#388: What is Life? (With Sara Walker)

The best thing about this podcast, for me, was this: Sam found a scientist (they're all duty-bound, apparently, to believe in the spontaneous occurence of life through probability and organic chemistry) who has managed to ask the hard question. Namely, is even the simplest living structure simply too complex to have spontaneously arisen?

Perhaps it's something of a spoiler alert to tell you that Sara Walker doesn't actually answer the question she poses. But she does something even better: she formulates HOW to answer it.

That's it. Nothing else really happens. Oh, sure, they talk about how many other planets might support life, and crap like that. But if you're like me, it is impossible to watch

without thinking, "There's no way anything this complex could ever have just spontaneously begun."

Maybe there is and maybe there isn't. But watching YouTbe videos isn't the same as doing science, and so I'm glad someone is addressing the question in a systematic and not merely an emotional way.

#360, Moron Free Will, with Robert Sapolsky

Something about all of these podcasts on Free Will has been bugging me for years, though I haven't ever gotten worked up enough to dig deep and come up with what it is. Until today. Listening to these two guys marveling over how dumb must of us are for feeling like we are in control of our decisions, and how we do it mostly for egotistical reasons, just pushed the wrong button.

So here are 3 things I'd like to say to Sam:

1. Stop talking about quarks and billiard balls. In fact, stop citing physics at all. I did my phd on the collision of two leptons, and we were unable to describe even that simplest of all interactions completely. Physicists still can't derive a single atom from the laws of physics, and we certainly can't write any equation from fundamental principals that describes a brain. So quit pretending that's possible.

2. I have yet to hear a single testable hypothesis in any of these podcasts. Sure, they're full of gedanken experiments like, "Suppose we stopped the universe and replayed it to exactly where it was 5 minutes ago--then you'd helplessly do exactly all over again whatever it was you did." But this is impossible to actually test. You might as well be arguing about angels dancing on a pinhead. Give me a test that disproves the notion that we can freely decide something. A real proof, not a Dennett approximation.

3. If you are able to prove that we have only the illusion of agency, and that in fact we're each helplessly controlled by the chemical processes of our brains, I'd like to know what you expect us to do about it. Sure, you say "don't hate tornados" and "rehabilitate don't punish." But punishment still has to happen. I've met kids who grew up in a permissive household with no punishment, and they were sociopathic monsters. Or look what happened here in California when we decriminalized theft--it's been chaos. So regardless of whether our wills are free, punishment is still a necessary response that helps us learn to cooperate, no?

If after all this sturm und drang you are unable to point to a single policy change that has to happen because of your beliefs and all you can conclude is "don't hate, and don't believe in evil", well... you could have said all that without wasting our time on all this free will bullshit.

Number 356 Rory Stewart redux

This was a podcast I was looking forward to, because I'm not sure how much credibility I give to Sam's bigotry against Islam. I know he tries to say he's not a bigot, but it seems to me that negative feelings about a whole religion are the exact definition of bigotry. Here's the Oxford website: "Bigotry: obstinate ... attachment to a belief..., in particular prejudice against ... people on the basis of their membership of a particular group."

So, yeah. Face it, Sam. You're textbook bigot.

Next question: Is the bigotry warranted?

Well, don't look to Rory if you want to see a logical hole poked into Sam's arguments. Every point Rory made fizzled out pretty quickly. Like when he suggested it’s impossible to despise an idea without despising the person that holds it. And then a half hour later tells Sam about friends of his who hold reprehensible views. He tries to walk that back, but he's already screwed that pooch. And anyway, what the hell point was he even making? That we can't despise bad ideas anymore, because that diminishes our humanity? It's just stupid.

Whatever. Let's move on. Really, Rory's main defense against Sam's criticisms of Islam goes something like this: "There are many Islams, and that the fact that some Muslims who lived in adverse environments want to murder sinners doesn’t mean that all Muslims are murderous. In any population, there are 15 to 30% who are batshit crazy, so it’s not fair to blame Islam if it has such a proportionate rate of murderousness."

But Sam lands several rather deadly blows against this point, on multiple fronts.
1. Many Palestinians would perpetuate genocide on Isrealis, if only they could.
2. The whole of ISIS is apocalyptically nutso.
3. Politicians and cartoonists and writers across the world are getting murdered by Jihadists.
4. It's in their holy book much less ambiguously than in any other religion's holy writings.
5. We have to be able to say that none of this is okay, and to condemn any system of religion that condones it.

To Rory, a few death threats and a few mass rapings by Muslims do not threaten England, and if forty percent of British Muslims want Sharia Law, or still support Hamas, that doesn't prove anything about their faith. None of this islamophobia is justified, and we should all find something else to worry about. Like Putin. Or climate change.

But here's some scary evidence that something fundamental and critical is being threatened in England, even as we speak: google this question "How many Muslims in England support Hamas?" If you do, you will not get a single British news agency to give you the answer you are looking for. Instead, you'll get a bunch of articles about islamophobia in Britain. Which, to me, means they are already losing a fundamental battle of ideas.

Number 354 with John Gray: Is Moral Progress A Fantasy?

The first thing that strikes you about John Gray is that he seems to never have recovered from reading Animal Farm as a child, so severely scarred by fears of Orwellian totalitarian mind control.

1. His first surprising claim is of the negative progress of the mind control going on currently. He says we’ve regressed to the level of the Soviet state with some kind of modern-day equivalent to their oath of loyalty.

2. But is it hyperbole? Sam asks whether the pendulum is swinging back away from mindcontrol, and groupthink, or whether it is swinging ever further towards it. John pushes back, and says that things were better back in the “good old days”.

3. Ever notice how the one guys that ever say that are white males? The nostalgia fallacy is never held by women, minorities, or Atheists. All of them had it much worse 100 years ago.

4. John claims that the Soviet totalitarian state represented a huge dip downward in human flourishing, and that proves that progress is an illusion. But let's consider this a little closer too: the masses in Tzarist Russia were pretty fucking miserable prior to the revolution. I'm descended from some of them, and all you have to do is google it and you'll see. Comparing life in the aristocracy to life under Stalin is bullshit. That's the same as Butt-fucker Carleson kissing Putin's ass about how great a metro station is and not considering the dire situation across the whole country.

5. Same thing with John's bullshit take on the French Revolution. Which, no coincidence, I'm also descended from refugees from. I say "no coincidence" because America was built by refugees and slaves coming in from really fucked up countries. Apparently John's ancestors never had to flee England. Lucky them. But he's still wrong.

6. Now, the craziest bullshit is that John "proves" that atheists are wrong because, since primitive times, humans have always belived in some kind of deity. By that logic, we're wrong about the universerse, because they also all believed the sun rotates around the earth.

7. But actually, I'll give John this: he does bring up an interesting question: was our primitive, animistic mind, more attuned to the true nature of existence than our logical materialistic minds are nowadays? He doesn't get into metaphysics, but I grant he has a point: mere atheism doesn't explain the Big Bang, the existence of matter, or life itself.

8. John gives the case of pre-World War I Vienna as a moment of supreme civilization which humanity has since fallen from. And yet, at the height of his idealized moment of supreme civilization, a part of the world was being brutally devastated at the whim of a few aristocrats. It was called Galicia, and it was a center of some of the worst poverty in the world, controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

9. So John's point that moral progress is not at all like technological progress, and it is often wiped out within a few generations of an improvement, seems pretty one-dimensional. Technological progress brought global warming and dioxin and asbestos and all kinds of shit that was backward steps, locally. Only in the aggregate could you say technological progress was a thing. So my point is, it's the same with Soviet Russia and Napoleanic France, and all the rest.

10. John's supposed high point--the Classical Era--still allowed for murder of your own children, incest, slavery, racism, a misogyny that we cannot even conceive of, and everywhere, religious wars.

11. One other thing: John makes a point that we can't even be said to be in disagreement with forces opposing us because “in order for you to be able to have disagreement, there has to be agreement,” some quote about Mussolini's Italy. But this doesn’t recognize is that there was a deep bed of agreement among the general population of Italy, and it was only a few intellectuals in the elite circles who were disagreeing about whether fascism was better than communism.

12. There’s an absurdly long aside about how some British war official was not a true consequentialist, because he felt regret when he had to fire an entire office full of people because one of them was a spy. I only mention the aside as a gigantic waste of time, because so much of his answers were like this—ad hominem anecdotes. In fact, every time he said “by the way” he changed to a new subject that was neither by nor way. An example of this is when Sam is trying to make a point about moral relativism, and the next thing you know we find ourselves listening to him tell some pointless story of Bertrand Russell’s friend rescuing him from Bankruptcy.

So unless you're prepared to wade through a lot of BS and are willing to take on some privileged white guy's cursing of "barbarians at the gate," I wouldn't recommend this episode.

#324: Debating the future of AI with Marc Andreessen

One of the rare events in Sam Harris’ podcast career is the occasional conversational train wreck. If nothing else, these remind us all that even our genius host is not quite infallible. When he interviewed Ezra Klein, for instance, (episode number 123) the listening audience could only marvel at the apparent Pexiglass wall that prevented them from understanding each other. Though you couldn’t really hold that against Ezra—Sam was at least half responsible for that fiasco.

But Marc has none of Ezra’s charm. In fact, he’s the hands down the most repellent guest I’ve ever heard on this podcast. Even Scott Adams with his absurd defense of Trump seems more palatable than this guy.

I think Marc’s secret sauce for achieving this distinction is fourfold:
* His almost Naziesque fixation with smart versus dumb people, particularly his conviction that people like him with engineering PhDs are better suited to make public health decisions than people “whose IQs are 50 points lower.”
* His double standard applied to his thinking versus Sam’s, such as which of them is too “religious“ about their convictions.
* I suppose Marc’s gratingly false attempts at a self-deprecating chuckle don’t help.
* And (though this might be unfair) nothing rubs me the wrong way more than a fatuous billionaire.

The funny thing is, I began the podcast with the expectation that Marc was going to champion my point of view: I also didn’t agree with Sam that any imminent AI is likely to “have the lights come on”, i.e. to become conscious. But after having listened to this, I am less secure than ever in that quasi religious conviction.

#318, physics and philosophy with Tim Maudlin

This guy Tim puts the aunt in pedant. He spends far too much of his time burning air on trivial and obvious things like “actual“ versus “now.” Or on whether it was Laplace or Bosch who invented the free-will demon.

I do like his succinct explanation of the difference between “many worlds“ and Copenhagen. That is, a measurement or a photon collapses the photon’s wave function from a quantum superposition to a single state in the many worlds view because the photon in your universe picks one path and the other universes pick the other paths. Whereas in the Copenhagen view the photon wave function collapses because it interacts with a macroscopic object (an eye, a cat).

Tim doesn’t like this explanation because he says the definition of macroscopic is unclear. But I think it’s extremely clear. A macroscopic object is one made of a very large number of particles. Each particle has a wave function. All of those wave functions have become so enmeshed with each other that they have essentially collapsed. And any particle that interacts with them has to lose its quantum superposition too.

Of course, Sam doesn’t point this out because he hasn’t studied quantum physics. But where he does take issue with Tim is when they start debating free will.

Sam says a person choosing between a crème brûlée and a bowl of broken glass might think he’s choosing freely, but he can’t control the subconscious thought processes that determine his choice. So he doesn’t have free will. But Tim says he doesn’t care what the subconscious thought processes are, as long as he doesn’t have to eat the broken glass.

So Tim and Sam have different opinions about whether a choice that you are happy with was done with free will. Both agree that it was orchestrated by some unknowable force that is hidden from you, in your subconscious mind. Sam says that means it’s not free because we’re not in control of that force, and Tim thinks that it’s only not free if you don’t get what you want.

And even though he veers to the pedantic, I agree with him.

My take on #314, "The Cancellation of JK Rowling", with Megan Phelps-Roper

This conversation in itself, though more reasoned and thought-provoking than almost anything else I've come across recently, was not really all that remarkable for Sam, certainly not worth highlighting in this blog....

...but for one salient reason. And that is his recommendation to listen to Megan's podcast, "The Witch Trials of JK Rowling".

Once again, Sam has struck gold and then shared it with us. This podcast is remarkably well done: empathetic, intelligent, highly controversial, and very well produced. It was a fantastic find. And there's no way I would have heard of it--or even of Megan--without Sam's introductions to her. We'd met her already in podcast #12, "Leaving the Church" which, if it did nothing else for me, convinced me to seek a better way to communicate with people "outside my tribe."

So, be you muggle or witch, trans-philic or trans-phobic, I'd recommend you check out Megan's podcast--only 7 episodes long, but full of great moments.