Making Sense of Belief and Unbelief

03/17/23 • 124 min

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In this episode, we examine a series of Sam’s conversations centered around religion, atheism, and the power of belief.

First, we hear the stories of three guests who have fled their respective oppressive religious organizations. We begin with Sarah Haider, founder of the advocacy group Ex-Muslims of North America, who details how her encounters with militant atheists catalyzed her journey to secularism. Then our narrator, Megan Phelps-Roper, walks us through her story of abandoning the Westboro Baptist Church. Finally, Yasmine Mohammed presents her harrowing account of escaping fundamentalist Islamism and Sam’s role in inspiring her public advocacy work.

We then tackle the concept of belief more broadly, diving into Sam’s understanding of atheism and what sets it apart from the views of other atheist thinkers like Matt Dillahunty and Richard Dawkins. We also revisit an infamous conversation between Sam and Jordan Peterson, wherein they attempt to come to some universal definition of the word “truth.”

The episode concludes with two Q&A portions from life events in which Sam addresses some real concerns about purpose and meaning in the absence of religion.

About the Series

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career.

Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

In this episode, we examine a series of Sam’s conversations centered around religion, atheism, and the power of belief.

The episode concludes with two Q&A portions from life events in which Sam addresses some real concerns about purpose and meaning in the absence of religion.

About the Series

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career.

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#312 - The Trouble with AI

Sam Harris speaks with Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus about recent developments in artificial intelligence and the long-term risks of producing artificial general intelligence (AGI). They discuss the limitations of Deep Learning, the surprising power of narrow AI, ChatGPT, a possible misinformation apocalypse, the problem of instantiating human values, the business model of the Internet, the meta-verse, digital provenance, using AI to control AI, the control problem, emergent goals, locking down core values, programming uncertainty about human values into AGI, the prospects of slowing or stopping AI progress, and other topics.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, co-authored with Peter Norvig, is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. Russell is also the author of Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with a current emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.

Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stuartjonathanrussell/

Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. He was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine-learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, co-authored with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI. His podcast Humans versus Machines, will come later this spring.

Website: garymarcus.com

Twitter: @GaryMarcus

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Website: https://ehrmanblog.org/

Twitter: @BartEhrman