Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events. Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing has been published in more than 20 languages. Mr. Harris and his work have been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, Newsweek, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Mr. Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.
Just came across this. Do you Sam Harris understand consciousness (the hard problem), mind, magnetism, please explain them as you are so supposedly smart? It is not surprising you do not understand transubstantiation as it is unlikely you understand consciousness. It is okay to be an Atheist and criticize if you understand what you are criticizing, if not you are just displaying your ignorance.
Peterson is knowledgeable and remarkably articulate. But being articulate does not make your opinions correct. It just means your opinions are eloquently expressed.
Sam Harris is talking about the hypothetical objective truth Jordan Peterson is talking about from the viewpoint of a biased individuals which we all are what can we establish as true, how and what can we know is true. It's truth from the perspective of someoe rather than the perspective of nobody (objective truth)
Been a handful of years since I’ve listened to this… this episode sums up Peterson so well and makes me want to bash my phone to pieces while listening to it. 😂
Bart is confused. The problem with belief is that it is tenuous. Why it is tenuous is because it is not knowing. Only knowing is valid, and comes from a personal experience of reality. So Bart believed, he did not have a personal authentic experience of reality, he only had a belief in reality, which has now changed to its opposite. Being knowledgeable is not knowing; being knowledgeable is having mental or psychic information about something. Knowing is being one with something, Bart was not one with Christianity, he was a believer in Christianity. He was never a Christian in the authentic sense of knowing, so that he is not one now is no more than a change of belief, which as stated above is tenuous. Only knowing from personal experience is authentic and Bart, operating from belief, not deep personal experience, changed his belief. Nothing new here.
We have free will so that we can align ourselves with Reality, or not, the choice is ours. The problem is if we do not align ourselves with Reality not just out of rebellion but out of ignorance the results and the suffering are the same. We do not get a free pass for being stupid.
Until atheists understand consciousness, what it is, they will be whistling Dixie, to no avail. The problem with Darwinism is that random evolution, to no known prototype, is magical thinking, that leads to all kind of unresolved problems. There being a human prototype takes care of the problem, while acknowledging that there are different versions of the human, reportedly fourteen different kinds, in a universal cycle. The problem here is a lack of knowledge on both sides. This is a comment on the introduction. Now to Sean Carroll. Naturalism is better than atheism, at least stick to what you know and comprehend. Not known is: Whether there are more electricities other than the two known: in entities and in the environment, and what magnetism is, not to mention consciousness and mind (does mind emerge with quantum events). Conscious being fundamental is a problem for atheists. What it implies is that if we, as human entities share in it, then it too must have a Self, which people have referred to as God. Not being free from oversight and maybe having to submit to oversight is not popular. But it is more than likely that Satan; the light that fell from heaven, rebelled for that very reason. The upside of being rebellious is that we get back to where we were, the hard way, with one plus in our favor, we are now self-conscious, painfully so. Multiverses doesn’t erase the Creator problem, if one can be created, so can multiple ones, the same or different, no limit.
The capacity to elude is Jordans accidental talent. I listened 5 years ago and he still sounds deluded. Sam Harris has an exceptional devotion to coherence and conversation, with a truly advanced capacity for patience and calm in the face of know-it-alls.
For someone who denies that his goals are not about money, Omer appears to be obsessed with it. He is avoiding conversation, which is a valid form of exchange.
Im only 1 hour in and I’m lost for words. This conversation makes Omer look literally brainless. Its just like you would ask me where I live and my answer was “I think it rained yesterday”
Jordan Peterson is enjoyable when he's talking in his area of expertise. I think it's pretty clear that he's pandering to his religious audience by being intentionally vague about his belief in God whenever asked. Also how his audience will cheer everything he says when in religious debates as if they're at a wrestling match.
1:19:54 yes. But the point is that, as a human, within the space of human experience, there's no place to stand outside of what happens to humans or what humans can do, so there's no point in this space where human behavior is not implicated. We don't *have to* talk about "should," but we can definitely talk about the consequences of that behavior! And about whether someone should do X or should want someone else to do X to them or for X to happen to them
I still keep hearing Charles Murray and the bell curve refered to as scientific racism in podcasts and talks etc. It seems he touched a very sensitive cultural spot and was smeared and this is a problem I have with the left they seem to want to ignore every piece of evidence of people having different ability
I had only watched the most recent Harris v Peterson debates, not the first ones in Harris podcast, my god...how can anyone be convinced by the "philosophies" of this charlatan (Jordan Peterson)
I love this thumbnail. It’s just so typical of Jordan Peterson. He loves his theatrics. He loves to make himself appear as if he has some kind of tortured titan of intellect, as if he is physically drained by some kind of quest of understanding when in reality he’s just basically a crank with delusions of grandeur.
Jordan believes in the Biblical definition of truth: that the truth and the good (what is in the ultimate human interest) are one. Sam believes in the Modernist definition of the truth: that the truth is ambivalent to human interest. My position? If we act like the universe is ambivalent to our existence, it will be.
"Darwin County 911. What's the address of your emergency?" "My house is on fire. The address here is 1234 Microexample Lane." "Is it true that your place of abode is on fire?" "Why else would I be calling?" "Good. I trust you'll survive it, then." *click*
Something in the way you communicate is a little off putting to me . I'm sure you are a very intelligent person , but if you can not make me understand what you are saying. Well then it doesn't matter your IQ . The least educated person could do the exact same thing.
Jordans position got destroyed by the adultery question. after that. He was just scrambling and scrambling in his frustration. Because he knows it you didn't miss the plot he's just wrong, and can't handle it
1:49:11 amazing that Sam manages to create a thought experiment which seems to reflect the COVID-19 pandemic. Meddling with viruses, inadvertent release, creation of viral super weapons through gain of function research which AIMS to create vaccines to protect AGAINST such viruses. Prophetic to say the least. And max tegmark would classify that as a Pandora’s box you SHOULDNT have opened. Jordan would say what you did there at wuhan was NOT TRUE, as in, it would lead to great harm, Sam would say it’s an excursion down one moral slope which you SHOULD have seen coming, BUT the problem is, we don’t have MULTIPLE INSTANCES of humanity, so if we scre this one up we’re cooked. Be careful opening Pandora’s box. Now we are toying with another dangerous box, that of AI. We don’t know if it leads up a peak or down a slope. And we only have one instance of humanity. Maybe it would be smart to branch, and create a parallel system which doesn’t go down that route. Keep one foot in the known and one in the unknown as Jordan says. And hey, if that box leads up the slope then we take a step with the other foot.
1:31:20 this smells like maslows hierarchy of needs. Survival is the foundation for all other values. Therefore higher values need to transcend and include lower values, so wellbeing is transcendent to survival. Any evolutionary chain which sacrifices lower values for higher values is an evolutionary closed path. Therefore you need a sense for when lower values might be threatened. I believe this might be the sense of moral panic. That is an IMPLICIT HEURISTIC for when a bedrock value is being threatened, though it MAY be misguided. An upgrade to that is a functioning religious framework of social and survival functionality. The flaws to that system are addressed in a scientific understanding of the world. But science CANNOT replace the moral system. Therefore, what Jordan has done is, look back through that functioning moral system of religion, and extract OUT the moral principles, which the religion was based upon, so a secular world can then function morally in a post religion world, where GOD IS DEAD. Jordan says “wait Nietzsche not so fast”, GOD may be dead from a scientific perspective, BUT we need to PICK THE CARCASS and extract OUT the moral principles which operated within that religion. And, the way Jordan does that, is by looking AT that religious framework, viewing the stories not from a scientific realist view, but from a pragmatist view. He extracts out what works, and to do THAT you need to look at the stories, and NOT just wave them off. So to all drifting atheists who were searching for a moral framework and stumbled into WOKE: You are now descending a moral peak into a trough so deep, into the depths of hell as Jordan would put it, chasing some dream of equality, or rather equity, by over correcting the mistakes of the past and essentially using retributive justice to punish those you “believe” were responsible for life’s woes, and that leads straight to the gulag at the bottom of that valley, and you can’t climb out of THAT valley. Just don’t drag us down that slope with you.
57:56 “the inside thing (morality) can’t ground the outside thing (science)”. Maybe not from a completely linear perspective. However, IF you agree that the inside thing, morality, is capturing something true about the outside thing, THEN, you can also agree that it is allowing you to navigate that outside thing, and therefore in some sense, feeds back on your ability to exist IN the outside thing. So, the inside thing, allows you to better navigate reality, it’s a kind of sense of what is good, which is an understanding of what allows survival most optimally, which is what allows the longest term survival, and if one is to make a sacrifice of one of those moral terms in exchange for some other thing gained in the outer thing, it could be that what you did was descend from a higher peak on the moral landscape to a lower peak, you were lead down a hill thinking what was in front of you was more important that the long term survival of you, your family, your society and your species. I think here there is the anthropic principle at work, in a moral sense. Imagine instead of all of the physical constants which allow subatomic particles to exist in our universe, there are moral principles which organisms abide by. Some moral principles, if not maintained, will result in the end of that evolutionary tree, and so one should go back to where the branch in moral principles was, and continue along the former line. In a sense, Sam’s idea of a moral landscape and Jordan’s idea of pragmatic truth capture the SAME thing, BUT, Jordan views it from the inner dimension of those morals being fundamental, whereas, Sam attempts to ground the moral landscape in wellbeing for the greatest good. My view is, well-being is independent to long term survival of the species. You might sacrifice some important moral grounding principle which might destabilise a species in the long term, and sacrifice that for short term well being, not seeing the cliff your species is heading for. I think the idea of Johnathon Haight’s “coddling of the American mind” taught us that feeling safe isn’t the best was to set kids up for optimal survival in the world we live in. That is an example of sacrificing a child’s ability to function in a difficult environment for their short term wellbeing by protecting them instead of exposing them to difficulty. I think that is why there MUST be freedom to explore different ways of living, and allow evolution to help us sift through the less than optimal modes of being compared to the functional ones. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
I was born an atheist. I never bought into all that nonsense. Unfortunately, my family was catholic so I had to do the whole charade... baptism,(of course I didn't have a choice), went to mass which I hated, and then the first communion at the age of 12 y/o. After that I said... enough, not more b.s. For lack of a better word... thank god....😂
Omer says criticism of Islam is a right wing thing. No, it's a left wing thing too. Islam, like any other religion, is simply erroneous and intolerable. Period. To defend religion as a political value is perhaps the greatest error of all. It poisons all politics. Thus, today the left is making the catastrophic error of defending theocrats and terrorists in the name of religious tolerance. They might cause Biden to lose the election.
Gave this another listen after 5 years. Even as someone deeply suspicious of people like Charles Murray, I found this to be a really frustrating conversation. I wish this had been someone with a science background, who could have critiqued the actual data and Murray's methods (while keeping in mind the social realities of course). But I do think Klein was pretty much spot on when it came to Harris' own cognitive biases. His whole "I don't have beliefs, I have objective moral calculations" schtick is absurd. And in hindsight, it's easy to see how he got suckered in by SBF and the "longtermism" grift.
So at first I found Jordan's stance unfounded, and completely opposite.of my beliefs on what truth is, but if I tweak it to truth with a capital T which I define as coming from some divime, universal omniscience, this deals with the issue of truth being mutable/needing to wait for the end of times to assess. It also takes the Darwinian/evolution argument a step further, where Truth is in fact at the basis ofncreation, but not merely by counting lives like sheep, but because it co!we from the Creator and thus there is a fundamental marriage of Truth and Goodness/creation/the source of life.
Sean seems to only accept a very strict definition of science where science is merely observational, a mere collection of data and "is" statements, whereas Sam makes the point that all sciences pull themselves up by some axioms and it is not necessarily "science" either, by Sean's strict definition, that we *should* understand the world in a logically coherent or consistent way nor that we *should* prevent or cure disease, it is only after we decide that these are things that are worth doing that we have a science of physics and, moreso (since the APPLIED sciences are the ones treading on shaky grounds here), medicine, economics, etc. Therefore, either there CAN be a science of morality or no applied science is a "real" science at all if we are limiting ourselves to Sean's perspective.
I'd say it's hard to believe that this didn't kill Sam Harris's career, but I guess anyone who has a basic grasp of philosophy and formal logic already wasn't a fan.
"The scientific endeavour, by demolishing the traditional underpinnings of our moral systems, has produced an emergent nihilism and hopelessness in people that makes them more susceptible to ideological possession" Discuss.
Peterson viewing/judging experience in the world as good or bad is inherently short sighted. Truth has nothing to do with what an individual seems to judge as Good or bad.
2:54:45 is so perfect. Dude starts trying to tell a story of how great he is for debating somebody about why they're wrong on stoning, and inadvertently provides the perfect example of someone with completely opposing, left-leaning politics, who holds an abhorrent moral view because of his religion. As he's trying to make the point that people only hold those disgusting views because of their political leanings. Absolutely insane, I know I'm late to this but cheers Sam for attempting to fight the good fight.
I feel like the whole bit on moral realism got a little too hung up on the is-ought problem. I wish Sam would have leaned more into the medicine metaphor as he has in the past, I think that's one of the most convincing examples. Like we can say medicine is an objective science, while also acknowledging that it's based around the general idea that being healthy is better than being ill. The science of medicine can still advance and develop news ways to cure diseases and make people healthier in as objective a sense as we can define. A science of morality would be largely the same thing in identifying what kind of actions, policies, laws, etc. would be best from the perspective of well-being. Just as the science of medicine doesn't require an "axiom" that being healthy is better than being sick, a science of morality would not need an axiom that we should try to minimize suffering and maximize well-being; simply acknowledging that suffering is bad and well-being is good would be sufficient.
