Speaker 0 (0s): Yeah, it is sometimes I wonder if there's a race as someone who is making the human being better and a philosopher it, do you see sort of a race between like biology and like technology as far as making the human better? Like there's a lot of particular see smart drugs or there's different kinds of things we can now take that help potentially make the hippocampus create more dendritic, spines, and, you know, versus going in and inserting a chip.

It seems like there's a race going on there. In fact, I saw this image and I'm going to, I want to try to use my words to paint you a picture because it was so beautiful. There's a sculpture and it's a two way mirror. And on one side of the sculpture, it's about four feet tall. Someone made a sculpture all in branches of a human figure, pushing on it. And on the other side, it's a sculpture of a made out of a 10 and wires and he's pushing on it. And it just so beautifully explained what I, what I was trying to convey about this race between biology and technology.

And it's, it's kind of like left right brain left, right politics. It's like, we need the corporate, we need a Corpus callosum to make everybody understand that we're in this together. You know, so that being said, I think this

Speaker 1 (1m 16s): It's really interesting. I mean, I think that there's a sense in which the, the, the distinction between biology and technologies is breaking down in the case of genetic engineering, right? I mean, it's not that you just have this fixed nature of the human nature. And the, the only question is can you sort of develop technologies that, that nature can use instead technologies now may be sort of penetrating into the thing that you took to be a sort of fixed human nature. And I think in, in there's going to be a kind of synergism, I think there's going to be some, eventually some genetic engineering that will actually change the biological platform of change the structure of the brain, but then it's going to be majored with technologies.

And, you know, that's the whole idea of cyborgs, right? And there are these blends of technologies and, and biology. And I think that's, I think that's likely to happen. I mean, the huge question is, you know, who's going to do this for what purposes, and that is it going to be driven by special interests. And also if there are huge improvements, are they going to be widely accessible or are they just going to be the privileged or the privileged?

I mean, you know, I go back and forth on that. Sometimes I'm very, very depressed and think pessimistic think that, you know, the rich are just going to get biologically richer and the poor folks will be left behind. On the other hand, if you look at some technologies like cell phones and cell phones were first produced, people thought it was going to be sort of a luxury toy for the rich. And now they're, they're used all over the world. For example, they're used by groups of fishermen in coast to Vietnam to coordinate their catches so they can get the best prices for them.

Whereas before they were pretty much at the pro at the mercy of the buyers, and it's being used to organize economic activity by very poor people, cell phones are, and it's being used to organize political activity and to monitor, you know, police and military brutality all over the world. I mean, it's, it's, it's something that had a completely anticipated effects and very rapidly cell phone technology became widely affordable. And that's the hope, the hope is that if we get some really powerful human enhancement technologies, that they'll become available pretty quickly to a lot of people.

I think that if it takes the form of, of medications of drugs, it will happen quickly because the patents will run out and they'll become generic. And you'll be able to get them in Walmart for $4 for a month's supply. Like you can with all the other stuff that's gone generic. If it's a matter of expensive operations on embryos, that's a different matter. That's not going to be affordable for most people unless governments decide that to be competitive, they need to subsidize those enhancements for their people because other countries will be doing it.

It could come enhancement could come to be viewed in the way that public education came to be viewed in the second half of the 19th century in Europe. That is that that government leaders thought that for their country to be competitive, they had to educate their people. Well, they have to enhance people too. That's possibility.

Speaker 0 (4m 47s): Yeah. I, I think, I think that would be a fantastic moral discussion for people to have a healthy discussion for people to have, you know, and that brings us to another part of your book where you talk about, you know, how do we build institutions that can lead to a more moral environment, but not as the moral environment, the inputs to the moral. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (5m 9s): Yup. Yup. Yeah. I think we were sort of talking about this a little earlier. I mean, it may require changes in Glip on institutions to get beyond a two-party polarized system. It may require changes in political institutions to practices that give people strong incentives to bargain and compromise and listen, it may require a completely different kind of education that really takes seriously what a virtual communication does.

Right? I mean, our, our education systems have not been geared toward the problems that we've been discussing that are attendant on, on the use of the internet and especially social media. So it may require a, a lot of changes now, here's, here's not a very happy thought human beings achieve unity only when they have to unite against an external threat. So there, there are days when I pray for an alien invasion, right.

That would sort of get us to cooperate against those, those horrible things. But, you know, that's, that's horrible. I mean, or why white just turned out that before we start getting better, we have to really bottom out. We have to witness sort of a total breakdown of the political system. And then people just say, we can't go on like this. Something has to change something like this happened at the end of world war II, with the creation of the modern human rights system. You know, at the end of world war two, Europe is a smoking ruin.

Most of Southeast Asia is the Pacific. There are revelations of the Holocaust and people just conclude that something has to change in a fundamental way. And so a committee is formed to, to draft a universal declaration of human rights. And it's quite radical because it's a document which states sign on to, to limit their own sovereignty over their own people. This has never happened before.

That's what this is, but I don't think it would have happened in happy circumstances, right. It required a kind of, you know, slamming your head against the wall and, and people realizing that something fundamental had to change or will, or this horror that we've seen will maybe repeated. And so I wonder whether at some point, if enough people in this country just realize that the way we're going is just the path to ruin that they may, you know, be willing to take some measures to stop that process.

But I don't know, see the problem is a lot of people when they see that things are going bad in this country, they just blame the other group. They just say, it's going, it's going, it's bad because of those guys and it's bad because of all of us, w w we're all contributing to this. And until people realize that I don't see much hope, actually.

Speaker 0 (8m 18s): Yeah. We're all guilty, you know, and it's, it's so it's so easy to, to blame other people and, and, oh, you know, it would be different if this happened. And, you know, it brings me to the back, back to what you were saying about when you sit next to them, but somebody be it education or a debate there's that felt presence of the other. And that's so important in order to thoroughly understand or better yet recognize yourself. And the other person you can't do that. We can do it from here a little bit, but when I see you, and I know I could reach out and touch you, it's like, I can see myself in you.

And the, you do that

Speaker 1 (8m 57s): Really important because one of the things that tribalism does is it's the death of individuality. In two ways, it makes all of the other the same. And it makes all of us the same on pain of, you know, being a dissident or being disloyal. But with respect to homogenizing, the other, making them all the same, it's easy to do that. If you're engaged in virtual communication, if you're face-to-face with a person you're more likely to take them seriously as an individual, right. And vice versa. And that's another reason why it's really important to engage in that kind of communication.

Right. I think that, you know, it's just so easy if you're communicating on the internet and you get a message from somebody and it triggers one of these sorting mechanisms he's, oh, he's one of those, like, then automatically you're not viewing that person as an individual. You're just viewing them as a member of that herd. I think it's terribly disrespectful and it's not productive. And it, it doesn't allow for the possibility that, well, you know, even if he's part of this group, that's sort of generally bad.

He might be a little different and maybe I can engage with him if I can't go to the others, and maybe I can even learn something from him, you can't do that. If you just view them as a giant monolith or just all the same, all liberals are the same, all conservatives aside. And it's, it's easier to view them all the same. If you're not communicating directly picking up the cues, listening to their voice, seeing their body language and recognizing that they really are an individual, you know, that even if they're saying the general things, that that group says, they they're putting a different twist on it.

There's some evidence that there's some differences there. That's really important. I think.

Speaker 0 (10m 46s): Yeah. I agree. I, I'm curious to get your thoughts. I, I have a great quote here from what is this gentleman's name from Paul Goodman? And he says, quote, whether or not it draws on new scientific research technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not a science. What do you think about that? Quote?

Speaker 1 (11m 6s): Wow, that's interesting. I mean, Paul Goodman, who was a very smart guy and very, very independent thinker. Well, I think that he's right, if he means at least this much, that is that technology's always embody and express and have an impact on values. They're not just like a, sort of a neutral tool, like a hammer or something like that, because they were created by somebody for some purpose and they're going to be used in certain ways.

And usually because they don't become available to everybody at the same time, the emergence of new technology has distributed effects. It affects who owns what, who gets, what, who has, what advantages, what opportunities. So I think technologies are, are value-laden. And also there's kind of ambiguity and talk about technology. You might talk about a gene splicing technology or gene modification technology, and use to describe it as a set of chemical processes.

Okay. But of course, when it's used, it's always embodied. It's going to be done in somebody's lab with somebody funding with some purposes in mind. And there they're going to be various choices made about how to apply the technology. So that's all going to be bound up with human interest and values. And in that sense, the real technology, the technology that's that goes out there in the world, changes things is not going to be some sort of inert, you know, object that has no values attached to it at all.

It's not going to be like that. I mean, the tech it, if the technology really means not just the sort of technical thing, but also the practice of using it, then I can, I can see why he would say that it sort of embodies a moral philosophy or assumes a moral philosophy. It assumes some set of values that expresses some set of values. I think that's right.

Speaker 0 (13m 5s): Yeah. It's fascinating to me. I, I, I was thinking recently too, about what you said about how sometimes it pains you to think about how there may need to be some sort of event or something to happen in order for us to get our wits about us and be like, okay, what are we doing here? Instead of it being in an alien invasion, or God forbid some sort of weapons of mass destruction, do you think that we could potentially recreate that event with something like a return to the Eleusinian mysteries, where we had this rites of passage that people did and they, they, they brought this back because I think that's something that's inclusive.

It was slaves, it was emperors. It was this, you know, death of Demeter where this, you know, this understanding of death and rebirth, and that maybe you come out of this world instead of, instead of coming into it. Does, does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (13m 59s): It's really interesting. You said that because I was just thinking recently about how deprived of, of rituals, especially those that you might call mystery rituals, modern society is so, you know, we don't have them. I mean, we have like sports events, you know, and rock concerts, but we don't have things that are an attempt to sort of help us grapple with these huge issues like death.

I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's interesting because if you had something like that, that would a large enough scale, it would have to be sort of neutral as a different religions. For example, something like this was tried, by the way, in the French revolution of the era had this idea of festivals of the Supreme being, it was supposed to be Christ or Buddha like that, but thus a pretty big, right. And his idea was that to get people on board with a project of creating a new France, you know, through the revolution that there had to be some social glue and he didn't want it to be traditional religion because it was too much associated with the Catholic hierarchy and fighting against, but he thought that human beings needed some kind of a quasi religious belief and they needed some public rituals to express this kind of belief.

So he had, he put on a few of these festivals of the Supreme being, and they weren't really terribly successful the other people in the ruling group at that time thought he was completely nuts because they were militant atheist. Right. But, you know, it's, I mean, it's, it's an attractive idea in a way. I'm just not sure it's practical at this point. You know, it's funny because when people now talk about spirituality, they tend to talk about it in a very individualistic way. They don't think about mass participation in some rituals or mysteries or things that they don't do it.

Sorry, let me turn the

Speaker 0 (16m 8s): Turn. That's that? No problem. No problem.

Speaker 1 (16m 15s): Yeah. I, I hadn't thought about that, but certainly this was a complaint about the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution that demystified the world and human existence and impoverished us by, by demystifying it, and there was a whole sort of romantic movement, which was a reaction against this. And, you know, Keats complained that, you know, by, by analyzing the rainbow into its constituent colors with scientifically that it was sort of ruining the beauty of the rainbow.

I, I have just the opposite feeling. I mean, the more I learned about science and especially about biology, the more in all I am of, of everything around us because of its incredible intricacy and help surprising the path of evolution has taken in some ways, you know, could have gone one way. It went another way. And I just find it absolutely fascinating. Okay.

Speaker 0 (17m 21s): I think it goes hand in hand with your idea of our evolving, flexible morality. I mean, is, can you think, I truly believe that we can look at the ecosystem in nature and solve a lot of our problems. Like if you think about the way that running water flows, be it a teardrop or a waterfall that takes the path of least resistance. And sometimes if you think about a morning, think about a glacier that, that is touched by the first warm golden hands of the sun and a little bead begins to sweat and it flows down the mountain side and then it stops it's pooling because it hits a significant roadblock like that is us right now.

We're that little bead of sweat that hit a little significant roadblock and we need to be reinforced by the source. And that, that is the nature teaching us. And it's the same evolution you use in your book about the morality of mind evolving, we're evolving. And I think we can learn from nature. Can you think of some other structures that may be analogous to the, to the mind evolving that are outside the mind?

Speaker 1 (18m 24s): I mean, it's interesting you use that water metaphor because a book that I really admire is the title is like water on stone. And it's a book about Whitesburg. And, you know, there are a lot of people who were very skeptical about the human rights movement. They say, well, you know, the great powers like China in the United States of Russia, they can violate human rights. There are no consequences and there are all these various problems, but, but what this, the point of this metaphor of like water and stone is that don't be impatient.

Important changes usually take a lot of time. And the human rights culture is gradually eroding the authoritarian, brutal regimes in the world and all of them. And so, yeah, I think that the idea of evolutionary time is fascinating because it's not on a human scale at all. And I think one of the reasons that some people reject evolution and embrace creationism is that they just can't grasp the magnitude of evolution of the evolutionary timescale.

We're used to thinking in terms of two or three generations of humans or something. Okay. And so they say, well, how could the human eye and all this complexity have evolved? You know, well, look, if you start out with some sickle cell organism and there's a mutation that causes a portion of its surface to be sensitive to light, well, then that means that if some big pressure comes near it and blocks the light, it's going to have some indication that there's something there.

Okay. So maybe it gives it a little bit of a reproductive fitness advantage. And then there are further mutations and over many, many eons where the life of the organism of the generation is very short compared to human being, right? So you can get more mutations, much more quickly over millions and millions of years, billions of years, you end up with a human eye. It's just hard for most people to grasp that. And, and that's why, you know, I tend to think that there's been a huge progress made in morality in the last 300 years, because it's been in the last 300 years that you've gotten the idea that people are citizens, not subjects.

They've gotten the idea of democracy, the rule of law, beginning of better treatment of animals and women, a better, but more, more rejection of racial hierarchies. And this is just like the blink of an eye in human history, the 300 years nothing. Okay. And so it, it just may take time. I think that we can accelerate the rate of progressive change, but for people just to throw up their hands and say things like, oh, for example, like that, you know, the European union doesn't work well.

I'll tell you what, in the European, the European union started out as the colon steel union and its express purpose was to link Germany and France together economically. So they wouldn't drag the world into another war and it works. If that's all it did, it worked fantastic. I clap that people just, they, they, they want immediate gratification. They want a new institution to work perfectly immediately. They want mortal progress to occur and rapidly.

And by the way, when, when a progressive valuable change occurs, it becomes invisible because we take it for granted. Well, we look at us what we don't have. I mean, the rule of law is a fantastic accomplishment, even when it's imperfectly implemented. Like it is almost everywhere, but people who live under the rule of law, just take it for granted. They don't realize how entirely different human existence was through the vast stretch of human history when people didn't have the protections of the rule of law.

And I think, you know, that that looking at history and thinking about evolution as a process that takes a long time can make us more patient and more willing to stay committed to progressive change. That's, that's how I would look at.

Speaker 0 (22m 45s): Yeah. It reminds me of what Jordan Peterson says. We're protected by some, from something we can't see from something we can't understand and that's culture from chaos, you know, it's,

Speaker 1 (22m 56s): I mean, when, when, when cultures are working, was there signs that working the way they work is invisible. And we take it for granted just like the air we breathe. And it's really quite an accomplishment. You know, it's human cooperation on the large scale is an incredible feat. And I think the fact that human beings have morality's is crucial for that, but we, we take it for granted. You know, I mean, when, when, when people on the right say, you know, the government is the problem, that's the solution.

Well, that's true for some things, but my God, without the government, we'd be living in a state of complete savagery and we wouldn't have enforcement of property rights. So we wouldn't have an economy. We beat up.

Speaker 0 (23m 43s): Yeah. It reminds me of John Dewey. Dewey said what the government is the shadow cast upon people by business. And it's, it's so funny to me to hear some large corporations say, oh, the government wants to regulate everything. But they, as employers want to regulate all their employees, you know, like, would the world be any better if corporations ran it, it would be, they would just become the new government. It's this, it's this fractal circle, you know,

Speaker 1 (24m 5s): Look about this, a philosopher, Michigan Elizabeth Anderson wrote a book called private government. And she talks about the fact that in corporations, you have super authoritarian anti-democratic rule over people in the major portion of their lives.

Speaker 0 (24m 24s): Yeah. Well, can you talk about any, maybe some similarities and differences in morality in Ethiopia and Catalonia versus us over here in the United States?

Speaker 1 (24m 36s): Oh yeah. I think there are huge differences. I mean, Ethiopia, I can't claim to know a lot about it. I was there for a total of less than two weeks. And it was at the time where the civil war was just ending and the transitional government invited me and a bunch of other scholars to advise them on the writing of the constitution. And we kept asking to be able to go outside of Addis Ababa and see the country. And they kept giving a lame excuses why we couldn't roll the rest of the country there, be out there.

Right. And they were, you know, they would control the area right around, out of Sababa. And so I didn't really get, you know, I, before I went there, I read everything I could find on the history of Ethiopia, but it was absolutely fascinating. But you know, it was, it was a sort of, I hope it unrepresentative time to look at Ethiopian culture because it was, they had it'll highlight the loss of these dictatorship. Then they had a Marxist dictatorship, which was just horrible. And then they had, you know, over a decade of multi-lateral civil war and the country was totally devastated.

There was no social trust. You know, if you're at dinner and somebody said, pass the salt, everybody's thinking, what does he really want? You know, it was like total strategic thinking, no trust, everything was horrible, but I found it to be, you know, I think if European people were among the most physically beautiful people in the world, they're, they're tall, long necks, Chisholm features sort of Akhil in those as those, a wonderful blending of Sub-Saharan African and middle Eastern physical characteristics, very dignified people.

Catalonia, I think is really interesting because I, I I've written a lot on succession and on the justifications possession. And I used to take a pretty dim view of the Catalan succession movement because I thought, well, look, they're not really suffering any major violations of human rights, you know, at the hands of the Spanish government and a liar, why do they insist on independence? But when I've spent time, there I've come to think they're first of all, but they have one good justification for secession, namely the Spanish government, granted them a certain amount of autonomy, but then they revoke the autonomy unilaterally, arbitrarily.

And I think that's not good, but also I think there's a different political culture in Catalonia. Then in many other parts of Spain, especially in, in among political figures in the judiciary, I think that some members of the Spanish judiciary outside of Catalonia are still sort of suffering under a Franco hangover. They're still sort of authoritarian. And, and of course the Cattlemen's were especially persecuted by Franco because Catalonia was one of the centers of the Republican movement and the resistance against Franco when he toppled the Republic.

And I think that it's not unreasonable for people in Catalonia to feel that given their political culture and their history, they just don't fit in. Well in Spain, they really don't. And, but the, the Spanish government has converted a lot of people in Catalonia who would have wanted just some autonomy within the Spanish state, it's converted them into secessionists because it's been so brutal. And so inflexible in listening to the demands of the, of the Catalans.

So I think, I think the Spanish government has shot itself in the foot. I don't know if there's really going to be a successful succession. I tend to doubt it at this point. It doesn't look like it's likely to happen, but you know, it used to be that there was a reason why states had to be big. They had to be big to have enough of a population to have an army big enough to protect them against invasions. Right. And they also had to be big enough to have a good market because there were usually barriers, trade barriers between countries.

Well, now none of that's true in Europe. I mean, I think it's a slide from Eastern Europe where the Russians may be invaded Lithuania, right? Aside from Europe, there was no, no need for big states in terms of security, right? You've got NATO, you've got other things and you've got a completely open market. So there's no reason why you have to have big states. There's no reason why the historical shape of Spain has to stay the same. The traditional reasons for having a big state don't apply anymore.

So in principle, it looks like, you know, states devolving into smaller states might make some sense, but there are problems. I think one of the things that I worry about if catalog kind of lemony does the seed is that it's going to wreck the Spanish welfare state as Catalonia is very rich. And it contributes a lot to the coffers of the central state as does the bass country, right? Those are the two, the richest areas in spite. And if Catalonia succeeds and then maybe the bass.

So you had maybe some other reasons say you're going to have sort of a case of the haves leaving the habitats behind. And I don't think you'd be able to maintain decent welfare programs in the rest of Spain. You know, by the way, this has happened in American cities, there's been a kind of polite succession where do corporate entities. So they don't have to pay taxes to support people that don't like black people in particular and flight of the, of the house.

And they have no nights. And it could happen in, in Europe. I mean, the, you know, there's this, the Legat, nor this group in Northern Italy, that claimed that they were racially different from the Southern Italians Celtic. The other people were a lot of the people in the north were industrious and they were paying all these taxes to these lakes south. They wanted to succeed and it didn't, it didn't didn't come off now they've changed their name.

It's not the leg of Nord. It's just a leg up. And now they're just against all immigrants. They're not Southern Italians. And, and they thought Southern Italy began about a hundred miles north of Rome. Actually, they were very young. So that was the session is a really interesting topic. And now, you know, people are talking about succession in the United States about the red states, the seating from the blue sites, you know,

Speaker 0 (31m 21s): For the international divorce.

Speaker 1 (31m 24s): Yeah. Well, it didn't work very well last time.

Speaker 0 (31m 29s): It didn't work very well. This doctor, I have a lot more questions and I'm enjoying the conversation, but I want to be mindful of your time. If you have something to go or somewhere to go, we could, we could set up another date or we could end it here, or we could continue to, to engage the people. And

Speaker 1 (31m 45s): I do have to go in a minute, but best is if you want to talk about changing human nature and human enhancement, I've written two books on that. One's called better than human. It's the more accessible one. You might have a session on that, but also, you know, I think, I think succession is a pretty interesting topic and it's becoming more interesting. So I I'm open.

I really enjoyed this. It was great fun. And your,

Speaker 0 (32m 18s): So this was a lot of fun. Thank you for doing this. And I'll reach out to you after we, after all I'll email you and we'll set some more up. This is it. I really enjoyed the book. And I think to anybody and everybody listening and or watching, I, I want to tell you to go out and get this book. It's, it'll blow your mind. It's not like any philosophy book you've read it is it's engaging. It's a history book. It's a book about our future. And it's, it's really well written and the ideas are packed and they're fun to think about.

And I think it'll make you a better person. If you read it or you should be my agent. You're fantastic. It's really good doctor. I'll be mindful of your time and I'll reach out to you. Thank you very much for your time. I had a great time and we'll talk again soon. Thank you. Thanks so much. Okay. Bye bye.

Speaker 2 (33m 20s): All right. You ready? Okay. Now already. Let's see what you got. Yeah. Burke. Whoa. Nice one.