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Robert Lawrence Kuhn on Truth, Faith, Idealism, and God
May 10, 2021
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Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a veritable truth seeker, and much of the modern proliferation of analytical and intellectual discourse in video form, into consciousness, into the origins of the universe, into the relationship between both, is due to his wonderful series, Closer to Truth.
It's likely that you've seen his show many times and even if you can't place his name, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, you'll likely be able to place his face. This episode is a dive into the nature of truth. So for example, how do you know if you're getting closer to it if you can't define it? As well as faith, as well as logic, as well as God. If you're new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm interested in what are called theories of everything, which is a physics terminology. It means the unification of gravity with
The next 30 days will be quite the unconscionable slog for me because I'm interviewing Chris Langan. That comes toward the end of June. Chris Langan is the person who's been
Characterized as having the highest IQ in America and he has a theory of everything called the cognitive theoretic model of the universe That's for later in June later in June as well as Rupert Spira Daniel Schmottenberger if I'm pronouncing his name, right?
In this month, May, I have Chomsky coming up. Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervecky are coming on again for round two of a Theolocution. At the end of May, I'm also speaking to Stephen Wolfram on his theory of everything, as well as Luis Elizondo on UFOs. There's also a secret project being planned with Yoshabok, which I think you may be extremely excited for. All of this takes a tremendous, tremendous amount of work, because what I'd like to do in these podcasts is not give an overview, but instead to go deep into certain subjects, and that
This is
A challenge. I try to over-prepare for virtually each topic except UFOs because UFOs is one that I'm wholly unacquainted in. So most of the time when I'm speaking to someone on the topic of aliens or UFOs, I'm speaking as a beginner. For example, to Kevin Knuth or to Jeremy Korbel, and to a lesser extent Avi Loeb because that was more physics-based. We also have a PayPal if you're more interested in that, and in fact more of the money, the percentage-wise, goes to the creator, that is me, if you donate or support using the PayPal link.
That's in the description. Thank you so much. Thank you. Regardless of your decision. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You don't generally say yes to interviews. I was wondering why you said yes to this one. At least interviews not about China. We've had a change with the internet. Closer to truth has had a spectacular year. Some of it energized by, of course, the lockdown, but it's been continuing at on our YouTube channel.
a fivefold increase over the last year. And we've appreciated and I've appreciated the thousands of comments that we've had for Closer to Truth. And a lot of them have asked, you know, they like my questions, but they'd like to see some of my answers. I do some commentary on our shows with interstitial commentary and an open and a close, particularly a close.
But on the vast majority of our interviews, I'm just literally asking questions. So an increasing number of viewers for Closer to Truth YouTube channel have been asking for my opinion and things. And a number of people have asked for interviews. So I've sort of changed our policy. We've had a kind of a laser focus on producing Closer to Truth. I've been doing this for 20 years.
really non-stop since 2006 when Peter Getzels joined Forces with Mays, an award-winning director, producer, very knowledgeable about science. And since that time, it's been just a tremendous, exciting productions and then doing shows. And so that, all of my energies was devoted to that. And when we
produce a show. When producing interviews, they're pretty much raw interviews, much like this, they're shorter, focused on an individual question will last for seven to 10, 11 minutes, and then it's on to the next. When we work with an individual, such as you've had Donald Hoffman or Robbie Loeb, we might have a session of 10 or 12 or 15 of those eight to 10 minute segments. And that's what we do. And we post those.
But then when we do our actual show, Peter and I spent an enormous amount of time worrying about every frame and every word and to get it right. And so that's been totally consumptive. And so I wanted to devote all of my energies to producing the best thought and the best presentation for
for the topics that we deal with, which I'm sure we'll discuss in great detail. But as I said in the last year, because Closer to Truth has now been using the YouTube channel and has broadened itself internationally, because we were on PBS television for 20 years, obviously our focus was in the US, so while
When our YouTube channel started, it was like 95% U.S. audiences. And we've been happy to see that percentage drop and drop and drop. And so now we're about 40% U.S., so 60% plus outside the U.S. with some very significant demographics in just very broadly in the world. And so all of that has contributed to kind of a rethinking. And so
I, rather than just focus entirely on producing our shows, wanted to respond to the times and to our audience to really get behind the scenes and just see me as a kind of a normal person who has the same kinds of
questions and interests that many of our audience does. And so that's why I'm pleased to do it. Obviously we screen and I think the professionalism by which you and some others have brought to questions involving science, each with its own particular orientation, which is fine. I would look and Peter and I would analyze the
the compatibility with what we want to do for closer to truth. So there is a level of sophistication and seriousness, not that we should take ourselves seriously, but that we should take our topic seriously and do it without, you know, in a very open manner. And so, you know, we've appreciated what you've done, what you've created and happy to share our experiences.
Well, firstly, I thank you for the compliment suggesting that I'm even somewhat professional and sophisticated. I wouldn't categorize myself as that. Just for the people watching, Robert's show, Closer to Truth, is the highly professional version of this show, the highly high production value. In fact, it's better to say that my show is the low budget version of yours because yours was out 15 years prior.
So if you like theories of everything this podcast, you're going to love closer to truth. I recommend searching closer to truth. I'm sure it's, it will come up and Robert Kuhn, if you search his name, interviews with him as well as closer to truth will come up closer to truth, closer to truth.com is our website.
and our YouTube channel. You can search for the YouTube channel, Closer to Truth YouTube channel. Those are our two main vehicles, other than, of course, the PBS television show, which is broadcast on over 200 stations in the US. Are you still producing Closer to Truth? Do you have ideas for future episodes? Yes, definitely. Definitely. In fact, we're very excited about this year. Of course, we've not. We've done post-production.
For previous productions we've had, we have a new series coming out in a couple of months. It's almost entirely produced. 13 episodes. We have 13 episodes in a season. Closer to Truth works in seasons. That doesn't mean one a year. They'll be varied. There might be one a year. It might be three a year. Normally it's about one and a half or two.
13 episodes and we've done 20, 13 episode seasons so far since our first, since the new version of Closer to Truth began broadcasting in 2008. So we've had 20 seasons of 13 episodes each. Actually, the last one was 10 episodes. And the new one coming out, which is season 21, will focus on scientific breakthroughs. And we've, we've shot
extensively at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Complexity Theory and have some just wonderful interviews. For example, Edward Witten, who we hadn't had before, the leading strength theorist, very extensive interviews with him and just a whole number of terrific people
at the Institute, Karen Ollenbach, Robert Digraph, our old friend Paul Davies is with us, V. S. Ramachandran, Antonio DiMazio in areas of scientific, Len Malat now. We really have a terrific season and we focus on scientific breakthroughs in physics and scientific breakthroughs in biology. And we break it into two parts. One is the
What is a scientific breakthrough in physics? How can you account for it? What does it mean? What kind of step function is there in understanding the concept of breakthrough? And secondly, what is the process of breakthrough? So we have one whole show on what is a breakthrough in physics. Then another one, what is the process by which a breakthrough in physics occurs? Then we do the same thing in biology.
about six of the shows in the new season will be on scientific breakthroughs. Then we have some really diverse and interesting subjects. One is on deception. We have some of the leading theorists on the concept of deception, both in the animal kingdom and in human beings. In fact, one show is on deception in animals, one show is
deception in human beings. And then two on music in the brain and one on transhumanism and what does it mean in brain science. So that's our new season coming up. It'll be broadcast on PBS I said within a few months starting. I should mention though that the first two episodes in the new season are a tribute to Freeman Dyson.
Freeman was one of our early contributors and enriched our show enormously and we very much appreciate it. And so Peter Getzels and I put together a two-part tribute working with his family and so we have a lot of inside photos and ideas and then most of the show of course is Freeman's own ideas.
And one of them will deal with his views on physics, which is natural, and the other is sort of his broad approach to a lot of other things. So it's a very exciting opening to the new season on Freeman Dyson.
Then going on from here, we've used the last year to look to the future. And we have a pretty exciting backlog of production, which are fully funded by excellent foundations with whom we work, the John Templeton Foundation, the Arthur Bynum Davis Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, Templeton World Charity Foundation. And so these series coming up
and in no order of importance because they're all important, like which of your children are the most exciting. So don't take it like the first one I mentioned is most important, but I just want to mention the ones that we'll be doing productions in the future. The first is the global philosophy of religion. And this is a very, not just exciting, but we believe an important project
that is
Originally a philosopher of mind and has become a leading philosopher of religion and really a wonderful philosopher and thinker. We worked with Yujin actually almost 10 years ago in producing a series of programs on alternative concepts of God, which were different ideas than the traditional Judeo-Christian Islam monotheism.
and those are very successful programs. And Eugene has put together a vision for engaging the world because philosophy of religion really has been pretty much focused on the Judeo-Christian religion, particularly Christian philosophers.
uh... and the work that has been done since the middle ages in christian philosophy is really wonderful stuff some people in sciences make fun of these kinds of philosophies and uh... we can get into that uh... but uh...
the contribution that Christian philosophy has done over the years to thinking about about now they do it from their perspective, of course, but the ways of thinking are really wonderful and expansionary for human human development, but it is still Christo centric or Judeo Christo centric, which is what we closer to truth has done just out of expediency. Right. We did reach out to try to get
non-Christian thinkers, and we have in the beginning, we have Sayed Hussein Nasser, who is arguably one of the leading Islamic philosophers in the world from Iran, Persia,
tradition and a wonderful philosopher, and we have some Buddhists and Hindus, but the skew is very much toward a Judeo-Christian. And so when Eugene had this project to really engage the whole world in this endeavor in terms of expanding the thinking in philosophy of religion, we jumped on and we said and worked together with Eugene and the John Templeton Foundation. We have it fully funded, so our
First, program in this regard is actually going to be an online conference, which will occur in June as a conference and then thereafter, we will have about 20 interviews maybe more panel discussions keynotes that will deal with the global philosophy of religion and we will deal with.
obviously, Islam and Hinduism, but we're going to go broader than that. We wanted to do a Sikhism. We are doing Sikhism and African religions. So we have a very broad diversity of ideas. So global philosophy of religion is one project for the future. Next year we'll be in Birmingham live for our typical closer to truth productions, very, very high quality.
Shows will take a year or so to get out on PBS, and then YouTube. It's a long process that we have, but we love it and we're dedicated to it. Other series coming up are Philosophy of Biology, which will be our first foray into biology in a very serious way, and it will become a new category for Closer to Truth. Right now, Closer to Truth classically has three big categories. Cosmos, which deals with cosmology, astronomy, physics, mathematics,
Consciousness, which deals with brain, mind, diverse intelligences, a little bit ESP once in a while, alien intelligences, personal intelligence. Alien intelligences, as in UFO aliens or just extraterrestrial life, what would they be like? No, astrobiology basically, and thinking about what the nature of alien intelligence is.
We deal with how does personal identity be maintained? Free will has been a major topic that we've dealt with. That's our consciousness. And then our meaning category really is philosophy of religion. And it heretofore has been somewhat, as I said, Judeo-Christian centric. And so what we're looking to do is expand that category, meaning. And now with philosophy of biology, which is one of our biggest grants and one of our biggest productions,
I'm
a continuing work on art seeking understanding. And we have a wonderful opportunity with the Arthur Bynum Davis Foundation in terms of Eastern traditions, which will focus on Buddhism and Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Taoism with big focus on Buddhism and how those religions or traditions deal with the big questions. This is not one-on-one religion about telling about these religions. That's not our job.
We're going to focus on what are the big questions that Closer to Truth asks that we have traditionally approached from a Judeo-Christian point of view, and how do these other traditions deal with those same questions. So we've got a long future ahead of us. We've just got to keep healthy. Robert, just so you know, if I ever look angry, I'm just thinking. That's my thinking face. I'm sure you're familiar with it. I don't mind anger. What I mind is passivity.
Alright, you mentioned that one of the reasons you stayed or steered clear from Eastern traditions before was expediency and I'm also wondering if
It's also due to the level of unfamiliarity that we in the West, we grow up with. So for example, if a Western philosopher thinks that the jump from analytic philosophy to continental is huge, try continental slash analytic to Eastern philosophy. It's a completely different base. It's almost meditative and experiential and requires special knowledge insights that you glean that you can't necessarily share. So is that another reason why or is it purely expediency?
I think, well, expediency is not a term I would use, because going in, we wanted to do it. We wanted to get first class philosophers, but in our limited production, because we weren't using internet where we could interview anybody anytime, we were doing, and we do it close to very high production value videos and television that are the
the equivalent, as we say, of Toyota commercials. And so we like to get crews, Peter gets directors of photography and cameramen, between their Toyota commercials where they're paid at rates, where they have off time,
They love Closer to Truth, so they do it at scale. And so we can afford it, but still very expensive. And we have crews of 13, 15 people, three cameras, dollies, jibs. I mean, it's a big effort. And so the only way we can do that efficiently is to sort of gang tape within a week. We do 15 because people are gathered at a conference. And the kinds of conferences that we've had
Because they've been limited have been Western oriented. Now a lot of been physics. We work very closely with an organization called FQXI Foundation Questions Institute.
which deals with sort of over the horizon physics and cosmology with some of the leading cosmologists and quantum physicists, physicists looking at the foundations of quantum mechanics, looking at new ideas in cosmology. And so that's what we have done. And it's just that in none of those venues that we've had would Eastern philosophers at a first grade level come up.
Now you bring up a very important point in terms of the experiential aspect of Eastern philosophy because we have a kind of an operating framework on Closer to Truth that experiential work is something that we can refer to but it's not our core.
Because it is difficult for third-party verification. You know it internally. So we have had shows and efforts saying why an analytic philosophical approach is not sufficient. That's a fair comment within the thing. But to then adjudicate between
large numbers of people in particularly Eastern traditions, but also in Western traditions who have experiential understanding. And that's part of their core. We have determined that's not within closer to truth's orbit to deal with in detail. And so that's probably a
an unintended skew why we have not pursued Eastern religions as much as we should, because in Eastern religions there is more of that experiential internal dimension. But that excuse is no longer acceptable to us. Yeah, I was also thinking if you're mentioning that there's a lack of third-party verification, the same could be said about consciousness, but you have a whole series on that. For example, you can't tell if I'm conscious, I can't tell if you're conscious.
Sure. And we deal with that very, very extensively as a very important part of the consciousness approach. Look, everybody has a bias. My PhD is in neuroscience. You can see some stuff on the background remind myself of my early days in neuroscience.
So that's a particular skew that I've had in terms of a worldview. It's a scientific worldview, it's a neuroscience worldview, at least that was the germinating aspect of my kind of thinking. So we have, as I said, recognized from the beginning the importance of Eastern thinking, and we have that right from the beginning, like Hoson
who was one of our first interviewees in 2007.
But we've not taken it further. This year, with the expansion of Closer to Truth globally, we've recognized that this is an issue. So Peter and I have made a focus to put our future approach into reach out. And again, our audiences are now broader so that they're pushing us as well, as rightly they should.
When we get criticized in feedback or YouTube comments that you should deal with Eastern religion, what we now say is, you know, we've done a little bit, but you're right. You know, that's a missing dimension that we have and we're going to fill it. And we're very pleased, coincidentally, that Yucha Nagazawa has put together this remarkable Global Philosophy of Religion project, which is very broad.
setting a three year project. It has three specific content areas. The first is on the existence and nature of deities. And that was the first of the three big areas. And that's what our first conference online conference will be. It was supposed to be in person, but we've now transferred it online. The second conference will be on death and immortality. So that will deal with consciousness kinds of issues.
And the third will be on problem of evil, suffering in the world, those kinds of things. So those are the three categories to take a global philosophy of religion, and we're doing the first online, the second we'll do in person, and hopefully we can do something with the third as well. And that will really broaden closer to truth where it should go.
Thanks to Eugene and John Templeton Foundation for their project. And Eugene's project is much broader than just these conferences. They have research projects, they're going to do books. It's a big effort to create really a new field of global philosophy of religion and reaching out to
is
Robert, how do you and Peter, besides let's say technical logistics, how do you prepare for each interview?
The way we do Closer to Truth normally, and then I'll describe the last year when we were doing it online, is that we have to have a generally minimum of five days and maximum probably of seven in which we will go to a location. For example, we've done with FQXI, we did it in Vieques in Puerto Rico, we did it in Iceland, we did it in
Iceland was on cosmology, Vieques when we did FQSI was in information theory, and in Banff Canada, which was the last one we did, was on physics of the observer and the physics of what happens. Basically it's the foundations of quantum mechanics. So let me just describe that. In Banff they had 80 or so physicists who
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It's a very intense seven, eight days. The Navy has something called Hell Week. That sounds like hell seven. No, it's really, I mean, it sounds like hell and if you look at our faces and our attention, you'd think we were miserable, but this is what we love. Yeah, I understand. It is terrific. And so we'll know in advance six months that there's that plan. And then Peter and his team will start working with individuals
who we've targeted and make a schedule. In general, we'll do three people a day. Sometimes if they're very long, we'll do two. Occasionally, if they're shorter, we might do four a day. And these days are 14, 16 hour days, especially for the crews. It takes them an hour and a half to set up. It takes them at least an hour to break down the set.
I'm
we're
an outline of topics to the individual and say this is what we're talking not specific questions but but rather here are the topics will be dealing with that i leave out anything something you want to discuss that i haven't mentioned uh... and we get that and then i have that that outline uh... and so i i have to go into each interview feeling uh... i i i should put it this way fooling myself to think i know almost as much as that person does about his
or her
Do you get people emailing you their variegated theories of everything on consciousness or physics? And how do you deal with that? Do you welcome it, for example?
That's a very good question, and I really appreciate when people write to us in general. I mean, it's much appreciated. I read everything that comes in directly into CloserToTruth.com, and I certainly skim through the large majority of the comments on YouTube. There are obviously so many now.
I've tried to respond to many of the ones that come in directly. Over time, there have been an increasing number of people who have their own theories. I'm polite and many times I can't
uh... accurately judicates a very sophisticated aspect of uh... of quantum physics but uh... it you know the uh... the the fact is is that if there are examples in history where people have made radical breakthroughs which as we all know that general relativity and quantum theory but you know it's not
It's not that frequent, so many of the ideas we get in the physics area and the consciousness area are on the extreme. I try to skim all of them, you know, never knowing when something, and even when ideas are, I wouldn't say crackpot, I'd say fringe or radical, it sometimes shows you a different kind of way of thinking.
And that to me is very helpful to understand different ways of thinking. Sometimes there are interesting insights that people have, but I can't... Do you have an example of an interesting insight off the top of your head? Yeah, I would say there's one individual, I don't want to mention too many names, who has shown with some rather bizarre
uh... comparisons between number theory and quantum physics but in his work showed the uh... high level of importance of chaos theory in understanding uh... deeper reality for that chaos theory is more fundamental than that it may seem on the surface of what it is uh... and that's that's an example in the
and quantum physics.
I don't buy and maybe I'm not qualified to analyze, but as a result of going through it and seeing the sophistication of thinking, it allows you to perhaps see things that you haven't seen before. So when anybody sends something in, I look at everyone. I may not look at it for long, but I do look at everyone and on occasion I will comment.
There is a danger in commenting because if you comment, then you're going to get, you know, 10 times as much back. And then now what do you do? Uh, so, you know, the ex the exgencies of life require that I can't be in detailed communication with dozens of people on sophisticated topics. I just can't, you know, I have to do some family stuff too for
It takes quite a bit of time to go through almost anyone's work in detail, even if it's non-academic and fluffy. It may take an entire day. Yeah, and I can't do that. I think I've gotten over the years having done, I don't know, 400 interviews and have read papers by so many people in so many ways, at least in the areas that I'm familiar with.
You know, I'm not putting public policy healthcare in my list of expertise, but in the areas that I have focused on, on Closer to Truth, I am very, very familiar with the scope of the field and in some depth. And so I can pretty quickly scan a paper in our categories very quickly and get a sense of what the point is and then go further as it may be.
I've had three experiences in the last year where individuals were presenting ideas that were not my traditional way of thinking and very sophisticated, and I engage with these people and consider them now colleagues. So out of the hundreds and hundreds, there are three, and maybe there'd be another one if I think hard.
There are three and curiously, maybe not curiously, all three present from an Eastern point of view. Two are from India and the third is from the Netherlands, but he's presenting about the concept of zero from an Indian point of view. He's very sophisticated. He's not a professional philosopher, but he's as good as one.
And the two from India, one is a quantum physicist who has very strong ideas about Vedanta. The other is an artist in the Tamil tradition who has written books on art and understanding art from a philosophical point of view. He was trained as a computer scientist, so he's very knowledgeable about science. He's an artist.
And he has written these books in Tamil about art and understand it. And from each of these I have engaged in serious communication and have learned a good deal. Were there any interviews that you felt particularly underprepared for?
I would say my early interviews with some superstars, I don't know if I would say underprepared, I would say I was nervous and kind of awed by the potential of the experience. I can drop names, but people on the physics side, Steven Weinberg,
Frank Wilczek, Alan Guth, Andre Lindy. These are people who I greatly respected, and many others in that category as well, just mentioning a few, and intimidated by their work and going in and wanting to do a good job on the philosophy side. Richard Swinburne, Alvin Planting, Peter Van Inwagen, just to name a few.
very sophisticated philosophers. I love philosophy, I study philosophy, but I'm not a professional philosopher, nor am I a professional physicist, obviously. And so these I have felt intimidated going in, but in the process, perhaps over-prepared, but still felt intimidated. And I got the greatest compliment
of
Which are when the professors ask you these hard questions about all the things that you do to get you to the stage where you then do your thesis. So you're supposed to know the field at that point. So when he said that, that kind of made me feel good. But I should tell you that there's not a single interview that I do that I don't feel apprehensive going in, because you never know enough. And I'm thinking with several
several levels at the same time i want to engage the individual i really want to understand it personally myself and then i want to make sure our audience sort of gets it too and it doesn't go over their head and i explain terms that are terms of art if i if i need to do that in context so i have to have this
Kind of multi-level thinking in each interview, but it never changes. In other words, I don't feel so confident going into an interview that I don't feel the tension and the apprehension to really get it right. And that's a good thing because this is what I love doing. I love learning.
Genesis closer to truth is that I want to learn this is not like I know the answer and I'm gonna tell people I don't know I want to I want to experience this and And and and show my anxieties and uncertainties along with everything else You know one thing I do want to emphasize and maybe not just a good point to describe it when many people write to us they say you know, I really enjoy watching closer to the truth and
And the first thing, and then they asked whatever they want. And I said, the first thing I have to tell you is that it's not closer to the truth. It is closer to truth. And this is an extremely important distinction. In fact, when the show was first named, which I can tell you that story if you're interested, the suggestion was it was in a, the original name of the show going back 20 years before 20 years was called MindQuest.
And the subtitle was the closest you'll get to truth. And the PBS president at PBS station in Orange County, that time KOCE, now PBS SoCal, at that time Mel Rogers, said he didn't, you know, he's going to give the show a shot, but he hated that title, MindQuest. And he said, what is it about? And I said, the subtitle was the closest you'll get to truth. And he said, that's it, the closest you'll get to the truth.
I said, no, no, we can't say the truth. Take out the, and that's the name, Closer to Truth. So thanks to Mel, who therefore became the godfather of Closer to Truth, it is that. So Closer to Truth, it's a progressive. And when we write it, we capitalize the two, T-O, because we want to emphasize that it's a process.
And it's not the truth coming out at the end because we know the answer. No, it's a process we all work through together by getting some of the best thinking and testing one against the other and seeking diversity.
We recognize we need diversity and in today's world that's even more important than we're striving to do that. But in our view, the most important thing is diversity of ideas and ideas that are both sophisticated and coherent.
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Okay, you use the word coherence. Now I'm wondering, do you subscribe to a coherence theory of truth or a correspondence or a deflationary? And when you say closer to truth, you have to be
Okay, so that's a very broad and important question.
The first way that I would approach it is to divide the ways of thinking about the word truth. There is the philosophy category, the correspondence theory, the various theories of truth. You need truth makers to make a truth.
Another way to look at it is you can't just define truth without
seeking the context for what it is. So many people will say argument is truth relative. If you're in one set of circumstances, one thing, and if you're another set of circumstances, another thing. Or if you have a different perspective on life, death, universe, God, whatever, you'll have different kinds of truths and they're all sort of
The way we look at truth is that we deal on closer to truth with the kinds of questions that should
I can't say absolutely does, but I would feel very strongly that there is a truth to the questions we ask on Closer to Truth, the large majority in cosmos, consciousness for sure, and potentially on meaning as well. And I go out on a limb and say, yes, so when all of the topics that Closer to Truth deals with, there may be exceptions.
that there really is an ultimate truth that is singular and absolute and non-relative. Do I expect to ever know that? No. Do I expect to make progress in understanding
what those mean. I think the answer is yes, because we're able to ask the kinds of questions and see the diversity of of smart, sophisticated, coherent thinking on these topics, even if they disagree radically on what that answer is on what that question is really asking. So I would then take your question about what is truth and and limit it
To have absolute answers.
When you say absolute answers to me that still there's still quite a few theories of truth that that could qualify for so perhaps Tarski's or a realist not an anti realist not a pragmatic those are more relative but then there's correspondence and coherence which could be seen as
I think you know that by the
It's almost the difference between operant conditioning and Pavlovian conditioning. Operant conditioning, you're just selecting from the universe of potential behaviors. I think that's what we're doing. We don't see the targets. If you see the target as clearly as you've said, as a bow and arrow to a target,
You're imposing on the nature of truth your own biases and we're not doing that. What we want to do is use a diversity of individuals who we believe doesn't mean we've got everyone or we're perfect by any means, but to bring diverse, smart, coherent thinking to these kinds of questions.
and to broaden the category of people that we work with. And again, we're wanting to do that with Eastern traditions and global philosophy of religion. We need to broaden our universe of people addressing those kinds of questions. But at the end of the day,
The questions that we ask at its most fundamental level in Cosmos is, what is the ultimate bedrock undergirding of the physical world? Is it quantum mechanics? Is it string theory? Is it something deeper below that? What is it in consciousness?
bimodal, digital, yes-no answer. Does consciousness require anything beyond what we now call the physical explanation, whether it's at the neuronal level, the synaptic level, the intracellular level, or the quantum level? All of that is physical. Can consciousness be entirely explained, and we can discuss what that
Does that being existent exist?
Now, one of the characteristics of it is a different one, but on those questions, so it doesn't really matter, is the word God correspond to a being who has those characteristics? That is a helpful approach to understand what you mean by truth. I agree with that, but at the end of the day, the kinds of questions we ask do have a
a deep absolute answer, which... Or you're hoping it has a deep absolute answer. No, no, I would say there is a deep answer. Now, I may not know it, I may not even be able to describe it. But however you deal with those questions, does God exist or does consciousness require anything beyond the physical, however you define it in some
I think I have come to understand and hope our viewers who have taken the
journey with us during these years that Peter and I have greatly enjoyed, appreciate these questions more than they have. I know I do. And I thank the audiences that made it possible and foundations that have supported us as well as my own little foundation to give us that opportunity. But I call it, we luxuriate in the questions.
And in that process, get a feel for the kind of ambience that answers would have on either direction. And so, you know, if God exists or if God doesn't exist, if consciousness is entirely physical, or if there's something beyond the physical, you know, are there alien intelligences in the universe, or no alien intelligences in
Whatever these questions are that have answers, we believe that we have enriched the understanding, not only of the importance of the category, but also what it would mean if either side of the answer were true.
So we want to show what either side is. One of the great joys that I've had in Closer to Truth is to see Closer to Truth being recommended by both theist and atheistic websites and people saying you know they may do a little bit on the other side but you know there's some really good stuff there. That's a great compliment especially because both of those communities tend to be
How do you improve as an interviewer, Robert? Do you rewatch the episodes? Obviously you do when you're editing. Are you taking notes? Are you looking at your mannerisms? Are you thinking, well, what are you thinking?
That's a great question and I think I have a personal deficit in not doing that.
I guess psychologically, I like to look to the future. I don't like
to
You know, I'm starting to prepare and learn about Hinduism and Islam at a greater depth than I've known before, and I'm really looking forward to that. And similarly, in philosophy of biology, you know, my background is from biology, my bachelor's was in human biology from Johns Hopkins. But, you know, I'm out of not current in a lot of aspects of biology. So I've been really learning about that. And so
My capacity as an interviewer is related to my passion for the ideas and my desire to learn in preparation for the interview and to learn during the interview. So it's not that I'm just asking get my list out of questions. I really want to engage with that person and understand how that person thinks about it.
And once that's done, I'm on to the next. I don't want to reflect back and, you know, I should have asked this, I should have asked that. You know, I mean, there are, you know, mannerisms. Sometimes I'm looking down on people and I don't mean to do that and I need to be told to do that. Peter's very good in his directorial activity. He doesn't like my hair kind of nicely combed. He likes it.
brushed up a little bit a little bit messy to kind of reflect the kind of a kind of a scatterbrained intellectual approach to things as opposed to a more padded down look. So I'm not sure my hair is proper now. You mentioned that when you're in the interviews, you're trying to be as engaged as you can be. And that's something that but at the same time, you have to wear different hats because you're wondering about the audience.
maybe there are other factors that you're weighing and that's something that I struggle with as well and for better or worse I err on the side of me being engaged and asking the questions that I'm more interested in regardless of if they use too much jargon or technical depth even if some audience members will find it extremely simplistic or overly complicated and I imagine that limits the audience and I could
monetarily benefit from a larger one and then invest in it so that then later I could go back to my previous style. But it's a balancing act. And I'm wondering, what do you weigh? And how do you make that decision? So marketing is one, your engagement, the answering of your own questions is another, how do you navigate that, that process?
You know, one says honestly, don't try to navigate it. I try to be as engaged as possible and have the audience come with us. And many people say that they don't understand a lot of the shows, but they love watching it anyway.
We'll watch it over and over again. We have many people like that, and I love that about Closer to Truth. In fact, it's one of the highlights of Closer to Truth is to see the diversity of people who are engaged. I've kind of come to my own theory about this, is that there is this subset of humanity that really are engaged with these big questions of
of consciousness, life after death, how did the universe happen, why is there something rather than nothing, is there a God, all those kinds of questions. And that no externality by age, economic level, race, religion, creed, national origin, none of those factors are relevant, exaggerating maybe a little bit, to their engagement with these questions.
The best example that I can remember was a viewer in the early days of Closer to Truth, a woman who wrote in and said, you know, I've only had a high school education, but I love Closer to Truth, love the questions that you asked. And he said, but I have my husband and I have five sons. They think I'm nuts. You know, one drives a truck and one is a manager at a warehouse.
And they think their mother is absolutely crazy to be interested in watch this, this show, this obscure show. And he said, but recently my 13 year old grandson has engaged and has loved these questions. So he and I, my 13 year old grandson and I secretly watch closer to truth when my husband and my sons and his father are not around.
and to me that was a wonderful story because superficially you would never say that woman and that child were closer to truth demographic focus and so that to me is exciting and so therefore we don't try to reach a demographic
uh... now as you get bigger people force you to do that and so i'm not saying repair but the original concept of closer to truth is you know build it and see who comes uh... i remember when you know mel rogers and k o c e uh... you know more than twenty two or so years ago now uh... said you know maybe we can we can run it and i i i i said to him even if you run it at three in the morning and it's only on k o c e
I'm excited
You know, that's a great satisfaction, but the satisfaction is not that, oh yes, we were right. No, no, the satisfaction is that there are other people in the world who have gone through the same things that I have and have these same questions and we're sharing it together.
I read each of the papers that you sent me, the PDFs. Thank you for that. One sentence that
stood out to me I wrote down it's simple sentence it says to me honestly nothing makes sense so then that has me thinking well well one when you said that there's absolute truth and I'm not critiquing absolute truth but to me that presumes classical logic it either is true or it isn't and then there are various forms of classical logic so how are you
Sorry, there's not various forms of classical logic. There are various forms of logic, intuitionist, paraconsistent, and so on. So then why did you arrive at that? And then also, well, what is it that you believe if nothing makes sense? That's something that I struggle with. I'm also wondering, how is it that you avoid this nihilistic trap of psychologically being homeless or philosophically being homeless? I'll make those questions succinct. So number one, you're using a form of logic. Why did you choose that one?
Okay, let me go back to the last one because, as I said, I luxuriate in the questions. And when I said nothing makes sense, that was not
What is existence?
God is a necessary being and God created the universe. That's one theory. Another theory is that the laws, the deep laws of physics, whatever they are, are cosmogenic. Pick your choice. There are lots of different ones. And all I'm saying is that all those different categories, none of them make sense. And obviously, one is true.
And that's where I start. Now, when you get into the classical bimodal logic or the tetralemma logic of Eastern traditions, I can't tell you I'm an expert in the difference in how the tetralemma argument of P or minus P both
I think my sense is that those terms are in that form of logic is being used in a blurry way and that at the end of the day the kinds of questions that we ask have a
a digital yes-no kind of answer. Once you define what that choice is,
Take the question, does consciousness demand anything beyond the purely physical world? You can blur that question by saying, well, what do you mean by physical? If you have a fifth force of nature or a panpsychist point of view, does that count as physical or not physical? How do you work that out?
Well, that's a semantical point about what you do, but ultimately, if that's the answer, then that answer becomes an absolute answer, however you create that answer, even in a fuzzy manner. So, to deal with the question, as I said, does God exist or traditional God, or does consciousness demand anything beyond the physical?
What does it mean to have a non-bimodal logic to those questions?
If consciousness is physical, it requires something beyond the physical. If that's either does or doesn't, but if you have a four-fold logic, it would say that it does and doesn't at the same time, or it does and doesn't and both are wrong. And that can give you an insight into the complexity of these questions.
But ultimately, there has to be some kind of an answer. If we're defining the physical world, and again, you can expand your thinking of what the physical world is, that's another set of issues. But if you restrict it to the physical world, and is consciousness demanding more of that,
What would it mean to use the other two forms of logic to that question? That means it does and doesn't at the same time. It does require something non-physical and doesn't require non-physical, and both are true. If that's the case, it's hard to conceive, but if that's the case, if it does and doesn't at the same time, the fact that it does
I think would skew the answer to that. It does, because it's kind of a possible world analysis. This is a technique and philosophy you may be familiar with, and it asks what happens in every possible world. Now a possible world is an entire state of affairs. So it's not just a world like a planet or something. It's all reality.
And a different possible world could be, you know, if there are 10 to the 90th particles in the universe and one particle is in a slightly different polarization, that's a separate world. Everything else could be the same. So there's an infinite number of possible worlds. So you ask questions, is something possible
is
If you
Could that kind of God exist in one possible world? Yeah, maybe I could. Maybe I'd see in a zillion infinite number of possible worlds, maybe one of them, that kind of God could exist. So when you admit that, and then you go into that possible world, in that possible world, God is a necessary being.
the
in the argument that I just made, which is called the modal ontological argument for God's existence. It doesn't work for sure. I mean, I don't believe that, but it is a tricky argument. So now what that does is it goes back to the questions we're asking in a four-fold logic system. If you have consciousness being something that is both
fully explained by the physical world
does require something beyond the physical, and therefore it would indicate that if it is true in one possible world, then it is a truism, even though it may not be in the vast majority of worlds. So that's an argument that I would at least suggest that shows that a
The fourfold logic is helpful in being able to see deeply into some of these very hard questions. And I need to learn more about that. And I look forward to doing that when we're dealing with global philosophy of religion and Eastern traditions and the big questions of these two big series coming up. We'll explore that. And I think that
that complexity of logic enables a deeper understanding of what these questions mean. But I'm still, you know, backward enough or west to westernize to think that at the end of the day, it is going to alter my thinking about the fact that there is an answer to these questions within a twofold logic classical system. Okay, let's harp on this for a bit.
with the twofold logical system you said it's obvious it's either yes or no and then you gave a case where it's imagine consciousness both is physical and not physical but you can develop a logical system where it's not true that consciousness is physical but it is true that consciousness is physical and not physical if you put the bracket behind both true and not true but not true in the singular for the consciousness and then you said well it's obviously true but
I don't necessarily see it as being obvious because well firstly as a scientist your whole point is to question what's obvious so dispense with the word obvious when you're a scientist and number two if you've been emailed several theories about zero or you're going to be interviewing Indian philosophers about zero often they have this notion that zero is the same as infinity and thus it's the same as all possible worlds and thus
You can see how it can be true and not true at the same time. So I don't see it obviously being the case or not the case only. Yeah. And so I think that I think what we're doing is enriching the understanding of aspects of reality. And that's fine. And I look to be able to to appreciate that better. But I don't think you're going to shake me off my my my view that at the end of the day, there is
There is some description of reality in each of these categories that is the correct and the one that corresponds to the reality. It can be much more sophisticated or complex than I would think now. And you're describing ways maybe that's the case. But if that is the case, then that is how to define it.
You also, you mentioned in one of your articles or many of your articles that you dislike faith. Now, do you see any faith? That's probably a slightly mischaracterization. It's not that I dislike it. Maybe I like it. It's just that I don't have it. Okay. Okay. So you don't have faith. Do you see any aspects of faith in the answer that you can't be shaken from your beliefs?
about whether or not there's one answer to a question yes or no.
the structure of the answer. There is one way to define that structure even if parts of it have uncertainty or however you want to deal with it. However you define that there is ultimately an answer to those questions that you can phrase.
You know, the issue of faith is in a different kind of category. You know, faith is a belief in something, the evidence maybe of which you don't see. And in various religions, that is a virtue and I see it as a virtue.
And I admire people who have it. That doesn't mean I think it's either correct or that I want it. Maybe I would want it, but I don't have it the way many people have faith.
When I'm talking about my belief that there are ultimate answers to these questions, even if we can never even define what that is, I wouldn't characterize that as faith, although it is part of my belief system and I'm happy to question it.
I'm not coming at this from a theist's point of view or an atheist's point of view. I'm just playing devil's advocate. When it comes to faith, I hear people say many times that they don't like belief. They don't like faith. Now I'm not saying you didn't, you said this and I apologize if I misquoted you, but when people say faith, faith is actually manifold there. I think on the Stanford encyclopedia, there's,
There's doxastic venture, non-doxastic venture, special knowledge, hope, belief, affective confidence, trust. And then when someone says they don't have faith, well, do you not have trust? Do you never have confidence? And then when someone says, well, I only trust what I have evidence for. Yeah, but you're presuming what evidence counts as. So let's say someone from the Eastern tradition would prioritize experiential knowledge. But then you not saying you, sorry, I'm saying one may prioritize
scientific verification. Okay, but you've just slipped the question because you've just, I've asked you, do you have faith? You say, I only believe what I have evidence for. Well, what counts as the evidence? And then you have a, an assumption there as to what is accurate evidence. So what do you say to that? Yeah, I look, I think those are all very legitimate questions. We've been dealing with that on Closer to Truth because a lot of people will ask us to interview X, Y, and Z person who are people of spirituality in
of them are from Eastern traditions, but also in Judeo-Christians who are messengers of experiential truths. We're not saying we reject that. We're saying that that's just not part of the way we address these questions, but recognize that those are
answered that those are approaches that many people feel are not only legitimate but are more legitimate than the quasi-analytic scientific approach that we have. I distinguish by the way between scientific method and the scientific way of thinking and I do not believe that all truths of significant nature are accessible by the scientific method which is
Experiments or observation repeatability testing etc. I do not think many of the questions are susceptible to that because science the scientific method has a physicalism Foundation and so anything outside of physicalism would not be subject to the scientific method by definition So none of these questions can really get at if there is something beyond the physical world through a scientific method
However, that does not free you from a scientific way of thinking. A scientific way of thinking has to have logic built into it and has to have knowledge of the sequence of the flows of your argument.
I try to be very rigorous about putting people to that test. This particularly would be in philosophy of religion to theists and even to atheists and forcing people, if they want to take me to a belief in God or belief in cosmic consciousness or idealism or something, I want to see the progression of steps that goes from what we all know with third party verification
that we all can agree upon and to their conclusion. And in virtually every case, there will be gaps in the logical flow because you can't go from a scientific method of understanding the world to getting something outside of, of what the scientific method can access. You can't do that. It's just such a self self contradictory. And so all I want to do,
is to point out where those gaps are and how those gaps are bridged. And that's a very fair and legitimate and coherent kind of analysis is to go from what we all can agree upon to questions about the existence of God or the nature of consciousness or life after death or whatever as a belief.
But I want to see when you're making those those jumps over that you're that you're leaping over a logical flow. And then we point those areas out and you're entirely justified in making those jumps. But I just want to be sure that we're all aware that there are as many times people make those jumps and not aware of it. And that to me is not acceptable.
So if you want to use faith or the inner experience that you've had with your religious belief, that's fine. I just want to know where in the sequence of steps that's occurring.
And then we really have a deep understanding of what that process is. And if you want to call that faith during that time, fine, but I want to see where that's occurring. So then we're all on the same sort of logical flow, logical timeline together. But by seeming to be so, you know, scientific way of thinking or analytic philosophy, I want to be clear that I do not reject
at all, those who use other ways of knowing, experiential, religious, as coming to what may be true. I do not reject it. I just want to be very clear where those gaps are being leaped, leapt, and to acknowledge those,
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Does science or the scientific method presume physicalism or give evidence for physicalism?
way that you understand the physical world. And the two are inextricably bound together. Science is the use of the scientific method to understand the physical world. And the physical world is the substrate by which the scientific method works. And you can't go beyond that. You should not go beyond that. The only thing I
It's
I know that you have a scheduled interview for Bernardo Castro at the
Maybe it's unconfirmed, but you're in talks with him and he makes an extreme extremely cogent argument that the scientific method presumes no philosophy doesn't presume materialism physicalism or idealism and what's happened was a grave error where we think we have initially these pixels of perception I'm seeing you right now and you see you see paintings Well, you can't see the paintings behind you if you were to look you would see the paintings behind you and then
we see regularities in our perception, our perceptive field, so we start with these mental states, then we see perceptive regularities, and then we start to make models about them, and then at some point we assume that this exists as an entity in and of itself, and that posits a completely new ontological category, when one, if one is to take scientific modeling seriously, it uses a principle called parsimony, so you want the minimal amount of assumptions, and I don't see
a flaw with this argument that the minimal amount of assumptions would lead you naturally to idealism. Now, I'm not saying I believe in idealism. I'm saying that I don't see how one can hold both parsimony and physicalism, or at least parsimony and not idealism. Well, parsimony is a principle. I mean, Einstein, he has a lot of quotes. I assume this is accurate. But he said, make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
So general relativity to some people is extremely simple, these elegant equations, and to others it's incomprehensible. And so parsimony is great, but doesn't always work. I mean, the orbits of the planets, philosophers and quasi-scientists in antiquity assumed that there were some wheels within wheels and some platonic
structures that had all the orbits, and the orbits are just not that way. They're all based upon some basic principles, but they all have their own characteristic. So, you know, simplistic and parsimony is a very good principle, but it is not a certainty to excess reality. I understand all those arguments.
Bernardo and we're trying to get together. Closer Truth has a difficult schedule because of ours. I told you the productions are very, very significant, but next year we hope to be, we plan to be, we will be in the UK and Bernardo will be on. So we will deal with these things in great detail and look forward to it.
But the kinds of arguments that you're posing lead very quickly to total skepticism.
And, you know, I can make that argument as well, because it's the brain and the vat. I mean, anything I'm perceiving and I'm perceiving, you know, through my brain. That's why I originally wanted to do my PhD in brain science rather than in physics or philosophy or other things I was thinking about, because I had the thought that everything comes through your brain. And so if we understand the brain, we can have a better sense of reality, because that's our only way of perception.
So we're never going to get around that. I mean, that's, that's obvious. And so from that, you can have all sorts of different derivations of, you know, anti realism is, is an easy argument to make, because you don't really have access to any underlying reality in a, in a, in a direct sense, it all has to be mediated by some
that we all have and those are subject to all sorts of problems and issues that we are not aware of in our daily life but in different kinds of trauma diseases they become very obvious and so any of those arguments cannot be totally refuted because at the end of the day anything we know is coming from our is translated into nervous impulses through eyes and
Well, with Bernardo, there's nothing that he says that violates any scientific theory in the least because you could just take the regularities that we see in nature as the physical law.
And then you mentioned, well, simple, but not any simpler. OK, why? Because at some point it won't work. And then my question is, well, what doesn't work about idealism? And furthermore, sorry. So you mentioned simpler, but not simple, but not simpler. OK, why not simpler? The reason is because at some point it won't work any longer. The orbits are oblong or elliptical. OK, OK. That means that there's a breakdown of the theory. OK, from what we can tell.
We have had several shows on closer to truth where we asked the question is the universe theologically ambiguous and All the people we speak to don't like that question because to each one of them
The answer is it's not ambiguous. And obviously the theists think it's not ambiguous because God does exist and the atheists think it is not ambiguous. But nobody liked the idea that it was ambiguous. I like the idea that it's ambiguous. Nobody else I talked to really liked it. I'm exaggerating by making the point. What does it mean when you say the universe is ambiguous just for the audience who is like, what the heck could that possibly? Theologically ambiguous, meaning that can data support both the existence of God and the absence of God.
And the answer to me is yes. And the to me, this is not a hard question, because you know, I have a lot of very, very, very smart friends and colleagues, and many we've entered in closer to truth on both sides of that question. And, you know, I'm not prepared to say what those groups are, you know, really missing some very specific kind of data.
I take the view that the data from the universe, the data that's fed into our ways of apprehension, both directly in ourselves and through our scientific
a process over the last four or five centuries as science has developed, has amplified both sides of the argument. Both theists and atheists have seen the results of science corroborating their fundamental ideas about how things work. People impose their way of thinking on data.
But the data itself has to have some ambiguity about it, or else that wouldn't be possible to happen. Now, the physicalists would say that's because the other side is imposing their artificial experiential selves onto data and kind of skewing it.
And the theists may say that as well, that they are imposing that they believe in God, that this inner experience they've had is both meaningful and certain in their minds. But the raw data of the universe can be interpreted in various ways. You know, I've used this different ways of interpretation
to illustrate that by taking a question, are there alien intelligences that are sentient in the way that human beings are sentient? It may be very different, but are there? And I pose it as a two-fold matrix in terms of, are there aliens, sentient aliens, or not? So that's one axis. The other axis
is are you a
There are zillions of sentient life in the universe, so atheism is clearly right. Now, if there are no other sentient life in the universe, the theists will say, see, we earthlings and human beings on earth are a special creation of God and therefore God exists. The atheists will say, see, the universe is wholly inhospitable to life and it's only on this
random planet that one thing had occurred so that God can't possibly exist. So here you take a very simple case of whether there are sentient aliens or not and interpret it from both the theist and atheist point of view and neither will change their fundamental position no matter what the answer is. Now if that's the case, if you give me that, then any of these other questions will fall in the same category as idealism versus physicalism versus panpsychism.
And so we can do our best to really understand the nature of each of the argument to give us a richer understanding of the questions. But I have no belief, no hope that there'll be an ultimate answer because I think that is given the circumstances we have that it's probably in principle impossible.
You and I think so much alike, Robert. When it comes to sitting on the fence for many issues and citing, well, how can you be so confident about your answer given that there are people who are extremely bright on both sides? And sometimes when I see, I'm pretty sure you get the same feeling. When you look at the comments, most of the time they're extremely positive and sitting with ambiguity. But plenty of the time you'll see people say these people are obviously incorrect because
God for sure exists or God for sure doesn't exist. I heard someone recently say religion lowers your IQ. Come on. Why do you think that? What makes you think that someone else? Why do you think the other side says what they do? Do you think it's because they're unconsciously motivated by something malicious? Well, we all are to some degree, but do you but more than you? And do you think that it's because they have a paucity of the data that you have access to?
There's a great quote by Cain, I believe, that in great controversy, not one side is mere folly, or only the shallowest of mind would think that in great controversy, one side is mere folly. I tend to subscribe to that, and you seem to be doing the same as well. My favorite critique was in one show, it must have been something to do with God, within about
five or ten comments on YouTube. One person said, yeah, it was good, but QAnon is too much a promoter of theism for my taste. And then ten comments later, it was, yeah, it was an interesting show. I learned a lot, but you know,
He's an atheist and he doesn't believe in God and I'm not going to really pay attention. Normally it's a different place, but here it was in the same context, in the same show. Some people accuse me of being an atheist and some people accuse me of being a theist in a negative manner for both, a critical matter.
And I took that as a compliment. By the way, you used a phrase I don't agree with. I agree with everything you said except one thing. I don't think I'm sitting on the fence. And I don't think you are either. It's not a sitting on the fence. It's a very sharp-eyed, tough-minded approach to questions. Now I could be wrong and when I'm wrong, I love to be wrong because then I learn. But I think of
What I want to do is being very tough-minded, very critical thinking, and being open-minded in a very real sense at the same time, and being hopeful. I often say that I fear my hope is swamping my reason, and so I try to be careful about that when I think. But it's not sitting on the fence. I take these questions very seriously. I have my whole life.
a great opportunity to discuss with many people and join discussing with you today, Kurt. And these are questions which all human beings face at the same level. And I think that's important thing in today's world too, that we all share these ways of thinking, which can go a long way towards bridging ostensible gaps between people.
I'm going to match your agreement slash disagreement with another disagreement slash agreement. So I would say, yes, I agree. I'm not sitting on the fence in the traditional sense of being on it. Well, I am in the sense that I'm unable to make up my mind, because as soon as I posit one position, I can almost immediately see a counter to that position. And it's difficult from in my mind, it's just even when I'm writing, I just see flaws, flaws, flaws, flaws with almost each side. So that's what I mean when I say on the fence. And then as for
As for you saying that you like to be wrong I don't think so Robert and I'll tell you why you don't want to be wrong about your wife not loving you or wrong about reason leading you reason not leading you to truth because your whole show is based upon reason and argumentation leading to someplace that's closer to truth so I want to say globally you care you're excited to be wrong unless
Please tell me if I'm wrong about that on specific topics. If I if I think a certain way and then I find out that's not correct in some sense, that to me is a learning experience. I
i like that i mean i i've had uh... from uh... uh... good comments that you know but greater appreciation i thought harder about experiential even though we still don't do without closer to truth because i have no way of adjudicating uh... you know which you know the week from the chaff and the huge amount in that area just not what we can do but i do appreciate that that is a consideration that needs to be uh... admitted
And we do that on Closer to Truth, but we don't then explore that further by testing all different experiential claims that various teachers or gurus or ministers or whomever propound. That's not what we would do. So my thinking on that, for example, has been expanded a little bit.
and uh... we've talked before about logic and i would have thought that the classical logic is is is the only way laws of excluded middle and all that but they are because a different logical system particularly you know the eastern uh... tetralemma i think that's what it's called before the four kinds of logic it gives you a deeper insight
into ways of thinking about deep questions. That's a learning experience. How that affects is what one needs to consider. When I say I like being wrong, I'm not saying that in a global sense.
I missed my calling and I should have believed in God or should never have dealt with questions about God. No, I don't think I'm wrong about that. But whenever there is something that I learned that was different, I look upon that as progress. Well, Robert, the reason I bring that up is because I'm sure you see this too. I'm constantly almost unconsciously assessing people of their unconscious motivations. And when I hear people say,
I'm sure you see this too when they say, well, I love to be wrong. Richard Dawkins has a story about this. I wonder how much of that is marketing or trying to show one's rational, intellectual proclivity by saying, well, look, I'm not the Catholic church where I say kneel down and obey and listen to whatever. I actually follow the data wherever it may lead me. Well, first of all, I don't buy that. I don't think that's necessarily true. If the data led you to kill yourself or led you to kill, destroy the world, would you do so?
and then if it does well maybe you should question your own reasoning and also when people say they don't like faith or they don't have faith or they don't have beliefs well I see that also as pounding their chest or at least pounding their brain in an analogous chest thumping manner by saying look how scientifically rational intellectual I am and something I think intellectuals dislike more than appearing to then being irrational is appearing to be irrational I'm questioning when people say
For example, you mentioned you don't have faith. Well, do you drive your car? And then you may say, yes, I drive my car. OK, do you have faith? You're not going to get into an accident. Well, my faith is based on evidence. OK, but OK, I know I'm speaking for you here. Sorry. Let me ask you. You say that you don't have faith. Do you drive a car? No, but you're interpreting faith in a much broader term. And I'm saying faith is faith in willing to give
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school?
I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock.
That would, I think, be pretty cool about the way the world works and what the potential of human beings are in terms of life after death or whatever. But I don't have the faith to make that leap between that hope and the belief. So I don't have the belief, you know, I'd like to, because I don't have the faith to do that. You're using the word faith in a much broader term.
That's not the way I, when I say I don't have faith, I mean faith in that very specific thing to make the leap from what I know about the world and philosophical analysis and everything to an absolute belief in God. I think I'm using that term in a very limited sense to that.
We all have predispositions in our belief system. Everybody has a belief system that's founded on principles, some of which are obvious to us and many of which are not. Scientists who say that philosophy is dead or there is no room for philosophy, it's just distorting. They are practicing philosophy. They are giving a philosophy when they say that.
and I say philosophy is dead is no that is a philosophy that is a philosophy you may think it's amateur philosophy or bad philosophy but it is a philosophy and so you know when I use the word faith that I'd use it in in that context but if we want to broaden the concept to how we deal with various ways of dealing with the world or with truth you know what we're
I would offer a different way of thinking about it. Rather than using the term faith, I'd use the term belief system. We all have a belief system which operates in the background for whatever we're doing. If we're driving a car, we have a belief system about that. If we're thinking about the nature of consciousness or God or life after death, we have a belief system that we bring to that discussion.
human belief systems is a wonderful topic for deep explanation. And that is a closer to truth theme. We, we deal with belief systems and how belief systems come about, uh, both in all respects, although we have maybe a, uh, a skewed towards religious belief systems and how they come about, but these are fascinating conversations. So we had one television show, you know, uh, religion without God.
What does that mean? How does that develop? That's interesting. Yeah. So belief systems is an exciting way of thinking about it. And I would put the way I would define faith as a small subset of the broader topic of belief systems. Okay, help me out, Robert. So there are belief systems about operating a computer or a vehicle and then there are belief systems about
Now, what's the difference between one? Why is it okay? Well, why is it rational to have a belief system about driving a car and being confident about one's abilities to drive a car versus irrational to have faith in a deity, let's say, or multiple deities, or whatever other religions espouse? I'm trying to find out what's the difference between those.
Well, I think in the ultimate sense, there is no difference in terms of belief systems being a mechanism by which human mentality deals with sentience and its world. So we deal with our worlds through our belief systems. Belief systems are inculcated by your own personal experience and their
they're inculcated by the culture from which we live. I mean, one argument against religion, and it's a strong one, is that if you go to the Western world, you know, Christianity is 90% or whatever, and you go to India, and Hinduism is whatever the percentage, 70% and Islam is 30%, whatever the numbers are. And, you know, do all these people make those decisions on
In a rational sense, of course, that's impossible. If that would occur, you'd have the entire world in every country having a similar percentage of people making their decisions. We have a tremendous amount of our
I had an experience that it may sound trivial, but it was really very meaningful to me. My first granddaughter, when she was learning to walk, she had a toy that was a walker and she just was starting to walk and she wanted to get to the other side of the room and she kept pushing into a hammock or a chair and she couldn't get
through the chair she kept pushing she wanted to get to the other side she couldn't get through the chair and then she slipped and she slipped and she got around the chair and it was one trial learning the next time she came there she knew she just went around the chair and so when she first saw that she wanted to get the other side of the room you just go straight
Because that's the belief system. When you go straight, you get there quicker. It doesn't matter if there's a chair in the way. You just go, but you couldn't. And then the next thing she learned was that if there are things in the way, if you go around them, even though it's longer, it's longer to go around than to go through, but if you do that, it works. So that was an example that I saw literally
Right there where a belief system was being developed and it was a belief system with how to deal with things in the world. Now that's very simplistic, but I think that analogy and that mechanism applies to lots of, you know, gets much more complicated and filters everything that we have.
And so one challenge for us when we're dealing with these very big questions of existence of God or nature of consciousness, life after death or whatever, is to challenge our own belief systems and to see what are the assumptions that our belief systems are making. And in doing this, I think we see broader
opportunities and broader ways of thinking and how other smart people think. And that's what we try to do on Closer to the Truth. We try to understand how presuppositions, we don't always call it belief systems, but how presuppositions and ways of thinking lead to certain kinds of conclusions and how different people make different arguments to get there, but they're all based upon these
Perhaps unconscious kinds of modules that are parts of our belief system. I think that's a good way to think about it. Our belief system have these modules in them. Marvin Minsky talked about a society of minds in his classic book. And so we have these modules, mental modules that we've had, many of which are unconscious.
This analogy or this story with your granddaughter? Is it your granddaughter going from point A to B?
See to me this means that there's a pragmatic definition of truth embedded within what you said because the first model is let's go to A and B in a B line and then the second and that fails and then the second is let's go around it and then you validate the model based on the goal based on if it gets you the goal which is a pragmatic theory of truth and before you were and pragmatic theories of truth are somewhat relative so to me that goes against what you earlier said what you said earlier about there being an absolute yes or no
What is Truth?
They can be very volatile. I mean, you know, morality is an absolute or relative, and there's a huge literature and a constant battle about those kinds of things. When I'm using the word truth and as we use it on Closer to Truth, the scope of what we're talking about as truth is extremely limited. If you look at all the questions of human life and existence and sentience,
The kinds of truth that we're focusing on on closer to truth are a minuscule subset of all the kinds of truths that there could be. And so when I'm using the term truth, that there is an absolute truth answer to the kinds of questions we ask, even though we'll never get to it enough. I'm not here to tell you what those answers are. That's for sure. That that that's a different category. So I will defend
the notion that there is an absolute truth about these big questions, even though we wouldn't even know what it means that
that we would know. We wouldn't even know what a verification, how a verification could be. For example, one of our contributors, a contributor less well-known but very sophisticated, sadly he died, Bede Rundle from Oxford, who is a very strong atheist, said this, he said
If I were trying to be convinced to be a theist, which he was not, and I went to a shrine or holy waters and I saw a person who believed in God suddenly materialize two limbs that they didn't have. They had no arms and suddenly they had arms. And that person said,
Therefore God exists. I mean, suddenly, and I saw that myself and I was sure it happened. He said, I would think it more likely that it was an alien ship on the dark side of the moon beaming special healing rays to that lady than there is a God. And to me that, you know, that sounds ridiculous in a sense, but you think about it, that's really profound.
Because to this person, the existence of a god in the traditional way is so unlikely that even an extreme explanation that he had to explain a certain set of data, whereas everybody else could, if they saw that, which nobody has, by the way, certainly in recent times, even no claims to that, they would look upon that as
What was that person's name? What was the person's name?
He wrote a very interesting book called Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, which gives one answer to that big question that I like to deal with. That's one of his works. But he was a very strong atheist and a very good thinker. Not that I agree with it.
Firstly, it depends on how one defines God and there are interdictions against that in virtually every religion, especially the Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition. Second, so what definition of probability are you using to say that this probably isn't the case? There's a measure theoretic definition? That's the mathematical one? What he was illustrating, not facetiously, he was illustrating that we're so used to definitions of God that we think it
It is a definition that is acceptable within the range of probabilities. He was just using it to show from his perspective on a de novo basis, just looking at things privately, that the existence of such a being is so extraordinarily unlikely. And that's what he was trying to convey.
uh... that it's so extraordinarily unlikely uh... at the issue of from from first principles if you if you weren't acculturated as we are that that's what he was trying to set uh... and it was it's it's uh... it's a striking uh... it's it's it's striking and it sounds facetious but it was it was making
A strong point that if we were not so acculturated, from his point of view, some people say that the belief in God is acculturated in all traditions around the world and everybody sort of believes it naturally. And it is a basic belief of human beings. This is Alvin Flanagan's famous kind of argument about when I interviewed Al,
One of our segments, we had many, many segments with Al. One of my segments, these 10-minute segments were arguments for God. I said, Al, from your point of view, you believe in God. He said, yes. I said, what do you think are the best arguments for the existence of God? That was the segment. He said, okay, I'm going to give you some arguments, but our first one to say is I don't think you need arguments.
to believe in God, and that you're fully justified, warranted, honest in your beliefs, and fully rational to believe in God without any arguments. Now, this was Al's big contribution. One of his big contributions to philosophy and religion, and Christian philosophy in particular, is to say that you could have warranted belief in God without evidence and without arguments.
And that the belief in God is similar to the belief in the existence of the past. Like you and I have been talking for now two hours of enjoyable time. And you know, did what we did in the first hour, was that real or not? Well, you and I both believe, the audience believes that what we did in the first hour really happened. But you know, how do we know that? How do we know that for sure? Well, it's sort of a basic belief
that we have. I believe that you are as well, although you could be a philosophical robot and have nothing inside, just have a lot of stimuli and responses. That's possible, but I believe in other minds. Al's point of view is that if you believe in the existence of the past and you believe in the existence of other minds, you should be able to believe in God at the same level of confidence without argument. Now, one could argue that.
Wait, why is that the case? Because belief in God is what Al would call a basic belief that is inculcated into human beings in the same way that our belief in the past is and so on.
I don't
I know you're not a defender of it. I don't see why it follows from the fact that you believe in the past and other minds that you then can believe whatever intuitively comes to you. It doesn't follow from it. That's not the logic. It is the same level of significance. It doesn't follow from the past in the mind. It just says with the same confidence level that you have
that there was a past, the same confidence level that you have in other minds. You should have that same confidence level if somebody says they believe in God. You don't have to subject them to proving through the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the teleological argument or the fine-tuning argument, any argument. You don't need any of those. Now, you may want to enjoy thinking about those and using those, but you don't need any of them.
That was his argument that you don't need arguments for God. Again, you can argue that, but the importance is to understand the nature of belief systems. Now, Bede Rundle takes that same view exactly 180 degrees opposite. That's why I brought it up. So Bede Rundle said the existence of God is so unlikely.
and so absurd and so ridiculous to have this concept that if somebody is healed, that it's a real healing, it's more logical to have these aliens in a hidden spaceship having done it rather than God. And my only point is I really like these two guys. These are, you know, I love being with them. These are, you know, I didn't know B. Rundle that well.
I can't think of more extreme cases of being opposite
where one says, belief in God, you don't need any arguments for that. It's just as basic to human existence as acknowledging there was a past or that other minds exist. And another person saying, no matter what would happen, no matter what evidence you could show me, doesn't matter what evidence you would show me, I will never believe that the cause of that evidence is a God rather than some other kind of explanation.
and to me that
that to some people that would seem terrible to have two smart people so opposite, I think is wonderful. I think it's so expressive of the of the human condition. And these are not people who who don't think about these are people to whom these questions are the deepest part of their lives. They've devoted their entire lives to thinking about these questions and come up with such diverse answers. But when when people do that, when they have such diversity,
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About both of those arguments, I want to tell you what occurs to me. Again, like I'm just a devil's advocate. I see flaws. So with Alvin's position, what occurs to me is monotheism is relatively new. So if you go back for even 3000 years,
then would that not be an argument for polytheism rather than a belief in a god that's what occurs to me okay so that's number one and then for bead grundle is that correct yeah for bead grundle again he's using unless he's using the measure theoretic definition of probability which is not because that's actually you need many many many many data points like in the financial world in order to use that then he's using a folk definition when he's saying unlikely which means he's using
propensity or subjective or or frequentist and so on they're all flawed so then one and then you also depends on the Drake equation which runs the gamut from 100% certainty that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists to 10 to the minus 400 be making vast assumptions there plus you're making vast assumptions as to what constitutes God so I don't see why he could say with any certainty that it's unlikely that it's God or it's likely to be aliens
Look, you're critiquing both positions, and I think that's entirely justified. I'm just looking at each one in its own right, and why these people have come to the view that they have. And as I said, I can't pick more diametrically opposite views, and that to me is fun.
I mean, these are the most opposite views you could have. One saying, you don't need any arguments for the existence of God. It is properly basic in human psyche now. You can say that going back that it was polytheistic, but people always had this sense of something beyond themselves. I see, I see, I see. A lot of that. But there's something intrinsically basic about this belief. On the one hand, on the other hand, it's just
It's so absurd that virtually any other explanation would be better. That's just expressing two different views. Both of them can be severely critiqued, and they are, and justified. When we do that on Closer to Truth, that's fine. But to deposit these two diametrically opposite views is, to me,
a very rich data point in in assessing human sentience and cognizance and dealing with these big questions. It's extremely interesting. Something that I think you would find, maybe you've thought about this quite a bit. Why is it that these? Why is it that brilliant people? Obviously, that depends on what you call brilliant. But why is it that they disagree when they have access to the same data? And they're not
Unless you want to say that they're biased, now let's remove the bias because, well, maybe you can't remove the bias. Either way, why do you think it is that people disagree like Noam Chomsky versus Peterson or Bernardo Kastrup versus virtually all of your guests? Why is it that they disagree? Is it that they have access to different data?
No, I think we posit that everybody has access to the same data. Now, each has belief systems which are either unconscious or developed culturally or deliberately manifest in terms of their own study as they've had, but they bring different belief systems and that's why we've run shows on the universe as theologically ambiguous.
religiously ambiguous because you're able to take these questions and interpret the data based upon your belief system. And I think that itself is a kind of truth which is really important that we can agree upon. So we can agree upon the fact that smart people take the same set of externalities data and come to radically different conclusions about
the big questions that we deal with. And so that is a truth. And that is an absolute truth. That's not a relative truth. That's a very clear absolute truth. That's a fact of our world. And I think that fact of our world is an important data point in understanding our world. So it sounds like we've made no progress because we've said that some people believe one thing, some people believe another.
But I would disagree. I would say we have made progress because we see that these people have made dramatically different conclusions based on the same set of the data. And these are all smart people trained in science or trained in philosophy or trained in a logical way of thinking.
and they're coming to different conclusions. So that is a firm data point about existence, that you can see, you can come to dramatically different conclusions, even though people have the same set of ways of thinking, they're all trained in the same system, and they have access to the same external data.
And so this is a fact of our world, and I think an important one. And I think it's one that is not a triviality. I think it's progress to understand that. Do you feel like you've gotten any closer to truth? So my wife would say that she's a pianist, not a scientist and not dealing with these questions. She said that when we met, which was now
How many years ago? 54, 55 years ago. Congrats, man. She and I were at the same kind of level of knowledge about things, and now I've done 300 Closer to Truth shows and 4,000 interview questions, and she says we're still at the same level of understanding these questions, even though I've done 4,000 interviews and she's done none.
and I've thought about this for 50 years and intensely with Closer to Truth the last 20 years, and she doesn't think about these things at all, and we're both at the same level. There's a kind of truth in that.
in terms of coming to an answer. But I think in reality, I have a very deep appreciation for the nature of the questions. I'm more excited about them than ever. So it's not after talking to so many people and hearing so many theories that I'm kind of fed up and I've heard everything.
No, it's the opposite.
Over and over again, for example, why is there something rather than nothing? We call it the mystery of existence. Why not nothing? What is the nature of nothing? So we've had multiple shows people can look that up on YouTube or posted truth.com just put in Nothing, and you'll see various shows that we've done on that many interviews means put in the actual quotation No, not put in nothing. You won't get anything No th ing right exactly
And I don't know how we could code for literally putting in nothing. And then nature of consciousness, is consciousness fundamental? What is the nature we've done in so many different ways? Because we have so many different people to speak on these issues, and we've not exhausted it. As you mentioned, Bernardo Castro, we look forward to discussing with him as well.
in terms of the thinking. So you're asking, am I close to truth after all this time? I would say no in terms of an absolute answer to questions, but certainly yes in terms of an appreciation of
Robert, with all these people you interview,
Are you able to keep their different theories? Now they're extremely disparate, but are you able to keep them alive in your head such that you can allude to them or quote them when you're speaking to another interviewer? And if so, how do you do that? Do you take notes? Yeah, I don't consider myself to having a spectacular memory.
I do it
Don't listen to anything Michael Shermer says. No, I'm just kidding. He's a friend.
I do it from my own perspective, but again, as enriched and informed by all the conversations that I've had, but I try to focus on each individual to try to get the best thinking out of that person by having them, you know, some free association, some probative questions, some questions to kind of attack or undermine their position just to get more out of them. So that's what I try to do. So each interview is done
On its own, its own focus, not in terms of what other people think. When Peter Getzels and I put together the shows, then we synthesize an artificial architecture where we'll take
The Apparent Chronology
based upon a state a flow of ideas an argument as opposed to a real real-world chronology which it it can't be uh... peter's the editor the uh... peter gets out as he stood up he's the producer director and then he has editors working for him which was wonderful editors uh... and and i i'm very much involved in the uh... in in the in the selection so i work together with them on a script basis but not the visual basis for the show works they
to
little under 27 minutes of airtime. It is every word, every frame is thought about, worried about, focused on my whole world is that one show and when it's gone I don't think about it again.
Do you rather these podcasts that are unedited, where you just put up the footage online, or do you actually enjoy the editing process? That's another expression, which was not in my DNA, and it was not part of Closer to Truth until we were forced to do it last year because of the lockdown. And so now we have three expressions of Closer to Truth. We used to have two. We had our super polished shows, which are our crown jewels, which we're most proud of.
Most of them are on YouTube now and CloserToTruth.com. They'll all be up in the next few months, releasing one a week now or several several a week. And we have the raw interviews, which are these seven to 12 minute sessions at which we have over 4,000, maybe 5,000 by now of these segments. And those are also very highly produced.
And now what we've done in the last years, we have the same things that you and I are doing here for your podcast, Theory of Everything, which is great. We've done that for Closer to Truth. So we've done 15 or so what we're calling Closer to Truth chats. And sometimes we do it live and most of the time we don't and we have a very wide
variety of people. We did Dan Dennett on free will and George Smoot, Nobel Prize winner in cosmology, Jill Tarter on alien intelligences, Len Miladnau just did a book on Stephen Hawking.
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.
If someone wants to know when is your correspondence with Castrop going to be? Our plan is to do the interview when we are shooting in the UK next year which will be in planning for March of 2022 and we hope to schedule Bernardo during that period of time which would mean that the interview would be posted you know several months later in in different segments because when we
We'll hope to do 12 or so segments with Bernardo on different ways of approaching this topic. It won't be the kind of interview we're doing here, which is all straight. It'll be in segments and we'll post the segments at that time and then eventually those will find their way into actual shows in which his views will be contrasted with others.
I'll link to that in the description once they're out just please I'm pretty sure it'll get recommended to me but if it doesn't send them to me and I'll put it in the description of this so if you're listening watching it's in the description okay someone named and by the way that previous question came from panda products okay Andrea s asks your favorite question why does anything exist and how has your thinking on this changed
You know, the question of existence is the great question of philosophy and indeed of reality. I've always said the questions, you know, does God exist? Is consciousness fundamental? How did the universe come about? What about the fundamental laws of physics? Life after death? These are all super important big questions, but I call them second level questions. The primary question is why is there anything at all? And, you know, I had a
Fascination of this when I was a literally a child that scared me so to think about it and I thought it was unique and over the years I found many people have had that same experience that kind of that feeling of disassociation where you wonder what if there were nothing and it's a very scary thought and had the opportunity now over the years to develop this very much in great detail we've done
Many shows on why is there something rather than nothing? What is nothing? Why not nothing? Mystery of Existence on ClosestofTruth.com and on ClosestofTruth YouTube. But I have to give credit to one of our early contributors, John Leslie, who is a British-Canadian philosopher who developed these ideas and other ideas, developed the philosophy of cosmology as well as
The Mystery of Existence
I didn't know Plato had thoughts on that.
Yes. I mean, you could read it into it, where Plato believed that the good or value was sort of a protogenitor of reality, that reality exists for the good. Interesting, interesting. So you can read back into, some people are very specific, like Leibniz and others, but others you could read into their thinking of why things exist.
And I have a piece called Levels of Nothing in which I deal with nine levels of nothing. People talk about nothing, they think they know what they mean, why isn't there nothing? But in this piece I show that there are nine ways that nothing can be described. So there are nine levels of nothing. And what's fun to me is the nothing that many physicists talk about, the quantum foam that takes
from nothing, no space time, no, no matter energy, no, no nothing. And then they you create a universe out of nothing, which many physicists believe happened indeed may have happened that way. But that to me is my level five, nothing, right? Because it presumes the laws and so on.
Neutrino, a commenter I love says, Robert, I kind of love you.
Steve Scully says, question for Robert, just because something exists, does this necessarily preclude nothing from also existing? Yes, I think it does. Some people would argue that, and many people said this, and maybe when you have your tetralemma theory of logic, you can have nothing and something at the same time, but I, in my simplicity,
We'd say once you admit there is something in one possible world out of an infinite number, then by my definition, there is something. And so once there is something, there can never have been nothing in the big sense. So once you admit any kind of something in any kind of possible world in any way, you've answered the question that there is not nothing.
PJ wants to know about your thoughts on UFO sightings and encounters. It seems to previously be getting laughed at, but
increasingly taken more seriously. And then someone wants to know what your thoughts are on life after death. Panda Products wants to know that. So PJ, what are your thoughts on UFO experiences, sightings, encounters? Yeah, we do not deal with those kinds of questions traditionally on Close to the Truth. I would also put another category which we're asked about even more often than UFOs is near-death experiences. Right, great. Panda Products. These are not categories we've dealt with a little bit.
The implications
So if parapsychology and ESP are true, and we would define what that means, real phenomena in some sense, what would that imply? What would that imply about the nature of mind or physical?
That's a legitimate close to the truth area, but not to determine the statistical proofs or not proofs of that. That's not what we would do. I put UFOs in that same category. I personally would be a skeptic, but I don't consider myself sufficiently knowledgeable. I have noticed there has been more attention lately to those kinds of questions.
multiple answers to that kind of question, much like there is to the Fermi paradox of why we don't see aliens, there are dozens and dozens of possible explanations. But I would remain a skeptic on UFOs if UFOs are deliberately
As far as life after death,
I think this is a this is a closer to truth topic we deal with this a lot it obviously has to deal with the nature of consciousness and If consciousness is a hundred percent physical then there is no life after death if consciousness is something beyond that or if there is a non-physical existence such as
traditional gods or some type of spiritual realm, then there is a possibility of that. I've dealt with this in a paper on an article I've written on virtual immortality. Yeah, I read that one. Thank you for sending that. And it's diverse explanations of consciousness from pure materialism to epiphenomenalism to what's called non
non-reductive physicalism, where it is physicalism, but there's something beyond that, to quantum theories of consciousness, to different aspects of qualia, to dualism and ultimately idealism, where everything is consciousness or cosmic consciousness. And each of these have different implications about the nature of life after death.
as well
is a deep philosophical question. It's also technological and it would take me thousands of years to be able to develop a technology, not decades or something. But even if you had the technology, you really have to discern what the nature of consciousness is before you can do that. So questions of life after death, questions of uploading your consciousness and questions of super AI consciousness.
Those are three separate questions, life after death, uploading your own consciousness into another medium and attaining some kind of immortality, and super AI consciousness. Those are three separate questions and I argue that they are the same question.
that all three of them are founded on the same question, which is the nature of consciousness. You can't answer any of those. You can't assume that you know the answer to any of those unless you have a prior belief in a certain theory of consciousness. Robert had to go, but luckily he was gracious enough to answer some of the questions over email. Some listeners wanted to know, what are Robert's thoughts on the demarcation problem? Robert said this, the key test is repeatability.
an important probative question. The next question comes from Abdullah Khalid. Could Robert tell us about his best interview experience? Robert says, which of your children do you like best? If you picked a quote unquote best, how would others feel? Another question viewers slash listeners asked was who would you interview of the past if you could? Robert says,
Pascal. The next question comes from MJ McGovern. This one comes from the Theories of Everything Discord. I would be curious how Robert Kuhn splits his time between his activities. What are some of the more surprising things he's learned through his career, and if he has any advice for people who want to follow in his footsteps, like maybe Kurt. That reminded me, by the way, that I wanted to ask Robert Kuhn what advice he has for me, building theories of everything, as a combination of my quest to explicate theories,
as well as to build a community around theories of everything, and as well as for me and the community to advance the state of theories of everything in general. Robert Kuhn said this,
both closer to truth and closer to china are based on my deep desire to learn and to share what i've learned the process as well as the content my advice keep doing what you're doing do what works best for you don't try to target demographics let me know your progress all the best robert okay that was a marathon man that's where we leave it robert thank you so much it was a pleasure it's it's still a pleasure and it's a bit surreal although i'm
By the end of it now I've acclimated to it but to see you because when I was younger before I even started theories of everything or a podcast and I would watch your videos and I found them incredibly insightful and I'm I'm fairly certain much of what I think has been unconsciously and somewhat consciously to influenced by you and your show. So thank you so much for there's many people here in the chat that is saying that they love you and thank you as well.
Great, Kurt. I enjoyed being here. Congratulations on the theory of everything. I think it's a real contribution and we're on this journey together. That's for sure, man. Have a great one. Bye-bye.
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"text": " This is Martian Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, you'll always feel good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
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"text": " Hi, I'm Cyndi Lauper. My scalp was covered with psoriasis, which could lead to psoriatic arthritis, but Cosentix treats both."
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"text": " Back so soon? Oh no, what happened? A little incident at the dog park. We gotta head to the vet. Oh, not again. These bills. We can use Cashnet USA. We can apply in minutes, get a fast decision, and have the money in the account as soon as the same business day. All right, Cheddar,"
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"text": " Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a veritable truth seeker, and much of the modern proliferation of analytical and intellectual discourse in video form, into consciousness, into the origins of the universe, into the relationship between both, is due to his wonderful series, Closer to Truth."
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"text": " It's likely that you've seen his show many times and even if you can't place his name, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, you'll likely be able to place his face. This episode is a dive into the nature of truth. So for example, how do you know if you're getting closer to it if you can't define it? As well as faith, as well as logic, as well as God. If you're new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm interested in what are called theories of everything, which is a physics terminology. It means the unification of gravity with"
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"text": " The next 30 days will be quite the unconscionable slog for me because I'm interviewing Chris Langan. That comes toward the end of June. Chris Langan is the person who's been"
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"text": " Characterized as having the highest IQ in America and he has a theory of everything called the cognitive theoretic model of the universe That's for later in June later in June as well as Rupert Spira Daniel Schmottenberger if I'm pronouncing his name, right?"
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"text": " In this month, May, I have Chomsky coming up. Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervecky are coming on again for round two of a Theolocution. At the end of May, I'm also speaking to Stephen Wolfram on his theory of everything, as well as Luis Elizondo on UFOs. There's also a secret project being planned with Yoshabok, which I think you may be extremely excited for. All of this takes a tremendous, tremendous amount of work, because what I'd like to do in these podcasts is not give an overview, but instead to go deep into certain subjects, and that"
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"text": " A challenge. I try to over-prepare for virtually each topic except UFOs because UFOs is one that I'm wholly unacquainted in. So most of the time when I'm speaking to someone on the topic of aliens or UFOs, I'm speaking as a beginner. For example, to Kevin Knuth or to Jeremy Korbel, and to a lesser extent Avi Loeb because that was more physics-based. We also have a PayPal if you're more interested in that, and in fact more of the money, the percentage-wise, goes to the creator, that is me, if you donate or support using the PayPal link."
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"text": " That's in the description. Thank you so much. Thank you. Regardless of your decision. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You don't generally say yes to interviews. I was wondering why you said yes to this one. At least interviews not about China. We've had a change with the internet. Closer to truth has had a spectacular year. Some of it energized by, of course, the lockdown, but it's been continuing at on our YouTube channel."
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"text": " a fivefold increase over the last year. And we've appreciated and I've appreciated the thousands of comments that we've had for Closer to Truth. And a lot of them have asked, you know, they like my questions, but they'd like to see some of my answers. I do some commentary on our shows with interstitial commentary and an open and a close, particularly a close."
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"text": " But on the vast majority of our interviews, I'm just literally asking questions. So an increasing number of viewers for Closer to Truth YouTube channel have been asking for my opinion and things. And a number of people have asked for interviews. So I've sort of changed our policy. We've had a kind of a laser focus on producing Closer to Truth. I've been doing this for 20 years."
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"text": " really non-stop since 2006 when Peter Getzels joined Forces with Mays, an award-winning director, producer, very knowledgeable about science. And since that time, it's been just a tremendous, exciting productions and then doing shows. And so that, all of my energies was devoted to that. And when we"
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"text": " produce a show. When producing interviews, they're pretty much raw interviews, much like this, they're shorter, focused on an individual question will last for seven to 10, 11 minutes, and then it's on to the next. When we work with an individual, such as you've had Donald Hoffman or Robbie Loeb, we might have a session of 10 or 12 or 15 of those eight to 10 minute segments. And that's what we do. And we post those."
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"text": " But then when we do our actual show, Peter and I spent an enormous amount of time worrying about every frame and every word and to get it right. And so that's been totally consumptive. And so I wanted to devote all of my energies to producing the best thought and the best presentation for"
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"text": " for the topics that we deal with, which I'm sure we'll discuss in great detail. But as I said in the last year, because Closer to Truth has now been using the YouTube channel and has broadened itself internationally, because we were on PBS television for 20 years, obviously our focus was in the US, so while"
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"text": " When our YouTube channel started, it was like 95% U.S. audiences. And we've been happy to see that percentage drop and drop and drop. And so now we're about 40% U.S., so 60% plus outside the U.S. with some very significant demographics in just very broadly in the world. And so all of that has contributed to kind of a rethinking. And so"
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"text": " I, rather than just focus entirely on producing our shows, wanted to respond to the times and to our audience to really get behind the scenes and just see me as a kind of a normal person who has the same kinds of"
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"text": " questions and interests that many of our audience does. And so that's why I'm pleased to do it. Obviously we screen and I think the professionalism by which you and some others have brought to questions involving science, each with its own particular orientation, which is fine. I would look and Peter and I would analyze the"
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"text": " the compatibility with what we want to do for closer to truth. So there is a level of sophistication and seriousness, not that we should take ourselves seriously, but that we should take our topic seriously and do it without, you know, in a very open manner. And so, you know, we've appreciated what you've done, what you've created and happy to share our experiences."
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"text": " Well, firstly, I thank you for the compliment suggesting that I'm even somewhat professional and sophisticated. I wouldn't categorize myself as that. Just for the people watching, Robert's show, Closer to Truth, is the highly professional version of this show, the highly high production value. In fact, it's better to say that my show is the low budget version of yours because yours was out 15 years prior."
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"text": " So if you like theories of everything this podcast, you're going to love closer to truth. I recommend searching closer to truth. I'm sure it's, it will come up and Robert Kuhn, if you search his name, interviews with him as well as closer to truth will come up closer to truth, closer to truth.com is our website."
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"text": " and our YouTube channel. You can search for the YouTube channel, Closer to Truth YouTube channel. Those are our two main vehicles, other than, of course, the PBS television show, which is broadcast on over 200 stations in the US. Are you still producing Closer to Truth? Do you have ideas for future episodes? Yes, definitely. Definitely. In fact, we're very excited about this year. Of course, we've not. We've done post-production."
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"text": " For previous productions we've had, we have a new series coming out in a couple of months. It's almost entirely produced. 13 episodes. We have 13 episodes in a season. Closer to Truth works in seasons. That doesn't mean one a year. They'll be varied. There might be one a year. It might be three a year. Normally it's about one and a half or two."
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"text": " 13 episodes and we've done 20, 13 episode seasons so far since our first, since the new version of Closer to Truth began broadcasting in 2008. So we've had 20 seasons of 13 episodes each. Actually, the last one was 10 episodes. And the new one coming out, which is season 21, will focus on scientific breakthroughs. And we've, we've shot"
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"text": " extensively at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Complexity Theory and have some just wonderful interviews. For example, Edward Witten, who we hadn't had before, the leading strength theorist, very extensive interviews with him and just a whole number of terrific people"
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"text": " at the Institute, Karen Ollenbach, Robert Digraph, our old friend Paul Davies is with us, V. S. Ramachandran, Antonio DiMazio in areas of scientific, Len Malat now. We really have a terrific season and we focus on scientific breakthroughs in physics and scientific breakthroughs in biology. And we break it into two parts. One is the"
},
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"text": " What is a scientific breakthrough in physics? How can you account for it? What does it mean? What kind of step function is there in understanding the concept of breakthrough? And secondly, what is the process of breakthrough? So we have one whole show on what is a breakthrough in physics. Then another one, what is the process by which a breakthrough in physics occurs? Then we do the same thing in biology."
},
{
"end_time": 869.241,
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"text": " about six of the shows in the new season will be on scientific breakthroughs. Then we have some really diverse and interesting subjects. One is on deception. We have some of the leading theorists on the concept of deception, both in the animal kingdom and in human beings. In fact, one show is on deception in animals, one show is"
},
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"text": " deception in human beings. And then two on music in the brain and one on transhumanism and what does it mean in brain science. So that's our new season coming up. It'll be broadcast on PBS I said within a few months starting. I should mention though that the first two episodes in the new season are a tribute to Freeman Dyson."
},
{
"end_time": 918.848,
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"start_time": 895.333,
"text": " Freeman was one of our early contributors and enriched our show enormously and we very much appreciate it. And so Peter Getzels and I put together a two-part tribute working with his family and so we have a lot of inside photos and ideas and then most of the show of course is Freeman's own ideas."
},
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"text": " And one of them will deal with his views on physics, which is natural, and the other is sort of his broad approach to a lot of other things. So it's a very exciting opening to the new season on Freeman Dyson."
},
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"text": " Then going on from here, we've used the last year to look to the future. And we have a pretty exciting backlog of production, which are fully funded by excellent foundations with whom we work, the John Templeton Foundation, the Arthur Bynum Davis Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, Templeton World Charity Foundation. And so these series coming up"
},
{
"end_time": 993.217,
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"start_time": 967.005,
"text": " and in no order of importance because they're all important, like which of your children are the most exciting. So don't take it like the first one I mentioned is most important, but I just want to mention the ones that we'll be doing productions in the future. The first is the global philosophy of religion. And this is a very, not just exciting, but we believe an important project"
},
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"text": " that is"
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"text": " Originally a philosopher of mind and has become a leading philosopher of religion and really a wonderful philosopher and thinker. We worked with Yujin actually almost 10 years ago in producing a series of programs on alternative concepts of God, which were different ideas than the traditional Judeo-Christian Islam monotheism."
},
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"end_time": 1053.558,
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"text": " and those are very successful programs. And Eugene has put together a vision for engaging the world because philosophy of religion really has been pretty much focused on the Judeo-Christian religion, particularly Christian philosophers."
},
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"text": " uh... and the work that has been done since the middle ages in christian philosophy is really wonderful stuff some people in sciences make fun of these kinds of philosophies and uh... we can get into that uh... but uh..."
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"text": " the contribution that Christian philosophy has done over the years to thinking about about now they do it from their perspective, of course, but the ways of thinking are really wonderful and expansionary for human human development, but it is still Christo centric or Judeo Christo centric, which is what we closer to truth has done just out of expediency. Right. We did reach out to try to get"
},
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"text": " non-Christian thinkers, and we have in the beginning, we have Sayed Hussein Nasser, who is arguably one of the leading Islamic philosophers in the world from Iran, Persia,"
},
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"end_time": 1138.08,
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"start_time": 1109.616,
"text": " tradition and a wonderful philosopher, and we have some Buddhists and Hindus, but the skew is very much toward a Judeo-Christian. And so when Eugene had this project to really engage the whole world in this endeavor in terms of expanding the thinking in philosophy of religion, we jumped on and we said and worked together with Eugene and the John Templeton Foundation. We have it fully funded, so our"
},
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"end_time": 1156.647,
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"text": " First, program in this regard is actually going to be an online conference, which will occur in June as a conference and then thereafter, we will have about 20 interviews maybe more panel discussions keynotes that will deal with the global philosophy of religion and we will deal with."
},
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"text": " obviously, Islam and Hinduism, but we're going to go broader than that. We wanted to do a Sikhism. We are doing Sikhism and African religions. So we have a very broad diversity of ideas. So global philosophy of religion is one project for the future. Next year we'll be in Birmingham live for our typical closer to truth productions, very, very high quality."
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"text": " Shows will take a year or so to get out on PBS, and then YouTube. It's a long process that we have, but we love it and we're dedicated to it. Other series coming up are Philosophy of Biology, which will be our first foray into biology in a very serious way, and it will become a new category for Closer to Truth. Right now, Closer to Truth classically has three big categories. Cosmos, which deals with cosmology, astronomy, physics, mathematics,"
},
{
"end_time": 1237.722,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1214.224,
"text": " Consciousness, which deals with brain, mind, diverse intelligences, a little bit ESP once in a while, alien intelligences, personal intelligence. Alien intelligences, as in UFO aliens or just extraterrestrial life, what would they be like? No, astrobiology basically, and thinking about what the nature of alien intelligence is."
},
{
"end_time": 1265.93,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1238.012,
"text": " We deal with how does personal identity be maintained? Free will has been a major topic that we've dealt with. That's our consciousness. And then our meaning category really is philosophy of religion. And it heretofore has been somewhat, as I said, Judeo-Christian centric. And so what we're looking to do is expand that category, meaning. And now with philosophy of biology, which is one of our biggest grants and one of our biggest productions,"
},
{
"end_time": 1274.889,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1266.186,
"text": " I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 1305.333,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1275.52,
"text": " a continuing work on art seeking understanding. And we have a wonderful opportunity with the Arthur Bynum Davis Foundation in terms of Eastern traditions, which will focus on Buddhism and Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Taoism with big focus on Buddhism and how those religions or traditions deal with the big questions. This is not one-on-one religion about telling about these religions. That's not our job."
},
{
"end_time": 1332.227,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1305.794,
"text": " We're going to focus on what are the big questions that Closer to Truth asks that we have traditionally approached from a Judeo-Christian point of view, and how do these other traditions deal with those same questions. So we've got a long future ahead of us. We've just got to keep healthy. Robert, just so you know, if I ever look angry, I'm just thinking. That's my thinking face. I'm sure you're familiar with it. I don't mind anger. What I mind is passivity."
},
{
"end_time": 1348.882,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1332.875,
"text": " Alright, you mentioned that one of the reasons you stayed or steered clear from Eastern traditions before was expediency and I'm also wondering if"
},
{
"end_time": 1375.981,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1349.377,
"text": " It's also due to the level of unfamiliarity that we in the West, we grow up with. So for example, if a Western philosopher thinks that the jump from analytic philosophy to continental is huge, try continental slash analytic to Eastern philosophy. It's a completely different base. It's almost meditative and experiential and requires special knowledge insights that you glean that you can't necessarily share. So is that another reason why or is it purely expediency?"
},
{
"end_time": 1404.462,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1376.971,
"text": " I think, well, expediency is not a term I would use, because going in, we wanted to do it. We wanted to get first class philosophers, but in our limited production, because we weren't using internet where we could interview anybody anytime, we were doing, and we do it close to very high production value videos and television that are the"
},
{
"end_time": 1419.445,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1404.735,
"text": " the equivalent, as we say, of Toyota commercials. And so we like to get crews, Peter gets directors of photography and cameramen, between their Toyota commercials where they're paid at rates, where they have off time,"
},
{
"end_time": 1444.275,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1419.735,
"text": " They love Closer to Truth, so they do it at scale. And so we can afford it, but still very expensive. And we have crews of 13, 15 people, three cameras, dollies, jibs. I mean, it's a big effort. And so the only way we can do that efficiently is to sort of gang tape within a week. We do 15 because people are gathered at a conference. And the kinds of conferences that we've had"
},
{
"end_time": 1454.633,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1444.275,
"text": " Because they've been limited have been Western oriented. Now a lot of been physics. We work very closely with an organization called FQXI Foundation Questions Institute."
},
{
"end_time": 1483.626,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1455.299,
"text": " which deals with sort of over the horizon physics and cosmology with some of the leading cosmologists and quantum physicists, physicists looking at the foundations of quantum mechanics, looking at new ideas in cosmology. And so that's what we have done. And it's just that in none of those venues that we've had would Eastern philosophers at a first grade level come up."
},
{
"end_time": 1505.418,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1484.019,
"text": " Now you bring up a very important point in terms of the experiential aspect of Eastern philosophy because we have a kind of an operating framework on Closer to Truth that experiential work is something that we can refer to but it's not our core."
},
{
"end_time": 1530.503,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1505.947,
"text": " Because it is difficult for third-party verification. You know it internally. So we have had shows and efforts saying why an analytic philosophical approach is not sufficient. That's a fair comment within the thing. But to then adjudicate between"
},
{
"end_time": 1554.053,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1530.998,
"text": " large numbers of people in particularly Eastern traditions, but also in Western traditions who have experiential understanding. And that's part of their core. We have determined that's not within closer to truth's orbit to deal with in detail. And so that's probably a"
},
{
"end_time": 1584.343,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1554.531,
"text": " an unintended skew why we have not pursued Eastern religions as much as we should, because in Eastern religions there is more of that experiential internal dimension. But that excuse is no longer acceptable to us. Yeah, I was also thinking if you're mentioning that there's a lack of third-party verification, the same could be said about consciousness, but you have a whole series on that. For example, you can't tell if I'm conscious, I can't tell if you're conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 1602.432,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1584.514,
"text": " Sure. And we deal with that very, very extensively as a very important part of the consciousness approach. Look, everybody has a bias. My PhD is in neuroscience. You can see some stuff on the background remind myself of my early days in neuroscience."
},
{
"end_time": 1627.346,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1602.705,
"text": " So that's a particular skew that I've had in terms of a worldview. It's a scientific worldview, it's a neuroscience worldview, at least that was the germinating aspect of my kind of thinking. So we have, as I said, recognized from the beginning the importance of Eastern thinking, and we have that right from the beginning, like Hoson"
},
{
"end_time": 1633.933,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1627.688,
"text": " who was one of our first interviewees in 2007."
},
{
"end_time": 1660.145,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1634.497,
"text": " But we've not taken it further. This year, with the expansion of Closer to Truth globally, we've recognized that this is an issue. So Peter and I have made a focus to put our future approach into reach out. And again, our audiences are now broader so that they're pushing us as well, as rightly they should."
},
{
"end_time": 1687.261,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1660.145,
"text": " When we get criticized in feedback or YouTube comments that you should deal with Eastern religion, what we now say is, you know, we've done a little bit, but you're right. You know, that's a missing dimension that we have and we're going to fill it. And we're very pleased, coincidentally, that Yucha Nagazawa has put together this remarkable Global Philosophy of Religion project, which is very broad."
},
{
"end_time": 1715.811,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1687.892,
"text": " setting a three year project. It has three specific content areas. The first is on the existence and nature of deities. And that was the first of the three big areas. And that's what our first conference online conference will be. It was supposed to be in person, but we've now transferred it online. The second conference will be on death and immortality. So that will deal with consciousness kinds of issues."
},
{
"end_time": 1737.159,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1716.015,
"text": " And the third will be on problem of evil, suffering in the world, those kinds of things. So those are the three categories to take a global philosophy of religion, and we're doing the first online, the second we'll do in person, and hopefully we can do something with the third as well. And that will really broaden closer to truth where it should go."
},
{
"end_time": 1755.077,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1737.637,
"text": " Thanks to Eugene and John Templeton Foundation for their project. And Eugene's project is much broader than just these conferences. They have research projects, they're going to do books. It's a big effort to create really a new field of global philosophy of religion and reaching out to"
},
{
"end_time": 1776.869,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1755.316,
"text": " is"
},
{
"end_time": 1794.224,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1777.705,
"text": " Robert, how do you and Peter, besides let's say technical logistics, how do you prepare for each interview?"
},
{
"end_time": 1823.166,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1796.135,
"text": " The way we do Closer to Truth normally, and then I'll describe the last year when we were doing it online, is that we have to have a generally minimum of five days and maximum probably of seven in which we will go to a location. For example, we've done with FQXI, we did it in Vieques in Puerto Rico, we did it in Iceland, we did it in"
},
{
"end_time": 1847.534,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1823.643,
"text": " Iceland was on cosmology, Vieques when we did FQSI was in information theory, and in Banff Canada, which was the last one we did, was on physics of the observer and the physics of what happens. Basically it's the foundations of quantum mechanics. So let me just describe that. In Banff they had 80 or so physicists who"
},
{
"end_time": 1868.251,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1847.858,
"text": " Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor"
},
{
"end_time": 1897.108,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1869.206,
"text": " It's a very intense seven, eight days. The Navy has something called Hell Week. That sounds like hell seven. No, it's really, I mean, it sounds like hell and if you look at our faces and our attention, you'd think we were miserable, but this is what we love. Yeah, I understand. It is terrific. And so we'll know in advance six months that there's that plan. And then Peter and his team will start working with individuals"
},
{
"end_time": 1922.21,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1897.824,
"text": " who we've targeted and make a schedule. In general, we'll do three people a day. Sometimes if they're very long, we'll do two. Occasionally, if they're shorter, we might do four a day. And these days are 14, 16 hour days, especially for the crews. It takes them an hour and a half to set up. It takes them at least an hour to break down the set."
},
{
"end_time": 1952.619,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1922.619,
"text": " I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 1967.551,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1953.473,
"text": " we're"
},
{
"end_time": 1997.671,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1967.807,
"text": " an outline of topics to the individual and say this is what we're talking not specific questions but but rather here are the topics will be dealing with that i leave out anything something you want to discuss that i haven't mentioned uh... and we get that and then i have that that outline uh... and so i i have to go into each interview feeling uh... i i i should put it this way fooling myself to think i know almost as much as that person does about his"
},
{
"end_time": 2017.466,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1998.114,
"text": " or her"
},
{
"end_time": 2047.073,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2017.739,
"text": " Do you get people emailing you their variegated theories of everything on consciousness or physics? And how do you deal with that? Do you welcome it, for example?"
},
{
"end_time": 2076.288,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2047.534,
"text": " That's a very good question, and I really appreciate when people write to us in general. I mean, it's much appreciated. I read everything that comes in directly into CloserToTruth.com, and I certainly skim through the large majority of the comments on YouTube. There are obviously so many now."
},
{
"end_time": 2098.66,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2076.613,
"text": " I've tried to respond to many of the ones that come in directly. Over time, there have been an increasing number of people who have their own theories. I'm polite and many times I can't"
},
{
"end_time": 2125.947,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2099.172,
"text": " uh... accurately judicates a very sophisticated aspect of uh... of quantum physics but uh... it you know the uh... the the fact is is that if there are examples in history where people have made radical breakthroughs which as we all know that general relativity and quantum theory but you know it's not"
},
{
"end_time": 2156.101,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2126.22,
"text": " It's not that frequent, so many of the ideas we get in the physics area and the consciousness area are on the extreme. I try to skim all of them, you know, never knowing when something, and even when ideas are, I wouldn't say crackpot, I'd say fringe or radical, it sometimes shows you a different kind of way of thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 2186.237,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2156.647,
"text": " And that to me is very helpful to understand different ways of thinking. Sometimes there are interesting insights that people have, but I can't... Do you have an example of an interesting insight off the top of your head? Yeah, I would say there's one individual, I don't want to mention too many names, who has shown with some rather bizarre"
},
{
"end_time": 2213.08,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2186.715,
"text": " uh... comparisons between number theory and quantum physics but in his work showed the uh... high level of importance of chaos theory in understanding uh... deeper reality for that chaos theory is more fundamental than that it may seem on the surface of what it is uh... and that's that's an example in the"
},
{
"end_time": 2223.575,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2213.387,
"text": " and quantum physics."
},
{
"end_time": 2252.244,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2224.377,
"text": " I don't buy and maybe I'm not qualified to analyze, but as a result of going through it and seeing the sophistication of thinking, it allows you to perhaps see things that you haven't seen before. So when anybody sends something in, I look at everyone. I may not look at it for long, but I do look at everyone and on occasion I will comment."
},
{
"end_time": 2278.558,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2253.097,
"text": " There is a danger in commenting because if you comment, then you're going to get, you know, 10 times as much back. And then now what do you do? Uh, so, you know, the ex the exgencies of life require that I can't be in detailed communication with dozens of people on sophisticated topics. I just can't, you know, I have to do some family stuff too for"
},
{
"end_time": 2305.111,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2279.189,
"text": " It takes quite a bit of time to go through almost anyone's work in detail, even if it's non-academic and fluffy. It may take an entire day. Yeah, and I can't do that. I think I've gotten over the years having done, I don't know, 400 interviews and have read papers by so many people in so many ways, at least in the areas that I'm familiar with."
},
{
"end_time": 2334.531,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2305.862,
"text": " You know, I'm not putting public policy healthcare in my list of expertise, but in the areas that I have focused on, on Closer to Truth, I am very, very familiar with the scope of the field and in some depth. And so I can pretty quickly scan a paper in our categories very quickly and get a sense of what the point is and then go further as it may be."
},
{
"end_time": 2362.892,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2334.855,
"text": " I've had three experiences in the last year where individuals were presenting ideas that were not my traditional way of thinking and very sophisticated, and I engage with these people and consider them now colleagues. So out of the hundreds and hundreds, there are three, and maybe there'd be another one if I think hard."
},
{
"end_time": 2388.217,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2363.541,
"text": " There are three and curiously, maybe not curiously, all three present from an Eastern point of view. Two are from India and the third is from the Netherlands, but he's presenting about the concept of zero from an Indian point of view. He's very sophisticated. He's not a professional philosopher, but he's as good as one."
},
{
"end_time": 2413.558,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2388.558,
"text": " And the two from India, one is a quantum physicist who has very strong ideas about Vedanta. The other is an artist in the Tamil tradition who has written books on art and understanding art from a philosophical point of view. He was trained as a computer scientist, so he's very knowledgeable about science. He's an artist."
},
{
"end_time": 2433.166,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2413.797,
"text": " And he has written these books in Tamil about art and understand it. And from each of these I have engaged in serious communication and have learned a good deal. Were there any interviews that you felt particularly underprepared for?"
},
{
"end_time": 2461.544,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2433.626,
"text": " I would say my early interviews with some superstars, I don't know if I would say underprepared, I would say I was nervous and kind of awed by the potential of the experience. I can drop names, but people on the physics side, Steven Weinberg,"
},
{
"end_time": 2487.91,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2461.834,
"text": " Frank Wilczek, Alan Guth, Andre Lindy. These are people who I greatly respected, and many others in that category as well, just mentioning a few, and intimidated by their work and going in and wanting to do a good job on the philosophy side. Richard Swinburne, Alvin Planting, Peter Van Inwagen, just to name a few."
},
{
"end_time": 2514.599,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2487.91,
"text": " very sophisticated philosophers. I love philosophy, I study philosophy, but I'm not a professional philosopher, nor am I a professional physicist, obviously. And so these I have felt intimidated going in, but in the process, perhaps over-prepared, but still felt intimidated. And I got the greatest compliment"
},
{
"end_time": 2529.241,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2514.838,
"text": " of"
},
{
"end_time": 2557.125,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2529.582,
"text": " Which are when the professors ask you these hard questions about all the things that you do to get you to the stage where you then do your thesis. So you're supposed to know the field at that point. So when he said that, that kind of made me feel good. But I should tell you that there's not a single interview that I do that I don't feel apprehensive going in, because you never know enough. And I'm thinking with several"
},
{
"end_time": 2575.589,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2557.381,
"text": " several levels at the same time i want to engage the individual i really want to understand it personally myself and then i want to make sure our audience sort of gets it too and it doesn't go over their head and i explain terms that are terms of art if i if i need to do that in context so i have to have this"
},
{
"end_time": 2602.568,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2575.879,
"text": " Kind of multi-level thinking in each interview, but it never changes. In other words, I don't feel so confident going into an interview that I don't feel the tension and the apprehension to really get it right. And that's a good thing because this is what I love doing. I love learning."
},
{
"end_time": 2629.684,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2603.524,
"text": " Genesis closer to truth is that I want to learn this is not like I know the answer and I'm gonna tell people I don't know I want to I want to experience this and And and and show my anxieties and uncertainties along with everything else You know one thing I do want to emphasize and maybe not just a good point to describe it when many people write to us they say you know, I really enjoy watching closer to the truth and"
},
{
"end_time": 2657.261,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2630.145,
"text": " And the first thing, and then they asked whatever they want. And I said, the first thing I have to tell you is that it's not closer to the truth. It is closer to truth. And this is an extremely important distinction. In fact, when the show was first named, which I can tell you that story if you're interested, the suggestion was it was in a, the original name of the show going back 20 years before 20 years was called MindQuest."
},
{
"end_time": 2685.811,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2657.722,
"text": " And the subtitle was the closest you'll get to truth. And the PBS president at PBS station in Orange County, that time KOCE, now PBS SoCal, at that time Mel Rogers, said he didn't, you know, he's going to give the show a shot, but he hated that title, MindQuest. And he said, what is it about? And I said, the subtitle was the closest you'll get to truth. And he said, that's it, the closest you'll get to the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2709.428,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2686.032,
"text": " I said, no, no, we can't say the truth. Take out the, and that's the name, Closer to Truth. So thanks to Mel, who therefore became the godfather of Closer to Truth, it is that. So Closer to Truth, it's a progressive. And when we write it, we capitalize the two, T-O, because we want to emphasize that it's a process."
},
{
"end_time": 2723.592,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2709.684,
"text": " And it's not the truth coming out at the end because we know the answer. No, it's a process we all work through together by getting some of the best thinking and testing one against the other and seeking diversity."
},
{
"end_time": 2741.152,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2724.224,
"text": " We recognize we need diversity and in today's world that's even more important than we're striving to do that. But in our view, the most important thing is diversity of ideas and ideas that are both sophisticated and coherent."
},
{
"end_time": 2761.015,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2741.51,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2788.012,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2761.937,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2807.892,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2788.012,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 2837.5,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2807.892,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 2861.254,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2837.5,
"text": " Okay, you use the word coherence. Now I'm wondering, do you subscribe to a coherence theory of truth or a correspondence or a deflationary? And when you say closer to truth, you have to be"
},
{
"end_time": 2880.742,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2862.551,
"text": " Okay, so that's a very broad and important question."
},
{
"end_time": 2899.582,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2881.323,
"text": " The first way that I would approach it is to divide the ways of thinking about the word truth. There is the philosophy category, the correspondence theory, the various theories of truth. You need truth makers to make a truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2928.558,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2899.582,
"text": " Another way to look at it is you can't just define truth without"
},
{
"end_time": 2950.708,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2928.933,
"text": " seeking the context for what it is. So many people will say argument is truth relative. If you're in one set of circumstances, one thing, and if you're another set of circumstances, another thing. Or if you have a different perspective on life, death, universe, God, whatever, you'll have different kinds of truths and they're all sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 2973.234,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2951.067,
"text": " The way we look at truth is that we deal on closer to truth with the kinds of questions that should"
},
{
"end_time": 3001.049,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2973.916,
"text": " I can't say absolutely does, but I would feel very strongly that there is a truth to the questions we ask on Closer to Truth, the large majority in cosmos, consciousness for sure, and potentially on meaning as well. And I go out on a limb and say, yes, so when all of the topics that Closer to Truth deals with, there may be exceptions."
},
{
"end_time": 3018.541,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3001.391,
"text": " that there really is an ultimate truth that is singular and absolute and non-relative. Do I expect to ever know that? No. Do I expect to make progress in understanding"
},
{
"end_time": 3044.974,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3018.882,
"text": " what those mean. I think the answer is yes, because we're able to ask the kinds of questions and see the diversity of of smart, sophisticated, coherent thinking on these topics, even if they disagree radically on what that answer is on what that question is really asking. So I would then take your question about what is truth and and limit it"
},
{
"end_time": 3067.619,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3045.333,
"text": " To have absolute answers."
},
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"end_time": 3094.497,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3067.619,
"text": " When you say absolute answers to me that still there's still quite a few theories of truth that that could qualify for so perhaps Tarski's or a realist not an anti realist not a pragmatic those are more relative but then there's correspondence and coherence which could be seen as"
},
{
"end_time": 3119.701,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3095.435,
"text": " I think you know that by the"
},
{
"end_time": 3140.776,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3120.811,
"text": " It's almost the difference between operant conditioning and Pavlovian conditioning. Operant conditioning, you're just selecting from the universe of potential behaviors. I think that's what we're doing. We don't see the targets. If you see the target as clearly as you've said, as a bow and arrow to a target,"
},
{
"end_time": 3166.476,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3140.776,
"text": " You're imposing on the nature of truth your own biases and we're not doing that. What we want to do is use a diversity of individuals who we believe doesn't mean we've got everyone or we're perfect by any means, but to bring diverse, smart, coherent thinking to these kinds of questions."
},
{
"end_time": 3187.807,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3166.8,
"text": " and to broaden the category of people that we work with. And again, we're wanting to do that with Eastern traditions and global philosophy of religion. We need to broaden our universe of people addressing those kinds of questions. But at the end of the day,"
},
{
"end_time": 3216.834,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3188.114,
"text": " The questions that we ask at its most fundamental level in Cosmos is, what is the ultimate bedrock undergirding of the physical world? Is it quantum mechanics? Is it string theory? Is it something deeper below that? What is it in consciousness?"
},
{
"end_time": 3246.015,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3217.927,
"text": " bimodal, digital, yes-no answer. Does consciousness require anything beyond what we now call the physical explanation, whether it's at the neuronal level, the synaptic level, the intracellular level, or the quantum level? All of that is physical. Can consciousness be entirely explained, and we can discuss what that"
},
{
"end_time": 3273.951,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3246.869,
"text": " Does that being existent exist?"
},
{
"end_time": 3301.425,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3274.206,
"text": " Now, one of the characteristics of it is a different one, but on those questions, so it doesn't really matter, is the word God correspond to a being who has those characteristics? That is a helpful approach to understand what you mean by truth. I agree with that, but at the end of the day, the kinds of questions we ask do have a"
},
{
"end_time": 3328.507,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3302.176,
"text": " a deep absolute answer, which... Or you're hoping it has a deep absolute answer. No, no, I would say there is a deep answer. Now, I may not know it, I may not even be able to describe it. But however you deal with those questions, does God exist or does consciousness require anything beyond the physical, however you define it in some"
},
{
"end_time": 3350.111,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3329.104,
"text": " I think I have come to understand and hope our viewers who have taken the"
},
{
"end_time": 3378.763,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3350.384,
"text": " journey with us during these years that Peter and I have greatly enjoyed, appreciate these questions more than they have. I know I do. And I thank the audiences that made it possible and foundations that have supported us as well as my own little foundation to give us that opportunity. But I call it, we luxuriate in the questions."
},
{
"end_time": 3408.131,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3379.241,
"text": " And in that process, get a feel for the kind of ambience that answers would have on either direction. And so, you know, if God exists or if God doesn't exist, if consciousness is entirely physical, or if there's something beyond the physical, you know, are there alien intelligences in the universe, or no alien intelligences in"
},
{
"end_time": 3424.548,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3408.319,
"text": " Whatever these questions are that have answers, we believe that we have enriched the understanding, not only of the importance of the category, but also what it would mean if either side of the answer were true."
},
{
"end_time": 3451.527,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3425.009,
"text": " So we want to show what either side is. One of the great joys that I've had in Closer to Truth is to see Closer to Truth being recommended by both theist and atheistic websites and people saying you know they may do a little bit on the other side but you know there's some really good stuff there. That's a great compliment especially because both of those communities tend to be"
},
{
"end_time": 3474.172,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3452.176,
"text": " How do you improve as an interviewer, Robert? Do you rewatch the episodes? Obviously you do when you're editing. Are you taking notes? Are you looking at your mannerisms? Are you thinking, well, what are you thinking?"
},
{
"end_time": 3491.63,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3474.974,
"text": " That's a great question and I think I have a personal deficit in not doing that."
},
{
"end_time": 3521.8,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3492.329,
"text": " I guess psychologically, I like to look to the future. I don't like"
},
{
"end_time": 3542.841,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3522.517,
"text": " to"
},
{
"end_time": 3572.363,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3543.183,
"text": " You know, I'm starting to prepare and learn about Hinduism and Islam at a greater depth than I've known before, and I'm really looking forward to that. And similarly, in philosophy of biology, you know, my background is from biology, my bachelor's was in human biology from Johns Hopkins. But, you know, I'm out of not current in a lot of aspects of biology. So I've been really learning about that. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 3601.015,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3572.688,
"text": " My capacity as an interviewer is related to my passion for the ideas and my desire to learn in preparation for the interview and to learn during the interview. So it's not that I'm just asking get my list out of questions. I really want to engage with that person and understand how that person thinks about it."
},
{
"end_time": 3627.415,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3601.015,
"text": " And once that's done, I'm on to the next. I don't want to reflect back and, you know, I should have asked this, I should have asked that. You know, I mean, there are, you know, mannerisms. Sometimes I'm looking down on people and I don't mean to do that and I need to be told to do that. Peter's very good in his directorial activity. He doesn't like my hair kind of nicely combed. He likes it."
},
{
"end_time": 3655.213,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3628.029,
"text": " brushed up a little bit a little bit messy to kind of reflect the kind of a kind of a scatterbrained intellectual approach to things as opposed to a more padded down look. So I'm not sure my hair is proper now. You mentioned that when you're in the interviews, you're trying to be as engaged as you can be. And that's something that but at the same time, you have to wear different hats because you're wondering about the audience."
},
{
"end_time": 3680.043,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3655.913,
"text": " maybe there are other factors that you're weighing and that's something that I struggle with as well and for better or worse I err on the side of me being engaged and asking the questions that I'm more interested in regardless of if they use too much jargon or technical depth even if some audience members will find it extremely simplistic or overly complicated and I imagine that limits the audience and I could"
},
{
"end_time": 3699.838,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3681.015,
"text": " monetarily benefit from a larger one and then invest in it so that then later I could go back to my previous style. But it's a balancing act. And I'm wondering, what do you weigh? And how do you make that decision? So marketing is one, your engagement, the answering of your own questions is another, how do you navigate that, that process?"
},
{
"end_time": 3714.991,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3700.879,
"text": " You know, one says honestly, don't try to navigate it. I try to be as engaged as possible and have the audience come with us. And many people say that they don't understand a lot of the shows, but they love watching it anyway."
},
{
"end_time": 3740.009,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3715.299,
"text": " We'll watch it over and over again. We have many people like that, and I love that about Closer to Truth. In fact, it's one of the highlights of Closer to Truth is to see the diversity of people who are engaged. I've kind of come to my own theory about this, is that there is this subset of humanity that really are engaged with these big questions of"
},
{
"end_time": 3765.896,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3740.213,
"text": " of consciousness, life after death, how did the universe happen, why is there something rather than nothing, is there a God, all those kinds of questions. And that no externality by age, economic level, race, religion, creed, national origin, none of those factors are relevant, exaggerating maybe a little bit, to their engagement with these questions."
},
{
"end_time": 3793.046,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3766.323,
"text": " The best example that I can remember was a viewer in the early days of Closer to Truth, a woman who wrote in and said, you know, I've only had a high school education, but I love Closer to Truth, love the questions that you asked. And he said, but I have my husband and I have five sons. They think I'm nuts. You know, one drives a truck and one is a manager at a warehouse."
},
{
"end_time": 3819.497,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3793.695,
"text": " And they think their mother is absolutely crazy to be interested in watch this, this show, this obscure show. And he said, but recently my 13 year old grandson has engaged and has loved these questions. So he and I, my 13 year old grandson and I secretly watch closer to truth when my husband and my sons and his father are not around."
},
{
"end_time": 3844.906,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3820.179,
"text": " and to me that was a wonderful story because superficially you would never say that woman and that child were closer to truth demographic focus and so that to me is exciting and so therefore we don't try to reach a demographic"
},
{
"end_time": 3874.599,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3845.23,
"text": " uh... now as you get bigger people force you to do that and so i'm not saying repair but the original concept of closer to truth is you know build it and see who comes uh... i remember when you know mel rogers and k o c e uh... you know more than twenty two or so years ago now uh... said you know maybe we can we can run it and i i i i said to him even if you run it at three in the morning and it's only on k o c e"
},
{
"end_time": 3891.817,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3874.838,
"text": " I'm excited"
},
{
"end_time": 3912.056,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3892.244,
"text": " You know, that's a great satisfaction, but the satisfaction is not that, oh yes, we were right. No, no, the satisfaction is that there are other people in the world who have gone through the same things that I have and have these same questions and we're sharing it together."
},
{
"end_time": 3939.804,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3912.295,
"text": " I read each of the papers that you sent me, the PDFs. Thank you for that. One sentence that"
},
{
"end_time": 3968.746,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3940.896,
"text": " stood out to me I wrote down it's simple sentence it says to me honestly nothing makes sense so then that has me thinking well well one when you said that there's absolute truth and I'm not critiquing absolute truth but to me that presumes classical logic it either is true or it isn't and then there are various forms of classical logic so how are you"
},
{
"end_time": 3998.404,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3968.968,
"text": " Sorry, there's not various forms of classical logic. There are various forms of logic, intuitionist, paraconsistent, and so on. So then why did you arrive at that? And then also, well, what is it that you believe if nothing makes sense? That's something that I struggle with. I'm also wondering, how is it that you avoid this nihilistic trap of psychologically being homeless or philosophically being homeless? I'll make those questions succinct. So number one, you're using a form of logic. Why did you choose that one?"
},
{
"end_time": 4015.845,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3999.974,
"text": " Okay, let me go back to the last one because, as I said, I luxuriate in the questions. And when I said nothing makes sense, that was not"
},
{
"end_time": 4035.555,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4016.374,
"text": " What is existence?"
},
{
"end_time": 4062.961,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4036.374,
"text": " God is a necessary being and God created the universe. That's one theory. Another theory is that the laws, the deep laws of physics, whatever they are, are cosmogenic. Pick your choice. There are lots of different ones. And all I'm saying is that all those different categories, none of them make sense. And obviously, one is true."
},
{
"end_time": 4091.101,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4064.053,
"text": " And that's where I start. Now, when you get into the classical bimodal logic or the tetralemma logic of Eastern traditions, I can't tell you I'm an expert in the difference in how the tetralemma argument of P or minus P both"
},
{
"end_time": 4117.91,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4091.305,
"text": " I think my sense is that those terms are in that form of logic is being used in a blurry way and that at the end of the day the kinds of questions that we ask have a"
},
{
"end_time": 4129.991,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4118.2,
"text": " a digital yes-no kind of answer. Once you define what that choice is,"
},
{
"end_time": 4155.469,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4130.725,
"text": " Take the question, does consciousness demand anything beyond the purely physical world? You can blur that question by saying, well, what do you mean by physical? If you have a fifth force of nature or a panpsychist point of view, does that count as physical or not physical? How do you work that out?"
},
{
"end_time": 4185.469,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4155.879,
"text": " Well, that's a semantical point about what you do, but ultimately, if that's the answer, then that answer becomes an absolute answer, however you create that answer, even in a fuzzy manner. So, to deal with the question, as I said, does God exist or traditional God, or does consciousness demand anything beyond the physical?"
},
{
"end_time": 4195.384,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4185.742,
"text": " What does it mean to have a non-bimodal logic to those questions?"
},
{
"end_time": 4225.418,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4195.913,
"text": " If consciousness is physical, it requires something beyond the physical. If that's either does or doesn't, but if you have a four-fold logic, it would say that it does and doesn't at the same time, or it does and doesn't and both are wrong. And that can give you an insight into the complexity of these questions."
},
{
"end_time": 4246.937,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4225.896,
"text": " But ultimately, there has to be some kind of an answer. If we're defining the physical world, and again, you can expand your thinking of what the physical world is, that's another set of issues. But if you restrict it to the physical world, and is consciousness demanding more of that,"
},
{
"end_time": 4276.271,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4247.568,
"text": " What would it mean to use the other two forms of logic to that question? That means it does and doesn't at the same time. It does require something non-physical and doesn't require non-physical, and both are true. If that's the case, it's hard to conceive, but if that's the case, if it does and doesn't at the same time, the fact that it does"
},
{
"end_time": 4305.077,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4276.749,
"text": " I think would skew the answer to that. It does, because it's kind of a possible world analysis. This is a technique and philosophy you may be familiar with, and it asks what happens in every possible world. Now a possible world is an entire state of affairs. So it's not just a world like a planet or something. It's all reality."
},
{
"end_time": 4326.323,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4305.35,
"text": " And a different possible world could be, you know, if there are 10 to the 90th particles in the universe and one particle is in a slightly different polarization, that's a separate world. Everything else could be the same. So there's an infinite number of possible worlds. So you ask questions, is something possible"
},
{
"end_time": 4342.244,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4326.988,
"text": " is"
},
{
"end_time": 4358.353,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4342.244,
"text": " If you"
},
{
"end_time": 4384.616,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4359.411,
"text": " Could that kind of God exist in one possible world? Yeah, maybe I could. Maybe I'd see in a zillion infinite number of possible worlds, maybe one of them, that kind of God could exist. So when you admit that, and then you go into that possible world, in that possible world, God is a necessary being."
},
{
"end_time": 4403.49,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4384.991,
"text": " the"
},
{
"end_time": 4430.862,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4403.797,
"text": " in the argument that I just made, which is called the modal ontological argument for God's existence. It doesn't work for sure. I mean, I don't believe that, but it is a tricky argument. So now what that does is it goes back to the questions we're asking in a four-fold logic system. If you have consciousness being something that is both"
},
{
"end_time": 4448.08,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4431.288,
"text": " fully explained by the physical world"
},
{
"end_time": 4477.346,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4448.541,
"text": " does require something beyond the physical, and therefore it would indicate that if it is true in one possible world, then it is a truism, even though it may not be in the vast majority of worlds. So that's an argument that I would at least suggest that shows that a"
},
{
"end_time": 4506.135,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4477.875,
"text": " The fourfold logic is helpful in being able to see deeply into some of these very hard questions. And I need to learn more about that. And I look forward to doing that when we're dealing with global philosophy of religion and Eastern traditions and the big questions of these two big series coming up. We'll explore that. And I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 4536.442,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4506.578,
"text": " that complexity of logic enables a deeper understanding of what these questions mean. But I'm still, you know, backward enough or west to westernize to think that at the end of the day, it is going to alter my thinking about the fact that there is an answer to these questions within a twofold logic classical system. Okay, let's harp on this for a bit."
},
{
"end_time": 4565.077,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4537.21,
"text": " with the twofold logical system you said it's obvious it's either yes or no and then you gave a case where it's imagine consciousness both is physical and not physical but you can develop a logical system where it's not true that consciousness is physical but it is true that consciousness is physical and not physical if you put the bracket behind both true and not true but not true in the singular for the consciousness and then you said well it's obviously true but"
},
{
"end_time": 4590.896,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4566.135,
"text": " I don't necessarily see it as being obvious because well firstly as a scientist your whole point is to question what's obvious so dispense with the word obvious when you're a scientist and number two if you've been emailed several theories about zero or you're going to be interviewing Indian philosophers about zero often they have this notion that zero is the same as infinity and thus it's the same as all possible worlds and thus"
},
{
"end_time": 4621.203,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4591.254,
"text": " You can see how it can be true and not true at the same time. So I don't see it obviously being the case or not the case only. Yeah. And so I think that I think what we're doing is enriching the understanding of aspects of reality. And that's fine. And I look to be able to to appreciate that better. But I don't think you're going to shake me off my my my view that at the end of the day, there is"
},
{
"end_time": 4647.688,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4621.8,
"text": " There is some description of reality in each of these categories that is the correct and the one that corresponds to the reality. It can be much more sophisticated or complex than I would think now. And you're describing ways maybe that's the case. But if that is the case, then that is how to define it."
},
{
"end_time": 4678.217,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4648.899,
"text": " You also, you mentioned in one of your articles or many of your articles that you dislike faith. Now, do you see any faith? That's probably a slightly mischaracterization. It's not that I dislike it. Maybe I like it. It's just that I don't have it. Okay. Okay. So you don't have faith. Do you see any aspects of faith in the answer that you can't be shaken from your beliefs?"
},
{
"end_time": 4697.073,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4678.626,
"text": " about whether or not there's one answer to a question yes or no."
},
{
"end_time": 4718.148,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4697.739,
"text": " the structure of the answer. There is one way to define that structure even if parts of it have uncertainty or however you want to deal with it. However you define that there is ultimately an answer to those questions that you can phrase."
},
{
"end_time": 4738.643,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4718.148,
"text": " You know, the issue of faith is in a different kind of category. You know, faith is a belief in something, the evidence maybe of which you don't see. And in various religions, that is a virtue and I see it as a virtue."
},
{
"end_time": 4752.568,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4739.172,
"text": " And I admire people who have it. That doesn't mean I think it's either correct or that I want it. Maybe I would want it, but I don't have it the way many people have faith."
},
{
"end_time": 4776.886,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4753.097,
"text": " When I'm talking about my belief that there are ultimate answers to these questions, even if we can never even define what that is, I wouldn't characterize that as faith, although it is part of my belief system and I'm happy to question it."
},
{
"end_time": 4807.227,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4778.473,
"text": " I'm not coming at this from a theist's point of view or an atheist's point of view. I'm just playing devil's advocate. When it comes to faith, I hear people say many times that they don't like belief. They don't like faith. Now I'm not saying you didn't, you said this and I apologize if I misquoted you, but when people say faith, faith is actually manifold there. I think on the Stanford encyclopedia, there's,"
},
{
"end_time": 4836.886,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4808.592,
"text": " There's doxastic venture, non-doxastic venture, special knowledge, hope, belief, affective confidence, trust. And then when someone says they don't have faith, well, do you not have trust? Do you never have confidence? And then when someone says, well, I only trust what I have evidence for. Yeah, but you're presuming what evidence counts as. So let's say someone from the Eastern tradition would prioritize experiential knowledge. But then you not saying you, sorry, I'm saying one may prioritize"
},
{
"end_time": 4867.5,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4837.841,
"text": " scientific verification. Okay, but you've just slipped the question because you've just, I've asked you, do you have faith? You say, I only believe what I have evidence for. Well, what counts as the evidence? And then you have a, an assumption there as to what is accurate evidence. So what do you say to that? Yeah, I look, I think those are all very legitimate questions. We've been dealing with that on Closer to Truth because a lot of people will ask us to interview X, Y, and Z person who are people of spirituality in"
},
{
"end_time": 4893.234,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4869.497,
"text": " of them are from Eastern traditions, but also in Judeo-Christians who are messengers of experiential truths. We're not saying we reject that. We're saying that that's just not part of the way we address these questions, but recognize that those are"
},
{
"end_time": 4922.944,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4893.677,
"text": " answered that those are approaches that many people feel are not only legitimate but are more legitimate than the quasi-analytic scientific approach that we have. I distinguish by the way between scientific method and the scientific way of thinking and I do not believe that all truths of significant nature are accessible by the scientific method which is"
},
{
"end_time": 4953.268,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4923.507,
"text": " Experiments or observation repeatability testing etc. I do not think many of the questions are susceptible to that because science the scientific method has a physicalism Foundation and so anything outside of physicalism would not be subject to the scientific method by definition So none of these questions can really get at if there is something beyond the physical world through a scientific method"
},
{
"end_time": 4975.759,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4953.78,
"text": " However, that does not free you from a scientific way of thinking. A scientific way of thinking has to have logic built into it and has to have knowledge of the sequence of the flows of your argument."
},
{
"end_time": 5005.043,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4976.22,
"text": " I try to be very rigorous about putting people to that test. This particularly would be in philosophy of religion to theists and even to atheists and forcing people, if they want to take me to a belief in God or belief in cosmic consciousness or idealism or something, I want to see the progression of steps that goes from what we all know with third party verification"
},
{
"end_time": 5032.773,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5005.469,
"text": " that we all can agree upon and to their conclusion. And in virtually every case, there will be gaps in the logical flow because you can't go from a scientific method of understanding the world to getting something outside of, of what the scientific method can access. You can't do that. It's just such a self self contradictory. And so all I want to do,"
},
{
"end_time": 5060.947,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5033.353,
"text": " is to point out where those gaps are and how those gaps are bridged. And that's a very fair and legitimate and coherent kind of analysis is to go from what we all can agree upon to questions about the existence of God or the nature of consciousness or life after death or whatever as a belief."
},
{
"end_time": 5090.776,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5061.254,
"text": " But I want to see when you're making those those jumps over that you're that you're leaping over a logical flow. And then we point those areas out and you're entirely justified in making those jumps. But I just want to be sure that we're all aware that there are as many times people make those jumps and not aware of it. And that to me is not acceptable."
},
{
"end_time": 5103.422,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5091.374,
"text": " So if you want to use faith or the inner experience that you've had with your religious belief, that's fine. I just want to know where in the sequence of steps that's occurring."
},
{
"end_time": 5131.084,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5103.677,
"text": " And then we really have a deep understanding of what that process is. And if you want to call that faith during that time, fine, but I want to see where that's occurring. So then we're all on the same sort of logical flow, logical timeline together. But by seeming to be so, you know, scientific way of thinking or analytic philosophy, I want to be clear that I do not reject"
},
{
"end_time": 5156.63,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5131.578,
"text": " at all, those who use other ways of knowing, experiential, religious, as coming to what may be true. I do not reject it. I just want to be very clear where those gaps are being leaped, leapt, and to acknowledge those,"
},
{
"end_time": 5179.053,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5156.869,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 5206.118,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5180.06,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5232.244,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5206.118,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 5258.029,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5232.244,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 5286.493,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5258.029,
"text": " Does science or the scientific method presume physicalism or give evidence for physicalism?"
},
{
"end_time": 5316.34,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5287.449,
"text": " way that you understand the physical world. And the two are inextricably bound together. Science is the use of the scientific method to understand the physical world. And the physical world is the substrate by which the scientific method works. And you can't go beyond that. You should not go beyond that. The only thing I"
},
{
"end_time": 5332.534,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5317.142,
"text": " It's"
},
{
"end_time": 5359.94,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5332.534,
"text": " I know that you have a scheduled interview for Bernardo Castro at the"
},
{
"end_time": 5387.79,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5360.606,
"text": " Maybe it's unconfirmed, but you're in talks with him and he makes an extreme extremely cogent argument that the scientific method presumes no philosophy doesn't presume materialism physicalism or idealism and what's happened was a grave error where we think we have initially these pixels of perception I'm seeing you right now and you see you see paintings Well, you can't see the paintings behind you if you were to look you would see the paintings behind you and then"
},
{
"end_time": 5416.8,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5388.439,
"text": " we see regularities in our perception, our perceptive field, so we start with these mental states, then we see perceptive regularities, and then we start to make models about them, and then at some point we assume that this exists as an entity in and of itself, and that posits a completely new ontological category, when one, if one is to take scientific modeling seriously, it uses a principle called parsimony, so you want the minimal amount of assumptions, and I don't see"
},
{
"end_time": 5445.401,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5417.5,
"text": " a flaw with this argument that the minimal amount of assumptions would lead you naturally to idealism. Now, I'm not saying I believe in idealism. I'm saying that I don't see how one can hold both parsimony and physicalism, or at least parsimony and not idealism. Well, parsimony is a principle. I mean, Einstein, he has a lot of quotes. I assume this is accurate. But he said, make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."
},
{
"end_time": 5475.23,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5446.357,
"text": " So general relativity to some people is extremely simple, these elegant equations, and to others it's incomprehensible. And so parsimony is great, but doesn't always work. I mean, the orbits of the planets, philosophers and quasi-scientists in antiquity assumed that there were some wheels within wheels and some platonic"
},
{
"end_time": 5500.862,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5475.691,
"text": " structures that had all the orbits, and the orbits are just not that way. They're all based upon some basic principles, but they all have their own characteristic. So, you know, simplistic and parsimony is a very good principle, but it is not a certainty to excess reality. I understand all those arguments."
},
{
"end_time": 5522.585,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5501.254,
"text": " Bernardo and we're trying to get together. Closer Truth has a difficult schedule because of ours. I told you the productions are very, very significant, but next year we hope to be, we plan to be, we will be in the UK and Bernardo will be on. So we will deal with these things in great detail and look forward to it."
},
{
"end_time": 5531.937,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5523.336,
"text": " But the kinds of arguments that you're posing lead very quickly to total skepticism."
},
{
"end_time": 5560.742,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5532.398,
"text": " And, you know, I can make that argument as well, because it's the brain and the vat. I mean, anything I'm perceiving and I'm perceiving, you know, through my brain. That's why I originally wanted to do my PhD in brain science rather than in physics or philosophy or other things I was thinking about, because I had the thought that everything comes through your brain. And so if we understand the brain, we can have a better sense of reality, because that's our only way of perception."
},
{
"end_time": 5585.862,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5561.015,
"text": " So we're never going to get around that. I mean, that's, that's obvious. And so from that, you can have all sorts of different derivations of, you know, anti realism is, is an easy argument to make, because you don't really have access to any underlying reality in a, in a, in a direct sense, it all has to be mediated by some"
},
{
"end_time": 5616.476,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5587.927,
"text": " that we all have and those are subject to all sorts of problems and issues that we are not aware of in our daily life but in different kinds of trauma diseases they become very obvious and so any of those arguments cannot be totally refuted because at the end of the day anything we know is coming from our is translated into nervous impulses through eyes and"
},
{
"end_time": 5644.565,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5617.142,
"text": " Well, with Bernardo, there's nothing that he says that violates any scientific theory in the least because you could just take the regularities that we see in nature as the physical law."
},
{
"end_time": 5674.701,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5645.145,
"text": " And then you mentioned, well, simple, but not any simpler. OK, why? Because at some point it won't work. And then my question is, well, what doesn't work about idealism? And furthermore, sorry. So you mentioned simpler, but not simple, but not simpler. OK, why not simpler? The reason is because at some point it won't work any longer. The orbits are oblong or elliptical. OK, OK. That means that there's a breakdown of the theory. OK, from what we can tell."
},
{
"end_time": 5704.582,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5674.957,
"text": " We have had several shows on closer to truth where we asked the question is the universe theologically ambiguous and All the people we speak to don't like that question because to each one of them"
},
{
"end_time": 5734.65,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5705.162,
"text": " The answer is it's not ambiguous. And obviously the theists think it's not ambiguous because God does exist and the atheists think it is not ambiguous. But nobody liked the idea that it was ambiguous. I like the idea that it's ambiguous. Nobody else I talked to really liked it. I'm exaggerating by making the point. What does it mean when you say the universe is ambiguous just for the audience who is like, what the heck could that possibly? Theologically ambiguous, meaning that can data support both the existence of God and the absence of God."
},
{
"end_time": 5756.596,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5735.196,
"text": " And the answer to me is yes. And the to me, this is not a hard question, because you know, I have a lot of very, very, very smart friends and colleagues, and many we've entered in closer to truth on both sides of that question. And, you know, I'm not prepared to say what those groups are, you know, really missing some very specific kind of data."
},
{
"end_time": 5786.903,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5756.988,
"text": " I take the view that the data from the universe, the data that's fed into our ways of apprehension, both directly in ourselves and through our scientific"
},
{
"end_time": 5815.981,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5787.295,
"text": " a process over the last four or five centuries as science has developed, has amplified both sides of the argument. Both theists and atheists have seen the results of science corroborating their fundamental ideas about how things work. People impose their way of thinking on data."
},
{
"end_time": 5837.483,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5816.305,
"text": " But the data itself has to have some ambiguity about it, or else that wouldn't be possible to happen. Now, the physicalists would say that's because the other side is imposing their artificial experiential selves onto data and kind of skewing it."
},
{
"end_time": 5864.138,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5837.671,
"text": " And the theists may say that as well, that they are imposing that they believe in God, that this inner experience they've had is both meaningful and certain in their minds. But the raw data of the universe can be interpreted in various ways. You know, I've used this different ways of interpretation"
},
{
"end_time": 5893.473,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5864.445,
"text": " to illustrate that by taking a question, are there alien intelligences that are sentient in the way that human beings are sentient? It may be very different, but are there? And I pose it as a two-fold matrix in terms of, are there aliens, sentient aliens, or not? So that's one axis. The other axis"
},
{
"end_time": 5923.763,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5893.78,
"text": " is are you a"
},
{
"end_time": 5952.602,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5924.07,
"text": " There are zillions of sentient life in the universe, so atheism is clearly right. Now, if there are no other sentient life in the universe, the theists will say, see, we earthlings and human beings on earth are a special creation of God and therefore God exists. The atheists will say, see, the universe is wholly inhospitable to life and it's only on this"
},
{
"end_time": 5982.108,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5953.08,
"text": " random planet that one thing had occurred so that God can't possibly exist. So here you take a very simple case of whether there are sentient aliens or not and interpret it from both the theist and atheist point of view and neither will change their fundamental position no matter what the answer is. Now if that's the case, if you give me that, then any of these other questions will fall in the same category as idealism versus physicalism versus panpsychism."
},
{
"end_time": 6010.879,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5982.329,
"text": " And so we can do our best to really understand the nature of each of the argument to give us a richer understanding of the questions. But I have no belief, no hope that there'll be an ultimate answer because I think that is given the circumstances we have that it's probably in principle impossible."
},
{
"end_time": 6040.913,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6012.039,
"text": " You and I think so much alike, Robert. When it comes to sitting on the fence for many issues and citing, well, how can you be so confident about your answer given that there are people who are extremely bright on both sides? And sometimes when I see, I'm pretty sure you get the same feeling. When you look at the comments, most of the time they're extremely positive and sitting with ambiguity. But plenty of the time you'll see people say these people are obviously incorrect because"
},
{
"end_time": 6066.988,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6041.323,
"text": " God for sure exists or God for sure doesn't exist. I heard someone recently say religion lowers your IQ. Come on. Why do you think that? What makes you think that someone else? Why do you think the other side says what they do? Do you think it's because they're unconsciously motivated by something malicious? Well, we all are to some degree, but do you but more than you? And do you think that it's because they have a paucity of the data that you have access to?"
},
{
"end_time": 6096.152,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6067.79,
"text": " There's a great quote by Cain, I believe, that in great controversy, not one side is mere folly, or only the shallowest of mind would think that in great controversy, one side is mere folly. I tend to subscribe to that, and you seem to be doing the same as well. My favorite critique was in one show, it must have been something to do with God, within about"
},
{
"end_time": 6112.278,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6096.476,
"text": " five or ten comments on YouTube. One person said, yeah, it was good, but QAnon is too much a promoter of theism for my taste. And then ten comments later, it was, yeah, it was an interesting show. I learned a lot, but you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6131.186,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6112.619,
"text": " He's an atheist and he doesn't believe in God and I'm not going to really pay attention. Normally it's a different place, but here it was in the same context, in the same show. Some people accuse me of being an atheist and some people accuse me of being a theist in a negative manner for both, a critical matter."
},
{
"end_time": 6156.92,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6131.493,
"text": " And I took that as a compliment. By the way, you used a phrase I don't agree with. I agree with everything you said except one thing. I don't think I'm sitting on the fence. And I don't think you are either. It's not a sitting on the fence. It's a very sharp-eyed, tough-minded approach to questions. Now I could be wrong and when I'm wrong, I love to be wrong because then I learn. But I think of"
},
{
"end_time": 6184.991,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6157.21,
"text": " What I want to do is being very tough-minded, very critical thinking, and being open-minded in a very real sense at the same time, and being hopeful. I often say that I fear my hope is swamping my reason, and so I try to be careful about that when I think. But it's not sitting on the fence. I take these questions very seriously. I have my whole life."
},
{
"end_time": 6209.94,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6185.299,
"text": " a great opportunity to discuss with many people and join discussing with you today, Kurt. And these are questions which all human beings face at the same level. And I think that's important thing in today's world too, that we all share these ways of thinking, which can go a long way towards bridging ostensible gaps between people."
},
{
"end_time": 6239.206,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6210.742,
"text": " I'm going to match your agreement slash disagreement with another disagreement slash agreement. So I would say, yes, I agree. I'm not sitting on the fence in the traditional sense of being on it. Well, I am in the sense that I'm unable to make up my mind, because as soon as I posit one position, I can almost immediately see a counter to that position. And it's difficult from in my mind, it's just even when I'm writing, I just see flaws, flaws, flaws, flaws with almost each side. So that's what I mean when I say on the fence. And then as for"
},
{
"end_time": 6263.302,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6239.633,
"text": " As for you saying that you like to be wrong I don't think so Robert and I'll tell you why you don't want to be wrong about your wife not loving you or wrong about reason leading you reason not leading you to truth because your whole show is based upon reason and argumentation leading to someplace that's closer to truth so I want to say globally you care you're excited to be wrong unless"
},
{
"end_time": 6279.923,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6263.831,
"text": " Please tell me if I'm wrong about that on specific topics. If I if I think a certain way and then I find out that's not correct in some sense, that to me is a learning experience. I"
},
{
"end_time": 6309.002,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6280.35,
"text": " i like that i mean i i've had uh... from uh... uh... good comments that you know but greater appreciation i thought harder about experiential even though we still don't do without closer to truth because i have no way of adjudicating uh... you know which you know the week from the chaff and the huge amount in that area just not what we can do but i do appreciate that that is a consideration that needs to be uh... admitted"
},
{
"end_time": 6336.664,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6309.002,
"text": " And we do that on Closer to Truth, but we don't then explore that further by testing all different experiential claims that various teachers or gurus or ministers or whomever propound. That's not what we would do. So my thinking on that, for example, has been expanded a little bit."
},
{
"end_time": 6363.558,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6337.125,
"text": " and uh... we've talked before about logic and i would have thought that the classical logic is is is the only way laws of excluded middle and all that but they are because a different logical system particularly you know the eastern uh... tetralemma i think that's what it's called before the four kinds of logic it gives you a deeper insight"
},
{
"end_time": 6383.507,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6363.831,
"text": " into ways of thinking about deep questions. That's a learning experience. How that affects is what one needs to consider. When I say I like being wrong, I'm not saying that in a global sense."
},
{
"end_time": 6412.022,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6383.848,
"text": " I missed my calling and I should have believed in God or should never have dealt with questions about God. No, I don't think I'm wrong about that. But whenever there is something that I learned that was different, I look upon that as progress. Well, Robert, the reason I bring that up is because I'm sure you see this too. I'm constantly almost unconsciously assessing people of their unconscious motivations. And when I hear people say,"
},
{
"end_time": 6442.568,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6412.602,
"text": " I'm sure you see this too when they say, well, I love to be wrong. Richard Dawkins has a story about this. I wonder how much of that is marketing or trying to show one's rational, intellectual proclivity by saying, well, look, I'm not the Catholic church where I say kneel down and obey and listen to whatever. I actually follow the data wherever it may lead me. Well, first of all, I don't buy that. I don't think that's necessarily true. If the data led you to kill yourself or led you to kill, destroy the world, would you do so?"
},
{
"end_time": 6469.189,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6442.875,
"text": " and then if it does well maybe you should question your own reasoning and also when people say they don't like faith or they don't have faith or they don't have beliefs well I see that also as pounding their chest or at least pounding their brain in an analogous chest thumping manner by saying look how scientifically rational intellectual I am and something I think intellectuals dislike more than appearing to then being irrational is appearing to be irrational I'm questioning when people say"
},
{
"end_time": 6498.541,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6469.531,
"text": " For example, you mentioned you don't have faith. Well, do you drive your car? And then you may say, yes, I drive my car. OK, do you have faith? You're not going to get into an accident. Well, my faith is based on evidence. OK, but OK, I know I'm speaking for you here. Sorry. Let me ask you. You say that you don't have faith. Do you drive a car? No, but you're interpreting faith in a much broader term. And I'm saying faith is faith in willing to give"
},
{
"end_time": 6522.875,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6498.968,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school?"
},
{
"end_time": 6545.503,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6525.657,
"text": " I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 6572.637,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6545.674,
"text": " That would, I think, be pretty cool about the way the world works and what the potential of human beings are in terms of life after death or whatever. But I don't have the faith to make that leap between that hope and the belief. So I don't have the belief, you know, I'd like to, because I don't have the faith to do that. You're using the word faith in a much broader term."
},
{
"end_time": 6593.592,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6572.927,
"text": " That's not the way I, when I say I don't have faith, I mean faith in that very specific thing to make the leap from what I know about the world and philosophical analysis and everything to an absolute belief in God. I think I'm using that term in a very limited sense to that."
},
{
"end_time": 6621.067,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6594.138,
"text": " We all have predispositions in our belief system. Everybody has a belief system that's founded on principles, some of which are obvious to us and many of which are not. Scientists who say that philosophy is dead or there is no room for philosophy, it's just distorting. They are practicing philosophy. They are giving a philosophy when they say that."
},
{
"end_time": 6644.224,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6621.391,
"text": " and I say philosophy is dead is no that is a philosophy that is a philosophy you may think it's amateur philosophy or bad philosophy but it is a philosophy and so you know when I use the word faith that I'd use it in in that context but if we want to broaden the concept to how we deal with various ways of dealing with the world or with truth you know what we're"
},
{
"end_time": 6671.544,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6645.06,
"text": " I would offer a different way of thinking about it. Rather than using the term faith, I'd use the term belief system. We all have a belief system which operates in the background for whatever we're doing. If we're driving a car, we have a belief system about that. If we're thinking about the nature of consciousness or God or life after death, we have a belief system that we bring to that discussion."
},
{
"end_time": 6698.063,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6672.176,
"text": " human belief systems is a wonderful topic for deep explanation. And that is a closer to truth theme. We, we deal with belief systems and how belief systems come about, uh, both in all respects, although we have maybe a, uh, a skewed towards religious belief systems and how they come about, but these are fascinating conversations. So we had one television show, you know, uh, religion without God."
},
{
"end_time": 6727.227,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6698.37,
"text": " What does that mean? How does that develop? That's interesting. Yeah. So belief systems is an exciting way of thinking about it. And I would put the way I would define faith as a small subset of the broader topic of belief systems. Okay, help me out, Robert. So there are belief systems about operating a computer or a vehicle and then there are belief systems about"
},
{
"end_time": 6754.991,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6727.875,
"text": " Now, what's the difference between one? Why is it okay? Well, why is it rational to have a belief system about driving a car and being confident about one's abilities to drive a car versus irrational to have faith in a deity, let's say, or multiple deities, or whatever other religions espouse? I'm trying to find out what's the difference between those."
},
{
"end_time": 6786.544,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6757.449,
"text": " Well, I think in the ultimate sense, there is no difference in terms of belief systems being a mechanism by which human mentality deals with sentience and its world. So we deal with our worlds through our belief systems. Belief systems are inculcated by your own personal experience and their"
},
{
"end_time": 6815.572,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6786.971,
"text": " they're inculcated by the culture from which we live. I mean, one argument against religion, and it's a strong one, is that if you go to the Western world, you know, Christianity is 90% or whatever, and you go to India, and Hinduism is whatever the percentage, 70% and Islam is 30%, whatever the numbers are. And, you know, do all these people make those decisions on"
},
{
"end_time": 6833.763,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6816.067,
"text": " In a rational sense, of course, that's impossible. If that would occur, you'd have the entire world in every country having a similar percentage of people making their decisions. We have a tremendous amount of our"
},
{
"end_time": 6857.227,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6833.763,
"text": " I had an experience that it may sound trivial, but it was really very meaningful to me. My first granddaughter, when she was learning to walk, she had a toy that was a walker and she just was starting to walk and she wanted to get to the other side of the room and she kept pushing into a hammock or a chair and she couldn't get"
},
{
"end_time": 6878.234,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6857.807,
"text": " through the chair she kept pushing she wanted to get to the other side she couldn't get through the chair and then she slipped and she slipped and she got around the chair and it was one trial learning the next time she came there she knew she just went around the chair and so when she first saw that she wanted to get the other side of the room you just go straight"
},
{
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"index": 279,
"start_time": 6878.626,
"text": " Because that's the belief system. When you go straight, you get there quicker. It doesn't matter if there's a chair in the way. You just go, but you couldn't. And then the next thing she learned was that if there are things in the way, if you go around them, even though it's longer, it's longer to go around than to go through, but if you do that, it works. So that was an example that I saw literally"
},
{
"end_time": 6925.23,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6904.053,
"text": " Right there where a belief system was being developed and it was a belief system with how to deal with things in the world. Now that's very simplistic, but I think that analogy and that mechanism applies to lots of, you know, gets much more complicated and filters everything that we have."
},
{
"end_time": 6950.657,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6926.101,
"text": " And so one challenge for us when we're dealing with these very big questions of existence of God or nature of consciousness, life after death or whatever, is to challenge our own belief systems and to see what are the assumptions that our belief systems are making. And in doing this, I think we see broader"
},
{
"end_time": 6977.176,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6951.425,
"text": " opportunities and broader ways of thinking and how other smart people think. And that's what we try to do on Closer to the Truth. We try to understand how presuppositions, we don't always call it belief systems, but how presuppositions and ways of thinking lead to certain kinds of conclusions and how different people make different arguments to get there, but they're all based upon these"
},
{
"end_time": 7000.23,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6977.176,
"text": " Perhaps unconscious kinds of modules that are parts of our belief system. I think that's a good way to think about it. Our belief system have these modules in them. Marvin Minsky talked about a society of minds in his classic book. And so we have these modules, mental modules that we've had, many of which are unconscious."
},
{
"end_time": 7024.497,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7000.503,
"text": " This analogy or this story with your granddaughter? Is it your granddaughter going from point A to B?"
},
{
"end_time": 7053.029,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7024.701,
"text": " See to me this means that there's a pragmatic definition of truth embedded within what you said because the first model is let's go to A and B in a B line and then the second and that fails and then the second is let's go around it and then you validate the model based on the goal based on if it gets you the goal which is a pragmatic theory of truth and before you were and pragmatic theories of truth are somewhat relative so to me that goes against what you earlier said what you said earlier about there being an absolute yes or no"
},
{
"end_time": 7072.022,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7054.991,
"text": " What is Truth?"
},
{
"end_time": 7098.916,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7072.449,
"text": " They can be very volatile. I mean, you know, morality is an absolute or relative, and there's a huge literature and a constant battle about those kinds of things. When I'm using the word truth and as we use it on Closer to Truth, the scope of what we're talking about as truth is extremely limited. If you look at all the questions of human life and existence and sentience,"
},
{
"end_time": 7124.974,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7098.916,
"text": " The kinds of truth that we're focusing on on closer to truth are a minuscule subset of all the kinds of truths that there could be. And so when I'm using the term truth, that there is an absolute truth answer to the kinds of questions we ask, even though we'll never get to it enough. I'm not here to tell you what those answers are. That's for sure. That that that's a different category. So I will defend"
},
{
"end_time": 7136.459,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7125.384,
"text": " the notion that there is an absolute truth about these big questions, even though we wouldn't even know what it means that"
},
{
"end_time": 7161.186,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7136.869,
"text": " that we would know. We wouldn't even know what a verification, how a verification could be. For example, one of our contributors, a contributor less well-known but very sophisticated, sadly he died, Bede Rundle from Oxford, who is a very strong atheist, said this, he said"
},
{
"end_time": 7186.664,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7161.186,
"text": " If I were trying to be convinced to be a theist, which he was not, and I went to a shrine or holy waters and I saw a person who believed in God suddenly materialize two limbs that they didn't have. They had no arms and suddenly they had arms. And that person said,"
},
{
"end_time": 7214.616,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7187.21,
"text": " Therefore God exists. I mean, suddenly, and I saw that myself and I was sure it happened. He said, I would think it more likely that it was an alien ship on the dark side of the moon beaming special healing rays to that lady than there is a God. And to me that, you know, that sounds ridiculous in a sense, but you think about it, that's really profound."
},
{
"end_time": 7244.855,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7215.401,
"text": " Because to this person, the existence of a god in the traditional way is so unlikely that even an extreme explanation that he had to explain a certain set of data, whereas everybody else could, if they saw that, which nobody has, by the way, certainly in recent times, even no claims to that, they would look upon that as"
},
{
"end_time": 7261.374,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7246.544,
"text": " What was that person's name? What was the person's name?"
},
{
"end_time": 7284.753,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7262.21,
"text": " He wrote a very interesting book called Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, which gives one answer to that big question that I like to deal with. That's one of his works. But he was a very strong atheist and a very good thinker. Not that I agree with it."
},
{
"end_time": 7313.063,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7286.391,
"text": " Firstly, it depends on how one defines God and there are interdictions against that in virtually every religion, especially the Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition. Second, so what definition of probability are you using to say that this probably isn't the case? There's a measure theoretic definition? That's the mathematical one? What he was illustrating, not facetiously, he was illustrating that we're so used to definitions of God that we think it"
},
{
"end_time": 7341.698,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7313.524,
"text": " It is a definition that is acceptable within the range of probabilities. He was just using it to show from his perspective on a de novo basis, just looking at things privately, that the existence of such a being is so extraordinarily unlikely. And that's what he was trying to convey."
},
{
"end_time": 7362.415,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7342.329,
"text": " uh... that it's so extraordinarily unlikely uh... at the issue of from from first principles if you if you weren't acculturated as we are that that's what he was trying to set uh... and it was it's it's uh... it's a striking uh... it's it's it's striking and it sounds facetious but it was it was making"
},
{
"end_time": 7389.36,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7362.415,
"text": " A strong point that if we were not so acculturated, from his point of view, some people say that the belief in God is acculturated in all traditions around the world and everybody sort of believes it naturally. And it is a basic belief of human beings. This is Alvin Flanagan's famous kind of argument about when I interviewed Al,"
},
{
"end_time": 7416.34,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7389.633,
"text": " One of our segments, we had many, many segments with Al. One of my segments, these 10-minute segments were arguments for God. I said, Al, from your point of view, you believe in God. He said, yes. I said, what do you think are the best arguments for the existence of God? That was the segment. He said, okay, I'm going to give you some arguments, but our first one to say is I don't think you need arguments."
},
{
"end_time": 7441.766,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7416.852,
"text": " to believe in God, and that you're fully justified, warranted, honest in your beliefs, and fully rational to believe in God without any arguments. Now, this was Al's big contribution. One of his big contributions to philosophy and religion, and Christian philosophy in particular, is to say that you could have warranted belief in God without evidence and without arguments."
},
{
"end_time": 7471.783,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7442.159,
"text": " And that the belief in God is similar to the belief in the existence of the past. Like you and I have been talking for now two hours of enjoyable time. And you know, did what we did in the first hour, was that real or not? Well, you and I both believe, the audience believes that what we did in the first hour really happened. But you know, how do we know that? How do we know that for sure? Well, it's sort of a basic belief"
},
{
"end_time": 7501.903,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7472.602,
"text": " that we have. I believe that you are as well, although you could be a philosophical robot and have nothing inside, just have a lot of stimuli and responses. That's possible, but I believe in other minds. Al's point of view is that if you believe in the existence of the past and you believe in the existence of other minds, you should be able to believe in God at the same level of confidence without argument. Now, one could argue that."
},
{
"end_time": 7518.592,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7502.073,
"text": " Wait, why is that the case? Because belief in God is what Al would call a basic belief that is inculcated into human beings in the same way that our belief in the past is and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 7548.473,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7519.104,
"text": " I don't"
},
{
"end_time": 7571.323,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7548.797,
"text": " I know you're not a defender of it. I don't see why it follows from the fact that you believe in the past and other minds that you then can believe whatever intuitively comes to you. It doesn't follow from it. That's not the logic. It is the same level of significance. It doesn't follow from the past in the mind. It just says with the same confidence level that you have"
},
{
"end_time": 7599.155,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7571.766,
"text": " that there was a past, the same confidence level that you have in other minds. You should have that same confidence level if somebody says they believe in God. You don't have to subject them to proving through the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the teleological argument or the fine-tuning argument, any argument. You don't need any of those. Now, you may want to enjoy thinking about those and using those, but you don't need any of them."
},
{
"end_time": 7626.305,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7599.855,
"text": " That was his argument that you don't need arguments for God. Again, you can argue that, but the importance is to understand the nature of belief systems. Now, Bede Rundle takes that same view exactly 180 degrees opposite. That's why I brought it up. So Bede Rundle said the existence of God is so unlikely."
},
{
"end_time": 7655.316,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7626.715,
"text": " and so absurd and so ridiculous to have this concept that if somebody is healed, that it's a real healing, it's more logical to have these aliens in a hidden spaceship having done it rather than God. And my only point is I really like these two guys. These are, you know, I love being with them. These are, you know, I didn't know B. Rundle that well."
},
{
"end_time": 7678.848,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7655.589,
"text": " I can't think of more extreme cases of being opposite"
},
{
"end_time": 7709.155,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7679.36,
"text": " where one says, belief in God, you don't need any arguments for that. It's just as basic to human existence as acknowledging there was a past or that other minds exist. And another person saying, no matter what would happen, no matter what evidence you could show me, doesn't matter what evidence you would show me, I will never believe that the cause of that evidence is a God rather than some other kind of explanation."
},
{
"end_time": 7712.79,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7710.367,
"text": " and to me that"
},
{
"end_time": 7741.067,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7713.763,
"text": " that to some people that would seem terrible to have two smart people so opposite, I think is wonderful. I think it's so expressive of the of the human condition. And these are not people who who don't think about these are people to whom these questions are the deepest part of their lives. They've devoted their entire lives to thinking about these questions and come up with such diverse answers. But when when people do that, when they have such diversity,"
},
{
"end_time": 7752.056,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7741.715,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 7779.121,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7753.029,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 7805.23,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7779.121,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 7828.592,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7805.23,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 7856.886,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7828.592,
"text": " About both of those arguments, I want to tell you what occurs to me. Again, like I'm just a devil's advocate. I see flaws. So with Alvin's position, what occurs to me is monotheism is relatively new. So if you go back for even 3000 years,"
},
{
"end_time": 7886.101,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7858.046,
"text": " then would that not be an argument for polytheism rather than a belief in a god that's what occurs to me okay so that's number one and then for bead grundle is that correct yeah for bead grundle again he's using unless he's using the measure theoretic definition of probability which is not because that's actually you need many many many many data points like in the financial world in order to use that then he's using a folk definition when he's saying unlikely which means he's using"
},
{
"end_time": 7911.544,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7886.937,
"text": " propensity or subjective or or frequentist and so on they're all flawed so then one and then you also depends on the Drake equation which runs the gamut from 100% certainty that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists to 10 to the minus 400 be making vast assumptions there plus you're making vast assumptions as to what constitutes God so I don't see why he could say with any certainty that it's unlikely that it's God or it's likely to be aliens"
},
{
"end_time": 7935.657,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7914.087,
"text": " Look, you're critiquing both positions, and I think that's entirely justified. I'm just looking at each one in its own right, and why these people have come to the view that they have. And as I said, I can't pick more diametrically opposite views, and that to me is fun."
},
{
"end_time": 7963.695,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7936.015,
"text": " I mean, these are the most opposite views you could have. One saying, you don't need any arguments for the existence of God. It is properly basic in human psyche now. You can say that going back that it was polytheistic, but people always had this sense of something beyond themselves. I see, I see, I see. A lot of that. But there's something intrinsically basic about this belief. On the one hand, on the other hand, it's just"
},
{
"end_time": 7990.282,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7964.121,
"text": " It's so absurd that virtually any other explanation would be better. That's just expressing two different views. Both of them can be severely critiqued, and they are, and justified. When we do that on Closer to Truth, that's fine. But to deposit these two diametrically opposite views is, to me,"
},
{
"end_time": 8019.77,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 7991.067,
"text": " a very rich data point in in assessing human sentience and cognizance and dealing with these big questions. It's extremely interesting. Something that I think you would find, maybe you've thought about this quite a bit. Why is it that these? Why is it that brilliant people? Obviously, that depends on what you call brilliant. But why is it that they disagree when they have access to the same data? And they're not"
},
{
"end_time": 8041.971,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8020.213,
"text": " Unless you want to say that they're biased, now let's remove the bias because, well, maybe you can't remove the bias. Either way, why do you think it is that people disagree like Noam Chomsky versus Peterson or Bernardo Kastrup versus virtually all of your guests? Why is it that they disagree? Is it that they have access to different data?"
},
{
"end_time": 8068.746,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8043.507,
"text": " No, I think we posit that everybody has access to the same data. Now, each has belief systems which are either unconscious or developed culturally or deliberately manifest in terms of their own study as they've had, but they bring different belief systems and that's why we've run shows on the universe as theologically ambiguous."
},
{
"end_time": 8097.517,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8069.172,
"text": " religiously ambiguous because you're able to take these questions and interpret the data based upon your belief system. And I think that itself is a kind of truth which is really important that we can agree upon. So we can agree upon the fact that smart people take the same set of externalities data and come to radically different conclusions about"
},
{
"end_time": 8121.988,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8098.029,
"text": " the big questions that we deal with. And so that is a truth. And that is an absolute truth. That's not a relative truth. That's a very clear absolute truth. That's a fact of our world. And I think that fact of our world is an important data point in understanding our world. So it sounds like we've made no progress because we've said that some people believe one thing, some people believe another."
},
{
"end_time": 8142.329,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8122.21,
"text": " But I would disagree. I would say we have made progress because we see that these people have made dramatically different conclusions based on the same set of the data. And these are all smart people trained in science or trained in philosophy or trained in a logical way of thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 8168.592,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8142.654,
"text": " and they're coming to different conclusions. So that is a firm data point about existence, that you can see, you can come to dramatically different conclusions, even though people have the same set of ways of thinking, they're all trained in the same system, and they have access to the same external data."
},
{
"end_time": 8194.906,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8169.087,
"text": " And so this is a fact of our world, and I think an important one. And I think it's one that is not a triviality. I think it's progress to understand that. Do you feel like you've gotten any closer to truth? So my wife would say that she's a pianist, not a scientist and not dealing with these questions. She said that when we met, which was now"
},
{
"end_time": 8225.64,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8195.759,
"text": " How many years ago? 54, 55 years ago. Congrats, man. She and I were at the same kind of level of knowledge about things, and now I've done 300 Closer to Truth shows and 4,000 interview questions, and she says we're still at the same level of understanding these questions, even though I've done 4,000 interviews and she's done none."
},
{
"end_time": 8238.404,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8226.049,
"text": " and I've thought about this for 50 years and intensely with Closer to Truth the last 20 years, and she doesn't think about these things at all, and we're both at the same level. There's a kind of truth in that."
},
{
"end_time": 8258.319,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8238.797,
"text": " in terms of coming to an answer. But I think in reality, I have a very deep appreciation for the nature of the questions. I'm more excited about them than ever. So it's not after talking to so many people and hearing so many theories that I'm kind of fed up and I've heard everything."
},
{
"end_time": 8275.998,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8258.319,
"text": " No, it's the opposite."
},
{
"end_time": 8304.923,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8275.998,
"text": " Over and over again, for example, why is there something rather than nothing? We call it the mystery of existence. Why not nothing? What is the nature of nothing? So we've had multiple shows people can look that up on YouTube or posted truth.com just put in Nothing, and you'll see various shows that we've done on that many interviews means put in the actual quotation No, not put in nothing. You won't get anything No th ing right exactly"
},
{
"end_time": 8329.65,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8305.589,
"text": " And I don't know how we could code for literally putting in nothing. And then nature of consciousness, is consciousness fundamental? What is the nature we've done in so many different ways? Because we have so many different people to speak on these issues, and we've not exhausted it. As you mentioned, Bernardo Castro, we look forward to discussing with him as well."
},
{
"end_time": 8346.664,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8330.128,
"text": " in terms of the thinking. So you're asking, am I close to truth after all this time? I would say no in terms of an absolute answer to questions, but certainly yes in terms of an appreciation of"
},
{
"end_time": 8371.783,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8347.005,
"text": " Robert, with all these people you interview,"
},
{
"end_time": 8391.903,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8372.227,
"text": " Are you able to keep their different theories? Now they're extremely disparate, but are you able to keep them alive in your head such that you can allude to them or quote them when you're speaking to another interviewer? And if so, how do you do that? Do you take notes? Yeah, I don't consider myself to having a spectacular memory."
},
{
"end_time": 8405.998,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8392.176,
"text": " I do it"
},
{
"end_time": 8432.5,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8406.357,
"text": " Don't listen to anything Michael Shermer says. No, I'm just kidding. He's a friend."
},
{
"end_time": 8462.705,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8433.712,
"text": " I do it from my own perspective, but again, as enriched and informed by all the conversations that I've had, but I try to focus on each individual to try to get the best thinking out of that person by having them, you know, some free association, some probative questions, some questions to kind of attack or undermine their position just to get more out of them. So that's what I try to do. So each interview is done"
},
{
"end_time": 8476.869,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8463.166,
"text": " On its own, its own focus, not in terms of what other people think. When Peter Getzels and I put together the shows, then we synthesize an artificial architecture where we'll take"
},
{
"end_time": 8501.442,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8477.261,
"text": " The Apparent Chronology"
},
{
"end_time": 8530.009,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8501.783,
"text": " based upon a state a flow of ideas an argument as opposed to a real real-world chronology which it it can't be uh... peter's the editor the uh... peter gets out as he stood up he's the producer director and then he has editors working for him which was wonderful editors uh... and and i i'm very much involved in the uh... in in the in the selection so i work together with them on a script basis but not the visual basis for the show works they"
},
{
"end_time": 8546.391,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8530.35,
"text": " to"
},
{
"end_time": 8561.544,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8546.817,
"text": " little under 27 minutes of airtime. It is every word, every frame is thought about, worried about, focused on my whole world is that one show and when it's gone I don't think about it again."
},
{
"end_time": 8590.418,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8561.988,
"text": " Do you rather these podcasts that are unedited, where you just put up the footage online, or do you actually enjoy the editing process? That's another expression, which was not in my DNA, and it was not part of Closer to Truth until we were forced to do it last year because of the lockdown. And so now we have three expressions of Closer to Truth. We used to have two. We had our super polished shows, which are our crown jewels, which we're most proud of."
},
{
"end_time": 8616.118,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8590.964,
"text": " Most of them are on YouTube now and CloserToTruth.com. They'll all be up in the next few months, releasing one a week now or several several a week. And we have the raw interviews, which are these seven to 12 minute sessions at which we have over 4,000, maybe 5,000 by now of these segments. And those are also very highly produced."
},
{
"end_time": 8640.23,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8616.408,
"text": " And now what we've done in the last years, we have the same things that you and I are doing here for your podcast, Theory of Everything, which is great. We've done that for Closer to Truth. So we've done 15 or so what we're calling Closer to Truth chats. And sometimes we do it live and most of the time we don't and we have a very wide"
},
{
"end_time": 8656.92,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8640.606,
"text": " variety of people. We did Dan Dennett on free will and George Smoot, Nobel Prize winner in cosmology, Jill Tarter on alien intelligences, Len Miladnau just did a book on Stephen Hawking."
},
{
"end_time": 8686.527,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8657.21,
"text": " This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way."
},
{
"end_time": 8720.469,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8691.544,
"text": " If someone wants to know when is your correspondence with Castrop going to be? Our plan is to do the interview when we are shooting in the UK next year which will be in planning for March of 2022 and we hope to schedule Bernardo during that period of time which would mean that the interview would be posted you know several months later in in different segments because when we"
},
{
"end_time": 8741.357,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8720.708,
"text": " We'll hope to do 12 or so segments with Bernardo on different ways of approaching this topic. It won't be the kind of interview we're doing here, which is all straight. It'll be in segments and we'll post the segments at that time and then eventually those will find their way into actual shows in which his views will be contrasted with others."
},
{
"end_time": 8765.657,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8741.869,
"text": " I'll link to that in the description once they're out just please I'm pretty sure it'll get recommended to me but if it doesn't send them to me and I'll put it in the description of this so if you're listening watching it's in the description okay someone named and by the way that previous question came from panda products okay Andrea s asks your favorite question why does anything exist and how has your thinking on this changed"
},
{
"end_time": 8795.964,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8766.254,
"text": " You know, the question of existence is the great question of philosophy and indeed of reality. I've always said the questions, you know, does God exist? Is consciousness fundamental? How did the universe come about? What about the fundamental laws of physics? Life after death? These are all super important big questions, but I call them second level questions. The primary question is why is there anything at all? And, you know, I had a"
},
{
"end_time": 8826.032,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8796.22,
"text": " Fascination of this when I was a literally a child that scared me so to think about it and I thought it was unique and over the years I found many people have had that same experience that kind of that feeling of disassociation where you wonder what if there were nothing and it's a very scary thought and had the opportunity now over the years to develop this very much in great detail we've done"
},
{
"end_time": 8855.196,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8826.596,
"text": " Many shows on why is there something rather than nothing? What is nothing? Why not nothing? Mystery of Existence on ClosestofTruth.com and on ClosestofTruth YouTube. But I have to give credit to one of our early contributors, John Leslie, who is a British-Canadian philosopher who developed these ideas and other ideas, developed the philosophy of cosmology as well as"
},
{
"end_time": 8875.128,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8855.196,
"text": " The Mystery of Existence"
},
{
"end_time": 8900.828,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 8875.725,
"text": " I didn't know Plato had thoughts on that."
},
{
"end_time": 8930.435,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 8902.176,
"text": " Yes. I mean, you could read it into it, where Plato believed that the good or value was sort of a protogenitor of reality, that reality exists for the good. Interesting, interesting. So you can read back into, some people are very specific, like Leibniz and others, but others you could read into their thinking of why things exist."
},
{
"end_time": 8958.916,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 8930.93,
"text": " And I have a piece called Levels of Nothing in which I deal with nine levels of nothing. People talk about nothing, they think they know what they mean, why isn't there nothing? But in this piece I show that there are nine ways that nothing can be described. So there are nine levels of nothing. And what's fun to me is the nothing that many physicists talk about, the quantum foam that takes"
},
{
"end_time": 8977.466,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 8959.138,
"text": " from nothing, no space time, no, no matter energy, no, no nothing. And then they you create a universe out of nothing, which many physicists believe happened indeed may have happened that way. But that to me is my level five, nothing, right? Because it presumes the laws and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 9003.746,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 8978.302,
"text": " Neutrino, a commenter I love says, Robert, I kind of love you."
},
{
"end_time": 9029.138,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9004.787,
"text": " Steve Scully says, question for Robert, just because something exists, does this necessarily preclude nothing from also existing? Yes, I think it does. Some people would argue that, and many people said this, and maybe when you have your tetralemma theory of logic, you can have nothing and something at the same time, but I, in my simplicity,"
},
{
"end_time": 9057.568,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9029.445,
"text": " We'd say once you admit there is something in one possible world out of an infinite number, then by my definition, there is something. And so once there is something, there can never have been nothing in the big sense. So once you admit any kind of something in any kind of possible world in any way, you've answered the question that there is not nothing."
},
{
"end_time": 9085.401,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9058.046,
"text": " PJ wants to know about your thoughts on UFO sightings and encounters. It seems to previously be getting laughed at, but"
},
{
"end_time": 9115.452,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9086.186,
"text": " increasingly taken more seriously. And then someone wants to know what your thoughts are on life after death. Panda Products wants to know that. So PJ, what are your thoughts on UFO experiences, sightings, encounters? Yeah, we do not deal with those kinds of questions traditionally on Close to the Truth. I would also put another category which we're asked about even more often than UFOs is near-death experiences. Right, great. Panda Products. These are not categories we've dealt with a little bit."
},
{
"end_time": 9135.794,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9115.674,
"text": " The implications"
},
{
"end_time": 9149.104,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9136.067,
"text": " So if parapsychology and ESP are true, and we would define what that means, real phenomena in some sense, what would that imply? What would that imply about the nature of mind or physical?"
},
{
"end_time": 9173.422,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9149.326,
"text": " That's a legitimate close to the truth area, but not to determine the statistical proofs or not proofs of that. That's not what we would do. I put UFOs in that same category. I personally would be a skeptic, but I don't consider myself sufficiently knowledgeable. I have noticed there has been more attention lately to those kinds of questions."
},
{
"end_time": 9193.148,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9173.746,
"text": " multiple answers to that kind of question, much like there is to the Fermi paradox of why we don't see aliens, there are dozens and dozens of possible explanations. But I would remain a skeptic on UFOs if UFOs are deliberately"
},
{
"end_time": 9216.783,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9193.439,
"text": " As far as life after death,"
},
{
"end_time": 9242.995,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9217.432,
"text": " I think this is a this is a closer to truth topic we deal with this a lot it obviously has to deal with the nature of consciousness and If consciousness is a hundred percent physical then there is no life after death if consciousness is something beyond that or if there is a non-physical existence such as"
},
{
"end_time": 9270.811,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9242.995,
"text": " traditional gods or some type of spiritual realm, then there is a possibility of that. I've dealt with this in a paper on an article I've written on virtual immortality. Yeah, I read that one. Thank you for sending that. And it's diverse explanations of consciousness from pure materialism to epiphenomenalism to what's called non"
},
{
"end_time": 9296.698,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9271.169,
"text": " non-reductive physicalism, where it is physicalism, but there's something beyond that, to quantum theories of consciousness, to different aspects of qualia, to dualism and ultimately idealism, where everything is consciousness or cosmic consciousness. And each of these have different implications about the nature of life after death."
},
{
"end_time": 9321.954,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9297.005,
"text": " as well"
},
{
"end_time": 9351.971,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9322.517,
"text": " is a deep philosophical question. It's also technological and it would take me thousands of years to be able to develop a technology, not decades or something. But even if you had the technology, you really have to discern what the nature of consciousness is before you can do that. So questions of life after death, questions of uploading your consciousness and questions of super AI consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 9370.196,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9352.483,
"text": " Those are three separate questions, life after death, uploading your own consciousness into another medium and attaining some kind of immortality, and super AI consciousness. Those are three separate questions and I argue that they are the same question."
},
{
"end_time": 9398.848,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9370.708,
"text": " that all three of them are founded on the same question, which is the nature of consciousness. You can't answer any of those. You can't assume that you know the answer to any of those unless you have a prior belief in a certain theory of consciousness. Robert had to go, but luckily he was gracious enough to answer some of the questions over email. Some listeners wanted to know, what are Robert's thoughts on the demarcation problem? Robert said this, the key test is repeatability."
},
{
"end_time": 9421.015,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9399.206,
"text": " an important probative question. The next question comes from Abdullah Khalid. Could Robert tell us about his best interview experience? Robert says, which of your children do you like best? If you picked a quote unquote best, how would others feel? Another question viewers slash listeners asked was who would you interview of the past if you could? Robert says,"
},
{
"end_time": 9448.302,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9421.34,
"text": " Pascal. The next question comes from MJ McGovern. This one comes from the Theories of Everything Discord. I would be curious how Robert Kuhn splits his time between his activities. What are some of the more surprising things he's learned through his career, and if he has any advice for people who want to follow in his footsteps, like maybe Kurt. That reminded me, by the way, that I wanted to ask Robert Kuhn what advice he has for me, building theories of everything, as a combination of my quest to explicate theories,"
},
{
"end_time": 9473.2,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9448.558,
"text": " as well as to build a community around theories of everything, and as well as for me and the community to advance the state of theories of everything in general. Robert Kuhn said this,"
},
{
"end_time": 9502.5,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9473.592,
"text": " both closer to truth and closer to china are based on my deep desire to learn and to share what i've learned the process as well as the content my advice keep doing what you're doing do what works best for you don't try to target demographics let me know your progress all the best robert okay that was a marathon man that's where we leave it robert thank you so much it was a pleasure it's it's still a pleasure and it's a bit surreal although i'm"
},
{
"end_time": 9530.828,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9503.063,
"text": " By the end of it now I've acclimated to it but to see you because when I was younger before I even started theories of everything or a podcast and I would watch your videos and I found them incredibly insightful and I'm I'm fairly certain much of what I think has been unconsciously and somewhat consciously to influenced by you and your show. So thank you so much for there's many people here in the chat that is saying that they love you and thank you as well."
},
{
"end_time": 9545.486,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 9533.37,
"text": " Great, Kurt. I enjoyed being here. Congratulations on the theory of everything. I think it's a real contribution and we're on this journey together. That's for sure, man. Have a great one. Bye-bye."
},
{
"end_time": 9579.923,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9556.442,
"text": " I won't let my active psoriatic arthritis joint symptoms define me. Emerge as you. TRMFIA-Gucelcomab is proven to significantly reduce joint pain, stiffness, and swelling in adults with active psoriatic arthritis. Some patients even reported less fatigue as assessed by survey one week prior. Results may vary. TRMFIA is taken by injection six times a year after two starter doses at weeks zero and four."
},
{
"end_time": 9598.848,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9579.923,
"text": " Serious allergic reactions may occur. Trimphia may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms of infection including fever, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough. Tell your doctor if you had a vaccine or plan to."
},
{
"end_time": 9624.002,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9598.848,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and"
},
{
"end_time": 9647.619,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9628.507,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
}
]
}No transcript available.