Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2193 - Jack Symes
Uploaded: 2024-08-22T17:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2193 - Jack Symes' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2193 - Jack Symes' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-22. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2193 - Jack Symes

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's up, Joe?
How's it going, Joe?
Nice to meet you.
Very well, thank you for having me, it's good to be here.
So I got the request to be on when it said multiverse and new atheism.
I'm like, what a combination that is.
Let's talk.
Nice.
Yeah, so I think it's interesting to think
why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right?
It tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff.
But I think at the moment,
we don't want to 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,
Stephen Hawking, 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 what the point of talking about the multiverse is.
So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to,
like what they take philosophy to be,
because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss
fall into the wider projects.
One of the ideas that I love is this one by 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 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 of 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 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 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?
Right.
But the big question, and to get to the multiverse now is,
the big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this
fundamental question,
the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus said,
the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth
living.
So my question is, what's the point of all this?
Is existence on the whole a good thing?
Should we be happy and pleased to be alive?
And what's the purpose of life?
And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism,
and these arguments for theism all come in into the project.
I think it's ridiculous to dismiss philosophy because you are a proponent of
science.
Just that reductionist perspective.
The idea that thinking about things and developing, for lack of a better term,
a philosophy,
developing your own personal philosophy, taking from the accounts of others and
their perspectives
and their interesting, unique view of the world that we live in,
the idea that that's not significant or important to me seems pretty silly.
Yeah.
It's silly.
I don't know how they get away with saying these things.
I think you get it though, right?
Like science splits the atom.
It puts a man on the moon.
So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems.
Right.
But the human beings that took place in the experiments that led to the
splitting of the atom
all had to have some sort of a philosophy that they managed their life by.
Yeah.
They had to have something that allowed them to have the discipline to commit
to their schooling,
to follow through with the project.
Especially think about Oppenheimer's struggle that he had with this thing that
he had created
that was ultimately going to lead to destruction of hundreds of thousands of
lives,
if not the entire human race itself.
Right.
Which was very deeply based in philosophy, like his perspective and his
struggles with it.
I mean, if he was just like an automaton, like some sociopathic, just super
Alzheimer's
guy, you know, that didn't, not autism guy, rather, that didn't think at all
about, no concept at all
about empathy, no concept at all about our perspective.
He would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs.
That's science depends on human beings that have a unique way of thinking.
And how does that not come out of philosophy?
Well, that seems to be like the failure of new atheism fundamentally, right?
We've got this movement in the early 2000s, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens,
who were all being critical of religion in the light of like the September 11th
terrorist attack
and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond like
criticism.
But then once that project and like once they embark on that project and they
criticize religion,
there isn't really anything left there.
Like they don't do the projects of philosophy of finding the meaning in the
ethics.
And when they try to do it, it's lacking.
Something's missing.
So I see that as like the reason why new atheism is going out of favor,
why it's becoming unfashionable, because it can't answer those questions.
Well, I think it becomes almost as dogmatic as religion itself.
Like atheism in a lot of ways is kind of related.
They're committed to this idea that there is nothing else.
Yeah.
You know, I just don't understand how you could do that without enough.
If you're a person who you view the world based in, he is so fucking loud, dude.
I mean, I'll cut off.
He's just like, he said, Marshall and Carl were having a wrestling match for
about 15 minutes.
And poor little Carl was over there.
It's also one of the hottest days of the year without air con.
So he is really going hard for the panther.
I was where I was before I distracted.
So I just think that these people sort of looked at this as religion is all
this superstitious nonsense
that these people have concocted and put together over years to keep people in
line.
And science is something that we can prove and see.
And, you know, there is no God.
There is no...
But just how do you know?
You do not know.
It's a crazy thing to say.
You have such a limited perspective just in terms of the universe itself.
We only see what we see on our planet.
And the tiny amount that we can reach out into this...
And, you know, they can look back 13 billion years, but what are they looking
at?
They're looking at, like, bright lights, like little dots.
And they understand this is a galaxy.
But it's like, how big is this fucking thing?
Where did it come from?
What's going on?
You don't know.
What is the purpose?
Is this a grand test?
Are you a part of some very bizarre journey that the soul has to go through in
this environment
before it expands and goes into the next dimension, the next phase of existence?
Who fucking knows?
You don't know.
We do know that people die.
We do know that people have near-death experiences and these very bizarre
moments where they come back from the dead
and have very similar accounts of something happening, about encountering...
Like, I had Sebastian Young on the podcast the other day.
And he was...
Sebastian Younger.
And he was explaining how when he almost died, he had an internal bleeding.
And he saw his father.
His father came to the bed with him and was talking to him.
It was like this very bizarre thing.
Like, we don't really know...
We really don't know what life is.
We don't know what consciousness is.
We don't...
So, we're being arrogant.
And I think, unfortunately, brilliant people that are so used to schooling
people in debates,
like Christopher Hitchens, like Sam Harris.
So, these guys are so good at making religious zealots look like buffoons.
Right?
And you get real good at that and you just sort of think that, look, I got it
down.
These fucking religious people, they don't know what the fuck's going on.
Yeah.
But you're involved in a religion.
As bizarre as it seems, just like wokeism as a religion, just like far-right
ideology as a religion.
I'm not sure about putting like religion on those things in particular, but...
Cult.
Like, yeah, they might be cult.
They might have some aspects which are cult.
They're ideological captured people.
But I think to have a religion, you do need to have like a belief in what
Christians, Jews, and Muslims take to be the perfect being.
Like, God has to be by definition perfect.
And if you think that being exists, then I think you certainly qualify for
having a religion.
What about Scientology?
I guess that's a cult.
But in our country, they actually won a lawsuit.
It's a bad classification.
I used to have a joke about it where I said that a cult is created by one guy
and that guy knows it's bullshit.
In a religion, that guy's dead.
That's good.
Well, okay, let's say this though on behalf of religion, right?
I think the two best things going for it aren't the, like for me, the sense of
community and the cultural aspects, they don't appeal to me.
I couldn't think of anything more boring than spending my Sunday singing hymns
and doing that.
No, that's not for me.
There's so many other things that you can do to find community, to find
fulfillment, to be happy.
Well, but you could recognize how some people would find great engagement with
the enjoyment from it.
But I think in terms of like philosophical arguments for thinking it's true,
like the one you mentioned a moment ago, like where this all came from, like
science can't get to that question.
The Kalam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular.
It just goes, everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore it needs a cause and then you do this deduction to figure out what
kind of cause that could be.
And it would have to be something outside of time and space with the power and
knowledge to bring this into being.
And that might not be, that might get you all the way to God.
That's a really strong reason for believing in God and the answers the atheists
give in place of it are nowhere near as strong.
And likewise, like the argument from fine tuning, which is gaining traction
again, the physicist Sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature,
like 26 of them have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and
intelligent life to form.
He calculates that the initial low entry point of the universe had to be 1 in
10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, which means if you sat there writing
out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe
first started expanding.
And you wrote down one digit every second, you'd still be writing out that
number now.
Like that number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are
incredible.
And when we're thinking of probability theory, if we're looking at the best
explanation for that, then I think, you know, those that posit the existence of
God have the better hand.
Like I'm not religious, but I think we have to put our hands up and go, no, to
those two problems, they've got really strong arguments for believing in God.
But, you know, people like Dawkins, people like Hitchens and the like, even
Dennett, I think Harris is a little bit m