Philosophy Professor: The 400-Year-Old Philosopher Who Predicted Our Broken Reality
Summary
Are you sure this life is real? How do we know this life is real? What does being “real” even mean?
According to Blaise Pascal, everything we know, everything we think we know is real, is a matter of feeling. It’s not a matter of reasoning, ultimately, at the foundation. This concept anchors my conversation today with Yuval Avnur, a Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College and author of Why Read Pascal Today?
We dive into Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century true polymath genius who believed that a human being is a heart with a belief-forming mechanism attached as an afterthought. According to Pascal, feeling something with your heart is a way of knowing. We get into why this idea provides the perfect lens to view everything from the escalation of political polarization to rabid online echo chambers to moon-landing conspiracies. Instead of getting trapped in those realities, Yuval argues that Pascal offers a way out.
He lays out Pascal’s remarkably modern advice on how to actually persuade someone: stop dunking on them with red-faced, shrieking facts, and start asking why the world looks the way it does from where the other person’s standing. It’s amazing how a guy who died over 350 years ago understands the internet age better than most of us alive today.
We also get into whether or not we live in a simulation, what most people completely get wrong about Pascal’s Wager, what a debate would look like between Blaise Pascal, devout Catholic, against staunch atheist Sam Harris, why AI art makes us feel alone, and The Experience Machine Dilemma: Would you abandon reality for a perfectly fake life?
Guest bio: Dr. Yuval Avnur is a professor of philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department at Scripps College in Claremont, California, specializing in epistemology, skepticism, and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of Why Read Pascal Today? (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which explores the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal’s insights into human nature, belief, reason, and the search for meaning. Avnur is also the author of The Skeptic and the Veridicalist and co-editor of A Companion to Pascal, examining questions about knowledge, reality, and how we understand the world.
Top Takeaways
Blaise Pascal and the Simulation Hypothesis: How Do We Know Reality Is Real?
The conversation begins with a philosophical question that has fascinated Yuval Avnur since childhood: how can we know that the world we're experiencing isn't a dream or simulation? Drawing on Bertrand Russell and the idea of inference to the best explanation, Avnur questions whether the existence of an ordinary physical world actually provides a sufficiently better explanation of our experiences than a simulated one. Pascal offers a different perspective: our fundamental certainty about reality may ultimately rest on feeling rather than logical proof. The discussion introduces one of the episode's central themes, that what feels obviously true to us may depend on something deeper than the evidence itself.
Pascal's Pensées: Why One of History's Greatest Philosophers Is Still Misunderstood
Avnur explains how teaching Pascal's famous wager eventually led him to question whether he had been presenting it accurately. When he returned to the Pensées, the collection of notes Pascal left unfinished before his death, he discovered a much richer philosophy than the familiar argument about gambling on God's existence. One passage particularly intrigued him: Pascal suggests that the same sky and birds could constitute proof of God for one person but not another. Avnur's investigation of that puzzle eventually became the foundation of Why Read Pascal Today?, a book that argues Pascal's insights into belief and human psychology remain remarkably relevant more than 350 years after his death.
Political Polarization and Conspiracy Theories: Why People See Different Realities
One of the episode's strongest connections to modern life is Pascal's insight that people can encounter the same evidence and arrive at radically different conclusions. Avnur applies this to political polarization, social media echo chambers, and conspiracy theories, including claims that the moon landing was faked. His argument is that evidence doesn't always determine what someone believes on its own. People interpret it through existing desires, fears, expectations, and beliefs. What seems indisputable to one person can seem deeply suspicious to another. Understanding this psychological dimension helps explain why simply presenting more facts often fails to resolve fundamental disagreements.
The Art of Persuasion: Blaise Pascal's Alternative to Winning Arguments
Avnur draws on Pascal's essay The Art of Persuasion to explain why attacking someone's interpretation of reality often makes them more defensive. Pascal observed that people generally don't mind learning that they've overlooked something, but they resist being told that what they've already seen is wrong. Rather than beginning by dismantling another person's beliefs, Avnur suggests acknowledging why those beliefs make sense from their perspective and then introducing another way of seeing the same evidence. We explore this through debates about moon-landing conspiracies and the performative arguments that dominate YouTube and social media. The goal is not to pretend every interpretation is equally valid, but to create the conditions for genuine persuasion rather than another shouting match.
Pascal's Philosophy of the Heart: Why Feelings Shape What We Believe
According to Avnur's interpretation of Pascal, the heart is the principal organ of belief. Pascal understood the heart not simply as emotion, but as the collection of motivations, desires, fears, and attachments that influence how people experience reality. Avnur connects this idea to modern psychological concepts such as motivated reasoning and cognitive bias. Someone who expects hostility may interpret an ambiguous facial expression as threatening, just as someone deeply suspicious of government may perceive ordinary information as evidence of a conspiracy. Crucially, Avnur emphasizes that Pascal was not a relativist who believed every interpretation was correct. He believed that some states of the heart were better than others, and that changing how we feel about reality can change what we're capable of understanding.
Pascal on Happiness, Social Media, and the Endless Pursuit of Validation
The discussion examines Pascal's argument that human beings are trapped in a cycle of wanting things that fail to satisfy them once acquired. Avnur describes Pascal's concept of concupiscence, a condition in which people become excessively attached to themselves and the things they can possess or experience. Pascal believed this misplaced attachment explains much of humanity's restlessness and unhappiness. Avnur connects the idea to modern social media behavior, where people immediately photograph achievements, vacations, meals, and even their children to present an appealing version of themselves to others. From Pascal's perspective, the constant need for recognition reflects a deeper dissatisfaction with the self. His proposed solution was religious: redirecting love away from the self and toward God.
Pascal's Wager Explained: Why Believing in God Is More Than a Calculated Bet
Avnur challenges the popular explanation of Pascal's Wager as a straightforward calculation that belief in God offers infinite potential rewards with comparatively little downside. He argues that Pascal was more interested in transforming what people love than convincing them to intellectually accept God's existence. Using an arranged marriage analogy, Avnur explains how someone might begin participating in the practices of a relationship before genuinely experiencing love. Similarly, Pascal encouraged religious practices that could put someone in a position to develop faith, while insisting that belief ultimately required divine grace rather than sheer willpower. The wager, on Avnur's interpretation, is less about choosing a winning bet and more about changing the condition of one's heart.
Can Atheists Learn From Pascal? The Secular Version of His Philosophy
Although Pascal's worldview was deeply Catholic, Avnur argues that many of his insights can be meaningful without accepting his religious conclusions. We explore whether experiences of gratitude, wonder, and connection can carry significance without attributing them to a creator. Avnur introduces a secular version of Pascal's Wager built around the belief that goodness will ultimately prevail, even when individual lives or historical events involve suffering. He also discusses the French film My Night at Maud's, in which a Marxist character applies wager-like reasoning to the possibility that history has meaningful direction. These examples suggest that Pascal's approach can help people examine which beliefs and commitments make their lives more meaningful, even when certainty is impossible.
AI Art vs. Human Creativity: Why Artificial Intelligence Can't Replace Human Connection
Moving from Pascal to artificial intelligence, Avnur discusses his essay The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn't Worry, and Neither Should You, inspired partly by students who feared that AI would make human beings unnecessary. He draws on philosopher Martin Buber's distinction between I-It and I-Thou relationships to explain why AI-generated music, writing, and art may not provide the same experience as human creations. A song written or performed by another person can facilitate an encounter with that person through their work. AI-generated music might produce similar sounds or emotional reactions, but Avnur argues that this particular form of interpersonal connection is absent. His position is not that AI art has no value, or that AI cannot become a tool for human expression, but that generating a convincing product isn't equivalent to replacing the human relationship behind it.
The Experience Machine: Would You Trade Your Real Life for a Perfect Simulation?
The episode concludes with Robert Nozick's famous experience-machine thought experiment. Avnur asks whether I would abandon my real life for a simulated existence filled with extraordinary accomplishments, happiness, and ideal relationships, without ever knowing that the experience was artificial. I ultimately reject the offer, arguing that my attachment to actual relationships and curiosity about the world matter more than the promise of a perfectly satisfying illusion. Avnur uses the response to illustrate his broader argument: the value of an experience cannot always be reduced to how it feels. Being genuinely connected to another person matters even when an artificial substitute could produce identical sensations. The discussion offers a philosophical explanation for why human relationships and creative expression may retain something irreplaceable in an increasingly AI-generated world.
Top 10 Quotes
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity, removing filler, repetition, and false starts while preserving the speakers' original wording and meaning.
Blaise Pascal on Reality: Everything We Know Begins With Feeling
"Everything we know, everything we think we know is a matter of feeling. It's not a matter of reasoning. Ultimately, at the foundation."
— Yuval Avnur
Political Polarization: How People See the Same World Differently
"The world can look so different to two different people that it's proof of something for one and it's not for the other."
— Yuval Avnur
Pascal's Philosophy of Belief: What We Bring to the Evidence
"The evidence or the stuff that we all agree on that happened underdetermines what we make of it and what we think the world is."
— Yuval Avnur
Moon Landing Conspiracies: When Our Beliefs Become Our Reality
"The world isn't telling me that the moon landing was faked. I'm telling me that the moon landing was faked on the basis of ambiguous evidence."
— Yuval Avnur
The Art of Persuasion: Why Arguments Become Personal Attacks
"Nobody minds being told that they don't see everything. What people don't like is when you tell them they're not seeing what they say they're seeing."
— Yuval Avnur
Pascal on Happiness: Why Getting What We Want Never Satisfies Us
"Even when you really want something, once you get it, within minutes you're over it and you want something else. You're never satisfied."
— Yuval Avnur, explaining Pascal's view
Pascal's Wager: Why Love Matters More Than Belief
"It's really about what you love and where your heart is that determines the value and the goodness of your life, not what you believe. The belief is an afterthought. It's a mechanism built on the side of your heart."
— Yuval Avnur
AI Art and Human Loneliness: When Creativity Loses Its Connection
"It is like that feeling of, oh, I am truly alone in this room right now experiencing this thing because there is no human connection."
— Zach Grossfeld
AI Music vs. Human Creativity: Why Algorithms Can't Replace Artists
"A person singing a song to you is not literally replaceable by an algorithm producing the same sounds that stimulate your brain or your eardrums in exactly the same way, because it's not the same thing."
— Yuval Avnur
The Experience Machine: Why Real Human Connection Matters
"It actually matters whether you are part of a we, whether you are part of a system of connections with others, whether you are genuinely encountering someone in an I-Thou, if you like, way. Even if you feel like you are and you're not, that's not as good as actually being in it."
— Yuval Avnur
Full Transcript
Zach: According to Blaise Pascal, everything we know, everything we think we know is real is a matter of feeling. It's not a matter of reasoning. Ultimately, at the foundation, this insight anchors my conversation with Yuval Avnur, professor of philosophy at Scripps College and author of Why Read Pascal Today? Today we dive into Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century true polymath genius who believed that a human being is a heart with a belief-forming mechanism attached as an afterthought. According to Pascal, feeling something with your heart is a way of knowing. We get into why this idea provides the perfect lens to view everything from the escalation of political polarization to raging online echo chambers to moon landing conspiracies.
Yuval: The world can look so different to two different people that it's proof of something for one and it's not for the other. Especially today in today's age where we seem to be living in different worlds, different parts of the population. Even within our country, some people arrive at one conclusion based on what they've learned. Another group of people arrive at a completely different and polar opposite conclusion. And it's a little puzzling. How could we all be looking at the same world and reaching such different conclusions? So, I think Pascal really has something to say about that.
Zach: Instead of getting trapped in those realities, Yuval argues that Pascal offers a way out. He lays out Pascal's remarkably modern advice on how to actually persuade someone. Stop trying to dunk on someone with red-faced, shrieking facts and start asking yourself, why does the world look that way to the other person from where they're standing? It's amazing how a guy who died over 350 years ago understands the internet age better than most of us alive today. We also get into whether or not we live in a simulation, what most people get completely wrong about Pascal's wager, what a debate would look like between devout Catholic Blaise Pascal and staunch atheist Sam Harris. Why AI art makes us feel so alone. And we end off with the experience machine dilemma. Would you abandon this reality for a perfectly fake life?
Yuval: It matters how the world actually is. I think that is the big point that it actually matters whether you are part of a wei, whether you are part of a system of connections with others, whether you are genuinely encountering someone in an I-Thou, if you like, way. Even if you feel like you are and you're not, that's not as good as actually being in it. It weighs something. It matters somewhat that there's real connection in the real meat space. And I think that is some relief.
Zach: Without further ado, let's get into it. Yuval Avnur, thank you so much for joining me on the Zach Show.
Yuval: It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
Zach: Of course. I don't know for me if there's any other way to start out because I need to ask you as someone whose life is consumed by philosophy if there's any philosophical problems or thought experiments or just like what recently has been keeping you awake at night in the world of philosophy?
Yuval: Wow. That's a great question because, well, it's a hard question because there's a lot that keeps me awake at night. Unfortunately, but luckily I had some coffee, so I'll be okay for this, for this podcast. But, I suspect what keeps me awake at night is less deep than what keeps you awake at night.
Zach: Yeah.
Yuval: I mean, I still I'm one of those I got the classic I got a classic case of philosophy. So, I still am consumed by similar things to what kept me up when I was a kid. So, I can tell you two that you've probably that you're probably familiar with. One is just the question of how I know what this life is. So, how do I know that after I wake up when I eventually fall asleep after I wake up, you know, I'll wake up into reality? How do I know that? How do I know? It's a how do I know question, right? How do I know that everything that I consider my to be my life is not just like a dream or in these days we can we can make it more sophisticated and fancy we can say how do I know that this is not all a simulation so of some sort so that those kinds of questions keep me up you know I have to say I don't like get it doesn't keep me up anymore to freak out about maybe this what I call life is not real quote unquote real.
But there are certain solutions that other philosophers offer to that problem and those keep me up because I think well what if that really works? What if that what if what so and so said is exactly how I can know for sure that this life is for real if you want to put it that way. And then I think about that and then I can't sleep. So that's that's a classic one. That's one I've been thinking about since I was a little kid and I'm I'm not done.
Zach: What are some of the solutions that are the most jarring to you?
Yuval: Oh, well, jarring is a good Well, I have so much to tell you, Zach.
Zach: Please [laughter] I will let me join you in the more restless nights.
Yuval: Okay, good. Good. So, I'm going to start with one that's maybe not so jarring, but it's maybe plausible. It maybe works. I don't know. I don't think so ultimately, but I don't know. So, one idea and this goes back to a name that you probably have heard of even if you don't study philosophy is Bertrand Russell from the earlier part of the 20th century. If you consider a hypothesis, let's let's let's think of the problem in these terms. I have a bunch of data, right? My experience of waking life. So, I'm looking at a screen with a picture of me and you on it. Whoever is watching at home is also looking at a screen of some sort. And then maybe their hand, if it's on a phone, you can kind of see your hand and so forth. Maybe you're walking down the street listening to the Zach Show, so you look down and you see your legs pounding the pavement like that.
That let's consider that to be data and let's think, okay, well, what hypothesis best explains this data? So, one hypothesis is that you're in some vast simulation that's somehow feeding your brain the signals that you would that you think you're getting from your senses and from your body, but in fact, it's just you're just a brain being stimulated by a machine to have those experiences. That's one hypothesis. Another hypothesis is just that things are as they seem. You're actually walking down the street. The pavement's really there. Your legs are really there. And one approach to this problem says well let's just think about the explanatory virtues of these two hypo these rival hypotheses and we'll see that there are all kinds of explan you know that the that the real world hypothesis the second one is just a better simpler explanation of your experiences and so we should believe that one we should always believe the best explanation right that's what we would do you know in science so to speak so that's one kind of approach.
I haven't given you many details. I didn't tell you, you know, like what the explanatory virtues of the one are supposed to be that the that the simulation hypothesis doesn't have. But that's one kind of nice way to think about the problem. I don't think it works ultimately, but [snorts] u but I sure think about it a lot these days.
Zach: You don't think the real world explanation works or you don't think the simulation Oh, no.
Yuval: I just mean the solution to the problem. So this is this is what philosophers do to you a lot like no I'm not talking about what's actually going on. I'm talking about what we were saying. So yeah. So, no, no, I mean just I don't know that the explanatory virtues of the real world hypothesis are that much better than the explanatory virtues of a simulation hypothesis or a you know or that u you're dreaming or you know I just don't think that the difference in the quality of explanation can explain why we should prefer the real world hypothesis.
Zach: Does that make sense or am I being too No, no, that it's So you're saying the line of thinking, if you have the two lines of thinking, one is simulation, one is real world hypothesis, if you follow let's say both of those lines equally down a certain length of the path, they the explanations or the reality quote unquote reality of those explanations don't feel as satisfying or they don't one doesn't feel more satisfying than the other or one doesn't do as good of a job as explaining reality as the other. They both kind of equally are they're both kind of equally under well underwhelming in the sense of like looking for a final answer. Does that make sense?
Yuval: You're you're you're good at this, Zach. I think you're feeling a real thing. So the second one you said is definitely what I meant that they don't the it doesn't do a better job at explaining I don't think your experience of the world or at least not enough of a better job to make it so that we should believe it. But the first thing you said and I'm just quoting this you first you said feels satisfying. I have no doubt that the real world ho hypothesis feels more satisfying. So you may you may not have meant it. You may not have meant the word feels to do that much work, but that's actually one of the puzzling things about this problem. It's it's obvious to me. It feels obvious that this is all real, that this is all happening. The question is whether what is the reason to for it to feel this way or is this just a feeling?
And you know, one of the one of the great philosophers in our in our history that I've gotten into a lot in the last several years, Blaise Pascal, he was the 17th-century French genius, you know, polymath. He actually thought there was a lot to that. So he would have actually really liked the first way that you put it. So yeah, it feels it feels more satisfying. The question is why? And if we follow that question to its correct conclusion, we'll see. Well, that's because everything we know, everything we think we know is a matter of feeling. It's not a matter of reasoning.
Zach: Yeah.
Yuval: Ultimately, ultimately at the foundation. So, so he would have agreed with me that the this idea of tallying how good an explanation each option is not going to cut it when it comes to big fundamental questions like whether this is all a dream and whether this is all reality, whether this is a simulation. He thought ultimately this is just a matter of feeling just as you put it first.
Zach: Yeah. The you mentioned your life having been you know hyperfocused on Blaise Pascal recently and of course the reason that we connected is that I often just I search for talks or new books coming out and I saw Why Read Pascal Today? and I thought this is a name just like we were talking about Prince earlier someone who I know the name but If you ask me to tell you five significant things about him, I don't even know if I could name two other, you know, other than his tragic death and Purple Rain. Those would be the two things. So, I'm like, okay, I think I know Pascal's Purple Rain, which is The Wager. [laughter] But then I started then I started reading the book and I quickly realized that I did not know Pascal's wager or perhaps maybe not in the way that he meant it to be.
And you have this really cool moment that you talk about where you're teaching Pascal's wager to your students and you felt like you didn't fully grasp it like you're you're standing there as a teacher and you feel like there's another level to it and you felt a disconnect. Can you talk about that realization and that feeling of disconnect to the to Pascal's wager?
Yuval: Yeah. It was really a moment of realizing that you're not being as honest as you should be. Now I never did that on purpose, right? We all everyone who teaches intro to philosophy or philosophy of religion or to maybe to some extent decision theory which is a topic that some philosophers teach [clears throat] h has taught Pascal's wager. So it's a kind of a standard part of the canon in philosophy departments and there's like this standard way to teach it and to set it up and it's so standard that there's even a whole literature of people writing articles and books and things on it that set it up that way the standard way and then they give objections to it. They show why it doesn't work. It's usually an exercise in figuring out why this thing doesn't work or you know why Pascal was so wrong. This is, by the way, an old tradition. It goes all the way. I mean, even Voltaire, you know, makes fun of Pascal for it.
Unidentified speaker: Have you ever thought about gambling on God? Well, welcome to Pascal's wager. Pascal, a founder of probability theory, argue that God has hidden himself. There's plenty of evidence for belief, but not enough to force faith without a spiritual encounter. So, if you're agnostic, what do you do? Well, play the odds. If God does not exist and you live as though he does, maybe you make some unnecessary sacrifices, but you don't really gain or lose much either way. But if God does exist, you stand to lose eternity if you don't believe and win the jackpot of eternal bliss if you do. Rationally speaking, Pascal says you should gamble on God. But Pascal new belief isn't a simple switch. You can't decide your way into faith, but you can live into it. Attend church, spend time with Christians, read the gospels, explore the evidence, avoid sin, pray. Just give this a few weeks and see what happens.
And given the sociological research that Christians have better markers for well-being than their secular neighbors, what have you really got to lose?
Yuval: And a lot of famous philosophers after too. So I taught it that way. And what you do in a standard class is you assign you know a I don't know three four paragraph excerpt and most people who teach it including myself before don't even know the work that it's excerpted from and you tell the students to read it maybe you read it too to prepare for class and then you put up this standard presentation of the wager and I just got tired of it because I didn't think that what he was saying in the thing I assigned was the standard thing that I was presenting and students that what I love my favorite thing to teach is intro because I want I love that first encounter with some of these questions and you know students are great students are smart everybody's everybody's actually pretty good I think everybody's pretty good at philosophy so you know they're asking great questions like yeah but he says this and you said that and I'm like well yeah you got a point so I decided one day to like I actually it was it was after class I came back to this office and this is several years ago.
I've been here a while and I got the book that the excerpt is from and I thought I think I think I should read this because I'm assigning part of it. I think I should read the whole thing.
Zach: This is right.
Yuval: Correct. Yeah. Which is French for thoughts. And I can tell you a little bit about this work if you want.
Zach: Yeah. Yeah.
Yuval: It's not actually it's not actually a book that he wrote, right? It's so it's a it's a compilation or a collection of a series of notes that were found on his desk when he died. So, he died tragically young, I think before he even reached the age of 40. Which is really mind-blowing if you think about everything he accomplished in his life. That I mean, you better get to work, Zach.
Zach: I was I was going to say that one of one of the things that is not to sidetrack you because I'll we'll come back to the Pensées, but one of the things that I kept coming back to as I'm preparing for this conversation is everything that I'm learning about Pascal happened before the age of 40. And he was I'm like I know it's it's a little bit of a mystery why he died. Had heard people say stomach cancer or I'm I'm sure you know better than me, but I for a long time people weren't sure, but I'm sure he was dealing with illness leading up to 40 as well. So, he probably had some pretty unproductive years in there and still he managed to do all this work. And it is it's it's hard to grasp having that much of an effect on the world, not only during your lifetime, but centuries and no doubt if we're still here thousands of years after in that short a period of life, it's it's insane. It's m it's mind-blowing. I agree.
Yuval: And as far as I know, we don't know exactly the cause of death. We do know that at the end of his life, towards the end of his life, he was working to write a book, an apology for the Christian religion is how he thought of it. And we do have some clues about the organization of the book. For example, he gave, you know, a pres like kind of like a presentation to his buddies at the Port-Royal, which is a place where a lot of his sort of like-minded colleagues were gathered to explain what he was going to do in the book. So, he kind of gave an outline of the book. So, we have some inkling of at least how he was thinking about the book earlier on, you know, before he died. But, you know, how authors are, you might think it you might think you'll organize it this way and then when you actually write it out, you change the order of things.
So we really don't know, you know, which of the notes that are included in the Pensées would have made it in. We don't know whether he was just brainstorming ideas. We you know, we don't know. We actually don't even know what order exactly to put them in. So different editions of the Pensées that you're that you might find in a book. You get different sorry in a bookstore. Different editions will order all of the things in different ways.
Zach: Yeah. It sounds like to me it's kind of like when a music artist passes away and they have a bunch of raw uncut audio files or song ideas on their laptop and then some producer comes along. Maybe they work with them for a few songs, maybe they didn't, and they go, "Okay, I'm going to take these raw files and produce a finished album based on what this artist truly would have wanted." And it's marketed that way. These are the finished thoughts of the artist when really like no one has any idea how many of those songs they would have trashed, how many of those songs were unfinished thoughts. It would have been something completely different. So when you talk about the Pensées like that, it kind of reminds me of you know like any rapper or singer that's passed away recently where it's like okay, how quick how quick can we get this album out posthumously?
Yuval: Sure. Yeah. And Yeah. And sometimes you know when you're listening to it that's not how it would have sounded if and I think that's the case that's the case here that we know that he wouldn't have put out a sequence of notes. There are even little notes that are little notes to self like remember to block you know here's an idea for the opening or here's an idea for a section. I mean there's they're all just kind of notes to himself that he jotted down. Who knows maybe he's walking by if he was walking at the time you know and jotted a quick note on his desk. So, so that's something you should know about the Pensées. It's the it's just the collect sort of like the collected thoughts of Mr. Pascal and so I'm so Oh, so back to the story.
Zach: I forgot why I was telling you this. So you Yeah, you get went back to the Pensées after the back to the office.
Yuval: I opened the Pensées right in that corner over there. I guess it looks like over there and I just kind of start and I knew that I knew this about the Pensées that it was a collection of notes. I did I knew that it wasn't a book that you know that he wrote through and so I was just started flipping around and I found [clears throat] this really great little note among all the notes of Pascal which really got my attention and I'm paraphrasing and it was in French originally but it's something like do you not think he's sort of imagining some having a dialogue with someone. So there's two characters, him and a and a friend, I guess. And the friend says, "Do you not think that the sky and the birds prove God?" And Pascal says, "No, I don't think that sky and the birds prove God." And the guy says, "But doesn't your religion say so?" And Pascal says no.
For while that may be true to some who God has enlightened, it's false for most of us, for the majority. And I thought, what on earth could that mean? If you and I are standing there staring at the same sky and the same birds, then it's either proof of God or not. What kind of proof would that be anyway? Would you be like, "Oh, it looks really nice. There must be a God." [laughter] Or would it be like look how organized everything is only a creator could have organized it that way. It doesn't seem like that's what he was saying. But it's even weirder than that because it's proof for one of us is not and not for the other. And the even weirder thing is the one for whom it is proof doesn't need the proof because he's already been enlightened by God. So the whole thing is just like a mess if you once you start, you know, once you tug on a thread and start thinking about it. But then I knew a little bit about Pascal.
I knew he was one of the great mathematicians of the 17th-century. Like he knows about proof. He knows what he's talking about. He knows what a proof is. So, you know, it's not like he was just confused. So, that got me interest. I wanted to figure that out. And I had a sense that it had something to do with the weirdness of the wager, the so-called wager. And that's began a years-long journey to figure out what he's talking about. And so, you know, sometimes you read something or you hear something, you're like, I can't I don't really know how that works, but it sounds really important. This idea to me, what sounded important is that the world can look so different to two different people, that it's proof of something for one and it's not for the other.
I think that's a powerful idea especially today in today's age where we seem to be living in different worlds different parts of the population even within our country right some people arrive at one conclusion based on what they've learned another group of people arrive at a completely different and polar opposite conclusion and it's a little puzzling how could we all be looking at the same world and reaching such different conclusions I think Pascal really has something to say about that. Yeah.
Zach: No, it is it is wild how well that the sky and the birds dialogue maps onto the modern-day echo chambers, conspiracies, you know, borderline cultish behavior where regardless of what side or what point of view you have, the evidence will mean two or 10 different things depending on what your inner perspective is filled with at that moment and has been being filled with for months and years and sometimes decades. And you see a news story or you know you see a fight on the subway or you see a kid playing with his mom and like 10 different people can tell themselves 10 different stories about the same exact thing happening. And so, yeah, it's it does make me wonder what Pascal's take would be on the state of modern-day echo chambers and the rampant conspiracies if he could come back for a year in 2026 and just kind of walk around and be like, "What the [profanity unclear] is going on?" [laughter] Yeah.
Yuval: That's a Oh, yeah. That's a great image. I think he'd have a lot to say. I think he'd have a lot to say. So, so one thing I'll just note is that this is all directly connected to the thing that we began talking about. How do you know that the world that you sense that you experience is quote unquote reality or a dream or a simulation or some or something completely else? That's a case in which one set of evidence if you like your experiences doesn't completely settle for you what the world is like that the world is ambiguous in a way the world that you experience is ambiguous and this thing we're talking about with Pascal you know two guys just looking at the sky and the birds and it's ambiguous one of them concludes oh that's proof that God exists the other one concludes that it is that it's no proof that God exists right you might the non-religious friend might say, "Well, the sky looks nice.
It looks it looks glorious even." Sure, you know, it looks super great today, but I don't see any What's the pro how does this prove that it was made by anything like, right, you might just not understand the way that your religious friend is understanding it. The religious friend sees the sky and the birds and s and sees this as a kind of an episode in a relationship with the creator of things. And so that's kind of how it might go for a Pascal. So of course it's pro I mean it's proof of God in this in a sense. Actually in that passage I quoted he says in a sense it's proof in a it's a proof in a sense in which you know well God created everything. So anything that he made, everything that you see is proof in a sense that God exists. [snorts] So yeah, I think this is directly sort of directly this the same topic.
And then you mentioned echo chambers and conspiracy theories and I would maybe we can sort of summarize all of that stuff as a certain familiar kind of polarization going on in society. Yeah. And this is also the same thing that the evidence or the stuff that we all agree on under that happened underdetermines what we make of it and what we think the world is the world is the world that we get through news feeds and through social media and all this stuff. It's ambiguous. You don't it doesn't actually tell you what to conclude from it. You have to bring a lot of yourself to the equation to make sense of it and to draw conclusions from it. And I guess if you put it at that level of generality, it sounds kind of obvious. I mean, obviously I have to come to the evidence with my background beliefs and my expectations. And only then can I as some say update my beliefs on the basis of the evidence.
That's that's all maybe pretty straightforward. But what's not so straightforward is exactly what are you bringing to the world to disambiguate it? Exactly what do you supply on your side of the equation when you meet the data or the evidence, whatever that is. And there's other questions. Is there such a thing as the evidence just as it is by itself independently of any perspective that a potential believer or doubter brings to the table? These are the questions that occupied Pascal one and you know and I think it's strange that we don't read them more today because you know we have one of the greatest minds of the modern era really focused on these questions and we don't we don't really get into his thoughts so much which is strange to me. One reason and I'm and I think this is explains the neglect of Pascal, the relative neglect of Pascal on these topics is that he's always talking about religion.
So he's always talking about God this and God that. And for a lot of us that's just not that interesting. You know, I'm not into the theology. So why should I read this book that's all about God and theology? So you do have to decipher. You do have to pick apart and make inferences on the basis of what he says about religion. But it's pretty easy to do and that's what I try to do in the book is do that for do that work for you. Get a picture of what he thinks about the ambiguity of the world and what we bring to the evidence and how that works out of these notes that he left on his desk about God.
Zach: Yeah. The what you bring to the evidence. It seems like that is a factor that's rarely considered in debates when topics are being parsed out. It's usually how many facts can I overwhelm the other side with or the other person and how can I perform for the audience that I want to perform for and dunk on someone and expose someone and you know insert any other YouTube caption that's going to get views because it's like a very anger inducing type video when you, you know, you dunk on someone in debate. And I've enjoyed many of those videos where I watch them and they're entertaining and they are informative and a lot of the debates I know my side coming into a debate. You know, I've watched I don't know if you've ever seen the YouTube channel Professor Dave. Are you familiar with that guy?
Yuval: Can't say I am. Sorry.
Zach: He's debated flat-earthers. He's deate debated people who don't think we landed on the moon and I come into this knowing that the earth is not flat that we did land on the moon but I still find these types of debates entertaining and I'm coming in on the side of I'm with Professor Dave I want to hear the evidence but I'm also interested in the entertainment of that evidence clashing with the evidence of another perspective and as that person truly sees it as evidence. But yeah, but often I think what's missing is what you're saying is and what P Pascal was hitting on is that what is the other side's input? What is the mish mash of ideas and feelings and trauma and sort of like rigid certainty that's within that person? And how are facts going to melt that? Because facts will not melt that. Facts will just like kind of ping and just like bounce off it.
And most of the time it's just the other person waiting to do their pings and then you ping back. So yeah, it's it's a really weird state to be in this society where the natural biases are you know on peeds. [
Yuval: Laughter] I think that's a great way to put it. Our cognitive biases are on steroids when especially when we're in this online environment.
Zach: But before I answer your question, I just want I just want to tell you your video has been frozen for several minutes. I don't know if that matters on your end. Let me pause this and then we'll we'll jump back in. I'm just going to pause this slight technical difficulty. Give technical difficulty and verbal difficulty. Glitch in the matrix, but we are we're back.
Zach: We're back. You were talking about the natural biases on steroids.
Yuval: On steroids. Yeah. No, that you said peeds and I think that's that's a great way to think about it. So I should say that I think that part of what you're describing is maybe specifically to do with the with the online sort of setup the platforms. So, when you watch short videos of people interacting, you know, inevitably you're just people are trying to get a nice, what do you call that? A cut or a nice take. And they're not there to convince the person they're talking with. They're there to sort of score, maybe to convince the people who are watching or something like that. So, it's a kind of a pretty artificial conversation that's usually going on. And I'm I don't think that's only online. And you know, you watch these kind of newsish debate shows, you know, there's like the Piers Morgan and all this stuff. [clears throat] I mean, clearly this is not this is not a conversation.
This is just sort of well, often they're talking over each other and this is just presenting something presenting different things almost like a collage rather than an interaction, right? You're presenting things to the viewers. Maybe there's some value in that. Maybe that's doing something for someone. And I don't mean to be, you know, to put everything down, but I think part of it is just sort of the genre that we're talking about. But part of it is not part of it is a general thing about arguing with each other about trying to persuade each other of something. And this is something that Pascal was really interested in. And I think he had some real insights into. In fact, he even has advice for you if you're when you're trying to persuade someone. Yes.
Zach: No, I was gonna say what let's talk about the Pascalian antidote to these echo chambers. What do you think he would prescribe in terms of advice for actually breaking through and persuading someone?
Yuval: Yeah. So, so he actually wrote a little essay called the art of persuasion. And he had some ev he had some advice too in the Pensées. I'll just kind of wrap it all up for you in a package. So in order to really get this advice though, you have to understand something about what how he thought we make up our minds about things. So at one point he says that the heart is the principal organ of belief. The heart. And what he meant by the heart is well, it's not entirely clear what he meant by the heart, but roughly it was, you know, your motivations, what you desire, what you fear, and that determines what you find believable and what you don't, what you're willing to consider, what you're not willing to consider, things like that. But it also determines how things look.
And so that's why he said the heart is the principal organ of belief that depending on what you're what you want to find or what you what you want in life or in the world, you'll look for aspects of things to match that. In contemporary times, this is a very familiar idea, right? Psychologists sometimes call this motivated reasoning. It's cognitive bias, right? You're you're you're you have a an aim whether you're aware of it or not that something you'd rather believe that would fit more nicely with what you already believe and that will affect the way that you weigh evidence and the way that you consider things and sometimes it even affects the way things appear and we know this experimentally. So I think a lot of people are familiar with this old result that you know people who are hungry think their plates look bigger, people who are not hungry thinks they think they look smaller.
But there's also, you know, things like for I if you're expecting someone to be angry, you're more likely to interpret their face as being angry rather than neutral and things like that. So our expectations and our motivations and our desires and fears will determine to some extent how we see things and how we process that evidence. And this is something Pascal was on to back in the 17th-century. And this is why he said the heart is the principal organs of belief. Now back to persuasion. He has this really great insight. And I have to say I kind of use this when I talk to people that maybe don't agree with me and it and it makes for a much better conversation. I don't know if I've ever convinced anyone of anything to be honest, but you know it does make it for a better conversation. What he says is nobody minds being told that they don't see everything.
It's not like you're going to be offended or mad or defensive if I tell you when we're arguing about something that there's something you didn't see, right? Nobody thinks they're omniscient that they know everything, right? But you can always tell someone, "Oh, there's this other thing." What people mind, what people don't like is when I is when you tell them they're not seeing what they say they're seeing. Yeah. They're wrong about what they see. That's an attack, right? So, so in other words, so in other words, in trying to persuade someone, Pascal says, don't start with don't say this. You think you're seeing this in the evidence and you think that it implies your view, but it doesn't. You're wrong. That's not that's not a persuasive approach. A persuasive approach is to say, okay, given your motivations, given that you love this or that, and you fear this or that, it certainly does appear the way that you think it does.
I'm here to tell you a different set of, a different heart, a different thing to bring to reality results in something that looks different. So maybe you should consider this other way that it could look. The same evidence can look different ways depending on what you bring to it. So depending on the state of your heart and your the state of your heart might not be the best state to be in it could be that being let's say in a fearful hateful state that and that and those things drive your motivations maybe that's not the clearest way to see the evidence. Maybe that's not the only way to see the evidence is really all you need to say. There's just other ways to interpret the report that we're both looking at. That starts a conversation. That starts, okay, well, let's talk about the states of our heart that given that the evidence, you know, looks so different from these different states. Let's compare these states.
Why do you hate what you hate? Why do you love what you love? And I'll tell you my version of that and we can start maybe communicating that is it feels indirect, right? Because you're not talking about the evidence itself at that point. You're just talking about how you feel to the other person.
Zach: No, but it is it's a connection you can form. Yeah, it to me Pascal's method of persuasion sounds like a magician revealing a magic trick where instead of like a magician would never look at the audience that thought they were seeing something they didn't and go, "You're wrong." They would if it [laughter] like actually it's this. They would they would if a magician's revealing a trick, it's like, "No, let me show you." Like, you're right to have seen what you saw and experienced that way because the world and the stage is set up for you to have that reaction. Now, let me pull the curtain back a little bit and show you what actually was going on. Let me show you how that woman was actually placed into the box that's making it seem like she was cut in half or how that, you know, I was actually picking up an entire car or at least that's what it looked like to you.
And yeah, it's like when you're told you're wrong, like what it immediately gives like what the [profanity unclear] do you mean I'm wrong? Like it does feel like an attack rather than saying, you know, going back to the moon landing example, you're you're right to have watched that video and came away with the opinion that the moon landing was fake based on what that guy or woman presented in the video. Now, let me expose the trick for you and show you how they're doing that. Would is that a fair interpretation of Pascal's persuasion method? Kind of like pulling back the curtain on a trick.
Yuval: I really like that. I really like that way of putting it. I would only say that sometimes it's not so easy. Sometimes all you can do is show the person how it looks how it looks given a different trick rather than being able to pull back the curtain. So I to take your moon landing example. I think what how I take the advice it would be something like this. I can see let's see I'm talking to you. You're who is like is it Joe Rogan who doesn't believe in the moon landing? I don't know.
Zach: The main guy is Bart [laughter] Bart Sibrel is the main guy that it pushes the fake moon landing theory.
Yuval: Okay. So let's say I'm talking to one of Bart's students.
Zach: Yeah. Disciples.
Yuval: Disciples. [laughter] So, so, so I talked to this person. I say, "Look, I understand how one might be extremely suspicious of official government narratives of things. There's lots of reasons to be suspicious of official government narratives, right? And also I get I mean I agree that it can seem like the physical evidence that we have these old grainy videos are not much to go on and I can see that a studio could have produced the images that you're looking at. So if you put all of that together you know you're suspicious of the official story. You know, you don't feel like the evidence that's given forces you to accept that the story is true. In fact, you can even find explanations of how they might have been produced in another way.
Zach: If I put all that together, I can see how like the whole thing seems pretty suspicious. Yeah.
Yuval: Yeah. Here's why I don't conclude the same thing that you do. I think the cases in which the official narrative are suspicious are easy to tell, right? Like I can tell at least looking back this far this we're talking in the 60s right the moon landing was what 1969 something like that supposedly think about [laughter] right so like and then I and then I'll give you and then I'll give them more so I'll you know I'll say why that's not convincing to me and then I'll also say you know here's another thing that I find suspicious you know I'm I'm suspicious like you but suspicious about more I'm suspicious about a large group of people getting way this much with such a secretive plot with no leaks, you know, whatsoever, etc., Etc.
I don't actually know the details of the moon landing story, so I can't go into more detail than that, but I suspect that if I were to look into it, it would seem more likely that we landed someone on the moon than it does that some perfect hoax has been played out for decades like this because everything would have to be just so for that hoax to work. So, maybe something like that. I just made that up on the spot, but it would be some of that. So, show why you don't accept it. Compare the two or maybe smush the two together. Like, hey, look, maybe we don't know for sure that there was a moon landing. I think it's more likely than not, but it's not like I'm going to die on that hill. Maybe I'll turn out to be, hey, we've turned out to be wrong about big things before. So, that's a conversation where he might learn something. I might learn something.
And I actually suspect that in most cases or at least in many cases you will move him you will dradicalize him a little bit. You will move him a little bit more towards a point of view like okay there are different ways to see this thing. It's not just the state that I'm in. Right? If someone's in a different state it really does look different. The world isn't telling me that the moon landing was faked. I'm telling me that the moon landing was faked on the basis of ambiguous evidence. And the same thing goes for Pascal for all of life's big important questions. And that's what's so fascinating to me. So there is this part about persuasion. That's advice for persuading. And I have found it to be good advice at least at the very least in the sense that it makes for much more productive conversations.
And what I think is just as important, it makes for real connections with people rather than talking at people or yelling at them or, you know, putting on a show for a third person who's watching you. You know, it actually makes for connecting with someone. If you can tell them what's in your heart, if you can tell them what are my motivations and here's how it's honest, right? Here's how things look to me. If I hated the same things you hated, and if I loved the same things you loved, then maybe I would see it exactly how you see it. It's just that I don't. And I think that's an I think that elevates the conversation.
Zach: No, no, for sure. And in that example, you're also you're validating the person's heart before you get into any of the technical details about the moon landing or whatever it is. You're saying, "I see how you feel this way."
Yuval: Yeah.
Zach: I could see how you could come to this conclusion based on your life experiences and content that you've been presented and the way the argument is formed and a million other factors that go into how we form opinions on things. I'm I'm not I'm not driving a stake through, you know, the heart of your like how like your being like your being forms conclusions on things and I think you said in one of your talks on Pascal the heart comes first and every the belief-forming the belief-forming mechanism comes after if that's if that's correct and then I think that's also when I said the our natural biases are on peeds I'm pretty sure I stole that from you because now I'm remembering the steroids thing from that from that same talk.
Yuval: So both but I Well, no wonder I liked it. No wonder I liked it when you said that.
Zach: You Yeah, I was like I think I think I heard that somewhere. But yeah, that like the heart comes first and then the belief-forming mechanism is after. And it makes sense that you have to be able to engage with the art bea you have to be able to engage with the heart first how that person even came to form their opinion and the experiences and data that went into that before you even attempt to kind of like crack away at the surface level of how that data formed the conclusion.
Yuval: Yeah. Yeah. The so I think that's that's that's really well put. I want to just put in a small like parentheses what do people do parenthesis caveat on it because it is a beautiful idea. I like I like it a lot. I want to just put a small caveat. None of this is to say that sometimes people are just wrong. Sorry. None of this is to say that people are not sometimes just wrong. Like people are still sometimes just wrong. Sometimes they are just misrepresenting the evidence or the facts. Sometimes people just mess up, right? They didn't realize what you were saying. So there is there are corrections that can be made. I just want to be clear. It's not like Pascal thought anything goes. It's just that in the deepest level of the disagreement once we agree about all the quote unquote facts, there's still we're still going to see things differently. And that's that exposes a difference in our approach to reality or our hearts.
The fundamental orientation towards reality. Furthermore, even in that deep level that we've just been discussing, it's not like there's no right and wrong. Pascal thought some states of the heart are better than others. There is a correct way to feel and there's an incorrect way to feel. There's nothing in Pascal that I've ever seen where he says, "Well, it's all fine. This person just had a different state of the heart and this person, so they disagree." That's not his vibe at all. He's not a relativist. He doesn't think that it's all the same. No, no, no. There's one state of heart and one only. That is the best and only correct way to feel about your life and about reality. He was very clear about that. It's just it's just a matter of getting everyone to see that and then getting everyone to try to get into that state.
That's actually I believe what the what the wager was actually about is trying to convince you that you should try to get into this correct state. So I just wanted to I just wanted to put that caveat out there. It's not like he was a relativist. It's not like he thought, you know, the moon landing denier is just as right as I am when I think the moon landing was real. No, the moon landing denier is wrong. We landed on the moon. This is my Pascal. Of course, this happened few hundred years after he was dead. But, you know, he would say, I think, of course, the moon landing was real. This person's just confused. We got to understand why he's confused. And we got to appreciate that sometimes I'm confused in a similar way. I have to think about it.
Zach: Yeah. And you say you say in the book that life is not about proving things. It's about feeling the right things. Like you said like Pascal didn't have the approach of yeah like whatever you feel like he had a very direct idea of what is the right way to feel so to Pascal what made a feeling right what was his compass for feeling the right thing okay well this the answer to this might rub you the wrong way and perhaps many of your viewers I don't know, but you know, Pascal ultimately hopefully they're open to persuasion, [laughter] right?
Yuval: I don't I'm not gonna try I'm not gonna try with this one. So just before I answer the question directly, something you have to understand or your readers or your listeners have to understand about Pascal is Pascal was a deeply religious person in a social environment where many people he felt were not. They were kind of fakes. They paid lip service. Maybe some of them didn't even pay lip service, but you know, they didn't really feel the religion in the way that they should. And so part of what he wanted to do with this book is to convince them of this and convince them to try to change. These were the so-called libertines of his day. They were intelligent. They were I think some of them were his buddies. They maybe officially their view was Catholic or something but they didn't live that way, they didn't take it seriously enough, etc.
So, so that's the first thing I want to say is he's trying to persuade those people to change to take it very seriously. And then what is taking seriously mean for Pascal? I mean, he had a very stern, dire, maybe somewhat extreme idea of the proper religious life. And so my answer to you is going to reflect that. So what is the true state of what is the best state to be in the heart? It's when you love God, the creator more than or rather than the creation. It's an old idea actually that could be traced back to Augustine. Way back way back early I don't know if your listeners know who Augustine is St. Augustine. But it was one of the church or maybe the church father. And the idea there is basically that since the fall since we were ejected from Eden, humanity, humans are kind of born into this default state in which we are concerned with and we want things and we love things in creation. Most of all ourselves.
So when I think about my life from this very natural kind of default human state postfall, this is the fallen state. When I see the sky and birds, I might think that's pretty. I should paint a picture so I can look at that more. Or I'll see a bird. I'm like, what a beautiful bird. I want to like kill it and stuff it and put it on my shelf or whatever. Whatever. Or I might think, here's a little much more subtle way to put it. I'm going to help preserve and protect that bird because it's such an important part of nature and that's really virtuous of me. I'm gonna be really good and actually I'm gonna be better than Zach because Zach eats birds. What an [profanity unclear] right? You get into this whole thing as you're just concerned with creation. And these are the basic fundamental things that motivate us. Sometimes it feels a little more noble than that, right? Sometimes it's like, oh, I get I have kids. I don't know if you do.
I have kids. They hug me. Oh, this is the best thing in the world. I love you so much. Right? What is that? That's me being attached to part of creation. And more so, moreover, it's a it's a part of creation that's directly related to me. And a lot of it's about me. You're a piece of me. I want to hug you. Right? So, u I want you to love me. I don't want you to hate me. Right? So, a lot of it is me. This general state where we grasp at things in creation and that we love primarily ourselves it is called concupiscence and that's kind of on this world view I guess that Pascal thought was clearly correct and he argues for it at length in this in this series of notes. That's the wrong state of the heart to be in. That's when you are you know you're confused. You don't make sense to yourself. You have the wrong desires. So, you desire things and then you get them and then you're still unhappy. How is that possible?
Well, because you want the wrong things. Your heart is in the wrong state. And that is concupiscence. The concupis being more obsessed with the creation than the creator.
Zach: Yeah.
Yuval: Exactly. So, so that's where your heart is. That's a kind of now there's lots of different versions of that and still different kinds of characters there but that's a kind of general description of a character that Pascal thought was okay your heart's in the wrong place and one of the bit one of the ways you can know this one of the ways you can know this according to Pascal is just look how deeply unhappy you are modern person look how look how your life just kind of sucks you have to work to like convince yourself that it's okay says Pascal this is not me talking I don't want to be responsible for any depression out there. But you know, yeah, he says, "Hey, look, even when you want even when you really want something, once you get it within minutes, you're over it and you want something else. You're never satisfied." And the only way that could be, says Pascal, is that you wanted the wrong thing to begin with.
You have to, if that's an indictment of your desires, that satisfying them doesn't make you completely happy. And it never does, he says. So, what do you do? How do you get to want things that you don't yet want? How do you get to love things that you don't yet love that you don't even believe in? You don't even believe that there's a creator? How are you supposed to love a creator? That's a that's a big problem. What's the right what's the right state of the heart? The right to the heart is to love the creator of things more than yourselves. He sometimes puts this in a very harsh way that I think is easy to misinterpret. I think one of the statements of this view that he gave again who knows it was just a formulation he was playing with or thought of it and wrote it as he walked by or hobbled by his desk. He said we should love only God and hate only ourselves.
But what he meant by that is that's how you get to that state where you know you reduce yourself in importance. So the things that you're offended by or the things that you are suspicious of that those don't that doesn't matter that much anymore because you're not the center of the world. God is the center of the world. You're orbiting that's what enobbles your life. There's a lot more to say here and I won't go on and on. This thing about being unsatisfied even when we satisfy our desires. There's a lot to this.
Zach: Pascal makes a lot of really interesting observations that actually they sound like they were written for the TikTok age honestly because you know I'm sure don't worry I'm sure someone has deepfaked Pascal already and made a Tik [laughter] Tok page where he's actually talking yeah maybe you already did and you just don't claim ownership of the page but I guarantee there's some version of that out there with deepfake Pascal. Oh yeah.
Yuval: I mean, he even he even said things like, "The moment we do something that we think we're proud of, the first thing we want to do is show it to other people." Yeah. Oh, I made a meal. Click and then post it. Or, you know, I'm on a great vacation. Look at, you know, you get your phone out. Look at me. What is that for Pascal? That's very clear. I made a kid. I made a kid.
Zach: Look at my baby. Right. [
Yuval: Laughter] what is that for Pascal? It's very clear what that is. It's it's you're creating a fake identity. You're creating a self by making other people to see it because you can't stand yourself. You can't just be yourself. This life in this current state is not satisfying. And so you have to show a version of it that might seem satisfying to others. It's the closest you're going to get. So he talks about this faking of identity. So it's a deep restlessness. But here's a little hopeful part in this. If you if you recognize yourself in some of this, here's a really hopeful part of it. What's really amazing about human beings is that we can be in this state and realize that we could be in a better state. We realize that we should be great and we're not. How do we realize that we should be great? Pascal asks, "How do we have this idea that life could somehow in this way we can't even understand?
How do we have this idea that life can be better?" And he says at one point, "Our misery is the misery of a king who's become a pauper, right? We can tell that we could be great somehow." How can we tell that? Because we have an inkling that if our heart were in the right place, we could be happy. We have some idea that we could be happy. And that's the key for Pascal. So what is the happy state now that I've given you all this rig of a roll background? The happy state is to love the creator rather than creation and thereby perceive all of creation as an episode. Everything that happens in your life is just it's an episode in your relationship with the creator of everything. That's amazing says Pas. I should make clear I'm not myself a fanatical rel religious person but this is a beautiful picture that Pascal paints for us.
So everything in your life then is just a sign and a communication from the creator of things even the suffering even the bad things that happen to you. They're enobled because they are episodes in the story written by your love different seasons of God or believing in a creator according to Pascal.
Zach: Yeah. Ex just so I wanted to go back to something you said. So Pascal he advocated for faking it in the beginning. If you don't truly believe in God to basically act as if you do and hopefully that will that will lead to a future belief at some point. There's a there's an element of fake it till you make it. Yeah, I was going to say he's like it sounds like the OG fake it till you make it. [
Yuval: Laughter] I don't know if that's exactly I mean I that's not far off. Yeah, I don't think that's exactly what's going on there. I think there's a better way to think about it. I like this analogy. It's a slightly different analogy. Think of if you I don't know if you're married or what, but you know, think of you were Oh, okay. So, you'll have to you'll have to ignore that. Ignore that fact about you for a minute. Imagine that you're put into an arranged marriage. Okay? So, let's say whoever takes care of your parents say, "Hey, look, we've arranged a spouse for you. That this is going to happen. It's best for us financially, it's best for us socially. This is just what you have to do for the family. I think I think people around the world and throughout history have faced just this situation. And at first you might like really be dismayed. You don't know this person. Maybe they're horrible. Maybe they'll mistreat you.
Maybe you won't love them at all. Maybe you won't like them. This is a pretty scary thing to jump into. You don't know this thing, this person that you're going to have an entire life with. So, you resist and the grown-ups tell you, whoever they are, your parents, whatever, grandparents, like, "No, no, you have to do this because it'll be good for us and it'll be good for you. You just have to trust me." So, you finally, the day comes, you finally meet this person. You get married. It's arranged marriage. You don't know them. What do you do? You try to make it work. How do you try to make it work? Well, a pretty good first guess is act like married people act. Act like people who love each other act, right? Yeah. Try to get yourself into the pattern of being a good spouse yourself. Try to try to meet your spouse in the way that you meet someone you love, right? And that's a bit of what happens in the ritual of a wedding, right?
You kiss the bride or the groom or what whatever side of this you're on or so that's not exactly fake it till you make it. There's an element of fake it till you make it there. But what you're doing is you're putting yourself in a position to be if you like seduced by this to accept this lovable person. The person has to be lovable. Reality has to be right for this to work for you. Right? It's not like you can just by sheer force of will say, "I love this spouse." No. The spouse has to be a certain way. Circumstances have to be a certain way. And Pascal was well aware of this in the case of bringing your heart to the right place. He said this is why it takes grace. He calls it grace. He wrote a lot about grace in some separate writings. That means no you had to be moved your heart. It's not just up to you. And that's one of the fascinating things another fascinating thing about his philosophy is it's not all up to you how your life goes.
The world has to sort of affect you in the right way to move your heart to be in the right way to love the right thing and that's what that's what he means I think by God's grace right so God has to change your heart help you change your heart but you can do things to put yourself in a position to receive this act like a lover is one of the first steps so I don't know if the how different that is from fake it till you make it but fake it till you make it makes it sound like it's all up to you.
Zach: That's why I didn't Yeah. Yeah. Fake it till you make it to me is like I don't know a mantra that someone says if they want to have a million YouTube subscribers. So they say, "Okay, I'm going to do the things that the biggest YouTubers do and collaborate with this person and algorithmically set up my videos this way and that way and I'm I'm going to do I'm going to fake myself in the moment now for a future result. In the arranged marriage example, it's like no, the reality of marriage is here. So now you have to decide, am I going to fight this or am I going to try it on like a piece of clothing kind of and like make it work? You know, you weren't you weren't it was out of your control, but are you going to not that I'm advocating for arranged marriage, but just like if you're in that if you're if you're in that if you're in that situation, I do get people like you have two families together, there's so much pressure.
I do get the inkling to be like, well, you know, if this is going to be it, let me give this a shot and act like a married couple would act. I do get that side of it and I get people resisting that as well. And in Pascal's example, that makes it to me that it makes more sense in that way with like the arranged belief in God. Like pretend like you've you are already in this relationship with God. Act as if you are now like you know try it on try it on for a few weeks or a month or a year and like see how it goes.
Yuval: Yeah. Yeah. What? So exactly right. So one thing to note is that what matters according to Pascal anyway according to his relig you know religion or worldview what matters is what you is the state of your heart not necessarily what you your what you believe is not the primary thing that matters. What you love is the primary thing that matters to your life to how your life is going. So, so the goal of this exercise is to put yourself in a position to love something. Once you do, then you'll see the world in such a way that believing in God is going to be obvious. It's going you're going to have so much evidence for it because everything's a sign of God once you love God. So, so the belief part will take care of itself. It's the love part that you need help with. And you need to put yourself in a position to get that help, to receive that grace. Some people are just born that way. Some people get the grace, so to speak, without any effort.
It's kind of a it's kind of a mysterious thing, I think, on this on this worldview. We don't know why. You're not I don't know what's best. I don't know how to run a world. God knows how to run a world, not me. So, you know, we don't know why. Hey, we don't know how that's fair. We don't know how that's right. But it's there that some people find it natural. You know, it's like this with music, too. Some people just have an ear for it and are so and move so naturally in it. And other people you have to train them. You have to actually tell them this note is higher than that note. So you go up for that one. And this it's the most elementary thing for a musical person to hear. So that's I think a kind of a love of God is supposed to be kind of like that. Some people are adept at it, some people are not. So that's another complication in this.
But really I would say the headline of all of this is it's really about what you love and where your heart is that determines the value and the and the goodness of your life, not what you believe. The belief isn't an afterthought. It's a it's a mechanism built on the side of your heart.
Zach: I is there a secular version to what Pal Pascal says about the heart? Because as you're talking, I think a lot of the messages can be I can see that message coming through in a lot of secular ways like where you talk about loving someone or being grateful or adopting a point of view. There are many times in my life as someone who grew up Catholic, went to Catholic school, I guess I would describe myself as atheist or agnostic, like I don't believe in God, but I accept the possibility that there may be one. And I have moments in my life that I think a previous version of myself would have said, you know, look at the sky and the birds and go, "Oh, this means that there's a God." And now when I have moments like that, if I'm if I'm standing on top of a mountain or I'm watching a sunset or even just having a moment where I'm I'm walking down the street and I recognize that everyone around me comes from a different set of stories and experiences.
You know, just like a moment where I'm like, "Oh, wow. This is like an oddly peaceful moment breaking into my day. Let me just enjoy this right now." When I feel that, I feel I guess a secular version of that where it doesn't I don't draw that to a creator. I draw it to more like, wow, this is awesome. Like, this is the life that I've been given and that we've been given. Let me do something that makes my own little corner of the world hopefully slightly better before I die and enjoy it and just, you know, do fun things and spend time with the people I love. Like, isn't this [profanity unclear] insane that we all get to experience this? And then like in those moments my brain tends to stop there and like it the meaning behind it to me doesn't infiltrate the or maybe I'm stopping it prematurely subconsciously. May you know maybe because I grew up Catholic and now I don't go to church anymore. I don't practice Catholicism.
Maybe like that part of my brain just kind of like atrophied and I don't really go there anymore. But it I do I feel grateful and I feel peace and I and I feel like of course you know you can't feel that mindset all the time like but I do try to enjoy when it happens but I it kind of just ends there for me if that makes sense. Like I'm just like whatever this is like it I'm glad that it is and let's let's let's rip it up while we're here. [
Yuval: Laughter] Yeah, I think that's a beautiful thought. Yeah, I think I think we can take a lot of what Pascal says and be elevated by it. Without the specific, you know, theological views that he's that he's trying to push. Does he think he probably wouldn't have thought so, but you know, who cares?
Zach: This is this is Yeah, he's dead. He's dead.
Yuval: Yeah, this is this is me. So, I'm not I don't think of myself primarily as a historian. It's not like my main interest in this stuff is what so and so said at what point. I'm not a historian of So, I'm interested in the in the actual stuff and the I'm interested in life. I'm interested in what life is and things like that. So, so, so it's it's okay for me to leave Pascal behind, you know, try to learn as much as I can from him and then take it out and see how does this apply to our life now or to our situation now. So, I'm all about that and I think I think that's that's great to do. So Pascal wouldn't agree with this, I don't think. But I think that there are a lot of ways to think about reality, the world or and your life in it that stop short of being religious explicitly, but about which a lot of the stuff that Pascal said can be applied.
And one thing that I try out in the book is the idea that somehow ultimately the good things in the world will triumph that ultimately the good things will triumph over the bad things. That's a another traditional kind of belief, but it has nothing to do with God. It just means goodness prevails ultimately. Yeah. Maybe in the short term, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Nature's cruel, you know. So, so, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes an entire life can be down in the dumps. That's real. That's matters and that it's awful. But ultimately, at the end of the story, things will be good. Consider that belief, right? You don't have to be a Catholic or a Jew or, you know, anything to think that or to seriously consider it. And now you can kind of apply a kind of Pascal's wager to that. Can say, "Well, well, isn't it better to live as if that's true?"
Zach: Yeah.
Yuval: And you might think, "Yeah, I think I have everything to gain and nothing to lose by thinking that's true." And you can you can I could do this in the book, so I won't go through the whole thing now, but you can actually go step by step and do it. A very similar very sim the state of the heart that believing that would require is a better state for your heart to be in. A more maybe famous example of a secular version of Pascal's wager comes from this movie My Night at Maud’s. I don't know if you've ever seen it's an old French movie. It's an old rorup movie. My Night at Maud’s. Yeah, it's in French, but you know, you can get it on YouTube with subtitles and everything. Although, I have to say the subtitles of the YouTube version that I've showed my students, they're not it's not a very good translation, but never mind that.
Zach: It's good enough. My wife is French and every time we watch a French movie with subtitles, she points out the bad translation. She's like, "That's not what no." [laughter] so, so yeah.
Yuval: So, so there's this really cool scene. I think it's towards the beginning where he this former Catholic, if I'm remembering the scene correctly, meets up with an old friend of his who's a Marxist, political Marxist. And the Marxist friend gives a kind of Pascal's wager for his basic worldview. And he says something like, you know, either historical political events have a meaning that is they're going somewhere that matters or they don't or it's all just random. We're just a bunch of apes fighting it out and does there's no pattern or meaning to how it goes. And he says, even if I think the no meaning hypothesis, we're back to where we started, by the way. We just we know that there are historical events that underdetermines which view is true. It's ambiguous. So we got to decide what to believe on it.
So he says, well, even if I think that the no meaning hypothesis is way more likely, let's say 90% likely that none of the this these political movements and evolutions in history matter and only 10% that they do.
Zach: Yeah.
Yuval: He says, well, I just have this one life. And he says, if I believe that they matter, but they don't matter, it's 90% of the time. So what? So, I was just another ape, you know, doing ape things. I didn't I didn't lose that much. But if I believed that they matter and they do matter, then I've made the most out of my life that I possibly could. I was part of this process of become, you know, whatever the political process supposed to be of bringing us towards the right way to be in society.
Zach: Yeah.
Yuval: And then he looks at the opposite. He says, "What if I believe that it's all, you know, it doesn't matter and in fact it doesn't matter." Well, so what? It still doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that I did that, right? Yeah. But if I believe that it doesn't matter and it does matter, then I missed out on my life having potentially a purpose and that's the worst outcome for me. So, it's a Pascalian wager. You have every reason. You have everything to gain from believing that historical processes matter and you have nothing to lose by believing it. So, of course, you should do it. That's a very similar he's they're discuss the two characters are discussing Pascal in this scene. So, it's not a coincidence, but he gives you a secular kind of version of Pascal's wager. So, you might be interested in watching that with your wife in French. It's a great movie.
Zach: Anyway, I've written it down. Yeah. All the just talking about debating and then the secular version of Pascal, it makes me wonder what a debate would have looked like between Pascal who's who was a devout Catholic and someone like Sam Harris who's a strong who's a strong atheist, a strong atheist. And like I feel like his Pascal's way of thinking is, you know, it just talk even thinking about getting at someone's heart before the belief the belief-forming mech mechanism. So foreign to the style of debates today. And it just makes me wonder what Pascal would say or how he would respond or how he would engage how someone like Sam Harris would even engage with Pascal. I don't know if you've ever thought about what it would be like if Pascal was transplanted into onto a modern debate stage, but I don't think it would be boring. I'll say that.
Yuval: No. Well, okay. So, we have very good reason to think that it won't be boring because one of the things that Pascal actually was most famous for before the Pensées became a historic historical hit is something called the provincial letters which were letters that he wrote under a pseudonym. Basically they were moves in a debate with the Jesuits at the time. He was a he was with the so-called Jansenists. Pascal was with the so-called Jansenists. They were having a debate about you know different versions of you could think of it this way different versions of Catholicism different views with the Jesuits and it was stylistically you know a marvel he was considered like one of the great pmicists and stylists in French for the provincial letters. They're wonderful to read. They're fun. They're funny.
So, we have good reason to think that when he's debating, at least through letters, we don't Yeah, I don't know about in person, he was brilliant. He was funny. He was effective. That there's no doubt about that. We can't really emphasize enough how brilliant this guy was. It was just there was no one like him in history. It he was just we didn't even get into this on your podcast, but I mean, the list of accomplishments of this guy is just insane. I mean, you know, invented the foundations of probability theory, did some other stuff in math, responsible for the first experiments to establish the existence of a vacuum. That's why a unit of pressure is called a Pascal. It's named after him. He invented the first calculator. Which is, I think, why the programming language Pascal is named after him. Yeah. He did he accomplished so I'm just there's just a couple things he accomplished so much. So, this guy was brilliant.
He probably would have a great debater. Now I don't want to put Sam Harris down. Sam Harris is a great debater too. I don't know if he's like Pascal level mind, but I don't know him. And I like a lot of I like a lot of what Sam Harris says and writes. So, this is not a knock on him at all. But I think that I think that Pascal thought that someone like Sam Harris is reasonable and miserable. Reasonable and miserable. And I think I think that I think that would be the diagnosis. Now, why reasonable? Well, because given the state of the heart, I don't actually know Sam Harris, so let's not of an atheist. Given the state of the heart, the archetype of someone who would take Sam Harris's viewpoint, right? I mean, yeah. So, so given someone like that, the world really does look like a bunch of crap thrown together that maybe evolved to produce some complexity and structure. That's how it looks.
That's a reasonable thing to infer given the way that the world looks to somebody with that state of the heart. So, that's perfectly reasonable. What's unreasonable, the only unreasonable thing about this character, I think according to Pascal, is that their heart is in the wrong place. And they should know that because they should know how life how their life is going and they should know a lot of other they should know that it would be better to change their state of heart state of the heart. So in a way it might not be a debate at all. It might be just look I know things look like that to you. Yes. Because they do look like that. That itself, this is a kind of a interesting judo move that Pascal makes. Yeah. That I think is really effective. He says, "Here's a remarkable fact about the world.
It's remarkable that you can look at it and see a heartless mechanism like the a like the atheist does." And you can look at it and see that it's throbbing with love as I'm using a phrase from Norman Malcolm. Yeah. So, so the world is ambiguous in just this way that if you have a certain state of heart it looks like just a mechanism and if you have a different state of heart it looks like a strong that fact that the world is ambiguous in this way is itself an empirical fact about the world. This is Pascal talking not me. And he says, "How do you explain that fact?" There are different ways to explain this fact. But he says only, if you're looking at religions, only one religion, says Pascal, explains this fact. Explains why God seems completely hidden if your heart is in the wrong place and appears everywhere because the world is lovable. In fact, reality does allow you to love it in this way, right? As the creation of the creator.
So what only one worldview can explain the ambiguity in nature. And that is one of maybe one move that Pascal would make in a debate with someone like Sam Harris. Yeah, it seems like the type of long- form debate that would be genuinely moving for both sides. Whoever was going into it having Pascal's viewpoint or Sam Harris's viewpoint where Pascal would be trying to get at the heart of Sam Harris and Sam Harris would bring a lot of reason into the debate and then at the end whoever was hosting the debate would go, "All right, now tell each other to go [profanity unclear] yourselves so we could get a nice thumbnail where we get we get you screaming at each other and your eyes will be bleeding and faces melting and then we'll clip it as like Pascal dunks on Sam Harris and you watch it, you're like this actually he they He didn't dunk on him at all. They just had a pretty nice conversation.
But yeah, that would be you know, a sight to see for sure. Let's let's watch it. Yeah.
Zach: Oh. Oh my god. I' I'd probably watch it multiple times. I'd send it to everyone. I'd be like there's a dead guy that's alive now and he's debating Sam [laughter] Harris. Let's take a break here because I do want to get into your article on the inventor of the thinking machine as we start to end off. If it's okay to go for another 15 or 20 and I realize we've blown through the hour bathroom break, which is probably a good sign because we were engaged in conversation, but let's take a break here because I've also had a lot of coffee and then we'll reconvene to end off on the article. So, you wrote an article titled, "The inventor of the thinking machine didn't worry and neither should you." And then the subtitle is, "In this age of AI anxiety listened to your heart, what inspired you to write this article?"
Yuval: Oh, yeah. Well, I should I should say I can't take credit for this for the subtitle because the editors at that at Nautilus came up with it, but what inspired me to originally write it? I noticed something in myself. So, well, well, one thing is I' I've just had a lot of like all of us had a lot of thoughts about AI and where it's going and what it's doing. And I one time I came into my philosophy seminar a little early to kind of set things up. The students were talking amongst themselves about how much they hate AI. And I've noticed this pattern that young people you know, I realize I look really young, but I'm not.
Zach: So, I re I have this pattern that I see this pattern that You're 83, right?
Yuval: You said Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good for 83, right? Yeah. That they don't at least the one at least the young people that I interact with, including my own kids, they don't like AI. They're not like enthusiastic about this new technology. And so I started talking to these students. They were kind of wishing that it didn't even exist. I started talking to them, asking them why. What's what are you so mad about? And so you first I heard the standard very good reasons to worry. You know, this they're going to take our jobs. You know, there's going to be all this social economic upheaval. Oh, what's this going to do to the world? You know, those these are really good I mean I have things to say about that too, but I mean those are these are really good worries, really important things. What is it going to do to the social order of things and to people? That hugely important. So yeah, let me be clear about that.
But then as we kept talking it was also just that they feel like they're being replaced as humans and everyone almost that I talked to there's this kind of underlying just below the surface anxiety that re that you know yes there are these important big social economic concerns that we need to think through very carefully. But also people think like why do we why do we need humans anymore? What are we for? Right. Yeah. I mean, AI can or eventually will make art write for us, come up with ideas, be our friends. You know, there's already reports of people falling in love with their chat and, you know, they're not lonely anymore because they're talking. So, they're kind of we're being replaced. I'm sure the arranged marriages with AI are not far in [laughter] front of us. That's right. So, yeah.
Zach: So, it's a good point. So, so that got me interested and I started connecting that with something I noticed about myself. So, I'm a big music lover. In fact, when I started school originally, I was just doing music. And friends send me, you know, AI music. I'm sure you played around with these AI music generators. And they say, "Oh, isn't this cool?" And it's it is cool. It's a It's a remarkable that technology can do this, but it's just I never listen to the track to the end. I'm just not interested in it. I just can't get myself to pay attention to it. And it's not because I h I'm not a lite. I'm not, you know, I'm not like an anti-technology guy at all. I think it's amazing. It's just not interesting as music. I can never see myself put on an AI album and go for a walk and just really get into it. I can't I can't see it. I don't know. I When I started thinking about this, I don't know why.
And I wonder if it has anything to do or anything to tell us about this fear of being replaced. So that's where the article came from.
Zach: Does the not caring does the not caring moment for you kick in when you find out that it's AI?
Yuval: Yeah. In other words, you if you feel mo have you felt moved by a piece that you thought was human and then you find out it's AI and then you go that's not it doesn't really do the same thing for me anymore. I can't say that's happened to me. Because I in fact I think AI isn't that great yet at making music, but I but that's just maybe I haven't heard the right one. And I'm sure that the technology will develop and will make music that will be moving and art that will be moving and certainly I think already it produces dialogue and companionship and quotes that is moving. So, I that hasn't happened to me, but I don't rule it out at all. And I believe I saw a study from a little while ago where I don't know if these are professional musicians or people who really knew box music, but apparently over 50% of people were fooled into thinking something was written by JS Bach when it wasn't. It was AI.
Zach: So, Oh, wow.
Yuval: We have to we have to admit that it's possible, right? Maybe I would be able to tell. I'm a big Bach fan, but maybe not. But so that's a that the question you're asking though is so important. Yes. So a lot of music doesn't move me. So I might be told first, hey, listen to this track and think, oh cool, okay, just music. Maybe I'm not moved, but I'm not like repulsed. And then I'm told to say I and I'm like, oh wow, that's amazing. They did it. And then I think I say this word for word in the article, you know, but once the novelty wears off, it's just not like why should I keep listening to this? Yeah, I don't I don't have any point. I don't see the point. [snorts] so why is that? That was my question I was asking myself. Why do I get so sort of bored when I find out it's AI? I talk to a lot of people and they have the same experience. This isn't something unique about me.
You know, there's a novelty to AI made stuff and then once the novelty resolves, it's just less interesting. And the question is why is it less interesting? Maybe that'll tell us something about music in this case or art or writing or companionship. And then I realized it doesn't tell us something new about that stuff. Martin Buber said this you know a hundred years ago when he wrote I and Thou that part of the value of music and art is that it in fact is a form of encounter with another person whether that's the composer or the performer or some other aspect of this. So when I learn that this is just being generated by an algorithm, I now have learned that even if I thought I was interacting with a person in a process in history and so forth, I wasn't or not in the way that I thought. And so it feel like a little deflated the it feels like it was a counterfeit.
Zach: Can you get into the differentiation of Martin Buber's I and Thou? The I it versus the I-Thou because your breakdown of this in the article really was a before and after moment for me of how I view AI creation and I suspect it may also be something like that for people listening to the podcast.
Yuval: Yeah. Well, I'm I'm really gratified to hear that. So Martin Buber just about a hundred years ago wrote this book I and Thou. I'll just put in a plug for something in the future if you don't mind. I'm I'm actually working on a book trying to explain I and Thou and kind of bring it into the contemporary world in terms of we can understand apply it to our lives now with a co-author brilliant philosopher Mara Vanderlet from St. Andrews. [snorts] and so this is something I'm that's on my mind anyway, but yeah, about 100 years ago, he wrote this essay. It's a very difficult philosophically it's very difficult to read. It's not always super clear what he's saying. It's been described I think well as a philosophical poem rather than a an essay per se. And what the bas the main idea of this book I am now is that there are two ways of being for a for a human two ways of sort of confronting reality or relating to reality. Right?
So when you perceive something, when you describe it, when you fit it into categories, when you figure out how it works, when you apply something to it, when you analyze it, you are in what he calls an I, it relation. This could be a person or an object or an animal. Talks about animals, too. This isn't like a bad thing. It's just part of how we interact with the world. One way of interacting is interacting with the world as an it as a thing. You can sort of map it on to the other things that you've thought and sort of know about and so forth. Then there's this other way of interacting with the world which he calls I thou. And you can think of the difference as similar to the grammatical difference between the third person and the second person. So when you're in the third person, you're not in the picture, right? You're just sort of describing things as they are arranged. The second person, it's me and you.
And what is this kind of interaction with the world? Well, it's he says a lot of different things about it. Well, one of the things he says is you and so you and I, let's say Zach, Zach, you're my thou currently, but we are the center of the world around which everything revolves. We are complete. I can relate to you. I can be responsible for you. I can have these affect a effective relations towards you. It's a completely different mindset. It's a completely different grammar if you like for my thoughts the way that I relate to thou to you. There's really good questions about whether only another person can be a thou. And let's not get into that because that's complicated. But one thing is clear for Booer is that it's always to some degree reciprocated that an I and Thou is a back and forth in a way that the I it interaction with the world isn't. So I think the distinction is intuitive enough for people to get it based on that.
But the really important point here is that I the I part of the I it and the I part of the I-Thou when I interact with the world as an I that between me and you rather than me and that those two selves are different. M so the eye of the I it is this you know collecting eyeball that's using and analyzing and things and the eye of the I-Thou is a member of a pair and there is no me without you in that in that mode. So that's just a very general I hope I hope that made some sense on the fly. That's just a very general distinction about two different ways to interact with the world. When I'm interacting with the world in an I-Thou mode, I'm encountering something. Countering Zach. Now we can ask what this has to do with products that are made by people and products that are made by AI.
Because one thing that can happen I think when we think about a piece of music that's either played or written by or both or just one of them by a person is that a piece of music is an expression of that person and it mediates an encounter with that person. It can mediate a kind of an I-Thou mode for me the listener the consumer if you like. So, let me put that in slightly less abstract terms that might help. So, you know, if I if I'm reading something that you wrote, then and I take it as something that you wrote, then I'm sort of connecting with you through what you wrote. In fact, if I'm reading a bunch of words, letters actually, phone names, whatever you like, that a large language model has spit out, having scrambled, you know, zillions and zillions of other examples of writing. This is, I don't know, roughly how LLM's work. That's not the case. I'm not actually encountering Zach there. I might be fooled. I might be wrong.
I might think that I'm reading a note from you that was not a note from you. What does that show? That shows that we could be wrong. That's all it shows. In the examples I give in the articles, you know, sometimes someone goes like that shooting a flyaway and you think they're waving at you. [laughter] What does that show? Does that show that waves don't matter or that? No, it doesn't doesn't show anything. It just shows you can be wrong. You can be fooled. And this is the same with AI generated stuff. My point is not actually that the AI generated product, the music or the writing, whatever. My point is not that it's not valuable. I'm not trying to say that it's not useful. I'm not trying to say anything like that. I'm just trying to say it's not a replacement. It doesn't replace human music, human writing because human music and m human writing can facilitate an I-Thou encounter in ways that the AI generated stuff cannot.
So this fear of being replaced, it's maybe not so well founded once we appreciate this difference between interacting with the world as it and interacting with beings as thou. [
Zach: Clears throat] I want to read an excerpt from the article that really hammered this point home for me in addition to your beautiful explanation. You wrote, "Why does it matter whether in fact the music connects me with another if I can't tell the difference? Everything in our lives says it matters." Think about when you say, "I'm sorry and don't mean it." Or when you interpret a person's accidental wave as a hello or swatting a fly and thinking they're saying hello. These are counterfeit encounters which feel like connections but aren't.
Yuval: A work created by a person enables an encounter with that person. But the product of an algorithm cannot do this.
Zach: Sometimes we think we are engaged with a thou, but we are in fact alone. And after reading this breakdown of the I it versus I thou, I can't help but think how this puts into words what I was feeling when I would engage with works of AI before I read your piece, which is that AI equals alone. That it can't chat GPT can't feel loss or it can't feel shame. It can't feel joy. And I didn't realize how much that mattered to me that someone else on the other end of that creation is connected to me in a way that I know that this is a human being walking through life that has experienced the highs and lows of that life and felt those emotions that is being put into the art and not just spitting out an algorithmic version of that or an LLM version of that is mimicking someone who has felt those emotions. And like you said, I am sure I will be moved by pieces of AI in the future if I have not been fooled already without knowing.
I'm sure that, you know, I've listened to AI music that I didn't even realize was AI and I'm like, "Oh, I could work out to this." It's like this is making me feel [laughter] jacked up right now or it's getting the job done or you know but I your point is that it doesn't matter because once you find out it's AI the magic of that kind of fades and at least from my perspective the way that I interpreted what you wrote is that like the entity that formed the creation, the entity that made the thing that I'm experiencing doesn't know what it's like to be human or doesn't know what it's like to like I'm not there's no connection. And I and I feel like when I listen to a piece of music or I watch a film, you know, when I when I watch Reservoir Dogs, I feel like I feel a little bit of what it's like to be Quentyn Tarantino.
Or when I listen to, you know, my wife's playing Sabrina Carpenter in the car, I'm like, well, I feel like I know kind of like a little bit of what Sabrina Carpenter is as a human being. And that just is not there with AI. It is like that feeling of, oh, I am truly alone in this room right now experiencing this thing because there is no human connection.
Yuval: And maybe that's just me being biased towards humans. Maybe there will be some sort of automaton in the future that can feel things. Who knows? I But as of now, LLMs, that is not the case. It's what's being produced is not having that connection to human emotion as far as we can tell. So it there is this emptiness. There is this alone feeling to what's being produced. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm really enjoying hearing that. I think there are maybe I can dig into a couple of a couple of things. Yeah. In your description of your experience, one well actually let me let me restore what I was going to say. So one thing is the idea that emotions or that experiences have generated the artwork or the music or the writing that you're experiencing. That seems to loom large for you that it wasn't an individual that kind of experienced the world, processed it somehow, and then created this work that allows you to engage with it.
I think that's a really important element of this. I don't know actually whether all of our alienation from AI products can be chocked up to that because and the reason I say that is you know sometimes human-made stuff does it for me in a way that AI doesn't but it also isn't the product of any particular emotion or experience of the of the maker you know just think about the difference between a craft and a machine made thing, right? Mhm. I think there's a similar connection that's facilitated by the craft that's not facilitated by the machine made thing. So, I don't know how essential that is. I do think what it is though, the reason I think that I'm I'm analyzing you now. You're on my you're on the couch. Yeah. I think the reason that looms large for you though is that's a hallmark of an I-Thou or an interpersonal connection.
A hallmark again hallmark is not always there but a hallmark of an interpersonal connection is the relatability of the experience and the sort of transmission of an experience from one to the other. There's a sort of free play of you know if you and I are talking about something I am just sort of producing for you and transmitting to you my experience of things directly. That's just often part of an interpersonal connection. So I would I would think that is a good symptom that what you're missing there is the is the I-Thou the sec the second thing that I would note and I like this because maybe it brings us all the way back to the beginning of our conversation tonight. You put you put this point very in a very interesting way that I want to I want to pick on.
You said, "Well, once you find out that it's AI, then it turns out it wasn't the valuable thing that you thought it was when you were moved by it." I want to kind of push on that a little bit and suggest that actually it didn't matter all along. Even when you were moved by it, even when you didn't know that it didn't matter, it still didn't matter. [
Zach: Laughter] And this is an old idea and I talk about this with people when we're doing philosophy and with my students in philosophy class all the time. Does it matter that something isn't real if you can't tell that it's not real just in general? There's an old thought experiment.
Yuval: Maybe I should have started when you asked me for thought experiments. Maybe I should have started with this one. This is by Robert Nosik who was I guess he was a philosopher at Harvard for many years. His book is somewhere back here behind me. One of his books maybe two of his books. He came up with this kind of now famous thought experiment called the experience machine. Are you hip to this? Do you know about this one? No. No. All right. So this kind of poses a question to you. So suppose I have a machine. He wrote this, by the way, long before simulations and AI and all these things were practical possibilities. I built a machine that if I put you in it, you will forget that you were ever put in it. In fact, you'll forget all of your previous life previous to it. And you can choose this machine will give you an experience of an entire life of your choice. So you know best life you can imagine.
So like you can it's the experience machine. So you can experience the life as the greatest hero in the world or I don't know what you're into man. Like you know the greatest conqueror or you cured cancer you saved the world you know whatever you think is the most incredible ideal. Yeah. Yeah. Ideal existence you will experience as having lived that if I put you in the machine and then you'll die instead of living whatever subpar life you're living right now and again you won't remember that you were put into the machine so you will think that is your entire life in fact in fact you will be this like you know bloated gross you know gradually dying body in a machine that's being fed these experiences and you're just a burden. I mean, you know, we just use resources and energy to keep this experience mission going to keep you alive. In fact, but you will have no inkling of this.
You have a choice whether to live your this is not an insult to you, you know, relatively mediocre life. You know, you're not saving the world or anything or maybe you will later, but right now we don't think you are. Or experience life as if. What do you choose?
Zach: I definitely don't think I'm saving the world with podcasting [laughter] until now. This one's going to save the world. Until you just made me realize I am a I am a real hero. There's no difference between the two situations you described. No. I would say that I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm in a subpar machine right now. Maybe I'm in a mediocre experience machine. Maybe my family couldn't afford to put me in the ideal heroise version. So, they're like, "Let's stick them. Let's stick them in the discount [laughter] experience." You got the clearance. You got the clearance rack version. Sorry. I mean, look at your podcast guests. You could they couldn't afford to give you better guests. [laughter] No, no, no.
I would say well let me if I had the option to go into that machine and you know it's kind of like I guess a version of the red pill blue pill from the matrix and assuming I'm not in a mediocre or just like let's call it the normal generating machine right now. Do I know for sure that this is the basis of reality that I'm not being offered an upgrade? That I'm like in a real Yeah, let's set that aside for the I would say that for better or worse, I am attached to this reality that I've come to know and I am interested in continuing this for at least until maybe I get this offer again. Who knows? Or maybe I'll never get it again. But right now, I'm too interested in continuing this version of reality.
And I like I don't want to moralize it because maybe the right answer is to go in the experience machine and be like, "Everything means nothing, so just go and have the best experience possible and be flooded with endorphins and sex and drugs and do, you know, whatever." And just be totally pumped full of good feelings until your garbled up fat pod body dies or gives out. But to me right now that is less interesting than this. So I would I would continue in this life because this life has people I love. This life has creations that are great, but also shitty human creations with which color my experience. Not I don't want to pretend that every like human creations are just good because they're human. Like there's a lot of [profanity unclear] that I come across. That's garbage. But for sure that colors the experience of like the spectrum of what reality can be and what human experience can be.
So right now I would say that because of love and curiosity and interest I'm too attached to this life to switch.
Yuval: Perfect. So I think that if we dig into why that is your choice and you said you didn't want to moralize and I'm going to moralize a little bit. I think if we dig into that, then we can really start to see something interesting about AI generated stuff before you realize it was AI generated. So, I'm I'm going to paint a connection, make a connection between these two things for you. So what the experiment experience machine experiment and your answer to the question shows us is that it doesn't just matter what you know about reality. It also matters what reality actually is, right? That one reason I think the main reason for you to make the choice that you did is that it matters to you what's actually it matters to you to be interacting with and encountering reality. That's part of what's valuable about life.
So I am moralizing part of what's valuable in life is that you make an impact on reality and this includes the people you love and interpersonal connections. Part of being a full self, part of being a full eye is to engage in this eyes out encounter with your wife, with your friends, with your podcast audience. This is what you're doing is obviously what you're into, right? So, you want to connect with people. So, that's valuable. Your life would no longer have that in the pot. In fact, the only connection you're going to have with people once you're in the experience machine is that they might see your, you know, your gross gradually dis the decomposing [laughter] immobile body as the experiences are that's what's really happening. So reality matters. This is an old idea. One of the beautiful things about philosophy and also one of the frustrating things about philosophy that not that much really ever changes.
You know if you go all the way back to the ancient Greeks they were already on to onto this. So I like to think about this old Greek tragedy edipus. This is what the edipus complex comes from the play. And do you know the story of Oedipus? It's roughly you know you know this I don't I don't know if I is the Oedipus complex is that love of the mother am I or am I yeah you'll see why. Yeah. Let me let me give you a quick rundown of the plot and then you'll see why it's called the Oedipus complex. That was years later but Freud named it the Oedipus complex. So though this is an ancient Greek tragedy. This guy Oedipus is the king of I believe it's Thebes the city. He looks around, he's, you know, he's got every reason to think that his life has gone really well. I mean, he's married to the queen. I think her name was Jocasta. Beautiful queen. He is the hero of the city.
He had become king by defeating the Sphinx by solving the riddle of the Sphinx. The Sphinx was terrorizing the citizens of the city. He got rid of it. So, he's the hero. They made him king. Awesome. Badass guy. Who's got everything that in a Greek world in the ancient Greek world you would you would want to have. But there's a plague in Thebes. And so he's trying to figure out why there's a plague. He goes to a an oracle or maybe it's a prophet. The prophet says, "Oh, it's because it's because there's a an abomination among you and the gods are sort of punish punishing this with the plague." I'm summarizing and going off [clears throat] memory of this play. But here's the thing. It turns out he learns by trying to figure out how to solve the problem of the plague of the city of Thebes. Turns out that actually his hot wife is his mother. He didn't know that, but all along it was his mother.
And he killed his father on the road on the way to Thebes. He killed his he thought he killed a beggar who had who was trying to rob him or something or he had a disagreement with him or something and ended up killing that was he killed his father, married his mother. And to make matters worse, it was these facts that made him an abomination and his presence and Thebes is what caused the plague. So the city that he thought he saved, he was actually making suffer. So all along, all along, even when he thought that he was living the most badass life you could live, he was actually in fact in a horrible situation. Now, you can think of the experience machine kind of like that. That you think you're living this badass life, you know, curing cancer, saving the world, whatever, being a rockstar, whatever you your idea is. In fact, you're just a pathetic burden. Just this bloated body in a machine. Yeah.
Right now it you can think of the story of Oedipus as a sort of indication of what matters to us, right? That even if you think you're very fortunate, you might actually be miserable. Even if you think you're having this lovely connection through this product, through this piece of music, through this writing, whatever, you might not be. It you still are not making that connection even before you realize it, right? You're realizing it is just some extra step that happens after whatever matters happens. That's my whole point and going through this whole thing that your subjective experience of the world is not the beginning and end of all that matters. What matters is actually what's happening in reality. Part of what really matters to humans is connection to other people. It's the I-Thou relation as Booer called it.
I think there's really something to that and I think it's telling that one of the first things you said when you described why you decide not to go into the experience machine even if ultimately you had decided to go in one of your main hesitations I think would have been but what about my wife or what about my friends what about my loved ones I want to keep connecting with them and I won't be able to in fact even if I think I am right I can build into that experience machine part of your per perfect life is that you're with your wife and everything's great and you have the best marriage for decades to come imaginable and you have this, you know, complete and beautiful connection with her. None of that's actually happening, but you'll experience as if it was. You'd hesitate to do that because it matters whether you're actually making the connection. Yeah. Just like it matters whether someone means it when they say they're sorry.
Just like it matters when someone's actually waving to you when they go like this. And I would say even more that maybe the fact that AI can generate intelligent looking things or musical sounding things or artistic looking things whatever you want whatever you want to think about. I think that actually leads us to reflect on what actually matters and I think that is great. I think we can really ask ourselves, you know, what matters about human life, just producing things, products or something else. And I think I think it we'll find that it's that something else.
Zach: Yeah, it's what you're saying is also making me think about another version of the experience machine where let's say I have my life now or I can go into another experience machine where my life will be exactly the same as my other life would have played out but everyone is AI generated. All my interactions are some form of a simulation. That would have been exactly the same type of interactions as my real life now, except in the simulated life, let's say I don't have to ever worry about money. So that gives me a good reason to switch. I' I'd have the same exact experiences, but every time I refresh my Chase app, I have a million dollars. [laughter] And I still have my wife. I have exact copies of my wife, my brothers, my, you know, future children, maybe my friends. Everything is exactly the same. And as soon as I make that switch, I have no idea that I was ever in the machine, except I just never have to worry about money ever again.
Do I keep the life I'm in now or do I switch to the AI generated exact copy of a slightly more financially lucrative life and so yeah I was just going to end off by saying like I'd still like it makes me think about like how you end it off where you it really makes you ponder what is the thing about humanity that connects you to other people. And I don't I don't even know how to say it concretely, but it just matters to me that it I want to know that people are feeling things in a human way and that this is my wife and that's my friend and they're they're going through something that is in some sort of union with the way that I experience the world. And I don't know how to better define it than that. But even if I was in another world that felt exactly the same and they were and I would have no idea as soon as I enter like it's done and I just like I'm basically just transferring my life over with more money. Mhm.
I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't want to even entertain the possibility of switching because even though it's not my experience of what's going on in my wife's head or my friend's head or the experience of other people, I still want to feel like I'm surrounded by other people that are experiencing that stuff.
Yuval: I think more I think you not only want to feel like you're around other people that you're connecting with, you want to actually be connecting with other people. Actually be yeah it matters how the world actually is. I think that is the big point that it actually matters whether you are part of a we whether you are part of a system of connections with others whether you are genuinely encountering someone in an I-Thou, if you like, way it actually matters whether even if you feel like you are and you're not that's not as good as actually being in it. I think that you could probably come up with versions of your dilemma that you came up with where maybe the reasonable thing to do would be to choose to go in for the fake version of things. That's okay.
I want to say, you know, what if the real the reality life you have to choose is full of real hardship, starvation, problems, suffering, you know, and what if the artificial version you have a choice to step into is like super comfortable, you know? Maybe we could come up with a scenario, cook up a thought experiment where it really would be worth it to just go into the artificial thing just to save yourself a bunch of suffering. That's fine. That's fine. That's compatible with what I want to say. All that matters, all that I want to convey is that it weighs something. It matters somewhat that there's real connection in the real meat space. [laughter] Yeah. And there's only fa artificial counterfeit connection in the artificial that it matters weighs something. What that shows us what that shows now it doesn't m it doesn't mean that the weighing will ultimately win out. It just means that it's something right now.
What that shows us, the fact that's something is that it's not the same thing. It shows us that actually connecting is not the same thing as seeming to but not actually connecting. Yeah, that's really all I need, if that makes sense, need to explain why we get a little bored with AI music because it's not the same thing. That's why I want to tell my students what I didn't think of it fast enough on the day that it happened, but when I walked in and I heard them say it, I should have said that. I should have said, "Well, but it matters at least a little bit, so you're not going to be replaced." A person singing a song to you is not literally replaceable by an algorithm producing the same sounds that hit that stimulate your brain or your eardrums in exactly the same way because it's not the same thing. That's all.
And the fact that it even weighs a little bit that in the real situation you're actually connecting with others, that you're part of a group, a wei, that you're together with others, that just shows that it's not an exact replacement. And I think that is some relief that it's we can't be replaced because we're we're us and we need connections with each other. It could be it could be that someday soon producing things via AI by writing prompts or arranging the AI in some other way will become a form of expression from me to you and will be recognized as such. That could happen. In fact, I'm pretty sure that will happen. And that is fine. That's not that's not a revolutionary radically new thing necessarily. That's a change in instruments. That's a change in the way in which I connect to other people. It's not replacing those other people or replacing me.
Zach: I think that's a great spot to end off. I know we could go for another three hours and I hope there will be a round two in the future. I believe you when you say your stamina is unbeatable when it comes to philosophical conversations. Where is the best place for people to follow your work? Where is the best place for people to check out your book, Why Read Pascal Today? Where can people keep up with everything Yuval Avnur?
Yuval: Great question. The well the paper the article that we discussed about AI is in a publication called Nautilus. They have a lot of cool stuff often. My book.
Zach: I'm going to link that to the description as well, the article, the book, wherever the best places are to follow you. So, that'll all be in the YouTube and Spotify description.
Yuval: Thank you very much. And one of the only advantages to having such a weird name as mine is I'm the only one with this name in the world. Google me and I have a website that I keep updated with all of my latest stuff. One of these days I'll join the technological internet revolution and get a and get a blog going, but that hasn't happened yet. So, the best I can do is my Google Sites web page.
Zach: That's perfect.
Yuval: And I welcome anyone to email me with questions or ideas or anything like that.
Zach: Yuval Avnur, thank you so much. This has been a blast.
Yuval: Thank you, Zach. This is a lot of fun.
Zach: Yeah, thank it's it's been an absolute blast and I'm I'm sure there will be around too. I could I couldn't help but stalk the rest of your profile and I see you've been working on a book about the afterlife for over a decade and you know perhaps that'll be what brings us back. We'll we'll start with the end of the AI article and slowly work our way into the afterlife. But th this is this has been an unbelievable conversation and yeah, thank you guys for tuning in.
Yuval: Thank you.