Sam Harris || Free Will (Part 2)

grant materialism. And it's it's deterministic flavor for this kind conversation, right, It's like, my mind is what my brain is doing in this moment. Right, So if I'm going to get to the end of the sentence, it's because of micro changes at the level of neural circuits that accomplish that. Right.

So the grammar of human English, the grammar of human language, and in my case English is somehow encoded in the physical substrate of my brain, as it would be in the physical substrate of a robot that was also speaking English successfully, although it just would be a very different kind of computer. So what we're talking about. Is information processing in a physical system. In my case, the computers made of meat. In a robot's case, it will be

made of silicon. And in neither case, is there something extra which is emerging or being added that is giving a degree of freedom beyond just the impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment. I think there is. I think that is. Let me like pinpoint precisely what I think that extra thing is. You know, cognitive control

are includes things like implementation intentions. If we could build a progres a robot to have the capacity for implementation intentions and what I mean by that is error correction ability to take its current Because you're right, you know, in the moment, you know, we don't really have free will, but we have the capacity to shift our behavior in the future so that we can learn from our mistakes,

so that we can even make moral reasoning decisions. You know, turtles, chimps, APPEs and robots right now don't really have a great capacity for moral reasoning about something in action they already need so they can change their behavior in the future. To me, that conscious control is free will. It's free will. But I don't think I can convince you to use

that label for that phenomenon. Is that right? Well, it's again you're either changing the subject or like either you're going to interact with the thing people think they they really think they have, right, or you're gonna or you're gonna grant Okay, they don't have that and we're going

to talk about this new thing. I mean, so, I like, there's there's no doubt in my mind that there is a difference that's that's rational to care about between you know, voluntary and involuntary action or an ability to regulate emotion or not. I mean, there are people who have brain damage who you know, just blurt out everything they're thinking. They can't stop doing that, right, So, and psychopaths are moral blind, morally blind, right yeah, so you can they're

they're people who are ethical or people unethical. There are people who are sensitive to certain things and not We could you know, you could be more or less intelligent. Like all of this, all this is descriptively true of human beings, and none of it requires free will in the in the common sense to understand or or to acknowledge so and so, so I can I can can serve the data of human experience, all the while repudiating

free will as a as a incoherent idea. Many people worry, but what is truly novel about what I'm arguing for is that you can recognize this subjectively too. So the only reason why we're talking about free will, the only reason why anyone cares about this topic, is because people are having an experience. They think they're having an experience

of being a self that can author its actions. So the experience of having free will and the experience of being a self, being a subject in the middle of experience, being a thinker, in addition to thoughts themselves right or feeling that one is those things, that's just those are two sides of the same coin, right it is. You know, people think that they are a subject in the middle

of experience. They don't feel identical to experience itself. They feel like they're appropriating experience from a point of view internal to their bodies. I mean, actually, the truth is most people don't even feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies, they feel like they're in a body. They feel like they're a subject in their

head most of the time. Right now, that is a meditation successful meditation absolutely proves to you, from the first person side, from the experiential side, that that's a false point of view, right, And that is the point of view that gives motivation to this claim about free will, because that is what that's how you feel when you feel you are the conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do, because you're not noticing that the next thing you think or intend to do is

simply coming out of the darkness behind you that you can't inspect, right, and that it is genuinely mysterious and so like, So you take a moment of conscious deliberation. I could decide, well, uh, you know, I have a glass of simplest possible case. I have a glass of water on the desk, and I could decide to pick it up and take a drink now, right, Or I could decide to wait. Right, this is a this is the prototypical case of me being in the driver's seat.

You know, I'm free to do this. It's no coercion, no one's no one's got a gun to my head. No one's saying don't pick it up, or pick it up right now? Inter compulsion, Right, I don't have some kind of uh uh, you know, compulsive water drinking behavior. So it's but you know, and I'm a little bit thirsty, but I can choose to resist my thirst, right, So I'm conscious of thirst, but then I can I can consciously decide to resist. And that seems to be me

prosecuting my freedom there, right. But the more you pay attention to what it's like to make that choice out of your own free will, the more you will discover that it is absolutely mysterious in every particular why and how you do what you do, when and how you do it? Right, Like im from subjectively, I have no idea why or how I do any of these things.

And I have no idea why why or how one particular moment becomes decisive, right, So, like I could be telling myself, all, right, now you're gonna wait, you just drank it. You just you just had to sip a few minutes ago, you know, you just just wait, right, And then I think, well, actually, I'm just gonna move now. No no no, no no wait wait no no no, I'm gonna do it no matter how many times I go back and forth, right vetoing the decision that almost

just got made. And then breaking through the veto and the inn said, oh fuck it, I'm just going to

pick up a glass of water. Right, that every increment of that subjectively is totally mysterious, totally, and and the thresholds that are being crossed or not crossed to make a thought or intention behaviorally active or or insufficient to provoke behavior, right, all of this is totally compatible with some guy, some evil genius in another room, typing in the instructions to my completely determined end and coerced brain you know, in this case using synaptic you know potentials.

But in the case of a robot using the whatever code of the programmers put in there, it is there is. I am a puppet who cannot see his strings there right, no matter how, And again I'm not none. None of this is to deny that certain outcomes in life are better than others and worth wanting. None of this is to deny that there are ways to get what you want out of life and ways to fail to get

what you want. None of this is to deny that there is just a vast landscape of experience and we need to navigate towards one part of it so as to be happy. And functional, and we should avoid navigating to another We should avoid being captured by another part which leads to you know, the worst forms of misery. All of that's true, and all we can talk about you know how to do all of that, and all of that includes the prospect that people can learn, people

can improve themselves, people can can you know. It's like first I first I didn't know how to play the guitar, and then I did. And there's there's a pathway between point A and point B. Right, all of that's true.

None of it requires free will, and none of it requires that we overlook the absolute mystery of our subjectivity, of our conscious subjectivity in each moment, right, like it is, it is just totally inscrutable, every part of this, like like literally, you don't you do not know what you will think next, Right, in what sense is that a basis for free will? You do not know what you will think. You do not know what it will take

to make it behaviorally active. You do not know. You do not know what is happening when you're second second guessing the thing you just thought and that becomes behaviorally active. You don't if something in you then just suddenly pulls the brakes and says no, no, no no. I'm like, I can't say that you don't know why that happens when it does, and when it works when it does, and when it fails when it does. All of this

is mysterious, not just a little mysterious, one hundred percent mysterious. Right, you have no insight into it, like this, like the next thing right right, like like so that in so far, like the laughter, where did it come from? Right? I agree? I agree, you're making good points, and I don't think what you're saying is wrong. But I think you're confusing

the hell it is to have no free will. So I think you're confusing the hell out of people because I think that you made great points that the kind of free will that matters to humans we have all that you know, and I think that's an interesting product. I see the difference between our projects all of a sudden, because I don't think either of us are saying anything

that's factually incorrect. I think that, you know, I try to every day, I try to, like show people, you know, the kind of free will that matters to you as a cybernetic system. You know, you're taking like the ultimate universe perspective, but from like a cybernetic perspective, all we have are stating our initial state. I'm also taking these subjective. So it's just not true that people understand this. Almost no one understands this. Dan Dennett does not understand this.

It's a big cree. He obviously doesn't understand this. He obviously feels like a self, right, And that's the that is the string upon which all of this controversy is strung. Right if you feel like me right that like most of the people listening to me right now are thinking, what the fuck is he talking about? I can like, but here's what I'm not. Not my audience, not my audience. That voice in your head, they get it, that says, what the fuck is he talking about? That? That feels

like you? That isn't you? Right like that is that's not a self? What do you mean? It's not you? It is it's you again? You're you're a dualist when you say that, it's no more you than than the bead of sweat that that drips down your forehead. Is you? It is an object? It isn't. I disagree. People don't identify themselves with their hand, but they identify themselves with

their conscious desires and motivations. So we can have gradations of things that people parts of our body that people identify themselves with from the point from the point of view of consciousness, there's there's simply consciousness and his contents. Like like, I'm not saying that there aren't important distinctions

in terms of what causally follows from certain contents. I mean, like the beat of sweat is a is is truly epiphenomenal for anything, any or any project I care about, right, So it's not going to get a lot a lot of things done in the world, and my thoughts might, but there's no causal property of the sweat to like being able to realize your loftiest ambitions in life. It's true, it's true. But I mean take my loftiest ambitions, right, like, like there there are and this is why, this is

why the concept of free will makes no sense. So let's say I here's a project to which I could be purposed. Right, I could decide that I want to become a classically trained musician. Right, there are people who have given their lives to that project, right, just from from the earliest years of their lives, as you know, and then there are people who late in life presumably decide, Okay, I've done a lot of things, and I know I'm not going to be I'm never going to be Mozart

now starting in my fifties. But I you know, let's just see what I can do here. I really, I really want to do this. Right. This is what I love. What I love more than anything on earth is classical music. Right, I love Bach more than anything. Right, Okay, I just that's true of somebody. None of that's true of me? Right? Why not? Why don't Why don't I care about Bach? Right? Why don't I care more about classical music? Why when I when I do listen to music, why is it

almost never classical music? Right? That all of these things have reasons, they have explanations, causally, right, some some in my corner of the universe, classical music is just not that interesting, right, it's not those Those are the things that make you who you are, though, even if you don't know why they were caused by environmental and biological confluence. Great, yes, okay, so so it's deterministic, it's rando, it's something, right, it's

some pattern of causation. Right, But so what does it mean to say that I am free to take a deep and and really all encompassing interest in classical music right now? Like I'm free, No one's no one's telling me you can't apply to Juilliard and and really just get into this. You know. It's like like no one's saying. No one's saying I can't give it a shot. You're not completely free, and there are constraints. But I wouldn't go and say you have no one Okay, but clearly

I could. I could decide to leave this podcast and spend the rest of the day listening to classical music, trying to figure out which instrument I'm going to learn, finding a teacher. Yes, there are constraints. We've got a COVID pandemic that I'm worried about. So like I'm gonna have zoom classes now in the cello, right, I can't. I'm not going to do it face to face until

I get a vaccine. Right, Yes, there are there are, there are things in the world that I'm navigating around, but there's nothing stopping me from just going all in on the cello from this afternoon forward, just dropping everything I'll teach you. I played cello, you do. My grandfather was in the Philadelph Orchestra for cello. Okay, so all right, so so I I could. I could absolutely do this.

I am free to do this right. This is my This is that this is the stage upon which my free will is going to demonstrate itself right right now. But what's the fun, what's the book? The problem is I have almost no interest in playing the cello or like so like, I can't. It's an end. The fact that I don't is something that I did not author. It's a constraint. It's a constraint, for sure. But we can one to one thing. This is where free will.

Free will is not in the one when you're when you talking about devoting your life to playing the cello, not wanting to play the cello is is a little bit of a constraint. Yes, no, it's a huge constraint. You're right, you're right. But I think that you're not distinguised between first order goals and second order goals. And I think that what gives us the free will as a human as species what you asked me, what's that extra?

It's the wanting to want you know. It's it's our capacity to use implementation intentions to get out of the bed and morning go to the gym, even though we don't want to. I don't want to get up in the morning and go. I build a whole workout thing on my porch here. I don't want to do it, you know. But my freedom wies in my capacity to use my consciousness and my change my environment in all sorts of ways where it's easier, where the constraints aren't

as big. You don't see that as an important part of free will that matters to people. Okay, I just see no reason to call it free will. It's when I inspect what it's like to be me here ye again, when I think about myself from the first person side, and when I triangulate on myself and think about myself from a third person side. At no point does free will any version of it, seem an apt apt aptly applied to this situation. So I am free to play the cello. I am free to do it right, there's

no question. So yes, I can talk about the difference between being coerced and not coerce. That's a you know, it's a political fact about me that I'm not coerced to play or not play the cello. Right, it's a social fact. But you still do it even if you're unmotivated. Right, I can't account for why I don't want to play the cello or I want so many other things so much more that I functionally don't want to play. I mean, the truth is I want. I potentially want an given

an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of energy. Well, then I potentially want an infinite number of things, right, Like all kinds of things are interesting, and I would love to have all these skills that I don't have, But I just don't. I don't feel that. It's just not when I rank order my priorities, you know, either consciously or unconsciously, And there can be a difference there, obviously,

you know. We can. We can think we want certain things and tell other people we want certain things, but act as though those things aren't anywhere near the top of our list of wants. But I have no idea why I don't like classical music more than I do. I have no idea why, and I do have Actually I do have the second order desire. I wish I liked it more than I like it. I mean, it's

more I'll teach you. I'll teach you. It's like I would be I think I would be a less of a philistine if I if I knew more about it. I wanted to know more about it, appreciate, and certainly if I could play, you know, the cello, that would be a wonderful thing to be able to do. Uh. And yet I am as I am with respect to

classical music. Now, if I if, if I if I decide, if just imagine I decided by force of this conversation you said something in conversation that inspired me to be different than I'm tending to be right like this, this really would be the the really, the the ultimate instance of free will, because this would be a kind of you know, just a surmounting of all my prior tendencies

into this new uh commitment. I could decide, you know what, Scott, you just on the basis of this conversation, I'm going to take up the cello, like right now, I'm going to do it. You inspired me, right, Yeah, So just email me gets I want to give me the name of someone who can teach me. And I'm like, like, I'm shopping for cello's right now, Like, you know, get

your point. When I look, what would it be like for me to experience that that sort of that that awakening in my own consciousness that's aimed in the direction of classical music and cello man, right, right, that would be totally compatible with the evil genius in the next room saying all right, we're going to give him the cello desire. Here he's going We're going to give him,

you know, just turn give him. He's now going to be just fixated on on you know, the difference between Mozart and Beethoven, and it's all like just going to download the the the classical music infatuation program, right, that would be what that would be compatible with. It would not demonstrate anything like free will. It'd be like what came over me? You know, I've had I've had fifty three years to discover in myself a desire to play the cello. If I discover it right now, what the

fuck has come over me? Right? This this comes from outside of consciousness. This is the point. I see your point, But I'm still gonna you know, because I know you don't like, let's just agree to disagree. So I'm really taking this seriously. I think that what people, you know, you're using these extreme examples that sound good and and they prove a certain point. But the point let me tell you what my point is. Yah, picking up a glass of water is not an extreme example and not extreme.

Extreme was not the right word. I take back extreme. I take back extreme. You're using examples that that make you it sound like you've won an argument. But let me just say what what my point was? Actually this, people, the cybernetic system wants to reach a goal that it desires. So you're right, you can pick examples where it doesn't. But let's pick you know, within the realm of freedom of things you do care about and you are motivated for. Don't you think that's a sensible uh sense of the

term free will? That you have the free will to make You know, you want to write a book. You want to write the Moral Landscape Part two, you know, back to future parts. You know what, and you write that book. You know your capacity to write the book and to use your consciousness to make that a reality to exist in the world. You don't see that as the kind of free will that people truly care about. Well,

do people care. Yes, people care about realizing their goals in life, right, and there are causal ways to succeed at that and causal ways to fail at that, right, And that's all it's like. Yes, so learning to play the cello is not going to happen to me by accident, right, So my denying free will is not the same thing as endorsing fatalism, where one would expect Okay, you know, I mean this is this is how people misunderstand this criticism of free will. They think, well, okay, if I

have no free will, then why do anything? Why not just wait to see what happens? Right? And so if I'm going to wait to see if I accidentally learn to play the cello, we know what's going to happen there. I'm not going to learn to play the cello, right, Like, so there is the only way to learn is to intend, to learn, to practice, to see construction, all of that. Right. So, people care about outcomes in life that are worth caring about.

They want good relationships as the bad relationships. They want to understand things rather than be confused all the time. All of that. But none of that requires free will to talk about, right, And that's some ultimate free will, and behavioral regulation is part of it, right, Like again, there's a difference between someone who can can defer gratification for long enough to actually get something done, as opposed to just you know, gobbling up everything in the refrigerator

the you know, the moment they presents itself. So it's it's all. But again, all of that can be understood.

There are there are genuine paradoxes here which are interesting to think about, which have ethical implications, and which are completely ignored the moment you embrace the compatibilist framing here and also again and the subjective insight is completely ignored because what happens to you when you recognize that that free will doesn't make any sense subjectively or or what has to happen to you in order for you to have that recognition is you have to recognize something about

the way the consciousness, the way the way consciousness is and the way the mind is. And it's incredibly freeing to recognize that, right, and and to recognize that is the antidote to a tremendous amount of psychological suffering. Right. And so let's say, let's say I do something that is incredibly embarrassing, right, you know, Like I say, I'm giving a public talk in front of two thousand people, and uh, you know, I I spill my water over

you know all of the Actually I've done this. I was at a public talk in front of two thousand people and knocked over a water glass and it just spilled over all the you know, the the equipment that was you know, connected to my microphone, you know, at that podium right right, So what what reaction do I have to doing that? Right? Like, like how long do

I stay embarrassed for? Well, there's one way of feeling about oneself and one's freedom to do otherwise and one's you know, and just kind of the integrity of selfhood that leads one to feel like, fuck, I'm I'm such a fool, you know, I'm just like this moment says a lot about me, Right, this is like, how did I become such a schmuck who would get up for

a public talk and knock his glass of water? And all these people see me, they've seen me do it, and maybe the sun video and fuck, you know, and then so like now open the bottomless pit of self mortification and go as far down as you want right like. That's that's a certain kind of person to be, right You could also be someone who instantly notices that it's funny, right like, who sees it, enjoys it, enjoys it from

the point of view of the people watching it. And you could actually have the internal lightness about oneself in the moment, so that it's just you realize you have a good story to tell later in the day, and your wife is going to laugh at it, and all of this is just more comedy, right like, So that like like no problem, right Like, That's a different sort

of person to be that has its own consequences. But another sort of person you could be is recognizing that that one I in this case, you didn't even you didn't obviously you didn't intend to knock the glass over.

It says basically nothing about you except the the the you know, a failed moment of motor programming, and you know, apart from your worrying that you might have some neurological disease that you know, cause you to knock the glass over, there's really nothing to think about any longer, right, There's just no If it just dry, it's like, is there something to dry up? You dry it up because you're you're well intentioned towards the whole project of maintaining the

integrity of this institution. But there's there's no self in the middle of this that just got exposed, right, there's just consciousness and its contents, and you're free. You're like it is. You're in a circumstance of total psychological freedom to just move on to the next moment without any rumination about the last moment, and deliver the talk you

were going to you're going to deliver. You're free to take that glass and move it out of the way so you're less likely in the future for Bill, there's some intelligent response to this, But there is no mortification,

there's no there's no place for it to land. There's just you are the next moment is is the world is truly born anew in the next moment, if you will only let it be right and rumination and perseveration and this this this mechanism that is so common to just still be beating yourself, your your non existent self up over this last thing that happened, which you didn't which you the self that is being beaten up, didn't truly author because it just fucking happened, right, That is, Uh,

there's a spell to be broken there, and it can be broken. And when you break it. You don't know what anyone's talking about when they're talking about free will. I mean, really you don't. You can't, you can you lose sight of the problem, right, And but yes, but there's one piece to add here, because our paradox is that are interesting. The responsibility of paradox is is real, and I still don't know what I think about it. And it's this and perhaps you've heard my example here,

but it's like when you it's with with uh. And this is something like you know, kind of a written debate with Dan Dennett came up this this idea of you take the prototypical case of of kind of behavioral control of a of a golfer trying to sink a short putt, right, and when you're a bad golfer and you fail to sink a short putt, well, you know, you know, everyone looks at that and says more or less, well,

of course, you know you're a bad golfer. And what do you expect you're going to make some of those?

You're going to miss a lot of those, right, but if you're Tiger Woods or some great golfer, you really should make that put right, and it would it would seem like like that's it would seem appropriate to beat yourself up over not over missing it, because you know, you make up a put of that length, you know, nine hundred and ninety times out of a thousand times, right, And so what does it mean to say that you should have made that putt if you're a great golfer

and that you know, this is just an analogy that you know, this this the morally relevant analogy is like what what what does it mean? You know, when a psychopath misbehaves you or someone with brain damage misbehaves, well, of course, what do you expect. This is what people with the relevant brain damage do, right? They they they're not they're not competent to be true free to behave well because they're they're they're malfunctioning robots on some level.

But when you take a truly good person or a truly competent person who then does something horrible right and then really misbehaves ethically, that person's really responsible. You know, that's like the true case of responsibility. But the paradox for me is that the more you make that, the more competent you make the person, the more their failures to behave well become inscrutable. Right, So you take the best golfer on Earth missing the shortest put putt he's

ever missed in his life. Right, that seems to say almost nothing about him. That seems to say. That seems to be an error on the part of the universe. Right, that seems to that seems to cry out for an explanation, which doesn't tell you he should have done otherwise. It tells you that there was some noise in the system, there was some neurological glitch. It's like whatever, whatever happened there intervened. It was it was it was adventitious to his life, Like he's going to make that put a

thousand times in a row. Now, what can we say about him based on the fact that he missed this one? We can say almost nothing about him other than he was unlucky. I think it's a good point. So I want to acknowledge that. When I read your produx responsibility, I thought it was a really truly good point. It seems like we've got it all backwards in our society. You know, nice people well intentioned people who make little tiny mistakes or being canceled, and the assholes are running

the country. I don't know if you if you see any linkage here, Yeah, yeah, well that you know, that's something I haven't linked those two topics, but yeah, I mean there's a there's an asymmetry there that many of us have found totally galling, and I think it's it does it is relevant to connect them in that free will isn't the thing that the concept of free will, or the concept that someone could have done otherwise, isn't the thing that that helps us understand what matters here?

What matters is there are certain systems, and you know, human and certain human brains are among these systems, and certain types of thinking, certain ideologies, certain thought systems, right, that reliably produce harm that we should want to avoid

because they make life suck, right. I mean, these are these are these are these are disproportionately bad, even if there's some good to be found in there, that the the the the bad outcomes are so reliably produced and they're so unsurprising that we should want to figure out how to how to avoid all of that, right, and having a a malicious and uninformed and sinister and and and utterly selfish person in charge of our country. Is it's a bad system, right, Like now, there's no free will.

I don't know. You don't need to attribute free will to Trump the idea that he could be otherwise. He can't be otherwise, right, He's a he's a moron, and he's and he's a narcissist. Right, what do you expect him to do with with with the power of the presidency? Right now, he's not he's not as dangerous, he was not as dangerous as he might have been. He's not Hitler, right, But Hitler is another bad system that we should want to disempower, right, and certainly not work to empower. Right.

But again, all of this is susceptible to a mechanistic interpretation. We don't want to put a bad robot in charge of our world, right. We don't want to co a a a system of artificial intelligence that has bad ethics, right, But and we know that if we do, we're going to get bad outcomes. But again, there's no and it is it is in fact true. I mean this, It comes back to the paradox. The better you, the more finely you calibrate any system towards toward good outcomes, the

more inscrutable its failures to achieve those outcomes become. You know, if you you know, it's just it's like if you realize if you have a a robot that has a you know, only a one in a billion error rate, if you experience a one in a billion error today, you know when you're you, when you're interacting with that robot, Damn, that's surprising, and it and it's and it's it says virtually nothing about what the robot did in the past, because it worked perfectly in the past, and it says

virtually nothing about what is likely to do in the future. And you were you and the robot, we were both unlucky. Today you know, you've got the one in a billionaire, right, so so so so again, to remind people what the

paradox is here. The more the more you make someone seemingly responsible, really responsible for their actions, the more you make them as competent as they can possibly be in that domain, right so so that they can shoulder this responsibility of feeling like, god, damn, I'm really culpable for my failures, like like I should have done otherwise I should have made that put right. The more that the less it seems like it really reflects them, right, the

more the more mysterious the failure is. And so it's it's it's almost like an uncanny valley effect. It's like most of us who live most of the time in the uncanny valley of just the chaos of our of our imperfect calibration. Right, that's the place where you can sort of heap claims of responsibility onto people, and they seem to land. And my argument is that it's never

to tell someone they should have done otherwise. Like, I mean, this is very clear in parenting, Like you know, I have, I have daughters who I'm not I'm certainly not browbeating about the illusoriness of free will. No, I'm trying to

raise them to be competent, self regulating human beings. Right, So when I say, if I if I talk to one of my daughters and I say, you know, you really should have done otherwise, right, I mean, that's not a way I would put it, obviously, But but if that's the implication of what I'm saying, Like the thing you like, it's be nice if you put your plate in the sink after you you do, we're done eating? Right, like, like can you do that next time? It really is

much more. It's it's never a claim that in this end stints, if I rewound the universe, they would they might have done otherwise, right, No, this is a causally determined outcome that is was always going to be the way it was going to be, even if you introduce randomness. Right. So there's no free will here. But it is a conversation about what I want them to do next time, right, And that is a that is and saying that is a further input into the clockwork of their lives. So

that will change them ultimately. It will change them ultimately. If my daughters are going to become civilized human beings, they will not behave the way they did at you know, at seven years old or twelve years old or you know when they're in their forties, right, and those changes will be causally affected on the basis of demands imposed on them. But again, there's no there's no place for the folk psychological notion of free will to land there.

It's like if you wouldn't give your daughter or any credit if she became president of the United States, some day you would look at her not with pride, because you'd say, well, she didn't you know ultimately cause that well well, honestly, so, I do feel like pride is a is a is a virtue that has an expiration date in a human life. I mean, I think it's developmentally, there's an appropriate there's like a critical period where pride is not a a an ethical error or a or

a sign of psychological confusion. It's actually it's actually something you want to get into the code. Right, So like I would I love it when my daughters are proud having accomplished something that seems like a good thing psychologically. But at a certain point, I think you want you clearly want to outgrow It's it's clearly it is a it is not a durable basis for self esteem. It's

not a basis for compassion for oneself and others. It's it is it does tend to rest on a confusion about just what it is you can reasonably be responsible for and what it is that it was just a happy accident, right, And people take to tend to take credit for the for for things that they weren't actually in control over, and and and uh, you know, attribute their failures differently, so there's kind of a delusion built

into it. In the normal case. I mean, if you're depressed, that probably flips and then you then you're more realistic about about what was actually within your within your purview to control. But yeah, I don't. I don't feel pride about anything in my life now. I mean, I'm not like I have all kinds of outcomes I prefer and sometimes I realize them and sometimes I don't. But and so so the the the obverse of pride, of course

is something like shame again. Shame is it's an important thing to be able to feel, but ultimately I think it reaches its shelf life. I think you want to be able to transcend shame again, you know, not too early. This is an interesting topic and again and I'm not totally I don't totally know what I believe about it, because I think there's this is certainly a pathology, you know, and a lot of danger on the other side of

losing one sense of shame. But I do think ultimately, you know, there's a psychological freedom in outgrowing pride and shame and just seeing that there's just no there's no basis to feel either. Ultimately, you're just telling yourself a story about the past. In both cases, you're thinking thoughts in the present that nominally refer to the past, and

you're and they're making you feel a certain way. You're feeling good about if like you're watching a movie about your past and you're being entranced by it, and it's kindling an emotional response that has a certain half life, and it's incredibly boring. It's in the end, it's an incredibly boring thing to do with your attention. It's a it's a masturbatory on the pride side, the pleasure side.

It's a masturbatory and self directed pseudo source of gratification, which divides you from least importantly it it sets up a system of comparison between yourself and others that ultimately is not a source of well being. Right and like you, if you're comparing yourself favorably to other people and feeling good about that, you know, then five minutes later you're going to be comparing yourself unfavorably to other people who are doing yet more impressive things, and you're gonna feel

bad about that. Like that, that pinballing between those two things is not the right algorithm to live a truly self actualized life. So I do think both pride and shame ultimately get outgrown. But at what point That's an interesting question. I love this transcendent view, and also the idea that you the point that you make that about hate, you know, there's really hate doesn't really have a place to program in the robot here once we understand that

there's no ultimate free will. And what I don't understand though, is you know, so your view absolutely and I loved your point about how can increase sympathy for others when we realize, you know that we're not always aware of or most of the time we're not constantly aware of the outputs or the inputs into our outputs. But what I do understand is is like in applying that in your own life, you you don't apply that when you

talk about Trump. I mean, you get you hate you, you get really angry, but you don't say things we should have sympathy for Trump, you know? Yeah, I mean so, well, there's certainly moments where I'm I'm I'm captured by by something that I find so despicable that I'm that I'm actually, you know, I'm blind to the to my own philosophy here, like I'm just lost. I'm I'm lost in thought, you know, I'm I'm identified with with with a moment of finding

Trump despicable. Say, and yeah, so I'm just I'm in the dream, you know, I'm asleep and dreaming and unaware of human Yes, yeah, so I'm not. I'm not a Buddha. But much of the time, a different thing is happening. And it's not it's not personal, it's not it's not that I hate Trump personally. It's that I hate And again this is all slightly anachronistic because now he's no longer president, so I'm basically never thinking about him now,

which is wonderful. But it's not that I hated him personally, it's I hated the fact of him, right. The fact that we made this sort of man president was so terrible. I mean, for all the things it's said about us as as a society and all of the risks we were then running for four years to put something in charge of the literally put something in charge of someone in charge of our nuclear codes who couldn't figure out why we can't use nukes. We've got him, why not

use them? Right? Like to like, take that one factoid about Trump that he had to be repeatedly admonished by his joint chiefs chiefs of staff that it was a good thing that we had reduced our warhead count from the sixties, And he asked, why why don't I have as many? When he heard that, you know, Kennedy had ten times a number of bombs that he has, Trump thought that was a problem, like, why why can't I why?

Why why did he have more bombs? Right? Like, the guy was so dangerously ignorant of in this case, just the the game theory of nuclear deterrence, and and all and all the rest, uh you know, which which our very lives, in the lives of our children, and the fate of civilization depend on someone not being that catastrophically ignorant about that thing which you know, which you know about which only he has the responsibility at this point

for the next four years. Right, So that fact alone joined to, as you said, ten thousand other facts about this man. Right. Reliability, He's reliable, awful, Right, he's so reliably bad as a malfunctioning robot. Right, if we put you can predict it with ninety eight percent accuracy. Yeah, so it's not so like it's a little bit analogous to if we if we elected a rhinoceros to be president. I'd be fucking tearing my hair out over how awful

that is. At no point in my imagining that the rhinoceros can be anything other than a rhinoceros, And at no point in my imagine, at no point am I wishing suffering upon the rhinoceros. I don't hate the rhinoceros. The rhinoceros just shouldn't be president of the United States,

right Like. That's a catastrophe to do that. And in some sense, we elected a rhinoceros president, and so I spent a long time complaining about that because of all the things to which that was connected in our society and in our possible future that we're worth worrying about. I hear you, and I hope you understood my point too. You know, you know, you never you never said these words such as you know, I think everyone's coming from

such a place of hate with Trump. You have to understand he doesn't have ultimate free will, and I think we need to have more sympathy for him like you would with a rhinoceros, you know, while still taking action to prevent him from ruining the world and pressing the nuclear button. I've never heard you like say that in a sympathetic way towards Trump applying your own principle. Do

you see my point here? So, I mean Trump is someone who is I find it unusually hard to have to feel compassion for him because he seems he seems damaged in ways that are that specifically render him impervious to suffering. Right So, he's like not someone who who seems to suffer anything ever, right now, maybe I'm sure he probably does, but that that requires an extra act of imagination. Imagine what he's like in the you know, in the privacy of his mind when he's suffering. He actually,

I mean, he doesn't seem comfortable. He doesn't see, he doesn't seem like he's he's got he has a nice mind to inhabit, but he seems to be missing a module that would would naturally provoke compassion. Free will. Well, no, it's not free, but it's not free will. It's it's just it's like he doesn't like does he care about the relationship. Does he love people? Does he care about like when someone close to him dies? Does he feel grief?

I don't. I don't know. Actually, he seems like he might be damaged, and precisely the way that would they would prevent someone from ever shedding a tear about anything, right, Like, like he's a car. He's a kind of cartoon for real, Right, it's not. It's not just that I've made him a cartoon because I don't know enough about the man or I or because I I find him so despicable that

I'm just not disposed to think clearly about him. He actually does seem like a very unusual person to me, And I wouldn't say this about even objectively worse people, like you know, Osama bin Laden, Right, Like Osam bin Laden seemed like a much more normal person to me than Donald Trump, albeit one who was committed to specific ideas that I found much more reprehensible, was much more dangerous. It's a good thing we killed him, all of that, like,

but much more. I understand his psychology, much more than I understand Trump's. There's a randomness, there isn't there there's a there's a malfunctioning robot like aspect to Trump, where he's he's got he's got a few obvious pieces of his code. He wants to be rich, he wants to be famous, right, and then on top of that, he's just win. He wants to win. Yeah, he wants whatever he imagines he is winning. And but then he's he I mean, there's there's there's almost no reason to talk

about the man now. But it's just the fact that people The thing that that got most under my skin was that half of our society apparently couldn't see what was wrong with him, right, like literally like they just couldn't see the thing I was seeing. In every instance of having it was completely unmediated. Unmediated too. It's not that I'm believing the New York Times profile, credulously believing the libtard profile on him, and the man is being

besmirched by a lying you know, fake news media. No, No, everything I feel about Trump was was fully communicated by seeing him at the podium talking like like, so it was unmediated, you know, and and and in many cases virtually unedited. You know, you sit down and watch two hours of Trump. That's who I'm reacting to, right, And the fact that half of the country felt there was I mean, either couldn't see it or felt that, you know, upon seeing it, that's exactly who they wanted to be

to be president. You know, uh, that there was something you know, crazy making about that, because it's it just was a transparent act of lunacy from my point of view, I mean, just like, okay, let's just drive you know, human history toward a cliff, you know, as as quickly as possible and see what happens. Right, It's like it seems like an act of chicken with with to be

playing with human history. And so anyway, I was reacting to that much more than than I was motivated, because the truth is, I see, like I can, I can I can have the reaction that the people who like Trump, I can actually run that reaction in emulation, Like I can see that he has moments where he's genuinely funny, genuinely charming, genuinely charismatic, like I like, I get that, right, and so, and I can feel my monkey brain light up in precisely the way every everyone else's brain lights

up when someone who is charismatic and charming and funny and taking risks shows up. Right, So, you know, like when he's at the debate and he said, you know, he's he says that completely, you know, he's he's challenged by Megan Kelly for all the heinous things he said about women, you know, in his history as a buffoon, and he says, you know, only Rosy O'Donnell, right, you know, and that did us a huge laugh line and it completely undercuts everything Megan Kelly thought she was going to

achieve in that moment journalistically, and it wins him the debate. Like there's part of me that just finds that hilarious too, right, Like,

so I get I get that. But to not have seen the bigger picture here, and to not have seen that this man is actually a sociopath with respect to his ethics, and to not have cared about any of that right, to not have done the moral arithmetic, and imagine who you'd have to be to have run the fraud of Trump University and have to have defrauded elderly people, to have encouraged elderly people to max out their credit cards to get your fake knowledge it's your fake you know,

your you know, you know scam university. To have been that that one data point alone in his backstory should have been absolutely disqualified. Know, like we should never have heard from him again after that. It's because it says so much about who you are and who you're likely to be in further moments, like that's not just a missed putt, that is a million puts missed in a row, right, Like we we know you can't play golf after you miss that many putts, not even in a row all

at once, Sam, all once. I won't even say hit a row. It's so much once that you can't even focus on one at a time. It's over, the conversation is over, you know. But so you don't hate him, No, No, in my in my clearest moments, I don't hate anybody, I mean, And yet there are people who I would I would sanction that we kill, right. It's like, I mean, it's like again, it's not I'm not a pacifist. There

are people who should. It's like we you know, we've invented guns for good reason, right, And it's there are people who I hope I'm not one of them after this interview, by the way, No, and I'm against the death penalty, right. So it's like, once we have safely confined somebody, then there's no reason to kill them, right, I mean, then then then that's a major ethical lapse. But no, there there are you know, there are acts

of self defense that are totally rational. And you know, you know, someone comes into your house and wants to kill you and your kids, by all means, shoot that person in the head, right, Like, that is what guns are for, and you should do it. You should do it if it's a grizzly bear, and you should do it if it's a person who seems to think he has free will to kill you and your kids. Right. So it's like that that's that's morally uncomplicated in my view.

But again, hatred, this is this is an asymmetry that I think you were referencing. People wonder, well, what about love? If people have no free will, how do you love anybody? Right? And this is a beautiful asymmetry between hatred and love, at least in my view, which is hatred really does require and an attribution to someone that they could and

should have done otherwise. Right, Like, it's like you believe they really are the authors of their bad actions, and the moment you find that they have a brain tumor or whatever it is that is exculpatory. Then you then you change your response. You think, oh, wow, you know I did hate Charles Charles Whitman for getting getting up on that clock tower and killing fourteen kids. But once they performed an autopsy on him and found a massive brain tumor pressing on his amigdala, well, then okay, then

I recognized you can't hate the guy. He was unlucky. He was unlucky as he was as unlucky as the kids he shot, right, I mean, that's just that's terrible, right on some level, that happens to everybody. Once you recognize that free will is an illusion. But love doesn't require an account of human behavior in that way that demands that people be the true upstream cause of all

of their actions. Love just requires that you really just two things that you that you care about the difference between suffering and happiness, right for for the for yourself and others. Right like you, you want people to be happy, and that is really the the what it is to love someone. You want them, we want to relieve their suffering.

You want to maximize their happiness. And additionally, you take a certain you find a certain pleasure and well being in their company, right, you want to be with them, right, So like you're in the presence of someone who you want to be with, who makes you happy and who you want to be happy, right, and you want to and and that and that that positive social orientation and that direct enjoyment of the state of love in your

own mind. That's what we mean. I would argue, that's what we should mean when when we say we love someone body, and none of that requires a belief that they are the you know, they've pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps causally speaking, whereas hatred really does on some level, like the moment you notice that. I mean, the example I always use is of Oude Hussein because

he's it's not as hackneyed as referencing Hitler. But you take a truly evil person who's done just objectively heinous things and just walk back the timeline of their life. You know, it's just like you know, you know, you take Hitler. Hitler as a forty year old was absolutely somebody who was just fit for nothing other than a bullet. But you know, walk him back to when he was four years old. He's just a little kid who's going to become Hitler? Right, But he's an unlucky little kid.

He's got bad jeans or bad parents, or bad society or something's kind of beat him into the shape we now recognize with the bad mustache and the and and the the the dangerous beliefs. Right, And at what point along the way did he get free? Will? Well, at no point? So at what point along the way are you just that you've become justified in hating him and

and feeling no compassion for him? You know, I would argue at no point, although it admittedly it's very hard once he becomes an adult to find any kind of basis for a compassion. But he didn't make himself, you know, And you know I certainly you know I certainly would have uh killed Hitler had I could have at any moment along the way to to to stop his his

real harms. But it's an interesting question like this is this is a Ricky Gervais bit, right, Like if you get get into a time machine and go back to kill Hitler, what if you land back with him as a kid? Are you going to kill the four year old Hitler? Right? Do you've killed Trump? At each four, Well, well, no, but I mean it's it's it's easy. It's I wouldn't say I would have killed Trump at any point, but it's easy to say I would have killed Hitler at

a certain point given the harms he caused. But killing the four year old Hitler's seems like, you know, an act of pure psychopathy. Right, He's a four year old kid who hasn't right, Right, So there's no point is is compassion unjustified? And at no point is hatred justified? In my view? And every so and so the so then the question is in the in these occasions where violence seems not only justified but necessary, right, killing Hitler? You know, I thought, you know, assassinating Hitler when it

could actually do the world some good. You just you just never need hatred for that to be motivated, right, Like, it doesn't, It doesn't, it doesn't require but but hatred does require a false description of authorship or and and human agency. And that's why, and that's why I would say it is possible to get rid of hatred without getting rid of love. Psychologically, well, I like the spirit of a lot of what you're saying, and even your your teachings and your and the whole point of loving

kindness meditation, you can have love, you know. Sharon Salzburg beautifully shows how we can meditate on our enemies, right, you know, you know we can wish them well because if they are clearly Trump wasn't well you know what I mean, like like, if we wish Trump well, that's only going to be the benefit of the world as well. Yeah, yeah, you know, so I really love the spirit. Yeah, I

love that. No, and I love these higher principles. Okay, So the is all to say, you have an interesting discussion. You say the separation between science and human values is an illusion. Now, why you for the first time in history thousands, you know, one, hundreds hundreds of years, no one's been able to put a guillotine on the on Hume's guillotine. And and how are you able to finally take us from an is to an aught? Can you walk me through the logic of how you think that

that's possible to go from facts to values. Well, I think it is a trick of people are getting hung up on language. It is a kind of a semantic distinction that I just don't think we need to be taken in by and It really is not something that Hume himself went deeply into. I mean it was, it's much more of an aside in his writing, this distinction, and it's been blown up into like this foundational notion of of meta ethics somehow that you can never get an is from an aught. I mean, there are a

few ways to see what's wrong with this. I mean one is, you can never get an is without certain aughts, Right, you can never make a factual claim about the world without following certain intellectual, logical rational oughts or values, right, buying into thems like what why should why should we value evidence? Why should we value logical consistency? Like if someone doesn't value logic at all, what logical argument could you invoke so as to convince them that they should

value it? And if someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence could you provide to suggest that they should value it? Right, It's just at a certain point there are certain axioms, Certain things are axiomatic, and that's not a problem. We can't do science without it, we can't do math without it, we can't do anything without it. And yet people are acting like if you need any of that to get your morality started, there's no such thing as morality, or

they change. There's a double standard here that we should notice, like that there people are finding people take the fact that there can be moral controversy has convinced most people that there's no such thing as objective but there can be controversy about anything. There can be fat there can be controversy about about physics. We would never have moved from that the mere fact of controversy to to to

the claim that there's no objective physics. You know, the fact that you know, the fact that the Taliban disagree with us about morality is invoked as a reason to believe that morality has to be relativistic. There are no universal truth claims to be made about right and wrong or good and evil because millions of people over here

don't agree with us. Well, millions of people over here don't agree with us about physics either, or evolution either, because they know they're just they're not adequate to the conversation, you know, because they're just, they're they're obscured by they're

they're mired in other belief systems. That never causes us to wonder whether or not biology may just be made up or a cultural construct or relativistic or right, which is, unless word haven't been complete, unless we've been completely taken in by some kind of postmodernism. But so that double standard is worth noticing. That you can't get to facts

without certain without indulging certain values, at least implicitly. But you know, I usually I just find a different starting point, which is okay, Fine, Let's say there's no such thing as oughts, there's no shoulds, there's no there's no morality, there's no values. Right, let's just deal with a universe

of facts. Let's just start there. Well, it is a fact that we live in a universe where there's a a vast landscape of possible experience on offer, and we have a navigation problem, right, like we can we can navigate toward places on this landscape that are more and more sublime, where you know, hairless apes like ourselves have

better and better experiences. Collaboratively, creatively, we we produce you know, brilliant works of art and have the free time to enjoy them, and we have epiphanies that that that you know, cause you know, the hair on the back of our neck to stand up not from fear but from you know, the rapture of just just how beautiful the cosmos is, right, and we can have and we have no idea how good all of that can get right with like that we could, we genuinely cannot see the horizon line there,

but we just know we can push into this area where cooperation and and curiosity and joy and loving kindness and all of this just gets like, just gets tuned up more and more and more, and the music gets better, and the and the and the people and people like myself who don't yet understand how good music can be learned more and more about out all that and get

better to get more adequate to that conversation. And then over here we can have failed states where sadistic monsters torture people for pleasure and nothing fun happens at all apart for just you know, more creative sadism uh and the benefits thereof you know, accruing to the few creative sus sadus who get to uh stay on top of that heap of misery before someone figures out how to murder them, and and the and the cycle continues, right and then you know there and they're you know, over

here there are cures for diseases because we have the free time to find them, and we have the the the insight into the you know, the mechanism that would allow us to find them, and we get vaccines quickly. And over here people don't even know the germ theory of disease, and they kill people for witchcraft and and you know, cut out the tongues of blasphemers, you know, because there they think that might be a cure for

the bubonic plague, as we did for centuries in Europe. Right, So there are two very different attractor states on this landscape that we already know a lot about because we've lived in both of them, uh sometimes for centuries, and we have a navigation problem we can and all of this again, this is all these are fact based claims right about how to move in this space. There are

right and wrong answers about how to move. There are and and the and at every level at which we are gathering human knowledge, there are right and wrong answers. There are genetic things that determine you know, where we where we're inclined on this landscape. There are environmental aspects to this, and all of this can be you know that broad strokes distinction can be can be defined and understood at every level that we have a specific science

or a specific almost science that addresses it. So we're talking about the truths of physics on through biochemistry, and you know, neurophysiology and psychology and sociology and economics and all of it. Right, any place where we're going to make a fact based distinction about anything is potentially relevant to how we navigate on this space of possible experiences. So we have not introduced morality yet, we haven't introduced any oughts yet, and so then, and we don't even

have the word should yet. Right now, let's invent the word should. Right, What does it mean? What should I do? What should we do? Right? I would simply claim this is the only thing you have to grant me in order to get my moral worldview booted up. All you have to grant me is that the word should, if it means anything at all, it means that we should

avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. Right, If we should do anything, we should do that anything else on this landscape is better than this one place where it's true to say that any conscious system that can suffer is suffering as much as it possibly can for as long as it can without any good thing coming up it. Right, there's no silver lining to the suffering. You know, we've created computer systems that are just hell realms, where conscious

computer programs suffer immeasurably for an apparent eternity. Right, everything that can suffer is suffering the most harrowing and pointless misery it can possibly endure for as long as it can possibly happen compatible with the laws of physics. Right, that's the worst possible misery for everyone. If anything is bad, that is bad. If the word bad means anything, Okay, it doesn't yet. We haven't invented the word bad yet. Now we have what does it mean? If it applies

to anything? It applies to that. What does good mean? Good means good? The direct where are you going to point toward the good? You're going to point away from the worst possible misery for everyone. Anything is better than that? And now then the question is how much better does better get? Well? Over here, we've got a beautiful global civilization figuring out how to colonize the galaxy based on environmentally sustainable you know, collaborative principles that are just redounding

to the advantage of almost everyone. And they're curing diseases as quickly as they crop up, and it's just, you know, and they're fast completing something like a mature psychology of human self actualization. And it just it's like, basically the entire world has become Esslin Institute on its on the most beautiful afternoon it ever enjoyed in the you know, in the summer of love. Right, right, that's the worst

day anyone has for the next thousand years. Right, that's a pretty good planet to be on, right, certainly better than the worst possible misery for everyone, right then, So so all the people who are who are getting wrapped around the axle of is an aught are saying, wait a minute, but is that is the worst possible misery for everyone? Really bad? Really? Should I should? I? Should I?

Really avoid it? Who are you to say philosophically that that you should avoid the worst possible misery for everyone, or you should actualize a galaxy full of of of uh amazingly happy conscious systems. And that's just a it's a misapplication of language. It's just if the word if the word should mean the place you are standing, So is to have the pretense of doubt about what those words mean, right, that like the place you're standing to say, well,

is the worst possible misery for everyone, really bad? Might there be something worse? Right? That is, that place doesn't exist if you if you understand what these words mean, right, if you're actually running them in anything like a kind of emulation so that you're you're understanding them, it should be obvious to you that that's not there's no place to stand from which to do that philosophy I mean like a much a much crasser but also emphatically convincing.

Uh framing would be Okay, put your hand on a hot stove, and then tell me about your philosophy about whether or not that is bad and worth avoiding. I'd like to double click on that example, though, go for it, because everything up to that example I was with you, and then you know the collective well being. But once we get to the individual level, you know. The way I think about it is that there's no should without

in order to which is a goal. If someone says you should do X, that necessarily implies that you should do X in order to get why there could be no a should without reference to a goal. Now, what if what if the goal is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone, then that's a good point. But what if that's not your value? So what or what if?

How could it not be your value? Well? What there's one could conceive of a situation in which suffering at an individual level is what will lead to a greater good for everyone. If your value system is that greater good that you're talking about. Couldn't you make the case you have to do sucky things sometimes in order to

get there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yea. So there are trade offs and and there, and there are forms of suffering that have silver linings, right, I Mean, that's why I'm careful to define the worst possible misery for everyone is as as really the worst possible misery for everyone. But if you're if you're going to talk about, you know, any project in life that is hard, that that can't be achieved but for hard work, you know, i e. Some measure of suffering, Yeah, then those that's just as

easy to understand. I Mean, there's there's sometimes there's some things that suck and nothing good come from them. And there's some things that suck but they're on their way because the value judgment though, but they could be in they could be well, no, there's there're framing effects, so that there are things that are unpleasant, but framed a certain way, we actually kind of like them. It's a kind of it's within the range of unpleasantness that we

actually like because we know what it means. Right, So, like a good workout is my is my favorite example here. It's like like that like once once you learn to love lifting weights, that physical stress, which if you felt in another context, if you woke up in the middle of the night feeling what you feel when you're doing you know, the heaviest deadlift you can you can you can accomplish, Well, you'd think you were dying, right, you'd be terrified. You'd call nine one one, right, like like

like that's a medical emergency. But because you're in a gym getting stronger, you actually like that experience. Right. So that's but you know, that's that is interesting psychologically, But that's not a counterpoint to my argument. That's just it's just in fact true that the cognitive frame you put

around certain sensory experience matters. But it's and it's it's also true that certain good things in life can only be accomplished by going through certain hard experiences, right, And it may it may be true both individually and collectively. And this is why my moral escape analogy could be relevant here on this question. You know, just imagine a landscape where our peaks and valleys and the peaks correspond to increases in well being, you know, individually and collectively.

And let's take a collective moral landscape for this argument. So we're on and you know, all of these, all of the landscape disappears into the mists beyond which we can see. So you never quite know you're on a peak, right, Like there's never maybe there's maybe the peaks go up infinitely, we don't know, but we just we're on a high spot. We know we can move higher and things get better and better, Things get happier and happier for all of us,

or most of us, or us in the aggregate. But there's and we know what it's like to go downward and things seem to get worse and worse. Well, it may in fact be that there's a we're just on some local maximum. But the way to get to a much better spot, a much higher spot on this landscape would require a collective descent into some kind of valley, right, like things actually will get worse in order for us to get better. It's like you do have to rip the band aid off, and that sucks, but you have

to rip it off. And that may be true of certain things like what if? What if climate change? What if our solution to climate change is absolutely necessary but actually painful economically. Now, I'm not convinced that's the case, right, I'm not convinced that we need to make significant sacrifices.

But what if it's just an accident. If that's true, what if we lived in a world where we're on a collision course with something truly horrible, and the only way to get off of it is to make a major sacrifice that diminishes, that noticeably diminishes the well being of more or less everyone for a generation. It's totally possible that we could be if we're not in that situation. Now,

that's an intelligible situation to be in. That would be an example of like, Okay, this is going to suck, but we have but here's why we're doing it, and and it's rational for us to do it. The better and worse are value judgments I don't know why you

don't see that. You know the thing about well being that people on a hot stove, and then tell me that if it was in order, if my goal was a broader goal and putting my hand on hot stove would help me with that broader goal, I'd put my hand on a hot stove and deal with the suckiness of the feeling. But the thing is, it's not to say that. To say that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad is a value judgment, is to say nothing. Well,

you're accepting a particular definition of well being. The point is that psychology people, no, no no, no, no no, I'm not definition. You're just you're just not understanding my claim. Take any definition. Take let's take value fulfillment as a definition, which is ano definition less. Imagine a universe of radical pluralism with respect to values. Right, so we've got so, we've got we've got a place over here where you have you have perfectly matched sadists and masochists who if you could

just get them together, they get really really happy. Right, But we want nothing to do with any of that, right Like that just sounds like hell to us. But the truth is psychologically for them. They're having a fine old time in their you know, BDSM dungeon. Uh and uh, we have no idea how weird all that can get. But it's just different values. Right. And let's say there's a functional infinity, a functionally infinite number of value systems.

I'm asking you to imagine a universe where every conscious creature, by its own values, is made as miserable as it possibly can be. So everything is tortured, even if your torture is my highest enjoyment, and vice versa. Grab whatever knobs there are and turn them down to the hell realms for everybody for as long as possible, right, with nothing good coming of it. If something good's coming of it, well, then that's just not as bad as things can get.

Let's make them worse. Right, Everything gets dialed down to the utmost misery by whatever uh causal structure would allow for that misery. And it's so if you're going to flip the flip, all the the the valances on a value system in some other corner of the universe will then okay, that's the antimatter of morality over there, will find it functions by its own principles. Let's let's screw let's screw things up perfectly over there, that's the place

that's the base case. Right. So if you're going to say, well, that's just a value judgment that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad, I don't know what you're talking about. You're just you're making you're making noisiers. It feels like you're inserting in AUGHT. You're only getting to IS because you're inserting in AUGHT with the IS. You're hearing them together. I'm granting. I'm granting you. There's no such thing as ought. We live in the universe without oughts. You don't have

to do anything. You shouldn't do anything. Okay, you're just you're you're you're off scott free, you're off the hook. There's no free Yeah, there's no morality, you know, Johnny Philosopher. Right, so we're we're in a universe where you don't you don't. You don't have to get out of bed, right, you don't have to get out of bed in the morning. I'm not going to judge how are facts going to

at all lead me to action? The fact the facts are that there there are very different experiences on offer here, and you will helplessly find yourself preferring the good day at Estlin over the the rat filled dungeon. Just to take the fairly parochial differences that we can notice here on earth. Good can only be used in relationship to a goal. How are you divorcing it from the goal? No,

it's it's it's just it's a it's basic. Well, no, because there's just there's just like the the the valance of certain experiences within consciousness that have no necessary reference to a goal. It's like, you can, you can take you can. You can be so happy or unhappy that it has no reference point in past or future, Right, Like you can have the best possible acid trip or the worst possible acid trip and you're not. There's no goal there. There's just a the sheer extremis of your

physiology pushed to the breaking point. I do think that there's pleasurable, there's unpleasant, But I don't think they map onto good or bad in the way that you kind of it seems like you're mapping your mong to give them, give them enough, to dial them up enough, and give them enough time. Right, Like, what what if what if existence was just that? What if existence? What if there was a way to to there was a place you

could be. Let's say, let's say reincarnation is true. Right, let's say that's a possibility and wouldn't yeah, that would that would be interesting. I mean, the truth is both both situations are interesting. You know, you know, getting non existence is also I mean the fact that you know it you appear and then you disappear, and you really disappear, that is also interesting. It's like the firm It's the Fermi problem, you know, it's like thinking of a universe

teeming with other life forms and advanced civilizations. That is, that is about the most astonishing possibility on offer, except if you think that there's no one else in the universe, that is also astonishing. I mean, they're both, they're both just jaw dropping to think about. But if you could be reborn in a state of perfect bliss, uncomplicated, uncomplicated by any goals, right that that that may not be

the the most interesting possibility for you. But maybe your intuitions about that caused you to think it's not the most interesting possibility are just born of your own you know, glitch in your own code. Whereas if we could change that, we could change those intuitions. Let's say we just perform the necessary you know, brain changes for you a little slightly, you know, maybe maybe analogous to teaching me how to

play the cello. All of a sudden I would appreciate you, like I don't know what I'm missing with respect to classical music. But once you, once you gave me the intuitions of a of a Beethoven, well, all of a sudden, I'd recognize, Okay, this is there was a there there. This is just you know, the person I was, the philistine I was who just didn't get it and who would rather listen to led Zeppelin just didn't know what

he was missing. Right. My point is, with respect to the moral realism here is that, just as it is with any other realistic claim about knowledge about facts, you know, with physics or anything else, it is possible in the moral domain not to know what you're missing. Right. You don't know how good or bad things are over there. Right, you don't even know there isn't over there based on

your own experience. Right, And when we were asking questions about how to navigate in this space of possible experience and whether it would be good or bad, to go one direction or another. We are constrained based on our own moral intuitions rather often, but we can triangulate on those and recognize that, you know, we're living in a universe where it could be possible to change one's moral intuitions.

In fact, it is possible based on pedagogy, and and you's just collisions with other people who have different intuitions, you know, through conversation, but ultimately ultimately might be possible to change them very directly, Like we're going to change your actual the code you're running on your brain, or we're going to upload you into a different brain, right Like like that's like, so, what what sort of robot

do you want to be? Once we once we can really change you materially, there's this further question of okay, if I can change your intuitions about right and wrong and good and evil, right, so that up is down, up is down and down is up? Right, there's this further question of asking would it be good to do that? Well, Who's whose intuitions are you referencing? Bye by when you even ask that question, Like, who's going to decide whether it's good to do that? Well? Again, we're we have

to fall back on this original navigation problem. There's this moral landscape. There's a functionally infinite number of experiences on offer you probably almost certainly not infinite, but functionally so. And we know that some of these experiences suck. Right, It's just built into the very logic of this case, which is, whatever your intuitions are, we can concoct an experience that is maximally terrible for you, right, But whatever

however your mind is built, we can make you suffer. Right, So getting away from if we should do anything, if the word should is going to mean anything, if the word good is going to mean anything, if the word better is going to mean anything, if a valance towards the positive is going to mean anything. Getting away from the burning stove that is burning everyone in the worst possible mode of burning that they're you know, their organization can admit of forever. Right, Getting away from that is

good and better and worth doing. I agree, and I think you should do it. But I only agree with you because I share your value system. No, no, over there, your whatever your value system is, its ultimate repudiation is part of this picture. You're if you are capable of wanting anything, you're going to want to be elsewhere once I get you into the worst possible misery for everyone. It doesn't take a lot, and that takes a lot of hubris though for us to think that we know

the right way. More important this is this is where the This is where the double standard I referenced earlier comes into the picture. People seem to think that a diversity of opinion or disagreement on values, on moral values has to mean something when it doesn't mean anything when

we're talking about scientific values or facts. The guy who shows up at the physics conference who doesn't care about causality and doesn't care about consistency, and doesn't care about logic, and doesn't care about the history of physics and all the conversations that were had before he got there, and doesn't know the math and doesn't he's just not adequate to the conversation. Doesn't get to be part of the conversation. The psychopath doesn't get to inform our ethics. The Taliban

don't get a vote. They don't know what it means to live a good life and produce a good society and treat women well. They're imbeciles. They have a shitty culture. We know this. This is not and it shouldn't be taboo to say this. They're relig they're trying to live by the lights of a fifth century book or seventh century book, which wasn't a good book even in the

seventh century, right it was. So it's like, by the lights of the seventh century, it was possible to do better than what Muhammad managed more really speaking, probably a good book. And so it is with the Bible, and so it is with the Book of Mormon, right, the book Like you know, if you're going to hold the Book of Mormon up as a history of the world or a history of anything else, or a book about

physics or a book about medicine, it sucks. It also sucks as a moral orientation in the twenty first century, right, It just it's like, we can do better than all of these things, and we want to have an open ended conversation about the nature of reality. We do not have to be constrained by this this spurious notion that values are something other than facts. They're not like there's a way of talking about them that that can seem to they can they can motivate that distinction for the

purposes of certain conversations. But it's like the distinction between reason and emotion, right, It's like, yes, there's there's they're not, they're not precisely the same thing. We know what it's like to have motivated reasoning where your emotion is causing you to misconstrue certain arguments or or or cherry pick certain data or whatever it is because you you know, you want things to come out a certain way, like like yes, reason and emotion or are you know, part

of a ven diagram that don't completely overlap. But it's also true that part that that there is a an emotional aspect two our to the cognitive apparatus that is producing our rationality. And if you and if you're damaged emotionally in the right way is if you have you know, orbital medial prefrontal damage that causes you not to feel the implications of certain reasoning strategies or certain correct uh conclusions,

you will you will malfunction. You'll you'll you'll know what's right and be unable to use what's right, you know, rationally speaking to reference Antonio Dimasio's work on gambling tasks there or and and even just the even just the feeling of doubt is an emotion. The feeling of certainty is an emotion, the feeling of of of Aha. Now I see how that adds up, like two plus two makes four. I get it there. That is leveraging emotion in order to land rationally right, Like there's it's not

it's not. It's not completely devoids. It's not. It's not unemotional, and so it's it's on some level it's a spury. It's not entirely clear distinction. And we have to be

careful in how we differentiate reason and emotion. And it's it is to a certain purpose, but so but the and so and so it is with values, It's like, hey, you can't you can't do arithmetic without valuing the you know, the the operations in certain ways, like if if you're going to do arithmetic, or pretend to do arithmetic and imagine that you should be free to think of the numbers differently on either side of the equal sign. Right, two means two over here, but it means something different

over here. That's what I value. I I don't I you know, I don't like your colonialist you know mansplaining white guy values of consistency across the equal sign. You know that got drummed into you in your in your private school. But over here in my you know, Taliban funded Academy of Arithmetic, we've got you know or my my, you know where we read uh dere dah and uh and uh uh you know fuco on the topic of arithmetic. And we realize this is just a socially constructed project.

And on the other side of the equal sign we can we can have left arithmetic and right arithmetic. I mean, I'm just obviously I'm just making this up, just confabulating, but what like that's not going to produce the results that we that we we dignify as arithmetic for very obvious reasons, and values are built into that project. Now again this gets subverted in specific instances, in very interesting ways which we which we also have to to enshrine

into our values. Right. So for instance, and this is a little bit like how intuition is is at bedrock for us, but it's constantly being subverted by the systems we build to leverage our intuitions, Like you have to have the only way you understand two plus two makes four is based on intuition. But we know our intuitions fail in other areas of mathematics, and we have to

we have to account for that. But so you can take something like like what I just said that the kind of arithmetic that would be impossible and and and and laughable. There we know we can find ourselves in situations where that seems to be so and it isn't. Right, Like when someone poses non proposes non Euclidean geometry for the first time. Right, you have a mathematician like Remond I believe was, you know, was certainly one of the

first people to do this. Like everyone thought that a triangle had to have one hundred and eighty degrees, and here comes somebody saying, no, no, I'm not going to be played by those rules. Not all triangles have one hundred and eighty degrees. Okay, there's there's there's one time point where he seems like a lunatic, or at least

he just doesn't understand what he's saying. But there is a path from from that initial seemingly crazy claim to making sense incrementally, and there's just not that many increments here where then you think, oh my god, unless everyone understands what this guy just said, they don't understand geometry anymore. Right, Like so like it goes from this is blasphemy and

you're an idiot to you're a genius, thank you. Right, And we know what it's like to traverse that boundary, and we know and we know that there's principles of intellectual honesty and self criticism and openness to evidence and argument, and patience and and and and being sensitive to bias.

We know all of it. We know what we need to have in the toolkit, and we know we get continually surprised by new discoveries and the fact that someone like Remond can come along and say, okay, look a triangle on a curved surface is going to have more or less than one hundred and eighty degrees, right, do you understand what I'm talking about? And that and the point Lands, we know that is a different project than postmodern you know, everything's everything's pure context relativistic bullshit. We

know it's different than the Taliban. May be right that the Koran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe, and it should subsume every other human project. We know enough to know then the kinds of errors that are being made there. And so it's just It's like the the exceptions, you know, those those exceptions where everybody's wrong and then suddenly some lone genius rewrites our

collective appraisal of reality. That does that needn't open the door to this this you know, quasi nihilistic picture that every doubter who comes along needs to be taken seriously. Right. The person who doesn't understand that the worst possible misery for everyone is worth avoiding, just doesn't get to come

to the Conference on Morality to belong. There so many good points and make a lot of good points in the moral landscape, but none of that is countering the naturalistic fallacy, which just simply says you can't have You can't have only factual premises. You have to have something that has no I am I'm I'm agreen. I am agreeing with that. Even when you only have factual premises, you can't get to a fact without first presupposing certain values.

You just can't like it because if you don't value not contradicting the last thing you claim to believe, right, if you want your beliefs to cohere, I see what you're saying, that's a value I can't both like to believe that something is red and something is also blue. You know, red and blue all over, right, not partly red and partly blue. But it's red and it's blue. Right, is a contradiction I can eat. So I could decide I have to have a value system to organize those

two propositions. I mean, either I don't think that's Let me give you a good example, a counterexample, and you tell me if this is not a counter I hated IQ tests, I hated intelligence research. I went into the field with the mission, because of my values, to take

down IQ. But I collected the facts to such I had to put my values aside as much as I possibly could, And I studied with the leading IQ researcher in the world, Nicholas McIntosh University of Cambridge, and I published studies which directly contradicted my whole experience as a child, and it was hard for me to stomach. But I still published it because I had a commitment to the truth. Now what that commitment to the truth is a statement

of your more value system. Value system of commit truth trumped my value system of wanting to change the intelligence field in it by taking down IQ. So I had two competing value. Is that is what that's what you're arguing. Yeah, yeah, no, you're value. Yes. We need to identify the values that

scale best that that can help. So we need to identify the intellectual and ethical values that allow for the the again, the the sanest and most efficient way of navigating in this space of all possible experience toward better and better, more creative, more insightful, more beautiful experiences which we are right to care about, if we're right to care about anything? Right, if caring? I mean this is this is where where language bites its own tail, right, Like,

this is this is where the definitions of terms become circular. Right, Like for someone to say, okay, what if I want to experience the worst possible misery for everyone? Right, that's not a use of the word want that makes any sense. Right, What you mean by want doesn't map onto this landscape, right, So like we have to like words people. This is what's happening with the isot problem. People are pretending to

think certain thoughts. They're not actually thinking them. They think they're thinking them, but they think that uttering a sentence is the same thing as thinking a thought. It isn't right, I can pretend to think this thought. You know what I have in my refrigerator right now? I have a round square, right, It's a sentence, right, It's utter bullshit. It has no reference point logically or empirically in our universe or any other that I can imagine, because round

square makes no sense, right. It is the round is exactly what a square isn't. Right, So the fact that I can say the phrase round square doesn't shouldn't make you think that I'm I'm I'm tracking the thought that there's a thought on offer that myke that that that my mind isn't passing through. It's like here, every thought, every every sentence is a It's like a needle that that needs to actually think it through. You need to be able to thread the needle, right, But I am

not threading it. I'm just saying, here's a needle and and and I'm pretending that my my intelligence has has passed through the eye of that needle by by uttering the sentence. But it's it's completely empty, it's completely vacuous. It is not a thought, right, I'm not thinking that thought. And that's not a paradox. I'm I'm making small mouth noises and pretending to be a philosopher when I say that sentence, right, that's what's happening with this is ought

distinction in my view. I mean, it's just it is it is empty language when you actually drill down on the circumstance, we're actually in right and what and and the way our intuitions allow us to make any claim at all cognitively or or or behaviorally a behavior to feel any motive to do anything right, It's like, what what is it to be a cognitively and volitionally a

live system? We we are we we're hurling words at this circumstance, trying to to to make some appraisal of it and to make and and again you know, whether we choose to think of it or not. We're trying to navigate within this space of possible experiences, like I feel something that makes me uncomfortable, and I want to stop feeling that way, right with my apish brain, and might not, But you might not want to stop feeling that way if you had a certain value system that

allowed that to happen. Right, But then, but then other things count as uncomfortable in that value system, right, So like I've got I've got whatever I've got that. I can't. I can I can't perfectly inspect. In fact, I'm really bad at inspecting it. Right, I can't look inside myself

and find my values. They have to come out in dialogue with the world, right they get they get revealed to me as as as they get revealed to you by these collisions, you know, linguistic collisions and behavioral collisions with the world, Like how do you know you don't like your hand on a hot stove? Well, touch one for the first time, right, and then you know, how do you know your allergic to strawberries? You know you eat them for the first time and you have a reaction.

How do you how do you know you don't? You want to reject the inconsistency in this other person's argument,

like like someone's telling you something that isn't adding up. Right, You're in your first philosophy philosophy class, and you've got some anti natalist arguing that it would be better better not to have been alive, Right, it'd be better not to be born, and having kids is totally unethical for that reason because life sucks, and you you feel like there's got to be something wrong with this argument, because it's like it's it seems, uh, it just seems to

open the door to all kinds of things that seems starkly unethical, Like which is which is to say that you kill everyone in their sleep tonight painlessly. That would be a good thing to do, right, Let's just murder everyone in their sleep tonight. That'd be no one bereaved, no one would be suffering any of the outcomes of that, and there'd be no attendant suffering to the deaths themselves. Like that's just let's let's if you could do that, you'd be a moral monster not to do that. That's

sort of the sorry, I'm uncomfortable with that. This is all kind of revealed values. And then you get especially uncomfortable when someone says something which amounts to two plus two equals five, like, okay, that's bullshit. We scan your brain while you're doing all of that, and we see you're using some of the same neural structures that you use when you find, you know, certain smells disgusting, right, because there is no other areas of the brain to

leverage to have these kinds of reactions. Because you're you're an ape after all, right, So where you're using a very old toolkit to you know, in evolutionary evolutionary terms, to do any of these higher cognitive things. So we're navigating. But then but but the truth is, we have enough that is abstract and not merely conforming to the appetites born of evolution, uh that allows us to take something like the view from nowhere, to stand outside ourselves where

we can say, okay, yeah, we're just apes. Now we're just you know, these these these uh, these warm and moist and and uh, meaty things that that crave certain

certain outcomes. But here we have we have we have this language game that is that is getting interesting enough that seems to promise that we can stand outside of this if only for you know, between the hours of nine and five in a in a at a place like M. M. I. T Or Harvard or Stanford or some institution that for whatever reason is carved out enough free time and you know, to to with the you know, our twenty watts of brain power toward toward problems that

aren't immediately relevant to feeding ourselves and not dying, and we can have a conversation that seems to look back on this creaturely circumstance of being mere apes, you know, trying not to die. And we can say, what should we do when we can rewrite the firmware of our nervous systems and do anything we want? What will be right to want under those conditions? When I can change your moral intuitions and I could make you a happy member of the Taliban if you want to be that?

Should you want to be that? When I can make you someone who recognizes how shitty it is to be a happy member of the Taliban? And where where can we stand? And what does this moral relativism seem to promise? In my view? It promises this moral landscape, which is okay. Now, let's finally admit we have a navigate a problem, and part of our compass is and part of the problem of solving this this navigation problem is recognizing that now

we can make changes to our compass itself. Right, it's not just reading the true north of I'm an ape born on earth that feels certain a certain dopamine rush. I mean, wow, this is why this is what you're saying is amazing, because it's precisely that metacognition and mindfulness that you're exhibiting that I think gives us a species, gives us free will. Okay, but it's amazing. You're ill.

You're illustrating exactly what I've been. The reason why it's not free will is because all of it is being pushed from behind causally, either deterministically or randomly, or both such that such such at every momentary instance of navigating and doing anything at all. Again, just me getting to the end of this sentence, right, is fundamentally mysterious, being driven from from behind. And no matter if if I maintain my current course or I change it, both are inscrutable.

If I pick up the glass of water with my left hand or my right hand, both either is inscrutable. If I decide to suddenly want to learn to play the cello, that change in me is an absolute mystery which I cannot account for. I cannot. It's the point, that's all, besides the point that's really interesting here because it's totally compatible with determinism, and free will is not

compatible with real determinism. Because if if you could say to someone, listen, the movie of your light life has already been shot and scored, edited, it's done right, there's a place to stand from which we know exactly what you are going to say two years from now to your wife in this conversation where you think you're having some kind of epiphany. You know, that's already written. We wrote it. We have the dialogue on our supercomputer. Right.

Our lives are compatible with that. Our phenomenology, our moment to moment phenomenology is compatible with that. I'm not saying that's true. I'm not saying randomness isn't part of the picture. I'm saying our experience is totally compatible with that. And to recognize that experientially changes things. It feels different, and it has moral implications, and it closes the door to hatred and real hatred, and it does not close the

door to love. And it makes you someone who can stand completely free of certain forms of psychological suffering that seemed to be an imperative if you don't experience your mind that way. That's so much of this is semantic, because I'm like right on board with your your whole life product. I can see so clearly the thread that unites all these you know, we talked about religion, you know,

and getting and the is all this stuff. You know, you want to pull back the curtain and have us derived values from some universal base of truth and reality as opposed to driving values from some belief. That's cocka ma amy, as my grandmother would say. I totally am on board with all this I could see semantically. I'm not going to convince you some of these things. But it's funny because I I love your project and your

mindful I am a subscriber to the Waking Up. I listen to your morning meditation today, and and and my as a human being, myself and the and my own teachings, with my own courses I teach to transcend course and all this is very much in line with what you're teaching, which is helping us to ascertain the reality of our mind and understand our patterns and in order so we

can have that potential to change in our lifetime. To me, the kind of stuff you're working on, the mindfulness, the metacognition driving values from facts, to me, that's worth calling free will from a human perspective. Well, so I mean freedom. Freedom is definitely something to value and to aspire to in all of its guises. Right, So you know, I think you know if someone and again this is all this can be as as transcendental or as or as

prosaic as you want it to be. But it's you know, if you just take freedom in the in the context of any goal, like like if you want to lose weight, it's better to feel the the the kind of free access to the internal resources that will allow you to

do that with with with the minimum amount of suffering. Right, It's like you're not constantly racked by by irreconcilable impulses like you want to lose weight, but you're desperate to eat chocolate, and then you eat the chocolate and you feel guilty and you cycle back and forth between that, and then you don't make any progress, and six months have passed and you're the same weight, and yet you spent you know, thousands of dollars on you know, to

join diet clubs, Like you're frustrated, Like all of that is not as good as having your your capacities and your aspirations truly aligned, where it's like, Okay, I've made a decision. I want to lose weight. I know how to do that. I got to eat at a caloric deficit, I got to work out more, and I'm going to do that without any sense of internal conflict, and it's just going to be a source of joy for me. And the pounds are just going to just fall off

hour by hour. You know. Literally, there's not going to be an hour over the next three months where I'm not going to be losing some amount of weight. I'm going to be happy the whole time. And three months from now, I'm going to look in the mirror or look at the scale and realize I've achieved my goal

without any impediment. Right, those are two possible experiences. Freedom is a concept that that useful to differentiate those two experiences, right, I'm, you know, in one case, I'm free to just follow my own advice without conflict and follow the advice of others, and to to to not be coerced by my own internal cravings and addictions, and like I'm not addicted. I'm

I'm free of those kinds of impulses. But again, I just I think there's something misleading about invoking this traditional concept of free will, because I know where people are starting. People are starting. It's the same problem with self, Like there are ways to talk about there's a ways to use the word self that I you know, that are unavoidable I mean, you know, there's no problem in talking

about oneself or the self. But what most people most of the time mean by the feeling of self is referring to something that is illusory, that is a source of real suffering. Right. It is the feeling of being a subject in the middle of experience. And when you lose that feeling, this is you know, it's not uh, you know, this is why this is a good analogy. It's actually it's the same. It's it's more than an analogy.

When you lose that feeling, you also lose the feeling to which this notion of free will can be attached, right, Like, that's that's where it's like, it's obvious that there's nothing in experience to which that would refer. It's like it's obvious that the next thought simply arises. There's no other way for it to appear. And I didn't think it before I thought it, and I am in some I'm not I'm maybe the first to know what it is, but I'm also the last to know what it's like.

It's it's it's and even with something like speech, it's like I'm unless I've prepared my speech in advance, right, unless I have a script I I'm hearing what I I say at the same time you're hearing it, right, It's like, I mean, they again, there's there's some delta here.

I mean there's some granted, there are kinds of speech acts where it's not totally scripted, but it's sort of you know, I have some internal sense of where I'm going as I'm going there, But rather often it's just you know, if I'm thinking of an analogy, if we're talking and I think, well, just imagine you're you know, imagine the old story of putting rice on you know, one grain of rice on each square of a chessboard, and you double it double each time, and by the

time you get to the end of the ship, Like I just thought of that old you know story, I didn't. I didn't think of it. I mean, it's not the greatest example because I sort of thought of it before the words got out. But you know, there's just you and I are hearing my thoughts at the same time for the most part when I'm speaking, and my thoughts aren't evidence of your free will, right, Like they're just appearing, right,

And that's what's happening for me too. And the impulse again, if I'm going to go for the glass of water, Like from a moment ago, I wasn't thinking of water, wasn't feeling anything about the water, I wasn't thirsty, But now I thought it might be nice to have a sip of water that came out of nowhere, out of nowhere. And but that leak between thought and action is not one to one. You know, there's a really interesting paper

on do smokers have free will? And that's the Bosid Baldmeister paper, and he found that in almost every case, people overestimated the extent to which they wouldn't be able to quit or they wouldn't be able to have freewill based on the urge. But turns out that humans have much more self control than they realize that they're capable of. You know, you don't have to obviously, you don't have to.

You know, you can want the water, but if you if you suddenly activate your prefaultal text, you could override that and be like, you know what, I'm gonna wait. But again it's subjective, so I'm not denying that. Again, there's there there's a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. There's a difference between behavioral self control and lacking that capacity. Right, Like, let's say I have goals, you know, to you know, to stop but my goal is to stop smoking, but

I'm completely incapable of not smoking. Right. That's one way to be. The other way to be is I have a goal to stop smoking, and I can actually veto the impulse to stop smoking when it comes online, right for the time it takes me to actually kick the habit.

But that's not again every instance of this, like let's say I'm you know, I'm trying to stop smoking, and I I'm able to successfully preempt the impulse to smoke on Tuesday afternoon, but Wednesday morning, I reach for a cigarette and smoke, but I only take one puff and

then I throw it away. Like every bit of that the the sufficiency of my my strength of will in one case, my weakness of will in another case, the fact that it wasn't so weak that I smoked the whole cigarette in that case, every bit of it is being determined by states of my brain which I didn't author, which I didn't create, which I'm to it. But my liver is still me and it gives me absolutely no sense of free will. If my liver stops fun my liver is working exactly the way it is in this moment,

and no other way. If it works better tomorrow or stops working completely on Friday, I am a mere victim of those changes or witness to their consequences. It's there. It's not within the domain of my of my autonomy or agency, but so it is with states of my brain. So it is with each instance of neuro chemistry in

my brain. And yet that is producing everything I experience, including my preferences and my goals, and my my impulses that are in conformity with preferences and goals, and then my sudden subversion of those goals with some alternate impulse, you know, the thought, Oh God, wouldn't it be great to have a cigarette right now? That's that's getting piped up from below. And I'm the one who who can seem seem to hear for the antidote. I can seem to say, oh, no, no, no, I'm not going to

follow that thought. I've been taught mindfulness by by Sam and Scott, right. But the fact that that comes online in that moment and doesn't in another right that'sous. The fact that it comes online to the degree that it does and not one degree further is also mysterious. It's probably dependent on other things that it seemed completely adventitious to my character, like whether I got enough sleep the night before, or whether I had a full lunch, or

whether that you know, whether I got enough sunlight. I mean, like, it's just who knows, like totally mysterious. Like I'm an absurdist, so I I love a lot. We were saying, because I will see things that I do and I'm like, but I'm like, oh, that was really kind of predictable that I would do that. But you know, it's not totally mysterious if we have an understanding psychology about how genes work. You know, I kind of get why I have the dopamine drive. You know, I get what's pumping

through my head. I can kind of understand it from a mechanistic level. Right, It's not like totally buttandb yeah, well, unders no, I get I guess it's it's descriptively in certain cases, it's descriptively not mysterious at all. I mean, we know causally we can tell a story about it. But again, it's just two differ levels of of connecting

to the phenomenology here. When I say mysterious, I mean like, like I can move my hand, right, This is the most This is one of the most prosaic things about me, that I can move my hand. I can do this. I have no insight into how I do this. Right. If I suddenly couldn't do it, yes, that would be flabbergasting. But the fact that I can do it is also flabbergasting.

I have no literally no insight. Now I know something about the neurology of this, right, I can talk about muscle fibers, and you know acting, and and you know the transduction in motor nerves, and you know a seal coaling, and like it, I can I can kind of vomit my concepts onto this experience. Right. None of that reaches in to the experience, none of it. Right, So like

this is this is irreducibly mysterious. You know that's interesting because some people have argued that autistic savants actually are an exception to all this, and they actually can get inside the module, you know, in a very deep way that most of us can't. That's why I wish I knew what the quality of an autistic avant was because I talked to the elite Daryld Treffort. He was a dear friend of mine. He was a you know, rain Man scientific advisor. He studied. He spent his whole life

studying these people. And it's interesting because it seems like some of those autistic capacities, like to be able to just verbatim play back something actually requires the ability to get into the module consciously in some way that is not privy to the rest of us. So I think there's actually some really interesting neuroscientific exceptions to some of this. Well,

I wouldn't say so. I'm not saying that you can't have more and more fine grained insight into the experience, right, So, like like you can learn to pay enough tension to anything a motor a simple motor experience like moving your hand, and it can break down into you know, it can become pixelated in ways that are interesting, right, So you can you can become more sensitive to the the link

between mind and body. I mean, like like the arison of intention and kind of having a kind of threshold effect that actually does you know, trigger a motor program. You can become more sensitive to things we know to be factually true. Like if you touch a hot stove, you can actually experience the reflex component of withdrawing your hand,

so that you actually withdrew it before you felt the pain. Right, Like the you know, the road to the amygdala is actually faster than the sensory the road to sensory cortex that actually registered the conscious percept of oh my god, that's too hot. Right, so you can you can notice that you can actually become sensitive enough to notice that first you withdrew your hand and then you felt the pain of how hot it was. Right. So I'm not saying you can't have any insight into this, but there

is still something. However deep you go into anything, however atomized your experience consciously becomes of of phenomenon. There is just simply this fact that first something wasn't there, and

then it's there. There's a there's a you can you can shatter your your your your subjective experience down to its atoms and notice that things are just appearing out of the darkness, right sights, sound, sensations, thoughts, intentions, emotions, or their micro constituents, in so far as you can find those with your attention, and and again, things can get incredibly pixelated when you're doing when you spend months on retreat doing nothing but pay attention to to mostly

sensory perception, it breaks down, It can break down into especially if you're if you're doing it strategically in the particular way so as to look for it's it's kind of smallest and briefest aspects, which is one style of meditation. Things become amazingly pixelated in your body, like you don't you don't feel that you have a body anymore. You have a you know, a cloud of sensation you know of temperature and pressure and and movement that is just and does you know doesn't have the shape of a

body at all. Right, you don't feel hand You feel these these these micro changes of of of primary sensation at age each moment. But again, whatever you're noticing is there, and then it's not there, and then something else is there, and then it's not there. You are not doing any of it. That's the crucial point. You, the one who witnessing, aren't doing any of them. But you can do something about it. That's the point I'm trying to make. Well, But whether or not you do in the next moment

is just as mysterious as this. I get your point, though, Yeah, I see what you're saying. It is. Look, let's end. But you're you're testing my limits of free will right now because I'm starving. But I and I'm sure you must be as well. I want to just agree with you that it's all inspiring. I walk around constantly in a state of all in wonder. That's my default mode is curiosity about everything about people I'm supposed to hate. I'm actually just I witness them, just like I would

witness my consciousness. So I'm with you on a lot of that. I really can't thank you enough for coming on today, spending four freaking hours with me, covering almost everything about human existence. And I would still say to be continued, because there I didn't get to the Twitter questions. I didn't get to the mindfulness thing. I'm not saying we have to like you come back my podcast, but I just suspect we'll talk again someday. You know, the

conversation will continue. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Scott. So thank you. It's a questions. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.