Speaker 1: You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained,
Speaker 1: Season six, episode twenty seven. All that we See. John
Speaker 1: Keel turned on his flashlight and pointed it into the
Speaker 1: entrance of the power plant, illuminating the cavernous space beyond. Then,
Speaker 1: with Connie and Keith following close behind, the three of
Speaker 1: them stepped into the gloom. As they moved further into
Speaker 1: the facility, only the sound of their footsteps softly padding
Speaker 1: over the ground could be heard as they carefully picked
Speaker 1: their way through the debris and puddles. A sudden crack
Speaker 1: had the three of them gasping in fright. Keel whipped
Speaker 1: the light round toward a darkened corner, just in time
Speaker 1: to see the back end of a rat scurrying away.
Speaker 1: For Connie and Keith, it was just too much to take.
Speaker 1: Deciding they'd gone far enough, they stayed back close to
Speaker 1: the exit as Keel ventured on alone deeper into the building.
Speaker 1: Having searched most of the ground floor, Keel found a
Speaker 1: step ladder and climbed up to the next level. He
Speaker 1: pulled himself on to the gangway above and continued making
Speaker 1: his way cautiously along it, careful not to make a
Speaker 1: sound while listening out for any sign of movement. Sadly
Speaker 1: for him, however, the place appeared completely deserted. Neither Connie
Speaker 1: or Keith had seen anything either by the time Keel
Speaker 1: made it back to them, and so together they made
Speaker 1: their way out of the building. But as they were
Speaker 1: approaching the door, Connie froze and her face crumpled in fear,
Speaker 1: hearing the skin crawling scream from outside the building. The
Speaker 1: rest of the group could only watch John in terrified
Speaker 1: anticipation as they waited for those inside to emerge from
Speaker 1: the building. A flash of torchlight from inside the entrance
Speaker 1: was quickly followed by the appearance of John, Keel, and
Speaker 1: Keith in the front doorway, holding Connie up between them.
Speaker 1: Tears were streaming down her face. She saw it again,
Speaker 1: cried Keel, as he and Keith helped Connie out of
Speaker 1: the building. Mary Higher rushed at once to her niece's
Speaker 1: aid and led her straight to the car, while Keel,
Speaker 1: with only one thing on his mind, dashed straight back
Speaker 1: into the power plant. Sadly for John, after scouring the
Speaker 1: place for a second time, he was again left disappointed
Speaker 1: to find nothing of interest inside. When he exited the building.
Speaker 1: A few minutes later, however, he was surprised to find
Speaker 1: the others huddled together by a fence toward the back
Speaker 1: of the sight. Mary Hire explained excitedly that they'd just
Speaker 1: heard something heavy and metallic crashing to the ground when
Speaker 1: some one spotted a silhouetted figure running away from the
Speaker 1: back of the building. They thought it might have been
Speaker 1: Keel in trouble, only he'd been inside the whole time
Speaker 1: and had heard nothing. My ear, cried Mary Mallet, suddenly
Speaker 1: shattering the silence. I think it's bleeding. Keel shone the
Speaker 1: torch at her head, and sure enough, there was blood
Speaker 1: seeping out of her ear. With no idea what an
Speaker 1: earth could have caused such a thing, and out of
Speaker 1: concern for the young woman, Keel suggested they call it
Speaker 1: a night, and so one by one they headed back
Speaker 1: to their vehicles and made their way back home. As
Speaker 1: Keel followed the others toward the highway, however, he couldn't
Speaker 1: stop thinking about what had just occurred. Was Mary's bleeding
Speaker 1: ear the result of some kind of atmospheric pressure change
Speaker 1: directed at them by the apparent entity. A clue perhaps
Speaker 1: that there was far more to this than the misidentification
Speaker 1: of a mere bird. Frustrated and dissatisfied at having missed
Speaker 1: the major drama of the night, key Or knew he
Speaker 1: couldn't give up yet, and so he promptly turned his
Speaker 1: car around and headed back alone into the thick of
Speaker 1: the TNT area. It was long past midnight, with only
Speaker 1: the faintest crescent moon visible in the sky. As he
Speaker 1: drove through the narrow dirt roads, his eyes peeled for
Speaker 1: any sign of strange lights or movement from above. Drawling
Speaker 1: a small stretch of road deep into the area, Keel
Speaker 1: was suddenly overcome by an intense surge of fear, But
Speaker 1: as he continued driving forward, the feeling quickly abated, almost
Speaker 1: as if the fear had been triggered by his proximity
Speaker 1: to something. John pulled the car over to the side
Speaker 1: of the road, and after seeing nothing untoward, he decided
Speaker 1: to try an experiment. Keel turned the car around and
Speaker 1: headed back toward the spot where the fear had first
Speaker 1: risen up. Sure enough, at the moment he passed it again,
Speaker 1: the fear came shooting back, disappearing again swiftly as soon
Speaker 1: as he went beyond it. He pulled the car over again,
Speaker 1: and this time I tried it on foot. Keiel's breath
Speaker 1: swirled thickened fast in the head lamps as he stepped
Speaker 1: slowly toward the spot ahead. As he later recounted in
Speaker 1: his two thousand and two books The Mothman Prophecies. Now
Speaker 1: he was on foot, Keel was apparently able to feel
Speaker 1: the fear steadily building as he drew closer to whatever
Speaker 1: was causing it, until finally the sensation completely engulfed him.
Speaker 1: Keel then took a few steps back, and once again
Speaker 1: the feeling quickly subsided. He looked out for a moment
Speaker 1: into the darkness of the black mass of trees and
Speaker 1: distant hills that surrounded him, just about visible in the moonlight.
Speaker 1: What on earth could this be, he thought to himself.
Speaker 1: Was it an accidental confluence of ultrasonic waves, perhaps affecting
Speaker 1: his nervous system, or could it be something more deliberate
Speaker 1: that someone or something near by was targeting him? Though
Speaker 1: may be far fetched, such a notion, he thought, might
Speaker 1: also account for Mary Mallet's bleeding ear earlier in the night.
Speaker 1: Keel then stared out at the empty stretch of road
Speaker 1: ahead of him, with the sudden undeniable, feeling that he
Speaker 1: was no longer alone, Turning quickly on his heels, he
Speaker 1: promptly made his way back to the car. The following morning,
Speaker 1: John returned to the same spot, but by then whatever
Speaker 1: had been influencing his senses appeared to have long gone,
Speaker 1: and there was no sign of the infamous moth man either.
Speaker 1: Satisfied he'd found all that he could, he then headed
Speaker 1: back to the mc daniel's household in Point Pleasant and
Speaker 1: made his goodbyes to Linda Scarborough and her family before
Speaker 1: making his way to Mary Hire's office. Having been impressed
Speaker 1: by her open mindedness to the events, Keel asked her
Speaker 1: that she keep him updated on any other strange incidences
Speaker 1: that might occur, and with that he said his goodbyes
Speaker 1: to her too, and returned home to New York. As
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six drew to a close, the bizarre events
Speaker 1: that had so enthralled and disturbed the inhabitants of Point
Speaker 1: Pleasant only weeks before were all but forgotten about as
Speaker 1: families across the country settled in together to celebrate Christmas.
Speaker 1: For Mary Hire and John Keel, who later became good friends,
Speaker 1: those first peculiar sightings in November nineteen sixty six proved
Speaker 1: to be just the beginning in a series of increasingly
Speaker 1: bizarre and strange events said to have taken place across
Speaker 1: the region over the next year. As Keel outlines in
Speaker 1: his own book on the subject, the Mothman Prophecies. As
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, an extraordinary array of apparent UFO sightings, animal mutilations,
Speaker 1: and visits from shadowy men in black seemed to emerge
Speaker 1: in the wake of those first mothman sightings. Mary Higher
Speaker 1: continued to write to Keel throughout that period to fill
Speaker 1: him in on any unusual events that she came across.
Speaker 1: As time went on, these unusual events seemed to occur
Speaker 1: with increasing frequency, all of which left the both of
Speaker 1: them with the unnerving feeling that it was all leading
Speaker 1: to something, and that something terrible was going to happen.
Speaker 1: And then, just over a year since the first apparent
Speaker 1: mothman sighting, it did. In the evening of December fifteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio
Speaker 1: River joining the towns of Point Pleasant and Gallipolis, was
Speaker 1: loaded with Christmas shoppers and motorists heading home from work
Speaker 1: when the structure suddenly buckled under the weight and collapsed.
Speaker 1: In total, forty six people, mostly from Point Pleasant and
Speaker 1: the surrounding area, lost their lives In the aftermath of
Speaker 1: the tragedy. Keel couldn't help but wonder if, perhaps everything,
Speaker 1: from the apparent UFOs and even the so called mothman themselves,
Speaker 1: had simply been trying to warn us about it. What then,
Speaker 1: are we to make of the whole Mothman mystery. In
Speaker 1: the absence of any irrefutable empirical evidence, as is often
Speaker 1: the case with tales of UFOs and the apparent sighting
Speaker 1: of strange, improbable creatures, we are left with only anecdotal
Speaker 1: eyewitness accounts with which to discern truth from falsehoods. Most
Speaker 1: would not unreasonably conclude that any reports of winged humanoid
Speaker 1: creatures or the appearance of seemingly unearthly mechanical crafts in
Speaker 1: the sky, due to the sheer unlikeliness of it, were
Speaker 1: due to the witnesses being at best mistaken in their interpretations,
Speaker 1: or at worst they were deliberately lying about them. What
Speaker 1: often intrigues me about these kinds of stories, perhaps more
Speaker 1: than whether or not the phenomena is what some claim
Speaker 1: it to be, is the way in which the number
Speaker 1: of reported sightings of something unusual, be it a supposed
Speaker 1: alien craft or indeed the Mothman, appear to escalate the
Speaker 1: more popular the story. Once something has captured the imagination,
Speaker 1: it seems more people seem to then find it in
Speaker 1: the things they are looking at, or rather, in some cases,
Speaker 1: whether we are able to see something or not is
Speaker 1: simply only a matter of perception. Perceptual narrowing is the
Speaker 1: way in which our brains will ignore certain information in
Speaker 1: our environment in order to better focus on other types
Speaker 1: of information, much like the invisible guerrilla experiment, as discussed
Speaker 1: earlier in the episode. Writing in Scientific American in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: neurologists Susanna Martinez Conde explored a number of studies that
Speaker 1: show how human infants younger than six months can see
Speaker 1: things that adults cannot. One study conducted in two thousand
Speaker 1: and two revealed that babies under six months old were
Speaker 1: actually better at telling different monkey he faces apart than
Speaker 1: adults were. Another study conducted by a team of psychologists
Speaker 1: led by Jile Yang of Chow University in Japan, shows
Speaker 1: that up until the age of five months, human infants
Speaker 1: have a much broader sensitivity to the effect of light
Speaker 1: on an object, being able to detect subtle variations in
Speaker 1: images and color that are invisible to adults. In other words,
Speaker 1: when we age, as our sense awareness narrows, we essentially
Speaker 1: become blind to other realities. The beneficial side of this
Speaker 1: narrowing of perception is that it is likely a useful
Speaker 1: evolutionary tool that helps us to better survive our environments.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't go as far as to say it would
Speaker 1: account for our inability to see alien technology, yet if
Speaker 1: it did, such a notion would be entirely consistent with
Speaker 1: the basic fact of our everyday reality that, due to
Speaker 1: the limitations of our singular perspective, much of the world
Speaker 1: is continually hidden from us. Or, as neurologist Susanna Martinez
Speaker 1: Conde so eloquently put it, there may well be such
Speaker 1: a place as reality out there, but it's not a
Speaker 1: place that any of us have ever been. The emergence
Speaker 1: of color is a perfect case in point. That babies
Speaker 1: are able to distinguish shades of color that we don't
Speaker 1: see as adults is because we perceive an object not
Speaker 1: as it is, but as our brains interpret it. For us,
Speaker 1: more profoundly. This has nothing to do with color at all.
Speaker 1: The color of an object does not exist in and
Speaker 1: of itself. The material that makes up a green rubber ball,
Speaker 1: for example, isn't green unless something observes it to be. So.
Speaker 1: When light hits the ball, depending on its molecular structure,
Speaker 1: certain wavelengths will be absorbed, while others will be reflected
Speaker 1: through the mechanics of the eye. It is this reflected light,
Speaker 1: and not the physical object, that we then discern as
Speaker 1: a color. Moreover, the color of the ball as it
Speaker 1: appears to us at any given time is completely dependent
Speaker 1: on how much light it is exposed to and how
Speaker 1: much our brains compensate for the difference. And since there
Speaker 1: is no set, universal measure of what is the right
Speaker 1: amount of light to shine onto a ball in order
Speaker 1: to discern its color, there is no one universal set
Speaker 1: color of anything. The twenty fifteen viral phenomenon of the dress,
Speaker 1: in which people seem unable to agree on whether a
Speaker 1: stripy dress in a photograph was black and blue or
Speaker 1: in fact gold and white, is a perfect example of
Speaker 1: this conundrum. So what then, of the ball itself? Philosopher
Speaker 1: Emmanuel Kant made the distinction between phenomena as being something
Speaker 1: as it is described and comprehended by our senses, and
Speaker 1: nomina as being the object as it exists independently of
Speaker 1: our senses. If a ball, for example, were to hit
Speaker 1: us on the head, we would reasonably say that it
Speaker 1: was something that we could physically interact with. But defining
Speaker 1: what that ball is exactly it's a little more complicated,
Speaker 1: As anti realist philosopher Hillary Lawson pointed out while debating
Speaker 1: the Strangeness of Things twenty seventeen for the Institute of
Speaker 1: Art and Ideas Phenomena. In our case, the idea of
Speaker 1: a ball is merely a useful metaphor its true real substance,
Speaker 1: its nominal property is not something we've ever been able
Speaker 1: to identify. Democritus, living in the fifth century BC, might
Speaker 1: say that the ball was fundamentally made of atoms. Since then, however,
Speaker 1: we've discovered that atoms are only the tip of an
Speaker 1: even more curious word of previously unknown subatomic particles and
Speaker 1: quantum level forces, with nothing to suggest that we have
Speaker 1: uncovered the final base property that defines all nomina. Probing
Speaker 1: a little further, we find ourselves confronted with an even
Speaker 1: more complicated truth about reality. We already know of species
Speaker 1: on Earth that physically see and interpret the world in
Speaker 1: different ways from ourselves. What's to say that there isn't
Speaker 1: a sentient species somewhere else in the universe that understands
Speaker 1: and exists only in electro magnetic waves, for example, or
Speaker 1: impressions of ultra violet light, or in a manner that
Speaker 1: we have yet to even conceive. And if we and
Speaker 1: this other species apprehend the moon, for example, in different ways,
Speaker 1: what exactly is it that we are observing when we
Speaker 1: look at the moon. Which is not to say that
Speaker 1: there isn't something there with properties that appear to us
Speaker 1: in the form of the moon, But it would certainly
Speaker 1: be problematic to claim that our version, the way we
Speaker 1: see the moon as a solid, bone colored and crater
Speaker 1: marked object in the sky, was the absolute, objectively correct
Speaker 1: version of how the moon looks. Imagine for a moment
Speaker 1: a being whose perception was similar to that of Alan
Speaker 1: Moore's Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen series of graphic novels,
Speaker 1: who was capable of observing subatomic particles with the naked eye.
Speaker 1: For them, the world would appear to be a very
Speaker 1: different place. Indeed, perhaps this is all fine. We cannot
Speaker 1: fault ourselves for the manner in which we perceive reality
Speaker 1: due to the way we are physically constructed. What's more,
Speaker 1: our brains and bodies do a pretty good job of
Speaker 1: keeping us alive and functioning in our broadly shared understanding
Speaker 1: of what our reality is. If we were to walk
Speaker 1: into oncoming traffic or be in need of open heart surgery,
Speaker 1: it serves as no good if we aren't able to
Speaker 1: consistently identify the object of a car or a heart.
Speaker 1: Both clearly share a solidity and existence that would have
Speaker 1: fatal consequences if ignored. I often think, what would it
Speaker 1: even matter if, like Neo from the Matrix, we discovered
Speaker 1: we were actually living in an entirely different reality to
Speaker 1: what we thought, like a computer simulation for example. After all, little,
Speaker 1: if any, of our physical experience of life would change
Speaker 1: as a consequence. But there is one crucial problem. If
Speaker 1: this is the only perspective that we know, it tends
Speaker 1: to follow that it's the only perspective we care about.
Speaker 1: And just as our biology will limit our perspective and
Speaker 1: hide the true nature of reality, so too does our
Speaker 1: subjective understanding of things. Distort in more subtle ways the
Speaker 1: way in which we see the world around us. Those
Speaker 1: apocryphal tales of European explorers and invisible galleons, as mentioned
Speaker 1: at the top of this episode, are meant to reflect
Speaker 1: the native people's inability to see the ships, But there
Speaker 1: is something else invisible in the stories the native people themselves.
Speaker 1: These tales are told from the perspective of the supposedly
Speaker 1: valiant explorers discovering and mapping uncharted territory that is actually
Speaker 1: already inhabited by other people. It isn't undiscovered or unmapped
Speaker 1: at all. The apparent failure to see the ships is
Speaker 1: a partial reflection on the perceived intellectual inferiority of the
Speaker 1: local people that have quote unquote been discovered. We'll never
Speaker 1: know for sure what Joseph Banks, for example, really thought
Speaker 1: about the people living in what is now known as
Speaker 1: Botany Bay, but we can be sure of what little
Speaker 1: importance was granted to their culture and perspective by the
Speaker 1: people who would subsequently colonize the land they lived on.
Speaker 1: It is unsettling to think of how much we are
Speaker 1: losing when we fail to accommodate other perspectives. I often
Speaker 1: wonder about how so many of our interactions are susceptible
Speaker 1: to all two common prejudices toward one another based on
Speaker 1: our individual bias of sexuality, race, gender, class, disability, etc.
Speaker 1: That have no basis an objective fact, is our sense
Speaker 1: of masculinity and femininity, for example, a genuine biological manifestation,
Speaker 1: or purely a constrictive social construction that blinds us to
Speaker 1: a more honest and thorough understanding of what a human
Speaker 1: being can be. You can see a similar idea explored
Speaker 1: in Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror TV series. In the episode
Speaker 1: Men Against Fire, a super soldier named Stripe played by
Speaker 1: Malachi Kirby fights to eliminate a race of feral humanoid
Speaker 1: creatures known as roaches that appear to be terrorizing the
Speaker 1: human race. Stripe, like the rest of his team, has
Speaker 1: been fitted with a neural implant to enhance his combat capabilities. However,
Speaker 1: after one particularly tough mission, Stripes implant is corrupted, revealing
Speaker 1: to him the truth about the enemy roaches. As the
Speaker 1: implant malfunctions, Stripe no longer sees his victims as monstrous
Speaker 1: mutants that scream out an indecipherable language to one another. Instead,
Speaker 1: he sees them as they really are, ordinary human beings.
Speaker 1: The implant had been fooling him all along, so he
Speaker 1: could exterminate them without questioning why. For a more terrifying
Speaker 1: real world example, consider the National Socialist German Workers parties
Speaker 1: virulent anti Semitic and racist campaign to affiliate the Jewish
Speaker 1: and traveler communities with rats and cockroaches. This tactic was
Speaker 1: also applied during the Rwandan Civil War in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: directed toward those individuals who identify ethnically as Tutsi. It
Speaker 1: wasn't based on any objective truth or empirical evidence. It
Speaker 1: was to construct a reality whereby killing them would be
Speaker 1: less complicated if people considered them to be less than human,
Speaker 1: and it was horrifically effective. This is a profound reflection
Speaker 1: of the practical reality in which we live. It is
Speaker 1: a place where a phrase as seemingly innocuous as to
Speaker 1: run like a girl can alter entire perceptions of expectation,
Speaker 1: a place where people can be driven to suicide because
Speaker 1: their community has arbitrarily pathologized their sexuality. As inconvenient as
Speaker 1: it can sometimes be, we can argue that perceptual narrowing
Speaker 1: is a useful survival tool, but might our failure to
Speaker 1: escape our perceptual limitations ultimately prove our undoing. According to
Speaker 1: philosophers such as Timothy Morton and other advocates of the
Speaker 1: theory that we are presently living in an epoch known
Speaker 1: as the Anthroposcene, our very survival may hinge on learning
Speaker 1: to do away with our human centric perspectives, especially ones
Speaker 1: that have deluded us into thinking that we are somehow
Speaker 1: above and separate from nature. The term anthropscene refers to
Speaker 1: a proposed era that dates back from present day to
Speaker 1: roughly twelve thousand, five hundred years ago, to the period
Speaker 1: when Homer Sapiens transitioned from hunter gatherers to agrarian societies.
Speaker 1: Such a time, it is believed, marks the beginning of
Speaker 1: the era when human societies began to have an inextricable
Speaker 1: impact on the planet, an impact that has left it
Speaker 1: and everything on it in a state of peril. Morton
Speaker 1: and similar thinkers are looking for a way to avert
Speaker 1: the impending ecological crisis of our time, chiefly but not
Speaker 1: limited to climate change, by encouraging us to find a
Speaker 1: better logic of coexistence with the natural world. One of
Speaker 1: Morton's central tenets, has laid out in his twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: book Dark Ecology for a logic of future coexistence, is
Speaker 1: the idea that all things, from inanimate rock to jungle vines,
Speaker 1: to bees to ourselves, have an equally justifiable existence and
Speaker 1: place in the universe, that their perspectives, as it were,
Speaker 1: are all equally valid, and that too often we see
Speaker 1: them merely as either the decoration of our space or
Speaker 1: as things to be exploited. Fair Enough, if you aren't
Speaker 1: quite ready to accommodate the perspective of a rock, perhaps, however,
Speaker 1: you might consider how we are learning, with increasing horror
Speaker 1: explored to amusing but devastating effect by Simon Amstell's twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen mockumentary Carnage, that those animals we've been rearing on
Speaker 1: mass and regularly in squalid conditions for the sole purpose
Speaker 1: of murdering them for their meat may not be the dumb, unthinking,
Speaker 1: edible meat machine genes we once assumed, or in some
Speaker 1: cases have even been taught to think they are. Instead,
Speaker 1: these living creatures existing in the exact same universe as
Speaker 1: ourselves are intelligent, sentient beings capable of cultivating relationships, who
Speaker 1: have memory and family bonds, and who also feel pain
Speaker 1: and mourn for their lost loved wants, just like we do.
Speaker 1: It is sometimes put forward that to view other animals
Speaker 1: in this manner is to anthropomorphize them, which is to
Speaker 1: say that we shouldn't apply human reasoning to their experiences
Speaker 1: because they are not human yet. The problem with this
Speaker 1: point is that, once again, it presupposes that only if
Speaker 1: something has human qualities does its existence or manner in
Speaker 1: which it experiences the world become valid. In a twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen study analyzing the social skills of ninety different types
Speaker 1: of cetaceans, whales, dolphins, and poor poises, evolutionary biologist Suzanne
Speaker 1: Schultz of the University of Manchester and her team discovered
Speaker 1: the not only do many of the species use tools
Speaker 1: with a complexity not previously realized, but they can also
Speaker 1: strategize in ways not previously imagined. They discovered that some
Speaker 1: dolphins have been observed assisting humans to fish, helping to
Speaker 1: round up the fish in nets, completely unprompted on the
Speaker 1: understanding that by doing so they will be given fish
Speaker 1: in return. It was also discovered that the most advanced
Speaker 1: species of cetaceans passed down their understanding of techniques for
Speaker 1: hunting and tool use to successive generations. They have also
Speaker 1: been observed conversing in more sophisticated ways than once thought,
Speaker 1: with regional dialects and names for individuals. Perhaps they even
Speaker 1: have a name for us. There is no reason to think,
Speaker 1: of course, that after alerting somebody to a different perspective
Speaker 1: they will care about it, And it's important to say
Speaker 1: that no one person has any authority to claim that
Speaker 1: one perspective over another is cosmically right or wrong. How
Speaker 1: blinkered it would be too to assume that someone seeming
Speaker 1: inability to accommodate other perspectives was merely an unconscious bias.
Speaker 1: We might make the deliberate decision that it's more beneficial
Speaker 1: for us to ignore other perspectives or to remain committed
Speaker 1: to our own interpretation of phenomena. Furthermore, to Bemoan, the
Speaker 1: human instinct of assuming a superior status above nature and
Speaker 1: other animals is to ignore the idea that this very
Speaker 1: behavior is in itself a natural process of the natural world.
Speaker 1: Some people, as much as it pains me to think
Speaker 1: about it, might enjoy killing animals, and it isn't for
Speaker 1: me to say they are wrong to do so. Certainly
Speaker 1: it would be naive to think that alerting a friend
Speaker 1: to the fact that a pig may be more intelligent
Speaker 1: than they might have thought would be enough to prevent
Speaker 1: them from eating one in the future. And crucially, there
Speaker 1: is nothing odd or inhuman or cosmically wrong in doing this.
Speaker 1: With all this being said, I think the question ultimately
Speaker 1: comes back to this, should or shouldn't we all try
Speaker 1: to see the world in the same way It may
Speaker 1: seem desirable to align our perspectives into one common point
Speaker 1: of view, that striving to see the world as one
Speaker 1: is the ultimate human goal, But one thing we can
Speaker 1: almost guarantee is that it would be a world in
Speaker 1: which much would remain hidden to us. The tension and
Speaker 1: conflict of our differing perspectives for better or worse, is
Speaker 1: the human experience, as inconvenient as it may seem, the
Speaker 1: survival of our species, the manner in which we and
Speaker 1: our societies evolve, we hope ultimately into something better. Whatever
Speaker 1: that means may very well depend on the fact that
Speaker 1: we don't all see the world in the same way,
Speaker 1: that we don't all converge into one homogeneous understanding of
Speaker 1: how things should and shouldn't be. That isn't to say
Speaker 1: that we can't find ways to align our points of
Speaker 1: view more close to work at improving our collective experience
Speaker 1: of life. But it's worth remembering that much of our
Speaker 1: shared understanding is realized not through objectivity, but through the
Speaker 1: exchange of our uniquely individual perspectives. It is far more
Speaker 1: useful then, even at the risk of allowing for viewpoints
Speaker 1: we don't agree with, for us not to focus on
Speaker 1: eradicating different truths, but that we learn to embrace our
Speaker 1: multifaceted perspectives as an inherent trait of our species, that
Speaker 1: we learn never to turn from the strange and unfamiliar.
Speaker 1: We cannot be expected to know, understand, and see everything instantaneously,
Speaker 1: but perhaps it is only through recognizing the potential validity
Speaker 1: of different perspectives that we are able to fully see
Speaker 1: what would otherwise remain hidden to us. In this process
Speaker 1: of becoming more aware and comfortable with the existence of
Speaker 1: different points of view, we might begin to better understand
Speaker 1: our world and each other. Two. If you enjoy Unexplained
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