54: Minds and Morality

to have Kurt Gray on the podcast. Kurt is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He received as BSc from the University of Waterloo and his PhD in Social psychology from Harvard University. He studies the mysteries of subjective experience and likes to wield Okham's razor to defend parsimony, asking whether complex phenomena can be simplified and understood through basic processes. These phenomena include moral judgment,

group genesis, and psychopathology. He's been named an APS Rising Star and was awarded the Janet Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Research. He was also given the SPSB Theoretical Innovative Award for the article mind Perception is the Essence of Morality. His latest book is The Mind Club, Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters, co authored with the late great Daniel Wagner. Thanks for being on the show, Kurt,

Thanks for having me. What a fascinating book. You know that you talk about how you like to wield Acam's razor to defend parsimony. Well, you also in this book kind of like you'd take all of the greatest life's mysteries and that just like distill it to like, Oh, you know, you put too much science in there. I think it's like, where's the magic of life? So tell me there is a lot of science. We do try to well down everything from love to falling in love

with animals. Yeah. I mean the range of topics that you cover in this book is so comprehensive, and you touch on so many big issues in the life of human existence, and I thought we could talk about a bunch of this stuff today. Yeah. So the Mind Club, Yeah, the book is called The Mind Club, and you define the mind Club is that special collection of entities who can think and feel. So in order to have a mind,

do you need to satisfy both criterion. That's a great question, And what we find is actually that there's really two mind clubs. There's a thinking mind club and a feeling mind club. Then you know, you and I have both the ability to think and feel, but some things only have one ability, like animals are often seen to only feel,

and corporations, for instance, are seen only to think. You know, I'm wondering because like in the field of cognitive psychology, is there a distinction between like emotions, like the study of emotions and the study of mind, the constructive mind in psychology, is it something that does naturally incorporates emotions, because I've seen it discuss different ways in the field. I've sort of seen it described like the cerebral core,

you know, like more of like the higher order processes. Yeah, I think, you know, I think it's a really vague concept what mind is and what emotions are. I mean, there's been debates going on for centuries almost about who has a mind and who has emotions. Sure, so I think, you know, we're just defining in a way that makes it easy for us to kind of look at these different mysteries and whether emotion's part of mind or different from mind or what have you seems almost like a

philosophical issue for sure. For sure, and your interest in those issues as well and incorporating that into your work. Let's back up a second and talk about how you met Daniel Wagner and this special bond you guys have and how this book came to fruition. Yeah, so I actually only met Dan Wagner once I was already his grad student. Seems kind of funny. I was actually traveling in Australia. So after college I took a year off

to go to Australia and surf pick grapes. And the first time I ever spoke to him was coming back from picking grapes one afternoon and my cell phone rang and it was Dan and he said, would you like to come and do grad school with me and explore the mysteries of the kind of human mind? And I said,

that sounds pretty amazing. And so you know, that was in two thousand and four when I started, and I originally wanted to look at free will, that's what he was doing at the time, but he had done this whole new area of mind perception, and that sounded really interesting, mostly for me because of all the moral questions that brought up, and we talked a lot about these ideas, and I think he wanted to write a book about them, and he was going to write that book by himself.

But in two thousand and ten, which is when I graduated, he found out that he had been diagnosed with ALS and he wondered if I might be willing to help him finish the book if he didn't have time to finish writing it, And you know, of course I said, yes, be grateful, And unfortunately, the disease went much faster than we hoped it would, and by the time he was too sick to write, he had kind of written the first chapter in a little bit of the second. Of course,

he'd planned out a lot of other stuff. But that's how I got it into the book and ended up doing a fair amount of it. But even when I was kind of writing the chapters after he'd passed away, I still kind of had this ability to, of course, perceive Dan's mind and always kind of wonder, you know, is this what Dan would have wanted to say? And most of the time I think, yes, you know, the much of the book is as Dan would have written it, down to the weird jokes and the weird examples. So

I agree, I think he would. You know, he's be very proud of you then this book. So how much of it did he write? How much did he get a chance to see before he passed away? How many chapters? So he, as I mentioned, he had kind of written the first chapter, and he had given me feedback on on the chain after of the machine. Okay, that's the third chapter, and he kind of looked at my plans for the other ones, but mostly, you know, near the end, he wasn't able to kind of write or read that much.

So I would just go up there and sit next to him. We look out over the lake through his picture window, and I would just kind of tell them what my plans were. And he said, you know, those plans sound reasonable, you know, go forth and multiply chapters and yeah. And it took me about three years after he passed away to get it all written up, but it got done, it did, and it is, like I said,

it's a very interesting book. You talk about cryptomnds a lot in this book, because is essentially every chapter in another manifestation of a crypto mind. Yes, that's exactly right. Every chapter is a kind of interesting mind, and a cryptomnd is just something that's you know, that's cryptic to us. We have a we have a hard time understanding whether there's a mind present or not, like an animal or a machine. Let we jump, you know, all the way and we'll work backwards to the self, which is your

last chapter. So do we have trouble? I know the answer to this question, but I'm asking a leading question. Do we have a trouble understanding ourselves? Yeah? We sure do. I mean, has anyone ever in the history of the world ever wondered who am I? I think I'm the first to ever bring up this question, right, So certainly psychology and philosophy before that have kind of plumbed the limits of our own self knowledge and wondered what it

means to be a person. And so some reviews of The Mind Club say that they're in some ways almost two different books. The first nine chapters is about all these kind of cryptic minds, and then the last chapter on the self, as you picked up on, is really a kind of brief, fun summary of modern social psychology and how we do or really do not know who we are? Have you read? I think Bruce Hood wrote it about how the self is a myth or as

an illusion. I haven't read Bruce's book, no, but Dan has a book or a chapter rather called the Self is Magic. I imagine is a similar kind of thing. Right. It's not a real thing. It's not like a book you can hold, but it feels so real. It does. Yeah, and we somehow, we somehow like we feel it as

a unified whole. Although you know, I think you asked, and actually in Bruce's book he asked people to think, close your eyes and try to locate where you think the self is and like kind of draw an X on a cartoon person of a version of a brain to show where it is. And you know what scared me about that exercise for me personally is when I close my eyes, I had trouble. I located it like in multiple areas, depending on what image of myself I thought of, Like I had all sorts of different images.

That bad. That means I don't have a unified self. Or is that normal? I think, Well, I'm not a clinical psychologist, but I'm pretty sure it's normal. I mean, I share your intuition, you know, if I try to pin down the self I mean I might not even put the X just in myself, because who I am is determined by my wife and my colleagues, my pets, you know, my work. Maybe I put part of the X in the mind Clubs, as I poured so much of myself into the book. Right, It's it's hard to

pin down absolutely. I mean, our self concept is constantly changing. I mean, it's good to have a stable source of self esteem, of course, but we do seem to have all these different aspects. So how does that relate to the mind? How does the self relate to you know, your main thesis running through this whole book that mind is a matter of perception. How does that relate to the self? Well, I think it kind of perfectly relates in some sense, because the self is really a matter

of perception. And at least in psychology, we kind of understand that the self is a matter of perception. It's something we make. But we often think that the minds of others as something that's really there. Right, And you know, there is an objective fact of the matter whether your pet can be embarrassed, right, whether your cat has deep thoughts. But the most part, the minds of our pets and

our machines, and dead people and vegetative patients. As you mentioned, it's a matter of perception, and that's something we really stress in the book absolutely, and you talk about implications for lots of things, and we'll get into some of this. So one I want to talk about is morality. So you talk about in this phrase diadic morality, and you talk about in virtually every chapter you talk about how it's relevant to the kind of cryptomind you're talking about.

So what is adic morality and how does it relate to whether or not something we judge it as immoral or not. Yeah, So dietic morality is just the idea that we understand morality in terms of two roles or two minds. Right. The word diet is the Greek word for two, And what it means is when we think of immoral things or moral things, we think of a perpetrator and a victim. That's all it really is. That's what a diet is. So murder has a murderer and

a victim. Abuse has an abuser and abuse ee, and we take that template to understand kind of everything around us. And the important thing is that those two people aren't just things but their minds. So an abuser or an a perpetrator. We think in terms of responsibility, thinking, right, kind of planning, intention, Those are what we'd call agency, but where you can think of it as really a

thinking doer. On the other hand, the victim is a vulnerable feeler, right, We're concerned about their suffering and their feelings. So morality is really about pairing together. A thinking doer causes suffering to a vulnerable feeler, that's all it kind

of is. Yeah, and that distinction explains so much. But can you like pull out the doer as well from the thinker, Like if we talk about like modern dual process theory, like the fact that we have you know, we have more automatic processes that might not be really thinking. We're not like consciously thinking to do them, but they still do things. Do you know what I mean? Isn't it possible to tease out the doer from the thinker as well? Yes, certainly you can kind of separate it.

But I think when we pass judgments of blame and more responsibility, we're primarily concerned with the thinking behind the doing. So if you're a sleepwalker or that's a great example of an automatic process where we infer mind even though and would you say, mind is still a part of that,

even though it's unconscious. I think. Well, so, of course, if you murder someone while you're sleepwalking, as we talk about in the self chapter, then you know you're still doing it, and there's still your mind is still involved in some sense, right, like your brain's making you move and kill someone. But it's not mind in the sense that we normally think, and certainly not mine in the

sense that we think deserves more responsibility. So in this case of the sleepwalker, everyone acknowledged that he killed his father in law, but no one thought that he was responsible. He lacked that kind of thinking part of his mind even if he was still doing it. Okay, okay, And this idea of you know, in the opposite end of the spectrum with the vulnerable feelers, we tend to have

the most compassion for them. You know, it's kind of like a ratio, like if you're much much more of a vulnerable feeler than you're thinking doer, we tend to have more compassion for you. It seems like if you've faced an injustice, for instance, or you're a victim, if you're a victim, certainly. Yeah, So people get incensed when people harm babies and puppies and orphans, right, these are all things that we think are very vulnerable and sensitive to pain. But we don't really get upset when CEOs

get injured or professional wrestlers get injured. Right, So it's really about you know, this vulnerability which makes them ideal victims and then, as you say, makes us empathize with them. And could that be problematic though from in the sense that we might not have as much empathy for the people that we've kind of put in the enemy category like that, maybe we could act she lack our own empathy for them because we do that certainly, Yeah, certainly.

So just because we perceive a mind a certain way, especially when it comes to human minds, doesn't mean that that's true. Right. So we can perceive that, you know, a CEO of a fortune five hundred company is cold and calculating and it's just doing things for a profit. But but maybe you know he or she is actually very sensitive to criticism and very caring, but their role

just prevents us from seeing that. So again all about perception, it is, Yeah, I mean we could there could be certain individuals in a company who could actually have been more innocent than others, but we want them as a part of the whole group and kind of strip them of their humanity in a way. Yeah. And on the flip side, we could have a child maybe who you know, we really empathize child. Yeah, exactly right, like a devil spawned child for them. But oh look how cute they are?

Exactly Yeah. No, for sure, My gosh, you really like nothing is off limits in this book, you know, like from bestiality to you know, I mean, it's amazing. So let's talk about bestiality for a second. You know, how does that relate to perceptions of minds? Well? So it's an interesting topic, right, because some people we cover in the book, Right, some people perceive a lot of mind an animal. They fall in love with animals, right, They fall in romantic love with animals and want to express

that love. I mean, you'd be surprised to how many people do it, but not enough that I would say it's normal, using like a statistical definition of what normal is. OK. But the weird thing from my perceptions perspective is why do we think bestiality is so terrible? And probably all our listeners, right, think that's really twisted when people do that. And you know, certainly it is weird, but it's not clear that the animals necessarily right feel as offended as

people do. Maybe it's not like animals give consent to sex and the wild to other animals. And so I think what people are really getting angry about is going back to this dietic morality thing, this imbalance between the person and the goat. Let's say, right, so the person is this clearly thinking doer. Right, A person can give consent, they can plan, and a goat can't. And so all

we think is that they're just vulnerable feelers. And so the example we raise in the book is, imagine how upset you'd be if someone has sex with a puppy. Chances are you'd be pretty upset. But now imagine that someone falls in loves and tries to have sex with a hammerhead shark. Oh right, we wouldn't have as much compassion, right,

we'd think, wow, that's a weird thing. But you know, if you can figure out a way, you know, to make love to our great way in that sense, don't we reverse it and say, like, maybe you're the victim if you get you know, your bits chomped off exactly exactly. So that's why we don't feel bad for the person because now they're the victim. So it's all about this ratio.

As as you mentioned, it's fascinating, especially in the Enemy chapter you talk about how, you know, the dehumanization aspect of what we do to our enemy that strips them of their agency and experience, right, And it's really interesting

because like, you know, we do that. We do that like in lots of subtle ways, like even like you know, like the person who doesn't like their partner, they think their partner is not spending a tension on them, and they call them a narcissist and they see, oh that person is such a nars My boyfriend or my girlfriends such a narcissist or like you know, so I share Rich read a really interesting book about that called The Selfishness of Others, which just came out recently, about how

we throw these words around that kind of like label the person in a way that strips them of their humanity to kind of sometimes make ourselves feel better about ourselves as well. Yeah, it's very easy to take away mine. I mean, as we talk about how easy it is to give mind oftentimes, how easy it is to kind of see your computer as having a mind or your

cat as being human. But it's equally easy to kind of strip a away mind from people who disagree with us, or who make us feel bad about ourselves, or we're just different than us, people have different religions or races or what have you. Are there humans though, that don't have a mind. Well, I think the I mean we don't really know is zombies could exist. Zombies philosophic Chalmers zombies,

Yeah right, yeah, Chalmers zombies. For you know, for listeners who aren't familiar, is this idea of someone who acts and looks and talks just like a person with a mind, but they actually don't have a mind. They're like a Stepford wife, a very sophisticated robot, you could imagine. So, you know, as you said, it's hard to ever tell if someone's really like that. I think the best contender for someone that doesn't have a mind that's a human is maybe someone in a in a vegetative state, right

who suffered a lot of brain damage. But someone walking around talking, I think it's a pretty good assumption that they have a mind like you, even if you sometimes ignore it. Okay, but even people vegeta states. You know, you talk about the emerging fMRI research or EG research looking at people vegetative states. How has that increased our

understanding of the presence of mind and such people. Yeah, it's been actually pretty important because a lot of these these minds of vegetative patients, as we say in the book, are silent. It's very hard to know if someone in a vegetative state has a mind because they can't tell you about it. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a vegetative state. Like do you ever have days where you're trying to work and like nothing is like flowing whatsoever? Yes? Yes,

why does that happen? Yeah? I guess that's a matter of perception. Yeah, as I think as dense as you feel on those days, I think you're still one up over people who you know, can't even blink. Okay, that's totally fair, that's a fair right. And so there's these people who you're not sure if they are, you know, vegetative, like there's nothing going on in their mind or they're locked in right that there's a mind there, they just can't express. It's somehow locked between their limp limp limbs

and their frozen face. And so MRI helps us distinguish that. So you can ask people questions in the scanner and you know to one example is think about playing tennis, or please think about walking around your house, And if you're in a vegetative state, you can't do that, right, you can't respond to those questions. But if you're locked in,

if you're still a mind back there, you can't. And so these MRI researchers found that a woman they thought was in a vegetative state actually seemed to be locked in because she could think about playing tennis when she was asked to think about playing tennis, and think about walking around her house when she was asked to do so. So it's really kind of flexible behavior. Really distinguishes it too. Wow, And fMRI was able to pick up on the relevant brain areas that we know have to do with like

spatial navigation and stuff. Yeah, exactly. I think the difficulty with MRI and why this isn't you know, like a godsend for having conversations with people, is because the signals really messy and you have to ask the question something like fifty times each and average across all those things to see what's happening. So it's not like you get incredible specificity where you can be like, well, think about how you feel about your mother right now. You know,

it's not clear what that would be. So it only works in specific circumstances, but still pretty powerful. Right. We can't read minds yet through fMRI, that's right exactly. I mean, do you think we'll ever get to that point? Maybe there's some researchers who are using EEG so kind of electrical signals that happen with much faster temporal resolution, not spatially, but much faster temporarily, and they're trying to get people to do kind of yes no responses, and some of

those seem pretty promising. And other potential ways with the deep brain implants, so you could implant electrodes, which gives you, you know, circumvents the skull being there, which kind of messes up a lot of measurement. So they're all potentials, and I think we'll get there someday, hopefully soon, but these things always take longer. I mean, can you imagine like a Google class type of a thing where you

I don't know. I'm trying to think of like like science fiction where we actually can read people's minds someday, you know, we have access to their brain scans. It's creepy. I mean you could. I just think that the brain isn't very compartmentalized, right, It's all like different networks on top of each other, and so it's just hard to

parse out. You just no themes. You'd be like, oh, they're in the like sexual you know, realm right now of what they're thinking, whatever it is, whatever the content is, or they're oh they're navigating something, or oh, they're really spending a lot of effort on metacognition because there be a ten is active or something, you know, right, So it's exactly exactly kind of broad themes like the when they unleashed I think it was Microsoft or Google unleashed

a computer to learn about the Internet, which you can imagine is kind of like a mind, this distributed network that thinks about a lot of things. And it came up with like cats and being a jerk basically like an aggressive person who likes watching things about cats. So maybe we'll do that. Seems like both extremes of your vulnerable, feeling and thinking doer, that's true? Actually, yeah yeah, cats and trolling. Yeah, that sounds like a great example of

each extreme category. Why are humanoid robots creepy? Ah? Yes? Why are humanoid robots creepy? So I think, well, I should say this has been something that's been noticed for maybe almost fifty years now. There was a Japanese roboticist named Maury and he came up with this idea called the Uncanny Valley. And the idea of the Uncanny Valley is that we generally like robots. The more human like they are, the more they express emotion and feelings, and so that's the kind of left side of a curve

that's going on up. But we don't like them to talk back right, right, But you like Wally right, the robot in the animated movie. Yes, like anthromorphic right feelings and thinking. But there's a point of which this kind of upward trend of liking robots and the the where they look human takes a steep drop, and that drop into the canyon or valley is called the Uncanny Valley, and you can find it all over the place. So, if you've seen the movie The Polar Express with Tom Hanks.

People don't like that because Tom Hanks looks human but not quite has these dead gray eyes. And in fact, Pixar refuses explicitly to do realistic humans because of the Uncanny Valley, so they only do things like animals or very stylized humans like The Incredibles. And so I think you know the reason for this. Some people suggested it's just the appearance that creeps us out, but I think

really what's going on is perceptions of mind. So we have this in our minds, this big separation between things that should feel and things that shouldn't feel. So you and me were okay, animals, that's cool, But cars and robots they are inanimate, they're made of metal. They should not feel. And so what's creepy is when things that shouldn't feel, like robots, seem to be able to feel

because they have a human like face. So we have research suggesting that even if it doesn't have a human face, if I just tell you, look, there's a robot over here. It looks pretty mechanical, but it has its like deep capacity for love and fear and pain. That's pretty nerving to people. Yeah, I just google image Tom Hanks and poor express. He looks pretty normal to me. He looks like a real human. Does it create me? Uh? He's

not moving yet though. Oh okay, we need to watch the video of it then okay, yeah, his eyes kind of track strangth it's really all in the eyes. Where we take people's faces and remove the eyes kind of weird, but people get super creepy if you take their eyes out, and they don't if you take their nose out, for instance, they just look kind of silly with they're at their nose. Oh yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, the eyes convey so much social information and so much emotion, right, So much

feeling is in the eyes. We think of the mouth that's smiling, but it's really in the eyes. So true, so fascinating. Let's talk about death. Why not we talk about this? So, what's the chances that you know, when when you die, your mind is gone forever? Well, we give us some hope. I'd say it's a non zero chance. Okay, you know that's something. Okay, you're doing a little Pascal's wager here, that's right, that's right, you never know. But I think what's the chances that we continue to perceive

someone's mind after they pass away. That's very, very high. That is high, And yet we perceive ghost all over the place, right, Why do you ghost always have unfinished business? For instance? Yeah, I mean, I think again, all these are outgrowths of how we perceive minds of the living. And certainly there's this effect called the Zigarnick effect in real life. And what it is is unfinished business is

always more strongly activated in your mind. So if you're driving to work in the morning and you're listening to something in the car and you get out of the car and you haven't finished the song yet, then that's the song you're going to find yourself singing all day, right, because it's like you haven't gotten to the end. It just keeps kind of in your mind, right, Or if you like want, is that how seduction works as well?

Like people really like people they can't have, or people really like people who like, you know, like, are kind of a little stand offish as opposed to like, I really love you, I really love you, I ruly want you,

you know what I mean? Yeah? Yeah, And I think I mean, if you want to talk about subduction, the greatest unfinished business, right is when you are about to have sex with someone and you get stopped just a little bit short, right, yes, because then you're like, you're so aroused and you're so excited and you're so anticipating this, and then all of a sudden it stops. And so this is the same thing with ghosts in some sense. Right, we think about a mind who's cease to exist, but

they just have one more thing left to finish. And because we can just can't imagine leaving something before we finish it, like sex, for instance, we can't imagine someone leaving to the afterlife until their work is done. And you've done actually done the study that people who die when they're in a state of alertness tend to we perceive their mind more, Is that right? That's right? Yep.

So actually writing that up now in a paper, and the idea is that we again perceive the minds of the dead as if they were in life, but really as if they were in life the moment before they died. Wow. So like the Kirk Cabbin and people who were in

that club was it twenty seven club? The twenty seven club? Yeah, Like, yeah, you make an interesting point, like if Kirk Caabine was still alive, or let's say, you know, we think it becomes eighty years old and then he's like barely able to make it on stage, you know, to play and his playing release is bad at age eighty whatever, and then he dies at age eighty five? Will we tend to remember? Will we not like idolize him as much? You think? And if he died at twenty seven, I

doubt it. I doubt it. I mean Jimmy Hendrix and Amy Winehouse and Nis Joplin, all sorts of folks who are kind of immortalized in our minds about music, Buddy Holly, right, I mean, we all understand that Rolling Stones are a huge deal, and we understand like the Beatles are a

huge deale. But it's really like lenin that we like pine after right, when Ringo's ninety and in some nursing home in London, would you know, would just be like, wow, Yeah, he used to be used to be Ringo, but it's not the same effective punch because he didn't end when he was famous. Wow. Okay, So we're not advocating that you kill yourself at a young age. That's true by

any stretch of the imagination. But the research suggests that if you want to be remembered as go down as a legend whenever you die, be in a as a you know, a work as possible, or as a you know kind of like in the middle of like a masterpiece. Yes, that's true. Is that right? Yeah? I mean it's really I this is like the most taboo written like podcast shat I've ever had. I think, you know, even if you're not doing some great creative work, you know, you

could die at the peak of your creative output. That's probably the best way to be as famous as possible. But if you're not doing some great creative work, then just make sure when you die you've got your eyes open and you're awake. Right. It's simple study. We basically ask people to say how much mind does someone have after their death when they die while a sleeper in a coma or while awaken fully alert, And if you die while you're awake and fully alert, people think you

have more personality after death. And I think it's more important to follow the wishes of your will, which I think is pretty interesting because I think you know you still care about it, versus if you died while you're in a coma, then I think, wow, whatever, we can

ignore his last wishes exactly. Yeah, people go to such a lens to follow people's asked wishes, even if it like sacrifices the living, you know, like, no, we can't, you know, we got to honor that his last wish to cut down that center, you know, even though it'll keep all these people out of jobs, you know, like, yeah, totally, because we still think that person still cares about it

in some ways. Or so if you think about it, right, like, if you're let's say you believe in heaven and hell, Like, if you're in heaven, you're having an incredible joy and bliss being reunited with with God, you're not going to care about something so petty as you know, to build this fence or to keep this building around. And if you're in hell, what then you're in internal suffering and you really don't care about some fence because you're in

pain all the time. And so it seems like there's no real, you know, account where people would care that much about what they cared about in life as in death. But where where do we go when we die? There's a very benimal possibility that we don't go anywhere, right, and that's like the most horrifying thing for people to think, you know, It's like people really don't want to accept

that possibility is that we don't actually go anywhere. Are the way, which is mostly what the mind is really what is who we are just ceases to exist for eternity, but it doesn't go anywhere. That'd be the scariest thing, right, right, our consciousness is annihilated but forever, yeah, forever, or maybe like the way the universe works, is it loops back on itself at some point, like you know, eternity is a really long time, Like maybe like the laws of

physics don't work that way. Maybe it's actually a continual loop or something we will never know till you know it happens. But isn't that possible? I mean, all these things are are definitely possible. I Mean some people say, like, why would I fear the world after my death? I don't fear the world for my consciousness, right, So, I mean it actually doesn't seem that funny to me because before you were born, you were you know, you didn't

have a full self. By the end of death, you've got a full self and you've done all these amazing things. So I mean, but you know, if the Big Bang is right in the sense so like we don't have free will and everything was determined in that moment, then isn't it technically true that like before we were born, there still was like a destiny of what that self would end up to be someday. So yes, I think, why are you not smoking pot right now? That's right

listening to some doors. For the record, I do not smoke pot. That was a joke. I just want to say. But it's definitely not predictable where you're gonna end up be. So even if the universe is determined, you know, you don't know what's going to happen next week or a year from now, and so you might as well try

your best to right but someone would know. Not someone, I mean, I'm inferring your mind, you know, but you know the whole God, You know, God is fascinating, like you argue in the in the chapter on God, And I was going to ask you does God exist? Because I feel like these are just like I just want to ask you all these questions like what happens when we die? Does God exist? And I feel like you've answers to all these things. So does God exist, Well,

many people would definitely perceive him to exist exactly. That's that's certainly more people perceive him to exist in people who even not to exist, So that's something. And it might not even be a hymn, that's true, that's true. Yeah, or even have a gender. I mean, you know, but it seems kind of offensive. Yeah, I don't want to

offend God. But it's fascinating because we infer. Not only do infer, but we you know, you know how like we talk about you know, like when we're you know, childhood trauma, and then we end up projecting things onto people in our relationships. Well, God's like the ultimate projection. Every one of us kind of projects onto God to be whoever kind of create out of our own image, as opposed to God create us in his or her image. Right. Yeah,

especially with morality. So you mentioned, you know, smoking marijuana, and there's a researcher named Nick Effie has this wonderful study and asks people, you know, do you think it's immoral or permissible to smoke marijuana? And what do you think God thinks about that? Yeah? And people think that God thinks the exact same thing as they do, especially with moral things. Yeah, I mean, you know, that just

makes so much sense. So yeah, my gosh, so many implications there, but is almost so much we could talk about today. But my god, there's this I just said, My god. So returning to death for a second, there are people who are trying to kind of try this experiment of cryogenics, right, it's a scientific experiment whether or not there will be facilities in the future that would allow us that would not consider us dead in the

sense that we consider ourselves dead now. And you know, like one hundred years ago we declared people dead and for things that we could actually now we have the technology to keep their lives going continuing. Right, So what do you think the feasibility and possibility of cryogenics are. It sounds to me like it's actually quite reasonable in the sense of, like, you know, you have one hundred percent chance of not existing forever versus some non zero

chance of there being some technology in the future. So I'm actually intrigued by cryogenics. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I am also actually very intrigued by cryogenics, and out of any sense of immortality, that's the one that also appeals the most to me, and I think it's very Do you want to be in the same canister as me? Sure, yeah, yeah, as long as it's a big canister. Yeah yeah, yeah. Let's fit some other people out there too. I think,

you know, it's very easy to free someone. I think the difficulty is unfreezing them and having them be alive again, because you know, you only freeze them once they're already dead by some problem. So maybe the best way to go about it is to freeze this before you know we're dead. But I think that's not it's not legal yet, but I have been thinking that is like that makes

the most sense. Like if you want to like maximize the chances that you're going to live like an extended life, Like there's a good chance that, like let's say, five thousand years from now, the life extension will probably be I'm just predicting to me much more than eighty years. And like, let's say we froze you at age like twenty, Yeah,

I guess, But then you take the huge risk. This is the point you're making, is you still take a hit, not still not guaranteed that we'd even be able to unfreeze you, even though you were alive when we freezed you, correct, right, And so that's a that's a big risk, yeah, as

opposed to guarantee to least live longer than twenty Yeah. Right, And you need to think of like the motivation for society at the time, right, Like eighty years from now, no one's going to know who you are, correct, like two hundred years, Like, why do we have to unfreeze

this guy? Great point, great point. Yeah, we're assuming that's a big assumption that five thousand years from now, you know, anyone will like go back to that kindister and be like, oh, we forgot about these people, right, and like let's spend a ton of money making their consciousness on the internet or you know, feeding into robots or something that it's be like, yep, let's just unthob them and throw them out. No, for sure, But doesn't it seem potentially seems kind of

unfair that like we just happened to be born. We didn't choose what epic of the universe we we were born. We were luckier than those who are born like you know, twelve hundred and eighty one, you know, in terms of life, I'm just talking strict in terms of life expectancy. Right, but you know, like what if we knew that, like five thousand years from now people live as long as they wanted to live in a healthy way, it kind of doesn't that. It's like darn it, you know, do

you know what I mean? Like, darn it were reported the wrong totally, do you know what I mean? Does anyone ever think of like this or's just just me? No? I think they do. I mean every time I think of, you know, young kids, I just think, you know, your life expectancy, yeah, ready be higher than mine. I think of that too. Yeah. I mean I'm going to outlive my parents hopefully or my grandparents hopefully, right, So it's

always getting better. So I think the key in life is probably just to do downward comparisons to make yourself feel better, whether that's in terms of longevity or income or whatever. Sure, sure, well, what a fascinating conversation. I think we can probably stop there. And thanks for writing this book and offering such fasting insights on the mind and everything else that's to do in this world. Thanks

for having me, It was a fun conversation. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Eric Hoffman, I hope you found this episode just as thought per booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com