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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, that's where you'll also find it. You'll find blog posts, you'll find podcasts, you'll find videos, links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. We're on all those things. And if you want to make your ignorance visible to us, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff works dot com? 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