Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning

Lex Fridman (02:24.560)

What is presence?

Lex Fridman (02:25.560)

And what does precedes mean?

Lex Fridman (02:26.560)

Yeah, exactly.

Lex Fridman (02:27.560)

What is existence?

Lex Fridman (02:28.560)

What is essence?

Lex Fridman (02:29.560)

And what is precedes?

Lex Fridman (02:30.560)

And in fact, precedes is Sartre's way of talking about it and other people will talk about

Sean Kelly (02:34.840)

it differently.

Lex Fridman (02:35.840)

But here's the way Sartre thinks about it.

Sean Kelly (02:38.340)

This is not, I think, the most interesting way to think about it, but it gets you started.

Sean Kelly (02:42.580)

Sartre says there's nothing true about what it is to be you until you start existing and

Sean Kelly (02:52.680)

still use until you start living.

Lex Fridman (02:54.640)

And for Sartre, the core feature of what it is to be existing the way we do is to be making

Sean Kelly (03:01.120)

decisions, to be making choices in your life, to be sort of taking a stand on what it is

Lex Fridman (03:07.460)

to be you by deciding to do this or that.

Lex Fridman (03:11.760)

And the key feature of how to do that right for Sartre is to do it in the full recognition

Sean Kelly (03:18.840)

of the fact that when you make that choice, nobody is responsible for it other than you.

Lex Fridman (03:25.700)

So you don't make the choice because God tells you to.

Sean Kelly (03:28.880)

You don't make the choice because some utilitarian calculus about what it's right to do tells

Sean Kelly (03:35.000)

you to do.

Sean Kelly (03:36.200)

You don't make the choice because some other philosophical theory tells you to do it.

Sean Kelly (03:41.020)

There's literally nothing on the basis of which you make the choice other than the fact

Lex Fridman (03:46.120)

that in that moment, you are the one making it.

Sean Kelly (03:50.320)

You are a conscious thinking being that made a decision.

Lex Fridman (03:54.460)

So all of the questions about physics and free will are out the window.

Sean Kelly (03:59.600)

Yeah, that's right.

Sean Kelly (04:00.680)

If you were a determinist about the mind, if you were a physicalist about the mind,

Sean Kelly (04:05.420)

if you thought there was nothing to your choices other than the activity of the brain that's

Sean Kelly (04:11.680)

governed by physical laws, then there's some sense in which it would seem at any rate like

Sean Kelly (04:19.200)

you are not the ground of that choice.

Sean Kelly (04:21.060)

The ground of that choice was the physical universe and the laws that govern it, and

Sean Kelly (04:24.800)

then you'd have no responsibility.

Lex Fridman (04:26.560)

And so Sartre's view is that the thing that's special about us used to be special about

Sean Kelly (04:31.140)

God is that we're responsible for becoming the being that makes the choices that we do.

Lex Fridman (04:39.060)

And Sartre thinks that that's simultaneously empowering, I mean, it practically puts us

Lex Fridman (04:44.580)

in the place of God, and also terrifying because what responsibility?

Lex Fridman (04:50.460)

How can you possibly take on that responsibility?

Lex Fridman (04:54.220)

And he thinks it's worse than that.

Sean Kelly (04:55.600)

He thinks that it's always happening, everything that you do is the result of some choice that

Sean Kelly (05:03.020)

you've made, the posture that you sit in, the way you hold someone's gaze when you're

Sean Kelly (05:09.040)

having a conversation with them or not, the choice to make a note when someone says something

Sean Kelly (05:16.420)

or not make a note.

Sean Kelly (05:19.040)

Everything that you do presents you as a being who makes decisions and you're responsible

Sean Kelly (05:23.660)

for all of them.

Lex Fridman (05:24.660)

So it's constantly happening.

Lex Fridman (05:27.060)

And furthermore, there's no fact about you independent of the choices and actions you've

Lex Fridman (05:35.220)

performed.

Lex Fridman (05:36.220)

So you don't get to say, Sartre's example, I really am a great writer, just haven't written

Lex Fridman (05:41.100)

my great book yet.

Sean Kelly (05:42.100)

If you haven't written your great book, you're not a great writer.

Lex Fridman (05:46.260)

And so it's terrifying, it puts a huge burden on us, and that's why Sartre says on his view

Sean Kelly (05:53.500)

of existentialism, human beings are the beings that are condemned to be free.

Sean Kelly (05:59.340)

Our freedom consists in our ability and our responsibility to make these choices and to

Sean Kelly (06:04.260)

become someone through making them.

Lex Fridman (06:06.820)

And we can't get away from that.

Lex Fridman (06:08.620)

But to him, it's terrifying not liberating in the positive meaning of the word liberating.

Sean Kelly (06:14.740)

Well, so he thinks it should be liberating, but he thinks that it takes a very courageous

Sean Kelly (06:19.580)

individual to be liberated by it.

Lex Fridman (06:22.180)

Nietzsche, I think, thought something similar.

Sean Kelly (06:24.860)

I think Sartre is really coming out of a Nietzschean sort of tradition.

Lex Fridman (06:29.940)

But what's liberating about it, if it is, is also terrifying because it means in a certain

Sean Kelly (06:36.660)

way, you're the ground of your own being.

Lex Fridman (06:39.500)

You become what you do through existing.

Lex Fridman (06:43.100)

So that's one form of existentialism, that's a stark atheistic version of it.

Sean Kelly (06:47.620)

There's lots of other versions, but it's somehow organized around the idea that it's through

Sean Kelly (06:53.700)

living your life that you become who you are.

Sean Kelly (06:56.140)

It's not facts that are sort of true about you independent of your living your life.

Lex Fridman (07:01.920)

But then there's no God in that view.

Lex Fridman (07:07.660)

Does any of the decisions matter?

Lex Fridman (07:10.180)

So how does existentialism differ from nihilism?

Lex Fridman (07:14.180)

Good.

Sean Kelly (07:15.180)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (07:16.180)

Great question.

Lex Fridman (07:17.180)

So it's two different ways that you're asking it.

Sean Kelly (07:20.900)

Let me leave nihilism to the side for just a second and think about mattering or is there

Lex Fridman (07:26.540)

any way that you can criticize someone for living the way they do if you're in existentialism?

Lex Fridman (07:32.900)

Including yourself.

Sean Kelly (07:34.020)

Including yourself.

Lex Fridman (07:35.020)

Yeah.

Sean Kelly (07:36.020)

Sartre addresses that and he says, yes, he says, there is a criticism that you can make

Sean Kelly (07:42.020)

of yourself or of others and it's the criticism of living in such a way as to fail to take

Sean Kelly (07:47.620)

responsibility for your choices.

Lex Fridman (07:50.280)

He gives these two sort of amazing examples.

Sean Kelly (07:54.060)

One doesn't...

Sean Kelly (07:55.060)

I don't know if it reads as well for us as it did in sort of mid 20th century Paris,

Lex Fridman (08:02.160)

but it's about a waiter.

Lex Fridman (08:04.280)

He gives this in his big book, Being and Nothingness.

Lex Fridman (08:07.380)

And he says, so waiters played, still do I think in a certain way in Paris, a big role

Lex Fridman (08:14.100)

in Parisian society.

Sean Kelly (08:15.700)

To be a waiter involved having a certain kind of identity, being a certain way, taking control

Sean Kelly (08:22.620)

of and charge of the experience of the people that you're waiting on, but also really being

Sean Kelly (08:28.820)

the authority, knowing that this is the way it's supposed to go.

Lex Fridman (08:33.780)

And so Sartre imagines a waiter who does everything that a waiter is supposed to do, the perfect

Sean Kelly (08:40.700)

form of the waiter, except that you can somehow see in the way he's doing it that he's doing

Lex Fridman (08:48.860)

it because he believes that's the way a waiter should act.

Lex Fridman (08:54.900)

So there's some sense in which he's passing off the responsibility for his actions onto

Lex Fridman (09:00.540)

some idea of what those actions should be.

Sean Kelly (09:03.180)

He's not taking responsibility for it.

Sean Kelly (09:05.300)

He's sort of playing a role and the contours of the role are predetermined by someone other

Sean Kelly (09:11.640)

than him.

Lex Fridman (09:12.900)

So he starts as acting in bad faith and that's criticizable because it's acting in such a

Sean Kelly (09:20.020)

way as to fail to take responsibility for the kind of being Sartre thinks you are.

Lex Fridman (09:25.500)

So you're not taking responsibility.

Lex Fridman (09:26.620)

So that's one example.

Lex Fridman (09:28.040)

And I think any teenager, if you've ever met a teenager, you've known someone who does

Sean Kelly (09:34.940)

that.

Lex Fridman (09:35.940)

Teenagers try on roles.

Sean Kelly (09:36.940)

They think, if I dressed like this, I would be cool.

Lex Fridman (09:41.300)

So I'll dress like this, or if I spoke like this, or acted like this.

Lex Fridman (09:46.360)

And it's natural for a teenager who's trying to figure out what their identity is to go

Lex Fridman (09:51.460)

through a phase like that.

Lex Fridman (09:52.460)

But if you continue to do that, then you're really passing it.

Lex Fridman (09:55.860)

So that's one example.

Lex Fridman (09:56.860)

And the other example he gives is an example not of passing off responsibility by pretending

Sean Kelly (10:06.140)

that someone else is the ground of your choice, but passing off responsibility by pretending

Sean Kelly (10:12.780)

that you might be able to get away with not making a choice at all.

Lex Fridman (10:16.940)

So he says, everything you do is a result of your choices.

Lex Fridman (10:21.040)

And so he gives this other example.

Lex Fridman (10:22.740)

Where you are on the first date, first date.

Lex Fridman (10:28.580)

And the date, the evening reaches moments when it might be appropriate for one person

Lex Fridman (10:37.460)

to hold the hand of the other.

Sean Kelly (10:40.980)

That's the moment in the date where you are.

Lex Fridman (10:43.100)

And so you make a choice.

Sean Kelly (10:45.080)

You decide, I think it's that time, and you hold the hand.

Lex Fridman (10:50.300)

And what should happen is that the other person also makes a choice on Sartre's view.

Sean Kelly (10:54.260)

Either they reject the hand, not that time, and I'm taking responsibility for that, or

Lex Fridman (11:00.180)

they grasp the hand back.

Sean Kelly (11:02.820)

That's a choice.

Lex Fridman (11:03.820)

But there's a thing that sometimes happens, which is that the other person leaves the

Sean Kelly (11:08.760)

hand there cold, dead, and clammy, neither rejecting it nor embracing it.

Lex Fridman (11:15.180)

And Sartre says, that's also bad faith, that's also acting as if we're a kind of being that

Sean Kelly (11:21.940)

we're not, because it pretends that it's possible not to make a choice.

Lex Fridman (11:27.780)

And we're the beings who are always making choices.

Sean Kelly (11:29.640)

That was a choice.

Lex Fridman (11:31.420)

And you're pretending as if it's the kind of thing that you don't have to take responsibility

Sean Kelly (11:35.340)

for.

Lex Fridman (11:36.340)

So both of the examples you've given, there's some sense in which the social interactions

Sean Kelly (11:41.020)

between humans is a kind of moving away from the full responsibility that you as a human

Lex Fridman (11:49.460)

in the view of existentialism should take on.

Lex Fridman (11:52.700)

So isn't the basic conversation, a delegation of responsibility, just holding a hand there,

Lex Fridman (11:59.500)

you're putting some of the responsibility into the court of the other person.

Lex Fridman (12:04.420)

And for the waiter, if you exist in a society, you are generally trying on a role.

Lex Fridman (12:12.500)

I mean, all of us are trying on a role.

Sean Kelly (12:15.100)

Me wearing clothes is me trying on a role that I was told to try, as opposed to walking

Lex Fridman (12:21.420)

around naked all the time.

Sean Kelly (12:23.660)

There's standards of how you operate, and that's a decision that's not my own.

Lex Fridman (12:31.460)

It's me seeing what everyone else is doing and copying them.

Sean Kelly (12:34.580)

Yeah, exactly.

Lex Fridman (12:35.940)

So Sartre thinks that in the ideal, you should try to resist that.

Sean Kelly (12:43.500)

Other existentialists think that that's actually a clue to how you should live well.

Lex Fridman (12:51.860)

So Sartre says somewhere else, hell is other people.

Lex Fridman (12:56.260)

Why is hell other people for Sartre?

Lex Fridman (12:57.940)

Well, because other people are making choices also.

Lex Fridman (13:01.340)

And when other people make choices, they put some pressure on me to think that the choice

Lex Fridman (13:09.260)

they made is one that I should copy or one that I should promote.

Lex Fridman (13:17.220)

But if I do it because they did it, then I'm in bad faith for Sartre.

Lex Fridman (13:21.780)

So it is as if Sartre's view is like, we would be better if we were all alone.

Sean Kelly (13:27.340)

I mean, this is really simplifying Sartre's position, and this is really just mostly Sartre

Lex Fridman (13:32.900)

in a certain period of his formation.

Lex Fridman (13:36.740)

But anyhow, we can imagine that view.

Lex Fridman (13:39.100)

And I think there's something to the idea that Sartre is attracted to it, at least in

Sean Kelly (13:43.540)

the mid 40s.

Lex Fridman (13:44.540)

Can you dig into hell as other people?

Sean Kelly (13:46.680)

Is there some, obviously, it's kind of almost like a literary, like you push the point strongly

Lex Fridman (13:53.620)

to really explore that point.

Lex Fridman (13:56.040)

But is there some sense in that other people ruin the experience of what it means to be

Lex Fridman (14:01.940)

human?

Sean Kelly (14:03.340)

I think for Sartre, the phenomenon is this, like, it's not just that you wear clothes

Sean Kelly (14:08.340)

because people wear clothes in our society, like you have a particular style, you wear

Sean Kelly (14:13.020)

a particular kind of clothes.

Lex Fridman (14:15.340)

And for Sartre, like to have that style authentically, in good faith, rather than in bad faith, it

Sean Kelly (14:22.460)

has to come from you, you have to make the choice.

Lex Fridman (14:25.980)

But other people are making choices also, and like, you're looking at their choices

Lex Fridman (14:30.660)

and you're thinking, that guy looks good, maybe I could try that one on.

Lex Fridman (14:35.500)

And if you try it on because you were influenced by the fact that you thought that guy was

Sean Kelly (14:41.080)

doing it well, then there's some important sense in which, although that's a resource

Lex Fridman (14:45.220)

for a choice for you, it's also acting in bad faith.

Lex Fridman (14:50.880)

And God wouldn't do that, right?

Sean Kelly (14:53.120)

God wouldn't be influenced by other's decisions, and if that's the model, then I think that's

Sean Kelly (14:58.660)

the sense in which he thinks hell is other people.

Lex Fridman (15:00.660)

What do you think parenting is then?

Sean Kelly (15:02.740)

It's like, what, because God doesn't have a parent, so aren't we significantly influenced,

Sean Kelly (15:08.540)

first of all, in the first few years of life, and even the teenager is resisting, like,

Sean Kelly (15:16.580)

learning through resistance.

Lex Fridman (15:18.580)

Absolutely.

Sean Kelly (15:19.580)

I mean, I think what you're pushing on is the intuition that the ideal that Sartre's

Lex Fridman (15:28.060)

aiming at is a kind of inhuman ideal.

Sean Kelly (15:31.580)

I mean, there's many ways in which we're not like the traditional view of what God was.

Sean Kelly (15:37.860)

One is that we're not self generating, we have parents, we were raised into traditions

Lex Fridman (15:46.740)

and social norms, and we're raised into an understanding of what's appropriate and inappropriate

Lex Fridman (15:53.700)

to do.

Lex Fridman (15:55.740)

And I think that's a deep intuition.

Lex Fridman (15:58.140)

I think that's exactly right.

Sean Kelly (16:01.380)

Martin Heidegger, who's the philosopher that Sartre thinks he's sort of taking this from,

Lex Fridman (16:06.340)

but I think Sartre's a kind of brilliant French misinterpretation of Heidegger's German phenomenological

Sean Kelly (16:13.740)

view, Heidegger says, a crucial aspect of what it is to be us is our thrownness.

Sean Kelly (16:20.860)

We're thrown into a situation, we're thrown into history, we're thrown into our parental

Sean Kelly (16:27.540)

lineage, and we don't choose it.

Lex Fridman (16:30.340)

That's stuff that we don't choose, we couldn't choose.

Sean Kelly (16:33.420)

If we were God and we existed outside of time, maybe, but we're not.

Lex Fridman (16:37.860)

We're finite in the sense that we have a beginning that we never chose.

Sean Kelly (16:42.940)

We have an end that we're often trying to resist or put off or something, and in between

Sean Kelly (16:50.300)

there's a whole bunch of stuff that organizes us without our ever having made the choice

Lex Fridman (16:55.340)

and without the kind of being that could make the choice to allow it to organize us.

Sean Kelly (17:00.740)

We have a complicated relationship to that stuff, and I think we should talk about that

Sean Kelly (17:05.900)

at a certain point.

Lex Fridman (17:06.900)

But the first move is to say, Sartre's just got a sort of descriptive problem.

Sean Kelly (17:12.460)

He's missed this basic fact that there has to be an awful lot about us that's settled

Lex Fridman (17:22.940)

without our having made the choice to settle it that way.

Sean Kelly (17:25.500)

Right, the thrownness of life.

Lex Fridman (17:29.380)

That's a fundamental part of life, you can't just escape it.

Sean Kelly (17:32.260)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (17:33.260)

You can't escape it altogether.

Sean Kelly (17:34.260)

Altogether.

Lex Fridman (17:35.260)

Yeah, exactly.

Sean Kelly (17:36.260)

You can't escape it altogether.

Lex Fridman (17:37.540)

But nevertheless, you are riding a wave and you make a decision in the riding of the wave.

Sean Kelly (17:42.900)

You can't control the wave, but you should be, as you ride it, you should be making certain

Lex Fridman (17:49.060)

kinds of decisions and take responsibility for it.

Lex Fridman (17:53.120)

So why does this matter at all, the chain of decisions you make?

Lex Fridman (17:59.100)

Good.

Sean Kelly (18:00.100)

Well, because they constitute you.

Lex Fridman (18:01.180)

They make you the person that you are.

Lex Fridman (18:03.300)

So what's the opposite view?

Lex Fridman (18:06.720)

What's this view against?

Sean Kelly (18:08.820)

This view is against most of philosophy from Plato forward.

Sean Kelly (18:14.700)

Plato says in the Republic, it's a kind of myth, but he says, people will understand

Sean Kelly (18:21.340)

their condition well if we tell them this myth.

Lex Fridman (18:24.700)

He says, look, when you're born, there's just a fact about you.

Sean Kelly (18:28.980)

Your soul is either gold, silver, or bronze.

Lex Fridman (18:33.340)

Those are the three kinds of people there are, and you're born that way.

Lex Fridman (18:36.820)

And if your soul is gold, then we should identify that and make you a philosopher king.

Lex Fridman (18:42.220)

And if your soul is silver, well, you're not gonna be a philosopher king.

Sean Kelly (18:45.800)

You're not capable of it, but you could be a good warrior and we should make you that.

Lex Fridman (18:49.540)

And if your soul is bronze, then you should be a farmer, laborer, something like that.

Lex Fridman (18:53.540)

And that's a fact about you that identifies you forever and for always, independent of

Lex Fridman (19:00.420)

anything you do about it.

Lex Fridman (19:03.120)

And so that's the alternative view.

Lex Fridman (19:05.380)

And you could have modern versions of it.

Sean Kelly (19:07.760)

You could say the thing that identifies you is your IQ or your genetic makeup or the percentage

Sean Kelly (19:15.120)

of fast switch muscle fibers you've got or whatever, it could be something totally independent

Sean Kelly (19:21.220)

of any choice that you've made, independent of the kind of thing about which you could

Lex Fridman (19:25.080)

make a choice and it categorizes you.

Sean Kelly (19:29.540)

It makes you the person that you are.

Lex Fridman (19:31.020)

That's the thing that Sartre and the existentialists are against.

Lex Fridman (19:35.420)

So this idea that something about you is forever limiting the space of possible decisions you

Lex Fridman (19:41.980)

can make.

Sean Kelly (19:42.980)

Sartre says, no, the space is unlimited.

Lex Fridman (19:46.260)

Sartre is the philosopher of radical freedom.

Sean Kelly (19:49.700)

Radical freedom.

Lex Fridman (19:50.700)

Yeah, radical freedom.

Lex Fridman (19:52.680)

And then you could have other existentialists who say, look, we are free, but we gotta understand

Sean Kelly (19:58.620)

the way in which our freedom is limited by certain aspects of the kind of being that

Lex Fridman (1:00:04.400)

And that's what you mean by the word aliveness, which is a fascinating and a powerful word.

Lex Fridman (1:00:08.960)

Yeah, that's what I mean by it.

Sean Kelly (1:00:10.640)

I think most people can recognize moments in their lives when they really felt alive.

Lex Fridman (1:00:17.560)

And it could happen in a moment when, I don't know, maybe Miles Davis felt it in that moment

Sean Kelly (1:00:23.600)

when he was responding to Herbie Hancock's chord, or maybe you feel it in that moment

Sean Kelly (1:00:29.160)

where you grab for the hand on the first date and the gesture is reciprocated, or maybe

Sean Kelly (1:00:34.940)

you feel it in some moment when you are doing a kind of peak athletic thing or watching

Lex Fridman (1:00:41.880)

somebody else do a peak athletic thing.

Lex Fridman (1:00:45.520)

But I think there are moments when it feels like it's not like the way Camus is describing

Lex Fridman (1:00:52.560)

things.

Lex Fridman (1:00:54.240)

And it's better because of that.

Lex Fridman (1:00:56.480)

So I think one really powerful way for me to understand aliveness is to think about

Sean Kelly (1:01:04.220)

going to a darker territory, is to think about suicide.

Lex Fridman (1:01:07.320)

And I've known people in my life who suffer from clinical depression.

Lex Fridman (1:01:12.880)

And whatever the chemistry is in our brain, there is a certain kind of feeling that is

Lex Fridman (1:01:21.320)

to be depressed, where you look in the mirror and ask, do I want to kill myself today?

Sean Kelly (1:01:30.180)

This is the question that Camus asks, this question, this philosophical question.

Lex Fridman (1:01:36.880)

And there is people who, when they're depressed, say, not only do they say, I want to kill

Sean Kelly (1:01:44.960)

myself or I don't, they say, it doesn't matter.

Lex Fridman (1:01:49.360)

And that's chemistry, that's whatever that is, that's chemistry in our mind.

Lex Fridman (1:01:54.720)

And then on the flip side of that, for me, I've had some low points, but I've been very

Lex Fridman (1:01:59.600)

fortunate to not suffer from that kind of depression.

Sean Kelly (1:02:03.920)

I am the opposite, which is not only moments of peak performance in athletics or great

Lex Fridman (1:02:11.600)

music or any of that, I'm just deeply joyful often by mundane things.

Sean Kelly (1:02:19.180)

As you were saying it, I was drinking this thing and it's cold, and for some reason the

Lex Fridman (1:02:22.960)

coldness of that was like, oh, great, like refrigeration.

Sean Kelly (1:02:27.920)

I don't know.

Sean Kelly (1:02:28.920)

There was a joy in that, like, I can't put it into words, but it just felt great.

Lex Fridman (1:02:32.840)

And then just so many things, you look out in nature, there's a nice breeze and just

Lex Fridman (1:02:37.960)

like, it's amazing.

Lex Fridman (1:02:40.160)

So that doesn't feel like I'm embracing the absurd.

Sean Kelly (1:02:46.540)

That seems like I'm getting some nice like dopamine hits in whatever the chemistry is

Sean Kelly (1:02:51.760)

from just the basics of life, and that is the source of aliveness.

Sean Kelly (1:02:56.000)

However my brain is built, it's gotten a natural sort of mechanism for aliveness.

Lex Fridman (1:03:05.560)

And so one nice way to see the absence of aliveness is to look at the chemical, the

Lex Fridman (1:03:12.000)

clinical depression.

Lex Fridman (1:03:14.260)

And so that Camus doesn't seem to contend with that at all in asking the question of

Sean Kelly (1:03:19.240)

suicide because when you look in the mirror and ask, like, if I ask myself, do I want

Sean Kelly (1:03:23.760)

to kill myself today, I ask that question in a different way, more like a stoic way

Lex Fridman (1:03:28.040)

often, like basically every day is, you know, what if I die today?

Sean Kelly (1:03:33.280)

It's more like contemplating your mortality every single day.

Sean Kelly (1:03:37.280)

You know, that excites me, the possibility that this is my last day, that, you know,

Sean Kelly (1:03:44.880)

it just reminds me how amazing life is.

Lex Fridman (1:03:47.160)

And that's chemistry, I don't know what that is, but that's not, that's certainly not some

Sean Kelly (1:03:53.640)

kind of philosophical decision I made.

Sean Kelly (1:03:57.080)

I am a little bit riding a wave of the chemistry of the genetics I've been given, of the dopamine.

Lex Fridman (1:04:04.320)

So that question of suicide, by the way, do you find that formulation of the question

Sean Kelly (1:04:10.760)

of existentialism, I know you didn't want to teach it because obviously suicide is a

Sean Kelly (1:04:17.600)

very difficult word, especially for young minds, but do you think that's a useful formulation

Lex Fridman (1:04:22.440)

of the question of existentialism?

Sean Kelly (1:04:25.400)

Like him saying, this is the most important question of suicide.

Sean Kelly (1:04:29.840)

I think there is something to it, if you read the question as the question, what is it in

Lex Fridman (1:04:35.240)

virtue of which it ought to be desirable to live the lives that we're capable of living?

Lex Fridman (1:04:43.400)

That's a deep question.

Sean Kelly (1:04:44.400)

Yeah, that's a question that gets focused when someone asks themselves whether they

Lex Fridman (1:04:49.880)

ought to continue to live that life.

Sean Kelly (1:04:53.760)

The famous line, nothing focuses the mind more than one's impending execution.

Sean Kelly (1:05:01.120)

I think there's something important about that, that recognizing the riskiness and the

Sean Kelly (1:05:06.880)

vulnerability of one's existence is super important.

Lex Fridman (1:05:13.800)

And I think that if we didn't have that, our lives wouldn't be capable of being meaningful.

Sean Kelly (1:05:20.820)

If they weren't risky and vulnerable, there would be nothing to lose.

Lex Fridman (1:05:25.300)

And it's only because there are things to lose that they can come to have the significance

Sean Kelly (1:05:28.320)

that they do.

Lex Fridman (1:05:29.320)

So yeah, I think I'm not against the idea that that's a deep way of approaching the

Sean Kelly (1:05:34.320)

questions at the core of existentialism.

Lex Fridman (1:05:38.120)

But as you said, I was worried for a while about how I was going to teach it.

Sean Kelly (1:05:42.880)

Well, I think there's a difference between suicide and not living because suicide is

Lex Fridman (1:05:48.560)

an action.

Lex Fridman (1:05:50.600)

So it feels like to me, like suicide doesn't make sense because, you know, imagine you're

Sean Kelly (1:05:58.800)

in like a hotel and you're saying the room I'm in sucks, but like there's other rooms.

Lex Fridman (1:06:04.920)

So like maybe explore those other rooms.

Sean Kelly (1:06:08.180)

Maybe you'll find meaning in those other rooms, like basically embracing the fact that you

Sean Kelly (1:06:15.320)

don't know everything and there's a, you need time to explore everything.

Sean Kelly (1:06:20.420)

It's like once you've explored everything, then maybe you can make a full decision.

Lex Fridman (1:06:25.680)

But it's unfair to make a decision.

Sean Kelly (1:06:30.680)

It's I would say unethical to make a decision until you've explored all the rooms in the

Sean Kelly (1:06:35.720)

hotel.

Lex Fridman (1:06:36.720)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:06:37.720)

And this gets focused in the brothers Karamazov, of course.

Sean Kelly (1:06:40.600)

There's one brother who is really asking that question, is asking the question of suicide.

Sean Kelly (1:06:47.520)

He's asking the question whether the world that we live in is a world that's worth living

Lex Fridman (1:06:53.220)

in.

Lex Fridman (1:06:54.820)

And I think that character is, as you say, very ill.

Lex Fridman (1:06:59.720)

And it's possible and often because, as you say, of, you know, brain chemistry, physiology,

Sean Kelly (1:07:08.480)

there's certainly a physical ground to that situation, to that condition.

Lex Fridman (1:07:15.500)

But I think it is possible for someone to be in that situation.

Sean Kelly (1:07:20.400)

I think that Ivan Karamazov, who's the character who's asking this question, is, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:07:28.560)

maybe let's say chemically depressed or something like that.

Lex Fridman (1:07:31.160)

But I think there's more to it too.

Lex Fridman (1:07:33.600)

And I think that Dostoevsky's real view is that the brain chemistry doesn't exist on

Sean Kelly (1:07:39.160)

its own.

Sean Kelly (1:07:40.160)

Like the way we interact with one another, the way we care about or isolate ourselves

Sean Kelly (1:07:45.440)

from others, the way we care for the lives that we lead, affects the chemistry of our

Lex Fridman (1:07:54.520)

brain, which goes on and changes the mood that we're in.

Lex Fridman (1:07:57.520)

So I think Dostoevsky does think that Ivan's salvation, if he's capable of being saved,

Lex Fridman (1:08:06.800)

is gonna come through the love of his brother Alyosha.

Sean Kelly (1:08:09.200)

Let me spring maybe a bit of a tangent on you.

Lex Fridman (1:08:13.200)

Do you ever, one of my other favorite authors is Herman Hesse.

Lex Fridman (1:08:17.640)

Do you ever include him in our deck of sport cards that represent existentialism?

Lex Fridman (1:08:24.640)

I haven't.

Sean Kelly (1:08:25.640)

Maybe I should.

Lex Fridman (1:08:26.640)

What should I read?

Lex Fridman (1:08:27.640)

What should I think about including?

Lex Fridman (1:08:28.640)

Oh no, there's some kind of embrace of absurdism.

Sean Kelly (1:08:35.040)

Like there's a existentialist kind of ideal pervading most of his work.

Lex Fridman (1:08:42.680)

But there's more of a, like with Siddhartha, there's more almost like a Buddhist sort of

Sean Kelly (1:08:49.840)

like watch the river and like become the river.

Lex Fridman (1:08:53.880)

Like this kind of idea that what it means to truly experience the moment.

Lex Fridman (1:08:59.800)

So there is an experiential part of existentialism where you want to, it's not just about, we've

Sean Kelly (1:09:05.560)

been talking about kind of decisions and actions, but also what it means to listen, like you

Sean Kelly (1:09:10.360)

said from Nietzsche, like what it means to really take in the world and experience the

Lex Fridman (1:09:15.960)

moment.

Lex Fridman (1:09:16.960)

So he's very good at writing about what it means to experience the moment and experience

Lex Fridman (1:09:20.960)

the full absurdity of the moment.

Lex Fridman (1:09:23.280)

And for him, I'm starting to forget, Steppenwolf, I think, is humor.

Sean Kelly (1:09:30.360)

It's part of the absurdity, which I think modern day internet explores very well with

Sean Kelly (1:09:35.880)

memes and so on.

Sean Kelly (1:09:37.920)

Humor is a fundamental part of the existentialist ethic that's able to deal with absurdity.

Sean Kelly (1:09:45.600)

You got to like laugh at it.

Sean Kelly (1:09:48.160)

I think there is some, let me just say something about humor because I think you're absolutely

Sean Kelly (1:09:52.080)

right.

Sean Kelly (1:09:53.080)

Richard Bard, who is Danish and most people think deeply depressed and so on, is actually

Sean Kelly (1:09:59.520)

an incredibly funny writer.

Lex Fridman (1:10:02.400)

And someone who was a classmate of mine in graduate school who left philosophy to become

Sean Kelly (1:10:07.320)

a Hollywood comedy writer, he's a very successful guy.

Lex Fridman (1:10:11.080)

And then he came back 25 years later and finished his dissertation.

Lex Fridman (1:10:15.880)

And I was the reader on the dissertation, there may be a conflict of interest, I'm not

Lex Fridman (1:10:21.480)

quite sure.

Lex Fridman (1:10:22.480)

But his dissertation was about, he called it Kierkegaard and the Funny, which is a kind

Lex Fridman (1:10:27.400)

of a funny title, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:10:29.040)

But Kierkegaard, according to Eric Kaplan's reading, Kierkegaard does have this idea that

Sean Kelly (1:10:36.200)

there's something destabilizing about humor that's crucial to the important possibilities

Sean Kelly (1:10:47.240)

for us.

Lex Fridman (1:10:48.240)

And so there's the idea that there's a moment when a joke is being set up, when you're sort

Sean Kelly (1:10:55.200)

of proceeding as if you're on stable ground, and then the punchline comes and the rug is

Lex Fridman (1:11:02.380)

pulled out from under you.

Lex Fridman (1:11:04.000)

And for a moment, it's like you're falling.

Sean Kelly (1:11:08.680)

There's nothing supporting you until you're captured by your totally new understanding

Sean Kelly (1:11:15.240)

of what was going on, and that humor necessarily has that kind of destabilizing feature to

Lex Fridman (1:11:22.840)

it.

Lex Fridman (1:11:23.840)

And that's like the riskiness, that's like the riskiness that you were pointing to.

Sean Kelly (1:11:28.740)

If there aren't risks in your life, if your life is totally safe, then there's no possibility

Sean Kelly (1:11:33.760)

of significance.

Lex Fridman (1:11:35.320)

And so I think on Eric's reading, Kierkegaard sort of wants to line up the importance of

Sean Kelly (1:11:41.440)

the riskiness and vulnerability in your life to its having meaning with the experience

Lex Fridman (1:11:47.440)

of destabilization that you get in jokes and comedy, which then becomes significant, right?

Sean Kelly (1:11:55.280)

When you remember having heard a joke for the first time, it's got a kind of salience

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.360)

for you.

Sean Kelly (1:12:00.360)

Speaking of jokes, and speaking of, you mentioned film and literature, so existentialism in

Lex Fridman (1:12:07.520)

film and literature.

Sean Kelly (1:12:08.880)

I think for a lot of people, especially nihilism, was experienced in the great modern work of

Lex Fridman (1:12:18.120)

art called Big Lebowski.

Sean Kelly (1:12:19.120)

I don't know if you've ever seen that film, but there's a group of nihilists in that film.

Lex Fridman (1:12:26.160)

They're just like, they don't care about anything.

Sean Kelly (1:12:27.920)

I think they happen to be German, at least they have German accents.

Lex Fridman (1:12:31.400)

So maybe can you talk about notable appearances of existentialism in film, and if you at all

Lex Fridman (1:12:40.360)

ever bring up Big Lebowski, if that ever comes into play?

Lex Fridman (1:12:45.240)

So I know that people think about the Big Lebowski in this context, and I did actually

Sean Kelly (1:12:49.840)

rewatch it not so long ago.

Lex Fridman (1:12:51.840)

We have kids, and I thought, maybe it's time.

Sean Kelly (1:12:54.160)

It wasn't really time for the 11 year old, so somewhat inappropriate.

Lex Fridman (1:13:00.320)

I have never taught that film, so I'd have to think more.

Sean Kelly (1:13:02.960)

We could talk about it.

Lex Fridman (1:13:03.960)

I'd be happy to try to think on the fly about it.

Sean Kelly (1:13:06.520)

Okay, so I would love to, because there is a, feels like there's a philosophical depth

Lex Fridman (1:13:11.760)

to that film.

Lex Fridman (1:13:12.760)

So there's a person that just, the main character.

Lex Fridman (1:13:17.920)

The Jeff Bridges character.

Sean Kelly (1:13:18.920)

Jeff Bridges character, yeah.

Sean Kelly (1:13:20.480)

He kind of, he drinks like these white Russians, and he just kind of walks around in a very

Sean Kelly (1:13:26.360)

relaxed way, and irradiates both a love for life, but also just an acceptance of like,

Lex Fridman (1:13:37.080)

it is what it is kind of philosophy.

Lex Fridman (1:13:41.200)

And then there's a bunch of characters that have very busy lives trying to do some big

Lex Fridman (1:13:49.080)

projects that are dramatic in some way, make some huge amounts of money.

Lex Fridman (1:13:54.420)

So it kind of actually reminds me of The Idiot by Dostoevsky in a certain kind of sense.

Lex Fridman (1:13:58.900)

And then there's these players, I mean, they're phrased as nihilists, but they kind of don't

Sean Kelly (1:14:05.160)

care to enjoy life.

Lex Fridman (1:14:07.140)

They want to mess with life in some kind of way.

Lex Fridman (1:14:09.440)

And of course there's interesting personalities that, what is it, Jesus, the bowler.

Lex Fridman (1:14:18.540)

And then there's like Donnie, who is a bit clueless, and then there's the John Goodman

Sean Kelly (1:14:26.640)

character that's talking about Vietnam and just takes life way too seriously, too intensely

Lex Fridman (1:14:32.320)

and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:14:33.320)

So it just paints a full sort of spectrum of characters that are operating in this world.

Lex Fridman (1:14:38.480)

And perhaps most importantly for existentialism are thrown into absurdity and hence the humor.

Sean Kelly (1:14:45.320)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:14:46.320)

All right, good.

Sean Kelly (1:14:47.320)

Well, that's helpful.

Lex Fridman (1:14:48.320)

Yeah.

Sean Kelly (1:14:49.320)

Reminding me of all that.

Lex Fridman (1:14:50.320)

And I think...

Lex Fridman (1:14:51.320)

So one thing to say is that the nihilists, the group of nihilists who call themselves

Sean Kelly (1:14:55.840)

nihilists, I think they've got a bad misinterpretation of what nihilism is supposed to be.

Lex Fridman (1:15:03.620)

And this happened actually in the 20s.

Sean Kelly (1:15:07.500)

There was a famous case of a couple of German students, Leopold and Loeb, who'd read a lot

Sean Kelly (1:15:14.520)

of Nietzsche, Nietzsche was a kind of hero for the Nazis even, I think based on a pretty

Lex Fridman (1:15:23.500)

bad misunderstanding of what he was up to.

Lex Fridman (1:15:26.340)

But Leopold and Loeb had the bad understanding first and they were students, they'd read

Lex Fridman (1:15:31.660)

a lot of Nietzsche and they thought, okay, nothing means anything.

Sean Kelly (1:15:35.140)

The only way that there's any significance in life is through our will to sort of powerfully

Lex Fridman (1:15:42.240)

bring something about.

Lex Fridman (1:15:44.460)

And if we're gonna do that in a way that reflects the fact that nothing means anything, then

Lex Fridman (1:15:50.940)

what we should do is take these things, these actions that people always thought were bad

Lex Fridman (1:15:58.140)

and do them and show that there's nothing wrong with doing them.

Lex Fridman (1:16:02.780)

And so they decided they would murder someone.

Sean Kelly (1:16:05.800)

Not because they were angry at them, just someone they'd never met.

Lex Fridman (1:16:08.900)

It was important that it was someone they'd never met.

Sean Kelly (1:16:10.940)

It was totally unmotivated act.

Lex Fridman (1:16:13.460)

And they thought, we'll embrace nihilism by showing that we can act in such a way as to

Sean Kelly (1:16:20.640)

do something that morality thinks is bad and through our will bring it about that we desire

Sean Kelly (1:16:27.920)

to do it for no reason that has anything to do with its potentially being interpretable

Sean Kelly (1:16:32.820)

as good.

Lex Fridman (1:16:34.720)

And I think that's a terrible misreading of what Nietzsche thinks the response to nihilism

Sean Kelly (1:16:40.500)

is.

Lex Fridman (1:16:41.500)

I mean, I think, read that against the Miles Davis thing.

Sean Kelly (1:16:44.260)

Miles Davis aim is to creatively bring it about that something works well in a situation

Lex Fridman (1:16:51.300)

where he is kind of constrained.

Lex Fridman (1:16:53.020)

So they thought two things, one, there are no constraints at all, not even the constraints

Lex Fridman (1:16:58.340)

of the situation that we find ourselves in.

Lex Fridman (1:17:00.380)

And two, we only become the beings that we really are when we act against what you might

Lex Fridman (1:17:08.400)

have thought the constraints were.

Lex Fridman (1:17:10.500)

And I just think that's a bad misreading of what that kind of nihilism is up to.

Lex Fridman (1:17:14.100)

And I think maybe that group in the Big Lebowski has got that kind of bad misreading.

Lex Fridman (1:17:20.460)

But then the major characters are much more interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:17:23.400)

Go ahead and say something.

Lex Fridman (1:17:24.680)

So there's some kind of apathy to that particular nihilism.

Lex Fridman (1:17:29.020)

Could you comment on whether you see sort of apathy as a philosophy part of that nihilism?

Lex Fridman (1:17:37.220)

Sort of like from an existentialist perspective, how important is it to care about stuff?

Lex Fridman (1:17:45.500)

Like really take on life?

Lex Fridman (1:17:48.940)

What does existentialism have to say about just sitting back and just not caring?

Lex Fridman (1:17:56.460)

Excellent.

Lex Fridman (1:17:57.460)

So apathy is like a really important word.

Lex Fridman (1:18:01.900)

The Greek word is apathe, it means without passions.

Lex Fridman (1:18:05.340)

And the Stoics, who you mentioned earlier, really thought that passions are what get

Lex Fridman (1:18:10.780)

in the way if you're living well.

Sean Kelly (1:18:14.300)

Because to live well, you have to think clearly about what you should do and you shouldn't

Sean Kelly (1:18:18.420)

let your resentments and your angers and your petty animosities direct your behavior.

Sean Kelly (1:18:24.660)

You should release yourself from those kinds of passions.

Lex Fridman (1:18:28.620)

So Stoicism, again, huge caricature, but it's an aim not to care because caring is bad.

Lex Fridman (1:18:37.340)

And there's certain forms of existentialism, certainly in Pascal and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky

Lex Fridman (1:18:44.780)

and Heidegger and Sartre in his own way.

Lex Fridman (1:18:49.560)

So it's not just a theistic or atheistic thing.

Lex Fridman (1:18:53.580)

What's crucial about us is that we do care.

Sean Kelly (1:18:57.540)

Heidegger says, care is the being of Dasein, Dasein is his name for us.

Lex Fridman (1:19:02.400)

What it is to be us is to be the being that already cares.

Lex Fridman (1:19:06.780)

And you can't not do that.

Lex Fridman (1:19:09.060)

You can pretend you're not doing it, but you're just caring in a different way.

Sean Kelly (1:19:13.460)

It's like Sartre saying, you can pretend you're not taking responsibility.

Sean Kelly (1:19:18.900)

You can pretend that you don't have to make a decision, that is making a decision.

Sean Kelly (1:19:23.500)

Not caring is a way of caring.

Lex Fridman (1:19:25.740)

And so I think the existentialists that I'm interested in think that we do care.

Sean Kelly (1:19:31.420)

That's constitutive of what it is to be us.

Lex Fridman (1:19:34.820)

And so they'll think that the Stoics got it wrong.

Lex Fridman (1:19:37.820)

But that leaves open a huge range of moves about how we inhabit that existence well.

Lex Fridman (1:19:49.840)

Let me ask about Ayn Rand.

Lex Fridman (1:19:53.620)

So it just so happens that she's entered a few conversations in this podcast, and just

Sean Kelly (1:20:01.820)

looking at academic philosophy or just philosophers in general, they seem to ignore Ayn Rand.

Lex Fridman (1:20:07.540)

Do you have a sense of why that is?

Sean Kelly (1:20:10.060)

Did she ever come into play her ideas of objectivism, come into play of discussions of a good life

Lex Fridman (1:20:20.620)

from the perspective of existentialism in how you teach it and how you think about it?

Lex Fridman (1:20:26.780)

Is she somebody who you find at all interesting?

Lex Fridman (1:20:30.980)

So no, I don't think she is, but it's been a long time since I've read her stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:20:36.420)

I read it in high school.

Sean Kelly (1:20:37.660)

I read The Fountainhead in high school and Atlas Shrugged, but that's at this point a

Lex Fridman (1:20:41.660)

very long time ago.

Sean Kelly (1:20:42.660)

I think I read something about objective epistemology or something too.

Lex Fridman (1:20:46.900)

So my view about her could be based on a total misunderstanding of what she's up to.

Lex Fridman (1:20:53.900)

But sort of my caricature of her and tell me if I've got it wrong is that she's sort

Sean Kelly (1:21:02.180)

of motivated by a kind of, I think maybe sometimes you call it libertarianism, but maybe let's

Sean Kelly (1:21:11.300)

in the context of our discussion tie it back to Sartre, a kind of view according to which

Sean Kelly (1:21:17.580)

we're the being who has to contend with the fact that we're radically free to do stuff

Lex Fridman (1:21:21.980)

and we're just not being courageous or brave enough when we don't do that.

Lex Fridman (1:21:27.300)

And the people to admire are the people who make stuff out of nothing.

Lex Fridman (1:21:33.100)

So maybe that's a bad caricature.

Lex Fridman (1:21:34.740)

No, no, no.

Sean Kelly (1:21:35.740)

I think, no, I think that's pretty accurate.

Sean Kelly (1:21:38.140)

I'm not again, very knowledgeable about the full depth of her philosophy, but I think

Sean Kelly (1:21:43.860)

she takes a view of the world that's similar to Sartre in the conclusions, but makes stronger

Sean Kelly (1:21:53.700)

statements about epistemology that first of all, everything is knowable and there's some,

Sean Kelly (1:22:00.180)

you should always operate through reason.

Lex Fridman (1:22:03.180)

Like reason is very important.

Sean Kelly (1:22:05.620)

Like it's like you start with a few axioms and you build on top of that and the axioms

Lex Fridman (1:22:13.420)

that everybody should operate on are the same.

Sean Kelly (1:22:16.860)

Again, reality is objective, it's not subjective.

Lex Fridman (1:22:21.660)

So from that you can derive the entirety of how humans should behave at the individual

Sean Kelly (1:22:27.300)

level and at the societal level.

Lex Fridman (1:22:30.060)

And there's a few conclusions, she would talk about virtue of selfishness and sort of a

Sean Kelly (1:22:35.380)

lot of people use that to dismiss her, look, she's very selfish and so on.

Sean Kelly (1:22:39.020)

She actually meant something very different is like, it's more like the Sartre thing,

Sean Kelly (1:22:44.060)

take responsibility for yourself, understand what forces you're operating under and make

Lex Fridman (1:22:51.620)

the best of this life.

Lex Fridman (1:22:52.980)

And that's how you can be the best member of societies by making the best life you can

Lex Fridman (1:22:58.740)

and just focusing yourself, like fix your own problems first and then that will make

Sean Kelly (1:23:03.760)

you the best member of society, of your family, of loved ones, of friends and so on.

Sean Kelly (1:23:10.700)

I think the reason she's disliked, obviously on the philosophy side, she's disliked because

Sean Kelly (1:23:16.580)

a little bit like Nietzsche, she's literary.

Sean Kelly (1:23:22.020)

I think the reason she's publicly disliked in sort of public conversations is because

Sean Kelly (1:23:28.540)

of how sure she is of herself, which is some of the philosophers have been known to do

Sean Kelly (1:23:33.700)

like make very strong statements like hell is other people, but she was making very strong

Sean Kelly (1:23:39.020)

statements about basically everything.

Lex Fridman (1:23:42.900)

But the reason I bring her up is she is an influential thinker that is not for some reason

Sean Kelly (1:23:52.980)

often brought up as such, it's not acknowledged how influential she is.

Sean Kelly (1:23:57.300)

I was recently looking at like a list of the most important women of the 20th century in

Sean Kelly (1:24:05.380)

terms of thought, not science, but like thought and she wasn't in that list.

Lex Fridman (1:24:12.020)

And I see this time and time again and it doesn't make sense to me why she's so kind

Sean Kelly (1:24:18.640)

of dismissed because clearly she's an author of some of the most read books like ever and

Lex Fridman (1:24:26.260)

she clearly had very strong ideas that she'd be contented with.

Sean Kelly (1:24:34.420)

That's why it kind of didn't make sense to me because she's also a creature of her time

Lex Fridman (1:24:39.580)

and an important one, she's a creation of the Soviet Union, somebody who left because

Sean Kelly (1:24:44.940)

of that and so some of the strength of her ideas has to do with how much she dislikes

Lex Fridman (1:24:50.540)

that particular philosophy and way of life.

Lex Fridman (1:24:56.340)

But also she's a creature of Sartre and that whole Nietzsche and so on.

Sean Kelly (1:25:02.300)

Now one of the other criticisms is she doesn't integrate herself into this history.

Sean Kelly (1:25:07.980)

She keeps basically kind of implying that she's purely original in all her thoughts

Lex Fridman (1:25:14.540)

even though she's kind of citing a lot of other people.

Lex Fridman (1:25:18.200)

But again, many philosophers do this kind of thing as if they are truly original and

Lex Fridman (1:25:23.860)

they're not.

Sean Kelly (1:25:24.860)

It is interesting and also what's interesting about her is she is a woman, she is a strong

Sean Kelly (1:25:29.220)

feminist and it feels like with Simone de Beauvoir, it seems like she's a very important

Sean Kelly (1:25:38.940)

person in this moment of history that shouldn't be fully forgotten.

Lex Fridman (1:25:42.620)

Interesting.

Sean Kelly (1:25:43.620)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:25:44.620)

Well, so I mean I don't have a lot to add.

Sean Kelly (1:25:46.940)

I will just say this, I mean the way she and Beauvoir seem to me from your description

Sean Kelly (1:25:54.220)

of her and remembering what I remember from 35 years ago, they seem pretty opposite from

Sean Kelly (1:26:00.500)

one another.

Sean Kelly (1:26:02.460)

One of the things I find interesting about Beauvoir is that she takes seriously the thing

Sean Kelly (1:26:08.000)

that Sartre didn't, which is our throwness, which is the sense in which we're born into

Lex Fridman (1:26:16.940)

a situation that's already got a significance.

Sean Kelly (1:26:21.340)

I think it was easier for her to recognize that than Sartre because she was a woman.

Lex Fridman (1:26:26.540)

And Sartre seems to act as if there are no constraints or at least there shouldn't be.

Sean Kelly (1:26:32.420)

We're pretty close as privileged white males and if we could just get rid of the last bits

Lex Fridman (1:26:38.340)

of them, we would be God like we're supposed to be.

Lex Fridman (1:26:41.860)

And I think Beauvoir sort of sees things differently.

Lex Fridman (1:26:44.940)

I think she recognizes one's not born but becomes a woman, she says.

Lex Fridman (1:26:50.140)

So how does that happen?

Sean Kelly (1:26:51.580)

Well you're thrown into your culture and your culture starts treating you in a certain way

Sean Kelly (1:26:56.220)

because of your gender and that starts to form your understanding and your experience

Lex Fridman (1:27:00.380)

of things.

Sean Kelly (1:27:01.380)

By the time you're grown up, well you're pretty well formed by that.

Lex Fridman (1:27:07.780)

That seems a fact.

Sean Kelly (1:27:08.780)

It's a fact about Sartre too though, it was harder for him to notice it because he was

Lex Fridman (1:27:14.580)

formed into his privilege.

Lex Fridman (1:27:17.580)

But the world reminds us of our throwness for some more than others.

Lex Fridman (1:27:22.060)

Yes, absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:27:23.540)

And for people who have to contend on a daily basis with the fact that the social position

Sean Kelly (1:27:31.660)

they're thrown into is one that negates them or one that oppresses them or one that sort

Sean Kelly (1:27:39.180)

of pushes them to the side in some way or another, I mean the black experience is interesting

Lex Fridman (1:27:44.660)

in this respect too.

Sean Kelly (1:27:46.300)

Frantz Fanon who's a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir writes about it and it's very

Sean Kelly (1:27:51.820)

familiar the things that he's saying now but he writes back in the 50s about being a black

Sean Kelly (1:27:57.580)

man in Paris and getting on an elevator with a woman alone and how her reaction to him,

Sean Kelly (1:28:07.260)

not knowing him, not having any views about any reason to have any views about him sort

Sean Kelly (1:28:12.980)

of puts him in a particular social position with respect to her.

Lex Fridman (1:28:17.260)

And if you don't have that experience, it's much harder to recognize the way in which

Lex Fridman (1:28:25.340)

what we're thrown into is something we might not have chosen.

Lex Fridman (1:28:29.340)

So the idea that that's not an aspect of our existence, which as you describe Ayn Rand's

Sean Kelly (1:28:37.740)

views, she sounds more like Sartre, she sounds more like either it's not an aspect of our

Sean Kelly (1:28:44.340)

existence or at least we ought to sort of aim at it's not being an aspect of our existence.

Sean Kelly (1:28:47.820)

Yeah, almost act as if it's not.

Lex Fridman (1:28:49.540)

Yeah, exactly.

Sean Kelly (1:28:50.540)

Act as if it's not.

Lex Fridman (1:28:51.540)

And so I think from my point of view, I don't pretend that I'm explaining the public reception

Sean Kelly (1:28:57.020)

of her, I'm just sort of trying to say how I understand her in this intellectual context.

Sean Kelly (1:29:03.860)

From my point of view, that's something big to miss and the ambition to think that really

Sean Kelly (1:29:09.980)

what's happening is that we're all the same, we're all rational beings.

Sean Kelly (1:29:13.780)

We're all beings who if we just got the axioms of our existence right and made good judgments

Lex Fridman (1:29:19.100)

and reasoned in an appropriate way, would optimize ourselves.

Sean Kelly (1:29:25.580)

That feels to me like a kind of natural end point of the philosophical tradition.

Sean Kelly (1:29:33.500)

I mean, sort of Plato starts off with a view that helps us in that direction and the enlightenment

Lex Fridman (1:29:38.500)

moves us further in that direction.

Lex Fridman (1:29:41.100)

But from my point of view, that movement has led us astray because it's missed something

Lex Fridman (1:29:47.320)

really important that's crucial to the kind of being that we are.

Sean Kelly (1:29:52.420)

Yeah, it misses the music.

Lex Fridman (1:29:55.180)

Exactly, it misses the music.

Sean Kelly (1:29:58.020)

Let's talk about thrownness and I think you mentioned that in the context of Heidegger.

Lex Fridman (1:30:02.260)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:30:03.260)

So can we talk about Heidegger?

Lex Fridman (1:30:04.900)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:30:05.900)

Who is this philosopher?

Lex Fridman (1:30:08.160)

What are some fascinating ideas that he brought to the world?

Sean Kelly (1:30:12.180)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:30:13.180)

So Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher.

Sean Kelly (1:30:15.900)

I do know when he was born, 1889, but I know that only by accident.

Sean Kelly (1:30:20.540)

It's because it's the same year that Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, was born and the

Sean Kelly (1:30:24.620)

same year that Hitler was born.

Lex Fridman (1:30:26.280)

So if I've remembered my dates right and someone will call in and correct me otherwise.

Lex Fridman (1:30:31.680)

But that's the way it sort of sits in my memory bank.

Lex Fridman (1:30:35.220)

And it's interesting that the three of them were born at the same time.

Sean Kelly (1:30:39.460)

Wittgenstein and Heidegger share some similarities, but then it's also interesting that Heidegger

Lex Fridman (1:30:46.980)

was a Nazi.

Sean Kelly (1:30:47.980)

I mean, this is a very disturbing fact about his personal political background.

Lex Fridman (1:30:53.380)

And so it's something that anyone who thinks that things that he said might be interesting

Sean Kelly (1:30:57.900)

has got to contend with.

Lex Fridman (1:30:59.900)

Heidegger was born in Germany, Hitler in Austria.

Sean Kelly (1:31:04.260)

Wittgenstein is Austria also.

Lex Fridman (1:31:06.860)

But so you have to, when you call Heidegger a Nazi, you have to remember, I mean, there

Sean Kelly (1:31:12.180)

was millions of Nazis too.

Lex Fridman (1:31:14.100)

So like there are parts of their, that's the history of the world.

Sean Kelly (1:31:19.500)

There's a lot of communists, Marxists and Nazis in that part of history.

Lex Fridman (1:31:26.740)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:31:27.740)

And one of the discussion points is, well, was he just a kind of social Nazi?

Sean Kelly (1:31:32.980)

I mean, you know, he went to parties with them and stuff, or was he like, did he really

Lex Fridman (1:31:38.500)

believe in the ideology?

Lex Fridman (1:31:40.220)

And that's a choice point.

Lex Fridman (1:31:42.540)

And we could talk about it if you want.

Lex Fridman (1:31:44.900)

He held a political position.

Sean Kelly (1:31:46.820)

That's one of the relevant parts.

Lex Fridman (1:31:48.780)

In 1933, he was made rector of the University of Freiburg.

Sean Kelly (1:31:52.820)

That's like the president of the university.

Lex Fridman (1:31:56.020)

And that was in Germany, all the universities are state universities.

Lex Fridman (1:32:00.980)

And so that's a political appointment.

Lex Fridman (1:32:03.320)

Can we just pause on this point?

Lex Fridman (1:32:06.380)

From an existentialist perspective, what's the role for standing up to evil?

Lex Fridman (1:32:13.620)

So I mean, I think Camus probably had something to say about these things because he was a

Sean Kelly (1:32:19.900)

bit of a political figure.

Sean Kelly (1:32:21.700)

Like do you have a responsibility, not just for your decisions, but you know, if the world

Sean Kelly (1:32:28.260)

you see around you is going against what you believe somewhere deep inside is ethical,

Lex Fridman (1:32:38.740)

do you have a responsibility to stand up to that, even if it costs you your life or your

Lex Fridman (1:32:43.460)

wellbeing?

Sean Kelly (1:32:44.460)

Well, you ask from an existential perspective and there's lots of different positions that

Sean Kelly (1:32:49.540)

you could have.

Lex Fridman (1:32:50.540)

So let me tell you something in the area of what I think I might believe, which comes

Sean Kelly (1:32:53.900)

out of this tradition.

Lex Fridman (1:32:57.620)

And it's this, if you live in a community where people are being dragged down by the

Sean Kelly (1:33:05.780)

norms of the community rather than elevated, then there's two things that you have to recognize.

Lex Fridman (1:33:13.900)

One is that you bear some responsibility for that.

Sean Kelly (1:33:17.520)

Not necessarily because you chose it, maybe you reviled it, maybe you were against it.

Lex Fridman (1:33:23.060)

But there's some way in which we all act in accordance with the norms of our culture.

Sean Kelly (1:33:29.660)

We all give in to them in some way or another.

Lex Fridman (1:33:31.860)

And if those norms are broken, then there's some way in which we've allowed ourselves

Sean Kelly (1:33:37.260)

to be responsible for broken norms.

Lex Fridman (1:33:41.020)

We've become responsible for broken norms.

Lex Fridman (1:33:42.960)

And I do think you have to face up to that.

Lex Fridman (1:33:45.400)

I think that, let's just take gender norms.

Sean Kelly (1:33:49.060)

Maybe the gender norms are broken.

Sean Kelly (1:33:51.340)

Maybe the way men and women treat one another or the way men treat women is broken.

Sean Kelly (1:33:57.780)

Maybe it is.

Lex Fridman (1:33:59.780)

I'm not making a substantive claim, I'm just saying lots of people say it is.

Lex Fridman (1:34:03.900)

And if you're in a culture where those norms take roots, you don't get to just isolate

Sean Kelly (1:34:13.460)

yourself and pull yourself out of the culture and think, I don't have any responsibility.

Sean Kelly (1:34:19.700)

You're already a part of the culture.

Sean Kelly (1:34:21.660)

Even if you're isolating yourself from it, that's a way of rejecting the sort of part

Sean Kelly (1:34:28.540)

you play in the culture, but it's not a way of getting behind it.

Lex Fridman (1:34:32.940)

Now you're playing that role differently.

Sean Kelly (1:34:35.220)

You're saying, I don't want to take responsibility for what's going on around me.

Lex Fridman (1:34:41.240)

And that's a way of taking responsibility by refusing to do it.

Sean Kelly (1:34:45.820)

I think we're implicated in whatever's going on around us.

Lex Fridman (1:34:50.540)

And if we're going to do anything in our lives, we ought to recognize that, recognize that

Sean Kelly (1:34:57.740)

even in situations where you maybe didn't decide to do it, you could be part of bringing

Sean Kelly (1:35:03.660)

other people down and then devote yourself to trying to figure out how to act differently

Lex Fridman (1:35:09.300)

so that the norms update themselves.

Lex Fridman (1:35:12.580)

And I think this is not a criticism of people.

Sean Kelly (1:35:16.100)

Alyosha, who we mentioned in The Brothers Karamazov, he's a character, he's a kind of

Lex Fridman (1:35:20.740)

saintly character in The Brothers Karamazov.

Lex Fridman (1:35:24.620)

But that one crucial moment in that story is when he realizes how awful he's been being

Lex Fridman (1:35:33.220)

to someone without ever even intending to do that.

Sean Kelly (1:35:36.980)

It's Grushenka, who's this sort of fascinating woman, and she's a very erotic woman.

Lex Fridman (1:35:43.220)

She's sort of sexual.

Lex Fridman (1:35:45.540)

And Alyosha, in my reading of it, is kind of attracted to her.

Lex Fridman (1:35:51.660)

But he's a young kid, he's 20 or whatever, and he's kind of embarrassed about it.

Lex Fridman (1:35:56.700)

And he lives in the monastery and he's thinking maybe he wants to be a priest and he's kind

Lex Fridman (1:36:00.500)

of embarrassed by it.

Lex Fridman (1:36:01.540)

So what does he do?

Lex Fridman (1:36:02.920)

Every time they run across one another in the street, he averts his gaze.

Lex Fridman (1:36:08.940)

And why is he doing that?

Lex Fridman (1:36:10.220)

Because he's kind of embarrassed.

Lex Fridman (1:36:12.640)

But how does Grushenka experience it?

Sean Kelly (1:36:14.340)

Well, she knows she's a fallen woman and she knows that Alyosha has this other position

Sean Kelly (1:36:18.940)

in society.

Lex Fridman (1:36:20.460)

So her read on it is, he's passing judgment on me.

Sean Kelly (1:36:24.260)

He can see that he doesn't want to be associated with me.

Lex Fridman (1:36:27.600)

He can see that I'm a fallen woman.

Sean Kelly (1:36:29.420)

He knows that in order to maintain his purity, he's got to avoid me.

Lex Fridman (1:36:34.980)

That's not what Alyosha intended to do, but that's the way it's experienced.

Lex Fridman (1:36:39.540)

And so there's this way he comes to recognize, oh my God, what I'm supposed to do is love

Lex Fridman (1:36:45.100)

people in Dostoevsky's view of things.

Lex Fridman (1:36:48.460)

And what I'm doing instead is dragging this poor woman down.

Lex Fridman (1:36:51.580)

I'm making her life worse.

Sean Kelly (1:36:53.100)

I'm making her feel terrible about herself.

Lex Fridman (1:36:55.460)

And if I actually came to know her, I'd recognize her condition is difficult.

Sean Kelly (1:36:59.940)

She's living a difficult life.

Lex Fridman (1:37:01.600)

She's making hard choices.

Lex Fridman (1:37:03.140)

And why don't I see that in her face instead of this other thing that's making me want

Lex Fridman (1:37:09.100)

to avoid her?

Lex Fridman (1:37:10.100)

And that's a huge moment.

Sean Kelly (1:37:11.100)

So, but the idea is that we're implicated in bringing other people down, whether we

Sean Kelly (1:37:15.780)

want to be or not, and that's our condition.

Sean Kelly (1:37:19.620)

The requirement to understand that is to be almost to a radical degree, be empathetic

Lex Fridman (1:37:26.060)

and to listen to the world.

Lex Fridman (1:37:30.860)

And I mean, you brought up sort of gender roles.

Sean Kelly (1:37:33.900)

It's not so simple.

Lex Fridman (1:37:35.580)

All of this is messy.

Sean Kelly (1:37:37.020)

For example, this is me talking.

Sean Kelly (1:37:39.740)

It's clear to me that, for example, the woke culture has bullying built into it, has some

Sean Kelly (1:37:47.860)

elements of the same kind of evil built into it.

Lex Fridman (1:37:51.340)

And when you're part of the wave of wokeness standing up for social rights, you also have

Lex Fridman (1:37:56.900)

to listen and think, are we going too far?

Lex Fridman (1:38:00.860)

Are we hurting people?

Sean Kelly (1:38:02.420)

Are we doing the same things that others that we're fighting against, that others were doing

Lex Fridman (1:38:09.020)

in the past?

Lex Fridman (1:38:10.020)

So it's not simple once you see that there's evil being done that is easy to fix.

Sean Kelly (1:38:19.100)

No, in our society, there's something about our human nature that just too easily stops

Sean Kelly (1:38:30.020)

listening to the world, to empathizing with the world.

Lex Fridman (1:38:33.900)

And we label things as evil.

Sean Kelly (1:38:35.640)

This is through human history.

Lex Fridman (1:38:37.300)

This is evil.

Sean Kelly (1:38:38.300)

You mentioned tribes.

Lex Fridman (1:38:40.100)

This religious belief is evil.

Lex Fridman (1:38:42.020)

And so we have to fight it and we become certain and dogmatic about it.

Lex Fridman (1:38:45.540)

And then in so doing, commit evil onto the world.

Sean Kelly (1:38:49.000)

It seems like a life that accepts and responsibility for the norms we're in has to constantly be

Sean Kelly (1:38:59.060)

sort of questioning yourself and questioning, like listening to the world fully and richly

Sean Kelly (1:39:05.820)

without being weighed down by any one sort of realization.

Lex Fridman (1:39:13.580)

You just always constantly have to be thinking about the world.

Lex Fridman (1:39:16.180)

Am I wrong?

Lex Fridman (1:39:17.180)

Am I wrong in seeing the world this way?

Sean Kelly (1:39:18.740)

I mean, the very last thing you said, you've constantly got to be thinking about the world.

Lex Fridman (1:39:23.740)

You've constantly got to be listening.

Sean Kelly (1:39:25.280)

You've constantly got to be attending.

Lex Fridman (1:39:26.880)

And it's not simple.

Sean Kelly (1:39:28.780)

All that sounds exactly right to me.

Sean Kelly (1:39:30.620)

The phrase that rings through my head is another one from the Brothers Karamazov.

Sean Kelly (1:39:34.940)

Demetri, this passionate sort of sometimes violent brother who is also sort of deeply

Lex Fridman (1:39:44.140)

cares.

Sean Kelly (1:39:45.140)

I mean, because he's passionate, he's sort of got care through and through, but it's

Lex Fridman (1:39:49.500)

breaking him apart.

Sean Kelly (1:39:51.240)

He says at one point, God and the devil are fighting and the battlefield is the heart

Lex Fridman (1:39:57.740)

of man.

Lex Fridman (1:39:58.740)

And I just think, yeah, it's not simple.

Lex Fridman (1:40:02.640)

And the idea that there might be a purely good way of doing things is just not our condition.

Sean Kelly (1:40:08.380)

That everything we do is going to be sort of undermined by some aspect of it.

Lex Fridman (1:40:13.000)

There's not going to be a kind of pure good in human existence.

Lex Fridman (1:40:18.180)

And so it's sort of required that we're going to have to be empathetic, that we're going

Lex Fridman (1:40:25.300)

to have to recognize that others are dealing with that just as we are.

Lex Fridman (1:40:32.260)

So I apologize for distracting us.

Sean Kelly (1:40:33.820)

We were talking about Heidegger and the reason we were distracted is he happened to also

Sean Kelly (1:40:40.220)

be a Nazi, but he nevertheless has a lot of powerful ideas.

Lex Fridman (1:40:45.260)

What are the ideas he's brought to the world?

Sean Kelly (1:40:47.420)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:40:48.420)

So that's a big, huge question.

Lex Fridman (1:40:49.820)

So let me see how much of it I can get on the table.

Sean Kelly (1:40:54.260)

I mean, the big picture is that Heidegger thinks, and he's not really wrong to think

Sean Kelly (1:40:59.980)

this, that the whole history of philosophy from Plato forward, maybe even from the pre

Sean Kelly (1:41:07.220)

Socratics forward, from like the sixth century BC to now has been grounded on a certain kind

Sean Kelly (1:41:17.880)

of assumption that it didn't have the right to make and that it's led us astray.

Lex Fridman (1:41:25.180)

And that until we understand the way in which it's led us astray, we're not going to be

Sean Kelly (1:41:30.560)

able to get to grips with the condition we now find ourselves in.

Lex Fridman (1:41:34.340)

So let me start with what he thinks the condition we now find ourselves in is.

Sean Kelly (1:41:39.100)

Lots of periods to Heidegger's views.

Lex Fridman (1:41:42.140)

I'm just going to sort of mush it all together for the purposes of today.

Sean Kelly (1:41:46.180)

Heidegger thinks that one of the crucial things that we need to contend with when we think

Sean Kelly (1:41:52.180)

about what it is to be us now is that the right name for our age is a technological

Sean Kelly (1:41:59.620)

age.

Lex Fridman (1:42:00.620)

And what does it mean for our age to be a technological age?

Sean Kelly (1:42:04.300)

Well, it means that we have an understanding of what it is for anything at all to be at

Sean Kelly (1:42:11.900)

all that we never really chose, that sort of animating the way we live our lives, that's

Sean Kelly (1:42:19.660)

animating our understanding of ourselves and everything else that is quite limited.

Lex Fridman (1:42:26.560)

And it's organized around the idea that to be something is to be what's sitting there

Sean Kelly (1:42:35.900)

as an infinitely flexible reserve to be optimized and made efficient.

Lex Fridman (1:42:45.640)

And Heidegger thinks that's not just the way we think of silicon circuits or the river

Sean Kelly (1:42:57.580)

when we put a hydroelectric power plant on it, we're optimizing the flow of the river

Lex Fridman (1:43:02.600)

so that it makes energy which is infinitely flexible and we can use in any way at all.

Sean Kelly (1:43:07.740)

It's the way we understand ourselves too.

Sean Kelly (1:43:11.180)

We think of ourselves as this reserve of potential that needs to be made efficient and optimized.

Lex Fridman (1:43:19.420)

And when I talk with my students about it, I ask them, what's your calendar look like?

Lex Fridman (1:43:28.140)

What's the goal of your day?

Lex Fridman (1:43:30.060)

Is it to get as many things into it as possible?

Sean Kelly (1:43:32.940)

Is it to feel like I've failed unless I've made my life so efficient that I'm doing this

Lex Fridman (1:43:41.340)

and this and this and this and this that I can't let things go by?

Sean Kelly (1:43:45.780)

The feeling that I think we all have that there's some pressure to do that, to relate

Sean Kelly (1:43:52.940)

to ourselves that way is a clue to what Heidegger thinks the technological age is about.

Lex Fridman (1:44:00.420)

And he thinks that's different from every other age in history.

Sean Kelly (1:44:04.980)

We used to think of ourselves in the 17th century at the beginning of the Enlightenment

Sean Kelly (1:44:09.960)

as subjects who represent objects, Descartes thought that a subject is something, some

Sean Kelly (1:44:17.900)

mental sort of realm that represents the world in a certain way.

Lex Fridman (1:44:23.620)

And we are closed in on ourselves in the sense that we have a special relation to our representations

Lex Fridman (1:44:30.220)

and that's what the realm of the subject is.

Lex Fridman (1:44:32.980)

But others, in the Middle Ages, we were created in the image and likeness of God.

Sean Kelly (1:44:37.540)

In the pre Socratic age, to be was to be what whooshes up and lingers for a while and fades

Lex Fridman (1:44:44.540)

away.

Sean Kelly (1:44:45.540)

The paradigm of what is were thunderstorms and the anger of the gods, Achilles battle

Sean Kelly (1:44:52.780)

fury and it overtakes everything and stays for a while and then leaves, the flowers blooming

Sean Kelly (1:44:59.900)

in spring.

Lex Fridman (1:45:00.980)

And that's very different from the way we experience ourselves.

Lex Fridman (1:45:04.760)

And so the question is, what are we supposed to do in the face of that?

Lex Fridman (1:45:09.780)

And Heidegger thinks that the presupposition that's motivated everything from the pre Socratics

Sean Kelly (1:45:17.820)

forward is that there is some entity that's the ground of the way we understand everything

Lex Fridman (1:45:28.160)

to be. For the Middle Ages, it was God.

Sean Kelly (1:45:31.460)

That was the entity that made things be the things that they are.

Lex Fridman (1:45:35.620)

For the Enlightenment, it was us.

Sean Kelly (1:45:38.240)

Maybe for Sartre, it's us.

Lex Fridman (1:45:40.800)

And Heidegger thinks whatever it is that stands at the ground of what we are, it's not another

Sean Kelly (1:45:47.060)

thing.

Lex Fridman (1:45:48.060)

It's not another entity.

Lex Fridman (1:45:49.060)

And we're relating to it in the wrong way if we think of it like that.

Lex Fridman (1:45:54.820)

This is partly why I was interested in Meister Eckhart.

Sean Kelly (1:45:58.020)

He says, what there is is there's giving going on in the world, and we're the grateful recipient

Lex Fridman (1:46:06.980)

of it.

Lex Fridman (1:46:08.180)

And the giving is like whatever it is, it's the social norms that we're thrown into.

Lex Fridman (1:46:13.040)

We didn't choose them.

Sean Kelly (1:46:14.040)

They were given to us.

Lex Fridman (1:46:15.040)

And that's the ground.

Sean Kelly (1:46:16.540)

That is what makes it possible for anything to be intelligible at all.

Sean Kelly (1:46:20.280)

If we lived outside of communities, if we lived in a world where there were no social

Sean Kelly (1:46:24.740)

norms at all, nothing would mean anything.

Lex Fridman (1:46:28.240)

Nothing would have any significance.

Sean Kelly (1:46:29.920)

Nothing would be regular in the way that things need to be regular in order for there to be

Lex Fridman (1:46:34.640)

departures or manifestations of that regularity.

Lex Fridman (1:46:39.600)

So community norms are crucial, but they're also always updating.

Sean Kelly (1:46:46.800)

We have some responsibility for what they are and the way in which they're updating

Sean Kelly (1:46:52.220)

themselves.

Lex Fridman (1:46:53.980)

And yet we didn't ever choose it to be that way.

Lex Fridman (1:46:57.320)

So those norms are somehow giving significance to us in a way that we're implicated in,

Sean Kelly (1:47:05.880)

we have some relation to, and all that gets covered over if you think of us as efficient

Sean Kelly (1:47:11.200)

resources to be optimized.

Lex Fridman (1:47:13.200)

Is that a conflicting view that we are resources to be optimized?

Lex Fridman (1:47:18.960)

Is that somehow deeply conflicting with the fact that there's a ground that we stand on?

Lex Fridman (1:47:23.960)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:47:24.960)

So what Heidegger thinks is that this is, he calls this the supreme danger of the technological

Sean Kelly (1:47:30.760)

age is that without ever having chosen it, without ever having decided it, this is the

Sean Kelly (1:47:36.040)

way we understand what it is to be us.

Lex Fridman (1:47:39.160)

But he thinks that it's also, he says, quoting Holderlin, this 18th century German poet,

Sean Kelly (1:47:46.680)

he says, in the supreme danger lies the saving possibility.

Lex Fridman (1:47:51.240)

So what does that mean?

Sean Kelly (1:47:52.940)

It means that this is the understanding that we've been thrown into, that we've been given.

Lex Fridman (1:47:58.280)

It's the gift that was given to us.

Sean Kelly (1:48:00.560)

It's supremely dangerous.

Lex Fridman (1:48:01.800)

If we let ourselves live that way, we'll destroy ourselves.

Lex Fridman (1:48:06.720)

But it's also the saving possibility because if we recognize that we never chose that,

Sean Kelly (1:48:14.520)

that it was given to us, but also we were implicated in its being given and we could

Sean Kelly (1:48:20.360)

find a way to supersede it, that it's the ground, but it's also updatable.

Lex Fridman (1:48:26.240)

He calls the ground, the groundless ground.

Sean Kelly (1:48:30.360)

It's not like an entity, which is there, solid, stable, like God, who's eternal and nonchanging.

Sean Kelly (1:48:38.100)

It's always updating itself and we're always involved in its being updated, but we're only

Sean Kelly (1:48:43.320)

involved in it in the right way if we listen, like Miles Davis.

Lex Fridman (1:48:49.400)

So optimization is not a good way to live life.

Sean Kelly (1:48:55.480)

If you thought that it was obviously clear that that was the relevant value, so obviously

Sean Kelly (1:49:02.760)

clear that it never even occurred to you to ask whether it was right to think that, then

Sean Kelly (1:49:07.400)

you would be in danger.

Lex Fridman (1:49:08.400)

Yeah.

Sean Kelly (1:49:09.400)

Got it.

Lex Fridman (1:49:10.400)

So yeah, there is some in this modern technological age, in the full meaning of the word technology,

Sean Kelly (1:49:16.440)

that's updated to actual modern age with a lot more technology going on.

Sean Kelly (1:49:23.520)

It does feel like colleagues of mine in the tech space actually are somehow drawn to that

Sean Kelly (1:49:29.440)

optimization as if that's going to save us, as if the thing that truly weighs us down

Lex Fridman (1:49:35.960)

is the inefficiencies.

Sean Kelly (1:49:38.760)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (1:49:40.080)

And I think if you think about other contexts, like what are the moments when, I mean, we're

Sean Kelly (1:49:45.880)

unique in this respect.

Lex Fridman (1:49:47.600)

This period in history is unlike any previous period.

Sean Kelly (1:49:51.180)

Nobody ever felt that way.

Lex Fridman (1:49:53.040)

But think about, but it's also true that no previous period in history was nihilistic.

Lex Fridman (1:49:58.520)

So our condition is tied up, that sort of thing is meant to be a response to the felt

Lex Fridman (1:50:03.880)

lack of a ground.

Lex Fridman (1:50:05.880)

And so no previous epoch in history felt that way.

Lex Fridman (1:50:11.200)

They didn't have our problem.

Lex Fridman (1:50:14.400)

So it was much more natural to them to experience moments in ways that feel unachievable for

Lex Fridman (1:50:22.680)

us, what we were calling moments of aliveness before.

Sean Kelly (1:50:26.120)

Think about the context in which they felt them.

Lex Fridman (1:50:28.640)

They weren't efficient, optimized contexts.

Sean Kelly (1:50:31.840)

Think about the Greeks.

Lex Fridman (1:50:33.780)

If you ever read Homer, it is a bizarre world back there.

Lex Fridman (1:50:37.540)

But one of the things that's bizarre is that they're so unmotivated by efficiency and optimizing

Sean Kelly (1:50:45.720)

that the only thing that seems to run through all of the different Greek cultures is the

Sean Kelly (1:50:52.240)

idea that if some stranger comes by, you better take care of them because Zeus is the god

Lex Fridman (1:51:02.640)

of strangers and Zeus will be angry.

Lex Fridman (1:51:04.840)

That's what they say, right?

Lex Fridman (1:51:05.840)

But how does it manifest itself?

Sean Kelly (1:51:07.880)

Odysseus, he's trying to get home and he gets shipwrecked on an island and he's trying

Sean Kelly (1:51:13.920)

to figure out, he's been at sea for 10 days, he's starving, he's bedraggled and he sees

Sean Kelly (1:51:20.000)

now Sissa, the princess who's beautiful and he's like, boy, I better, I don't know, get

Lex Fridman (1:51:26.360)

some clothes or something.

Sean Kelly (1:51:28.160)

I don't want them to beat me up and kill me.

Lex Fridman (1:51:31.240)

And so she takes him to the palace.

Sean Kelly (1:51:34.520)

They have three days of banquets and festivals before they even ask his name.

Lex Fridman (1:51:41.040)

It's like, here's a stranger.

Sean Kelly (1:51:43.360)

Our job is to celebrate the presence of a stranger because this is where significance

Lex Fridman (1:51:48.600)

lies.

Sean Kelly (1:51:49.880)

Now we don't have to feel that way, but the idea that that's one of the places where significance

Sean Kelly (1:51:54.720)

could lie is pretty strongly at odds with the idea that our salvation is going to come

Sean Kelly (1:51:59.940)

from optimization and efficiency.

Sean Kelly (1:52:02.080)

Maybe something about the way we live our lives will have that integrated into it.

Lex Fridman (1:52:08.440)

But it's at odds with other moments.

Lex Fridman (1:52:12.160)

Let me ask you a question about Hubert Burt Dreyfus.

Sean Kelly (1:52:16.780)

He is a friend, a colleague, a mentor of yours, unfortunately no longer with us.

Sean Kelly (1:52:24.200)

You wrote with him the book titled All Things Shining, Reading the Western Classics to Find

Sean Kelly (1:52:30.920)

Meaning in a Secular Age.

Lex Fridman (1:52:33.360)

First, can you maybe speak about who that man was, what you learned from him?

Lex Fridman (1:52:39.980)

And then we can maybe ask, how do we find through the classics meaning in a secular

Lex Fridman (1:52:45.800)

age?

Sean Kelly (1:52:46.800)

Okay.

Sean Kelly (1:52:47.800)

So, Burt Dreyfus was a very important philosopher of the late 20th, early 21st century.

Sean Kelly (1:52:58.560)

He died in 2017, about a little over four years ago.

Lex Fridman (1:53:03.220)

He was my teacher.

Sean Kelly (1:53:04.220)

I met him in 1989 when I went away to graduate school in Berkeley, that's where he taught.

Sean Kelly (1:53:10.880)

He plays an interesting and important role in the history of philosophy in America because

Sean Kelly (1:53:18.080)

in a period when most philosophers in America and in the English speaking world were not

Lex Fridman (1:53:26.440)

taking seriously 20th century French and German philosophy, he was.

Lex Fridman (1:53:31.040)

And he was really probably the most important English speaking interpreter of Heidegger,

Lex Fridman (1:53:37.120)

the German philosopher that we're talking about, we've been talking about.

Sean Kelly (1:53:41.360)

He was an incredible teacher, a lot of his influence came through his teaching.

Lex Fridman (1:53:47.840)

And one of the amazing things about him as a teacher was his sort of mix of intellectual

Sean Kelly (1:53:59.720)

humility with sort of deep insightful authority.

Lex Fridman (1:54:05.400)

And he would stand up in front of a class of 300 students, he taught huge classes because

Sean Kelly (1:54:11.280)

people love to go see him and I taught for him for many years and say, I've been reading

Lex Fridman (1:54:18.760)

this text for 40 years, but the question you asked is one I've never asked.

Lex Fridman (1:54:23.440)

And it would be true.

Lex Fridman (1:54:26.360)

He would find in what people said, things that were surprising and new to him.

Lex Fridman (1:54:32.120)

And that's humility actually.

Lex Fridman (1:54:33.760)

That is.

Sean Kelly (1:54:34.760)

Listening to the world.

Lex Fridman (1:54:36.560)

Absolutely, absolutely.

Sean Kelly (1:54:38.340)

He was always ready to be surprised by something that someone said and there's something astonishing

Lex Fridman (1:54:46.080)

about that.

Lex Fridman (1:54:47.080)

So his influence was, for people who didn't know him through his interpretations of these

Lex Fridman (1:54:52.840)

texts, he wrote about a huge range of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:54:55.160)

But for people who did know him, it was through his presence, it was through the way he carried

Lex Fridman (1:54:59.160)

himself in his life.

Lex Fridman (1:55:02.400)

And so in any case, that's who he was.

Lex Fridman (1:55:05.680)

I graduated after many years as a graduate student.

Sean Kelly (1:55:10.520)

I didn't start in philosophy, I started in math, math and computer science, actually.

Lex Fridman (1:55:14.480)

And then I did a lot of work in computational neuroscience for a few years.

Sean Kelly (1:55:17.920)

That's a fascinating journey.

Sean Kelly (1:55:20.000)

We'll get to it through our friendly conversation about artificial intelligence, I'm sure.

Sean Kelly (1:55:26.080)

Because you're basically fascinated with the philosophy of mind, of the human mind, but

Sean Kelly (1:55:32.160)

rooted in a curiosity of mind through the, it's artificial, through the engineering of

Sean Kelly (1:55:39.080)

mind.

Lex Fridman (1:55:40.080)

Yeah.

Sean Kelly (1:55:41.080)

Yeah, that's right.

Lex Fridman (1:55:42.080)

So Bert, I mean, the reason I was attracted to him actually is because of his, to begin

Sean Kelly (1:55:47.680)

with, was because of his criticisms of what was called traditional symbolic AI in the

Lex Fridman (1:55:52.960)

70s and 80s.

Lex Fridman (1:55:54.560)

So I came to Berkeley as a graduate student who'd done a lot of math and a lot of computer

Lex Fridman (1:55:58.960)

science, a lot of computational neuroscience.

Sean Kelly (1:56:01.760)

I noticed that you interview a lot of people in this world.

Lex Fridman (1:56:07.400)

And I had a teacher at Brown as an undergraduate, Jim Anderson, who wrote with Jeff Hinton a

Sean Kelly (1:56:13.880)

big book on neural networks.

Lex Fridman (1:56:16.600)

So I was interested in that, not so interested in traditional AI, like sort of Lisp programming,

Sean Kelly (1:56:24.360)

things that went on in the 80s, because it felt sort of, when you made a system do something,

Lex Fridman (1:56:31.240)

all of a sudden it was an interesting thing to have done.

Sean Kelly (1:56:34.920)

The fact that you'd solved the problem then made it clear that the problem wasn't an interesting

Lex Fridman (1:56:38.640)

one to solve.

Sean Kelly (1:56:39.640)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:56:40.640)

And I had that experience.

Lex Fridman (1:56:42.360)

And Bert had criticisms of symbolic AI, what he called good old fashioned AI, GoFi.

Lex Fridman (1:56:51.080)

And I was attracted to those criticisms because it felt to me that there was something lacking

Sean Kelly (1:56:57.800)

in that project.

Lex Fridman (1:56:58.800)

And I didn't know what it was.

Sean Kelly (1:57:00.320)

I just felt its absence.

Lex Fridman (1:57:03.320)

And then I learned that all his arguments came from his reading of this phenomenological

Lex Fridman (1:57:10.720)

and existential tradition.

Lex Fridman (1:57:12.560)

And so I had to try to figure out what those folks were saying.

Lex Fridman (1:57:15.160)

And it was a long road, let me tell you.

Lex Fridman (1:57:18.040)

It took me a long time.

Lex Fridman (1:57:19.480)

But it was because of Bert that I was able to do that.

Lex Fridman (1:57:21.560)

So I owe him that huge debt of gratitude.

Lex Fridman (1:57:23.900)

And eventually we went on to write a book together, which was a great experience.

Lex Fridman (1:57:28.680)

And yes, we published All Things Shining in 2011.

Lex Fridman (1:57:31.840)

And that's a book that I definitely would not have had the chutzpah to try to write

Sean Kelly (1:57:37.600)

if it weren't for Bert because it was really about great literature in the history of the

Sean Kelly (1:57:43.320)

West from Homer and Virgil and Dante to Melville.

Sean Kelly (1:57:47.780)

There's a huge chapter on Melville, a big chapter on David Foster Wallace who Bert didn't

Sean Kelly (1:57:53.320)

care about at all, but I was fascinated by.

Lex Fridman (1:57:56.220)

And so learning to think that way while writing that book with him was an amazing experience.

Lex Fridman (1:58:04.400)

So I have to admit, as one of my failings in life, one of many failings is I've never

Lex Fridman (1:58:10.260)

gotten through Moby Dick or any of Melville's works.

Lex Fridman (1:58:15.400)

So maybe can you comment on, before we talk about David Foster Wallace, who I have gotten

Lex Fridman (1:58:21.040)

through, what are some of the sources of meaning in these classics?

Sean Kelly (1:58:28.160)

Good.

Lex Fridman (1:58:29.160)

So Moby Dick, I think, is the other great novel of the 19th century.

Lex Fridman (1:58:33.880)

So the Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick, and they're diametrically opposed, which is one

Lex Fridman (1:58:38.520)

of the really interesting things.

Lex Fridman (1:58:40.320)

So Dostoyev, the Brothers Karamazov is a kind of existential interpretation of Russian Orthodox

Lex Fridman (1:58:47.240)

Christianity.

Lex Fridman (1:58:48.600)

How do you live that way and find joy in your existence?

Lex Fridman (1:58:52.320)

Moby Dick is not at all about Christianity.

Sean Kelly (1:58:55.400)

It sort of starts with the observation that the form of Christianity that Ishmael is familiar

Lex Fridman (1:59:06.600)

with is broken, it's not gonna work in his living his life.

Sean Kelly (1:59:11.280)

He has to leave it, he has to go to sea in order to find what needs to happen.

Lex Fridman (1:59:18.240)

And Ishmael is the boating captain, the whaling boat captain.

Lex Fridman (1:59:23.760)

So he's not the captain, that's Ahab.

Lex Fridman (1:59:25.960)

Ahab is the captain.

Sean Kelly (1:59:26.960)

Yeah, right.

Lex Fridman (1:59:27.960)

Let me back up.

Sean Kelly (1:59:28.960)

The famous opening line to the book is, call me Ishmael.

Lex Fridman (1:59:32.240)

And Ishmael is the main character in the book.

Sean Kelly (1:59:35.640)

He's a nobody.

Lex Fridman (1:59:36.940)

He's you and me.

Sean Kelly (1:59:37.940)

He's the everyday guy.

Lex Fridman (1:59:39.420)

He's like a nobody on the ship.

Sean Kelly (1:59:41.520)

He's like, not the lowest, but certainly not the highest.

Lex Fridman (1:59:44.960)

He's right in the middle.

Lex Fridman (1:59:47.420)

And he's named Ishmael, which is interesting, because Ishmael is the illegitimate son of

Lex Fridman (1:59:52.480)

Abraham in the Old Testament.

Sean Kelly (1:59:55.440)

He is the, I think if I have it right, again, someone will correct me.

Lex Fridman (20:02.820)

we are.

Sean Kelly (20:03.820)

If we were radically free, we really would be like God in the traditional medieval sense.

Lex Fridman (20:09.340)

And sort of these folks start with the idea that whatever we are, that's a kind of limit

Sean Kelly (20:15.700)

point that we're not gonna reach.

Lex Fridman (20:17.980)

So what are the ways in which we're constrained that that being the way the medieval's understood

Lex Fridman (20:24.920)

him wasn't constrained?

Lex Fridman (20:26.780)

So can you maybe comment on what is nihilism and is it at all a useful other sort of group

Lex Fridman (20:33.700)

of ideas that you resist against in defining existentialism?

Lex Fridman (20:37.180)

Yes.

Sean Kelly (20:38.180)

Good.

Lex Fridman (20:39.180)

Excellent.

Lex Fridman (20:40.180)

So nihilism, the philosopher who made the term popular, although it was used before

Sean Kelly (20:45.180)

him as Nietzsche, Nietzsche's writing in the end of the 19th century, in various places

Sean Kelly (20:51.100)

where he published things, but largely in his unpublished works, he identifies the condition

Lex Fridman (21:00.260)

of the modern world as nihilistic, and that's a descriptive claim.

Sean Kelly (21:06.900)

He's looking around him, trying to figure out what it's like to be us now, and he says

Sean Kelly (21:14.820)

it's a lot different from what it was like to be human in 1300 or in the 5th century

Sean Kelly (21:21.660)

BCE.

Sean Kelly (21:22.660)

In 1300, like what people believed, the way they lived their lives was in the understanding

Sean Kelly (21:34.260)

that to be human was to be created in the image and likeness of God.

Lex Fridman (21:38.500)

That's the way they understood themselves.

Lex Fridman (21:40.500)

And also to be created sinful because of Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden,

Lex Fridman (21:48.180)

and to have the project of trying to understand how, as a sinful being, you could nevertheless

Sean Kelly (21:54.320)

live a virtuous life.

Lex Fridman (21:56.860)

How could you do that?

Lex Fridman (21:57.860)

And it had to do with, for them, getting in the right relation to God.

Sean Kelly (22:01.220)

Nietzsche says that doesn't make sense to us anymore in the end of the 19th century.

Sean Kelly (22:07.100)

God is dead, says Nietzsche famously.

Lex Fridman (22:10.060)

And what does that mean?

Sean Kelly (22:11.060)

Well, it means something like the role that God used to play in our understanding of ourselves

Lex Fridman (22:16.420)

as a culture isn't a role that God can play anymore.

Lex Fridman (22:21.960)

And so Nietzsche says the role that God used to play was the role of grounding our existence.

Lex Fridman (22:27.900)

He was what it is in virtue of which we are who we are.

Lex Fridman (22:31.940)

And Nietzsche says the idea that there is a being that makes us what we are doesn't

Lex Fridman (22:37.660)

make sense anymore.

Sean Kelly (22:38.660)

It's like Sartre's atheism, Sartre is taking that from Nietzsche.

Lex Fridman (22:41.260)

And so the question is, what does ground our existence?

Lex Fridman (22:46.420)

And the answer is Nihil, nothing.

Lex Fridman (22:49.340)

And so nihilism is the idea that there's nothing outside of us that grounds our existence.

Lex Fridman (22:55.300)

And then Nietzsche asked the question, well, what are we supposed to do about that?

Lex Fridman (22:59.980)

How do we live?

Lex Fridman (23:02.260)

And I think Nietzsche has a different story than Sartre about that.

Lex Fridman (23:07.220)

Nietzsche doesn't emphasize this notion of radical freedom.

Sean Kelly (23:12.940)

Nietzsche emphasizes something else.

Lex Fridman (23:15.220)

He says, we're artists of life.

Lex Fridman (23:19.340)

And artists are interesting because the natural way of thinking about artists is that they're

Lex Fridman (23:25.860)

responding to something.

Sean Kelly (23:28.420)

They find themselves in a situation and they say, this is what's going to make sense of

Lex Fridman (23:32.260)

the situation.

Sean Kelly (23:33.260)

This is what I have to write.

Lex Fridman (23:34.660)

This is the way I have to dance.

Sean Kelly (23:36.260)

This is the way I've got to play the music.

Lex Fridman (23:39.460)

And Nietzsche says, we should live like that.

Sean Kelly (23:41.860)

There are constraints, but understanding what they are is a complicated aspect of living

Lex Fridman (23:48.980)

itself.

Lex Fridman (23:49.980)

And there's a great story, I think, from music that maybe helps to understand this.

Sean Kelly (23:56.900)

I think Nietzsche, of course, jazz didn't exist when Nietzsche was writing, but I think

Sean Kelly (24:01.820)

Nietzsche really is thinking of something like jazz improvisation.

Lex Fridman (24:06.180)

He talks about improvisation, there's classical improvisation.

Sean Kelly (24:09.460)

Nietzsche was, by the way, a musician.

Sean Kelly (24:11.660)

He was a composer and a pianist, not a great one, really, to be fair, but he loved music.

Lex Fridman (24:19.380)

And Herbie Hancock, who's a pianist, a jazz pianist, who played with Miles Davis for quite

Sean Kelly (24:26.200)

a while in the 60s, tells this kind of incredible story that I think exemplifies Nietzsche's

Sean Kelly (24:34.060)

view about the way in which we bear some responsibility for being creative and that gives us a certain

Lex Fridman (24:44.500)

kind of freedom, but we don't have the radical freedom that Sartre thinks.

Lex Fridman (24:50.780)

So what's the story?

Sean Kelly (24:52.060)

Herbie Hancock says, I think they were in Stuttgart, he says, playing a show and things

Sean Kelly (25:00.980)

were great, he says.

Lex Fridman (25:03.020)

He's a young pianist and Miles Davis is the master.

Lex Fridman (25:08.260)

And he says, I'm back in the solo and I'm playing these chords.

Lex Fridman (25:14.300)

And he says, I played this chord and it was the wrong chord.

Sean Kelly (25:22.860)

He's like, that's what you got to say, it didn't work right there.

Lex Fridman (25:27.380)

And I thought, holy mackerel, I screwed up, I screwed up.

Sean Kelly (25:30.740)

We were tight, everything was working and I blew it for Miles, who's doing his solo.

Lex Fridman (25:35.860)

And he said, Miles paused for a moment and then all of a sudden he went on in a way that

Sean Kelly (25:46.900)

made my chord right.

Lex Fridman (25:51.900)

And I think that idea that you could be an artist who responds to what's thrown at you

Lex Fridman (25:58.220)

in such a way as to make it right, by what measure?

Lex Fridman (26:05.500)

Everyone could hear it, is all you can say, right?

Sean Kelly (26:08.100)

Everyone knew, wow, that really works.

Lex Fridman (26:11.640)

And I think that's not like, there are constraints, not anything would have worked there.

Sean Kelly (26:16.340)

He couldn't have just played anything.

Lex Fridman (26:19.160)

Most of what anyone would have played would have sounded terrible.

Lex Fridman (26:23.420)

But the constraints aren't preexisting, they're what's happening now in the moment for these

Lex Fridman (26:30.220)

listeners and these performers.

Lex Fridman (26:32.220)

And I think that's what Nietzsche thinks the right response to nihilism is, we're involved,

Lex Fridman (26:37.260)

but we're not radically free to make any choice and just stand behind it the way Sartre thinks.

Sean Kelly (26:42.260)

Our choices have to be responsive to our situation and they have to make the situation work.

Lex Fridman (26:47.820)

They have to make it right.

Lex Fridman (26:50.020)

And there's something about music too, so you basically have to make music of all the

Lex Fridman (26:55.660)

moments of life.

Lex Fridman (26:57.700)

And there is something about music, why is music so compelling?

Lex Fridman (27:01.100)

And when you listen to it, something about certain kinds of music, it connects with you.

Sean Kelly (27:06.580)

It doesn't make any sense.

Lex Fridman (27:07.580)

But in that same way, for Nietzsche, you should be a creative force that creates a musical

Sean Kelly (27:14.100)

masterpiece.

Lex Fridman (27:15.100)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (27:16.100)

And I think what's interesting is the question, what does it mean to be a creative force there?

Lex Fridman (27:19.940)

There's a traditional notion of creation that we associate with God.

Sean Kelly (27:26.420)

God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.

Lex Fridman (27:31.080)

And you might think that nihilism thinks that we should do that, create ex nihilo, because

Sean Kelly (27:36.140)

it's about how there's nothing at our ground.

Lex Fridman (27:38.500)

But I think the right way to read Nietzsche is to recognize that we don't create out of

Sean Kelly (27:43.260)

nothing.

Lex Fridman (27:44.260)

Miles Davis wasn't nothing, that situation preexisted him, it was given to him.

Sean Kelly (27:49.860)

Maybe by accident, maybe it was a mistake, whatever, but he was responding to that situation

Lex Fridman (27:55.540)

in a way that made it right.

Sean Kelly (27:57.500)

He wasn't just creating out of nothing, he was creating out of what was already there.

Lex Fridman (28:01.700)

So that makes that first date with the climbing hand even more complicated because you're

Sean Kelly (28:06.420)

given a climbing hand, you're going to have to make art and music out of that.

Lex Fridman (28:10.660)

Exactly.

Sean Kelly (28:11.660)

That's the responsibility for both of them.

Sean Kelly (28:13.900)

Wow, that's a lot of responsibility for a first date because you have to create.

Sean Kelly (28:19.620)

The emphasis isn't just on making decisions, it's on creating.

Lex Fridman (28:26.180)

But also on listening, right?

Sean Kelly (28:28.300)

I mean, Miles Davis was listening.

Lex Fridman (28:30.800)

He heard that.

Sean Kelly (28:31.860)

He knew it was wrong.

Lex Fridman (28:32.860)

And the question was, what do I play that makes it right?

Lex Fridman (28:37.620)

So let me ask about Nietzsche, is God dead?

Lex Fridman (28:42.060)

What did he mean by that statement?

Sean Kelly (28:43.940)

In your sense, the truth behind the question and the possible set of answers that our world

Lex Fridman (28:50.300)

today provides?

Sean Kelly (28:51.300)

Good.

Sean Kelly (28:52.300)

So, I mean, I think that there's something super perceptive about Nietzsche's diagnosis

Sean Kelly (28:59.220)

of the condition at the end of the 19th century.

Lex Fridman (29:02.460)

So not so far from the condition that I think we're currently in.

Lex Fridman (29:08.340)

And I think there's an interesting question what we're supposed to do in response.

Lex Fridman (29:12.620)

But what is the condition that we're currently in?

Sean Kelly (29:14.880)

When Nietzsche says God is dead, I think, like I was saying before, he means something

Sean Kelly (29:20.260)

like the role that God used to play in grounding our existence is not a role that works for

Sean Kelly (29:26.300)

us anymore as a culture.

Lex Fridman (29:29.060)

And when people talk about a view like that nowadays, they use a different terminology,

Lex Fridman (29:34.700)

but I think it's roughly what Nietzsche was aiming at.

Lex Fridman (29:37.700)

They say we live in a secular age.

Sean Kelly (29:40.620)

Our age is a secular age.

Lex Fridman (29:42.020)

And so what do people mean when they say that?

Sean Kelly (29:44.740)

I think, first of all, it's a descriptive claim.

Lex Fridman (29:47.580)

It could be wrong.

Sean Kelly (29:48.900)

The question is, does this really describe the way we experience ourselves as a culture

Lex Fridman (29:53.340)

or as a culture in the West or wherever it is that we are?

Lex Fridman (29:57.380)

So what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age, an age in which God is dead?

Lex Fridman (2:00:01.120)

I think he's the one that Islam traces its genesis to.

Lex Fridman (2:00:08.880)

And so Islam is an Abrahamic religion like Judaism and Christianity, but Judaism and

Sean Kelly (2:00:15.520)

Christianity trace their lineage through Isaac, the quote, unquote, legitimate son of Abraham.

Lex Fridman (2:00:22.000)

And Ishmael is the other son of Abraham, who he had with a girlfriend.

Lex Fridman (2:00:28.200)

And so he's clearly outside of Christianity in some way.

Sean Kelly (2:00:33.000)

He's named after the non Christian sort of son of Abraham.

Lex Fridman (2:00:39.460)

And the book starts out with this, what does he call it, something like a dark and misty

Sean Kelly (2:00:46.600)

November mood.

Sean Kelly (2:00:50.040)

He's walking along the street and he's overcome by his, I can't remember what the word is,

Lex Fridman (2:00:55.400)

but his hypos.

Lex Fridman (2:00:56.400)

That's what he calls them.

Sean Kelly (2:00:58.000)

He's in a mood.

Lex Fridman (2:00:59.280)

He's depressed.

Sean Kelly (2:01:00.640)

He's down.

Lex Fridman (2:01:01.640)

Things are not going well.

Lex Fridman (2:01:02.920)

And that's where he starts.

Lex Fridman (2:01:05.080)

And he signs up to go on this whaling voyage with this captain Ahab, who is this incredibly

Sean Kelly (2:01:14.040)

charismatic, deeply disturbing character, who is a captain who's got lots of history

Lex Fridman (2:01:22.720)

and wants to go whaling, wants to get whales.

Sean Kelly (2:01:25.980)

That's what they do.

Sean Kelly (2:01:26.980)

They harpoon these whales and bring them back and sell the blubber and the oil and so on.

Lex Fridman (2:01:31.960)

So he's kind of rich and he's famous and he's powerful, he's an authority figure.

Lex Fridman (2:01:37.800)

And he is megalomaniacally obsessed with getting one particular whale, which is called Moby

Sean Kelly (2:01:44.200)

Dick.

Lex Fridman (2:01:45.200)

And Moby Dick is like the largest, the whitest, the sort of most terrifying of all the whales.

Lex Fridman (2:01:51.240)

And Ahab wants to get him because a number of years earlier, he had an encounter with

Lex Fridman (2:01:56.800)

Moby Dick where Moby Dick bit off his leg.

Lex Fridman (2:02:00.600)

And he survived, but he had this deeply religious experience in the wake of it.

Lex Fridman (2:02:08.480)

And he needed to find out what the meaning of that was.

Lex Fridman (2:02:12.240)

What is the meaning of my suffering?

Sean Kelly (2:02:14.460)

Who am I such that the world and Moby Dick, this leviathan at the center of it should

Sean Kelly (2:02:20.480)

treat me this way.

Lex Fridman (2:02:22.680)

And so his task is not just to go whaling, it's to figure out the meaning of the universe

Sean Kelly (2:02:29.200)

through going whaling and having a confrontation with his tormentor, this whale, Moby Dick.

Lex Fridman (2:02:36.320)

And the confrontation is so weird because Melville points out that whales, their faces

Sean Kelly (2:02:41.600)

are so huge, their foreheads are so huge, and their eyes are on the side of them that

Lex Fridman (2:02:49.600)

you can never actually look them in the eye.

Lex Fridman (2:02:52.560)

And it's kind of a metaphor for God, like you can't ever look God in the face.

Lex Fridman (2:02:57.840)

That's the sort of traditional thing to say about God.

Sean Kelly (2:03:00.160)

You can't find the ultimate meaning of the universe by looking God in the face.

Lex Fridman (2:03:05.980)

But Ahab wants to.

Sean Kelly (2:03:07.520)

He says he's got a pasteboard mask of a face, but I'll strike through the mask and find

Lex Fridman (2:03:13.320)

out what's behind.

Lex Fridman (2:03:15.280)

And so Ishmael is sort of caught up in this thing, and he's like going whaling because

Lex Fridman (2:03:19.880)

he's in a bad mood, and maybe this will make things better.

Lex Fridman (2:03:24.080)

And he makes friends with this guy Queequeg.

Lex Fridman (2:03:28.080)

And Queequeg is a pagan.

Sean Kelly (2:03:30.600)

He's from an island in the South Pacific.

Lex Fridman (2:03:33.440)

And he's got tattoos all over his body, head to toe.

Sean Kelly (2:03:38.560)

He's party colored, like every different color, says Ishmael, is these tattoos.

Lex Fridman (2:03:45.500)

And they are the writing on his body, he says, of the immutable mysteries of the universe

Sean Kelly (2:03:54.680)

as understood through his culture.

Lex Fridman (2:03:58.520)

And so somehow Queequeg is this character who is like not Christian at all.

Lex Fridman (2:04:06.280)

And he's powerful in a very different way than Ahab is.

Sean Kelly (2:04:09.360)

He's supposed to be the king, he's the son of the king, and probably his father's died

Sean Kelly (2:04:13.240)

by now.

Lex Fridman (2:04:14.240)

If he was home, he'd be the king.

Lex Fridman (2:04:15.840)

But he's off on a voyage too, trying to understand who he is before he goes back and leads his

Lex Fridman (2:04:19.960)

people.

Lex Fridman (2:04:21.000)

And he's a harpooner, the bravest of the people on the ship.

Lex Fridman (2:04:25.400)

And he's got the mystery of the universe tattooed on his body, but nobody can understand it.

Lex Fridman (2:04:32.760)

And it's through his relation with Queequeg that Ishmael comes to get a different understanding

Lex Fridman (2:04:39.280)

of what we might be about.

Lex Fridman (2:04:40.760)

So that's Moby Dick in a nutshell.

Lex Fridman (2:04:45.260)

And connected to a book I have read, which is funny, there's probably echoes that represent

Sean Kelly (2:04:51.280)

the 20th century now in Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway that also has similar, I guess,

Sean Kelly (2:05:01.280)

themes, but more personal, more focused on the, I mean, I guess it's less about God.

Sean Kelly (2:05:09.320)

It's almost more like the existentialist version of Moby Dick.

Lex Fridman (2:05:13.520)

And hence shorter.

Lex Fridman (2:05:14.520)

And a lot shorter.

Lex Fridman (2:05:15.520)

Yeah.

Sean Kelly (2:05:16.520)

Well, Hemingway was brilliant that way.

Lex Fridman (2:05:18.360)

But do you see echoes and do you find Old Man and the Sea interesting?

Sean Kelly (2:05:23.880)

It's been since ninth grade that I read Old Man and the Sea even longer ago than The Fountainhead.

Lex Fridman (2:05:29.920)

So I didn't know we were going to go there.

Sean Kelly (2:05:31.480)

I mean, I find Hemingway interesting, but Hemingway, my general sort of picture of him

Lex Fridman (2:05:37.380)

is that we have to confront the dangers and the difficulties of our life.

Sean Kelly (2:05:44.360)

We have to develop in ourselves a certain kind of courage and manliness.

Lex Fridman (2:05:48.320)

And I think there's something interesting about that.

Sean Kelly (2:05:50.720)

He's for risk in a certain way.

Lex Fridman (2:05:54.160)

And I think that's important.

Lex Fridman (2:05:56.800)

But now I don't have any right to say this since it's been so long since I read it.

Lex Fridman (2:06:02.800)

I do feel like there's, I don't remember a sense for quite the tragedy of it.

Sean Kelly (2:06:11.840)

Maybe there is.

Lex Fridman (2:06:12.840)

Is it a melancholy novel?

Sean Kelly (2:06:14.200)

I don't even remember.

Lex Fridman (2:06:15.200)

No, it's, I mean, it has a sense like The Stranger by Camus.

Sean Kelly (2:06:20.160)

It has a sense of like, this is how life is.

Lex Fridman (2:06:25.120)

And it has more about old age and that you're not quite the man you used to be feeling of

Sean Kelly (2:06:34.080)

like, this is how time passes.

Lex Fridman (2:06:36.760)

And then the passing of time and how you get older and this is one last fish.

Sean Kelly (2:06:44.280)

It's less about this is the fish.

Lex Fridman (2:06:46.560)

It's more like this is one last fish.

Lex Fridman (2:06:49.640)

And asking, who was I as a man, as a human being in this world?

Lex Fridman (2:06:56.960)

And this one fish helps you ask that question fully.

Sean Kelly (2:07:00.400)

Wonderful.

Lex Fridman (2:07:01.400)

But it's one fish, which is just sort of all the other fish too.

Lex Fridman (2:07:06.560)

And that is a big difference because for Ahab, no other fish will do than Moby Dick.

Lex Fridman (2:07:13.560)

It's gotta be the biggest, the most powerful, the most tormenting.

Sean Kelly (2:07:18.160)

It's gotta be the one that you've got history with that has defiled you.

Lex Fridman (2:07:22.640)

And it's a raucous ride, Moby Dick.

Lex Fridman (2:07:28.160)

What about David Foster Wallace?

Lex Fridman (2:07:29.960)

So why is he important to you in the search of meaning in a secular age?

Sean Kelly (2:07:36.120)

Good.

Lex Fridman (2:07:37.120)

So I'll just, just to finish the Moby Dick thing, I think what's interesting about Melville

Sean Kelly (2:07:41.840)

is that he thinks our salvation comes not if we get in the right relation to monotheism

Sean Kelly (2:07:47.280)

or Christianity, but if we get in the right relation to polytheism, to the idea that there's

Sean Kelly (2:07:52.120)

not a unity to our existence, but there are lots of little meanings and they don't cohere.

Lex Fridman (2:07:59.440)

Sometimes like in Homer, sometimes you're in love.

Sean Kelly (2:08:05.680)

Helen's in love with Paris and they do crazy things.

Lex Fridman (2:08:09.160)

They go off and run away and the Trojan war begins.

Lex Fridman (2:08:12.420)

And sometimes you're in a battle fury.

Lex Fridman (2:08:15.120)

Love is Aphrodite's realm.

Lex Fridman (2:08:16.520)

And the battle fury, that's Aries realm and that's a totally different world.

Lex Fridman (2:08:20.560)

And they're not even, I mean, they're related.

Sean Kelly (2:08:22.840)

There's a kind of family resemblance, but not much.

Lex Fridman (2:08:25.840)

Mostly you're just in different sort of local meaningful worlds.

Lex Fridman (2:08:30.320)

And Melville seems to think that that's a thing that we could aim to bring back.

Sean Kelly (2:08:36.420)

He says we have to lure back the Merry May Day gods of old and lovingly enthrone them

Sean Kelly (2:08:43.940)

in the now egotistical sky, the now unhaunted hill.

Sean Kelly (2:08:48.040)

That's what we live in this world where hills aren't haunted with significance anymore.

Lex Fridman (2:08:52.120)

And the sky is just a bunch of stuff that we're studying with physics and astrophysics

Lex Fridman (2:08:57.880)

and stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:08:58.880)

But they used to be awe inspiring and we have to figure out how to get in that relation

Sean Kelly (2:09:04.080)

to them, but not by trying to give a unity to our existence through developing habits

Lex Fridman (2:09:09.320)

and practices that get written on our body.

Lex Fridman (2:09:12.300)

And so his is about the end of Judeo Christianity and the sort of Roman appropriation of it.

Sean Kelly (2:09:19.840)

In Wallace, one of the things I think is so interesting about him is that I think he is

Lex Fridman (2:09:25.320)

a great observer of the contemporary world.

Lex Fridman (2:09:29.460)

And he's a very funny writer, he's really funny.

Lex Fridman (2:09:33.120)

But he's a great observer of the contemporary world and what he thought was at the core

Sean Kelly (2:09:38.460)

of the contemporary world was this constant temptation to diversion through entertainment.

Sean Kelly (2:09:44.160)

That's a different story than Heidegger's story about efficiency and optimization, but

Sean Kelly (2:09:49.920)

it's the other side of it.

Lex Fridman (2:09:51.760)

What is this temptation sort of diverting us from?

Sean Kelly (2:09:55.840)

The ability to be more efficient.

Lex Fridman (2:09:58.520)

So you're tempted to go watch some stupid film or television show or something that's

Sean Kelly (2:10:05.520)

dumb and not really very interesting, but you read that temptation as a temptation precisely

Lex Fridman (2:10:11.400)

in virtue of it's taking you away from your optimizing your existence.

Lex Fridman (2:10:16.000)

And so I think there are two sides of the same coin.

Lex Fridman (2:10:18.040)

I think he's brilliant at describing it.

Sean Kelly (2:10:20.320)

I think he thought it was a desperate position to be in, that it was something that we needed

Lex Fridman (2:10:26.340)

to confront and find a way out of and his characters are trying to do that.

Lex Fridman (2:10:33.080)

And I think there's two different David Foster Wallace's, one, I mean, David Foster Wallace

Lex Fridman (2:10:39.040)

committed suicide and it's very sad.

Lex Fridman (2:10:42.740)

And he clearly did have sort of, there was a physiological basis to his condition.

Sean Kelly (2:10:49.720)

He knew it, he was treating it for decades with medication, he had electroshock therapy

Sean Kelly (2:10:55.640)

a number of times, it's just very, very sad story.

Sean Kelly (2:11:00.220)

When I decided that we were going to write about David Foster Wallace, the first thing

Sean Kelly (2:11:04.240)

I was worried about is can you, like obviously a motivating factor, maybe the motivating

Lex Fridman (2:11:12.720)

factor in his committing suicide was his physiological condition.

Lex Fridman (2:11:17.400)

But there was a question, could you think, I mean, he's obsessed with the condition with

Lex Fridman (2:11:25.120)

what we need to do to achieve our salvation, to live well, to make our lives worth living.

Lex Fridman (2:11:32.040)

And he clearly in the end felt like he couldn't do that.

Lex Fridman (2:11:37.300)

So in addition to the physiological thing, which probably most of it, the question for

Sean Kelly (2:11:41.960)

me was, could you find in his writing what he was identifying as the thing we needed

Lex Fridman (2:11:49.960)

to be doing that he nevertheless felt we couldn't be doing?

Lex Fridman (2:11:54.800)

And he talks as if that's the difficulty for him.

Lex Fridman (2:12:00.060)

So that's one side of him and I did want to find that.

Sean Kelly (2:12:03.960)

I think there's another side of him that's very different, but you were going to ask

Lex Fridman (2:12:06.800)

something.

Lex Fridman (2:12:07.800)

No, please, what's the other side?

Sean Kelly (2:12:08.800)

I mean, what I write about in the chapter mostly is what I think he's got as our saving

Sean Kelly (2:12:19.120)

possibility.

Sean Kelly (2:12:21.040)

He thinks our saving possibility, he says this in a graduation speech that he gave to

Sean Kelly (2:12:25.360)

Kenyon, is that we have the freedom to interpret situations however we like.

Lex Fridman (2:12:33.580)

So what's the problem case for him?

Sean Kelly (2:12:36.480)

He says, look, the problem case, we have it all the time.

Lex Fridman (2:12:40.480)

You get pissed off at the world.

Sean Kelly (2:12:44.400)

Some big SUV cuts you off on the highway and you're pissed off and you might express your

Lex Fridman (2:12:50.760)

anger with one finger or another directed at that person.

Lex Fridman (2:12:56.520)

And he says, but actually, you're being pissed off as the result of your having made an assumption.

Lex Fridman (2:13:05.200)

And the assumption is that that action was directed at you.

Sean Kelly (2:13:08.680)

Like the assumption is that you're the center of the universe and you shouldn't assume that.

Lex Fridman (2:13:14.980)

And the way to talk yourself out of it, he says, is to recognize the possibility that

Sean Kelly (2:13:21.880)

maybe that wasn't an action directed at you.

Sean Kelly (2:13:25.520)

Maybe that guy is racing to the hospital to take care of his dying spouse who's been there

Sean Kelly (2:13:34.520)

suffering from cancer, or maybe he's on the way to pick up a sick child, or maybe he's...

Lex Fridman (2:13:43.100)

And it's not an action directed, that was your assumption, not something that was inherent

Sean Kelly (2:13:47.800)

in the situation.

Lex Fridman (2:13:49.320)

And I think there's something interesting about that.

Sean Kelly (2:13:52.160)

I think there's something right about that.

Sean Kelly (2:13:55.000)

At the same time, I don't think he speaks as if we can just spin out these stories and

Sean Kelly (2:14:04.040)

whether they're true or not doesn't matter.

Lex Fridman (2:14:07.060)

What matters is that they free us from this assumption.

Lex Fridman (2:14:11.320)

And I think they only free us from this assumption if they're true.

Sean Kelly (2:14:15.600)

Like sometimes the guy really did direct it at you and that's part of the situation.

Lex Fridman (2:14:20.140)

And you can't pretend that it's not part of the situation.

Lex Fridman (2:14:23.240)

You have to find the right way of dealing with that situation.

Lex Fridman (2:14:25.440)

So you have to listen to what's actually happening and then you have to figure out how to make

Lex Fridman (2:14:31.060)

it right.

Lex Fridman (2:14:32.100)

And I think he thinks that we have too much freedom.

Sean Kelly (2:14:35.180)

He thinks that you don't have to listen to the situation, you can just tell whatever

Sean Kelly (2:14:38.320)

story you like about it.

Lex Fridman (2:14:40.920)

And I think that's actually too tough.

Sean Kelly (2:14:43.760)

I don't think we have that kind of freedom.

Lex Fridman (2:14:47.160)

And he writes these sort of incredibly moving letters when he's trying to write The Pale

Sean Kelly (2:14:51.980)

King, which is the unfinished novel that really sort of drove him to distraction.

Lex Fridman (2:14:58.480)

At the center of the novel is this character who...

Sean Kelly (2:15:03.000)

One of the characters at the center of the novel is a guy who's doing the most boring

Lex Fridman (2:15:08.920)

thing you could possibly imagine.

Sean Kelly (2:15:11.340)

He is an IRS tax examiner.

Sean Kelly (2:15:14.280)

He's going over other people's tax returns, trying to figure out whether they followed

Sean Kelly (2:15:19.360)

the rules or not.

Lex Fridman (2:15:21.580)

And just the idea of doing that for eight hours a day is just terrifying.

Lex Fridman (2:15:27.360)

And he puts this guy in a enormous warehouse that extends for miles where person after

Sean Kelly (2:15:34.460)

person after person is in rows of desks, sort of nameless, each of them doing this task.

Lex Fridman (2:15:42.520)

So he's in nowhere doing nothing and it's got to be intensely boring.

Lex Fridman (2:15:48.020)

And now the main character is trying to teach himself to do that.

Lex Fridman (2:15:53.500)

And the question is, how do you put up with the boredom?

Lex Fridman (2:15:56.520)

How do you put up with this onslaught of meaninglessness?

Lex Fridman (2:16:01.120)

And the main character is able to confront that condition with such bliss that he literally

Lex Fridman (2:16:11.880)

levitates from happiness while he's going over other people's tax returns.

Lex Fridman (2:16:17.240)

And that's my metaphor for what I think Wallace must have imagined we have to try to aspire

Lex Fridman (2:16:22.960)

to.

Lex Fridman (2:16:24.360)

And I think that's unlivable.

Lex Fridman (2:16:25.760)

I think that's not an ambition that we could achieve.

Sean Kelly (2:16:29.440)

I think there's something else we could achieve.

Lex Fridman (2:16:31.840)

And the other thing that we can achieve that I think is something that he also is onto

Lex Fridman (2:16:38.320)

but doesn't write about as often is something more like achieving peak moments of significance

Lex Fridman (2:16:47.880)

in a situation when something great happens.

Lex Fridman (2:16:50.920)

And he writes about this in an article about Roger Federer.

Lex Fridman (2:16:54.500)

He loved tennis.

Lex Fridman (2:16:55.760)

Are you a tennis lover?

Lex Fridman (2:16:57.160)

I'm not a lover of tennis, but I played tennis for 15 years and so on.

Sean Kelly (2:17:01.160)

I don't love it the way people love baseball, for example, I see the beauty in it, the artistry.

Lex Fridman (2:17:07.840)

I just liked it as a sport.

Sean Kelly (2:17:09.560)

Good.

Lex Fridman (2:17:10.560)

Okay.

Sean Kelly (2:17:11.560)

Well, I didn't play much tennis, but I hit a ball around every once in a while as a kid.

Lex Fridman (2:17:14.680)

And I always thought it was boring to watch.

Lex Fridman (2:17:17.640)

But reading David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer, you're like, wow, I've been missing

Lex Fridman (2:17:22.040)

something.

Lex Fridman (2:17:23.040)

And the article which appeared in the New York Times Magazine was called Roger Federer

Lex Fridman (2:17:27.200)

as Religious Experience.

Sean Kelly (2:17:28.200)

Oh, wow.

Lex Fridman (2:17:29.200)

There you go.

Lex Fridman (2:17:30.200)

And he says, look, there's something astonishing about watching someone who's got a body like

Lex Fridman (2:17:36.920)

us and having a body as a limitation.

Sean Kelly (2:17:40.640)

It's like the sight of sores and pains and agony and exhaustion.

Lex Fridman (2:17:47.040)

And it's the thing that dies in the end.

Lex Fridman (2:17:51.040)

And so it's what we have to confront.

Lex Fridman (2:17:53.240)

I mean, there's also joys that go along with having a body.

Sean Kelly (2:17:56.600)

Like if you didn't have a body, there'd be no sex.

Lex Fridman (2:17:58.800)

If you didn't have a body, there'd be no sort of physical excitement and so on.

Lex Fridman (2:18:04.640)

But somehow having a body is essentially a limitation that when you watch someone who's

Sean Kelly (2:18:11.040)

got one and is extraordinary at the way they use it, you can recognize how that limitation

Sean Kelly (2:18:17.360)

can be to some degree transcended.

Lex Fridman (2:18:20.480)

And that's what we can get when we watch Federer or some other great athlete sort of doing

Sean Kelly (2:18:26.560)

these things that transcend the limitations of their bodies.

Lex Fridman (2:18:31.280)

And that that's the kind of peak experience that we're capable of that could be a kind

Sean Kelly (2:18:37.120)

of salvation.

Lex Fridman (2:18:38.120)

That's a very different story.

Lex Fridman (2:18:40.200)

And I think that's a livable story.

Lex Fridman (2:18:42.860)

And I don't know if it would have saved him, but I feel like I wish he'd developed that

Sean Kelly (2:18:48.860)

side of the story more.

Lex Fridman (2:18:50.880)

Can we talk about...

Lex Fridman (2:18:51.880)

And first of all, let me just comment that I deeply appreciate that you said you were

Lex Fridman (2:18:57.440)

going to say something.

Sean Kelly (2:18:59.240)

The fact that you're listening to me is amazing.

Lex Fridman (2:19:01.600)

Like that you care about other humans and I really appreciate that.

Sean Kelly (2:19:05.820)

We should be in this way listening to the world.

Lex Fridman (2:19:07.840)

So that's a meta comment about many of the things we're talking about.

Lex Fridman (2:19:14.200)

But you mentioned something about levitating and a task that is infinitely boring and contrasting

Sean Kelly (2:19:20.480)

that with essentially levitating on a task that is great, like the highest achievement

Sean Kelly (2:19:28.560)

of this physical limiting body in playing tennis.

Sean Kelly (2:19:33.400)

Now I often say this, I don't know where I heard David Foster Wallace say this, but he

Sean Kelly (2:19:38.760)

said that the key to life is to be unborable, that is the embodiment of this philosophy.

Lex Fridman (2:19:44.640)

And when people ask me for advice, young students, I don't find this interesting, I don't find

Lex Fridman (2:19:52.080)

this interesting, how do I find the thing I'm passionate for?

Sean Kelly (2:19:55.040)

This would be very interesting to explore because you kind of say that that may not

Sean Kelly (2:19:59.840)

be a realizable thing to do, which is to be unborable.

Lex Fridman (2:20:04.340)

So my advice usually is life is amazing, like you should be able to, you should strive to

Sean Kelly (2:20:11.000)

discover the joy, the levitation in everything.

Lex Fridman (2:20:17.720)

And the thing you get stuck on for a longer period of time, that might be the thing you

Sean Kelly (2:20:22.580)

should stick to, but everything should be full of joy.

Lex Fridman (2:20:26.560)

So that kind of cynicism of saying life is boring is a thing that will prevent you from

Sean Kelly (2:20:33.800)

discovering the thing that will give you deep meaning and joy, but you're saying being unborable

Lex Fridman (2:20:42.120)

is not actionable for a human being.

Lex Fridman (2:20:45.760)

So okay, excellent question, deep question.

Lex Fridman (2:20:49.640)

And you might think because of the title of the book that Bert and I wrote, All Things

Sean Kelly (2:20:56.480)

Shining, that I think all things are shining.

Lex Fridman (2:21:02.160)

But actually, I think it's an unachievable goal to be unborable.

Sean Kelly (2:21:07.560)

I do believe that you're right, that a lot of times when people are bored with something,

Lex Fridman (2:21:14.480)

it's because they haven't tried hard enough.

Lex Fridman (2:21:16.840)

And I do think quite a lot of what makes people bored with something is that they haven't

Lex Fridman (2:21:21.940)

paid attention well enough and that they haven't listened, as you were saying.

Lex Fridman (2:21:27.840)

So I do think there's something to that.

Lex Fridman (2:21:30.240)

I think that's a deep insight.

Sean Kelly (2:21:32.460)

On the other hand, the perfection of that insight is that nothing is ever anything less

Lex Fridman (2:21:40.240)

than joyful.

Lex Fridman (2:21:42.440)

And I actually think that Dostoevsky and Melville both agree, but in very different ways, that

Lex Fridman (2:21:52.480)

life involves a wide range of moods and that all of them are important.

Sean Kelly (2:21:59.760)

It involves grief.

Lex Fridman (2:22:01.280)

I think when someone dies, it's appropriate to grieve.

Lex Fridman (2:22:05.720)

And it's not in the first instance joyful.

Sean Kelly (2:22:09.780)

It's related to joy because it makes the joys you feel when you feel them more intense.

Lex Fridman (2:22:17.480)

But it makes them more intense by putting you in the position of experiencing the opposite.

Lex Fridman (2:22:24.240)

And it's only because we're capable of a wide range of passionate responses to situations

Sean Kelly (2:22:31.920)

that I think the significances can be as meaningful as they are.

Lex Fridman (2:22:36.580)

So Melville, again, has this sort of interest.

Sean Kelly (2:22:41.080)

Let's just say the guilt and the grief in the brothers Karamazov.

Lex Fridman (2:22:45.640)

Alyosha loses his mentor, Father Zosima.

Sean Kelly (2:22:49.080)

He's grieving.

Lex Fridman (2:22:50.160)

It's super important that he's grieving.

Sean Kelly (2:22:52.640)

He has a religious conversion on the basis of grieving where he sees the deep beauty

Sean Kelly (2:22:59.160)

of everything that is, but it comes through the grief, not by avoiding the grief.

Lex Fridman (2:23:04.980)

And Melville says something like, Ishmael says something like, he says, I'm like a Catskill

Lex Fridman (2:23:10.100)

mountain eagle, the Catskills mountains nearby.

Sean Kelly (2:23:13.360)

He says, who's flying high above the earth, going over the peaks and down into the valleys.

Sean Kelly (2:23:20.600)

I have these ups and these downs, but they're all invested with a kind of significance.

Sean Kelly (2:23:26.540)

They all happen at an enormously high height because it's through the mountains that I'm

Lex Fridman (2:23:31.320)

flying.

Lex Fridman (2:23:32.320)

And even when I'm down, it's a way of being up.

Lex Fridman (2:23:35.200)

But it's really down.

Sean Kelly (2:23:37.480)

It's just that it's a way of being up because it makes the ups even upper.

Lex Fridman (2:23:40.560)

Well, I guess then the perfectionism of that can be destructive.

Sean Kelly (2:23:46.680)

I tend to see, for example, grief, a loss of love as part of love in that it's a celebration

Lex Fridman (2:23:56.880)

of the richness of feelings you had when you had the love.

Lex Fridman (2:24:02.040)

So it's all part of the same experience, but if you turn it into an optimization problem

Lex Fridman (2:24:07.080)

where everything can be unboreable, then that can in itself be destructive.

Sean Kelly (2:24:13.480)

I heard this interview with David Foster Wallace on the internet where it's a video of him

Lex Fridman (2:24:20.200)

and there is like a foreign sounding reporter asking him questions.

Sean Kelly (2:24:24.120)

I think there's an accent of some sort, German, I think, something like that.

Lex Fridman (2:24:29.120)

And I don't know, it just painted a picture of such a human person.

Sean Kelly (2:24:32.760)

We were talking about listening.

Lex Fridman (2:24:35.040)

The interviewer, if I may say, wasn't a very good one in the beginning.

Lex Fridman (2:24:41.400)

So she kind of walked in doing the usual journalistic things of just kind of generic questions and

Lex Fridman (2:24:47.720)

just kind of asking very basic questions.

Lex Fridman (2:24:50.720)

But he brought out something in her over time.

Lex Fridman (2:24:53.900)

And he was so sensitive and so sensitive to her and also sensitive to being a thinking

Lex Fridman (2:25:00.600)

and acting human in this world that just painted such a beautiful picture that people should

Lex Fridman (2:25:05.080)

go definitely check out.

Sean Kelly (2:25:07.120)

It made me really sad that we don't get this kind of picture of other thinkers, all of

Sean Kelly (2:25:14.160)

the ones we've been talking about, just that almost this little accidental view of this

Sean Kelly (2:25:19.400)

human being.

Lex Fridman (2:25:20.400)

I don't know.

Sean Kelly (2:25:21.400)

It was a beautiful one and I guess there's not many like that even of him.

Lex Fridman (2:25:25.640)

Yeah.

Sean Kelly (2:25:26.640)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:25:27.640)

No, I think he was more than his writing ability, which was extraordinary.

Sean Kelly (2:25:33.600)

He had developed a style that was, I think, unlike anyone else's style, was his sensitivity

Lex Fridman (2:25:42.640)

to other people and to sort of what he was there to pay attention to.

Sean Kelly (2:25:51.060)

In one of his essays, I think it's the one called An Incredibly Fun Thing I'll Never

Lex Fridman (2:25:57.280)

Do Again.

Lex Fridman (2:25:58.280)

Do you know that one about cruise ships?

Sean Kelly (2:26:00.640)

I think he describes himself as this sort of roving eyeball that just sort of walks

Sean Kelly (2:26:07.040)

around the ship noticing things and he was incredibly good at that.

Lex Fridman (2:26:14.240)

But I also worry that that reflects something that you find in Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.

Sean Kelly (2:26:20.600)

Ivan, I don't know if you remember this part, when he's away at school, at college as a

Sean Kelly (2:26:27.000)

young boy, he makes money by going around town to where tragic events have occurred.

Sean Kelly (2:26:35.320)

Someone just got run over by a carriage or something just happened.

Sean Kelly (2:26:40.960)

Being the first one there, he always knows somehow where these things are going to happen

Lex Fridman (2:26:45.640)

and writing about it, giving this really good description and then signing it eyewitness.

Sean Kelly (2:26:54.200)

It's as if Ivan's understanding of his life is that he was supposed to be a witness to

Sean Kelly (2:27:01.800)

it.

Lex Fridman (2:27:02.800)

He was supposed to see others but not get involved.

Sean Kelly (2:27:05.840)

He never is interested in trying to keep the bad things from happening.

Lex Fridman (2:27:09.360)

He just wants to report on them when he sees them.

Lex Fridman (2:27:12.480)

And I think that he's an incredibly isolated person, character, and it's his isolation

Sean Kelly (2:27:19.160)

from others, from the love of others and his inability, his desire not to love others because

Sean Kelly (2:27:27.240)

that attaches him to someone that I think is really at the ground of his condition.

Lex Fridman (2:27:34.840)

And I think that aim to be isolated, which many people have nowadays.

Sean Kelly (2:27:39.440)

You see it in The Underground Man too, just sort of taking yourself out of the world because

Lex Fridman (2:27:45.840)

you don't wanna have to take responsibility for being involved with others.

Sean Kelly (2:27:50.800)

I think that's a bad move and I do worry that maybe, I mean, I never knew David Foster Wallace,

Lex Fridman (2:27:57.040)

I have no right to comment on his life.

Lex Fridman (2:28:01.020)

But he portrays himself in that one episode as a person who does that and I think that's

Lex Fridman (2:28:08.200)

dangerous.

Sean Kelly (2:28:09.200)

Yeah, there's some sense in which being sensitive to the world, like I find myself, the source

Lex Fridman (2:28:13.600)

of joy for me is just being really sensitive to the world, to experience.

Sean Kelly (2:28:19.240)

There's some way, it's quite brilliant what you're saying that that could be isolating.

Sean Kelly (2:28:25.200)

It's like Darwin studying a new kind of species on an island you don't want to interfere with.

Sean Kelly (2:28:32.440)

You find it so beautiful that you don't want to interfere with its beauty.

Lex Fridman (2:28:36.900)

So there is some sense in which that isolates you and then you find yourself deeply alone,

Sean Kelly (2:28:45.840)

away from the experiences that bring you joy.

Lex Fridman (2:28:49.280)

And that could be destructive.

Sean Kelly (2:28:52.640)

That's fascinating how that works and in his case, of course, some of it is just chemicals

Lex Fridman (2:29:00.360)

in his brain, but some of it is the path, his philosophy of life let him down.

Lex Fridman (2:29:09.160)

And that's the danger with Nietzsche too and gazing into the abyss.

Sean Kelly (2:29:16.200)

Your job is a difficult one because doing philosophy changes you and you may not know

Lex Fridman (2:29:25.160)

how it changes you until you're changed and you look in the mirror.

Lex Fridman (2:29:32.180)

You wrote a piece in MIT Tech Review saying that AI can't be an artist.

Sean Kelly (2:29:39.960)

Creativity is and always will be a human endeavor.

Lex Fridman (2:29:44.520)

You mentioned BERT and criticism of symbolic AI.

Lex Fridman (2:29:49.040)

Can you explain your view of criticizing the possible, the capacity for artistry and creativity

Lex Fridman (2:29:55.680)

in our robot friends?

Sean Kelly (2:29:59.040)

Yeah, I can try.

Lex Fridman (2:30:03.040)

So to make the argument, you have to have in mind what counts as art, what counts as

Sean Kelly (2:30:13.560)

a creative artistic act.

Lex Fridman (2:30:17.160)

I take it that just doing something new isn't sufficient.

Sean Kelly (2:30:24.160)

We say that good art is original, but not everything that's never been done before is

Lex Fridman (2:30:29.520)

good art.

Lex Fridman (2:30:31.360)

So there has to be more than just doing something new.

Sean Kelly (2:30:36.040)

It has to be somehow doing something new in a way that speaks to the audience or speaks

Sean Kelly (2:30:44.160)

to some portion of the audience at least.

Sean Kelly (2:30:47.840)

It has to be doing something new in such a way that some people who see or interact with

Sean Kelly (2:30:55.400)

it can see themselves anew in it.

Lex Fridman (2:31:00.200)

So I think that art is inherently a creative act, sorry, a kind of communicative act that

Sean Kelly (2:31:09.040)

it involves a relation with other people.

Lex Fridman (2:31:13.600)

So think about the conditions for that working.

Sean Kelly (2:31:19.240)

I talk in that article, I can't remember, something about new music.

Lex Fridman (2:31:23.360)

I think I don't talk about Stravinsky, but let's say Stravinsky.

Sean Kelly (2:31:28.080)

Stravinsky performs the Rite of Spring and there's riots.

Lex Fridman (2:31:34.920)

It is new and people hate it.

Sean Kelly (2:31:39.780)

People can't...

Lex Fridman (2:31:40.780)

It sounds like a cacophony.

Sean Kelly (2:31:42.440)

It sounds awful.

Sean Kelly (2:31:44.240)

It's written according to principles that are not like the principles of music composition

Sean Kelly (2:31:48.640)

that people are familiar with.

Lex Fridman (2:31:51.000)

So in some ways it's a failed communicative act.

Lex Fridman (2:31:55.200)

But as Nietzsche says about his own stuff, we now can recognize that it wasn't a failed

Lex Fridman (2:32:02.220)

communicative act, it just hadn't reached its time yet.

Lex Fridman (2:32:09.160)

And now that way of composing music is like it's in Disney movies.

Lex Fridman (2:32:16.000)

It's so part of our musical palette that we don't have that response.

Sean Kelly (2:32:22.040)

It changed us.

Lex Fridman (2:32:23.760)

It changed the way we understand what counts as good music.

Lex Fridman (2:32:27.600)

So that's a deep communicative act.

Sean Kelly (2:32:29.720)

It didn't perform its communication in that opening moment, but it did ultimately establish

Sean Kelly (2:32:38.900)

a new understanding for all of us of what counts as good art.

Lex Fridman (2:32:42.400)

And that's the kind of deep communication that I think good art can do.

Sean Kelly (2:32:47.240)

It can change our understanding of ourselves and of what a good manifestation of something

Lex Fridman (2:32:55.320)

of ourselves in a certain domain is.

Lex Fridman (2:32:57.760)

And you use the term socially embedded, that art is fundamentally socially embedded.

Lex Fridman (2:33:04.400)

And I really liked that term because I see like my love for artificial intelligence and

Sean Kelly (2:33:10.400)

the kind of system that we can bring to the world that could make for an interesting and

Sean Kelly (2:33:16.160)

more lively world and one that enriches human beings is one where the AI systems are deeply

Sean Kelly (2:33:22.360)

socially embedded.

Lex Fridman (2:33:26.280)

And that actually is in contrast to the way artificial intelligence have been talked about

Sean Kelly (2:33:31.000)

throughout its history and certainly now, both on the robotic side and the AI side,

Sean Kelly (2:33:36.240)

it's especially on the tech sector where the businesses around AI, they kind of want to

Sean Kelly (2:33:42.640)

create systems that are like servants to humans.

Lex Fridman (2:33:48.520)

And then humans do all the beautiful human messiness of where art will be part.

Sean Kelly (2:33:55.960)

I think that there is no reason why you can't integrate AI systems in the way you integrate

Lex Fridman (2:34:02.640)

new humans to the picture.

Sean Kelly (2:34:04.920)

There are just the full diversity and the flaws, all of that adds to the thing.

Sean Kelly (2:34:12.140)

Some people might say that AlphaZero is this system from DeepMind that was able to solve

Sean Kelly (2:34:22.600)

the game, it beat the best people in the world at the game of Go with no supervision from

Lex Fridman (2:34:26.860)

humans.

Lex Fridman (2:34:28.120)

But more interestingly to me on the side of creativity, it was able to surprise a lot

Lex Fridman (2:34:32.780)

of grandmasters with the kind of moves that came up with.

Sean Kelly (2:34:37.000)

To me, that's not the creativity, the magic that's socially embedded that we're talking

Lex Fridman (2:34:42.720)

about.

Sean Kelly (2:34:43.720)

That is merely revealing the limitations of humans to discover.

Lex Fridman (2:34:51.200)

It's like to solve a particular aspect of a math problem.

Sean Kelly (2:34:55.960)

I think creativity is not just even socially embedded, it's the way you're saying is part

Sean Kelly (2:35:05.720)

of the communicative act, it's the interactive, it's the dance with the culture.

Lex Fridman (2:35:11.320)

And so it has to be like for AlphaZero to be creative, truly creative, it would have

Sean Kelly (2:35:18.320)

to be integrated in a way where it has a Twitter account and it becomes aware of the impact

Sean Kelly (2:35:26.200)

it has on the other grandmasters with the moves that's coming up.

Lex Fridman (2:35:30.400)

And one of the fascinating things about AlphaZero, which I just love so much is, I don't know

Sean Kelly (2:35:37.840)

if you're familiar with chess.

Lex Fridman (2:35:38.840)

I am, yeah.

Sean Kelly (2:35:39.840)

Okay, okay.

Lex Fridman (2:35:40.840)

So it does certain things that most chess players, even at the highest level don't do,

Sean Kelly (2:35:47.520)

which is it sacrifices pieces, it gives pieces away and then waits like 10 moves before it

Lex Fridman (2:35:54.120)

pays you back.

Lex Fridman (2:35:55.120)

So it does, to me, that's beautiful.

Sean Kelly (2:35:58.640)

That's art if only AlphaZero understood the artistry of that, which is I'm going to mess

Sean Kelly (2:36:05.720)

with you psychologically because I'm going to do two things.

Sean Kelly (2:36:10.200)

One make you feel overconfident that you're doing well, but actually also once you realize

Sean Kelly (2:36:16.240)

you are playing AlphaZero that is much better than you, you're going to feel really nervous

Lex Fridman (2:36:21.280)

about what's on the way, like this is the calm before the storm.

Lex Fridman (2:36:24.780)

And that creates a beautiful psychological masterpiece of this chess game.

Sean Kelly (2:36:30.100)

If only AlphaZero was then messing with you additionally to that, like and was cognizant

Sean Kelly (2:36:36.720)

of us doing that, then it becomes art.

Lex Fridman (2:36:39.120)

And then it's integrated into society in that way.

Lex Fridman (2:36:42.980)

And I believe it doesn't have to actually have an understanding of the world in the

Lex Fridman (2:36:50.440)

way that humans have.

Sean Kelly (2:36:51.600)

It can have a different one.

Sean Kelly (2:36:52.720)

It can be like a child is clueless about so many aspects of the world and it's okay.

Lex Fridman (2:36:58.660)

And that's part of the magic of it, just being flawed, lacking understanding in all interesting

Lex Fridman (2:37:04.800)

kinds of ways, but interacting.

Lex Fridman (2:37:06.720)

And so to me it's possible to create art for AI, but exactly as you're saying in a deeply

Lex Fridman (2:37:14.360)

socially embedded way.

Sean Kelly (2:37:16.240)

Good.

Sean Kelly (2:37:17.240)

Well, I think we agree, but let me just highlight the thing that makes me think that we agree,

Sean Kelly (2:37:23.640)

which is that I think for people, for a community to allow themselves to recognize in a certain

Sean Kelly (2:37:34.280)

kind of creative act, I'm thinking of Stravinsky here, but we could think of a chess thing,

Sean Kelly (2:37:40.320)

to recognize in a certain kind of creative act a new and admirable worthy way of thinking

Sean Kelly (2:37:47.280)

about what's significant in the situation, you have to believe that it wasn't random.

Sean Kelly (2:37:54.360)

You have to believe that Stravinsky wrote that way because he was receptive to what

Lex Fridman (2:38:01.920)

needed to be said now.

Lex Fridman (2:38:05.040)

And so you said, if only AlphaZero could do all this by virtue of recognizing that this

Sean Kelly (2:38:14.280)

was the thing that needed to be done, then it would be socially embedded in the right

Sean Kelly (2:38:18.840)

way.

Lex Fridman (2:38:19.840)

And I think I agree with that.

Sean Kelly (2:38:21.880)

First of all, it's possible to do in a constrained domain, a game playing domain, go or chess,

Sean Kelly (2:38:29.160)

go is more complicated than chess, but either one of them, because there really are only

Sean Kelly (2:38:33.680)

a finite range of possibilities if you make the game end at a certain point, it's a combinatorial

Lex Fridman (2:38:42.800)

problem in the end.

Sean Kelly (2:38:43.800)

Now, obviously, AlphaZero doesn't solve the problem in a combinatorial way.

Sean Kelly (2:38:50.360)

That would be take too much energy, you couldn't do it, it explodes the problem.

Lex Fridman (2:38:58.880)

So it does it in this other way that's interesting, this pattern recognition way, roughly.

Lex Fridman (2:39:03.960)

And in that context, it may well be that it can see, having had lots and lots of experience

Sean Kelly (2:39:12.400)

in the training stuff against itself or against another version of itself, it can see that

Lex Fridman (2:39:17.920)

the sacrifice here is gonna pay dividends down the road.

Sean Kelly (2:39:21.240)

See, I put that in quotation marks, that's to say it's got a high weight to this move

Sean Kelly (2:39:29.600)

here as a result of experience in the past where that move down the line led to this

Sean Kelly (2:39:36.480)

improvement.

Lex Fridman (2:39:38.280)

So in that finite context, I think the game players can trust it and they talk that way.

Sean Kelly (2:39:46.800)

It's got a kind of authority.

Sean Kelly (2:39:49.440)

They say, I've read some people who said about AlphaZero when it played Go, it's like it's

Sean Kelly (2:39:55.840)

playing from the future.

Sean Kelly (2:39:58.580)

It's making these moves that are just outlandish and there's a kind of brilliance to them that

Sean Kelly (2:40:06.160)

we can't really understand, we'll be catching up to it forever.

Sean Kelly (2:40:09.720)

I think in that context, it's mapped the domain and the domain is mappable because it's a

Sean Kelly (2:40:15.280)

combinatorial problem roughly.

Lex Fridman (2:40:18.220)

But in something like music or art of a nonfinite form, it feels to me like it's a little harder

Sean Kelly (2:40:30.620)

for me to understand what the analog of our trusting that Stravinsky has recognized something

Sean Kelly (2:40:37.200)

about us that demands that he write this way, that doesn't seem like a finite thing in quite

Sean Kelly (2:40:44.420)

the same way.

Lex Fridman (2:40:45.420)

So now we could ask the system, why did you do it?

Lex Fridman (2:40:48.720)

We could ask Stravinsky, why did you do it?

Lex Fridman (2:40:52.280)

And maybe it will have answers, but then it's involved in a kind of communicative act.

Lex Fridman (2:40:59.400)

And I think lots of times artists will often say, look, I can't communicate better than

Lex Fridman (2:41:05.360)

what I've done in the piece of work.

Sean Kelly (2:41:07.620)

That is the statement.

Sean Kelly (2:41:08.620)

Yeah, we humans aren't able to answer the why either, but I do think the question here

Sean Kelly (2:41:15.840)

is, well, first of all, language is finite, certainly when expressed through a tweet.

Lex Fridman (2:41:23.120)

So it is also a combinatorial problem.

Sean Kelly (2:41:25.620)

The question is how much more difficult it is than chess.

Lex Fridman (2:41:29.680)

And I think all the same ways that we see the solutions to chess is deeply surprising

Sean Kelly (2:41:38.140)

when it was first addressed with IBM D Blue and then with AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero.

Sean Kelly (2:41:46.760)

I think in that same way, language can be addressed and communication can be addressed.

Sean Kelly (2:41:53.400)

I don't see, having done this podcast, many reasons why everything I'm doing, especially

Lex Fridman (2:42:00.160)

as a digital being on the internet, can't be done by an AI system eventually.

Lex Fridman (2:42:06.300)

So I think we're being very human centric in thinking we're special.

Sean Kelly (2:42:11.960)

I think one of the hardest things is the physical space, actually operating touch and the magic

Sean Kelly (2:42:19.060)

of body language and the music of all of that, because it's so deeply integrated through

Lex Fridman (2:42:24.080)

the long evolutionary process of what it's like to be on earth.

Lex Fridman (2:42:29.560)

What is fundamentally different and AI can catch up on is the way we apply our evolutionary

Lex Fridman (2:42:38.640)

history on the way we act on the internet, on the way we act online.

Lex Fridman (2:42:44.120)

And as more and more of the world becomes digital, you're now operating in a space where

Lex Fridman (2:42:48.360)

AI is behind much less so, like we're both starting at zero.

Sean Kelly (2:42:56.080)

I think that's super interesting.

Lex Fridman (2:42:58.040)

Do you know this, do you know this author, Brian Christian, is that someone you've ever

Lex Fridman (2:43:02.080)

heard of?

Lex Fridman (2:43:03.080)

That sounds familiar.

Lex Fridman (2:43:04.080)

He's a guy who competed in the, what is it called?

Lex Fridman (2:43:08.160)

The Loebner Competition.

Sean Kelly (2:43:09.160)

The Loebner Prize.

Lex Fridman (2:43:10.160)

Yeah.

Sean Kelly (2:43:11.160)

Yeah, the Turing Test thing.

Lex Fridman (2:43:13.200)

And I'll just tell you the story, but I think it's directly related to the last thing you

Sean Kelly (2:43:17.080)

said about where we're starting in the same place.

Sean Kelly (2:43:21.160)

He competed in this competition, but not, he didn't enter a program that was supposed

Sean Kelly (2:43:27.680)

to try to pass the Turing Test.

Sean Kelly (2:43:30.800)

The Turing Test, there's three people, there's the judge, there's the program, and then there's

Sean Kelly (2:43:36.200)

someone who's a human, the way they do it.

Lex Fridman (2:43:38.520)

And the judge has got to figure out by asking questions, which is the computer and which

Sean Kelly (2:43:42.040)

is the human.

Lex Fridman (2:43:43.200)

So little known fact, there's two prizes in that competition.

Sean Kelly (2:43:47.500)

There's the most human computer prize, that's the computer that wins the most.

Lex Fridman (2:43:51.960)

And then there's the most human human prize.

Lex Fridman (2:43:54.920)

And he competed for the most human human prize, and he won it, he kept winning it.

Lex Fridman (2:44:00.220)

And so he tried to think about what it is that you have to be able to do in order to

Sean Kelly (2:44:07.780)

convince judges that you're human instead of a computer.

Lex Fridman (2:44:11.080)

And that's an interesting question, I think.

Lex Fridman (2:44:14.520)

And what he came to, my takeaway from his version of this story is that it is true that

Lex Fridman (2:44:22.920)

computers are winning these contests more and more as technology progresses.

Lex Fridman (2:44:29.880)

But there's two possible explanations for that.

Sean Kelly (2:44:32.800)

One is that the computers are becoming more human, and the other is that the humans are

Sean Kelly (2:44:38.240)

becoming more like computers.

Lex Fridman (2:44:41.580)

And he says, actually, the more we live our lives in this technological world where we

Sean Kelly (2:44:52.040)

have to moderate our behavior so that it's readable by something that's effectively a

Lex Fridman (2:45:01.080)

computer, the more we become like that.

Lex Fridman (2:45:04.760)

And he says, it happens even when you're not interacting with a computer.

Lex Fridman (2:45:09.320)

He says, have you ever been on the phone with a call center?

Lex Fridman (2:45:14.720)

And they're going through their script, and that's what they've got to do.

Lex Fridman (2:45:18.040)

They've got to go through their script because that's how they keep their job.

Lex Fridman (2:45:21.680)

And they ask you this question, you've got to answer it.

Lex Fridman (2:45:24.600)

And it's as if you're no longer interacting with a person, even though it's a person,

Sean Kelly (2:45:29.440)

because they've so given up everything that's involved normally with being able to make

Lex Fridman (2:45:34.620)

judgments and decisions and act in situations and take responsibility.

Lex Fridman (2:45:38.840)

And so I think that's the other side of it.

Sean Kelly (2:45:43.400)

It is true that technology is amazing and can solve huge ranges of problems and do fantastic

Sean Kelly (2:45:51.580)

things.

Lex Fridman (2:45:52.580)

But it's also true that we're changing ourselves in response to it.

Lex Fridman (2:45:57.880)

And the one thing I'm worried about is that we're changing ourselves in such a way that

Sean Kelly (2:46:03.240)

the norms for what we're aiming at are being changed to move in the direction of this sort

Sean Kelly (2:46:10.520)

of efficiently and in an optimized way solving a problem and move away from this other kind

Lex Fridman (2:46:16.480)

of thing that we were calling aliveness or significance.

Lex Fridman (2:46:22.280)

And so that's the other side of the story.

Lex Fridman (2:46:25.040)

And that's the worry.

Lex Fridman (2:46:26.040)

But it's very possible that there is, for you and I, the ancient dinosaurs, we may not

Sean Kelly (2:46:32.000)

see the aliveness in TikTok, the aliveness in the digital space, that you see it as us

Sean Kelly (2:46:39.960)

being dragged into this over optimized world, but that may be this is in fact, it is a world

Lex Fridman (2:46:49.480)

that opens up opportunities to truly experience life.

Lex Fridman (2:46:55.000)

And there's interesting to think about all the people growing up now, who their early

Sean Kelly (2:47:01.060)

experience of life is always mediated through a digital device, not always, but more and

Sean Kelly (2:47:06.240)

more often mediated through that device, and how we're both evolving, the technology is

Sean Kelly (2:47:11.560)

evolving and the humans are evolving to then maybe open a door to a whole world where the

Sean Kelly (2:47:16.640)

humans and the technology or AI systems are interacting as equals.

Lex Fridman (2:47:22.840)

So now I'm going to agree with you.

Sean Kelly (2:47:24.120)

You might be surprised that I'm going to agree with you, but I think that's exactly right.

Sean Kelly (2:47:28.200)

I don't want to be the person who's saying our job is to resist all of this stuff.

Sean Kelly (2:47:34.240)

I don't want to be a Luddite.

Lex Fridman (2:47:35.880)

That's not my goal.

Sean Kelly (2:47:37.160)

The goal is to point out that in the supreme danger lies the saving power.

Lex Fridman (2:47:46.760)

The point is to get in the right relation to that understanding of what we are.

Sean Kelly (2:47:52.280)

That allows us to find the joy in it.

Lex Fridman (2:47:54.520)

And I think that's a hard thing to do.

Sean Kelly (2:47:56.920)

It's hard to understand even what we're supposed to be doing when we do it.

Lex Fridman (2:48:00.800)

Maybe I, more than you, am not of the right generation to be able to do that.

Lex Fridman (2:48:06.120)

But I do think that's got to be the move.

Lex Fridman (2:48:07.640)

The move is not to resist it.

Sean Kelly (2:48:09.300)

It's not a nostalgic move.

Sean Kelly (2:48:11.360)

It's an attempt to push people to get in the relation to it that's not the relation of

Sean Kelly (2:48:17.160)

it controlling you and depriving you of stuff, but of your recognizing some great joy that

Lex Fridman (2:48:22.960)

can be found in it.

Sean Kelly (2:48:24.760)

When I interact with legged robots, I see there's magic there.

Lex Fridman (2:48:29.640)

And I just feel like the person who hears the music when others don't.

Lex Fridman (2:48:34.080)

And I don't know what that is.

Lex Fridman (2:48:35.600)

And I'd love to explore that.

Sean Kelly (2:48:38.440)

Because it's almost like the future talking.

Lex Fridman (2:48:43.040)

And I'm trying to hear what it's saying.

Lex Fridman (2:48:45.280)

Is this a dangerous world or is this a beautiful world?

Lex Fridman (2:48:48.480)

Well, I can certainly understand your enthusiasm for that.

Sean Kelly (2:48:51.680)

Those used to be things that I found overwhelmingly exciting.

Lex Fridman (2:48:56.560)

And I'm not sort of closed off from that anymore.

Sean Kelly (2:49:01.480)

I mean, I'm not now closed off from that even though my views are changed and I don't work

Lex Fridman (2:49:06.680)

in that world.

Lex Fridman (2:49:09.340)

But I think it's interesting to figure out what's at the ground of that response.

Sean Kelly (2:49:15.440)

We talked about meaning quite a bit throughout in a secular age, but let me ask you the big

Sean Kelly (2:49:21.640)

ridiculous question, almost too big.

Lex Fridman (2:49:25.320)

What is the meaning of this thing we got going on?

Lex Fridman (2:49:28.000)

What is the meaning of life?

Lex Fridman (2:49:32.480)

You're saving the softball for the end, is that it?

Sean Kelly (2:49:34.680)

Easy one.

Lex Fridman (2:49:35.680)

Easy one.

Sean Kelly (2:49:36.680)

I don't know what the meaning of life is.

Sean Kelly (2:49:37.920)

I think there's something that characterizes us that's not the thing that people normally

Sean Kelly (2:49:44.040)

think characterizes us.

Sean Kelly (2:49:46.620)

The traditional thing to say and the philosophical tradition, even in the AI tradition, which

Sean Kelly (2:49:51.360)

is a kind of manifestation of philosophy from Plato forward.

Sean Kelly (2:49:57.320)

The traditional thing to say is that what characterizes us is our rationality, that

Sean Kelly (2:50:02.200)

we're intelligent beings, that we're the ones that think.

Lex Fridman (2:50:06.760)

And I think that's certainly part of what characterizes us.

Lex Fridman (2:50:11.280)

But I think there's more to it too.

Sean Kelly (2:50:14.840)

I think we're capable of experiencing simultaneously the complete and utter ungroundedness of everything

Sean Kelly (2:50:27.200)

that's meaningful in our existence and also the real significance of it.

Lex Fridman (2:50:34.480)

And that sounds like a contradiction.

Lex Fridman (2:50:38.200)

How could it really be significant and not be based on anything?

Lex Fridman (2:50:42.280)

But I think that's the contradiction that somehow characterizes us.

Lex Fridman (2:50:45.860)

And I think that we're the being that sort of has to hold that weird mystery before us

Lex Fridman (2:50:52.360)

and live in the light of it.

Sean Kelly (2:50:55.800)

That's the thing that I think is really at our core.

Lex Fridman (2:50:59.280)

And so how do we do that?

Sean Kelly (2:51:00.800)

I will say this one thing.

Lex Fridman (2:51:03.280)

And I learned it from a philosopher, from a guy named Albert Borgmann, who's a German

Sean Kelly (2:51:08.360)

philosopher who lives in Montana now, taught in Montana for his whole career.

Lex Fridman (2:51:13.360)

And I say this to my students at Harvard now.

Sean Kelly (2:51:16.840)

He said, this is the way that I think about my life, and I hope you'll think about your

Lex Fridman (2:51:21.020)

life too.

Sean Kelly (2:51:22.020)

He said, you should think about your life hoping that there will be many moments in

Sean Kelly (2:51:30.540)

it about which you can say, there's no place I'd rather be, there's no thing I'd rather

Sean Kelly (2:51:39.480)

be doing, there's nobody I'd rather be with, and this I will remember well.

Lex Fridman (2:51:49.320)

And I think if you can aim to fill your life with moments like that, it will be a meaningful

Sean Kelly (2:51:54.280)

one.

Sean Kelly (2:51:55.280)

I don't know if that's the meaning of life, but I think if you can hold that before you,

Sean Kelly (2:51:59.400)

it'll help to clarify this mystery and this sort of bizarre situation in which we find

Lex Fridman (2:52:04.720)

ourselves.

Sean Kelly (2:52:05.720)

Sean, this conversation was incredible, and those four requirements have certainly been

Lex Fridman (2:52:11.760)

fulfilled for me.

Sean Kelly (2:52:13.760)

This was a magical moment in that way, and I will remember it well.

Lex Fridman (2:52:19.160)

Thank you so much.

Sean Kelly (2:52:20.160)

It's an honor that you spend your valuable time with me.

Lex Fridman (2:52:22.800)

This was great.

Sean Kelly (2:52:23.800)

Thank you.

Lex Fridman (2:52:24.800)

Thank you for having me, Lex.

Sean Kelly (2:52:25.800)

I really, really enjoyed it.

Lex Fridman (2:52:27.720)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sean Kelly.

Sean Kelly (2:52:30.440)

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

Lex Fridman (2:52:34.900)

And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Camus.

Sean Kelly (2:52:39.000)

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Lex Fridman (2:52:46.480)

Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Sean Kelly (30:01.020)

Well, the first thing is it doesn't mean there are no religious believers because there are

Lex Fridman (30:05.060)

plenty.

Sean Kelly (30:06.060)

There are people who go to church or synagogue or mosque every week or more, and there are

Sean Kelly (30:12.540)

people who really find that to be an important aspect of the way they live their lives.

Lex Fridman (30:19.500)

But it does mean that for those people, the role that their religious belief plays in

Lex Fridman (30:28.860)

their life isn't the same as it used to be in previous ages.

Lex Fridman (30:32.400)

So what's that role?

Lex Fridman (30:34.180)

We'll go back to the high middle ages.

Sean Kelly (30:35.860)

That was clearly not a secular age.

Lex Fridman (30:38.560)

That was a religious age.

Lex Fridman (30:40.940)

And so there we are in 1300, Dante is writing The Divine Comedy or something.

Lex Fridman (30:46.820)

And what did it mean then to live in a sacred age?

Sean Kelly (30:50.260)

Well, it meant not just that the default was that you were a Christian in the West, but

Sean Kelly (30:58.740)

that your Christianity, your religious belief, your religious affiliation justified certain

Sean Kelly (31:06.660)

assumptions about people who didn't share that religious belief.

Lex Fridman (31:11.020)

So you're a Christian in the West in 1300, and you meet someone who's a Muslim, and the

Sean Kelly (31:19.140)

fact that they don't share your religious belief justifies the conclusion that they're

Lex Fridman (31:24.940)

less than human.

Lex Fridman (31:27.400)

And that was the ground of the Crusades.

Lex Fridman (31:30.460)

That was the religious wars of the high middle ages.

Sean Kelly (31:35.620)

To say that we live in a secular age is to say that, not that there aren't a lot of people

Sean Kelly (31:40.940)

who have religious belief, there are, but it's to say that their religious belief doesn't

Sean Kelly (31:45.660)

justify that conclusion.

Sean Kelly (31:49.140)

If you're a religious believer and you meet me and suppose I'm not a religious believer,

Sean Kelly (31:57.100)

concerning that about me doesn't justify your concluding that I'm less than human.

Lex Fridman (32:02.540)

And that's the kind of liberalism of the modern age.

Sean Kelly (32:06.140)

Most of the time we think that's a good thing.

Lex Fridman (32:08.380)

We let a thousand flowers bloom.

Sean Kelly (32:10.420)

There are lots of ways to live a good life.

Lex Fridman (32:13.120)

And there's some way in which that is a nice progressive kind of liberal thought.

Lex Fridman (32:18.360)

But it's also true that it's an undermining thought because it means if you're a religious

Sean Kelly (32:24.340)

believer now, your belief can't ground your understanding of what you ought to be aiming

Sean Kelly (32:32.140)

at in the life in the way it used to be able to.

Lex Fridman (32:35.580)

You can't say, as a religious believer, I know it's right to do this.

Sean Kelly (32:40.780)

Because you also know that if you meet someone who doesn't share that religious belief and

Lex Fridman (32:44.420)

so doesn't think it's right to do that necessarily or does, but for different reasons, you can't

Sean Kelly (32:50.180)

conclude that they've got it wrong.

Lex Fridman (32:52.860)

So there's this sort of unsettling aspect to it.

Sean Kelly (32:55.940)

Well, isn't it true that you can't conclude as a public statement to others, but within

Sean Kelly (33:03.060)

your own mind, it's almost like an existentialist version of belief, which is like you create

Sean Kelly (33:12.980)

the world and around you, like it doesn't matter what others believe.

Lex Fridman (33:19.620)

It's actually almost like empowering thought.

Lex Fridman (33:23.660)

So as opposed to the more traditional view of religion, where it's like a tribal idea,

Lex Fridman (33:31.060)

like where you share that idea together.

Sean Kelly (33:33.300)

Here you have the full, back to Sartre, full responsibility of your beliefs as well.

Lex Fridman (33:38.660)

Good, good.

Lex Fridman (33:39.660)

But what you're describing is not a religious believer, right?

Sean Kelly (33:44.340)

You're describing someone who's found in themselves the ground of their existence rather than

Sean Kelly (33:49.540)

in something outside of themselves.

Lex Fridman (33:51.060)

So the religious belief, I mean, if you go full Sartrean, then, well, you're not in a

Sean Kelly (33:57.300)

position to criticize others for the choices that they make, but you are in a position

Sean Kelly (34:03.240)

to criticize them for the way in which they make them, either taking responsibility or

Sean Kelly (34:08.180)

not taking responsibility.

Lex Fridman (34:10.700)

But the religious believer used to be able to say, look, the choices that I make are

Sean Kelly (34:15.140)

right because God demands that I make them.

Lex Fridman (34:19.100)

And nowadays, and so it would be wrong to make any others.

Lex Fridman (34:25.740)

And nowadays, to say that we live in a secular age, say, well, you can't quite do that and

Lex Fridman (34:32.980)

be a religious believer.

Sean Kelly (34:34.100)

Your religious belief can't justify that move, and so it can't ground your life in the way

Lex Fridman (34:40.380)

it does.

Lex Fridman (34:41.380)

So it's sort of unsettling.

Sean Kelly (34:42.380)

I think that's one of the interpretations of what Nietzsche might have meant when he

Sean Kelly (34:46.380)

said God is dead.

Lex Fridman (34:47.940)

God can't play the role for religious believers in our world that he used to.

Lex Fridman (34:52.960)

But we nevertheless find meaning.

Sean Kelly (34:54.740)

I mean, you don't see nihilism as a prevalent set of ideas that are overtaken in modern

Sean Kelly (35:00.140)

culture.

Lex Fridman (35:01.140)

So a secular world is still full of meaning.

Sean Kelly (35:03.940)

Good.

Lex Fridman (35:04.940)

Well, I think that's the interesting question.

Sean Kelly (35:07.540)

I think it's certainly possible for a secular world to be a world in which we live meaningful

Sean Kelly (35:12.580)

lives, worthwhile lives, lives that are worthy of respect and that we can be proud of aiming

Sean Kelly (35:22.700)

to live.

Lex Fridman (35:24.260)

But I think it is a hard question what we're doing when we do that.

Lex Fridman (35:28.020)

And that is the question of existence.

Lex Fridman (35:31.020)

What does it mean to exist in a way that brings us out at our best as the beings that we are?

Sean Kelly (35:37.040)

That's the question for existentialism.

Lex Fridman (35:40.980)

So besides Sartre, who to you is the most important existentialist to understand for

Lex Fridman (35:49.020)

others?

Lex Fridman (35:50.020)

What ideas in particular of theirs do you like?

Sean Kelly (35:52.380)

Maybe other existentialists, not just one.

Lex Fridman (35:54.980)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (35:55.980)

So Sartre is the grounding, strong atheistic existentialism statement.

Lex Fridman (36:00.740)

Who else is there?

Lex Fridman (36:02.740)

So I'm teaching an existentialism course now, and I think the tradition goes back at least

Lex Fridman (36:08.220)

to the 17th century.

Lex Fridman (36:10.760)

And I'll just tell you some of the figures that I'm teaching there.

Lex Fridman (36:13.880)

We can talk about any of them that you like.

Sean Kelly (36:16.780)

The figure I start with is Pascal.

Lex Fridman (36:19.300)

Pascal, French mathematician from 17th century.

Sean Kelly (36:24.380)

He died, I'm terrible with dates, but I think 1661 or something like that, middle of the

Lex Fridman (36:29.380)

17th century.

Sean Kelly (36:31.100)

Brilliant polymath, we have computer languages named after him.

Lex Fridman (36:34.920)

He built the first mechanical calculating machine.

Lex Fridman (36:39.040)

But he was also deeply invested in his understanding of what Christianity was.

Lex Fridman (36:46.380)

And he thought that everyone before him had really misunderstood what Christianity was,

Sean Kelly (36:54.040)

that they'd really attempted to think about it, not as a way of living a life, but as

Lex Fridman (37:01.020)

a set of beliefs that you can have and which you can justify.

Lex Fridman (37:06.800)

And I think that's the first move that's really pretty interesting.

Lex Fridman (37:11.900)

And then figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky developed that move.

Sean Kelly (37:17.620)

All of those take themselves to be defending an interpretation of a certain kind of Christianity,

Lex Fridman (37:23.900)

an existential interpretation of Christianity.

Lex Fridman (37:27.380)

And then I think there are other figures, other theistic figures, figures like Camus

Lex Fridman (37:32.620)

and Fanon, who are mid 20th century figures.

Lex Fridman (37:38.120)

And then I'll just mention the figure who I think is the most interesting is Martin

Lex Fridman (37:41.940)

Heidegger.

Sean Kelly (37:42.940)

He's a complicated figure because...

Lex Fridman (37:45.540)

By the way, when you said, sorry to interrupt, that when you said Camus, you meant atheistic?

Sean Kelly (37:51.820)

I think that Camus is an atheistic existentialist, yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.

Lex Fridman (37:56.000)

So okay, so we got, it's like sports cards, we have the different existentialists.

Lex Fridman (38:00.180)

So maybe let's go to...

Lex Fridman (38:04.020)

You know what?

Sean Kelly (38:05.020)

Let's go to Dostoevsky.

Lex Fridman (38:06.020)

All right.

Sean Kelly (38:07.020)

Okay, let's do it.

Lex Fridman (38:08.020)

So my favorite novel of his is The Idiot.

Sean Kelly (38:11.180)

First of all, I see myself as the idiot and an idiot.

Lex Fridman (38:15.640)

And I love the optimism and the love the main character has for the world.

Lex Fridman (38:22.240)

So that just deeply connects with me as a novel.

Lex Fridman (38:25.820)

It comes from underground as well, but what ideas of Dostoevsky's do you think are existentialists?

Lex Fridman (38:33.340)

What ideas are formative to the whole existentialist movement?

Lex Fridman (38:36.660)

Excellent.

Lex Fridman (38:37.660)

So let me talk about The Brothers Karamazov.

Lex Fridman (38:40.300)

Partly because that's the last novel that Dostoevsky wrote.

Sean Kelly (38:43.500)

I think it's certainly one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, maybe the best.

Lex Fridman (38:48.460)

And I'm about to teach it in a few weeks.

Lex Fridman (38:50.020)

So I'm super excited about it.

Lex Fridman (38:53.020)

What is The Brothers Karamazov about?

Sean Kelly (38:54.820)

I mean, without spoiling the ending for anyone.

Lex Fridman (38:58.900)

Spoiler alert.

Sean Kelly (38:59.900)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (39:00.900)

I mean, look, it's a murder mystery, right?

Sean Kelly (39:02.900)

I mean, the father gets murdered.

Lex Fridman (39:06.380)

And the question is, who did it?

Lex Fridman (39:08.180)

Who's responsible for it?

Lex Fridman (39:09.540)

So there's a notion of responsibility here, like in Sartre.

Lex Fridman (39:12.860)

But it's responsibility for a murder, that's what we're talking about.

Lex Fridman (39:17.740)

And there's a bunch of brothers, each of whom has pretty good motivation for having murdered

Sean Kelly (39:25.980)

the father.

Lex Fridman (39:26.980)

The father's a jerk.

Sean Kelly (39:28.060)

I mean, if anybody is worthy of being murdered, he's the guy.

Lex Fridman (39:34.540)

He's a force of chaos and he's nasty in all sorts of ways.

Lex Fridman (39:38.820)

But still, it's not good to murder people.

Lex Fridman (39:44.140)

So what's the view of Dostoevsky?

Sean Kelly (39:46.260)

I mean, it's this intense exploration of what it means to be involved in various ways with

Lex Fridman (39:54.380)

an activity that everyone can recognize as atrocious.

Lex Fridman (40:00.220)

And what the right way is to take responsibility for that?

Lex Fridman (40:05.500)

What the right way is to relate to others in the face of it?

Lex Fridman (40:10.140)

And how, even through this kind of action, you can achieve some kind of salvation.

Lex Fridman (40:16.780)

That's Dostoevsky's word for it.

Lex Fridman (40:19.800)

But salvation here and now, not like you live some afterlife where you're paradise for eternity.

Lex Fridman (40:27.960)

Who cares about that, says one of the characters.

Sean Kelly (40:31.260)

That doesn't make my life now any good and it doesn't justify any of the bad things that

Lex Fridman (40:35.980)

happen in my life now.

Lex Fridman (40:37.240)

What matters is can we live well in the face of these things that we do and have to take

Lex Fridman (40:42.940)

responsibility for?

Lex Fridman (40:43.940)

So it's this intense exploration of notions and gradations of guilt and responsibility

Lex Fridman (40:52.000)

and the possibility of love and salvation in the face of those.

Sean Kelly (40:56.300)

It is incredibly human work.

Lex Fridman (40:59.840)

But I think Dostoevsky is the opposite of Sartre.

Lex Fridman (41:03.260)

And let me just...

Lex Fridman (41:04.260)

I think it's so fascinating.

Sean Kelly (41:05.260)

I don't know anybody else who notices this.

Lex Fridman (41:07.860)

But Sartre actually quotes a passage from Dostoevsky when he's developing his view.

Sean Kelly (41:14.860)

It's close to a passage.

Lex Fridman (41:15.860)

It doesn't appear quite in this way.

Lex Fridman (41:18.100)

But the passage that Sartre quotes is this.

Lex Fridman (41:21.900)

It's in the form of an argument.

Sean Kelly (41:23.180)

Sartre puts it in the form of argument.

Lex Fridman (41:24.780)

He says, look, there's a conditional statement is true.

Sean Kelly (41:29.800)

If there is no God, then everything is permitted.

Lex Fridman (41:34.020)

And then there's a second premise.

Sean Kelly (41:36.340)

There is no God.

Lex Fridman (41:37.900)

That's Sartre's view.

Sean Kelly (41:38.900)

I mean, he's an atheist.

Lex Fridman (41:39.900)

There is no God.

Sean Kelly (41:41.900)

Conclusion, everything is permitted.

Lex Fridman (41:45.060)

And that's Sartre's radical freedom.

Lex Fridman (41:47.940)

And if you think about the structure of the Brothers Karamazov, I think Dostoevsky, though

Lex Fridman (41:52.640)

he never says it this way, would run the argument differently.

Sean Kelly (41:56.380)

It's a modus tollens instead of a modus ponens.

Lex Fridman (41:59.460)

The argument for Dostoevsky would go like this.

Sean Kelly (42:02.460)

Yeah, conditional statement, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.

Lex Fridman (42:07.100)

But look at your life.

Sean Kelly (42:09.500)

Not everything is permitted.

Lex Fridman (42:11.940)

You do horrible, atrocious things like be involved in the death of your father.

Lex Fridman (42:17.700)

And there is a price to pay.

Sean Kelly (42:19.340)

That's not a livable moment to have to take responsibility, to have to recognize that

Sean Kelly (42:27.780)

you're at fault or you're somehow guilty for having been involved in whatever way you were

Sean Kelly (42:33.500)

in letting that happen or bringing it about that it does happen, is to pay a price.

Lex Fridman (42:38.740)

So we're not beings that are constituted in such a way that everything is permitted.

Lex Fridman (42:44.680)

Look at the facts of your existence.

Lex Fridman (42:47.000)

So not everything is permitted.

Lex Fridman (42:50.100)

Therefore there is a God.

Lex Fridman (42:55.540)

And the presence of a God for Dostoevsky, I think, is just found in this fact that when

Sean Kelly (43:00.380)

we do bad things, we feel guilty for them, that we find ourselves to be responsible for

Sean Kelly (43:05.180)

things even when we didn't intend to do them, but we just allowed ourselves to be involved

Lex Fridman (43:09.420)

in them.

Lex Fridman (43:10.420)

And the nature of God for Dostoevsky is, I mean, unclear.

Lex Fridman (43:13.380)

I mean, it's a very complex exploration in itself.

Lex Fridman (43:17.060)

And he basically, God speaks through several of his characters in complicated ways.

Lex Fridman (43:22.960)

So it's not like a trivial version of God.

Sean Kelly (43:26.420)

It's totally not trivial.

Lex Fridman (43:27.500)

And it's not a being that exists outside of time.

Sean Kelly (43:31.620)

None of that is sort of relevant for Dostoevsky.

Lex Fridman (43:33.740)

For him, it's a question about how we live our lives.

Sean Kelly (43:36.700)

Do we live our lives in the mood that Christianity says it makes available to us, which is the

Lex Fridman (43:40.740)

mood of joy?

Sean Kelly (43:42.820)

Is there, maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but so I'm a Russian speaker and one of the,

Sean Kelly (43:50.860)

I kind of listen to my heart and what my heart says is I need to take on this project.

Lex Fridman (43:55.760)

So there's a couple of famous translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that live in Paris

Lex Fridman (44:03.420)

currently.

Lex Fridman (44:04.420)

So I'm going to take the journey.

Sean Kelly (44:06.460)

We agreed to have a full conversation about Dostoevsky, about Tolstoy and like a series

Sean Kelly (44:12.820)

of conversations.

Lex Fridman (44:14.860)

And the reason I fell in love with this idea is I just realized in translating from Russian

Sean Kelly (44:20.340)

to English how deep philosophical, how much deep philosophical thinking is required.

Lex Fridman (44:29.300)

Just like single sentences.

Sean Kelly (44:31.140)

They spent like weeks debating single sentences.

Lex Fridman (44:35.380)

So and all of that is part of a journey to Russia for several reasons.

Lex Fridman (44:40.220)

But I just, I want to explore something in me that longs to understand and to connect

Lex Fridman (44:48.140)

with the roots where I come from.

Lex Fridman (44:51.780)

So maybe can you comment, whether it's on the Russian side or the German side or other

Sean Kelly (44:59.900)

French side, is there something in your own explorations of these philosophies that you

Lex Fridman (45:06.580)

find that you miss because you don't deeply know the language?

Lex Fridman (45:11.660)

Or like how important is it to understand the language?

Sean Kelly (45:14.580)

Good.

Sean Kelly (45:15.580)

I think it's super important and I'm always embarrassed that I don't know more languages

Lex Fridman (45:19.900)

and don't know the languages I know as well as I would like to.

Lex Fridman (45:23.860)

But there's a way in.

Lex Fridman (45:26.060)

So I do think different languages allow you to think in different ways and that there's

Sean Kelly (45:30.980)

a sort of a mode of existence, a way of being that's captured by a language that it makes

Sean Kelly (45:38.060)

certain ways of thinking about yourself or others more natural and it closes off other

Lex Fridman (45:43.280)

ways of thinking about yourself and others.

Lex Fridman (45:46.780)

And so I think languages are fascinating in that way.

Sean Kelly (45:51.140)

The Heidegger who is this philosopher that I'm interested in says at one point, language

Sean Kelly (45:56.540)

is the house of being.

Lex Fridman (45:58.940)

And I think that means something like it's by living in a language that you come to understand

Sean Kelly (46:07.860)

or that possibilities for understanding what it is to be you and others and anything are

Lex Fridman (46:13.440)

opened up.

Lex Fridman (46:14.580)

And different languages open up different possibilities.

Lex Fridman (46:16.780)

And we had that discussion offline about James Joyce, how I took a course in James Joyce

Lex Fridman (46:21.340)

and how I don't think I understood anything besides the dead and the short stories.

Lex Fridman (46:27.220)

And you suggested that it might be helpful to actually visit Ireland, visit Dublin to

Sean Kelly (46:33.340)

truly to help you understand, maybe fall in love with the words.

Lex Fridman (46:37.500)

And so that presumably is not purely about the understanding of the actual words of the

Sean Kelly (46:43.900)

language.

Sean Kelly (46:44.900)

It's understanding something much deeper, the music of the language or something, music

Sean Kelly (46:50.440)

of the ideas.

Lex Fridman (46:52.020)

Absolutely.

Sean Kelly (46:53.460)

Something like that.

Lex Fridman (46:54.460)

It's very hard to say exactly what that is.

Lex Fridman (46:56.160)

But when you hear an Irish person who really understands Joyce read some sentences, they

Sean Kelly (47:02.020)

have a different cadence, they have a different tonality, they have different music to use

Sean Kelly (47:06.180)

your word.

Lex Fridman (47:07.340)

And all of a sudden you think about them differently and the sentences sort of draw different thoughts

Sean Kelly (47:13.580)

out of you when they're read in certain ways.

Lex Fridman (47:15.600)

That's what great actors can do.

Lex Fridman (47:18.080)

But I think language is rich like that.

Lex Fridman (47:22.780)

And the idea which philosophers tend to have that we're really studying the crucial aspects

Sean Kelly (47:29.600)

of language when we think about its logical form, when we think about the sort of claims

Sean Kelly (47:35.280)

of philosophical logic that you can make or how do you translate this proposition into

Sean Kelly (47:39.640)

some symbolic form, I think that's part of what goes on in language.

Lex Fridman (47:44.160)

But I think that when language affects us in the deep way that it can when great poets

Sean Kelly (47:51.700)

or great writers or great thinkers use it to great effect, it's way more than that.

Lex Fridman (47:58.460)

And that's the interesting form of language that I'm interested in.

Sean Kelly (48:01.080)

It's kind of a challenge I'm hoping to take on is I feel like some of the ideas that are

Lex Fridman (48:07.620)

conveyed through language are actually can be put outside of language.

Lex Fridman (48:11.480)

So one of the challenges I have to do is to have a conversation with people in Russian,

Lex Fridman (48:17.700)

but for an English audience and not rely purely on translators.

Sean Kelly (48:22.000)

There would of course be translators there that help me dance through this mess of language,

Lex Fridman (48:28.920)

but also like my goal, my hope is to dance from Russian to English back and forth for

Sean Kelly (48:36.080)

an English speaking audience and for a Russian speaking audience.

Lex Fridman (48:39.000)

So not this pure, this is Russian, it's going to be translated to English or this is English,

Sean Kelly (48:44.200)

it's going to be translated to Russian, but dance back and forth and try to share with

Sean Kelly (48:49.400)

people who don't speak one of the languages, the music that they're missing and sort of

Sean Kelly (48:54.720)

almost hear that music as if you're sitting in another room and you hear the music through

Lex Fridman (48:59.480)

the wall.

Sean Kelly (49:00.480)

I get a sense of it.

Sean Kelly (49:01.640)

I think that would be a waste if I don't try to pursue this being a bilingual human being.

Lex Fridman (49:08.260)

And I wonder whether it's possible to capture some of the magic of the ideas in a way that

Lex Fridman (49:14.800)

can be conveyed to people who don't speak that particular language.

Sean Kelly (49:18.920)

I think it's a super exciting project.

Lex Fridman (49:20.920)

I look forward to following it.

Sean Kelly (49:23.240)

I'll tell you one thing that does happen.

Lex Fridman (49:25.680)

So we read Dostoevsky in translation.

Sean Kelly (49:28.280)

Occasionally I do have Russian speakers in the room, which is super helpful, but I also

Sean Kelly (49:32.120)

encourage my students to, some of them will have different translations than others.

Lex Fridman (49:39.460)

And that can be really helpful for the non native speaker because by paying attention

Sean Kelly (49:45.880)

to the places where translators diverge in their translations of a given word or a phrase

Sean Kelly (49:52.520)

or something like that, you can start to get the idea that somehow the words that we have

Sean Kelly (49:57.480)

in English, they don't have the same contours as the word in Russian that's being translated.

Lex Fridman (50:02.760)

And then you can start to ask about what those differences are.

Lex Fridman (50:07.360)

And I think there's a kind of magic to it.

Sean Kelly (50:11.240)

I mean, it's astonishing how rich and affecting these languages can be for people who grew

Lex Fridman (50:18.020)

up in them, especially who speak them as native speakers.

Lex Fridman (50:20.480)

And that's a really powerful thing that actually doesn't exist enough of is, for example, for

Sean Kelly (50:26.160)

Dostoevsky, most novels have been translated by two or three famous translators.

Lex Fridman (50:33.840)

And there's a lot of discussion about who did it better and so on.

Lex Fridman (50:37.560)

But I would love to, I'm a computer science person, I would love to do a diff where you

Sean Kelly (50:43.360)

automatically detect all the differences in the translation just as you're saying and

Sean Kelly (50:48.080)

use that, like somebody needs to publish literally just books describing the differences.

Sean Kelly (50:55.840)

In fact, I'll probably do a little bit of this.

Sean Kelly (50:57.960)

I heard the individual translators in interviews and in blog posts and articles discuss particular

Sean Kelly (51:04.120)

phrases that they differ on, but like to do that for an entire book, that's a fascinating

Sean Kelly (51:09.040)

exploration as an English speaker, just to read the differences in the translations.

Sean Kelly (51:15.440)

You probably can get some deep understanding of ideas in those books by seeing the struggle

Lex Fridman (51:23.760)

of the translators to capture that idea.

Sean Kelly (51:26.360)

That's a really interesting idea.

Lex Fridman (51:28.240)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (51:29.240)

And you can do that for other projects and other languages too.

Sean Kelly (51:32.480)

I mean, one of the, I don't know, I have this weird, huge range of interests and some days

Sean Kelly (51:38.320)

I'll find myself reading about something.

Lex Fridman (51:40.960)

At one point I was interested in 14th century German mysticism.

Sean Kelly (51:46.080)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (51:47.080)

Turns out there's somebody who's written like volumes and volumes about this.

Sean Kelly (51:50.760)

He's fantastic.

Lex Fridman (51:51.880)

And I was interested in reading Meister Eckhart.

Sean Kelly (51:55.480)

I wanted to know what was interesting about him.

Lex Fridman (51:58.640)

And the sort of move that this guy Bernard McGinn, who's the great scholar of this period

Sean Kelly (52:04.520)

made, was to say what Eckhart did, and everybody knows this, he translated Christianity into

Lex Fridman (52:11.880)

the vernacular.

Sean Kelly (52:12.880)

He started giving sermons in German to the peasants, sermons used to be in Latin and

Lex Fridman (52:17.080)

nobody could speak Latin.

Lex Fridman (52:18.080)

Can you imagine sitting there for a two hour sermon in a language that you don't know?

Lex Fridman (52:22.460)

So he translated it into German, but in doing it, the resources of the German language are

Sean Kelly (52:27.920)

different from the resources of the Latin language.

Sean Kelly (52:30.340)

Then there's a word in middle high German, Grund, which we translated as ground.

Lex Fridman (52:38.280)

And it's got this earthy feel to it.

Sean Kelly (52:41.640)

It sort of invokes the notion of soil and what you stand on and what things grow out

Sean Kelly (52:46.800)

of and sort of what you could run your fingers through that would have a kind of honesty

Lex Fridman (52:52.960)

to it.

Lex Fridman (52:54.700)

And there's no Latin word for that.

Lex Fridman (52:57.240)

But in Eckhart's interpretation of Christianity, Grund, that's like the fundamental thing.

Sean Kelly (53:02.640)

You don't understand God until you understand the way in which he is our ground.

Lex Fridman (53:07.280)

And all of a sudden, this mysticism gets a kind of German cant that makes sense to the

Sean Kelly (53:14.240)

people who speak German and that reveals something totally different about what you could think

Sean Kelly (53:21.400)

that form of existence was that was covered over by the fact that it had always been done

Sean Kelly (53:25.640)

in Latin.

Lex Fridman (53:27.800)

Yeah, that's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (53:29.600)

So we talked about Dostoevsky and the use of murder to explore human nature.

Sean Kelly (53:36.380)

Let's go to Camus, who is maybe less concerned with murder, more concerned with suicide as

Sean Kelly (53:42.280)

a way to explore human nature.

Lex Fridman (53:44.220)

So he is probably my favorite existentialist, probably one of the more accessible existentialists.

Lex Fridman (53:52.840)

And like you said, one of the people who didn't like to call himself an existentialist.

Lex Fridman (53:58.740)

So what are your thoughts about Camus?

Lex Fridman (54:01.120)

What role does he play in the story of existentialism?

Lex Fridman (54:03.960)

So I find Camus totally fascinating.

Sean Kelly (54:06.360)

I really do.

Lex Fridman (54:07.360)

And for years, I didn't teach Camus because the famous thing that you're referring to,

Sean Kelly (54:14.200)

The Myth of Sisyphus, which is a sort of essay, it's published as a book, super accessible,

Lex Fridman (54:19.960)

really fascinating.

Sean Kelly (54:20.960)

He's a great writer, really engaging.

Sean Kelly (54:23.960)

The opening line is something like, there is but one truly significant philosophical

Sean Kelly (54:30.840)

question, and that is the question of suicide.

Lex Fridman (54:34.120)

And I thought, I can't teach my 18 year olds.

Sean Kelly (54:39.840)

I just thought that's terrible.

Lex Fridman (54:41.800)

How can I...

Lex Fridman (54:42.800)

I mean, it's not wrong, but do I want to bring that into the classroom?

Lex Fridman (54:47.880)

And so I read it, I read the essay, I avoided it for a long time just because of that line.

Lex Fridman (54:54.900)

And I thought, I'm not going to be able to make sense of this in a way that will be helpful

Lex Fridman (54:58.320)

for anyone.

Lex Fridman (54:59.320)

But finally, one year, maybe seven or eight years ago, I sat down to read it.

Lex Fridman (55:03.760)

I thought, I've got to really confront it.

Lex Fridman (55:07.000)

And I read it and it's incredibly engaging.

Lex Fridman (55:10.160)

I mean, it's really, really beautiful.

Lex Fridman (55:12.900)

And Camus was against suicide, which just turns out to be good.

Sean Kelly (55:17.360)

I was happy about that, but he has a bit of a bleak understanding of what human existence

Sean Kelly (55:24.720)

amounts to.

Lex Fridman (55:26.320)

And so in the end, he thinks that human existence is absurd.

Lex Fridman (55:32.560)

And absurd is a kind of technical term for him.

Lex Fridman (55:36.720)

And it means that the episodes in your life and your life as a whole presents itself to

Sean Kelly (55:45.720)

you as if it's got a meaning, but really it doesn't.

Lex Fridman (55:51.320)

So there's this tension between the way things seem to be on their surface and what really

Sean Kelly (55:59.760)

turns out to be true about them.

Lex Fridman (56:03.560)

And he gives these great examples.

Sean Kelly (56:05.560)

You probably remember these.

Sean Kelly (56:06.760)

He says, there you are, you're walking along the street and there's a plate glass window

Sean Kelly (56:13.120)

in a building and through the window you see somebody talking on a telephone.

Sean Kelly (56:18.400)

I mean, I imagined it as a cell phone, but Camus didn't, but you see somebody talking

Sean Kelly (56:24.620)

on a cell phone and he's animated.

Lex Fridman (56:26.720)

He's talking a lot as if things really meant something.

Lex Fridman (56:31.840)

And yet Camus says, it's a dumb show.

Lex Fridman (56:36.660)

And it's not dumb just in the sense that it's stupid.

Sean Kelly (56:39.360)

It's dumb in the sense that it's silent.

Sean Kelly (56:41.880)

It presents itself as if it's got some significance and yet its significance is withheld from

Sean Kelly (56:46.640)

you.

Lex Fridman (56:47.640)

And he says, that's what our lives are like.

Sean Kelly (56:50.120)

Everything in our lives presents themselves to us as if it's got a significance, but it

Lex Fridman (56:54.120)

doesn't, it's absurd.

Lex Fridman (56:56.880)

And then he says, really what our lives are like, they're like the lives of Sisyphus.

Lex Fridman (57:01.960)

Just day after day, you do the same thing.

Sean Kelly (57:07.440)

You wake up at a certain time, you get on the bus, you go to work, you take your lunch

Lex Fridman (57:11.960)

break, you get off.

Sean Kelly (57:13.760)

I have a colleague who once said to me something like this, it was about October or so in the

Lex Fridman (57:19.440)

fall semester.

Lex Fridman (57:20.440)

I said, how's it going, Dick?

Lex Fridman (57:22.680)

He said, well, you know how it is.

Sean Kelly (57:24.000)

I got on the conveyor belt at the beginning of the semester and I'm just going through

Lex Fridman (57:29.960)

and that's the way my life is.

Lex Fridman (57:32.140)

And Camus thinks that experience, which you can sometimes have, reveals something true

Lex Fridman (57:38.920)

about what human lives are like.

Sean Kelly (57:41.320)

Our lives really just are like the life of Sisyphus who rolls this boulder up the hill

Lex Fridman (57:46.400)

from morning till night.

Lex Fridman (57:48.200)

And then at night he gets to the top and it rolls back down to the bottom.

Sean Kelly (57:53.080)

Over the course of the night, he walks back down and then he starts it all over again.

Lex Fridman (57:57.560)

And he says, Sisyphus is condemned to this life like we're condemned to our lives.

Lex Fridman (58:03.680)

But we do have one bit of freedom and it's the only thing that we can hang on to.

Sean Kelly (58:10.440)

It's the freedom to stick it to the gods who put us in this position by embracing this

Lex Fridman (58:18.100)

existence rather than giving up and committing suicide.

Lex Fridman (58:21.400)

And I thought, well, it's kind of a happy ending.

Lex Fridman (58:26.720)

But I also thought it's a dim view of what our existence amounts to.

Lex Fridman (58:33.240)

So I think there's something fascinating about that.

Lex Fridman (58:37.480)

But what I came to believe, and I tried to write about this once, I know you read the

Sean Kelly (58:42.500)

thing about aliveness that I published once, that's secretly a criticism of Camus.

Lex Fridman (58:47.960)

I don't think I mentioned Camus in there.

Lex Fridman (58:50.400)

But I think Camus has got the phenomenon wrong or he's missed some important aspect of it.

Sean Kelly (58:56.520)

Because in Camus view, when you experience your day as sort of going on in this deadening

Sean Kelly (59:02.360)

way and you're just doing the things that you always do the way you always do them,

Lex Fridman (59:07.500)

for Camus, that reveals the truth about what our lives are.

Lex Fridman (59:11.280)

But I think there's some aspect, at least for me, and maybe he just didn't feel this

Lex Fridman (59:16.700)

or didn't have access to it, maybe others don't.

Lex Fridman (59:20.400)

But for me, there's an extra part to it, which is somehow that, yes, that's the way

Lex Fridman (59:25.200)

things are and it's inadequate.

Lex Fridman (59:30.520)

And there's something that's missing from that aspect of our existence that could be

Lex Fridman (59:36.440)

there.

Lex Fridman (59:38.060)

And it feels like our lives are not about just putting up with that and sticking it

Sean Kelly (59:43.120)

to the gods by embracing it, but seeking that absence part of it, the part that's recognizable

Sean Kelly (59:50.840)

in its absence in your experience of that.

Lex Fridman (59:54.660)

And that's what I think.

Sean Kelly (59:56.700)

I think we do have the experience of the presence of that in moments when you feel truly alive.