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| Hey. Hi. How's it going? Yeah, good. Bit sweating. I just had a hot bath. I was already in. It was too late. I couldn't back out. But yeah, good. From judging from Twitter, you're a bathman more than a shower, man. I love it. I have I have two either two baths a day in the winter or a bath in the shower, or two showers in the summer. Sometimes I do it because I'm bored. There's something I think it's from my upbringing where, you know, we could only have one bath a week when I was little. Wow. Sometimes secondhand water. Oh, I've had it hard. It was like it's like a Bickens novel. That is that is hard. You joke, but that is yeah. Deprivation. One bath a week. I mean, that's that's 17th century stuff. Well, I remember in the winter in our house, we had this is absolutely true. This sounds like a joke. This sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but we had ice on the inside of the windows when I woke up. Yeah. I used to dream I'd got up and got dressed, and then I'd wake up and go, oh, fuck, I haven't got dressed. I know. Anyway, have you got a minute? I've got a question for you. Another question? Yeah. I'm just not in the bath. I've been thinking a lot about the brain, or rather my brain has that's sort of a point. Now, this is quite a long question. Stop me at any point if I've made some sort of fallacious leap. Okay. The brain I totally understand evolution by natural selection. It's a no brainer, and the brain is just an organ like anything else, okay? It came from 3 billion years, from a blob of reproductive protein to this most complex computer, right? But it is just physical. It's it, you know, it goes by all the laws, the contingent laws of the universe chemistry, physics, energy, electricity, all that, right? But obviously, we're talking about this. It has the epic phenomenon of consciousness. We feel like we've got a self. We feel like we've got free will, even though that's an illusion. And this leads to imagination, invention of philosophy, art, gods. So two part questionnaire. One, a chimps going through that. Do you think they've got all the rudimentary tools to invent their gods or have spirituality or he need his imagination and a decent brain, or even a sense of self? And two, if that is true, if the brain is purely physical, it can be reproduced. So in the future, will a computer will we have paranoid computers? Will we have computers that are nice and nasty and don't want to die and want to murder someone? Shoot, yeah. So that's a great question, and there's so many questions contained in it. Here's what's not controversial. There are many places where one can try to find a foothold or a handhold to debate some materialist assumptions and then try to open the door to something that many people in science and philosophy at the moment would consider spooky or theological or just unwarranted. So the central drift of your question is fairly uncontroversial in science, which is to say, it's safe to assume that everything we know and notice about the mind from the first person side, as a matter of experience, what it's like to be us all of that is a product of what our brains, as physical information processing systems, are doing, right? So our brains are essentially computers made of meat. Although they're they're not computers that are all that similar to the computers we currently call computers. I mean, they're different and important ways. Many people will point out that science has been repeatedly confounded by bad analogies, that we used to make analogies to water pumps and steam engines. And now we no longer do that because now we have a much better analogy a computer. But many people will be tempted to argue that it's still not a perfect analogy or not even a good one. No, but the important thing is that intelligence is basically the ability to problem solve, negotiate the world. And obviously those things, if they work, they're favored and they're passed on and it presumably gets better and better or it doesn't work or it's a dead end or whatever. Yeah, I get that, and it starts worrying me. I came from a science background and I went to do philosophy. So all the things like determinism and materialism, all those things, I sucked them up. Anything that felt a little bit new AG nonsense, mumbo jumbo, magic, I sort of rejected, but I kept no mind. I said, well, prove it to me. I am this sort of this hardwired contingent. I need proof. I need physical proof. And so even consciousness freaks me out because, yeah, it should because really we don't understand it physically yet and there are impressive impediments to doing that. I think the so called hard problem of consciousness is genuinely hard because it's not clear why anything we do as minds, all of our behavior, all of our mental behavior, everything, including our intelligence needs to be associated with experience, right? We could build robots and we undoubtedly will build robots eventually that pass the Turing Tests that are indistinguishable from humans and in fact only become distinguishable from humans by their superhuman capacities. They will be as intelligent as we are in every respect. They'll be conversant with our emotions and display emotions of their own because we will program them that way, very likely, at least some of them that way. And I think it's true to say they're already as good. They might even be better at facial recognition than humans are now. And that will eventually include detecting and responding to our emotions and just so much of what makes us effective social beings. Millions of years of evolution as social primates and 300,000 years or so of finishing school as Homo sapiens. We're very good at this, and there's no question we're going to build machines that are better than we are. And then literally everything we do cognitively will be like chess, where it will be true to say that the best mind at that is now a computer mind, not a human one. We will never be the best at chess ever again. Right? Yeah. And that's going to be true of looking at a person's face and deciding how they feel. Will there be a robot, right, that's bigger and taller and stronger than me, right. Made of steel that can see in the dark and he's a better stand up. The robots are coming for your job. I'll always love that. I'll go out, I'll fall over and the crowd will go wild. They go, look at him. They're going to look at that fat bloke. He's dying. And the robot will go, I can't compete with that. I never thought of that. Ricky and the steam engine. But, Nelly, I think it's true if ultimately something like that has to be true if intelligence and even comedic intelligence and comedic timing and everything that gets built into that empathy, I learned it. I learned it was still my brain. Yeah, exactly. If that's just information processing, there's no reason why a human has to be the best at that forever. And in fact, there's no way one will be if we just keep making progress building intelligent machines. So I think that I totally accept that. I suppose my question is, then what it comes down to is why this illusion of free will? Is it the same as if it wasn't an illusion? What's the difference? That's my question. I totally accept it. But so what? We are what we are, what does it matter? What does it matter that there isn't free will? I mean, the reason why it's important is that so much of our psychological suffering personally and so much of our social suffering in terms of what we, the ethical and legal decisions we make, is anchored to this illusion. The feeling that you are you and really responsible for you. It's not that it's never useful. It's useful in certain cases. But the fact that we put people in prison for the rest of their lives or even, you know, give them the death penalty in certain states and my country and feel totally justified in doing it as a matter of punishment, not as a matter of social necessity, that we have to just keep certain dangerous people off the streets, which obviously and I think that's quite different. Yeah, it is different. And I'd say what I'd say with them, I think to and I know you're not saying this, but to say no one has free will, so no one should be punished, is a nonsense. Rather like if a machine breaks down in a factory, you don't go, well, it didn't mean to break down. We keep it on you get rid of it because that's a new one. It's not a punishment. Well, we got to still protect the innocent and I get that and I think, yeah, definitely something else. There's loads of punishment certainly makes sense still in many cases, but retribution doesn't, or the vengeance part of it doesn't morally. Once you swallow this pill of free will being an illusion, what are the three reasons for retribution? Rehabilitation and what's the restitution? Yeah. Have you read Ted Hondrick's book on no punishment? I think it's called it might be called Eye for an Eye. No, I think it's just called punishment. It's got a picture of an eye and a tooth on it was my professor. Oh, yeah. He told me about four years ago. I was I was sold on it as he strode, rather. And yeah, he breaks down why that sort of punishment for retribution doesn't work. And, you know, we totally agree with and, you know, with the death penalty, you can't go back and say, we were wrong. We know the worries about that. My point is, even if everyone understood freewill was an illusion, we're hard to work. I don't think it should make any difference because we're not saying, oh, we came from a tough background, or it was a crime of passion. We're just saying, we're all robots, let's do what we like, which we know isn't acceptable. That's why I mean that it doesn't make a difference. All the other caveats would still be in place. A sympathetic judicial system and acts utilitarian as opposed to rule utilitarianism. All those things will still be in place. But what I can never accept is the people that say, if hard determinism is true, no one is responsible for their actions are the societe or level. That's the difference I'm making. Once you view people in this vein as akin to malfunctioning robots, right. If we built an evil robot, it would reliably produce evil. Nature has built evil robots for us as psychopaths and other people who just reliably create a lot of harm for everyone else. The question is, how should we feel about that? And whether hatred is the right emotional response. Now, it's a totally natural response, certainly if you've been victimized by such a person, but I think we should treat it like any other force that isn't our fault. You don't you go you don't go into morality of an angry bear exactly. Trying to attack you in the woods. Right? He came from a tough background. I love angry, but if a bear is attacking me, I don't care about his home problem. But he did come from a tough background. He came from the background of being a bear. Right. What else was he going to do? And I don't care when it's whether should I rehabilitate this bear? If I can't get out of there, I try and stop him it's not a moral issue. It's the fact that I don't deserve to die by a bear yet that's when it comes down to I love bears, I love bears. I've never heard of bear. I absolutely love them and good luck to them, and they've got to do what they've got to do. But as I say, if he's in my apartment, I've got other words, I don't care. Yeah, I don't know where that analogy goes. What I'm saying is the psychopath is part of nature, like the bear. I know it's not his fault it's a psychopath. Just like it's fault that it's a hungry bear. But that's no reason for me not to try and stop things. We've got things, but you don't have to hate it. And you wouldn't hate it in the same way you'd hate a person. And that's the crucial piece for me. That's a very good point. Ethically. Right. Even if it harmed you. I don't know if you got to that part in my in my I know you heard some of the audio from Waking Up, where I talk about free will, but just imagine the two cases. One case you're attacked by a bear, and let's say you lose a hand, so you really are you've had a terrifying encounter with near death, but you're saved and the bear gets tranquilized and let's say it gets put in the zoo. Right? Yeah, that's one case. The other case is you're you're attacked by an evil person and suffer the same injury. Right? Yeah. And so that but then the question is, what is your subsequent mental state? No, you're right. For the rest of your life, you could be hating the person and fantasizing over killing that person with your bare hands or hand. But with the bear, you might especially if he laughed in court. Yeah. He could just play upon your hominid emotions so that you would really hate him, you know, and want to kill him and fantasize. Totally true. Yeah. Yeah. Because we've got a sense of self and morality and we feel what's right and wrong. Yeah. We impose that on another human where we wouldn't do it on the bear. Rather in the way if I walk into a tree and I sprake my nose, I do not hate that tree. You hate yourself. I hate myself. And when the council put a fence down, I would want someone to blame. I want someone to blame with the weather if it rains, who didn't tell me to bring out whose job was it? Yeah, that's true. That's a very good point. And it's hard to forgive another human who hurts you for fun, even though in a naturalistic framework, they can't help it. I'm putting quote marks around help it. But we mean it literally as well, don't we, if we're determinist. And honestly, that does help me now a fair amount psychologically. I mean, there's so many people out there on social media in particular who this is where I tend to see it. I don't see it in my life who just maliciously attack me and attack people who are associated with me in any way. And it's, Why am I talking to you? There good luck on social media after this. I don't know anything about I thought you were super popular. I don't like Sam. I'm asking him. I'm using him, if anything. That's all, guys. If you're listening, that's a very good point. It's much easier to process when you actually recognize that certain people are doing what they do, because that's what they do. They're like bears. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there's lots of other factors on social media getting noticed, wanting, being part of someone else called aware of heckling, they're not like that in real life. They ask you for an autograph. All these things their fault. I get it, really. If someone sends a nasty tweet I think I've told you this before that I thought, Why? They said that. And I look back and they've sent 20 nice ones, but I didn't notice them. And I think I put this line in afterlife as well. Why would people rather want to be famous for being an asshole than not famous? What is the attraction of being famous? Saying, I was here because cavemen used to put their hand on the wall and blow wood over it, and I was here, and now it's obviously got out of hand, but I think it's some sort of cachet for eternal life. I think that's a very human worrying quest. What's the point? What will happen after I die? Will people remember me? Will myself carry on? Will I come back as a spirit? Is there heaven? Have I led a good life? Was it worth it? Will I come back as a cow? I think all those things, as irrational as they all are, are very human. And I don't know why. I don't know. Again, they could be upshots, but yeah, all right. Well, we can work that out after you've had your third bath of the day. I'm going to have a tea now. So in conclusion, yes, robots, computers will soon be indistinguishable humans. Final question. Is there a chimp somewhere that sat down and looked up and thought, where do we come from? Who did all this? Where are we going? Has that happened here? As a chimp thought, what the fuck is going on here? I would highly doubt that, but the interesting thing is that there are certain things we do that are really crucial to our being smart, like, you know, working memory, which chimps are better at, which is pretty. And you can you can see this display there. We could find this video on YouTube where, given a memory task, where there's a keyboard, like a keyboard on a screen and many numbers and letters suddenly get illuminated and then you have to recapitulate. You have to press all the right keys. Yeah. Chimps are so fast and so much better at it than humans that it really is. It's kind of terrifying. Have you seen that experiment that shows it's not just the arbitrary test, it's the reward that has a sensory so they did a thing with a chimp with beads. So if it chose the small pile of beads, it got a jelly bean. Right. It got it right every time. Choose the smallest pile, get a jelly bean. When they gave it the choice to choose the smallest pile of jelly beans, it didn't. It chose the big pile of jelly beans because it wanted all the jelly. The experiment was out of the window. It just went fuck that. That's the big pilot. Jenny Bean. That's hilarious. Isn't that great? That's fantastic. That's a genius. Now I don't have a sense of self and I want to be a chimp. Brilliant. Cheers, man. Cheers. See you later./n |