Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson in Vancouver 2018 (with Bret Weinstein moderating) — Night One
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Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson - Vancouver - Night One
Moderated by Bret Weinstein 06/23/2018
This is the first time Sam & Jordan appeared live together on stage. This event took place at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver BC Canada on June 23rd 2018 in front of a sold out audience of 3000 people. The event was produced by Pangburn Philosophy.
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Peterson argues that moral and ethical frameworks must be grounded in deep evolved intuitions and archetypal narratives that predate rational discourse, while Harris insists that values must be derived from facts and empirical reality without relying on religious dogma or unfalsifiable metaphysical claims; their disagreement hinges on whether stories/intuitions or facts are the proper foundation for ethics.
- Peterson claims certain moral intuitions are a priori structures evolved over billions of years and cannot be derived from facts alone, while Harris argues the worst possible misery is objectively bad and grounds all value therein
- Harris contends religious texts embed dangerous dogmas that obstruct rational progress, while Peterson defends archetypal and narrative truths as carrying wisdom that literal-empirical frameworks cannot capture
- Both agree dogmatism and totalitarianism are catastrophic, but disagree on whether religious heuristics remain valuable guides or should be superseded by empirical reasoning
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Both Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson agree that there are two catastrophes to avoid in ethics: the catastrophe of moral relativism (where all values are equally valid) and the catastrophe of arbitrary moral absolutism grounded in religious fundamentalism or unfalsifiable dogma.
“you want to ground a structure of ethics in something solid and and and there's two there's two things you want to avoid two catastrophes let's say one is the catastrophe that you identified with religious fundamentalism and the other is the catastrophe that's associated with moral relativism”
The intuition that there is an objective reality and that understanding can converge when multiple people look at reality with the same tools is more fundamental than and independent of religious narrative, and losing this sense of objectivity undermines the possibility of rational communication with others and accurate prediction of future events.
“that is certainly deeper than religion it's not best captured by stories it's it even if it even if you could as a matter of historical fact point to its roots in story and myth and religion that's not an argument that it's now in the 21st century best captured by story and myth and religion I think it is a fundamental intuition to which our sanity both personally and inter subjectively is anchored I mean to lose a sense of objective reality is to lose the the platform on which you can communicate with anyone and or rationally expect anything to happen a moment from now to think that your memory represents something about a prior state of the world and your beliefs represent something about a possible state in the future all of this is anchored to a sense that there's a difference between knowing something really and just imagining it right there's a difference between perception and hallucination”
People are not as amenable to behavioral change through rational educational interventions as one might hope; this is documented in clinical literature and suggests that appeals to reason alone may be insufficient to modify behavior related to sexuality, reproduction, and other areas of human conduct.
“well people aren't nearly as amenable to behavioral changes as a consequence of rational educational interventions as you might hope I mean and that's that's part and parcel of but that broad clinical literature they're they're not Azamat they're not is amenable to dogmatic intrusions either”
Free speech and free discourse are mechanisms by which dogmatic errors are corrected, and systems of governance that properly elevate free speech as a foundational value put the process of error-correction above the specific dogmas themselves, which is why the First Amendment approach is correct.
“I think of free discourse like the discourse that we're engaged in as the mechanism that corrects totalitarian excess or dogmatic excess and so I also think that systems of governance that are laying themselves out properly have to eval it have to elevate the process by which dogmatic errors are corrected over the dogmas themselves which is why I think the Americans are right say with regard to their first amendment is the process of free speech is the process by which dogmatic errors are rectified and so it has to be put at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of values”
The problem of infinite interpretation in postmodern literary criticism applies equally to the problem of deriving values from facts—you can interpret facts to support many different values just as you can interpret texts in many different ways, so moving away from the text toward interpretive freedom is equivalent to moving away from facts toward interpretive freedom.
“you can you can you could make exactly the same objection with the world of facts is there's an infinite number of facts and there's an infinite number of potential interpretations and so Pat tracking the pathway from the fact to a value is actually impossible it's the same argument with regards to know”
The problem Harris's moral landscape faces is the necessity of an intermediary interpretive structure between facts and values, and Peterson maintains that this interpretive structure is itself not derivable from facts but rather consists of a priori intuitions that take the form of stories, personalities, or narratives.
“the problem is is that I can't see and you actually state this in your book I can't see how you can interpret the world of facts without an a priori interpretive structure and and this is an old philosophical claim it's not unique to me it's it's the claim of conte for example that you can't get directly from the fact to the value because there's an interpretive framework that mediates between you and the facts so first of all I'd like to know if you accept that proposition and then the second question would be if you do accept the proposition then what's your understanding of the nature of the interpretive framework because I think it's best understood at least in part as a personality or as a story for that matter”
Religious fundamentalism is not the core danger; rather, dogmatism—the practice of believing things strongly on bad evidence and enforcing these beliefs through force—is the defining characteristic of totalitarian systems, whether religious or secular, because dogmatism prevents the revision of false ideas through discourse.
“the overarching problem is believing things strongly on bad evidence and B and the reason why dogmatism is so dangerous is that it is it doesn't allow us to revise our bad ideas in real time through conversation it is it that dogmas have to be enforced by force or the threat of force because the moment someone has a better idea you have to shut it down in order to preserve your dog”
Fundamentalism has an advantage over sophisticated theology because the literal reading of text is less constrained than the interpretive additions that reframe it; the more one moves away from literal reading, the more unconstrained one becomes, which allows projection of any desired meaning onto texts.
“this is this is why fundamentalism always has an edge over more quote more sophisticated theology because the the sophisticated theology is in in most cases inspired by a more and more modern recognition that well we can't read it literally because it either makes no sense or it makes barbaric sense right so we have to get away from the literal and the more you get away from the literal the more you are unconstrained by the text and you can just broadcast on it anything you want to put there”
Jane Goodall's discovery in the 1970s that chimpanzees at Gombe engage in coordinated raiding parties against neighboring troops, including tearing apart interloping members, demonstrates that tribal violence and in-group aggression are not uniquely human and cannot be solely attributed to cultural corruption or religious dogma but rather have deep evolutionary roots in primate behavior.
“my reading of what was originally Jane Goodall's discovery about chimp behavior you know because there was this idea that was really rooted in Rousseau Ian's thinking that the reason that people committed atrocities in the service of their group identity let's say they're tribal identity was because culture had corrupted us so was this uniquely human thing but then of course Goodall showed in the 1970s that the chimps at Gombe I think that's been pronouncing that correctly it would go on raiding parties right and so there'd be like four or five adolescent chimps usually male sometimes with a female in there they would patrol the borders of their territory if they found an interloper on the border near the border from another troop even if it was a member of their troop that had emigrated”
Virtually everything good about human life is the result of culture-based and highly intelligent efforts to mitigate the aggressive and selfish impulses that are natural to us, including the state of nature itself which humans recognize as undesirable without such mitigation.
“we have we have these primate capacities that we have to correct for and we're busily trying to correct for almost everything that we've have been evolved to do and we're not you know we don't like the state of nature for good reason and virtually everything that's good about human life is born of our I would argue culture based and and highly intelligent and necessary effort to mitigate what is in fact natural for us”
The doors out of fundamentalism don't open from inside through reinterpretation; they are bashed open from outside by humanism, secularism, and scientific rationality that exerts winnowing pressure on religious traditions, which is why modern Christianity looks less fundamentalist than medieval Christianity but Islam may still embody 14th-century values.
“there's a point I made I think in my first book is that the the doors leading out of this kind of fundamentalism don't open from the inside they get bashed open from the outside and it's it's it's humanism and it's secularism and it's scientific rationality that has exerted such pressure such winnowing pressure on Christianity you know now for multiple centuries that that's why we're not encountering the Christians of the 14th century on a daily basis but we and we are essentially encountering Muslims of the 14th century”
Religious texts contain unambiguous injunctions that rational people following the texts straightforwardly would feel obligated to follow, such as cutting off the hand of a thief (Quran), stoning a non-virgin bride to death (Old Testament), or the permission and regulation of slavery in both Testaments and the Quran, and these textual realities create genuine risks that cannot be explained away through sophisticated reinterpretation.
“if you just want to I want to understand what these words mean right you get at the first pass the literal interpretation right and you're not bringing the the any armamentarium you've brought your view you've got from the outside from other parts of culture to parse the text you're just trying to really if it's in English and you speak English you're you're just trying to decode the words right right and when it says if you're if you're the girl is not a virgin on her wedding night take her to her father's doorstep and stone her to death that you know what stone means you know what girl means you know what father means and you're you're 90% there to an obvious atrocity”
Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions understand the nature of evil, good, and moral reality differently from Christian traditions; specifically, Buddhism treats evil as ignorance rather than malevolent will, which is an irreconcilable difference in fundamental moral understanding.
“Hinduism Hinduism is a completely different set of stories right and many of them the logic the emotional logic the psychological import many of them have the opposite valence from any Christian story you would tell for instance the whole notion of good and evil yeah right which has such primacy I mean you talk about religion being deeper than ethics because ethics just deals with right and wrong and religion deals with good and evil right bedrock okay good and evil do not have the same meaning in the East Buddhism and Hinduism do something very different with living I'm willing to accept your definitions of good and evil through this is just not even evil is just ignorance on some level it's just”
Harris argues that every moral or value claim, when traced back, relies on foundational intuitions that cannot be cashed out by the system itself—this is true of physics and mathematics as well, making moral intuitions no different in kind from other foundational truths.
“every claim every claim we make about anything at a certain point if you trace all the tools we're using down to you know Turtles all the way down to something that we can't explain and justify right this is true of physics it's true of mathematics... we have intuitions of truth that can't be cashed out by recourse to the system itself and it's true morally”
Moses's laws of war in the Old Testament, which prescribe killing every male of an invaded nation and taking the wives, are brutal instructions about military occupation that cannot be recontextualized as acceptable through reading the New Testament or any narrative framing, because they are straightforward prescriptions for genocide and sexual slavery.
“what does that do to Moses's laws of war this is not a narrative this is instructions about what to do when you invade a foreign land if you intend to take over that land you kill every break right there are other rules in there about killing husbands and taking the wives yeah this custom it's a brutal document absolutely brutal and so my point would be I don't know that reading that portion in light of the end even if you call the end of the New Testament I don't know that it changes Moses's laws of war and their acceptability”
Not all intuitions are equally respectable or reliable; someone's intuition that Joseph Smith saw golden tablets and that Mormonism is true is not the kind of fundamental moral intuition that deserves to be treated as foundational in the way that the fact-fiction distinction does.
“given that picture that doesn't render all intuitions equally respectable absolutely someone says well I happen to have an intuition that that Joseph Smith saw those golden tablets and they were you know and what Mormonism is true that's not the sort of intuition we're talking about here your intuition doesn't look good insight into history”
The New Testament supersedes the Old Testament on some points but not all points, and slavery is specifically not superseded in the New Testament, which means that the balance of honest textual reading does not support abolition but rather supports slavery, making the historical abolitionists' theological position genuinely difficult rather than obviously correct within Scripture.
“well if you take the New Testament seriously it does because it's a suit it's a document that supersedes it and I think there's actually technical reasons doesn't supersede it on every point I mean this is a problem slavery is a very straightforward case because clearly the the bible thumpers of the south who were defending slavery with reference to the text felt they were on firm ground and i would just I would invite anyone to read what the the New Testament and the Old Testament say about slavery to see that they were on fairly firm ground that the the balance of the of the honest reading was on the side of clearly we can we can keep slaves right Jesus Jean Jesus never envisioned a world without slavery and he admonished slaves to serve their masters and to serve their Christian masters especially well”
The worst possible misery for everyone—a universe where every conscious being experiences maximal suffering for as long as possible with no learning or silver lining—is objectively bad, and this principle is foundational to all value judgments because one cannot coherently use the word 'bad' without presupposing this core claim.
“my argument is that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad that's hell okay that's so so hell is is the religious version of that but I'm just you can forget about religion or whether there's a God or anything else that we live in a universe that admits of the possibility of experience I'm asking you to imagine a universe where every conscious mind every mind that can have an experience is tuned to the worst possible experience for that mind for as long as possible so there's no silver lining there's no there no lessons learned everything that can suffer suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can”
Religious belief systems can channel primate aggression in unhappy ways, leading to tribal violence amplified by religious dogmatism, but this is not unique to religion; nationalism, racism, and all forms of dogmatism produce similar effects.
“religion can channel these primate urges in unhappy ways so you can get tribal violence that gets amplified by religious dogmatism and that should trouble everyone but it's not unique to religion it's also nationalism and it's racism and it's all other kinds of dogmatism”
The facts that have shaped human evolution over 3.5 billion years have produced a priori intuitive structures that guide our interaction with facts and mediate between us and reality; these structures cannot be derived from facts because they emerged from the evolutionary process and predate our conscious interaction with facts.
“but the thing is is that the facts as they are have been around for a very very very very long time right let's say three and a half billion years the entire expanse of life and it's the operation of those facts on life that has produced the a priori implicit interpretive structures that guide our interaction with the facts and those a priori implicit structures that have emerged out of this evolutionary course have a structure that mediates between us and the facts that cannot be derived from the facts at hand so so then the question is what is that structure”
Religious fundamentalism poses a unique danger beyond secular dogmatism because it invokes supernatural variables and otherworldly rewards that allow believers to justify misbehavior by reasoning that this life doesn't matter in comparison to the afterlife, creating especially pernicious justification for atrocity.
“I would I think one has to acknowledge that there's something uniquely pernicious at least potentially about religious beliefs because they they have the the otherworldly variable the supernatural variable the you're going to get everything you want after you die so this life doesn't matter issue that right that allows for kind of misbehavior that is especially”
The Bible is a complex narrative that has been assembled through centuries of editorial process, and it cannot be understood by taking individual sentences in isolation; rather, each sentence must be interpreted in light of the paragraph, the paragraph in light of the chapter, and the chapter in light of the entire book, which is a coherent developmental narrative with the beginning conditioned by the end.
“it's a narrative and everything in a narrative is conditioned by all the rest of the things in the narrative and it is well known like if you're a screenwriter for example there's an old dictum remember who generated was one of the great Russians that if there's a rifle lying on a table in their first scene that it better be used by the end of the second scene or it shouldn't have been there at all so there's this coherence I'm looking for the rifle in your answer to this question yeah I want to be used my point is is that it isn't reasonable to take a single sentence out of a coherent narrative and say that stands on its own where it's rarely reasonable because you have to interpret the word in the sentence and the sentence in the paragraph and the paragraph in the chapter and the chapter in the context of the entire book”
Harris counters that while narrative logic applies to fiction, biblical texts contain non-narrative injunctions (like Mosaic laws of war) that cannot be recontextualized by later passages without importing external moral frameworks not present in the text itself.
“this is not a narrative this is instructions about what to do when you invade a foreign land if you intend to take over that land you kill every... there are other rules... about killing husbands and taking the wives... I don't know that reading that portion in light of the end even if you call the end of the New Testament I don't know that it changes Moses's laws of war”
Harris objects to Peterson's interpretive strategy, arguing that one can play this game of psychological or archetypal interpretation with almost any text, and that the danger of this is that you become unconstrained by the text itself and can project anything you want onto it.
“you can play this kind of interpretive game with almost any text this is this way of... the problem is that you can so again with this has been focused through the lens of your attachment to Christianity largely but... you can you can read into any story some apparently meaningful set of psychological insights which... there's an infinite number of facts and there's an infinite number of potential interpretations”
Nietzsche observed that discovering the existence of other belief systems with equal utility can shatter one's belief in belief systems themselves, leading to postmodern nihilism, which is why finding a deeper fundamental landscape that subsumes apparent contradictions is important.
“it's one of the things that Nietzsche said was it's very much apropos to this is that you know it's one thing to have your your belief system shattered by the observation that there are other belief systems that are in commensurate that seemed to have equal utility so that that's but it's even worse is that once you make the observation that there are other belief systems that that have equal utility then it can shatter your belief in belief systems themselves and then you're in the postmodern nihilist landscape and that's a big problem or you could just be in a more fundamental landscape that subsumes both of us that's fine let's hope that that can happen”
Sam Harris is a moral realist, meaning there are objectively right and wrong answers to questions of human value, and these answers can be discovered through examining what variables make life good versus needlessly horrible, with the caveat that we almost certainly don't yet know what we're missing about human value.
“I would add to just closing the door to moral relativism here those who do want outwits are wrong to want Auschwitz obviously it's only happened because some people did want now it's not the victims side but the perpetrator side and so crucially for me is the claim that I'm a realist I'm a moral realist and what realism means is that it's there that there are right and wrong answers to questions of this kind and and and you can not know what you're missing in fact we almost certainly don't know what we're missing on questions of human value and then and our job is to discover just how good life can be and just what variables are making it needlessly horrible and to mitigate all of that”
Harris argues that a worldview guided by continuous honest engagement with reality and present tools/insights is superior to one anchored to unchanging ideas from people with none of our present knowledge, even if the process of updating is difficult.
“we should be able to agree that having a worldview guided by a continuous honest engagement with reality and so far as we can apprehend it is better than having a worldview solidified or anchored to unchanging ideas that were born of people who had none of our present tools none of our present insights”
Peterson argues that the phenomenon of religious belief persisting even after being challenged by rationality and science suggests that something important persists in the rubble and that we should not dismiss religious traditions as pure fiction but rather try to extract what Baby is mixed in with the bathwater.
“I don't know if the whole edifice comes crashing down it and it isn't clear to me that you want to claim that because one of the things you did say in the moral landscape and I think this is associated with your interest in spirituality is that there is some baby mixed in with the bathwater and the question is how do we how do we distill that out”
Harris argues that stories about masturbation being sinful, sexuality being dangerous, and celibacy being holy have created unnecessary sexual neurosis and psychological harm throughout Christian history, and that these harms are not justified by claiming the doctrines serve some larger purpose.
“the taboos around masturbation the taboos around sexuality prior to marriage the taboo around divorce all of that is a is just a diabolical machine of needless sexual conflict and misery... there is some interpretation that takes supernatural principles and magic and other worldliness out of the equation here that gets you some wisdom in the heuristic yes if you're masturbating all the time you're not satisfying you are you're monogamous relationship”
There is a hierarchy of moral intuitions based on their universality and context-independence; the most profound moral intuitions apply across all times and places (like the claim that universal maximum suffering is bad), while lower-order intuitions are specific to particular cultures or times and may be superseded by more fundamental principles.
“there's a hierarchy of moral intuitions and the more profound the intuition the more it works as a universal truth across contexts just like in a scientific truth so scientific truth is more profound this is why the postmodernist readings of Thomas Kuhn are wrong is that the idea that protons are real is really fundamental because no matter what span of time and space that you pick you're going to encounter protons it works everywhere and then with moral intuitions let's say our moral a priorities you have the same issue as some of them are so delimited that they only work here and now sort of impulsive low-level intuitions a whim even but some of them are really really deep”
What most troubles Sam Harris about religion are cases where psychologically normal people who are not captured by tribal impulses are led by religious doctrine alone to commit atrocities, such as converts to ISIS who become extremely committed jihadists despite having no prior religious background, demonstrating that doctrine can drive behavior independent of pre-existing tribal aggression.
“what most worries me about religion I would say the obviously religion can channel these primate urges in unhappy ways so you can get tribal violence that gets amplified by religious dogmatism and that should trouble everyone but it's not unique to religion it's also nationalism and it's racism and it's all other kinds of dogmatism but what most worries me are those cases where clearly good people who are not necessarily captured by tribalism per se are doing the unthinkable based purely on religious doctrines that they believe wholeheartedly with with good evidence so you have the person who joins Isis who wasn't even Muslim before they converted you know 16 months ago and they go all the way down the rabbit hole to the most doctrinaire most committed most uncompromising view”
God, in Peterson's conception, represents how consciousness and reality manifest themselves across the longest timescales through the operation of natural selection and other evolutionary processes; this conception of God requires no supernatural intervention and is consistent with evolutionary biology while still capturing something about the transcendent reality that operates across deep time.
“God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth that's a fundamental element of here mythology God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values that's another way of looking at it God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure God is the voice of conscience God is the source of judgment and mercy and guilt God is the future to which we make sacrifices and something akin to the transcendental repository of reputation here's a cool one if you're an evolutionary biologist God God God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men so you know men arrange themselves into hierarchies and then men rise in the hierarchy and there's principles that are important that determine the probability of their rise and those principles aren't tyrannical power there's something like the ability to articulate truth and the ability to be competent and the ability to make appropriate moral judgments and if you can do that in a given situation then all the other men will vote you up the hierarchy so to speak and that will radically increase your reproductive fitness and the operation of that process across long expanses of time looks to me like it's codified in something like the notion of God the Father”
Religious texts and sexual taboos function as behavioral modifications that discourage excessive masturbation and encourage partner-seeking, which increases reproductive fitness and pair bonding, but this adaptive function does not justify maintaining these taboos once we understand the actual variables (sexual health, relationship quality, population balance) that should guide sexual ethics.
“so if I understand you correctly you are agreeing that a certain amount a certain number of people will get masturbate some of them join the priesthood and raped little boys I mean that's their topic so a certain number of people will have masturbated they will have thought honestly is the same topic I mean that though that the the taboos around masturbation the taboos around sexuality prior to marriage the taboo around divorce all of that is a is just a diabolical machine of needless sexual conflict and misery hold on hold on but yes okay you have to take house the whole flood of pornography thing working out okay yeah great I will I will grant you that there is some interpretation that takes supernatural principles and magic and other worldliness out of the equation here that gets you some wisdom in the heuristic yes if you're masturbating all the time you're not satisfying you are you're monogamous relationship with your wife or husband we need to go there let's just you're not procreating and we must agree that a certain amount of masturbation was presented was prevented by that story which made people fear the consequence of them engaging in it which would result in I'm pretty sure less yes masturbation which means that in seeking a release which we are physiologically programmed to seek one might end up looking in a more urgent fashion for a mate right so it's are we going to enforce monogamy”
Religious texts and metaphors function as heuristics—simplified decision-making tools that allow people to navigate complex realities with limited information—and if such heuristics demonstrably increase well-being, this provides a pragmatic justification for them even if they are not literally true.
“what if these religious texts are heuristics through which most people simplify calculations that they are in no position to do based on the limited amount that they are capable of perceiving the amount that they understand about the things that are in play so they're deploying these heuristics maybe to reduce things that degrade well being if it were true that religious heuristics increased well-being by allowing people to actually on average operate in the world in a way that that increased well-being what would you say about them”
Religious stories and heuristics have evolved to solve real adaptive problems in past environments, and this evolutionary functionality explains why they appear valuable to believers, but this value is environment-specific and therefore unreliable as a guide when the environment changes.
“so there's no answer Bret's question because I think oh sorry sorry I answered the first half of it but the second part is I think that this is where I'm gonna sound like a postmodernist which I really hate I would say sentence by sentence yes you're correct paragraph by paragraph perhaps but here's here's the problem with complicated texts especially ones that actually constitute narratives so in imagine imagine this so you imagine you're at a movie and it's a movie with a twist at the end and so the entire movie is set up to make you think one particular way and to have one set of experiences but when you put the twists in at the end it changes the entire structure”
There is a tension in the Old Testament between dogmatic rules and prophetic traditions, and to the degree one is interested in religious phenomenology, one finds oneself on the side of the prophetic tradition, which implicitly contains a damnation of cruelly dogmatic rules.
“there's a real tension and this is I think the tension that would be of interest to you is there's a tension between the dogmatic and the prophetic traditions and I think to the degree that you're interested in religious phenomenology you find yourself on the side of the prophetic tradition and the prophetic tradition has implicitly in it what would you call an an implicit damnation of those dogmatic crew those cruelly dogmatic rules”
In Revelation, there is a psychological truth that things always fall apart and that societies come to an end (apocalypse is built into the structure of human reality), and that the hero is born at the darkest point in the journey, with Christ identified with truthful speech, suggesting redemption under apocalyptic conditions comes through the revelation of truthful speech.
“there's an idea that's expressed in that book is that it's something like things are always falling apart in a fundamental manner... there's an apocalyptic element to human life we fail in small ways and we fail in catastrophic ways and everything that we have we lose and we die so there's and societies come to an end... the hero is born at the darkest point in the image in the journey and it's a psychological truth... when things fall apart that's the time for the birth of the hero and the hero in revelation is also the place where free where we're truthful speech most clearly manifests itself because in the Christian tradition Christ is identified with truthful speech”
Peterson reconceptualizes the two catastrophes Harris identifies as 'a pathology of order and a pathology of chaos' using slightly different terminology but working on the same axis.
“I think of that as a pathology of order and a pathology of chaos so the terminology is slightly different but I think we're working on the same axis”
The idea that you can have a complex book that contains all the answers but that those answers are not obvious even to experts, such that you cannot claim with certainty that you understand it correctly, is rarely given weight by religious fundamentalists who conflate the claim that the text is absolute truth with the claim that their interpretation is correct.
“because you could imagine a situation where you had a book and I'm not saying this is the case it's an imaginative exercise where you had a book that had all the answers that was extraordinarily complicated and so that when you read it it wouldn't be obvious that you understood it perhaps wouldn't be obvious that you didn't understand it either but you're not going to be able to you can't get an uninterruptible and so the fundamentalist claim is far worse it's that not only is there an absolute reality truth embedded in the book but that their particular take on that absolute reality is the absolute take on that book”
A prayer can be answered in the naturalistic sense when a person genuinely confesses wrongdoing, accepts responsibility, and opens themselves to understanding what they did wrong and how to correct it; this process of moral reorientation through sincere self-examination represents a form of answered prayer without requiring supernatural intervention.
“so imagine that okay so let's imagine that hellish situation that you laid out okay but but let's let's put the extra twist in it because one of the things that we both decided I think was that you also have to build in the intent into that so let's say the hell that we're talking about isn't the victim of the terrible massacres that you laid out in the jungle story but a perpetrator okay so someone who's actually acted in a malevolent manner truly malevolent manner okay or maybe perhaps we wouldn't have to take that extreme case we could say well perhaps you've decided that you've seriously done something wrong okay and that you you want to get away from Hell you want to make things better okay so here's here's an exercise you can try so what you do is is as you sit on the edge of your bed and you say okay what I did was wrong and you have to really believe this right so you've thought about it's killing you it's killing you it's now you're penitent and you're confessing let's say and you're confessing to yourself as much as to anyone and you say I really want to know what I did wrong and I really want to know what I could do to put it right and I'm willing to accept any answer that will manifest itself to me try that see what happens that's a prayer that will be answered”
Religious texts claiming to be divinely authored cannot be easily edited or reformed without losing their authority, and this lock-in effect keeps believers shackled to Iron Age philosophies and conversations when they should be having 21st-century conversations about ethics grounded in modern understanding.
“insofar as you make religion look palatable insofar as you suggest to your audience that they can they can have their religious cake and eat it too they can they can have their reason they can have their respect for science they can have a 21st century worldview but they can also hold on to everything they love in Christianity or fear to lose and it is undoubtedly mostly Christianity but but whatever any religion my concern is that it keeps us shackled to these Iron Age philosophies and these Iron Age conversations where we should be having a 21st century conversation about everything ethics included”
Peterson states he acts as though God exists but is cautious about claiming he believes in God literally; he argues that true atheism would make one more likely to commit crimes like those described in Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, suggesting that belief in God (or the functional equivalent) is necessary for moral restraint.
“I say I act as if he exists a much more precise claim... if I were really an atheist I would be far more poorly behaved than in fact I am but I would be like Raskolnikov committing murders”
Sam Harris is concerned that Peterson's redefinition of God using these abstract principles does not correspond to what most religious people mean when they say they believe in God, and that Peterson's rhetorical choice to use the term 'God' for these naturalistic processes may mislead audiences into thinking he endorses traditional theism.
“I was not hearing in that list of attributes a God who could care if anyone masturbated I was not hearing a God who depends on what else is stopping you from doing Sam well I'm sorry but I miss that I said it depends on what else it's stopping you from doing well yeah okay so it's it's important to do something other than masturbate yes yes which which actually constitutes a problem which is harder than it sounds I'm not hearing a god a personal God who can possibly hear anyone's prayer is much less answer them right and I'm just I'm wondering what percentage of religious people who would say oh yeah I believe in God and it's the most important thing in my life what percentage of those religious people do you think have in mind a God of the sort you just described”
Jordan Peterson attempted in 'Maps of Meaning' to find universal patterns across multiple knowledge domains—Christianity, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, emotion/motivation research, and Piaget's developmental theory—to discover patterns that repeat across all dimensions of evaluation, which would indicate deep structure independent of cultural variation.
“I tried to address that problem seriously like it's a really big problem that it's the problem of multiple interpretations it's the postmodern problem is that there's an infinite number of potential interpretations okay so oh so what do we do about that and the answer is it's something you allude to I'm sorry in in the moral landscape and and it's part of the basis of your argument why these things need to be grounded in facts so because that is part of the the answer to the problem of an infinite number of interpretations in maps of meaning I tried to do what al Wilson recommended but this was before he wrote his book I tried to use a conciliation so I looked at multiple religious systems I looked at Christianity I looked at evolutionary biology I looked at philosophy I looked at neuroscience and I looked at the literature on emotion and motivation and and in the literature on play that was very nicely delineated by Piaget and I tried to see where there was a pattern that repeated across all dimensions of evaluation”
The notion of prophecy itself is dangerous and worth worrying about because the claim that ancient books contain perfect descriptions of the future if only interpreted rightly has led generations to live according to apocalyptic expectations that have consistently failed to materialize.
“the notion of prophecy is dangerous and worth worrying about the idea that any ancient book contains in it a perfect description of rightly interpreted however difficult to interpret it if you're only smart enough you could extract from this text a perfect window on to the future right and that that whole generations of people have lived by the lights of this cockamamie idea right that the world is going to end and it's ending is going to be glorious right this is this is the center of most most eschatology”
Sam Harris focuses on reducing suffering rather than maximizing well-being as the initial basis for ethical agreement because it is easier to gain initial agreement between people on what constitutes a generalized ethic by concentrating on what we don't want (avoid Auschwitz, avoid Gulag Archipelago) rather than on what we do want, which is harder to achieve consensus upon.
“I focused on the suffering element I think as I've done in my own work because I actually think it's easier to zero in on in some sense like I think it's easier for people and I think you lay out the argument in the moral landscape kind of like this I think it's easier perhaps to gain initial agreement between people on what might constitute a generalized ethic to concentrate on what we don't want yeah I'm not saying that what we do want is unimportant but it seems to me to be harder to get a grip on we don't want to Auschwitz we don't want the Gulag Archipelago”
Good stories (like languages) share enough commonality across the class of all stories that we can identify what constitutes a story, and similarly there is enough commonality across good stories that a canonical good story can be identified, which is what Harris does by contrasting horrible versus good conditions.
“you could say well there's a very large number of stories it's like yes there are but the fact that there's enough commonality across the class of stories the set of all possible stories so that we can identify what constitutes a story and I would say that there's enough commonality across the set of all possible good stories that we can say well here's a canonical good story”
The thing to fear about religious belief is not religion itself but rather the dogmatic nature of how religious belief is held; if dogmatism is removed from religion, the buildings, music, paintings, and phenomenology of spiritual experience become potentially valuable rather than dangerous.
“the only thing that's wrong with the religion is the dogmatism if you get rid of the door I've got no problem with the buildings and the music and the and the paintings and wait wait no that wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute that's not a trivial that's not a trivial point and it's not just a joke because the buildings and the music are very important parts of the religious process”
Sam Harris is deeply interested in the phenomenology of spiritual experience and the genuine subjective changes in consciousness that occur through religious practice, but maintains that such phenomenological reality does not require supernatural explanations and must be grounded in universal human psychology rather than accidental cultural specifics.
“I've got no problem in fact I'm deeply interested in the phenomenology of spiritual experience so so whatever experience someone like Jesus had whoever he was historically or any of the other major arts and patriarchs of the world's religions though that phenomenology is is subjectively real I mean that it's diverse I'm not saying everyone's had the same experience but there are changes in consciousness that explain both how religions have gotten founded by their their founders and the experiences people have had in the presence of those people or by you following their methodologies”
Peterson proposes that Christianity contains within it the deepest claim that the thing that is redeeming is free truthful expression (the Word), and that if Harris agrees that free truthful speech is the antidote to totalitarianism and pathology, then Peterson's embodiment of this principle in Christian theology (Christ as the Word) is a parallel claim.
“one of the things I would say that's absolutely crucial to Christianity in particular is the notion that the thing that's redeeming is exactly that [free truthful expression]... and it doesn't matter... if we both agree on that the idea that the free expression of truthful speech is the antidote let's say both denialism and to totalitarianism then the notion that that might be embodied in something like the word which is truly I think the deepest of Christian ideas is that why is how is that not the same claim”
Peterson distinguishes between literal truth and metaphorical truth, claiming that metaphorical truth is when something is literally false but if you behave as if it were true you come out ahead compared to behaving according to the fact that it's false; such truths occupy an intermediate space between false and true.
“metaphorical truth is my argument that there are some things which are literally false but if you behave as if they were true you come out ahead of where you would if you behaved according to the fact that they are false and so that these things hover in a kind of intermediate space to call them false is incorrect”
Well-being is an elastic term that subsumes the positive side of being, and reducing suffering is a foundational moral principle, but well-being captures broader possibilities of what consciousness can achieve in the universe beyond mere absence of suffering.
“I know from having I don't think we spoke about this on my podcast but from having seen you in other interviews I think you think that phrase doesn't capture everything one could reasonably want but I think it does a mattress I've you know it's an elastic suitcase term for a reason and it's it's actually in reading your book I realize there's a point of contact here because you use the word being capital B being was as though it were imbued with significant gravitas”
Zero percent of surveyed UK Muslims report that homosexuality is morally acceptable, a finding that reveals a stark difference from baseline population responses to almost any other moral question, indicating a real and systematic disagreement on fundamental values that cannot be easily reconciled.
“the fact that zero percent of UK Muslims think homosexuality is acceptable right zero percent me you there's almost no question you can come up with where we could pull this this this society and say you know I mean do you think that that the you know Lizard King is living in the Oval Office you know that you do never get a zero percent response to any poll question right but if you ask Muslims on the streets of London is homosexuality morally acceptable apparently you can find no one who says it is”
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an ambiguous textual claim that scholars have debated for 2,000 years, and whether Christ was physically resurrected is not a simple question that can be easily answered, though the most straightforward modern interpretation would be that it is almost certainly not a physical resurrection.
“someone once asked you whether you thought Jesus was literally resurrected and you said it would take me 40 hours to answer that question okay that's best if that's the kind of thing I'm responding to here you don't need to do that if you have a clear-cut answer to that question I don't have it cleared out if you don't and if you don't that connects with many other things that we still have to talk about yes definitely because that it isn't obvious in the biblical account that Christ was literally resurrected so it's not simple there's no no no no you don't but if the question is do you think he what let's bless put probabilistically I mean anything's possible I'll tell you that it's possible that he was physically resurrected I mean it's it's not it's even the second quantum mechanics the point is you said it would take me 40 hours to answer the question I didn't say that he was go ahead how's this for an answer almost certainly not”
The university systems that have helped us make sense are breaking down at the same moment that a network of people trying to make sense in an alternative way is emerging, creating both risk of failure and opportunity for upgrading our intellectual software on difficult issues.
“we are existing in a moment where all of the systems that have helped us make sense are breaking down the university systems are breaking down and at that same moment we have a network of people who are trying to make sense in an alternative way”
Sam Harris admires Jordan Peterson's conversations with Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Brett Weinstein, finding approximately 90% of Peterson's statements in those conversations wise and well-intentioned, with the remaining 10% being problematic in ways that made their own conversations difficult.
“I reached out to Jordan and it really was born of seeing him in conversation with people other than myself I saw him to a podcast with Joe Rogan I saw him speak to Dave Rubin I saw him speak with Brett on on Rogen's podcast and I had so much admiration for him in those conversations it's 90% of what he said in those conversations struck me as really wise and useful and well-intentioned and 10% didn't”