#729 - Alex O'Connor - Are People Becoming Less Moral?

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24:17That's how confident they are. They love it. Head to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box that's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. What happens downstream from that in the world of philosophy? I've just a massive migraine basically. People start coming up with arguments, responses. People start saying, oh, maybe it's not justified, I believe. Maybe it's like causally related justification to the cause of the... But presumably, kind of in the same way that I guess a new scientific discovery is made about the way that we metabolize glucose or about what happens if you take this amount of nicotine or the role of metformin in preventing high blood pressure or something.

25:04There are stacked on top of that one assumption, a number of other assumptions, but with philosophy, especially something I imagine, like the philosophy of knowledge, it's so foundational that having this entire universe built on this particular foundation then means that the entire house of cards collapses down and people then need to rebuild all of this nightmare on top of it. Yeah, well most of philosophy is just a consistency test. As it is in something like mathematics, it's just that we accept that there are certain axioms that even mathematical axioms, you know, you can question them. I mean, Veritasium just made a quite good video about Euclidean geometry and how it's sort of just accepted for a very long time that for example, if you have a right angle, then if you sort of join up the two lines coming off that right angle, you'll create a triangle whose interior angles add up to 180 degrees.

26:04And then people start thinking about what about curved geometric spaces. What if you do this on a globe? If you put a triangle on a globe, the angles aren't going to wet up in that way. And these are sort of like axioms of mathematics that essentially, they don't necessarily get proved wrong or thrown out, but people realize that you can think about things differently. And so most of what we're doing is actually just testing for consistency. And so it's actually quite difficult to prove an axiom wrong, because you kind of need an axiom just to get off the ground and the rest of everything you're doing is just consistency tests with that axiom.

26:39This is one of the most interesting things I learned from you, maybe in the first episode that we did, as you were teaching me about the difference between ethics ethics and meta -ethics as someone that isn't formally trained in either. And I use this all the time. It's such an interesting mental model to think that in order for me and you to have a discussion about ethics, our meta -ethical foundation, we need to agree on that. Because out of that, if we don't, the entire ethical discussion on top will just continue to fall back to definitional problems. and what you're presuming that, so you can't discuss this stuff that happens on top if you unless you discuss this stuff that's underneath.

27:18And this is, it's the entirety of the trans debate, right? It's the entirety of lexical overwhelm that if you can't agree on the definition of words, the argument about the words and what they then refer to just collapses in on itself and continuously just falls back to an argument about the definition of what? Yes, this happens with, for example, freedom. There are lots of different ways of conceiving a freedom, famously freedom from and freedom too, right? Is freedom just being left alone or is freedom being empowered to do things that you should be able to do? And then when you have people arguing about nationalized health care, for example, one person says, to be free, you need to be healthy, And one person says, to be free, you need to spend your own money as you please and not be forced to fund other people's healthcare.

28:10Now, both of these people can be right. They're just defining freedom differently. Of course, you're quite right. And that's why Metaethics is quite important. I mean, AJ A .A. pointed out in language truth and logic that the vast majority of ethical debate is not ethical debate. It's descriptive debate. It's factual debate. If you look at the so -called ethical debate around gun laws in America, for example, people are talking about statistics. They're saying, X, many people die per year. are, well, don't you know that more children are killed by swimming pools? Don't you know that, like, if we introduce, you know, if we ban certain types of weapons or blah, blah, that this many less people will die, all these kind of things are just descriptive factual statements that people like to dispute with each other.

28:51And that's why they like to say we have the facts on our side. But the actual ethical question that undergirds at all is hardly ever even reached. And so most of the time people are actually arguing about that. I mean, the same thing with an abortion debate, for example. You know, questions about biology, when does consciousness emerge? Can it survive on its own outside of the womb at this week or this week, you know, this kind of stuff? Will it increase the number of women who die or decrease the number of women who die? But none of these are ethical questions. And people think they're having an ethical debate, when they're actually just having a debate about facts that can be resolved in principle by scientific empirical inquiry.

29:26The ethical question is the more interesting one that's often assumed. and if people think that they agree with each other or understand each other in the same way on that ethical first point, then you're in for a disaster. What do you wish they don't? Yeah, what do you wish that more people could realize when it comes to understanding ethics and consistency and their own lives? Is there something that a little red pill or a particular insight that you wish you could deposit into the mind of the populace that you think would make their lives a little bit more easy or their sense making a bit more simple.

30:00I don't know about making lives easier, but I do think that people should recognize the extent to which emotions dominate our ethical thinking. I mean, I take a... I think it's seen as a relatively eccentric view that ethics just is the expression of emotion. This was something popularized by that same AJ Aya in a book that was so troubling to the philosophical consensus at the time that there's a story of a... I think it wasn't like a maybe a dean of Bailey old college or something who when a student came in, everybody wanted to talk about this book and they were so scared of the implications of it that he literally throws it out of the window because he just doesn't want to talk about it because he was talking about how the only things that can be meaningful are those which are analytically true or empirically verifiable.

30:43If the statement you're making isn't something you can at least imprintsable test empirically or something that's just a topology, two and two was for, then what you're saying is literally meaningless. And people came to him and said, well, what about ethical statements? You can't prove these in principle and they're not total logical. And he said, well, the way that they're meaningful is that they are expressions of emotion. And it gives birth to this view called emotivism, which is really a philosophy of language more than a philosophy of ethics. It tries to describe what people mean when they say good or bad.

31:16And famously, he comes up with this analogy that saying murder is It's like saying, boom, murder. The saying murder is, or you know, saying, give it to charity is good as like saying, yay charity, it's just an expression of emotion. It's not even the same thing as saying, I like charity, or I don't like murder. Because those things can be true or false. They have truth value. It could be true that it is just a psychological fact that I don't like murder. He means murder is wrong, that's the same. And it's just the expression of the emotion. Boom, murder. And I think even if you don't agree with him to that extent, as I more or less do, you, if you begin to recognize the extent to which emotions are dominating your ethical conduct, pay attention to what it feels like when you analyze something as wrong.

31:58I think it belongs in the same category as... Because you've got this sort of sweet of... Super stimulus going on inside of you. What is it like to feel like something is wrong? And we know that people seem to change what they rationally do based on how they're feeling. I mean, I don't know if you've come across terror management theory before. It surprised me if you hadn't. The idea that all human beings are doing is trying to manage their fear of death. And that's what motivates all human activity. And there have been some interesting studies and there's some of them are harder to replicate than others.

32:31But I mean, the first one, the most famous was some, I think, Arizona state judges. And they were being asked to recommend a bond for the solicitation of prostitution. And what the researchers did was they asked them to fill out a form first. And on half of the forms, they just mentioned death. They just put in a few questions about death. What do you think happens after death? Who would you put in your will? That kind of stuff. Nothing too extreme. And they found that the bond that was set by the judges, I think the average bond for the control group was less than $100. And for the ones who reminded that of their death, there's might two or three hundred dollars on average.

33:16What's that imply? So the interpretation of Terra Management Theory was that when we're reminded of our deaths, we need to temporarily more heavily reaffirm the sort of death denying aspects of our culture. The reason that we do things, the reason we create are the reason that we get out of bed, the reason that we have conversations like this. It's because in some way it's traceable back to trying to essentially deny our own death, Ernest Bakker wrote a book called the denial of death. And this is essentially the idea. And so for judges it might be something like by participating in the legal system, they're participating in something that's a bit beyond them and therefore it exists outside of their own mortality.

33:55And so the thesis, this mortality salience hypothesis, as it's known, is that for a judge, if they're reminded of their own death, what they will temporarily be compelled to do is more harshly reaffirm that thing that is, you know, the death denying aspects of their daily life, which is participation in the legal system, so more harsh penalties. Right, okay. That's amazing, the explanation seems a little bit tenuous. I'm not sure about that, but it does seem strange that when you remind people of their own death, they will, you know, Christians and, like Muslims will become more derogatory towards Jews.

34:32People of different nationalities will sit further away from each other. People will, when asked to draw pictures of currency, will draw physically larger pictures of currency. People's opinion on whether they prefer a picture of a forest or a picture of suburban neighbourhood will change on average. These things are extraordinary, just from being reminded of your own death. Of course, the biggest manifestation of the denial of death would be religion. And that would also explain why religion deals a lot with death and why sort of, if you remind people of their own death, they also become religious, which by the way is true of atheists as well.

35:12People who don't believe in God will still become more religious, even if they don't ultimately believe in God when reminded of their own death. Yeah, I um, I've been thinking a good bit recently about how people do an awful lot, especially in the modern world, that is death denialism, masquerading as something else. I think the productivity movement very much is that, you know, trying to fit more into less time. If only I could get more life, more work, more output out of my one unit of days or whatever. I think that a good chunk of the health and fitness world, the longevity movement, the biohacking movement, all of that is absolutely death and ism.

35:53And you can see as well, nutrition, all of the arguments about, is it better for me to be carnivore or vegan? Should I go high carb or low carb? Can I do intermittent fasting? Should I be using ketones exogenously? Ultimately, the reason that I think these arguments are so vehement and passionate, especially when you think it's diet, guys, right? It's diet. It's like, I want to have aspartame, you want to have sugar. Like, how does my aspartame consumption, or impact your sugar consumption? But what it hits at for a lot of people is a certainty about I can predict and project out into the future.

36:39How long I'm going to be able to live or die and I'm going to be able to compare myself to this other person. And their conviction in their particular approach, which derogates my approach implicitly suggests to me, you're going to die sooner. And that causes me to be fucking terrified. And it's the same reason why people are so, how long do you need to do it? It's not VO2 max, it's most important, it's HRV, it's not it's resting heart rate, it's not it's galvanic skin temperature, we're not looking at that, we're looking at telomere length, we're not looking at that, it's whatever, all of the things, you know, the entire field of health and fitness, which I'm a big part of, I think is a good chunk of it, is death to nihilism, just masquerading as getting big biceps.

37:22Yes, sometimes it is more obvious. I think we need more nihilist health influences who will sort of say, you know, I need to, I need to. When the question is asked, you know, should you eat white bread or brown bread or whatever it is, you know, that they'll sort of begin with the question. It sort of depends on your views on the intrinsic value of life. Also, if you're a bit of a utilitarian, I mean, people often say that being unhealthy might be unethical because in a country with nationalized health care, you're a burden, but are you? I mean, who costs the taxpayer more? The person who eats a bunch of burgers and has a heart attack and dies instantly, or the person who lives into old age and therefore has some kind of long term health problem like outside of society.

38:06I need to interject here. So you ring me probably three years ago, four years ago, you ring me and I'm in the gym. And you say something like, what are you doing? So I come in the gym, what are you doing? Just whatever, whatever, catch up a little bit. I was like, what's going on? What's happening? And you said, I'm trying nihilism. And I said, what do you mean? And you went, as a life philosophy, I'm trying nihilism. And I still don't know what you mean. So how is your experiment to make nihilism great again going? Well, I was getting a bit fed up of people saying, oh, you're an analyst. Oh, you're an atheist?

38:49Well, they wouldn't say it in the terms of nihilism. and they say, oh, you're an atheist? Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, there was a cliff of Jordan Peterson on the Lex Friedman podcast. And he says, oh, you're secular, and you go to art galleries, yeah? Well, what makes you think you're secular? And the head turn is real, he does that, you know. I thought to myself, what on earth are you talking about, man? You think you can't be an atheist and enjoy art? Now, I've tried my best to understand what he was getting at, And I think he was trying to basically say that in order to enjoy art, you need to have some kind of value and in order to have any kind of surface level value, you can always ask the why that question.

39:32Why do you value this? You know, the classic sort of why do you go to school to get a good grade? Well, you don't just want the grade, why do you get the grade, you do it to get a good job and so on and so forth happens with value. And so why do you go, why do you value art? Because maybe you value beauty or something. and Peterson's whole thing is that whatever's at the top of this value hierarchy is in his definition divine. People, he just defines it as such. And so he essentially said that like, you know, people claim that they, that they are nihilists, but they don't live like that. I thought, oh, what would it mean to really live like a nihilist?

40:03And you know, I, I guess I tried it on for size, but he's right into the extent that I think most people don't live like their nihilists. Well, the definition of living like a nihilist be. I think it would just mean the rejection of any such thing as a non -contingent reason for acting. Be more accessible. You would need to really think that there's no reason to do anything outside of essentially your crude preferences and biological drives. Right. And I think the reason why people think that nihilism is unlivable is because they have this image of somebody just immediately becoming a Raskolnikov type figure and just committing a murder or something.

40:49But they forget that these people still have their memory, and they're going to be embedded in a culture and an upbringing that their preferences are essentially still going to be aligned. I mean, Pendulette was once asked, if you're an atheist, why don't you kill and assault every person you want to? And he says, I do. I do kill and assault everybody I want to, which is precisely nobody. and very clever, I guess a bit of an applause, but I mean the difficult question ethically is what happens when somebody doesn't have that view, what happens when somebody does just disagree with you, but I don't know.

41:22It was kind of boring. Just to interject that, so you could see the meaning -making machine of society and cultural norms as being useful to constrain the behavior of those outlier people, the ones who would go out and commit the litany of mass murders, but you know mum told me that I'm not supposed to squash bugs when I was five years old and this is now carried on through. But yeah, I think you know for most people we are the descendants of the people who avoided at least for the most part killing people that were close to us and we feel a lot of the time like we're now close to each other. Yes, yes.

42:00I think that's probably true. The issue is that the more that we try to explain in a way these mechanisms, we try to understand why in our evolutionary history we might have evolved certain moral taboos, this kind of stuff. It begins to essentially take the complete ethical force out of it, and that's what people think leads to nihilism. What once you have fully explained why something would be considered immoral, just on evolutionary grounds, you've essentially taken out the moral factor altogether, and you're just explaining it in terms of genetic preference. Yeah, there's no more meaning. There's nothing, there's no additional fluff or feeling of anything.

42:43But this is, you know, I've spent a lot of time over the last few years talking to evolutionary psychologists, evolutionary biologists, people that have looked at the evolution of culture as well from a me -metic standpoint too. And it does seem to me that But culture is just like exclusively an adaptive response to coordination at large scale. And that all of the things that are encoded in that are effective ways for your tribe to not blow itself up. Would you say this thing about morality in general? Yes. So then how do you escape this nihilist conundrum that you think all it is, you know, the reason why you're not killing people is just because you sort of evolved that way.

43:27Does that kind of take out some of the meaning? So I think if you were permanently self -assessing why you do the things you do and the inputs that you feel, but what that doesn't account for is the fact that we are self -deceptive. Quite right. And the sense of being a human is one that is imbued with meaning. I often use this term about how you are not personally cursed as a reassurance. And it was something that was reassuring to me if I was spending a bit of time where I was feeling sad or down or whatever It would feel like whatever emotion I was going through whatever unpleasant emotion I was going through was like a personal curse And this makes sense when you look back at how the gods were personified as different sorts of emotions Right that you know keep it had an arrow that hit you or that you know you had Gods of war you had gods of wrath you had gods of envy you had gods of narcissism because it The experience of a thing, of a thought, of an emotion, of a state is not just the confused chemical signals of your body and I can just reverse engineer this.

44:32Even the interaction of you and whatever's going on in the social group around you isn't just that. It's imbued with meaning because you interpret things in this supervexperience which scales things up from just what's happening to, and it feels like there's something, it feels like there's some there there, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, you can't escape that illusion if it is an illusion. This is another thing that I spoke to Ben about, first name to, first name basis, it seems now, Mr. Shepero. I did try that in, you know, when I was emailing back and forth about setting up that event, I went to type out sort of like, well, oh, it'd be great to talk to Mr.

45:11Shapiro about, it just didn't feel right, you know, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. At least not behind his back, not say that I'm rude behind his back, but if I'll even wear that, he wasn't there to sort of appreciate the courtesy. Anyway, he said, like, you know, that I don't believe in free will. I don't know if you believe in free will, perhaps we can talk about that. He's like, you know, you don't believe in free will, but you, you act as if free will does exist all the time. And I remember thinking, what do you mean? What does it look like to act as though free will doesn't exist?

45:44The very argument or one of the arguments against free will is that you are essentially driven by your biology, your genes, your will, the Arthur Schopenhauer line that you can do what you will, you just can't will what you will. In fact, you have to do what you will. That's what drives behavior. If that's the case, then why do you have this vision in your head that if you lack a belief in free will, you're not going to get out of bed in the morning? The very argument is that you will get out of bed in the morning because you desire to go and get some breakfast. That's like the whole point. And so any argument of that form of people say, well, you don't live like that's the case.

46:22I was like to think, well, what would it look like to you then? You know, if I could ask Jordan Peterson when he says, well, you don't live like an atheist, what would that look like to you? I don't know if you might say something like, well, you'd probably be this morally depraved, you know, self -interested blah, blah, blah. like maybe, but is that really what you think? I mean, I don't know, but... Yeah, I think it forgets the fact that you are a product of your time regardless of your beliefs from that time. Yeah. Right? I understand the Judeo -Christian values that everything is based on, you know, it's like a common talking point from those guys.

46:58But okay, how am I supposed to extricate me from that, completely shake the etch a sketch of my value set and then take it from the beginning? and let's not forget, like a lot of those values have grown out of what would have been an adaptive response in any case. So the illusion is there. The illusion is unshakable and so it sort of is a bit senseless to me to us particularly on the free will thing like, well why don't you act like free will doesn't exist? What do you mean? I mean, I literally it's unintelligible. Did you listen to my Sapolsky episode yet? No, right. So his new book determined science, Yes, life without free will.

47:38Every time that I talk about free will, people get upset. Why is that? That's the question for you. I think the reason in insert joke about how it's not their fault. Yeah, yeah. It's like my least favorite genre of joke that's done in the free will of my own. In philosophy, it's every single time. Every know free will of my own. Without fail. I don't know. I don't know. And it's something that the conversation about free will is such a turn off for people that I actively push it further into episodes. I actively don't title episodes that have got that in it. I can surreptitiously coax people into thinking about it, but the response is very, it's a lot amount of, a high amount of dissatisfaction.

48:23People don't like to think about that. Now, it may be because it's dry, I'm open to that, that's true. It may be because it threatens their sense of agency and sovereignty, which is something I've kind of built this channel off the back of, like you can enact change within your own life, internalize your locus of control, stop being such a bitch, etc. And so maybe I'm a victim of my own foundation in that regard that I've selected for a particular group of people. But it's happened a few times, a few different conversations about it, tangential. One guy was a compatible, quasi -compatibleist, shaking your head, why are you shaking your head?

49:11It's just the most ludicrous compromise to me. Compatibilism. Am I right in saying that compatibilism just kicks the can down the road and plays lexical overload with things? I think more or less. Right. A lot of the time you're just also dealing with essentially a redefinition of free will. It's what I don't mean that. I mean this thing. Yeah, yeah. Sam Harris is called it the Atlantis fallacy. He had an extended argument with Daniel Dennett, a compatriolist about free will and Daniel Dennett would talk about all about how this exists and this exists and this and and sounds like yeah that's true but you're just not talking about what people care about in free will.

49:49What you're doing is we're trying to ask if Atlantis exists and you're pointing to Venice and you're saying, look, here's the city, it's got a lot of water and it's kind of old and these are all true but it's just not Atlantis. Well, most people are talking about when they try to bring free well back into the discussion, is just not free well. It's as straightforward as it gets in my view. There are versions of freedom that can be sensibly believed in. It depends on what your conception of freedom means but if you mean something like authorship over your actions. If you mean that we could have rewound the clock and I could have done something differently, but I could have won a different shirt.

50:26I don't think that the answer is yes. Logically yes, you know, the possible worlds discussion earlier, there's a possible world where I'm in a different shirt, but I guess like physically, possibly met a physically, I couldn't have made a different choice. Well regardless of what you believe or don't believe about free will. The response, people's response to it is fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. And maybe, yeah, maybe it is that degree of control, almost like the denial of death. Like, I wonder, have they done experiments on when people are reminded that they do or do not have free will that their behavior adjusts?

51:03Not that I know, but I would love to see that, because if it is, maybe it is true, but I think if it is true, I can understand what might be quite like fatalistic. I mean, it literally is quite fatalistic really, to say that there's no freedom. And I can understand why that might make someone sad and that sadness might motivate their behaviors slightly differently. But I think that intrinsically, if there are a way to control for people who are sort of happy or sad about it, because you can believe in, there's no free will and be like, thank goodness, it's all out of my hands. If you can control for that and show that people do, they are like less productive or they don't get out of bed as much, then I think that would be meaningful and it might be a sort of second order reason not to have this conversation.

51:45I don't know if there's been such a investigation as there has to death, which by the way I think a good example of the death denial thing is to think about your magnum opus if you were sort of working on the great life work or something and you're about to die and you're just about to sort of to finish it off. Suppose you found out that after you publish this and you die a week later, you found out that a meteor was gonna come and destroy the earth. Everybody dies. Does that make you more or less enthusiastic about finishing your project? Now, for most people I think, it's gonna make them less enthusiastic.

52:27It would certainly make me less enthusiastic, but why? What's the difference to you? It doesn't make a difference. You're gonna be dead beforehand anyway. Nothing's going to change. seems to suggest that maybe, you know, the desire to get this done before you die in the first place isn't just as people like to claim for the love of the art and it's all in the process. No, it's because here's a work that's going to outlive you. Here's something that's going to help you to escape your own death. And when faced with the inevitability of the destruction of even that, the motivation goes down. I wouldn't be surprised if simply reminding somebody who's writing a play or something that one day heat death, everything evaporates, including your new book, if that would make them less motivated to finish the book.

53:08Which to me implies that the reverse corollary is that the reason you are making the book is in some way indebted to the fact that you think it will outlive you and therefore is an exercise in the denial of death. Didn't Ernest Beckett die at an unfortunate time? I don't know much about his personal life. I think he did. But there are interesting coincidences like that dotted across a lot of... The thing about coincidences is that so many things happen all the time that the only extraordinary thing would be if there weren't some extraordinary things like that. Like Albeca Mue was killed in a car crash and he was killed in the car crash with a train ticket in his pocket.

53:45So it seemed like he decided at the last minute to go in the car and said and he had previously said that the most absurd way to die would be in an automobile accident. And that's how he does. It's a sigma Freud was terrified of, I think it was the number 63. It was like 63 or maybe it was like 48, I can't remember. It was one of the, a number around around that, he was just terrified of it. Had it had a real sort of foreboding about it for some reason. He got a phone number that ended in that number and it freaked him out. He got a hotel room that had that number and he just became convinced that he was going to die at that age.

54:23Guess when he died? 48. No, when he was like 80. Sometimes it goes wrong. You're a dick. You are a dick. Rest of that was true though. All right. What's your sexy paradox that you wanted to show me? Yeah, so I think paradox. Think about that. Think about this, right? Now, I can't remember what the source is. Now, I want to attribute the person who does it. Maybe I can find it. Yeah, get it. I want to make sure that they get the credit for it. I was told about it by a friend.

54:56And you have to give him a minute because I don't want to pass this office my own. What can you do with everything else? I think it's called the anthropic. So website called risingentropy .com is seemingly the origin of this paradox, but I was I sort about it by a friend and it's, I guess, okay, so imagine that, and what this does is it shows us the different ways of thinking, give us wildly different answers to the same problem, different ways of like looking at a problem. So imagine that there's a maniac who, and it's called the anthropic dice killer if you want to look it up. There's a maniac who is kidnapping people and murdering them.

55:43And what he does is he kidnaps one person and he blindfolds them and he rolls a dice. And if that dice is a six then he'll kill you. If not, he'll let you go free. And what he'll do if he lets you go free is he'll go and pick up two people, kidnap them, blindfold them, roll the dice. If it's a six, it kills you. If it's anything else, go free. Then it's four people. Then it's eight people and it doubles. So it's an exponential. Until he hits a six. Until he hits a sex. Now you wake up knowing all this information, you wake up blindfolded and you know these facts. And you know that a device is about to be rolled but you're blindfolded, you don't know how many people are there with you.

56:27You're given a button that you can press that will make the chances that you're killed half, one and two. So if you want to, you can press this button and a 50 % of the time it will just kill you immediately and 50 % of the time you'll get to go free. or you can let him roll the dice. Okay. What do you do? Do you press the button or not? So, at least on the surface, this is to do with the probability of one in six versus one in two. But there is this escalating thing that's happening in the background. So I would presume that you would say, don't hit the button because that has increased the chance of you being killed from one in six to one in two.

57:07Right. And this and this seems true and it and it is true that yeah, I mean like you've got a one and six chance of dying And if you press the button you've got a one and two so you better off rolling the dice but if you think about it as a sort of as one big block Then then something very strange happens because if you consider all of the people involved if all you know is that you've sort of woken up And you're somewhere in this process then And interestingly, like, say it gets to number two, it gets to round two, then there have been three people involved, three victims involved. The first one and the second two.

57:48And two of them end up dying and one of them goes free. So if you find yourself in this situation as a victim, you've got a more than half probability that you're in the second group that ends up dying. I suppose that actually it ends in the third group. Right, now there are how many people involved you got one then two then four. Yeah. So we've now got seven people involved. Right. And four people end up dying. And so if you sort of wake up in this scenario, you've got a four in seven chance that you're going to die, that you're going to be one of the people who dies, which is more than half.

58:27And this continues such that if you consider the fact that it doesn't matter where it ends, you're always going to have a slightly higher than half chance that you're in the group that ends up getting killed. But is it more than half given that each round of the dice roll is only one in six? Yeah. Because it's about like if in fact it gets to number three. Right. it. Like you know that you know that you're going to be in the, there's a more than half chance that you're going to be in the group that dies. If it, if it in fact gets to number two, then there's a more and half chance that that you've got to die.

59:08If it in fact gets number four, I'm going to hit the button. Is that right? Well, maybe I don't, I mean, it seems ludicrous to hit the button, but, but thinking about it this way, it seems like that's what you should actually do. It's simultaneously the case that you have got a one and six chance of dying because you're doing it on the roll of a dice. But at the same time if you think about the fact that one of these groups is going to end up dying and it doesn't matter where it ends, the chances of you being in that group are always going to be slightly higher than half. Right. From a population level.

59:38If white's the anthropic dice killer because it's the anthropic principle it's thinking about. Yeah, what's that? I once read a sci -fi book that was, there was a threat of the end of the world and they looking to get humanity off the planet. And there is a theory that uses almost this exact same idea, which says that if you take the entirety of human history and you were to pick a time at which you were to live and you have this rapid increase toward humanity, it works out that it's more likely that you are within some percent of the end of humanity. Right. Yeah. Because of the exponential growth.

1:00:25Yeah. Sincerely. Are you familiar with this idea? I don't think so. Right. But it works as a statement. It works the same principle. It works the exact same. Yeah. As long as that graph is going up at the, at the requisite speed, then, then yeah. Right. And this is the exact same thing. I mean, the, the, the version on the website actually involves snake hive. So, so it's two dice. And instead of it being one, then two, then four, it's one, then ten. than a hundred, then a thousand. Right. Ramps up, mockingly. And now you're rolling snake eyes. So it's a one and 36 chance. And it turns out that if you add up the probability of, of like, you know, N number of cases, it's something like a 90 % chance versus the half that you get to press, which you've just seen through the cross.

1:01:04And it seems that two things are true at once, depending on just how you look at the problem. So sometimes problems like this are just to do with the way you work. I mean, there are tons of like these sort of interesting math paradoxes, which aren't paradoxes at all. You must be familiar with the man who walks into the hotel, pays 30 pounds, goes up to his room, and the bellboy says, or the guy behind the bar says, the manager says, I know he should have only paid 25 if he got a deal on. So he calls the bellboy and says, can you go and give him five pounds back to the man in the room? And the bellboy thinks to himself on the way up like this guy doesn't know any better.

1:01:35He doesn't know how much he owed. I'm going to pocket three pounds for myself. I'm only going to give him two pounds. So he goes back to the room, he says, excuse me, Sorry, you paid 30 pounds, you paid too much. Here's two pounds change. So how much is the man now paid? £25. No, £28. £28. How much is the bellboy got on his pocket? Two. He gave the guy £2 back. Right. Where's that money come from? Yeah, he's got three. So the bellboy, so the man's now only paid £28. He's paid £30, he gets £2 back from the bellboy. He's paid £28. £3 in his pocket, which makes 31. So where's the extra pound come from?

1:02:16Actually, no, he hasn't. The guy paid 25 plus now he's got two back. That's right. So it's the way you word it, right? So this, this, like, stumps people. And you can do it the other way around as well. You can say that the guy goes up and he gives, the bubble gives £3 back to the guy. So he's only paid £27, but the guy always got to it. He's got two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's only 29. And this, you know, it sort of goes viral on social media because people are like, how the hell does it work? It's the blue and black or green and gold dress. It's like, I mean, for those that, yeah, I guess there is, it's like those in that there is a real answer to what the actual war was actually going on there.

1:02:53I mean, these people based on how you word it. It's how people, you know, short -changer when they scan people at a bar or something. I mean, the easiest way to visualize that particular problem was to imagine that the man was only supposed to pay two pounds. You know, so the bulwag goes up and gives him 28 pounds and decides to pocket two pounds for himself. So he says, oh, so he gives him, you know, give him 26 pounds back. So how much is the man paid, like, four pounds and how much is the bulwag got, like, 26 pounds, which is ludicrous. But it'd be amazing how easily people can be completely and utterly stumped by it.

1:03:29And it's all in the wording. So a problem like the anthropic dice killer, I wonder how much it's just sort of to do with the way that you describe it. Have there been any paradoxes that sent you into a fugue state for a little while? Was there anything that captured a particularly long amount of time that you sort of couldn't stop considering? Hmm. Um, well, most of the famous ones since, since I started learning about paradoxes like the famous Monty Hall problem, that, that, that obsessed me for, for, well, I wouldn't say obsessed me, but I was, I was sort of blown away by it. There's also, you know, the Monty Hall problem that you'll definitely have heard of this before this, um, it's, it's the game show and the three doors.

1:04:16Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. There are interesting paradoxes that aren't actually paradoxes. There's a book by Jim Alcalele called Paradox, which is a description of so -called paradoxes. So I think, I think, I think, all this paradox is, when people used to think that the universe was infinite, infinitely large, I mean, there was this problem that if empty space is filled up fairly randomly with stars. I mean, we know there's a lot of stars in the sky and galaxies and objects that emit light. Then there should essentially be no darkness in the sky. The sky should look kind of like an overcast day because like the gaps in the sky, you know, infinite amount of light.

1:05:05And any amount, any small gap, you might think the stars are really far away. They'll also be like closer together, therefore, emitting more light visually on, there'll be bigger. And so if the universe is infinite, you should just see a sort of overcast day. And it was a paradox. It was like, how does this, how does this happen? And it basically became an interesting proof that the universe has a beginning, that the universe is not in fact infinite, just the fact that it gets dark at night. Because if we're actually infinite, there should be a sort of overcast view, Olbers paradox. And like I say, it's sort of a paradox, but not really a paradox.

1:05:39And I'm familiar with the Buete's Void, do you know this? I think so. This is like my favorite part of the universe. I'd say like I'm mapping it like my favorite barbecue restaurants in Austin. And it's a huge, what's referred to as a super void, which is a period of the universe, an area of the universe which has way fewer galaxies than you would anticipate. And given what's the principle of like, homogeneity across the universe that it should be, it should be relatively similar, right? Like thermodynamics. Yes. It's entropy and you just know you're just saying the space words that mean. Well, you know, when you spray an aerosol can and it will eventually spread up the ring.

1:06:20Disappears equally. So the point is that there shouldn't be huge fluctuations in the way that we see the universe. Everything should be spread relatively evenly. Now, I found out that supposedly at the point of the Big Bang, there were one million particles of antimatter and one million and one particles of matter. And it is that one to one million and one ratio that is exactly where everything that we see comes from. And this minor imbalance is actually what's permitted everything to exist. But this particular, Buet is B -O -O, one with an Oomlaute T -E -S, Buet is super void. It's just super fucking interesting.

1:07:04is this gap where there's way fewer galaxies than there should be. You think, why should this exist, given that we've got this principle of homogeneity across the universe? And that's one of my favorite things to learn about. Yeah, it's, but is it that we know about this void because of the disbalance, or is it that we hypothesize the disbalance because of the knowledge of the void? We know based on mapping of, I think, I'm not sure if it's telescopic or if it's microwave background stuff, but we know that it's there. Right. And the question is what the fuck is this thing doing there? Yeah, well that's a bit like sort of dark energy when we discover that galaxies are spending a little bit too quickly on the outside.

1:07:46There seems to be something like pushing them along. What do you make of the fine tune universe idea? A lot of people describe it as the most powerful argument for God's existence. Christopher Hitchens and the pack of a car once said that that was really what gave him pause. I don't find that it moves me very much. I mean, it does seem quite extraordinary that had any of the constants of the universe, the force of gravity, for example, if it was stronger or weaker by the most unimaginably small amount, then it would either be strong enough that the universe would collapse in itself or it would be so weak that atoms couldn't even form or at least objects couldn't form and everything just gets blown apart at the big bang.

1:08:33Three explanations for this, it's chance, it's necessity or it's design and chances seems like a ludicrous suggestion. I mean, there are lots of different constants and it may be the case that we discover this sort of theory of everything that reduces it down to one. Still a huge mystery as to why it has the sort of the constant that it does, but would mean that we're not talking about lots of different constants in harmony. Somehow happens to be unified in one word. The idea of it sort of necessarily being that way doesn't seem that out of the question for me. Like people put in the language of saying that had the constant's been different by dis -emount, the universe couldn't exist, and what people often hear is the chances of the constant being as it was was the same number, but I don't think that's the same thing.

1:09:23It might just be not possible that it could have had a different value. What's the observer selection effect of this? This doesn't work for the fine tuning argument, I think. So the so -called like anthropic principle. The universe seems designed for human life. It seems like people might point to, for example, the Earth's perfect distance from the Sun in the so -called Goldilocks Zone had it been a little bit further out or a little bit closer, humans couldn't exist. And the easy answer to that is to say, well, yeah, but if you didn't exist, then you wouldn't be there to observe that it didn't exist, right?

1:09:57And so you say, given the size of the universe, life might develop somewhere, possibly in multiple places, and the place is where it's going to be observed, you know, coming about is where it comes about, to be no surprise. That works there, but the fine tuning constants of the universe, we're not talking about like, we're not talking about like a potential billions of earths that could all give rise to human beings. We're talking about if one of these constants was different by a tiny, by the tiniest amount, nothing exists. And sure, it is still true that didn't not happen. We wouldn't get to.

1:10:35My friend Josh Perique has given me an example in the past of like, I don't know, you can imagine like a series of highly trained knife throwers, just just just lob like a hundred thousand knives at you in an attempt to kill you. And they all miss perfectly cutting out the silhouette of your body behind you, absolutely perfectly, just like uncanny. And someone says, well, they must have done that on purpose. It's like a trick, right? And you say, no, no, I think it's just, it just happened by chance. You say, well, that's ludicrous. Oh, well, if it didn't, and I wouldn't be here to observe that it did, would I?

1:11:10It still just wouldn't do it for you, even though that is true. Had you been killed, you wouldn't be there to observe it. It just seems such an unlikely coincidence that that just doesn't work for the, when we're talking about the actual fundamental stuff of the universe, which is why people are so troubled by it. But I do think, generally speaking, with all of these kinds of things, fine -tuning, consciousness is another example that's broadly in the scientific realm that people think that this just can't be explained to that reference to a god. Maybe they're right. I don't know. But if you intuitively were to step into a time machine and look at some people having this conversation, and you said, like, imagine them looking back and saying, gosh, can you believe it?

1:11:49They hadn't worked out fine -tuning yet. They hadn't figured out the constants. They hadn't figured out the science of consciousness yet. I can conceive of that. Just intuitively. I can see someone doing that. But when I think about my arguments for atheism, the problem of divine hidden, this kind of stuff. I can't imagine somebody looking through a time machine similarly at a conversation that I have and going, gosh, can you believe it? They hadn't worked out the problem of evil yet. They hadn't worked out divine hiddenness yet. I think these are perennial problems. So where you have these scientific arguments to the existence of God, I guess I just have more of a trust that they will one day be explained in a way that won't require recourse to a divine author in a way that my criticisms of religion will probably not be similarly resolved.

1:12:35We had a great conversation in Austin as you explained to me about the potential historical accuracy or inaccuracy of Jesus' resurrection. Can you go through that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, sometimes you use as an argument for the existence of God, but I think more successfully as you've already established the existence of God to try to establish the truth of Christianity, and that is a bunch of historical facts surrounding Jesus' alleged resurrection that you have to ask what the best explanation is for. Now you can't historically prove a resurrection, but you can historically prove events and then ask what the best explanation of those facts is.

1:13:16So people will often point to the fact that there was a man called Jesus walking around morally teaching people who was crucified by the Romans and that a few days after his death was seen, people made claims that they'd seen him after he died. And the question is how do you explain these facts? The gospel reliability is an interesting question in general and people will often on the surface level say, look, the Bible contradicts itself, it's full of contradictions. And there are some seeming contradictions in the gospel stories. But of course, what a lot of people neglect to consider is that when we're talking about a text as a historical document, contradictions shouldn't make us think that it's less accurate, but more accurate.

1:14:08If historical sources contradict each other, that's evidence of that accuracy rather than out of the opposite because if this is a mythical story that somebody's making up, you would expect the details to concur. That is, if you're questioning to suspects in some kind of murder trial or something, and their stories match up perfectly, like to the tea, the timings, everything, it arouses suspicion. Seems like somebody's inventing something. someone's coming up with a story here and trying to perfect it. Now, people have this idea that a bunch of people got together and tried to fool the world into this sort of mythical story of, you know, this man rising from the dead.

1:14:52Do you think they would have made the mistake of just including these blatant contradictions? I don't know. In other words, I think if somebody was making it up, they probably would have taken more care. Is there a term for this? I'm sure there is. Right. I'm not a historian. I couldn't tell you what it is.

1:15:09But we do see contradictions on the minor points. We don't really see much disagreement about the major points. I mean, there is some enough disagreement that I think to a rare suspicion. I mean, I'm saying this is if I'm some kind of Christian or thea, so I sort of put on that hat when I'm asked to have a conversation of this kind. I mean, it does seem to me suspicious, for example, that the Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest Gospel, contains no post -resurrection appearances. and then the Gospel of Matthew does include post -resurrection appearances. The Gospel of Luke includes even more.

1:15:43It's only in the Gospel of John that we get, for instance, doubting Thomas, which is the latest Gospel, canonical Gospel, I should say. That's where that arises. In fact, the story of doubting Thomas famously, he doesn't believe that it's the risen Christ, and Jesus has come and touched my wounds. and he touches his wounds and he says, my Lord and my God. And Jesus says, you believed because you've seen blessed are those who believe without seeing. So in my view, what we have is this so -called mythological development of no post -resurrection appearances and as the time goes on, as we get further away from the source, the stories get more fantastical.

1:16:25Ending in a moral lesson to believe without evidence. Yes. This to me does seem a little bit suspicious. So it is a fascinating mystery, like something very strange happened on Easter morning, because how do we explain the fact that this man gets crucified by the Romans and then people claim to see him after he died? And we're willing to be put to death for that belief. Now, okay, maybe he didn't die. unlikely, as they say, the Romans knew how to kill people. And supposedly, you know, they check. And they go to break the legs of the other prisoners as they're taking them down from their crosses.

1:17:09They were taking them down, you know, sort of temporarily and they hadn't died yet. But when they go to break Jesus' legs, they realize he's already dead, which is why his legs don't get broken. and they stab him in the side with a stick to make sure that he's dead. I mean, yeah, like this was a very effective method of killing people and they knew how to do it. So it's unlikely that he just somehow survived this. It's not the guy that stabbed him with the spear and supposedly this blood on the spear. Or was this the biggest stab? It's almost out of some of the spear like after the... Right. ...after he's on the cross.

1:17:38And it's essentially to check he's dead. Okay, so likely he was actually crucified. and then a few days later people are claiming to see him. Maybe they're lying, but then you don't tend to go to death for something you know to be a lie. You're willing to be put to death for things that you think are true, but a false, but very rarely are people willing to die for beliefs that they don't actually believe themselves. That doesn't really happen, so they probably weren't lying. Maybe they were mistaken, fooled. Yeah, now I've known you since about 2019, which is probably, it will have been slightly longer than Jesus was with his disciples, but imagine spending every single day with this person, living with this person, eating with this person, and then you've only seen him a few days ago.

1:18:31And somehow imagine somebody managed to convince you that they were me. Even if I had a twin brother, they probably wouldn't be able to convince you that it was me. Or maybe they were hallucinating in groups. One of the earliest, New Testament sources is the letters of Paul, the earliest. And in one of those letters, Paul refers to Jesus having appeared to 500 people at once. And in some of the gospels, you get at least some group appearances, at least more than one person. And sometimes groups of disciple, the 12, all seeing Jesus all at once. You don't get group hallucinations like that. And so it doesn't seem like they were mistaken either.

1:19:12And so if they're not mistaken, they're not making it up. What explains the fact that these people claim to see him after he had died? And the Christian apologists will say that the only real blogblable explanation is that he really did rise from the dead. Now, it's an interesting argument and it's quite powerful. However, my response has always been that this sort of process of elimination is very clever, and that's how it's usually run, but it can go the other way. I mean, imagine I were trying to prove that there was such thing as a group hallucination and as extraordinary, but there was a group hallucination, and I tried to prove it by saying, well, what are the other explanations?

1:19:53Or maybe they lied? Well, they wouldn't do that because they wouldn't go to death. Or maybe a man rose from the dead, but come on, that doesn't happen. That breaks all the laws of physics. So the only remaining option is this. kind of depends where you start, but it is weird. Something very strange seems to have happened on that morning. I can see why philosophers go mad because you were able to simultaneously convince yourself of something and then convince yourself of the opposite and don't convince yourself of everything that you've believed. Yeah, but that's that's... I think one of those famous quotes of Socrates is that, you know, the sign of wisdom in a man or something is is the ability to entertain a belief without holding it or without becoming convinced by it or something like that.

1:20:34And I think it's something anybody can do if they want to. And it's why philosophers are so, they would think that philosophers are better at doing this. I don't think that's true. I think they're just talking about stuff that's far less political, far less real. And so they're less likely to get, they're less likely to be offended at the prospect of considering the falsehood of their beliefs. So you get into a relation, I suppose. You definitely seem to be able to have an ability to drop into and out of arguments on both sides of the same fence and play with ideas in a way that I think is rare and presumably a bit of a disposition, but also largely trained because you can sit and convince chat GPT that God exists or try and turn me into a theist.

1:21:26and then stand on stage and do the exact opposite. I think that there's probably quite a lot to learn from how people who have spent a good bit of time playing with ideas in philosophy dispassionately have that separation between themselves and the idea and the belief and what it means to them in the emotion and kind of that whole ambient mess. Yeah, it's playing. It's a good word because it's fun. It's enjoyable. That's why it's fun to talk about theory of knowledge because who really cares? It doesn't grow corn, as they say, or make corn. How have you as opposed to say it? That's fine because if it did, then it would get a bit serious.

1:22:15And it really matters whether you get it right or wrong. Whereas here we're just having fun. But you can, I don't know, I can kind of see why heretics would get burned at the stake when religion had social power because You know you become convinced that this is the source of meaning this is the source of truth without it We are nothing. No being threatened and then it turns out that maybe there are actually some holes to poke here What are you gonna do? I mean you can't let them do that because this is literally you know but society cult calamitous. And so they end up getting better at stake.

1:22:50That's what also annoys me. I mean, you mentioned earlier, this recent resurgence in the idea that we're all sort of balancing on Judeo -Christian values maybe kind of true in a sense, but it does kind of get on my nerves that after I said this to Ben yesterday that the history of religious persecution against the varied developments that those religious groups now like to claim as their own. I think the religion has shown to be wrong on a number of things. I listed them yesterday, the position of women in society, the fate of homosexuals, at least practicing homosexuals, the position of the earth in relation to the sun, the age of both of those celestial bodies, wrong about the common evolutionary ancestry of all animals, including the human animal, wrong about the ownership of other human beings as private property as is explicitly condoned not only in the Old Testament but also in the New.

1:23:44And now, not only does religion fail to come to us with an apology and contrition and say, maybe we were wrong, it says, no, no, no, those things are ours all along. It says, yes, we may have shown the instruments of torture to Galileo because he suggested that the earth might orbit the sun rather than the other way around. But hey, didn't And you know that the scientific revolution is essentially Judeo -Christian in origin. Yes, the Old Testament gives you explicit instructions about exactly how to either buy or steal other human beings and keep them sometimes as your sexual property. But don't you know that the abolitionist movement is essentially Judeo -Christian in origin?

1:24:29Yes, I know that St. Paul says that, man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of and that I suffer not a woman to teach, not to assert authority over a man, rather she should remain silent for Adam was formed first then Eve. But don't you know that social justice movements are essentially Judeo -Christian in origin? Yes, we know about the stoning of homosexuals and the fact that even St. Paul says that they're not getting into heaven. But don't you know that the LGBT movement is essentially riding on Judeo -Christian principles? It seems to me relatively offensive to the people who have managed to secure these developments against the very religious traditions that now like to claim them as their own.

1:25:06Yeah, both cause and defa - it's like being punched in the face by somebody who then comes over and gives you a bandage for it. Yes. I mean, people like to refer to - and this is - I'm sort of rehashing some of the stuff that I said yesterday here. It's sort of a - or often believes in God. Galilee or believe in God, Newton believed in God. In fact, Newton spent, but people were fascinated to discover his diaries to find that he spent more time writing about theology than science. Mad man for the last 30 years doing alchemy, right? Right. But here's the thing, right? Like if, and as I said yesterday, I don't claim that this is the case.

1:25:54But if it were true that science had like undermined religion and Christianity, if it were the case that actually these things aren't compatible with each other. Then when somebody says, well, that can't be the case, because don't you know that the people who sort of founded the scientific revolution were religious? Well, what else would they have been if they hadn't yet invented the mechanism by which their beliefs would come to be undermined? It's like saying that it's amazing that the person who invented the motor car didn't own a motor car beforehand. You see what I'm saying? It's sort of, I don't know, it seems very strange to me.

1:26:22And it's very recently that the popularity of this has increased as you say. I mean, you go back to the mid -naughties at the height of new atheism and it was very popular to talk about how religions sort of always getting in the way of science. And maybe that was a bit crude. But I think we're seeing an equally crude annexation of all of the beneficial social developments of the past 100 years as somehow necessarily standing upon the Judeo -Christian tradition, as if it couldn't have happened without them. Is this a scrabbling for something to hold on to given that the collapse of grand narratives has had some poor externalities over the last couple of years?

1:27:00Is it just mass -coap? I think so. I think that nihilism, as it were, carries with it the feeling of being naked. You sort of thrown off what were essentially optional clothes to reveal. What was there all along, but when you actually face it to nature, it's embarrassing, it's scary, and you will do anything you can if you find yourself naked in public to find any clothes to put on, not just your old ones. doesn't matter what clothes, any clothes are better than no clothes. And this is what people are beginning to realize. And so they're scrambling for their old clothes again. And trying to legitimate.

1:27:38And yes, and trying to put them on. And that's why it's easy as well for people to go around poking holes in other people's clothes. It's very easy to do. But that's what the success of a movement like New Atheism consists in. In the fact that all they have to do is just tell other people why they're wrong. You only need to poke holes in other people's clothes, but if you need to like, so your own shirt, that gets a little more difficult. Yes, Slua said that the purpose of philosophy is not the cutting down forests for the irrigation of deserts. That's very interesting. Yeah, I've thought about this for a good while.

1:28:18The seductiveness of being critic as opposed to being somebody that makes suggestions. and the lack of preparedness of anybody to put forward any proposals for anything. And it's easy for both sides accuse each other of being reactionary, right? The reactionary right, the reactionary left. And ultimately, for instance, perfect example of this is in the world of dating and sort of mate selection in the mating market, everybody can provide criticisms about what's going wrong and almost nobody provides any actionable steps to improve it. Beyond something that is eliminated rather than additive, right?

1:28:59Like, well, if we could just stop doing this, then this would be fixed. It's like, I don't think that that's quite the way that it works. And there's another very unique protection mechanism that's given, which is, it's very hard to criticize someone's criticism, or at least being a critic leaves you open to criticism way less than being a proposer. Oh yeah. Right. If I put something forward, if I posit a potential solution for you to be able to come back and say, well, this is shit and this is shit and this is shit makes complete. It's very easy to do. Whereas for you to say, for me to critic what you did and then for you to come back and go, well, actually this and this and this and this.

1:29:39But it's like, eh, it kind of gets all a little bit abstract and it's a few degrees removed from anything that feels real. Yeah, Simon Cowell can't write a song. You know, like if the world was full of Simon Cowell's and we'd end up with no music, somebody's got to do the building here. You can't just be a critic. And this is what I think has been the reason for the success of this sort of anti -New Atheist stuff that we've been seeing recently. I mean, you'll have seen this, even the New Atheist themselves sort of treat it like it's a dead animal. And in many ways it is. And I think it's got to do with the fact that, Yeah, they've done a very good job of cutting down the central pillar of what has traditionally been the reason for people getting out of bed in the morning.

1:30:24And then when people are there saying, well, what do we put in its place? What do we put in its place? They're like, see ya. You know, I'm out. And they go off and do different things. And what are people to do? And that's why I... Was it a job of the New Atheists to provide something to... Well, maybe not. Some people are just good at diagnosing problems. Karl Marx is a good example. Karl Marx is a diagnosis of the way the world works. They're fascinating to read and incredibly useful, even if you disagree with them. Obviously, attempt to build societies on those ideas alone have failed. It seems like you need something a little bit more.

1:31:06more. I just don't think it's true the religion stuff, I mean. And so that's why I think we're seeing this because people are beginning to realize that it probably isn't true. They can't get quite get behind the truth claims, but they recognize that there's some utility and having other people believe that it is true. And I don't know where that leaves us because in this discussion about whether religion is good or bad for society, I said yesterday, look, I will accept your premise wholesale that religion is good, maybe even necessary for society. What do you want me to do if I just don't think it's true?

1:31:46I just lie to my children, raising and believing something that I don't believe is the case, because I think it will somehow be beneficial to society. I don't think it works like that. I don't think people can actually fool themselves. Sure, you can act as if God exists, and that's what someone like Peterson says that people do already. But ultimately, if you just say, well, I think that, you know, it should just act like a Christian because it's good for me. Then when push comes to shove and you really have to make a moral sacrifice, if you're not actually a Christian, you're probably not going to do the actually Christian thing.

1:32:14Well, I wonder whether this is afforded to people because of the convenience and comfort of one life. The fact that having to really, really put something on the line, it's mostly larping as, you know, belief systems and oh, I'll pick up that piece of trash, you know, will give money to this person on the street. Yeah, people have forgotten, like bourgeois, we just believe. So irregularly that we have to make genuine moral sacrifices of the kind that used to be commonplace throughout the history of humanity that we've forgotten our ability to do so. I think that if you push people now, they recognize that they probably wouldn't make those sacrifices.

1:32:48Did you see the Mr. Beast poll where he asked, would you rather have like a million dollars or like a random person on earth dies or something like that if you press this button? And I think it might have been a majority of people that slim majority said they'd press that button. Yeah, kill someone around them. I'll take a million bucks. And I actually kind of believe them. I think they actually would. And people want to say that that's because we've lost our belief in God. I don't know. Maybe I think a better explanation is just that, like you say, we've become too comfortable. And so when somebody says in other words, like, oh, well, you know, this must be due to due to declining religion.

1:33:29And the fact that we've forgotten our Judeo -Christian heritage, I mean, you'll probably hear that a lot from people that you might talk to on this podcast. They'll say something like that, just think to yourself, like, is that really the best explanation? Is that the only explanation? Could it be something to do with the growth of technology? Could it be to do with something, something to do with the growth of comfort? And is it more likely to do with that? And maybe it's not the lack of religion that's causing the other stuff, but this other source that's causing both of those things. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot recently about stuff that is literally true but figuratively false and figuratively true but literally false.

1:34:04And it kind of seems a little bit like the beliefs that you're talking about here. It may be comforting, increasing in happiness, adaptive to kind of act as if these things exist. The belief in free will actually, believing in free will, sorry, yeah, determinism generally is something that may be literally true, but figuratively false. Yes. And that's kind of where I've come to as an opinion with this that largely it's through designed ignorance. I just don't think about it that much. Precisely the reason it evolves. That's why it exists as an illusion because it does something for us. And that's fine.

1:34:44I've never had a problem saying that. But when the sort of ospices under which I'm having a conversation with Ben Shapiro is that he made a video called the atheist delusion and in that video he says like, look, you can't have free will without God. I say, yeah, I agree. You can't have free with will without God. You just also can't have it with God. And he essentially says like, well, you know, there's sort of a, I don't know how free will works, but it's sort of a mystery that I'm willing to accept wholesale. And I'm like, well, this is fine. But who's the delusory one here. You know what I mean?

1:35:18Like I've got no problem with you saying like, well, I see that this is more bento, by the way, but I have no problem with somebody saying, well, yeah, I mean, maybe free will doesn't exist, but it better to act as though it does. It's like, okay, fine, but then don't say that I'm the one acting under a delusion. I mean, delusions can be good. They might have all for a good reason, but I don't know. I guess I find it difficult to treat something as true that isn't. It's a bit like the gun is always loaded. That's one of Brett Weinstein's example. examples. It's not true that the gun is always loaded, but we're just going to pretend that it is.

1:35:48And that's much better, at least to a good society, if we were to... It actually falls perfectly true. But you can't actually act like it's true. Like if you ask me to put money on opening the gun and seeing if there's a bullet in that. You can behave in a way that functions as if it were. But then when push comes to shove and you really need to make a decision, you're not going to be able to do it unless you really believe it's true. So this only works in low stakes situations? Yeah, so it's all too easy to say, oh, yeah, we're just sort of actors though, it's true. Good example here, using the actors if the gun is loaded thing, you do not point it to anybody, you do not leave it around the children, you do not do the rest of it.

1:36:26If a robber breaks into your house, you don't go downstairs with said gun acting as if it's loaded. Exactly. Exactly, right? And so the moment that it actually really matters, like in the prior case, it only matters when it goes wrong, right? but when it begins to matter when it goes right and that it goes right, this principle just doesn't work. And so I'm suspicious of as efficacy in other words, I think we might need to actually start acting in accordance with what's true. Which by the way is what people have been saying for a long time. Now why don't we all just act in accordance with what's true?

1:36:57And then suddenly when you begin to realize that maybe free will doesn't exist, maybe morality is just a social adaptation. Suddenly, this idea of acting in accordance with what's true as a point of principle goes out the window. It's amazing how I see deontologists, virtue ethicists, transform my very eyes into utilitarians. Outgo is the principle of living accordance with the truth. Outgo the principles of honesty and lack of intentional self -deception. Well, we want the greatest good for the greatest number. A better, more functional society comes about if we just pretend as though this is the case.

1:37:35What happened to the virtue? What happened to the principle? What happened to the deontological ethics? It's just out of the window, all of a sudden. I think sometimes people like to have their cake and eat it too in that respect. I like to act in accordance with what I think is true. And when somebody challenges me and says, well, you don't act as though you don't have free will, I just don't know what that means. I don't know what that looks like. It probably looks something like this. Alex Okana, ladies and gentlemen, Alex, it's been a while since I've had you on. I think I'm going to be joining you on your show at some point soon.

1:38:06Hope so. What can people expect of you over the next couple of months? What's coming up? Hopefully that conversation with Ben Shapiro, which I'll mention for a 16 billionth time, will be out. I've got a few debates coming up. Oxford, Union, Durham, Union, something at Cambridge on the monarchy. he, so you're being known for the Piers Morgan's propelled you, catapulted you to the forefront of the anti -monicists. Yeah, I'm becoming somebody of a royal correspondent for that news. A anti -roll correspondent. Hey, my Twitter bio is growing by the minute on this podcast. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the stuff you do?

1:38:44Just type in my name, Alex O 'Connor. I am technically still cosmic skeptic. That's my old handle. I tend to go by my Christian name now, but the handles are still there, so you'll still find me that way too. Alex, I appreciate you. Thank you mate.