Ross Douthat: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There’s some day of transition. That to me seems very weird. For a long time, everything operates according to quantum mechanics and Einstein and Newton. Then one day, there’s a monkey or a tree shrew. That animal eats a magic banana and is somehow infused with free will or a soul or the ability to contemplate the deity, but it’s still subject to all the same physical laws. It would be very odd to me. It’s like Descartes’s interaction problem, how one day is different from the next. Look, what does the day look like when the trilobite becomes the God-perceiving human? What’s the critical event in the middle? I don’t know what the critical event is in the middle. I don’t think we have any kind of access to that. Even in principle, like if someone believed in a fairy world that we can’t access, you could be skeptical.…

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