wrong, or if I'm seeing this entirely the wrong way. I think the reason you developed a theory of morality and took the trouble to write this book about it is it's not an intellectual reason. Or at least not primarily intellectual. It's not that you wanted to tweak the best existing theories and improve them or to contradict some prevalent erroneous theories, because there are a lot of true and false theories out there. And usually we don't write about them. We know life is too short. I think the reason you wrote this particular book and develop this particular theory, as I said, is not intellectual. It's for a particular purpose in the world, namely to defend civilization, you might say in grandiose terms, to defend it against. It's not really too much hyperbole to say it's an existential danger from or two existential dangers. One is moral relativism and the other is religious dogmatism. ### Sam Harris 00:09:05 - 00:10:24 Yes, that's that's very fair. And imputations of grandiosity are also fair, because I really I feel like what I was doing in that book is attempting to draw a line in the sand to defend the claim that the most important questions in human life and the questions that are by definition the most important questions and the questions that where the greatest swings in value are to be found, that the answers to those questions exist, whether or not we can ever get them in hand and certainly better and worse answers exist and that it's possible to be right and wrong or more right and wrong about those questions. And so, yes, it's very much a I wanted to carve out the intellectual space where we could unabashedly defend the intuition that moral truths exist and that morality is not completely different. Morality and values altogether, claims about right and wrong and good and evil are not on some completely different footing from the rest of the truth claims and claims to fact that we want to make about the universe. ### David Deutsch 00:10:24 - 00:11:56 OK, well, so I agree that there's an existential danger. So I wasn't using the word grandiose, pejoratively. I think there is that danger. And whether they're the biggest dangers, I'm not entirely sure, but they are existential dangers, which is bad enough. And I agree with what you just said about morality. There is true and false in morality or right and wrong. They are objective. They can be discovered by the usual methods of reason, which are essentially the same as those of science, although there are important differences, as I said when we last spoke. OK, so this was your purpose. You had an intellectual purpose that was morally driven in developing this moral theory. And therefore, you had this moral purpose before you had the details of the moral theory. So you wanted in advance your theory to have certain properties, as you just said, to create an intellectual space in which one could assert and defend the proposition that there's objective right and wrong. And so these properties that you wanted the theory to have in advance weren't just expressions of your personality or something. They were the fact that you thought that the moral values that made you want to write the book are true, objectively true. ### Sam Harris 00:11:56 - 00:12:35 Well, forgive me, I'm starting to I'm smiling now. If you could see me, you'd see how much I'm smiling because I'm just amused at how tenderly you're leading me down by the hand down the slippery slope to the dissolution of my theory. I think theory is too big a word for what I thought I was putting forward. I think my theory, such as it is, contains explicitly the assumption that there are many things I can be wrong about right now with the morality that I have in hand. Right. So like I'm not my theory isn't based on my current moral intuitions. ### David Deutsch 00:12:35 - 00:12:36 It's based on some of them. ### Sam Harris 00:12:36 - 00:13:22 It's based on the intuition of what I call in various places moral realism, which is just the claim that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible not to know what you're missing. It's possible to be cognitively close to true facts about well-being in this universe, about how good life could be if only you could live it or could discover it, if only you had the right sort of mind that would give you access to these states of consciousness. So it's so that's it's not so much that I think, well, my intuition that gay marriage should be legal is so foundational that I know there's no state of the universe that could disconfirm it. That's not that's not where I'm standing. It's just it's the intuition about realism and about the horizons. ### David Deutsch 00:13:23 - 00:14:20 I wasn't making that sort of allegation. In fact, I think I agree with everything you've just said about morality. You see, the thing is the ideas, the theory, if you want to call it, don't want to call it a theory, whatever it is that you express in the book contains that, but it also contains something else. It contains the something else that I disagree with. There must be something else because I've agreed with everything you've just said. The thing I suppose the basic thing I disagree with and this disagreement is probably deeper than it sounds that you one of the properties you wanted to create this space is that this theory of morality or whatever you call it should be based on a secure foundation, namely science and in particular, especially neuroscience. ### Sam Harris 00:14:20 - 00:16:53 Oh, actually, well, that may be I mean, I the fault is certainly mine in from the subtitle onward and the subtitle, you know, the way subtitles of books get fashioned, as you probably know, that's sometimes outside the author's control as it was in this case. But I wouldn't put it that way. I would say that it doesn't it's not that morality has to be founded on the secure foundations of science. It's that the truth claims we want to make about morality are just as well founded, however well founded that turns out to be as the truth claims we make in science and that really I'm talking about this larger cognitive space in which we make truth claims and some of it for bureaucratic reasons or methodological reasons, we call these the scientific claims, some we call historical, some we call merely factual. Some sciences are not are still struggling to be as scientific as other sciences, but we still call them sciences. But there is just this claim the claims about subjectivity and in particular about well-being and what influences it. And those claims, I think, are true, whether or not we can or true or false, whether or not we can ever get the data in hand at any moment in history. And I just want to say, I mean, the example I may have used this last time with you, but the example I often use is there is a fact of the matter about what John F. Kennedy was thinking the moment before he got shot. And we won't know what he was thinking. We don't actually know what it was like to be him. In fact, we know there's no way we could get access to the data at this point. And yet there are an infinite number of things we could say about that that we would know were wrong. I mean, I know he wasn't thinking about string theory. I know he was, you know, trying to I know he wasn't, you know, reiterating the largest prime number that we discovered a year after he died again in his mind. You can go on like that till the end of time, knowing what his state of consciousness excluded. And that's it. That's a fact. That's as factual a claim as we ever make in science. And so what I was trying to argue is that morality, you know, rightly considered is a space of truth claims that is on all fours with all the other kinds of truth claims we make. Differences of methodology aside. Yeah. ### David Deutsch 00:16:53 - 00:19:04 Well, there are two ways that something can be objective. And I think you are in favor of one of them and I'm in favor of the other. That is, things can be objective in the sense that their truths about them just are truths about the other thing. Like, for example, chemistry, the truth of chemistry, just are truths about physics. And that maybe wasn't obvious when chemistry started, but it is obvious now that some of the truths are emergent truths. But still, in principle, everything, every law of chemistry, everything you can say about chemical reactions and so on, they are all statements about physics and chemistry then is objective because physics is objective. Then there's a different way of being objective, the way in which the integers exist objectively. They exist objectively not because and again, in the history of this, there were different theories about the integers that took different positions about whether they're real and if they're real, in what sense they're real. I think that they are real in a separate sense from physics, that the truth about them are independent of the truth of physics, not that integers are objective because they are some aspects of physical objects, but they're objective because integers exist in some sense that is not the same as existing physically. And although they have an influence in truths about them are reflected in truths about physical objects, but they're not identified as them. There's nothing we could discover about the laws of physics could possibly change the truth of theorems about prime numbers. Sorry, that's the kind of independence that I think truths of morality have. ### Sam Harris 00:19:06 - 00:23:01 Actually, David, can I interrupt you there and just explore this a little bit? I think I talk about this in the book at some point. I follow the philosopher John Searle here. I don't follow him in that many things, but he made a distinction between the ontological and the epistemological sense in which we can use this word objective. And I think that's a useful one that at least I've been pressing to service a fair amount. So if something's ontologically objective, it exists, quote, in the real world, whether or not anyone knows about it, it's independent of human minds, it is the kinds of facts you just described with chemistry and physics. And we can imagine a universe without any conscious creatures and those facts would still be the case even though there's no one around to know them. And so that's ontological objectivity. And then there's epistemological objectivity, which is to say that there's the spirit in which we make various claims about facts of all kinds, which is to say that so to be objective in the epistemological sense, you're not being misled by your own confirmation bias or wishful thinking, or you are making honest claims about data and the consequences of logical arguments and all the rest. And what most people worry about with respect to objectivity versus subjectivity, I guess I should talk about the subjective side of those two things. So something can be ontologically subjective, which is to say it doesn't exist independent of human minds or conscious minds. It is a fact that is only a fact given the existence of minds. So when I'm talking about what JFK experienced the moment he got shot or prior to that moment, I'm making a claim about his subjectivity, but I can make that claim in the sense of it being epistemologically objective, which is to say it's not subjective epistemologically. I'm not being merely misled by my bias and my dogmatic commitments. I can objectively say about that is epistemologically about JFK's subjectivity that it was not characterized by him meditating on the truth of string theory. And so I'm more worried that the ontological difference between objective and subjective doesn't really interest me. It's useful for certain conversations and I think not useful for others. And I think in the case of morality, what we're talking about is how experience arises in this universe and what its character can be and the extremes of happiness and suffering that conscious minds are susceptible to. And what are the material and social and every other kind of requirements to influence those experiences? And so part of that conversation takes us into the classically objective world of in our case talking about neurotransmitters and neurons and economic systems and quote objective reality at every scale that in any given instance may not actually require a human mind to be talked about. But the cash value of all that, if you're talking about morality, is conscious states of conscious creatures and whether they're being made more or less happy in as capacious a definition of happiness or well-being as possible. ### Sam Harris 00:23:03 - 00:24:36 It's a kind of a suitcase word I use to incorporate the range of positive experience the horizon beyond which we can't currently imagine and the opposite being the worst possible misery for everyone. So the status of integers, whether they occupy some kind of platonic zone of existence that is not in fact linked to material reality in any way but we still have to talk about as being real whether or not anyone has discovered it, I actually don't have strong intuitions about that at all. I mean that seems like we I feel like we touched that in our last conversation and I think you could probably argue that one way or the other but to bring it back to what you were just saying I guess there's the physical reality which is often called objective ontologically of chemistry and physics. There are things like integers which are not as you just said dependent on what we know about atoms but then there are the experiences of conscious systems whether or not we can ever understand what those experiences are. They have a certain character and that character depends upon the whatever material requisites exist for those conscious systems but that hasn't been worked out and it's also it may and even if you work that out perfectly it's still it's the subjective side of that coin that is of interest. ### David Deutsch 00:24:37 - 00:27:14 So yes it's funny just at the end you said what I was about to say. It took me a while. So I know that you use the term science for example more broadly than some people and I think that's quite right so do I and so you and I both use it to encroach on things that some people who think they're purists would like to exclude from science but to expand science you know so therefore part of philosophy you can call part of science and the Popper's criterion of demarcation is not intended to be either sharp or pejorative you know or criterion of meaning or worthwhileness or anything like that. It's just a matter of convenience a matter of convenient classification of subject matter. If you want to extend the term science to cover certain things that are traditionally considered philosophy like the interpretation of quantum theory for example which I think is definitely part of science and but then if you want to sort of make the connection between human well-being and neuroscience then you know you're trying to encroach on neurophilosophy as it were and neurophilosophy is epistemology. Once you've extended it to neurophilosophy and into epistemology you run into a deep fact about the physical world which is that epistemology is substrate independent. It is that once you have once knowledge or feelings or consciousness or any kind of information or computation is instantiated in a universal device then the laws it obeys are completely independent of the physics and of the neurology and every kind of physical attribute of the device falls away and you can talk about the properties of those things as abstract things or not perhaps abstract is the wrong word because they're perfectly objective. It's just that they're not atoms right they're not neurons. ### Sam Harris 00:27:15 - 00:28:00 I would just say that I think at this point I'll go with you there I think I think that's probably true but what you're what you seem to be smuggling in there in the leap from atoms is a kind of information based functionalism where we just we're assuming for the purposes of this conversation that we know consciousness to be an emergent property of information processing and it's not some other constituent of physical reality that isn't based on bits but if we assume that it is if it's if it is if it is just something that computers non-biological computers can one day have yeah well then I'm with you. ### David Deutsch 00:28:05 - 00:28:52 This is something that that is generally true of morality that morality has reach if you don't steal a book from a library when you realize that you easily could do so without getting caught. This doesn't just affect you and the library this because this comes from a universal machine which is you this machine has universal theories or theories which try to be universal theories or are universal in some domain or other and when you commit the crime for instance you're changing the facts you're changing something that you can't change back. ### Sam Harris 00:28:52 - 00:29:00 Isn't that change occurring in you assuming that there's no one else who will ever discover your act I mean where else would the change occur but ... ### David Deutsch 00:29:00 - 00:29:34 In you? It's well for example suppose you're telling your children about morality do you say okay well when you're in that library situation it's okay to steal the book because no one will ever find out right or do you say no you shouldn't even in that situation if the first then it's affecting your child as well yeah and if the second then you are lying to a child right which itself has vast implications. Yeah no I'm totally with you there I just let's linger ### Sam Harris 00:29:34 - 00:30:10 On this one point that again it's I understand it's disconcertingly far afield but I just think it's interesting so if you could apply a painless local anesthetic to the child for the purposes of receiving a vaccine that would be a better thing to do and it's being better is the measure of it's or the claim that it's better is synonymous with the claim that it's good to reduce needless suffering and the suffering is both needless and in fact probably harmful ### David Deutsch 00:30:10 - 00:30:24 For the child to whatever degree. Yes I'd say that my first the first line of my critique would be that it violates the human rights of the child but okay there are all these other things which are related. ### Sam Harris 00:30:24 - 00:32:57 I think that the way we interpret and value very powerful stimuli is remarkably susceptible to the conceptual frame around which that experience is held and yes conceptual conceptual frame within which it is held so which is to say your thoughts about your experience and your thoughts about reality are in many cases constitutive of the sum total of the experience and there are many things but this does connect back to I agree with you about human rights and consent to a large degree I think I think we want certainly when you're talking about adults who can consent you want them to be able to consent to various experiences but I can still imagine experiences that are unpleasant that it turns out are very good for a person and you have done them a great favor if you subject them to these experiences and you may in fact I mean this is just kind of a paternalistic claim of a possibility you may in fact be doing someone a favor to subject them to these experiences without their explicit consent if in fact the benefits are so great now I don't know what those experiences are but let's just say it's true that you know a culture finds that there's a certain ordeal that you can put teenagers through and many of the teenagers don't want to do it but it is just so good for you as a human being that strikes me as possible I just don't have an example but I do see I see people who do consent to do things which are really incredibly difficult you know like people become Navy SEALs you know I've met some of these guys and you know they've got they in many cases literally went through hell to equip themselves with the skills they they've got and part of the training is a kind of culling of all the people who are not fit to yes go through the training in the first place and so it is a selection procedure but these guys go through an intense ordeal and come out in many ways enviably strong psychologically and physically as a result and I can see that that there are extreme experiences that we might not want to rule out just in principle as being bad for us ### David Deutsch 00:32:57 - 00:33:40 As I said that they if it's a matter of knowledge if we know this then we have an explanation if we have an explanation we can give it to the people if we have a machine that can detect whether somebody would benefit from Navy SEAL training and it can just detect this by putting it on their head and pressing a button then you would probably find that a lot of people who aren't Navy SEALs would benefit from it and if it's true if the theory on which this machine is based has a good explanation then you should be able to persuade those people to take the training or they might say yeah well but what ... ### Sam Harris 00:33:40 - 00:34:01 It was so what if you can't or what if the benefits you're conferring on someone is so out of reach to them so let's say let's say you have people with severe autism who really can't consent to much of anything and you can't really explain the benefits you're about to give them but the benefit you're about to give them is a cure for autism yes well this reminds me of a you know ### David Deutsch 00:34:01 - 00:34:22 Cure for lesbianism or something I mean there are people who think that raping somebody will do them good under various circumstances but you can't base either a legal system or a moral system on saying that if one thinks that that's true once you do it well no but clearly in that case it's ### Sam Harris 00:34:23 - 00:34:31 Certainly sounds like it's on its face to be a delusional and unethical claim yes we're ### David Deutsch 00:34:31 - 00:34:37 Considering all sorts of implausible things here what I hear you doing is using the ... ### Sam Harris 00:34:37 - 00:34:46 Principle of consent and human rights to trump everything else that it's more epistemology ### David Deutsch 00:34:46 - 00:35:30 Because I don't think human rights are fundamental either they are they are just a way of implementing institutions that promote the growth of knowledge and the reason why knowledge trumps everything else here is fallibilism in all these cases where we have a theory that something is better we're implementing a moral theory and we might be mistaken about that and the it must be a fundamental fact of morality of finding an objective truth of morality that it's immoral to close off the paths to correction of a theory if it turns out to be false ### Sam Harris 00:35:30 - 00:36:11 Oh yeah I'm totally with you there but so but that seems to be asserting my you know underlying claim which is human flourishing conceived as broadly as you want and it's a definition that is continually open in the manner you just described for refinement and you know fallibilism that is the point and you know we want to move in the direction of better and better worlds with better and better experiences and who knows how far that can go but we know it's possible to move in the wrong direction and we never want to we never want to tie our hands and make it impossible to correct ### David Deutsch 00:36:11 - 00:37:22 Course yes so if once you have an institution that allows that this is why consent isn't just a you know a nice thing to have it's a fundamental feature of the way we handle ideas if you have a system that allows people to enforce an idea on another person who disagrees with the idea then the means of correcting errors are closed off you know you imagined people who had a disability or something and couldn't but could be cured of that disability but they couldn't be explained to them and so on well the thing is either those people are in a constant state of suffering in which case applying the thing to them won't change that or there is a thing that they prefer to some other thing and then there will be a path towards the better state that involves just doing things that they prefer like if it involves an injection then it might involve either an anesthetic or getting into a certain mood in which an injection doesn't matter ### Sam Harris 00:37:22 - 00:40:17 Let me give you an example again I want to get back to these core issues but all of this is just I find too interesting I think this is an example that I mentioned somewhere in the moral landscape but I'm not sure the Nobel laureate in economics Danny Kahneman did some research I think he was just associated with this research I don't think he was the main author on this paper but they did some fascinating research on people receiving colonoscopies and this was an at a point where there was no like there was no twilight anesthesia associated with colonoscopy so people really had to suffer the full ordeal and they discovered they were trying to figure out what accounted for the subjective measures of suffering associated with this procedure and also what would positively influence the compliance of patients to come back and get another one on schedule five years later or 10 years later or whatever it was so they found that the this confirmed I don't know if this was the first instance but that but there's something in psychology called the peak-end rule which is your judgment about the character of an experience is largely determined by the peak intensity of the experience whether that was good or bad and what the character of the experience was at the end of the episode so those are the two the real levers you can you can pull to influence whether someone thought they had a good time or a bad time and to test this they gave you know the control group they gave these ordinary colonoscopies and you took the appliance out at the first moment that where it was where the procedure was over but in the experimental condition they did everything the same except they left the apparatus in quite unnecessarily for some minutes at the end providing a low intensity a comparatively low intensity but decidedly negative and again unnecessary stimulus to the subjects and the result was that their impression of how much they had suffered was significantly reduced and their willingness to come back and get a potentially life-saving colonoscopy in the future was increased so the greater percentage of them showed up in five years for the next colonoscopy and so this was a you know by any real measure this was a good thing to have done to these people except what in fact it was if you just take the window of time around the procedure it was prolonging an unpleasant experience without any medical necessity right and yeah so that's so I just want you to there's going to be ... ### David Deutsch 00:40:17 - 00:40:22 A way of telling them that you're doing this and it's still working presumably ### Sam Harris 00:40:22 - 00:40:46 But what if what if in fact is true that the placebo effect is ruined if you if you tell someone that might be what's happening to them or that you've done this thing it's not medically necessary but we're gonna leave this tube in for a few minutes because you're gonna feel better about it afterwards what if that actually cancels the effect again um the universe ### David Deutsch 00:40:46 - 00:41:27 Hasn't got it in for us it doesn't like us at all it doesn't care about us but it hasn't got it in for us if what you just said is the case then you could for example there'll be a way of getting around it for example you could say to them you could say to the patient look there is a way of reducing the amount of perceived suffering of this procedure but it involves a placebo but it won't work if we tell you what the placebo is so um you know do you give us permission to use this placebo and of course the patient will say yes but what can you if that doesn't work ### Sam Harris 00:41:28 - 00:42:25 Can you really some other way but is that really consent because what if we just we run the alternate experiment what if we say we pose it like that to people and then you know 99 percent say sure you know sign me up but we have a another condition where we just now we're just doing research on compliance and we say we tell them exactly what the placebo is in this case we're going to leave the tube in you for five minutes not doing anything and you're going to for that for those full five minutes those will be five minutes where you would have been saying when's this going to be over already and you could have been off the table and driving home but you know now you're still on the table with this tube in you but that's the placebo let's say the people who sign up for that drops down to 17 so now we know that there's all these people in the first condition who are only consenting because you have masked what the placebo is and so in fact they're not really consenting to the thing you're doing ### David Deutsch 00:42:26 - 00:43:29 Uh I think that's still consent rather like you know if you if you uh you don't have to you don't have to be a doctor and have know exactly what the heart surgeon is going to do to your heart in order to um uh consent validly consent to heart surgery and it's the same with the placebo you know if you're told that it won't work if you know what the placebo is but there will be one then you're consenting and the p the one percent who still say no those people are just making supposing it is true those people are simply making a mistake the same kind of mistake as you would be making if this whole theory wasn't true you know we can't you can't uh um bias the rules under which people interact towards a particular theory that they disagree about. ### Sam Harris 00:43:29 - 00:44:15 But there are people who have ideas about reality and ideas about how we should all live within it which are so perverse and incompatible with everything we could reasonably want to do in this world that we do have to we have to wall off their aspirations from the rest of what's going on I mean whether that's locking them in prison because they just are so badly behaved or just exiling them in some way from the conversation you know so again but the people I use are like you know the Taliban or ISIS you know they don't they don't get to vote on our public policy and for good reason because their votes would be crazy um ### David Deutsch 00:44:15 - 00:47:01 Yes well we again we have institutions we try to tune the institutions to have the property that um uh the political institution should have the property that disputes between people are resolved without violence and the moral institutions include the idea that participating and obeying such institutions is morally right and also in interpersonal relationships that don't involve the law we still want we want a bit better than that we want we want interpersonal relationships not only to resolve disputes without violence but we want them to resolve disputes without any kind of coercion an institution that institutionalizes coercion about something is ipso facto irrational now I'm not saying that I know of institutions that achieve this perfectly I'm saying that this is a rough criterion any more than I do in the political case I'm saying that that's the criterion by which institutions should be judged by how well they are how good they are at resolving disputes between people without violence without coercion so but there are people people who are not rational actors who occasionally have to be coerced right yeah uh well um sometime in the future we'll know of a way we already have ways of getting along which involve far less coercion like that as Steven Pinker has pointed out than what was needed to stabilize society you know 100 years ago 200 years ago and I expect this to continue and there you know one day somebody might invent a way of curing the most fanatical mass murderer uh you know terrorist mass murderer and converting him to a benign religion or to atheism or whatever but you know initially when this is invented this is fabulously expensive because it involves putting him into a into a artificial community with thousands of actors who have to be trained to act in a certain way towards him and blah blah blah and so under those circumstances we still wouldn't do it even though it was possible to save him it's still better to imprison him because the institutions couldn't survive if we had to spend billions of pounds on every terrorist but once it's down to thousands of pounds we might we might um uh if we knew how to do it then we certainly would do it. ### Sam Harris 00:47:01 - 00:47:08 What if he what if he didn't want it done to him what if he wanted to remain a psychopath terrorist ### David Deutsch 00:47:08 - 00:48:06 So the way I see that is that um you know he he'd have been caught at some point and then he'd have been put on trial and then he'd be sentenced and then these methods would have the property that they would they would uh you know so a good method might have him consent to what was happening after a month and the better one would have him consent after a week and you can imagine millions of years in the future there will be methods so sophisticated you know that they will involve things like doing a brain scan and discovering some memories of his and working out a customized treatment for him which involves the sun coming out from behind a cloud at the exact moment when he leaves the courthouse and so on so I think there's no limit to no limit to the possibility of removing evil by knowledge. ### Sam Harris 00:48:06 - 00:48:46 Yeah well I agree with you there and in that case it's no longer evil it's just bad luck you were the victim of bad luck to be the kind of person who wanted to be a terrorist or who was you know biologically susceptible to be the terrorist and once we have the cure for terrorism or the cure for psychopathy or anything else that falls under the rubric of evil at the moment there'd be no more moralizing about it than there is moralizing about a cure for diabetes we would just give the killer I mean he would still... ### David Deutsch 00:48:46 - 00:48:59 Say after he'd been cured he would still say um what I did was wrong yeah I mean I think it would be a bit more than to say what I did was a mistake it's different oh no he might he might be horrified by what he did ... ### Sam Harris 00:48:59 - 00:49:03 He might say that's I can't believe I was the kind of person who wanted to do that ... ### David Deutsch 00:49:03 - 00:49:10 Yeah although that that could be cured too but you can imagine a feeling of gratitude to ... ### Sam Harris 00:49:10 - 00:49:30 No longer be that person once he was restored to yes you know decent humanity by the cure that's what in my view that completely negates the underlying ethic or the claimed ethic of justice as a matter of retribution you know the way oh yes we're punishing people because they deserve it ... ### David Deutsch 00:49:30 - 00:49:41 On some level I agree it's just a matter of operating the institution which is the best institution we have for achieving this um absolutely vital purpose. ### Sam Harris 00:49:41 - 00:49:53 One thought experiment that may expose something of interest or not but and then I then I want to just ask you what you think we actually disagree about because I think I've lost sight of it ... ### David Deutsch 00:49:53 - 00:49:57 There's one more important thing I want to say about your book but okay carry on. ### Sam Harris 00:49:57 - 00:50:27 Yes well I guess so imagine that this future of completed science of the mind where we not only understand the brain basis or the computational basis of every possible experience but we can we can intervene as completely as we would want so you know I now have this machine that I can put on your head and you can we can dial in any possible conscious state it's just this perfect experience machine. ### David Deutsch 00:50:27 - 00:50:41 Well wait but we'll we'll always have limited knowledge and therefore the only states we'll be able to download are the ones with knowledge that we already know the vast majority of possible states will always be unknown, I mean the infinite majority will always be unknown. ### Sam Harris 00:50:41 - 00:50:48 Can't we use this device to plumb experiences that have yet to be characterized ### David Deutsch 00:50:48 - 00:50:54 Well there are exponentially many of them so we can't because we won't know all of them. ### Sam Harris 00:50:54 - 00:51:02 No I'm not claiming that there's a finite number of experiences and we'll know all of them but there's there is the experience of ... ### David Deutsch 00:51:02 - 00:51:08 Knowing tomorrow's scientific discovery which we will never be able to download into somebody ### Sam Harris 00:51:08 - 00:53:31 Until tomorrow right I would exclude all experiences of that type I'm talking about conscious states I mean let's let's just say we've recorded let's trim it down to something simpler but let's say we've taken a range of people who are good candidates for having the best sorts of human experiences so we've taken you know the best scientists and the best and the most saintly people in the ethical space and the best athletes and the most creative artists and we've we not only have recorded their experience and you're able to sample their direct experience but we've extrapolated from their experience and the various commonalities among different classes of experience and we have produced kind of novel experiences that are in some ways even better or certainly more extreme or just fundamentally new to the human mind so that you take a little bit of John von Neumann and you take a little Mozart or their equivalents that we have access to and you throw in you know what it's like to be Lionel Messi scoring his you know record-breaking goal and you can get all this tuned up in various ways and you've got all the time in the world to explore various states of consciousness to see which you prefer so my question is there's something about my thesis that presupposes that we will converge on the value of those kinds of experiences that you and I will not have radical disjunctions in our sense of what is good given an ever-expanding menu of possible experience and if we do have disjunctions if you if you really like experience you know 45 and I really like 46 and I detest 45 and vice versa well then that difference will have an explanation about you know a neurological one or so you know computational one which will also be open for revision then the question is you know how should we change our intuitions about what is good in light of what is possible and is it good ### David Deutsch 00:53:31 - 00:55:45 To change one's sense of what is good there's a kind of a misconception there about well at least a mismatch between that and how I think of minds so this assumes that there's such a thing as a happy state of mind that's that's like orthogonal to the question of what is being processed so you say you know can be as happy as Mozart that that kind of omits the question of what specific music what specific problem are you solving as Mozart are you solving one of the ones that he solved when he was alive one of the specific ones well then in that case you're just repeating an experience which is not the same as I mean that isn't can't be what happiness consists of because we need to make progress so we're I think we're more characterized by our problems than by our particular ideas at a particular time what are the problems so a happy person is somebody who has a set of problems which are hard enough to be worthwhile devoting a lot of effort to interesting enough and yet not so hard that you can't make any progress and these problems will consist of conflicts between theories the conflicts again must be interesting and so now it's not obvious that you can download this into something without it simply being a recreation of the individual person you know if I get if I get a download of Mozart's theories as they were at a particular time then it's I don't think it would be I could sort of have the equivalent of remembering what it felt like to solve that problem but it wouldn't be my problem unless they unless they managed to integrate it with the rest of me so much that I was actually Mozart in which case what's the point ### Sam Harris 00:55:46 - 00:57:11 Right um one thing I would add here is that I think there are states of consciousness that are clearly extraordinarily pleasant and it's the kind of pleasantness that does that does shine through in moments where we are we're solving problems in satisfying ways but you can tap into this pleasure in a way that isn't at all dependent on having interesting problems to solve or successfully solving them and some ways of tapping into this pleasure certainly seem pathological or at least it's that these experiences don't allow you to solve interesting problems and your ability to wallow in the pleasure is predicated on your neighbor solving some interesting problems so if you want to be a heroin addict and just lie on the couch all day and dissolve into the bliss of a heroin high well you may be able to do that I mean let's say there's a maybe we could probably pick a drug that's you know hasn't been discovered yet or invented yet that's better than heroin but it doesn't have its obvious downside but just being able to sustain that you know pure opiate pleasure it may be something which if you could compare that experience to the experience of being Mozart you would actually prefer the experience of being on you know heroin plus but you might ### David Deutsch 00:57:11 - 00:57:14 I think not I think only at first ... ### Sam Harris 00:57:14 - 00:57:39 Yeah well that's true so that's that just remains and that's an empirical question that remains to be seen and I share that intuition but at the very least let's just say that's true let's grant the sort of depressing case that you know the kind of the Aldous Huxley style punch line which is we all just want to be medicated into oblivion and that's what we would in fact prefer if we if we could get our hands on ... ### David Deutsch 00:57:39 - 00:58:53 I think we can't I think this is a myth that people can be trained to interpret heroin as so pleasure isn't joy and people can be trained by our culture and by their circumstances for instance if they haven't experienced much joy to interpret pleasure as joy but it doesn't fulfill the same function in the mind and it's particularly insidious because when you first experience it might well be joy because then you're investigating a new experience and then and the new way of being and you know new sensations and so on and that is interesting and therefore can be joy but once you're once you're doing this every day and it's your way of life then it gives you nothing and if you nevertheless interpret that nothing as being good then well that's like being dead you know it's not a human state of mind and I think I think in reality the vast majority of actual heroin addicts stop of their own accord because they're bored with it the problem you've just described though ### Sam Harris 00:58:53 - 00:59:06 The difference between mere pleasure and joy is obviously a problem that we could overcome with yet more knowledge so more knowledge would allow us to bridge that and you could create this ... ### David Deutsch 00:59:06 - 00:59:47 Kind of perfect oblivion that included joy I don't think so because what you know now you're assuming that there's kind of a joy receiving center in the brain which receives messages from the creating something center and then but if you could simulate the former center artificially then that would just do, but I don't think it can possibly be like that that I think the only way you can create joy artificially is by downloading some state of a person who is experiencing joy and then you would be that person but haven't you ever had a so I mean this again this is an empirical ### Sam Harris 00:59:47 - 01:00:33 Question and you might be right but what I'm imagining here is now forget about drugs now we're talking about something that's more like the matrix where you could you know every mind could be just consigned to this oblivion which could be as creative or as apparently creative as you like but it would in fact be isolation where it's just a it's just a simulacrum where you're not actually dealing with other minds you know you've lost reality and you're now in virtual reality and but virtual reality is so good and so creative and so conducive to joy that is, is there in your mind ethically is there an important difference between being in reality and being in some kind of dreamscape of our own invention ### David Deutsch 01:00:33 - 01:01:23 Not from the person's point I mean assuming that he's gotten into this thing voluntarily no it's that what in that case what he's experiencing is real joy generated genuinely generated by his own mind in the same way that that any other joy is and actually this matrix like thing is not so far from the truth if we if we're thinking of for example a pure mathematician you know Hardy said that a nice thing about being a mathematician is that you can sit in the armchair after dinner with your eyes shut and nobody knows whether you're working or not right so you know he's in the virtual reality of pure mathematics and he's experiencing great joy and great creativity just in the confines of a few cubic centimeters of brain ### Sam Harris 01:01:24 - 01:01:49 So we produce the matrix like this and we decide to migrate human consciousness into it but then where does consent come into view if new minds are simply spawned into this matrix I mean how is that any I mean you and I didn't consent to be born into the universe there's no one to blame for that would we be blaming the generation of humans who created the matrix for the for all the rest of us? ### David Deutsch 01:01:49 - 01:02:46 Well obviously there are practical issues you know how safe is this thing from real life asteroid strikes and so on but assuming that that kind of problem can be dealt with well then I don't see I mean it is there isn't an ethics I use the word ethics slightly that you use you say ethics and morality almost interchangeably ethics I would use more as just a set of practical rules like the medical ethics you know what doctors have to do to be safe that they won't be criticized morally there would have to be an ethics of creating people in the virtual reality if there was a phenomenon of people sometimes wanting to get out then there would have to be a pass out and that I think that's just a practical problem there's no deep morality there ... ### Sam Harris 01:02:46 - 01:03:10 But you don't have a strong bias so for instance at least the matrix I'm imagining all the people you'd be dealing with wouldn't be real people I mean it would be like you'd be like a dream so everyone would be in there in a dream of their own that would allow for a kind of maximum creativity but you're not in relationship with anything so there wouldn't be ... ### David Deutsch 01:03:11 - 01:05:48 Yeah there wouldn't be genuine collaboration on any problem because the other people wouldn't be creative so you might notice this after a while and this might be but you know some people like it that way it is definitely true that people collaborating can create better and faster than the sum of the individuals but that's only a general rule it's sometimes people like to work by themselves and like to be by themselves you know I'm fairly solitary and so long as they're free to do otherwise so I think in this matrix where there was only one person one real person and the others were zombies I think very few people would want to be there but those who did you know fine it's as long as they are creative that's the fundamental thing by the way I think there's a concept of being entertained by other people or by things or by heroin or by TV programs or whatever that is a mistake we may subjectively feel or we may interpret what's happening as the other thing entertaining us but really the only thing that entertains us is our own creative engagement with it and without that creative engagement nothing can entertain us and this you know when people get this wrong idea about what entertainment is that's the kind of mistake where they where they think that something mechanical such as heroin uh can entertain them there's these uh cliched uh situations where somebody uh wins the lottery and then is miserable and I think that the generic um trap that one can fall into in this sort of situation is by thinking that money can entertain you not realizing that only you can entertain you and same with uh you know rock stars who think that if they had a life of uh as much sex as they like and as much drugs as they like and then so on then they'd be happy and then one in a million of them actually achieves that and they find that they're miserable that that's a cliche which strikes me as very plausible ### Sam Harris 01:05:49 - 01:09:14 Yeah yeah well so I agree with that I think however there is another way to be happy and in some ways it's a more fundamental way of being happy or experiencing well-being which is in some important sense not the result of being creative so I agree with you that that it that there's this just to follow your line through entertainment the opposite of being entertained is being bored and yes but boredom in my experience really is nothing more than a lack of attention and the reason why I say this is so I have this experience of having learned to meditate and I've spent a lot of time practicing various techniques of meditation and you know from the side of one who wants to be creative and solving problems much of this perhaps all of it looks like a quite a crazy and unproductive thing to do so for instance I've done meditation retreats where I've gone into silence for the longest period has been three months on a retreat where you're doing nothing but meditate you know 12 to 18 hours a day depending on how you know how much you're sleeping and the meditation consists of nothing more than paying very close attention to the contents of consciousness and so for the longest time when you're learning to do this the technique is just paying attention to your breath the sensation of breathing and once you have some ability to concentrate on breathing you open it up and you can pay attention to anything that's arising your moods and other sensations and sights and sounds and thoughts themselves arise in consciousness but for the purposes of this practice of meditation there's nothing worth thinking about yeah I mean this is it really is and the practice is kind of is inimical to creative thought because you have decided not to follow any train of thought the moment you notice it has arisen and what you what you continually find is that you know when you're meditating you're paying close attention to something the breaths say and then a thought comes upon you in a way that you didn't notice and all of a sudden you're left thinking for five minutes something you know some creative thought or some boring thought whatever it is and then you then you notice that you're thinking you notice the thought itself as an object in consciousness and then you come back to the practice of just being aware but the deeper you go into this which is to say the more concentrated you become the less thoughts intrude and the earlier you notice them and the moment you notice them they unravel and disappear and you're left with just the prior condition of consciousness and so but this becomes a circumstance of absolutely exquisite happiness and well-being and in fact I mean there's much more to say about this but I would say that at least it's not prototypically creative you're not it's not a matter of generating many new concepts or following them to on to new theories or solving problems that require discursive thought so you know ### David Deutsch 01:09:14 - 01:10:55 I know nothing about meditation you know more than what you just told me but so and you know it could be that the whole thing's an illusion but since it's you I doubt it so most thinking is actually unconscious what we're consciously aware of is just the tip of the iceberg and even in our conscious thoughts they're supported by a rich infrastructure of unconscious thoughts and those obey exactly the same epistemology as the conscious ones so they can be creative they can be uncreative they can be irrational they can be rational they can make progress or not and it depends on the same conditions conditions which either promote or inhibit the growth of knowledge in various ways so assuming that at the end of this process you're a better person that is your mind is a better mind that means that that betterness has been created by something and if you're not consciously aware of the process then it's been created by your unconscious mind and it could be that the that under certain circumstances deliberately preventing your conscious mind from doing anything clears some obstacles to creativity in your unconscious mind obstacles are themselves ideas and it could be that there are in fact the unconscious mind almost certainly goes wrong more often than the conscious one so this could simply be a way of enhancing creativity after all ... ### Sam Harris 01:10:55 - 01:12:38 Well actually I would just say nothing really turns on this but it's definitely true that it is and one of the you know this is viewed as an obstacle from the side of meditation but it's you know if you want to be creative you know you can do it from either side but when one is trying to meditate and do nothing but that it's a very common experience to find that you have more and more creative thoughts well if you're a novelist you'll have the best ideas you've ever had for dialogue you should write or stories you should write and suppressing all this or letting go of all this in the interest of staying on retreat can become you know very difficult to do and I've actually had retreats where I failed to do it where I you know I'm intending to do nothing but meditate but I have some idea for something to write or something to think more about that I just convinces me that I you know I should not let go of it and it completely derailed the retreat that is something that happens but the I would just say that the value of the experience is not merely that it equips you to be more creative in the future the value is that there's a there's a fundamental insight here about the nature of well-being itself and the nature of suffering and just the mechanics of human suffering which you can there's a riddle to be solved here which can be solved which allows you yes it allows you to be more creative in the future allows you to be happier in the future that allows you to suffer less in the future which and then all of that is all that's what's important but in the moment too it's it also tastes like it is the experience you want to have in that moment it is. ### David Deutsch 01:12:38 - 01:12:55 If it's true that it's your unconscious mind being creative then that's exactly what you'd expect you'd expect an unconscious well-being to permeate up and then you become aware of it which previously hadn't been happening because something was something in your conscious mind was preventing it. ### Sam Harris 01:12:55 - 01:13:17 The way it seems to me is more that there's you're ceasing to do something that you are deeply conditioned to do and have become helplessly doing all the time in other states of consciousness which is negatively creative which is to say it's creative of neurosis and fear and anxiety yes and all the rest yes ### David Deutsch 01:13:18 - 01:13:25 Yes so you cease to do that yeah creative yes well I feel like you haven't we haven't totally ### Sam Harris 01:13:25 - 01:13:31 Nailed what we might disagree about because I'm just feeling an ocean of agreement yeah just as a ... ### David Deutsch 01:13:31 - 01:17:24 Last thing let me just say that the overview of your book I mean I think your book achieves its purpose and it is a uh very timely and important purpose and if I have criticism of the sort of fundamental logic of it I can't even say that I'm sure that if it had been written to conform to what I think what I'm about to say it would have achieved its purpose better so I don't know whether it would or not um but as a matter of truth so I want to take the same attitude towards moral theories as Popper does towards scientific theories and therefore regard all the theories about morality which claim to give it a foundation as being mistaken but all of them have more or less value uh some of them much less and some of them much more regarded not as ideas about morality but as critiques so I think that say for example so there are lots of different uh suggestions for the foundation like you know Kant's categorical imperative and utilitarianism and Rawls's justice as fairness and the will of God you know and human flourishing so all those uh are proposals for the foundations of morality but if you regard them instead as critiques then I think they are they're all quite valuable um uh and human flourishing could be interpreted as a sort of as an improvement on what went before as a critique so you can say for example you know with utilitarianism uh they were able to say you know um if um uh what we're supposed to do what morality consists of is um going to church every Sunday what purpose does this serve and if it doesn't serve any purpose it's up to the person who advocates it to um to make the case. It's a prima facie critique of something that it doesn't have a purpose and so that therefore it puts the onus on the on the religious morality person to explain why although usually if something doesn't have a purpose we can reject it in this case we should not reject it then he could say well because God said so and then there is the standard critique of religiously based anything of how can we tell the difference between that claim and someone else's claim to have uh based on a different God or a different holy book or whatever what criterion should we use and if he says well the criterion is that our one is correct then uh that is a bad explanation because everyone else could use the same criterion so it doesn't it's the criterion that isn't a criterion uh so I think human flourishing is a similar but utilitarianism regarded as a fundamental theory is rubbish um it uh you know regarded as a critique of other theories it's very powerful and I think your uh thing is like utilitarianism but it also has elements of some of the other uh it also has elements of plain common sense which is often forgotten by these theorists ### Sam Harris 01:17:24 - 01:18:27 Let me just recharacterize my foundation a little bit differently because it's not so much that it's certainly not merely human flourishing it's because it extends to all possible conscious systems but my base claim is that there is a space of possible minds and possible experiences and there are experiences that are better and worse than others whether or not we'll ever discover them whether or not the requisite minds could make judgments about them but the worst possible misery for everyone is bad if the word bad is going to mean anything and I think that is as foundational a claim as we ever make in science about anything and the foundation upon which even Popperian science is based it seems to me is just a claim about there being a larger reality than the one we currently have in hand which is to say there's stuff we can be confused about there's stuff... ### David Deutsch 01:18:27 - 01:18:51 It's not a foundation in the sense of being uncriticizable we can always say why that criterion and not another criterion why assume that we exist why assume that there is a truth I think that one is giving up unnecessarily if one says well there are some things you just have to accept on faith you have to start somewhere I don't think you have to start somewhere and I think all claims to start somewhere are fallacies ### Sam Harris 01:18:51 - 01:19:18 Can't you start with consciousness because because for me I mean consciousness as defined that there's something that is like to be what you are in this moment which is to say you don't know if you're this might be a dream you might be a brain in a vat you might be confused about everything but the fact that there's a starting point the fact that ... ### David Deutsch 01:19:18 - 01:20:04 There's consciousness it doesn't get us anywhere you have a certain substantive conception of what it is to be conscious and as we've discovered in this conversation different people can have different conceptions for example I prefer to think of the mind as a dynamic thing that's constantly not self-consistent whereas other people would regard well you regard happiness sort of more as a state and I think that you can't separate it from the specifics of what it is so that you there's no such thing as downloading Mozart's happiness without downloading his ### Sam Harris 01:20:04 - 01:21:24 Actual problems I agree with that it's just that there is I think there are two levels to it but I agree with you that this comes back to the framing issue just that the fact that certain experiences of suffering or unpleasant experience can be framed in such a way that they seem to be great you know peak experiences of well-being but I but I but all of all of that is again these are just empirical claims that could be borne out more or less so for instance if someone could you know you're going to have your next year of creative thought now and it will be whatever it will be you know you're a mountaineer of physics experiencing pleasure and pain but even the pain is adding to the interest say to some degree but some pains aren't let's say let's say we could add yes we could add something to your tea every morning which would make you just a little bit happier in the conventional sense throughout all of that creativity and theorizing and let's just say there's an optimal way to dial it so that it's just a fact about you that it could be yeah it could be twice as pleasant as you're tending to have it and you'll be just as creative right so I think yes I think we should do that ... ### David Deutsch 01:21:25 - 01:21:37 But I don't think it would add I don't think the um flourishing meter would register this even though we should do which I suppose is an argument against your theory ### Sam Harris 01:21:38 - 01:22:16 Why would you say that because if you lost this thing but let's well let's let's go let's go better than double let's say by a factor of five or ten so that the kinds of days you would have going forward if you reviewed your history of being a conscious being you would recognize that the days that you're going to have 300 days this year that previously each one of which would have been the best day of your life previously and you're still going to be as creative nothing will be lost in terms of you know will you get any things done you're saying that the flourishing ### David Deutsch 01:22:16 - 01:23:47 Meter wouldn't register that yes I mean I've slightly lost track of exactly what you're putting in my tea here it's good if it's the either it's going to be a mindless thing in which case as I say it is worth doing so we are we are accustomed to levels of physical comfort that would have been inconceivable even you know 50 years ago or 100 years people like, say, Newton or Mozart lived lives of incredible awkwardness and uncomfortableness and you know that it was never never really warm in the winter and it was never really cool in the summer and the bath was never the right temperature and the food never tasted quite right and they were constantly in danger of various kinds and their clothes itched and you know I could go on forever and ever and yet they were happy it was possible to be happy under those circumstances it's definitely worth the change and if only for the fact that that the change itself is a creative and a beneficial thing but once you've done the change once you've had it once and for all I don't think you're any happier for having had that comfort the I think the only thing that actually makes you happy is actually creating but it's understandable coming from ... ### Sam Harris 01:23:47 - 01:24:30 You but it seems like a narrow definition of happiness that that a scientist and an artist could easily sign on to but many people who can still register differences in their happiness changes in their well-being would not really recognize so for instance what has happened when you're going along you're very happy you're as fulfilled as you've ever been but then you know your wife dies or your child dies and now you're not as happy for obvious reasons but those reasons aren't best summarized by a sudden lack of creativity on your part I think they are I ### David Deutsch 01:24:30 - 01:24:49 Think that the reason why you're unhappy is that your the um your previous methods of making progress in thinking were tied to these people who have died and you can't just instantly replace what you would have got from them by something else ### Sam Harris 01:24:49 - 01:24:57 But then what do you mean by progress because because this I just said progress I caught your accent what do you mean ### David Deutsch 01:24:57 - 01:26:41 By progress well remember you know I'm not I'm not uh I'm not snobbish about what kinds of knowledge count as knowledge all all kinds of not all any kind of state of mind which one regards as preferable to another state of mind can't be reached without creativity and reaching it is kind of what happiness is so somebody who uh doesn't isn't interested in science and isn't interested in art or any of the things usually regarded as progress or creativity might still be thinking about something all it takes is for them to be a better person in regard to x after the thought than before and x might be might be anything might be something that's impossible to name it doesn't have a name because it's not socially valued but it might be um you know a particular way of interacting with the family but they would have to be improving it they would have to be you know if they think back they would think yes uh I um I could have done I could have done it better and now I am doing it better and even if that's you know enacting Jewish rituals uh at anything like that you can get anything that you can get into and improve at by your own standard takes creativity and that that's what it takes and lots of people don't do even that and I think they're in a in a bad way even if they are saying that they're not ### Sam Harris 01:26:42 - 01:27:47 Right right so then to come back to the fundamental disagreement which has something to do with my reliance on fundamentals or my my hands my hand waving in the direction of a foundation here I may have seemed to be doing that more than I was or that or I mean some of that may be dispensable for me but so come to the my argument about the worst possible misery for everyone being bad what is wrong what's wrong with that claim so I mean just imagine a universe in which yes anything that can suffer any conscious system that can exist and can suffer suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can, and nothing good comes of it there's no silver lining to the suffering. This is just the worst possible hell that exists my sense is that everything so that's one possible state of the universe and everything else is better than that everything everything else is better than that ... ### David Deutsch 01:27:48 - 01:28:14 Yes I'm not denying that there's a that there are objectively better and worse states and that's one of the ones that's objectively worse whether but that's my I would agree about that's my which well the thing is different theories of morality and different theories of human flourishing will disagree about exactly which is the worst possible state ### Sam Harris 01:28:16 - 01:28:21 Well no no because I think okay well let's just so then so then the image for me of ... ### David Deutsch 01:28:22 - 01:28:40 The moral landscape again you can't download this worst possible state into me just by itself without looking at the details of what is actually happening any more than you can download Mozart's happiness oh yeah so I'll grant you that so but let's let's just say that ... ### Sam Harris 01:28:40 - 01:29:19 So we have a universe of a finite number of beings we'll talk about the worst possible misery for everyone at time t which is you know which is obviously defined by who everyone consists of so there's all whatever beings are here are here and each is as miserable as he or she or it can possibly be given the sort of being it is and given its entanglement with all other beings so listen we just we just make this as bad as it can be there may be some vagaries here where you know if you make something really really bad for one being things get a little bit ### David Deutsch 01:29:19 - 01:29:23 Better for another being given how they're entangled with each other no no never mind that never mind ### Sam Harris 01:29:24 - 01:30:22 Yeah let's just make it you know you know if there's one worst possible there are a finite number of worst possible states for all these beings to be in yeah and if we change that if we if we start making life better for them you know all together or even just some of them that's moving in a direction that we will call good and there is no other way to so what I'm claiming here is that any theory you have about goodness has to entail moving away from that worst possible misery for everyone if it's going to be Kant's categorical imperative it's going to be deontology if it's going to be religion if it's going to be consequentialism it's going to be virtue ethics it's going to be something that has yet to be invented it has to recognize that navigation in this space of possible experiences away from the worst possible misery for everyone ### David Deutsch 01:30:23 - 01:32:01 Is what is in fact the cash value of goodness yeah though once you're more than a millimeter away from this worst possible state there are lots of ways of getting better and some of them are better than others and a lot of you know once you get as far away from that as we are uh many things affect what people think is right and wrong good or what people think is flourishing and the worst possible state if it could exist I'm not sure that it can but if it could exist if it's if it's unique or if there's some equally bad ones which everyone would agree were equally bad and the worst they have the property that you can move away from it without creativity because you can simply download any other state into those people's brains but once you get a certain distance away and that sort of amount of getting better isn't worth very much it's um you know it's saying okay you're cured you know you're cured of cancer now you are happy and the person isn't because they were happy before and now they're back in the state um that they were in and or you know you let someone out of prison and they go back to their old life uh and the fact that it's all better than the worst possible one doesn't actually resolve disagreements about what is worse or better well yeah so that but then that's why my ### Sam Harris 01:32:02 - 01:32:27 My metaphor of the moral landscape seems relevant to me here because I acknowledge that there are there are peaks and valleys here which we may disagree about and we and we it may in fact both be right so for instance there could be an equivalent peak some distance from where we are where human beings just like ourselves could live very different lives that would strike us as ... ### David Deutsch 01:32:27 - 01:32:34 Morally perverse and yeah in that case there's an even better peak which is better than either ### Sam Harris 01:32:34 - 01:32:47 Exactly exactly so and we'll never discover it because we just are unlucky or we just don't have the right minds to discover it we'd have to change our minds change our brains since we're ### David Deutsch 01:32:47 - 01:32:52 General purpose I don't think that's possible well you'd have to augment you'd have to you'd ### Sam Harris 01:32:52 - 01:33:18 Have to give us more memory and more processing yes and all the rest yeah we already do that routinely right so but in any case it's just it's just a contingent fact of the history of the cosmos that Homo sapiens will not explore this one peak that could be explored with the right technology and it is better it's better in every in every rational way we could talk about better and worse than what we've done ### David Deutsch 01:33:18 - 01:33:21 We'll just find an even better one and bypass that one ... ### Sam Harris 01:33:22 - 01:33:31 Right but yeah and so this could continually recede so like some peaks are yes we'll never arrive at the peak right yes or what will seem to be a peak will recede ### David Deutsch 01:33:32 - 01:33:52 Based on you know more computational power given to us yes well I actually I think that the real fact is that whenever we make a great discovery it creates more problems so the same is true of morality we get better and then we find that that getting better itself ### Sam Harris 01:33:52 - 01:34:01 Creates more problems right but they're not problems they're more refined problems you're trying to figure out whether you should be a vegetarian not whether you can rape all of your ... ### David Deutsch 01:34:01 - 01:34:07 Well there's also um you know we've abolished war and therefore we find self-defense more problematic ### Sam Harris 01:34:08 - 01:34:19 Right right but that but that those are kind of local wrinkles based on just how many of us are still barbarians or how bad our institutions are ... ### David Deutsch 01:34:21 - 01:34:47 Creating order in our world. I mean, we are still apes yeah all problems are parochial but I think the fact that improvements create new problems is a universal fact and it'll always be true so we will a peak will only look like a peak when we're approaching it when we're at it we'll see lots of problems there right but I but you can imagine how ethereal ### Sam Harris 01:34:48 - 01:35:26 And high-class these problems could become right I mean imagine perspective yeah yeah but even from the perspective of I mean because certainly certainly you've been in some state of high creativity and high pleasure and very low physical complication where if that could just endure for the longest time the kinds of problems you would be noticing are the fun problems of which is more beautiful a or b as opposed to you know I can't get the cockroaches ### David Deutsch 01:35:26 - 01:35:58 Out of my kitchen and I'm driving me crazy I don't know I mean I think I'm agnostic on that one I how well for example will there always be existential problems I don't know I don't know why there should be a limit on the size of mistake we can make well that's yeah that is a problem yeah um so I think that there always is there always is a way we can ... ### Sam Harris 01:35:58 - 01:36:16 Improve but we may not take that way but by your own description we tend to successfully automate the solutions to these problems in a way that doesn't require any more work so that like you don't have to you don't have to reinvent clothing you just buy a new jacket when you need one and ... ### David Deutsch 01:36:16 - 01:37:10 The problem is solved yeah but uh you know in a few billion years time uh we'll have an existential problem that we have to get out of the solar system or because the sun is going to become a red giant right and uh who knows what kinds of moral problems will be raised by presumably not the problem of who gets to leave because by that time we'll have very powerful machinery but you know I don't know maybe by that time there are whole classes of severity that will not be known anymore um but as I said I don't see why that should be I how can there be a limit on the size of mistake we can make um that that would seem to be an engine for producing truth which can't exist uh without creativity so I don't know I don't know um well may that be our biggest ### Sam Harris 01:37:10 - 01:38:51 Problem yeah yeah yeah how to escape a red giant in time yeah it'll take me re-listening to this to see where and to what degree I've lost the thread of our disagreement but I'm not sure I think my summary of our disagreement insofar as I understand it is that you are allergic to the concept of there being a foundation to knowledge moral moral or otherwise and you follow Popper in this line and I basically I think I agree with you insofar as what you tend to mean by foundation except I view this claim about reality exceeding our knowledge which is to say reality exists whether we know about it or not and this includes possible experiences I feel like that's the only foundation I need to get the ball rolling in and then I'm happy to have it roll in a Popperian sense of it being open-ended kind of endlessly open-ended and requiring continuous correction to our theories and the way I've thought about it without really thinking about Popper but I do think about morality as just a navigation problem and just forget about the concept of moral truth or truth at all we are conscious systems that are moving in a space of possible experience and we will continually discover that some are better and some are worse some are more creative some are less so and we're not wrong to be wanting to move away from the ... ### David Deutsch 01:38:51 - 01:39:04 Worst possible misery for everyone and up some peak we'll be changing our opinion of what constitutes better and worse and we'll be doing that by the methods of reason right uh not I think ### Sam Harris 01:39:04 - 01:39:09 Predominantly. I think this is maybe an even more fundamental disagreement between us ### David Deutsch 01:39:09 - 01:40:33 I think not predominantly by the methods of science there's... so I'm just looking at your book and that that you quote somebody or other as saying there couldn't be a science of the human condition and you're very scathing about that you describe that as faith in the intrinsic limits of reason right but I think it I mean again you use the word science in a slightly different way uh but I have I have um faith if you like in the non-existence of limits on reason right but and the reason that there are limits on science is a very prosaic reason it's not that there's an impenetrable barrier it's just that prosaically you can't use theories to address issues that theories aren't about but you can form theories about the things that it is about you know moral things you can improve those by the methods of reason and science is occasionally relevant but I don't think it's fundamentally relevant or especially neuroscience because neuroscience has its effect via a universal machine which blanks out all relevance of its details the fundamental thing there is that yes that that is might be ... ### Sam Harris 01:40:33 - 01:42:18 In stating that point about there couldn't be a science of human nature is really it is synonymous with the faith in reason that I share with you and the fudge there is that I do have this more elastic definition of science yeah and yeah because I just view things that don't I mean I because the again the boundary between science and the rest of reason is not clear and we will continue to surmount it in surprising ways so it's suddenly something that didn't it all seem open to science a moment ago is all of a sudden something that we you know people in white coats are testing the veracity of so I mean one example is I think I use this in the book or somewhere where you know the question of you know is the Shroud of Turin really a and a relic of the historical Jesus or not well that's a religious claim it's a claim about history it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem a claim about science at all but then all of a sudden you someone invents the method of radiocarbon dating and now it's a claim about chemistry or physics depending on who's doing the experiment and I just noticed that that's that's continually happening and going to happen and going to happen even more and the direction and it's and it's unidirectional right it only goes toward science and never away science keeps capturing this ground and no longer and doesn't lose it right so the moment you have radiocarbon dating and you're going to ask whether a piece of cloth came from a certain period in history well it's a scientific question today and it's a scientific question tomorrow I don't expect science at any point is going to say actually we're no longer in the radiocarbon dating business ### David Deutsch 01:42:19 - 01:42:35 Once we're all in the matrix for example if we decide to all migrate into a matrix and stay there then all questions about what we should do next will not be scientific questions apart from extending the machine or something right ### Sam Harris 01:42:35 - 01:43:58 Well let's plant a flag there that is a fascinating topic for a future conversation obviously the question about where this is all headed technologically is not going away and is only going to become more and more interesting so some podcast hence I think you and I can talk about that but I don't know that there's no question at all that I could have written that book better than I did because it's actually it's actually the bowdlerized version of my dissertation and the reason why the neuroscience is in there is because it was a it was a you know there were there were two two fMRI experiments at the center of that dissertation which you know were connected to my thesis but I totally take your point there which is that the neuroscience is not central in principle or in practice to many of these questions you know but in terms of understanding what well-being is at the level of human beings and their lives questions about what is happening in the brain are potentially always relevant and you know we can ignore them when it's easier to talk about thoughts than it is to talk about neurotransmitters well then that's fine but then the conversation always can come back to the details of neuroscience you know when relevant ### David Deutsch 01:43:59 - 01:44:27 Relevant when we're not talking about something on the universal level like for example how exactly emotions are related to sensations that's partly a matter of hardware yeah and how sensations are interpreted especially visual ones that's also partly a matter of hardware and there are also surprising ### Sam Harris 01:44:27 - 01:47:23 Connections so there are things that we can discover about the brain based on the rather crude techniques of neuroimaging as they currently exist which can lead us to understand connections that we may have never noticed on the on the subjective side I know one example I use in the book is it's not the best example because you could have noticed this subjectively although not that many people have I think but there was an experiment done on envy and schadenfreude so it was just found that people tend to feel schadenfreude for people whom they envy right so there's a connection like there was a, and I could be getting the details slightly wrong because it's been now years since I looked at that paper but there was a neuroimaging experiment that showed a connection between feeling schadenfreude for people you know when you see someone trip on ice and you feel you know the surge of happiness you will tend to feel that more for people whom you envy so when you see the rich woman you know you know bejeweled with her you know Christmas shopping bags in both hands slip on ice you will feel a surge of schadenfreude which you might not have felt for a homeless person slipping on ice and envy is somehow so there's a relationship between schadenfreude and envy let's just let's just assume that's a fact about us psychologically subjectively the common neurological real estate that that can be found in an experiment could help us to discover that about ourselves and there may in fact be things that you would never notice subjectively but which are there to be noticed which discoveries about the hardware point you to and actually one example I think historically if I'm not mistaken is the optic blind spot I think that the fact that we understood the anatomy of the retina and that it would dictate a blind spot is what caused people to first notice the blind spot subjectively by closing by closing one eye and you know putting a dot on a piece of paper and moving it once you realize that the optic nerve is transiting through the retina and there's going to be part of the retina that's not registering any information then people went in search of the blind spot and found it I believe that's true but in any case it you know whether or not it was historically true it's certainly it could have been true yeah that sort of thing could be true easily yes yeah neuroscience for me is relevant in all of those ways but for any for the purposes of any conversation you know certainly need not be brought in and may in fact just be complicating things unnecessarily for the purposes of that conversation I want to also give you an award for the best possible blurb that is non-committal and not obviously denigrating which is the book achieved its purpose full stop ### David Deutsch 01:47:24 - 01:47:39 That is that is a big accolade no no no but it could it could it might might also be given to Mein Kampf for some other book oh yeah okay the book achieved. It's a highly worthwhile and ... ### Sam Harris 01:47:39 - 01:48:18 Necessary part I like the book achieved as far as that reminds me I know someone who works in Hollywood who's constantly in the experience of going to movie screenings and coming out of them just hoping not to run into the filmmaker because he hated the film and you know this person is a friend or a colleague and he doesn't know what to say and how to marshal his euphemism so as not to be totally dishonest but also not totally insulting and I was with him at one of these screenings and I knew he absolutely hated this movie and we run right into the filmmaker as we're walking out and he looked he looked earnestly into the eyes of ... ### David Deutsch 01:48:18 - 01:48:28 The filmmaker and said you must be very proud okay that's nothing like what I said well anyway ### Sam Harris 01:48:28 - 01:49:17 David it's once again it's a thrill to talk to you and I don't know if we made progress that anyone can measure but I certainly feel like I am a better person every time we talk so thank you so if you enjoyed this podcast there are several ways you can support it you can leave reviews on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it you can share it on social media with your friends you can discuss it on your own blog or podcast or you can support it directly at samharris.org/support