Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
sean kelly a philosopher at harvard
specializing in existentialism and the
philosophy of mind
this is the lex friedman podcast to
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and now here's my conversation with sean
kelly
your interests are in post-content
european philosophy especially
phenomenology and existentialism so let
me ask what to you
is existentialism
so it's a hard question i'm teaching a
course on existentialism right now you
are i am yeah existentialism in
literature and film which is fun
uh i mean the traditional thing to say
about
what existentialism is is that it's a
movement in mid 20th century
mostly french some german philosophy
and some of the major figures associated
with it are people like jean-paul sartre
and camus
um simone de beauvoir
maybe martin heidegger
but that's a weird thing to say about it
because most of those people denied that
they were existentialists and um
and in fact i i think of it as a
movement that has a much longer history
so when i try to describe what the core
idea of existentialism is
it's an idea that you find expressed in
different ways in a bunch of these
people one of the ways that it's
expressed
is that
sartre will say
that existentialism is the view that
there is no god and at least his form of
existentialism he calls it atheistic
existentialism there is no god
and since there's no god there must be
some other being around
who does something like what god does
otherwise there wouldn't be any
possibility for significance in life
and that being is us
and the feature of us according to sart
and
the other existentialists
that puts us in the position to be able
to play that role is that we're the
beings for whom
assart says it existence precedes
essence
that's that's the catchphrase for
existentialism and then you have to try
to figure out what it means
what is existence what is presence and
what does proceeds mean yeah exactly
what is existence what is essence and
what is proceeds and in fact precedes a
start way of talking about it and other
people will talk about it differently
but here's a way of here's the way start
thinks about it this is not i think the
most interesting way to think about it
but get you started
sartre says
there's nothing
true about what it is to be you
until you start
existing and still use until you start
living and for sartre the core feature
of what it is to be existing the way we
do
is to be making decisions to be making
choices in your life to be
sort of taking a stand on what it is to
be you by deciding to do this or that
and the key feature of how to do that
right for sartre
is to do it in the full recognition of
the fact that when you make that choice
nobody is responsible for it other than
you
so you don't make the choice because god
tells you to you don't make the choice
because some
utilitarian calculus about what what
it's right to do tells you to do you
don't make the choice because some other
philosophical theory tells you to do it
there's literally nothing on the basis
of which you make the choice
other than the fact that in that moment
you're you're the one making it
you are a conscious
thinking being that made a decision so
all the questions about physics and free
will
are out the window yeah that's right if
you were a determinist about the mind if
you were a physicalist about the mind if
you thought there was nothing to your
choices
other than the activity of the brain
that's governed by physical laws
then there's some sense in which it
would seem at any rate like um you're
not the ground of that choice the ground
of that choice was the physical universe
and the laws that govern it
and then you'd have no responsibility
and so sart's view is that the thing
that's special about us used to be
special about god
is that we're responsible for
becoming the being that makes the
choices that we do
and sart thinks that that simultaneously
empowering i mean it practically puts us
in the place of god
and also terrifying
because what responsibility how can you
possibly
take on that responsibility and he
thinks it's worse than that he thinks
that
it's always happening
everything that you do
uh is the result of some choice that
you've made the posture that you sit in
the way you hold someone's gaze when
you're having a conversation with them
or not
the choice to make a note
when someone says something
or not make a note
everything that you do presents you as a
being who makes decisions and you're
responsible for all of them so it's
constantly happening and furthermore
there's no fact about you
independent of the choices and actions
you've performed so you don't get to say
search example i really am a great
writer i just haven't written my great
book yet
if you haven't written your great book
you're not a great writer
and so it's it's terrifying it puts a
huge burden on us
and um and that's why sart says
on his view of existentialism
human beings are the beings that are
condemned to be free
our freedom consists in our ability and
our responsibility to to make these
choices and to become someone through
making them and we can't get we can't
get away from that but to him it's
terrifying not liberating
in the positive meaning of the word
liberating well so he he thinks it
should be liberating but he thinks that
it takes a very courageous individual to
be liberated by it
um nietzsche i think thought something
similar i think's artists
really coming out of a nietzschean sort
of tradition
but what's liberating about it if it is
is also terrifying because it means in a
certain way you're the ground of your
own being you become
what you do through through existing so
that's one form of existentialism that's
a stark atheistic version of it there's
lots of other versions but it's somehow
organized around the idea that it's
through living your life that you become
who you are it's not facts that are
sort of true about you independent of
your living your life
but then
if there's no god in that view
does any of the decisions matter so how
does existentialism differ from nihilism
good okay great question
there's two different ways that you're
you're asking it
um let me leave nihilism to the side for
just a second and think about mattering
or
is there any
way that you can criticize someone for
me for doing for living the way they do
if you're in existence including
yourself including yourself yeah start
addresses that and he says um
yes he says there is a criticism that
you can make of yourself or of others
and it's the criticism of living in such
a way as to fail to take responsibility
for your choices he gives these two sort
of amazing examples
one
doesn't i don't know if it reads as well
as for us as it uh as it did in sort of
mid 20th century paris
but it's about a waiter
he gives this in in his big book being
in nothingness and he says um so waiters
play played still do i think in a
certain way in paris a big role in in
parisian society to be a waiter involved
having a certain kind of identity being
a certain way
uh taking control of in charge of the
experience of the people that you're
you're waiting on but also you know
really being the authority like knowing
that this is the the way it's supposed
to go
and so sartre imagines a waiter who does
everything that a waiter is supposed to
do
the perfect form of the waiter
except that you can somehow see in the
way he's doing it
that he's doing it because he believes
that's the way a waiter should
act
not
so there's some sense in which he's
passing off the responsibility for his
actions
onto some idea of what those actions
should be he's not taking responsibility
for it he's sort of playing a role
and the contours of the role are
predetermined by someone other than him
so he starts as acting in bad faith
and that's
criticizable because it's acting in such
a way as to fail to take responsibility
for the kind of being sart thinks you
are
so you're not taking response so that's
one example and i think you know i think
any teenager
if you've ever met a teenager you've
known someone who who does that
teenagers try on roles they think if i
dressed like this i would be cool so
i'll dress like this or if i spoke like
this or acted like this
and it's natural for a teenager who's
trying to figure out what their you know
what their identity is to go through a
phase like that but if you continue to
do that then you're you're really
passing it so that's one example the
other example he gives
is an example uh not of passing off
responsibility by
pretending that someone else
is the ground of your choice but passing
off responsibility by pretending that
you might be able to get away with not
making a choice at all
so he says you're always everything you
do is a result of your choices and so he
gives this other example there you are
on the first date
first date
and the date the evening reaches moment
when
might be appropriate for one person
to
hold the hand of the other
that's the moment in the date where you
are and so you make a choice you decide
i think it's think it's that time and
you hold the hand
and what should happen is that the other
person also makes a choice on sart's
view
either they reject the hand
not that time and i'm taking
responsibility for that
or they grasp the hands back
that's a choice but there's a thing that
sometimes happens which is that the
other person
leaves the hand there cold dead and
clammy neither rejecting it nor
embracing it
and start says that's also bad faith
that's also acting as if we're a kind of
being that we're not
because it pretends that it's possible
not to make a choice
and we're the beings who are always
making choices that was a choice
and you're pretending as if it's the
kind of thing that you don't have to
take responsibility for
so both of the examples you've given
there's some sense in which the social
interactions between humans
is the kind of moving away from the full
responsibility
that you as a human
in the view of existentialism should
take on so like isn't all isn't the
basic conversation a delegation or
responsibility just
holding a hand there you're putting the
response some of the responsibility into
the court of the other person
and for the waiter if you exist in a
society
you are generally trying on a roll
i mean like
all of us are trying on a roll me
wearing clothes yeah it's me trying on a
roll that i was told to try uh as
opposed to walking around naked all the
time like there's there's like standards
of how you operate and that's not
that's a decision that's not my own
that's me seeing what everyone else is
doing and copying them
yeah exactly so
sart thinks that
in the ideal you should try to resist
that other existentialists think
that
that's actually a clue to how you should
live well yeah so sarge says somewhere
else hell is other people
why is hell other people for start well
because other people are making choices
also
and when other people make choices
they
put some pressure on me
to think that the choice they made is
one that i should
uh copy or one that i should
sort of promote
but if i do it because they did it then
i'm in bad faith for sorry
so it's it is as if sart's view is like
we would be better if we were all alone
i mean this this is this is really
simplifying starts position and this is
really just mostly start in a certain
period of his of his formation
but anyhow we can imagine that view and
i think there's something to the idea
that's art is attracted to it at least
in the mid 40s can you dig into hell as
other people is there some obviously
it's kind of a almost like a literary
like you push the point strongly to
really explore that point
but is there some sense in that other
people
ruin the experience of what it means to
be human
i think for start the phenomenon is this
like it's not just that you wear clothes
because people wear clothes in our
society like you have a particular style
you wear a particular kind of clothes
right and for sartre like to have that
style authentically in good faith rather
than in bad faith
it has to come from you you have to make
the choice
but other people are making choices also
and like you're looking at their choices
and you're thinking that guy looks good
maybe i could try that one on and
if you try it on because you were
influenced by the fact that you thought
that guy was doing it well
then there's some important sense in
which although that's a resource for a
choice for you it's also acting in bad
faith
so
so god and god wouldn't do that right
god wouldn't be influenced by others
decisions and if that's the model
then that's i think that's the sense in
which he thinks hell is other people
what do you think parenting is then it's
like what because god doesn't have a
parent yeah so aren't we significantly
influenced first of all in the first few
years of
life um and in the even even the
teenager is resisting again learning
through resistance
so absolutely i mean i think what you're
pushing on
is the intuition
that the ideal that starts aiming at is
a kind of
inhuman ideal i mean we're we're there's
many ways in which we're not like the
traditional view of what god was
one is that
we're not self-generating we have
parents we
we're raised into
traditions and social norms and we're
raised into an understanding of what's
appropriate and inappropriate to do
and i think that's a deep intuition i
think that's exactly right
martin heidegger who's the who's the
philosopher that's art thinks he's sort
of taking this from but i think starts a
kind of brilliant french
misinterpretation of eideker's german
phenomenological view
heidegger says
a crucial aspect of what it is to be us
is our throneness we're thrown into a
situation we're thrown into history
we're thrown into
our parental lineage we're and we don't
choose it that's stuff that we don't
choose we couldn't choose
if we were god and we existed outside of
time maybe
but we're not we're finite in the sense
that we have a beginning that we never
chose we have an end that we're con you
know often trying to
resist or put off for something
and in between there's a whole bunch of
stuff that organizes us without our ever
having
made the choice and without our being
the kind of being that could make the
choice to allow it to organize us
we have a complicated relationship to
that stuff and i i think we should talk
about that at a certain point but the
the first move is to say zara's just got
a
sort of descriptive problem he's missed
this basic fact that um there's an awful
there has to be an awful lot about us
that's
settled
without our having made the choice to
settle it that way right the throneness
of life yeah you have that's a
fundamental part of life you can't just
escape it exactly you can't escape it
all together all together yeah exactly
you can't escape it all together but
nevertheless you are riding a wave
and you make a decision of the in the
writing of the way you can't control the
wave but you should be uh
like
as you ride it you should be making
certain kinds of decisions and take
responsibility
for it so
why does this
matter at all the the chain of decisions
you make
good well because they constitute you
they make you the person that you are so
you here's what's the opposite view
what's what's this view against uh this
view is against most of philosophy from
plato forward plato
plato says in the republic it's a kind
of myth but you know he he says people
will understand
their their condition well if they if we
tell them this myth he says look when
you're born there's just a fact about
you your soul
is either gold silver or bronze that's
those are the three kinds of people
there are and you're born that way and
if your soul is gold then we should
identify that and make you a philosopher
king yeah and if your soul is silver
well you're not going to be a
philosopher king you're not capable of
it but you could be a good warrior and
we should make you that and if your soul
is bronze then you should be a farmer
laborer or something like that and
that's a fact about you
that
identifies you forever and for always
independent of anything you do about it
and so that's the alternative view and
you you could have modern versions of it
you could say the thing that identifies
you is your iq
or your genetic makeup or
the percentage of fast twitch muscle
fibers you've got or whatever it could
be something it's totally independent of
any choice that you've made independent
of the kind of thing about which you
could make a choice
and it
and it categorizes you it makes you the
person that you are that's the that's
the thing that started and the
existentialists are against
uh
so
this idea that something about you is
forever limiting the space of possible
decisions you can make sarcha says
no the space is unlimited start is the
the philosopher of radical freedom
radical freedom yeah radical freedom and
then you could have other
existentialists who say look we are free
but we gotta we gotta understand what
the way in which our freedom is limited
by certain aspects of the kind of being
that we are if we were radically free we
really would be like god in the
traditional medieval sense
and and not sort of these folks start
with the idea that look whatever we are
that's a kind of limit point that we're
not going to reach
so
what what are the ways in which we're
constrained that
that that being the way the medievals
understood him wasn't constrained so can
you maybe comment on what is nihilism
and is it at all a useful
other sort of group of ideas that you
resist against in defining
existentialism yes good excellent so
nihilism
the the philosopher who made the term
popular although it was used before him
is nietzsche nietzsche's writing in the
end of the 19th century
in
various places where he he published
things but largely in his unpublished
works
he
identifies the condition of the modern
world as nihilistic
and that's
a descriptive claim he's looking around
him
trying to figure out what it's like to
be us now
and
he says it's a lot different from what
it was like to be
human in 1300 or in the fifth century
bce
in 1300
like what people
believed what they the the way they
lived their lives
was in the
understanding that to be human was to be
created in the image and likeness of god
that's the way they understood
themselves
and also to be created sinful
because of you know adam and eve's
transgression in the garden of eden
and to have the project of trying to
understand how as a sinful being you
could nevertheless live a life a
virtuous life how could you do that and
it had to do with for them getting in
the right relation to god he just says
we we
that doesn't make sense to us anymore in
the end of the 19th century
god is dead says nietzsche famously
and what does that mean well it means
something like
the role that god used to play in our
understanding of ourselves as a culture
isn't a role that
that god can play anymore
and so nietzsche says
the role that god used to play was the
role of grounding our existence he was
what it is in virtue of which we are who
we are
and nietzsche says
the idea that there is a being that
makes us what we are doesn't make sense
anymore that's like atheism so artists
taking that from nature and so the
question is
what does ground our existence and the
answer is knee hill nothing
and so nihilism is the idea that there's
nothing outside of us that grounds our
existence
and then nietzsche asks the question
well what are we supposed to do about
that how do we live
and i i you know
i think nietzsche has a different story
than start about that
nietzsche doesn't say
doesn't emphasize
this notion of radical freedom nietzsche
emphasizes something else
he says
we're artists of life
and artists are interesting because
the natural way of thinking about
artists is that they're responding to
something
they find themselves in a situation and
they say this is what's going to make
sense of the situation this is what i
have to write this is the way i have to
dance this is the way i've got to play
the music
and nietzsche says we should live like
that there are constraints but like
understanding what they are is
complicated
aspect of of living itself and there's a
great story i think uh from music that
maybe
helps to understand this i i think
nietzsche of course jazz didn't exist
when nietzsche was writing
but i think nietzsche really think is
thinking of something like jazz
improvisation i mean he he he talks
about improvisation there's classical
improvisation nietzsche was by the way a
musician i mean he was a composer and a
pianist not a great one really
to be fair but but he loved music
and
herbie hancock who's a pianist a jazz
pianist
who played with miles davis for quite a
while in the 60s
tells this kind of incredible story
that i think exemplifies nietzsche's
view
about
the way in which
we bear some responsibility for being
creative
and that gives us a certain kind of
freedom
but we don't have the the radical
response the radical freedom that's art
thinks so what's the story herbie
hancock says
they're they're they i think they were
in stuttgart he says
playing it playing a
show and
things were great he says i'm pl he's a
young pianist and miles davis is the
master
and he says i'm i'm playing the i'm back
in the
solo and i'm playing these chords and he
says
i played this chord
and
it was the wrong chord
[Laughter]
he's like it just like that's what you
got to say it didn't work right there
and i thought holy mackerel i screwed up
you know i screwed up we were tight
everything was working and i blew it for
miles who's doing his solo and he said
miles
uh paused for a moment
and then all of a sudden he went on
in a way that
made my cord right
[Laughter]
and i think that idea that like you
could be an artist who responds to
what's thrown at you
in such a way as to
make it right
by what measure
everyone could hear it is all you can
say right everyone knew wow that really
works
and i think that's not like there are
constraints not anything would have
worked there he couldn't have just
played anything
most of what anyone would have played
would have sounded terrible
but the constraints aren't like
pre-existing they're sort of
what's happening now in the moment for
these listeners and these performers and
i think that's what nietzsche thinks the
right response to nihilism is we're
involved
but we're not radically free to make any
choice and just stand behind it the way
sart thinks
our choices have to be responsive to our
situation
and they have to make the situation work
they have to make it right
and there's there's something about
music too so you basically have to make
music
of all the moments of life and there is
something about music why is music so
compelling
and when you listen to it something
about certain kinds of music it connects
with you it doesn't make any sense but
in that same way for nietzsche
you should be a creative force
that creates a musical masterpiece
exactly and i think what's interesting
is the question what does it mean to be
a creative force there there's a
traditional notion of creation
that we associate with with god
god creates ex nihilo out of nothing
and
you might think that nihilism thinks
that we should do that create ex nihilo
because it's about how there's nothing
at our ground but i think the right way
to read nietzsche is to recognize that
we don't create out of nothing miles
davis wasn't nothing that situation
pre-existed him it was given to him
maybe by accident maybe it was a mistake
whatever but he was responding to that
situation in a way that made it right he
wasn't just creating out of nothing he
was creating out of what was already
there so that makes that first date with
the climbing hand even more complicated
because
you're giving a climbing hand you're
gonna have to make art and music out of
that exactly and that's the
responsibility for both for both of them
wow that's a lot of responsibility for a
first date because you have to
create it's just the emphasis isn't just
on making decisions
it's on um
creating and but also on listening right
i mean miles davis was listening he
heard that he knew it was wrong and the
question was what do i play that makes
it right
so let me ask about nietzsche
[Music]
is god dead
what did he mean by that statement yeah
what's in your sons the truth behind the
question
and the possible set of answers that our
world today provides
good so i i mean i i think that
there's something super perceptive about
nietzsche's diagnosis of the condition
at the end of the 19th century
so not so far from the condition that i
think we're currently in
and i think there's an interesting
question what we're supposed to respond
what we're supposed to do in response
but what what is the condition that
we're currently in when nietzsche says
god is dead
i think like i was saying before he he
means something like the role that god
used to play in grounding our existence
is not a role that works for us anymore
as a culture
and when people talk about a view like
that nowadays they use a different
terminology but i think it's roughly
what nietzsche was aiming at
they say we live in a secular age
our age is a secular age and so what
what do people mean when they say that
i think
first of all it's a descriptive claim it
could be wrong
the question is does this really
describe the way we experience ourselves
as a culture or as a culture in the west
or wherever it is that we are
so what does it mean to say that we live
in a secular age an age in which god is
dead well it first thing is it doesn't
mean there are no religious believers
because there are plenty there are lots
of people who
go to church or synagogue or mosque you
know every week or more and there are
people who
really find that to be an important
aspect of the way they live their lives
but
it does mean
that for those people
the role of their religion the role that
the religious their religious belief
plays in their life isn't the same as it
used to be in previous ages so what's
that role
we'll go back to the high middle ages
that was clearly not a secular age
that was a religious age
and so there we are in 1300 dante is
writing the divine comedy or something
and what did it what did it mean then to
live in a sacred age well it meant
not just that
the default was that you were were a
christian in the west
but that your christianity your
religious belief your religious
affiliation
justified certain
assumptions about people who didn't
share that religious belief
so you're a christian
in the west in 1300 and you meet someone
who's a muslim
and the fact that they don't share your
religious belief
justifies the conclusion
that they're less than human
and that's that was the ground of the
you know the crusades that was the
religious wars of the high middle ages
we live in it to say that we live in a
secular age is to say that
not that we don't have there aren't a
lot of people who have religious belief
there are but it's to say that their
religious belief ju doesn't justify that
conclusion
if
you're a religious believer
and you meet me and suppose i'm not a
religious believer
learning that about me doesn't justify
your concluding that i'm less than human
right and that's the kind of liberalism
of the of the modern age most of the
time we think that's a good thing we let
a thousand flowers bloom there are lots
of ways to live a good life
and there's some way in which that that
is a nice progressive kind of liberal
thought
but it's also true that it's an
undermining thought because
it means
if you're a religious believer now
your belief can't ground your
understanding of what you ought to be
aiming at in the life
in the way it used to be able to you
can't say
as a religious believer i know it's
right to do this because you also know
that if you meet someone who doesn't
share that religious belief and so
doesn't think it's right to do that
necessarily or does but for different
reasons
you you can't conclude that they've got
it wrong
so there's this sort of unsettling
aspect to it well isn't it true that uh
you you can't conclude as a as a public
statement to others but within your own
mind
it's almost like an existentialist
version of uh belief which is like it's
you create the world and
around you like it doesn't matter what
others believe you don't
there's not it's actually almost like um
empowering thought so as opposed to the
more
traditional view of religion
where it's like a tribal idea like where
you share that idea together here you
have the full
back disartry a full responsibility of
your beliefs as well
good good but what you're describing
is not a religious believer right you're
describing someone who's
found in themselves the ground of their
existence rather than in something
outside of themselves so the religious
belief i mean if you go full sartrean
then
uh well you're not in a position to
criticize others for the choices that
they make
but you are in a position to criticize
them for the way in which they make them
either taking responsibility or not
taking responsibility but the but the
religious believer used to be able to
say look the choices that i make are
right because god demands that i make
them
and nowadays
like
and so it would be wrong to make any
others
and nowadays
are kind of
to say that we live in a secular age say
well you you can't quite can't quite do
that and be a religious believer your
religious belief can't can't justify
that move and so it can't ground
your life in the way it does so it's
sort of unsettling i think that's one of
the interpretations of what nietzsche
might have meant when he said god is
dead god can't play the role for
religious believers in our world that he
used to
but we nevertheless find meaning i mean
you don't see
nihilism as a prevalent set of ideas
that are overtaken modern culture so a
secular world is still full of meaning
good well i think that's the interesting
question i i think i think it's
certainly possible for a secular world
to be a world in which we live
meaningful lives worthwhile lives lives
that uh are
sort of um worthy of respect and that we
can be proud of of aiming to live
but but i think it is a hard question
what we're doing when we do that and
that's the that is the question of
existence sort of what does it mean
to exist in a way that brings us out at
our best as the beings that we are
that's the question for existentialism
so besides sartre who do you is the
most important existentialist to
understand for others what ideas in
particular of theirs do you like
maybe
other existential it's not just one yeah
so sartre is the grounding strong
atheistic existentialism statement who
else is
uh there so in i'm teaching an
existentialism course now and i think
the tradition goes back at least to the
17th century
um and i'll just tell you some of the
figures that that i'm teaching there we
could talk about any of them that you
like
the the figure i start with is pascal
pascal
french
mathematician
uh from the 17th century he died i'm
terrible with dates but i think 1661 or
something like that middle of the 17th
century brilliant polymath sort of we
have computer languages named after him
he built the first mechanical
calculating machine he's but he he was
also
deeply invested in his understanding of
what christianity was
and he thought that
everyone before him
had really misunderstood what
christianity was that they'd really um
attempted to think about it not as a way
of living a life
but as a set of beliefs
that you can have
and which you can justify
and i think that's the first
move that's kind that's really pretty
interesting and then figures like
kierkegaard and dostoyevsky
um developed that move and and they're
all of those are
take themselves to be defending an
interpretation of a certain kind of
christianity
an existential interpretation of
christianity
and then i think there are other figures
other theistic figures uh figures like
um camus and uh fanon who
mid 20th century figures and then i'll
just mention the figure who i think is
the most interesting is martin heidegger
he's a complicated figure uh because by
the way when you said uh sorry to
interrupt that when you said camus
you meant atheistic i think that camus
is an atheistic existentialist yeah i'm
happy to talk about that so okay so we
got it's like sports cards yeah yeah the
different exercises so maybe let's go to
uh
you know what let's go to dusty yes all
right okay let's do it so my favorite
novel of his is uh the idiot first of
all
i see myself as the idiot and an idiot
and i love the optimism and the love the
main character has for the world
so that just deeply connects with me as
a novel
uh notes from underground as well but
what
ideas of this yes do you think are
existentialists what ideas are formative
to the whole existentialist movement
excellent so
let me talk about the brothers karamazov
yes partly because
that's the last novel that dostoevsky
wrote i think it's certainly one of the
greatest novels of the 19th century
uh maybe the best and i'm about to teach
it in a few weeks so i'm super excited
about it
but what's what is the brothers
karamazov about i mean without
you know without spoiling the ending for
anyone spoiler alert yeah i mean look
it's it's a murder mystery right i mean
the father gets murdered
and the question is who did it who's
responsible for it so there's a notion
of responsibility here like consort but
it's responsibility for a murder that's
what we're talking about
and there's a bunch of brothers
each of whom
has
pretty good motivation for having
murdered the father the father's a jerk
i mean he's you know if anybody is
worthy of being murdered he's the guy
he's he's he's a force of chaos and he's
nasty in all sorts of ways
but still it's not not good to murder
people
so so what's the what's the view of
dostoevsky i mean it's this intense
exploration
of what it means to be involved in
various ways
with an activity
that everyone can recognize is atrocious
and what the right way is to take
responsibility for that
what the right way is to
relate to others in the face of it and
how even through this kind of action
you can achieve some kind of salvation
that's dostoyevsky's word for it you can
le and but salvation
here and now not like you live some
afterlife where you're you know paradise
for eternity
who cares about that says one of the
characters
that doesn't make my life now any good
and it doesn't justify any of the bad
things that happen in my life now what
matters is can we live well
in the face of these things that we do
and have to take responsibility for so
it's this intense exploration
of
notions and gradations of guilt and
responsibility and the possibility of
love
and salvation in the face of those it is
incredibly human work
and hit but i think dostoevsky is the
opposite of sartre
and let me just i think it's so
fascinating i don't know anybody else
who notices this but sart in sard
actually quotes a passage from
dostoevsky when he's developing his view
it's close to a passage it doesn't
appear quite in this way but the passage
that sartre quotes is is this
it's it's in the form of an argument
sorry puts it in the form of an argument
he says
um look there's a a conditional
statement is true
if there is no god then everything is
permitted
and then there's a second premise
there is no god
that's sart's view i mean he's an
atheist there is no god
conclusion
everything is permitted
and that starts radical freedom
and if you think about the structure of
the brothers karamazov i think
dostoevsky though he never says it this
way would run the argument differently
it's a modus tollens instead of a modus
ponens the argument for dostoevsky would
go like this yeah conditional statement
if there is no god then everything is
permitted
but look at your life
not everything is permitted
you do horrible atrocious things
like
be involved in the death of your father
and there is a price to pay that's not a
livable moment
you to take to have to take
responsibility
to have to recognize that you're at
fault or you're somehow guilty for
having been involved in whatever way you
were and letting that happen or bringing
it about that it does happen
is to pay a price
so we're not beings that are constituted
in such a way
that everything is permitted
look at the facts of your existence
so not everything is permitted
therefore
there is a god
and and and the and the presence of a
god for dostoevsky i think it's just
found in this fact that when we do bad
things we feel guilty for them with that
we find ourselves to be responsible for
things even when we didn't intend to do
them but we just allowed ourselves to be
involved in them and the nature of god
for just the yeski is i mean unclear
i mean it's a very complex exploration
in itself and he
basically god speaks through several of
his characters in in complicated ways
yeah so it's not like a trivial
it's totally not trivial and it's not a
a being that exists outside of time and
none of that is sort of relevant for
dostoevsky for him it's a question about
how we live our lives do we live our
lives in the mood that christianity says
it makes available to us which is the
mood of joy
is there um maybe this is a bit of a
tangent but so i'm a russian speaker
and one of the
i kind of listen to my heart and what my
heart says is i need to take on this
project so
there's a couple of famous translators
of dostoyevsky and tolstoy
that live in paris currently so i'm
going to take the journey
we agreed to have a full conversation
about dostoevsky about tolstoy and like
a series of conversations
and the reason i fell in love with this
idea
is i just realized in translating from
russian to english
how
deep philosophical how much deep
philosophical thinking is required
just to get like single sentences they
spent like weeks
debating single sentences so uh and all
of that is part of a journey into russia
for several reasons but i just i want to
explore
uh something in me
that uh
longs to understand and to connect with
the roots where i come from
so
maybe can you comment whether it's on
the russian side or the niche of the
german side
or other
french side
is there something in your own
explorations of these philosophies
that you find that you miss because you
don't
deeply know the language or like how
important is it to understand the
language good i think it's super
important and i'm always embarrassed
that i don't know more languages and
don't know the languages i know as as
well as i would like to
but there's um but there's a way in so i
i do think different languages allow you
to think in different ways and that
there's a sort of a mode of exist a way
of being that's captured by a language
that it makes certain ways of thinking
about yourself or others more natural
and it closes off other ways of thinking
about yourself and others and so i think
languages are fascinating in that way
the heidegger who who is this
philosopher that i'm i'm interested in
says at one point language is the house
of being
and i think that means something like
um
it's by
living in a language
that you come to understand or that
possibilities for understanding what it
is to be you and others and anything are
opened up and different languages open
up different possibilities and we had
that discussion offline about james
joyce how i took a course in james joyce
and how i don't think i understood
anything besides the dead and the short
stories and you suggested that
it might be helpful to actually visit
ireland visit dublin
to truly to help you understand maybe
fall in love with the words
and so that
presumably is not
purely about the understanding of the
actual words of the language it's
understanding something much deeper
the music of the language or something
music of the ideas
absolutely something like that it's very
hard to say exactly what that is but
when you hear an irish person who really
understands joyce read some sentences
they have a different cadence they have
a different tonality they have different
music to use your word and all of a
sudden you think about them differently
and the sentences sort of draw different
thoughts out of you when they're read in
certain ways that's what great actors
can can do but i i think language is is
rich like that and and the idea which
philosophers tend to have
that we're really studying the crucial
aspects of language when we think about
its logical form
when we think about the sort of claims
of philosophical logic that you can make
or how do you translate this proposition
into some symbolic form
i think that's part of what goes on in
language but i think that when language
affects us
in the deep way that it can
when great poets or great writers or
great thinkers
use it to great effect
it's way more than that and and that's
the interesting form of language that
i'm interested in it's kind of a
challenge i'm hoping to take on is i
feel like some of the ideas
that are conveyed to language are
actually can be put outside of language
so one of the challenges i have to do is
to have a conversation with people in
russian
but for an english audience
and not rely purely on translators there
would of course be translators there
that help
me
dance through this mess
of language but also
like my goal my hope is to dance from
russian to english back and forth
for an english-speaking audience and for
a russian speaking audience so not this
pure this is russian it's going to be
translated to english or this is english
it's going to be translated to russian
but dance back and forth and try to
share with people who don't speak one of
the languages
the music that they're missing and sort
of almost hear that music as if you're
sitting in another room and you hear the
music through the wall like get a sense
of it i think that would be a waste if i
don't try to pursue this
being a bilingual human being and i
wonder
whether it's possible to capture some of
the magic of the ideas
in a way that can be conveyed to people
who don't speak that particular language
i think it's a super exciting project i
look forward to following it i'll tell
you one thing that does happen so we
read dostoevsky in translation
occasionally i do have russian speakers
in the room which is super helpful
but i also encourage my students
um
to you know to
some some of them will have different
translations than others and that can be
really helpful for the non-native
speaker because
by paying attention to
the
places where translators diverge in
their translations of a given word or a
phrase or something like that you can
start to get the idea that somehow the
words that we have in english
they don't have the same contours as the
word in russian that's being translated
and then you can start to ask about what
those differences are
and i i think it's i think it's there's
a kind of magic to it i mean it's
astonishing how rich and affecting
these languages can be for people who
really who grew up in them especially
who speak them as leaders and that's a
really powerful thing that actually
doesn't exist enough of
is
uh for example for this dayofsky most
novels have been translated by
uh two or three famous translators and
uh there's a lot of discussions about
who did it better and so on but
i would love to this i'm a computer
science person i would love to do a diff
where
you
automatically detect all the differences
in the translation just as you're saying
and use that like somebody needs to
publish literally just
books describing the differences in fact
i'll probably do a little bit of this i
heard the individual translators and
interviews and in blog posts and
articles discuss particular phrases that
they differ on
but like to do that for an entire book
that's a fascinating exploration
as an english speaker just read the
differences in the translations yeah you
probably can get some deep understanding
of ideas in those books by seeing the
struggle of the translators to capture
that idea that's a really interesting
idea yeah absolutely and and you you can
do that in for other projects in other
languages too i mean one of the
i don't know i have this weird huge
range of interests and some some days
i'll find myself reading about something
at one point i was interested in um 14th
century german mysticism okay turns out
there's somebody who's written like
volumes and volumes about this he's
fantastic and i was i was interested in
reading uh meister eckhart i i wanted to
know what was interesting about him and
the and the
the the sort of move that this guy
bernard mcginn who's the great scholar
of this period made was to say what what
eckhart did and everybody knows this
he translated christianity into the
vernacular he started giving sermons in
german to the people used to be in latin
and nobody could speak latin can you
imagine sitting there for a two-hour
sermon in a language that you don't know
so he translated it into into german but
in doing it the resources of the german
language are different from the
resources of the latin language and
there's a word in middle high german
grunt
which is like we translate it as ground
and it's got this earthy
feel to it it sort of invokes the notion
of soil and what you stand on and what
things grow out of and
uh sort of what you could run your
fingers through that would have a kind
of honesty to it
and
there's no latin word for that but in
eckart's interpretation of christianity
that's like the fundamental thing you
don't understand god until you
understand the way in which he is our
ground
and all of a sudden this mysticism gets
a kind of german can't
that makes sense to the people who speak
german
and that reveals something totally
different
about what you could think that form of
existence was that was covered over by
the fact that it always been done in
latin
yeah that's fascinating
so so okay we talked about dostoevsky
and uh the use of murder to explore
human nature let's go to camus
who is maybe less concerned with murder
and more concerned with suicide as a way
to explore human nature so he is uh
probably my favorite existentialist
probably one of the more
accessible existentialists
and like you said
one of the people who didn't like to
call himself an existentialist so what
are your thoughts about camus what role
does he play in the story of
existentialism so i find kamu totally
fascinating i really i really do and for
years
i didn't teach camus
because the famous
thing that you're referring to the myth
of sisyphus which is a sort of essay
it's published as a book
super accessible really fascinating he's
a great writer really engaging the
opening line is something like
there is but one truly significant
philosophical question yes and that is
the question of suicide yeah and i
thought i can't teach my
18 year olds you know like
yeah i i just thought that's terrible
like how can i i mean it's not wrong
like that's a but do i want to bring
that into the classroom and and so i
read it i read the the essay i avoided
it for a long time because just because
of that line
and i thought i'm not going to be able
to make sense of this in a way that will
be helpful for anyone
but finally one year maybe seven or
eight years ago i sat down to read it i
thought i've i've gotta really confront
it
and i read it and it's incredibly
engaging i mean it's really really
beautiful and and
kamu is against suicide which just turns
out to be good you know
i was happy about that but he he has a
bit of a bleak understanding of what
human existence amounts to
and so
uh in the end he thinks that human
existence is absurd
and it's being absurd as a kind of
technical term for him
and it means that
the episodes in your life
and your life as a whole
presents itself to you as if it's got a
meaning
but really it doesn't
so there's this tension between the way
things
seem to be
on their surface
and what really turns out to be true
about them and and he gives these great
examples like you probably remember
these he says um there you are you're
walking uh along the street and you
there's a plate glass window in a
building and through the window
uh you you see somebody talking on a
telephone i mean i imagined it as a cell
phone but camus
for didn't
uh but you see somebody talking on a
cell phone and and he's animated he's
talking a lot as if things really meant
something
and yet camus says it's a dumb show
[Laughter]
and it's not dumb in the scent just in
the sense that it's stupid it's dumb in
the sense that it's silent
it presents itself as if it's got some
significance and yet its significance is
withheld from you and he says that's
what our lives are like
everything in our lives presents
themselves to us as if it's got a
significance but it doesn't it's absurd
uh and and then he says really what our
lives are like are like they're like the
lives of sisyphus
just
day after day
you do the same thing
you know you wake up at a certain time
you get on the bus you go to work you
take your lunch break you get off
my i have a colleague who once said to
me something like this it was about
october or so in the fall semester i
said how's how's it going dick he said
well you know how it is i got on the
conveyor belt at the beginning of the
semester and i'm just going through
and that's that's the way my life is and
camus thinks that that
experience which you can sometimes have
reveals something true about what human
lives are like our lives really just are
like the life of sisyphus who rolls this
boulder up the hill from morning till
night and then at night he gets to the
top and it rolls back down to the bottom
over the course of the night he walks
back down and then he starts it all over
again
and he says sisyphus is condemned to
this life like we're condemned to our
lives
but we do have one bit of freedom
and it's the only thing that we can hang
on to
it's the freedom
to stick it to the gods who put us in
this position
by embracing this existence rather than
giving up and committing suicide and i
thought well it's kind of a happy ending
but but but i also thought it it's a dim
view of what our our existence amounts
to
so i i think there's something
fascinating about that
but what i
came to believe and i tried to write
about this once i know you read the
thing about aliveness that i published
once that's secretly a criticism of
camus i don't think i mentioned camu in
there but i think camus has got the
phenomenon wrong
or he's missed some important aspect of
it because in camus view
when you experience your day as sort of
going on in this deadening way and
you're just doing the things that you
always do the way you always do them
for camus that reveals the truth about
what our lives are
but i think there's some aspect at least
for me and maybe maybe he just didn't
feel this or didn't have access to it
maybe others don't but for me there's an
extra part to it which is somehow
that yes that's the way things are
and it's inadequate
and there's something that's missing
from that aspect of our existence
that could be there
and it feels like our lives are not
about just putting up with that and
sticking it to the gods by embracing it
but seeking that absence part of it the
part that's
recognizable in its absence
in your experience of that
and that's that's what i think
i think we do have the experience of the
presence of that in moments when
you feel truly alive
and that's what you mean by the word
aliveness which is a fascinating and a
powerful word yeah that's what i mean by
it i mean i think
most people can recognize moments in
their lives
when they really felt alive and it could
happen in a moment when
you know i don't know maybe miles davis
felt it in that moment when he was
responding to herbie hancock's cord or
maybe
you feel it in that moment where you
grab for the hand on the first date and
the gesture is reciprocated
or maybe you feel it in some moment when
you are
doing a kind of peak athletic thing or
watching somebody else do a peak
athletic thing
um but i think there are moments when we
when it feels like it's not like the way
camus is describing things
and it's better because of that so i
think one really powerful way
to uh for me to understand aliveness
is to think about to go into a darker
territory is to think about suicide and
i've known people in my life who suffer
from clinical depression yeah
and
you know whatever the chemistry is in
our brain
there is
a certain kind of
feeling that is to be depressed
where you look in the mirror
and ask do i
want to kill myself today
this is the question that camus asks
this question this philosophical
question
and
there is people
who
when they're depressed say
not only do they say i want to kill
myself or i don't they say it doesn't
matter
and that's chemistry that's whatever
that is that's chemistry in our mind
and then on the flip side of that for me
i've had some low points but i've very
been very fortunate to
not suffer from that kind of depression
i am the opposite which is
not only moments of peak performance in
athletics or
great music or any of that i'm just
deeply joyful often by
mundane things like as you were saying
it i was drinking this thing and it's
cold and for some reason the coldness of
that was uh
like oh great like refrigeration i don't
know there was a joy in that like i
can't put it into words but i just felt
great and then just so many things you
look out in nature
there's a nice breeze and just like
it's amazing so that
that doesn't feel
like i'm embracing the absurd that seems
like i'm getting some nice like dopamine
hits
in whatever the chemistry is from just
the basics of life and that is the
source of aliveness however my brain is
built
it's gotten
a natural
sort of mechanism for
for aliveness
and and so the one nice way to see the
absence of aliveness is to look at the
chemical the clinical depression
and so that camus doesn't seem to
contend with that at all in asking the
question of suicide because when you
look in the mirror and ask like if i ask
myself do i want to kill myself today i
ask that question in a different way
more like a stoic way often like
basically every day is you know what if
i die today it's more like contemplating
your mortality every single day
you know uh that excites me
the possibility that this is my last day
that you know it just reminds me how
amazing life is and that's that's
chemistry i don't know what that is but
that's not that's certainly not
some kind of philosophical decision i
made i am a little bit riding a wave of
the chemistry of the genetics i've been
given
of the dopamine so that that question of
suicide um
by the way do you find that formulation
of the question of existentialism
i know you didn't want to teach it
because obviously suicide is a very
difficult word especially for young
minds but do you think that's a useful
formulation of the question of
existentialism
like him saying this is the most
important question of suicide i think i
think there is something to it if you
read the question as the question
what is it in virtue of which it ought
to be
desirable to conti to live the lives
that we're capable of of living that's
that's a deep question yeah that's a
question that gets focused
when someone asks themselves whether
they ought to continue to live that life
who
would the famous line nothing focuses
the mind more than one's impending
execution
i mean i think that's i think there's
something
important about that that recognizing
the riskiness and the vulnerability of
one's existence is
super important and the idea and i think
that if we didn't have that
our lives
wouldn't be capable of being meaningful
if they weren't risky and vulnerable
there would be nothing to lose
and it's only because they're things to
lose that they can come to have the
significance that they do so yeah i
think
not against the idea that that's
a deep way of approaching the questions
at the core of of existentialism but as
you say i was worried for a while about
how i was gonna how i was gonna teach it
well i think there's a difference
between suicide and not living i
because suicide is an action yeah so it
feels like to me
like suicide doesn't make sense because
you know imagine you're in like a hotel
and you're saying the room i'm in sucks
but like there's other rooms so
like maybe explore those other rooms
maybe you'll find
meaning in those other rooms like
basically
embracing the fact that you don't know
everything
and there's uh you need time to explore
everything it's like
once you've explored everything then
maybe you can make a full decision but
it's um
unfair to make
a decision
it's i would say unethical
to make a decision until you've explored
all the rooms in the hotel yeah and this
gets focused in in the brothers
karamazov of course there's one brother
who
uh is really asking that question is
asking the question of suicide he's
asking the question whether
the world that we live in is a world
that's worth living in
and i think that characters as you say
very ill i mean that and and it's
possible
um
and often because as you say of you know
brain chemistry physiologies there's
certainly a physical ground to that to
that situation to that condition
but i think it is it is possible for
someone to be in that situation
i think that
ivan karamazov who's the who's the
character who's asking this question
is can you know maybe let's say
chemically depressed or something like
that but i think there's more to it too
and i think that dostoevsky's real view
is that
the brain chemistry doesn't exist on its
own like the way we interact with one
another the way we care about or isolate
ourselves from others the way we
um
uh care for the lives that we lead
affects the chemistry of our brain which
goes on and changes the mood that we're
in so i think dostoevsky
does think that
um
ivan's salvation if he's capable of
being saved
is going to come through the love of his
brother alyosha let me spring uh maybe a
bit of a tangent on you do you ever one
of my other favorite authors is herman
hesse
uh does do you ever include him
in our
deck of uh
sport cards that represent
existentialism i haven't maybe i should
what should i read what should i think
about including oh no there's some kind
of
uh embrace of
absurdism
like there's a
existentialist
kind of ideal
pervading most of his work
uh but there's more of uh like with
siddhartha
there's more almost like a buddhist yeah
sort of like watch the river and like
become the river like this kind of
idea that uh what it means to truly
experience the moment so there is an
experiential part of existentialism
where you want to not it's not just
about we've been talking about kind of
decisions and actions but also what he
means to listen like you said from
nietzsche like what it means to really
take in the world
and experience the moment so he's very
good at writing about what it means to
experience the moment and experience the
full absurdity of the moment and for him
uh i'm starting to forget steppenwolf i
think
is uh humor
it's part of the absurdity which i think
modern day internet explores very well
with memes and so on
humor is a fundamental part
of the existentialist ethic that's able
to deal with absurdity you gotta like
laugh at it i think there's something
let me just say something about humor
because i think you're absolutely right
kierkegaard who is danish and you know
most people think deeply depressed and
then
is actually an incredibly funny writer
and someone who was a classmate of mine
in graduate school who left philosophy
to become a hollywood comedy writer
a very successful guy and then he came
back
25 years later and wrote finished his
dissertation and i was the the reader on
the dissertation but it may be a
conflict of interest i'm not quite sure
but but uh his dissertation was about
he called it kierkegaard and the funny
which is a
kind of a funny title yeah but but
kierkegaard according to eric kaplan's
reading um kierkegaard has um
does have this idea that there's
something
destabilizing about humor
that's
crucial
to the sort of the important
possibilities for us and and so he
there's the idea that like there's a
moment when a joke is being set up
when you're sort of proceeding as if
you're on stable ground
and then the punch line comes
and the rug is pulled out from under you
and for a moment it's like you're
falling you don't
you you there's nothing supporting you
until you're captured by your totally
new understanding of what was going on
and that humor necessarily has that kind
of destabilizing feature to it and
that's like the riskiness that's like
the riskiness that you were you're
pointing to if if there aren't risks in
your life if your life is totally safe
then there's no possibility of
significance and so i think on eric's
reading kierkegaard sort of wants to
line up
the importance of the riskiness and
vulnerability in your life to its having
meaning
with the experience of destabilization
that you get in jokes and comedy
which then becomes significant right
that when you when you remember having
heard a joke for the first time it's got
a kind of salience for you
speaking of jokes
and speaking of uh you mentioned film
and literature
so existentialism in film and literature
i think for uh
a lot of uh people especially nihilism
was experienced in the great work of art
modern work of art called big lebowski i
don't know if you've ever seen that film
but there's uh a group of nihilists in
that that film they're just like they
don't care about anything i think they
happen to be german at least they have
german accents
so maybe can you talk about
notable
appearances of existentialism in film
and if if you at all ever bring out big
lebowski uh if that ever comes into play
so i know that people think about the
big lebowski in this in this context i
and i did actually re-watch it not so
long ago we have kids and i thought
maybe it's time it wasn't really time
for for the 11 year old
so somewhat inappropriate but i but i
have never taught that film so i'd have
to think more we could talk about it i'd
be happy to try to think on the fly
about it okay so i would love to because
there is a feels like there's a
philosophical depth to that film so
there's uh
there's a person that just uh the main
character the jeff bridges character
jeff bridges character yeah he he kind
of um he drinks like these white
russians and he just kind of walks
around in a very relaxed way
and uh
irradiates
both
a love for life but also just an
acceptance of like it is what it is
uh
kind of philosophy
and then there's a bunch of characters
that have
are have very busy lives
uh trying to do some big projects
that are dramatic in some way make some
huge amounts of money so it kind of
actually reminds me of the idiot but
that's the esky in a certain kind of
sense and then there's these players i
mean they're phrased as nihilists but
they kind of don't care
to enjoy life they want to mess with
life in some kind of way and of course
there's
interesting personalities
uh what is it uh
jesus the bo the uh the bowler and then
there's like donny
who is a bit clueless
and then there's the
john goodman character
is talking about vietnam and just takes
life way too seriously too intensely and
so on so it just paints a full sort of
spectrum of characters that are
operating in this world and perhaps most
importantly for existentialism are
thrown into absurdity yeah and
hence the humor okay all right good well
that's helpful thank you for reminding
me of all that and i i think so one
thing to say
is that the nihilist the group of
nihilists who call themselves nihilists
i think they've got a bad
misinterpretation of what nihilism is
supposed to be
uh and they're you know this this
happened actually in the 20s there was a
famous case
um of a couple of german students
leopold and loeb who'd read a lot of
nietzsche
nietzsche you know
was a kind of hero for the nazis even
i think based on a pretty bad
misunderstanding of what he was up to
but leopold and loeb had the the bad
understanding first and they were
students they'd read a lot of nietzsche
and they thought okay nothing means
anything the only way
that um there's any significance in life
is through our will to sort of
powerfully bring something about
and um if we're gonna do that in a way
that reflects the fact that nothing
means anything then what we should do is
take these things
these actions that people always thought
were bad
and do them and show that there's
nothing wrong with doing them
and so they decided they would murder
someone
not because they were angry at them just
someone they'd never met it was
important that it was someone they'd
never met it was totally unmotivated act
and they thought we'll embrace nihilism
by showing that we can act in such a way
as to do something that you know
morality thinks is bad
uh and through our will
bring it about that we desire to do it
for no reason that has anything to do
with it's potentially being
interpretable as good and
i think that's a terrible misreading of
what nietzsche thinks the response to
nihilism is i mean i think read that
against the miles davis thing miles
davis aim
is to creatively bring it about that
something works well in a situation
where he is kind of constrained so they
thought two things one there are no
constraints at all
not even the constraints of the
situation that we find ourselves in and
two we only
become the beings that we really are
when we act in what you know what you
might against what you might have
thought the constraints were and i just
think that's a bad misreading of what
that kind of nihilism is up to and i
think maybe that group in the big
lebowski
has got that kind of that kind of bad
misreading but then the the major
characters are or maybe are much more
interesting go ahead and say something
so there's some kind of apathy to that
their particular nihilism could you
comment on
whether you see sort of
apathy as a philosophy part of that
nihilism
so like um
from an existentialist perspective
how important is it to care about stuff
like really take on life
what what does existentialism have to
say about just sitting back
uh and just not caring
excellent so apathy is like a really
important word the greek word is apathe
it means without passions
and the stoics who you mentioned earlier
really thought that
you know passions are what get in the
way of your living
well because to live well you have to
think clearly about what you should do
and you shouldn't let your resentments
and your angers and your petty
animosities
direct your behavior you should release
yourself from those kinds of passions
so stoicism
you know again huge caricature but you
know it's it's an aim
not to care because caring is bad
and there's certain
forms of existentialism certainly in
pascal and kierkegaard and dostoyevsky
and heidegger
and sartre in his own way
uh so it's not just a theistic or
atheistic thing where what's what's
crucial about us is that we do care
heidegger says
care is the being of dozen dozen is his
name for us that what it is to be us
is to be the being that already cares
and you can't not do that you can
pretend you're not doing it uh but
you're just carrying in a different way
it's like start saying you can pretend
you're not taking responsibility you you
you could pretend that you don't have to
make a decision that is making a
decision
not caring as a way of caring
and so i think the existentialists that
i'm interested in think that we do care
that's that's constitutive of what it is
to be us
and so they'll they'll think that the
stoics got it wrong but that that leaves
open
a huge range of moves about
how we inhabit that
existence well
let me ask about
ein rand
okay so it just so happens that i've
gotten
she's entered a few conversations in
this podcast and just looking at
academic philosophy or just philosophers
in general they seem to ignore ayn rand
do you have a sense of why that is does
she ever come into play
her ideas of
objectivism
come into play of discussions of
a good life
from the perspective of existentialism
in how you teach it how you think about
it is she
somebody who you find it all interesting
so no i don't think she is
[Laughter]
but it's been a long time since i've
read her stuff i read it in high school
i read the fountainhead in high school
and atlas shrugged but that's at this
point a very long time ago i think i
read something about objective
epistemology or something too
so you know my my view about her could
be based on a total misunderstanding of
of what she's up to
but sort of my my caricature of her and
tell me if i've got it wrong
is that she's
sort of
motivated by
a kind of i think it's maybe sometimes
you call it libertarianism but
maybe let's in the context of our
discussion um tie it back to sartre a
kind of view according to which we're
the being who has to contend with the
fact that we're radically free to do
stuff and we're just not being
courageous or brave enough when we don't
do that and the people to admire
are the people who make stuff out of
nothing
um so maybe that's a bad caricature no
no but i i think uh no i think that's
pretty accurate i'm not again very
knowledgeable about the full depth of
her philosophy but i think she takes
a view of the world that's similar to
saturate in
in the conclusions
but
makes stronger statements about
epistemology
that first of all everything is knowable
and there's some you should always
operate through reason
like reason is very important like uh
it's like uh
you start with a few axioms and you
build on top of that and
the axioms that everybody should operate
on are the same
again reality is objective it's not
subjective
and so from that you can derive the
entirety of how humans should behave at
the individual level
and at the societal level and there's a
few conclusions
she would talk about virtue of
selfishness
and sort of a lot of people use that to
dismiss her look she's very selfish and
so on she
actually meant something very different
is like it's it's more like the sartre
thing take responsibility for yourself
understand
what uh forces you're operating under
and make the best of this life and
that's how you can be the best member of
societies by making the best
life you can and just focus on yourself
like fix your own problems first and
then
and that that will make you the best
member of society of your family of
loved ones of friends and so on i think
the reason she's disliked
obviously on the philosophy side she's
disliked because a little bit like
nietzsche she's like she's literary
uh i think and the reason she's publicly
disliked
uh in sort of public conversations is
because of how sure she is of herself so
that which is some of the philosophers
have been known to do like make very
strong statements like hell is other
people but she was making very strong
statements about basically everything
and
but it is the reason i bring her up is
you know she is an influential
thinker
that is not for some reason often
brought up as such it's not acknowledged
how influential she is
you know i was recently looking at like
a list of
the most
important women of the 20th century in
terms of thought not science or but like
thought
and she wasn't in that list
and i just i see this time and time
again
and it doesn't make sense to me why
she's so
kind of dismissed because clearly she's
an author of some of the most read books
like ever
and
she clearly had very strong ideas that
should be contended with you know um
and that that's why it kind of didn't
make sense to me
because she's also a creature of her
time and an important one
she's a creation of the soviet union
somebody who left because of that and so
some of her the strength of her ideas
has to do
with how much she dislikes that
particular uh
philosophy and uh way of life
but also she's a creature of like sartre
and like death whole like nietzsche
and so on now one of the other
criticisms is she doesn't integrate
herself into this history she keeps
basically kind of implying that
she's purely original in all her
thoughts even though she's kind of
citing
a lot of other people but again many
philosophers do this kind of thing as if
as if they've uh they are truly original
and they're not it is interesting and
also what's interesting about her is she
is a woman she is a strong feminist
and
it feels like with simone de beauvoir
you know like she seems like she's a
very important
person in this moment of history that
shouldn't be fully forgotten
interesting yeah well so i i mean i
don't have a lot to add i i will just
say
um
this i mean the way
she and beauvoir seem to me from your
description of her and remembering what
i remember from 35 years ago
they seem pretty opposite from one
another
like one of the things i find
interesting about beauvoir is that she
takes seriously
the thing that
sartre didn't which is our throneness
which is our um the sense in which
we're born into a situation that's
already got a significance for her
i think it was easier for her to to
recognize that than sartre because she
was a woman
and sartre seems to act as if
you know there are no constraints or at
least there shouldn't be we're pretty
close
as you know privileged white males yeah
exactly if we could just get rid of the
last bits of them we would be god like
we're supposed to be yeah uh and i think
beauvoir sort of sees things differently
i think she reckons one does not one's
not born but becomes a woman she says so
how does that happen well you're thrown
into your culture and your culture
starts treating you in a certain way
because of your gender and that starts
to form your understanding and your
experience of things and by the time
you're grown up well you're you're
pretty well formed by that
that seems a fact
it's a fact about
too though it was harder for him to
notice it because uh he was formed into
the into his privilege
but the world reminds us of our
throneness
for some more than others yes absolutely
and and for people who have to contend
on a daily basis with the fact that
the social position they're thrown into
is one that um
negates them or one that oppresses them
or one that sort of pushes them to the
side in some way or another i mean the
black experience is is interesting in
this respect too franz fanon who's a
contemporary of sarton both wars
writes about it and it's very familiar
the things that he's saying now but you
know he he writes back in the 50s about
being a black man in paris and getting
on getting on an elevator with a woman
alone and how like you know
her reaction to him not knowing him not
having any views about any reason to
have any views about him sort of puts
him in a particular social position with
respect to her
and
that that's um if you if you don't have
that experience it's much harder to
recognize
the um the way in which what we're
thrown into something we might not have
chosen
so the idea that that
that that's not an aspect of our
existence um which as you'd describe in
rand's views it's she sounds more like
sorry she sounds more like it either
it's not an aspect of our existence or
at least we ought to sort of aim at its
not being and yeah almost act as if it's
not yeah exactly if it's not and so i i
think from my point of view i don't i
don't pretend that i'm explaining the
public reception of her i'm just sort of
trying to trying to say how i understand
her in this
um intellectual context from my point of
view that's not something big big to
miss and the ambition to think that
really what's happening is that we're
all the same we're all rational beings
we're all beings who if we just got the
axioms of our existence right and made
good judgments and reasoned in an
appropriate way would
optimize ourselves
that feels to me like
a kind of natural
end point of
the philosophical tradition i mean plato
starts off with a view that helps us in
that direction and the enlightenment
moves us further in that direction
but from my point of view that movement
has led us astray
because it's missed something really
important that's crucial to the kind of
being that that we are
yeah and this is
the music exactly
that's just abuse
let's talk about throneness and i think
you mentioned that in the context of
heidegger yeah so can we talk about
heidegger okay who is this philosopher
what are some
fascinating ideas that he brought to the
world okay so martin heidegger was a
german philosopher he he i do know when
he was born in 1889
but i don't know that only by accident
it's because it's the same year that
wittgenstein an austrian philosopher was
born and the same year that hitler was
born so if i've remembered my dates
right and someone will call in and
correct me otherwise uh but that's the
way it it sort of sits in my memory bank
and it's interesting that the three of
them were born at the same time uh
wittgenstein and heidegger share some
similarities
but then it's also interesting that
heidegger was
was a nazi i mean this is a very
disturbing fact about his personal
political background
um and so it's something that anyone who
thinks that things that he said might be
interesting has got to contend with
heidegger was born in germany
hitler and austria that's right
wittgenstein is
austria also but so you have to when
when you call heidegger nazi you have to
remember
i mean there's millions of nazis too so
like there are parts of their that's the
history of the world
you know there's a lot of communists
marxists and uh
nazis in that part of history absolutely
and you know one of the discussion
points is well was he just a kind of
social nazi you know
[Laughter]
i mean you know he went to parties with
them and stuff or was he like did he
really believe in the ideology and
that's a choice point and and
you know we could talk about it if you
want he he held a political position
that's one of the relevant parts in 1933
he was made rector of the university of
freiburg that's like the president of
the university
um and that was in germany all the
universities are um are state
universities and so that's a political
appointment can we just pause on this
point yeah
from an existentialist perspective
what's the role for standing up to evil
so
i mean i think camus probably has
something to say about these things
because he was a bit of a political
figure like do you have a responsibility
not just for your decisions but you know
if the world you see around you
is um
going against what you believe somewhere
deep inside
is
ethical
do you have
to stand up to that even if it costs you
your life or your well-being
you ask from an existential perspective
and there's lots of different
positions that you could have so let me
tell you something in the area of what i
think i might believe which comes out of
this tradition
um
and it's this uh if you live in a
community
where
people are being dragged down by the
norms of the community rather than
elevated
then there's two things that you have to
recognize
one is that you bear some responsibility
for that
not necessarily because you chose it
maybe you reviled it maybe you were
against it but there's some way in which
we all act in accordance with the norms
of our culture we all give in to them in
some way or another and if those norms
are broken
then there's some way in which we've
allowed ourselves to be responsible for
for broken norms
we've become responsible for broken
norms and i i do think you have to face
up to that
i think that um let's just take gender
norms maybe the gender norms are broken
maybe the way men and women treat one
another the way men treat women
is broken you know maybe there's maybe
it is maybe there's
i'm not making a substantive claim i'm
just saying you know lots of people say
it is
and if
uh you're in a culture where
uh those norms take root
you you don't get to just isolate
yourself and pull yourself out of the
culture and think i don't have any
responsibility
um that's you're already a part of the
culture even
if you're isolating yourself from it
that's a way of rejecting the
sort of part you play in the culture but
it's not a way of getting
behind it you now you're playing that
role differently you're saying i i don't
i don't i don't want to take
responsibility for what's going on
around me
and that's a way of
taking responsibility by refusing to do
it so i i think we're implicated in
whatever whatever's going on around us
and if we're going to do anything in our
lives we ought to recognize that
recognize that even in situations where
you maybe didn't decide to do it you you
could be part of bringing other people
down
and then
devote yourself to trying to figure out
how to act differently so that the norms
update themselves
and i and i think this is not a a
criticism of people and the alyosha who
we mentioned in the brothers karamazov
he's a character he's a kind of saintly
character
um in the brothers karamazov but that
one crucial moment in his in in that
story
when he realizes how awful he's been
being to someone without ever even
intending to do that
it's grushanka who's this sort of
fascinating woman
and she's a very erotic woman she's sort
of sexual and and and alyosha
in my reading of it is kind of attracted
to her
but he's a young kid he's 20 or whatever
and he's kind of embarrassed about it
and he lives in the monastery and he's
thinking maybe he wants to be a priest
and he's kind of embarrassed by it so
what does he do every time they run
across one another in the street he
averts his gaze
and why is he doing that because he's
kind of embarrassed you know
but how does grishanka experience it
well she knows she's a fallen woman and
she knows that alyosha has this other
position in society so her read on it is
he's passing judgment on me he can see
that he doesn't want to be associated
with me he can see that i'm a fallen
woman he knows that in order to maintain
his purity he's got to res he's got to
avoid me
that that's not what alliosh intended to
do
but that's the way it's experienced and
so there's this way he comes to
recognize oh my god like what i'm
supposed to do is love people in
dostoevsky's view of things
and what i'm doing instead is dragging
this poor woman down i'm making her life
worse i'm making her feel terrible about
herself and if i actually came to know
her i'd recognize her condition is
difficult
she's living a difficult life she's
making hard choices and why don't i you
know why don't i see that in her face
instead of this other thing that's
making me want to avoid her and that's a
huge moment so but the idea is that
we're implicated in bringing other
people down
whether we want to be or not
and that's our condition so
the requirement to understand that is to
be almost to a radical degree be
empathetic and to listen
uh to the world
and i mean you you brought up sort of
gender roles it's not so simple all of
this is messy for example this is me
talking
it's
clear to me that for example the woke
culture
has bullying built into it has some
elements of the same kind of evil built
into it and when you're part of the wave
of wokeness standing up for social
rights
you also have to listen and think are we
going too far
are we hurting people are we doing the
same
things that others
that we're fighting against that others
were doing in the past so it's not
simple
uh once you see
that there's evil being done
that is easy to fix no in
in our society
it's uh there's something about our
human nature that just
too easily stops listening to the world
to empathizing with the world
and we label things as evil this is
through human history this is evil you
mentioned tribes this religious belief
is evil and so we have to fight it and
we become certain and dogmatic about it
and then in so doing commit evil onto
the world it seems like
a life that accepts
and
responsibility for the norms we're in
has to constantly be
sort of questioning yourself and
questioning like listening to the world
fully and richly without being
weighed down by
any one sort of uh realization you just
always constantly have to be thinking
about the world am i wrong am i wrong in
seeing the world this way i mean
the very last thing you said you've
constantly got to be thinking about the
world you've constantly got to be
listening you've constantly got to be
attending and it's not simple
all that sounds exactly right to me and
the the phrase that rings through my
head is another one from the brothers
karamazov dimitri this passionate sort
of sometimes violent brother
who um who is also
sort of deep deeply cares i mean he's
because he's passionate he's sort of got
care through and through but it's
breaking him apart he says at one point
um god and the devil are fighting and
the battlefield is the heart of man
and i just think yeah it's not simple
and the idea that there might be a
purely good way of doing things is just
not our condition that where everything
we do is going to be sort of undermined
by some aspect of it there's not going
to be a kind of pure good in in human
existence and so it's it's sort of
required that we're going to have to be
um empathetic that we're going to have
to recognize
that
others are dealing with that just as we
are
so i apologize for distracting us we
were talking about heidegger okay that
uh
and the reason we were distracted is he
happened to also be a nazi but
he nevertheless has a lot of powerful
ideas what are the ideas he's brought to
the world okay so that's a big huge
question so
let me see how much of it i can get on
the table
i mean the the big picture is that
heidegger thinks and he's not really
wrong to think this
that the whole history of philosophy
from plato forward maybe even from the
pre-socratics forward from like the 6th
century bc
to now
has
been motivated by a certain kind or has
been grounded on a certain kind of
assumption
that it didn't have the right to make
and that it's led us astray
and that until we understand
the way in which it's led us astray
we're not going to be able to get to
grips with the condition we now find
ourselves in so let me start with what
he thinks the condition we now find
ourselves in is
lots of periods to heidegger's fuse i'm
not i'm just going to sort of mush it
all together for the purposes of today
uh heidegger thinks that one of the
crucial
things that we need to contend with
when we think about
uh what it is to be us now
is that the right name for our age is a
technological age
and what does it mean for our age to be
a technological age
well it means that we have an
understanding
of what it is for anything at all to be
at all
that
we never really chose
that's sort of animating the way we live
our lives that's animating our
understanding of ourselves and
everything else
that
is quite limited
and it's organized around the idea
that to be something
is to be
what's sitting there
as an infinitely flexible
reserve
to be optimized and made efficient
and heidegger thinks that uh that's
that's
not just the way we think of
silicon circuits
or you know the
the river when we put a hydroelectric
power plant on it we're optimizing the
flow of the river so that it makes
energy which is infinitely flexible and
we can use in any way at all it's the
way we understand ourselves too
we think of ourselves as this reserve
of potential
that needs to be made efficient and
optimized and when i when i talk with my
students about it i ask them you know
like
what's your calendar look like you know
what's the goal of your day
is it to get as many things into it as
possible is it to feel like i've i've
failed unless i've uh i've made my life
so efficient that i'm doing this and
this and this and this and this that i
can't let things go by
the feeling
uh that i think we all
have
that there's some pressure to do that to
relate to ourselves that way
is a clue to what heidegger thinks the
technological age is about
and he thinks that's different from
every other age in history
we used to think of ourselves in the
17th century at the beginning of the eli
of the enlightenment as subjects
who
represent objects descartes thought that
a subject is something some mental sort
of realm
that represents the world in a certain
way and we are closed in on ourselves in
the sense that um we have a special
relation to our representations
uh and that's that's what the realm of
the subject but others you know in the
middle ages we were created in the image
and likeness of god in in in the
pre-socratic age to be was to be what
whooshes up and lingers for a while and
fades away the paradigm of of what is
where thunderstorms and
the anger of the gods achilles battle
fury and it overtakes everything and
stays for a while and then leaves the
the flowers blooming in spring and
that's very different from the way we
experience ourselves and so the so the
question is um what are we supposed to
do in the face of that and heidegger
thinks that
the
the presupposition that's motivated
everything
from the pre-socratics forward
is that
there is
some entity that's the ground
of the way we understand everything to
be
for the middle ages it was god that was
the entity that made things be the
things that they are
for the enlightenment it was us
maybe first heart it's us
and heidegger thinks
um whatever it is that stands at the
ground of what we are is not another
thing it's not another entity and we're
relating to it in the wrong way if we
think of it like that
there's some way and he this is partly
why i was interested in meister eckhart
he says what there is is there's giving
going on
in the world
and we're
the grateful recipient of it
and the giving is like
whatever it is it's the social norms
that were thrown into we didn't choose
them they were given to us and that's
the ground that is what makes it
possible for anything to be intelligible
at all if we lived outside of
communities if we lived in a world where
there were no social norms at all
nothing would mean anything
nothing would have any significance
nothing would be regular in the way that
things need to be regular in order for
there to be departures or manifestations
of that regularity uh so so community
norms are crucial
but they're also always updating
we place um we have some responsibility
for
what they are and the way in which
they're updating themselves
and yet we didn't ever choose it to be
that way
so those norms are somehow
giving
significance to us
in a way that that we're implicated in
we have some relation to and all that
gets covered over if you think of us as
efficient resources to be optimized is
that a conflicting view that we are
resources to be optimized is that is
that somehow
deeply conflicting with the fact that
there's a ground that we stand on
absolutely so what heidegger thinks is
that this is this he calls this the
supreme danger of the technological age
is that without ever having chosen it
without ever having decided it this is
the way we understand what it is to be
us
but he thinks that um it's also he says
quoting holderly in this 18th century
german poet he says in
in the supreme danger lies the saving
possibility so what does that mean it
means that we this is the this is the
understanding that we've been thrown
into that we've been given it's the gift
that was given to us it's supremely
dangerous if we let ourselves live that
way we'll destroy ourselves
but it's also the saving possibility
because
if we recognize that we never chose that
that
it was given to us
but also we were implicated in its being
given and we could find a way to
supersede it that it's the ground but
it's also updatable it calls the ground
the groundless ground
it's it's not like an entity which is
there solid stable
like god who's
eternal and non-changing is always
updating itself and we're always
involved in it's being updated but we're
only involved in it in the right way if
we listen
like miles davis
so optimization
is not a good
way to live life
if you thought that it was obviously
clear that that was
the relevant value so obviously clear
that it never even occurred to you to
ask whether it was right to think that
then you would be in danger yeah got it
so yeah there is some in this modern
technological age in in the full meaning
of the word technology that's updated to
actual modern age with
a lot more technology going on
it uh it does feel like
like colleagues of mine in tech space
actually are somehow drawn to that
optimization
as if that's going to save us
as if the thing that truly weighs us
down
is um
the inefficiencies exactly and i think
if you think about other other contexts
like what what are the moments when
i mean we're unique in this respect this
this period in history is unlike any
previous no nobody ever felt that way
right but think about but it's also true
that nobody no previous period in
history was nihilistic
so our condition is tied up that sort of
thing is meant to be a response to the
felt lack of a ground
and
so no no previous epoch in history felt
that way they didn't have our problem
but think so so they it was much more
natural to them to experience
moments in ways that feel
um unachievable for us what we were
calling moments of aliveness before
think about where the context in which
they felt them they weren't efficient
optimized contexts think about the the
greeks
if you ever read homer it is a bizarre
world back there but one of the things
that's bizarre
is that they're so unmotivated by
efficiency and optimizing
that
the only thing that seems to run through
all of the different greek cultures it's
the idea
that if some stranger comes by
you better
take care of them
because zeus is the is the god of
strangers and zeus will be angry that's
what they say right but what is it but
how does it manifest itself
odysseus he's trying to get home and he
gets shipwrecked on an island
and you know he's trying to figure out
he's been at sea for 10 days he's
starving he's bedraggled and he sees uh
now sissa the the princess who's
beautiful and he's like boy i better you
know i don't know guess to get get some
clothes or something like i don't want
them to beat me up and kill me
and so they so she takes him to the
palace
they have three days of banquets and
festivals before they even ask his name
it's like here's a stranger
our job is to celebrate the presence of
a stranger because this is where
significance lies
now we don't have to feel that way but
but the idea that that's one of the
places where significance could lie is
pretty strongly at odds with the idea
that our salvation is going to come from
optimization and efficiency now maybe
something about the way we live our
lives will have that integrated into it
um but it's but it's at odds with other
other moments
let me ask you a question about uh
hubert bert dreyfus
he is a
friend
a colleague a mentor of yours
unfortunately no longer with us
you wrote with him the book titled all
things shining reading the western
classics to find meaning in a secular
age
first
can you maybe speak about who that man
was what you learned from him
and then we could maybe ask
how do we find through the classics
meaning in a secular age okay
so bert dreyfuss was a
very important philosopher
of the
late 20th early 21st century he he died
in um 2017 about a little over four
years ago
uh he was my teacher i met him in 1989
when i went away to graduate school
in berkeley that's where he taught
he
plays an
interesting and important role in the
history of philosophy in america
because
uh in a period when
most philosophers in america
and in the english-speaking world
were not taking seriously 20th century
french and german philosophy he was
and he was really
probably the most important
english-speaking interpreter of
heidegger the the german philosopher
that we're talking about we've been
talking about
he
was an incredible teacher a lot of his
influence came through his teaching
and
one of the amazing things about him as a
teacher
was his um
sort of
mix
of
intellectual humility
with sort of
deep insightful authority and he would
stand up in front of a class of 300
students he taught huge classes because
people love to go see him and i taught
for him for many years
and say you know
i've been reading this text for 40 years
but the question you asked is one i've
never asked and it would be true
like he would he would he would find in
what people said
things that were surprising and new to
him and that's humility actually that is
listening to the world absolutely
absolutely he was always ready to be
surprised
by
something that someone said yeah and
there's something astonishing about that
so his influence was you know for people
who didn't know him through his
interpretations of these texts he wrote
about a huge range of stuff but for
people who did know him it was through
his presence it was through the way he
carried himself in in his life
and uh so in any case that that's who he
was we i graduated
after many years as a graduate student i
i didn't start in philosophy i started
in math math and computer science
actually and then i did a lot of work in
computational neuroscience for a few
years it's a fascinating journey we'll
we'll get to it through our friendly
conversation about artificial
intelligence okay i'm sure
because you're you're basically
fascinated with the
philosophy of mind of the human mind but
rooted in a curiosity of mind through
the it's artificial
through the engineering of mind yeah
yeah that's right so bur so bert i mean
the reason i was attracted to him
actually is is because of his uh to
begin with was because of his criticisms
of what was called traditional symbolic
ai in the 70s and 80s
so i came to berkeley as a graduate
student who'd done a lot of math and a
lot of computer science a lot of
computational neuroscience i
i noticed that you had you
interview a lot of a lot of people in
this world and i had a teacher at brown
as an undergraduate uh jim anderson who
wrote with jeff hinton a big book on
neural networks um so so i had i was
interested in that
not so interested in traditional ai like
sort of lisp programmings things that
went on in the 80s
because it felt
sort of
you know when you made a system do
something all of a sudden it was an un
interesting thing to have done
the fact that you'd solved the problem
then made it clear that the problem
wasn't an interesting one to solve
that's right
and i had that experience and and bert
had criticisms of of um symbolic ai what
he called good old-fashioned ai gofi
and um and i was attracted to those
criticisms because
it felt to me that there was something
lacking in in in that project and i
didn't know what it was i i just felt
its absence
and uh
then i learned that all his arguments
came from his reading of this
phenomenological and existential
tradition and so i had to try to figure
out what those folks were saying and it
was a long road let me tell you
it took me a long time but but it was
because of birth that i was able to do
that so i own that that huge debt of
gratitude and eventually we went on to
write a book together which was a great
experience
and yes we published all things shining
in 2011. and that was that's a book that
i definitely would not have had the hood
spa to try to write if it weren't for
bert because it was really about
you know great literature in the history
of the west from homer and virgil to and
dante to melville there's a huge chapter
on melville a big chapter on um david
foster wallace who burt didn't care
about it all but i was fascinated by it
and so
learning to think that way while writing
that book with him
uh was an amazing experience
so i have to admit
it's one of my failings in life one of
many failings is i've never gotten
through moby dick
or
or any of melville's works so
maybe can you comment on before we talk
about dave or david foster wallace who i
have gotten through
um
what are some
of the sources of meaning in these
classics good so
moby dick i think is the other great
novel of the 19th century
so the brothers karamazov and moby dick
and and they're diametrically opposed
which is one of the really interesting
things so
the brothers karamazov is a kind of in
it's a kind of existential
interpretation of russian orthodox
christianity
how do you live that way and find joy in
your existence
moby dick is not at all about
christianity it's about
it sort of starts with the observation
that that
that the form of christianity that uh
that ishmael is is familiar with is is
broken it's not gonna it's not gonna
work in his living his life he has to
leave it he has to go to sea
in order to find what needs to happen
and and and ishmael is the the boating
captain the the the whaling boat captain
so now he's not the captain that's ahab
ahab is the captain yeah right let me
back up the famous opening line to the
book is call me ishmael
and that's ishmael is the is the main
character in the book he's a nobody he's
you and me he's the everyday guy he's
like a nobody on the ship he he's like
you know not the lowest but certainly
not the highest he's right in the middle
he and
and he's named ishmael which is
interesting because ishmael is the
illegitimate son of abraham in the old
testament he is the
the i think if i have it right again
someone will correct me
i think he's the he's the one he's the
one that islam traces its its um genesis
to
and so islam is
is an abrahamic religion like judaism
and christianity but judaism and
christianity trace their lineage through
isaac the the quote-unquote legitimate
son of abraham and ishmael is the other
son of abraham who he had with a with a
girlfriend
uh and so
so he's he's clearly outside of
christianity in some way he's named
after the non-christian sort of son of
of abraham
um and and he's the the book starts out
with
this what does he call it something like
a
dark and misty november mood
he's walking along the street and he's
overcome by his i can't remember what
the word is but his hypos that's what he
calls them he's in a mood he's depressed
he's down things are not going well and
that's where he starts
and he he signs up to go on this whaling
voyage with this captain ahab
who
is this incredibly charismatic
deeply disturbing
character
who is a captain who's got lots of
history and wants to go whaling wants to
get whales that's what they do they
harpoon these whales and bring them back
and sell the blubber and the oil and so
on um so he's he's kind of rich and he's
and he's famous and he's powerful he's
an authority figure and he is
megalomaniacally obsessed with getting
one particular whale which is called
moby dick and moby dick is like the
largest the whitest the sort of most
terrifying of all the whales and ahab
wants to get him because because a
number of years earlier
he had an encounter with moby dick where
moby dick bit off his leg
and he survived
but he had this deeply religious
experience in the wake of it
and he needed to find out what the
meaning of that was like what is the
meaning of my suffering who am i such
that the world and moby dick this
leviathan at the center of it should
treat me this way
and so his task is not just to go
whaling is to figure out the meaning of
the universe
through going wailing and having a
confrontation with his tormentor this
whale moby dick
and the confrontation is so weird
because melville points out that whales
their faces are so huge
their foreheads are so huge
and their eyes are on the side of them
that you can never actually look them in
the eye
and it's kind of a metaphor for god like
you can't ever look god in the face
that's the sort of traditional thing to
say about god you can't find the
ultimate meaning of the universe by
looking god in the face
and but ahab wants to he says he's got a
pasteboard mask of a face but i'll
strike through the mask and find out
what's behind
and so ishmael is sort of caught up in
this thing and he's like going wailing
because he's in a bad mood
and maybe this will make things better
and he makes friends with this
guy queequeg
and queequeg is a pagan
he's from an island in the south pacific
and he's got
tattoos all over his body head to toe
he's a party colored like every
different color says says ishmael is
these tattoos and they they are
the the writing on his body
he says of
the immutable mysteries of the universe
as understood through his culture
and so somehow queequeg
is this character who is like not
christian at all
um and he's powerful in a very different
way than ahab is he's supposed to be the
king he's the son of the king and
probably his father's died by now and if
he went home he'd be the king but he's
off on a voyage too trying to understand
who he is before he goes back and leads
his people and he's a harpooner the
bravest of the people on the ship and um
he's got the mystery of the universe
tattooed on his body but nobody can
understand it
and
it's through his relation with queequeg
that ishmael comes to get a different
understanding of what we might be about
so that's that's moby dick
in a nutshell
and and uh connected to a book i have
read which is
funny there's probably echoes that
represent the 20th century now
in old man in the sea by hemingway
that
also has
similar i guess themes
but more
more personal
more focused on the
i mean i guess it's less about god is
almost more like the existentialist
version of moby dick
yeah yeah and hence shorter and a lot
shorter yeah well hemingway was
brilliant that way yeah
but do you see echoes and uh do you do
you find old man in the sea interesting
it's been since ninth grade that i've
been in
even longer ago than the fountain had uh
so i didn't know we were gonna go there
i mean i find hemingway interesting but
hemingway my general sort of picture of
him is that you know he's he's uh we
have to confront the the dangers and the
difficulties of our life we have to
develop in ourselves a certain kind of
courage and manliness and i think
there's something interesting about that
he's for risk
in a certain way and i think that's
important uh but i but i do i don't now
i i don't have any right to say this
since it's been so long since i read it
i do feel like there's there's
i don't remember
a sense for the for the quite the
tragedy of it maybe there is is it a
melancholy novel i don't even remember
no it's uh
i mean it has a sense like the stranger
by camus
it has a sense of like this is how life
is
and it like it has more about old age
and
that uh you're not quite the man you
used to be feeling of like this is how
time passes
and then the the passing of time and how
you get old you get older
and this is one last fish
it's less about this is the fish it's
more like this is one last fish like and
asking
who was i
who was i as a man as a human being in
this world and this one fish helps you
ask that question fully wonderful but
it's one fish which is just sort of all
the other fish too right and and that is
a big difference because
for
for ahab
no other fish will do than moby dick
it's got to be the biggest the most
powerful the most tormenting it's got to
be the one that you've got history with
that has defiled you
and it is
it's a raucous ride moby dick
what about david foster wallace so why
is he important to you in the search of
meaning uh in a secular age good so so
i'll just
just to finish the moby dick thing i
think what's interesting about melville
is that he thinks
our salvation comes not if we get in the
right relation to monotheism or
christianity but if we get in the right
relation to polytheism to the idea that
there's not a unity to our existence
but there are lots of little meanings
and they don't cohere
sometimes you know
uh like in
like in homer sometimes you're in love
helen's in love with paris
and they do crazy things they go off and
run away and the trojan war begins and
sometimes you're in a battle fury that
for the love is aphrodite's realm and
the battle fury that's ares realm and
that's a totally different world and
they're not even i mean they're related
there's a kind of family resemblance but
not much mostly you're just in different
sort of local meaningful worlds and
melville seems to think that that's
that's a thing that we could aim to
bring back he says we have to
lure back the merry mayday gods of old
and and
lovingly enthroned them in the now
egotistical sky the now unhaunted hill
that's what we live in this world where
hills aren't aren't haunted with
significance anymore and the sky is just
a bunch of stuff that we're studying
with physics and astrophysics and stuff
but but they used to be
awe-inspiring and we have to figure out
how to get in that relation to them but
not by trying to give a unity to our
existence through
developing habits and practices that get
written on our body
and so his is about the end of
judeo-christianity and the sort of roman
appropriation of it in wallace i what
one of the things i think is so
interesting about him
is that i think he's a great observer of
the contemporary world and he's a very
funny writer he's really funny but he's
a great observer of the of the
contemporary world and what he thought
uh was at the core of the contemporary
world was this constant temptation to
diversion through entertainment
that's a different story than
heidegger's story about efficiency and
optimization but it's the other side of
it what like what is this tension
temptation sort of diverting us from
the ability to be more efficient
so you know you're tempted to go
you know watch some stupid film
or television show or something that's
dumb and not really very interesting but
you read that temptation as a temptation
precisely in virtue of it's taking you
away from your optimizing your your
existence and so i think they're two
sides of the same coin i think he's
brilliant at describing it i think he
thought it was a desperate position to
be in that it was it was something that
we needed to confront
and find a way out of
and his characters are trying to do that
and i think there's two different david
foster wallaces
one
i mean david foster wallace committed
suicide
and when i and it's very sad and he
clearly
did have
you know sort of there was a
physiological basis to his condition he
knew it he was treating it from decades
with medication he had
uh electroshock therapy a number of
times it is just very very sad story
when i decided that we were going to
write about david foster wallace
the first thing i was worried about is
what can you can you
like obviously
a motivating factor maybe the motivating
factor in his committing suicide was his
physiological condition
um but there was there's there's this
there was a question
could you think i mean he's obsessed
with the condition with what we need to
do to achieve our salvation
to live well to make our lives worth
living
and he clearly
in the end felt like he couldn't do that
so in addition to the physiological
thing which probably most of it the
question for me was could you find in
his writing
what his
what he was identifying
as the thing we needed to be doing
that he nevertheless felt we couldn't be
doing
and he and he talks as if that's that's
the difficulty for him
uh so so that that's one side of him and
i i did want to find that
i think there's another side of him
that's very different but you were going
to ask no please what's the other side i
mean what i write about in the
in the chapter mostly
um is what i think
he's got as our
as as our saving possibility
he thinks our saving possibility he says
this in a graduation speech that he gave
to kenyon
is that
we have the freedom to interpret
situations however we like
so what's the problem case for him
he says look you know the problem case
we have it all the time you get pissed
off into the world you know
some some big suv cuts you off on the
highway
and you're pissed off and you might
express your anger
with one finger or another
directed at that person and he says but
actually
you know
you're being pissed off as the result of
your having made an assumption
and the assumption is that that action
was directed at you
like the assumption is that you're the
center of the universe
and you shouldn't assume that and the
way to talk yourself out of it he says
is to recognize the possibility that
maybe that wasn't an action directed at
you
like maybe that guy
is racing to the hospital you know to
take care of his dying
spouse
who's been there suffering you know from
cancer or maybe
he's you know on the way to pick up a
sick child or maybe he's and it's not an
action director that was your assumption
not something that was inherent in the
situation
and i think there's something
interesting about that i think there's
something right about that
at the same time
i don't think he speaks as if
we can just spin out these stories and
whether they're true or not doesn't
matter
what matters is that they free us from
this assumption yes and i think they
only free us from this assumption if
they're true
like sometimes the guy really did direct
it at you and that's part of the
situation and like you can't pretend
that it's not part of the situation you
have to find the right way of dealing
with that situation so you have to
listen
to what's actually happening
and then you have to figure out how to
make it right and i think he's he thinks
that we have too much freedom he thinks
that you don't have to listen to the
situation you can just tell whatever
story you like
about it
and i think that's actually too tough
i don't think we have that kind of
freedom
and he and he writes these sort of
incredibly moving letters when he's
trying to write the pale king which is
the end of which is the unfinished novel
that
really sort of drove him to distraction
at the center of the novel is this
character
who
one of the characters at the center of
the novel is a guy
who's doing the most boring thing you
could possibly imagine he is an irs tax
examiner
he's going over other people's tax
returns
trying to figure out whether they follow
the rules or not
and like just the idea of doing that for
eight hours a day is just terrifying
and and he puts this guy
in a enormous warehouse that extends for
miles where person after person after
person is in rows of desks
sort of nameless each of them doing this
task
so he's in nowhere doing nothing
and it's got to be intensely boring and
now the main character's trying to
trying to teach himself to do that
and the question is how do you put up
with the boredom
how do you put up with this onslaught of
meaninglessness
and the main character
is able to confront that
condition
with such
bliss
that he literally levitates from
happiness while he's going over other
people's tax returns and i i that's
that's my metaphor for what i think
wallace must have imagined we have to
try to aspire to
and i think that's unlivable i think
that's not i think that's not an
ambition that we could achieve i think
there's something else we could achieve
and the other thing that that we can
achieve that i think is
is a is something that he also is on to
but doesn't write about as often
is
something more like achieving
peak moments of significance in a
situation when something great happens
and he writes about this in an article
about roger federer he he loved tennis
are you a tennis lover i'm not a lover
of tennis but i played tennis for 15
years and so on i don't love it the way
people love baseball for example i see
the beauty in it the artistry i just
liked it as a sport good okay well i
didn't play much tennis but i hit a ball
around every once in a while as a kid
and i always thought it was boring to
watch
but reading reading david foster wallace
on roger federer you're like wow i've
been missing
and the article which appeared in the
new york times magazine was called roger
federer as religious experience oh wow
there you go
and he says look there's something
astonishing about
watching someone who's got a body like
us
and having a body is a limitation
it's like the sight of sores and pains
and agony and exhaustion and it's this
it's the thing that dies in the end
uh and so it's it's what we have to
confront
i mean there's also joys that go along
with having a body like if you didn't
have a body there'd be no sex if you
didn't have a body there'd be no sort of
physical
excitement and so on but uh but somehow
having a body is essentially a
limitation
that when you watch someone who's got
one and is extraordinary at the way they
use it
you can recognize how that limitation
can be to some degree transcended
and that that's what we can get when we
watch federer or some other great
athlete sort of doing these things that
transcend the limitations of their
bodies
and that that's the kind of peak
experience that we're capable of that
could be a kind of salvation that's a
very different story
and i think that's a livable story and i
and i
don't know if it would have saved him
but i feel like i wish
he developed that that side of the story
more can we talk about and first of all
let me just comment that i deeply
appreciate
that you said
uh you were going to say something that
the fact that you're listening to me is
is amazing like that you care about
other humans i i really appreciate that
um we should be in this way listening to
the world so um
there's there's that's a meta comment
about many of the things we're talking
about but you mentioned something about
levitating and a task that is infinitely
boring
and contrasting that with
essentially levitating on a task that is
great like uh the highest achievement of
uh
this physical limiting body in playing
tennis now i often say this i don't know
where i heard david foster wallace say
this but he said that the key to life is
to be unborable
that is the embodiment of this
philosophy and i when
people ask me for advice like
young students you know i don't find
this interesting i don't find this
interesting how do i find the thing i'm
passionate for
uh this would be very interesting to
explore because you kind of say that
that may not be a realizable
thing to do which is to be unborable but
my advice usually is life is amazing
like
you should be able to you should strive
to discover the joy
the levitation in everything
and uh the thing you get stuck on for a
longer period of time that might be the
thing you should stick to but everything
should be full of joy so that kind of
cynicism of saying
life is uh
boring
is a thing that will prevent you from
discovering the thing
that will give you deep meaning and joy
but you're saying
being unborable
is not actionable
for a human being so okay excellent
question deep question and and
the um you might think
because of the title of that of the book
that bert and i wrote all things shining
that i think all things are shining
[Laughter]
and but actually
i think it's an unachievable goal to be
unborable i i do believe that you're
right
that a lot of times when people are
bored with something it's because they
haven't tried hard enough
and i do think quite a lot of what
makes people bored with something is
that they haven't paid attention well
enough
and that they haven't listened as as you
were saying
um so i i do think there's something to
that i think that's a deep insight
on the other hand
the
perfection of that insight is that
nothing
is ever anything less than joyful
and i actually think that dostoevsky and
melville both agree but in very
different ways
that
life involves a wide range
of moods
and that all of them are important
it involves grief like i think
when someone dies it's appropriate to
grieve
and
it's not in the first instance joyful
it's related to joy because it makes the
joys you feel when you feel them
more intense
but it makes them more intense by
putting you in the position of
experiencing the opposite
and it's only because
we're capable of a wide range of
passionate responses to situations
that i think the significances can be as
meaningful as they are so melville again
has this has this sort of interest i
mean
let's just say the guilt and the grief
in in the brothers karamazov alyosha
loses his mentor father zasima he's
grieving it's super important that he's
grieving
he has a religious conversion on the
basis of grieving where he sees the sort
of deep sort of beauty of everything
that is but it comes through the grief
not by avoiding the grief uh and and
melville says something like ishmael
says something like he says i'm like a
catskill mountain eagle the catskills
mountains nearby he says who's sort of
flying high above the earth going over
the peaks and down into the valleys i
have these ups and these downs
but they're all invested with a kind of
significance they all happen at an
enormously high height because it's
through the mountains that i'm flying
and even when i'm down it's a way of
being up
but it's really down
it's just that it's a way of being up
because it makes the ups even upper
well i guess then the perfectionism of
that can be destructive
i mean i i tend to uh see for example
grief a loss
of love as part of love in that it's a
celebration of the richness of feelings
you had when you had the love so it's
like it's all part of the same
experience but if you turn it into an
optimization problem where everything
can be unboreable then that can in
itself be destructive yeah yeah
i heard this interview with david foster
wallace on the internet
where it's uh it's a video of him and
there is like a a foreign sounding
reporter asking him questions i think
she's
uh there's an accent of some sort of
german i think something like that
and i don't know it just i painted a
picture such a human person we were
talking about listening
the interviewer if i may say
uh wasn't a very good one in the
beginning
so she
kind of walked in doing the usual
journalistic things of just kind of
generic questions and
and just kind of
asking very basic questions but he
brought out something in her over time
and he was so sensitive and so sensitive
to her and also
sensitive to being
a thinking and acting human in this
world that's just painted such a
beautiful picture that people should go
definitely check out
they made me really sad that we don't
get this kind of picture
um of of other thinkers
all of the ones we've been talking about
just that almost this little accidental
view of this human being
i don't know it was a beautiful one and
i guess there's not many like that even
of uh him yeah yeah no i think he was
more
than his
writing ability which was extraordinary
he had developed a style that was i
think unlike you know anyone else's
style and
it was his
sensitivity
to other people and to
sort of what he was there to pay
attention to
he wants in one of his um
essays i think it's the one called an
incredibly fun thing i'll never do again
do you know that one about cruise ships
i think he describes himself as this
sort of roving eyeball that just sort of
walks around the
walks around the ship
noticing things
and he's incredibly good at that
but i also do but i also worry
that that reflects something that you
find in ivan in in the brothers
karamazov
ivan i don't know if you remember this
part
when he's away at school as a young
ecologist as a young boy he makes money
by
going around town
to where tragic events have occurred
someone just got run over by a carriage
or someone you know something just
happened
and
being the first one there
he always knows somehow where these
things are going to happen and writing
about it
giving this really good description
and then signing it eyewitness
and
it's as if
ivan's understanding of his life is that
he was supposed to be a witness
to it he was supposed to see others but
not get involved
he never is interested in trying to keep
the bad things from happening he just
wants to report on them when he sees
them
and i think that he's an incredibly
isolated person character and it's his
isolation
from
others from the love of others and his
inability his desire not
to love others because that attaches him
to someone
that i think is really at the ground of
his
condition
and and i think that aim to be isolated
which many people have nowadays i mean
you see it in the underground man too
just sort of taking yourself out of the
world because
you don't want to have to take
responsibility for being involved with
others
i think that's a bad move and and i and
i do worry that maybe i mean i never
knew david foster wallace i have no
right to to comment you know on on his
life but he portrays um himself in that
one
episode as a person who who does that
and i think that's dangerous yeah
there's some sense in which being
sensitive to the world like i find
myself the the source of joy for me is
just being really sensitive to the world
to to experience
there's some way it's quite brilliant
where you're saying that
that could be isolating it's like darwin
studying
uh
a new kind of species on an island you
don't want to interfere with it you find
it so beautiful that you don't want to
interfere with this beauty
so
there is some sense in which that
isolates you and then you find yourself
deeply alone
yeah uh away from the experiences that
bring you joy yeah
and that could be destructive it's it's
um
that's fascinating how that uh that
works and in his case
of course some of it is um
just chemical chemicals in his brain but
some of it is the
the the path
his uh philosophy of life let him down
and that's the danger we need you too
and gazing into the abyss
that you can um
your job is a difficult one because uh
doing philosophy
changes you yeah
and
you may not uh know how it changes you
until you you're changed and you look in
the mirror
you wrote a piece
in mit tech review saying that ai can't
be an artist
creativity is and always will be a human
endeavor
you mentioned burt and criticism of
symbolic ai
can you explain your view
of criticizing the possible the capacity
for artistry and creativity in uh our
robot friends
uh yeah i can try
so
to make the argument
you have to have in mind
what counts as
art what counts as a creative artistic
act
i take it that
just doing something new
isn't sufficient
i mean we say that good art is original
but not everything that's never been
done before is good art
so there has to be more than just doing
something
new
it has to be
somehow doing something new in a way
that speaks to
the audience or speaks to
some portion of the audience at least it
has to be doing something new
in such a way
that
some people who see or interact with it
can see themselves anew
in it so i think that art is inherently
a creative act it it i'm sorry
a kind of um communicative act
that it it involves a relation with
other
people
so
think about the conditions for that
working
someone i talk in that article
i can't remember something about new
music i think i don't talk about
stravinsky but let's say stravinsky
um stravinsky
you know performs the right of spring
and there's riots
it is
new
and people hate it
people can't sounds like a cacophony it
sounds awful it's it's written according
to principles that are not like the
principles of music composition that
people are familiar with
so in some ways it's a failed
communicative act
but as as nietzsche says about his own
stuff i mean we now can recognize that
it wasn't it wasn't a failed
communicative act it just it just hadn't
reached its time yet
and and now
that way of composing music is like you
know it's in disney movies you know it's
so part of our musical palette
that we don't we don't have that
response it changed us it changed the
way we understand what counts as good
music
so that's a deep communicative act it
didn't perform its communication
in that opening moment
but it did ultimately establish a new
understanding for all of us of what
counts as good art and that's the kind
of
deep communication that i think good art
can can do it can change our
understanding
of
ourselves and of what a good
manifestation of something of ourselves
in a certain domain is
and he used the term
socially embedded that art is
fundamentally socially embedded yeah and
i really like that term because um
i see like my love for artificial
intelligence and the kind of system that
we can bring to the world that could
uh make for an interesting and more
lively world and one that enriches human
beings is one where the ai systems are
deeply socially embedded good yeah so so
that and that actually is in contrast to
the way
artificial intelligence have been talked
about throughout its history and
certainly now both on the robotic side
and the ai side
it's especially on the uh the tech
sector with
the businesses around ai they kind of
want to create um
systems that are like servants to humans
and then humans do all the beautiful
human messiness of
where art would be part
i i think that
there is no reason why you can't
integrate ai systems
in the way you integrate new humans to
the picture they're just the full
diversity and the flaws all of that
adds to the thing yeah
like you know some people might say
that alpha zero is this uh system from
deep mind that was able to achieve
uh
you know solve the game it beat the best
people in the world at the game of go
with no supervision from humans
but more interestingly to me on the side
of creativity it was able to surprise a
lot of grand masters
with the kind of moves they came up with
now to me that's not
the creativity the magic that's socially
embedded that we're talking about that
is merely um
revealing the limitations of humans to
discover
it's it's like uh to solve a particular
aspect of a math problem
i think creativity is
not just um
not just even socially embedded it's the
way you're saying is it's part of the
communicative act it's the interactive
it's the dance with the culture and so
it has to be like for alpha zero
to be creative truly creative it would
have to be integrated in a way where it
has a twitter account
and it becomes aware
of the impact it has on the other grand
masters with the moves that's coming up
and
one of the fascinating things about
alpha zero
which i just love so much
is uh i don't know if you're familiar
with chess i am yeah okay so the
it does certain things that most chess
players even at the highest level
uh don't do which is it sacrifices
pieces it gives pieces away and then
waits like
10 moves before it pays you back so it
does to me that's beautiful that that's
crazy that's art if only alpha 0
understood the artistry of that which is
uh
i'm going to mess with you
psychologically because i'm going to do
two things
one make you
feel overconfident that you're doing
well but actually also once you realize
you are playing alpha zero that is much
better than you you're going to feel
really nervous about what's on the like
is this is the calm before the storm and
that's
that creates a beautiful psychological
masterpiece of this chess game if only
alpha zero is
then
messing with you additionally to that
like and be was cognizant of this doing
that then it becomes art and then it's
integrated into society in that way
and i believe it doesn't have to
actually have
an understanding
of uh the world in the way that humans
have it can have a different one it can
be like a child is as clueless about so
many aspects of the world and it's okay
and that's part of the magic of it just
being flawed being
lacking understanding all interesting
kinds of ways but interacting and so to
me it's it's possible to create art for
ai but
exactly as you're saying in a
deeply socially embedded way
good well i think i i think we agree but
let me just highlight the thing that
makes me think that we agree yeah which
is that i think for people
for community
to allow themselves
to
recognize in
a certain kind of creative act let's i'm
thinking of stravinsky here but we could
think of a chess thing
to recognize in a certain kind of
creative act
a new and admirable worthy way of
thinking about what's significant in the
situation
you have to believe
that it wasn't random
you have to believe that stravinsky
wrote that way
because he was receptive to what needed
to be said now
and so you you said if only
alpha zero
could do all this
by virtue of recognizing that this was
the thing that needed to be done
then it would be socially embedded in
the right way and i think i agree with
that first of all
it's possible to do in a constrained
domain
a game-playing domain go or chess
goes more complicated than chess but but
either one of them because there really
are only a finite range of possibilities
if you you know make the game end at a
certain point there's
there um
it's a combinatorial problem in the end
now obviously
alpha zero doesn't solve the problem in
a combinatorial way that would be
sort of take too much energy you
couldn't do it it's too too
it sort of uh explodes the problem
um so it does it in this other way
that's interesting this pattern
recognition way roughly
and and in that context it may well be
that it
that it can see
having had lots and lots of experience
on in the training stuff against itself
or against another version of itself it
can see that the sacrifice here is going
to pay dividends down the road
see i put that in in quotation marks
that's to say uh it's got you know a
high weight to this move here
as a result of experience in the past
where that move
down the line led to this this
improvement so
so in that in that finite context i
think you know the game players can
trust it and they talk that way that
it's got a kind of authority
um they say i've read some people who
said about
alpha zero when i played go
uh it's like it's playing from the
future
it's making these moves that are just
out
landish
and there's a kind of brilliance to them
that we can't really understand we'll be
catching up to it forever i think in
that context like it's mapped the domain
and the domain is mappable because it's
a combinatorial problem roughly
but in something like music or art of a
of a
non-finite form
it feels to me like
i i it's a little harder for me to
understand what the analog
of our trusting that stravinsky has
recognized something about us
that demands that he write this way that
doesn't seem like a finite
thing in quite the same way now now we
could ask we could ask the system why
did you do it we could ask stravinsky
why did you do it and maybe it will have
answers
but then it's involved in a kind of
communicative act
and i think lots of times artists will
often say look i i can't communicate
better than what i've done in the piece
of work and that that is the statement
yeah yeah so the yeah we humans aren't
able to answer the why either yeah
but i do think the the question here is
uh well first of all language is finite
uh certainly when expressed to a tweet
uh so it is also a combinatorial problem
the question is how much more difficult
it is than chess
and
i think
i think all the same ways that we see
the solutions to chess is deeply
surprising when it was first
addressed with ibm d blue and then with
alpha go and alpha go zero alpha zero
i think in that same way language
can be addressed and communication can
be addressed i don't see having done
this podcast
many reasons why everything i'm doing
especially as a digital being on the
internet
can't be done by an ai system eventually
so like i think we're being very
uh human-centric and thinking we're
special i think one of the hardest
things is the physical space
actually operating like touch and the
magic of body language and the music of
all of that because it's so deeply
integrated through the
long evolutionary process of what it's
like to be on earth
what is
fundamentally different and ai has
can catch up on is the way we apply our
evolutionary history on the way we act
on the internet and the way we act
online and as more and more of the world
becomes digital you're now operating in
a space where ai
is is behind much less so
like we're both starting at zero
i think that's super interesting do you
do you know this do you know this author
brian christian is that someone you've
ever heard of that sounds familiar he
he's a guy
who competed in the what is it called
the loebner competition
yeah the turing test thing
so
and i'll just tell you the story but i
think it's directly related to the last
thing you said about where we're we're
starting in the same place
uh he competed
in this in this competition but not he
didn't enter uh a program that was
supposed to try to uh pass the turing
test
the turing test you know there's three
people there's the judge there's the
program and then there's there's a
someone who's a human the way they do it
and the judge has got to figure out by
asking questions which is the computer
and which is the human so little known
fact there's two prizes in that
competition there's the most human
computer prize
that's the computer that wins the most
and then there's the most human human
rights
and he competed for the most human human
props
and he wanted he kept one winning it and
and so he he tried to think about
what it is that um
you have to be able to do in order to
convince judges that you're human
instead of a computer
and that's an interesting question i
think
um and when he came to this my takeaway
from his version of this story
is that it is true
that computers are winning these
contests more and more
you know as technology progresses but
there's two possible explanations for
that
one is that the computers are becoming
more human
and the other is that the humans are
becoming more like computers
and he says actually
the more
we live our lives in this world where in
this sort of technological world
where
we have to moderate our behavior so that
it's readable
by
something that's effectively you know a
computer
the more we become like that and he says
it happens even when you're
uh not interacting with a computer he
says have you ever been to the you know
on the phone with the call
you know center
and they're going through their script
and that's what they've got to do
they've got to go through their script
because that's how they keep their job
and they ask you this question you've
got to answer it
and it and it's as if you're no longer
interacting with a person even though
it's a person
because they've so given up everything
that's involved normally with being able
to
make judgments and decisions and act in
situations and take responsibility and
so i think that's that's the other side
of it it it it is true that technology
is amazing and can solve huge ranges of
problems
and and do fantastic things but it's
also true
that we're changing ourselves in
response to it and the one thing i'm
worried about is that we're changing
ourselves in such a way that the
norms for what we're aiming at are being
changed
to move in the direction of this sort of
efficiently and up in an optimized way
solving a problem
and move away from this other kind of
thing that we were calling alive and
aliveness or or significance
and and so that's the that's the other
side of the story and that's the worry
but it's very possible that there is uh
for you and i the ancient dinosaurs we
may not see the aliveness
in tiktok
the aliveness in the digital space
that you see it as us being dragged into
this over optimized world
but that may be
uh this is
in fact
it is a world that opens up
opportunities to truly experience life
and there's interesting to think about
all the people growing up now
who their early
experience of life is always mediated
through a digital device not always but
more and more often mediated through
that device and how we're both evolving
the technology is evolving and the
humans are evolving to them maybe open a
door to a whole world where the humans
and the technology or ai systems are
interacting as equals
so now i'm going to agree with you you
might be surprised that i'm going to
agree with you but i think that's
exactly right i i don't want to be the
person who's saying our job is to resist
all of this stuff that i don't want to
be a luddite that's not my goal the goal
is to
point out
that
in the supreme danger lies the saving
power yes
the point is to get in the right
relation to that understanding of what
we are
uh that allows us to find the joy in it
and that's i think that's a hard thing
to do it's hard to understand even what
we're supposed to be doing when we do it
i'm maybe high more than you i'm not of
the right generation to be able to to do
that but i do think that's got to be the
move the move is not to resist it it's
not a nostalgic move it's an attempt to
push people to get in the relation to it
that's not the relation of it
controlling you and depriving you of
stuff but if you're recognizing some
great joy that can be found in it
when i interact with league of robots
i see there's magic there
and i just feel like the person who
hears the music when others don't and i
don't know what that is and i'd love to
explore that yeah
and because it seems to it's almost like
a the future talking
and i'm trying to hear what it's saying
is this a dangerous world or is this a
beautiful world hmm
well i can certainly understand your
enthusiasm for that those used to be
things that i found
overwhelmingly exciting
and i'm not sort of closed off from that
anymore
i mean i'm not now closed off from that
even though my views are are changed and
i don't work in that world
but i i do think i think it's
interesting to figure out what's at the
ground of that of that response
yeah
we talked about meaning quite a bit
throughout
in a secular age but let me ask you the
big ridiculous question almost too big
what is the meaning of this thing we got
going on what is the meaning of life
you're you're saving the softball for
the end
easy one i i don't know what the meaning
of life is i i think there's something
that characterizes us
that's not the thing that people
normally think characterizes us
the traditional thing to say in the
philosophical tradition even in the ai
tradition which is a kind of
manifestation
of philosophy from plato forward the
traditional thing to say is that what
characterizes us is our
rationality that we're intelligent
beings that we're the ones that that
think
and i think that's certainly part of of
what characterizes us
but i think there's
more to it too i think we're capable
of
experiencing
simultaneously
the complete and utter ungroundedness of
everything that's meaningful in our
existence
and also the real significance of it
and that sounds like it that sounds like
a contradiction like how could it really
be significant and not be based on
anything
but i think that's the contradiction
that somehow characterizes us and i
think that
we're the being that sort of has to hold
that weird mystery before us and live
in the light of it that's the thing that
i think is really at our core and so how
do we do that i will say this one thing
and i learned it from a philosopher from
a guy named albert borgmon who's a
german philosopher lives in montana now
taught in montana for his whole career
and when i i say this to my students at
harvard now he said this is the way that
i think about my life and i hope you'll
think about your life too
he said you should think about your life
hoping
that there will be many moments in it
about which you can say
there's no place i'd rather be
there's
no thing i'd rather be doing
there's no buddy i'd rather be with
and this i will remember well
and i think if you can aim to fill your
life with moments like that it will be a
meaningful one i don't know if that's
the meaning of life
but i think if you can hold that before
you it'll help to clarify this mystery
and this sort of bizarre situation in
which we find ourselves
sean this conversation was incredible
and those four requirements have
certainly been fulfilled for me
this was a magical moment
in that way and i will remember it well
thank you so much it's an honor that you
spend your valuable time with me this is
great thank you thank you for having me
lex i really really enjoyed it
thanks for listening to this
conversation with sean kelly to support
this podcast please check out our
sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from albert camus
in the depth of winter i finally learned
that within me
there lay an invincible summer
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you