KOL461 | Haman Nature Hn 119: Atheism, Objectivism & Artificial Intelligence

hello and welcome to Haymon Nature I am Adam Haymon and on this episode I’m

talking once again to my friend Stefan Canella He had comments about the

conversation I had with economist Bob Murphy on a recent crossover about God and the nature of belief and the nature

of knowledge and how humans act in the world and the nature of

certainty And we talk about all of that in a very interesting way I think you’ll find So please

enjoy Haymon nature a journey in search of a peaceful and prosperous society

with human nature as a guide led by your host Adam Haymon

Hello Stephan Hello Adam It is great to see you after not after

not so long I know there was we were we were just both on the Tom Woods cruise I

was so glad that you decided to come aboard that How you had a great time right me too It was Yeah I it was really

good for me I needed at this point in my life I had a rough year and all my friends were in town and I had FOMO creeping in and yeah I really enjoyed it

Plus I wasn’t speaking which I can always enjoy something better when I’m not speaking Uh just enjoyed hanging out

with my buddies You all came to my house You got to meet my wife So I got further proof that I have a wife That’s

right We We’ve been speculating but you you either hired a great actress or you

I I’ve had over the years people wonder if I had a wife because I always go to these conferences without her But over

the years on occasion like Tom Woods or GTO Hollesman would come to Houston stay at my house and they’d say “Oh there’s

proof.” But it wasn’t until 2018 when Mises Institute had their 35th anniversary

thing in New York City and my wife likes New York City So I I was able to coach her into going to that um and she did

come to one Soho Forum thing Her and my son to hear me debate um at Gene Epstein’s

thing and now she’s going to the giant Bandari thing I’m speaking at in Vancouver in August because she had to

go there anyway for work uh for Whistler So she’s going to come with me and Greg and Joy So um she will come to another

libertarian thing Positive Might be making a little progress with her I don’t know All right Well it’s great to

have you back on my little show here Um it’s a weird recording cycle but you’re

going to come on right after I had you on uh previously to talk about your intellectual career and your like

lawyerly career And the reason is because you saw or heard the conversation I had with Bob

Murphy about God and belief and atheism And I was basically just asking him a

bunch of questions about his journey and providing a little bit of push back But

you heard that and uh wanted to take me to task for for not going hard enough or

or something or other So I thought we’d do it on air and uh and flush things out uh in a in a thorough way

Yeah And to be clear I Yeah you know you’re joking I think but I wasn’t taking you to task We were just privately I was I was just expressing

some of my um my own take on the the theism debate really Um and if you don’t

uh if you don’t mind can we just start right at the beginning um yeah with your own journey in this this field how what

you thought as a young man and how that changed i can And and you were fellow

atheists I believe if I’m not correct Um um and I by the way I’ve hardly ever

spoken about this not because I’m worried about it but you know I I try to speak about things I know something about Um and um um and you no one’s ever

asked me to speak on theology and phil even philosophy that much Um but hey

I’ve actually always been disappointed in the the way that this issue is

discussed Um so I’ I’ve developed my own views and so that’s what we’re going to talk about I was raised uh very

conservative not conservative a Catholic in Louisiana Um I was adopted and I’m

really one reason I’m glad I was adopted is my my birth mother was Protestant and I really would not have wanted to been

raised Protestants I’ve developed a deep empathy towards fundamental not Protestantism per se but fundamentalism

especially right which of which there is some in south in south Louisiana is a is a is a Christian state and the the I

think the northern half is more more kind of redneck Protestant type a fundamentalist type Baptist type

whatever the south is heavily French and Catholic um and um I was I was raised Catholic I went to

Catholic schools for 12 years St George Elementary in Baton Rouge and then Catholic High in Baton Rouge And I loved

it I loved it I was a I was an altra boy We were we were we went to church every we went to mass every Sunday Um I took

it seriously I was interested in the the theology um until I wasn’t right Um so I was I

was I was devout Uh but I I also questioned things and I had this really

um interesting religion professor at St George named Mr Jim Owens who has since

passed that he was subsequently the principal very interesting guy And he had us thinking about things hard in in um

in religion class And surprisingly you know this is Louisiana which is a conservative state This was in the in

the 70s And we I was taught evolution was true I was taught that the Old Testament was only that you don’t have

to believe it’s literally true You can take it uh figuratively Um so I was always mystified later at at

fundamentalists and even Catholics who seem to have this kind of literalist view of things Um you would think

Louisiana is a backward state but hey I was taught that evolution is um true So

I never had a problem with it for those reasons but I remember and this is right before I started reading Ein Rand a

librarian in Catholic High School suggested I read that uh in 10th or 11th grade And that that started making me um

become a libertarian but also more philosophical and and more of a hardened

atheist But by that point I was already an becoming a non-believer because I remember I was um I used to argue with

my Protestant cousins and people and I just thought Protestantism was so ridiculous because you know you’re lo

you’re missing a lot of the aspects of the Christian church of the Catholic Church Um like how do they even know how

many books are in the Bible because if you don’t believe the church was guided by the Holy Spirit inherently in

choosing the canon you don’t even know what the Bible is But at least the the Catholic Church they believe well Jesus

anointed the first pope Peter and then there’s a line of popes and then the Holy Spirit was there for two or 30 hund

years helping the church select which books are going to be in the Bible helping the people write the Bible without error and then helping the

church preserve it after that So to me it makes sense the Catholic view made sense if you’re a Christian In any case

I remember I was uh mowing the lawn My parents had a like a 4 acre uh p farm

pastor kind of thing and I used to Saturday mornings mow this lawn and it

it would it would take I I was on a gravely tractor so it would take three or four hours and u sun now we have uh snappers and uh and

and and better lawnmowers but back then I had a tractor but anyway I remember I was puzzling over something and it was

about the hell issue and it was the it was I just kept wondering ing how can a

finite amount of um of sin that you commit in your life justify a good god sending you to hell

forever to me to my mind it didn’t match there was a mismatch between infinite punishment and even Hitler only did a

finite amount of evil you know what I mean like so um and so I started thinking that just can’t be right either

there’s not a good god or there’s a good god and he wouldn’t do that because it’d be better not to have been born than to

have been born when god knows you’re going to commit sin and go to hell Like why would God bring you into existence

in the first place so but I thought but if I doubt that then everything might fall apart So but I said well it

I’m going to doubt that So I I started doubting hell But as soon as I did that

then I thought to myself wait a minute how do I know Christianity is the right one or Catholicism is the right one or

that Jesus is even real and I remember I had a brief moment in my head probably in the

same lawnmowing experience and I thought well if I’m going to doubt hell do I

even know Jesus really was what they say and then as soon as I started thinking like that it all just fell apart like

within five minutes in my mind So you’re telling me that you were a good Christian and then you got heat stroke

and it all just went away Yeah I didn’t think of it that way but that could be what happened So I stopped going to I

stopped going to church with my parents and uh I just became an atheist and then reading Rand I think reinforced it Um

and of course listen to all the debates I’ve read a lot of stuff on it Um probably the best thing I’ve read on it

the one I agree with most would be George Smith’s book Atheism The Case against God although even he I have a

few problems with but I think he’s the closest to being the right way to look at it And I will say that I was kind of

an I would say I was uh for many years I would argue with people I was sort of the a the atheist Um I think I’m

less of an a I’m probably still an but not an atheist Um but um I’m much more tolerant of

religion now and and compassionate about it and see there’s good like you mentioned in your talk and I think like

even rand you know said there’s good things that are transmitted in the under the cover of religion because that’s the

way you get an idea to spread you have to has to have some value So I think it does encode some values and my personal

view is if you’re going to have a religion a traditional religion is far better than what the substitute

substitute is for most people which is state worship Right Right I’d rather which is what the atheists and

secularists really are They worship the the god the god of government I’d much rather worship what we think of as the

real god which at least has some some some permanent values as part of that Um

and I do think there’s a good Tom Woods episode from a few years back was like something like “Do you have to be a

dummy to believe in God or are you a dummy?” And I think I took that to heart because I do think that the way we

simplify and caricature and blow off the arguments of theists is sometimes a little bit brusk and unfair Um I do

think there’s probably more to it especially the sophisticated ones like from from from um from Thomas Aquinus

and people like that but in the end I think they’re all still flawed Um and as I mentioned maybe on the on the cruise I

came up with my own argument for God which I’ve never heard anyone make which I still think is closest to being

persuasive but I don’t want to reveal it because I’m afraid people will listen to it and I’ll start a new religion And you

don’t want to start a new religion come on man Ju just for the tax tax breaks alone Well maybe on this episode if we

get to it I I’ll I’ll I’ll give you my theory and everyone will make say that wasn’t that good of an idea but um so

that’s where I am Um but my approach to it which we can get into is like I think

what I disagreed with you on was when you were like I think you said something like um it was how you defined atheism

and like you said “Well I don’t know there’s not a god I just don’t have the belief.” Or something like that Um and I

was uh I was reading over because you mentioned George Smith to me in our text back and forth and I asked Grock about

him right because Grock is the font of all knowledge right and he sounds like

uh he sounds quite uh compatible with me at least his weak form of atheism

correct which is that he sees no compelling argument uh to make him believe in a god but he’s not going out

on a limb and saying “I know for sure that there is no god.” Correct And the way I phrase that is that’s a claim to a

type of omniscience that I don’t have Correct I’ll have access to So right

Which I don’t agree with I don’t think it’s a claim to omniscience necess it’s not necessarily a claim to omniscience

to say that that you know there’s not a god I mean you could debate it but I don’t think it’s necessarily a claim to

omniscience but but that’s because of my randian view of of knowledge which we can we well let me uh yeah no let’s

please do but let’s uh let’s let me frame it

thusly Um I remember the Tom Woods episode uh you’re talking about you

don’t have to be a dummy to believe in God So I looked up Thomas Aquinus’s five basic arguments right and it all is very

similar to there must be a prime mover to keep not only have started everything

big bang style but to even now keep things in motion right and a bunch of

similar arguments like that And I don’t think you

can sit in your armchair and logic yourself into a belief in something like

a god I just think there’s way too much we don’t know about how the universe works at all to make declarative

statements like there must be a prime mover and it must have these attributes In fact it must be a being That was one

of Aquinus’s uh declarations Yeah It must be a being not a a thing And I just

don’t think we have anywhere near the visibility on how the cosmos works to

say something like that And similarly I don’t think you can sit on an armchair

and disprove the existence of some unspecified thing Now what what I think you can do is blow a bunch of

intellectual holes in the claims theists make I think that’s pretty easy But

saying definitively I know so much about this universe that I can I can you know

state declaratively that there can be nothing like a god anywhere at any time I just don’t think you can say that

Right Yeah And I would agree with your first half um about uh the limits of our

knowledge and the problems with the assertions that we do know there’s a god Uh I’m not quite

as your second half I I I I have some some quibbles with Um please So let me

tell you how I I approach this Um and I think you said you’ve you’ve read or experienc you you you’re you’re

somewhat familiar with a lot of Ein Rian’s philosophy and I I’m I’m not everything all of it right and I’m not

an objectivist Um well I guess I think I am an objectivist in in my sense of I I

accept her four basic of the four basic branches of philosophy Um not talking

about aesthetics although even there I think she’s roughly right Um I think you and I are basically the same and I came

up through objectivism and I think she went wrong here and there but her her basic structure I think is correct Right

now the objectivists would say no because they think that the way she applies it is is part of her philosophy

Like I think capitalism is what she means by individual rights in the free market and I think that is correct but I

think it implies that the state is also wrong because it it’s aggressive Exactly

And um I wouldn’t call it selfishness I would call it you know rational egoism

or something like that But uh um and and I certainly believe in her epistemology that is her real her view that there is

reality and that reason is the the means of knowing it Um so I agree with all

that Um as far as knowledge um and I agree

with her theory of knowledge So my understanding is and it’s probably simplified but um I I believe that there

are only two in a sense two sources of knowledge and one is reason which is

really the the bigger category and the other is experience or evidence right

um which is why I think that she’s a little bit wrong to reject Kant’s or or

Mises as operary categories I think that’s just another way of using reason to discover something that’s

apppedictically true which is what she does when she talks about her her axioms of the basic axiom Those are not based

on well they’re based on experience chronologically but they’re they’re the type of knowledge that you could never

disprove because asserting the opposite leads to contradiction So anyway

that’s I agree with all of that and I’ve always thought that religious

people they think there’s a third way of knowledge which is what they call faith But to me that’s just a confusion Um and

you mentioned earlier about something like you can’t reason your way into a belief and I I agree with you but I

think what what’s a lot of people think of as belief they think is you can they think it’s valitional that you can

choose it and maybe in the long run you could brainwash yourself but I think we can choose our actions but we can’t

choose our beliefs really um on a momentto moment basis um if you offered me you know um 10

bitcoins to choose to believe that the moon is made of cheese I would simply

not be able to collect on the offer because I don’t believe the moon is made of cheese and I can’t make myself believe it because I don’t believe it So

I when people say God will punish you if you don’t believe in him I’m like well I can’t help that I don’t believe in him

So why would God punish me for something i can see punishing me for committing murder something that’s within my choice

of you know my scope of action but I can’t choose my beliefs I think your beliefs arise from the way your mind

works and from what you see and what you how you think Um so I I think that there’s only two sources of knowledge

and faith is not one of them because faith faith means either believing in something for no reason which to me is

irrational and arbitrary or it means you want it to be true But they’re conflating on you know people say how

can you live in a world where you don’t believe there’s an afterlife i’m like well because the that’s the world we we I live in Uh and what what they’re

saying is how can you accept that as true because it’s not a nice thing to believe people like well ch if I if I

pretend to believe it or if I force myself to believe it it still doesn’t change what whatever reality is so I

never I don’t get this way of talking about belief as something you can choose um to my mind belief so knowledge is

something that we have that is based upon evidence of the senses or or or

experience and and our reason so far with me yeah totally I was just

gonna throw something else tangential I think I think people talk that way

because it’s socially useful Like believing in God is mllifying And if

you’re I don’t know raising a family or something or just trying to keep peace in the neighborhood maybe it’s good to

have mllifying beliefs And so you just start to think you know why would you want to believe something that one out

of 10 people it makes them just go absolutely insane you know what right Right And that’s fine if you don’t want

to be combative or whatever I think someone sent me a post the other day um it was a meme and it says some or

it’s a quote from oh no it was uh it was a Jeremy Kaufman because he said he was going to confirmation and I on Twitter

and I said I didn’t I wouldn’t take you as a Catholic he says I’m a Voltarian Christian and I didn’t know what that

means so he sent me a quote from Voltater and Voltater has some quote like I don’t want to believe in God but

I do want the you know the maids working in my house to believe in God like I think what he meant was if you’re kind

of going to approach this simplistically you want them to have some kind of value system where they think it’s they think it’s wrong to steal and murder I’m like

okay I’m fine with that But it doesn’t mean it’s true That’s the thing right uh um so the way I the way I look at it and

George Smith helped me look So he he he categorizes people into I guess

different types There’s there’s there’s a theist who believes there’s a god and then there’s atheist And I think as you

pointed out atheist just means the lack of belief atheism without theism So in

in a pedantic kind of way or in a simplistic way even a rock or or a dog is an atheist or a baby They’re atheist

because they don’t have the positive belief that there is a god right uh I mean it’s pushing the definition

but technically speaking they are not a theist It’s really pushing it because I I mean I would reject that Yeah Because

I think you would have to consider the question in order to actually be an atheist that a rock or a baby can’t do

that Yeah I I I think when people when they use the word atheist to describe someone they’re talking about a rational

human that has some some types of views about all this I agree with that I’m just saying if you look at the word

etmologically Sure Most things don’t have a belief in God because they don’t even have beliefs you

know sure So a human that doesn’t have a belief in God is without theism So they’re an atheist But then Smith says

well there’s two types of atheist There’s p I think he calls them passive and active atheist And a passive atheist

is someone who just says,”I don’t I don’t have a belief in God I just happen not to be persuaded that there’s a God.”

Like like sort of like what you said You’re not persuaded by what you’ve heard so far Right And

um and then there’s an active atheist who would say “I actually believe there’s not a God.” Which is how I would

characterize my views But even within that there’s different types of belief systems There’s there’s

agnosticism versus non-agnosticism And most people use the word agnosticism to

mean someone who just doesn’t know which is the wrong definition By that definition you’re an agnostic because

you don’t you just don’t know Yeah I wouldn’t I I hate that word I would never call myself an agnostic Right So

Smith says agnosticism just means your your your epistemological stance about our ability to know or what we do know

And so a lot of I would say most people that claim to have an opinion about whether God exists or not whether

they’re theists or are atheists they are most of them are agnostics because they think it’s impossible to know for sure

Right let me let me let me give a little intuition on this because most people they hear the

word agnostic and they think ambivalent Like I just don’t know Maybe it’s a 50/50 proposition right and I definitely

am not in that camp I’m a betting man and you would have to give me extremely long odds to get me to bet that there is

a god I’m going to bet the other side every time So I don’t believe words like

agnostic uh because it seems like ambivalent I just don’t think it’s

accurate and and you and you think that so where I would disagree is you think that if you were to say not only do I

think it’s highly unlikely there’s a God and not only am I not convinced and I’m probably skeptical that um um that we’re

ever going to be able to prove it like beyond a reasonable doubt um you still think it’s highly likely there’s not one

You just think that it it’s some kind of pretense of of certainty to say we know for sure because that would that would

imply omniscience which we’re not omnicient and I agree we’re not omnicient and we never will be and in fact I think it’s impossible to have

omniscience and the concept is is is contradictory which is a one reason why I think there’s no god because one of

his characteristics is omniscience and omnipotence which are all nonsensical Yeah I do think you can sit in your

armchair and say that’s a thing that a that a being can’t be Like I

I’d be comfortable with that And that’s why but but but that but that would be a claim to certainty about there being no

God At least that characterist that that characterization of Yes So that’s part of the problem is theists are very vague

and all over the map about what they mean Some people say the universe is God

You know some people say it’s a man with a beard Some people say it’s just it’s it’s the cosmos Some say it’s the force

of goodness Some people say it’s the force You know I don’t know So the point is you can’t ever pin these guys down

And in fact some of them take pride in that They’ll say “Well it’s a mystery.” And and if you could define God you

would take away the mystery It’s like so they’re really in a way saying almost nonsense And so by the Aran’s view of of

of certainty is she calls it I think contextual certainty And that’s because our our faculty is a is a real faculty

of the world our our mind our mind and our reasoning faculty and our senses

um they I won’t say they have limitations but they have a nature and by the nature of how we acquire

knowledge we do it by getting the the the evidence of the senses from our from

experience and then using our our reasoning faculty to integrate it and to come to understanding of the way the

world works and that that understanding is always limited by the context in

which you’re in And so it’s always necessarily contextual certainty

Now the the critic of that view would say well that just means that uh that

you guys don’t have complete certainty but I think they’re holding up a false a false alternative So what they’re saying

is you can never know anything for sure because you can never have total complete knowledge like God does So but

they’re holding up a false alternative which is not even a realistic one because knowledge always has to be

contextual It has to be based upon your experiences and the way your mind actually works in the world So I think

any knowledge we have is always contextual which and given that within

understanding knowledge as contextual we can form contextual certain conclusions

about some things we can say I have contextual certainty that there is no god because given the way you’ve defined

its characteristics make no sense and you have no you’ve given no evidence for it And remember the only basis for

knowledge is reason or evidence If you can’t give evidence and if evidence is impossible to give and and this ties

into another thing she rejects what’s called arbitrary assertions you can’t just say something is possible without a

reason for it Because again you have to have a reason or evidence to make an assertion If I say it’s possible that

there’s a purple dragon on the back of the moon I don’t have to say well maybe there is maybe there’s not I think

there’s a 99 99% chance there’s no dragon on the moon but we can’t know for sure We can’t know anything for sure

Actually I think the right response is to reject that assertion out of hand as being an arbitrary assertion with no

cognitive basis whatsoever No epistemological standing whatsoever because they’re they’re they just

asserted it They didn’t give any reason or evidence for it and everything we know is contrary to that So if someone

says there’s a god and it’s up to you to disprove it I don’t think it is up to me to disprove it It’s up to you to define

it to justify your definition and then to give a reason or evidence for it

That’s why that’s why I say I believe there’s no God because the way I’ve understand the concept as they define it

or as they kind of implicitly define it by all the things they say about it it is simply there’s no reason to think

that’s possible None I agree with everything you said about

uh contextual knowledge Of course that word does an awful lot of work You know what exactly do you mean by contextual

and there’s two ways to look at it I guess Um one is we can’t actually be

100% certain of everything but people tend to freeze up when they hear that Like if you’re not 100% certain then how

can you act in the world blah blah blah Right and I I I think I think that’s not

true Obviously we do act in the world And one way to think about that is it’s just fine to go ahead and act even

though you’re not certain correct necessarily about anything That shouldn’t freeze you up Um what we know

is contextual If we learn new things tomorrow will change body of knowledge

based on our new understanding which could almost which almost certainly is also wrong or incomplete And that’s just

how human beings operate I don’t think that’s a that’s an impediment My only

objection is um I agree with how you define an assertion and you should just

reject them out of hand but I still think you should leave a little bit of room in your epistemology for for things

that you don’t know I totally agree Yeah You shouldn’t believe that there’s that little purple dragon visible on the back

side of the moon But you you just can’t rule it out No you can’t rule it out because that that that example that

there’s nothing logically impossible about that right it’s just there’s no proof for it But there are some things that are that are logically impossible

right and that’s that’s part of what God’s nature is Like the I mean even Mises has sort of an implicit criticism

of God in in in the ultimate foundation of of human of of economic science and

other places Well I think I think you and I are atheists Not only for the most

extreme definition of what God is but even what that chick was thinking when you were trying to get her into her

pants in college about how there’s some fuzzy god Uh you know we’re all one man

It’s the one big universe You want to reject all those all those claims too Even though they’re not making claims to

omniscience or omnipotence that are logical contradictions Yeah we don’t have evidence for any of it Yeah But we

I mean we can only take down one concept of God at a time because I mean so we we

could we could we could we could name say 10 of them and have different ars

each one of those is a flawed assertion But then they’ll just come up with the 11th So it’s hard to do a comprehensive

I think it’s one takedown You just say you haven’t shown me evidence that I’m convinced by that’s true That’s true But

there so let’s say that half of the concepts of God I would say I’m

conceptually certain that that they’re impossible just by the nature of what it means to exist

Um now a weaker version of God like a very say you could say a very there’s a

very powerful being out there that we would call God because he’s so far above us in every way like like there could be

a civilization out there that has transmuted into some technological powerful thing using AI and quantum

stuff and it would effectively be God in the sense of it could do so much that we

would treat it like it could do what it would do what would what would appear to be miracles Now I would say that is

logically possible You haven’t given me any evidence to believe that So I’m not going to accept your assertion that that thing exists or even that it’s possible

um without some kind of evidence or proof But I wouldn’t reject that on logical and possibility grounds But I

would reject other things on logic because I think what I would say is well if that thing exists it’s just not God because it’s just another thing within

the laws of the universe It’s very po like just a very powerful space alien Um

and it might effectively be God because it could kill us and it could give us things It could do miracles for us but

it wouldn’t be God that’s classically conceived So it’s all it all comes down to semantics and how the theist wants to

define the type of God he wants to assert exists And some of those I think you can dismiss out of hand because

again like Mises did like if if you say there’s a God who’s all knowing and all

powerful and all good omni omni omni benevolent omni powerful omniscient and

omnipotent All three of those things together my personal view is that is impossible because for various reasons

Number one God could never act Um so he but he’s held he’s he’s set to create

the universe to do things but according to Jesus if you act it shows that you’re imperfect because something is wrong

with the plan of things So the whole thing is self-contradictory Um and not only that I think it’s just from what we

know about knowledge knowledge is always contextual It’s just doesn’t make any for the same reason we don’t know the

universe completely We never will know everything God can’t either because it

doesn’t make any sense and and and um furthermore there is such a thing as time The future hasn’t happened yet So

even if there was a little godly who thought he was God he might be wrong There might be a god higher than him

who’s playing tricks on him I you know Yeah And I I agree with everything

you’ve said um with I don’t know maybe 99.99% of the certainty that that that

you’re expressing Um so let me let me ask a weird

question Like I’ve often I don’t believe in the simulation but I love thinking about it Yeah And part of the reason is

just so I don’t pluck my own eyeballs out if I ever woke up in a vat with a cable attached to the back of my skull

outside of the matrix I want to have the mental flexibility to just handle whatever this universe throws at me So

in a similar vein I mean what would you do if you encountered a being just like in Star Trek 5 who had

all the attributes of God and all the powers like you know at least as much as far as you’re concerned right would you

would you just believe you’re you’re talking to a space alien or would you think about maybe changing your mind

about something or or if Jesus appeared to me you sure yeah Yeah Yeah Came back something like that Um well I I don’t

think he I don’t think he would have all the attributes of God He would you know he wouldn’t have all of them because he wouldn’t he he wouldn’t know the future

He wouldn’t he wouldn’t be he wouldn’t be omnipotent because he’s acting you

know so he would have a lot of the aspects of what we call God Um

uh no I would so if I would Aam’s razor would lead me to go to the point where

it’s just impossible that this is God Obviously there’s some very powerful

being which is doing something in front of me I can’t explain Um but there would

have to be a natural explanation even if I didn’t know it Sure Um one of the things that I refuse

to close the door on these things all the way is just the fact that I don’t understand how anything works Like I

don’t really understand what spaceime is right i can’t conceive of it And sometimes when people talk about their

vision of what an all- knowing God means considering time is they they describe

something like a multi-dimensional cube right where all things have already occurred past and future are one and we

just can’t perceive the distinction And since I don’t know how anything works including quantum mechanics or I I just

say “Okay I I have to leave a little room in my brain for Right.” And yeah and I think you’re I I think what you’re

doing is you’re confusing humility and um and fallibility with with all this because

so the way one thing I think is important to point out is that see sometimes the

empiricists and the positivists criticize us Austrians who believe in operary categories because they think

that that means um infallibility right and actually Barry Smith has a great

article on this about extreme I think it’s called extreme oper a prioristic

fallibilism So oprierism doesn’t mean infallibility It just means that if you

start with correct conclusions and your and your deduction is right then your your

conclusion is correct But it doesn’t mean you didn’t make a mistake and you could always be on the lookout for maybe I made a mistake Sure Uh all you could

do is say “So far as I can tell given my reason this conclusion is true It’s impossible for there to be humans for

there not to be humans that that don’t act.” Because I think it’s important I I

like I love what you said I agree completely I I think it’s important to remember that preamble even if we don’t

always say it as far as I can tell based on evidence and reason And you can always say and I could be wrong because

it’s exactly be wrong But the thing is the the theist and the positivist and

the person who rejects this way of looking at it they will seize upon that They’ll say “Aha well you don’t know

either.” See the thing is you said “I don’t know These guys talk about quantum physics and all this stuff and maybe

there’s a supercomput Maybe we’re in a matrix.” Well they don’t know either They’re just they’re making this stuff up I mean I love science fiction I just

think I know the I know when I’m reading science fiction It’s just a table told by some creative author I don’t conflate

Star Trek with reality Um you know which I think a lot of people do So

I I actually think that’s true I think most people’s because we don’t we don’t

reason We come to our conclusions you know emotionally and intuitively Yeah

And I think before we ever had uh science fiction on TV or the books were popular I bet a lot fewer people

believed in space aliens than they did after Star Wars came out and Star Trek and you know all the bee movies People

think you know people are influenced by what they see even if even if it’s just on a a movie screen Yeah And so so I I I

I agree with your kind of humble approach in the sense of you’re admitting that we don’t Well first of all I think it’s we don’t we can never

know everything In fact I don’t even know if it what it means to say we you would like that’s a false standard It’s

impossible to know everything It doesn’t even mean anything Knowledge is a cate is a is a category of action in the

sense it’s a practical thing It helps guide our choices and our awareness of the world but it’s always inherently I

won’t say limited but it’s always got a nature and it comes from somewhere Knowledge is a category of action Is

that what you said i think in a sense it is because when you act action is a is categorical It has

these categorical aspects to it like it presupposes that there’s an actor who

has some awareness of the world and he’s trying to achieve an end But it’s it’s not just that There’s a it’s important

point I’ve made before in the intellectual property argument There are two most people think of action as

having one main component which is the availability and employment of scarce means scarce means of action which is

what you use to achieve your goal in the end in the future Um but knowledge is

the second part and they’re both crucially essential and they’re distinct from each other because all human action

is motivated by reason and choice which which presupposes some knowledge on the

part of the actor Knowledge about what the way the world is knowledge about the availability of means knowledge about

the laws of cause and effect knowledge that there is cause and effect and causality and knowledge of the future

These things all have to be consulted when you make a choice So all knowledge

is the employment of a scarce means but guided by knowledge Those two things are

both essential to what human action is So knowledge is a category in the sense of you can’t conceive of action without

the actor having knowledge now doesn’t mean it’s um um infallible knowledge but

it is his understanding of the way the world works um that guides his actions

Yeah I agree with all that It’s just that since it’s so directly tied to action it feels weird to pull it apart

Um but if you don’t pull it apart then you’re you then you’re left with intellectual property because you start

thinking well you own your actions these metaphorical things You own your axes therefore you own the results of your

actions which is things that you create which is where intellectual property comes from You know Hapa’s book a lot of

people haven’t read it He’s got this little short twochapter or two section book called economic science and the

Austrian method which is his attempt to build

upon see a lot of Randians would criticize Mises because they think he’s

a Kian and they think Kant is the is the arch evil of the universe My understanding of it after having read

Hapa and Mises and studied all these guys over the years I think the Randians in a way get Kant wrong because and it’s

partly Kant’s fault because he is a murky writer and he’s been interpreted by so many different uh schools of

thought But to simplify it my understanding is that one school of interpretation of

Kant on the European continent the continental way is is realistic And

that’s where Mises got his from and and hop his uh the American idealists sort of took it in this skeptical direction

and that is so I think when Rand is criticizing Kant she’s criticizing the American idealist interpretation of Kant

and I think she’s roughly right about that Um but I think that the there is a

you can you can interpret what Kant meant in in a realistic way which is what Mises does in a pragmatic way And

then Hapa went a little bit further in that little that little monograph and he

tried to explain where action is where human the humans contact the world

through their action and through their thoughts and and because action is a realistic thing in the world that is

affecting things because we’re we’re we’re causing things to change by using causally efficacious scarce means Then

then action itself is the connection between our our categories and our minds

and the world which is why um our prayerism in the copian and

mizesia sense is epistemologically realist and compatible with I think ran’s view That’s a long way of saying

it but but that’s why I think there there is a bridge between it’s action that gives us this connection to reality

not only through our senses but through our acting acting And in fact there’s a whole school of philosophy in German only which I’ve only read some summaries

and her hop was a guy named Peter Janick I wish more of the stuff was in English Um or I wish there was no copyright so

that the the AI engines could easily just give it to us right away with a good translation But um yeah Peter

Janick has this real practical way of using content sort of ideas to show that all of our concepts come from literally

from manipulation using your hands to interact with the world and building these concepts over time And I think

that’s all sophisticated and realistic and way of and is compatible with

Einran’s realistic view that they would just not they would reject it because it’s using contean terminology

Yeah I think there’s probably something to that Um when if you listen to Jordan Peterson talk he’ll often say that exact

same thing that that’s how knowledge concepts enter our brain uh neuro

neuroysiologically Mhm And you know if you look at how from

being an infant you know how we how we move in the world and act the sensory input the the the trial and error that

that does seem to be how we build the model in our brain of our surroundings and ourselves and our concepts Yeah it’s

it’s based upon human evolution It’s based upon human experience chronologically and temporarily in the

world and and and and the way our minds work the way our reasonable rational faculty works And it’s also highly

strangely it’s compatible in my view uh with Montasauri the Monasuri method which we talked about a little bit on

the cruise the Monasuri understanding of the tactile environment and the way we have levels of understand uh levels of

uh uh planes of development she calls it among infants children different levels

different p planes of development in an environment a sensory environment that’s

suitable to your your level of development which is how our our brain I think this is all natural

there’s no incompatibility between this stuff Sometimes you’ll have someone say “Well is that category logically prior

to this one and they want you they want you to admit that once like the Randy is they they don’t like dichotoies They

they want to say that oh there’s no dichotomy between um axioms orary

knowledge and and and experience It’s all one thing It’s all reason.” But really um there are different modes of

of understanding different realms of phenomena like in in in in the dualism of mises we

understand the causal world which is what our action has to understand when we manipulate means they’re causally

efficacious So it’s an understanding of causal laws but also it’s teological

We’re talking about the teological world because we’re we’re explaining a human action that is chooses among different

means and different ends based upon your values Right so there there’s different

ways of explaining what a human does You can explain him teologically as an actor with choice and with goals and

purposes or causally as a cloud of electrons and and quirks under the

causal realm But they’re they’re different modes of understanding Yes Exactly I agree completely and

tangentially again I think that’s why your Tesla Model Y is going to achieve

general artificial intelligence way quicker than Chad GPT ever will Yes

Robots or cars could be they could be intelligent someday because they have

peripherals They have inputs and outputs in the world They can manipulate They control the world They can do experiments They can learn from from

their trial and error Exactly Computer a computer never could You have to have a a body You need to be embodied and you

need to have desires of some kind You need to be in an environment where you need to figure out just like an infant

how to make your desires manifest in the world And then if if it’s ever to be

it’ll it’ll figure out itself how to become a general intelligence And I totally agree with that And I I now I I

I’m I’m a skeptic of this quantum stuff and also of of AI Um I I don’t think it’s

impossible to have a a a genuine AI if it’s embodied Um I suspect that we can

only achieve that with a wet brain instead of a hard brain And by that I mean I I think you can’t just simulate

it with digital signals the brain is wet and and you have so you have to have enough resolution in the transmission of

the signals between the neurons In other words I think you have like if you could build a posatronic net which as a mo

envisioned and you could train it it could be it could it could and if it had a body it could develop intelligence but

it but you wouldn’t know why it was intelligent because it would just be like our brain We don’t know It’s just got this mushy cloud of patterns inside

of it The only difference would be that if it was electronic you could theoretically have access to every one of its neurons and you could you could

have another computer analyze it You could know like if it has a memory you could see where that memory is

distributed among all the neurons Whereas our brains is too messy to to see it Yeah that’s really interesting I

don’t know if you need I mean my intuition runs counter to what you just said I don’t understand why it would

have to be a wet electrochemical signal rather than something we could duplicate digitally But because I think that the

for the same reason that LPS have a different sound than than CDs

because you can digitize the the the the wave that’s has basically infinite

infinite information on that groove You can digitize it with sampling to a very

very small degree so that you your ear can’t tell the difference if it’s reproduced with a CD or a digital

version but it’s still not a perfect repro reproduction So I just think it you’d have to have a neural if it’s a

digital neuronet network It would have to be so much bigger in terms of neurons than a

human brain to achieve the same level of of of processing ability Um so I in

other words that’s the reason is because the dig the digital brain can only simulate the the fine nuances of a of a

wet brain just just like a CD is I mean if you ever if you ever look at the the amount of information on a CD ROM you

you know what it is It’s enough to have an hour of music under the old format Uh but that’s a lot of wasted data because

you had to capture enough of that group But that record groove has I won’t say it’s infinite but it’s it’s a lot of

data in there right it’s just inefficiently Just between you and me Stephan Yeah I don’t think grooves and

records are real I think it’s magic I don’t understand how sound can come out of a needle going through this vinyl

It’s ridiculous Come on You’re trying to tell me that’s real Well I I will say you’re one insight you just had was is

that there’s not grooves on a record There’s only one groove right well per side Sometimes they put a second one

there in the middle You have to you have to lift the stylus and move it over Oh really i did not know that I just cuz I

just made it up so that I would be so that I wouldn’t be wrong Yes it’s one you you could do it You know I kind of

wonder why Uh oh the I think there was one record made that did have two grooves if you were like real careful at

the beginning You get one groove or the other I can’t remember who who did that but yeah I mean usually what they have

is they have the silence between songs It’s just like a 3se secondond Yeah pause But but it’s just the groove has

no information It’s just silent Uh but um for that part of it uh but um you

know I don’t this is a techn technological question I’m not sure why it’s not possible yet I mean theoretically you could take a record up

an LP and you could take your iPhone and just take a picture of it because the resolution on these iPhone cameras is

pretty damn good now and have just a computer start playing it because it could

I I don’t think the resolution is enough yet but theoretically you could just you could just take a picture of it and then you could play it from the picture Again

man that’s just magic How does the sound come out that’s that’s magic The sound the sound is well no the question is how

do you get a digital s how do you get a signal off of looking at the grooves I mean you know the grooves are

wobbling right I don’t I think I’ve demonstrated that I

don’t understand how it works well this is you know the first one was it was a wax cylinder right with Edison or

someone so you you have a stylus connected to a big uh um like a funnel

thing and he spoke into it and when you speak into the funnel it vibrates it and it makes the needle jiggle and as the as

the as as the cylinder rotates around it it it etches a spiral into the like a

helical spiral into the outside of the wax wax in the in in the thing But as it

jiggles it makes little perturbations of that groove And when

you play it back the needle is affected by the back and forth movement of those little

oscillations on the on the groove And you use use transducer to to convert it

to another form of energy that you can amplify I think if Thomas Aquinus had had the ability to describe what you

just did that would have been a lot lot further in pushing me into thinking there is a god than anything else Can

you tell that I really wish I’d stayed in electrical engineering yeah you uh get really animated Yeah I know I love

oscillations and perturbations and tubes He’s very excited

Well I mean you’ve heard of AM and FM right sure Do you know what that stands for even the amplitude modulation or

frequency modulation correct But do you know so modulation means a perturbation

of a carrier signal carrier whether it’s frequency or whether it’s amplitude and something can detect it but they’re

detecting the perturbations but they have to be perturbed in the first place So you take a signal like from a speaker

from a microphone and that perturbs the uh the amplifier that’s emitting the

signal So let’s say for amplitude like the ampl or for frequency let’s say this carrier frequency and it goes back and

forth away from that a little bit like if it’s silent it’s just that that signal one sine wave but if you perturb

it you deviate slightly from that and then the receiver can pick up the amount that it deviates and that’s how you get

radio transmission I mean I’m tempted to just say I get it and move on but really all that happened was I understand that

when the guy in the funny hat says abracadabra the rabbit appears and that’s how everything works

I just figured you would have this would have factored into your your gambling skills over the years somehow knowing

something about about modulation Do you know what the word modem means by the way you know you’ve heard of modem sure

It’s an acronym for modulator de modulator modem I did not know that Yeah it’s just a it’s modulate the signal a

carrier signal and then de modulate at the other end Yeah All right All right I’m starting to understand Although I

hate to give up my belief that it really is just fairies in there making it making it happen

magically Um all right Well I didn’t really want to take up more than an hour of your time but this was great man Um I

think we’re largely sympotico Um just let’s tell all our friends out there because the there’s a

lot of Christians out there nowadays among the libertarian core We you and I are the good atheists We’re we’re pro

we’re pro-ch Christianity or whatever in a weak form in a weak way Yeah Well I mean it shouldn’t be that hard We’re

pro- hierarchy of values right well that’s basically what a religion is

right if God’s if God exists and he’s good he’s a libertarian I would I would think so and he’s he’s rooting He he was

going go Ron Paul in 2008 Exactly Um All right Well uh yeah again I think this

was wonderful I think uh hitting on contextual knowledge and operating in the real world with uncertainty because

we are analog creatures I think that’s all really good stuff and deep stuff And

if you understand it and believe it you can operate in the world without being uh complete neurotic

so far in an incomplete neurotic All right man Um well thanks again Um I

really appreciate it Uh why don’t you tell people where to find you you have a website and all sorts of good stuff and

you’re on the you’re on the X I’m on Twitter at NSella in for Norman in case

anyone wants to know Uh and uh stefanello.com is my website Awesome We

will put links to all that stuff in the YouTube video description and also on Substack Thank you sir Pleasure as

always and thank you all for listening and watching to hand in nature Catch you

next time [Music]