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Robert Wright episode is released! (Patreon)

Published:
2022-02-19 22:12:39
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hi everyone,

Told you we would get it out next!

This episode was a welcome relief after the last few episodes and I’m sure you will see that reflected in our charity.

I’ve seen some people hoping that this would be a takedown of Bob based on his current ‘cognitive empathy’ stances towards Putin & Russia. I’m sorry to disappoint but as discussed on the episode we were not focusing on his politics but rather his broader worldview.

We don’t share Bob’s views but we also think he does a good job of laying them out, issues genuine caveats, and acknowledges alternative points of view. Those are all seriously rare in the guru-verse and yet Bob does appear to be a paid up member with a modern ‘secular’ philosophy and plenty of long form podcast content.

So ultimately we do judge Bob to be a ‘good’ guru regardless of how far we agree/disagree with his worldview.

Do you agree with our assessment? Or were we blinded by seeing actual self deprecation? Thoughts and comments welcome!

Files

Robert Wright: A Cosmic Journey Across the Bob-o-verse - Decoding the Gurus

Matt and Chris finally leave the Rogan-verse behind, activate their Infinite Improbability Drive, and blast off for the Bob-o-verse.

Comments

Ethan Milne

I hope rob exercises his right to reply and takes Chris to task on his dismissal of P zombies /j

Lilydale

So glad Matt survived the bull sharks and the stone fish so you two could finish up this really good decoding episode with Bob! I hadn’t thought of Bob as a guru before, but since reading the New republic back in my 20s and then reading most of his books and watching almost every Blogginghead show he’s done and reading dozens of books whose authors he’s interviewed—I wonder how much of the information in my head is from Bob one way or another! A lot! This was a totally delightful decoding. You two are always so fun to listen to, so super funny, but this time heartwarming was mixed in and I loved it….so three cheers for Bob, Matt And Chris!

Paul Bowman

Enjoyed the discussion. I find the whole "logos" thing a bit too far into actual faith/mysticism for my own taste. But I do agree with the proposition that Robert is open about signalling when he's moving from the science-y bits to the more faith-y ones. And as far as faith systems go, it seems relatively benign and shorn of a lot of the toxic baggage that tends to come along with more trad theocratic and revelatory religious traditions. The black holes as universe-creator gods was fun and more a kind of modern deism, if I understood it right, than an anthropomorphised sky-god creator dude view. I'm actually with Chris on the p-zombies being silly thing. While I agree with Matt that it's not so easy to get the hard problem of consciousness to go away (clue's in the name), I do think some of the contortions philosophers knot themselves into on this one are dumb. You get sober references like the IET saying that we can't conceive of why consciousness is necessary. That's taking it too far. There are perfectly good intuitive accounts of why consciousness is an important part of our social functioning. "The ability to imagine what another person is feeling and thinking" is intuitively hard to conceive of without having the model of your own consciousness to project onto others (and I recall Matt making this point re gurus being terrible at this, because their starting model - i.e. their own self - is generally so atypically narcissistic, needy, envious, etc - Gad Saad ep, possibly?). And we can tie that to natural selection, in the sense that at a certain level of development, the main "environmental" challenge to surviving long enough to reproduce becomes other humans, before anything else. In such a situation, the first humans to evolve higher consciousness would have had a definite edge over the others. In the ring victory generally goes to the fighter that can predict the other person's next move before they even know they're going to make it. Even outside such narrowly conflictual cases, the intuitive position that the rise of higher consciousness coincides with the rise of "second nature", i.e. the point at which cultural evolution takes over from "biological" evolution, as Chris outlined it, is persuasive and its a failing of the philosophy discourse on the topic that they don't seem to address it (I'm sure someone somewhere probably has addressed it, but it doesn't seem to feature highly in the common overviews of the debate)

Dan

Ditto, I’m on Team Chris for the fourth option regarding consciousness….kinda shocked that option isn’t more mainstream.

Grammaticus Gore

Best episode to date! Bob is the golden god of the gurus. I say that from a completely impartial non-tribalist viewpoint. 😎

Dave Lavelle

An hour into the podcast, I (internet dumbass) realised it would make sense to listen to the whole original Bob video first, and then listen to the DTG breakdown. I wonder if others took the same approach?

CLP

Not my favorite episode. I think you engaged with the material too much instead of the Guru-dom of your friend. For example, when discussing biological evolution, he jumps to the non-sequitur of "what if universes/realities experience evolution," and "what if the two mechanisms are correlated to create consciousness?" There is no reason to believe that black holes and intelligent life coincide in any relevant way. This is the kind of baseless thinking-out-loud you criticize Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein for. "The fact that you can even say that is astounding." If i wanted to engage with the material I could always just listen to Bob's podcast. IDK, YMMV, just sharing my opinion

Nick Boyle

Ironically, in Chris's fourth option (the Cavanagh Conjecture of Consciousness) - in his own words - "there is no observer, there is only the feeling that an observer is there". This necessarily means that the self is an illusion. You got yourself in knots there Chris, and I agree with the sentiment that you went too much into the content of the talk rather than just analysing the guru, although perhaps this is an opportunity to go back and turn the microscope back on that "rant" segment to see how Chris scores on the gurometer ;)

Jason Trock

reflecting on rob's discussion of evolution i'm drawn to the passage from milan kundera's "immortality" "No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you." and, second point, it makes complete sense that awareness is an evolutionary concept -- except for rocks. the rock is... just a rock. great episode and keep 'em coming.