What are we talking about today, Matt? We're gonna start with a general knowledge quiz. Oh, are you ready? Oh, yes, I'm ready.
I haven't thought of the questions. I'm gonna make them up as we get them. All right, all right. All right.
Name someone who governed France. Okay, just someone who governed France, the Sun King. Oh, who's that? Louis the 13th.
Thumbs up. Louis the 14th. Oh, I get close. Dude, that's really good.
I was really good. I expected you to go with like, you know, my corona or Napoleon or you went like old school. That was great. No, I was great.
The Marquis. The Marquis. You're the other. Oh, yeah.
Okay. What's capital of Norway? Oslo. Very, very good.
Okay. The interesting thing about Oslo is there's a really interesting port there and they have this really big fort right at the, like where you have to go this way and I got these huge guns there. It's really cool. I've never been in Norway, but I know how to say cock and fire in Norwegian.
How do you say that? Colquet? Fury. I think I can remember the only Norwegian I know involves machine guns.
Don't worry about why. What's that general enough knowledge? It's amazing. It's working.
No, this all fits into the plan. Okay. What's square root of 81? Nine.
What is the fourth planet from the sun? Earth. Wait. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
What are the moons of that planet? Phobos and DMOs. Some people say Phobos. Phobos, DMOs.
Yeah, I think I just realized I say that wrong too. I don't know how to say it. I see it written a lot. So, yeah, that's it.
When people make up a fake book of the Bible that sounds like it would be in the Bible, but it's not what fake book do they always go to? It's absolutely true. Okay. That's real, real good.
This weapon does Leonardo use. Oh, the swords. Are they called katanas? Yeah, there you go.
That's just phenomenal, man. How do you know all that? Oh, it's a great. Now we're getting to it.
So, I don't know. It's just experience, I guess, is one way. I've ingested content. Over time, some of it was deliberate, like the Louis XIV thing.
I deliberately read a book because I wanted to learn about Marquis de Lafayette. And so I learned about his interactions there. Ninja Turtles, that was me sitting in front of the TV as a kid. The Norwegian stuff.
That was me working with a crew of Norwegian guys on a weapon development program. And so it's a combination of going after content and knowledge and ingesting it. And it's also, you know, just things just kind of fall on you at different times as you go about one ring through the world. Slum dog millionaire style learning.
I've never actually seen that movie, but I know enough to know. It's done long through the world that it's a poor person in India that gets on one of these game shows. It could be a mill of that. Yeah.
And he just, you know, his experience tells the story of how he knows the answers. Yeah. Yeah. How sure were you of all those answers?
Oh, pretty sure. I think that's good enough. Okay. Yeah.
But are there any of those where you're like, maybe Oslo is the capital of Norway or would you say that like, 100% sure? Yeah. Like for example, I was trying to recall the capital of Michigan last night and I couldn't remember if it was Lansing or Albany. I think I thought it was Albany.
That's New York, right? And so it was really late and I was having a hard time and I was like, I don't remember. So there's a fuzziness to recalling information and facts. And I don't know.
It's like the recall is not perfect when you dig into a memory. I think it depends on if we're trying to collect a fact from the recesses of your brain or if we're trying to recall an experience. I think I don't know where this question is going, but I'm really enjoying this. That's okay.
Okay. So I don't know how recall happens, but I know that it is not a discrete. You know what discrete means? Like, discrete is like it's this number or that number.
Okay. There's some amount of fuzziness to recalling a memory and I don't know what that is. Yeah. And I suppose memories can be broken down into units of certainty.
So like the wholeness of a memory, for example, going camping on the upper peninsula of Michigan with my family when I was a little kid, we went to a place called Tukwamanan Falls, but I can't picture the falls because I've been to a lot of waterfalls in the upper Midwest. And I know I was there. I got a pennant from there. It was the same trip where we went to Sleeping Bear Dunes.
That pennant was orange and there's another one. It was like just the style back in like mid 20th century tourist, big dramatic block font and like pictures of a guy and like a fishing cap fishing and there's all a little cartoony. I remember the pennant, but I just for the life of me can't remember what those falls actually look like. I saw some falls here in Alabama a while back and it messed with that memory.
It brought it up falls on the way down to Georgia that we stopped at. It was beautiful Clearwater Falls under a bridge. And I remember I got there and my brain kind of did this like glitchy, staticky thing and Tukwamanan Falls popped into my brain. But I know those are in Michigan, but I don't know what they look like anymore.
But immediately the memories mushed together. Yes. And now I still can't remember just from a year ago, which is which, right? I've crammed that into a blank space in my memory from childhood.
And so people who think about knowledge for a living man, this is a whole field. Just thinking about how you know stuff. Some real smart folks over the last several thousand years from all around the world have suggested that memories are best understood in their most elemental forms. So you can break things down all the way to the smallest level of a memory.
And then you can somehow cobble all of those little bits that you still have together into some sort of sense of the experience, the moment, whatever you obtained there, whatever it felt like, but we don't just remember a thing, right? Like I don't remember the trip to Tukwamanan Falls. I remember a Jillian little things that add up to some sum of that experience. Is that making sense?
A thousand percent. Yeah. Yeah, there's this essence of a memory. Like there's all these secondary and tertiary qualities of the experience that kind of combined to give you the overall feel, the sense of, oh, I remember that.
One of the things that happens to me is when I was really young, I can tell those formative memories. My brain was just welding down memories. I can remember sitting in my bunk bed when I grew up on the bottom bunk. I was probably four years old.
I can remember I had a quarter in my hand and I swallowed it. We shouldn't. I shouldn't do that. Did you ever see that quarter again?
No, no, I did not. So am I still being there? But I remember the time of day because I remember where the sun was. I called my cousin the other day and I said, hey, you remember your grandparents house that your parents got married at?
Remember this was before my cousin was alive. He's like, yeah, I used to go out there when I was a kid and I said, your parents got married in a gazebo, right? He's like, yes. And I said, I have a very, very, very faint memory.
I was four or five years old. I was like the ring bearer or something. I said, I know they tore that house down, but did the gazebo face and I told him the cardinal direction. I was like, was it?
Did it face south east? And he's like, yeah, why? And I was like, because I remember the way the sun was setting on that day. And I did not know that the sun sets in the west, but I can record like the memory in such a way where the sun was in a specific place in my memory and the house has since been destroyed.
It is in Tennessee, they would have also I can plant there. But like I was able to reconstruct it and gain some facts as an adult from a childhood memory. And I didn't understand what was going on in the childhood memory. Does that make any sense at all?
Yes. And I went off of my aunt as she's sitting up there getting married. That was like a tertiary or what is the word for the fourth quadrinary memory? Yeah, it's a quadrinary.
I think that might be it. Yeah. So these all add together to the memory. But you started by asking me about facts.
Right. And now you're talking about these fuzzy things. Well, intuitively went to different types of knowledge because you start asking somebody how do you know something? The most natural question is, what do you mean by no.
Right? Oslo is the capital of Norway and I'm just sure I know that. Well, there's some qualifying questions even to be asked about that type of just propositional fact knowledge. But then there's also I know how I felt when she said that to me for the first time.
Well, that's not testable. That's a different type of knowledge. But you might feel just as certain that you felt this way when she said that to you for the first time as you are sure that Oslo is the capital of Norway. But you see what I'm saying?
I do. And there's also the knowledge of who you are, where you've been, memories, things like that, knowledge of the abstract. Are these all the same things or are there different kinds of knowing? There's absolutely different kinds of knowing.
I'll give you an example. There's the general knowledge that squirrels make nests in trees. Okay. And then there's the specific knowledge that there's a squirrel with a nest in a pecan tree in the front yard.
And it's on the seventh branch up to the right. Is it actually on the seventh branch? No, it's not. But that would be that would be an example of specific knowledge.
More than positive squirrels. So you could have general knowledge like, for example, myself and I were in a parking lot and we were waiting on someone and I saw a man. Were you buying another gun in a parking lot? No, it was not a windy.
So he popped his hood and there's smoke coming out of his hood. And I looked at my son and I said, son, that man doesn't know what's wrong with his car. And he looked at him and he said, huh, he said, there's a lot of steam and smoke coming out of that. I was like, yeah, I was like, I don't know who he is, but he's not from here.
And he's confused. And he doesn't know what a thermostat is. I was like, you're going to be the type of man who knows what a thermostat is. So let's go over and have a conversation with this man and let's figure out how to get him to his next place.
So we walked over there and sure enough, it wasn't a thermostat actually. It was a little, a leak in one of his radiator hoses. He knew that when your car gets damaged and steam comes out, what you do is you pull over, you park and you pop the hood and you look at it. He knew that, which is what I knew when I was 16, the first time it happened to me.
And my dad pulled the radiator hose off the Chevy three 15 and said, this is where the thermostat is and the thermostat controls cold water going in, you know, the first time someone gave me that knowledge. And so yeah, you almost have to be given the knowledge from someone else or you have to experience it. Those are the two ways that I can see specific knowledge is given to someone. That's fantastic.
Where's this conversation in our way right to something people have thought really, really hard about for a very long time and you intuitively are into the categories like that. Really? Amazing. Yeah.
The specific knowledge part? Yeah. Well, how do you think about knowledge in general? So let's go back to the basic starting question.
How do people know things? So you've said experience. Well, yeah, absolutely. The fancy term for that is empiricism.
Empiricism would say that almost all or all knowledge comes through experience. They also experience and then they tell you or your experience, you touch the hot stove. It's hot. I'm going to remember that when the stove is red, it's hot.
You shouldn't touch it. It's too hot to be touched. That's knowledge that you could say you are certain of as far as certainty can go. But then you got another school of thought where some folks are more optimistic about what you can reason to.
What is evident with a little bit of hard thought or that is just intuitively evident just by nature of who you are. It's some kind of genetic awareness that is passed down. Like George is telling the story about the rabbits. Yeah.
Rabbit in the backyard. A mama rabbit and a baby rabbit. He lets his dog out and the dog runs out and baby rabbit sees the dog immediately. The dog's aloof doesn't see anything.
And so baby rabbit sneaks over under mama rabbit. And then when the dog sees mama rabbit, he takes off after mama rabbit and mama rabbit does a circle off to the right. And the dog takes the bait and chases mama rabbit. And then baby rabbit just sneaks away gently while mama rabbit is providing the distraction.
And the conversation was like when babies come out of the womb, a human baby, we just kind of cry and poop ourselves. And this baby rabbit is like three months old and it's like doing subterfuge and like sun-zoo level tactics. So like that's baked in I think. How do we know?
Yeah. How does it know? Like oh don't run at the same time mom does wait and then sneak. Have they run that drill before?
That's a good point. Maybe maybe not. Has that baby rabbit second before? Was there a second baby rabbit?
Okay. That's an expensive way to learn but that's one way to learn. Yeah. Some folks will look at that and say there's a certain knowledge that is genetically passed along.
Maybe the empiricist would say well it's passed along through experience. It just wasn't your experience and it wasn't verbally passed along to you but it was the experience passed along somehow genetically or through natural selection. The rationalist or the person who believes that some things are knowable beyond the five senses would look at that and say no it's further evidence that there is a greater realm of knowledge and reality and that the human mind maybe even soul has the capacity to tap into that and reason through things that simply cannot be physically manifested or experienced in that way or even if it could be physically manifested you can still reason to it apart from physical tactile five senses experience. So when you say empiricist yes is that an E or an I on that word?
That's a great question that is an E. It is an E. Okay. So I think of empirical data.
Yes. Okay. It's the same word. Yes.
Okay. All right. So what you're saying now is very interesting because there's this amount of hubris that I see in I'm doing big air quotes big scary big air quotes science right. Was that a capital S?
It was a science you know in science big scary air quotes we have this thing where oh we know all the things because we I mean you don't you don't trust science you don't know this and one thing I often think about humbly and quietly and I don't tweet about it is that we do have these five senses that you talk about and the way we observe the world is limited to the things we can detect. So one of the things I used to always do as a tester and the whole point is to get to truth was I would set up a transducer to detect something a pressure wave or an amount of light or an electromagnetic emission or something like that. But the only way I can interact with those things is through this transducer that I've built or purchased or whatever the James Webb Space Telescope it's heavily biased towards the infrared regime because. Help me out on that.
So the visible spectrum. So the red side when something's moving away from you because of the Doppler effect you remember the Doppler effect with an ambulance comes by. Yeah. So because of the Doppler effect things that are expanding away from you they'll ship red that's called the red shift.
Okay for that term. Yep. So the James Webb Space Telescope like I'm not sure all but massive amounts of infrared detection capability because they we're detecting things that are shifted into the infrared spectrum. Does that leave a red signature a red trail that's an object moving away a peer somehow red.
Yes. Okay. Yes it does. And so so by through a baseball and we were looking at that with the right technology from behind me and I threw a baseball away from me the red shift would be visible at that small scale or does it take something real big for that to be evident.
It depends on how fast you throw the baseball. Really fast. Yeah. You wouldn't believe it.
Yeah. Super super super super. Have you seen rookie of the year? Oh yeah that fast but like double.
Yeah. So down a rabbit trail with is our second rabbit. Sorry man you brought up a thing and I don't know how the thing works. Well I understand your example so I got to ask a couple questions.
Thank you for indulging. No my I'm more interested in what you're bringing up. So basically what I'm trying to say is we haven't had the ability to make these types of infrared detectors and now that we can we're learning new things. And so we humans are limited to our empirical data collection by the things we can interact with and we might not be able to do it with our physical body.
I can't detect radar waves with my body but I can use a radar horn and collect that electromagnetic radiation and figure out you know oh that's X band or C band or whatever the radar. Band is right. My point is there's this whole thing this whole universe and who knows how many different things we can't detect. We are limited in our knowledge because we have been pinned to a human body and I've talked to you about this.
I want to go deep into this like the fact that I believe my soul is pinned to a human body. There's all kinds of implications for that. That conversation was brought to you by Texas Roadhouse. It really was.
I think about their salads a lot. I do. So anyway I'm with you. I'm with you and I'm interested in what you're talking about.
So there's general knowledge there's specific knowledge we can get there by empiricism. Yes. Which is experiencing. Yes.
And what do you call it when someone tells you something they know? What is that called? Well it would still be empirical data because it's like secondary empirical data. Yeah exactly that.
Sometimes testimony is the term that's used. So your sources of truth the two big schools of thought and there's shades of gray between them would be rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism would acknowledge that knowledge comes through the five senses as well but the rationalist is also very optimistic about what can be reasoned to. The empiricist might allow for some reasoning but they would say that even the capacity to reason to that is born out of experience.
So it seems like true abstract thought is still actually an extension of the five senses. So those are your two big ones. Do you want to take any swings that people who are exemplars throughout history of rationalism or empiricism? Empiricism.
Da Vinci was really cool. Archimedes was awesome. He could also do abstract things. He was really good at math and things like that.
I don't know where the abstract takes you. It's not that interesting because it's kind of a foot in both worlds when it like when we sat in these chairs and you explain calculus to me. The other thing I was getting excited about was to this philosophy. You're starting to introduce me to a different language to think about philosophical ideas than the one I know.
That's very interesting but sorry. I rather try to ask you a question and then I went after that. I mean the big names. This is your field not mine.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Okay. So Socrates and Plato would lean rationalist. Socrates didn't write anything but the most basic theory of knowledge which I want to bounce off you and see what you make of it here in just a minute is born out of Plato either reciting or crafting or summarizing some dialogues that as a student of Socrates in the fifth century BC he heard Socrates have with other people.
And so for example Plato records a conversation between Socrates and an uneducated slave. And in it Socrates is trying to demonstrate that through asking the right questions, a socratic method, there you go, even an uneducated slave can arrive at quality moral reasoning, can arrive at an understanding of truths about the universe and the unseen. And so Plato is a rationalist, like the rationalist, like the father of rationalism though he isn't really the father of it. He's the big name.
Aristotle, his student, so Socrates didn't write anything. We know a lot about him from his student Plato. They look like they are pretty rationalistic. Plato's student Aristotle seems to have differed from his teacher on this point.
We got a whole lot from both Plato and Aristotle, most of which we recovered actually from the Muslim world in the Middle Ages. They still had that stuff sitting around and a lot of it was lost to the West. So that's a kind of cool little footnote to history where East and West work together to preserve important ideas. And then Aristotle, he famously tutored Alexander the Great.
So those four are just gigantic names in the history of thought with the first two being pretty rationalistic and I don't know if you can say for sure about Alexander, he's not really known for philosophy, but Aristotle being more of an empiricist. And then the big names in your field, Francis Bacon, he's an empiricist. He looked at the methodology for arriving at truth that had been handed down from the classical world, the ancient world. I was like, I don't know.
It looks like they all started with an observation about planet earth, about existence, and then worked backwards to support it. So that's deductive reasoning. Bacon's big innovation was we need a method to go the other way. We need a system of observation and repetition and duplicability by which we can start with no assumptions about the world and go and do homework to arrive at conclusions.
Does that make sense? Yeah, scientific method. But so you said, tell me the difference in deductive reasoning and what would the opposite be? Inductive.
Yeah, can you just tell me the difference in those two? Yeah, deductive reasoning starts with an observation and then works to support it. Inductive reasoning starts with more of an open mind and then does homework to try to work your way toward defensible conclusions. So you start with a truth claim and then test it in deductive reasoning.
You start with the testing and try to arrive at a truth claim with inductive reasoning. So for example, in my field, there are two approaches to Bible. One is you start with historic Christian theology born out of the Christian creeds and then you go to the Bible to see how it supports Christian conclusions. The other is you just start with the Bible and you see what conclusions come out of the text.
Obviously, the stuff that I do is largely the latter. You just start with the book of Matthew and try to figure out what you get if you just look at the book of Matthew as opposed to here are all the things I already think. Let's figure out how Matthew supports them. That's fascinating, dude.
This episode of No Them Questions is sponsored by Raycon. You can get some earbuds by going to byraycon.com slash in DQ when you use the promo code in DQ on the page that gets you 15% off and Matt. They've got several different earbuds you can choose from. They've got the everyday earbuds.
Those are my everyday carries. They've got the fitness earbuds. They've got the work earbuds and now they have this thing called gaming earbuds. I'm going to try that.
They have a different mechanical form factor. Let's like it hangs down in that little what do you call it a little slot? You got your ear hole and then you got the like little gutter that comes down. Is there a name for the gutter?
Your ear gutter that sounds trashy. Isn't that your ear sewer? No. Come on.
Something. Your drain hole? No. We can do better than that too.
No, it's not the the the the pinet. No, what's it called the the floppy parts of your ear up top? Yeah, that has a different name. Anyway, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Like the there's a slot right there and it just feels like there should be an earbud in it. Yes. I mean, they got like bright colors and stuff. They look like a computer.
You can get blue. You can get purple. You can get gray and get. Oh, Jet Silver.
Excuse me. Not great. Let me see the gray. Show me some of the real vivid one.
Yeah, there's the blue. I'm going to be the blue and it's purple. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
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Well, I mean, you know, it just kind of happens over time, but I'm down to one set. I'm proud of you now. I did finally destroy a set. How'd you do that?
My very first set ever, the third time I ran it through the wash. I finally broke them. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you.
And like, hey, you can even wash these things. Not three times alert alert alert. Do not run them through the wash three times. Oh, that's fantastic.
I'm very proud of you. Thanks. I've been trying to destroy this for a long time. I dropped them in rivers.
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Yeah. And the point there is that these things are affordable and they're high quality and like it doesn't ruin your week if you lose them. So I mean, because they're good quality products, but they are affordable so that if you do destroy them, it doesn't break the bank to get another set. Yeah.
One of the substitute swears when I discovered mine was broken, whereas if it was a more expensive thing, it might have been like, I might have gone full on. I might have gone full on. Yeah, I might not have used a sub. Also, like I traveled down here to see you.
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That's awesome. By Raycon.com slash in DQ and that gets you 15% off your order. Let's go all the way back to a question I was asking you earlier. Okay.
The one out of squirrel. I like that question too. How sure are you of all of those things of all of those truth propositions? Oh, man.
We're going back to our memory. We're going back to our memory. We're going back to our memory. We're going back to our memory.
We're in knowledge. We're in knowledge. Yes. Those questions I asked you at the beginning, all of which you got right.
No, let me ask you a question in every way. How do we know you were right? Okay. Because I think we both agree you were right.
I think the third chair, every one of those that they know, they would say we agree you were right. How do we know you were right? Well, this is Steve Bateman's territory. Okay.
Steve Bateman. Yeah. Pastor Church. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who's a philosopher and a very well read. Dr. Steve Bateman. No, Dr.
No, no, no credentials. But he talks about the difference in historical knowledge and scientific knowledge. Okay. I think we just wait and have him on for a whole different thing on that.
Okay. Because that's awesome. That is a little different question, I think. Because that is really a question of testability and certainty, verifiability.
How do you do it? Well, inductive, deductive. I don't know. Maybe that factor is in there as well.
But how do you know George Washington was the first president of the United States? History. Historical knowledge. And what are the components just quickly?
Walk me through it. How would your kid is like dad prove it. Okay. Watch this, son.
Okay. There's a picture, maybe go to a dollar bill and say, okay, we have a record of this. But it doesn't say he was the first president. Right.
At some point we'd end up at Mount Vernon. Okay. So that would prove he existed or right. It would get us closer.
The Washington Monument. Okay. But somebody could have faked all that. Yeah, that's true.
At one point I was looking at purchasing a letter written by George Washington. What? Yeah. I was like, man, because there's some website where you can like do autographs of famous people and Brady really likes autographs.
Dude, if you want stuff like that, just go rifle through some Ivy League dumpsters. I think they're pitching all of it. Yeah, it should be free. Oh, yeah.
That was a complex joke. Yeah, I saw this letter that George Washington had written to an acquaintance and he was talking about the, I think it was the performance of his cabbages that year in his garden. Yeah. I think this was later in life when he was reclining under the shade of his own fig tree.
But I thought it was really interesting. It's those things that are most fascinating to me. The, yeah, we got the big monuments and we got the paintings and all this stuff. But it's like the things these people do when no one's looking, that's what's most fascinating to me about proving the existence of someone.
Let me ask you this. So is it true? Who is the one that was killed in, oh, shoot, don't disturb my circles. Who was that?
Who am I talking about? Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, Tollies?
No. It's not our committees. Was it our committees? I don't know.
I don't know. It's fine. I don't remember. You've brought it up before and it sounded right.
The story is there's an invading army that comes in. I don't know if they were in Athens. I don't know where they were, but he's sitting there working on a math problem. He's drawn circles in the dirt and the soldier comes in and is like, Hey, you got to get out of here or something.
I'm going to soldier you. Don't mess with the dirt. I'm messing with it right now. I'm trying to figure something out.
Who was that? It was our committees. Our committees. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's okay. Got it.
This is Syracuse. It is in Syracuse. Okay. So which was a Greek colony.
Okay. That was romified. So it was very early. So it was a Roman soldier that killed our committees?
Yeah. The Romans invaded and conquered Syracuse. Really? We found where our committees had used pulleys to pull a ship of war into, like he pulled an entire ship by himself just by a clever arrangement of pulleys.
I just remember thinking, man, that was awesome. And this was all written down. Like this was a historical record. Well, I mean, I guess I guess to your question, how do we know what actually happened?
Yeah. But I don't know. It's interesting to think that this stuff, these were real people. You and I are going to die and we're going to be forgotten.
That's going to happen, you know? And so I think preparing for that well is important. You know what's funny about that. The same guy who introduced me to this question is also the same guy who introduced me to my wife is also the same guy who read poetry at my wedding He's also the same guy who introduced me to the idea.
I was going to die Who was this guy freshman year honors philosophy professor Clifford Williams? Okay interesting cat good dude I met Camilla in his class first day first class honors philosophy She patted the chair next to me when I walked in I was like Bert next to her. That's like kidding That's a pretty scroll in the room. He's seriously.
I'm a 110 pound still haven't hit any kind of growth spurt I'll take it. Okay, great. I was a buyer and she's like I don't want to say this other guy Dang it. I can work with that.
Monday. You'll bear my children That's an all the end I need yeah, and and I remember he the very next thing that happened like right after I met Camilla I'm Matt. I'm Camilla cool. Yeah, there's somebody else wants to sit here I don't want to sit here.
Okay, cool The very next thing that happened in my life after that was Cliff Williams gave us a pink syllabus for honors philosophy and on it We're the objectives of the class one of the objectives is what you and I are talking about right now to gain a basic function of thinking about Human knowledge how we know things. Why is this illness pink? I don't know it just was and I remember that okay I think I could even find a way to verify it But there are a few other things on the list and the last thing the last objective of the course was to prepare the student for death And so it's really interesting to me that you and I Bring up this topic in depth for the first time together and you go right to Preparation for death because that is where Cliff took me the day I met my wife really yep, and I put it on every single syllabus of every class I taught I think I put it on every syllabus after that maybe some surveys But the final objective of each course I taught in college was to prepare the student for death Wow, that's also it from him That's interesting my wife and I were bickering about something not important the other day, and that's where we landed That's how we ended it. We're like, you know, we're gonna die and this is not gonna matter And we're like, you know, that's right.
Let's just hold each other and just be happy at the moment. It was good That's really really good. It was like this is not going to matter to either one of us We're just emotionally worked up in this moment and it doesn't matter and we're gonna die so yeah, I love you We're done with that it was great. It was really really good So to prepare the student for death hmm.
Let me get back to knowledge Let me let me go back to the other direction you kind of tiptoeed around some deep water in the beginning of this recording session here with memories Mm-hmm. I have a question. Yes. How are your memories written and how are they recalled because you said that when you were in Georgia And you saw a different waterfall it kind of rewrote some of the memories right something you may not have known There's this guy named Luke Talley He's here in Huntsville.
He is an engineer who worked on the Saturn V rocket Okay, and he worked with a memory core on the Saturn V rocket in the earliest computers The way the memory works on the Saturn V rocket is you have these little iron rings and you magnetize them one way or the other And they're able to hold that charge or that you know whatever you want to call it It's either a one or a zero okay But in order to go back to that bit that physical data bit You have to erase it in order to read it. Oh Oh, okay. Yeah, okay. So the act of reading the memory.
Sorry. I got excited because I see where you're going. Yes I did okay. Yes.
So the act of reading the memory erases the memory and then you have to re record it So the way it would work is let's say there's a there's an 8-bit number And we're gonna we got all these little iron cores there and we're gonna go ping all the little bits It's so weird. They're physical iron rings. It's the most bizarre thing to see under a microscope So you go and you read the polarity or whatever you want to call it the one or zeroness of it the state You read it and then you just erased it and you're like, okay What was that that that was a one okay put the one back and that's how it works I'd like to think their system was more precise and complex than Kyle. What was that again?
Was one it's exactly what it was it wasn't humans doing that it was a computer one of the first digital computers did that like they they flew like some early Simi conductor transistor things on that that bird. That was really really cool. Wow. You see where I'm going with this When you recall a deep deep memory and you pull that back out.
So I'm currently working on math for a test to have coming out Yes, you are I saw that whiteboard. Yeah, I am it's crazy humbled. It's very difficult What is the integral of tangent X? I don't right exactly right so if you've ever been taught that how do you do it?
How do you get to that is it? You know, I don't remember it right now. I do not remember the integral of tangent X There's a secant squared floating around in my head. There's also a the fact I can turn tangent into sign over cosine And then it might be lnx because you have do you over you?
It's so there's all these different things and that's all fuzzy and I can't get there Mm-hmm like I can't just be like this equals this. Mm-hmm like you probably remember what is cosine squared X plus sine squared X I don't remember it's one that's that's a good one. There's some things that you can remember that are like identities Like we know this is this it's like a math fact. You know what I could have to that with time You could have yeah, I see it now.
Yeah, so it's a math fact like what is four plus four. I know that one Okay, what is it say eight? Yeah, exactly you just know it But there's these other things that I'm hitting my head against right now, or I don't know it and I have to reason to it But it is it is a math fact But there are ways that I can like brute force and like bushwhack through the briars and brambles that have yeah It's just making any sense perfect sense. I wrote a song that is the book of Matthew.
It's the whole book of Matthew It rhymes it's quirky, but like it's literally like a learning song that is everything that happened in the book of Matthew with chapter divisions The idea is let's pick one book of the Bible It doesn't like the main character the Bible's got Jesus the religion's named after him He seems pretty important like there you go Here's a song and I'm gonna give it to the people who listen to my podcast when it's all tidied up and done so that they can keep this giant Eight hundred episode project we've done together working through Matthew in their hip pocket I want them to own that book of the Bible what they do with it like whatever atheists listen people believe totally different things And we listen but just to hold the raw data of that whole book of the Bible at once in your brain My theory is that should unlock new things that should provide opportunities for understanding knowledge growth remembrance I believe communion with God in a way that is new and different and not accessible when you're just taking little splashes and Snapshots from the text here and there I want people to hold one whole book at once So I wrote this stupid song and it is stupid But I can use that crap to get to things that are Bible facts Like this is what happens in the story in this order But I can't remember exactly where and so because of that song and because the amount of time that I've spent working on it I can like you reason back now. Okay. No, he wouldn't have gone up on that northern road trip and that I know that's in chapter 15 So it'd have to be before that so he's still in northern Galilee. Oh Yeah, it's chapter 12.
It's chapter 12. I can work back to it whereas other things like you give me a quote from Matthew I'm like boom Matthew 517. I know exactly what that is and I quoted you. I have that formula What is this?
I don't think that I've come to abolish the law and the profits I haven't come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Hmm. So I don't know what you call that There's things that you hold as a fact and you just have that data that memory Okay, and then there's these other things that you can reason to yes So you have something that's different than me in this regard you own people's names as facts You own their names like I've seen you be like oh, yeah, that's that's William or you know someone you've met once you have their name Okay, I don't I have to reason to their name. I picked my daughter up last night at a pool party now you've got her name Yes, okay, so I picked my daughter up last night at a pool party and I saw the guy that was there at the house I knew his name I knew his first name and then you just started mouthing consonants and I did not know his last name I did not know his last name and I knew what I called him the last time we were there and it was wrong Oh, no, I knew what his last name was last time.
I thought it was wrong because he told me So For some reason with people's names I have to make little rhymes and things like that in my head and it's not because I don't care about the people because I can tell you what they Do for a living I can tell you that they're very involved in sports with their child and they're a very good father at this And you know I like the way they laugh when they do this like I genuinely care about the person So it's not me being like emotionally dismissive for some reason just names of humans is hard for me to grasp That's very difficult for me and so I have to I have to come up with all these little things There's a lady at the bank. I called her brandy Incorrectly and the reason I called her brandy is because the first time I walked in the bank She told me her name and it sounded something like that and I said oh, yeah, yeah brandy In sixth grade there was that girl that came over trick or treating her name was brandy And she asked if she could use the bathroom and she went upstairs and she stole all of our toilet paper So she could go roll the yard with it. Oh, yeah, yeah Just give her some more toilet. I know exactly.
Oh, she was vandalized. Yeah She's saying like okay, and so I was like okay, and so in that moment I was like, you know, she told me her name and it started with a B and I was like, okay I'm gonna pin this image of brandy walking upstairs in my old house and stealing our toilet paper I'm gonna pin that to you and that's I'm gonna rationalize to this and it was wrong And so now I have this problem where I pin the wrong thing with the wrong person and now I have to come back and figure it out so That's my internal struggle. I have a struggle with that and It's a limitation and I acknowledge it and I see it and I'm constantly trying to work around it and Tara is my lifeline because I'll just text Or be like hey this person this thing. What is their name?
I am my lifeline because I just text me. I literally after I meet people I text myself Are you about to give me a life hack? I text myself details and so like the Emergency I need this text thread is with me. I've got my phone up here and I'm scrolling back to my last text with me and Okay, my most recent text to me says NDQ episode on birth with a midwife Oh as a reminder Reminder but the one before that says I'm not gonna say the name out loud But it says so-and-so blue F-150 and the name of the street on which he lives Wow because I met him I will probably never reference this again to recall this gentleman's name But the fact that I texted it to myself knowing that's a name I'd like to have but I didn't interact with him enough to keep it Now I got it without checking it again.
I've got it and I've seen him five times since and I've had it every single time I'm gonna change the names here a little bit, but Dave and Candy building on Kansas City Street here since a certain year this job worked here And has this job title I texted it to myself when I see this person around town again. I'm going to remember oh Oh, oh there they are there over there. I'm gonna go and talk to them I only met them once there's an opportunity here to just show them that people care about them and notice them Well, you pull your phone off So then I all I do is before I walk over I go up here to the search function in this text thread I search within the text thread a keyword related to them where I met them what I remember they do for a living Something and it pulls it right up jogs my memory and all the things close the phone and I go and say hello is that cheating? Absolutely and on the one hand you can be like well That's super disingenuous that you have to do that and you try to pass it off like you know someone But on the other hand previous me did think you were important enough to make the effort like who cares how you made the effort right Right, I care about those people I want them to know I remember meeting you it made an impact on me and you matter and I give a rip about how you're doing And so if I think I'm not gonna remember I use that text thread with myself and I cheat so that's awesome Takes a little luster off of the nice compliment you just paid me but no no That's the truth of the situation.
Okay, so you struggle with it a little bit as well. Yeah, but you're really good at it I've seen I've seen you recall you know this way your your recall on names is Double if not triple the capability mind. It's impressive. I don't know about that, but thank you for the kind words Yeah, so I don't know I think that is important and I would like to work on that That's a thing that I'm trying to get better at and my daughter's made fun of me before and that's fine You can make fun of me, but I'll give you another tip.
Yeah one time. I was campaigning for a job Okay, I was being interviewed by 40 people. Okay 40 showed up for the interview We sat in a circle the people conducting the interview literally had us go around the room and everyone introduced Themselves and say a couple things about themselves. It was like a three-hour interview.
It was nuts I didn't even take the job they offered it to take it they all went around and did this thing I pictured each person Doing something very memorable with someone. I know very well who has the same name a celebrity or an individual Like the person sitting next to me. I saw her member their name was Robin It was a lady and so I just pictured Robin crusading with Batman. Okay ridiculous.
No not but we got done going around and I went around and just said Cool, it's nice to meet all of you. Let me make sure I've got this straight Robin Dave Carol Mark and no you did I did that is such a baller move And that's the moment I got the job. Yes, but that was it. How did I do it?
Well? I can't retain 40 things in a row I just remembered the most absurd point of connection between them that's something about what they were wearing where there was any Point of ridiculous connection between them and something I own epistemologically knowledge I'm sure of I just receptor so we welded them I welded it to something not to knowledge. I don't have yet and it totally sucked so next question Yeah, I'm a squirrel and I just like I'm all well. I chase squirrels.
Let's put that way. I'm just sure 7th branch I can just be country completely taken off course in an instant by a crazy thought about waterfalls or whatever I like you filming me while we're doing that little video on the beach in Destin or wherever we were Southern Alabama And like all your job is is to point the camera at me while I finish up this little bit for my channel and there's a helicopter I'm just gonna straight to the helicopter. They're really yeah I'm like jumping up and down like waving to try to get you back in we finished the video And then I think you just I think you just capped off the insult injury by tapping me right in the crotch with one of those paddle balls What just happened? What do I think I with you?
Sorry go ahead No, so like when you're doing that and you're going around the circle and you're trying to memorize everybody's name And you're like this this person's you know with Batman doing whatever Yeah, can you hear what they're saying? Oh heck yeah? Okay, yeah, cuz you don't put a lot of thought into it because the first thing that comes to mind is gonna be the best Because like you thought of brandy in the toilet paper Yes, and you welded it because it was the first thing that came to mind like whatever is top of mind is what you're holding in that Memory access spot. I don't have to dive deep into the memory hole and be like wasn't there a lady named Gladys who my parents knew When they were in college they told me about once that doesn't do me any good.
It's not a robust memory I don't own that knowledge. I flirt with that knowledge I need something really concrete that I can grab onto if I'm gonna use that trick so it happens fast and you're on to listening This episode of not him questions brought to you by hello fresh We have eaten hello fresh since forever and they have sponsored this program since forever We so appreciate them as a sponsor and we also appreciate the fact that this is a genuinely awesome product that tons of you already enjoy Hello fresh, Dustin once a quick rundown how you summarize it somebody elevator pitch Yeah, you can go to the website and you can choose from over 55 weekly options They have these pre-portioned meals that they send to your house super high quality ingredients You get the right amount of them they come like straight to your door and then you little recipe card You can make the meal so the cooking and the learning how to cook is part of the experience You're making sauces you're like saute and stuff You're doing all the things that like a fancy chef would do but you're doing at your house and you're learning how to cook Which these skills I have learned help you with every other meal you make so I really enjoy the educational aspect of hello fresh Yeah, and I find that when I go out to eat I lock in like I got a thing if we're going there I get this thing and that's fine I like the thing I get when we go to different restaurants What I like about hello fresh is that it expands my taste because it just seems very natural to try things I haven't tried before also They're always messing with the menus and doing seasonal stuff trying new menus for various dietary goals things like that right now They've got a taste of summer series going on. They've got old base shrimp and sausage boil I don't even know what that is. You don't know what old Bay is it says old base shrimp and sausage boil That's a special like it's a spice that you do.
It's it's kind of like a low-country boil. You don't know that is do you? Shrimp and salsa they really have that yeah, they have that that's also family-style grilled steak lettuce wraps also part of the taste of summer thing And so it's just I mean you go there and something new is always happening I feel like hello fresh is always pushing me on the food thing and I like that yeah, but one of my favorite things that we make Are the tacos there's like pork carnita tacos. There's all kinds of different things.
I'm looking right now They have a new one pan mango salsa pork tacos. That sounds great with cilantro and sour cream Yeah, I really enjoy tacos in particular, but they also have really good stuff like the melty monoray jack burgers It's all good all this stuff shows up when it's supposed to show up So you can also pause it if you're not gonna be around for a while So to try out hellofresh you can go to hellofresh.com Slash ndq 16 and use the code ndq 16 for up to 16 free meals and three free gifts Yeah, big thanks to hellofresh for sponsoring the podcast Thank you for supporting the sponsors because that makes all this happen You're smart, you know, it's going on and we are grateful for your support of the sponsors once again hellofresh.com slash ndq 16 Use the code ndq 16 to get 16 free meals and three free gifts You know you taught me a lot of things Melvin and this is one of its you know what go ahead No, I I've heard that technique before You're just good at it. You're really good at it. I didn't know that was a technique I thought I was making crap up.
I'm happy that to know that I lucked my way into sign memory hacks for somebody else Yeah, it's really interesting. What's interesting about this math? I'm doing yeah is I'm 40 and all these people that are doing it Could be or 23 24. They're better than me They are they are locked on they are laser focused on that and though you are a very competent man You are not laser focused on this your primary objective right now is not kids pass those math tests Yeah, kids are my primary focus right now, but their minds are better.
I can feel it. Yeah. Yeah, it's all right better at some stuff Yeah, yeah, but old aged into battery will you know you didn't scale any day? I found that a thrift or cross stitch and I got another room on the wall.
It's great. Well done cross-stitchers. Okay. Here's what we've done though What we have talked about both Intentionally and accidentally are different theories of acquisition of knowledge so intentionally we've talked about rationalism and empiricism We've talked about some of the people who champion those positions John Locke would be another very famous empiricist His empiricism is noted in his most famous phrase right that being tabular rasa You for this one?
No, what does tabular rasa mean? You know that clean slate blank slate blank so locks assertion is when you're born You don't have the rabbit intuition. You don't have any abstract knowledge that you can gain you are completely blank slate your experiences start to etch Onto that slate season empiricist very famous one whereas Sir another very famous philosopher suggested that well, what can I actually know? I've got an empirical conundrum here and I'm gonna work my way back to something I can prove Descartes There you go very nicely done.
Yeah, I got to a point of saying I'm not even sure of my own body My body could be an illusion, but I am sure I'm thinking therefore I think therefore I am exactly so that would be rationalism It's only one step beyond that to get to moral law like a true moral code. That's a big Well, there's a recent Descartes informs classical liberalism Which is founded on the assumption that you you are you exist everyone else thinks therefore they are as well Therefore entirely apart from God self ownership is the order of the universe and morality starts with ownership of yourself and the product of your labor Well, it agrees with that, but that's how morality flows right out of that. I got there differently I mean it's Lewis. Yes Lewis.
He talks about the fact that I know there are things that I should do that I don't and I know That there are things I shouldn't do that I do whatever that is whatever you call that That's the moral law written on my heart. Yeah, anyways, you were running a corner Well and rationalist doing ethics they were trying to figure that out apart from God in the 17th century 16th 17th century That was a big question the world's getting smaller We're getting no people from all over the world. What if our version of God isn't right is there any morality is or is it just whatever consensus or How it says morality is and so a lot of these thinkers during that era of the Enlightenment are trying to say how is there any universal moral law? That is hardwired that is universal language into the rules of existence just as they are and so that's what a lot of those guys Are thinking about whereas Lewis is appealing to not just reason but also some theistic assumptions together saying these things are here And I think they're etched there by the maker of all things that would be his assumption the question is are they etched in the yeah The bios the built-in operating system or are they in something different are they physical or they something different anyway?
And that kind of gets back to rationalism in piercism again The nature nurture thing is kind of a cousin of the same discussion. So we got rationalism. We've got empiricism But then we've also really thrown out Testimony as a third potential source of truth whether it's personal testimony that is accessing your memories and being pulled by a previous version of yourself That maybe you know even had to erase the previous memory to access it So there's a reliability question with testimony or testimony external to ourselves somebody else saw a thing I know I'm telling you there's a fire two blocks over you can't see the smoke but that house is on fire Well, it's testable, but if there's no reason for them to lie you soon There's probably a house fire a couple blocks over nothing to be gained But still there's a it's not as reliable as walking over there and being like that is one a house two flames and three It is now therefore that house is now on fire. That's probably the more reliable There's another thing if telling you the information causes pain to the person Then it's more reliable.
Yes, which is why a lot of people are I mean the early church was so adamant They're like hey, this Jesus dude. It happened. Mm-hmm. Well, we're gonna murder you.
Okay, so someone I saw that doesn't change what I saw And so that's the history of Jesus comes comes, you know down to that you're not wrong. Yeah So even bringing that up though you're getting into what the stakes of this thing are when you're a kid and you're 18 You're maybe taking your first college class and you're just a super pretty girl You want to have kids with some days sitting next to you? It just feels like oh, this is a fun esoteric thing and the goal here is get it great I'd like to do it well enough that I appear competent to this girl who I like and I'd like the respect of this professor I'd like to appear competent to him further. This is genuinely fun and further.
I like good grades And so those are those are the motives then you age a little bit and life happens a little bit and memories fade come go rewrite Just a little bit you get lied to maybe you look back on a thing or two here there And you're like I'm not even sure I was as honest as I would have like to have been there I'd like to imagine myself an honest person, but now I can think of moments where I could have done better on that in my life and Questions of certainty and knowledge go from being like a fun thing to tinker with to kind of foundational How do I know anything at all? Let's go all the way back to Plato and Aristotle There is this very old formula for truth that's been jabbed at a lot of different ways It gets abbreviated as JTB if you have these things you have knowledge J equals justification T equals actual truth is it real? Belief means some sort of personal sense that that is reality if you have any one of those things you don't have knowledge So if you have just a justification you could be like no, um, you know, I think that water right there I know a lot of other liquid things mercury is liquid. I assume that that water bottle there contains mercury Well, either it does or it doesn't I could have a justification a rationale for why I think it's mercury because I've seen liquid mercury And that's liquid so it must be mercury, but it's not truth So I don't have knowledge because I just have this one I have a rationale, but it doesn't square with reality truth Can be a thing like that's h2o, but if I don't know what h2o is that's a truth external to me and I don't have knowledge of it It's still true, but I don't know it and this isn't a question of truth.
It's a question of knowledge. How do we know things? Belief I might believe Really strongly that that is water, but it might actually not be water in your water bottle I don't know that for sure. What's the difference in justification and belief?
I don't in the JTB justification truth belief, so I think I don't understand the justification part there justification would be a defensible evidence-based rationale for Why a thing is oh what a certain thing is okay? I see my belief Isn't empirical my belief is just sort of an assumption like I don't know it's in a water bottle that says water on the bottle Ah, I believe it's water. Yeah, also like in the past there have been many water bottles that had water in them. Therefore, it's probably water So yeah, that's my justification right well.
No, that's my belief My belief is that it's water my justification would be poured out. Let's test it like let's put under a microscope That feels like truth We can use it like trialist and then that gets us to and then truth is external to my experimentation truth is external to my belief Truth is the reality of it is that h2o or is it something else? truth doesn't I almost made it sound like a stupid catch phrase that people use when they argue with each other on the Internet But the reality is in this equation truth doesn't care about your justification truth doesn't care about your belief truth just is So Socrates and Plato flirt with this idea JTB justification truth and belief equals knowledge and this kind of carries the day for a really long time Can you think of an exception to this equation? Justification truth and belief what if you had all three of those but you still didn't have knowledge is there a scenario in which you could have justification a solid rationale truth what you think you know squares with reality and belief that you assume a thing to be true You have all of it, but you still don't actually know is there a scenario where that could be or if you have JTB Do you have knowledge?
I don't know. I mean Intellectual dishonesty is having truth but not believing or wanting to see the justification I'm seeing a lot of intellectual dishonesty these days. That's what I'm seeing which is not JTB. Yeah No, I don't know.
I don't have to answer the question. It's okay. You've stretched me quite a bit And so I'm it's very difficult for me between the justification and the belief to understand It's so I'm gonna take this as an introductory course in this concept and I'll have to go think about it Okay, well don't feel bad that you didn't have an immediate answer I don't think I did either when this was brought up with me But the reality is that any kind of philosophical assertion just like a mathematical assertion if you can find an exception Well, it's no longer ironclad now. There's an exception.