Join us this spring for the sixth annual nexxus, the northeast largest conference dedicated to critical thinking and science education. It's all going down in New York City the weekend of April 11th through 13th 2014. We're excited to feature a keynote by physicist Lawrence Krauss, who's authored bestsellers like The Physics of Star Trek and who just started with Richard Dawkins in a new film last year called The Unbelievers. This is in addition to a great lineup of other speakers like Paul Offit, expert on vaccines and infectious disease, and Cady Coleman, veteran astronaut for NASA.

Of course, Masimo and I will be there taping a live episode of the nationally speaking podcast, and so will the cast of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Get your tickets now at NextG. That's an easy Sorg. Registration prices go up after March 20th. So don't wait. Get your tickets today.

Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Puchi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what's up today?

What's up today, Massimo? Well, today we have a very special guest audience to help us celebrate our one hundredth episode of the Rasslin speaking podcast.

Hello, audience. And how is this going to work so that there's no topic today, essentially we're doing a full episode of Q&A where we invite the audience members to ask us anything. And questions could range from science to philosophy to social science to culture, to our feelings about bumblebees.

Really anything you want to ask us, we'll do our best to answer intelligently.

And as I was mentioned to the audience before we started taping the episode, just because you can ask the question doesn't mean we're going to give you an answer. Other than air. It's not interesting or I don't know anything about this, but we'll try intelligently, if that's right.

We'll do it right to try our best. So why don't we get started? Who is who wants to ask the first question? We got one over there.

So the question was, out of all of the podcast episodes we've done so far, what's the biggest insight that each of us has gained? Oh, and just as a procedural note, you can direct a question that one of us in particular, if you like, but if you don't, we'll just assume it's meant for both of us.

Right. And even if it's directed to one of us, the other one will probably chime in anyway. So you want to start once you're inside? Yeah.

So that's a good question. I think so.

There have been a few. It's hard to pick out the biggest. There have been a few insights that I've had sort of in the middle of taping, which is a nice sort of a pleasant experience for me.

I like changing my mind or noticing something that I missed. One of them was in one of the sort of more mind tangoing ones was in the podcast with Graham Priest, who's a philosopher of logic.

And I started out the episode thinking that his his main thesis that it might make sense to talk about some things being both true and false at the same time formally in logic, was made no sense then that surely we would be able to demonstrate over the course of the episode that making such a claim could only involve mangling the definitions of true and false in a way that made them unrecognizable compared to the way we're used to thinking of true and false, and therefore wasn't actually a statement about truth and falsity as we are used to thinking of them.

But he actually, by the middle of the podcast, had me about 70 percent convinced that this might be a more sensible way.

She has a copy machine. She has a convincing meter.

I do. I do make sure to tell my Bayesian overlords.

So it's going to be hard to articulate exactly what all his arguments were.

But the gist was basically that thinking of truth and falsity as things that are as mutually exclusive leads to various absurdities, various paradoxes, and that as absurd as it feels to talk about some things being both true and false, I wasn't actually sure that it was more absurd than the paradoxes that arise from thinking of truth and falsity as mutually as being mutually exclusive.

So if if people want to check it out, the the topic that Gumperz was covering is called PADA consistent logic. And it's it's about these kind of things. It's about how to deal, how to to incorporate in logic the issues of paradoxes.

I was thinking that what the thing that impressed me the most in answer to the to the question during these 100 episodes or the previous ninety nine episodes, I guess that we taped is how much better it is to have a conversation with somebody as opposed to exchanging barbs via writing.

You know, as we have had guests with whom I disagree pretty substantially. But having the guest either either directly in the in the studios in Greenwich Village and then going out for dinner with them or having them via Skype and having just a conversation where, yes, you can ask sharp questions if you want, but it's a conversation.

It's a back and forth. It really in my case at least, it really makes you listen more carefully to what it is that the other person is saying. That doesn't mean you're going to agree with with your interlocutor anyway. But but it was you know, one of my models of the Russian speaking blog is a phrase attributed to David Hume, which is argument sort of truth springs from argument amongst friends.

And that is really the feeling that I got sometimes even with Julia, because it's not like I see eye to eye a lot of things necessarily.

But you meant sometimes even with Julia, I feel like I'm talking to a friend, even her. Right, exactly. No, I mean, it's it's been a very interesting experience.

And of course, we've had great guests. You know, it's the only reason I've got to mention one is because it's the last one we had and the podcast isn't there because it's not out yet at this moment. This was Peter Singer. The famous and controversial moral philosopher, and he was just a delight to have a conversation with this guy who has written for decades about really interesting topics, who has had an influence on my own sort of philosophical thought, even though I actually disagree with his main thesis or his main framework.

He's a utilitarian ethicist and I'm not. But it was just a pleasure to interact with this person and genuinely try to learn and understand his point of view. So I think that was the most important thing that from my perspective in these episodes, we have questioned back there. And then tomorrow, all right, people are getting warmed up.

Generally, when somebody is in your position, they have an expertise in a certain area like how to train your dog or something. And they answer all kinds of questions.

But you say we can ask you any kind of question right now. Either you're a rather arrogant person or you're some kind of a genius or what are your qualifications?

I mean, why should I ask you the question and not this guy over here?

So question your qualifications, how you got to be such an incredible genius, even smarter than me that I don't understand.

The question is, who the hell are we to think that we can then we can answer every every every question.

So the short answer for one answer could be, well, I'm a philosopher. Of course I can answer everything.

But but more seriously, this was actually the title. And the idea for the for the for the for the episode podcast episode is in part in jest and sort of just Salvatori to have a nice conversation with with our audience. We don't pretend to have that kind of expertise or genius at all, but between the two of us, we do cover a significant amount of ground.

I mean, you know, our background is significantly different. And of course, I'm an academic by training. I, I, I did an initial first career in evolutionary biology. So if we're talking about most areas of organismal biology and to some extent biology more generally, I can actually talk about it with with some knowledge.

And then I switched full time to philosophy and particular philosophy of science and philosophy. Dustan, I mean, I was joking earlier when I said, you know, I'm a philosopher, therefore I can answer everything. But there is some truth that one of the reasons I was attracted to philosophy as a discipline is because it forces you.

The whole point is to think more broadly about issues that span a variety of fields, even fields within which you obviously cannot have the same level of expertise than a specialist in that field. I mean, there's you can do philosophy of science, for instance. You don't necessarily have the same expertise in depth expertise that a scientist practising scientist has in a particular discipline, like biology or physics or whatever or so forth.

But you do have enough of an understanding and enough knowledge of how the field works that you can sort of take a bird's eye view of things and think more broadly in a way that the scientist himself or herself cannot actually do because he's focused on things like getting grants and, you know, getting very specialized in order to publish these papers and so on and so forth. So, you know, that would be my response would be yours.

So I can know you're just a genius, period. That's yeah. That's the story I consider the.

Practice of listening to an expert tell you the the facts and the arguments that he knows because of his expertise, that's totally interesting. But it's a separate thing from listening to someone talk about how to think about something when you don't have all the facts, which is the case for, you know, all of us, at least some of the time.

Probably most of the time. Even if you're an expert and you know a bunch of things, you're not going to be expert in most of the questions that you encounter the person in the world.

So to the extent that I have expert, I mean, I have small areas of expertise just from, you know, a degree in statistics and working as a journalist and working as a research assistant and stuff like that.

But that what I would point to is my the focus that I've been developing over the last, I don't know, six, seven years is just how do you think as clearly and accurately as possible about things when you're not when you don't have all of the information and philosophy certainly plays into that, that actually that could have maybe been an answer to one of my insights over the course of the 100 episodes that I've grown to see more value in philosophy, partly just as a result of encountering more philosophy that it can really help clarify your your thinking and help you figure out which questions you should be asking, even if it's not, you know, teaching you empirical things about the world.

That's not its role. So philosophy is part of that.

But I think that there's also a whole lot of expertise that you need to have, that you need to develop beyond philosophical rigor in order to think about questions about the real world. Like you need to be aware of the kinds of mistakes that your brain makes when you try to think about things. So you need to be aware of just the empirical fact from cognitive science that human beings tend to be overconfident and that, you know, when we say that something seems, you know, 99 percent likely to be true, it's only actually true maybe, you know, 60 percent of the time, depending on the domain.

This is a very sort of generalization.

And you and you just need to be good at noticing how you formed a conclusion, noticing whether you were whether you came up with the probability, for example, because you were looking at a reference class of similar cases and sort of estimating how many of them turned out a certain way or whether you just told yourself sort of plausible sounding story. So the thing that I've been focusing on, both talking to people about, reading about and practicing on my own, has been noticing the way I'm thinking about things and learning which ways of thinking are most likely to lead to accurate answers.

I'm not going to add another little thing. But before we go to the next question, which also actually mostly so dovetails with the first question about what what have we learned in the last 100 episodes, which is we have a very sharp audience both on the blog and on the podcast.

So if there is anything we say that doesn't actually work very well, either factually or sort of logically, somebody will let us know in pretty sharp and fast tones.

So and that's, of course, one one of the way you learn stuff.

I mean, you know, I spend an inordinate amount of time, probably more than I should on the blog, especially because from the blog we get most of the comments actually even about the podcast, on the blog, on the Russian speaking blog.

And, you know, some of these these people are really sharp. I know that some of them are professional physicists or philosophers or biologists or social scientists and so on, so forth.

But even the non-professional ones, you know, these are people who clearly appreciate sort of the broad perspective, but also the sort of the sustained discussion. And they enjoy being part of the discussion. And I learned tremendously. I mean, you know, every time that I post something on the blog, it's immediately somebody posts, you know, a summary of another link or another resource that I should have checked out. Then I go and check it out if I have the time.

And it's been a long, you know, a long and ongoing learning since the blog has been published since 2005. So it's been, you know, almost nine years going. Next question.

So let me just give one more quick example of what I'm talking about. So my my organization, the Center for Applied Rationality, has started holding what we call rationalist debates, which are not necessarily the point is not to have a zero sum battle where one person's supposed to win, the other person's supposed to lose. But just two people who start out with somewhat different views on a subject sharing their reasoning and their relevant evidence and trying to sort of converge in some way towards new positions.

And so the first one we held was about a very specific claim in nutrition, that the percentage of your calories that come from fructose is correlated or sorry has a causal effect on various metabolic diseases.

So neither I nor my colleague are experts in nutrition at all, which is sort of the point. The question was as just an intelligent layperson. Who's willing to spend a little bit of time doing research on the Internet? What's the best conclusion you can come to? And so what we did was we broke down the question into things like what? What should your prior be about this question? What what are the relevant reference classes to think about that this claim falls into?

So, for example, claims about nutrition, how how likely is any given claim about nutrition to be true, claims about nutrition that aren't believed by a majority of scientists in the field? How likely are those to be true? And of course, there's no exact probabilities, but you can sort of get a sense of whether a priori you should think this claim is very unlikely to be true or quite plausible before you find out the evidence. And then we also break down the evidence that was available to us based on two days of Google research and set up a lot of questions two days ago.

Research not continuously OK, but like, you know, OK, so I found well, actually, that's sort of another question that you have to ask as an intelligent layperson trying to get an answer to a complex question, what are the most reliable resources? So this involves knowing things like meta analyses are more reliable than any single study. Some analyses are more reliable than others. Sources that have conflicts of interest are less reliable than sources that don't, etc..

So those are the kinds of things that we are talking about, even though we couldn't, as non nutrition experts give precise answers to what the evidence actually shows.

But the bottom line is, well, my colleague actually updated a little bit towards my position, which was skepticism about the claim.

OK, so this one's mostly from Masimo, but I guess Julia could chime in, too.

Are there any forms of objective morality that you might consider to be plausible that might actually exist, or do you think that's ultimately always going to be futile?

So the question is about other sources of objective morality. And the alternative is, if there aren't, then the whole moral discourse is kind of futile.

I tend to reject that kind of sort of dichotomous approach to morality. I've actually written quite a bit about we covered this in the Bakos in the past and, you know, ethics and also even media ethics where you're talking about it's really mathematics, which is the study of how to do ethics. Right. Is is it possible at all to do ethics and under what conditions? Around quite a bit about on the blog.

And actually, that's one of the things that I learned about myself. You know, I often learn how I think, what I think, what I actually write it down.

So when I start writing the blog post, I may not necessarily have a complete thesis in my hand, in my in my mind. And I think I'm going in a certain direction. Then I start running things. Now, that doesn't make any sense. Let me check this other thing. And by the end of the post, I may actually have a slightly different or sometimes significant different position about Ethics Committee ethics.

So the two major broad categories of of metaphysical positions are ethical realism and ethical realism for for ethical realist, for a moral realist that really are objective truths, moral troops out there, although there is a bunch of different ways in which you can cash that that concept for the anteria list.

On the other hand, there is no such thing as is a moral truth that also can be cashed out in different ways. I mean, for some people, some of the anteriorly motives, they say, you know, talk of ethics is simply emotional talk. It's like it's like or dislike. You know, when I said that something is right or wrong, it's like I have an emotional reaction to it. Others are so-called noncandidate. They think that that when people talk about truth in ethics, they're just they're committing a category mistake.

They're really talking about something that has it doesn't not does not admit of the category truth. It doesn't apply to ethical concepts and so on and so forth.

So if I were to choose between those two, I would probably lean towards some kind of mild form of ethical realism.

But I don't want to do that because the way I think about ethics is actually that ethics to me is a type of applied rationality. We're talking about a minute ago about applied rationality.

So ethics is best conceived in my in my mind as a kind of if then sort of reasoning, if I start with certain assumptions about human societies and about what human beings want and so on and so forth, then certain things follow from those.

So, you know, for instance, just today, because because one of the latest topics on on on the blog was, in fact, ethics, mathematics.

And somebody asked me bluntly, it's OK. I want to short answer is, you know, murdering innocent people is immoral, you know, wrong or not.

And I said, well, there's no short answer. I mean, the short answer is, yes, it is wrong. But if you want to know why, we need to get into some details. And I said, well, the thing that we're doing if we're saying. My mind, if we're seeing that that killing innocent people is wrong, is we're starting with certain assumptions about what it means to be a human that most of us share unless we are sociopaths.

OK, and one of these assumptions is that human life is valuable, that your life is, from an objective perspective, as valuable as anybody else's life.

And so even though you have a personal, subjective interest in your life above everybody else from a sort of societal perspective, there is no such such thing.

And so if we had a few more sort of assumptions about human nature and how human beings interact constructively in a society, then it follows that, yes, it is in fact wrong to kill innocent people.

So to me, ethics is a type of reasoning.

It's analogous, not identical, but analogous to mathematical reasoning. You start with certain actions and you can start with any set of axioms. But in mathematics, you will see that some axioms are uninteresting.

They don't lead to anything interesting. Some axioms are self-contradictory. There are some if you start with certain sets of axioms and you don't go anywhere, you quickly reach contradictions. You quickly reach things that you cannot work out. I think it's the same with ethics, with the addition, of course, that there are some empirical constraints due to the fact that we're living in a world of a particular type, and especially that we are beings of a particular type.

We're social beings capable of self reflection, consciousness and so on and so forth. If we are not, then perhaps the whole category of ethics wouldn't apply to us.

The whole idea of morality wouldn't apply to us.

So I tend to the short version of the answer is I tend to stay away from sort of these these dichotomous realism versus anti realism and rather think of prefer to think of ethics as a type of applied reasoning, given certain empirical and value type assumptions about how we want to conduct business in our society.

So Masimo and I have disagreed about this before on the podcast and also on the blog. So this probably won't be news to you. But my position is that, yes, you can reason, starting from certain empirical facts about what what things give human beings happiness or cause human beings suffering.

And you can also reason, starting with certain premises about what you value, about what you consider objectively value valuable.

But I don't think that either of those practices of reasoning from those premises give you what most people would call moral prescriptions.

I think if you're you can reason about what is going to cause human beings happiness or suffering, starting from scientific facts about human beings. But that's just you're doing science. You're not actually doing ethics. And you can also reason, starting from certain premises about what you consider to be wrong, like intentionally causing suffering is wrong. And then you can reason from that, you know, give another empirical facts about specific things that are right or wrong.

But most of the work in in debating ethics is about those premises.

You know, if if Peter Singer is utilitarian and believes that the only things that matter to morality are whether you increase happiness or decrease or, you know, decrease suffering or whether you fulfilled people's preferences or don't fulfill them, that's just a completely different set of premises than someone who's maybe an Objectivist and believes that respecting autonomy is, you know, a very valuable thing in its own right, maybe sometimes completely trumping how much happiness or suffering there is in the world.

And so you can, you know, reason starting from any set of premises you want.

But the point of metaphysics is about what sort of premises to choose.

And I don't see any way to argue, you know, starting from one set of premises to convince someone with another set of premises.

I want to disagree. And the reason for that, I think, is because ethics being, again, a type of applied logic logicians are very familiar with the idea that you can have more than one rational solution to a particular set of problems.

And so in these these different types of of ethical systems essentially are analogous or or alternative solutions, none of which is, you know, refutable on on on on sorry, on theoretical grounds. You can be a utilitarian and be a self-consistent. You do. And you can have and you can live your life that way. Or you can be a visual artist and you can and you can do it starting from different premises.

And there's no there's no knock down argument that the visual artist can come up with to say the town is wrong. But I don't think that that is necessarily a problem for two reasons. First of all, because it shows you that it's actually more complicated than most people think. Second of all, because I do disagree on one of your premises, which is in actual practical, ethical reasoning, everyday ethical, ethical reason, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference what your meta ethical position actually is.

A lot of actual ethical reasoning if you actually read ethics books about ethics.

Papers about ethics, it tends tends to be about fleshing out assumptions that or positions that are actually fairly common. And when people do disagree on certain things and fundamental things, at least what you do, what you get is it becomes much more clear what exactly it is that they disagree on.

OK, so if it turns out that, you know, one of the agents engaging in an ethical debate says, look, I just don't care at all for any kind of social programs because I think this is where the priorities should be.

Well, OK. But now we got it out of you know, we got it out in the open. That is exactly that's that's the clear assumptions.

And now we can just go to the polls and vote on it. Right. And you can you can just make your argument based on, you know, to other people and and see how we should conduct business in society.

The other thing to say, I think about mathematics is that a lot of people that are impatient with that, impatient with the ethics claim that no matter how you put it, ethical reasoning is not is not compelling.

It's not there's nothing that compels you.

You know, you can come up with the perfect, perfectly logical ethical argument. But once somebody can simply sit there and say, OK, I don't care, I don't want to do it right, and that's it.

So there's no compulsion. And that's true.

But that is the same kind of compulsion that come up comes up when you explain to somebody Pythagorean theorem and they say, yeah, I don't I think it's wrong. OK, well, you think he's wrong. That just means you didn't get it, period. I cannot force you compel you to get it or to agree that that is the right thing to do or the right way to think about certain things.

That is one difference.

But by the way, between theoretical sort of rational and was like ethics, mathematics, logic and so on in science, science does compel you if you really believe the gravity does not have an effect and you try jumping off the fifth floor of a building without a parachute or something to that, that's compulsion.

That's there's nothing you can't get around the laws of physics.

But with logic.

Yeah, well, you can disagree for the wrong reasons and nobody can say, well, jump off the window while they can say, but it wouldn't be compelling.

So there's I'm losing track. So can somebody try try to keep track of things I saw hand over there. Yeah. Back there. Yes. Thank you.

OK, so I think we would agree that science aims at providing facts and truths about the world. But I think what people really want is not truth, but meaning. So my question to you is what is meaning and related question concerning nihilism? Is nihilism or nihilism a lack of meaning, or is there actually a meaning in it?

OK, so the question is about people. It doesn't seem to be that interested necessarily in in the way the world works. They're interested in how to make sense of the world from a point of view of meaning in life. And the related question was, if somebody and nihilist, which is a position typically associated with lack of meaning, would reject it. And there is any such thing as meaning in life, does that really follow you?

Is that really a meaningless position? Do you want to take it on first or you want me to go?

You let me take the hard ones first. Oh, that's right. No, no, no. I got this, OK.

She says I so I've I've written some articles and I give a talk sometimes about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I think which is one of my favorite works of, I would say philosophy. Yeah. As well as science fiction. And it and I think this is sort of the central question that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is tackling.

And and the answer is 42. Right. So it's very short. So I want to recap the entire plot of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as much as I would like to.

But I'll just say that there are a number of major threads running through the book that get at this problem in which human beings feel like they're there must be more meaning out there that's important that they can grasp.

But they not only don't know what the answer to their questions are, but they don't even know what the questions that they should be asking are, which is why their question to the supercomputer that they built was was just what is the answer to deep thought?

I was about to say deep blue, no computer.

Right. So the the question that they posed was what is the answer to life, the universe and everything?

And so the computer spits back 42 and when after millions of years. Right. Right. And when met with their looks of consternation, that this was the answer they got after millions and millions of years of waiting, the computer points out that, well, you know, you didn't you didn't actually ask me a question. Like the question was not well-formed. So, of course, you got a silly answer. And so this is sort of the problem.

The nice thing is that you. You have to build the suggestion is that you have to build a even larger computer to figure out the question. The question is yeah. And so I think that the meaning question is not well-formed. And I think that you can sort of get it, that you can notice that fact when you look at what what feels meaningful to different people.

And it's very different and very contradictory.

And Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy treats this problem, too, with its various examples of people who either feel like life is meaningless because it's all going to end someday, or people who have eternal life like Wilberger and feel like life is meaningless because of it.

So, you know, when you get to a point where life is meaningless, either because the world's going to end someday or because the world's not going to end someday, this is sort of a proof that your concept of meaning was not well formed. So I think what's really going on is a bunch of things that make that make existence feel sort of absurd or empty to us, like comparing our personal lives and our personal concerns to this sort of astronomical scale.

I don't think that human beings really evolved to we evolved in a scope that's much smaller than the scope that we're now aware of now that we know how big the world is and how big the universe is and how long time is.

And so the drives that make us care about things were developed on the small scale.

And when we compare it to the large scale, it makes our own personal concerns seem so tiny. And so I think part of the what is the meaning of life quest comes from that comparison, which is a natural thing to feel. But I think that it's the result of a clash between how the human brain evolved and the modern world that we live in today and all that we know. So it's the feeling of having a lack of meaning is not so much a statement about lack of understanding the universe as it is a statement about just how our our brains work, I think.

So my answer is going to be a little different, although I agree with pretty much everything I just said in this case. But there's three answers to what I think to be a three part question.

One is actually going to question one of the premises, which is I don't think that people are more interested in meaning than in how things work. In fact, most people spend most of their lives trying to figure out practical things about their lives.

They don't think about life, the universe and everything to the meaning, the meaning issue, some sort of background condition. You often don't think about it at all. And when you do think about it, typically people settle for very simple answers like, oh, there is a God, fine, you got a plan. That's it. And the story let me go back to do the grocery shopping.

So I'm not so sure that there is.

I mean, obviously, the question is important. And obviously, if you do ask people there will sort of think about it. But I'm not sure that on a practical based on actual everyday basis, most people don't spend that much time to think about the meaning of life.

People are not concerned with the day to day, day to day basis with the truths of science, except one, of course, they get into a car or open a computer or, you know, do anything that is actually the result of science. So, you know, again, it's the background. Yes. They don't they're not concerned with it. But in fact, as a matter of fact, they should perhaps be concerned. Now, that's not to diminish the importance of the question, because I think the question is important.

There's two the two part answer, I guess because the first one wasn't an answer, was just a questioning of the premise.

Is this first of all, I don't think that there is that the question in the meaning of life is that difficult? I think Aristotle pretty much got it.

We can't go to meaning in general, I think, because the term meaning as as multiple multiple meanings or was about to say multiple applications or multiple sort of ways in which it is deployed.

And for instance, you know, I can ask you, what is the meaning of this particular sentence in Italian? In which case what? By meaning what I mean is, you know, can you translate it into a language that understand.

So I take it within the context of this discussion, particularly for talking about nihilism and why people are concerned about meaning rather than science. I think that we're talking about really is the meaning of life, however conceived.

And that one, as I said, I think that Aristotle pretty much got it right, that there is no such thing as universal, external, independent, meaning it's not a God, it's not a universe that gives meaning to your life, life, the meaning of life.

And it's not just Aristotle, but also, for instance, Epicurus, meaning in life, comes from having goals, pursuing things that you care about, having friends, having family, having, you know, love relations, that sort of stuff. So it's not really it's. It's really not rocket science, it's not relative, and I decided we'd have to resist it. Of course, it's anachronistic to think about what really started, what I thought about relativism, because that wasn't around the concept, wasn't around the time.

But now I think that it's not relativistic unless by relativistic you mean, you know, specific to the human human race. Right. In that case, I would have to agree. Yes, of course.

You know, there's no meaning of life for Rux for that or for plants, for that matter.

But if we're talking about human beings, I mean, are these response there would be that there is such a thing as human nature? It is, of course, heterogeneous. It's complicated. It's not. It's not you know, it's not that well made exactly the same way. But we have certain things in common that are pretty much universal, again, except for sociopaths and occasionally other exceptions. So pretty much every human being does want to have meaningful relations with other people.

Friendships, love, you know, children often that pretty much every human being wants to feel like he's needed by other people for something else wants to pursue goals about things that interest them. Now, what interests you? Maybe, of course, very different from what interests another person. And for Aristotle, that's fine, as long as it is not destructive to society.

If you say, well, what interests me is to, you know, going out and killing people at random. OK, now we've got a problem. So I do think now I don't want to go too long about this particular question, but I think that that pretty much the Aristotelian servitor ethical response to the meaning of life is the right one.

Incidentally, when we talk about morality, you know, these days in modern parlance and if you are a utilitarian or the anthologist or one of these, the more recent ways of looking at morality, the the more of the typical moral question is what is the right thing to do?

All right. What is the wrong thing to do?

And for the ancient Greeks, that would have been a very strange definition of morality. For Aristotle, morality was concerned with the question, what kind of life should I live?

And once you answer that question, then the question, too, is this the right action or wrong answer? And that comes automatically because you built, you know, a certain view of life and a certain view of how you should behave in general through the sort of developing of virtues.

So I think that there is an answer there, and I think it's a pretty convincing one now, the nihilism stuff.

So there are some happy nihilists.

And I'm thinking in particular about Alex Rosenberg, for instance, who was a philosopher of science, who recently wrote The Atheist Guide to Reality or something like that, which I've reviewed somewhat negatively in the Philosopher magazine.

I then eventually met Alex, and he's a really nice guy. As it turns out, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from the book, but he's a really nice guy and he's convinced he's a convincing nihilist. He thinks of himself as an epic nihilist or whatever. And, you know, he says that, you know, you can still find meaning even even though you realize you recognize that there is no external meaning, that whatever you do doesn't really matter and so on and so forth.

I think that people like Alex are either deluded or they don't understand what people mean by meaning. Right. Because if he says, you know, I asked him, I mean, we had lunch together.

We went for three days at these naturalism workshop that was organized by cosmologist Sean Carroll about a year ago. And you can find the video of the whole discussion three day long.

They are not just between me and Alex, but other people than Dennett and Jerry Coyne and a bunch of others.

And so I asked Alex, I said, you know, so what gets you going in the morning? And he gave me a surprisingly long list of things.

Right. You know, I love getting up and, you know, teaching my classes and running my books and, you know, and and interacting with my wife and with my children. OK, so now. So you're not an atheist, really? No. You're telling me that what you did you're a visual artist is essentially you're simply telling me that there is no overall cosmic meaning.

Fine. Yeah, that's that's OK. But that's not nice. That's just relocating to the locus of meaning internally to human societies as opposed to externally to the cosmological level. Fine.

Well, I don't think you guys actually disagree. I mean, I think that Rosenberg and other nihilists and I guess I would count myself in this Category two are just saying there's no objective answer to the question of what is meaningful. There are facts about what what give human beings the sense of meaning and that objective, they are the result of a particular evolutionary trajectory of we are a particular type of being.

That's an objective fact.

Yes, but but traditionally, when people have asked what you know, the answer to life, the universe and everything is they've been asking, like, what should I find meaningful, not empirically, what things can I do that will give me the sense of meaning, but what is true about what is meaningful?

And so that's I think that's like morality where, you know, I might say I don't think there's an objective fact about what is moral to do, but that doesn't mean that I don't, you know, care passionately about reducing suffering and about, you know, all these other things.

I just don't call those those values of mine objectively correct in the way that a moral realist would.

That is true. No, I don't think we disagree in substance in this case. But I will stay away from the from the liberal nihilism, first of all, because it has philosophical baggage that it's really negative. And what would you want to take it on? In fact, with glee in the case of Alex, I mean, Alex is really a gleeful nihilist, which is in itself a contradiction in terms.

You know, why would you be gleeful about anything if you're an idealist?

But so so I think there is a there's a sort of baggage reason for it. But but also the idea is that although, you know, we're simply redefining what it means to be objective, what counts as an objective fact here.

So Aristotle will say, for instance, that even though there are objective facts about human nature. Right.

That we can discover and we can both by personal experience and by, of course, science, scientific investigation, some people still get it wrong. Some people still under what you would consider wrong, factually wrong impression that the goal of life is to maximize your wealth, for instance, regardless of other things.

And so for a result of that is wrong in an objective sense that is given the kind of animal that we are that is actually and objectively wrong thing to do.

This is you're just doing living your life in the wrong way, even though, of course, a nihilist doesn't have an answer there, because an analyst would have to say, well, there are no objective facts about anything. And therefore, if the person wants to spend his life as a as a psychopath, why not? Right. Well, it's has pretty good answers for. Why not? You're sick. Literally sick in your in your in your soul.

I think we should move to the next question. OK, go ahead.

Very, very briefly. You can you can completely agree with someone about the empirical facts. Like you can agree that if I leave that person alone and don't intervene, he will end up doing great harm to himself.

And so, you know, a utilitarian and someone else, a genealogist could completely agree about that, but. They have different beliefs about what the right to action is, in that case, the utilitarian would say the right action is intervene. The ontologies might say the right action is to, you know, leave him to his own devices and not infringe on his autonomy.

So I'm sorry, did I not mention that the anthologist trends are wrong about that?

We got one or two in the front here and then here. Who's got.

Hi, my name is Brenda. Do you guys have any plans on, like, expanding your audience in terms. I'm just frustrated all the time with the general public.

The everybody seems to just use emotional reasoning, like when the rubber hits the road, it's going to be emotional reasoning and drama. And I'm in the music business and I have to deal with this kind of stuff all the time. And people who know me, my audience knows my philosophies and they know the way that I think and that I like to think critically, but they don't care. So in terms of cognitive bias, which is what I think you were talking about, Julia.

Have you guys considered how to maybe circumvent that a little bit and get people a little more interested?

Well, that's an excellent question. And it's about, you know, yeah, we're talking about rationality, but we're reaching a somewhat small, you know, audience anyway. I mean, I think the typically the Russian speaking podcast in particular has done pretty well. And we range from something like 20 to 30000 downloads or something like that per episode with a peak of 100000 for free will, of all things inexpressibly.

People didn't have choice whether to download them or not.

So but of course, it's a tiny fraction. And now it's true that we are one of the several podcasts and there's a bunch of blogs that deal with rationality, with, you know, ethics, philosophy, science and so on and so forth.

But yeah, yeah, you definitely can be frustrating. But I think that so what saves me from nihilism and desperation when I when I contemplate.

So the bigger picture, which is pretty much any time that I turn on, I don't know, Fox News, for instance, what says my sort of what helps me maintain my my sanity is the subtitle of one of the Carl Sagan's most famous book, The Demon Haunted World. The subtitle of the book was Reason Science is as a Candle in the Dark. And my version of it is reason as a science in dark, which I think is broader than science.

The image that that conjures is the idea that that reason and science are a precious thing. They're surrounded by darkness. They will always likely be surrounded by darkness. But that doesn't mean that it's not important to, first of all, keep it alive.

And second of all, you know, push the.

There what I mean, that's right, that's right. We might come up with significantly better ways of doing things, but the point is what what keeps me going is this idea that, look, all I'm doing here, my goal, my limited goal is to keep that thing alive and to expand it a little bit. If I were to set myself the goal of, you know, making humanity rational, forget it.

And so that would definitely be a situation for, you know, desperation.

And, you know, after a while, you just give up and it's a similar I take the same the same approach to that, I suppose, that I that I take with my students in my classes.

Right. So typically, you teach a class of 30 students, for instance, you know that about, you know, maybe a third of them just don't give a crap about what you're telling them. They're there because they're feeling some fulfilling, some requirement. And then you know that a number of other people probably can go in and out of high school. And so there really shouldn't be in college to begin with.

It's you know, once you start counting down, it's like, why are you doing this? Well, you're doing this because there is always going to be a number of people, usually a minority in the class that throughout the semester you just look at them and you see the light bulbs going off and say, oh, you got it. She she understands what what I just said. You know, she's thinking about it. And that makes to me, that makes it worth it.

And if you if you focus and in some sense, I guess it's lowering the bar. But but if you focus on that kind of goal, then anything else that you can do that you then you managed to do?

It's a it's a plus. And it's and it's welcome.

Yeah, I've thought about this a fair amount because my organization runs workshops on applied rationality and how to take, you know, critical thinking and use it for your career or your relationships or to help the world.

And at the moment, our demographic is similar to the rationally speaking listeners. You know, they're like reasonably well educated. They're already intellectually curious and motivated and, you know, not representative slice of the whole population.

So we think pretty often about how and when to try to expand our demographic. And I think it's certainly hard. And in some sense, we're starting with just the low hanging fruit, because if you can't take people who are already, you know, intellectually curious and motivated and help them improve their rationality, then you don't really have a hope of doing it with people who aren't already interested and motivated.

So that's sort of an argument for why we're starting there.

My impression at this point is that there's two things that are going to actually make people who aren't already inherently interested in rationality more rational. First is if it's clear to them that it will help them with things that they care about.

So that's an argument that I think you can make in various domains, certainly with no sort of concrete practical goals like starting a business, you can make an argument for various aspects of rationality being helpful there.

And I think that's one reason that entrepreneurs are interested in rationality, even if they aren't inherently interested in it for its own, you know, as an end in itself. And, you know, there's been an increasing amount of research on rationality and how it helps with various life outcomes.

Keith Danovitch is a researcher who's actually on our board of advisors, and he just got a million dollar a large grant to study rationality over time and how it affects life outcomes. So I'm hopeful and we're doing some research ourselves, too.

I'm hopeful that in the next several decades we'll have clearer arguments for clearer evidence about rationality being concretely useful with things people care about. And then the other the second thing that I think would cause a cultural shift is just making rationality, making various aspects of rationality seem admirable, seem like socially like not doing that would be socially unacceptable. You know, that refusing to change your mind or treating arguments like bottles would be sort of something people would look down on you for.

And that's a hard thing to do to change the culture. I you know, in my dream world, we essentially infiltrate Hollywood and get them to make the attractive and charismatic heroes in their movies, change their minds in response to evidence and use rationality and other attractive ways.

And optimist. Yeah. So by the time of Episode 500, I think we'll have made significant progress. It's like, OK, we move toward the front.

This dovetails very well with the question you just answered. And you're addressing a small audience, as you're saying, but it's pretty big. And if we as the audience can take that further, this is my question for parents and educators. What do you think is the very best way that we can inspire critical thinking and logic and scientific reasoning inspire the children?

So I've actually done a few videos on my YouTube channel about how I think my parents helped put me and my brother also onto this track of enjoying rationality, trying to be more rational, trying to think critically about things, and it had to do so.

The intellectual curiosity part was partly setting a good example. My parents are both really intellectually curious, but also when we would ask them questions instead of instead of telling us to be quiet and also instead of just telling us the answer, they would sort of lead us through the thinking ourselves in a kind of Socratic way. So, you know, I would ask my dad, why is the sky blue? And so he would start, well, why do you think the sky is blue then?

He sort of, you know, ask me leading questions to help me think about it. And so it I don't know, it formed good habits early on.

And I remember in particular noticing that my parents were really good about listening to arguments and changing their mind. So I think I must in six or seven, when I first noticed this, I made some argument to my parents probably having to do with why some rule of theirs was unfair. And and my my dad came back a few minutes later and said, you know what I was thinking about? And I think you're right.

I think that's, you know, what's unfair, given what we said earlier or something like that blowing is like, well, I was so impressed.

You know, I remember like as a seven year old thinking, that's really cool of him. I want to be like that.

I actually my experience growing up with my grandparents was very similar to this kind of in particular my grandfather. He had this sort of open ended encouragement to, you know, reading books. Do you know, getting interested in science was whatever I was doing was it was encouraging. But I also think there are systematic studies. I mean, other than anecdotal evidence about these sort of things, there are better ways of schooling children and more ways of schooling children, you know, the Montessori type of school and similar things.

It's a class it's a category of broad category of doing things with small classes where where there is a mix of younger and older students to teach each other, interact with each other, where the method of teaching is more Socratic, it's more of sort of a give and take with the teacher. Those empirically are significantly better than the sort of the standard. You know, I talk to you in a large classroom and I spend most of my time making sure that you just sit there and behave right.

That sort of stuff, which, of course, implies that most of what we do in terms of education, especially public education, is exactly the wrong thing to do.

And but, you know, the problem is that things like Montessori schools are similar types require significant investment, both in the training of the teachers, of course, and in the fact that the classrooms are small.

So it costs money to do that sort of stuff.

Now, in this country in particular, there is every time that there is an election, there is a lot of people make a lot of noise about how important education is and then they don't do anything about it.

So I think it's own damn fault. And by the way, did I mention Aristotle before?

So, again, I think he got it right.

He realized that, you know, being a virt becoming a virtuous person, by the way, I mean, I'm sure you guys know this, but when I talk about virtue in the context of Aristotelian and similar ancient Greek philosophy, I don't mean Christian virtue. I don't mean chastity and purity and that sort of crap.

I mean, forget that. Right. So so the virtues for the ancient Greeks, sort of things like courage, equanimity, you know, the ability to deal with complex situations, you know, in the right way.

And Aristotle was on the one hand, made a point that is still used today, even in applied, you know, therapy like cognitive behavioral therapy. That is, if you want to change your behavior, you want to become more virtuous in the discipline and sense. You do it by practicing. It doesn't come natural. It's it's a it's a slow process. But the more you do it, the better it is. It's the equivalent, the ethical equivalent of going to the gym.

Right. The first time. It hurts like hell.

But if you keep going, it gets better and better and it's easier and easier and in fact at some point becomes even pleasurable and it kicks in.

And the point of, you know, you actually get pleasure out of it. But even so, that's not enough. According to Aristotle, you also have to be lucky, meaning that you have to be healthy and, you know, not crippled in any substantial way because otherwise you can't develop your full person. So that's a matter of luck.

And and also, you have to be growing up in a supportive social and family environment, because the first the very first level, when you get your first steps toward becoming a virtuous person, in a sense, is in fact your family. And so if you're family, it's not supportive. If your family is not nudging you in the right direction, you're ready. Start out with a handicap and the schooling can only do so much after that. And if the schooling is also not particularly good, then you're done.

By the time you got to college to me, in my classes, you're topless. You know, all I can do is to weed out the few that actually, you know, within I guess the few that actually are kept. Keep going. We need to really rethink this at a at a societal level.

This is a broad discourse that. At a societal level.

Yes. Very funny. Yeah. Without disagreeing with the question, has philosophy given us any really good answers and what and what are they without disagreeing with the question which we'll see about that as philosophy, giving us any any good answer and about what.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I mean I just mentioned the couple. I mean, you know, how do you live your life. That's a pretty big one and it's a pretty good one I think, and I mean philosophy.

So that, you know, often you hear these things.

The philosophy is not about answers. About questions. Yeah, that's true to some extent.

It's about how to reformulate, how to clarify concepts. So to, you know, reformulate your question, maybe your question like like the case of the Chinese guide to the Galaxy that Jim was mentioning earlier, maybe sometimes is the question that is actually ill conceived. And so you want to think about what exactly is it that you're trying to to to do? And philosophical analysis can help there. But I do think that philosophers have come up over the years and over the years, over the millennia that come up with very interesting, reasonable answers to a lot of questions often to do with with.

For instance, morality, but also about epistemology, how how we know things, you know, which is the basis for science. I mean, he was a philosopher, Francis Bacon, that restarted basically the scientific revolution in the 17th century, 16, 17 centuries or so.

And of course, there are there are other areas of philosophy where people may or may not convinced that that we got good answers, like aesthetics, for instance, or metaphysics. But there are some really interesting things to be said in those areas as well.

And I think that the point of philosophy is, in fact, not to give you permanent final answers, but to give you a good analysis of the problem and a good provisional answer or an interesting provisional answer or even a set of answers, as we were talking about earlier.

In the case of mathematics, you have several ethical systems that that you can think about and, you know, does that help?

I think so. I mean, some of the major ideas that we take for granted today, like the idea of democracy or the idea of women's rights or animal rights and so on and so forth, they come out and they've been elaborated by, at least in part by philosophers.

And, you know, today we sort of think of them as everyday obvious stuff.

But in fact, there was a time where only people like, you know, Kant or Aristotle or or John Stuart Mill were thinking seriously about this stuff. And then these things percolate slowly. Philosophy can take all the credit for that. I mean, this is a conversation that it's going it's been going on a cultural conversation and of course, that has been going on throughout the last several millennia.

But I think the philosophers have been a very important part of that conversation. In fact, I think that it's best that's the way philosophy works, that philosophers can talk about themselves, about certain things. And then and then the best parts of those conversations sort of percolate in the more general societal milieu. And then we absorb ideas and we modify them and so on and so forth. So I think the answer. Yes, absolutely, yes. In fact, I'm working on a book to show that the philosophy actually makes progress and has provided very interesting answers or ways to think about things that we didn't have before.

So, yeah, I think there's a lot of bad philosophy out there, and having encountered mostly just the bad philosophy was the source of my original position. You know, five years ago, that philosophy was pointless. Since then, I've encountered some really valuable philosophy and I feel like it's improved my thinking quite a bit. So with that said, I think a couple of things that philosophy, does that come closest to giving us answers, as you put it, are first giving us better ways of thinking that give us better answers, you know, with with the addition of other empirical facts.

So to give an example, I the practice of dissolving a question is one of the most useful philosophical tricks that I've learned. So it involves, for example, I remember thinking a few years ago about something that had happened in my life that had sort of turned out poorly, but seemed like a good idea at the time.

And I remember puzzling over this question of, well, was it bad? Was what happened bad?

And I felt very confused about this question until I eventually dissolved it and realized, well, OK, so it you know, I could ask myself different questions that that would all actually have answers. Whereas the question of was it bad? Doesn't have an answer. I could ask, is that policy actually something that I should follow in general? Yes, that does actually seem like based on the information I had at the time, that was a good thing to do.

Were the consequences worse compared to what otherwise would have happened?

Well, hard to know because I can't see counterfactuals, but seems likely anyway. I could ask different questions like that. I just I just took the original question, which was intractable because it was poorly formed. It broke it down into other questions that actually did have answers. And that was very satisfying to me. So let's just sort of a personal example. But this happens in science, too, just taking questions and dissolving them into questions that actually can be answered.

So the philosophy is helping in the process of getting us answers. It's just not providing the empirical facts because that's not really its role. I think philosophy is also helpful in as we were alluding to earlier, when you have premises helping you come to conclusions based on those premises. So, you know, I was dissing meta ethics before as not being able to give an answer to which set of ethical premises you should, in some objective sense, adopt.

But if you start with a set of premises, philosophy can totally be useful in pointing out conclusions that you didn't realize followed from those premises.

Like if you believed that if you believe that you don't want to hurt a dog or that it wouldn't be worth it to hurt a dog in exchange for a few moments of pleasure for yourself. And you also believe that there's no sort of morally relevant difference between a dog and a pig, then, you know, ergo, you should also believe that it's not worth it to hurt a pig in exchange for a few moments of pleasure eating ribs, for example.

So that may not have been something that occurred to you before, you know, putting together or you probably like the conclusion.

Well, you may not like confusion and you can disagree with different points in the reasoning, too. But but the conclusion is actually a pretty valuable thing to realize, you know, given whatever values you start with.

And I also think that philosophy needs to take given giving credit in part for some of the historical developments that it has engendered.

Right. I mean, most of the other things that we think are valuable today, actually, where at some point or another philosophy, science was natural philosophy. Mathematics started out as a as philosophy. Logic still is a branch of philosophy.

And, of course, it has applications in computer science and things like that.

So all of these, you know, today, if you say well, but about science and science has done this, not philosophy. I know, but science wouldn't exist without the development of philosophical ideas. And so you've got to give some credit to your parents or grandparents. You know, it was funny very recently.

I saw I read an article. Oh, yeah. Steven Pinker famously was giving his advice to the humanities from the point of view of sort of a modern scientist. And he says, oh, you know you know, all these people there are all these scientists who had done all sorts of interesting things during the alignment. And he started listing people like the card. Can't you know, it's like, wait a minute, those are philosophers.

Those are not scientists that they thought of themselves as philosophers.

We still think of them, of them today, mostly as philosophers. So it's like, wait a minute. So you need to give credit where credit's due. And sometimes that credit is historical because, you know, psychology was not an independent discipline until the late 19th century.

Early 20th century was a branch of philosophy. And James, who was arguably the father, the principal figure that brought psychology out of philosophy and into its own discipline, was in fact himself essentially a transitional figure, was both a scientist and a philosopher.

So that sort of stuff needs to. Not because there should be some kind of scoring rubric out there, but because people have this unfortunate tendency to sort of discard, discard philosophy, as you know, notoriously useless and notoriously so nitpicking about things. Well, and nit picking has a reason. You know, it's about clear thinking and the uselessness. Well, it depends on what your scale is. If you're looking at a temporal scale large enough, you will see that philosophy is arguably the most useful thing we've done as a as a as a race, as a human race.

OK, so the question was the question was, how do you see the future of the world?

Then you rephrased it as, yeah, the rephrases you manage this or it's a little bigger. A little smaller. Sorry. And then what now limited to just the end of the century or something like that. Right. I'm not a catastrophist, so I don't think that major catastrophes will happen, even though we do face serious challenges, some self-imposed like climate change, for instance, and others that, you know, may just happen. You know, an asteroid comes in and hits us and causes a, you know, dinosaur scale mass extinction.

That will be a problem.

But saving that, you know, setting aside that possibility, I I think that humanity will be around for a little bit longer, that that our ability to solve practical and technical issues will improve as it has improved over the last several centuries, ever since at least the beginning of the scientific revolution.

But and but again, arguably earlier on, I mean, the Middle Ages was, in fact, not a particularly innovative period, but there were still a lot of actual technical innovations and new ideas coming out even during that period.

So humanity does that sort of stuff.

What worries me the most, I should say, I should, however, say add is that we have not been making quite as much progress in terms of sort of from a moral perspective, from a way of, you know, point of view of handling our problems.

We have made some progress there, too.

I mean, one of the things that that some of my more pessimistic friends tend to discard is, again, the long, the long view of things.

Right.

So so we get discouraged because, you know, the latest progressive I'm a liberal progressive, as you might have noticed.

But the latest and, you know, progressive legislation that got hampered or setback or whatever it is, or because there is a resurgence of, you know, anti-Semitism or whatever the problem at the moment may be. Right. And all of those things are factors that need to be considered, taken, taken seriously.

But think about it the longer perspective. Right. So until 10 or 20 years ago, it was inconceivable that we might have a number of states approving gay marriage, for instance. It was just inconceivable. You talk to people, you know, 20 years ago is like, what? That's not going to happen. A black president. That's not that wasn't going to happen until probably. In fact, when I saw Obama running for president, I said, here we go, the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot again.

This is never going to happen.

Well, it happened. Expand a little longer time scale. You know, about a century, less than a century ago, women didn't have a right to vote in this country. And, you know, they do now. They say equality. Now, there's no equality yet, but we certainly have made significant progress, expand even further. And just two or three hundred years ago, you could actually burn people at the stakes for being witches.

So I. I count that as significant progress. You know, if you want to go back to the Middle Ages, fine. But I do think it's progress.

I think it's lower than the technological progress, technological progress.

It's easier, I think, by comparison, because all it takes is a few people to have the right idea and be able to implement it and then everybody else is just going to use it, OK? It doesn't take billions of geniuses to invent the iPhones. All it takes is one or two and then everybody else buys it. OK, but in terms of unfortunately, in terms of morality or ethics, that doesn't work that way.

Every single one of us has to agree or most of us have to agree that that is a good idea. We can't just buy off the shelves, you know. Oh, animal rights. Yeah. Let me let me buy it.

No, you have to convince people and that I'm pushing it takes more time. So we get to the paradoxical situation where although I think you can demonstrably argue that there's been, you know, progress both technically, technically, scientifically and sort of morally, the latter one is definitely slower and more painful, subject to pushbacks and that sort of stuff, and certainly not universal. Anybody can use an iPhone regathered, whether they're in China or in the United States or in the middle of Africa.

Not everybody can access can have the same access to, you know, women equality or gay rights and so on and so forth throughout the world. So you can see that there is a difference there.

But I have to be pretty optimistic. Besides, you know, I'm not going to live that long anyway, so it's going to be somebody else's problem.

So, yeah, I suppose I'll I'll just add to that that I have a general, very large amount of uncertainty about exactly what kinds of technologies will be developed or exactly what problems will arise, which is, I think, a useful corrective to the.

Sort of overconfidence that we tend to have about specific stories that we could see happening that said, you know, it would be unusual, it would be surprising if the technological progress trend suddenly stopped with our generation.

So I think it's reasonable to assume that there will be technological progress, although we don't. I feel very uncertain about exactly what kinds I may maybe less optimistic than Masimo just because of a general not law, but general principle about technological progress, which is that I forget who said this and I'm going to mangle the quote.

But basically the gist was every year the level of intelligence required to destroy the world goes down, which, you know, doesn't.

You have to be destroy the world. You have to substitute, you know, cause a catastrophe. So, you know, I may have, you know, low probability on any one particular catastrophe, like a, you know, pandemic or nuclear war happening in any given year.

But there are enough of them that over the next hundred years I, I have trepidation and I think that's reasonable.

We have time for maybe a couple more quick question if you want to go on. That's all right.

I have been looking at your website and reading all the materials that you've been covering. I think that you have an interdisciplinary approach to philosophy. And one of the things I'm asking myself, why are you not embracing the idea that the source of all the answers to your typical question about meaning of life and philosophy, philosophical questions?

What stem from the body, from the biological physiological processes of the body, so I say to myself, how come they're not up there? You're saying biology, biology, as in the process of life, saying the body of the body, the body, because from the body, if you use the body of use, the premise that the body is this is a very useful source to answer any meaningful question, any question has to do with philosophy.

You're going to have all the answers.

OK, so the question is, if I understand you correctly, is why not look at the body as the answer to all questions, its particular philosophical questions, since after all, we are biological beings evolved in a particular way. And so ultimately the answers have to sort of work with whatever we are in terms of biological beings.

Well, I think on the one hand, you could say that that is a obviously true point.

And on the other hand, you can say that that that's just not enough. I mean, it's obviously true in the sense that, yes, everything we do, including we're doing, including this conversation, requires a particular biological body that works in a particular way.

And if you don't understand that particular how that body works, you're in deep trouble. I mean, what what Julia was referring to earlier, for instance, you know, you can you can do philosophy, epistemology, for instance. So philosophy, you can you can you can study the structure of of logical argumentation.

But then you have also to realize that the reason there are reasons why people don't think logically.

Most of the times there are, you know, cognitive biases. There's all sorts of stuff that comes out of this that comes out out of the way in which human beings are made. There are certain things, you know, we got we come equipped with because of evolution or other reasons. We come equipped with certain kinds of, you know, your mistakes and shortcuts and all that sort of stuff, which is why we're better reasoning, naturally better reasoning.

We're naturally better at probability theory, which is how casinos make a lot of money and so on and so forth. Right. And so in that sense, if you just do philosophy in the formal sense of, you know, I'm going to analyze the ideal way of reasoning, and then you ignore that there is no such thing as an ideal reason or you're not making contact with what really matters with the way people actually are.

So in that sense, yes. But I do think that people do take that into account. I mean, it's not like, you know, nobody studies philosophy in a vacuum, even even even metathesis. Still, think about the way human beings actually are, not the sort of esoteric, you know, these embodied structures.

So my reductio ad absurdum of that argument, although I agree that understanding human biology and psychology is very important, is, well, ultimately everything is made of cork. So why don't you know if we just understand quarks and we'll have the answer to all of our important questions. It's just like a level of analysis that's not helpful for for most of the questions that we're interested in.

Right? Yeah, I think we've probably time. I think we can talk after time.

One more. Yes, one more. And then we'll. Yeah.

So the question is about then Ken then Danny cornerman book thinking fast and slow and whether that has any influence on us. You I go first. Yeah.

That's the book. Well actually I didn't read the book until, you know it was published a few years ago, but I had been familiar with the research that the book describes and that was a huge influence on me on the Center for Applied Rationality, because. Well, so Danny Kahneman was a pioneer of research on critics and biases, sort of exploring the different ways that the human brain forms judgments about what to believe or what to do and the different heuristics that that are our brains use and how they can go astray.

So biases are just basically systematic errors caused by the heuristics that our brains use, and in particular, like more so than any particular research about, you know, particular histories and biases, was the general conception of the human brain as first fallible reasoning machine, you know, not a perfect homunculus, you know, single unified agents making decisions, but instead of sort of cluj of lots of different reasoning modules that don't work in tandem and often contradict each other.

But then second, the division between what Kahneman sometimes refers to as System one and System two, thinking sort of automatic intuitive judgments versus deliberate analytical judgments and thinking in that framework and recognizing that, for example, I can, you know, believe something with my system too, but not really believe it on a gut level with my system.

One study noticed those contradictions and figure out when, for example, my system one's more likely to be reliable, when my system is more likely to be reliable, how to get them to communicate and coordinate with each other, like how to tell my system one things in a language it will understand and actually be convinced by, which usually involves showing my system one something instead of telling it a statistic. Stuff like that has been hugely influential for me personally and and I think is sort of the future of how to actually get human beings to reliably behave more rationally.

Yeah, the book I said far less influence on me. I must I must say not because it's not a good one and not because it's not based on interesting research. It certainly is, but because to me that book has done what often psychology books in psychology do, and that's psychology is not even the only discipline in which that happens. Another one is, for instance, psychology, which is closer to my expertise as a biologist.

They expand and quantify and systematize certain notions which are where we're present long before these books or these particular research came out.

So the idea that human beings, you know, thinking with different systems or that that there is such a thing as a rational, deliberate, slow approach to things as opposed to a sort of a subconscious fast juristic based way of doing things that has been around for a while. I mean, if you want to, you can track it all. Aristotle now.

Plato. Yes.

And as we know of all philosophies of footnotes to Plato, and since science is part of philosophy, then all of science is a footnote to Plato. It's a little more than that.

I think the common stuff is very interesting. There's now a lot of interest in psychology, actually in cognitive science about dual processing theories in general. So there's people that are expanding on his work. So but you asked about the influence. And so the answer in my case is it had much less influence than because Julich because I had already sort of incorporated from other readings that kind of general view of things. But it's nice to have empirically well substantiated confirmation that, yeah, that's actually the way it works.

And then you start learning something about the details, which, of course, Plato or people writing 200 years or 20 or 500 years ago couldn't possibly know because there were you know, we did not have the empirical evidence. We do not have that kind of approach to things. So it's an important book.

It has changed less my way of of looking at things compared to other to other meanings. But it's definitely something that I would recommend people to to take a look at if if you're not aware of it.

So are we all out of time?

Yeah, I think we're way past out of time, man. You can sit up here pontificating for so much longer. Exactly. But there will be time for that and social.

So you've been a wonderful audience. Thank you so much for coming out here and asking us such wonderful questions. And this concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations at the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.