How Do We Know What We Know? (Epistemology)

[music] There's this 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 and said, "Well, it's not true, whatever I remember," she said exactly, but it kind of caught the attention of everybody. And the professor directed his attention towards her and was like, "Okay, 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." And we arrive at the circle and the thing that I think about is 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. You know, outside evidence or, you know, nothing needs to, from the outside, confirm that. 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. The thought process can't get outside of that circle. So I think we all have that. I mean, if anybody doesn't have it, it's science, Mike. I'm going to try to find it. I know where it is. Okay, let's take the idea that Mike and I are talking right now. 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. So I would, you're the worst person to do this game with. Literally the worst. And we should do it in some way or remember how to do it any other way. Like 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 past, your past experience teaches you 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 liturgous podcast. The most famous example would be a brain and 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 therefor 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-referring straight to the bottom. There we are at the bottom. And usually the rhythm of the liturgous 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. We're going to do a great job of doing this. 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 in 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'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. 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. It is the monogical bit. 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 knowledge. The system monogical break down. You've got to have that your sensory input of even seeing words on a page and a Bible that that's a real thing. 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, from translation to translation through thousands of years and different translations and histories and that you 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 translated into their brain. And that you can interpret it correctly. And I'm sure there were circles that I missed along that path. 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?" But if you can stack all of it up and you say, "Well, it's true because the Bible says it's true." 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 go ahead and say, "And this is really critical." And Michael's depiction there of the authority of Scripture in a thought exercise looking at it in terms of epistemology. We have to admit that epistemology as 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 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 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 exists in his self-evident? And that's the heart of this one big debate about whether or not God exists. But these differences in epistemology, these differences in judging what is truth, as 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. 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 on day one. No, don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving Sean Spicer our press secretary gave alternative facts to that. I mean, basically the way I view our culture right now looks a little bit like this. If you look at a glass, it's a vessel 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 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 is 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 picturing 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 when you say pony you actually mean glass. Like the word pony for you that 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. 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 them. Would you invite them again? Would you want to work with them at the office? And it's an absurd image but it's absurd for a reason because we're nearing a 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, the construction in postmodernism would point out a glass is a word rooted in a language rooted in a culture rooted in these all these cultural assumptions and language assumptions that you can you can start deconstructing far before you even get to what is this glass you're saying a word you're making sounds to communicate from one mind what you assume to be one mind to another. And so postmodernism is like 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 that 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 is 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 it's my truth. And then and then eventually now what you have is this postmodernism that when you really get into it is there's all this brilliant subtle stuff going on but then it just kind of gets dumbed down to and 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 we know we don't know most of us don't know how the internet actually works we just kind of go for it get on our phone and assume that it's going to happen. We've taken little pieces of postmodernism and just kind of tried it on for size you know it's my truth and this is how I feel and this is the result of this 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 to it's borrowing from something complex and simplifying it to a way of where it becomes a cartoon of itself and actually quite makes living life impractical with other people and it creates tension and violence. 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 cater to people like us the weirdos that care about things like the intersection of science or 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 of 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 actually being more productive and fruitful with our time rather than just Mike and I trying to do everything. And so we're actually going to 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 are 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 liturgist 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 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 digested with practice. These sort of ideas unwed to infleshed 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 than what I'm putting out here in the future. But you also help make this space possible and make this 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 an epistemology which I believed to be the only valid one. Now I didn't know the word epistemology. But I knew that my foundational assumptions and my philosophy were the only right ones. I think it's really helpful talking about postmodernism and post truth. Let's just reinforce how that came to be. You have 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 middle ages, in the medieval period. And then basically the one to 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. Modernism had an underpinning that progress is inevitable, that we're moving toward utopia through our increased understanding of the world. 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 spiraled dynamics blew way for what is supposed to be an orange movement, a single story, a single cultural story, a single historical understanding. And the beauty of postmodernism, fundamentally what postmodernism 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 it's impossible to have a perfect understanding of truth from a human perspective. That's like the fundamental tenet of postmodernism philosophically speaking. And 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 have come 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 postmodernism, which is pretty recent historically, it's 1900s, really late 1900s, it starts to have real cultural sway. And I almost feel like what we've taken from postmodernism culturally is almost a self-centered nihilism. It's either 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 is 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. Now that's definitely not Newton. Newton would be 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 is being valid in science. The first is Einsteinian relativity. Let's just do a little thought in experiment that is completely valid and 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 box car, 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 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 and them in 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. And with me, so far, me and Michael opposite ends 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 held 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 rail car 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 she 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 Roar. Yes. 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 well, 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 Roar radios in and says, no way. That wasn't fair because the light reached Michael Gunger first. And so science Mike was at a disadvantage. Richard Roar has got quite the eyesight. There's nowhere to compete with. It's all embracing. It's nature itself. 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? 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 rail car 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 pass 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 to 100% uncertainty 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're placed Michael and I with robots and your place 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 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 have 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 decoherence. 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 it 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 may be. Which is why we call it a wave function or saying it has a 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 reinforce what that means I'd like to tell you about the most famous experiment of all time in quantum dynamics. If you listen and understand you will 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 going to cut a slit in the middle of it. We'll make it a three feet tall and you know three or four inches wide. So 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 waves. 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 through 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 experiment. But they got tricky. They wanted 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, deco-heared state. And so physicists started to say, like does the moon exist when no one is looking? And 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 deco-hearing 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 and physics. And the way those fundamental particles and 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, the test got rerun 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 chain shape during the course of the progress from the 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 large can we take this? 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 a particle interaction, that 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 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 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, it's not the whole time. Yeah, all the Taoists in the house are like, yeah, thank you. You're saying that objective reality is not a thing. It's just subjective. It's just our perception of the one business and it's the what we perceive as reality is the 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 because my like reality is in fact a deeply mystical experience as revealed by science. And frankly, many, you've seen this movement, 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 equations. So we've got modernism that includes all of sort of the classical science. 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. So modernism begins to deconstruct all of that and we're left with this fuzzy probability and relativity that is true or to reality, then our perception tends to be. 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 going to make reality whatever I want it to be in a practical political social way. There's going to be dire consequences to that sort of action and so how do we scale this up let's think about something like pizza gate 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 of abstraction we called 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 baby spread your jeans 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. Like if you watch films yeah there's there's a lot of that going on literally the pursuit of food insects 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 were 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 pizegate specifically the reason people are accepting these stories are a combination primarily if 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 in 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 pizegate 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 or liberal I was going to I was going to save the liberal come up it's for the end I was going to feel nice and superior but I knocked him down. But yeah all these biases cut equally strongly on the left or for literally any group of people including scientists. 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 pizegate 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 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 pizegate and yet there are dozens of documented well understood human cognitive bias. Human cognitive biases that the we all walk around completely on aware 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. The stakes are that high 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 describe 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 option we're facing right now. 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 it 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 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 money's 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 $10 bill that means something to you. So that assumption and you assume that if you give it to somebody else that means 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 need some clothing 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. States cities governments religions lots 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 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 isness 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 getting by and surviving based on our evolutionary constructs and our hardware 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 like 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 saying okay I don't want to believe in money anymore it's just a construct but then what I don't have any food in my garden so I'm going to 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 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 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 and it's like well 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 to cooperate in a society together. And so these are big stakes. Well, and I think part of the violent tomato stealing comes from a hostility towards informed perspectives or expertise that's got some really interesting routes 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. So there's there's already kind of an anti authority thing there and then you have this proliferation of faith traditions because literally anytime someone who was persuasive or charismatic disagreed with the church or denominated their part of they just went and started a new one. And so America became this this accelerator of new religious traditions and then you had this entrepreneurial period especially in the tech economy where people like dropped out of college and built world changing businesses and kind of the intersection of Protestantism and entrepreneurialism is if I work hard and study hard I can I can do anything and all you elites here telling me I can't you're just part of the problem and there is a healthy critique at the core of that. But it's not to say that every opinion or perspective is equal validity if I were to take a readout of numbers from the large hydrogen 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 there 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 with equally valid conclusions part of this this infectious nihilism that we've got going on right now. We do what's called a petulant nihilism is a rejection that lived experience 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 twelve or twenty 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 postmodernism 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. 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. We started this idea for this episode looking at the news, looking at social media feeds and being like, oh my god. We've got to 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 ways that we kind of get into these patterns of thinking that can result 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 came back with all this all 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 coworker or with an aunt or something who like she really needs to hear this because 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 for the girl that was in my classroom that assumed, you know, that said, the Bible Street 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. We thought we're going to do something different with this episode. We're going to, this one is for like the hardcore liturgist podcast people. You've been along, 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 way. So we're going to do like a, what would you call it, Mike? A family family? Media literacy. Yeah. Well, this was, this was like epistemology. And the next one's more like media literacy or how do you discern more practically good information from bad information, helpful media from not helpful media. 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 going to have to make a bunch of assumptions 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 leaps of assumptions that we're going to have to make to even like to speak on a level of 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 like to disclose those assumptions as we make them consider this whole episode, a disclaimer for the next episode. A guided tour of how historically people have determined truth, belief, and justification. 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 Nordin, Corey Pig, Madison Chandler, Tyler Chester, and of course to Father Roar, who could have been doing many other things with his amazing eyesight. Sometimes I'll just sit and look at the candle.