Joe Rogan & Lawrence Krauss on Wanting to Believe

Hello, freak bitches. I'd be frozen than liquid. Okay? And it's some numbers that tell you whether it's acting like it's frozen or liquid. Just like I could describe the beer, I could define some numbers that would tell me whether the beer was frozen or liquid. And so as the universe cooled, that cosmic fluid, which is everywhere, all these elementary particles, if you wish, that are permeating space, suddenly found themselves preferring, as the universe cooled down, to be in a certain configuration rather than another configuration. Okay? And it really is no different than the arbitrary state of an icicle. No. Exactly. It's just essentially as arbitrary. It's not magic, and it's not as if, you know, if we, in some sense, the accidents of what the dust that's on your window and the wind that's blowing and everything else is going to determine what that pattern looks like. Every day, if you had a new cold day, the icicle pattern would look different. Okay? It's not as if every day you'd have the same icicle pattern on your window. It would be different. And that's what I mean by an accident. It's not as if the laws of physics at some level couldn't have told you that if you knew all the configurations on that day, why it would look one way or another. But it's not significant. That's what I mean. There's no special significance to that pattern. That meant God meant it to be. And there's no special significance to the universe in which we live that meant God meant it to be. It could have been quite different. We should celebrate that it's not quite different because you and I can have this conversation. So it's a wonderful thing that it is the way it is. And let's celebrate that we're, that we've evolved, and I can still say that word in this country, we've evolved a consciousness so that we can appreciate all of the wonders of the universe. Let's celebrate that. So it doesn't mean we're meaningless just because the universe has no purpose. We make our own purpose in our own life. It means to me in some sense that life is more purposeful. There isn't someone pulling the strings. We're pulling the strings. And so it's okay to live in a purposeless universe. It doesn't make life worse. It makes it much better. We just always ascribe significance to things that happened to us. The physicist Richard Feynman used to go up to people and he used to say, you won't believe what happened to me today. You won't believe. And people say what? He'd say, absolutely nothing. Okay? Because when things happen to you, suddenly they're significant. You know, you have a million crazy dreams. And then one night you dream that your friend is going to break their arm. The next day they break their leg. You go, oh my God, I'm clairvoyant. You know, or he'll say this. He'll say, you know, I just saw a license plate. You wouldn't believe I just saw a license plate. It was J 24 7 9 6. Can you believe it? Because, you know, that's as significant as seeing a license plate that says 1 1 1 1 1 1 or a license plate that says I am God. Okay? They're all just as significant. But the things that appear to mean something to us suddenly take on some significance. Because we're hardwired to want to believe. Just like the X-Files said. We want to believe. We all want to believe. We're hard. Here's the reason. We want to ascribe meaning to everything. And I think there's an evolutionary reason for that. For example, if you're an early modern human on the savannah in Africa, the leaves can be rustling in the trees next to you. You can say, no reason. Or you can say, maybe there's a lion there. And what happened was, so maybe there's a lion causing. Maybe there's a cause for that happening. Now those of our potential ancestors that said, eh, there's no reason. They got eaten. Okay? The ones that didn't are the ones that reproduced. Right. And so in some sense we're kind of hardwired by evolution to want to find purpose and meaning in everything. But isn't that just recognizing danger or potential danger? No, it is. In that case. But a side effect of anticipating danger is to ascribe significance to things that may not... You're much luckier if you're... Not luckier, but you're much more likely to survive if you ascribe significance to everything, perhaps, in the early days. Than if you ascribe significance to nothing. But when you're talking about significance, essentially you're talking about divine significance. Well, no. But it can be divine significance, but it can just be... You can think there's more to it than meets the eye. But when you're talking about clairvoyance or when you're talking about some sort of a divine intervention by a deity, you're talking about something powerful. This is the one that is meant to be the leader of this tribe. Yeah, but that's a consequence. Yeah, but it works at all levels. It works at all levels from the fact that the leaves are rustling and it means it's lion. But once we have that hardwired thing, then our desire to believe continues. And social beings maybe found that if they imposed some meaning on the universe, on a universe which otherwise is hostile and dangerous, that maybe it might help bind them in tribes. That maybe it would help make them happier about being alive early on because they might be so scared of a universe that wants to kill them all the time, that it would embolden them. So there's obviously an evolutionary purpose to what is religion. Because if there wasn't, religions wouldn't be everywhere, right? I mean, pretty well all human cultures have religions. Each one is inconsistent with every other one, which is the reason we know that they're probably all wrong. But it works. The fact that it's universal must mean there's some evolutionary utility to believing. But then certain things eventually, even though they worked and were useful early on as our human condition changes, they may not be so useful. Well, that seems to be the place where we're at now as a civilization. Yeah, exactly. I would argue that religion is turning out to be counterproductive now. It may have been useful early on in human history. But now what it's doing is it's getting in the way not only of progress, but of human cooperation. And so evolution is now counterproductive. But the great thing is we have a consciousness, we have an intellect, so we can actually overcome that evolutionary predilection by realizing we have that predilection. And as Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. So if you're a scientist, what you have to do is ask yourself, am I believing that because I want to believe or because there's evidence. So if we constantly are skeptical of ourselves, we can know to overcome that ingrained impulse we have to want to believe. That's one of the utilities of science. So I may listen to you and like you, and I may listen to another radio person and not like them. And I may be therefore naturally willing to assume that they're wrong and you're right. But I should also say to myself, is it really the case or is it just because I like Joe Rogan and I don't like, you know, you pick your favorite right wing nut. And so we should be asking ourselves, okay, maybe I should go beyond my predilections, beyond my biases, to ask why I am sympathetic to what I'm hearing. And if we did that in everyday life, I think we'd cut through the crap more carefully. So science says, look, we are hardwired to want to have these weird beliefs. And it's fine. Maybe some of them are right. But the only way to know is to test them. If we're not willing to test our beliefs and subject them to the test of nature, then we're going to be deluded.