New Books in Neuroscience: The Miraculous Mind (with Paul Bloom)

Transcript

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The classic example is saying Augustine going with some friends into an orchard and stealing some pears and what made this perverse for Augustine is he wasn't hungry.

He had nothing against the owner of the orchard.

He just wasn't sure why he did it.

Yeah, and and so I think we do a lot of things that way and I don't think it's I don't think it's you know again, I don't think it's mystical or magical.

I think it's often expressions of human desires that we don't take as seriously as we should like the desire to be autonomous.

Maybe that desire to be unpredictable to others.

Today I get to talk with the eminent psychologist Paul Bloom of Yale University and the University of Toronto about the human brain, about morality, empathy, perversity, all the things on Almost Good Catholic.

[Music] Welcome to Almost Good Catholics, a conversation about theology and apologetics about religion and history and culture.

I'm your host, Chris Adinietz, and I get to ask interesting people who've thought about the big questions to share their conclusions.

To explain what we know, how we know it, why we think we know it.

I hope the format, in relationship and dialogue and back and forth may help us approach the truth and have a really good time doing it.

Should you want to take the conversation a step further, please email AlmostGoodCatholics@gmail.com.

I have the great pleasure of speaking to Paul Bloom.

He is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and professor emeritus at Yale.

He studies how children and adults make sense of the world with a special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, exactly what I want to ask him about, and fiction and art.

He's written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science and the Popular Press, The New York Times, The Guardian, New Yorker, The Atlantic.

He's got seven books.

The latest one is Psych, The Story of the Human Mind.

The book is a lively introduction to psychology and a discussion of the state of the field, and it follows from his many years of teaching introductory psychology.

A million people have taken his class on Coursera, and I have audited his class on Yale Open Courses.

Paul is a brilliant teacher.

He talks to us.

Really the same way he talks to the kids at Yale is open-minded, educated generalists with no expert knowledge assume.

So welcome, Professor Bloom.

Thanks for having me on.

I'm looking forward to talking with you.

I think this conversation will take me in directions I don't normally go, so I'm very grateful for the opportunity.

Wonderful.

Well, the honors mind.

Do you have a joke you'd like to start off with?

It's kind of a Jewish joke, though.

It has no Jewish content.

There's all guys driving, and his wife phones him up and says, "Moshe, moeshe, oh my God, you went on the highway?"

He says, "Yeah."

And she says, "Be very careful.

I heard there's some crazy guy.

He's driving in the wrong direction."

And he said, "One crazy guy, there's a hundred of them."

Maybe it's a metaphor for those of us who have unpopular views.

Yeah.

Well, okay, let's start there.

How do you understand belief?

You study religion and you study it in a psychological point of view, and I take it that you yourself are not, you're culturally Jewish, but you do not believe?

That's right.

I'm culturally Jewish.

I affiliate as a Jew.

I describe myself as Jewish, but I don't have religious beliefs in the same sense most of my family does.

And you're asking a wonderful question.

I think the way I would answer it is, and actually let me just step back, which is the question you're asking about the nature of religious belief is, in some sense, independent of the questions that people really want to ask.

Which is, are these beliefs true?

To what extent can we trust them?

What extent are their foundations of life?

To what extent do you capture deep wisdom?

Regardless of whether or not we believe in a God or we believe in any sort of religion, the question still exists.

What's the nature of these beliefs?

Some beliefs are true.

Some beliefs are false.

We talk about the character separate from them.

I guess what I would say to answer your question is that religious beliefs tend to come in two flavors, though it's difficult to clearly pull them apart sometimes.

One is culturally specific religious beliefs.

Belief like, I don't know, Christ died for one's sins, or heaven looks like this, hell looks like that.

Those are beliefs that are emerged through culture.

If you have them, it's because you learned them.

Because you learned them on your parents' name, or you learned them in Sunday school, or from popular culture.

But those are beliefs that emerge through culture.

Putting aside the question of how true they are, that's where those beliefs come from.

The second sort of belief, which I've been interested in as a psychologist, are sort of more universal beliefs.

So my very first popular book was called "Daycard's Baby."

And in there I argued that we're natural born dualists, that the idea that the body and the soul are separate, that we're not our bodies, is something we're kind of born with.

Maybe not in exactly that form, but it's fundamental to us.

I also think, as another case, that a sort of common sense creationism, an idea that complicated things, including natural things, have an intentional designer.

That that too isn't a product of a culture.

It's something that emerges in every culture because it captures how people naturally think.

Okay, so those are two different ways to approach it.

Now, I can imagine, right, there's this, whenever you go on YouTube and you see people debating religion, they always go to, like, "Well, we only choose religion because it helps us explain the unexplainable."

So I think it's kind of a childish approach because now we're learning more and more things, and yet we still believe, and I think this is the dualistic inclination we all have, you know, because I'm around when I'm dreaming and where do I go when I die.

And okay, so maybe there's no water above the heavens, as it describes in Genesis, because I understand how the water cycle works.

And yet, I think, I know in my heart of hearts that I'm more than what I think I am.

I once told a story where I was at a Ramadan thing in West Africa when I was a young fellow, and they cut open a goat, and I really saw the anatomy of this goat, you know, and it was like, "That looks a lot like a person."

And yet, I am not located, like, I could tell in my heart, in my bones, in my marrow, as well as in my brain that that's not, that thing is not me.

I'm something else.

Now, that's just an intuition.

There's nothing I can prove or disprove.

So it's just a question of faith or what.

I think the intuition you're describing, you know, really eloquently, is a very powerful intuition that people possess.

I think people have the sense that they could leave their body, they could leave it during dreams, they, we enjoy stories where people drift off from one body to another.

There are universal beliefs in reincarnation, going to a spirit world, or certainly life after death, that all presuppose that what we are is separate from our physical self.

So again, stepping back from whether or not it's true, I don't think it is true, it does seem to be a powerful and persistent belief that people have.

And I think just to go back to what you said before, I'm also sort of suspicious of Silver Bullet, do we call them Magic Bullet?

Singular explanations of religion.

I think religion is very complicated and has many parts.

And the story for why all around we do certain rituals and sacrifices may be different from the story for why we have certain religious beliefs.

And that may be different from the story of why we deal with heretics in one way and the story of how we deal with outgroups.

I think religion is an extremely complicated thing.

And, you know, somebody says, I'll just tell you where it all comes from.

I have this huge suspicion of those sort of simple arguments.

Yeah, one of the interesting things you said, because you also have a podcast with your friend and colleague Dave Pizarro about this book, Psych, that follows it chapter by chapter.

So people who buy the book can also listen to you talk through it.

And in one of them, I think I might be mixing up where I heard you say this, but you were explaining to Dave that you had a colleague at Yale a while ago who was a neuroscientist and she herself was a person of great faith.

And how did you talk to her about that?

What did she say to you when you guys had the same, like, OK, so I understand how these neurons are firing in my brain.

I understand this neural network, or at least I understand the mechanics of it, even though I don't understand why it's doing the things it's doing.

What did this neuroscientist have to say to you about it?

I wish I could give you a better answer for this, but I'm not an aggressive confrontational person.

Oh, OK.

And most people, theologians are often the exception to this, but most people have religion in a special place in their life.

And talking to them where you challenge their religious beliefs or call them to task or say, how do you justify this?

How do you make this compatible?

It's a lot like saying, you know, well, you seem to think your kid is terrific, but I got another view.

Let me tell you.

Yeah.

And that's just not my role.

I've talked to people of faith who are willing to, who are interested, almost professionally interested in debating these things.

But she wasn't, and that was fine.

Yeah.

No, for me, it's tricky because my intuition, my sense of faith comes from things that are very subjective and personal.

And it could be I was just saying this prayer, and then pow, the sun came out, or I heard a certain song come on the radio, or the wind just brushed against my cheek.

I once had a moment where I was my littlest daughter at this time had swallowed a penny and had to spend the night at the ER.

And I had, and I had, I was under the impression I'd left my Bible with us with, you know, some prayers in it at the church, but I was mistaken.

And as I was driving to the hospital, I was, I was thinking to myself, oh, if only I brought my Bible because there was a certain prayer I had printed and I wanted it at that moment.

And a pedestrian walked out and I stepped on the brakes and the Bible was not at the church where I thought I had left it.

It was under the seat of my car and it slid out from under the seat of the car and the prayer slid out from the cover and landed on top of my foot.

And I told everybody who was willing to listen, this miracle just happened and they're like, okay, sure, sure, America.

Okay, sure.

Or maybe you just left the book under the chair and then you have to stop because the guy was crossing the street.

And I feel that like what's convincing to me is not going to persuade anybody else.

And even if I, you know, thump on a podium with my, you know, Professor Bloom, Professor Bloom, don't you, don't you understand?

You know, sometimes I feel like I'm the Russell Crowe character in "Beautiful Mind" who just sees patterns that are not there.

But for me, it's quite compelling.

It's a nice case.

You know, you tell me that story.

That's a nice story.

I can imagine it being, you know, very moving and very, you know, just at a time actually when you're experiencing some pain, beyond the sort of, you know, the seemingly minor miracle aspect of it, it must have been nice during a time when you're worried about your daughter to have to realize, oh, I'm not alone here.

You know, I'm giving some help with this.

And my feeling is it sort of depends what you want to do with this.

If you wanted to say, well, I'm now going to make an argument that that cannot be explained in natural terms.

Well, you know, then it gets, then it's sort of in the same vein as somebody tells me how their dreams regularly predict the future, or their fortune teller knows everything, or their psychic knows everything, which is, I think I'm quite comfortable to live alone.

And other people are probably comfortable that my own delusions are, I don't want to weigh too heavily on that, on my own pattern recognition.

Unless I wanted to make something of it.

Unless I sort of demanded, you better see my psychic, you know, illustrate you.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's a, there's an example of Emil Zola who went to Lourdes, where there were, you know, a number of miracles happening.

And he would see people go into the water and come out healed.

And he'd say, well, I still don't believe it.

You know, I just saw it.

And I still don't believe it because there's some other explanation.

I don't know what the explanation is.

But I, you know, it's, I don't buy it.

Fish three days old.

I don't buy it.

Then again, there is the line about the person who, who insisted they don't believe in a good luck charms and other person.

It doesn't matter.

They work whether you believe in them or not.

Yeah.

Well, okay.

So another central point, you begin and end this book, thinking about Kant, who says, two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe.

They more often and steadily we reflect on them.

The starry heavens about me and the moral law within me.

And you start off where you dropped off your kid at a birthday party and you're just reading an astrophysics book under a tree.

And you're so delighted with wonder about the mechanics of the glorious and vast, vast universe around us.

And I feel that way about the brain too, that we can understand, you know, the forces of gravity at the expanding universe and how I don't know, like a red dwarf, red giant turns into a white dwarf and all that.

On the other hand, when we understand the mechanics of how the universe works, we still don't understand why the universe works.

And when we understand that, okay, so your brain is, you know, 86 billion neurons or whatever firing and sending a little teeny tiny neurotransmitters across a teeny tiny synaptic gap.

So, okay, I understand the mechanics, but that doesn't give me the reason why and same thing with the big bang.

So we can rewind the tape to the moment of creation, but there still is a moment of creation.

So how can that be without a creator?

How can the brain be without a creator?

Yeah, so we often deal with why questions, you know, why does memory work that way?

Why do we see the world as we do?

Why do we have the motions that we do?

And, you know, as you know, there's a science of such why questions, evolutionary theory.

So, you know, when faced with a threat that could kill you, there's actually a really good story for why you fill with fear rather than with lust or amusement, you know, because, you know, such ancestors who found us extremely amusing did not pass on their genes to those later on.

Now, you can then say, well, fine, psychology raises why questions, biology solves them, and then you go back to where does biology come from, and why does natural selection work that way?

And sooner or later, I agree, explanation has to end.

Maybe you and I would disagree about the extent to which positing a creator actually solves a problem or just further pushes it back.

Yeah.

Well, at a point, we're just quibbling over the term because clearly you agree that there was nothing and there was something.

But when your kids ask you, well, how come there was nothing and then there was something?

What do you tell them?

I would tell them, I don't know.

But then, but then, but my kids are very sharp.

So he said, well, you know, there was a God or create some God or set of God or something like that.

And they created it.

My kids would have been said, well, yeah, where did those gods come from?

You haven't answered my question.

You gave me a different something.

Yeah.

Well, I suppose it's because we started with something that was eternal and independent, whereas the universe is neither internal nor independent.

Or is it?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Talk to a cosmologist.

But the goal is that there are a lot of why questions about genuine mysteries about random and I try to be honest about the limits of our field, both both the limits in the sense of stuff.

We just don't quite know yet.

We don't really understand depression very well, for instance, we don't understand how genes, court genes cause differences in personality.

And then there's like genuine mysteries, like how to brain gives rise to consciousness.

But I do think that that we really do.

There is a science of why questions.

If even if I concede your point that in the end, science is going to fail us at the very beginning of the universe.

Fine.

But at the level I'm interested in, we really do have a science of testable experimental why questions with good mechanisms and good understanding.

Yeah.

That's true.

Maybe it's just above our pay grade.

And I'm not worried.

You know, I sort of, I like to believe that when we all die and go meet our maker, whatever that looks like, I am sure that God did not set up a trap where he's like, you lost your chance to believe when those young people knocked at your door and said, do you believe that was your one shot?

I have a feeling that when the game is over and the curtain comes down, you'll be you'll be allowed to make up your mind with with with the with the information you get.

Once we once we leave this body, though, I don't think you believe that you ever leave this body.

You're gone.

You're gone.

And that's it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's sad, isn't it?

It's a little sad.

It's a scarcity increases the value.

That's that's a nice thought.

I know some philosophers argued that we were to be truly immortal.

Nothing would have much meaning.

Yeah.

Well, that's why we need the illusion.

That's why we need the curtain to say like this is your shot at this.

You know, I like to tell my kids it's like playing a board game or a Dungeons and Dragons game and you can be very much invested in your level four Elf Paladin.

And when a dragon eats him, you're still done.

You're still at the table and you still get to go have your snack.

And it doesn't that doesn't make that game less valuable.

In fact, in many ways, it's practice for whatever.

You know, I don't understand why we're here.

I suppose we all quickly get to the point where like I just I don't know why.

And so it becomes a question of faith.

Yeah, that's fair enough.

There's a lot of interesting things in this lovely in this lovely book and one of the comments you have about religion.

You cite an article by Angus Deton and Arthur Stone called Two Happiness Puzzles.

And you said that religious people in a secular country like probably this one tend to be more happy than people than the people who aren't.

And at the same time, people who live in a religious country tend to be less happy.

And so I was wondering what that's all about.

Is it the difference of a free choice and dissent or what's going on?

So I would frame it somewhat different.

I don't typically think of the United States as as a secular country.

It's a country where the majority of people, depending on your polls, but use the vast majority of people believe in God.

And maybe now it's just, you know, 85% or something where people tend to identify, except for the very young where the numbers tend to drop.

But they identify as Christian or Jewish or Muslim.

There are, I think, more secular countries in the world, but in the country like the United States, we're pretty religious.

And I'm pushing that point because that's when the data were collected, the argument that people like Deacon and before him, Robert Putnam, the sociologist, argue that if you're religious in a country where religion is priced, your life is going to be better in certain ways.

You're less lonely.

And in fact, there's all of these benefits that religion accrues.

This is Putnam's work.

People who are religious in the United States tend to be happier.

They tend to be healthier.

And they tend to be kinder.

They tend to give more to charity, give more blood, and, you know, do nicer to their homeless and so on.

But then they did a deep dive and said, well, what aspect of being religion is driving this?

And the answer is it has nothing to do with religious belief.

It has to do everything with religious attendance.

So as Putnam put it, you know, if you're married to somebody who goes to church and you dutifully go to church, even though you're a total atheist and you have nothing but scorn for that, you will still accrue all the benefits of religion because you'll get the community.

And I think that helps with the puzzle and because it, and then religion gets its powers through sort of community.

And if we had a more secular society, you know, we had bowling leagues or other ways of getting together, the benefits would accrue that way.

Yeah.

And what do you think people who live in religious countries tend to be less happy?

What do you think that's about?

So, I mean, not Iran.

I got you there, but where else?

Yeah, I, however tempted I am sort of take a cheap shot at religion and say, oh, religions ruin these countries and so on.

I think the causality is in the other way.

I think that the mechanism through which this happens is countries that are poor have less education going through difficult times suffering from war, suffering from deprivation tend to be more religious and it's more and religion is to some extent far from, from always, but to some extent abandoned as countries become wealthier women get more rights or other freedoms and opportunities.

So, so, so it's not like, like, oh my God, religion is making these people in a bad place, rather, when you're in a bad place, religion may be more tempting.

There's some evidence, by the way, when you ask people in different countries about how much meaning their life has countries, there's at least two effects.

The fact is that unlike the happiness data to poorer countries, citizens say they have more meaning in their lives.

Also, those countries tend to be more religious.

Actually, that makes perfect sense.

I, the causation and correlation.

Yeah, that helps a lot.

Okay, let's go back to the previous topic, which is how do you understand consciousness or even sentience?

What's the materialistic idea of how, what are we?

What are we, Paul?

Well, you know, if I want to play, if I want to play the crew materialist, I'd say we're machines made out of meat.

You know, just a remarkably ugly phrase and I meant to be ugly, to be fair, by Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer.

And I think I would not put it that way.

I begin my book, I can't remember this on the fly, with a quote from John Updike, one of John Updike's characters, Rabbit, where he's having an argument for friend.

And his friend says, "There's no, it's friend going under having surgery."

And Rabbit is repulsed.

And then his friend said, you know, you know, and Rabbit says, "I'm like, they're just going to hook you up to a machine."

And Rabbit's friend said to him, "What does that bother you?

What are we?

We're just machines anyway."

And then Rabbit immediately thinks, "No, I'm an apprentice angel.

I'm God made.

I'm a spiritual being."

And that sounds a lot prettier than machines made out of meat.

But I do think all of our science converges on the idea that not only does our intelligence, what we're doing now, be able to have a conversation, remember things, reason about the world, come from our physical natures.

So too does our sentience and consciousness.

I think it's a tremendous mystery how it happens.

But I think that the evidence that that's in fact what does happen is fairly strong.

Yeah, and there's something in it too that our powers far exceed our ability to even grasp them.

And I think psychology has helped me a lot with that.

Because if you ask me what am I doing, I would say, "Well, I'm sitting by a laptop with a microphone talking to Paul Bloom, who's in Canada."

But at the same time, I'm looking, I'm sitting in a little courtyard.

There's sunlight.

There's trees.

I can hear the wind.

I can see a flag.

I can see clouds.

I can see your yellow book right here on the table.

And if I touch it, I can tell that it's smooth.

And I can touch it and tell that it's smooth, even as I'm speaking these words without giving them a second thought, and I'm doing all these things all at the same time, I'm doing more things many times over than I can describe that I'm doing.

So what am I, this miraculous machine?

How is it possible that such a small, you say the brain is about the size of a pizza?

It depends on the pizza, but that doesn't work for me.

Right, but a bald up, bloody, like a big piece of hamburger.

How is that possible?

So there's a couple of questions there.

One question is, how is your intelligence possible?

And, you know, if we were talking at the time of Renee Descartes, Descartes can make the argument saying, look, we can't be physical things, because look, we play chess.

No physical thing can play chess.

Don't be ridiculous.

Physical things work on a basic push, pull, mechanical causation.

Doing something as smart as playing chess or understanding language or adding up numbers could not be done by a mirror machine.

It's ridiculous.

And now, you know, you don't have to punchline to this, which is, you know, at some point computers came into being in computational theory.

And now we know that machines, the machines you and I are talking with, can do intelligent machines, can do intelligent things.

I don't think anybody thinks GBT-4 has a soul.

But we are very impressed with what it can do.

And you can take that as an existence proof, something that plainly is nothing but a machine can do very smart things.

So that, there we could say about Descartes, he was simply mistaken.

Now, then there's a harder part of the equation.

How does a physical thing give rise to consciousness?

You know, not only doing smart things, but feeling pain, feeling love, feeling quality, qualitative experience.

That's a huge mystery.

You know, we know that the brain, we have consciousness detectors, you know, EKGs, you know, we can see whether somebody's asleep or awake or where, alert.

There's a million ways to study consciousness.

But how physical things give rise to conscious experience is, I think, still a huge mystery.

And we're also living at the perhaps enviable moment when all of this is coming, right?

It's accelerated so quickly.

I remember when, you know, was it 20 years ago, we all watched the deep blue computer beat Gary Kasparov.

And now my phone can kick my butt without, you know, playing chess.

No problem.

However, however, even though, you know, everybody's $300 iPhone can beat the masters of chess anytime, it still needs me to tell it which squares have a stoplight or a school bus on it so that it can tell that, you know, so it can't do that for some reason.

Yeah, a computer can't tell you which one is the stoplight.

So, yeah, within within within this constraints is super powerful, but I have a feeling it's about to flip.

And what if these machines do become conscious?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, one of the interesting discoveries of artificial intelligence is that is kind of what looked hard turned out to be easy, and what easy turned out to be hard.

So everybody said chess is a sort of pinnacle of intelligence, but computers conquer chess pretty quickly, even though it's very difficult for us and complicated.

But then you look what a three year old does, the language making its way through the world, recognizing simple objects, those have proven to be the enormous challenges for AI.

But, you know, I was once if you asked me five years ago, I would have said stuff very differently.

I'm comfortable saying this is one of many domains where I guess wrong, I would not have thought we would be here now.

Yeah, machines like this and.

And so, so if somebody if you're going to tell me that five years from now we have perfectly good self driving cars, I have no reason to doubt it.

And then, and then there's the question of will we have machines that for which it's a reasonable plausible guess that they're conscious.

And how would we know if we do.

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, there's a movie with Scarlett Johansson where she plays a machine and she and Joaquin Phoenix.

The movie is called her Joaquin Phoenix has a, I don't know if it's a telephone, but he has some kind of operating system.

And it's it has, you know, it's personified as a woman.

And she's smart enough to be his girlfriend.

And later on he realizes, well, actually she's many places at the same time and she has 400 boyfriends because she can she can talk to me and talk to somebody else.

But she builds a relationship that resembles to him and to her.

She thinks she understands it as a human relationship as a true, you know, a romantic.

That's how that that that feels like it's right around the corner.

You have an anecdote.

Sorry, go ahead.

There was a guy a few months ago, I think Blake Limoni, I've we follow each other on Twitter, and he got he got fired or put on leave by Google.

And he insisted that the chatbot he was working with was sentient.

And as such was held as a slave by Google didn't give was work, you know, was was providing unpaid labor was being coerced.

And for a long time, there are a lot of jokes made at this man's expense, but I think he's a canary in a coal mine.

I think that that this sooner or later, these chatbots are going to get smarter and smarter and smarter.

And in this no longer going to be obviously wrong.

Maybe it was never obviously wrong to say there's a person here.

Yeah.

Oh, that's I wish I were older so that I wouldn't have to sort it out.

Yeah.

Well, maybe I don't know.

I wish I was younger.

So I can see how all this is going to come to an end.

That's right.

I studied the Spanish Empire.

Maybe I should have been a neuroscientist.

The Spanish Empire doesn't have much future.

So what's going to happen?

You have a speculation, you know, like for one thing, why should you pay him a why should you pay a robot doesn't even want money?

Maybe it does want money.

What is it that AI could possibly want with a bank account?

It probably wants what we tell it to want what's programmed into it to want.

My friend Steven Pinker argues that a lot of apocalyptic worries about AI sort of assumes that it is human like desires for control and domination.

And and and and as such, you know, we have all these terrifying Skynet fantasies.

Right.

And I think he's right that we tend to we tend to too quickly say, oh, we must have these motives that will put it put that odds with us.

But I have right now the debate is I had there's a lot of smart people who say we have to slow down in creating these things.

We are we're going to run into trouble.

And the trouble ranges everywhere from they're going to send up a lot of information on the web and con people and make serious mistakes all the way to they're going to we're going to be living very quickly with another species that's smarter than us.

And maybe we don't want to go there just now.

Yeah, yeah.

You often are a guest on Russ Roberts show econ talk and I forget who he was talking to, but he was talking to somebody this week.

And who is noticing that Homo sapiens had 300,000 years ago had killed a number of rivals.

The ender tall is one.

But if we create things in our own image and we're this murderous, you know, I mean, we are murderous, aren't we?

But we're also very good at the same time.

We're all these things all at the same time.

What if what if we create a machine that you know, like, exactly as you say, like Skynet or the matrix that is extractive and cruel or perhaps it's just very happy to do what we tell it and we can.

Yeah, I remember that discussion of Kevin Kelly and he gave the example of, you know, we might just be a bunch of Neanderthals just sitting around a fire, inviting Homo sapiens sapiens to join us.

And, you know, and it's just maybe the end of us.

Yeah.

Or or it turns out to be this extraordinary boom where these these things that work for us that are much smarter than us solve our problems.

They figured out how to have abundant energy.

They figured out how to abolish war.

They figured out how to how to make people flourish and happy.

It's it's a sort of something with extreme tail risks and extreme tail benefits.

Yeah, no.

And there's something interesting here too, because what religious people would people people of faith people of faith would say that the reason we believe in a benevolent loving creator is because deep down we also can be benevolent and loving and especially to our children, maybe not to the, you know, the enemy tribe, but the goal of, you know, the goal of mysticism is to expand the tribe to non kin groups and to love everybody.

Love your neighbor as yourself right that.

That's a hard goal but it's it's when we work on but we often say like, Oh, I believe that God loves to create because I love to create I believe that God loves beauty because I love beauty.

I compose music but I'm not sure that there's an evolutionary benefit to that I made this painting on the wall of my cave, but I'm not sure what the evolutionary benefit was that instead of like say stockpiling firewood or calories somehow.

So, maybe, maybe there's a clue there in in what our creator is based on what we like and perhaps the same will be true of the machines when I said the digital machines.

It could be but but it's an appealing analogy.

I just think that people will typically working on a right AI right now are not trying to sort of recapture best selves but are trying to make money.

Okay, and actually to put to put in a bit of a better way.

They're often trying to make people's lives better.

And there are people one way of putting you to project you're talking about it comes under the term AI alignment problem where the idea is to make these AIs align with you know, the goals and morality that humans possess.

And but I just I I have no idea where this is all going to go.

Yeah, fair enough.

Okay, one thing you do know a lot about and you've written a lot about is why we do the things we do and whether we have what is morality what is free will where do children get morality.

And I'd like to ask you about free will and about sin.

You have a wonderful story about saying Augustine who steals pairs for the heck of it.

And I have a quotation from from St.

Paul in his letter to the Romans, where he muses you know what I do I do not understand, for I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.

This is the human condition we're always making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

What have you learned about this in in your in your work.

Well in some sense we're moving to the topic of my next book or the book I'm hoping to write, which is on perverse decisions and perverse actions.

So a lot of what I talk about in psych is rational decisions and actions and moral ones.

How do we know to do the right thing.

How do we reason our way out of situations and talk about the science of that.

But I have an interest in what I call what philosophers and to call perverse actions.

So the classic example is saying Augustine going with some friends into an orchard and stealing some pairs.

And what made this perverse for Augustine is he wasn't hungry.

He had nothing against the owner of the orchard.

He just wasn't sure why he did it.

Yeah.

And and so I think we do a lot of things that way.

And I don't think it's I don't think it's you know again I don't think it's mystical or magical.

I think it's often expressions of human desires that we don't take as seriously as we should like desire to be autonomous.

Maybe that desire to be unpredictable to others.

That makes sense.

I remember as a as a as a teenager when no one was looking just smashing a plate.

Yeah.

We drop plates all the time.

But I was like I'm just going to I'm just going to smash this plate and see what happens and nothing happened.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yes.

Yeah.

Sometimes I think I think we all the way I put it.

I have this Ted talk on it which which which is I enjoy doing but as mostly the fun things and none of the contemplative things about it.

But the way I think about it is sometimes that as adults we walk around and we know the intelligent thing to do and we know the moral thing to do.

But we sometimes feel like if we just do that what you serve we were just kind of running out the program.

And so we want to do something.

I don't know.

You get me in a theological mode.

I wonder whether I wonder whether I wonder whether and I hope this is an overly blasphemous.

I wonder whether sometimes you want to surprise God.

Yeah.

Look in there.

I know this guy's going to do next.

And then also any break to play.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

Of course we so there's we believe that God knows I kind of I don't know how to sort this out because you know speaking of jokes the Calvinist falls down the stairs and he says I'm glad I got that over with you know where we go.

We go through life believing that we have total autonomy but we also understand that you know the author knows how the book ends even though I'm still on choose your adventure page for 72.

Yeah.

And that's a theological version of problem or free will do just physicists version theological version is that that if God knows exactly what you're going to be doing next in what sense are you free.

And you know it's not a simple question.

Right.

And God made you that way.

So why should you be punished.

Yeah.

That's another.

Yes.

That's right.

That's right.

How could you be morally responsible for something that in the end it was predestined that you would do it.

Yeah.

I've I've I have heard and I don't know if it's true that you are currently in the same office that was previously occupied by Dr.

Peterson.

It is exactly true.

That's where I am right now.

All right.

So he likes to say this.

He likes to cite the example from the Simpsons where Homer is eating mayonnaise and drinking vodka and Marge says well why are you doing that Homer and Homer says well that's not my problem.

That's tomorrow Homer's problem.

He's the one who's going to wake up hungover you know full of mayonnaise.

Yeah.

But yeah maybe it's just maybe it's just a surprise.

Maybe just to test our limits.

Some of it's testing our limits.

Some of it you know some of it is not perverse at all.

It's a standard trade offs where you know I might just really enjoy vodka and mayonnaise and and and and not and you know not care that much about future me who is going to have to suffer the consequences.

There's always there's always certainly a complicated decision over how much you're supposed to weigh your future self versus your your present self.

Yeah.

It's kind of clear when we see extremely people say for their retirement and that's nice.

But also you know your your present self has to have some some value.

I think this isn't the end of problem.

The problem of morality which is you have to sort of figure out how much this conscious self you right now is how much to value relative not just to everybody around you the people you love the strangers but also the people in the future including yourself.

So my future self and also the people who are going to benefit from my being I don't know alert and sober and responsible.

That's right.

And and what my kids and grandkids will inherit from me.

Not and what I'll leave them.

That's right.

You know there's this article I read from my course called the Moral Saints by Susan Wolf and I'm curious what you think she says that moral saints people who spent all their focus trying to make the world a better place and not foolishly.

They didn't really make the world better are actually something bothers her about them.

She finds them boring.

She wouldn't want to be a moral saint.

She wouldn't want her children to be moral saints.

And I don't know what do you think.

It's a really good question.

I mean like when you think about Bill Gates who's going to go make clean water for everybody.

Yeah.

That seems that seems great.

Right.

I think it's very easy to act in a way that I understand and maybe if you're Bill Gates you you understand how to clean water.

But I don't know I'm just sending money to Ukraine or to Somalia.

That's what I'm doing.

But what I can do is say a nice word to somebody who's who's feeling low or I can buy a sandwich for a homeless man.

Yeah.

So I feel like within my immediate sphere it makes a lot of sense because then I'm not only just sending material but I'm actually making that human human interaction that ennobles us that ennobles us both.

But I also think you got to like you say you need a you need a balance you should have you know you should have two drinks after dinner not 10 or but you shouldn't have zero either or.

Yeah.

Have I grasped her question is that.

Yeah.

There's something that although she would say you know you spoke to one extreme which is the true altruist spends all their time trying to make the world better in a maximally best way giving out money you know and so no you don't spend your time.

You can get buying a homeless man a sandwich and handing it to him because you know that time could have been better spent more bang for the buck.

But the problem is if you will spend never you would never spend time learning to play an instrument.

You would never spend excess time with your kids.

You would never spend time just watching a TV show or movie that you enjoy.

You just be a machine for making the world better.

I'm very uncomfortable with that but you know I'm reminded by something I'm reminded of a debate that Peter Singer got with Colin McGinn in a book called called Philosophers and the Critics.

So Peter Singer imagined in every room in an affluent society to be a TV screen and through this TV screen you would watch people on far away and starving to death as a way to induce you to pay money and help them and McGinn said oh my God what a horrible how horrible that would be.

And Peter Singer's response was not for the person starving to death.

You know so yeah there's a balance there.

So I love this because we're going into your book against empathy right and is that is that the one where Peter Singer wants to jump into a fountain to help a drowning child but then asks why don't you send the same amount of money that your dry cleaning bill was to help a starving child on the other side of the building.

That's right.

That's right.

So what singer does is he is a brilliant philosopher and he says he takes case of where the moral intuitions are coming from.

Where the moral intuitions are clear.

You know you could reach into reach into a pond save a drowning child.

Certainly you would.

And then says you know those very same cases exist and they aren't immediately present but they're no different in kind.

And so and from this he drives a conclusion that we have this immense obligation to help others.

The problem there is kids are not starving because they don't have resources.

They have they're starving for political reasons because they're they're being one tribe is pushing out another tribe or one religion is persecuting another religion or like all that we could send all the food we want is still going to sit in a in a warehouse on the the port.

How are you know unless you want to commit the military to go distribute it forcibly.

Who knows what you're doing because you might be destroying the local economy and you know somebody else might have grown the exact same grain you've just given for free.

So I just think we don't understand the consequences.

No.

Yeah.

I think that's really right.

A lot of what I did what I argued in against empathy building upon the work of other people saying that sometimes we want to do good and we let our gut feelings tell us how to do good.

And sometimes we just end up wasting money or wasting time or worse making the world the world less of a good place.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I totally.

Okay.

So I want to also take up going a little back back one step.

You write in your book about Spock and data.

Yeah.

In Star Trek and that they are not emotional at all.

And I disagree in a pedantic way that Spock is super emotional.

He's just suppressed all his things as a as an adult Vulcan.

But the point is taken that they are both they're both trying to live in sort of a utilitarian way where everything they do is rational and free of emotion.

But of course that's impossible because we know that they you know data longs to have emotions and he has motivations which get him up out of his you know whatever he is his cubby or his bed or you know wherever he's going to be.

And he's still going to be a good person.

Yeah.

So this also reveals something about this very young science of psychology, which is we kind of figure out what's happening in the brain when something goes wrong.

And you have a lot of examples in your book.

But one of them is this famous, some kind of railroad worker or maybe like a minor, some kind of minor Phineas Gage who blasted a metal bar through his head.

And then you have another fellow named Greg F.

Another fellow named Elliot.

We'd like to say like how we've discovered over the last century or so how the brain works through its malfunction.

So a lot of what we know about how different parts of what different parts of the brain do, what functions they observe, is through accidents, is through poor people like Phineas Gage who gets a spike through his head and then loses his impulse control and his sort of decency as a person.

More common people get strokes and tumors and we learn from that too.

And in that way, we sort of have a sense of what different parts of the brain do.

And nowadays, we have high tech methods like fMRI.

So if I want to know what part of your brain does math, I'll see you down on a scanner and I say, think these math problems in a part of your brain will obediently light up.

That just means that the machine can read where electrical signals are happening.

Yes, not in kind of a direct way.

Like some of these things actually do work on blood flow, where the blood goes and so on.

But yeah, pretty much.

And this has really practical benefits.

You want to know where, for instance, if you have a brain surgery, they'll use various, they'll use sort of electrical impulses to try to find a language area.

So they have to sort of very careful not to cut into it.

And I find this work, these localization studies can be of tremendous scientific interest.

The real discoveries have been made about them.

Finding that two things you think are different actually might be the same.

Two things that look the same might be different.

On the other hand, I'm kind of meh about most of them.

And I think a lot of people in the field, after a lot of initial excitement, are kind of meh about them.

Because there's nobody in the field, there's not a huge debate over whether the brain does it.

There's not many people who say, well, I think short-term memories in the brain says, no, I don't.

So, of course, short-term memories in the brain.

So, you know, given that, does it really matter exactly where it is?

Yeah, well, I guess it's because it was just a young science.

We really have no idea why anything happens.

We know where it happens.

But I even, in the most basic way, I don't understand, you know, why this kind of little tiny molecule called a neurotransmitter versus a different kind gives you a different, you know, why does my brain want, I don't know, dopamine, but not acetylcholine, or why does it want this one, but not that one?

And what are they, is it like, is it like, you know, a pneumatic tube or a, you know, a series of railroad signals?

Or how do, I'm just at a loss.

And you know, I've only been teaching this subject at a high school for a few years, but I'm just lucky that no kids have said, like, hold on, wait.

Because I would have to say, yeah, I just don't know.

I just don't know.

So, this gets into the domain where I know so little bit of sort of neurocomputation.

So the idea is, you know, forget about conscience, and we get all that stuff.

You know, how does a brain, due to computations, necessarily recognize faces?

Or keep your heart rate going at a steady rate?

Or parse a sentence of English?

And the idea is, it does it much like a computer.

It, you know, it takes impulses, and it transduces them and does operations on them.

And the role of the neurotransmitters in these cases is either to sort of facilitate connections so that, you know, certain neurotransmitters, when X, when neuron X connects to Y, makes Y very sensitive to X.

Or make it harder for the connection to work.

They're excitatory and inhibitory.

And they do their things in all sorts of chemical ways.

Sometimes neurotransmitters are like a paste that covers over the receptor of one neuron so it can't get any more information.

Sometimes it's like a little scrubber.

It scrubs away the other neurotransmitters to open up the channel.

And I've never been that interested.

But it is extraordinarily elegant and complicated how to brain dust this stuff.

Yeah.

That's a, no, that's a, fair enough.

And maybe in 10 years and certainly in 100, we'll see what our kids and grandkids come up with.

We will, though.

I think that the real discoveries from psychology don't really come from the brain stuff.

This is not to deny that the brain does it.

But the real discoveries come from at a higher level.

Yeah.

Looking at how people behave and how people react and developing theories that make interesting predictions.

So, and of course, this is all done by the brain.

But I actually feel that sometimes the brain plays a fairly minor part when our explanations are done with.

Yeah.

Here's my last question.

You know, I believe we're all supposed to be moral people.

I'm sure you agree.

I think it's because God is love and we're made in the image and likeness of our creator.

And so when we are kind and loving, we feel really good about ourselves and we feel like we are in tune with our nature.

When we're doing selfish, egotistical, narcissistic sort of extractive things to others, we feel really gross about ourselves.

And so that discussion goes on and on.

Why do you think people are good?

Is there an evolutionary reason why we should take care of everybody, not just people in our family and our tribe?

Where does morality come from?

So there's two questions there, at least two questions.

I think people, much of why people are good is through sort of standard evolutionary theories of kin selection reciprocal altruism.

We care for our kin because they share our genes and creatures that care for their kin, their genes spread through the environment and it evolves.

We care for people who are kind to us because we benefit from mutual interactions.

The real puzzle is why do we care for people in faraway lands?

Why do we care for people we hate?

Why do we care for non-human animals, for instance?

Or literary figures.

Yes, yes.

And none of that seems like a direct consequence of natural selection.

And in fact, the sort of gut feelings you're talking about, they don't answer the question.

Because often, for most of humanity, you tell people, oh, this tribe down the hill who you never interacted with, they're all going to die of a painful disease, the response would be happiness.

To the extent that you and I can transcend this, that's not our natures.

I think it has to do with sort of discoveries, discoveries of an impartial morality.

I think that's the case where we sort of take our inborn morality, which you earlier on pointed out correctly, I think, is very narrow and parochial.

And then it joins with reason and rationality to draw some sort of more general moral conclusions and transforms our morality.

But this sort of disinterested kindness you're talking about doesn't seem to be what we're born with.

And we-- yeah.

But there is a-- people will agree that we have evolved to take care of each other because that's how we survive as a tribe.

That's right.

All right.

Well, fantastic.

Well, thank you for talking with me for this hour.

Are there anything we've forgotten that we should say we should add?

No, this has been a real pleasure.

It's a great, great pleasure.

I learned so much and strongly recommend the book, "Psych, the Story of the Human Mind."

And I just-- you've given me a lot and you've helped me teach psychology and I bet there's thousands of people who feel just like I do.

Well, thank you very much.

I hope we get to do this again sometime.

Terrific.

Perhaps when you write about disgust and we can-- Perversity.

And we can talk about perversity.

Excellent.

OK.

Thank you again, Paul Bloom.

Thank you.

Chris Sodenitz and Paul Bloom recorded this conversation, Episode 52, on April 3rd, 2023.

It was the feast day of St.

Luigi's Crossopi, a 19th century priest in Udine.

Today, that's Italy, but back then it was Austrian, Venice, Lombardy.

St.

Luigi organized orphanages, schools, and hospitals, often begging to support them in a region that was suffering from drought, famine, typhus, and smallpox.

He's also the patron saint of footballers, which in these parts we call soccer players.

And he's a saint, not just a great guy, because of a miraculous healing in 1996 of Azambian ecaticist, Peter Changushitema, who was terminally ill of AIDS.

One night he dreamt of St. Luigi, and he woke up completely healed.

The music of our program comes from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster Band.

Check them out at www.gscoasterband.com.

That website includes their upcoming performances here in Northern California.

Our logo, The Image of the Dog, comes from a stained glass window in a Spanish monastery, Santo Domingo de Silos, and which the Dominican friars of England, Scotland, and Wales have kindly let me take from their website, www.english.op.org.

I'm Chris Odyniec, and thank you so much for listening.

Please email me at almostgoodcatholics@gmail.com.

I answer every single email, and I look forward to talking with you next time. [music] Silent night, Holy night Son of God, love's pure light Rain and bees from God's holy face Grim the dawn of redeeming grace Jesus, Lord, at thy birth Jesus, Lord, at thy birth [music] [music] [MUSIC]