In which we come to the realization that there may be nothing that isn’t on a two-sided spectrum.
Recorded December 11, 2024.
Show notes:
René Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction
Sam Harris on “Free Will”
Jordan Peterson’s Response to Sam Harris’ Free Will Argument
John Gray – MarsVenus.com
Sesame Street: Grover And Herry Explain Here & There
What is the ‘3 Body Problem’? Astrophysicist explains concept behind hit Netflix show
there are 10 types of people in this world
The Long Earth – Wikipedia
The Butterfly Effect: How Tiny Actions Unleash Global Consequences
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) – IMDb
Superman (1978) – IMDb
If You Could Hie to Kolob, LDS Hymn
Transcript:
Jump to end
[clip] Let’s say temperature, hot and cold.
There’s very hot.
There’s the most hottest that has ever been recorded and even hotter than that because
our recording devices have limits.
Melt.
Right.
And then there’s cold.
They melt.
There’s very cold and the coldest we’ve ever recorded and the same story.
Right?
Right.
And so you can’t ever say on that temperature scale, this item is purple on this temperature
scale.
You can’t give it a color.
It’s a purple temperature.
You can arbitrarily, white hot, you can, I mean white.
You can use, but that’s a description of temperature though.
Then you’re comparing it to another spectrum.
You’re bringing another spectrum into view to put color onto it.
So if you say, let’s put color in it.
If you put color in it, then you’re adding another spectrum.
Red is hot, blue is cold, but that’s still on that same line.
[introduction] You’re 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.
[conversation] Well, do you have a minute right now?
Yeah, I do.
Yeah?
Okay.
What shall we, what shall we discuss?
Well last week we, we did say that we were going to do dualism.
So and I did research a little bit about that, but I wonder if I researched the right thing.
So that’s good that you looked at it because I, I almost necessarily on purpose didn’t
look at it.
You didn’t look at it.
I, I kind of been aware of it.
I was completely blind going into it.
So I felt like I should, you know.
Yeah.
Other words that, that means something to me that I’ve thought about this week are binary.
Okay.
Binary and continuum ideas from one side of the other.
So it’s a continuum.
What do you call those?
Yeah, a continuum.
What’s the name of that thing?
I don’t know.
Binary.
The curve on a continuum.
If you’re on a continuum, you’re on a sliding scale from one end of it to the other end,
tyranny to spectrum, a spectrum, a spectrum.
Okay.
Probably a spectrum.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that’s a, that’s a dualism.
You’re either one side or the other or you’re somewhere between those two.
Right.
But there’s only two.
Right.
And it’s not.
Yeah.
It’s, it’s not.
So a spectrum is like a gray world, not a black and white world.
It’s it’s there’s this, this far end and this other far end and everything in between is
also on that spectrum.
So you and I are both on the same spectrum of autism.
You might be a little bit more on the extreme side and I might be on the little bit more
on the less side, but we’re both there.
I’m autistic to a small degree.
Or to a huge degree and I’m autistic on the more.
More.
Right.
We don’t know.
I’m never going to get tested.
I’m just going to operate like I am.
So right.
So the way I look at dualism is it’s, it’s two sides.
I mean, you’ve got one or the other.
Okay.
Yours more of one, less of the other, less one, more of the other.
The yin yang idea that you’ve got two things in that circle, two opposing forces.
That’s the way I’m seeing dualism and binary.
I mean, there’s only two.
Yeah.
So what did you discover in regard to dualism as you searched it?
Since I haven’t looked at it.
So I had to listen.
I was, I found an episode on dualism done by BBC for the BBC four channel, I guess they
have a podcast and it was really interesting.
I had to listen to it four times to really understand it though.
And finally last night, the fourth time I’m like, I think I get it.
But it’s Rene Descartes is the guy that really pioneered the dualism idea of mind body because
the problem that philosophers have been discussing is how are the mind and the body connected
or separate and so this is a philosophic discussion that has been going on and still is going
on.
So what Rene Descartes says is that, well, no, I don’t know.
I don’t remember what he says, what his position is.
But I think the, one of the positions that they had were, you can think of the mind and
the body as two separate substances.
Like the thoughts that we are having is a substance.
Oh yes.
Okay.
So this is what Rene Descartes thinks is that you have the body and that’s a physical substance
and then you have the mind, which is a separate physical substance, but it’s substantial.
It’s a substance separate from the body.
And so it’s kind of like a soul idea, but it’s not theistic in nature.
His idea was not that there was a soul that carries on.
It’s to answer it.
Okay, what?
To answer it from the physical realm that this is inactivism.
So he’s got physicalism or inactivism.
Inactivism is what you do.
That’s your actions, maybe the mind and body, your mind, what you think, what you deserve,
desire.
This is the physiology of mind, mind, body dualism.
So that’s what you looked at the mind body dualism, which is not, yeah, that’s one way
to look at it, but it does say it encompasses a set of views about relationship between
mind and matter, as well as between subject and object.
But that’s just one, so you looked at that specific dualism, mind body dualism.
Yeah, I didn’t look at any other dualism outside of the mind body problem.
So the general, yeah, yeah.
And so that’s like the is ought problem that we discussed last week.
It’s the same thing.
Something is and you ought to do something that’s on a continuum.
That’s not necessarily a continuum.
And this one may not be necessarily a continuum either, the dualism there.
But you can’t design an ought from an is.
You can’t really identify the physical body from the thoughts or from the actions.
They’re not necessarily connected.
Yes, there was a couple of other theories, philosophical theories, stemming from Descartes
position on it.
So he’s got the dualistic view where myself, I have the physical body, and then I’ve also
got my mind and they’re separate, but they’re so integrated.
They’re so intimate with each other.
And he supposes that the location of the mind in the body is in the pineal gland.
And there’s a lot of history behind that, like how he decided that that was where it
was.
I guess he’s got a meditations book just like Marcus Aurelius does, and he goes through
all of these things, his process to get to this opinion of dualism.
But there is monism idea after that where the theory is that the mind and the body are
not separate substances.
They are the same substance, but we have physical properties of the substance.
And then we’ve also got mind, non-physical properties of the same substance.
So that’s monism where we’re not separate.
We’re the same.
Same is the same thing.
The same thing just in different appearances.
Yeah, right.
Yes.
That appears differently, different purposes to serve a different purpose.
It’s the same thing.
So then leading from that, there’s one more step that some people are exploring right
now is epiphenomenalism where there is just one.
It’s our body and our thoughts, like our body and our physical actions and everything, the
physical world.
There is no non-physical intent, no non-physical things going on.
So we have the physical, but then we’ve got where do our thoughts come from.
So epiphenomenalism is suggesting that our thoughts are not causes of actions or anything.
They’re byproducts of the actions.
The actions are happening and our thoughts are like the hum of the machine.
It happens because the action happened.
Because of a circumstance.
So relating that to circumstances happen or we create circumstances and that’s what creates
our thoughts.
Yeah, right.
So our thoughts can’t happen independently.
They happen as a result of some action, some circumstance.
And that’s difficult for a lot of people to really understand and accept because then
that removes all free will.
Like things are happening and I think that I’m controlling my body, but really my body
is being controlled.
We can only respond.
And the response is I got to scratch my nose and that, did I think to scratch my nose before
I scratched my nose or did I scratch my nose because there was an itch?
And then I thought like at the same time, but like in conjunction with the scratching,
I thought, I had thought scratch your nose, what came first, the thought to scratch it
because there was an itch or there was an itch.
So my body responded and then I thought about it.
Okay.
And the thought from that standpoint, I mean my thought of my nose itching right here only
happened because you started talking about your nose.
Yeah, I triggered it.
And my nose didn’t itch, but you trigger a thought.
So thoughts happen because of action.
Someone else acted and then you got to do something with it.
Yeah, you know, Sam Harris talked a bit about free will and I don’t think that I understood
it very well back when I listened to that.
It was a couple of years ago and now I want to listen to it again and see now that I know
a bit more about the mind body problem.
Well and he identified that will doesn’t exist.
Free will doesn’t exist.
You can’t choose what’s not already in front of you.
If it’s not in your brain, if it’s not even at the forefront, you use that interesting
think of a movie, that idea.
And now what’s the movie you thought of?
Yeah, Beauty and the Beast.
Wizard of Oz.
No, Wizard of Oz.
I thought Beauty and the Beast.
It wasn’t Beauty and the Beast because he talked about that.
He said there’s no way you came up with Wizard of Oz.
No one thought of Wizard of Oz.
But now after he said that.
Now you’re thinking that.
What’s the movie you think of when you say think of a movie?
Because you’re thinking about movies you’ve seen recently or movies that have been around
and Wizard of Oz now because of Wicked, I guess in the theaters now, maybe more people
will be thinking about Wizard of Oz.
Yeah.
But probably they’ll be thinking about Wicked.
Probably, right.
And see, I’m not even thinking of Wicked.
Now I’m thinking of Oppenheimer.
Okay.
Yeah.
But you’ll have a movie and if you identify the five movies, he says you don’t have free
will because your will is only limited by what your physical environment is.
You can’t choose something you don’t know.
And there’s more things you don’t know than you do know.
Dualism.
So yeah, we’re not all the same thing.
So that’s…
You’re going to a specific idea of dualism.
Yeah, that is the…
The definition.
So you took an example and thought about that.
And that’s what we’re talking about this mind-body dualism is a dualism, a dualism to discuss.
The general definition is the division of something conceptually into two opposed or
contrasted aspects or the state of being so divided into opposed or contrasted aspects.
So where you can put one on one end of a continuum and the other one on the other end of a pendulum.
So you got a South Pole and a North Pole on the Earth, magnetically.
So that we have dual poles.
We don’t have a middle.
Is there a point on the Earth where you’re definitely…
I mean, every point on the Earth, you’re either on the North side or the South side, but is
there a gray area in the middle where you’re like, it could be on the North or the South.
I don’t know.
A no man’s land, what?
War-free zone.
What do they call that in the middle?
No man’s land in the middle of a war.
Neutral ground.
Yeah, something like that.
Is there something that way?
There’s not, I don’t think.
On a magnet, it’s either positive or negative.
You don’t identify the center.
Okay.
So what other binaries do we have in this world that’s like a true binary and not a
spectrum?
Magnetism, we’ve determined that.
And we’ve determined then also based on your inference right there that there is not a
spectrum for magnetism.
You can’t be 30% negative, positive, or 30% North and 70% South.
That’s what I believe.
You’re either…
It’s South or North.
You have the direction.
So that’s just a straight binary without divisions inside of it.
Yeah.
Right?
A strict binary is magnetism.
The other strict binary is male and female, unless you happen to be…
Okay.
So maybe I can share…
Have we talked about male and female yet together ever in the last 15 years?
No.
Okay.
So…
So unless you happen to be you, tell me why that’s not as strict binary.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I’ll try and share what I know as best I can.
So the assumption is that you’re either male or female and that’s determined by your genetics
and your XX and XY, right?
Chromosomes, okay.
Yeah.
And so they say this is obviously clear.
You can look at someone’s chromosomes and say, absolutely, XX is women and XY is man.
And that’s…
Everyone fits into either of those two, right?
But that’s not how it is actually.
If you had your chromosomes tested, it might be XY, but it might be XXY or XYY or you might
be XXX and you just…
Your body just turned out how it is, right?
Are there varied chromosomes then?
You’re saying that there are more than two.
There are the two, X and Y, but there’s a lot of different combinations that you can
have in between XX and XY.
So…
Okay.
So that is a continuum.
The XXXY continuum is huge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you can have it tested.
It’s expensive, but you can go and find out what is your exact gender chromosome profile.
So is that saying potentially that you have three Xs and four Ys?
In that continuum somewhere, there’s an availability…
Somewhere there’s an imbalance.
They can inspect further down than just the general, the generic XY is just a big thing.
But Xs may have…
Can they see deeper into that?
I believe so.
To see what makes up that X?
I’m no scientist.
This is what I read from a scientist’s post on Twitter.
X.
It was back when it was Twitter, but the genetic scientist was like, now you only need to be
clear.
This is not as cut and dry as everyone’s trying to make it.
Right.
And this is the same thing.
It was cut and dried in the 80s that men were from Mars and women were from Venus.
That was easy.
The personality differences between men and women.
And we’ve talked about this before a little bit, but now you’ve got Asperger’s syndrome
and PTSD and borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia.
There’s all kinds of things that go in that spectrum between Venus and Mars, men and women,
and differences that can affect that.
So a man with Asperger’s is different than a woman with Asperger’s.
A Venetian that is on the autism spectrum is a lot different than a man.
That’s a Martian.
Right.
It’s on the spectrum.
It was just easy to describe it in the 80s as two differences.
And let’s talk about that.
But then if you can delve into that, those differences have all kinds of different…
Yeah, that’s like a conversation start.
Not, yeah, like a conversation start.
Getting the conversation started, identify at least two possibilities, get people understand
that.
The general large things.
And then you can add more meat to the theory.
Right.
And so that is…
And that’s the same thing.
We’re looking at the binary and to see if there is anything different than that.
We still have men and women, but we’ve identified that it is a continuum.
It’s not a…
What do we say magnetism was?
A strict binary?
Right.
Something like that.
Yeah.
That doesn’t have gradations.
There’s no spectrum in between.
And maybe someday when we figure out…
Last I heard, we don’t know where magnetism comes from.
That’s still a mystery.
And so maybe someday when we know where that comes from, then we’ll realize, oh yeah, there
is a spectrum.
And so as you can delve into it, you’ll see that’s a spectrum too, because we used to
think men and women, male and female were definite.
That’s the end all answer.
But it’s not the end all answer.
There’s all kinds of stuff in between that.
If you look at DNA and then you get into chromosomes and the…
What is each cell?
Is it a male cell or a female cell?
And maybe there is a difference.
Maybe you do have male and female cells in your body all over the place or in this table.
Right.
Right.
And where…
Right.
If…
Yeah.
Yeah.
I’ve got some thoughts around that, but it’s not time.
It’s not time.
The specific question though is the dualism of that, the binary aspect of it.
And maybe magnetism, we can understand that, but…
What else?
What else could be binary?
Just in general.
What else do you think is purely binary?
Not even black and white itself is binary.
There’s like a hundred different shades of white that you can go choose from at the paint
store.
Yeah.
Right.
White isn’t white.
So we see the spectrum on everything and magnetism only seems to be directly up and down, jump.
You jump when I say how high you have a high.
Yeah.
Two dimensional worlds have up and down, but they don’t have forward and back.
What about…
You talked about smart and dumb.
You’re somewhere between those two.
What did we talk about last week was competence and incompetence.
Competent and incompetent.
There is definitely a spectrum there is you can be.
Yeah.
You have a certain level and if you think you’re competent, actually the most competent
people realize they’re incompetent more than they’re competent.
So even in your field of study, you’re specific.
The smarter you get, they say you see that the spectrum goes beyond you.
The receding horizon that we’ve talked about.
There’s more to learn even in your specific specialty of study.
If you become the expert at it.
So the dualism is there two?
So you’ve asked if there…
I think we can identify that there is a spectrum on everything.
Yeah, I think we can.
I don’t think that there…
I don’t believe there’s anything out there aside from magnetism, but only because we
haven’t figured it out yet.
Just because we don’t know.
Yeah.
Oh, good and evil.
And if you get into quantum physics, there’s probably things good and evil.
As bad as I can be.
Yeah, certainly that’s a spectrum.
You can be as bad as you can be or you can just be bad.
What about God and Satan?
Is that a binary idea?
I think you have to create that.
In a story.
It’s a story.
So suppose that God…
Yeah, in mythology, it can be…
It’s a spectrum.
Polytheism exists in mythology.
So you’ve got many gods and many evils maybe as well.
Only one Satan.
No, no, no.
Because protagonists, antagonists and protagonists, those are gods and satans.
Loki is not necessarily the Satan of that world with Thor.
Those were just two of the people involved in the family that they tell that story about,
right?
Yeah.
Thor and Loki and whatever they’re doing in their stuff.
It’s just one member of this whole community of Zeus.
A whole spectrum of good and bad.
Yeah, yeah.
So let’s say that God is a single person that exists for this universe and he created it
as the religion states.
Created all things, all things are made by him.
In that case, he is one person.
And was there anything opposing him?
So is he a dualism or is he a singularity?
So he’s a god.
You consider that God actually created it.
So God created all things, so he created Satan.
So well, that’s only in reference to us.
In reference to God, is there a Satan?
Is there a dualism for him or is he a singularity?
Well, that’s unknowable, but we could hypothesize that there is.
Yeah, you could hypothesize.
I just had a conversation yesterday with one of your siblings about that you can’t say
what does God think about this?
It’s impossible to identify what God thinks about this.
How can I do that?
I can hypothesize about it, but I don’t know how God thinks about this.
You read the scripture and there’s a quote that the end says, what does God think about
love?
Or whatever the topic was.
I don’t know what God thinks about.
What do you think about love?
I can tell you what I think about it, but I don’t know what God thinks about.
So you can’t really identify that singular.
It’s out of our realm even further out than magnetism.
We can see the effects of magnetism and we still can’t figure out its spectrum.
We don’t have its spectrum fully identified.
So the spectrum of God, wherever that is, so that’s possible.
We have things we create.
So I wanted to roll that to things we are the God of that we created.
So what are we creating?
Say we’re creating this conversation.
You and I are in the conversation.
Is there a dualism in the conversation that we’re in?
Well, it’s not black and white.
There is a dualism in it.
There’s a dual collaboration here.
You and I, our brains are thinking different things and we’re bringing those together.
And does it become one?
Do you call a conversation one conversation or do you say these two people conversed?
No, you call it a conversation.
It’s this conversation here, this one thing that we’re doing even though there’s two voices.
So it’s an event.
Yeah.
And is there a dualism to that or is the conversation singular?
It seems it’s singular.
What could possibly be with the definition of contrasted aspects of it, state of being
conceptually into two opposed or contrasted.
There’s really nothing where the conversation doesn’t have a contrast or an opposition.
Except for where I disagree with you.
Outside of the conversation though, there’s, I mean, you could say maybe mom is the opposition
of the conversation.
That there’s someone who doesn’t support the conversation happening.
So they could be opposing it, but that’s from the outside.
That’s still effective inside the conversation though.
We’re aware of it.
You’re aware of that opposition or that contrast.
Yes.
And plus you’ve got dogs in your house and I’ve got dogs and you’ve got other people
that will say something and it will interrupt.
There’s interruptions that can happen.
That’s in contrast to the conversation, isn’t it?
Yeah.
If the conversation were pure, it wouldn’t have interruptions or we’d be able to just
think through the positive and negative things that we’re talking about.
The opposing views that we have inside the conversation, but the conversation itself
has circumstances outside of it that may come into play.
Like that text message that we had to break out.
So it’s not part of this conversation now because it was something that was interposed
into it that now we cut out.
So there is a world that operates outside the conversation.
That world then is the opposition to it.
The world is in opposition to the conversation.
Anything singular that we can say this is the conversation has outside events.
The outside structure is going to oppose.
You’re either here or you’re there.
It’s the here or there idea.
Everything that’s not here in this conversation is there and can affect here.
It’s like that, the Sesame Street thing.
I want to be here.
Well, I’m here.
Well, you’re there.
How can I be here?
The here and there problem.
You can’t be here with someone if they’re there.
Right.
Okay.
So maybe we identified a true binary there is the here and there.
There’s no…
Here and there.
You can’t be both in certain degrees.
Well, it’s a spectrum still.
It’s a binary.
You’re within degrees.
I’m nearly there, 10 minutes out.
Okay.
But you’re not there yet.
You’re not there.
Yeah.
So you’re there or you’re not there.
There’s a truth.
There’s an actual…
Not there yet.
What is it?
Absolute.
There is an absolute there, but I can never be absolutely there because I am always here.
Always here.
Yeah.
When I get there, when I get there, it’s here.
It becomes here.
It changes state.
Right.
Right.
I think that’s what that cartoon was about.
It says, I wanted to be there, but you’re here.
I don’t want to be here.
I want to be there.
You can never be there.
So is that a dualistic idea?
Here and there or everywhere.
Here and there or everywhere.
Everywhere is just the spectrum of that between here and there.
There is where you want to go.
Here is where you are.
Yeah.
And you have all the spectrum of places you could end up.
And just like this conversation, this is a conversation that’s here, here and now, and
you’ve got the now and later idea too.
You can never get to later.
Because it’s always now when you get there.
It’s always now.
As soon as you get there, it changes its aspect.
So everything outside of here and now is opposite, is the dual of it.
Yeah.
And it’s any spectrum of things that can be there.
So it’s not a multiplicity.
Okay.
And this is what I had the thought of why we brought this up in the first place.
The spectrum or the pendulum that you’re on with the opposing sides like magnetism.
The three-body problem where if you have three bodies, if you’re going to three, you can’t
work with three things.
Can we work with three things?
Can there be something non-dualistic, trialistic, or quadrilistic?
Like a triangle.
So think of a triangle.
I don’t know if I can figure out how triangles relate.
I remember you shared a video or a podcast about the three-body problem.
But I mean, well, that was in the title.
But in actuality, the whole conversation was all over the place.
Maybe they touched on the three-body problem for a half a minute.
Right.
Yeah.
And so I didn’t get anything out of it.
That happened to be the interesting part.
Because there was a whole lot of other stuff in there.
That was a Jordan Peterson conversation with someone who was a scientist.
The scientist was saying that mathematically you can map out with math two bodies and how
they relate to each other.
In the astronomy.
Okay.
In the universe.
Two bodies.
But if you try to put a third, it’s unpredictable.
You can’t define it with math.
So it’s undefinable.
And maybe that’s it.
It’s undefinable because you don’t…three bodies circling each other, affecting each
other.
And clearly we have that astronomically.
It’s the universe or the galaxy, the center of the galaxy, the sun and the earth.
All the other things are just a dualism.
The earth and its solar system.
It’s a dualism between the solar system and the earth.
But there is an effect on all of that from the center of the universe.
And that effect, that third body problem, they can’t make math…they can’t…you can’t
mathematically identify that.
That’s what Einstein worked with.
The theory of relativity is how everything’s related to each other based on mass.
But they say that that’s not a defined answer.
The theory of relativity is still a theory and it’s not definite.
It breaks down in very small degrees and it breaks down in very large degrees.
Interesting.
So it works right here.
But that’s what he was talking about.
He was talking about the science breaks when you get to a certain level.
Yeah.
Okay.
The science that we think exists and it clearly doesn’t exist.
It’s the three-body problem for us right now because you can’t identify it.
So the three-body problem is in opposition to dualism or goes hand in hand with it?
I don’t know how they relate.
Yeah.
That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
That’s a good question.
Is it hand in hand or is it opposition?
And we’re using that as a dualistic idea.
Yeah.
We are.
Is it on this one side of the continuum hand in hand or is it opposed?
Or maybe it’s not even the same ball field.
It’s not.
Yeah.
It’s a completely different sport.
Because we’re thinking dualistically there.
Does it support it or does it refute it?
That’s a dualism.
Is there another thing?
Support or refute?
What else can you do?
Anything else you do is on that spectrum of supporting or refuting.
Yeah.
Well, they say two things can be true at once.
And so not necessarily supporting, but like it’s not so much that I’m hot or I’m cold.
It’s I’m hot, but also I’m hungry.
And the hunger doesn’t support or refute my hotness.
It’s just another true thing.
Okay.
So that may be kind of the triangle idea if you’re talking about hunger and temperature
and being, your being is both cold and hungry or I’m warm and not hungry.
Yeah.
So hungry or not hungry is a dualism.
Cold and hot is a dualism.
Being and not being, I guess, here or there.
I’m here, cold and hungry.
Here or cold and hungry, those three things on the triangle I’m looking at.
But that triangle is still just, they’re all positive, all true at the same time.
But they’re all their own dualisms.
So it’s like a, I don’t know if you can see a triangle on a plane or you see a prism,
that triangle is a spectrum all the way down.
If the hot is the top part of that, hot and cold, you’ve got the spectrum of it.
So you’re looking at the plane of a triangle, looks like it’s a three-body problem.
But really, each of those points, each point on that triangle has a depth to it, which
is the dualism.
Okay, yeah.
Your yes or no.
It’s a one, that’s the binary idea.
There are, I love this quote that you shared it with, you taught me what it meant.
There are one zero kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those
who do not.
Ten types of, ten kinds of people in the world.
It’s the way most people are.
Right.
There are ten kinds of people in the world.
Let’s understand binary, that’s what I should have said.
It’s not one zero, it’s ten.
The numerical ten.
So in one zero, everything, and that’s the way reason binary works then, is because you
can either be on or off.
That’s the dualism.
Right.
Yeah, on or off.
Everything can be on or off.
Yes or no.
Yes or no.
Maybe that’s a binary without a, is that a specific binary without a spectrum?
Somewhat no.
Maybe they would say maybe.
Yeah, you could say maybe, they say always, sometimes or never.
Or mostly, or hardly.
Hardly at all.
Right.
Or maybe once a year.
Yes, because you don’t want to, you’re not comfortable saying yes.
I think maybe that’s a comfortable thing.
Are you comfortable saying yes to this question?
And if you’re not, are you comfortable saying no?
And if you’re not, then you’ve got to say something in between.
Sometimes, you know.
And you’re using that comfort as a dualistic idea.
You’re either comfortable or uncomfortable.
Is there a spectrum between comfort and uncomfort?
Or yeah, I’m comfortable with that.
Or can you say I’m 30% comfortable with that?
You can say that, but does it mean anything?
Right.
Hmm.
Is it useful even if it means something?
Is it a useful tool?
Would you ever, yeah, useful meaning, would you ever use it?
Do you ever say I’m mostly comfortable with that person?
That there’s some discomfort.
Yes.
You know what?
I think that if we’re talking about real life.
Right.
That’s what we’re trying to talk about.
Yeah.
I think that there are some people that I’m comfortable with in certain situations.
But if maybe I was alone with them, then I would be uncomfortable.
yeah, you have awkward as well
Uncomfortable or awkward or comfortable, what’s another word that you use for your ability
to be with people?
Happy, sad.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe it all can be described by comfort levels because if it feels awkward, then you
are uncomfortable.
So there are levels of comfort.
Just the fact of that word levels, levels means it’s a spectrum.
Yes.
You have comfort levels.
Thinking of just the words we’re using, willpower, where we don’t have will, we can only use
the words that we have in our recent vocabulary.
Right.
That we’ve recently read or thought about.
We can’t speak on anything we haven’t even encountered yet.
Yeah.
And you don’t have those words that you thought about four years ago.
Even the word that I circled in the book yesterday, I know I circled it in the book.
I know what it is, but I can’t use it.
You can’t remember it.
Yeah.
Because I didn’t, I haven’t used it and it may not even apply.
I don’t even know specifically the definition that I got from it.
But I haven’t used it and I’d have no reason to use it.
And it’s one of those words that they put in the book just to be cool and no one really
ever needs to use it.
Makes me think about Les Miserables and [redacted]
And I are almost to the end of book one, which is all about the bishop who I think is the
bishop that takes Jean Valjean in for a night.
He gives the silver?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You haven’t got to that point though.
You haven’t had that.
14 chapters, all about the character of this bishop.
Okay.
And finally in the 13th chapters where we’re at, Victor Hugo gives one sentence that says,
we’ve identified that this bishop is this and this and like, these are all the characteristics
he has.
And [redacted] was like, we could have just left it at that.
Why did we have to read 12 chapters illustrating all of this?
Too many words.
Completely unnecessary.
He was probably doing a writing contest.
He had to find out how…
No, you know the reason for that.
Why?
Because Victor Hugo was part of that era that they were paid by the word.
They weren’t paid for the work.
Right.
There are so many words that are unnecessary in that book.
And that’s why cliff notes of a book like Les Miserables may be totally appropriate.
You can get 14 chapters down to one sentence and be perfectly okay with it.
Yes.
Okay.
Because they were paid by the word.
Okay.
So that’s a tangent for sure.
I know.
Dualism though.
Language.
Well, and with that, I mean, the words that you use, is that dualistic?
You either use the word or you don’t use it.
Or it’s the right word or it’s the wrong word.
Or that’s what I was trying to get at.
You’ve got the specific word you can use, but you can always specify it further.
There’s a definition, there’s a specific technical word that means a more pertinent thing to
what your intent is.
So you can roll it down.
And if there’s not a word that exists for that, you can make it up and create the new
word that specifically identifies.
So language is also a spectrum.
You don’t have the right way to say ran.
He ran.
He jaunted.
He struggled.
So you have all kinds of things you can talk about the way he’s running or about his running.
It was awkward.
So the spectrum of language is also, it’s not either right or wrong.
Yeah, there’s probably not any word out there that only means one thing.
Or that even if you’re talking about the same definition, that that definition is understood
the same way by everybody.
So the fact that there are billions of people on earth and in history, that necessitates
a spectrum of everything.
And the question is, a spectrum of everything, is it just a spectrum?
Is it just binary, a dualism?
Or does a third thing exist, a third option?
We try to think through that.
I think if you add a third option, you’re creating the depth that just makes a more
in-depth thing.
They can all be true at the same time.
You’re not on a spectrum with those three things.
Those three things have their own spectrums.
If you try to introduce a third object, then you’re introducing a new spectrum.
So with length and height, they all have their spectrum in it.
You can say there’s three things, but there’s really only dualistic.
You’re so far right or so far left, so far front or so far back, so far up or so far
down.
The fourth dimension, if you add a fourth dimension to it, is going to be so far whatever
that fourth dimension is and so far back.
It’s still going to be a dualism.
Are you saying that the spectrum for anything is a dualistic spectrum, left side and right
side?
And it’s not…
Yeah, there’s the two ends.
So that’s the dual part.
You’ve got one end and the other end.
And there is a spectrum to all dualism, maybe.
Is that what you’re saying?
You can only go between one or the other.
If you’re talking about a dual or anything, you’re talking about anything, you can identify
that it has an opposite.
The two words here, something opposed or contrasted to it, and you’re always between those two.
You can never be outside of that between.
That’s what I think I’m saying.
Okay.
Straight and narrow path.
You can be beyond it.
You can be beyond it, but there is a pivot.
There’s a pendulum, a spectrum, and you can be nowhere except that spectrum in regard
to that topic.
Okay.
Yeah.
So let’s give an example then.
Let’s say temperature, hot and cold.
There’s very hot.
There’s the most hottest that has ever been recorded and even hotter than that because
our recording devices have limits.
Melt.
Right.
And then there’s cold.
They melt.
There’s very cold and the coldest we’ve ever recorded in the same story.
Right.
Right.
You can’t ever say on that temperature scale, this item is purple on this temperature scale.
You can’t give it a color.
It’s a purple temperature.
You can arbitrarily…and white hot.
You can…I mean white.
You can use…but that’s a description of temperature though.
Then you’re comparing it to another spectrum.
You’re bringing another spectrum into view to put color onto it.
So if you say, let’s put color in it, if you put color in it, then you’re adding another
spectrum.
Red is hot.
Blue is cold.
But that’s still on that same line.
You can’t say this item on this spectrum is now dog.
No.
Because as soon as you say dog…and you can do that.
You can map the dog spectrum to it as far as the hottest animals.
Okay.
Because certainly dogs have a hotter temperature than…well…
Some dogs are hotter than other dogs.
Dogs are hotter.
Chickens are the hottest animal out there.
109 degrees average, I think is what it is.
And some of them are cold…snakes are the coldest animal.
Perhaps.
So you put them on the spectrum, but you’re just introducing another spectrum to it.
But they’re still on that temperature spectrum.
They haven’t jumped off of the temperature spectrum arbitrarily.
No matter what language you use for that spectrum, they’re still that spectrum.
Yeah.
You can’t be anywhere else on it.
We can’t even think.
Can you think anything outside of hot or cold if you’re thinking hot and cold?
I know.
That’s really difficult.
If you’re thinking temperature, can you think anything but hot or cold?
It’s impossible to think beyond the spectrum.
Yeah.
Well, maybe we haven’t spent enough time on it.
So look at science fiction movies and things where people were trying to invent a new world.
What new worlds have been invented in science fiction?
Harry Potter’s world.
Harry Potter is still in an Earth-related thing.
Still on Earth.
You’ve got Muggles and…
I think that’s why it’s so popular is because it’s this Earth, and so it makes it reachable
for everyone.
And Star Trek is still us.
What’s someone trying to create something completely new?
Yeah, I read this book, maybe this, The Long Earth, where you step off of this universe
into identical…not identical though.
It’s a universe that’s here, but you’re just stepping into it one way.
Like they say east or west.
If you step east, then there’s like so many thousands of worlds, universes that way, and
then west.
And each universe has different people, different properties, different temperature.
It’s all different variations of what this Earth could have been if something just was
tweaked in evolution or in the creation of the universe.
Kind of like the butterfly effect.
Multiple universes.
Well, that’s the…what’s that show that’s really hard to understand?
Everywhere All at Once?
Oh yeah.
Everything Everywhere All at Once.
That South Korean show?
Yeah, everything Everywhere All at Once.
The South Korean show is you’re jumping from one universe to another, and I haven’t finished
that yet.
Right.
Or understood it.
Right.
I mean, so maybe that doesn’t help the theory, the idea.
But it’s still a spectrum.
You’re going onto another…you got a spectrum of universes, just the way you described it.
And that’s the only way you can describe it.
Maybe stories, what we’re talking about archtypical stories.
Maybe they are…they can only be dualistic.
You can’t tell a story.
You can either tell a story or don’t tell a story.
What is it if it’s not a story?
Can science fiction jump off that pendulum?
Avatar.
No.
Yes.
I mean, well, that’s still kind of an extension of Earth.
Avatar, you’re going to the computer world.
Oh, not that avatar.
But yes, similar.
The avatar I’m talking about is the blue people, the other planet that people on this Earth
went to.
Yeah.
That’s the same thing.
They got there.
How did they get there?
It is specifically they’re an avatar.
They’re still alive in this world, but they jump to another world.
Yeah.
Space travel.
And it has different things.
I’m thinking of Star Trek and all those.
Those are still people here.
Doctor Who is still just…
Just traveling to other physical places, right?
Right.
With his box.
There’s got to be.
There’s got to be a story that’s completely fictional.
That escapes binary dualism, escapes dualism.
What do you have to do to escape dualism?
That’s what I…
That’s the quandary here.
Yeah.
Everything is dualistic.
We’ve determined, we’ve supposed here until we can find the break of it.
What about heaven?
Is heaven separate from the universe, the physical everything that humans can…
Experience.
An ethereal plane.
That’s kind of like that prism that Superman’s parents are in floating through the universe.
Krypton.
I’m thinking, when Krypton blew up, Krypton blew up and then they went off in this computer
thing.
They saved their essence.
Oh, really?
I don’t think I watched that one.
In a box.
It was the box and that’s where he was in, but he had the whole history of his ancestors
and everything in that and his parents were actually in there.
That he was…
So that’s the Christopher Reeves Superman.
Oh, yeah.
Oh man.
I gotta watch that.
So they explained to him, they could train him and teach him and that’s how he built
his crystal cathedral thing and so how he knew.
But that’s still the same binary thing.
You’re dead or you’re alive.
If we find some binary that you can be something else, dead or alive, you can be…
And maybe we’ll talk about this.
I mean, the next thing we’re talking about, let’s just introduce it, immortal, immortality
or eternal.
Maybe those things will advance us on this idea that let’s not talk about that now because
we’ll approach that next week.
But that’s kind of the heaven concept.
So I don’t want to use that as an example right here, but heaven being the best of all
worlds, you’ve got the best of all worlds or the worst is hell, worst of all things.
Is hell, the best of all things is heaven.
This is heaven.
Yes.
You can have it anywhere.
It’s just a thought.
It’s an idea.
And if you consider it’s an exact place, then you’re putting it in a place somewhere.
Right now, we don’t know the place of heaven.
That song, if you could hide a kolob, if you could identify where kolob is and get there,
but you can’t.
I’m just saying it’s out there, but it’s still there.
It’s still on a binary continuum.
It’s somewhere there.
Yeah.
I don’t want to be there, but I want to be somewhere that’s not there.
Somewhere that’s not there, and it’s going to be another there that is always still a
dualism from here, from here to there, here to something else that’s not dualism, here
to not here, here to jello.
You’re just introducing another spectrum.
Everything you do is another spectrum.
So jello is just another food that you do, or an ice cream bar.
You’ve created it.
From jello to ice cream bars.
You’ve created a spatial spectrum out of jello and ice cream bars.
And you can do that because we speak language.
And because language is it has a meaning.
Jello, jello, you know, you could say that.
And it doesn’t mean jello.
It means hi.
Yeah.
Jello, but it’s still a different spectrum.
It’s a language spectrum.
So what was your statement then that everything is dualistic?
Right.
We can’t find anything that isn’t.
Necessarily.
Everything is necessarily dualistic.
There’s no option.
You cannot get off of dualism.
You cannot be singular.
Okay.
Does this help illuminate the dualism versus monism philosophical theory where there’s
absolutely a difference between your body and your mind.
You can’t have them both be the same thing.
See and with the way you described it, and we could look into it and see whether the
philosopher knew what he was talking about, but probably not.
Because saying the attribute, saying it’s monistic, you’re one person that has an effect
this way and effect that way that still introduces a spectrum to it.
So you’re one conversation that can go any number of ways.
There’s still a spectrum to it.
You’re one person.
Okay.
But its effect is either ethereal or physical.
The effect that the intention is either ethereal or physical.
Whatever your action is, your action or inaction is still a binary thing.
Yeah.
They’re trying to encompass something in dualism.
Yeah.
I don’t know specifically with that, the mind-body dualism.
Is there anything third besides mind and body?
You’ve got spirit, spirit and body, spirit-mind feelings are different maybe than your spirit,
your emotion.
When you have emotion, you have a spiritual maybe intuition, emotion, intuition.
You have bodily functions, you have bodily actions.
There’s all kinds of things you can do with your body and your mind.
But there are ways to split them into binary buckets.
Everything that you can say is binary in itself.
Yeah.
So, if you say intuition, you’d have good intuition or bad intuition or excessive intuition
or fairly a little bit.
Yeah.
Or none, none.
Or actually my intuition works negative against me.
I’m thinking it’s not working at all.
So the spectrum really doesn’t affect whether there are two choices.
The spectrum is just a byproduct of there being two ends, these two binary ends of the
spectrum.
The spectrum is just there because there are two ends.
Right.
The spectrum has to be there.
And there is no way that you can have two ends without a spectrum.
And there is no way that you can have a place without having two ends.
Everything has two ends.
Everything has a spectrum.
Yeah.
So, if you try to identify something that’s not that spectrum, it’s its own spectrum.
Yeah.
If something doesn’t have a spectrum, then that’s a single point and it’s not a binary.
Right.
And what is that?
That’s what I’m saying.
That doesn’t exist.
Singularity.
Right.
You just stated an impossibility.
Okay.
That’s impossible.
That’s what we’re trying to identify with this dualism in binary.
It’s impossible to be singular.
Even if there’s only one of something in the entire existence of everything, there’s still
the binary of not that something.
Of not that something, of everything else.
Right.
That’s like this conversation.
We talked about the singular conversation.
It’s everything else out there that affects it.
Right.
Okay.
That just even someone getting an ice cream bar, that’s going to affect the conversation.
Interesting.
And change it and augment it.
And that, the painting.
So when you make a painting, this painting hanging behind me, it’s a singular painting.
It’s one.
But the meanings can be immense.
Right.
The spectrum of what it means, what it is.
Now it is there.
It’s got oil stacked onto it and it’s specifically a given direction.
I don’t know that the oils will ever change.
They will deteriorate over time.
I mean the major artworks of the past, they can remake them, they can brighten them again
or whatever they do to them.
But they’re going to deteriorate.
They’re rolling down.
The cells and the atoms in that painting are failing.
They’re moving from vibrant to less vibrant on their spectrum.
They’re falling on their spectrum.
So you can’t say a painting is always exactly singular.
It’s going to stay the same.
It’s not.
No one’s going to change it from the outside that it’s changing from the inside anyway.
Just by existing.
By living.
By moving from now to the next now.
Doing to the future will never be in the future.
But in the future it will be a now that’s different than this now.
Yeah.
So theologically, would you say that God is the same now as he will be and as he ever
was?
Because I was just trying to figure out if there’s anything that you can say is static,
ever-changing, even with time.
Well, God’s promise through the scriptures is the same today, yesterday, and forever.
So that he’s speaking about his rules, about the laws, about the commandments.
The purpose of the earth, the plan of happiness is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
So those rules are immutable.
If there’s something immutable and that maybe that’s the word.
Something that cannot be changed because it’s a rule in place.
You still have the not rule.
It’s everything outside of that, everything that’s not immutable.
That’s immutable, but that leaves everything else opposed to it.
God being the same yesterday, today, and forever.
That’s one aspect of him.
That’s one aspect of his spectrum.
So if you consider that that’s a point, that God being perfect and what, omniscient?
No, omnipresent.
What’s that mean?
He’s good yesterday.
God is good.
So you state that on the goodness scale.
There’s a God goodness scale.
Is he better to me yesterday than it was today?
Or whatever.
You think it’s a point, but it’s a spectrum that maybe we just don’t see.
Yeah.
So perfection is what?
What am I trying to say?
Just perfection.
What about perfection?
That’s…
Right, that word.
It’s on a spectrum.
It’s binary, not perfect, perfect.
If someone is claiming to be perfect, or if someone claims someone else is perfect, that
implies that they cannot get any better.
Like right, well, I watched this video, a guy that drew a perfect circle, and he practiced
it.
He did it.
He does an on-the-talk board, and just a teacher, and he drew a perfect circle, and
say, that looks perfect.
That’s perfect.
It looks perfect.
Yes.
It’s a perfect circle, and you could probably measure it, and there’s imperfections.
And if you get down to the molecular, not even molecular, the millimeter size, you’re
probably seeing a lot more imperfections in it than just looking at it on a chalkboard.
It’s not going to be a perfect circle.
And even if you…the computer screen with the pixels, you get your pixels 8 HD or whatever,
or however small you can get, if you cut that smallness in half, you’re going to be way
imperfect still.
So your perfection is subjective based on your perspective of it.
That’s our perspective.
Maybe that’s what makes everything binary, is that we have two eyes.
If we had one eye, would it be different?
Yeah.
It’s not the two eyes thing.
That was just flippant, but it’s the way we see things.
Is there another perspective?
We can’t seem to get out of the dualistic perspective.
Is there some way that could be imagined, even in imagination, that you’re outside of
that perspective?
I can’t even…Horton, hears a Who, those stories, that’s still just smallness, going
smaller.
You can go smaller or larger.
Same spectrum.
It’s like identifying the edge of the universe, but you’re still at the edge of the universe.
If you identify the edge of the universe, you’re still at the edge.
You’ve got to find something that’s not the edge of something, something that’s not there,
something that’s not here or there.
What is it that’s not there and not here?
If it doesn’t exist, then it wouldn’t be here or there.
Something that is unthought of by anyone, uncreated.
Non-existent.
If something exists, it exists on a spectrum.
Maybe that’s something…non-existence, uncreated.
Those are just your thoughts.
That may be what we’re talking about when we started the mind-body dualism.
You can’t have a thought before there’s an object.
That was one of the suppositions there.
You have an action, that’s what creates thoughts.
We’re touching on if you could have a thought that’s outside of your existence, a thought
about something that’s not.
But once you think about it…
Can we think about things that are not?
Once you think about it, it is.
You bring it into existence with a thought.
Your thoughts bring it into existence and then it exists.
Let’s just right now think about all of those things that don’t exist and now they exist
because I just thought about them.
Now they exist.
If you bring it into existence, you created it.
I just created all of those.
You created it by your thought.
You create it and as soon as it’s created, it’s binary.
It’s either there or not or it’s here or there or it’s higher or lower than this other thought.
It’s more worthy or less worthy of an idea.
So you introduce it into a binary system by thinking it.
But if you don’t have…so talking about that will, if it’s not in your powerhouse, not
in your abilities, but then it’s outside your abilities, so it’s still binary.
It’s still binary.
All the things you haven’t thought about is just…those are things I haven’t thought
about yet.
That’s all the things out there is a spectrum of things I haven’t gotten to yet.
I can’t use those words because they’re not in my lexicon yet, but they will be at some
point when they are, then they come into reality.
Then you’ll use them.
But they’re in that spectrum of
unusable things at this point,
unwillable things.
All right.
Is there anywhere else we could go with this?
I think we’ve solved the dualism issue.
Yeah.
No, anything else to say.
Yeah.
And what we’ve solved is our own definition of dualism because some of that did relate
to the actual conversation of dualism that real philosophers are talking about.
The one you identified is they’re just using one idea, mind-body dualism.
They’re using one continuum and saying, this is a continuum.
I think they proved it.
I think we can identify that is a continuum.
No, it’s not a continuum.
I believe mind-body, those are two spectrums.
You have a spectrum of mind, mindfulness, and you have a spectrum of bodyfulness.
And they’re separate.
They’re two separate things.
Yeah.
So there, and I don’t know, maybe no one’s ever identified this idea of dualism is that
it’s ubiquitous.
It is the single ubiquitous thing.
Well, is that a singularity?
Dualism is a singularity.
Dualism is a singularity, yeah.
Because it’s everywhere.
You can’t find a place it doesn’t exist.
Thereby, dualism is not dualistic in itself.
It’s not dualistic.
Yeah, well…
Because it has no opposite.
Maybe if we think…
And it’s everywhere.
We’ll learn, we’ll watch, we’ll read.
Maybe there’s more to learn to find out if there are actual singular things.
But I mean, we’ve already discussed that that’s impossible because if there’s a single thing,
then there’s also the not single things.
But what about, yeah, finding the things where there’s three?
Maybe there is something out there that we just haven’t thought of where there’s…
We’ve tried those.
We did try, but did we try with what we’re gonna learn tomorrow?
Because we’re gonna learn something new tomorrow, and then maybe we can try it again.
Right.
So keep your mind open about it.
Singularity, singularity has to be something we can search as well.
So we searched dualism, we talked about that.
We’re looking for…
If there is a singularity, if dualism is a singularity, if there’s a spectrum of dualism,
you’re more dualistic or less dualistic, I don’t think you can do that.
Dualistic is dualistic.
Spectrumized is spectrumized.
You can’t be more or less of a spectrum, higher or lower, greater or lesser value of a spectrum.
I don’t think you can do that either.
Greater or lesser value of a dualism.
That’s how it relates to you, but is in itself…
I think that we deserve at some point to talk about singularity now and see if that exists
or what people have said about that.
Okay.
Yeah, let’s put that on the list.
Because that’s a word that’s out there that we haven’t talked about.
So next week is immortal and eternal, and those aren’t necessarily ends of the spectrum.
You’re not immortal versus eternal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s like this mind-body thing.
It’s not necessarily on a spectrum, but it’s eternal.
They’re in the same realm of discussion that we have to see how they relate.
Eternal, immortal.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thanks for the conversation.
It’s been fun.
Yeah.
And next week will be even funner.
We’ll find something else to talk about.
Immortal and eternal things next week.
Yeah.
All right.
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