#2193 - Jack Symes

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

Shrined by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Jack Symes (0:14)

Very well. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

So I got the request to be on when it said, multiverse and new atheism. I'm like, what a combination that is. Let's talk.

Jack Symes (0:24)

Nice.

I think it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right? It tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff. But I think at the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society. We're stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions. So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox. They all say something along the lines of philosophy is dead. So just before we get into the multiverses, it's probably best to say what philosophy is and what the point of talking about the multiverses. So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, what they take philosophy to be. Because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider projects. One of the ideas that I love is this one by the late great British philosopher, Mary Mitchley. She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing, right? So like we have these conversations in our societies, and like these conversations are flowing around, and likewise, we have these pipes running underneath our houses, keeping the water flowing. But occasionally, it gets clogged, and so the philosopher needs to pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again. So these are things like what it is to be a woman, or what it is to have free speech, or what it means to say that a gene is selfish. So that's, I see, like the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like trying to understand the concepts we're using. Then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy, which is like how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Like let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology, and the arts, and let's try and get a big picture of the world. And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be. So I take that to be the project. And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks are things like, why is there something, a universe rather than nothing? No universe. Like why are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life? Where does consciousness come from? Like when I make a moral statement like the Holocaust is bad, is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad? Like are they the same kind of statement? Is that the same bad I'm using? But the big question to get to the multiverse now is, the big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question. The French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus said, the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living. Like so my question is, what's the point of all this? Is existence on the whole a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased to be alive? And what's the purpose of life? And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism and these arguments for theism all come in into the project.

Joe Rogan (3:21)

I think it's ridiculous to dismiss philosophy because you are a proponent of science. Just that reductionist perspective. The idea that thinking about things and developing, for lack of a better term, a philosophy, developing your own personal philosophy, taking from the accounts of others and their perspectives and their interesting, unique view of the world that we live in, the idea that that's not significant or important to me seems pretty silly.

Jack Symes (3:50)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:50)

It's silly.

Jack Symes (3:51)

I don't know how they get away with saying these things. I think you get it though, right? The science splits the atom. It puts a man on the moon. So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems.

Joe Rogan (4:01)

Right, but the human beings that took place in the experiments that led to the splitting of the atom all had to have some sort of a philosophy that they managed their life by.

Jack Symes (4:12)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (4:12)

They had to have something that allowed them to have the discipline to commit to their schooling, to follow through with the project. Especially think about Oppenheimer's struggle that he had with this thing that he had created that was ultimately going to lead to destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives, if not the entire human race itself, which was very deeply based in philosophy, like his perspective and his struggles with it. I mean, if he was just like an automaton, like some sociopathic, just super Alzheimer's guy, not an autism guy, rather that didn't think at all about no concept at all about empathy, no concept at all about our perspective, he would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs. Like that's, science depends on human beings that have a unique way of thinking, and how does that not come out of philosophy?