Freedom of Thought & Absolute Truth | Joe Rogan & Brian Cox

But some stuff's ruled out. Well I love the way you communicate this because it takes into consideration human nature and like I love Dawkins. He's fantastic. I think he's very very very valuable but he likes to call people idiots and the problem with that is people go fuck you you're an idiot. Like it's a natural inclination when you insult people to argue back and to sort of dig their heels in. And you don't do that and I think that's very important and I think that a guy like Dawkins just gets frustrated from all these years of debates with people who are uneducated or saying ridiculous things. He's a bit of a curmudgeon you know and he seems to be softening as he's getting older. Well he's an evolutionary biologist and that's the the front line in some sense isn't it? Yes. I mean the thing about particle physics is that you don't get a lot of shit because people don't understand what you're talking about. Whereas evolutionary biology is right there. So I understand his frustration. Oh I do too. Having said that you know I've kind of softened a bit over the years actually because now I think at this point both in the US actually and in Britain and in some other countries we are at a point you've sort of alluded to it where everybody's angry. There's a lot of anger and a lot of it's justified by the way. You know we could talk about that you know income inequality and all those things. So there's justified anger but it seems to me that there are people of goodwill who need to band together to diffuse the anger in our societies. Otherwise we won't have countries like the United States. Yes. It's the United States because it's united and everybody you've got the United American flag there you know it's a sense of belonging and identity and togetherness in a country which you've got to preserve. And so I've stopped actually picking. I used to for example quite enjoy picking fights with Deepak Chopra on Twitter you know and it's just for me to laugh you know and you just do it and he says some crazy stuff and he's and but I've started almost I've stopped doing it going well but relative to some of the other people right he's someone who means well yes I don't agree with virtually anything he says. However he's a well-meaning person and so I've started trying to seek common ground now that's why I get for example gave a talk to the bishops that asked me to come yeah I don't agree with them on the framework their theological framework but they mean well most of them. Yeah. So I think seeking consensus and diffusing anger as you said is it is incumbent on all of us especially people like us who have a public voice. We need to diffuse some of this anger because otherwise it will consume everyone. Yes I've tried very hard to evolve in that respect and just get better at communicating ideas and get better at understanding how people receive those ideas and I think that's it's there's it's easy to get lazy and to insult and to yeah it's fun. Especially me I mean I'm a comedian. It's part of what I do is insult people. Yeah. It's funny. For humor I want to entertain people that's the whole idea behind it but I think in terms of like discussing ideas especially that are so personal to people like religion I've reexamined the way I interpret these ideas and the way I talk about these things. Yeah. It's interesting. I did a BBC program ages ago I was asked to do it on the thing called the Wreath lectures that the BBC had done since 1952 I think it was and Robert Oppenheimer did them in 53 and it was it's fascinating you can get the transcripts online they're free and you can get one recording of the five they taped over the other four can you believe it. Wow. They erased them because they wanted to tape for something else. No. It's just unbelievable. One of them exists of Oppenheimer giving these lectures. Oh my god how could they do that? But you can make it nice. They taped over. Can you buy more tapes? Bertrand Russell did them though. They taped over Bertrand Russell. Oh my god. Because tape was so expensive. But he talks crazy. But it's brilliant. It's called science and the common understanding and they weren't very well received because they thought he was going to talk about the Manhattan Project so they thought he was going to talk about the atom bomb you know because he ran it basically but he didn't. He talked about how thinking like a scientist which means thinking in the way that nature forces you to think can be valuable in other areas. And that's an insight in itself the great thing the unique thing about science is nature forces you to think like that. You can't have an opinion. You can't have an opinion about gravity. Right. You just jump out the building you can hit the ground. That's it. Doesn't matter what your opinion is. And he said so if you think about for example quantum mechanics so sometimes you think of a particle like an electron sometimes it has to it's a point like object. It behaves like a little billiard ball thing a pool ball that bounces around. But sometimes it behaves like an extended thing like a wavy thing and nature forces you to hold both ideas in your head at the same time in order to get a complete picture of the objects a description of an electron. And he said that's the valuable thing about quantum mechanics. You know unless you're doing electronics or inventing lasers you don't need to know this stuff. But if you want to learn how to think it's valuable to be forced to hold different ideas in your head at the same time. It's really teaching you not to be an absolutist teaching you the example he uses is because he was I think he was had problems with McCarthy and all those things didn't he. So you think he's right in the 50s. So he said you can either be you can be a communist which in his definition would be that you think the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Right. So say society is all that matters. Or you could be a libertarian right on the far conservative end where you think that the individual is the only thing that matters. And that's it. But actually of course to have a function in society you need a mixture of the two and we can wait it one way or the other. But you need to hold both ideas in your head at the same time. And that's he said that's one of the most valuable things about science because it forces you into modes of thought that are valuable. And that's what we're talking about here. It's some absolute positions are always just a blink of subsets of what's actually happening. You can't understand the world by being an extremist. Yeah. You've got to hold all these views in your head. Well that I find that so often on this podcast because I talk with people I agree with and disagree with. And I always try to put myself in the head of the person that I disagree with. I always try to figure out how they're coming to those conclusions or where they're coming from. And I think it's so it's so important to not be married to ideas. I got a conversation with someone about this. And they said sometimes you change your opinions a lot. I go yeah I do. I do. I'm flip-flopping. I'm not a politician. I'm not flip-flopping. I'm thinking. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I will have one opinion on a thing whether it's a controversial thing like universal basic income. I'll change my mind 100 percent in two weeks. And I'll go no no no. Now I think it's probably a good idea. And then I'll go back and forth. No no no no no. People need but it's as cruel as it seems. They need motivation. And I don't know. I bounce around with these things. But I've tried really hard as I've gotten older to have less absolute opinions. Yeah. Yeah. Richard Feynman another great physicist wrote a similar essay at a similar time to Oppenheimer. And he also worked on the Manhattan Project. And it's called The Value of Science. I think that was 1955. And they both shared actually a surprise I think that they were still alive because they thought that the power they'd given to the politicians, the atom bomb, would destroy everything. They didn't think the political system would control it. And it did. So that's an remarkable thing. We're still here. But in that essay he said that the most valuable thing about science is the realization that we don't know. And he said he said in that statement, he calls science a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, by the way. He said in that statement is the open door, the open channel, he called it. So if we want to make progress, we have to understand that we don't know everything. And we have to leave things to future generations. And we can be uncertain and we can change our minds. And he said that that's that it's a great last line. I can't remember exactly what he says, but he said it's something like is our duty as scientists to communicate the value of uncertainty and the value of freedom of thought to all future generations. That's the point. That's what freedom of thought means. Freedom of thought means the freedom to change your mind. In fact, that's what democracy is. If you think about it, democracy is a trial and error system. So it's the admission that we don't know how to do it. Therefore, we'll change every four years. We'll change the president or every eight years, we'll change the president. Why? Because the president doesn't know how to do it. So someone better. There will be someone better that comes along and then someone worse and someone better. But it's a trial and error system. And he's right. And he's right that that is the open door. That's that's the road to progress. It's certainly better than humility. Yeah. One of the things that I love so much about Bertrand Russell and about Feynman was how human they were. They were very human. I mean, Feynman liked to play the bongos and chasing girls and Bertrand Russell was addicted to tobacco. He would talk about how he wouldn't fly unless he could smoke. Like he had to get us was back when they had smoking sections on airplanes and he had his pipe and he just refused to fly without tobacco. He couldn't imagine being without tobacco. It's so strange. He was such a brilliant guy to be addicted to such a gross thing. Yeah, you're right. Because I think these are people that found existence joyous. They wanted to know. They just wanted to know stuff. They didn't want to know everything because you can't know everything. I suppose that's what you think about what the job of a scientist is. It's to stand on the edge of the known because you're a research scientist. So if there's nothing to know, then you've got no job. So you have to be naturally comfortable with not knowing. And there's one thing I really do think it was how do we begin to patch our countries back up again. One of the reasons I think in education is to teach people the value of uncertainty, of not knowing. It is not weak to not know. It's actually natural not to know and not be afraid of it. And that's one of the problems with religion is to say that you know when you do not or to say that you have absolute truth and absolute knowledge of something when it can't really exist.