Michael Shermer || Science and Skepticism

doctor Michael Shermer on the podcast. Michael is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, a New York Times bestselling author, and monthly columnist for Scientific American. He has been a college professor since nineteen seventy nine. Thanks for being on the podcast today, Michael, Oh, thanks for having me. Oh boy, Lots and lots of topics we could talk about today and hoping we can cover a shmorgasboard of some of

these things. First of all, I want to say congratulations for your twenty fifth anniversary of in a lot of wayser life's work. Right, Yeah, that's right. It's we started Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptic Society in nineteen ninety two, so it's our twenty fifth anniversary the organization of the magazine. And then it's also, by chance, just the twentieth anniversary my first book, Why People Believe We're Things, still probably

my best selling book, I think. And then next month actually marks the two hundredth consecutive monthly columns I've written in Scientific America, the skeptic column. So we're just, you know, kind of using these all as an excuse to particularly in the age of alternative facts and fake news. Oh yeah, in fact, we've been combating that for a quarter century. That's what we do. Yeah, it seems like now things are more relevant to your work than ever. Yep, they are.

That's right. You would think, you know, we've made progress for sure, but there's always plenty of skepticism that needs to go around. I have a question, what is skepticism. What's the skepticism and pessimism. Well, there's no relationship at all other than they have ism at the end. Also confuse it with cynicism. Skepticism is just a scientific way of thinking. It's just using science and reason to evaluate all claims and assume that the null hypothesis, that is,

your claim is not true until proven otherwise. So the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on scientists and skeptics to disprove a claim. So if you say you think bigfoot is real, we say, well that's nice, prove it, you know, show us a body. It isn't on us to prove that there is no bigfoot, because how would you do that anyway. So, and this

is the way it is in all of science. You know, there's kind of an accepted norm of beliefs, a set of tenets that compile a theory or a paradigm that people work in, scientists work in. If you come along and you say, well, I have this completely different idea, it's like, well, that's nice, what is it? And show us your evidence that if you don't have any, and then the burden of proof is on you to go out and provide that evidence to us. And that's how

all science works. So really, what we're doing is applying those principles of scientific skepticism to all areas of life. Do you think we could theoretically prove everything theretically proved? Well, technically in science pluss and science you don't prove anything, you just don't disprove it yet. Yeah, So yeah, all truths are provisional, but you know there's degrees of confidence.

You know, it's the principal portionality that Hume outlined in his great work, that you proportion your beliefs to the evidence. So things like the germ theory of disease, plate tectonics and geology, the theory of evolution in biology, the Big Bank ori, the rgin of the universe. You know, these are all pretty solid theories. It would be quite surprising

if they turn out not to be true. They may get tweaked here and there, of course, on the margins, but the main core the theory is very unlikely to change. And that's why when climate scientists talk about the consensus, they don't mean this in some sort of democratic way, like let's all vote and see how we feel about climate.

What they mean is that the convergence of evidence has been so strong that virtually all working climate scientists agree on the general conclusion that climate change is real and human caused. Now, they disagree on a whole lot of details, and they have different data sets and different compewter models

and so on. But the general consensus means that we can apportion our confidence pretty high because the evidence is so strong, and then other areas are you know, not so not so strong, and so there's lots of room for skepticism and very little consensus. So it just depends on the claim, right, So you base things on the probability upon which we have evidence for them in any regard whatsoever. I mean, things range from like we have

like zero evidence that that God. Oh, that's a controversial statement. Device I feel like, right, that's a very comfortable But what's the probability evidence wise that God exists? Yeah? Have you put a number on that? Yeah, it's pretty low. It would be hard to put a number on it. But it depends on because we don't have a metric

that we're using to measure it. I mean. But of course intelligent design creationists would say, yes, complexity information theory, the number of component parts in a cell, for example, would be a measure of complexity. For an intelligent design creationist to say that it couldn't come about by chance, therefore there must be a god. Of course, the evolutionists response to that is that no one ever said it

was by chance. There are always simpler antecedents to these complex organisms, and that's the point of doing evolutionary biology is to figure out what the antecedents were to the structure you're looking at. So from a scientist's point of view, that would not constitute evidence for God. To creationists it would. So then it begins to turn on what you consider to be evident what counts as evidence for something like a god. And it's pretty hard to find agreement with,

say theologians or creationists. What would constitute our agreed upon experiment where we're going to run and see how it turns out, and then we both agree when the results are seen. I'm just thinking about, like, you know, it seems like a lot of times there are people that live in completely different worlds in terms of their worldview, I should say, And you've done research on like personality

differences in your attraction, you know, skepticism in general. I mean, there are some people who are more attracted to the work you do. There's some people more attracted to like the work like Deepak Chopra does, right, And there's individual differences in attraction to that way of thinking. Now, first of all, could you speak to that idea of personality and maybe how agreeableness could be a factor in this. Yeah, So, there we're talking out so much about evidence as why

people believe in certain things. That's the other area of my research that I spend a lot of time on and there it depends on to what extent you're open to new ideas. And it's good to be open minded. It's good to be open to hearing new ideas because often we're wrong and the only way to find out is to listen to what other people have to say. But of course you don't want to be so open minded as we say that your brains fall out and you believe every crazy thing that comes along. And like

all human characteristics, there's variation on those traits. Some people are more open minded, some people are more close minded, and you know, and the rub is finding a balance between those two. And so, you know, a good balance, I think is to be very open minded to new ideas but also high and conscientiousness, skepticism and sort of critical thinking. That is, you're open to considering ideas, but you're also going to scrutinize them pretty carefully before you

commit to believing them. That's spoken like a person who's school would score high in intellect. The thing is, you know, Ice, I'm a personality psychologist. So I'm viewing this through that lens, well partly a personality psychologist. And you know, I've studied the openness to experience demain of personality and you can divide it, and my Colleagun and I have divided it

into two subsections, intellect and actual openness. And you find that if you do like a you can plot like in a two dimensional space well into like you know, with this rate x sort of model, you can actually see where IQ is correlated with extreme manifestations of both intellect and openness. And you find that extreme openness is appopenia, which is where you see the tendency to see patterns in everything, basically everything, and that apipenia lie is in

a complete opposite spectrum as IQ. However, the interesting thing is that both intellect and open to experience are positively correlated with each other in the general population. So this is created a paradox, right, How can it be that on the one hand, these two traits tend to be associate with each other, yet they pull part in meaningful significant ways when you look at the underlying mechanisms associated with each and so this is just kind of you know,

just in. Yeah, that's really interesting. You got to send me your papers on this so I can write about this in Scientific American. And I'm always looking for new column ideas. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I had not seen that pulled apart that way. It's hard to know where to go from that. I mean a lot of people, like a lot of creationists that I meet, a lot of Holocaust deniers, climate deny. You know, they're smart people, very smart, you know. So it isn't a problem that

they're uneducated or unintelligent. You know, there's something else going on there. Ideologically speaking, they want certain things to be true, and they're really good at marshaling evidence in the direction of the way they want things to be. And the smarter and more educated you are, the better you are doing that. But that of course is not helping us get at what's really true. It makes it worse. Actually,

So it's probably context dependent. There's probably another variable there, like your political or religious or ideological predilections that would then push you in one direction or another to utilize your openness and intellect to you know, evaluate evidence. Yeah, and I see a lot of people and I want to say, like your community, like that has the meaning to when I say that, I feel like that does

mean sometime I understand. Yeah, I see a lot of people in that community, and I can tell who are the ones that would score sky high on both intellect end openness because they're highly skeptical but also highly spiritual, not necessarily religious, but spiritual, like like Deepalk Trouper you mentioned. He's very smart. He loves science. But you know, he and I have a fundamental difference in worldviews. Start at a starting point. You know. He believes consciousness is well,

he calls it the ground of being. You can't get underneath it or behind it. It suffuses the universe. It is the universe and the physical stuff we're used to dealing with their manifestations of consciousness. You know, well, you need a brain to be conscious. That's like saying you need a radio receiver to get the waves. I don't agree with any of this, but I'm just telling you

this is his argument. But once you can see that, say, consciousness is the ground of all being, it's fuse it throughout the users, it's everything essentially kind of a deistic more like a pantheistic argument. Then his arguments from there actually make sense. You know, it's sort of a Buddhist way of thinking about the world. And when you read his tweets in that context, it's like, Okay, I see what that's supposed to mean. If you don't understand that,

then they're nonsensical. They sound like just rubbish, sure, just rambling. That's funny. I just had a chat the last podcast episode was with Dan Harris and we talked exactly about that and how if you take some of these statements that people like Eckart totally make as well, and you don't view it through a strictly scientific lens, but you could actually reinterpret the things to make sense. Yeah, in

some way. Yeah, Eckart totally. I mean I read his book The Power of Now, and you know, from his context it does make sense that you know, there is only now, There is only now. Our memories don't really exist anywhere. They're just current states of you know, neural connections and storage, synaptic patterns and so on that form our memories. But the memory of say, ten years ago, is just what it is right now, and it'll be different a year from now or whatever, and there is

no tomorrow. There's just so you know, the psychological now of roughly three seconds. That really is all there is now, of course, is I'm kind of saying, yeah, but my mortgage is still do next week, so I can't just live in the now. But you know, when Deepak and Eckhart talked this way, they're really talking as maybe therapists or spiritual gurus or something that make people to help

people put things into perspective. Like if you're always worried about your mortgage and you always want to, you know, make more money so you can spend more money, you're sort of caught up in the hedonic treadmill. Then that actually psychologically is not healthy. So really, just stepping back, why Jews have this shava, you know, the Sabbath is that you're supposed to take a day off and don't

do any of that to put things in perspective. And yeah, that kind of makes sense to a certain extent for a balance, you have some kind of balance between you know, obsession about the future or the past and living in the now. Yeah, I've been thinking about like this idea of guruishness. Are you a skeptic guru? Are you a guru within your community? I mean, like again, I'm trying

to think of this from an individual differences perspective. There are people that are attracted to the wisdom of Deepak, and there are people who are equally I would argue a different personality profile, who are attracted to what you can offer as well. I mean, is there such a thing as a you know, skepticism guru well and skepticism, atheism, humanism and so on. There's a handful of people that stand out that you have best selling books or whatever.

They get invited to conferences a lot, and and you know, you can you can think of, you know, people like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett and so forth. And you know, maybe I'm one of those. I don't know, but I would say in our so called community, there's less of that than another community, simply by personality style of reasoning. And I think that we don't like her rus and hierarchies and that sort of thing. It's a little bit.

The analogy I would make would be with libertarians. You know, the reason libertarians will never be a big organized political party is because they hate big organized political parties. Yeah, I think it's a good point. I've noticed this. You all are very skeptical of each other in a way that a lot of Actually there's a lot of unfortunate inside fighting and personality conflicts and just ridiculous arguments over

trivial things. But I think that's also what happens to most social movements, you know, Marxist feminists, you name it. There's always a purification process of purging those who are not the purest feminist, Marxist atheists, whatever. You know, I'm fine of making a joke about the Atheist of the Year award. You know, well, who would that go to? The person that didn't believe the most all year? I didn't believe even once the entire year. Okay, that's not

really what it's for. But you know, what does it mean to have an organization that isn't in the organizations like religion? And it's an unfortunate thing that a lot of religious people think atheism is a thing, it's a worldview. It's it's like to be an atheist is to be something, and it isn't. To be an atheism is it doesn't

mean anything. It just means lack of belief in God. Really, what we're talking about is, you know, humanism or secular humanism or Enlightenment humanism, you know, commitment to civil rights and civil liberties and women's rights and gay rights and animal rights and equal treatment under the law, and you know, basic principles of a secular government. You know, now all of a sudden, we're talking about something different, and that's

really what you know. I don't like to define myself by what I don't believe, you know, So let's talk about more positive things, like you know, science and reason and rights and things like that. Well, that's the idea of belief is of interesting canon worms. There are things throughout the course of your day that you just have to have faith in in order to get through your day, right,

Like you can't wait for the evidence to come into Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean it's one of the points of comment and Diversity's heuristics rules thumb is that most of the decisions we make, you know, we don't sit there and weigh the evidence and decide. We just make these snap judgments. Because as you said, you'd never get out of the supermarket, you know, you got to just go in and go toothpaste.

I like the blue one, okay, And then you know fruit, I always get this fruit and this you know, you just we're just creatures that habit and quick rules of thumb or else, and that works. I think for most areas of life. Maybe it's not so good for say, financial investments, getting sucked into gambling schemes or financial scheme And in principle, it would be good if we didn't do that. In politics, yeah, now that if we weigh evidence more. But we fortunately we're pretty tribal there we are.

And you know, I'm thinking about, like all these individual differences variables, I think there's something else that goes beyond intellect openness. And I try to touch on this briefly when I set agreeableness, but I would say that there seems to be in your community high in freethinking and nonconformist tendencies. There's a kind of autonomy there that people in your community seem to really crave, like to be able to be like, no, I don't want to be

told it's kind of anti guru in a way. Yes, okay, cool. So let's move on to a second about a topic I know you've been increasingly more interested in, and that's free speech speech on campuses and in the public discourse. And again, these things are more relevant today. You know a lot all these things we're talking about too, are just so relevant. So let's start with how let's start with campuses. What do you make of the whole? You know,

Jordan Peterson has become like the celebrity now. I've published with him scientific papers, so I feel like I like I knew him when Oh yeah, he's a cloud bird of mine on openness to experience, and so it's pretty open to experience, I would say he is. Yeah, i

would say he's very open to experiences. But I've never mentioned I've only seen him on Joe Rogan twice and I heard one of his podcasts with Sam Harris, and you know, it was just somebody told me he makes a lot of money on Patreon and I had no idea how this paatreon and stuff works going on there, and I was just floored. I mean, he makes like forty five thousand dollars a month. Really, yeah, yeah, really,

I should be more controversial. See this is all my friends and everyone you know says to me that, you know, Scott, you could be so much more famous if you just stop trying to be so integrative. I mean, like that's just the way I think that's just the way I am. Like my personality is I want to take all the different perspectives and see what emerges as appeared to you know. But man, I mean, it's amazing what you can do. I think of, like, you know, the Milo phenomenon as well.

I see Jordan perhaps as he would certainly not be happy if I like him to Milo whatsoever. But there's some genus there I can explain it. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yes, I do. I think, yeah, I think from what I heard from Jorden he really believes what he says. Milo. I'm not sure he believes what he says, you know, because he says it's wild stuff. That's a good point. It's a little bit like Alex Jones. You know, how much of it is show how much

of it does he really believe? He himself says, you know, it's an act. I don't know. But any case, I think I'm hoping that the Evergreen incident is the you know, the sort of the bottom of the barrel here. They can't get any worse. Although I've been saying that for six months now. You know that maybe this will call national attention to a problem that will trigger administrators and college presidents, and hopefully fact will be to get a

lid on this problem. And what's the problem. The problem is is a confusion of free speech and hate speech and what hate speech means. And you know, if you follow the reasoning, and it kind of makes sense. You know that we act based on our beliefs, and many of our beliefs are based on our language and the way we talk about other people. Then that helps form prejudices or not. And therefore the language you use matters, which is why we don't use the N word anymore.

For example. You know, we've tried to be better as writers to not always say he, say he or she, or pikes it up, or you know, use the plural, you know, those kinds of things. You know, I think there are small concessions to make to political correctness that we've already done that are pretty reasonable, you know, and from there you kind of start to scale up, you know, to like the stuff that Jordan's into with various pronouns.

And I guess he's combating some Canadian bill that I actually haven't read, and so I don't really know to what extent he's right about his claims. That you could be prosecuted and jailed for not calling somebody by their preferred pronoun. I'm not actually sure that's the case, but anyway, that's what he says. So if that's true, I mean,

obviously that's taking things too far. And I think in the minds of a lot of these students who have been taught by professors who believe not in the old Marxist class warfare conflict tension, but in the newer neo

Marxist identity politics, conflict or competition for power. And so if you believe that different groups have different levels of power in society, and that we don't want any group to have any power over any other group, by definition, on a college campus, administrators in faculty have more power than students. It's just by definition. So the students railing against these power differentials, that shouldn't surprise administrators and faculty,

because that's what they have been teaching them. And that's what and this is one reason why a lot of these administrations and faculty back down. Why they cave into the demands of these students, not because they're afraid so much. Whether they're invertebrates, as Jerry Coin calls them, but that they actually believe this, that you know that there shouldn't be power differentials in society because that's how prejudices play out in the political realm, and therefore we have to

stop it. Bat down to the words you use and the power that's on campus. And you know why these students are more concerned about like the biology teacher Brett Weinstein when there's real issues that people like Ian heersy Ali call attention to, like female genital mutilation right here in the United States. Surely they can see that that's a bigger problem. But I think there's a practical thing

as well. On these college campuses. It's just easy to walk down to the classroom where your racist biology teacher is there and surround him and burate him. It's just simpler to do that than go to Somalia try to, you know, affect some political change there to help women, you know, in a foreign land. Yeah, I hear your argument. I know that it can be controversial to just try to do comparisons between like what could be one person's internal drama. Shouldn't you say drama but internal you know,

what's important to that person. You know, it would really upset that person to say, like, you know, but there are bigger problems than that sort of thing. Do you think we can come up with like objective like relative problems, like scientifically and say, look, scientifically, you're so preoccupied with this when this X, Y, and Z actually would have a greater impact on I don't know, like can we

even do that? I don't know if you can do it, because I mean, the example Brett Weinstein is so poignant because here is a guy who calls himself, you know, a radical restive, a Bernie supporter, you know, a guy that's devoted his life to combating racism and bigotry. And you know, he gets surrounded by these students calling him a racist and he's just trying to talk to them, and you know, do you want to hear my answer? No? And it's like, okay, it may be beyond hope of talking.

We intellectuals like to think, well, we can just talk through our differences. Sometimes that isn't the case. This idea of giving validity. Everyone wants to have the validity of their experiences recognized. You know, it's kind of a fundamental human thing. And but also we also view the world from our own perspective. So we all, I think, tend to overinflate the importance of our own personal experiences and sometimes the detriment of even taking other people's perspectives, you know, right,

like you talked you you talked about tribalism earlier. Yeah, I'm trying to think of like do I want to go there with some of this stuff? And I figure, why not? Right, I mean, why not have an open discussion.

I remember this big like Rebecca Watson elevator gate thing a couple of years ago, and I think that was in your community, and I remember Richard Dawkins, very well respected skeptic, kind of downplay that experience in a tweet or some comment, a comment saying, you know, kind of saying, look like, dear MUSLIMA, you know there are genital mutilation bigger issues than a male in an elevator, and that really upset a lot of feminists in your community, is saying,

how you know that was really uncalled for for him to contrast the importance of these different invalidate her point just because there are great problems. Now I'm bringing this up and I want to talk about a subjectively as you know, like what are your thoughts on that, because one could make the case that we shouldn't be contrasting different things, and that these students and it is relevant

to your point about college campuses. A student who like a pronoun issue or is upset at a teacher for triggering something or something like that, Like one could make the case of that is the teacher really should take that seriously because that is very important to that person. Yeah, so who this is we are complicated? Is these are complicated the person that they gets assaulted physically or verbally

assaulted or verbally insulted or whatever. They're not really helped by someone saying, yeah, but somebody in another foreign country has it, you know, way worse than you. So chill out, dude, and yeah, okay, yeah, that's true. You know, Richard kind of stepped into it there. I think his point was perfectly valid, but it was irrelevant to the point that I guess Rebecca was trying to make about hitting women up for you know, a romantic encounter at three in

the morning and an elevator isn't cool. You know, I'm still amazed that blew up into a whole thing. You know. It's like any guy reading that you go, yeah, all right, yeah, I get that. You know, it's a hard subject to talk about because it's so sensitive to people. It's like, you know, the moment someone makes the point like, well, maybe you should not get camera drunk at a rat party to the point where you're completely out of control, then you're accused of blaming the victim. Yeah, okay, we

don't want to do that. But on the other hand, you know, if the guy and the woman are both completely plastered out of their minds, why is it that the guy has responsibility but the woman doesn't. You know, that seems to be the opposite of what feminism was about. The second wave feminism, the kind that Carol Tavers talks about, that you know, women want to be treated equally, and so this new version, this sort of third wave is

sometimes called fainting couch feminism. That is, women are now being treated as like they're weak, they're indecisive, they can't control their emotions, they can't control their liquor, they can't control their volition, and therefore it's the men's responsibility to take care of them and monitor how much they're drinking at a party and don't take advantage of them and protect them, you know, to second wave feminists like Carol Tavers, you know, she finds us insulting. Like you know, I'm

capable of taking care of myself, thank you. I'll control how much I drink, and I'll make my own disc visions, and I'll take responsibility for my actions and what happens to me. And I think some of the conflict is between younger millennial and whatever the next generation after millennials is compared to older say, people born in the forties,

fifties and sixties, you know, baby boomers. I think maybe there's some generational differences there and where they are, and that you know, the sort of feminists or civil rights you know, movement, and to what extent you think, you know, people have personal responsibility for their actions versus anybody can be a true victim. Now, Michael, as a personal I psychologist, again, I want to put together a battery and look at differences among feminist factions. Can we do that study as

well within your community? How could we do that? Yes? Well, and could do that. I give the same battery, the same exact battery. It'll become they were giving the deep ok people. Yeah, yeah, we could do that. It would be good to know. I mean, it would begin to

have data so we know what we're talking about. So much of this conversations turn on anecdotes, which is, as we know, don't really mean much, you know, and then when then we start compiling just so stories, Well it could be that generationally there's these different you know, now we're off the scientific page. Yeah, you know, I yearned for peace is what I yearned for amongst all these different factions. When I look at all this, I just want to say to everyone, like, very rarely do I

see people start on common ground. They'd start on emotional triggered ground, so to speak. Yeah, and that's certainly part of the campus thing. It's you know, very emotionally volatile and you see these things explode. Now, to be fair, you know, I still think it's a minority of students that are into this stuff. You know, Like I teach at Chapman University. I'm just there one day a week, so I don't I don't see a lot, but I don't see much of this at all at that campus.

And even at Evergreen, now considered to be you know, the craziest campus in the entire country. You know, we saw maybe two hundred students on those videos total. You know, there's fourth thousand students there, So where are the other thirty eight hundred students? And my guess is they're just hould up in their dorms, keeping their heads down. They don't want anything to do with this one way or the other. They're just trying to study and just have

a decent life. And that's my guess is that most you know, we can't call all students snowflakes or whatever insult you want to use. I think most of them are not into this at all. But but of course that you know, the media is tasked to cover the extreme events. That's what it does, you know, So if you have a you're not going to send a camera crew to some campus where nothing is happening and it's

just boring. You're going to send it to you know, you're going to show the videos of the students surrounding the faculty member yell and racist at them. So it's so interesting, I mean, I trying to process all this in real time because it's such there's so many complex issues at play here, and well, what you're thinking about that me just clarify one thing, you know, my community, our community, Yeah, that one. You know, there's atheists, humanists,

and skeptics, and they're actually three different things. So atheists really are are just more into combating religion. Say you might think of maybe Dawkins Harris gets you know, the

late great Christopher Higgins in that camp. Then you have skeptics like myself, James Randy maybe you know, and like the skeptical Inquirer readers, skeptic magazine readers that are have traditionally been into debunking the paranormal, pseudoscience, alternative medicine, that sort of thing, and largely stay out of the religion business, although just peripherally when it comes up, say regarding creationists

teaching creationism in school, violation of church and state. Then humanists are more political, you know, they're into women's rights, reproductive rights, the right to die, euthanasia, the passage of legislation that interferes with civil rights. They're much more political in that sense, less concerned about, say, pseudoscience, and they're not so focused on debunking God as they are keeping

religion out of politics, separation of church and state. So in your battery you might think about, you know, kick the box one, two, or three boxes that you cander yourself a member of which community because they're a little bit different. I think that would be really valuable to look at the you know, subgroup differences within the community. That's great. And deep box people, a lot of them

don't believe in God. They're not Christians. They think the whole Abrahamic God thing is insane, right, you know, but they're sure that you know, there's a great spirit in the sky. You know that the cosmic consciousness is aware of us, and you know the secret and you know the universe knows what you want, and you know, not in any anthropomorphic sense at all. You know. So when deep Box says, oh, I'm into God, I believe in God. God cares about you know, he's not talking like a

Christian wo at all. Well, speaking of which, I mean, these beliefs are really fluid through across our life. They can be across our life span. You were at one point of fundamental as Christian, right, Yeah, I was, Yeah, in high school and college. I went to Pepperdine University Church of Christ, and yeah, I was into it. So

I really understand the mindset that the worldview. Internally, it's pretty coherent and logically consistent inside the bubble, particularly when you're surrounded by people that believe the same thing, and it just gets reinforced. That's true for all beliefs. Now we are always talking about the bubble and the cylinder and the echo chamber and all that stuff. But that was true in my religious beliefs, and it wasn't really till I got out of that went to graduate school

at a secular university. This is in the late seventies, long before the whole atheism thing took off. People might have been atheists. I don't really know. It just never came up. It wasn't a thing science and religion. No one talked about it. It was just irrelevant, and so it was easy to kind of give it up. When I decided I no longer believed in the central tenets of Christianity or any religion and become an atheist, I

just quit talking about it. And that was that. There was no declaration of atheism and coming out parties or anything like that. That's fair enough, and I believe there was. I mean, the whole series of chain of events that kind of caused you to eventually become an atheist. One involving a college sweetheart who was involved in automobile accident? Is that right? And you kind of were sitting there at her bedside and yeah, yeah, that's right. I wrote

about that in Believing the Brain. Yes, it was kind of the last straw. It wasn't that it was a cast, but you know, she was in an accident, broke her back, paralyzed from the waist down. And you know, it's quite a shocking thing to see somebody in that state in an emergency room. You know, they got just strapped in his bed, hanging upside down and all the oxygen mess and all this stuff and hyperbaring chamber and it's like,

holy shit, this is unbelievably life changing. And you know, so I was just there constantly for weeks on end, and you know, so I got boy, and this is a you know, a really sweet, sweet, nice woman. I mean, not the kind of argument you could make from the problem of evil, like you know, human sin or made bad decision. You know, it was truly an innocent person, the kind of thing we would say today like childhood leukemia,

you know what's with that? And so I just prayed, you know, just like all right, you know if there's a God, if ever anybody should be healed, you know, this would be a good time. And you know, nothing happened. Of course, she's still paralyzed. I'm still in touch with her periodically, and she had a full life, heads kids and got married, head kids, the whole thing, but still not healed. So you know, to me, it wasn't like, Okay, if God doesn't heal theer, then I'm gonna quick believe in.

It wasn't like that. It wasn't an experiment, but it was just like the last straw. It's like after that, I was like, you know what, forget it. This is nothing. There's just nothing here that's not necessarily evidence that God doesn't exist, though I had a either interesting possibility is David Chalmers was on my podcast, The Phiosopher Hey chatting about how may he actually puts it like a forty to sixty percent probably that we're living in a simulation,

which is much higher probability than you would think. Really, but it's very possible that the simulators just aren't listening. I mean, they did their thing, they set it off, and maybe there's millions or billions in the galaxy of simulations. But yeah, yeah, right. I mean, so, how isn't that still possible? I don't think so. I mean there's these to me, what are just essentially science fiction fantasies that are fun. You know, are we living in a simulation? No?

How do you know? Okay I don't, but you don't either, so you might as well, you know, say, none of this is really like sollipsism. You know, none of this exists. You're just you know, a pigment of my imagination. Well, you know, but deig Card already played that whole thing out and built from the starting point that at least I know I exist because somebody is doing the questioning, and you know, he built from there a whole worldview that you know that essentially he's still living. And I

think that's been refuted. Somebody else was saying there should be little pixels that go out every once in a while in the sceneio, because no simulation is going to be perfect, well you know, buffering or something. Well, I mean some people think that the current presidency was a glitch in the system. There's a pixel, big problem, big glitz, Like how did that happen? Oh? Yeah, So I guess

this means you don't believe in an afterlife earlier either. No. My next book is on this, said, Heavens on Earth, about the scientific quest for the afterlife, immortality, and utopia. Skeptical of all of them, not just the religious afterlife of course, heavens and so forth. Not only is there no evidence for that, I think they have the same problem that the mind uploading people that Ray kurzbel isles

the singularity people have. That is, it would just be a copy of your connect dome, your soul, and your whatever you want to call it. Your pattern of information represents you, all your thoughts and memories, emotions. It would just be a copy. You'd still be dead in the ground.

And unless there's some continuity of consciousness, like when you go to sleep and you wake up, there's kind of a break in continuity that comes back, or you go under anesthesia and you come back there's a break in continuity, but your point of view self is still there through your looking at the world through your eyes. To me an actual death, like with cryonics, to be chronically frozen, you actually have to be dead. Legally, they can't do it.

Like you know today this afternoon, when you're strong and healthy, and young. If you think about it, when you're chronically frozen, it's the worst day of your life the day you die. Uh yeah, or just copying your connect dome and uploading it into computer, turn the computer on, like in Transcendence when Johnny Depp's in side the computer looking out through the little camera hole here. I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's a problem of identity. You know,

who are you? What does it mean to be you? Here's your memory self, the themself, and then there's the point of your self, the peel of e self. And I think you need both. And I think a copy through an uploading or chronic saying might work. That might be like a long sleep. I mean, it can't work

technologically at the moment, but in principle it might. But heaven, you know, most religions say that you really religious texts, most of them say that essentially your resurrection into heaven is a copy of you, that you are still in the ground ed and buried, and that your soul the copy of your pattern it's taken to heaven or re enacted, recreated in heaven. I still claim that the problem of identity, that it's just a copy of you, no more than a twin looks at the other twin and says, there

I am. I mean I had this very conversation again with David Chalmers that what once you start uploading to the system, at what point are you no longer the you here? Like we were like, when we get to fifty percent, let's say fifty percent of us in the computer and fifty percent of you is here, is still you? Okay? Like which one is you? I mean, you can actually do that thought experiment. It gets really tricky. No, I agree that this is very we don't know. We really

don't know, is what I would say. No, Yeah, I mean I'd be happy to be proven wrong in my skepticism here. So the default skeptical position is that it can't happen. You know, it's a dream. It's always been a fight cream. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong. And you know, I wake up in a silicon chip somewhere. And although I never quite know why people think it'd be so great to live in a computer, because these

computers really don't last very long. Yeah, they're not that great compared to the you know, electric need of our brain that at least last eighty ninety years. I think, like when you wrote a Scientific American article about this recently, I think like Jeffrey Miller like responded to your tweet or something with an interesting point. What was that? Well? Oh well, he said, how do you know that the continuity wouldn't last? I don't you know. I mean, no

one knows it. Just to me, it seems like there's a logical break there, because, I mean, the only way to copy it connect to them at the moment it's done with lower organism is you actually sacrifice the animal and kill them and slice their brain up. This was done at this brain Preservation Price lab out in Fontana. I went out to see it, and you know, they

took the rabbit and they infused. They cut its neck and put two tubes into its carotid arteries, and while it was still alive and scized and its own heart, pumped the anti freeze into the brain. The problem with freezing brains compared to say, freezing embryos, is that the brains are so much larger you can't get the anti freeze into every last cell and synapse, such that the freezing process that damages them and destroys the memories that

presumably destroys the memories that are in there. So this process is supposed to get around there. And so they, you know, then sacrifice the animal, froze its brain, defrosted it, sliced it up and looked at it under a scanning microscope and you could see the synapses. We're still intact. So it's like, okay, but the animal's dead, right, Oh yeah, it's dead. Okay, so you copy it and then what well, we put it in this computer and then what well

you turn it on? Wait? Wait, what does that even mean? Turn it on? You know? So the analogy they said was well, okay, it's like incasing a book in whatever, like a resident of some kind, and you'll never open the book again. But you could slust the pages of the book and read every letter on the page and know what's in the book. It's like, yeah, okay, that makes sense in terms of reading the book, but the book isn't going to come alive and all of a sudden have a point of view. So to me, it's

all just deeply flawed. You know, when I go to these I've been to the Singularity Summit a couple of these and it's like religion, you know, it's like, you know, here comes ray kerswild of Messiah. Yes we forever. Well, he's definitely probably getting a message that a lot of people want to hear. And who knows, with all those vitamin supplements he's taking, with all his cocal ten he takes every day, Rays about ten years older than me, and he looks it. Oh really, Oh well that's I mean,

he would not be happy to hear that. Well, I mean, I'm sorry, but you know, everybody ages and there's nothing you can do about it. What there is something you can exercise, you can have a good decent diet, and so on. The alls we're talking about is living closer to the upper ceiling. Yeah. Yeah, it's like an argument that people say, well today people lived twice as long as they used to. If you lived one hundred years ago,

five hundred years ago, you'd be dead by now. No. No, no, people lived in their eighties and nineties a century ago or five hundred years ago, just not very many of them. So alls we're talking about is more people making it up to the upper ceiling. You know, you remind me of something a cartoon I saw which I want to send you where they had two different like women aid stands,

so to speak. One had a sign on it that said uncomfortable truths you know, sign up here an the other one said like things that will make you feel good, And there was no like, no one was that the uncomfortable. It was like there was like a billion people lined up for the other one. You remind me of the person kind of at that lemonade stand. Yes. Unfortunately, maybe that's why my book books don't do as well as depaks,

although I try to know. So my next book I have a big ending about so what's it all about? What's the purpose of life? And so on? So I try to end on a positive note. It's not like living now as if the big show is coming and this is all just a temporary staging where we practice. If anything, that would be an impoverished worldview. If you think, well, this is the big show now you are on the stage. Go, well, that's right. I mean that could be a book titled

this is it? This is it? Yeah? Some thing? No, No, I get your point. I am wondering personally, are you scared of death like in your worldview? No? Okay, so you can so you can reconcile all these things in a way in which you don't need these other things in order to make you. I don't deal with that, okay, but that may be a temperament thing. You know, some

people say they're bothered by it. There's a whole theory about terror management theory, right, you know, you know, most of everything we do is to avoid the terror of death awareness. I think it's nonsense. I have a whole skeptical section of my book on terror management theory. But I think most people just live their lives, even religious people. I think in the back of their minds they're thinking, I get to go to heaven and so on. But most of the time they're just living their days like

the rest of us do. Okay. So I want to cover the last topic today, something that is a mutual area of interest, and that's you know, the science of flourishing and positive psychology. Before we get to your criticisms of positive psychology, I want you to talk a little about how science can legitimately inform and determined policy is optimal for human flourishing. Oh well, yeah, I'm not that

skeptical of positive psychology. I mean, I've written about excesses I think, and the concerns I have about it, Like Barbara Aarnright wrote about in her book, you know that some of it sort of blends over into that kind of deep hop the secret you know, if you just if you wish it enough, your cancer will go away. You'll get to drive the Ferrari, you can have whatever you want. You know, that that kind of positive psychology that I think most real positive psychology researchers would also

just how if they will. Yeah, it's not healthy, and I think, you know, living a realistic world view. But so the thing, A couple of things I wrote about it. One of them was about a Steve job So, you know, here's an example of somebody who you know, definitely you know, is pushing the envelope, you know, letting himself be controlled by other people's restrictions and all that, and thinking, you know, I can just wheel my way through life, you know.

And so when he gets his cancer diagnosis, he's fiddling around with all this nonsense stuff rather than the boring old, you know, his oncologist recommendations, and he probably would still be alive had he done something about it at the right time. That's an example of over optimism bias that you know, just think I can do anything. Yeah, no, actually you can't. It's better to be the slight more

positive and slightly more negative, I guess. But how about just be realistic with a slight, you know, try to have a positive outlook, and maybe by temperament it's easier to be around somebody who's more optimistic and happy. As you know, there's only so much you can do about that. Some people, you know, at least fifty percent ritable. That form of temperament may be more and is tweaked a little bit by culture, and you can change some of

it yourself. I guess by willpower. Maybe some people claim it, but so that'd be my concern about it. And I guess in terms of human flourishing, the better thing we could do is to try to figure out what we've been doing right for five hundred years and do more of that, you know, like expanding civil rights and civil liberties. I would have to say healthcare, you know, for everybody, would be a good thing for human flourishing. You know, at this point our healthcare system is so messed up.

I almost agree to a you know, a single pair thing, but you know, just the basics of life. Get everybody out of poverty, you know, these kinds of things, even though that pudonic treadmill is real. And you know, once the people are out of poverty, they're going to want more and more and more. That's okay, that's fine whatever. I don't care about that, you know, in terms of human flourishing, Let's solve the problems at the bottom before we worry about I don't know, let's say some you know,

the life of rats. Let's worry about the life of dolphin, cetaceans, the great apes. You know. Just just scale down and just start with the big steps, you know, and that everybody has rights and things like that. That's the level of human first, and I think more that than the individual, you could do anything you want. Kind of psychology. I love that I'm a positive psychologist and I wholeheartedly embrace that.

I even I work at the Positive Psychology Center at Penn that's my job, right And I have long believed that the morally dimension is woefully missing from positive psychology and it needs to be part of it. And I love that equity and fairness is and helping vulnerable individuals that you talk about that, like I have you know, I've been quoted as saying that, you know, I feel like a lot of the field of positiology focus on helping the flourishing forish more as opposed to helping the

vulnerable flurish. And my whole miss life's mission is to help the vulnerable for USh. So well, look, thank you for putting that perspective there. Yeah, I think what you do, you guys are doing it pan is great and it's really important. And that whole positive psychology movement that Marty Sellingman really helped planeer, you know, is really a good corrective to all the negativity stuff that psychologists were studying, which is also important. But it's like there's other aspects

of human flourishing that are important. So yeah, that's all good. Absolutely, Yeah, and put all this stuff on a scientific foundation is really important or else. Yeah, you're just in the secret territory all the time, right, Yeah, that's study I cited in one of my columns on the entrepreneurs and how you know, entrepreneurs have to overcome a lot of failure, some over optimism bias. Is good, Like, I can do it, I can do it. I can keep pushing I can

keep pushing. You're more likely to be successful if you do that then if you give up early. But on the other hand, there's studies showing Kinman writes about this in Thinking Fast and Slow that entrepreneurs tend to air too much on the over optimism side at the point where they really should cut their losses and get out of this investment and move on to something else. You know, the sun cost fallacy kicks in and they hang on to investments way too long when they should just say,

you know what, I'm a failure here. I'm going to move on and try something different. So there. I don't know what the right balance is, but there's a balance the absolutely And I just in my head thought of something I want to circle back that we talked about earlier in the conversation. Maybe we can just end with this. And I think a lot about Robert Wright's ideas about he kind of just like, you know, there does seem

to be a telios or telios to the universe. You know, there does seem like it when you look at the patterns over time, there seems to be some order and happening. And you did touch on that a little bit. You talk about complexity and stuff. What do you think of that idea of telios. Yes, I know Bob Wright pretty well and his ideas. I think he pushes that thesis just a little far. Of course, that's what writers do, and that's okay. First of all, I don't think there's

anything built in or inherent or inevitable about that. So in my next book, Heavens on Earth, the last chapter I touch on this idea what does it mean to have a purpose in life? So you start with something simple like a star. What's the purpose of a star? You know, because theis what's the purpose of the universe? Well, what do you mean by purpose? The purpose of the

star is to convert hydrogen into helium. You know, the moment it's a certain size and it hits a certain temperature because of the forces of gravity pulling the atoms together, and you get fusion, and then it releases through nuclear power, you know, light and so forth, you know, and then and the byproduct is helium from hydrogen and so on and so on. You build all the elements were made out of star stuff. So that's a purpose. That's it. It's pretty simple, you know. So if you just scale

up what's the purpose of water. It's to find its natural level. It's the purpose of mountains to grow and to crumble. You know, Rivers are to you know, move along towards the lowest point of gravity. And what's the purpose of life? Reproduce and flourish, you know, on simple life, complex life, So you know, the more complex life, more decrease of freedom, you have some more choices you have

of what it means to flourish. But at some point, just you know, trying to survive, reproduce, flourish, and you know that's our purpose and it's valshaped to us by evolution. It's just the laws of nature. This is who we are and that should be enough. And if it isn't too bad, because that's all there is and you know, accord to you well according to science anyway. But with humans are so complex, there's essentially an infinite number of

things that you could find meaningful, purposeful. But the research, the kind of research you guys do, shows that there are certain things we can do that will predictably bring us a sense of purpose. Now I'm not talking about happiness here. I review a paper by Roy Baummeister and his colleagues separating happiness from meaningfulness, right, and that there's two different things. Like much of what I do in my life doesn't make me happy, but it makes me

feel fulfilled. Like I just got back on a two hour bike ride. Okay, so you know I want up the super steep hill in Santa Barbara here. You know, I'm just hammering away. It's hard, you know, it's painful. I can barely breathe. I'm not happy doing this. I'm suffering, you know. But it feels good to work out. It makes me feel, you know, more like a more purposeful, meaningful life when I work out every day. That's completely

separate from happiness. And so, you know, much of what you know finding you know, you know, having kids, having a family, having friends, helping charities. You know, these kinds of things don't make you happy, but in the long run they make you feel, you know, better about yourself. They bring meaning or purpose. However, you now Roy in his paper they didn't define it. They just let the subjects define it in their own minds. But clearly it

was different from happiness. And so in the end, just finding, you know, those kinds of things, meaningful work, friends, family, loved ones, you know, some reason to get up every morning, get around, you know, helping to make the world a little bit better place, whether it's religion, spirituality, science, whatever

your thing is. And then also you know, something like dance, exercise, meditation, long walks on the beach, heights, whatever it is, you do that kind of you know, get your body moving and you're out, you know, doing something. That kind of thing seems to predictably make people feel better. Absolutely, you're right that there's this key distinction made between Youdemonia and Edonia.

But you know, my colleagues and I, particularly David Yayden, who's a graduate student at the Positive Psychology Center, trying to make the case that there's a third pillar that's really been neglecting, that self transcendence, which is different than the other two, and it's a fundamental need and there's individual differences in that need. But as well as you know, we actually are creating a scale right now in self tresentence. I'm going to give you the scale some day, going

I'll put that in the battery. Maybe. So, I think that there are some humanists that feel like if atheism wins out, then what about these people that have a high need of self transcendence. Don't we need to build the equivalent of brick and mortar secular churches. So these are like Unitarian Universalists type churches where you go and you sing hymns to Newton and the sort of thing. And yeah, for me, I never really did it. I never needed that. But I know a lot of people.

Do you know there's a lot of secular type Sunday services. Well, this is I mean this, these scales and the science that is being developed around this is purely secular. I mean, it's about the core modive. There is universal connectedness. Yeah, that's really what it's about. And I think at the end of the day, when you think of it in terms of we think of the most secular friendly trait that we're studying is all awe because you don't have to believe in God to have all. You know, you

can have all while having sex. You can have all while going to a concert looking at nature. And so I would say you can live a spiritual life by cultivating all in your daily life without belief system. So you know what, if we're agreed on that, let's end on that note. Thank you so much for a great chat and congratulations on the twenty fifth anniversary. Thank you so much for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just

as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.