hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm chatting with elijah milgram who is one of the best philosophers and a professor at the university of utah elijah welcome uh hi um thanks for having me we're going to get to your work on jon
stewart mill and nietzsche and your current project on the lives of philosophers but i'd like to start with a few just very basic questions about philosophy what do you think is the most underrated tool in the rationality toolbox for practical reasoning um this is really really basic
but um i think people don't pay attention to their own experience they pay attention to experience when they um are trying to figure out what what's going on factually but when they're trying to figure out what to do they uh they discount experience as an input they
so this is true among the professional philosophers and i think it's true of just anybody the the tacit ideology i guess is that people are supposed to know what they want already right and then they they try to figure out how to get it but um um you learn what's important and what's
ma and what matters from experience and if you don't pay attention to your own experience you'll go off marching in some direction that you in the end are going to find uh probably really disappointing um so yeah everyone somehow in the end pays attention
um but it's really underrated so if people in trying to assess their own preferences are underweighting their own experience in relative terms what are they then overweighting social conformity pressures uh john stewart milhome a little bit of a fan of and kind of have an interest in
um complained about that very he complained about his contemporaries that um too many of them didn't bother to ask themselves what they wanted or they preferred they would just look around to see what was expected of them and um and then go for that and so there's a
lot of that but i think the other thing that uh is being overrated is um what you think you already what what you think you already know about what's important and what matters so it's um it's inertia inertia of your own assessments newcomb's paradox are you a one boxer or
two boxer and why you know i've never been able to take a stand on that mostly because you know there's this moment in robert nozick's discussion of the uh the nukem paradox should should we pause to kind of tell the audience what no no no no this is not for them
this is for us no this is for us okay so um uh so nozick said look um here's what happens when you get a class or just not not even a class people talk about nuclear's paradox some people end up having one view and some people end up having the other view
and each side has the argument for their own view but they don't have the explanation of what's wrong with the other argument and then nozak says and i think this is absolutely on target um it doesn't help to just repeat your own argument more slowly and more loudly
and since i don't know what's wrong with the whichever other argument it is um i don't have a view but if you don't have a view doesn't that by default put you close to the one box position it means you don't consider the dominance principle self-evident right because you're not sure that in
fact you're getting more by opting for the two boxes quantum mechanics is weird aliens may be weirder yet you don't know what to do so why not just take the slightly smaller prize and opt for one box not with extreme conviction but you would be a kind of default
mildly agnostic one boxer so um well who knows what i would do if somebody turned up and gave me the but let me say uh something kind of a little bit of the meta level and then i'll speak to the the the uh the view that i would be a one boxer um so i don't know i live in a world
where um uh i feel disqualified from a privilege that um almost everybody around me has so um you know people are supposed to have opinions about all kinds of things right they have opinions about politics and they have opinions about um uh sports teams and they have
opinions about who knows what right um i'm i i'm in the very peculiar position of being in a job where um i'm paid to have opinions and so i feel that i can't have opinions unless i've worked for them and i can back them up and that means that unless i've done my homework
i unless i have an argument for the opinion i don't have it so i so i so so i don't and um but now going back from the meta level kind of one one level down um so let's stop and think about what's built into the when you explain dominance to a classroom in like right you say well
look here are the different options you have and uh uh i guess the options are usually the column and here are the different states of the world and you can see that for each state of the world this option does better than that option so you should take right
there's a lot built into that already um and for example that the world is carved up into these different uh uh the state space is carved up and your option space is carved up and um you don't get to rethink re-characterize the characterization of the things that
you do is already given to you and it's fixed and um it's an idealization and um i don't until the situation arrived and i had a chance to sort of face it and think about it i wouldn't know whether to accept that idealization i know that sounds really coy but the principled view is
that since i don't have an argument i don't have an opinion did the quantity intern in analytic philosophy turn out to be a dead end yeah why so let me see if i can try to talk this through let's say that the quantity in turn there's different versions of the coina
in turn right different things you could mean by that but let's say that it means this [Music] um to be quiet slogan was to be is to be the value of a variable so if you're a philosopher and you're doing metaphysics and you want to say what the world is composed of right
that's kind of the right well you have a theory which is continuous of science and maybe it has logic at the very middle of it but it's all one sort of seamless i guess this phrase with uh it was web of belief and you see what the theory tells you exists and of course that's what you think
exists it sounds right it sounds very low key and down to earth and and naturalistic but now um [Music] okay quine went into um quine went into his program um thinking that what you start with your sort of raw material um is uh people agreeing and disagreeing
with things that you right right you show them a rabbit and you say gava guy and they say yes or no they make a an a center descent response and you kind of collect these and you build your interpretation up of the people and then you right um um and that assumes
that um you can already understand their sense in descents before you understand everything else um now dave barry has a really funny uh riff on a comedian dave barry he's been a guest on this show by the way oh that's so cool um i get i i think i've cited him more than once
as an authority so he's also one of the best philosophers there we go and um um so his riff is um he's uh i guess his wife is trying to book travel plans to japan and she can't communicate with the travel agent because the travel agent doesn't think she can say no politely
right uh my problem isn't so much that there's uh you know circumcision around saying no although you know if you ask somebody for a date if somebody asks you for a date and you're gonna turn them down you don't do it by saying no right you just right there's other ways to do
it um my complaint is that all the interesting informative responses uh to somebody asking me is that the way they are usually turn out to split the difference well it's true in a way it's kind of true it's sort of true there's something to that it's technically true
well it's officially true it's got a grade of truth in it right i can sort of go on like that and um and you can't understand that stuff without already speaking the language very very fluently so quine's entry point into his program is is a non-starter and um
and so yeah i think i think it wasn't going to go where he thought it was going to go are we living in a simulation i actually think i have an argument that not what is it let's hear it so you're familiar with the bayesian argument that an advanced civilization can create
a lot of simulations so odds are if you feel you're alive you're in one of those simulations right what's your counter argument so um think of the simulation as a work of art i mean it has to be that by a work of art i don't mean anything fancy schmancy
i mean that um i just mean that it's an object created to look a certain way um works of arts have styles they inevitably have styles i can give you sort of a subsidiary argument in a moment if you want that and so if you were in a simulation unless you simply had no
taste unless you were sort of taste blind you were aesthetically crippled right you'd be able to recognize the style and it would be obvious universe 2.0 right that's what we're living in right a lot of black some stars not too much noise except on planet earth
so when i try this argument out on people some people say but my world is styled um and they and i say well let's split the difference you know if it turned out that you looked around in your world okay there are parts of the world that are definitely styled um uh pt
cruisers i don't know if they're still around but they're styled for sure okay these were you know cars that were meant as an allusion to i guess the dick tracy strip right but a fair sense of the aliens or creators notion of style is very distant how firm could we be in our belief that
our universe doesn't have a style that seems hard to defend to me i know what my sense of style is like but it's hard enough to understand the sense of style of people in other countries much less creators of our simulation so let me kind of pull in my horns a little bit
but say this um to the extent that i understand the simulation hypothesis right i have a pretty tangible sense of how it works and plays out um then i think that the simulators um uh i have to understand them as being something like us right um and then it'll turn out that
they have styles too i'll fill in the the argument if they're if you think of them as sort of omnipotent right um uh then i then then i don't know right so this isn't uh i don't think i can uh uh if we get theological i i'm i'm not confident anymore um but think
about it this way the simulation we're talking about um so this we will have in common with the with the space aliens it's going to be complex right it has to be built up of many working parts i mean the kind of working parts i mean [Music] if you look at uh trade journals for the
cgi industry um they enthuse over people have figured out a way to make the backwash of a rocket look right here's how you do it people have figured out a way there's a really old scientific american article which is sort of nice as an example of this people have
figured out a way to make weathered surfaces look right um to get the simulation to look right it has to be an accretion of a lot of these devices right um so um so you're looking at something that uh you're looking at a tradition right in the background of the simulation uh
the tradition that builds up the devices and learns to integrate them and to produce these appearances and now you ask what the result of having this tradition will be um how are these devices going to make it into the tradition well some of them will be sort of
realistic in some very naive sense but some will be uh they will strike the the simulators as um as vividly realistic they'll induce suspension of disbelief now there's two possibilities the simulators are like us so they're not if these devices that are in there because
the induced suspension of disbelief in them but not in us right if they're there then we'll notice them immediately um but if they are there because they do suspension of disbelief in people like us you know suspension of disbelief is requires complicity on your part
right um uh um there's a recognition that you can train yourself involved in it and you can train yourself to notice it and so um style in this sense the creation of a repertoire of devices that work together to produce the appearance pretty much guarantees that if you're
looking out for it you'll see it what do you think of the robert allman agreement hypothesis that if two people who disagree come together and exchange views they might also exchange arguments but even if the arguments don't convince the other party
the mere fact that one sees we have different views we form estimates of who is the epistemic superior and we ought to converge upon agreement simply by communicating with each other is that a useful tool of practical reasoning or is that worthless you know i have to put aside what
there's a in philosophy you may know there's a pure disagreement literature and i have to put this aside somehow in my head to think about this you know it doesn't match what i experience in my life at all no of course i've had people may not be
truth seekers right no no no rather obvious no so i'm a philosopher right and my best conversation partners or other philosophers who i think are truth seekers and who i have enormous respect for um but it's not exactly that one of us thinks that the other one is the smarter
one right it's not like that um and some of these people i've known for i guess 40 years now and we have overlapping interests so we have regular conversations and mostly neither of us convinces the other what happens is our views evolve so i talk to my philosophical
conversation partner i've come up with an objection to her her view or her argument and she goes home and comes back and her argument has changed and the view has changed but not to agree with me but she's in objection to my view and my argument and i take the point so i go home
but i come back not agreeing with her i come back with a my my view has mutated to sort of swallow the objection that's going on a different right and and i have a new argument um so maybe philosophers are a special case but these conversations the really productive interesting ones
don't seem to uh they don't seem to produce agreement but isn't that proof that you are all and we are all not truth seekers if you are truth seekers the evolution of your views should be a random walk so your views evolve but in unpredictable ways but i observe
empirically is people move bit by bit toward a new position and in essence their position a week later from today is somewhat predictable at least the direction of change from their position now so maybe people are more interested in being interesting
a word you used and they're just not that much truth seekers because the evolution should then be a random walk so it could be but um and maybe this is something special about philosophy but you know there's something very weird about philosophy um it's in the west anyway
it's a discipline that's well over two millennia old and some of the smartest people who have ever lived have worked in this discipline no question and there aren't any results um so maybe it's a feature and now maybe you think they're all not truth seekers they're just after the
being interesting or something like that that's hard to believe over a that kind of stretch of time instead it looks to me like there are patterns of ideas or dialectical patterns that people are forced into that don't produce the convergence but
which they're helpless against and i even have a meta example from last night so i once wrote a paper where i argued that you know philosophy goes in cycles and you know the the the positions evolve in a kind of predictable way and then they collapse and somebody reinvents the wheel again
right um sure enough i'm reading i guess i'm not sure how you pronounce his name it's either etienne gilson or jerezlong right uh paris or paris right exactly um and this book is called the unity of philosophical experience and he is illustrating my view with the sort of
um a precurrence of it um he this the part of the book i read was reading last night at the beginning it starts off discussing medieval uh treatments of universals and his line is people get forced from position to position to position um you don't get agreement but it's also
not a random walk there's it's as though the the path is carved in stone and when later philosophers start at the beginning of that path and independently they too get forced down the same route now you're we may get back to these general questions but let's try a few
specifics the project you're working on now is a new book project and it's tentatively titled why didn't nietzsche get his act together right uh-huh now i have just a very general maybe sort of cynical question if i look at the status of nietzsche in 1900 when he died
i would think if i were living in 1900 at that point in time nietzsche was a great philosopher he was very important he was a culmination of a lot of trends he gave rise to a lot of new ideas that came to fruition in the 20th century but when i read nietzsche today he
doesn't actually seem to me like a great philosopher he seems to me like a once important philosopher that so much of his work is very context specific we will to power is a phenomenal insight but we now have better explications of the wilt of power if i look at his maxims they seem to me
worse than what i see on twitter every day so i pulled a few out from the the supredo book on nietzsche uh let me just read three of them one quote there were no facts only interpretations another even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love
after we have lived in it for three months and some distant coast attracts our avarice end quote the final one quote the most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments now none of those seem very profound to me they seem okay
like i said worse than twitter so i i understand the historic importance of nietzsche but why is he today a great philosopher that we can learn from so i think we can learn from him because um for in a lot of ways we haven't caught up to what he was doing
and um there are some moves he he makes that we've kind of almost gotten to the place where we're like three steps behind um and um but i want to step back a second and ask uh and think about the form for a moment so some of these uh some of these quotes
they belong to a period where nietzsche was trying to be the next rashfoco right so they sort of sort of like rush for comment and he was right but lynx schopenhauer but that was then this is now that's right that was then this is now but then he um then he moved on right um
his later writings are also choppy they don't sound like rush for co-like aphorisms um and sometimes the they're more shrill but and sometimes the the passages are a little longer but they're very different um let let me try to point out two or three ways of
seeing nietzsche that make him out to be interesting philosophically interesting um one of the reasons for the choppiness is that nietzsche couldn't work for more than 20 minutes straight he simply couldn't stay on point he was really sick as i'm sure you know and i i guess
people listening to this probably know the during the period he was writing the uh books that we think of as sort of most characteristically nichian he was coming apart at the seams his life was a series of lurches from one plateau of psychic disintegration to the next one down
until finally um i guess he collapsed and in the last 10 years of his life he was well first a psychiatric patient and then a ward of his uh mother and then award of his sister and he was a coma boy for a lot of that so he was coming apart and um
his writing style reflects that and now okay if you're a philosopher but also not if you're a philosopher so if you're a philosopher you take for granted a way of thinking about people that you can think of it as a notation that we don't have an alternative to you ask what does he think there's
it's as though there's a hook uh and then there are the various uh beliefs or uh things the person wants or is after that sort of hang off of that hook and uh built into that picture as a kind of uh presumption of a certain amount of coordination and consistency
and taking responsibility for those attitudes um this is the default view in philo so so the the the phrase that you'll see to kind of label this as unity of agency um and there's a lot of discussion in uh starting with harry frankfurt maybe in about 1970
of you know what it takes to get that kind of full ownership the assumption always is that it's a good thing and mostly we haven't people who don't are lost causes right but no one has it right we know from behavioral economics reference reversals right really doesn't have it and he's a
philosopher and he's trying to cope with him not being the agent which is the only kind of agent we already have tools to talk about and understand so he's philosophizing for himself it's a it's an exercise in personality management right he's trying to manage his own disintegrating
personality and keep it together and functioning as much and as long as he can but he's also theorizing about it and that's that's one of the things we haven't quite gotten to yet and which we absolutely need to um so that's one that's one okay here's another so you know
nietzsche was uh if if you had to sort of describe his program in a phrase uh it would be the program he's offering people would be inventing values so let me give you a characterization of so you know nowadays not in nature's own day we have a sub-specialty of philosophy
meta-effects which you could think of as the metaphysics of values or of the things you should do right and for about 100 years over the course of the 20th century um if you were thinking meta ethics you basically fell in one of two caps so you could be i hate this phrase but
you could be a moral realist so you think that the values are out there already and what you should do is some kind of special fact and you just have to be responsive to this truth this fact about what you what you have to do right or what's important or you could be i
hate this word too a non-cognitivist so the evaluations or the the shoulds their expressions of your feelings or their commands that you give other people and maybe also yourself or their expressions of your commitments that you've taken on now
notice what happened in in in that inmate ethics whichever branch you took you this was a sort of mythologizing of the abdication of responsibility it's it's making it okay to be the subject in the milgram experiments no relation the other milgram yes the other milgram yeah
so if the facts if the facts about what you should do are already out there well you're not responsible you're just doing what the okay and if it's like your feelings well you're not responsible for your feelings and you can't control them right when nietzsche says um what you do
with values is invent them we've done that always inadvertently but now it's time to do it self-consciously um not all the same for everybody you could have idiosyncratic values you could have temporary values and they're not whims no more than other inventions maybe the
ones coming out of you're in san francisco now right the ones coming out of silicon valley they're not whims if they fly there's a story about why they make sense right and um um and that's that's that's an invitation to assume the responsibility
that within philosophy anyway people have gone very far out of their way to uh slough off that's a big deal it's one way to think about it again in this next step thing the the alternative that's been emerging to um these two camps in the last maybe few decades sometimes gets called um
constructivism one way to think about nietzsche's proposal is it's in the spirit of constructivism but it's much more sophisticated it's a few steps out from where we are right now we're kind of in a place where that gesture will help some people to appreciate
it but he's doing way better than we are um uh let me tell you another reservation that i have about nietzsche i i think of him as obsessed with christianity right it's a recurring theme through a lot of the works antichrist is his last statement in a sense
and also i think of as his attempt like slaughterdike suggests to present a kind of fifth gospel if christianity is dead the god of christianity is dead what is the new gospel what is the new revelation and it just seems wrong to me so we have many parts of the world where christianity
is not as important anymore the the gospels that have replaced the previous influence of christianity they're not like zarathustra very much at all and it just seems empirically wrong to me now i take you is presenting the heinrich meyer view that the the book zarathustra is a
parody rather than an honest attempt to kind of create a successor to christianity but why is that an interesting project under either interpretation at this point in time and nietzsche thought it was his most significant work uh when i read it i'm actually bored
so um i saw this footnote that said that nietzsche had read uh you lose velhausen's prologue to the history of israel and i said to myself i know what that means of course i had to make sure i actually trekked off to weimar to look at nietzsche's personal library
and i even equipped myself to be sort of a spy industrial spy because um i needed to see i needed to see his marginalia and you know that um german handwriting has changed in the last hundred years along with the printed script and so you know i didn't know that i could read it
um so but i also thought they wouldn't let me photocopy it so i brought a concealed camera so that i could take pictures of the pages but of course then i didn't have to um and mostly nietzsche it turns out he underlines and even i can read an underline
i don't have to read gothic handwriting um okay so meyer thinks uh the guy you mentioned right he thinks that um zarathustra is a parody of the new testament and that's not exactly right um it is a parody of the new testament but also of the old testament and also apparently of the quran
and um also of buddhist writings that nietzsche knew about so it's meant to be a parody or satire of religious scripture but not the scripture of any particular religion and my entry point was has been but my entry point is more the uh the bible we're familiar with
because we have both nietzsche's copy of a book about the old testament with his markings so we know how he read it and we don't have his copy anymore but we know that he read david strauss's life of jesus um so um okay here's how this ties to the uh
the program of inventing values that i described for you a few steps back um um the way nietzsche writes nietzsche writes zarathustra as the holy text of a non-existent religion um um in a way that conforms to the views of the of the the critics he was reading
um this is a school of um of bible criticism that we've we've pretty much forgotten about and the common denominator of this school the shared view is that the people who actually write the holy texts of a religion come much later and they systematically misunderstand and misrepresent and have
their their own values are flipped upside down from the values of the founder and so they misrepresent the history and the doctrines of the person founding the religion completely zarathustra is obviously meant to somehow stand in for his views he talks about
views that are familiar from other works um and it seems to me that the exercise is to show that if you try to institutionalize the values nietzsche wants you to invent and the values he's inventing if you try to make it in the way that a religion institutionalizes values
um you'll the results will be completely perverse they'll be turned upside down and inside out and that's the last thing you want so in zarathustra this seems interesting to me nietzsche is setting up a problem which he tries to solve in his the books
he was working on till the end of his life for the rest of his life um and um the awfulness of the i mean the schlockiness of the book the horrific sentimentality and sappiness and the over-the-top i mean all of that stuff that's nietzsche showing you what what scripture looks like
is that parody or is that nietzsche recognizing the necessarily sentimental nature of prophecy to some extent if you think of heidegger and jung as two of the more insightful readers of nietzsche on this they don't seem to think it's parody right they're they're recognizing these
eternally recurring structures and how we tell myths um let me give a different spin on it um so i won't like argue back against the direct against the the other way of looking at it directly but let me give you an alternative way to see it um so suppose you invent a value
and you want to make it socially real which usually takes time that's got two sides it's got an external side normally the way we normally do it is we institutionalize the value so that has to do with creating a church or universities that teach students to do things a certain way or
their their very their variations on this but there's an internal uh flip side to that you have to change people's tastes so that the new value becomes natural to them right you're changing their sensibility and um i think zarathustra's surface style is meant as an
illustration of um what that sensibility would look to us now before we have it you're supposed to look at this okay so if you look at the king james bible it's a classic of english literature i mean it's up there with shakespeare every sentence almost is quotable it's
just wonderful right and if you look at luther's bible in german also it's a classic of the german language it's every sentence is quotable and if you look at the hebrew bible i mean it's a sort of reference point for every modern of hebrew writing author right um it's a
classic and if you look at the quran okay how can this happen there's two explanations one is that every time somebody writes a holy book it turns out to be a classic of word literature just on its own right the other possibility is when a book occupies a particular role in a culture
when it's that sort of reference point the sensibilities of people in the culture reshape themselves around the books so that it is in retrospect a classic and zarathustra which is awful schlock is inviting you to think what would have to happen to me for me
to look at this book and and have it seem as to me as though it were the key like the king james a classic of world literature and at that point you're supposed to go whoa um maybe this is a decision i need to think twice about but it's a the point is sort of a
relative of i don't know if you remember martha nussbaum's uh fragility of goodness sure and do you remember her discussion of um i guess she's considering the protagoras and her line in the protagoras is that socrates hedonism on which you know you make decisions on the basis of you
know just producing the greatest amount of pleasure and that's the only thing that matters she says that's not supposed to be how we are now that's socrates recommendation for reforming our decision making and nussbaum goes on to talk a little bit about what
the world is like in which people have done this tragedy doesn't make sense to them anymore because there are no tragic choices it's just a matter of quantities of pleasure and if your friend or lover dies it doesn't matter because you know there's you know they were just the bearer of a
certain quantity of pleasure and you go look for the pleasure elsewhere and the ideas are supposed to start to look inhuman and then you're supposed to think what kind of decision was it supposed to be anyway we're supposed to be looking to the reform program to make
things better for us better by whose lights and i think nietzsche is prodding you in the same way now i like very much your book about jon stewart mill your latest book called john stuart mill and the meaning of life let me see if i understand your view
properly it seems to me you're fairly critical of lives that are full of projects because in some way they make people subordinate to external authorities is that a fair reading of what you're suggesting um well let me distinguish do a little bit of distinguishing and then kind of
say kind of what i think the book was was aiming for um a life that's full of projects in the plural might well be fine i think if you've got it through an individuation issue right so elon musk is he full of project full of projects i'm not sure there's a difference right
he wants to build things that's a project but there's spacex there's tesla uh there's more i mean does the world really matter it does matter um so maybe in musk's case we could we could actually so i i haven't kind of looked into what he does i only know
what you know random people understand he does a lot of different things right that we know it's sort of you sort of have the impression that he's mostly focused he's a view about saving the planet and some of it is saving it down here by making everyone drive electric cars
and some of it is saving the planet by moving you know uh humanity off of the planet or something or maybe moving heavy industry off of the planet um so maybe that's his one big project and then he has things he gets distracted by and they're sort of
smaller or maybe he really has different projects he's um he's focused on cars and he's also spoke focused on on uh on a space space industry i don't know um but it really does matter um here's and here's here's i think why if you have one big project a project that's the um that you think
is the meaning of your life or that has that function that role um not only does it tend to push everything else out but you end up being very very focused on uh getting the project to cohere internally right figuring out right how to make all the parts fit together
and as your very very ambitious project gets more and more tightly wound [Music] so here's the actual punchline of the book if what you uh what you were looking for was the unified project that will occupy your whole life and be the meaning of your life as the project gets more and more
tightly wound um it starts to develop fissures and you end up not having the unified project in the unified life um it doesn't sell deception kick in to save you so if you think there's no set of views that are even close to fully coherent you work very hard as mill did to get
your your views to have more conciliance maybe ultimately you fail but he did many great things he actually had many wonderful projects liberation of women would be one voting rights would be another you could go on through the list and he he loved his work as a process
right so he had a lot of value in the moment-to-moment existence of his being so it's like hume's card players except you get to be in parliament and write incredible books and essays and if at the end of it all it wasn't that coherent mill's self-deception kicked in
he still thought he did wonderful things it was a somewhat self-validating self-deception why should we be so worried about that i mean take the people who did the mrna vaccines they had these incredible projects which the vaccines work there's a coherence to that uh by the
end of their lives they're likely to feel very good about this why don't we just take the money and run and applaud oh so the book is part of a larger project and let me place it a little bit so i actually do think mill at various points had there were rough sides to his
life i mean it wasn't all uh peaches and cream but i'm not also thinking i don't think of the life as a failure or or think that he shouldn't have done what he did or anything like that that's not the wor where i'm going so i'm interested in looking at the role
that something you would be comfortable describing as the meaning of somebody's life can play in a personality and an end in a life um but of course what roles uh uh something can play depends on what the architecture of the personality and the life is and people
have different differently structured personalities mill is interesting to me because um he's he was a very mobilized personality um i mean he accomplished remarkable amounts and it's all very very structured sub-projects inside sub-projects inside sub-projects
and he was able to sustain this over most of his life and for him for a personality like that the natural role for the meaning of his life is to be um something that guides action right because he he he's such he's so good at acting at the other extreme you're already talking
about nietzsche you have somebody who is completely disintegrated um giving him a big project which is going to sort of to which he'll refer his decisions that's simply not going to work because he can't make plans and execute them um for him uh something you'd think
he invented a number of values that you could think of as successive meanings of his life for the different configurations of his disintegrating personality and um because they couldn't tell them what to do they had a different role it's like they would by appealing
uh by serving as a kind of pole star to his different psychological psychic parts he could he could they could keep the parts flying more or less in the same configuration and that's how nietzsche managed to actually write his last books and for people i guess like myself and i
suppose most of us who are somewhere in the middle who aren't so tightly wired right um as wired as mill and as or as fragmented nature there other functions and meaning of life could have um so um on the on the mill extreme i think what you see in mill is that
turning your life into a single unified unified uh project and being as tightly wired as that isn't in fact an option it doesn't work out to be as tightly wired as that and so you should just give it up as an objective the thing you might end up with might look to you like you're pursuing a
single project if you're self-deceived about it as you as you say but we're already moving towards the towards the middle of the spectrum to ask you a rather forcing economist's question okay margin should we be taxing or subsidizing projects life projects um
so if you think that you can't actually get somebody to have something that lives up to the billing that really is the life project there's no point in subsidizing it subsidizing something that you can't get people to do um but people are built differently i mean again if
you think if there's something like a spectrum with more tightly wired people on one end and more tightly and more disintegrated people on the other end than different configurations in the middle um it's not as though there's any one thing we should be encouraging
people to do a different ways of approaching their lives are going to suit different people i worry in your book that you are underselling jeremy bentham a bit and underselling mill's view of bentham so if i read mill's famous essay just called bentham which i'm sure you know
very well mill is still pretty positive on bentham he says bentham has a lot of flaws but fortunately his main influence has been on the law if we think of bentham's writings the panopticon an auto icon proposal to always be reputationally evaluating the achievements of dead people i don't
favor those as policy proposals but they seem quite profound and have been highly influential and prophetic bentham on usury is smarter than adam smith on gay rights on animal welfare his pamphlet on interest-bearing currency fragment on government is quite
good and mill sees this so why be so down on bentham why isn't he just a brilliant wonderful philosopher with serious limitations along with most of the other brilliant wonderful philosophers um so mills so so first of all although bentham was a very strange guy
right um um he had a lot of a lot of bad ideas but also a lot of really good ideas and the good ideas uh they speak for themselves right there's well they're doing it maybe today but they don't to most of the world even now and they certainly didn't in bentham's
time the vision he needed to see very don't even think of this is something that was once a radical innovation that a crackpot had to suggest but you know putting stamps on an envelope and dropping it in the mailbox that's bentham so he had great ideas um mixed up with like
other ideas that weren't so good but okay think about it this way mill because i'm interested in mill under the heading of thinking about the meaning of life um um mill started out as a protege of jeremy bentham and so bentham's view of the utilitarian project
is we all struggle out of our teenage conceptions of what we're about and what we're what we're going to do sometimes we turn our back on them right i mean that's normal but sometimes what we do and this is what mill did is he worked his way to a different
version of the utilitarian program that he was comfortable with and that he could live in and that meant fighting his way out from under the father figures conception of of of that program and of the the key concepts in it like utility and so um so it's not surprising that there's
uh a kind of emotional tone that i see in that essay of um somebody dismissing their father uh even though he does recognize that bentham had real accomplishments there's still that tone as the french philosopher pierre hedeau has suggested is philosophy true philosophy
fundamentally dialogue rather than writing things and putting them out there um so i don't know that a piece of hadaus i do know his philosophy as a way of life but this question was taken up very very early in the history of philosophy i guess it's in the in ephedras right
sure and there's dialogue before this writing right dialogues while they are written but by plato their their dialogues are representing dialogues at least yes and in the fiedras i guess socrates floats the worry that written philosophy isn't really philosophy it's sort of the
fossil of the real philosophy the real philosophy can only be the spoken philosophy and the reason he gives is that you can't ask the text questions about things it doesn't talk about and i take it that the feeders itself this is very typical of plato actually
his dialogues there'll be moves that are made sort of textually and then moves that are made by way of the dramatic frame the feeders is plato showing you how to write a dialogue and he did this with almost all of his dialogues anyway the ones we mostly read
that you can ask questions of and they will answer right the philosophical texts that have survived that we keep reading all have this feature or we wouldn't keep reading them um so the objection to uh written philosophy as opposed to uh philosophy as dialogue um uh maybe it's been addressed
though not all of us can do it and maybe i don't know if i can do it are you worried that as you described earlier in this dialogue all of your best conversations are with philosophers doesn't that mean you're leaving trillion dollar bills on the table so to speak
since philosophers know a somewhat circumscribed set of things right as would be true of any group uh why have all your best conversations with philosophers isn't that a warning sign that something's badly wrong with philosophy you said yourself about mill in your
book the fact that he in some ways had to attempt to rule parts of india made you think much more of him as a political philosopher right um i think this is uh generally true as a a professional vice or handicap of philosophy um for my own part i actually do try to
i mean there's two ways you can interact with non-philosophers uh the there's the dead ones you read them right and then there are the live ones uh and i try to do um uh both to talk to people who aren't philosophers and also to talk to um and also to talk to uh dead non-philosophers
um so i'm an enthusiast for recently norbert elias who i guess started out as a philosopher but we remember him for you know the history of manners which is something else entirely and um uh yeah and you have to and i'm i just finished reading the um i guess it's the latest iteration of the
boarded richardson project it's a book by uh i guess a student of one of theirs uh joseph henrik um so yeah you have to if you're too narrowly boxed into uh your field especially if it's philosophy um that won't be good for you but then there is also this
um it's often hard to get the non-philosophers to engage engage you philosophically uh in the way that a philosopher would so uh talking with philosophers ends up being a large part of your diet to what extent do you think philosophers today are even still
philosophical in the true sense of that word oh that's such a painful question i know for seems true of economists i might add okay um to answer the question you have to have a view about what it is to be philosophical and the problem here is that i have three different views
i mean i worry about this question a lot i think it's part of philosophy to be aware of the question what is it you do philosophy right and what what philosophy is so i can run through the three takes i have really quickly and three questions so sometimes i think
um philosophy is um it's an applied science it's the machine tool industry of the mind we make the intellectual tools that make the intellectual tools where uh engineering and engineering science we're very high up in the value chain so people don't notice but that's what we do
right and then if on that take we have all of these colleagues most of my colleagues who think that what they're doing is completely useless and they're proud of it right um they have the attitude that john dewey complained about where you think of yourself as a member of the leisure
class and you're glad that you don't do anything useful right there's a second take on philosophy that i can't get away from which is that it's a response of a certain kind to um the imperative of the delta oracle right know thyself um philosophy requires you not to take
things for granted and just okay i had a colleague in a previous job who remarked to me that there's a phrase that non-philosophers use that philosophers never use it's starting a sentence with my philosophy is and um and he pointed out that what's going to follow
is some view that the person simply will not reconsider or give up right that's not what philosophy is about philosophy is about noticing that there's something you've been taking for granted and maybe it's time to have second thoughts about it and again if that's your view of what
philosophy requires there are a great many people in my line of work who don't live up to that i mean that is just disappointing they're just very very confident in the way they do things and they're not going to have second thoughts and then there's a third way of making
out the um seeing what philosophy is it's got it's got central questions that somehow don't go away um i guess plato socrates asks um he says so the question is um how should you live so that's one of them and content these four questions right what what
what can you know and uh what should you do and what can you hope for and i guess the fourth question was what is it to be a human being i think one of these questions is what's the meaning of life and um and again uh well just on that last score uh the meaning of life in analytic
philosophy has been pushed to the very very very very distant margins of the field instead of getting as i think it should get our most serious attention so when you ask that question i end up feeling sort of depressed as you know we've been living through a
pandemic and it seems we're faced with trolley problems every day when should we reopen who should get the vaccines first should we go first should we do first doses first and so on and my casual impression is that hardly anyone is out there asking philosophers what they think i
don't know of any writings by formal philosophers on those questions that have gotten a lot of attention is that that the philosophers have such better answers but the rest of us are not up to digesting them or are philosophers simply not usefully
engaged with those questions i mean what's your diagnosis of what's going on there because these articles about trolley problems for what 50 60 years oh and at the end of the day it's so painful okay um sometimes uh you'll have a topic of sort of current interest and
there'll be something work in philosophy that touches on it directly and speaks to it directly but often that's just not the way philosophy works i mean uh philosophy produces uh produces what it produces uh it's got internal dynamics and they'll be and eventually there's kind
of downstream upshots but you can't just sort of turn around and say to the okay we have something turned up in the news and we need to know what to do what do we when you do that uh you usually get really bad philosophy and trolley problems in particular not
that they were i mean think about that genre of philosophizing so there's some kind of a thought experiment right maybe you know something about a trolley uh swerving from one instead of one one track to the other i mean um or i mean i mean there are a lot of these thought
experiments maybe uh uh thought experiments about cutting people's brains in half and putting in different bodies or right and philosophers have they invite people to have um [Music] reactions right snap judgments i mean these snap judgments get dignified uh with the term intuition
but they're just snap judgments and you might think what could the value of these snap judgments be and why would you want to system systematize them why would you think they were worth anything at all that's a very very this is the methodology and philosophy that
um when when you know that something's been produced by this methodology you should go into it being very skeptical that anything of value could come out of it i mean nothing unless you have some special reason to think that the snap judgments going in
are high quality and they somehow are guaranteed to capture something important you shouldn't think that systematizing them is going to give give you anything important or or be of high quality what's your best robert nozick story [Music] um i'll give you two of them
well i'll only give you the two that i've heard directly there's some there's a story that's sort of hearsay but maybe you know i shouldn't right so um i ta for him once and i uh discovered how he taught he would assign huge piles of material that he wanted to read
but he wouldn't write a lecture he would just read the assignment the reading assignment all week in parallel with the class he would turn up five or ten minutes early before class and lock himself in his office he refused to be disturbed in those five minutes
and then he would get up in front of the class and he would open his mouth and a lecture would come out i can't imagine being able to teach that way um uh when i lecture i spend you know most of my week preparing for my lectures i can't imagine just just having it happen like that
um here's another okay this i think is philosophically interesting um at one point i realized that when you discussed something with nausic he instantly saw arguments sort of a sheaf a panoply of arguments for and against encounter arguments that would just appear to him all at once
this came up in a conversation in his office when um maybe we have a little bit too much in common that way um i i was a an advisee and he said well what about this point and i said give me a minute and i'll think of an argument and he looked at me and he said
that's the problem that you that i would that i will think of an argument so the way a lot of philosophers make up their minds about things is they sort of consider some question and then they find an argument and if the argument seems like it gets them a conclusion that's enough for them
they stop because they can't think of any more arguments um right and if you could only think of one argument this is a good way of any way like person would say of settling on something right that wouldn't work for nozek because um he could arguments just sprang to his mind more
and more of them instantly and so he ended up thinking of arguments as the idea that you could force somebody to believe something by giving them an argument that's just taking an event that's just taking advantage of somebody's disability right that they
could only think of one argument they can't think of more and that's why he titled his book his i guess it's his second book philosophical explanations um his line was okay i know better than this i'm not going to try to twist your arm with arguments
i'm going to give you explanations for things and you can buy them or not but hopefully they'll be illuminating that's a very interesting place for somebody to be it's uh you have to be as smart as him to be in the place that he was was carl popper a great philosopher even a good
philosopher and why do his followers in practice so often seem to be dogmatic oh that's a snarky remark but it's true yeah i've never so you know when i was 18 or whatever it was i read the open society and i read uh the logic of scientific discovery and each one there's a cool idea
and you know it was nice to have the cool idea right i maybe i didn't need a book to get it somebody could just tell you the cool idea and maybe the idea is too simple and you kind of move past it after a while um i don't know when if a philosopher over the course of his
professional life um has a few cool ideas that you're happy to have heard about i mean he did good so i'm not going to complain about popper um i don't myself see the idea of being a paparian that you would sort of this would be a school you would join or something
like that um but you know i'm glad i heard about those ideas if you think about sociological correlates of philosophers and if you learn that someone has a philosophy phd they have knowledge of formal philosophy other than the obvious like oh they they
went to school for a lot of years i mean what unusual correlates do you associate with that and let me give you an example when i meet a philosopher i actually tend to assume they're not that interested in the quality of the food they eat relative to people of similar education
and income classes because that's what i've observed empirically so what have you observed empirically what signals are correlates of knowing formal philosophy do you see let me think about that for a moment but while i'm thinking let me resist um your observation so
um i mean i watch the same thing um and here's why i mean since i have an interest in male um uh thinking about the principle of utility i mean like okay there's an early version on the late version right the early version is the benthamite version where it's about
maximizing the total pleasure and minimizing the pain that people experience it where he thinks of these as sensations and i found myself thinking um okay maybe that's a reasonable way to direct to shape policy when you have a population of people who know how to
enjoy themselves and who do taste the food they eat and how often do you see that um and what i see actually is geographical variation so um actually in the east bay and you're in san francisco right you're part of the but not typically you're in the you're right now in a part
of the world where um people do pay attention to the food and other i guess this is a misleading sounding word sensual aspects of their life in um um in the bay area people people notice the view um um they uh they pay attention to how things feel they um when they exercise uh
surprisingly often it's not about how they look it's about how good it makes them feel i find something similar sometimes i spend time in northern italy and i find a similar awareness of you know the the enjoyments that you actually sense but i don't see it
varying so much by profession as by where people live elsewhere in salt lake city um when you run across somebody who notices tastes what he eats and notice right you think wow that's unusual so what do you think is correlated with being a professional philosopher
in the united states you know i don't know um they're superficial stuff that's what i'm looking for the superficial bring it on well because it's not going to be superficial right well so if you wander into okay i'm no longer a member of the apa because i don't think there should be
such an organization but i imagine this is still true if you wander into an eastern division apa hotel lobby you'll see this sea of people who basically look identical all the guys are a little bit scruffy and there's sport jackets and sneakers in there
right right so the superficial stuff there's a kind of homogenous appearance um but when i cast about thinking about philosophers i've known they're inside they're often surprisingly different surprisingly different in the way they live their lives and what matters to
them and what they think is reasonable um so i can think about it some more but i actually don't know what the uh uh what have we come up with it's a really good question as you have tried to apply a biography of a sort to jon stewart mill tenecha if you did the same to derek parfit what
kind of understanding do you come away with don't spend too much time don't spend your whole life living at all souls and what's wrong with all souls all souls is wonderful but don't spend too much time but at the margin right here in addition to philosophers um well
parfait wrote a wonderful first book i mean i still teach this first book the reasons in person's book um his last book was horrifically awful i don't know if i want to blame it on the institution but two volumes it's trying to reply to every possible criticism right
it's so bad so um it's thin in the way that the first one isn't so i was actually visiting also at all souls when he was finishing it up and i tried to have conversations with him about it and about the draft right and um and you know we had frequent conversations um
you know after lunch in the and they would within seconds turn into parfait saying but look it's obviously right you just know that torturing babies for fun is a bad thing and whatever you think about the merits of torturing babies not that i think it's a good thing there's a thinness to that
you can sort of see that the environment has somehow whittled him down or thinned him down i don't know enough to say for sure how it happened but but that's my impression it's a it's it's too cloistered an environment for you for you to want to spend that much of
your life in it should philosophers read their papers out loud word for word as is so commonly the practice in seminars economists don't ever do this right most academics don't but philosophers do is that good or bad i know why they do it and it's actually what i do it's
becoming a practice that's less frequent but i know why they do it suppose you're in some other field maybe it's economics or it's um a lab science right when you when you turn up to give a talk your talk is describing something else right the result you got in your lab or
right but when you're a philosopher and you turn up to give your talk um the result is the talk right and so you want to make sure that it's as carefully crafted as you can make it because you can't just sort of point over somewhere else to your
you know to the the the graphs you you got right um so i do understand why people do it that way it makes sense to me at the beginning i mean they make it boring right there's no reason that when you read a paper it has to come out boring that's just bad you know staging but um
but i understand why they they scripted but isn't some of it rent-seeking we might be better if we had a rule that no one would do it so to some extent people do it so they don't screw up and they want to get a higher post or keep the post they have but that's to some extent
zero some game and if they just all were more willing to be more interesting uh there'd be more philosophy more interest in philosophy there'd be more errors but wouldn't that be a better equilibrium um so i really don't think it's about um um well there's let me separate out two
things there's interesting and then there's um uh i don't know protecting yourself from people people's complaints i actually think that maybe this is just me right um i have a a a a a blind spot for my own practice right but i do script my own talks but i rehearse them so it
looks like i'm right they're interactive right that's that's the way it looks right um i don't just monotonously read the thing that is written so as they type right um and um everybody could do that and that would just be uh spare people a lot of pain right um
but i do see why you want to make sure that your formulations are precise and that's not um um that's not a sacri you're not sacrificing interest for that um you want to make sure you set it exactly right not because you're competing with other people but because
the formulation is what you have to convey now here's something you here's something you could be thinking we could just get rid of the talks right so in previous step stages in my life i thought um why do i bother going to talks i mean i can read way faster than i can hear
and if i zone out for a moment you know when i'm reading i can just go back but if i zone out while they're giving the talk i can't raise my hand and say can you just repeat the last five minutes right so it's just not efficient the reason you go to talks is for the uh
the q a right um it's that point of plato so you want to see if the person can answer questions about what the about the view they presented but then you want them to have the view presented clearly you don't want the questions to be then cleaning up the sloppiness and the
presentation because you know they hadn't stuck to the the way they thought it out but let's do all q a then so university of chicago used to do that to some extent they still do right everyone has read the paper and you start with q a isn't that much better if you can
i think it does better if you can get people to do it it's great i've done a lot of talks in sort of this format usually they actually split the difference when you do a talk like this um people ask you to do a sort of five-minute warm-up to kind of get people all on the ball together uh
but yeah i have a lot of fun doing that and it makes sense to me to ask you another forcing economics question assuming that your will is disposed of in the way that you would prefer how much would i have to pay you to step into a star trek transporter machine
so you'll materialize somewhere else you can debate axante whether or not that's the real you perhaps you've been murdered and replaced with a double and you're gone but maybe it's simply you and that's all there is something like nozik's closest continuer theory
at what price are you indifferent to stepping into the machine so you're asking a what is two questions bundled one is like how much are you a physicalist and the second is how altruistic are you because if you get paid a billion dollars and you're zapped into non-existence
that billion dollars will someday save many lives right or help your family or some combination so um uh what i i'm gonna be coy and explain why you're not gonna get an answer so um you're not gonna get the money then that's fine um so um you know uh
if you're a philosopher you're already in the business of saying look i'm not going to consider lots of economic opportunities there are lots of ways to make much more money than this right so um i mean this is actually material i've taught and i think about i have an
ongoing interest in personal identity although it's a little bit different from the parfaity-like interest that from the from these kinds of things and um so here's how i teach right um the class they turn up having read something maybe it's some of reasons and persons
and it has teletransporters and things like teletransporters and i come to class with an outline of arguments that i've extracted from um from the reading and maybe they come to class i often assign his homework something and something like that they come to class with an outline of an
argument they've extracted from a passage in the reading and we step through one of these arguments and i ask them what's wrong with it right and i have really bright students so it might take them a little while to get going but they get going and they start producing
objections and more objections and more objections and the objections don't run out at some point i say okay it's time to move on we're moving to the next argument but not because they ran out of objections i'll give you a data point actually there's a sometimes i teach the same
thing more than once and there's a paper that i found it works to start a practical reasoning class off with it's michael smith's human theory of motivation you might know it or you might not right it works for the purpose and when students come up with an
interesting decisive trenchant cool objection i mean i type it up for them and give it out to them in the next class but i also save it i'm compiling these objections i think this paper is something like 25 pages and i now have a document that's more than 30 pages of objections
the objections don't run out and so when you ask me what's your the resolved view in this problem space where i've been looking at arguments where i know very well that the objections don't run out i don't really have a view so if jeff bezos offers you 10 billion dollars
to step into the transporter you say no think of all the lives that could save well that's when i start to think about it right okay but he gives you a minute to decide right he gives you limited time the offer is going to expire probably i shrug and walk away the way i
shrug and walk away when you know before i left salt lake some guy turned up on my doorstep and he had the story about why i should install solar panels on my roof it made economic sense and i just kind of shrugged and said it's a distraction i'm i'm trying to stay focused
last two questions at the very beginning you mentioned the importance of one's own experience for practical reasoning if you would to sum up in a nutshell what you think you as a human being and philosopher have special experience of that you draw upon how would you
describe that you won't be surprised to hear that if i have if there's a domain in which i think i have special experience meaning experience that most people don't have um it's in philosophy i have um uh uh something like 40 years of training and kind of
okay this this is promising this is going to work pan out into something interesting uh this probably is not uh this will come together in a real cool way oh no that one's not going anywhere right it's very specialized not a lot of people have a use for it but it's unusual and i've got it
last question why do you view aesthetics as so central to philosophy leverage so aesthetics has been ghettoized you know if you look back a couple hundred years if you look at people who are sort of strong all-round philosophers they knew they had to have views and
aesthetics because they would need those views for something else uh kant had to have used in aesthetics to make sure he'd gotten the first critique right um chopra had to have use in aesthetics nietzsche had to have used in aesthetics uh hume had to have used in aesthetics
um and somehow we've gotten the idea that well okay aesthetics it's housed in philosophy departments for historical reasons but everybody has the attitude that we already know we don't need to listen to anything these people have to tell us we don't care and they
also think uh but and the people who do aesthetics have somehow internalized this they often they typically don't expect anyone else to be interested in what they do and to have a use for what they do this is terribly wrong so here's more experience since we're
talking about philosophical experience my experience is that when you look at problem issues and aesthetics that crop up when you're thinking about one thing or another including logic epistemology um uh kind of frankfurt stuff about what it takes to own what you
you know what you think um there's aesthetics at the heart of it and when you look at the aesthetics problem the rest of it changes you get leverage so yeah you should absolutely pay attention to aesthetics if you're in philosophy elijah milgram thank you very much thank you