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  • Okay, So I'm talking today with Dr Michael Shermer.

  • And Dr Shermer is, among other things, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

  • But more importantly for our purposes today, he is also the author of this book New book and we're Heaven on Earth.

  • We're going to talk about this today in some detail, and so I'm going to turn this over first to Dr Shermer, who's gonna tell you some things about himself, and then we're gonna have a discussion.

  • He's gonna outline this book and then we're gonna have a discussion about but why he wrote it and what it contains and what the implications are in all of that.

  • So over to you, Michael assured Jordan.

  • Thank you for having me on the show.

  • It's well, the book is kind of an extension of my previous work.

  • Most of my books, when I write them, they kind of push off from the previous books going all the way back to my first book.

  • Why people believe, where things which was about the supernatural in the paranormal and and all that.

  • Then that led to how we believe, which was why people believe in God.

  • And then if you don't believe in the supernatural.

  • And you don't believe in a deity?

  • What about morality?

  • So wrote two books on math, Science of good and evil and the moral our last book s O.

  • Then you know, kind of covering all the big subjects from a skeptical scientific perspective thing.

  • Afterlife is obviously a huge one.

  • And I had really dealt with that too much of my previous books.

  • And you know, now that I'm in my sixties, I guess you could say I'm cramming for the final thinking about these big issues.

  • This is not something I obsess about.

  • I'm not terrorized by death, like like some people actually are.

  • But I think it's a super interesting subject because, um, it's obviously a part of the human condition.

  • It's something people do think about.

  • And apparently we're the only species that could do this.

  • Although I have a chapter in every gunners on animals that grieves clearly quite a few mammals degrees, and they have some sense of loss, death and grief, you know, for fellow group members or family members that I was not clear that they understand that their moral, um and then I can cover the possibility that Neanderthals were self aware of their mortality because of grave goods that have been found.

  • Although that's it's hard to fossil possible fossilization box is difficult to interpret, but, you know, it seems reasonable that they had some sense of that.

  • But in any case, s O I deal with the, you know, the Monotheism Sze versions of the afterlife haven't immortality Judaism, Christianity, Islam, mainly because you sort of have to.

  • Although mine's a science book and those there sort of, well hanging fruit that atheists have already kind of picked out self.

  • I don't spend a lot of time on that.

  • I focused more on scientific attempts to achieve immortality and spoke of science.

  • So, uh, actually start with what doesn't seem like a scientific chap.

  • But Deepak Chopra's worldview of sort of western Buddhism that, um, that there is that the idea of birth, death after life, life before life is all kind of meaningless because it's all consciousness in a deep box worldview.

  • As he puts it, uh, consciousness is the ontological primitives every you can't get underneath that, you know the scientific attempt to explain it by material means will always fail because That's not where consciousness lies anyway.

  • So I I, um thanks to my wife, you know, actually delved into his world.

  • D'oh!

  • Deepak and I have class her 20 years, and I've called his worldview woo and in pseudo science, and, you know, we've been kind of at odds with each other, so as it changes mean, he's sort of the main, you might say, intellectual force.

  • I don't think it's unreasonable to say the main intellectual force behind the new age movement or associated with the New Age movement is that every one of them, certainly one of the most prominent ones.

  • He's got a huge following.

  • You know, he goes on Oprah and talks about these things and Dr Oz or whoever, and, you know, he has a lot of following.

  • So my wife and I actually went down to his center.

  • That Jumper Center in Carlsbad, California, spent some time there.

  • I we delved into meditation and yoga and the tea and the chanting and all that, just to kind of see what it's all about.

  • And, uh, you know, I think there's something there in terms of behavioral change.

  • That is how it affects your body in your mind you're thinking, and I could definitely see something to that.

  • And, um and but but also the difficult part that Deepak and I have had is the same problem that most scientists have with New Age beliefs but not to step it, but took non Western traditions that what Deepa calls the Eastern wisdom traditions that it's the language, the difficulty of language.

  • We have to use words to communicate on the words you use matter.

  • At some level, you have to be ableto b talking on the same level with words off when Deepak says tha the ontological primitive or consciousness is the womb of creation.

  • You know, it sounds sort of metaphorical, and he means something very specific by that.

  • If you can't get out that you're wasting your time talking so deep and I have kind of become friends and we were constantly communicated, just try to see if we can find some ground where we're talking, you know, on the same plane.

  • And so I think I've learned a lot from him in that in that sense, and so my chapters devoted to him on that and the General Eastern wisdom traditions you know that when you die because I always ask him, Where do you go when he said he said Just the wrong question.

  • I mean, you just returned to where you were before, because when people ask me, well, what do you think happens after you die?

  • My standard come equipped is the same thing.

  • You go to the same place you were before you Reform will say, What are you talking about?

  • I wasn't anywhere before I was born, right, and you'll be nowhere after you die.

  • But for deep on time and consciousness kind of overrides the concept of time in the beginning and an end.

  • Really, your consciousness just returns to where it waas and that the this physical body and brain is just a temporary in Stan she ation of consciousness into physical B.

  • But it just going back to some other place.

  • And there's like a figure.

  • We don't have the words to even conceive of what that meets that.

  • Is that the Western language?

  • The way scientists talk, I can't really capture what he's talking about in that sense, and so that's why I think we kind of hit a histological wall there where you have to actually get into introspection, meditation, and that the deeper parts of that tradition.

  • But I've never been ableto, you know, really get into personally, so I can't say I understand it other, like a kind of see where he's coming from in that regard.

  • So So let me ask you some questions about that.

  • So the first might have to do with this idea of the ontological primacy of consciousness.

  • Say now, one of the things I've learned from studying mythology is that the mythological world view.

  • First of all, I think the mythological world view conceptualize is the world as a place to act rather than as a place of face.

  • So it's sort of like Stephen G.

  • J.

  • Gould's idea of two Magisterium don't overlap.

  • There's a moral Magisterium in a materialist, magisterial say, but it's been striking to me, looking at the archetypal foundations of mythological thinking that in the in the scientific world view, there seemed to be too fundamental causal elements.

  • You could say nature and nurture something like that.

  • Biology and society and then technically sophisticated Western academics argue about the relative contribution of each to any given existential phenomenon.

  • But in the mythological world view, there's always three actors.

  • There is nature, usually personified his female or experienced his female because personified isn't quite the right word.

  • There's culture, but there's also the individual, and the individual's seems to be the same thing as the conscious actor.

  • And that would be the hero of the Dragon slaying hero say, And there's that there is a kind of primacy given to that.

  • So in the oldest creation, Miss, you always see this interplay between the mother, often Mother Earth and the Father that sky and then the hero who separates the two and somehow brings and perversely, in some sense, although being their product clearly as the offspring is also the thing that gives rise to the Mount the same at the same time.

  • And it seems to be something that's in keeping in some sense with our lived experiences that we confront the social world, obviously and our beneficiaries and victims of it, and we confront the natural world in the same manner.

  • But we also seem to be a gent, IQ actors and without us as a gentle doctors.

  • The idea that there's a reality seems to it seems to be full of paradoxical holes like reality without a conscious actor.

  • And I think that's the sort of saying that that generates the thinking that you've referred to as characteristic of Deepak Chopra and the people who who make those sorts of claims.

  • So I mean, what what's your What's your take on consciousness and its role in being well and one and it's everything because it's what I do.

  • What I tell deep on what I write about in a chapter is that you're familiar with the anthropic principles.

  • I call this the week consciousness principal bet.

  • Without consciousness, without consciousness, nothing exists.

  • You know, this is one of the points T Park makes on for me and you personally.

  • If we're dead or were not conscious, the world doesn't exist for our brains.

  • It's gone.

  • There's nothing.

  • There's nothing, Uh, but he goes further than he says.

  • This is what I call the strong consciousness principle that that consciousness is required.

  • Our consciousness is required for material things to exist.

  • And so there I have a discussion of what Donald Hoffman, the cognitive scientist at UC Irvine, calls his, um, the interface perception theory.

  • I don't know if you're familiar with this.

  • But his analogy is like you know, your laptop screen.

  • Here you have these icons on the screen and, like the little trash can icon, it's like a trash can.

  • But of course, there's no trash.

  • Get the open, the open your laptop.

  • There's a trash can in there.

  • You know, these air, just kind of icons.

  • That represents something that we think of as a trash can.

  • And, um, you know, this is gets the problem of you know, what it's like to be a bat.

  • It was not a crowd.

  • I can't know if I bolted on some some huge years and and I had an echo location system in the neural processes to process that information.

  • And so I would have some sense of what it's like to be about, But they have everything on to actually be about that.

  • I would just be a bat, and I wouldn't even be.

  • I wouldn't even know I was a human, wondering what it's like to be a bad Okay, so that some level we can't actually no, um, you know what it's like to be something else.

  • And so you begin with Deepak and I, and these kinds of traditions like that, we hit this system a logical wall of language.

  • It's difficult to say what you mean by certain things.

  • Yes, yeah, well, especially when you get down to the fundamentals of things.

  • Well, it's pretty clear that the things that so let let's look at that user interface idea So obviously what happens when you're looking at a computer screen is that the complexity of the screen is reduced to a set of icons that conserve as tools.

  • Right?

  • And I think that that's a reasonable way of thinking about how we look at the world is the complexity of the Net.

  • Hoffman's theory is that natural selection didn't select our brains to record an accurate representation of reality, like a scientific model attempts to get ever closer to what reality is really like.

  • No natural selection just wants us to estate predators.

  • Doesn't matter.

  • What they looked like with the icon is in your brain of breath.

  • That's brain or whatever is left of you survived.

  • That's all that matters.

  • Uh uh, This is why we're so easily deceived by illusions and magic tricks and things like that that our brains aren't really wired to represent reality as it really is, whatever that means.

  • And, yes, you could say that without human consciousness, the iconic reality that we inhabit would not exist.

  • Right?

  • Okay, okay.

  • Additive that slightly.

  • Is that it is.

  • I told him so let's say you know, what's it like to be adults?

  • And I don't know.

  • Okay, so some kind of echolocation systems and his point is, Well, there, you know, sharks are dangerous, so his they avoid charts.

  • But the question is, what is a shark look like in a dolphin's brain versus looks like an armory?

  • Um, it's probably quite different, and I really have no idea what a shark looks like.

  • Two adults.

  • But I do know this.

  • There really are sharks, and they really have sharp things on one end and a tail on the other.

  • And they're eating machines and you should avoid themselves.

  • Yeah, so that's actually a weakness of the icon claim, I would say, because it looks to me like here's a twist on it.

  • What we see in our conscious experience are functional icons, but there are also low resolution representation of the things that are actually there.

  • And and I don't think that computer icons are low resolution representations of the things that air they're they're just functional icons now.

  • I might be wrong about that, because has it's hard to to conjure up that analysis on the fly.

  • But the trash can, for example, on your desktop is actually it's actually a low resolution representation of an actual trash can, not a computer trash can, even though it functions the same way.

  • So so I think I like the icon idea.

  • But I think it mrs some element of the actual relationship between the perception and the reality we definitely see in low resolution, which is why we can stand animated pictures like, say, The Simpsons, that you know where where everything is.

  • One extremely little resolution.

  • But that makes no functional difference to us whatsoever.

  • And we definitely see and hear in low resolution.

  • But the Resolute like I I think, what we see or something like Instead of icons, they're more like some nails that are functional.

  • That's a good analogy.

  • And then, well, I like it because the thumbnail the thumbnail actually is an unbiased sampling of the actual object, right, because a photograph is relatively un by a sample of an object, and you can compress it.

  • You can, you can, you can ready until it.

  • And what you're doing is blurring out distinctions between you're blurring out distinctions between different aspects of it, without without losing the relationship between the parts.

  • It's something like that.

  • Yeah, that's right.

  • Yeah, And all in, in a way, much of science operates at a metaphorical level.

  • You know that string, you know, Have you ever seen a string theory document memory that didn't have violins featured in it?

  • You know that the compute that brain is like a computer.

  • It's like a dual processor is like a quantum information those metaphors where you can't because we have to talk and you have to transfer the literal meaning of metaphors to move something from here to their original Greek.

  • So, you know, we're trying to capture some idea that's really hard to get that by something We're very familiar with.

  • Some part of the problem we have to that addresses some of the issues use dealt with with, um, some of your recent conversations with people is is we're operating on a different level So Deepak, for example, pounds me with articles about quantum physics.

  • You know, the material stuff is really just energy Adams, or mostly empty space and so forth.

  • And you know this This table is you know, it's actually mostly empty space of this is all true, but we don't live at the quantum level, right?

  • You live at the pro level where I'm sitting in a chair and I'm not passing through it because at that, at this level, you know it's not the same as at the quantum level.

  • And and And I think making that distinction helps clarify a lot of things.

  • Like when you talk about the truth to be found in biblical stories or literary stories like That's the SG or or Shakespeare or whatever and materialist scientist says, Well, no, I mean something different.

  • By truth, it's not that one of you is right.

  • The others wrong says that these are different levels are different ways of talking about Yeah, you think about them as different tool kits.

  • Yeah, that that's right.

  • Different tool kits.

  • That's right.

  • Yet not that they had it under the classic American pragmatist is that I think of these things as tools, you know, and there's a scientific tool kit and there's Ah, there's a tool kit for action in the world and they overlap, but they're not the same.

  • So, for example, I call this Alfie's error Alvy Singer, the character in Woody Allen's film um, Annie Hall.

  • And there's that funny scene where there's a flashback to where he's in childhood and he's refused to do his homework and he's depressed and his mother takes him to the doctor psychiatrist wherever he is.

  • And okay, what?

  • Why are you depressed?

  • Alvy says, Because I found out that the universe is expanding.

  • So what?

  • Because if the universe is expanding that eventually it's all gonna blow up and nothing means anything, right?

  • Mother's Name's Adam.

  • We live in Brooklyn.

  • Brooklyn's not expanding.

  • Had a mark.

  • That's a That's a nice observation.

  • I think, too, because so, Okay, let's go back to the conceptualization issues.

  • So one of the things that we've agreed on and I don't want to lose track of that threat because I think it's useful, is that we do see an iconic reality, and the icons have practical utility.

  • But they also bear some 1 to 1 correspondence with the thing in itself, and its low resolution is a nice way of thinking about.

  • So they're low resolution icons with functional utility.

  • Now the question would be so that, and what that makes clear is that without human consciousness, all that disappears, right?

  • Okay, then the question is Hartley.

  • What is there outside of that functional, iconic representation?

  • And so that would be the old question of the thing in itself, you could say, And I think you could say with some justification, that the thing in itself is in potential, something that collapses across time and space so that it's everything and nothing at the same time, which is, Well, I guess that's an Eastern claim.

  • That's one way of thinking about it.

  • It's a Taoist claim, and I like it because the problem with one of the issues that and this is associated with the idea of Brooklyn, it's not only does LB LB or Elvi Elvi Elvi, not only does LV live in Brooklyn, he lives in Brooklyn.

  • Now they're ready, right?

  • And so it's spatially located and temporally located.

  • And so his mother's objection is, well, don't pick a reference point that makes everything right now we relevant which I which is really good practical psychological advice because one of the things that leaves people down the path of nihilism is this claim that this observation that you can pick a time frame of analysis that makes your current action useless.

  • Who's gonna care in a 1,000,000 years?

  • It's like that.

  • Well, right.

  • So the B s that argues, you know, without God without some sort of external source for morality, on meaning, nothing.

  • What were nothing.

  • We do matters because of 15 billion years.

  • You know, the heat, death of the universe or whatever.

  • We don't live 15 billion years from now.

  • We live now here, and what we do doesn't matter, you know, So, like, this would argue, you know, theocracy problem.

  • You know, without God, there's no right or wrong.

  • Whatever Stalin did or Hitler dead is perfectly fine because of the heat death, the universe.

  • No, it's not fine because the people that are suffering in the Gulag Archipelago are in the gas chambers that house fits.

  • They're not thinking about 15 billion years from now, they're living right here.

  • Right now.

  • The torture is really doing wrong by these standards again, the level at which we're talking about is everything.

  • And this is why I'm concerned about the obsession with people obsessing too much about the afterlife.

  • Not just religious people, but scientists.

  • So what, I call it a the, uh the afterlife for atheists is you know, the core of my book is really about all the cryonics people in the trance humanists and the singular Terrians and the extra Peons.

  • That and the people that are gonna upload your mind into a computer and turn it out.

  • Ray, Kurzweil and all these guys, you know, they're they're almost gurus.

  • When you go to these conferences, you know, it's like we get to live forever.

  • We are the generation that gets to live for yes, like some of them think they're the They're the generation that's going to Dunstan.

  • She ate the dandy in the form of of computational entities as well.

  • That's right.

  • I mean, Kurzweil even has a funny line about that, you know?

  • You know?

  • Is there a guy?

  • Well, there's going to be pretty soon.

  • As soon as we hit the singularity, right?

  • I've been to the singularity summits in it reminds me when I was really just, you know, I used to be evangelical.

  • I went to Pepperdine University ER, which is a church of Christ Cole.

  • I was really into it and going to church and all that stuff, and I go to the singularity some and I was like, Why am I back in church right now?

  • Here's Ray Kurzweil guru up there telling us we are the first generation that will live forever and you operate a gray, This radical life extension.

  • The scientists, you know, he's on record saying the first person to live 1000 years is is born now is alive now, right?

  • So okay, so hard and issue.

  • There's two elements to They have an issue that we could discuss then, and one is the belief in the existence of heaven and the other is the depositing of heaven as a name.

  • Yes, and those air interestingly related.

  • So from my perspective, from so one of the things, as far as I've been able to tell, one of the things that allows us to transform the reality that's too complicated to perceive into these functional, low resolution icons, let's say, is a name you have to aim right and you have to aim with your eyes.

  • In fact, we're also extraordinarily good at detecting how other people aim with their eyes.

  • Yes, so and right.

  • The question is always well, where should you aim?

  • And the answer to that archetypal Lee, I would say and biologically, for that matter, is that you should aim up, because why the hell would you aim down?

  • Down is hell right down is where the suffering is.

  • Down is where the malevolence is.

  • So you came up and architecturally up is heaven.

  • And so one of the things that I can't It seems to me that there's some possibility that it was impossible for human beings to discover the future, which is something that we seem to have done.

  • Maybe that was pre frontal extension, and that was that.

  • The expansion of the prefrontal cortex and it's deep wiring with the visual cortex that actually enabled us to foresee the future.

  • Something like that.

  • I don't know if you can foresee the future without without stumbling upon the idea of heaven at the same time, because heaven in that sense, becomes the best possible future.

  • And then you're aiming out you're aiming at a better future.

  • And because you're ending at a better future, you're kind of compelled to also conceptualize, at least in principle, like the platonic ideal of the future.

  • And so then that future potential starts to become kind of a reality.

  • It's something like that.

  • Yeah, I think that's a super good point.

  • My again, my concern about two obsessing too much about the next life is you're gonna miss out on this life, which is where you live right now.

  • Uh, but that's different from meaning at it.

  • I mean, you know, I wrote a book on moral progress tomorrow.

  • Are you aiming for incremental improvements in civil rights and health and longevity and and, you know, ridding ourselves of disease and or these air all admirable goals.

  • And we should keep doing that, aiming for something.

  • And I do like the metaphor up because it is.

  • Maybe it's because we're a social hierarchical species.

  • Yeah, well, I think that's why the pyramids, I think I believe that.

  • I think that's what the pyramids represent with her.

  • With the gold capped right, it's right.

  • And, uh, and the Washington Monument is the same thing, right?

  • Packed with aluminum or the pyramid of hierarchy of needs.

  • And so on a T end of my chapter on Monotheism versions of Kevin I float.

  • The idea probably won't be accepted by you.

  • Can jellicles environmentalists that that But you know, when Jesus talked about the kingdom is within, uh, he mentions this not as not as often as I would have liked, but I think he's referring to the fact that heaven is within us in the sense that we should be aiming to improve ourselves.

  • And you know that the Christians of an atheist conflicted over this This passage where he says, Ah, you know, Matthew 16.

  • 26.

  • I say unto you there some standing here which will not taste death till they see the son of man coming in his kingdom.

  • And, you know, course atheists go.

  • Huh?

  • Uh, he's still not here.

  • Uh, but what if he meant something else?

  • That heaven is not a place to go, but a way to be here and now I'm very very, uh what would you call?

  • That's a viewpoint that I think is very much worth pursuing.

  • I would also, but I also think there's something deeply strange about that, too, because, um, I think that if a psychological state becomes profound enough, it starts to become a social state.

  • And so I would say that that Kingdom of God, that's within which is something Tolstoy wrote a lot about.

  • By the way, that was, Ah, book that was You wrote a book called The Kingdom of God Is Within Us and that profoundly influenced Mahatma Gandhi, by the way.

  • And they had a lengthy correspondence, which was part of the reason that Gandhi became a non used on violent resistance right in its fight against the English, which was quite interesting.

  • But I think that there is.

  • There is there's look, look, it's something like this.

  • Maybe when you go to a concert, it's a great concert and you're having a very profound psychological experience of unity and harmony, which, of course is what you get in the concert.

  • But if the experience is profound enough psychologically and individually, it also starts to encompass an envelope, the people around you and so I think the Kingdom of God that Christ was talking about with something like This is why I like jumpy a J so much It's something like the PJD Nicola berated state where things are working out really well for you and your deeply immersed in a meaningful experience.

  • But at the same time that meaning is structured so that it's Maxime beneficial for the people who are immediately around you and for the people who are distantly related to you.

  • And so everything stacks up and something something that's that's something like the idea of the ladder to heaven or the stairway to heaven that everything's stacking up properly.

  • And then there's a there is.

  • See, I think when people experience that and this is where the metaphysics touches the material, I think that would be better.

  • Yes, exactly that precisely that yes, precisely about being in.

  • You noticed that the demons are upside down, going down, right, right, which is exactly right that that's exactly exactly the right way to conceptualize it.

  • So I think that when people have an experience of that stacking of meaning, if they also have an intimation of immortality that goes along with that that's embody and that that's partly why the metaphysical speculations about the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven have emerged because it's not just conceptual right there.

  • There is embodied experience, and people report the same thing when they have transcendental experiences of various sorts.

  • Those and we know from a scientific perspective that those could be very reliably induced with the use of agents like psilocybin.

  • And, you know, I have been really fascinated by what's been happening at Johns Hopkins Hospital with the psilocybin experimenters because one of the most recent things they showed was that if you take people dying of cancer and you give them cell assignment and they have a mystical experience, which is something like an experience of the kingdom of God on earth, but also eternally at the same time that they lose their fear of death or that at least it's much modified it, you know, that's a hell of a finding that's really you can't just you can't just walk away from that easily because that's a hell of a thing to treat.

  • Well, yeah, I have a chapter on that in happens on Earth on near death experiences.

  • It s O.

  • But we're talking about two different things.

  • You know, the transitioning from life to death in the most pain free or anxiety reduce state is more is progress, you know, medical progress, psychological progress or whatever.

  • And I'm all for, you know, is psilocybin does it or whatever.

  • Um, then great.

  • You should do that.

  • But there's a lot of people who claimed more than that that this is opening the doors of perception into another world, right actually out there and that those of us had they have not taken asset, but we just simply can't know.

  • So now we Now we get at this question of truth.

  • You know, it's one of my columns in Scientific American recently wrote called What is Truth anyway?

  • I mean, when I say like I prefer dark, dark chocolate and you prefer milk chocolate.

  • You know, there's no truth that is to be discovered.

  • Yours is true for you, Mind street for me or I say Stairway to Heaven is the greatest rock song of all time and you say no, no, Freebird is better than Stairway to Heaven, and we argue about that.

  • But there's no no experiment.

  • We're gonna run.

  • And so as we start to move along these lines, like when deep October tells me meditation works Okay, so it works for you or it doesn't work for me.

  • Okay, Those air still in that state of internal truths.

  • But what we want to know in sciences doesn't work for everybody.

  • Or, you know, 67% of people that do an hour of meditation a day under these conditions have reduced stress hormones and blood pressure and so on.

  • And it's a measurable way that's different than just an internal state.

  • So when we're talking about again, just, you know, you know, working on torque for striving to better ourselves or some kind of heaven if you mean just metaphorically so that I could better myself That's different than there was an actual place you can go to That's going to be there after we die.

  • And so I think this is where you know scientists go.

  • You also start messing about the idea of place in a way that that that's the problem with having discussions about fundamental realities.

  • And, you know, when you said another thing that Christ said was that the Kingdom of Heaven has spread upon earth, men do not see it right on, and that's that's something that's akin to the idea of the Kingdom of God is within you, although it's it's a strange twist on it because it also adds an element of externality, or physicality to it and an element of immediacy, not something that's forestalled into the future.

  • But I wonder.

  • See, in my wilder moments of speculation, I have this notion that if things stack up properly, so imagine that you're immersed in a very deeply meaningful experience and it's it's operating.

  • It's indicating that harmony has been established between multiple levels of being simultaneously.

  • I wonder if that can.

  • I wonder if that could put you in a place that's profound enough or deep enough so that the structure of time and space it's still starts the warp around that I mean, I know that that's, Ah, I can't formulate it well, But there's there's something There's something about it.

  • It seems to me to be correct about that, because people have intimations of member of immortality, and they have intimations of heavenly and hellish abodes as well.

  • And they're not.

  • They're not the scent.

  • They're not the simple kind of rational, even rational fundamentalist beliefs that often people talk about when they're discussing religious belief there more reflected in direct experience, and it's not easy to make sense of them.

  • Well, when you delve into the literature on Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their versions of the afterlife heaven, they're quite different.

  • And the Jews were far less obsessed with going someplace after death.

  • In fact, originally they were going no place at all.

  • Show was just nothing.

  • It was just returned to where you were before you're alive.

  • Just no place on so so that that religion is far more focused on the here and now like way have a moral duty to help people, the poor and so on now and to live better lives and more lives of dignity and honor and morality.

  • Now and Christianity really started off more like that kind of morphed over the the centuries, and particularly in fundamentalist and evangelicals in the 20th century toward this place.

  • We're gonna go running it right now or we die.

  • You kind of have the schism in Christianity today between the and of the fundamentalist that they're constantly talking about the afterlife and accepting Jesus.

  • And they're focused on missionary working into burning people versus say, maybe the Rick Warren's of the world that want to put their money in a soup kitchens and helping the floor.

  • And Christians have a moral duty to, you know, help those in need and and not so much focused on the next life's.

  • And it's funny because they're they're a real dangerous associated with both.

  • Those kinds of conceptualization mean you alluded to one danger that was associated with Let's call those who are concerned more with the immediate present.

  • And that's the that's starting to manifest itself in these in these technological immortal ists there saying Well, we should transform the nature of being extraordinarily radically right here and now so that we have heaven and immortality here.

  • You think?

  • Well, what if we lose by doing that?

  • You know, And that's a question that's really worth asking, because if we're trans human than we lose being human, and it may be that we actually don't want to lose being human, even though being human means suffering and malevolent something like that.

  • It's a very hard question, but then the Christians, this is what we're nature went after the Christians with such an axe, he said.

  • Well, if you despise the current world and you leave everything to be rectified in the afterlife.

  • Then you just abandon life itself and you're really traders.

  • Toe life s o how to steer through those 2 to 2 shoals.

  • Let's say is there are two cliffs.

  • That's a very difficult proposition.

  • Well, it's the message, my message in the book to to the singular Terrians and the cryonics and trance Few Minutes and Solan is, um, you know, I'm glad you're working on this problem, you know, But because of excited Shermer, don't you want to live to be 1000 years?

  • And my responses Look, just get me the 90 without cancer and 100 without Alzheimer's on 110 without being plugged into machines, line in a bed because that's not a life's.

  • And and so I'm glad people are working on, like, What's the best diet?

  • How much now?

  • Yes, what can we do to improve our memory and saw that's all great, and I'm glad that our do them and I'm black first while is now that, you know, chief engineer of all Google.

  • I mean, he's got some resource is to do something about this, But if this focus on living 1000 years.

  • Your missus first, you may miss the little incremental things we could do, but also you're missing out.

  • Now there's this smell my right about in the book on Ray Kurzweil.

  • It's a little kind of biographical film of him, transcendent man, and he's constantly talking about living forever and so on.

  • And he's obsessed with his father.

  • His father died when he was 51.

  • The father was 50 ones and ready was, you know, it kind of missed out having a father figure because the father was always working and Ray was a real entrepreneur achiever from his teenage years.

  • So he was always working, and the film kind of follows him around, collecting everything he can about his father, and he keeps it in the basement of his house.

  • He wants to resurrect his father in a computer.

  • It's like old boy.

  • Freud would have a field day with this guy, but there's something there's something going on there, this sort of rose focus up.

  • I see this this this strange dichotomy and attitude that you just describe even characterizing you.

  • I see that my life, because I'm very interested in technologies that stave off aging dietary manipulations.

  • And I have this machine in my basement that's, Ah, intense pulsed light, late, intense, pulsed light machine.

  • That's unbelievable.

  • Skin rejuvenating like it's It's an absolute miracle, this machine and you'll take It'll take sun damage from your skin completely and force rejuvenation.

  • Its like its uses, like using photo shop on your skin.

  • It's amazing.

  • And but But And so I think, Well, isn't it interesting to do everything possible to prolong youth in life?

  • A.

  • At the same time, there's another part of me that's thinking Well, this is something I wrote about it in this new book that I'm publishing.

  • I was thinking about Socrates and his ability to accept his death.

  • No.

  • And what socket he seems to have revealed in his acceptance of his death was that if you live your life properly, then you maybe you lived your life.

  • In some sense, you've exhausted it in some sense.

  • And the question is, if you if you lived 1000 years, well, what exactly what it is?

  • What exactly would you do?

  • You know, like I've had kids and I loved having kids, but I wouldn't have them again like I wouldn't do that again.

  • I don't think and I have a grandchild and that's fine.

  • But that's a new thing.

  • And like I've had a career, I get older.

  • The idea of having 10 more careers seems it's not like I'm not interested in it, but it doesn't grip me the same way that it would have saved 20 years ago.

  • And so I wonder.

  • Like I wonder if it is the case that life is in some sense structured so that its fin itude is necessary and not something that should be, well, casually transcended.

  • Let's say, Well, the trans humanists would respond to that.

  • You're just used to this idea of only living 80 90 years, and then you're done, that we would adjust to that Well, maybe three other.

  • Yeah, the question would be, though, who would be the we that would adjust to that because, well, yes, you would no longer okay to get their way would really no longer be human.

  • Three Idea of the trans humanists and cig military in people is is truly you're not human anymore.

  • We have brain look like the cochlear implant for hearing is a kind of brain transplant device.

  • Well, they want to ramp that up and put chips in your cortex.

  • And you know it's essentially have Wikipedia in your brain for instant access.

  • And so it would truly bring new meaning to what it means to be human.

  • Okay, yes, well.

  • And then you could also argue that that's a form of death.

  • Because if you transform yourself so radically that you're unrecognizable, then what?

  • Where's the continuity with what you once were?

  • You know, this is one of the reasons I have some real sympathy for many reasons.

  • Many reasons for this but one of them that I have very much sympathy for the idea, the Christian idea that is associated with the mortality of the resurrection of the body.

  • Because the Christians insisted that this is not some sort of abstract lights like it's, it's not uploaded into a computer.

  • It's not blowing out all of your limitations.

  • Now, you know, you might ask what the resurrected body would be.

  • And of course, that's a particularly that's perfectly fine question.

  • But it doesn't It doesn't that doesn't move you around.

  • The fact that there was a question that was really to be grappled with their because what the Christians were trying to do was to have their taken either to in some sense and to say, Look, there's some absolute utility to the limitation that's imposed upon you by a mortal frame, right?

  • That's the characteristic element of being human and that perhaps there's a way of having that in transcending it up the same time.

  • Now, what that would look like is obviously by no means all e deal with that Evans on her to have a chapter on the soul.

  • And, you know, post day card Christians became more duelist.

  • Before that, they were more focused on the physical resurrection of the buy.

  • There are still some Christian sects today think that physically be resurrected, but most, moreover, most of them are duelists, and it's just it's just this kind of non physical thing that goes and and beat It is with God and Jesus and so on.

  • But, you know, they actually debate this.

  • And so the problem.

  • It's the question of identity, the problem identity.

  • Well, if you're physically resurrected in heaven, what's what's there?

  • How old are you?

  • It's something I actually have an answer you're 30.

  • You know, that's like the ideal age distinguished and I suppose, mentally to be threatened.

  • And also Jesus was 30 right?

  • You know, maybe.

  • Okay, so but But then the question is is And I ask this question for the mind uploaders.

  • The trance humanist is like there is no fixed self.

  • First of all, all your cells and near the end, almost all the atoms in your body or recycle about every decade or so.

  • So there is no defined physical self of you, you know that he sees ship.

  • You replace all the wood on the ship, we still call it can anticipate of structure.

  • That was Schrodinger's turn, right?

  • Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  • So Okay, so it's the pattern of information that is your memory.

  • Is your mem self memory self okay?

  • Yes.

  • Yeah.

  • Okay, that's better.

  • But at what age?

  • Because I have memories now that I didn't have when I was 30.

  • So what happens if I'm resurrected at 8 30?

  • Where's all the memories of my last?

  • I'm 63 now.

  • The last 33 years of memories of it.

  • I want those two and so OK, you can have all those memories But wait.

  • The memories I have now at 63 of when I was 30 are very different than the memories when I was 30 of what I was like that time.

  • And so there's no fixed set of memories even that represents you, because those are constantly edited and changed and reinterpreted.

  • It's like, OK, now I understand.

  • When I had that 10 years as a bike racer in the 19 eighties, I was just sort of going through doing my thing.

  • And now I see in context what that meant for my life, but I didn't know it at the time.

  • That's true for everything we do.

  • That's why I was laughing.

  • People write memoirs in their twenties or thirties.

  • It's like, How can you write a memoir?

  • You have no idea what you're doing now is going to be in 30 years and religious.

  • So both both scientific attempts at immortality or the afterlife, the order and religious that they have the same problem.

  • You know what is up there that's being resurrected because there is no fixed self.

  • It's a constantly dynamic changing system and then there's one more problem that I deal with the point of Yussef Appeal Visa.

  • You know there's you and I love looking out through your eyes.

  • And you, Jordan, go to sleep tonight You wake up tomorrow morning and you're groggy for a few minutes.

  • But it's your city.

  • Your point of view returns and you know the singularity people.

  • They think we'll copy all your memories and put him in a computer.

  • Well, turn it on and you'll wake up.

  • You'll be looking out through the little camera.

  • Hold their like Johnny Depp in transcendence on.

  • You'll be in there.

  • No, I don't think so.

  • Uh, why would your point of view all of a sudden leaps from your current body into the computer in the same sense that instead of sacrificing your brain and slicing it up and scanning, this is current thoughts scanning every synapse?

  • What if 100 years from now we had a sophisticated F M R I machine that could scan your brain and scan every single synapse and reproduce it?

  • We had a computer big enough.

  • Moore's Law W.

  • And selling It would be enough just to reproduce your entire connect up and turned it up.

  • But you, Jordan Peters, they're still standing there right next to the computer, and they turned it on.

  • You're not all of a sudden.

  • Oh, yeah, Absolutely.

  • Well, there's other problems without two.

  • Is that you know, if I remember correctly, you have more neurons in your autonomic nervous system than you have in your central nervous system.

  • Well, you know those man and I like your beard on your brain isn't in your head, Not just your brain.

  • No, no, Zo, you haven't extended, buddy.

  • So you to the crime Ionics people, They lop off the head.

  • We're just gonna clone your butt.

  • Okay?

  • This is getting too complicated.

  • You really need the whole body.

  • Yes.

  • Well, that's again.

  • That's the physical resurrection issue.

  • Is that the idea?

  • That And I think that you put your finger on the flaw in in the in the in the new immortal in the new immortality crowd, you know, they think they really yard Cartesian.

  • They think of your consciousness is something that's well, they're confused about, in some sense, because they think of it as a kind of soul, which would be a pattern.

  • And that pattern is only in Stan.

  • She aided in the brain's like, Well, physiologically, that's just not the case.

  • It's like, What about the hormones?

  • What about There's a lot of things going on in the brain that aren't easily reducible to synaptic patterns, especially when you consider also its connection with the body.

  • And you have to consider that, and so even worse than that, because not only are we all of those things, we are also social beings.

  • And so there's all the interactions we have and have had with all the other people in our lives or neighbors or strangers or whatever.

  • So you have all those binary digits that have to be captured, of all the interactions going back for your whole life, not just your life, but all of this social, cultural, political, economic forces that have been grinding along for centuries, that shape who we are and the kind of world we live in.

  • You know, if you're gonna create a virtual reality, a Holodeck that degrades all that you know, it's, uh, this would be a huge computer.

  • Essentially, it would be the universe is like you would need, but we have enough with the map.

  • That's Justus.

  • Biggest the territory.

  • That's right.

  • Yeah, that's right, That's a big problem.

  • You wrote a book about that way.

  • You're gonna fold it up.

  • Where you gonna put it?

  • That's the big girl like that, Stephen.

  • Right line about it.

  • I got a map in the United States actual size.

  • Yeah, it's really hard to fold up.

  • Exactly.

  • It's exactly so.

  • Oh, so let me ask you a couple of more personal questions, if you don't mind.

  • Now, you you mentioned, um, briefly during are during our conversation that you know, you you were you're from a pretty fundamentalist Christian background.

  • You became a skeptic.

  • And you've been pursuing that with with with?

  • Well, adamantly, let's say for a very long time.

  • So two questions is what what put you on that path And what do you think you're positive function as a skeptic is, Yeah.

  • So, first of all night, my family wasn't religious at all.

  • They weren't anti religious to just wasn't a thing.

  • I became interested in it in the early seventies, when I was in high school, which was sort of the early development of the evangelical movement United States.

  • So I called born again movement and there was no affiliation with any church in particular.

  • We all recognize that, you know, organized religion was probably not all that great.

  • So just sort of a one on one.

  • It's just you and Jesus, you in the Bible, you and God and so on.

  • And that was that whole, uh, you know, Jesus Christ superstar time and left.

  • So But I took it really seriously.

  • And I went to Pepper Dine and I two courses in the Old Testament New Testament.

  • I read everything C.

  • S.

  • Lewis wrote to the course of the rides.

  • I was into it that, you know, peppered on you're in the bubble of, you know, the Christian world do this totally consistent.

  • It's internally coherent until you're outside the bubble.

  • So when I went to ah secular university and to study experimental psychology um, not only was that more of a grounding

Okay, So I'm talking today with Dr Michael Shermer.

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懷疑論者邁克爾-謝爾默博士的 "人間天堂 (Heavens on Earth with skeptical Dr. Michael Shermer)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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