Haunted Cosmos - Is your life real? (S8, E3)

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

What if we are all the ones and zeroes of a higher intelligence putting us through a simulation of life for the amusement of the programmer? How would we know or not know? Are we men dreaming of life as brains in vats? Or are we brains in vats dreaming of being men?Brian’s new book, The Longhouse: How Feminism Conquered the West and Made Us Miserable, is now available for pre-order! - Thelonghousebook.comNew Haunted Cosmos shirt available for a limited time! - Get it here!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes and monthly Livestreams, by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosThis episode is sponsored by: Jake Muller Adventures is an immersive, mysterious, and engaging audio drama. Use code "HAUNTED" to claim 10% off all digital downloads. https://www.jakemulleradventures.com/haunted Indigo Sundries Soap Company - Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com and use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today. https://stonecropadvisors.com/hauntedcosmosTalk to Josh at Volenté Creative to get help you with your branding and marketing: https://volentecreative.com/ncpMemento is helping thousands of Christian men grow in their spiritual discipline - Go to Memento70.com/haunted and get 10% off an annual membership.Chronicles of the Elohim is a line of premium action figures Visit https://kaleolegends.toys and pre-order your figures todayWhite Tree Solutions can help your company’s data problems. Call William at 952-209-9638 or visit WTSData.comGray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order. https://graytoadtallow.com/Buy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!If you're a Christian business owner who wants to reach thousands of like-minded people and grow your company, we'd love to partner with you. Email us at [e-mail] Support the show

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, we investigate a question that has plagued the mind of philosophers and theologians alike. Across history, the ancient Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, even some of the greatest Christian theologians and philosophers of all time have asked this question, maybe one that you've never thought to ask. Do you really exist? Does the world really exist? Is there really anything at all outside of your own mind? and if so, can you prove it? There was once a car driving down a highway with a woman in the passenger seat. It was sometime in the early 2000s. Who was driving, what type of car it was, or where precisely they were, it's unimportant. What matters is that the woman in question was not driving, and it was night.

She absent-mindedly watched the world pass by in its varying shades of blue and black. At every intersection, there was a gas station, a strip mall, or a restaurant. At some, there were all three and more, an apartment building or a neighborhood whose lights could be seen flickering through the trees. But for the most part, there was nothing and no lights. Suddenly, the woman perked up in her seat and looked a little more intently through the window. On the surface, it was just another restaurant. But three things made it stand out. First, it wasn't an intersection.

On the contrary, it was on a stretch of road that had been empty for miles and would remain empty for. for miles more. Second, despite its isolation, was crowded with people. Not in some out of the ordinary way, as if a special event were happening. It was just busy. The parking lot was nearly full, and she could see the silhouettes of patrons and employees going about their evenings inside. And third, most importantly, it was old. Not old in an aged or neglected sense, just out of its time. It was a diner, a diner that would have been perfectly normal on the main street of any mid-sized town in, say, the 1950s, but even the cars, and there were plenty of streetlights around a lot, looked to be from just a different era, an older era. But it was the turn of the millennium.

Why was there a thriving, bright, and shiny 1950s diner with a lot full of 1950s cars randomly set on the side of a rural highway? Of course, these things flashed before the woman's eyes for just a few seconds, but it was long enough to captivate her. The late hour and the the inconvenience of getting there made stopping in for a milkshake unreasonable. But she noted the whereabouts and resolved to come back for a visit at first opportunity. Only days later, said Opportunity presented itself. The woman, now alone, drove down the same highway but in the opposite direction. She passed the last intersection before the diner and started scanning the opposite side of the road for it.

At the same time, she constantly glanced back to watch her own side of the road. after three miles of this and not seeing the diner, she assumed that she just missed it. Without the bright streetlights to give it away in the dark, it was bound to be harder to see. So she kept driving until the next intersection, turned off, realized there was no obvious frontage road to head back the opposite way, and pulled into a gas station to ask for directions. She explained herself to the gas station clerk and was a bit annoyed by his blank and confused reply. She explained again, the diner, how do I get? to the diner that's just a few miles up the road. The clerk had no idea what she was talking about.

So she left, she got back in her car. Now she too was confused. She got on the highway, going back the way she knew she'd come, their eyes peeled on the roadside. She drove the entire distance between that intersection and the next, but all she passed were woods and fields. There was no building there at all, let alone a bustling restaurant. She racked her brain, for she knew what she'd seen. She asked her friend from a few nights prior, the one who'd been driving, but they didn't remember anything. The whole thing just left an odd taste in her mouth. Something didn't sit right about it. Obviously, it's frustrating to waste a day looking for something or someplace that turns out not to exist, but it was more than irritation. There was fear, too, with a lingering kind of almost

paranoia. She knew what she had seen, a diner out of place and out of time, but very much there and very much real and lively and right on the side of the road. She wasn't sleeping just before and she didn't sleep soon thereafter. It made her wonder a terrible thing. If that diner was not real, what else might not be real? Once upon a time there was a man in China named Zhu. He was a thoughtful man and he cared very much for even the smallest parts of life in nature, believing them all to mean something. One night as he slept, Zoo dreamed that he was a butterfly. He was a very happy butterfly, constantly flapping his wings and going to new places. He did as he pleased. He smelled the sweetest flowers, drank the purest raindrops, drifted on the wind to

unimaginable heights, and rested in the most tranquil of meadows. Yes, he did as he pleased, but as a butterfly would do as it pleased. In the dream, he didn't know. He didn't know. He didn't that he was a man named Zoo. But eventually he woke and was himself again. He was Zoo, the man and the thinker. But being the thinker, he started to think. Am I a man who dreamed about being a butterfly? Or am I actually a butterfly who is now dreaming of being a man?

He surmised that within himself, there must be some faculty which allowed him to distinguish between the man and the butterfly. But before his conclusion, he had to face and reckon with terror. terrible questions. How do we know what is real and what is not? How do we know that we exist and that others exist in the way that we believe ourselves and them to exist? How can we be sure we're not just figments of our own or some other intelligences imagination? Quote, the things themselves are equally indifferent and unstable and indeterminate,

and therefore neither our sense nor our opinions are either true or false. For this reason, we must not trust them. But be without opinions and without bias and without wavering, saying of every single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.

End quote. With these words, the ancient Greek philosopher Piro summarized an ancient philosophical skepticism, aiming to dismantle man's ability to truly know anything. Is the sky blue? Who can know?

The sky sometimes looks red or purple, or white. My eyes are unreliable. Another's eyes are equally so. And even if one uses his voice to affirm with me that the sky is blue, his voice and my ears are unreliable as well. The end of this thinking, though perhaps beyond Piro's own scope, is inevitable. How do I know that I exist? If I cannot know that my world is real, then I cannot know that I am real. Though his philosophy was not as widely accepted as other titans of antiquity, he did have his followers. And like Poison Levin, the skepticism worked its way through the lump of a Western man, prompting polemics and apologies for reality and sense reliability for men like Plato and his student Aristotle. In the early Christian tradition,

there was Augustine, who, in direct answer to the skepticism of his day, said the famous words, if I'm mistaken, I exist. A non-existent being cannot be mistaken, therefore I must exist if I am mistaken. In the Middle Ages, there was Aquinas who outlined the Christian way of knowing by building on much of Aristotle's work. Nature is reliable, even if we understand it wrong, and it proclaims a God who is not a deceiver, who's not capricious. The same God who made what is sensed made the senses, too, and he tells us he is not silent,

but tells us that those senses and what they sense ought to and do lead us to the ultimate truth that is himself. But I digress. Ultimately, pironic skepticism was influential, but was never a mainstream paradigm outside of the higher intellectual class. That was until the Renaissance and the various academic trends thereafter. In those days, men like Michel de Montaigne took up the mantle and continuously prompted their colleagues and opponents to answer the question, how do you know? Dreams feel real when you're in them. Animals perceive and interact with the world in ways obviously different from man.

A deluded man can firmly believe his delusions to be true. Intelligent and sober men can apprehend the same problem, work on it for their entire lives, and yet come to entirely different conclusions. How do we know that what we say is real is real? Enter then, René Descartes. Facing down his day's systemic skepticism, Descartes wished to reestablish the foundation of objective reality and existence of truth. And his method of reestablishment was nothing short of genius. Descartes said that whatever can be doubted must be doubted.

Whatever remains, whatever cannot be doubted, must be the cornerstone upon which man builds his epistemology or way of knowing. He grants the common deception of sensory data, We oftentimes see, smell, taste here and the like wrongly. Mountain tops appear smooth and gentle from far away, but up close, they're jagged and cruel. A stick partially submerged in water appears bent at an impossible angle. An admixture of wind and sound can convince one that he's hearing the voice of a person when no person is there. Next, Descartes turns to God. Can God be doubted?

Can his power and goodness and knowledge be doubted? If so, then let him and his attributes be doubted. What if there is no God? What if there is only human nature? Emerged as if by happenstance from a virtual nothingness. And what if that nature, by its very nature, walks in constant error? In light of these questions, these horrible and plaguing questions that even gave Descartes pause, he developed a final test by which he could challenge every ground of epistemology.

He called it the evil demon, or the evil genius or the malevolent God, but that's not very important. And he supposed the existence of this evil demon, whose sole job was to deceive Descartes and all of mankind in everything no matter what. All sensory perceptions are false. All mathematical and logical proofs are fabricated. Even the memories we have, all of them, both those we cherish and those we dread to recall,

are implanted in our minds and were not actual experiences in history. They didn't actually take place. In short, all of life, passes through the filter of the evil demon who gives us whatever it wants until we're helpless puppets bouncing on the end of an unknowable powers strings. Answering this was Descartes's greatest challenge. If some objective ground for reality could be found within this system of radical skepticism, that was the only ground upon which man must build his reality. And what is the objective thing that remains. Descartes turned the question over in his mind. With every idea, his doubt answered

with one of equal and opposite force. But then, who knows, perhaps recalling the words of Augustine, he realized something. He realized that he was thinking. In order to be deceived, he must be, and must be able to conceptualize the deception. Thus, at the end of his thought experiment, he intuits, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. Sometime later, he summarized the intuition with the famous phrase, Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am. With this, Descartes resolved skepticism, at least for himself. But his conclusion was not enough to undo the collateral damage of his own experiment. His evil demon took root in the minds of many, both in his day and the days that followed,

and it eventually metastasized into a cancer of radical skepticism. The result, for some, was ongoing and increasing skepticism of reality's fabric, existential dread, and a despairing of meaning and purpose and truth. For these unfortunate souls, the question remained, how do we know that our reality is real? For those unsatisfied with previous answers, the question lingered while mankind and his societies kept on with their normal evolution. And as technology advanced, providing the answers to some other important questions, it never seemed to answer this one. And so the doubt just didn't go away.

On the contrary, technology only made it more pressing. With the advent of the computer in its rapid ascent and use and dependence within human civilization, the doubt became a sort of panic. And this panic resulted in many of the supposedly wise, resigning themselves to an uncomfortable and inhuman conviction. If I cannot prove my existence, if I cannot prove my reality, then it must not be there. Updating Descartes' evil demon for the modern age, for it, of course, was the gold standard of skepticism. Philosophers Gilbert Harmon and Hillary Putnam introduced a new version of its same core idea. Suppose a mad scientist kidnaps a man, removes his brain from his body, places it in a vat of nourishing liquid, and hooks its neurons up to a computer program.

Suppose further that the program can control the perceptions of the brain via electrical impulses. In such a case, the mad scientist could simulate an entire reality, a whole life for this person, and assuming he wiped its previous memory, the brain would be none the wiser. This brain, fed commands by the computer, might think itself to be a full life. full man walking down the streets of New York City when in reality it's nothing more than the plaything of a lunatic in a lab. The man would no longer be a man living in the world. Instead, he would be just a brain living in a simulation, completely at the mercy of whoever was running the program. It's a fascinating idea despite its morbidity. What if we're all just ones and zeros of a higher intelligence, putting us through a simulation of life for the

amusement of the programmer. How would we know or not know? Are we men dreaming of life as brains and vats? Or are we brains and vats dreaming of being men? Ben, have you heard of the Jake Muller adventures? What's that? A Christian audio drama. Zombies, vampires, global conspiracies, and faith at the center. I was up all night on the edge of my seat. Is it fully immersive? Sound effects and cast and everything? Yes, full cast, cinematic sound. It's like you can hear the danger coming. Ooh, so kind of similar to Hanna Cosmos, but know your mom jokes and more drama? No mom jokes yet. But yeah, tons of drama. So it's kind of like your mom then? Not quite. Check it out at jakemulleradventures.com slash haunted for 10% off.

Most companies have a data crisis. Not from a lack of data, but from how that data is made. White Tree Solutions has recognized that data is often scattered across reports, systems, and the minds of employees. They figured out how to turn data into functional processes by connecting the systems that run your company. They then build AI models on top of those processes to assist the people at your company. Protect what your company knows. Call William at 952-209-9638 or visit WTSData.com. Kaleo Legends debut series, Chronicles of the Elohim, explores the divine beings referenced in scripture and mythology, framing their story within a biblical worldview. They're asking big questions.

If the gods are real and created by the one true God, what were their roles before their rebellion? What were the consequences of that rebellion? And what part does humanity play in the divine council? Chronicles of the Elohim is a line of premium action figures that takes a supernatural worldview and turns it into legendary collectibles kids' love and collectors display. Visit Caleo Legends. Toys and pre-order the Chronicles of Elohim Figures today. Are you ready to record Honocosmos? Yeah, for sure. Let me just grab my Gratotelo lip balm, my Gratotelo whipped balm for smooth,

moisturized skin, and also my Gratio... Why do you need all of that? Dude, I got to feel moist. I got to feel fresh for every episode. Otherwise, I'm not going to perform well. I guess it's a good thing then that Gratotel uses simple organic ingredients instead of synthetic fillers most skin care products use. I'm moisturized.

I'm moisturized. I'm thinking smooth. I'm thinking moist. I'm ready to tell some ghost stories. Visit gray toad tallow.com and use code Cosmos 15 for 15% off your order so you can tell spooky stories too. Hey everybody. Welcome to this episode, this very professional, very cool, calm, collected episode of Hanna Cosmos.

Buttoned up. My name is your host, Ben Garrett, and I'm joined by a man named my co-host, Brunswick. That's me. That's right. I'm so glad to be here. You know, this is. a typical haunted cosmos, like philosophically rigorous. We have exciting news, a new sponsor.

We have been sponsored by Dr. Pepper, strawberries and cream zero sugar. This is the fifth one I've had in a 40-minute period. Let me just say, Dr. Pepper, before you send us a cease and desist, consider it. Also, we spell Dr. Pepper, I-D-I-G-O, S-U-N-B-R-E-S-O-A-P. Hey, can we get Indigo sundries, but they make us something this chemicals that taste this good for no calories? Indigo Sundries.

We have a proposition. You've dominated the soap game. You have. Now it's time for you to get into zero sugar sodas. Household name. Here's the thing. This is one of the most delicious creations ever made by man. And whatever chemicals have gone into it, I approve of them.

I can't. John Moody, don't tweet it. I can't go with you there. It's close. The only reason is because I don't like, I don't like flavored sodas. I know. You like carbonated water. Hear me out.

Hear me out. Hear me out. Hear me out. Okay, I'm hearing you. I don't like the non-standard. You know, like Coke is great. How do I know that you are not just a figment of my imagination? You don't.

Arguing as a foil against my love. Like, this actually is a good argument that nothing is real. Because how can this be so full of strawberries and cream flavor? Like when Frot, when Sam was on Mountain Doom and when he was like, Mr. Frodo, do you remember the Shire? They'd be bringing in the straw bars and cream. This is what he was talking about. This is what he was talking about.

Actually, you should rethink your entire existence. You know when you're a kid and you're like, I can't wait to go to heaven. That is what he was talking about. Everything glitches out. I can't wait to go to heaven. Yeah. Pizza's going to be healthy. Oh.

I am living in a childhood fantasy where the child said, what if Sprite was healthy? And it is. And it's refreshing. It's a vegetable. It's basically a vegetable. It's a vegetable. Okay, guys, welcome back to Honest Cosmos. I am so excited for this episode.

Me too. This is a really fast. Because people keep saying like, Ben and Brian aren't serious professional philosophers. And we're going to show them that that is true. But they were right. But what we can do is popularize things. Hey, but we have fun.

People have been waiting. People have been saying since time in memoriam. Yeah. When is Hanna Cosmos going to? to talk about simulation they've all been asking for it you know well or do they even exist right in my simulation people have been asking my favorite thing about the simulation idea is that like that means that in the simulation for most of us like we live in a world where we have like invented and i know that this isn't it's not all like you've invented there could be other minds or like digital people

or whatever yeah for like just imagine if you were the brain and like i am simulating people who hate like hate my guts who think we're stupid and cringe And we're just like, you're not even real. It's like in the office. You're not real, man. Let me get this straight. In your wildest fit, you are in hell. And you co-manage.

And you co-manage a bed and breakfast with the devil. I haven't told you my salary. 80,000. 80,000. All right. Hey, guys, it's good to be. For real, simulation theory. Shout out indigo sundry soap.

Go pick up their soaps. They don't make zero calorie sodas, but you know what they do make? Zero calorie soap. Well, actually it's full of calories because this is like made with animal fat. Well, not animal fat. I think it's made with the fat not of an animal, but of a plant. Which honestly, no, they make tallosope now.

Yeah, they do. So it's definitely not zero calorie. It's zero calorie if you use it the way you're supposed to, which is not to eat it. You could, but you could. What more can I say? In a pinch, though, Indigo sundries could sustain your life. They could. So let's talk about radical skepticism.

are you a butterfly or are you a man? Your thoughts? I don't think that I'm a butterfly. I'm just going to come right out and say it. Cards on the table. I think that I'm a man. I think I might be butterfying. I think I'm not a simulation either.

I think that I'm a real person. Yeah. I think that you're a real person. Do you? Yeah. I'm actually, I'm a butterfly. And I don't. You got to let me fly.

Okay, so the reason, this episode's about simulation theory, but the thing is simulation theory finds its roots in much older ideas, namely systematic skepticism of thought. Radical skepticism. Radical epistemic skepticism. Yeah.

The opinion, you know, we talk about it with Piro, that you cannot trust anything that you see as actually there. Yeah. You know, and hey, and the idea is like, why not, right? Because you want to get to this base reality, this base level of truth and say that is the foundation upon which I build my entire epistemology, which is what René Ricard was trying to do. Yeah. And it actually does force you. to ask some uncomfortable questions. Yeah, I mean, it genuinely is difficult in a non-circular

and non-just merely self-referential way to prove things outside of your own mind. It genuinely is, so you have to, before you dismiss it as a crazy idea, you have to follow Descartes. You have to follow these older philosophers and reckon with the fact that this is actually a serious epistemological challenge,

epistemic challenge for man, to give some kind of grounding for his own reality or the reliability of his sense data or, or like, think about this, the reliability of your own thoughts. Because we know they're not perfectly reliable. We have seen and we have probably experienced the different points. Some people don't like Honda Cosmos. Yeah, like those people are unreliable as heck, you know, which reminds me, we have a comment to read.

Do you want, hey, we're going to talk some philosophy and then, because we need some meat. We'll take a break. Before you get to some, like a chocolate chip cookie, you got to eat your dinner. So before we go into the next story section, I'll read one of my favorite, it's not actually a review from the podcast, but it's a tweet. And it's, I love it. It may as well be your review. It's great. Yeah, it brings out some of my best qualities.

Offered up in good faith, I'm going to choose to assume. Yeah. I'm a big fan of Descartes. Really? Yeah. What do you like about it? Not because I agree with a lot of what he says. Yeah.

But because I respect the game. I respect what this man was trying to do. He was a Western philosopher of the Western philosophic tradition. He was a Christian man. Yep. And he was trying to interact with ideas in his day and basically provide an apology for traditional Western realism, so to speak, or like epistemic reliability. That if he had been maybe more successful or more convincing, I don't know. Could have helped answer for the rationalism that came in.

then the Enlightenment and then the skepticism that came about from there. So I really do like Descartes. I think he's cool. I think a lot of people give him a bad rap because he comes off. If all you know is I think therefore I am with Descartes, then he can come off as very individualistic. But that's not what he was trying to do. He was trying to find some objective base reality that he could point to.

But this is something that comes up a lot in Descartes's other writings. Is this constant reference back to an a priori understanding of being? where he's basically operating under this very, I think, human paradigm that if I have a thought, my thought presupposes some kind of existence. And that existence points to being that I am, that I have agency, that I live a real life. And if I don't have that basic first principle of being that's guiding all of my thought, which for Descartes and for us ultimately flows from, of course, the being, the pure being of God, then I can't function. I may as well not exist and you lose purpose and things like that.

So even for Descartes, though, the thing that a lot of people run into is that you can say all that. And you can even have a simulation theorist that's like, sure, yeah, okay. Like I constantly am in an unspoken way referencing back to an operative. priority understanding of being that I have. But what if my being is programmed in a simulation? Right. My reference to being is just ones and zeros. And so eventually, you have to just admit, like, if you're going to insist on saying that, or a lot of people admit, if you're going to insist on saying that, there's basically nothing that I can say to you to convince you otherwise. And it almost becomes a matter of, or an article of faith for these simulation theorists.

In 2023, Indigo Sundries became one of our sponsors. At the time, their business was little more than a side hobby generating a couple hundred dollars a month. But because of their partnership with us and because all of you chose to support them, they've grown enough to make it their full-time livelihood. This is what happens when Christians support Christians. Our communities are strengthened and faithful businesses thrive. So if you're a Christian business owner who wants to reach thousands of like-minded people and grow your company, we'd love to partner with you. Email us at advertising at newchristendompress.com. Yeah, there was, I'm pulling some of this from my memory of,

from preparation than I did before. I had a crazy invitation like, how about two years ago? Maybe two years ago. Kind of out of left field on a Monday morning, a producer from Tim Poole's show, big, big conservative commentator. He did this thing called the Civil War where he'd bring two opposing ideas, basically onto a show and they'd have a free,

free for all kind of argument about a subject. And he wanted to talk about simulation theory, but also AI safety and whether like AGI was going to come in or like destroy humanity. Yeah, destroy humanity. And so it was, they had a guest fall through and they, and someone else had recommended,

you should talk to Pastor Brian Savay, which is, this is real, I was like, okay, cool, whatever. And I said yes. And then it was a guy who believed that AI was going to kill all of us. Okay.

And then Tim Pool. And then also, what's his friends? He was like, basically a hippie. I don't remember. And if you listen to Tim Pool lot, you know who I'm talking about.

He's like a hippie. Long hair, long hair, said some crazy stuff. And that episode, I think, is on Rumble or whatever, but it was,

so I prepared for it. I had like three, four days to prepare, I'm trying to read up on AI, AI safety, simulation theory, and some of this is still rattling around. I might get a few details wrong,

but there was an interesting idea that I ran across in my preparation that I had heard about in philosophy classes in high school, or not in high school, my college philosophy classes from Dr. Fudge, who is the actual name of my philosophy professor.

Shout out. Dr. Fudge, if you're listening, you had no idea how high I could fly. Here I am. We used to argue about like Christian theism in class all the time. Anyway, so there's George Barkley, who is a famous philosopher, 20th century.

he had an idea called Barclan, or I think they call it Barclay is how it's pronounced. It's spelled like Berkeley, but it's Barclan idealism. And I might be getting this wrong again. This is not, I'm a layman on this stuff. But his idea was that, you know, he's famous for this saying,

all that exists are minds and their ideas. So it's in a stream of some of this conversation. But then he theorized, if I'm getting it right, that the, whole, all of creation is essentially a simulation and it doesn't exist when it's not observed. However, it always exists, like not that it's eternal, but that it exists and continues to exist moment by moment because God is the ultimate observer who observes all things are under his gaze at all times. And so he sustains their being by observing them. And so in a sense, we

are a simulation of the mind of God. Okay. And I was like, deep. And I don't know where this fits. It's kind of, isn't that just like classical theism light? Yeah, it's like a very, you know, you get into some of these, and I think he was pretty sure he was some kind of Christian, but you get into some of the, maybe not, I could be wrong about that.

But you get into, in fact, that might actually be a Christian synthesis of some of his ideas. But you get into this world of radical skepticism, and it is actually really. really unmooring and you could see how people could get into it and then like freak out. Yeah. It gives people an existential crisis in the purest sense of the word existential. It questions your existence. And it does, at the end of the day, because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, speedy. Speedy.

They don't believe we exist. They don't believe in us. They don't believe in us. They don't believe in us. In themselves. They don't believe in the reliability of sense. Speedy. Speedy, they don't believe. They don't believe that they're hearing me say,

Speedy, they don't believe enough. Speedy, this whole podcast is part of the simulation. Dude, this review that you're going to read. This is a huge, vindicated. Speedy, this is a huge waste of RAM on some alien computer. That's right. Speedy, these people, they like dumb things. Okay.

What was I going to say? I, literally, you're welcome. You're welcome. have no, you were talking about, oh, this is what it made me think of. Barkley and Idealism, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff. And like how God is the ultimate observer. Yeah.

And if he were to stop observing, everything would cease to exist. Yeah, I mean. Okay, well, here's the thing. To a degree, it may be like, it depends on what you mean by observe. Yeah. But it's in his light that we see light. If God were, he upholds,

if he were to stop sustaining, he upholds at all. Yes, there would be nothing. There would be nothing. It's nothing. But I, he has nothing. It's nothing. But hold on.

But I do think it undersells the reality of creation. I think it undersells the, yeah, the meaning. Yes. The stakes of creation. And it doesn't do this intrinsically, but it can tend to in the way people think about it. That can make it seem as if the universe is a figment of divine imagination. But God makes it clear that creation is a thing. And it's a thing separate from God.

Yes. There is a distinction in being. For example, God is spirit. And he tells us that creation is not that. Yeah. Physical. It has materials. And in a really, in a very real sense, like citing Psalm 19 where the heavens declare the glory of God,

we are actually supposed to be the observers of creation to be overwhelmed with awe at what God is doing in creation. So it's a real thing. But what it made me think of. Yeah. was in family worship, we've been going through stories in Genesis. So you get like, you know, the primordial saints, as I like to call them. Such a good. Such a good title.

And one of the things that God says is, or, you know, in his word is like, God remembered Noah. God remembered Abraham. Yeah. He remembered his promise. He remembered. Yeah. So there is a very real sense in which, like, if God were to, quote, unquote, forget, you or the world, it would be, it would be gone. Be catastrophic.

But it's not because we only exist as a. a memory or a construct in God's mind. There is actual existence that is derived from the being of God. Yeah. But that has being. It has existence. Let me just, let me blow your mind real quick.

I'm just kidding. I think it'd be helpful to just, I'm going to lay out like a really basic epistemology. The Christian view of these things. Yeah. In brief. I was going to do that with like, there's Van Til,

there's, you know, classical theater. There's lots of different streams. But basically the Christian view is that fundamentally, these other theories have it wrong. Because they're actually trying to reason from this self-referential human view instead of by faith, believing that God tells the truth when he speaks, but not just in the book of scripture, but also in the book of nature. So God is not capricious. He doesn't make us where we're in this world or where the senses correspond to the physical world.

and that they just fundamentally lie to us. But he actually made human beings with the capacity to know things, with the capacity to observe and deduce. And yeah, we do it imperfectly. And especially since the fall, our whole selves are corrupted. Every part of what it means to be a human is corrupted. But that doesn't mean, even for fallen man, that every intuition and thought that he has is incorrect.

Every deduction is incorrect. Even fallen man can invent great inventions and discover truths about the, The universe. Even fallen man can participate in accurate natural theology. Yeah, exactly. And this is, I know some Vantilians are like, ah, true justified belief. And they're not always down with everything we say. And I think that they have some really good emphases that exist in other philosophical traditions, I think. But, you know, stuff like the preconditions of intelligibility. I think that's a good point that they harp on a lot, that the Vantilian stream,

because it really is true that there are certain preconditions that you cannot prove by reason and that you cannot prove by scientific investigation even that they are valid. Yeah. But yet must be valid for reason and for scientific inquiry to work. Things like the past is like the future.

Yeah. Part of the thought experiment of the evil demon and different variations of it or the brain and the vat. I've heard this and even Dr. Fudge, this was one of the ways he described it in the class when we were talking about, Descartes and some of these ideas is that, you know, there could be an evil demon that invented all the thoughts in your brain five seconds ago. And they're all fake. You know, not even just

warped, but completely fake and made up. And everything began to exist five seconds ago. So how can you disprove? You actually can't. You disprove that. Yeah. So the one precondition of intelligibility is that the past is like the future, that our sense data is correct. that the laws of logic and reason apply everywhere through all time, that the laws of physics apply. Can you prove that the laws of physics in a distant galaxy are the same as they are here? You actually can't. Not empirically.

And you're assuming that they do on the basis of your observation of 0.000,000, a bunch of zeros 1% of all available data in the universe, which is what we can observe from the Earth, which is not a lot by volume. So the Vantilians are right to point out that, wow, like we actually have to take a lot of these things by faith in order to even use them. Yeah. Reason, scientific inquiry. And because of that, there are very real limitations to our knowledge.

These are all good Christian insights that I think this conversation can draw out in ways that actually increase our faith rather than decrease it. Because the thing you discover is that the only transcendental ground that works for these preconditions is a divine, eternal, all powerful, all knowing. Like, it is God. Again, this is how the, this is how the classical theist that we get, you know, Aquinas talks about this. Like, what is Aquinas' ground of epistemology? Well, it's an a priori, I exist. Yeah. And it's an a priori understanding that if I exist, something had to cause me because I'm not self-existent because I would know that.

And so then you get the cosmological cause and effect. And then there's the ultimate cause. It's the unmoved mover. And then it's like combined with this ontological idea of like what's the greatest thing that could be conceived of? Well, it's God. And is it better? Is it greater to exist in my thought or in reality? Well, in reality.

And so God exists. And then there's these attributes that you can learn about him from creation. And then so Aquinas starts there, reasons back to God, and then reasons back forward and says, and if that's true, and since that's true, God is not capricious. And I am able to look at creation and learn true things. And what you're discovering is the consistency, the harmony between the creature and the duty he was created for. The way that I've actually thought about this a lot recently, just because of some other books that I'm reading on my own, kind of on my own time. But I think there's a reason why people have such a hard time with the simulation thing

and really poking at the foundations of epistemology and existence. And it's because at some level, to your point, it will either give you an existential crisis where you utterly lose true faith or it'll increase your faith. It's kind of like a question or an idea that creation is not really allowed to actually. actually ask. It's like you can ask it, you know, but it's kind of perilous to ask it. And if you don't ask it and then realize immediately the ridiculous nature of the question itself, yeah, you're probably going to just go, you're probably, it's going to lead to death. Yeah, it can lead to madness. Yeah, like an existential death. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think this really naturally

brings us into the review. Of course, yeah. That was a lot. Let me, let me pull it up here. 1,000. And you know what, while you're doing that, yeah, go ahead. Let me just speak to the people and say, I'm going to go in flow state, hit me up, bro, mate, when are we going to go? This is unbelievable good. To get a book, order killing lust today. Hey, when this comes out, will there be pre-orders for Longhouse? For Longhouse. Oh, yeah.

I'm going to tie it to this. All right. Don't worry, guys. I will let you cook. So here's, this isn't a review. We try to pick out one review we really, we really enjoyed. Typically, they're negative and something about how. racist we are. And the thing is, like, I'm actually, again, we're honoring Japanese culture when

we imitate their accent. We are because they are one of the coolest, especially if you say a culture that hasn't yet been reached by Christianity effectively. And yet, like, game recognized game, go ahead. Suzuki. Exactly. That was honoring. Yeah, exactly. That was honoring. So this was a, this was a tweet we received and we take all these very seriously said, I'm torn on continuing to support Hanna Cosmos. I love it and use it for homeschooling sometimes. But I'm financially supporting Brian having time to tweet about how the downfall of everything is women. He probably wouldn't want this woman's money then. And I would say sincerely, like you don't, you, you don't have to, if you don't like that we constantly point out

that women need to calm down, that is fine, totally acceptable. I get it. But we're insufferable. You should probably calm down. But also like you seem emotional. And I just wanted to say, that you probably should calm down though. Yeah. And I think that sorted it. Yeah. Thank you. No, no.

But in all seriousness, no, where are these tweets, we got haunted cosmos listeners. We tell people this all the time. We're wildly right wing. Like, you just got to understand this about us. Like, we're so right wing that a lot of haunted cosmos listeners, when they discover how right wing we are from like Googling us at another point, they're like, oh, oh, no. Yeah.

I thought it was all just silly your mom jokes. And then it turns out that they like think a lot of people need to go back. Yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah. But where all the tweets came from, in my defense, I've been co-writing with another one of my compatriots, Eric Kahn, a book on the Longhouse, History of Feminism, how feminism, how feminism, how muched, how feminism, and I've been thinking a lot about the effects of feminism. And I do just want to say, look, I love women. we joke about women because we actually have such a high affection for them and think that a woman being a woman is a glorious thing.

And we just don't want women to do civilizational destroying stuff that has borne terrible fruit. And a lot of men, like men are up to stuff too. Men like consider yourself on notice. I just want to say men, it's official. You're on notice. You're on notice. had to write a whole book and be like, hey, you know what you've been doing. Stop it. That's true. Google it. There's a lot of the Longhouse, you know, speaking of the Freemasons.

Yeah. Speaking of the Freemasons. Yeah. Dude, so true. The French, French Revolution. 100%. And like, enlightened and Mary Wollstonecraft. So much of the Longhouse reminds me of, of the of the Freemasons. Yeah. We're, you know, in some sense, I think a lot of ladies are in it. A lot of guys are in it. Yeah. They don't even know. And even if, even if they do know, they kind of think like, yeah, but we're just like, isn't it good for a woman to vote? No. And we're like, here's the thing. No.

Like, in fact, women, like, if you stacked up, like, Stalin, Mao, all of the great genocides of history, in fact, if you stacked up everybody we know who was killed in war. There's one that you left out. And then, yeah, Hitler, you stack them all up. You stack them up, Ben. Pol Pot. Pol Pot's maybe the worst. And women have killed more of their own babies through abortion than all the people killed in war in history.

Yeah. So when I say that we probably, that like society up until the 20th century was like maybe we shouldn't give them the vote, they were so real for that. Yeah. And also, I stand by it. Yeah. So look, like, I get it. If this just ends up being Hanna Cosmos is like for the boys. That's fine.

That's fine. Isn't that? Yeah, I mean. Look, ladies, you're welcome to stick along for the ride. We have a good time. Here's the thing. Ladies, we love you. We just want you to be happy.

Yeah. And you're not happy when you think that you're a man and can do everything a man can do. In the same way, I would not be happy. If I thought and behaved as if I could actually be or do what a woman can do. So the boys, we need five-star reviews from the boys because women are about to give us all one-star. 100%. Like, we need the boys to come through right now. And like, what was me?

Because it's, it's, it's because we love them so much that we have to say these things. Yeah. I actually do. I do. I also do mean that. So with that completely unconnected rabbit trail, it's time to now get from the philosoph, we've shown the providence of the ancient philosophical question man has been wrestling with, with respect to his own existence and the existence of reality.

Hey, I'll throw a bone to the ladies. Ready? Yeah. Hey, this whole, like, philosophy, male dominated always has been. All right. This simulation theory stuff, bad idea. That's our bad.

That's exactly. That's our fault. And you know that Descartes came home. He's like, I don't even know if I exist. And his wife was like, I was going to make her German. I'm not even going to try. His wife was like, okay, honey, dinner's ready. So like, it's going to get cold.

You got to come to the table. Yeah. Because the dinner is real. Can I pour you a beer? Yeah, like, which is also real. But you need to. Like, she would never have come up with this. I know.

This is only something that the guys could come up with talking to each other. They're like pacing around wildly smoking a cigarette. I don't even think we exist. And the ladies are like, what the heck is happening to these guys? Why do you have time to think that? Stop. So, man, so shout out to the ladies. Shout out to the ladies.

Shout out to the ladies for that. You wouldn't have did it. Tell us, take us there. I'm going to talk about it. We're going to talk about the flip and trilemma. The Chinese Room Experiment in Boston Trilemma. Lemma. Imagine a man sitting in a closed room. Once inside and once the room is closed, the man is completely sealed off from the outside world, with the exception of a small crack

under the door through which papers may be slid. Even so, he can neither see nor hear anything at all beyond the walls of the room. The man speaks only English. He has no exposure to any other language, at least not in any formal educational setting. Besides him, the only other things in his room are a stack of papers, a pen, and an enormous book written in English consisting of rules detailing how he ought to respond to any combination of Chinese characters. The rules are refreshing in their simplicity. If you see this Chinese character followed by that one, write this other character in reply. Suddenly, the man sees a piece of paper slide into the room through the crack under the door. It's covered with Chinese writing. He picks it up and flips through the rulebook until

he determines how he is supposed to respond. Then he writes the appropriate response on one of his own sheets of paper and slides it back through the door. This pattern continues. A new paper with new characters, the man consults the rulebook and writes the right response, and then he slides that response back out. To the Chinese speakers outside the room, the answers are perfect. They are exactly what would be expected from another Chinese speaker. Thus they conclude that the man in the the room, whoever he is, is certainly fluent in Chinese. But of course, the man inside has no understanding of Chinese whatsoever. He speaks only English. He's simply following his book of rules. He has no actual grasp of the meaning of anything given to him or anything he gives back.

What you just heard is known as the Chinese Room Experiment. It was developed in 1980 by American philosopher John Searle as a means of refuting what he calls the strong AI high hypothesis. The hypothesis states that a properly programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs can be said to have a mind in exactly the same sense that human beings have minds. It's a conclusion that presupposes philosophies reducing human cognition to high-level information processing and nothing more. Since such data processing can be replicated in machines, certain machines can be said to possess true understanding. In his Chinese room, Searle sought to show that such a system possesses no true mental state because it possesses

no actual understanding. It can manipulate symbols and other constituent parts of language in order to produce an acceptable response, but it fails to grasp or achieve any actual or independent meaning. And at the highest and truest level of intentional human communication, the Chinese room remains passive. It's just an automaton. Despite being fairly limited in scope as a refugee, of strong AI, the implication of Searle's experiment immediately trickled over into the philosophy of the mind. It clearly touches on issues related to functionalist and mechanistic views of human cognition and consciousness, as I already said. Thus, in trying to speak about so-called artificial intelligence, Searle actually produced one of the most discussed philosophical arguments about the mind in general. Over time, the discourse found Searle having to defend his conclusions.

conclusions. The philosophers opposed to him were insistent that the Chinese room didn't adequately dismantle their position. To such philosophers, Searle had only succeeded in highlighting the importance of their hypothesis, that the right combination of instruments is capable of producing conscious meeting. As technology continued to advance and the seemingly unrestricted potential of computers became apparent, philosophers began to see these questions as tangled in the web of that advancement and potential. The question for some shifted slightly. It was no longer do I exist and how can I know, but rather how do I exist? The difference is subtle, but in the context of the new millennium, it carried immense profundity. While cyber profits told the world about the coming

capabilities of AI, how machines would think and reason and create in the same way we do, philosophers postulated a dizzying question in response. If human society, is nearing the capability of manufacturing machines that truly possess sentience, might it be possible that some higher or older society has already done this and is now using such a machine to simulate the evolutionary path that led to its own development? If a computer can achieve consciousness, who is to say that I am not a product of some merely computational consciousness? Again, the question became, how do I exist?

in what way do I exist, as one in a budgeting society nearly capable of true machine intelligence, or as one in a simulation that such a machine is running for a higher society that already exists. If humanity is going to become capable of running simulations containing true sentience, assuming true sentience is purely computational, then how can we be confident that we ourselves are not simulations of true sentience? This is precisely the type of thinking Searle was attempting to correct with his Chinese room, but it didn't satisfy everyone. And once Pandor's boxes opened, you can't close it.

If we could simulate the realities of others, namely simulations, then we ourselves could inhabit someone else's simulated reality as simulations. These ideas and questions and presumptions and many others like them eventually led Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom to posit a trilemma. A trilemma is a difficult choice between three opposed options that's now known as the formalization of the simulation hypothesis. The argument begins by stating three possibilities. One, the fraction of human-level civilizations capable of running true consciousness simulations is very close to zero. Two, the fraction of otherwise capable simulations interested in running true consciousness simulations is very close to zero.

Or three, the fraction of all people having experiences like ours who are living in a simulation is very close to one. Bostrom then concludes that one of these propositions has to be true to the exclusion of the others. If it's true that no civilization ever achieves the ability to run consciousness simulations, then we are not living in a simulation. If it's true that any civilization advanced enough to do such a thing would, for whatever reason, choose not to, then we are not living in a simulation. But if neither of those things is true, then the likelihood that each of us is actually living a simulated life becomes exponentially high. Why? Because a single civilization capable of running such simulations

would presumably run multiple, perhaps countless such simulations, so that any consciousness you pick out is more likely to be simulated than true. Here at Haunted Cosmos, we talk about a world that isn't just stuff, but if the unseen world is real, it should change how we live in the visible one,

especially as husbands and fathers. That's why we're excited to partner with Memento. Memento helps men build disciplined lives through daily devotions, structured scripture reading, seasonal spiritual disciplines, and tools to track participation and progress, alongside a growing brotherhood of men pursuing the exact same thing.

Go to Memento 70.70.com to join thousands of Christian men and get 10% off in annual membership. Do you want a six-pack? No, I don't mean abs and I don't mean beer. Now, I'm talking about the six-pack you really want, a six-pack of masculine-smelling bars of soap from Indigo-Sundry soap company.

And if you're buying masculine soap, then we all know your beard needs some grooming too. And that's why they sell a beard care bundle with beard oil, balm, and mustache wax. Get the soap and the beard bundle at Endigosundrysoap.com and subscribe for 10% off your order. You must begin a perilous journey to find treasure in the mountains. Along the way, be weary of demons, vampires, and ghosts. They will lead you astray and corrupt the wealth you seek. You'll be assigned a personal guide, stone crop, wealth advisors.

They will help you find the treasure and fight against the corruption. Are you acting like you're in a movie trailer again? This is supposed to be a simple ad to tell people to use Stonecropped Wealth Advisors to invest in faith-based portfolios instead of pagan companies. Visit Stonecroppadvisors.com slash Hawned Crosmos to get the demons out of your portfolio outfactory services offer through Stonecroft Wethers L.C. A registered advisor with the U.S. Security Exchange. Does your outdated website give your visitors sleep paralysis?

What? Is that a thing? Are you haunted by that logo your uncle's pet werewolf made? Brian, what are you talking about? If you're ready to level up your brand and website, you need to talk to Josh at Valenti Creative. What's up, guys? Josh, my guy. What the heck?

How did you just appear? Head to valentecreative.com slash NCP to talk with Josh about your brand and website. Oh, oh, this is an ad that we're doing right now? Wait, wait, how did he teleport into this room? Ben, I wish I could tell you, but this is an ad. You have to go to valentec creative.com slash NCP and reach out today. So, Ben, for those who are not PhDs in philosophy like you and I, of course, are, not. Can you just explain to us the nature of the theory?

Because this is slightly different from the evil demon, but it is, it's not actually that different. It's categorically similar. It's built on similar thinking. Yeah. Before I do, I do just want to admit, one of my life goals is to get an honorary PhD. and I don't care what. For anything. From some institution.

So if any institution is low brow enough to offer that. Yes. First of all, it's a package deal. If Ben gets one, I want one too. But think about how cool that would be to say, I got an honorary. And I wouldn't ever explain them. None is an honorary.

Like, I wouldn't give the caveat. I'd immediately put doctor in front of my name. It'd be the opposite of Dr. Stephen Wolfe, who doesn't like it. And people call him doctor. I would insist upon it. Stephen Wolf PhD. I'd be like, oh, I'm sorry.

That's Dr. Brian's something. Isn't it an honorary? It'd be in like female studies or something as a future. How great. Columbia University, I accept. Okay. Nick Bostrom's formal... Trilemma.

Formal trilemma. So the trilemma, we described it in the reading, but, you know, it's basically, there's three propositions, and only one of them can be true at the exclusion of the others. Legitly. And Nick Bostrom is saying,

and he's kind of like basing all of this on a functionalist and mechanistic view of the, human brain, he's assuming that that is true. Yeah, which... I don't know if he believes it, but he's assuming that's true. That is a big assumption. But he's saying, if that's true, then one of three things has to be true.

Either no civilization is ever capable of creating... He calls it ancestor simulations, which is... And I'll talk about that in a minute, but it's basically like a simulation of your own history leading up to that moment. Either that can never happen. It has never happened. or it has happened and that advanced civilization

just doesn't want to create any... They could... But they're not in any way. But they don't want to for some reason. Or some civilization or multiple civilizations has reached that point and they've began creating ancestor simulations.

In which case, the odds of you and me being a simulation in that simulation are almost 100%. Because their reasoning is that if you're running these simulations, there's a couple reasons you would. One of them would be to see how history might have unfolded given a different

tweak of a variable. Like let's say that World War I didn't start. Yeah. So what would have happened if you tweak the variables and you're like, okay, but there's not a real value of doing one simulation like that. Right. But it would want to do like a thousand or 10,000 or a million. Yeah. And it's also, if a civilization had that, you could have like derivative simulations. where the simulated civilization also reaches that capability, and they start doing it too. And they do their own simulations. And so now you have simulation.

It's like inception. Thank you. Yeah. Of simulation. The reason, part of the reason why he says a, like an ancestor sim, is because if you do a simulation based on beings that are like yourself and you have sentience, then your simulation has to include simulated people with their own form of

sentience within the simulation. So that's kind of why he has to assume that. And some other types of ancestor simulations in this materialist worldview would also be evolutionary. Yeah. You know, could we simulate different evolutionary pathways or things like that? And so, like, there is a type of logic to this. Yeah.

One of the problems that I have with it, one of the problems I have. Layed on me. Is that Bostrom's ideas basically take, you know, within this simulation, universe that we probabilistically live in, you take the physics of the, you know, of this simulated universe, the simulated history of computing, and then our simulated observations

of this simulated universe. And we within this simulation come up with this trilemma. But the problem is that those premises are themselves, given those preconditions, the outputs of that simulated world. Yeah. And so it's, but you can't use simulate.

physics and simulated history and simulated observations of a simulated universe to therefore conclude that you're in a simulated universe. You're just doing a self-referential circular type of thing. It's still a circular thing. You're cutting the branch off of that you're sitting on. That's actually why we started that section with the Chinese room experience. Exactly. As a way to show people how you actually ought to interact with this idea that human meaning,

intent and understanding is based on purely functional or mechanistic things. Because this is a different, like there's multiple ways of attacking simulation theory. One of them is what I just did, which is to say that you couldn't have knowledge

that you could lay out in premises like that that would even be reliable in the first place. Another one would be to say that digitally simulated consciousness is not actually consciousness, which is what you're, the Searle's. That's what Searle is saying. You actually,

like you're calling it, what they're saying is what the functionalist and mechanists are saying is actually a little bit semantically sneaky. They're saying that the Chinese room actually does have consciousness and understanding as far as we can see. And so in every way that we understand meaning and consciousness, it has that. And Searle is saying, yeah, but if you go inside the room, you see that it actually doesn't. And you as a human being have to be willing to admit that there is something more that you have. And it's not just input and output. It actually is independent, like agent meaning that you're importing into things.

So if you, if listeners would like to hear a lot more philosophical depth, critical philosophical depth from a Christian on this subject, there's a YouTuber. I mean, that's so derogatory. I was just like he's a YouTuber. Yeah. But his name's Parker Setakase. Parker's Ponce is his pensies, if you're like,

Z American, then he does a lot of interviews with philosophers of mind and of AI. He is also very, I actually don't know what his credentials are. I can't remember off the top of my head, but Parker does a lot of work in this field. I've talked to him, even before I went on Tim Poole, I messaged him like, hey, bro, I've got four days.

They should have called you, but they called me. Can you, you know, help me out. Download it into my simulated mind. Yeah, like, downloaded it in my simulated prefrontal. vortex because they don't believe in us and they probably shouldn't. But he's great. He has a lot there. You could go, he even has a couple really fascinating videos where there is, and I can't remember his name, it's either a philosopher or a philosopher who also has experience in AI who developed an argument for the existence of God from AI.

It's really interesting. And one of them has to do with the gap between even artificial intelligence and our own consciousness. And like everything that is, because there is a gap, and it's quite a large gap. So for me, there's two, I would want the listener to understand that, A, don't be fooled by large language models

and by artificial intelligence into thinking that you are interacting with a consciousness. Yeah, you're not. It's not actual intelligence. So number one, because you're not. You're actually not. And to think you are, you have to reduce human consciousness

down to something, far beneath what it is. This is part of why, so A, it's an interesting topic, but this is also part of why it is relevant to the Haunted Cosmos project is because in order to accept that AI is intelligent consciousness or could be,

you have to accept a materialistic view of all things, and you have to tacitly, at least, accept the functionalist and mechanistic view of consciousness and thought and understanding. As we've said before on this show, I think, we don't view the brain as the mind or even the mind as an epiphenomenon or just a network effect of the brain.

Yeah. Where the mind is just this thing that arises as a consequence of the electrical firing of neurons and the physical capacities of the brain as a structure. Sorry, go ahead. But rather the mind is related to the reasoning and thinking of a human, of a person.

But the mind is more, the illustration I've always used is that the mind is more like an instrument that the consciousness plays. Yeah. And so if you damage the brain, it absolutely does affect the working of the mind, at least in how it can express itself in this body. But in the same way, I would say that if you damage a guitar, a guitar player can't play the same type of music on the instrument, you've damaged the instrument he's playing. It's an imperfect metaphor, but I think it goes at least some of the way to helping us understand what is really complicated. Yeah.

And on some level, beyond our finding out, because it is beyond the, it is beyond the scope of something like science. Science actually cannot investigate the immaterial mind directly. Because science is an empirical art. Yes. And empirical art requires observation,

which also, by the way, assumes that observation can give you reliable data. And so it has to be falsifiable. and if something is not falsifiable, it can't be empirically studied. And science itself, the scientific method and process itself cannot investigate and validate itself.

Yeah, it can't justify itself. You can't investigate scientifically the preconditions required for science to happen. That they're valid. You actually have to just take them as assumptions. As a first principle. So their first principle type of issues.

So that's the first thing I would want a haunted Cosmos listener to take away. Usually they take away like your mom jokes. Today I want them to take away, and I do want them to take away that. but also that AI is not consciousness. And it can never be. It can't.

And that is also really important. If you accept the mechanistic view of the mind, then you have to accept the singularity hypothesis of technology and AI eventually getting to the point where it does gain consciousness and then vastly, you know, at a rapid rate, evolves past humanity and becomes our overlord. That's almost an in inescapable concept

if you accept that first principle, which is a first principle. But the way that you even see this in Scripture, like scripture talks about the heart as well as the brain. And it's not doing that because it was written by ancient people who didn't understand consciousness or anything like that. It's using analogous language to help us understand that it's not just this. It's not just what you can see.

It's not even just what you can see if you dissect the body and the skull. We would say that the brain is the organ that does serve, as a bridge between the mind and the body in various real senses. But there is that added layer of consciousness, heart, soul, and all of those things actually transcend the mere brain. It's one of the most insurmountable problems for the materialist, not just abiogenesis, how can life arise from non-life? But how can consciousness arise from matter?

From non-consciousness. How can an atom be about anything? How can it have intentionality? How can an atom know something? How can an Adam string together a sentence that results in a truth claim or even an opinion that corresponds to actual reality? It's just these are very, very difficult questions for the materialist to answer. The Christian, it's not difficult. Yeah.

Because we know a God who is a mind and is conscious and he is actually eternally conscious and like a perfect mind. Yeah. So I don't want to like import a belief that Nick Bostrom doesn't actually hold to. but I think that he is a functionalist when it comes to consciousness. I don't know for sure. But even if he is or not, it's important to understand

that his simulation hypothesis trilemma assumes that. And so he's not actually saying we live in a simulation. That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is given that framework, one of these three things has to be true. Now, given that framework

that his premises rely on, sure. It's an effective trilemma. If I were to go step into it and take some of those assumptions, one that I would still critique and maybe even land still on the side that we're not likely in a simulation is I think it vastly

overestimates the likelihood of life arising from non-life and becoming conscious again. Like you still have to face the problem of abiogenesis and the origin of consciousness from mere matter. And it just assumes, and evolutionists and materialists often do this.

They're like, oh, the universe is, it's so big and it's so vast. Therefore, like, oh, it's probably teeming with life because all you need is a, obviously, like, life arises from non-life all the time. Unfortunately, that is a hypothesis that has never been demonstrated, been attempted from a million different angles, and has currently absolutely no viable explanation from, the cutting edge of evolutionary biology. They simply don't have an answer for it.

And if you say that to a professor at the university in your evolutionary biology class or something, they'd be like, no, no, there's all these theories and they'll act much more confident than they talk like when they're all together when the students aren't there. When they're at their symposiums and at their conferences, they all admit like, hey, and you could read a book

like The Return of the God hypothesis or Darwin's doubt from an old earth guy, who I don't even agree with on a lot of stuff, I can't remember his name off the top of my head. Is he the Italian guy? Stephen Meyer. Oh, no. Not the Italian guy. But he, evolutionary biologists don't even have an answer to the Cambrian explosion.

They don't even have an answer for the combinatorial problem of creating a single protein fold that would work from random genetic mutation and chance. Like they just don't have answers to these things. And the more we know about them, the more insanely difficult to solve, they become not less. And the thing is, we're not just talking about an empirical attempt at finding these things. It's also in the realm of theory. The mathematical theoretical. Yeah. Even purely in the art of philosophy, as it's now understood in the modern day, they cannot

give you two premises and then form a syllogism that is inescapably true, given the two premises, unless those premises assume things that are indemonstrable. Yeah. And think about this from the two. You get two types of arguments. You have an inductive argument and a deductive argument. In a deductive argument, if the premises are true and it's valid and sound, then the conclusion follows necessarily in a logically ironclad way from the premises.

Inductive. Here's an example. Yeah. This is a deductive syllogism that is a really good example. Men are mortal. Men die. Socrates was a man. Socrates was mortal.

that is a deductive syllogistic argument that is sound and that coheres. And you could have method of affirming, method of denying, modus tollens, modus ponens, these forms of arguments that people have investigated. Okay, an inductive argument is more probabilistic. The conclusion follows, you know, with greater varying degrees of probability from the premises. Within the simulation theory, the problem is any deductive or inductive argument that we attempt to form cannot definitionally tell us anything about the nature of true reality.

It can only tell us about the nature of the programming of that simulation. So what we're trying to do is bootstrap our way philosophically from within that simulation to the world above it. And you can't do that. The way that they do that

or the way that they try to get around that is by doing the ancestor thing. By assuming that a higher simulation must be likened to the simulator. So they programmed it the same. And that is just something that they say. Yeah. It can't be falsified and it can't be demonstrated.

So it's not scientific. No. It can't be scientific. And it's, you know, when we, I'm not going to keep going down this rabbit show because I realize a lot of Honest Cosmos listeners are like, dang, but what about, like, what if there are demon chipmunks running around Ohio? I know. I'm trying to kidnap people to take them to the lepricon layers.

We'll get back to that probably next time. We won't get back to it next time. Our next episode is going to be a fliven banger, though. Yeah, it is. You're not going to want to miss it. Dude, you are not going to want to miss that. There's going to be a lot of Russian action. And the thing is, like, if we're in a simulation, then there is a universe probably where the next episode of Haunted Cosmos is about demon chipmunks in Ohio kidnapping people for leprechaun

because they've run so many that that was probably one that we would have come. Simulated us would have come up with. 100%. And I just want to say that there is no simulation where we're not utterly based. And never annoying ever. There's no simulation where we've ever annoyed anybody re-justifiably. So let's start to land this plane. Yeah, I mean, I think what more to say.

We've said a lot. We've said a lot. Hopefully, this topic interests you and gives you reason to actually thank God for not being capricious, for giving us a way to have epistemic reliability in the world that we live in so that we're not brains and a vat. And we're also not marionettes at the end of strings that are living in a deterministic world where we have no agency and purpose. that's not the world that we live in.

We're Christians, we all affirm that. Hopefully this can give you some ammunition, though, against any existential friends or family you might have or existential thoughts that you have come up with on your own. But the question is, and it's more of a pastoral question, what happens to a man who really runs with this? Yeah. And who starts to take it down to the very bottom,

believing that he's living in a world at first that is materialistic and where these questions would actually have a lot of import for how he lives his life or doesn't live his life, but then being faced with the truth that he doesn't live in a materialistic world, but still accepting the idea that it could be a simulated world.

I'm trying to frame it well. Yeah. So if you are convinced of materialism and convinced of this possibility of simulation, And then you get a peek behind the veil of the material world. But remember, you think it's materialistic. So when you get a peek behind the veil, what you're seeing is, in effect,

the base reality that your simulation is based on. Flesh world, yeah. Or not. Pure spirit world or whatever. What happens to that person and what happens to his mind? That's what this hot close is going to at least, you know, tangentially touch on. Yes.

So will you take it? us there, you're taking us. Yeah, I'll take us into there. And I just want to say, guys, thanks for listening. If you like what we do here at Honda Cosmos, do consider becoming a patron supporter. Our patrons make the show happen. We do like lots of fun live streams, early ad-free episodes. We do the dusty tome. In most weeks, you're getting an episode of the dusty tone, which is like a short form story podcast as well. We've got the campfire tales coming out. Campfire Tailtales. The Telltale Campfire Telltales. heart by Poe, which is coming out, and that's going to be like Ben and I around a campfire

hanging out and telling stories. Evan will be there too. And Evan's going to be there too. Behind the camera. He's always there. And then we also... He's the presence that you feel. You can also...

I don't think that at the time of releasing, they will be up. In fact, I know that they won't be. But we are also going to start doing special extra episodes of the graveyard shift, available only to our upper tiers of patronage. So get excited for that. support the show. And ladies, have a personal word for you. Go check out the new book available for pre-order right now through New Christenam Press. Newchristin.press.com slash Longhouse, a book I co-wrote with Eric Conn about the history of the Longhouse, how feminism conquered the West and made us miserable.

We're going to go through the rise of the Longhouse, what it is where it came from. We're going to go through the history of it. How did it actually rise? Who was involved? Maybe is this myth, is this idea true that first wave feminism was great? it was just later waves that were hijacked by crazy people. We talk about what the longhouse did to the church, to politics, to the athletic field, to economics, and more. We talk about how to escape the longhouse, not just theoretically, but we've actually, I think, done it here in Ogden.

And then some guiding principles on what to build instead once you're outside of the walls of the long house. And it will go a long way to explain really the way that we are. Thanks for listening. Enjoy this hot close. It was a cool February morning in Santa Ana, California. A groggy man named Philip opened the front door of his suburban home and rubbed his eyes against the encroaching light.

The young woman, who was quite chipper, didn't wait for him to say anything. She greeted him loudly and with a genuine smile and handed over his medication. She had to hold the bag of pills out for a few awkward seconds before Philip caught up with what was happening. He'd completely forgotten that he himself had scheduled the delivery for this time. time. Once he did catch up, he apologized and took the bag. He thanked the woman and started back into the house, but stopped at her question. Do you need anything else? Is your recovery going well? Philip assured her that he did not, and then it was going well. Just a wisdom teeth

removal, nothing crazy. He thanked her again, and this time it was she who turned to walk away. Philip just stood there, still waking up. Something had caught his eye, but what was it? She was already halfway to her car when he realized what it was and called out for her to come back, and this she did. Sorry, I don't mean to keep you. I just, I couldn't help noticing your necklace. What does it mean? He was referring to the small golden chain with an ichthys hanging high and close to her neck. She explained that it was a Christian symbol used since the early days of the church. He asked, why is it shaped like a fish? And she responded at first that she didn't quite know, but a moment's thought, yielded an educated guess. I guess because Jesus seemed to like fish. He fed the 5,000 with some fish.

He told his early disciples, some of them were fishermen, that he'd make them fishers of men. He cooked some fish for the disciples at one point. Yeah, I think he just made fish a memorable thing. There could be more to it, though. I haven't actually looked into it. She said all this quickly, and Philip heard very little of it after the first sentence. It wasn't that he wasn't listening, mind you. It's just that something else was demanding all of his attention, something only he could see. He later described it as an anamnesis, a loss of forgetfulness. In a single moment, he was overwhelmed with images and memories of a life that he had been made to forget, his supposedly real and true life. Later, Philip recorded this religious experience in a manifesto of sorts.

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it, but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian, and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true. For a short time, as hard as this is to believe explain, I saw fading into view the black prison-like contours of hateful Rome. But of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us and had gone temporarily away and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome

him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought he was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return and our delight in anticipation were boundless. When he came to, the woman was gone, and in a fever of excitement for getting the pain of his surgery days before, he shrank back into his little house and waited for more of the truth to come. Soon enough, he got his wish. As he sat alone in his study one afternoon,

he was engulfed in a thick beam of pink light, which he described as saturated with pure information. He saw impossible geometric patterns and visions of the highest, most unimaginable beauty passed before his eyes. He could only liken it to the most vivid of dreams or hallucinations, but those comparisons fell short. He'd had dreams before, he'd hallucinated before.

Whatever this was, it was more real even than his waking consciousness. In what he perceived to be a clear continuation of the encounter with the woman in the ichthys, Philip felt his mind being invaded and freed of its limitation by something of transcendent rationality. He eventually started to refer to this intelligence as God. And while many might have written him off as mad, something happened soon after that did lend some weight to his claims. He emerged from the light imbued with the knowledge that his infant son, a normal and healthy child, was critically ill with some as yet undetected condition. Philip knew the boy would die if he didn't act. And so immediately he packed his family into their car and raced to the hospital.

For hours that turned into days, Philip pleaded with the doctors to run more and more tests on his son. But the doctors repeatedly returned with the news that the boy's completely fine. Philip was inconsolable and wouldn't be convinced. Finally, after one last test, the doctors discovered a nasty hernia deep under the skin. of the child. It had grown enough to be a severe threat to the boy's life. He was rushed in a surgery. The doctors, so recently irritated by this mad father, turned rather to praising Philip's instinct and perseverance. In turn, he set them straight. It was an instinct. It was sudden and miraculous knowledge of what had previously been unknowable. This man was Philip K.

Dick, an American science fiction author who lived from 1928 to 1982. Born in Chicago, but based mostly in California, Dick was one of the most successful pioneers of early science fiction. He wrote 45 novels and upward of 121 short stories. Today, no fewer than a dozen Hollywood blockbuster movies have been direct or indirect adaptations of his work. Films like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and Paycheck reflect the man's overriding artistic focus. Philip Dick was always forcing readers and other. audiences to ask, what is real and how do I know? But he was a troubled man, five marriages and five divorces, decades of drug abuse used as fuel for an aggressive and unsustainable writing schedule,

magazine and book publishers always demanding more, legal fees piling up, his own volatility drawing him into a life of total instability, and an ever-growing paranoia regarding other people, especially other writers, whom he believed to be communist agents trying to recruit him. He was, in short, abnormal. Abnormal, troubled, foolish perhaps, but crazy? In the years that followed, he continued to experience intermittent so-called revelations. And while, as he said, he started by referring to the being he believed was commuting with him as God, that didn't last. He eventually gave it a new name, Valis, which stood for vast, active living intelligence.

system. Of particular note is the reference to it as a system. In his own notes on the significance of the events, he wrote, we appear to be memory coils, DNA carriers capable of experience, in a computer-like thinking system, which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction, a failure of memory retrieval. In becoming convinced of the utter unreliability of his own perceptions, Philip Dick also became convinced that the universe was a mechanistic structure governed by a higher intelligence system attempting to fix some malfunction. It is dualism. It's gnosticism. It's the conviction that

this world is a veil placed over our eyes by some malevolent force and that piercing that veil, the veil of creation and sensory input, is the only means by which we might attain the truth. However, disappointing or fatalistic that truth might be. At the end of his life, by all available evidence, he believed that he was only dreaming of life and death. He says, I dreamed that I wrote down that which we call world is a program in a metacomputer. The program is arranged conceptually and not in time, space, or by causation. We call this metacputer that our world is in God. And what is the result of all this enlightenment? The belief that somewhere out there, beyond anything witnessed in nature, there is a benevolence. And our true selves exist or may exist within that divinity,

even though our material selves are trapped here in this wretched and indeterminate place where very little means anything at all. Man's only hope is to apprehend and attain that true world, a world that cannot be known in any way apart from direct intervention by the benevolence and to go there upon his death, which is his awakening. It was in 1974 that he had his first religious epiphany on his front doorstep with the medical delivery woman. He would die eight years later from complications of a stroke. Want more Honodd Cosmos? Head over to the Honod Cosmos Patreon page. Over there, you get the pride and joy of supporting two very handsome men.

Brian and myself. You also get access to our Patreon exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, monthly live streams, early and ad-free episodes, as well as our brand-new show that's coming soon to patrons-only Campfire Tales, name-subject-to-change. We appreciate all the support of the show and hope you enjoy the extra content. And if you've never been a patron, get your first month free by heading to the hauntedcosmos.com slash free.