Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Masimo, this is a very special episode. This is going to be twice our normal length.

And yeah, I know. Sorry to break it to you.

We are going to also forego our usual rationally speaking packs because we have so much to cover. So what's happening? So this is our first open mic episode. So it's kind of an experiment we wanted to do.

We asked our readers on the rationally speaking blog and listeners of the podcast to submit questions that they were wondering about, that they wanted to know our opinion of. And we got a pretty good crop of questions.

I got to say, you guys do not buy any punches. I think one of our easiest questions was about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Well, that's the answer is easy. As we know, it's 42, right? Right. So it's one of the easiest. No, this is a serious list of questions, and we'd really better get started because we have a whole lot of ground in philosophy, science and logic to cover in the next.

I'm sure it'll go by fast.

So, yeah, let's let's jump right in and start with a question that was asked by in in different ways, by two of our questioners, tourist assist.

And also let me pronounce this correctly, incredulity and rationale they asked about.

I love the names, the fake names of our listeners. I know there's a fun to say. I'm sorry. I try not to put questions just because the comment names are fun to say. But but no, this is actually a good question. And we've covered it in variations and previous episodes, but maybe not to their satisfaction.

So they asked the question. He says, I often find it hard to come up with something that would convince me that there is a God, simply because I think more or less that there will always be a natural explanation for any seeming evidence.

But what does this say about my belief or lack thereof about gods, the implication being there, that you should always have some evidence in mind that could convince you that you're wrong about something in theory, if you were to come across that evidence?

Right. And it's a fair question because, of course, often skeptics or atheists do ask that kind of question to religious believers. You know, what would it take, for example, to abandon belief in X?

So turning the question back on ourselves, it's only fair. Of course, my answer is that there isn't going to be any kind of evidence that is going to do the trick precisely for the reasons that both of our listeners brought up, which is that no matter what the actual empirical evidence, you're always going to have the suspicion that you're going to be finding one one of these days a natural explanation for what you're seeing. One way to put it is, of course, a famous third law.

I believe it was the second law. I never, never remember the exact number. But Arthur C. Clarke once famously said that a sufficiently advanced civilization will look to you like magic because which is something, interestingly, that actually happened during the history of humanity itself.

We have, for instance, at some point the so-called cargo cults in Papua New Guinea where locals who had never seen an airplane, for instance, started worshipping what they saw approaching and bringing bringing stuff down because they had no idea what it was. That kind of technology was completely not only unknown, but incomprehensible to them. There is also science fiction, of course, that has explored that that theme several in so on several occasions. One of my favorite is actually an episode of Star Trek.

The Next Generation, where the Enterprise meets comes on a world which is in under the control of apparently the devil.

And it's is this this woman who can seemingly create earthquakes and on command and, you know, natural disasters and things of that sort.

And of course, Captain Picard doesn't believe for a second that it is, in fact, the devil. He thinks that there is a trick. And sure enough, by the end of the episode, they have found the trick. It was a series of highly technological but nonetheless technological answers to it.

So the question here is, did I mean, this goes to the to the heart, of course, of one of the themes that that is recurrent on the nature on the Russian speaking blog, which is the reason I don't think any evidence would ever convince me that there is in fact, a God is, because I don't think the question of God, it's a question of empirical evidence.

If it were if in fact, I believe that the the God hypothesis were in fact, the hypothesis there is it's something it's a it's a coherent set of of statements about the world, which leads to predictions that can be explored empirically. Then there would be that would have to be some kind of empirical evidence that would, in fact, prove to me, to my satisfaction that there is a God. But I don't think that's. The case, I think that the concept of God is, on the one hand, sufficiently vague and incoherent that it doesn't actually lend itself to do these kind of things.

And at the same time, I think that the answer at the base of the root of all this, that this question is, in fact philosophical. That is, it depends on what kind of assumptions do you think it's reasonable to make about the world?

So I agree that there are certain formulations of the notion of God, which would not be confirmable by any empirical evidence and certainly not falsifiable by any empirical evidence, which we've discussed in previous episodes.

I do think that there are certain formulations of God which just based on anecdotal polling of people that I've done, they would accept as far as meeting the criteria to constitute a God and which also would have empirical evidence that could, if not confirmed, then strongly support it.

So if well, so if we are, it's at least conceivably possible that we are actually beings in a simulated universe and embedded in some outer universe.

Somehow it's hard to make conjectures about because, you know, we can't extrapolate based on what we know about the laws of physics, because those are just the laws of physics in our universe, which, you know, by by hypothesis in this example is simulated. So then whatever being is running the simulation is meets a lot of the criteria for God. They would say, well, wait, just let me finish. He created us. He created the world.

He can presumably interfere in our world to whatever way he wants. He can interfere with the laws of physics because they're just part of the simulation which is controlling.

And and all of that to us would would feel like like a God.

And and I have talked to people who, you know, when I when I lay this out for them, say, yes, if that were the case, I would consider that God existing.

Of course, this hypothetical being also differs from what many people would consider a God in certain ways, and that even though he is omniscient and omnipotent in relative to our world, he's not omniscient and omnipotent relative to his world, which I think to many people would make him feel not like God.

So. Well, that's right. So so first of all, that example is interestingly far fetched, meaning that for one thing, they probably wouldn't be any way for us to find out that we're part of it.

Actually, what if I can think of evidence that would make me give a lot more credence to the idea that we were in such a simulated, you know, like one of the stars spontaneously rearrange themselves to spell a message to us in modern day English.

Would that not give you some push, push your your likelihood, your the probability in your head a little bit more towards that?

It would probably nudge me to that conclusion. But the best you get is this is another case of clerks law, which is, you know, OK, fine. There is somebody who is in fact capable of doing those kind of things. But as you yourself said a minute ago, that doesn't meet actually the definition of a God.

But most people stuff that most people wouldn't go for that OK? I mean, so, yeah.

I mean, otherwise, my brother, who spends a lot of time playing video games, is in fact a God by that definition. But no, because the the beings in his universe he's playing with or not actually conscious being. How do we know?

OK, well if you are then right. Then maybe they would consider him a God. But yeah. But of course, yeah. You can also formulate God in such a way that no evidence would.

Well I don't know. I actually I've thought about this a lot and I haven't reached any definite conclusion about it.

I have the sense that it might be the case that any definition of God for which there would be no empirical evidence is actually logically incoherent. And therefore the question of empirical confirmatory evidence is is irrelevant. You don't need that because you can show it's logically incoherent.

But I have no I can I can give you one just off the top of my head, which is the classic version of the Eastern God, you know, is being who somehow created the universe and then retired and didn't do anything else at all. You never interfere again with the universe is something that is clearly, by definition outside the realm of any empirical evidence whatsoever. Right.

But it also makes assumptions about omnipotence and being caused by anything else. And so I'm saying once you lay out all those assumptions, you might see logical incoherence in it.

No notice that I never said anything about not being cause or anything like that or all I said. Right.

But if you if you allow it to have been caused and I think most people say, well, then it's not God, but if you go that route, then again, you're raising a philosophical objection on an empirical.

Oh, yeah, no, I know that's what I'm saying, that you could disprove it just philosophically rather than empirical.

That's exactly why on my original answer went the way it did. Now, as you know, there are some of our colleagues who do claim that there are ways to falsify a God.

And and I think that they're mistaken. I think that what we do have is a way to falsify specific claims made by some religious traditions. So if a creationist tells me that the Earth is 4000 or 6000 years old or the 4000 years ago, there was a worldwide flood, well, those are very empirical claims are clearly falsifiable. I mean, there is no question that science can can reject those claims. But unfortunately, the Bible.

Falsifiable, you mean it contradicts what we know about science, right? But if we were to reject everything we know about science, then we could accept that, of course.

But talking about empirical evidence, then those claims, definitely the on empirical grounds, as far as the best, the science that we know today is is concerned, but that unfortunately we do precisely nothing to reject the whole idea of God, because, you know, first of all, because the God hypothesis and I said it's not my hypothesis, not that those predictions come out of any particular theoretical structure that one can assume is part of the definition of God.

But those are just arbitrary statements. And as such, there is no logical connection between the existence of the existence of a God and the fact that that particular God created the universe 6000 years ago or four billion years ago or 20 billion years ago.

So the whole idea that science has something to do with this belief in God, I think is has some merit, because clearly, the more we understand scientifically about the world, the less there is a need to believe in anything supernatural. But ultimately, in going back to the original question of our of our listeners, ultimately, there is really no fundamental answer is philosophical in nature. It's what sort of logic and what sort of assumptions are you willing to make about about the universe?

And from there, it follows what you believe or what you don't believe.

OK, let's move on to the next question. This one come from Ian Espie. I don't know how you pronounce your comment. Hender handled them, but ENFP says a lot of people I'm going to paraphrase. He says there are a lot of people who hold the same beliefs that other skeptics do, but they don't really hold them for the right reasons. They didn't arrive at those conclusions based on critical thinking. They just believe that astrology is is bunk because, for example, because that's what their friends believe in, because astrology sort of feels like a weird woo woo notion to them, but they haven't actually thought about it.

And so E.S.P is asking what are some good tests for to distinguish these non critical thinking people in the skeptic community from the actual skeptics?

Oh, there's a simple test. Actually, this is a great question because it is I like this question. It's it really goes to the core of what what it means to be skeptical, critical thinking, as opposed to just posing as a skeptic or a critical thinker. As you know, we're both at the amazing meeting ET recently, and I gave a talk that to some extent had something to do with this question, which is I called on on the fact that skeptics really have an intellectual duty to do the homework, to understand what it is that they're there against and what it is that they're in favor.

Now, as I said, that there is an easy answer to this question. The answer is simply that you can ask the test to to see whether somebody actually is a real skeptic or critical of real critical thinker or not is simply to ask, how do you know whatever whatever statement they make, either pro evolution or anti astrology or whatever it is. The question is, how do you know? And the reason I say that is because I go back to the definition of knowledge that has been prevalent, although I should say just as a caveat recently debated but has been prevalent in philosophy since Plato, Plato defined knowledge as justified, true belief.

Notice that there are therefore three components to to know knowledge, which he said that I know something. Let's say that I say that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around.

OK, well, that for that belief to be to be knowledge, to count this knowledge according to plan, it has to be justified. It has to be a belief and it has to be true. It has to be a belief. Let's start with the simple parts.

It has to be a belief, meaning that I actually have to be convinced that that's the case. I can't fake it. If I fake something, then I don't actually know it. It has to be true, or at least at least to the best of our actual knowledge of our abilities. Right. I mean, for for something you can't this knowledge really we have to think that that is the best understanding of of of the actual state of things.

But those two parts are not necessarily controversial. The third part is the critical one that comes in as far as skeptics are concerned, which is the justified for me to actually know that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around.

If you were asking me if you were to ask me, well, how do you know, I would have to give you at least one reason and possibly more than one for why I think the Earth goes around the sun. And that reason cannot be because I writing a book because an astronomer told me or whatever the other appeal to authority one may come up with. I really have to know. I don't have to know in detail. I don't have to know all the same reasons that, say, a professional astronomer may bring up.

But they have to know, if I don't if I cannot justify my belief, then that's not knowledge. That's just. Beating somebody else's opinion. Yeah, and I think that's the best direct approach to judging whether someone believes something for four good reasons.

Sometimes, though, you can't either you can't ask someone why they believe what they believe. This is a public figure or something who espouses a position. You can't ask them directly. And and sometimes someone will profess a belief or a belief in something that you don't know enough about.

And so it's hard to judge on the face of it their rationality by their belief or disbelief in that thing. And so I do think it's useful to have sort of a set of external criteria for assessing rationality that help you make those decisions. In fact, I started working on this list a couple of weeks ago after your talk at 10:00, because we we got into a bit of a debate about how you judge the the quality of someone's expertise in something.

You know, how much should you trust them, even if they're an expert? How much should you you trust their conclusions?

And so I just started thinking about what what phrases in in someone's speech are like flags of critical thinking to me.

So things like I would change my position if I saw that what we were just talking about, about the falsifiability of of your beliefs or or someone stating a level of confidence and a belief as opposed to just saying the standard dichotomy of I believe this or I don't believe that that indicates a sophistication, a nuanced, a level of nuance in their reasoning that that less critical thinkers don't have or statements like, well, the evidence I've seen so far indicates that or being careful about defining their terms or something.

Some mention of selection bias or significance levels, not necessarily by those official terms, but just sort of any any point about why the particular sample we're looking at may not allow us to draw a general conclusion about the population as a whole.

These are these are sort of the signs of, I think, sophisticated, critical reasoning in terms of any awareness of the fact that any particular conclusion is provisional or is limited by whatever. Yeah.

An awareness of things that might bias what seem like simple rules of inference from samples to populations.

And the interesting side note that occurred to me as I was thinking about this question is that this this can help you decide how much credence to give, how much how seriously to take certain fields that you don't know enough about to evaluate the expert concerned season.

And I'm sure you're going to take issue with this.

But this is all I had. This is actually I never stopped me in the past.

This is actually why I I give a little more credence to things that, on the face of it, seem very far fetched, like some of the claims of the Singularity Arian's, some of the terms that the libertarians and secularists.

But then I saw blogging heads with Eliezer Yudkowsky and he said Singularity. And I'm going to switch to that.

If if the man himself it's I like it because it sounds like the kind of word you would use for a religion.

So it's really go like the singularity.

So the the claims that they put a lot of confidence in, like about cryonics being a feasible method of of prolonging our lives or about the possibility of uploading our consciousness onto a computer. I don't I'm sort of in the process of investigating these claims because I think they're interesting and I haven't really done enough research yet to state either way for myself what I think.

But but the community of people who put strong credence in those claims is by far disproportionately scores really high on these sort of external tests of critical thinking and rationality that I was just bringing up.

And so that's not on its own going to make me accept their beliefs, but it will make me take the time to actually investigate them, whereas I otherwise might not have been inclined to.

Yeah, that's an interesting position. I mean, we will probably need to to actually have an episode about Singularity Arian's and certain things, because actually I was struck by quite the opposite. I find a lot of the singularity is pretty fluffy fingers. And so I think we definitely need to have an episode about that. OK, we want to go to the next question in the meantime.

OK, this next question is from Harry S. Pharisee, who asks, How should a rational person approach the specific claims of venerated philosophers or scientists that on the face of it, seem morally repugnant? I can start off with my answer.

I would say that whether a claim offends our our moral intuitions should not be a determinant of whether we give it fair consideration.

We might end up concluding that our moral intuitions are wrong or we might end up concluding that it's true.

And still morally repugnant. But that said, you could hold that view and also hold the view that claims you decide are sound but also morally repugnant should not be publicized. I do think that there are beliefs which are both true and also would be harmful to everyone if everyone believed them.

So but let's let's take a look at the examples that Fozzy bring up. For instance, he talks about Neches, views of women or a Heidegger's support of Hitler.

All right. I didn't bring them up because I thought they were bad examples. No, no, I'm sorry. I didn't actually. They're good. I guess we're going to disagree on this, but I think they're good examples, particularly, for instance, Heidegger's support for kids who are you know, often people do.

Heidegger was, of course, a prominent philosopher, postmodernist, essentially continental philosopher of the early part of the 20th century. Some people consider one of the greatest philosopher of the early part of the 20th century.

And a lot of people tend to dismiss Heidegger's ideas precisely because of his connection to Hitler and Nazism. Now, I mean, that's that's just bad.

That's just bad thinking. That is bad. It simply doesn't follow that. You know, we have to come to terms that even smart human beings, even the smartest human beings, can commit huge blunders given certain conditions, the cultural conditions or whatever. I mean, there are examples in science as well, not just in philosophy. In the two examples that Fozzy gives us are from philosophy, but there are examples in science. You know, Newton famously believed in alchemy.

Kepler was interested in astrology and so on and so forth. I mean, you can you can come up with all sorts of examples, even more modern than those. And does that mean that we should reject the mechanics because he was interested in alchemy or that we should not believing Kepler's laws because he was just doesn't doesn't follow.

But I think this question is not about how should we judge a claim in light of other beliefs that the philosopher held that were repugnant.

But how should we judge a claim that is itself repugnant? Right. The claim that is itself repugnant or wrong, such as those about astrology or or alchemy, should simply be rejected regardless of who who makes them on its own, on their own merit.

Right.

It's not because it's repugnant. Because you think it's argued in a way.

That's right. If you're talking about a rational decision making process or a rational analysis of the claim, no, the claim should not be rejected just because it's repugnant. Let me give you an example that we may actually have touched upon occasionally in the past. And that is a fairly famous or infamous book that came out a few years ago in the tradition of evolutionary psychology, which was entitled A Natural History of Rape. Hmm. You know, the claim of the book was that rape as evolved by natural selection as a secondary sexual strategy in human beings.

Now, a lot of people took issue with the very idea that what could even ask the question of whether rape is a natural phenomenon or not. And I think that's silly. You know, whether whatever you think from an ethical perspective has no bearing whatsoever with the with the facts of natural history. So it may be repugnant to think let's assume that these two authors of that book, Palmer and I forgot the name of the other author, Tonin and Palmer.

Let's assume that they were right. I don't think there were. By the way, I read the book actually, and I talked to both of them about it at some point in the past. But but let's assume that they were right. Well, OK. That's the way it is. In a rational conclusion, rational person would have to accept the conclusion, regardless of how repugnant the idea may seem. Similar discussions come up when when we talked about race, when we talk about race from a biological perspective, there's a lot of discussion about where our human race is really from a real from biological perspective, or are they mostly a cultural construction?

Well, what if they are real?

That may or may not be a welcome or unwelcome thought for some people. But it's it's a it's a matter of fact. And he actually carries nothing in terms of implications, in terms of how we should think about about race. So I think the answer to the question is every claim should be approached on its own merits, regardless of how repugnant or how distasteful the whole idea underlying that claim may be.

Would you, though, make the distinction that I made between considering it with an open mind yourself versus publicizing the claim?

Like what about what if research found that that there was some interracial difference in IQ or something? Could that I mean, that that claim, if people knew it and believed it, you know, assuming it were true, you could have really negative repercussions.

People would judge other people based on their race and it would have been horrible.

I guess I am an optimist from that perspective, and I'm a big believer in peoples in the fact that people can learn from reality and that shouldn't be shielded arbitrarily. From reality, I find it very paternalistic as an attitude to say, well, you know, I the scientists discovered X, but I'm not going to tell you the normal person because who knows what you're going to do with X?

Well, you know what? What people people have a right to know the best of what we know about how things actually are. And then they make what they what they will out of it.

Hmm.

So I can think of one other example that I want to bring up, because it's a little bit different than what we were talking about before. We've been talking about empirical facts or discoveries that that have negative or unfortunate implications. But what about an argument just by reason that shows us that our our intuitions logically lead to a morally repugnant conclusion?

So with that long winded intro, for example, that I wanted to bring up, which is Peter Singer, the bioethicist philosopher at Princeton, has I mean, what he's most notorious for, I think, is his argument that we should morally kill infants, newborns who are disabled enough, that they're going to have a sufficiently reduced quality of life.

And his he's he's a utilitarian. And his argument is that, well, assuming that the parents are going to try again and get pregnant again and have another baby in the place of the one we kill, then that baby's quality of life will presumably be much better than the previous baby's quality of life so that we're all better off. And of course, he also is making the assumption that there's no there's nothing morally wrong with killing a newborn because it's not yet a person.

He sees it as pretty much indistinguishable from abortion, from late term abortions.

So if you accept his reasoning, which is to say, I largely do as well as it sounds, I think it's pretty much right.

Yeah.

And you can quibble on some of the details and where you draw the distinction and all that, but that's fundamentally the reasoning is in fact, correct.

Well, I'm actually glad to hear you say that. I wasn't sure if I should come out and say that or if I should just say, well, I haven't rejected it yet. I think our positions are pretty similar on that.

But at the same time, you could say, you know, if people followed this, followed this reasoning, it would still be the worst for for everyone, like maybe maybe by some sort of rule based utilitarianism.

It's much better for us to think of that as a morally wrong action because it preserves our the value that we place on life in general.

And that if we abandoned this, if we made an exception in this case, then that would sort of shake the foundations of our general respect for life, which is overall an overwhelmingly good thing.

No, I see your point. Again, this this is we're discovering a lot of topics that make for an entire episode.

Yeah, really. Thank you, listeners, readers.

Now, I see your point, except, of course, that I would one of the one of the ways to challenge that that objection is that I actually see, I guess, far less evidence than you seem to to see about the fact that we do hold life, human life in a particular esteem because, yeah, we don't kill babies, on the other hand. Then we we massacre large numbers of people a little later on. So I'm not so sure that we can really honestly derive that this idea that we that human beings have a high value on life.

And as you know, there is, of course, a lot of religious ideology that goes into these and these kind of discussions. But but it is an interesting. So we move to the next question.

Yes. So this next question is from youngness.

And he's asking I'm going to paraphrase again, but he's asking about philosophical arguments that are flawed because of scientific facts that are as of yet unknown to us.

And so he's asking, is there any way to identify which kinds of philosophical arguments are are resting on on our current flawed and incomplete scientific knowledge versus the ones that are not? Or is this, as he says, just one of those unknown unknowns that we can't do anything about?

Well, it's neither is more complicated.

That's what he's referring to is actually a position that a lot of philosophers themselves hold, which is that part of philosophy, not not all of it, but some parts of philosophy are really historically have been placeholders for science, beginning with science itself. Science itself, of course, was used to be natural philosophy before it became a separate branch of knowledge. Right. But also within science. For instance, psychology was a branch of philosophy until essentially William James.

Right. Right now, we're in the process of seeing another one of these transitions. Philosophy, your mind, although it's still an active area of scholarship in philosophy, it's obviously transitioning into cognitive science. I'm not so sure that cognitive science, what I would do entirely away with philosophical, philosophical underpinning, because there's always going to be questions about, well, what do you mean exactly by consciousness and things like that. But nonetheless, the clearly, at least at this moment, it is at the very least a hybrid field.

In fact, if you go to a lot of. Philosophy mind conferences, you will see almost an equal number of neurobiologists, kindie scientists and philosophers. So what what the listeners are referring to is this model, this idea that if a question becomes empirically actionable, you know, I'm going to go to empirical answers. Then it becomes science. It may become science either entirely.

For instance, a lot of branches of metaphysics become fundamental physics. If your question is what is the basic structure of the universe? Well, you know, you don't ask the outermost philosophers anymore. You ask people don't smash atoms inside the colliders or they become in part scientific.

And I think the philosophy mind is that it's a good one. Those that are perhaps even ethics may be a good one. There is quite a bit that we're learning about ethical decision making in human beings from neurobiology. I don't think and I'm on record as saying that on the Russian speaking blog, I don't think that science can actually answer ethical questions and therefore can do away entirely with with with ethics.

But on the other hand, it certainly is the case and it has been the case for many years that philosophers, ethical philosophers do pay a lot of attention to what neurobiologist and evolutionary biologists are telling us about the origin and functioning of modern moral reason, reasoning and human beings.

So they're really now in answer to the fundamental question that the reader was posing. Is there a fast way to tell a tale when when this is happening now?

There is you have to look at the history of a field and in fact, the history of both philosophy and science and become very important because you learn to distinguish these kind of areas of scholarship by looking at historical examples. And as I said, there are some that are for which the institution has been essentially completed for a long time. And there are some that are for which the transition is in. The president may never be completed. And those are areas where philosophers and scientists actually work together to mutual benefit.

So I think that's a good answer. But what I'm wondering about. You're welcome.

What I'm wondering about and I think this is sort of what Janice was getting at was is there any way to tell ahead of time?

It seems like there are a lot of philosophical arguments which to the people at the time that they were making them seemed just incontrovertible, not the right word.

Yeah, it seemed unquestionably sound right.

And they had no way to know that that question was actually an empirical question because they weren't yet aware of that branch of science.

They weren't even aware of the possibility of approaching such a question in an empirical way. And so I'm wondering, along with Yoni's, if there's any way to tell ahead of time.

And so when I was thinking about this question, I started thinking about, well, maybe certain disciplines within philosophy that are more vulnerable to getting overturned by empirical discoveries later on and certain ones that are less vulnerable. And so I started thinking, well, you know, ethical.

I actually thought that ethical philosophy, once you accept your sort of starting ethical premises and then draw conclusions from there, maybe that that is less vulnerable to to empirical discoveries later.

But. But at least the ethical questions like about the question of whether there are objective moral truths, I think looking back before, say, before we knew anything about evolution, I could see how it would not be at all obvious to philosophers or to people in general that, well, they have this evidence that we have these extremely strong moral intuitions about these properties of rightness and wrongness in the world.

And that seems, on the face of it to them, like good evidence that these intuitions are actually reactions to something real existing in the world. And that inference is weakened once you learn that, oh, there are good reasons why we have these intuitions that have nothing to do with objective properties of right and wrong, as in the world, that they were adaptive adapted to happen.

That's a very good argument. But but I'm going to raise a little bit of a question about about that logic. And I'm beginning to repeat myself, but this is yet another topic. Then it's going to be interesting for a half an hour. But I'm going to raise a question.

So there is a distinction between asking where certain things come from and asking about the true value of certain things. So there's no question that if you question that, if you if you want to know where a sense of morality in human beings come from, then the answer is definitely evolutionary biology is to be found in evolutionary biology, you know, in comparisons between human beings and other primates and things like that. But regardless of where certain things come from, that doesn't tell you anything about their true value.

And the obvious example there is, in fact, science itself. You know, the way we find we do science is through the five senses. We have to we have to see things where to hear things. We have to smell things and so on and so forth. And you definitely we definitely have an evolutionary account where those things come from. We even have an evolutionary account of our fallible and limited and all that those capacities are. But that hasn't stopped us from building an entire way of knowing things that is ultimately derived from the use of our senses.

But that goes way beyond in terms of truth value, in respect to what our senses originally we're capable of as a result of a natural process of evolution. So I'm not so sure that that enlighten the the the origin, the evolutionary origin in this case of anything as interesting as it is intrinsically necessarily has much to say about the way in which we use that particular capacity today. Oh, I agree.

I just I'm saying to the people, before we knew about evolution, the existence of moral intuitions might have seemed like good evidence for objective moral truths.

And I just I, I think I agree with what Janice was implying, that there it's hard ahead of time to distinguish questions of logic from some questions that are empirically grounded, like I'm sure philosophers in the past thought that we could reason about time.

And surely that was just a question of logic, not of empirical evidence. But now that physics has been discovering that time is not necessarily doesn't exactly operate the way we thought it did. Now it turns out it's an empirical question, but we didn't know that before.

And it's not entirely political question. OK, but at least partly. That's right. Exactly. It is definitely in part an empirical question. But in fact, time is a really interesting area where mathematicians, physicists and philosophers are all collaborating and thinking about these things now. So that's that's one example of a question that is still fundamentally, philosophically philosophical. But that is, in fact, it has to be empirically informed. You cannot do philosophy of time these days without knowing anything about, say, general relativity, because otherwise you'd be talking to the back in the vacuum.

And so, again, in other words, the idea is that, yes, the question is a good one.

It may be impossible or very difficult, at least our priority to say whether a particular question is necessarily logical or a matter of of clarifying concepts, which is what philosophy does, versus an empirical question.

And a lot of a lot of the times you will have some kind of hybrid and hybrid itself will evolve over time.

Our next question is from Costus. Who? Well, it's not actually a question. It's more of a request. He wanted us to find out what is sacred to you and question that that'll make for an interesting discussion, you troublemaker. OK, so do you want to start would you like to kill one of your sacred cows on the air?

Well, so the, the easy answer, but it is in fact true is that I don't have any sacred cows. I don't really consider. Yeah, right. Well, I'm going to give the the question however some some more food for thought I hope in a second. Fundamentally I don't have any sacred cows, meaning that I do take, you know, the classic skeptic position that is that is the I mean the David Hume kind of position that anything should be open to question.

And, you know, if there is, because there may always be a reason at some point or another to question even your most cherished beliefs or assumptions. And you ought to be able to do it, at least in principle, whether. Human psychology actually allows that in a particular case, it's another matter, but at least in principle, I do subscribe to that idea. Now, that said, there are things that, of course, I do consider very, very high in my sort of scale of of of important principles about life, the universe and everything, and that I do have a hard time or I have had a hard time in the past.

Questioning the obvious example in my case is the power of reason itself or of logic itself. So when I was younger, as in, say, college and graduate school years, I really put much more trust into the power of reason and logic than I do today. And that's because I had a naive understanding of both reason and logic on the one hand, and also, of course, of the the other components of what it means to be a human being, which is the emotional part.

These days, I'm convinced that logic and reason are a great tool for doing all sorts of things. And I certainly still believe that we don't have enough of it in our society. It's not I'm I'm all of a unconvinced that we actually have too much reason going around. I think we're very far from that from that point. But I also realize that there are intrinsic limits. Part of that realization comes from the study of things like epistemology and being aware of the limitations of human reason of reason in general.

Actually, I should say, first of all, and then a human reason in particular, one reason is more even more limited than than sort of the general abstract principles of logic. But it also I also have developed an appreciation for the fact that one simply cannot be a balanced human being unless one keeps a balance between reason and emotions. Now, interesting. And of course, one of the ways I found out about this is to study again, David Hume, I probably my favorite philosopher of all time, who famously, rather counterintuitively at some point said that reason is and ought to be the slave of passions.

Well, this is a strange thing coming from a skeptic philosopher who was friend with the several exponents of the Enlightenment. He was definitely a believer in reason. And yet he said this strange thing about the role of reason and passion, what he meant by it was that you can have all the reasons you want to do certain things in the world, but unless you care, in other words, unless you have an emotional attachment, unless you have a passion for something, there's really no reason for you to do to do anything in particular.

So that's one of the things that I've actually cut down to size quite a bit over the last several years and that I would consider sort of a quasi sacred cow. But no longer. No longer. What about you?

So this or my first reaction to the question was, I don't know of any sacred cows, and I think I am at least tending towards that. But that's like a conscious effort that I make to not have sacred cows.

And the one recent example I can think of in which I had something kind of sacred cow that I haven't yet kept, keep conning words today.

Sacred cow, the regular Shakespeare.

Well, so I have this reaction of I have these intuitions about what kinds of traits I respect and or don't respect.

And sometimes in conversation with a good friend of mine who is, if possible, even more rational than I am to believe.

I know, right. I would refer to, like, really respecting something about someone or not respecting something about someone.

And he would ask me, what do you mean by that? And I was kind of flummoxed to realize that I didn't know what I meant.

I, I think that.

Can you give us an example of something?

Yeah, well, like rationality. I mean, to tie it into what you were saying, I mean, I'm saying something a little different, but to relate it, I would say that I fervently respect people who are who are rational and who try to be rational.

And so when I try to explain what I mean by that, one of my first reactions would say, well, maybe I mean that it's better for the world that they're rational.

And I I think that's partly true. But I don't think that's why I said that, because there are plenty of traits that are good for the world that I don't feel this feeling of respect for.

Like I mean, niceness is a good thing.

And I'm glad that people are nice, but I don't feel the same feeling of respect for general niceness as I do for rationality.

And that's because you're an educated intellectual.

That's why I'm I'm still sort of trying to unpack this notion of respect and whether I I mean, there are actually a lot of value judgments like this, but respect is the one that I've been focusing on and see if I have any justification, if I'm actually saying anything real about it.

If I'm honest, at least my current my current evaluation of of what I meant by it subconsciously was just that I meant that it was just better, like just objectively, fundamentally better to be rational than not to be rational. And I can't defend that.

Yeah, that's that's a hard thing to defend. I know. I know. Oh, well. So we're tracking a cow.

We had a good run. OK, next question. This one comes from Max. Actually, Max and Dunkirk also asked this question. And it's another science and philosophy question for you, Masimo.

They want to know whether philosophy really progresses.

Max says science progresses because scientists can resolve disagreements by making objective predictions and testing who's is better. But how do philosophers resolve their disagreements and how does philosophy progress? And then down?

Quark adds on the question about whether the rejection of one philosophy by another one, the replacement of one philosophy by another one is just a matter of fashion, or whether it's an actual progression in the way science progresses towards truth.

Right. So I think there are two answers to this one. Let me start with the potentially more controversial answer, which is science actually doesn't make as much progress as people think it does.

Now, you say that and I think people take you more literally than you really mean or more like.

So let me clarify this to you, because I think you're constantly misinterpreted when you say so. Let me clarify. So first of all, it is certainly the case that the science, if you look at it from an historical perspective, has gotten itself into all sorts of bland blunders. And and that ends and things that didn't work out and they were simply abandoned. It's not there. Then we sort of went back and found a better way to do it is just we got into a dead end and that was it.

And, you know, things progressed in a different way.

Science is a much more complicated and much less linear sort of progress toward a better understanding of the world than most people, including, frankly, a lot of scientists themselves seem to think. And you can appreciate that if you start looking at the actual history of science. But the other thing is actually science itself is subject to a lot of fashion. There are certain questions in science that that recursively become popular at some point or another and then they get abandoned because people don't make enough progress.

If you want to look at specific examples, a lot of things, a lot of questions in ecology, for instance, have gone through cycles over and over and over about, for instance, the structure of communities, how to do biological communities come together. There's usually two or three or four options that are put on the table. And then people think about it and do research about it for 20 years. And then there's no consensus in the whole thing becomes abandoned then.

And then 20 years later, somebody else tries again and the cycle repeats itself without necessarily settling one way or the other. The history of physics also has several examples of that sort. If you read them, Lisa Mullins, the trouble with physics, which is largely about quantum physics, sorry about string theory. Yes, also about quantum physics, but about string theory.

There is a large part of that book that is actually a interesting examination of all sorts of blind alleys and blunders and abandoned theories that physics has that have characterized fundamental physics in the last century.

So this idea that science always makes progress and it goes in March to where it needs to be cut back to size, that doesn't mean, of course, that science does not make progress.

Of course, that's that little extra addendum that you need to really underline for us. Think that's right. So let me underline again, yes, science does make progress. And yes, we do have much better understanding of the world today than we did only five hundred years ago, but even 100 years ago or 50 years ago. So that's the first part of the of the answer, which is, you know, let's let's start by questioning these sharp contrasts between the science that always makes progress by empirical verification of things and the philosophy that doesn't make progress because it's not based on empirical verification.

The second half of the of the answer is the philosophy actually does make progress, but it makes progress in a different way from the way in which science does.

And for obvious reasons, because philosophy, of course, doesn't depend. It's not based on on on empirical evidence.

The best analogy that I can come up with is that philosophy makes progress in a similar way, not exactly the same, but in a similar way to which logic and mathematics make progress in mathematics.

We can have a whole discussion about whether mathematicians invent things or discover things.

This podcast will, in retrospect, become known as the podcast that spawned a thousand podcasts. Precisely. But regardless of what you think, it is certainly the case that progress in mathematics does not depend on empirical. At all, you know, it's not like you discover new mathematical theorems or in fact new principles of logic by empirical evidence, they're just not going to be that way. Philosophy is similar, not quite the same, because, of course, although part of philosophy does deal with logic, philosophy as a whole is much broader and much more heterogeneous enterprise.

But there are examples of progress in philosophy. And one of the best ones is in fact, I think in philosophy of science. There are others in ethics, for instance, but philosophy of science, which is my field. So I'm much more familiar with the details. I can tell you that we have made progress since Popper's suggestion that falsification was the the way in which science ought to work and should work. So famously made that suggestion in the 1930s, 1940s, the first part of the 20th century.

And it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. It seemed like, yes, that's what we were missing. Science doesn't make progress by confirmation of theories. It makes progress because Duse can be disconfirm, definitely disconfirm.

You know, these falsified it was like a really brilliant insight, which all of a sudden made philosophy of science make a jump forward in terms of understanding of how things are supposed to work. But then immediately, of course, people started thinking about it, including some of his own students and colleagues like Thomas Kuhn or Emrah Lakatos.

And they say pocking at these idea, which is what you do with ideas, you poke at it. And he said, well, OK, let's see. But what about objection, number one or number two? And number three, the classic objection, which is now considered a fundamental objection to falsification, is called a Duran Duran Quine disease.

The D'Wayne quaintest essentially says that actually you can never falsify a theory because if the empirical results do not agree with the theory, there is always the possibility that it's not the theory that is wrong. But it's one of the many corollary assumptions that go into building the theory or in fact, even in making the measurements necessary to get the empirical results. That could be wrong. And there's no way apriori to know in any particular case where whether it is the theory that is wrong and therefore it's been falsified, or in fact is one of the cholerae assumptions that brought the following phase in philosophy of science, which is.

Well, then how do things work? Because it seems like science can get out of this kind of rut when they when they when they run into of problem. So how do they do that? And that led to a new generation of theories in philosophy, science, which are much more sophisticated than the original falsification. And that deal with, for instance, look at the idea of of research programs that have in science that have a protective belt, as he called it.

They have a certain number of cultural assumptions that can be called to explain the occasional disagreement between the theory and empirical results. But the idea was that if this disagreement keeps keeps mounting, if there is a large number of ad hoc changes that you have to do to the theory or had an explanation that you have to come up with, then eventually the research program becomes what Lakatos termed degenerated, meaning it doesn't actually yield new results and new discoveries and eventually it's abandoned.

Now, I can go on because there's many other iterations since throughout the history of philosophy, science in the last even in the last seven or 70 or 80 years. But that to me, it's a very good example of how philosophy actually works. That is, you start out with a certain idea which originally invariably is simple, and then people look at the structure of that idea and sort of start poking at it and see how it works and how if if it's evry reacts well to criticism once you started that process.

Those criticisms are, of course, those analogies and those and the suggested implements and the original idea are on record. So today, no philosopher of science can start out and say, all right, well, let me talk about falsification is because, of course, that is something that we have a much more sophisticated understanding of than than we did seven years ago. So I think that's a good model to look at.

How philosophy actually makes progress, as I said, is very different from science because it's conceptual progress. It's not empirically based progress, but it's progress nonetheless. I mean, no philosopher today in ethics, for instance, would be able to defend the original version of utilitarianism.

And the reason for that is because utilitarianism has been subjected to certain kinds of criticism and utilitarians have responded to those criticism by modifying the original idea. And that has gone through many, many iterations until what you find today is a variety of forms of utilitarianism, which are much more sophisticated than than the original version.

Just a side question.

Do you think that the actual practice of science changed in the period before Pupper formulated his falsification theory and then after Popper, but before the do him claim, he says, and then.

No, no, no, no. I don't think he did as and I wouldn't expect that either. I mean, you know, famously, there are a lot of scientists do ask similar questions, which I do think sort of in some sense missed the point. But in an interesting sense, missed the point, my favorite example is Steven Vineberg, Nobel physicist who wrote an essay several years ago entitled Against Philosophy, which is a kind of a peculiar thing to do, in my opinion.

But but is starting premise by starting premise was asking the question, what have philosophers done for us, meaning for scientists lately? What scientific question has been asked by a philosopher? And to me it's like asking why the Yankees didn't win an NBA title. Well, they don't play that game. It's philosophy. It's a different kind of enterprise. The scope of philosophy, even a philosophy of science, is not to solve scientific questions, is to understand how science works and how, in fact, more broadly reason and rationality work.

What scientists themselves do, it's it's actually use the natural tools that come with being a human being, and they come with being part of a group of a peer review group, and they make up their own their own rules and they go on their business independently of philosophers and vice versa. So the two I would never expect philosophy to actually solve a scientific question just in the same way in which science rarely solves philosophical questions. However, the two are are informative of each other.

I chastise my colleagues in philosophy if they don't know enough about science when it's pertinent to their particular specialty. And by the same token, I think that scientists could use just a little bit more sophistication about philosophy.

I think we have time for one more question.

So let's take a question from Max who asks, Does voting involve some self-deception that you're one vote makes a difference? Do you ever feel like voting is not worth the hassle, especially when it's not a close race?

That's a good question to start off. And I have plenty to say about. OK, well, let me start off briefly, because we're running out of time up. Yeah, of course. Sometimes you do feel like why bother? You know, if especially as the listener is pointing out, a lot of elections are, in fact, not even close. And so you might think, what is the point? What is the point?

There are two counters to that. Number one, it's actually more often than people realize the case that elections are, in fact, close, especially local elections and especially primaries in the United States.

It is true that general elections, you know, national elections are rarely that close, although we've seen in recent years several examples of elections that were literally decided by a few hundred votes, in which case you can say that, yes, your vote does count yours and those and those of those 100 people that made the difference, but especially at the local level, there is I think that one of the troubles with American democracy is, in fact, that very, very few people pay attention to local elections and to primaries, evidently thinking that, well, they're done.

They're not important because they're not national, they're not the real the big thing without realizing apparently that those are, in fact, the points where the democratic process takes a turn, a sharp turn one way or the other, because candidates can get elected locally, that then go, of course, to national elections and primaries do make a choice that then is present the general electorate. And that choice is very often, in fact, based on a difference and very few votes or the participation of a very small number of people.

There are very small percentage of people participating in those kind of elections. That's one type of answer. The second dimension, I guess, is more idealistic, but it is as it goes along the lines that I think the voting is not just a right, it's a duty in a democracy. And so, you know, whether you do you think it's relevant or not, whether you think it's you, you shouldn't be bothered to get up in the morning before going to work and vote.

I think you ought to do it in the in the sense that it comes as a responsibility. It is part of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. You really it's not something, again, that you have a right to. It's, I think, something you have a duty to.

So I agree with a lot of that answer, especially the part about how you one way to conclude.

I think I but I, I well, so I agree with your distinction between the you know, the more global and the more local elections and the fact that your vote really does make much more of a difference, not local elections.

And you have to keep that in mind.

I. Well, first off, I don't I don't believe in duties. I'll just get that out there.

So so from my perspective, the question is, is is the expected out, the expected effect of your vote worth the cost to you of voting? That's the question that you know, the rationality of the voting decision. And I'll say that for the for the large scale, the you know, the national elections, I don't. I don't actually think that I think it would be really hard to formulate that equation in a way that would make it rational for an individual to decide to vote.

If you there's a bunch of papers that have been written about this one by a former professor of mine, Andrew Gelman.

And even if the even if the populace, the population is sort of split 50 50 between the two candidates, when you have enough people, as you do in national elections, the chance of your vote, well, to make a difference, your vote would have to be the deciding one. It would have the election would have to be split.

And the chance of that happening is just so incredibly small.

I mean, we're talking about one in a hundred million along that scale.

And and that's assuming, of course, that you're right about which candidate is actually the better of the two if you're you know, you could be wrong. So that uncertainty makes the expected value of your vote even smaller.

Well, that's an interesting reasoning, but I think it's fundamentally flawed, frankly, because the idea is that your vote doesn't count only if he makes an actual difference. It's the cumulative effect of voting that counts because. Right.

But I'm only making a decision for myself and I have to hold other people's behavior content because their decision about whether to vote is not affected by whether I decide to vote.

But you running into a tragedy of the Commons at that point situation where you're thinking just of your own rational interest, which means that the Commons is going to be tragically ending.

But it's not if just I mean, I can only make the decision for myself and that's not for the people I know. I understand. And that's what I think the flyers. I think that because we live in a society, you simply cannot in fact, it's irrational to make a decision just for your own benefit.

But I'm sure we will have to leave well into another episode, don't we?

I think we do. Well, OK, maybe for our next episode we should do something a little easier like, I don't know, prove Fermat's last theorem.

Sure, why not? All right. The date that concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, true by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.