Self, Mind and Supermind

Zen and its Western cousin, "Mindfulness" were a stop on my long journey to self-discovery. They introduced me to a line of investigation through subjective experience. In spite of the strong tradition against a philosophical interpretation in Taoism and Zen, all this came with a certain amount of "theory". To make a long story short, these disciplines challenge our idea of the "self" and, following ancient Buddhist tradition, regard the self (whatever that is) as impermanent**. Some would go as far as to claim that the self is an illusion. The Western "scientific" branch would claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain. Sam Harris is a leading popularizer of this view and he claims extensive subjective experience (hundreds of hours of meditation) as his "evidence".

Antonio Damasio takes a different view, based on thousands of case studies (a more trustworthy kind of "evidence"). His view is that our feeling of "being there" has its physical home in brainstem structures that we share with all mammals (at least). Sub-cortical structures, such as the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the thalamus play an intermediate role, with the cerebral cortex "assisting" and informing the core brain stem function.

Damasio doesn't deny the conventional functional analysis of brain functions. The problem with such analysis is that it reveals what information is sent back and forth without saying anything about how this information becomes conscious. To whom or to what is all this information relevant?

Damasio draws a distinction between two types of information coming into the brain stem from massive neural systems. Broadly speaking: "inside" and "outside".

Let's talk about the "inside" system here. The sensation of the status of your own body. To me, it is no accident that "meditation" techniques primarily focus on inner sensation - usually through bringing attention back to the breath or other direct bodily perception. This amounts to an attempt (with varying success) to draw attention away from the "outside" - perceptions and the chattering distractions of the everyday world: the world of Samsara.

Now, the ancient sages had no idea that "inside" and "outside" amounted to two quite distinct perceptual systems. For the most part, they were unaware of the role of the brain in any of this. So, the experience afforded by directing attention to the "inside" mind - often for hours or days at a time - felt very different. At least calming or even mystical. My theory is that the "experts" like Sam Harris have succeeded in suppressing "outside" brain functions enough so that they experience or remember experiencing (not quite the same thing) "loss of self".*

Such an experience would involve almost entirely suppressing functions of the cerebral cortex. The mysterious memory function of the hippocampus (subcortical) would continue to "tick over", explaining why Sam remembers losing himself. Of course, Sam avoids giving a straight answer to "who" is remembering having no self. Zen loves paradox.

For many years, I have pictured my brain stem when I talked about my "lizard brain" - the source of my animal instincts that often got me into trouble. Damasio has allowed me to change this image slightly to think of the "lizard" as me. It's a part of me shared by mammals. It's just a shared structure bequeathed through common descent from a distant ancestor. The lizard brain in a dog is no more "primitive" than my own.  (I hate the word "primitive" since it tends to sprinkle evolutionary fairy dust over ideas).

What is different is this massive "cap" of cortex that filters perception of the outside world. In particular, I have a "forebrain" (prefrontal cortex) that is, compared to other mammals, rather large., along with "speech centers" that seem to be unique to humans. What are these structures doing?

Obviously, the answer that question would fill a library, full of books I would probably not understand. At my current humble non-professional level of understanding, here are some things I imagine the prefrontal cortex is doing:

• It's the part of the brain most like a computer. It calculates. It "reasons".
• An important function is to suppress and override impulses to action coming from my "lizard" subcortical structures like the amygdala (flight or fight). It's the forum for "sober second thought".
• It performs two distinct kinds of "calculation". One involves abstract questions and the outside world. The other involves social calculations. The latter is far more complex and equally important to survival. Who can I trust? What behavior is socially acceptable? What is "right" and "wrong" to do? What is the "moral" thing to do? What can I get away with?

So I wind up with an image of myself as a lizard in my head, not much bigger than my thumb, trying to make sense of the world with a huge over-growth of evolutionary "new" equipment that allows me to regard both morality and the Big Bang as objectively "real". This new equipment doesn't add much to my ability to perceive the world more accurately than, say, my dog. What it adds is the ability to connect my humble powers to those of other human beings. In fact, my "world" - "umwelt" - is shared. It is the supermind.

Anyone who has seen a video of a wolf pack running down a caribou will see that the wolves have a pretty good idea of what the other wolves are doing. Wolves have a shared umwelt. But it's nothing compared to the way humans coordinate attention, intention, perception, resources, and behavior to do things like putting one of their members on the moon for "all mankind".

That's what makes us special. That's what makes us dangerous.

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* I tend to distrust "data" gathered by introspection since my own mind has quite often provided compelling evidence for factually wrong ideas. My lizard is easily fooled. For me, meditation techniques help to calm my chattering brain - nothing more. The scientific supermind is where I go for the facts and theories.
**  I don't attempt to decipher the muddle of what became of some branches of Buddhism, which eventually came to include ancestor worship, heaven and hell, gods and reincarnation of "something", when the Buddha explicitly (seems to have) built his whole teaching on the impermanence of everything, including the "mind".  At home, "On the ground", Buddhism seems to be as crazy and superstitious as medieval Christianity.

Tragedy

THE HUMAN TRAGEDY

There has been a lot going on since my last "status report". A few little insights have added up to quite a change in outlook - not so much from a logical point of view, but from the subtle emotional impact of it all. This post builds on some previous fragments and may seem to ramble a bit, but here goes ...

The Sam Harris podcast on consciousness made a few interesting points that take awhile to sink in.

• Sam points out that it is hard to imagine what an "explanation" of consciousness would look like. There is something about it that puts it in a different category from even the most notoriously difficult to explain things such as quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave equation.
• Thomas Metzinger plugs a powerful meme into my head when he suggests that final acceptance of our mortality leads to a "tragic" view of human existence.

That word, "tragic" seems to chew around the edges of everything I have intellectually decided to make it all feel real and more urgent.

Making things "feel real" is the subject of a book on neuroanatomy: Decarte's Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. For me, This built on the excellent "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Their Best and Worst.", along with "Zen and the Brain", which I read a few years back and started me on my "Zen Phase". Taken altogether, these texts have made me more and more comfortable with the general workings of the brain, along with some respect and awe. We know a lot, but there is a lot we don't know - perhaps a lot we will never know - cannot know (see Sam's first point). The issue of consciousness (the inexplicable "first-person" perspective) is fascinating and worth an essay or two on its own, but I will leave that for now.

It is obvious that we are a brain - more precisely we are a body with a brain (turns out you can't ignore the body when you consider emotions, which are phenomena in the brain). Through experiments and injury, you can disassemble the personality and, by inference, the mind itself - the "soul". Even major injury to the "body" (apart from the brain) can result in major changes to "personality" - who we are.

We have an unknowable soul that is mysteriously identical to the very fragile and mortal body (seen from an inexplicable first-person point of view). This is the tragedy.

UNIVERSAL IGNORANCE

As Metzinger points out, the vast majority of human beings deny the tragedy itself or respond in ways that completely deny the reality of the human condition. The "Abrahamic" religions, deny mortality in a direct way-we survive death (for better or worse - new problem). Buddhism and Hinduism, assume that the "soul" lives on to be reborn. This creates additional problems that were never far from the mind of the Buddha. All of these religions assume with no evidence that there is a kind of "moral machinery" behind the world, that cares about the minutiae of human behavior. 

Perhaps  Buddha* saw this most clearly. Life is unavoidable suffering. But his response was to withdraw from life and escape from the imaginary "wheel of rebirth". If life is awful, we need to avoid being continually re-born into it. So both his response (withdrawal) and the reasons for it were, to say the least, flawed. It's worth asking if life really is unavoidably awful but that's a subject for another essay ...

Over history, Buddhism has become just another religion, split into dozens of factions, including the one sponsoring genocide in Myanmar (Burma). As in all religions competing "schools" of authority lead to endless fragmentation and violence over fundamentally irreconcilable issues. This doesn't happen when authority is about something real, such as quantum mechanics, which enjoys its own controversies, rarely resulting in death. In science, evidence counts. In religion, only authority counts. But I digress ...

Religious wars and persecutions were sponsored by the Christian religion from the beginning (there are echoes in the New Testament over whether Jewish law applied to new Christians), through the middle ages (the Crusades) but also the Catholic/Protestant divide which still claims lives in Ireland. Again, the dispute is over who is right (the authority) about a subject that bears no relationship whatever to verifiable reality. Disputes like this can never be resolved - they simply fester and become more and more divisive over finer and finer points of mythology. The only way you can be "right" is to kill off those who disagree with you. That's the "solution" that has appeared in history for thousands of years and continues to this day.

Those who reject "organized" religion fail to fully re-think the question. We hear vague bullshit like "Things happen for a reason" or "There must be a power greater than us". Those who reject even this can claim to be "spiritual", which usually means attributing some cosmic significance to the soul or life in general, denying its indispensable connection to the physical brain along with the alarmingly contingent nature of human existence. 

Those who reject all of the above tend to deny the existence of the "soul" altogether. Supposedly, our feeling of being in the world is an "illusion". This idea seems to be a modern spin on the ideas from some minority sects of Buddhism - usually explicitly acknowledged by the modern Guru in a faint claim for authority. We also see quite a few philosophers and scientists who make grand claims to "explain" consciousness (usually "explaining it away") while never peering into the consequences of a worldview stripped of the most fundamental assumptions of religion - the existence of the soul.

Finally, we are left with hardcore skeptics who sweep aside the whole issue as not worth discussion. The problem is that who and what we are matters. Adopting a sensible position on this matter would seem to form the basis of any other decision, both personal and public.

So that's the second aspect of what I am calling the "tragedy" of the human condition. We live in a tragedy but tragically fail to recognize it. The mythical Buddha* would have advice for us on this score. Step 1 would be to accept the fact as an unavoidable circumstance, not a problem to be solved (by ritual, prayer, or living right for example). Step 2 is to realize we are all in this together, which should inspire genuine compassion for all living things. Or so it seems to me.

BEING ALL IN IT TOGETHER - GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

One thing that neuroanatomy teaches is that a great deal of our human neocortex (the gray matter) is taken up with getting along with / cooperating with other human beings. Specifically:

• We have extensive areas on the left side of our brains devoted to speech and speech recognition. This makes sense only in the context of communication with other humans. Speech is instinctive and fundamental to who we are. We are not born knowing a language but we are hard-wired to learn one.
• We have brain areas that specialize in face recognition. We are also great at voice recognition.
• Our logic centers, in the cortex that govern our ability to make decisions in social situations - such as what to say when your wife asks if her dress makes her ass look big. Social calculations play a huge role in our lives but we pretend that mathematical logic governs what we do or at least should govern it.

In my "Programmable Ape" blog, I have explored the idea that we somehow "clump" into entities ("dragons") that acquire a life of their own - sometimes having aims that work against the interests of the human beings that make up the "clump". Neuroanatomy provides the details of how we are "wired in" to such organizations, often to the detriment of ourselves and any other human being. We are assimilated. Resistance is futile.

THE TRAGEDY OF LANGUAGE

The "glue" that binds us together in clubs, nations, religions, corporations, and armies is primarily language. But language is, to say the least, imprecise. We can lie with language much more easily than by any other means. We can use language to sound like we are talking about something real (such as what "God Wants") when there is no substance behind the words. It is language that makes the poison of religious conflict possible. It is language that inspires young men to kill and die for causes spun out of thin air.

The Koran praises itself and mandates that the believer trust words over reality in these words:

This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.

Mysteriously, the word of God has required entire libraries of interpretation ("scholarship") and spawned dozens of sects at war with each other over fine points of interpretation. It is taken for granted that the ordinary believer cannot figure out what the Koran is saying without consulting one of many dozens of self-styled "authorities". This is only possible if there is no evidence behind the squabbles. It's solely about authority. Squabbles over authority are made more violent when the parties speak different languages (as do the Shia and the Sunni). The Shia (who speak Persian) remark in hushed tones that it seems that Allah only understands Arabic.

It is easy to see the entire history of religious conflict as one inspired by language itself: the use of language to support spurious claims of authority and the role of language to make different parties unintelligible to each other.

Of course, language plays the same role in International conflict and many conflicts within nations, including my own (Canada), which. 150 years after its birth as a nation, struggles over "language rights" for French and Indigenous peoples.

Language is the main instrument in the toolbox of those whose agenda is based on "us and them". This is the third face of our tragedy. We are helplessly tossed in a bag with our friends and neighbors, weighted with our superstitions and assumptions, then thrown overboard into an uncaring world.

LIVING IN A TRAGIC DRAMA

Tragedy has long been recognized as a rich theme in drama. Even our comedies - the good ones - encourage us to smile at our own foolish nature. We are not entirely uneducated in this way of seeing the world. Even in tragedy, the dignity of the human soul can shine. One might even say it is only in tragedy that we find deeply inspiring meaning. We are not living in a Walt Disney version of Jungle Book. We are living in a dangerous world where our lives and the lives of those we love can be snatched away at any moment. This is the curse of human consciousness: to know our ultimate fate. To my way of thinking, this is where we need to start if we are to face life and find meaning in it.
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* What we learn about Buddha in the "West" is the "Walt Disney" version. For those of us who have traveled in the birthplace of Buddha, Buddhism seems like a rather jarring example of ignorant religion. Study of the actual writings of Buddha reveals a man deeply caught up in the superstitions of his day. The way of life he recommends seems right and sensible only when viewed through the spectacles of an individual hungry for an authority to show the way. The same considerations apply to Zen, which has been laundered for the West as "mindfulness" and Hinduism laundered as "Yoga". Even self-appointed 21st-century sages such as Sam Harris seem unaware of how much they rely on the ersatz authority and (lack of) standards of evidence coming from "Eastern Wisdom" doctrines.

The Hard Problem - Who Counts?

Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like.

For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible. The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that is capable of experiencing the world in some way similar to the way I do. I know I have a soul (but I may still be wrong). I'm less sure about you.

I love to collect impertinent questions about consciousness. Let me give you one that had my head spinning for awhile.

Sam Harris poses a thought experiment:

Suppose we could build a robot that perfectly mimicked human behavior with the ability to totally fool anyone as to its mechanical nature (passing the Turing Test with flying colours and then some). In philosophy, this entity is called a "philosophical zombie" which is identical to a human in all respects except lacking a "soul".  Typically, Sam sprinkles scientific fairy dust on an old problem by imagining the zombie to be a robot. This is just a modern spin on an old issue [2].

Harris claims (and I agree) that we would treat this robot as a "person" long before this high level of functionality was achieved. After all, people love their cars and pet spiders.

So Sam asks, What is the meaning of such a relationship? If you fall in love with a robot, are you not, in fact, alone in he universe and just fooling yourself about being "in love"? Good question.

Harris is famously capable of asking impertinent questions, but, like the rest of us, rather poor at coming up with pertinent answers [1]. What is it that is bothering Harris? One thing you will know about Harris if you listen 5 minutes into any of his podcasts is that he loves an audience. He would clearly not be doing what he's doing if he had only an audience of robots (I feel the same way about my blog, by the way). So it makes sense for him to be horrified by the notion that a person might have nothing but "relationships" with soulless machines [3].

Perhaps Sam needs to get over himself. Really, there is no way to know for sure if Sam himself is not a robot . At the core of his concern is his need to know that there is a soul-to-soul connection which, as a byproduct, validates that he himself has a soul.  Possibly a robot would falsely validate Sam's soul by acting in a programmed way like a human being but, inside, being nothing but millions of lines of code instructing the machine to act like a living being. How does Sam know that he is not a zombie? Impertinent question: why does it matter? Is it not annoying to as the Universe the ultimate question and get back the response: Why do you ask?

Is it possible that one of the key attributes of this hypothetical "soul" is simply the desperate need to contact other souls? Perhaps one preoccupation of "souls" is to prove their own existence - another form of the "hard problem"!

We can understand Sam's problem without invoking the idea of soul at all (this happens a lot with "soul" questions). Humans are social animals. Our evolutionary survival strategy gives us hard-wired brain functions that recognize faces, voices and social status. We have "mirror neurons" that allow us to experience the behavior of other people as our own - an ability that allows the great apes (and some birds) to learn by watching. The great evolutionary achievement of man is language, which makes no sense unless it's an excellent way to share experience. Thus, we can suspect that this hunger for connection arises out of human nature. Not necessarily anything to do with "souls".

Along with this "deep hunger" are two more notable human characteristics: curiosity and self-awareness. We can easily understand why humans would be aware and curious about their own need to connect with others "like themselves" and for some of them at least to ask, What do I mean by "like myself"? Damn. The hard question again.

Returning to Sam's concern, I'd say that it "feels good" to make connections with entities that feel like souls. It's more than just feeling. It's good for you - a way of behaving in a human way. Not feeling this way is "swimming upstream", bound to create unnecessary tension and suffering. Cutting to the chase, our lives will feel just fine even if we are living in a society of zombies. By definition, zombie relationships will fulfill all the inner needs of a human unless that human persists in asking unanswerable questions.

So Sam, If you can't find someone to love you, buy a dog. Or start a blog ...

But wait! Suppose Sam is, indeed, a zombie. This is an even more chilling scenario: a world consisting of nothing but robots - just machines pretending to interact in a human way. A world of intelligent cuckoo clocks. Since there is nobody left to fool, we can imagine that the robots fall far short of accurate human simulation. If we think about it for a second, this is worse than Sam's empty love affair. We can see that we don't need Sam at all to reach this horrifying dystopia. What if only our machines are left and there are no souls at all in the Universe?

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[1] Sam is also good at burying his ideas in a deep layer of scientific "fairy dust", making it seem like he's got a new spin on very old problems. By sleight of hand, it can seem that his new way of asking the old problem actually answers the old problem.

[2] In fact, Sam's problem may not even deserve treatment as a philosophical question at all. Is it not painful to be in a relationship with someone who "has no idea who I am?" Is that not a common complaint? Is that not a relationship that lacks "soul to soul" connection - like living with a zombie? Possibly even feeling yourself to be a zombie?

[3] The vast majority of "hits" on this blog come from Russia. I assume that these are "bots" crawling the web for nefarious purposes not including an interest in philosophy.

Sam Harris Explains the AI Myth

TED Talk: Can we build AI without losing control over it?

This talk packs most AI mythology into a single 15 minute presentation. Harris joins a long list of "talking heads" that warn us that AI is a clear and present danger. We are just around the corner from an AI armageddon. 

His bottom line is that this disaster is real and unavoidable. His complaint is that we are not sufficiently scared about it.

AI, like the concept of God, becomes more and more real in the public mind just because everyone is talking about it.

His assumptions:

1. Intelligence is a matter of information processing. He employs the fallacy that our brains are "mere matter" so we will eventually build something like brains because our brains are just "mere matter"
2. We will continue to improve our machines.
3. We don't stand on a peak of intelligence. He assumes that intelligence is defined as in #1 and puts everyone on a curve between a chicken and John Van Neuman. It's "overwhelmingly likely" that machines will "explore this spectrum" to the point where you will "obviously" build something millions of times faster than a team of Standford researchers.

Past about the 9 minute mark, Harris totally abandons any connection to machine intelligence and slips into a polemic that assumes the catastrophe he thinks he's established as inevitable. AI is assumed to be possible, assumed to zoom past human "intelligence", and assumed to become God-like. 

Let's unpack his assumptions.

At the most basic level, Harris is presenting himself as uniquely capable of seeing the future. Marvin Minsky,  is pessimistic about making predictions in the field he founded.  But Harris, who has no claims to expertise in the field, knows better. Much has been written about the laughable track record of "futurists" in general.

The "elephant in the room" is the term AI itself. Those who warn about the dangers of "Artificial Intelligence" assume that industry is hard at work creating machines that are more and more "intelligent". To the average person, "intelligence" is a human quality and therefore, "Science" is working on building very smart humans. A flood of movies featuring metallic people creates the impression that "AI" is just around the corner. This seems to be the modern equivalent of the vision of interstellar travel we saw in Star Trek. The level of plausibility is similar.

What we are really working on is "Machine Intelligence", which Harris correctly defines as "Information Processing". But the "Information" a machine "processes" is not the "information" that the human mind processes. It is more precisely referred to as "data". It becomes "information" only in the eye of a human being, who is uniquely capable of detecting the "meaning" of the data. "Meaning" is a very slippery concept. We are still struggling to understand what it would be for a machine to "understand" what it's doing. The pioneers of AI (such as Marvin Minsky) are still with us and they admit that they still have no convincing definition of what it is to "reason". Half a century of AI research is showing a divergence, not a convergence between the concept of machine intelligence and the human mind.

Is it true that intelligence is "nothing more" than information processing - "mere computation"? This is the "brain as computer" analogy. It's important to realize that this is an analogy, not a fact.  Harris uses the most naive possible reductionist assumption: because our brains are "just" atoms whizzing around in our skulls, there is nothing more to them. "In principle", not only is intelligence just a matter of physics, it's a matter that we can completely understand and duplicate with equivalent machines. In fact, the more we learn about brains and minds, the more we discover layers of complexity that don't seem to be fruitfully explained or described by the physics of "atoms whiling around", by which we must assume Harris means "quantum mechanics".

There are radically different ways of describing human intelligence. For example, "Surfaces and Essences" portray the human brain as outstripping computers in the ability to form and use analogies and form new categories based on experience. At bottom, computers are terrible at detecting meaning. One of the most compelling observations in "Surfaces" is that meaning has little do do with "logic" - the basis of all computer software.

Can we assume that "thinking machines" will continue to improve endlessly? It's fair to put this assumption up against a similar prediction about other technologies. Are we improving our ability to explore space "in person" endlessly? At what point will we discover a way to travel faster than light and explore he galaxy? Even here on Earth, are we improving the speed of aircraft "endlessly"? Are our transport jets getting faster and faster? Will we continuously improve the efficiency of the chemical engines or does thermodynamics pose a limit? In the case of computers, can we assume that they will get faster and faster "without limit"? Can we assume that the "intelligence" of machines is solely a function of speed and sophisticated design or are there things that are intrinsically impossible for a machine to do? 

Do we have any sign at all that machines are on the verge of designing better versions of themselves?

What we do see is humans getting smarter and smarter as they build and use more and more powerful machines of all sorts. It is the human mind, not the machine mind that seems to hold promise of unlimited intelligence. The danger is posed by humans who control other humans by means of machines. The problem seems to be that we create human organizations that reduce humans to "cogs in the machine" and these organizations don't seem to be getting "smarter". In fact, we see dumber and dumber human organizations employing more and more sophisticated technology. 

The trend for human to use technology to enslave other humans is not new. Genghis Kahn used the technology of the horse to enslave vast swaths of Eurasia. America knocked Japan out of World War II with an atom bomb that didn't design itself, select its target or deliver itself.

We are justifiably worried about the power of information technology to monitor our every movement. In the hands of a totalitarian government, such technology would seem to lock in the power of those who control it, spelling the end of our dreams that society can be organized to benefit all is members. In fact, we see this actually happening all over the world. While the power to monitor and control is aided and abetted by sophisticated technology, it's also true that we are seeing hints that there are limits to the power technology bestows on its owners. These limits are precisely due to the inability of machines to discover meaning in all the vast data they process so quickly. 

The real danger to humanity is that technology itself, in any form, forces humans into more and more narrow "slots" in big machines of human construction. We have "jobs". Our role in society is reduced to the mathematics of economics. We are producers, consumers, soldiers or superfluous. We have seen the enemy and he is us.

Assimilation and Atheism 101

Interesting discussion between leading atheists 
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A wide-ranging discussion of subtle issues with atheism, including an unusually subtle treatment of why people accept religion - the process of assimilation and the difficulty in freeing people from assimilation.

• Risks associated with criticizing Islam;
• When to take the gloves off - being polite to people who have been indoctrinated;
• Vetting the authorities;
• How liberal kids get assimilated to radical Islam;
• Sam Harris speaks eloquently about the powerful meme of Islam;
• Dawkins doesn't understand that everyone doesn't think like he does;
• Dennett refers to the "narrative arc" in TV shows and movies, which primes a person for assimilation;
• The appeal of Islam to intelligent, liberal women;
• Ali calls Islam a form of madness;
• Dennett compares crime committed for religious reasons with drunk driving
• Harris points out that religious delusion is excluded in DSM 
• Are religious people just lazy;
• Dennett makes the important point that religious people "just go along", they are not intellectuals;
• Harris makes the point that theologians are not lazy. Making sense of religion is hard work;
• Dawkins is unsympathetic - regards believers has having their ears stopped up;
• Harris points out that crazy Christians understand crazy Muslims better than atheists do. Atheists don't take belief seriously;
• Ali points out realization of individual identity as a core challenge to Islam. "Submission to Allah" is basically surrender of individuality;
• Dawkins makes a similar point about the depth and scope of the "bossiness" of religion, far beyond reason. Why do religions make things so hard for believers?
• Dennett points out the parallel between religious hokum and "viral" memes - "infectious stupidity". 
• Dawkins- quotes Chesterton- when people stop believing in religion, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything;
• Harris makes the point that, for example, there is nothing in Science to fill the "Santa Clause Hole";

The discussion is continued without Ayann, adding Christopher Hitchens

• doubt - the idea that doubts are "normal";
• faith - nice discussion of how belief without evidence becomes evidence and a barrier to further evidence;
• Dennett calls it all a "bag of tricks" - cons could be used to sustain anything;
• Harris points out how easy it is for Christians to spot the "bag of tricks" in other religions;
• Theology is like stamp collecting - theologians "take in each other's laundry";
• Dawkins again displays his lack of appreciation of myth;
• Dennett confusing myth with metaphor;
• Harris points out the pride of religious people when they maintain their faith in spite of the "hammer blows" that destroy all its premises;
• Dennett complains that the professionals "know better" but the problem with the flock is that they have ceded authority to the professionals. The buck stops with the professionals. The pastor's job is to know what he's talking about;
• How is scientific authority different from religious authority? Competitiveness, structure of the discipline, predictions, puzzles vs. mysteries, glorification of "mystery";
• giving up the demand for intuitive understanding; 
• religious moves are not allowed in debates. For example, if you say this is just what I believe, you disqualify yourself from the debate;
• Harris: "Is there a single sentence in the Bible or Koran that shows it's not a work of a human author?" If these are not "magic books", Christianity and Islam collapse.