Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Josh and I are going on tour again
Speaker 1: to basically wrap up twenty twenty three on the road
Speaker 1: in Orlando, Florida first, then Nashville, Tennessee, and then wrapping
Speaker 1: it up here in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can listen to the next Tuesday's episode
Speaker 2: for details on when we'll be there and where to
Speaker 2: get tickets and all that stuff. But we just wanted
Speaker 2: to give you guys a heads up, And if you
Speaker 2: don't feel like listening to Tuesday's episode, you can still
Speaker 2: get all of your info at linktree, slash, sysk, or
Speaker 2: our website Stuff youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
Speaker 2: there's Charles w. Tchuck Bryant, and here too is Jerry Roland.
Speaker 2: If Jerry Roland exists and this is Stuff.
Speaker 3: You Should Know?
Speaker 1: Can I make a just a quick thank you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: make a thank you? I met Baker, Thank you?
Speaker 2: Sorry, Sure, build a thank you.
Speaker 1: I you know, I mentioned in that one episode that
Speaker 1: I was going to put pictures of my new podcast
Speaker 1: studio up, and then that episode came out thank you.
Speaker 1: And I put it up and everyone was just so
Speaker 1: nice and sweet, and I just want to say thanks.
Speaker 1: And also I want to say sorry to you because
Speaker 1: that post now just supplanted a picture of you and
Speaker 1: I as my most popular ever post on Instagram.
Speaker 2: Really, I'm sick of that post.
Speaker 3: It just passed it today.
Speaker 1: That picture when we did our secret mission out to
Speaker 1: the desert in January was my previous most popular post ever.
Speaker 2: Okay, but you should have probably taken down this new
Speaker 2: post just before it topped it. I'm not sure why
Speaker 2: you didn't.
Speaker 3: No, I had a counter. I was like, here it comes,
Speaker 3: here it.
Speaker 2: Comes, and then you had like a confetti and the
Speaker 2: little noise maker.
Speaker 3: That's right, and then the picture of us just dissolved.
Speaker 2: No, we just aged and turned into mummies in the picture.
Speaker 3: That's right, because it's not reality.
Speaker 2: Right, it isn't reality. That. That's a great segue, Chuck,
Speaker 2: because I have a question to kick this one off. Sure, Chuck,
Speaker 2: are you hallucinating right now?
Speaker 3: Unfortunately no, but philosophers might say that. I am.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not just philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists, biologists, maybe evolutionary biologists
Speaker 2: in particular, especially ones that are hipped to this whole thing,
Speaker 2: would say, yeah, you're hallucinating right now, and so are you, Josh,
Speaker 2: and so are you Jerry. If you do exist, you're
Speaker 2: hallucinating every single thing you're looking at, smelling, hearing, touching.
Speaker 2: That none of this is real. And we're talking today
Speaker 2: about whether reality is real or not, and there's a
Speaker 2: very deep, like mind blowing aspect to it. And I
Speaker 2: feel like that's where a lot of people leave. But
Speaker 2: it's just like, in this the craziest stuff these people
Speaker 2: are talking about, but there's more to it than that.
Speaker 2: And like, I've realized that in investigating the nature of reality,
Speaker 2: we end up learning more about ourselves than we do
Speaker 2: about reality. And I just find that endlessly fascinating.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Jurassic Park. I know what you mean because
Speaker 1: this article. And by the way, big shout out to
Speaker 1: Dave Ruse, because you threw him this topic as if
Speaker 1: it was just like, hey, do one on elephants, and
Speaker 1: it was tough, and Dave even had to take a
Speaker 1: rare second stab at it, because it's just really hard
Speaker 1: to nail something like this down, this sort of it's
Speaker 1: hard to not delve into philosophical navel gazing with stuff
Speaker 1: like this. And we've covered some philosophy stuff here and there. Sure,
Speaker 1: and it's always kind of fun. But you know, my
Speaker 1: deal with philosophy was I did pretty I took one
Speaker 1: class in college and did pretty well, and I think
Speaker 1: it made an aar b. But the same thing happened
Speaker 1: in that class, as it happens every time we tackle it,
Speaker 1: is I'm lost and then annoyed, and then eventually he
Speaker 1: kind of come around and think it's cool and understand
Speaker 1: it a little bit.
Speaker 2: So that's where you are with this.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it's like the fifth or sixth time I
Speaker 1: went through it, I was like, all right, this is
Speaker 1: actually kind of cool, whereas before I was like.
Speaker 3: I hate all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Of course everything is that apple is real and see it,
Speaker 1: I can taste it.
Speaker 3: But now I kind of get it.
Speaker 2: Now you know that you're dead wrong?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Maybe?
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I want to point out Dave didn't have
Speaker 2: to do a second attempt of this. We didn't ask
Speaker 2: him to, but we had taken so long to get
Speaker 2: her getting around to doing it. He's like, here I
Speaker 2: revised this. Maybe you can say is that how went down? Yeah?
Speaker 2: For sure?
Speaker 3: Yeah, gotcha.
Speaker 2: We definitely didn't say like I know. I was just like, okay,
Speaker 2: this is you know, thanks for doing this, Dave, and
Speaker 2: we'll do it when we can.
Speaker 3: And he's like, I've noticed you haven't red that.
Speaker 2: Very much, very much, So thank you to Dave for sure.
Speaker 2: So people have been thinking about whether what we think
Speaker 2: and see and feel is real for a really long time.
Speaker 2: It's probably one of the first things we ever thought
Speaker 2: of that was you know, kind of deep, since we
Speaker 2: started eating mushrooms and developed the consciousness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And as we go through this, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it makes sense that as we go through it, it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of been a timeline of different philosophers and
Speaker 1: as we learned more about science, things were tweaked and
Speaker 1: changed all the way up and then eventually we end
Speaker 1: up with some modern day like Ted Talkers or one
Speaker 1: in particular. So it kind of makes sense that things
Speaker 1: would morph and change philosophically over time as we talk
Speaker 1: about things like ohay, is time even real?
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you really look at it, and especially
Speaker 2: if you're paying attention later on, as we get more
Speaker 2: into modern interpretations, they very striking resemblance to some of
Speaker 2: the first cracks at explaining whether reality is real to us.
Speaker 2: And one of the first people that we know of
Speaker 2: who really tried to tackle this was Plato, and he
Speaker 2: came up with a very famous allegory of the cave
Speaker 2: where people are he calls them prisoners. They're situated in
Speaker 2: a cave, they're chained up, they're not able to turn around,
Speaker 2: so all they can do is face the back wall
Speaker 2: of the cave. Behind them is a fire, and then
Speaker 2: on the other side of the fire. No, I already
Speaker 2: messed it up, sorry, Plato. Behind them is a fire,
Speaker 2: and then between them and the fire are people who
Speaker 2: can move around their puppeteers. They can cast shadows from
Speaker 2: the campfire onto the wall, and all the prisoners have
Speaker 2: ever experienced are the shadows on the wall. So to them,
Speaker 2: that's real. But in reality, what's actually real are the
Speaker 2: puppets that the people are showing behind them that they
Speaker 2: can't see. So what they think is real is actually
Speaker 2: just a similacrum like kind of a distilled version of
Speaker 2: the actual reality. And that was Plato's take on the
Speaker 2: whole thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like, here's a bunny, this is Richard Nixon. H
Speaker 3: what else?
Speaker 2: That? But that? But yeah, that that what we think
Speaker 2: of as Richard Nixon is a distilled form of what
Speaker 2: actually is Richard Nixon.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And the key to doing Richard Nixon is and
Speaker 3: the knuckles.
Speaker 2: I used to do his knuckles a lot.
Speaker 3: No, no, talking about shadow puppets.
Speaker 2: The trick is a man's knuckle.
Speaker 1: I can oh, man, I can actually do a few
Speaker 1: shadow puppets pretty well.
Speaker 2: Oh which ones? Which ones?
Speaker 3: I can do.
Speaker 1: A I just well, one's kind of a rabbity gargoyle.
Speaker 1: And then I can do like an alligator, and I
Speaker 1: can do a some some other long snouted animal with
Speaker 1: an ear, I mean dog.
Speaker 3: Sure, I can do a few things.
Speaker 2: That's really great, man.
Speaker 3: I used to mucky around with it.
Speaker 1: And then a few you're ago, when Ruby was little,
Speaker 1: there was a light casting and I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: check this out, and her mind was blown.
Speaker 3: I was like, still got it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's where you like Plato would have loved you, kid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And she was like who.
Speaker 1: So anyway, Plato basically is saying that the material world
Speaker 1: around us and how we perceive it is not a
Speaker 1: reliable thing. And what he believed in as the truth
Speaker 1: is something he called forms or maybe ideas. But we're
Speaker 1: going to use the word form. As we move forward
Speaker 1: into Aristotle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as Dave puts it, that our perceived reality, according
Speaker 2: to Plato, is just the shadow of an objective higher
Speaker 2: truth makes sense, Yes, But what he's saying is what
Speaker 2: we said, what you're like, what's in front of you,
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon, your apple? It's not actually real. It's just
Speaker 2: a version of that. And along came Aristotle, who was
Speaker 2: a contemporary of Plato. I think he learned directly from Plato,
Speaker 2: if I'm not mistaken, But in this case he disagreed
Speaker 2: with Plato. He's said, Plato kind of on the right track.
Speaker 2: But these things are not totally separate. And the way
Speaker 2: that a shadow is not truly related to the object
Speaker 2: that's casting the shadow, it's something detached from it. These
Speaker 2: things are attached, like, yes, there's an actual objective, real form,
Speaker 2: but the thing that we perceive is somehow tied to it,
Speaker 2: and it's tied to it through what Aristotle called forms.
Speaker 2: So forms were in a human, our soul, whereas the
Speaker 2: organic body is the matter matter in forms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, eventually science would come to the
Speaker 1: picture slowly. So if we go, you know a few
Speaker 1: centuries ahead in time, the nature of reality and truth
Speaker 1: as people knew it started to change once science started
Speaker 1: saying you're kind of wrong about a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: And a good example Dave gives here is, you know,
Speaker 1: we thought the Earth was the center of the universe
Speaker 1: for a long time. Astronomy comes along and math comes
Speaker 1: along and says, no, that's actually not true. So now
Speaker 1: there's actually a basis for saying, hey, what you think
Speaker 1: is true and what you think is reality might not
Speaker 1: actually be the case. And we're starting to prove that
Speaker 1: a little bit. And Galileo steps in and this is
Speaker 1: in the I guess the seventeenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Speaker 1: And he comes along basically and says, and this is
Speaker 1: an actual quote, I think that tastes, odors, colors, and
Speaker 1: so on are no more than mere names so far
Speaker 1: as the object in which we place them as concerned
Speaker 1: that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence, if we
Speaker 1: live in creatures were removed, all these qualities would be
Speaker 1: wiped away and annihilated. Meaning in other words, and this
Speaker 1: is something we're going to kind of repeat here and there.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if a tree falls in the forest,
Speaker 1: does it make a sound. What Galileo's saying is it's
Speaker 1: only because we've assigned these things color and odor and
Speaker 1: taste that they have color and odor and taste.
Speaker 2: Right, They don't inherently possess these objects. Something exists, but
Speaker 2: it doesn't exist in the form that we perceive it as.
Speaker 2: It's probably far more complex or at the very least different.
Speaker 2: What's interesting is that quote could have been written by
Speaker 2: anyone today researching that, Like, that's a very contemporary understanding
Speaker 2: of what's going on, and that was Galileo back in
Speaker 2: the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It's pretty cool. John Locke
Speaker 2: was the next one to really kind of contribute to it,
Speaker 2: and what he came up with was similar to Plato
Speaker 2: and Aristotle's take. He said that there are everything has
Speaker 2: two types of qualities primary qualities, which is the actual
Speaker 2: objective reality of the thing, and apples just for some
Speaker 2: reason keeps it's the easiest example for some reason. But
Speaker 2: in apple has it has a form, it has like size,
Speaker 2: it has shape, it has bulk to it. It cannot move.
Speaker 2: That's a big primary characteristic of it. Like the apple
Speaker 2: itself isn't inherently red. There's a certain arrangement of electrons
Speaker 2: inside the apple skin or that make up the apple skin,
Speaker 2: that absorb some kinds of wavelengths of light and reflect
Speaker 2: back the red wavelength of light. And that's what we
Speaker 2: see that hits our eye. But that doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: the apple itself is red in any way whatsoever. It's
Speaker 2: just that's what we perceive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't even hit our eye. It hits the
Speaker 1: receptors in our eye, those rods and cones, yep. And
Speaker 1: it just sends dumb data messages to our smart brain,
Speaker 1: right right.
Speaker 2: But then there's secondary qualities, things like it's taste, it's color, shininess,
Speaker 2: and that the secondary qualities are the things that we
Speaker 2: lay on top of it. That that's our perception. But
Speaker 2: that if you took away our perception, what would be
Speaker 2: left are the size, the bulk, the inability of the
Speaker 2: apple to move. Those things are objective and unchanging.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he labeled those was called extension. And that's
Speaker 1: the fact that it just takes up physical space in
Speaker 1: a place. And then permanence, it does that at a
Speaker 1: specific time, so it exists in time. And then the
Speaker 1: last one is that it interacts with other objects. And
Speaker 1: he called that causal powers, and that can be anything
Speaker 1: from just the air around it to the desk that
Speaker 1: it's sitting on or whatever, sure, which are also constructs.
Speaker 2: Yes, we'll get to that, and then I think the
Speaker 2: last contributor to the historical understanding of reality, at least
Speaker 2: one of the big name, big shot ones, was Emmanuel Kant.
Speaker 2: He was a German mathematician philosopher from the Enlightenment era.
Speaker 2: I believe, yeah, And he basically he wasn't so much
Speaker 2: after like, okay, what is the nature of reality? His
Speaker 2: question was even more basic than that. It was can
Speaker 2: we even possibly perceive actual reality? And after thinking about it,
Speaker 2: thinking about it, really kind of humming on it for
Speaker 2: a little bit, he said no, no, I don't believe
Speaker 2: we ever possibly can, and that forms the basis for
Speaker 2: the modern exploration of reality.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was one of those that pushed it even further
Speaker 1: and said, all right, so I'm digging what you're saying
Speaker 1: that that red apple, that color isn't really real and
Speaker 1: the shape isn't really real. So lock what you were
Speaker 1: saying about these primary qualities, even that it exists in
Speaker 1: time and space, like dude, that is in your head
Speaker 1: as well, like those don't even exist. They exist in
Speaker 1: our minds, and so we can't even conceive of anything.
Speaker 3: We can't know really anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he went so so far as to say, like
Speaker 2: science and math, which describes the basic laws of the
Speaker 2: universe quite accurately, these are constructs themselves, Like what we're
Speaker 2: actually describing are hallucinations that we all share in common
Speaker 2: m hm.
Speaker 3: Or he called them appearances, yeah.
Speaker 2: He And in fact, he called science and math appearances
Speaker 2: of appearances. And he was saying, like, there's we're never
Speaker 2: going to be able to figure this out. And luckily
Speaker 2: Kant was wrong, because we do seem to be kind
Speaker 2: of on a track of figuring things out a little more.
Speaker 3: All right, Man, that was a robust, like thirteen minutes.
Speaker 2: I think I think so too.
Speaker 3: So let's take a break and we'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Stuff you should know, Josh, and show stuff you should know? Okay, So, uh,
Speaker 2: we've been kind of teasing it, and I think she
Speaker 2: was probably saying it outright too. Some of these early
Speaker 2: philosophers really kind of hit the nail on the head
Speaker 2: as far as our current understanding goes. And one of
Speaker 2: the big contributions or one of the big contributors of
Speaker 2: the twentieth and especially twenty first century to exploring what
Speaker 2: the basis of reality is was neuroscience. Neuroscience has said, okay,
Speaker 2: well wait a minute, there's a there's something that we
Speaker 2: all need to kind of explore. If all of this
Speaker 2: is just in our minds, which is what's suggested, we
Speaker 2: have ways of looking into the mind, so let's figure
Speaker 2: out what's actually going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this, you know, I realized that as I
Speaker 1: have had problems with some deep philosophical things like this,
Speaker 1: listeners to some of this stuff might like, it's not
Speaker 1: for everyone, you know what I mean? Sure, So, like
Speaker 1: I get it if some people are listening and being like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, what have you been talking about When
Speaker 1: we say things like our eyes don't see and our
Speaker 1: ears don't hear. But we're going to explain it in
Speaker 1: a science y way that I think grounds it as
Speaker 1: others have before us. This is not like our ideas, right,
Speaker 1: but it is true that our don't actually really see
Speaker 1: and our tongues don't actually taste. What we have is
Speaker 1: a system, which is our body and our brain working together.
Speaker 1: So we have all these receptors that capture this data basically,
Speaker 1: and we send it to the brain, which is and
Speaker 1: we're going to reiterate this too. The brain does great work.
Speaker 1: But the brain is inside the skull. It's trapped in there.
Speaker 1: The brain isn't eyes and ears and tongue and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. It just works with whatever sensory data is
Speaker 1: sent to it from those receptors, from those organs and says,
Speaker 1: all right, here's what I think is going on in
Speaker 1: a way that will make sense to you walking around
Speaker 1: in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's what produces our conscious experience, that translation
Speaker 2: of electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves just hitting like our raw.
Speaker 2: The way that I got this finally was to start
Speaker 2: thinking of eyes and ears and tongues like antenna on
Speaker 2: a bog same thing, right, and that the brain just
Speaker 2: puts all that sensory information together. And one of the
Speaker 2: ways that we've we've shown like indisputably that this happens
Speaker 2: are through optical illusions. There's so many optical illusions out there.
Speaker 2: One of the most famous are is the checkerboard, where
Speaker 2: there's a cylinder casting a shadow across the checkerboard and
Speaker 2: there's like gray, gray squares and white squares, and if
Speaker 2: you link these two squares together, you realize they're actually
Speaker 2: the same color. It's just the brain sees a shadow
Speaker 2: being cast, so it's darkening one of those squares where
Speaker 2: really it's the exact same color. And so what neuroscience
Speaker 2: did was to step up and say, okay, let's investigate
Speaker 2: exactly where this weird illusion is happening. And what they
Speaker 2: found that in cases of visual illusions optical illusions, the
Speaker 2: eyes are sending the correct data. There's seeing the illusion
Speaker 2: for what it is. They can see that those checkerboards
Speaker 2: are the same color. It's when it gets transferred to
Speaker 2: the frontal lobe and the frontal lobe starts putting together
Speaker 2: a picture of reality based on past experience and physical
Speaker 2: laws and things like that, it says, no, that's not possible.
Speaker 2: This is actually two different colors and produces the illusion
Speaker 2: in our conscious experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they've shown this with the Wonder machine, with
Speaker 1: the fMRI machine and experiments. It's literally just the brain saying, well,
Speaker 1: that ain't right. So I'm gonna tell you that it's
Speaker 1: this based on everything that you've ever seen in your
Speaker 1: life that really makes sense.
Speaker 2: Right, And so the upshot of all that is we see,
Speaker 2: we can demonstrate that the brain does not give us
Speaker 2: any sort of accurate picture of reality. It gives us
Speaker 2: a rough sketch, a good enough sketch of reality to
Speaker 2: allow us to navigate the universe. So we know for
Speaker 2: a fact that what we see and perceive is not
Speaker 2: actual reality. The question then becomes is just how removed
Speaker 2: from actual reality is our conscious experience as human beings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know what, I haven't gone through it yet,
Speaker 1: but we have an upcoming episode at some point that
Speaker 1: I've been avoiding on stereograms, hm, the hidden eye pictures
Speaker 1: that were such a big deal in the nineties. So,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure that all of this stuff is in there,
Speaker 1: because that's kind of what you're talking about, or what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, Yeah, the frontal lobe taking perfectly good, legitimate
Speaker 2: information and putting it together in wacky ways. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I would guess that would be the basis of a
Speaker 2: stereogram too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a sailboat there. You don't see it, look harder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's the Tasmanian Devil.
Speaker 3: Did you ever see a Tasmin?
Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm just imagining that because he
Speaker 2: was huge at the same time. But I'm sure there
Speaker 2: was a Tasmanian devil stereogram.
Speaker 1: Or was it a mud flap of the Tasmanian devil
Speaker 1: and it said back off.
Speaker 2: That was just somebody saying, oh, that's right, I've had
Speaker 2: the two guns.
Speaker 1: I even had him in my brain. But you know,
Speaker 1: is that is that even real?
Speaker 2: Very nice?
Speaker 3: Chuck, Okay, okay.
Speaker 1: So here's to me where it gets really really interesting.
Speaker 1: We've sort of laid the groundwork. It all makes sense
Speaker 1: to me, hopefully, hopefully it's making sense to to listeners.
Speaker 2: I feel like, yeah, we've been laying it down pretty clearly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: But here's where it gets interesting to me, because why
Speaker 1: is this happening? And the reason is, like what you
Speaker 1: have to do is you have to You don't have to,
Speaker 1: but it's very beneficial, I think, to look at almost
Speaker 1: everything that we are able to do through a lens
Speaker 1: of evolution and natural selection, so like there has to
Speaker 1: be because in that lies a fundamental reason why your
Speaker 1: brain is doing this. There has to be a reason
Speaker 1: why this is happening. And it turns out when you
Speaker 1: look at it through that lens, it makes sense. And
Speaker 1: like I don't know if this is a I mean,
Speaker 1: this is still philosophical stuff, but like it all makes
Speaker 1: total sense to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the basis of any time you bring evolution or
Speaker 2: natural selection into the picture, you're basically saying, Okay, whatever's
Speaker 2: going on actually improves our chances of survival. So there's
Speaker 2: a psychologist from I think you see Berkeley. Don't quote
Speaker 2: me on that. His name's Donald Hoffman, and he is
Speaker 2: one of the I guess leading researchers into the nature
Speaker 2: of reality right now. His hypotheses seem to be pretty
Speaker 2: ocorront right.
Speaker 3: I bet it's Berkeley.
Speaker 2: It's gotta be, it's gotta be. The basis of his
Speaker 2: interpretation is that we see a rough sketch of the
Speaker 2: world around us, because that's the version of reality that
Speaker 2: is most likely to allow us to survive, or was
Speaker 2: over the millions of years of our evolution to this point.
Speaker 1: By the way, he's from uc Ermine, so close not
Speaker 1: it seemed very much like a Berkeley kind of thing
Speaker 1: to do, for Surevine, who knew?
Speaker 2: At least I didn't say Davis.
Speaker 3: Or sand burdu.
Speaker 2: I didn't even want to bring that up.
Speaker 3: What was the last thing you said?
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I said that. He was saying, like, the
Speaker 2: reason that we have a rough sketch of reality is
Speaker 2: because natural selection has said that's the that is the
Speaker 2: version of reality that will keep humans alive most likely.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, so you have to remember what we said earlier,
Speaker 1: because this all you know ties together is that we
Speaker 1: got to reiterate. The brain is in its skull. It
Speaker 1: is only receiving these messages that it's given from these receptors.
Speaker 1: Evolution is the same thing. Evolution is also blind in
Speaker 1: a sense. Natural selection isn't favoring one thing over another
Speaker 1: to try to get what's accurate as far as reality goes.
Speaker 3: It's UnBias.
Speaker 1: This natural selection is only going to favor the reality
Speaker 1: that's going to give you that chance to survive. And
Speaker 1: this is the point where I got it fairly confused.
Speaker 1: But then it all came back around with the desktop analogy.
Speaker 1: But I do have to admit this, before the desktop thing,
Speaker 1: I was pretty lost right here and still sort of
Speaker 1: am Okay.
Speaker 2: So one of the examples that I've seen Hoffmann use
Speaker 2: to describe what he's talking about at this point is,
Speaker 2: let's say we had developed the ability to see oxygen
Speaker 2: or levels of concentrations of oxygen in the air. Right, Okay,
Speaker 2: we need oxygen to breathe. So in his example, the
Speaker 2: greener the air, the more oxygen there is. The redder
Speaker 2: the air, the less oxygen there is. Right. So, if
Speaker 2: we had just been gifted with a view of the
Speaker 2: actual reality, so we saw the gradient that was present
Speaker 2: in any given parcel of air that we were standing around,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean that we know what gradient we want
Speaker 2: or that will help us survive. Instead, what we were
Speaker 2: gifted with in this analogy was the ability to see
Speaker 2: red and stay away from that because it will kill us,
Speaker 2: or green and go to that because that was the
Speaker 2: kind of that was the amount of oxygen that we
Speaker 2: know we need to survive. Right, We don't know how
Speaker 2: much oxygen is in the air, and as far as
Speaker 2: natural selection is concerned, it doesn't matter if we know
Speaker 2: how much oxygen is the air. We just need to
Speaker 2: know that that green air is where we want to be,
Speaker 2: the red air is where we want to stay away from.
Speaker 2: Or back to the apple example, we know that the
Speaker 2: red apple is the one we want to eat, the
Speaker 2: black rotted apple is the one we want to stay
Speaker 2: away from. But then you have to take it back
Speaker 2: to the beginning. That apple's not actually red. So somewhere
Speaker 2: along the way, our brains and natural selection got together
Speaker 2: to allow us to see colors. And because we could
Speaker 2: see colors, that was the way we began to interact
Speaker 2: with the world. Because we can taste things, that's the
Speaker 2: way we interact with the world. There are plenty of
Speaker 2: other ways to interact with the world. There are plenty
Speaker 2: of things that were missing about the world because we
Speaker 2: only have these particular five senses. But that's all humans
Speaker 2: needed to survive as a species. That's why we don't
Speaker 2: see the full picture of reality. You did it, thank god,
Speaker 2: because that is the hardest part for sure.
Speaker 1: That's the part that kept breaking my brain. You were
Speaker 1: you had that oxygen thing in your hip pocket. You
Speaker 1: didn't let me know about that, so I.
Speaker 2: Did my friend, I sent it to you. You did, yeah,
Speaker 2: But it was a flurry of emails, for sure, so
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 3: It was behind the curtain everyone.
Speaker 1: There's there's always a few things leading up to an
Speaker 1: episode here and there that we try to lock in
Speaker 1: early as possible. But this one was just like, h
Speaker 1: and I think this and probably this will help. It
Speaker 1: was kind of like akin to like, as someone is
Speaker 1: shoving his out on stage, they're like, and just remember, guys,
Speaker 1: this is the key to it.
Speaker 2: All right. They shove us out on stage, but they
Speaker 2: make sure to flash that Shepherd took that they've gotten
Speaker 2: already if we screw it right.
Speaker 1: All right, So I guess that now, now we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about what I mentioned before, which really brings
Speaker 1: it home in a very understandable way, is the desktop analogy.
Speaker 1: I'm having a hard time saying that for some reason.
Speaker 1: And this is Hoffman again from Irvine and by way
Speaker 1: of Berkeley, and here's the analogy. All you have to
Speaker 1: do is look at your laptop and your desktop screen,
Speaker 1: and you've got icons all over it. You've got those
Speaker 1: those blue folders that have all the the things that
Speaker 1: might have like a word document or a or an
Speaker 1: MP three file or whatever's on your desktiny.
Speaker 2: O an MP three file? Did you get it off Napster?
Speaker 3: They did? Or MP three is not even anything anymore,
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 2: I don't think they call them MP three.
Speaker 3: I don't even know what are they now.
Speaker 2: I think they just call them songs.
Speaker 1: Okay, just listen to music. Oh boy, So here's the deal.
Speaker 1: You see all that stuff, You know that you're supposed
Speaker 1: to click on that blue folder and click on that
Speaker 1: word document if you want to get your.
Speaker 3: Word file up.
Speaker 1: But all that stuff is just a user and interface,
Speaker 1: a graphical user interface that we know how to interact with.
Speaker 1: What's really going on is there's a system in the
Speaker 1: guts of that computer that is hard at work with
Speaker 1: ones and zeros.
Speaker 3: But we wouldn't know.
Speaker 1: How to make heads or tails of that stuff if
Speaker 1: we didn't have these icons that represented the things that
Speaker 1: we want to interact with on that desktop. And those icons,
Speaker 1: my friends, is the same thing is that apple on
Speaker 1: the desks. The apple is an icon, the same way
Speaker 1: as that blue folder on your desktop is an icon.
Speaker 1: It's just something that we have assigned so that we
Speaker 1: can interact with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we couldn't possibly get done what we want
Speaker 2: to get done by interacting with real reality. It's not
Speaker 2: how we see things. We see things as like shadows
Speaker 2: on the cave wall. Right. I love the desktop analogy, man.
Speaker 2: There's another part of the desktop icon analogy too, that's
Speaker 2: a consequence of this whole hypothesis. Right, That is, when
Speaker 2: you turn your computer off that folder icon ceases to exist.
Speaker 2: It doesn't keep running in the background. It's gone. It
Speaker 2: does not exist. The circuitry, the software, the operating system
Speaker 2: that produces that desktop icon that continues to exist, and
Speaker 2: when you turn the computer back on, the icon exists again,
Speaker 2: but in the meantime it ceases to exist. And that
Speaker 2: is analogous to this interpretation of reality that when you
Speaker 2: stop looking at an apple, that apple ceases to exist.
Speaker 2: The thing that produces that apple, whether it's some grand
Speaker 2: circuitry that we're unaware of that actually that's actually base reality,
Speaker 2: or it's some data combined with a simple algorithm that
Speaker 2: produces our experience of reality. Whatever produces it is still there,
Speaker 2: just like the circuitry and the operating system in the
Speaker 2: computers still there. But the apple doesn't exist any longer
Speaker 2: because there's no human around to experience it. Because apples
Speaker 2: only exist the way we see them in the reality
Speaker 2: that humans experience. That's the only place they exist.
Speaker 1: By the way, you said operating system, I think we
Speaker 1: call that an OS now.
Speaker 2: Sorry, mister MP three.
Speaker 1: By the way, we should totally have t shirts that
Speaker 1: say stuff you should know on the front and on
Speaker 1: the back. It just says everything is an icon. I
Speaker 1: think that's a great idea, but not well, that might
Speaker 1: confusing though they might think they mean icon is in
Speaker 1: an iconoclast.
Speaker 2: Well, we could put in parentheses. Listen to the reality
Speaker 2: episode and you'll know what we're talking about. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: and then we'll put okay question mark because we don't
Speaker 2: want to boss anybody around.
Speaker 1: So if you were confused by what you were Josh
Speaker 1: was just talking about, we have to look at it
Speaker 1: again through that lens of natural selection and evolution because
Speaker 1: our brains have you know, let's talk about the apple again.
Speaker 1: Our brains evolved to see that color, like you said,
Speaker 1: as something that is ripe and delicious and that will
Speaker 1: give us nutrition to a certain degree. But our brains,
Speaker 1: like weren't evolving in isolation. Everything else was evolving along
Speaker 1: with it, including that apple, and that apple evolved to
Speaker 1: be read so we would eat it and eventually spread
Speaker 1: those seeds so it could survive as well and grow
Speaker 1: more apples.
Speaker 3: So evolution itself is that desktop.
Speaker 2: Right, That's what created that desktop. It's not our brains
Speaker 2: just like we just came up with this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: It was like working in conjunction with evolution, that's just
Speaker 2: what we evolved to experience. And so in that sense,
Speaker 2: this to me was super reassuring when I realized this, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that means that there's no big mysy, there's no there's
Speaker 2: no purposeful veil that like God or the universe or
Speaker 2: somebody cast over us to prevent us from seeing real reality.
Speaker 2: The reason we don't see real reality is because we
Speaker 2: just didn't evolve to see reality that way. We evolved
Speaker 2: to see reality in a different way. And that that
Speaker 2: even though we know that there's other aspects of reality
Speaker 2: we don't sense like, that doesn't mean that there's something
Speaker 2: forever beyond our grasp. Like Emmanual Kant suggested.
Speaker 3: I agree, all right, uh neo, I think you go
Speaker 3: take the red pill the blue pill.
Speaker 2: I always say, why not both exactly.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Stuff you should know and shock stuff you should know.
Speaker 1: All right, So quick recap of Hoffman from Irvine basically
Speaker 1: saying that, like everything that we're perceiving around us is
Speaker 1: a construct from a combined process of these evolutionary forces
Speaker 1: that are blind working in cooperation with the brain. And this,
Speaker 1: you know, this can be hard to swallow to some
Speaker 1: people that might sound kind of goofy and ridiculous. People
Speaker 1: have come along, certainly, and this was pre Hoffman, of course,
Speaker 1: but people have come along through the years to poopoo
Speaker 1: all this great thinkers, even someone like Samuel Johnson, he
Speaker 1: was an essayist in the eighteenth century and a great writer.
Speaker 1: He had it out with a contemporary of his philosopher
Speaker 1: named Bishop Barclay not Berkeley from UC Berkeley, and he
Speaker 1: was basically like, dude, you can't tell him that these
Speaker 1: things don't exist outside of the mine, Like look at
Speaker 1: this rock right here. And he went and kicked it
Speaker 1: and said, I refute it thusly. In other words, how
Speaker 1: can you tell me that rock is just a construct
Speaker 1: of my mind when I just went and kicked it
Speaker 1: and it made a sound, and it was heavy and
Speaker 1: it hurt my toe.
Speaker 2: That's where we come back to, like John Locke and
Speaker 2: Plato and Aristotle and Galileo especially getting it right, like
Speaker 2: basically out of the gate that yes, these these objects
Speaker 2: that we interact with in the universe, they have bulk,
Speaker 2: they have mass, They move or they don't move. They
Speaker 2: have primary characteristics, right, So yes, if you kick a rock,
Speaker 2: apparently mass is part of the rock's primary characteristic, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but say the color of the rock, or the shape
Speaker 2: of the rock, or the shininess of the rock, that
Speaker 2: is not necessarily part of reality. Yeah, Okay, I think
Speaker 2: we've got it. Is mind blowing for sure, But at
Speaker 2: the same time, it's just there's more to reality than
Speaker 2: we see. But it doesn't mean that there's some great
Speaker 2: mystery necessarily. I feel like we solve that the mystery
Speaker 2: doesn't actually exist. It's just there's other parts of the
Speaker 2: universe we just don't sense and there's nothing to it
Speaker 2: other than we didn't evolve to sense it that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And well, we have great concrete examples of that,
Speaker 1: and that is the fact that we when we see things,
Speaker 1: what we're seeing is just a small portion of what
Speaker 1: there is. Yeah, we see what a visible light on
Speaker 1: the on the spectrum, like, it's pretty narrow in comparison
Speaker 1: to the entire spectrum. But there are also gamma rays,
Speaker 1: and there are X rays, and there are radio waves,
Speaker 1: and there are all these things that we can't see
Speaker 1: and detect with our human eyeballs, but we still know
Speaker 1: they're there because we have built machines and systems to
Speaker 1: allow us to enter act with those things like X
Speaker 1: ray machines or radios that allow you to hear what's
Speaker 1: happening on those radio waves, but you can't actually see
Speaker 1: that stuff. So it's a good way of illustrating, like
Speaker 1: what you know is just a very small portion of
Speaker 1: what there really is out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But also one of the other cool things about
Speaker 2: it is we know that they're out there, and we've
Speaker 2: learned to like build machines that can detect things that
Speaker 2: we can't perceive with our senses pretty amazing, and then
Speaker 2: we've built more machines to figure out how to interact
Speaker 2: with those parts of reality that we can't since. So,
Speaker 2: if you see an image from a James Web telescope
Speaker 2: picture right, and what you're seeing is there is a
Speaker 2: radio telescope picture. So the James Web telescope sees in
Speaker 2: radio waves. We can't see radio waves, but part of
Speaker 2: its software converts radio waves into visible light spectrum, which
Speaker 2: we can see. So for all intents and purposes, when
Speaker 2: you're looking at a picture of a star that the
Speaker 2: James Webb telescope took, you're seeing that star in the
Speaker 2: same way we would see it if we could see
Speaker 2: radio waves. Right, So it's not like reality is forever
Speaker 2: out of our grasp. Were becoming smart enough to learn
Speaker 2: ways to sense it in other ways, to convert it
Speaker 2: into things that we can sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know this is when I thought of
Speaker 1: and it sounds kind of silly, but I actually got
Speaker 1: a more a deeper appreciation of the movie Predator, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: from this, because when I was a kid, I saw
Speaker 1: it and I was like, Oh, that's cool. The Predator
Speaker 1: thing can see heat or thermo whatever would it be,
Speaker 1: Thermo thermo properties. You can see heat, let's just say that,
Speaker 1: and cool and stuff like that, can see temperature. I
Speaker 1: was trying to be all fancy, which is true, and
Speaker 1: when you kid is like, oh cool, that thing can
Speaker 1: see temperature. But this made me think of it in
Speaker 1: like a more philosophical way, that this thing is so
Speaker 1: advanced that it has gained a new maybe not consciousness,
Speaker 1: but a new ability to see the unseen, or.
Speaker 2: It evolved in a different type of pressure that favored
Speaker 2: being able to see infrared, so you can see temperature
Speaker 2: of things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: You know, it doesn't necessarily make it more advanced in
Speaker 2: the same way that you know, butterflies can see UV.
Speaker 2: We can't see UV. But that doesn't necessarily mean the
Speaker 2: butterflies more advanced than we are. It's just it evolved
Speaker 2: to sense the world differently, right. Yeah, it's as simple
Speaker 2: as that. But it also kind of brings back a
Speaker 2: certain amount of humility to us that we like, we
Speaker 2: just can't interact with parts of reality because we didn't
Speaker 2: evolve that way, and it just kind of, I don't know,
Speaker 2: it knocks us down a peg. I think in my estimation,
Speaker 2: it kind of reminds us like, hey, yeah, we're pretty great.
Speaker 2: We do a lot of really neat stuff, but we're
Speaker 2: still animals. Don't forget that part. Yeah, I like that,
Speaker 2: And then I think, to me, Chuck, the fact of
Speaker 2: the podcast, oh, is that if you take Hoffman's argument,
Speaker 2: there's an answer to that zen question of if if
Speaker 2: a tree falls in the woods and no one's around
Speaker 2: to hear it, like you mentioned, does it make a sound?
Speaker 2: The answer is no, it does not make a sound.
Speaker 2: And then even further, there's not even a tree if
Speaker 2: there's no human around to see it or hear it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh boy, I love that.
Speaker 2: Like this, it's like, you know, it's like Bart Simpsons saying,
Speaker 2: what's the sound of one hand clapping. M right, you
Speaker 2: know they figured it out. I love it.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, I tell you what.
Speaker 1: Man, every time we and we haven't done these many times,
Speaker 1: but every time we tackle something philosophical like this, I'm
Speaker 1: upset for a little while, and I always come out
Speaker 1: on the other side I think better for it.
Speaker 2: So same here.
Speaker 3: I'm glad you think of these things because I certain
Speaker 3: wouldn't ass on these topics.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, i'd be like, hey, what about elephants?
Speaker 2: That was a good one. Remember baby elephants suck their
Speaker 2: trunk like baby humans suck their thumbs.
Speaker 3: They have no trunk, Yeah, they do. Trunk. Trunks don't exist.
Speaker 2: Man, you keep getting me with that one. I know
Speaker 2: you got anything else. No, I don't either. So since
Speaker 2: we have nothing else about this, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3: All right, I'm gonna call this Smell of Vision. This
Speaker 3: is a pretty good one.
Speaker 1: Hey, guys, couldn't help it, but I just finished the
Speaker 1: Smell Vision episode, and I think you've missed a real
Speaker 1: opportunity there, or they did rather by calling it Centemah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw that. That was a great idea.
Speaker 3: That was a good one.
Speaker 1: I love the show, the wide range of topics you cover,
Speaker 1: the fun jokes in the banter, and even the occasional
Speaker 1: Chucker's reference. Obviously, the learning beneficial component is a huge plus.
Speaker 1: But I cannot find a term that I heard in
Speaker 1: one of your previous shows, and I need your help. Essentially,
Speaker 1: Josh mentioned a term that spoke to humans or any
Speaker 1: life form will take themselves after a certain period of time.
Speaker 1: What if humans don't take ourselves out of the event,
Speaker 1: take ourselves out?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Okay, Oh yeah, I miss the word take themselves out. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if humans don't take ourselves out in
Speaker 1: X term, we will see a greater opportunity for long
Speaker 1: term human existence.
Speaker 3: It's driving me crazy. I hope you have a reply.
Speaker 3: Do you know what that is?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think what they're talking about is technological maturity.
Speaker 2: If we if we make it through what's considered the
Speaker 2: great filter, which is all like all the ways that
Speaker 2: we could possibly wipe ourselves out using technology before we
Speaker 2: learn to use it wisely. If we can make it
Speaker 2: through that, then we'll emerge on technological maturity and we'll
Speaker 2: be basically will this live forever as a species?
Speaker 3: Okay? I bet you. That's it.
Speaker 1: It's gotta be and he finishes off. My wife is
Speaker 1: seven months pregnant with our first child. You can spare
Speaker 1: a moment for a shout out to Stephanie and baby
Speaker 1: Coorra coming in August to make a great birthday present.
Speaker 1: But Darren, we don't do shout outs on the show.
Speaker 1: We get so many requests for shout outs that we
Speaker 1: just can't.
Speaker 3: Get to them all. So we are certainly not going to.
Speaker 1: Shout out Stephanie and your amazing baby Coorra that's coming
Speaker 1: in August. We're just not going to mention them. No,
Speaker 1: not at all, so don't ask. Thanks for all the positivity,
Speaker 1: joy and laughter that you spread in the world.
Speaker 3: That's much needed. Your Floridian friend, Darren Nutting.
Speaker 2: Very nice, Darren, Thank you, and thank you also to
Speaker 2: Stephanie and Cora, who are not going to mention. And
Speaker 2: if you want to get in touch with us, like
Speaker 2: Darren did, you can send us an email to Stuff
Speaker 2: podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.