Well so taking the red pill on free.
makes you much more forgiving of a lot of the stuff yeah because you see just every one is an open system no one authored themselves well one created themselves no one can directly regulate the effect that of every influence that they had or didn’t have you know it’s like you are the totality of what brought you here I mean the universe is sort of just pushed you to this point in time and the only thing you’ve got is your brain and it states and that is based on your genes and the totality of environmental influences you as a system have had working on you up until this moment and so the next words that come out of your mouth are part of that process now the some people find this to be a you know frankly demoralizing picture or like I think okay well I’m you’re telling me I’m just a robot but you’re a robot that is continuously open influence to the influence of you know internally based on its own processes I mean it’s like there’s top-down control of you know executive function in the brain to your you know your emotional life say.
And you’re continually open to the influences of culture right you know the culture is this operating system that you’re interacting with in each moment and whatever is getting in can change you in radical ways very quickly there’s no telling how much you can change on the basis of one new idea coming your way right now I would argue the that process of change and if I say something that changes your view on anything that’s not evidence of free will that is evidence of just yet more causality I mean you don’t pick the changes that come your way if I get you to see something that you didn’t see a moment before you’re not responsible for the fact that you didn’t see it a moment before and you’re not responsible for the fact that you now see it it’s just like the dominoes just kept falling right but it does give you this a far more patient sense of one it just you know all the causes and conditions that have created this odious behavior you’re now disposed react to in the world right like you can everything on some level is more of a force of nature than it is something.
That you need to take personally it’s like if there’s a hurricane blowing outside we don’t respond to it the same way we would respond to you know al Qaeda dropping a bomb on us right it might create the same amount of damage but the in the latter case where we have an identified entity right we feel like okay now we’re in the presence of Bible Verses human evil and we have to go kill these right now we may have to kill them right because that may be the only way of putting out this you know stopping the damage they’re committed to causing but and we would kill hurricanes if we could kill them right I mean we would you know we would nullify them but the feeling we have in both cases is very different the feeling you have attributing ultimate authorship to a person’s behavior is super narrow psychologically ethically and it’s you know the feeling of vengeance right like don’t don’t you have a you this feeling of vengeance is so natural to get triggered in response to a person it’s not natural in response to a San Diego wild animal who may have done something.
Right I mean like you would like I mean there’s been examples of this where people have taken vengeance on animals and it just looks like a kind of moral dysfunction on the part of the people who did it I mean there’s a famous picture of a an elephant that got hung from a Parking 2 railroad crane I think back in the 20s right so like this is a Ringling Brothers circus elephant escaped and it ran you know rampage through the streets and it trampled you know a few people that and the people in the town I don’t know where this it was a Baltimore or someplace we’re so outraged that they’ve decided to lynch the elephant right like and yet that’s there’s something uncanny about that sort misappropriation of agency to an elephant what is a what is a mistreated Kathryn Worth circus elephant gonna do when it gets out and it’s terrified and it’s trying to get away from people it’s going to trample a few people so we have a very different set of books we keep ethically for humans and but some of its understandable some of its inevitable but a lot of it gives us moral illusions that we don’t need to have and gives.
It it gives us a kind of just an inability to take stock of all the variables that are actually guiding human behavior and react to them and mitigate them and disincentivize them intelligently I mean punishment makes sense not because people really deserve at bottom whatever their punishments are it make sense in a retro retributive paradigm it makes sense if it’s the best tool to discourage dangerous behavior and it works right so it’s like you know if you’re gonna punish people for they can’t control well that’s right because if you much as you punish them that you’re not going to you’re not going to moderate the behavior so you have to punish people for that are actually under voluntary control and it only makes sense if it’s the only tool to do the job and if the moment you have I mean this is a may have brought this up last time we spoke about free will but this is really the sort of reductio ad absurdum of where most people are on this topic the moment we really understand Flies Innate human evil at the level of.
The brain the moment we understand psychopathy se which is maybe that’s not the totality of evil but let’s you know certainly Center the bullseye once we understand psychopathy is a neurological condition that’s governed by genes environment and we can actually intrude at the level of the brain to mitigate it like so compa the– becomes a disease right it becomes a an injuries a syndrome right that we can fix and let’s say it’s let’s say it’s a very simple fix let’s say it’s a pill right let’s say it’s just a neurotransmitter bitter imbalance in the presence of that breakthrough we will feel very differently about that species of Rousseau Believed human evil we will not judge it in the same way will because what will happen is you’ll give people the pill and they’ll say I can’t believe I was that dangerous like I gotta thank you for like I I’m as horrified by who I was before you cured me as you were and it’s totally soso suck psychopathy in the presence of a cure for it would look much more like diabetes than it looks like evil in the present case and.
People aren’t imagining what it would like what it would be like to be there what it would be like to actually fully understand the under underlying neurophysiology here and actually have something that means there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to deal with it in a simple way but it’s certainly possible and I mean the classic example is just like the Charles Whitman example where know you have a Frontal Lobe brain tumor that’s causing this aberrant behavior in that case everyone sees okay this is not evil this is a Survival Rate brain tumor that’s the tower shooter yeah back in 64 I think and so but in the same way that a Life Expectancy brain tumor tumors exculpatory there I think a full understanding of the underlying neurology would be exculpatory again it mean you in the meantime but you know before we get there obviously we have to lock up dangerous people if there’s no way to help them but the more we see causes the more we view this in terms of just sheer bad luck right like there are people who when they’re adults are quintessentially evil who we and they provoke the greatest feeling of vengeance from us but if you just.
Walk back their timeline you recognize that at a certain they were four years old at one point right they were the four year old who was destined to become this terrible person right it’s an unlucky four-year-old right you know and so at what point where’s the bright line that says okay here’s the point where it’s appropriate to just hate this person and feel no compassion and it on the other side of this line you should just feel compassion because this person is unlucky there is no such line and a complete understanding of this life line in scientific terms would obliterate any line think you have right it would just be this cascade of causation and you know adding randomness to the picture help right just it’s random this is just you know somebody is in your brain rolling dice and influencing your behavior that way well that’s that give you the free will people think they have so there isn’t there’s ironically there is what seems on some level deflationary of the gravitas of the human spirit for people opens the door to at least in my view a far more ethical tolerant patient and understanding.
View of you know human failings and human frailty just and then at that point you can just have a conversation about what’s pragmatic works what helps people change like in this person over here who’s doing terrible is there something we can do to make him a better person well if there is let’s do that without all the judgment wouldn’t it be amazing if that’s how we treated these public shaming events like wouldn’t it be amazing if we gave someone an opportunity to say this is what I did this is how awful I feel about this I would never do that again I’m a different person that was 20 years ago whatever it is and have everybody join in hey anyone could be thank you for being honest about who you are now thank you for evolving thank you for expressing yourself in a way that maybe other people who have also committed really on just unsavory or just unfortunate in the past unfortunate acts in the past they can feel relieved by the fact that you’ve grown and evolved to become a better person oh yeah and that you’re a different thing now and you are the.
Product all of your experiences you’re not this one thing you’re not stuck in who you were when you were 16 years old but if you were marky-mark and you hit that guy with a stick whatever you know whatever he did you know you’re not stuck in that spot forever these don’t mark it’s not a Scarlet Letter it’s done a mark on your forehead that you keep for life yeah I mean think about the Liam Neeson incident which I find so interesting is that there’s a case where I mean what he’s revealing about himself is pretty amazing right it’s like he just decided okay we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for who I used to be right you know and just volunteered this and for me like you know uh I don’t actually understand that State of Mind I mean there many aberrant states of mind that I can understand I certainly understand what it’s like want to harm somebody and you know to feel vengeance and all that but the instrumental violence piece I don’t understand I’ve never felt like okay this type of person wronged me or someone close to me so to any person of that type will do right like that.
Right but that is such a problem the world over in human history yes that it is just fascinating ethically for someone of his you know stature to reveal that about himself and he put it in terms of Honor I mean it was like it was an honor I mean this is what this is what is so dysfunctional about on our culture right this is what you this is what we see more in the south and anywhere else in the country and this is what you see basically everywhere you go in the Middle East is just and this is what Islam inculcates to a degree that’s fairly unmatched in its community this notion of honor is does link up with this tendency to find satisfaction in instrumental violence like but when you try to run that software on my brain that just looks like madness right the idea that any other person will do right of a certain type right that’s just you know III don’t read that resonates not at all right and so it’s just damn interesting and the fact that the lesson being taken from this seems to be this is the this should be the end of your career for having talked about this in the way and again a band you know apologies if.
There’s some part of the story that I’ve gotten wrong I’m not or missing but it seemed to me that he was always counting this in the horror and amazement appropriate to the disclosure like he can’t believe he was inhabiting this state of consciousness and you know it’s just an amazing thing to reveal about yourself so yeah and I’m sure he regrets every second of it yeah and that’s the wrong punchline yeah right you know and the thing that should happen is someone with a lot to lose should be able to say you know how ugly a human mind can be this is an experience I had right this is who I was and you know how much I have to live for and how much I have to lose we have to talk about this kind of mania that can get humming on a human brain right we see this eight every time you open the paper you see someone in the grip of this kind of thing right it even happened to me right I think it’s an amazing conversation to start and the fact that the result is just you know and an auto to Faye is the problem we’re trying to fight our way through it