Joe Rogan Experience #2193 - Jack Symes

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) What's up, Joe? How are you, man?

How's it going, Joe? Yeah, I'm very well.

Nice to meet you.

Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

So I got the r- request to be on when, when it said multiverse and new atheism.

Yeah.

I'm like, what a combination that is. Let's talk.

Nice.

(laughs)

Yeah, so I think, like, it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right? Uh, it tends to be, like, a theory thrown about by physicists and, and stuff. But I think there's a... At the moment, we don't wanna be talking about philosophy as a society. We're, like, stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions. So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, um, Stephen Hawking, uh, Brian Cox, they all say something along the lines of, like, "Philosophy is dead." So just before we get into the multiverse, it's probably best to say, like, what philosophy is and sort of-

Yeah, let- please.

... what the point of, of-

Yeah.

... talking about the multiverse is. So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, like, what they take philosophy to be 'cause it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into their wider projects. And one of the ideas that I love is this one by, uh, the late great British philosopher, Mary Midgley. She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing, right? So, like, we have these conversations in our societies, and, like, these conversations are flowing around. And likewise, we have these pipes l- running underneath our houses, keeping the water flowing. But occasionally, it gets clogged, and so the philosopher needs to pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again. So these are things like what it is to be a woman, or what it is to have free speech, or what it means to say that a gene is selfish. So that's, I see, like the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like, trying to understand the concepts we're using. But then also there's this bigger aspect to philosophy, which is, like, how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Like, let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology, and, and the arts, and let's try and get a big picture of the world. And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be. So I take that to be the project. And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks are things like, why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing, no universe? Like, why are, are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life? Where does consciousness come from? Like, when I make a moral statement like, "The Holocaust is bad," is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad? Like, are they the same kind of statement? Is that the same bad I'm using?