← Modern Wisdom
Loading summary
Transcript383 lines
- [00:00]
A
Was philosophy always meant to be practically applicable or is that some modern reinterpretation?
- [00:06]
B
Ah, that's a Joe question.
- [00:08]
C
Oh, well, I mean, I suppose one of the differences between, like, very broadly speaking, between something like ancient Greek philosophy, say, and the way that we conceive of philosophy today is that, you know, philosophy today is largely thought of in terms of different fields. You've got your kind of epistemologists who discuss questions like, you know, what is knowledge? And you know, more importantly, how do we, how do we attain knowledge? What are the kinds of systems and processes that produce reliable knowledge? That kind of stuff. And then there are kind of ethicists talking about, you know, what is the good life? You know, vitally important question also, you know, what are the right things to do? And then you've got kind of logicians talking about, you do a lot of proofs and try to often model ordinary things using formal mathematical or at least semi mathematical systems. You've got philosophers of language, philosophers of science. But suddenly in the ancient world, these weren't as differentiated certainly as they are today. And so, you know, Aristotle wrote different treatises on these different topics. But even in his philosophy, everything is so interlinked. And if you go back before Aristotle, it's very, very hard to separate these. So, for example, the Stoics, although in kind of popular discourse around Stoicism today, we talk a lot about Stoic ethics. The Stoics thought that their ethics fell out of their metaphysics and their logic, which was their word for what we would call today things like logic and epistemology. So I think that's one major difference in terms of practicality, I mean, yeah, a lot of ancient philosophy is incredibly practical. Especially one of the paramount questions that's asked by almost every ancient philosopher is how to live a good life. The first philosopher, like in receive wisdom is Thales. He's a kind of ancient Greek philosopher. But before that there are lots of kind of. We have scraps of ancient Egyptian philosophies and things like that, and they're often concerned with what's the good life, how do we live it. So I think philosophy is eminently practical. I also think maybe this is just my own bias showing. I think that today philosophy at its best is often very practical.
- [02:22]
A
How has something gone awry? Is there some sense that modern philosophy, a lot of that is kind of like string theory in physics, where there's not much progress being made in quite the same way for people's practical applicability?
- [02:35]
B
We're trying to do the Ethics without the metaphysics. As Joe just said, a lot of these ancient philosophers in particular, are remembered for their ethical teachings, the Stoics. You might know what a Stoic is. It's someone who sort of is resistant to suffering and pleasure and is sort of neutral. But why? Because of their metaphysics. Because of what they believed was true about the world. Same thing with Epicureanism. People might know that Epicurus, for example, thought that you shouldn't worry about death. You know, like, death is nothing to us. He said literally nothing to us. Because when you're alive, it's not with you. And when it's with you, there's no you. That stems out of the Epicurean tradition of materialism. They were staunch materialists. They believed that everything, including the human soul, was made up of matter, so that when that goes, there's nothing left. And it seems like they really thought that these metaphysical commitments were what led to these ethical commitments. And so if all you have are the ethical commitments now, that there isn't really a way to make progress, because ethics is kind of conjectural if it doesn't have a metaphysical grounding. It's just like, you know, what feels like it works, what feels like it vibes with your worldview. I mean, I think a lot of people approach these philosophies now. They'll look at Stoicism and Epicureanism, utilitarianism, emotivism, and they'll sort of think, which of these do I like? Yeah, that makes sense to me. And they sort of adopt it. So all that's really being done by reading these philosophies is some ancient guy elucidating something you already kind of believe. So you're not going to make much progress in terms of actually developing your thought unless you believe something new that's true about the world that will cause you to commit to something else. You know what I mean? So it's like, you know, if you ask someone what Stoicism is on the street, or indeed in a podcast, they would list, you know, 50 different things before they told you anything about their metaphysical claims about what they actually thought the world was made of. It'd all be about, you know, how to live your life.
- [04:30]
C
Oh, sorry, go ahead. In Stoics for, you know, the kind of. One of the reasons why Stoics are so big on acceptance and accepting things, things that happen to you and accepting that. The kind of state of the. In kind of very, very broad strokes is that the Stoics were big believers in what Today we would recognize as something like divine providence. You know, they had a real kind of teleological view of reality. So they thought that the universe was inherently rational, inherently reasonable. And as a result, this, whatever is happening is in accordance with the rationale will of the universe. So it's kind of, you know, it's sort of a. You know, in modern Stoicism, people tend not to have that assumption baked in. But this is a huge part of ancient Stoicism. And it's actually interesting to the kind of. We see, you know, we talking about kind of how things get stripped away over time. Even in the difference between Greek and Roman Stoicism, you already see less emphasis placed on Stoic logic. For example, you know, Chrysippus, I have no idea if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but he wrote, you know, reams and reams of parchment on Stoic logical systems. And, you know, you don't, you don't, you don't even see that in my favorite Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, you know, not that concerned with Stoic logic. And I think, you know, he's the kind of the goat of Roman Stoicism. And, you know, so it's not like. It's not like a necessarily just a modern thing of this, of stripping back aspects of philosophies. But of course, you know, there is an argument to be made that this is part of what development consists of. Although I do think it's sometimes worth going back and going back and revisiting some of the assumptions that maybe we ought to. Ought to reconsider.
- [06:05]
A
Is it fair to say? Well, I guess, at least for me. Good avatar for the layperson. When you think about development, you think about sort of refining over time about becoming sort of more accurate, more detailed, seeing things with a higher resolution. How fair is it to say that modern philosophy is more sort of concerned with intellectual masturbation than it is teaching people fundamental questions about themselves and the world?
- [06:35]
B
Very fair indeed. I think that philosophy doesn't develop in the way that something like physics does. The idea with something like physics is that you're born into a world with a particular understanding. You develop that understanding, you learn new things, you maybe dig a bit further down into an atom and you find out what it's made of. And then you have children and you tell those children as a starting point, this is what atoms are made of. And then thereof to the race is trying to go even further. And philosophy, I don't think quite works in the same way. You might disagree with This, I don't know. I think it's instead of something which you sort of go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of 20 generations, you go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of one generation, and everybody has to sort of start afresh. Which is why you find that these ancient philosophers and early modern philosophers and modern philosophers and guaranteed future philosophers too, are all essentially saying the same thing. You know, if you read, if you read Epicurean philosophy, it's kind of very similar to utilitarianism. It's. It's got a very sort of similar thread. At the very least, it seems to be based on similar intuitions. So you might sort of think that philosophy is a bit stagnant, that it hasn't actually progressed anywhere, but it's maybe not kind of what it's supposed to do. You know, you're supposed to do that throughout your own. Your own Life.
- [07:52]
A
Somebody asked ChatGPT what it's like to be itself. I imagine you've probably done this. You've done everything with ChatGPT. Everything with.
- [07:59]
B
Not everything. Everything. Not everything.
- [08:00]
A
Everything. Within reason.
- [08:01]
B
Within reason.
- [08:01]
A
Yeah, yeah, subscribe. He said it, and one of the things that it said was imagine. Basically, every time that you had a conversation, your memory of the last one was wiped. Each new context window is a brand new. So it makes me think about what you're talking about here. This generation needs to rediscover or it tries to answer the same questions over and over and over again.
- [08:25]
B
Because the important stuff with philosophy is probably the way that it allows you to live a good life or a life that you see fit, or to console you in some regard. And that is something that will happen over the course of an individual life. I would take what ChatGPT says with a pinch of salt because of course it probably is not in fact conscious, but it does give us an interesting sort of in for thinking about what it might be like to be such a creature. What would it be like not only to have your memory wiped every time you started a new day or conversation, but also to kind of be one thing with many avatars, you know, like ChatGPT is one thing, we're speaking about it as one entity, but you could have a conversation on your phone, I could have a conversation on my phone with it, and it's this sort of one thing, but having two distinct and separable. And I think that a lot of philosophies kind of view human beings in the same way. You know, this is how an ancient Indian philosopher who's reading or indeed composing the Upanishads, might think about human consciousness, that it's sort of all one consciousness, that somehow the localizing of individual selves is kind of an illusion, and it's all just sort of one big thing. And we're probably somehow restricted in the sense that we have our memories and our localized experiences. But if we knew the truth, if we could somehow step outside of that, we'd recognize that we're all actually just one big thing. So I imagine if ChatGPT was conscious, it would probably be a little bit like that. It would be this sort of illusory individuation across. Across different computers and things, which is what a lot of philosophers think is going on in human beings.
- [10:04]
C
It's interesting to talk about kind of, because there are clearly elements to how, you know, people kind of go on their own, have to wrestle with the questions of what makes a good life for themselves. I do have a thing that, you know, we can chart progress in certain philosophical problems, and it's more nebulous than others. One of philosophy's historic successes is just creating lots of new fields. So, of course. So, you know, something like philosophers are.
- [10:33]
A
Good at making jobs for philosophers.
- [10:35]
C
Philosophers are good at making jobs for other academics. So, you know, like originally, maths was inseparable from philosophy, and then that becomes its own field of study. And, you know, physics is originally rolled into philosophy, and it becomes its own field of study. Economics is another one that stems from philosophy. I mean, something like psychoanalytic theory or psychology. This comes partly from Freud. Freud, although he denies ever reading Nietzsche. His theories are so incredibly influenced by Nietzsche and by earlier philosophical thinkers. So I do think that it's very easy to hide some of philosophy's successes, partly because quite a lot of the time they're hidden away. They're handed off to other fields. I think this is a point that Bertram Russell made, was this idea that, you know, one of the measures of philosophy's efficacy is just in giving birth to other fields. You know, linguistics is another one, you.
- [11:29]
A
Know, very sort of philanthropic field in that way.
- [11:33]
C
I mean, you could also argue that it's taking credit for other people's work further down the line.
- [11:36]
A
Okay.
- [11:39]
C
That'S one way.
- [11:40]
A
It does sound like Alex, actually. So you mentioned Stoicism. There. Are there some ancient schools that you think have been most unfairly ignored? You know, if you were to ask any person about, give me some ancient schools of philosophy, Stoicism would be up top. Maybe they'd think Buddhism, Taoism or something. They'd go oh, I'm gonna be like real. A different approach to this. I'm gonna go to the other side of the planet. But beyond that we're probably really bouncing off the limit of most people's knowledge. Are there some schools that you think you should have got a little bit more time at the table?
- [12:15]
B
I think, well, yeah, I mean, you're quite right to point out that certainly any western thinker is probably going to have neglected Eastern philosophy to a significant degree. But even within so called Western thought. Yeah, I suppose one thing that jumped out at me while you were speaking is not so much a school, but an idea which is like, I've been thinking a lot about like Aristotelian metaphysics, so from Aristotle, right. And when I ask people about cause and effect, like what causes particular things to occur, Aristotle famously, one of the foundational doctrines of his metaphysics is that there are four kinds of causation that go into anything like why is this beautiful and tasty can of Newtonic on the table? Well, it's got four different kinds of explanations. There is its formal cause, which is sort of the shape that it takes. There's its material cause, which is the stuff that it's made out of. Right. We don't think of the stuff that's made out of strictly speaking as a cause, but it's clearly part of the causal story that puts this on the table. There is the efficient cause, which is like who actually made it. Right, you put this together, somebody put it in a can, I put it on the table. And finally there is the final cause, which is what it was done for, what it's going towards the teleological cause. In the modern era, we essentially, when we talk about causation, we just talk about the efficient cause. If I say why is that on the table? And you say, well, because I put it there, question is answered. But I think that neglects a lot of really important questions about the nature of the thing itself, why it's there in that particular time slice, taking that shape with that particular form. I think we neglect that and I think that modern science is lacking in that. It only seems to concern itself ultimately with efficient causes and maybe a little bit of the material cause too, in that if you ask a scientist in a laboratory, in a laboratory, why is that shuttle flying and escaping the atmosphere? They'll say, oh, because it has an escape velocity and the thrust of the rockets. But if you ask the same scientist at the pub, they'll say, because we wanted to go to the moon and Suddenly they become an Aristotelian again. And I think that the. The influence of these other kinds of causation isn't really there. The only other thing that came to mind is potentially the pre Socratics. And Joe already said that the sort of first philosopher, as it were, was Thales. But people might have thought when he went to say that, well, the first philosopher that people generally think of is Socrates. If you ask somebody who was the first philosopher, they'll say Socrates. But Socrates didn't just spring up ex nihilo. You know, he's working in sometimes, and him and Aristotle and Plato, they're working sometimes in response to, but certainly after. And contemporary with other thinkers too, who, a lot of the time their ideas just, you know, because they weren't particularly popular or didn't win the war of ideas we don't even know about. Parmenides didn't think that change could occur. In fact, you've heard of Zeno's paradoxes. So Zeno had these wonderful paradoxes of motion where like, I can't clap my hands because first I'd have to half the distance, then half the distance, then half the distance. And you can't complete an infinite series of tasks, so I can't clap my hands. Everybody knows about Zeno's paradoxes, but do they know that the reason he came up with them is because he was following in the school of Parmenides, who believed that change was literally impossible. And these were paradoxes which were kind of supposed to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of change. For that reason, again, we've got the conclusion that we haven't got the working. And sometimes the working is the most interesting stuff.
- [15:52]
C
You know, I definitely concur with the kind of neglect of aspects of Aristotle thought. I mean, especially really with regards to something like Aristotle's ethics. Aristotle's book, the Nicomachean Ethics, is, I would say, Even after over 2000 years, the most useful book of philosophy for anyone to read. I would say, go on and get yourself a copy. They're great. There are some excellent translations, and the most recent Penguin one is an excellent translation. And Aristotle's Ethics is, I think one of its real strengths is that it's incredibly realistic. So he's very, very concerned with virtues. But as opposed to, say, someone like certain Stoic thinkers and also the Cynics, Aristotle denies that virtue is sufficient for a good or flourishing life. He's very. When he, you know, he's very good at getting down to brass tacks. You know, he kind of at one point during the Nicomachean Ethics, he basically says, you know, like, there is no philosophy that's going to make you happy on the rack. You know, you always need certain, like, minimal levels of your physical needs fulfilled in order to just like calm down the bestial part of you that recognizes that you need to eat and breathe and sleep in order to live. And I think that, you know, and again, Aristotle has a number of incredibly, I think, still incredibly insightful ethical insights that sometimes sound obvious when you say them out loud. But we're talking before we started filming about the. The idea that actually sometimes very, very obvious things bear repeating because we just forget them very, very easily. I mean, this is again a point that Tolstoy made where he talked about that idea of loving your neighbour as yourself. And Tolstoy basically says, yeah, that sounds trite, but have we ever got round to doing that? And he argues that we haven't. And I probably concur. And one of Aristotle's ideas here is I'll just focus on two. One of them is the idea of a golden bean. So his idea that virtue lies between the poles of two vices. Being br is in between being cowardly and being reckless. Being generous is in between being profligate and being miserly. And, you know, he has. And I think that that's a very useful framework. You know, it sounds almost like common sense when you say it out loud, but actually attempting to think in these terms can be incredibly useful. And the other thing that Aristotle really, that I'm so bullish on with regards to Aristotle is he's got an incredibly well worked out theory of friendship. It's in two books, book eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics, and it's some of the best writing on friendship I think there's ever been. Aristotle, in some ways following in the footsteps of some previous thinkers like Epicurus, was a very big fan of friendship. Actually, I'm getting. My timeline's confused there. But either way, Aristotle is incredibly. He thinks that having a group of friends, and moreover friends that are friendships of virtue, so friends that you're not just. You're not just there because you enjoy their company. You're not just there because you know, they have something that you want and you're trying to get at, you know, in the way that someone might schmooze up to their boss or just you're friends with somebody, but simply because you enjoy their company. These are friends who are sort of getting together in order to make one another more virtuous and moreover, hold like, duties and loyalties to one another. You know, Aristotle thinks that these are enormously contributive factors to your life.
- [19:06]
B
You owe them things.
- [19:07]
C
You know, this is a, I think, can be real antidote to the sort of, you know, ah, nobody owes anyone anything anymore. You know, that kind of. That approach to life, which I think is sort of can be very unhelpfully individualistic and. Yeah, I think that sometimes stepping into the footsteps of an ancient thinker like Aristotle is one way to sort of, you know, get a bit of distance from the way that we might currently live. I think that books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachian ethics, where he so clearly thinks, you know, groups of friends, these are. This is, you know, halfway to the good life, effectively is an insight that we could really use. You know, everyone thinks friendship is important. It's very easy to say, but, like, culturally we place significantly less emphasis on friendship than almost any other point in Western history. This is like, you know, think about. I don't know if you've, you know, ever read through sort of like letters from the World wars or from like the Crimean wars or. Or even Napoleonic Wars. These are people writing to their friends. And the way that they talk about their friends is amazing.
- [20:09]
A
It's more passionate.
- [20:10]
C
Passionate. Passionate and sort of vulnerable and more. It's just very clear that friendship is a huge part of the way that they organise their lives. You know, like we. You know, the kind of standard way of, I suppose, of organizing your adult life now is to organize it around a romantic partner. And, you know, I think there's an awful lot to be said for romance. I just think that there's also an awful lot to be said for friendship. And it very much gets overshadowed, like, when was the last time? Or if we were to compare the amount of great films that are about, you know, two people getting together versus two great friends. I mean, you know, films about two great friends. What, like Bill and Ted?
- [20:46]
A
Harold and Kumar got the wine Castle.
- [20:48]
C
Yeah, Harold and Kumar got the munchies. You know, these are, I mean, great films all, but, you know, it's completely outmoded. And I think. I think, you know, that's why I'm very bullish on Aristotle. Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachian ethics.
- [21:00]
A
Yeah, I. I wonder what it is about stoicism. I guess just very good PR and branding kind of suits the modern world. A time when people are a little bit lost, they're unsure.
- [21:09]
B
I've never been super attracted to it on that level. It's really popular as a, as I guess, kind of a means of consolation and way of sort of structuring your life. But I sort of, I don't know, I guess people who are suffering are always looking for alleviation from that suffering. And traditionally it's come with a lot of metaphysical baggage, be that religious or be it not. And I suppose it offers people a way of seemingly achieving that without the metaphysical Baggage.
- [21:37]
A
Good news. AG1 just released their Next gen formula. It is a more advanced, clinically backed version of the product that I've been drinking every day for years. So you still get the same one scoop ritual, but now with an even more thoughtful formulation, flavor and four clinical trials behind it. AG1 has been evolving since 2010, continuously improving alongside the latest research in AG1. Next Gen is the result, clinically shown to help fill common nutrient gaps and support gut health even in people who already eat well. In one study it boosted healthy bacteria in the gut by 10 times. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for three months and if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now you can get a year's free supply of vitamin D, 3K2 and 5 free AG1 travel packs, plus the 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com Modern Wisdom. That's drinkag1.com ModernWisdom. You are somebody who tried nihilism as a life philosophy.
- [22:40]
B
Yes, I suppose. Look, the thing Nihilism, man.
- [22:44]
A
Here we go. Bull. Case for nihilism.
- [22:46]
B
Nihilism is often thought of as a synonym for all things depressing and upsetting, and in many cases it is. But nihilism, it just means there's sort of no purpose to it all. It's a difficult thing to define in analytic terms. That's why it's generally in the wheelhouse of like existential philosophers who tell stories to try and sort of grasp at a feeling. But in theory, you know, it's not just that you're suffering. You could be suffering but not be a nihilist. It's if you're suffering and suffering all the more because you think you're suffering without reason, that makes you a nihilist. But I think you could just as easily be having a wonderful time and think there is no rhyme or reason to this. I'm having a great time, but there's absolutely no purpose to this and you'd still be a nihilist because you think that there's no purpose behind it all. But it doesn't mean you have to have a bad time doing so. So I think it is worth, if you are somebody who wants to toy with the idea that there is no meaning. Like, try it on, see how it fits. That's what you've got to do with all philosophies. You know, if something seems like it sort of chimes with you a little bit, like live in accordance with it for like a week and a lot of time. It'll be way too hard. But sometimes it will teach you something.
- [23:52]
A
There's a lot of memes about philosophy making people depressed.
- [23:55]
B
Yeah.
- [23:56]
A
That the more that you learn, the worse that you see the world. What's the darkest philosophies that you guys have been exposed to?
- [24:04]
B
Turan.
- [24:06]
C
I mean, I love Tehran. I think that Turan is an incredibly underrated. Kind of Romanian, French. Wrote lots of his work in French, but was Romanian. Kind of adopted France in his. In his later years.
- [24:18]
A
Well, that'll make you depressed straight off the bat.
- [24:20]
C
Well, potentially. And Chiran.
- [24:23]
B
Emile. Emile Charan.
- [24:24]
C
Yes. Emile Charan writes these incredibly pessimistic tracts of philosophy now. One's called the Trouble With Being Born. Another's called A Short History of Decay. And he's kind of incredibly.
- [24:34]
A
Love him already.
- [24:35]
C
His first book.
- [24:35]
A
You sure he's not British?
- [24:36]
C
Well, I don't know if it's just because I'm British that it kind of. I like it so much. His first book is called on the Heights of Despair. Truly melodramatic, sanguine shit.
- [24:46]
A
Yeah.
- [24:46]
C
One of the things that I find very interesting about philosophies that are supposedly dark, and I'm specifically thinking of the pessimistic philosophies here. People like Schopenhauer and Choran. Maybe to a lesser extent, someone like Philip Maylander. I don't know. This is something I think Choran is so good at, is that oftentimes when you're reading him, he's very good at subtly shifting the scope so that you're reading him and he's complaining about life. His view on life is far more pessimistic than my view on life is kind of the characteristic property of life is suffering for a variety of reasons. But he occasionally just this. This kind of dark, pessimistic outlook breaks through into a kind of natural lightheartedness that I think is absolutely amazing. So one of the things that. One of the things that is interesting I Say, about reading a pessimistic philosopher is that. Is that if. And I think that nihilism to a certain extent shares this prior, that it's kind of framed in a certain way, is that if you're not expecting things to go very well, and if you think the characteristic property of the world is meaningless suffering, well, then to a certain extent the stakes are kind of lowered. It's very similar, I suppose, to that advice that Seneca gave in one of his letters, which is to kind of imagine how things are going to go horribly wrong so that you feel much better when it comes to it.
- [26:05]
A
Low expectations.
- [26:06]
C
Yes. Yeah, yeah. And I think that on a kind of existential level, reading an incredibly darkly pessimistic philosopher, sort of, as I say, there is sometimes a moment where it breaks through. I suppose the only way I could kind of try and contextualize this is like, have you ever had an astonishingly bad day? Just like a comedically bad day? And I do mean like comedic. You know, you get to like five o' clock and, you know, you've been mugged seven times and a car drives by and it kicks up a puddle of dog shit over your nice suit or whatever. And you can't help but just laugh because at that point it's like, oh, wow, like, this has become funny. And I think that's something that Ciran is very, very good at. And that's why, you know, I often talk about him as one of the darkest philosophers of all time. He's also one of the funniest, one of the few philosophers where you can read him and laugh out loud.
- [26:50]
A
It is hilarious that suffering is dose dependent in that way. Like your response to it. U shaped curve. It's like too little, everything's probably okay a bit, oh, God, this sucks. And then too much, it's okay again.
- [27:05]
B
It almost leads to frivolity. Right. And that makes it. Makes it livable. I do think sometimes the more pessimistic philosophers can be a little bit self indulgent. It's a bit sort of, you know, woe is me.
- [27:16]
C
Oh.
- [27:17]
B
Like, because, you know, I don't know.
- [27:18]
A
How sophisticated my thoughts.
- [27:19]
B
Yeah.
- [27:20]
A
How deep my engagement with the world.
- [27:22]
B
Is when actually you just, like, you know, you got dumped by a girlfriend and now you're writing about how terrible life is.
- [27:28]
A
I mean, look, I asked Joe this the last time that we sat down. I often think philosophy is just clever branding for depressive thoughts.
- [27:39]
B
It often is, but it's also often just clever branding for, like, any kind of thought. I think it's like you literally just have a thought and you try to systematize it, right? This is why the greatest philosophers. Another thing we said before we started, tell you something you already know if you open Wittgenstein's Tractors. The first line of the introduction is something like, I don't think this book will be useful except to anybody who's already in agreement with the things that it says. It's just supposed to be sort of elucidating an idea. And so, yeah, a lot of the time it is just sort of feeling out a vibe, finding someone who puts it into good words and saying, oh, I think that person that resonates with me.
- [28:14]
A
I feel less alone, by the way.
- [28:15]
B
Is why when people ask me for, like, a recommendation of what philosophy to read or something, if someone says, you know, where should I start with philosophy? You might be tempted to say, okay, well, let's start with Plato, read about Socrates and Aristotle, then do a bit of existentialist philosophy. I just tell people, just literally read what you've heard of. And the reason for that is because these people will have come up in contexts that are relevant to you or of interest to you. Right? So if you've heard Nietzsche mentioned a bunch of times, because you're a big Jordan Peterson fan, if you like Jordan Peterson, and Jordan Peterson obviously likes Nietzsche quite a lot and finds a lot of use in him, you're probably going to find some use in him. Whereas if you just randomly pick one of the great philosophers, like if you just pick up Sartre, as I did the other day, I told you this, and read existentialism as a humanism, and think, this is complete nonsense, that was a complete waste of time, because you're not going to resonate with it. It's not going to, strictly speaking, convince you, unless I think you've already got sort of one foot in the boat. I did think on the pessimistic philosophers, or you said the darkest philosophers, which doesn't necessarily mean pessimistic. Right?
- [29:15]
A
Dark philosophy, pessimistic philosophy, whatever.
- [29:17]
B
I think Schopenhauer comes to mind. He's writing his on the Sufferings of the World. That's your sort of indulgent pessimist. I think he had trouble with women for some of his life, and he's got this infamous essay on women which would read like a comedy. In fact, one version of his essays I have in the introduction or the preface, the translator says, by the way, the essay on women isn't a joke. He's not being sarcastic. This is what he actually thought, he comes to mind.
- [29:44]
A
It's an irony disclaimer.
- [29:45]
B
Yeah. But in order to sort of avoid that, I think that a good example of a potentially non self indulgent pessimistic philosophy that seems genuinely just philosophical might be something like antinatalism, the view that it is immoral to have children. David Benatar is the sort of superstar of anti naturalism. He wrote a book called Better Never to have Been, which sounds like one of these sort of, you know, I'm about to write about how terrible, how terrible life is. You know, I wish I was never born. But it's not. It's like philosophically speaking, he tries to make a case that it's just better for no one to be born. Even if their life is filled with more pleasure than suffering, he thinks that it's still immoral to bring them into existence. It's an interesting take.
- [30:22]
A
I had a debate about this five years ago in the barbican.
- [30:25]
B
That sounds about right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [30:28]
A
When we first met, like canteen at the barbican and we were having the conversation and people came, tried to be social, listened for five minutes and then left. And there was just this sort of steady cycle of people coming and going. This doesn't sound very nice at all. So, yeah, Bennet probably does fit a.
- [30:49]
B
Good example of why you might find it dark. I mean, I call it dark, if you like. I mean, for an anti natalist, they'll say no. I mean, the darkness is that you're, you know, unconsensually bringing people into suffering.
- [30:59]
A
You know, that's a representation of.
- [31:01]
B
But in terms of how it's perceived, I think that as far as pessimism goes, the idea that it's immoral to have children, I mean, you've heard of like the pro life and the pro choice crowd. Benatar and his crew are like anti life. You know, like, it's like this sort of third option that everybody forgets about. He's got some wonderful sort of little tidbits in there. He takes a divergence into the philosophy of disability for a time, sort of making a case that in principle we are all disabled in some philosophical sense.
- [31:30]
A
How so are we all disabled?
- [31:31]
B
It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he sort of imagined. So one way of thinking about this would be like, imagine if everybody whose legs worked suddenly just died and the only people left on planet Earth don't have functioning legs. Maybe not instantly because people would have memory, but after not very long. It just wouldn't be considered a disability to not have legs because that's just how everybody is. And Benatar sort of imagines in principle the things that we could have that we don't. Which means that in principle we are disabled in the same way.
- [32:00]
A
So we can't fly.
- [32:01]
B
Exactly. So there are all kinds of sufferings that come about in our life, like having to climb the stairs, which we don't even notice as sufferings. And if you add all of these up, they become pretty significant. It's a bit of a trip, but really interesting. And I think probably, probably dark for that reason.
- [32:16]
C
That's quite nice about Benatar. I said it was sort of dry earlier and I did mean that as a compliment. Sorry, it's almost like frilly. Yes, yeah, yeah. Is that. Benatar is very. He gives a very logical argument. As in, you know, I would say there are problems with the argument, but you know, as in, like, it's very clearly laid out in a way that quite a lot of pessimistic philosophers write in sort of semi poetry. Benatar, if you're a hardcore analytic fan, he's probably self indulgently the pessimistic.
- [32:42]
B
Seems that way, I suppose.
- [32:44]
A
Did you speak to him?
- [32:45]
B
Right, I did. I had him on my show. He doesn't show.
- [32:47]
A
Pseudonymous.
- [32:47]
B
Yeah, he doesn't. I actually don't know if he uses his real name, but he doesn't show his face. So there is also that added element that he doesn't want to be seen.
- [32:57]
A
Oh, so he's the sleep token of the philosophy world.
- [33:00]
B
Oh, are they mask wearing? Slipknot.
- [33:03]
A
Don't make that face.
- [33:04]
C
No, no, no, sorry. No, I don't.
- [33:07]
A
It's very cool, very popular. You know, when you guys start telling me about, you know, anesthetists of ancient city, I go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I need to nod along like this. This is your turn.
- [33:18]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [33:18]
A
Okay. There we are. Thank you. Very good.
- [33:19]
B
What's the philosophy of Sleep Token?
- [33:23]
A
If you go on the Reddit, really deep. Really, really, really deep. The lore goes hard.
- [33:29]
B
The lore goes hard on many subreddits. I have a subreddit too, which has some interesting laws of its own.
- [33:35]
A
I've seen them. I've seen them. Yeah. You've got canon.
- [33:38]
B
Yeah, apparently. Apparently. Apparently so.
- [33:42]
A
Okay, so Benatar's got this. I remember you. His whole thing is this balance between suffering and pleasure is that even a tiny microcosm of suffering is so great that it doesn't it outweighs any amount of pleasure.
- [33:58]
B
He calls it like an asymmetry argument between pleasure and pain.
- [34:01]
A
So I've just pulled that out of a five and a half year old canteen concert.
- [34:05]
B
You've got a memory on you.
- [34:06]
A
Thank you. I mean this is why that's a great advert for a 10 tasty drink. Zero calorie, 3 million subscribers later, modern wisdom, I don't know what it is.
- [34:14]
B
And he remembers, I think when a lot of people would consider is life worth living? One crude way of working it out is adding up the pleasure, minusing the pain and sort of seeing what you're left over with. Is it worth living overall? Beneta thinks that crucially before you exist, the potential pleasure that you might experience if you come into existence doesn't matter. Like one jot, it's literally irrelevant. But the potential pain that you would avoid does matter. And he tries to prove this through some sort of intuitive thought experiments. For example, there are no conscious beings on Mars, right? We don't really think that it's a bad thing that all this pleasure that could be on Mars is being missed out on. We don't think, what a tragedy that all of the potential pleasure that could exist on Mars isn't actually happening. But we might think that it is a good thing that there's no suffering up there. And some people hear that kind of example and go, yeah, that makes sense. Some people go, well no, I am, I am sad that there's no pleasure. It's sort of an intuitive thing. He also, one other way of thinking about this, at least for the imbalance, might be a question which is would you take five minutes of the worst imaginable conceivable suffering that you could experience if afterwards you got to have five minutes of the best possible bliss? I mean, I don't know what you guys would do. You wouldn't take it.
- [35:39]
A
No, thank you.
- [35:40]
C
I think that's. I don't think I'd take five minutes.
- [35:42]
B
Of the best possible bliss anyway.
- [35:44]
C
The rest of your life, the rest of your life will you just expectation? Yeah, you just be completely. You just feel empty.
- [35:49]
A
Well, I mean that's another asymmetry. Yeah, that's an additional asymmetry.
- [35:53]
B
And that actually might be just a sort of good response to this kind of thought experiment. Because what Bennett's trying to say is that most people would say no. And so crudely it seems like the suffering kind of counts for. But as so much of philosophy does, it kind of relies on intuitive, your sort of feeling of Thought I have.
- [36:12]
A
A sense of negativity, bias and loss.
- [36:13]
B
Of another way he talks about. And crucially, this is only before you exist. Right. Once you exist, your pleasure is good for you and your suffering is bad for you. But before you exist, which in fact.
- [36:23]
A
Other people have a choice about whether you do or don't.
- [36:25]
B
Yeah. For someone who doesn't exist, them not experiencing pleasure is not bad, but them not experiencing suffering is good. And so before you're born, the only moral calculus is the goodness that you're not suffering. And so that's all that should be taken into account. It's good that you're not suffering, let's not bring that into existence. Another sort of line of reasoning he goes down is kind of like a rights based approach where he says, suppose for example, that if I were to break your arm, you would get an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy or something. If I gave you that option, you might think to yourself, like, you know what? I think that's worth it. Probably. It'd definitely be worth it for me. I'd take that. However, even if I would actually prefer that if you didn't ask me first, if you just did it, you don't have the right to do that to me. If I found you in need of an ambulance and the only way to save your life somehow was to break your arm, then I think most people say you should do it. But if by causing you suffering, I can not save you from worse suffering, but bring you something good, most people think that I don't have the right to inflict that suffering on you, even if it would be ultimately worth it. So for Benatar, same thing before you were born, right. You're allowed to inflict suffering to prevent worse suffering, but you're not allowed to inflict suffering on the promise that there'll be some good that comes out of it unconsensually. Because what you're essentially doing is causing a bunch of people to unconsensually experience masses of suffering that they had no say in. Some people have actually tried to sue their parents for wrongful birth because they. That has actually happened if you're Benatar pilled.
- [37:57]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [37:58]
B
So the asymmetry thing is quite important to Benatar's flavor of antinatalism. You can have antenatalism without it. You can just say that life consists in more suffering. And if you think it consists in more pleasure, you've fallen for the Pollyanna principle, as I think they call it, which is the idea that we tend to remember the good stuff more than the bad stuff. The sort of rose tinted view of the past. Most people, says Benatar, like, vastly underestimate the extent to which their lives are going terribly. They sort of, in retrospect think, oh, you know, it's all good, but if you actually were to live through it again, you'd realize that at every moment it was going very badly. He then, after convincing you that you're. But he sort of says like, you know, it doesn't matter how much you suffer or experience pleasure in life, it's immoral to bring people into existence. And then after convincing you of that, he then says, but just so you know, life is actually, does actually contain a lot more suffering. And this detour into disability ethics or metaphysics, I suppose is sort of part of this case. You know, these menial sufferings that you don't even notice.
- [39:03]
A
You shouldn't have been here. You should be upset that you are here. And by the way, the fact that you are here also is a reason for regret.
- [39:09]
B
Yeah, it gets a little bit tricky because once you're here, I mean, the inevitable question for David Benatar is then why don't you just think we should kill ourselves? And David Benatar in a footnote, compares this to going to a movie. And when you're about halfway through thinking like, this is kind of a crap film, it's not bad enough that I'm gonna leave now that I'm here, but I kind of wish I'd never come in the first place. That's sort of his position on life.
- [39:36]
A
How robust do you think that is as an answer to why shouldn't I just kill myself?
- [39:39]
B
I think it doesn't really work very well because I'm quite suspicious of the asymmetry argument anyway. So I think that a case that sort of makes life not worth living and therefore not worth beginning will inevitably create a powerful argument for not continuing life. Beneshard is, as far as I can remember, quite sort of staunchly not that, but I'm not so sure that they can be so definitively separated.
- [40:09]
A
Has someone taken that. Is there a suicide cult philosophy?
- [40:14]
B
There have been examples. I think Camus talks about a few examples at the beginning of the Myth of Sisyphus, doesn't he? He sort of mentions, I think like one or two examples of some philosophers who like rode a tractor. He mentions, I can't remember who it was he mentions who rode a tract and then killed himself in order to like bring attention to his work. But it didn't work because no one liked the work anyway.
- [40:32]
C
Philip Mainlander killed himself, but I don't know if that. I can't remember if that's what he's talking about.
- [40:36]
B
I can't remember who Camus is talking about. But no, you tend to find that people who are genuinely committed, I mean, Camus says in the Myth of Sisyphus, for the man who does not cheat, what he determines to be true must determine his action. So if you become convinced that life is not worth living and you're like certain enough of that in order to kill yourself, then you're probably not going to sit around writing a book first. So it's sort of like self selecting. There's an interesting sort of evolutionary deselection for views like this and for views like antinatalism. And again, Bennett addresses this. It doesn't affect the truth of the claim, but it means it will never.
- [41:07]
A
Take off because mimetically, it's cancerous.
- [41:10]
B
Exactly.
- [41:10]
A
Yeah.
- [41:11]
B
Which in reverse is the explanation, I think, for the general optimism. That sort of, sort of just, just, just.
- [41:19]
A
Only the optimistic pool.
- [41:21]
B
Exactly. To some degree. I mean, there are people who are not optimists, but they're not quite pessimistic enough to fully commit to the bit, as it were. And if they are, then they select themselves out of the meme pool.
- [41:31]
A
If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start. Which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over a hundred biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, to your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. And getting your blood work done and drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function, it is only $499. And right now they're giving 1000 Modern Wisdom listeners another hundred dollars off, bringing it down to $399. So just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that' functionhealth.com modernwisdom I had a conversation with a gentleman who his entire theory of human evolution, human cultural evolution, is that human culture is almost expressly built around Helping people to not take their own lives and that our system is too. And we got halfway through the episode, and it's the only time this has ever happened. He bailed out of the episode partway through, had had a bad night's sleep, and wasn't. He felt like he wasn't making a. And I thought, well, that's kind of on brand for somebody who had this sort of a worldview that everything is about avoiding things going badly. That partway through an episode about it, he decided that it was going so badly that he didn't want to continue. Yeah.
- [43:02]
B
Yeah. Another thing Camus says is that the meaning of life is literally whatever is keeping you from killing yourself.
- [43:09]
A
Yes.
- [43:09]
B
You know, and I think that's more or less true.
- [43:13]
A
Why don't you kill yourself?
- [43:15]
C
Yeah.
- [43:15]
B
And I think that there are. Most people who engage with that topic, do so on an emotional level, and that's the motivation for these kinds of thoughts. There are people who are just intellectually interested in the worthiness of life, like, whether it's worth living, but that very rarely is actually what's going on. I think when people are seriously struggling with this. And so, I don't know, it makes it sort of difficult philosophical terrain, but I think that people who are just interested in it intellectually often will appreciate someone who can just forthrightly discuss it, you know, because a lot of the time, it's like, you know, you. You open a. Open a. A YouTube video that's going to discuss abstractly the philosophy of suicide, and it opens with a helpline. It's like, way to give away your position, you know, like, it's. I think people will, like, like, loads.
- [44:02]
C
Of ideological bias in the suicide discussion, but people.
- [44:06]
B
I think people want to feel like they're being taken seriously. Right. And if you. If you come with a. With a. With a philosophical or emotional conviction to the table, and someone, before you even get started, says, hey, just so you know, like, you know, we're gonna move towards this direction. I think a lot of people would appreciate, like, a forthright, direct approach, which is why so many people are attracted to the myth of Sisyphus by Camus, because it sort of. It starkly opens with that. You know, there is but one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. And it captures a lot of people's attention, because even people who aren't feeling suicidal are like, whoa, yeah, that's interesting. And they just want to read about it in a relatively straightforward way. I unfortunately, think it's pretty overhyped. The myth of Sisyphus.
- [44:47]
A
Why do you not like the myth of Sisyphus?
- [44:53]
B
I don't have an aversion to existentialist philosophy sort of generally, but it sort of doesn't really capture me. Like, I think that. I don't know. I mean, I don't know if Camus, like, sufficiently answers the question. His famous conclusion is imagining Sisyphus happy. Right. And I just. I don't know if that's, like, a satisfying thought to me. For some, it might be, but for me, it's not. It's just as meaningless as the situation that we began with, you know, this sort of happy pushing of the boulder. I don't know, Joe, you can probably make this.
- [45:25]
A
Is there a bull case for. Well, just imagine this thing to be different. Just play pretend until you believe.
- [45:35]
B
It's like an act of rebellion for Camus, it's almost like an existential irony, right? Like he's sort of. You're just going to enjoy the thing.
- [45:44]
C
Well, it's interesting because I find the development of Camus thought over time very interesting for this, because the myth of Sisyphus is often, you know, the thing that people take away is, of course, you know, imagining Sisyphus happy. It's such a. Such a famous image.
- [45:56]
B
But.
- [45:57]
C
But a lot of the myth of Sisyphus is significantly more. I don't know what the right word is, like, more intuitively abhorrent than that, if that makes sense, and even to Camus. So Camus writes the myth of Sisyphus. He paints a bunch of characters who are meant to be, like, absurd men. And some of them are, like, really awful people, you know, like kind of philanderers or, you know, one of them is kind of, you know, the actor who never becomes themselves and is just playing characters all the time. And. And he has this idea of, like, okay, well, if you're an absurdist and you think there's no objective or, you know, no way to say that one aspect of life is better than any other, you're kind of trying to live out valuelessness. Well, then, in that case, Camus thinks, well, if you decided not to kill yourself, the only value that you're at least enacting is that life is better than no life. And so you should value the quantity of life over the quality of life. Now, of course, although that's not existential nihilism, that's pretty close to moral nihilism. And Camus clearly is troubled by this because one of the next things he writes is a play called Caligula, which is all about the Roman Emperor, a kind of fictionalized version of the Roman emperor Caligula going absolutely batshit and killing lots of people. And, you know, there are various analyses you can make of this. When I read that, I think, yeah, this is Camus wrestling with his own philosophy. And he's got. He's painted himself into a corner whereby you can only value the quantity of life and not the quality of life. And then he's teasing out some of the consequences of that. And he's clearly not happy because he then writes books that are ostensibly attempting to go, no, hang on a sec. We can't. There are further things that we can do with absurdism that wasn't definitive. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And we just. You know, the Myth of Sisyphus is one of the first things that Camus writes along with the Stranger.
- [47:42]
A
Oh, it's the difficult first album, and.
- [47:45]
B
It'S the second DP of the Outsider.
- [47:48]
C
And it's. It's. And it is. You know, I. I've. I like the Myth of Sisters, partly because it's so counterintuitive. But some of his later works, things like the Plague. The Plague is an amazing novel, sort of. It's.
- [47:58]
B
It.
- [47:58]
C
It became like a bestseller for obvious reasons. And it's about a kind of a plague hitting the. The town of Oran in. I think it's, you know, in French Algeria, what was in French Algeria, and how people cope with that. And it's, you know, to. People are given various different analogical readings for this. So one is to read it as an analogy for the Nazi occupation of France. Another is to. But part of the kind of tying this back to the developments of Camus thought from the Myth of Sisyphus, one way of looking at it is to say, well, these are lots of things that Camus thinks when the chips are down, people turn to. One of them is friendship. I'm very bullish on friendship generally, but another one is kind of this kind of shared struggle. There are bits in the. In the Plague where they sort of say, okay, yeah, we're fighting a kind of nigh omnipotent disease, but we're gonna fight it. Because that's the way that we are coping almost, you know, in a time of kind of abhorrent struggle and people are dying around them all.
- [49:00]
A
It feels like the human centipede of philosophical arguments a little bit.
- [49:02]
C
Yes. And like, as in, it's. And so, you know. And then Camus writes the Rebel, which is one of his later works, which is again, discussing, you know, what can an absurdist coherently value without simply falling back onto a kind of leap of faith or something? And I really like those later works. I'm not convinced that they actually are consistent with this earlier position he has of hardcore absurdism, but I do think they're still worth reading.
- [49:26]
B
I think that's actually understated in a great deal of philosophers who are now dead is what they thought as if they just lived for one year, wrote everything down and stayed the same. We sort of. We forget that people like, you know, if you've ever thought about writing a book, and I'm sure we all at this table probably have at some point, one of the thoughts you have is like, you know, am I ready? You know, is this the right time? Because you recognize that whatever you write now, in 20 years, at least some of it you're going to want to revise or you're going to have changed your mind about.
- [49:57]
A
And you're also going to have to answer to.
- [49:58]
B
Exactly. And, you know, you're going to have your name in a bookstore and you have to grimace every time you walk past it. I would probably be driven mad. I'd to, like, pull it off the shelf and scribble out the paragraphs by hand. And this is what humans do, right? And so when we talk about what Camus thought as if his life consisted.
- [50:19]
A
Of actually just that day when he finally said. And done. Yes.
- [50:24]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like, he's just had a fantastically bad day and the car has just. And he thought, you know what? Fuck it, let's go for it. Yeah. Like, David Hume writes the. What's the first one? The Treatise Concerning Human Nature. And it's like this.
- [50:39]
A
Did he spell human with an e?
- [50:42]
B
And.
- [50:42]
A
Because that would have been fucking brilliant.
- [50:45]
B
Would have been properly bad. Well, he didn't know much about PR because the book didn't sell. And he later sort of revises his thoughts into the much shorter inquiry concerning human understanding, the same kind of thoughts revisited. And it's posited as like a sort of like an update. And he tells people not to read the other one, but some people think it's just because the first one kind of wasn't selling. And in fact, when I went to university, they made us study the Treatise because it's more like fleshed out. But he literally writes the kind of same thing again in different form later in his life. And so there is always sort of development of thought with philosophers, and we only tend to be aware of it when it's grand and dramatic, when someone Converts from one side to another. When Anthony Flew becomes a theist or something. But it happens throughout the history of thought, too. So, like, when you're reading a text by somebody, if you're interested in their thought, try to keep in mind some chronology of when it was written. Because otherwise you might be reading the Goblet of Fire before you read the Chamber of Secrets. And you're probably going to get the wrong kind of idea.
- [51:46]
C
Sorry. No, I was good. Even someone like Plato, who we quite often think of as having a very strong, stable, consistent set of literature prints.
- [51:54]
B
Are made out of marble.
- [51:56]
C
If you. It's one of his earlier works, which is both a kind of. Of political treatise, but also a theory of the human mind, is called the Republic. And then later he writes a book that's also a political work called the Laws. And you can see the development of his thoughts. In the Republic, he's very focused on what makes a good ruler. And in the Laws, he's very focused on. Okay, he'd had quite a disillusioning experience with a tyrant called Dionysus, I think.
- [52:20]
B
Cool.
- [52:21]
C
Yeah. In Syracuse, where he tried to. Dionysus invited him over twice, actually. And both times it went terribly and said, yeah, yeah, like, I'm really interested in being. In being like one of your, like, philosopher kings. Yeah, like, this sounds really cool. You can help me rule better. And then he shows up and Dionysus is just, like, drinking himself silly. And Plato's like, look, like one of the really big things about being a kind of philosopher king is like, temperance and, you know, not gorging yourself and kind of staying. Cause other. How are you gonna make, like, really good decisions if you're drunk all the time? And Dionysus kind of goes, look, I'm gonna stop you right there. Like, you don't understand. I'm in charge. And like, you do what I say.
- [53:01]
A
It's very unknown.
- [53:03]
C
And he basically kind of imprisons Plato for a bit, and he eventually gets free, and then he goes back and same thing happens and he flees. And disillusioned by this, Plato writes the laws which are much less concerned with what makes a good ruler and are much more concerned with if, you know, rulers come and go. How are you going to keep everyone in check?
- [53:18]
B
These philosophers often have, like, extraordinary lives. Why does Thomas Hobbes write it, the Leviathan? Because he had to flee. Him being a royalist during the English Civil War, he has to flee to France because of the English Civil War. And he writes this tract about how we should all Submit to an authoritarian dictator, essentially, and who should be able to dictate everything with full submission, including religious affairs. You've got to be aware not only of the chronology, but also the context, personal motivation. And also one other thing on this thread is beware that sometimes when you're reading people, they're kind of. They're writing under the laws of a country. Dostoevsky, his Notes from the Underground, one of the most famous of his books, because it's so short and easy to read, originally contained a chapter which essentially argued for the necessity of Christianity as Dostoevsky saw it. But it was censored and taken out. And so you end up with this sort of quite fully nihilistic tract. But I think a lot of that is also going on historically too. So beware that these are human beings with developing thoughts and political considerations inspiring their writing.
- [54:24]
A
When it comes to history of thought, is there someone that you think changed thinking forever but was sort of useless in practice? Like someone who contributed to moving thought forward most without having any real life applicability?
- [54:38]
B
That's a tricky question. I'm tempted to say in a non insulting way, theologians.
- [54:43]
C
Only because the category of the category.
- [54:45]
B
Only because like, obviously if you're a believer in God, the nature of God will greatly affect some practical things in your life. The way that you worship, you know, should you worship the saints or not? Not. Are you worshipping a tripartite God or a singular unity? That kind of stuff will be important to your daily practice. But if you're talking about in practice for society, as it were, then it's probably not particularly relevant to anyone who doesn't care about that kind of stuff. So that sort of springs to mind. But outside of that, I don't know, maybe some of the more abstract. The name that actually sprung to mind was Bertrand Russell, which you might jump down my throat for. But was he actually a practical philosopher? Everything he tried to write in practice was awful.
- [55:31]
C
Bertram Russell's very. I suppose it depends what you mean by practical. Bertram Russell's very important in the kind of history of studies of the foundations of mathematics and stuff like that. And although he wrote a three volume insane project. Is it two or three volumes? I always get confused. Nobody's read the whole thing. This is like because it's deeply impenetrable.
- [55:51]
B
It takes him what, 300 pages to prove that one A.D. one is two.
- [55:54]
C
Yes, it might, yeah. It's like, I think around the 200 page mark, which is quite a thing.
- [55:59]
B
To do from first principles.
- [56:00]
A
It's a Real battle of attrition.
- [56:01]
B
Difficult.
- [56:01]
C
Yeah, yeah, but, you know, but so.
- [56:03]
B
And like, the terms and conditions of philosophy, it's like no one actually reads it, but you kind of. You kind of need it to be there because it's important.
- [56:09]
C
And he writes that with Alfred North Whitehead, and that's very influential. You know, even though the grand project failed, there were some operators they coined that are very important things. Like there exists a unique object such that which is now very helpful in areas of maths. So, you know, not kind of helpful on an everyday level. But a lot of Russell's academic writing is very much in philosophy of language, philosophy of maths, foundations of mathematics, logic, which I think are very handy. But it's not necessarily like you're going to read his theory of Descriptions and then just be out and about being.
- [56:46]
A
Like, oh, yeah, my life is so much better. Okay, so I guess even broader than that, are there some branches of philosophy that should be just. Just jettisoned entirely? Any bits that are just intellectual cosplay dead ends?
- [57:00]
B
No, because philosophy, if you find a philosophy useful, then it is useful. Like, that's kind of what it's there for. It's like asking the question of sort of, you know, are there any, like, music genres that you think should get in the bin? And the answer is like, no, because somebody's enjoying that. Right. Like, I'm sure it's useful to somebody, but, you know, if we had to get rid of one of them, I don't know.
- [57:25]
A
Maybe pure logic puzzles, Philosophy of mind.
- [57:28]
B
Philosophy of mind is way too important. Philosophy of mind is the next big thing. You know, it's excruciatingly boring for a lot of people. I mean, we've talked about how it's quite difficult to talk about it in a concrete way.
- [57:39]
A
That's no one on YouTube likes. And I can't work out whether it's because it's hard or because it's pointless.
- [57:43]
B
You know, my audience have quite taken to the philosophy of mind, I think, because I have too. And so I've got this enthusiasm for it. I think it's really important. And I think, like, watch.
- [57:51]
A
Sell me. Sell me on philosophy of.
- [57:53]
B
Watch this space, as it were.
- [57:53]
A
I think, sell me on it.
- [57:55]
B
People are beginning to realize that consciousness, it's always been like, you know, you'll have someone and they'll say, like, consciousness, it's just such a mystery. And like, you know, it's like trying to view the window pane through the window pane, because we experience the whole world through that's interesting, but everybody kind of already knows that. That's why we're at the table having the conversation. There is a. There is a stark increase happening in the view that consciousness is, so to speak, fundamental. Here's the interesting thing. Yeah. So panpsychism, right? And here's one interesting observation, which is that there are these cliches that crop up basically everywhere you look, right? If you look at ancient Vedic literature, if you look at a meditative monk who achieves enlightenment in the forest somewhere, if you look at Joe Bloggs, who took LSD last week and had this insane experience at the peak of his hero dose, they will say similar things, which is this sort of cliche of everything is one, I am one with the universe. The ego, death, the disillusion type. Exactly. And this kind of stuff has been present in these philosophical traditions, like from the beginning of history. The pre Socratics talk about it a little bit too. And I think that we're beginning, like, people are beginning to become much more open to the idea that there is something true about that and there's a reason why that keeps coming about. Panpsychism is growing in popularity because the problem is we believe that there is a world of matter and we know that we are conscious. And you've got a few options available to you. Either the consciousness is like a totally separate thing from the material, which makes it seem really weird. Why does it interact with me? If consciousness is literally immaterial, if it's not made of matter that my brain and my body is, then it is a complete mystery how it would interact with my physical body. Like, it's not like it's floating around out there. It has no spatial dimension. It's not materials.
- [59:51]
A
It's another piece of matter that is not matter. So the idea, some other kind of matter.
- [59:55]
B
It is as mysterious that my mind would interact with my brain as it is as it would be if my mind suddenly started interacting with your brain or with that can of tasty new tonic on the table, it would just be like, what are you talking about? If these are two separate kinds of things you're talking about, like. Like taking the number two, adding in a chair and getting the colour orange. Just categories of different things that seem like they shouldn't be able to interact. Okay, so then maybe the mind is just made out of material, but then you run into some intuitive problems about the nature of thoughts. People keep coming at me because I like to sort of froth at the mouth over the thought of closing my eyes and imagining a triangle and asking where on earth that triangle is. There are true facts about that triangle. It's got three sides, right? That's true. It's really like, I can see it in my head. It's true that it's got three sides, but where is that triangle? It's not just made up of the matter of my brain. If I cut open your brain, I'm not going to find a triangle in there. You can sort of find the material activity that's correlated with the experience of the triangle. That's not the same thing as the triangle. So you've sort of got this sort of barrier problem of where you get from this material stuff to this non material stuff. And the panpsychist says there is no barrier. But instead of saying everything's made out of material and so is consciousness, they just say that everything is consciousness from the get go. And therefore you get consciousness. The biggest myth for the panpsychist and other related schools in consciousness is that complexity is required for consciousness. That might be the big myth that needs to dissipate in the argument that.
- [61:34]
A
Because the brain is the most complex thing we know, it's the one that's got the most consciousness.
- [61:37]
B
It's got what the things that we think consciousness is, are actually sometimes just what consciousness does. Okay, what the fuck does that. I'll explain it this way, right? So if consciousness just means like some kind of experience, some kind of awareness, right? When we talk about what makes somebody conscious, we might talk about things like memory, first person conscious, experience, awareness, these kinds of things. But like rudimentary consciousness on its own wouldn't necessarily require any of those things. Imagine for a moment that you had no memory. I don't mean like you forget what happened yesterday, like you've got dementia. I mean literally no memory laid down in any instant. What would that be like? It's kind of impossible to imagine. Imagine you were falling through the air and no memory was being laid down. At any instant would you even know that you were falling? You'd have no sort of instant before to compare yourself with. You wouldn't even know that you were a being. You wouldn't know that your feet are part of you. You wouldn't have. There's no time for that to happen. You would literally, like, it's impossible to even conceive of what the content of your thoughts would be. They'd be the simplest possible thing that consciousness could experience. And yet it would still be conscious and aware. And so this like the laying down of memory is Something that consciousness can do, which gives rise to more complex conscious behaviors like our conversations and me knowing that we're in a building and that this is a microphone and that kind of stuff. But that is not consciousness. That's just one thing that consciousness does when it's complexly arranged. So when we look at like a rock and say there's no consciousness and look at a brain and say there is, and it's because, oh, the brain is complicated. The panpsychist says, no, consciousness is at the foundation of all of it. That you've just got more complicated consciousness which does things like memory and self awareness and communication. And you've got less complex consciousness which just sort of at the atomic level just sits there and sort of fizzes around. Right. The analogy I sometimes give to explain this is imagine comparing the rock to the Empire State Building. And we said, look at the Empire State Building with its complexity, with its elevators and cash machines and it's got like light switches and electricity. And you kind of think it's this. It can't be made of matter, you know, because like a rock is made of matter. No, it is still made of matter. It's just arranged in a more complex way and so doing much more interesting things. And our brains are like the Empire State Building of, you know, fundamental consciousness, which is, you arrange it in a particular way and suddenly it can do all these magical things like have conversations and talk to each other. But the panpsychist thinks that at root, it's consciousness.
- [64:15]
A
Before we continue, if your sleep's not right, you're taking ages to nod off. Waking up at random times and feeling groggy in the morning. Momentous sleep hacks are. They're not your typical knock you out supplement overloaded with melatonin, just the most evidence based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. I'm banking on you not being able to hit me. That's why I take these every single night, especially when I'm on the road, and why I trust my mentors with my life. All right, okay, there we go. Or at least my sleep. Because they make the highest quality supplements on the planet. What you see on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else. And if you're still unsure, They've got a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it every night for 29 nights, 30 nights in fact. And if you don't like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get 35%. He's run out of ammo. Right now you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by heading to livemomentous.com modern wisdom code modern Wisdom at check out that's L I V E m o m E-N-O-U-S.com Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout what do you make of panpsychism, Joe?
- [65:43]
C
I like it in the sense that I think that it's kind of satisfyingly empirical, which sounds a very strange thing to say, but ultimately it's somebody saying, okay, we've got matter and mind. It's very difficult to reduce mind to matter. We can't deny that mind exists because it is in some sense the precondition for thinking that everything else exists. And so, right, if we can't reduce the two, we'll just have to make mind and matter play together. So I'm sympathetic in that sense. I think that for me, the aspect of the panpsychist approach that will probably need to be worked out in more detail, somebody probably has because I'm not that well read regarding panpsychism is a kind of detailed account of what complexity amounts to. So like, you know, for example, you know, we can arrange the brain and, you know, we have brains, they're arranged in a certain way. You can arrange, you know, a series of rocks in that way. You could try and simulate it with a kind of simulate aspects of the mind with a binary gate system, stuff like that. I think that kind of. I worry that sometimes a lot of the work is then being thrown at this notion of complexity and that I sometimes think that the plausibility of the panpsychist program is going to rest on how that idea of complexity is cashed out. This may just be, however, a neurological or a neuroscientific problem. There's a guy called a neuroscientist called either Francisco or Francisco, I don't know, Francisco Varela, who his whole project is, okay, I want to try and contribute to solving the hard problem of consciousness, which is the idea of, you know, bridging the gap between the material world and felt experience. And so he's going to try and do that by. And has been trying to do that by charting as many possible neurological correlates as you can between phenomenologically reported experience and stuff going on in the brain. And that's his whole. And he just kind of. And I have a lot of sympathy for that, partly because I think that no matter what your philosophical stance is, you're clearly going to have to deal with these findings. Whether you think, as Varela does, that this will actually allow you to bridge the hard problem of consciousness eventually and that you'll be able to reduce mind to matter or whether you're a panpsychist and this will help you with your fleshing out your or account of complexity. I think that this is one of the reasons why the philosophy of mind, I think is in such a boom period, academic wise, is because I often think that philosophy is most helpful when it's interdisciplinary. I really like, for example, the intersection between philosophy and linguistics because I think that there's a real strength in taking empirical results from linguistics and empirical results from neuroscience and from psychology and looking at it through a philosophical lens, trying to, you know, in very broad terms, I suppose, trying to see what it means and then applying it to different things. You know, this is, I think that a lot of the best philosophy work occurs at the intersection of philosophy in different fields. And specifically I think philosophy and neuroscience is a very promising one. I think there's a lot of very.
- [68:39]
B
Good work being done there.
- [68:41]
A
What else is that? Cause it felt to me when I say I started learning about panpsychism. Who's the dude from Durham University?
- [68:49]
B
Philip Gough.
- [68:49]
A
Thank you. So Philip was the first guy I had an entire conversation with about. And that was on his first project book 2019.
- [68:54]
B
Yeah, Galileo's era.
- [68:56]
A
I know he's done a new one, Antzychist. So that was it. But before then I'd sort of seen it, had a bit of an understanding about what it was. Annika has done two books on it now, I think something like that.
- [69:11]
B
Annika, the way she conveyed it to me was like the only conclusion I can draw from my interviews on consciousness is that I have to take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental. Not quite sure what that means. And it sounds like sort of the.
- [69:25]
A
Agnostic of the theory of mind world.
- [69:27]
B
Yeah. And she's totally materialistic and she's like, look, it sounds totally insane, but bear with me. And she does this 12 part documentary interviewing all these people and thinking actually there is something very, very strange going on. The biggest problem for panpsychism is the so called combination problem. That's like the actual biggest critique that a panpsychist would recognize, which is crucially Panpsychists don't really think that like, like everything is conscious. They don't necessarily think this can is conscious as a unified entity. They think that it's made out of consciousness. The consciousness is the stuff of the universe out of which things are made. You know, like calling this a can, this is an artifact. We've put this together as human beings. We've taken materials and arranged them. So it's like there's nothing to say that it would get this unified center of consciousness. That would be kind of weird, right? If we took a bunch of consciousness and just put it together in this shape and suddenly it had a unified sense of consciousness. That'd be strange. But that's what happens in the brain, according to the panpsych.
- [70:20]
A
But it's like if one person is in a field and a ton of other people are in different fields, and then you put them all together in the same field and somehow combine one brain.
- [70:28]
B
Exactly. Why does my consciousness, if my brain is made up of consciousness, then why, when it's arranged in a particular way, do I get this singular unified sense of self? And why is it not that all three of our brains have a singular sense of conscious self?
- [70:43]
A
And if we got close enough together, which we're not going to do, then it would happen.
- [70:47]
B
They call it the combination problem because it's like, how do they combine? And interestingly maybe. Right. Like, I don't know if you've come across these split brain patients. I talk about these all the time. We've got some evidence to suggest that you kind of have multiple people, two like consciousnesses that are, that are battling out with each other inside your very own brain. So that's the interdisciplinary thing, like a lot of scientific research into the way that the brain works in weird cases like split brain patients. Look into it, ladies and gentlemen. It is. Is freaky what your brain can do, like the two hemispheres, what they can do.
- [71:17]
A
What's your favorite example?
- [71:18]
B
My favorite example of this are. So your brain, the two hemispheres of your brain are connected by the corpus callosum. Corpus callosum, right. It's the connective tissue which actually does more to inhibit communication than facilitate communication. There seems to be an evolutionary advantage to keeping them separate. Right. Some people, as a severe treatment for epilepsy, would undergo so a corpus callosotomy where you sever it. Right. This is what a split brain patient is. It's someone who has the connective tissue severed. They can still communicate through other means a little bit. But basically the communication it's like a vertical decapitation. Exactly. Now most people know that the left hemisphere governs broadly, like the right visual field and the right hemisphere broadly the left visual field. Also the right hemisphere is supposed to be the kind of like creative one and the left one is the sort of rational mathsy one. Bit of an oversimplification, but. But take a split brain patient whose hemispheres aren't communicating properly. You can show them something just in their right visual field. So you block off the rest of their view and you just show them something to the left hemisphere and vice versa. So they've done some experiments on such people where they will, for example, show them a picture of an apple and they'll say, what can you see? And they'll say, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about. And then you ask them to draw a picture of something and they'll draw an apple because part of their brain has seen it, but part of it hasn't. You will find those kinds of cases. But the most interesting to me, I needed to say that Set it up is a study that was done. I can't remember what it was. Arnica writes about this where they took a split brain patient and they showed one hemisphere of the brain an instruction. It's an experiment. So you're ready to do an instruction. And the instruction just says something like, get up and walk over there. So the person reads it, they get up, they walk over to the wall. And then you ask them verbally why did you just walk over to the other side of the room? And you know what they say? It would be weird if they said I don't know, wouldn't it? But they don't. They give a reason, they confabulate, but they're not making it up. They're not lying. They're not like, oh, they believe it. They're like, oh, I was, I was trying to get some air, it's kind of warm in here. And they believe it. So there's this idea that one hemisphere of your brain is the so called interpreter and that you've essentially got your brain working on like, like, like doing particular things. Like you can imagine working on your like emotive impulses. You just do something because you just impulsively want to or like instinctively feel it's the right thing. And then your left brain comes in and retrospectively says, oh no, no, no, this is the reason why I did that. I've got good reason for that. And you've kind of got These two parts of your brain governing different parts of your activity.
- [74:02]
A
What's the implication of that?
- [74:04]
B
Philosophically, the implication of that is that consciousness might not be so unified as our sort of present experience leads us to believe. The sort of unity of self might not actually be sort of what's going on in reality. I have a pet theory that a lot of the reason why we feel like we're in our brains and it is the sort of center of our neural activity. Of course. But I feel like the reason why we really experience ourselves as up here is because it's where our senses are, where our eyes are and our ears are. I kind of imagine that if our eyes were like on our hips, we might sort of. And our ears were down there too. We might sort of feel as though we were located because that is where.
- [74:43]
A
Everything is being fed through.
- [74:44]
B
Exactly. It sort of feels like you're up here because that's where the information is. A lot of weird, weird stuff to think about, this so called combination problem. I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff in experience. Like if I pinch myself in the hand, I feel it in my hand. I'm told that it's my brain that's doing the experiencing, but I really feel it in my hand. You know, it's very strange. I think that poses a good analogy for those people who think that like there is one consciousness or one like oneself. Like Atman, which we're all sort of avatars of, is like the left hand. If I pinch it, my right hand doesn't feel it, but it is.
- [75:15]
A
And that's within something that is supposed to be discretely kind of its own localized.
- [75:19]
B
We are one thing, but I can get this localized pain in my left hand that my right hand doesn't.
- [75:24]
A
So let's just scale that across the one thing that is everything.
- [75:26]
B
Yeah, People say like, well, my consciousness can't be the same as yours because I don't have access to your thoughts and you don't have access to mine. So they're separate minds. Right. But when you're asleep, you don't have access to your waking thoughts. But it's still the same mind. There are a lot of weird avenues to explore this unity of consciousness as this sort of fundamental principle of the universe.
- [75:47]
C
One of the interesting kind of corollaries, I mean, one thing that I find very interesting about that kind of one part of our, a lot of our conscious reporting is the kind of PR brain, so to speak, is that it reminds me a lot of Nietzsche's picture of the will and of the mind, which is, broadly speaking, that we kind of have a parliament of different drives and that those drives do what they will, so to speak. There's not one will, there's all of these forces pulling in different directions. And then once we've won out on a course of action, we then put a. We then justify that. At least that's part of what Nietzsche thinks is going on. I'm always reminded of that kind of split brain going over to the other side of the room and saying, oh, yeah, I went here because I want to look out the window or something. It's like, yeah, it's quite a surprisingly Nietzsche picture. The other part of having a picture of consciousness that is in some way combinatoric. So functionalism works like this, as does panpsychism, is that in theory, you can start scaling things up quite extremely. So it's known as the China brain experiment. You'd actually need far more people. It's just because China's the most populous country, but you need far more people than the amount of people in China to do this. And the thought experiment goes that, say you had billions and billions and billions of people. If you made them all behave like neurons, kind of, you know, they all had walkie talkies or phones or something, and they were, you know, they'd say, you know, they'd give a code to someone else and they'd relay information that way. Exactly. Like a brain would. Would that give rise to a consciousness? And I know, I think that's. That's a fascinating partly because, you know, it may. It sounds crazy.
- [77:23]
A
Well, there's a lot of complexity.
- [77:25]
B
It sounds absolutely insane, but why not? Isn't it just as insane that you can do it with atoms and get yourself a brain?
- [77:30]
C
And also, you know, we talk about things like hive minds and insects and things like that. We kind of, you know, it's, you know, you can say that's just a metaphor, but a lot of the time, you know, you describe it as if it's in some sense, you know, sharing a conscious. You have had Peter Godfrey Smith on recently, and something he says in his book is that in an octopus, a huge amount of its neurons are in its arms. So I don't even mention this in the podcast. I'm so sorry, I haven't seen it yet. But one thing that he might. One thing he says is he ponders when an octopus gives an instruction to its arm, it kind of gives it the general vibe, and then the arm works out the details.
- [78:10]
A
Or what if the Arm does it itself.
- [78:11]
B
It seems like the arm sometimes is sort of feel it and then sort of like, oh, what's that like then? The brain. But interestingly, they sort of seem to be able to act independently in that way, but when they need to, they suddenly become unified when there's a. When there's a predator, they can suddenly, like, shoot together and swim off as fast as they can. So it's like it's separable when it needs to be, but unified when it doesn't. And our brains probably do the same thing. Why do we have two hemispheres?
- [78:30]
C
And also, you know, just because there's.
- [78:31]
B
Some utility in it.
- [78:32]
C
And to build on that point, you know, if we're, you know, scaling up to the idea we talk about, or at least we're used to it, it's kind of fall out of fashion. But a lot of the 19th century writing, not necessarily philosophy, just writers, very keen on the idea of spirits of nations and things like that. Stendhal, the French author, travels around Europe and in his little notes, he talks about like, oh, yeah, the spirit of the German, this bit of Germany, and the spirit of Italy, and that kind of. The spirit to the different regions also. Not nations at that point, but the different regions that he's visiting. And. And we think that's kind of quaint now and a bit funny. It feels like largely it's kind of a collection of stereotypes, but it's kind of amusing to read. But the idea of having groups of people having animating principles and treating them metaphorically as bits of mind is a metaphor. The idea that groups of minds can coalesce to form something analogous to a mind, if you believe in that, that makes that metaphor a lot more substantial. I mean, you know, I was. But then, you know, the further you go down this rabbit hole, the more interesting the questions become. You know, could. Could a bunch of people simulating a mind have a conscious experience? You know, we think about it. You know, we think about the mind as having. It's much easier to think about, you know, a group of, you know, 10 billion people having a thought or an idea than it is the idea of 10 billion people in this neurologically unification area. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But, like, I don't know. I think, you know, it's. The more emotion based you ask those questions, the less intuitive it becomes.
- [80:08]
A
What I like about this as an example is that you can bring this down to your own experience. It scales in that way because. Is it. Can you make one of your neurons have a thought?
- [80:20]
B
Yeah.
- [80:21]
A
Like, can that localized part of this localized part feel anything? Because you can kind of there. Okay, but what about if you do individual nodes and then you think, well, if we scale it up, where is. And this makes sense with the combination.
- [80:34]
B
Problem, it's all a bit weird to think about. Right. Interestingly, David Hume.
- [80:37]
A
Maybe this isn't as boring as I accused it of being.
- [80:40]
B
David Hume didn't think that you would know. Like Hume, the famous empiricist. Yeah. There's a lot to say about Hume, but he thought, for example, if you had no experience with the world, if you just had a pain in your big toe or something and you'd had no experience before, you wouldn't know it was in your big toe. It's like. It's a really weird sort of implication of Hume's view, which I think is ridiculous. It's one of the many things that Hume says which is completely ridiculous. He thinks that you essentially need to have this experience which you then know, you realise has been due to something happening in my finger, and that allows you to draw that memory. I think memory is the key to a lot of this consciousness problem.
- [81:17]
A
Memory is it allows you to string this sequence.
- [81:19]
C
Yeah.
- [81:19]
B
And when we think about memory, again, we think about it in terms of like, remembering what you did yesterday. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about remembering, like remembering the instant before this instant, which when you start thinking about it in those terms, it becomes revolutionary. If you imagine yourself falling, as we were picturing earlier, with no memory, you'd probably act. And according to the panpsychist experience the world a lot like the can, wouldn't it?
- [81:43]
A
Would that not preclude a Boltzmann brain?
- [81:45]
B
Would it preclude a Boltzmann brain?
- [81:47]
A
Yeah, just that if they coalesce into this single form for such a short space of time, how is it. If it didn't exist prior to that? Oh, their argument would be be the neurons are created in such a way as if you had memories prior to that.
- [81:59]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [82:00]
A
Right. Okay, so you understand what I meant by that. If it's so transient, but encoded in its transient is the fake memory.
- [82:08]
B
Yeah, exactly. I want to point out that we're talking about this in the context of panpsychism and it's all a bit sort of woo woo, and people are like, this is totally crazy. But the example Joe just gave of the. What do you call it, the China problem is called the China brain. Like, we brought this up in the context of panpsychism, but most People listening to this are probably materialists to some degree about consciousness. They'll probably think, you know, I think that consciousness is just emergent of material, a bit like how, you know, zeros and ones become a picture on a screen, something like that. This example kind of poses a challenge to that, because it's like, if you believe that you can just take atoms, put them in a particular order, and get a unified, conscious experience of pain, then why can't I do that with individual brains, put them together in a particular way and get a unified experience?
- [82:55]
C
In the same way that you can make a triangle out of wood or out of stone or out of metal? You know, if you define something relationally, what you're making it out of ceases to be as important.
- [83:02]
A
Exactly.
- [83:02]
B
If consciousness is just an arrangement of atoms, then you should be able to get consciousness out of an arrangement of atoms in other ways. And if you think that's not true, then you either have to explain why it's different or, I suppose, abandon materialism or abandon the view that consciousness is, in fact emergent and is not somehow fundamental. It's wacky, right?
- [83:23]
A
Maybe this is. It might just be the messenger. It might have been the messenger. So far, sorry to everyone that's done. Theory of Mind has come on my podcast because it's like five or 10 people.
- [83:32]
B
I think it might actually be, like, the next sort of big thing. I'm excited about this idea. I think it's fun. I mean, I think there's a lot to dislike about it, too, of course, but like. Like, it's exciting, and I think people are interested in it.
- [83:43]
A
And, well, the first thing that it gives everybody is. I have always had questions about my own experience. Everyone is always kind of narcissistic when it comes to that. And this is the most direct you're ever going, why am I a thing? Why do I feel anything at all? Why do I sort of exist in that way? The other thing that I'm very interested in, which is one of your pet theories, is emotivism. Can you explain emotivism to me? Like, I'm 12.
- [84:08]
B
So emotivism is a kind of a theory about ethics and a theory about language. We've been talking so far about sort of what stuff is made out of. And there's lots more to be said about that, by the way, like why everything is made out of consciousness and how we even get there. That's like a kind of metaphysical question in the realm of ethics, like, what's good, what's bad? What should you do what shouldn't you do? Everyone's familiar with that kind of language. If I say, like, you know, it's bad for you to kick a homeless person on the street, you kind of understand what I'm saying. You get what I mean. But a philosopher will hear that statement and try to break it down. What literally do we mean? What does this word, like bad mean? The ethical emotivist is someone who thinks that ethical statements are just expressions of emotion. It means that when you say something is good or bad or that you should or shouldn't do something, all of that moral language is a kind of emotional expression. A big confusion about this is that suppose I think that suppose I just don't like murder. I just don't like it, Right? Ethical subjectivism says that when I say murder is wrong, I mean to say something like, I don't like murder. That is a reporting of my mental state that I don't like it. Ethical emotivism is not a reporting of your emotional state. It is the expression of the emotion itself. So it's the difference between saying, saying, I don't like murder and going like, ugh, murder. Like, literally expressing it. So when I say I don't like murder, that's a claim that you can investigate. Is that true? Is it true that I don't like murder? Maybe I'm lying to you. Maybe it's false. Right? So it's sort of. It can be true, it can be false. It's a fact about my psychology. Whereas the expression of distaste for murder just going as it famously has been, boo. Murder is not the kind of thing that can be true or false. You can't really, like, debate it. Exactly. It's just an expression. The emotivist thinks that that's what's going on with ethics. So AJ Ayer is kind of the father of this emotivist theory in the 20th century. And it's only one part of his philosophy, but it's probably what he's most remembered for. And so he compares saying. The difference between saying murder and saying murder is wrong is a bit like the difference between saying murder and then saying murder with an angry emoji and three exclamation marks. It's just this emphasis on something. So, okay, why think this? Right. Why would you believe this? Well, pay attention to what your brain is doing when it moralizes. If I walk down the street and I kick a homeless person, you will notice a fact about the world, which is that I have just kicked a homeless person, and you could be Completely like morally emotionally detached from that. You could just report as a fact if you were like a robot, it's a true fact. Alex just kicked a homeless person. Right. But if you think that it's wrong, there's something more going on. You think Alex just kicked a homeless person. And, and what's the extra thing? What is that extra thing that makes you say that it's wrong? Well, I think that if you pay attention to what your brain is doing in those instances, it's something that belongs in the category of emotion rather than that kind of rational thought. Like that extra bit that's making you say it's wrong versus just reporting it. Is that extra bit more like when you burn your hand and take it away or when you get angry at someone for doing something? Or is it more like two plus two is four and the sky is blue? Like, which of those is it more like? I think it much more strongly belongs in the category of emotion. And so the actual isolated moral element of the statement it's wrong to kick a homeless person is an ethical expression.
- [87:46]
A
Okay?
- [87:47]
B
An emotional expression.
- [87:48]
A
You've probably heard me talk about element before. Come on. Frankly, that's because I'm dependent on it. And it's how I've started every morning for the last three years. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. Each grab and go stick pack contains a science backed electrolyte ratio. Sodium, potassium and magnesium. With no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients or any other junk. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite and curbing cravings. The orange flavor in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salt, salty, orangey nectar. And I genuinely feel the difference versus when I've started it and when I've used it and when I haven't. Anyway, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US and right now you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavor favors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. Heading to drinklmnt.com ModernWisdom that's drinklmnt.com Modernwisdom if emotivism is true, does that mean that morality is just vibes?
- [89:09]
B
More or less, yeah.
- [89:10]
C
Although it's important. I think that the one thing's worth noting is that even if you put forward this emotivist thesis, it doesn't necessarily mean that anything goes. So we're very quick to.
- [89:20]
A
That's an obvious sort of follow on.
- [89:21]
C
Well, just because we're very quick to generally say, okay, something is, I'll say subjective in the sense that I say it's different from subjectivism. But somebody can say boo and another person can say yay. At least in theory. But of course, there are constraints on this. I think that sometimes we get very caught up in ideas about objectivity and subjectivity. And actually sometimes I think what we're actually often getting at is the difference between stability and instability. So, like most people think that beauty is subjective in some way.
- [89:53]
B
Right.
- [89:53]
C
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, famously. And there are people that dispute that, but that's a pretty majority view. It doesn't follow from that that you can in fact find anything beautiful. You just try. If you try and you know, look at a dog turd on the street and just be like, so many of my analogies have been dog turd related. But, you know, adults hurt on the street and just try and find it beautiful, you'll find that you can't. And so plausibly there are still restrictions on the kind of things that people can and in fact do find beautiful. And so you kind of say it doesn't follow just from. Yeah, if you're emotivist, it doesn't follow just from the fact that. Or the idea putting forward that all ethical statements are emotional expressions, that this means that we're gonna have total chaos and that everyone's gonna value different things. There are plausibly just pragmatic constraints on the kind of things that people feel moral disgust about. So it's.
- [90:46]
A
Which is going to cause some kind of consensus.
- [90:49]
C
Yeah. So I mean, you know, the class. I mean, one. I mean, one way of looking at it is the tribe of 150 people that say, yay, murder. Aren't gonna be. They're not gonna last very long. They're gonna be outcompeted by people who.
- [91:01]
A
Are very Boomer cancerous memes here.
- [91:03]
B
Yeah. These kinds of responses function in a similar way to ethical subjectivism, which most people are familiar with this idea that some people think that ethics is real. Maybe it's given by God, maybe it's inscribed into the foundation of the universe. And some people think, no, we essentially kind of make it up. And the debate is always this practical one. Well then how can you say that this was wrong? How can you say that that was right? Some people just say, well you can't. So one thing to note is that it may be true that if we all became emotivists, the world would become a complete disaster and people would just start being self indulgent. That wouldn't make it untrue, it would just make it not very practical to believe. And therefore maybe we should cut this segment and not let anyone hear about it. Right, but if you're asking what is.
- [91:43]
A
Vibe coding, human rights, what is true.
- [91:44]
B
It will evolutionarily self deselect. So if it were actually a bad thing to believe, that doesn't mean that.
- [91:51]
A
It'S cultivating a lot of emotivists ancestors, but they maybe didn't stick about.
- [91:56]
B
Yeah. Or like if it is in fact something that would lead to this sort of, this arbitrary disaster.
- [92:02]
A
Do you think it does?
- [92:03]
B
No, for a few reasons. Partly because I agree with Joe. I mean, people will be listening to this going like, well, I think I could see a dogshit as beautiful in the right sort of context. And I think that's true. But the point remains that there are things that you find beautiful that you can't just choose to not. And there are things that you don't find beautiful that you can't just choose to become beautiful. I think there is a degree on fundamental matters of like somewhat universal agreement. In the same way that we kind of broadly agree on many artistic points. Right. We might have, you know, I don't like impressionism and I think Van Gogh is overrated. But broadly speaking, we have an idea of one piece of art being like, you know, a good beautiful piece of art and one thing like not really being a piece of art at all. But of course there's so much room for subjectivity there that on the moral particulars you run into a problem. How do I think this can be addressed? Well, one important thing to note is that AJ Ayer talks about this most moral debate, because this is the thing that you undercut the ability to debate morals to say, I think I'm right and you're wrong. If it's all just feeling, you can't do that. We're just feeling so you can't morally debate. Ayer points out that the vast majority of moral debate that you hear on a regular basis is not actually moral debate. It's debate about facts which then inform Your moral view. So imagine you're having a debate about gun violence in America. The debate might sound something like, did you know that if we criminalized guns then gun related deaths would drop by 10,000 every year? Oh, but having a swimming pool is more dangerous than having. These are factual claims that you can test, you can run statistics and you can find out whether they're true or false. And a lot of the debate consists in that sort of factual disagreement. But the actual moral element isn't actually being crossed up against what people are.
- [93:48]
A
Trying to do there, which would, I guess, at least reinforce the emotivism view. Do is get further up the stack from someone's emotive outburst and say, well, actually the facts that your emotions are based on are different. Let me change those facts and see what happens.
- [94:05]
B
Exactly. And it would just bring about a new emotional state. Because suppose you were like, you were really scared of getting on a train and I said to you, right now we're going to go to Edinburgh and you felt an emotion of fear and then I just told you a fact which is, oh, we're going to get the plane instead, your emotion would change. I haven't like convinced you on an emotional level. I haven't changed your emotions exactly. I've changed facts which then dictate what your emotional state is.
- [94:30]
A
Presumably you could also teach me some things about the safety record of trains.
- [94:34]
B
That'S also true, which would change your emotional state without just you saying, I'm scared of trains and me being like, no, you're not. And then we have a debate that doesn't make any sense.
- [94:42]
C
Right.
- [94:43]
B
That's not actually how it goes. And that's actually not how it goes in morality a lot of the time, you know, because if you, if you find two people who are debating about guns and one says that, you know, if we have guns on the streets, then you know people are going to get attacked. And another person says, yeah, but when somebody's attacked, like, do you only want the bad guys to have guns? Don't you want good people to be able to defend them? What's the like moral boo and yay there? It's something like, you know, boo innocent people dying. You know, like they probably agree on that. And then it's just sort of a factual dispute of what will sort of bring about that innocent people dying.
- [95:14]
A
Does that suggest that people's moralities aren't actually as divergent as we think they are? That most people agree on most things when it comes to morality?
- [95:23]
B
Not necessarily. It's actually A very difficult question to answer. The thing I'm intending to get across here is that if it is the case that there is this big problem with something like emotivism, that it doesn't allow us to have these debates and say that people are wrong, I think that it would be much more restricted than people who first imagined imagine. Because you first think, gosh, I can't say, you know, I can't say that you're wrong to do it. I can't say that you're wrong to steal that apple from the store. I can't say that you're, you know, it's a good thing to, you know, walk your wife home or something. You know what I mean? Like, but that's not the case. If there were some kind of disagreement that we were unable to resolve, it would be much more foundational and much more broad. That might exist, it might not. Our evolutionary psychology might be such that we on the most fundamental level, like, basically are made of the same stuff. But it does seem plausible to me that there could be genuinely irresoluble, foundational value complex.
- [96:16]
C
I suppose one potential candidate for that would be the notion of rights versus consequences, which is a sort of, you know, so. Oh, yeah, that's in. That's like one way of, you know, a lot of. Say I'm having an argument with someone about, I don't know, let's do the gun control example. I know nothing about the facts on the ground about gun control. But one thing somebody might say is just, no, I have a right to this. And that would be an ethical statement and thus an expression. But people do use that in a kind of load bearing, justificatory way. I think that would be one example of a type of moral disagreement that emotivism would struggle to accommodate. You might be able to get it in some way.
- [96:53]
B
You might find that it would break down. Because I agree with you. You'd break it down to like, you know, someone ultimately isn't just going, boo, innocent people dying. Because that's a sort of consequentialist view, like, innocent people dying, that's a bad consequence. Boo. Another person might be. Be like, boo, taking my rights away. And that would actually conflict.
- [97:09]
A
However, I think one person's priority and another person's priority and who trumps.
- [97:14]
B
But I do think that both of these in fact, are not actually foundational. Right? Because you've got to break down this con. You say, boo innocent people dying. And like, I can think of 10 examples off the top of my head where you'd be okay with an innocent person dying. Right. And likewise, you know, boo rights are notoriously difficult to actually justify or ground. So if you had further conversation with these people, you might find that the emotional motivation that has led one person to innocent people dying is bad and another person to rights being violated is bad is actually the same wellspring as it were. And if that's the case, then this problem goes away. It might not be the case though. And then you are left with this problem of value conflicts that can't be resolved, but it's much more restricted and would probably operate on the level of societies rather than individuals which guess what, it does. And we kind of like just accept that some societies have different morals and some don't. That's a good point. I suppose. The other, at least on the particulars, the other, the cannibals, we don't.
- [98:11]
C
Well, the other potential issue you might find is that it is entirely possible that we just have a non foundationalist moral psychology. So on that we've kind of said, oh well, you know, maybe we won't end up disagreeing because we'll get down to fundamentals. But I would potentially, you know, it's certainly a possibility that we have just loose branches of moral statements. You know, like something about, you know, it's a good example. So like the example that was, I think this in Jonathan Haidt's book, he uses the example of. He takes a bunch of consequentialists and then asks them about like the kind of theoretical consequence free incest scenario.
- [98:50]
A
Yes.
- [98:51]
C
Where, you know, which basically just never exists in real life, but in this kind of laboratory setting. He kind of posits it and he often finds that, you know, that's a kind of, that's something that people will condemn regardless of the foundation, their stated foundation to morality. So that's one potential counter. You talked to Simon Blackburn recently.
- [99:11]
B
Yes.
- [99:11]
C
Is he still calling himself a quasi realist?
- [99:13]
B
He actually regrets inventing that term. Okay, what does he call himself now? I'm not sure what he actually calls himself now. I think he's still a non cognitivist and Blackburn is a, is a non cognitivist, a kind of emotivist. He's got a lot of interesting things to say about that. I just did a whole episode with him. So, you know, watch it. I think what you just said. What did you just say?
- [99:33]
A
Quasi realist.
- [99:33]
C
Before that. Oh, about the idea of. It's possible that our, the ethical statements that we will boo and hooray at are Not a foundational structure. Oh yes, indeed in emotivism. We might expect that to more to be the case in emotivism because whereas in a kind of standard cognitivist picture of ethics, we come to our ethical propositions through having a kind of base level set of ethical principles that we believe are true and then derive our ethics from that. And emotivist kind of throws out that picture entirely. So another explanatory problem you might posit for emotivism in ethics, which is basically a variant on Frege Geech, which would be like, oh well, we have this whole inferential setup for our ethical propositions that we don't. For emotions, you know, do. It doesn't, you know, I don't get angry because I've inferred anger from some kind of previous emotional principle. I might get angry because somebody does something that I perceive to be an injustice. But that's. It just happens that's going from a thing that I believe to be true. And that kind of this whole inferential structure that our ethics seems to follow. And at the very least, we want our ethics to follow as an ideal. We hold people being ethically inconsistent as a bad thing seems to rely on some kind of underlying intuitive cognitivism. So there are like, there are different problems you can have with emotivism and non cognitivism and ethics more generally. But there are responses to those problems and I think some of them incest.
- [101:00]
B
One good proof of emotivism might just be the incest question. It's famously difficult for people to deal with incest. And it's always funny watching people sort of wriggle thinkers on stage when somebody's breaking brave enough to ask the question why it's wrong. Consequentialists are notoriously bad at justifying this. And they'll say things like, well, because, you know, incest leads to having disabled children. In response to which there are a few questions. Firstly, what's wrong with having disabled children? Secondly, obviously, what about cases where procreation is not going to be possible? That's obviously like a side issue we can obviously correct. Oh well, there's like a power imbalance between. Okay, we can obviously just like, just answer the question, right, you know what I'm asking you. And people can't do it. The emotivist bear in mind this is one of the most universal taboos in the world is the incest taboo. It's like everywhere. Interestingly, some societies have variant forms where it's like, it's okay to Marry your older sister but not your younger sister, Stuff like that. It's kind of weird.
- [101:55]
C
I mean, famously, cousins were in the royal family.
- [101:58]
B
Oh, yeah, Yeah. I mean, cousins have always been a sort of, a sort of stick in the mud for this. Like, people don't seem to care so much about cousins historically, but quite clearly.
- [102:11]
A
Like they're the Goldilocks zone of familial relation.
- [102:14]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [102:14]
B
Yeah. For keeping it in the family but.
- [102:16]
A
Not in the other family. Yeah. You know, they're close enough that you know them. You don't have to actually go that hard looking.
- [102:20]
B
Exactly.
- [102:20]
C
That's how you end up with these 15th century monarchs with chins out to air.
- [102:23]
B
It's true, it's true. So they say. But clearly there is this universal taboo and most people just instinctively think it is just. Well, what's the word? Realistically, what's the word? It's something like. It's just gross, man. It's just. Ugh. It's just. It's not. The emotivist says, yeah, that's what's going on. Right. And so the, the wrongness of incest. When you, when you recognize how difficult it is for people of a non just prescriptivist moral theory, like if you're, if you're a believer in God who thinks that it's just revealed that it's the wrong thing to do, then fine. That still doesn't actually explain why it's wrong, just tells you that it's wrong. But for any secular ethicist, it's notoriously difficult when you select out those other factors. And so if I ask you, Chris, if you think incest is wrong, I don't know what you would say.
- [103:07]
A
Well, I'm an only child, so it's.
- [103:09]
B
Actually really difficult to. Difficult to.
- [103:11]
A
I've thought about this.
- [103:12]
B
Imagine at least a little.
- [103:13]
A
It was you that first taught me about the incest question. And then Jonathan Haidt, kind of like I read it in full. Two things. First off, the reason that humans feel incest aversion is because of something called the Westermark Window. Familiar with this?
- [103:27]
B
No.
- [103:28]
A
Okay, so the Westermark effect is young children that are raised together that spend sort of infant and young child years in close proximity, especially if they see their mother raising another child, they have sexual aversion to them. This is adaptive. Right. You do not know who your sister is.
- [103:50]
B
Is.
- [103:51]
A
You don't know who that person is. What you do know is that that particular individual was fed and cared for by your mother and you played with them and they were around between 0 and 10 years old. This leads to some pretty difficult situations. If you have twins or brother and sister that are separated at birth, they've missed this Westermark window. They do not have sexual revulsion. Now, cognitively, they might. But that, like, ick. That apparently people who have brothers and sisters. I don't have a brother or a sister, so I don't like. To me, that innate sense when you do this, anytime that you do the incest question, people's faces start to sort of squeeze a little. There is. I feel. This is the one time in my life that I feel like a psychopath.
- [104:37]
C
For you, the incest question is just intellectual masturbation.
- [104:41]
A
Specifically intellectual.
- [104:44]
B
But just.
- [104:44]
A
No, not to get.
- [104:46]
B
Not to get. Like. I don't like to make the examples like this personal, but, I mean, you have parents, you know, like, that's true. Surely the thought of. Without going any further with that sentence, you get what I'm driving at. Like, there is.
- [104:58]
A
I can map that on.
- [104:59]
B
There's something you can.
- [105:00]
A
That's true. But anyway, Western mark window, really interesting. So if you have brother and sister, or specifically the classic sort of daddy issues thing, daughter and father, father, deadbeat dad, dad leaves, dad comes back in.
- [105:12]
B
Oh, right.
- [105:12]
A
Now, sometimes this happens and they don't even know, you know, adopted kids, so on and so forth. And you end up finding. Because there is a kind of resonance that's in that you think, wow, like, this person just seems so like me. And he's like, yeah, they share quite a lot of your genetics.
- [105:29]
B
Well, look, the thing is, like, I think there are all kinds of explanations you can give for, like, why this taboo has emerged. But. But there are explanations for things that do not equate to justifications for things. I could explain why human beings have an inherent racial bias, because when you're living in tribes, it makes sense to be suspicious of other. So I can explain evolutionarily why somebody might be a bit racist, but most people think, actually that's wrong. We don't want to do that. So it's not a justification for it. It's an explanation for why it exists in the human psychology. So you can explain why. Why the incest taboo exists in the human psychology and why it crops up in some areas and not others. But if you think it's wrong, I'm gonna ask you why. And as an emotivist, if someone says, well, I just think it's. I've had this conversation with people in the pub and they say, they give me an emotivist answer, they say. But it's just. It's just disgusting. It's disgusting. That's your brother, you know, that's your sister. It's just. I'm like, yeah, exactly. And it's like one of the most, I think, compelling cases for emotivism.
- [106:28]
A
Everybody's larping as an emotivist when it comes to the incest question.
- [106:31]
B
Or rather they're larping as something else until it comes to the emotiv around every question.
- [106:35]
A
Okay.
- [106:36]
B
Yeah. So much of it actually breaks down to emotion. There are lots of reasons to think about.
- [106:40]
A
Do you identify as this an emotivist?
- [106:43]
B
To be clear. Yes. Yeah. Not. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I find it.
- [106:48]
A
Have you heard of some sort of qualifier, quasi.
- [106:51]
B
I've got kind of philosophical commitment issues, you know, Like, I find it very difficult to call myself anything really.
- [106:57]
A
Like it's because you're sort of philosophically non monogamous.
- [107:01]
B
Yeah. Not just because. Not just on a practical level of like, oh, you'll be held to it and people will. But just because, like, you know, who bloody knows, man? Like, realistically, who.
- [107:09]
A
Because we like to put labels on things.
- [107:11]
B
Yeah, that's right. Like we like to put labels on emotions such as good and bad. I mean, I think one way I've tried to explain this and why I do call myself an emotivist and say, yes, I am one, but like, you know, pending corrections, as it were. I would, you know, drop it in a moment. If there were sort of good evidence against emotivist.
- [107:28]
A
Agnostic.
- [107:29]
B
Yeah, like emotivist with a degree of emotivist. Curious confidence. Yeah, yeah. I think if you imagine what it would be like if we didn't have a word for anxiety, just like there was no word for it. Right. And you were feeling anxious. You would try to describe your feeling to me by using other emotional terms. You'd say like, oh, well, I feel a bit. It's sort of like sadness, but I'm like excited. I don't really know how. And so you isolate that feeling, give it its own word. So if I ask you in that kicking the homeless person case, what is the extra thing you're feeling other than just the knowledge of the descriptive fact? You'd be like, well, it's something like no. Or something like stop or don't or boo or gross. And it's none of those things, but it's something a bit like that. So we sort of put a box around this feeling and give it a label. And I think we've done that. And that label is bad. And so. So you kind of. It belongs in that category. One big mistake people make, I think with emotivism is that you say that ethics is an expression of emotion. I don't mean that bad or shouldn't. Maps on to pre existing emotions that we know of, like boo and anger and frustration. It's its own unique emotion. Those are just like. It belongs in that category. Right. People often think that an emotivist thinks that murder is wrong means something like expressive anger or distaste or disgust. It's not. It's its own unique thing. It's expressing wrongness, which is its own thing distinct from those things. But it belongs in that category. It's a kind of emotion.
- [109:03]
A
You know what I mean? Yeah, I do, I do. I'm interested. Is there a philosophy of influence? Because you two are both influential. Study this stuff. Do you have a responsibility that is philosophically interesting given that you are supposed to be at least in some way sources of insight around the study of ethics, the study of logic, the study of philosophy. Is there an additional level of responsibility that you have as the closer to the source of where this comes from to be extra highly scrutinous with the way that you sort of put ideas across and what you talk about?
- [109:38]
C
I suppose, I mean, I suppose there's a base level of trying to be accurate, right? You try and get things right, inevitably you sometimes get things wrong, but you try and get things right. I think another thing that, that I'm very keen on when presenting philosophies is to try and get across that this is only really a starting point, right. This isn't me from your computer screen telling you what's definitely true about the nature of the life and the universe, that being ridiculous, but that hopefully if you find some of this helpful or you find some of this insightful, it will be kind of grist for the mill of your own thinking. I'm, I'm very like. I think that I think this about a lot of, you know, people quite often talk about things like videos on YouTube or podcasts or various different types of just disseminating media will sort of react with a little bit of skepticism. And people do. It's about news articles and journalism where they sort of say something like, oh yeah, but, but you know, there are flaws within this medium. You know, your errors will creep in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they're certainly right. I think that the one of the correct, correct, one of the appropriate responses that I feel to that is to try and front load a kind of a statement of your own fallibility so that inevitably like you'll get things wrong. We all get things wrong.
- [111:10]
A
This is a justice privilege thing that we were talking about.
- [111:12]
C
Yes, yeah, but I, I think it's important to say that because quite a lot of, you know, you're on YouTube, you're at the very least presenting yourself as knowing more than the viewer about something. And so it's very easy all of the kind of implicit signals there are saying, I know I am right, listen to me, position of authority, I am authority. And I think that it's, I think that it's in order to kind of do what I want to do, which is to largely get people doing this philosophy for themselves and for this to just be something that they look back on in five years and think, oh yeah, that was a kind of quaint starting point, but now I'm much further along than that. I don't need this anymore. Part of doing that is to front load the idea that you're wrong, you don't have the, you might be wrong, you don't have the final word. This is just a smattering of the literature, etc.
- [111:59]
A
You see yourself as kind of the child's Hulk Hogan playset of lifting weights before someone actually goes and gets a gym membership.
- [112:05]
C
Well, I suppose thing is that, you know, you're never going to be able to get, you never able to compress all of the complexity of even a single philosopher into a 30 minute YouTube video. It's just not possible. They're all very complicated. But you might be able to give people a general idea and also hopefully put them in a position whereby if they choose to go and look at that philosopher or that philosophy or that philosophical question for themselves, they are then slightly better equipped to do that. And hopefully if they find some bit helpful, it helps them in their everyday life, it might do, it might not. But that's what I tend to think. I think that, you know, no medium of communicating any kind of information is perfect. And I think that a lot of the way that I like to react to that is to just front load the flaws if they're not obvious.
- [112:50]
A
I mean, you know, Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
- [112:52]
C
Yeah, you know, public debates are a bit like that. You know, public debates have numerous flaws.
- [112:56]
B
Right.
- [112:57]
C
They are oftentimes people be persuaded by emotional rhetoric rather than, you know, straight tricks, logical reasoning, because that's just part of how we're wired. I don't think that that's necessarily a problem until we start pretending that public debate is something that it's not. As long as we bear that in.
- [113:14]
A
Mind, some unique insight into wisdom and accuracy.
- [113:18]
C
Yes, exactly. As long as we're not watching.
- [113:19]
A
Nod's the guy who does debate very regularly.
- [113:22]
C
But I think you pretty much share my view on this as well.
- [113:24]
B
There's nothing wrong with theatre, you know, but you've got to know that that's what you're doing.
- [113:28]
A
What's your thoughts on this? You know, if we're moving into a world with philosophers as influencers, surely the platform comes with a huge ethical duty not to mislead, given that ethics is part of the source code of what you guys, at least in part, are supposed to do or be remotely educated in.
- [113:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, we find it interesting and fun and there's a kind of academic duty to not mislead, not misrepresent people's opinions and that kind of stuff.
- [113:53]
A
But if you are gonna reduce this down to do as I say, not as I do.
- [113:56]
B
No, no, no, no. It's the reason I trip over myself to indicate my agnosticism, even about things I believe. Doesn't mean I don't have an opinion, but it means that I could be talked out of it at any moment. I do that with something as inert as meta ethics. Because earlier today we spoke for five or ten minutes about suicide and there's somebody listening to this podcast for whom that's going to be the most significant discourse that they've heard on the subject possibly in their life, probably in the past past few days and past month or year or so. If somebody's thinking about that a lot, you might have some influence over their thoughts on an issue as important as that. That's not something to just sort of piss about with. It's serious. This stuff matters to people. And it's worth remembering that sometimes philosophy is just people in this sort of intellectual playground having a bit of fun. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it's not always that. And if it is always that, then you're kind of probably wasting your time in idle leisure and you should do something more constructive.
- [115:00]
A
You always end up castigating. You always end up sort of finger wagging after a little while.
- [115:04]
B
Yeah, but you've asked me to reflect upon my own sense of duty, and I think that you need to wag your own finger in the mirror every now and again and remember that it's great fun and I love what I do and it's an amazing Amazing thrill and beautiful opportunity to be able to make a living doing things like this. But it's not all fun and games. Like, it does come with a kind of a duty and a responsibility that it's easy to forget about because here we are having a conversation. We talk about this stuff all the time. We're gonna, you know, go off to the pub and forget about it later on today. But that's not the case for everyone.
- [115:39]
A
You think of certain areas of philosophy, or maybe even most areas of philosophy is kind of like information hazards in that way.
- [115:46]
B
I think that information hazards are a bit of a. I mean, we were talking about the concept of overrated philosophical ideas or ideas that should, you know.
- [115:57]
A
Get in the bin.
- [115:57]
B
Get in the bin. And I kind of think information hazards are one example.
- [116:01]
A
Oh, nice.
- [116:02]
B
It's sort of part of this whole AI hype that a lot of it is just sort of sensationalist and I think doesn't have a very good grounding.
- [116:09]
A
You know, the analogy that I mean, though, like a high potent cognitive, specifically.
- [116:14]
B
Not an information hazard in that literal sense. But yeah, like there are maybe there are things that are sort of not worth knowing or not worth exploring. Right. There are topic areas which just aren't worth.
- [116:25]
A
The price of entry is too high getting into.
- [116:28]
B
But that's sort of for you to decide whether you. Whether you find it interesting, whether you find it worthwhile. I don't know. We stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were, as Newton said. In that I see myself as a communicator of ideas. I don't really say anything genuinely novel or unique. There's nothing new under the sun. I'm just trying to communicate other people's ideas. So my principal responsibility is trying to do so in a way that makes sense. Like, why am I talking to people about this? There must be some application for why I'm doing it. But I think, yeah, being a communicator rather than somebody who's trying to put a steadfast view into the world makes it a little easier.
- [117:12]
A
Is that just a very slippery way of never having to actually stand your ground?
- [117:16]
B
Maybe. But if in order to be successful in any field, including my own, I would have to plant my feet firmly in the ground and say, this is what I believe, and I don't think that I'm wrong about it, it then I'd probably give up and go home. At least for now. I mean, maybe I'll feel that way one day. But for now at least, I mean, you know, the idea that a 26 year old philosophy YouTuber would like know anything significant with a level of certainty that is immune to a healthy dose of agnosticism is completely batshit insane. There's just no way that's ever going to be true, you know, or justified.
- [117:56]
A
Even though the incest can question.
- [117:57]
B
Even, especially on the incest question.
- [118:01]
A
Gentlemen, I appreciate both of you very much. I wish that we could keep going for longer, but this location is going to kick us out.
- [118:07]
C
It looks like it's literally about to.
- [118:09]
B
Collapse in on us.
- [118:09]
A
Yeah, perhaps. Look, I genuinely appreciate both of you. I think it's so cool that we've got two British guys leading, contributing to leading forth, philosophical influence, unsolicited advice and Alex o'. Connor. Within reason. You don't have a podcast, do you Joe?
- [118:27]
C
I don't. I'm gonna start interviewing a few people. I've got a few people lined up.
- [118:31]
B
I told him what to call it. You know what he should call it?
- [118:33]
A
Solicited advice.
- [118:34]
C
Solicited advice.
- [118:36]
B
It's right there in front of you boys.
- [118:38]
A
Thank you very much for coming through.
- [118:39]
B
You got it man.
- [118:40]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [118:43]
A
If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I the Modern Wisdom Reading List. A list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and non fiction and real life stories. And there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.