Episode 52 - How Do We Know What We Know? (Epistemology)

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[Music] there's a story that i have referred to before that i think about often because it makes me think about how i think i was in my college freshman english class and our professor was talking about evolution one of the girls in the class just kind of ruffled her feathers up at it wow that's not true whatever i can't remember she said exactly but it kind of caught the attention of everybody and the professor directed his attention towards her i was like okay well what what are your thoughts and she proceeded to sort of teach him that evolution was a lie and that it clearly states so in the bible and that's god's word so it doesn't matter what kind of things he would say about evolution and he you know graciously said okay well tell me why do you think that the bible is reliable why do you think that the bible is something that can make you know something like that how do you know it's true and she said well the bible says that it's true [Music] and we arrive at the circle the circle and the the thing why i think about this is i i think we all have that i think that was a really small closed circle of assumption and the circular logic of the bible is true because the bible says that it's true no outside evidence or you know nothing needs to from the outside confirm that it's it's a self-sustaining circle so anything inside of it's up for question once you get outside of that circle it's just you can't you can't the the thought process can't get outside of the circle so i think we all have that i i mean if if anybody doesn't have it it's science mike i'm gonna try to oh i have it and i know where it is um okay let's take the idea that mike and i are talking right now uh mike how do you perceive that to be true i've judged that my senses are generally reliable and giving me a summary view of reality and so the fact that i hear your voice i assume it's your genuine voice and not a simulation of your voice based on my past experience hearing voices in the physical world with only a single exception in my life always emanated from someone and not materialized from nowhere you're the worst person to do this game with literally the worst we should do with somebody even remember well because to do it any other way and i already believe it or not there's a million holes even in that justification that i was trying to not skip to that was my attempt of not going right to the bottom because you're already there yeah the assumption is that those senses and memories that you're pulling from to make this decision are reliable and why are they reliable it's just an assumption because your assumption your past experience teaches you that you're that it was true your assumption that you are accurately remembering your past experience is an assumption the lived experience of being software that was booted up just now with false memories would be identical to the lived experience of being a human with a memory there would be no difference if the software were sufficiently well created likewise there would be no difference between a very convincing dream and reality if the dreams we have are actually dreams within dreams and actual dreams are reality it's possible that everything you know to be true is simply in a dream that you're having and you're actually an interdimensional highly intelligent elephant welcome to the liturgist podcast the most famous example would be a brain in a jar being fed a simulation of reality through direct connections to a spinal column would be no different than lived reality so you have no way to prove that anything other than your conscious experience exists now my problem is the idea that i think therefore i am was born out of rationalism and that is even an unfounded assumption that is simply treated as self-evident but doesn't have any further justification without being self-referential right to the bottom there we are at the bottom and usually the rhythm of the liturgist podcast is to slowly deconstruct it beautifully and in a way that informs your view of the world but we usually end the show at a position of nihilism today we're going to do something a little strange we're going to start at nihilism and work our way up today we are talking about how do we know what we know epistemology it's going to be a good one 306 electoral college votes i guess it was the biggest electoral college win since ronald reagan you said today that you have the biggest electoral margin since ronald reagan with 304 or 306 electoral votes in fact president obama got 365 426 when he won as president so why should americans trust well no i was told i was given that information i was just given we had a very very big margin i guess my question is why should americans trust you when you accuse the information they receive of being fake when you're providing information well i don't know i was given that information i was given i've actually i've seen that information around but it was a very substantial victory do you agree with that okay thank you that's a good answer yes we all have this circle right i mean you can't function without some sort of circle coming back on itself the tension is how many circles you have and how far up you're willing to go with circles from a foundational idea like i think therefore i am so i'm an empiricist that's my epistemological philosophy and an empiricist places confidence and a belief in proportion to the evidence they have to support the belief that means that empiricists have to be skeptical towards any and all claims because they have to evaluate it for merit using evidence but empiricism also requires that you accept evidence as a valid means of finding knowledge or else it's actually just nihilism skepticism without the acceptance of evidence is nihilism so as an empiricist i tr i'm making the assumption that the fewest possible assumptions is best so i go ahead and make an unfounded assumption that i am a conscious observer because i have that experience and then i make another assumption that my senses are perceiving an actual reality and from there once with those two assumptions only two assumptions i then allow empiricism to test reality using sensory information now sometimes other philosophies will take different assumptions for example the authority of the bible or the revelation of god as valid means of finding information and that's why we can be completely honest in a discussion and completely listen to another person for example a theist and an atheist and talk past each other because we don't accept the same bits of circular reasoning as allowing knowledge to be valid [Music] so think how many how many circles have to stack on top of each other to get to the bible is true because it says it's true first you have to go through the i am a real thing that can trust my hardware as a reliable mechanism to determine such a thing as gotta knowledge that your sensory input of even seeing words on a page and a bible that that's a real thing epistemological breakdown uh then you have to have the assumption that god is a thing that speaks and then you have to have the assumption that that speaking came to the through the authors of the bible and then you have to have the circle that that information was effectively communicated by those people and then you have to have the assumption that that effective communication was passed on effectively by those people from person to person to person from translation to translation through thousands of years and different translations and histories and and that you made that made it to you and then you have to have the assumption that you can understand it and that it will translate into your brain in the way that it translates into their brain and that you can interpret it correctly and i'm sure there were circles that i missed along that path but that's a that's a whole stack of assumptions that you take any of them away and you're left with well how can you know the bible is true if you can stack all of it up and you say well it's true because the bible says it's true [Music] the problem with this conversation or at least me having this conversation is i've studied so much epistemology and philosophy that i can hear the objections of different schools of thought in real time as we say every sentence and it's hard for me to decide which group to address and in which order with the full knowledge i can't address all of them but i would i would go ahead and say and this is really critical and in michael's depiction there of the authority of scripture in a in a thought exercise looking at it in terms of epistemology we have to admit that epistemology is a discipline is pretty new the term was never used before 1854. now if you talk about philosophy which is a search for truth epistemology is a specific discipline which is totally concerned with what is belief what is truth and what is justification those are those are the core tenets of epistemology but philosophy extends back much further we would probably call the first major philosopher plato but the issue is the scripture uh was written at least most of the scripture certainly the hebrew scriptures were written before plato before the birth of philosophy so we have to admit that looking at reality as a series of justified or unjustified assumptions is an idea that is newer historically than the bible and frankly is largely associated with western thought and so you can see the idea that the bible is based on a series of assumptions is a uniquely western frankly uniquely modern concept many theologians would say why is that a more valid set of assumptions than a presupposition that god ex exists and is self-evident and that's that's the heart of you know this one big debate about whether or not god exists but these differences in epistemology these differences in judging what is truth what is a belief and how do we justify those things is actually the engine behind politics and fake news and many of the social ills we see sweeping the world right now it's a fundamental disagreement over the nature of truth itself and when we disagree about what truth is and we can't agree on a common set of facts to frame a discussion productive dialogue is completely impossible much less empathy or action that creates change you did not answer the question no you did not you did not answer the question of why the president asked the white house press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood why did he do that it undermines the credibility of the entire white house press office so don't be so overly dramatic about it chuckle what you're saying it's a falsehood and they're giving sean spicer our press secretary gave alternative facts to that [Music] i mean basically the way i view our culture right now work looks a little bit like this if you look at a glass it's a vessel uh made of melted sand that holds water now sometimes we would also call a vessel made of plastic or wood or ceramics a glass as well because of the function but we would all pretty much agree what a glass is the thing we have to admit is that a glass is an abstraction a glass is actually composed of a bunch of molecules which are composed of atoms which are composed of subatomic particles which themselves are mysterious and somewhat nebulous in the means by which they exist they're they're clouds of probability but we all just sort of because our senses don't show us that world we look at a physical object or what we perceive as a physical object and we all call it a glass and it's a thing we drink water out of and making those kinds of abstractions allows us to operate in the world so imagine for a second there's 20 of us at a party and we're all looking at a glass and we all agree it's a glass and then one of the 20 people says that's not a glass that's a pony i mean just just picture in your mind an actual party with your friends for a second where one of your friends calls a glass a pony everyone would probably laugh and be like what are you talking about that's ridiculous and if the person was resolute you might say oh oh when you say pony you actually mean glass like the word pony for you you're pointing to the same thing that we're pointing to when we say glass and then the person says yeah of course we're all talking about a domesticated mammal that does work and at this point i imagine the room would grow somewhat quiet because we would probably start to question the mental health of that person right that would be such an obviously divorced from truth idea that a glass is a pony we could just reject it out of hand but what if it was eight out of the 20 people at the party and eight people resolutely confessed or said that it was a pony while the other 12 said that it was a glass imagine how you would feel about those people how you would feel about being at a party with him would you invite them again would you want to work with him at the office and it's an absurd image but it's absurd for a reason because we're we're nearing the point right now where we can't agree on the basic facets of reality you're saying you know here's a glass and the assumption that when you're saying glass that's actually referring to the swirling bits of atoms and electrons and all the things that you think of as a glass no deconstruction post-modernism would point out a glass is a word rooted in a language rooted in a culture rooted in these all these cultural assumptions and and language assumptions you you can you can start deconstructing far before you even get to what is this class you're you're saying a word you're you're making sounds to communicate from one mind what you assume to be one mind to another and so post-modernism is like it it gets so weird right and it gets so deep into language and metaphysics and epistemology and it's all really subtle and deep and then what happens is the these ideas start filtering down into into language and into academia and into art and media and and you have people that start saying things like well there is no objective truth it's relative it's all based on relativity and all these things and then so you have all this as part of like the cultural discussion that's been happening since the 20th century but then it starts filtering into since we're seeing it in our movies we're seeing it we read it in a book we heard somebody really smart say you know it's relative truth and then somebody says it's my truth and then and then eventually now what you have is this post-modernism that when you really get into it there's all this brilliant subtle stuff going on but then it just kind of gets dumbed down to in when it when it reaches most of us in a cultural way it's my truth you know it doesn't matter that it's like objectively true it's my truth and it's your truth and you have this kind of lazy uninformed postmodernism and i think that's what we're seeing with with a lot of this fake news stuff and a lot of the social media you have this kind of the deconstruction of modernism happened academically and philosophically and even some scientifically but then most of us like we treat anything in society you know we don't know most of us don't know how the internet actually works so we just kind of go for it and get on our phone and assume that it's going to happen we've we've taken little pieces of post-modernism and just kind of tried it on for size you know that's why it's my truth and i this is how i feel and this is the result of this is has been pretty destructive because what you see is this sort of post-truth society where now it's not just what is a glass when i say those words what is a glass but it's yeah i'm going to call that glass whatever to me that glass is a pony and that's just my truth and it's it's borrowing from something complex and simplifying it to a way of where it becomes a cartoon of itself it actually quite makes living life uh impractical with other people and it creates tension and violence [Music] hey everybody just wanted to take a second and remind you that the liturgists isn't actually just a podcast we actually started this work because we found a dearth of liturgical and spiritual material in the world that catered to people like us the weirdos that care about things like the intersection of science art and faith and so we started making meditations and music and all sorts of other things and the podcast was one of those things and it's taken up so much of our energy over the last couple years that we've kind of slacked a little bit in making the meditations and all those things because we've been short staffed but thanks to the patrons those of you who have supported us on patreon we've been able to start a little team and we're we're actually being more productive and fruitful with our time rather than just mike and i trying to do everything and so we're actually gonna start making more of that work again and i'm excited to tell you about one of the first things that's coming up is a weekly guided meditation and if you're interested in having access to that as well as the second podcast that mike and i record that's more conversational actually a little bit more like this episode is just without any edits or anything a little bit more raw it's called the literature's conversations and that's also accessible through patreon so if you would be interested in becoming a liturgist and making this show happen and having access to the weekly meditation and our bonus podcast just go to the liturgists.com look for that donate button in the right hand upper right hand side click it and then the easiest way is if you download the patreon app you can just have access to all that stuff right there otherwise you'll get notifications and sent files and stuff but uh that's sort of the simplest way and we would love to invite you into this community into this thing that's happening because it's more than a podcast it's more than just ideas in fact the ideas that we talk about on here are best are best digested with practice these sort of ideas unwed to enfleshed life within your own practices and community it just remains ideas and there's certainly more to life than ideas so once again go to the liturgists.com click that donate button at the top right hand corner and not only will you get access to those extra materials as well as more that we plan on putting out here in the future but you also help make this space possible and make the space happen for people that don't have a lot of other options people that feel a little spiritually homeless and frustrated so if this show and this work means something to you we would love to invite you to be a part of it with us and we're so grateful for each one of you thanks as any good modernist i spent most of my life with a single epistemology and uh an epistemology which i believed to be the only valid one now i didn't know the word epistemology but i knew that uh my foundational assumptions and my philosophy were the with the only right ones i think it's really helpful talking about post-modernism and post-truth let's just let's reinforce how that came to be you have you know classical history in the west which was greco-roman that's the birth of western civilization and things for logic and philosophy are going really well until the fall of the western roman empire and then things get bad in europe in the in the middle ages in the medieval period and then the basically the one-two punch of the enlightenment and rationalism start to shape this new movement in history which we call modernism and modernism had a few amazing tenets that pushed culture forward you know it was to question the traditions that we used to hold and test things for merit that's a really great idea i'm a huge fan uh modernism had had an underpinning that progress is inevitable that we're moving toward a utopia through our increased understanding of the world uh that's maybe a little less informed probably the darkest part of modernism was the way it would completely ignore or marginalize the oppression caused by its own actions modernism created in the most spiral dynamics blue way for what is supposed to be an orange movement a single story a single cultural story a single historical understanding and and the beauty of post-modernism fundamentally what post-modernism is saying is there is no uniquely elevated human interpretation of truth all human portrayals of truth have flaws and assumptions it is likely that there it's impossible to have a perfect understanding of truth from a human perspective that's like the fundamental tenet of post-modernism philosophically speaking and that that's actually brilliant that's a critique of power structures and systems because basically throughout the entire modern period science and rationalism were used to dismiss the claims of any group that was not in power and the only way for a group to become in power or gain standing in society was rebellion or to gain standing with the group in power to make a case in some ways it was nasty so academic post-modernism which is pretty pretty recent historically it's 1900s right really late 1900s it starts to have real cultural sway and they almost feel like what we've taken from post-modernism culturally is almost a a self-centered nihilism it's either like like my truth is the truth or my truth is one of many truths because there's no truth anyway there's an underlying assumption in the statement like my truth that an objective truth isn't possible i mean the funny thing about that to me and something i wrestle with is like to some degree that's a reasonable interpretation of science it's that like there is no objective truth which really philosophically puts you in a pickle i mean let's get into some of the science that's not newtonian no that's definitely not newtonian uh newton would be a a huge proponent of a single objective reality as would most scientists before him and when scientists started to discover a non-singular perspective in the sciences the response was generally panic like they would panic themselves but there's two major ways to kind of undermine a single objective perspective as being valid in science the first is einsteinian relativity [Music] let's just do a little thought experiment that is completely valid and fit this is well demonstrated physics and so i want you to imagine for a second a railroad car you know like a train car but not like a boxcar one of the flat ones a flat railroad car being pulled by a very powerful railroad engine on train tracks and on one end of the car the front end of the car toward the engine i'm standing there and on the other end of this flat rail car michael is standing there the two of us are facing each other and we have incredibly high-powered nerf guns these nerf guns have been specially made just for this uh live liturgist podcast duel so they fire a nerf dart at the speed of a bullet but without doing harm since michael and i are both largely pacifists now in addition to having high-powered nerf guns we're both wearing helmets with leds in them and sensors and these leds go off whenever they're exposed to a bright flash of light like you would get from say a flash photo are you with me so far me and michael obsidians of a rail car wearing funny helmets with leds holding high-powered nerf guns i'm with you mike in the middle of the rail car is rachel held evans i'm rachel evans and rachel held evans is holding a firecracker why is she holding a firecracker because her job is to start the duel by lighting the firecracker dropping it to the center of the railcar and taking a step back now once she drops the firecracker she just has one job to make sure there's no cheating she wants to make sure that neither michael or i fire our nerf gun before we get a signal and that we both get signals at the same time so she's got a pretty complex task but she can stand far enough back that you can see us both at the same time now we're all on a rail car together this rail car is going pretty fast up above the tracks is a tower and on the tower stands that great francescan richard rohr and richard's roar job is simply to back up rachel he's a second set of eyes to make sure that neither michael or i cheat because we're both really competitive so here's what happens rachel lights the firecracker drops it and steps back the firecracker goes off and of course michael and i both fire our nerf guns and rachel says oh wow good job that was a fair draw you both got the signal at the same time and you both fired at the same time and richard rohr radios in and says no way no no that wasn't fair because the light reached michael gunger first and so science mike was at a disadvantage richard rohr's got quite the eyesight there's no one to compete with you understand it's all embracing it's nature itself research well that's why we've got the flashing led helmets right so he could see that your leds went off first and my leds went off second rachel saw both leds go off at the same time so who's telling the truth it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over one million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists they both are they're both telling the truth rachel and me and michael all saw the lights go off at the same time and had a fair draw richard father roar saw michael's lights go off first both are true because there is no such thing as a universally simultaneous reality and in fact the closer that railcar got to light speed the more pronounced that difference would be and that's just like one thing in relativity another idea in relativity is if you had a train that was traveling near light speed you could conceivably have it passed through a tunnel where the observer on the train would see the tunnel as shorter than the train but an observer not on the train would see the opposite one would see the train shorter than the tunnel the other would see the tunnel longer than the train that doesn't seem possible except that it's a proven aspect of reality that literally you can't agree on a universal basis the order in which events occur because there is no universal now that is like crazy that means with one as close as we can get 100 certainty with with demonstrated six sigma certainty there are multiple correct interpretations of physical events that depend on the perspective of the observer and there is no single now so an idea like that fundamental in physics is mind-blowing when we think philosophically and how we justify claims it means that there's an intrinsic dependence on our perspective in terms of how we perceive events now let's be real relativity isn't going to make a dramatic difference at human scale speeds and distances it's just not as michael alluded to as i kind of gave my ridiculous example richard has really good eyesight none of us could tell the difference between a tower and a train going even 100 miles an hour or 200 miles an hour or 800 miles an hour it's far beyond human perception it's not beyond machine measurement though if you replaced michael and i with robots and you replace both observers with very very fast robots they would be able to discern timing differences between observers on the train and observers off the train but like more fundamentally and this gets weirder is the picture presented by quantum dynamics through something called decoherence now the reason uh i really want to talk about this is because like the most abused thing in theology and popular culture is quantum mechanics i've even heard the very bright listeners of the liturgist podcast and guests who've been on the liturgist podcast who are brilliant make totally ridiculous false claims and interpretations of quantum mechanics but the real science behind what happens here is so deeply strange and so relevant even to fake news that i'd like to explain to you exactly what happens in quantum d coherence so if you take an atom apart you get protons neutrons and electrons and if you look specifically at an electron we understand an electron to be a particle that it has mass that has a physical presence but as we studied electrons more we found that you can't always tell exactly where an electron is that most of the time in fact you can only ascribe a probability to where an electron made b which is why we call it a wave function or saying it has wave particle duality so unless it's directly observed an electron is just kind of a cloud of probability now to kind of explain how we know that and and reinforce what that means i'd like to tell you about the most famous experiment of all time and quantum dynamics if you listen and understand you'll be the smartest person at the next party you go to so just imagine for a second we take a big square of iron just a huge let's call it eight foot by eight foot square of iron and then we're just gonna cut a slit in the middle of it we'll make it uh three feet tall and you know three or four inches wide see we've got this big iron plate with a slit in the middle now i'm going to take a golf ball cannon and just fire golf balls toward the iron plate now because golf balls aren't the most accurate projectile in the world some are just going to ping off of the iron plate but some are going to pass through and they're going to strike the drywall on the other side and they'll leave a line in the wall if we fire enough golf balls because that's what things with mass do if instead we flood the same room with water and we leave the iron plate there and instead of just drywall on the other side of the plate we have a pressure sensitive plate and we drop a bowling ball into the room which would create a wave a wave would make a different impression on the other side of the plate it would make a gradient that was brightest in the middle there was the most pressure directly in the center that would fade out towards zero that's how waves act that's a big big big big point because if we take the same experiment with golf balls and a bowling ball created wave and we add two slits instead of one to the iron plate golf balls will make two lines but the bowling ball will do something weird it will make a bunch of lines all across the pressure plate in something called an interference pattern because taking one wave and have it strike two plates creates two waves that interfere with each other the only reason this matters is because it lets us see clearly using nothing but slits you can tell the difference between something that's a particle and something that is a wave so let's shrink our experiment down to the size and scale that would be relevant to use electrons which is convenient we can make electron guns it's the coolest thing in the world i've played with them they're amazing when we tested for the first time electrons to see if they were particles or wave we started with the single slit experiment and it revealed immediately that electrons are particles so we ran the experiment again with double slit which revealed immediately that electrons are ways which which is deeply strange and not the strangest part of reality because if you only send one electron at a time you can imagine with an electron gun you're sending a stream of electrons so scientists thought oh they're banging against each other on the other side of the plate so they decided to send one at a time and when they sent one electron at a time to a single slit they got the particle outcome when they sent a single photon at a time through double slits they got the wave outcome so somehow a single electron was splitting in half traveling through both slits bouncing against itself and interfering with itself onto the film which is not something golf balls do and i wish i could say that was like the weirdest part of the experience but they they got tricky they went to see exactly how this was happening so they added a sensor on one of the slits so they could tell definitively which slit the electron went through so now you have a double slit with a sensor on one of the slits and what do you know now it acts like a particle the act of observing the electron changed its behavior and turned it back into a particle that's weird that's so weird now let's talk about what that means the stuff that makes everything is quantum particles everything in the cosmos is made of quantum particles to our knowledge when they're unobserved they exist in a fuzzy decohered state and so physicists started to say like does the moon exist when no one is looking and that was it that's a genuine question in science now today physicists would say probably because the moon is huge there's a lot of mass in it but what about a car or an orange or an atom like where's the line between quantum mechanics and actual reality and we've been building to this and this entire little rant because physicists scaled up the double slit experiment to test atoms and everyone in physics was sure atoms would just act like particles and guess what atoms in these experiments act like wave particles when they're unobserved they are d coherent waves with an interference pattern atoms now here's the problem with that atoms are made of what protons and neutrons and electrons which are made of what fundamental particles in physics and the way those fundamental particles in physics become an atom is by communicating with each other using force carrying particles which should count as what an observation but they don't now once they got that result with atoms first of all it the test got re-run in a ton of labs because it was a big deal that confounded physicists the most recent experiments with the wave slit and dual slit experiment have used molecules as large as 114 atoms that are so large that they actually change shape during the course of the progress from emission to absorption and molecules with 114 atoms show wave particle duality that's so crazy to the point now some scientists are saying how how large can we take this can can we literally get a golf ball into a state of decoherence can we get macro scale objects to behave like waves and no one knows and the reason that's so nuts is if decoherence is based on observation and all observation is is a particle interaction then any atom or molecule should have sufficient internal observations on their own to be consistently coherent and yet experiment has revealed that they do not so on the one hand relativity says there's no such thing as universal time or a universal agreement on the order in which events occur and two quantum mechanics tell us that all of reality is composed of very fuzzy probabilistic wave functions that don't collapse consistently if that's true all of reality is based on at the relativity scale and the quantum mechanics scale the intersection of observations that it requires multiple perspectives to describe reality and that no perspective in reality is any more privileged than other perspectives because here's why that matters if that's true if if we admit there is no universal objective reality how in the holy hell do we gain knowledge and function in the world how do we agree on what exists and what does not does this mean that literally all ideas are equal this is this is the west's process of getting to reality and somebody in india or china might hear something like this and be like well yeah of course that's not the whole time yeah all the taoists in the house are like um yeah thank you you're saying that objective reality is not a thing it's just subjective it's just uh our perception of the one is-ness and it's the what we perceive as reality as the uh as a result of all of these perspectives lying to themselves well and i mean when people say to me how can you be a science-minded person and a mystic like in interviews i just want to give that whole speech yeah because my like reality is in fact a deeply mystical experience as revealed by science and frankly many you you've seen this movement it it's been true for a long time but it's especially true recently that people involved in fundamental physics are very drawn toward the arts they like to write they like to compose music because what they discover in the science evokes something they can't articulate exclusively in [Music] equations [Music] [Music] so we've got modernism that includes all of sort of the classical scientific assumptions about the universe being this real solid thing like billiard balls bouncing off of each other and all of the philosophy that goes with that and the certainty about how things are and it's easy to parse up the universe and figure it out in the modern age postmodernism begins to deconstruct all of that and we're left with this fuzzy probability and relativity that is truer to reality than our perception tends to be and and then here we are and somehow that really subtle and deep stuff turns into something far sloppier and far more dangerous because saying that a photon became a particle when observed going through a slit is not the same as saying it was observed and it remained a wave in other words it's not the same thing as contradictory fact just because something is fuzzy and mysterious does not mean that one plus one really equals three if i feel like it does because when the subtlety of quantum mechanics or postmodernism gets filtered down and distorted and becomes i'm gonna make reality whatever i want it to be in a practical political social way there's gonna be dire consequences to that sort of action and so how do we scale this up let's think about something like pizzagate that is this conspiracy theory about hillary clinton and pizza rings with sex stuff and there's no actual evidence for it but this belief about it so let's talk about how to engage with ideas like that because there's all sorts of competing claims about reality right now in our society and in a world where none of us really know what the hell is actually going on at the fundamental reality of things how do we make claims at all just imagine for a second if you actually saw reality as collapsing wave functions collapsing wave functions if your senses actually fed you that scale of information how would you find the correct collapsing wave functions that would coalesce into the right kind of molecules to feed your metabolism how would you find the right collapsing wave functions to take this very higher order abstraction we call dna and allow it to replicate if you saw reality as it is you would be unable to survive so we have to remember our brains fundamentally in no way are tasked by nature with finding truth that's not a core feature of the human operating system that's not who we are evolution gave us one task survive make babies spread your genes and try whatever you can if you pull it off i'll reward you if you don't i'll eliminate you so those are pretty strong pressures very big carrot very big stick and your brain is using like your internal experiences your thoughts and your feelings and combining that with your sensory information to tell this story where you're the hero and the whole purpose of the story what is the hero looking for food shelter and sex that's like if you watch films yeah there's there's a lot of that going on literally the pursuit of food and sex and like the pursuit of money which does what gets you food but you add human consciousness as another layer where these like incredible social mammals social primates the most social primate on the planet so our story in order to get food shelter and sex also has to be about fitting in and succeeding socially in our communities so if you look at the stories we're like enthralled by they're all about people attaining social status for food shelter and sex or sacrificing themselves for the safety of the tribe which goes counter to the first narrative but evolution was smart enough to shape social primates to be occasionally completely selfless under the right criteria and if you take that assumption instead of i see truth i remember truth like my senses are a hack a way of understanding reality to achieve a goal you become aware that all and i mean literally all of our thinking is deeply biased which is something scientists call cognitive biases so in pizzagate specifically the reason people are accepting these stories are a con a combination primarily of i would say probably four well-documented cognitive biases like the first would be confirmation bias confirmation bias is simply that humans tend to accept new information that reinforces what they already believe not not based on merit the first thing you look with for information is does this reinforce how i understand things if it does you are much more likely to accept it confirmation bias means we need an overwhelming amount of information to overcome our existing preconceptions but there's a problem there's something called the backfire effect if we encounter too much information too quickly that goes against our assumptions we rebel against the new information you can imagine a voter in a booth who's been overwhelmed with information that their views on minorities and their views on same-sex relationships harm people and they've been overwhelmed with that information and in a backfire effect they would reject it and they would pull a lever voting for president donald trump right so these are these are cognitive biases there's another one that specifically for pizzagate called the bandwagon effect and the bandwagon effect is simply we believe what our community believes so if you identify as conservative or alt-right or evangelical or any of these terms or liberal people or liberal oh i was gonna i was gonna save the liberal uh comeuppance for the end i was going to feel nice and superior before i knocked them down but yeah all these biases cut equally strongly on the left or for literally any group of people including scientists yeah so the bandwagon effect we believe what our community believes so i'm a liberal man i think the new york times is really trustworthy i think fox news isn't like one of my uncles would think the fox news is really trustworthy and the new york times doesn't why bandwagon effect and social identity another thing in pizzagate and this is huge is authority bias we tend to believe authority figures or people we view as having elevated status unless they have elevated status with a rival group at which point we disregard them even more vehemently and finally and this is this is a big part that explains what's happening right now is something called the availability cascade we believe things we hear repeatedly regardless of evidence or merit so in a an age where social media is playing an increasing role in how we learn about the world and how we understand how other people are thinking and feeling and when social media is being driven by algorithms designed to make money to feed us things our brains find most gratifying we hear more and more that which we agree with so suddenly we have an exponential force multiplier on a cognitive bias and that's what's historic about 2015 2016 and 2017 the intersection of digital economic incentives and software with human cognitive bias and you only need those four biases to describe pizzagate and yet there are dozens of documented well understood human cognitive biases that the we all walk around completely unaware of now why does this matter because if we unthinkingly allow digital echo chambers and polarization to break down a consensus on what is real our society could fall yeah the stakes are that high if if we can't agree that when you run a clip of someone talking and if if they immediately deny that they said that and half of the people believe them because of authority bias and the bandwagon effect there's no ability to have discussions about policy or governance the only option is physical division and separate governance or outright conflict and that that's why i'm concerned today is i see cognitive bias playing a significant role at all levels of society politically socially and economically the fact is let's talk about the science again yes there is no such thing as a privileged observer there is a great mystery to how reality operates those things are true but it's also true that if we accept certain ideas about abstractions and philosophy and an actual reality we learn more about reality by sharing perspectives the intersection of two or three or four points in a system of relativity gives you more insight literally additional observers make the universe exist in quantum mechanics so instead of saying you know no viewpoints are valid or all viewpoints are valid instead i think that's why something like empiricism is a reasonable compromise we all ascribe evidence we all test the evidence and we create systems that are designed to detect and counterbalance our cognitive biases you know or we just blow the whole thing up i mean that's that's kind of the the option we're facing right now [Music] it's kind of like you think about money if you really get down to it money is nothing but a common assumption that we've all come to agree on originally gold or whatever kind of thing that we took out of the earth gems precious stones we decided these are precious and these are worth more than this other kind of stone to us it's totally subjective it has no real grounding in reality other than our imaginations and a practical way of getting some things done together so we have this whole financial system and it feel you know monies you know the economies are crashing and or going well or the stock markets all all that stuff is nothing but existing as an assumption within all of our brains i assume that if i hand you a ten dollar bill that means something to you and so that assumption and you assume that if you give it to somebody else that would mean something to them so that assumption allows us to do something together where i say listen i have this you know this plant in my garden or on my farm that creates this food that you can eat because you don't have any food but i would like to get this imaginary thing from you that i could assume somebody else will will give me something else for it that i would need that i don't have because i don't have something to cover up my bare chest with i'm going to need some clothing but rather than going directly from tomatoes to clothing maybe we could make it a more efficient system if we could all believe in some sort of value universal value system and money exists because of this and this is all this is what our whole society is built on all these assumptions like this nations uh states cities governments religions philosophy it's all these like all dealing with these little assumptions that can make practically help us live a better life together including the idea of together the idea that we are different things that that i can't just go to a movie theater and buy one ticket and anything in the one is-ness that i want to invite with me into the movie theater can't get to go because we've created this social arrangement that you and i are fundamentally different things which is there's no reason to believe that other than it's just a practical way of us uh getting by and surviving based on our evolutionary constructs and our hardware um and the software that we're operating with so all that when you go to ideas and truth and news you need something like empiricism at this level you can't just borrow from the fundamental nihilism of oh you can't know anything so how can i know if the president said this or didn't say this it's a bad it's an irresponsible social thing to do because by doing this what we're doing as a society by moving to this post-truth thing is cutting our legs off it's like it's like saying okay i don't want to believe in money anymore it's just a construct but but then what i don't have any food in my garden so i'm gonna starve to death without without money because i don't i don't have enough food the way i our whole society has like been operational on all these assumptions like news should be reflective of things that actually happen that in wave functions that have actually collapsed and been perceived as such [Laughter] these events and if we can't assume that when you say something the language that you're saying has some correspondence to what our shared perception of reality is uh it cuts the legs out of society like at the at the deepest part of how we communicate and function together and it's it may sound dramatic and it's a and it's like well you know you just don't believe the fake news stuff and it doesn't seem like that big of a deal but if we don't get better at this as a society it really could head towards some very dark violent upheavals of society because they're it's attacking the very foundations of how we cooperate and get along and how we can avoid killing my neighbor and taking his tomatoes from his garden it's like we have this language and these shared assumptions of what what it means to tell the truth and what it means to cooperate in a society together so these are big stakes one i think part of the violent tomato stealing comes from a hostility towards informed perspectives or expertise that's got some really interesting roots i think in terms of social science you've got an american religious tradition largely based on state independent protestantism so everyone's culture of faith was telling the catholic church to go pound sand right so there's there's already kind of an anti-authority thing there and then you have this proliferation of faith traditions because literally any time someone who is persuasive or charismatic disagreed with the church or denomination they're part of they just went and started a new one yeah and so america became this this accelerator of new religious traditions and then you had this entrepreneurial period uh especially in in the tech economy where people like dropped out of college and built world-changing businesses and uh kind of the intersection of protestantism and entrepreneurialism if i work hard and study hard i can i can do anything and all you elites who are telling me i can't you're just part of the problem and there there is a healthy critique at the core of that but it's not to say that every opinion or perspective has equal validity if i were to take a readout of numbers from the large hadron collider at cern and read those numbers and give you an opinion about what they mean my interpretation of those numbers that we all agree are real would not be as good as a physicist at cern right we just and but frankly mine would be probably better than most listeners of the program so it's not that we could all look at the same numbers and all come up with equally valid conclusions part of this this infectious nihilism that we've got going on right now why we do what's called a petulant nihilism is a rejection that lived experience and and learning create a better ability to interpret data and events i think we should always feel free to ask tough challenging questions especially of institutions that have power economic military social power but i also don't think we should all think that our take on the fossil record or climate science or what have you is as good as the people who have spent eight or 12 or 20 years intensely focused on that single topic i mean i get i literally get fan letters from scientists saying thank you for not overstepping your bounds because when you when you hear me talk about science on this program what as a non-expert i am not a science expert what i have worked incredibly hard at is accurately relaying the work of people who know what the hell they are talking about because i'm not one of them like an informed nihilism an informed postmodernism creates an incredible intellectual humility but a petulant post-modernism or a petulant nihilism creates a sense of pride and intellectual entitlement that my ideas are just as good as anyone's if we assume reality exists your ideas are as good as anyone's on some topics but woefully less good or less informed as others practically speaking practically speaking with a set of assumptions including that reality is a thing can you imagine the fine print for this program if we were to write it out do you think lawyers are bad oh my gosh you have to list our set of known epistemological assumptions and then disclose the fact that it's likely we have unknown epistemological assumptions that we can't determine from our own perspective [Music] we started this idea for this episode looking at the news looking at social media feeds and being like oh my god we gotta talk about this we've got to talk about how to think how to use empiricism how to use how to see through things like confirmation bias and authoritarianism and all these all these ways that we kind of get into these patterns of thinking that can result in in these really destructive practical things in society and then mike we kind of took a break and mike thought about it for a while and he like came back with all this he's like this whole list of really deep epistemological things to get in this episode basically and we're like okay this is beautiful we want to talk about it but some of our episodes are the kind of episodes that people will share with a co-worker or with an aunt or something who like she really needs to hear this because she it's all fake news on her feet all the time or whatever it is and we recognize that this episode is probably not ideal [Music] for the girl that was in my classroom that assumed you know that said uh the bible's true because the bible says it's true if that's where she's at this might be a couple steps down the road that she might not want to take yet so we thought we're gonna we're gonna do something different with this episode we're gonna this one is for like the hardcore that are just podcast people you've been along you you've listened to the spiral dynamics episode you've kind of been following along you know you get kind of where we've been but we this is not all that shareable for a broad audience in some ways so we're going to do like a what would you call it mike a a family friendly illiteracy yeah well this was this is like a epistemology and the next one's more like media literacy yeah or how do you discern more practically good information from bad information helpful media from non-helpful media and frankly how do you tell when trustworthy media has dropped the ball intentionally or unintentionally so we wanted to do this first because we're gonna have to make a bunch of assumptions to do that episode without without really bogging it down so this was a good dose of like don't take anything we're saying too seriously we recognize all the the leaps of assumptions that we're gonna have to make to even like to speak on a level of uh don't do this do this morality and all these things there's a bunch of assumptions that have to be made and we're the kind of people that we we like to disclose those assumptions as we make them consider this whole episode i just a uh a disclaimer for the next guided tour of how historically people have determined yeah uh truth belief and justification um well let us know what you think about this episode if you think thinking and communication is a thing worth doing thanks so much to all of our patrons for making this show and all that we do possible thanks to greg nordine corey pig madison chandler tyler chester and of course to father rohr who could have been doing many other things with his amazing eyesight sometimes i'll just sit and you know look at the candle [Music] you