In which we explore a little if self-awareness is a good determining factor for whether a living creature should be protected from death at the hands of other creatures that can choose their actions.
Recorded October 31, 2024.
Show notes and links:
A Guide for the Perplexed: Mapping the Meaning of Life and the Four Levels of Being – The Marginalian
Mount Ararat – Wikipedia
Ark Encounter
Francis Collins – BioLogos
The Wonders of God’s Microscopic Realm – Part 2 – Molecular Machines
Ken Ham – Answers in Genesis
90 Minutes in Heaven (2015) – IMDb
2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – Wikipedia
The Dunning-Kruger effect in innovation
Transcript:
Jump to end
And what do you say about that?
How do you feel about a desk having stories to tell, a consciousness of some sort?
I believe it does.
Everyone’s got to believe something.
It’s man-made though.
Like at what point, I mean, that means that almost feels like we can’t burn anything.
We can’t take stuff to the dump because it all has a story.
You are listening to our podcast, Do You Have a Minute, in which a guy and his daughter
dive into deep discussions about life’s most profound and mundane questions.
While we know we don’t have all the answers, and possibly none of them, we open our minds
to new perspectives, and most importantly, we have a good time in conversation.
Join us as we explore the unknown together.
Okay.
So, I want to talk about the levels of consciousness in the animal kingdom and in humans.
And I want to talk about what governs, I want to discuss what governs animal actions.
And if they have souls, and you know, people with very limited cognitive ability, do they
have souls if they have no apparent will?
And things like that.
That’s a difficult thing to think about.
But what brought this up for me?
You think it’s difficult?
I think maybe it’s difficult if you don’t have a worldview already that already packages
the answer for you.
Okay, so try to figure it out like Charles Darwin did.
Now, he had a worldview, but he disclaimed it.
He disclaimed it?
But that’s what everyone was watching that in the 1800s, mid-1800s, 19th century.
Yeah, they were trying to figure out evolution and how everything worked.
Since I’ve been studying that, that’s just there.
Some people went against their worldview to try to figure it out, but they saw things
that didn’t match.
But go from your side.
You’re running this.
So this German economist, E.F.
Schumacher, wrote a book in…well, he wrote a book.
It had to have been earlier than 2015.
The book has a publication date of 2015, but it says that this guy died in 1977.
So this had to have been written long before 2015.
Maybe this latest edition is 2015.
I’m trying to find out when the book he wrote is a guide for the perplexed.
Maybe you can find the original publication date on that.
But in a part of it, it says here on this, theexaminedlife.org…
It says ’77.
It was written in ’77?
So the year that he died, he published this book.
This is his seminal work, what he worked his whole life to do.
And I think I heard that on his deathbed, he told his daughter, this is the book.
This is the most important book of my life or something like that.
So what are we beyond materiality?
That’s the question is, what are we beyond what our bodies are made of?
And so he gave some equations.
So if we have M, which means mineral, that is rocks and dirt and sand.
You know, that’s just the things that are purely mineral, purely material.
And then if you do M plus X, and X represents the presence of life in some form, it is alive.
M plus X would be the plant world, things that grow, things that live, like plants,
vegetables, things like that.
So the equation for rocks and stuff is just M, that’s them.
And then the equation for plants is M plus X, X being life, right?
Okay.
All right.
So you’re animating it.
The animation is the X that can move on its own, self-animated, which you don’t suppose
a rock is self-animated.
So you’re saying it’s M. Okay.
So the next status?
Then the next level up would be M plus X plus Y, Y being consciousness.
And that is the animal level.
It can move, it can be trained to respond to stimulus, I guess.
I mean, plants kind of respond to the sun.
You can train them around things, but they can’t defy you.
It has apparent thought about its animation, as opposed to just following the sun.
Instead of just acting on basic instinct, it seems to have some thought.
Can choose to eat this or not.
Yeah.
And then the last level, which is the level of man, is M plus X plus Y plus Z, which represents
self-consciousness.
We are conscious of ourselves and we have will.
Let me see what self-awareness is how Schumacher puts it.
We are aware of ourselves, we are conscious of ourselves.
And so that’s something that animals, he’s saying animals don’t have.
They don’t have self-awareness.
They have awareness of, you know, a hot dog is really delicious, but they don’t have self-awareness
where I’m not going to eat that hot dog because I know it’s bad for me.
What they should do or shouldn’t do, they don’t have a should question.
Yeah.
Values.
Values tend to not be there in that game.
It’s just instinct.
That’s the first word that came to mind was instinct.
So MXY is an instinctual being, MXYZ is a sentient being, a self-determined being who
can set values and direction.
Okay.
Separate from instinct.
I think that’s the idea.
That you could choose to be a Hitler or a mass murderer if you want to be.
You can choose that.
Where a regular instinctual animal can’t necessarily do that.
Yeah.
Dogs, dogs don’t bite other animals because they hate other animals.
It’s not because they decided to either.
They have a disease.
There’s a rabies takes over and they go crazy and they just start eating anything and everything.
Well, yeah, that’s one reason.
But then also like if they are afraid or if they feel threatened, like these are instinctual
reactions to that the bite is the reaction to what’s happening, I suppose.
That’s the thing that zombies are.
Zombies move back to that.
In the zombie apocalypse, what is that?
The Walking Dead?
Yeah.
That whole series.
When you get a zombie in that relationship, he stepped back without the Z. The Z disappears
and now they’re just operating.
They can’t think anymore.
The life zombies is if you gain that zombie thing because you can’t get the drugs or you’re
off of what is it?
The cause of zombieism right now.
You lose your medications.
Or if you’ve stopped.
If you have an addiction that you stopped and then it just takes over your life, you
can’t operate without that crystal meth or whatever it is.
Whatever the addiction is.
Whatever the addiction is, yeah, there’s addictions to mild chemicals and there’s addictions to
anything that creates a dopamine high, things like that where you can’t, you are a zombie
if you don’t have that chemical reaction happening in your body.
Depression drugs or whatever pharmaceuticals they’ve prescribed to you, if you can’t get
those, you can’t function.
And so you function back on the instinct level.
Just you’re going to breathe.
You can keep breathing, but you really can’t do anything else.
Right.
So the world view, a common world view is that all animals are without that Z part of
the equation.
They’re without self-awareness.
And that’s just the way it is.
If you’re an animal, if you’re an ape, if you’re a dog, if you’re a whale, you’re just,
you don’t have it.
Okay.
So that’s a world view of someone who is not an animal lover or an animal best friend.
That has to be the world view of the common human.
We humans are above the animals.
So that’s the world view that says we’re above the animals.
And it’s the current scientific consensus.
You sure?
Like I’m not saying that you have to only believe in a certain God to be able to accept
this world view.
We don’t have any proof that animals have any self-awareness.
I mean, my question is though, well, there might be proof.
I mean, people are talking about how intelligent dolphins are.
And there was something I read kind of recently about how, about the language of sperm whales,
I think.
It’s the whales.
There’s a…
What it was, President Trump mentioned this with the, and his Joe Rogan podcast.
They talked about the wind machines that are out there in the ocean and all the whales.
He says 20 years ago, 40 years ago, no whales beached themselves on the beach.
And now there’s hundreds a year that are beaching themselves.
And it’s because of the vibrations.
They’re not able to communicate.
They’re getting, they’re sending them…
They’re getting depressed?
Becoming zombies or depressed or something.
They’re becoming something that’s not a whale anymore because of the vibration of those
huge machines in their environment.
It’s made them not know what they’re doing.
So that’s something maybe to look at too.
And they were operating and now we introduced another, and that’s the evolution type thing.
You introduce an animal that they don’t know what to do with, it’s going to cause them
to go crazy for a bit.
And maybe they will evolve in the next thousand years with something that will allow that
noise to be in their waters and they still can communicate.
Homing pigeons, there’s…
I don’t know how those work, but you put them into a box and drive them 300 miles and they
fly up in the air and go right back to where they were.
So is there a way for us to really know if animals are or are not self-aware?
Whether they communicate.
I mean, if they communicate, aren’t they self-aware?
The communication, that would be a…
That’s what they’re discussing here.
If dolphins actually have a language, then they’re self-aware.
Yeah.
But I mean, birds, we know that birds have like the certain different calls that they
have depending on whether they’re intending like they’re communicating that there’s food
or if there’s…
Or they want to copulate or things like that.
They’ve got different calls for these things, but…
Bees have their directions inside the hive to tell you how far away something is.
And they talk about those indications.
They don’t have speech.
Right.
I mean, just because something doesn’t have speech doesn’t mean that it’s not self-aware,
right?
I would think so.
It’s not as aware as we are.
Well, humans…
Trying to identify it non-biblically.
I mean, biblically, the humans in that worldview were given dominion over all the animals.
Yeah, it’s easy.
Biblically, that makes it easy.
So that’s too easy.
And that’s why they had this evolutionary challenge for a hundred years or so as they
started thinking about that, trying to piece it together.
Do these animals actually speak?
And one thing that what I read just recently that Darwin is talking about is some animals
will…
Their only communication is whether they’re ready to breed.
The birds will have a dance and that’s the dance.
That’s the only thing they ever communicate.
There’s nothing else he can identify that they even approach each other on.
Yeah.
So it’s the only thing is the copulation, the propagation of the species.
We can pretty much agree that birds are simple creatures that have no actual self-awareness.
In that case, if the only instinct is to copulate or to have produce, then that’s just instinctual.
There is no Z there.
So you can say there’s no Z.
Right.
So how about the animals though that do appear to communicate with each other?
Those that they’ve determined are closer to us evolutionarily like the monkeys and orangutans
who can actually…
They can write letters.
You train and they can speak with machines.
You can train them.
Their tongues don’t work, but they do have that.
And they’ve got a hierarchical society.
Even lobsters, what Jordan Peterson talks about where he got lobsters are hierarchical
in their nature.
And they have an order and they have a discussion back and forth between them.
Yeah.
So Google AI says no animal communication meets all the criteria for a true language,
but many animals can communicate with each other in a variety of ways.
Right.
So it gives the example of sperm whales and dolphins and…
Songbirds.
They even have compassion with each other.
So that’s a bigger, larger communication of horses.
I saw a video of a horse, a horse herd.
There was an older horse, an older stud that was out there.
And the stud that was in control of it led the other one to water and helped him make
sure he was taken care of.
They weren’t fighting.
Usually you’d fight and kick them all away.
But he said, no, now I’m the alpha here.
You’re under my protection as well.
So come on.
And he coaxed him up to say, you’re okay with me, is kind of what he was saying.
That’s what the rancher said they were saying.
But I don’t know.
He did clearly talk with them and coddle them and say, you don’t move up here.
You’re okay.
You’re all right.
We’re not going to fight anymore.
You’re in the group.
You’re in the protected class now.
So that appears to be that that alpha horse was communicating, had a level of intelligence,
care, compassion.
Compassion for the other animals.
And when they have a herd of mares, they’re taking care of them.
And the gazelles or any animal that’s a prey or a predator, a prey animal, they watch out
for each other and they have compassion and care.
Whether it’s just instinctual, I don’t know if they can sacrifice.
Maybe that’s a role if you can sacrifice something.
So if having a language, being able to communicate with other beings in your species isn’t a
determining factor of whether you are self-aware or not.
Right?
No, I don’t think that that’s too shallow.
Self-aware.
Language is too shallow of a criteria.
Self-aware has to be way below that.
This whole question, I think it comes up because you’re wondering how this all happened.
Evolution, it’s the evolution question.
It’s part of the larger question of why do humans think, I mean, why are humans the top
of the-
The food chain.
Evolutionarily, like, yeah, on the top of the evolution pyramid.
Why are we dominating the earth and not something else?
But is that easily explained by Darwin or evolution theory?
Okay, so I’m also in the middle of a book that I’ve been reading for a really long time
about, well, it’s the guy that does that ARC museum in, you know, Noah’s Ark museum.
Where is that at?
In Mount Ararat in Turkey?
No, it’s a United States one and he used to be a government scientist.
I don’t know, I don’t think he is still, I don’t remember his name exactly, but I think
the book’s called The Language of God or something like that.
And he wrote this book because he’s a Christian and he is trying to explain how there is a
God with science, you know.
Creation museum, Ark encounter in Kentucky.
I see that, I don’t see the book, but the creation museum is next door.
So it sounds like that’s his point.
Yeah, what is his name though?
That’s the question.
I feel like it starts with F. I’ll just go get it.
Hold on a second.
Well, you know, I can’t be certain that this guy is related with the Ark encounter, but
Dr. Francis Collins, this is the book, The Language of God.
Okay, Francis Collins, you’ve got a book and you’re reading it.
He was one of the scientists that, it says he on the back of the book, he’s the head
of the Human Genome Project.
Okay, so he’s talking about these machines.
I just watched a video last night in regard to the machines.
I can’t remember, I can’t identify who they are.
But he’s probably talking about the fact that, what is it that Darwin said in Origin of the
Species?
He said, if there was a machine that was, what’s the term, that you can’t make it smaller,
a smaller thing can’t be brought out of it.
It’s a, there’s a specific term that they talk about.
I’ve just got to find that, like a mousetrap.
So here’s the description they did in a mousetrap.
If you have one of the pieces, you can’t incrementally increase, you can’t increase that a little
bit and make it work or take a little bit away.
It all has to be there.
The machine has to be intact, complete.
And so they’re looking at the cells of the body.
Darwin said, if I could find anything like that, but I can’t find it in my observation.
So in the 1850s, he couldn’t see anything that was small enough that it couldn’t be
incrementally increased.
Birds and snails and anything he could see or they could study in the 1800s, 1700s, was,
that’s what brought the theory about.
But now we have these small things, bacteria cells with engines in it that are built the
same way that we built engines.
It says it could be manmade, but it’s built with proteins and proteins run this thing
that runs on its own.
The single-celled animal that has cilia and all kinds of stuff that does amazing, incredible
stuff that we can’t figure out how it works.
And it’s run on energy and protons.
So Darwin said, if I could find something, but I can’t find it, it would break my theory.
So his theory is broken necessarily.
And that sounds like that’s the purpose of that book as well, The Language of God.
It’s especially since he’s the genome project, when you look into genes and the creation
of genes and then the machines that keep our body going, there’s a thing called ATP.
I mean, we run through 10 billion of them in a day.
It’s the whole glucose engine, the thing that makes glucose energy and allows us to do what
we do.
They now can see what that is.
And it’s a machine that we can’t make.
We can’t figure it out.
It runs though.
And it is important all by itself.
Yeah.
Okay.
So the ark encounter guy is Ken Ham, and I don’t know why I thought it was Francis Collins,
but of course it’s Ken Ham.
I know that.
The subtitle of this book, A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
The biggest thing that stood out to me though in here that’s related to evolution is that
this guy believes at some point that we did evolve from amoebas or whatever, whatever
the most correct form of evolution is that everybody believes now.
And at some point then, God came in and gave us the very best version of his evolved humans,
homo sapiens and neanderthals and all of the different forms that had evolved up to functional
enough bodies, I guess.
He chose the very best one and gave that one self-awareness and turned that into what we
are now.
And that was the fall of Adam and Eve.
That was the Garden of Eden is the two best whatevers back then received self-awareness.
And that’s where we all come from now.
That’s why we have intelligence in the way that we do and that’s why animals and apes
and all of that don’t.
Okay.
I have to fight against that with the worldview that I’m believing exists.
And it’s in the microscopic environment that I don’t know, whoever, when he wrote that
book, when was that book written?
This book was?
Published.
2005?
Yeah.
See, and you probably knew as much about it then.
We don’t know as much about it then as we know now.
I mean, 20 years ago is a long time in technology.
It is a long time.
So it’s a long time in technology.
So that’s where we’re at.
This is what Darwin said in this video.
It’s from a group called NW Creation Network.
So write that down and I’ll send it to you.
You can start looking at this network.
But talking about the wonders of God’s microscopic realm.
So irreducible complexity is the idea.
Okay.
Darwin said, and this is a quote from his Origin of the Species, if it could be demonstrated
that any complex organism existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous,
successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down, but I can find
no such case.
So in the 1700s, he couldn’t see anything like that.
But we see in the microscopic world, millions of things like that.
You can’t break it down.
It can’t have evolved.
It’s put together 500 million proteins, make this machine that pumps to create the ATP
stuff.
See, I can probably come to the picture of it.
It’s called ATP Synapse.
So you’re saying today there’s a lot of microscopic things that we can see that we can’t figure
out where they came from.
That it’s a machine that we can’t build for sure.
It’s much smaller than we can build and it’s much more intricate.
The flagellum, there’s a flagellum.
It resembles a machine designed by humans.
We could make it bigger, but we can’t make it do what it does inside of a cell.
And that small microscopic thing with protons is its only construction material.
Yeah.
It’s irreducible.
Yeah.
Irreducible complexity.
Yeah.
And so that’s the sign that it was created.
It’s created by something we don’t know.
So it’s not saying that this is God that created it, but it’s a more intelligent design than
we’re able to comprehend.
Replicate.
And from Darwin’s statement, the best he could comprehend at the time said, if I could find
this, if we could find this in nature, it would entirely disrupt and break my system
of evolution, which he agreed.
And we all have to agree that.
My theory would absolutely break down.
And that’s after years of thought that he put into it.
And plus he was building on the back of at least 20 or 30 other scientists that were
building at the time.
And now we’ve got hundreds of thousands of scientists beyond that that are still coming
to these conclusions.
And this is clearly an irreducible complex machine that couldn’t have been built.
So my other feeling in the dead, life after death descriptions in some of those stories.
And Tim Ferriss just did, I haven’t heard of this yet.
He’s talking to, his recent interview is of someone who’s seen a thousand near death experiences.
He’s written about it.
He’s in a position in a university that is built to study near death experiences or after
death experiences.
Who is it?
Who is it again?
Tim Ferriss has his recent podcast.
Oh, it’s somebody he recently interviewed.
Just someone he recently interviewed.
So it’s, let’s see who it is.
Near death experiences is an interesting topic for sure.
It almost makes me want to try and die and just have someone there waiting to revive
me just as soon as it seems like I’m dead so I can have a near death experience.
Bruce Grayson, yeah, University of Virginia.
Learnings from a thousand plus near death experiences.
So some of those experiences though, and I think it’s the one that 90 Minutes in Heaven,
I forgot his name again.
Just recently I read the book too and he had, they made the movie about him.
How do you have so much time to read books?
Interesting, I read it.
What is the deal?
I read it all.
It was kind of cool.
He said that the walls, the desk had consciousness that he could feel.
He could feel and you could talk to him.
You could see that they’re talking.
So he didn’t really describe that he heard them.
But there are people who in that level, in that realm, if you get to the spiritual realm,
you see that they’re as animate and as alive.
They have memory.
He was getting memories, getting stories from them, from the desk around the hospital rooms
and the walls.
So he was understanding things from them.
And it wasn’t necessarily voice, but it was how you would talk in that realm.
So I’m wondering what this guy, Bruce Grayson, might have to say about things like that as
well.
Be interesting.
Yeah.
So you listened to the Tim Ferriss episode with this guy, right?
I didn’t yet.
No, it’s just brand new.
You haven’t yet?
I haven’t heard it yet.
Okay.
Yeah.
And what do you say about that?
How do you feel about a desk having stories to tell, a consciousness of some sort?
I believe it does.
Everyone’s got to believe something.
It’s been made though.
Like at what point?
I mean, that means that almost feels like we can’t burn anything.
We can’t take stuff to the dump because it all has…
You could burn it.
Sure.
A story.
That was… and I still haven’t figured this out.
That was my question about what photons are.
Photons travel for hundreds of millions of years through this light years away and they
hit your eyeball.
You can understand them.
You comprehend them.
Where does the photon go?
What is it?
And where does it go?
Energy can’t disappear.
Matter can’t disappear.
So that matter that’s the desk that has a memory, the cell, that flagellum inside of
your bacteria, there’s another word that starts with an M, it’s mitochondria.
The mitochondria is a huge machine, but there are hundreds of them or millions of them inside
of each cell.
It’s the machine that runs the cell.
But a mitochondria, they know what it is, they know how it’s made.
It’s really complex and you can’t…
They don’t…
I don’t know.
It’s irreducible complexity.
They exist.
We can’t see where that evolved from.
They’re doing something based on a consciousness.
So they’ve got the Z characteristic in them.
They can choose to move this way or move that way.
Even a cell in dividing, maybe the cell dividing itself may look like it’s…
It may look like it is instinctual just with a Mxy.
The mitochondria may look instinctual until you can see that a mitochondria or a cell
division or whatever the other names are, these little small, tiny microscopic figures,
until you see them change direction and go somewhere else and do something different
and divide a cell a different way this time than they did before.
I would expect and I would have a belief.
My belief is that they are sentient beings.
The little tiny mitochondria and flagellums inside of cells are sentient beings that have
memory, that have a life, and they might live for three days or three seconds, but they
do their job and that life has a consciousness and a purpose rather than…
And the cells of the desk, the cells of this computer screen, the LED crystals, they’re
doing their job, but they have a consciousness inside of their job.
Would you say then that a spiritual soul and consciousness are two different things?
In my current world view, I don’t know that they’re distinguishable.
I don’t know that they would be.
So like each mitochondria has a soul and it has a heaven and it has an outer darkness or
a hell and it’s here on this earth to do something and then…
I mean, the first thing that people start thinking about are the ants.
What about the ants?
We’re killing ants all the time.
There’s millions of them.
Do they go to heaven?
Is there an ant heaven that they just love?
Right.
termites,
all these things that…
These are bacteria, the bacteria that kill people.
What is it?
This ATP synapse, it’s useful.
The thing that kills it, arsenic.
Arsenic makes it not work.
So that’s what he said in this video.
If you take a little bit of arsenic, all of these synapses die and the person dies very
quickly because whatever millions of things they’re making every hour, every minute that
we live on, the arsenic causes them to stop working.
And so they go to hell right there.
So well, maybe.
They have their after death, near death experience and maybe some of them actually pass over
and who knows if they come back to life again.
You’re trying to decide if there is a…. the worldview, so the God-based religious worldview.
If you try to map that onto everything else, can it be mapped?
You’re trying to see if our status of living, what do you call those things?
Our…
Community?
Our community, if the community can be actually mapped larger or smaller than a person.
We were talking about, yeah, with communities, that’s a good thing to start because we were
talking about cells and the community of your body is major complex.
There’s all kinds of communities there.
The zero-eth tier in us has billions of matter involved in it and maybe billions of communities,
billions of zero-eth tiers just to make one of us work.
Right, it’s like at the end of Men in Black where you zoom out and you see that each universe
is just inside of a marble and then he’s got a bag of marbles, which is like a bag of universes
and it’s crazy to think about and then maybe that’s what’s going on inside of everything,
inside of our mitochondria.
Maybe there’s universes inside of that.
Horton hears a who, there’s little who’s all over the place.
Yeah, which Horton hears a who, was that written for, like is it an abortion thing?
Is that what that was written for, that story?
So that people would say, see this thing is alive.
The little animal was alive.
Yeah, I don’t know, it can be used for that.
I don’t…
What was written for?
I think it was written against evolution.
Not necessarily even against…
No, I don’t know whether it was against anything.
What was Dr. Seuss’s…
What’s his real name?
Theola Sieg, something like that.
Yeah.
So what was his purpose?
What was his moral behind each of the stories?
I don’t know that we really have that.
The archetypical story behind Horton hears a who.
Yeah.
But we know it’s true.
I tried to open a website, but there’s all kinds of pop-ups here, making me click them
before I can even see it.
I’m okay.
There’s got to be a truth behind it.
A person’s a person, no matter how small.
Yeah, so that sounds exactly like abortion.
It does.
But it’s also evolution.
There’s these worlds that we just don’t know about.
Yeah.
Let’s see what he said here.
There’s something he said.
He was interviewed and a snippet of what he said was, well, this is post-war Japan.
While Japan was just emerging, the people were voting for the first time, running their
own lives, and the theme was obvious.
A person’s a person, no matter how small.
Though I don’t know how I ended up using elephants.
Of course, when the little boy stands up and yells, yop, and saves the whole place, that’s
my statement about voting.
Everyone counts.
It’s all left over from my war experience when I was making propaganda and indoctrination
films.
One of them was to encourage soldiers to vote.
So it wasn’t an abortion thing.
That was a, hey, you have a voice.
Was that Dr. Seuss stating that or just someone else?
That’s what the claim is here that it says there’s a link that you can go, that you should
be able to go.
But then I click the link and it says there’s no page here on this website.
So perhaps, let me see.
I think it’s an archetypical story.
If it’s archetypical, it can be applied to any situation.
Archetypical, yeah.
So that’s what, and even though Horton hears a who, it’s got to be a copy of something
else.
Well, Men in Black is a copy of that saying the galaxy on Orion’s belt.
It’s not up there in the sky.
It’s on this little cat’s necklace.
Yeah, right.
So you have confusing things like that, and inside that galaxy there are other necklaces,
other cats.
Yeah.
There’s, I mean, it’s rational to assume that there is more than just our universe.
Right.
Right.
And it’s hard to identify the end of an archetype.
If it’s an archetype and it actually occurs and we have these machines we can build and
we see these little tiny machines that are inside of every cell that we have, millions
of them, and they do their specific job and they can change their mind about what they’re
doing.
And you can’t make a definite answer from all that.
It’s all unanswerable.
It’s just, that’s like our conversation.
What is our conversation?
We just have fun.
Yeah.
What is the thing?
We’re wrong about everything, maybe not right about anything, because you can’t be.
Yeah.
But the most important part is to have fun and conversation, the good conversation.
Yeah, just enjoy it.
And the great conversation continues because, I mean, these mitochondria and phagellums
and whatever they are, the tiny things, ATP synapses, they didn’t exist.
They didn’t even exist five years ago, let’s say, or 10 years ago.
Whenever they found them, and I don’t have the year on that, but I do have the year because
the guy got a Nobel Prize in, was it 2014, 2011?
There was a Nobel Prize on the people that identified this synapse.
And it was maybe 97, was as far back as it was, so 20 or 30 years ago.
And we know easily, 50 years ago, none of this existed, and maybe it was only in 2017
that they got the Nobel Prize for finding this.
So within five years, 10 years, 15 years ago, these things didn’t exist.
Now they exist, there’s something new.
Yeah, well, they existed, we just didn’t know.
And of course, they existed before, we just couldn’t see them.
So in the future, we could know how mitochondria work, or we could know where protons go.
And we could know what makes an atom be.
Yeah, even how many pieces there are inside a one cell atom, a one cell organism.
Dividing the cells, there’s all kinds of these things in there.
And they know there are chromosomes, and the chromosomes do this, and then they split them
apart.
You can see that happening because you can see an atom, but you can’t see these other
smaller proton particles there.
You can animate them, what you think they’re doing.
But they are doing this.
Are they doing it because they have a soul, or are they doing it because they’re instinctual?
And the question is, can you answer that definitively?
We can’t even prove that the cat has a soul, right?
That’s the question, the way we started.
Do animals have a Z?
Do they, are they self-aware?
That is the abortion argument right now on college campuses and everybody saying, well,
you’re not a person until you’re self-aware.
It was an interesting one that Ben Shapiro battled that question, saying, well, what
if you got sick and you were going to get better, but you had no awareness while you’re
sick, while you’re in a coma?
You’re just kind of a comatose for a while.
And you know that in, let’s say, nine months, you’re going to wake up and be coherent.
So what if that is that person, no longer a person?
Is he just a bundle of cells, or is he a person still?
So you’re saying that, you know, let’s just say that you’re incoherent for nine months,
just as a random number, and then you’re going to wake up.
I just watched an interview, not an interview, a guy giving his story of locked-in syndrome.
He was in a coma for 10 months, and it just happened like it was a brain, a brain, something
happened in his brain where he was, he started experiencing symptoms like lightheadedness
and things like that a couple of weeks before going into a coma.
But then once he was in a coma, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move his body.
He was conscious, he knew everything that was going on around him.
He knew when the doctors came into his room, but he couldn’t respond, his body, he couldn’t
make his body respond.
And he lost all ability to speak and walk and everything that he used to be able to,
he was a chief chef and everything, and then he lost it all in a matter of a couple of
weeks.
Those are common stories.
I mean, the operating room people who are awake, but they can’t move, they can’t talk,
but they feel the pain of them cutting them open, but they can’t do anything.
They’re conscious inside their body.
Yeah, so just because they aren’t able to communicate, do anything, they appear completely.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have a Z. So the Z is still there.
And so why, how can we confidently say though that all animals don’t have a Z?
Right, you can’t.
Any more than you can say that a fetus is not a person.
Just a bundle of cells.
You can’t say it.
You can’t say that the initial sperm and egg are not conscious on their own.
The sperms currently have a, they’ve got a job to do and they’re, maybe they can choose.
They know what they’re doing.
Maybe they’re alive.
Maybe it is actually a sin to masturbate and throw it all away.
Like maybe it’s morally wrong to step on bugs.
Okay, no, no, let’s deal with that.
That one egg, one sperm wins out of 10 million.
And that’s 10 million in one ejaculation.
That’s not 10 million ever.
Right.
That’s a lot.
That’s a lot that die.
And even if, so it’s not making the baby.
The sperm’s job isn’t to make a baby.
The sperm has to have another purpose.
They’re just a cell that’s living.
It’s like the mitochondria are inside these cells.
Some of them may not ever develop and do their job.
There are down central mitochondria that really, quadriplegic mitochondria that don’t have
their capacities.
And they sit there for their three seconds of life and they filter away.
But their material, their protons, whatever they’re made out of, whatever the sperm is
made out of, continues.
And it started from somewhere.
Matter never disappears.
You’re not disappearing and opening, or even these small microscopic cells.
They’re going back and forth, fully understanding the way atoms are.
We’re 99% space, right, inside of us.
An atom is 1% material and 99% space, where the electron is flying around.
So how do we feel like there’s solidness here?
There’s nothing solid here in the atomic world.
It’s just, this is very interesting stuff to think about.
You can’t come to a conclusion.
It’s just fun.
Right.
We can’t figure out how to rearrange our body to be able to go through doors without opening
them.
Not yet.
Not yet.
But it happens.
Someday.
It has to happen.
That’s magic.
Magic is just not knowing how it’s done.
Some higher order doing something that we don’t know.
And it’s called miracles.
Miracles are magic.
They happen.
Right.
Okay.
And so you blame that all on God.
It is all a belief system.
So I wonder then if we are so set on avoiding abortion because that fetus might have a life,
it is alive from the very beginning, from conception, then why aren’t we all so concerned
about killing spiders or raccoons or mice or any pest that might have, like we don’t
know for sure that they’re not self-aware.
You do know that people are concerned about that.
That won’t kill any animal.
I do know that some people are, but why aren’t more people concerned about it?
Because we’re not all crazy and we’re not all sane.
Oh, well now, wait a minute though.
Crazy and sane are the same exact thing.
So the sane person won’t kill a spider.
They will pick it up and take it outside and put it in the garden where it needs to live.
Even if it’s a black widow or a brown recluse, or whatever the spider is, they’ll pick it
up safely.
Yeah, would you say it’s also like killing rodents, pests, mosquitoes?
There’s a guy in town that feels like he is, oh, I don’t know.
We had that conversation yesterday about someone who thinks that he’s gone to a billion years
somewhere else in another planet.
Right?
So we spoke about him.
There’s another guy in town here in my small little town that has had that type of experience.
He’s younger.
There was someone else here in town too.
These people are all over the place.
But he was younger.
We’ve got a really weird town.
Really weird people that move to small towns in the country because they can do whatever
they want.
It’s no wonder you moved there.
Yeah, that’s why I moved here because I’m either sane or crazy.
And they’re the same thing.
Which are the same thing.
But he said, you’re killing weeds.
When you’re planting crops, you think you want to grow this thing, but the weeds are
not your enemy.
The weeds aren’t the bad thing.
The weeds are a good product.
You have to work with everything that’s there.
You don’t kill something.
When you gain a love for the universe and for God and for all the creation, then all
of a sudden mosquitoes are really amazing things.
I don’t know, killer bees or swarm of bees that’s going to kill you.
You just die, I guess, if something like that happens.
That’s just a part of the circle of life.
I watched the rhinoceros running down the street in India, I think it was, or maybe
it was Africa.
It had to be Africa, maybe.
But these animals that could kill you, what do we have that can kill us around here that
really is dangerous?
Black widows and spiders.
You can get killed by a brown recluse spider.
Yeah, but they’re not…
You’re killed by them, by threatening them.
Is there anything that is actually…
I do know someone that died from a brown recluse.
Actually, a client of mine, her son, died at 38 or something.
He was young, but he got bit by a spider, just a spider outside of his house.
Didn’t really care anything about it, but the venom just started eating away his organs.
That’s what it did.
That killed him.
Wow.
He didn’t get it tested.
It’s just a spider bite.
You’re going to scratch it and itch it.
That’s what I’m accused of.
If I ever get bit by a black widow, I’m not going to know to get it taken care of really
fast.
I think I will with a black widow or a brown recluse.
I’ve seen the-
I mean, you do have mom in your life.
She will not let you just sit around and not do anything.
That’s why I have her.
That’s the reason.
She’ll notice this thing running up my arm and say, that’s a spider bite.
You’ve got to take care of that.
You can’t enjoy that itch.
There’s some itches you can enjoy and we know what those are, but don’t enjoy an itch from
a spider.
All right.
So, the sane people are the ones that don’t kill, is what you’re kind of saying.
Exactly.
The crazy people are the ones that don’t kill.
No.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Because it just doesn’t matter.
That was a statement, another statement from my youth that I have to tell you.
It just doesn’t matter because all the really good looking girls are either married or going
with somebody.
I think in reality with everything that we can learn and study, the scientists are doing
the best they can to figure out stuff and they can’t do very good at it.
There’s more questions you don’t know.
There’s a curve.
I forgot what the curve is called.
It’s called something about it, confidence and knowledge.
And it’s a curve that goes from the upper left and near the Y axis and drops down.
It’s a U, makes a U.
And then the more you learn about something, the more confident you are in that thing you
learned.
So, that’s confidence.
There’s some name for it.
I forgot what it was.
But when you barely learn something, you’re really confident in it.
God exists.
I know God.
God’s here.
And He’s among all of us.
And this is the worldview I believe in and it’s true and that’s it.
But the more you learn about science and everything else, you start losing your confidence in
that worldview that you held, let’s say.
And after you die and you’ve been dead for 10,000 years, as the amazing grace says, if
I’ve been dead 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, I wouldn’t have known, I wouldn’t
know any more than I know now than when I first began.
So you realize that that same worldview you have of God’s there, God’s there more confident
after 10,000 years.
But you gain confidence through time.
And whether that’s the story that you’re telling, amazing grace just, it’s of course that worldview.
We look at evolution and what Charles Darwin was trying to figure out.
Because he wrote, he lost all confidence and then he gained confidence because he came
to the end.
He started with the Christian worldview and said, this can’t be, I see the evolution.
But if we saw anything smaller, it would break my theory down and I’d lose all confidence
in my theory.
But his theory when he died was very strong.
He wrote the book, a 200 page book and it indicated the origin of the species.
He said, I pulled this all together from everyone’s writings, everything I’ve done and it seems
right to me.
It’s the seminal work of my life, just like that one that you have in your hand, right?
That book, whatever that book was.
The one that I talked about was a guide to the perplexed, or guide for the perplexed.
And the Language of God is probably one of Francis Collins’ final works as well.
Best books in his mind.
Yeah.
And it is pretty good.
It’s interesting.
So that’s something that makes me think about things.
That doesn’t mean that that’s the final end all on those thoughts.
And it’s not.
Right.
Socrates’ statements and Aristotle’s statements, a lot of that stuff still lives.
The archetypical stuff lives, but even the archetypical stuff is likely to come to an
end at some point.
Or there’s going to be something bigger that says, we were trying to say this, but this
is the right way to say it.
So all these stories are now garbage.
They’re unreliable because now the way that it’s encompassed in this story is much more
important, much more valuable, much more descriptive of many more things.
Once we know better and we start treating beings better like they have a life, like
if we somehow find out that we shouldn’t have been killing ants all along and they really
did matter.
Go with that.
See where it takes you.
And we find a way to communicate with them.
Should we offer an official apology?
Yeah.
So should Kamala Harris apologize for killing these girls with her open border policies?
Because she’s not apologizing.
She’s saying, I feel very sad for their loss, but she’s not taking it on as it’s her responsibility.
It was her responsibility to allow these illegal aliens in that killed these kids.
And those are only the few.
I mean, there’s maybe a lot more murders that aren’t making it in the public scene, but
at least those in the public scene.
And they’ve asked her point blank, will you apologize?
And what you just said, should we apologize to the ants or should there be reparations
for slavery?
Right, right.
Should there be official apologies made?
I’d heard of an official apology made kind of recently.
I mean, and it makes sense, but it feels like, why, I don’t know, am I evil for thinking
this?
It feels like apologizing to the Native Americans is a pointless endeavor.
Like sure, I would love an apology.
People are like, but they’ve never actually apologized for what they’ve done.
And I’m like, well, are they still doing it anymore?
Why isn’t that enough?
Like, why do they have to actually come out and say, I’m sorry?
I mean, that’s a lot of ex-Mormons are angry at the church for never apologizing for their
cover-ups, for their long, yeah, everything that has harmed people by making them believe
that they were going to go to hell if they did something.
The way I see that, it’s the primary answers for teaching the primary answers.
Yeah.
And the church is just not apologizing for any of that.
And so I’m going to remain angry until they apologize.
So who’s crazy in that or who’s sane?
Of course, the person is sane because now they left this crazy institution.
But the institution, of course, is sane because they’re not worried about that crazy person
that left.
Right.
But they’re crazy.
Yeah, the person is crazy because they won’t let it go.
They won’t recognize that they can’t make someone else do something.
But yeah, apologies.
Apologies is something else because why does it have to be necessary?
And why do you have to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Persons Day?
Yeah.
So it’s not Columbus we’re honoring now, it’s the natives that he overtook.
Yeah.
But that was all just how it happened, like how it turned out.
We’re here where we are because everything happened the way it did from the beginning
of whatever to now.
Shakespeare put it perfectly in one of the quotes, there’s nothing either good nor bad,
but thinking makes it so.
Yeah.
So that came, archetypically, I don’t know where it came from before Socrates, or yeah, Shakespeare
put it in the play.
But there’s nothing either crazy nor sane, but thinking makes it so.
And nothing either evolutionary or creationist, but thinking makes it so.
Right.
We don’t have the answer, we can’t have the answer, right?
I’m more convinced, yeah, we should stop talking because I get more convinced all the time
that we can never know anything.
We can never know anything.
So how do you operate based on not knowing anything?
Those philosophers, Jordan Peterson’s got, I think he says this quite often, he says,
we don’t know, I don’t know.
The prophets, the apostles, someone who thinks as a prophet on the earth that is supposed
to know everything, they don’t know everything.
They don’t know even what the next day is going to happen in their responsibilities.
They don’t know that.
There’s no, you know, they say the prophet can see around corners.
Sometimes he can see around corners, but knowing no one can see around the corners that are
going to happen.
Christ even said, scripturally, no man knows even I, but the Father knows the time and
place.
And maybe the Father doesn’t know.
That makes you wonder why prophets are called prophets because if they can’t see around
corners any more than you and I can, then what is the purpose of that?
Go ahead.
What is the purpose of having an ant and a mouse and a cat and a dog and a horse?
What is the purpose of any of that, hierarchically?
Why are there people on the earth that have dominion over anything supposedly?
Yeah, there is no purpose.
Yeah, a prophet is just a person.
If you talk to him, if he happens to be your grandfather, the prophet, he’s just your grandfather.
He’s not a prophet.
That’s just grandpa.
It’s nothing special.
The pope is just someone’s dad.
That’s who the pope is.
Wait, did the pope have children?
Is that?
Oh, I don’t know.
He probably is someone’s dad because he wasn’t supposed to have children.
He just wasn’t supposed to.
I just broke the whole news thing.
This is going to go viral because the fact that the pope has a child.
Pope Francis may have a child.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what their rules are.
Well, their rules are not to have kids.
They’re priests.
He’s been a priest in Montenegro, a bishop, and he’s gone up there.
That’s your life.
The church is your child.
Yeah.
He’s the celibate.
Any Catholic priest is seen to be celibate.
But he is somebody’s friend.
Somebody’s friend.
He’s someone’s child.
He’s just someone’s son.
He’s just a guy.
Yeah.
He is a son.
He has to be.
He has to have a parent.
He has to have a parent.
Yeah.
That’s for sure.
All these people are just normal guys.
They have a job to do just like you and I have a job to do.
The reason we’re here in this conversation isn’t because there’s anything special about
this conversation.
Even after 10 million people see it and say, golly, this makes a lot of sense, it still
doesn’t make any sense.
Jordan Peterson is a nobody.
I think he’d be the first to say that.
He’s just filling his role while he has the chance and he has the voice.
If he had died five years ago when he went through that catastrophe, it would have been
just the same.
If God didn’t vote for Trump three months ago and he was dead, it would be just fine.
God voted for Trump three?
Oh, right.
Yeah.
When he turned his head just the right way for the bullet to miss his brain.
That was God voting for him?
Yeah.
That was in the recent Madison Square Garden thing.
You’re supposed to be president.
It was the comedian that started the thing out.
He said, we get to vote in two weeks.
God voted three months ago.
It’s kind of an interesting way to say it, but it was a realization.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is interesting.
I would say more about that if I wasn’t afraid that someone would hear it and call the cops
on me.
Yeah, don’t say that.
But no one will hear this anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
I might be upset with you if you say that.
Oh, yeah.
You don’t even know what I’m going to say.
Right.
I’m not going to say it.
I have no idea.
I’m thinking it though.
Okay. Think away.
And it won’t matter because it’s crazy and it’s the most sane thing you could ever say
at the same time.
And those really mean nothing in themselves.
They’re just words that are attempting to make an understanding, bring understanding
to something.
All of our words, I think we started out with one of those statements is all of our words
don’t mean what they should mean.
We need to adjust them all the time.
All the time.
Yeah.
We’re always having to choose better words.
And if we have to use a word, we have to adjust what it means to us.
So if you are…
Everyone’s just got to decide what their morals are.
Is that what you’re saying?
Their morals, their values, morals, values, beliefs.
It’s basically what you believe.
Your deepest held beliefs are your religious beliefs.
And they have to decide that for themselves.
It’s your morals, it’s your values.
And we talked about that value challenge a time or two ago.
When you should do something, you apparently value something differently.
So you should let your values inform what you’re doing, whether it’s the right thing
that you should do or not.
Yeah.
And that then means that there is no objective truth as far as what you should value or what
you should believe.
Consequently, the Jordan Peterson and Mark…
No, what’s his name?
Where they battled against truth.
They haven’t spoken for a last little while.
Oh, Sam Harris.
Sam Harris, yeah.
Sam Harris, who believes there’s objective truth.
Certainly there’s objective truth.
And Jordan Peterson says, you can’t have objective truth.
That doesn’t exist.
And in trying to explain that, trying to come to a definite conclusion that now you can
prove to everyone that it’s wrong to kill ants or it’s right to kill ants.
Yeah.
Yeah, the objective truth.
Yeah, that’s impossible.
Where is it?
Okay.
Everyone chooses their own.
Even do you believe in God?
And Peterson’s reason for not liking that question because how do you define God?
What is the God?
Hey, where does the question come from?
Yeah.
There’s a God.
It’s not necessarily the same God that you believe in or he believes in.
And you don’t even know the God you believe in.
It’s a belief you put out there, but you don’t have any objective proof that that’s the God
you’re believing in.
The name is way too big.
God, especially God, the term God is a lot bigger than the term ant.
And we can’t even identify how many ants there are on the earth or how many kinds or varieties
even probably.
Right.
So, God’s much bigger than that.
Ants are bigger than we can comprehend.
Yeah.
And they’re little tiny things.
Never bugs.
Yeah.
And what’s inside our cells, all these flagellums and mitochondria and all kinds of things that
we’re naming, we didn’t create them, we didn’t make them.
We don’t know what they do, really.
We know what they do.
We don’t know how they do it.
We don’t know how it’s done.
Yeah.
And we can come up with theories, but we still don’t know.
Yeah.
And even the way we describe how we think it’s like the cilia, they know there’s these
connecting pieces, but they can’t see those pieces.
They’re just assuming those pieces because the way it moves, and this is how tiny it
is, and it must be a proton, but we don’t know how the protons are attached together
and how they get there at different assignments.
So because it’s so small, it has to be a proton because an electron is way too big.
I have another question then.
Is it more useful to admit that we know nothing or is it more useful to present your beliefs
as I know this?
To try to persuade our belief system, our understanding.
Yeah.
Persuade other people with our understanding.
That’s a question.
That’s a good question.
That is.
Maybe we don’t have time for that question right now.
Because we know in reality that we don’t know.
There’s no way we can know if with as complex as things are and everything’s stupid and
everything’s crazy and insane, everything is both.
But our role in society, it’s community.
It’s got to come back to community.
That’s where we started in this whole structure of the life I’m building and we’re trying
to build.
The conversation is based around community.
If you’re going to operate in a community, you have to have some common ground.
And so that’s where you persuade.
You persuade a common ground.
And that’s where we say if you find someone that just doesn’t match your community, you’re
fitting in.
What was that?
It wasn’t fitting in.
What was the title of that one?
Well-rounded.
You’re going to be well-rounded in a group.
That well-rounded group is going to have commonalities with them.
They’re going to fit in.
Yeah, and you’re all going to think the same things are true.
And you’re going to have a persuasion.
You’re persuading each other that this is true.
If someone comes up with a new idea, it may still work in the group.
The group will have to all adopt it and agree to stay there or else someone that doesn’t
agree is going to split off.
They’re going to disappear.
They’ll go somewhere else.
So we do have to be persuasive.
We do have to have beliefs.
You can’t exist without beliefs.
That’s a non-existence.
You would disappear.
You disappear if you try to not believe in anything.
Okay.
So you have to choose what you believe and you acknowledge.
Is it useful to acknowledge that you chose that belief and not that it is particularly
the true belief?
It’s the one you chose.
It’s your belief right now and truth.
Gosh, you have to believe what’s true as well.
Yeah.
I am not okay with believing something that’s not true.
And so how can I even be sure that everything that I’m believing in?
You’re not okay believing something that’s not true.
You’re not okay believing in something that is not true.
Why are you saying it like that?
I have to hear it again to see where my fault is.
Say it again.
Yeah.
You’re not okay believing in something that is not true.
Who’s to say that it’s true?
Let me ask that question.
Me.
You.
Excellent.
Your belief.
So your belief system is based on your belief system and nothing deeper than that.
It’s based on what I think and what I perceive.
Yeah.
Yes.
So hopefully, do you still believe in evolution?
Yes, but my beliefs are limited to what makes sense, I suppose.
So it’s almost easy to believe that there were other intelligent communities on the
planet before everything was wiped out by some big event that burned up the whole earth
and left only a few things to turn into us again, to turn into all of the…
Because I mean, black and white evolution says we all came from this little mitochondria
and amoebas and everything that grew in swamps and got bigger and different.
And so we all have that one common ancestor or possibly five or possibly a hundred all
created themselves all in this way.
Right?
Is there…
Like maybe it wasn’t one thing.
Maybe the Big Bang wasn’t just one thing.
That might have been a lot of them, but evolution means it possibly was just one.
Yeah.
But possibly…
So you’re still trying to put…
I don’t believe that there was a beginning.
It’s difficult to imagine that there was a start.
I think that…
I mean, this is too big to talk about right now.
Right.
And so that’s where my simple answer to that, it’s the crazy sane idea.
Every truth is crazy.
Every truth is true.
It doesn’t matter what it is.
Okay.
We’re in a…
And it’s a dualism.
That’s what we ought to talk about dualism sometime in reality, that that’s that…
You see the true or false, and there’s no other option.
So it is both true and false because there’s no other option.
Okay.
So you have to choose whether you believe it’s true or whether you believe it’s false.
Your belief is what positions it.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
It’s your thought that makes it what it is.
Yeah.
And so you don’t know that it’s true.
There’s no way you can know that it’s true because we can’t figure out how the mitochondria
work.
We know they’re there, but we don’t know that they’re true.
Okay.
And then does it matter?
Do I need to know?
Do I need to decide whether I believe in evolution or not?
Or can I operate just as well in my roles on this earth in this life without knowing?
Not being able to see around corners.
I’m not caring whether I know.
So seeing around corners.
Can you see around corners?
Do you know?
Do you know anything?
And that was your question.
Should we just say we don’t know anything or should we try to persuade others that we
know what we’re talking about?
Should we have a belief?
Should we hold the belief or should we hold no belief?
And you can get into a problem because you could say, I believe this, but I believe this.
I believe true and I believe the false.
I believe that Nazis are completely right and I believe that Jews are completely right.
It seems you can’t believe those things at the same time.
Right.
But you can.
It depends on what you’re talking about.
I believe that the Democrats are a wonderful party of people or that their plan works.
I have a definite opinion against the platforms of the Democratic platform or the Republican
platform.
But my belief is that it doesn’t matter which way we go, we’re going to survive it.
We may not be better off necessarily in the nationalist plan.
There may be other things in play that if we just go full nationalism and make our country
great again, that that’s going to hurt us.
It’s possible.
Right.
It could hurt us.
And the other side to globalism and saying global warming is going to kill us all if
we don’t solve it this year or by 2030.
Maybe they’re right, but maybe by solving that issue, other things are going to happen
that we don’t see yet that are going to kill us there.
Right.
I mean, we are going to die at some point anyway, but whether it’s all together or not.
There is no truth between those two.
It’s just which way you decide to go.
And I decided to go with the nationalism.
I think that’s a better plan.
I’d love to follow that path right now as opposed to the globalist path.
Yeah.
So it’s where I’m taking my next step.
That’s all.
And whatever you get involved in, you just be involved.
So your statement, your statement of I can’t believe in anything that’s not true.
I don’t want to believe.
I’m not, what did I say exactly?
I’m not okay with believing things that aren’t true.
Believing things that aren’t true.
So the question on top of that is what’s not true?
What’s not true.
Right.
How can something be not true?
So that may be a discussion we should talk at some point.
Yeah.
How could you possibly make something untrue?
To cap that, I don’t know, to do something with that, to answer that just real quick
is right now, I think that everything I believe in is true because of that.
Yeah, because of your belief.
Yeah.
And when I find something out, something new, then I have to change my belief.
I’m not going to continue believing in something when I hear something that contradicts its
truthfulness.
Is it the first thing that you hear?
How many things do you have to hear in order to contradict truthfulness?
I suppose it could be many.
I mean, it did take me a few months to lose my belief in Joseph Smith as a prophet.
And how could that be lost?
So how can you refute truth?
How can you say something isn’t true?
Is it possible to say something is not true?
That’s the conversation I’d like to go to.
I think that we’ve demonstrated that it isn’t.
Yeah.
We don’t have time.
Okay, we’ll talk about that.
But what is truth is a future episode that we will have.
What is truth?
Oh, say what is truth.
That’s the scripture.
That’s the song, yeah.
Okay.
But what is truth and how can you break it?
I don’t.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you look at it, that’s good.
Because what we’ve talked about…
We’ll talk about it, but we certainly won’t figure it out.
The topic here was consciousness.
Is consciousness truth?
Self-awareness.
How can we…
The real question I wanted to see if we could answer was, how can we say something is self-aware?
Yeah.
And that got us into…
Or not.
Amoebas and microscopic things and universes inside of marbles.
Yeah.
Are they self-aware?
So the self-awareness, that is a question.
You have to consider that in regard to truth as well.
The Horton hears a who.
The microscopic world.
Is it just as alive and just as aware as we are in this earthbound world?
And is it just as aware in the universal world and beyond the universe, outside this universe?
What happens?
Is there awareness?
And that’s the Z. So is that Z in his book?
Does it mean anything?
In Schumacher’s book.
Is it true?
Is the Z true?
Yeah.
Okay.
That’s mind-blowing.
That’s what it is, thinking about this.
It took us all the way around that.
He’s trying to describe something very simple and very direct and put a linear equation
to it.
And is that possible?
That’s why we have spin physics and quantum physics, because these things are not explainable.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
Okay.
Let’s see what happens with that.
The problem is, I think this is too much fun.
And I’m enjoying myself too much with all of this.
But it is fun.
It’s a place to go.
It’s a thing to do.
Who doesn’t like it?
Who could not like it?
I don’t know.
That may be the discussion about truth.
Yeah, there’s too much.
We’ve talked enough.
Enjoy your day.
Good luck thinking.
Oh, thanks.
Thanks.
Just think about something, something else.
Thank you for tuning into our podcast.
We appreciate you taking time to listen.
We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts.
Please continue the conversation with us at doyouhaveaminuteconversations @ gmail.com.
Your participation means the world to us, and we look forward to sharing more exciting
conversations with you in the future.
Do you have a minute? 
Leave a comment