Transcript for:
Parker's Pencils Podcast - Do Souls Exist?

hey welcome back to another episode of parker's pencils this is a podcast where we explore all the deepest ideas in philosophy theology nature and life i love thinking about cool stuff so come think with me i got a big smile on my face because this is another special episode uh it's live so some of you guys are listening live and i have with me dr graham oppe and dr michael humer and we're going to be talking about whether or not souls exist and particular uh we're also gonna be talking about dr humer's argument for reincarnation i'm really excited about this uh this conversation i say conversation because it's not really like a formal debate or anything like that it's gonna be conversational um and i'll be kind of moderating maybe too much for some of you maybe not enough for others but it's my channel so sorry guys um we will be doing about an hour hour 15ish of conversation and then maybe half hour or so of questions so if you guys have questions uh go ahead and leave those in the live comment live chat and i'll give priority to super chats no guarantee we're gonna get through all the super chats or anything like that so if we don't cover yours um please consider that just a donation to the pence's channel thank you i'm really excited so um if you could keep them on top but that's keep the questions on topic that's probably better don't go too crazy on us but uh you know we'll see it's up to them whether they want to answer it or not so um without further ado let's just jump in and i'll pull in dr oppy and dr humer well thank you guys so much for for coming on the podcast today thanks for having us yeah likewise so before we jump in i just want to give a huge thank you to both of you both you guys are as the audience will know um great philosophers and uh especially in the academic realm you guys have published a lot of high class work but then both of you also do a lot of public philosophy and you're you go on a lot of youtube channels and not even gigantic ones all the time and so i just really appreciate you guys and a lot of the audience um we've learned a ton from from both of you guys so thank you for for all you doing and giving us so much your time and then giving us your time tonight too yep you're welcome it's been fun awesome well um the pieces that that that i have in mind tonight are a critical notice of jp moreland's consciousness and the existence of god by dr gran moppy and that's in the european journal for philosophy of religion also his consciousness theism and naturalism in debating christian theism and then two pieces by dr humer disembodied souls are people too i believe that's still forthcoming is that right dr hamer yeah would you know the name of the book offhand uh i don't know uh it had something to do with extreme philosophy but they might change the name okay all right and then uh existence is evidence of immortality and uh i'm just so excited so let's let's go we're gonna go in um the the the title is um do souls exist and so we're gonna say look if if the mind is immaterial that's what we mean by soul so we're gonna go over some arguments for the immateriality of the soul or reason to think that substance dualism is true we'll use all these interchangeably um so dr humer maybe i'll start with you um well actually let me let me go over naturalism really quick um dr oppa you give this definition of naturalism you say quote i take it that the core of naturalism is the claim that natural reality exhausts causal reality there is no supernatural causation that's it um and so i just wanted to ask dr humer under that definition would you consider yourself a naturalist i i don't know i don't actually know what natural means like i wouldn't say that the mind is supernatural i think that i guess supernatural means above nature and i don't really understand the sense of above there so it's not that i think that we're above physical objects or whatever um although i think the mind isn't physical okay i i assume graham is going to say that i'm not a naturalist though um well perhaps i'm undecided about that because as you're kind of alluding to the word natural is kind of got a lot of stretch in it right i mean we'd have to say a lot more which we probably don't want to go into now to nail down um a meaning for naturalism and if we did that we would be using the word in a way that lots of other people don't so yeah okay that's good i i had that as crossed off my thing just in case we got into quagmire but you guys avoided it perfectly so that's great um well dr humer i want to start with um with qualia first uh you give qualia as an argument or maybe some arguments from qualia for thinking that that the mind is immaterial can you uh can you help us out why why does qualia what is qualia first and then why i think that it leads to substance dualism uh yeah so you know qualia well frequently said to be uh what it's like to have a mental state it's supposed to be a property that a mental state has and that property is uh you know what it's like so you know this comes from thomas nagel's article what does it like to be a bat where he says the fact that an organism is conscious means that there is something it is like to be that organism so you know like you think intuitively there's nothing that it's like to be a rock but there's something that it's like to be a bat for example because bats are conscious beings and actually it's some it's an interesting question and something unknown to us what it's like to be a bat because you know they navigate by echolocation so they have information that's like the information we have when we look at things but they're getting it by their ears so what is that like so anyway okay so there's like you know there's some character characteristic of the experience that's sort of like the you know an inherently first person whatever first person nature and um and that's you know and it's it's this thing that you know intuitively you think you would only be able to understand it if you have had similar experiences so like we don't know what it's like to be a bad because we've never had that experience um and then okay yeah so um and what does this have to do with you know physicalism um it's hard to explain what qualia are you know in physical terms like this doesn't sound like a physical property at least it's not it's not what i would think the word physical referring to right like sort of like feeling a certain way uh and nagel's article is you know very interesting and of course very famously justly famous um because you know like one of the things he talks about is um he compares other cases in which there's a reductionist account of something so like there's a reductionist account of heat and he says you know when you explain the nature of heat you don't have to explain the feel of it like right and you know that's good because when they say oh there are these molecules that are moving around fast and like that's what heat is um you're like wow that doesn't seem like that's what it is but like it's okay because you don't have you don't have to explain the feel of it because the feel of it isn't part of the phenomenon the feel of it is the effect that the real external phenomenon produces in your mind right so that's why the theoretical reduction doesn't have to explain that but if you're trying to explain qualia no the feel of it is the phenomenon so you can't say oh we don't have to explain that part because that's just an effect that the phenomenon produces on human minds right okay so and then you know nagel says and you know justly like we just don't we don't like have a conception of how you could give a reductionist account of qualia yeah that's good well uh dr robbie do you i thought i read somewhere that you don't believe in qualia okay so let's add a little bit more to the story so i want to talk about a particular thought experiment the one that frank jackson is really famous for um the the neuroscientist in the black and white room so the way that this i mean this this story for many people kind of brings out the difficulties in giving any kind of i mean say physicalist account of qualia though whether i'm a physicalist is kind of open to debate that's something that we'll come to in a bit um so so jackson asks us to imagine uh very well equipped i'll say neuroscientists but where to imagine that they're enclosed in a room where everything's in black and white there's no colors and we you can kind of imagine a way difficulties like what if she takes a scalpel to herself or something like that um we're supposed to just pretend that that doesn't happen right yeah so all of her ex all of her visual experiences in black and white and but we suppose that she's very well equipped and she actually is so well equipped as a scientist a physicist that she knows everything there is to know about the physical state of the universe everywhere at all times um so she's got exhaustive physical knowledge we don't maybe we don't have to make it quite that extensive but we may as well for the purposes of the thought experiment so um so there's mary in the black and white room she knows all this physical stuff so she knows everything about the physics of her brain she knows everything about the physics of perception she knows everything that you might think there is to know about color vision nonetheless when she leaves the room and she looks at a ripe tomato for the very first time something happens to her that gives her new knowledge because despite all the knowledge that she had she didn't know what it was like to look at a red thing until she left the room and so the thought is that this shows that whatever we're going to think about the knowing what it's like for something to look red it's clearly not going to be a physical property because we assume from the beginning that she knew everything there was to know about the physical properties okay so i think that's a fair presentation of the thought experiment so what do i think about this case um so my preferred view about the mine is very similar to jack smarts so i'm a kind of old-fashioned identity theorist roughly so i think that um for example perceptual states uh largely i mean i'll ignore details about the kind of relay sort of relations to environmental history environment social relations and so on and just focus on the kind of brain throughout perceptual states are largely states of the brain now what what the kind of interesting question here is if we're thinking about states as physical states of the brain are there states that you can only know about fully if you're in them right so can you only know the kind of experiential dimension as you might put it of um having the looking at a red thing by being in the state of looking at a red thing or not right so here's a question right is there some way that you could know about it from a physicalist point of view about what it's like to look at a red thing except by being in the state of looking at a red thing right so there's two ways you could go here right thinking about mary one thing is that you might think look while she's in the room so long as she's equipped with um enough surgical skill and knowledge and so on she might be able to put herself into a state she won't actually be looking at a red thing but she'd be able to give herself as it were hallucinations of red things and she'll be able to know what it's like because she's been able to put herself into that state if she can't do that then there's a kind of limitation on her because she can't occupy a certain state that means that she will learn something when she leaves the room either way it seems that this is perfectly consistent with the idea that the perceiving a red thing is purely physical state and that knowing what it's like for something to be read is also a purely physical state so that's going to be the kind of way that i want to respond to the jackson thought experiment yeah uh dr humor do you do you think that uh is there a significant difference between nagel's uh what it's like for bat is is that the same are they both uh relevantly similar knowledge arguments well uh i mean they're both appealing to qualia um i mean you know nego makes this point which um i guess isn't not in jackson's article that i remember about so you know like comparing other theoretical reductions and you know saying there's a disanalogy um can i say something about that so i mean the heat case might look favorable but compare um lightning and electrical discharge right i mean the kind of qualia question just doesn't arise for that kind of reduction i mean well there you know there's like there's the look of the lightning which yeah but but but we're not interested in that yeah well right but that i mean that's why the theoretical reduction is okay right so like you don't explain the look of lightning because we don't care but in the case of qualia you can't say oh we don't care right but but as i say it the kind of issue here is whether we think that there are certain states physical states you can only know what they're like by being in them yeah and that's perfectly con that's perfect it seems to me that that's a perfectly consistent position for a physical quite smart assuming that smart was a physical assignment he was certainly an identity theory for him to take i mean i'm not sure that that's an issue sorry i'm not sure that that's the issue uh whether they're states that you can only know by being in them so like i mean not sure that that's what the dualist is saying right so i mean um it might be it might be true that you can only know what it's like to see red by seeing red or hallucinating red it might be true but i don't think that's the essential point so you know like think about um hume's missing shade of blue right we're like you know you've seen some other shades of colors there's a particular shade of color you haven't seen but you can imagine it because you've seen other other colors in the spectrum so you know like maybe that's possible right but i mean i i took it at the point was that it's possible to not know what one of these mental states is like even though you know all the physical properties of it and then that's right it's like isn't one of the physical properties so so it's so i'm not sure sure how that doesn't fit with what i suggested right it's possible for you not to know um what it's like to be in certain kinds of physical states if you've never been in them so it's possible for you to know to not know what it's like to be read even though you know everything else about the physical properties this is just for the physical properties and there's a constraint on it right we because i mean we just said at the beginning that mary knows all the physical facts but there's this question about whether she really does or not right you can't just stimulate it right so so if this way of thinking if it turned out to be true that there are some physical facts that you can only know by being in certain kinds of physical states then there's no mystery about the fact that she doesn't know them because we've prevented her from being in those states we oh yeah so you'd have to say so you'd have to say that mary can't know all the physical facts in the locked room right because there's some that i think i think tim crane goes for that route too yeah but then that's not the thought experiment right well i mean this makes me feel like i've lost my grip on what physical facts means okay so i took it that if you're claiming that you know this is a physical fact you mean you know it's like one of these things about the um locations of the particles and their arrangement and their mass in charge okay so so now that's good because now we come down to this question about whether i'm a physicalist or not because um so so i'm certainly not um thinking that there's a reduction of all properties to microphysical properties and some people who are physicalists want to go that way so um i describe myself as a naturalist and maybe once i tell you what my view is you'll think well you're just not a physicalist at all well doctor can you use the the type token distinction too like are you are you a type uh um are you yeah so so that's a fair question um i think neither in the kind of way that lewis opts for neither in man painting marsha's martian paint so you have a kind of restricted type identity so there's a kind of you know what it's like to see red for humans or something like that it's but it's not what it's like to say red full stop um but okay maybe i'll go back to the so i think of the the the universe as um being i don't know we can think about the universe as having content and a whole lot of different scales you can think of them as length dimensions so we can think about if you if you could only see the universe at a very small level right you could you could kind of perceive it somehow well it's not you so you're very small you're on the kind of scale of the things that you're looking at and we're down at the level of the quarks and you think about the kind of um i'll say properties i'm tempted to talk about predicates but and and let's just say properties right so the properties of that you need in order to describe what you can see down there is a kind of very narrow range of properties that are all couched in the language of kind of um microphysics bump up a few levels in the scale to say the level of molecules um or maybe a bit bigger proteins or something like that and now when we start talking about the properties of things at this level there will be some new predicates that we need um we won't be able to just use the i mean these molecules have properties that quarks and electrons simply don't have and and so this is the kind of important part i don't think that there's any way of defining the properties at the higher scale in terms of the properties at the lower scale even in principle right so that there's an autonomy of the i'll say suppose we're now at the level of the chemical maybe that's not right the scale of the chemical i'm trying to not use the word level i'm trying to stick with the word scale right at the scale of the chemical um and this sort of is true at other scales as well so when you get to the scale at which we exist uh there's a whole lot of properties that are properly attributed to us that molecules don't have and um that quarks don't have and when you move up to the very very biggest scales we go back to i mean it's not the same properties at the micro scale but it's just some physical properties the only properties that are kind of attributable to the universe that really large scales turn out again it's just that they're properties that belong to cosmology rather than to the physics of the very small are those are those like emergent properties then i don't like the word emergent right because that kind of suggests that there's a privileging for things at the lower level whereas i'm stepping away from this kind of privileging idea altogether right so so i don't i don't think of this as emergence i just think of it as a kind of um scale independence so when it comes to the mind do you go in for something like like davidson's anomalous monism then no i'm an identity theorist right but that's a that's not a cross-scale identification right you've got two things on the same scale right and so when people talk about reduction they often talk about levels and they think that the most fundamental things are going to sit at the bottom level right so there are there are some people who've kind of pushed back against that kind of way of thinking um so for example i know john hiles written quite a bit where he's sort of attacking the idea that there are levels of reality and my thinking seems to converge with john's in various ways and this is one of them okay yeah dr humor uh what do you make of that uh i mean it was you know it was it was sounding like the theory of emergence until he said that he didn't like the word emergence right that's right but i wonder i wonder if uh it's actually substantively is the theory of emergence but you just don't like the term so so so it might be it depends it depends um what i mean i i'm not that familiar with what people have written about emergencies so i would want to go and look to see whether it fits so here's one thing that i think um is true and maybe emergencies all accept this as well but think about the space that that i occupied me the kind of the organism and think about what happens if you look at different scales just within the volume of space that i occupy if you go down to the microphysical level all you will find there are quarks and electrons right there are no and those things don't have proto-consciousness or you know proto-mental properties or anything like that and as you move up through the scales you'll find all you'll find is things that have chemical properties of biological problems whatever as you go up and down the scales so i don't know maybe emergencies think that too i don't know yeah well do you get to qualia i think that's dr humerus uh that's that's one of the points like do you believe in qualia at some point does it i i can't i don't know what i'll say besides emerge but does it come forth so so that depends on whether we stick with the what it's like so suppose think about um the ability to tell what something what color something is just by looking at it right um that's presumably when she's in the the black and white room mary just doesn't have that ability because you can't have that ability unless you've seen some red things and some yellow things and some orange things leaving aside though hallucination rude or messing with your brain or whatever so i don't think of their their equality or if those are kind of distinctively mental things or substances or something like that but i'm prepared to go along with the idea that that there are certain skills that we have that depend upon our having been in certain kinds of states so that we know what it's like to be in those states maybe that's enough to commit me to qualia i don't know yeah i'm really curious doctor what do you what do you make of that well uh i mean so i i don't think that we merely have skills right so i you know when no when mary learns what it's like to see red um so it's true that she maybe she requires a new skill for like identifying tomatoes and stuff um that's that's true but also it's something else which is that she knows a fact which is that seeing red is like this right so right like you can imagine different ways the world could have been like there are different ways that seeing red could have been like or you know it could have been different qualitative characters of that experience and when she sees the tomato for the first time now like her evidence rules out a bunch of alternatives right so i'm not sure whether that's different i mean it sounded different but maybe it's the same as what i said that she knows what it's like to see red and that's a kind of knowledge that you can only have by being in the state of looking at something that's red you know set up in the right kind of way but so she used that ability i think if i'm tracking dr hamer she used that ability to see red that she gained to then come to that that phenomenal fact of red and now like she has that right she now she can remember what it's like to see red and such right like does that does that seem right so it's not just the ability stability was used to acquire a phenomenal fact yeah i mean well well you might think it was the other way around right she had to know what it was like in order to have the ability right requires the knowledge you have to know what it's like yeah i mean so you know my interpretation of the case is okay she looks at the tomato and then she has a sensation which we call a sensation of red and she's you know directly aware of it because you know she's a self-conscious being and she's aware of it having this uh particular quality of character you know she simultaneously forms the concept of that because like she wouldn't even have a concept without having experienced it but also now she knows that that qualitative character is experienced by people who are looking at red things and not some other qualitative character so she's ruled out a set of possible worlds and you know world in the set of possible worlds so that's a proposition right and also like you know there's a property that the experience has which you know which you know they had it had before and so yeah so and and it looks like that property doesn't look like it's a physical property if you say it is a physical property i need to hear more about how that's a physical property right so i tried to tell the story about why i think it's a physical property before um so uh but maybe i mean sorry we had this disagreement about whether it's physical right it's it's a it's and and sorry about whether i'm a physicalist right because on that kind of emergency view if that's what my position is it's not clear that i'm saying it's a physical property right um but it's it seems to me that it's a that if we're going to think about what it's a what sort of property is it it's going to be something like a neural property um yeah so i i want to move on to intentionality but before i do i wanted to ask uh each of you a question about dogs which i think could clear some stuff up or maybe not in dr kimmer's case but doctor opie so if you were if you were a type type uh brain identity mind brain identity theorist if you went in for the the type uh identity theorist thesis then a dog and you would not have the same red uh qualia experience right because it wouldn't that the type would be a physical thing in your brain and i think this is what the uh this is what the multi multiple realizability argument against uh identity theory of the type variety goes goes with if you were if you're a token theorist it seems like that's functionalism to me and not identity theory right like there's a type that can be multiply realized in the dog or in you and as long as they're playing the same functional role so when it comes to you and and maybe my dog do you guys both see red okay so one one of the things that you said was is really quite historically interesting which is the question about whether identity theory and functionalism are compatible consistent or not so there was a kind of division of opinion in the 60s between kind of north american theorists like putnam who thought that they were inconsistent and antipedian theorists like armstrong who thought that they were perfectly consistent and interestingly lewis sided with armstrong on this question again makes sense that australian connection right but but he did it i think by slightly changing the way that he was thinking about it because he wasn't thinking that there's there's a single type here that everything um has he was thinking that maybe types would be restricted by kinds of entities so maybe maybe um dog color vision really is a slightly different type of thing from galatians but he was assuming that amongst humans there was a there was a common time okay saying red for example so maybe it could go along with like natural kinds or something like that okay yeah there's a lot of ways to cash it out um dr humer if and i maybe i shouldn't pick dogs because i think dog they say dogs are colorblind but let's just stipulate the dogs aren't colored blind right now so i don't look too stupid but um dr humer you um to have a qualia experience you use qualia in order to argue for substance doula's dualism does that mean if you and my puppy can both see red that my puppy also has a soul yes okay yeah i mean um you know and anything with mental states has a mind okay you know and like the arguments that your mind isn't physical would yeah i'll obviously also apply to the mind of anything that has a mind so i mean okay i like some of the minds are physical and some of them aren't that's right that's what because i think descartes was like no they're just automata right like yeah yeah i mean yeah so he's denying that it has the experience at all so okay okay then it would be really physical but gotcha but if you think they do have that experience okay um well anything to tie up before we jump on to intentionality we could spend the rest of the time on qualia here but i want to cover some more yeah yeah i mean we can move on yeah and we can come back to maybe a cumulative uh throw them all together and see what sticks um so we got intentionality uh dr kimmer you you say that intentionality is another uh peculiar uh property of mental states um that is is it evidence for this is something i wanted to ask you about is it is it evidence for substance dualism or does it logically entail substance dualism or does it uh point to you know what what do you what's the strength of the evidence i mean um like the uh the structure of the reasoning was that these things are evidence for dualism uh so like um you know intentionality and qualia um but they don't distinguish between substance and property dualism so like this is just evidence that there's a different kind of property because qualia are apparently a non-physical property and intentionality also and then how you get from dualism in general to substantialism is you have to look at the problem of personal identity yeah um but i take it that once you become some kind of dualist it's not it's not that much further to go to say you know just substances and not only properties uh anyway um yeah in what way does it support um what way does intentionality support dualism um i guess so like my feeling is uh i guess i think that it's metaphysically impossible for intentionality to be physical uh i guess i shouldn't say that i'm 100 certain of that though so i guess i would say it inconclusively support i guess i would say it's evidence okay like in the way that intuitions are evidence i guess [Music] okay you just brought up intuitions and that's another thing we could spend the rest of the time debating definitions but yeah um well okay so so we have we have an intentionality does everybody is everybody in the audience know what intentionality isn't it yeah hit us yeah but they probably do if they listen to my stuff i do a lot of philosophy of mind type stuff but if you if you wanted to real briefly um a lot of them are master students so yeah it's the property of being about something so like when you have a thought your thought is about something and that's a weird property like yeah so it like doesn't sound like that's a physical property like physical properties sound like you know things like that mass or the shape or size or whatever and like property of referring to something doesn't sound physical yeah yeah um well um let me let me just follow up really quick and ask about like the i think we probably talked about this before but what about like the the rings in a tree uh if you go in for like uh a type of information theory and you say it looks like those rings in the tree are about the age of the tree and yet they're they're physical yeah yeah that totally doesn't seem to me like they're about anything it just rings okay i mean the best i can figure is that people are sort of like projecting like when you see the rings you take the rings as evidence for something yeah like you have a mental state that represents the tree as a certain age because okay i think i think cyril calls it derivative yeah it's like derivative intentionality but not intrinsic um yeah well dr oppy what do you make of all this so i think that most people think that intentionality is less of a problem for physicalists than sort of consciousness and qualia and part of the reason for that i think is that there are still lots of people who kind of side with the australians and think that you can be an identity theorist and functionalist and they think that kind of from functionalism you get a reasonable account of sort of intentional attitudes like belief and desire and so on aboutness really isn't as challenging as consciousness that would be the one comment that i'm inclined to make here maybe that's part of the reason why mike's less inclined to think that it's kind of conclusive consideration if if you go in for identity theory then the mental state would you say the mental state is the the brain state yeah that's so then so then that brain state then you do have something that's physical that's about something is that you would say physical things can be about things yeah okay well i mean a physical state can have representational content if it happens to be a state of um an organism like us right there's no there's i mean there's lots of different projects um in philosophy of mind that have tried to spell out um physicalist or naturalistic ways of getting content you know teleological theories of content oh there's all kinds of stuff there i don't think we want to go down there yeah yeah yeah i mean so you know graham is of course correct that like you know in philosophy of mind people people are more happy with um reductionist accounts of intentionality than they are with reductionist accounts of qualia and i guess um i have somewhat of the same feeling like i don't i don't feel happy about either of them but the like reductionist accounts of qualia seem like more counterintuitive like just seems like more obvious that that's not what quality is you know you can say things that sound sort of vaguely plausible about what intentionality might be though i don't ultimately buy them yeah it's a relation between two yeah rilada or something like that um well let's let's jump onto a free will because that might be a little bit more spicy um and again dr hamer you and i have talked about this on our episode but um you talk about uh i think you might mention even libertarian free will and um that that is uh another another feature of the mind which uh points to it being uh um immaterial but uh i know dr oppy is not gonna buy that one um so actually uh dr humber let me let me just pass it to you so can you just fill us in about free will here yeah yeah yeah actually so you know i found out that opie is a compatible list so we might have to argue about that yeah so i know it looks like we have free will and it looks like that's not compatible with determinism and you know you start thinking like how can you explain you know what this free will thing is and then you're assuming that you don't want to just reject it okay i guess we'll just assume that so um you're like okay and you know why why do i think it's not compatible with determinism um you know like i have examples like this so okay so you know let's say a student comes to me near the end of the semester and says hey mr humor because you know students call you mister anyway because that's what they call their high schools yeah teachers okay all right so hey mr humor how do i get an a in this class and let's say i say something like well in order to get an a you would have to have at least gotten an 87 average on the first four tests and actually your average was 75. now what can the student infer from this it looks like he can infer that he can't get an a right and by the way don't say that he could get an a by convincing me to change the grading scale or something like that okay because just assume that what i said is true that he would have to you know it's a necessary condition you would have to have gotten 87 and he didn't so then you can't get anything okay and what this illustrates is that if in order for you to do a something would have to have happened in the past that did not happen then you can't do a okay now if determinism is true then in order for you to do anything different from what you actually do stuff would have to have happened in the past you know going all the way back to the big bang stuff would have to have been happening that didn't happen is not what happened right yeah you know like the big we would have to have been in a different state at the time of big bang and that and that's not the case so so you can't do anything different from you what you actually do so it sounds like you don't have free will yeah dr robbie what do you what do you make of that okay so i don't i suspect that the world is not deterministic in the big scale right so it's not the case that um the laws plus initial conditions assuming that this initial conditions right so assuming there's an initial state determine everything that comes after in particular i suspect although this is admittedly it's controversial but i think that the there's quite a lot of indeterminacy at the kind of quantum level so there's lots of chancy events and the at say right down there at the scale of you know the quarks and electrons there's quite a lot of chance down there and some of the chants can kind of percolate up they're away in fact um if you if you want assuming that there is quantum in determinism and assuming that geiger count is so sensitive to it you can taking as your kind of model the dice man you can be the quantum dice man or woman or whatever you can be and use your quantum dice to make your behavior both non-determined and unpredictable whenever you like just by kind of sampling the indeterminacy that's there nonetheless i think that at the level of um organisms like us there are lots of cases where like over a period of deliberation um were you two kind of if you had the ability to wind back um a little bit the clock and run it again you just get the same result over and over there's a kind of as it would local determinism which is um vulnerable to various kinds of things so when i assume that you run it again i'm assuming that for example there isn't some sort of chance thing that plays differently and sends an intervenor that's you know so that you end up getting struck by lightning before you finish the course of deliberation or whatever but but there's it's kind of robust enough that it will support counterfactuals so you know were we to run it again like in all in all nearby worlds you'd get the same outcome that gives you something that's not determinism it certainly gives you something that's not vulnerable to anything like fanning wagons consequence argument but it still gives you something that people who think about libertarian freedom probably aren't going to like because you know set the circumstances exactly the same and across a very wide range of nearby worlds you're just going to get the same result everywhere there's a sense in which you actually can't do otherwise it's not that there aren't really remote worlds but there's right so so i'm inclined to be to think that we don't in in any very strong sense have libertarian freedom um it's not um what what you need is a kind of compatible misconception of freedom what it is to act freely is just to act on your normally acquired beliefs and desires in the absence of the feeders of various kinds that's the kind of freedom we have it's all of kind it's all the freedom that we need well okay sorry that's a little bit complicated but that's the thing i think i think we might be able to to get down to um the the crux of the matter if we because i i had this conversation with dr humer and i said you know i'm a compatibilist um but i believe in divine determinism and i still think i can have rational deliberation and interactionism because i'm a substance tourist um i wonder if to me it seems like dr robbie like on uh on a physicalism is a problem not necessarily the determinism because your beliefs that you're acting on even in your compatibilistic freedom aren't those beliefs produced by like non-rational forces like the laws of physics like the the neurochemistry they don't seem like they're it's like irrational laws right so i mean you go back to the what i said previously about scales it comes back here importantly it's not that there's a determination of what happens at what what you see at higher scales by what there is at lower scale so the the relationship isn't a unidirectional thing so um when you're kind of down there at the level of the quarks and the electrons you may see a whole bunch of quarks and electrons moving in a certain kind of way the reason why they're moving that way is because i'm waving my arm around right it's not uh so it's not that i'm thinking that they but why are you i guess direction of explanation of here the direction of explanation here goes in one direction does it right so so so you're right to point to the idea that there there are two different kind of determination worries one of which is sort of past future one of which is micro to macro and what i've tried to give is reasons for rejecting both of those worries so there's like an interaction there's an interactionism on your identity theory such that like you're i guess i just wonder you're waving your hand around and that's making the quarks do stuff but what made you uh raise your hand wave your hand around well state of my brain but remember that you're not the this isn't determined by what happened at the big bang because there's lots of indeterminacy some of which um yeah in the way that guy counters can cause the indeterminacy to percolate up there are other ways that indeterminacy that's why i thought you were going with like an anomalous monism like like once you get to this emergent level there are no laws determining the beliefs um um so so i don't think that's right um so at any point in time there'll be there'll be kind of laws of this kind so long as there's no interventions from outside this closed system will evolve in this way okay yeah yeah no i mean it sounded like you're proposing downward causation right and you know and i'm uh i'm happy with downward causation but almost no physicalists are so so except i mean downward causation uh i mean i mean maybe this is kind of like emergenism i guess i guess maybe that's the right libel uh yeah okay follow-up yeah yeah i mean like you know if we if we found out that this was definitely true um duelists would declare victory so well i don't see why not substance jewelers because there's no i mean there's there's no there's no mental substances anywhere in this story what's happening at what's happening at the on on the human scale is just stuff that's happening in your brain yeah no i mean they yeah you know property to ls would declare victory yeah it doesn't it sounds like there's this higher level the highest scale sorry not level but the high scale seems like it it could just be yeah property dualism or like hasker's uh emergent dualism of some kind so so again i'm not sure that i'm seeing that but then maybe that's because um the the thing that i thought was important was kind of about natural rather than about the physical and the people i'm not not you but lots of people who are um jewelers want there to be kind of supernatural substances yeah that's why i wanted dr uh humeron because he doesn't have a bone to pick in this fight yeah yeah yeah so you know like again i'm not totally sure what natural is but like yeah like i you know i don't i don't think god created us or whatever or like i don't know i mean maybe there is a god maybe he did create us but that's not what i'm saying um right you know and like you know the the non-physical things are caused you know and they have physical causes and they'll be caused according to laws and they won't be caused into magic you know so so i don't think they're non-physical i mean they have the brain has i mean to go back to the thought before about if you probe it at um lower scales in the space that you occupy you don't find anything except physical stuff that's conforming to physical laws right so there's a certain sense in which i am physical right that's the sense in which i'm physical oh well i mean the stuff that the stuff that your body's made of is physical and we could we can agree on that and we could disagree about whether there's some other substance right but yeah that's right we could disagree about whether there's some other substance and i'd like that the properties that you have are not all physical properties that's what i was going to bring up like like pain especially if it's not if you're not going in for the type theory right well or restrict the type theory though so it'll turn out to be let's do it okay yeah but the but the so so i i mean i think i agree that they kind of important question is about the way in which say biological properties or psychological properties or whatever related to the physical properties is there some definitional connection there is there some definitional connection in principle well i just say no and if that if that's all that you want to say then maybe we don't disagree about anything substantively yeah i mean you know we definitely disagree about the mental substance i mean yeah so now we definitely disagree about that um well dr humor do do mental states have spatial location oh uh i think not okay because i know that's one that that yeah dr opp would be committed to that right yeah i you know like why why am i saying that well it's just sort of intuitive like okay i say you know i have a thought and you're like where's the thought like well like a question of where the thought is sounds to me kind of like a category mistake like where's the number four so so that might be because you're mixing up the kind of a current versus dispositional um vocabulary here so where's where's my perceiving happening well i think i know where that's happening i think that's happening in my brain well i know where the brain process is happening and i don't know where the experience is right but then i don't think there's anything in this yeah that's you know on my view that's all there is going on right so yeah well maybe i can push uh dr humer if you don't know where the experience is happening but um i'm having this experience in my office right and i'm not i'm not having experience on mars yeah and it's presumably because you know like i'm located here yeah and if i am yeah what do you make of that yeah i mean you're saying your eye is ambiguous your body is located in in there and so you know i think it might just be like a confusion where you say like because we have the word the word that refers to your body and your mind then sort of like you get confused into thinking that the mental states are located either yeah all right um uh you know you can ask other questions about the mental states like you know what shape is it and what size is it how big is my belief that paris is in france and what shape is that like so those are kind of odd questions to ask about states though like neural states you're going to and processes questions like how big are they feel like they're kind of category errors anyway so yeah i'm not sure if they have sizing shapes i mean like well i mean if the thing is like you know it's a pattern of activation of neurons that might have a size and shape right because you could draw them yeah you could look in textbooks right well at a point in time but the if you think about what it looks like over time and you think about how many different things are going on in your in i'll talk about it the way you want in your mental life at any one time it may be very hard to pick out any bit of it and say this bit is just uniquely the the seeing of the red rather than the seeing of the shape of the thing or the seeing that it's got a boundary there and there's this other thing behind it or you know whatever it might be hard but in principle like that's the uh you know the the problem of vagueness or something right like is there a maybe epistemologically it's hard for us to pick that out but do you think in principle there is a story uh there's a matter of fact that this string would be from from here this neuron to this neuron would be uh the thought or the experience even if we can't know it so i doubt it i doubt that the first story gone that the neurophysiological story is going to have that kind of simplicity okay okay i wonder um it kind of brings up like this wasn't part of uh dr humer's arguments but with the unity of phenomenal consciousness where it seems like our consciousness is unified and it seems like maybe you're even making that point uh just there dr oppy that doesn't seem like we can just chunk off different parts of the brain and say there's one thing is that are you familiar with that argument and is it uh yeah it doesn't sound like it's going to be a problem though okay uh as long as the brain is inferred well because because we're familiar with doing maybe you want to call it abstraction or something focusing on some aspects of physical processes and just ignoring others that's a kind of familiar thing that we do so i'm not sure that it's any more problematic when we're thinking about our mental lives than it is with any other sort of you know fluid flows or other complicated things that we might look at okay well um i thought i thought we could move i'm not sure we made a ton of progress in moving either one of you at all but um that wasn't the goal we're just to talk about it but i wanted to broach uh dr humer's like arguments for the uh infinite past and um and this does come into play with uh your substance dualism and why you think uh we exist now because we uh have been reincarnated like the whole thing i'm gonna i'm gonna butcher it but dr humer can you can you lay that out first oh yeah uh well yeah so i think i think we talked about the reincarnation argument on a previous episode of yeah yeah so you know what's going on to too much because the audience will be familiar and if they're not there's a whole episode on it yeah so you know like here's the short version right so you know suppose that people could only live once then and suppose also as i'm assuming that the time is infinite both in the past and in the future okay so then on those assumptions what's the probability that you would be alive now specifically um it looks to me like it's zero okay so you know out of all the infinite past because you know like you should have been born at some previous time and if you can only live once and that would have prevented you from being here now um you know unless you are being born as a probability zero event in which case you also shouldn't be here now right and so okay but you are here now so you know the theory that assigns zero probability to them um is just confirmed right maximally disconfirmed so it's not true that you can only live once or i'm wrong about the past being infinite yeah yeah well it's like so can i ask you just a question about i mean i want to focus on the past bit but i want to ask you a question about this whatever happens now will be probability zero so isn't your argument going to entail that we i mean it's not it's not just a problem about your existence it's about anything that happens that's happening right now uh i i don't think that everything has probabilities there i know that it should be happening right now given the infinite it's not just your existence but your office um uh well i mean so my office like you know this might also recur right many times right yeah so so it can it can and so there will be some and so it exists for a certain period of time and then and it recurs over and over again throughout the infinite history of the universe so you know at any given time there's a non-zero probability right it's a it's a non-zero proportion of the time that the office exists well doctor no but if there was a problem about you sort of existing just once there'll be the same problem about everything else but everything and everything else doesn't have souls right that was that was your your point about needing a soul but your office you know the argument might be oh look you know humorous argument for reincarnation also implies that like uh tables can be reincarnated like this office could be reincarnated okay and then you know like is that bad i don't know so i believe that um in one sense that's true like there will happen over and over again they will happen an office that's qualitatively like this and now whether or not that counts as the same office well then uh you know like you could have a debate about that but i think that might just be a semantic question um and so like if you don't if you don't think that the office can recur that might be because you're just sort of like stipulatively defining it to not be the same office no matter how similar it is right but i think you can't just stipulatively define you know a future person to not be me right like it's not a verbal question whether a future person is me or not so so i'm not clear about that why what's the difference that matters here is it that you think that you kind of remember past lives whereas the office doesn't yeah i don't remember any bad signs and uh i know some people claim to remember past lives but you know they're they're probably wrong or they might be hoaxes um but anyway um no i didn't like i want you to have the intuition that you know for any person that exists at any time like there's an objective fact about whether it's you or not there's got to be a fact about whether you exist at a time or not you know it's not just like a matter of decision like maybe this this helps to um you sort of like pump your intuitions right so like suppose you think it's just a verbal question whether something counts as me so then uh spell you know like i want to live longer so i'm gonna just try to get people to talk as if some person who's going to be born in the future is me like if i get them to talk in a certain way that's going to make that person be me and then i'm going to live longer so like now i've got a super strong reason for trying to change the way people talk and now and you're supposed to think no that's not probably not correct so so that doesn't sound good but i don't see why what's wrong with the view as far as this goes um of just thinking that those future things or those past things weren't me it's just a fact of the matter and the fact of the matter is that they're not uh yeah yeah well i mean i mean the point i was getting at there was just that there's a there's a fact it's not just a purely verbal question which is different from you know ordinary like inanimate objects where at least you know some have the intuition that there isn't a fact about uh whether you have the same you know okay so i so i certainly don't have that intuition i mean it struck me the office and you were in the same boat yeah i mean so but uh like do you think do you think that it's obviously false that the office will occur again so well maybe maybe we should go back and talk about whether the past is infinite or not at this point um i know i doubt that anything is obvious it's kind of true in general in philosophy but so on your view the most probable view to have about the kind of shape of causal reality is that it's infinite in both directions it's infinite in the past and it's infinite in the future i think kind of going by at least by the physics the most plausible view is it's finite in the past and infinite in the future and then and this might be kind of curious but i think the next most plausible view is that it's finite in both directions and they're kind of the only view that's less plausible than yours is the one that has an infinite in the past and finite in the future which i think is very hard to kind of right nobody thinks that get head around yeah no i don't think there are many people who think that yeah so why do i think this well uh and and also and so so that's one kind of question and then there's this other question about recurrence and i think that physics right the serious physics about the future tells seriously against that as well um so i mean i guess part of it is just it's kind of standard the kind of most widely accepted view of marx physicists seem to be finite past and infinite future i mean there are some who think that there's a multiverse um maybe we can put that to one side and just focus on the kind of one universe view if we go with the one universe view then some people have thought maybe they could be cycling expansion and contraction but we seem to be pretty confident that there's not going to be another contraction so the kind of cycle of expansion and contraction is not looking good and there's this other problem about entropy the entropy doesn't decrease when you have a contraction it goes on increasing so it feels like every every universe is going to start with maximum entropy and ours doesn't so there's a bunch of reasons why um the kind of finite past infinite future looks better i think uh yeah um and so i you know there are a bunch of things to comment on there uh i don't know like okay so you know does entropy always increase over time well uh you know in our experience yes but you know every once in a while entropy is going to decrease not not systematically but you know just by chance right and um yeah if you get like you know if you're in a um if you're in a limited region of phase space like you're guaranteed to repeat your initial conditions right like just you know just by chance and um i'd say you know it's going to take a really long time um but actually you know like the number of transitions from high to low entropy is equal to the number of transitions from low to high entropy if you have infinite time right so so that's assuming that you kind of have um finite cycling but this is the other point i wanted to make is that on the kind of views of the future of the universe that um so you know there's a nice book by adamson lachlan about the likely future of the universe and it goes kind of a very big picture it kind of goes like this in about 10 to the 40 years protons will decay after that the only things that will form will be black holes about 10 to 150 years from now the last black hole will decay by hawking radiation thereafter the universe goes on expanding all it contains is the odd blip of radiation and it goes on expanding forever and there's no protons don't come back never mind stars and people yeah right and that's the kind of serious future as said i mean the kind of view that when you push physicists that's the one that they go for so the kind of you know the repetition thing just doesn't look good from that standard yeah no uh yeah i mean i think i think there's just a bunch of things that we don't understand um so you know you know going back to the finite past okay because you know like i think the past is infinite well okay so but you know there are these people who think the past is finite like it began 14 billion years ago at the time of the big bang and then you know i just find this on unsatisfactory theory and so okay so you know on this theory what happened uh the universe so 14 billion years ago there was the universe there was like a huge amount of matter and energy in a tiny region with um you know ridiculously low entropy right which you know okay and it was moving outward and that was just the first thing that happened for no reason and that and that's the theory and there can't be any explanation for why that thing happened because they're saying it's the beginning of time so nothing could cause it okay i think that's an unsatisfactory theory and you know like so here's here's part of my illustration of how that's unsatisfactory i'm going to give you a better theory okay the better theory is the universe started in the year 1950 it popped into existence in 1950 in the state that it was in in 1950 just already like that you know complete with everybody having false memories you know in the past that never happened and everything okay and then just goes forward from there and that explains all of the observations that we've made since 1950 assuming you were born after 1950 explains all of your observations just as well you know just as much as the big bang theory and uh you know you're like oh but this is super improbable that it would pop into existence in that state yeah but like that's just like the big bang posit that just popped into existence in fact in the big bang theory it popped into existence in an even less probable state right because like you know we have higher entropy in 1950 than we did in 14 billion bc and higher entropy means like well that's a more probable state yeah so actually you know if you're gonna pick a starting state for the universe the 1950 state is way way more probable i think so right but there's a problem with that um argument i mean there are various problems with it but one is that 1950 is obviously not the best choice that you could make it's inferior to 1951 for example and in fact it's going to be inferior to right now right the universe just began right now that's going to be better but the problem is that that's an unstable theory because in a minute you'll want to shift the theory right so if you if if you want to be sort of consistent over time in your choice of the theory you're not going to pick any of those obviously skeptical scenarios right because for anyone that you pick there are better ones that you'll want to pick tomorrow well um i don't see this as saving the big bang i mean yeah well there's no there's no non-arbitrary starting point that comes after the big bang no but like this is not um this is not an answer to the skeptic right right you know like so you're right like yeah maybe the best theory is it appeared just now at this instant okay then you're like oh but you don't want to say that because if you say that then you're going to change your view in a minute how does that show that that's not the best view right like okay so then in a minute from now the best theory is going to be that the universe just began at that time so well and wouldn't it wouldn't it only be a little bit more probable because it's only a few seconds difference between in an entropy whereas 1950 the difference between entropy there and the initial big bang is much broader right that's right yeah and there's been yeah look i mean see i'm not i'm not actually advocating the 1950 theory you convinced me though right so i'm saying like what's wrong with that is you know it's just it's like it's not a good theory to have the universe just start existing for no reason right so like i'm rejecting all the theories and also the big bang thing like it shouldn't just be starting for no reason in some super improbable state so so i don't know whether we want to go there but i do think that there's something else that you can say if you have the kind of single universe theory starting from an initial singularity if you want to have an explanation for that initial state you can claim that it's necessary and now you've got an explanation of why it happened it happened because it had to i can see you raising all eyebrows at once so so the way that i'm thinking about this is that um you need to think about what's the best theory of metaphysical modality and the one that i like is one that says that all worlds share some history with the actual world branch off from it because chances play out differently so you've got a kind of stores mccall picture about what the metaphysical possibilities are and immediately falls out of that picture that if there's an initial state is necessary so that was how you get there right so so this runs against the kind of standard conceivability views of metaphysical possibility which i don't like i would rather not multiply possibilities beyond necessity the only ones you need are the ones you need for chances so let's just leave it there well wait i mean the only one the only one we need is the actual world we could say that that's how possible well not not if there are chances though right because there's chances you're committed to saying there's other ways it could have gone yeah right so that gives you the there are possibilities but you don't need any other possibilities except the ones there right yeah but i mean saying there are chances like that's not part of the evidence right i mean like yeah what you have is just observing the actual world well it depends what you're counting as like it depends if we think of quantum mechanics as the best theory for explaining a certain amount of the evidence and quantum mechanics says that there are chances then that's how you get the commitment to chances right with the thing you're thinking about all the different bits of the theory that you're going to commit to and so the bit that i'm picking on here is that um and it's controversial is that the most that quantum mechanics is a really good theory of the world and the best interpretation of it commits you to chances yeah uh i mean i know so you know i was thinking like well why doesn't somebody say okay the actual world is the only possible world yeah okay so like if quantum mechanics implies that you know there are other other possibilities then you know it's false but like this theory the theory according to which the actual world is necessary predicts everything that we've actually observed since it predicts all the observations right because we're not obsessed but it doesn't give you the it doesn't give you the most economical theory i mean depending on your views you might think that if you suppose that everything is necessary then everything is going to turn out to just be kind of it couldn't have been otherwise it turns out to be kind of brute so you have a very uneconomical theory why did this happen next well it had to and that's the only thing that you can say about it when we lose our liberty i think the doesn't strike me as kind of theoretically virtuous in all respects it doesn't compress your evidence in any interesting ways for example uh yeah uh is it is it simpler though dr hammer yeah well not if what i just said was right but it depends on what you mean by simpler right it's like yeah there are fewer fewer possible worlds if those are supposed to be things that exist then you know it's committed to fewer things existing it's simply in that way i don't know you don't have chances either right like whatever you might say oh yeah it's super comp yeah that's right you don't have to say your search yes you might say oh it's super complicated because so it says there's only one thing but the description of that one thing is super complicated it's like every fact right um whereas if you've got some you know if you've if you've got some genuine theories um you can compress a whole lot of the description and you might think as i do that that makes for a better theory [Music] yeah i mean well so you have you have a shorter description but it doesn't explain everything right so like the sort of description says oh there are these laws these laws give you probabilities of things happening okay if the if the description specifies and here's what happened so like there was this probability this probability and then this one is the one that was actualized oh then that's just as complicated or or more so actually than the one that just says you know the entire description of the actual world right right so yeah so like you know the theory that's got the chances in it um so it's your description but it doesn't predict all the evidence so i suspect that's not quite right um but uh it depends on the kind of domains of local determinism as i yes you might call it so you get you get quite a lot of stuff where there's compression it's just that there are places where everywhere there's a chance you have to feed in a bit of data by hand it's not feeding in all the data by hand i'm not sure whether this is right or not but that's yeah my hunch yeah you know like um i don't know like when i thought about why i believed in modality i wasn't thinking about quantum mechanics and stuff like when people told me that there was this thing called necessity i thought the basis for it was basically like you have intuitions that things could have been a certain way and somebody describes something you go yeah it seems like i could oh it could have turned out that newtonian mechanics was true and like you know so like in your view like there's a whole bunch of stuff that i would have thought as part of the data that leads you to positive modality you know that you're rejecting yeah that's right so if it too it's it couldn't have turned out that the world was newtonian according to me i mean in the metaphysical sense there's we need we need probabilities for another thing which has to do with our ignorance right um and so there are oh some people call them epistemic probabilities i'm going to call them doxastatin probabilities you need if you if you're going to gamble for example you need those yeah yeah wait but so would you would you say that you know you apply probabilities to possibilities that aren't really possible because right because like we've got to consider you know we have to consider theories where the laws of physics are different right and like on your view those are impossible right like almost impossible so so if you're so suppose you were doing kind of theory selection of theories of everything then you're going to be talking about theories that by your lights couldn't possibly be true um and so i don't think when you're doing that theory selection you can actually attribute probabilities to the theories i'm not a bayesian then i'll be zero at that level um i think there are limits to the ways in which you can sensibly attach probabilities to things so i don't think that there's a probability that you could have given say in um to to to newton's theory being true saying it's 1710 and 1750 and 1830 and 1870. yeah well i don't know if there's a determinant probability but like if you say like there's no probability at all like this makes it hard to understand like you know how you can talk about theories being supported or not supported or you know more strong so so that so that i don't know whether we want to go down there there are things to say but we've been going further yeah yeah you did uh dr upper you did trigger him by saying that that uh bayes has its limits um so i could have started on conversation um well okay so uh the infant we just had this long conversation you guys said about the infinite past and that's important because if the past is uh finite then dr humor your argument for us existing now collapses then right the argument for reincarnation yeah yeah it requires an infinite past okay uh and an infinite future or just the past yeah also into the future well you know like because if the if the universe ends in whatever sometimes you might not be reincarnated again during that time right right i can't predict how long it takes you know so might take longer than the amount of time we have left okay well awesome let's let's um let's go ahead and ask some questions here uh we got a little bit more time folks so go ahead and put your question in the chat i already see some coming in and like i said earlier the super chats will get priority so let's start with our one and only super chat here um this one is from steven dillon to both what's at stake what is lost by introducing non-physicality to account for the mind and what's lost by broadening physicality to include the mind and i think you guys know which respected person those are directed at yeah uh i don't know i mean like so like you know i think about why i'm saying the mind is non-physical it's not because i think there's some call costs to say it's physicals because it just doesn't seem to me like what we call physical like as far as i understand what physical means like and i don't understand all that well but it's sort of like i guess i understand the concept physical by some examples like okay you know like size is physical and where mass is physical or whatever and then you know like thinking about paris man it doesn't sound like the same kind of thing like that's why i'm saying that so and anyway if somebody wants to say no i'm just going to use the category physical to include mental things i'm like okay well whatever okay then i just think that that's a verbal mistake right you know i did just think you're using the word physical in a weird way whatever but you know who cares okay so i don't know the the what's at stake questions when it comes to philosophy are often kind of hard to to answer i think um one thing that you might think is that there are um lots of people who have world views um where they think that there are supernatural minds and think that we have a kind of supernatural dimension right it's not that we're destined for reincarnation in this universe we're distant for some supernatural destination where we're going to be reincarnated and so on and there um there are kind of practical stakes about whether you're going to be a member of a religion that has that kind of view or not so that's one way of thinking about where there might be stakes yeah um all right well following following up on that one uh dr appi here's a question for you if you believed in souls would you believe in libertarian free will [Laughter] ah dear counterfactuals are so difficult to start with and this one's got you know i guess it has to do with which one's more fundamental for you right like um so yeah so given out given our conversation uh if we if by believing in souls we mean not just thinking that there are that that there's this kind of interesting relation between mental properties and other properties but that there's a substance i'm probably more firmly committed to yeah i don't know i don't like either of them and i don't but i don't see them as connected either i have kind of independent reasons okay uh i think libertarian free will if you take the standard kind of principle of alternative possibilities really is very unattractive so um the and you know maybe if you can have a kind of agent causation account without the principle of alternative possibilities as some people seem to think you can then maybe that would be more attractive than the kind of we have supernatural souls yeah okay that makes sense um also dr humer in case you don't get to respond uh what is your response to opie's argument that indeterminist randomness seems to refute the consequence argument yeah uh well i mean so you know like what i said wasn't exactly the consequence argument per se but it was about why determinism was incompatible with free will so you could say oh yeah that's fine because you know like we don't have determinism because of quantum mechanics or something right um so i mean you'd want to say something else about why like an indeterministic physical list view would be a problem for free will you want to say something like well i mean it kind of just like makes it seem like your actions are random you're like and not under your control you might think oh but then you know why isn't it true that your actions are random even with dualism but the thought is well there's a special problem if your actions are caused by some totally um you know blind non-conscious things right and so i was sort of assuming and then like you know this got challenged but i was sort of assuming that if you're a physicalist you would be like a bottom-up causation kind of physicalist so i think you know all your actions are determined by the stuff that the microscopic particles are doing and then they're completely blind they don't have any reasons they don't respond to reasons so you know then it's going to be that your behavior is going to be determined by um these physical things that don't respond to reasons then it doesn't matter if they're deterministic or indeterministic um and then you know like the only way to get free will is to have well you know like the the thing at the higher level like the mental properties are causing the behavior yeah so that was my thought um yeah well so i want to push that back on on dr oppy there and just add in maybe like like over determination there maybe it doesn't work right but dr robert can you respond to what dr humer said there um at the end so so i'm thinking about your remark about over-determination uh it i mean one of the standard worries about the kind of bottom-up view for philosophy of mind is that it's going to make all the you know if you thought that there was any kind of separate causal power that attached to say beliefs and desires and the causation of action um there would be a kind of causal over determination because the what happened would be determined by the stuff at the lower level um because i was thinking that there aren't there aren't determination relations of that very strong kind between the scales you won't have that kind of worry yeah does the strength matter um don't the physical particles whatever they may be super strings don't they still need to be in the right spot in order for you to have such such a thought or they completely uh you know once you get up to the next scale it's completely not attached to the bottom scale well no there's definitely attachment so if you think about the region of space that your body occupies and then think about some low scale right there's going to be particles down there and there won't be anything else filling that space yeah but the question wasn't about the stuff it was about the properties yeah right and yeah okay okay um yeah that's good oh i guess yeah dr hammer please sorry to accept super venus like that the you know the mental properties super bean on the arrangement of the micro physical objects so there are um super veniance relations so think about the kind of picture in pixels right that's a standard view i'm thinking about super veniance in the kind of rough roughly in the kind of um jackson lewis way so no change in the properties of the image without some change in the pixels presumably no change in your mental state without some change in the arrangement of the particles but that's a very very weak relation very weak yeah but and i mean sort of consistent with the point about the um the impossibility of defining the kind of high level properties in terms of low level properties yeah i mean there are there are stronger versions of super venues stronger versions than that that weak one but then i'm not inclined to accept the stronger principles of superfanians yeah i'm so tempted to stick with the argument from reason type stuff here but uh we do have another super chat here um to humor uh do your views on minds have any non-obvious philosophical implications for animal mind if so what are they uh i don't know um i mean so you know like i assume that animals have mental states or you know some mammals have mental states uh you know like i assume that your dog uh you know he has visual experiences when you come to rummy sees you whenever like he knows that you're gonna feed him and he wants the food or whatever okay you know beliefs and desires all that so so he has a mind so you know it's non-physical i mean you know and so i guess those are the obvious implications yeah um you know like one thing i wondered about was like hey can you be reincarnated as a non-person animal and uh unfortunately i don't know the answer to that and i i hope i hope the answer is no because i don't want to live as a non-person animal but i have no way of answering that okay but there might be some interesting like you know implications if you know like you know if you can be reincarnated animals maybe you should think more carefully about how you treat animals so so one question there though is i mean resemblance seemed to play a big role so the idea was that there was going to be this it's essentially a kind of duplicate of you qualitative duplicate of you at some point in the future that would be you because there's another bit of the argument about sort of what matters for personal identity it's not clear that how animals you know are going to get into that story really because your dog's not that similar to you yeah yeah yeah well you know any particular dog is probably not that similar to you but maybe there's some dog that's really silly no way i don't think yeah i mean what happened was you know when i was thinking of the argument um i was led to the argument by thinking about um you know eternal occurrence actually i was led to it by thinking about the multiverse because i read uh leonard suskin's book about this i started thinking hey and you know they're the multiverse people are talking about how like oh there's going to be like a duplicate of you in some universe and then i started thinking why isn't the duplicate actually me so then why am i not having the duplicates experiences at the same time okay but then i realized that you don't have to have other universes to have a question like this like even in one universe like there's gonna be a duplicate of you later and maybe that will be you okay and then so that's how i started thinking about reincarnation and then and like when i wrote the paper it sounds like the eternal recurrence is essential to it but later i realize that it's not but the eternal recurrence is on account of how reincarnation might come about but it's not the only possible way that it might come back so like maybe you have a soul and maybe there's some just unknown conditions that cause your soul to go into a living thing and then you know and then that's right it's like a metaphysical this is now getting much closer to certain kinds of in eastern metaphysical views about the nature of reality i think once you've gotten that far you know i mean the typical um in hindu thought but also in buddhist thought that there's a fairly long scale over which for a single cycle but reality is just made up of a series of cycles and from one cycle to the next or even within a cycle from one lifetime to the next you can come back as a cockroach yeah yes i you know i'm more skeptical about cockroaches because i'm not sure they're even sentient yeah is is does rationality i i know you said you you don't you're not sure on this but do i have a rational soul are we can dr humor can we follow like descartes in that does does the cogito give us that or anything such that i can't be a [ __ ] i can't be a dog because i have a rational soul and he doesn't oh uh this doesn't sound to me like compelling reasoning so uh look i mean you know when i when i think of the soul i just think like it's the mind or it's the subject of mental states so like these mental states which you can argue are non-physical and okay and if you accept that then you're like okay and what are they states of oh it's states of this thing called mine then somebody says hey look in addition to the regular soul i have this other thing called the rational soul and i'm like i don't know what you're talking about because like the subject of my different mental states there's one subject of like my rational thoughts and my sensations and my emotions like those are all had by the same me so there's not more than one soul so yeah but but so qualitatively is there is there can we get at a qualitative difference between like a dog soul and my soul why does the dog not have uh the capacity for speech that i have is it just because he has a different brain than me that allows him to have a mental mental state yeah that might be yeah because then we're going to make a different story about the mental state you know supervening on the physical state brain state yeah no yeah yeah he doesn't doesn't talk because he doesn't have a speech center in his brain or you know whatever like because he doesn't have the genes that evolved over the course of you know some millions of years for for speech but in principle he could be having like the same kind of soul that i have and just really frustrated that he doesn't have the speech center maybe he's screaming internally right yeah yeah well i mean he um yes but he wouldn't know what speech was so he wouldn't be frustrated that he doesn't have the interest oh because yeah you say that he doesn't remember but if he has the capacity it's like an unrealized oh yeah if it's unrealized okay that's interesting yeah yeah so like i like i i don't know i don't know whether you can come back as a dog or something um i think you could come back as a member of another species but i don't know whether it has to be another intelligent species or you know but uh yeah um yeah i was gonna say something else i've forgotten oh sorry about that just jump in when you get it here's a here's another one uh for dr humer is the existence of souls equally likely on theism and atheism and i want to push that to uh dr abby as well yeah oh uh well let's see if there's a god i guess god is a soul by definition right it's just a physical object right okay so then i think and the answer is uh it's more likely on theism because there's a guarantee like probability one that there's at least one soul okay also maybe you mean human souls okay well yeah if there's at least one if if you know that there's at least one soul that's not human that raises the probability that they're that humans have souls right so yeah i guess yeah a crappy i guess it depends on your version of theism so if you i mean as mike just suggested if you're thinking about god as as a person then you're gonna and and you're thinking of the the this is a person without a body right non-physical person you you are gonna be stuck with the soul and so it's right um but there are views of the divine that don't make um god come out as having personal attributes of any kind and so um then we have this kind of difficult question about okay so which is a more likely view right right when it comes to three years that much you don't quite know how to someone needs to write a book about arguing about gods or something yeah um okay uh just a few more here um following up on a similar thread there uh this is for uh dr humor but also i'll i'll pose it to dr api how probable is theism what's the best argument for theism in your opinion yeah good yeah i'd like this question because it lets me plug you know this book knowledge knowledge reality and value in which i do talk about theism uh it's an introduction to philosophy the best argument um you know that i know of is the fine-tuning argument um what's how probable is theism like i really don't know it's like really hard for me to assess so okay so i think um some of the things that are traditionally said about god i think are metaphysically impossible okay but also i think like given examples sorry oh uh being all powerful i guess i think that's metaphysically impossible or being infinitely powerful so i think you could you can have any degree of power but there's no maximum degree of power and you can't be infinitely powerful infinite power yeah sort of like how yeah they're like there's no largest natural number so there's just natural numbers getting bigger and bigger and infinity isn't a number yeah so that's analogous to how i think like there's there's no property being maximally powerful there's just like more and more degrees of error okay i can maximally just be the highest amount i i get the infinite infinitely powerful yeah there's no highest amount right it's like the largest number there's no larger number they just get bigger and bigger yeah okay um okay well maybe i'm wrong but anyway yeah sure um okay but you know i think you could have like a view that's recognizably theistic without saying all the things are traditionally said so maybe there's an extremely powerful creator intelligent creator who's also extremely good and extremely knowledgeable yeah and then i mean is that god it's like i get right so i guess you could call that theism so in that case then i then i'm agnostic about theism okay and his son is you know jesus christ maybe even he died for your sins and now we're messing with the probabilities here yeah yeah so you know you're making the probability lower but still still possible yeah uh anyway so like you know i think that i think there are two explanations of fine-tuning there's the multiverse and then there's intelligent design and they're both amazing right which by the way i mean in i do not mean a sense of praise right like being amazing means it's less less likely on the facebook ads are amazing but they're the only two things that somebody has thought of so like you're like which one of these is less amazing i don't know okay yeah yeah droppies so just on that point if you go with the kind of mccall style aristotelian view of modality you get a different account i mean it depends whether you think that the fine-tuning is you know the values are fixed in the initial state or not if they're fixed in the initial state they're necessary so there's the explanation if they're not then what you've got is some sort of chance transition because they weren't fixed they go from being not fixed fixed in which case doesn't matter what the probability is you're committed to that explanation anyway because there's numbers that the size of the improbability doesn't matter once you've accepted that it was just a chance transition okay so uh there are other options that have been considered though many people think that these options are kind of crazy yeah philip gough says the universe designed itself and his cosmo psychism and i guess that being a similar case is your chance where now the property probabilities go out the window because it's a a personal car uh personal cause i guess yeah i don't know i don't want to talk smack on this position because he's not here um but well yeah so i know she you know i don't know if we want to say more about the fine-tuning thing um some of the responses to the fine-tuning argument i think um you know i i think are bad because they would also be responses in hypothetical scenarios in which surely you would have evidence for theism right so suppose that somehow it was built into the laws of nature that you know there are certain uh crystals that when they form they form into the shape of the letters made by god like and like there's these different crystals that form made by god in all of the late languages of the world yeah right and but you know nothing else and then like and but you know just stipulate that it's like it's built into the laws of nature okay and so then you know if we have one of these responses to the fine-tuning argument that says oh you can't assign probabilities to the laws of nature so you can't infer anything uh so then that response implies that even in the made by god world you have no reason to think that there's any kind of intelligent design right and like come on okay so that doesn't so so so that doesn't sound good for the um for the certain views but it doesn't seem to touch the aristotelian modality view well no i mean like you know so so like in my scenario so like it was always built into the laws that you know there would be these made by gold messages and so then yes but but the truth is that what you're talking about is impossible right uh i'm just i'm assuming there are no such crystals are you 100 certain that it's impossible um so so the question about certainty is kind of interesting at this point no right it would be crazy to take the view that you accept to be certain but still when if the view that you accept says that certain things are impossible then that's what you should think right that is your view it's just that you hold it tentatively it's open to revision right i mean i think which is kind of sensible but if there's like then we answer the question by looking to see what our you says no but i think like if there's you know a possibility if there's a possibility that they got by god world could happen then i think there's an intelligible question as to what you should say or like what would be confirmed if that were to happen so i don't but but then possibility in what sense is there a metaphysical possibility i think not if you mean could somebody dream up this speculation and then we could think about how that speculation squares with the evidence that we've got well in that case not well because we have none of these crystals and i think we should be very confident that we'll never find one of them but i mean like if the question is would it would it what what would we think if you know this is sort of like hume's question about the voice from the sky what would we think oh actually i don't know why we think in that circumstance yeah but i mean we wouldn't just shrug our shoulders and go well it's necessary that it's that way so it doesn't matter sure that's that's probably true right but then what you've got there is something i think different from the fine-tuning of the constants so i mean maybe i don't i'm not convinced that there's a very good parallel between the kind of thing yeah the crystal so i mean you did say built into the laws i'm not sure how that's gonna work exactly um anyway yeah i mean obviously i haven't worked out the physics model yeah yeah we still got to find these crystals and then we can back backfill it and figure it out uh well dr opp um what do you think is is there a best argument for theism and uh how probable is theism a lot of people know what you're gonna say here well you can probably guess i mean i'm so on the on the theory that i've got theism just turns out to be impossible right so one way of going is to say it gets probability zero okay i'm not going to go that way um unless you just say what's the probability with respect to your theory right right because because i don't think my i mean as i just said it would be absurd for me to think that my theory was certain in all respects that would be just crazy yeah um i'm not sure that it's very useful to talk about probability beyond this what i think is that there can be reasonable disagreement that there are other world views that very smart people hold that disagree with mine in ever so many ways because that's the nature of philosophy and physical speculation um and it can be perfectly reasonable for people to accept some other views so that's that's the kind of how i want to talk about these things i just don't want to talk about probability yeah well i don't think that i sort of have probabilities for beyond the relative to my view i don't have another set of probabilities that says well you know bill craigsview gets this much and richard swinburnes gets that much and elven planting is gets that much and okay mike humors gets so much and so on right i just i just don't have probabilities like that um on the question what's the best argument for theism well obviously some kind of cumulative case argument so i mean swinburne i think has the most developed cumulative case so i think that this is the best argument that's been put together so far though i expect that there are theists who could put together kind of better cases than his if they bothered to take him as a model and try and set out that kind of cumulative case yeah if they took swinburne and uh and posed it uh the universe starting in 1950 then it would presumably be more likely maybe maybe i'll try it maybe around something right well there's there's lots of options i mean there's lots of controversial from it from kind of christian viewpoint there's a lot of that conflict that's controversial about swinburnes you're absolutely right argument and so you can feel you know you can develop an alternative and but that seems to me to be the right kind of model okay all right so we have just two more uh super chats here uh dr humor at what stage of evolution did souls emerge uh they've already entered uh yeah uh no we didn't answer it um of course i don't know but i mean it was whenever there was first a conscious being i don't know when that happened i didn't even i don't even know which beings are conscious now so yeah um so so i've thought about this question too and i might i i i suspect that it that consciousness actually goes pretty low down maybe lower than you think so maybe you know worms are conscious i'm i mean i'm not wedded to that opinion but sometimes when i think about it i'm kind of tempted to think that just a few layers of neurons will be enough interesting okay okay um well so oh sorry uh dr humerus muted yeah please yeah sorry maybe this is not exactly answering what the person wanted but actually in my view souls existed forever yeah yeah there's no time it emerged it's like infinitely infinite into the past yeah well okay so so here's a um maybe maybe i can uh tease this out a little bit dr you you believe in uh evolution though right right yeah so there was at some point where well i don't know i guess it depends on what you say about souls but um this type of soul i couldn't exist as me uh two billion years ago or whatever it when you know my ancestors weren't on track to weren't me yet right right so was there is there a certain point at which a human soul can then enter in does that make any sense you're getting more yeah so you know presumably there are some physical conditions that are required um for you to have a life right yeah like uh and an object has to have certain physical characteristics in order for you to be able to inhabit it yes that's why i'm not in the desk right now yeah and i don't know what these conditions are okay but yeah you know probably took a couple billion years for or maybe it took four and a half billion years for there to be the first thing that you could have occupied okay because that's when there was first an intelligent being yeah or you know there was a first a brain capable of supporting intelligence yeah okay and and i guess just a quick follow-up when we're disembodied um do we have rational thoughts or do we need a brain in order to have rational thoughts yeah no no thoughts sorry okay so as far as i know i'm like why do i say that well like if you suffer brain damage then like it damages your um reasoning ability and stuff like that like just you know any any of the things that you do can be impaired by suffering brain damage so if you after you die your whole brain is going to be destroyed so you're not going to be doing anything that's true but if if tony stark suffers damage to his iron man suit he can't fly but then you put him in a new suit and in that intermediate time yeah you know he can still do tony stark things uh yes that's true but i mean that's because you know he's like a whole being without the suit i mean yeah but but like you know we don't know everything about tony stark that we have about people like because we have evidence about people getting brain damage and just like yeah well i don't i don't really know this but like i'm assuming you know like every thing that people do can be impaired by some kind of brain damage i think that's true everything now we're you're asking you know i'm flying grand mopey's right here man you run around there someone's going to point some counter example yeah well like if that's not true that would be amazing right and that would be like we're kind of amazing yeah yeah i think it would be amazing okay all right all right well uh let's move on this one's uh related but it's just moving up the timeline a little bit for both uh when in fetal when in fetal development does the soul slash consciousness emerge does this have implications for the abortion debate no pressure it's not a super hard question yeah i mean yeah that's a great question right and of course you know like i have no way of knowing this because i don't remember you know like i was a fetus once but i don't remember or i don't know if i was a fetus maybe i was only a baby okay but yeah so you know well this the soul appears the first time that there's a conscious experience okay but actually your soul always existed it's eternal it's just that it became like you know a particular body became that soul's body at the time i don't know when that happened yeah but also i'm not sure that this has the implications for abortion that you'd think that it does so um because like on my view well you already existed you were just like unembodied you know so if you're at the time during fetal development before the soul inhabits the body uh you know there's the soul is still there so it's still true that there is someone who you're gonna be harming if you destroy the venus uh and you know and just like after the soul goes into it there's someone who's going to be harmed if you destroy the fetus and that by the way and i don't know what the implication of that is right but also by the way like you know and i i guess um you know if you're worried if you think that it's unethical to destroy the fetus because there's somebody who will be harmed because like they're going to have to stay unconscious instead of being conscious and embodied and having life well that's actually true if you just refrain from producing a child and could have produced right there's there's somebody yeah they weren't in the queue at the time who would have become embodied and then you're going to stop them from being a body so so there are some other problems about kind of infinite mathematics here if you really think that you get kind of incarnated infinitely many times it's not clear that missing one is actually going to make any difference to your well-being yeah that's right there's there's you know great ethical questions about this right like how should we you know if you're a consequentialist how should you calculate the consequences that matter like should you sort of like look at each person and so like you know like if you if you had a choice to be embodied or not at some particular time and that you know that lifetime was going to have positive value but lower than the average value of your lifetimes you know it should you take it or not yeah so well if you don't take it maybe you think the average will just infinitesimally go up so yeah yeah yeah so i mean so i mean that's the question like do you yeah so do you just look at um you know your subjective sequence right or do you look at um do you some value over objective time would you some value over like some you know subjective times so to speak yeah you guys just made everyone a bunch of anti-natalists so uh there's that well i wonder if if you don't know if you don't know whether there's a person in there or not it's kind of like the uh the demolition of a building right like if you don't know if someone's in there or not don't don't dynamite the building it's like you if you if you don't know and you don't know if it's gonna actually if it will cause harm and you don't know their subjective calculations uh on you know if they're if they're trying to just have one life and they'll be super awesome and then they'll their experiences will be great they're trying to avoid being reincarnated if you don't know that then don't don't dynamite the building um yeah yeah no yeah so there's this argument from moral risk i mean just like more generally if there's something that you're not sure if it's extremely morally wrong or not um but like there's no case for it being obligatory then like there's a strong reason to not do it sure even if you think it's probably not wrong at all but there's a chance that might be extremely wrong and also it's definitely not wrong to not do it then like yeah don't do it right yeah then you'd have to yeah so then people are going to be arguing about whether it's obligatory or whatever uh dropping what do you think about this so i as mike said before we have quite a lot of information about um sort of brain activity and mental states and so probably we can be very confident that in the in the fetus to the point where we have kind of brain activity of the relevant kind there isn't going to be a soul attached that seems fairly solid i would have thought the question is exactly where that happens not in the first trimester yeah well and i guess it has to do with like the how you um characterize like the value i guess of the of the fetus whether it's like able to do that function now or whether it's potentially it will if if left untouched it will grow into that and um so the question the first question was just when does it happen oh yeah right when is it and so i'm thinking about the answer to that gotcha yeah yeah that's good thanks for thinking about what data we would have to go on and i think we've got some okay that's that's a really helpful clarification someone sent in one last super chat and it actually connects a little bit i'm not sure whether the question was asked but assuming we will be reincarnated what effect might this have on the ethics of killing and so yeah like is it is it less serious uh to kill an immortal uh being or a immortal and then also immortal that's going to be reincarnated a ton of times oh oops he's muted here dr humor sorry about that oh yeah okay so yeah you might think oh well like the total value that you experience over infinite time is infinity uh regardless of whether you're killed or not so maybe you know maybe there's no reason not to kill someone okay but the thing is like that reasoning like that would be the if that's correct like that destroys consequentialism in general right it's like the value of the universe is infinite or it might be negative infinity but anyway it's either positive or negative infinity and it's going to be that no matter what you do in any situation so like you know if you buy this argument then oh no reason to do anything or not do anything right yeah presumably that's wrong presumably you know you're supposed to look at some more limited range of things like look at you know the consequences of your action maybe maybe you restricted to the consequences of your action in this actions in this lifetime or something you're supposed to add up those see whether those are overall negative or positive or something okay so so if you have a the view that the universe is finite in the past and spatially finite then you aren't going to be committed to the infinity of value i mean given the what i take to be the facts about what the future is going to be like so consequentialism will survive in some frameworks against this objection it's just in the kind of infinite universe infinite reincarnation there's going to be well yeah i was assuming an infinite future and i guess that you know there will be other living things going you know going on forever uh you might you might think because of the heat death of the universe that you know there will be a permanent end of life proton decay and and the endless expansion and just no more protons after that yeah maybe is there actually is there a zero probability of a proton being generated from radiation so so i think the answer is yes but i'm not don't quote me on that right i'm not i'm not sure but i think that there there is that kind of aft on so the book that i'm quoting from is a little bit old now so it'll be useful if there's another book that some bunch of cosmologists have written about the likely future of the universe that that might answer that question but okay um okay i hate to do this one last just like a ten dollar one to two no one ask any more questions after this one please it's funny to say that because they're super chats but i want to respect these gentlemen's time and i'm already intimidated having them on here uh okay so uh for dr humer if life needs a biological substrate and always arises through a process of evolution average incarnation would likely be a net positive is that plausible i i find this emotionally comforting i don't wait i didn't understand why he said uh average incarnation would be a net positive uh is it is this like you know you're assuming that um most living things have good lives actually i'm not saying the connection between the first part between the antecedent and the consequent of that um actually like i have a blog post at one point you know talking about what the value of the universe is and i think it might be negative infinity because like okay you like you probably have a positive utility life but when you think about like all the other like almost all conscious beings are non-intelligent animals and their lives are shitty yeah like you know constantly in danger of starvation and like being eaten alive by other animals like whatever and you know like when it's raining you can't get out of the rain you just have to sit there you get sick like there's no medicine or anything you break your leg you're just gonna die what if they're loving it though because like we don't know what it's like to be a bat right so what if they're just like i love echolocation so so i think you should focus on a different case which is the history of humanity and the percentage of people who don't make it out of the first year or two um it's not clear that their lives are a net positive and they make up the probably the majority of people in history i mean maybe you have to maybe you have to sort of look at person years right not persons right yeah yeah i mean yeah okay so the average incarnation it's that's not quite the question it's the average over-incarnation years would be yeah possibly that's the issue okay well uh gentlemen thank you so much for this was uh fantastic i'm glad we made it through uh i'm unscathed i think i i feel good i was really nervous about this but uh i thanks for both both of you for all your time and again like i said the beginning uh we really appreciate you guys we've learned a ton from you the the internet community public philosophy and you guys do it in a way that um is fun you do take like requests that you probably shouldn't i've seen some of you guys you go on with these crazy folks maybe i'm one of them but crazy folks like parker yeah that's right that's right but i i really appreciate you and just a big thanks from from uh everyone we love hearing from you guys thank you for doing it okay great well thank you for organizing and and everything yeah definitely all right folks well um oh thanks dr yeah this is uh um this is ben parker's pencils and uh as always all glory to god