[0:00] Hi everybody, I hope that you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio again. I hope that you are having a wonderful day.
And today we are going to take a swing at a little shibboleth we call the truth.
And of course we're going to start with a little bit of a definition as we did before.
And just by the by, I've decided to change the names.
I don't know if this matters to you at this point, but I've decided to change the names of the previous shows to make them a little less technical, so I changed metaphysics to reality, epistemology to knowledge, so I'm going to just make it a little bit less technical, hopefully to invite even more people to come in and have a look, although we've been getting some good feedback so far, I certainly appreciate that.
So let's have a look at the definitions of truth that are available, this is through Google.
[0:56] And truth is defined as a fact that has been verified.
Though it's hard to know exactly that hasn't been verified, how we know it's a fact.
And the examples are given, quote, at last he knew the truth, and the truth is that he didn't want to do it. So that's an example.
Now another one is conformity to reality or actuality. Quote, they debated the truth of the proposition. proposition.
The situation brought home to us the blunt truth of the military threat.
He was famous for the truth of his portraits he turned to religion in his search for eternal verities, which we'll get to soon enough.
A true statement, he told the truth. He thought of answering with the truth, but he knew they wouldn't believe it.
Accuracy, the quality of being near to the true value. He was beginning to doubt the accuracy of his compass.
The lawyer questioned the truth of Maya Kant.
So, I would say that it's fair, to comment on truth and say that it is a conformity to something external to consciousness.
[2:14] We've talked about reality as existing in the real world, honest to goodness, external to consciousness, independent of consciousness.
We can affect reality through the use of our body, but we cannot mentally control external aspects of reality.
It exists independent of consciousness the atoms were here before human consciousness they will be here if there's such a time where there is no human consciousness and we've also talked about, in terms of human knowledge that we can say that something is is accurate or true the degree to which the concepts in the mind reflect both the existence and properties of matter or the the principles which are derived from the existence, consistency, and properties of matter.
So now that we've laid that foundation, we can start to get a little bit closer into this idea of something called the truth.
[3:13] And the truth obviously has something to do with accuracy and consistency.
[3:23] And in order for us to be able to understand what that means, The first question we have to ask, of course, is accuracy and consistency in relation to what?
There's an old, I don't know if you could call it, joke among certain philosophers where, I can't remember who, some philosopher was asked, how is your wife?
And he said, compared to what? Which is a bit of an annoying way of using philosophy, but I think you sort of get the idea that if we are going to add a conceptual category to propositions called the truth then it really shouldn't be arbitrary so i don't know if you can see the wall of my study here with the fabulous painting i've been working on working on for quite a while of a vague light, but uh this is a it's a red wall and it's more red around the edges of the screen and so on but But when I say red, it's not an arbitrary or subjective thing that I am talking about.
And I can't call my forehead red, although I can call it bright.
I can't call my semi-Star Trek-y top here red, because red is a description of.
[4:37] Of wavelength fundamentally but red is also a description of an experience that we have of seeing or processing through the eyes and then into the brain a particular wavelength, and so here we have red you know you could say this is red there's a rust red i can't remember what fruity name the um the paint company gave it but you know something like you know sunset set Tuscado or something like that.
And generally, though, we can say that if I say to you, this wall is red, you probably don't think this wall has text on it, but you can read, you don't think this wall is a communist, you think, okay, the wavelength of this wall translates in our minds to the color red, which has certain boundaries in terms of its waveforms between other there are colors and so on.
So when I say this wall is red, the truth statement of that proposition or the truth value of that statement is entirely dependent upon the actual properties of light, waves or particles, however you want to define them, of light bouncing off a particular, I think it works that it absorbs every color but red and reflects red back to my eyes.
[6:00] So, when I say this wall is red, I'm talking about a statement in my mind that conforms to the physical properties and attributes of matter in the real world.
Now, just as we talked about last time, I was staring at an orange, I think it was, trying to turn it into a banana, into an orange, into a banana, I can't recall.
Some sort of fruit transmogrification was going on, or rather not going on, which was instructive.
If I say this wall is translucent or this wall is Scottish, or this wall is purple or plaid or has wallpaper or is an elephant, these are all statements that I make within my mind that can be validated relative to the external behavior, the behavior of matter external to my mind.
And it can be validated through your sensual understanding, appreciation, and processing of objects as they exist and move and operate and have properties and so on within the real world.
This wall is red is something which can be verified either through getting a bunch of other people to come in and say, yeah, that wall's red, you know, with maybe the one blind guy and the colorblind guy and the guy who's just philosophically perverse saying something different.
[7:22] But you can either sort of verify it that way, and this, of course, was before there was such a thing as a spectrograph and stuff like that, or you can analyze the wavelength coming and find that it falls within a particular range and so on.
The first is a little bit more useful in a sort of social situation, but the second one is a little bit more sort of scientific and procedural.
There's nothing wrong with that, but there's sort of two ways of validating a statement, this wall is red.
Right so we're getting some sort of useful stuff out of here because we are now able to sort of understand that when it comes to validating a proposition as we talked about in the last video class when it comes to validating a proposition there are two rules right either the evidence of the census follows it up or if you are looking at a proposition called two plus two is four you don't have to have two things in front of you stack them together count them to to make four.
You can do that in your mind, but it does have to follow the laws of logic, when the laws of logic we fundamentally get from the consistent behavior of matter in the real world.
So, when we start to think about something like truth, then we can start to use the principles which we've developed so far to be able to have accurate looks at something like.
[8:49] What makes a statement valid or invalid right because the whole thing that goes on in philosophy and and in life in general is that we're always making statements which are propositions of one form or another and we'll get into that a little bit later but it's a very once you get the hang of this it's very instructive when it comes to not just talking to people about philosophy or thinking about philosophy which is wonderful but even in reading the newspaper watching the news listening to people talk about various things it's easy to start to bring to bear these principles that we've been talking about to get a further and clearer delineation of what is meant by truth, and what is meant by falsehood so we did ghosts right we cleared off the whole ghost thing i'm going to put forward another sort of duality of um possibilities or things that we could talk about in terms of figuring out the true or false nature of statements, right?
How we can say whether something is possible, is probable, or is not possible, right?
These are sort of some very important distinctions between statements that people make.
[10:04] So let's start with, we did something that doesn't exist like ghosts, let's do something like UFOs, unidentified flying objects, little green men in metal frisbees thrown by cameramen slightly off camera.
This is the idea, of course, that life forms from another planet are buzzing our world and abducting Ohio farmers for strange purposes all their own.
And we can have a look at this as a proposition that could be put forward, right?
UFOs exist, right? This is a proposition that's put forward.
Lots of people believe it. Lots of people pour a lot of time and energy into making the case.
[10:48] And what we need to do when we're starting to look at this sort of proposition, UFOs exist, is we need to start sort of breaking it down in our minds.
We need to find out if it's possible, Possible, probable, or not possible.
[11:03] Probable is always this varying slide from, you know, very, very, very tiny chance to almost certain.
But the first thing we need to establish when we're thinking about the truth of a proposition is, is it even possible at all?
So when you think about something like UFOs, what we have as a proposition is that life forms exist not of this world, right?
Well, the universe is a huge, huge, huge place, right? There are like 100 billion galaxies, each composed of 100 million suns.
And so it seems quite likely that some other M-class planet is out there somewhere that has life forms on it.
And it seems likely that given that we've managed to make it through the nuclear threshold to space travel and so on, that it seems possible.
Of course, it's not impossible since it's happened to us. It's possible within reality, right? Right.
If if a man can jump five feet high, then it's possible for men to jump five feet high.
No man can just of his own power jump 50 feet high or jump to the moon. Right.
So there's a difference between the sort of very strict difference between possible and not possible.
And of course, we have various degrees of probability.
Few men can sort of from a standing jump, jump sort of five or six feet high.
But it's still possible. It's just not very probable for the average man to have that ability. but it's still possible. That's sort of the very important thing.
[12:24] So when you look at something like UFOs, the proposition that's being put forward is that.
[12:29] Life forms exist not of this world. Well, you know, certainly it's not breaking any of the laws of biology or physics, right?
We can always question the probability, but the probability is probably not that whether life forms exist anywhere else in the universe.
That seems, I would say, a virtual certainty, just given the number of stars, galaxies, planets, and so on involved, involved, and given the commonality of matter and energy, atoms, and so on, it seems almost impossible that life would not exist anywhere else in the universe.
It's certainly quite a common thing on Earth.
So, when we sort of hear the proposition of UFOs, that they're populated by material beings, right?
They're not populated, at least not the ones that I've heard about, They're not populated by angels or square circles or leprechauns or anything like that.
They're populated by biological material beings with their, you know, spaceships and so on, flying their spaceships.
[13:37] And so, so far, in the proposition that UFOs exist and all of the associated propositions that, you know, life exists in other worlds, it's achieved a certain technological superiority, priority probably to ours and so and so and so then we can start to say well yeah this is not impossible right this is a very fun this is not impossible in the way that ghosts are impossible given all known laws of physics and the basic laws of logic and the need for central reproduction of evidence and so on and the basic scientific method and so on we can say ufos right space aliens which which we know life exists, and there's a big universe, so life could exist, and there's no reason to believe that the conditions for life to exist.
I know that it's very rare, but there's no reason to believe that of the hundreds of billions of planets out there, that none of them have life.
So, so far, we're not violating any of the known laws of physics.
And so, when we talk about UFOs, I think, not to labor the point too long, we can put them in the category of not impossible.
[14:47] Right not impossible and then we can start to talk about different degrees of probability involved in when people say that they see ufos are they in fact actually seeing ufos well.
[15:07] There's no sensual evidence for UFOs. There's no reproducible experimentation that has proved even the trop circles would turn out to be a hoax.
So we also know that human beings are capable of lying, right?
This is a very important thing.
This is why we need philosophy, because human beings are capable of error, capable of mistakes, capable of lying, either for a nefarious motive or just for the funsies of it.
And because of all of this, because we can sort of, our minds can be fooled by the evidence of our senses, and because we can make mistakes, because we can be incorrectly taught, and because human beings lie for a variety of motives, we know that we can't take other people's statements as absolute facts of truth, right?
So if somebody comes up and says, I saw a UFO, I saw a UFO, there's lots of possibilities that you have to go through before you're willing to settle even on it being a probability.
[16:08] So, I mean, to take some sort of silly examples, but I think you'll sort of get the point.
If somebody comes up to you and says, dude, I saw a UFO. I don't know why they sound like they're from California. It just seems to be the case.
Dude, I saw a UFO. then you can say you have to go through a whole series of questions i would say rather than saying where where let's go get them you would have to sort of say um you know were you drunk did you just awaken from a sleep uh did you have any uh motives so you may not ask this directly but you might want to find them out if you felt like pursuing the matter right do you have any motives.
[16:44] For promoting you know did you just write a book about ufos or or uh is your farm not going going very well, and you want the UFO people to come over and camp out to see UFOs.
So you would look at sort of motive and possibility for error and possibility for lying.
And then let's say that you accepted that all of those had occurred and were not major factors or not factors enough that you would start to, you would dismiss the whole thing out of hand, right?
So if the guy says, I saw a UFO, and you said, what were the proximate circumstances?
And he says, well, I'm on a farm that's doing really badly. I'm desperate for money.
I just dropped a whole load of LSD, and a friend of mine was playing with a metal frisbee, and it was Halloween.
And lots of kids around here like to dress in those little sort of green Martian uniforms, but I saw a UFO.
Well, there's enough sort of circumstantial stuff there. Oh, and I'm really really bad and my eyesight is really bad and I didn't have my glasses.
[17:49] So, and I have a form of schizophrenia, which causes visual and auditory hallucinations, right?
There would then be lots of reasons to say, well, I'm not sure that I'm going to believe you that.
I believe that you're telling me what you perceived, but I'm not going to believe that that translates into the objective existence of a UFO.
So, that's sort of one way of approaching this question of veracity, right? What do we consider a true statement?
So there are certain things which require investigation right so i mean we all have seen about a million cross examinations in legal dramas or maybe you've seen uh courts themselves running but if you are given an alibi by somebody right so there's a murder in question or something and you were given an alibi so the guy says uh uh i was at the movies right and.
[18:52] It's possible of course that he was at the movies when the murder was occurred so you say okay did you see the movie with anyone who can verify that you were there um no i went alone, it's possible that now people go to the movies alone okay i tell you what we're going to pull Pull the security tapes, just assuming they're there.
I'm going to pull these security tapes, and we are then going to review and look for you on the security tapes.
The guy says, no, I was wearing a hat.
Or, if he's not expecting anyone to be wearing a hat, he's going to say, well, I snuck in the back.
I stole my way in through the fire escape because I didn't want to pay for the movie.
Oh, okay. Did you buy any popcorn? Is there anyone? No, I didn't buy any popcorn.
When I bought my own snacks. Did anyone see you come in? Um...
[19:44] Well, the movie theater was very sparse and so on. And then you go and you ask the movie theater manager how many people were there, and oh, it was very full, and this kind of stuff, right?
So you're going through a process when somebody says, I was at the movies, and therefore I could not have committed this crime.
You're going through a process of trying to figure out whether there's independent verification from other people's consciousnesses, through their essential evidence, from security cameras, and so on.
So it's possible but as the person begins to knock down more and more probabilities it becomes less probable that they were at the movies right then it just becomes a i said i was at the movies there was it was an automatic projector there was no one in the movie theater and there was nobody who could conceivably have seen me i came in through the sewers i watched a movie i went back out through the sewers and there was nobody in the movie theater the whole time.
[20:36] Right there's simply no way of verifying it as i said before it has no null hypothesis there's no way let's just assume there's no way of disproving this particular proposition that i was at the movies i came after the sewers and so on and so that's sort of one thing where you say yes it's possible but you're going to look for all of the problems or possible problems problems in somebody's statement about a particular proposition. I was at the movies when this trial was committed.
So that's one aspect of talking about a truth, right? It's possible.
I need some independent verification. Your say-so is not enough.
And obviously, the motive just to not get caught for a murder would be quite high.
So, you're working out the probability. Now, yes, it is possible that the Worson went to the movies, there was almost nobody there, nobody saw them, they went in through the back, they, nobody, you know, it's possible for all of these things.
And let's say three people put them at the scene of the crime, and here you're into this well-known thing of probability within the legal system, and we do all of this in our day-to-day lives, you know, fairly regularly.
We're combing over, knowing that people can make mistakes, knowing that they can lie, knowing that our own consciousness can make mistakes, that our senses can, or we can misinterpret the evidence of our senses.
We're constantly going over a process of verifying things, right?
[22:03] So, reasonable doubt, right? That's sort of the criteria. Would a reasonable person, in general, doubt that somebody went to the movies on their own, nobody saw them, three people put them at the scene of the crime, said that's the guy, identified him in the lineup.
Up but they are all mistaken he's got a twin he you know like at some point it just starts to become sort of ridiculous and it is sort of fairly clear that somebody's you know very likely not telling the truth all of these things are possible but without independent verification they have no no provability or disprovability and so um the possibility that somebody's truth statement, has no testability to it is so remarkably low we're all social animals we're all out and about we're all meeting and greeting and talking and walking and so on a lot of times we when we go out of the house we're with somebody else i mean unless we're just doing groceries or even if we're at the groceries we're doing with somebody sees us so the possibility that somebody went through a series of events or a series uh made a series of choices that resulted in nobody seeing them other kind of stuff it's possible highly unlikely so here's where we're starting to get into the.
[23:11] So that's sort of one example of how it is that you would comb over something to do with a proposition put forward like I was at the movies, which you would try and verify according to other people's independent verification of the video camera or whatever.
Now, if, however, I'm the guy who's being accused of this crime, and I say, yes, I was, I have an alibi, I was both at the movies and eating dinner on the other side of town simultaneously. simultaneously?
[23:49] Well, I got to think that if you're the cross-examining lawyer, you're not going to say, okay, so he's at the movies and he's also eating dinner across town simultaneously.
So what we need to do is get one team out to the movie theater to figure out whether he's showed up there.
To get another team out to interview the maitre d' and the waiters and the other, and find out if he was theirs. I mean, obviously, it's not possible for a human being to be two ends of a town simultaneously.
So that's a situation that's impossible. And he may be in one place, he may be in the other, but he can't be in both places at the same time.
[24:29] So, there's an example of something that's impossible, right?
So, there's all these realms of probability when it comes to establishing truth statements, and they're all to do with finding independent verification and corroboration of propositions put forward by people who may be lying, may have self-interest, may be mistaken, and so on.
But then there are statements which are just flat out impossible, right?
I was at the movies on one side of town, and I was eating dinner at the other side of town, so that's my... I have two alibis.
It's even better, right? So, that's not a situation that's going to be at all believable. Nobody's going to say that.
So, when we look at UFOs, we can start to look at things like probability, right?
They're an incredibly advanced and brilliant species, enough to figure out probably faster-than-light travel and so on. They're like tachyon-based life forms or something.
And yet, they either want to be seen or they don't want to be seen.
If they do want to be seen they're not doing a very good job because they're not landing in front of all the cameras in front of the White House and CNN or whatever and if they don't want to be seen then.
[25:36] They seem to be seen by a lot of people who are in sort of remote areas the other thing of course which you can look at is is there an Air Force base nearby that does a lot of experimental stuff you know lots of different things because there's something in the water that makes people hallucinate and so, but But there's a pretty high barrier to proof for saying that UFOs exist, are buzzing the world, and are abducting people, and so on, right?
[26:01] Spielberg movies, to the contrary, it's a pretty hard hump to get over, right? It's certainly possible.
Certainly possible. But the probability is very low. For me, it's, like, low enough not to worry about it.
[26:16] This, sorry, there's one other thing you can mention about UFOs, which is to say that, you know, in the sort of Star Trek universe, you have all these races roughly at a similar stages, stages of development.
Now, given the age of the universe, I said 20 billion years or something at the age of the planet, about a 5 billion years, what we represent in terms of human development, like we've really only had technology for the last under 200 years, tiny, tiny slides, right?
It's the idea that with the 20 billion year span of the age of the universe, 5 billion year span for an M-class planet, that we're going to be within 50 or 75 or 100 or 500 years of technological development.
Very, very low chances, right, that we're going to be even close, even remotely within, like, they'll be like beings of pure thought when, you know, we're trying to pound something into the ground with the jaw of a hippo or something.
[27:05] So there's lots of reasons of probability. probability uh and of course the motive for the ufo guys remains obscure have they come to trade have they come to dominate have they come to whatever we don't know so i think when we start to look at that we have possibility but not probability and where probability is low the onus of proof lies on the side of the people who put forward the putting forward the proposition, right just as we talked about the last time if there's a and now it's officially i guess a a dwarf planet, right?
So if there's a moon sort of on the far side of Pluto, which is rotating directly so that it's always being eclipsed by Pluto, it's not impossible.
There's no evidence for it yet. So the proposition, the people who put forward the proposition are the ones who are then responsible for proving it.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean that it is.
Even if it's probable, it doesn't mean that it is. But if the probability is very low, there's no evidence us to prove it, you have to conditionally say, not so much the case.
[28:14] I mean, the same thing is, and we won't get into this in a big deal, but the same thing is sort of true of astrology.
Yes, it does seem rather unlikely that the movements of distant stars have any effect on the personality of people or where the planet was, given that the planet is in a constant set of motion, as is the Sun, as is the Milky Way.
It seems unlikely that where the celestial bodies were relative to when you were born is going to have a strong effect on your personality.
[28:41] Is it impossible, completely and totally? no it's not the same as saying that there's a square circle but i think that it is important to understand that people who put forward claims like astrology there's significant evidence against it of course the idea that alpha centauri or or betelgeuse or or sirius would have anything to do with my personality in their emotions would would require a force you know a bazillion times stronger than gravity that's never been noticed, right, because they're so far away, it's possible that there's some force that ripples in and out, and who knows, right?
But, you know, it's not really going to be the case, you know?
It's possible that I've achieved some remarkable mutation as a human being, just coincidentally, that my DNA is allowing me to live for 300 years of this amazing thing, which there will only be 100 more years, which would be cool.
It's possible, but I'm still going to plan for my retirement anyway, right? You know, just because it's possible, the level of probability is important.
If the level of probability is very low, the onus of proof falls upon those who put forward the proposition.
All right, so enough about that. Let's talk about another sort of similar issue or item, which would be a leprechaun, as I sort of mentioned before.
[30:08] Now when we talk about ufos they're in the realm of possibility they don't contradict all known laws of physics and biology but given that there's no evidence no central evidence no logical explanation for why they would be here and doing what they're doing then it's pretty safe to say not until proven right i mean i don't i'm going to put a lot of time into debunking it or whatever, just, it's not true until proven.
You don't want to go out and say, it's never true, it's impossible.
I mean, unless it's a square circle that's being proposed or a leprechaun, right? Now, you know, So leprechauns are mythological elves that live in Ireland and on cereal boxes.
And leprechauns, you know, have a number of properties.
They're fairies. And so they can pop in and out of existence that at the end of a rainbow is their pot of gold.
They hide lots of gold in the ground and they they're very tricky and they seem to always work on one shoe and so on.
So the question is, do leprechauns exist, right? We've got UFOs and leprechauns.
Well, without going into a lot of detail, because I'm sure you're getting the general pattern of these kinds of things, it's pretty safe to say that leprechauns do not exist, because this idea of popping in and out of existence.
[31:27] Second law of thermodynamics says no-no to that, right?
So this is violating a known law of physics, that beings can pop in and out of existence at will.
And of course the idea that there's a pot of gold buried at the end of a rainbow is not valid because there is no uh end of a rainbow so you can't uh you can't find it so there is uh these other ways of looking at things where you can say leprechauns um not possible right not possible I don't think you want to be in that state of eternal possibility where you can say, yes, maybe the earth is square and round at the same time, because then you're just sort of making stuff up, right?
Now, when you talk about living organisms having the ability to pot in and out of existence at all times, is it conceivably possible that the second law of thermodynamics could be broken and this and that and the other?
[32:27] It's certainly possible, I mean, I guess you could say, but certainly would not be something that you could will, really.
That's never been examined or seen in the real world.
And so it's fairly safe to say that little green men who can will themselves in and out of existence and fly and so on don't exist.
Because by flying, they're defying gravity.
By popping in and out of existence, they're violating the second law of thermodynamics.
[32:53] So, from that standpoint, I think it's fairly safe and accurate for us to say that leprechauns don't exist, that it's not a question of probability.
[33:05] It's not a question of probability. It is a question of possibility.
It is not possible for leprechauns to exist, given our current knowledge of physics and so on.
And we'll get into sort of next time how we deal with changes in the knowledge that occurs for us in terms of physics right because people will often say who are sort of want to be open to everything they'll sort of say yes well you know things are always considered impossible and then science discovers something new and then it becomes possible so you don't want to ever say never say never blah blah blah well i'll sort of put forward the argument that that's not the case that's not the case it is never going to be the case that leprechauns will be considered as objects that will validly exist because someone says so right this this is very very important i'll just sort of end up with this i'm going to get all sort of the whole new topic here but it's true that newtonian physics gave way to einsteinian physics einsteinian physics will will probably give way to something else in the future.
But it's not true that Einsteinian physics are going to give way to imaginary cloud nine leprechaun physics.
[34:24] Because in order for truth to be considered a refinement, to be considered a more accurate description of that which occurs within reality, then physical, tangible, sensual, logical evidence has to be gathered.
Logical, airtight propositions have to be put forward, which more accurately described the behavior of matter and energy than what came before.
[34:46] And so, there's never going to be a case where leprechauns exist because a whole lot of people just sort of believe that they exist.
If leprechauns are proven to exist, it's going to be in a logical, rational, scientific, objective manner.
It's not going to be because a whole bunch of drunk Irishmen sang a leprechaun song and thought they saw something.
That's not going to be enough for a scientific invention. You know, we all thought we saw leprechauns, so let's put them in the zoological classifications, despite the fact that they violate almost all the known laws of physics.
I think they live forever, too, which seems, you know, just another reason why you shouldn't believe in them.
[35:27] So, from that standpoint, it's not a question that human knowledge just willy-nilly gets replaced by other things, and therefore we can't ever make a statement about truth and falsehood.
There is no scientific truth which is accepted that is not accepted because it more accurately describes the behavior of matter.
The testable, objective, measurable, reproducible behavior of matter.
So that's never going to be the case with leprechauns. We have a second law of thermodynamics.
Dynamics so um if you want to sort of look at that sort of position i would really say that it's important to understand that human knowledge does increase but it builds on what came before and it's always always always measured by its accurate representation of objective physical tangible matter and energy so i hope that that's helpful when you sort of look at uh i mean you you may not have strong opinions about UFOs or leprechauns for that matter, but I'm trying to establish these propositions in a manner which is not going to be threatening to your core beliefs so that when we start to examine these principles, right, if you agree with them about leprechauns and you agree with them about UFOs, which I think is, you know, I'm not going out on a huge limb here, then we do have a sort of stake in the ground wherein we can begin to examine...
[36:50] Your other beliefs, right? The beliefs that not a lot of people are going to be that offended if you disprove the existence of leprechauns, but there may be some other things that you might be slightly more attached to, or the other people in your life might be slightly more attached to, that when we bring this sort of clarifying laser of philosophy to bear on other beliefs that you have, religious, political, ethical beliefs, moral beliefs, it's a little bit more of a ride, But I want to start with some stuff that's not offensive so that you can at least understand the arguments and then we can apply them to maybe some more of your sacred cows and you can sort of submit yourself to the laser and see what comes out on the other side.
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey.
I hope that you're enjoying it. I'm suddenly having a blast talking about it and I hope that this is helpful in giving you some understanding about the power of philosophy and its unique, unique ability ability to separate truth from falsehood, which is very essential in the living of a happy and ethical life. Thank you so much again for listening. I'll talk to you soon.
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