Jack Symes
Appearances
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You know, we've got the, the right wing fag in our country. Uh, he's not in our country. I think he's in a, in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment. Uh, Tommy Robinson, he's doing the rounds again in the light of all of this violence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
saying, like, we should shun people. He tweeted something along the lines recently. I'm going to paraphrase it. And Jamie, I'd be really grateful if you could fact check this one, because I might be liable if I get it wrong. He essentially said that people in Palestine are or the majority of people in Palestine are terrorists, inbreds and parasites.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And given what's going on there right now, I don't know anyone on the right who uses such obviously degrading language. And that person's not being shown. He's having more attention than ever. He's got his record outreach right now. So that's not illegal, what he said? I'm not sure if it's illegal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
He said it on a tweet. Oh, he said it on a tweet? Yeah, he put it on a tweet replying to somebody at some point. Again, as far as my knowledge, that's roughly what was said. I should say that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, what's going on? This is an interesting, you know, I'm pretty liberal when it comes to platforming and speaking to people who we disagree with. I think it's a real shame we get really polarized when we stop talking to people we disagree with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And there's very, very, very few people I won't have a conversation with. But when we're continually platforming someone like him in a moment like this, that does raise questions. And Peterson's had him on once. I think he's having him on again recently. That sort of thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. I'd be surprised if he... You should tell him and see what he says about it. I mean, a quick... When Tommy Robinson says something like the UK grooming gangs are out of control for a certain demographic and saying that they're responsible for all this crime in our country...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
A quick Google would reveal to Jordan that that's not true in terms of the big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely culturally to be doing these things. Rutger Bregman.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, take Rutger Bregman. Did you know the Utopia for Realists guy? He's a big proponent of universal basic income.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I can see if I can dig it at the same time. Okay, go ahead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
See if you can find that tweet. I'm just turning this on now as we're going. The big point here, though, when we're looking at... This is something Steven Pinker's always emphasizing, right? The idea that we shouldn't just be looking at anecdotal evidence, which is stuff like he does, and cherry-picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
We should look at the big data. Rutger Bregman points out wonderfully in his book, Utopia for Realists, that... People that come to the U.S., for example, first-generation migrants, are less likely to commit crimes than the native population. The same is true for their children as well in the U.S. and the same stories in the U.K.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
They're less likely to be filling up our prisons than people who live there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It might be lumped in together. Again, we're fact-checking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I think during the violence upon people who are Muslim in the UK, attacks on mosques, attacks on people's lives, and the current state in Palestine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
My honest, full, my fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal. I don't know if that kind of dehuman, it's like, it's morally abhorrent. It's something we should we should reject and condemn. But should it be legislated against? I'm not sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
What's clear, though, is that people to me that are sharing those ideas, people who are platforming that person, helping that idea spread, are doing something again that doesn't have to be legislated against. But we should condemn as morally wrong as well. We should say you ought not do that because you should know that that's not right. That's reasonable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of people. Nowhere near as the amount of people that you've managed to interview over the last... How long have you been doing this? How many years? 15 years. 15 years. And like three or four times a week over 15 years as well. So a hell of a lot. So I've been going nine years, but interviews like once a month or something, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And what I've thought from the perspective of philosophy and good public conversation on this stuff is that when we're in our car listening to the radio or listening to a podcast at the gym or something, we don't have the time and the mental strength or maybe even the skills in some cases to pick apart someone's argument and analyze them in the way that might be needed. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And so I wonder if you've got any views on like, What the moral responsibility is or what the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be, let's just like say, read up on like a topic in order to pick holes in someone's arguments or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So I know you've been like there's been previous things, right, where people have said that you should be analyzing people's arguments in more detail. Sometimes I don't know what they're going to talk about, which is a problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, I think maybe what we do to avoid that problem, because we're just doing philosophy as well, right? We're just doing a philosophy podcast, and we say to them, we're just sticking with this book or this paper. And so we've got four researchers working on this, and we know all the ins and outs of it, like the back of our hand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So we can give the audience member the best analysis they can get without having to go and do it themselves. When you're doing such a broad project like this on so many different topics, it's impossible to be able to do that. But I wonder if you think, I'm genuinely interested and curious to hear your thoughts on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Is a better situation for our public discourse a media in which we've got lots of different, let's say podcasts, for example, lots of different podcasts, lots of different hosts who all specialize in a different thing in order to analyze?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Having this general public facing podcast, which has not an area of speciality with people talking about things which are, you know, in some cases dangerous, right? Or like are important at least. Like is this is the situation better when we have lots of hosts on lots of topics and lots of podcasts? Or is it when we've got a general podcast which is covering all of these topics, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So it's sort of on the listener to not just go, I've just listened to this person for two or three hours. I should leave my church or like, I don't know, go out and live in the middle of nowhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Maybe. If someone listens to this and decides to quit their job and start counting grass or something. I just don't want someone to give up and think it's all meaningful. No, as in like counting grass instead of helping people. It's not your fault.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, I'm fundamentally here for a reason, which is that a lot of the things we're talking about, especially today, are just things that are underrepresented in legacy media. Yeah. Especially like non-human animal rights stuff. I find that when I've tried to talk about it and whether it's BBC or podcasts and stuff that people sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like two weeks ago, I was removed from a panel which I was supposed to be speaking on because I was going to be defending non-human animal rights. So they changed the topic of it. Because, well, they don't want to upset people who are in the audience who consume these creatures. That's stupid. It's stupid. It's a conversation. Yeah, precisely. And that's a shame. As well with agnosticism, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
There's a huge amount of people who are spiritual but not religious. And we've got this public conversation, which is you're either like the Pope or Jordan Peterson or you're like one of the four horsemen of new atheism. And leaves out all of these people in the middle who was like trying to search for that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Cool. So if you just search Jack Symes philosophy, you can get to my site where everything sort of is. The podcast I do is the Panpsychast. It means casting thought everywhere in reverse. And that's all about all kinds of philosophy. Two books out this year, Philosophers on Guard. Two in a year. Damn. Both on guard as well. So first one's Philosophers on Guard, talking about existence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And the second one is Defeating the Evil God Challenge in Defense of God's Goodness. So I spend that book defending the existence of God despite being an agnostic. So that doesn't show that I don't have a horse in the race. I'm not ideologically driven. I don't know why.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
controversial ideas they're throwing around about like 22 billion years old or 23 billion years old oh well no it's interesting what you say first of all like about us being like so involved with our egos in terms of these arguments it's always baffled me that people can care about their like their views or their philosophies to such an extent that they're they're willing to die on these hills yeah and refusing to they count in their their wins and not their losses i just had a
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Jordan Peterson on his podcast about his motivations for being religious. And so I basically sketched out my broad argument, which is atheism's shortcomings are it can't answer the two problems we've just spoke about, why there's something rather than nothing fine-tuning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But then the problem with theism is that no perfectly good God would allow for evolution by natural selection. Like, what a wicked thing to do to create the rules of the game to be that... To have intelligent life, it necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures over billions of years. If God exists, then God's a psychopath, right? God didn't have to do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's logically and metaphysically possible for God to create it as the Christians thought God did in the Garden of Eden 5,000 years ago. That is way more compatible with the perfectly good God hypothesis, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. But then when I asked Jordan about this, again, I don't think he's serious again about following the evidence and argument. He just digs down. He builds a trench. He says, like I said, what do you think of what's called the systemic problem of evil? Why would God create the system? And he goes, we just need to keep working on it. It's like, no, you need to suspend belief in something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
What did he mean by that? You don't have the evidence. You need to keep working on it? Like we just need to crack on with the problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, but we've been trying to solve it. In between 1960 and 1998, 3,600 articles and books were published on the problem of evil. People are working on it, and it's not going anywhere. The systemic problem of evil undercuts the God hypothesis. But then it's this weird place, right? Because you've got these strong arguments. that an atheistic view can't solve.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But then you've got this big problem for belief in God. And like you say, this is moving philosophers of religion to this really interesting space where they ask, well, maybe we need a different concept of God, like the universe. So this is pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical. And panentheism is the view where
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
the universe is in God, but there's this extra layer of God, which is like heaven, or the thing that brought it into being.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Pantheism. I'll go with that now. The interesting thing about pantheism is, is it worthy of the name God, like the universe? Because if it's just nature-loving atheism, then that doesn't get you far. But I think if you believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
like there is some will or agency underlying the things that we interact with, then I think that gets you pretty close to a concept of God.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But the idea, though, that probably everywhere in the whole world there's been some creature that's died, right? I don't feel weird sat here. Or like when you get a record or something, or you're listening to it on Spotify or something, like a song, but you know the person who's made that song has done something dreadful. You get that same kind of feeling then.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So maybe the simpler explanation is something like, It's your association with these things. It's just these connections in your brain going, bad thing, this building, right? Sure. It's shortcut evolutionarily speaking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I think Pink is right on all of these metrics. Everything's better now than it was. And if you want to combine that with a process theology in which God is identical to the world and the world's getting better, and it's better to start a business, go broke, pull yourself up again, and then succeed, than it is just to have the best thing to begin with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, right. So that taps into our intuitions about what it is to develop a great character and have a better world, you might think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But I suppose like pre 1859 before the on the origin of species in Darwin I think actually theism was the reasonable worldview to have like this idea of this God outside of time and space and You can run all of these they call them like theodicies and defenses like reasons why God allows evil to exist right? I think when you think about
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
like the evils, like events, like the wars and all the diseases that are in our country, in our world, you sort of go, well, I can see how some of these defenses, like you need hurricanes for hurricane relief funds, or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something, right? All of these, I think they probably work for humans.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But then I don't think since then, and maybe this is a part of the reason why people or Christians, especially in this country, are fearful of evolution by natural selection. Maybe it's not because they just care so much about their history of the world, which would seem a little bit weird to me that that's the hill they want to die on, like how old the earth is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But actually, if God is responsible for this process, that seems like a bigger stain on God's record. So you can see why they're reluctant to accept something like that. Maybe it's the only way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I worry, though, that when you do the maths, whether it can be justified. We're talking like trillions of uncountable animals. Forever. Forever. Into time, and eventually it sorts itself out. Well, it's kind of getting better, right? But, like, if I was to say to you, like, you know, I can spawn a person here next to us now, but to do it, I'm going to execute 50 chimpanzees right there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like, if you said yes, I think I'd say that was a stupid choice to do. It's a weird choice because we've definitely done that. We've definitely done that for makeup. Well, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. Well, this ties in. I think people think this, though, that the problem cuts deep. When you ask people, 90% of people in the UK think that keeping animals in cages is cruel. 50% of people in the US think that. Yet 98.5% of chickens, turkeys, and pigs are kept in factory farms. Is that real? That's a real number? 70% of cows.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Holy shit. And 98% of turkeys. Wow. And it's about the same for pigs. But you see the juxtaposition there, right? You've got people that think it's wrong, but they're doing otherwise.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
They live this idyllic life until he's like in the meat is better You feel better about the whole thing It's like I've heard him say something about this before where he goes like but ultimately it's because it tastes better So although like I'm happy he's doing it, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
This is a this is no comparison to factory farming and if all the farming that was out there in the world was like Russell Crowe's then I
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, do you think he's got like the... Yes, he cares about them. Did he talk about how he like ends their lives? He didn't. I didn't ask.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, right. Apparently that's instantaneous. Take the comparison, right? Yeah. Would you rather have your nose cut off, your children taken away from you, be stuffed in a cage for your life and pumped full of hormones and then be electrocuted or have your throat slit? Or would you rather run around in the field with your family and then one day the lights just go out?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I'm skeptical because if it goes average age to cow, if it's going to be like wild cow, maybe 15, 16 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
That happens with bulls too. Well, especially in the factory farms as well. They're definitely not going to live much longer there, are they? No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, it's interesting. So I don't know when he's obviously killing these cows, right? But is he doing it right towards the end of the life? Then it seems like it might still be... wrong in a sense though, right? There's a reason why when we take our dogs to the vets to be euthanized that you don't get there and the vet pulls out a fucking crossbow or a gun or something, right? Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Because you go, no, there's a better way you can do this. You've run out of injections or something. The Greek for euthanasia means good death. There are better ways of doing it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
My suspicion is yes. Why? It slows down the heart. You can't see them struggling in a sense of like they don't exhibit features that look like they're in pain or they're fighting. So it's better for you? The heart slows down, the brain slowly shuts down. Well, you'd expect them to resist in some certain way. Maybe there's not much difference between them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's more of like a cultural thing that we don't want our pets shot rather than have injections. Yeah. I mean, we see it's less.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, no, definitely. Still, I think we both agree on this, right? That the factory farming is the overwhelming amount of meat we're consuming is that. And people feel, and we think this, we know that non-human animals are morally valuable. I love this thought experiment by the philosopher Tom Reagan.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
He asks you, imagine you're on a lifeboat with, let's say, a golden retriever and another human being. And you've got to throw one out and you get to keep the other one in. Right. And so everyone throws out the golden retriever. Depends on who the person is. What if it's Hitler?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I would do that, right? It's random default. But wouldn't you do that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I might eat him. You don't know who this guy is. Me and the dog might eat him. It's not your, it's not martial arts, it's some random golden retriever. I love all golden retrievers. I'm killing Hitler over every fucking golden retriever that's ever been born.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And then, Tom, I went on a date with this girl in London once, and I asked her this law experiment. I said, what would you do? And then she said, I'd kill the golden retriever. And then I did the Tom Reagan thought experiment and said, well, how about if it was five golden retrievers, 10, 100, 1,000? Tom Reagan goes, I'll kill a million of them. And you kind of go like, that's not cool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Exactly. Well, this girl I was on a date with, she said she'd kill an infinite number of golden retrievers because she was Catholic. And I think an infinite number of suffering in the ending of life. You say that. You say that. I think after you get through like 50, you go, I made a real mistake.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The interesting thing is as soon as you pick a number, as long as it's not infinite, then you recognize that non-human animals have a comparable value to human beings. And you have to draw the line somewhere. There's going to be a rough number. It's like how many leaves make a pile of leaves or water droplets make a cloud.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's not going to be clear exactly how many, but as long as you pick something. I think everyone, well, minus a few people. I think if someone says infinite, something's gone wrong in their thinking. I think that's absurd.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Kill that guy. You know, I've got great sympathy for people who, like, you've probably heard this before, people give, like, health reasons for why they still consume non-human animals. Yeah. And, you know, they say, I have to eat this much meat, or maybe they just eat me and nothing else. That's me. And you just eat meat? Yeah. You don't eat anything apart from meat?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I eat very little other than meat. Okay, this is good. I eat fruit and I eat meat. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So those people who, like yourself, who maybe it's like whatever health reason it is, they still, some people use that argument as if it gets them off the hook, like as if they, because their value as a human being outweighs so many cows and pigs and the like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But I think, again, once you run this thought experiment and you have to kind of put a rough number on it, you sort of have to ask yourself an honest question and go, like, is what I'm doing like morally right? Is this something I should reconsider? And I think given the if you pick a number, then you have to you have to make a call on that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, okay, here's a couple of things, right? So I think you're probably, well, it speaks to your own experience, right? That you feel like maybe it's spiritual or it taps into our histories when you hunt, especially with a bow. Like 10,000 years ago, the first bows come about and I imagine it was thrilling for them now and it's then and it's thrilling still now to do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Same reason like paintball or like laser tag and war can be fun, right? People enjoy it. People going off to the First World War thought it was a great sport. Maybe it taps even deeper than that because it's the food we're eating in the early days. I think the worry... Okay, let's think about the ethics though, right? So I think it's not comparable to factory farming again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Nice. Yeah, so I think it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right? It tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff. But I think at the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society. We're like... stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
This is splitting hairs really compared to factory farming.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
the ethics of what we're doing good so two things come to mind right the first is it depends on the kind of killing that you're doing when you do the hunting like if i hunt with a spear and you'll know more about this than me a spear is probably not going to knock the animal out like a bullet to the back of the head right a crossbow and a and a bow are going to be somewhere between them right so they're going to be better ways to hunt than not so maybe perhaps i wonder what you think of this
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
on the whole, when you run the numbers in terms of probability, that hunting with guns is going to be significantly better than hunting with spears or even bows. Would you agree with that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Are you good? Are you pretty accurate? Yeah, I'm very good. When you hunt, it's like elk. Yeah. When you hunt elk, do you kill the animal without much suffering, would you say?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Okay, so here's where I agree with you, right? Is that when people eat, again, you say don't draw the comparison between factory farming, but I think this is... The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that on earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls. And that rings true for me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
This is the worst thing we could have done in terms of production of our food, in terms of the amount of suffering we're creating. So I think when the person says to you, you're a bad person for hunting, if that person is engaging in buying these products from factory farms, which the overwhelming majority of people are, then they don't have a leg to stand on. What they're doing is way worse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's a psychological explanation. It's the same reason why RAF bombers will drop a bomb on a clouded city but not go down there and shoot a mother and a child, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox. They all say something along the lines of, like, philosophy is dead. So just before we get into the multiverse, it's probably best to say, like... what philosophy is and what the point of talking about the multiverses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, it seems like it's an interesting one, right? We just did a big podcast series on the philosophy of war and the history of it and how it's trying to move the person that's killing another person further away from the act. So more killings when you're using guns than when it's hand-to-hand combat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Even in the Second World War, fieldwork showed that it was about 20 or 30 percent of people were actually firing the weapons.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I'd be interested to know how severe their PTSD is in comparison.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Because there's a thought, right, which is we seem to be outraged at the use of drones, but it takes one less person out of the fight. And so it seems if you're doing like a utilitarian calculation that it's going to be better on the whole.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The numbers, though, according to like the UN and stuff, are pretty damn high. Oh, they're horrible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, like what they take philosophy to be, because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider projects. One of the ideas that I love is this one by the late great British philosopher Mary Midgley. She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, I think the things that are relevant morally speaking are the same things there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. It's a vegan diet. Well, it's like a 98 or 97 percent, especially when traveling and stuff, when you can't seem to find things. I think the perception is, and there's a lot of gotcha stuff, right? In terms of when people say they've got vegetarian or vegan diets, the idea that they're going to be eliminating suffering entirely from their diets, it's impossible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
That's not what anyone thinks is happening. You hear like crop death arguments and stuff like this, right? Which don't tread much water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, the vegan needs to be, or the utilitarian, or all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this. I don't know any serious philosopher of moral philosophy or ethics that runs a good argument which says that the lives of non-human animals, their pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, doesn't matter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So the vegan needs to be concerned about this loss of life as well, or the pain and suffering that goes into it. There are going to be better ways to do it than not. I often get asked about tofu or our soy production. So 77% of global soy production goes towards feeding non-human animals that are fed and we end up killing and eating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So like we have these conversations in our societies and like these conversations are flowing around. And likewise, we have these pipes running underneath our houses, keeping the water flowing. But occasionally it gets clogged. And so the philosopher needs to. pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
A bunch of it's used for biofuels and stuff, but only 7% of all the soy that we're growing actually is consumed by human beings. So if we look at the vegans' contribution to that, it's marginal even then in comparison to what the factory farming industries they're responsible for. But here's, I think, an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to a side.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Because you hear loads of different arguments like ecological arguments, human nature arguments, all of this stuff. As if it's going to get in often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non-animal rights, such as the Catholic I was mentioned a moment ago, don't matter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But think of this, like if it was the case that we're forced to do these things and we can't do otherwise to sustain the people we have, we have to kill animals. Let's just give the person the benefit of the doubt and say that's the case. That wouldn't get God off the hook if God's forcing us to do that. Like here's life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
To enjoy it, you need to kill, what is it, like 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals each year?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's not. Out of interest, how many did you pick in terms of like how many golden retrievers you were going to chuck out the boat until you chucked the human being out? Depends on the person. I can't say. If it's just a random person, you don't know them, any person walking down the street in Austin today, he's talking like tens, hundreds? No. Thousands? He's talking thousands?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So these are things like what it is to be a woman or what it is to have free speech or what it means to say that a gene is selfish. So that's, I see, like the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like trying to understand the concepts we're using.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, thinking he could live long. He was worried he was going to die, right? A vegetarian diet to make sure he could. Not just vegetarian, but terrible vegetarian diet. He ate mostly bread and sugar. Yeah, you've got to do it right, but he certainly didn't. I've just finished Ian Kershaw's book on Hitler. It's like over 1,000 pages. It's a real good read, like a 40-hour read.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So if you're interested in like— You've got to be careful leaving those around your house. I know. I bought it my dad for his birthday and he was there in the restaurant showing everyone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy, which is like how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Like, let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology, and the arts, and let's try and get a big picture of the world. And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
If you take it to its logical conclusion, then we can't, even on the view which I hold, which is hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that the morally relevant facts are pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering. Right. If you can't then just let all of the animals free to run around, that's going to, as you say, create like a sort of mayhem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You have to. That seems I mean, that's in my view, that's OK to give them birth control and the like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So I take that to be the project. And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks are things like, why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing? No universe. Like, why? Why are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life? Where does consciousness come from?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, OK, this is good. I think Martha Nussbaum in her new book, Justice for Animals, she argues that these things, as you say, are a problem. You can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control. And she thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and keeps down populations in like animal sanctuaries, if you like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And I was thinking recently, like there's a lot of arguments for human reparations, like when a full group is harmed by another group, that we think that they're owed something, whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in North West Africa. We think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should right that wrong. I don't know the details.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I don't consider myself like a reparations philosopher. But let's say that's a view that people hold as they do. Well, if you take non-human animals to be like these subjects which you can stop their flourishing, cause them harm, bring them pleasure and happiness, then it seems that they also are part of a group.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And so you might run an argument to say that if all of these creatures were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this other group, then that group owes them the research, the time, the money to make their lives as good as possible. Now, it might be, just like in our lives, we can't avoid pain and suffering in the day-to-day of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's not something we can eliminate entirely, but we should be doing everything we can, says the argument, to reduce it as much as possible. If that ends up being like having to add predators to a sort of, you know, into that situation, then so be it. But perhaps there's a, you know, with the right time and money, you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering, so to speak.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
When I make a moral statement like the Holocaust is bad, is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad? Are they the same kind of statement? Is that the same bad I'm using? Right. But the big question, and to get to the multiverse now, is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, there's a question of like what's wrong with death, which is at the heart of this. So it might not just be like the hedonistic properties I've just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature from fulfilling their ends, from fulfilling their project, you're somehow wronging them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So like if I was to hypothetically, you know, if we had this random person again that we had on the boat earlier and I put a bullet in the back of their head, this person had no friends, family, no one will remember them. And I can erase the thing I did from my memory.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You might still think what I did was wrong because that person saw themselves as having a future, had projects they were working on, and I stopped their flourishing in some sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But again, you probably would want to bring them back. And then when it comes to non-human animals, the same is true, right? The dog looks forward to their dinner in the evening. They look forward to the walk. They bury their bone. These are creatures with complex inner lives which see their futures or know that they will exist in the future.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I think the same is true of the creatures which are hunted or in the farms. And so... Simply painless killing might not be everything there. Removing the potential for future happiness and pleasure also seems to be morally relevant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
One of the things that... So you check the... How do you know the age of... You can see.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Their face looks different. How long does an elk live for?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question, the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living. So my question is... What's the point of all this? Is existence on the whole a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased to be alive? And what's the purpose of life?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. To bring this back to like, you know, that fundamental question we began with, like on the whole, is existence a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased with this world? And it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window or, you know, especially if we're forced to do these things, like we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Again, like this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good God would do. So if you're an atheist, why not?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But it's the process which, according to Christians, Jews and Muslims, that God created and God can do anything with the following qualifier. It has to be logically or metaphysically possible. So there are possible worlds without evolution by natural selection. Sure. Those things are entirely possible. Right. And a perfectly good God would have to bring about the best possible state of affairs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
What did they say? The optimist says this is the best possible world and the pessimist hopes it's not the case.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I mean, there's still a sense in which they're doing good, like when a non-human animal sacrifices themselves for their young or something. There has to be something they're going towards in order for it to be good, in the same way we freely choose. And they're getting better. at being elk to avoid that. And that's what leads to their natural selection.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
There's going to be a significant number of non-human animals that don't have what we call free will, which is the power and freedom to do otherwise, the power and choice to do A rather than B. There are some non-human animals that just act. The raindrop lands on the bird's beak. It just instinct, it turns, sees what's there. It doesn't think, what was that? It doesn't have this inner chat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It doesn't choose, reflects. And there's going to be a lot of non-human animals, which that's the case for. So that sort of like character development, theodicy or defense won't work for them. Like, especially if they're... It doesn't bring about a better entity at the end of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But all these creatures that die painfully and miserably and don't have the opportunity to develop, like their individual lives seem like they're, again, cases of gratuitous, i.e., unnecessary evil. But the point fundamentally is this, right? God... could have made it so that these creatures that don't have free will and that can't develop their characters don't suffer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism and these arguments for theism all come in into the projects.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. Well, here's the thought, right? Which is in terms of like cashing this out in terms of problems with atheism and religious beliefs. is that when you look at the system, and you mentioned a second ago, like, maybe we don't know God's reasons and stuff like this. Well, I think in that case, I think Peterson said something along the same lines when I spoke to him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And I think in that case, you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words. Or, you know, William James, the philosopher, has this example of a mountaineer who's got like this gap they need to jump over, a storm behind them. So it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump or the runner... who has to believe they're going to win the 100-meter race.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's rational to believe it then, even if they lack the evidence. I think these arguments work for, like, psychological states, but you believing that God has some good reason or believing you can jump the gap doesn't make it any more reasonable that... there's a proposition which says God exists and it is true.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So I think the reasonable thing to do here is to suspend belief, is to go, here we have some really good arguments for this hypothesis, here's the evidence we have against it, but it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So the most reasonable thing for us to do is to embrace like some form of agnosticism where we go, how can we find ethics and meaning in a world that's seemingly godless? And that's to go back to the start of our discussion there. It's like the failure of new atheism hasn't been able to address that. are looking for meaning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Shakespeare, it wouldn't be right for someone English to come on the podcast and talk about meaning without quoting Shakespeare, wouldn't it? So you'll have to excuse me. Shakespeare says, essentially, if there's no God, then life is like a tale told by an idiot. It signifies nothing. Isn't it amazing that guy was so good so many years ago? So the agnostic life is like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And a lot of my thought here comes from Albert Camus, which everyone should read. He says that we've I wonder if you've had a feeling or experience like this because this is sort of like What got me on my philosophical journey? He says one day the stage set collapses and everything begins in that weariness with a tinge of excitement i.e.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
one day you're going about your life, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and you sort of start to think like, what's the point of all this? What's the meaning? It almost seems like it is a tale told by an idiot. And like, maybe it isn't meaningful. I'm not a part of this big plan. And you're sort of at a loss.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But there's an excitement there too, like the openness of being, the gift of meaninglessness. So I think...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
the reasonable thing for us to do in the light of those arguments we've spoken about is to suspend and be agnostic about belief in god but then have this honest search for finding meaning and moral value like there's a this isn't the kind of notion of the absurd that physicists keep talking about like again this is when
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You know, I won't talk about physics and sometimes the physicists start doing philosophy and you sort of get a little bit frustrated. Like you've probably heard people say things like this, like in comparison to the vast cosmos in which I exist, I feel so small and meaningless. Or comparison to the 13.8 billion years in which I've existed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like my 70, if I'm lucky, feels like it doesn't really matter. But like... Imagine if you were really big, like the size of the universe. Imagine you live for 13 billion years. It doesn't seem to have any effect on how more meaningful your life is. Your life still lacks that fundamental purpose. It's like how big you are and how long you last.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Same with Dr. Manhattan. Same with the multiverse or like simulation theory, right? I've just been watching this on the flight over here, the Umbrella Academy. I was watching that on the flight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. It sounds like a burn then. No, she loves it. It is good. Anyway, like they're in like a multiverse and their lives, like they're still going about their lives like they matter. Or imagine we're in a simulation. Imagine the fundamental nature of stuff is ones and zeros rather than particles or consciousness. It all still matters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So I think the project of agnosticism, the thing we need to be doing, isn't just digging down with this new atheism that's flippant and... It doesn't offer us any, like, I can't solve these big problems and lacks answers to the fundamental questions. And it isn't just a gamble on faith and just believe for the sake of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But it's to try and, like, create ourselves a patchwork, like, blanket to keep us warm in the void of meaninglessness, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I don't know how they get away with saying these things. I think you get it though, right? Science splits the atom, it puts a man on the moon. So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
We catch them lying. Have you seen the Trump clip when he's asked about his favorite Bible verse? Have you seen that? Yeah, what did he say? Jamie, are we allowed to get the clip? What did he say it was? I don't think he has one. He doesn't have one? No, he didn't come along with a favorite Bible verse. Let's see if he can get it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Here's just to wrap up the fine meaning part. I think you're right. We can still, even if there's no God and there's no ultimate. Oh, here we go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, this is what's dangerous, right? And this is what's not just confused, but careless about some of this thinking. When you go, my team thinks this, and I'm just going to double down on it. Even though I've got reasons against this position, I'm still going to be defending the position of my group.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So people like conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro think that eating non-human animals is morally wrong, but they carry on doing it. I think probably because it's part of what their team does. When I spoke to Peterson, he conceded that that problem we spoke about a moment ago, the problem of systemic evil in nature, was a massive problem for the God hypothesis.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And as we said, he thinks you should just crack on and carry on working on it. But there's a sense in which it's okay if your view isn't affecting anybody, right? You can have a false belief and you're entitled to that, that freedom of conscience to think something, as long as it's not bringing about and breaching the harm principle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But there's a sense in which, like, take Peterson's view, because we spoke about taking that leap of faith. After I had this conversation with him, he tweeted like an hour later. I was arguing that my view is that happiness and pleasure has to correspond to a purposeful life. That if your life is meaningful, it also has to involve a flourishing of happiness and pleasure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. Essentially, his view was like that. He tried to pull them apart. And afterwards, he tweeted something like… what use is happiness when we have mountains to move, which is a nice Nietzschean quote, but it's a nice bumper sticker or something or fridge magnet, but I don't think we should live our lives by it. I gave him this example.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I said, suppose God came down to us and said, here's the meaning of life, like create war, spread disease, commit genocide, right? You'd go, that's not the kind of meaning I thought. That's not what I had in mind. I don't want that kind of meaning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But this idea that only meaning and purpose ultimately matter and they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure, that's a recipe for disaster. You can't hold that view and tell people that all that matters is their purpose and meaning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You just have to look at the 20th century to see how when people think they know what ought to be done, despite all the pain and suffering they cause, how that can lead to all kinds of atrocities. So this idea that we should just carry on sticking with our thinking beforehand and This ultimately comes from having the wrong view about things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It ultimately comes from taking an unreasonable leap of faith. He offers arguments. Let's take Peterson, for example, again. People are holding him up as the champion of Christianity at the moment. People are writing books saying, this person's going to save our faith, which is going extinct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
In the U.S., for example, the Southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s. But your population's growing. It's disappearing. In 2001 in the UK, we had 70% of people identifying as Christian. Now it's less than half. And you're about that now in the US. You're just 23 years behind and it's the same trend.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Religion is disappearing and it needs to evolve philosophically. You need a proper philosophical defense of it. People like Bill Craig do a good job. I don't see why we can't just keep holding him up for the Christians. But this same old... Just bet your soul on it. Just go for it. Take the leap of faith is the thing and the reason why Christianity is going out of favor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I saw one televangelist saying he has a private jet because it means he's closer to God and God can hear his prayers quicker.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, that seems to be like the failure of new atheism fundamentally, right? We've got this movement in the early 2000s, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, who were all being critical of religion in the light of like the September 11th terrorist attack and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond like criticism. But then once that project started,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Okay, we can kill it. We get it. It's like he's been possessed by a demon, isn't it? His eyes when he jumps up for defense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Because we have factory farming religion too. They skipped all the verses about selling all your stuff, giving it to the poor, not fitting through the eye of a needle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
God, you can tell that he's just fumbling, isn't he? Just trying to find anything to say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You look wild, wild behind the eye. Maybe it's wild with the Lord. I think here's something I think the atheist does need to concede, though, right? I was just thinking about it as well. Look at those fucking eyes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I think the theist, if they think they've got a good reason to believe in God, right, and we talk about all this evil, which we've just explored, maybe we can jump and bring the multiverse in on this as well, is that... If you're up at the University of Oklahoma, which is not too far from here, is it? It's like five, six hours?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Eugene Nagasawa working there has got this brilliant argument where he says, given the evil in the world, it's unreasonable for atheists or agnostics to be what he calls existential optimists. Like you can't be happy and pleased to be alive. and think the world is a good place, and believe in all of the evil that you typically run against the God of traditional Christianity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So when I run the argument as an agnostic against the Christian about all this evil, that means I have to concede my optimism about the world. I can say that the world is neutral at best, or mixed, or maybe I have to be pessimistic. I think this is the difficulty of it all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Once they embark on that project and they criticize religion, there isn't really anything left there. They don't do the project of philosophy of finding the meaning in the ethics. And when they try to do it, it's lacking. Something's missing. So I see that as the reason why new atheism is going out of favor, why it's becoming unfashionable, because it can't answer those questions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Again, to give another quote from Camus that I love, he says, I've always felt as if I was living on the high seas, threatened at the height of royal happiness. So you're in this moment where you think, actually, my life's pretty good. And then you remember all of the crap in the wider world and in history and the purposelessness of it all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And you're sort of left like, that's the state for the atheist. And that's... I mentioned that notion of the absurd from Nagel's idea, like, I wish I was bigger and I last longer. And maybe that resonates with a few people. Maybe that's just Thomas Nagel. The real problem of the absurd and the meaninglessness of life for us as agnostics and atheists is,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
is we desire or want meaning from the world, but the world sits there cold, dark, and empty. It doesn't respond to us. It's worse than having a parent that doesn't care about you or a partner that doesn't want anything to do with you because at least they're there, right? The world is completely unresponsive in terms of that love and affection.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The universe, we ask for meaning, we ask for purpose, and it doesn't respond. I love this quote from Michael Housecutter from Liverpool, who used to be my head of department. He says, this notion of the absurd rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and dragons. Here be cold and dark and emptiness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And you sort of feel that and you go like, all right, that is the hole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But that I think is, Camus says that this is why people commit what he calls philosophical suicide. They kid themselves and think that God exists despite the evidence against the hypothesis. They don't want to feel that feeling. Like it's a really uncomfortable feeling. You know, there's three great books by Camus which I highly recommend. One, The Outsider or The Stranger.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
A lot of high school students read this book. And the main character starts off, his mom just dies, and he doesn't care. And then he goes to the beach and just shoots some random guy, and he doesn't care. And then he's put on death row and he dies, and he still doesn't care. And you're reading it as the reader, like, what's wrong with this guy? But he's mirroring the world's indifference.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
That's what it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world. In one of his next books, The Fall, the characters trying to find meaning or better put, trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins. Again, I think this is a huge problem for agnostics and atheists. When we do something that's bad, we don't have this omnipotent, all-forgiving father figure
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
to take that away from us like we have to live with it i think as someone who's never embraced christianity i have no idea what that's like what a gift that is to do something bad and be forgiven by god from it and so it's like a great life hack can i push back on this idea that the world's meaningless though yeah this cold and meaningless and uncaring well
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I think that's exactly right. But it's a different kind of meaning to the one which the world ultimately lacks. So call one meaning with an uppercase M, like meaning with a capital M. The ultimate meaning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like if God exists for the Abrahamic believer, they believe that there's ultimate meaning, a plan which has been set out before they began to exist and will be completed throughout their lives and to the end of their life. What we're talking about or you're describing there is what you might call like not the meaning, but like a meaning within life. And there's a problem here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, but it depends. Again, when you strip away all of these Judeo-Christian principles, we're left trying to find worthwhile meanings to non-worthwhile ones. So let's say you said the meaning of your life, Joe, was like counting blades of grass on your front garden, right? And I said my meaning was like being a doctor and helping people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, but imagine you thought that, right? Imagine you said the meaning of your life was counting blades of grass. And I said mine was helping people with medical care. I have the more meaningful life. But if what you're saying is true, if it's like there's no ultimate meaning and all meanings are just created by the person, like we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
We need some kind of way of differentiating between worthwhile meanings and things that are less worthwhile. Yeah. And so there's a problem there. I think we can solve that problem, which is, although the world doesn't have an ultimate meaning, we can see that there are moral values in the world that correspond to happiness and suffering, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The reason mine's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right and you're doing something which... I'm not willing to concede that it doesn't have meaning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's also one of the hottest days of the year without aircon, so he's really going hard for the panting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I want to separate the meaning, though, there from the thing we do. Define meaning. Well, in the thing that you're giving there, it's called the is-ought fallacy, right? It is the case that certain things do this thing, so they ought to be doing it more. So you might run a similar argument.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Imagine you come down to Earth as aliens ages ago, let's say like 30,000 years ago, and all the humans you interacted with were just eating berries and loads of sugary food. What are the humans? They just eat sugary food. That's their meaning. That's their purpose or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You'd go, no, like the meaning or the purpose of them or their natures isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past. Right. It's the thing given to you by the thing that's created you. It's imposed from elsewhere. It's quite odd to think about what it would be like outside of religious beliefs because that's the problem of agnosticism. It's an absence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Or better put, I keep saying that the world is meaningless. What I really mean is... It's seemingly meaningless, like it's not obvious to what the meaning is when it ought to be like or it feels like it ought to be. So it's not the case that the world is meaningless. But I think maybe our disagreement here or the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I think, as you mentioned earlier, you're quite a fan of these pantheistic views where the world is moving towards a purposeful end, which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and the like. So if you hold that view, then, yeah, it looks like life can have a meaning if there is a consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
then, yeah, if that's moving towards some ultimate destination as a process, then it can be meaningful. But there are problems with that view, too. So I don't want to cash out and go, that is the view. Hence why I embrace the agnosticism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
This view is pretty close to, I think you've had it on the show before, Philip Goff, who's my colleague at Durham. He's currently defending a view just like this, right? He thinks that the fundamental nature of the world is consciousness that is identical to what we should describe as God. And that this is a process by which we're becoming, making the world better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And we have parts to play in that. And that's what constitutes a meaningful life. So I sort of got two problems.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like the meaning there for Goff would be something like the world is in a better state of affairs than what it was before. And if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful. If you're sat on your ass not doing anything and you're taking away from the greatness of the world, then... your life isn't as meaningful as the person.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So if you're counting grass and I'm helping people, then my life is more meaningful in this metric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants its end to be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
They weren't the people I had in mind when I said people sat on their ass doing nothing. Well, they are sitting on their ass doing nothing though. Okay, I'll bite the bullet. I'll say there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a Buddhist monk sat on your ass doing nothing. Although, here's the value of what they are doing, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've uncovered the fundamental nature of the world, which is a unified field of consciousness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So, hypothetically, if something like Goff's view of this fundamental consciousness is right, and the Buddhist monks tap into this, and they tell all of their mates in the town, and they all come to see it to be true, and they all contribute towards it, then that is meaningful. If you sit on your ass in a cave doing absolutely bugger all for your whole life, you never tell anybody about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
then I don't see that as being as meaningful as being an NHS worker or fighting to defend your country or something like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. Or like when you've, like kids, right? If they're sat around doing nothing, just playing video games, something, you go, get outside, stop. We say stop wasting your life, right? There is something better for you to be doing, something for you to contribute towards individually and holistically. But the problem, I think, and why I don't embrace this for you myself is that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
There's a problem in philosophy of mind and consciousness, which is, let's say, you contemplate your own being, let's say, and you look inside of yourself. What's it like to be a physical entity? And you look inside your mind and there's this consciousness, there's this... qualia or being or experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
People like Schopenhauer say that because we don't know the inner nature of things, and Galen Strawson here at University of Texas at Austin says, if you think physics tells you about the inner nature of things, you don't understand physics. It doesn't tell you about, it tells you what things do, but not what things are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So let's say, for the sake of argument, underlying all of this physical stuff is consciousness. And then you want to bring in the philosophy of religion. And you say that as a whole, All of the universe is one big conscious mind. You've got a problem there, which is either the combination problem or the decombination problem, which goes something like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You take all of these little conscious particles in the table. How do they add up to one unified mind like they do in my brain? I don't have loads of little experiences going on now. I have one coherent stream of consciousness seeing you, hearing these sounds, seeing these lights. It's not like there's loads of little conscious experiences happening.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So how is it that they all come together to form one unified experience? And you have the opposite problem for this pantheistic view, which is if you've got this great big global mind, this ocean of consciousness underlying everything, how does that big godlike mind...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
decombine into little minds like why is my experience not your experience why is it here rather than there and it doesn't seem like although we might have some like knee-jerk reaction answers to that question philosophically we can't draw the boundary like the skull and my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries when i'm saying that the whole thing is well let's let's explore it like what would be the reasons why we would have individual experiences and a collective consciousness
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
There could be benefits and there could be reasons for it. In terms of, let's paint this pantheistic picture of, again, the reason and the goal of the universe and life. If I see myself as here rather than there, perhaps it allows me to better my community in this location and add to the value of it as an individual. Actually, it's time to think about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I'm not sure from the perspective of God what reason there is to break these things apart. Maybe it's better for God if you have lots of disjointed egos that transcend them and make the world a better place, despite the fact that you just want to buy private jets and look after themselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You're a fun person. Be the person. Yeah, okay. These are good reasons for perhaps why, like, you break up the mind in that way. But they don't tell us how. They tell us why the universe would want to do it. But still, it doesn't carve out the boundaries between why our experiences are different from each other's if we're a part of this big global mind.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
This still gives you a good why, like a really strong why. It seems that... the better world is one full of lots of individual subjective experiences, like loads of individual minds, like you say, all able to do lots of different things. I saw this clip of Musk speaking about this recently, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And I was quite surprised because in the past I came, I was teaching philosophy of mind at Liverpool and I remember showing them one of these clips and it was of Musk talking about like the origins of consciousness. And I was using it as like, this is like the general public opinion of it. You learn more about the brain. This is like his Neuralink stuff. And you solve the problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And we spoke about like how that won't happen. But recently, he came out and said something I thought was really interesting, which is essentially the view we're talking about here, panpsychism, the view that consciousness is everywhere. He said...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, in order to have consciousness, there'd need to be some rudimentary consciousness or experience in the inner nature of stuff in order to get complex and interesting kinds like me and you. But in the origin of the world and the Big Bang, it was just hydrogen. So what hydrogen gets more and more complex until it gives rise to consciousness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And he gave this line, which is essentially where philosophy of mind is right now. He said, either consciousness is nowhere, as in it's just an illusion, it's a trick of the brain, it's pulling a rabbit out of the hat when there's not really a rabbit, or it's everywhere. And I think given that you can hear me and see me now, and this is what Descartes' cogito ergo sum is, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You're 100% confident that you are conscious right now. So it's not a non-existent thing. So following that reasoning, which has been embraced by public figures such as him more recently, you'd have to say that everything is conscious in this way in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience. But leaving aside the how the big mind can break itself up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
There is still a question, this might be a bit of a boring terminological one, so you can tell me to shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary corner, but it's the idea that I spoke about earlier that all theists think that God is the perfect being. If God exists, God has to be perfect. You can't have a unicorn with no horn on its head, like uni-cornu, one horn. A unicorn has to have one horn.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
In the same way, a triangle needs three corners, God needs to be perfect. But on this definition, it seems like God isn't perfect. At the beginning of time, if God is the universe, God wasn't perfect then. There was a greater being that God could have been. And even in the fullness of time, perhaps God won't be as perfect as the being which is described by... Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So what we're seeing is people embracing, I think this is Goff's term as well. I think he's coming out as this, or maybe I'm coming out for him. He's describing himself as a heretical Christian. So to be a Christian, he thinks you don't need to believe in the virgin birth. You don't need to believe in the resurrection.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You don't need to believe that God's perfect, but you can still believe that there's this big cosmic story that you're a part of and that there is something God-like at the essence of it all. I think that's the kind of view that we need to start carving out. Theism's on the decline. Are we just speaking about the numbers?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. I mean, I think that seems to be that's the general view. I think that it's the zeitgeist of the time. It's the feeling of the age that we think in such a way. But there is still that movement. And this is my view.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I just want to shed light on like an alternative idea, which is go back to Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher who thought that all change and all individuation is an illusion, that we live in this block universe, this big one thing. Have you heard of Zeno's Paradox? You've done this one before? No, no, what's that? Zeno's Paradox is great. So you've got two, like, see these two cups here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
For that cup to reach that one, it needs to go from point A to point B, say in the middle. And then to get another half, it has to do another half journey from point B to point C. And that goes on infinitely for Zeno. Like there's always another halfway point in between point A and point B because you need to keep making these half journeys.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Which seems ridiculous because we quite clearly can move the cup next to the other one, right? Right. But theoretically, if time and space is infinitely divisible, then you can always make another half journey in between point A and point B. Okay. It gives the example of like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, every step of the way. Like, is it Hercules or somebody racing a turtle? Maybe it's not Hercules. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, Achilles. There you go. So the turtle and Achilles are having a race. And the idea is like for Achilles to get to the finish line, Achilles needs to go halfway. But then he needs to get three quarters of the way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And then there's another half point between three quarters and the full way. And it will go on and on and on and on. So the answer to the question, who wins the race out of Achilles and the turtle, is neither of them win. It's a draw. No one can finish the race. But we quite clearly finish races. We quite clearly move the cups next to each other.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So Zeno thought, and people like Heraclitus thought as well, that this means that it's all an illusion. Like the idea of change and motion isn't actually something that's out there in the world. It can't be possible. Right. So when you're seeing change in motion, what are you seeing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It seems like that's not true. Well, take, like Einstein tells us, and this is, let's bring in the multiverse for this too, right? Einstein told us that space is like stretchable. So it expands. So we have the moment of the Big Bang and the universe or existence as a whole, we might say, space and time, evolves according to the law of inflation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space. And some physicists think that this inflation happens eternally, that it isn't reasonable to say that it just stopped as soon as our universe was created or one or two later.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So what you have is this popular view in physics where you keep getting more and more of these universes and end up with a popular multiverse view where every single possible physical reality is realized. So there's worlds, according to this view, where we're having this conversation in Spanish or, God forbid, French, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Or there's a very nearby possible world where we're having this conversation in Italian, German, or Japanese, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
There are worlds, though, and I think the real question we want to ask, there are a bunch of these multiverse views. We spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy, Mary Midgley clarifying these concepts. This is an idea my friend Ellie Robson convinced me of recently, that it's a really important job in philosophy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
We haven't done a good job in physics and philosophy of defining the multiverse. We keep using the word, but you've had Sean Carroll on the show, who's fantastic, and I've spoken to him about his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. You've got views in philosophy that give you every single metaphysical possibility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The easiest one to illustrate, it's just this inflation model that I've just given. But what we really want to know is why this matters. Does this change the value of the world? Because there are universes where little girls are born, they're tortured for their whole lives, they're executed, and it repeats. There are universes where Matt Damon's career didn't get worse, but it got better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So there are good universes too. But on the whole, that means you've got an uncountable number of bad universes and an uncountable number of good universes. So I think if the multiverse theory is actually true, as agnostics or atheists, we should be really fucking worried. Like this is a horrible state of affairs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
If there are all of these worlds, if you actually believe that they exist, you shouldn't be singing and buzzing with the bees and jumping with the shrimp and being all excited about existence. Like we should be really concerned.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
There's a couple of problems there, right? Well, there's three big problems that come out of it. The main one, which we've just linked to, is like... if you're trying to weigh up the overall value of existence, is the world, i.e. the multiverse, a good thing on the whole or a bad thing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And I think if you say that there is, let's just say it's infinite, even though it might not be, if you say there's infinite suffering and infinite goodness, that doesn't seem like you can be optimistic. You'd have to go, on the whole, the existence is like neutral, mixed, or maybe it's bad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Maybe you don't want a city where everyone's getting tortured next door to a city where everyone's living a blissful life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Maybe. Well, it's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that, like, it just means that you can't, when you contemplate all of existence, think that it's an overall good thing. So in that sense... We don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I'm not sure about putting religion on those things in particular. Cult. Yeah, cult. They might have some aspects which are cult-like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, this is good. So let's say, entertain the multiverse view. Let's pretend it's true, right? And so you've got infinite pleasure, happiness, and infinite suffering and pain. So I think once you do minus one from the other, you've got a neutral set of existence. Let's just say this. So on balance, it's about the same.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So if you're a pantheist and you believe in the God of the multiverse, if you embrace multiverse theism, then you can't believe that God is good in the same way. There's also a problem which is, you mentioned something like the process, right? But there are worlds in which this process has already been realized.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
captured people. But I think to have a religion, you do need to have a belief in what Christians, Jews, and Muslims take to be the perfect being. God has to be, by definition, perfect. And if you think that being exists, then I think you certainly qualify for having a religion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It doesn't really matter if our world reaches that or not in the grand scheme of calculating the amount of good and bad in the world. You might think that some people say stuff like this, right? They go, I want to stop eating meat or stop taking long-haul flights. But really, when it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter whether I buy that chicken or take that flight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's not going to impact the overall good and bad that's in the world. It's a drop in a huge ocean that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of it. If the multiverse theory is true, something like that hits a little bit harder. If your goal is to make existence as a whole greater or better, then it's nothing compared to the infinite suffering and pain that's already out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You can't change the overall value of existence. I still think, and I'm with you on this, I'm sort of following the line of argument to the point where it's fleshed out fully, but... Now we've said that, I still think there's a point in being moral in developing your own character, sorting out your own house or community or country or continent and the world. It seems like that's what our job is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I think that's fine. There's other problems though that seem to fall out of this as well, right? Which is like we have a concept of what it is to be a person back to our individual subjective conscious minds.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You know, when we try and think about what it is for me to be me today is the same person born 31 years ago and the same person in the halfway point between that again to go back to Zeno. Like how am I the same person throughout time? I think the best answer to this is is something like, I have the same capacity for conscious experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
If it was stream of consciousness, that would mean every time you drift off during me talking now, then you would die and you'd be born again when your stream of consciousness reemerges.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, like if you say Joe Rogan is that stream of consciousness, that sequence of experiences that he's undergoing now, and that stops because you drift off, that would mean your stream of consciousness has ended. Think of it like sleep. When you go into like NRN sleep and you don't have any conscious experiences, let's say, you would die according to that view.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
or the reviews in philosophy which say you are your psychological continuity. Joe Rogan is the person that believes, I don't know, that Marshall is golden retriever is fantastic and that consciousness is the fundamental nature of stuff. But then if I were to strip those beliefs away from you, the psychological continuity view would say Joe Rogan doesn't exist anymore.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Because I don't exist anymore. Yeah, I get you. So I think it's like the thing that gives you your consciousness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, but when you sleep, you have it, right? Yeah, but when you sleep, you dream. Like what is going on there? We don't even understand that. You don't think there's ever a moment when you don't have an experience? No. Well, you don't have a conscious experience because you're not conscious. That will do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's a bit of a, even then, it might seem like a bit of a problem, right? Take out, like, copy and paste teleportation to really put it out there. You know, I copy all of the parts of you, I destroy them and recreate them elsewhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, the Star Treks. I don't know much about Star Trek. It's different on Star Trek. It's not copying. It sounds so nerdy. Yeah, I'm really embarrassed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But some nerd told me that when the beam, beam, don't you like Star Trek? Yeah, sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I shouldn't call you. It's okay. I was a kid. So when you're getting beamed around in Star Trek, it's not copy and paste teleportation. It's cut and paste. No, it's not cut. Oh, it's cut and paste here. Okay. So it would be cut and paste. I copy you. I recreate you. It'd be copy and paste if I made another Joe Rogan.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And then we've got the problem that sort of Paul Rudd has in that Netflix show, which is great, Living With Yourself. Have you seen that? Oh, no, I haven't. Oh, it's gold.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
If you can do it once, you can keep doing it, especially as technology advances. Oh, it's a gold, the Paul Rudd one. They recreate him, but as a better version of himself. Oh, no. So all of his friends want to hang out with the other one. His wife wants to be with him. Oh, no. Oh, no.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
In Star Trek, what happens is you carry on having experiences. Someone told me there's an episode where you see what it's like to be teleported. And it's just like this world of things and lights around you. So it's not like the lights go out even for a split second. But on the copy and cut and paste version, it would be that second.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
That's good. Well, okay. Let's say this, though, on behalf of religion, right? I think the two best things going for it are...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Because I've been unpacking philosophical arguments or reasons for holding these views. What's your motivation for like, I'm not sure if this is your view, but even like entertaining it, right? It might seem like they call them like just so stories, right? In philosophy, right? You can tell a tale about what it might be, but why take that tale you're telling seriously?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
aren't the like for me the the sense of community and the cultural aspects they don't appeal to me i couldn't think of anything more really boring than spending my sunday singing hymns and doing that no that's that's not for me there's so many other things that that you can do to find community to find fulfillment well but you could recognize how some people would find yeah sure that's fine with the enjoyment from it but i think in terms of like philosophical arguments for thinking it's true like the one you mentioned a moment ago like where this all came from
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I couldn't think of much worse. We're social animals, right? So we do look for that. But that's still something. You need something stronger there, right? So you go, we want to connect with people. We want to form these communities and bonds. In the face of tragedy, we come together and we support each other and we work. We empathize with each other and we love and support each other.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But like on a deep philosophical level, I'm still seeing the world through my eyes and not your eyes, right? So why think that gives us a reason to think that there is this unifying experience or mind that occupies all of space and time, right? What's the motivation for thinking something like that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Hmm. Do you think there's a parallel with religious experience there? Yes, I think so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, do you think then, what makes you think that on the one case, let's say, someone takes a drug and they... think that there is a fundamental conscious unifying mind behind the cosmos, right? That's person A. Person B has it and they see like the Easter Bunny or something running down the road.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
What makes, given that they have the same cause, person A's religious experience, caused by psychedelics in this case, more reasonable than person B's?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It seems that people have those experiences perhaps without those obvious triggers as well, though, right, in the literature. I do work with the Center for Inner Experience at Durham University. Some cool work from Jules Evans on this. It looks at people who have had like long-term negative effects because of taking psychedelics. He takes like 700 people because they're pretty underreported.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The data doesn't reflect them very well. Do you remember what they took? No, not off the top of my head. They say that a third of people who have long-term effects from the psychedelics, maybe you can pull this up, Jamie, Jules Evans, the guy's name, a third of people have negative effects lasting longer than a year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Science can't get to that question. The Kalam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular. It just goes, everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, it needs a cause. And then you do this deduction to figure out what kind of cause that could be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And one sixth have it for longer than three years. And what were these effects? Like feeling the sunlight on them and shaking with terror, seeing things that aren't there, extreme forms of anxiety. What do they give these people, acid? Well, perhaps, I'm not sure. This is the thing I think I'm concerned with. Same kind of stuff when we're talking about free speech.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Who the fuck's not in favor of free speech? Everyone wants free speech, but people want to draw the line in different places. So we need a nuanced discussion about where that line is. Similarly with psychedelics, what we see are writers, philosophers, documentary makers, just give this blanket statement about them being good. but don't recognize or talk about some of the negatives.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like you see these documentaries on Netflix, right, that don't mention the bad things that happen to people. And I think if it corresponds to religious experience, as you pointed out there, they have certain similar comparable analogous properties about them. then it's probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of data.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The Alistair Hardy Research Centre asked for people to write in with their religious experiences and just tell them about them, right? And the researchers were really surprised. Alistair Hardy himself said, I didn't think 5% of these were going to be people seeing the devil or...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
having Satan watch over their baby every night or walking down the street and suddenly feel like I'm falling through the circles of hell, terrified for the next several years. These are religious experiences from people from what year was this? This is like the last 30, 40 years or so. I think this data was collected in the 80s maybe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The data, like they just asked for them to account to give their examples of these experiences. But what's notable is First of all, the phrase religious experience and it being negative is kind of like oxymoronic. Right, we never think of that. Yeah, we don't. And they asked for religious experiences with no mention of negative stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So let's say if it's about 5%, and that's a modest generalization, right, given they didn't ask for it. Let's say it's about 5%. And then you take the number of people that have claimed to have had religious experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Then the amount of people existing in the world now who have had negative religious experiences outweighs the total number of people who are Zoroastrian, Jains, people who are Jewish. We consider them significant minorities. Add all those groups together to the, I think it's in between maybe one or two million people have had negative religious experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And it would have to be something outside of time and space with the power and knowledge to bring this into being. And that might not be... That might get you all the way to God. That's a really strong reason for believing in God. And the answers the atheists give in place of it are nowhere near as strong. And likewise, like the argument from fine tuning, which is gaining traction again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
and lay out all the boring maths in a bucket hat out of the shirt and say like, look, my point there was, if you're a Christian, then you've sort of got to accept the fact that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones if you want to accept religious experiences. You can't keep pretending there aren't negative spirits in the world if you're a Christian.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But the deeper point there is like, if it's the same for psychedelic trips as it is for religious experiences, then there are a big number of people in the world who are having these experiences And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well. They're scared. They're ashamed. They don't want to talk about the negative.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
In my life, I probably know about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs whose lives have fallen apart because of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
This is good. So are we taking from that 10% of people say that we shouldn't be?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, I want to just make it clear, right, so that I've sort of formed an overall view on it, which isn't perhaps as strongly put as I've given there. It's that... I don't want to say that people ought not to be using them or stuff like that. I think in controlled circumstances. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. So I think that I don't deny the positive things that come from this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The physicist Sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature, like 26 of them, have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and intelligent life to form.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But there's 76 billion neurons there. Right. And we don't know what they're all doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I think it's important to differentiate as well, and this happens with the problem of evil and philosophy of religion, is we differentiate between the existential problem of evil, which is really bad things happen to me, so I'm abandoning my belief, and compared to the evidential problem, which is let's look at the big data. Does that give me a reason not to believe? And I recognize that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
as a person that I'm strongly influenced by the existential part that people that I care about have been, their lives have been ruined because of this. But then I look at the big data and I think on the whole, it seems like this is a positive thing for people more generally. But I still think that there is a big amount of data there
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
He calculates that the initial low entropy point of the universe had to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, which means if you sat there writing out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe first started expanding, and you wrote down one digit every second, you'd still be writing out that number now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I'd like it to be the case that they were all like that, right? I know a friend who's over in Australia who's abandoned his family after taking these and ran off with a 70-year-old man. This guy's like 30, living in a mud hut now. What was he like before that? Just like me and you right now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, I had a housemate when I was at university who was – You know, it seemed from all measures grounded. I was happy enough to live in the room next to him and I was, you know, we got along just like good friends. And, you know, he started taking psychedelics. We left university.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Six months later, he started a Facebook live feed and this guy was like just masturbating in front of all of his friends and family because he was just, he'd lost his mind. Wow. Like these, this horrendous.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, I just think all the things we've just said there, right, is the nuance that's lacking in a lot of the public conversation about this stuff. Absolutely. I agree. At the start of your documentary, just say, don't do this. If you're going to do this, you need to speak to – again, it's about legalization. It's about safe use.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
That number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are incredible. And when we're thinking of probability theory, if we're looking at the best explanation for that, then I think, you know, those that posit the existence of God have the better hand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, it's the same kind of, again, this is back to the point of philosophy, getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes to psychedelics. I mentioned free speech a moment ago, right? This is something which is huge in our culture at the moment. I was at your comedy club on Monday. I've never seen Kill Tony before. Pretty fun. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It was great fun. And afterwards, a few guys in the bar afterwards were asking what I'm talking to you about. And they started talking about free speech, because I'm obviously from the UK and wanted to know whether I supported Keir Starmer as if Keir Starmer was like Mao or something. I was like, there's no comparison. He's like, you're like Marxist there now, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
It's a fun place. The people in Austin are some of the best people in the last five days that I've came across.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah, well, it seems like, I'm not sure if, this happens in the UK as well, especially with the, like, we've obviously been exposed to a lot of riots and stuff as of late, those three poor girls that lost their lives in Southport. You know, and it's a huge shame, because this is what people wanted to talk to me about at the bar, right? Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
The big shame is that people are going out of their way to use it as an excuse to rob shops and firebomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with innocent women and children in there, right? Like every single politician in the UK condemns them. Less than 5% of people in the UK even sympathize with them, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like, I'm not religious, but I think we have to put our hands up and go, no, to those two problems, they've got really strong arguments for believing in God. But, you know, people like Dawkins, people like Hitchens and the like, even Dennett, I think Harris is a little bit more... I guess, sympathetic to those arguments than the other three. But they're not serious about following the arguments.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But there's an interesting question that comes out of that, which we're not talking about, which is, the line of free speech, right? Everyone just goes, it's like George Orwell's 1984 or something. It's like you can't be open with your thoughts. And it's been interesting being here and experiencing a bit more of that strong sentiment, which is, you know...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I think free speech isn't an absolute right in the US or in Europe. You can't share, you can't engage in slander. There's laws against that. You can't share sexually explicit images and the like of children, which is a type of freedom of expression, which might come under freedom of speech.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Well, if you were to take... Okay, let's take an image. So you don't want to include... If you want to include images, plays, symbols... Well, you can't dox people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
You can't display a Nazi flag on your front lawn. Right. You might be able to do that some places. Well, it was interesting in the US it was 1919 when someone was, uh, that the high court, Supreme court legislated against somebody for spreading anti-war leaflets because it was a threat to the stability of the US more generally.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
And the state decided that the thing more important for free speech and to preserve it into the future is to limit it in this case. So there are things, you might think that free speech is like intrinsically valuable, the thing which is more important than anything else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Yeah. And my intuition is in that case that that was the wrong way to legislate against.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
This is what I found speaking to some of the comedians after the show, because comedians are often, you know, the strongest defenders of free speech, right? It's an interesting conversation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Is that when we're thinking about the things we value most, I think things that come ahead of free speech are things like life, ability to have conscious experiences, the potential to flourish, be happy and experience pleasure. So I take even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to be, it is still subject to those other things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
So even one of the strongest proponents of free speech in the history of philosophy, John Stuart Mill, argued that free speech should be allowed in every single scenario except when it breaches the harm principle. And so the interesting question we need to ask is, when does something breach the harm principle? People famously say, so you can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
If you know by shouting fire that there's going to be a stampede and two people will die, thought experiments, pretend those are the rules. You shout fire, two people will die. Should we punish that person for doing it, knowing that those two people would die? And you sort of go... I think it's fairly reasonable. It doesn't have to be 100% the case.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
We just need it to be more reasonable than not to prosecute that person. So in that case, you might go, yes. So it breaches the harm principle. John Stuart Mill gives the example of, I think it's like a corn dealer, and saying like, you can write in a newspaper like, The corn dealer's like, you know, he's the worst. He's exploiting us all. That's the reason we're hungry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
They're not serious about going wherever they take them. Like you say, there is a dogmatism there. They're not open-minded enough on these points.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But then he says, you can't shout that to an angry mob that's outside the corn dealer's house. And maybe that one's a little bit more tricky because there's more... The harm's not as direct. Right. But what we're seeing is... Public intellectuals who, back to our conversation earlier, like I'm a part of this team that just defends free speech no matter what.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
Like even the most valiant defender of free speech might go, don't shout fire in a crowded theater. One of your comedians actually said, I'd shout theater in a crowded fire. I thought that was funny. I'd even think it's okay to get people to stay in the fire if there was one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
But when people are already setting fire to cars, mosques, hotels, dragging people out of taxis and beating them up, if you go online and say, everyone come to this hotel, let's burn it down, I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close as you can get. That's inciting violence. That's illegal. So in that case, I think... But people... People aren't saying that, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
We're stuck in these sweeping, snappy statements which are, it's like Orwell's 1984. It's either anti-free speech. It's like, no, tell me what kind of free speech you want to defend and why you want to defend it, or else we're going to carry on being stuck in this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2193 - Jack Symes
I haven't found that might well be a more fringe example. I think it's like 20, maybe Jamie, you can live fact check me here. Maybe up to about 30-ish people have been prosecuted for stuff they've put online in the UK recently.