Joe Rogan Experience #2193 — Jack Symes Transcript

Transcript

0:00 This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. The world is a big place and it's filled with all different kinds of people. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. You can cook up same game parlays on any MLB or soccer game Yeah, very well. But I think there's a, at the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society.

2:49 because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider the concepts we're using. But then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy, which is like Like, why are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life? Camus said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living. the accounts of others and their perspectives and their interesting, unique view of the

5:38 So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems. He would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs. don't do the project of philosophy of finding the meaning in the ethics, and when they try to do it, it's lacking, minutes and poor little Carl was over there panting. You do not know. the next phase of existence? Who fucking knows? You don't know. We do know that people die. We do know that people have near-death

9:57 We don't really know, we really don't know what life is. religion just like far-right ideology as a religion I'm not sure about putting I guess that's a cult. But in our country, they actually want a religion. What about Scientology? I guess that's a cult. Well, OK, let's say this, though, But I think in terms of like philosophical arguments for thinking it's true, like the

12:17 into being. And that might not get you all the way to God. That's a really strong reason second, you'd still be writing out that number now. Like that number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are incredible. following the arguments. They're not serious about going wherever they take them. Like you know, they're not serious about following the arguments. They're not serious about going

14:17 arrest people, he's going to find reasons to arrest people. And if you have a person that is getting social credit, you're getting notoriety, adulation held for a long time, they want to defend those ideas instead And they come in my head and they go. but his position is not that that was the beginning. That there's probably, this is probably a series of these things that have gone on in eternity, and that they're, the infinite nature of the universe

16:34 You know, oh, we know this planet formed, you know, 4 billion years ago. Oh, well, it's interesting what you say first of all, like about us being like so involved just spoke about, why there's something rather than nothing fine-tuning. But then the problem Yeah. But then when I asked Jordan about this, again, I don't think he's serious again about

18:59 articles and books were published on the problem of evil. Like people are working on it, and into being. Do you think that we have an egocentric perspective of consciousness that it only applies to things There's a memory in that house of a horrible thing. I should buy that theater. It was so sad to me to watch these people that for decades were Definitely and it kind of feels like it there

22:19 It's just these connections in your brain going bad thing, this building, right? something there. But maybe this table has consciousness, maybe cloth has consciousness, maybe rocks have consciousness. They just don't have an ability think the dogmatic perspective that a lot of religious zealots put to these ancient texts is, see to respond to become better. And maybe this is this grand evolutionary process that's going

25:47 Yeah, I think Pink is right on all of these metrics. Everything's better now than it was. have a better world, you might think. relief funds, or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something, right? All of these, I why they're reluctant to accept something like that. Maybe it's the only way. Maybe this process It's a stupid choice to like It's 98%?

28:49 You've got people that think it's wrong, but they're doing otherwise. bush in Australia. was like Russell Crowe's, then it's not just because it tastes better. That's not, do you Would you rather run around in the field with your family and then one day the lights just go out? if you give them all the right food, apparently. Australian bush. Oh really? Yeah, Asian buffaloes are dangerous but scrub bulls

31:53 changing their snout extends their their tusks grow their hair gets thicker they Just more chronically obese basically. Yikes. Right. It slows down the heart. I don't think there's any difference. That'd be horrific. Overwhelming amount of meat we're consuming is that yeah and people feel and we think this we know that non-human animals I haven't met any.

35:36 I went on a date with this this girl in in London once and I asked her this thought experiment It was just you and this dude and you have a bond with that guy forever. You probably kill yourself. Yeah, I think after you get through like 50, you go, have a comparable value to human beings. golden retrievers look like? That's fucking crazy. Kill that guy. You know I've got great

37:30 I eat very little other than meat. who maybe it's whatever health reason it is, is what I'm doing morally right? What I've preferred, there was a few years back in 2012 that I decided that I was either And if I can't handle that, if I don't like that, class and it was it was a real problem so I tried being a vegetarian for a I felt like I had all this energy.

40:12 And I think it probably has something to do with why we became human beings in the first And when I was eating that deer by the fire, I was like, this is what I'm doing forever. I'm Everybody's like, good job, nice fish. now to do it same reason like paintball or like laser tag and war can be fun Good. So two things come to mind, right? The first is it depends on the kind of killing

42:39 Right. It requires intense amount of practice, hours and hours every day. Yeah. run, run, run, boom, dead. Because of all get old and they will do the dire starvation, they'll freeze to death or more This is the worst thing we could have done in terms of like production of our food, in terms of the amount of suffering If they did, they would have to come to grips

45:23 and you buy a T-bone steak, will drop a bomb on a clouded city, And then you'll be haunted. and then that kid goes and becomes a part Even in the Second World War, like, field work showed that it was about 20 or 30% of people were actually firing the weapon. PTSD is. See you can find an article on it because there was something that I'd read about it

48:00 It's hard to tell because what's been explained to me And they had been told that 500 people were dead or 5,000, I forget the number. New York Times about they're like PTSD and whatnot is different from killing on the ground, it still carves deep scars. In many ways it's like a video game and I have to warn them, there is no reset button. Yeah. So it's a

50:45 and there's a lot of gotcha stuff, right, Monocrop agriculture, which is a horrific loss of life. Like if you're buying corn or ethics that runs a good argument which says that the lives of non-human animals, their at like the vegan's contribution to that, right, it's marginal even then in can't do otherwise, created by human beings because I think it is. I think it's just like, it's like money

53:52 you can't film those things. I don't wanna say they're the same thing as people, Depends on the person. I can't say. Yeah. But we think I probably wouldn't I probably bring him back so people could study him thousand pages it's a real good read like 40 hour read so if you're interested in like you got to American Coyote Dan Flores Dan Flores this I forget where is your professor

57:24 Oh wow. millions of them in fields because that doesn't exist anywhere in nature unless there's a problem. create like a sort of mayhem. Wildlife biologists do surveys on the areas and they know So limited draw entry is like say maybe you have an thing. Because these are areas where they're difficult to get to, can allow to hunt in these areas. You're going to have to bring in mountain lions and mountain lions can't kill buffalo so you're gonna have to bring in wolves you have to bring in big

1:02:01 animal sanctuaries, if you like. And I was thinking recently like there's a lot of arguments for human reparations like when a full group were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering, That's a rough, the worst is killed by bears, properties I've just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature

1:04:31 because that person saw themselves as having a future, see their futures or know that they will exist in the future. I think the same is He probably had another year or two left if he was lucky and again their death is horrific There's bears there, we see bears. it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window or, you know, especially

1:07:05 So there are possible worlds without evolution by natural selection. Like those things are I think this constant struggle of good and evil is maybe even necessary for us to keep It would never become an elk. And they get torn apart by coyotes and bears when they're down. But they don't seem to have like a, like, there's going to be a significant number of

1:09:33 For all these creatures that die painfully and miserably of this thing that ultimately will make sense when we reach the end of our journey, and That's when it really becomes a problem, it can go underwater for hours, Human beings live in the most comprehensive than all these other processes that You're in the natural world. them, so it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump, or the runner who

1:13:02 How can we find ethics and meaning in a world Like if, so the agnostic life is like this. And a lot of my thought here comes from Albert And you sort of a loss, but there's an excitement there too like the openness of being the gift of meaninglessness I feel so small and meaningless. Like, or comparison to the 13.8 billion years in which I've existed. Like, my 70, if I'm lucky, feels like it doesn't really matter. But like, imagine if you were really big, like the size of the universe.

1:15:36 that on the flight. so I think the project of agnosticism a thing we need to be doing isn't just We know it. I think we get too caught up in religious dogmatism, and we get too caught up in religious dogmatism and we get too caught up in these literal interpretations of ancient What was the experience that he actually had? It's like listen the president United States is just on TV the other day lying this people are full of shit

1:18:26 Trump on gay rights Even decide a verse that you like? but as I've gotten older, I kind of have a belief what's real and what's not real How does he feel about that? And the moment people become dogmatic, the moment people become ideologically You know there's propaganda involved. is that it did become like a philo... Remember when they had Atheism Plus? Do you remember that? Do you remember that? Oh, it was wonderful.

1:22:20 philosophies, their myth of the origins of things that they all accept as their own. I used to do a joke about Noah and the arc that if you told that I And I think it's way more likely that all these stories are about of this thinking when you go, my team thinks this, and I'm just gonna, I'm gonna double down on it, on it. But there's, there's a sense in which it's okay if your view isn't affecting

1:25:21 just seek pleasure all the time are miserable, because they're missing that part of the equation, meaning. they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure. Like that's a recipe for disaster. sticking with our thinking beforehand. This ultimately comes from having the wrong view Religion's disappearing, and it needs to evolve philosophically. You need a proper philosophical

1:27:46 in Rolls Royces and brag about their stuff. because she had heard that he said Here, put your headphones on. Not the people. Look at his eyes. What's your response to that? Very simple. It takes a lot of money to do what we do. that I bought from Tyler Perry, Yes, I do. Do you think that people that fly commercial are demons? He skipped all the verses about like selling all your stuff, giving it to the poor,

1:33:11 just thinking about it as we're watching this clip. given the evil in the world, difficulty of it all is that, and again, to give another quote from Camus that I love, he says, bigger and I last longer. And maybe that resonates with people. Maybe that's just Thomas Nagel. rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and

1:36:24 of high school students read this book. And the main character starts off his mom just dies and take that away from us. Like, we have to live with it. I think as someone who's never embraced That it's cold and meaningless and uncaring? You find meaning in a great dinner date a fun time with friends a vacation It's not just not like the lottery. whether it's groups of people, your family,

1:39:02 That person might not have had a good connection to their community or to friends or to loved ones. So, call one meaning with an uppercase M, their lives and to the end of their life. Yeah, but it depends, like, again, when you strip away all of these Judeo-Christian principles, meaning and all meanings are just created by the person. Like we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful. We

1:41:33 But the... It's all they do and everything that's hardwired into people I mean, it's it's it's few every year. There's a new phone every year. There's better computers every year I think that means we make our artificial life. So they ought to be doing it more. So like you might run a similar argument. Imagine be like outside of religious beliefs, because that's the problem of agnosticism, right? It's

1:44:42 So if you hold that view, then yeah, it looks like life can have a meaning. And that's what we're attaching the concept of meaning They have alpha males and they have bonds Like their meaning is to continue getting better at this then they develop metallurgy then they they figure out combustion engines how to harness It's going to make an artificial life.

1:47:29 who's my colleague at Durham. He's currently defending a view just like this, right? He and if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful. Is their achieving, they're actually communicating with what they believe is God. Matthew 14.1 Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've

1:49:39 I mean there's a classic versions of stories right like the the king's son the you go outside, we say stop wasting your life, right? you look inside of yourself. What's it like to be a physical entity? And you look inside there, which is either the combination problem or the decombination problem, which goes something is it here rather than there? And it doesn't seem like although we might have some like knee-jerk reaction answers that question

1:52:43 Like, if I see myself as here rather than there, It motivates movement? And to have all these different consciousnesses like competing with You might be in the middle of a novel If you could fake it for a little while, Well that competition has to exist all throughout nature, right? Matthew 11 This is like his neural link stuff and you solve the problem and we spoke about like how that won't happen

1:56:06 gets more and more complex until it gets right, gives rise to consciousness. And he sort of, in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience. if God is the universe, God wasn't perfect then. There was a greater being that God could have been. And even in the fullness of time, of view that we need to start carving out, like, theisms on the decline. I was just speaking about

1:58:52 like what exists physically, right? That's the very nature of the matter of the world in which we find ourselves conscious Everything is moving towards a state of deeper and deeper complexity. one thing, and have you heard of Zeno's paradox? You've done this one before? need to keep making these half journeys, Yeah, every step of the way. get three quarters of the way.

2:01:55 Did but did they understand evolution back then? So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space. in Italian, German, or Japanese, right? to him about his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. So I think if the multiverse theory is actually true, as agnostics or atheists, we should be really There's a couple of problems there, right?

2:05:25 everyone's getting tortured next door to a city where everyone's living a blissful life. Like there's no way you're going to know whether or not there's a multiverse of people suffering. Well, it's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that like if you it just means that And what if the universe is constantly in a state of evolution itself? more powerful state or a better state.

2:08:42 There's also a problem which is, Explain that again, say that again. existence as a whole greater or better, then it's nothing compared to the infinite suffering You know when we try and think about what it is for me to be me today is the same person born mean your stream of consciousness has ended. Think of it like sleep. When you go into like N. Ren sleep and you don't have any conscious experiences,

2:11:42 The drifting off thing doesn't make sense to me because drifting off is just a failure We don't even understand that. Like, what is going on with consciousness You know, I copy all of the parts of you, Isn't it? It's okay. I'm like what's to stop someone from doing that a thousand times. What's to stop someone from making an army of Donald Trump's?

2:14:18 So it's not like the lights go out even for a split second, right? and then we'll realize like oh we fucked up these views, right? But that we share this one thing together. thing than the entire consciousness that we share. But we share it with each other so So you go, we wanna connect with people, It's just a thought that it may be the case. It's not of I'm sure that that's what's going on.

2:17:45 Yeah, I think so. was burning a bush that contained dimethyltryptamine. and consuming these mushrooms. That's the Eleucinian mysteries, that they all got together reasonable. I think each each experience is probably valid and maybe person B It seems that people have those experiences, perhaps without those obvious triggers as year. One third of the entire group of 700. Yeah, and one sixth have it for longer than three years.

2:21:27 Who the fuck's not in favor of free speech? have certain similar comparable analogous properties about And these people, had they been diagnosed Yeah, we don't. experiences. And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well. 333, 34, 54.9% said yes, and 246, 40.5% said no. So have we taken from that 10% of people say

2:25:38 may have, like unique to yourself that makes you either allergic to these and some people that just biologically don't agree with them. I think that's the case with psychedelics as well. But there's 76 billion neurons there, right? And we don't know what they're all doing. to believe? our data logs. they denied FDA, denied MDMA to be used in clinical settings

2:28:42 unreasonable. And I think that the real problem with these things being illegal is it's mostly being had on their shoulder and I think that can't be denied and I think it's another thing that's Just from the outside and no right, but the thing is it's not on the outside. It's psychologically I knew a dude was a little bit loony and then he delved very heavily into the world of psychedelics and he became

2:31:13 And again, I don't know if he was a normal person before. Yeah, is the nuance that's lacking in a lot of the public conversation about this stuff. There's jaguars and snakes out there. Well, it's the same kind of, again, this is back to the point of philosophy, getting clear And afterwards, a few guys in the bar afterwards We're terrified of everything going in that direction.

2:33:34 music, drinking all the time, that's Texas for real. I didn't think it was going to be I'd be like, this is crazy. as well, especially with the, like we've obviously to use it as an excuse to rob shops and firebomb mosques which is the line of free speech, right? Yeah. You can't put, you can't make threats. All those things are illegal. You can't threaten

2:36:37 you might think that free speech is like intrinsically valuable, the thing which is Yeah. This is what I found speaking to some of the comedians the potential to flourish, be happy, so you can't shout fire in a crowded theater. might go yes. So it breaches the harm principle. John Stuart Mill gives the example of, I think who, back to our conversation earlier,

2:39:25 I'd even think it's OK to get people to stay in the fire. That's exciting violence. Yeah, so in that case, I think but people people aren't saying that right? He legislates against those Twitter policies. Criticizing the lockdowns would get you banned. Because they will do it to their best convenience. That is what got scary and that's what's scary about government controlled speech

2:42:03 broad right? Is that what it is? It got repeated over and over again for like the last few years a few people might have been arrested not in our country, I think he's in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment, Tommy Robinson, be liable if I get the wrong... statement somewhere? He said it on a tweet. Oh, he put it on a tweet? Yeah, I agree. surprised if you should tell him and see what he says about I mean a quick when

2:45:06 We should find out what Tommy Robinson's quote actually was before we go on so we don't get in trouble. He's got a face from Peaky Blinders. Yeah, by order the Peaky Blinders. He looks like that, right? Okay, good. he does, and cherry picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas. Is it all the same? I'm going to have to... My honest, my fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal.

2:48:24 that's reasonable was debating a guy from the moral majority who was this right wing group at the time. They let this one guy speak his mind and. They let this one guy speak his mind, make the other person's view of the world look foolish and make his So nowhere near the amount of people. the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be, let's just

2:51:09 Yeah, I'll try to find out how did this person come to this conclusion? Why do they believe this? from that sort of sensibility as possible. important issues and that you you gotta let that person express themselves. You Well, I think maybe so what what we do to avoid that problem, they can get without having to go general public facing podcast, which has not an area of specialty with people talking about things which are, you know, in some cases dangerous, right, or like, are important at least.

2:54:10 I want it laid out to me. And there's a lot of podcasts that are experts someone's curiosity, and if we only do So it's sort of on the listener to not just go, in the way that you want to live your life. elevates our own understanding of ourselves and how we interact with each Obviously, and I don't I don't mind that sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive. Like two weeks ago, I was

2:57:45 Right. It was like trying to search for that. You're either in TFO. You're a proud boy Both on God as well. So first one is Philosophers on God, talking about existence,