Jack Symes

Very well. Thank you for having me.

Nice. Yeah, so I think it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right? It tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff. But I think at the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society. We're like... stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions.

So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox. They all say something along the lines of, like, philosophy is dead. So just before we get into the multiverse, it's probably best to say, like... what philosophy is and what the point of talking about the multiverses.

So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, like what they take philosophy to be, because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider projects. One of the ideas that I love is this one by the late great British philosopher Mary Midgley. She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing. Right.

So like we have these conversations in our societies and like these conversations are flowing around. And likewise, we have these pipes running underneath our houses, keeping the water flowing. But occasionally it gets clogged. And so the philosopher needs to. pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again.

So these are things like what it is to be a woman or what it is to have free speech or what it means to say that a gene is selfish. So that's, I see, like the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like trying to understand the concepts we're using.

Then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy, which is like how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Like, let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology, and the arts, and let's try and get a big picture of the world. And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be.

So I take that to be the project. And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks are things like, why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing? No universe. Like, why? Why are the laws of nature fine-tuned for the existence of life? Where does consciousness come from?

When I make a moral statement like the Holocaust is bad, is it the same as me saying that Jonah Hill's movies are bad? Are they the same kind of statement? Is that the same bad I'm using? Right. But the big question, and to get to the multiverse now, is...

The big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question, the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living. So my question is... What's the point of all this? Is existence on the whole a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased to be alive? And what's the purpose of life?

And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism and these arguments for theism all come in into the projects.

I don't know how they get away with saying these things. I think you get it though, right? Science splits the atom, it puts a man on the moon. So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems.

Well, that seems to be like the failure of new atheism fundamentally, right? We've got this movement in the early 2000s, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, who were all being critical of religion in the light of like the September 11th terrorist attack and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond like criticism. But then once that project started,

Once they embark on that project and they criticize religion, there isn't really anything left there. They don't do the project of philosophy of finding the meaning in the ethics. And when they try to do it, it's lacking. Something's missing. So I see that as the reason why new atheism is going out of favor, why it's becoming unfashionable, because it can't answer those questions.

It's also one of the hottest days of the year without aircon, so he's really going hard for the panting.

I'm not sure about putting religion on those things in particular. Cult. Yeah, cult. They might have some aspects which are cult-like.

captured people. But I think to have a religion, you do need to have a belief in what Christians, Jews, and Muslims take to be the perfect being. God has to be, by definition, perfect. And if you think that being exists, then I think you certainly qualify for having a religion.

I guess that's a cult.

It's a bad classification.

That's good. Well, okay. Let's say this, though, on behalf of religion, right? I think the two best things going for it are...