Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
BFNB2: Thought for Food (Discussion about Learning)
378 Plays7 years ago
Sponsored by www.brilliant.org/breakingmath, where you can take courses in calculus, computer science, chemistry, and other STEM subjects. All online; all at your own pace; and accessible anywhere with an internet connection, including your smartphone or tablet! Start learning today!
Check out: https://blankfornonblank.podiant.co/e/357f09da787bac/
What you're about to hear is part two of an episode recorded by the podcasting network ___forNon___ (Blank for Non-Blank), of which Breaking Math, along with several other podcasts, is a part. To check out more ___forNon___ content, you can click on the link in this description. And of course, for more info and interactive widgets you can go to breakingmathpodcast.com, you can support us at patreon.com/breakingmathpodcast, and you can contact us directly at breakingmathpodcast@gmail.com. We hope you enjoy the second part of the first ___forNon___ group episode. You can also support ___forNon___ by donating at patreon.com/blankfornonblank.
---
This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
Check out: https://blankfornonblank.podiant.co/e/357f09da787bac/
What you're about to hear is part two of an episode recorded by the podcasting network ___forNon___ (Blank for Non-Blank), of which Breaking Math, along with several other podcasts, is a part. To check out more ___forNon___ content, you can click on the link in this description. And of course, for more info and interactive widgets you can go to breakingmathpodcast.com, you can support us at patreon.com/breakingmathpodcast, and you can contact us directly at breakingmathpodcast@gmail.com. We hope you enjoy the second part of the first ___forNon___ group episode. You can also support ___forNon___ by donating at patreon.com/blankfornonblank.
---
This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
Recommended
Transcript
Strange Places of Luck & Online Gaming
00:00:00
Speaker
Lucky Land Casino, asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky. Lucky? In line at the deli, I guess? Haha, in my dentist's office. More than once, actually. Do I have to say? Yes, you do. In the car before my kids PTA meeting. Really? Yes. Excuse me, what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky? I never win and tell.
00:00:20
Speaker
Well, there you have it. You can get Lucky anywhere, playing at luckylandslots.com. Play for free right now. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary. Voided by law. 18-plus terms and conditions applied. See website for details.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello, it is Ryan, and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on ChumbaCasino.com. I looked over the person sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing? They were also playing Chumba Casino. Coincidence? I think not. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumba Casino's home to hundreds of casino-style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere, even at 30,000 feet. So sign up now at ChumbaCasino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. That's ChumbaCasino.com and live the Chumba life.
00:00:57
Speaker
Nobody stole our website. Oh no, whatever shall we do?
Podcast Promotions and Introductions
00:01:05
Speaker
I mean, I guess you could go to the new website. HTTP colon slash slash breaking math podcast dot a P P with no WWW for all you old timers. So breaking math podcast dot app. I mean, if you're into that sort of thing,
00:01:26
Speaker
Hey, Breaking Math fans. First, I want to thank you for listening. I have an important message for everyone. You can start your own podcast right now with Anchor. Anchor lets you create and distribute your own podcast. Just get an idea, record, and upload. It's just that easy. Anyone can do it. I'm on my way to accomplishing my dream, and you can too. Just get on your device's app store and download Anchor. It contains everything you need to make a podcast. With Anchor, you can put your podcast on all the big platforms.
00:01:54
Speaker
Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Amazon, and more. Reach the whole world with Anchor. Best of all, Anchor is free. You have nothing to lose with a free platform. Download the Anchor app or go to anchor.fm to get started.
00:02:17
Speaker
Hello, I'm Jonathan Baca, and what you're about to hear is part two of an episode recorded by the podcasting network, Blank for Non-Blank, of which Breaking Math, along with several other podcasts, is a part. To check out part one, just download our catalog. To check out more Blank for Non-Blank content, you can click on the link in the episode description shown by your podcasting player, or go to tinyurl.com slash batteryhorse. And of course, for more info and interactive widgets, you can go to breakingmathpodcast.com
00:02:44
Speaker
You can support us at patreon.com slash breaking math podcast and you can contact us directly at breaking math podcast at gmail.com We hope you enjoy the second part of the first blank for non blank group episode. Thank you
00:02:58
Speaker
Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back or welcome for the first time if you skipped over part
Perception and Consciousness Discussion
00:03:03
Speaker
one. You are now listening to part two of the first ever blank for non-blank group episode. The episode is about learning and in this part of the conversation we go very much off topic into kind of subtopics and we talk about
00:03:17
Speaker
perception, specifically how perception can be distorted. We talk about the framework of perception. We talk about social concepts and many other things that, quite frankly, I cannot remember. I know that I really had an excellent time listening to this while it was happening. I had an excellent time listening to it while I was editing it. Every single time I go through, there is really never a time I listen to it and don't pick up anything new.
00:03:41
Speaker
I sound a lot like my professors, but that's because they're eloquent. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you'd like an introduction to our panelists very quickly, we have Seth Wilson from Let's Talk Talk, who is coming at us from a linguistic perspective. We have Chris Cogswell from the Mad Scientist podcast, who is generally a sciencey guy. We have, what's his face? Oh, John Jonathan. We have Mr. Jonathan Baca from
00:04:04
Speaker
The Breaking Math Podcast, who is an excellent computer programmer and knows a great deal about algorithms and likes math and sounds like a very good math teacher. Please enjoy.
00:04:28
Speaker
That's interesting. Could you elaborate? Hmm. Sure. A ball hitting the ground creates a little spark of it just like it maybe not doesn't know it's a ball. It probably doesn't. It doesn't have a brain. It doesn't. There's just like a little like click. Like so far we've done a pretty good job of covering the problems primarily with like learning and free will. And I actually have a few more questions about that as if we have time, but beneath learning there's
00:04:58
Speaker
consciousness or a general awareness of what is going on. Like I read an Al Dolce Huxley essay where he was talking about this kind of distinction, how there's one part of the mind that remembers facts and has sort of a personal history and creates concepts and thinks thoughts. But then there's a sort of secondary part of the mind that when you raise your arm, you really have no clear idea of how you've done so. It's this involuntary part of the mind that is constantly there.
00:05:27
Speaker
And that is the fundamental consciousness. My question is, what is consciousness? How can we best describe it? And how does it interact with the process of learning? And are they even different? I want to illustrate that exact point that you said. We're not quite aware of how we're able to. I'm aware, conceptually, of how I'm able to lift my arm up. But I still don't know. I'm not meta aware of that. And I've thought about this issue a lot with Superman and his ability to fly.
00:05:58
Speaker
Is it active for him? Is it like picking your hand up? Can he just fly? So I feel like that's a pretty colorful way to introduce that question as well. It's quite different than Martian Manhunter. Like Martian Manhunter is telekinetic. Yeah, and they just do it. I'd say even thoughts are involuntary too. He's actively doing it, right? Well, see, that's the question.
00:06:21
Speaker
I'd say evidence that consciousness is not dependent upon choices that we make is Things like okay like just last night for example. I had sleep paralysis all night, and I saw imps and imps are if you don't know they're Products of the mind they're terrifying there are basically creatures that don't exist and have no distinct shape Yeah, you should stop sleeping on your back good because that's probably what's on the couch my my bed was too uncomfortable But yeah
00:06:50
Speaker
Oh, no, no, no. I want to hear about the imps, though. I do, too. So I consider myself conscious of that experience, but obviously I had no choice. And some people argue, and I've heard it argued, OK, that's the truth. I've heard it argued that when you lucid dream, all you're doing is
00:07:08
Speaker
Exerting a slight amount of dream control or perception of how you dream and then remembering it as though you decide because I've had lucid dreams were I don't fly I go to the store and order like 30 lollipops like what's that all about?
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, lucid dreaming is a hilarious phenomenon. I was very into it about seven years ago and I'd try to practice it, but I would always end up gaining control and then immediately losing it. So I would like, okay, I can fly, but then all of a sudden I would spin or something and it would just change. So it's like this, it's not an active thing. Like you try to exert some sort of control over it, but like you said, I'm curious as to whether you're just waking up and remembering it this way.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Phobias
00:07:49
Speaker
I'm not sure if you're actually controlling your dreams at all.
00:07:52
Speaker
So one really interesting thing is so I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and so part of the training process for like getting better or getting over that kind of the process of like living with this is what's known as cognitive behavioral therapy. I don't know if any of you guys know what that is or any of the listeners at home know what that is but basically what it is is
00:08:13
Speaker
You train your brain structures to respond differently to scary thoughts or phobic situations that would make you panic by almost by throwing yourself into them and making you sit there with them, right? But conceptually, it's extremely interesting because
00:08:32
Speaker
what you're doing is you're trying to combat these things called called intrusive thoughts and they're kind of things like um... they're just sort of you know for for someone who doesn't doesn't have this kind of issue you might have a thought like you know oh i i could uh... you know i don't know well pineapples are tasty or you know i could i could go to the store right now or i could you know whatever i could take a nap right you'd have these thoughts and they wouldn't bother you uh... and sometimes you'd have thoughts that are
00:08:59
Speaker
completely out of the blue and seemingly distressing, right? You could have thoughts like, oh, that tree looks like a snake or, you know, I wonder if there's a monster under the bed, things like that. And so when you have obsessive compulsive disorder, what occurs is the brain doesn't let you get rid of those thoughts until they become a phobia almost, right? And so part of the treatment for that is literally training your brain to not involuntarily create, or rather,
00:09:27
Speaker
It's not, you can't control those involuntary thoughts, those happen always to everyone, right? And most people just don't remember them, they don't notice them, right? The trick is to then train yourself to not let them continue to be an issue, or rather, I think the way that it was described to me that was really effective was, imagine you have a,
00:09:53
Speaker
So it goes in a fight or flight response. You have a scary thought and then you immediately go into fight or flight if it's been traumatic to you in the past, right? You know that the sound of a gunshot means that something bad is happening, right?
00:10:08
Speaker
And so you'll immediately have a flash of panic and want to hide or something right the problem with with someone with an anxiety disorder something like OCD or something is that a non dangerous situation gets linked to a feeling of anxiety so it's something like.
00:10:27
Speaker
I mean, it's the same with phobias, right? You're on a tall building and you become phobic. And over time you just reinforce that by every time you get near a tall thing, you become scared and scared and scared, right? And so your brain now is trained almost like Pavlovian conditioning that every time you see this thing, panic kicks in. And so I find, I find it fascinating at least that you can train the brain to
00:10:52
Speaker
respond differently to inputs that the brain is sending to you that you have no control over ultimately, right?
Brain Stimulation and Unusual Experiences
00:10:59
Speaker
That's really my question for you is I would say, do you think that your thoughts are voluntary? And is it only the reactions that are involuntary? Or is it the thoughts as well?
00:11:12
Speaker
No, well, that's the thing is that it's the thoughts themselves are involuntary, right? But then there's like a second you that is looking at those thoughts and saying, I don't want these. So which one is which one is actually you, you know, there's a third you that exists all of it to you. And that's part of the difference between what we would consider to be cognition versus simply
00:11:36
Speaker
learning to pull in information and then spit it out in a useful way. We all know that me as a human being, I have tiny little cells that are all individually alive as well. It's not like it's an unheard of concept to be made of many parts and especially internally.
00:11:57
Speaker
So I mean, it's just incredible, but it's it's just an interesting I know I find it I find it very fascinating that the
00:12:07
Speaker
The brain can almost be tricked in that way, right? Being a scientist in the Boston area for a little while. I have a lot of friends that work in biology or in medical technology and things like that. And so one of the most interesting series of tests that have been going on relatively recently at least is the ability to shock the brain, literally shock the brain to cause different experiences to occur to someone.
00:12:34
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And a lot of and a lot of these things happen. A lot of these things happen by accident. We find out. So one one really famous one that happened not very long ago. And this actually didn't happen in Boston. This one happened in I think Alberta, Canada or somewhere in Canada, maybe Ottawa. I want to be happy. We can just name every area of
00:12:54
Speaker
I don't know.
00:13:14
Speaker
and change the way that the brain responds to the stimuli, or maybe even to find what portion of the brain it is that's causing the epileptic seizures to occur. Do you know what I mean? Because if they don't know what structure it is, they may not know how to treat it. What they found, though, was when they were supplying this voltage to this woman's brain, at a certain area of the brain, she would notice basically shadow people, the dark figures in the room with her, kind of like the MC you were talking about. Right. Right?
00:13:44
Speaker
she would notice that that was occurring to her. And at another different area of the brain, this was the same researcher, I'm sure it was with a different person, but I mean, who knows? They claimed to be able to see, you know, like the tunnel of light that people say they see when they die, right? That you're going to heaven or whatever.
00:14:04
Speaker
I'm Jonathan. And I'm Gabriel. And we here at Breaking Math are big on many things. We're big on math, we're big on science, and we're big on learning. Today, we are very excited to introduce our new sponsor, Brilliant.org, because they are big on the same things that we are. Brilliant is an amazing resource for anyone who, like you, loves to learn.
00:14:24
Speaker
This partnership means a lot to us. I'd like to say off script that we know that our goal here is to teach people. I used to be a tutor and teaching people is one of the greatest joys I've ever had. And Brilliant really jives my worldview. So back on script, the best way to learn math is through active problem solving and Brilliant.org emphasizes that a lot.
00:14:45
Speaker
The other day I was working through the course called The Joy of Problem Solving and I was really impressed with the visuals which helped those who are struggling to master math. When I started the quiz called Flipping Pairs, I was really surprised that I could actually interact with the image and that helped me to really work on my intuition to solve the problem.
00:15:05
Speaker
And if you ever get stuck, you could just say, show me the solution, click on that button. They provide some really, really nice scaffoldings to help you get a good grasp of the concepts to use and then work with them and then get through the quiz.
00:15:19
Speaker
So I will just say you have to check this website out. Go to www.brilliant.org slash breakingmath, which lets them know that we sent you. You've got to check it out guys. It is great. It really is. And now onto the rest of the episode.
00:15:39
Speaker
The patient basically had an out-of-body experience. Well, when they almost die. Nobody says that when they die. Right. Of course, yeah. You'll never guess what I saw. No, when they almost die. You mentioned briefly a second ago that there's a third you. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you meant by that? What I meant was the social you. The you that exists as a representation. That's a concept.
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, but I don't think there's a difference between the concept and the thing. There is a difference, I think, because the concept can't do anything. If there is a third one, which is just the conceptual one, that one isn't actually real, but we need it in order to categorize things in the world in our mental frameworks that we develop.
00:16:28
Speaker
See, that's not what I meant. You should check out. What I meant was the you that exists in the brains of people around you. When they talk about you, that conception changes. It's dynamic.
Philosophical Concepts of 'The Other' and Ego
00:16:40
Speaker
Oh, that's interesting. And the reason why I say that is because, Chris, you did not come up with CBT. Somebody else came up with it, and that's part of this extended you, this sort of... Yes, yes, yes, yes. That is actually very, very interesting.
00:16:55
Speaker
Well, that's part of one really famous concept in philosophy is, this is famous specifically in existentialism, is the concept of the other, right? Of how other people relate to you. It's the Russians. That's kind of what you were getting at, I think. I think that's very interesting.
00:17:13
Speaker
the sense of how do we, because we don't always think of it that way, right? I mean, I think most people, when they think of their life, it's very easy to consider yourself to be the star of your own show. Right, yeah. In order to understand other people's points of view, you have to experience something called ego loss, and I think we're all probably, and usually people will try to induce that with things like LSD in a scientific, so they have control studies where they'll do
00:17:41
Speaker
or they have before in the 70s where they would do, try to induce ego loss so that people could experience what it's like to see themselves in like third person, is not the main character of the universe. And it's a very interesting experience, I would imagine. Yeah, it's just super fascinating. I mean, yeah, I would never have, and see, that's the thing. I don't think, I don't think any of us, I mean, Jonathan, you did, you brought it up, but I don't think if you had not brought that up, I don't think the three of the rest of us would have thought of that had we been talking the rest of the night. Absolutely not, no.
00:18:11
Speaker
A social understanding of yourself is very bizarre. In passing, I think we all think, what other people think of me? But we don't stop to think about, oh, that is a form of Seth. The way that Chris sees Seth is Seth. It's interesting.
00:18:28
Speaker
Right. And we also, we also don't tend to think of ourselves. I mean, that's, again, we're getting, we're getting deep into philosophy. But aren't there like infinite Seths because nobody else's concept of Seth is the same as the other person's concept of Seth, including Seth's.
00:18:46
Speaker
Oh, okay. It's the coastline of Britain, infinite. It's a fractal question. The limit, the limit is Seth approaches infinity is equal to, we're getting there. The recursive set. Seth is going to say that might've been a joke for Jonathan and I.
00:19:05
Speaker
And like five other listeners who were like, haha, limit jokes. Although in my mind, you meta listeners are laughing, so that's great. Congratulations. All names been obsessed are laughing also. Oh yeah, when Chris, you're talking about obsessive obsessions and compulsions or whatever. Is that what they're called? Yeah.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's what they're called, yeah. I suffer from a similar thing called intrusive thoughts, which are, I think, different because the content of them is intrinsically something that should, if it were to exist, be feared. I'm only comfortable talking about the violent ones. So I have the same thing. It's all within the same
00:19:49
Speaker
I think for me when I first noticed it as a thing that other people didn't have was when we were reading John Paul Sartre in Freshman Existentialism.
00:20:01
Speaker
And it was like, and he mentions the story of the housewife who's sitting in the parlor of her home looking out the window, and she thinks to herself, I could jump out the window at this moment. Yeah, Chris, I was going to say that. That's the human condition. Everyone experienced it. They call it the call of the void. It's the sign of protection, right?
00:20:22
Speaker
Right. The difference is that when other people have those thoughts, it does not distress them for hours. But that's, well, that's the thing though. That's how, that's part, I mean, if you believe in this kind of idea of like social or psychology, psychological conditioning or whatever,
00:20:45
Speaker
That's the trick. The trick that it does, the reason that it happens is that your brain is, you know, not making enough chemicals somehow, or making too much or whatever it is. I've never really gone into the biochemistry part of it too hard. But it's basically this idea that when other people have an intrusive thought, it doesn't recur. So like, it's kind of like that, you know, everyone at home listening, I want you to not think about red elephants.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's never going to happen. Are you not thinking about them? Well, there we go. Oh, we're doing word tricks now. I see how it is. Insert air horns.
Intrusive Thoughts and Anxiety Management
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's that trick of other people when they hear, don't think about red elephants, they will think about it once and then maybe they'll move on in a couple of minutes.
00:21:34
Speaker
for someone with an anxiety like this or intrusive thoughts like dealing with those things that it's a problem for them, it'll just keep coming back. And what it ends up turning out is that the longer that you try to make yourself feel better about the thought or its contents or even just having thought or whatever, the more you'll think about it because you're like, you know, well, I'm not going to think about red elephants. I would never buy a red elephant.
00:21:57
Speaker
You know what I mean? Why am I thinking about red elephants? Like, red? Red's so stupid, that's such an ugly color. And elephants are ugly, I don't even like elephants. And then, but you're still thinking about it, right? Then it gets worse and worse and worse, too. Right, and it ramps up. It kind of, the intensity of it kind of crescendos and then goes down and then crescendos again. And so, what ends up being the case is that the best way to
00:22:18
Speaker
stop having that anxious moment, and this is the same way with the Red Elephant's argument, is to think about Red Elephants so much that they become bored. To think about them so much that your body is no longer responding in a fight or flight way, and you come down, and it's very, very similar again.
00:22:39
Speaker
to the idea of neuro-linguistic saturation. You're talking about semantic satiation? Did I say wrong? Like if I say like Clyde, Clyde, Clyde. If you say biscuit too many times, it starts becoming meaningless.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's very similar to that actually. And it's almost, I like to think of it as like working out a muscle or something, right? The longer you work it out, the less pain there's going to be in you lifting up a certain weight. You know what I mean? Yeah. I used to have this friend, Brianna, and the first time I had a thought about strangling her to death, I was like eight years old at the mall. So every time I went to the mall, I thought about strangling her to death.
00:23:18
Speaker
And it was extremely, extremely bad. Like, it distressed me. And then I started having the thought that when I wasn't at the mall, anytime I was near like a shopping center, and then anytime I hung out with her, and it got worse and worse.
00:23:32
Speaker
So that happens to everyone, but it bothers you and it's persistent to you, right? Is that what you're saying? Because obviously I've been, you know, next to a very high cliff and say, wow, I could definitely throw myself off of this and I would, I would be dead. And honestly, that's your brain telling you that you're in control of the situation and to not do that because it's not safe. So if I'm hearing you right, it's that it's persistent and ongoing and it will not leave you alone.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, and your brain just, and because of what I have, which is a schizoaffective disorder, I think it's part of the brain just kind of likes to be creative with really messing with you. So it's like the thoughts get oddly specific. They build upon each other. There's the study that was done where they told people to not say polar bear, or I don't know if it was polar bear, it might've been a different word. It was some kind of animal, but to talk as fast as they could. And on average, they said polar bear several times a minute.
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, so it's just that that's actually called priming, right? So you can do this all the time, like with pretty much anything you can you can actually prime someone's grammar. If you're ever in a room full of people, start a sentence with that I eat is good or something like starting it with a conjunction that is super rare in English. But you'll find that everyone around you will be using it far more than they would ever use it in the normal life because if I if
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah, so you can prime people with any word, so you can go in and say, oh, epiphenomenon. So now, you guys are gonna have epiphenomenon in your brain, and you're gonna find a reason to use it. So like, maybe not now that I've told you that, but that may be a meta prime, who knows. But so that happens, that happens not just with language, but obviously with just concepts at all, like any time you do something, you prime yourself, or if you say, hey, don't do this, you're just priming them to do it.
00:25:16
Speaker
It's a whole concept behind why advertising works at all.
00:25:20
Speaker
Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need this underwear. Me Andi's brought to you by Me Andi's. Use the coupon code blank. Let's leave Me Andi's out of it. My butt has never felt more comfortable, OK? If Me Andi's wants to sponsor my show, I'm going to jump on that deep. Yeah, they're aligned with antimicrobial silver lining. I don't even care. They're like being a silk or something. It's the best feeling in the world.
00:25:46
Speaker
One really, really interesting piece of this that I think... You got me off the top. You got me off my train with me. I'm dying right now. What was it? No, we were talking about intrusive thoughts.
00:26:02
Speaker
I'm back. I'm back with it now. Okay. One really interesting thing with this and this is something that this is something that comes up on my show a lot because we deal with cases where people are seeing things that aren't like normal.
Perception Variations and Logical Thinking
00:26:18
Speaker
They're not average kind of things you experience and there's always the question of well,
00:26:23
Speaker
You know, oh, that that person must have been having a hallucination or something. And it's like the idea that that hallucinations are much less common than we than they actually are or misremembering things. Right. And that comes down to this concept of we don't really talk to other people about how we think. Right. I mean, before at the very beginning, Seth, you said, well, you don't think in words.
00:26:49
Speaker
Right? Right. And I immediately thought, oh crap, I do think in words. No, no. Do you think in words? You know what I mean? I mean, I understand. Yeah, but like, here's the thing. To clarify a little bit for the folks at home and for everybody, for us, just for the sake of conversation, I'm not saying it's impossible to say words in your brain.
00:27:08
Speaker
You can, but when you think you do not think in words, people can think without language, right? And, you know, it's like, you know, deaf people don't think in sign language. There's an experiment I'd like to bring up where they put two sheets up like walls. They were white or some color. Then they put two sheets to make it a box, and these two are reds. They have red, white, red, white as a box.
00:27:36
Speaker
Hm.
00:27:59
Speaker
Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, I actually find, so I have always thought, and this is again something very interesting, right? I have always thought that I think much more clearly when I say the things in my head, and actually even sometimes visualize the words themselves or the functions, the math of what I'm thinking about, than if I try to do it visually. Yeah, it's like rubber duck programming. Yeah, like I have a, but that's something that,
00:28:28
Speaker
So I, okay. When I was a, I have two stories that kind of go to this. When I was a kid, I used to hate sleeping in my aunt Janice's house because when they turned the lights off in her, in her, in the guest room, whenever she lived in Jersey and I grew up in New York. And so in New York, when you turn the lights off in your house, it's still like, you can still read at night. You know what I mean? Because like it's bright. There's, there's, it's never dark in New York. You know what I mean?
00:28:57
Speaker
but in Jersey, she lived like in a forest and it was pitch black. And so at nighttime when they would shut the lights off, I would, uh, I would see, um, almost like I would see stars. Do you know what I mean? Um, and it's actually, it actually turns out it's a, what happened?
00:29:20
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It turns out it's a relatively common phenomena, right? That children, when they close their eyes or even when they sit up, and adults too, right? I mean, if you rub your eyes, you'll see what I was seeing. I do that on purpose all the time. It's fun. It is fun, right? But it's just kind of like a weird trick of the brain that happens to some people. You know what I mean? But when I was a kid, I was like, oh, good. I'm going blind.
00:29:49
Speaker
You know what I mean? You don't know what's going on. You're like eight years old, you're in a terrifying forest in the middle of Jersey. Terrifying as, you know what I mean? Like, it was scary, right? And it wasn't not scary for me until I was like 13 and we had the internet and I googled it, or I'd not even googled it, I'd probably like asked what you used it or something. Horrible, you know what I mean? Disgusting.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah, I know what it will feel man. Gross. But I had another experience like that when I was older in grad school. We were we were all out at a bar. It was like all the first year students and we were all talking about like what our favorite music was and whatever. And a friend of mine at the bar with us was like I actually can't like I don't get music like he his brain doesn't when he listens to music his brain does not
00:30:42
Speaker
get the melody. He can tell you what the beat of the music is just as like a factual thing. Yeah. Right. But he can't like he can listen to a jingle or a song. He can't whistle the song back to you. Well, I think that's yeah. I mean, you know that like I have a I have a couple of I have a friend who's getting his a PhD in or his PhD in music theory or finished up the Masters pursuing his PhD. And we have a couple of episodes where we talk about that.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so much
00:31:14
Speaker
theory, I mean not theory, I'm so sorry, there's so much social, there's such a huge social component to how we register music. There have been experiments in like sort of non, no contact tribal zones where they would play for like indigenous people in, you know, Brazil. And they would play, he mentioned one specific instance where they played the theme from Psycho. And the villagers thought it was like a very exciting celebratory song because it was like very fast, like the only thing they perceived.
00:31:42
Speaker
Right? It's just like, why is a minor chord sad? Well, it's social. It's not inherently sad. These things are just rectivoles. The early Christian music from the first and second centuries AD, like a second and third, or I can't remember, one of those early centuries AD was all done in like minor chords and it was supposed to be joyous.
00:32:04
Speaker
Of course, right, and you can have sad major key music, and he showed me lots of it. It's very mind-blowing at the massive similarities that linguistic system or language and music have, and how also incredibly divergent they are, because I do think that music is an epiphenomenon that sort of emerged with cognition, but language, I believe, is we have a mechanism that allows us to use that, because no other animals can.
00:32:31
Speaker
So I actually had a question. Sorry, Stephanie, I don't mean to be stepping on your hosting toes here. I actually had a question for you, for you two other podcast hosts here. Stephanie too, of course. You're hosting this podcast. I'm hosting this one podcast, yes. You're phenomenal. It's going great. You're doing a great time. Really going good. So, okay.
00:32:56
Speaker
We said it would be organic eventually, you just had to light the spark. Okay, so language and math are both their own symbolic or representative methods of some facts of the world or some way of representing the world as we find it into repeatable and sensible kind of little bits, right? Now, one very interesting question that always comes up, and it's something actually that I think
00:33:26
Speaker
We got close to it with the discussion about, can you think? So you argued that you could think without words, right? You could think without language. I agree with you there that you could think without language. However, is there an age? Is there a point where you can no longer teach someone?
00:33:50
Speaker
these sorts of languages, whether it be mathematics or it be if you've never introduced the concept.
00:33:58
Speaker
Feral children have no ability. Exactly. I was thinking of cases of feral children. There's only one that's very well studied. And I'm going to let you finish the question, because I'm really, really curious to see what it is. But in that particular study, there's a lot of ethical issues we couldn't follow up. But it seems that after the critical age, which is somewhere between the ages, for phonology, it's six months. So crazy, crazy young. And then for syntax or grammar, it's from seven to 11 years old.
00:34:26
Speaker
And then you can notice it. So if you have a child, you'll probably will notice at the point when they're about seven years old, when I said they started using grammar correctly, or like wrong, that means that they're no longer acquiring language. Right, where they start not using grammar. They start learning, right? Exactly.
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah. So when they do it, when they do it, when they use bad grammar, it means that they are learning. They have, they are hearing you do things, uh, as with a pattern. And then they start doing that until then they acquire it. They have no effort in learning it at all. So when they do it bad, they're learning and everybody deserves a trophy, you millennial. I'm just kidding.
00:35:02
Speaker
It's also – it's also – no, no, no, no. You know, it's funny. I'm going to go out and get on a soapbox for two seconds and I will say it's completely useless to correct the grammar of anyone if the language is understood. It doesn't help them and it doesn't help you, especially children. So if a children said, I goad, there is no reason to tell them when. They are just going to hear you say goad again.
00:35:28
Speaker
It's irrelevant. They will learn it naturally. It's a social thing. But once they've acquired language, they already have it. So when they do things like goad, that's just your brain going through the process of applying the rules that they're hearing you use, with other words.
00:35:44
Speaker
Hmm. Well, so I guess what I was gonna what I was gonna ask is yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I I'm always thinking about because I like you know, I I kind of taught at the graduate level a little bit I tutored for a long time different subjects and whatever and The question I always have is with with say mathematics, right we introduce the concept of a number of
00:36:09
Speaker
very early, right? I mean, when a kid's learning how to count, they're probably five or six, right? Babies know how to recognize groupings of up to a few. Groupings.
00:36:21
Speaker
Okay, so, yeah, in some ways, I mean, numbering of things and labeling of things, both of those are kind of intrinsic, right? I would argue. Yeah, yeah, you can
Language and Math as Symbolic Systems
00:36:31
Speaker
illustrate that. Like, I know Daniel Everett, he's like super duper controversial because most of them think he's, you know, just full of crap. I mean, I'm one of them, but there are some interesting components. He studied this language in South America called, like, piranha or something like, and,
00:36:46
Speaker
It's apparently doesn't have a future or past tense and it also doesn't have any system of counting. So they say like it but here's to really illustrate at home. Do you genuinely believe that because they don't have words for numbers that they don't understand the concept that they have three children like they know there's
00:37:10
Speaker
Children, children, child, child, child. No one. Of course not. Concepts are before language. You don't think in labels, right? You think in concepts. But right. So here's the thing. Here's here's the well, here's the part that I was kind of. Yeah. I'm really, really, really interested in Jonathan's answer here.
00:37:30
Speaker
is because like I use math every day, definitely math is like a, you know, whatever, my PhD might as well have been in math, right? Engineering is just applied to math ultimately at a certain level.
00:37:43
Speaker
I would wonder, I would think, I always think of functions and things like calculus and trigonometry and things like that, anything that uses functions. I always think of functions as similar to the grammar of a language of numbers, right? That functions are like a language. And so I always wonder why when we teach children math, children to young adults, mathematics, we introduce the concept of
00:38:13
Speaker
Numbers first I guess it's like introducing the concept of letters first, but we never we don't even touch functions really until they're in I mean middle school to High school right to me. It's it's it's almost as if
00:38:30
Speaker
The first 10 to 11 years of your life, you just learned letters and how letters go together to make words, right? But you never learned how to put them into a sentence to usefully represent something. Do you know what I mean?
00:38:49
Speaker
So I actually do I actually wonder then about the ability because there are a lot of adults who do can't think in terms of mathematical functions. Well, I would argue that someone who's been trained someone who's been and I think I don't know. I guess I just I just always wonder that like, you know, when I try to explain to my mom.
00:39:10
Speaker
You know, like, I don't know, velocity or something, right? Or she'll, she'll listen to my podcast and she'll ask about some math thing I've said or something else. And I'll try to explain it to her. And she's just like, well, I just, I don't get it. Like I can't, I don't see like a graph in my brain. I can't, you know what I mean? Yeah, exactly.
00:39:27
Speaker
Well, and I want to just really, really super quick. I don't know if it's a direct parallel because going back to acquiring versus learning, like whenever you say what you just described, like it would be as if we were learning letters to put together and make words, but never actually have like a functioning thing. That's acquired. We already know that. So what you're learning in school is like orthography.
00:39:50
Speaker
I'd like to say something about the way that mathematics is acquired, having taught brilliant students and having taught students who I wish had better teachers before me, because it seems that something does cement for math learning. There's this 24-year-old who I taught, who's the girlfriend of a good friend of mine a long time ago, and she could not comprehend what multiplication was. I had to teach her with pebbles.
00:40:17
Speaker
she never got that. So then you have that side of the spectrum. Then you have, I think, the average side of the spectrum where people understand things like I think that it's for me, the way that I experience mathematics is I don't think it's applicable to everybody because first of all, I was taught it at a very early age. So there's some kind of weird, synesthetic part of me that thinks about like rotating
00:40:44
Speaker
like rotating masses and cubes that transform into circles. Like for example with exponential function, I think about the feeling of compression mixed with the look of a sphere. So that's not relatable.
00:40:59
Speaker
So I think that you can have thought outside. So when I manipulate these things and when I design algorithms, I'm doing them completely outside of verbal stuff. I'm using some other weird kind of thing. But then the question is, can that be reduced to a verbal concept or is it less than a verbal concept or am I fooling myself into thinking that I'm not using words when I do this?
00:41:28
Speaker
So that's really interesting. I mean, I, yeah, I always, I guess that's the, I guess that is part of the, I mean, we kind of came full circle back to that original point of, you know, in the eighties and nineties, it was kind of in vogue to talk about visual learners versus auditory learners and whatever. Right.
00:41:45
Speaker
is probably part of the reason why we've been given the monstrosity of PowerPoint presentations. It's like trying to merge the worlds together in a weird way. But whenever I try to teach someone applied mathematics,
00:42:01
Speaker
for engineering courses or something, I always try to start by talking about how the graphs of the things look or how the functions themselves fit together logically.
00:42:18
Speaker
This is just the rate of change of concentration with time or or position with time or velocity with time or whatever Right when you're trying to get to a higher a higher level and then that's what a derivative or an integral will do and you know I mean like I it's I take a little bit opposite of approach when I'm teaching Sure, and I try to let them know why they should care about it first like for example with matrices I say
00:42:44
Speaker
First of all, a matrix is a bunch of rows and columns of numbers and then just forget that for now because we're not going to talk about that for a while. And then I tell them, imagine a sphere. It's spinning around and it's made out of a liquid. So when it spins, it goes outward. So you have this sort of flat sphere. That's what a matrix does to a sphere. And then we go from there back to the numbers. Interesting. That is an extremely applicable and really good
00:43:14
Speaker
That's an awesome man. I got shivers just now, dude. I'm not even kidding. I'm totally nerding out right now. That's amazing. That's a really, really great explanation for man. Is logic a voluntary kind of thinking?
Voluntary Logic and Decision-Making
00:43:32
Speaker
Or is it involuntary, like we said, other thoughts are? It's kind of taking it back to what we were talking about way before.
00:43:40
Speaker
There's an experiment. Is logic voluntary? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, like is logical thinking, is that a voluntary process or is it something that you've kind of trained your brain to do and that you're doing it involuntarily? I'd say needs the water training.
00:43:56
Speaker
Yeah. Can any of us honestly say, sorry, sorry, I was just, can any of us honestly say that if someone, like if, if the rock came up to you and like spit on your shoes, can you, can you honestly say you wouldn't get extremely angry?
00:44:15
Speaker
And not be like, and not be like, well, logically the rock can murder me right now with his bare hands. And so I mean, although the rock I've heard is a very nice man. Like can, can any of us really say that we have disengaged at like the angry
00:44:31
Speaker
Gorilla part of the popularity of gambling and there is the empirical results of this game There's a hundred dollars in a pot. You could either take all the money or wait Oh, no, there's a hundred dollars in the pot and what look let me start over. There's a plate
00:44:49
Speaker
There's a hundred dollars in a pot and then there's the put one dollar on the plate You either take it or wait until the other person takes their turn and then the other person would get two dollars And then if they wait you get three dollars and so on the most logical choice is to get you the highest Expected amount of money is to take the very first dollar and not let the other person try at all because then you have a chance of losing but most people when they try this out don't do that they wait to get the money and
00:45:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, and well, I think of it this way, too, like it's okay, I'll give you a disgusting example. So let's say I logically understand that if I eat five cans of Vienna sausages filled with Tabasco sauce, that it's going to be empty calories and that I shouldn't do that because of my goal of losing fat.
00:45:36
Speaker
But I want those Vienna sausages and eat them anyway, even though I logically understand the consequences. So yeah, I think it is voluntary. I think you have to, it takes quite a bit of training, like you guys have said, that logic is not something that is just innate or that it's, well, you know what, now that I think about it, I don't know. It might be innate and we just need training to use it. Seth, I have a question for you. Yeah, let's have it. Why did you eat six cans of the Vienna sausage?
00:46:05
Speaker
It was only five. It was only five, Jonathan, for goodness sake. No, no, it's okay. Since I was in seventh grade, it's so weird because it reminds me of being in poverty, and I wasn't ever really in poverty to begin with, but I would eat a Vienna sauce. I have no idea. I get these weird cravings for like nasty canned meats, and it's disgusting, and there's no reason for it. Goodness. Yeah, no, no, and it's so weird because I'm a big fan of like spam, you know?
00:46:29
Speaker
And I don't have to eat these things. It's not due to anything. It's like, I'll go follow, I'll be like going down the aisle and I'll just be like, okay, well, let me just get some Vienna sausages and fill them up with Tabasco sauce and eat that. And I don't know why I do it, y'all, so that's. What a time. Yeah, it's. What a time to be alive. What a time to be alive indeed. Can buy tiny sausages and cans. That's right. So actually, you were, Jonathan, your story was reminding me of, I saw a really funny,
00:46:57
Speaker
a really funny, well, funny kind of funny video, and it's based on, I guess, actually kind of a relatively, I think this study was done on a more serious scale, but anyways, the idea is you have kids in a room, and each kid you put a marshmallow in front of them, and you tell them, if you can wait a minute, I'll give you another marshmallow, or you can have that marshmallow now,
00:47:23
Speaker
And the kids will invariably pick the one marshmallow now. Really? Well, the ones who don't have better success later in life. Is that what this study is? Yeah, they tested them 10 years later and checked their bank accounts and stuff. Oh, OK, OK. Well, let me ask this. Do you guys think that it's that immediate sort of satiation is innate
00:47:54
Speaker
Okay, all right, cool. I'd say that there's... I'm sorry, there's a lag in the conversation. No, no, no, yeah, yeah, there is. This has actually been demonstrated, I can't remember through which experiment, but there's an innate amount of interest that we have as human beings that we put on experiences. So let's say you have a very high interest, a very high rate of interest, then waiting is going to be difficult for you.
00:48:12
Speaker
and that logic is something we pick up. I'd say it's more nuanced than that.
00:48:21
Speaker
So if you have a low rate of interest, that's where you even, like that's when you, and this is when your situation where you apply math without even knowing it. Also when you catch a ball, you're doing differential calculus, but that's beside the point.
00:48:34
Speaker
Right, and I was gonna, are we talking about formal logic or are we talking about sort of the layman understanding of logic? I mean, so the problem with this kind of argument is that we always, this gets into what's called the naturalist fallacy. The naturalist fallacy is, I'm sure as you guys all know, and this is just for, you know, for everyone who may not, the naturalist fallacy is
00:49:03
Speaker
Basically, it's called the is-ought problem. Because something is a certain way, it ought to be that way. So we've always eaten meat, so we ought to eat meat.
00:49:15
Speaker
Right? It's kind of like you ascribe a moral claim, a normative moral claim to a factual thing about the way the world is and assume since that's the way it's been, it must be the right way or the good way, right? It's the way things should be. Now, on the other side of that, I think we're edging kind of close to the idea that
00:49:42
Speaker
It's what's called a just so story, which is we look at the way
00:49:48
Speaker
we have two assumptions coming into it. The first assumption is that we are animals who are natural things, right? So we get free will out of the equation, let's say. And then the second part of that assumption would be that the way that we do things now is logical, is the right, or not logical, let's say. The other assumption then made is that because these things are the way they are now, they must be the right way.
00:50:15
Speaker
right? And if they're the right way, it's because they are the biological way, right? So it's kind of this argument like, you know, why does Billy play acoustic guitar? Oh, because, you know, acoustic guitar gets all the ladies and then therefore Billy will be able to pass on his genes and it's better for the species. It's that kind of silly argument, right? Where you, you take a macro scale social thing, and you turn it into a biological construct,
00:50:41
Speaker
Right? Or you try to explain it using biology when really the two things are so far apart that there's no causal shame left.
00:50:53
Speaker
Oh, God. Well, so what I was going to say is, just quick, what I was going to say is that arguing then that logic is intrinsic or logic is biological, I think kind of edges us kind of close to that problem of saying that because we currently, what is logical?
00:51:16
Speaker
whatever we say it is exactly and so we turn it into like you know if we were utilitarians then we would argue that the logical choice would always be the pragmatic one and then therefore that is a that is what biology has told us to do right if we were nihilists or people who believed that humans are innately selfish then we would say that the selfish choice is always a logical one and therefore the right choice or the one that biology would tell us to make you know what i mean so it's kind of like a
00:51:46
Speaker
It's almost axiomatic. Exactly. Like logic is itself a byproduct of our time and our culture and whatever. And so at least how we think of logic is a byproduct of all these other things. I would argue that categorization is innate to us.
00:52:03
Speaker
I would argue that counting is innate to us. I would argue that that recognition of patterns is innate to us, right? And all of those things eventually I do think lead to something like logic, like a deductive process. Do you know what I mean?
00:52:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they do, right? But I would argue, though, that subscribing a specific logical system to that is probably a bridge too far, you know? Yeah, I tend to agree with that. And I've spoken to, just to exemplify this, I've actually used this example, Stephanie, I think, but I'll use it with you guys and hope you haven't heard me say it.
00:52:43
Speaker
To you said that it's sort of a it's an innate thing to our brains love to categorize and I think that is true because you can you find this in language all the time and and just cognition so Okay, so there's there's a sport where you have this round orange ball right and what is that called? I Feel like I mean tricked
00:53:04
Speaker
No, no. This is very straightforward. So it's a sport and there is a ball that is used in it. It's very large and orange. I'm going to put my head out and say, um, basketball.
00:53:18
Speaker
That's correct. It's a basketball. And whenever you think of a basketball, typically we think sports, right? We think the sport of basketball. However, if you are on a sinking ship and there is nothing in the room but this round orange object, is that still a basketball used only for sports?
00:53:42
Speaker
Mmm, I see what you're saying. Right, so... So you were tricking us. So concepts, right? Just at the end. Just at the end. This kind of comes full circle back to our idea of like, okay, words or concepts, you know, like, are they stagnant or are they not? Of course they're not, because you can change something you fundamentally understand into a different category and it becomes something fundamentally different.
00:54:06
Speaker
I mean, I think that this question even edges upon tangentially questions like, do real numbers exist in the universe?
Philosophical Debates on Concepts and Truth
00:54:15
Speaker
Yeah. Exactly right. Exactly.
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah, somewhere out there, there's like a floating, a giant golden E. There's a giant, there's a giant gamma with, you know, gamma function of whatever floating out there like, you'll never be able to solve me. If you take a Viking crystal and shoot a particle at it, then you get like an intrinsic square root. And then how does that exist in the universe? And that just trips me out.
00:54:47
Speaker
I know all that honestly the that's a topic that we keep like I have a list of topics that I want to do that I know are going to take me far too long to do and like nestled right there in between you know between like the Mothman sightings and like and and other you know nuts stuff that we talk about on my show there is our numbers intrinsic right that whole thing about you find
00:55:16
Speaker
you know, just people finding the fact that circles or hexagons are a common shape because they're the most, you know, surface tension-wise, they're the most efficient use of energy in space. Well, Chomsky, in a documentary, I think it's called, Is the Tall Man Happy? I don't know if it's someone that likes it or not.
00:55:35
Speaker
It's a good one. Yeah, so he illustrates this at this point and kind of on the same note of what you're saying is that it's all these things as hard of a science as math is like it's these heart it's this the pinnacle of like objectivity right and even at that point it's still axiomatic you it still only exists because we make it that way right or we recognize it that way and so Chomsky thinks that we're stuck in the same way as
00:56:00
Speaker
He illustrated, he said that before gravity was understood, our explanation for the scientific reason an apple falls from a tree is because it must, because it desires to fall to the tree. And that's not detailed enough, and then we learned about gravity, and we understand that gravity works, I guess technically not invariably, but pretty darn close, right? It's pretty important law. So he thinks that we're stuck thinking in the same way that people before Newton
00:56:27
Speaker
thought about science. I don't think Chomsky learned how to program computers. I don't think Chomsky learned to program computers. Computer logic is so different. I mean, like, it's almost super mathematical.
00:56:41
Speaker
He is, no, absolutely, because he is like, he literally is a linguistic theorist. All he does, he's brilliant. And he has some really insane works on just like, just why we think and stuff like that. But it's like, he ultimately sits in a chair and says, this is the way it is. Whereas applied linguists would be like, well, judging from our descriptive experiments, or objectively, that might not be the case. He's like, yeah, but it's logical.
00:57:06
Speaker
right so that brings us back yeah it's sort of it's sort of like in the philosophy of science there's a very famous famous logician named Ludwig Wittgenstein oh i know Wittgenstein he is the bane of my free yeah man i mean bring him up with linguistics all the time like this is not applicable
00:57:22
Speaker
He thinks he's a linguist and he was. I was going to say, he's probably the art generation's hot philosopher, I would say. If Nietzsche was the 60s and 70s push-off kind of philosophy guy, I think Wittgenstein is the art generation's.
00:57:45
Speaker
Pasha philosophy guy, but he has this really interesting quote that I he's got a number of very interesting quotes But one of one of my favorites is it comes from the track TARDIS Which is his famous kind of like treaties on logic and basically he comes to a point where he says that of which we know not we cannot speak and
00:58:04
Speaker
And basically he makes the argument that of things that we can't measure, of things that we can't logically come to, like this question of consciousness, we just shouldn't say anything because we can't even start, right? How can you start on, if you're starting on the grounds of a priori knowledge, without any experience or anything else to back it up, then you're kind of already up Schitt's Creek because, excuse my language,
00:58:29
Speaker
Oh, but, you know, you're already stuck without a paddle. You're like, you know, you have nothing else to hold on to and everything becomes possible. He's never heard of politicians. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's what kills me. Have you guys heard of the, uh, it's a relatively new fallacy called the Newton's Flaming Laser Sword? That's new. That sounds new. That sounds new. Okay, so it says that if someone brings up a topic that is non-falsifiable, don't talk about it.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's basically what- It's a razor, sorry, it's not a fallacy. Oh, okay. But the- No, yeah, that is, I don't know why they don't call that Popper's dictum or something. Yeah, well, yeah, it's the same shit. So funny. Same stuff, actually. It's like that Vixenstein says, oh, yeah, if you can't talk, if you- I don't know, man, I don't buy that at all. Like, that's the whole point. Well, also, it's a very-
00:59:16
Speaker
I mean, if Godel's incompleteness theorem at the universe, is it statistical or not, et cetera, I'm sure you could make up my response from those two things.
00:59:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite philosophers of science is Karl Popper. And basically, that's the argument he makes for whether or not something is scientific or scientifically valid. Or how does science happen in the real world, right? And his argument is that it happens by falsifying currently held beliefs, right? Science is like a chipping away. I just use this analogy in another thing, right?
00:59:53
Speaker
It's in another interview. It's a chipping away of falsehoods till we get to something like the truth.
01:00:01
Speaker
Right. Right. Something like the truth. That's an important distinction for the folks at home, is that the scientists will never say, this is true. This is true as we know it now. Right. I mean, saying the people who think that there's absolute truth. People can't. There's a hard T truth out there. But see, the thing is, to think that there's a hard T truth, I would argue is logical, but it's not science. Right. It's like science can't exist that way. It can't. You can't say this. We figured it out. That's the universe. Well, I would say science can science can like
01:00:30
Speaker
point to the hard T truth, but it can't actually ever get to it. Well, that's the idea, right? It's the howls, not the whys. Right. So then the people assuming that there's a hard T truth are equally as logical as people assuming that there isn't one, right?
01:00:46
Speaker
Yeah, but it's also like, but it's, that's also like that silly, what was that silly argument that floated around the internet for a little bit? That was like one plus one doesn't equal two. And it was like using some weird, it was using some like weird series expansion or something.
01:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, it was like it was something weird like that, but it's like the same thing I mean if you're at a point where your theory has been proven or has worked 99.9999% of the time you know what I mean right every time and and you're just waiting for that next time for it to be false it makes it very hard to say that this is still just an idea or that you know I mean like
01:01:27
Speaker
My, uh, one of my chemistry teachers used to say that the proof is in the pudding. You know, that was like his thing every time we're talking about quantum stuff. Well, whenever, whenever we talked about quantum, so we were, this was a class that I took with him on, on the use of quantum mechanics to, to determine things about chemicals from their infrared spectrum and other kinds of spectrums. And we'd come to, you know, there's a certain point in that class, you can only ever solve one equation in that class.
01:01:54
Speaker
Because once you get to the next form of that equation, it becomes impossible. You need a computer.
Quantum Math and Scientific Proofs
01:02:00
Speaker
So if you're teaching... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you're trying to solve the potential function... Oh, the infinite well. Yeah, yeah. If you're trying to solve the infinite well for a single electron atom, then you're okay. But once you get to two, it becomes, you know, too computationally difficult for you to do it by hand, right? And so the...
01:02:20
Speaker
He would just kind of be like, okay, well, how do we know it works? All this math's too complicated. Well, the proof's in the pudding. And then he would take out his laser pointer and like shine it at your face. He'd be like, look lasers, we have lasers, it works. But it's really, yeah, I think it's true. And it's, yeah, there's nothing to it. I didn't get the laser thing. I thought you just... It certainly does not. Like to shine lasers in people's faces.
01:02:56
Speaker
that what you're perceiving in your context is actually true, like that your perception of reality is correct. Because maybe things work in this little thing we've made up, but maybe that's not really what's going on at all. Yes, the idea of descriptive parameters, right? Like the rules that we follow because we're already following. Well, on that question, I always like to joke that Descartes came up with that same problem once.
01:03:10
Speaker
He kind of probably did too.
01:03:25
Speaker
And he solved it, he solved it in such a way that he was then never able to do anything else useful ever again. Right. You know what I mean? Like, Descartes solved it and was like, well, all I can know is that I exist and I guess I'm retarded.
01:03:41
Speaker
What else can I know? I think that's kind of a problem with most philosophy is that you end up at that point and then you can logically justify ignoring pretty much everything going on.
Impact of Marxism and Capitalism on Perception
01:03:51
Speaker
Oh my goodness. We can do a whole thing on infinitely regressive full philosophical arguments. It drives me crazy. I think that's what I do in my head automatically. That's like my autopilot. I took a course on Marxism
01:04:09
Speaker
in grad school, not in grad school, an undergrad in philosophy because it was considered like, it's still considered and it really was a phenomenal class. It's considered like one of the best philosophy classes at UNH and probably one of the best ones on the East Coast, I'd imagine, at least available to people not in like, you know, super crazy, super fancy colleges or whatever. And like, and it's taught by a philosopher who actually has his own podcast or he did have his own podcast and he still does it.
01:04:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was on New Hampshire NPR for a while. Oh, no way. I should see if he's still interested in peeing on a podcast. Yeah, I'm kidding. Anyways, he's awesome. His name is Nick Smith. He teaches at UNH, too. He's famous for the philosophy of apologies.
01:04:58
Speaker
Actually, and like, what does an apology actually mean? What is it worth? You know what I mean? Anyways, this Marxism course there was like, it's famous at the school because you take it and he's so effective at arguing from the position of like, capitalism is evil and capitalism is making you think the things that you think. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's almost like being outside the matrix.
01:05:26
Speaker
but like you're in the matrix and you're like everything you're seeing is the matrix and so whatever you say to me that says I'm not in the matrix I can just say you're in the matrix right right that's like ultimate that's ultimately what that argument becomes it's like it's like you know well whatever we only buy uh
01:05:43
Speaker
Lamps we only buy jewelry because you know capitalism telling us to buy jewelry and it's all marketing whatever and you're like well I like this I think the stones are pretty no you only think they're pretty because of capitalism you know what I mean and it becomes this thing we're like for like a year you're taking this course and you're just like every day you're like I don't see any way out of this problem
01:06:03
Speaker
You know what I mean? You're like, I don't see any way out of this argument. And then finally you get to the, you get, you like end of the course and you like have a summer off and you come back and like, you know, you're Nike's and you're, you know, you come back with like a new, uh, you come back with everything. You're like, well, I guess I don't care anymore.
01:06:26
Speaker
I got through the class. I guess the fact that that argument was really hard to refute doesn't matter to us anymore. Well, I guess because you can't perceive or really know or trust anything that you're not actually experiencing immediately. So in the end, the only thing you have is falsifiable evidence in your context, and you can't make legit judgment off of anything but that. Last Tuesday is... Absolutely. What is that?
01:06:52
Speaker
Oh, it just reminds me of last Tuesday where you said the universe was created in all of its places. Everybody with their thoughts in their minds and the trees with their rings in them last Tuesday. Prove him wrong, right? Prove him wrong. Exactly. And that's the thing. I love Elon Musk comes out and is like, or was it the only ones that said we're in a simulation or he thought maybe he was certain of it. He was like the logic behind it was he said because
01:07:21
Speaker
Technology has advanced so quickly and humans die out so fast or they should given our like limited resources that it's almost it's highly highly highly unlikely that we are not in a simulation and he gave something like
01:07:34
Speaker
some kind of fraction like a billionth or something like that. It's like he he could have I know really that argument like you know when that happened like everyone on new on Facebook was like Chris you got this guy like invented a battery battery he just bought the rights to a battery from someone else I think he has a point to
01:07:57
Speaker
I've seen that way before Moscow at the universe as a simulation, is when you see some kind of inconsistencies in mathematical perception like
01:08:05
Speaker
that calculations don't work out exactly the way that you would anticipate them, like the rays of the sun are not at the right angle, or there are things which don't line up the mathematics that we currently have. But I guess the problem I have with that argument, at least, is that it could be then anything. Exactly, yeah. Right? We could be, like Frank Reynolds says, we could be floating around in a turtle's dream. You know what I mean? We might be, exactly, because the money we are being...
Practicality of Simulation Theory
01:08:32
Speaker
That's useless.
01:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, we could be in anything, right? It could be aliens. Giorgio could be right. It could just be aliens. I mean, it's such a silly, ultimately a silly argument. Yeah, it's like conspiracy theory. It's even farther than that. It becomes the point to where it's not useful, which is sort of... No. So can we say that? It's like Occam's razor, right?
01:08:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it becomes like a pragmatic approach. It's like, okay, well, whatever. We're all in a simulation. We got to live in a simulation. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, like I better still go to work because my boss isn't going to take or the guy at McDonald's isn't going to take. No, it's a simulation. Give me a burger. I know what happy is. Unless maybe you're Elon Musk and you show up and you're like, how is this a simulation?
01:09:14
Speaker
You know, go ahead. No, I was just, I'm going to send me a Tesla Elon. Somebody should, because everybody that's my age, I think I'm probably about a decade younger than most of you. It's like huge Elon Musk fan. Oh yeah. I'm actually, I am a huge Elon Musk fan, but I don't get information about simulations based off of Elon Musk theories. Cause I feel like he's like creative in kind of the same way that writers are,
01:09:40
Speaker
creative and then you just take it too far. Like you have one kind of thinking that you're aware of and you take that way too far to the place where everybody else is like, I don't know what's going on here. Well, it's the same. It's the same like, I'm not, I'm obviously not going to go on a political tangent, but it's the same thing like, um, Chomsky is a foundational linguist, right? He came out like the dude is like,
01:10:02
Speaker
So many theories in the 50s that still some of them hold up as much as he's changed them all but he also has these what's it called a Anarcho socialist right and so he talks about this stuff and people believe all of his rhetoric because he's a brilliant linguist. It's very strange So the same thing with Elon Musk for me, right? Is that like yeah, you can I don't believe we're in a simulation but I do want a self-sustaining solar-powered car that I never have to Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean it's it's the myth of the
01:10:32
Speaker
It's the myth of the lab code, right? They seem to be really good at this. Although, everyone should respect my lab code. Everyone's lab code on this particular episode should be respected.
01:10:48
Speaker
Listen if they got a blank for non blanks let logo on their thing About lab coats just random maybe a little bit of a refresher or whatever I wore a lab coat to school as a mad scientist that had legitimate cadaver juice on it. It was my mom's
01:11:17
Speaker
Did we have a proper stopping point cuz I think it's just gonna stop we had what were we talking about we were talking about Halloween and
01:11:30
Speaker
And that's the end of part two if you enjoyed these episodes you could support blank for non blank at patreon.com slash blank for non blank or you could continue to support breaking math at breaking math podcast comm slash blank for non blank and For more content from blank for non blank you could subscribe at the link found at tiny URL comm slash battery horse Thank you and keep breaking math