Episode 125: Our Lovecraftian Universe?

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Peter: Hello out there. This week on The Theory of Anything podcast, it was our honor to have back on Micah Redding of the Christian Transhumanist Podcast. We had a joyful conversation, touching on religion, science fiction, and teleology. My intention was to look at science fiction and fantasy for an indication of the kind of universe we live in with respect to meaning. We also touch on whether or not it makes sense to believe in a personal God that answers prayers. What is the difference between panpsychism and teleology? And whether there is a difference between an actively malevolent lovecraftian universe and a meaning neutral universe in line with existentialism? I loved this conversation and I hope someone else does too. Or at the very least, I hope someone is inspired to rewatch Ridley Scott's Prometheus.

[00:01:08]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast.

[00:01:10]  Unidentified speaker: Hey guys.

[00:01:11]  Unidentified speaker: Hello, Bruce and Micah.

[00:01:14]  Unidentified speaker: Hello, hello.

[00:01:16]  Bruce: We got Micah Redding with us back again. This is a topic that Peter picked. Peter, do you want to maybe introduce the topic? I did want to read my short article at the beginning, but maybe you can explain what it is we're gonna be discussing.

[00:01:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, of course.

[00:01:32]  Peter: So this is something that you introduced me to, this concept, Bruce. I mean, obviously, not obviously, but I had read some HP Lovecraft before. But when you started talking about this idea of a Lovecraftian universe, a universe that is actively malevolent, a universe created by perhaps evil wizards, that kind of like provoked a chain of thought in my mind. And I started thinking about this different ways to look at reality. I mean, maybe it kind of coincided with me getting into teleology a little bit more. And suddenly, I started, when I watched science fiction, or read science fiction, I started thinking about things in terms of a meaning neutral universe, a inherently meaningful universe, or a Lovecraftian or actively malevolent universe. And I'm just in this space where everything I see, I start classifying it in that way. So I guess I found your idea pretty convincing or interesting, I suppose. And yeah, so that's where I'm at. And also, I just like to give a big shout out to this Paul Davies book, The Cosmic Blueprint, which is basically the most convincing argument I've ever read for teleology, or this idea that we do live in a universe that's meaningful. And I'll get more into that as this conversation transpires, of course. But Bruce, I know you have your essay, your article that I thought we could kick things off with. So if you want to go into that, we'll see where this conversation takes us.

[00:03:44]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[00:03:44]  Bruce: So this is a blog post I wrote back in my religious blogger days. This is February 26th, 22nd, 2010. So Howard Phillips Lovecraft, born August 20th, 1890, was the great horror writer of his generation. Lovecraft created the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, which is even today visited liberally by imaginative writers the world over. Even one of my favorite Babylon 5 episodes, Third Space, visited Lovecraft's chilling universe. Lovecraft seems to have lived a depressing and lonely life. As a young man, particularly from ages 18 to 23, he had quote, almost no contact with anyone but his mother, end of quote. In 1924, he married, though he and his wife separated a few years afterwards, never to live to live with each other again. The divorce was never finalized. Lovecraft was hardly a prolific writer and never wrote even a single full-length novel. He would have died in an obscurity had it not been for the efforts of his pen pals, particularly August Derleth, who managed to breathe life into his stories. Not socially adept, Lovecraft's pen pals were his real social life. He is believed to have written nearly 100,000 letters in his lifetime, of which one-fifth survive. Though through his correspondences, he inspired numerous famous authors, including Fritz Leiber and Robert E.

[00:05:01]  Unidentified speaker: Howard from Conan fame.

[00:05:03]  Bruce: His stories directly inspired the current generation of horror writers such as Stephen King. King called Lovecraft, quote, the 20th century's great practitioner of the classic horror tale. Lovecraft invented a whole new genre of horror known today as cosmic horror, cosmic pessimism or cosmicism. In Lovecraft's tales, typically the storyteller is explaining how they stumbled upon some bit of forbidden knowledge that proves to marginalize the importance of the existence of humankind. Unable to deal with the truth, said storyteller either goes insane and is locked up in an asylum or commits suicide to escape the truth. One of my favorite examples of this is the story of the Shadow of Innsmouth, over Innsmouth, which I might add was cripplingly brought to life in the video game Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth. In this classic tale, a visitor to the seaport town of Innsmouth becomes too curious for his own good and begins to research the strange happenings in Innsmouth. He accidentally stumbles upon the horrifying tale that the residents of Innsmouth are actually a crossbreed between humans and the spawn of Cthulhu known as the Deep Ones, an ancient advanced race of sea monsters that make humans look like mere monkeys. Forced to spend the night in their hotel, he soon finds that the denizens do not intend to let him leave Innsmouth alive with his knowledge. Though he manages to escape with his life, he soon discovers that he was drawn to the town because he himself is a descendant of Innsmouth stock.

[00:06:26]  Bruce: He soon finds his human features dissolving day by day as he is drawn to the siren call of the deep ones in the sea. This story is an apt illustration of Lovecraft's reoccurring themes, particularly psychic disintegration in the face of cosmic horror perceived as truth.

[00:06:41]  Unidentified speaker: That was a quote.

[00:06:42]  Bruce: Discovery of advanced races of gods hostile to humanity, and horror at discovering one's bestial evolutionary heritage. Joyce Carol Oates suggested that Lovecraft's gothic tales, quote, gothic tales, would seem to form psychic autobiography, apparently inspired by his own religious views, commonly called Maltheism, where one, quote, achieves the mere opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality, end quote. In a letter to Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft affirms his agnostic atheist beliefs. All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world or an eternal survival of personality exists. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all guesses which can be made about the universe. Indeed, it is not hard to discern that Lovecraft's horror was nothing less than that of an atheist worldview followed with fidelity to its logical conclusions. I should probably note at the time, based on the way an atheist would have seen things scientifically at the time. Lovecraft's real gift was his ability to understand the ramifications of his own beliefs and to channel that into horror fiction. To Lovecraft, morality was subjective and thus meaningless, quote, in a cosmos with absolute values, we have to rely on the relative values affecting our daily sense of comfort, pleasure, and emotional satisfaction, which gives us relative painlessness and contentment, we may arbitrarily call good and vice versa.

[00:08:13]  Bruce: One's personality, one's personal morality simply impacted upon another with no hope of any sort of universal resolution, proving morality a mere illusion, quote, what now gives one person or race or age relative painlessness and contentment often disagrees sharply with the psychological side from what gives the other, gives the same boons to another person or race or age. Therefore, good is relative and variably invariable quality, depending on ancestry, chronology, geography, nationality, and individual temperament. To Lovecraft, humanity was of no significance in the cosmic scheme of things. Quote, now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos at large. Once properly understood, the universe was a terrifying place from which our only protection was ignorance. We were a tiny bubble of illusory order floating in a sea of universal nothingness that can and would snuff us out when it got around to us. It got around to it. Quote, the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of a black sea of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. His love for science clashed with what it implied about humanity and our utter unimportance. If we really understood, madness would be the only option.

[00:09:41]  Bruce: Quote, the sciences, each straining in their own direction have hitherto harmed us little, but someday the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. His belief in the godless world in part drove Lovecraft to write his weird tales, allowing him what he called imaginative liberation from quote, the galling limitations of time and space and the natural law for which forever imprison us. So his fiction was paradoxically a simultaneous release from reality while attempting to face it head on. The horrors he wrote reflected his true horror of our place in the universe, yet were somehow more satisfying in that we were not alone and were actually surrounded by wondrous and fantastical just out of sight. Even terrible gods like Cthulhu and Dagon, who cared nothing for humanity other than to breed us with their own spawn, would be a relief compared to the non-existent god that cared nothing at all.

[00:10:52]  Unidentified speaker: That's the end of the post.

[00:10:54]  Peter: I've got a question for you guys based on that. If we can start here. We've got, you know, I'm a little disoriented because we had a little, some technical problems, but on our show again, the amazing Micah, also known as the Christian transhumanist. I don't know if that's your name, but I think that could be cool if you were just the, you know, it seems like that was about 10 years ago on YouTube. Everyone had like a handle like that or whatever. But you know, we've got the Christian, the Christian transhumanist Micah. And I'm curious, based on Bruce's blog post there, do you and or Bruce, do you see a difference between like a more naturalistic, meaning neutral universe and a actively malevolent Lovecraftian universe? Because it seems like we're not, what I hear you saying, Bruce, is you're kind of connecting the two.

[00:12:02]  Bruce: Lovecraft was connecting the two, in my opinion.

[00:12:05]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:12:05]  Bruce: So I agree with you. So Lovecraft saw a meaningless universe, not necessarily directly. Well, that's not quite right. I could explain in more detail what he, the aspects of it that he thought were somewhat malevolent. But there's kind of this idea within Lovecraft, in his personal beliefs, that the universe just did not care.

[00:12:31]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:12:32]  Bruce: So that would be more the indifferent universe, not the malevolent universe. Now, when he wrote his stories, you would have these really kind of malevolent gods. He would always portray them as just not caring about us because he was trying to capture that chillingness of an uncaring universe. But like they always end up kind of caring about us. They want to mate us and breed us and you know, sometimes they're just gonna wipe us out at some point because they just don't care, you know, like there's different depending on the story, there's different things that he has in mind. But a lot of times, they come closer to being malevolent. There's even some that I would even dare say come somewhat closer to being not caring but maybe care a little bit. And so there's they're almost not evil, some of the some of the god races that he writes about. So it sort of depended. I mean, like sometimes he'd do pulp, sometimes he'd do more serious science fiction. And depending on which story he's doing, he would change things around, right? So like if you're reading Dunwich Horror, Dunwich Horror is very pulpy. And ultimately the way they defeat the Cthulhu Mythos is they learn a bunch of spells and they cast the spells and they overcome the evil. Like most of his stories aren't like that, right? Where the good guys win. He does that sometimes. But like most of his stories, they find out the truth and they just sort of go mad, right? And it's just a bad ending. So it always depended somewhat on which story he was telling.

[00:14:02]  Bruce: And he was first and foremost just trying to write fun stories, right? But I think his own personal worldview probably came closer to not the universe being malevolent, but to just being indifferent.

[00:14:16]  Micah: Something that's different to me about those two things is the role of knowledge. So in some of those stories, it seems like the idea is that it's the knowledge itself. It's the knowledge of the kind of horrifying indifference that then is corrupting or destructive to the human mind. And so then that ignorance becomes this safety net. And I think there's a lot of things that are like that. That I'm currently reading, There Is No Antimemetics Division, where it's to know about the kind of horrors that surround us that actually gives them power over us. So the bubble of ignorance that most people live in is actually protective in some way. And it seems like in this era that Lovecraft is writing in, I'm thinking about the king in yellow, which precedes Lovecraft by a few decades.

[00:15:20]  Bruce: And that he wraps into his mythos. So King in Yellow is today considered part of the Lovecraft mythos, even though it predates him.

[00:15:29]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:15:30]  Micah: And I think, Bruce, you kind of opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of, there's a lot of thinking during this era that is sort of fearful about this discovery, right? I think even like Nietzsche, who, you know, other people will understand better than I do. But I think, you know, the sentiment that he seems to be expressing is, you know, God is dead, we have killed him. And now we are horrified because we don't know what to do now. We, you know, we're kind of lost in some sense. And this seems to me to be an attitude that, that was occurring throughout the scientific and intellectual world of the time, is that yeah, it's not just that the universe is indifferent, but that there is some kind of a tragedy or horror that's actually emerging from that learning of its indifference, where, yeah, it's actually like a psychological danger to us in some ways. So I would not, you know, I would distinguish between a meaning indifferent universe and a malevolent universe, but it seems like that for a lot of people, as soon as they considered the possibility of a meaning neutral universe, it went far beyond that into the malevolent territory. And maybe that's because even to maintain the kind of capacity for meaning neutrality, meaning knowledge is not ultimately destructive to the human mind. That actually is a kind of meaning as well, right? Or at least it's a very hard target to hit precisely neutral on that scale of meaningless.

[00:17:26]  Unidentified speaker: That's a good point.

[00:17:26]  Unidentified speaker: To meaningful.

[00:17:27]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:17:28]  Bruce: So, let me, so yes, particularly episode 56 is what Micah is referring to, if you called Rationality, Religion and the Omega Point. And like I go over Tolstoy's story. Tolstoy is someone who literally, I would dare say started going mad over just trying to deal with what science was, the cosmology of science was saying at the time, because it seemed to rip away all meaning out of his life. And he couldn't figure out how to enjoy his life anymore. Like nothing gave him meaning anymore. And what he did to overcome it is ultimately, he became a Christian. But he even struggled with that. Like he kind of goes through where he disagrees with Christianity, things like that, or the Christianity of his era and country. But I think what Micah is saying is correct, that the idea of neutrality was in some sense perceived, and I would even argue it continues to be perceived today, except by a few, as something malevolent, right? That if the universe is indifferent to us, and there's no meaning, that's really bad. That's a bad thing, and it's difficult to know what to do about it, right? And so I do think that was definitely the attitude that Lovecraft took. And he's channeling this into his stories, but this is, keep in mind that we're talking about a guy who was almost surely mentally ill, right? Like, so he was, at a minimum, he was clinically depressed, right? But it might be something worse than that.

[00:19:06]  Bruce: He is channeling this into his stories, and he's taking what he thinks he's learning from the cosmology of his day, the science of his day, and he's trying to put the horror he feels over it into his stories. And this is how he's come up with his horror stories. By the way, there's another really great horror author, Thomas Ligotti, who's alive today, who's considered the modern lovecraft. He's also mentally ill. Go read about interviews with him or something. And he just channels the horror of his life into his stories. So you read these horror stories, and he's not even trying to hide it, like that it's all something about his life. So there's this horror story that I read of his where the boss at work is a monster, and so it's terrifying to approach the boss. The whole story is so obviously just what we all experience when we're afraid of our boss, right? And how hard it is to try to go reason with them, and the way that the company slowly takes away and eats away your time, so it takes your dreams from you until finally all you can do is have the dreams that the company wants you to have. I mean, like it's very, in some ways, these mundane horror that comes from this kind of idea that the universe just does not care, right? About you, about your values, about what you care about.

[00:20:34]  Peter: One thing that occurs to me, I mean, I'm speaking to two people who are religious, who are Christian, which, you know, is a view that I'm seem to be getting more sympathetic to. But I really want to steel man this idea, you know, before I move on to some other science fiction, we're going to talk about xenomorphs, we're going to talk about predators, borgs, some other things. But I want to steel man this idea that this universe is meaning neutral, you know, and that we have to create our own meaning. I mean, it might not be so bad. Lots of people seem to do it and are fine. And, you know, they don't go mad like Tolstoy or Lovecraft or Ligotti, is that who you said?

[00:21:30]  Bruce: Yeah, Ligotti.

[00:21:32]  Peter: Ligotti, they're just, they live perfectly honorable lives, just creating their own meaning.

[00:21:39]  Unidentified speaker: So this is a text.

[00:21:41]  Peter: I'm just actually reading a text I wrote to my girlfriend here and attempting to steel man this meaning neutral universe idea. I guess I might be kind of a weird person to date if I'm sending these texts to my girlfriend. But so our laws of physics suggest that the universe is deterministic. The second law of thermodynamics suggests heat death is the ultimate end of reality as we know it. The behavior of subatomic particles is ultimately what defines nature. If there is meaning in the universe, it's something we must arbitrarily create for ourselves in our paleolithic minds governed by selfish genes. We are ultimately a collection of atoms perceiving other atoms in a world governed by something like chaos or determinism. And if it at times seems we find ourselves in a special kind of world, it's because the multiverse is so large that of course we find ourselves here. The Anthropic Principle. So yeah, so like the Anthropic Principle is conceived of by Douglas Adams were a puddle wondering why the shape of the hole in the ground fits us so well. What's wrong with this worldview, religious guys?

[00:23:12]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, why is it so compelling to so many people?

[00:23:16]  Micah: I think constitutionally, I'm very much a skeptic and a naturalist, I think. And I probably would be, in a complete sense, if I hadn't discovered Tipler and transhumanism at a young age and kind of reconsidered how a lot of these things are framed. So I find it, yeah, I find it very compelling in some ways, the meaning neutral universe. And it certainly seems to at some level be the truth about our lives, right? We, you know, we by and large, whatever our ambitions, aspirations, dreams, hopes, loves, they have failed, they fail inevitably because we die and other people die. And so we, whatever we achieve is partial at best, incomplete, and we, we just have to sort of make the best of it. And, and when we do that, we, you know, we actually can sometimes seem to be making the, you know, actually actively doing the best thing possible in, in our lives, right? When we recognize that, that sort of no one's coming to save us, we can, you know, the best we can do is just kind of make what we can, make the meaning we can out of, out of our situation. That seems to be really effective for some people. So, yeah, I think, I think that that is a compelling idea. And it, for me at least, it is something that I sometimes need to work within. What, where that fails for me is when you start zooming out farther and start asking about the kind of long-term consequences of this and, and whether you, whether you're sort of implicitly leaning into something else.

[00:25:38]  Micah: So, you know, if you are aspiring to something to change the world in some way, and you come up against, for very practical reasons, you come up against, you know, the limits of an individual human life. If you are still striving for that, if you are still striving for these, you know, these big changes to create new and glorious knowledge, to help enable a wonderful and beautiful future. In some ways, it seems like you are implicitly already working within an assumption that the universe is sort of ready to meet you in that, that you're leaning into something that's true beyond your own personal experience. And so the more you kind of go into these larger scale things, the more it seems to me like we're either working within some kind of meaning context that we project onto the universe, or we are working within a kind of perspective of despair. And there's a, there's a, since we're all reading quotes, there's something from Bertrand Russell that I always think about.

[00:26:59]  Micah: And he says, he has this idea that man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his growth, his hopes and his fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental co-locations of atoms, that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. So Bertrand Russell is counseling a philosophy of despair and trying to build something on top of it. And yet that philosophy of despair does not look like an optimistic, hopeful, certainly not a transhumanist future, certainly not a future that I would be striving for.

[00:28:15]  Unidentified speaker: And so-

[00:28:16]  Peter: Kind of the anti-Tipler is what I'm hearing.

[00:28:19]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[00:28:20]  Bruce: Keep in mind, that was the view of the time, right? Like this isn't just Bertrand Russell we're talking about. This seemed to be, this seemed to many, many, many people that were elites in scientific circles like this, or I guess Bertrand Russell would be a philosophic circle, but you know what I mean. That it seemed like these were just implications of the science we were discovering.

[00:28:44]  Unidentified speaker: And they truly, truly believed that, right?

[00:28:48]  Bruce: Let me try to give my own answers.

[00:28:50]  Unidentified speaker: I think I agree with what Micah is saying.

[00:28:52]  Bruce: So let me say that I've actually experienced this myself. I went through, I've mentioned on this podcast, I went through a period where I was in lots of pain all the time. I was really, really struggling. And I was, without a doubt, I was in a fairly deep depression. I was not able to, I could barely make it through work because it was painful to use a computer because of the pain in my shoulder.

[00:29:15]  Unidentified speaker: I have a lot of health problems.

[00:29:17]  Unidentified speaker: I just found out I have another very big health problem two days ago.

[00:29:21]  Bruce: So it's like nonstop. But when I was in the worst point of that dark period, I'm pretty sure I did not believe in God even slightly at that point, right? I was a pessimistic atheist in every conceivable sense, similar to Bertrand Russell or to HP.

[00:29:43]  Unidentified speaker: Lovecraft, right?

[00:29:45]  Bruce: The thing that always went through my mind was, what meaning could I find in my life, right? Given the new limitations that I thought I had. Let me, luckily, I eventually found what the problem was. [I'm?] my 15th doctor, I think, and they finally found a way to get me past the pain, so I wasn't in pain all the time. The thing that I always struggled with, and I still, I think this is, I accept that I am weird, right? Like, I accept that most people don't think the way I do. And so I'm not trying to, I think this is the thing that keeps people, getting people confused when I try to talk about this. I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just trying to explain my own thinking process as a rational person, and how I got stuck in a loop like Lovecraft did, or like Russell did, right? Like it's super common to come across these people who got stuck in a loop, right? And the problem that I faced was, yes, like I understand this idea that you make your own meaning, right? And that strikes me as absolutely the right thing to do. And if you can pull it off, if you're not Tolstoy, and if you can pull it off, then of course you should make your own meaning. And that would be so much better than having no meaning in your life at all, even if it's just something you just made up, okay? If you can do it, then I guess I don't... If you're looking at this from the purely pessimistic, atheistic worldview that I was in at the time, I can't see any downside to it. It's all upside, okay? It's, of course, that's the right answer, right?

[00:31:27]  Bruce: The problem that I faced was that I couldn't see how to make it work for me, because it seemed to me that that point of view was irrational.

[00:31:37]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:31:39]  Bruce: And, yes, an irrational person who isn't me might make this work, and it would be very, very good. And so, they should, under that circumstance, be irrational and make up some sort of meaning in their life. Now, what do I mean by irrational? This is the part that I think is tough, because there's no way to prove it one way or the other. But let's say that you very sincerely think, you know what, I'm going to go, you know, work in this soup kitchen and I'm going to make people's lives better, and I'm going to make the world a more beautiful place, okay? So you do, and let's say that creates meaning in your life, and that's all you really probably need. You live a happy life, a meaningful life, and you die. Okay, again, I don't see any downside. Go do it if it works for you, right? But let's say that you zoomed out a little bit, and you thought, you know, what I'm really doing here, because I'm taking the Lovecraft-Russell worldview at the moment, what I'm really doing here is I'm allowing these people to propagate so that there's more human beings, and that eventually all of that's going to come sliding down, and I'm actually making the world a worse place by doing this. Now, you might laugh at me over that, but there's nothing irrational about that thought. It actually seems to follow from the Russell worldview that he just expressed, right? It's a very, very rational viewpoint.

[00:33:00]  Bruce: So suddenly, you can't get meaning out of this, even something like serving in a soup kitchen, because all you had to do was zoom out just a little bit more, and you realize that there was a kind of inversion that takes place, mainly because of something like heat death, right? Where no matter what you do, in the end, it's going to end in horror, right? And this point of view just sort of seems to undermine everything, where anytime you come up with something meaningful, you can quickly think of some reason to say, oh, no, actually, it's a net negative, right? Which, again, sort of seems to follow from the whole entropy thing, that there has to be as much negative entropy as there is positive order. There has to be more entropy, actually. So if you look at entropy as kind of roughly bad and order is roughly good, there's always going to be more bad than good no matter what you do, right? Now, this isn't necessarily the right scientific worldview. But again, I want to emphasize it was what was widely believed at the time and is still even widely believed today amongst most elite scientists, right? In some form or another. And it's only been recently where you've had Tiplers and Deutsches and Julian Barbers that have really kind of started to challenge this and say, no, actually, this didn't follow from our theories.

[00:34:19]  Unidentified speaker: We were mistaken, right?

[00:34:21]  Bruce: But when you look at it in this way, the struggle is to come up with some sort of meaning in your life in a meaningless universe. It's just saying, yeah, it's meaningful to me.

[00:34:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, sure.

[00:34:34]  Bruce: Subjectively, maybe it is. But can you figure out how to make it not illusory? And as a rational person, see that you weren't just throwing in there some sort of illusion, okay? I struggled with that, right? Like everything I came up with, I would think of some sort of way in which it was actually illusory. Now, there's a few things I came up with. Like, let's make it kind of a silly example. Let's say that you got your meaning out of your life by making fecal sculptures. And what you did is you wanted to show people the beauty of feces, right? I mean, this is kind of a dumb example, but I'm intentionally trying to make it as silly as I can.

[00:35:15]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:35:16]  Unidentified speaker: Like, but let's say somebody did.

[00:35:18]  Bruce: Let's say somebody actually got meaning out of their life by doing that.

[00:35:21]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, I think they've done that.

[00:35:21]  Unidentified speaker: Someone's done that.

[00:35:22]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:35:23]  Peter: I'm afraid to do a Google search, but yeah.

[00:35:26]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:35:27]  Bruce: I'm not sure I necessarily see like an entropy negative there, right? So maybe there are some sort of non-illusory meanings in a non-meaningful universe you could come up with. Like, you can almost think of a few like that, but they seem like to someone like me, it seems meaningless, right? Like, it's really hard to come up with a meaningful, subjectively meaningful thing that doesn't ultimately boil down to some sort of assumption that was tacit, that you didn't realize you had at first, but a tacit assumption of meaning that was built into the universe. It maybe can be done, and I guess I'm not saying it can't be done, but it is so much harder than people who take this point of view ever give thought to, right?

[00:36:15]  Unidentified speaker: Like, it's so much harder.

[00:36:17]  Bruce: And I think that's one of the reasons why I would very much prefer a universe that really does have some sort of more innate non-subjective meaning. Again, if you are living your life with subjective meaning, and it's working for you, and you simply don't have my mind where I go to the dark place and I try and I start to realize, oh no, actually that's illusory. So that one doesn't work for me. If you don't have that problem, which most people don't, then do it. I mean, in a non-meaningful universe, of course, subjective meaning would be the best thing that you could strive for, right?

[00:36:54]  Peter: That's also kind of interesting how that very few people really live like that. I mean, they might say, like people who are educated in a certain way are probably going to say that the universe is not inherently meaningful, at least a lot of them are.

[00:37:13]  Unidentified speaker: But that's not how they live.

[00:37:16]  Peter: So what's the better expression of like what they actually believe?

[00:37:21]  Unidentified speaker: I agree.

[00:37:22]  Micah: Well, let me offer a counter example. So there are lots of people who are sort of in despair at the potentially impending climate crisis. And because of this, feel like the right thing to do is to not bring children into the world. And not just for two different reasons. One is that this may be sort of a negative towards life as a whole. Like if you bring children in and they are making the climate crisis worse, then you are basically by increasing the number of people, you are decreasing the amount of good. And ultimately, then it's a zero-sum thing. Like even existence itself as a human being is the sort of negative. And then the other thing, which is the idea that either because of that or because of some other trends in the world, something like that, that to bring a new human into the world is to bring them into a future of inevitable suffering. And so that is a negative. And if you adopt that kind of view, then you will tend to say, no, no, I'm going to opt out of, I'm going to opt out of propagating the human species. I'm going to opt out of trying to extend my own life. I'm going to opt out of trying to grow or enhance human culture and human civilization in these ways. I think that's actually a significant number of people, even my members of my own family, as they were getting older, like struggled with this. Like why do we bring people into this world to suffer and die and to make things worse, basically, for other people? And they'd already done this, but we're now like, I think, sort of second guessing their choices in life.

[00:39:25]  Micah: So I don't think it's actually purely theoretical. I think that a lot of people are making that kind of assessment to where the ways that a lot of people have traditionally found meaning are very conflicted for them, because it doesn't seem to be an unmitigated source of goodness. It actually seems to be very conflicted, if not very negative.

[00:39:51]  Peter: Yeah, well, it is a compelling world view in a way, that humans are parasites, and antinatalism makes sense when you consider how much just suffering there is in the world.

[00:40:07]  Micah: Yeah, most of our science fiction, when we have a super-intelligent AI show up, that's their attitude towards human beings, that humans are a disease in the Matrix.

[00:40:21]  Unidentified speaker: That's what the...

[00:40:22]  Unidentified speaker: In the Matrix, I was just thinking that, yeah.

[00:40:25]  Unidentified speaker: Humans are a parasite.

[00:40:27]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[00:40:29]  Micah: And that's not an uncommon view, and it's interesting that we put that in the mouth of the intelligences, right? Like, when it's like the idea is like, yeah, if you got a little bit more intelligence, you would realize that actually, you know, we are, we ought not be around.

[00:40:48]  Bruce: So let me, so let me kind of, I think what you just said, Peter, is correct. So you've got this idea, you can make your own meaning. And this is often presented by more elite people as what's wrong with this point of view? I mean, there's kind of an attitude it is often delivered with, right? There's two problems with this. So first of all, there's no problem in the sense that, yeah, if this is the best you can do, go do it, right? Like, I'm not suggesting that I should talk you out of this point of view. The question is, since you're delivering with an attitude, and it's usually [instead of?] you religious people or something like that, right? The question is, is this less religious than the point, the religious point of view that you just rejected? Is it less illusory than the religious point of view you claim you're rejecting, right? And I do think you have to see it in that light, right? Obviously, if the answer is, there is no meaning, so just go find your own, well, then, you know, okay, then being religious, even though it's false, well, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's probably one of the better things you could do with your life now.

[00:41:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:41:57]  Bruce: If you're going to take the attitude that's bad because it's false, then your meaning needs to not be illusory too. And that's so much harder than it appears. For the reason that you gave, one is that you may say the words, but you don't mean it, that your point of view may actually be tacitly assuming meaning. And also because you may just not be thinking it through, right? Like I had somebody say to me, what about just humanitarianism? Humanism, I mean, that you believe in as much as you can, making life good for humans. And I pointed out, I said, humanism is from the ground up built on optimistic assumptions about the future of humanity.

[00:42:42]  Unidentified speaker: It is.

[00:42:42]  Unidentified speaker: And he said, no, it's not.

[00:42:43]  Bruce: I'm like, no, it really is. Like go seriously try to go start a humanist movement built on entropy and second law as your starting point, where you know what, ultimately, no matter, the more humans we get, the more suffering we're going to cause. Like seriously go try to build humanistic point of view and philosophy out of that. It cannot be done, right? It is pure illusion if entropy is actually true. It's no less illusory than religion at this point.

[00:43:15]  Unidentified speaker: In fact, that's what it really is.

[00:43:16]  Bruce: It's just another religion. And I think that's the problem. Again, I don't want to say it's completely impossible because of the fecal sculpture example, but I do think we're flattening it to a degree where most of the ones that people who would take this stance, most of their points of view where they say, this is my subjective meaning, still is built on either the tacit assumption of objective meaning or they simply aren't thinking it through to its logical ends. And I think that's so common, so overwhelmingly common that it undermines the value of this point of view for me personally.

[00:43:51]  Unidentified speaker: Does that make any sense?

[00:43:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:43:53]  Peter: Why do I feel like the fecal sculpture thing is going to become a recurring theme on the podcast?

[00:43:59]  Bruce: It probably will.

[00:44:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:44:01]  Bruce: It's one I've been using for many years. So like a lot of these ideas that I bring up on the podcast are things that I've been using for years, and I'm just happy to finally dump them somewhere so that somebody else can be forced to hear it too.

[00:44:15]  Peter: Well, before we become too depressed and turn into an existentialist podcast, let me give you the part two of my text to my girlfriend. And you can tell me what you think. Largely kind of my summary of Paul Davies' book, The Cosmic Blueprint, basically. Has the universe ever stopped being creative and self-organizing? Novelty is what the universe does. This place started as infinitely dense time, space, matter, energy, and then has continued to explode into physical space, planets, stars, and finally life with enormous chemical complexity. This life force has never stopped creating cool stuff, including human minds capable of infinite knowledge growth. Our capacity to create beautiful things might never cease till the universe is controlled by this explosion of complexity that has begun on this obscure planet. Obviously, channeling Tipler there. Does it really seem so far-fetched to suggest that physical reality is self-organizing, that reality moves in the direction of beauty, that there is an underlying orderliness to nature? Is this assertion that reality is governed by an optimistic arrow really so far-fetched when we contemplate that we live in a world that is not just a collection of particles and energy, but contains life and beauty? Determinism may be more and not less meaningful than chaos or a god that plays dice with the universe. Doesn't the mysterious algorithm called the human mind manipulate reality every bit as much as subatomic particles or laws of physics?

[00:46:08]  Peter: If the universe is not inherently meaningful, what would an inherently meaningful universe even look like?

[00:46:16]  Unidentified speaker: Awesome.

[00:46:18]  Bruce: By the way, Peter, you need to find that quote that you put from Popper that was very similar to that. Maybe pull that up in the background and we'll read it later in the episode.

[00:46:28]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, sure.

[00:46:29]  Bruce: That was such a great quote that I had never heard before.

[00:46:32]  Peter: Well, he seemed to be basically endorsing teleology in his own way.

[00:46:36]  Unidentified speaker: He did, yeah.

[00:46:38]  Bruce: You know, I guess my two cents, I think that's a better viewpoint, right? I guess you could argue that is itself an illusory, like if I'm Bertrand Russell, maybe I'd argue that that is itself an illusory viewpoint.

[00:46:53]  Unidentified speaker: But you know what?

[00:46:55]  Bruce: Given Bertrand Russell's view, I guess I see no problem with illusory viewpoints. In fact, it seems to me one of the honest things you must say if you are Bertrand Russell is that illusory viewpoints are exactly what we're striving for, and they are preferred because they're better. So either what you just expressed is false, and therefore better than the truth, or it's true.

[00:47:19]  Unidentified speaker: So it's either true or it's true.

[00:47:20]  Bruce: It's better than true. It's got to be one of the two, right? So it seems to me like this, and this is definitely the point of view that I have chosen to endorse and to move towards is this more optimistic view, principle of optimism type view, right?

[00:47:36]  Peter: The optimistic arrow is what Paul Davies calls it.

[00:47:40]  Bruce: Yes, that there really is some direction and destiny that we're moving towards, right? And I think I would be the first to admit that I'm not sure that this qualifies as a best theory.

[00:47:55]  Unidentified speaker: Micah might disagree with me on that.

[00:47:57]  Bruce: So, and feel free to do so, because obviously I would prefer that this was a best theory. But even if it's not a best theory, I don't think I care, because the alternative is so bad by comparison, that I think I'm prepared to, on faith, endorse the principle of optimism. Even if some, I mean, it would be a problem if someone could prove to me that it was wrong. But like, surely no one can prove to me it's wrong. It's not that sort of thing where the entropy worldview is definitively stronger and better, right? So, I think that this is just really the right choice. Like, just instrumentally, it is for sure rationally the right choice. And I think it even could turn out to be, epistemically, the most rational choice.

[00:48:43]  Peter: Well, I mean, even the most hardcore atheist, or we would have to admit that non-life, we live in a universe where non-life, physical matter created life.

[00:48:56]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, that's crazy.

[00:48:58]  Unidentified speaker: Somehow, right.

[00:48:58]  Peter: People don't, like, I feel like myself as an former...

[00:49:05]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know what I am.

[00:49:06]  Peter: I don't want to put a label on myself. But even when I was, you know, immersed in Hitchens and Dawkins and whoever, I mean, I didn't fully appreciate this, just how crazy that is. Like, it's really astonishing that, like, I mean, it could be... The way I feel right now that the evidence for teleology is, I mean, it's almost like we are immersed in it every single day.

[00:49:40]  Micah: The thing that I would want to say is, I think that Bruce just pointed out this arrow of optimism, as Davies uses it, like this choice of optimism, and this choice of understanding or seeing the universe as moving towards things that are meaningful, knowledge growth and so forth. That doesn't necessarily entail like a traditional or conventional kind of religious outlook. Certainly, we're aware of people who have this optimistic view that doesn't aim at something that looks traditionally religious. And personally, I'm totally good with that. I think that's great. I think optimism is the thing to optimize for, and the sense of meaning that you can, you know, that meaning is possible is the thing to optimize for. Now, as I extrapolate that, you know, in something like a Tiplerian universe, then that becomes a religious vision, not because it's the sort of cause that I'm leaning on, but it's sort of the outcome of where I think that goes. And so I would distinguish those things just for clarity's sake. And I guess I would bring in maybe some philosophical categories you could land on in terms of how you define what that meaning might be. You know, existentialism where you define meaning for yourself versus, I think, the ancient world view in which maybe some very non-human, non-personal gods sort of define the meaning of the universe.

[00:51:42]  Unidentified speaker: Versus the idea that meaning sort of coheres in what it means to be a person.

[00:51:48]  Micah: And that's where I would want to land ultimately, is that meaning is contained in personhood. It is not in the arbitrary existentialist idea where we just have to subjectively make it. But actually that personhood somehow is the sort of meaning or the key to the meaning of the universe. That's where I would want to land in my sort of hopeful, optimistic framing that I would choose.

[00:52:15]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know if that...

[00:52:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:52:17]  Peter: Well, it seems to me a set like a defining characteristic of a universe that is inherently meaningful, is that the universe is able to observe itself, to know itself.

[00:52:32]  Unidentified speaker: And that is the universe we live in, right?

[00:52:37]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:52:38]  Peter: I was also going to ask you guys, and I thought I would have brought up Xenomorphs by now.

[00:52:44]  Unidentified speaker: This is supposed to be about science fiction, but we'll go there later.

[00:52:52]  Peter: But because this touches on what you were saying, Micah, I mean, what is the argument? Both of you go beyond just teleology, which is more what I'm sort of sympathetic to. I mean, that religion is a lot different than teleology, it seems to me. I mean, you're making assertions about reality, that this book is special, this tradition is special. This isn't just, well, it's kind of sort of seems like the universe trends towards chemical complexity and consciousness or something like that. I mean, it's a very different kind of a claim. They're interrelated, interwoven maybe, but what pushes you over the edge to a religious world view, past teleology?

[00:53:49]  Micah: For me, it's something about the pattern of caring, I think about the future and the pattern of how we plausibly get there. So if you think about the, Deutsch's idea about the beginning of infinity, right? It's that there is a first instantiation of a certain piece of knowledge, a certain idea. And then over time, we become very much, we grow in our understanding of it, so that the understanding of that idea becomes this much richer thing, right? And yet, there's always that history of where it started, the first moment that it happened.

[00:54:44]  Unidentified speaker: And that history has this cultural continuity, right?

[00:54:52]  Micah: So if you look at something like the British Empire and the history of knowledge growth in Britain and the Anglosphere and the parliamentary democracy and these sort of institutions of freedom and so forth, that has a history that's deeply interconnected with culture, with place, with people, all this kind of stuff. And so the way that we sustain that progress, that history of progress is that in some ways we stay in communication with it, right? We recognize ourself as part of the British tradition or the Enlightenment tradition or the scientific tradition or something like that. Because it provides that starting point, it provides that ongoing discussion, this conversation that we're building on and growing with. And we never fully detached from that because much of that is inexplicit. Much of what allows the parliamentary democracy to continue is inexplicit. Much of what allows these traditions to work is inexplicit.

[00:56:12]  Peter: Well, I agree with that completely. We've all, I think we've all read Tom Holland's Dominion. Except to push back on what you're saying, I still don't hear a defense of a personal God, like a God that answers prayers that you can communicate with.

[00:56:28]  Unidentified speaker: Like, how do you get there?

[00:56:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:56:31]  Micah: So I'm not sure that I would make that argument from those steps, right? So there's a lot of things that in between just teleology and a religious-looking future and the context of religion itself, and then a personal god, and then a personal god who answers prayers in these specific ways, like there's a lot of things there that are going on. And I would, I guess I would say, although I'm happy to get to dig into all of those things, the key for me would be the idea that the ultimate future that we're going towards, if it's something like an omega point, which I'm not, the specifics of that, I don't think are critical, but the idea of a convergent sort of ultimate unending ever growing civilization, this looks like the Christian idea of the future, I think. And it looks increasingly like a god-like future. And it looks like, and it's a personal future, it's a future increasingly defined by personhood, right? So it's it is a personal god in that sense. And and maybe in much deeper senses as well. But the the vision that we are moving towards then and growing towards is not a impersonal thing or or a ultimately a divergent idea, but a convergent idea that that converges on a particularly elevated idea of personhood. And in what you bring up, because now I'm talking about like Christian theology, that in Christian theology, that's never, it's never exclusive. It's always the thing that we're all supposed to share basically.

[00:58:47]  Micah: So there is not a, there's not an idea that despite, despite the kind of what we might get from popular level thinking, there's not the idea that there's just one person who is important in all these ways. And then all the rest of us are not as important. It's actually that we're all important, all becoming as important, all becoming as glorious and great and so forth. There's just a beginning of infinity. There's a beginning where that kind of comes into the world, comes into our history.

[00:59:24]  Unidentified speaker: And so we're connected with that.

[00:59:26]  Micah: And that is something that we relate to in this personal way. Now, psychologically and memetically and so forth, that also already exists in some form in our cultures and our communities. And that's where I would look at probably a jumping off point for talking about all these other kinds of spiritual practices that we engage in. There's God in the sense of this sort of grand vision of what personhood is in some sense. And there's God in the sense of what already exists in the communities around us. And yeah, so there's a lot there. I guess I would just say like it really comes down to whether it makes sense to engage in communities that are cultivating this vision, this idea, this optimism, this future, or whether it doesn't. And that's going to be, yeah, decisions that people are gonna have to make over time. And I have conjectures about which of those decisions will pay off the most, but that is something that remains to be seen, I suppose.

[01:00:51]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, let me take a shot at it.

[01:00:54]  Bruce: Okay, so I think that you're asking a really good question, and it doesn't have an easy answer.

[01:00:59]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm gonna have to give you a nuanced, complex answer instead.

[01:01:04]  Bruce: So let me start with episode 121 about beliefs that came out recently at the time of us recording this. One of the things that I've argued for is the idea of holding beliefs loosely. I'm against the idea of not having beliefs, because I think that's dangerous. I think that human beings do have beliefs, that if you try to decide that you are not going to have beliefs, that will be exactly the same as having them dogmatically, right? So I would advocate instead for the idea that you go ahead and you have favorite views, you have views that you prefer, you have reasons, maybe those reasons don't amount to having falsified every single competing view. Even Popper, as we discussed when we looked at episode 120, Popper on trial, Popper believed that you could pick between non-falsified views and that there may be basis for doing that. How would I apply this as a religious person to my own religious beliefs?

[01:02:09]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm a Latter-day Saint, formerly known as Mormons.

[01:02:12]  Bruce: And so we are a kind of Christian. We're actually more traditional than I think even we want to admit. We're pretty highly traditional in many ways. But let's say I were to die and I wake up and I discover that actually Buddhism was true, okay? Buddhism is not exactly a bad religion, right? Like there are religions out there that I would not want to discover are true. Specifically, there are certain Baptist sects that have told me in no uncertain terms that the very fact that I'm a Latter-day Saint means that I will burn in hell forever. So I would definitely not want to wake up and find that religion to be true. But Buddhism would really not be a bad pick. Now, Buddhism does not believe in a personal god. Now, I would argue, as a Christian, that they actually sort of do believe in a personal god, that their idea of the universe ends up mimicking the concept of a personal god. But strictly speaking, they don't believe in a personal god. They believe in a sort of more impersonal force in the universe that causes karma to take place, causes justice to exist. They arrive at a lot of the same final solutions. I don't want to say they're not final solutions. They address some of the same problems. That would be a better way to say it. As a Christian like a Latter-day Saint would address. But in some totally different narrative or totally different way.

[01:03:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:03:45]  Bruce: And that narrative does not include a personal god. It instead includes an impersonal sort of, I don't think they would call it even god, but like I would probably still call it god, because it's like basically playing the exact identical role, has the same powers, but it's not a person.

[01:04:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:04:04]  Unidentified speaker: Would this be a bad thing?

[01:04:05]  Bruce: Like this is actually the truth. I'm trying to imagine, I wake up, this is the truth, right? You know, maybe I feel a moment of disappointment. Oh, my beliefs weren't true and these are instead. It's hard to believe I would care that much for more than a moment. And I think most religious beliefs probably are like that, right? Where if you were to wake up and you were to find your religion was false and this other religion was true, assuming it's not one that puts you in hell forever or something truly evil like that, I think you would find that you're probably pretty okay with most religions turning out to be true. And it would be, even I think most atheists, like if you were an atheist and you died and suddenly you wake up in an afterlife and you find out that Catholicism, or at least a form of it, is true or something like that, I doubt you would see it as a bad thing. I know people say they would see it as a bad thing, I just don't believe them. I don't think there's any chance that they're doing anything but lying to themselves when they say something like that. There are so many good things that would be true if one of these religions turned out to be true, one of these world religions turned out to be true. And I think a lot of times there's a concentration on what's bad in that religion, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that a lot of the bad stuff disappears or gets explained in such a way that it's not a problem.

[01:05:26]  Bruce: I mean, presumably if we're talking about a good God or a good universe or something like that, we're using Buddhist as the example so it'd be a good universe, that even the things that you dislike about the religion, they would end up in some sort of context, either that part turned out to be false, nobody really believes their religion is 100% true, there's still this human element of error that exists in most theologies, or that it turns out that it is true, but not in the way you expected, something along those lines. So let's say that those are taken care of for you. It's just really hard to see this as ever being a negative thing, okay? So I think to some degree, that's what I hear Micah saying. Keep in mind Micah is a transhumanist, and I've got these really strong transhumanist leanings myself. So neither of us is probably typical of members of our religion, and we're maybe atypical in some ways. So we're probably going to think through things like this, where a part of me just sort of thinks, hey, you know, this is my best understanding, but if it turns out to be something else, as long as it's still good, then what do I care, right? And from this point of view, it's hard to get too worked up about what the ultimate reality turns out to be, so long as it's some sort of good reality, okay? So I think that's part of the answer, is that in some sense, you don't get to a personal god. I would be, yes, that's part of my religious tradition. And honestly, I think it's a better tradition. I think Buddhism is sneaking personal gods in the back door, for example.

[01:06:55]  Bruce: So I would consider the Mormon version of it better. But if I'm wrong about that, I just can't see myself as caring. It would still be this really good outcome. And it would be like, okay, I will adjust myself to what the truth actually is, and I will move on. So from that point of view, I think we're talking about holding your beliefs loosely.

[01:07:19]  Unidentified speaker: You have them.

[01:07:20]  Unidentified speaker: They mean something to you.

[01:07:21]  Bruce: They may be a driving element in your life. But when it comes right down to it, you're not really that concerned about, well, is this religion true or is that religion true? You argue, I don't even want to say that. You are concerned about it. You believe yours is true maybe, right? But if you were to discover it was something else, as long as it's still good, as long as it's as good, what does it matter, right? And I do think that that's part of the answer here, is this idea of holding beliefs loosely. Now, I don't feel like that's a satisfying answer. So let me try to give you maybe a second part to the answer now that I think drives harder towards what you're asking, Peter, okay? So, the main thing that I think I would explain here, it's similar to what I just said a moment ago, is that there isn't as much middle ground as there appears to be. If you think really hard, you can think of middle ground. So for example, let's imagine that the actual ultimate fate of the universe was the big rift. Okay, so this is the idea that the universe continues to expand out, and life expands. Initially, it matches an Omega Point-like stuff, you know, Deutsch-type stuff, where the universe is explicable within that time period. You can gain knowledge. But at some point, suddenly, at light speed, the universe just ceases to exist. It just rips apart, and you're done. There's no pain, there's no suffering, there's no horror at all. It's just, at some point, the computation stops and you're done. And that's the end of the universe. Now, I've seen this put in news media as a horror, okay?

[01:09:10]  Bruce: And it's generally treated that way. Oh, what if the universe, what if the Big Rip was actually... I can't remember if it's rip or rift, but Big Rip is actually true. And what if just someday, you didn't even see it coming, just life just ceases to exist, and you're done. And this is often portrayed as this horrifying cosmology. There's nothing horrifying about it at all. Surely, it's not an optimistic cosmology, like the Deutschian or Tiplerian type world where knowledge creation goes on forever and everything eventually becomes explicable and things like that. But there's no actual, unlike entropy where there's a turning point and then everything turns to horror and there's more horror than there is good. The big rip actually allows you to have all good, mostly good, subjectively good. I don't know how to quite put this. But at some point, that stops. But it stops without suffering, it stops without horror, it just stops. This would be an example of a neutral cosmology.

[01:10:15]  Unidentified speaker: So they must exist.

[01:10:16]  Bruce: But again, I almost had to purposefully come up with it because it doesn't naturally or easily follow from our best theories, okay? And I had to almost intentionally, like with fecal sculptures, I had to come up with some super convoluted example of how there could be a neutral cosmology, okay? I think the simple truth is, is that most cosmologies, the ones that kind of follow more naturally from our theories, are either uber pessimistic or uber optimistic, with the neutral ground where it's not really either, being feeling kind of convoluted, right? And who knows, maybe the Big Rip is actually the right cosmology, and so therefore maybe the evidence is misleading at this point, okay? But if you're really trying to get serious about, okay, what's the universe like? You're probably going to feel like you have to choose between either Lovecraftian or Tiplerian, right? Because those are by far the best two options in terms of level of explanatory power today. And in that sense, I feel like, again, this doesn't quite answer Peter's question, which was, how do you get to a personal god? So I'm answering more, how do you get to a Buddhist god? How do you get to any sort of god, whether an impersonal one or a personal one, that's all good, okay? And I think you get there by realizing that you've kind of really only got two options, the really bad one and the really good one, with a little tiny slice of in-between possible, right? And so on faith, I choose the more optimistic one. I have really no reason to reject it at this point.

[01:12:00]  Bruce: The arguments for why you should reject it, that used to exist and used to be so popular, and even in some circles still are so popular, they don't strike me as very good arguments, right? Like I feel like these other scientists that have come along since then have shown that it was a mistaken interpretation to begin with, right? Or could be a mistaken interpretation to begin with? Certainly isn't the surety that was believed in the time of Bertrand Russell. And so that is how I get to this final leap of faith, is just the realization that picking big rip, I guess I don't mind. If big rip's what it is, then I will subjectively live my life as good as I can. I'll get as much as I can out of it, and nothing will matter afterwards. I'll be dead by the time the big rip happens, so it won't matter. And so I got no downside to it. My beliefs will have been false in that universe, right? There will be no truth to them. But in that universe, it doesn't matter if there was truth to them or not. Being untruthful in your beliefs could have, in some cases, in this particular case, was a good thing. So let's just embrace that and we're fine. And just from an instrumentalist, rational instrumentalist viewpoint, I don't feel like there's much option left. There is a rational choice and it is a belief in something that is very much like God. I don't know if it's a personal God or an impersonal God. That is a matter of theology, but it's got to be somewhere in that sector. It's got to be the Tiplerian type sector.

[01:13:32]  Bruce: Again, I hate to say that because, of course, I don't even buy Tipler's theory. I feel like Tipler's theory is quite problematic in many ways. And a lot of times I just say an Omega Point-like cosmology because I'm just trying to draw a very broad picture of what I have in mind. And Tipler just happens to be the best example that exists out there that I can point to specifically. But I think that's how you get to that final leap, right? It is a leap of faith. It is ultimately because that other possibility, that more negative pessimistic view, it's always, I don't think it ever quite gets eliminated. I think there's always the possibility that that is the truth after all, right? And so, I think that you make a sort of choice and you say, you know what, given these two options, I'm absolutely going to be better off living my life as if the better of those two options is the right one, and that knowledge grows going to go on forever, that all problems are soluble, that we're at the beginning of infinity. I think those are beliefs that are just great to have, even if they turn out to be false, they're great to have, right? They're subjectively good and they might be objectively correct also.

[01:14:41]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, that's my answer, Peter.

[01:14:43]  Micah: I just want to tack on something there that Bruce, I think, highlighted or clarified, which is, so there's the idea of an inherently meaningful cosmos, right, which we've been talking about. And then there is the idea of like, what if you could have the ultimately meaningful cosmos, right? There maybe is a scale of meaning that you could hypothesize about what's available in the universe, right? And so there's this line from Carl Braaten in 1969. He says, hope is at the heart of existence. It seeks an outlet at every level of human life. Where there is life, there is hope. And where there is hope, there is religion, says Bloch. We will add where religion becomes total hope, there is Christianity. So what he's suggesting is that Christianity is basically the formulation of the ultimate level of hope and optimism that you could have. Now, I think that's not intuitive to a lot of people, that that's not clear that that's what Christianity is. But if you buy that, if you buy that Christianity is the formulation of the ultimate most complete optimistic view possible, then that's kind of where you might land as one of Bruce's choices, between this kind of meaning negative, meaning neutral, meaning positive, and then meaning ultimate, something like that. So you might find yourself choosing, as I do, to embrace the [French?], the cultural, the language, all of the stuff that actually seems to me like a formulation of total hope, hope and optimism, sort of raised to the ultimate extent. And so that's where that kind of lands for me, I suppose.

[01:16:56]  Peter: Well, those are great answers. Well, because we are a critical rationalist podcast. I thought it might be a good time to read this quote from Karl Popper before we move on, where he seems to... I mean, you tell me if he's not endorsing teleology right here, because that's how I'm reading it. This is from one of his lectures. He says, I think that scientists, however skeptical, are bound to admit that the universe or nature, or whatever we may call it, is creative. For it has produced creative men. It has produced Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Mozart, and thus indirectly their works. It has produced Darwin, and so created the theory of natural selection. Natural selection has destroyed the proof for the miraculous specific intervention of the creator. But it has left us with the marvel of the creativeness of the universe, of life, and of the human mind. Although science has nothing to say about a personal creator, the fact of the emergence of novelty and of creativity can hardly be denied. I think that Darwin himself, who could not keep out of the question, would have agreed that, though natural selection was an idea which opened up a new world for science, it did not remove from the picture the universe that science paints, the marvel of creativity. Nor did it remove the marvel of freedom, the freedom to create and the freedom of choosing our own ends and our own purposes.

[01:18:40]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[01:18:41]  Unidentified speaker: That's a great quote.

[01:18:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:18:45]  Bruce: Popper surprises me over and over with quotes like that, where you can definitely catch this world view, semi-spiritual world view maybe, that he was holding on to, that he worked in with his epistemology. And you get these glimpses of it. It's not something he seems to have, like when we did the Popper in God episode. He didn't let the interview be published until after he was dead. So, I mean, like, he's not like trying to hide it, but he doesn't necessarily want it to define his philosophy, right?

[01:19:25]  Peter: So, yeah, I think he probably knew that, well, I don't want to psychologize him, but he probably knew that if he emphasized it, how people were going to react to that, who were interested in the philosophy of science.

[01:19:40]  Bruce: By the way, that episode is 106, Karl Popper and God. So, we go over someone who interviewed him about his beliefs in God and what he said.

[01:19:48]  Unidentified speaker: It was very interesting what he said.

[01:19:52]  Peter: Well, I have one more question about this. This was supposed to be a lighthearted discussion about science fiction, but we've gotten into some heavy stuff here. One more question. I especially wanted to ask you this, Bruce, and you too Micah, but I know Bruce that you hate panpsychism. I think you have an emotional reaction to it a little bit, which I get. But I also kept thinking when I'm getting it, like thinking about this idea that the universe is meaningful, that even subatomic particles even want to form chemical complexity, and rocks, and stars, and life, and consciousness, moving towards this thing that can understand the universe and create knowledge, and perhaps, you know, dominate the universe one day. I don't think any of us, most people think that's kind of weird, but we might be kind of weird because we all find that pretty plausible, I think, that one day we're moving towards a future where knowledge becomes the dominant force in the universe. But isn't this a lot like panpsychism, though?

[01:21:20]  Unidentified speaker: Good question.

[01:21:22]  Peter: Isn't it kind of similar, this idea that, I mean, is that much, is it so different to say that a rock is conscious? Is it so different to say that a rock wants to become, ultimately, given time, to become a human or a knowledge creating entity?

[01:21:42]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, that's a lot like consciousness, right?

[01:21:46]  Peter: In its own way, I mean, it's not like these panpsychists are saying that rocks have a social life and they like parties or something.

[01:21:54]  Bruce: So, let me clarify. First of all, this is a lot like my Buddhist example. If I were to wake up after death and find out that the universe was panpsychic, I would hardly care, right? Like, it hardly strikes me as a bad belief system. So, if we're looking at it as a belief system, a religious belief system, there does strike me as a sort of beauty to it, right? And I think I can even understand, like, after reading... What was the guy's book you had me read?

[01:22:26]  Unidentified speaker: Philip Goff.

[01:22:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, Philip Goff.

[01:22:28]  Bruce: Like, after reading his book, I can see the beauty in his viewpoint. Like, I've got no spiritual problem with his viewpoint, his spiritual viewpoint, right? When I have had a negative reaction to it, the negative reaction is my rational side. It's the fact that Philip Goff, specifically, and every panpsychist I've ever seen, specifically, is making horrifically bad rational arguments. And I've come to associate panpsychic views with these horrifically bad arguments that these people use, that try to argue in favor of it. If someone were to come along with a panpsychic view that didn't use horrifically bad rational arguments, I would change my mind in a heartbeat, right? Like, I've got, I'm just not someone who... When the right argument comes along, and I assess it and I go, wow, that was a good critical rationalist argument for a change, right? Like, I'm absolutely going to change my mind and want to change my mind because I don't care to be a memoid for a certain point of view. I just kind of want to follow towards whatever the truth is. I have this faithful viewpoint that the truth is good. That's why I'm anxious to go find the truth. And so that is what I would move towards if that were actually a good set of arguments. The thing that rankles me about panpsychism isn't the panpsychism itself. It's the really just, just awful arguments that every panpsychist I've come across has made. Now, I guess I'd have to make an exception here.

[01:24:17]  Bruce: Michael Levin came out as a panpsychist, and his argument for panpsychism is nothing like Philip Goff's, and what he really seems to really believe is not that the universe is conscious, you know, a single conscious entity, or that it's all made up of conscious entities, or a rock is conscious, but he seems to instead be merely arguing that there is an element of agency or, you know, that exists down into what we would consider to be non-life, which makes a certain sense to me. Like, I don't know if I actually believe that to be the truth. I kind of doubt it's true. I suspect there actually is, a rock actually is not alive. But Michael Levin's whole viewpoint is that if you were to come up with the right tests, you may well find that a rock is able to testably show a level of intelligence. So keep in mind, Michael Levin's whole viewpoint is, is that agency exists down to the cellular level and even down to the tissue level, and may well exist into things that we consider today to be non-life. That if you were to figure out the right experiment, you may find that a tornado has a degree of agency. Because it's not like in a mystical way, right? Like, because it's a complex computation that tries to keep itself stable, then it would by definition have to have a degree of intelligence.

[01:25:45]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:25:46]  Bruce: So, I guess I see no problem with that. If that's what you really mean, is that a rock is somewhat intelligent because it's going to turn out that it has to hold itself together in some way, and then we're going to come up with a set of experiments that shows that that's equivalent to a really, really small degree of intelligence, then sure, I guess I have no particular problem with panpsychism, right? Especially if the experiments came out positive, they corroborated that idea, I would at that point endorse that particular form of panpsychism. But that would still be nothing like Philip Goff's, right? Like, it's not even close.

[01:26:21]  Unidentified speaker: They're not even...

[01:26:22]  Bruce: To call them both panpsychism is to create confusion between two completely unrelated viewpoints, in my opinion.

[01:26:34]  Peter: Okay. Any thoughts here, Micah, before we move on?

[01:26:38]  Micah: I don't have any really strong ideas about panpsychism or really like about consciousness in general. It's a mystery to me, but I'm a little bit, I think, like Deutsch on this, which is, he thinks that consciousness is overemphasized, whereas knowledge creation is the more important idea. And I think Bruce, I think I've seen you talk about the idea that perhaps knowledge creation is a kind of phenomenon that goes down to the smallest levels, right? Something like that.

[01:27:17]  Bruce: That's Campbell's theory, right? I don't know if he would say it goes down to the smallest levels, but it's a hierarchy that exists and it's ubiquitous. I don't know that Campbell would consider a rock having any sort of intelligence, right? But Campbell's theories and Levin's theories have a great deal of overlap, just by chance, since I don't think that they have any awareness of each other, right? Campbell's obviously dead, but Levin knows nothing about Donald Campbell.

[01:27:43]  Micah: But that idea that knowledge creation is pervasive and exists in these lower level ways, I mean, I think that would fit well with the idea that the Cosmos has kind of an arrow to it, and seems to be how Popper thinks about at least certain things, like dogs are engaged in discovery, you know, trial and error is a kind of knowledge creation. So, you know, yeah, that's interesting to me as a possibility. Where that lands in terms of panpsychism or anything like that, yeah, I'm kind of agnostic about that.

[01:28:32]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:28:33]  Micah: I'm not sure what that would mean, and maybe I'm, yeah, I guess that's where I'm not. I'm not actually sure what panpsychism is ultimately telling us. So that's where perhaps I need to do more study on that, because I guess I'm confused about what it actually is at the end of the day.

[01:28:53]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:28:54]  Unidentified speaker: Well, it just seems to me about the optimistic arrow again.

[01:28:57]  Peter: I mean, it's a much more rational world. I mean, you would think it would be much more normal if we truly do live in a meaning neutral universe, that the universe would look like something like a collection of hydrogen atoms, maybe, or just like a bunch of stuff that's just nothingness in one way or another. Maybe nothingness doesn't exist, but there's a lot of ways you could basically have the same effect. I mean, the more I, the way I'm thinking about the world right now, is that it's pretty obvious that we live in a meaningful universe. So anyway, I'm happy to happy with this conclusion, I guess. But anyway, I thought we could kind of shift gears to the science fiction stuff, which is how I originally, you know, to reiterate why I thought this would be so interesting is because, you know, I think if there was one thing that would really, at least for myself, and maybe you guys too, would settle this discussion one way or another, and not even just the idea about teleology or religion, but also critical rationalism. If we meet another species that creates knowledge in a completely different way, then it seems to me that critical rationalism might not be right.

[01:30:48]  Peter: Or if we meet another species and they do, engage in something very similar to critical rationalism, broadly speaking, I mean, I'm not talking about the specifics of the epistemology necessarily, but if they're curious and moral and respect other points of view and are able to have debates and discussions and make conjectures and all this, then I think that would be pretty good evidence that we do live in an inherently meaningful universe. But, you know, perhaps arguably, we don't have access to alien species right now. So what we've got is science fiction. And I have, the older I get, the more seriously I take science fiction. And since Bruce started talking, introduced me to this concept of the Lovecraftian universe, suddenly it's the lens I'm seeing all this science fiction through. I've got a 13 year old who loves science fiction. And it seems to be what we do together a lot now, is that we will watch, you know, we just watched the entire Mad Max, all the Mad Max films. We watched all the Predator films. We watched all the alien films. I read to him every single day, almost exclusively science fiction and fantasy. And it just seems to be how we enjoy our lives together. And I'm kind of looking at the stuff through my weird David Deutsch, Karl Popper inspired lens. And so, you know, one of the things I, to go through, I thought we could go through a couple of examples of this. And if you guys have your own, please bring them up. But the alien films, I think this is probably the clearest example of the Lovecraftian universe that I'm aware of.

[01:32:59]  Peter: But you kind of have to look at it, watch them pretty closely, especially Prometheus. Some people might not like Prometheus.

[01:33:11]  Unidentified speaker: I don't understand those people.

[01:33:14]  Peter: I think it was one of the greatest movies of the 21st century. So Prometheus, the engineers, okay, so these are these godlike entities. They're a highly advanced species that travels the universe and seeds other planets with DNA. So there's kind of like a panspermia-like element to it. They are cosmic gardeners, architects. They just like to create stuff. I don't know if the movie really explains why, but for some reason, humans are dangerous or disappointing to the engineers who wanted to destroy them by creating a bio weapon, which the bio weapon I think turned in to the xenomorphs. And apparently, I did not know this, but you might be interested in this Micah. Apparently, there is an allusion in the movie that Jesus might have been an emissary of the engineers. And so they might have been pissed off that he was crucified. So that might have kind of played into it. So yeah, the xenomorphs, on the other hand, are universal DNA rewiring systems. So they create knowledge, not through carefully considering other opinions, not through debate, not through conjecture and refutation. They steal the DNA to create knowledge. That's what they're doing when they go into your stomach and come out your chest, right? And coming out, they're stealing your DNA and becoming like... They're kind of like beyond parasites, all right?

[01:34:56]  Unidentified speaker: It's great science fiction.

[01:34:57]  Peter: These are some of my favorite movies ever. But I gotta say, I think it's a reductio ad absurdum. I don't think I'm the way I'm watching it.

[01:35:09]  Unidentified speaker: It's not realistic.

[01:35:10]  Peter: Ultimately, it's not the world we live in. I think it kind of like it helps illustrate why a Lovecraftian universe. I mean, you said it seemed like you indicated that you thought it might be plausible.

[01:35:28]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:35:30]  Unidentified speaker: I think it might be kind of stupid in a way.

[01:35:33]  Peter: I don't think that we live in a Lovecraftian universe. I think it's probably when I started really taking seriously some of these, albeit fictional, examples, I think it kind of illustrates why it doesn't make sense.

[01:35:53]  Unidentified speaker: What do you guys think if you want to react to that?

[01:35:56]  Micah: The allusion to Jesus makes me think of the meme where somebody meets some aliens and they say, have you heard of Jesus Christ?

[01:36:05]  Unidentified speaker: And the aliens say, yeah, we love this guy.

[01:36:07]  Micah: He comes by every year or so.

[01:36:10]  Unidentified speaker: Why?

[01:36:11]  Unidentified speaker: What did you guys do to him when he stopped by?

[01:36:19]  Unidentified speaker: So, yeah.

[01:36:22]  Micah: I think science fiction is how we do theology and philosophy in the modern world, right? And we wrestle with these big questions. The same questions, I think, but through these different lenses, it does get at that, the same sort of dynamic as we see in a lot of AI movies, the idea that the thing that we're postulating is greater than us is antagonistic towards us, sees us as hateful or disgusting or something like this, so that our progress, our reaching up, so to speak, is the very thing that brings about our destruction. It brings down the wrath upon us, something like that. And, you know, in this really gruesome way, right? The parasitic way of kind of entering into human organisms and treating, dehumanizing them, treating them as just these kind of very grotesque material sources to feed off of, that sort of thing.

[01:37:45]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think, it doesn't feel coherent to me.

[01:37:47]  Micah: Those things never really make a lot of sense to me when I see them portrayed in movies. It always seems like there's somewhere where there's a non-sequitur like in The Matrix with them, you know, using humans as batteries, you know, something that really like does not compute, like the rationality of this doesn't really work, but it works as a projection of our own conflicted feelings about ourselves. Essentially, we don't feel that great about who we are and the kinds of things we do and the kind of impact we have in the world. And some of that's pessimism and some of it's realism. Some of it is the fact that we are actually kind of bad to each other. And so we project out that our superiors, our betters would have this pretty negative view of us, I think, something like that. That's how I read it initially, at least.

[01:38:55]  Bruce: So, you know, a really good example of what you're bringing up and why it doesn't work. It came from the TV show Star Trek Voyager. They encountered, as their reoccurring enemy, the Borg. And there's this other race, I forget the name of the race, it's got like just a number for the race, that the Borg aren't able to assimilate because they're very, very advanced biologically speaking. And so the Borg, there's a great opening where you see like these three Borg cubes. And we've long established by this point in the Star Trek universe that the Borg are the biggest bad A's of all times.

[01:39:31]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:39:32]  Bruce: You see these three Borg coming towards some ship and it goes, stop, you will be assimilated, resistance is futile. And suddenly the ship just blows all three of them up. And so you realize there's somebody worse than the Borg.

[01:39:46]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:39:47]  Bruce: And it turns out that there's this fluidic space that this race lives in. They look a lot like aliens, but they're intelligent, xenomorphs, but they're intelligent. And so it turns out that the Borg are helpless against this race because they can't assimilate them. And the way they make knowledge is by assimilation. So they have to turn to the Voyager, the only Starfleet ship in the quadrant, for help because Starfleet uses introspection or critical rationalism in our terms to be able to create knowledge, whereas the Borg use assimilation and therefore only Starfleet can possibly come up with a way to defeat this other alien race that is able to defeat the Borg, right? Now, the whole thing is absurd, like at every single possible level. Think about, like, the idea... Let's go as far as we can to try to make this as believable as we can. So there's a race called the Borg and they gain knowledge by stealing knowledge. Now, that's not too far-fetched, right? Like, we can imagine a race that goes around assimilating knowledge from other races.

[01:40:56]  Unidentified speaker: They take them over.

[01:40:56]  Unidentified speaker: They absorb their knowledge.

[01:40:58]  Bruce: But how do you actually learn that knowledge that you've stolen? Like, if I were to suddenly hand Peter some alien device and then say, OK, here you go. Here's this knowledge. The device isn't itself knowledge, right? It might be used as the basis for Peter to come up with a series of conjectures. And then having that physical device might allow him to test his conjectures as to how it works until he figures it out himself and has recreated the knowledge. But if you are able to take, steal knowledge from another race, you have to have the power of what they were calling introspection, right? Because it's the only way to ever create knowledge in the first place is conjecture and refutation or variation selection, let's say. It's a maybe slightly more generic term. So this idea that the Borg somehow can run this big advanced technological empire, but all the knowledge was stolen from other races because they can't create knowledge themselves.

[01:42:00]  Unidentified speaker: That's literally a contradiction, right?

[01:42:02]  Peter: Well, can they create knowledge through their unified consciousness, though?

[01:42:07]  Bruce: You know, they sometimes portray them as being quite clever and creative in their unified consciousness. But in this particular episode, they made a point of saying, we can introspect and they can't, therefore we have an advantage. And that's really what I'm criticizing that line. So, I mean, there's no consistency. This is just a fun TV show, right?

[01:42:28]  Peter: But it sounds like you would you agree, though, that if we meet a species that are like the Borgs, or if you guys are watching that show, Pluribus, at least through episode five, you know, that gets into the whole hive mind thing, where there's like a, I don't even know what it is yet, but it's some kind of a hive mind that's infecting planet Earth. That if we actually, if that species like that actually existed, that would refute Popperian epistemology. Would you agree with that?

[01:43:04]  Bruce: I think it would if they were gaining the knowledge without some sort of variation selection process.

[01:43:11]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:43:13]  Bruce: So, by the way, just for the record, the Xenomorph was in fact, and that whole universe was in fact inspired by HP.

[01:43:22]  Unidentified speaker: Lovecraft.

[01:43:23]  Bruce: So I looked this up, Lovecraftian Horror on Wikipedia. Lovecraft has also profoundly influenced visual artists. And they mentioned H. R. Giger, his book of paintings, which led directly to many of the designs for the film Alien, was named Necronomicon, which is the famous book of lore that causes you to go insane inside the Lovecraft universe. The name of a fictional book in several of Lovecraft mythos stories. And then he says, Dan O'Bannon, the original writer of the Alien screenplay, has also mentioned Lovecraft is a major influence on the film. So, if the aliens—so if the Borg do have the power to make their own knowledge through conjecture refutation, but they also happen to find it easier to just go steal other races' knowledge. That wouldn't necessarily contradict the Popperian view. You would call into question why they're bothering to do this. Wouldn't it make more sense to just go get their own scientists, make their own progress? Why is it better for them to go steal knowledge from races that are clearly technologically inferior to them, right? So from a certain point of view, I guess it doesn't make sense. But it wouldn't necessarily violate Popper's epistemology, as long as they actually did have the ability to... When they stole this knowledge, what that really meant was is they got access to the knowledge, and then they used their scientists to figure it out, okay? I guess I could see something similar with the aliens. The aliens go in and they steal knowledge from your DNA. Well, I mean, parasites do reuse DNA, and we had our episodes on third-way evolution.

[01:45:06]  Bruce: They apparently even... Bacteria can apparently even go find which strands of DNA they need, and from the population, use it to go disperse between the population to find an immunity or something along those lines, right? But it still does it through a trial and error process. So it's not really in contradiction to Popper's epistemology at all once you realize how it actually works. If they could just directly steal it, and they didn't have to figure out how to use it, then yeah, I guess that would be a contradiction to Popper's epistemology. It would be in fact a form of induction, right? That you're given this passive knowledge, you don't have to rediscover it, right? It's just suddenly you're able to have it. And so I guess that would be kind of the empiricist, inductivist viewpoint that would refute Popper's epistemology.

[01:46:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:46:04]  Micah: Something else that's at play in these stories is the idea of ethical convergence versus arbitrariness, right? So David Deutsch is, rejects this idea of, well, it's in the Less Wrong Community, Yudkowsky has the orthogonality thesis, or maybe that's Bostrom.

[01:46:31]  Unidentified speaker: I might be mixing people up.

[01:46:33]  Micah: But anyway, their orthogonality thesis essentially says you can have an intelligence that has any kind of arbitrary ethical system, any kind of arbitrary goal system that you want. So you could have any kind of-

[01:46:48]  Unidentified speaker: The predators, like the predators.

[01:46:49]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:46:50]  Micah: Right, so that you can have arbitrarily high levels of intelligence that would be evil or from our point of view, or completely opposed to our ethics, that kind of thing. And so if you find a highly advanced alien species that is successfully colonizing the galaxy and solving problems and building new things and so forth, that has this completely alien ethic, then that would seem to really counteract the Deutschian idea, that in fact, ethics are a real factor in knowledge creation. And that you need the correct ethics to be a Popperian knowledge creator. Well, not if the predators or the engineers or something are actually a viable, intelligent species. So yeah, I think it would matter to a great extent, if we find other interstellar technological species, it would matter what their ethics turn out to be. That would tell us something pretty significant about what's true about knowledge creation.

[01:48:21]  Unidentified speaker: I agree with that.

[01:48:22]  Unidentified speaker: I agree with that.

[01:48:22]  Peter: Yeah, and to flesh out the predator things so people know where we're going with this. So yeah, I watched the Predator films with my sons, with my younger son too, and I found them absolutely excellent. That new one, Badlands, so good. So in that universe, you have these, well, I say in that universe, right before this podcast, I was talking to my son about this, and he ruined the whole thing for me by pointing out that the alien and predator universes are the same, perhaps arguably, but if you get into that alien versus predator movies or whatever.

[01:49:04]  Unidentified speaker: But we're just going to ignore those.

[01:49:06]  Peter: You know, that's kind of out, what do you say?

[01:49:07]  Unidentified speaker: Outside the canon or arguably.

[01:49:11]  Bruce: Those are what if scenarios for sure.

[01:49:13]  Peter: Well, I mean, it kind of makes some sense that the predator would hunt these aliens, considering their whole thing. So, okay, so the predators, I say the predators, Yautja or whatever, they're a knowledge-creating species with advanced technology, and they've got those cool dreadlocks. And they're basically trophy hunters that travel the universe in search of worthy opponents to fight. So like in the first one, they found the commandos, and then in the, in prey, they found the Comanche, and so they're, they want to find honorable opponents to kill, and or to be killed by, which is a very, very honorable thing to do in their culture. So this to me seems more consistent with a meaning neutral universe. Like if we met a species like that, I would, who had values like that, and still managed to create enough knowledge to travel the universe, I would probably convert to existentialism or something. But it seems, I mean, again, it's a reductio ad absurdum. As entertaining as it is, it's really pretty stupid, right? Most people know that. It's not, these things don't exist. It's really hard to imagine any culture creating that much knowledge with such a, what we would consider immoral outlook.

[01:50:51]  Micah: So there's a line in the Badlands movie where the Yautja has been, you know, basically, I think saying, yeah, it's an honor for you if you get to watch me kill something, or you get to be killed in the process, or, you know, that it's a great honor for you. And then at one point, a representative of the nihilistic corporation has taken, I guess these are spoilers. So, but it essentially says like, oh, it's a great honor for you for us to possess you as a item of the, of the, you know, acquisitions of our corporation. And I thought that was a really great kind of moment, where, yeah, the sort of essential nihilism or existentialism of the, of the thing is, is held up and, yeah, contrasted, like, we typically don't think that, you know, nihilistic corporate actions are some kind of great honorable example, but it's not clear why, right? It's not clear why that's any less of a honor culture than, you know, something that's built around just, just trophy hunting and, and die, you know, killing and dying on alien planets. You know, there's nothing really moral about that. Although I think we tend to be more sympathetic to the, the Yautja in this, in this scenario.

[01:52:34]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not sure.

[01:52:35]  Peter: Yeah, particularly in the new one, sure.

[01:52:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:52:39]  Peter: And, you know, it seems to me also that, you know, when you get more into, I don't know if this is a generalization about all hard science fiction, but when you get into more, like, science fiction that to me at least feels plausible, the aliens are nicer. I, you know, if you think about Carl Sagan's contact, I'm reading my son, Hail Mary, Project Hail Mary, which is absolutely excellent book, David Deutsch recommended.

[01:53:18]  Unidentified speaker: I think they're about to come out with a movie about it.

[01:53:20]  Peter: But, you know, in that one, you have this alien species, these Eridians who are involved on...

[01:53:27]  Bruce: No spoilers, haven't seen the movie or read the book.

[01:53:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:53:30]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:53:31]  Peter: Well, I'm going to talk about it a little bit, Bruce, so you can cover your ears, okay? I won't give any major spoilers, but the Eridians are a species that are, they evolve on some planet with ammonia on it, and they look like giant spiders, and they see through echolocation, and they couldn't be more different than us in terms of the biology, but they are also able to communicate with humans. They are moral, they're able to consider other points of view, they care about life, they care about knowledge. They're like us in all the right ways, that they can even form these interspecies friendships with the main protagonist who's also trying to save his planet.

[01:54:33]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think I gave away too much, Bruce.

[01:54:37]  Unidentified speaker: But to me, that feels more realistic, honestly.

[01:54:41]  Peter: I think if we meet an alien species, it'll be more like that. And it taps into an intuition. And I guess my intuition is that we live in a, to circle back to our discussion, that we live in an inherently meaningful universe. And that's why it just feels more realistic. That's why we create knowledge through, there's a connection between creating knowledge and what we would consider an ethical framework.

[01:55:15]  Micah: Yeah, what I'm curious about is the possibility of static cultures being instituted in these advanced species, right? So in the kind of Deutschian construction of history, we have hundreds of thousands of years of static culture in humanity, right?

[01:55:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:55:44]  Micah: And humanity is presumably, at this point, advanced beyond the, you know, it's sibling species, but it is living in this static, static society. And so then I have the question, you know, if you do have some kind of alien spacefaring civilization, or perhaps us in our future, is it possible for that to fall back into a static society that embraces some of these kinds of anti-rationality? And I think, you know, I think maybe, I think Deutsch would say, no, it's not possible because basically beyond a certain point, if we were to become static, we would be, we would destroy ourselves or some something like this. I would be interested in teasing out that particular hypothesis better, to better understand if that is indeed a meaningful way of thinking about this. Are we once we go beyond the orbit of the moon, are we then like sealed to be either a moral, ethical knowledge-creating species or self-destruct? Like what's the, you know, what is actually the cutoff there? Or could we become something in the future that does look like, you know, say a dune universe, like a Butlerian Jihad universe, where, you know, knowledge creation has been shut down and we revert to some kind of ancient hierarchical society, you know, the formula of that.

[01:57:31]  Bruce: But it's some arbitrarily high level of pre-existing technology.

[01:57:34]  Unidentified speaker: Right, right.

[01:57:35]  Micah: Yeah, something like that.

[01:57:36]  Bruce: It does seem like you could bomb humanity back into static societies by basically removing most of their knowledge and most of the humans or something like that, right? You could, you might be able to in that way, but it does seem like it would probably be impossible to have a dune-like universe, where you just have a static high level of technology. The very fact that that high level of technology exists implies the existence of science, right? So it's, I mean, I guess you could try to do the Asimov approach where the science exists for a period of time as a religion. But again, it seems ridiculous to me, right?

[01:58:15]  Unidentified speaker: It's, it's, I'm thinking foundation here, by the way, where it, it does seem ridiculous.

[01:58:24]  Micah: But they, you know, like in Dune, the, it kind of steps through a lot of the things that would be needed in order for this to make sense or, you know, to be plausible. One of which is that knowledge is actually segmented into very different cultures that have this like cooperation, but don't inter inter relate, right? There's the, uh, Bene, Bene Gesserit and then the Navigators and the, um, uh, the Mentats, you know, and the, the aristocracy and they, these are basically it's postulated in the, the story that the human mind in this, in this story has so fragmented that to reunite the male and female, uh, pathways of knowledge in the brain would be an apocalyptic event that would destroy, destroy the entire society, right? This is the, the sort of premise behind the Kwisatz Haderach, you know, that, that they're going to try to bring it together in a way that's not, um, that, that is apocalyptic, but it isn't going to destroy them or some, something like that, right? So they are postulating, uh, an incredible level of, uh, psychological destruction and distortion in order to sustain this, um, you know, this, this society at a particular level and yet maintain it as a static society. So that's kind of, it's, it's, I don't know if he, if the author was actually trying to think through that, but he, I think he did a good job of trying to imagine what it would take. I think it still seems ridiculous. It's, it's absurd to imagine that would be where you ended up.

[02:00:12]  Micah: But if, if you could find yourself in a galactic static society, it seems like it would have to rely on, on, you know, breaking the human mind in these particular ways, like they do.

[02:00:26]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[02:00:27]  Bruce: Which wouldn't that technically make us not universal explainers anymore?

[02:00:31]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[02:00:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:00:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:00:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:00:33]  Micah: Or at least not functionally, right?

[02:00:35]  Bruce: Functionally, right. We're only, only universal explainers only exist across some sort of hive of minds or group of minds. Again, it's, I think it makes good fiction, but I think Peter's right that none of these, like it doesn't really make sense that the, the idea of the, of an evil advanced race. I, let me just, one caution here. I have seen CritRats go too far the other way, where you don't even need to worry about the possibility of advanced. Artificial intelligence being a challenge to humans, because of course, they're going to be morally advanced. I actually buy that argument, by the way, but then I'll always ask them, I'll say, isn't Hitler sort of a super advanced intelligence compared to say, times past, where we had a lot less knowledge? Couldn't you use the same argument? And you could say, oh, we never have to, you're living in the medieval ages, we never have to worry about a Hitler, because those 20th century people with their advanced knowledge, they're going to have advanced moral, so there's no possibility of a Hitler. And that doesn't seem right either, for the obvious reason that it wasn't right. So I do think that there is danger. It's almost like, how would you put this though? Like, it's not that an alien race, if they showed up, would be guaranteed to be meek and undangerous, right? I don't think that's the case. There may be differences of what our needs are. There could be, just like we go to war with ourselves, it could be they go to war with us. I don't think that's an impossibility, right?

[02:02:20]  Bruce: But I do think that as knowledge grows, that so does moral knowledge, and the possibility of the Hitler, if nothing else, it becomes probabilistically less common, right? Like maybe there's still a danger, but as you, the further you get along the line, it's hard to imagine. I say this in an era where it maybe isn't so hard to imagine, but it's hard to imagine a Hitler arising in our era, right? I don't think it's completely impossible to imagine, but like it's, that happened in an era where it seems more possible, more plausible than in a more advanced society that we have today, where there's a lot more inner trading, and it's harder to see how it could happen today.

[02:03:08]  Micah: Hitler rose to power in a culture, a country that had only been using what we would think of as a modern governmental system for a couple of decades, right? There is a lack of stability and so forth in their culture, their governance culture that was there. It was still like early days in some sense. And I think we in the American culture, we're the beneficiaries of many more centuries of kind of governance and so forth. I think the question is, yeah, when AI is, AGI is created, or when aliens show up or something like that, where will they be in that process? And will they have the potential to have splinter groups who in some sense don't actually have that cultural knowledge, who then go off and behave erratically?

[02:04:30]  Unidentified speaker: We have this now, right?

[02:04:31]  Micah: It's totally possible for people to grow up in our society and yet adopt extremist views and to go off and become terrorists even if our society at large would not do these things.

[02:04:46]  Bruce: Okay, let's use this.

[02:04:49]  Unidentified speaker: We're critical rationalists, right?

[02:04:50]  Bruce: So we're going to try to find the strongest counter example to what we're saying. I think I'm going to put forward China today as the strongest counter example to what we're talking about. And let me just confess before I ask you guys' opinion on this, I am actually shocked that the Chinese government hasn't been overthrown yet by its own people. Like, I'm really, really surprised that their move towards capitalism didn't undo their governmental authoritarian tendencies because I had a theory back when I was, you know, teenager or whatever, that it was not possible for a capitalistic system to exist and to be competitive with ours without having a governmental system that was open society, right? I don't know if I would have used the term open society back when I was a teenager because I hadn't read Popper yet. So I'm actually surprised that the Chinese government has survived as an authoritarian government as long as they have into a modern society still clearly able to create knowledge, right?

[02:05:56]  Unidentified speaker: Through in ways that might even be considered competitive with us.

[02:06:01]  Peter: Let me as perhaps one of my final thoughts, let me push back against that a little bit in my from my extremist, white-pilled, optimistic lens. You know, I would point out that China has become more free than it was in the past.

[02:06:25]  Unidentified speaker: That the Maoism did not work.

[02:06:27]  Peter: So fascism, Italian fascism and national socialism died very quickly. Communism, Soviet communism died a little more slowly. But to me, like these events of the 20th century do support the idea of a final anthropic principle, you know, Tipler's idea that life is inevitable, life is eternal, and that knowledge basically grows till it takes over the universe. Maybe it's more of a gut feeling than a carefully considered critical rationalist viewpoint. But I think that through a certain lens, it kind of seems like what's happening in history, even as horrific as the implosion of Europe was, or Chinese communism was and is still. But things are trending in the right direction. And I would like to think that we're on a journey that begun with the Big Bang and will end with infinite knowledge.

[02:07:48]  Unidentified speaker: I hope.

[02:07:49]  Peter: So that's my final thought.

[02:07:53]  Bruce: I was just going to say, I think you're right, Peter, that my counter example of China is somewhat surprising. But maybe if you look at the broader trend, it maybe isn't such the counter example as I was making it out to be.

[02:08:06]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[02:08:07]  Peter: I mean, it's a good example, but.

[02:08:11]  Micah: I think it's the case that an open society or a progressing society is always going to actually create space for the counterpart to itself. Because it's not going to clamp down on it. It's on its opposite, as firmly as its opposite would clamp down on it. And so you're always going to allow, like if you're allowing freedom to critique the establishment, you're always creating the openness to actually advocate for something completely counter to the society. Or to, you know, and by extension, to kind of have adjacent societies that are antagonistic to the values of that society, which will be sustained in part by the fact that the progressing society exists, right? If there is enough wealth being created and knowledge being created, other societies around can sort of live parasitically on that, externally and internally. And I think that's just the nature of of the situation.

[02:09:41]  Unidentified speaker: And I think it will always be the nature of the situation.

[02:09:43]  Micah: Now, I don't think it's it's the case that it will always be that way in the same to the same degree, right? We won't always help, you know, absolute dictators or whatever continue to persist. But we all I think we always will enable something that actually goes counter to the to the view of progress and and knowledge and all that. I think that will always be just kind of a function, much as I imagine that some form of parasites or disease will probably always exist at some level, just by the opportunity created by healthy organisms. And maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe we can manage biology so extensively that that never becomes a possibility, I don't know. But I think that the good actually does create space for the bad in some sense. And that's not a counsel of despair, it's just we continually have to kind of work to address it and to answer it and to overcome it over time.

[02:10:59]  Peter: No, that's a very intriguing perspective. If you think about how many innovations take place in free societies that are kind of like, I don't want to say stolen, but appropriated by totalitarian societies, like, final questions, final anything.

[02:11:20]  Bruce: We could almost do a separate podcast on this, but I do want to kind of mention, Lovecraft had certain ideas. And I think Deutsch has disproven most of them, right?

[02:11:31]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:11:31]  Bruce: So for example, and since we're talking about how the real universe just doesn't track with these horror versions of the universe, right? That it's so much easier for us to imagine a horror universe than it seems to actually like for purposes of a story, that it seems that you can make it a self-consistent, internally self-consistent idea, right? It just doesn't seem like these horror universes can actually exist. If you were to look at kind of the main themes that Lovecraft brought up, one of them was incomprehensibility. So he, the discovery of Riemannian geometry, and the fact that that was part of Einstein's theory. So he imagined that science was incomprehensible. So he has this reoccurring, really reoccurring theme of an incomprehensible universe. Well, that's total garbage, right? Like mathematically, it's not that hard to understand what Riemannian geometry is. It's true that you can't have a straightforward intuition for it. Actually, I'm not even sure that's true. I think you probably could if you worked with it enough, right? But clearly, we're not biologically built from the ground up. We have a sort of default 3D space, Euclidean's geometry. But mathematically, that doesn't really stop us from comprehending it. We're able to, using our universal explainership, understand exactly what Riemannian geometry is, you know, curved space and how that works.

[02:12:53]  Peter: That's a great connection. But to push back on that a little bit, I mean, it seems like probably most people think, do not subscribe to the universal explainer hypothesis, and think that most of what is worth knowing about the world is beyond human comprehension, right? So that's a more, that's a Lovecraftian view.

[02:13:16]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, I agree with you.

[02:13:17]  Peter: It's just not right.

[02:13:19]  Unidentified speaker: It's likely not right.

[02:13:20]  Bruce: If we're going to go with the best theory, it's a wrong theory.

[02:13:22]  Unidentified speaker: Let's put it that way, right?

[02:13:23]  Bruce: Like absolutely that is a wrong theory if we're going with the best theory. Now, there's the other one that comes up all the time with Lovecraft is our animal heritage. So this seems to have been him reacting to the fact that we have animals in our lineage because of evolution. And he was horrified by that. So he over and over again, brings up this idea that this person discovers that they're part ape or something like that, right? Or part monster. And then they're horrified by that and it changes who they are and they become what we would consider evil, but from their point of view, they're just doing their thing, right? You know, again, it's hard to imagine, during Lovecraft's era, I can see why people got upset about that because it was such a new idea. But like, it's hard to even imagine anyone caring today and seeing that as horrifying anymore, right?

[02:14:12]  Unidentified speaker: Especially since-

[02:14:12]  Peter: We have our DNA tests that were like 2% Neanderthal.

[02:14:16]  Bruce: Right, exactly. Like, we think it's cool.

[02:14:19]  Unidentified speaker: And there's a good reason.

[02:14:20]  Bruce: It's because we've reimagined evolution as this creative process of knowledge growth, which is what it is, right? So it just doesn't contain the horrifying, de-evolutionary ideas, those ideas that Lovecraft have. They were wrong, right? They have been disproven, okay? Another one that I might be reading in, but maybe he didn't intend, was the entropy thing. So Call of Cthulhu, you've got this idea that when Cthulhu arises, this point in time is going to happen.

[02:14:49]  Unidentified speaker: We don't know when.

[02:14:51]  Bruce: And all of earth will turn to violence and will revel in violence. I saw that as entropy, the reach the point where entropy shifts and now it's not possible to have knowledge growth anymore. And the only way to survive is by feeding on each other, right? This is kind of the second law of thermodynamics, horror story that was being told back then. That one, I don't know if we've necessarily disproven. I think it's been strongly challenged at this point. But Deutsch has kind of shown and what Tipler has kind of shown is that there's no particular reason why we shouldn't be able to have infinite knowledge growth, even though entropy is growing. You just have to let entropy grow forever, basically.

[02:15:34]  Unidentified speaker: But the order can grow forever, too.

[02:15:37]  Bruce: And that those two aren't in contradiction. They only seemed to be in contradiction because we were kind of imagining the universe as a closed box. There's a number of things that we've talked about and passed on the show. So that one, I don't know if we can directly eliminate it to the degree of the other two that I just gave, but I feel like that one's been strongly challenged. And I think many people would just consider it false today. The other one that he brings up all the time is just the idea that there's just no such thing as anything but subjective morality and the problems of subjective morality. This one is a harder case, I think. I think the way you would work around that is you would probably believe in an objective morality due to the need for knowledge growth. So this one, I think, has also been strongly challenged, not maybe as strongly as the first two I listed. But there's still a lot of people, Ivan claims he believes in subjective Bayesianism. I don't know if I believe he believes in subjective Bayesianism. Certainly he believes, he does, but I've always felt like there's a objective, sorry, not Bayesianism, morality. There's an objective morality kind of hiding in his theories, in my opinion.

[02:16:46]  Unidentified speaker: Shots fired.

[02:16:47]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:16:49]  Bruce: So I think that that's another one that kind of hasn't survived well, right? And I think what you're going to really find is that as much as he was trying to pour his horror of what science was finding into his horror stories, that the real science turned out to be quite different and turned out to be something way more optimistic, or at least potentially optimistic, and that he just couldn't even conceive of during his time period. It was just so well understood that science was pessimistic, that he just couldn't have conceived that there might be better answers out there.

[02:17:30]  Unidentified speaker: So that would be my final thought.

[02:17:33]  Unidentified speaker: CS Lewis even talks about this.

[02:17:35]  Micah: I think he calls it the tragedy of the gods, or something like this, which is the tragic view that was on offer in the scientific consensus of the time, something like this, which is like, oh, we rose to such great heights only to inevitably be destroyed, that there's nothing but despair waiting for us. And it's kind of beautiful, but it's tragic, right? It's beautiful in its tragedy. And that captured the imagination of a lot of people at the time. I guess the other thing that I would throw out here, we didn't really talk a lot about, is the idea that knowledge itself can be dangerous or destructive to one's mind. And I think this is actually something that Deutsch brings back in in a weird way. In talking about anti-rational memes and static societies lasting for hundreds of thousands of years, it is sort of suggesting that there is a category of knowledge that has the capacity to destroy us. You know, that there are some ideas that get perpetrated and corrupt our minds and turn us to, you know, basically something that is not a universal explainer, something that is not ultimately personal, but more beastly, something like that. And so there is a horror there, I think, in contemplating that. And I know that's a whole other thing to unpack and nuance and tease out the ramifications of that, and whether that's the right way to understand it or something. So I do see like a sort of tension between the optimism of just solving problems and everything is caused, every evil is caused by lack of knowledge.

[02:19:34]  Micah: And also this idea that there are anti-rational memes, which are in some sense a kind of knowledge, which we have to derive, but then which distort us and turn us towards evil and staticity and so forth. I think that's a little bit of a paradox that's left within the critical rationalist view that I'm not sure how to completely resolve or to tease out or to erase. Maybe you guys have the answer to that. Maybe that's, yeah, it's a complex thing, I think.

[02:20:10]  Peter: Yeah, I can't believe we haven't discussed that yet is that, yeah, that's another big Lovecraftian theme, isn't it? That knowledge is dangerous.

[02:20:18]  Bruce: Yes, that's one I forgot. Yeah, that knowledge was dangerous. Yeah, I've probably skipped a couple others too.

[02:20:25]  Unidentified speaker: He's got some good ones.

[02:20:26]  Bruce: But my point is, is that I think all of them have either been proven wrong or I've been challenged at this point.

[02:20:33]  Micah: Yeah, there's something interesting about this. I think there is a way in which knowledge is dangerous. That we're aware of with young children. So I have a three, now four-year-old, and recently he started watching something, an animated thing, and it has ghosts on it. And so now he's afraid of ghosts. And so now we're dealing with that. And so I think people have this intuitive understanding of like, yeah, exposure to certain ideas prior to the ability to intellectually grapple with them can be horrifying. And yet once we've developed the intellectual architecture, then horror itself is something entertaining, right? And so we do entertain ourselves with these lovecraftian universes because we have developed the ability to somehow transmute that horror into fun, into entertainment. And so there's something like we have to develop the ideas, the knowledge, the intellectual architecture, to make all the kinds of knowledge actually be something that is ultimately a gift and not a horror.

[02:22:02]  Bruce: And just we're giving examples of how knowledge can be negative. The one that I think captured people's imaginations during the earlier era was of course the nuclear bomb or the atomic bomb initially, right? This idea that there's this knowledge that we've discovered that might wipe out the human race. Nevil's On the Beach is a horror story that was very realistic about humanity had done a nuclear war and wiped themselves off out. And you have people in, by the way, great movie. Go watch the movie if you don't want to read the book. But trying to live in Australia and they're waiting for the nuclear cloud to come reach them and they're all going to die.

[02:22:43]  Unidentified speaker: So they have to all commit suicide and there's just no hope, right?

[02:22:46]  Bruce: That it was very Lovecraftian but it did it entirely through just technologies that actually existed. I think that there's even today, we don't have that horror as much as we used to. I mean, think about the stop, drop and roll era where we were so horrified by the bomb that it just kind of grasped our consciousness. And yet there is something, like there've been multiple times where we almost had a nuclear bomb go off and something probably, you know, just stopped it.

[02:23:15]  Unidentified speaker: Somebody just refused to do it or something like that, right?

[02:23:19]  Bruce: And so there is this idea of this forbidden knowledge that has maybe a strain of truth to it, right? And in a universe where nuclear bomb wipes out humanity, if you believe in the multiverse, there is such a universe out there, unless you believe in the Tipler version where those universes don't exist. You know, there is this idea that there could be a universe where humanity wipes itself out with a nuclear bomb. And in those universes, the nuclear bomb was knowledge that was bad.

[02:23:49]  Unidentified speaker: Like it was.

[02:23:51]  Bruce: But even then, it seems like it is at worst probabilistic, right? Like some small percentage chance you wipe yourself out. But in general, understanding nuclear power is not necessarily a bad thing, right? It's got potential downsides. By the way, another great one, go watch Chernobyl.

[02:24:09]  Unidentified speaker: That's such a great show.

[02:24:11]  Unidentified speaker: Terrifying.

[02:24:12]  Bruce: It will terrify you. It's a horror show that really happened, right?

[02:24:17]  Peter: Well, I have not seen it. I've heard it described as the greatest show ever, and I do need to watch it. But I've also heard it criticized as being inaccurate in a lot of ways too, and contributing to kind of anti-nuclear energy.

[02:24:33]  Bruce: Yeah, it probably is. So it does show the incompetence of the Russians dealing with this, which is probably true, which is why the problem happened in the first place. It's not like these were insoluble problems.

[02:24:49]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[02:24:50]  Bruce: But yeah, for the people who lived near Chernobyl, that knowledge was definitely forbidden negative knowledge, just like what Lovecraft said. But there does seem to be a local quality to it. There's no such thing as absolute forbidden negative knowledge. There can be kind of local negative knowledge.

[02:25:13]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, totally agree.

[02:25:14]  Peter: Well, on that note, I think we should probably wrap things up here. But I've gotten everything that I wanted to get out of this conversation and more. And Micah, the Christian transhumanist, I really appreciate you coming back on our podcast and I hope we can do it again.

[02:25:38]  Unidentified speaker: Soon and yeah, absolutely.

[02:25:40]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:25:41]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you for having me.

[02:25:42]  Micah: And I love the conversations you guys have. And you know how deep you go into these questions.

[02:25:49]  Unidentified speaker: I think it's I think it's great.

[02:25:51]  Micah: So yeah, I'm just appreciate it. And thanks for thanks for letting me be a part of it.

[02:25:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, thank you for coming, Michael.

[02:26:00]  Unidentified speaker: Take care.

[02:26:00]  Unidentified speaker: Bye.

[02:26:08]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielson01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[02:26:52]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.