Interview Interlude Playlist, Part 7: R. Scott Bakker

Let's talk about alien philosophy. Here's our 2017 chat with Canadian author R. Scott Bakker, discussing his dark fantasy novels as well as his paper 'On Alien Philosophy,' published in the The Journal of Consciousness Studies.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. The thoughts of all men arise from
the darkness. If you were the movement of your soul,

(00:23):
and the cause of that movement procede you, then how
could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could
you be anything other than a slave to the darkness
that comes before? Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
today's episode is mostly going to be an interview with
the Canadian author are Scott Baker, best known for his

(00:45):
Second Apocalypse saga, Robert, how would you characterize that? Well?
I think that quote that I read there from his
first book in the series, The Darkness That Comes Before,
sums it up rather nicely. I was first turned onto
the work of our Scott Baker back in two thousand seven,
and I hadn't read anything quite like it at the time,
and I really haven't read anything quite like his work

(01:05):
since then. His first novel, The Darkness That Comes Before,
cast the reader into a dark fantasy world and invokes
the Holy Wars of our own world, token esque evil
factional in fighting worthy of Frank Herbert's Dune and a
deep philosophical core, And we're actually gonna be getting into
not so much his science fiction and fantasy but a

(01:26):
recent philosophy paper of his that sounds kind of odd,
though We will discuss his science fiction and fantasy a
fair amount. Don't don't worry about that if you're a fan,
but we're really going to be focusing on our Scott
Baker's recent paper on alien philosophy, published this year in
the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Yes, you heard that right,
alien philosophy. We will get back to that in just

(01:47):
a little bit. Yes, on alien philosophy. This is a
wonderful thought experiment and sort of a reverse engineering of
human philosophy via the consideration of a fictional convergeon ale
in species and what's sort of philosophical systems they might
create to make sense of their own existence. Yeah, so
in the past we've actually speculated about possible characteristics of

(02:10):
alien life forms. We did this in that episode Grizzly
Bears from Outer Space. Do you remember that? Yeah, like,
would aliens have eyes? Would they have hands? How large
or intelligent life forms? Generally? Where there was there was
a paper back then that tried to use some statistical
analysis to say, you know, it's really more likely, given
certain planet sizes and gravity and stuff, that aliens are

(02:32):
going to be pretty big. Um. But this is always
a tricky game because if you are a reasonable person,
you have to admit that if alien life exists somewhere
out there, there's every chance that it could just totally
defy your expectations. We we don't always know what to expect.
We can't be certain about much, but it is always

(02:52):
fun to play the game. Okay, if we just start
with a few fairly safe assumptions, what can we deduce
about what types of life are possible? And one of
those fairly safe assumptions is that whatever alien life exists,
it's going to be the product of evolution by natural selection.
I think it would be incredibly surprising if it turned

(03:13):
out to not be the product of evolution by natural selection,
meaning it's going to be a system that somehow incodes information,
makes copies of itself through that information, and the copies
survive and make their own copies at differential rates. And
from these humble premises you can actually start to make
a lot of interesting guesses about what types of life

(03:35):
are more possible or more common than others. And so
we've already tried this with biological and ecological traits in
the past. But in this new paper, Our Scott Baker
chases this this phenotype problem really deep. He goes on
to guests, what are the philosophical projects that intelligent alien
life forms would wonder about? What big questions would they

(03:58):
share with us? What hang up so they really likely
to dwell upon. Yeah, it's a fascinating paper and if
you want to read it in full, I'll include a
link to it on the landing page for this episode
is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. And I
should also point out that the first six books in
the Second Apocalypse saga, including the first trilogy, are currently
out there and just about any reading format you desire,

(04:19):
and this summer Our Scott Baker brings it all home.
He's gonna follow up last year's The Great Ordeal with
the Unholy Consults, which is gonna be out July eleven
from Overlook Press. And if you're not ready to commit
to a multi book series, his standalone novels Neuropath and
Disciple of the Dog are out there as well. Robert,
I know you warned me about neuropath well, as as

(04:40):
we'll explore in the interview, Baker himself warns everybody about neuropaths,
so be sure to tune in for that section of
the conversation. Just a few quick notes about this episode.
First up, this is a phone interview. We're in Atlanta
and Scott chatted with us from the wilds of Canada
in the midst of a thunderstorm. So, uh, everything's not
going to be necessarily as crisp as a you reually is,

(05:00):
but we think the content is is definitely worth sticking
around for. Secondly, I bring up a couple of details
from the Second Apocalypse saga that I think bear quick explanation. First,
there's the ink Ai. Now, this is a hedonistic alien
species that descends upon the world in ancient times undying.
They're devoted to selfish indulgence, limitless pleasure, and a cataclysmic

(05:23):
scheme to shield themselves from judgment. And then there are
the non Men. This is an all male race of
humanoids that essentially serves as the waning elder race the
elves of Baker's world, only far darker and interestingly inhuman
in many respects, both in body and in mind. And finally,
there's a tiny bit of cursing in this episode, but

(05:44):
it's polite Canadian cursing, and we bleaped it all out
for you. All Right, Well, i'd say, without further delay,
maybe we should get into our conversation with our Scott Baker. Hey, Scott,

(06:05):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Thanks for taking
time out of your day to talk with us here
about your new paper on alien philosophy, as well as
uh your works of fiction, which I know personally have
been a lot to me over the years. I'm I'm
a big fan of the Second Apocalypse saga. I loved
an Neuropath and Disciple the Dog as well. So we

(06:26):
want to welcome you to the show. And I believe
Joe has the first question here related to on alien philosophy. Well, actually,
I mean, I guess we should start just by Scott.
Is there anything you'd like to tell our audience about yourself?
Just introduce yourself and then second we'll we'll get to
the meat of the paper. I'm a farm boy who
grew up in southwestern Ontario and uh ended up falling

(06:48):
in love with Lord of the Rings and Conan the
Barbarian at a preposterously young age and just never grew up.
What's your opinion on the Millius movie? It has to
be the one written by alver Stone. Yeah yeah, Ernie.
All right, So we wanted to get into the idea

(07:09):
of your your paper about alien philosophy. Could you just
start by as succinctly as you can explaining what your
motive for writing this paper was and what your basic
conclusions are. Okay, So, I mean I kind of backed
into philosophy. Um, my original my original degree program I
took at university was languages and literature, and it quickly

(07:33):
became apparent to me that I was barking up the
wrong tree. And so the question for me was basically
how to transition my literature degree into something more philosophical.
So I did a critical theory graduate degree, and in
that case, I found myself knee deep and all these

(07:54):
philosophical traditions, ten thousand different interpretations of the same bloody thing.
I think the best way to put it is dismayed.
There's just so much confusion. It seemed like there was
so much obvious obtuscation. I so it quickly came to
the conclusion that something profoundly wrong lay at the heart

(08:19):
of traditional philosophy, and I just endeavored to be as
honest and as ruthlessly skeptical as I could and try
to figure out what that something wrong was. And aude
alien philosophy is basically the answer I've been able to
come up with after about twenty years of studying and
researching the topic, both informal university contexts and UH and

(08:42):
on my own. And the idea, in a nutshell is
simply that we human beings simply did not evolve the
capacity to reflect upon ourselves and our experience in any way,
shape or form that would allow us to answer theoretical
questions regarding our experience. And when you really look at

(09:06):
you know the question empirically in terms of cognitive neuroscience,
for instance, and you see the way in which the
brain constantly windows information, constantly just selects a little bit
of information from this process, a little information from that process,
a little information from that process. You discovered the brain
really is a giant bottleneck machine that is bend on

(09:29):
selecting only what it needs. And on alien philosophy gives
us a sort of picture of how we can understand
that bottleneck machine such that it explains the morass of
traditional philosophy of mind are you know, epical inability to

(09:52):
figure out what the hell is going on inside of
our own heads? So in the paper you you make
this distinction you just talked about and you you mentioned
the idea of causal cognition versus heuristic cognition, right, Uh,
basically having a true understanding of the workings of things
in in a sort of deep information way, versus having
a you know, on the fly, good enough understanding of

(10:15):
things that gets us through everyday life and that we're
constantly using the ladder to try to get at the former. Um.
A question I sort of wonder about. Is the former
to me, sounds like it is best executed in science.
If we're trying to get causal cognition, it's when we
you know, put these tools on our inquiries, like scientific

(10:36):
investigatory tools. And so does that leave any room for philosophy?
Do you think that there is really any good philosophy
to be done or really should it just be science
and everything outside of science is misapplying these heuristic models
we have. Um, yeah, I mean I think there's definitely

(10:57):
good philosophy. I mean, uh, Um, it's not the death
of philosophy or theoretical speculation. I mean, there's no way
to kill that. Um. What for me it signals the
end of is a certain type of philosophizing, which just
happens to be the majority of philosophizing since the ancient Greeks,

(11:17):
which is the idea of actually using heuristic cognition to
try to get to the truth of heuristic cognition, using
these shortcuts, these ways of actually avoiding knowledge of what's
actually going on to solve problems as a means of
getting at what's going on. And that's the philosophy that

(11:38):
does That is the philosophy that's caused the bulk of
our confusion today. So how much of philosophy do you
think is really just sort of backward looking ex post
facto justification for our biases. So the way I look
at it is we have this capacity to metacognize. We

(12:00):
have these ancestral abilities to basically pick things from the
stream of experience and think about them and change our
behavioral responses to the world on the basis of them.
So think about Christmas with your relatives. You know, everyone
has that family member who says something that you jest. Oh,

(12:27):
you got to say something about it, but you know
if you do, it's going to ruin the whole night.
And then it's a great example of meta cognition at work.
You know you're gonna say something, and then all of
a sudden, Wait a second, Scott, he's an soul. Everyone
knows he's a whole. You don't need to tell everybody
he's in sool. If you tell everybody's, well, then the

(12:48):
whole night's ruined. Right, Your reproductive chances go flying out
the window. That sounds weird. It doesn't know, But meta
cognition consists of a suite of practical tools. There's no
a in the world that we evolved the meta cognitive capacity.
We needed to do much more than a handful of

(13:08):
practical things on the fly. And what philosophical reflection does
is it it basically takes those tools, repurposes them, and
asks them to solve questions. There's just simply no way
they could possibly solve them. But since we lack the
ability to even see how little ability we have when

(13:30):
it comes to man cognition, we have no sense of
constraints or limits or whatever, and so we're confunded by
this constant illusion of transparency. It seems like, yes, if
only I think hard enough on this, Yes, if only
I get my concepts arranged just right. Yes, if only
I abandoned the metaphysics a presence, Yes only I abandoned

(13:52):
the mirror major on and on and on it goes.
Everybody thinks that there's a way to use philosophical reflection
to solve or the problem with human experience. So, uh, Scott,
in the paper you seem and the way you just
described it now, you definitely do seem to be trying
to use this idea of imagining what alien philosophy looks

(14:16):
like in order to reverse engineer our own human philosophy
to better understand how we've arrived at our philosophical traditions.
But I'm also just really interested in that speculative project
trying to literally imagine what an information processing organism orbiting
a faraway star might think about, what hard problems would

(14:37):
they encounter and how would they deal with them? And
so I wonder if I could ask you just a
few crazy kinds of questions that you don't even address
in the paper. Uh. I started off thinking, like, you know,
would could you imagine that there would be an alien
Hagel or an alien Wittgenstein. But these are kind of
stupid questions because I think these philosophers necessarily exist in

(15:00):
a tradition, if you know what I mean, Like they're
reacting to all the philosophers that came before them, and
so it's sort of silly to try to imagine if
that history of philosophy would be recreated on other planets.
But you can't imagine other fields of philosophy and how
they would be created. So I'm trying to think, like,
what would alien meta ethics look like? Is there anything

(15:22):
that we could guess, uh that that would form the
basis of how aliens would think about, you know what,
they're where their sense of right and wrong comes from.
But this is a really hard question to ask. I mean,
part of the reason why I took so much care
to uh underscore how how really you know, plausibility of

(15:45):
alien philosophy was all I was after. It's just simply
because asking the question of alien philosopy earnestly, you know,
um is really difficult, simply because you've got to assume
so much convergence just to just get off the ground
I mean have to that they use language in similar
ways that we as we use language for instance. Um,

(16:08):
So if you grant all that, if you grant convergence,
as I call them in the paper, then I think
meta ethics would look like a giant mess the way
meta ethics looks like in contemporary philosophy, justly because when
it comes to where we stand in these various super

(16:32):
complicated systems that nature has us pinned in, we just
have no access to the information we need. So what
we really have to rely on is basically these blind guesses,
you know, these simple heuristics, these little tricks that have,

(16:52):
for whatever reason, um, preserved our ancestors in the past.
Now these tricks are just simply uh, they're literally invisible
to us, even though they actually are the foundation of
guiding our behavior through these super complicated natural natural environments. Now,

(17:15):
any creature like the human is stuck in the exact
same informational bind. They're stuck in a shallow information environment.
They have these tools for picking out those handles, those
features of the environment that actually help them get along

(17:36):
or get on or get it on, um, but they
actually have no way of isolating those simple heuristics as
simple heuristics, no way of understanding where they stand in
these superordinance systems. They're just they're blind, and even worse,
they're blind to their blindness. So every time these aliens

(17:57):
would attempt to solve ethical questions what is ethics, They're
going to run into the same sets of illusions and
problems that beset human philosophers. They're going to confuse the
load in scape of ethical concepts as being a sort
of autonomous system as being all there is. They're going

(18:19):
to think that they've actually solved something, even though all
it takes is another person to ask the exact same
question to arrive at, in some cases, radically different answer
following what seemed to be very similar intuitions. So those
two things I think they're gonna are going to strand
them as effectively as we've been stranded by meta ethics.

(18:41):
I can imagine a skeptical objection to what you're saying, Um,
that would be okay, you're right that we are, by
nature shallow information consumers. We don't have deep knowledge about
the world in order to get along in a natural setting.
But you can definitely look at the way we've loved
ridged the weak tools. We do have to do amazing

(19:03):
things in say science and technology, like we can build
an international space station, and that has nothing to do
with our ground level survival and reproduction. We've just managed
to sort of bootstrap up some very basic survival tools
into incredible products. Why would you think that we couldn't
do the same thing with these hard problems, like like

(19:27):
met ethics or natural philosophy or understanding the mind that
we do with science and technology. Well, I mean I
actually think that you know a lot of the say
you know norms of science. I actually see these things
as technology. I mean I see them as basically ways
of turning, you know, spinning tools out of our own

(19:48):
brains if you will. I mean the idea of the
idea isn't that we can't use heuristic cognition in novel ways.
I mean we literally, I think we literally evolved to
do exactly what philosophers do, which is just simply trying
to recast, repurpose that our existing cognitive capacities in order

(20:11):
to solve um different kinds of problems. The problem with
meta ethics in particular is it doesn't really have anything
to do with that process. So ethical thought it has
given us a lot of great ideas that we've been
able to institutionalize in ways that have been tremendously tremendously

(20:31):
beneficial um to humanity. But there's no way of actually
realizing that that's the case short of putting those tools
into application. I mean, I would argue that the type
of norm toolmaking that humans have just done so fantastically

(20:55):
well is actually a completely different process than the process
that underwrites meta ethical thought. I mean, problems get solved
when we actually discover a new simple heuristic that allows
us to get along with each other in some way,
shape or form. But when you actually ask the fundamental

(21:20):
nature of ethical thought, and you begin by looking at
all these terms, all this norm talk as referring to
posits that actually plays some role in some kind of
economy transcendental economy or a normative economy, or an anomalous
economy or an autonomous economy outside of the circuit of nature.

(21:45):
No one's gotten anywhere, no one's the through anything. I mean,
the all the dilemmas that confronted the ancient Greeks are
still confronting modern philosophers today. And that's just simply because
constitutes an attempt to apply these simple heuristics not to

(22:05):
practical problems in the real world of politics and social interaction,
but to the theoretical problem of ethics itself. All right,
now it's time to take a quick break, and when
we come back, more of our conversation with our Scott Baker.
So maybe I've got one more and then I'm going

(22:25):
to throw back to Robert here. Uh So, I wanted
to go to a footnote in your paper about alien philosophy. Um,
you say that because we evolved in ecologies that didn't
give us access to deep information, you know, we just
knew enough to get along. You write, quote, My fear
is that the provision of this information is likely to

(22:46):
crash the effectiveness of many of our tools. A good
deal of my fiction is devoted to exploring different crash scenarios.
So I wondered if you could explain a little bit
more what you mean about the idea of a crash
scenario and how you explored so when you understand that
the bulk of our cognition is heuristic, that it really

(23:06):
relies on these kinds of guesses that we're making with
the lack any sort of deep understanding of the actual
physical structure of the environment around us. You realize that
that guesswork depends upon an invariant background. So a perfect
example would be AI for instance. So human beings we

(23:30):
evolved to manage unbelievable amount of complexity. We we evolved
to solve the most complicated systems that we know of
in the universe, basically each other, without actually knowing the
first thing about what's going on in brains or or

(23:51):
ecologies or or what what have you. So heuristics solved
by taking things for granted in their environments. So that
means the only cognition can be properly function is if
those things that it takes for granted actually obtained in
its environments. So if you look at that last year,

(24:14):
there was the first fatality ever attributed to a self
driving car, and I think it was a Tesla Um
and the unfortunate fellow was driving on an incline and
a truck was crossing his path. He was watching Harry
Potter on his dashboard. He had his autopilot on his car.

(24:37):
Now the autopilot actually read forward, and the white truck
crossed what was actually white sky. This is what they
think happened, and as a result, the truck's trailer qued
open space to the computer, and so the car just
drove right underneath the truck trailer. Um, that's exactly what

(24:59):
happen when the environment doesn't cooperate with a heuristic problem
solving system. If that system cannot discriminate between white truck
white sky, then it just sees sky. And so that's
actually a perfect example of a crash space where you
have a cognitive system that requires the environment to be

(25:22):
a certain way in order to properly solve the problem.
When the environment is changed or varies in a way
that it cannot accommodate, then you literally have a car
crash in that case. Now, that obtained as much for
self driving cars as it does for human social cognition.
So my big fear with AI generally is that you

(25:46):
and I evolved to solve each other um over literally
the history of life on this planet. We're enormously complicated,
and yet we're so finally attuned to one another that
we can make unbelievable predictions as to each other's behavior
and reliability and so forth. Now, what happens when you

(26:09):
take that ecology and you start injecting all these little
artificial agencies that are literally designed to cue your heuristic
social positive systems out of school, right for some sort
of commercial advantage. Now, all of a sudden, you find
human beings using these systems that are exquisitely designed to

(26:33):
make sense of other human beings. Now we're using these
systems to make sense of machines that have literally been
designed to mpre wallets or you know, swear our votes
or what have you. Now that's a crash space, and
it's a tremendously significant crash space because what it means

(26:56):
is that human beings are going to be able to
trust their social cognitive systems that suite of simple heuristics
we use to solve the monstrous complexity of each other.
We're no, we're gonna be able to trust that less
and less and less moving forward because the environment, the

(27:17):
invariant background that it's adapted to solve, no longer exists.
So really, what my big fear is is that we're
looking at the destruction of the human cognitive habitat, that
all this stuff that people are celebrating Mark Zuckerberg, even
President uh really is the beginning of the end of

(27:43):
the ability of human beings to make sense of each other,
the world themselves. What have you, Robert, I know some
of these ideas come up in some questions you had
about the fiction, right, Oh, yes, Um. At this point
I want to jump ahead to a question I had
for later, but I think it's ees in here. So
your your book Neuropath is a wonderfully scientifically disturbing thriller,

(28:07):
sort of near future neuroscientifically charged psychological thriller for those
who haven't read it, Well, you've just described here instantly
made me think of the semantic apocalypse. Is that the
same concept? Or is that a related concept? That's the
same concept, that's the that's the semantic apocalypse. I kind
of see it as having two stages to it. I
mean the first stage is actually on alien philosophy. I mean,

(28:31):
the first stage is just clearing away all these philosophical
conceptions of meaning and um coming to understand the practical
nature of of intentional cognition. And then the big problem
with semantic apocalypse has to be with the slow degradation
of the environments that intentional cognition requires in order to

(28:55):
function reliably right, And it's the depth of meaning in
every sense. When you say the intentional environment, there you
mean reasoning on the basis of inferring the intentions of others,
sort of what Daniel Dennet would call the intentional stance.
Actually greatly enjoying uh Denna's book right now, his latest book.
There's no intentional stance in my position. Um, there's no

(29:19):
uh perspectives or anything like that. I mean, intentional cognition
just simply means basically all the machinery in your brain
that enables you to solve the behavior of other biological
life in your in your vicinity to like incredibly rarefied extents, right, um,

(29:41):
and when you look and when you look at human
behavior in particular. The problem with the intentional stance is
that it's actually an attempt to use intentional cognition to
theorize intentional cognition. And that's the big reason why Dinnett
has such a hard time actually selling his position to
h their philosophers of mine who want intentionality in meaning

(30:04):
to be a thing, to be something in the world. Uh,
I share much of of then it's view, but I
don't see how the intentional stance has anything to do
with the parts I share your original question had to
do with, uh, just simply what I mean by intentional cognition,

(30:27):
And once again, it's simply the machinery in our head.
That's you know, what gets taken out by a stroke.
That's what gets you know, pathologically attenuated in cases of autism,
that's you know what gets degraded in dementia. You know,

(30:48):
that's where the action is. And UM, I think that's
all we need to to really get a theoretical grasp
on what's going on with meaning. In your Second Apocalypse saga,
an alien race known as the ink Roy play a
crucial role did on alien philosophy impart stem from trying

(31:09):
to understand their perspective and yes or no, how does
one try to think like the people of emptiness? How
does one try to think like an Inkroy? Wow? I've
tried to actually get into their headspace on several occasions.
I find it really difficult. I mean, the problem is
is that, you know, our own sort of experience, of
our own first person is so unbelievably specific to our

(31:33):
biology and to our history that that, um, as soon
as you've tried to actually think of an alien way
of thought ceases to make sense. I mean on Alien
philosophy is tied to the ink roy, not not so
much as uh exploration. Okay, so the incroy not so

(31:56):
much you know, the object of on alien philosophy as
they are kind of uh, the cipher for the ultimate
significance of alien philosophy, because the ultimate significance of Alan
philosophy is that, you know, once we understand that thought

(32:18):
is ultimately material physical um uh, and just simply part
of all the natural processes going on in our environment,
nothing on theologically extraordinary, then we realize that this boundary
that we've just we're just creeping up to and are
getting ready to cross, where we have literally gained the

(32:42):
ability to control physical processes at unbelievably small scales, cellular scales,
at this point where our own biology is becoming technology. Um.
If on alien philosophy is right, then ink oi are

(33:06):
one possible consequence of us crossing this boundary. So the
ink roy could possibly be us in some respect where
you know, been up on any sort of normative ideals
of or truth or what have you, and have literally

(33:28):
just simply collapsed into this bioheedionism that is to our
moral sensi abilities, absolutely horrific. And that's for me. The
ink y have always kind of represented the ugly consequences
of an alien philosophy, the fact that we are going

(33:53):
to climb out of this dream that we've had of
being exceptional in some way and this or that we
are just simply material and that we will just simply
chase fitness indicators, you know, via our technology, to the
point where we um become something that our present belves

(34:14):
can only be horrified by. Well, that's excellent, that's certainly
a horrifying thought to think of ourselves as the ink roy.
So in imagining alien philosophy, you've got these convergions, who
are you know, have some amount of sufficient uh convergent
evolution with us there there's somewhat similar to how our
information processing works at least. Um, is there any reason

(34:37):
to assume that, even if conscious cognition exists in conversions,
that it would feel the same to them as conscious
cognition feels to us. I know, that's kind of a
strange question to ask, because you can't even be sure
that another person's you know, consciousness exists or feels the
same as yours. But we tend to assume that feeling

(34:58):
like a human, you know, if sort of like one thing.
Mostly we could be wrong about that, But is it
possible to imagine radically different subjectivity is not just radically
different behavior throughout the universe. I mean, I'd argue that
it's not impossible to them that, and I think it's
just a lot more complicated than than people would give
it credence. And I think all you have to do

(35:19):
is look at the human case to see that um
has to be the case. Just think of the difference
between different philosophers and the phenomenological tradition like Heidegger, Myrtle, Punty,
uh Sartraum, husserl Shoots Gatamer. I mean, if you look
at all these different philosophers and all the different interpretations

(35:43):
they've given of the fundamental nature of experience. I mean,
some cases are similar, they certainly share similar commitments, but
there's a wild variance in how human subjective experience is describd. So,
given that we have difficulty even pinpointing what it's like

(36:07):
to be a human, the notion of being able to
understand what it's like to be an alien, it's got
to be that much more difficult, And so one of
the things they try to argue in that paper is
that you really, even if you can't say what it
would be like, what you could say is what kinds
of information they'd have access to, and what kinds of

(36:28):
information they wouldn't have access to, and what kinds of
problems they potentially might into as the ability to see
their own neglect structure, to understand what it was their neglecting.
So to give a strange answer to your question, I mean,
I think you can you can say things about the

(36:51):
shape of alien experience, even if you can't say much
of anything about the quality of of that experience. Yeah.
One possible idea I had here was I was wondering
if you think it would make a difference in the
evolution of an alien philosophy if it occurred in a

(37:11):
species that subjectively just had much less of a self
world distinction than we have. You know, we think of
ourselves as in the universe rather than being the universe.
But of course we are the universe. The universe is
in a small part, embodied in us and in the
brains that generate our consciousness. Um, we we just don't

(37:33):
feel that way yet. There are you know, they're meditative
exercises like you can do meditation that's specifically aimed at
trying to get you into that state of mind where
you feel like you are the universe. You just are
the world you are experience and wat right, right apprehension exactly.
Uh So, I wonder if you know, if you imagine

(37:54):
an alien species that doesn't naturally possess this self world distinction,
just feels that it is the universe, could we imagine
it would generate a radically different type of ontology of
the universe, of what it means to be and all
of the socially derived philosophy, the meta ethics and everything
like that. Yeah, and I think this is I mean,

(38:16):
I think this is actually a fascinating question. I mean
I've I've cracked my skull open against it a couple
of times now. And um, I mean what I think
is the case? I think I think meta cognition it
doesn't matter where you are in the universe. Meta cognition
is expensive. And if meta cognition is expensive everywhere and

(38:37):
you go in the universe, um, it is going to
be hard, very very hard for an alien species to
to it its own continuity with its own environments. So
I mean, they're going to be stuck relying on simple
heuristics in some way, shape or form. And if they

(38:58):
don't develop the medicoc it of capacity to be intuitively deduce,
you know, the fractioning heuristic nature of their own metacognitive capacities,
they're going to be duped the same way we've been
duped into thinking that the information they're getting is sufficient
to draw conclusions. And I think about human philosophy, how

(39:23):
strange it is. I mean, we've been asking the same
bloody questions for thousands of years, thousands of years, no answers,
no answers. I mean, really that's madness, isn't it. I mean,
the same thing and expecting a different result. I mean,
I mean, I know each philosopher tweaks something along the

(39:45):
way and they think that tweak is going to give
them a different result. But but it really is. You know,
a paradigm for madness, if you if you think about
philosophy in those terms, traditional intentional philosophy for flection on
the soul um ah. I think that yes simply follows

(40:07):
from the biological expense of metacognition, so that you can
have an alien species realize their continuity with nature, but
there will be some point in their past where they
assume the same kinds are similar kinds of exceptionalism as

(40:28):
we have, where they think that they're actually something apart,
simply because they lack the metacognition ability to actually cognize
themselves as continuous with their environments. You see, I mean
think about choice for instance, there's just nothing incredively obvious interest.

(40:51):
But they're just physically impossible when you consider it in
light of causal cognition. Um. Like, the reason we believe
in choices is simply that we have no way of
intuiting any causal providence for anything that happens inside of
our beings. And that will be the case for any

(41:12):
alien species whatsoever. So they're gonna be blind to the
causal providence that holds them continuous with the greater circuit
of nature. So and I think you know that that
first move, the move that humans made, Oh well, we
must be something apart from nature. We must be something exceptional,

(41:33):
something outside, transcendent, anomalous, autonymous, what have you. I think
that is going to be something Any intelligent species, working
through the bugs of its metacognitive capacities, is going to
encounter awesome. Now, as as we've been talking about the

(41:54):
crash scenarios alien philosophy, Uh, it's interesting to to think
back on the books of the Second Apocalypse Saga and
you know, and and see how this is utilized throughout
the books because this fantasy series has been the playground
for your ideas for so long here and it's generally

(42:14):
classified as as fantasy. Yourself classified as fantasy. So I
wanted to ask in your in advance of your recent
UH A m A on Reddit, you stated quote, if
God is dead, then fantasy is his grave. Can you
expand on that for our audience? Um, yes, yes, sure,
I mean the m A organizers Um. Uh, they give

(42:36):
you a fact sheet. In the fact sheet, the first
thing the fact sheet recommends is that you come up
with some something jaunty and light you introduce your A
M A. And I'm just such a conturian first thing
that in my head and uh, but it was Joe

(42:57):
very serious. At the same time. It's serious insofar as
it makes a reference, of course to Nietzsa's famous claim
that God is dead, and that's usually taken as UH
an emblem for basically the way in which enlightenment, reason
collapses into nihilism. And uh so, in that sense that

(43:20):
claim is very serious. If God is dead, then fantasy
is his grave. Um. If you see the death of
God as the problem of nihilism, then fantasy actually becomes
the greatest place in the world to try to understand
what the role of nihilism in contemporary society is. Fantasy

(43:45):
worlds are fantasy worlds because they resemble scriptural scriptural worlds.
The more of your world looks like that a India
or biblical Israel or or Homeeric, the more readily your
world will be identify fight as fantasy. Why is that, Well,
in all worlds, meaning is objective, morality is objective. There's

(44:10):
a fact of the matter when it comes to right
or wrong. You know, um uh, intentions are objective. All
these things have objective existence, and that's what accused them
as being fantastic. Now that's for me, that's crazy. For me.
That makes fantasy the canary in the coal mine. Fantasy

(44:34):
is where we can actually see meaning die in our culture.
We see all these worlds that science has rendered factually irrelevant,
you know, recreated over and over and over again for
the enjoyment and edification of millions millions of readers worldwide,

(44:59):
and the um uh that statement is just simply meant
to encapsulate that that, you know, we can look at
fantasy not as a throwaway, escapist, culturally retrograde uh mode
of entertainment. You know, that's ideologically tram open, how many

(45:23):
waves we can look at. Fantasy is actually the very
cutting edge of where human thought, in nihilism, our own
the fact of our own material nature come into conflict.
Fantasy is the spark, you know, when when that flint

(45:44):
and that iron are struck. So Scott, if you see
fantasy embodying um some of the meaning structures that we
used to get from mythology and religion, I wonder if
you see a kind of parallelism in in modern asy
of the different types of meaning and ethical uh structures

(46:05):
that you would get from different ancient mythology. Is one
thing that I think of is like the mythological world
that has a virtue ethic versus the one that has
a moral ethic. I don't know if you might consider
this like Greek mythology versus Buddhism or something where wherein
one you have you know, an ethic that's about being great,

(46:25):
and then another one in ethic that's about being good.
Did you see this paralleled in modern fantasy, I mean
fantasy like any other fictional platform in which to explore ideas.
Um just really just sort of you know, UM rips
the windows out and he kicks the doors down, right.
I mean, you really can go almost any direction you want.

(46:48):
Stephen Shaviro, who's a uh fantastic cultural uh critic, uh
who teaches at Wayne State University. He has a book
called Discognition where he literally um argues that fiction is
or has become the primary platform for being able to

(47:11):
explore philosophical ideas. For this very reason, the fact that
you can actually contrast the virtue ethics to a more
authoritarian ethics, the fact that you can ah ask questions
like what is the meaning of life without it just

(47:34):
simply collapsing into a joke. Only what happen it's outside
of fiction, it seems, Um. I mean, either you think
of meaning of life? What part of the bookstore you
go to to discover the meaning of life? You don't
go to the science section, you don't put to the
philosophy section. You go to the new wage called section.

(47:54):
Um fiction gives you that freedom to actually show that no,
I don't care what your a priori intuitions tell you,
we can actually build a plausible narrative as to you know,
what would come of the depth of meaning for instance. Um,

(48:18):
it just provides a platform that allows you to blow
past all of these philosophical constraints and explore things without
having to worry about being lectured by pendance, you know,
on on your ignorance regarding to sort that. All right,

(48:40):
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we're gonna jump right back in to the conversation. Now, Scott,
you've you've mentioned that, among other works, Frank Herbert's done
influence your your fantasy fiction. What's your take on Frank's
run of Doom books and were there any essons there

(49:00):
that informed your own world building and approach to a
multi volume series. Yeah, and this is a very good question,
I mean, because it actually my my experience reading Dune
probably is one of the has had the biggest influence
on my UM discipline writing these books over over the

(49:24):
past decade. Um. I mean, so my experience reading Dune
was I read Dune blew me away, absolutely blew me away,
and so what do what do I do? I go
out and it buy Children at Dune. I quoted by
God Emperor in Dune Messiah and I read in order

(49:45):
and God Emperor okay, but he lost me on and yah,
And I could just feel that, Uh. I just had
a feeling that he had kind of lost focus. Uh
lost the spark that drove the original vision. And so

(50:07):
for me, reading Doone was sort of a process of
being disappointed in in Um what I thought was his
commitment to to the vision. And so when I set
out and started these books, I'll never forget. I mean
darkness that came before I had come out with Think
was two thousand four, two thousand three, and I found
myself having lunch with one of my idols, Uh as

(50:33):
a younger man. Anyways, Um guy K and we're on Uh.
We're in Greektown in Toronto, and he asked me about
my next book and I told him as a sequel,
and he said, well, how many sequels do you have planned?
And I said, well, I think nine and he literally
said the last thing. This is another multi volume epic fantasy.

(50:59):
And no, my my heart did not think to the
through the bottom of my shoe, I said, no, I
think that what the world really needs is a multi
volume ethics fantasy that does not lose sight of its
vision guide and hum. And so that's the thing I mean.

(51:22):
And I was a young writer writing The Prince of
Nothing and The Warrior Prophet, I mean, I was teaching
at the time, and uh, the thousand fol thought even
more so, I really felt the pressure to actually write
those books, um inside of my delivery dates. And uh um,
I think both those books actually suffer for it, and

(51:43):
I think the vision suffered for it. I still think
I still love the books, but I would love to
rewrite them as well. Um. Moving into The Aspect Emperor,
I decided, no, I mean that's a problem. I committed
to the vision in the very beginning, and that means
I just like the vision called the call the Shocks,
and so you know, with the judging Eye from the

(52:05):
White Luck Warrior, and then of course the final volume
of The Aspect Emperor having into two, that was just
exactly what had happened, you know. Rather than worry about
what my agent would say or what my editors would say,
and I hate to say it, my my readers, I
thought you know what, everyone will be better served if
the vision is better served, because really, that's what people

(52:28):
are signing on for. They want to follow this story,
one story all the way through to the conclusion. They
don't want it to turn into a different story. They
don't want it to suffer because of my you know,
I mean I spent ten thousand hours with these characters.
I hate them at times. You know, readers, readers spend
a few dozen hours with them, and they don't get

(52:50):
tired of them the way a writer does. And so, um,
really all along that that experience reading Dune is really
sort of informed my decision making. You know, if I'm
hating this character, I'll stop writing. I'm not going to
force it, right, I know, I love that character. I'm
just tired of that character right now. I'm not going

(53:10):
to invent a new character, right because I'd just be
freshening freshening things up for me, my writer, my readers,
they don't want a new character. They just want to
see what happens to this character, this beloved character or
hated character or what have you. And U um, yeah,
so my whole m o kind of became one of
sit back, let the story tell itself the way and

(53:33):
needs to be told, and I think that's part of
the reason why I just feel so supremely confident in
these final two books. I know these people who disagree,
there always is, but but I really feel like, I
really feel like I accomplished that the promise I made
to ay all those years back in Greek Camp, well,

(53:55):
I really enjoyed the most recent one, and I'm looking
forward very much to The Unholy Consult coming out the summer. Correct. Yes, yes, yes,
hopefully you agree with me. Hopefully you think it you
think it works. So the Rooky series, right, I mean
I was certainly. I always feel it's it's a risky
scenario reading one of your books, because I don't know

(54:18):
to what extent You're going to damage my psyche a
little bit, you know, or force me. There's so much
fantasy takes one out of oneself, you know, and uh,
and it serves as as at times just pure escapism,
but that your work always manages to sort of do
both at the same time. So I'm able to to
escape into a dark, rich imagined world, but then also

(54:41):
you're forcing me to ask, at times troubling questions about myself.
And about humanity in general. That's the goal. I mean,
that's just what you just said there. That's writer's gold.
That's what I'm aiming for. What I'm trying to always
trying to do, is to try to uh immerse and
and push out at the exact same time. That's stuff.

(55:04):
It doesn't work for a lot of readers. It's true.
Now you've mentioned in interviews before how you might have
written some aspects of neuropath differently if you've finished it
after the birth of your daughter. Has becoming a father
affected the arc of the Second Apocalypse saga? Um, well,
I certainly hope not. I mean through the Second Apocalypse saga. Uh.

(55:24):
The the idea came to me when I was seventeen
years old, the basic narrative idea, and it's actually remarkably unchanged.
I mean, it's given the fact that it's you know,
sort of soaked up so much of my education basically,
you know, all those years in university, you know, studying literature,
and then all those years studying uh history, philosophy, and

(55:46):
then all these years now soaking up cognitive science. Um,
it's still that that narrative which ends at the end
of the Unholy Consult is still the same. So I
even dug out for the for a couple of the
final scenes of Dann Holy Console. I even dug out

(56:08):
material that I had written almost twenty years ago to
rework to put into the end of the book, and
that was really exciting for me. I mean it, uh,
the fact that you know, when you aim at a destination,
at a far far away destination, um, and when the
journey is a sort of fraud with reversals in this direction,

(56:32):
as as this journey has been for me, um, when
you actually arrive at your destination, and sometimes wondered this
must be what a nuclear missile feels like when it
actually hits its target. I mean, it just doesn't seem
possible that you can actually arrive at the place you
set out to arrive. And Uh, I really feel as

(56:54):
though I've closed um the deal when it comes to
that first seventeen year old idea. So there's more to come.
There's more to come yet. But I'm interested in something
you mentioned briefly in the paper, which is Susan Schneider's
idea that if we encounter alien intelligence, it's less likely

(57:15):
to be biological intelligence and more likely to be machine
intelligence or or what you might call more broadly post
biological intelligence. UM. So I assumed, based on the way
you mentioned it that you agree with that. Would you
agree with that? And what do you think about it? Oh? Yeah, yeah, no,
I think I think the argument is pretty iron clad.

(57:36):
I mean, if you just look at where we stand
in terms of our ability to travel between the stars,
and where we stand in terms of our ability to
manipulate our biology and uh basically offload um cognition onto

(57:57):
our Machini artifacts, I think it seems pretty clear that
the transition from biology to post biology is actually something
that becomes more technically feasible um earlier than interstellar travel.

(58:19):
Another question that that comes to mind, and this might
be just two specific and I'm, you know, tugging at
something that's supposed to remain mysterious. But there's a there's
a scene in I believe it's The Judging I where
the characters are walking through the ruins of the non men,
and it's in and and you do a wonderful job
just explaining the their artistic style, their their use of sculpture.

(58:43):
And I believe it's mentioned that the non men cannot
see paintings UH, and that one of the reasons they
they depend on sculpture. UM. Can you elaborate on that
at all? Or is that meant to be sort of
a mysterious cipher You always want to distinguish your your
various UH races and species that you create in UH

(59:07):
specul fiction and UM. This notion of non men not
being able to see visual two dimensional visual representations is
sort of like a textured textural detail along those lines,
But it actually does have a rationale. I me the
idea is that we just think of the cavemen in

(59:29):
Chauvais in France actually drawing you know, their uh, charcoal
stained fingers across the cave wall for the first time
and realizing you can see shape in that in the
experiment right turns out for umans we can actually see
horses and bison and figures of humans. UH. Given very

(59:56):
very small amount of visual information, finger coverage in charcoal
dragged across the cave wall is enough for us to
be able to recognize a lion or a horse. UM.
Famous horses of Chauveis are are a wonderful example of
UM for non men. Their ability you know, to cue

(01:00:17):
demission of scenes. UM just simply requires a bit more information,
in particular requires um death information so they can see
representation the way weekend. They just have difficulty with two
dimensions just simply because those the amount of information that

(01:00:38):
is given in a two dimensional representation comp isn't it
enough to actually cue the cognitive systems involved in recognizing
horses and tigers and what have you. So so there's
a kind of that. I mean, it's just one of
many ways in which you know, my blind brain theory,

(01:00:59):
uh uh um has sort of nuance the background and
the landscape of of the novels and the blind brain theory.
I don't know if you want to elaborate here, but
this is basically the idea of getting down to the
idea that the brain cannot perceive itself and that's one
of the big stumbling blocks to understanding ourselves in our

(01:01:20):
place in the world. Right, Yeah, exactly. It's just basically
the description I gave earlier, this notion of of meta
cognition being largely almost utterly blind as to the brain
zone operations and UM, and more importantly being blind to
that blindness and so being convinced that it actually can

(01:01:42):
see its own operations. And then that's the explanation for why,
you know, we have this madness called philosophy where we
simply asked the same questions over and over again, assuming
there's answers and during their proves I know in past
interviews you've you've referred to the ending of Neuropath, which

(01:02:02):
no spoilers for anyone, but it's a it's a particularly
bleak ending in many ways. And you've you've you said
that you might have written that differently if you had
written it after the birth of your daughter. Yeah, I
almost certainly would have written it differently, almost certainly would have.
It's a hard book to read it. I mean I
had a fan like I don't recommend the book. Actually,

(01:02:23):
I've stopped recommending the book to people. I've had good
friends email me, you know, give waited a couple of
years before reading the book and read the book, and
they basically said, I wish I hadn't read this book.
I've been feeling depressed for weeks. I found it at
the depressing but fulfilling reading. Um. I do occasionally recommend

(01:02:44):
it to people who I think you gave me a copy.
Rob to do now the speaking of parenthood and dark stories. Uh.
I assume reading plays a big role in your household.
What's the darkest children's book you've found yourself reading to
your daughter? Uh? In, is there a particular genre book
you're looking forward to being able to read with her? Well,

(01:03:05):
I mean, I'm looking forward to being able to read
The Hobbit with her. I mean The Hobbit was a
watership read for me, and uh, the idea of actually
being able to share that with my daughter makes me
feel giddy. I mean, it's crazy about with the balloons
and streamers up or something like that. But it's a
pretty dark book. But I mean all the all the

(01:03:27):
other's grown fairy tales, mother Goose fairy tales. I mean,
we have um a couple of collections and I read
them to my daughter, and my wife would prefer that
I not read them, just simply because they're so strange
and uh and violent, right, I mean, Hunsel and Gretel,
Holy moly, what a story that is. And uh uh,

(01:03:51):
I worry that as a culture, we're really we're really
losing faith in our children's ability to deal with darkness
and unsettling thoughts. And I actually think that that's a,
that's a huge social problem moving forward. I remember yearning

(01:04:12):
for that kind of stuff when I was a kid.
I remember when I was a little kid, I wanted
more dark. I was like not satisfied with how dark
and disturbing and weird the children's stories I was supplied with.
Were asked me what my favorite Bible story is? What
is your favorite Bible story? Sodom and God mora? I

(01:04:33):
just thought that was the coolest story ever. I mean, um,
obviously it's not a cool story at all. Well yeah,
and plus they have these illustrated a daughters seducing him
in the cave afterwards. I mean to sticks down right
creepy story. But those are the kinds of things I liked,
And I mean I grew up in religious households. Those

(01:04:56):
are the things that I caught my attention held it alright.
So one last question here, and this is just an
idol curiosity here. So I've long wondered if a Wrong
and the Rocks the last living in Karoa in your books?
Are they at all a wink at Kang and Kodos
on the Simpsons, Not that they have anything to do

(01:05:17):
with each other except the fact that there are pairs
of aliens. Yeah, yeah, no they're not. But it's pretty
hard to move forward. Thanks you that a little piece
of pollution there, and mean, well, maybe it just changes

(01:05:37):
the Simpsons. It elevates the Simpsons rather than Yeah, as
if Simpsons is the only immovable object in the universe.
I think it doesn't in anyways. It's funny like I
stopped reading um uh messageward banter on my books and stuff.

(01:05:57):
It's just just simply um to keep too late clean.
I just find you know, people, people will so will
mention something to you and it'll be like, hey, that's
a great bloody idea, actually better than the idea, and uh,
I mean it may feel that way. Your own idea

(01:06:18):
is always feel old to me, right, Um. I just
try to shelter myself from that a bit so I
don't get too much interference when it comes to following
through the original vision that I went on and on about.
Oh yeah, I can imagine where you definitely want to
plow ahead as much as possible towards that original vision
without polluting it in any way. Basically interaction. Yeah, I

(01:06:41):
mean the big thing is is like I say, you
spend ten thousand hours with these characters and this narrative
and stuff, and the tendency is to you make it broke, right.
I Mean, there's just so many ways in which an
author's exhaustion with the project ends up creeping into that project.
And why For me, so much of it just comes

(01:07:02):
down to U being mindful of my own exhaustion, I mean,
how I feel about my own material, and you know,
making sure I'm in the right place while I'm working
on the books so that the books actually express, you know,
what it does I wantcome to. Well, on that note,
thanks again for chatting with us, for answering our questions.

(01:07:23):
Your books are all available right now, the all the
books in the Second Apocalypse Saga, Disciple of the Dog Neuropath,
you know, for the Brave I guess based on our
discussions of it here, and the Unholy Consult. The latest
book in the Second Apocalypse Saga coming out this summer.
This summer. Yeah, and it's the culmination of what feels

(01:07:46):
like a lifelong quest for me now so basically uh
adolescent narrative that I've managed to pursue through you know,
graduate degrees and job changes. Strangely enough, the world, the
world just keeps trying to make my horrific vision come true.

(01:08:07):
So it feels like it's only become more relevant um
now than than it was back at the turn of
the millennium when I first got serious about publishing. And
if anyone went out there wants to follow you, you're
you're on social media, but also your blog Three Pound
Brain correct is is a great way to sort of
keep up with your regularly plice to to pester me

(01:08:31):
with with questions and whatnot, or just simply shoot shoot
me an email. You'll find my email on my blog.
But just google three Pound Brain and Baker and you'll
you'll find yourself at my profane doorstep soon enough. All right,
Thanks Scott, Thanks Scott, Thank you guys. So there you

(01:08:54):
have it. Thanks again to our Scott Baker for taking
time out of his day to chat with us about
alien philosophy and his dark fantasy works. It was really
a treat for me to finally chat with our Scott
Baker throw out a few questions here and there. I
tried to limit my geeky questions in this interview, but
I worked in one or two there again. The first
six books in the Second Apocalypse Saga are out there,

(01:09:15):
and the next one, The Unholy Consult, comes out July
eleven from Overlook Press. If you wanna learn more about
our Scott Baker and follow him, his blog A three
Pound Brain is our s Baker dot WordPress dot com.
He's also online our Scott Baker dot com and if
you want to follow him on Twitter. He is the
Devil's Chirp. That's just one word, of course, the Devil's chirp.

(01:09:39):
And finally, I want to drive him again that one
of the things that I really love about his work
is that I'm able to, on one hand, escape into
just this this wonderful dark fantasy world with all of
its magic and intrigue, all of it just just so
perfectly created for the reader. And then at the same
time he's throwing in all of these, uh, these thought

(01:10:00):
provoking notions about human experience and identity, motivation and cognition.
It really, you know, challenges you and and and forces
you to to to look hard into the mirror. And
I wanted to just share one more quick quote from him.
This is from his book The Judging I uh that's
in the Dark the Second Apocalypse saga. He says, I
remember asking a wise man once, why do men fear

(01:10:21):
the dark? Because darkness, he told me, is ignorance made visible.
And to men despies ignorance, I asked, no, he said,
they prized it above all things, all things, but only
so long as it remains invisible. All right, and uh again.
We'll throw all those links on the landing page for
this episode at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
And if you want to check out more of our work,

(01:10:42):
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(01:11:09):
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