E4: The Truth Project - Can the Mind Move Matter? — The Interaction Problem

How does an immaterial mind move a material body? Philosopher Warren Edick II calls it the interaction problem — the fault line under every modern picture of reality. In Episode 4, Warren traces it to three possible answers, and find the most common worldview in Western culture lacking a way for free will, meaning, and truth to exist.

Along the way: Descartes and the pineal gland, Bishop Berkeley's proposal to keep monism but drop matter, Kant's phenomenal vs. noumenal, and Warren's hard claim that materialism, taken to its end, tends toward totalitarianism — with Marx, Stalin, and "eliminativism" as the cautionary tale. It closes on free will, meaning, and "the opportunity of a lifetime."

The Truth Project is meant to be heard in order. New here? Start with Episode 1.

(00:00) Welcome — start with Episode 1
(00:51) Recap: the interaction problem
(05:58) Respond, don't answer: worldviews & idea vs. matter
(15:45) Descartes, the pineal gland & "no magic atoms"
(24:00) The three answers — and why materialism kills free will
(30:00) "I am Warren": being itself
(40:00) Bishop Berkeley: keep monism, drop matter
(47:00) Kant: phenomenal vs. noumenal
(55:00) American Transcendentalism: Emerson, Thoreau, James
(1:04:00) Marx, Stalin & "eliminativism"
(1:13:39) Ideas have consequences
(1:17:26) Is the mind itself an idea?
(1:21:10) Why materialism tends toward enslavement
(1:26:43) How to "try on" idealism — "Be not afraid"
(1:37:06) The opportunity of a lifetime
(1:43:35) Nihilism vs. meaning

Hosted/produced by Alex Kosley. with philosopher Warren C. Edick II, author of The Clearing in the Wood. New episodes monthly. Watch the full series on YouTube and Rumble.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, and thank you for joining us for the Truth Project Podcast. This is a show about truth, meaning, purpose, and trying to make sense of the world we live in. The show is intended to be listened to chronologically, starting with episode one. So if you haven't yet listened to episode one, please go back and start there. We hope you enjoy the journey. Hello, Alex. Good morning, Warren. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Doing well, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Very good. Well, thank you for joining me again. Episode four of the Truth Project. I'm gonna start out uh just recapping our conversation from episode three the best that I can and um revisit a question that you asked in episode three, and we'll go from there. How's that sound?

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Sounds good.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Awesome. All right. Well, in episode three, um, well, beginning, I recapped episode two, we primarily talked about kind of quantum uncertainty and how it doesn't uh apply to the mesocosm or the world that we live in. Um, I mentioned the word mesocosm, what you uh considered the human condition, and I interjected and asked, what exactly do you mean by the human condition? Um it was kind of a beefy question, so you laughed a little bit and then uh went into a description, uh, told a little story where you and I went on a hike. We went up into a valley, and when we came back from the hike, you asked me to paint the valley. And essentially the point that you were making is what I portrayed as the valley of my painting was not really, um, we can't know that that's what the valley actually is in and of itself. We talked about the limits of our our senses. Uh, you said that you know the eyes are not windows into reality, as is sometimes said. Uh you talked about bats and sonar and sharks and their ability to sense electromagnetic signals uh from far away, um, making the point that there's a lot of things out there that we're not aware of in our limited perspective. And you know, you described uh the phenomenal world as the world that that we see, and you equated that to the human condition itself. Uh we talked about naive realism being the idea that that phenomenal world uh is all that exists, is the idea of naive realism, um, and just determined that that is uh short, a short uh come falls short in terms of explaining reality. Uh, then we went on to talk about philosophy. Uh you described it as not a singularly progressive field where physical sciences are. We talked about some different scientific theories evolving over time. You went on to describe philosophy as the foundation or the very basis of science and made clear that we shouldn't just assume things philosophers came up with hundreds or thousands of years ago are not relevant today. We went into knowledge and talked about human rationality as a defining characteristic of being human, but also went on to describe how intelligence cannot be the highest marker of human value. Talked about Hitler, Ted Bundy being very intelligent, but clearly not representatives of goodness and virtue. Talked about AI and just questioned, are we possibly creating something that we don't want? And talked about how you know the benefits of AI can be so great, according to the tech giants. And as soon as we start talking about greatness, uh we get into value judgments. And so at that point, we kind of made distinction between wisdom and intelligence, and we talked about the rat race and kind of intelligence operating in this horizontal plane and wisdom in a vertical plane. And you'd have described the rat race as a maze, and that in order to be amazed or removed from the maze, we need to enter that vertical dimension so that we can see the maze for what it is. And from there, um, we we got into a conversation about free will. We bump into that when we start talking about the the vertical dimension. And um really we you describe the horizontal as quantitative and the vertical dimension as qualitative, and really from there that's where we got to this question, um, which you know come to find out is called the interaction problem in philosophy. The question is, well, how does the immaterial interact with the material? And kind of left left with that question, and so um I don't have the answer to that question uh so far, but um hoping that we can dive into that and maybe uncover some answers on that front today. So I don't know if you want to answer it directly, but I'd love to explore how the the spiritual or immaterial can move the material, and hopefully we can hash out an answer to that question at some point today. So Lauren, love to hear your thoughts, kind of feedback of that recap and and you know what you think about the question that you left us.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Well, that was I would think excellent recap. Didn't realize we covered that much ground. That's a lot. Um no, I cannot answer the question of interaction. What I can do is merely respond to it. And that to me at least is the beauty of philosophy. To me at least. I've met many people to whom that is not the case, but to me it is. I can study different ideas and philosophy, and literally once I grasp them, put them on me like clothes, and all of a sudden experience and see the world through through that vantage point. And so it's very much an experience, these different ways of looking at the world and it's an adventure to be able to see it and and experience it in these different modes of understanding. And uh but I I'm I'm cognizant that that's you know, I've met many people in my life who are not able or seem not able or unwilling to try on, so to speak, a different world view. I guess for different reasons. Some people might be fearful of that, other people might find it not, you know, distasteful because they want to stay true to what they believe in. I'm able to do that without losing being true to what I believe in and my values. I can experience a worldview and then come back to my own and be enriched by that experience and it adding in to my own. Ultimately we're all called individually to separate the wheat from the chaff in our own ways unless I just wish to embrace being dogmatic. Um that being said, interesting, yeah. Um the material and the immaterial. I think a good way for us to proceed is to perhaps just to consider those distinctions. What is that distinction? See um for example, let's conceive of an idea. I have a mind and I can you know entertain the idea that was given to me, let's say, through my senses of an elephant. Okay, elephant, got it. I can entertain the idea of pink pink God. I can entertain the idea of a bird flying about God. The mind is able to conceive and thereby then entertain an idea of a pink flying elephant. I can do that. I can conceive of that in my mind's eye. Take the wings of the bird, the color of pink, put it on the elephant flying around. I conceived of that idea. If I call that an idea, then what does that mean in contrast to calling something a physical entity, like an atom or something like that? Well in a formal nerdland analysis and philosophy we get into what we call ontological contingency. Now it's a big word. Ontology is simply the systematic study of being to be or not to be. Existence in and of itself. Here we may be reminded back to the biblical story that all of us grew up with our one way or another, whether we're religious or not, namely Moses coming up on the mountain and experiencing the burning bush. And you know, after a while realizing, wow, there's a bush and it's burning. I'm the only one up here. And after a while, he realizes, huh, it's not burning up. It just keeps burning. So finally he gets really weirded out, apparently. That's how I imagine it in my mind, and he spins around and says, you know, who is this? And then lo and behold, Bush speaks. And it's my understanding that Bush says something to the effect of Yahve. Meaning loosely speaking. I know. Or likewise, sometimes translated, I've heard it as I am who am So we're getting into this idea of being as opposed to non-being. Just you know, taking it a step back and wait a minute, let's not take take too much for granted. I mean, on the one hand I'm warren, okay, but at the other hand I am. Seems to be the very precursor to what I am, which is Warren. So so that's what the field of ontology An ontological contingency is the question of whether something's being its mere existence is dependent on something, is contingent on something outside of itself. So here I am and I have conceived of a pink flying elephant. We refer to that as an idea in philosophy, formal philosophy because the very word idea implies that it is contingent on something outside of itself. That idea does not exist in and of itself. It depended on a mind conceiving the idea, a mind entertaining the idea, a mind holding that idea into existence. In other words, that pink flying elephant was inside my mind. If my mind didn't exist, then at this very moment that pink flying element elephant, that idea wouldn't exist either. It's dependent on a mind for its existence. That's what we mean by idea. Now, strictly speaking, in a formal philosophy, the word matter is the juxtaposition to what is meant by idea. Now, matter itself is an idea, but it's the kind it's the idea that says whatever I want to term as matter, it is implied that what I'm saying, what I'm proposing, is that its existence is not contingent, is not dependent on something outside of itself. So matter, thusly conceived, would imply the idea that let's say we call an atom matter. Well, if that's the case, if it is matter, then in the absence of any and all minds, any and all conceivable possible minds, it would still exist in its own right, blindly, non-conceived, non-perceived, floating about as an atom. Because its existence, its ontology is inconting. That's the definition. If you take it all the way down the rabbit hole and think about it and think it really through and properly, soundly in a proper analysis, that's what matter means. That's what that is. Now, having set that stage in formal analysis, we came to the problem of interaction. I don't know if we spoke of this in episode three or not. But it was brought to the forefront most famously. Not not as a problem, but just the whole idea of interactionism was brought to the forefront by Rene Descartes, 1500s, a famous philosopher. And he would uh, you know, be real, you know, scientifically minded kind of getting there. He'd want to know stuff. And so he'd dissect dead animals, and on occasion he'd he'd dissect, you know, get into doing autopsies on human bodies and stuff like that. And he believed that somewhere inside this human body, the immaterial, the human mind, would interact with the material. Else there is no freedom. And I think we spoke of this at some length in episode three, that um the laws of cause and effect, the first law of thermodynamics, known as conservation of energy, or in short, a Newtonian universe does not allow for something like that. In other words, there are no magic atoms. Atoms are, in principle, like dominoes. They don't start moving unless they were moved upon from the outside and made caused to move. Or if they are moving, they don't stop unless something stops them. Cause and effect seems to be total in the world in front of our eyeballs. But even Rene Descartes did believe in free will, ultimately believed in humans being morally culpable beings. In other words, we do at times in our life engage in making genuine choices. We could have gone there, or they so that it's our decision and we're responsible for the consequences and things like that. Things that can't readily be said of animals. You know, there are no evil bears. There's some hikers, let's go mess with them. No, no, no, no. You know, you get attacked by an animal out in the wild, it's it's considered a wildlife accident. You startled it, you stumbled onto a mom with her young well, whatever. It's it's it's an instinctual behavior, it's not evil in the sense of malevolence that we can experience in our human condition. Most notably probably in psychopathic and sociopathic behaviors in human beings. Someone who intentionally wishes to do really, really bad, bad things, and perhaps even takes pleasure in it. Renee Descartes believed that it's somewhere the ghost has to kick the can if we're gonna be free. If there is such a thing as moral culpability. And so he theorized that that happens in the pineal gland. Oh gland in our brain. I don't know much about it. I'm not a biologist in that sense, but I I believe it has to do with hormone secretion, I believe it has to do with the timing for puberty and all that kind of stuff. Well, the twentieth century did give us good and plentiful evidence. Okay, that there are no molecules or atoms in the human body or human brain that just stop moving as if having been pushed by a ghost. So no, there's no interaction, metaphysical, metaphysical substances interacting in the pineal gland. There's there's no such thing. Okay. If I, in front of my eyeballs, open up a human skull and look in there, all I find is neuronic mush, blood, water, atoms, stuff that's on the periodic table of elements, molecules, and all of it. It very much behaves in accordance to cause and effect, the Newtonian universe. See? So there's a conundrum, the conundrum of interactionism. There's two ways to go about responding to the conundrum. Well, three actually. Namely that there is no human freedom. We are all automatons. We are all robots suffering from the illusion of being morally culpable beings. And you know, if you want to put it thusly, then Karl Marx was right. Okay, if you go down that road of philosophy, you're into monas. Meaning metaphysical there's only one, only one metaphysical substance, monism, only one materialism. Matter. So we're no different, we're just complicated mechanisms. No moral culpability, no true, no freedom in that sense. And I and I and I certainly believe that to be a false conclusion. Let me put it, let me use, let me, let me apply some words of wisdom out of their original context onto this one where they fit just as well. They were given to us by the great Alex Cosley in the introduction to episode one, where you say, you know, can it be that nothing is truth? Well, we, meaning human beings, we don't really live our lives like that. I mean, that's the ultimate argument. I mean, that's just straight up. It doesn't get more palpable than putting it like that. We don't live our lives like that. We really don't. How can I believe something to be true that is antithetical to how all of us, not just me, everybody appears to live their life as a human being in our human condition? I mean, that to put that much in a nutshell, I thought that was awesome when I heard you say that. Yeah, we don't live our lives like that. What are you crazy? Yeah, of course we live our lives as this, you know, we believe certain things to be true and others not. And and or very much particular things we believe to be true. I I expect you to believe them to be true as well. And that's what I we've exposed in our talk on a lot of postmodernists, too, you know, getting a sandwich, getting the wrong change, mouthing off to the vendor. You know, I know my change is supposed to be this, that's true for me, and I'm gonna hold you to that standard, and then take your sandwich, walk into my classroom and say, no, there is no truth. Hello.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

That's not it.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Same goes for moral culpability. We don't live our lives like that. I think I gave the example of, you know, it's unbelievable how many PhD, you know, tenured professors in physics I've spoken to, and publicly so on stages of debate, that would claim publicly, no, no, there's no moral culpability. We live in a Newtonian universe, that's all we are, and there's no free will. And of course, it's obvious to me that those who say that, which to my surprise, as a younger man, you know, growing up into all of this, studying it and getting to know these kinds of things, to my surprise, there's many an Aerudite human being claiming that I've never met one who lives their life like that. So this whole idea of claiming something to be true that is on its very face value, antithetical to how I or you or anyone else lives their life, is distasteful to me, to my making sense of the world, to my basic understanding of logic and reason. It just know that that makes no sense whatsoever. Of course, then the postmodern mind, you know, there's people who like the idea of not making sense. We can get into that. Um So anyway, that's one way of dealing with it, saying there is no freak. I don't buy that. As I am able to experience in my own personal growth that I am responsible. And not just that, that I want to be responsible for many of my decisions in life. Ultimately, it is in such responsibility that true freedom as an experience and liberty becomes possible. The vertical experience becomes possible. There's that. So then we're left with two other ways of dealing with the conundrum of interactionism. One is, and this is a very honest one, one that I respect dearly, because straight up, it's it's as honest as it gets. I don't know. Hey, religious people may at this point insert the phrase, God works in mysterious ways. Mysterious meaning I don't know. I can't explain it, I can't understand it, but it is what it is. My experience in my human condition is that I'm morally culpable, that I have freedom in a very different way than animals that I've met hitherto in this world have. And no, I can't explain it in light of in front of my eyeballs, finding singularly what appears to be a Newtonian universe. In other words, I don't find particular miracles in front of my eyeballs. Okay. I've met many physicists just you know, straight up say we don't believe in miracles and blah, blah, blah. But what is a miracle? All scientifically speaking, with the backdrop of our understanding now, what we're talking about is an uncaused event. Okay, something that has no cause. It's like a magic atom just moving without having been pushed. It's like, whoa, that'd be you know, miraculous. Okay, well, why would people say that? On careful analysis, it's just not true because you know, you get down to the Big Bang, if you will. What are you saying? Right? We already spoke of this. If that just came out of nothing, well, then we're at least called to believe in one miracle, namely that at all, the whole universe came out of nothing. Well, what's nothing? Well, it's not a cause. So let's be honest and just put it out like that. Einstein said that once, you know. We're all called to believe by all he meant scientists called to believe in at least one miracle, namely, how it is that anything at all exists. Bringing us back to ontology. Theologians who study philosophy have long called God the ontological condition of the world. It's presupposed by the world existing at all. That existence itself is holding it in existence, to be or not to be. I am who am Yahweh from that perspective. Just on a segue here, when I say I am Warren, theologically speaking, what am I referring to? Warren? Only one of those three words refers to Warren. Because I am not who am I not Yahweh. I am not the burning bush. So you have I am Warren. There's a precondition, an ontological precondition for me to exist at all. Namely being itself. And I am not being in and of itself. I am contingent on food, on oxygen, on nine months before I was born, my parents, blah blah blah, all of that stuff. So it's perfectly okay to say I don't know. There's a lot of mysteries. And that is one of the crimes of the twentieth century that persists, perhaps even more so, lingering into the twenty-first century of Western civilizations, and one of the great wounds in our being. Namely, we are stooped in what I will call scientism. And it really expresses itself in a pseudo false understanding of science. It really expresses itself in us rearing so many generations by now who literally, as young people, believe that, you know, science got it all figured out. You know, we really only have, you know, we cross the teeth and dot the eyes, and we will be all knowing. And there's nothing that could be further from the truth. There's so much we do not know. Let me just give you a simple example. To this very day, science knows nothing, nothing about what is consciousness. I can open up the human skull all you want. I'm not going to find consciousness. I'm going to find neuronic mush and blood and water and molecules that behave like domino pieces. Okay? What is that? No answer. This is where you step into what Germany in German language is called Geistesmisschaft, namely the science of the mind, or properly translated, the science of the spirit. The English speaking world people are like, huh? How can that be science? Oh, oh, oh yeah. Make no mistake. There's much more going on here. Why the English speaking world? Well, because you have the radical empiricists and the whole English school of Britain, Britain's school of empiricism, and it's just a position to a continental philosophy and a philosophy of mind. So saying I don't know is perfectly valid, it's a good answer. There it is. But then there's a third option. And after this interactionism conundrum simmered for like you know, two centuries. And during the same time, what simmered was one of the greatest riddles in philosophy ever. And this happened in a different field. It happened in not in metaphysics, but in epistemology, the science of knowledge, the systematic study of what is knowledge. You had this division between the British empiricists and the continental philosophy rationalists. Where in Europe, you know, 15, 16, 1700, continental Europe, the philosophers and the scientists themselves would say true knowledge is rational knowledge, logic, deduction. Whereas the British empiricists would say no, true knowledge is empirical knowledge. It comes through our physical senses only. So one might ask, well, why couldn't they say there's two different kinds of knowledge? And there you go, leave it at that. Well, because if you do a more hardcore analysis at the deep end of the pool, okay, nerd land, you come to realize that empirical knowledge so conceived, as knowledge coming through our five senses, implies the idea that when we are born, we are born without it. We don't acquire knowledge until our five senses start operating. So whenever that is as a fetus, or just call it for figuratively at birth, we we come into the operation of our senses as a tabula rasa was the big turn back then. A blank slate. There's no knowledge in there. That's ultimately what analytical means. You know, the root noun here would be anon, which means contained within. There's no knowledge there. Whereas if you do the same rigorous analysis into analytical knowledge, rationalism, or deductive abilities, you come to realize that knowledge must be innate. It's in them when you come into this world, it's already in there somehow. Okay. A simple example, maybe we spoke of this before, Pythagorean theorem, you know, Pythagoras figuring out the law that governs the behavior of all perpendicular triangles. He didn't need to go into some jungle and discover that growing on a tree. Okay, we can blindfold him and lock him in a dark cave. He was a rational thinker. That kind of work can be done just using your noodle. Okay. The coherence method, as opposed to the correspondence method. And he can discover things like that, you see, and not invent them. We've we talked about this. Discover it, and then we asked, well, where does such a thing exist if it existed prior to being discovered, which is implied by discover, the idea not being invented? Well, somehow in whatever that means. In style. What is that? Okay. And there that forms these two ideas are antithetical. Rationalism and empiricism as epistemologies, as foundations of knowledge. They can't coexist. So you it's just an obvious conundrum that dog philosophy unspokenly for millennia, but out in the open and in everybody's face in these two and three hundred years, 15, 16, 1700s.

unknown 38:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

Anyway, in the 1700s, then, as often happens epically, you know, you have all these different things converging from different directions. And when that happens, we like to call that a zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. It just things matured from different fields. And it may said to start with uh uh a huge finger in philosophy known as Bishop Berkeley, okay, early 1700s, who was an Anglican bishop, highest ranking Anglican bishop in Ireland. And so the Irish people loved him very much and referred to him as the Pope of Ireland, but in the Church of England, and this man, as is often the case, much more often than pop culture wants to even consider, you have religious leaders, okay, really stooped deeply in science and in philosophy. Like we spoke of this, the Big Bang Theory itself was discovered and formulated by a Catholic priest.

unknown 40:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

Sure, PhD in physics and all of that, but yeah, you're gonna get that a lot, actually, if you study the history of all of this. Much more than our culture is comfortable, entertaining because we like to keep things of, oh no, those are the baddies and we're the goodies, and all this kind of stuff. Bishop Berkeley said, Well, wait a minute. Interactionism is a real conundrum. It really is. You know, how does the ghost kick the can and this, that, and the other? Well, how about looking at it like this? And he just threw it out there, basically. In a nutshell, what he said, and he was, he studied a lot of philosophy. Okay. He just threw it out there that, well, how about we stay in a monism? Because metaphysically, interactionism only happens in dualism or pluralism, where I have different metaphysical substances and I don't know how they interact with each other. Right? The immaterial pushing the material. How about we stay in a monism? But get rid of the idea of matter. People are like, huh? What do you mean? Well, the only distinction between calling something an idea and calling something matter is whether its existence is dependent on something outside itself, on a mind, ontological contingency. And him being a bishop and a theologian, he refers to Genesis and realizes, hey, God, monotheism, is considered to have conceived the world out of nothing. What do we conceive? We conceive life and we conceive of ideas. What is it that engages in such an activity of conceiving? A mind. So God creates the whole world ex nihilo out of nothing. In his mind, he conceives of all these ideas that we call atoms. And he holds them in existence. In other words, creation is ongoing. And every instant that something exists, it exists because it is being conceived by God in God's mind. So it's not like in a theism where God creates the world and turns his back on it and abandons it, you know, like some an all-powerful perhaps, but not an all-good God, like a bad parent, and that's why we have all these troubles in the world and all that. So, in other words, the entire what we call or what we imagine to be physical universe exists as one small part inside God's mind, imagining it. In such a way that Us, it's real. And so there's no more talk of interactionism because all there exists is one substance, namely ideas. And albeit behind my eyeballs, I am able to manipulate what are my ideas, flying pink elephant. I can't do that to atoms in the front of my eyeballs because they're not my ideas. He created that. God conceived of that, or better yet, God conceived present tense of that. There are ideas in his mind. And therefore there is lawfulness in the world so that we're not completely just lost in chaos. But there is dependability, there is reliability, there is trustworthiness, there is truth such that we are able to do science and understand certain things, to experience the phenomenal world as orderly to one degree or another, which theologically speaking was a higher degree in what may have been or was, depending on your orientation, the Garden of Eden, where there was order and no chaos, no deception, no deceiving, only conceiving and conception. And things apparently didn't have an expiration date, as metaphorically speaking, death has not entered the world. So something happened, and that's the whole journey of theology, of trying to make sense of that, which linguistically is very, very interesting. But he just throws that out there, okay? And thereby solves interactionism, obviously, because there are no different substances. There's only one substance. Everything is mental, everything is ideas. Of what Western civilization has become during and after the Industrial Revolution. Materialistic. Whereas to me, it's one of the most joyous and playful garments to put on and walk through life, thinking of it like that and experiencing the world like that. But then all kinds of other things happened that more or less converge. See, he just threw it out there. So a hard-nosed German philosopher would look at the you just threw that out there. They would have a word for that. They would call that dogmatic. Okay, because you're not explaining it. You're just throwing it out there. Immanuel Kant was that guy. In age a junior to Berkeley. Immanuel Kant was intrigued on the one hand, but on the other hand, the development of continental philosophy had gotten to the point we're in a different field, not metaphysics. Those are the claims made by Berkeley. In epistemology, the conundrum we spoke of earlier, two or three hundred years. Is knowledge empirical or is it rational? In this hypotomy. And it can't be both. As an epistemology, as a as a theory of knowledge, they be they are antithetical to each other. It can't be knowledge is inborn and not inborn at the same time. In a philosophical, logical way, that's like not a good statement to make, right? You see what I'm saying? Just logically, you know. That's not that's not sensible from a perspective of reason. What Immanuel Kant did, and this is his life's work, is he solved that age-old riddle at the deep end of the pool in philosophy. And uh it's a stunning analysis, and and and it's way beyond us having a podcast conversation in terms of how exactly deductively he puts all this together. Suffice to say, I believe his argument to be sound, and the result of it is that neither empiricism nor rationalism is a proper theory of knowledge. Instead, he gives the world the epistemology of constructivism, which allows for both rationalism and empiricism to be conceived of as methodologies, not epistemologies. And thus conceived, he overcomes the contradiction they can coexist as methodologies, but not as epistemologies. And in a nutshell, he conveys that it is the human mind that interacts with the world as it is in and of itself, and that interaction produces what we find in front of our eyeballs, the phenomenal world. And therefore, our minds have in part a constructive function into what is the phenomenon. Our minds are not passive. The reality we live in, our human condition, is in part constructed by the categories of understanding that is the human mind. But what it what it implies the way he he brings this to the forefront is also what's known as metaphysical monistic idealism. Very much like Berkeley, that all that exists are ideas, and that matter is an untenable argument, that atoms are ontologically inconting. Okay, it's called monistic idealism. Now, in metaphysics, idealism doesn't merely mean there's some perfection, platonic perfection, and we try to live up to it. That's how we use that word in our vernacular. You know, some people are very idealistic. Oh, stuff like that. In metaphysics, idealism refers to there's only one substance, the claim that there's only one kind of substance, and it's not matter, it's ideas. That's what that means. So he gives the rational, that is to say, scientific support to what Berkeley was saying, without the dogmatic influences. Okay, for example, Kant doesn't, you know, doesn't on the face of it get into mentioning God or religion or the denominations and things like that. Okay, he simply refers to the numinal, which is the world as it is in and of itself. The numinal and the phenomenal. And our human condition is in the phenomenal, not exhausted by it, because the phenomenal is merely the world as we find it in front of our eyeballs. Then there's the world behind my eyeballs. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, of course, when we get deeper and deeper, then there's the world behind, behind my eyeballs. And getting into all that kind of stuff, which that's where I call semantic space, where things exist that are ideas that existed before any human being ever discovered them. You know, we're back to this Plato calls it the world of forms, Augustinus Aurelius, namely Saint Augustine calls it ideas principalis, Latin for original ideas, meaning the ideas that exist long before any human ever apprehended them. Carl Gustave Jung knocks on that door exactly by referring to archetypal ideas in the collective unconscious. And I I refer to it as concepts in semantic space. Um this basic map that I just gave you, by the way. It's intrinsically useful when reading C.S. Lewis and coming to understand how that maps on the way he puts things. Anyway, we have Berkeley coming here. We have Immanuel Kant coming here. And then in America, roughly around that time, we have Rolf Waldo Emerson studying theology basically at Harvard University. And all of this culminates in America into what becomes known as transcendentalism and the great American transcendentalist tradition, carried from Rolf Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, all the way through up into the great William James, the varieties of religious experience, and giving us the epistemology of pragmatism, which is really new tools and insights. So now we have empiricism, rationalism, and pragmatisms as methodologies of inquiry. And all of it is really creative and filled with a light all its own, and juxtaposes greatly in its zeitgeist to the British school of empiricism, which really demands, which really reduces into materialism and the five physical senses, and not going in that direction, denying and being really critical of continental philosophy, rationalism as being able to stand on its own two feet, and therefore utterly willing to say things like, yeah, no, there's no freedom, there's no free will, there's no moral culpability. No, no, no, no, no. Tabula rasa, there's nothing there. And Warren says, well, where does such a thing exist? Let's say figuratively oversimplified, like the Pythagorean theorem. Where does such a lawfulness exist prior to having been discovered, if we're going to entertain the idea that it wasn't just invented like a piece of art? What happened in America that's sideguised from the 1700s into the beginning of the 19th century, certainly into the late 1800s, is an enormous outgrowth of creativity being the primary currency of our society, civilization here in America, because it's like a synthesis between the empirical and the rational resolution of a centuries-long dichotomy between the continental and the empirical philosophies, and it explodes over here, which opens up so many vistas to now look at, you know, that we see still see today, that we still see today, things that become apparent in geopolitics and the current reordering of the whole world that we're in right now. Um, where the the British Empire, if you will, the Bank of England kind of a view, which is still present in the central banks of the world, is that it's all about money. Whereas in America, the whole system was built by our founding fathers. Where now it's not about money. The currency here in the very framework of the foundation of our country is human creativity. Human creativity. This led, for example, to the very, you know, the civil war ends. Well, we're a pile of rubble here in America. It was a terrible event. But in a short, less than 10 years later, there's the great first economic world fair in America, and the whole world realizes what becomes known as the miracle of America, our economy. Just being able to cook it on all burners and accelerate in the creation of true wealth way beyond what systems can. They're very static because it's all about money, and therefore it's all about conserving money and and having it grow controlled in a way where you have this these class differences, the aristocracy and this, that, and the other. Whereas the only currency that that works in the American ideal of how a society runs under a somewhat free market is creativity, as opposed to just just money. And this really flows and goes hand in hand, this paradigm shift of a zeitgeist that comes through, or that came through, transcendentalism. It runs parallel to transcendentalism. And of course, you know, you'll find many, many books back here by you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David, Thoreau. I mean, how can you not? Classic literature, read that and go, wow, you know, wow. Wow. You know, we're not just machines. You know, we're not just machines. And that whole tradition has a liberty all its own because it's it's intrinsically not bound by rigid dogma. Okay. I mean, when Henry David Thoreau, his thoughts on nature, and then Ralph Waldo Emerson, his thoughts on divine mind and spirit emanating, if you will, from Berkeley and all of this with the underpinnings of reason in Kant. It's not it's it doesn't necessitate denomination or denominationalism. It doesn't necessitate dogma. Now, don't get me wrong. I find free attitude in many, many things. I mean, ultimately, I personally am a pluralist, an epistemological pluralist. You know, I've spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, in India, Africa. I've learned to meditate at Buddhist temples and with Buddhists and studied Buddhism and teach comparative religions and higher learning. And I treasure what I have learned in all these different ways of grabbing a hold of a garment and putting it on and looking at the world and experiencing like that. I'm not afraid of worldviews and learning in that kind of way. And I but but but by doing that, I'm not saying that dogma is in itself in and of itself something bad, not at all. I've I've met, especially now getting older, I I meet people where I realize that their you know philosophy is not their thing. And they they they're not like me. We're different. I was a very broken young man, I think we spoke of this at some point. I had to be what William James calls twice-born in order to find any peace, any kind of happiness at all. And that all didn't happen until well in adulthood. And actually, that is what brought me into philosophy and finding my answers, answers where I could put myself together and make a go of it in terms of living a meaningful life. I was a very melancholic teenager. Other people don't they're not other people are not necessarily like that. That's not everybody's story. So I've met tons of people whose story is somewhat opposite almost. They find a faith community, a denomination, and they absorb the dogmatic teachings thereof, and they practice that, and and after a decade or two of doing that, they're able to be the recipient of well-being in their heart, and and also you know, of so of some wisdom and and peace and being at ease. And that's you know, so I'm not knocking anything per se. It's just that in philosophy, to my mind at least, as a you know, more or less classical philosopher, I would describe myself as. People ask me, well, what do you mean by classical? My first answer is I value reason. I value reason. And for some, a kind of blind faith may work, that never worked for me. Although faith does, but faith and blind faith are two very different things. There's another thing that is so lost in the twentieth century, understanding the difference between faith and blind faith. We should talk about that one day as well. So just uh as perhaps a mega overview, you very much identify with the American transcendentalist tradition as a Zeitgeist and my philosophical leanings. So much so that it's not merely an abstraction of thoughts. That I point to as something that I think is cool. But much more me waking up in the morning, and that's the world I'm in. So those would be the three options to deal with this interactionism, especially given we don't find any magic atoms in the neuronic mush when we open up a human head during the 20th century. We've gone, you know, way beyond just looking at atoms. We're in the subatomic and the microorganism and all that stuff. So yeah, no, interactionism doesn't seem to be a thing. So I can either turn my back on free will and moral culpability and total, total antitheticalness. How we all live our lives. Or I can simply say, I don't know. But clearly, I'm not going to buy into merely being a machine. We are morally culpable. Or there's this rather large zeitgeist that happened inside of our country. America. The American spirit. So there is this metaphysical monistic idealism. Those would be the three options to look at free will. Now Karl Marx will grab the first one, say there is no free will. We're just machines. And this, of course, to my mind, has horrendous consequences. To him, the state is more important than the little machines that make up a state. In other words, these little robots and machines, they're there to serve what he calls the state. As opposed to what Americans believe that, you know, a government by for and through the people. Implicit in that is that the state is a machine and it's built for one reason and only, to serve we the people. And then if you take that to its logical conclusion, as Stalin did, you end up in the early 1950s in the Soviet Union, where Stalin actually enacted eliminativism. The idea of eliminating from the dictionary of Eastern Europe huge sloths of words that implied freedom. Turning everybody into a machine by thinking that if we can just get these ideas out of our heads, which ultimately must be some sort of molecules floating around there, we're not functioning correct as machines. We need to get the freedom out and just be machine. You're heading into what is what in Star Trek is called the board. Which is scary stuff. Scary stuff. I think we spoke. Did we speak of that before eliminativism and Stalin? I mean, during that period of eliminate eliminating words that have to do with free, you would have, you know, you would have to, you'd have to, you can't use words that imply the idea that you think you're free, or else you out yourself as a faulty machine. They will haul you off into a mental hospital, which is a work camp, or a gulag. So you come to work under the eliminativism of Stalin and Russia, and you're late half an hour. Under eliminativism, you can no longer say to your boss, comrade, I'm sorry, I overslept, won't happen again. You can't do that. Meaning you believe you had a choice. Talk like that, and secret police that evening comes and picks you up, sometimes your entire family to never being heard, seen of again. So you'd have to say, Comrade, my alarm clock malfunctioned, causing me to be late. Okay, comrade, go to work now. There's nothing in there now. This is the eliminativistic language. There's nothing in there where he can get it on you that you, one of the cogs in the machine, believes you have choices or that you're free. See that? Now you're a good communist. Okay. Under that kind of dictatorship, Stalin executed between 40 and 80 million people. We don't know exactly, but let's call it 40 million people. And the scary part, of course, is those weren't enemies. We're talking about his own people. Lined them up on a wall and had them shot because you were non-functioning machines. There it is. That's how that works. First thing that happens in true communism is, you know, they declare to the world that, hey, this is the Marxist dream, right? We have no more criminality. Criminality only exists because of all this craziness about freedom. And then you have to have prisons where you actually believe people can change or change their mind or moral insight, you know, repentance, all this kind of stuff. No, no, no, no, no. So what happened in the Soviet Union is from one day to the next, they went to all prisons and took down the sign that said prison. Put up a new sign that said mental hospital. And then they declared to the world our communist dream is already shown to be successful. We have no criminality. There are no criminals here. Just malfunctioning pieces known as mental illness. And that then brings us through the exploration of free will back into postmodernity and us wanting to discuss what is truth. What are your thoughts here?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:39

Well, yeah, that's uh quite a lot going on there. Um, but I think yeah, really rich and and valuable, and you know, just really illuminates the idea that you know ideas have consequences, and just how we approach this question of interactionism, you know, could lead your answer could lead to you know mass killing of human beings just just from your answer of that question. And you know, I think you know, just emphasizes the importance of you know philosophy and in asking these kinds of questions. And um yeah, I have a lot of a lot of thoughts, questions. Um so yeah, we have these kind of three paths, three answers to to the interaction conundrum. Uh one is materialism, which you know is monistic, uh, clearly, and you know, seems to be a pretty um an easy easy answer in some sense until you run up into you know our actual you know lived experience and um our sense of moral obligation and responsibility and our not just sense of it, but our desire for it, as you mentioned. And uh and I think yeah, there's you know quite a few problems and quite a few unanswered questions that you alluded to with the you know scientism uh materialistic view, such as you know, well, where does consciousness even come from? You know, it comes from matter, matters creating consciousness. Um we can get more into the details of kind of those issues, but um then yeah, the I don't know answer, of course, is is a good and honest answer, uh, if if you don't know. And then really, I mean you're you're presenting this as you know three distinct exclusive exhaustive ideas, and the third one being you know, really monistic idealism, uh, which is you know pretty radical, you know, as you mentioned, especially in light of our kind of western zeitgeist, uh, which is very much based on the you know scientism and you know the idea that you know matter is all that exists. Um and I I think that's an interesting point that you made that matter kind of by definition in that view is something that exists without it doesn't have an epistemological contingency, uh, I think is how you described it. We know it doesn't in that view doesn't depend on us ontological, not epistemological, yeah. Ontological contingency. Um, but you know, clearly the this idea of you know monistic idealism is very opposite of that, and you know, would proposes that everything that exists is an idea, and so it's contingent on the mind that conceived of it. And and so I guess you know, the the I think the biggest question I have in my mind is you know, you said the only thing that exists are ideas. So what is the mind? Is that also an idea? Because the mind that creates the ideas you know seems to be something separate from those ideas. Can you dive into that? Does that question make sense?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:26

It does typically an idealism, monistic idealism. If one would go down the route to say only one thing exists, it would be minds. Okay, so you can have a cosmic mind, a divine mind, that which some call God, and then our minds, and so forth. And minds by their nature can conceive of ideas, that's one way of going about it. Um in an Eastern analysis, you could entertain ideas. And then what is mind when there are no ideas, you see what I'm saying? Then you get into Bramana and things of like that kind of thing. Um Schopenhauer touches on this kind of stuff. I've studied Arthur Schopenhauer extensively. Um as a young man, he influenced me more than any other. Like I said, I was very melancholic. Most people who study Arthur Schopenhauer go from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche. I went from Schopenhauer to Immanuel Kant because it was through Arthur Schopenhauer that I was then able to understand Kant. So I hope that touches on it. I mean there's much more, much more here. And and you're asking, you know, deep level philosophical questions and I hope that touches on it in a conversational context. Think of it as mind in an idealism. The idea is that the only thing that's real is mind. In other words, everything is ultimately mental. There is a beautiful congruency with the creation stories of monotheism here and how God conceives of the world and how it is concepted and how it is and how creation is an ongoing process, even in its fallen state. So these are really noteworthy congruencies. The other thing I would mention is that the second option that we explored, the one where we just declare I don't know, that option does imply an information of free will and moral culpability. See what I'm saying? That's that's squaring that with what we find in front of our eyeballs. I don't know. There you go. But I'm saying that because I do believe in that second option, that we are morally culpable, as opposed to denunning it, which happens in materialism. The other thing I would want to point out here is that materialism, no matter how you twist and turn it, always tends to core enslavement, which then expresses exponential increase in unnecessary human suffering. It can be done in your face, straight up as in true communism, okay, where you are subjected to being a machine. You are a subject, not a citizen. But even in a free society, what we term free society or a free market, it will inevitably tend towards economic slavery. The idea of a of a servitude of the masses. Where, you know, transnational corporate conglomerates become vertically integrated, thereby having sidestepped antitrust laws that operate inside individual nations, and inevitably monopolize the means of production with a top-down and immediate real-time command structure. Okay. All companies are owned by a corporation, and all those corporations are owned by a holding company, and all them holding companies are owned like a firm to the top. Extensively. And these conglomerates become more wealthy, more powerful than any nation on earth. Make no mistake. You know, making them far wealthier than what is the very national debt of the United States of America. I mean, think about that. Think about who the masters are on planet Earth. You know, so materialism, either way, tends towards totalitarianism. You're not going to get away from that. Um its driving force in what is in the appearance of a free trade, free society, if run by materialism, is going to be consumerism. And convenience. We spoke of that. George Orgel speaks of that. Even on his deathbed, he gives a breathtaking interview on his deathbed, dying of tuberculosis. Stunning to watch that interview, the things he says. It's when you realize how big an access to the intellect that man had to see things from so high up how they have to how they inevitably will develop in that regard. So um yeah, materialism, no matter how you conceive of it, funnels into the annihilation of what is individual liberty. Some macro level considerations here just to throw that out there. I don't push anyone, I don't want to do that. But I encourage my students to try out different garments of worldviews and feel safe and playful and come back and you know put your own back on.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:43

What uh how would someone try on an idealist worldview?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:55

Well, in my experience at least, it helped to understand what that is and how that can make sense. When I get it to make sense, then then it that that facilitates the process. I mean I'll be perfectly honest with you. I don't care what the world says of me. You know me, I like to go hiking into the wilderness. Not always, but more often than not. I head into the wilderness. I find myself walking through Narnia. I'll just put it straight out there. We're back to me trying to explain a few months ago. A friend I've made here in this little town where I live. He's a painter. Highly intelligent man. He kept telling me in conversation he doesn't think if Human beings were able to switch their minds into different brains of different people, we'd we'd still all be in the find ourselves not different at all in the same world. And every molecule of my being screamed in the inside of me. I couldn't believe something any more different than nowhere. Nowhere. Generically speaking, that that's that's what religiosity can do for a person just to lift off into the vertical. Literally. Change the light. The way we experience light becoming more brilliant, colors being more vivid. Poets perhaps have referred to this as recapturing in adulthood and beyond the um and wonder of being alive that was there when we were little kids. Looking at a Christmas tree. William James speaks of that. To me, that journey is the adventure of meaning, meaningfulness in my life. I mean, there's the best advice I've ever heard in that regard. By far the best. It's very simple. Be not afraid. There's too many people I meet and my my students, too many that are really stuck just viewing the world, experiencing the world through their world view, okay, in one set particular way. Either taking it for granted that everything they've been fed, spoon-fed in their education is true, and of course, we almost know everything. Science knows so much now. All we got to do is cross the T's and dot the I's. We'll know everything. Very reductionistic way of experiencing the world. Or likewise, just being afraid. If I wiggle loose and look at it a different way, somebody might call me crazy. Might be called into question by others. And so we have to learn. We have to learn as adults to liberate ourselves from giving too much of a hoot, what others think. I mean, at the end of the day, let's be very clear. We have all been given this opportunity of a lifetime. Let that reverberate what I just said. That's what I got. I don't want to waste a single part of it. I don't want I want to take as little of it as I can for granted. I'm at the point in my life where I do singularly what I want to do. I mean, I don't spend not one waking second of my life doing something I don't want to do. Getting to that point was was hugely important for me. That's not, I'm not talking about financial freedom. Oh, I won the lottery now, I can do whatever I want to do. I remember studying psychology in the early 90s. It was a well-known they did studies back then, that the majority. People who won the jackpot in the lottery 12 months later were unhappier than they ever were before in their life for this lavish hedonistic thing. No, no, no, that's not it. That's not what I'm talking about. I still have to work. I work every day. I work really hard. I work sometimes 60 and 70 hours a week. But I never do it, not for one second. In spite of not wanting to do it. No, no, no, no. This is I'm called to do what I do, and therefore I want to do what I do. I want to do that. I want to do the way my life is unfolding. I want that. I want that. Here we're back to volitional body, the formation of a volitional body. Remember we spoke of that? Be not afraid. Are the most kick-ass words ever spoken, if you think about it. You have this opportunity of a lifetime. Give it your all.

unknown 1:34:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:22

Does that mean some people think you're weird? Well, let me shed some, let me let me give you some news, okay? No matter what you do, people already think you're wound. Doesn't matter what you wear, you walk around in public, somebody's gonna think, gosh, that's terrible. It doesn't matter what church you go to, plenty of other churches think, oh, they're going to hell. There it is. I mean, now we're knocking on the door of what is truly called the spiritual life, spiritual experiences, and things like that. Yeah, and who knows where our conversation goes as we go. I mean, be not afraid. Sadly, there there are things that seem worthy of being afraid of. But we gotta work through that, I think. I mean, sadly, I say, because you know, I've had a lot of students in my life. Thousands and thousands of thousands of students, mostly adult students. And uh I mean I've known dozens and dozens of people who've been disowned by their family because they went, they they grew up in this brick and mortar church belonging to Christendom. And as an adult exploring things, they decided to from henceforth to every Sunday go to this brick and mortar church, which is a member of Christendom, disowned of the whole family. So it's not like you know, these urgents aren't real. The question is, are they vindicated? Are they proper? Are they right? I mean it's sad, but sometimes our own liberation can bring to the forefront some ugly notions about those around us. Perhaps my loyalties were misplaced. I don't know. You see what I'm saying? I mean it's just yeah. What are your thoughts here, Alex?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:05

Well, again, I think you know the idea that ideas have consequences uh is very relevant. And you know, the ideas that we have in our minds and you know what we choose to believe, you know, could affect our reality, including you know the way other people see us, perceive us, treat us, how we treat other people, how we live in the world. And yeah, there can be you know great costs. There can be great costs to having you know making the wrong decision. Um you could make you know, you could believe something that's wrong, and it could you know benefit what appears to benefit you, you know, in the short term, you know, more people like you. Uh, you know, you might have more financial success, like, oh, I did something unethical my boss asked me to do, but I got a promotion. And I think you know it it illuminates like well what what's driving our decision making and how are we how are we thinking through those things? And it has a lot to do with you know value and priority. And you know, I think interesting, I think the word worship, you know, really kind of define you know means what you are valuing, what you are placing worth on. And yeah, I think that there's you know, I think in this conversation, one of the most you know kind of recurring themes as I mentioned is yeah, ideas have consequences. And but yeah, like you know, do not be afraid. I think that's so powerful. And you know, we're often so afraid of the short-term consequences of believing something or taking an action, you know, as the result of our beliefs, that we can you know stifle our purpose, our contribution, you know, to the world by um instead of seeking after what's true, what's good, what's real, seeking after what will make other people you know think more highly of me, what will gain me more you know, riches in this world or social status.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:06

You have your finger exactly on the pulse. There you go. I mean, these are essential decisions that everybody has to make for themselves, given this opportunity of a lifetime. What do I want? What do I want? I mean, I you just said it. I I I want truth. I mean, ultimately, I want meaning, meaningfulness. Okay, that's what I want. Other people decide others, okay. There's people who decide, well, I want to, you know, have a yacht in the San Diego harbor, you know, the kind with the helicopter pad on it and all the nice babes and bikinis or whatever. Okay. To that end, what often happens is there, you know, on YouTube, you can look at these rich people doing videos and trying to, you know, convey the best way to be successful, meaning rich in life. And they say things like, well, what you should do is, you know, be careful who you hang out with, find the right circles, the right club, tennis, golf club, or whatever. Do what they do. You know, develop a taste for those clothes so they think, you know, you're one of us, and your fork and your your your knife has to be here and here, and then adapt like evolution-wise, you know, but here again, you're very materialistic. Adapt to this, and then, you know, uh read the things they read, you know, for the sake of ultimately be being more successful, networking, and and becoming wealthy. And uh I, as a small village philosopher, and that's just me, I read for oil when I hear that life advice. That's where I realize that, you know, a lot of people like that when they when they receive the New York Times and they're was a having it on prescription. I always wonder. I think the reason they read it is because they know that's where they can find what they're supposed to believe. So as to always remain in the successful track. Okay. I mean, I don't want to criticize people like that too harshly, but that's just antithetical to who to who I am and what I want to do with my opportunity of a lifetime. I I wouldn't want to do it like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:59

See what I'm saying? Well, and if it's yeah, and if it's you know well-being or even you know, happiness that we're seeking after, I mean it's it's pretty well documented at this point that you know just becoming wealthy does not actually there's actually like an inverse correlation, as far as I understand, uh, between wealth and happiness, and you tend to find the most happy, fulfilled people um being some of the most impoverished, um, you know, kind of globally speaking, it's my understanding. And so again, even if your goal is to feel happy or whatever, then you're missing the mark. Um, you know, oftentimes pursuing that way, you know, more money, more problems. Um yeah, so I think you know, big questions for people to ask is what are you gonna do with this opportunity of a lifetime and and why? And what are you seeking after? What are you valuing? What are you putting worth on? And how does that affect what you do day to day? Are you you know are you living freely or are you responding to chemical stimuli only? Are you interjecting you know something from a vertical plane in your life and seeking something you know greater than you know a big pile of cheese in the the biggest rat enclave?

SPEAKER_01 1:43:35

And these decisions have huge consequences. Like in postmodernity, what we often find is nihilism. The idea that no, I'm not looking for meaning because there is none. And I realize that's the opposite, that's antithetical to who I am. I seek meaningfulness, I seek meaning in everything, in every activity and everything I do. My aim is to harvest meaning. Even if that and that takes us then into a deeper analysis and insight into what is happiness. Because happiness, properly conceived, oi daimonia, as Aristotle would call it, well-being, does not exclude suffering. Does not exclude pain. See, by happiness, I don't mean our vernacular. You want to be happy, happy, happy. No, no, no, no, I don't want pain. I want it to be real, I want it to be meaningful. That will involve pain, that will involve also suffering and sacrifice, and it will inevitably also involve moments of elation and pure joy. Nihilism is utterly alien to my orientation. In everything I can contribute into the formation of my volitional body. Every fiber of my being wills the directionality of intention and life towards and into meaning, which is totally away from nihilism. And at the end of the day, I don't think that the choice is entirely relative. I think one involves the denial of what we call truth, and the other involves the seeking thereof, which cannot be honestly done if I don't believe it exists, irrespective of whether I find it in the end or not. Enough for today. Yeah. Wonderful speaking with you. Thank you for your time speaking with me.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:21

Yeah, I thank you again, Warren. It was definitely a pleasure, and um, you've given us all a lot to think about and consider, and uh, you know, challenge all of our listeners to you know consider taking on trying on some new ideas. You know, think about some of the things we said here. Try that on. What would it mean if if the only things that exist are minds and ideas? What are the implications of that? And you know, think about that. Maybe take a walk in the woods and and and try that on.