Episode 90: Sci-Fi and Philosophy with Guest David Brin

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. We have many questions for episode 90, including what's the relationship between science fiction and philosophy? Or perhaps is the human race doomed? We'll be talking with David brin about his 2012 novel existence. You can join the discussion, get the text and get lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, my voice preserved across the ages. From Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, not yet transferred into a crystal in Austin, Texas.

0:44 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, existing in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:48 Brian: This is Brian Casey in Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

0:51 David: And hello, I'm David Brin, or at least a simulation of him. One of the top level dittos that was assigned by my master to deal with you guys. It's a sign of respect. He didn't think you worthy of his own attention. But I'm one of the really, really good ones.

1:10 Mark: Yes, I like that bit where you always have people talking. One's on Saturn and one's on Earth or something. There's of course a delay getting the signal from one place or the other, so they just get to say something and then wait. But you overcame that by saying you sent the message along with some partial AI so that it could respond pretty much as I would respond and then report back to me later. So it still has that delay, but you almost get to have a convers.

1:33 David: Well, you're getting the conversation with as high a quality of Brin as I could afford time to give you.

1:39 Mark: Yes. So we very much appreciate your indulgence. We are always trying something new here on the Partially Examined Life. This time we thought we'd invite one of our favorite sci fi authors to play our little conversation game, see how that works.

1:50 Seth: Oh, really?

1:50 David: I look forward to meeting her.

1:54 Mark: And we have another guest, actually, Brian, another Casey. We have an extra Casey here today, indeed, who is Dylan's brother. And he is someone that Dylan and I have a lot of conversations with. And actually we are greatly indebted to him because he runs the server company and gives us space on it for the website and helps us when everything crashes. So thank you.

2:14 Brian: My pleasure.

2:15 Mark: We'll give you a plug root levelservices.com is that useful? Are you for the average consumer or are you only for the elite that will not be listening to this?

2:24 Brian: I have a mix of clientele with disparate needs

2:29 Mark: and Brian was not a philosophy student, but he is a astronomy PhD just like Dylan was a physics PhD.

2:36 Brian: That's true.

2:37 Mark: And is the one who introduced me to David Brin and has read lots of his books and starts conversations with me about the Transparent Society. Bought me that book. That is Brin's book from 1998, a very prescient one about surveillance. As a sort of an ex scientist rather than an ex philosopher, I know that we discuss lots of things that are, I would call philosophical and you're very politically active, but like many people, and maybe David is one of them who are born in the sciences, they maybe didn't quite make the jump, you know, don't quite see the point in reading Descartes or Malebranche or Foucault. So speaking across the divide seemed interesting here.

3:13 David: Do Sartre and Derrida count?

3:16 Mark: Well, the fact that you called him Derrida, then yes, that's good.

3:21 David: Or sorry, my old texts don't have pronunciation guides.

3:26 Mark: We have that same, especially with French, that we'll do a whole podcast and then people will post nasty messages to me about. Oh no, mispronouncing things now actually my

3:35 David: pronunciation in French is very good. I lived for a year in Paris, but my grammar sucks. In any event, what can I do you guys for?

3:45 Mark: Well, so this novel existence is very philosophical, I think, and this is one of the points to sort of discuss here. I don't want to dwell upon it. I should point out as a side note, pretty much when I ran out of steam in getting the actual philosophy PhD many years ago, I took a year to get a master's in library science. So I got to experience what the library were. And I didn't actually end up going into either of these as a professional field. But I got a glimpse of that fabulously insecure profession of librarians who they're all worried that technology is going to make them obsolete and they need to prove their worth.

And that's kind of how I feel about whenever I talk about philosophy with non philosophers that I'm trying to say. Even though I'm not a representative of the philosophical establishment, nobody pays me, apart from our wonderful members for our site and our donors to this podcast, nobody pays me to do philosophy. But yet, because I have such an affection for it, I feel like I'm having to defend to the scientific community why, you know, it is worth focusing on these. It's a different kind of patience or lack thereof, that there are things in specific scientific theories that I don't have patience for.

That's one of the reasons I studied philosophy instead of a psychology or something else that I was looking into in my undergrad years was because I didn't ultimately care about the details of some particular mechanistic theory or you know, what exactly chemical in the brain is causing what I wanted the high level, the big picture stuff. That's all that philosophy is to me, is just looking at the big picture stuff. But with that comes having the patience maybe to focus on some texts that when you're reading them do not seem big picture at all.

Why are we spending 100 pages deciding whether the chair is really there, that kind of thing?

5:21 David: Well, it comes down to the purpose of these prefrontal lobes that we have that are just above our eyes. That's the one organ we have that the apes don't have, that none of our relatives have. You know, we share the cerebellum and medulla with fish. We share the basic mammalian cortex. With all the other mammals, we share the primate cortex, which is laid on top of that with other primates and other layers with the apes. But this last layering, and that's how we gained our br, keeping what worked before, but layering things on top this last layer no one else has.

And it's what we use when we do what Einstein called the Gedanken Experiment. Einstein, when he did relativity, he imagined himself riding a streetcar that was leaving the clock tower in Bern, Switzerland at the speed of light. And just by working out the rays in his head, where would the rays go and how would they meet the eye? That was half of relativity and the other half, you know, with the math. His wife did most of that. The point is that the Gedanken experiment is what we do when we imagine what if, what if I were that person, for example?

And so it's the seed of empathy. What if I were to aware this today or spread this rumor by the water cooler or propose this plan or try to run this yellow light, what might be the consequences of these actions? And this is the method by which we find maybe 90% of our horrible mistakes. And it's why the average male goes nah about 60 or 70 times per hour, simply saying, no, no, we're not going to do that. And that merely leaves the 5% of ideas that seem plausible to us. But if you've ever watched the Jackass movies, you realize that just because we individually think that they are plausible doesn't mean they actually are.

For that we need the other. And that's one of the things that I've been pushing in the transparent society and Other works, and that is reciprocal accountability. The only thing that enables us to actually find our mistakes is a thing that we hate. And it's called criticism. Reciprocal accountability. Reciprocal criticism. That's what the theme of my novel Earth, and that's the theme of the Transparent Society.

7:49 Mark: Well, it seems like you've actually pointed out a great similarity between what philosophy does and what science fiction does, certainly. Which is using these thought experiments. The thing that more scientifically oriented people find intolerable about philosophy is that, yes, okay, of course there's criticism. Philosophy is all about people criticizing themselves back and forth. But the fact that the criticism is not definitive, that it's not the machine you're trying to build actually blew up. There was a falsifying experiment. You know, if there actually is such a.

We've had discussions about philosophy of science before that would suggest that that's actually a myth. You can always. In the face of counter evidence, there's more than one strategy to pursue. You don't necessarily have to get rid of the theory that you were ostensibly testing there, but that's at least part of the nominal construction of how science is supposed to work. I would assume, then, if you're looking beyond the rigors of a particular science and the experiments within that, and testing out ideas more freely than you know, whether it be predictions of the future or about politics or whatever, that you probably look for that same kind of confirmability or falsifiability.

8:51 David: Well, you're talking to a guy who is. Well, first off, the number one thing is I remember all my past lives, and I was burned at the stake or garrotted or eviscerated or stomped flat by the time I was 16 in any of them. Because according to those who believe in reincarnation, the one thing that continues from life to life is personality, not memory. I'd never understood the point of that. It seems like a pretty silly system. But you take what you're dealt, and if you're dealt that, then personality continues. And if I ever had this personality in any previous life, I was dead by the time I was 16.

Because, like you guys, I question, I poke. I think I remember one time when I raised my hand at a meeting and I said, napoleon, your emperorness. I hear they have snow in Russia. But you see, that illustrates the point that criticism is the antidote to error. It's not that it's a perfect antidote, but if any of you have ever been married, that's the first thing you do to get adequate criticism. But if you want to become good at anything, then you institutionalize it. And the one great aspect of science is that science has so institutionalized this reciprocal accountability, reciprocal criticism approach that officially every scientist is in favor of it.

Officially, he or she knows that they must overcome the natural human tendency that we inherit from the harems of all those bastards who became top feudal lords, and that is to kill anybody who criticizes. For one thing, we live in a civilization where you can't kill them. But secondly, if you're in a profession that repeats it over and over enough, then a certain fraction of the time you'll actually decide that it's wise to grit your teeth and expose your ideas to the brickbats. And as you say, the ultimate critic, which is objective reality.

That's what science has, that's what made it so powerful, is that objective reality is the ultimate critic and says, no, it sounds really good, but you're wrong. Herbert Spencer said, there's nothing more tragic than a disproved beautiful idea. But the point is that what you're talking to right now is a guy who, for the first of all of his lives, got to live to his 60s and be honored for this character trait that got me burned in all my other lives. And that is poke, poke, poke at this, poke at that. And in doing so, what I do is I spend part of my time as a scientist.

I have my union card. I was an astrophysicist. Dylan, you were one, right?

11:35 Dylan: Brian has the astrophysics PhD, I have the particle physics PhD.

11:39 David: Oh, I see. Well, I'm a scientist, but I like to also think I'm an artist and I'm also a philosopher. I'm interested in them all, and I can see the points of all of them. As you, Mark, were pointing out, there are serious ways in which each of them can claim to be a fundamental approach to exploring this incredibly puzzling world. If I may, I was about to shut up and let someone el speak, but I just want to tell one little anecdote. I was at a party at Caltech when I was much younger than this, and a physicist was saying, you know, the physics is the most fundamental of sciences.

And the mathematician said, oh, it's all just applied mathematics. And the philosopher said, well, what Bertrand Russell showed is that it all depends on what philosophical underpinnings you use for your darn math. And the psychologist said, which you're going to choose is going to be based upon your psychological frame of mind, and your personality utterly determines which philosophy of who you're going to go with. And the Biologist says, and what do you think is the organ within which all this psychology takes place? And the chemist says, and your darn brain is just a bunch of colloidal chemistry.

And the physicist sighs and says, as I was saying, so, you know, you have this great circle, and one of the most tasty things about life is its ironies.

13:05 Seth: That anecdote also neatly summarizes how people who profess to come from just one of any of those disciplines have a tragic sense of not being able to listen to others who come from other disciplines.

13:19 David: Almost exactly 50 years ago, CP Snow made a very, very famous speech that became a famous essay about the two cultures. And sure, there's lots and lots of cultures on any university campus, but he said the two major cultures on most universities was the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities, arts, etc. And he described how the humanities and arts were based upon an older scholastic tradition that, for example, was based upon citation in order to argue with each other, citing the older text and then the older and the older and based upon the notion of the look back notion of authority, that the farther back in time you get, for example, the more interesting or relevant or cogent the authority, as opposed to the look forward view which is inherent in science, because even though we have our heroes from the past, it is inherently assumed that if you were to time travel a physicist from 2100 and bring Einstein together, the guy from 2100 would know more about how the world works.

But it was a lot more than the time flow of wisdom. There were many, many other things that he discussed about the vernacular, about the assumptions, the underlying assumptions of speech. And he said that they basically spoke different languages. And he despaired about them ever being able to connect. Well, here in San Diego, for example, we just established ucsd, the Arthur C. Clarke center for Human Imagination, and every department signed on, from the arts, dance to neuroscience. And the notion is that nobody is afraid anymore of being caught collaborating with somebody else.

And what you get is scientifically educated and technologically skilled artists. And you get what we've always had, and that is scientists who have artistic avocations. All of the great scientists I've ever known had artistic or philosophical avocations on the side. I drew the wrong conclusion from this for 30 years, the same conclusion that CP Snow drew, and that is that the scientists were simply smarter, that they're better, that it's easier for a scientist to do art than it is for an artist to do science. Well, that much is true, but what does it mean, and I thought it meant that the scientists were smarter.

Well, suddenly I realized that's not what's going on at all. What's going on is the positive sum game. And the most important concept that we can have philosophically for our current civilization amid culture war is the notion of the positive sum game. People have to read Robert Wright's book Non zero and really get in their souls the difference between the zero sum game, like chess or like most human societies, societies were zero sum games or a positive sum game, which is what our markets, science, democracy and courts are supposed to be, which is where one guy may win, but we all win by things getting better.

And one aspect of the positive sum game is the point that I try to make in my novel Kiln People. And that is we're many. We're capable of being more than the limited categories that used to squelch us on campuses and all over the world. And when I met Murray Gell-Mann and we talked about Finnegan's Wake and ancient Roman history, and when I met Richard Feynman and saw him play the bongos and saw his paintings, it wasn't that they were smarter than artists. It was that they were large, they were polymaths who refused to accept any boundary. And they loved both science and art.

And here they faced a quandary which should come first, which should be their day job. And hands down, it had to be science that you chose as your day job, because it's harder and requires more collaboration and it requires more money. So even if they love art slightly more than science, they would become scientists because you can do art in your spare time. And so the lesson that I learned was, no, scientists aren't intrinsically smarter than artists. It's that if you're intrinsically smart enough to do them all, your day job and your identification will be scientist simply for the convenience.

18:01 Brian: That reminds me of some of the things that you've written about a number of times about the empowering of the amateur. You've referred to the age of the amateur in a number of your writings. And I'm wondering if that changes the equation a bit, if it makes it possible for someone to do art in whatever form as their day job and to still contribute meaningfully to scientific endeavors. People can do that very casually now with all of the crowdsourced things like the zooniverse and the protein folding at home and the other tools like that, where they've gamified some of the things that scientists need to do.

But. But with the ability to have access to Vast clusters of computers through something like Google or Amazon or even the power of desktops now are vastly superior than what I had to reduce spectroscopic data on back in the day. Is it possible for people to reverse that equation that you talked about and make the other choice and be artists by day and scientists as an avocation?

18:58 David: Brian, that's an extremely cogent question, and it raises about 10 different points. First off, in my novel Earth and in Existence, I talk about the age of amateurs and what the age of amateurs basically is. It's an answer to one of the major problems we have in the 21st century, and that is that the 20th century had only one monotonic trend all the way across it. Fascism came and went, communism came and went. But the professionalization of everything. When the 20th century began, most fathers and mothers did most things for their family that today you hire professionals or go to the store for.

The professionalization of everything is still going on in the developing world as they double every 10 years the number of skilled, professional, educated people. But we can't do any more doublings. It's just not demographically possible. So how are we going to keep increasing our expertise? That's one aspect of this age of amateurs. And it reflects back on the whole business of, again, the positive sum game. If we are large, then our avocations will fill in a lot of the expertise that we could not get anymore if we were stuck in these individual professions.

And this reflects in, as Brian mentioned, amateur science and amateur so many other things, so much even more so in the arts. But yes, SETI at Home was the first of the. I'm going to lend my computer for its extra cycle times to a scientific project. There are now scores of these. And I'm involved in SETI. I have been for 30 years, and I'm trying to help develop an amateur SETI program that would keep its eye on the sky through 5,000 backyard telescopes. That may be the things that would actually detect ET So amateur science and all of that. But the crux of your question is, will this reverse?

Well, it will become looser and there will be many people with artistic day jobs who are able to do amateur science. But the imperative that I described, that if you want to be at the top of your fields, that if you can do both, you're going to choose to be a scientist as your day job. I don't think that's going to change. That imperative is going to be the same in that there's just so much more to know and there's so much more money flowing through and there's so many more collaborative that you need, and you need so much of your reputation. Whereas to be able to do an avocation, an artistic hobby at a quasi professional level.

I'm told that when I was three years old, I saw Einstein play the violin. I have no memory of it, but I was told that that happened. That aspect of whether 80% of the true genius polymaths will continue to have science be their day job, I think that'll continue. It's just going to be more easy to do this and it will be easier for artists to go the other way. One great example is the director of the Arthur C. Clarke center for Human Imagination. His name's Sheldon Brown and he is a tech artist primarily.

21:54 Dylan: I have a very big place in my heart about the idea of amateurs. And for me part of that has to do with the do it yourself aspect. The sort of self reliance. And what you were just saying made me wonder about what it means to have these skills or a skill and develop it. And what's the distinguishing factor? You were saying that the thing that's going to keep the path of most people who have a talent or an inclination in both directions, roughly speaking, that they'll continue to do science is because of some dispositional factors, but a lot of sort of cultural factors. Both the culture of science and the culture that we live in in terms of what makes more money, what makes more honors and so forth. As things in some ways get easier to do in those. It made me wonder a little bit about what ends up being this sort of differentiating factor.

22:44 David: I think personality. And I think. Well, you alluded to it earlier and that is that one of the reasons why it's good that we're many is because it's amazing that the same species, let alone many times the same person, can contain a philosopher, a scientist and an artist. Because when you get right down to it, these are very, very different schemas. Extremely different. When I am an artist, when I am creating my worlds, I am in the world of romance. And romance is where I am standing on the edge of a cliff, like Heathcliff, like Shelley, like Keats, like Byron, shouting at God, I'm hurling lightning bolts, I am adapting reality.

And it's the next day during the daytime that my editor self sits down with some tea and says, okay, God, what did the genius do last night? And has to clean it up and make it consistent with the standards of science fiction, which are much higher standards than any other literary genre. Because the Levels of consistency. I mean, at the high end of science fiction, of course, you know, 90% of anything is crap. That's the great philosophical statement of Theodore Sturgeon. But the point is that making it all be consistent is not the first thing in your mind when you're sitting there late at night thinking that you're basically Prometheus, you know, I'm God, I'm creating this world.

That's not a scientific frame of mind.

24:15 Dylan: Well, but you make me think about the creative aspect of science when you're talking about this. And my own experience with even analyzing data or trying to figure out anything, I guess, whether it be solving problems or those creative aspects which seem to me, you know, in the writing that I've done, whether it be fiction or not and the creative work I've done, whether it be building sheds or building pieces of art, that there is an aspect of that figuring out that has everything in common with creative activity. And to say that scientific activity, there is certainly a rote aspect to it.

But that's a little bit like the editor aspect you talked about. Or when you're an artist and you have to say you're a painter and you have to make sure you get your paints mixed in exactly the right way. There's a deductive aspect to it, preparing of your tools. It seems to me that the part where you feel the most alive, where you feel most the experience of doing the activity that you're engaged in involves creative aspect. I guess that's the best word I have for it. That has a lot in common across those things where you are making something new out of what you had before you.

My experience as a physicist, and they all ring true in common with those kinds of things. So I guess I'm saying that I'm not so sure that a deep difference between them in terms of the sort of fundamental activity of mind.

25:46 David: I'm sort of notorious for my screeds denouncing what became of Star wars, for example, mind you, the Empire Strikes Back. I thought it was one of the greatest things that I'd ever seen when I first saw it. And I was willing to forgive Return of the Jedi because it could have been fixed with five minutes of change dialogue. But it got worse, worse and worse. And I consider Yoda to be the most evil character ever in the history of literature or storytelling. But that's because romanticism is such an allure. People should look up David Brin and self righteousness.

I'm not saying that they're synonyms, but if you look it up. You'll get a paper that I delivered at the National Institutes on drugs and addiction showing that self righteous indignation is probably the worst addiction plaguing the American civilization today. Because it's devastating our ability to be pragmatic problem solvers. And it's an addiction, it's a bonafide chemical addiction that comes up in your book.

26:45 Mark: Yes, everything discussed here tonight. I should say that what makes this such a lengthy and idea filled book is that you didn't just take like a science fiction short story. One of your characters who's a sci fi author in the book is described as writing many of these where they just try out one idea and say look how this idea, this technological advance would destroy the world or something like that. But in this it's not just one idea, it's. It's your entire sort of vision of 40 years in the future thrown in here.

27:10 David: Well, yeah, I'm inspired by John Brunner whose epochal book of the 1960s stand on Zanzibar basically invented the field of. Let's see how well we can weave a plausible near future. The point is that Romanticism has dominated every single human culture that we know of. And that is the belief in magic, the belief in rules of cause and effect that are subject to authority rather than subject to objective proof. And this correlates with that look backward view of when a golden age appeared, which almost every human culture believed that there was one in the past, whereas we're trying to aimed toward one in the future.

And romanticism relates to that Keats and Shelley guy leaping and hopping on the edge of the cliff while lightning's crashing all around him. The two most romantic nations in the last 200 years were the American Confederacy and Nazi Germany. In that their artistic motifs and the literature that they liked and the music that they liked were all 100% romantic. And we can't afford that anymore because we have nuclear weapons. Whoever is the central heroic profession of your culture is driven mad by it. And for 6,000 years our central heroes were warriors, men on the white horse.

And they were insane because if they were crazy enough and wild ass enough, they could kill all their competitions, squelch all the peasants and get to take all the other men's women and wheat and were all descended from the harems of the guys who did that. And that's why males are so screwy, because we're all descended from those guys. For the first time our civilization, our principal heroes are entertainers. And if you want to know how crazy Human history has been squint and look at Tom Cruise and he's one of the better ones. Look at your average movie star and envision him with chain mail and the right of life and death over his peasants.

That's what human history was like. We've taken this horrible psychotropic, mind warping burden of heroism and taken it away from the warriors and dumped it on entertainers where it's relatively harmless. And that's what we have to do with romance. Romance should never again be in charge of policy. It should not be involved in our deliberations, our negotiations, and unfortunately Fox News is making sure that it is. But what it should be is not killed. Because we would not be human without romance. So where does romance go? Into our movies, into our songs, into our novels, into the night where you take the kids out near the edge of the forest with a campfire and tell them ghost stories until a little snap of a twig in the nearby forest sends shivers up their spines the way it did our ancestors.

We wouldn't be human without that. And we see in front of us the possibility of being able to assign to the daytime, to policy, to running civilization. All the rational stuff, the reciprocal accountability that I talk about in the transparent society. And we won't then be robots. We'll get home at night and we'll want some beers, we'll want the fire, we'll want the stories, and we'll be many. And we'll be more than just one thing.

30:33 Dylan: I was really intrigued by something you said just a minute ago about the relationship between what you're calling romanticism and our disposition with respect to authority. That one of the distinguishing features is that we look to knowledge or rightness or decisions to be based upon a specific authority of a specific person. We would have that power by authority. You gave the example of magic. That's the distinguishing feature of magical speaking is even though it sounds like it might be a little bit scientific in the sense that you have to learn it, you have to figure it out. The distinguishing feature is that you become powerful by getting authority.

31:18 David: Yeah, well, you raise a very important thing and then whenever human beings get authority, they try to monopolize it. And that's why most human civilizations were pyramidal in shape. The social structure was a pyramid with the lords up top and their number one thing they collaborated with each other about in between killing each other. And that was making sure the peasants didn't rise up and compete with them. And this was Adam Smith's big complaint. He didn't Think that the great enemy of capitalism and enterprise and creativity and competition was a government or socialism.

He knew from 6,000 years that the great enemy of market enterprise and open fair competition is oligarchy. It's feudalism, it's the owner aristocrats conspiring with each other. And what we developed 250 years ago and had to keep refining it once per generation, ever since, is called the Enlightenment, especially the Anglo American Enlightenment. And it's all based upon reciprocal accountability. This fantastic tool that we stumbled into, and that is no one person can be trusted. Therefore you break up power, you divide up the powerful and sic them against each other.

Not only among the branches of government, but government against the oligarchs, for example, is an antitrust legislation. And this is what the Koch brothers are trying to end. They want to capture government, they want to end government being their obstacle to power. And believe me, there are leftists who want the same thing. It's just that the left is kind of pathetic right now. By developing this tool of reciprocal accountability and enacting this competition in these four great arenas, competitive markets, democracy, science and justice courts, we found ways of getting synergies that no human civilization ever imagined.

And it resulted in this fabtastic culture that's so comfortable that we can graduate a whole lot of philosophy majors and it doesn't matter. George Lucas can get so rich from our extra income that we give him in his movies that he can be a Medici and hire and subsidize something like a thousand of the world's greatest artists. This is a fabulous civilization. But the problem is that this diamond shaped social structure in which a well off and empowered and educated and confident middle class is not only strong, but outnumbers the poor. This diamond shaped social structure is unstable.

The pyramid is what's stable. The pyramid is what's natural for humanity. And that's what we constantly are about to return to. If we don't refresh the diamond, if we don't keep constantly dealing with the threats that try to hammer it back into a pyramid. But the pyramid is supported. It always used to be guys with swords and right underneath them were the priests or the shamans or the magicians who would leap and hop and dance and persuade the people that it was a good thing that the son of the king can take your daughters at will. But do you want to know what's the most powerful magic of all?

34:18 Dylan: Sure.

34:19 David: Well, I'm the practitioner because I practice a magic that unlike all other magics in history, I don't even have to be present. I create industrial grade incantations that consist of chains of black squiggles pressed onto sheets of vegetable matter or that now glow at you out of glass. And more than a million of these squiggles are in my novel Earth. And these chains of black squiggles constitute incantations. And 90% of the citizens of our civilization have been fooled into training themselves to expertly decrypt these incantations. So that when you're reading one of my paragraphs, your eye is scanning the squiggles, but you don't notice the squiggles.

What you notice is suddenly scintillating conversation, deep human insights, spectacular star spanning explosions. These things tunnel into your subjective reality and they feel palpably real. You see them taking place. You feel the emotions because your eyes decrypted an incantation and it's industrial grade, quality controlled because the same experience will be felt by with differences in subjectivity by the next person to read it. Now that's magic, because magic is the creation of subjective realities in other people's heads. And the bridge is philosophy, because philosophy, it's all about the persuasion that is the crux of magic and art.

But it is also about the incantatory process of self checking and reciprocal accountability that's related to science.

36:10 Mark: Yes, I was trying to think as you were going through that, and you do this in the book as well, contrast the artistic endeavor with the scientific endeavor. But so much of your writing is not fiction and certainly has the apparent motivation that your scientific writing would certainly not doing something experimental. But your commentaries on privacy and all these other political issues and a lot of things you've been talking about here, you're doing something that I would call philosophy in that you are not just trying to weave a spell, that you're trying to actually get at truth, you're trying to say something.

But this is why, I think, why philosophy is thought of as the parent of all sciences. Because once a particular method is figured out for a particular science, once you've got a paradigm, once you've got an experimental procedure and what's going to count as evidence within this experimental procedure, then you're doing a science. But once you back off from that and you start asking about the foundations of the science, if you ask how these things fit together, you tell the anecdote about all the different scientists, then well, you're doing philosophy.

And so putting that clearly on the side of the humanities and then equating the humanities with spell weaving, with basically sophism seems a Little strange. That doesn't seem to characterize, certainly, how philosophers see what they're doing.

37:16 David: Yeah, I understand that. But you have to understand that philosophy is still rooted in one of the great renaissances that passed through the west, and that's scholasticism. And if you go back to Aquinas and Augustine, it was Platonist in the authoritarian sense. But after a while, you got, especially after the Crusades and great translations of the earlier Greeks, you had these young guys in the colleges who had discovered the logical process, logical fallacies, and all these sorts of things. And I'm pleased to say that in a lot of the schools now, logical fallacies are now being taught.

But look to us physicists, we have mad cousins, and they are called mathematicians. And they actually believe that you can prove something with a pencil and a paper. Now, the quality of the incantations and the spells they weave is extremely high. The utility is extremely high. But we don't believe that they actually have come up with anything useful until we try it and we see if it can be used. Tell you one example, you know that the first and second derivative, the third derivative of x squared, the first derivative is 2x. The second derivative is 2.

The third derivative is 0. You go in the opposite direction. You could call integrals the negative one derivative. Well, that would be, you know, 3x to the third or something like that. You know, the process. But let me ask you this. What is the half derivative or the three quarter derivative? People have been taking for granted forever that it's in integers. It turns out that it's a continuum. You can have the half derivative, you can have the five thirds derivative, you can have the negative PI derivative. It's amazing. And I have this book over here, Oldham and Spanier.

It's all about this stuff, and it's amazing. But because nobody has found hardly any uses for it, nobody knows about it. And it's just considered to be an autoeroticism by mathematicians. But look it up. It's actually quite cool.

39:27 Mark: I mean, you're making it sound like philosophy is about erecting a grand edifice, which certainly is something like Aristotle or many philosophers historically were doing. But in reaction to those kind of system builders, what philosophy does now is in some ways what particularly insightful literature does, which is instead of imposing a theory on experience, on society, instead of being like a behaviorist or someone kind of reductionist or having to talk about everything in terms of evolutionary biology, is trying to at least figure out, like, what constitutes an accurate description of anything.

So, for instance, philosophers have spent a lot of time dwelling on causality. This is something that for practical purposes, of course, we know what causality is. Every single science assumes causality, but yet it's not even a single sensibility. It's a shifting spectrum in terms of what actually makes sense to you. That a guy like David Hume sat down and looked at, okay, I see one billiard bell hitting the other, but I don't actually see the causality. I don't see a power behind that. And that puzzled him of how then could we account for why we have these expectations, Et cetera, et cetera?

I think what philosophy is trying to do is not create. For the most part, of course, there's really no generalization you can make about what philosophers try to do. There's far from being an integral part of the humanities within a given diverse philosophy department. Half the people think that the other half of the people are not doing real philosophy at all. So there's no generalization to be made. But if I could, I think a very common trend is to say that to even figure out what we're doing when we do science, that you have to start somewhere more basic.

40:55 David: Well, yes, Look, I'm not trying to denigrate philosophy. After all, I do philosophy. I mean, I don't have my union card in philosophy, but certainly I do it, and I am intrigued by it. But my number one priority is, is this going to help me to save this civilization so we can get Star Trek? Because in my opinion, so many of the philosophical issues, so many of the issues of how do you design good artificial intelligence, for example, and how will we know when we have an artificial intelligence? Is a Turing test enough, and will it be possible to deal with them?

Will it be possible for them not to stomp us flat? Are there fundamental ethics that will carry through into these new entities that we create? These are all questions that are partly philosophical, and that's very important. But you see, in my opinion, there comes a certain point where I just have to shrug and say, look, it's my job because I have this role in civilization, to speculate about these things, to ruminate about these things, to tweak people's minds and get them thinking about these things. But my number one job is to be a good ancestor.

Because if we succeed at saving this always fragile world, advanced enlightenment civilization, then we will have grandchildren, and their grandchildren will be so much smarter than us that they can deal with the abstractions, they can negotiate with the AI. Our job is to create a civilization that's so Worthwhile, that no AI will want to stomp it. And so what I look for, first out of both mathematics, as I described earlier, and philosophy, is number one, what are you providing that's practical? And the number one thing that philosophy provides that's practical is teaching millions of people how to comprehend logical fallacy.

Because if you can comprehend logical fallacies, then you are equipping them to either argue with each other more ferociously and effectively if they're going to be lawyers or to negotiate better to say, wait, wait, wait. I think I understand what you're saying. You've just made this logical fallacy. Let me see if I can paraphrase what your point is. Without that logical fallacy. Now, that's how an adult behaves when he or she argues. Now, does philosophy give us more than that? Of course it does. It gives us the second thing that mathematics provides, and that is insight into possibilities that can then be tested.

And there's no question that philosophy has done this. It gave it to Einstein, it gave it to Murray Gell Mann, who, by the way, one of his major artistic sidelines was philosophy. Do those two things take up all of philosophy or math? Of course not. It's good for the soul. It's good for us to poke away at the godlike parts of it. And I'm all in favor of that too, but I have to divide it up into these categories. And the last category is where philosophy gets in my way. You start with Plato. Oh, sorry, guys. I abso freaking lutely detest almost as much as I despise Hegel.

But very close after them come, of course, the postmodernists.

44:11 Seth: How do you feel about people who work in marketing

44:15 David: for them? The Golgafrincham B Ark.

44:19 Mark: This is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yeah, I just heard you in another interview talking about that. The unessentials in society.

44:26 David: Yes, well, if you put it that way, then it really sounds nasty and Nazi, but it's a lovely metaphor, and that is that they were going to evacuate the planet Golgafrincham and the A Ark was going to carry all the thinkers, and the C Ark was going to carry all the people who actually did things and made useful things. And the B Ark was going to carry all the middlemen, all the account executives and middle management and telephone sanitizers and nail salon people. And it's actually a fairly vicious little riff that fortunately it ends properly, because the people who have a renaissance, a golden age, once they've got rid of their useless ninnies Back on Golgafrincham because only the B Ark is sent into space, they are all killed by a disease contracted by an unsanitized telephone.

So morally speaking, Douglas Adams takes it full circle and says, no, no, no, I'm not a fascist, but isn't it a nice fantasy?

45:21 Seth: Well, as an amateur philosopher and a professional product marketing person, I guess I understand where my magic sits relative to ye scientists and other types.

45:33 David: Look, 100 years ago in the west, most people were on farms. This was at the beginning of the age of amateurs. Now 5% are on the farms. Another 5% move the produce around and process it and get it into our stores and feed us. Another 5% provide absolutely essential services like the electricity and the water. You could argue that another 15% do things that are of such a intrinsic importance that there's no way they would ever be sent on the B arc. Did you ever read Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano?

46:08 Mark: Long time ago.

46:09 Seth: Yes, a long time ago.

46:11 David: Yeah, it's his most science fictional and most straightforward novel. It's his first novel about automation and it portrayed a world in which everything was so automated that only 1% had jobs and the rest were all working for the reeks and wrecks, the reconstruction and recreation, and they all had make work government jobs. Well, in a sense that's what we've done. We have this economy in which all the people working in nail salons or writing science fiction novels get to have the honor and self respect of thinking that they actually do something for a living because they are able to sell their services into an economy that somewhere along the line the exchange of money and all of that, somewhere along the line the farmers say, yeah, sure, I'll feed you for that.

And the question is, as automation continues, as artificial intelligence continues, robotics continues, manufacturing, will we be able to continue this miracle of giving 80% of the population jobs? That they can then think of themselves as being hard working and really accomplishing something at the end of the day and deserve the food that's in their fridge? I hope so. But I think that that's one of the problems for which our children are simply going to have to be smarter than us. And that leads us towards both the Singularity and seti.

47:43 Mark: How so?

47:44 David: Well, because of the notion of what is intelligence and whether or not we are smart enough to go out into the galaxy or whether or not, as I pointed out In a recent YouTube, the whole Fermi paradox of why we haven't glimpsed aliens. Well, among the hundred explanations that I've cataloged. And I'm probably the world's expert on the Fermi paradox because I don't have an opinion. And this is a flaw in human nature is that if there's a topic about which nobody knows anything, that maximizes the degree to which people have opinions.

48:20 Brian: Opinions like religion.

48:22 David: Right. I should let you guys talk. Everyone is so opinionated about which explanation is concerned that I found a niche where I say, no, no, no, I'm just cataloging a hundred of them and here's my rank ordering of them. But there are 20 top explanations that are pretty much equal. But one of them is that we are anomalously smart. And more and more I am coming to the conclusion that that may be the case. And that's scary because we're not smart enough. Our children have to be smarter than us in order to solve the problems that we've created.

48:59 Dylan: I was going to maybe start a conversation specifically related to one theme that's in existence, which broadly speaking, is just the relationships that human beings have to technology. And specifically what struck me about this topic was the way in which the text genetic is really part of our environment and therefore part of the evolutionary force on our species in the book. And so what it means to be a human being changes the way a species would change. And one of the factors in that is environment or nature, broadly understood, sort of in the form of, well, we affect our environment and we affect that environment by in part, not just through pollution and stuff like that, but by creating technology, whether it be writing or whether it be combustion engines or AI.

And that that in turn affects us through generations, through our children, our children's children, our children's children's children. To really render our species different and then render our self understanding sort of as a species changes it. And so by the end of existence, we have five different classes of human beings, broadly understood. And I say broadly understood meaning that the very notion of what a human being is has had to change so that the sentient Android has a status in society as a human being. And. And Ascension dolphins have status there.

50:39 Mark: And you positive autistics as actually being a separate forgotten race.

50:44 Dylan: Yes. And Neanderthals are brought back. I guess I just want to sort of talk about that aspect of it, of what the relationship we have with technology is and your book in the end, despite there being sort of warning signs about it and there being possible pitfalls, in the end, it's unequivocally positive. And I don't necessarily disagree, but I just sort of Wanted to parse that out a little bit.

51:08 David: Yeah, well, you raised a whole bunch of stuff there. One is the effect of technology. And of course that brings us to the positive sum game, because technology supposedly allows us to leverage ourselves in ways that are vastly more efficient than before. And one thing that I point out is that ever since we discovered glass lenses, movable type and perspective, this was, you know, about 1400s, we have seen almost every generation witnessing expansions and sometimes exponentiations of what they are able to know or remember, what they're able to see and what they're able to pay attention to.

And that's what glass lenses and movable type perspective did. And then we went on to libraries and, and telescopes and new art forms. And every single time this happened, it looked like it was going to vastly expand the bands upon the human brain. And there were always grouches who said, the human brain can't deal with this new tsunami or tidal wave of information. And it's going to have to be a be controlled because human beings are fragile and they'll get meme poison or children will question what their parents taught them even worse. But also that some kind of elite is going to have to serve as an intermediary.

And every time there were transcendentalists who leaped on this new thing and said, this is going to change everything. It's going to make us all wiser and better and smarter and the average people will be able to cope with it. And always the grouches were proved right first. The first effect of printing presses was to horribly exacerbate the religious wars in Europe. You'd only get a few printed materials and they would be propaganda to hate the people over on the other side of the river. The same thing happened in the 1930s when loudspeakers and radio seemed to amplify the voices of gifted polemicists to godlike proportions.

And the only difference between the English speaking world on the one hand and the rest of the world was that our master polemic narcissists were on our side. Churchill and Roosevelt and so on, while the rest of the world fell sway to this hypnotic effect that then passed away as we moved on to other advanced forms. And each time the grouches proved right in the short term. But in the long term, average people proved capable of drinking from the fire hose. And that's what we're doing with the Internet right now, is adjusting to drinking from a super fire hose.

And are the grouches right that we cannot cope with this latest thing? Are the techno, cyber transcendentalists and the singularitarians right that this is going to change everything and turn us into gods? Well, so far the effects have been nonlinear. We have seen prodigious expansions of what human beings are able to think, let alone accomplish. And if you've read Jared Diamond's book Collapse, which he wrote after Guns, Germs and Steel, both very good books, well worth reading. But he's a dour guy. And whereas he's very good at laying out the problems, for example, that many past civilizations ignored their ecological crises until it destroyed them.

His prescription is one that I talk about in existence, and that is renunciation, that our only hope is to step back from the brink, step back from dangerous technologies, step back and become more humble and enforce it ruthlessly so that we can survive. And my answer is it's been tried and it doesn't work. Yes, it slows down deterioration, but deterioration continues. And what you've created is a permanent Orwellian state. We have a lot of practice with it. It's called feudalism. It's those pyramidal social structures and never will be invented, the tools that would get us out of the trap.

It will only happen more slowly. Whereas if we move forward as quickly as possible, then we have a chance. And the chance is what we see, and that is that the world is filled with good news. It's filled with danger and horrible news. But the good news is 50% of what's out there. 4/5 of the children on this planet come home from school, put their school books down in homes that have an electric light, a little refrigerator, a toilet, a tap. It's incredible poverty for half of them, from our perspective. But they go to school and their bellies are full.

55:54 Brian: That's a theme that Steven Pinker touched on in his book the Better Angels of Our Nature. We often don't see the forest for the trees and the improvements that one could consider in terms of the amounts of violence, the kinds of violence both at the state level and the national level, as well as the lifestyles that people are living in. But another thing that he touched on, which I was also reminded of when you were talking earlier and Dylan was talking about the different sort of kinds of people, is he talks about expanding spheres of empathy or circles of empathy, where more and more groups of either sidelined people, whether it's by race or by gender or by sexual orientation or even into the animal world, are sort of being enveloped by this growing circle of empathy that people have.

And we start to treat more and more beings with that kind of respect. And it made me think of that, with the multiple sort of things that were called human at the end of existence.

56:57 David: What you're describing, I mean, Pinker's book is a wonderful book, and it points out, out that violence has plummeted per capita every decade since the pit of what I call the concave century. The 20th century was the concave century because it started from the tumble and the fall, from the huge optimism the world had in 1913 into the calamity of 1914, and tumbled down to the nadir, the bottom, the pit of hell of 1943. And we've been climbing out ever since. But our mood has been so cracked that we cannot let ourselves see that things are getting better enough, not better quick enough to save us.

We're still aimed towards hell if we don't fix things real fast. But things are getting better enough to suggest that we should have confidence that we could save the world and save most of the world's species and all of that. The insanity of the right is that they don't get it, that we have to save the world and it has to be a. A big deal. And our major focus of our attention, the insanity of the left, is the anger that you'll get from most people on the left if you mention the good news, because they think that if we admit that there's been good news, that it will remove the intensity of the need to do the rest.

That is functionally insane, when in fact, if you brag about how much progressivism has achieved, it would encourage people to engage in progressivism.

58:28 Brian: I think a lot of progressives do that, though. There's a small group of people on the ostensible left that talk about how things are getting worse and worse and worse in different ways, perhaps than people on the American right. But I think a lot of people in progressive politics, certainly they point out the fact that most measures of economic well being in the country are better under certain sets of policies than other sets of policies, that things are improving, that we are expanding the number of states, for example, where people can marry the person that they love, regardless of what sex that person happens to be.

And that's a battle that's being won. Things continue to ratchet in that direction and that it's a hard fight and that the people that are losing those fights continue to clawed, scraped to keep that from happening. But I wouldn't say that there's an equivalence between the lack of recognition of objective reality on the part of a lot of right wing politicians in terms of just the basics of where the environment's going or basic measures of how certain things have certain effects on the economy with the far, far left or the loony left, the numbers and the degrees are different there.

And it's sort of a false equation equivalence to say that they're both guilty.

59:48 David: Well, I know I didn't say there was an equivalence in numbers. The distinction that you can make on the left side of the political spectrum in America is between liberals and leftists. And liberals vastly outnumber leftists. It's just that they are sometimes fooled into thinking that they are people of the left, when in fact what they are is the true heirs of Adam Smith. Which comes as a huge surprise to most liberals because they've been taught to think that Adam Smith is this horrible, horrible man, when in fact he wanted mass public education when there was none.

He wanted mass public health when there was none. In order to supply the grist, a maximum Number of skilled 25 year olds ready to compete. He wanted competition. And liberals get this somewhere in their gut that the most important liberal and progressive enterprises are those that equalize the starting blocks, not those that equalize outcomes. If liberals were to start recognizing that Adam Smith was their founder and that true market enterprise is the biggest victim of the madness that has taken over the American right, of the rise of oligarchs who want to return us to a feudal pyramidal shaped social structure, then liberals would be able to embrace their founder, Adam Smith.

And that jiu jitsu move would so stun Fox News that they wouldn't know what to do with it. But unfortunately it's really hard to get that meme out there. The real distinction is that it is the far left that's mad and the entire American right that's insane. Except for some wakened, what I call ostrich conservatives who hear the moans of William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater and have started gathering on a magazine called the American Conservative to try to see if there is any kind of consensus among any number of sane conservatives to say, all right, it's time for us to get mad at the people who have hijacked our movement and turned it into a monster.

Let me give you a little statistic to show how bad it is. Did you know that 17.3% of the electricity that's generated in the state of Arizona comes from magnets and coils that have been placed around the spinning in Barry Goldwater's grave?

1:02:15 Seth: That was nice setup. Apparently amongst your other Talents. You're also a comedian.

1:02:19 David: Okay, like the way I said that, I thought the timing was good. And New York is drawing 7% of its electricity from William F. Buckley. You know, look, don't get me wrong here. I know where the biggest threat is now. But here's the point. If you look at American media, if you look at Western media, if you look at our movies and our music, what are the basic themes that are taught in an average popular American film? And I don't care whether it's a chick flick or a zombie hunt. It all comes down to one major and two or three minor messages. The minor messages are eccentricity and tolerance.

If you want the audience to bond with the character, you show the character having some harmless eccentricity, and that shows them to be interesting. And that says something about our culture, because eccentricity was considered suspicious and alienating in most cultures. The second is tolerance. And if you want to show who's the villain in the movie, show the villain expressing some intolerance in the very first minutes of the film.

1:03:27 Seth: Film.

1:03:28 David: If it's just verbal intolerance, then, like Archie Bunker, he may get a chance to save his life by seeing the light. If he kicks a dog, he's gonna die.

1:03:37 Seth: Deservedly, yes.

1:03:40 David: The number one message that appears in almost all of our films is suspicion of authority. The protagonist has to deal with or face or be abused by or confront some authority figure, often several. In the course of the film, we've all been trained to experience suspicion of authority, but the other thing we've been trained to do is to think we invented it. It's amazing. It's in every movie. But each of us thinks that we're the rebel who invented suspicion of authority, or our small group or the people who believe like us. But in normal times, when you're not in stage three of the American Civil War, which is what we're in right now, meaning that we're kind of.

But in normal times, a decent conservative differs from a decent liberal in where they see authority being dangerous. The average decent conservative is concerned about snooty academics and faceless government bureaucrats. The average decent liberal is concerned about conniving aristocrats and faceless corporations.

1:04:46 Brian: But that gets to the point that one of the things that, you know, you were talking about is how important it is to have. Have reciprocal accountability. And some of those structures that we have are more amenable to the reciprocal criticism and accountability being put in place than others. We don't have in our culture right now a system or an expectation that most people can look into the doings and schemings and plannings of the extraordinarily rich individuals or corporations. We don't have it. We have ostensibly a balance of powers in our government to try to separate things out.

We have, in principle, some sorts of freedom of information acts and things like that to allow citizens to see into what their government is doing. But we don't have it for some of these other parts of our society that are wielding power. So from a practical point of view, how can we get from point A to point B where we can have that sort of reciprocal accountability?

1:05:42 David: Well, what you just illustrated was that as a liberal, you have a tendency to think that your side's favorite elites are more under control than the ones that you have your own reflexive suspicion of authority aimed toward. When in fact, those four authority figures that I described, too hated by conservatives, too hated by liberals, the only proper response is duh. I mean, they're all dangerous.

1:06:09 Brian: Well, I wasn't disputing that. What I was questioning, and maybe you have some suggestions on where it comes in, is, is I see at least some levers for providing some control over some of those things, but I see no lever to provide control over Rupert Murdoch or Warren Buffett or Walmart. I don't see the lever by which we can have any significant impact on that.

1:06:34 David: Well, I actually agree with you. But let's remember that intrinsically, government has force, it has coercion. So in many ways the libertarians are correct that it is intrinsically very dangerous. One of the things that I talk about in the transparent society and in my more recent transparency related discussions is what is the actual answer to Snowden? What's the actual answer to this era in which they call it Brin's corollary to Moore's Law, that the cameras are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more numerous and better every single year at a rate that's faster than Moore's Law.

Under those circumstances, the reflex that we see from our civil liberties protectors is to whine and complain and moan, don't look at us. And if they succeed in making it illegal for the NSA to look at us, guess what happened back in 2003. There was a little thing called total information awareness, and the public got equally upset about that. And it was banished.

1:07:44 Brian: Well, it was renamed, it went to the nsa.

1:07:47 David: If we pass a law saying the NSA cannot look, it'll just show up someplace else. It's absurd. The notion that you can blind elites has no precedent in human history.

1:08:01 Brian: So is the answer, then, to empower people like Edward Snowden to provide better protections.

1:08:06 David: It's called sousveillance. S O U S veillance. It's the answer to surveillance, which is looking down from above. Violence is looking back from below. And believe it or not, it has precedent. It's how we got our current freedom. All we have to do is come up with methods to put a choke chain around the watchdogs instead of trying to blind the watchdogs. The watchdogs have jobs to do. They're trying to protect us. I don't mind the watchdogs seeing. You're not going to stop them from seeing. Anyway. What should bother us is not what corporations and governments and all that can see.

It's what they can do to us and that we have some power of. If we strip them naked instead of trying to blind them. Make sure, for instance, that the inspectors general in all of these departments and agencies don't report to the President or to the secretaries of those agencies. They don't owe their jobs to the people who they're inspecting, but instead owe them to a completely separate, separate service called the Inspector General of the United States. That's just one of a dozen ways that we could impose a choke chain on the watchdog that we can yank if it ever tries to do anything to us.

And that's the important thing, to remind the dog that it's a dog and not a wolf.

1:09:30 Brian: That reminds me a little bit. In your Kiln People novel, there was a piece that appealed to the part of me that wants to stick it to the people that are causing the problems. And you had a henchman's law where there was actual financial benefit essentially, to whistleblowers for exposing things that were being done, whether it was by corporations, by individuals, or by governments, people that were part of the apparatus that saw things like Edward Snowden, that revealed crimes and problems, instead of being thrown in prison, were rewarded for it.

1:10:07 David: Well, what we need is something that's more subtle and that's a sliding scale, because, quite frankly, what Edward Snowden did was illegal. It broke his oaths. Now, the question is, under the principles of civil disobedience, which, believe it or not, American jurisprudence actually accepts as a portion of our law, does he deserve pardons, for example, and that sort of thing, or even rewards? I am all in favor of henchmen, laws that entice henchmen into blowing the whistles on the truly heinous, on reporting carefully the merely illegal. And then this nebulous ground that Edward Snowden's in or Julian Assange. Almost nothing that they reported was actually illegal.

1:10:55 Brian: Well, there's been a number of revelations from Snowden that a number of people have suggested have been drastically illegal.

1:11:02 David: It's really, really iffy whether any of it was actually illegal. The question is, did he do us a service by getting a national conversation going as to whether we want some of these things to be legal? And that's his great service. And for that, I'm willing to vote for or speak up for some kind of a pardon. But you have to understand that he's in that middle ground. The things that he was reporting were perhaps excess diligence in trying to find out stuff that civil servants sincerely thought was going to protect us. We have a right to decide.

We don't like this. We want to change the parameters of this deal, and it was wrong for the Patriot act to hide it from us. So what I'm trying to say is, is I want what I describe in my novels. I want the henchman's act, I want the whistleblower's axe. But if you're getting down to specifics, Assange and Snowden fall into this middle ground, where I am hoping we'll be a civilization that recognizes that the good they did. But you remember, there has to be a deterrence value as well. If you break your oath of secrecy that you swore and what you reveal wasn't illegal.

Study civil disobedience. It's a very major branch of philosophy. And if you're engaged in civil disobedience, one of the things that Gandhi and Martin Luther King said was there is a reasonable level of punishment that actually honors you. And a week in jail, for instance, was considered by Martin Luther King to be a sign that he was being effective and not unfair, because he said, I am breaking the law. I am inconveniencing this civilization in order to get at their conscience and to teach them that this law is a bad law. So things are more complicated sometimes than our simple reflexes say.

But we only have a, you know, a short amount of time left. So what else would you like to talk about? Do we live in a simulation? The Singularity?

1:13:23 Mark: Let's talk about the smart dolphins.

1:13:26 David: Smart dolphins. Oh, well, you just raised a can of worms.

1:13:28 Brian: Here's a question that I have about the various kinds of humans that you have at the end of existence and the smart dolphins that make appearances in several of your novels. And the whole idea of uplift. And this gets to sort of the practical nature of if we have citizens. If we have people that we've welcomed into sort of the broad embrace of humanity, there will be a step there where they are certainly not the same as people. And so how do we get over the fact that people will want to say, well, they're smart dolphins, but they shouldn't be able to vote, they're not smart enough yet. Where do we get to that point? And then in the terms of artificial intelligence, if we get some computer that's able to pass whatever tests we want to say that yes, this is a sentient insilication being, do we let them make a billion copies of themselves and then vote a billion times in our elections?

1:14:24 David: Well, you know, these are important philosophical and practical matters.

1:14:29 Mark: Yeah, it's when they start complaining, that's when we historically have made moves. When there's a group that has not been considered citizens and they get their act together enough to inconvenience us and bitch enough, then all right, some political progress is made.

1:14:44 David: Well, yes, yes, that's been the process. And this, the expansion of these horizons that people on the left are addicted to and that people on the right, the fundamental personality difference between right and left is that the right doesn't like being chided to change their horizons, their definitions of loyalty. And the left is utterly addicted to self righteously expanding these horizons. And liberals like it, but they also like their old loyalties. To get back to the dolphins, I was invited to this Personhood for Animals conference and I attended by Skype back in December.

And many of the radicals there were not happy with what I had to say because I said that if you want us all to be vegan and vegetarian under some definitions, fine. Science is going to enable us to do that when we get tasty, efficient tissue culture meat and it will help to save the world. Fine. If you want the end of the factory farms, I may want my chicken, but nevertheless I'm willing to negotiate. If you want to stop experiments on higher animals for our benefit, okay, fine, liberate all the chimpanzees and all that. If you want to totally ban forever all experiments on higher animals that might be for their benefit, then we have a real problem here because you are forbidding your grandchildren from doing something that they may be wise enough to do that we are only glimpsing the glimmers of every year we find out about some other species that's smarter than we thought it was.

African gray parrots, crows and corvids, sea lions. Most recent thing was prairie dogs whose barks contain information about what kind of animal, whether it's a human that's passing through their village and whether it's wearing a red sweater and is female. And more and more we're finding out that this is cool. They're smarter than we thought when they were. But we're also finding out that they all seem to crowd under a glass ceiling of intelligence. It's as if Darwin and nature are saying evolution will let you get this high and no higher. And maybe the Velociraptors got this high too.

In which case that asks the big question, how is it that we not only broke through, but we broke through by so far and so capable of reconfiguring ourselves so that every time it was predicted we had reached our limit of being able to drink from the fire hose. It turns out we were able to drink from more information and more and then more and be smarter than our parents and smarter than their parents. And that's our hope, is that our children will be smarter than us. How did we get to be people like that? And that I believe is a leading explanation for the Fermi paradox.

It may be that Darwin's glass ceiling holds all across the galaxy.

1:17:40 Mark: Since one of the questions I threw out as initial question to launch this whole thing was is the human race doomed? It's perhaps fitting that we should at least consider that for a second. Second, I don't want to give away what the main thing that happens in the book, but it's at least raised as a theory. It is propagated among the people. The idea that a Star Trek like future civilization with lots of different races flying around and talking to each other is not going to be possible because no species survives its technological adolescence.

1:18:11 David: I certainly talk about this in my novel existence and the situation that I portray and I'm called this incredible optimist. But in fact the situation I portray is a very daunting one. Let's put it this way. Human survival and our ability to become good ecological managers of this planet, more than just our survival and the survival of this planet and dolphin bays and all of that, more than that may be riding on it. It may be that there may be millions of quasi intelligent life forms or even fully intelligent life forms that have never been able to figure out the things that we're wrestling with right now and that they're waiting for us to get out there, that we may be.

And of course this is teleological and it's more romantic than scientific. And that takes us full circle in this entire conversation. It May be that we have a job to do and that so much is riding on it and that the galaxy cannot afford for us to fail.

1:19:12 Dylan: I guess it makes me wonder about that teleological end there, because you surprised me a little bit with that. Given the way in which existence works, the book does. Where there is a kind of constant growing out, there's a little bit of sloshing back and forth. Are we more like viruses or are we not? Or are we just like viruses? But there's more flourishing viruses and less flourishing viruses. But the directionality there, I guess it's not portrayed as teleological. In the end, the closest thing would be people who feel like they have a role to play.

Something like what you talked about earlier. That a disposition of being a good ancestor would be somehow their understanding of their teleological end. But that's a little bit different than what you were just talking now about. That it might be the galaxy's existence might depend upon. That's a bigger teleology. I was wondering if that somehow follows naturally from the kind of chemical to chemical, person to person, society to society, evolutionarily based growing that you have in the book.

1:20:23 David: I'm partly colored by the fact that I just finished writing a paper for the American Academy of Religion, trying to come up with the four classic questions that are asked about theology, the question of pain and all of that, but then adding 12 more questions that have either been neglected or possibly not asked before that help to carve out whatever space there is short of atheism. It's a fascinating exercise. Some of the things that are involved is the look back view towards a golden age versus look forward. Another is a very philosophical question, and that that is, does the created automatically and inherently owe anything to its creator?

The Romans answered in the principle of paterfamilias, absolutely yes. And that the father had a right to kill his children. We in the west have answered almost unequivocally no. And that is that the parent has a right to impose his or her will while raising the child. But the child does not have an intrinsic and inherent obligation of perpetual obedience to its creator, its parents.

1:21:37 Brian: That's different than saying they don't owe anything to their creator, though.

1:21:41 David: Yes, but as the phrase with the man talking to the woman on a date, now we're just negotiating. You know the old joke.

1:21:49 Seth: Sure.

1:21:49 David: Now we're only negotiating. And if you're negotiating, then you have set up the fundamental principle of whether or not we can demand to negotiate with God. That of course, is the issue that was raised by Elie Wiesel in his novel the Trial of God, in which, faced with the Holocaust, rabbis at Auschwitz hold a conclave to decide whether or not man has the right to put God on trial for such a betrayal. It's a fantastic piece of work. And the conclusion was, yes, we have an absolute right. The rabbis say, we here, under these circumstances and in this room, we don't have the jurisdiction. And they closed their books and marched off to the gas chambers. But they established the principle that under circumstances like these. Well, in any event, these are among the questions that I try to raise in my paper. But Mark can share it with you. I sent it over to Mark.

1:22:48 Mark: Yes, so I took it. We had your permission then to post that 16 hard questions about the human place in creation on our member site so that all the philosophy minded folks that have subscribed to us could read that. And in fact I'm willing to collect the feedback. So they're not just emailing you individually, but that you will get a pile of comments.

1:23:08 David: Yeah, it's interesting stuff. And so that's my job, that's why I used to be murdered in all my past lives, is to poke at things. When people say, oh, that's very interesting, I say my job is to be interesting, it's not to be right.

1:23:21 Dylan: How very Socratic of you.

1:23:22 Mark: Yes, yes, that's often how I feel about philosophy. It's an addiction. During my formative years, the reason I got into this was because, you know, I wanted truth. There's so much just interesting stuff, even completely wacky. So we just read George Berkeley, which is somebody that even in the context of this very open minded podcast series, you know, we'll read people just because they're historically important. Putting aside whether they're right or not, that was still somebody that in the early days I did not want to cover him because he was so obviously ridiculous.

But I found it a hoot just going back to it last month. That's why I thought that you would be great to visit with us here because so much of the appeal, at least for me, of the crazy kinds of philosophy and I, even at this point in my, my formative years, I hated postmodernism in the way, the same way you're talking about it. But now I find it a challenge like what are these people talking about? And getting off on the weird language. So the appeal is very much like reading about a strange futuristic society of the type that you're describing where, you know, in the case of Existence that the ubiquitous technology has really given us extra terms.

It felt like you were being an amateur marketing guy and coming up with, you know, instead of the iPhone, it would be the AI aiphone, you know, and endless amounts of this extra verbiage. And that just changed the fundamental landscape, the character of the land the these people were living in. And that's what makes it so entertaining. I find the same putting aside whatever the practical value might be or ultimately whether you at the end of the day want to retain some of those ideas in your personal stock or not, what just makes it a lot of fun.

1:24:54 David: I'm delighted to be paid for. This is way cool.

1:24:58 Mark: So I just compared you to the postmodernists and you're excited.

1:25:01 David: Well, the appeal of reading your book

1:25:03 Mark: is very much like the appeal of reading Derrida Actually, there's no that.

1:25:07 David: We are both incantatory magicians.

1:25:10 Mark: And I will say readers who are new to you, I might recommend that they start with Startide Rising or one of the more encapsulated stories that is not quite so expansive because I think that my philosophy, training the building of patience to get through 100 pages, talking about is the chair there made me able to very easily, especially since I was expecting it after reading some reviews. Embrace the fact that in this book Existence, you've got five different, at least, protagonists who, you know, you jump from one to the next to the next. And for a while it's not even clear what the association between them is. A large number of pages spent on a very small amount of action because in the process, you're revealing so much of the environment, you're revealing so much of the new way these people think that it is. It's a book that rewards patience and maturity, I think.

1:25:54 David: Well, I appreciate that. Of course, the simplest book of them all for people to read is they can have the pleasure of comparing it to Kevin Costner's movie the Postman. Ah, but I'm trying to write a sequel to Startide Rising as we speak and I need to get back to work on that that so that I can earn a living because you guys didn't pay me, except in the pleasure of glimpsing very sharp minds. Even though I hardly let you get in a word edgewise. Your questions were really sharp and I'm very appreciative.

1:26:21 Brian: That's all right.

1:26:22 Mark: We can keep talking about these topics week after week after you go away. We're more than happy to have as big a slab of you as we got here.

1:26:30 David: Well, that's Terrific. And Mark, Seth, Brian, Dylan, and all the rest of you out there, there, stay philosophical, but not passive, okay? Because remember, no matter how good you are at this philosophy stuff, the whole objective is to help everybody's children be a lot better than us and to smile and pat us on the head or think indulgently about how smart we were for our primitive times. That means we have to be practical about making a better world.

1:26:58 Mark: Before we drop off, let's just quickly go around and sort of give our closing thoughts. Whatever thing that we wanted to say that we didn't get to say yet. Who wants to start? Seth.

1:27:07 Seth: Thank you, David, for coming on. I can imagine under other circumstances having a slightly different conversation. I don't think it would repeat no, But I appreciate your participation and your insights and your breadth of knowledge. So it was a pleasure to listen to you.

1:27:24 Dylan: Thanks for coming on.

1:27:25 David: Sure thing.

1:27:25 Mark: And thanks, Brian, for coming on. Brian, what do you have still left on your mind? Yeah.

1:27:29 Brian: Well, thanks to the PEL group and David. David, for allowing me to participate. Something new for me. The only thing that I had thought about when reading the book that didn't come up in the course of the conversation is I by coincidence have been reading a book on the French Revolution. And it struck me how the discussion of the sort of different groups in society, the use of estates to describe different groups in existence, was very explicit. That the characters actually refer to, referred to the first estate and the fifth estate and things like that.

And it made me wonder whether there's some group of billionaires out there that actually refer to themselves and their clan in that way or whether they're all just trying to do the best that they can for their own business ventures. And they don't actually think of the different classes explicitly that way. And the same would be true of the people that are in the Protector class. I don't remember which estate that was. There were, I guess, 10 estates described in existence versus the three. From my reading of the French Revolution, the one was referenced French Revolution was referenced several times in existence.

And I hadn't appreciated that quite as much on my first reading. But then on the second reading I noticed it more just because I'd been reading the history. And so that might have been something interesting to the sort of terminology and how much of it was sort of explicit would have been another thing to talk about.

1:28:50 David: Well, I don't think that there's any doubt that we have at least 24 hours worth of topics that we could do. You're interesting guys. And this is what I live for. Maybe another time will come.

1:29:03 Seth: Thank you so much.

1:29:04 Dylan: Thanks.

1:29:04 David: Best of luck to us all.

1:29:06 Mark: Next time we will continue our discussion of David Brin's existence and supplement that by reading an essay called why I Want to Be a Post Human When I Grow up by Nick Bostrom from 2006. The partially examined Life is supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. I'll read the big donors names next time, but I want to thank also to the smaller donors, including those who are newly or are on a continued basis signed up for a $5 a month citizen site and as we said, citizens will have access to, among a lot of other bonus content, the draft of David Brin's philosophical essay about theology.

So you can really hear him full on in his philosophy mode. We also have a Twitter feed you might want to follow us. We've got a Facebook group you might want to join. You can sign up for for near daily email updates from the blog as we post follow up articles. I'm going to for sure post some links to other podcasts and articles that David has been associated with so you can get as much David as you can stand even before you go and buy his awesome books. Which you should definitely do. Good night David.

1:30:07 David: Good night, Good night, Good night and good night.

1:30:12 Mark: All right.

1:30:20 Unknown speaker: A light dry streak on your eyelids A low dull rub in your ears your breath drapes cool your nubid feels ready, ready you put your weight on your shoulders racing your arms on the wall I would be tough your chest if you're ready, ready if it's the last damn thing that you ever do Something's going to get done the lucky ones are those who fight the lucky ones are those who persuade. I can see, I can see that dried up husk a spirit yearning cakes with rust Starts sounding a bad aching void Ankles come back overjoy we gripped with a feeling of nausea and some amazing stunts with a rope your eyes betray what you like to say and weird ass things you hope Making a scene of commotion acting out changes inside Shake the dust from your filthy heart Be ready, ready if it's the last damn thing that you ever do something's gonna get done the next lucky ones are those who fight the lucky ones are those who fight the lucky ones are those who persevere.

1:32:26 David: Sam.