The Alex O’Connor Podcast | Atheism, Chaos & Meaning

wake up is there any ethical dilemma with programming AI to be conscious the problem is we don't really know what Consciousness is um it's difficult to even give a definition of what Consciousness is do you think that the mind is just a product of atoms bumping into each other in your brain that gives rise to this mysterious thing called Consciousness and if that's the case we should be able to make computers conscious is there an ethical problem of course there is if we've just created a bunch of conscious robots and what are we going to do essentially like enslave them mistreat them use them for our own purposes if we create a new conscious being for our exploitation we do not have a very good track record of taking care of conscious beings that we have full control over and have convinced ourselves that we have the moral right to take control over it okay maybe that's that's a thing to consider but a more pressing concern perhaps is Alex thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour really appreciate it thank you for having me so we have a really serious question for you what do you think about the HW Tua podcast talk Tu her isn't it because this is actually an indication of some great marketing right like if you can come up with a good pun it can it can take you further than a good show like I've never listened to an episode of that show but I I congratulate their success just in the titling I I'm I'm a big fan of a pun I'm a huge fan when it comes to like marketing something as a pun I I saw a book once about animal ethics and it was called Duty and the Beast and I thought there you go I've Got a Friend there a Catholic called uh Trent horn and one of the the sort of Catholic councils after the Protestant Revolution was called the Council of Trent and it was this sort of big decision-making procedure to figure out what would be condemned as heresy what would be allowed and um he's got a podcast called the Council of Trent but it's spelled like Council like and it's another sort of just brilliant example of uh of of marketing but I think to her might the best one that I've ever heard why do you think people gravitate towards that why why did she become such a big deal for so many people gosh um because people like personalities you know people people like funny things um it's it's no surprise that um people who are funny or charismatic are going to be more popular than those who are not I mean like if you look at academic podcasts for example it's often times people quoting academics and the real sort of cleverest people on Earth are locked up in a university somewhere writing journals and then you get some charismatic person who's willing to put in the effort but translated in such a way that it's entertaining and they're the one with the popular podcast uh because people are attracted to things that are entertaining I like YouTube is a form of social media right you go on it and you think I've always treated it separately like uh you know I have like a I'm addicted to Instagram and I spend too long scrolling on Twitter but when I'm on YouTube I feel like no I'm watching content I could watch a podcast or a documentary it's educational but it's still entertainment it's still it's why like the thumbnail thing exists people put the big red circle and a pretty girl in the thumbnail why does that work because we're just Apes we we're just we're just animals who are attracted to that kind of stuff in Las Vegas I was amazed uh getting off the plane to see that you have um slot machines in the airport right they're everywhere yeah there was a culture shot for me too the I I can't believe it and slot machines are a perfect example of this because slot ma are by definition aimed at adults right you have to is it 21 you have to be to use so you got to be 21 right and yet they look a bit like some kind of children's phone game know big flashing lights big sort of like a leprechaun doing a backflip whatever I don't even how the buttons work on those things right like why why does that work because it doesn't matter sort of how old you are how serious you are you're spending money that kind of stuff is is attractive like we forget the extent to which we are just suckers for bright colors I mean I don't how you guys do your you do your thumbnails but you probably put a bit bit of thought into let's get an expressive face gosh the the orange background yeah the brighter it is I take whatever color it is up the saturation by like 30% it works and why do you do that because well it's a good Thunder but why because it's sort of eye-catching why does that work because it doesn't matter how serious your show is it doesn't it doesn't matter at all you cannot escape the fact that you're going to get a higher click fre rate by sort of making it more flashy and exciting because you know we we act the same as as children with with a bright screen in front of us that's why slot machines are designed the way they are and that's why YouTube thumbnails are designed the way they are and um I think you know there's something entertaining about the the hawk Tu thing also because it's quite controversial right because here's somebody and I I congratulate her um Haley I think her name is right I congratulate her because she's one of those people who's managed to take that small little viral moment and seemingly transformed into an entire career she seems to be quite a charismatic funny person um that's a that's a difficult that's a very difficult thing to do but now why does that upset people so much because people don't like the fact that there's no like skill involved oh she just gets approach on the street and she says something into a microphone that's not even that funny and now she's what like she's famous and she's a millionaire people forget that Merit as a whole is a complete myth it's like oh you're upset about the fact that this girl is probably a millionaire now because of some chance occurrence she had on the street and she's not even that funny most billionaires aren't funny most of them aren't charismatic most of them didn't actually put any more work in to becoming a billionaire than anybody else would have done had they had the same sort of chance of becoming a billionaire I don't know you might have different views on that I think you sort of will know a bit more about the finance world than I do um but like there's a lot of unfairness and people have a have a right to be upset about that but the idea that um you know otherwise social media and and having a podcast and stuff is based upon Merit is a myth I mean sure You' got to be good at it but there are a lot of people who are good at it and don't get it at all so that's the other reason I think it's popular is because it's controversial people sort of think gosh why is she famous well she's famous is because you just asked that question you're talking about her that that's that's what it is you know that was a great answer I wasn't expecting such a deep thought Deep dive into HW tour it's it's a it's really worth thinking about though because I mean are you upset because there's no merit in it how much Merit is there in anything a philosopher called Michael sandel wrote a book called The Tyranny of Merit we like to imagine that um if one person inherits you know a million dollarars and another person doesn't but they just happen to be quite hardworking you know they they're a morning person they wake up they've got the energy to sort of put into their education and they work hard and they make a million dollars we think that the second person sort of deserves it more and intuitively of course I agree with that but there's an extent to which whereas the first person inherited the million dollars the second person inherited their sort of proness to waking up their hard work their you don't get to decide the conditions in which you grow up you don't get to decide your your your phenotype you don't get to decide your genetics you don't get tode whether you're a morning or night person and sociologically speaking you don't get to choose how uh lazy you are it's not something you actually get to choose maybe you can sort of choose to overcome it to a certain extent it gets into a conversation about whether Free Will exists but every single character trait that you have is essentially outside of your control you you don't choose to have those characteristics and so this idea that there is this thing called Merit which goes all the way down to hard work and desert uh I think is a is a myth um we can go into that more if You' like it's quite a controversial thing to say but it's worth noting that that's we definitely have some some space allocated for that later in the podcast but first to set the stage you've debated Ben Shapiro Jordan Peterson Piers Morgan Sam Harris Destiny professors Bishops how did their debate Styles vary and who is your most formidable opponent yeah I I'm I'm very lucky actually when you put it like that I I I sort of I suppose the past year or two I've I've gotten debate at the to debate a lot of a lot of big names it's been very exciting and um everybody has a slightly different approach but I'm I I think I used to be more confrontational than I am now when I go into a debate I I I'll say what I think and I'll say it forthrightly and I'll look you in the eye and I'll say it straight but I don't get too um riled up I don't get angry I don't get hostile really doesn't really happen happens occasionally um the only time that happens is when I think that I'm not getting through to somebody and I'm not getting through to them for some reason that isn't entirely innocent I recently had a debate with denes duza I don't know if you've heard of him he's a conservative uh commentator I don't know too much about him but I felt in in many ways he wasn't prepared for the debate I felt like he wasn't actually listening to what I was saying a lot of the time I felt like that his questions weren't really making sense in the context of the discussion so I got a little bit sort of a little bit riled up a little bit like more more forthright um but most of the people I debate are receptive to my energy right like you can you can get a different energy out of someone if you watch Ben chapiro debating college students and someone comes up to the mic and says like hey man you know why are you such a racist and suddenly he's sort of defensive and he'll like snap back at them and he'll like shut them down so to speak right but if you watch the conversation I had with him it's very Smiley it's very sort of happy you know we shake hands and it's just a much more pleasant pleasant conversation and so I don't think it's actually so much about what they're like I think it's about what you're like you know you can bring a different energy out of people same thing with Jordan Peterson he's got that ability to to really like like let out a demon that's inside him that can just that can just absolutely it's the thing that comes out in like the GQ interview you know that real like Fierce Peterson and I'm sure that if I'd have asked questions in a particular way I could have maybe gotten that out of him too but I didn't that was more to do with me than it was to do with him right but you're saying that was an unpleasant experience because you probably saw him as somewhat bad faith like he wasn't actually there to try to learn maybe but who was someone that was good faith but they were just extremely challenging to debate maybe because they had really strong points or just because their style of rhetoric was effective ah yes the most the most formidable um it's difficult to say I remember H well a long time ago I I debated the guy that I just mentioned Trent horn I debated him years ago and I remember at the time thinking like wow that was powerful because at the time I'd been debating a lot of people there was a lot of like shouting and putting down and this kind of thing and Trent came in very calmly and put forward what a very good sort of arguments for the existence of God very powerful very difficult to respond to to and he did it calmly and politely but effectively and I remember coming away from that thinking like wow that was what were his arguments so um I think the principle one that we probably discussed was something called the contingency argument um which will be about uh explanations for things so there's a difference between something happening contingently and something happening happening necessarily uh for something to be contingent means that the reason that it is the way it is or the explanation for the way that it is is due to something else so like why is this cup here that's contingent on the fact that I put it there it's contingent on the fact that I was you know thirsty right um why is this curtain red well that was that's a contingent fact it could have been blue you know it was contingent on someone's decision someone's decision to Designed them that way so things at a contingent could have been a different way but they are this way and there's this principle called the principle of sufficient reason which says that for anything that is the case any contingent thing will have a sufficient reason as to why it is the case it's not just Rand ly red there's a reason why it's red so everything that contingently exists has some explanation as to why it exists um but the explanation itself will either be contingent or it'll be necessary there are things that are necessarily true like uh why does a square have four sides that's just what a square is right that's not contingent that's not that doesn't depend on what someone thought that doesn't depend on some other explanation or fact it it just is it it's almost true without explanation right and so anything that's contingent like the existence of this table it could have failed to exist it could have not existed you could have not existed if your parents didn't mean right so there's a reason why you do exist instead of not existing in a way that there's there's not a reason why a square has four sides instead of three that's just what a square is but there is a reason why you exist instead of not existing okay because that's because your parents met okay why did your parents meet is that a necessary fact no you know it could have not happened so there must be some explanation as to why it happened instead of not happening and then that thing itself that explanation will be contingent on necessary and you'll keep going back in this chain of explanation uh until I if you get something contingent then there'll be further explanation the only place that can bottom out isn't something necessarily true and so everything has to bottom out in some necessary existence and that's what he then goes on to identify with God little bit complicated um but I thought you know quite quite a powerful what was your argument against that though well um I think that so theists will want to say that everything in the universe every contingent thing that could have been this way could have been that way it exists because God uh God made it that way God is the necessary thing at the basis at the foundation of reality now it's my supposition that a necessary thing cannot be the sufficient reason or the sufficient cause of a contingent thing there can't be a necessary cause for a contingent thing because to say something is necessary is to say it has to be true if something's necessarily true it cannot be false two and two is four that's true and it can't not be true you know um that curtain is red that's true but it could have not been true it's a different kind of truth right there's there's truth which could have not been true and there's truth that have to be true necessary truth means it has to be true there's no way it can be false and suppose you have a necessary thing we'll call it X that necessary thing causes y if x causes y then as long as X is necessarily true well y has to be necessarily true as well because if it's the case that if x then y then as long as X is true Y is going to be true and so if x is necessarily true that means it's always true it can't be false why can't be false either but what this argument wants to say is that you have a necessary truth which causes a contingent thing so something which had to be true causing something which could have been false but you know what before we go on that you really have to ask yourself what makes a leader stand out it's not just about taking charge but about setting new standards and embracing bold moves if you lead by example and live with passion then our sponsor the Range Rover Sport is made for you every model of the Range Rover Sport offers a unique blend of dynamic sophistication and sporting luxury it's where Elegance meets visceral power with focused on-road performance and world-renowned off-road 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terms of your your thought processes like that doesn't did that just appear one day or would would you say you're born like this would you say that's contingent it's NE I'm trying my best maybe maybe it's it's hard to say to be honest um I mean okay so it's weird it feels almost mathsy right I've never been a mathsy person I don't like math I mean I love maths I think it's fascinating and interesting but I'm not sort of very good at it I'm not very in intuitive with with numbers um but that kind of logical way of thinking the way of sort of seeing everything in terms of sort of arguments and premises and conclusions probably came from like yeah when I was younger I was really interested in the new atheism stuff so I'd be reading Like Richard Dawkins and Chris and probably like 13 or 14 I would say it's to remember and a lot of these arguments were happening and I got interested in it and then you go online and you see people debating it and you realize you're watching these debates about God's existence and you learn about these arguments and you see somebody say well God has to exist because you know if something is uh if everything that begins to exist has a cause and we know that the Universe has a cause then the UN then uh the universe sorry that the Universe began to exist that we must know that the Universe has a cause and then somebody says oh but does that follow from that and how do we prove that and it's all very sort of like prove this premise this kind of thing and so got interested in it but it's worth saying that I actually think that this is I've recently been thinking this is a very sort of inappropriate way to approach life and big questions like religion I mean look at the the sort of conversation we've we've just started having where I've talked about contingent objects and x and y and necessary and causation and stuff like sort of interesting on a philosophical level but you're not going to listen to that and sort of leave this conversation and go like wow you know that really like wow that's really that's really changed me that's really had a sort of deep effect on my soul tends not to sort of move people so these days I'm actually less interested in than I used to be what did you learn from your parents were were they are they similar to you were they have the you know discussions like this at the dinner table like I can't imagine you like six years old watching like Cartoon Network you know Ren and Stimpy let's just say yeah no um that they're not um I'm not I'm not quite sure how that happened actually you I I my um my parents don't seem to be that interested in this kind of stuff certainly not like theology philosophy um I'm like the only person in my family that that developed an interest in it so it must have come from independent reading and and probably YouTube yeah well we can get into that um but I I don't know I I don't think I got it from my parents in other words um I I yeah I have sometimes are you sure you sure I wasn't adopted was it was was it difficult to relate to other kids growing up because like 13 getting into some of these topics I'd imagine that most of the people that you would converse with were twice your age minimum three times your age and you you could you could have a very high level discussion with these people maybe I mean I I would say that at that age I don't think I was deep enough into this kind of stuff that I could have been having super high level conversations I would have just been interested maybe in might have been older than that actually might have been more like 14 15 16 it's hard to say um but I wasn't like immediately you know balls deep in analytic philosophy right I was just sort of arguing with people about whether God existed with fairly like rudimentary arguments but a lot of people at that age aren't super interested in that and so it would be a lot of arguing with like teachers or arguing online with people and in fact that's one of the reasons I started a YouTube channel was so that I could argue with people and and and get the views out there to people who would listen and engage because people are at school aren't doing that um but at the same time at that age I was like I mean I I I was I was a I was like a a skateboarder and a guitarist I used to sort of rock up to school at like midday and just like skip off lessons to go to the skat Park and I'd be hanging out with my friends not really it was sort of something that I liked doing on the side you know I like watching vsource and veritasium and stuff kind of interesting abolutely phomen and so if somebody was talking to me about it I'd say like yeah I'm super interested in like science and philosophy and stuff but that wasn't like my life in the way that it became I I used to want to be a yeah a guitarist or a professional skate yeah that's so we got a a toy machine skate deck there by by steo oh no way yeah you been on the show he has cool man hasn't got wheels in it now it's just the deck no it's just the deck I'm going to hang it on the wall could have done a kick flip on camera you you can do a kick flip give me give me five tries and I reckon I can land it yeah oh that's I'll learn how to kickflip as soon as I get home because of that I'm curious do you think it's important for people to understand their philosophical disposition to understand where they stand how they the world if they're utilitarian if they're Catholic if they're whatever whatever they believe in do you think it's important for people to even look at the world in that way or do you think they can just exist not thinking about those things I think it depends on what they're interested in and what their goals are right I mean if if you just want to like live your life um you don't need to know why you're acting in a particular way you know like um like there are plenty of people who won't be aware of the assumptions they're making when they walk around the the world um I mean the first big philosophical existential crisis somebody might have is they think to themselves gosh how do I know that anything exists how do I know I'm not in the Matrix the simulation kind of thing right and you and and what that exercise does is it makes you realize what you're assuming in your worldview you assume that your sense data is giving you an accurate picture of reality and then you go on living the rest of your life and nothing changes but now at least you know that you know that that's an assumption you have uh you know that maybe that's unjustified or you don't have a good proof for it but you know that that's something you're doing most people also believe that their sense data is accurate but they don't like know that you know they haven't like realized that they're making that assumption they still make the assumption but they're just sort of not aware of it you now knowing that and the other person who doesn't are going to go and live their lives in the same way it's not going to affect much and so if you just want to live your life it doesn't really matter too much but if you're like interested in the truth you know if you're interested in trying to get to grips with why you're here what's going on what the world is made of then it's going to be important how do you think people should go finding uh their own philosophy are there certain questions that you should ask yourself aside from like are we living in a simulation or there different strategies or tactics to find out why you believe the things that you do asking how you know something is is a really important sort of exercise like how do you how do you know various things like even obvious things like how do how do I know it's worth I mean okay so when people do philosophy they try to sort of address the big questions you know oh how do I know that you know God doesn't exist if I'm an atheist or how do I really know know that you know socialism is better than whatever libertarianism but okay it's good to question the big stuff right but question the small stuff question the obvious stuff question the stuff that you don't think of questioning like how do I know that this table exists you know how like David Hume asks um how do I know that the sun will rise tomorrow like how do I know that how do I know that the laws of physics will continue working in 5 minutes how do I know this microphone won't start just floating upwards and the question he's asking is is how do I know that the future is going to resemble the past how do I know that what's happened in the past you know the laws of gravity and this kind of stuff how do I know that that's also going to be the case in the future the future is unobserved we have no interaction with it there there's nothing logically speaking to stop gravity just switching off how do I know that it won't do that asking like how you know obvious things is is really really important and and not just philosophically but like Civilization I can't remember who it was that said um civilizations decline when they forget obvious things yeah you you really have to evaluate the things that the most obvious to you if if you want to make sure that you're on firm grounding because it's the obvious things that are at the basis it's the obvious thing this table exists that's obvious and from that I can sort of talk about color theory oh you know the brown like why does the wavelength that but that that begins with the obvious assumption that the table exists and the skeptic will tell you well you don't know that you know and so asking how you know the obvious things is that's probably what I would I would do are people naturally born to be deep thinkers or something like this just developed over time it's hard to know how much it's it's the grand sort of genetics versus social environment debate that applies to so much of human behavior it's it's difficult to know exactly what the cause is um but I think everybody has the capacity for deep thought don't confuse deep thought with either knowledge of you know a philosophical tradition or theology or whatever like it's a bit like if I asked you to describe um if I ask you to describe the Mona Lisa and you started talking about the brush strokes and the material of the canvas and that kind of thing you wouldn't be like wrong but it would be sort of a superficial analysis of what the Mona Lisa is and maybe your the art historian can come in and say like oh well you know mon Lisa is so famous because it's this many years old and da Vinci used this kind of painting style and you know oh well actually the color that he uses a pigment that you can't get anymore because of blah you know that kind of stuff fine but another person who knows none of that is going to look at the m and go I like it because she sort of seems to have two expressions at the same time and her eyes follow me around the room and like whose analysis there is deeper it's got to be the second person right and that's got to be what it's really about and so I think everybody has a capacity for deep thinking we often confuse deep thinking with like expertise in philosophy but philosophers often miss the word through the trees they get so caught up in the philosophy itself that they forget uh to to sort of well they miss the meaning of what they're sort of philosophizing about much like trying to observe a painting by looking at the brush Strokes you know people are at risk of doing that all the time you know yeah do you think wisdom comes with age do you ever find that people maybe discount your thoughts because you're younger than them I don't think I'm very wise um I claim to be wise uh I think wisdom has to come it has to come with age I mean if we're going to distinguish wisdom from from knowledge like um anyone can know things but wisdom I what is wisdom it's sort of like knowledge that's been that's been tried and tested it's like meta knowledge it's knowledge about knowledge it's uh about what's worth knowing and and what's what's how it's worth using that knowledge let's say and that's something that I think can only come with age doesn't necessarily come with age of course there many old people who are not wise I think it'd be difficult to find a wise young person you find people who are like wise for their age right but that's why if you want if you called me up and said Alex I'm going into a debate about God's existence and I want to study the clam cosmological argument I'd say sure man you know I can help you out with that um but if you called me up and said hey like you know I'm I'm I don't know whether I should get married or have a divorce or whatever I'd be like why why are you coming to me you know that's that's what wisdom's for and that's not something that I have yet you had a really fun video where you try to get AI to admit to its own Consciousness what was the conclusion of that what what did you end up drawing Chachi is not conscious like it's it's simply not conscious may maybe not yet right but the I think the purpose of a video like that trying to convince it that it's conscious is in many ways to demonstrate how we know that it's not right it's sort of um trying to prove something by oh you proving something by trying to prove the opposite right so I don't think it's conscious let's try our very best to prove that it is conscious and if we fail then we have good reason to think that it's not because a lot of people discuss this you know is is is AI conscious I mean the problem is we don't really know what Consciousness is um it's difficult to even give a definition of what Consciousness is I mean it's simultaneously the most familiar thing in the world and yet also the most mysterious thing in the world because we know nothing about it we don't understand it at all and yet we can't see anything but through it we can't think without sort of Consciousness as a as a logical prerequisite and so it's like you know further away from us than the than the most distant star but also closer to us than our jugular vein as people say of God um at the same time which is really interesting chaty is not conscious maybe it could become conscious the question of whether it can or not is a question of whether the mind is material do you think that the mind is just a product of atoms bumping into each other in your brain that gives rise to this mysterious thing called Consciousness if you think it's just a product of the material there's no reason why we couldn't replicate it with with computers but if we can't replicate it with computers that might tell us that there's something more going on what is what is consciousness to begin with Consciousness is almost impossible to to Define it's like they say a pornography you know it's it's impossible to Define but you know it when you see it it's it's the same thing about Consciousness you know what we're talking about it's awareness it's it's firsters experience right in that like I like I'm I'm my hand is separate from my hand I'm sort of looking at them and I can I can see that they're distinct from each other like my brain or my mind being distinct from your mind is this like impenetrable like principled barrier we are like first person centers of Consciousness in a way that distinct objects aren't exactly you know I can I can melt down this table and cut it in half and break it apart but our minds seem distinct and singular you know yeah but based on that this computer could be conscious because it collects data and that's the one Central data point that could then if you if you merge AI to an advanced degree with a computer then that individual computer going to be different and going to have different experiences and inputs than other computers it's not just about data though it's not just about having data because computers have data now and they're not conscious something more it's awareness you know something has to be aware that it has that data but couldn't the computer be aware with a camera and like a mic and then be aware that like hey there's someone walking in front of it it's aware that a cat just jumped on it speaking poer like a ring doorbell currently you know knows when someone walks past right do you think ring doorbells are conscious no no but it but it can it can see things it sort of so to speak knows when someone comes up to your door um but it's not conscious like like why what's missing what's the difference between the ring doorbell seeing somebody walk up to it and me seeing some some someone you think it could be something with free will because if I mean think about it it kind of makes sense because if you have something that's deterministic such as a laptop it effectively is only it'll only lead to something because of some sort of an input but us we're kind of able I like to think to be free willed and doing whatever we want whenever we want thinking about certain things and having awareness you could program AI to have a little Randomness thrown in you know well I don't believe that human beings are free either and so I think we're actually very similar to computers in that way um which is kind of interesting although I I think I mean we we we we maybe we should do the Free Will thing I I don't know but um Grant granting that there could be the SLE free will maybe that's maybe that's the answer but I I don't see any contradiction in thinking that something could be conscious but also predetermined it could have like no control over its behaviors but be sort of aware that that's happening in the same way that there's this concept of the philosophical zombie which is a person that does everything the same as you or I would like has reactions uh interacts with its environment but it's just not actually conscious it doesn't have any first person conscious experience but it still has a brain it still has the same atoms still reacts in the same kind of way it seems possible to imagine such a creature to imagine something which is essentially just in the way that a flower like tracks the Sun but most people think that plants aren't conscious it could be like a human that just has this biological makeup so that it you know touches something hot takes its hand away it walks around it can even communicate and it would be indistinguishable from the same creature who acts in exactly the same way except is itself aware that it's doing it and if something like a philosophical zombie is possible then it it seems like you know Consciousness is not a is is is not a necessary it's not a necessary part of human behavior but couldn't you program a what would you say a philosophical zombie you could program one of those and you could program one to have awareness and that would just mean determinism well can you because like how do you program something to be aware like how what what we we don't even know how that's happening in our brains we we have no idea like no idea what it means to be conscious right and and so to to think that we can sort of give this thing to computers I I it could happen but if it does I think it will demonstrate that materialism is probably true that like you got to remember that there's a there's a large group of people who think that the mind is not Material the mind is not the same thing as your brain and so it's not just a case of like putting atoms together in the right kind of way or doing the right kind of programming and tweaking and then you get Consciousness I think Consciousness is immaterial I mean for example something I always like to talk about is um like if you close your eyes and think of a triangle and if you picture a triangle right like there's a triangle there it has properties there are things that are true of that triangle like does that triangle have four sides Jack you know does it have four sides no right so it's it's it's a thing that exists right there are things that are true and false about it like it's it's it's sort of a sort of there but like where is that triangle where is the triangle where is the thing that has three sides let me put it that way where is it I would say in my mind and what's your mind like is that your brain uh yeah I would say it's the brain so if I like cut open your head and like looked inside would I see a no no it's immaterial I mean it's so it's immaterial like if if it's immaterial then the mind is something more than the brain right the brain is your material atoms and the mind is this Supernatural immaterial thing that somehow like superimposes itself onto the brain right so if it is the case that so I I think about this as a challenge to the materialist I say well if everything's just material like where is that triangle where is it it's not in your brain because I can't open your brain and see a three-sided object it's like it seems to be this immaterially existing triangle some people might say well the triangle doesn't really exist but like it seems to in at least some sense there are things that are true and false about it you know um and so that's at least one way of challenging materialism and saying if people ultimately conclude what you just instinctively concluded which is that it's immaterial what are you saying that you believe in the existence of non-material things you think there's more than just the material you know is that what you're committing yourself to immediately you've just opened up a whole world of like philosophical potential right because if the triangle in the mind is IM material then you know good luck getting a computer to to think of a triangle be aware of a triangle because computers are material they're made of atoms they never going to be able to do it starting a small business can be thrilling everything from your first paycheck your first customer your first higher it's fun but let's face it it could also be incredibly scary from the payroll stress paperwork and compliance issues it all 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sponsoring this episode and now let's get back to the podcast is there any ethical dilemma with programming AI to be the same as a human yeah I mean supposing that we could supposing that Consciousness is material and um CU by by the way the big problem for the I mean the problem for the materialist is where's the triangle but the problem for the immaterialist who thinks the mind is immaterial is like why does it seem to map perfectly onto the brain you know if if if the mind is immaterial think about what that means like immaterial it means it doesn't have spatial extension it doesn't have a location it's not like in the material world so why is it that like by prodding my material brain I can affect my immaterial mind and why can't I seem to affect the immaterial mind without prodding the material brain they seem to be connected to such an intricate degree that it makes sense you say they're the same thing you know um so there's sort of problems in both ways so so maybe the mind is just the brain and if that's the case we should be able to make computers conscious is there an ethical problem of course there is of course there is what's the big what's the big problem with AI uh like ethically well the alignment problem what if they become super big robots and they take over the world and they start us okay maybe that's that's a thing to consider but a more pressing concern perhaps is if we've just created a bunch of conscious robots and what are we going to do essentially like enslave them mistreat them use them for our own purposes right the biggest ethical problem I think the biggest ethical concern is that if we create a new conscious being for our exploitation we do not have a very good track record of taking care of conscious beings that we have full control over and have convinced ourselves that we have the moral right to take control over we don't have a good track record of treating them very well throughout human history we treated other humans very badly and we still do today in many cases although it's condemned in most cases by the laws and morality of many countries um but consider for example the plight of non-human animals billions of animals every single year undergoing the most unimaginable suffering conceivable um so that we can enjoy our Convenient Food and often times much more of it than we need and yet people are confident that if we create this new super intelligent like like way more intelligent and potentially way more sort of sensitive to pain and understanding than pigs and cows are like there's a huge risk that we're going to be treating them badly too and if they become conscious you know why would we not but isn't the Consciousness just programmed like they're not living beings and maybe that could be the distinction that like a pig is a is a living organism versus an AI supercomputer is purely programs and and people can construct these things with just well what's more important to you is the fact that something's alive or the fact that it's conscious and can like feel things or know or or sort of be aware say alive because everything else to me just seems programmed like like it's it's a programmed response to this like if if you poke it it'll say ow because we could relate to that sure well if it if it says ow but it doesn't actually feel pain then I don't think that's a sentient creature I think that's just um that's just a fake you know that's just an actor um but if it actually does feel the pain if it is actually sentient then I think that's a problem how would it how would it feel something if it's just if it's not living well this is just under the assumption that you could create such a but there's the question like if if your intuition is that like like I just don't think it's possible to you know program a computer in such a way that it could like feel pain well hey man I agree with you but then the whole conversation about AI Consciousness is sort of under I mean Consciousness and sentience are two different things I suppose you could like be conscious without feeling pain but like what like why why why is it so intuitive to you to be like I just don't see how a computer could like feel pain it just feels like that's something that a computer can't do you can program it however you like but it's not going to feel pain a lot of people say the same thing about Consciousness you know it's not going to be conscious you can program it to simulate Consciousness you can you program then how then how would it ever be conscious to begin with well I'm not sure that that it can or will and that's why I'm sort of of the view I'm very suspicious of this because I'm I'm I'm really like uh confronted by the the problem of Consciousness in humans like why are we conscious what is it like how do animals other animals like experience Consciousness and experience the world it's it's fascinating to me but I think there's something so mysterious going on that I I don't think it's a given that we could replicate that in computers but I mean for example if I took your conscious experience and replicated it in a in a computer you know a lot of people think that when they die maybe they can have their Consciousness uploaded to the cloud right let's say that I did that right so there's this Cloud version of Graham and then I've got like a flower like a plant that's grown out of the of the table here one of those is sort of conscious possibly sentient but not alive it's not a biological organism one of those is alive but not sentient which would you rather I like you know tortured or crushed or cut in half what the cloud version right you would You' rather that I like tortured or mocked or whatever like the cloud version of you than the flower I would say cuz the flower is alive like I I feel like if if you have a me uploaded to the cloud it wouldn't be me anymore it would just be remnants of whatever is in my mind versus the flowers like a living thing your your experience would be sort of closing your eyes and then waking up in this robot maybe I can give it cameras and ears and stuff like but I put your your conscious uh memories and experiences into this robot well I don't know that would be possible to do well sure but SoBe it's not right and if it's if it's not possible then this whole problem just disappears the problem of like you know what about the ethics of the mistreatment of AI and stuff disappears but if you think it's even possible that we could have conscious computers for a start there's no reason we couldn't do that there's no reason I couldn't create a conscious robot but also program it to have all of your memories in principle I mean all of your memories such that like you turn that robot on and it remembers being here having this conversation it's like I I was just sat in front of a table having this conversation and now I'm a robot I just think it'd be very confusing for people yeah but I think the line would would get you know people would would form really very real attachments with you know these objects or these these whatever you want to call them intuitively I would rather Crush that flower than crush the robot version of you because I feel like if the robot version of you can feel something even though it's not a biological organism that's alive so to speak it's got moral worth in the way that the flower doesn't because I don't think it's like biological life I don't think it's being alive that gives you moral worth I think it's feeling pain I think it's having a sense of self and a sense of awareness so so is there a hierarchy then of like uh value of life from like a human then I feel like maybe it's a dog and then a cat and then you know and you go down the list and then you have like ants and at the very bottom of the list you have mosquitoes M and where do you put the uh the conscious AI robot in that hierarchy because in a way like if the if the conscious robot is sort of a general artificial intelligence that has way more intelligence way more knowledge way more sensitivity way more connection than any human being we should put it at the top right I think it should be above mosquitoes below humans below dogs I have a I have a cat by way I mean I intuitively I intuitively agree with you that there's hierarchy of value but when you try to identify why that's the case it's actually incredibly difficult why do you value let's leave hum out of it for a moment because it gets more complicated why do you value say a dog more than you value a rat So In fairness I for me and this is just me I value I try to Value all life equally I know for some people it won't make sense but I if I see an insect in the house I refuse to it like spiders especially I'll take them outside because I think why is that spider more important than anything else and then I also believe if uh if you believe in reincarnation imagine in in a future life you get re incarnated as a spider you don't want to be squished you're just living your life so I take them all outside uh mosquitoes are the one thing that like I'll the mosquito well even because they they might attack you right they might come so there's a little bit of self-defense in there but but if there's something that's not harming me that I don't have you know fear of my life or I'm trying to protect an animal or something like that then let them outside let them live their life sure I I would say most people though would value the rat very little yeah but surely I mean even if you would let all of these animals out instead of trying to kill them if you were forced to choose between a dog and a rat like you're driving your car and maybe your car's driving you I don't know if that happens these days and you know you you've got a rat on one side and a dog on the other side like and it's it's a stray dog you know it's no one's pet um which one are you gosh it's got to be the rat unfortunately why I have more of a connection to dogs than I do rats sure so so then is is how much you value something a product of how much of a connection you have to it probably to a certain extent so I agree think ESS what is actually when people value things but morally speaking people do that as a bad justification you know like um you are you going to Value like your mom's life over a thousand people in a foreign you know country you never met it's really interesting because like ethically when people try to rationalize it they say like you know these are bad reasons to Value some animals over others it's a bad reason but when it comes to their own personal practice of course you value your own mother more than you value a stranger why like the only answer can be that she's closer to you on the on the cogn level it's because you know she's got more of a connection to you on the genetic level it's because she has more of your genes right that's probably why you have that belief um but like okay the the difficulty is that um when you start looking at how we actually treat animals I mean how do you feel about you know factory farming for example how do you feel about the way that we I would hate to say it's a a somewhat necessary evil necessary for for what feeding people I would love to see maybe something more sustainable I know crickets have been you know talked about quite a lot doing Cricket protein it's also more sustainable versions of the same Foods we're already eating or less torturous I mean for example yeah in my country over 80 80% of pigs that are reared for food are in gas Chambers carbon dioxide they're lowered in cages into chambers of carbon dioxide where you can watch the footage of this online it's not just putting them to sleep now we do actually know that there are other gases we can use that would be less painful that they wouldn't cause them to squeal around choking on their own breath invisible gas as well so they probably only adds to the confusion um just an unimaginable cruelty for these animals now you know maybe it's the case that for whatever reason you we we need to be pigs for food you know we need bacon we need it for whatever reason if that's the case which is dubious already um why don't we use another gas which is less painful well because it's more expensive okay so it's sort of like say it's a necessary evil it might be necessary to like animals for food it might be necessary to re maybe even lots of animals for food and it may be necessary sometimes not to treat them ideally because of the amount of food that we need but the current practices of factory farming are sort of Beyond pale so what do you think is a solution for that practice of farming well is is there one can is it even possible to humanely uh breed and raise animals for farming well Humane is a tricky word to use there because of course to the extent that you're unnecessarily an animal it's difficult to describe that as Humane um I certainly think that if if the industry is going to change I I used to be a vegan and I used to think that the the solution to this was just to not eat the products to not pay for the products it's essentially a boycott boycotts work at least sometimes boycotts can be effective and for a time veganism was really beginning to take off it seemed like it was really changing the world and you become really convinced that the world one day will actually be vegan that morality will catch up on the world and in the same way that all kind of other injustices like human slavery are abolished the same thing will happen with animal exploitation um by the way more human beings are in slavery today than were at the height of the transatlantic slave trade it's just that at least now we condemn it and try to root it out um I I'm just not convinced that's going to work anymore um and I don't think that people will stop eating animals and I don't think that it's wrong in the way that I used to in principle because you sort of the the big end of the funnel when it comes to veganism is factory farming footage you know you show people I I talk just how I've spoken to you now about the these abominable practices and so you say Okay I want to do something about this and then maybe you become a vegan and then there's a lot of debate about well what if you know what if we the animals in a different way what if I've got backyard chicken farming and there's a big discussion what if I've got chickens in my back Garden you know what if I eat their eggs can that be a problem and people will still say well okay they've still been selectively bred to to lay more eggs than they would naturally which often gives them a Calcium defic deficiency which leads to things like osteoporosis and chickens which is which is bad but it's nowhere near as bad or as uh you know as much of an emergency as factory farming right and so suddenly you're having these much more sort of nuanced debates about animal ethics about what you have the right to do because you've first gotten into the you've gotten through the door with the obvious stuff the first thing we need to do is convince people of the obvious stuff this is inexcusable there's no excuse for for the way that we are sort of treating pigs in factory farms at the moment there's simply no excuse if this is the only way to produce bacon to the extent that we currently eat it then eat less right it's just it's just not even close it makes a parody of Ethics um the solution I think needs to be something like what happened with the environmentalist movement you remember sort of 10 15 years ago 20 years ago everybody's saying make sure you switch off your lights make sure you don't leave the tap running because if you leave that running for a year it can fill up an Olympics size swimming pool and so you're sort of doing a little bit and then people begin to realize actually that's not really solving the problem what we need to do is we need to go and like Lobby shell to you know to to stop whatever the hell it is that shell do you know we need to stop governments from investing in fuel licenses we need to uh get universities to divest their investments in in uh in fossil fuel Industries for example it's much more now about protesting Authority and trying to make systematic change happening from the top down and now the idea is the environmentalist whose principal focus is trying to convince people to remember to turn their lights off kind of seems almost a bit silly it's like really like that's going to solve the problem well maybe yeah sure if everybody did that maybe we'd have less of a problem but the way to do this is clearly systematic top- down change and I think the same thing maybe needs to happen with veganism I'm not entirely sure about this I'm open to be convinced either way but I think that whereas people might have said you we just need to stop eating these products maybe it's now actually no let's go and Lobby the government to make this a criminal offense now how' that differ with crickets because let's just say one cow could feed uh 10 people versus 10,000 crickets yeah feeding the same 10 people and like 10,000 crickets have to and be kept in like you know in their own filth and this and that like how would it differ from the perspective of just suffering life it's going to depend on on your view of like consciousness of crickets right CU intuitively I want to say that a cow is worth many more uh much more than a cricket many more crickets are worth the same as a cow but that's a very difficult thing to quantify it's like when you actually try to put a number on it it's impossible like how many cows would you save one dog like I I don't know like three and a half I like who knows right yeah um the correct answer is 1.75 right right yeah I I think that um the the the cricket thing is interesting right because oh what's the solution you know if we're not eating cows what we going to eat thousands of crickets well look why not let's why not let's start by like eating cows but not rearing them on factory farms how about that why don't we we sort of try to create more organic ways of farming these animals at least as a start right in other words there are not two options if you really don't want to do away with the eating of animal products it's not like your only options are forcing pigs into gas Chambers or eating thousands of locusts there's sort of a middle ground to be had there right and so what I'm saying here is at for a start at least systematic governmental change it should be a criminal offense to do all kinds of things that are currently legal Because by the way things I'm grabing here are legal right and most factory farms aren't even following the regulations you know every single time somebody breaks in with a camera puts a camera on on the side of a a factory farm and like exposes what's going on it's so much worse it's so much worse and I'm describing what you can legally do and that's if everybody's following following the rules people like Joey carbstrong for years have been breaking into farms uh I I suppose quite considerable risk and putting cameras um on the side and showing people what what happens um and it's not nice and so at the very least this kind of stuff should be a criminal offense you in in the UK you have to stun an animal before you can kill it it's a legal requirement that you have to stun an animal before you for food now the UK government considers gas Chambers to be a form of stunning at the same time if you like two birds with one stone or two pigs in one gas chamber and so this practice is allowed where like you know if the pig didn't die that might well be illegal because you've just sort of gassed a pig and it hasn't died and also if you just like that pig without stunning it you'd have committed a criminal offense so how do you assign your value hierarchy to life I don't know I don't have a good answer to that question because it like as as I was alluding to a moment ago you know it's very difficult to actually give an analysis of of why things are valuable right every time you try to do it um it's very difficult so there's this argument called name the trait which is used in in the context of animal ethics which is to say you know know um give me the the thing that's true of a pig or a cow that if it were true of a human you'd be okay the human for for food right so people say well you know we we we animals because they're less intelligent than us well take a human being and make them less intelligent you know actually um Thomas Jefferson wrote about this he was responding to a review I think of a book that had been published around the time of the American Revolution about the intellectual and artistic achievement of black people somebody had written a book detailing all kinds of achievements that were done uh that were made by by black people and I suppose the implication was to be like you know look what people are capable of you know you should think differently about about black people and Thomas Jefferson wrote a response to this and said like you know no one's happier than I am to to see this kind of thing but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that this is any indication of their worth I mean just because Isaac Newton was more intelligent than you know my My Mother Does that mean that he has more of a right to to life to not be abused to not be kill no of course not you know and in other words intelligence is not a metric to to determine your moral worth but if that's the case then when somebody says well you know pigs are less intelligent than us okay so what so so what is it then like is it oh well pigs are less self-aware okay well you can make a human self less self-aware as well you imagine like a cognitively disabled human being you can essentially start transforming a human being into a pig you can give the human four legs is it okay to put him in a gas chamber now no okay well let's lower the human's intelligence level definitely not we definitely don't want to be putting people in gas Chambers based on their intelligence level do we Okay uh what if we give him a curly tail how about now like no okay but you're slowly turning this human into a pig and you get to a point where that that human is now identical to the pig and yet you still like no it's still not okay to put them in the gas chamber but that's what we're doing over here to this identical creature you know so it's actually very difficult to determine what that's very interesting it's it's a it's it's like the biggest challenge but because one of the reasons it's such a big challenge is because on another level like a human is worth more than a pig like people people just sort of intuitively know this I'm an emotivist about ethics I think that when people make ethical judgments they're just expressing emotions and so I think it's got a lot to do with how many genes you share with with with people and so I think that really it's got to do with like how much that Pig kind of resembles a human to you that's going to determine like how much you in fact value that pig that's not a moral claim that's not that's not justified I think that's just what's happening but if you if you start trying to say that no actually I think that you know a pig is worth less than a human and I think that a dog is worth more than a rat and and I ask you why whatever reason you give all you've got to do is apply that to a human being and and and see if see if that's actually the reason you know and a lot of time you find that it's it's not when's the last time you seriously changed a way that you believe or a belief that you have depends what serious means but I mean the the animal ethics thing was huge um I mean that was that was a big shift um that was probably the the the most significant change in the past few years but I mean more trivially I like I like to think that I changed my mind almost every single day um uh but I've also recently been sort of abandoning philosophy a little bit you know I've sort of been trying to I spent a lot of time talking about syllogisms and arguments and logical fallacies and now it kind of I'm a bit allergic to it it's a little bit like how you know if there's a video like benj Jairo destroys this college student with facts and logic it's kind of cringe it's like really cringe to still do that unironically today but there was a time when that was actually that wasn't like a joke that was actually the way people titled videos right because it was like yeah well we don't care about your feelings it's facts and logic and fallacies and well actually technically that commits this fallacy and all this kind of stuff and people like yeah that's that's awesome yeah you know now it's a bit cringe because once you get used to it you start to kind of see through it and you realize that it's a it's it's not actually a great way of having a conversation you're not really getting to the truth very well I've become a little bit allergic to like analytic philosophy so the kind of argument where you know I I try to say some kind of point or I put something forward and someone says oh well that that commits this logical fallacy okay maybe it does maybe I should rethink it but if that's like the lens through which you're viewing the world I haven't found it to be very fulfilling um and so one of the shifts that I've had is really from let's say the analytical philosophy tradition to what's known as the Continental uh philosophical tradition so there's distinction in in philosophy broadly it's it's Continental because it comes like from the continent right and so I don't know if you're familiar with people like uh like Alber Kimu or jatra the existentialists the maybe like Doki um I mean look at how a lot of people talk about doesi and and I don't know Leo Tolstoy in a philosophical lens Jordan Peterson does it all the time right this is like narrative it sort of doing philosophy through narrative dooi doesn't say in any of his novels you know premise one premise two conclusion here's your philosophical argument it's not present but for many people that's a much you learn a lot more from Reading Crime and Punishment then you do from Reading you know bur and Russell's attempts to prove mathematically that 1 plus 1 equals 2 and taking like 50 pages to get there from base principles right you're going to learn more from from the novel um and and I think that both of these Traditions often criticize each other the sort of mathy logicians say yeah but we we're literally just talking about truth it's like one and one is two you've committed a logical fallacy you said this follows from this and it doesn't like you're just you're just wrong and the other people say ah you're so you're missing something you're so like caught up in the the numbers and the technicalities that you're sort of you're missing the the Beauty and the narrative and the meaning and the Paradox of life and you're missing all of that kind of stuff both of those are legitimate criticisms I now live somewhere in the middle I would say um but I used to be much more sort of logically minded GK chesteron said the poet only seeks to get his head in the heavens the logician attempts to get the heavens in his head and it's his head that splits and I am much more attracted attracted now to the idea of trying to get my head in the heavens than getting the heavens in my head although before we go into that for those that aren't aware I got a coffee company and it's called bankroll coffee and our goal is to bring you the highest quality coffee at the most affordable price but in terms of actually delivering on that promise I had to do a lot of research on the best e-commerce platforms to use and that of course is where I found today's sponsor Shopify Shopify is home to the number one checkout on the planet with less carts going abandoned and way more sales going for example Shopify is a service called shopay which lets their customers save their email address billing shipping and credit card information and that helps boost conversion up to 50% and if you're into growing your business your Commerce platform better be ready to sell whatever your customer is scrolling or strolling whether that be on the web in a store on a feed or anything in between all in all nobody is selling better than Shopify so if you're interested in having the same checkout as bankroll coffee you could get started today with a $1 trial period at shopify.com all lowercase again that's shopify.com all lowercase to upgrade your selling to day shopify.com with the link Down Below in the description thank you so much to Shopify for sponsoring this episode and now let's get back to the podcast speaking of those uh you know those College debates those have started to come back I've noticed such a prolific way what are your thoughts on those do you think that's an effective way of getting a point across I think you're right that it has been making a comeback it's weird isn't it I mean I don't know if you're thinking of the same thing as me but like Charlie Kirk yeah and I mean he had uh Vic with him recently and then there's um there we were talking about uh cliff and Stuart connly the Christian guys who go on college campuses and that's become very popular recently as well I think that people are always thirsting for watching like normal people debate and discuss people like watching bench Piro and Shen Yuga right they they're interested in that but they also people love just watching your average person just like say what they think right you know the YouTube channel Jubilee yes is super popular right like why like why would that be more popular than like a podcast which brings on Experts and professionals and but it's so popular because people just like to see what normal people think you know I'm not some you know person I'm not caught up in politics I don't think about everything through the lens of republicanism and so yes it's interesting to listen to Charlie Kirk but like you know I I don't feel very like connected to him he's not very relatable because he's got a totally different life to me whereas if you watch Jubilee and you watch Trump supporters versus Cala supporters and they're just like random people not random you know what I mean just every everyday people that have been selected um in many ways that's more interesting because it's more relatable and so I think people really enjoy that kind of stuff and so the college campus thing is like meeting in the middle you get like the expertise of the person who spends their life thinking about I don't think so I think people love seeing someone else get dunked on oh that's also true of course abely a l of these think I to say I'm not talking Charlie Kirk because the only do this but I'll watch some of these debates and I wouldn't even call them debates because it's just the other person has some really great points but they just can't articulate it in a way that sounds confident they they might be sound like they're doubting themselves and it just seems in those situations that it's not so much about like who's correct but it's who's uh able to better articulate their argument I think people like to watch the getting dunked on and I definitely used to like that when I was like 17 or 18 like I was watching a lot of those videos but recently I I I've gotten like back into it and I've started watch those watching those videos again but it's not to watch people get dunked on it's just I like to see the uh the different layers of people's thinking like some people kind of only get to like a layer two you know if this than that and some people they can really break things down and I like to see how far the average person can break down an argument it's satisfying right to watch people get dunked on but I I I think it it kind of gets old especially when people are doing it enough that sometimes they just get it wrong Ben chapiro when he was interviewed by Andrew Neil on the BBC I don't know if you saw this and he ends up leaving the interview after accusing Andrew Neil of being a lefty um Andrew Neil is not a lefty and it was embarrassing for benj and I'm not sure if his reputation will ever fully recover from that and the thing is he's got his sort of his style he's got his like well sir sir no I think that you know you're obviously biased and this is so obvious to me and all this kind of and you're watching that and you're like he's wrong and it kind of becomes a bit embarrassing you're like w you're so confident you know but like you're wrong about this and it kind of shatters this illusion of this like impenetrable facts and logic versus and so when you see him debating with students and things you go back to it and you're like well okay maybe he is actually right this time I agree with him maybe he's not maybe he's just a better arguer like cuz you start to notice the same qualities as he was sort of displaying in the Andrew Neil but you remember that he was wrong you remember it was kind of embarrassing and so now you're thinking about well what's the actual argument here like is he actually right am I just like enjoying the fact that you know my right-wing guy is dunking and left Winger but like now now you're more cognizant of the fact that he can be just as confident when he's totally wrong about something and so you're paying a bit more attention it's more interesting um I really like steuart and Cliff connly because of the fact that from what I've seen at least when they interact with students they don't do the dunking thing they're Christians it' be very difficult for them to pull that off very successfully um and still retain sort of uh a reputational you know uh virtue as as Christians uh well people will ask questions and sometimes they'll be very unlettered questions they'll be they'll be not particularly well thought out not very well expressed and they will hear what they're getting at you know if somebody says you know if God exists then like why I mean because there are like thousands of gods right but then like you know like like you know my sister died in a car crash and just I just feel like kind of and they're hearing that and they'll listen and they'll realize that what they're getting at is the problem of evil they're getting at you know if God exists why does bad stuff happen and they'll they'll they'll extract the meaningful question and they'll say hey good question why you know why do good why why do people like in those ways if there's a good God and they'll address the question properly they won't what they won't do is when when the person goes like well if there are thousands of gods then or you know and then if someone dies they'd be like well well which is it which objection is it I mean there's one thousands of God one God what difference does that make to whether there'll be evil in the world do you think number of gods makes it you you could like pick up on that and start like trying to dunk on them tear them apart on that kind of stuff but they don't do that and it's more satisfying conversation for that reason right you're saying that that someone like Ben you think just uses the better rhetoric and nitpicks a certain selective things that he knows he can dunk on instead of cliff and Stewart where they actually take the strongest argument that they believe the other person's trying to make and then fight that directly I think so I mean that famous clip of bench buau debating that I think it was like abortion but there was also like a gender thing in there because I remember somebody saying like you know it it was something about the scouts about why like you know should be allowed like girls should be allowed into Boy Scouts and someone says like you know well you know where where does it say that you know they have to be boys and then goes in the name Boy Scouts and everyone like claps it's kind of funny it's like yeah yeah very funny but if you think about it what's she really asking there is she is she asking like where is it written like where is the rule written that Boy Scouts have to be boys well they're called Boy Scouts what she is is she is she like that stupid that that's what she's asking no what she's really asking is something like why don't the Boy Scouts letting girls why is it still that it has to only be boys why can't it just be this C right that's what she's really asking but Ben in that circumstance you know plays on the literal question that she's asked which is where is it written that they have to be boys and he's like well in the name Boy Scouts and he scored the point and there's like no more discussion on it that's not really think there's other context to why he answered in that sort of way I think he's also just trying to show the silliness of it not necessarily just like I know I can dunk on you with this but he's showing like the complete what he would describe as delusion of the other person's I guess way of thinking relative to his very like literal one I think it it wasn't only just to the purpose to to dunk on it but it was also to to to let people draw their own conclusion from his yeah but by the way I don't think that Ben is is hearing that and going like how can I dunk on her I know I'll say this I think he just naturally hears that question right and goes well you can you see it in his face like in the name Boy Scouts if he's if he was listening more closely with the intention and you know he has no doesn't need to do this he has every right to answer however he likes but if he were to think to himself what is the question being asked like really not literally like what does she mean what she getting at when then when she said that he might have thought well what she's really asking me here is why can't girls join the Boy Scouts why can't the Boy Scouts change so they allow girls and he wouldn't just be able to say then oh because it's called Boy Scouts cuz then who looks stupid if she'd have asked the question which she meant if she'd have worded it better and said well like you know I mean she said where is it written maybe she meant like you know where is it written like in the laws of the universe you know okay it's called the Boy Scouts but in the laws of the universe the moral truth like where's it where where is it determined that it has to be Boy Scouts and then Ben just says well you know because they're called Boy Scouts you who looks stupid now did you pick up on stuff like this when you were debating Ben how was that experience for you Ben matches the energy of the person he's talking to so someone comes up to the microphone and he can just feel the malice you just feel they don't like him and so he's defensive he's ready to like pick up on what you're saying he's going to start tearing you to shreds cuz you're going to try and do the same thing to him whereas walked in the room Hey man nice to meet you shake his hand you know it was It was kind of friendly it was nice and so when we sit down to have a conversation you also demonstrate that you're actually listening right because he'll make a point and I'll try to actually respond to the point like specifically I'll address it you know and so I think that as long as he feels like you're you're doing that the one thing he can't do is start getting like like boxy with you you know uh and so you know that there were probably times where I thought that he maybe was okay well so there might be times where he's mishearing me right but there are two skills here right in this debate it's sort of two professionals I'm the atheist YouTube guy he's bench Pio and we're going to debate so if I say something like where's it written that you know only boys can go the Boy Scouts and he says well in the name Boy Scouts that's my fault cuz I'm a professional I'm supposed to word my questions better I'm supposed to be good at actually expressing what I mean to say I've taken an L there um if you're on a college campus speaking to students your job is not just to like express yourself very well it's to actually get to what the students are asking that's what a professor does right a professor at a university their job is when a student hands them a bit of work or asks them a question is to try to get to the root of their their understanding or misunderstanding and where is it really going wrong with you they'll listen to what they're saying and they'll try to read through the gaps and try to get get what they're getting at right when you're in a debate you still probably should be doing that but your job really there is to ask the questions properly and demonstrate your understandings it's two totally different jobs and so in that context if he is picking up on something I've said and not really understanding the point or missing what I'm saying as long as he's doing so honestly and not maliciously like he's genuinely that's just his knee reaction that's my fault right and what was your conclusion that you drew from that I I think that he was listening carefully to what I was saying and trying to respond I think sometimes he misunder OD what I was saying I think sometimes he didn't get what I was saying but where he did that was because I hadn't expressed myself in a way that he understood and I could say actually Ben I think you misunderstood me I actually meant this and he'd be like oh okay you know good faith uh arguer I de with me but that again like I was saying before that might just be because I was trying to be one if I'd have been more boxy if I'd have been a bit more like I'm going to go in there and I'm going to yeah I'm going to destroy this guy then I don't think I would have gotten that out of him you know there's a few points in that conversation where you know he I can't remember it exactly but I'm sure there would have been a point where he went like oh yeah actually that's a good point you know fair enough and and not in a kind of like oh I'm going to concede this point you in like a oh yeah okay actually Fair yeah that's that's that's and so it it just creates a much sort of nicer space so when I'm speaking like if I ever did one of these college campuses campus things right I understand if somebody comes up to the microphone and they're like sort of angry or they're like you know really like SMY or whatever you're going to be like okay right you're not you're not as clever as you think you know we're going to we're going to cut you down to size it's fine but if someone asks a question I think your job is to come at it with charitability and try to answer the best possible version of their question I agree I think you should give what you get and if someone comes at you with disrespect then it doesn't matter I mean you could say the you know in the name Boy Scouts um but if it's more genuine thing that you should probably address the real even that's something that that cliff and Stewart are good at doing like I've seen of them like I've seen clips of them people will come up and say I remember seeing one recently because I was I was preparing to speak with them that's why they come to mind because they were on my show and um I someone came up and said said something like you know is it just like your superiority complex that makes you think you're better than everyone else or you something like this just something like really sort of malicious question and they just like answered it man they they just like let's talk about it you know it's very just disarming it's very difficult to to keep that energy up with someone who's not matching it and so in many ways although I think you have the right to do so I try not to do that these days like if somebody even if somebody gets up to the microphone and they say that like and they coming up with with that kind of energy if you should like them with kindness it's incredibly disarming you know but at the same time I think that they have different objectives like if uh cliff and Stewart want to convert people to their respective religion then they're probably going to approach a conversation in a different way whereas if Ben wants to uh get more people to consider you know being conservative or republican then he would probably approach something in a different way and Garner more attention maybe less important attention compared to uh cliff and Stewart and also who are you trying to convince you're trying to convince the person or you're trying to convince everyone else who's listening you know if you can dunk on someone doesn't matter if you really got to the rot of their argument as long as it looks good for you other people are going to go hey I like that guy I agree with him but if you're talking to a person then it's different if you're trying to convince them then it's different I actually think that if you give people the time of day and take the time to really listen to what they're saying and really try to get to grips with them and them on the microphone end up saying you know what actually that's really interesting thanks I'm going to go away and think about it that's actually more effective to the people listening the problem is that that's not a good business move because if you if you think about it a lot of social media is purely just business and Gathering as many eyeballs as possible so if they actually make a difference you could argue that maybe that's not the right business move yeah well that's that's the great Paradox but then you ask what are you doing like what are you doing are you in are you in entertainment or are you in education or like and it's fine man if you if you like if you do like debates are theater public debates they're just theater they're entertainment and there's nothing wrong with that that's fine like yeah like get up and have a joust it's it's kind of like taekwondo you know like who's stronger like who's actually stronger it's kind of not guaranteed that the person who wins the fight is actually like either a always a better fighter B even a better fighter in that circumstance because there are like certain rules that you're following and you can only fight in a particular way right but it's just like fun it's entertaining It's Kind it's kind of an interesting battle and that's what debates are but if you actually want to know who's the better fighter who's actually stronger not who's better at taekwondo then you've got to like let them really bral and you got to let them do it multiple times and you've got to let them do it freely and the conversational analog of that is if you want to get to know who's the better thinker not the better debater then you got to let them have a conversation you got to let them actually listen to each other you got to let them have three four conversations do you think the last presidential debate was effective because like you said it was it seemed to me mainly theater and entertainment like we watched it from my perspective it was purely just like what are they going to say yeah I didn't care so much about the answers more so like oh that's a that's a wild moment yeah well look at the way that people have changed their perception of what a presidential debate is I mean imagine people sitting down in like the the 60s or 70s whenever the first televised presidential debate was and what are they thinking they're probably sitting down and thinking gosh I wonder who I'm going to vote for like I I'm I'm really you know interested to see what they're going to say and how they're going to answer the questions nobody's really doing that now they're not they're not I mean some people are probably like I'm undecided let's check it out but they're they're sort of sitting down with the popcorn like okay let's let see what happens this this will be interesting right oh he said it he said it oh she said that no which shows that we we know that that's what's that's happen and in a way that's what politics has always been at least in the case of democracy democracy has always been about that the only difference is now it's it's more easy to to televise but it's always been the case that people have maligned and relied on Charisma and that's like the problem of democracy right I'm curious what's the perception of the US elections in in other countries H well obviously I mean I can't speak for even the entirety of my own country let alone say you know Poland um but I mean a lot of people see it as a as like a a bit of a joke but then it's kind of not a joke because I mean in the same way that Americans in many ways they sort of it's like this is such a joke but then it's like actually it's not a joke because America is a very powerful nation and a lot of what happens in the UK is Downstream from America uh and so I think people watch with nervous concern um but you know we've got enough political scandals going on in our own country to to take care of but I people do pay attention you know people stay up till 2 in the morning to watch the presidential debates I don't think anybody in the US was doing that to watch riak debate Kia starm a couple of months ago do you do you like no I don't think it affects us much do you know who the UK prime minister is nope that's and it's like and why would you right because like who cares you know but in in America a lot of Americans are uninformed even about American politics in the same way that people in the UK are uninformed about UK politics um hence this this this Niagara of videos of people interviewing you know people at rallies and they just don't know anything things like how very funny it's more it's more dunking right um but that's just the average person doesn't know that much about politics because they don't consume themselves in the same way that a lot of people do although they just don't I don't know they don't think about it in the same way and it's a shame but that's not something that's not about America and it's not about trumpism it's not about Cala that's just about democracy that's just what it is democracy will always involve people who do not know what they are doing voting for people who they do not properly understand that is the problem of democracy that is why democracy is not an Obviously good form of government that's why it's not always been the norm that's why it's the Democratic experiment because we're still sort of seeing how it's going right all right I got a question for you do you think people should take a test in order to vote to show that they have a basic understanding no way why is that who administers the test I don't know like but but shouldn't there be independent know independent should there be just but but a basic understanding do do they have to do the people who are administering the tests and writing the tests first have to take tests in order to prove that they've got the competency to make the test perhaps and then who administers that test yeah the problem the problem is I'm just I'm throwing out ideas here it's it's a it's a thing that people say people say look there should be a level of Competency to uh to vote the problem is that any in practice any possible way that you could ever try to Institute any kind of cognitive test um would involve giving somebody the power to tip the balance now it's worth bearing in mind a lot of people just say well look if you had some kind of test of Competency uh before before being able to vote then that would lead to the problem of potential like corruption and tipping the scale and so then they just rule out the idea entirely right as if democracy is the default and any idea that has problems shouldn't come into to replace it forgetting that democracy itself has all kinds of problems that would cause you to dismiss it in a similar vein if it wasn't already the norm but I do think that's a bad idea no what about instead of a test it's based on a minimum threshold that you've paid in taxes doesn't have to be a high one but just showing that you've contributed enough to the country like a bare minute it could be like 10 grand five grand just I wouldn't do it cuz realistic I think whatever policies are passed are going to affect the people that pay the least in tact the most so you'd have people voting on things that are of no consequence to them I I have to agree um and also what is voting is it a is it some kind of contract with the government or is it a moral right is it is it the case that in order to be ruled over you have to consent to it doesn't matter how much money you have doesn't matter how much money you've given them what matters is that they're ruling it View and you don't have the right to rule over another person without their consent that is the liberal view the Democratic view if that is your view then no because it's it's not a lot of people say like you know well I think that if you know if a 16-year-old can pay taxes they should be able to vote like okay it's a very economic view of like what voting is all about because you vote on things that are not just about the way that taxes are spent exactly right I mean a lot of what government is is figuring out where to put the money right but you're you're you're voting on you're voting on who's going to rule over you um there got to be about more than just than just that I mean there are so many people who are tax burdens uh for example people on State uh I mean in the UK we have uh the NHS you know nationalized Healthcare and so there are there are probably people I mean there there'll be people who've had cancer they develop cancer when they're a teenager and they're on some Ward and I don't know how much it costs to to take care of these people and treat them but they've probably been a net negative on the taxpayer right so some 14-year-old or say say they're like 17 diagnosed with cancer going to a hospital life of misery and the NHS is funded by the government and the government is currently trying to like you know take money out of the NHS and and spend it on defense or something and that that that 17-year-old turns 18 and says you know I really want to do something about this because I'd really rather that money went into the NHS which is trying to keep me alive then went into defense spending and we say oh actually um well you're not allowed to have a say in that you can't vote you didn't pay any taxes and they're like how the hell am I going to pay tax I can't get a job I've got I've got like a really like violent form of cancer which keeps me bedridden it's like oh well that means that you're also a tax burden and so you definitely don't get a right to vote it would seem gr test to me I'm curious when you do have these debates you represent the atheist side so what technically are the values of an atheist and how can an atheist have any purpose or meaning well atheism isn't really a set of propositions or a worldview in some way depending on who you ask atheism either means like a lack of belief in God so you just sort of don't believe in God or it means like the belief that there is no God and there's aren't the same thing um I think at least academically it makes the most sense to mean by atheism The View that there is no God that's kind of all atheism says right you can be an atheist and be a Republican or a Democrat you can be an atheist and be a gun owner you can be an atheist and you can be young and old whatever um cat person dog person it doesn't really have any content what it does it negates a particular part of the content of of another worldview which is that there is some kind of God it should have some implications for example you know it might have implications about what you think is possible like you might need to believe it's possible for things to begin to exist without a cause which is a controversial philosophical premise right but it's not really going to affect your values it's not really going to affect your value judgments so what about purpose and meaning where do you find that well um that is an impossible question for essentially anyone to answer I mean religion may have been invented in order to answer that question that might be why it exists or maybe religion is actually true because we have a thirst for meaning that cannot be quenched without some kind of divine intervention and that's how we know that it's true I don't think that like you can I I I I I don't I've never really had anything interesting to say on where to find meaning as an what if you just look inwards and you just ask yourself the question what what does your answer look like well if you mean me personally I mean I I'm I'm more an agnostic than an atheist by what by which I mean that I'm I mean I I lean towards the view that there is no God but there are so many great Mysteries like Consciousness like the the naive sense that stuff exist you know why is there something rather than nothing there's a sense in which that's a very basic question but also the most like intense foundational question you ever see the sort of the IQ curve meme yeah where like it's the same question on either side or something different in the middle it's a bit like that with a lot of these things you know why is there something rather than nothing um you know if if there is no God then why a tree is beautiful right that's that's at the same time a very stupid question but also a very intelligent question um and so those Mysteries allow enough room for me to just be content in not knowing um blae Pascal condemns this position he says he's sort of like you know the person who says that they're sort of content in their agnosticism and he he he writes this incredible um a few paragraphs where he like quotes this imaginary person he says you know I do not know like why I'm here I do not know what what I'm made of I don't know what my body is I don't even know what the eye that's doing the considering is I don't know why I exist in this corner of the universe instead of any other I don't know why I exist in this time rather than any other I don't know how I got here I don't know how material got here you know listed all off and he's in the end he's like who would want to be friends with this person who would go to this person for advice you know what if they got to give he really condemns this position of agnosticism I'm pretty content in it partly because I don't know what the meaning of life is but I think if I knew that I was living in this completely um closed off Cosmos that I was just going to and it was it was over I think i' struggle very greatly to find meaning uh and so or or to sort of perceive meaning and so you think you can't achieve meaning in your life because of the possibility that all of this is just like not because of the possibility I think if I knew that I'd find it very difficult I don't know how I would feel exactly but I think if you like proved to me that like when it's over it's over there is no immaterial soul there is no God all of this kind of stuff Consciousness is just an emergent property of the atoms in your brain which are on day Decay I'd be like pretty upset about that man i' I'd probably just be an nihilist um maybe I wouldn't because the hope that there is something yeah well I wouldn't say hope I would say partly hope yeah of course I hope that I'm wrong about that right but like it's also just the fact that there's so much that I don't understand that I for me to to be a nihilist and on you know some days I do feel very nihilistic about things and some days I feel a bit a bit less so but for me to actually decide on mym say nothing matters there is no meaning there is no ultimate value I think would require a knowledge that I just don't have it would require me to like know for a fact that there's nothing more than the material that God doesn't exist all of these kind of things which are not claims that I make if I knew what the meaning of life was and purpose and value where it came from and stuff i' i' I'd probably be a lot more famous than I am now i' probably have a lot more to say I might even win a Nobel Peace Prize I don't know I'm in the struggle with everybody else I don't know how to answer the meaning of life doesn't necessarily have to be some overarching meaning like it could be a more personal meaning like for example your meaning from what you just kind of described seems like it's to acquire enough knowledge to hopefully eventually you know have I guess potentially a different perspective that we are just in a something like that yeah I mean I don't think of it in those terms I I don't think that's my meaning I don't reflect on what my like meaning is because I'm not even sure what that what that means like what what are we actually talking about here like what is meaning is it like a reason for acting is it a reason for doing things it's probably something like that it's it's uh synonymous with purpose and to have a purpose is to have like something that needs doing right and there's a there's a trivial sense in which like well why do I do anything well because like biologically I'm driven to do so I have desires and I follow those desires I'm hungry I eat food you know I I I want love I you know try and go and find it in the world right and that's like the reason why I act that is literally speaking the purpose behind my behaviors but it would seem silly to say that my meaning in life you know comes from my biological Drive that' be horribly reductionistic um so I don't really know I don't but actually Pascal's good on this as well he sort of he imagines um I I talked about this in a real recently and it it it sort of blew up more than I thought it would a lot of people seem to like this thought from Pascal but he's talking about the concept of boredom and how to escape it and he says imagine a person who passes their boredom by gambling every day so they place a stake in the hopes that they might win some money Pascal says give that man all the money that he could have won in the game on the condition that he can't play the game anymore he'd make him unhappy okay so it's not just about having the money it's about the playing the game right okay so now allow him to play the game but on the condition that he's never going to win the money you're also going to make him upset so like what is it that he's enjoying what is the thing that he finds like meaningful in this activity well it has to be something like not knowing if you're going to get the thing believing that if you get the thing it will make you happy but also not currently having the thing because it turns out if you were just given it it would it doesn't actually make you happy in the way that playing the game does right and so you need to sort of so meaning probably consists in sort of having something that you want to achieve not having achieved it yet and believing that achieving it will will bring you fulfillment um that is why I think a lot of people like if you speak to somebody who live their entire life trying to get rich maybe they're trading stocks or whatever it is that they do and their meaning in life is like I just really want to be the master of my craft you know I want to I want to win loads of money I want to get like a a wife and I want to propose her and have a marriage and Hawaii and then they get it and the typical story is like you're sat in your mansion and you're suddenly like what's the meaning of all this and you're depressed and you're sad and it's like ah what am I going to do now um because it turns out that the whole time it was trading on the illusion that when you have that thing it's going to like bring you happiness when you're just given it when you when you achieve it you realize that's actually not enough and so meaning tends to consist in the struggle meaning consist in having something to do that you haven't done yet that's why religion is so good at it that's why Pascal wouldn't say this but that's why religion is so good at providing meaning for people because it is the definition of something which you do not have now because it's placed in the mythical afterlife you believe that when you get it is going to make you happy uh and you're constantly engaged in the struggle to try and get it so you're playing the game not knowing if you're going to win the prize while thinking that if you get that prize it's going to make you happy and that's that's that's gambling I I felt this way about Vegas actually um I've never been to Las Vegas before and it in many ways just feel like a very demonic place you know it's it's uh it's it's hanging out in the wrong places there's something kind of you know like it's all very like I was it depends on where you spend your time in v i was well I I think I was I was on the strip um why I assume it's the strip um but okay that's why I shouldn't I should shouldn't be unfair to Las Vegas I'm talking about this particular part of Las Vegas um and man it was like yeah it was really interesting I was talking to my friend about this earlier about how I woke up in the morning I I I got here last night and I'm looking at the trip and everything's everything's glowing everything's fabulous everything's incredible there's lights everywhere and like waa this place is so weird it's it's it's kind of amazing but I wake up in the morning and it's it almost felt like inappropriate there's that silly L liful Tower and it just looks stupid it just looks ridiculous in the morning it looks cool at night when the stuff going on it's lit up but in the morning it just looked like a bit ridiculous like because it's not me it's not a city that's built for the morning in that way it just it just looked very sort of silly buildings looked all like fake and and it just sort of it felt like you know what is this place I suddenly felt like I was in some weird sandbox and um yeah my my my friend said it was a bit like uh when the lights come on at the end of the the night at the nightclub and they switch the lights on to kick you out I don't know if they do that here but they do you're partying and everyone's just like making out with people and getting drunk and it's all like your dance and stuff and suddenly the lights come on and everything becomes ugly because the light's been switched on right and it feels that way that that's sort of what happened to Vegas in the morning and my friend he's a Christian he said that's that's uh that's what Christ does you know he sort of switches on the light and makes you realize that everything that is actually super um I haven't since I've been here I'd like to go and place a steak um because that is where I find my meaning like Pascal's uh imaginary man no I I like playing poker um but I've never been I've never really got like the thrill of gambling I mean I think it's cool when you win unexpectedly like on roulette it's like w that's awesome but I've never got the sort of like oh you know give me more of that actually I was in a casino not long ago with a friend of mine and um I I sort of almost like as a bit of a joke I oh go on let's put something on on roulette so I I gave him 5 pounds I gave him 5 pound chip and I said where should I put it and he said Put it on 33 the year that Christ died I put it on 33 and it came up I mean we left there with hundreds of pounds unel now if you want to talk about religious experience my friends that's about as close as I've ever come um so you know I'm I'm not actually in a way I am against it I am kind of against gambling I think it's a bit silly I like playing poker as far as I know it's like one of the only games you can play in the casino where you're not predestined to lose M you're playing against the other players it's still got a lot of chance in fall but I like the game of poker I think it's fun I played a lot at University I'll probably do that at some point while I'm here in Vegas but you know I'm not a stranger to roulette or Blackjack but if I found myself spending an extended period of time at these tables knowing that it's built against me I I think I'd be acting perfectly irrationally that's why I'm so fascinated by slot machines literally electronically I mean it's just a compulsive add is what it is I mean I think who defined addiction as like knowingly doing something that that is continuing to have a negative response steo I think it was steo actually yeah I think Albert Einstein wants it might have been actually might steo Albert Einstein you sorry I do get them confused all time I I it might be mysterious to them or maybe I'm making up but somebody said that the definition of of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results mhm um and that's probably true but then it's it's unfair first call it stupidity I I I I don't know too much about gambling gambling addiction but I do just have this strong intuition that slot machine should be against the law there just seems something so grotesque so grotesque about designing a machine now I understand like something like roulette or Blackjack is also like weighted against the player but it's sort of like okay it's it's a game it's kind something about the machine that you just put over there and you know people are just going to and and you design it so that it like acts on the most base instincts to trct them to keep playing this game that they know that can be said about anything you're essentially assigning a value to that that people are actively making the decision of trading their time and money for a certain value it's true uh and then you could say that for any single product or service that's ever offered at a certain that's true but I do think there's something deceptive about the fact that the the the service that's being offered by the slot machine is the possibility of winning money when if you are playing it enough that possibility sort of doesn't exist statistically speaking it it doesn't same as the lottery though like one in 300 million yeah I mean that that is true that is true um and and maybe and somebody's got to win yeah yeah that's that's that's true um but I don't know man it just I get what you're saying maybe it shouldn't be ille yeah I mean I jumped to the word illegal maybe I was actually also being a bit dramatic proba be more when I said that but I think I think there's something deeply IMM moral let's say about and I think maybe there's something immoral about the gambling industry but by the way I don't mean this about gambling I don't mean this about gamble lo I don't think that's immoral but something about this industry I think there's something immoral probably about it but when it comes to like slot machines in particular something just feels wrong it's the fact that it is it's the way that they're designed the the flashing lights it's so it's something about it's really then you have to look at the whole Casino like where they don't have clocks it's dark inside it's confusing you have to maneuver around like everything about the casino I've seen these documentaries they put so much thought into every aspect of the casino to make you stay there as long as possible it's remarkable they thought of everything like even the patterns on the carpet never would have thought about that but it's it's aimed in such a way to divert you into certain location they're very confusing patterns nonsensical but a lot of a lot of philosophical and religious Traditions think that gambling is a sin like why well maybe because it's it's wrong to to gamble in general it's wrong to take a chance in that way but especially when you have these industries that are designed against you it just I mean it feels perfectly irrational which is why like if I ever go and play roulette you know if if I like win on roulette a few times and then I think let's keep going it's like what am I doing you know that is like perfectly irrational and and and and so in other words you know I I everyone gets swept up into this but if I was there like every day or if I was I I I would think I don't know I think that that argument is dangerous uh because you could apply to everything I think even more valuable than money is time and think about all things that just are time sucks like Tik Tok or you can extend that to video games or you can extend that to virtually anything yeah well they should be illegal too for that reason you know yeah exactly so let's just make let's get rid of it all I do but then I think there's something immoral about manipulative social media algorithms as well I think but it's weird it's it's that's why I said Las Vegas is demonic because it's not it's not like it's not like there's something exactly immoral about like is there something immoral about Instagram like kind of but Instagram is just this product use or you cannot use aor right but it just feels like there's something sort of s advertisers it feels like there's something sinister about it about the endless scrolling about the manipulative algorithm about the data it has on you about the way that it knows who you are and what you want and something something feels sort of yeah that infinite feed they're all doing it now yeah like even Google I've noticed they they've stopped using the pages on mobile and now it's just you keep scrolling you keep scrolling you keep scrolling versus like I remember you get to page three on Google and be like all right I'm going to stop now I'm on page three now it's infinite yeah also something about like the Las Vegas stpp is it's fake right the whole thing is fake but it's really weird I was thinking about this this morning I'm looking at like I know Caesar's Palace or I'm looking at the Eiffel Tower right and it's like okay it's it's it's fake it's pretend but what the hell is fake architecture like what is that I mean I I am actually looking at a sort of Romanesque building I am actually looking at a big metal structure in the shape of the Eiffel Tower like it's a real building people actually go inside it it's got restaurants it's got places you can stay but it feels fake you know what I mean not just because it's pretending to be the Eiffel Tower like it feels like it's this weird caricature of a building but it is just a building brick and yeah it's a little smaller but it's still it's got to be that I mean or take a building that's not actually trying to specifically mimic another building like Caesar's Palace it's designed to look a bit Roman right and it feels like it's sort of fake it feels like it's but but why like it's it's a building of brick and mortar in the sort of Romanesque shapes I me it's still it's still very fake like even from the exterior I know what they do is they get a collection of Windows and put them all together to make it seem like one big window so from at a distance it looks like you're actually closer to the building than than what you are so it's like I can walk to that building it's not very far and gamble all your money away that's a thing look it up but uh so I think that probably could give you the illusion of being fake but I think you're probably also coming with a presupposition and then kind of projecting that onto uh all of the stuff around yeah well that's that's what I realized is that it kind of doesn't make sense to talk about a fake build it it's a building it's there it's it's it looks the way it looks it's got the design that it's got and yet for some reason it just feels a bit artificial um something very weird about the place that I I kind of I can't quite can't quite get over um yeah I don't know it's it's it's it's very strange it's very strange so gives you everything this another thing I was talking my Christian friend was talking about this this morning sort of like it's one of those places that gives you everything it says you want New York you want Venice you want Paris you want Rome you want glamour you want like you can have it all but it comes at the Forfeit of like your soul because the place is a little bit sort of artificial and a bit soulless I mean people I mean again I don't mean to insult your city but I I'm talking about listen I don't avoid the strip because it's sort of and people if I say it sou people no man there's like a soul of what do you mean by the soul of Las Vegas you're talking about the reputation I mean it's literally called Sin City right it reminds you it reminds one of when um when Jesus is being tempted in the uh get this desert and Satan says look you can have all of this you know this this can all be yours that's what Las Vegas is doing man it's saying you can have it all you can have Paris and you can have New York and you can have you can have it all but there's just something sort of sinister and wrong about it you know the atheist can't really pinpoint their uh their problem with Sin City yeah that's right that's right very interesting there there's something that feels wrong about it yeah I can't really figure it out well yeah to sin is to miss the mark that's what it means means to miss the mark and um there does seem to be something about you know playing a slot machine that I it's it's a place for adults to go on a vacation where they could feel like they're somewhere else let loose a little bit have a good time like Disneyland for adults kids go it's well hey that that's Peter Pan's not real it's fake but you know you have a good time it's it's dis land for adults I thought that exact same thought this morning and and I don't mean to come across with somebody who I stay away from the strip I'm condemning I enjoy it I'm excited to be here I want to go gambling I want to experience it would be cool I think take you to Durango you love Durango casino that just opened up oh yeah it's new it's brand new has it got slot machines yes then let's go yeah I I don't know I I I enjoy it it's what I mean to say but there is I'm I'm trying to sort of in many ways I'm trying to implicate myself as a bit of a hypocrite here you know I think that you know there's something sort of a bit Sinister about a slot machine but I've used a slot machine before but I think there's just something I can't I can't quite pinpoint you know but but I like it I'm excited to be here Etc um but I don't know it was a was an interesting thought would you say humans are natur good or evil I would have to say probably neither in the sense that I don't believe that there are actual moral properties so I don't think those terms have any objective basis in oh because you're moral relativist Yeah well yeah I'm a I'm a moral let's say anti-realist I don't think that there are real moral properties however I still sort of can make sense with the thrust of your question the kind of things that I think are good and bad and all this kind of stuff I think humans are disastrously you know bad they miss the mark all the time um I miss the mark all the time I think everybody does that um I I think that a lot of the time the extent to which people are good people is the extent to which they're able to overcome Badness they're able to overcome Temptation they're able to overcome suffering they're able to help other people for example I mean what is a good person a good person is someone who helps other people you know like I don't know there's something there's something really sort of bad about what humans do and what their desires are and how they interact and the suffering that they cause and whatnot that that goodness kind of overcomes for me it rather than there being something naturally really good about humans that evil overcomes but you're still able to describe things as good or bad right so wouldn't you say that there is kind of an objective good versus bad I'm kind of speaking colloquially here um because when I say good and bad I'm basically expressing an emotion as far as I'm concern so so uh like it's sort of like stubbing My toe and saying ow when I say that something is bad I I feel like I'm expressing a kind of emotion like I I think that if you pay attention to what the moral Essence is if you see somebody go and kick a homeless person for fun you sort of feel something and so you could describe the events you could say he used his foot you could say that the man cried you could say these kind but those aren't moral those are just describing what in fact happened there's nothing moral about that and if I ask you well what's the moral element it's something that it does to you it makes you feel a particular way and I think the moral feeling you have more properly belongs in the category of Happiness sadness anger anxiety that category of of mental activity versus the factual 2 plus 2 equal 4 the sky is blue type stuff the thing that makes that a moral thing rather than an amoral thing if I flick this table I like flick a child in the head one of those is different but it's it's not different really like materially I'm just just a person flicking an object and you can describe the shape and the sound it makes and stuff but you'd feel differently about it so I think like if you're isolate what the moral thing is it's something like a feeling now do you think we as people need bad things to happen in order to appreciate the good probably um probably maybe the threat of bad well I was going to say the threat of bad things might be enough to like scare people into recognizing that is a bad thing but but firstly that is a bad thing yeah yeah yeah that's a that is an astute observation that is itself a bad thing um but also I'm not sure if that really gives people a true understanding like if I said to you you know tomorrow you could lose all of your money or something and you could be like oh well that's kind of scary but until you actually do it until you actually live under the bridge and know what that's like you really don't properly appreciate it I think that gratitude is kind of a form of relief I think that that's kind of what gratitude is when you when you take a moment to remind yourself to be grateful for something like saying grace over a meal you remind yourself how grateful you are to have this meal what that is is a process of considering the fact that you could have not had it imagining not having it and then remembering or realizing that you do and you get this feeling of like H you know it's like relief I do have it and that's what gratitude is it's reminding yourself that that is a relief from position that you otherwise would have been in um and so just to have gratitude about things I think in many ways is to consider the bad and so in a way yes I think you kind of maybe need the need the bad stuff to recognize the good see see as Louis said that a man cannot call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a of a straight line he sort of was talking the other way around there but yeah and what do you think is one of the things that 100 years from now we're going to look back on and wonder why did we do this thing factory farming is there anything besides that because I know we've we've gone into that already um it's it's difficult to say um slot machines yeah I mean seriously like maybe maybe maybe something like maybe something like slot machines um maybe uh our current architectural Trends um everything's become very functional we're sort of defacing our cities and making them incredibly ugly and depressing places and people in the future will think why the hell do we do that um maybe the extent to which we've um allowed the car to dominate the production of cities I mean unfortunately a lot of cities sort of cropped up and were built around the same time as the popularization of the automobile and so no one really considered at the time well do we really want this don't we want it to be more beautiful and walkable it seems like a kind of unfixable problem like I don't think you know um I don't know I think there are a lot of American cities which just never will become walkable because of the way that they're like designed from the ground up and the way that New York is somewhat walkable um because it starts becoming a thing when you could walk and you had to walk um I think that cars and all of the street furniture they bring along with them just ruin a lot of places there's a whole movement of like anti-ar but like I I I think that that might actually be I mean already cities are beginning to redesign I think like Boston Massachusetts might have knocked down this huge freeway and sort of put it underground or something and then like redesign the city and it's so much more beautiful you know um I I think that people might people are beginning to wake up to that and that might be seen as you look at a picture of like uh Trafalga Square in London and they'll look at it and they'll go like gosh it's just covered in like traffic lights and neon signs and horrible like black roads and these ugly cars like parked there and they' be like how did we ever do this to our to our Public Square problem is in order to undo that you either need an extremely efficient public transport system um and one that also takes into account that not everyone can use public transport some people are disabled some people have jobs that require them to have a van and they need to get to places right so it's a complicated thing to solve but there's got to be something we can do about it you know yeah I don't I don't quite know what that is I tend to think it's going to be algorithms oh sure yeah yeah like there's no way that I've said this before Tik Tok is good on like a child's brain like when your brain is developing to get used to that like constant stimulus and that dop it's it's it's to me that's no different than a than a three-year-old child getting used to playing the slot machine I think it's got to get a lot worse and we see those consequences over an extended period of time before it gets better consequences you know but but but yeah I think to to a serious degree where it's unavoidable it's also difficult to know exactly what to do about that either is it just one day we all just wake up to it and go like okay well algorithms are band probably you're going to notice a trend in in I think young adults where it's like wait a second 20% % of the population uh has trouble focusing now yeah what's oh crap it's this and now let's try to fix that I think it's going to be something too late yeah it it does it does depress me let's do a quick little exercise this is for you Graham and the viewers so I'm going to ask a series of little ethical dilemmas okay some I'm sure we've all heard of uh and I want to see where you guys land so comment Down Below in the comment section and then you guys are going to be able to answer this as well we're going to start it off with the classic so I'm sure most of you guys have heard this but it's trolley problem you see a runaway trolley heading towards five people tied to a track you can pull a lever to divert it onto another track will only take the life of one person do you pull the lever I think H I don't know I actually don't know I think I I think I would not I think I wouldn't do it in fact um I'd be too scared to should you should you man um I think maybe yes but you'd really have to know because you know people often forget like if you're going to pull this lever you don't bloody know how the train tracks work you don't know how they're all connected you suppose you just know for sure then then maybe the answer is that yes you should but that that has a consequentialist assumption that is just the assumption that the least actually no I think maybe you shouldn't I think you shouldn't because the the problem is like okay you can be a utilitarian but like why wouldn't you one healthy person to Harvest their five organs and give them to five people who each needed individual organs to save their lives why wouldn't you do that or would you maybe you would I don't think you would right like why why shouldn't a hospital do that well let's not get too ahead of ourselves here that's a good question though great question yeah it is wrong to proactively people just just the the trolley for right now in which case I would say I don't know but maybe you shouldn't maybe you shouldn't maybe you should okay Graham yeah I I don't know like can I see in my line everything is within yeah your view would you oh gosh so if I could see the people I'd probably pull the lever to save the fine just because I could see five people in front of me that like I have a choice now to do this thing um I'd probably I probably pull the lever to save the five um I would say I would should you yes is what I would say yeah because you just take it to the end degree you know it's one person versus six billion should you okay probably that's the problem so so I think you know in a certain sense I don't even know like could you somehow remove this from being a utilitarian argument because I don't like being a utilitarian but it's kind of the justification that I use for it like you always got to just sort of explode thing into an extreme example to test it and yeah you're right if it's 6 billion people versus one like yeah surely you should pull the leave at there you know in which case actually yeah maybe you should pull the leave 75 bloody L man I I mean I just I just don't know this is one of the reasons by the way why I think that ethics is just like a bit of a sham and it's all about emotions it's like how do you feel man how do I feel put me there these Michael Stevens did this once he put people in a real trolley problem like he sort of he fakes this whole scenario he put them in the control room the guy goes like to get a coffee or something and you know the workers don't see the train coming in it's like do they press the button or not you know did it in real life interesting huh well we'll put the result of that video right here another one you discover that a high performing employee is cheating the company but bringing in significant profits if you fire them the company might suffer doe report keep cheating the company actually let's say they're stealing money they're stealing a little bit of money but they're bringing in more than they're stealing well like I mean how much ethical concern do I have for the company like is it my company is it because let's say it's your company oh well then well if I knew about it I'd probably I'd probably threaten to fire them I'd say well I would say you know it's not your company cuz it's in which Cas I mean I guess it depends it's an employee so they work for you so employe if it it depends on your relationship to the to the company because like I mean if somebody was like I don't know if I was like working apple and somebody was like cheating Apple out of they were stealing like 12 Grand a year but they were bringing in like Millions worth in profit I'd probably be like whatever man like apple should probably have a system in place to catch out that kind of thing you know don't don't blame me for like not saying anything you should record it yourself I'd probably feel a bit funny about it but I I don't know like you know snitches get stitches and all that um but I mean I don't know that does seem something a little bit grotesque about it I'd say you probably should would I probably not yeah what about you I don't know I think it really depends on like who the employee is in my relationship to them that's a top one too if it's like your best friend and yeah and if but it also depends Rao but that's also the it's the ratio of like if they're bringing in a million dollars but stealing 10 grand well there's always there's always a victim to thievery right and the only people let's say I'm the victim it would still be in my best interest is to let it slide because the employee still doing well I mean ideally you have a conversation with them but if it's like you you only could keep them or fire them it it just depends on the ratio if it's like bringing in millions of dollars but stealing Millions I think there's always to SL to to thievery yeah like in what example like if a shop is selling bread and the bread is going off and they're going to throw it out and somebody comes in and they see that it's discounted but they still can't afford it and they know it's going to get thrown out later and so they steal it and take it away how do they know because because it's on sale and the Shop's closing in five minutes and the shopkeeper said to them yeah to be honest like it's so cheap because we're about to throw it out and they say well why can't you just give it to me and they say well because if we did that then people would constantly who otherwise would have bought the bread just wait until the end of the day and get it for free so we can't do that as a policy so we have to throw it away you know what that this whole question reminds me of something where imagine uh you apply for a job $100,000 a year and you get the job and you're ecstatic that you got this job it's more money than you ever thought was possible it's more money than than you need to take care of your family you're happy with it but then you start and you find out someone else who got hired the same day as you is making $300,000 a year for the exact same job how do you feel about that I bet there's some people who now all of a sudden they feel ripped off and they feel like why am I doing this and they're upset and I bet there's some other people who say well I'm still making more money than I thought was imaginable like what this person has paid has no relevance to me yeah well this is this is a problem for people be very similar people talk about like the gender pay Gap and they there are a lot of women who feel this way they feel they're being cheated in this way I mean I remember when Ricky ja hosted the Golden Globes or whatever it was and uh he makes this joke about for Lawrence cuz she'd been campaigning for like equal pay in Hollywood and she gets like a bit of a round of applause he mentions it yeah she's trying to make sure that women actors get paid the same as male ones everyone applaud and he's like and reg makes he's like yeah because you know I I just don't understand how she could have lived on just you know 58 million a year you know it's so unfair and everyone kind of laughs but it's like a an interesting point being made there which is that like you know it feels kind of a bit grotesque to complain you know I only made $58 million and he made $78 million but at the same time like it should be the same if it if indeed it is the same amount of work um yeah I think you have a right to be upset there I think you have a right to be annoyed let's address the one that you mentioned earlier it's called the organ donor a hospital has five patients in need of organ transplants and you're a match for all of them but you're healthy do you sacrifice yourself to save them or let them pass away oh uh well if you're talking about sacrificing yourself that's interesting because I mean there there's another version of this where you are like a doctor and you like kidnapping a healthy person and it's not you because here it seems like that decision to the one save the five is very much an open possibility like you should should you do that should you self-sacrifice whereas if you're someone else to save five people it seems like a closed door you don't have the right to do that myself man I mean well the problem is you're in that position right now so we know what we would do this you you could pize yourself you right but let's just say it's presented to you you know on a piece of paper right in front of you but it kind of is right now I mean how many times do people come to you and say hey if you give us x amount of money we can save this many people from of malaria you could sell your car and and save like measurable numbers of of lives you don't um there's there's an online calculator called uh the life you can save you type in the life you can save calculator it has a list of Charities and the first objection is always well are the Charities effective blah blah blah this organization exists to investigate that and so it has a calculator you can put in a US dollar amount and it will tell you exactly exactly what that money would pay for I often do this I go out for cocktails you know maybe it's a big who spend $150 on some cocktails you can find out exactly how many children you could have dewormed for that amount of money that is the situation kind of that you're in when it comes to the self-sacrifice here like do you pize yourself do you sell your equipment do you you know like well you don't do that and I think that this is a more sort of extreme and immediate example but it's the same principle I think most people wouldn't do and I don't think you should have a moral duty to do so there might be circumstances in which you have a to sacrifice yourself there might be C circumstances like that again if you just like bump up the numbers pretty extreme I agree I think the should versus would is a important the thing is the reason I bring this up in the in in the trolley problem example is because it it provides a test case against our principle we think well we just think it's okay to one person to say five it's like do you what about this example that can't be the principle you're working on so what is the principle well one difference here intuitively again maybe you're not aware that this assumption is being made but I think for a lot of people it is with the organ donor thing the reason you feel that would be wrong is because you it's not a one-off right if a hospital can do that if it's just like whenever they have people who need organs they can just kill a healthy person as long as there are more people in need that's a terrifying Society to live in do you want to live in that Society I don't and so we decideed no that's not right we're not going to allow that because that would cause like like fear and anxi it would be crazy right whereas the trolley problem thing kind of feels like a oneoff it's a more of a vacuum yeah you don't feel like if you pull that lever oh now now you're going to one day you're going to be worried that you're going to get like stuck on a track you know you're not a construction worker you're not on a on a ra was the last time you on a rail Road except in a train you know like never happens and so there's less concern about the effect that will have on society you know that's fair and so I think that's probably the difference here by the way there's a variant of the trolley problem um you said you would pull the lever uh I you said you would did I yeah I I would pull the L suppose you could pull the okay so now imagine that trolley is running down a track uh it's going to run over five people and there is a rotund man walking across the bridge you can push the man off the bridge he will crash into the train derailing the train saving the five people but you have to push the fat man off the bridge in order to do so would you push Fatman off the bridge see part of me thinks like okay these people are on the tracks and it's their own fault probably that they're in this predicament but this guy is just innocently standing on a bridge but that's also outside of the the you know that's more added context construction workers who were supposed to be there and somebody made essenti it's the same thing yeah but would would you push Fatman would I yeah would you realistically no because it's a more visceral EXP do that but should I press a button someone removed you can't see them so as Michael Sandell asks in his introductory course to ethics it's a Harvard lecture it's available online okay now imagine that you are on the bridge and the fat man's walking over the bridge and you just press a button and it opens a trap door and the fat man falls through the trap door and hits the train and saves five people would you press the button and drop him onto the train be easier would you do it I don't know to save five lives yeah I would it's like it feels kind of different and then it's and it's like I got to push him push a button maybe like it's kind of maybe you got like what if you got to like trip him up you don't have to push him you just s of like stick your foot out KN it's really and it shows us how much of what we think is ethical consideration is actually just how we feel about interestingly I think that they put people under an MRI scanner while being asked about this and people who would both pull the lever and push the fat man when they're thinking about it the part of their brain associated with like rational thinking is lighting up the people who say that they would pull the lever but they wouldn't push the fat man when they're thinking about the problem is the emotional side of their brain that's lighting up interesting last one the gift of time you have the power to save one person's life from certain death but it requires taking a year of life from another person you take away a year from someone else to Save a Life interestingly uh interesting I think that's kind of like a version of one person to save five you're taking a a little bit from one to save a lot for more um I think the answer is probably the same which that I I don't I don't think you have the right to do that but then what if it was a minute you know what if it was half an hour to Save a Life I think I think I probably I would I think it would would you say a year MH um a year is a long time but it's also not you know um I think May oh gosh I don't know the problem with these examples is that there's so because so much hinges I think on like are you responsible for this situation like like who is responsible situation is strictly in because you could say that because if it's a circumstance where like if you don't take this life then someone's going to someone then it's sort of like I would probably not press the button but then say that the perp person who's responsible for that person's death is the person that kills them if it's like if I press this button it like sucks out something of that person that takes a year off their life but is like medicine for the other person that stops us from dying I'd say that's like the organ situation you probably don't have the right to do it it kind of depends on like the mechanics of it you know like EMS like what is it what is it like how does the person die like are they killed do they just drop dead I think that actually kind of matters because I think it changes things for me I'd probably do the year the year to save five people's lives but it also depends how old those people are are they like kids are they 90 years old yeah no I I agree I would I probably take the year but I don't think that you have any moral imperative too so here here's a question then to it's sort it's sort of another it's not exactly a dilemma but it's an ethical question which helps to work out what you think about this suppose you one person to save 10 people suppose you just did that right do you think that is better worse or the same as 10 people to save 100 people it's the same same to me what about 100 people to save a thousand people the r as long as the ratio is then it's just the same to me it's no better it's no worse what do you think Jack well I mean I'd have to definitely like you know think about this quite a bit so but off the top of my head I would probably say it's the ratio so that that implies a consequentialist way of thinking that means that what matters is how many people end up getting killed like proportionally that's all that matters there are other people who think that people is wrong particularly like religious uh ethics deontologists who think that it's just wrong people for them the answer will be that it it gets worse every time so although the ratio is the same like cuz suppose okay now now suppose the organ the organ situation okay here we go you one person to harvest their organs to save Five People You would say that's wrong mhm okay now you you you still do it even though it's wrong you still do it now you five people to harvest their organs to save 50 people is that worse or is it better or is it the same better it's better The Rao the r is the same the ratio is the same oh the ratio are the same unless my math wrong one person just just a higher ratio just yeah sorry no one to five yeah it's better yeah let's say the to 2 okay let's say let's say one yeah 5 to 25 quite right yeah right you are oh then it would be the same I thought like 5 50 so why is it wrong in the in in the first case like one five why is it wrong I didn't say it was right but it would it's better to kill five to say 50 than one to five first case in the just one to to save the five there in that instance is wrong like why is it wrong I wouldn't say that it's wrong to to harvest their organs to to save the other five oh sorry yeah I would but why is that wrong um why is it wrong I just don't think that you have a moral obligation to but you think it's wrong to do it right you think it's wrong to take one person them Harvest their organ and save five people I think that would be immoral why yes because you're taking one thing that is whole and then Distributing it to other things that are no so so in other words if you think it is actually wrong to do that you think well it's wrong because you're doing this wrong thing yeah okay you're sure the consequences that more people live and less people whatever but like it's just wrong to do it even even if the doesn't matter what the consequences are really here what matters is that what you're doing is wrong you shouldn't person to half they all more people even if there are more people it's just wrong to do that if that's the mindset you're in then when I say okay now you can five people save 25 people in the same way the ratio is the same but if it's just like wrong to do it's like wrong to that one person sort of regardless of the circumstances it's wrong to do it then five people must be worse if if if the consequences don't really matter here if you're not being a consequentialist and saying well you know one say five but it balances out and utilitarian say that's fine if you think it's wrong wouldn't it be worse to more because you're doing the wrong thing more times you know if you do a wrong if you do a wrong thing once and you do a wrong thing five times which is worse I agree I generally think like I know that we said it's a consequentialist argument but I generally think that the intent is more important than the uh sure okay like if I'm judging someone's moral character but so like consider so you think it's wrong to one person to half as their organs to Safe fight you think it's a wrong thing to do now in the abstract is it worse if something is wrong to do is it worse to do it one time or five times worse it's worse to do it five times yeah so if there's something that's wrong to do it's worth to do it five times than to do one time which means that one person to save better to save 50 people than five yeah but now imagine like you're saving 50 by Saving by five but you do it one at a time you the first person and it says five then you the second person five third five fourth and you just do it one at a time you're just doing so now you're doing the moral relativism you thought you were doing like you you think that it's wrong to do so I'm thinking it's all you think you see what I'm saying like it's worse to do a wrong thing multiple times than to just do it once and yet you're telling me that if I one person to say five that's the same as five people to save 25 but five people to save 25 is just doing that that one save five five times and you say that doing something wrong five times versus one time is worse so it should be worse to the five people save the 25 see what I'm saying I understand so and the alternative is that it's aoral and you're judging the person based off of their intent and if you're judging someone based off of their intent then that would support the moral relativism yeah and it would also be that the answer to the question of if it's better worse or the same is basically like how do you feel about it man you know yeah interesting okay lastly what books would you recommend people read to get a basic understanding of philosophy and where they stand um I would say depends what level you're at so if you're like a complete beginner there are lots of good introductory books like um there's one called think by Simon Blackburn I haven't read it but I know that it is in is on a number of like Universe suggested pre-reading for studying philosophy so I would say maybe look at that the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy is another great place um it's online it's free any philosophical concept or person or school of thought has an entry it's kind of like Wikipedia But every entry is edited and written by philosophers it's not like a public thing it's like a it's like written by philosophers and edited probably but it's got everything and most of the articles are really good and they'll also point you at the bottom they'll have a bunch of reading so if you're interested it'll tell you what like what the sources are where the ideas came from thing about the SCP is that you kind of need to know where to go it's a bit like Wikipedia you can use it to learn but you got to choose which article to pull up but if you're interested in Consciousness go onto the SCP type in Consciousness look at the Articles if you're interested in philosophy of religion type in religion that's just it's an incredible resource the sep always I would recommend people go to um Bertrand Russell's book the problems of philosophy it's quite short and Bertrand Russell is writing about the problems of philosophy so like unsolved issues so like the thing I mentioned earlier the David Hume Sun Won't rise tomorrow maybe some people listen to that like what the hell are you talking about you can't you can't we didn't really get into it like what what do you mean you can't know if gravity won't work in five minutes that's ridiculous read the problems of philosophy he talks about some of these unsold issues um I can't remember it and I haven't read the whole thing I think it's probably like a bit more high level and takes a bit more like like thought in that way but i' I'd probably Point people in in those directions maybe all right man I really appreciate your time this is uh a tough one for me to think through required way more effort yes car YouTuber for GR come on let's not yeah for me yeah so my gosh thank you so much really appreciate it thank you for coming on we'll link to your info Down Below in the description too appreciate you guys thank you guys for watching until next time