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0:00:39 Humans are the dominant species on a dying planet, and we’re still clinging to the idea
0:00:45 that we can think our way out, invent our way out, maybe even upload our way out.
0:00:52 And isn’t that the entire problem right there? If there is a trait that is decidedly, definitely
0:00:59 human, it’s that we think of ourselves as individuals, as separate from everything around
0:01:04 us. It’s the trait that helped us take over the world. And if we can’t figure out a way
0:01:12 to change it, it might also destroy us. But what if the solution isn’t more mastery, more
0:01:17 control? What if the only way to survive is to become something else entirely?
0:01:23 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:01:33 My guest today is Mark C. Taylor. He’s a philosopher, a cultural critic, and the author
0:01:41 of a book called After the Human. It’s a sweeping, sometimes dizzying book. One that moves from Hegel
0:01:49 to quantum physics to the ethics of soil and fungi. It’s packed with hand-drawn diagrams and photos of
0:01:55 dirt, and discussions of philosophy, and the history of technology, and day-to-day dilemmas like the
0:02:01 problem of having too many books for your number of shelves. And somehow all this coalesces into a
0:02:09 uniquely ambitious attempt to explain what it is to be human, and what it could mean. About the myths that
0:02:18 myths that shaped us, the ideas that trapped us, and the need for a new story, a new self, and really a
0:02:24 whole new way of thinking and being in the world. I think people will be reading this book for years,
0:02:29 and I’m glad I got to spend some time talking to the author. Now.
0:02:35 Mark Taylor, welcome to the show.
0:02:37 Mark Taylor: Delighted to be with you.
0:02:41 Mark Taylor: I’m excited you’re here. This is going to be a doozy of a conversation
0:02:51 because it’s a doozy of a book. I was thinking about how to anchor this conversation, and I just decided that the best way to do it
0:02:58 is to start where you start the book, which is with a pretty jarring thought experiment,
0:03:05 we’ll call it. You write on the, I think it’s on the very first page, and now I’m quoting:
0:03:12 “How would your understanding of the meaning of your life change if you knew that next Friday,
0:03:19 at precisely 12 o’clock midnight, the human race would become extinct?” End quote. That’s a hell of
0:03:25 a way to kick off a book, Mark. I love it. So why come out swinging like that? Why do you want us
0:03:30 right out of the gates thinking about total extinction next Friday?
0:03:33 Mark Taylor: Because I think it’s a realistic possibility.
0:03:38 The real urgency of this book comes out of my concern about climate change,
0:03:48 because there’s absolutely no doubt that we are facing catastrophic effects in the very near future.
0:03:58 And there’s a complete blindness or unwillingness to confront the actuality of that problem and to address
0:04:09 what needs to be done to dodge it, if we can. But it’s not just that. It’s also the intersection of
0:04:18 new technologies which are related to this, and the ways in which those new technologies have transformed
0:04:28 the social, economic, and political systems. And all of this, they’re all interrelated. And the problem is
0:04:35 isn’t just that people are not connecting the dots. People do not know the dots that need to be connected.
0:04:43 And that’s partly related to our educational system, and it’s partly related to the new media
0:04:47 ecological system that has emerged with this technology.
0:04:51 Mark Taylor: But it’s also even more fundamentally related to,
0:04:57 I mean, and this is the conceit of the book, right, to the way we’ve come to think of ourselves,
0:05:02 the story we’ve come to tell ourselves about ourselves and what and who we are in the world
0:05:10 and how we relate to everything around us. So, I mean, that’s hence the title, “After the Human,” right?
0:05:13 Mark Taylor: This book is very much about what we think being human means.
0:05:14 Mark Taylor: Correct.
0:05:20 Mark Taylor: So, let’s just start very simply, very simply. What is the human?
0:05:26 Mark Taylor: This class, “After the Human,” that I taught, I began by asking the students two questions.
0:05:35 One, the question you just asked me, what is the human? And two, the question of
0:05:43 Mark Taylor: whether the students think that human beings, as they are now constituted,
0:05:51 are the end of the evolutionary process, or if there will be other forms of life that will evolve from us.
0:05:58 Answering what is the human is, it’s a difficult question to answer without falling
0:06:04 into the trap I’m trying to escape. And that is the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the human.
0:06:12 Mark Taylor: Because, historically, part of what has made humans distinctive is the propensity to
0:06:15 distinguish themselves from all of us, right?
0:06:15 Mark Taylor: Right.
0:06:21 Mark Taylor: To distinguish themselves on the one side from the animal and on the other side from
0:06:28 the machine. And that is collapsing now. That is collapsing. Part of what distinguishes the human
0:06:35 is that we can ask the question, what it means to be human. That’s a level of self-consciousness and
0:06:42 self-reflectivity, I think, that is important. So it’s that level of self-reflectivity that I see as,
0:06:44 in some ways, distinctive of the human.
0:06:50 Mark Taylor: So what you’re saying is we have come to think of human consciousness as something special,
0:06:58 something distinct, something almost separate from nature, as though we are outside of the natural
0:07:01 world, looking down at it, trying to make sense of it.
0:07:06 Mark Taylor: Correct. I mean, that begins in the Bible in certain ways. I mean, I think there’s a
0:07:13 philosophical foundation to the Anthropocene. And I think, in many ways, that philosophical foundation
0:07:19 begins with modern philosophy, which begins with Descartes. And Descartes, as everybody knows,
0:07:25 said, “Think, therefore I am.” And what Descartes does is to identify a human being with thinking,
0:07:33 and everything else is a machine, including the human body. From that point on, there’s always this effort
0:07:40 to distinguish the human from the non-human. And that can be the animal, that can be the plant,
0:07:47 and, you know, philosophers all the way down to Heidegger will just distinguish the human in
0:07:54 certain ways. For Heidegger, the distinction of the human is awareness of death. He says animals expire,
0:08:01 humans die. Dying is knowing there is such a thing as death.
0:08:10 Mark Taylor: So is it best for us to think of Descartes as the philosophical father of the modern world,
0:08:15 the guy who gave us this subject-object split? The guy who convinced us that we are all little,
0:08:21 tiny, private islands of subjectivity, bopping around in a world of objects and things?
0:08:30 Yes, I think so. He begins the argument of defining human uniqueness in terms of human consciousness
0:08:38 and self-consciousness. That identification of the human in terms of cognition and everything else is not
0:08:43 being cognitive in any way. I mean, that becomes the heart of anthropocentrism.
0:08:50 And anthropocentrism is the basis of this Anthropocene, that everything is directed toward in this
0:08:58 evolutionary process, its culmination in human being. It separates man as being unique in this sense,
0:08:59 and human being is not unique.
0:09:03 Mark Taylor: So that’s anthropocentrism, the idea that human beings are at the center of things.
0:09:07 Mark Taylor: Correct. Heidegger makes a form of this argument. He states this in one of
0:09:12 the best ways I’ve ever heard. He says, “Everywhere man turns, he sees only himself.”
0:09:17 That is the world in which we are living. It’s a selfie world.
0:09:19 Mark Taylor: To stick with Descartes for a second,
0:09:22 Mark Taylor: To just make sure his villainy is appreciated here.
0:09:23 Mark Taylor: Right, right.
0:09:28 Mark Taylor: And to put it in plain language, what Descartes really does is he helps
0:09:35 drive a wedge between the self and the world, so that the self or self-consciousness becomes
0:09:41 the only thing we really know for certain, and everything outside our minds becomes this
0:09:49 external thing. So with Descartes, we really think ourselves into alienation, or we think ourselves
0:09:53 out of the natural world. Is that a decent summary of his contribution?
0:10:00 Mark Taylor: Correct. He sets up what I call an oppositional ontology, that everything defines
0:10:07 itself in opposition. So you’re right. The human is not this, not that, not that. Separates us out from,
0:10:12 or to use your language, it alienates us from the natural world.
0:10:18 Mark Taylor: So just to bring everyone along with us here, right, how does that lead us to
0:10:24 this situation where we are exploiting nature and wrecking our environment, which is obviously where
0:10:29 we started with the ecological catastrophe and climate change. I just want to draw a line
0:10:34 from one thing to the other for the audience, so they know why this is more than a bad idea,
0:10:38 where this actually had really terrible consequences for us in the world.
0:10:42 Mark Taylor: It has consequences, yes, with respect to the natural world, but also social and
0:10:45 political and economic world. Mark Taylor: What does that mean?
0:10:51 Mark Taylor: So we view the individual as what is most concrete and most real. And we see
0:11:00 groups as formed of individuals, right? That’s wrong. Because there is no such thing as an isolated
0:11:08 individual. Every individual is what it is by virtue of its interrelationship to other individuals and
0:11:11 entities. Mark Taylor: Can I ask you, Mark, why is it so hard to see that?
0:11:15 Mark Taylor: I don’t know. Mark Taylor: Why is the illusion that we are just disconnected and
0:11:22 separate so powerful? Mark Taylor: It’s one of many things that puzzles me. But here’s what’s also so
0:11:29 puzzling is that interrelationship affirms itself in the very effort to negate it.
0:11:35 Mark Taylor: Yes. That’s the thing, right? We’re so conditioned to think of ourselves this way,
0:11:41 but it really isn’t that hard to see why it isn’t true, right? I mean, the idea of an individual or the
0:11:47 idea of an “I” is kind of nonsensical, right? If there isn’t an “other.” What could it possibly mean
0:11:51 to be an individual if you’re not already in a world of others? Mark Taylor: The only thing you can say
0:11:58 about the individual is negative. The only thing that you can say about your individuality is that it’s
0:12:03 not this, not that, not something else. But anything positive you say, you’re saying you’re a man,
0:12:11 you’re a woman, you’re a certain name, whatever. Here’s the issue: identity is difference. We’re in
0:12:16 the midst of this political… We’re talking about politics right now. We’re talking about the
0:12:23 politics that are being debated on the floor of the Congress as we now speak, right? Because the only
0:12:28 way in which you can establish your identity is by your difference from others, right?
0:12:34 By defining yourself against which you’re not. Mark Taylor: In relationship too.
0:12:41 So we think we’re separate, but the reality is that we exist in this web of interdependence.
0:12:50 Web. Exactly. But if you come back to climate, we’re parasites on the Earth. It’s a parasite-host
0:12:57 relationship. And we are in the process of destroying the host upon which we depend, right? You cut down all
0:13:12 the trees in order to serve the economy and we die, right? So in that sense, right, the interrelationship
0:13:20 is confirmed. I mean, when the current politicians pull out of all climate accords, reinforce fossil fuel,
0:13:23 they’re destroying the planet, without which we can’t live.
0:13:26 Yeah, we’ll get there. I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves.
0:13:27 Mark Taylor: Okay.
0:13:31 Mark Taylor: Because I want to get to what is more
0:13:35 or less your alternative or your answer, right? So where we are at this point in the conversation in
0:13:41 the book is with this philosophical problem we have, which is the problem of modernity,
0:13:47 the problem of the modern human, right? This conception of ourselves as separate from each
0:13:52 other and from the world, as outside of nature. And nature is this external thing that we can manipulate,
0:13:59 control, whatever, right? That leads to a situation where we’re both isolated from each other and from
0:14:04 the natural world, which makes it easier for us to destroy the very thing on which we rely. Destroy the host,
0:14:05 as you say, the parasite.
0:14:05 Mark Taylor: Right, exactly.
0:14:12 Mark Taylor: So if that’s the problem, that’s the diagnosis, what is the answer? What kind of vision of the
0:14:16 self do we actually need? And what are the ideas that are going to get us there?
0:14:18 Mark Taylor: First thing I want to say is
0:14:30 Mark Taylor: That I think ideas will help us get out of. Ideas matter. And these issues that should
0:14:37 already be evident are really complicated. Another way to think about what Descartes does is that he
0:14:49 takes mind out of nature, makes everything but the human mind a machine. So part of what you have to do is put
0:15:04 mind back into nature, right? And to do that, you need an expanded notion of mind and of consciousness. So then, if you’re going to have an expanded notion of mind, you have to rethink what we mean by
0:15:10 knowledge, what we mean by cognition, what we mean by intelligence and the like. So part of what I’ve
0:15:19 tried to do in this, I mean, it’s a meta, meta book. I mean, the layers of abstraction, I know. But what I’ve
0:15:29 wanted to do is to start at the actual physical subatomic level and look at quantum mechanics and try to
0:15:36 understand quantum mechanics in terms of relationality and information processing, which I think can be done.
0:15:46 There’s a very important theoretical physicist by the name of Carlo Rovelli, who understands quantum mechanics
0:15:57 through this notion of relativity, that you begin to see the way in which everything is interconnected.
0:16:03 I mean, we are organisms of organisms, right? And all the way down at the cellular level,
0:16:20 you know, the cell engages in cognitive processes because it makes distinctions different within its environment, which is the rest of the cell.
0:16:26 So you begin to think through the ways in which this notion of relationality, right,
0:16:36 works itself out from this most rudimentary level to the physical, and then you look at the biological level,
0:16:49 biological systems are information processing systems, right? I have diabetes, and that’s one of the ways in which I began to understand this.
0:16:59 When you understand how autoimmune disease works, right, you see that it’s a coding problem and a misreading problem.
0:17:10 And one way to understand the mess we’re in now is autoimmune disease, because what autoimmunity involves is that the body turns, the body,
0:17:16 or the body politic turns on itself and destroys itself in certain ways, because it misreads itself.
0:17:25 And you can trace this notion of information processing all the way through the physical, the biological, the ecological,
0:17:40 try to understand ecological systems as information processing systems, and then extend that all the way up into plant and animal cognition, and finally, technology and artificial intelligence.
0:17:47 Can we stick with this idea for a minute of, how did you put it, putting the mind back in the world?
0:17:47 Right.
0:17:51 Because you have this idea in the book, the networked self.
0:17:52 Right.
0:18:03 The networked self, and you’re talking about the mind and even identity, not as something we have, but something that happens, something that emerges in this web, right?
0:18:12 What is the simplest way to describe this? What does it actually mean to think of the mind as something that extends beyond the individual human?
0:18:17 Because, again, that is, it just feels so counterintuitive. It’s so hard for us to do that, even if it is the case.
0:18:28 So, I use the image as the web of webs for a lot of this, or networks.
0:18:37 Think of yourself as a node within an ever-expanding and changing network.
0:18:47 That is, things are events. Everything’s in motion. Everything’s a process, right?
0:18:49 Everything’s in motion.
0:19:04 And what I am constantly becoming is a function not only of what I have been and what I anticipate, but of my relationships to others at this particular moment, to my relationships with others in there.
0:19:10 And ultimately, the whole entire web.
0:19:14 I mean, there are different ways in which you can understand part and whole.
0:19:24 To understand the part, you have to understand its relationship within the whole and how that is constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly shifting.
0:19:33 And so, you know, what you are and what I am is changing as we speak.
0:19:45 Everything is what the Buddhists, and I hesitate to get into a lot of Buddhism because I haven’t studied it in detail, everything is co-dependent and co-emergent.
0:19:50 I am what I am by virtue of my place within this web.
0:19:55 Well, look, part of the problem here is, I think you alluded to this earlier, we’re sort of trapped in our language.
0:19:59 I mean, if I think of my head or my mind, again, the words right there, my.
0:20:01 I think of my mind.
0:20:06 It is my head and my brain is the container for this thing we call my mind.
0:20:08 And is that what you’re talking about here?
0:20:15 We got a shifting away from this idea of the mind as a container to mind as connection.
0:20:16 Yeah.
0:20:20 Another way to put this is, I mean, this sounds simple, but it’s complicated.
0:20:22 Everything is connected.
0:20:23 Everything is interconnected.
0:20:35 And you need an expanded notion of the mind, right, that to understand that there are alternative intelligences, right?
0:20:44 There are different forms of intelligences, of which ours is a part, right, of which ours is one particular kind.
0:20:54 But, I mean, there’s some really, I mean, I know it sounds off the wall, but there’s some really interesting scientific work being done on plant communication.
0:20:58 I mean, Richard Powers’ Overstory is an example of that.
0:21:12 But that book is based upon the work of Susan Simard, his book Searching for the Mother Tree, in which she does develop a scientific study of how these trees interrelate.
0:21:15 And she had a lot of trouble getting any acceptance of that.
0:21:19 And to think differently is to be different.
0:21:35 And there has to be some kind of a recognition of this vital interrelationality, or 99.9% of the species go extinct.
0:21:36 We can go extinct as well.
0:21:37 We can go extinct.
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0:24:15 For me, the relationship between thought and action isn’t always so neat.
0:24:22 I’ve spent a lot of time around Western, woo-woo, new-agey types.
0:24:22 Right.
0:24:34 Boy, they love to talk about Buddhism and meditation and how transformative it is, but I have seen time and again how easily these same people manage to take on all this wisdom and wear it like an ornament,
0:24:37 only to end up even more self-centered.
0:24:51 So I guess I’m asking, even if people chasing wisdom fall back into these ego traps, what does it really take to move from theory to practice or from belief to behavior?
0:24:53 Because the theory part is easy.
0:24:55 The practice part, I find to be much harder.
0:25:00 I’m not so sure the theory part is all that easy.
0:25:10 I mean, it’s easy to say that we live in this world of interdependence and codependence, and I am not an I.
0:25:15 I am related eternally to everything around me and how transformative that belief is.
0:25:29 But then I’ll get up and I’ll have my coffee, and then I will moonwalk into a world, into a culture, almost every part of which is designed to reinforce the illusion that I am an ego, that I am separated.
0:25:39 And so you can read the books, you can recite the ideas, you can even believe them, but then you go out into the world and you just kind of go back into the default, if you know what I mean.
0:25:40 So that’s what I’m asking.
0:25:47 I mean, Hume always said he was a skeptic as long as he was in the study, but he stepped out into the world and he no longer maintained skepticism.
0:25:49 I mean, I want to say two things.
0:25:55 One is that I think, I believe, thinking is a form.
0:26:01 I don’t, there’s not a sharp, thinking is a form of action in certain ways, but your point is well taken.
0:26:09 And I guess one of the ideas I wish I could get more people to understand is positive feedback.
0:26:11 What do you mean?
0:26:15 So positive feedback isn’t getting good reviews on your book, your podcast, your classes.
0:26:22 Positive feedback is related to these complex systems where change accelerates, right?
0:26:25 The popular term for that has reached the tipping point.
0:26:32 And then there’s a major shift, you know, there’s a pile of sand and grain after grain.
0:26:35 You know, there’s going to be an avalanche, but you don’t know when it’s going to occur.
0:26:48 And it’s that, I mean, that’s the bind we’re in now, not just with respect to climate, but with respect to, these systems work the same way.
0:26:52 They’re isomorphic across media, financial bubbles and climate change work the same way.
0:27:13 So my problem is how, how do you convey the urgency of the situation without making the situation hopeless and using these ideas then to enact the kinds of changes that need to be made, right?
0:27:20 But until you understand the nature of the problem, you don’t see the urgency with it all.
0:27:25 We’re talking about a problem that may have began as an individual problem, but now it’s a cultural problem.
0:27:27 Cultural problem. It’s an absolute cultural problem.
0:27:33 Which raises the difficult question, how the hell do you solve a cultural problem?
0:27:42 It’s easier for an individual to change what they do and how they think, but it is a lot harder to change a culture.
0:27:51 And if what you’re saying is true, and I think it is for the most part, if we don’t change at a cultural level, then nothing matters, really.
0:28:01 Look, I graduated in 1968, and the world was pretty dark at that time.
0:28:11 The war in Vietnam was going on, draft deferments were going on, racial riots in the town I grew up in, student suspicion of universities and so on.
0:28:18 And there are very, very interesting similarities between the student left of the 60s and the far right today.
0:28:19 When you look at it, it’s weird.
0:28:41 But one of the differences between where we were in 1960, people I knew and was involved with, as a Wesleyan and then at Harvard, and my students in the last years of my teaching, is we believe fundamental change could occur.
0:28:48 Young people today, many of the young people today whom I have got that, don’t.
0:29:02 My question, as I taught, I mean, one of the questions I constantly ask myself is, how far into the dark dare I take them?
0:29:12 And yet, they’re smart, and they know when I back off, and when I’m not being honest with them.
0:29:25 But how can I be honest with them about how, about the crisis I believe we’re in, without leading them hopeless?
0:29:29 And hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:29:32 It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:29:54 So, you know, for my students, my children, and my grandchildren, and others, you know, either we figure this out, the way in which we need to address this, or they have no future.
0:30:10 My grandchildren just came last night here in Massachusetts for a visit, and my grandson Jackson is now 11, and during COVID, they were here for a while.
0:30:12 And one day, he was sitting on the deck.
0:30:14 We live in the mountains.
0:30:25 And Jackson, who was only seven at the time, said to me, Grandpa, maybe the world would be better if there were no humans.
0:30:27 And I said, Jackson, what do you mean?
0:30:32 He said, well, Sadie, that’s their dog, we keep her on a leash.
0:30:38 And we eat turkeys and cows and pigs.
0:30:42 And if we weren’t here, they could roam freely.
0:30:50 And I said, where did you think of, why are you thinking of that?
0:30:51 Did you talk about this at school?
0:30:54 He said, no, I just thought about it.
0:30:56 Now, what does that say?
0:31:02 That a seven-year-old is thinking, I don’t know where he got it.
0:31:05 But it’s in the ether, right?
0:31:05 Right.
0:31:13 And how do we convey a sense of hope and mission?
0:31:15 Because that’s what it is.
0:31:18 It’s mission in a way that will, you know.
0:31:26 I mean, writing a book like this, granted, they’re not going to change it.
0:31:35 But it’s an effort to say, if we look at the world this way, different kinds of actions follow.
0:31:43 In these sorts of conversations, I’m trying to imagine myself on the other side as an audience member listening and wondering, okay, now what?
0:31:43 What do you want me to do?
0:31:56 And I guess what I’m wondering is, if someone reads your book or someone listens to this conversation and they think, okay, I am intellectually going to make this shift from individualism to relationalism.
0:32:05 I’m going to stop thinking of myself as this separate I in the world of others and think of myself as part of this web, as codependent on all of this.
0:32:13 What then, concretely, how differently should someone live?
0:32:17 Like, what do they do differently in their life once they’ve made this shift, right?
0:32:18 What does it look like?
0:32:24 Well, let me speak as a teacher and what I’ve experienced in that way.
0:32:31 I taught most of my career at Williams College, which is an undergraduate liberal arts college.
0:32:36 And the last 20 years, I taught at Columbia, which is, everybody knows Columbia these days, right?
0:32:50 And in all honesty, I always enjoyed teaching undergraduates more than graduate students because – and I’ve written a lot of heavy-duty criticisms of higher education.
0:32:52 A lot of them got me in big-time trouble.
0:33:02 But one of my criticisms of university teaching is it’s a process of cloning, to produce people to do what you do.
0:33:12 And for ever since I was in the business, the job market in academia dried up in 1970, and it hadn’t been a realistic possibility to have a job.
0:33:17 So I would always tell my students, don’t do what I do.
0:33:22 Do what I could never imagine doing and come back and tell me about it.
0:33:32 When I stopped teaching two years ago, we had a gathering of about 50 of my former students, dating from my first year to my last year.
0:33:39 So people ranged from 72 to 22, which is really an interesting kind of thing.
0:33:44 And those, you know, there are countless others that you don’t know what happened.
0:33:49 But they have gone into – I mean, some went into teaching.
0:33:53 There are doctors.
0:33:55 There are lawyers.
0:34:00 They’re not doing what a lot of doctors and lawyers are doing.
0:34:07 One of the most remarkable students I ever had was a refugee from Cuba.
0:34:11 He works in media, Telemundo.
0:34:15 We have some working in theater.
0:34:16 I mean, there are different ways.
0:34:18 And so there are corners.
0:34:20 There are startups.
0:34:23 I mean, you fail sometimes.
0:34:27 Steve Case, who introduced – who was the head of AOL.
0:34:29 He was a student of mine, right?
0:34:34 He could have done different things with what he created.
0:34:47 I started – I mean, the most political, if you will, form of action that I took based on these ideas
0:34:57 was that I started a company with a big New York investment banker by the name of Herbert Allen in 1998 called Global Education Network.
0:35:05 And I started webcasting my classes in 1996 when nobody was doing it.
0:35:11 And in 1992, I taught a course using teleconferencing with Helsinki.
0:35:19 And at that time, I thought that the world would be a better place if everybody could sit down around the table and talk about Hegel or Nietzsche, right?
0:35:22 Who among us hasn’t had that thought?
0:35:22 Right.
0:35:26 And we tried.
0:35:34 And the man I did this with, he put $27 million into that effort, and we failed.
0:35:44 You know, and I had a vision, and it was all based upon this idea of networks to make education more widely available through these technologies.
0:35:53 Now, what I didn’t understand, and I don’t think many, if any, did, was that these technologies that connect also separate.
0:36:03 But there was an example of trying to put the ideas into action in a way that would bring us together in certain ways.
0:36:13 There are ways in which you can do it if you understand, if I may put it this way, the nature of reality and the urgency of the problem.
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0:38:08 Do you worry that AI might change our understanding of humanity in even worse ways?
0:38:13 That we will just gradually come to think of ourselves more and more as machine-like?
0:38:14 Absolutely.
0:38:18 I mean, this is a longer conversation in terms of…
0:38:19 Because I worry about that.
0:38:19 Yeah.
0:38:32 I mean, look, this man, Herbert Owl, that I mentioned, not many people have heard about him, but he is enormous.
0:38:34 He’s my neighbor here in Williamstown.
0:38:53 And he has a conference that he and now his son have been running in Sun Valley that brings together the people running the world, technology, media, entertainment, sports, for five days, and their families for five days.
0:39:01 And we were there before Bezos, before Bezos was Bezos, in all of that.
0:39:11 Gates, Warren Buffett, these are really smart guys, but they have a very narrow vision of the world.
0:39:15 And they know what they’re trying to create.
0:39:21 And Trump does not, in my judgment.
0:39:23 Vance does.
0:39:28 Vance is the bigger problem.
0:39:31 But it’s Peter Thiel.
0:39:34 I don’t know if you’ve run across him or not.
0:39:36 You should.
0:39:41 He’s a follower of René Girard, Stanford.
0:39:44 Thiel is a really powerful person.
0:39:46 There’s a philosophy behind that.
0:39:48 Marc Andreessen and these people.
0:39:50 They have a vision.
0:39:57 And I think that what they understand is that whoever controls AI runs the world.
0:40:04 What is happening now is creating a condition of what I call algorithmic authoritarianism.
0:40:08 We’re being programmed.
0:40:10 That’s not new.
0:40:16 The first critic of modern media was Kierkegaard, a book called The Present Age.
0:40:17 For him, it was newspapers.
0:40:21 But I assume you’ve seen the film, The Social Dilemma.
0:40:23 I have.
0:40:25 They’re programming.
0:40:27 They’re programming us.
0:40:34 And that’s taking control in ways.
0:40:38 And so, I mean, I think there are serious dangers.
0:40:42 Well, you know, we started the conversation talking about death.
0:40:43 Right.
0:40:44 And you mentioned Thiel.
0:40:47 Thiel was just on Ross Douthat’s.
0:40:48 Yeah, yeah.
0:40:50 New York Times podcast.
0:40:51 I don’t know if you saw that.
0:40:53 And it’s a doozy.
0:40:58 But there was one point at which, and it was very revealing.
0:41:07 Ross basically just asked him straight up, like, you know, do you think the human race should continue?
0:41:11 And he treats it like a gotcha question.
0:41:20 I mean, he has to pause for a considerable amount of time before he can muster an answer to what should be like the mother of all, you know, yes or no’s.
0:41:25 And it speaks to, well, a lot of things.
0:41:32 But there is this kind of techno-salvation, techno-utopianism, anti-humanism.
0:41:43 You talk about this a lot in the book, you know, this idea that we’re going to build these tools and we’re going to upload our minds and we’re going to escape all the problems that come with being mortal meatbags on this planet.
0:41:50 I mean, is that, does that just feel like an old story in a new disguise to you and also a problem for us to, okay.
0:41:51 It is.
0:41:51 It is.
0:41:53 It’s what I call techno-nosticism.
0:41:54 Right?
0:41:59 Andresen is a really important player in this.
0:42:00 I don’t know if you know him or not.
0:42:07 There’s an absolute view of the future that these guys have.
0:42:11 And Andresen has a book, it’s a manifesto, it’s worth reading.
0:42:23 But, and part of this human, so, you know, I mean, the first line of the book is all serious philosophies of meditation on death.
0:42:30 For these guys, and again, they are guys, death is an engineering problem.
0:42:40 And, you know, and, and, I mean, Heider defined, you know, authenticity as being towards death.
0:42:48 But, you know, this whole notion of the singularity in Ray Kurzweil, live long enough to live, you know, live forever.
0:43:02 That they really believe that in anti-aging stuff, and they do believe that the human life cycle can be expanded considerably, if not infinitely.
0:43:05 Talk about thinking yourself out of the natural world.
0:43:06 Exactly, exactly.
0:43:16 If the end result of a line of thinking is that we come to believe ourselves outside of, as immortal creatures that can escape our own finitude, that’s…
0:43:17 But think of it this way.
0:43:25 If you go back to the early years of Christianity, Gnosticism was one of its greatest competitors.
0:43:28 And Gnosis, the word Gnosis means knowledge.
0:43:34 And Gnosticism was a radically dualistic understanding of being.
0:43:40 That the world was completely evil, and the whole point was to get out of this world, right?
0:43:43 And the body was divided between mind and soul.
0:43:45 Get the mind out of the world.
0:43:50 And the way the world was, there were concentric spheres.
0:43:58 And each sphere had a password, had Gnosis, took a certain kind of code to get you out of it.
0:44:03 And you gradually became more and more detached from the world, right?
0:44:08 That’s what this Mars exploration is about.
0:44:17 Gnosis is the code that is going to get us to Mars to populate the universe, because what’s going to happen?
0:44:21 They’re convinced this world’s going to go to hell, right?
0:44:25 I mean, it’s a complete eschatology.
0:44:28 Religion is most interesting where it’s least obvious.
0:44:33 As you said, it’s an old story in a new version.
0:44:38 That’s what all this—I mean, there are a lot of other things going on with the rockets, but that’s certainly part of it.
0:44:40 Don’t look up.
0:44:42 You know the film.
0:44:43 Yeah, yeah.
0:44:47 I mean, so there’s this escapism, right?
0:44:49 Which is a nihilism, right?
0:44:52 The real is always elsewhere, right?
0:44:56 You know, there’s a profound nihilism.
0:45:05 The last words of after the human are amor mundi, love of world, right?
0:45:08 I don’t believe there’s an afterlife.
0:45:11 I always tell my students I do believe in ghosts.
0:45:14 Hegel and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are my ghosts.
0:45:21 I’m writing a play now called Specters of Philosophy, a ghost story.
0:45:29 And I also tell my students, I’ve told my students, that I will haunt them for their lives.
0:45:32 That’s the way we live on, in the lives of others.
0:45:43 If individualism is an illusion, and we are part of this web of life, does death mean something different than what we normally think it means?
0:45:48 And it’s the end of a certain kind of subjectivity, right?
0:45:52 But is it more transformation than the end?
0:45:53 I think it does.
0:45:53 The end.
0:45:57 And I guess we’re getting a little bit into Buddhism and that kind of thing, but—
0:46:14 But look, just as I was beginning to write the section on consciousness, or plant and animal consciousness, my younger brother fell into a coma for three weeks and died.
0:46:27 And it wasn’t fully clear whether he could understand some of what we would try to talk to him about.
0:46:33 In this comatose, a quasi-comatose state.
0:46:43 And it wasn’t clear as to whether we were going to have to make a decision about termination of life.
0:46:46 We had to make that decision about my mother years earlier.
0:46:50 But in her case, her brain had exploded.
0:46:53 It wasn’t really a decision.
0:47:02 And here I am trying to figure out mind-body problems, consciousness problems.
0:47:17 And, you know, the first time I entered that hospital room, when he was in this comatose state—
0:47:23 And this was like two days before—this was like the night before I taught my last class in 50 years.
0:47:27 He was hooked up to more machines than you can imagine.
0:47:33 And, I mean, you see the fragility of life.
0:47:34 Yeah.
0:47:42 And with my brother, you know, everything—you adjust the dial to fix one thing and another thing gets out of whack.
0:47:46 First time I walked into that room, he is in a comatose state.
0:47:51 And his heartbeat increases.
0:47:57 What is life?
0:47:59 How do you define death?
0:48:02 Where is that line?
0:48:07 The more interconnected we are, the more fragile everything becomes.
0:48:12 And understanding how that is—
0:48:13 And also sacred.
0:48:14 How much more sacred everything else becomes.
0:48:20 Yeah, and, you know, I mean, you know, my training is in religion.
0:48:24 I’ve written many, many books on theology and the like.
0:48:32 God talk is complicated because of the images that people have of God
0:48:39 and how you stay away from, you know, evangelical crazies on one side and New Ages on the other side.
0:48:46 So I’m always hesitant to invoke the notion of God.
0:48:53 But there is a way—and I’m just trying to get back to your question about does it change the way?
0:49:03 That, you know, we are part of this web, right?
0:49:09 And I’m fine with talking about God or the sacred.
0:49:14 And religions, East and West can do that.
0:49:19 I mean, what Hegel called the absolute was this web.
0:49:24 And remember, I said the absolute was the holy—was ghosts, geists.
0:49:30 The way he understood the third person of the Trinity was this kind of pervasive spirit, if you will.
0:49:35 And—but that doesn’t have to be some kind of mushy stuff.
0:49:37 You know,
0:49:48 I mean, all these, you know, complexly interrelated particles and bits
0:49:51 we are events.
0:49:58 And Hegel’s definition of the absolute is as close to the notion of God as I can come.
0:50:02 And that is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away.
0:50:04 We’re a moment in that.
0:50:09 Well, to bring us back where we started with death,
0:50:12 that thought experiment about imagining the end next week.
0:50:12 Right.
0:50:14 You know, memento mori, right?
0:50:15 Remembering death.
0:50:15 Do you think—
0:50:16 Exactly.
0:50:27 We have simply created a form of life in which it is all too easy to not think about death
0:50:31 and not thinking about death, not maintaining a relationship to death,
0:50:34 is an easy way to take life for granted.
0:50:40 And if you take life for granted, well, you’ll abuse it and the things that make it possible.
0:50:43 I mean, is that a fair summary?
0:50:44 Yeah, that’s fair.
0:50:49 I mean, I also, 20 years ahead, I always say I died without dying.
0:51:02 I mean, I had a biopsy for cancer and went into septic shock and, yeah, I’ve been there.
0:51:15 And, you know, the strange thing for me was that it was a strange and liberating experience.
0:51:22 You know, sometimes the only way to hold on is to let go, right?
0:51:23 Yeah.
0:51:27 And how does one let go?
0:51:32 And learning to let go is one of the hardest lessons of life.
0:51:45 But when you’re able to do it, right, life comes back to you differently.
0:51:54 Kierkegaard talks about two moments of infinite resignation, which is the withdrawal,
0:52:04 and then the movement, what he calls faith, which is living in the world as gift, right?
0:52:05 We’re not given tomorrow.
0:52:09 We’re not given this afternoon.
0:52:13 You may die this afternoon, as might I.
0:52:19 I mean, I taught a class at noon, and I taught Derrida’s Gift of Death, which he wrote at my urging.
0:52:23 And at seven o’clock that night, I was near dead.
0:52:27 That’s how fast it happens and how fragile it is.
0:52:42 And, you know, if you could convey the sense of the fragility and the beauty of this world, what more do you want?
0:52:46 What more do you want?
0:52:49 Do you think we’ll turn it around?
0:52:54 It’s a bit of a ridiculous question, but are you hopeful, to use that word again?
0:52:56 Are you hopeful that we can, of course, correct?
0:52:59 I’ve been jotting down aphorisms.
0:53:01 I’m up to about 500.
0:53:05 And one of them that I like the best is,
0:53:07 hope is an act of defiance.
0:53:11 We have to hope.
0:53:13 What do you define?
0:53:16 I’m defying the way the world is heading.
0:53:25 I’m defying what is happening, not only in this country, but throughout the world.
0:53:29 I mean, we’re heading to the premises.
0:53:37 And it’s only willful blindness that doesn’t recognize that.
0:53:41 When the ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida are 103 degrees,
0:53:44 marine life dies.
0:53:45 Marine life dies.
0:53:47 Life on Earth changes.
0:53:48 Right?
0:53:50 When the fires burn,
0:53:52 we’re here in Massachusetts.
0:53:59 We had smoke and haze from Canadian fires again this summer.
0:54:01 The world’s on fire.
0:54:04 Literally, it’s on fire.
0:54:04 Right?
0:54:09 And given the nature of positive feedback, right?
0:54:11 Faster gets faster.
0:54:17 And in many ways,
0:54:21 what we need,
0:54:24 much of what needs to be done is known.
0:54:42 But the absurdity of the moment is that we are destroying the organizations, the companies, the rules, the regulations, the universities that can address these problems.
0:54:46 Well, that’s what I was trying to get at earlier.
0:54:47 Maybe I didn’t say it quite right.
0:54:48 It’s suicide.
0:54:51 The gap between knowing and doing.
0:54:52 Right.
0:54:54 Which is really the gap between knowledge and wisdom.
0:54:55 Right.
0:54:56 We know everything.
0:54:56 That’s absolutely right.
0:55:00 We know everything we need to know in order to do what we know we ought to do.
0:55:02 And yet, we cannot do it.
0:55:04 Or we seem unable to do it.
0:55:08 And it’s not just because of individuals making poor choices.
0:55:17 It’s because we’ve created a culture and a set of incentives and disincentives that push us in the direction that we’re going.
0:55:41 You know, I do think that intelligence and even wisdom have, I think that what they are involves this ability to see connections where others don’t see it.
0:55:43 To see these interrelationships.
0:55:49 I mean, you can have knowledge, you have information without knowledge.
0:55:50 You can have knowledge without intelligence.
0:55:54 In some instances, you can have intelligence without wisdom.
0:55:55 There’s a hierarchy.
0:55:56 That’s right.
0:56:00 You go from cognition to consciousness.
0:56:04 You can have knowledge, intelligence.
0:56:05 Right?
0:56:08 We need you to find what all those are.
0:56:09 And then you can have wisdom.
0:56:17 And, you know, wisdom is in some sense, I think, trying to understand how this all fits together.
0:56:25 And how we are an integral, and that’s the word, integral member of this web.
0:56:29 And that web is constantly moving.
0:56:33 I wrote a little book called Intervolution.
0:56:36 I thought I made it up, but Milton used the term.
0:56:37 Rather than evolution.
0:56:39 Because evolution is an unfolding.
0:56:43 Intervolution is an interweaving.
0:56:47 Everything develops by this process of intervolving.
0:56:48 And interweaving.
0:56:50 And interconnecting.
0:56:55 And there will be new forms of life that evolve.
0:56:56 Right?
0:56:57 I don’t think human life will go away.
0:57:11 But it’s also very possible, you know, that we will bring about our own extinction.
0:57:21 And I cannot look Jackson in the eye and say, that’s okay.
0:57:31 And I don’t believe anyone can really do that.
0:57:48 And when I posed that question about the world ending next Friday, it was to try to convey the sense of the certainty of death.
0:57:55 And for me, that experience of dying without dying liberated me.
0:58:00 It makes life more precious in certain ways because of its fragility.
0:58:10 So, maybe the real question isn’t, what would we do if the end came next Friday?
0:58:17 Maybe it’s, what would we become if we lived like that were true?
0:58:19 That’s a better way of putting it.
0:58:20 That’s a better way of putting it.
0:58:28 All right.
0:58:29 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:58:31 This one was special for me.
0:58:34 Conversations like this.
0:58:38 Ideas like these are why I got into philosophy in the first place.
0:58:45 And I think Mark’s book is wildly ambitious and earnest and gave me a lot to think about.
0:58:47 I hope it did the same for you.
0:58:53 And of course, you can let me know what you thought by sending us an email or voicemail.
0:58:59 We read and listen to all the messages we get and hearing from you helps us make a better show.
0:59:03 We would love to know what your response is to Mark’s question.
0:59:12 How would your understanding of the meaning of your life change if you knew that next Friday at precisely 12 o’clock midnight, the human race would become extinct?
0:59:17 And what would we become if we lived like that were true?
0:59:19 Big, deep questions.
0:59:20 Tell us what you think.
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0:59:48 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact check by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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0:00:39 Humans are the dominant species on a dying planet, and we’re still clinging to the idea
0:00:45 that we can think our way out, invent our way out, maybe even upload our way out.
0:00:52 And isn’t that the entire problem right there? If there is a trait that is decidedly, definitely
0:00:59 human, it’s that we think of ourselves as individuals, as separate from everything around
0:01:04 us. It’s the trait that helped us take over the world. And if we can’t figure out a way
0:01:12 to change it, it might also destroy us. But what if the solution isn’t more mastery, more
0:01:17 control? What if the only way to survive is to become something else entirely?
0:01:23 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:01:33 My guest today is Mark C. Taylor. He’s a philosopher, a cultural critic, and the author
0:01:41 of a book called After the Human. It’s a sweeping, sometimes dizzying book. One that moves from Hegel
0:01:49 to quantum physics to the ethics of soil and fungi. It’s packed with hand-drawn diagrams and photos of
0:01:55 dirt, and discussions of philosophy, and the history of technology, and day-to-day dilemmas like the
0:02:01 problem of having too many books for your number of shelves. And somehow all this coalesces into a
0:02:09 uniquely ambitious attempt to explain what it is to be human, and what it could mean. About the myths that
0:02:18 myths that shaped us, the ideas that trapped us, and the need for a new story, a new self, and really a
0:02:24 whole new way of thinking and being in the world. I think people will be reading this book for years,
0:02:29 and I’m glad I got to spend some time talking to the author. Now.
0:02:35 Mark Taylor, welcome to the show.
0:02:37 Mark Taylor: Delighted to be with you.
0:02:41 Mark Taylor: I’m excited you’re here. This is going to be a doozy of a conversation
0:02:51 because it’s a doozy of a book. I was thinking about how to anchor this conversation, and I just decided that the best way to do it
0:02:58 is to start where you start the book, which is with a pretty jarring thought experiment,
0:03:05 we’ll call it. You write on the, I think it’s on the very first page, and now I’m quoting:
0:03:12 “How would your understanding of the meaning of your life change if you knew that next Friday,
0:03:19 at precisely 12 o’clock midnight, the human race would become extinct?” End quote. That’s a hell of
0:03:25 a way to kick off a book, Mark. I love it. So why come out swinging like that? Why do you want us
0:03:30 right out of the gates thinking about total extinction next Friday?
0:03:33 Mark Taylor: Because I think it’s a realistic possibility.
0:03:38 The real urgency of this book comes out of my concern about climate change,
0:03:48 because there’s absolutely no doubt that we are facing catastrophic effects in the very near future.
0:03:58 And there’s a complete blindness or unwillingness to confront the actuality of that problem and to address
0:04:09 what needs to be done to dodge it, if we can. But it’s not just that. It’s also the intersection of
0:04:18 new technologies which are related to this, and the ways in which those new technologies have transformed
0:04:28 the social, economic, and political systems. And all of this, they’re all interrelated. And the problem is
0:04:35 isn’t just that people are not connecting the dots. People do not know the dots that need to be connected.
0:04:43 And that’s partly related to our educational system, and it’s partly related to the new media
0:04:47 ecological system that has emerged with this technology.
0:04:51 Mark Taylor: But it’s also even more fundamentally related to,
0:04:57 I mean, and this is the conceit of the book, right, to the way we’ve come to think of ourselves,
0:05:02 the story we’ve come to tell ourselves about ourselves and what and who we are in the world
0:05:10 and how we relate to everything around us. So, I mean, that’s hence the title, “After the Human,” right?
0:05:13 Mark Taylor: This book is very much about what we think being human means.
0:05:14 Mark Taylor: Correct.
0:05:20 Mark Taylor: So, let’s just start very simply, very simply. What is the human?
0:05:26 Mark Taylor: This class, “After the Human,” that I taught, I began by asking the students two questions.
0:05:35 One, the question you just asked me, what is the human? And two, the question of
0:05:43 Mark Taylor: whether the students think that human beings, as they are now constituted,
0:05:51 are the end of the evolutionary process, or if there will be other forms of life that will evolve from us.
0:05:58 Answering what is the human is, it’s a difficult question to answer without falling
0:06:04 into the trap I’m trying to escape. And that is the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the human.
0:06:12 Mark Taylor: Because, historically, part of what has made humans distinctive is the propensity to
0:06:15 distinguish themselves from all of us, right?
0:06:15 Mark Taylor: Right.
0:06:21 Mark Taylor: To distinguish themselves on the one side from the animal and on the other side from
0:06:28 the machine. And that is collapsing now. That is collapsing. Part of what distinguishes the human
0:06:35 is that we can ask the question, what it means to be human. That’s a level of self-consciousness and
0:06:42 self-reflectivity, I think, that is important. So it’s that level of self-reflectivity that I see as,
0:06:44 in some ways, distinctive of the human.
0:06:50 Mark Taylor: So what you’re saying is we have come to think of human consciousness as something special,
0:06:58 something distinct, something almost separate from nature, as though we are outside of the natural
0:07:01 world, looking down at it, trying to make sense of it.
0:07:06 Mark Taylor: Correct. I mean, that begins in the Bible in certain ways. I mean, I think there’s a
0:07:13 philosophical foundation to the Anthropocene. And I think, in many ways, that philosophical foundation
0:07:19 begins with modern philosophy, which begins with Descartes. And Descartes, as everybody knows,
0:07:25 said, “Think, therefore I am.” And what Descartes does is to identify a human being with thinking,
0:07:33 and everything else is a machine, including the human body. From that point on, there’s always this effort
0:07:40 to distinguish the human from the non-human. And that can be the animal, that can be the plant,
0:07:47 and, you know, philosophers all the way down to Heidegger will just distinguish the human in
0:07:54 certain ways. For Heidegger, the distinction of the human is awareness of death. He says animals expire,
0:08:01 humans die. Dying is knowing there is such a thing as death.
0:08:10 Mark Taylor: So is it best for us to think of Descartes as the philosophical father of the modern world,
0:08:15 the guy who gave us this subject-object split? The guy who convinced us that we are all little,
0:08:21 tiny, private islands of subjectivity, bopping around in a world of objects and things?
0:08:30 Yes, I think so. He begins the argument of defining human uniqueness in terms of human consciousness
0:08:38 and self-consciousness. That identification of the human in terms of cognition and everything else is not
0:08:43 being cognitive in any way. I mean, that becomes the heart of anthropocentrism.
0:08:50 And anthropocentrism is the basis of this Anthropocene, that everything is directed toward in this
0:08:58 evolutionary process, its culmination in human being. It separates man as being unique in this sense,
0:08:59 and human being is not unique.
0:09:03 Mark Taylor: So that’s anthropocentrism, the idea that human beings are at the center of things.
0:09:07 Mark Taylor: Correct. Heidegger makes a form of this argument. He states this in one of
0:09:12 the best ways I’ve ever heard. He says, “Everywhere man turns, he sees only himself.”
0:09:17 That is the world in which we are living. It’s a selfie world.
0:09:19 Mark Taylor: To stick with Descartes for a second,
0:09:22 Mark Taylor: To just make sure his villainy is appreciated here.
0:09:23 Mark Taylor: Right, right.
0:09:28 Mark Taylor: And to put it in plain language, what Descartes really does is he helps
0:09:35 drive a wedge between the self and the world, so that the self or self-consciousness becomes
0:09:41 the only thing we really know for certain, and everything outside our minds becomes this
0:09:49 external thing. So with Descartes, we really think ourselves into alienation, or we think ourselves
0:09:53 out of the natural world. Is that a decent summary of his contribution?
0:10:00 Mark Taylor: Correct. He sets up what I call an oppositional ontology, that everything defines
0:10:07 itself in opposition. So you’re right. The human is not this, not that, not that. Separates us out from,
0:10:12 or to use your language, it alienates us from the natural world.
0:10:18 Mark Taylor: So just to bring everyone along with us here, right, how does that lead us to
0:10:24 this situation where we are exploiting nature and wrecking our environment, which is obviously where
0:10:29 we started with the ecological catastrophe and climate change. I just want to draw a line
0:10:34 from one thing to the other for the audience, so they know why this is more than a bad idea,
0:10:38 where this actually had really terrible consequences for us in the world.
0:10:42 Mark Taylor: It has consequences, yes, with respect to the natural world, but also social and
0:10:45 political and economic world. Mark Taylor: What does that mean?
0:10:51 Mark Taylor: So we view the individual as what is most concrete and most real. And we see
0:11:00 groups as formed of individuals, right? That’s wrong. Because there is no such thing as an isolated
0:11:08 individual. Every individual is what it is by virtue of its interrelationship to other individuals and
0:11:11 entities. Mark Taylor: Can I ask you, Mark, why is it so hard to see that?
0:11:15 Mark Taylor: I don’t know. Mark Taylor: Why is the illusion that we are just disconnected and
0:11:22 separate so powerful? Mark Taylor: It’s one of many things that puzzles me. But here’s what’s also so
0:11:29 puzzling is that interrelationship affirms itself in the very effort to negate it.
0:11:35 Mark Taylor: Yes. That’s the thing, right? We’re so conditioned to think of ourselves this way,
0:11:41 but it really isn’t that hard to see why it isn’t true, right? I mean, the idea of an individual or the
0:11:47 idea of an “I” is kind of nonsensical, right? If there isn’t an “other.” What could it possibly mean
0:11:51 to be an individual if you’re not already in a world of others? Mark Taylor: The only thing you can say
0:11:58 about the individual is negative. The only thing that you can say about your individuality is that it’s
0:12:03 not this, not that, not something else. But anything positive you say, you’re saying you’re a man,
0:12:11 you’re a woman, you’re a certain name, whatever. Here’s the issue: identity is difference. We’re in
0:12:16 the midst of this political… We’re talking about politics right now. We’re talking about the
0:12:23 politics that are being debated on the floor of the Congress as we now speak, right? Because the only
0:12:28 way in which you can establish your identity is by your difference from others, right?
0:12:34 By defining yourself against which you’re not. Mark Taylor: In relationship too.
0:12:41 So we think we’re separate, but the reality is that we exist in this web of interdependence.
0:12:50 Web. Exactly. But if you come back to climate, we’re parasites on the Earth. It’s a parasite-host
0:12:57 relationship. And we are in the process of destroying the host upon which we depend, right? You cut down all
0:13:12 the trees in order to serve the economy and we die, right? So in that sense, right, the interrelationship
0:13:20 is confirmed. I mean, when the current politicians pull out of all climate accords, reinforce fossil fuel,
0:13:23 they’re destroying the planet, without which we can’t live.
0:13:26 Yeah, we’ll get there. I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves.
0:13:27 Mark Taylor: Okay.
0:13:31 Mark Taylor: Because I want to get to what is more
0:13:35 or less your alternative or your answer, right? So where we are at this point in the conversation in
0:13:41 the book is with this philosophical problem we have, which is the problem of modernity,
0:13:47 the problem of the modern human, right? This conception of ourselves as separate from each
0:13:52 other and from the world, as outside of nature. And nature is this external thing that we can manipulate,
0:13:59 control, whatever, right? That leads to a situation where we’re both isolated from each other and from
0:14:04 the natural world, which makes it easier for us to destroy the very thing on which we rely. Destroy the host,
0:14:05 as you say, the parasite.
0:14:05 Mark Taylor: Right, exactly.
0:14:12 Mark Taylor: So if that’s the problem, that’s the diagnosis, what is the answer? What kind of vision of the
0:14:16 self do we actually need? And what are the ideas that are going to get us there?
0:14:18 Mark Taylor: First thing I want to say is
0:14:30 Mark Taylor: That I think ideas will help us get out of. Ideas matter. And these issues that should
0:14:37 already be evident are really complicated. Another way to think about what Descartes does is that he
0:14:49 takes mind out of nature, makes everything but the human mind a machine. So part of what you have to do is put
0:15:04 mind back into nature, right? And to do that, you need an expanded notion of mind and of consciousness. So then, if you’re going to have an expanded notion of mind, you have to rethink what we mean by
0:15:10 knowledge, what we mean by cognition, what we mean by intelligence and the like. So part of what I’ve
0:15:19 tried to do in this, I mean, it’s a meta, meta book. I mean, the layers of abstraction, I know. But what I’ve
0:15:29 wanted to do is to start at the actual physical subatomic level and look at quantum mechanics and try to
0:15:36 understand quantum mechanics in terms of relationality and information processing, which I think can be done.
0:15:46 There’s a very important theoretical physicist by the name of Carlo Rovelli, who understands quantum mechanics
0:15:57 through this notion of relativity, that you begin to see the way in which everything is interconnected.
0:16:03 I mean, we are organisms of organisms, right? And all the way down at the cellular level,
0:16:20 you know, the cell engages in cognitive processes because it makes distinctions different within its environment, which is the rest of the cell.
0:16:26 So you begin to think through the ways in which this notion of relationality, right,
0:16:36 works itself out from this most rudimentary level to the physical, and then you look at the biological level,
0:16:49 biological systems are information processing systems, right? I have diabetes, and that’s one of the ways in which I began to understand this.
0:16:59 When you understand how autoimmune disease works, right, you see that it’s a coding problem and a misreading problem.
0:17:10 And one way to understand the mess we’re in now is autoimmune disease, because what autoimmunity involves is that the body turns, the body,
0:17:16 or the body politic turns on itself and destroys itself in certain ways, because it misreads itself.
0:17:25 And you can trace this notion of information processing all the way through the physical, the biological, the ecological,
0:17:40 try to understand ecological systems as information processing systems, and then extend that all the way up into plant and animal cognition, and finally, technology and artificial intelligence.
0:17:47 Can we stick with this idea for a minute of, how did you put it, putting the mind back in the world?
0:17:47 Right.
0:17:51 Because you have this idea in the book, the networked self.
0:17:52 Right.
0:18:03 The networked self, and you’re talking about the mind and even identity, not as something we have, but something that happens, something that emerges in this web, right?
0:18:12 What is the simplest way to describe this? What does it actually mean to think of the mind as something that extends beyond the individual human?
0:18:17 Because, again, that is, it just feels so counterintuitive. It’s so hard for us to do that, even if it is the case.
0:18:28 So, I use the image as the web of webs for a lot of this, or networks.
0:18:37 Think of yourself as a node within an ever-expanding and changing network.
0:18:47 That is, things are events. Everything’s in motion. Everything’s a process, right?
0:18:49 Everything’s in motion.
0:19:04 And what I am constantly becoming is a function not only of what I have been and what I anticipate, but of my relationships to others at this particular moment, to my relationships with others in there.
0:19:10 And ultimately, the whole entire web.
0:19:14 I mean, there are different ways in which you can understand part and whole.
0:19:24 To understand the part, you have to understand its relationship within the whole and how that is constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly shifting.
0:19:33 And so, you know, what you are and what I am is changing as we speak.
0:19:45 Everything is what the Buddhists, and I hesitate to get into a lot of Buddhism because I haven’t studied it in detail, everything is co-dependent and co-emergent.
0:19:50 I am what I am by virtue of my place within this web.
0:19:55 Well, look, part of the problem here is, I think you alluded to this earlier, we’re sort of trapped in our language.
0:19:59 I mean, if I think of my head or my mind, again, the words right there, my.
0:20:01 I think of my mind.
0:20:06 It is my head and my brain is the container for this thing we call my mind.
0:20:08 And is that what you’re talking about here?
0:20:15 We got a shifting away from this idea of the mind as a container to mind as connection.
0:20:16 Yeah.
0:20:20 Another way to put this is, I mean, this sounds simple, but it’s complicated.
0:20:22 Everything is connected.
0:20:23 Everything is interconnected.
0:20:35 And you need an expanded notion of the mind, right, that to understand that there are alternative intelligences, right?
0:20:44 There are different forms of intelligences, of which ours is a part, right, of which ours is one particular kind.
0:20:54 But, I mean, there’s some really, I mean, I know it sounds off the wall, but there’s some really interesting scientific work being done on plant communication.
0:20:58 I mean, Richard Powers’ Overstory is an example of that.
0:21:12 But that book is based upon the work of Susan Simard, his book Searching for the Mother Tree, in which she does develop a scientific study of how these trees interrelate.
0:21:15 And she had a lot of trouble getting any acceptance of that.
0:21:19 And to think differently is to be different.
0:21:35 And there has to be some kind of a recognition of this vital interrelationality, or 99.9% of the species go extinct.
0:21:36 We can go extinct as well.
0:21:37 We can go extinct.
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0:24:15 For me, the relationship between thought and action isn’t always so neat.
0:24:22 I’ve spent a lot of time around Western, woo-woo, new-agey types.
0:24:22 Right.
0:24:34 Boy, they love to talk about Buddhism and meditation and how transformative it is, but I have seen time and again how easily these same people manage to take on all this wisdom and wear it like an ornament,
0:24:37 only to end up even more self-centered.
0:24:51 So I guess I’m asking, even if people chasing wisdom fall back into these ego traps, what does it really take to move from theory to practice or from belief to behavior?
0:24:53 Because the theory part is easy.
0:24:55 The practice part, I find to be much harder.
0:25:00 I’m not so sure the theory part is all that easy.
0:25:10 I mean, it’s easy to say that we live in this world of interdependence and codependence, and I am not an I.
0:25:15 I am related eternally to everything around me and how transformative that belief is.
0:25:29 But then I’ll get up and I’ll have my coffee, and then I will moonwalk into a world, into a culture, almost every part of which is designed to reinforce the illusion that I am an ego, that I am separated.
0:25:39 And so you can read the books, you can recite the ideas, you can even believe them, but then you go out into the world and you just kind of go back into the default, if you know what I mean.
0:25:40 So that’s what I’m asking.
0:25:47 I mean, Hume always said he was a skeptic as long as he was in the study, but he stepped out into the world and he no longer maintained skepticism.
0:25:49 I mean, I want to say two things.
0:25:55 One is that I think, I believe, thinking is a form.
0:26:01 I don’t, there’s not a sharp, thinking is a form of action in certain ways, but your point is well taken.
0:26:09 And I guess one of the ideas I wish I could get more people to understand is positive feedback.
0:26:11 What do you mean?
0:26:15 So positive feedback isn’t getting good reviews on your book, your podcast, your classes.
0:26:22 Positive feedback is related to these complex systems where change accelerates, right?
0:26:25 The popular term for that has reached the tipping point.
0:26:32 And then there’s a major shift, you know, there’s a pile of sand and grain after grain.
0:26:35 You know, there’s going to be an avalanche, but you don’t know when it’s going to occur.
0:26:48 And it’s that, I mean, that’s the bind we’re in now, not just with respect to climate, but with respect to, these systems work the same way.
0:26:52 They’re isomorphic across media, financial bubbles and climate change work the same way.
0:27:13 So my problem is how, how do you convey the urgency of the situation without making the situation hopeless and using these ideas then to enact the kinds of changes that need to be made, right?
0:27:20 But until you understand the nature of the problem, you don’t see the urgency with it all.
0:27:25 We’re talking about a problem that may have began as an individual problem, but now it’s a cultural problem.
0:27:27 Cultural problem. It’s an absolute cultural problem.
0:27:33 Which raises the difficult question, how the hell do you solve a cultural problem?
0:27:42 It’s easier for an individual to change what they do and how they think, but it is a lot harder to change a culture.
0:27:51 And if what you’re saying is true, and I think it is for the most part, if we don’t change at a cultural level, then nothing matters, really.
0:28:01 Look, I graduated in 1968, and the world was pretty dark at that time.
0:28:11 The war in Vietnam was going on, draft deferments were going on, racial riots in the town I grew up in, student suspicion of universities and so on.
0:28:18 And there are very, very interesting similarities between the student left of the 60s and the far right today.
0:28:19 When you look at it, it’s weird.
0:28:41 But one of the differences between where we were in 1960, people I knew and was involved with, as a Wesleyan and then at Harvard, and my students in the last years of my teaching, is we believe fundamental change could occur.
0:28:48 Young people today, many of the young people today whom I have got that, don’t.
0:29:02 My question, as I taught, I mean, one of the questions I constantly ask myself is, how far into the dark dare I take them?
0:29:12 And yet, they’re smart, and they know when I back off, and when I’m not being honest with them.
0:29:25 But how can I be honest with them about how, about the crisis I believe we’re in, without leading them hopeless?
0:29:29 And hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:29:32 It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:29:54 So, you know, for my students, my children, and my grandchildren, and others, you know, either we figure this out, the way in which we need to address this, or they have no future.
0:30:10 My grandchildren just came last night here in Massachusetts for a visit, and my grandson Jackson is now 11, and during COVID, they were here for a while.
0:30:12 And one day, he was sitting on the deck.
0:30:14 We live in the mountains.
0:30:25 And Jackson, who was only seven at the time, said to me, Grandpa, maybe the world would be better if there were no humans.
0:30:27 And I said, Jackson, what do you mean?
0:30:32 He said, well, Sadie, that’s their dog, we keep her on a leash.
0:30:38 And we eat turkeys and cows and pigs.
0:30:42 And if we weren’t here, they could roam freely.
0:30:50 And I said, where did you think of, why are you thinking of that?
0:30:51 Did you talk about this at school?
0:30:54 He said, no, I just thought about it.
0:30:56 Now, what does that say?
0:31:02 That a seven-year-old is thinking, I don’t know where he got it.
0:31:05 But it’s in the ether, right?
0:31:05 Right.
0:31:13 And how do we convey a sense of hope and mission?
0:31:15 Because that’s what it is.
0:31:18 It’s mission in a way that will, you know.
0:31:26 I mean, writing a book like this, granted, they’re not going to change it.
0:31:35 But it’s an effort to say, if we look at the world this way, different kinds of actions follow.
0:31:43 In these sorts of conversations, I’m trying to imagine myself on the other side as an audience member listening and wondering, okay, now what?
0:31:43 What do you want me to do?
0:31:56 And I guess what I’m wondering is, if someone reads your book or someone listens to this conversation and they think, okay, I am intellectually going to make this shift from individualism to relationalism.
0:32:05 I’m going to stop thinking of myself as this separate I in the world of others and think of myself as part of this web, as codependent on all of this.
0:32:13 What then, concretely, how differently should someone live?
0:32:17 Like, what do they do differently in their life once they’ve made this shift, right?
0:32:18 What does it look like?
0:32:24 Well, let me speak as a teacher and what I’ve experienced in that way.
0:32:31 I taught most of my career at Williams College, which is an undergraduate liberal arts college.
0:32:36 And the last 20 years, I taught at Columbia, which is, everybody knows Columbia these days, right?
0:32:50 And in all honesty, I always enjoyed teaching undergraduates more than graduate students because – and I’ve written a lot of heavy-duty criticisms of higher education.
0:32:52 A lot of them got me in big-time trouble.
0:33:02 But one of my criticisms of university teaching is it’s a process of cloning, to produce people to do what you do.
0:33:12 And for ever since I was in the business, the job market in academia dried up in 1970, and it hadn’t been a realistic possibility to have a job.
0:33:17 So I would always tell my students, don’t do what I do.
0:33:22 Do what I could never imagine doing and come back and tell me about it.
0:33:32 When I stopped teaching two years ago, we had a gathering of about 50 of my former students, dating from my first year to my last year.
0:33:39 So people ranged from 72 to 22, which is really an interesting kind of thing.
0:33:44 And those, you know, there are countless others that you don’t know what happened.
0:33:49 But they have gone into – I mean, some went into teaching.
0:33:53 There are doctors.
0:33:55 There are lawyers.
0:34:00 They’re not doing what a lot of doctors and lawyers are doing.
0:34:07 One of the most remarkable students I ever had was a refugee from Cuba.
0:34:11 He works in media, Telemundo.
0:34:15 We have some working in theater.
0:34:16 I mean, there are different ways.
0:34:18 And so there are corners.
0:34:20 There are startups.
0:34:23 I mean, you fail sometimes.
0:34:27 Steve Case, who introduced – who was the head of AOL.
0:34:29 He was a student of mine, right?
0:34:34 He could have done different things with what he created.
0:34:47 I started – I mean, the most political, if you will, form of action that I took based on these ideas
0:34:57 was that I started a company with a big New York investment banker by the name of Herbert Allen in 1998 called Global Education Network.
0:35:05 And I started webcasting my classes in 1996 when nobody was doing it.
0:35:11 And in 1992, I taught a course using teleconferencing with Helsinki.
0:35:19 And at that time, I thought that the world would be a better place if everybody could sit down around the table and talk about Hegel or Nietzsche, right?
0:35:22 Who among us hasn’t had that thought?
0:35:22 Right.
0:35:26 And we tried.
0:35:34 And the man I did this with, he put $27 million into that effort, and we failed.
0:35:44 You know, and I had a vision, and it was all based upon this idea of networks to make education more widely available through these technologies.
0:35:53 Now, what I didn’t understand, and I don’t think many, if any, did, was that these technologies that connect also separate.
0:36:03 But there was an example of trying to put the ideas into action in a way that would bring us together in certain ways.
0:36:13 There are ways in which you can do it if you understand, if I may put it this way, the nature of reality and the urgency of the problem.
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0:38:08 Do you worry that AI might change our understanding of humanity in even worse ways?
0:38:13 That we will just gradually come to think of ourselves more and more as machine-like?
0:38:14 Absolutely.
0:38:18 I mean, this is a longer conversation in terms of…
0:38:19 Because I worry about that.
0:38:19 Yeah.
0:38:32 I mean, look, this man, Herbert Owl, that I mentioned, not many people have heard about him, but he is enormous.
0:38:34 He’s my neighbor here in Williamstown.
0:38:53 And he has a conference that he and now his son have been running in Sun Valley that brings together the people running the world, technology, media, entertainment, sports, for five days, and their families for five days.
0:39:01 And we were there before Bezos, before Bezos was Bezos, in all of that.
0:39:11 Gates, Warren Buffett, these are really smart guys, but they have a very narrow vision of the world.
0:39:15 And they know what they’re trying to create.
0:39:21 And Trump does not, in my judgment.
0:39:23 Vance does.
0:39:28 Vance is the bigger problem.
0:39:31 But it’s Peter Thiel.
0:39:34 I don’t know if you’ve run across him or not.
0:39:36 You should.
0:39:41 He’s a follower of René Girard, Stanford.
0:39:44 Thiel is a really powerful person.
0:39:46 There’s a philosophy behind that.
0:39:48 Marc Andreessen and these people.
0:39:50 They have a vision.
0:39:57 And I think that what they understand is that whoever controls AI runs the world.
0:40:04 What is happening now is creating a condition of what I call algorithmic authoritarianism.
0:40:08 We’re being programmed.
0:40:10 That’s not new.
0:40:16 The first critic of modern media was Kierkegaard, a book called The Present Age.
0:40:17 For him, it was newspapers.
0:40:21 But I assume you’ve seen the film, The Social Dilemma.
0:40:23 I have.
0:40:25 They’re programming.
0:40:27 They’re programming us.
0:40:34 And that’s taking control in ways.
0:40:38 And so, I mean, I think there are serious dangers.
0:40:42 Well, you know, we started the conversation talking about death.
0:40:43 Right.
0:40:44 And you mentioned Thiel.
0:40:47 Thiel was just on Ross Douthat’s.
0:40:48 Yeah, yeah.
0:40:50 New York Times podcast.
0:40:51 I don’t know if you saw that.
0:40:53 And it’s a doozy.
0:40:58 But there was one point at which, and it was very revealing.
0:41:07 Ross basically just asked him straight up, like, you know, do you think the human race should continue?
0:41:11 And he treats it like a gotcha question.
0:41:20 I mean, he has to pause for a considerable amount of time before he can muster an answer to what should be like the mother of all, you know, yes or no’s.
0:41:25 And it speaks to, well, a lot of things.
0:41:32 But there is this kind of techno-salvation, techno-utopianism, anti-humanism.
0:41:43 You talk about this a lot in the book, you know, this idea that we’re going to build these tools and we’re going to upload our minds and we’re going to escape all the problems that come with being mortal meatbags on this planet.
0:41:50 I mean, is that, does that just feel like an old story in a new disguise to you and also a problem for us to, okay.
0:41:51 It is.
0:41:51 It is.
0:41:53 It’s what I call techno-nosticism.
0:41:54 Right?
0:41:59 Andresen is a really important player in this.
0:42:00 I don’t know if you know him or not.
0:42:07 There’s an absolute view of the future that these guys have.
0:42:11 And Andresen has a book, it’s a manifesto, it’s worth reading.
0:42:23 But, and part of this human, so, you know, I mean, the first line of the book is all serious philosophies of meditation on death.
0:42:30 For these guys, and again, they are guys, death is an engineering problem.
0:42:40 And, you know, and, and, I mean, Heider defined, you know, authenticity as being towards death.
0:42:48 But, you know, this whole notion of the singularity in Ray Kurzweil, live long enough to live, you know, live forever.
0:43:02 That they really believe that in anti-aging stuff, and they do believe that the human life cycle can be expanded considerably, if not infinitely.
0:43:05 Talk about thinking yourself out of the natural world.
0:43:06 Exactly, exactly.
0:43:16 If the end result of a line of thinking is that we come to believe ourselves outside of, as immortal creatures that can escape our own finitude, that’s…
0:43:17 But think of it this way.
0:43:25 If you go back to the early years of Christianity, Gnosticism was one of its greatest competitors.
0:43:28 And Gnosis, the word Gnosis means knowledge.
0:43:34 And Gnosticism was a radically dualistic understanding of being.
0:43:40 That the world was completely evil, and the whole point was to get out of this world, right?
0:43:43 And the body was divided between mind and soul.
0:43:45 Get the mind out of the world.
0:43:50 And the way the world was, there were concentric spheres.
0:43:58 And each sphere had a password, had Gnosis, took a certain kind of code to get you out of it.
0:44:03 And you gradually became more and more detached from the world, right?
0:44:08 That’s what this Mars exploration is about.
0:44:17 Gnosis is the code that is going to get us to Mars to populate the universe, because what’s going to happen?
0:44:21 They’re convinced this world’s going to go to hell, right?
0:44:25 I mean, it’s a complete eschatology.
0:44:28 Religion is most interesting where it’s least obvious.
0:44:33 As you said, it’s an old story in a new version.
0:44:38 That’s what all this—I mean, there are a lot of other things going on with the rockets, but that’s certainly part of it.
0:44:40 Don’t look up.
0:44:42 You know the film.
0:44:43 Yeah, yeah.
0:44:47 I mean, so there’s this escapism, right?
0:44:49 Which is a nihilism, right?
0:44:52 The real is always elsewhere, right?
0:44:56 You know, there’s a profound nihilism.
0:45:05 The last words of after the human are amor mundi, love of world, right?
0:45:08 I don’t believe there’s an afterlife.
0:45:11 I always tell my students I do believe in ghosts.
0:45:14 Hegel and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are my ghosts.
0:45:21 I’m writing a play now called Specters of Philosophy, a ghost story.
0:45:29 And I also tell my students, I’ve told my students, that I will haunt them for their lives.
0:45:32 That’s the way we live on, in the lives of others.
0:45:43 If individualism is an illusion, and we are part of this web of life, does death mean something different than what we normally think it means?
0:45:48 And it’s the end of a certain kind of subjectivity, right?
0:45:52 But is it more transformation than the end?
0:45:53 I think it does.
0:45:53 The end.
0:45:57 And I guess we’re getting a little bit into Buddhism and that kind of thing, but—
0:46:14 But look, just as I was beginning to write the section on consciousness, or plant and animal consciousness, my younger brother fell into a coma for three weeks and died.
0:46:27 And it wasn’t fully clear whether he could understand some of what we would try to talk to him about.
0:46:33 In this comatose, a quasi-comatose state.
0:46:43 And it wasn’t clear as to whether we were going to have to make a decision about termination of life.
0:46:46 We had to make that decision about my mother years earlier.
0:46:50 But in her case, her brain had exploded.
0:46:53 It wasn’t really a decision.
0:47:02 And here I am trying to figure out mind-body problems, consciousness problems.
0:47:17 And, you know, the first time I entered that hospital room, when he was in this comatose state—
0:47:23 And this was like two days before—this was like the night before I taught my last class in 50 years.
0:47:27 He was hooked up to more machines than you can imagine.
0:47:33 And, I mean, you see the fragility of life.
0:47:34 Yeah.
0:47:42 And with my brother, you know, everything—you adjust the dial to fix one thing and another thing gets out of whack.
0:47:46 First time I walked into that room, he is in a comatose state.
0:47:51 And his heartbeat increases.
0:47:57 What is life?
0:47:59 How do you define death?
0:48:02 Where is that line?
0:48:07 The more interconnected we are, the more fragile everything becomes.
0:48:12 And understanding how that is—
0:48:13 And also sacred.
0:48:14 How much more sacred everything else becomes.
0:48:20 Yeah, and, you know, I mean, you know, my training is in religion.
0:48:24 I’ve written many, many books on theology and the like.
0:48:32 God talk is complicated because of the images that people have of God
0:48:39 and how you stay away from, you know, evangelical crazies on one side and New Ages on the other side.
0:48:46 So I’m always hesitant to invoke the notion of God.
0:48:53 But there is a way—and I’m just trying to get back to your question about does it change the way?
0:49:03 That, you know, we are part of this web, right?
0:49:09 And I’m fine with talking about God or the sacred.
0:49:14 And religions, East and West can do that.
0:49:19 I mean, what Hegel called the absolute was this web.
0:49:24 And remember, I said the absolute was the holy—was ghosts, geists.
0:49:30 The way he understood the third person of the Trinity was this kind of pervasive spirit, if you will.
0:49:35 And—but that doesn’t have to be some kind of mushy stuff.
0:49:37 You know,
0:49:48 I mean, all these, you know, complexly interrelated particles and bits
0:49:51 we are events.
0:49:58 And Hegel’s definition of the absolute is as close to the notion of God as I can come.
0:50:02 And that is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away.
0:50:04 We’re a moment in that.
0:50:09 Well, to bring us back where we started with death,
0:50:12 that thought experiment about imagining the end next week.
0:50:12 Right.
0:50:14 You know, memento mori, right?
0:50:15 Remembering death.
0:50:15 Do you think—
0:50:16 Exactly.
0:50:27 We have simply created a form of life in which it is all too easy to not think about death
0:50:31 and not thinking about death, not maintaining a relationship to death,
0:50:34 is an easy way to take life for granted.
0:50:40 And if you take life for granted, well, you’ll abuse it and the things that make it possible.
0:50:43 I mean, is that a fair summary?
0:50:44 Yeah, that’s fair.
0:50:49 I mean, I also, 20 years ahead, I always say I died without dying.
0:51:02 I mean, I had a biopsy for cancer and went into septic shock and, yeah, I’ve been there.
0:51:15 And, you know, the strange thing for me was that it was a strange and liberating experience.
0:51:22 You know, sometimes the only way to hold on is to let go, right?
0:51:23 Yeah.
0:51:27 And how does one let go?
0:51:32 And learning to let go is one of the hardest lessons of life.
0:51:45 But when you’re able to do it, right, life comes back to you differently.
0:51:54 Kierkegaard talks about two moments of infinite resignation, which is the withdrawal,
0:52:04 and then the movement, what he calls faith, which is living in the world as gift, right?
0:52:05 We’re not given tomorrow.
0:52:09 We’re not given this afternoon.
0:52:13 You may die this afternoon, as might I.
0:52:19 I mean, I taught a class at noon, and I taught Derrida’s Gift of Death, which he wrote at my urging.
0:52:23 And at seven o’clock that night, I was near dead.
0:52:27 That’s how fast it happens and how fragile it is.
0:52:42 And, you know, if you could convey the sense of the fragility and the beauty of this world, what more do you want?
0:52:46 What more do you want?
0:52:49 Do you think we’ll turn it around?
0:52:54 It’s a bit of a ridiculous question, but are you hopeful, to use that word again?
0:52:56 Are you hopeful that we can, of course, correct?
0:52:59 I’ve been jotting down aphorisms.
0:53:01 I’m up to about 500.
0:53:05 And one of them that I like the best is,
0:53:07 hope is an act of defiance.
0:53:11 We have to hope.
0:53:13 What do you define?
0:53:16 I’m defying the way the world is heading.
0:53:25 I’m defying what is happening, not only in this country, but throughout the world.
0:53:29 I mean, we’re heading to the premises.
0:53:37 And it’s only willful blindness that doesn’t recognize that.
0:53:41 When the ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida are 103 degrees,
0:53:44 marine life dies.
0:53:45 Marine life dies.
0:53:47 Life on Earth changes.
0:53:48 Right?
0:53:50 When the fires burn,
0:53:52 we’re here in Massachusetts.
0:53:59 We had smoke and haze from Canadian fires again this summer.
0:54:01 The world’s on fire.
0:54:04 Literally, it’s on fire.
0:54:04 Right?
0:54:09 And given the nature of positive feedback, right?
0:54:11 Faster gets faster.
0:54:17 And in many ways,
0:54:21 what we need,
0:54:24 much of what needs to be done is known.
0:54:42 But the absurdity of the moment is that we are destroying the organizations, the companies, the rules, the regulations, the universities that can address these problems.
0:54:46 Well, that’s what I was trying to get at earlier.
0:54:47 Maybe I didn’t say it quite right.
0:54:48 It’s suicide.
0:54:51 The gap between knowing and doing.
0:54:52 Right.
0:54:54 Which is really the gap between knowledge and wisdom.
0:54:55 Right.
0:54:56 We know everything.
0:54:56 That’s absolutely right.
0:55:00 We know everything we need to know in order to do what we know we ought to do.
0:55:02 And yet, we cannot do it.
0:55:04 Or we seem unable to do it.
0:55:08 And it’s not just because of individuals making poor choices.
0:55:17 It’s because we’ve created a culture and a set of incentives and disincentives that push us in the direction that we’re going.
0:55:41 You know, I do think that intelligence and even wisdom have, I think that what they are involves this ability to see connections where others don’t see it.
0:55:43 To see these interrelationships.
0:55:49 I mean, you can have knowledge, you have information without knowledge.
0:55:50 You can have knowledge without intelligence.
0:55:54 In some instances, you can have intelligence without wisdom.
0:55:55 There’s a hierarchy.
0:55:56 That’s right.
0:56:00 You go from cognition to consciousness.
0:56:04 You can have knowledge, intelligence.
0:56:05 Right?
0:56:08 We need you to find what all those are.
0:56:09 And then you can have wisdom.
0:56:17 And, you know, wisdom is in some sense, I think, trying to understand how this all fits together.
0:56:25 And how we are an integral, and that’s the word, integral member of this web.
0:56:29 And that web is constantly moving.
0:56:33 I wrote a little book called Intervolution.
0:56:36 I thought I made it up, but Milton used the term.
0:56:37 Rather than evolution.
0:56:39 Because evolution is an unfolding.
0:56:43 Intervolution is an interweaving.
0:56:47 Everything develops by this process of intervolving.
0:56:48 And interweaving.
0:56:50 And interconnecting.
0:56:55 And there will be new forms of life that evolve.
0:56:56 Right?
0:56:57 I don’t think human life will go away.
0:57:11 But it’s also very possible, you know, that we will bring about our own extinction.
0:57:21 And I cannot look Jackson in the eye and say, that’s okay.
0:57:31 And I don’t believe anyone can really do that.
0:57:48 And when I posed that question about the world ending next Friday, it was to try to convey the sense of the certainty of death.
0:57:55 And for me, that experience of dying without dying liberated me.
0:58:00 It makes life more precious in certain ways because of its fragility.
0:58:10 So, maybe the real question isn’t, what would we do if the end came next Friday?
0:58:17 Maybe it’s, what would we become if we lived like that were true?
0:58:19 That’s a better way of putting it.
0:58:20 That’s a better way of putting it.
0:58:28 All right.
0:58:29 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:58:31 This one was special for me.
0:58:34 Conversations like this.
0:58:38 Ideas like these are why I got into philosophy in the first place.
0:58:45 And I think Mark’s book is wildly ambitious and earnest and gave me a lot to think about.
0:58:47 I hope it did the same for you.
0:58:53 And of course, you can let me know what you thought by sending us an email or voicemail.
0:58:59 We read and listen to all the messages we get and hearing from you helps us make a better show.
0:59:03 We would love to know what your response is to Mark’s question.
0:59:12 How would your understanding of the meaning of your life change if you knew that next Friday at precisely 12 o’clock midnight, the human race would become extinct?
0:59:17 And what would we become if we lived like that were true?
0:59:19 Big, deep questions.
0:59:20 Tell us what you think.
0:59:30 Drop us a line at the gray area at fox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:59:37 And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the pod.
0:59:48 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact check by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:59:52 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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What comes after the human?
We’re living through multiple crises — ecological, technological, political. But beneath all of that is something even deeper: a crisis of the self. Who are we, really? How did we come to see ourselves as separate from the world, from each other, from the systems that sustain us? And what if that way of thinking is what got us into this mess?
Today’s guest is Mark C. Taylor, philosopher, cultural critic, and author of After the Human. Mark and Sean discuss the philosophical roots of climate change, the dangers of individualism, the false promise of techno-utopianism, and what it might mean to shift from seeing ourselves as isolated egos to members of a vast, interdependent web. They talk about AI, death, Hegel, Descartes, hope, and why ideas matter.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Mark C. Taylor, philosopher and author of After the Human: A Philosophy for the Future.
We would love to hear from you. To tell us what we thought of this episode, email us at tga@voxmail.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show.
And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.
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