Chris Williamson 和 Naval 的对谈（PART I）

以下是Chris Williamson 和 Naval 的谈话总结。计划分成几期整理完。 完整的视频在：Youtube

主题包括： PART I: 成功与价值观 主题核心：探讨成功的定义、欲望管理、价值观成本（如骄傲）及哲学根基。

  • 00:00 Is Success Worth It?
  • 07:43 Ways To Shortcut Our Desires
  • 29:46 Why Pride Is The Most Expensive Trait
  • 2:18:03 Philosophical Beliefs

PART II: 自我认知与心理健康 主题核心：自我反思（观点改变、地位游戏）、自尊提升、心理观察与成长工具。

  • 10:47 Is Changing Our Opinions Hypocritical?

  • 14:35 How To Become Less Distracted By Status Games

  • 21:02 Ways To Raise Your Self-Esteem

  • 49:08 Objectively Viewing Our Own Mind

  • 1:52:38 How Being Observant Of Yourself Allows Change

  • PART III: 幸福与焦虑管理 主题核心：幸福的本质、真实性、焦虑应对策略。

    • 32:19 Identifying Our Happiness
    • 44:22 The Key To Being Your Authentic Self
    • 1:07:20 What Is Happiness?
    • 1:21:24 Learning How To Deal With Anxiety

  • PART IV: 人际关系与社会互动 主题核心：人际边界、自我幽默感、财富的社会影响。

    • 1:32:36 Why We Can't Change Other People 1:45:22 Why We Shouldn't Take Ourselves Too Seriously
    • 2:09:31 The Best And Worst Places To Spend Wealth

  • PART V: 育儿与家庭趋势 主题核心：少子化现象、育儿中的直觉与信任。

    • 2:30:50 Are People Choosing To Have Less Kids?
    • 2:37:40 Trusting Our Instincts Throughout Parenthood

  • PART VI: 社会观察与未来预测 主题核心：文化冲突演变、被忽视的历史性议题。

    • 2:50:26 What Does The Future Of The Culture Wars Look Like?
    • 2:59:01 What Is Currently Ignored By The Media But Will Be Studied By Historians?

  • PART VII: 个人成长哲学与未来展望 主题核心：逆境优势、保持乐观、生活质量优化、个人未来规划。

    • 3:11:49 Is There An Advantage To Starting Out As A Loser?
    • 1:00:40 How Can We Avoid Cynicism And Pessimism Within Ourselves?
    • 3:15:20 Naval's Foreseeable Plans
    • 1:28:07 Optimising Our Quality Of Life

  • PART VIII: 其他 主题核心：嘉宾参与动机与观点更新。（不计划单独整理）

    • 2:00:23 Why Did Naval Come On This Podcast?
    • 2:23:55 Recent Insights Into Naval's Opinions

以下是第一部分，关于成功与价值观。

幸福和成功的关系

一上来 Chris 就抛出了一个不容易回答的问题：「幸福就是满足于已有之物，而成功源于不满足。那么成功还值得追求吗？」

Naval 先是强调了这个论述的情境性和时效性。然后试图用苏格拉底的故事去解释。苏格拉底走进市场，面对众多展示的奢侈品和精美物品，他却说：「这个世界上有多少我不需要的东西。」意在说明，对一些人来说，物质上的丰饶华丽不是他们所追求的。

然后又补充了第欧根尼的故事。这里补充扩展这个故事：

据说第欧根尼住在一个木桶（亦说是装死人的瓮）里，拥有的所有财产只包括这个木桶、一件斗篷、一支棍子和一个面包袋。有一次第欧根尼正在晒太阳，这时亚历山大大帝前来拜访他，问他需要什么，并保证会兑现他的愿望。第欧根尼回答道：「我希望你闪到一边去，不要遮住我的阳光。」亚历山大大帝后来说：「我若不是亚历山大，我愿是第欧根尼。」第欧根尼说：「这就是我们的不同，我不希望成为亚历山大。」

Naval提到了两种追求幸福的方式：

  • 满足物质需求的幸福
  • 满足精神层面的幸福

每个人的答案可能会不同。Naval 分享了自己的经历，认为随着自己变得更平和、更专注于当下、更满足于所拥有的，他仍然想做事，而且想做更大的、更纯粹和更符合自身独特能力的事情。这表明变得更幸福可以让人更成功，但同时会改变对成功的定义。

Chris 说实现物质欲望比放弃它们要容易。Naval 强调如果你想要什么，就去得到它。玩游戏的目的就是为了摆脱游戏。我们玩游戏赢得游戏然后厌倦游戏。我们陷入一种困境，寻找不再试图赢得游戏的方式去摆脱游戏。

Chris 提到了 Naval 另外一个观点：「生活中的大部分收获来自于短期的痛苦，这样你才能在长期内得到回报」并且将它类比为「棉花糖游戏」。这里提到的棉花糖游戏应该指的是斯坦福棉花糖实验（Stanford Marshmallow Experiment），由斯坦福大学的沃尔特·米歇尔（Walter Mischel）博士在1966年到1970年代早期进行，研究儿童的自控能力。实验中，4到6岁的孩子被单独留在房间，面前放一块棉花糖，被告知若能等待15分钟不吃，将获得第二块作为奖励。结果显示，约三分之一的孩子成功等待。后续跟踪发现，这些能延迟满足的孩子在成年后往往表现更好，如成绩优异、肥胖率低等，体现了自控力与未来成功之间的潜在联系。

Naval 对此回应，如果你把痛苦定义为身体上的痛苦，那么它是真实的，你无法忽视它。但是我们所谓的痛苦大多是精神上的痛苦和折磨。我们需要弄清楚：是沿着痛苦的道路前进更有效，还是以一种不痛苦的方式来解释它更有效？成功人士往往说「旅程才是有趣的部分」，我们应该享受过程而非承担痛苦。旅程并非仅仅是回报，它是唯一存在的东西。（这里指的是当下存在的意义？）我们去做手头的事情，去行动，即消解我们痛苦的方式。

当我们想要一个东西的时候，我们会默认我们在没有得到它的时候是不幸福的。得到之后又会觉得无聊。过段时间我们又想要别的东西。如此循环。因此，不管是幸福或者不幸福，这都是一种状态，不会持续太久。我们要打破这种循环，也就是享受过程本身。

Naval 不否认钱能解决所有和钱有关的问题，拥有钱是一件好事。但正如研究表明，中彩票的人和背部受伤的人在两年后又回到了他们原本的幸福水平。如果你通过努力赚到了钱，那么钱可以买到幸福，因为在这个过程中，你对自己既感到自豪又有信心，你有一种成就感，你设定了一个目标并实现了它，你做出了正确的判断。我们 99% 的时间都花在了过程上，享受过程，而不仅仅是关注结果。

Naval 提到一个小练习：你可以回到自己的生活中，试着把自己放在5年前、10年前、15年前、20年前的确切位置。然后试着回忆：

  • 我和谁在一起？
  • 我在做什么？
  • 我有什么感受？
  • 我的情绪是什么？
  • 我的目标是什么？

真正地、真正地让自己回到过去，看看你是否会给自己一些建议，会有什么不同的做法。

Naval 自己的结论是：「我会做同样的事情，只是我会带着更少的愤怒、更少的情绪、更少的内心痛苦去做，因为那是可选的。它不是必要的。我会说，一个能够至少平静地，也许快乐地完成工作的人，会比那些有不必要的内心痛苦的人更有效率。」

对话原文：

Is Success Worth It?

C: Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Is success worth it then? N: Oof I'm not sure that statement is true anymore. Like I made that statement a long time ago and a lot of these things are just notes to myself and they're highly contextual They come in the moment they leave in the moment. So, happiness is a very complicated topic but I always like the Socrates story where he goes into the marketplace and they show him all these luxuries and fineries and he says how many things there are in this world that I do not want. Diogenes And that's a form of freedom so not wanting something is as good as having it in the old story with Alexander Diogenes right Alexander goes out and conquers the world and he meets Diogenes who's living in a barrel and Diogenes says get out of the way you're blocking my sun and Alexander says oh how I wish I you know could be like Diogenes the next life and Diogenes says that's the difference I don't wish to be Alexander. So, two paths to happiness, one path is success you get what you want you satisfy your material needs. (second is) Like Diogenes you just don't want in the first place.

And I'm not sure which one is more valid. And it also depends on what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it? Does being happy make you less successful? That is conventional wisdom. That may even be the practical, earned experience of your reality. You find that when you're happy, you don't want anything. So you don't get up and do anything. On the other hand, you know you still have to do something. You're an animal. You're here. You're here to survive. You're here to replicate. You're driven. You're motivated. You're going to do something. You're not just going to sit there all day. Unlikely. Some people do. Maybe it's in their nature. But I think most people still want to act; they want to live in the arena.

I found for myself, as I've become—uh, happier is a big word, but you know, more peaceful, more calm, more present, more satisfied with what I have—I still want to do things. I just want to do bigger things. I want to do things that are more pure, more aligned with what I think needs to be done and what I can uniquely do. So in that sense, I think that being happier can actually make you more successful, but your definition of success will likely change along the way. C: Is that a realization you think you could have gotten to had you have not had some success in the first place?

N: At least for me, I always wanted to take the path of material success first. I was not going to go be an ascetic and sit there and renounce everything. That just seems too unrealistic and too painful. Uh, in the story of Buddha, he starts out as a prince and then he sees that it's all kind of meaningless because you're still going to get old and die, and then he goes into the woods looking for something more. I'll take the happy route that involves material success, thank you.

C: I think it's quicker in some ways. You know, one of your insights is it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them. And, uh...

N: It depends on the person, but I think you have to try that path. If you want something, go get it. You know, I quipped that the reason to win the game is to be free of it. So you play the games, you win the games, and then hopefully you get bored of the games. You don't want to just keep looping on the same game over and over, although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels and are relatively open-ended. Uh, and then you become free of the game in the sense that you're no longer trying to win it. You can win it, and either you move to a different game or you play the game for the sheer joy of it.

C: Yeah. You, another one of yours: most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term. I think that's classic—winning the marshmallow test on a daily basis. But, uh, there's an interesting challenge where I think people need to avoid becoming a suffering addict, sort of using suffering as the proxy for progress as opposed to the outcome of the suffering. Right? It's like, I was in pain not eating the marshmallow; I was in pain doing this work. I have attached well-being and satisfaction to pain, not to what the pain gets me on the other side of it.

N: If you define pain as physical pain, then it's a real thing. It happens and you can't ignore it. But that's not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental anguish and mental pain. And it just means you don't want to do the task at hand. If you were fine doing the task at hand, then you wouldn't be suffering. And then the question is: what's more effective—to suffer along the way or just to interpret it in a way that it's not suffering? You hear from a lot of successful people—they look back and they say, "Oh, the journey was the fun part," right? That was actually the entertaining part, and I should have enjoyed it more. It's a common regret. Uh, there's a little thought exercise I like to do, which is you can go back into your own life and try to put yourself in the exact position you were in 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. And you try to remember: okay, who was I with? What was I doing? What was I feeling? What were my emotions? What were my objectives? And really, really try to transport yourself back and see if there's any advice you'd give yourself. Anything you would do differently. Now, you don't have new information, and don't pretend you could have gone back and bought a stock or bought Bitcoin or whatever, but just knowing what you know now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age-related experience, how would you have done things differently? And I think it's a worthwhile exercise to do. So don't let me rob you of the conclusion, but I'll tell you for me: I would have done everything the same except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering, because that was optional. It wasn't necessary. And I would argue that someone who can do the job at least peacefully, but maybe happily, is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil.

C: Well, you end up with a series of miserable successes, right? The outcome may have been the same, but the entire experience of getting there...

N: And the journey is not only the reward. The journey is the only thing there is. You know, even success—it's human nature to bank it very, very quickly, right? Because the normal loop that we run through is: you sit around, you're bored, then you want something. Then when you want something, you decide you're not going to be happy until you get that thing. Then you start your bout of suffering or anticipation while you strive to get that thing. If you get that thing, then you get used to it and then you get bored again. Then a few months later, you want something else. And if you don't get it, then you're unhappy for a bit, and then you get over it, and then you want something else. Right? That's the normal cycle. So whether you're happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last. Now, I don't want to be glib and say, "Oh, there's no point in making money or being successful." There absolutely is. Money solves all your money problems, so it is good to have money. That said, there are those stories—I don't know if you've seen those studies—I don't know how real these are. A lot of these psych studies don't replicate, but it's a fun little study that shows that people who break their back and people who win the lottery are back to their baseline happiness two years later. Yep. Again, I don't know if that's entirely true. I think money can buy you happiness if you earned it because then, along the way, you have both pride and confidence in yourself, and you have a sense of accomplishment, and you set out to do something and you were right. So I'll bet that lingers. And then, as I said, money solves your money problems. So I don't want to be too glib about it. But I would say, in general, this loop that we run through of desire, dopamine, fulfillment, unfulfillment—you have to enjoy the journey. The journey is all there is, right? Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent on the journey. So what kind of a journey is it if you're not going to enjoy it?

欲望与名声

  • 人们有很多不必要的欲望，这些欲望是不快乐的根源。要想成功，就必须对欲望变得挑剔，专注于真正重要的事情，而不是浪费精力和时间在各种欲望上。
  • 名声能带来一些好处，如参加更好的派对、进入更好的餐馆等，它也是高地位的象征，能吸引异性。
  • 但同时，名声也有成本，如没有隐私、会遇到怪人、被迫表演等。Naval认为，名声最好是作为更有价值的东西的副产品来获得，而不是为了名声本身而追求。那些为更大群体做出贡献而获得的名声是值得的，比如宗教领袖、艺术家、科学家等群体。而增加曝光刷脸，带来的只是空洞的名声。空洞的名声会让人感到脆弱和不安。

对话原文：

Ways To Shortcut Our Desires

C: How do you shortcut that desire contract?

N: You could focus. You could decide that you don't want most things. I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere. We have opinions on everything, judgments, and everything. So, I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires. And frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus.

C: You can't be great at everything.

N: You can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time.

C: Is fame a worthwhile goal?

N: Well, it gets you invited to better parties, gets you into better restaurants. Fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you, but you don't know them. And it does put you on a pedestal. It can get you what you want, at a distance. So, I wouldn't say it's worthless. Obviously, people want it for a reason. It's high status, so it attracts the opposite sex. Especially for men, it attracts women. That said, it is high cost. It means you have no privacy. You do have weirdos and lunatics. You do get hit up a lot for weird things. And you're on a stage, so you're forced to perform, so you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions, and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense.

But the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want it, means that it would be disingenuous to say, "Oh no, no, I'm famous, but I don't want to be famous." That said, I think fame, like anything else, is best produced as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile. Wanting to be famous, craving to be famous, and being famous for being famous—these are sort of traps. Fame for fame's sake. Exactly. So, it's better that it's earned fame. For example, earning respect in the tribe means doing things that are good for the tribe. Who are the most famous people in human history? There are people who sort of transcended the self—the Buddhas, the Jesuses, the Muhammad of the world. Who else is famous? The artists are famous. You know, art lasts for a long time. The scientists are famous; they discover things. The conquerors are famous, presumably because they conquered for their tribe. There was someone they were fighting for. So, generally, the higher up you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people, even though it may be considered tyrannical or negative—like Genghis Khan is famous, but to the Mongols he was doing good, to the rest of them, not so much—the higher level you're operating at, the more people you're taking care of, the more you sort of earn respect and fame. And I think those are good reasons to be famous. If fame is empty—if you're famous just because your name showed up in a lot of places or your face showed up in a lot of places—then that's a hollow fame. And I think deep down you will know that, so it'll be fragile, and you'll always be afraid of losing it, and then you'll be forced to perform. So, the kind of fame that pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn't want. But the kind of fame that's earned because you did something useful—why dodge that? Now you can.

骄傲阻碍进步

  • 骄傲是学习的敌人。那些仍然停留在过去、成长最少的人，往往是最骄傲的人，因为他们觉得自己已经知道所有的答案，不愿意公开纠正自己。
  • 骄傲让人不愿承认错误，从而陷入局部最大值，而不是回到谷底重新攀登。这会导致人们被困在一个次优的位置，付出金钱、成功和时间的代价。
  • 创造任何伟大的东西都需要从零到一的勇气。这意味着你要回到零，这真的很难做到，但这是实现真正进步和成功的必要条件。
  • 伟大的艺术家和企业家总是愿意重新开始。埃隆·马斯克的例子表明，他愿意冒着看起来愚蠢的风险，全力以赴地重新开始。

对话原文：

Why Pride Is The Most Expensive Trait

C: The most expensive trait is pride. How come?

N: Oh, that was a recent one. I tweeted that just because I think that pride is the enemy of learning. So when I look at my friends and colleagues, the ones who are still stuck in the past and have grown the least are the ones who were the proudest because they sort of feel like they already had the answers and so they don't want to correct themselves publicly. And so this goes back to the fame conversation. You get locked into something you said. It made you famous. You're known for that and now you want to pivot or change. So pride prevents you from saying, "I'm wrong."

C: What's pride in this context here?

N: It could be as simple as you're trading stocks and then you don't admit you were wrong. So you hang on to a lousy trait. It could be that you made a decision to, you know, marry someone or move somewhere or enter a profession, it doesn't work out, and then you don't admit that you were wrong, so you get stuck in it. It's mostly about getting trapped in local maxima as opposed to going back down and climbing up the mountain again.

C: And that's why it's an expensive trade because you continue to need to repay it in one form or another.

N: Yeah. You're just stuck at a suboptimal point. It's going to cost you money. It's going to cost you success. (C: And time?) And time. The great artists always have this ability to start over. Whether it's Paul Simon or Madonna or, you know, two and I'm dating myself a little bit. But even the great entrepreneurs, they're just always willing to start over. I'm always struck by the Elon Musk story where he did PayPal as X.com, originally. Actually, it was his financial institution that got merged into PayPal. It's good that you've got the domain. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. I'll park that. I'll hold on. He's consistent. He's been using it for quite a while. And he said something like, "I made $200 million from the sale of PayPal. I put $100 million into SpaceX, $80 million into Tesla, $20 million into Solar City, and I had to borrow money for rent." Right. This guy is a perennial risk-taker. He's always willing to start over. He doesn't have any pride about being seen as successful or being seen as a failure. He's willing to put it all (C: in and back himself again) each time. But the key thing is, he's always willing to start over. Even now, when he's sort of made his new startup is a USA, right? He's basically trying to fix it like he would fix one of his startups. And I think that is a willingness to look like a fool and that is a willingness to start over. And a lot of people just don't have that. They become successful or they become rich or they become famous, and that's it. They're stuck. They don't want to go back to zero. And creating anything great requires zero to one. And that means you go back to zero, and that's really painful and hard to do.

哲学

这段内容需要批判式接受。

  • 哲学的起源和普遍性：
    • Naval 认为哲学源于对生活中具体经历的深入理解和反思，寻找普遍真理。任何深入研究的学科最终都会引向哲学，因为精通任何领域都需要对基本真理的概括。
  • 哲学的演变：
    • 随着科学的发展，哲学的边界也在扩展。例如，从地心说到宇宙无限的观念转变，以及从宗教解释到科学解释的转变，都深刻影响了人类的哲学视角。
    • 道德哲学也在进步，如奴隶制的废除和对婴儿疼痛感知的重新认识，显示了哲学观念的演变。
  • 解决哲学悖论的方法：
    • 许多哲学悖论看似矛盾，是因为我们在不同的层面上提问和回答。例如，自由意志的辩论往往混淆了个体体验和宇宙视角。
    • 问题应在被提问的层面上回答。如果我们以个体身份提问，就应在个体层面上回答；如果以宇宙视角提问，则应在宇宙层面上回答。这种区分可以解决许多悖论。
    • 「在提问的尺度内回应问题」，是一种避免抽象和无限制递归的途径。
  • 自由意志和生命意义的例子：
    • 自由意志的辩论被框架错误地提出。个体层面的自由意志是显而易见的，因为我们感觉自己有选择的能力。然而，从宇宙层面来看，一切似乎都是预先决定的。这种矛盾可以通过区分提问的层面来解决。
    • 生命的意义也类似。从个体的视角来看，生命在此时此地是有意义的（存在主义），因为我们可以创造和赋予它意义。但从宇宙的无限时间尺度来看，一切似乎都归于无意义（虚无主义）。这种矛盾同样可以通过区分提问的层面来解决。

Naval 提到了 AI 的局限性，即缺少创造性思维和经验提炼能力。哲学化就是在经验中提取真理的能力。因此，比起总结，没人比 AI 更牛，而判断则依赖于经验的提炼。哲学不是真理，而是我们解决问题的工具。

Naval 同时提到了哲学随着科学而进步，这一观点有些过度简化哲学发展。N 的意图应是哲学随着科学和时代的发展在变化，但也并非失去了自身的独立性。比如，AI 无法回答伦理责任的问题。关于尺度回应解决悖论，也有一定的局限性。比如电车难题，不同的出发点，功利主义 or 道德主义，无法通过调整尺度去规避。

对于提到的婴儿疼痛认知，无法查验这个说法的准确性。我查到的 WHO《新生儿疼痛管理指南》（2016）规定：所有侵入性操作必须使用镇痛措施。可能是即兴聊到了伦理道德问题，不应归为哲学的陷阱和缺陷。

对话原文：

Philosophical Beliefs

C: Yeah, I again, you know, just to sort of call out a lot of what I tried to do this redemption arc thing of if I sound smart, that's like being smart, right?

N: You go well, ChatGPT has memorized the entire internet. Good luck competing with that. You're not going to beat it in memorization. You're not even going to beat a library at memorization. You're not going to beat any 10 books in memorization. So memorization is not the thing.

C: Understand the value of memorization is going down by the day.

N: It's already so low. Understanding is a thing. Being able to make judgments is a thing. Taste is a thing. And understanding, judgment, taste—these come out of having real problems and then solving them and then finding the commonalities. What is philosophy? Everyone you live long enough, you'll be a philosopher. Philosophy is just when you find the hidden generalizable truths among the specific experiences that you've had in life and then you know how to navigate future specific experiences based on some heuristics, and you create a philosophy around that. Any subject pursued deeply enough will eventually lead to philosophy. Mastery in anything literally anything will lead you to being a philosopher. You just have to stick with it long enough and generalize the truths back out. And these are universal truths. It's back to the unity and variety. You can find unity in anything if you go deep enough.

C: And that's why the trite stuff unfortunately sort of keeps coming back around. You're like, well, look, this is cliché for a kind of a reason.

N: It's cliché for reasons. But you know, sometimes you learn new things. Sometimes you do figure out new things too. Even in philosophy, for example, science has advanced. As science has advanced, it's actually expanded our boundaries of philosophy. When we used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe, you would actually have a different philosophical outlook than when you think the universe is vast and we're infinitesimally small. It gives you a different philosophical outlook. The same way, if you think that nature is driven by angels and demons and gods versus if there are laws of physics that are computable and understandable, that will lead you to a different philosophical outlook. If you think that knowledge is something that is passed down from above and through generations versus something that is created on the fly and then tested against reality, that will lead you to a different philosophical outlook. If you think humans are created by God as opposed to humans evolved from some unicellular organism, yeah, it still doesn't solve the original problem of who created that, but at least it takes you further down the road. Even sim theory is an attempt at reformulating philosophy based on what we know about computers, even though it kind of leads to a lot of the same conclusions as, you know, creator. But it is at least philosophy that is informed by technology and by science. So philosophy can also evolve. Moral philosophy evolves. Right? There was a time when every culture that was a conquering culture practiced slavery. Now almost all cultures reject slavery. That's moral philosophy having evolved. There was even this, it sounds too ludicrous to be true, and I don't know if it fully is true, but there were a fairly large group of doctors based on studies who believed until the 1980s that babies couldn't feel pain. And so even to this day, I think circumcision is done without anesthesia because under the theory that very young children, babies, don't feel pain. And that's ludicrous. And there was a study that came out in the 80s that said no, no, no, they do feel pain. Oh, yeah, of course, right. So people can be stuck in bad philosophical traps for a long period of time.

So even philosophy can make progress. And as an example, one of the realizations that I had, and this is thanks to David Deutsch and my friend James Pierce and also thinking it through a little bit, is that there are these timeless old questions that we run into where the answers seem like paradoxes. So we stop thinking about them. An example is free will. Do you have free will? Or does anything matter? Is there a meaning to life? And we get stuck in them because, for example, is there a meaning to life? Like yes, life has a meaning because you're right here. You create your own meaning. This moment has all the meaning you could imagine. It's all the meaning there is. On the other hand, you're going to die. It all goes to zero. Heat death. The universe has no meaning. Right. So which one is it? Well, the reason why it seems paradoxical is because you're asking the question of a human here and now at a certain scale and a certain time, and then you're answering it from the viewpoint of the universe over infinite time. So you pull the trick. You switch the level at which you're answering the question. And questions should be answered at the level at which they're asked. So if you ask the question, "Is there meaning?" You, Chris, are asking that question. Yes. To Chris, there is meaning. There's meaning right here. This is the meaning you can interpret any meaning you want onto it. Don't ask the question as Chris and then answer it as God or as the universe. That's the trick that you're playing. That's why it seems paradoxical.

The same way you can say, "Do I have free will?" People debate free will all day long. The question is answered at the wrong frame. So they ask the question, "Do I, as an individual, have free will?" Hell yeah, I have free will. My mind-body system can't predict what I'm going to do next. The universe is infinitely complex. I'm making a choice in my mind, and I'm doing something. There's my free will. So answer at the level at which you were asked. Of course, I have free will because I feel like I have free will, and I treat you like you have free will, and you treat me like I have free will. We have free will. The problem then is you start trying to answer the question as if you're the universe. You're like, "Well, on the universal scale, big bang, particle collisions, no one makes any choices. How could you be any different than what the universe wants you to be?" And it's all one block universe. So you don't have free will. Don't answer the question at the level at which it wasn't asked. So if God asked the question, "Is there free will?" No, there is no free will. If the universe asks the question, there is no free will. But if an individual asks the question right now, then yes, there is free will. So a lot of these paradoxes resolve themselves. Philosophical paradoxes that people have been struggling with since the beginning of time when you just realize that you're answering them at a scale and time different than they were asked.