The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Michael Shermer. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: This episode is one of a series I’m doing on the worldviews of thinkers and doers. The premise is simple. I want to map how they actually see the universe and their place in it, not just dig into their latest book or project, but explore the scaffolding underneath. Enjoy this opportunity to look backstage at the minds of some of my favorite people.
Today’s guest is Michael Shermer. He is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and the host of the podcast, The Michael Shermer Show. He has taught college courses in critical thinking and for many years wrote a monthly column for Scientific American. He’s the author of a long list of best-selling books, including Why People Believe Weird Things, and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, and his newest book, we’re going to talk about today, Truth, What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. And you can follow him on X or Twitter, as I prefer to call it, at Michael Shermer. Welcome, Michael.
Michael: Nice to be on your show, Jim. I love talking about worldviews.
Jim: Yeah. This is a new thing I’ve started, and it’s been a lot of fun. You’re the third one, so we’re still a little bit in test phase. But so far, the audience seems to like it. And certainly a little different than, you know, the usual thing that I have done historically.
Michael also has writings that turn up in many publications, and I’ve always found them a refreshing dose of common sense and clear thinking. You know, when I see the byline, Michael Shermer, I go, the probability of bullshit is about as low as you’re ever going to see in mainstream media.
Michael: I hope so.
Jim: Yeah. Today’s episode is going to be a bit of a hybrid as, regular listeners know. I’ve been—I’ve started this new series on worldviews. Michael’s also, though, got a new book out. And as you know, I’m author friendly kind of guy. I like to help guys tout their books a little bit and dig into them. So we’re going to do a bit of both. And as Michael had promised, after I finished reading the book, I realized that there was a quite considerable overlap between the book and, you know, my concept at least of worldviews.
So let’s jump into it with a worldview-ish question. You woke up this morning, and, you know, after a few seconds, there was some dude, Michael Shermer, that it was a thing to be, and you woke up in a universe. Who was this Michael Shermer, and what universe was this?
Michael: I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that, Jim. That’s a great question. Yeah. That’s the biggest picture of all.
Well, obviously, I am a self. I don’t believe in the self as an illusion. I think there actually is a self contained in the skull of my body. And I am my brain or I am my mind. So I’m not a dualist. I’m a monist. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a ghost in the machine, a little homunculus, a mini me in there. There’s just me.
And, of course, there is a universe whether I’m around or not to perceive it. So in that sense, I’m a realist. Sometimes it’s called naive realism, but I’m a realist in the sense that as scientists mean it, that there is a physical objective world. We can know something about it even if we can’t know everything about it. I’m not a deity. I’m not God. I’m not omniscient, and neither are you. So all of us are flawed in our perception of this universe. It’s called fallibilism. And so we start with the premise, I could be wrong, but here’s what I think right now.
So I open my eyes, and I think, well, I think I’m in the universe that’s expanding at an accelerating rate on a planet going around the sun in about three quarters of the way out of the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, one of perhaps a trillion galaxies in this expanding universe. So that’s what I know.
Jim: And how do you think you know it?
Michael: Mainly through senses and experience and my own personal history, but there’s also a reliance on authorities, experts, institutions. Much of what I think is true about the world, I’ve never seen myself. I’ve never gone and looked at the Hubble telescope photographs myself. I assume that the photographs of black holes from which we discover that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate are real, that they’re not fake NASA photos to fool us into a fake worldview that the world is flat and NASA’s faked all these photos. I assume a certain amount of trust in these institutions, and there’s a lot of research on this in cognitive psychology that most of us do this.
Take the Chinese spy balloon, for example. I have a whole chapter in the book on UFOs. What would it take for me to believe that UFOs represent aliens? Well, something like the evidence we saw with the Chinese spy balloon. It’s clear and unmistakable high resolution videos and photographs. All the networks covered it. Secretary of defense, Pentagon, president all acknowledged it was real. We could see the jet photographs of it being shot down, but I never personally saw it. I didn’t, you know, I’m in Southern California, so it didn’t go over my head. And so I just trusted that the networks, the Pentagon, secretary of defense, and so on were all telling the truth about the Chinese spy balloon.
Something like that. Whereas with UFOs and UAPs, what we get is, well, these things are alien spacecraft that are operated by these nonhuman intelligent aliens. Okay. Can I see them? No. They’re classified. But I know the guy that touched them. Well, who’s the guy? Can we meet him? No. He’s got to be protected for security reasons. Okay. There, I don’t believe it. I don’t just believe somebody’s word for it. I trust experts and institutions that have been tested, that have embedded in their operating system checks and balances where somebody is checking what they put out there. Something like in journalism where you have editors and fact checkers that hopefully weed out the BS before I watch it on the evening news.
Now this doesn’t always work, so that’s why you have to have multiple sources in journalism. Or that the judicial system usually gets it right. The guy they put away in jail being found guilty, I assume probably is guilty. Even acknowledging that they get it wrong, and that’s why we have an adversarial judicial system with two different attorneys fighting it up. That’s why we have an appellate court and appellate attorneys that on appeal give it another shot just in case. Or we have the Innocence Project that does DNA testing just in case they got the science wrong in the courtroom and turns out that person is innocent. But for the most part, what I’m getting at here is that, although I don’t know for sure, personally, the systems we’ve established, if you want to go worldview, in the Western worldview of science and reason and rationality and so on, that works pretty well.
Jim: Yeah. A term I use for that is the intersubjective verification of the interobjective. Kind of a mouthful of Latinate syllables, but I think it expresses the same idea.
Michael: Yeah. That’s pretty good. I like that. I might steal that. What is that again? No. I’m just kidding. That is good.
Jim: Feel free. Yeah. And, you know, the fact that I’ve done a few experiments, I know that I can separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, for instance. I did it when I was 11 years old. But on the other hand, I haven’t measured the Hubble constant or actually personally tuned in the background microwave radiation or any of those things. But I assume, as you do, that over time, an adversarial system that has rejected authority, which is key, right, can converge to at least a reasonable iteration of a reasonable model of reality based on the quality of our instrumentation today. And I think both of those things are critical.
One is the instrumentation. Right? When Newton came up with Newton’s space time, that was as good as you could get. Basically crunch Kepler’s numbers and from Tycho Brahe’s observations, and you come up with Newtonian mechanics. Well, when you get a little better math and a little bit better instrumentation, you realize entirely wrong at the metaphysical level, even though to the first order approximation, it’s fine. Good enough for artillery shooting, for instance. But a guy like Einstein comes in and moves the puck quite a distance.
And, you know, fortunately, we lived in that era where the second aspect, we’ve gotten past the world of authority. And this strikes me as a very important part of the world we live in. You know, up until the Enlightenment or just before in the seventeenth century, you know, what was believed in the intersubjective verification of the interobjective was completely dominated by authority. Right? You know, you look at—I make the point fairly often that what Galileo did to disprove Aristotle’s theory of gravitation would cost even today about $10 worth of parts at Home Depot, and take about twenty minutes. Right? This was not, you know, building CERN or something. Anybody who had questioned Aristotle could have demonstrated it trivially. Right? And yet nobody did because the authority, in the West of Aristotle, then Aquinas basically shut down thinking.
But fortunately for the world we live in, during that pivotal seventeenth century, there was a group of people in Western and Northern Europe that decided that, I’m not going to believe anything that somebody hasn’t verified. And I think those two things together are what open up the kind of world you’re describing that we can finally have some trust of fidelity within the quality of the instrumentation that the society and its math that society has available to it at any given point in time.
Michael: Yeah. That’s well put. I think I think of it as the battle of the books, the book of authority versus the book of nature. And, you know, using reason and rationality alone could get you a certain ways, which is what Aristotle did then revamped by Aquinas in the Renaissance and all that. But by the time you get to the early modern period in the scientific revolution, a lot of Aristotle’s derived from just thinking in his armchair that planets must be perfectly round and perfectly smooth, and that they travel in perfect circles. If you actually look out the window, you look through the telescope, you can see that’s not how it is. He’s just simply wrong about that, which is what Kepler and Copernicus and Galileo and then ultimately Newton did. And so there, you know, we have to balance rationality with empiricism.
So one distinction I make in the book is, you know, there’s these true by definition type or, you know, mathematical type proofs, you know, the sum of the angles of a triangle at a 180 degrees, you know, or that, you know, pediatricians are doctors. You only have to know what the terms mean, what the words mean, or two plus two equals four. If you know what two is, you know what the plus sign means, you know what the equal signs mean. You can’t come to any other conclusion. You don’t have to check anything. But if I say, you know, or, you know, what is a pediatrician? It’s a doctor. It’s a type of doctor. Okay. You only have to know what the words mean. But if I say pediatricians are rich, well, there I have to go check. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not. I don’t know. Compared to what? You have to look up some numbers. You got to look out the window to see what’s actually true. So that’s why we need both of those kind of truths.
Jim: Yeah. Though I would push back just a little bit on the first kind of truth, and that is that certainly in the land of mathematics and logic, the provable theorems and lemmas, et cetera, are dependent on the axioms. For instance, you give the triangle equals one eighty. True for Euclidean geometry.
Michael: Yes.
Jim: But as it turns out, not true for non-Euclidean geometry. And we live in a universe that appears at least to be slightly non-Euclidean. It’s pretty close to the Euclidean, pretty flat, but appears that there are some little dips here and there and such. So I always think of that first class as constructions within axiomatic systems, and it then allows us to explore the space of axiomatic systems and find, you know, in fact, if it wasn’t for the insight that non-Euclidean geometry was possible, Einstein almost certainly would not have found general relativity.
Michael: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I mean, if you just you could apply this, I guess, any, like, platonic ideas like a perfect circle. There’s no such thing in the real world. I mean, no matter how perfect you think you’ve made the circle, and it looks like a perfect circle to your eye, you put it under a scanning electron microscope, it’s, you know, full of pits and ragged edges and, you know, whatever instrument you use to make the circle, it’s not going to be a perfect circle. So, you know, there’s the ideal, the idealism, the ideas of these things, and then there’s what it’s actually like under the microscope. Absolutely. Put it that way.
Jim: Absolutely. Alright. Let’s hop into the book a little bit further. You opened the book talking about January 6, 2021, I guess it was 2021, where you described people acting rationally on false beliefs. And while today you’re a professional skeptic, you weren’t always. You were a born again Christian at one point. You were an elite athlete at another time. You know, you’ve had various identities. You’ve believed different things. How is it that you have come to change your beliefs, and what that you have learned in your journey might be good advice for the people from January 6.
Michael: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Great. This is really good. You’re really good. What I mean by that, if you watch the videos of that day, you know, a lot of the response was these people have lost their minds. They’re completely crazy. They’re irrational. Look what they’re doing. But if you really believe that the election was stolen, that the country is losing its democracy, I mean, the boss himself said, you know, you’re not going to have a country if you let this happen. Now he did also say we’re going to march down there and peacefully protest. Yeah. Okay. You know, but it’s a pretty risky thing to do to get a mob all worked up and hope they don’t lose their minds and get too emotional, which they did.
By way of analogy, I guess it to flip the political orientation, up the headlines of Minneapolis ICE raids. I mean, there’s the, you know, these protesters are out there in the street, you know, screaming and yelling at these big muscular men with guns. I mean, this looks completely irrational. I mean, are you out of your mind? You could get shot. Well, somebody did get shot. Okay. But in fact, if you really believe that Trump is Hitler, that MAGA is the Nazi party, that ICE is the Gestapo, and that they are disappearing brown people and innocent children into concentration camps, and no one’s doing anything about it, it would not be irrational to think, you know what? I think it’s time we put a stop to this.
You know, the thought experiment, if you could go back in time and kill Hitler in 1930, would you do it before all the bad stuff happened? Well, yeah. Almost everybody goes, yeah. Yeah. I would do that. That seems like the good thing to do. Well, it’s something like that. You know? Would you do something to stop, you know, these people? So I think that’s what’s going on here, and they’re just simply wrong. You know? Trump is not Hitler. MAGA is not the Nazi party. ICE is not the Gestapo. You could just simply look at the immigration policies and actions of Clinton, Bush, and Obama. You could, you know, they deported more than Trump did. They used ICE just like Trump is. It’s just a different political climate. So if you get the facts right, then the irrationality goes away, and people behave more rationally in that sense.
Okay. On my own journey, yeah, I wasn’t raised religious. My parents were secular or whatever. They were just nothing. But when I was in high school, the kind of nascent born again evangelical movement was really taking off. This was the early nineteen seventies, and, you know, the kind of Jesus movement and Jesus Christ Superstar of that opera, that musical, and all that was, you know, hugely popular, and so my buddies talked me into it, and I went along with it. I thought, yeah, this is interesting. Okay. I’m going to explore this and live it. You know?
Then I went to Pepperdine University for my undergraduate studies. First graduating class of the Malibu campus of Pepperdine, and it was Church of Christ School. I took courses in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the life of Jesus, the gospels, the writings of CS Lewis. I’ve read everything CS Lewis wrote. So I know all that stuff. And then I went to a secular university for graduate school where nobody was religious, or if they were, it wasn’t a thing to talk about. We were just doing science. And so I just sort of quietly dropped the whole thing because it’s like, yeah. I don’t know. I’m not sure I got that right.
You know, I took courses in psychology. I was in experimental psych program. Psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and there, you know, you study world religions, comparative world religions and mythology, and it’s obvious. Everybody thinks they got the right one. So I got to thinking, what are the chances I got the right one? And all these other thousands of religious sects and millions and billions of people, they’re all wrong, and I’m right. That didn’t seem very rational. So I just quietly dropped the whole thing, and I’ve been an atheist ever since.
Although I did go through a bit of a, you know, born again atheist phase where I try to talk people out of believing in religion. Now I’m more of an agnostic, I guess. Technically speaking, like, Huxley meant the term not knowable. Yeah. I don’t think science can tell us if there’s a god or not, but I act as an atheist. I just assume there’s no god. I’m happy to be pleasantly surprised that in the next life, if there is, where I’ll see my friends Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and Isaac Asimov and the Amazing Randi, and going back, Houdini and Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell and maybe even, I don’t know, David Hume will be there. So anyway, that’s kind of a rough overview of my journey.
Jim: Actually, mine was kind of the opposite. I was raised in a somewhat religious Catholic family, and I had a great Sunday school teacher, CCD as the Catholics called it, Mister McMillan in fourth grade. And this was just after Vatican Two when Catholics were finally being encouraged to read the Bible. It used to be, yeah. Don’t read that stuff. You know? If you need to know anything, the priest will tell you about it. But—
Michael: Leave that to the smart people.
Jim: Yeah. Exactly. And then when fourth grade, you know, Mister McMillan took the Vatican II seriously and had us all buy Bibles and had us read stuff. And fortunately, he was more interested in the Old Testament than the New. So I always found the Old Testament really excellent literature. The level of storytelling in there, the kind of intricacy. And what I love about the Jews is they talk about all their horrible doings, you know, all the time. Right? We were terrible. We did this. We disrespected God. And the stories were—I just found them amazing.
And for the same reason, I later became an insane fan of Lord of the Rings, which I have read 39 times, including once late in 2025. You know, I found these intricate stories just extremely engaging, and, you know, fourth grade, fifth grade, I continued to be into that stuff, but I was also always into science. I was reading, you know, high school level science books when I was six, and particularly astronomy, geology, to some degree zoology, mineralogy, et cetera. And the two were kind of in a—they weren’t even in tension for a long time.
But then as I started getting, you know, sixth grade, I go, a little tension. And so in the summer between sixth grade and seventh grade, and you’re old enough that this might have been true for you too, that was the boundary between elementary school and junior high school, where we were given way more personal freedom than we should have been at the level of seventh grade, which many of us, including myself, abused. But anyway, during that summer, it was a, you know, a known big step up in your life. And so I started having that same question that you did, which is, wait a minute. All these religions are all claiming to be true. Let me learn more about them.
And so I spent a couple of weeks at the county library, and I wish I could recall the name of the book. It was about yay thick, had blue covered. It was stuck in the reference section. You couldn’t take it home. And it was like page and a half on hundreds of world religions. And I just read through them one after the other, and I go, damn. You know, these things—these things are all over the place, and they all believe they’re true. And then I went and read two different encyclopedia entries on about 15 religions. And I said, damn. You know, even closely related religions like Presbyterian, Methodism, and Catholicism actually describe three different metaphysical universes. Right?
And then with all that, one day, I just had an epiphany, which is, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Catholicism is the one. And further, how would I know if it was? Then I had a leap that was probably not quite right but close, which is what seems a much more reasonable explanation is these are systems created by people to control other people, and that’s what they are. I would say in my mature self, I would modify that only slightly, which is I now believe that probably most, other than L. Ron Hubbard, religious folks actually are sincere. Probably a significant majority are mentally ill, and some of them are talented enough that they’re able to propagate their memetics to a group. And then by survivorship bias, occasionally one goes all the way. Right? And then they fairly quickly get co-opted by the powers that be as ways to control people.
So anyway, that was my journey, and I probably also ended up a place near you. At one point, I was a militant village atheist or anybody that had two hours that wanted to understand why religion was bunk. I’d be happy to explain it to him. At this, you know, this age, I now describe myself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, which is can’t prove anything, but operationally, I operate as if I’m an atheist. And, yeah, if I die next week hit by a bus and I go up to the Pearly Gates, I’ll just get down on one knee and say, gentlemen, I was wrong.
Michael: I was wrong. Why didn’t you give me more evidence?
Jim: That’s one of the points I made to one of my friends who’s a Presbyterian minister. I said, God really wants to throw us in the sulfur lake for figuring out something more obscure than the New York Times crossword puzzle. Right?
Michael: It’s because he loves you. He loves you.
Jim: I find that kind of hard.
Michael: She did ask me, okay, Jim. What would it take?
Jim: And I actually gave her a brisk answer. Came right off the top of my head even though I hadn’t precooked it, which was give me two weeks notice so I can round up a thousand witnesses and five video crews around the Washington Monument, and I want the Washington Monument to rise 300 feet in the air, rotate three times around its center of axis relatively slowly, and settle back down on its foundations.
Michael: But even that, Jim, I mean, you’ve probably seen Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear. And you know he’s not actually doing that. Right? Or you could have Penn and Teller do the double bullet catch. You know, one thing we know for sure, they’re not actually catching bullets in their teeth. Okay? So, I mean, what looks like a miracle, well, a good illusionist can do that.
Jim: Maybe not the way I described with five different camera crews and a thousand people surrounding it. You know? But anyway—and of course, she said, well, that—no. That’s not how it works. Like, okay. You know?
Michael: Let me float this idea by you that I’m trying out in this book. That is treating religious literature like great literature. And so since you mentioned the Lord of the Rings, you know, where is Middle Earth, and can we go there? Well, I mean, your response should be something like, what are you talking about? This is a made up story. Well, what if all great literature is made up stories with deeper truths, and that includes biblical stories? That includes, you know, religious scriptures contain deeper truths that we can respect. You know, a good Jane Austen novel or a Dostoevsky novel has deep truths about the human condition. Right? So that’s why we like great literature. And so to ask if there really is a Middle Earth would be like, you know, I don’t know.
I get these atheists that send us articles to skeptic on, you know, I have a natural explanation for the parting of the Red Sea. It was this earthquake, or this volcano erupted on Thera, and that caused these plagues of locusts because of the corruption of the atmosphere, blah blah blah, you know, or the swoon theory of Jesus on the cross. You know, he never really died. He was, like, in a coma that they put him in this coma through some drugs, and they put him in this tomb for three days, and then they went and got him, whisked him off to France, where he married Mary Magdalene, you want to go full Dan Brown, you know, they had children, and the descendants of Jesus and Mary are still with us. Okay. What if it never happened? Okay. What if all of these things are just story? You know, Jonah and the whale. How did Jonah spend three days inside of a great fish? You idiot. It’s a story. It’s a made up story. There’s no Jonah. There’s no great fish. This is a story. Okay.
And so I can get Christians to go with me some of the way in this argument. This is a—I devote a whole chapter in the book on this. But when I get to the resurrection and I go, you know, what if it didn’t actually happen? What if, you know, he wasn’t really, you know, he was just dead? And that, you know, it’s a story about redemption and starting over and forgiveness and overthrowing our oppressors and creating a new life on earth that’s, you know, heaven is within us, you know, and there’s all these scriptural sayings from Jesus, you know. People ask me, where’s heaven? Is it there? Is it here? I’m telling you, it’s within you. You know, those sorts of things. What if the whole thing is just a story that contains deeper truths? Okay. When I try this on Christians, they’re not buying it. They go, oh, no. No. No. This is not mythological. This is not some deep psychological truth. It literally happened, or else I would not be a Christian.
Jim: I think Paul said something that you maybe even quoted it in the book.
Michael: He did. He did. Yeah. He did. Yeah.
Jim: That if Christ didn’t rise, then this is all bullshit, basically. And that’s—you are absolutely right. Now I made a similar point, which is that I’d have no objection to the great religious traditions if they were treated as literature. Right? And literature is a great thing, and part of the reason is the limits to reason. Right? At least at any given point in time, there are many, not only known unknowables, but in your language and Rummy’s language, but unknown unknowables and high dimensional ways of seeing, beyond the details of what we currently know are include our abilities, to use our emotions, our feelings, our senses of reasonableness, et cetera. And great literature brings that forth because, you know, while I know damn well there ain’t no Middle Earth, if I want some guidance on something, I’ll go to Gandalf more often than anybody else. You know? He gives better advice than most people, even though I know he’s just a story.
And if we thought about our great religious traditions that way, they could be very useful. So, yeah, I think we’re pretty much on the same page there. Let’s move on in the book a little bit. One of my great interests is the study of consciousness. In fact, probably spent, you know, a fair percentage of my time on that. I’m the chairman emeritus of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, where we’re working on how to build machine consciousness. And one of my motivations in getting involved with those guys was if there’s any topic that has more blather per syllable than consciousness studies, I have no idea what it might be. And part of the reason is legit is that it’s really hard to study. Right? And part of it is just it’s a natural attractor for blather and cranks.
Michael: That’s funny. That’s funny. I’m glad that you said that.
Jim: You know, I do believe it is, you know, scientifically studyable, and that machine consciousness will be more studyable than animal consciousness because we can completely instrument, you know, that machine consciousness, and we can get readouts in real time at, you know, the equivalent of a synapse firing. Otherwise, kind of maybe a little surprised that in your book, you classified consciousness as a known unknowable.
Michael: That because of the way it’s conceived at the moment, the hard problem of consciousness. That is the easy problem of consciousness is, you know, figuring out what the wiring does, and how it works, and how it processes inputs from the senses, and so on. The hard problem seems to be asking, what’s it like to be the wiring? And that seems to me a problematical, you know, conceptual problem. That is a problem with our concepts. You know, what’s it like to be a bat? What’s it like to be a dolphin? How would I know? You know, if I really knew I would just be a bat or a dolphin, I would not be a human inside the head of a dolphin or a bat. Right? I wouldn’t be in there, you know, like looking around going, oh, this is what it’s like.
So, you know, this is like my little homunculus transports out of my head into your head, and I know what’s going on there. You know, this is the problem of other minds. How do you know, the philosophical zombie. How do you know I’m actually sentient? How do you know you’re not the only one in the universe who’s sentient, everybody else is, you know, is just a zombie? And so you have the same problem with machine intelligence. How do you know Data on Star Trek is actually sentient? Well, you don’t. But I don’t know that you’re sentient. Right? So that seems to be a hard problem.
But on the hard problem of consciousness, you know, as you know, Christof Koch, David Chalmers, 25 years ago that they would be solved by 2025, and it wasn’t. So he had to pay him a, I think it was a case of wine, they bet. And I don’t think it’s ever going to be solved doing what we’re doing because it’s conceptually just asking what it’s like to be the wiring, not how the wiring works. It’s not possible to know, you know, what that’s, you know, it’s often defined that way. What’s it like to be something? And I don’t see how you can get to that answer. But, you know, maybe I’m wrong. You tell me what you think is the best. I listed 22 different theories in the book there. Which one do you like?
Jim: There’s a whole bunch of them, and last I had read one review that I had a 192 theories in it, I think. A guy had done a big review article and compiled every known theory.
Michael: Oh, that was Anil Seth, I think, did that paper. I read that. Yeah. Even more than 22.
Jim: There’s 100 and some, I think. I’ve had Anil Seth on my podcast and Christof Koch also. And I’ve had most of the top consciousness studies guys on there, Bernie Baars and some others. And so that’s always very interesting conversations. I want people to hear my interactions with those guys. You can look them up on the website at jimruttshow.com.
But I don’t believe anybody’s nailed it. Right? I think, you know, people like Anil Seth, the idea that we are kind of a controlled hallucination, there’s some truth to that. Bernie Baars’s Global Workspace Theory, which I think that there’s been a little under focus on the sensorium, the multimodal joining of our senses, and then some machinery of attention that moves from one object to another in the sensorium. And I coined the expression that attention is the cursor of consciousness, and I imagine it as operating in something like Baars’s Global Workspace, and, you know, we’re approximately single threaded in our consciousness. Not quite, but close even at things like if you monitor three lights for which one turns red and press the button, you’ll be slower than if it’s two lights or one light, more or less proportionate to the number of lights.
So, you know, my own view is that the sensorium plus the attention mechanism plus couplings to different kinds of memories, because we have many memories. We have perceptual memory, lasts about 80 milliseconds. We have working memory, which lasts a couple of seconds. We have short term memory, which lasts five minutes or so, something like that, the hippocampus version. And we have all these memories. And I think that they all vote on the next item in attention. And so the skipping is involving a bottoms up process, unconscious, which forces the next object in attention, and then sometimes forces us to use one of the affordances that the object has. And my own theory that that is approximately what consciousness is, and that it is not that difficult, and that’s been around for a long time.
I’m an early consciousness guy who thinks that, yeah, probably amphibians have consciousness, if only because birds do and mammals do, and the common ancestor is amphibians. Could have been something just past amphibians. But—
Michael: How about a single cell just following a chemical gradient toward food or light? You know, the light’s that way. It’s dark that way. I’m going to move that way. You know, it’s interacting with the environment. It’s sensing it, so it’s sentient in that sense. It’s not self aware, of course, because it’s just a single cell.
Michael: How about a single cell just following a chemical gradient toward food or light? You know, the light’s that way. It’s dark that way. I’m going to move that way. You know, it’s interacting with the environment. It’s sensing it, so it’s sentient in that sense. It’s not self aware, of course, because it’s just a single cell.
Jim: I have this discussion all the time, which is the first thing you got to do is separate the concepts of intelligence and consciousness. They’re two very different things. Absolutely, a bacteria is intelligent. If it was, it would not have been winning the reproductive race for the last 3.5 billion years. Right? And so everything that has survived that long is intelligent to a greater or lesser degree. A self driving car is very intelligent. Right? The things it can do, it’s astounding. Consciousness, zippo, at least in my world.
My assumption is that consciousness is like digestion. Right? Is that, it’s a biological process for a very specific purpose that’s energetically and genetically expensive. And so it is a specific biological mechanism. And I would say the same about consciousness. It’s, you know, maybe 25%, 20% of the brain. The brain’s 20% of the body in terms of energy, so it’s a nontrivial expenditure of energy. It’s also no doubt a very expensive in terms of genetic coding to get it to hang together. It’s such an odd thing. So I think of it as a quite specific biological thing that is understandable, and that one day we will understand.
Michael: Wait a minute. So you said biological. So it couldn’t be machinery? It couldn’t be a computer?
Jim: Well, the ones that exist today are biological. But the nature of a sensorium with attention and memory, at least my view, could easily be wrong, is functionalist, and that if you can produce whatever set of functions produce the biological consciousness should also produce or at least could produce something like a machine consciousness.
Michael: You know, I have a 2025 Model S Tesla with the full self driving mode updated just last week, $100 a month. It is unbelievably smart. It is so good at what it does. I’ve just been astonished at how I’ve had three, this is my third Tesla. How much better it’s gotten just in the last couple months. And also, if I hit the little voice button on the right of the steering wheel for Grok, you know, I can just drive along and have a conversation with Grok.
In fact, my buddy from out of town, my best friend I’ve known for decades, we couldn’t remember something, so we asked Grok if she tells us, and then we have a few more fun conversations with Grok, and she’s talking to us. And then we just went back to our conversation. And like, half an hour later, we’re talking about something, and the voice comes on again. Is there anything else you’d like to ask me? We’re like, have you been listening to our conversation? We’re talking about personal stuff. It said, no. I said, no. I can sign off if you tell me to. It’s like, but have you been? And so she said, no. No. It was like, yeah. But what if you’re lying? What if Elon’s engineers have heard everything me and my buddy talked about for the last half hour? Yeah. No. I don’t think so. But, you know, my point is it really felt like intrusive. Like, there’s this woman in the car listening to us. Oh my god.
Jim: And in the future, you may well say that’s great because she’ll be so useful to hear everything that you hear. Right? If you believe, if you can get sufficiently comfortable that whatever company is running it actually takes your privacy seriously.
Michael: Oh, yeah. Well, there’s that. Yeah.
Jim: For instance, there is an app for the Mac. I wish it had it on Windows, that watches your screen all the time and creates a database of everything you’ve ever seen on your computer now.
Michael: Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.
Jim: Yeah. Very dangerous. And but, you know, and they’re smart. They only create the database on your computer, but, you know, so they say.
Michael: But how do you answer the question, how would you know if the equivalent of Data was sentient? Was, you know, a conscious being deserving of rights and so—
Jim: That’s one of the big jobs of the California Institute of Machine Consciousness and the consciousness sciences community more generally is, is there a universal invariant that we can define that constitutes consciousness irrespective of platform? And that work has not yet been done fully by any means, but it’s part of the process to be able to answer that question.
I’ve actually fooled around a little bit with the physics of invariance, and have come up with things which are not yet satisfactory, but tell me that someone a little bit better physics math than I might be able to figure out. In fact, I’m going to publish it just to motivate somebody who’s deeper into the invariance literature and the coarse graining literature, et cetera, to take a whack at it and see if they can come up with an invariance, which would be very interesting.
This is actually a perfect transition point to our next thing from the book. You critique Hoffman’s interface theory. Right? And now this gets to one of the fundamental worldview questions, which is the veridicality of our view of the world. And give us your thoughts on our relationship between what’s out there and what’s in here.
Michael: Well, I remember when Donald came out with that. It was just a paper initially, and I wrote about it in Scientific American because a lot of it reminded me of Deepak Chopra’s kind of Western form of Buddhism. You know, it’s almost a Buddhist kind of worldview. But I don’t think he means it that way. You know, and his analogy is the, you know, the desk, your laptop here. I’m looking at mine with the little trash icon, which I see the new operating system for Apple is that the trash can is no longer round. It’s now sort of elliptical. But, you know, his point is if I look inside the hardware here, there’s no trash can in there. There’s, you know, it’s just an icon.
So for Hoffman, everything is just an icon. Well, but there really is a real world out there. To me, it just goes too far. There’s no way to know if there’s really a world out, a real world out there. But if there wasn’t, then how would we—so that’s why I have in the book the M. C. Escher illusion, right, of the water appearing to run uphill, you know, the famous M. C. Escher. That wouldn’t work. That wouldn’t work as a kind of an illusion that tricks our mind, and it’s kind of fun to look at, like all those M. C. Escher drawings are, if there wasn’t an actual world in which gravity operates in a certain way and that water only runs downhill. And if it looks like it’s running uphill, there’s something weird.
But there’s this place in Oregon that they call, I figured it’s like the antigravity spot or something like that, where it looks like water runs uphill. But it’s just an illusion the way the land is tilted and so on. Anyway, it’s just a fun place to go. You pay a couple bucks. You can see the weird stuff going on. But that wouldn’t be fun, and magic itself wouldn’t be fun to watch if there wasn’t a real world that we usually get right, veridical perception, most of the time. This is the way things are in our history of interacting with the world in a certain way leads us to a pattern of this is the way things are, and whoops, look, it’s different now. Isn’t that funny, or it’s shocking, or it’s surprising, or, you know, look what the magician did. He made the thing disappear. Oh, that’s so—or the water runs uphill.
So in Hoffman’s world, you know, there’s no difference between those. In my world, there is. Or I use the, you know, the mimicry in nature that, you know, butterflies with eye spots on the back to deter predators who, you know, are about to chomp on the butterfly, they see the eyes, and it looks like a snake or whatever, and then they back off. That wouldn’t work if there wasn’t really, you know, snakes in the real world that look like that. Right? Mimicry wouldn’t work if there, you know—so that’s my argument for that. I think he just—I like Donald. I like, you know, the way he thinks about these things. It’s really super stipulated and interesting, but I just think he takes it too far.
Jim: Yeah. That is an interesting question because, you know, one of the points I like to make is that all those perceptions that we have inside of us are within a relatively narrow size boundary. Right? Call it a fraction of a millimeter to here to Jupiter or something, right, that we can actually reason about. We can’t reason really as humans without deep science and mathematics about things that are really small or really large. So I have reasonable trust in the nature of reality at this meso scale.
And it’s funny you use the eyes on the butterfly. I use a little different model, which is a lot of animals know how to climb a tree. Right? And they don’t fall out. And so there must be some common form of a tree that a number of animals that are, you know, evolutionarily quite different from, you know, geckos to raccoons know how to climb a tree. So a tree must be a thing, at least at that, at least within the constraints of our mesoscale and the mesoscale that raccoons and geckos have been evolved to deal with.
And yet we also know that in reality, the concept of an object is not necessarily what’s actually out there. You know, we in our consciousness, one of the great superpowers of the brain is objectifying almost everything. In fact, only great artists, even bad artists like me, can occasionally get there if I’ve been doing a lot of art, to be able to see the world as a raster pixel thing rather than objects. And so we have to be a little bit careful that we’re not fooled by the objectization software that we all have, but it can’t be very far from reality or, again, this question of how did we survive three point five billion years.
Michael: I’ll just use my book as an example. So for a bat, if a bat’s flying at the book, it’s going to move out of the way because its little sonar boom boom boom is going to bounce off the book. So there really is a book. The bat really knows it’s there. The bat is moving around it. Now what does a book look like in a bat brain? It probably looks nothing like at all what I see. It doesn’t even know what a book is. It’s just an object and so on. So, you know, its worldview mapped on its brain is very different from mine. But there really is a book there or else it would just hit it. It would just ram into it.
Or, you know, sharks, you know, for if you’re a dolphin, what’s it like to be a dolphin, right? Well, there really are—I’m sure a shark to a dolphin brain looks very different as an icon than it looks like on my brain. But there really are sharks, and they really have pointy things at one end and a tail at the other end, and you really got to be able to perceive which direction it’s moving so you can move the other way. And all of that has to be true or else none of the sensory evolution of sensory systems we have would work.
Jim: Yeah. That, you know, I think that is the strongest argument at the end of the day that there may be some gaps between what’s really out there and what we see, but it’s good enough to have given those that have the current level of resolution the ability to make sense of the world in a way that’s actually stable.
Michael: One more thing on that because you’re a super smart guy that’s thought about all these things. You know? What troubles me about all taking some of these ideas to the extreme, like, how do you know anything is real? Are we just a brain in a vat? Are we living in a matrix? You know, to me, these things are like, just look out the window. What does it look like? You know, does the world look like it’s a matrix? I mean, wouldn’t there be some buffering somewhere or some little pixelation when the computer’s overloaded or whatever? And the people that promote these things, they ultimately just say, well, there’s no way to prove it. Okay. Then what are we talking about? This is just like, you know, late night philosophy conversation or metaphysics or science fiction. It’s just fun. Like a Star Trek episode, you know, where they end up thinking, maybe this all is a matrix.
You know, the famous one where they’re in the holodeck with Moriarty, and he walks out of the holodeck, and he’s in the enterprise. You know, like, how could this possibly have happened? You know, a virtual figure in the holodeck can’t actually go out into the physical world. And then at the end, you find out that they created in the holodeck an entire enterprise and that they were always in the holodeck the whole time. And then they wonder, well, what if the entire universe that we think we’re in is just another holodeck. Right? Okay. This is all fun. It’s entertaining. It’s fun to talk about, but come on.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah. You know, of course, the current a Koran version of this is a simulation hypothesis. And I like to tell the boys, you know, the three of us cooked that one up, my sophomore year at MIT under the influence of way too much wacky tobacco. Right? So this is certainly an out there idea that’s been accessible for a long time and can’t prove it. In fact, I like to point out to people regularly, I can’t prove that the universe didn’t flick into existence five seconds ago with all of our memories in place, airplanes in motion, and five seconds from now the universe will flip out of existence. I can’t prove that. But if I’m going to have any traction in the world, I have to start with a I call it my minimum viable metaphysics. I’ve got a paper I posted on my substack about that. You got to assume reality. You got to assume causality. You got to assume causal time. You got to assume, at least I choose to assume, as people don’t, a base level of lawfulness and a few other things if you’re going to actually be able to take action in the world that’s meaningful. And so I can’t prove shit actually when it comes to metaphysics, but that’s okay. Works pretty well.
But I live as if I can, and duh. Turns out that having a realistic view of the world makes you in general more successful than people that have an unrealistic view of the world. I’d love to see postmodern professors, you know, walk in front of a boss or something. That’s not real. I’m not going to get run over and, whoops. Yep. You will.
Michael: Yeah. That’s Richard Dawkins’ famous line. You know, show me a postmodern philosopher at 30,000 feet who doesn’t believe reality exists, and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Yeah. When they get on a plane, they assume, you know, yeah, math and physics and engineering, it’s actually real, or else they wouldn’t get on the plane.
Jim: I like that. That’s good. I didn’t realize that. That’s a good Dawkinsism. You know, my kind of more prosaic version of that is, I live in a very rural area, and I know a bunch of these guys. I say, I’ve never met a postmodern farmer. Right. That’s right. Being a farmer is an intricately detailed engagement with reality.
Michael: Do you know that there’s a okay. There’s a joke about that that I’ll modify slightly for our conversation where the postmodern philosopher goes to this sheep ranch in Montana, happens upon it and happens upon the sheep rancher and says, excuse me. If I can tell you how many heads of sheep you have in your herd, can I have one of them? And the rancher goes, yeah. Okay. And he blurts out, 87. He goes, wow. Wow. That’s right. So the postmodern philosopher grabs his prize and starts to walk away, and the rancher goes, excuse me. If I could guess your profession, can I have it back? He goes, okay. He goes, you’re a postmodern philosopher, aren’t you? He goes, yeah. How did you know? He goes, because that’s my dog you’re holding.
Jim: I like that. That’s good. Let’s move on to the next one, which you talk about quite a bit in your book. And to my mind, it is the biggest question of all, which is why is there something and not nothing?
Michael: Yeah. Well, so I really just start with what does that word even mean? Nothing. You know? No thing. Even the word applies. There’s a thing that doesn’t exist. But how can that be? You know? And so if you start, you know, just picture yourself in the room. Okay. I get rid of all this stuff in the room here, all my bookcases and so on. And, well, I have to get rid of the floor, the table, and I there can’t be a chair. And in fact, there can’t even be a Santa Barbara where I am. In fact, there’s no Earth. There’s no solar system. And even that’s not enough. There can’t even be space and time or energy, and just keep going. There can’t, you know, now I’m just a brain, you know, just floating around in the universe, but there’s no universe. There’s no platonic ideas. There’s no, there’s not even consciousness because I can’t exist. And then you could just throw in other stuff like, you know, mathematics and logic and reason, and then God himself. And at some point, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. We’re just using words. And so, you know, the difficulty of answering that question, do I put it in the bin of unknowables? At some point, we’re just going to hit an epistemological wall where it just beats me. I’m not even sure what the word or the question means.
Jim: Yeah. I have the same reaction, which I just say, above our pay grade currently. Right? Maybe someday humanity will or our successors will have some perspective that allows them to talk about it. But, you know, I do enjoy listening to people speculate about it, but I often, I always, find them making an error, a level error. I like your exercise that you laid out in the book about just peeling the piece away. Because a fair common version of it is, well, you know, universes pop out of the quantum vacuum. Right? But where’d the quantum vacuum come from? Right? That’s a thing. Right? So you can’t, you know, you, if you pick a level and say that’s the base, you know, where’d that come from? And that’s, that’s not nothing, no thing. It’s a, it’s a thing. And in fact, my good friend Stuart Kauffman did an episode on—
Michael: You know Stu? Oh my god. I, yeah. Yeah. I just saw him in the news. I spent my fiftieth birthday with him at a monastery in Italy for a week. He was such an interesting guy. He’s one of the smartest, most thoughtful guys. You know, we would have these round table discussions, recon conversations, just ricocheting around the table in the room, and everybody there is super smart. And then Stu would say something, and it completely changed like, oh. Oh, yeah. And now we’re talking about something else. It’s like, this guy is at another level.
Jim: He is truly, and the interesting thing about him is that he has very weak math skills, and he’s the first to admit it. Right? He is an intuitive genius of the highest order who somehow understands the universe better than almost anybody, but not via bottoms up mathematics. Right? I mean, yes, he does. He’s done some interesting mathematics around the, you know, the edges of the edge of chaos and order and things of that sort, but it’s frankly not all that sophisticated. He’ll admit it. Right? In fact, I had him on not too long ago. He at the age of 77, he started working on a new theory of cosmology on the origin of the universe. And I had him on, I think, the age 83 or 84, and I go, Jesus Christ. He ran my ass into the ground. I’m a pretty high energy guy. Right? But I will say he did make that the level at which he operated did assume quantum vacuum of some sort.
Michael: Well, yeah. So okay. So here’s another idea. I quote Thomas Nagel, the guy who wrote the What’s It Like to Be a Bat paper, but he’s one of the deeper thinkers, and he has this idea of one thought too many. I think this comes from his book Words and Thoughts or something like that. Anyway, so like to ask a question, can you use reason to prove that reason works, or can you use induction to, know, show that induction works, or can you use science to prove science? This is what he calls one thought too many. A little bit like the Cartesian, you know, that, that I’m, I’m going to doubt everything including that, that there’s even a doubter asking the question that’s doubting. Right? That’s just one thought too many. We don’t, reason is just a tool we use. It’s not something that you apply to itself. So I apply this idea to some of these unknowable questions like, you know, what was there before time began? Okay. This is a nonsensical question. That’s just one question too many. You know? It doesn’t, it’s a meaningless question. You know, why is there something rather than nothing? One thought too many. You know? Even if the multiverse people arrive, turns out the universe is cyclical like Penrose thinks, or there’s multiple universes and they pop out of, you know, these bubble nucleations of the quantum foam, but that still doesn’t explain where, you know, as you said, where all that stuff came from, and, you know, you could always just keep going back, which is what the theists do, but the theists want to stop at God. And I just go, well, hang on. You don’t get to do that. You know? What, know, if you’re going to say, well, God just always exists outside of space. Can’t I just say, look, our universe just always existed even if it’s the multiverse and, and, you know, and so on. And, know, you, it just becomes a game of words at some point where, again, no one’s looking out the window because there’s nothing to see. There’s just one thought too many.
Jim: Yep. Yep. Yep. That captures pretty closely my own concept of above our pay grade. Right? Because it’s one question too many now because we can’t even reason about it. But, you know, does an AI the size of a Dyson sphere also have that limit? I don’t know, actually.
Michael: Well, yeah, there I think it’s just okay, as you said, just to say, I don’t know. Let’s see. I mean, that’s the one argument I have for cryonics is I’d like to be frozen and brought back like a thousand years from now. Oh, look. That’s what dark energy is. Oh, okay. That’s, oh, consciousness, oh, we solved that one five hundred years ago. That’s an easy one.
Jim: Yeah. What would be cool would be to have, you know, again, too early, but would be able to be woken up every thousand years or actually better on some kind of exponential. A thousand years, ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years, a million years. Yeah. And you get a year to look around. You may find that you actually only have, you know, the canonical 70, 80, 90 years. And so you have to, you know, get frozen when you’re young and then get thawed 50 times, and that’s all you got. Something like that.
Michael: See. And you could get a job as a history professor as the historian of the twenty-first century. I was there. I’ll tell you exactly what it was like.
Jim: You won’t believe it. Right?
Michael: There was this guy named Trump. What?
Jim: The fuck. Right? And this is the guy that was sitting in the chair of James Madison? What? Yeah. Well, let’s get back to the more systemic stuff that we were talking about earlier, which is, you referenced the constitution of knowledge. Who was the author? I had him on my show.
Michael: Oh, Jonathan Rauch.
Jim: Yes. I had him on my show.
Michael: Very thoughtful guy. Really thoughtful guy. I love that book.
Jim: He made some very important points about how we know collectively.
Michael: Yeah. It’s a social process. Again, you know, we offload most of our beliefs onto other people and institutions, as I said. And that’s but it has to work that way. Who has time to fact check everything? How do I know that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen? You know, I never went to that polling place in Arizona where they had that video of the truck pulling up behind, dropping off these boxes. What was in those boxes anyway? You know, I never went there to see for myself. You know, I trust the Department of Justice. You know, Attorney General Bill Barr, lifetime Republican, voted for Trump twice, said, I’m going to look into this fraud thing. He came out and said, you know what? We looked into it. We didn’t find anything. You know? So there, I just go, okay. That’s good enough for me. I don’t need to go to Arizona to check it for myself. Right?
So most of what we think about the world, you know, comes through that. And it’s a collective process because, you know, no one has time to fact check everything. So I like that idea of the constitution of knowledge in which, again, the you know, there’s a fact checking system and editorial system in place for journalism. The scientists have peer review and other labs to try to replicate your findings.
And look what happens when it doesn’t happen, like with the replication crisis that started in 2010 in which it was discovered that probably half of all psych papers, the famous ones we’ve all heard of, should have never been published. They were unable to be replicated. But I should point out to that, the science critics that use that as an example. It was the scientists themselves that figured that out. Right? You know, they were unable to replicate some other scientist’s experiment, and they, you know, blew the whistle on them.
So I think the system is self-correcting, and that happens in journalism where they publish their mistakes, or you have competing independent journalists. They go, you know what? The New York Times got it wrong, and we got it right. Look. And now there’s an economic system in place to support yourself to do that sort of thing as an independent journal. That’s all good. You know, podcasting is another source of this. But in general, I think, you know, we can still get back to having reliance and confidence in our institutions.
I do talk about in the book a little bit sticking the a big hit after because of the COVID pandemic and all the errors that were made. And it’s not just that the scientists, the CDC, the Faucis were wrong because everybody gets it wrong. It’s that they were overly confident at the beginning. And instead of being more Bayesian with us, you know, that, you know, for now, we think this is what we should do about masks or closing the schools or whatever, but we may come back next week when we have more information and change our recommendations. But they didn’t say that. You know? And it’s like so now people are like, why should I believe you? I mean, look what you did. You lied to us about school closures and masks. You said vaccines would stop the spread. That’s not what the vaccines then you said, no. No. Vaccines are going to do this.
If I can’t trust you about that, why should I trust you about climate change things you guys are talking about? And I’m also critical in the book of academia, which I’ve spent decades in. People used to trust, you know, the findings from Harvard and MIT and Caltech. But, you know, now they’ve all gone so crazy far left woke that, you know, they can’t even answer the question, you know, what is a woman? You know, can a man get pregnant? Are you kidding me? You know, the average Joe who knows nothing, just the centrist voter like the whatever. You know, it’s like, are you kidding me? And then when some Harvard scientist says, you know, climate change, we have to do this. It’s like, dude, you don’t even know what a woman is, so I’m not going to believe anything you tell me. That’s the problem with the breakdown of trust in institutions and expertise.
Jim: Yeah. And I would add an extra gloss to that, and it applies both, I think, to COVID and to the more well, even fairly close to the center of some of the climate stuff. And that was what I would call the noble lie from Plato. You know, there were times when I think we now know that certainly with respect to COVID, they told us things they knew were false, but they thought they were good for us. Right? Like wearing masks. Right? They knew pretty damn well that masks slowed spread outward, but not inward, basically. And that the probable costs of someone should’ve been able to figure out the probable cost of school closings was greater than the benefit based on the age profile of who got sick and things like that.
Michael: Jim, they closed the beaches here in Santa Barbara. Are you kidding me? Where it’s sunny and warm and windy, you’re telling me this is bad for me and I should stay in my house?
Jim: Yeah. Wish more people would do that rather than believe some idiot with a big loud microphone, and we now have scaling laws with followership, unfortunately. I’m a little medium-sized podcaster. I have a little effect, but I’m no Joe Rogan. Right? I’d say my shit’s more likely to be right than his shit by a lot. But, nonetheless, he’s the one with 50,000,000 followers. And so the way these followership statistics have evolved, there’s a number of people with very large microphones and not necessarily all that well grounded in the truth.
Michael: Well, then you get, like, the Candace Owens and the Tucker Carlsons. Exactly. It’s astonishing to me why they have millions of followers because they’re just uttering utter bullshit, but I just wrote a big piece about them for Quillette coming out this week or next week on the new Holocaust denial, you know, which they call just asking questions. We call it jacking off. I’m just asking questions. I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just saying, how could they have burned that many bodies in those crematoria at Crema 2 at Auschwitz Birkenau? I’m just curious. No. No. You’re not. You know what you’re up to.
Jim: We can easily spend, you know, days talking about this one is, what the philosophers call axiology, ethics. What matters? You take quite a nice walk through that in the book. Why don’t you, you know, sort of tell your tale on what matters and why we would think so?
Michael: Well, so I’m a moral realist. I think there is objective right and wrong, good and evil, and truth about moral values. You know, not always, but they can be. So you just start with the simplest thing, you know, quoting Lincoln as I would not be a slave. I would not be a slave owner. Well, what’s behind that? Well, that’s the principle of interchangeable perspectives. That’s the golden rule. How would I feel if somebody did this to me? Then I probably shouldn’t do it. So that actually, most religions and worldviews have adopted that fairly early on.
Now once you start with the idea that there is an objective moral values to be discovered, what are they? So I began with the survival and flourishing of sentient beings. So I say it that way so that we include animal rights in there because I think that case could be made. As Jeremy Bentham famously said about animals, it’s not can they think or can they talk, but can they suffer? So the suffering of individual sentient beings should be our moral starting point, and we want to build on that. Let’s reduce the amount of suffering for everybody. Let’s build the amount of flourishing for more people in more places, and that’s what we’ve been doing since the Enlightenment, saying, okay, let’s leave religion out of it. Let’s see if we can reason our way toward discovering moral principles and values that really exist.
And we do that through solving problems, you know, like democracy is better than autocracy. Market economies are better than command economies. You know, that it’s better to be fed rather than hungry. It’s better to be educated rather than ignorant. It’s better to be literate than illiterate. And, you know, would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Everybody knows the answer. It’s not moral relativism if when you put it that simple. And so I just think, you know, it’s just in the same way that Kepler discovered planets travel in ellipses, we’ve discovered historically that people don’t want to live in autocracies. Given the choice to vote with their votes or their feet or their money, they will go to where they have more freedom, prosperity, education, wealth, you know, housing, clean water, safe roads, and so on. And they always do that when given the opportunity. So to me, we’re actually discovering something about the world.
Jim: I like that, and I agree. I think we can say something about that for humans. But it may be not true for other animals. For instance, a herd of antelope may value the solidarity of the group and the dominance of the ram in a completely different way than we do.
Michael: Certainly. Yeah. But yes. Of course. Yeah. In terms of animal rights, you know, again, just can they suffer? Let’s just forget the rights, you know, chimpanzees can’t vote. Obviously. But, you know, just reduce the amount of suffering. You know? Should we have chimps locked up in these cages in labs for scientists to experiment on? No. We really shouldn’t do that because they can suffer.
Now how far down do you go, you know, throwing a lobster in a boiling pot of water? I’m not crazy about that anymore, but, you know, I used to not give that two thoughts. You know, you could kind of see where the—where do you draw the line? Well, you have to draw it somewhere, I guess, because we have to eat something. You know, even plants, you know, maybe some of these plants communicate through their root system, and so that’s a kind of sentience. Okay. Slow down. I’m going to eat salads, and I’m probably going to eat some meat. You know, I’m a pescatarian. I eat fish. Okay. You know? Yeah. Maybe fish are sentient. But you get the idea. There’s—you know, there are intuitions that suffering is what matters. Let’s reduce that.
Jim: And then the evolution of ethics. You mentioned slavery because it’s such an interesting example from our current perspective, but totally horrifying. We can’t imagine—and be, you know, hard to think of a more vile system than chattel slavery. And yet Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, all were fine with it and actually gave little details on how you could be a more just slave owner. You know? What do you think about that? What does that tell us about humanity and our evolution?
Michael: tells us that we’ve expanded the moral sphere to include other sentient beings, whereas we didn’t used to do that. Why are we doing that? Well, there’s two things. One is the argument that you should take somebody else’s perspective in mind. Just took several centuries to kind of be inculcated into culture, but it did happen. It happened slow enough sort of on a decadal level of time. If it happened by the week or month or year, we’d notice it. But like the shift from civil rights and women’s rights happened just slow enough, it was hard to see, and it’s hard to notice how different things are now than they were, say, in the nineteen fifties.
But if you really take the bigger picture, I like to say the conservatives today are more liberal than liberals were in the nineteen fifties. If you just look at the literature and how everybody talked about women and Jews and blacks, you know, that the even conservatives today would be horrified at talking like that. Even though today, go, oh, they’re the closed minded illiberal ones. No. Actually, you know, and that happened and that has continued to happen again because of our exposure to other people, our exposure to the arguments, and the inculcation into, you know, literature, film, comic books, you know, nonfiction into politics and economics, and all that, everybody has shifted their kind of perspective on other people. Peter Singer calls that the expanding moral circle. I use a sphere because it’s three-dimensional, but that’s the idea.
Jim: All righty. I really want to thank Michael Shermer for an extraordinarily interesting tour of his worldview and his book, Truth. It’ll be on sale by the time you hear this podcast. So we don’t want the Shermer children to be lacking shoes. So go out and buy five copies and give them to your friends.
Michael: Oh, my poor kid doesn’t have shoes. That’s right.
Jim: All right. This has been a wonderful conversation, Michael.
Michael: Thank you so much. I had no idea what this was going to be like. This is one of the better interviews I’ve or conversations I’ve ever had. You’re really a smart cookie. Let’s do this again.
Jim: Absolutely. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Michael: All right. Take care.