Episode #063 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, I want to start out the episode today by saying probably the most and least controversial thing that I’ve ever said on this show before. You, listener, you, you are not built to have total knowledge of everything that’s around you. Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, my friend. As a friend, I feel obligated to tell you. No matter how painful or unpainful this is for you to hear, you just were not designed to arrive at a full understanding about everything that exists out there. You weren’t! You know, there’s this weird tightrope that we walk as human beings sometimes. On one hand, we live our lives, and we want to feel like everything is knowable. We want to feel like if we just keep philosophizing about stuff and conducting science experiments that eventually we’ll get to some knowledge rest stop along the knowledge highway, to a place where we just know everything or at least close to everything. But on the other hand, at some level we know that this is impossible. At some level we know just how incapable we are of knowing some things.

Many people—simply by virtue of being the kind of person that listens to a podcast like this—there’s a part of you that sees value in seeking knowledge, right? It’s understandable. For the record, I’m one of you. But why do you do it? Why do you do it? Why seek knowledge about the world as opposed to not seeking knowledge? Have you ever had somebody ask you that before? Have you ever had somebody say, “Why do you like to learn stuff all the time? You know what I like to do? Not-reading. That’s my thing. I like not-reading. Why would you ever read a book about something when you could be out in the world enjoying your life instead? Why would you ever watch a documentary on something when you could be entertained by reality TV, be entertained by Honey Boo Boo or something?”

It’s a valid question. Why are you even listening to this podcast right now? There’s tons of other ones out there you could be listening to. There’s thousands of hacky ex-standup comedians with a podcast that tell the same formulaic jokes into the microphone about the news week after week after week. Why not listen to them? Where’s the love for those guys?

Now, I’m being facetious, but how would you respond to somebody if they asked you this question? Well, personally I would respond by saying that no matter how immediately ungratifying an educational experience may seem on the surface, knowledge usually leads to my life being better in some way, right? Knowledge is power. That’s not controversial. I learn new things about the world, and I create for myself a richer, fuller understanding of the universe that I live in. Just off the top of my head right now, I could list off a thousand ways that knowledge has made me less ailed by ignorance, less fearful, less regretful or clouded by superstition like some member of a pygmy tribe somewhere. Knowledge does a lot of stuff. Knowledge brings opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise have, right?

And by that I mean, not only do you see more opportunities because you have that knowledge, but opportunities present themselves to you in this world because you’re a knowledgeable person. This pervades the way that we see the world even down to the most basic level. You can just look around you at the world being a knowledgeable person and appreciate things more than other people. You actually appreciate the world more. In this way, knowledge broadens our vision of what the universe is. It makes everything in this small, very limited community that you live in bigger. It makes it more exciting, more interesting.

For example, let’s say you’re watching a documentary on—I don't know—electrical boxes. When you’re walking down the street and you look at that electrical box on the side of the road, you don’t just see some green box sitting there. After you’ve watched that documentary, you see all the ingenuity behind it. You see how it powers the entire neighborhood, how incredible that is. You think about how George C. Electrical Box in the year 1843 made the first one. You might consider the intricate web of wires and connectors inside of it, the billions of calculations that box is making every day just to make your life possible. When you apply your knowledge to your perception of the world around you, you are for all intents and purposes seeing a completely different world than somebody else who hasn’t seen that documentary, who watches Honey Boo Boo instead and just walks past that very same electrical box and says, “Uh, I guess this thing is there.” They might not even notice it. “I guess I have to mow my lawn around this electrical box. That’s an inconvenience.”

Knowledge makes the universe bigger and more interesting. And it’s lucky for people like us that knowledge is a respectable paradigm to strive for in our society. In fact, I think it’s so respectable, it could run us into problems. I think it’s such a respectable paradigm that many of us choose it, and then we fall into the trap of failing to ask ourselves, “What is my ultimate goal here with knowledge? Like, what’s the end game with knowledge? What am I aiming towards with acquiring all this knowledge?” And you can ask that same question on a bigger level. What are we as a species aiming towards with all this knowledge? Total knowledge? What, we’re just going to keep going until we get total knowledge about everything there is?

Well, sure. Why not? I mean, really, why would we ever get to a stopping point? Can you really ever imagine scientists stopping? These people, these neurotic maniacs with their goggles and those speakers—do you really see those people ever stopping? We could arrive at the most awesome piece of knowledge imaginable; these people would still be in their office the next day doing their little experiments, trying to find more knowledge. Why would we ever stop? There’s no stopping point when it comes to knowledge, right? Or is there?

There’s this way of thinking about our knowledge of the universe that seems pretty popular when I talk to people in today’s world, but it was actually being talked about all the way back in Immanuel Kant’s time too. There was a famous mathematician; his name was Pierre Laplace. That’s my cultured way of saying it: Pierre Laplace. He was sort of the posterchild for this way of thinking. The idea was that if we knew the location—theoretically speaking here—if we knew the location of every atom in the entire universe and we knew exactly how to calculate these seemingly necessary, constant forces like gravity, that we could at least in theory simulate every cosmic event that was to come, every natural event. We could simulate or predict everything that was going to happen for the rest of time.

Now, in modern times this usually takes more of the form of, “Hey, look at science, man. Good job. Look at what science has done so far. Look at how much we know now compared to how little we knew before. Man, as long as these people that I’ve never met before, in this building that I’ve never been to, called scientists keep conducting these experiments, like, as long as they keep concluding things and then building new experiments and concluding things off of those experiments, eventually, we will have arrived at the truth! We will have knowledge of everything that there is in the entire universe!”

Well, there’s a huge difference between truth and knowledge. What Immanuel Kant would want us to consider—and this is a very key distinction to make—is that even if we arrived at this rest stop along the knowledge highway that these people are talking about—even if this was possible, at best, all we could ever have is not total knowledge of everything there is out there but total knowledge of human experience. There’s a big difference. Remember, Kant talks about how there are two worlds: the world of things in themselves, the noumenal world as he called it—out there somewhere, out of our reach—and the world of appearances—that’s the world we live in—the crude map of that more real world out there that our mind and senses produce so that we can navigate this existence.

We know this! Like, we know at some level that everything we see around us is not true, fundamental reality but only what our mind is depicting of that reality. Yet just at a raw, everyday-existence level, how many of us make that distinction? I’m guessing very few because I don’t. I guess that’s anecdotal. We live our lives as though we are existing in some infallible, true depiction of the universe. It’s almost like a defense mechanism. This is why I said this is simultaneously the most and least controversial thing I’ve ever said on this show. People navigate their lives emphatically believing that they are making judgments in the real world. But it’s funny, they’re never more than a couple well-placed questions away from being talked down from that standpoint, from saying, “Aw, yeah, well, of course it isn’t reality.”

For example, if you believe that you are an agent of the Christian God’s will, navigating this planet, then you don’t believe that God created your eyes, ears, and mental faculties to necessarily be able to comprehend the full extent of his creation, the full extent of this majestic, glorious tabernacle that he’s created for you. No, he made you so that your eyes and ears work well enough, well enough to read the Bible and treat other people around you nicely. Now, on the other hand, if you’re a godless, hedonistic monster, well, I guess you also have a way that you look at the world. You probably believe that this hardware that you have to perceive the world is not necessarily designed to measure the fabric of reality itself. No, it’s designed to pick bananas well and live in these particular climatological conditions. And in that way—this is super interesting by the way—the hardware that you have that’s picking up this reality right now, is completely arbitrary on a cosmic level, right? This way that you perceive the world is really only a relevant skill set on this tiny little blue planet in between these two asteroid impacts, right?

Let me explain what I mean by this. Right now, you can perceive certain types of waves. You can see light waves, heat waves, etc. But you can’t see other ones like gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves, but they still exist, right? Just because you can’t see them with the naked eye doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. But how did we ever get to the place where we needed these special instruments to see some waves but not other waves. Well, again, if you’re a godless hatchet man of Satan, then you probably believe that life forms with genetic mutations that could perceive things like light and heatwaves—had a reproductive advantage in some former world, and that being able to see things like gamma rays or radio waves is not impossible; it just wasn’t useful to us before the advent of radio. Nobody was listening to Rush Limbaugh back then.

Let’s use a modern example. Let’s imagine some really bizarre, post-apocalyptic scenario where there are disparate pockets of WIFI signal still being transmitted and we have these devices—smartphones. We carry them around and they pick up that WIFI signal, and it connects us to a network. And we’re told where to find fresh water and food. Now, I got news for you. If that’s the world you’re living in, pretty much everybody listening to this podcast right now has a very serious problem on your hands, right? Like, you don’t see WIFI signals, do you? Like, when you walk into Starbucks and there’s free WIFI flying around, do you see WIFI signals? Because I don’t. By the way, as a broadcaster, I feel like I should say, if you do see those WIFI signals, please get that checked out by a medical professional or a specialist of some kind. But for most of us, you don’t see the WIFI signals. But they’re still there, all around you.

Now, because of that fact, your life in this post-apocalyptic world that we’ve just laid out would be very, very difficult, wouldn’t it? I mean, you’d be reduced to walking around aimlessly, just randomly holding your phone up in the air praying for bars to show up, like Mr. Magoo with a smartphone. You’d be hopeless. Now, here’s the crazy thing. There probably are several people alive right now in today’s world that can sense when WIFI signal is present either by seeing it or feeling it or hearing it. But either way, that skill that that person has right now that’s practically useless in today’s world becomes very relevant, very relevant in this bizarre, post-apocalyptic world that we’re talking about. I mean, you essentially become like a human dowsing rod. I mean, talk about a survival advantage. What, you can sense where the disparate WIFI connections are that lead you to fresh food and water? If we’re picking teams for the post-apocalyptic world, get that guy on my team. Get that guy a jersey.

My point is, this guy goes on to reproduce because he finds the fresh food and water. His kids inherit this gene. Their kids inherit the gene, and so on and so forth. This goes on enough generations, and it’s not crazy to think that at some future date the average human being might eventually be able to see WIFI signals, right? Now, my bigger point here is that the fact that you can’t see WIFI signals right now and you can see light rays is equally as arbitrary. It’s determined by whatever climatological conditions your ancestors were in. If survival was contingent on some other skill set in the past, well, you wouldn’t be here. And if we want to pretend like we would be here, then it’s not contrary to reason to say that the map that our mind creates of this reality—this experience of the world that we’re having—might be much different than it is right now.

See, what we are to Kant—this is very important for us to understand—is not a perceiver of the world of things in themselves, the actual world. No, we should think of ourselves as an experience machine, a human apparatus that walks around experiencing stuff. That mind that you have that draws you a picture of reality is not necessarily depicting the world as it truly is but just the information that’s useful to you. And that, as we just talked about, could be any number of things. It could be God giving you eyes that are just good enough to find the collection plate every Sunday or eyes that are just good enough to get by in this very subjective, circumstantial, narrow set of climate conditions.

But think of what that means. Think of the depth of that. If that is true, then human experience itself might be very subjective, circumstantial, and narrow. What you’re seeing right now could be nothing compared to what there actually is. There could be an infinity of parallel universes stacked on top of you right now that you have no idea are even there because it serves you no evolutionary purpose to see them. Doesn’t mean they’re not there. No, it just means God’s love is not limited to one universe, and why would he show you all these other universes if you’re being morally judged in this one? Might inhibit your ability to act correctly. Now, on the more secular end, there could be an infinite number of waves or particles or signals. An alien race could be trying to contact us constantly. They could be sending signals our way all the time. We don’t have an instrument that reads these signals. That doesn’t mean they’re not there. No, just that a hundred million years ago it didn’t give some mutated fish with a gimp leg a reproductive advantage to perceive them.

Now, here’s Kant’s point. Kant loves the sciences. He loves them. He loved Newton. He thought Newton was definitely headed in the right direction when it comes to arriving at knowledge about this seemingly mechanistic universe that we live in. But what Kant would say is, what science is really good at doing is arriving at knowledge about human experience, not things as they are in themselves, necessarily. Now, that doesn’t make any part of the scientific body of knowledge not useful in Kant’s eyes, but it does make a very good point about human knowledge itself: that what we know, what we call knowledge, what we’re organizing when we do these scientific experiments is only human experience; and that any inference we make about what the actual world is, to Kant, is useless. What this also does is it makes a very interesting point. Given how obviously flawed and narrow this human-experience machine that we have at our disposal is, it starts to beg another question: are there things out there—at least potentially—are there things out there that we just can’t know? I mean, after all, knowing anything is always contingent on this human apparatus that we have. So, are there things out there that ours is just not capable of knowing or perceiving regardless of how big of a microscope we make or how much philosophy we do? What Kant’s saying is, both metaphorically and literally speaking, are there signals out there that we just can’t pick up simply because of this human apparatus that we fell into completely by happenstance?

Well, Kant thinks the answer to that question is yes. He also thinks that dismissing things about what the world is based on this very narrow conception of reality that you have is just plain dumb. Now, that said, Kant believed in God. Kant was not just a believer in God. He believed in human souls. He believed that we actually have free will despite how that might seem contrary to the Newtonian universe that was emerging during his time. He believed all this stuff. Now, at first glance, this may seem weird or inconsistent from Kant. To be fair to you and everyone listening to this, it might seem weird or inconsistent at second or third glance as well. In fact, now that I think about it, eventually you just stop glancing all together. Like, you stop glancing at Kant, and you start glancing at everyone that came after him. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting conversations to be had.

Kant’s views on God—I feel bad for somebody just getting into philosophy that tries to hear Kant’s views on God, because they have to be really confusing. “Does he like God? Doesn’t he like God? Because the fact that…” Just keep in mind that before you start labeling Kant, this is the same unparalleled-genius Kant that we referenced back in our episode on Saint Anselm. This is the same Kant to finally debunk Anselm’s proof of God’s existence. Quick recap: if God exists, then it must be the greatest possible thing that can exist. God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Can we agree on that? Alright, now, I can imagine that thing in my head right now. I’m doing so as I’m talking to you. Now, you couple that with the fact that something actually existing has to be at least marginally greater than something not existing. Therefore, the true thing than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist. Therefore, God exists.

Now, if you’re rolling your eyes right now, keep in mind, this was a knockdown argument in philosophy before Kant. Keep in mind that Kant went out of his way during his lifetime to debunk this thing. In fact, Kant goes out of his way to debunk a lot of stuff people were thinking about God. Remember, Kant agrees with Hume. He agrees with Hume in his rebuttal to the cosmological argument, or the prime mover argument, that we are assuming that the universe needed to have a cause, unjustly. Now, Kant says, sure, when navigating this world as one of these human-experience machines, yeah, it intuitively makes sense that all this needed a cause. But we can’t say anything about things in themselves, which is what all this truly is. Cause and effect, space and time, these are ways that our minds make sense of the world. We know nothing about what things are like in themselves, just the human experience of these things. So, all these arguments out there that use these intuitive approaches to what has to be true because it just doesn’t make sense otherwise, these are nonsense to Kant.

Kant makes all these arguments against these arguments, and he still believes in God. He still believes in human souls. He still believes in free will. And if you asked him about it, he wouldn’t do what everyone else did. He wouldn’t do what Anselm or Descartes or Aquinas or any of these people that try to persuade you into thinking that God exists—give you an argument for how we know that a God exists. Deep breath. No, Kant takes it in a different direction. He thinks these things we’re talking about here—God, free will, souls—these are beyond our capacity to know. If you ask Kant, “Do you know if God exists?” or “Do you know if humans have free will?” he’d probably laugh. He’d say, of course not. Of course I don’t know whether God exists or any of these things. But these things are, by their very nature, outside of what is possible for us to know with this very narrow, limited apparatus that we have to navigate the world with.

Now, at this point you might be saying, “Okay, Kant. Okay, I was on board for a while. But it seems like you’re sidestepping the issue here. Seems like you’re contradicting yourself. It seems like you’re creating this alternative world that we can’t know anything about and then hiding behind it. And I’m fully on board with the idea of the alternative world. I’m fully on board with the idea that we shouldn’t be making assumptions about things in themselves or even speaking about things in themselves because to do so would be using human language—words and phrases that we use to describe our human experience—and even that is assuming way too much about the things in themselves. I’m on board with all that. But it seems like you, Mr. Kant—now it seems like you are assuming quite a bit about this real world. I don't know, like the fact that a God is a part of it at all.”

But there’s us walking that tightrope, that tightrope that I talked about at the beginning of the episode. We want to believe that if a God existed—we want to believe that—come on, we’d at least be able to know that it exists, right? We want to believe that’s a piece of knowledge that our mind could arrive at. But what if it’s not? We know at some level, isn’t it possible that it’s not? What if there’s some other creature out there looking at the world through a different apparatus than our human one? It’s perfectly obvious that a God exists or that humans have souls or any number of things. What if the existence of a God is as unknowable to us as the existence of some type of ray or particle or parallel universe that we just don’t have the ability to ever sense, no matter how big of a microscope we build? Really interesting. Good question.

When you look at the world like Kant does, it really makes the God of the Abrahamic religion start to seem pretty sadistic if you think about it—to make part of the criteria of whether you get into heaven or not a belief in whether it exists, but then to give you hardware that makes it impossible for you to know. To Kant, if you’re looking at the world like Kant did, it’s like the entire meaning of your life is just to believe something based on nothing. Like, why doesn’t God have a YouTube channel? That’s why I’m saying this. That’s really what’s behind this soliloquy. Why doesn’t God have a YouTube channel, people? It would be massive. Do you know how many subscribers God would have on YouTube? I can see it now. I could do his content for him: weekly addresses, no more ambiguity. There could be a special segment on every video. It’s called “Here’s what I meant when I said that thing, that thing that you’ve interpreted twelve different ways over the last couple thousand years.”

Anyway, back to Kant. Kant has a lot of slippery arguments about why he believes in all three of these things. And by the way, they change all throughout his life depending on which particular work you’re reading of his. And that’s understandable. We have to be understanding that we’re reading the intellectual development of a human being, a human being that thought about stuff all the time and is a genius himself. It makes sense that some things would change in his thinking. He talks about free will sometimes by saying it’s an undeniable fact that most people have feelings about what is right or wrong and they feel compelled to act in a certain way about them. But even by mentioning the ideas of right or wrong implies that we have some sort of choice in the matter. So, although it appears to our human-experience machine that we live in a fully mechanistic universe where we can predict everything that’s going to happen, including human behavior—although it looks as though we live in a hard, deterministic universe, in reality, even though we can’t see it or sense it, there must be some sort of moral realm out there that’s responsible for this. We must have what we think of as free will.

Now, again, these things change all throughout his career. There’s a whole period: reason is the basis for morality, reason is not an object of experience. The larger point is, we don’t know what this other world is like. All we know is human experience. And this is why he spends so much of his career spending so much time trying to understand how we experience the world. Because if we can understand this human-experience machine fully, then we can understand the limits of human knowledge itself. See, what we can glean from Kant here is a really interesting insight about the limits of that human knowledge. Kant would say that his belief in God is based on faith. No, he doesn’t know whether God exists. He thinks all these philosophers that are sitting here trying to prove to you that God exists are wasting their time, which is why he spends so much of his time trying to destroy their arguments. No, God and free will, these are beyond anything we can ever experience.

He makes a really interesting point that I must have glossed over the first time I read Kant, honestly. But he says—and I’m paraphrasing here. He talks about, be fair to me, because there are two different kinds of faith. He says that if you have faith about something that is potentially knowable, then that is superstition. That is detestable. That is laziness—intellectually unacceptable. For example, a group of tribal people that look at a volcano around their home and they don’t understand why sometimes it shoots lava out of it and other times it doesn’t. Now, if you have faith that it’s your act of throwing people into this volcano that’s affecting it, that it’s somehow appeasing the volcano gods that honor human sacrifice, and that’s what you blame for the frequency or infrequency of volcanic eruptions, well, that is superstitious, ridiculous faith to Kant. Reason being, because if you put in all the leg work, if you conducted these scientific experiments and you’ve studied the volcano and geology and eventually plate tectonics—if you did all that, you could conceivably arrive at knowledge about when and why the volcano erupts. That’s what makes it superstitious. Tide goes in; tide goes out, right?

But, Kant says, having faith about something that is unknowable to us can never be a justification for laziness. That’s not superstitious faith. There’s nothing more you can do on the matter. If knowing whether God exists or not is unknowable to a human mind, then assenting to a faith-based belief in it is less bad to Kant. And I think he would just want us to recognize that fact. This is the ultimate point. What exists is not just what we can measure and see existing in this narrow, crude, biased, completely random apparatus that we’ve duct taped around our heads in the year 2015.

And while many of you still listening to this episode—if you made it this far—although many of you wouldn’t disagree that knowledge is power, maybe knowledge is not the paradigm. Maybe it’s something else. Like, maybe it’s not just “Stockpile as much knowledge as I possibly can!” that’s the paradigm. Maybe knowledge is a bridge to something else that you want. Maybe the reason you’re listening to this podcast as opposed to some other one that’s less abrasive to what you already think you know is because maybe it's not the knowledge you want but something else, something else that usually comes along with knowledge. But I guess that’s the thing. I wouldn’t know, would I?

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