Making Sense

Sam Harris

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062857804
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book

From the bestselling author of Waking Up and The End of Faith, an adaptation of his wildly popular, often controversial podcast

"Sam Harris is the most intellectually courageous man I know, unafraid to speak truths out in the open where others keep those very same thoughts buried, fearful of the modish thought police. With his literate intelligence and fluency with words, he brings out the best in his guests, including those with whom he disagrees." -- Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene

"Civilization rests on a series of successful conversations." —Sam Harris

Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author—has been exploring some of the most important questions about the human mind, society, and current events on his podcast, Making Sense. With over one million downloads per episode, these discussions have clearly hit a nerve, frequently walking a tightrope where either host or guest—and sometimes both—lose their footing, but always in search of a greater understanding of the world in which we live. For Harris, honest conversation, no matter how difficult or controversial, represents the only path to moral and intellectual progress.

This book includes a dozen of the best conversations from Making Sense, including talks with Daniel Kahneman, Timothy Snyder, Nick Bostrom, and Glenn Loury, on topics that range from the nature of consciousness and free will, to politics and extremism, to living ethically. Together they shine a light on what it means to "make sense" in the modern world.

Finding Our Way

A Conversation with David Deutsch

David Deutsch has a talent for expressing scientifically and philosophically revolutionary ideas in deceptively simple language. He is a visiting professor of physics at the Center for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford University, where he works on the quantum theory of computation, and constructor theory.

This chapter features two of our conversations. In the first, we focus on the surprising power and reach of human knowledge, the future of artificial intelligence, and the survival of civilization.

After our first conversation, Deutsch read my book The Moral Landscape and wanted to discuss it. He intended to do this privately—probably because he disagreed with much of it and didn’t want to break the news to me on my own podcast. But I urged him to let me record our conversation, because if he was going to dismantle my cherished thesis, I wanted it done in public. Given all that was covered in our first meeting, we hit the ground running.

In this second conversation, we further explore the nature of knowledge and the implications of its being independent of any specific, physical embodiment. This is one of the things that make David’s views on more ordinary topics so interesting. As a physicist, his understanding of something as mundane as why it’s wrong to coerce people to do things they don’t want to do connects directly to his view of how knowledge ultimately accumulates in the cosmos. His ideas are fairly startling—and unlike most scientific thinking about our place in nature, they put us somewhere near the center of the drama.

Harris: David, I want to creep up on your central thesis. Certain claims you make—specifically, about the reach and power of human knowledge—are fairly breathtaking. And I want to agree with them in the end, because they’re so hopeful. But I have a few quibbles.

Deutsch: Sure. But I should say first that while I think the outlook is positive, the future is unpredictable. Nothing is guaranteed. There’s no guarantee that civilization or our species will survive, but there is a guarantee that we know in principle how both can survive.

Harris: Before we get into your theory, let’s start somewhere near epistemological bedrock. I’d like to get to a definition of terms, because in The Beginning of Infinity you use words like “knowledge” and “explanation” and even “person” in novel ways, and I want to make clear just how much work you’re requiring those words to do. Let’s begin with the concept of knowledge. What is it, in your view?

Deutsch: The way I think of knowledge is broader than the usual use of the term—and yet, paradoxically, closer to its commonsense use. Knowledge is a kind of information, which is to say that it’s something that is one particular way and could have been otherwise; additionally, knowledge says something true and useful about the world.

Knowledge is in a sense an abstraction, because it’s independent of its physical instantiation. I can speak words which embody some knowledge. I can write them down. They can exist as movements of electrons in a computer, and so on. So knowledge isn’t dependent on any particular instantiation. But it does have the property that when it is instantiated, it tends to remain so. Let’s say a scientist writes down a speculation that turns out to be a genuine piece of knowledge. That’s the only version he doesn’t throw in the wastebasket. That’s the version that will be published, that will be studied by other scientists, and so on.

So knowledge is a piece of information that has the property of tending to stay physically instantiated. Once you think of knowledge that way, you realize that, for example, the pattern of base pairs in a gene’s DNA also constitutes knowledge, in line with Karl Popper’s concept of knowledge as not requiring a knowing subject. It can exist in books, or in the mind, and people can have knowledge they don’t know they have.

Harris: A few more definitions: in your view, what’s the boundary between science and philosophy, or between science and other expressions of rationality? In my experience, people are profoundly confused about this, including many scientists. I’ve argued for years about the unity of knowledge, and I feel you’re a kindred spirit here. How do you differentiate—or do you differentiate—science and philosophy?

Deutsch: Well, they’re both manifestations of reason. But among the rational approaches to knowledge, there’s an important difference between science and things like philosophy and mathematics. Not at the most fundamental level, but at a level which is often of great practical importance. That is, science is the kind of knowledge that can be tested by experiment or observation. I hasten to add, that doesn’t mean that the content of a scientific theory consists entirely of its testable predictions; the testable predictions of a typical scientific theory are a tiny sliver of what it tells us about the world. Karl Popper introduced this criterion, that science is testable theories and everything else is untestable. Ever since, people have falsely interpreted him as saying that only scientific theories can have meaning. That would be a kind of positivism, but he was really the opposite of a positivist. His own theories aren’t scientific, they’re philosophical, and yet he doesn’t consider them meaningless. In the bigger picture, the more important distinction that should be uppermost in our minds is the one between reason and unreason.

Harris: The widespread notion is that science reduces to what is testable, and that any claim you can’t measure is somehow vacuous. So, too, is the belief that there exists a bright line between science and every other discipline where we purport to describe reality. It’s as if the architecture of a university had defined people’s thinking: you go to the chemistry department to talk about chemistry, you go to the journalism department to talk about current events, you go to the history department to talk about human events in the past. This has balkanized the thinking of even very smart people and convinced them that all these language games are irreconcilable and that there’s no common project.

Take something like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. That was a historical event. However, anyone who purports to doubt that it occurred—anyone who says, “Actually, Gandhi was not assassinated. He went on to live a long and happy life in the Punjab under an assumed name”—would be making a claim that is at odds with the data. It’s at odds with the testimony of people who saw Gandhi assassinated and with the photographs we have of him lying in state. The task is to reconcile the claim that he was not assassinated with the facts we know to be true.

That task doesn’t depend on what someone in a white lab coat has said, or facts that have been discovered in a laboratory funded by the National Science Foundation. It’s the distinction between having good reasons for what you believe and having bad ones—and that’s a distinction between reason and unreason, as you put it. While one sounds more like a journalist or a historian when talking about the assassination of Gandhi, it would be deeply unscientific to doubt that it occurred.

Deutsch: I wouldn’t put it in terms of reasons for belief. But I agree with you that people have wrong ideas about what science is and what the boundaries of scientific thinking are, and what sort of thinking should be taken seriously and what shouldn’t. I think it’s slightly unfair to put the blame on universities here. This misconception arose originally for good reasons. It’s rooted in the empiricism of the eighteenth century, when science had to rebel against the authority of tradition and to defend new forms of knowledge that involved observation and experimental tests.

Empiricism is the idea that knowledge comes to us through the senses. Now, that’s completely false: all knowledge is conjectural. It first comes from within and is intended to solve problems, not to summarize data. But this idea that experience has authority, and that only experience has authority—false though it is—was a wonderful defense against previous forms of authority, which were not only invalid but stultifying. But in the twentieth century, a horrible thing happened, which is that people started taking empiricism seriously—not just as a defense, but as being literally true—and that almost killed certain sciences. Even within physics; it greatly impeded progress in quantum theory.

So to make a little quibble of my own, I think the essence of what we want in science are not justified beliefs but good explanations. You can conduct science without ever believing in a theory, just as a good policeman or judge can implement the law without believing either the case for the prosecution or the case for the defense—because they know that a particular system of law is better than any individual human’s opinion.

The same is true of science. Science is a way of dealing with theories regardless of whether or not one believes them. One judges them according to whether or not they’re good explanations. And if a particular explanation ends up being the only explanation that survives the intense criticism that reason and science can apply, whether or not that includes experimental testing, then it’s not so much adopted at that point as just not discarded. It has survived for the moment.

Harris: I understand that you’re pushing back against the notion that we need to find some ultimate foundation for our knowledge, encouraging instead this open-ended search for better explanations. But let’s table that for a moment. Let’s address the notion of scientific authority. It’s often said that, in science, we don’t rely on authority. But that’s both true and not true. We do rely on it in practice, if only in the interest of efficiency. If I ask you a question about physics, I’ll tend to believe your answer, because you’re a physicist and I’m not. And if what you say contradicts something I’ve heard from another physicist, then, if it matters to me, I’ll look into it more deeply and try to figure out the nature of the dispute.

But if there are any points on which all physicists agree, a nonphysicist like me will defer to the authority of that consensus. Again, this is less a statement of epistemology than it is a statement about the specialization of knowledge and the unequal distribution of human talent—and, frankly, the shortness of every human life. We simply don’t have time to check everyone’s work, and sometimes we have to rely on faith that the system of scientific conversation is correcting for errors, self-deception, and fraud.

Deutsch: Yes, exactly. You could call that consensus “authority.” But every student who wants to make a contribution to a science is hoping to find something about which every scientist in the field is wrong. So it’s not irrational to claim one is right and every expert in the field is wrong. When we consult experts, it’s not quite because we think they’re more competent. You referred to error correction, and that hits the nail on the head. If I consult a doctor about what my treatment should be, I assume that the process leading to his recommendation is the same one I would have adopted if I’d had the time and the background and the interest to go to medical school. Now, it might not be exactly the same, and I might also take the view that there are ...