#71: Larry Shapiro: Why Science Needs Philosophy

Episode Transcript
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(00:14):
Hi and welcome to the Fools and Sages podcast.
I'm Boaz and we are very excitedtoday to welcome Larry Shapiro
to the show. Larry is a professor emeritus,
or the Barrett Inch Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the
University of Wisconsin, and he was kind enough to share a

(00:35):
manuscript with us of a book he's working on.
So we got a preview of what Larry's been thinking about.
Before we dive into the meat of that, Larry, I wonder if you
could introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you
are and what you're interested in, and then we'll get started
with the good stuff. Sure.

(00:57):
Let me begin by just thanking the two of you for inviting me
to your podcast. So I am Larry Shapiro.
I'm professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, where I've been since moving from Philadelphia back in
1993, and I specialize in philosophy of mind, philosophy
of psychology, cognitive science.

(01:20):
I also have some interest in philosophy of religion.
But lately I've been thinking about topics concerning bigger
questions, and that's what my book manuscript is focused on.
Great. I, I just want to say I, I,
we're very honored to have you come and talk with us.

(01:41):
We've been thinking about, you know, these similar topics and,
you know, we spoke with your, your fellow Dr. Nadler and and
I, I began with with Doctor Nadler by saying that I felt
that we were really brothers in arms and, and I feel that with

(02:03):
you even maybe more so. That's that's flattering.
We'll get into why. And.
But you know, for example, I, I am somebody who actually is a
welder and a plumber. And I also was trained in

(02:26):
philosophy with three years of Latin and two years of Greek and
French and German and Euclid andyou know, the whole shebang.
Spent hours reading Aquinas and Herodotus and all these things
that I sure, I had wished I was doing other things when I did,
but but to me, unlike to Marco Rubio, these two things are not

(02:49):
polar at all, right? Like, like the in fact, the
argument that I would make is that because I'm also was
trained as a psychotherapist andI'm also a painter and I've done
all these things. I'm a builder, but I would argue
that I've done all of them as a practice of philosophy.

(03:14):
My argument, I said when we first when we first spoke, that
I think that my one string banjosong is is actually an expansion
on yours to say that we all everywhere need philosophy and
we maybe need to drill down on what that really is.

(03:34):
I make the argument that I thinkdovetails into your argument
that the type of philosophy thatwe all need is largely
interpretive. That within the philosophy that
we all do, the specific questionof what we know to be sure in a
scientific way that we can defend, actually only makes up a

(03:59):
small percentage of the things that we need to know and deal
with and strive to interpret andto understand to make our lives
work. So that I see a awash in a sea
of interpretive challenges wherewe have these little islands of
certainty where science or geometry or these I would call

(04:22):
special case scenarios where we can have this kind of certainty.
But most of us, we've got to getfood on the table and we got to
make sure the car works. And we can't wrestle a certain
type of certainty out of all of the things that we have to face.
And so that's why I'm, as I saidbefore, I'm kind of more focused

(04:44):
on hermeneutics and this idea ofinterpreting ontologically, who
are we? What are we?
How are we, you know, happiness,free will, consciousness, those
are all tangled. And then, and then this idea
that that I also like to touch on of embodied cognition, you

(05:06):
sort of points that not only arethose ideas all entangled, but
we in all of our dimensions and the world are also entangled in
a way that requires an interpretive effort.
And, and what I see your work as, I mean, to me, this is
really important stuff because it ties into who we are

(05:30):
collectively, where our culture's going, how we think
about things, how we think aboutthe world as, as with each
other, which is a topic we've rested on, you know, before and
ethics and all that. So that all of that is why I'm
super excited to have you here, because these things to me are
are of a vital interest. And that's my one string banjo

(05:52):
song is that we all need philosophy for everything.
And I think your special case ofmaking that argument around
science, which is this bastion now, I think it's especially
critical. You know, it's it's an important
arrow in that quiver. So, so anyway, that's my
introduction to the general topic of you know what about

(06:15):
philosophy and and so with that,let me let me just invite you to
to let her RIP. Yeah, well, let let me say that
I'm I'm glad you see the importance in the project
because lots of philosophical projects are so abstract that
you you you try to articulate tosomeone why you think they're of

(06:38):
value. And if if, if the person with
whom you're speaking is courteous, they'll stress sort
of nod their head as if they understand the importance of the
project while thinking to themselves, I don't get it.
Or why is this person spending their time on this or I can't
believe in in in my case at the state of Wisconsin is paying

(07:01):
this person to do this kind of stuff.
But but I'm hoping to convince an audience that's more
skeptical than you are about philosophy's importance that
philosophy really matters. And it matters not just for
plumbing questions like is therea God or what is the meaning in

(07:23):
life or how should we be virtuous?
But it matters in everyday affairs.
And this is an especially important point to make against
a number of growing number of scientists who think that
they're the authorities on thesequestions that have
traditionally belonged to philosophers.

(07:47):
Yeah, I, I would, I would completely agree.
You know, I, I, it brings to mind the criticism that I think
David Bentley Hart made in his relatively recent book, All
Things Are Full of Gods, quotingThalis, the ancient Greek
philosopher, maybe the first ancient Greek philosopher,

(08:07):
maybe. And he, he refers to this sort
of Cartesian scientific method as a method that has
metastasized into a metaphysics.And I kind of feel like that's
at the root of of where I feel like science is maybe missed the

(08:28):
forest for the trees in that ourculture has taken such an
imprint on that, that it's shownup on the other side as creating
a world where a lot of people are suffering from a lack of
meaning. See, one of my other hats is, is
a psychotherapist. I was trained as a
psychotherapist and there's plenty of evidence, hardcore

(08:50):
scientific evidence that human beings don't do well when they
are have a meaning deficiency. And given the change in
religion, the change in culturalvalues, the the, the, the hyper
novelty of our times, meaning becomes critical just from a

(09:13):
psychological standpoint and people warding off despair.
And, you know, so that's sort ofmy angle on yeah.
I mean, philosophy right now should be having a heyday.
It it it should really be in a renaissance of here's why.
If you didn't get it up until now, well, now you should start

(09:36):
to smell the coffee. I'm I'm happy to say that the
philosophy major at Wisconsin isa thriving major.
We have more majors now than we've had in a while.
And it sort of reminds me back in the in the 1960s, philosophy

(09:57):
majors were very, very popular too, in response to all all the
shit going on in the world at that time.
So there's there's definitely, Ithink a trend toward recognizing
the value of philosophy when theworld around you seems to be

(10:18):
going in the wrong direction. People start looking for meaning
in other places and they start grasping for ideas that seem to
have real real value, real significance when when the world
around them is is not going wellas as ours today is not.

(10:41):
Larry, I wonder if to Orient us,you could give our listeners a
preview of the argument for why science needs philosophy as a
kind of jumping off point for us.
Yeah, sure. If, if you don't mind, I'd like
to take a step back from that first and just introduce the

(11:03):
motivation for the project that got me working and thinking
about this stuff. The the motivation came from
reading. I, I, I, I read popular presses
like The New Yorker or The New York Times.
And the New York Times especially has a section called
Science Times. And every so often I would see

(11:27):
an article about a scientist whothinks they've solved the
problem that traditionally belong to philosophers.
So we all know that free will isa, is a, is a philosophical
problem. And so it comes as something of
a surprise that some scientists should come along and say we

(11:49):
don't need philosophers to understand whether we have free
will. This is now a problem that
scientists should be grappling with because philosophers have
have failed with their methods to make any headway on this.
And similarly, you see scientists saying that
philosophy is nothing to offer in our, in our hope to

(12:12):
understand what consciousness is.
And, and the same with, with, with happiness and happiness,
consciousness, free will. These, these have all been
problems that philosophers have worked on for millennia in, in
some cases. And so now we have some
scientists saying philosophers have done nothing but waste,

(12:32):
waste their time. I mean, it's, it's very
discouraging when you spend a good part of your life and time
training and philosophy to be told that I've done or we've
done nothing but waste our time.And now it's the scientists turn
to to roll up their sleeves and and provide the answers that

(12:53):
philosophers that have sort of beyond been beyond the
philosopher's ability to comprehend.
So, so it was a project taken upwith the, with the idea that I
was going to try to convince these scientists that they're
wrong about what philosophy has to contribute.

(13:15):
And in fact, they can't make progress themselves without
philosophical assistance. So that was that was the
motivation for the project and what I would I do in talking
about these three particular topics.
I could have talked about other topics, but my my expertise lent
itself more easily to happiness,consciousness, and and free

(13:38):
will. But in each case, I look at the
science that these scientists are offering, which they think
is putting us on the path to answering these questions.
And I show how the science by itself can't answer these
questions. Or to the extent that the
science is making progress on these questions, it's deeply

(14:01):
informed by philosophy, whether they recognize that or not.
This might be an an aside, but the these problems, when they're
quote UN quote answered by science, strike me as adaptive
dilemmas, which is a phrase I recently learned that I love

(14:22):
because these are slippery topics and and and many layered.
One, one thing that struck me inthe, in the manuscript that you
shared is that I don't think yousay this explicitly, but you
kind of have a dual approach where where you're, you're
saying how we ask questions is informed by philosophy and why

(14:46):
we ask the questions that we askis also informed by philosophy.
And I'm curious to get your reaction to that and and maybe
you could say more about those two aspects of how we think
being important. Yeah, good.

(15:10):
The question about how we think about it an issue and invites
the idea that there is a kind ofscientific method that is
employed by scientists and a philosophical method that's
employed by philosophers. And I, I want to push back a

(15:30):
little bit. I mean, I'll get, I, I hope to
sort of get to more refined answer your question in a
minute. But let me start by pushing back
on this idea that there's a scientific method and a
philosophical method. This, this is I, this is kind of

(15:52):
entrenched in our culture that there's such a thing as a
scientific method. I remember when my girls were
coming back from middle school having learned about the
scientific method, and I thought, OK, I'm, I'm not going
to, I'm not going to try to convince this middle school
teacher that there's not a scientific method.

(16:13):
But, but scientists approach problems from an empirical
perspective. That's about as much of A method
as I can find in science. And the reason why I'm, I'm
loathe to, to say anything more specific than that science tends

(16:35):
to be interested in collecting empirical evidence.
Is, is, is because the way an astronomer approaches the
problem is very different from the way an evolutionary
biologist approaches a problem, which differs in in the way that
a chemist does. You can't just take one of these
scientists from their laboratoryand put them in another

(16:55):
laboratory and expect because there's one scientific method,
that they're going to be able tosolve any problem and in any
field. Different fields rely on
different methods. So that's why I'm rejecting the
idea of a scientific method. And similarly, there's not a
particular philosophical method.We can make a generalization,

(17:17):
just like I made a generalization about the
emphasis on empirical data collection among scientists.
But then philosophy, there's an emphasis on conceptual analysis
and and thought experiments, butthat's not true in every
philosophical field either. It's just a kind of tendency or
emphasis. And we might divide science from

(17:39):
philosophy simply by pointing out that they emphasize
different sorts of practices. But often a philosopher will be
doing something that can appear in a scientific journal because
the scientific problem at hand is one that involves a lot of
conceptual analysis. And, and often you'll see

(18:00):
philosophers embracing scientific findings because they
recognize that some philosophical questions benefit
from understanding how the empirical world works.
So there's a great deal of overlap between science and
philosophy, I think when when both are done correctly.

(18:22):
Now in in the book, what I'm interested in doing is seeing
how these scientists approach these questions.
And some, sometimes they approach the questions and at
the same time that they're, they're saying that philosophy

(18:43):
is nothing of value. They don't even recognize that
they're making philosophical assumptions or helping
themselves to philosophical styles of reasoning.
And so it's, it's it's naive or or worse, sometimes disingenuous
for these scientists to say the scientific method alone allows

(19:05):
me to see an answer to this question that it's perplexed,
perplexed philosophers for for centuries because they're
helping themselves to philosophywhen they're making their
groundbreaking discoveries. And sweeping it under the carpet
at the same time typically. Yeah, yeah.
And the, the, the, the, the and.And being dismissive of

(19:28):
philosophy, even even worse. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it seems to me that thatthat a whole worldview sort of
rode in with the scientific method, so-called.
And I, you know, I know Carte Descartes catches a lot of Flack
for that. But you know, the, the the hyper

(19:54):
scientism, we might say has had a reaction that goes back, I
mean, at least to Goethe, right?And the Sturm and Drong movement
and like people have been saying.
Wait a minute, the baby's going out with the bathwater for a
while sort of in reaction to theto the purely empirical

(20:19):
worldview. And it seems like now maybe
science itself is bringing us tothat point.
And you know, for me, one of theways that shows up is, and
again, you know, using this the the H word, which I've sworn
off, but ontological hermeneutics, this idea that we

(20:42):
have a cohesive picture of the whole.
And every time we get a new part, we take that new part, we
hold it up against that coherentpicture.
And so we're always kind of psychologically striving for a
coherence. And there's a fundamental that
that base that we are holding everything up against to

(21:05):
interpret is subjective. It's built on all of our world
experience. And, and the scientific world
view says, oh, that's dirty. Like if it's not objective, it's
got no value in the world of truth.
You know, But you know, 1 philosopher was talking about

(21:28):
one of his coffee mugs and he said, you know, I have two mugs
in my office and one of them is just the one I used to drink
coffee and the other one came from my mother who died
recently. And it has a handle that's been
broken off and reglued so many times you can't count it.
But when I drink out of that coffee mug, it not only brings

(21:52):
to me my relationship with her, but it brings to me an
understanding, a deep understanding of the frailty of
life and the things that persistbeyond the grave because of our
human connections. And we'll see with all of that
is truth and all of that is meaning that has no place in a

(22:15):
purely empirical method. We can't find any of that when
we subject the mug to it. And I, and I would submit that
that that's a kind of a contamination to think that, you
know, I only want to be objective about everything.
Now, I don't want to make myselfstupid with subjectivity, of
course, but the idea that it brings a certain richness to our

(22:40):
potential meaning in our experience of the world.
That's the part that I think it's kind of gone out with the
bathwater somehow. I.
Mean I also want to clarify and,and and and Brian ought to tell
me whether you agree with this. I suspect you do that that I I

(23:01):
hold science in the highest regard and I want to draw a
distinction between science, thediscipline and scientists, the
people who practice this discipline.
Science is is is is great. Science is a source of of truth
and knowledge. It's contributed as much or more

(23:25):
of the world as pretty much any other discipline.
I can, I can, I can think of. But scientists are the people
who practice science. And some of them might be good
philosophers, some of them mightbe bad philosophers.
And we have to be careful when taking scientists to task that

(23:45):
we let them know that the problem isn't with the science,
it's with the way that they're interpreting this science or
applying this science. The interpretation again, the
philosophy. Yeah.
David Bohm, the the Nobel Prize winning physicist who we've
talked about a number of times here because he got into

(24:08):
philosophy later in his life, talked about fragmentation being
the result of how we're taught to think and how we communicate.
And when I, when I see news articles about science, like you

(24:28):
mentioned earlier, Larry, they frequently remind me of that.
Like, like it's really common tosee an article along the lines
of, you know, the, the genome of, of this monkey was just
mapped. And, and that has implications

(24:49):
for obesity therapies. And, and, and, and, and
likewise, I think when we see ads for pharmaceutical products,
we, we, they're, they're presented as a solution to a

(25:10):
very particular problem that comes often with a host of side
effects that imply to me that the system as a whole is not
adequately understood either as a cause of the issue or as the

(25:30):
the cure. So I think this idea of
fragmentation and coherence alsogoes to what I think you're both
touching on, that science is really good at asking the
question how and, and specifically excludes the
question why. And finding a way to ask both of

(25:55):
those questions, I think is often a path out of
fragmentation and towards coherence.
And and maybe is is one of the reasons that science needs
philosophy. Yeah, I like, I like the the
distinction you're drawing between the how and the why.
That's an important, important distinction.

(26:18):
And I also think you're right that scientists are are often
interested in the how question. If you think of the world as
composed of a bunch of differentkinds of mechanisms, you know,
there's a mechanism that makes sure that the, the, the, the,

(26:40):
the, the tides go in and out when they should.
It's a mechanism involving mass and gravity in the distance of
the moon to the Earth. And then there's a mechanism
that explains why it is we get rainfall.
And of course, organisms are just mechanisms, mechanism upon
mechanism. And the how question is a
question about how does a mechanism like such work.

(27:04):
And, you know, you could, you could ask a, a watchmaker,
explain to me how the, the mechanism in the watch works.
And they'll tell you the components and how they
interact. And, but, but that's different
from answering why the mechanismis as it is.
I mean, why do we have a mechanism that moves hands

(27:27):
around the face of a watch? Well, because we want to know
the time. And that's the answer to the why
question. And I, I think, I think a lot of
philosophical questions are, arewhy oriented and, and, and
scientific questions can be how oriented.
But of course, this going back to my, my idea that there's not

(27:50):
a scientific method or, or a philosophical method.
I, I, I think sometimes philosophers also could, could,
could have their sights set on ahow question and sometimes
scientists, especially in the field like evolutionary biology,
could have their, their focus ona, on a why question.

(28:11):
So, so that seems like maybe an entree to a conversation about
free will because I think the the scientific approach to free
will and kind of the the new atheist movement and the
conclusions that people like SamHarris have reached about free

(28:34):
will are essentially the outcomeof that mechanistic worldview.
I think where all of the pieces of our psyche are oriented
already. And therefore any outcome of

(28:54):
those workings is, is, is is determined, right, Because the,
the mechanism is determined. So the outcomes are determined.
Maybe you can elaborate on that,on that case and and maybe you

(29:15):
have some other thoughts about how we might think about free
will. Sure, free will is a a topic
that many scientists think has been resolved once we understand
that the the world operates deterministically.
So let me just spend a minute defining some terms.

(29:38):
So to, to, to say that the worldoperates deterministically is to
say that given the, the, the state of the world at, at one
instant. And by the state of the world, I
mean, you know, we could think of the universe consisting of,
of trillions upon trillions upontrillions of atoms or something

(30:00):
like that. And now freeze time.
All those atoms are in a location at a, at at a time.
And then let's move forward one second and see where those atoms
are at the next second. And the the way the universe is
a second from now is completely determined by the way the world
was a second ago. And it's determined in such a

(30:24):
way that if we knew all the lawsthat describe for us how atoms
behave and we were really, really smart, we could say what
the world would, what the universe would be like a second
from now, 10 minutes from now, abillion years from now.
And so if determinism is correct, from the instant

(30:44):
following The Big Bang, it was inevitable that the three of us
would be having this conversation.
And and so the scientists working on free will thinks,
think, let's, let's grant the truth of determinism, which is
something I'm OK granting, although it's, it's not, it's

(31:05):
not a conceptual truth. Determinism might be false, but
let's grant that determinism is true.
They think that's the, the end of the story that establishes
that we don't have any free will.
But this first notice requires Aphilosophical assumption about
what the nature of free will is.They think free will requires

(31:27):
that determinism be false, but they don't argue this.
And philosophers spend a lot of time trying to figure out
whether determinism is in fact in conflict with free will.
And philosophers have developed conceptions of free will that
make it compatible with determinism.

(31:49):
And so it's, it's just irritating to see these
philosophers dismissing, sorry, these scientists dismissing
philosophers when they haven't even taken the time to read, you
know, a chapter from an introduction book on free will.
I I I can list examples of scientists who who who who are

(32:13):
seem completely ignorant of whatphilosophers have discovered
about the nature of free will and just think, well, it follows
from the truth of determinism that we lack free will.
Can. Can it?
Weeds just a little bit and explain how determinism and free
will can be compatible. I think that might be useful.
Yeah. Compatibilism.

(32:35):
Yeah, yeah. So there's a view known as
compatibilism. It was, it's been around for a
while, but one of my favorite statements of the View came from
the the Scottish philosopher David David Hume back in the
18th century. But it's, it's been updated,
there's been important work on compatibilist conceptions of

(32:57):
free will. Your, your listeners might be
familiar with the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
He's done some, some nice work on, on free will.
But the idea, the the insight behind a compatiblist theory,
free will starts with a distinction between different
kinds of of causes. So the determinist says

(33:18):
everything is caused and that's why we don't have free will.
And the compatiblist says we agree that everything is caused,
but not all causes are the same.And so here's.
Here's an example. Suppose you are walking through
the dark alleys of a city late one night and a mugger comes

(33:43):
confronts you and says I, I, I want all the money in your
wallet and holds a gun to your head.
And you, you give the money to the to the mother.
And contrast that with a case where you're, you're, you're
walking through the same city and come across a homeless,

(34:04):
unhoused family or or child who is begging you for some money.
And you, you willingly open yourwallet and, and and hand over
the same amount of money that you lost to to the mother.
Now in in both cases, you've given money to someone.

(34:24):
In both cases, you've been caused to give money to someone.
In the case of the mugger, amongthe causes that would explain
why you parted with the money was your fear of being shot.
And there was a sense of coercion there.
We can bring out the sense of coercion by thinking about an
answer, how you'd answer a question from a friend.

(34:48):
Why did you give the mugger the money?
Did you want to give the mugger the money?
And I think you would say, no, of course I didn't want to give
them the mugger, the money. It's the last thing I wanted to
do. But but what was, what was I
supposed to do? I had no choice.
I didn't give the money to the mugger of my own free will.
You would say quite compellingly, I think now in

(35:10):
the, in the second case where you, you see a family in need
and feel sympathy for them, you're still caused to give them
money. But now what's causing you to
give the money is your, your feelings of empathy or sympathy,
your compassion and, and these attitudes are what's causing you

(35:32):
to give the money to the, to thefamily.
Now I ask you, well, why did yougive the money to the family?
Did you have to, you'd say, no, I didn't have to.
I I, I could have chosen not to,but I wanted to.
It seemed like the right thing to do, so I did it with my own
free will. So in in the mugger case, you're

(35:54):
you're giving money without freewill in the in the charitable
case, you're giving money of your own free will.
But in both cases, you're givingthe money has been caused by
something. And so determinism remains true,
but because the causes initiating your actions in these

(36:16):
two cases differ. One is 1 is a 'cause we could
describe as compulsion or threat, and the other is a
'cause we can describe as desiring to be compassionate.
We we can see a difference between those actions that are
done of your free will and thosethat are not.

(36:40):
See, and and my suspicion is that all these scientists that
say there is no such thing as free will, I suspect that they
still live their lives as if there was wondering about what
they'd like for dinner and and all that, but.
Yeah, sure. Which is kind of a de facto sort
of, you know, as as practical guys.

(37:01):
But but you know, when I look atthose three, happiness, free
will and consciousness, they seem to me to all be like a
different versions of the mind body problem, which are
different versions of the monismor dualism problem, which has
been like the thing that philosophy has been circling

(37:23):
around for 3000 years, somethinglike that.
So we're not exactly new to thisgame Philosophers.
That's right. I mean, and there's quite a bit
of hubris to think you're going to, you know, I mean, I know lab
coats are snappy and all, but tothink you're going to, you know,
you're going to dance past all that, right?

(37:45):
I mean, wow, there's only two things that could that could
explain that. I will leave them both unsaid.
But you, you, you know, imagine the attitude of science
scientists would have, you know,a scientist working on a really
hard problem like protein folding or, or, or, or the

(38:08):
mysteries of dark matter. And, and you, you approach the
scientist and you say, you know,I have absolutely no scientific
training at all. But here's where I think you
ought to be going with this research.
They, they, they would, they would roll their eyes.
That would be the most kind thing they could do.
You know, I have a fun story about that.

(38:28):
When I was a kid in college, I was riding in a train and I was
sharing the car with this very old professor from a college
back east. And he was behind the the
creating of the, what is it, thedialysis machine.
And he said he was in a room with all these other hotshot

(38:50):
scientists, and they're trying to figure out what membrane to
use to put the blood on one sideand the solution on the other,
to let the action go to work. And while they're discussing
this and they're flummoxed, there's a custodian who's
cleaning up the room and cleaning the blackboards and
emptying the trash paint can andlistening to their conversation.

(39:14):
And he listens to their conversation.
And before he leaves, he tells them, you know, maybe you ought
to try wax paper. And then he leaves.
And, you know, the, the aha, theEureka moment.
And of course, what do they use is some very special, very
expensive, no doubt type of wax paper, which kind of shows

(39:36):
there's in, in the, the Greek traditions we talk about, about
sapientia, you know, or knowledge or what's the word?
Well, Sophia wisdom. But then there's this other type
called phronesis, which is kind of like knowing what to do

(39:58):
right, that has that pragmatic sort of thing sewn in there.
Which is why I also, you know, Imake the argument that we're all
doing philosophy all the time 'cause we're all interpreting
things to try to get the best results.
And that's kind of how we pragmatically define wisdom.
If it's getting me to dinner andI'm liking the dinner, then my

(40:20):
plan paid out and so. My argument is that getting
wiser in any way will get you more of what you want, just kind
of by definition of the situation.
So philosophy can't help but help us do everything that's a.
Aristotelian view, yeah. And that and that.
Originally everything was philosophy, natural philosophy

(40:44):
or yeah, yeah. So can you talk about the mind
body problem is as it relates toconsciousness, free will and
happiness, because they all seemto to.
Am I mistaken in the similarity of that?
The mind body problem is probably most related to the

(41:06):
issue of of consciousness, but certainly because happiness and
and free will are both both minddependent in a sense there they
do also connect to the mind bodyproblem.
So, so the mind body problem wasmost famously developed by

(41:30):
Descartes, which isn't to say that he was the first to make
the distinction that creates theproblem, but but Descartes
insisted that there are two different kinds of substances in
the universe. There's mental substance and
there's physical substance. And physical substance is

(41:51):
characterized by familiar properties like mass and volume.
And so every physical object is extended.
It takes up space. It's in a location.
It, there's a time which it did not exist and the time at which
it will no longer exist. And, and those are the sort of

(42:13):
essential features of, of, of mass or physical objects.
And, and then Descartes thought that minds lack those
characteristics, thought that itmakes no sense to talk about
minds having a mass or, or, or taking up space.
And so he thought of minds as sort of substances that are

(42:38):
defined negatively in the sense that they they lack those
properties that make something aphysical object.
And so he he drew a sharp boundary between minds or what
he would call souls and, and, and bodies which are physical.
Now we get to the problem. The problem was forcefully

(42:59):
raised by the correspondent of Descartes, the Princess
Elizabeth of, of, of Bohemia, and she was corresponding with
Descartes and she said, you know, I, I have difficulty
understanding how if minds are as you as you describe them and
bodies are as you describe them,how the the two could ever

(43:20):
interact. And it's obvious or should be
obvious that minds and bodies dointeract.
We can test this easily ourselves.
We can think the thought let my arm rise and your arm will rise.
So there's your arm, which is a physical object with mass and
volume, and it's being caused todo something by by your mind.

(43:43):
And likewise, you could wrap your knuckles sharply against a
desktop and that physical actionwill cause some mental activity,
namely you'll feel pain in your knuckles.
OK, so it's it's obvious that minds and bodies interact.
And what Princess Elizabeth was curious about was how something

(44:04):
with physical properties can interact with something that
lacks physical properties. We tend to think of
interactions, causal interactions, as involving
something like the transfer of energy or, or, or something like
that. So the classic model of 1
billiard ball hitting another billiard ball.
Why does the first ball cause the second to move?
Well, because the first ball hasa certain mass and a velocity

(44:27):
and it's transferring energy to the second ball causing it to
move. But but but now here I am
thinking a thought. Let my arm rise which is causing
not nervous activity and muscular activity.
How does something that doesn't have any mass or volume get
something with mass and volume to behave?

(44:49):
Or in the other case, how can perturbations on on my skeleton
and muscles and nerves cause in me mental states like feelings
of pain? And so Elizabeth raised this
problem and and Descartes basically brushed it off.
He he had no good answer. And since then this difficulty

(45:12):
in understanding how minds and bodies could interact given
their apparent differences has been known as the the mind body
problem. And this is especially acute in
the discussion of consciousness because we think of
consciousness as something some subjective feelings or

(45:35):
experiences. So feelings of pain, feelings of
happiness, sensations of blue when we look at the sky, these
are all sorts of conscious phenomena.
They belong in the mind, if theybelong anywhere.
But we also think that the brainis somehow important for the
possession of these conscious experiences.

(45:56):
But how does the brain this physical object, which is
basically a big battery transmitting electrical impulses
from 1 cell to another cell, howdoes the brain get the mind to
have these experiences? And so philosophers and
scientists who work on consciousness are confronted

(46:18):
with this challenge of explaining how something
physical, the brain, can producesomething that seems non
physical, conscious experiences.And, and we've juxtaposed those
as the bottom uppers and the topDowners, OK, right.
That some people are saying we're coming from the bottom,

(46:42):
we're taking all these pieces and we're building them up.
And then somehow consciousness is going to come out of this
either as an epiphenomenon or through some mechanism.
And then you have the others dating back to Platinus maybe
saying that this is actually coming down as an emanation of

(47:04):
mind. And then the question would be,
how does mind make a brain so that it can do the things that
it needs a brain to do? Yeah.
And and it sounds like now there's even 1/3 option that
says, well, you just can't thinkabout it like that.
Does that. Is that fair to say?

(47:24):
Yeah. I, I, I, I, I think you can't
think about it like that. Apparently thinking about minds
and bodies as different kinds ofsubstances leads to this problem
that can't be solved. So we have to start thinking
about it in new ways. And, and the new ways are not
going to be discovered by just collecting more evidence about

(47:48):
how brains work, which is what scientists do.
And this is a place where philosophers are essential to
making progress because they're going to think about the
concepts involved in, in, in, in, in mental states like
consciousness and, and physical goings on like in the brain.
And they're going to try to understand how these two things

(48:10):
can can actually be related, caninfluence each other.
And, and I think that this is actually one of the places where
some of the interior sciences might be able to shed light.
Like for example, your description of of a sort of the

(48:31):
modern compatibilist view is actually very, to my way of
thinking, very harmonious with alot of the traditions of
Buddhism. That there's free will with
conditions and that their idea of dependent originations is
exactly that idea that everything is contingent upon

(48:53):
something else. And but that doesn't mean that
within that we don't have free will, but but we have karma.
And so we're, you know, but still.
And this is where where I think interior experience might
enlighten the conversation, but I don't know that science is

(49:15):
ready to go quite there just yet.
You know, like for example, I think shamanism has some things
to to enlighten us about that. I think some religious practices
have some things to enlighten usabout that.
And psychology and psychology, very much an internal practice.
We were talking in our last episode about how another,

(49:41):
another way of saying we get attached to something is, is
saying that we turned it into a symbol and made meaning out of
it. And well, that's absolutely on
the border of the religious and shamanic worlds.
But it's very much a just a psychological statement.

(50:01):
And and Larry, I know you're a, a, a philosopher of psychology,
among other things. I'm curious what you think about
the maybe the interrelationship between psychology and
philosophy or, or yeah, I mean also the the great chain of

(50:23):
being, you know, do you start atthe bottom or at the top or both
in, in how you think about things, including free will,
happiness and consciousness. And does embodied cognition
shine some lights on? That would be mine.
OK, this is broad range of questions here.
Let let me start with maybe a brief description about what I

(50:47):
see my role as a philosopher of psychology.
So there's there's a broader branch of philosophy of which
psychology, philosophy of psychology is a, is a species.
The broader branch is, is philosophy of science.
And it used to be about 100 years ago, philosophy of science

(51:08):
was enamored with physics, and it was as if physics were the
only science that had enough integrity for philosophers to
spend their time thinking about.And this sort of physics
adoration prompted or or coincided with a philosophical

(51:32):
movement known as logical positivism or logical
empiricism. And the logical positivists,
logical empiricists, had a very hard nosed scientific view of
the world. They thought questions were of
no value unless they could be sort of solved empirically.

(51:53):
And so here were philosophers who were antithetical to the way
that I see philosophy working today.
These are philosophers who wouldhave been happy with the
scientists that I'm wrestling with, who think that they can
solve all these problems. These are philosophers who would
dismiss a problem as as nonsensical if it didn't have a

(52:14):
kind of, if it wasn't empirically tractable in some
sort of way. But, but philosophy of sciences
has moved on from from that mar austere conception of what
philosophy should should be doing.
And we now find philosophers working on individual sciences.
So I have a colleague who's a philosopher of biology, I have a

(52:34):
colleague who's a philosopher ofeconomics.
I know philosophers of, of chemistry and I'm a philosopher
of psychology. And what that means is that I
spend a lot of time reading psychology, meeting with
psychologists and psychology departments, going to psychology

(52:55):
lectures. And the sort of psychology I
have in mind here is, is not, it's not clinical psychology.
We're not interested in therapy or patient treatment, but it's,
it's cognitive psychology which is concerned with how, how to
understand what makes a perception possible or language

(53:17):
possible or attention possible. So we think of cognitive
scientists think of of psychology as consisting of
various faculties like attention, perception, memory,
and psychologists develop theories about these things.
And it's the philosopher of psychologists job to, to look at

(53:39):
these theories and to put them into a bigger context, sometimes
to, to point out conceptual confusions, to think about
whether that the data psychologists collect actually
support the hypotheses that theymake.
So it's a very interactive, interdisciplinary field.

(54:00):
A philosopher of science today has to know a fair bit of
science as well as having trained in the, in the, in the
practice of, of philosophy. So I'm a, I'm a philosopher of
psychology. What I do is read and think
about psychology and try to address questions that arise

(54:21):
from the theories that psychologists are offering.
Embodied, embodied cognition is a particular approach to
understanding the sorts of questions that I was just just
listing. And it's it departs from the
conception of cognitive psychology that has been sort of

(54:44):
raining for the past 50, maybe even 75 years, depending on how
you think about the origin. And according to this
conception, brains are like computers and cognitive
processes are basically computational processes.
So how does memory work? How does attention work?

(55:06):
Is the question? Like how does that word
processor work? And to answer the question, how
does that word processor work, you have to think about the
algorithm involved and think about the sorts of
representations and symbols involved in the algorithmic
processes that produce word processing.
And so many cognitive psychologist for for a long time

(55:28):
now, Noam Chomsky included, if you're familiar with with Noam
Chomsky thought that the way to to understand how attention or
perception works is to discover the algorithm by which the brain
does the computations that creates its output perceptions

(55:49):
or linguistic utterances. And body cognition rejects this
computational picture. Not it's let me let me let me
just caution that embodied cognition is a fairly new field.
And it's harder to articulate founding principles in the way

(56:14):
that you could for the computational approach that I
just described. But but there's a tendency among
embody cognition theorists to the reject the idea that that
minds are algorithmic or mental mental capacities are, are
algorithmic in nature. And, and the thought is that my
brains do a lot less than peoplethought they did, because brains

(56:40):
are just a part of the body and they work in conjunction with
the body. And so if you want to look at
how mental processing occurs, wehave to think of interactions
between the brain, the body and the environment.
And the the the interactions themselves are are what produce
psychological capacities rather than running algorithmic

(57:03):
programs on a brain. That's the tangle that I was
referring to. I see.
That, that we have this idea that we're separate somehow, but
we're all tangled up with everything, you know, and I was
trained as a, as a, a psychotherapist in the Wilhelm

(57:25):
Reich tradition, you know, he was a body psychotherapist.
And so he, you know, they're very tuned into the fact that
forms of cognition are happeningthrough all your body segments
is the way that they refer to it.
And to me, you know, because I was also trained in in East

(57:45):
Asian martial arts and particularly the internal arts
traditions, Tai Chi Chuan shingyBagua, going back to the Nate of
the Huang de Naging, the the internal the the Yellow
Emperor's internal classic. They propose a solution to the
mind body problem. And their solution is chi is

(58:10):
that third component, which I'veseen translated as a type of bio
sentience. But Wilhelm Reich sort of
reintroduce that idea with his concept of Oregon.
Now he had a million other problems, but in the process of,
of learning how to do Reichian therapy and having it done on

(58:31):
you, you become aware of the fact that energy moves different
ways in your body in different ways.
So for example, one of the firstthings they did to me was a
certain breathing and then they pressed on my on my muscles
right underneath my eyes. And in less than 5 minutes, I

(58:52):
flashback to being a very littlekid and something wants to make
me cry. Something's making me want to
cry. But big boys don't cry.
And my jaw starts vibrating in away that it literally had not
vibrated since I was that age asa toddler, fighting back the

(59:12):
urge to cry. And so their argument is that
this type of meaning, this was acognitive experience as a child
that was formative, that somehowis embodied because that got
released. And so then they go through the,
the all these different energetic levels till the idea

(59:33):
till you know, and this get is where right got in trouble
because he wrote the book the function of the orgasm and the
orgasm has to do with this energetic movement up and down
the circuits and yada, yada, yada.
But what happens as a therapist is you're working on a person,
you start perceiving what's going on with them through your

(59:55):
own body segments. And So what I'm, what I'm
pointing to is that cognition certainly isn't brain focused.
I mean, or maybe there's a focusthere, but it's certainly not
exclusive. And you know, as a Tai chi
person, as a martial artist person, my brain, at the highest
level, my brain is just saying what?

(01:00:18):
And my body is actually reactingand moving and recognizing
places and doing all of this stuff in a way that if I think
about it cognitively, I'll only bugger it up.
You know, it's a body based thing.
When I was a kid, I worked in a bakery and I was a benchman and
they just throw lumps of dough at you and, and which it's quite

(01:00:41):
an interesting training because your left hand catches 1 and it
starts to knead it into a ball and then your right hand catches
1. And when you start to do this,
your cognitive, your brain attention goes to 1st your left
hand and then to your right handand there.
And you're really slow at it. But when you get experienced,
your attention goes off somewhere else and you just let

(01:01:03):
your hands do the thing. And there is a type of
interaction with the environmentthat is purely body based.
It's purely body intelligence, bio sentient somehow that's not
really mentalized cognition, youknow.
And so that's another way I think that we're tangled up.

(01:01:25):
We want to say it's all brain and but it's really tangled up.
Go ahead. But what?
I was wondering if if it makes sense to take that back into the
free will conversation. And Larry, you described

(01:01:47):
different types of causes, but Isuspect that there are a lot
more varieties of how we might think about something like free
will that expand on the options like different, different types
of causes is, you know, it's probably the tip of the iceberg

(01:02:08):
of compatibilism. But compatibilism isn't the only
response to the free will question either, is it?
No, it's not. There are other responses as
well. I I find compatibilism the most
coherent response, but there areother responses.
There's something called libertarianism which has nothing

(01:02:32):
to do with that repugnant political movement.
But the libertarian thinks that determinism somehow leaves out

(01:02:54):
of its grasp minds. And so according to the
libertarian, there are causal chains that can start from the
mind itself, as if the mind werea kind of prime mover.
And so determinism is true of physical world, but there are

(01:03:18):
special kinds of effects that can be produced just by mental
activity, which is itself somehow not caught in the causal
web of events outside the outside the mind.
So this is a view that I, I, I, I I don't have much appreciation

(01:03:41):
for. I guess because I don't
understand how something can create causes itself without
being caused. It's it's this unmoved mover
idea that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Got it. That's an interesting one.

(01:04:02):
We could probably kick that around some too.
I mean, the, the, you know, I, Ithink maybe the, the prime mover
question also exists at the beginning of determinism also
like how did all this determinism come about?

(01:04:24):
Right. So I think one one way I've
heard that at least superficially reconciled is that
both individual mind and universal mind have this prime
mover quality or are in interrelationship with one

(01:04:46):
another, whether individual minds or fragments of universal
mind or or or whatever. Those are definitely not
scientific questions. Yes, that's true.
That sounds like analytic idealism, actually.
Yeah. So, so should we, should we talk

(01:05:07):
a little bit about consciousnessthen?
And we talked about the mind body problem as like one element
of why science alone might have a hard time explaining what
consciousness is and how it comes about.
And I think there's more there. Sure.

(01:05:30):
The hard problem maybe? Yeah, let's talk about that.
So the the hard problem is a is a label that the contemporary
philosopher David Chalmers gave to it's it's a problem that's
very similar to what I've been calling the mind body problem.

(01:05:53):
What what Chalmers was was wondering was how does the the
brain produce or produces actually loaded because that
makes it sound like it's causing.
But what what does the brain do in virtue of which we could put
it that way, in virtue of which we have conscious experiences.

(01:06:16):
And he calls this the hard problem because he thinks that
there are many problems in psychology that are not hard,
which isn't really to say that they're easy, but they're not
hard in that way. So, for instance, we might want
to know what the function of sleep is.
Why do people spend a third of their lives on conscious or

(01:06:36):
asleep? And there are scientists working
hard to understand what the function of sleep is.
And we don't yet have a definitesolution to this question.
But it doesn't seem like there'sany sort of conceptual
impossibility to answering this question about the function of

(01:06:58):
sleep. It looks like more research of
the same kind that's been going on for the last couple decades
will eventually lead us to a clearer idea about why sleep is
important. But the hard problem doesn't
seem like more research of the kind we've been doing the last
couple decades is going to shed light on how it is that brains

(01:07:21):
doing what they do result in conscious experiences.
And this is because, as I was describing Descartes distinction
between mind and body, because conscious experiences seem so
unlike the sorts of physical things that we know about in the
world. They seem so unlike it because

(01:07:43):
they're purely subjective experiences.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who is still regarded as an
important figure in the theory and the literature on
consciousness as a result of a paper he wrote back in the 1970s
called What is it like to be a bat?

(01:08:04):
Thomas Nagel pointed out that there's this subjective feature
of conscious experience that seems to make it immune to
scientific investigation. And he thought this and, and,
and he, he worked out this idea by asking people to imagine what

(01:08:24):
it's like to be a bat. And he chose bats because bats
are very different from from human beings.
Bats navigate through the world using little blasts of, of
sound, which reflects off objects and, and returns the
bats ears. And using these sonar blasts,
bats are able to navigate through the world with every bit

(01:08:47):
as much precision as we are using our eyes.
So now what? What is it like to be a bat?
Nagel thought we can study bat Physiology all we want, get the
best brains working on bat brains that that we can get, and
we'd still never have an idea ofwhat it would be like to be a

(01:09:11):
bat. And that's because experience is
completely subjective. Scientific methods tend to be
objective. That is, they're inter
subjective. When when a scientist is
interested in measuring the the the temperature of a of a sample

(01:09:31):
of liquid, they can stick a thermometer in the sample of
liquid. They could see what the
thermometer says. All the other scientists in the
room can look at that thermometer and see what it
says, and they can all agree thethermometer says this.
But when I look into a bat's brain, all I see is its brain.
I don't see what it's like to bea bat.

(01:09:53):
And so these subjective experiences that are the
hallmark of conscious experiences seem outside the
outside scientific bounds. There's no inter subjective way
to access the conscious experiences of of bats.
So it seems like there's something really hard about

(01:10:15):
studying conscious experiences and something really difficult
about understanding what brains do that bring about these sorts
of experiences. Another way to think about this
is to to point out what are sometimes called the neural
correlates of consciousness. So you might put a subject and

(01:10:36):
some kind of brain scanning machine and fMRI and you might
notice where blood activity is highest when when the subjects
are experiencing an itch or, or looking at a patch of red.
And so you say, aha, that part of the brain is making red
experiences, that part of the brain is making itch
experiences. But now if we look at those

(01:10:59):
parts of the brains, it's hard. It's it makes no sense or we're
unable to say why brain activitylike this kind results in an
itch and brain activity of that kind results in an experience of
red. Why isn't it the other way
around? If in fact it is, it does result

(01:11:19):
from it, and it isn't just a correlate to 1/3 from a third
thing that we don't have a machine to measure.
It could be a common cause that it that that results in the
correlation of this brain activity in this experience.
So that's the hard problem. It seems like consciousness is
not like anything else that scientists study because of its

(01:11:40):
intrinsic subjectivity. And then the question
philosophers start start tossingaround is, well, what is it
about consciousness that makes it so unique?
What might shed light on its nature?
And some of them work with scientists trying to develop

(01:12:01):
various answers. But for the most part,
scientists listen to philosophers raising these
problems. And they say, you know, these
are good questions, but we're not really going to care about
them. And so one way that philosophy
contributes to science now is topresent the kind of challenge

(01:12:21):
the the philosopher who who is characterizing these hard
problems, describing these hard problems, is within his or her
rights to say, here's a questionthat if never answered, will
prevent us from having a a good theory of consciousness.

(01:12:41):
So they throw the gauntlet down.They say to the scientists, I've
just described a hard problem. I want to know why this area of
the brain results in an itch andnot a sensation of red.
Unless you can answer that question for me, you don't have
a complete theory of consciousness.
And scientists haven't answered that question.
They've no idea how to answer that question.

(01:13:02):
If we look at the history of science, one could make the
argument that that if they haven't come to back to
philosophy, they're not quite stuck enough yet.
Yes. That that's right, They they
haven't thought it through. Right.
And the right questions will help them feel the degree of
their stuckness. That's right.

(01:13:23):
Right. Yeah.
And see, and I and I feel like there's a, a surrogate argument
that goes along with this that maybe first started to show up
post World War 2, which is look at the world that you're
building and are there assumptions that are coming out

(01:13:43):
of this, this Veltenshaweng, your world perspective that's
tied up in these scientific assumptions?
It's actually generating some ofthe things that are not so
positive. I mean, do you think that's a
leap or do you see a, do you seea trail?
There, I see a trail. I think you're you're on the

(01:14:04):
right path, yeah. OK.
And do you think that maybe today's hyper novelty is
emphasizing or bring amplifying all of that?
It's like we're not going to go away, we're just going to dial
up our volume. Probably.
Probably. Yeah, yeah.

(01:14:25):
Were you thinking of something, Bo, that you wanted to?
I, I wanted to, to hear more about what it looks like for a
philosopher of science to introduce the, the questions
that might move the boat in the water and, and you know, you all

(01:14:46):
sit around a, a boardroom table and with a whiteboard and try to
figure out which questions. Going to fix their wagon
advancements. Well, some of the questions have
been around forever. Well, for as long as

(01:15:08):
philosophers have been thinking.And if Brian's right, then
people have been doing philosophy forever, so they've
been around for a long time. So we can draw on the history of
philosophy to look at certain to, to understand certain
questions and understand certainanswers.
And we know from successes and failures in the history of

(01:15:31):
philosophy that some answers are, are, are going to be better
than others. So, so here's here's a bad
answer to the the mind body problem.
This was the answer that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz gave
in the 17th century. Leibnitz thought there was a a
pre established harmony between the physical realm and the

(01:15:52):
mental realm. So Leibniz embraced Descartes
distinction between minds and bodies.
And then we have to question, why is it when I form the desire
to to raise my arm, my, my arm rises?
And why is it when I wrap my knuckles on the on the desktop,
I feel pain in my knuckles? And Leibniz's answer was, well

(01:16:13):
there's no real interaction between minds and bodies there,
but but God is perfect and God pre established things so that
at the instant you form the desire to raise your arm, your
arm would rise and at the instant you wrapped your
knuckles on the table, you'd feel pain.
So on Leibniz's view, it's as ifyou know if you, if you, if, if,

(01:16:38):
if you're watching TV, sometimesthe, the, the, the sound and the
video go out of synchronization and, and so you see the lips
moving and then the voice comes out or, or or vice versa.
So you can imagine if, if God weren't perfect, there might be
some slippage sometimes and you might feel pain in your knuckles
and then find yourselves wrapping the desk or you might
feel your arm rising and then form the desire to raise your

(01:16:59):
arm. But.
As we get all. You don't have that worry
because God's perfect. Yeah, or we might see the same
black cat twice. Yeah.
Right, right. Glitch in the Matrix is where I
thought you were going. Yeah.
But but anyway, to get back to your question.
So one thing philosophers do is they they have a long tradition,
a long heritage of people thinking about these problems.

(01:17:22):
And they can avail themselves inof this and dismiss sort of
almost out of hand, certain scientific answers because they
resemble bad philosophical answers from the past.
And we already know what's wrongwith these answers.
And philosophers also can interact with scientists.

(01:17:43):
This is what I've done and this is what many of the philosophers
I discussed in my manuscript do.They interact with philosophers
and they learn from interact with scientists and they learn
from scientists what they're doing and how they're doing it.
And because these philosophers are are typically good thinkers,
they can offer insightful criticisms or raise questions

(01:18:10):
like the hard problem raises that pushes the scientist to
think about their work and from a new orientation.
As as somebody that that's fascinated about how to help
organizations be more high performing, if you will, I'm,
I'm very curious about what the organizational structure looks

(01:18:33):
like that brings scientists and philosophers together in this
way to collaborate. And I imagine there's all of the
same kind of silo busting necessity that there would be
between sales and OPS in a typical manufacturing company.

(01:18:54):
So there are conferences now that promote scientific and
philosophical interaction. There's a conference that's been
running since the late 90s that brings scientists and
philosophers interested in consciousness together.
And this is forged some interdisciplinary

(01:19:18):
correspondences, some some some bonds.
Dave Chalmers has been a big figure in, in, in this
scientists like Julio Tanoni, who is a colleague of mine here
at UW, who who's a scientist interested in, in, in
consciousness. He's also a figure who.

(01:19:40):
He typically he. He often brings philosophers
into his lab to speak. So there are scientists who who
have more patient, tolerant ears, are willing to listen to
to philosophers. It's not always clear to me that
they're they're doing more than paying lip service to their
interest in philosophy, but someof them are.

(01:20:04):
There are opportunities that universities create to encourage
interaction between scientists and philosophers, scientists and
philosophers. So there are sometimes
certificate programs that. Develop courses of study in
which students are required to take courses in both philosophy

(01:20:30):
and in particular science. So there are there are these
strategies that I I think have become more prominent in the
last couple decades and are are are good.
I think I think they're they're they're actually cultivating the
the kinds of interdisciplinary research that solution of these

(01:20:53):
big questions are are are going to require.
So in a related 30,000 foot question, looking at the history
of philosophy, I kind of feel like philosophy and science as a
subcategory of philosophy and the idea of figuring everything
out. It's sort of is like a like a

(01:21:14):
litmus for the progress of the human culture and understanding
through history. And I'm wondering to you from
your seat, do you see anything like a phenomenology of spirit
going on here in the Hegelian sense?
Is there a story? Is there progress?
Are we going somewhere? Are we just going around in

(01:21:37):
circles? Do you think we're in a
particular chapter where certainrevelations or realizations will
be particularly relevant? Anything around that?
Like what's going to happen? The spoiler alert, folks, if you
want to, if you want to wait andsee, you'll want to tune out
now. But, you know, like that.

(01:21:57):
Well, right. So, so, so some, some people
think that we're just moving in circles and we're chasing our
own tails. But I, but I actually am, I
think I'm more optimistic than that.
I, I think science continues to make important discoveries and
philosophers it's, it's harder to measure progress in

(01:22:21):
philosophy than it is in, in, inscience.
But but philosophers continue toproduce interesting theories and
ideas. And I, I see no reason why we
can't make genuine progress on these big questions that I'm
interested in, in, in discussingin the, in the manuscript.

(01:22:43):
I think no, we're coming much closer to a richer understanding
of what happiness is Say then, then, then we we've had in a
long time. And I think the science of
consciousness has now advanced to the extent that philosophers
can begin to look at this science and understand how how

(01:23:07):
to how to approach the the hard problem and in ways different
from ways they might have thought about a decade or two
ago. Are there cultural dimensions to
that thought? Like when you just look out the
window at the world around you and you say, Oh my God, what's

(01:23:28):
going on? Is there a philosophical story
running through history that youcan textualize that with?
That's a hard question and I think I'd have to think about
that harder. I'm not prepared to just throw
an answer out there, I think. OK, we'll have you back.
OK. Or that might be another book.

(01:23:51):
Yeah, it might be another. Book Should we not just conclude
that happiness is an outcome of gut Biome health?
Well, I'm sure some people wouldbe happy with that answer, but
but. Depends on their gut Biome.
Yeah, it also depends on what you mean by happiness.
It's just why he fosters around.Say more Get.

(01:24:13):
Get old enough and a good poop is happiness.
So. So scientists have been studying
happiness for a while now. They're interested in, say, what
we can do to increase happiness.So the government is also

(01:24:36):
interested in questions like this.
There are these happiness surveys that that always show
the Scandinavian countries to bethe happiest in the world.
And so, so we can ask the question, well, what what makes
Scandinavian so happy? What policies are actually
promoting their happiness that less happy countries lack?

(01:24:57):
Then we can ask particular questions like what effect does
income or money have on happiness?
What what effect does unemployment have unhappiness?
What effect does a divorce have on unhappiness?
So So scientists are interested in all these questions and
answering these questions have obvious importance for policy
decisions. So if if we find out that

(01:25:23):
education leads to a happier life, then we're going to we're
going to want to make sure that our populace gets as much
education as as possible. If we if we find out that that
unemployment is the source of depression, then we want to do
our best job to make sure that unemployment remains low.
OK, so scientists with practicalinterests are interested in

(01:25:44):
studying the dimensions of happiness and and correlations
of different factors with happiness.
But none of this makes any sensebefore you have an idea of what
happiness is, and you find much less discussion among scientists
about what happiness is, and youdo about what causes happiness,
what's correlated with happiness.

(01:26:05):
And so philosophers have offeredcriticisms of different
assumptions about happiness thatthat scientists have adopted.
And they've offered theories about what happiness is, that if
scientists took the time to listen, they could develop the
kinds of tests for measuring happiness that might lead to

(01:26:27):
more beneficial outcomes. When I, when I read this part of
the manuscript, I guess I ran into a challenge that I have
with the, I guess some of the ways in which we're, we're
thinking of philosophy and forming science are similar to

(01:26:51):
what I've heard about acupuncture being used in
medicine, where it's kind of like, we don't really understand
it, but it seems like if you stick needles in these places,
it kind of helps with pain management and it's kind of
tossing the whole system out. So, and, and just kind of

(01:27:14):
fragmenting, right. Instead of taking a, taking the,
the holistic system, imperfect though it may be, and figuring
out how to apply it or integrateit.
And, and when we talk about happiness, and I remember, I
don't remember exactly what it was, but you talked about John
Heights definition of happiness.And I have a ton of respect for

(01:27:36):
for Height and and the work he'sdoing.
Talk about height. Maybe you're pronouncing it
height, Jonathan Hate. Yeah, no, I talked about Hebron.
OK, well, maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe I read
somebody else's manuscript. Of course, maybe I don't
remember what I wrote. But but, but without, without

(01:27:59):
that example still, we talked toSteve Nadler about Spinoza's
idea that man's attempt to achieve happiness or live a good
life is wrapped up in fulfillinghis true nature.

(01:28:22):
And I wonder if any definition short of that kind of gravity,
it doesn't have to be that definition, but but when it,
when it's more like can, can be reduced to something measurable

(01:28:44):
or something that can be empirically wrangled with that,
we lose its meaning. And I worry about and, and
actually, you know, in consciousness and, and free
will, I also have the same concerns.
What do you think about that? There are conceptions of

(01:29:07):
happiness that I agree with you would be difficult to design
measurements for, but we have towonder whether those are the
right conceptions of happiness to begin with.
So. So it sounds like Spinoza.
I don't. I don't know much about Spinoza,
but it sounds like Spinoza's conception of happiness isn't

(01:29:29):
that different from Aristotle's,who thought that happiness
requires living to your human potential.
This was an idea you also see remnants of in in John Stuart
Mills talk about happiness. So, So Mill thought that the

(01:29:49):
happiness you received from reading poetry or doing
mathematics is of a much higher grade than the happiness you
received from eating a, a bar ofbar of chocolate, say, or, or,
you know, So Mill said better a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied. But I'm not sure that's the

(01:30:14):
right definition of happiness. So there are many competing
ideas about what happiness is. And philosophers rely on this
idea that John Rawls, the great political philosopher, put a
label on called reflective equilibrium in order to develop

(01:30:36):
a definition of of happiness. And the idea behind reflective
equilibrium is that we might start with some intuitions
about, say, what happiness is, and then we might build a theory
about what we think happiness is.
And then we're going to test ourtheory against our intuitions,

(01:30:57):
and we're going to try to resolve clashes between what the
theory tells us happiness is andwhat the intuitions tell us
about happiness. And the idea is that we have
these reflective intuitions, intuitions that we we we derive
by deep reflection on something.And we're constantly changing

(01:31:20):
our intuitions or changing our theories so that the the 2
become compatible. And I think what this method
allows us to see is that something like the idea of
living to 1's human potential might not be the best
characterization of happiness, because we can imagine someone

(01:31:40):
living to their best potential but still horribly depressed.
And if that's so, it doesn't seem reasonable to say that the
person is happy. See, and I was interested, Boaz,
in what? In what you were saying about
maybe the larger implication of the difference between finding a
place for philosophy within science rather than philosophy

(01:32:05):
being something that's actually lived, that your science becomes
one of the petals of the unfolding flower of your
philosophy. The who's in who's movie
question. Because I I believe that the
only movie there really is is philosophy either well done or

(01:32:26):
or not done at all, which is still an answer to the question.
You know, even if you don't answer it, that's an answer.
And science is maybe one of the chapters within that.
But to me, the idea that philosophy needs to serve
science is is bass ackwards. Science should be serving
philosophy. If our knowledge doesn't serve

(01:32:48):
our wisdom, then we're just going to become really well
informed idiots. So you know, so that's that's
what I thought was part of the implication of of what you were
saying boys. And I'm interested in your idea
about that because I mean, I, I could see working in and say,
well, you really need, you really need philosophy as just

(01:33:11):
the preamble to, you know, I'd like to know how many of these
scientists, I want to know how happy they are before I wanted
to know about their research on happiness.
You know, and this is coming from, you know, one of the
things we didn't mention is we both worked with South American

(01:33:33):
shaman that were Iowa scarrows, which is like understanding
consciousness through a very specific method of consciousness
and the questions of am I happy or not?
Am I able to exert my will or not?
These are things that are kind of answered from a whole inside
question. But that's why trying to

(01:33:55):
understand like how a human is organized, you live your
philosophy whether you know it or not.
And so, you know your science isgoing to be informed by your
philosophy. The odds are just that it's been
unconscious and you haven't really given due diligence to
the whole thing. And I think that's kind of your
argument a little bit. Yeah, I'd, I'd be a bit reticent

(01:34:22):
about some of the things you said.
I think so. I don't think philosophy is
everything. I think it makes sense to draw
disciplinary boundaries. Sometimes when I'm doing
mathematics, I'm not doing philosophy.

(01:34:44):
Some mathematics, some mathematicians wonder about
whether, say, numbers are real things and what that means.
And here are philosophers have lots to say because they
understand do metaphysical issues around around questions
like that. But if I'm just, you know, doing
mathematics or or or or or studying organic compounds, it's

(01:35:12):
not clear that philosophy plays much of A role at all.
See, I would argue that philosophy was the was the
premise that caused you to ask the question based on an
interpretation that made that question relevant.
And then when you get your answer, you've got to do
philosophy again to interpret it.

(01:35:34):
Like our favorite answer to the question of life, the world and
everything came out to be 42 andyou know Douglas.
Adams. You know, yeah.
And, and that's what I one of the things I love about that is
because I don't think anything happens without interpretation
setting it up and interpretationreintroducing it back into the

(01:35:56):
life flow. And so when I say philosophy, I
mean in the broadest sense of interpreting your reality and
getting what you want out of it.OK.
You know, yeah, yeah. And and when I say science
should serve that, that's that'swhat I really mean is, is that
it should be getting us to a better life.
And, you know, this was part of the thing that David Bohm, you

(01:36:19):
know, here, he believed in science.
He wanted to help the world. He wanted to make things better.
And then he fell in with Oppenheimer and they made the
atomic bomb. And then he's going, wait a
minute. And that was what pushed him in
the philosophy direction, you know, coming to the idea that if
we're going to have a better life, it's going to be through

(01:36:42):
mind and not through just a manipulation of stuff, I think.
Scientists forget more than knowledge to your earlier word.
Exactly, exactly. And so that's my little my
little Barb into the scientism movement, because I think that I

(01:37:03):
think we are badly in need of critiques of that as a
worldview, not as just a question about do we get the
right answers to the questions that we ask.
I want to know if we're asking the right questions and I want
to know when we get the answer to those questions, what are we
going to do with them? And are flowers going to grow or
only black pumpkins, you know? It's kind of a metaphysical

(01:37:27):
stand that you're taking, Brian,which is that not only you, but
everybody is continuously makingmeaning.
And even being completely unconscious about that process
and taking no critical role in it, one is still making meaning

(01:37:47):
or even by making a lack of meaning, one is still making
meaning. And, and so that kind of
undergirds all of the choices that we make, whether it's to do
mathematics or how to do mathematics, etcetera, right.
So, so I, I, I don't know, Larry, if, if that resonates

(01:38:08):
with you, I'm guessing that thatyou're, you know, kind of like
being disciplined about separation of disciplines is, is
more in line with your metaphysics, I think, but I'm
curious to hear more. Well, I think the, the, the
world can be described at lots of different levels.

(01:38:31):
So we, we could, we could talk about the quantum world, can
talk about the molecular world. We could talk about the, the
economic world. And when we do that, we're
interested in studying phenomenalike transactions and trade.
We can talk about the psychological world.
When we do that, we're talking about beliefs and desires and

(01:38:56):
how they cause behavior. And we can talk about the
biological world when we're talking about collections of
cells and and the operations of organs or organelles.
So there's a sense in which everything is the same.
Everything is just a bunch of quarks.

(01:39:16):
But there's also a sense in which there's a lot of different
things in in the world. And you don't see these
differences without the kind of apparatus that that that makes
them conspicuous or, or obvious.And so biologists take one

(01:39:37):
perspective on the world. They think in addition to all
these quarks and molecules, they're also biological
organisms. And, and chemists take a
different perspective on the world.
So despite the fact that in a sense, all there are are atoms
in the in in the void, there's another sense in which because

(01:39:57):
these atoms interact in certain ways, collect in certain ways,
we've got lots of other things in the world that we can only
see from certain perspectives. And so I'm, I'm just making a
plea here for maintaining different perspectives so that
we can. Locate different objects.

(01:40:17):
Different kinds of objects. Yeah, I don't.
I don't think that's incompatible with anything
either of you have said. Yeah, no, I don't think so.
And I think it's it's congruent with the history of the mental
progress of our species that that's the way things kind of

(01:40:39):
tend to work. Yeah, Yeah.
We're, we're now able to see things that exist, really exist
in the universe that we couldn'tsee before because we have the
the the perspectives to see them.
Or maybe, Brian, this is what you would call a new sort of
interpretive framework. Right, right.
And a finer tuning. Yeah, yeah, right.

(01:41:04):
So I'm wondering, circling back to happiness, are there are
there kind of modern definitionsof happiness that might be more
fruitful to, to inform the kindsof questions that governments
might be asking? Yeah, so one kind of entrenched

(01:41:30):
view of happiness equates happiness with what's called
life satisfaction. And so life satisfaction, what
is life satisfaction? Well, we could ask questions
like this. How satisfied with your life are
you on a scale of 1 to 10? Or if you could live your life
over again, would you? And the scientists who seek to

(01:41:58):
measure life satisfaction think that they're measuring
happiness. But I think there's good reasons
to to distinguish life satisfaction from from
happiness. People can be satisfied with
their lives even if they're unhappy, and people can be happy

(01:42:19):
but not satisfied with their lives.
So that seems to me philosophershave have done a lot of work to
show why there seems to be this gap between life satisfaction
and and and happiness. So then the the question
becomes, well, if if happiness is not life satisfaction, what

(01:42:42):
is it? And philosophers have often
offered, offered different theories about this one.
One theory that I like that I talked about in the manuscript
is a theory that the philosopherDan Haberon has been developing
over the past couple of decades,and he thinks of happiness as a
kind of emotional condition. Just as we can talk about

(01:43:05):
depression as involving various attitudes, we can think of
happiness as involving various attitudes.
And it might be harder to measure than life satisfaction.
But Habron has actually collaborated with scientists
with the aim toward developing ameasure of of happiness as as he

(01:43:29):
understands the the. The term and these types of
philosophical assumptions reallydo form how we operate in the
world. You know, when I was reading
your section on happiness, I, I realized that in the times that
I've worked with people counseling them, I've never once

(01:43:50):
considered my job being to help them be happier.
I always sort of had a picture that happiness was the natural
condition of everything when it unfolds according to the the
intelloky, to use the Aristotelian term.

(01:44:13):
And so I always sort of saw my job kind of like a farmer.
Maybe there's some weeds to move, maybe there's a little
deficiency of water or of nutrient.
But this is a thing that kind ofhas its own nature.
And I'm so I'm more of a bonsaiist, you know, working

(01:44:34):
with something that has its own dynamic within it.
You know, Dylan Thomas's green fuse that drives the, you know,
nature and that that the real that really it's kind of an
undoing. And maybe this is a Zen sort of
a thought, you know, just get out of the way, get out of the
way and looking at removing obstructions and that maybe

(01:44:57):
happiness is a natural state when the obstructions are
removed. But my feeling is that one of
the big obstructions is not having access to meaning.
And that, that that's absolutelyrelated to your philosophy, your
or your worldview, if you would.If, if we want us, if we want to

(01:45:19):
reserve the term of philosophy for those who put in conscious
effort, then I would argue that the average person still has a
worldview and it's often maybe it's been engineered for them by
other folks, but that that worldview still translates
across to that. Everything else has to sit

(01:45:40):
within that. We refer to that sometimes as a,
as a cognitive model. And I, and I've referenced that
everybody is, is born with theirfoot nailed down in a particular
room on a particular St. and that, that sort of forms the
basis of their, their worldview.And so, you know, one of the

(01:46:03):
only things that I think that help release us, that help us
pull that nail up where we're, where we're nailed down
originally is the cultivation ofphilosophy.
It is the, the, the process of looking at our own
understanding. And, you know, the, the
philosophy of psychology is critical.

(01:46:24):
A biologist, A molecular biologist is not going to get
very far if they don't really know how to work the microscope.
And an astronomer has to be a pretty good expert at running a
telescope or he's not going to get real far.
And so for a philosopher, you are the telescope, you are the

(01:46:48):
microscope. And so learning about yourself
is almost meta philosophy. You can't you can't even talk
about philosophy without understanding our perceptual
faculties and the the way the human who, who are we?
What are we? What?
What's going on here kind of thing.
I I think one thing philosophical training

(01:47:15):
facilitates is the ability to understand that certain beliefs
you have are based on particularassumptions.
Because it's too easy to to to go through life thinking that
what you believe is just the sensible thing to believe when

(01:47:37):
it's sensible only against the background of some assumption
or, or other assumptions that are sometimes quite difficult to
unearth and clarify. And one thing that I tried to
instill in my one O 1 intro to philosophy students is the
extent to which thoughts about the world are contingent on, on

(01:48:02):
these assumptions that they didn't realize they had in the
1st place. I'm.
I'm thinking in, in terms of trying to, to imagine what a
definition of happiness that really covers all people and all
of their understandings of happiness maybe.

(01:48:25):
And, and the, the idea of, you know, everybody is nailed down.
I'm sorry, everybody is born with their, their foot nailed to
the floor. And the truth is that a lot of
people don't engage with that sort of thing directly.
And, and so I, you know, I'm, I'm just wondering if something

(01:48:48):
as subjective as happiness, where, where some people might
as, as you said, Larry, be happywithout being satisfied with
their lives or be unhappy despite being satisfied with
their lives or their lives beingsatisfying by all objective
measures. How, how could we possibly

(01:49:09):
reconcile that and, and happiness being a condition
similar to, you know, an emotional condition similar to
depression, not similar to depression, but in the way that
depression is, or as the absenceof depression.
I don't know. I, I find depression a pretty

(01:49:30):
slippery topic, even, right. I mean, I think the, the DSM
updates every few years how it segments depression into
different types. And there's irritable depression
and anxious depression and there's depression that's anger
turned inward and there's depression that's despair.
And, you know, there's like, andwhat are all those things again?

(01:49:53):
I'm like it's, it's interesting to to try to make the subjective
objective. It's overwhelming for me to to
imagine that. No one said it would be easy.
So they, they One way to think about how philosophers go about

(01:50:18):
creating a theory of, of happiness is they, they look at
other theories and they find reasons to be dissatisfied with
these, and then they try to comeup with a compromise.
It seems to to do the best job of resolving the difficulties
that these particular theories face.

(01:50:39):
So, so for instance, 1 early andkind of kind of simple minded
but understandably compelling ideas that happiness is just
feelings of pleasure, unhappiness is feelings of pain.
But you don't have to scratch too deep to to to see what's

(01:50:59):
wrong with that. You know, as the, as the heroin
addict who's in a state of euphoria, really happy is, is
the woman in pain as she pushes the, the, the, the baby from
her, from herself really unhappy.

(01:51:22):
So, so then the philosopher says, OK, so it's not good
enough. It's not sufficient to identify
happiness with just feelings of pleasure.
So what's what's missing from that account?
And, and that gets the ball rolling and different, different
philosophers take different directions from that, that core

(01:51:42):
insight and, and then we're leftwith, you know, 3-4 main
competitors in the world of happiness theories.
And some, some answer questions that the others can't.
None might fit all the data, butyou got to keep plugging away

(01:52:03):
and. Aristotle was probably not the
first, but he certainly had a lot to say about what wasn't
happiness, right. And that and that we could be
fooled in this, in this situation, which I don't think
he's the first sage to tell us. Be careful what you think is
happiness. Right, right.
Some people might identify happiness with living a virtuous

(01:52:25):
life, but they're. Or fulfilled narcissism.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
You know, and that's and and youknow, we put Confucius in there
because he also has very similarconclusions that he comes to, of
course, in a completely oppositeway for more from a social

(01:52:47):
standpoint. But I think his Chun so looks
very much like Aristotle's man who has attained the good life.
I'll take your word for that because I don't know anything
about Confucianism. Well, and I'm always very
interested in the things that philosophers say that are the
same. Yeah.
All the all the interest goes into their contrasting their

(01:53:10):
differences. But but there's some really big,
huge things that they all say like get yourself wiser, right?
Is is of course that my kettle drum, but but and that it's a
doable thing. I think maybe that's the maybe.
It seems to a lot of folks that how would I even effort to do

(01:53:30):
that? Right.
Yeah, I I do know that there's been a lot of attention paid to
the possible influence on David Hume of of Buddhist philosophy.
People would see a lot of connections between Hume and
Buddhism. Yeah, apparently Thoreau as
well. We had a a guest a a few months

(01:53:52):
ago who had had spent a lot of time studying what Thoreau was
reading before he went to Waldenand at Walden and even
translating himself and the the Eastern influence is a lot more
than I than I had realized. And he's got a book coming out
on that shortly, I think. Who is that, remember?

(01:54:15):
Krishnan Venkatesh. He's the one of the heads of the
Middle Eastern program up at St.John's The.
Eastern studies program. Eastern studies program.
Yeah, OK. Good.
Well, I think this might be a stopping point, at least for
this chapter. I, I, I thought maybe we would
get to talking about miracles too.

(01:54:36):
But maybe next time. Brian, did you want to close out
with someone? I just wanted to more of a
specific pitch about the book when it'll come out.
I don't know if the title is is is it official yet or?
Just for. Folks that want to pursue this.
Title I'm still not completely satisfied with.
It's something that the editor I'm working with thought would

(01:54:58):
be good. But if I come up with something
better, I think I think the title now is something like the
biggest questions why PhilosophyStill matters.
And my dissatisfaction with the title is that it doesn't
indicate anything about the books focus on science.
So I, I, I might want to suggestsome, some modifications, but

(01:55:19):
the book will be coming out withPrinceton University Press.
I'm supposed to get a draft to them by the end of this year.
Looks like I might actually be on time with that.
We'll see how the next couple months go.
And, and then, you know, it typically takes a year, a year
and a half for production. So maybe 27 is a reasonable.

(01:55:43):
OK, well, and we always have show notes, so when that
happens, you can put us on the list to notify us and we'll put
it in the show notes and if people come across it after
publishing date, they'll be ableto find it.
I'll certainly do that. Thank you.
So yeah, that'll be great. OK, good.
Any other last words for our listeners of encouragement or?

(01:56:07):
Well, I encourage all your listeners to pick up some
introduction of philosophy booksand just see why, why it's such
an exciting discipline, such an excited feeling, exciting field
of study and, and, and develop an appreciation for the, the
breadth of issues that philosophers cover.
It's, it's, it's always a disappointment to me when well,

(01:56:30):
no longer because they're no longer any bookstores.
But I used to walk into bookstores and and go to the
philosophy section and see all these books on things like
crystals, and I thought, crystals come on, It's got
nothing to do with philosophy. So I think philosophy has been a
source of ridicule, in part because the people who market

(01:56:56):
philosophy don't know what philosophy is.
I would agree, Yeah. And we need it more than ever.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's what we're trying to do here, at least in
in part, is have these conversations like we used to
have sitting in Brian's living room out in in the public square

(01:57:20):
and have really interesting folks like you join us and make
us that much wiser. It's a real pleasure, Larry.
I really enjoyed our conversation today.
I sure did. It was a fast two hours.
Very much so. And, and you know, we trust at

(01:57:41):
some point we may be able to have you back.
Sure. Yeah, I'm not going to say.
That, you know, yeah, we're we're, you know, constantly
there's their perennial themes that that rise up with the show.
And so I think you're well situated to have a illuminating
perspective. Great.

(01:58:02):
And we really appreciate your time.
Well, I appreciate your thoughtful questions.
Thanks very much. Awesome.
Thank you.

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#71: Larry Shapiro: Why Science Needs Philosophy

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