Episode #094 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I hope you love the show today.

So, if you’ve listened to this show before, you know that something that’s a bit of a tagline for this show, or at least the kind of people that like to listen to this show, is the phrase “Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday.” Really is a neat phrase. To be honest, I wish I could use it a lot more. Part of me is just scared that I’m going to become like a hacky radio guy, and I’ll start calling you guys the Philosophize This! nation, stuff like that.

Point is, it’s a wonderful phrase, right? I certainly didn’t come up with it. In fact, the origins of that phrase, “Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday,” I share with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson, if you don’t already know, is an absolutely fantastic scientific educator. If you have Netflix, he’s the guy on the Cosmos series that whenever he’s making some sort of deep, profound point, he just kind of gazes into your eyes, talks to you like he just spiked your drink or something. That guy.

But the original thing that he said—he was responding to somebody that was asking him what advice he’d give to somebody that’s young and ambitious and they’re trying to make waves in the world. And he responded, I think quite brilliantly, two pieces of advice for you: know more today about the universe than you did yesterday and limit the suffering of others. Now, we’ve talked quite about the importance of the first part of that. But what about the second part, limiting the suffering of others? Do you think that’s something we should be trying to do on a regular basis? Should that be an intrinsic good that you assign to your life when you’re young on the same level as “know more today than you did yesterday?”

Seems tempting to say yes, right? I mean, after all, what kind of person says no to that? I mean, you have to be some kind of sadistic monster to have a choice between suffering and no suffering, and you land on suffering. Who does that, really? Maybe it’s helpful to start with another question. What is progress anyway? What do we mean when we talk about something being progress for humanity? Are we talking about anything that limits the suffering of others? Are we talking about maximizing human happiness? Two very different things. Are we talking about the propagation of the species? Are we talking about the propagation of all life on this planet including the longevity of the earth itself?

Now, at first glance, I mean, I get it. I probably sound like an eighth grader trying my hardest to ask a deep question. It may seem like this question doesn’t even matter. And to be fair, historically, it hasn’t mattered that much. I mean, if you’re living thousands of years ago in Babylon, and the problems facing humanity as you know it are that there’s a drought going on or some pandemic disease is ravaging people’s lives or your grandma’s foot is black from frostbite, whether you believe that human progress is the happiness index or the propagation of the species or life or whatever, your solution to these problems don’t really change that much. Right? I mean, your answer if there’s a drought is still to get some water. If there’s a disease, you get rid of it. If your grandma’s feet are black from frostbite, you rub the feet together really fast and you try to start a fire with them. The answer was clear back then.

Now, on the other hand, in today’s world, things aren’t so clear. Because once you end the drought or once you cure the pandemic disease, it’s not like there’s no problems in the world that you can focus on anymore. The problems we’re focusing on just become more fragmented and niche. Not to mention, if that wasn’t bad enough, all the technology that we have at our disposal, despite all the seemingly good stuff it does, drastically complicates things, because technology allows us to have way more options than we otherwise would have. More options means more difficult decision-making. More difficult decision-making means we need to have some sort of come-to-Jesus moment where we think about what exact criteria we’re going to use to determine which option to pick.

In other words, this question of “What exactly is progress?” may be more important today than it ever has been at any point in history. I mean, even if you can give a definitive answer to that question right now—you know, let’s say progress is the maximization of human happiness to you—things quickly become very complicated because it’s not like there’s a consensus about what the best way is to bring that world about. For example, let’s say we want to make people happy; do we try to eliminate human suffering as a means of doing that? Well, some people would say yes. Some people would say no. They’d say that to be as happy as you can means you got to offset that happiness with different types of suffering.

So, the person may say back to that, okay, I’m not talking about all suffering. It’s certain types of suffering, involuntary suffering. Okay, so, let’s say our goal is that we want to bring the billions in poverty on this planet up to a certain standard of living—you know, food, water, shelter, economic sustainability. In that world—just a question—in that world, is building a rocket ship so we can fly to Mars and take a core sample—should that be considered progress? Some people might say no. No, we got to focus on the home front. But on the other hand, how can we really know for certain that a bunch of super geniuses sitting around building a rocket ship and going to mars, how do we know that that might not innovate some technology that allows everyone on earth to have food, water, and shelter?

My point is, there’s a lot of questions. And I think the first step to solving them, or at least knowing what questions are worth asking, is by trying to get to the bottom of what exactly we mean when we reference progress. Sometimes it can seem like every single person has their own individual definition of what progress is. Sometimes it can seem like if you’re even marginally politically aware, you have some hashtag that you subscribe to, right? And that life is this 70-year neurotic dance from hashtag to hashtag trying to bring about a better world. Maybe you were an advocate for stem cells in the 1990s. That moved on to being pro-America and democracy post 9/11. That moved on to being anti-interventionist once the war lost its luster. And that moved on—I mean, you get it, right?

I guess the question we got to ask ourselves is, what are the similarities between all these hashtags I support throughout my life? Do all these aim to limit the suffering of others? Do they all aim to sustain sentient life on this planet? What world, exactly, are all these things aiming towards? Because you can just imagine if Donald Trump came up to you and he said, “Look, I’m going to let you do anything you want with the world. Any possible thing you can come up with about the world that you want changed, I’m going to make it happen. It’s going to be tremendous. It’s going to be really, really tremendous. Just wait and see.” What would you say? What would you do?

You’d have to acknowledge that at some point your request would end, right? At some point, it couldn’t go on forever. What would that world look like? Well, if you actually do that thought experiment, what you quickly realize—at least what I realize—is how little I know about how to actually solve these things and how complicated the world is when you start to consider all of the unintended consequences that might happen. I mean, it really does get overwhelming for me very quickly. And why should I feel bad about that, really? Was I born to know everything about the earth and save the world? I read CliffsNotes into a microphone for a living. What do you guys want from me?

Now, the reality is, not everybody looks at themselves in this self-deprecating way. And with all this ambiguity about what exactly we should be doing when it comes to bringing about progress, a very tempting trap that a lot of people fall into is they sort of become like a single-issue voter for their entire life. You know, it can be pretty daunting to consider all the different options and all the different variables. And what a lot of people will do is they’ll say, “Okay, well, I’m a happy person. I’m not walking around miserable because of the way the world is. But you know what? If only we could get this person elected, then everything’s going to be great. If only we could get this group of people to leave, then everything’s fine.”

Well, someone who was very aware of this type of thinking was a guy named Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is good man; strong back. And upon that strong back of his he carried several pretty life-changing ideas about what it means to be an individual. And he recorded all of these ideas throughout his anthology of work. The central thesis, if I had to name one, of all of his work is an attack on this way of thinking—the idea that paradise is just around the corner, the idea that there’s some plan out there or some course of action that, “If only we could get Congress to pass this thing, then you’re going to be satisfied with the state of the world; then everyone’s going to be happy.”

He says, a lot of people tell themselves this isn’t what they’re doing, but if they just looked at themselves a little more honestly, this actually is what they’re doing. And he’d say, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us that so many people look at social progress this way. Just look at how often they use it in their personal lives. Like, how many times have you told yourself this story at some point in your life? I’ve done it dozens of times. Things are bad right now, but you know what? Once I get this promotion, then things are really going to fall into place. Once I get out of this bad relationship, then I’ll feel good. If only I could get that belt tightened on my car, then I could finally confidently drive away from intersections without it screeching like the ghost of a wild boar is following me around. Then things would be great in my life, right?

But, honestly, how accurate of a prescription for your life is that? How often do you get the promotion and everything’s great? And how often do you get that promotion, things are good for a while, and then you find something else to complain about? This isn’t something Dostoevsky’s attacking people for. He’s saying, maybe this is just a part of what it means to be a human being for some people.

See, because at the root of this way of thinking is the idea that wherever you are right now is not good enough. Something needs to change to bring about the world that you’re actually going to be satisfied with. But what often happens is, once you’ve brought about this new world, it’s not like you’re in this perpetual state of bliss, floating around on a cloud for the rest of your life. No, you find yourself living in that new, improved world that you brought about, and then you find something else to ail over.

The point that Dostoevsky’s making is, we do this in our personal lives, and we’re often guilty of doing this when it comes to humanity as a whole. We tell ourselves this story that we’re suffering now, but if only X thing came about, we wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. But what if suffering is just a part of what life is? What if you had it all? Imagine 20 hashtag wishes coming true. Imagine you had a Walmart parking lot full of cars. Would you be good to go for the rest of your life? Or would you find something else to suffer about in that new world?

Dostoevsky would say, maybe suffering is as integral a part of life as breathing is. You can go short periods of time, a few minutes, without breathing. Eventually you got to do it again. Eventually it comes back. The only person that doesn’t breathe is dead. What if the only person that doesn’t suffer is dead? In the same way it’s pointless to try to find some recipe, some approach to life that permanently rids you of all suffering, maybe no matter how much we want there to be, maybe there’s no policy that can be written, no bill that can be passed that will ever completely rid people of unnecessary suffering.

Now, Dostoevsky isn’t saying that we shouldn’t try to make things better. He’s not against all progress. He’s against what he sees as a very convenient but very toxic way of thinking that makes us more miserable than we need to be: this idea that we’re just going to keep progressing and progressing and hashtagging to our heart’s content, and that one day we can expect to bring about a world that’s totally equal, fair, and peaceful. He’s not trying to strawman the argument here. What I think he’s saying is, even if you concede that this utopia can never actually exist, you’re still in practice trying to get as close to it as you can, right? How will we ever know when enough is enough? How good does the world have to be? I mean, if the world is always going to be flawed to some extent, it stands to reason you’re always going to be able to find flaws in the world to start a new hashtag about. Maybe the same way no matter how good our lives are, we’re always going to suffer; no matter how good the world gets, people are always going to be suffering. And that this task that we often assign ourselves to of “progress is limiting the suffering of others,” maybe that can’t go on indefinitely.

Or maybe, maybe it can. Maybe it actually is possible for there to be an end to all human suffering. You know, it’s funny, Dostoevsky says that when people have one of these worldviews that paradise and the end of suffering is just around the corner, one of the most common things they turn to as their savior that’s going to bring this world about for them is science and technology. Makes sense, right? Enter the movement in science and philosophy today knows as transhumanism.

Now, for some reason just in casual conversation with people, they often conflate the idea of transhumanism with the idea that we can use technology to live forever. But transhumanism is actually much more exciting than that. It’s much bigger. Transhumanism is a movement that tries to use technology to transcend any barrier human beings currently have, physical or mental. Probably not a big surprise, the philosophical basis for the entire field of transhumanism is Nietzsche’s overman. Remember, what is ape to man, man shall be that to the overman. What is the next stage of evolution for human beings?

You know, a bird can build a nest, and that nest is at least part of what it means to be that bird. Wouldn’t you say that it’s at least possible for us to use technology to augment our lives so much that we become something almost indistinguishable from what it is to be a human today? What if we could fundamentally alter the way our brains interact with the world to such an extent that the way you or I interact with the world to this new thing, this new type of person—to it, we’d look like a zebra or something. Transhumanism looks to identify these barriers, and then use technology to break them.

Now, one very small part of transhumanism that’s pretty relevant to what we’re talking about today is a movement known as the Hedonistic Imperative. Hedonistic Imperative movement would say that not only is it possible to use various designer drugs, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering to create a world where nobody ever has to suffer if they don’t want to, but that we have a moral obligation as human beings to bring this world about.

Now, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself here, so maybe I should just generally talk about how they look at the state of the average human being alive today. People working in this field, they would see somebody like you or me, and they would see us as really the last of a dying breed. They think that when the history books are written 4,000-5,000 years into the future, that we’re going to look back at the history of the mental architecture of human beings, and we’re going to see the people living in the year 2016 as some of the last human beings to ever have to experience their existence in what they call the Darwinian pathology of consciousness. Basically, what this means is, the variance in emotions that we can experience—sadness, happiness, guilt, excitement, jealousy, all the others—all these emotions that we bundle together into a package and call our default human emotional experience of the world—these emotions, these things have been with us for millions of years.

Really is one of our closest friends, this package of emotions we got. They’ve served us well, haven’t they? Remember that time you were out there dying of thirst and you went over that ravine and you saw the glimmering lake of drinkable water, and your brain sent you that burst of chemicals that made you feel happy? Yeah. That was a good time. Remember that time you didn’t shower for like three weeks, and just when you thought your tribe of people were going to kick you out into the woods for smelling horrible, that feeling of guilt rode into town on horseback, and it made you take a shower? Ah, the memories.

Point is, this reward system and negative-feedback system that you have set up in your brain has served a very important purpose all throughout pre-history for your ancestors, no question. The people that are a part of this movement today are just asking: why do we still need most of this stuff? More specifically, why do we still need the ones that make us feel horrible? Remember, as I said, you and I exist in this Darwinian pathology of consciousness, an emotional spectrum that rewards certain behaviors and punishes others, the ultimate goal being survival. The Hedonistic Imperative is trying to bring us into what they call a post-Darwinian pathology of consciousness, or a world where we use, at first, specialized drugs but, eventually, advanced forms of genetic engineering to alter the limbic system of the brain and sort of program out every form of suffering that exists. In their vision, we are some of the last human beings that will ever get to experience this thing that we refer to as “suffering.”

And it isn’t just humans, by the way. They actually have a date—and there’s a lot of different competing theories here, obviously—but they actually try to predict the year that the last being on this planet will ever have to experience an unpleasant experience, the last time! At that point, it’s probably going to be some obscure, rare fish deep down in the ocean somewhere. Either way, pretty sure we’re all getting the day off of work that day. And on that day off in this world without suffering, life at that point would become very different. It’d become varying degrees of constant bliss with future technology that we invent only allowing us to potentially explore deeper and deeper levels of bliss on top of that.

Now, if this all sounds impossible to you, they’d say, yeah, well, it would sound impossible to you, wouldn’t it? They’d say, “Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people’s lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could never be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice.”

So, what they’re saying—like, just for a second, just for a second think of the veritable roller-coaster of emotions that most of us exist within on a daily basis. You know, you go to the movies, and you love the movie. And you’re happy. Then you go home, and now you got to mow the lawn. And you hate mowing the lawn, so now you’re upset. Then you take a nice warm bath, and you feel all clean and relaxed. But then your uncle makes Salisbury steaks for dinner, and now you’re angry at him. Most of us live in this constant volatile flux between different degrees of feeling good or bad. I mean, one of the most admirable qualities you can have in our modern world is the ability to have mental strength. Everyone respects that, right? To not break down when something stressful happens to you, to be able to regroup, pull yourself together, and stay relaxed. It’s admirable.

But what if we lived in a different world? What if we lived in a world where all those skills of being able to pull yourself out of bad feelings and focus your attention on good ones, what if those were useless? You know, we have all these makeshift ways that we try to regulate this Darwinian model that we have. You know, we take a deep breath. We think of something positive. We write really nice stuff about ourselves on the mirror, so we see it all throughout the day. And it perks us up. All these ways we’re trying to desperately hold it together with these monkey brains that have software designed for a completely different world than we live in—What if it didn’t have to be this way? What if we could program out all of this negative feedback that really doesn’t serve us in the world we currently live in?

You know, it reminds me of the pre-Socratics. When Thales says something like, “Magnets are alive,” or that everything in the universe is made out of water that’s just taking different forms, nothing about that statement really informs modern science. I mean, as interesting as it is to hear about the conclusions of these early Greek thinkers, as cool as it is to hear that, they’re not really practically useful to us today, right? In fact, the reason they’re so interesting is because we can acknowledge that they’re living in a completely different world than we are, a pre-science world. Well, just try to imagine what a human being would be like in this post-Darwinian world. I mean, it’s not crazy to think, they’d look at something like stoicism or something like the parts of Buddhism that deal with emotional regulation, and they’d look at that similar to the way we see the metaphysics of the pre-Socratics.

“Wow! Look at this. Here’s a bunch of people from the year 2016 talking about all these different techniques they’ve come up with for trying to regulate negative emotions. Man, can you imagine doing that? They must have lived in such a strange world back then.” I mean, think about it. Think about just how much this Darwinian, survival-oriented, conquer-other-things lens that we view everything through—think about how much that affects every decision you make. Think about how much it shades the way that you view people or the universe or even your idea of what progress is.

The following is a quote from one of the leading websites dedicated to the Hedonistic Imperative. And they’re talking about what it would be like if we could peak behind the curtains and see just how different the lives are going to be for these post-Darwinian human beings. “Indeed the entire life of post-Darwinians may be opaque to our hunter-gatherer minds. The first-person texture of their modes of experience may be nothing like our own in anything but name. Even if we could glimpse the future, perhaps we’d be like cats watching TV. We just wouldn’t understand the significance of what was going on.”

Now, if this sounds a little extreme to you, just think about how fundamental of a change we’re talking about here. Think of how different life would be if we never had to worry about negative emotional states. When we were talking at the beginning of the episode about progress or what criteria should we use to choose exactly what we should be doing or what is good, so many of us base those value judgments that we’re making about human behavior on how much suffering ourselves or other people are going to have to endure as a result of it. Well, what do we base it on in this new world? What metric do we use in a post-suffering world? And in that world, do Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Bentham—does all this work in the field of morality just get thrown out the window? Does it become obsolete because it was done with this Darwinian mental architecture that we have? Think about how different the world would be. I mean, if this happens, there will be a certain point where there’s a last time somebody ever asks somebody else the question, “What are you so happy about right now?” because it’ll just be the default. They won’t even think to ask that question.

So, let’s regroup here for a second. No doubt at this point some people are probably saying, “Okay, great, great. Maybe someday in the distant future people in lab coats are going to figure out how to do all this. But what does this really matter to me? This technology they’re talking about is so far off. Why do I care about any of this?” Well, the interesting thing is, this is already happening to a certain extent, albeit in a lab setting, and yes, with methods that no doubt in the future are going to make us look like a bunch of chimpanzees using sticks at the zoo. But at least in our time it’s at the cutting edge.

They call this method wireheading. Wireheading, at least as the word’s used in a lab setting—scientists will take a rat, and they’ll hook little things up to the reward center of the rat’s brain, and they’ll fire electrical signals down into it, constantly stimulating the reward center. Now, I’m not a scientist. Personally, I’ve never wireheaded a rat before. But the results from what I understand seem promising. The rat seems pretty happy. It seems to the scientists that the rat is so happy it forgets to eat. It seems to them the rat is so happy it doesn’t even prowl the cage looking for a rat domestic life partner to spend the rest of its days in the cage with. Like I said, we’re just in the initial stages of this technology, but people a lot smarter than me that have dedicated their life to it seem optimistic.

Now, on to the objections of some of this stuff. One of the most common problems people have with this movement is the idea that we’re always going to be feeling good, 24 hours a day. How is that even possible? You know, let’s say you’re one of these lucky people that have been genetically engineered to never experience suffering. Okay, but if you never experience suffering, how do you have a frame of reference to even know what good feelings are at all? In other words, if everything’s good all the time, then nothing’s good. Things gain their value in relation to their opposites. If you never experience suffering, wouldn’t life just become this numbness, this dull flatline of emotions where, yeah, you never experience the lows, but you can never experience the highs either?

Well, the proponents of this movement would say that no, they don’t think that’s going to be the case. And they certainly don’t think that if somebody only experienced bliss in their life—that doesn’t altogether remove the value of experiencing bliss. For example, a common rebuttal from this side is that there are currently people out there right now that because of some horrible, unfortunate genetic condition, they are rendered in constant pain and mental anguish. There are people out there that have never and will never experience happiness as you currently experience it. Suffering is visited in their lives on a level that seems almost unbelievable to tolerate for the average person.

But would you say that just because they hadn’t experienced happiness before that they’re somehow not suffering or that they’re incapable of understanding that the feelings they’re going through are unpleasant? No, they’re still suffering. They just have no hope of a better destination. They can’t imagine life as anything but constant suffering. Now, in the context of somebody only experiencing bliss, similar situation. They’d probably find it equally hard to imagine an alternative where you’re in agony all the time.

So, another common objection that people bring up is, what about human progress? If everybody in the entire world is just happy as a clam all the time—in a world without suffering, nobody’s ever going to have the motivation to make things better: no new iPhones, no new musical artists, no more rocket ships. Is that really the world we want to live in? Well, the good people of the Hedonistic Imperative would respond that as far as science goes, as far as the science that we currently have access to goes, people with high levels of dopamine don’t tend to get lazy; they tend to feel more enthusiastic about going out and doing more.

They say, “Hyper-dopaminergic states tend also to increase the range of activities an organism finds worth pursuing,” and that, “Instead, an extraordinarily fertile range of purposeful and productive activities will most likely be pursued. Better still, our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we primitives cruelly lack. For on offer are sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend.”

What they’re basically saying is, when you’re in this post-Darwinian state, this is kind of like an anti-depression anabolic steroid. All the negative thoughts that you have, all the fear of failure that typically stops people from chasing their dreams and taking risks, not only is that not going to be there anymore, but it’s not crazy to think that this limited, survival-oriented lens that we currently look at everything through, it prevents us from seeing all the possibilities around us, all the beauty. That we’re so hell-bent on focusing on our insecurities that we’re missing out on all kinds of stuff that’s around us right now. They often talk about how art in this new post-Darwinian age—you know, when we can experience these deeper and more complex emotional states—that’s going to make things like Beethoven sound like a racoon scratching on a trashcan. Crazy to imagine just how different this new type of human being is going to look if this ever comes to fruition.

You know, it’s tempting to think that people like Dostoevsky and the people of this transhumanist movement are completely at odds, they’re opposites. And in a certain way they are, but in other ways I think they’re actually talking about two completely different things, two different creatures. What I’m saying is, maybe they’re both right. Maybe a day will come in the future where there’s this next level of human being that won’t ever have to experience suffering. And maybe simultaneously for us—people living in 2016—maybe suffering is an intrinsic part of life comparable to breathing.

You know, whenever I think about this idea that suffering is a guaranteed part of your life—there’s no escaping it—for some reason it always brings me back to this thought experiment I heard when I was 13 years old. It blew my mind at the time that I heard it. It was delivered by a guy named Alan Watts on this obscure late-night radio station I was listening to. Now, since the time I heard it, the internet’s become what it’s become, and this particular thought experiment has actually become pretty popular in just the philosophy-videos circle in today’s world. It’s exciting. But it’s actually very helpful. I’m going to paraphrase it. It goes like this.

Imagine if when you went to sleep at night you could condense an entire human life down into 8 hours of sleep—75 years. Basically, you’d go to sleep. Dream starts. You’d be born. You’d experience an entire life of 75 years, and when you die, you wake back up into the real world only to go about your business for a day, then to go back to sleep the next night to live another human life. Now, imagine if within this dream that you had, you have the power to completely dictate the terms of your life. You can do whatever you want in this dream. You choose everything that happens in your life. What would you do in that dream?

Well, most people, if they’re given total control over their lives, what are they going to do with it? They’re going to give themselves anything they could ever possibly want. They’re going to have a yacht. They’re going to be friends with P. Diddy. They’re never going to lose at mini golf. They’d just be the absolute king or queen of the world, right? But you can imagine, after a while, that’d get kind of boring, wouldn’t it? I mean, how many times are you really going to lay your head down on that pillow knowing full well you’re about to spend the next 75 years having nothing but unbridled success and pleasure? How long are you going to do that before that whole 75-year trust-fund life gets a little boring to you?

So, what you’d eventually do, Alan Watts says, is you’d work in some kind of variance to the equation. You eventually wouldn’t want the dream to be totally in your control. I mean, you’d control certain aspects of the dream. But you’d want things to happen to you that you had no idea were going to happen to you just to make things interesting again. But then eventually this would get boring. And you’d continue down this path of adding more and more variance into the dream. Bad things would happen to you contrasted by good things. You’d continue this momentum of having less and less control over the terms of your dream.

And eventually, the final thing you’d want to ensure about the dream is that you wouldn’t want to know that it was a dream at all. In other words, this perfect life that we’ve engineered in this dream world becomes exactly what life is to us right now. And, yes, along with all of its uncertain happiness and suffering.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.