Episode 56: Rationality, Religion, and the Omega Point
- Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
- This transcript was generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor.
- Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes. Please check against the actual podcast.
- Speakers are denoted as color names.
Transcript
[00:00:11] Blue: All right, welcome back to the theory of anything podcast today. We’ve got Peter. Hey, Peter. Hello,
[00:00:17] Red: Bruce. Nice to talk to you.
[00:00:19] Blue: And we have Lily with us today. Hey, Lily.
[00:00:22] Green: Hey, how’s it going?
[00:00:25] Blue: Lily is actually going to interview me today. Peter and Lily are going to interview me today. This was her idea. And she said, can I come on your podcast and can I interview you and ask you some questions? Because I know that you’re a religious person. I’m like, absolutely. So she has come on the show and we’re really grateful to have her here. Guys, why don’t you go ahead and ask me questions?
[00:00:47] Green: Yeah, so a bit of just a bit of context about me for the listeners. So I grew up in an atheist household and so I haven’t actually heard that much about religion, much less about the Mormonism. So first of all, I guess you have mentioned to me that the Mormon religion is similar in some ways to the beginning of infinity and this David Deutsch type worldview. And I was just so curious about what what are the similarities?
[00:01:22] Blue: Okay. So let me actually give some of my background. So I used to be a religious blogger. So I grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints and we have long had a nickname Mormons. They’re actually no longer using that as a nickname, but I’m okay with that. In fact, I find it really hard not to use because I’ve been using it all my life. And so officially we are Latter -day Saints, not Mormons, but I will answer to Mormon just fine. So I was on these Latter -day Saint blogs and I was a blogger. I actually started off on a doubting blog. I am obviously someone who’s been kind of in a weird space religiously and I’m really into science and reason and things like that. But I wasn’t comfortable there for various reasons. So I moved over to a kind of staunch believing blog actually helped restart it even though they knew that I had some doubts and things like that. They didn’t really care that much. And so I actually went out and found the most conservative believing Latter -day Saints I could that currently weren’t comfortable on the sort of doubting liberal blogs that were out there and kind of helped make sure that the more conservative believing voice had a blog also and that there was a place that people could go to. While I was on that blog, I met a guy named Firetag, which that’s not his real name, obviously, but that was his blog name.
[00:02:52] Blue: And he is so when you think of Mormonism, you think primarily of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter -day Saints, but far and away, the vast majority of people who are associated in any way with what you would call Mormonism are members of a single church, the Church of Jesus Christ Latter -day Saints. But there’s actually other churches that have broken off over the years and the second largest one, although they’re way smaller than the Church of Jesus Christ Latter -day Saints was one called the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ Latter -day Saints.
[00:03:23] Green: Are you saying that there was the Book of Mormon that was written and then a bunch of different things that were not just the Latter -day Saints? Wow, I had no idea.
[00:03:34] Blue: There’s actually, I mean, like there’s hundreds of them, but like the vast majority of them are tiny, tiny, tiny.
[00:03:39] Red: There’s a really good book called, or I thought it was good. You might hate it, honestly, but the John Crackauer book Under the Banner of Heaven, have you read that one, Bruce? No. They go through the history. I found the history really interesting where all the different Mormonism groups kind of interoff and a lot of it, I think, was maybe about polygamy. About polygamy, yeah.
[00:04:09] Blue: There’s a number of splits over polygamy. So yeah, so you’ve got like, if you’re familiar with like Jeff Warren’s and the FLDS, that’s the fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter -day Saints, no relation other than back in history to the Church of Jesus Christ Latter -day Saints. So that would be the polygamist group. And a lot of times people try to lump us all together. And I mean, I guess I kind of get it. There’s at least some shared history, but a lot of cases it’s like over 100 years ago, there’s not a whole lot of recent shared history. All Christian religions have some shared history. So we kind of fall into that category. So he was a member of this other group, which was at one point called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ Latter -day Saints, and then they renamed themselves the Community of Christ. So they’re kind of a more liberalized version of Mormonism. And in a lot of ways they’ve kind of moved away from the unique beliefs that make a Mormon a Mormon, and they’re almost more like just a standard liberal Christian church today. And he was actually a little disturbed by that. He had grown up believing in more of these unique Latter -day Saint beliefs. And he was kind of disturbed that his church that he was a part of was starting to move away from that. And I got talking, if he said, you know, I have this book I recommend to people that I think you would really like. And it was The Fabric of Reality by David Deutch. So I read it and I just, I loved it. I thought it was a great book. And I said, wow, that was a fantastic book.
[00:05:39] Blue: You were totally right. And in fact, that ended up informing like I’m always reading, trying to read up on stuff. I’m kind of a reader and I like researching things. And after I read David Deutch’s Fabric of Reality, I spent years reading related books, trying to understand those theories better, and honestly trying to refute them. So I’m very critical of everything. And so I’m always trying to find criticisms and what are the best alternative theories. So I spent quite a bit of time like trying to figure out what’s the best alternative to many worlds, quantum physics. And that one probably took me four or five years before I was satisfied that David Deutch actually had that one right. I started reading Carl Popper and then I would read David Deutch mentioned Roger Penrose. And he said Roger Penrose is in Fabric of Reality, he mentions him and he starts to explain Roger Penrose’s views and how they differ from his own. And he says Roger Penrose is obviously at odds with my world view and if he’s right, then what I’m saying here wouldn’t be true. So I’m like, Hey, David Deutch has supplied me, you know, what the alternative view is. And so I went out and I read both of Roger Penrose’s books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows. I forget the other one is called Shadows of the Mind, which are by the way, completely excellent books. I would dare say at this point, looking down backwards, I can dare say that he gets absolutely everything wrong. And David Deutch really feel like his theories really survived the criticism of Roger Penrose very, very well.
[00:07:12] Blue: But I don’t think I ever could have really understood David Deutch’s theories to the degree that I do now, without really having read the alternative which was Roger Penrose and trying to understand Roger Penrose argument in full. And I spent years going through his books and reading books that he’d suggested and David Deutch had suggested, and only at some point started to realize, yeah, the four strands at least those are really surviving criticism well. So I actually think David Deutch is on to something here. Now at this point, I didn’t know anything about anyone else being interested in David Deutch. I had not discovered the Deutch fan community on Twitter. I’m not even sure if they were around at the time. I’m not even sure Twitter was around at the time. And so I started to blog about David Deutch’s four strands and Karl Popper’s critical rationalism on religious blogs, and there’s this huge and I did it on both a doubting blog and on I was kind of on both and a believing blog and I did both and did this whole series on epistemology. Do these posts still exist? Have you have you crossed posts? They still exist. Yes. Oh my God. Are they have you crossed post them to anywhere? Like, I feel like, oh my God, you’ve been holding out on me. You’ve got all this stuff from the past. So I did cross post my epistemology, my religious epistemology epistemology posts on four strands.org until I lost that website. So that website, unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on air before, but I have a sister who is dying of cancer.
[00:08:49] Blue: And so I went into a depression and I was struggling and Peter actually saved the show by offering to come on and start doing editing and things like that. And unfortunately, I didn’t keep up on the software for that blog and it got taken over by spammers and I lost it. So you’re going to you’re going to get it back though, right? I’m just trying to show me that a bunch is available on Web Archive and not I can’t seem to find all of it there. So I’m still trying to find out how much I can save from web through Web Archive. Okay. I tried doing a download of everything, but it really only got like the first page like using a tool. And I still haven’t talked with my boss about restoring the website. He’s actually my boss is my host. So I do everything bargain budget bargain budget. So that was my way of trying to save money. So I’m still working on that. I’m going to still try to get back as much as I can. I just downloaded a bunch of it that I was able to get off of Web Archive and I’ll probably like eventually try to put it back up on medium. But yeah, I took a whole bunch of the epistemology ones. I figured the audience of four strands that or it wasn’t going to be interested in my purely religious blogging. So I didn’t put any of that there, but anything that was like some of both I would put there. So yeah, I have a long history out there and actually had someone recently contact me on Facebook from the Facebook group that Peter runs.
[00:10:17] Blue: And he’s like, I’m really curious about your past blogging and he like sent me like this link to something that was out on Millennial Star, which was the one of the Mormon blogs. And he’s like, I’m like, oh really, you’re someone who’s interested in David Deutsch and religion. And he’s like, yeah, you know, I’ve actually found a number of people like that. So I think that the reason why fire tag recommended it to me was because he knew that because of my, what did I say background that we would find something like David Deutsch’s book super interesting because there’s this heavy overlap between the philosophy of David Deutsch and the religious philosophy that nowadays saints have. Now, I should probably explain though, there’s, there’s not such a thing as a single set of religious thoughts with Latter Day Saints. It’s probably that’s probably not true of any religion religions tend to be a lot more diverse than people think. And the Latter Day Saint religion is particularly speculative. So there’s a tradition of while you don’t bring it up in church, because you want church to be mostly the stuff that everybody agrees upon that it’s perfectly acceptable to have your own theological speculations. And there’s a wide variety that are accepted as completely just fine. There are several lines of thought within Mormon thought that really drive towards what they call it, God is scientist and vast majority of Mormons would know what that means. But most of them would probably understand it in a fairly traditional religious way. But there is a line of thought that tries to understand Mormonism in a purely scientific way. In fact, there’s a group called the Mormon transhumanists.
[00:12:10] Blue: And they’re one of the largest groups of trans most active groups of transhumanists, and they have done quite a bit to try to merge transhumanism thought and Mormon thought together. And it’s not that hard to do because of the way of the way Mormon religion works and a lot of things that exist in our past. So, for example, if you were to like meet Mormon missionaries off the street they’re going to start with the simplest stuff and there’s just so much in Mormonism that is just not that different than any other Christian religion. We are very very traditionally Christian in so many ways. But so they would probably start with mostly kind of basic Christian ideas, but they would probably mix in some of the things that are unique to a lot of the saints, such as the Book of Mormon, which is usually a little bit shocking for people and so they only want to give a little bit of the shock a little bit at a time, right. And so, as you go along and as you start to associate with Mormons, you’ll start to discover that, for example, they believe that the destiny of human beings is to become just like God, or to become gods that that maybe doesn’t mean exactly what you think it means. But it’s the idea that we can become just exactly like God that we can grow and have eternal progression like him they have this concept of eternal progression, which many Christian religions don’t have. They have this.
[00:13:35] Green: Go ahead. So this this already sounds very similar to the passage in the Socrates chapter of the beginning of infinity, when Socrates is being mind blown, and he’s like, yes, we are we are like so so what you’re saying is we can get to understand anything and and we are like gods. That’s right. And and the Hermes is something like, well, you know, kind of, but yeah, basically, yes.
[00:14:03] Blue: It
[00:14:03] Green: is a lot like
[00:14:04] Blue: that and in fact, that is actually part of Christian tradition that kind of got lost that Mormons largely rediscovered
[00:14:11] Red: and they
[00:14:12] Blue: do it slightly differently. It’s not quite the same. But if you were to go back in time and you were to look at St Athanasius or, you know, you can find all sorts of quotes from early Christians up through the first four centuries, where they talk about God became man so that man could become God and things like that. So there is this thread within Christianity that kind of got downplayed and lost and Mormons kind of rediscovered it and reinvented it in their own way. And it became a part of their religion.
[00:14:43] Green: Do you happen to know whether there was this thread at all in Judaism or was it only when when Jesus came on the scene?
[00:14:51] Blue: I do not know. I guess I can obviously Christians use both Jewish scripture and the Christian scripture and certainly the passages that are suggestive of this idea of the deification as it’s called the idea of man becoming God exists mostly in the New Testament. There is maybe a handful in the Old Testament and to be perfectly honest, you can find almost any thread of thought you want amongst Jewish rabbis and ancient writings and the Talmud and things like that. So it wouldn’t surprise me if there was in fact that line of thought within Jewish thought at some point.
[00:15:29] Red: If I may interject, if I may interject one thing, everything you’re saying makes a lot of sense to me in its own way. As someone who like Lully was came up, it is more of a secular background and I used to for years, I was really into evolutionary psychology and humans are just another animal. But I kind of had this feeling that just something about that didn’t quite sit right with me for a long time. Even though I am an atheist still, of course, when I discovered David Deutsche, I almost think that’s the single thing more than anything that really pulled me into the worldview where I was just like, yes, this is right. Humans are not just another animal. There’s something fundamentally different about our species and our ability to create knowledge. I hear what you’re saying that they’re about parallels between religion and Deutsche and Islam.
[00:16:33] Blue: Yes. So there’s a number of other things like that. It’s unique that Latter -day Saints see us as sort of creating a heaven through becoming. It’s what you become that is what matters. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past. It’s what you become in the long run. They have lines of thought that are very universalistic. Nearly everybody is thought to eventually go to one of three heavens. For example, they believe in three heavens instead of a single heaven. There’s a lot of these ideas that, and this whole idea of God a scientist that at some level it is taught, although it’s never really explained very deeply, that God isn’t a supernatural being per se, but that there is no such thing as the supernatural. That God is just a being of great knowledge. And because of that, that is what makes God God. Now, as I said, the vast majority of Mormons probably do not understand that in a transhumanist Deutsche in sort of way, they would understand it in a far more traditional sort of way. But that idea is something that if I mentioned it in church, no one’s going to bad not because they’re going to know exactly what I’m talking about even if they maybe understand it somewhat differently than I do or something like that, right?
[00:17:48] Green: Are you saying that it’s against supernaturalism?
[00:17:51] Blue: It can be interpreted that way. Let’s put it that way. Technically speaking, a Mormon would tell you, I don’t actually believe in supernaturalism, but if you actually sat down and talked with them, a lot of their beliefs probably come across very much like supernaturalism. So I think it’s one of those things where it’s this thought that exists as part of the theology and then people interpret it in different ways. And that’s essentially this idea of God a scientist. Now, some of the Christian religions that really don’t like Mormonism very much have kind of latched on to this idea. And then they’re going to try to pitch to you, oh Mormons, they’re not really Christians at all because they actually believe God’s some alien being out there and he’s not actually God at all. He’s just this alien with lots of knowledge. Well, you’re never going to hear it taught that way in a Mormon church like ever. But they’re latching on to this idea of God a scientist, which actually is an actual doctrine of the church. And they’re kind of trying to take it to a place where it sounds weird so that you feel a little afraid of Mormons. They’re not entirely wrong, I guess is what I’m trying to say is that there is this threat of thought with the Mormonism that there’s just simply is no such thing ultimately as magic or the supernatural. It really boils down to God’s greater knowledge.
[00:19:05] Green: Right. That makes sense. So, well, so it’s been a long time since I saw this episode, but there was this one South Park episode that had a bunch of the the most easy to make fun of ideas in the last day Saints. And I don’t actually remember the details of them. But so is it is it the case that in the religion, you would say that each of those has a like, like physical explanation for it, or would you just class God as not being supernatural in some way or what’s the argument that it’s not supernatural.
[00:19:43] Blue: So, it’s never fully explained, right? It’s one of those things that they talk about and it’s a part of the religious thought, but they don’t necessarily try to work out every single detail and a lot of it’s left up to you to interpret and for you to speculate on yourself. So, on the one hand, that’s what I would say a lot of the things that they make fun of in the South Park episode. Like, for all intents and purposes, we’re talking about something that is effectively supernatural, right? On the other hand, if you were to ask a Mormon, they would say, well, no, it’s more like, you know, what’s the old quote from Arthur C. Clark about any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to us. They would probably tell you something like that, right? They would say, once we actually understand it all, we’re going to see that it’s not actually supernatural. But yeah, for all intents and purposes, we treated it supernatural today.
[00:20:35] Green: Going back to in what way is the David Deutsch worldview similar to Mormonism?
[00:20:42] Unknown: So,
[00:20:43] Green: you covered this, we are like gods or like we are gods or we become gods or what’s the specific thing? They will talk about
[00:20:52] Blue: humans as God and embryo. So, it’s the idea of growing up and maturing into being like God.
[00:20:57] Green: Yeah. And then we also covered how it says that humans are unique in the world. They are not just like other animals. That’s correct. And are there other similarities between the Latter -day Saints view? I don’t know if I’m to call it Mormonism or Latter -day Saints.
[00:21:18] Blue: So, the official term is Latter -day Saint, the unofficial term. And I will accept Mormonism just fine, so don’t feel like I’m going to be offended or something.
[00:21:26] Green: Okay.
[00:21:27] Blue: So, I think that there’s a number of things like that. And then it depends a lot on how you choose to interpret it. So, if I were to go talk with, so I subscribed to the Mormon Transhumanist group that’s on Facebook. And I received their emails. I’ve never really gone to any of their meetups. But I have like some of their books. I reviewed some of their books for the religious blog. And I think what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to take this side of Mormonism and they’re trying to take it to its logical conclusions. So, they will actually interpret Mormonism. Well, it depends on the individual. Some of them are probably far more traditional believers. But some of them will actually try to interpret Mormonism in terms of what the science might look like. What does God’s science look like? What is it that we were eventually going to discover? It comes across very similar to like the Omega Point where they’re trying to work out what is it that God is actually doing that allows God to be God, right? And another thing I would probably mention is you say, what else is similar? I keep speaking of God in the singular. But Christianity has always had this idea of a triune God, the Trinity, okay? And Mormonism has a version of the Trinity. We usually refer to it as the God. Growing up, we refer to it as the Trinity. But because there was a desire to maybe differentiate ourselves from traditional Christian creeds to some degree, they kind of started to downplay the term Trinity, although a Mormon still will know what you’re talking about if you refer to the Mormon Trinity. And
[00:23:01] Blue: they instead use the term Godhead, which means divine nature. And it’s usually understood to be made up of three different persons. Both Mormonism and in other forms of Christianity, it’s understand that you’ve got the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Now, there’s this whole giant thing with creeds and splits of Christianity over how you need to word that and what it’s supposed to mean. And I want to get into any of that. Let me just say that Mormons are what you would call social Trinitarians. So they see, they still accept only one God, but they see that God is being made up by actual persons. And in fact, one might even say that if you really stop and think through Mormon doctrine to its logical conclusions, they’re really not so much Trinitarians as they are Infinitarians. So they imagine God can be made up of basically an infinity of different persons, all of which will have the same moral will and moral understanding. So they still are considered one God for all intents and purposes. But they’re different people, right? The Father and the Son are not the same person. They are distinct in terms of their personality. And in fact, even they tend to see them as physically distinct in Mormonism. That’s one of the things that other Christians would disagree with us on, although it’s sometimes unclear what they’re trying to say because they use these creedal terms that don’t have a lot of modern meaning. So I think that’s another thing that is the idea that there’s really no limit. It’s not that there’s this one special being God. We’re literally a part of that God, right? And anyone can be.
[00:24:41] Blue: And this is where the universalism sort of comes in, right? That anyone can become part of this.
[00:24:48] Green: This is almost sounding like non -dualism. It’s sort of like the oneness with everyone, sort of witches with God or something like that.
[00:24:57] Blue: Yes. So Mormons are, they believe in spirits. So I would say they are dualistic in important ways. But yes, there is this unique way of looking at Christianity that Mormons have. And it’s something that I’ve always found very fascinating. And I think that’s one of the reasons why Mormons believe very heavily in education, right? They’ve got better men in university and they encourage people to go become highly educated. And I think this is, there’s because even though we, even though in particulars, science and their religion are at odds with each other in some important ways today, they believe eventually that will be worked out, right? That’s the way they would tend to see it. And so this is usually done so that there’s incentive to still go out and study the sciences. And Mormons get very geeked out over science in a lot of cases because of that. And this is actually why fire tag kind of barred up to me. He was like a physicist that was Mormon in member of the community of Christ. And he thought that this really was a possible way to look at certain types of Mormon doctrine, trying to use the theories of David Deutsch.
[00:26:11] Green: Yeah. When I said non -dual, I meant in the same sense of non -dual awareness meditation so that you are not fundamentally separate from other people or the world or awareness or something rather than non -dual or dual in the sense of Christian material. So
[00:26:28] Blue: Mormonism does not have a concept of you. There is no you like say Buddhism would have. They believe very much strongly in there is a you and that you is eternal and it’s going to eventually become part of God. But they do have a non -dualistic in the sense of the whole idea is there’s, they believe in an objective morality, right? So they believe there’s only one actual set of moral standards, whatever that turns out to be. We don’t always claim to know what that is. And ultimately God would be perfectly moral. And so everyone who becomes like God has to develop moral knowledge as well as other types of knowledge. And so they would all have a converging will because of that moral will because of that. That’s probably the best way I could explain it to secular people.
[00:27:18] Green: So are people sort of pre -God or are they sort of ever more becoming more God -like or are they a fragment of God or?
[00:27:29] Blue: They’re understood to be literally the children of God. So there’s kind of physical nature, which many Mormons today do believe in evolution, some don’t. But they might see that as not being part of God, although they believe God has a physical form. So they don’t see it as evil or a problem. But they would say that the spirit, the internal spirit, that that is a child of God. And that’s where our divine spark comes from, the soul, if you will. Are we children of God in the same way that Jesus is?
[00:28:00] Green: So like Jesus is God and so we are like that guy?
[00:28:06] Blue: It’s similar but different. So Jesus is uniquely divine and uniquely the child of God in a different sort of way because of the virgin birth. So they’re fairly traditional on that front that Jesus was uniquely divine.
[00:28:20] Green: Okay, cool. So you mentioned that there were other, maybe I don’t know if it was little things that reminded you of Mormonism as you were reading the fabric of reality and I don’t know perhaps the beginning of infinity. I wonder if you remember any of those other things that reminded you or seemed similar?
[00:28:38] Blue: The thing I really loved about the fabric of reality is David Dwight starts off with these different theories and then he kind of just covers some really cool things like what would time travel be like, you know, kind of mind blowing stuff. And he does all these different things. And then at the very end in the final chapter, he describes how when you take all four of these strands and you combine them together, you wind up with something really kind of cool. And then he kind of lays out the Omega point, his version of the Omega point, which differs from Templars in some important ways. And I thought found that really fascinating. It was almost like it was a nonfiction book that had like a twist ending. And when I got to that chapter, I thought, okay, now I see why fire tag was telling me to read this book. He knew that that final chapter comes across so Mormon like in so many ways that it kind of draws all these different threads together of theological threads and scientific threads and kind of twist them all together in an interesting way. And that was kind of what where a lot of the aha moments for me came out and I thought, oh, this is really interesting. For one thing, I don’t know very many scientists that have done something like this where they come up with this strongly optimistic world view that’s so typical of religion, but not so typical of scientific world views.
[00:30:00] Blue: And so I guess that would be another one I would mention is that extreme optimism of that which has and the fact that it stems from eternal progress, which is something that Mormons except theologically is that all problems can be solved. This is, I know he said that more in beginning of infinity, but that would be a thread from beginning of infinity that I think Mormons would really relate to.
[00:30:23] Green: Cool. So I’m curious what feels inadequate about this sort of critical rationalist Deutsche in world view from from the Mormon perspective of like, why, why is it not just an alternative to Mormonism?
[00:30:39] Blue: Well, that’s an interesting question. I can answer that in a couple different ways. So maybe let me first start with giving you maybe a somewhat more boring but technically correct answer. So let’s let’s let’s answer the question like, is the Deutsche in viewpoint, is it a religion? I’ve told you in my opinion it is. And since I’m a religious person, I don’t mean that as an insult at all. I intend that as a compliment.
[00:31:06] Green: Yeah, I’m grinning what in what senses is it a religion. So
[00:31:10] Blue: it has a lot of the things that make religions, religions, right? A lot of the different ideas and philosophies that kind of you find within theology that the optimism, the that man is special that we have a destiny, things like that. And I think that that’s a lot of what gets people excited when they read David Deutsche’s books, right, is they actually have they may not in their minds think of it as a spiritual experience. But I think that’s exactly what they’re having, right? It is something like a spiritual experience when they read David Deutsche’s books and they come away with this idea of infinity. Oh, that’s another one. Mormons have a very big deal. All Christians do actually about infinity and the importance of infinity and it features prominently within all different Christian theologies. Well, obviously that’s a huge thing within the Deutsche worldview. And I think that that is when someone gets excited about David Deutsche’s philosophies and theories. I think that they are reacting to a lot of the same things that get people excited about religion. This special place of man in the world and the fact that we are different than the animals and that there’s something we have a special destiny things like that. Now, where would I say that view is inadequate compared to a religion. I think the boring answer is that it while it’s like a religion in terms of its belief, it’s not currently like a religion in terms of institutions. And that churches are these complex, mean plex institutions that have lots of stuff going on that. If you really think about it, we often treat religion like it’s almost the reason why someone believes in religion is because they were raised in it.
[00:32:59] Blue: Well, the vast majority of people relates to religion don’t go with that religion. It’s actually quite hard to pass your religious beliefs on to your children to your children. And in fact, it’s so hard that the vast, vast, vast majority of religions have gone out of existence at this point. The reason why it doesn’t feel that way is because the religions that succeeded and that are still around and are still growing are the exception cases. They are the cases where they’ve got that right set of institutions and things that allow a religion to be successful. And there’s actually scientific studies about this. And as someone who’s interested in both religion and science, I’ve tried to read these studies. And one of the ones that I have really liked was called why strict churches are strong, that it’s a really interesting study. And what they do is they try to look at religion through an economic lens. So it’s a rational lens, but rational in the economic sense. Why is it that some religions prosper and grow and others just kind of disappear? What is it that causes that? And their explanation is that if a religion is strict, and so what they mean by that is that the religion actually asks you to do things. So, for example, in the warmer religion, famously, we don’t drink alcohol, we don’t drink coffee or tea or used tobacco. Okay, we call that the word of wisdom. But like all successful religions that are still around have things like that that kind of define them as an identity as a group. And the fact that they ask for things like that, and there’s even an expectation that you will make that a part of your religious practice,
[00:34:41] Blue: requires you to make sacrifices in your life, right? The fact that I choose not to drink alcohol, that’s a sacrifice. And at the same time, it also creates a group identity that immediately when somebody sees that I don’t drink alcohol, they go, Oh, are you religious? Yes. Oh, are you Mormon? Yes. Right. And it kind of makes me stand out a little as a Mormon, because I choose not to drink alcohol. And the fact that there is this price that you have to pay, but it’s made up in other ways, right? Yeah,
[00:35:12] Green: or just on that note, I’ve heard that one of the theories for why early Christianity spread in the first place was that it was, I think it was, I can’t remember if it was Paul or one of the early guys, there was intolerance in the spreading of it. This guy, Bart Ehrman, wrote about the spreading of early Christianity and the fact that it was possible to, like so before, it used to be that you could kind of believe in lots of gods. Like you could believe in the Jewish God and then also kind of dabble in paganism on the side. And then the followers of Jesus, you said, no, you have to believe that Jesus is the prophet and that you can’t believe in these other gods. And so it sounds like in Mormonism, it’s kind of continuing that thing where, no, like you actually do have to believe in the thing. Yes.
[00:36:11] Blue: Yes. So, so the argument in why strict churches are strong is that because there is this sacrifice that takes place where you have to have to believe in certain things and you have to take part in certain practices and things like that. Their argument is that solves the free writer problem. So you end up with people who are weaker in the faith and they don’t believe in it as much and it’s not as interesting to them. They kind of fall away because it’s just too much effort. And you end up with this community where you put a lot into it, but you also get a lot out of it because everybody in that community is putting a lot into it. So you end up with this net positive. And so this is their argument anyhow, and there just been studies that have challenged this and I think that this is probably a true correct understanding of religion, but only to a degree. There’s like exception cases that are really important. Like one of them is that probably no church would be particularly successful if they were too intolerant, right? And so if they want to be able to try to get people who are weaker in the faith to slowly move into the more faithful side. So they’ve got to be accommodating into some degree of people who are weaker in the faith and then they’ve got to kind of make a path into the more faithful side. This is one of the other studies. I don’t have the name of that study handy, but it’s challenged why churches are strong to some degree.
[00:37:31] Green: And presumably if you were too intolerant, then you’d basically become a cult. Like you’d have this very much insider outsider thing.
[00:37:39] Blue: That’s correct. So you’re trying to find a kind of maximum tension with the rest of the world that doesn’t create a boundary too strong. You want it to be porous and you want it to allow people in. And but you don’t want to honestly, that’s what a cult is, right? It’s a religion where the boundary has become too strong. And so now they’ve become elitist. They’re often not even that interested in recruiting for conversions from the outside. They and they start to need to cut you off from the rest of the world. In Mormonism, we often talk about living in the world, but not being part of the world, which is a fancy way of saying, OK, we’re going to behave differently. We’re going to have beliefs that are different than other people. But we’re not trying to not be part of the world. We’re not trying to section ourselves off entirely. We want to have regular careers, live in peace with our non -Latter -day Saint neighbors. We want to be good neighbors. And so you’re not trying to be cult like you’re trying to be a still out there into the world. This is often like in Christianity, they often talk about a city cannot be set on a hill. This is from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. You imagine yourself as a light to the world or something along those lines. This is, I think, something that religions that are successful do well is they find that right balance where you do have some sort of straightness. There’s a lot of desire for some members of religions. They like certain aspects of the religion that they grew up in. They love the fact that there’s this strong, vibrant community.
[00:39:23] Blue: They love the community. But maybe they’re just not into the truth claims of that religion. Or maybe they even just politically disagree. Religions tend to be very conservative politically and they’re very liberal. And so they really want to sort of liberalize their religion. And they actually sort of a really useful purpose. They then become these internal critics where they raise issues. And this is what liberals have always been good at is raising issues. And it creates something that we then have to improve upon and work on. But a lot of times you wonder, why don’t they just go join a liberal religion? There’s like a ton of them out there, right? If you don’t like the Latter -day Saint religion because it’s too conservative, there’s this community of Christ that Fire Tag was a member of that is completely liberalized and has left -wing beliefs now and isn’t concerned about the truth claims really much at all. And it’s like, why don’t these people go and join those? Well, they don’t really make great religions. And they’re usually not that great to be a part of. They haven’t properly solved the free writer problem. And so they end up with these kind of communities that aren’t that great. And really, these people often end up preferring to stay in the stricter, more conservative religion because they’re just better religions in a lot of ways. They fulfill that spiritual religious need better than a lot of these liberal religions do.
[00:40:47] Green: And have a tighter community. Have a tighter community, right?
[00:40:51] Red: I would say for myself as I’ve gotten a bit older, maybe I’ve gotten a little more conservative and that I think I kind of envy what Mormon’s the sort of the prescription for life that, aside from the kinds of truth claims that you’ve mostly talked about, it could be thought of maybe as its own kind of truth claim telling people how to live, which would be, you know, you have a lot of kids. Mormons are known for having a lot of kids. I wish I’d had two or three more, honestly. I love kids and you sign them up for scouts and, you know, it tends to be very family and community oriented. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve just more, much more sympathetic to that prescription for how to live.
[00:41:38] Blue: So let me put that into a critical rationalist way of looking at things. Religions have these theology beliefs, practices. They’ve got this giant set of institutions that make them up and memes that make them up. Well, if they’re a successful religion, particularly like in America, where there was no state religion, so you just had to compete, right? You really needed, if you were going to survive as a religion, you had to actually provide value to your adherents. And because of that, you’re going to end up with this set of beliefs that actually is something that contains knowledge. They’re the ones that survive. They’re religions that didn’t implement the better beliefs. They die out, right? And so you end up with this kind of knowledge bearing traditions. Now, politically, I see myself as a conservative, right? And I am very much a traditional conservative in so many ways. One thing that I think as a critical rationalist, I would say conservatives get one thing wrong. They try to sacralize tradition and you really shouldn’t do that. And obviously, religions are sacralizing their traditions. But I think a lot of these traditions are actually just really valuable. And a lot of times, some of the traditions I think would be valuable to anybody, even if you could do them completely secularly. But a lot of times I think you almost have to have the beliefs to go with them to allow you to get it in your mind, this is an important tradition that I need to do. Honestly, to moralize it to some degree. If I could use an example, Christian tradition involves this idea of no sex before marriage. Now, a lot of Christians do have sex before marriage.
[00:43:25] Blue: It’s probably not that abnormal amongst Christians today. But I don’t think that was necessarily a bad tradition, right? It’s something that actually has some real value. But it’s really hard to live in the modern world unless you are part of a community that accepts that as a moral rule. And you’ve got enough people in that community that are willing to live it. If you were just a Mormon on your own and you’re trying to date non -Mormons, I mean, like no one’s going to be okay with that because there’s going to be other expectations of the world around you. So if you’re not… By the way,
[00:43:57] Green: I just wanted to say it’s really interesting that I’ve seen people who come from a more sex positive promiscuous culture end up identifying as one of these new sexualities like demisexual or gray asexual, which basically, as far as I can tell, is trying to bring back some of that. No, I’m only attracted to someone who I have an emotional connection to or I very am rarely sexually attracted to someone.
[00:44:29] Red: I’ve had that same thought before that a lot of this stuff is kind of a long way around to coming back actually sort of a more conservative view or something.
[00:44:39] Blue: Yes. And I guess what I’m trying to say is I think in a lot of cases, even if the tradition is something that people would benefit from, it may be very hard to hold on to it without a religious setting for it, right? And having it wired into the religion in some way. It may just not be possible to hold on to even some of the good traditions that actually do have value. And so religion could be thought of then as carrying a lot of these positive traditions. Now, obviously, there’s negative traditions too. And I don’t want to act like I’m unaware of the negative side of religion. Religion definitely has a negative side. I think that in a lot of cases, what Pierre is kind of getting at, having lots of kids is kind of a really meaningful thing to do with your life, right? It’s a very positive tradition. By the way, another one that I’ve noticed is another parallel between Latter -day Saints and Deutschians is you talk to Deutschians and even though a lot of them aren’t married and don’t have kids, they’ll talk about the need for more humans, right? And that we don’t… Never mind the whole zero population thing that’s so popular secularly. They’re like, against that, we need more knowledge creators in the world. I think that that’s another place where Mormons captured that tradition religiously. And it’s something that was actually had some truth to it.
[00:45:58] Green: I wonder whether to any extent the reason for these people not having kids is that the Deutschian philosophy doesn’t appeal to women somehow. I mean, I guess philosophy in general is very male dominated. And so I’m wondering what types of features of Mormonism does appeal to women more or what kind of changes that the Deutschian philosophy could make that would make it more appealing.
[00:46:27] Blue: Well, I can answer that question. I don’t know how you would apply it to Deutschian philosophy, but let me go ahead and answer the question. So different religions appeal to different genders. That’s just a fact, right? Oh,
[00:46:39] Green: is that true? I just thought you’d need… Okay, interesting. So,
[00:46:43] Blue: and now this one’s going to shock you when I tell you. So the first one won’t shock you. The Muslim religion is very appealing to masculinity.
[00:46:51] Green: And
[00:46:52] Blue: they have a much easier time keeping men involved in the religion than the women involved in the religion. Christianity is exactly the opposite. It is very appealing to women, but it’s not as appealing to men.
[00:47:05] Green: Why is that?
[00:47:07] Blue: Well, there’s a lot of unknowns around this. I mean, to be able to answer that question, I would have to scientifically explain to you why women are different than men. And there’s no real easy answer to that question, in part because we’re universal explainers. And it may be culture. We don’t know how genes and culture relate in a lot of cases. And I don’t know if there is a great scientific answer to that question. But we know that women find a lot of… So Brett Hall did a podcast where he tried to advance libertarianism as a belief. He talks about how seculars actually secretly still believe in the teachings of Jesus. So this is… He’s looking at it in a negative sense. And Jesus’ teachings about equality and, you know, everyone’s equal before God. And a lot of these ideas and that we need to help the poor and things like that. And he was kind of trying to present that secular people are still actually imbibing this religious tradition. And in his mind, they shouldn’t. Well, that religious tradition, that whole idea is very appealing to women for some reason. And the left is also has a lot… Has more women than it does men for that exact reason. And the left is a philosophy that is a little more woman dominated than male dominated and kind of captures a lot of these same ideas that probably did come out of Christianity. And so I think that there’s a lot of these traditions that just really work for women. Now, I think on top of that, you’ve got this patriarchal side to Christianity. And this is just me, but I heavily suspect the patriarchal side of Christianity.
[00:48:54] Blue: And what I mean by that is only Catholic priests are always men, for example. There’s this male side and they’ve got their theological reasons why they do that. They need to represent Christ, Christ was male. But when it really comes down to it, I think that that is a tradition that allowed for more men to find Christian traditions appealing. And it kind of worked more for them that they had these male figures that they could look up to as they were growing up inside of Christianity, things like that. And I don’t know and I understand the concern. I’m not trying to downplay it because it can lead to sexism because you only have male leaders and things like that. And that’s something that comes up with Mormonism because they have some more sort of traditions as with the Catholics on that. But I think these traditions actually were the successful ones precisely because it allowed a religion that probably wouldn’t have as appealed as much to men to be able to hold on to more of their men. And to this day, Mormons still have a harder time holding on to men than compared to women, right? Really? Yeah, all Christian religions do. In fact, all the ones I know about do. There’s so many Christian religions I can never make a universally true statement about Christianity. Because when you think of Mormons, you think of the elders who come and knock on your door and you don’t necessarily see the mass of women who are there. Yeah. You as in me as in
[00:50:22] Green: an atheist.
[00:50:22] Blue: Yes. So my wife served as a missionary, right? So there are quite a few women who serve missions just like the elders that come and knock on your door. Yeah,
[00:50:34] Green: although fewer of them do it.
[00:50:38] Blue: Fewer of them do it. There is not as much social pressure on the women to do it as the men. And it’s typically seen as as masculine duty that you need to serve a mission. This is one of these things that has changed over time. And they’ve made a lot of changes recently. And there’s they now for people who maybe a mission wouldn’t work for, they often allow them to do a shorter mission, things like that to try to accommodate people.
[00:51:06] Green: Really?
[00:51:07] Blue: Yes. So there’ve been a lot of changes recently. Does that count? It does. Yes.
[00:51:12] Green: Okay. Does it does it does it count in coolness points? It does
[00:51:17] Blue: not.
[00:51:21] Green: I was I was also wondering because you said in that the Catholic church has only only male priests. And so I’m wondering whether Protestant Protestants that there are more women Protestants than there are women Catholics proportionally.
[00:51:39] Blue: That’s a good question. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s, it’s, um, so the Protestants, some Protestant religions still have these patriarchal elements. And so you would probably expect them to be more similar to Catholics or Mormons or something like that. It’d be interesting, like when you’ve got plenty of Protestant religions now that allow female priests, right? How does that actually impact the proportion of males to females? And if it didn’t impact it, what did they do instead that allowed them to try to compensate for that? There’s probably more than one way to slay this beast, right? So it’s not like there’s only one way to go about it. But my guess is, is that tradition that those traditions have been around for a long time, right? I suspect that those were knowledge bearing traditions that were necessary for the cultures that these religions grew up in. And really honestly, they should only change slowly, right? It’s that they probably should change, but they should only change slowly. And they should be careful to figure out alternative traditions. Mormonism, in their short history, a lot happened. They had to go through some fairly significant changes, specifically giving up polygamy was a huge, much bigger than you probably think. Even though most Mormons weren’t polygamists, that was such a huge part of the theology at the time. And it tied into the culture in ways that modern Mormons can’t relate to today and aren’t even aware of, right? If you actually go study the history.
[00:53:06] Red: Isn’t it true that Brigham Young’s wife never accepted polygamy as a… Or not Brigham Young, but Joseph Smith’s wife never accepted polygamy and kind of founded her own branch of the church because of that after Joseph Smith died? You do. It
[00:53:27] Blue: sort of depends on how you read her. Let me first finish answering the other question. Mormonism took some of their lesser known, not as emphasized doctrines when polygamy went away and they started emphasizing those instead. They actually had to… And so it’s not like they made up new doctrines. They were doctrines that already existed, but they just weren’t a huge part of the practice of the religion. So one of the ones, I mentioned I don’t drink alcohol, up until polygamy died out, that really wasn’t a huge part of the religion. You can find it and they talk about it and it was always there, but Mormons would chew tobacco and it wasn’t that big of a deal, right? In some cases, famous Mormons would own bars or something like that back in that time period. So it wasn’t something that was really a part of the identity of Mormons. It was just something that was kind of a background doctrine that you shouldn’t try to live, but it’s not that big of a deal if you don’t. And it took on a totally different importance when polygamy went away because now it had to carry a lot of the weight of the group identity and what makes this different from the outside world and things like that. And that surprises a lot of Mormons since you don’t know your own history in a lot of cases. They’re a little surprised that Brigham Young chewed tobacco or something like that, which it shouldn’t surprise them because that was a different emphasis back then because they identified as a group using polygamy. Instead of the word of wisdom. And
[00:54:59] Blue: the leaders of the church were quite smart that they understood, okay, as we retired this practice, we’re going to have to come up with a new emphasis on other practices. And they picked that, they picked some other ones I could tell you about, but that led to a sort of new group identity that still had continuity with the old group identity. And it was quite smart, right, and it worked fairly effectively and allowed Mormonism to thrive. Okay, getting back to your question about Emma Smith. The historical record is really split on this and it’s really hard to know. Most people feel pretty safe that she wasn’t real hip on polygamy. And that’s based on the fact that she definitely had issues with some of the other wives and things like that. The truth is, though, is that there were at times she was accepting of it to the point where she actually, two of Joseph Smith’s wives, actually, she gave them to him and said, here, take these two, I want you to take these two women as wives. And she later in life claimed that he never practiced polygamy, and that was her official stance. And she didn’t help start the RLDS that biotagged religion is the one that was the non polygamist one. But she did join it because she stayed out there and that was her they didn’t have a Latter -day Saint religion where she lived because she didn’t go over to Utah. So she ended up joining the what today we would call the community of Christ the RLDS. And because officially, she said that polygamy never happened. She fit in well with the RLDS who were against polygamy.
[00:56:40] Blue: So it’s really hard to know what she was thinking to be perfectly honest.
[00:56:45] Red: Well, it’s got to be kind of a hard thing for most women to accept if you’re suddenly your husband says,
[00:56:52] Blue: well, you know, let’s bring in a couple more wives here and
[00:56:55] Red: revelation from God and right.
[00:56:59] Blue: So yeah, polygamy was a hard thing that was not very popular, even at its height. The vast majority of Mormons did not practice it. It was a giant sacrifice economically for a man. It was a giant sacrifice for the woman for obvious reasons. And that was that was kind of the tradition that allowed them to be very different than the outside world and it served its purpose well in terms of creating a group religious identity. But I think the vast majority of Mormons are really glad it’s gone. Right. They don’t have any problem with the fact that Mormons in the past practiced it, but they don’t want to ever see it come back again.
[00:57:37] Red: And it may be fair as practice. I think probably most places in the world.
[00:57:45] Blue: And it’s in many ways the Latter -day Saint Church has got to be one of the most anti polygamous churches in the world today because really. Yes. So that’s one of the things that will get you excommunicated really fast is if you. That
[00:58:00] Green: must be so annoying that that reputation still kind of drags on.
[00:58:05] Blue: Well, for some historical reasons, because we did practice it and a lot of our biggest heroes, religious heroes were known polygamists and things like that. So we have kind of a split mind on that. We accepted for the people in the past, but we do not practice it today and there is zero expectation that will ever be practiced again.
[00:58:22] Red: And to be fair, there are still offshoots. There are still out there right now. If you want to practice
[00:58:28] Blue: it, you are a member of you have to go start your own offshoot. That’s how it works. You’ve got to go start your own church, your own religion. This is your own thing. You’re not part of the Latter -day Saint Religious Church anymore. So OK, let me let me actually get back to what Lily was asking me, though. What does Deutcheanism lack? I could probably tell you in some ways, you guys, one of your main competitors is effective altruism. I think effective altruism has actually captured some of these religious institutions better than the Deutchean movement has. So this idea of sacrifice is huge and effective altruism that allows that’s going to allow them to be more successful in a lot of ways. Do you think sacrifice in particular is necessary or just some kind of strict rules that maybe don’t feel like a sacrifice?
[00:59:18] Green: Because you think, ah, yes, I’m doing the good thing.
[00:59:21] Blue: So I’m using the word sacrifice in a religious sense and it’s not seen as a negative in when it’s used in a religious sense. Because that’s exactly how a religious person would see sacrifice, a religious sacrifice, as I’m doing the good thing. So it doesn’t feel like sacrifice at the time.
[00:59:39] Green: It just feels like a challenge. It’s sort of like we don’t feel like we are sacrificing to the laws of mathematics. It’s just those are the challenge that we have. And so it’s really difficult. And so in order to do it, it is difficult or is there an element of personal sacrifice?
[00:59:57] Blue: There is always that element of personal sacrifice. Let’s look at effective altruism as the example. They give up money. They have their reasons for doing it. It may not feel like a sacrifice. It may feel like exactly the right thing for them to be doing. But they could, in theory, go take that money, not give it up to charities. And they could use it to buy beer or whatever, right? I mean, there is an economic sacrifice that is going on. And I think that’s what I really mean by it is that there is something you’re giving up. And then you feel like you’re getting something better instead. And they often define sacrifice religiously as giving up something good for something better. That element, though, is what solves the free rider problem. It is what allows, it’s important to the forming of a group identity of a boundary. You have to have a boundary between you and the outside world as a religion. Whether I’m talking about a true religion like Latter -day Saints or a not quite religion like effective altruism. They do have this important group identity and a boundary between them and the outside world. I would suggest that libertarians are the same way, right? I mean, whenever you talk to a libertarian, they’ll almost always say taxes are theft or something like that, which is guaranteed to cause a reaction to the outside world, but also identifies you as part of the in -group to another fellow libertarian. I actually think that is part of this idea of strict churches are strong, that it’s the element that allows that group identity and allows you to be separated from the way the rest of the world is.
[01:01:26] Blue: But in a healthy, porous sort of way, right? Do you think that a religion requires coercion or internal coercion or some kind of forcing yourself to do something?
[01:01:38] Green: Or do you think there could be a religion that is entirely based on non -coercive principles, such that if there are sacrifices, they’re not really sacrifices in the sense that, yes, they are very strict, but you are fully into it?
[01:01:56] Blue: That’s a really good question. So I definitely think self -coercion discipline is a big part of religious tradition, and it’s a big part of non -religious tradition. I do not know the answer to that question. That’s a really interesting question. Could you figure out a way to make the sacrifice really not feel like a sort of internal discipline? I think that’s the goal is that it becomes so much a part of your nature that it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice anymore, that it’s just a part of who you are. But I also think that that’s not the way human beings are, and if you tried to not have any discipline at all, at least with our current knowledge state today, that would probably be hard to get the religion off the ground.
[01:02:38] Green: Yes, yes, a challenge, if you will. Because I’m thinking that the Deutsche and Wild -View, with taking children seriously and this very non -coercive, non -authoritarian take, maybe there is this possible scope for something that has specific ideas because certain things are true and certain things are false, but that doesn’t have this coercive element to it. I think that is a challenge for you. I think that’s an interesting challenge, right? It really is. Go ahead.
[01:03:19] Red: I’m very curious about this idea of self -coercion that Lulie brought up. Maybe Lulie,
[01:03:26] Unknown: could you define that?
[01:03:30] Green: Yes, so I think that as Bruce was saying, current society and religions and sort of basically everyone works by thinking that there are some things in life where you have to force yourself to do things that you don’t want to do, or you have to push through the pain, or you have to make yourself go to work every day and so on. I think that this is always indicative of there is some kind of idea in you that is a criticism of the thing that you’re going to do. And as a Popperian -Deutschian, I would say that there is always a possible solution to that internal conflict and that you don’t have to use coercion to get yourself to do these things. You can think of yourself as consisting of multiple parts or sub -agents or different strands of your personality or whatever you want to call it. And if those are in conflict, instead of acting on that, then if you can resolve that internal conflict so that you are fully on board with the thing, that would be a better society or a better internal state. Now, I don’t think that’s always possible. Just like in regular society, we still have laws against committing crimes and so on. And so some people do want to coerce others and then you do have to have law to prevent people from doing things that they might otherwise do. But the ideal for a liberal society is that we get to the point where we have so much knowledge that we don’t need to resolve conflicts by force. Instead, we can resolve it by reason or by resolving the conflict that is present.
[01:05:21] Red: I find that to be a very compelling take. Can I just ask you one more question about that that hopefully won’t take us down too much of a tangent? What is the definition of coercion to you? That’s another thing I’ve been a bit confused about. Is that too obvious? Yeah, no.
[01:05:42] Green: Again, to take a sort of papyrin frame on this, when you have two or more theories, and this can be intuitions, this can be subconscious theories, when you have two or more theories that are in conflict, that are still in conflict before you have to act. So in other words, you are acting on one when you still haven’t resolved the criticisms from the other and these two theories are still active. So coercion is basically when you are forcing something through instead of resolving a disagreement. And you can resolve the disagreement in a kind of meta way by saying, okay, given we can’t solve this disagreement in time, then what is an adequate sort of solution to this? And you can do various different moves to try and resolve this conflict, but there will be the particular conflict between these two ideas needs to get resolved at some point for coercion not to happen.
[01:06:47] Blue: Okay.
[01:06:48] Red: So they’re like what do I think he calls them the implicit and explicit ideas. And so that can happen either internally or externally, this conflict between the ideas.
[01:07:01] Green: It could be between two explicit ideas. It could be between two inexplicit or subconscious ideas. It could be between an inexplicit idea and your explicit idea. And so there can be conflicts between all of these things just like there can be conflicts with a spouse. You can have the explicit conflict about why didn’t you turn off the lights? Or why didn’t you do the dishes? And then there’s the actual thing that the disagreement is about which is that I don’t know that they’re not providing love or something and that there’s something under the surface that that’s about. And so I’d say the same can apply with one person.
[01:07:39] Red: Okay. Okay. Thank you for that.
[01:07:41] Blue: So let me try to actually finish answering one of these questions then. What are other things that the Deutsche movement could maybe learn from religions? And there’s no good answer to that question, but obviously one thing is the idea of having a set of beliefs. I think Deutsche’s do have a set of beliefs. I don’t think that they lack in this department. There’s no real evidence that the set of beliefs directly impacts the success of the religion. But I do think the reality is that if you don’t have a set of beliefs that you really kind of have moralized, that like if you were to go look at, they did a study of, I want to say it was the Episcopalian religion or I think, which would be the church of England in America. They looked at, you know, what was going on and they would talk to these kind of lay liberals and they would ask them, should you go to church? And they would say, yeah, it’s really good to go to church. I intend to go to church, you know, and they would talk very positively about the need to go to church and how much they loved it when they went to church and things like that. But they didn’t actually go to church. It was more of a theoretical than an actual practice. And I think one of the things that happens with religion is once they’ve moralized some of their beliefs and these are things that you really, this is something that you should be doing, that it kind of switches in their mind from,
[01:09:06] Blue: in theory, I should go to the gym and then it’s really hard to actually do it to, this is something that I’m really going to do and then they go to the gym, right? And I think going to church is something like that, that you’re going to find a stricter religion that actually has beliefs and actually places going to church as something that God wants you to do. This is a positive moral thing that they’re more likely to actually do it. And I think that’s where beliefs do kind of play a role. And then I call this the message. So I jokingly call it the message from God, but if you were, I think I’ve mentioned previously the idea of meaning memes, that we often say, oh, communism is a religion. Well, obviously communism’s not a religion. It’s got no beliefs in God at all. And yet when somebody says that, you know what they mean, is that there’s something very similar between communism and religion. I call this concept meaning memes. So a meaning meme is the idea that there’s these meme plexes or memes that people get into their mind and it becomes part of how they self -identify and it always has some sort of moral message that this is the message from God, as I call it, where they’re trying to bring this message to the world that needs to be heard. And it’s important that they do because it has moral meaning. And it helps people find meaning in their lives. It’s also very dangerous. This is something that Peter and I have talked about quite a bit.
[01:10:27] Blue: I think all meaning memes are inherently dangerous, but they’re also the source of pretty much every good thing that’s come in the world up to this point. What’s dangerous about them? So this idea of the message that you’ve got something important to say to the world that you need to bring the world, that’s kind of the meme. You’re trying to bring this set of beliefs to the world. It could very quickly, the very fact that you even have a message that the world isn’t accepting this message yet. So for Deutsche Inns, that might be the idea of infinity, that there’s this actual idea of infinity and there’s really great things that could be used that are part of the message of Deutsche Inns. But you can very quickly see how it could become elitist. We have this message, whatever, and it very quickly can become, we’re better than everybody else. And I think religions, from what I’ve seen, they spend a lot of time trying to teach their members not to vilify non -members of the religion. And I think that’s a necessary institution that has to exist. I think it’s one of the things that’s lacking in some of the more radical versions of leftism, is that they don’t have that non -vilify message yet. Hopefully they’ll pick it up at some point. It seems like religion spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to have this message you bring to the world, but not try to see the world as evil, because they aren’t doing this thing that has this moral meaning that you think is important for the world to know about. And I think that that is something that is tough, right?
[01:11:58] Blue: Is that on the one hand, you actually do believe you’ve got something that’s important. If I could pick on libertarians, I love libertarians. If I could pick on libertarians as an example of a meaning name here, you’ve got these moral ideas that come out of economics that libertarians are very attracted to. It’s not that hard to go too far to find a libertarian that is condemning anyone who doesn’t agree with them morally and in really negative ways. It’s because the very existence of the meaning name has the potential to become elitist and dangerous. And you have to be constantly fighting against that and trying to turn it into more of a, we try to persuade people rather than we try to out them. And that’s what we’re doing for disagreeing with us. And I’ve noticed religions do spend a lot of time trying to keep themselves safe in that way. And religions that fail at this will become cults and will become dangerous. I also think that the other thing that I would mention is this idea of regular meetings or a gathering. Religions have traditionally had churches where you meet together as a congregation physically and or a concept of gathering. We’re all going to gather in Israel or something like that. And this is something Mormons have had a lot of both of those. And I think that this is a really important institution because if you just have a bunch of people who are kind of just out there, they tend to evaporate over time. Whereas if they can be part of a community and fill part of a community that they’re physically neighbors with then it’s a lot harder for the meme to evaporate.
[01:13:35] Blue: Now this may be changing because of the internet. I think we’ve seen a lot of meaning memes, some positive, some negative, some both, cropping up because you finally had people on the internet who were geographically diverse coming together and forming groups online. So it may be that the internet will allow to not have to have a physical gathering anymore. But I think that the physical gatherings are still really important. I know that you guys have had a number of physical gatherings and I think that that’s like an important institution to build up.
[01:14:07] Green: Do you think that you can have a happy life without meaning memes?
[01:14:14] Blue: That’s an interesting question. So I would guess that the vast majority of humans that have lived didn’t have meaning memes because if you’re just trying to survive you’re probably not spending any time on your meaning memes very much. But I’m not sure that’s an ideal way to live or you’re just trying to survive from day to day. And I definitely think that as we’ve gained knowledge and we’ve overcome the need to make every single moment about survival that the rise of meaning memes became increasingly important. I mean like you can easily find studies on this and people who talk about this, the idea of a meaning crisis. The fact that modern societies as they’ve become less religious that they’ve had a meaning crisis. It’s harder for them to find meaning. And I think that I won’t out anything but let’s just say that there are some powerful meaning memes out there right now that have some fairly negative influences that honestly almost every religion I know is safer than at this point. And I think that will change over time, right? Do we have a meaning meme shaped gap then?
[01:15:21] Red: Is that just kind of a different way of saying God shaped gap?
[01:15:26] Unknown: So
[01:15:26] Blue: I can’t say that every human is like this but it sure seems to be common. At least in modern societies where you’re not just trying to survive from day to day that you need some way to actualize yourself. If you were to think about the hierarchy of needs, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with self -actualization being at the top of the pyramid. Now I know that as much as that theory gets used it’s actually a disproven theory but there are theories similar to it, so similar to a lay person you may not even be able to tell the difference that have actually survived a number of empirical tests. So I definitely think that there’s something to the hierarchy of needs even if it’s technically incorrect and even in real life it’s far more complicated than that but the idea that people need something to live for, something that gets them up in the morning I think that that’s just really common. I don’t know if it’s universal but it sure is ubiquitous. And this is actually one of the things that I brought up to people, like you had mentioned in one of your posts, Peter, the idea that humans seem to have this real need to see themselves as righteous compared to other people and I said that’s what meaning memes are. All meaning memes have that potentially dangerous side where we’re the righteous because we have this message, the truth and everybody else’s evil by comparison and it can run away fast and easy, right? And inside of an open society it gets in check outside of it and this is another thing I’ve brought up is when you people talk about the evils of religion they’re almost always,
[01:17:03] Blue: really talking about the most evil things that religion has done, they’re almost always talking about pre -open societies or religions outside of open societies. Religion is dangerous because it’s a meaning meme. It can run away really fast but inside of an open society where we have the Popperian filter in place religions are forced to compete with other meaning memes and forced to compete with non -meaning memes and things like that and religions inside of open society, even let me just give you the most obvious one. The Muslim religion inside of an open society versus outside of an open society since they exist in large numbers in both inside and outside open societies today. I’m not even sure you should truly think of those as the same religion, right? They’re very different in so many ways because being part of that open society allows the more positive things to come out and the negative things get filtered out. And as long as you keep in the open society’s institutions working I think that that Popperian filter will continue to filter out that negative side of meaning memes and I think we benefit a lot from meaning memes precisely even if the adherents are very dogmatic I think we benefit from having that element because they often raise issues that are real and that we need to solve and problems that need to be resolved.
[01:18:22] Blue: Now here’s the thing though I think that there is something I hate to say this and I hope I’m even wrong but I’ve always felt like critical rationalism has a sort of side to it where it’s maybe meaning meme destroying where once you really imbibe the idea of fallibilism it’s very easy to start losing the meaning meme elements of a movement. Again, I’ll pick on libertarianism I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s a heavy libertarian element within the Deutsche movement but I don’t think critical rationalism allows a lot of the things that make libertarianism vibrant I don’t think it will survive criticism. I think that the moment you start to realize my traditions, the things I believe are really true may not in fact be entirely true they may only be partially true that sometimes for some people they just kind of lose interest so I do think that we do have to recognize the human need there and I don’t know how to handle it and there’s probably a really good way to handle it maybe we just haven’t figured it out yet
[01:19:30] Green: I wonder to what extent that is because people still have this dichotomy where either there is truth and I can have the truth or there is no truth and therefore I can’t have the truth whereas fallibilism says there is a truth but you may not know what it is or your understanding of it may constantly evolve but then I would have thought that that would fit again more into Mormonism where it says that you are constantly improving or in Christianity in general that you are constantly becoming more godlike or more godly or more closer to Christ or whatever let
[01:20:15] Blue: me give you a non -religious example that fits really well let’s say you went to Greta Thunberg and you said hey you know what I’ve got really good news Greta turns out that it’s trivially easy to put action in the air and to stop the world from going extinct yes that’s got some negatives we might destroy the ocean if we do that but that’s so much better than going extinct like you’re so worried about do you think she would this should be a positive message for her do you think it would be
[01:20:45] Green: no that would be a big oof yes and I wonder whether religions work and specifically religions that refer to a god works because that is something that is very difficult to falsify or very difficult to attack in this way so there is this thing that is sort of solid and continuing
[01:21:07] Blue: right I actually think what you just said is correct I think all meaning memes suffer from this problem to various degrees and I think one of the hard things is trying to get around it right is if you were to look at I mean like does anybody seriously doubt the value of feminism at this point and yet it’s not uncommon to not want to be around someone who’s too feminist in part because they have meaning mean lies it in such a way that a lot of them are a little intolerable to be around and if you were to come to them and try to look at positives let’s look at the positive things maybe women have actually advanced more than you give them credit for it it’s going to be a negative for them because they see their life meaning in a certain way and it can’t be challenged and I think that that’s always going to be the difficulty and right now if you really look at how open societies work I think being dogmatic on something is like just ubiquitous in common and open societies don’t work despite that but it because of that that we’ve got people who are very passionate about their beliefs which almost always have some truth to them and they never actually see it in the fully true way but because there is some truth to it and because there are actual problems that come out of this the paparian filter lets the good parts through and we actually make improvements largely because of their meaning memes even if the meaning meme was a fault technically speaking could
[01:22:39] Blue: you make meaning memes out of the idea that progress is always possible that your ideas are always you know rife with errors and that your whole thing is about finding those errors making progress like could it could it be
[01:22:54] Green: I see no reason why you
[01:22:55] Blue: couldn’t I think that those are interesting challenges how could you turn those things into something that functioned more really what we’re talking about is there’s many meaning memes out there religions just a small part of that probably they’re not even the most important meaning memes probably politics is the most important meaning memes that exists today but I think religions have done this in a far more positive way than people give them credit for I mean it’s religions have this long history of figuring out how to you know particularly inside of open societies to live with their neighbors and to how to keep their religions from becoming dangerous and things like that and I honestly think there’s a lot of meaning memes out there that are more dangerous than religion today that are going to need to learn from religion and how to go about this in a more productive way inside of an open society before they’re done so I I think the idea of perfection and error correction would be a great basis for a meaning meme that would maybe hopefully reduce a lot of the negatives that come out of meaning memes I kind of want to let peter ask me the hard questions now about supernatural it the
[01:24:05] Red: question I had was was about the difference between the a religious claim and a more empirical claim that might be or metaphysical claim I suppose that might be more subject to critical rationalism I mean do you think it’s appropriate to go after the kinds of religious claims that you’ve brought up using the tools of critical rationalism or does it just is it more of a does not apply kind of a situation okay
[01:24:42] Blue: that’s a really hard question you also kind of asked me about like you mentioned in passing Joseph Smith and he has these glasses and he received revelations through them it sounds kind of weird to people should you
[01:24:57] Red: yeah I’m not going to lie it does sound a little weird
[01:25:00] Blue: so you know to answer that question let me go ahead and so people often ask me this how do you reconcile your religious side to your rational side now I usually tell them I don’t and it’s not a very helpful answer but it gets me past having to give a deeper answer that I know is going to require some time and I’m in a sound bite situation where I don’t have the time to get into it but in large measure I kind of have two sides a religious side and a rational side and I accept that they’re not in that their intention with each other and I don’t think that this is an entirely abnormal thing for religious people to fill I think that it’s quite normal in fact let me kind of lay out something though that I think might help explain how religious people go about looking at it and how they try to deal with the supernatural side of their religion while they’re trying to also be a modern educated rationalist so let me give
[01:26:01] Blue: let’s start with a quote from unfortunately this is to answer this question I can’t answer it fully I can only kind of hint at what I’m getting at and it’s going to probably take me 30 minutes to give you the answer so bear with me for a second okay so here’s a quote from Bertrand Russell it’s from his article a free man’s worship it says even more purposeless more void of meaning is the world which science presents for our belief amid such a world if anywhere our our ideals henceforth must find a home that man is the product of causes which have no provision of the end they were achieving that his origin his growth his hopes and fears his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental co -location of atoms that no fire no heroism no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave that all labors of the ages all the devotion all the inspiration all the noon day brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruin all of these things if not quite beyond dispute are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand and then he goes on to say in the same thing the world was not made for us however beautiful may be the things we crave fate may nevertheless forbid them okay now since you guys are Deutschians that that quote probably bothers you for a lot of reasons bought a good reasons but I would suggest that this is the current scientific world view absent dutching is that there’s a couple other physicists like Julian Barber there’s a few others that are that
[01:27:47] Blue: Freeman Dyson that have kind of bucked against this view but this view is widely accepted within scientific community certainly prior to H it was all of them all this all scientists except maybe theistic scientists and even post do H very few scientists except dutchist theories at this point they’re really not widely accepted as the paradigm of scientific thinking at this point this what Bertrand Russell is laying out is how the vast majority of atheists scientists see the universe and see the world now this point of view I one of my favorite authors is HP Lovecraft and he’s a horror author he invented something called cosmic or and he loved science but he felt it was very negative and he hated religion but and he would write about the hypocrites in religion and things like that at tons of his writings from the letters that he sent around famously he was pen pals with Robert E Howard the measure of Conan several other famous authors that HP Lovecraft kind of helped mentor because he was older than them at the time he says HP Lovecraft says now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos at large he actually based on his understanding of science created this whole new set of horror this idea of cosmic horror and all his stories are actually analogies or
[01:29:19] Blue: metaphors for what how he actually saw the world now this is a guy who was by today’s standards we would say he was deeply anxious and depressed and mentally ill right and channel that into his writings and even Karl Popper gunning the act on this here’s a quote from Karl Popper the trivial truth is that the ultimate future of man whatever fate may have in store for him can be nothing more splendid than his ultimate extinction so what I want to do is obviously you guys have lashed on to the Deutsch way of looking at science which is a minority view by far at this point the majority cosmology is really heat death today entropy is going to lead to heat death it’s not even a bad cosmology scientifically speaking it kind of does seem like it follows naturally from the second law of thermodynamics which is why it’s so widely believed
[01:30:13] Blue: what I want you to do is just for a second think about what if you were a rationalist and you didn’t have which is way of looking at things available to you because you lived prior to that point or what if you just bought heat death what if you just accepted heat death as a cosmology which parts of dutch’s views are no longer valid and so the first one the most obvious one is there’s no infinity of progress because all progress must at some point come to an end or reverse under heat death cosmology and the universe is not really explicable okay we’re universal explainers only in the sense that if we lived in a totally different cosmology than the one we actually live in for the moment assuming heat death that we could theoretically explain everything but since we don’t we won’t in fact there’s an infinity of things to explain and there’s only a finite number of ticks of computation that exist in the universe before heat death happens we will basically explain nearly nothing before we’re done morality justice is not real when hitler killed somebody death is the end
[01:31:18] Blue: hitler actually did enjoy victory over them there is no actual justice there morality becomes parochial this one I have to explain a little but if someday all is going to reverse and all our knowledge is going to disappear as we start to approach heat death there’ll be a long period where morality will no longer hold survival value so morality as a meme will go out of existence and because you can only survive via immoral means really you would have to say it’s not that morality is completely unobjective but it’s parochial it’s something’s temporary and there’ll be a much longer period where it just doesn’t apply you can’t really make a better future under heat death you can do it temporarily and you can do it kind of subjectively based on whatever moral parochial moral wisdom you think you have at that point but ultimately it will be based on values that will disappear at some point and if you do make a better future it just means that there’s that much more suffering and horror when now suddenly a larger group that has learned way more has to lose it awful and there’s no immortality even if you could work out how to avoid death for say a trillion years a trillion is infinitely closer to zero than it is to infinity so we often talk about if I could live a billion years I’m immortal except you’re really not that’s just a way of speaking right it’s an analogy that’s not actually true and sure you could make up meaning for your life any way you wish but if you actually lived long enough which you might if the transhumanist turned out to be right and we can get past death which this heat death universe doesn’t stop you from doing you actually will live long enough to see everything that you lived for come undone at some point when heat death is reached
[01:33:02] Red: can I just so what I hear you saying which is I think extremely interesting way to put it but if if heat death is real which I think maybe is controversial in the physics no
[01:33:14] Green: it’s
[01:33:15] Blue: definitely doesn’t believe in it
[01:33:16] Red: but they accepted
[01:33:18] Green: yes
[01:33:18] Red: and that has sort of a direct implication to morality it means that it’s it’s completely subjective or parochial
[01:33:29] Blue: parochial it’s not really subjective it’s parochial
[01:33:32] Red: okay okay
[01:33:32] Blue: so keep in mind that this is what the vast majority of rational atheists have believed throughout time it’s science when put in this light which is the light that most of them accepted in even today most rational atheists accept in is deeply pessimistic it’s a profoundly pessimistic viewpoint this is why so going back to HP Lovecraft quotes he’s trying to talk about morality in terms of how him with his scientific world view looked at morality he said in a cosmos without absolute values we have to rely on the relative values affecting our daily sense of comfort pleasure and emotional satisfaction what gives us relative painlessness and contentment we may arbitrarily call good or vice versa then he goes on to say now what gives one person or race or age relative painlessness and contentment often disagrees sharply on the psychological side from what gives these boons to another person or race or age therefore good is relative and variable quality depending on ancestry chronology geography nationality and individual temperament now let me assure you that because Lovecraft you can guess this just from that quote he was a deeply racist individual he was basing it on his understanding of science and the pessimistic nature that he understood it to be holding now you probably all familiar with Leo Tolstoy he’s another person who here’s an author but he’s part of the elite circles in Russia and he really that circle that he ran in they were non -religious they may participate in religion just for the sake of the public but like they don’t really believe in it he explains this in a confession which is an excellent read by the way and so he talks about his existential crisis where he reached a point where because of his scientific world view that he accepted and how pessimistic it seemed to him how it started to destroy his life now so let me just read a little bit about this and kind of explain his viewpoint the question to be put like this why do I live why do I wish for anything or do anything or express another way is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me I was finally forced to conclude that my questions were the only legitimate ones serving the basis for all branches of knowledge and that the fault did not lie with me and my questions but with science even had the pretensions to answer these questions the answer given was none other than that the one that I had already given myself what is the meaning of my life it has none or what will come of my life nothing or why does everything there is exist and why do I exist because it does
[01:36:17] Blue: so he started to have this thought and he in his book he says I imagine that you know here he is one of the most famous authors to ever live right he’s like I could be like a hundred times more famous and my legacy could last a hundred times longer and yet it still would be nothing it would all disappear in a finite amount of time and it’s going to be gone and it just doesn’t matter how successful I am okay and he likened it to a story that he gives of some of a man himself in this case running through the forest and a beast is chasing him and he to hide from the beast that’s trying to kill him he jumps into a well and he’s hanging from you know weeds or something in this well and the beast is up above trying to kill him and he sees that underneath in the bottom of the well is a dragon that’s trying to eat him and he’s stuck in between the beast at the top and the dragon at the bottom and his arms are starting to give out starting to lose strength and he sees that there’s these little mice chewing on the weeds and that it’s just a matter of time now before the weeds are going to get cut and he’s going to fall to that dragon beneath oh but it happens to be that there’s some honey right there and he can look at and honey’s pretty pleasurable
[01:37:29] Blue: he saw people as telling him when he would he would go around and try to talk with people it’s like how do you look at this from in his elite circle they would say well just enjoy the honey and he would basically say I don’t see how to enjoy the honey and so this is him trying to explain that he says the delusions of joy of my life had formerly stifled my fear of the dragon no longer to see me no matter how many times I’m told you cannot understand the meaning of life do not think about it but live I cannot do so because I’ve already done it for too long now I cannot help seeing day and night chasing me and leading to my death this is all I can see because it is the only truth all the rest is a lie those two drops of honey which more than anything all else diverted my eyes from the cruel truth my love for my family and my writings which I called art I no longer found sweet it was quite dreadful and so in order to escape from this horror I wanted to kill myself I wanted a horror I wanted a horror of what lay ahead of me and knew that this horror was worse than my present position but I could neither drive it away nor patiently await the end so Tolstoy found himself in this situation where he took his understanding of the cosmology of science based on the best theories that were available to him at the time and he tried to he followed him to there what he felt was their logical conclusions and it destroyed his life now right there was no way for him to get joy out of life given what he thought was actually true now I I don’t actually find his solution to the problem very convincing and I have a friend who suggested the book to me and she’s like I really didn’t like his answer he does eventually get more involved with religion of the peasants and then he has issues with that and it’s interesting kind of where the story goes from there because he found much to criticize within religion as well and Tolstoy famously criticized religion quite a bit but he also practiced it and came to at least believe parts of it so what’s going on here is there’s a Catholic Jesuit named Telly Hard to Charden I don’t know if I pronounced that right
[01:39:36] Blue: and he wrote a book called The Phenomenon of Man and he was a scientist a very very very good scientist one of the ones that helped discover as the Peking man it helped really turn evolution into an important scientific theory and the existence of pominids and things like that and while being this Catholic priest at a time when the Catholic Church did not accept evolution they do today but they didn’t back then so he found himself in a lot of tension with the Catholic Church over this and in his book which he wasn’t allowed to publish in his lifetime so he arranged to have it published after he died because the Catholic Church wouldn’t allow him to and he didn’t intend to go against them he wanted to follow what they said so he just arranged for it to be published after he died he says our minds by the very fact of being able to discern infinite horizons ahead it is only able to move by the hope of achieving through something of itself a supreme consummation without which it would rightly feel itself to be stunted frustrated and cheated a total death an unscalable wall on which consciousness would crash and then forever disappear are thus incomposible with the mechanisms of conscious activity which would immediately break its main spring either nature is close to our demand for futurity in which case thought thought the fruit of millions of years of effort is stifled stillborn is a self abortive and absurd universe or else an open exists man will never take a step in a direction he knows to be blocked there lies precisely the ill that caused our disquiet having got so far what is the minimum requirement we fill before we can say that the road ahead to us is open that is the only one but it is everything it is that we should be assured that the space and chances to fulfill ourselves that is to say to progress till we arrive at the utmost limits of ourselves
[01:41:28] Blue: so you’ve got these ideas you’ve got this tension that exists that science is widely understood to be deeply deeply pessimistic and that is accepted by almost everyone at the time and it’s very hard to see how to get around it given what we think we understand about the scientific world view now it’s interesting you guys probably are familiar with Michael Sherman who’s the famous skeptic from Scientific American he actually took that roll over from Martin Gardner who by the way was a theist so I actually want to show some differences between their approaches but they were the they were the writer that kind of wrote about
[01:42:07] Blue: the pseudoscience and took skepticism of it and that was kind of what they were famous for both of them were both Martin Gardner and Michael Sherman so Michael Sherman quoting Christopher Hitchens says to the old theistic question why is there something rather than nothing we can counter pose the findings of Lawrence Krauss and others about the foreseeable heat death of the universe so the question can and must be rephrased why will our belief in something soon be replaced with nothing it’s only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progress and consider the many recessions we have undergone and we’ll undergo and we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design and then he goes on to say after this quote this is Michael Sherman now talking the dialectical usefulness of clear logic coupled with elegant prose layered on top of the usual dollop of data cannot be overstated and should be considered by scientists as the instrument of persuasion in the battle of ideas now when I read this I honestly don’t see how he doesn’t see that this argument isn’t what he thinks it is if so he’s arguing literally against the existence of God exists of existence of anything that’s religious in nature by trying to say look the real truth is is that there’s no infinity there’s no there’s no eternal progress we’re all going to go into nonexistence and it basically lays out the pessimistic scientific world view as a way of trying to disprove to religious people that they should no longer believe in their religions this doesn’t seem like a good argument to me just at an emotional level you might as well at this point as if you’re a religious person you’re going to go wow if that’s what you believe then I’m glad I don’t agree with
[01:43:53] Blue: you even if you’re right I’m glad I don’t agree with you you know even if you’re completely right I’m glad I’m delusional in fact and this I think is I’m trying to emphasize here the degree to which the scientific community has imbibed this pessimism religion in many ways has been through the years through the ages the carrier of optimism and there wasn’t really a non -supernaturalistic way to look at optimism prior to say David Deutsch’s time that was one of the things that really grabbed my interest in David Deutsch is that here’s an actual scientist atheist scientist who’s trying to figure out a way to use science to get to optimism instead of the normal pessimistic way that people look at science and by the way in a sort of imagined response to Michael Sherman tell you Deschardin says of why heat death is so awful perhaps anything would be better than a long drawn out senility heat death really is an almost you can’t imagine something worse than it type of situation if it’s actually true now Martin Gardner he wrote a book where he tried to explain why in part he’s trying to explain a lot of his different philosophical beliefs but one of me tried to explain was why do I believe in an afterlife why do I believe there’s a God things like that and he did not take a scientific
[01:45:20] Blue: critical rationalist paparian world view to be able to get to that because honestly at least for the time period he was living in that was impossible instead he kind of took the approach that I’m kind of suggesting here so quoting GK Chester so first of all quoting GK Chester he points out that this isn’t actually a problem unique to science you might think oh it used to be that everybody believed in an afterlife and then science came and ruined it by telling us about the truth and certainly that is one of the ways science presents itself to the world but in fact Chester points out that materialism was always something that every single human being in the history of the world had to contend with he says the materialism of things is on the face of things it does not require any science to find it out a man who has lived and loved falls down dead in the worms eat him if mankind has believed in spite of that it can believe in spite of anything so it’s not really specifically science that is the pessimism there’s this materialistic world view that has always existed at the same time as the religious world view
[01:46:29] Blue: and then he goes on so Martin Gardner did on to say if we take seriously our hopes that justice will be done with respect to our lives so we must posit an afterlife and if there’s an afterlife there must be a God who is good enough and powerful enough to provide it if we want to make our beliefs consistent with the demands of our moral nature we must posit God and immortality and if we have faith we do more than recognize them as posits we also believe them to be true and then quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson he says our passions our endeavors have something ridiculous and mocking if we come to such a hasty end the point that Martin Gardner is trying to make is he’s actually reversing the way we normally think of this so a lot of times you will hear people ask do you need religion for morality obviously this could be a very offensive question because obviously atheists are moral people a lot of atheists I know get very defensive about this question what he’s really saying is that you’ve reversed the cause and effect that what really is going on is religion comes from morality morality is something that we all believe we believe it’s real we believe it’s objective it’s a part of the human world it’s a part of our hopes our aspirations it’s a part of who we are religion is what you get when you take it seriously as a theory but you don’t have any other way to show that it could be objective and non parochial so you end up with really honestly supernatural beliefs
[01:47:58] Blue: and that’s really in many ways where religion comes from is it’s this need for humans to kind of put a finger on the scale and say you know what I’m not sure I do accept the pessimistic world view that I see presented before me I think maybe life is better than it seems and then you look at religions in this sense they’re different theories about how that could be true and a lot of the things that people make fun about them they’re probably all true right is there sometimes the answers come across to silly
[01:48:28] Blue: and yet I can’t help but feel this alignment with the fact that they are willing to just say okay you know what if he that’s actually the way it is things are really as bad as you say they are then yeah I’m bucking reality I do not care I’m going to be optimistic anyhow I relate strongly to that viewpoint and this is actually how I navigate the supernatural side of religion with the knots and with the my rationalist and reason side so the thing that kind of comes out of this though is this idea of truth is not a good thing so again this is Lovecraft since most atheist scientists will never admit to this Lovecraft actually realized if we take this scientific view as we currently understand it seriously what we’re really saying is that the truth isn’t good that truth and goodness are not aligned it says 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 black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far the sciences each strain in their own direction have hitherto harmed us little but someday the piercing piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from revelation or flee from the deadly light into a peace and safety of a new dark age now remember Lovecraft’s anti -religious so he’s he’s not saying the same thing some of these religious people I’m quoting like Martin Gardner but he’s accepting the pessimistic world view and that informs his horror I think that this is kind of the starting point though is it if it is actually the case that the world is as pessimistic as many scientists believe it to be even today still continue to believe it to be I’m not sure you can say religion is a bad thing even if it’s completely false fact it might even be the case given that world view that religion is good for humankind precisely because it is false and that would have to be the starting point for any actual discussion on the subject now I’ve never seen an atheist actually start at that point like Richard Dawkins he’ll admit to the survival value of the God name he says the survival value of the God name in the meme poll result from its great psychological appeal provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence it suggests that injustice in the world may be rectified in the next the everlasting arms hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which like a doctor’s placebo is nevertheless effective for being imaginary then he goes on to but then he says in his introduction to the book be warned that if I if you wish as I do to build a society which individually individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards the common good you can expect little help from our biological nature let us try to teach generosity and alt altruism because we are born selfish let us understand that our own selfish genes are what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their design something that no other species has ever inspired to do it’s hard to even figure out what Dawkins is trying to say given that he does in fact believe in heat death and that he should be looking at morality as Procure it’s it’s hard to even know what to make of that statement in terms of his own world view and yet I don’t really doubt that he very seriously believes in what he’s saying and that it’s a meaningful moral statement to him so Deutsch in his book fabric of reality he talks about the omega point and I know you wanted to ask me about the omega point
[01:52:13] Blue: it might make sense to try to explain the history of the omega point and the fact is that the history of the omega point is primarily religious yes it’s science it was a serious scientific attempt very special in many ways and I’ll actually talk about my criticisms of it I have a number of very strong criticisms of it but I also feel like Tippler should be acknowledged for his genius for recognizing lots of things that no one noticed before well it’s kind of a weird theory because
[01:52:43] Red: it’s kind of I think people probably most people who hear about interpret it as something that’s religious because he’s known as a Christian physicist but it also can make make sense in just a very materialist yes kind of interpretation to at least is let me can I just give you like a five sentence overview of what I think it is and then you can tell me how wrong I am here okay so it’s the I mean I haven’t read his book I’m just getting this from YouTube videos basically but so the the end of the universe we’re nearing the heat death of the universe substantiation of knowledge or information has has sort of grown you know we’ve gone sort of beyond the Dyson sphere or whatever and we’re it’s it’s literally taking over the universe as part of that descendants however you want to put it decide to bring back all former humans according to their DNA so all possible combinations of DNA are created it’s like sort of a resurrection thing and because we’re moving the the speed of light time is no longer a factor so we’re living eternally in a kind of paradise that’s
[01:54:14] Blue: a pretty good summary is
[01:54:15] Red: that sound sort of right okay well that’s good but I won one question is I am not why does it this I even have to happen at the end of the universe says as the what’s the relationship between that I mean it seems to me that could happen without heat death of the universe
[01:54:31] Blue: so heat death would heat death would be that not happening so this is the mega point posits that death is the wrong cosmology it’s a it’s an opposing cosmology to heat death
[01:54:42] Red: okay so
[01:54:44] Blue: let me explain kind of the difference because there’s a really simple difference here so there’s this idea of the second law of thermal dynamics which is the idea that entropy must always grow chaos must always grow so heat death is if you’ve got nothing else to look at if you like you take something and it’s in a box and you spend its energy eventually it all turns into heat then the energy is still there it doesn’t disappear but it’s all the same and to be able to use energy you have to have a heat sink you have to be able to have like a hot sun and a cold earth and you have to be able to move energy between them once everything is evened out the energy becomes useless and you can’t use it anymore so heat death would be that the amount of entropy or chaos reaches where everything is exactly equal everywhere it’s literally impossible to build a clock because nothing everything changes time ceases to exist in heat death this is something people don’t know time from a physics viewpoint is usually based on the ability to build a clock if you can’t build a clock you’ve got no time so once heat death is reached there’s no life there’s it’s life is completely impossible just really you’ve just got a lot of nothing basically so the the information in this sense is something that’s pushing back against heat death then so not exactly so if
[01:56:08] Blue: you were to look at our life on earth today one of the theories and it’s actually a pretty good theory is that the reason why life exists is to increase the rate at which heat death is reached increase the rate at which we create entropy because remember that you can’t you can’t actually push back against entropy no matter what you do you will always create greater disorder than you create order those two can never be more than balanced and they will always be in favor of the entropy so life itself is not in any way defying or going against the second law of thermal dynamics that’s a misunderstanding it’s one that Christians like anti -evolutionist Christians have latched on to evolution defies the second law of thermal dynamics it’s just not true right
[01:56:55] Blue: life creates disorder faster than if it’s not there because that’s just the natural part of the second law of thermal dynamics here’s the loophole and this is and until you realize that there is a loophole it’s really hard to see around the concept of heat death so Freeman Dyson is actually the one I think that at least I know of was the first to really mention the existence of the loophole so it’s true that you have to always have an increase of entropy but it doesn’t necessarily have to even out it doesn’t have to necessarily reach heat death it could be that you could in theory move have an intrepent infinite growth towards entropy that chaos grows forever allowing you to have a world of order forever now how would you do this well there’s not a lot of known mechanisms within physics that allow you to do this in fact it’s it’s really hard to come up with a mechanism that allows you to take advantage of this loophole which is why most scientists don’t accept that the loophole can be exploited they mostly just accept heat death today for good reason I mean and this is one of the things that Peter you and I have talked about a lot of times you read something from Dawkins and it’s so pessimistic and you say why does it have to be so pessimistic and I said look you’re missing the point his world view is inherently pessimistic he’s he’s just talking the truth as he understands it right yeah doesn’t accept Deutsche’s views so of course it’s pessimistic yeah
[01:58:19] Blue: so the idea that you could somehow you can’t work around entropy but you can grow it to infinity but how do you do that what’s the mechanism by which you do that well there wasn’t a known mechanism so Freeman Dyson came up with a possibility and it was this idea that you could life would go out and as the universe expanded it would create these it would create little pockets of order and then what it would do is it would wait for a billion years until its heat was different from the heat around it and then it could do a few computations you know and then it would stop and it would wait another billion years and it would increase the number of years very similar to Deutsche’s dark energy model that’s in beginning of infinity except that there’s no dark energy in this model and so he tried to work up a way that life could continue forever and it didn’t work for a number of reasons at least that’s my understanding Dyson he was the first to really try to work out and publish how could life survive forever there’s a lot of problems with the way he tried to go about it I just quoted Tellyard de Chardon he’s actually the one that came up with the term omega point he had his own omega point theory but it was based in evolutionary theory because he was a evolutionary biologist rather than a physicist
[01:59:40] Blue: and he had this idea and some of the ideas informed Frank Tipper including taking the term omega point and so he would so for example he would he had this idea of us taking control of evolution so he imagined with man coming into existence that we would start here’s the quote yet when the first spark of thought appeared on the earth life founded had brought into the world a power capable of criticizing it and judging it very interesting idea then he has this idea that man is going to replace he says we’ve given to the thought the question of what medical and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection should we suppress them so he meant he doesn’t imagine natural selection ever coming to an end but it won’t be about genes anymore right it will turn into something else that we will decide how it is developed and how things evolve and even coined a term the no sphere spelled no of sphere which is actually still used today and it it’s refers to exactly what ended up coming into being remember this guy lived quite a while ago so this was actually quite prescient of him the internet the idea of this world of information and memes that man lives inside of and how it will grow and it will take over and the idea that memes will become more important to evolution then the word mean didn’t exist back in his time but the memes will become more important to evolution than genes and that genes won’t play a big role at some point this is part of his theory where he’s trying to reconcile his religion with science and he had this idea of us evolving into an omega point where we evolve and forever and move towards perfection forever
[02:01:33] Blue: now he had a bunch of other ideas in his evolutionary theory this idea of radial energy and things that aren’t accepted today they allow they were a kind of teleology for evolution that evolution had a direction which isn’t generally accepted in evolution today and yet I think a charitable reading of him would be more like human beings will create this right and we know that we do like we decide how wolves are going to evolve we decide how humans are going to evolve and we decide whether we like what evolution has given us of we’re going to go beyond that and do something different because we prefer it and that’s what morality is so he had this idea that evolution could be directed and towards an omega point and to him omega point was this concept of God but it was also this concept of humans becoming this omega point so typler picked up on this idea but his is a physics theory instead of a biological theory although it uses natural selection uses all four of the strands typler is actually the original four strander before I talk about typler I got to admit typler is a bit of a nutter and this just can’t be avoided so for instance in his book the physics of Christianity
[02:02:56] Blue: he writes about he tries to explain the virgin birth of Christ by suggesting that Christ was an X X chromosome male which would be a male without a Y chromosome but with the Y chromosome having copied itself inserted itself into the X chromosome so that he would still appear as if he was an XY male X X males exist in real life they they would be genetically a woman but due to the way things develop they develop the primary characteristics of a male instead they’re typically smaller they look more feminine things like that but they would be biologically a male so he tries to work out what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to work out how Mary the mother of Jesus could have had pathogenesis so that a virgin birth was possible now why would he go through so much trouble well it’s because typler does not believe in the supernatural he is today a Christian a lot of his books were written when he wasn’t but he is today a Christian but he does accept the existence of miracles but miracles in his mind are improbable outcomes not supernatural outcomes he doesn’t believe in the supernatural at all so if he’s going to as a Christian believe in the virgin birth then he needs to by golly work out a biological theory for how the virgin virgin birth could happen that does not require any sort of reference to the supernatural
[02:04:23] Blue: and a huge part of his books is working out how to test his theories so he talks about how to get the turn shroud which is the shroud of Christ or at least you know the Catholics believe it’s the shroud of Christ that’s pretty debatable whether it’s actually the shroud of Christ and he wants to test the DNA to see if there’s an XX male that had left DNA on the shroud in fact in the book he I don’t fully understand it but he explains what tests were done and why he thinks that this is correct things like that and this is actually there are some worse ones right I mean like he really just goes to weird lengths
[02:05:04] Blue: and I don’t really believe any of his theories right I think that the need for an XX male it’s pretty out there right and I don’t really think if we were to go and to do a full experiment with this we would find that this is even true even assuming the shroud even existed at the time of Christ which I don’t think it did here’s the thing I have to give him some credit for and I actually do stand by this I don’t think we should judge theories based on how nutty they are I think we should judge them based on their testability and Tipler does try to make every single one of his theories all of them testable because of this I do consider it to be complete you know cockapoo right I don’t think any of it’s true but it’s the right kind it’s the kind where you take seriously you don’t try to immunize your theories from testing and criticism you try to figure out how to formulate them in an empirical way because of that I don’t really believe he even though I do think he’s a nutter I think he’s an okay kind of nutter he’s the kind that is a scientist at heart and we just shouldn’t judge theories based on how weird they sound we should judge them based on whether they actually survive testing or not I fully expect his theories to not survive testing here’s something else that’s interesting while Tipler did start life as a Christian he quickly gave it up and became an atheist because he couldn’t figure out how to reconcile his scientific worldview with his Christian beliefs so he became a full -on atheist obviously one that still had some interests in religious type thought but in his 1986 book which with co -author John Barrow who’s well -known very respected physicist also called the Anthropic Cosmological Principle Tipler at that point is an ex Christian and he’s an atheist and this is the book in which both of these authors for the first time unveiled the megapoint theory so when the megapoint theory was actually released for the first time it was by an atheist right the atheist Tipler not the Christian Tipler and yet you can see why it would take someone with a religious background like Tipler that very clearly knows quite a bit about theology just from his writings I can tell he does to probably be the right kind of atheist to decide I’m going to see if there’s somewhere to get around the pessimistic nature of science so I don’t think you can entirely divorce religion from the megapoint theory because of that I think it was informed by a man who had religious desires if not religious beliefs if that makes any sense then in his 1994 book the physics of immortality he says he’s still an atheist now in the book he goes to great lengths to try to work out how the megapoint could be
[02:07:59] Blue: synchronized with religious belief including Christian beliefs but he says he has a chapter called why I’m not a Christian and he states in here he says let me state here that I am at present forced to consider myself an atheist in the literal sense that I am not a theist I do not yet believe in the even believe in the megapoint if the megapoint theory is confirmed I shall then consider myself a theist
[02:08:22] Blue: so even in the physics of immortality which is the 1994 book which was the one that Deutsch read that then informed his 1995 book the fabric of reality even in that book Tipler is still seeing himself as an atheist however notice that he says forced which really I think shows where Tipler is coming from he doesn’t want to be an atheist he wants to figure out how to come up with a scientific world view that’s not pessimistic and his view if science can allow for the human aspirations that we’ve been talking about that I’ve been quoting from Martin Gardner and Palliard de Chardon if it can allow for that in his mind that’s God it’s not a supernaturalistic God it’s one that’s completely consistent with a materialistic mechanistic scientific worldview and that’s really what he’s striving for now here’s the thing and this is why I think he sometimes gets into really nutty things by the way in his chapter why I’m not a Christian in physics of immortality he talks about how the resurrection of Jesus could be much easier explained as a mass delusion rather than an actual empirical observation just to show that he was not a Christian at the time even though his theory went on to have observations that did not match the predictions specifically that the universe is not collapsing and it’s expanding which is then why Deutsch abandoned the Omega Point theory even though that happened by the time he writes his next book which is the physics of Christianity he is clearly at this point turned back to religion and theology
[02:09:59] Blue: whereas in the physics of immortality he’s hoping that there’s a God what he calls a God in the physics of Christianity he’s now fully sold to it which is why I think he now comes across kind of a nuttier he’s now trying to work out how can Christian theology be reconciled with science which is not an easy task that’s a very helpful chronology I’ve been wondering how that worked out yeah can you repeat one more time why did Deutsch reject the theory? so the universe has been observed to be expanding rather than contracting at the time of the Omega Point theory they didn’t know whether it was going to expand forever or if it was going to contract so one of his predictions was he gives a series of actual physical predictions of what we should expect to find about top quirks and things like that that are required for the universe to contract and they did not work out that way because the universe is in fact expanding but
[02:11:04] Red: he kind of he still believes in the theory he kind of rescued it okay
[02:11:10] Blue: I’ll get to that in a second let’s talk about Deutsch’s criticisms of the Omega Point Deutsch is a full on proponent of the Omega Point in 1995 however he does offer some criticisms of the Templars theory one of the main ones is that he’s really uncomfortable with the idea of referring to the Omega Point as God Deutsch says, if ever a reality he says that Templar refers to the advanced society in the Omega Point as God these people who are very advanced that live into the far future in the Omega Point he refers to that society as God okay notice the somewhat parallels with Mormon doctrine there however if you actually read Templar he never actually says this so this criticism is actually somewhat inaccurate what Templar actually says is that the people living inside the Omega Point aren’t God although it’s their knowledge that is forming the Omega Point and the Omega Point at the limit of infinity is God now how do I explain that it’s a mathematical point which does talk about this that he refers to the Omega Point as the limit at infinity Templar sees that as something distinct from the knowledge created by the individuals inside of time this is this point of infinity where all knowledge is finally gained but only at infinity and that limit that is what he sees as God he sees as having all power and all knowledge and things like this that it’s consistent with the religious aspirations that exist in most religions and Deutsch actually confirms this he says if we actually reach infinity then it’s true that we would have all knowledge and there even be a sense in which we have all power but it wouldn’t actually be the kind of God that answers prayers but Templar even responds to that right he has this theory he’s worked out about how it could respond to prayers but basically it sounds a little nutty but it’s basically the Omega Point neat is quantum physics is time reversible so he’s worked so the future determines the past as much as the past determines the future in quantum physics okay that’s true by the way so that’s not just Templar being nutty so he’s imagining that the Omega Point is the destiny of the universe and therefore it influences itself into existence which is what if you knew like if I I roll a 20 sided die and I roll a 20 and I see that it’s a 20 but it’s hidden underneath so you don’t know because you don’t know you have to treat it with probability theory so you would say there’s only a 1 in 20 chance of rolling a 20 I’ve already seen it I know what the future holds so for me the odds of it being a 20 are 1, 1 in 1 he sees miracles and God is interacting with with people in the same light that this future Omega Point is at infinity that we never actually reach inside of time influences us to always form the Omega Point because it already exists somewhere out there remember this is something we’ve been discussing on your board the future already exists under quantum physics it already exists so if the Omega Point exists then it is having a poll on what’s happening today that’s how he sees it as God and as interacting with us that it is the destiny of the universe and the universe will end up at it then he works out all these theories the eternal life postulate trying to prove that it will happen he’s doing his best so this would be one of the main things that Deutsch and him disagreed over because Deutsch doesn’t see it as God at all whereas Tipler sees it as God and Deutsch seems to have somewhat misunderstood on that Deutsch also argued that we have no way of knowing that they would choose to resurrect us whereas Tipler says they will resurrect us Deutsch uses the analogy of just because we can build a mile high tower doesn’t mean we will people who lived in the past may have guessed that people with our level of knowledge would automatically choose to build a mile high tower but in reality we just lost interest in that sort of thing and we would never do it because it’s not practical Tipler is actually quite good on the theology side I mean
[02:15:28] Blue: this is a guy who’s really thought about this it really impresses me even though I’ve got some really nasty criticisms that I need to lay out he actually impresses me quite a bit with how hard he’s thought about this here’s the thing though Deutsch’s criticism never made sense to me if the Omega Point we live in a multiverse this is something that Tipler accepts right it’s an integral part of his Omega Point theory
[02:15:54] Blue: if any Omega Point in any part of the multiverse decides to start resurrecting people then everyone will be resurrected death becomes literally just a problem to be solved it’s not something that the laws of physics deny us so someone with the knowledge will at some point gain the knowledge how to resurrect people and Deutsch gives a pretty good example of where you create a virtual reality simulation of the entire universe or in fact the entire multiverse and you just resurrect everybody so Deutsch is arguing they may not choose to do that that’s not right right someone anything that is possible will happen in the multiverse so someone will do it and if it’s not someone in our Omega Point in our universe it’ll be someone in a different Omega Point in a different universe and we’ll be resurrected there instead so if death is really just a problem to be solved and it’s not something that overcoming death is not something that is denied by the laws of physics and knowledge growth is going to go to infinity then resurrection is a given like it literally goes to one okay and I actually think Tipler’s right about that and Deutsch is wrong about that okay so then in the beginning of infinity this is where he starts to split with against the Omega Point he argues the Omega Point theory it doesn’t match observation because the universe is expanding now this is and then so he suggests the dark energy model instead right which is that we use the dark energy of the universe and we collect the energy from that and that will allow us to do an infinite number of computations so
[02:17:26] Blue: Deutsch’s criticism here doesn’t make sense to me either when I it does to a degree like if I didn’t know what Tipler had written it would be a very reasonable criticism but Tipler’s like already responded to it so here’s what Tipler says responding to Deutsch and others that have criticized him on this he says Tipler’s adjusted his argument to argue that humans can utilize quote the mechanism of creation destruction of Baryon number by electro -weak quantum tunneling to power starships now that part I don’t know what Deutsch thinks of that like is does Deutsch have a criticism of that that this is a possible source of energy that we could use it’s dangerous because it’s also an infinite source of destruction but you could like it would be a source of energy much larger than anything that we’ve ever come across before you know much much more powerful and ubiquitous than say nuclear energy so it’s again it’s the creation destruction of Baryon number by electro -weak quantum tunneling I don’t even know what that means in in his book the physics of immortality he uses that as a theory for how we might power starships to colonize the entire universe which is a necessary part of the megapoint you have to actually have life spread out take all the matter of the universe and turn all of it into life at some point and then you have to collapse the universe with basically the entire universe is one giant computer full of life so he hadn’t considered the fact that that process so he says that that process would cause the universe to collapse into a singularity so even though the universe is expanding and we have an observation of that once life has the ability to use this process to create power he’s arguing that it will and that that will change the cosmology of the universe back into a collapsing universe now David Deutsch in beginning of infinity he makes a big point out of the fact that you can’t choose you can’t decide the cosmology of a star without considering what life chooses to do so I don’t understand his criticism of tippler on this he may have a legitimate criticism but he doesn’t mention what it is he simply says the observation show the universe is expanding so we can discount the megapoint no you can’t right it’s if there’s any way to collapse the universe and if humans have you know men and
[02:19:49] Blue: women people have a choice over it and they’re going to choose to do it to power their starships or power their cultures or their societies then you can’t just use an observation like that to discount the megapoint now having said that let me just say that this feels a lot like an ad hoc safe I mean it is an ad hoc safe sure you have these observations they don’t work out so then you say oh but it could be that life is going to choose that that’s a completely valid point but you need your own new testable explanation or this is no longer a scientific empirical theory and this is where I would probably start my criticisms of tippler I don’t actually buy any of Deutch’s criticisms of tippler I think Deutch’s criticisms of tippler are wrong let me give you my criticisms of tippler which I think are all correct and are valid criticisms of the megapoint so one of them that really bothers me and that I would love to sit with tippler and just ask him to explain this to me because it just makes so little sense to me he argues that if the universe expands forever unity
[02:20:54] Blue: uniterity will be violated well uniterity is a necessary part of the laws of physics so it’s like it’s similar to like the conservation laws right it’s he’s saying in layman’s terms if the universe expands forever then conservation laws will be violated and that’s impossible under the laws of physics so he argues that there will be an event that there will be an event that if the universe expands forever there’ll be an event horizon where information is lost and therefore information is not concerned so the universe in tippler’s mind needs life to keep the laws of physics consistent we’re going to cause the collapse of the universe because if we didn’t the laws of physics would become inconsistent this just blows my mind like this this has got to be one of the worst arguments i’ve ever heard ever to say that you need life to keep the laws of physics consistent what would happen in any universe that doesn’t have life there’s got to be in the multiverse universes that don’t have life like are the laws just consistent there or what about a universe where there is life and then the sun projects off you know a piece of itself at earth and we’re the only life in the entire universe let’s say and it roasts us alive like under many worlds quantum physics this happens constantly to us right in some portion of the
[02:22:14] Blue: multiverse would those just have inconsistent physics it doesn’t even make sense to me now tippler does try to address this a little he tries to argue that mathematical reality is ultimate reality something that sodia would hate and i somewhat agree with her on this one and that physical reality is a subset of it so what does he base this on well he bases it on basically a pathology he says we define existence in terms of conscious beings and a reality without conscious beings therefore doesn’t physically exist because physical existence means you’ve got a conscious being in that universe that can observe it otherwise for all intents and purposes it’s a it’s a mathematical reality but it’s not a physical reality this seems like a word game to me so then he has to address the question well wait a minute what did the universe exist prior to you know life existing on earth so he immediately uses the little trick of well the omega point is a person and it’s observing itself and so therefore it existed it’s like oh my gosh it’s like this is such bad arguments tippler and so this would be my criticisms of tippler’s omega point and why you won’t hear me advocating for it as a theory i will advocate for it more as a theology than as a theory more as an idea of what we want than as a theory that actually follows from science and so at this point i think that these are actually pretty good criticisms and i don’t know how tippler would respond to them
[02:23:47] Blue: here’s the thing though i mentioned that i think tippler is actually quite ingenious and he’s actually a really decent theologian so he has given a lot of thought to what would it take for science to allow think of it like this what type of special universe would we need to be able to fulfill the optimism of David Deutsch which is by the way exactly equivalent to the religious aspirations of every religious person that’s ever lived since religion is the carrier of optimism during periods where we didn’t have a good scientific theory to allow it what would it take and he’s trying to work that out he’s trying to work out and the omega point is an ingenious way of doing that because as the universe switches what you do is you you life so imagine the suns all start to burn out so this would be heat death to most scientific theories the suns all go out then you gotta wait for the black holes to all evaporate but eventually this is the first big step to where life become the universe becomes uninhabitable tippler points out that life even if they can’t communicate
[02:24:52] Blue: that they will start to move matter together so that certain parts of the universe collapse faster than other parts of the universe and when you do that that creates heat and that is a source of energy in fact it’s a gigantic source of energy that just dwarfs suns then you do that for a while and then heat death starts to arrive so life even if it can’t communicate will start to collect the matter the other direction and it will cause you to have another source of energy and you can basically do that trick forever and entropy goes to infinity and you have found your loophole on entropy by the way your computers keep growing right Moore’s law never ends in a tippler tipplerian cosmology your your computers double in speed forever and the number of computations just constantly dwarfs like any problem you have that’s intractable today you just wait a little while and your computers can now do them tractably it doesn’t violate computational theory an intractable algorithm will forever be intractable but its usefulness will start to become tractable so think about like you want to write an algorithm that plays chess well that’s intractable so you would say okay that’s intractable but you know what it’s intractable but today but it’s finite so there will be an omega point computer in the future of the mega point there would be a computer at some point that has enough computing power that it can solve chess it will no longer be considered intractable all finite problems which would be all of them at some point the computing power dwarfs it and even though the algorithm may be an intractable algorithm it just won’t be a big deal because nothing’s intractable to the omega point is how David Deutsch put this and this is a huge part of how the mega point works he also works out what you would need to get out of certain kinds of hell so this isn’t a religious term but I think it’s an appropriate term so one of the things he works out is how do you get out of eternal return so this is idea of eternal returns I forget who it was famous scientists that came up with it if you have a set number of pieces of matter you know atoms in a set amount of space
[02:27:06] Blue: then those atoms must at some point repeat and so like let’s say you had a box and you have matter inside this box every single over infinity every single combination of the that matter will happen including turning into an apple you know or whatever you’ve got a bunch of gas and it will happen to turn into an apple right just by chance and every single combination will happen and then that’ll happen in a finite amount of time and then it’ll all repeat well if you were a life being living inside this box you would live forever in a sense because you’d have an infinite number of computations but it would be hell right you would not be able to progress forever you would eventually reach some point where everything would repeat so he wants to work out a cosmology that not just overcomes entropy but overcomes a lot of these other philosophical objections that people have come up with over the years and it turns out it does right if you’ve got this infinite growth of knowledge inside of an infinitely growing computer that keeps getting more and more ticks etc then there is no repeating right you do not have the problem of eternal returns anymore okay so you’ve escaped that hell trying to escape and he works out several others like this trying to escape all of them is really hard it’s really really hard trying to escape entropy alone is really hard trying to escape all of the hells is even harder and yet Omega point escaped all of them basically he demonstrates so David Deutsch lays out his dark energy model as an alternative well the dark energy model doesn’t escape all these hells in fact it doesn’t even suggest it’s not even suggestive how you could use it to have eternal life so one of the things that happens if you have a slowing computer which is the dark energy model instead of a increasing computer imagine something like the opposite of Moore’s law where every single year your computers are half the speed that’s the dark energy model yes you could probably have an infinite number of computations using that model but you would have slower and slower computers constantly and so you would be harder and harder to solve your problems fact it would eventually reach a point based on my understanding of physics where it would just become impossible to solve your problems so for example one of the ones that came up in one of the books that I read is they said look you get quantum fluctuations that are just weird and most of them are microscopic and they happen really rarely and so you’re never going to actually see one in your lifetime most likely but there’s always this chance that some that quantum fluctuations happen and something weird happens a black hole forms in the center of the earth and kills everybody or you turn into a frog you know just weird quantum fluctuations just take place sometimes ok even though they’re super super rare over the lifetime of a human or even a lifetime of a human civilization so far you would probably see something like none of these ok because they’re so rare but if you were trying to live forever and your computing power were cutting in half every single year the number of quantum fluctuations would eventually grow to the point where you could not keep up with them so when one of your experiential seconds requires a billion years in real time and then the next second requires 2 billion years in real time etc forever eventually quantum fluctuations dominate and they’re the only thing that matter and it would be impossible to keep life living in such a state I don’t know how you can overcome that with the dark energy model so I don’t actually the dark energy model works as an actual source of life forever that’s equivalent to the omega point on top of that the dark energy model if it does work it’s based on a theory that doesn’t exist today because we don’t have a theory of dark energy it is under critical rationalism a theory to be considered like this really needs to be an actual empirical theory today and you have an actual explanation today you don’t get to count hopes of a future theory as your theory which is what Roger Penrose falls into he’s got this hope of a future theory that is going to say these different things about quantum physics and things like that that’s not an reasonable rational scientific world view and yet that’s kind of what we’re doing with the dark energy model now I understand why Deutsch did this though Deutsch is really more taking the stance this is just a problem to be solved and maybe it’ll be dark energy maybe it’ll be a mega point when you hear him in interviews he doesn’t actually rule the mega point entirely out I think he almost had to in a book somebody asked him what about what Tipler said and he goes yeah that’s a possibility you know and so he seems a little more open in interviews but he’s kind of just taking the stance stance problems are soluble the problem with that though is that the concept problems are soluble your universe has to first allow that problem to be solved and it’s not clear that our universe does
[02:32:07] Blue: and if it’s the laws of physics that say you can’t do it then you can’t do it it doesn’t matter about this whole idea of problems are soluble and in a lot of ways that’s what heat death is it’s scientists saying our physics say this is an insoluble problem now maybe they’re wrong maybe Deutsch is right but it was a lot more helpful when you had an actual scientific testable theory that you could point to like the mega point and we really kind of don’t have that today we’ve got a lot of ideas on how you might go about it but I don’t think we’ve got a good consistent cosmology that we can point to and say this is how you exploit the loophole that life can live forever so just to summarize Deutsch’s position so he recognizes that there’s a contradiction between the heat death of the universe and the something like the principle of optimism he sees the something like the omega point theory if not exactly that as a way to sort of get around the heat death of the universe would you say that’s fair whereas Deutsch isn’t exactly an advocate of Templar’s theory but he’s maybe sort of a sympathizer you might say that Deutsch believes we’re going to find something equivalent to the omega point and so I think that’s a hard thing to do now I actually mentioned this on a tweet thread and Deutsch responded to me and he said there are many great new theories here that have been discovered recently and I’m like wait what are they come back to the thread I’m like tell me I want to research them so
[02:33:51] Blue: I know this is something that’s still on his mind when you write a book he wants the book to be optimistic and I’m kind of giving you the more realistic view we don’t yet have what that replacement theory is but Deutsch is very optimistic we’re going to have one even if it doesn’t exist yet today that does to some degree violate the concept of critical rationalism and I’m not sure I have a problem with that right what I’m really kind of laying out is that there is a sort of faith -based nature to being alive you have to kind of start your life each day with I can make the world a better place that my aspirations aren’t completely meaningless and we should put our thumb on that scale towards we’re going to work this out this is a problem we can solve and yes maybe you could argue that’s supernaturalism today or maybe not I don’t know I think that there’s a grayer area than we first give it credit for because supernaturalism in religion is really not so much I want to believe in magic as I want human aspirations to be meaningful that’s a good thing right it makes sense that they’re going to try to come up with things and if they don’t have a good scientific theory then they’re going to supplement it with a little supernaturalism even if it’s not a desirable thing and I think that’s the way a lot of religious people Latter -day Saints in particular would look at supernaturalism and
[02:35:19] Blue: let me make another point here I think supernatural belief is way more common than people think it’s not solely the domain of religion so if I were to talk about Emmett Goswami who’s a famous physicist who appeared in what the bleep do we know he has written whole books about how quantum physics makes the observer the center and he’s worked out all these things based on quantum physics and he’s not the only one I’ve come across like there are youtube videos that come across to very legitimate scientists who have said the observer is the center of reality and this is part of quantum physics and by observing we make things real and maybe this future like one of them actually worked out that our future progenitors were observing us through history and that was what brought us into reality which is really kind of the omega point theory but a kind of more primitive version of it the backwards causality here’s the problem all of that is based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and MWI ruins it right if you want to make the observer the center of reality MWI just destroys it it destroys quite a number of things that physicists accept today
[02:36:32] Red: it seems like what you were saying before it almost makes it sound like tippler believes in many worlds but also finds a way to make observers the center of reality
[02:36:43] Blue: oh it’s not yeah is that
[02:36:45] Red: fair
[02:36:46] Blue: it’s not based on quantum physics anymore it’s based on the I guess it is it’s based on the reverse the time reversal of quantum physics whereas they’re trying to make it the observation in quantum physics something totally different I
[02:37:00] Red: see
[02:37:00] Blue: largely unrelated right
[02:37:02] Red: I say yeah
[02:37:03] Blue: if you were to talk to most physicists today they reject MWI and because they do they very commonly believe in non -locality Sadia accepts non -locality because of that many worlds so she accepts non -locality when she helped me interview Chiara she asked all sorts of questions along along about non -locality because that’s part of her way of looking at the universe let me just say that that’s exactly equivalent to believing in the supernatural non -locality is not part of many worlds quantum physics which is our only actual explanation of quantum physics almost every physicist today believes in non -locality because they accept a supernaturalistic world view of quantum physics rather than a scientific world view of quantum physics now they don’t know that they would never say that way they might even be offended by me saying that but it’s the truth that they filled in the gaps and their unwillingness to accept many worlds they’ve instead filled in the gaps with really honestly supernaturalistic explanations because they didn’t know what else to do they mostly just sort of don’t talk about it too much so if I were to say let’s let’s take Martin Gardner he’s the skeptic who believed in God that I was quoting if heat death’s really the truth of the universe then Martin Gardner is a supernaturalist because he believes there’s gonna be a life after death and there is no life after death but guess what that’s also true for Deutsch okay and if heat death really is the death of the universe then those beliefs are actually supernatural too obviously they don’t believe it to be supernatural but what if it were actually true right I think this is why Richard Dawkins I quoted Richard Dawkins I don’t know how you make sense of his morality given his worldview with heat death I believe his morality is a supernatural belief today right he has to just on faith except that morality means something even though his worldview doesn’t allow for it so I when I get back to Mormon supernaturalistic beliefs
[02:39:11] Blue: I see it in that light I start with the assumption that supernaturalism is something we want to get rid of it’s bad in that sense but we all start with it and it’s really hard to get rid of it you only do it a little at a time and let me give you an example of this so I was once in a group of fans of David Deutsch and we were talking about consciousness and determinism
[02:39:33] Blue: and you know two of the guys talking were very concerned about how to reconcile their feelings of free will and consciousness with the deterministic nature of a turning machine and both of these are podcasters people who have said a lot about David Deutsch on their podcasts and things like that and so they were they were very concerned about this so one of them wrote an article and he says quote the problem in a nutshell is that creativity is unpredictable in principle computer programs on their hand are completely predictable okay that’s not a true statement it does not follow from our theories there’s nothing in our theories that creativity has to be unpredictable in every single possible sense somebody suggested to this person they said okay that’s not actually right so he tried to correct it and he said well the problem in a nutshell is that creativity is not predetermined but computer programs on their hand are completely deterministic okay well that’s not right either there’s computer programs are completely deterministic that’s true but creativity is also predetermined in a world view of the multiverse it’s it’s the future already exists it is already predetermined they’re stepping outside of the four strands to try to find a more comforting way to look at free will and it’s understandable Kearmer Leto spends a page or two on the deterministic nightmare because it bothers her too that some of the implications of four strand ism are maybe a little concerning and she wants to work out some way to reconcile with those that’s all these guys are doing right it’s understandable that they would want to work something out so I started to give them a thought experiment to help them understand how to reconcile these things and I said suppose you had some A.I.’s A.G.I.’s living in a virtual world and then you have the same world on a different computer but the computer is slower it’s true that whatever creative knowledge they come up with you could then predict it on the second computer because that second computer is going to predict exactly the same things in exactly the same ways that have already happened on the faster of the two computers because the computer is deterministic right that is a term machine is deterministic that is part of the theory and there’s no way around that because the quantum computer is also deterministic you it’s true you could predict what the second one’s doing but you could never actually predict what the first one’s going to do and as long as you don’t allow any communication the people inside that world can’t predict what knowledge is going to be created so when we talk about knowledge being created being unpredictable we don’t mean retro -dict yes you can retro -dict knowledge okay and by the way Deutsch has admitted this in an interview he talks about retradiction versus prediction your mistake is is that you’re confusing retradiction with prediction and knowledge is unpredictable in the sense that it can’t be predicted the first time but it can be to be predicted numerous times the second time in fact going to school and learning knowledge is all about trying to get you to make the same discoveries as the first person in your mind and we’re we’re retro -dicting that you’re going to be able to right it’s it’s very predictable that we can get you to if you will follow what they’re doing in class and do your best that you’ll be able to create this knowledge in your mind for yourself so it’s a very good thing that we can retro -dict the creation of knowledge but we can’t predict the creation of knowledge okay after I give this explanation in my mind solves the whole deterministic nightmare like I just have zero concern with the deterministic nightmare because of this they were not accepting it right and they’re like no I that is not right and they they say they wouldn’t even take I said why don’t you try the the thought experiment I’m giving you like actually think it through to explain to me how it could be otherwise and they would touch the thought experiment it would not even respond and acknowledge I had made it to him and then they started talking about well computers can have errors and errors would then cause unpredictable things I’m like okay look just change the thought experiment to be sure a computer might have an error but they’re really rare and we can make them as rare as we want them to be under the laws of physics so let’s have let’s say we’ve got two computers that are going to have no error for a very long period of time make the thought experiment about that you’re going to have exactly the same problem there’s no way around the problem if you’re going to insist on retradiction being something that is you know deterministic machines are retradictable period and story there is no way around this problem you are wasting your time as long as you’re adhering to the four strands and then immediately one of them responds and he goes no I don’t think you know that because quantum physics is fungible and that means that mines are fungible and so that means that we don’t know how that’s all going to work and when we understand consciousness then we’re going to find that the fungibility does something with it okay at this point I suddenly realized just as people will try to pour all their supernatural beliefs into quantum physics quantum physics becomes quantum magic right they were doing exactly the same thing with fungibility if you actually understand the fungibility of quantum physics it’s got zero to do with this and it cannot save you in the slightest from this problem if we ever do one on quantum physics I’ll explain how it actually works and how it fits in with quantum physics and why do I choose fungibility as the basis so in essence these people were engaging in supernaturalism they were they were finding some mysterious part of four strands theories that they didn’t fully understand and they were pouring their hopes and dreams into it exactly like a religious person does and I just think that supernaturalism in this sense is just way more common and maybe we should just be way more open to it and I kind of backed off at that point I sort of realized oh this is something they’re not ready to talk about or try to work through I’m going to just let them believe what they want and I’m not going to keep trying to convince them I will probably be damaging if I continue to try to push on this I do think that this is it’s just way more common right and you never really your own supernatural ideas never seem weird to you they always seem weird to everybody else if that makes any sense if you were to take doitians and put them in front of the people and have them try to explain how fungibility and consciousness relate it would seem really weird and for very good reason because it actually is a supernatural belief but to them maybe this seems reasonable and I think that this is really kind of what I’m getting at is we try very hard we always put our thumb on the scale of human aspirations and we’re trying very hard to them this sounded nightmarish and so they weren’t ready to accept my answer which wasn’t good enough for them yet right by the way Sabine what’s her name the famous YouTuber that’s a physicist she wrote a whole paper on how free will could be real and basically what it boiled down to is that you had an inaccessible pseudo random seed that deterministically creates random numbers but they’re not really random because they’re deterministic but they’re completely unpredictable because of that like you don’t need any of this to try to work out the lack of predictability and knowledge creation but to her this was the best she could do I would submit that that paper is entirely supernaturalistic right she just doesn’t have enough science yet she hasn’t understood doitius theories well enough to realize there’s an easier solution so she’s trying to her best to come up with this weird idea of all of us containing as pseudo random seeds this is my words but this is pretty much what she was saying and it’s just an unnecessary thing by the way Karl Popper his article of clouds and clocks is basically him trying to work out how life isn’t deterministic because he disliked the implications of determinism even though the laws of physics are deterministic and so that whole article is in my opinion supernaturalistic he’s trying to come up with now it did lead to something good it led to the propensity theory of probability which was his way of trying to get around it but the principle theory of probability doesn’t really solve the problems he’s trying to solve he thought it did but it really boiled down to life is unpredictable which yes it is that is absolutely true I went to a Popper conference and I was presenting the Popper without reputation and the guy before me was arguing that there was no way for a computer to be intelligent and he was using Popper’s arguments so amongst and I happen to know amongst critical rational circles on Facebook the ones that are like students of Popper and such they’re really against the idea of an AGI because of what Popper said I would present that that’s supernaturalism okay that they’ve got concerns about AGI that haven’t been resolved yet and so they’re going to be in denial of it based on what really are supernatural beliefs at the moment but maybe it would be better to think of them as conjectures right they’re trying to conjecture some solution they don’t have a good scientific one at the moment so they kind of put the thumb in on the scale in favor of what is comforting to them at this point and one of the things I really got out of Deutsch is he took all these things that had always seemed so pessimistic about science to me and he really said they may not be so pessimistic if you take them together individually they come across pessimistic but if you take all four of the strands and you roll them together you come up with something totally different
[02:49:24] Green: and
[02:49:25] Blue: it’s way more optimistic and it’s exactly the special kind of universe that religious people have aspirations for which is why I think the Deutschians aren’t particularly negative towards religion they to some degree the religious people are their allies for optimism and no they’re not religious themselves and they reject supernatural claims of religion
[02:49:46] Green: but
[02:49:46] Blue: they’re not really there to go get in your face over it because these are the allies I’ve definitely noticed that too and I would say that Deutsch’s beliefs are a kind of religion he’s got the right idea though he’s got the same idea as Tipper he’s going a somewhat different direction than Tipper but he understands the importance of finding a scientific way to fulfill the aspirations of the infinite horizon that broke Leo Tolstoy that he as Tolstoy put it, I didn’t find this quote but I know it’s in there what we need is we need a relationship with infinity if we don’t have a relationship with infinity things are pretty bad it’s really hard to make meaning out of life if you don’t have a relationship with infinity so Deutsch is putting that relationship with infinity back in and saying yes there’s actually a scientific way to go about this and even though I don’t have all the answers worked out entirely I believe there’s going to be and that’s kind of where we’re coming from so now let me get back to Joseph Smith and his magic spectacles first of all let me say that I never in my entire life heard about Joseph Smith and his magic spectacles in church we did talk about Joseph Smith receiving revelations through something called the Jermyn Thummim and that’s what a non -Mormon calls the magic skeptical spectacles to try to make fun of Mormons but they never mentioned it in church it is so Jermyn Thummim is a Jewish concept that’s in Hebrew Scripture
[02:51:16] Blue: these stones that you receive revelation from now there’s different ideas as to what they were Joseph Smith had his own idea he described them as kind of clear crystals that you could look through and you could receive revelation by looking through them you didn’t put them on your head like glasses that appeared that were as part of a breastplate this is how it is in the Bible also that they have them kind of in the breastplate and then there’s different traditions your average liberal Bible scholar would say it was just a randomized device that you would basically you would roll the dice and it would come up with one of the theories is that it basically just said guilty or not guilty and so they would use a random device to determine if you were guilty or not guilty and we know that ancient civilizations didn’t understand randomness and probability theories so they often used probability as a means of trying to communicate with God and but you know more recent like by more recent I mean
[02:52:10] Blue: like New Testament times they saw it as you would stand before the priest and the light of God would come out of it and it would reveal things to you that’s kind of more similar to what Joseph Smith had in mind and so we look at these and it’s really easy to say that’s just weird I mean sure it’s just weird okay let me now make a case for each of these so first of all if you actually believe in the religion it won’t seem weird to you it’s it’s just a part of what you accept right that that God can communicate however he wants and sure God can use in German thumb to do that he did in the Old Testament and by the way the reason why people who don’t like Mormons refer to it as magic spectacles is because they refer to it as a human thumb that’s something that they accept and so they need to make sure they describe it in such a way that it sounds stupid but doesn’t make them sound stupid so they go to great lengths to try to reinterpret it for example so let’s let’s just take a completely atheistic view of human thumb in fact let’s even take the view that it’s just a random device okay it’s a die you roll and it’s an eight ball magic eight ball and it gives you an answer to your question could this be stupider maybe as a modern person it just seems so stupid you just can’t even believe that this could ever have been a part of a religion in the first place you’d be wrong because as it turns out that’s a knowledge bearing tradition
[02:53:39] Blue: and I have a book that talks about this let’s say that you are out and you’re at war and so you decide to use your randomized die, your human thumb or burn entrails or whatever it is your religion does to try to determine when you should attack because you want to know what God’s going to tell you to do turns out randomly attacking is one of the single best strategies you can ever imagine in war and so that tradition would grow up and would provide survival value because it’s a knowledge bearing tradition it’s not so weird once you think of it that way so some of the others we think about like you try to see if someone’s a witch or if they’re guilty by seeing if they float in water you know and that you put your hand in the hot boiling the bible has one of these that you want to know if your spouse cheated on you so you give them this mixture and if they’re guilty it kills them and if they’re not guilty it makes them you know more fruitful and they’ll have children more easily okay from our modern viewpoint sure that just seems so bizarre these were really useful traditions basically the priest understands what’s going on they understand that the real purpose is to get the person to confess and so they have this boiling water and then what they generally do is they don’t boil the water the oil too much and so you can actually easily put your hand into it and it’s not going to be a problem
[02:55:11] Blue: but nobody else knows that except for the priest so they come in and if you’re an innocent person then at the time you would have believed in God you would have believed God could have protected you from boiling oil so you wouldn’t really have any concerns so you’d come in and you put your hand in the boiling water you’ve seen other people do it and they’ve survived and so you put it in and then they go okay God says you’re not guilty or maybe you are guilty so you come in and you’re just terrified you’re going to burn your hand off God’s going to make you burn your hand off and so based on that culture that exists at that point in time they end up getting a lot of really useful confessions and they actually it actually works as a way of trying to find out who’s guilty and who isn’t and yeah it wouldn’t work today right if I were to go do it because we live in a different culture it would be completely different today but for the culture that these traditions grew up in they were actually knowledge bearing traditions that were effective and contain survival value the idea of looking into a crystal to try to receive revelation okay if you’re an atheist you want to look at that in a non -weird way think of it as a form of meditation okay revelation is you’re trying to talk with your inner self you’re trying to understand things better you’re trying to access that subconscious okay looking into crystals or fire or whatever that’s a normal part of even secular meditation practice today there’s not necessarily anything weird about it when you look at it that way the thing that you won’t be able to accept is that God’s actually independently doing something with it but I don’t think you can say that it’s actually bad or unuseful or not knowledge bearing it’s still a useful tradition that the the religions have
[02:56:56] Blue: picked up and is a part of that religion so that would actually be how I would suggest looking at it so W.B. Yeats he this is a quote from him
[02:57:05] Red: yes
[02:57:06] Blue: so this is very definitely not a scientific world view and in the book that he did I have
[02:57:11] Blue: Celtic Twilight it’s a set of stories about supernatural things happening that he can’t from people okay they believed in them okay we wouldn’t believe in them today and when explaining his point of view he says this he says it’s better doubtless to believe so much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial’s sake truth and unreason alike for when we do this we have not even a rush candle to guide our steps and we must fumble our way into the great emptiness and after all can we come to so great evil if we keep a little fire on the hearths in our souls and welcome with open hand whatever excellence come to warm whether it be man or phantom and to not say too fiercely be gone so he’s expressing this idea and it’s bad epistemology I admit that look I’m not going to just throw out all the supernatural beliefs even though I know probably most of them are false because some of them might turn out to be true and is at least and especially in light of what I’m saying about it’s okay for us to put the thumb on the scale of we are in favor of looking at the world in terms of humor human aspirations I think that’s what he’s getting at you know what I I’m not saying I think that all these supernatural stories are completely true but I’m not discounting them either right there may be some explanation that we don’t have yet and if those are true if some of them are true if it turns out something like the omega point is true then let me ask you a really honest question who was closer to the truth on the things that matter was it Richard Dawkins the atheist or was it a religious person I would submit it’s the religious person they didn’t kick out infinity just because at the time that was the best theory is that there was no infinity that there it will actually find out that religious people were far closer to the truth if dutch’s views are correct than any of the atheists that existed at the time of dutch and I think that’s what Yeats is really saying is look I’m not prepared to kick out all the supernatural beliefs because who knows maybe some of them will turn out to be true and I would rather accept a bunch of false hoods and the truth that really mattered then kick out the truth that really mattered
[02:59:29] Blue: because I was just trying to make sure I only had true beliefs because as HP Lovecraft put it the truth isn’t necessarily good it’s if the truth is good then that’s what we’re after but if the truth is that he does the end of the universe then I don’t think it matters that much whether we have the truth or not scientists don’t have any real advantage over religion in this case so that would be my final thought
[02:59:52] Red: well I thank you for that I’m still an atheist but I can’t say you’re you’re wrong so thank
[03:00:00] Blue: you well I hope that at least it can show why I have an appreciation for religion
[03:00:06] Red: I think you’ve done that well
[03:00:10] Blue: the theory of anything podcast could use your help we have a small but loyal audience and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well to the best of our knowledge we’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects if you’re enjoying this podcast please give us a 5 star rating on apple podcast this can usually be done right inside your podcast player or you can google the theory of anything podcast apple or something like that some players have their own rating system and giving us a 5 star rating on any rating system would be helpful if you enjoy a particular episode please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on facebook or other social media to help get the word out if you are interested in financially supporting the podcast we have two ways to do that the first is via our podcast host site anchor just go to anchor.fm slash 4 dash strands f o u r dash s t r a n d s there’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations if you want to make a one time donation go to our blog which is 4 strands dot org there is a donation button there that uses PayPal thank you
Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor. Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes; please verify against the actual podcast.