Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 18: An Interview with Dr. James Madden: Philosophy & UFOs

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

In this episode, I’m bringing you an interview with Dr. James Madden, professor of philosophy at Benedictine University. He is a martial artist, fitness coach, and philosopher with particular interest in the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, Aristotelianism, and phenomenology.If you’ll recall from the last episode, Diana mentioned Dr. Madden as someone who shared her “spooky” interpretation of the Cave. I first met Jim when he was a speaker in one of Diana’s classes over the summer on this subject, and I really enjoyed learning from him. He has a really coherent way of placing the Cave within its proper context both within Plato’s Republic and within its historical context that opens up these ideas in inspiring and challenging ways.So that’s where we’ll start, with an hour-long deep dive into Plato’s Cave, and what it implies for the nature of both reality and the UFO phenomenon. And then in the second half of the interview, we’ll turn to Dr. Madden’s latest philosophical work with regard to the phenomenon including what Heidegger reveals to us about the life and work of Godfather of Modern Ufology, Jaques Vallee, what Aristotle’s natural theology suggests about the potential nature of non-human intelligence, and how that work is being continued in the modern day by Dr. Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University. And finally, we’ll explore Dr. Madden’s fascinating hypothesis for the origins of the UFO phenomenon through the concept of the “umwelt”.I hope you all enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. This is my longest episode to date because we were having such a blast that I completely lost track of time. And when I went back to listen again, there wasn’t anything that I wanted to cut out. If you enjoy wading out into the deep end of the UFO phenomenon, this episode is for you.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowLISTEN TO THESE EPISODES FIRSTIf these ideas are new to you, you might find it helpful to go back and listen to the previous two episodes to get greater context.Ep 16: The Sky Calls To Us: The Occult Origins Of The Space RaceEp 17: An Interview with Dr. Diana Walsh PasulkaGO TO EPISODE BRIEF FOR ALL RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODEFIND MORE OF DR. JAMES MADDEN’S WORKDr. James Madden’s WebsiteDr. James Madden’s SubstackOnline Course: Heidegger’s The Question Concerning TechnologyUFO Realism and the Uber-UmweltAristotle, Myth, and Extraterrestrial IntelligencesGET TICKETS TO THE OHIO UFO HERITAGE CONFERENCEMay 5th & 6th at the historic Hope Hotel at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. BECOME A PATRONGET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonMusic Break: Golden Hour by Jonas KolbergBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. I toked up on the knife and I tacked to a circle around his heart, lasting circle. And that was a very intimate act. He said, here's a list of all Aaron Brotherhood dropouts. Go through this list, sent a letter to each one of these M-Fing rats, and ask them if you could come and interview them for me. He has created this illusion of who he is. If you believe anything he tells you, you're screwing up.

You want to send me to Michael Thompson, who bucked the whole AB, dropped out, and testified against them, and you think I'm going to go there and convince him to recant? My mom told me, Eric, he's kind of a borderline con person most of your life too, but you got conned by a con man. Blood memory, a new podcast series from love and read wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. First of all, I just want to thank everyone who reached out with your thoughts and feedback after the last interview with Dr. Diana Walsh Vesalka.

It was such a privilege to be able to share that conversation with you all, and I'm thrilled to see how deeply it resonated. Because so many people expressed an interest in Plato's cave specifically and in a more philosophical approach to UFOs in general, I thought it was the perfect time to bring in my friend, Dr. James Madden, to dive into these topics a little further. Dr. Madden is a professor of philosophy at Benedictine University. He's a martial artist, fitness coach, and philosopher with a particular interest in the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, aristotelianism, and phenomenology. If you'll recall from the last episode, Diana mentioned Dr. Madden as someone who shared her spooky interpretation of the cave. I first met Jim when he was a speaker in one of Diana's classes over the summer on this subject, and I really enjoyed learning from him.

He has a really coherent way of placing the cave within its proper context, both within Plato's Republic and within its historical context, that opens up these ideas in inspiring and challenging ways. So that's where we'll start, with an hour-long deep dive into Plato's cave and what it implies for the nature of both reality and the UFO phenomenon. And then in the second half of the interview, we'll turn to Dr. Madden's latest philosophical work with regard to the phenomenon, including what Heidegger reveals to us about the life and work of Godfather of modern uphology, Jacques Foulet, what Aristotle's natural theology suggests about the potential nature of non-human intelligence

and how that work is being continued in the modern day by Dr. Jeffrey Criple of Rice University. And finally, we'll explore Dr. Madden's fascinating hypothesis for the origins of the UFO phenomenon through the concept of the umwelt. I hope you all enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. This is my longest episode to date because we were having such a blast that I completely lost track of time. And when I went back to listen again, there just wasn't anything that I wanted to cut out. If you enjoy wading out into the deep end of the UFO phenomenon, this episode is for you. And before we begin, I'll mention that, as always, you can find all of the books, articles, and resources mentioned in this interview linked up in the episode description so that you can

explore these ideas further. In particular, I suggest that you check out Dr. Madden's articles on the topics we'll be covering today. They're excellent. And if you find yourself wanting to dive more deeply into the ideas of Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology, Dr. Madden also has a great online course that you can take and I'll link that up as well. All right, let's get to it. Here's my interview with Dr. James Madden. So, Jim, thank you so much for being here with me today. I am so excited to talk to you.

You know, you were one of the first people I actually thought about when we were going through the last episode, partly because Dr. Pasolka mentioned you in terms of also having kind of a spooky interpretation of Plato's Cave, but also because I know I'm a little bit familiar with your work and with Tyler's protocols and you kind of take this two-pronged approach with both fitness and philosophy. And I just, I would love to hear what your thoughts on, on Tyler's protocols are based on your,

just your background. Yeah. You know, I am, wait, just into, like even before I met Diana or heard of Tyler or went down this rabbit hole,

as it were, looking at like what those protocols are and looking like just my daily habits, it's really close. It's very close. Like, I think the only thing I don't, excuse me,

I drink too much caffeine. I think because I think caffeine's out, right? Yeah. But in terms of obviously like a rigorous physical exercise, that's definitely a part of my life, I eat a very strict diet. I have a pretty dedicated meditation practice that I do. You know,

a lot of that stuff. The only thing I think I'm missing on is, is in fact the caffeine. Maybe that's why I haven't invented a world-changing device yet. came up the caffeine. That's the tree. But I will say this is I have found like in in my those that's all like habits that came to me, you know, kind of accumulated over life and they came together in middle age. Since I've been doing that, I do have that that almost like download a kind of experience.

Like I tend to write things in fits now where I'll just like sit down and like like like, you know, a hundred page manuscript. scripts will come to me and stuff like that. And maybe it goes somewhere, maybe it doesn't. But a lot of what Diane's talking about there really does resonate with. Yeah. That's very cool. Yeah. I think that's,

that's amazing. So I would love to know, I know that you're very excited on the topic of UFOs right now, which I think is wonderful. And I just love to know, how did you get into this from, from, you know,

your academic background and what is it about this topic that, like, feels really relevant to you right now? Sure. So, okay, I'm, uh, I am, I'm 49 years old. So this marks me as like the exact middle of the Gen X generation, right?

Okay. So I, and I am like a cliche Gen Xer, if you got to know. Okay. And as a cliche Gen Xer, when my kids got to high school age, it was required that I would show them the X-Files. Okay. So the summer of 2021, you know, my kids and I are binge watching the X files. Okay. And that's also right when the big Pentagon press conference came where, you know, suddenly it got okay for us to think that the UFO thing was a thing, right?

It had been building for me. I had like been, I had been a Rogan fan and I'd seen Christopher Mellon on the Rogan show and I think David Fraver. So, but that summer I'm watching, it was the last season, I think it was the 2018 X-Files reboot, which is maybe not pretty good. But, and there's some episodes where you've got UFO disclosureish going on with, you know, Scully going on like conservative cable news TV shows to do this. There's a pandemic. There's, there's questions about weird, you know, vaccine, all this stuff. And I found myself sitting there thinking like, okay, what was Fox Boulder wrong about? It was this incredible thing where you had this show that was made in 2018,

and you would think that it was something that had been made after the fact of the year or two that we had just lived through. Okay. Then right after that, I heard Lou Alessando for the first time on the Threes Everything podcast. This is absolutely incredible. So one, there's just the issue of are these UFOs real or not? And I think that ship has just sailed. Okay, there's something going on here. Okay.

As I put it, the UFO realism is not an option. Okay. And then, but then there's these other strange issues that come up that are like really, I think, philosophically rich and important. So for instance, like, just using the X-File example, so you have an event that seems predictive of, like a fictional event that seems predictive of what's actually happened. Not exactly, right? Okay.

But there's odd symmetries there. So what is that? Is that because, you know, someone has been conspiring with the pop culture to prepare us for something? That has been said, right? Okay. Is it because there's a collective unconscious a la Jung that is like pushing us out in front of ourselves, prepare us, right? There's all these questions that come up there that I think make our, like force us to ask, like, what our relationship to the reality is and like who is not running that that came up. I just thought this is just dying for philosophical reflection.

and I can't believe no one's doing it, right? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely it does. Absolutely it does. It's so interesting the things that, you know, pull this topic into the forefront for someone because it's always something a little bit different. But once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Exactly, exactly. And then, of course, what, then what happens is, because I am an academics. I'm like, okay, so how do you do this? Like, how am I going to study this a scholar? and I try to find out who was the most kind of scholarly, respectable, reliable person to go to this, and it was Jacques Fillet. And so then I just binge read a bunch of Jacques Valet stuff. And that's what turns me on to Diana Posalka's work.

And here we go. Yeah. Yeah, Valet will read Pill You pretty hard. Yes. So I was really excited to have you on to talk about the cave. And then I found out there's all sorts of one other wonderful work that you're. doing that we're going to dive into also. But I'd love to start there.

I think that with this last episode, I wasn't planning on doing another interview on this, but it just people were responding so well to the cave. And, you know, even the people who were like, this is really cool, but I don't know why we're talking about it. And so I really the cave is one of those things that once

I kind of had that moment where I started reading it more in the way that you and Diana Pesalker read it. It feels like, it now almost feels like the most important thing I've read. And it keeps coming back and it keeps being central to my work and to my thinking. And I would just love to hear your thoughts.

I'm like, what is it about the cave? This thing that was written, you know, like almost 2,500 years ago, what is it about it that feels so relevant and so urgent and that speaks to people now the way that it does? Sure. Sure. Do you mind if I maybe start with kind of a background, you know, on Plato's Republic's and then we kind of like situate it in that? Please, absolutely start wherever you would like.

Diana mentioned some of this in the earlier interview, but I think it's important to note that, okay, so Plato is not a character in the dialogue, okay? And but he puts his brothers in it. Okay, so there's a weird thing he's done right off the bat. He's present, but he's absent in the dialogue. His brothers are there, but not him. So GlauCon and Adamantis are brothers, maybe uncles,

but they think they're probably his brothers. Okay. So there's that. Also, you know, Plato is, he sets it at a time. We know because there's a festival that's mentioned, and we know when that festival happened is like kind of during a timeout period during the Peloponnesian War. Okay, so Athens had been doing pretty well.

And then there's a leg. And then, but we know, because he's writing this 50 years after the fact, it's going to end really badly for Athens in this war. Okay. And many of the characters in the dialogue will be dead by the time Plato is writing this and not by natural causes. Okay, so Plato's brothers are going to be dead. There's other character in the dialogue that they,

some people think his brothers put a hit on, like kind of political warlord, bronze age violence, right? So, and then Socrates's execution may have been payback for that hit because they're all kind of in a faction. Okay, so Plato, and here's the point is, the book in many ways is an expression of a kind of pessimism. like Plato knows where this all goes at the level of politics is going to end badly for everybody concerned. Okay.

So there's this kind of time out here. We're going to like try to reason our way to things, but we know in the end it's not going to work because these guys are going to kill each other. Okay. Do you see that? Yeah. Okay. Another thing to note about the book is, you know, you have to be careful too because like, you know, Plato wrote dialogue where this is written as a dialogue and we know that Plato probably wrote other treatises and things like that. So he had other literary options.

So anytime someone chooses to write that way, that is telling us something, right? And so we have to take the literary aspects of the little republic as philosophically informative. They're not accidental. Okay. The book is, you know, shall I say book ended, right, in death. Okay. So, like, I think you have to see that the republic is about the problem of death in some sense of death. Okay.

So it starts out, you know, the guys are in a city outside of the city. so I think that's important. And they're going to stay for a festival, like Socrates and his students, and they're going to stay at this guy's house named Kefis or Seifis, who's an older guy, and they're asking him,

you know, doesn't it suck to be old? He's like, oh, it's not so bad. I'm not burdened by like, you know, like carnal desire and all that anymore. And they're like,

aren't you afraid of your death? And he says, well, I'm not afraid of my death because I've lived in just life, okay? And they ask him, what do you mean by that?

He's like, I've got to go to bed, I'm old. Okay. so you won't tell them. Then that occasion is the question of what is justice, which becomes the surface level question of the entire book. But note, that is subsidiary to the question of death.

Okay, like, why are we not worried about our death? Well, we're only asking after justice because we're worried about death. Okay. I think that's important. And the book ends with a myth about death, about the afterlife. Okay. And oddly also, Plato throughout the book has Socrates say, part of education is to tell people literally good lies about the afterlife, and he ends with a good

lie about the afterlife. But so do note, the book, the narrative is in between two a question and an answer about death. So I think we have to, when we, whenever we approach a public, we have to remember that that being onto death in like Heideggerian terms really is the subject matter of the book, even though the question that gets pursued is justice, right? Because the old man says, I'm not afraid of death because I've lived a just life. Okay. And then that occasion's like, well, what would it be to be just? All right.

So then the question is, okay, what does it mean to be just? And it's asked about initially about in the individual human being. Okay. And the claim is, though, well, it's just too hard to understand that individual. So we're going to talk about it at a political level. All right. So throughout the book, there's a parallel going on, right? We're talking about death by talking about justice.

Okay, then even within that, we're talking to a justice in the individual human by talking about it in the political unit. Okay. So note the as above, so below thing that's going on throughout the dialogue. Okay. All right. So a little background. All right. Now, I think an important episode that happens in leading up to the cave in allegory is at a certain point, Socrates is given his account of what justice is in the city.

Okay, well, let me rewind. So we're going to investigate justice in the city. Okay. And Socrates then says, okay, how does cities get formed? All right. And we then get a natural account of how cities are formed. Okay. And it's based on just simple self-interest.

Like I, you know, I've got wheat. You know, Kelly's got cattle. I'm not good at cattle. Kelly's not good at wheat. So we have to depend on each other in exchange. Okay. And Socrates then says, though, sooner or later, though, like, Kelly's going to want more than what she can get naturally. So there's going to be cheating.

And Jim's going to want more. There's going to be cheating. He calls it there's going to desire to do better. Okay. And he argues that this means every natural founding of the city will end badly. It will end badly, okay? Because it seems like we have to be better than we are to get ourselves off the ground on the right track in the first place. Okay.

Now, keep in mind, he's saying that about. cities and he's saying that about individual humans. Okay. That like anything left to its own natural devices is going to end up falling to the cycle of violence and greed and thereby collapse upon itself. Okay. So natural foundings can't happen. I want you to bookmark that because it needs to be important for my take on the republic

and why it's irrelevant to the phenomenon. Okay. All right. So at a certain point later in the dialogue, Socrates has given us this like this, hypothesis or I guess he's going to say it is it is what the ideal city would be like and it's you know we're going to we're going to be utterly hierarchical right you're going to have a philosopher king is going to run it right and you're going to have this guardian class of of soldiers who are going to like enforce the law very harshly on the populace and the populace will you know the artisans they'll produce and everybody

will stay in their lanes and that's why we're all we're going to like not going to get greedy in all this okay And the things that he brings into it are like, well, we're going to decide marriage by lottery. Okay. But it's really going to be a rigged lottery because we're basically bringing the master race, right? And, you know, when you're when you have children, they're going to be taken away from you and they're going to be raised in the commons, right? And he heaps and heaps and heaps, all these like really heavy things that are going to have to happen, right? And at one point, I think it's GlauCon says, Socrates, that's, that I can't believe that. It's no way.

Like no one's going to go for that. All right. And Socrates's reply is, well, it's the ideal. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm not even saying he even says, I'm not even saying it's possible. I'm saying it's the ideal. And he replies and he says, look, if I painted for you the most beautiful human image I could give you, and you said, well, yeah, but no one's that beautiful, it wouldn't mean it's not the ideal of beauty.

It just means it can't be done. Okay. So once again, this is going back to my point about the deep pessimistic. of this of this book like both politically and personally it it seems like this thing we need to get to is really not within our natural grasp right okay right all right now uh so and i mean we're very fast for the book and there's much more or else going on here but i want to keep it relevant to what we're going to discuss so then we go to the allegory the cave and um the question of how we educate the philosopher king has come up okay the person who's going to run the city and we're given kind of a very formal version of that and then now we're given an allegory to help us understand it better but I think there's more going on then.

All right. So the allegory of the cave goes, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with this, is you have a bunch of prisoners and they're chained down and they're looking at images projected on the wall of the cave and that's all they've ever seen, so that's all they've ever known. Okay, and they don't know the difference

and that's important to know. It's like the people who are chained up don't even know there's a problem. Okay. All right. And one of them becomes liberated. Interestingly, we're never told how that liberation happens. But one of them becomes liberated, turns around and sees that what they thought was reality,

were just shadows of puppets that are being held up by other people. I think that's important. By a fire that's casting light on the wall. Okay. And so this person who's liberated, you know, crawls out of the cave, and it's, like very, very hard. It's arduous where he goes away and he makes a lot of attempts and has to start over and eventually the free prisoner

gets out and it's the light outside of the cave is too bright to see. It hurts too much so he has to go back in and he eventually gets out where he can like see real objects and then eventually you know works up to where it can kind of glimpse at the sun but can't stay there. You just kind look at the sun and look away otherwise it'll blind you

and okay and the freed liberated person goes back in the cave and says hey guys you're living a lie. You're living a caricature of things. And he's persistent about it, and they kill him. Okay.

I think that's important. Because this is all a not-so-thin, you know, reference to the actual life of Socrates, right? Okay. That basically, you know, Socrates, what did he do? He came to see that, like, given Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War, given what he saw was, like, their cultural collapse. came to think that everybody was like chasing illusions and there was another truth.

He dared to speak it and then he, you know, and he was kind of like snotty. And he gets himself killed and he gets himself killed. Okay. All right. Now. So let me, let me, there's like an overview and some background things. I want to maybe talk about a few things. Okay, so, um,

I, why, why is this story perennial to us? Okay. And I think, Because what Plato has done here is he has arrived allegorically at like the very structure of human experience. Okay. Or he's arrived at maybe the very structure of human life. Okay.

And we have this view of ourselves that we are like we run this planet in as much as we do. Or maybe we'll find out we don't. Okay. But we have the illusion that we run this planet because we think of ourselves as like, like, individually innovative, right? Like that, like what really drives, like, human success is that, like, one of us thinks up a great idea, right? And, like, like, you know, and we do things on our own and we're creative, et cetera,

et cetera, et cetera, okay? And I think if you look at what, like, a lot of the cognitive science literature on this, a lot of psychological literature on this is actually what really, really makes humans so success, or part of it is we're actually really, really good conformers, okay? All right, and we're very, very, very good conformers. Like, we don't talk about it's hard to hurt humans. We talk about it's hard to hurt cats because it's actually pretty easy to hurt humans. Okay.

It's true. It's true. Okay, so this is a fairly famous experiment. And if someone wants to read about it, it's in a book called The Social Leap by William von. I'm watching his name now. I'll look it up. It'll be in the episode description for anybody you listened. And he talks about an experiment, and I hope I'm getting the details right,

whereas if you take a human child and a chimpanzee that would be, so that they're kind of relatively on cognitive par, right? We all had our chimp stage, right? And you can show them a box that's opaque, and it's got a number of holes in the top, and you put a treat in the box, and you go through a sequence of poking a stick in the hole that results in you hitting the lock that unlocks the box,

and you get the treat, okay? So if you do it several times, times in front of the human child, the human child will, if you had to guess, will follow suit, right? Right. Do it in front of the chimp. Chimp will follow suit. Okay, so far so good. Now, make the box transparent.

So it's obvious where the lock is. Okay. Do the same sequence. Okay. Human kid will follow suit. Right. The chimp will, bang, go right to the lot. Okay.

Okay. Now, why is that? Okay, because being human is really, really damn complicated compared to being almost any other animal, right? Like, we, we, like, we, like, we come out of the womb and we're not ready to do anything that we need to do. Like, we have to learn to be able to, in order to do what we need to do. Whereas, like, most animals come out of the womb, they're pretty well ready to go fairly quickly, okay? But we have this long, extended educational period that is child, right? And so, because, so if, so if cultural, cultural knowledge is part of our survival strategy. So therefore, we have to have, we have to be very good at being taught, right? So humans come out of the womb with a default assumption that another human face is telling me the truth and they're probably have something good to tell me and I'm going to follow, I'm going to follow suit in the sequence. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely.

Another fairly famous example, this is by a guy named Tomasello in a book called A Natural History of Human Thinking. he talks about a number of, I think you may have actually done the experiments of where if you take a human child and we're playing a game, you and I are playing a game with this child, where we have to take turns to meet a common agenda that would get us both a treat, okay? And you do the same thing with the chimp. The chimp can a lot of times play along and like get, okay, I have to do this for Kelly do that, then I have to do that, then Kelly do this and then we get the treat, okay? Now let's say we're doing that and you quit the game, okay? the human child will get pissed. Okay.

Okay. Because, but whereas the chimp will just grab the treat. Okay. Because what we get, right? Because the humans, like we understand our role here is in our getting the treat together. That's a natural default thing that we have. We should work together on this thing so we can get a common good. Whereas the chimp, it's like, I'm going to use you to get me the treat, right?

Yeah, and maybe I have to divide it with you, but do you see that? And so as soon as you're not playing anymore, I'm going to grab the treat because it's about the treat, not about the game. But for humans, it can actually be about the game for us having. Okay? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, all right.

Now, so what does that mean, though? It means, okay, we have to have a common that we walk around it. Like, like, Heidegger calls this an everydayness. Okay, an ordinary everyday way of being in the world, right? That's going to involve basically conforming to other people, right? like I need you to stop at that stop sign. I don't want you to have your own existential meaningful moment at the stop side. I want you to like do what you're told and stop at the stop side.

Do you see what I mean? And that's why we can have like traffic, right? It says that we'll do that. And so the idea here though is we need to have a conforming, basic, accepted system where we don't really question all that much. And it's even going to, because we're cultural, it's going to even conclude like stories about what reality is. Okay.

Yeah. All right. And so what I'm getting at here is like being in the cave, looking at illusions that are put on the cave wall by other people, right? Isn't necessarily this like dark evil conspiracy theory. It is just the human embodied condition. Like this is this because we're so good at creating caves for ourselves that we can share, it makes us very effective, right? And this is kind of where we start out in life is we start out in a cave. And that's neither good nor bad. It's just what we are. Okay. Did you see that?

But notice, though, that's always just one way the cave could be done. There's probably lots of collective illusions we could have that would get us around the world really, really well, all right? So the question will always come up is like, okay, what is it? Like, what, okay, beyond just what we have to, like, the natural human default of conformity our everydayness, like what actually is true? Okay. And that's like kind of like the philosophical awakening.

Okay, do you see that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of people have that experience coming into this topic. Yeah. Also, you know, I think what I was most shocked in myself is I consider myself to be a pretty good, critical thinker and to be an open-minded person and to be an independent thinker and to realize that I had gotten so far in my life just right, completely writing off things that I'd never done any actual research on myself.

But you, and it also makes me think, I want to. sometimes if that might not be the reason why there are fewer women in this field is because I think women, I mean, I hate generalizing too much based on gender, but I think women in general tend to be more communal. You know, I think that when you're primarily engaged with like the child rearing and the caring for the home and, you know, the protecting of those resources and that sort of thing that you were, you know, they say like it takes a village, right? And I think that for women, maybe it feels more threatening just culturally to step outside of that kind of collective everydayness that you're talking about. Or at the very least, we don't reward women for

doing it the way we do men, right? That sounds so true. That sounds so true. I have not gotten my word in the mail. Exactly. Exactly. And so, I can identify kind of with some of what you're saying earlier there is like, look, here I, you know, here I was, you know, of 40, something you're old academic, professor of philosophy, like a proud critical thinker, right? And I had just simply dismissed, you know, anybody who believed in UFOs as, as tinfoil hatters. And I don't mean to make fun of schizophrenia there by saying that. But I had like just dismissed UFO believers as tinfoil hatters or conspiracy nuts or whatever perjordive I want to use. But you know what? I had never really thought about it. It's just what they told me.

This is Heidegger's term for this. It's, it's, we didn't, we don't always have our own We have the they self. We have, I just say what they say. I do what they do. It's what one does in this situation. And, you know, good, you know, critical thinking, academics just don't take UFOs seriously. So I just never took UFOs seriously, right?

But then I had a kind of wake up out of the cave moment, you know, with while watching X-Files during the pandemic with my kids, right? But do you see that? So I want to make clear here. So my take here is the cave. is a natural human condition. It's not necessarily the product of a nefarious conspiracy theory, though I think maybe it is sometimes, right?

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. There's an interesting problem, like a meta problem about all this that I want to bring in that's going to help us connect even deeper with the phenomenon. Okay, so think of what, like, what Plato is saying here, is he saying, look, any natural human attempt to found a city, scare quotes, okay, found a self,

is going to end in, you know, self collapse. It's going to end badly. Okay. So it's, and he says, so what you need to found a city

is you need an educational system that produces philosopher kings who can run the city, okay? But then there's this really difficult problem. Well,

then, how do you get a city in the first place then that's going to last? It seems like to have, like, you need a good city to produce the philosopher.

Okay. But you can't get a philosopher until, but you can't get a good city to you have philosophers that can be educators. Right. So there's a circular problem of founding in the Republic, okay? And throughout the book, you get these very weird oblique references. Well, next our educators will have to do this or next our founders will have to do this or next we will have to do this.

Okay. But we're never told like in the like original erer sense, who is that? who is getting this off the ground if indeed we're going to have a good city it seems like we'd have to already have it in order to get it do you see that and this is this is a common platonic theme where plato says hey to know something you'd have to have already known it like there's only memory there's not discovery there's only memory there's not discovery okay um and so like there's this question so then how does the first person to like leave the everyday common shared illusion and look out of the cave how does that person do it because it seems like they would have to be educated

by somebody who has it. Okay. Right. So it looks like implicit, the planet doesn't say it, but it looks like implicit, there's like something from outside has to reach in and pull us up.

Yes, that makes sense. Yeah, you see that. Something from outside. So something from outside our everyday cave illusions has to like peek its way in and guide us out of it. It cannot be just our own doing.

Yeah, you know, something that, that I have a few different translations, and I know there are many, many different translations of Republic in the cave. But the one that I've been looking at and one that I've seen in a few different translations is that when it talks about that first instance

where he's explaining the layout of the cave and the initial, the first time that waking up experience is explained, like in a lot of translations, it actually says that this person, what if this person was forced to look at the fire? The firelight. And then it says if they were forcibly dragged up the steep climb of the cavern and firmly held until finally he stands in the light of the sun.

Like that, first of all, I laughed at that the first time I read it because that was what my, I felt my waking up experience, I actually described to people as being dragged by the hair. Like it was not something that I wanted to have it necessarily. Yeah. But I wonder if that's that that made me think of that. Exactly. What you're talking about. Like, do you read it that way that they like in some ways, these announcements. experiences are the thing that like forces you to look yes exactly so so increasingly okay so

what do I think it's going on well gosh I'm speculating right but is what does Plato arrive at he arrives at kind of a structure of of what enlightenment is right we're in our necessary everyday home drum pack of like if not outright lies convenient truths right I think I think it's better to think of as convenient truths because like the the puppets the people in front of the fire holding are images of the things outside of the cave, but they're just caricatures. They're conveniently contrived so we can get around. So we have our life of like home drum, convenient truth. And then something drags us out of it and like we have to look at something beyond. So we realize that the world we make for ourselves is not the whole story. Okay. And that we have

indeed made this and we can ask dark questions about it. And there's something beyond that for good or ill that we should look at and it's going to be very painful to do that. But note for it seems implicitness that this requires, you know, dare I say, like an arrival from the outside, right? And you know, like, okay. And you can see, so whether, whether in this, I think really hooks up with Diana's work, interestingly, right, or Valet's work is whether it's UFOs showing up to like wake us up from the vulgar conformism of the 1950s, right, or, you know, an apparition at

Fatima, you know, doing something similar, you know, something is ego. Like, we can see that this, like, what Plato is hitting here is a structure of human experience. This is just how enlightenment works for us. We're in our everydayness. And then something beyond that hits us and drags us out of a cave through a painful process, do you see? And so this leads me to think of the UFO very much as this is, this is Western history, maybe all of history, right, going through another cycle of this same. you know, forgetfulness, enlightenment, forgetfulness, enlightenment, right, that we've seen

throughout, right? And that's not, it's not to like take the UFO as just a psychological projection. Not at all. It's to say that no, something outside of our ordinary world, whether it's like literally off the planet or just outside of our phenomenological world is showing up and slapping us in the face. Yeah. In a sense of like, oh, wake up. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I think some of the that would be really cool for us to unpack throughout this interview because I had such an awesome time over the last few days going through all of your work is sort of like what is the nature of that thing because as you kind of alluded to before are we talking about like a collective unconscious thing that kind of is this like feature of the of the software of consciousness or is this

we're like like I think you know especially when people first come to the UFO phenomenon they might think that and even based on stuff we've talked on last few episodes that they might think like that there's literally maybe some you know non-human intelligences of some kind upon a craft in that you know sending these things to wake us up or but I think that there's a lot of really more interesting potentialities there as well right you know and let me let me hang with Plato yeah absolutely so think of it though you know when the the deliberated person goes back to the cave his attempts to articulate himself fail they utterly fail, right? Because he's been called beyond something that, like, fits into the ordinary

everyday language. And then the attempt to articulate and that always fails, he becomes an articulate and then eventually he's going to be killed. Did he see that? Okay. So, you know, I, you know, I, I wonder, you know, is the very structural enlightenment such that it's going to leave you just an inarticulate babbler in your attempt to give an explanation of it? Do you sort of me. And if you do, and I think this is very much in Valais's work, you know, if you look at it, it's, gee, you know, we just got done, you know, in America, like, you know, winning a war by using, like, you know, aircraft, right? And then suddenly things that are kind of like, look like, you know, airborne war machines show up for us, right? Or, you know, like there's like Valet

talks about in the 19th century, like people would have anomalous experience. and they would look like sailing ships, right? And, you know, in the ancient world, they would say shields or they would see, you know, chariots or whatever, right? And I think you have to be careful to say, well, what we're finding now is that, you know, the, what the Romans saw as a shield is actually a flying saucer. Or maybe what we see as a flippant saucer as a shield.

Like, I think what we're seeing here is when we try to, when we come back from like the moment of enlightenment and we try to make sense of it, We're going to put it back into our everyday terms. You know what I mean? So I think our attempts to articulate it are always going to fall short or they're going to be in some ways relative to what we can make sense of and then thereby not really going to get it. Yeah. Right.

Okay. And so what do we do now? I don't know. But it might be that like it's part of it. Part of his our admission that the ball is in the court of the other side of this. You know what I mean? Like it's not going to be up to us to articulate this. It's going to be up to it to articulate itself to us, right?

Do you think that we have a prayer of coming up with, I mean, we could certainly come up with better models that would at least like allow for these things to happen. But I mean, do we have a prayer through those models? Like, is it just that our models are wrong and that's what keeping us trapped in the cave or is just the nature of our human experience that of the cave? And we can't necessarily, a model isn't going to get us out of it. Yeah, I tend toward the latter.

Okay, I tend toward the ladder that we, whatever we do, we're going to have, like, and as much we're going to articulate it, it is going to be in the cave language, right? We will be as if cavemen in talking about this. And so I think there can be better or worse models within the cave language, but the idea that somehow we're going to not be ourselves when we articulate this, I think that that's an impossibility. right right so i see this is it's going to be i see this it will be a perennial problem right like it's a it's a perennial problem yeah and i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about because

because this is because the cave is about education right you know so many of plato's ideas about education are kind of implicit in the story in a way that might not like pop out to people who are reading it for the first time so you could Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I feel like the idea of the divided line might give people a better idea of why the outside of the cave is so unintelligible to us in a way. Yeah, sure. So, you're right.

I think a lot of ways we should see the Republic really is a treatise on education. It's a treatise of how to become enlightened. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount.

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Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. And, you know, Plato's actual process of education. And we have to be careful too. He's not saying this is what an education he would prescribe to every human being. It's to the philosopher, which I always tell my students, doesn't, the philosopher for Plato is not a guy like me with like an incredibly easy job.

I mean, the philosopher for Plato is the, the enlightened person, the person who has love of wisdom, but in like a lusty sense, someone who lusts for wisdom. Okay. And the education of that person for Plato, first of all, at least as he outlines it in the Republic, or he has Socrates outlining the Republic, begins with a lot of physical training, okay, because he has this famous line that someone who doesn't have physical training becomes too soft and someone who doesn't have training and philosophy in the art.

becomes too hard, right? So he does say there would be rigorous physical training, mainly aimed towards fighting. So he's talking like martial arts here. Okay. And then people would be taught a trade. Okay. And so his idea there, so kind of have to take care of like the root animal body stuff, right? Okay.

And then what's the next step up? It's like between, you know, science and root animal bodily martial arts stuff, right? I mean, that's the wrong way to put it from our source. But there's this other thing, which is like a, it's like a practical skill, which is kind of intellectual, but still Marshall, right? And so next you would learn a trade, right? So literally you would, and, and so for instance, he would have you start learning agriculture and architecture, okay, or house building, okay, because both of these for Plato naturally raised the issue of geometry.

Okay, so in learning the trade and getting good at it, it's going to raise another kind of question to you, right? Which should be the geometric questions, okay? And he has the same thing, like, well, you should learn navigation, right? Why? Because it's going to raise the astronomy questions to you. And you can see what we're doing is we're ascending a hierarchy of less bodily and more abstract questions as we go up.

Okay. And so, and eventually then, you know, so like you'll go from like just agriculture and house building to geometry. You'll go from, you know, sailing a ship to astronomy, right? You'll go from like record keeping in your dad's business, right, to number of theory. And you're becoming now not practical, but entirely theoretical. Okay. And then he thinks at the top of that, you're eventually going to all unite into this one single study of the absolute. ideals of things and for him will eventually become an understanding of just what is good.

And what he means by that, he can't tell you because that's the top of the wrong, but it's just what is best and ideal. Okay. And when you mentioned the divided line, so you have paralleling that, like in Plato's metaphysics and epistemology, the least real, the least worth knowing things are just simply bodily things, right? Next up are things about which we can have opinion but not absolute knowledge, like trades. okay. And then next

up from that are things we can have absolute knowledge, which are the specialized sciences and then the greatest of the specialized sciences is something like metaphysics or ethics for him, right? And so the idea that education would take you from the lowest to the highest for that process, right?

And note, the lower where we go, the more we're in our everyday practical get around world and as you become educated, we get our way out of that, right? Yeah, absolutely. And it it correct me if you're wrong, but it seems like there's a, there's an intuitive leap that happens in there,

where the person who is being educated, you know, as they start to, I heard you put it somewhere that, like, that people have to understand what something is good for before they can understand what it is. And so there is like, like you could educate someone on all of these things. You could set them on this path, But there's a certain point where the student, through doing, it has this kind of greater understanding that is revealed to them that, like, a teacher can help steer them towards. But that leap is sort of something that the student has to do, right?

Yeah. For Plato, education is not a spectator sport. Right. And I think it's important that you have to learn for him, you have to begin by learning a trade. Okay. So, like, this idea, like, what do we do to young people today and it was done to you and me? when we went to school is we don't teach you how to do anything we just we like we don't teach you you know like how to be an accountant we just jump you right into the algebra right okay

right and then you're left like but what is that it's an empty abstraction it has no grip on reality for you because you've never done it right in in a practical way like we might just take you right to the physics but we never touch how to navigate a ship right so then what is it what is physics to you then. It's this empty abstraction, right? And Plato thinks the abstract is greater than the concrete, but he also doesn't think the abstract is empty. It is contentful. It is being itself. But you would only have a sense of that if you built your way up through the concrete to the abstract, right? Yeah. What I find really interesting are kind of circling with this is, and I love your thoughts, is it seems like there's a weird thing that happens with studying UFOs and this whole field

that I've seen happen to so many people over the last few years as I've done this and it happened to myself, which is that you get into UFOs and then suddenly you become much more concerned about being a good person. And in some ways I feel like, I've had a hard time putting my finger

on what that connection is because as we were talking about, to understand what something is, you have to kind of understand what it's good for first. And the UFO phenomenon seems to be good for you know, waking people up, but also giving them this new appreciation. Like I went from believing that I needed to act in the correct manner to believing strongly

that I need to think in the right manner, that like it's not okay if I do the right thing, if I've just got venom in my heart. And it's hard to explain why that is exactly. But I think that, you know, gives us kind of a model because he talks about how I'll just read this quick section that's my favorite in the cave, which is that he says, and if you assume that the ascent and contemplation of things above, if the soul's ascension into the intelligible region, you will not miss my meaning, but God knows whether it's true. But at any rate, my dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known, the last thing

to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of good. And that when we see it, must needs points us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth to the visible world and to the light and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely and private or public must have caught sight of this. Like, what do you make of that section? I just find it, it gets over a lot and I find it to be so rich. Yeah. Well, okay, so the last line you read in that translation, I think is really decisive.

Is like anyone who manages to be decent, he thinks whether they know it or not has caught sight of this, right? Right. You know, okay, so he's, so what he's saying is, okay, implicit behind our ordinary everyday lives, right? Everybody has sort of, he really thinks everybody to some degree has been out of the cave, right?

But we just forgot it, right? Okay, so the, the Republic ends with this myth of er, okay, ER, okay, and it's this story about a soldier who dies in battle and he was a noble, noble person and he goes into the afterlife and it's kind of a conventional Greek tale with the afterlife, but there's a moment where he's with all these other souls after their death, okay? and there's sort of a lottery over like who gets to be what as they reincarnate. And Plato makes it clear that like basically there's a lottery on the order of what you get to pick. And so if you win the lottery, like, I'm going to go be a rich guy or I'll be a really good looking person or I'll be this. And he says that the truly good person doesn't care where they end up in the lottery. Okay. because no matter what, they'll remember and they'll do well with what they have, whether they're rich or what have you, okay?

Anyway, so they have this experience in the afterlife, and then everybody's going to get sent back to the normal world, right? And they have to sleep next to the river of forgetfulness before they go, okay? But Err does not forget. Like he doesn't, he was a good person and he doesn't forget. And he goes back to the afterlife knowing where he's been before. Okay. So, or it goes back to the before life, right? He reincarnates knowing where he was before, okay?

And so what's Plato saying there is like, what an enlightened person is, right, is just someone who remembers where we all already were, which is in this intelligible realm of the form of the good. Do you see that? So anyone who's doing well in their life is acting according to that form. But it's the enlightened person who knows why, because they've seen it and they remember it. Do you see that, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, okay. So Plato thinks, ultimately we make up our little cave world and we do that. Why? Because it's going to be what's best for us and we're doing it for the sake of the good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is most people, though they do manage to be more or less decent, right, don't know why they're doing.

Right. They haven't remembered it. Right. And so you think of it like for Plato, what is the antidote to death? It's to remember what the real grounding of life is. It's in this ultimate good, this mystical thing that's out beyond the cave. That, remember that that's the end of the book on death is er returns to normal temporal life, but with the knowledge that, normal temporal life is not the whole thing and that other thing is guiding us. Right, right. No, that makes a lot of sense. And that it's also, he's also giving us some hints, I think, because I think it's

really easy to say like, oh, it's for the good. But I mean, what is what is that? You know, so like what is the good? And I think like the, he kind of gives us some hints, right? With the fire and the sun, like, what do you make of like those two sources of light and what they tell us about the light? Well, okay, so if you look at what Plato says about, you know, okay, what is the sun outside? And he says, well, the sun is the source of the light by which we see things.

Okay. Now, so the idea there, though, is if you can't count the sun among the things, because it's the source by which we see the things, it's not one of the things. You see that? So what is the good? it's that which makes other beings become available to us. Like we're going to, like, we're going to parcel out the world in terms of like, what is better and worse and we're going to pursue what's better and we're going to avoid what's worse.

Okay. So the good then is the light that reveals things that way to us. Okay. But then can we, there's no way to shed light on the light by which we see. Do you see the point there? Okay. So for Plato, for Plato, And this is like the problem is there is no way to articulate this in the ordinary language of the cave, which is like what we're trying to do right now.

Right. And you might have probably talk about this elsewhere. There's an interesting moment where after he tells the allegory, one of the other guys, I think it's, I think it's Galakon again. It's usually Glauqon. Glaucon seems to be the brighter one, the two. But Alcon says, so, you know, gee, it's like, can we really ask the enlightened person to go back to the cave? cave, right? Can we ask the philosopher to return to the city? And because he seems like that's like this terrible injustice because he's seen the light, right? He's been with the good,

but he knows it's going to go badly when he goes back because it's inartic. It's, it is mystical for Plato, right? And Socrates says, well, okay, it depends. If the city, in fact, educated him to the point that without it, he would not have achieved this enlightenment, then he owes it to them to go back, right? No, that's silly because that means they're already philosophers running the city, so there would be no need for him to do this. Do you see that?

Okay. But then Socrates says, if he found his enlightenment in spite of the city, not because of it, he has no obligation to go back. Okay. And you can see my read on this is, if you look at the earlier dialogues with Socrates, Plato claims that

you know, Socrates really nobody wanted to punish him really like they they they said yeah we think you're guilty but what you've done isn't that bad what you like take a plea bargain and he said well the only fitting punishment for me would be like a lifetime pension because I'm the best thing that happened to Athens right so then they're like okay so we yeah we have to kill you and then while he's in prison he nobody wanted to kill him and they bribed the guards and said just take off and don't come back to the city right and he chooses to stay why because he said he said that it would be like betraying my parents.

I can't do that. I want my life to Athens, right? Okay. But so what's Plato saying here later on is he shouldn't have stayed. He should have left. Like this was futile. It was a fool's errand. The philosopher should like achieve enlightenment and you're better off not going back.

Right. Right. Yeah. But in another moment in the Republic, he says, you know, even the best city. which is to say even the best soul, at some point is going to fall prey to attachment and sexuality. You're going to love things. You're going to love people, right, which will bring you back into the cave. So I think Plato's view here is ultimately kind of romantic, ironic.

Like, we're going to achieve an enlightenment, but we hope we can, right? That enlightenment will be inarticulate to others, and it will be very difficult to go back. But because we're bodied humans, we're going to love things back in the real world. world or the other world and ultimately kind of like go there and meet frustration. Does that make sense? Yeah. This is kind of the pessimism of the book, right? Right. And so what do I think about? So I think when we, if we think of like the UFO phenomenon, it's just one more case of the thing beyond trying to pull us up, right? And then we go out there and we pursue it. Maybe we see something.

Maybe it brings us to some conclusion, some enlightenment. And then we try to go back to the bugle world and articulate that. Wayd it would say, you're going to do it because you love the muggle world. There are muggles you love, right? But he does not think it's going to end well for you. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I can see that.

I think what's interesting about the period that we're in right now is that it's at least conceivable in a way that it hasn't been, at least as long as I've been alive. It's what got me. If Lou El Salvador is not out there, I don't come around, right? Right, right. Well, and also we have the opportunity for like our, to, change the cave in a way.

It doesn't eliminate the cave. It doesn't eradicate the problem, but it would suddenly, it makes it possible to talk about some things inside of the cave that maybe you weren't able to. Yeah, you know, and this is something that,

because I'm this like, grouchy old, you know, guy, right? So this is something like Diana in some of our conversations actually helped me with. It's like, but Plato formed an academy. He brought students around him. He formed a community of people

who sought enlightenment help bring them to enlightenment, right? Here we are, right? You know, we're talking about this, right? Okay, you know, you have all sorts of friends in this now. So it does seem to be like Plato's, if I'm right, is pessimism, though, it seems to maybe be a little disingenuous because here he is in a community of like-minded, enlightened people that he was writing these texts for and with and educating. Do you see that, right?

I think, though, the caution is, and I think this was implicit what you just said, is, to say, look, when we take this back to the cave, cave's going to cave. Right. It's going to be co-opted into, you know, like, you know, people profiteering and grifting on like bad, you know, sham documentaries, right? I mean, maybe that happens, right? Oh, for sure. For sure, right?

Or, you know, like, like Jack Valle will point out to you all the spooky sciops that the government has done with this. Cave is going to cave, right? But that doesn't mean we can't get together with other, scare quote, philosophers, right, and have genuine human commerce about this, right? Do you see that? But I think play would say,

don't think this is going to like resolve the human condition on a grand scale. It might resolve Jim's condition or help that. It might resolve Kelly's condition or like create our friendship so we can go together as scholars to figure this out. but it's not going to be, you know, it's, it's not going to make American great again. It's not the hope we've been waiting for politically, right?

You know what I mean? Right. Right. Right. I think there's a, there's a temptation. Yeah. And it's something I'm actually really intrigued by, which is that, I mean, I think, you know, people say, our interviews, I am a little, I'm suspicious of technology and of what that, of what that is.

But I'm also at the same time, I sometimes wonder if technology doesn't give us an, or can't give us an ability to hack the cave in a way. Not that you can't get rid of the cave and you can't save everyone, but it does feel like if you're able to talk to a lot of people at once and like we're doing right now, this conversation, anyone who's listening to this, this is an entirely independent media channel that's reaching people. I'm listened to in 96 different countries, you know. So it's not, I mean, we're not going to get.

get everybody. We're not even going to get like a small fraction of everybody, but there's, there seems this way that you can start to go back into the cave and at least find the people who are ready to listen, who are ready, you know, who've had a glimpse that are looking for, and it seems it feels that gives me some hope and that's like the optimism that I find in technology. Right. But. So look, I mean, and you've seen some of my, like my course on hydrogen technology and, and, and I can get pretty grouchy about technology because once again, I'm like a grouchy gen Xer, right? And I mean, I got my first cell phone.

Gosh, I mean, I don't think I, I think, I don't think I've had a cell phone for five years. Okay, so I've, I was late into it, okay? But there's a very good friend of mine, a guy named IJ Markham, who co-hosts a podcast called the Cosingram Dialogue. And I was so the first, the first podcast I was on, right? And I remember I was really reluctant to it because I was like all anti-social media. and all this stuff. But, you know, going on that show led to, like, a pretty profound friendship that I have with IJ. Okay.

And, like, we've never met in person, all right? And it's led to us, like, doing some very interesting conversations, and it's, like, it's, like, made me a better person and all this. And it's all been mediated through this technology. Okay. So, you know, like, I do think, I don't think technology is entirely neutral because I do think it does change us. It's not like we enter into it unscathed. Right. But I also don't think there was ever a pre-human,

a pre-technological human moment. I think like being us is to be tool users, right, even language is a kind of technological offloading of data into our environment, all that. Okay. So one, there's no going back to before tech, because there's no before tech for us. Okay.

And I think what we're seeing was baked in the cake from the very beginning. right and I have gotten better about just admitting there is quite a bit of good that's come with this not just in terms of commerce right but just in terms of interpersonal human relationships like I would have never met you Kelly right yeah never had the conversation with this like very bright person right if it weren't for technology I wouldn't have met Diana I wouldn't bet my friend IJ, right? Do you know what I mean? I wouldn't, you know, like, think of how much better my relationship is with my kids who live across oceans because of the tech, right? You know,

so I do think, I do think there is something too, you know, that we're not going to like, we're not going to go back because there is no to go to. And moreover, um, whatever is going to account for like moving us into a more humane direction. It's got to be from within this paradigm of technology because there's no other option, right? And we would lose so much. Yeah. Right. Well, and I think what I see so much through my own experience and through just being a part of this community and UFO Twitter for all of its, you know, problems is, you know, that's where it's on my community. And that's where, you know, that's how I met you. That's how I met, Diana. That's how I met all of my friends in this space. And if I had gone through this, that experience, the first time you look over your shoulder and realize you're in the cave and there's something else back there. Right. You know, I don't, it's really profound and it's so hard. You know, as it's sort of, we've talked about throughout this and is sort of as demonstrated throughout the cave, it's a really difficult, it's not for wusses.

It's a very intense process. And if I had it been finding other people going through the same thing is really critical. But to find those people in your own life who are also at that same stage of making up is I can only do that really because of the technology that we have now. I would be completely alone in this otherwise because I don't have anyone. else in my life that's going through going through this. And so in a way, we can form, we can form little like cave escape teams that are remotely dispersed. I agree. And I think, I, okay, so here's the deal. So nothing is creating a deeper cave for us than technology right now. True. True. But at the same time, nothing is giving us a means to carve out of it quite like

technology is right now. Right. So, you know, how many books would I not have read? that I've read if it weren't for Amazon. Right. I have to admit it, okay? And this is me showing what a terrible scholar I am now. When I want to look up a book, I don't go to the library website in my college. I go to Amazon now. Right.

The search engine is faster and stuff like that. You know, so I have to admit, like, there it. And I like how you put that is like maybe what we can do now is form these kind of like platonic academies of the internet, right? You know what I mean? Where like here we are, we're like, we're, stuck in Athens, which is completely unenlighted and like going into like cultural like like chaos, right? But yet maybe we can form platonic academies of people seeking enlightenment, right?

It's funny to think of though, considering that Plato like didn't even really want to write because he felt like that was like a bridge too far with technology. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's interesting though, but that he did write. And it's also you have to be careful. he has Socrates say that. Now was that Plato's view? I'm not so hard to tell because like the episode I just alluded to earlier, that's clearly him trying to like disagree with Socrates from another dialogue. Right. So but but I do think I do think it's clear that Plato thought because he did write in dialogue though,

at least the writings we have of his and it seems like the most important ones. And what's he trying to do? He's trying to reproduce the experience of speaking face to face to, somebody as much as possible, right, rather than ready to treat us, you know. So then, and then, though now that we've kind of moved to this, increasingly the internet, this kind of podcast conversation, right? To what degree are we just maybe now we're reproducing the platonic dialogical experience, right?

Do you know what I mean? Like rather than writing books now, it seems like the way to like communicate ideas is to have a conversation on a podcast, right? What did Plato do? he seemed to like reject writing books because it was so artificial instead wrote in dialogues right well you and i have just been writing a dialogue for the last hour yeah yeah you know exactly but there's also way immature technology has like obliterated the dialogue in that it's i mean even just the way we approach each other like when you go on twitter you know i'm what i love about

reading plato is that when you go the throughout the dialogue he'll challenge someone's thought like like he'll challenge someone's idea and then that person will be like well by god you're right there's a there's a willingness for people to both put up ideas but also to have somebody come and knock them down and you're like not pissed about it you're like well that's a great point moving on you know no yeah i i agree like so uh once again it's it's the ever two-edged sword of of technology in the one hand we're having we're like recreating dialogue right and we're having cards that we're in hand but also it's been manipulated to take people down rabbit holes in the bad sense but we're for some rabbit holes you found these rabbit holes of

self affirmation so that they don't know how to deal with somebody who disagrees with you right rather than it being used to have these open-knit dialogues where you know Kelly and Jim are perfectly free to disagree with each other right because we're committed to the truth not to ourselves right we'll be right back after this quick break In one of your emails, we're talking about technology, and one of your emails to be you said something really interesting, which was you said that you felt like Diana really hit the nail on the head in the last interview when she says that Jacques Valet personifies Heidegger's question

concerning technology. Can you say more about that? I find that really intriguing. Sure. Okay. So, and I can't remember if Diana reproduced this quotation in the conversation. But there's a, in Heidegger's original essay, the question concerning technology, he quotes the poet Herdlin by saying where the

saving power, where the greatest danger lies, there too lies the saving power. So where we find the greatest danger, there we find the saving power. Okay. And the greatest danger of technology for Heidegger is not that we're going to necessarily nuke ourselves, right? Although he's worried about it.

It's not, okay. it's not just that we'll maybe like undo ourselves with our own transhumanist ambitions or something like that okay for him the greatest danger is a kind of obliviousness to be okay that that as as as humans more and more offload responsibility for themselves onto their machines onto technology okay that will just quit really carrying a about the questions anymore. Okay. That will become sleepwalkers. Okay. That like what is distinctively human is going to, to end,

and instead we'll just become, we'll become more machine-like, the more we like define ourselves in terms of our machine technologies. Okay. That's probably too quick a character, but that's what he's up to. Okay.

And, but Heidegger, people miss this in Heidegger. He's not saying, therefore, we should all go and like become Hunter Galsh, gatherers now because he doesn't think that's possible, the ship is sailed, and he's very quick to point out there was never a non-tool-using version of humanity.

Okay. So then he says, so where we're going to find the saving power is actually from within the technological paradigm somehow. Okay. And I find it fascinating that Valet is himself one of the leading technologists of our times, right? He has had this hand in the development of the internet. He's a computer scientist and all this, okay?

But I do think if you look at very carefully, almost all of his books, okay, he seems to be very worried about the technological question and like what it's doing to us, right? And it's interesting. I don't think in any of his books, the so-called aliens or the phenomena are the main stars. It's people are the main stars. And he like, if you think of like, messengers of deception, like, what does he do? He goes through all these cases of these people have just been run over by UFO cults, right?

Okay, or like, have had their minds ruined by these cults, right? Or if you think of the most recent book, Trinity, it's a story of two young men, young boys, now old men, who had their lives fundamentally changed by the introduction of the atom, right? And then it's the story of like all the people, in New Mexico, who we've never heard of, right, who had their lives in some cases ruined by the atom bomb. And so the way I read valet is,

like a really high, well, not necessarily the surface level, is to say, look, we have realized that we have done things to ourselves with our technology that we can't undo. We realize we have the power to end the world now, okay? we realize we have this like transhumanist possibility where we might just undermine humanity itself. Do you see what I mean? Like he seems to have a sense that humanity, like there are a lot of, like, that what we're seeing here is this like movement into a new era of technology that is very threatening to our very self-conceptions. Do you see that?

Okay. And this is in Young too. And it's at that exact moment that the UFO thing starts to become very, very important to us. right okay and so i think like valet is seeing here is like how we deal with the UFO thing this like technological metaphor for the transcendent that's always been there right really is how we're going to deal how we're dealing with like the pressure on us of that that the technological errors is provided right and he's not saying we should like get rid of the technology right but he is saying that we are in a crisis of meaning in the way

wake of our technology and he's worried about that. And I think that's exactly what Heidegger's on to an idea. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, and I think I keep, I think that idea of the crisis of meaning is something that that keeps coming back to me in my work and in my research is that idea, you know, that there's something not just technology but science and our, you know, the way that science has sort of almost replaced religion in our society in terms of the meaning making. But that science doesn't really do much, really a better job. In many ways, it does a worse job at meaning making for us and that we've kind of found ourselves in this place. It's like the, we're in this just postmodern healthcape where, you know, I can't trust my own subjective experience,

just your subjective experience. I can't, you know, and there's, there's, we've amputated these huge pieces of the human experience. It's decided that, like, those things aren't real. And it puts us in a, it makes it really hard. Because like you were talking about going outside of the cave and coming back in, you become unintelligible to the people inside the cave. But I think that there's a way in which there's an unintelligibility that is like permeated the cave also.

Right. Yeah, exactly. You know, think of it. So I think this is why. I mean, I think partly why is because Valet is writing a story that's about the, he, he and his co-author writing a history of what happened around the event of the testing of the first nuclear weapon, okay? But also I think there's bigger why people, why people write too, okay?

And I think of it, like when the first, when we blew up our first atom bomb, we basically said we can decide whether or not life continues in this plan. Like we can decide that, okay? and whether or not we actually choose to end life in this planet or not, or someone chooses to, right, that we still have to live with the fact that we have shown that we're capable of this, right? And that it seems like once you realize, like, we could, like, undermine all of this, it seems like being is a lot flimsier than we might have thought it was. Do you see my point, right?

Yeah. That, like, if we, if we are powerful enough that we could shape it to the point that we might have thought that we could get rid of it, right? Then it seems like, well, then there's nothing here but us, and we have nothing to hope for. We have nothing to look to for guidance, right? Like the promise that Prometheus made humanity has come up very, very empty now. Do you see that?

And it doesn't matter if it's nuclear weapons or if it's transhumanism or if it's, you know, complete psychological control of ourselves or whatever, right? Like all these things that these technologies since the Second World War forward have started to show us, it makes being look very, very flimely. is how I put it, right? And, and it, and this, this probably is just like fully realizing, like, what Nietzsche calls the death of God. This is what you were talking about, right?

That it looks like it's just us and what we do, okay, but then there's nothing to look to now, right? There's nothing to look to hope for. There's nothing to look for guidance for, and that, that this is the crisis of meaning, right? And when I, like, did my, my obsessive read of all these books by valet, I saw that on every page. Like he's he's showing us people in the modern meaning crisis, right? Grasping for something, which leaves them really vulnerable to like, you know, sciops and all this stuff.

Do you see that? Okay. But yet, but yet for Valet, he thinks the UFO phenomenon is real. He does not think it's from here in like a conventional sense of here, right? And so it seems like there's a hope that there's something that isn't just us. Do you see that? Yeah. And that's why I get that sense of him in him where the,

greatest danger is in our technological nihilism that we're in right now, there seems to be some kind of like saving power out there that's showing up at that very moment, right? And that that that me is like this kind of really beautiful irony that is shock fillet. Right. Well, I hope they hurry up because we we need some help. The thing that scares me is, um, you know, I've been a writer. I was a marketer for years and, you know, hiring copywriters and all of that. Now you've got chat GPT that can, you know, do a decent job writing you a listicle.

It'll get better. And we have AI art. My profession is losing its stuff over chat GPT, right? Because suddenly the college essay is going to become obsolete, right? Exactly. Exactly. And I wonder, you know, I feel like there's a lot of people like, oh, AI art is going, is bad for artists. I'm like, Visillian is bad for artists. This is bad for all of us. I mean, we're not

that far out from an AI-assisted 3D printer. You know, I don't, there's, we're, like, I don't know how far out we are from like 80 or 90% of the population being unemployable. And if we don't have those, like, if we don't have that ability, those like meaning making paradigms and if we don't have a clear idea of what a human is good for and what a human and what a human value is like, I worry about where we're headed with that. because if a bunch of people suddenly become, you know, first of all, what do we do with all those

people who are unemployed if we don't have an agreement about what the value of a human life is? And then also what becomes of humanity, like we were talking about before, there's something about being grounded in your body, learning a trade, you know, being rooted in this world that helps you get to that next level. So what's even the, you know, if we don't, people don't have trades anymore. I guess I just don't know what becomes of us. Are we like the idiocracy thing sitting in the toilet seat and watching television? Well, no, 100%. I actually wrote a substack on this a couple weeks ago on human obsolescence.

There's a student of Heidegger's a guy named Anders, who's like less known, right? If one of it, there's a book called Prometheism as a translation of one of his essays. Like the real problem with the technological paradigm run amok is human obsolescence. Okay, and he's very fast, he's writing in the 1950s about how suddenly now with like the space race, and he's right in the 1950s, 1960s, we have to find a way to train humans to use certain machinery, not build machinery to work around humans. So like, think of like with the spaceers, they had to go through all these trouble to find people who could work with what they thought

was a technological possibility for a machine that was going to get us to the moon. Okay? So now you've got men and women being built for the sake of the machine, not the machine being built for the sake of the men and the women. Do you see that, right?

Yeah. The 1964 film, Failsafe, have you ever seen this? No. Very interesting film. Stanley Lumette's director, and it's about an accidental, you know, nuclear war, but the thing is,

it's not really accidental. It's that, and this is pre-AI, it's not because the computers are smarter than us. It's just that once we start operating, according to the logic of the machine, and it's up to us to conform to the machine, then we are not running things anymore. We are actually obsolete to the process, right?

And it's interesting, like, in the film, the nuclear war is going to happen because it's going to happen, and that's just the logic of the machine. Like, do you see that? And there was very little human decision-making made anymore, right, because it's all programmed out by procedure, okay?

And I think you're right is like the threat here is coming human obsolescence. It's not just like whether we'll nuke ourselves, right? It's not just whether, you know, we'll, you know, we start all these sort of apocalyptic calamities. I mean, that's there, okay? But it's that I think there's evidence to think that really we're not going to like run out of jobs

for humans to do, okay? Like we're all going to become those supervisors of machines, all right? And we will have very little to do with the actual product, productive activity that goes on. Okay, and this was your point, is to the what happens to our self-conception now? Like, we are just here to operate, to observe what the machines do and consume products, right? Yeah.

Well, I have no sense of pride in this now. I have no sense of achievement of this. I have no sense of bodily development. I have no sense. I am just now reduced to a consumer entirely. Do you see that? Yeah. And what is that?

That is a kind of apocalypse. That is an undermining of humanity, as we've known it for our many millennia of history. Yeah. It's like you work all day in the potato chip factories and go home and eat potato chips. Exactly. Yeah. Now what it's going to be is you're going to spend your day just double checking that the machines at the potato chip factory are working, right?

You can go home and consume those potato chips. Like you can't even say I made the chips. I just sort of made sure it didn't go off the rails, right? Right. And I think that's to change the nature of human work very, very radically, okay, which, and I think that's the change human nature very radically, or to put human nature in a situation it wasn't attended for, right? Yeah.

Right. I think that's so important. And I really did enjoy your class on that. I'll put the link in the episode description for anybody who wants to take that. It's phenomenal. I really think the question concerning technology, it's so challenging and the ideas are not easy but the more I go back to it and the more I

the better and better I understand it the more it helps me understand what's happening around me. That is a hard essay and that you're reading that on your own and crew is great. I actually think I think Diane might mention this but there's a short book. So I'm actually a book by Heidegger, it's just two essays. It's actually two lectures he gave.

So there's one, it's called discourse on thinking is the name of the book, discourse on thinking. And the first essay in that, she's called the memorial address. Okay. And that's actually where he brings up meditative thinking and the things that Diana mentioned.

The memorial address is really like the question concerning technology, the reader-friendly version. So, yeah, so listeners who want, want to like kind of like a nice friendly, Heidegger, right? Yeah. Heidegger's ref. Yeah.

I went back to being in time recently, and it's a, it is a log and a half. It's a hard book. Very, very hard book. Yeah. It's a very hard book. Definitely. All right. So is there anything else you want to say about the question concerning technology?

No, no. And what's going to, I'll leave it, I'll leave it to the listener to pursue that course. And they can, they can harass me on Twitter or whatever if they have questions about that. Okay. Wonderful. Love that. Cool.

Well, and I'd love to turn to. to an article of yours about, it was entitled Aristotle myth and extraterrestrial intelligences. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, do you want to sort of like walk us through that? Maybe like, sure. I think Aristotle's natural theology, I just saw such parallels there. They were really helpful.

Okay, so, um, yeah, okay, so, you know, I'm not, I want to be careful. I'm not coming out to like defend the argument here. I mean, I think, I think there's much to be said for it, but to defend it in any responsible way. I'll go far beyond what we could do in this conversation, right? But so Aristotle, it gives an argument for God's existence, but I want to be careful by even saying that because like when we hear that, we really tend to miss what he's up to. Okay. So, but Aristotle has a view that if something undergoes a certain kind of change, okay,

that has to be ultimately accounted for. but the thing that accounts with that change cannot be subject to that same change otherwise the question is left unexplained, right? So if you ask like, why is there a freezing change going on, you can't answer it with some higher level freezing. You haven't really answered the question. Okay.

And so in his philosophy of nature, he's worried about like the kind of motion or change that goes on on the earth, okay? But then in his metaphysics, he says, okay, that's fine, I gave you an account of that. But now, but why is that change going on? Well, he says it must be because of something that is not subject to that change. Okay.

And, you know, it's going to mix with some empirical stuff, but like the Greeks knew, well, we've got these celestial bodies, right, moving around up there. Okay. And he says, well, it must be because, like, say, you know, I forget what the order is, you put to that, but, like, say because the moon is responsible for, like, the explanation of the change that goes on in the Earth. Okay, so why is there change happening on the earth? Because the moon is doing what the moon does, okay?

But it must be a different kind of change. So he's saying the moon must be made out of different stuff from the earth, right? Okay. It's more ethereal and less earthy, okay, because it's accounting for this change, right? But then he notes, well, wait, the moon is changing then, right? So there must be something higher level than it that accounts for its change, say, mercury, or whatever, right? And so he goes through and he says, well, so look, it looks like we've got a hierarchy

universe of changers. But as we go up the hierarchy, we're getting less material and more general, right, rather than earthy. Okay. Another thing to note about this is on Aristotle's view is, like, say, if the moon is going to explain the change on Earth but not engage in Earth-type changes, it can't, like, reach down to the Earth and dirty itself with it. It must be that the Earth's stuff.

looks up to it, right? So this goes, so Aristotle is kind of almost like pan-s psychic views. Like everything in nature kind of desires or intends to get after the thing above it. Okay, so the Earth stuff is quasi-consciously pursuing the moon stuff. But then the moon stuff is quasi-consciously pursuing the Mercury stuff, okay, and so on and so forth. So keep in mind, so what Aristotle arrives at is he thinks the celestial bodies are conscious. they're smart in some way. But he says that can't go on forever,

so there's got to be an absolute overall dome around the whole thing and everything's pursuing that dome. But he says, but wait, that dome would that be in motion? So he says there must be something outside of the whole thing that is not in motion that everything is pursuing, and he calls that the God, okay? Okay, be that as man, I mean, the point I want to make here is that Aristotle, like Plato too,

if you read Plato's style at 10 minutes, you get a summer story, has a view of a universe that is full of conscious beings, okay, some of which are celestial, some of which are intelligently celestial, okay, and they have a role to play in the explanation of things going on on Earth, okay? So one, like if you ask me, is Aristotle believe in extraterrestrials? Yes, he does. Okay, all right. All right. But that's not like the really interesting thing to me, is after Aristotle gives his natural theology, he has this very interesting set of Marxi makes that I quote in this article, that you don't see common on very often where he says,

okay, this shows that my ancient ancestors were actually right about something, namely that the universe is surrounded by divinity, right, and the skies are full of gods of a sort, okay? And then he says, but that original insight that our ancestors had was kind of co-opted into like popular religion and used to make caves is to use it. What we said earlier is they make manipulative caves. But now with my scientific work, because he would think of himself really as a kind of physicist here, because of my scientific work, I've shown that the original er myths are true. There's a kind of insight that these people had.

So I find that absolutely fascinating, especially in light of work by like Jeffrey Krippel recently. Okay. what what Crippel is trying to do is to break down this distinction between the natural and the supernatural. And they get us to see that nature is actually itself super, right? And I think that's exactly how Aristotle and really Plato and like the Greeks in general thought of it, is that it's not that there's like interventions into the universe from without. It's that the universe itself is full of things that go beyond our ordinary consensus reality and actually good science. is going to reveal that to us, right?

And when I find I'm very interested about this, is like Aristotle seems to be saying that our very, very ancient ancestors had this, like, spooky, revelatory insight into this before they had the scientific means to get it. So for him, behind all of our religious myths, there is this contact, insight, revelation that's kind of baked into the human cake

that we're surrounded by divinity in the skies and full of gods. what we're seeing with the phenomena, like we feel like it's like new agey, right? And it's like cutting edge. I think it's more like the structure of real human experience, right? That we can see enlightened philosophers that talking about going back to the ancients. Do you see my point, right? Yeah.

To me, that's what that's the valuable. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. I think there are two things I really love about it in particular. The first is, you know, he had that he talks about those sort of like interlocking hierarchies. Yeah. And that would sort of make sense within, you know, a lot of the conversations we've been having over the last couple episodes and what we were talking about before about that

there's something, there's something that draws us up to that next. Yeah. We're being pulled up. Right. Yes. Exactly. Right. Right.

Right. And so I think it kind of gives us sort of a model for how that might happen. But I also, I mean, I just think the idea of even just the idea that a planet is a conscious being, I think is a really important thought exercise, especially in the contest of what we've been talking about, right? Because we, because now we have the ability to scan the clouds of Jupiter and say more or less what those clouds are made out of. And we create these very like scientific models or you think about that, you know, we've all seen that picture of the Earth cut in half or the quarter. removed so you can see what the inside looks like. And so we have this like scientific idea of what a planet is and it's rocks and it's water and it's chemicals and it's, you know, it's all of these different things. It's whether or not, you know, it's kind of atmosphere. But we, but to think of it as a

full, but then because of that, we don't see the full being of the planet and ask like, what is this, what is this thing? What is it? Not what is it made out of, but like, what is it? What is it? Yeah. And so you're really, you're going Aristotelian there hardcore, right? Because like, Aristotle is well, well done. I did my homework. Well done. Well done. I know professors want nothing more than just for someone to do the reading. Yeah, just we just want somebody to care, really. Right? Just don't go to sleep and we'll love you. Okay. So, but, um, no, because like, Arsolol is, I think one of our important insights from Aristotle. It's in Plato, too, is,

look, there's more than one question we can ask about something. There's more to ask about it than just what is it made out of it. And when we ask, why is it doing what it's doing? Yeah, part of that answer will be like, because it's been bumped into certain things and our laws of bumping in that determine what's going to come out. But also we can ask, what's it for, right? Okay, you know, what is it in its very being or definition of it has one? And I think you're right.

Like, we're so used to, like, looking at a planet in terms of the rock that's made up. But maybe there's, like, deeper questions to ask, like, what's it for? And I mean, this is certainly not a consensus view, but I mean, there are serious scientists, serious philosophers, right, not just jokers like me, right? You know, who are taking seriously, like, you know, the idea that, you know, plants are in some sense conscious, right? And there was an article, like plants, right? And there was an article published in the Journal for Consciousness Studies by Rupert Sheldrake, relatively like in the last year or two. where he, I mean, this is one of the most important, like, philosophy of mind, cognitive science journals out there.

And he got a paper published, peer reviewed, arguing that the sun is conscious, right? Yeah, I read it. Yeah, it's a fabulous paper. And he makes a pretty darn good case that the sun is conscious. And, like, this is a vindication of Aristotle's conception of the universe. I mean, Aristotle's wrong in, like, what order the planets lie out, that there's rings and stuff like that. But it looks like the fundamental metaphysical insight that, that we're not.

What maybe is driving the whole thing is conscious desire, not just push from behind. Sheldrake, I think, makes a case that that's not scientifically just beyond the pale anymore. Right. Right. It makes me wonder if the microscopic mites that live in my eyebrows spend their whole life in the forest of my eyebrows. Like, do they wonder if I'm conscious? We wonder if this forest is just, you know, like hair on the head of a greater being, right? Right.

And they're right about that. Right. Right. What I think it's become important to me in like my teaching and just conversations like this is they get people. I had a student the other day, sorry to double back on myself. We had just, we were reading Plato's Temeas in class, which is a crazy, spooky dialogue. And the students said, well, gosh, this count sounds so new age.

And I said, well, it's because new age is actually really old. Right. Like a lot of this stuff that we see a spooky woo and stuff like that was actually with the serious views of like the ancient Greeks. And I'm not experts in other traditions, but I suspect you'll find the same thing. And ancient Hindu philosophy they had philosophers, ancient, you know, Pacific Rim philosophy they had philosophers. Like it's coming to very similar conclusions, right? And I think those conclusions, you know, are increasingly sustainable in light of like contemporary thought. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so interesting. I love that. And so when we start talking that we're going to look into UFOs or we're going to look into ghosts or looking at like all sorts of sci paranormal phenomena, right? Hey, if we're in a universe that's suffused with consciousness like the ancient's thought, that doesn't seem to be so crazy, right? If indeed, you know, there is some kind of ultimate insight that our very, very ancient ancestors

had through some non-scientific means, then that's significant. Right. And I think this is one of the things I think is so cool about the breakout of the UFO thing is it's making respectable to take seriously what we think are weird, but are actually very old ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

I love that. Well, and speaking of the eyebrow mites, it makes me think you are kind enough to share with me an article that you're in the process of finishing up. Yeah. Quillard needs editing, but yeah, yeah. It was great. And I, no, I loved it. I was so grateful you sent it to me because I think it's so perfect.

And so what I'm excited about, it makes me think of the tick metaphor that you used because it was, and I'll let you tell it. But what I'm excited, so excited about is that, you know, I mean, you're familiar with my podcast. I spent like the whole first part of the podcast kind of laying out all the different hypotheses. And I think that what you're putting out there is a hypothesis that I personally haven't heard, at least not in this. way before. So I'm really excited for you to share that. Excellent. So that's that actually, I wanted to ask you about that. So that's, that's cool. Okay. So, um, there's a concept that comes up a lot in, um, it's, it's, it literally has its origins in some early 20th century biology, but it, it, it actually, like 1930s biology.

But the same notion was very operative in early phenomenology and people like Husseril and Idyger. and it's become popular in cognitive science if you wanted to see it. Like deployed a guy named Andy Clark, who is a very important contemporary cognitive science, uses it quite a bit, but it's the notion of an umwelt, okay, the German word umwelt, which literally would mean around a world, okay, gets translated as environment, though I'm not a Germanist, but I don't quite like that translation because it lends to misleading conclusions for people speaking in English, but um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, what the concept is, is that the world of perceptual experience that's available to us is,

is, it's a selection out of the possible perceptual experiences there could be. And that selection is based on this sort of interplay between the needs of an organism and the means of meeting those needs that has evolved. Okay. And so the best way to understand this is, it's a famous example. Andy Clark uses it, it goes back to the original biology. literature is you've got a tick, right? And this, there's a, there's this tick is it really frames its whole life around the amount of mammal skin acid in the air, right? And heat and a sense of surface pressure. Okay. And it's so good at this that it can time its jump on you as you approach

based on how much acid it's sensing in the air, okay? And then it can make its jump and then it can sense when it's touching you, it has a sense of the surface pressure, and it can sense heat so it knows where to bite you. Okay. And like that's its world. It's got acid, it's got pressure, and it's got heat. And that's pretty much it. Okay.

And he's, this little tick is getting the world right in terms of those three factors. And it has senses, like set up perfectly to get that right. Okay. But when it, when it jumps on Kelly, not the U.F.T. right but when it shows down Kelly to buy Kelly this little tick is just getting this small sliver of the total being of Kelly like you far

outstrip like what what the snapshot that that tick can get is right and so the idea is yeah it has an umwelt it has an around world that it constructs for itself not that it makes it up it doesn't dream it up it's really there but it's selective and it's selective

based on what is relative to its actual needs and its means or meaning. Okay. And here's like the cool but like troubling thing is it, you know, humans have an umwelt. Like we have senses. Those senses have an evolutionary history, right? That evolutionary history is conditioned by our needs. Okay. And so when I sense the tick now, in the same way the tick has a caricature of me in terms of certain sensory properties, I too have a caricature of the tick in terms of the sensory properties that I'm capable of picking up on. Excuse me. So, so, so,

What's the idea here is, is we too are only getting a selective view of the world, right? Okay. Based on our senses and, of course, our conceptualizations, our science is based on that original limited perspective that we take on it. Okay. I want to be clear, I'm not saying we just dream the world up. I'm not saying it's all relative or something like that. That's not it. The point is it's selective, right?

We are selecting for relevance to us, right? So we're in it. Okay. Now, the example I use in the paper is, hey, that, that little, tick could be encounter things from outside its umwelt. I call it it's Uber umfeld. Um, and those things that's encountering like may just not, they're, they're not there in terms of skin acid. They're not there in terms of surface pressure. They're not there in terms of heat or what have you. Okay. But they're really there. Right. Um, and so like we have to admit there's a vast

world outside of our um, felt. There's a really big. big Uber Umveld out there and our access to it is very, very limited. Actually, if it's really out there, we don't have any access to it all, but it's there, right? Like we too select out of the possibilities for our perceptions. Okay. So we have to admit, like our ordinary, our cave, right? We're getting a pretty small chunk of what there is to know. Okay.

Now, and then I give examples of let's say, like we encounter like a shark, right? Like the shark has got its perceptual capacities. We've got our perceptual capacities. we probably weren't really evolved to deal with each other, okay? And so we can show up on each other's margins, right? Like, we can, you know, like, we can kind of, like, have a really limited sensory encounter with each other, but we don't understand each other at all.

And it's uncanny. Like, the first time a human sees a shark, right, without any preparation to be, what the hell is that, right? It's an alien, right? The first time a shark sees one of us, whatever the shark version that is, is what the hell is that? It's an alien, okay?

So where am I going with all this? I'm going to say, look, I think, or here's a model is what we're encountering when we encounter phenomenon, right, is we're encountering things that may well be from the earth, okay? They're not like breakaway civilizations that have like, you know, have runaway technology and they're conspiring or something like that. They might just be other animals that are very marginal to our umwelt, right, that we aren't really set up to perceived. and we're bumping into them and having this very alienating experience in doing it. And I find that like at the level of epistemology very helpful hypothesis because it doesn't ask us

to like posit conspiracy theories. It doesn't ask us to like have to like explain why this is so elusive. And we've already got this going concept in cognitive science and biology and phenomenology of the umwelt and what I'm calling the Uber umwelt, right? And it shouldn't surprise us that maybe there's things, there's some animals that we don't have much evolutionary contact with. We have much of a common history and we can just barely have a little contact like in a shared

umwelt and that's it. Right. And it seems that if that happened, it would be spooky. It would be crazy. It would be, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Right. No, it makes me think of how like for, forget what year. But it was relatively late in history when we realized that meteors were real for a long time, that was just a, you know, sometimes like a farmer would tell a story about like, this rock, came out of the sky and fell in my field and people were like, what are you talking about? Rocks don't fall out of the sky because we had no model by which a rock would fall out of the sky. Right. And let's say, let's say this, these things are not in the aspect of reality that like our five senses hit. Okay.

So it's something even more foreign than a rock. Yeah. It's not just the model that's the issue. It's not our intellectual. It's something else. It's like, look, I mean, if it, if it's not manifesting itself in terms of skin acid or heat or surface pressure, the tick doesn't get it. Right? It just doesn't get it, right?

And so let's say, like, at best the thing has got like a little skin acid-ish, something that kind of barely trips the skin acid detector of the tick. The tick might register it, but it's going to make very little sense to it, right? I think, or I don't know, who knows, right? But like I'm, I'm avaring the model where I'm like, that's kind of like what the phenomenon is. It's something that just barely registers. It's not our visual or tactile or olfactory senses. And so it's, we can't even really model it.

It's just beyond our sense repail, right? Yeah. It makes you think of, it's kind of similar to Donald Hoffman's work in what, you know, he's saying about how, and I'll talk about that in the next episode. about how not just that we may not have evolved to see the world as it is, but we necessarily have not evolved to see the world in the way that it is in the same way that the tick didn't evolve to see the world as it is.

We evolved to deal with the things that are most relevant to us in our survival day to day. And what if there's something that the properties of which are not, relevant to that evolutionary history and then we start bumping into that thing. Right. It would be utterly uncanny and I like to play. It would be alien. Right.

Yeah. Alien to us. That's what I'm getting it. Right. Like there's a very recent, very episode with, I was it, John Varicky and Hoffman on, on the theories of everything. Very good dialogue. Like if you want to go, like, go into this direction.

It's a very good way to look at it, right? just in terms of the cognitive science of sensations like that. But the point, though, is, is like, we sort for relevance, right? This is Vareki's work. Like, we sort the world for relevance. And so what isn't relevant, we're kind of, like, designed to leave behind, okay? That means we're leaving a lot behind in reality that isn't relevant to, I mean, you have to remember, it wasn't relevant to our, like, sub-Saharan ancestors 200,000 years ago when, like, the final,

like, the final, like, human cognitive package, final for the moment came on. line. Do you know what I mean? So, and so when I say relevant, I mean, like, relevant to our evolutionary past, it might be relevant as hell now if like they're showing up to take us over now, right? Okay. But it, but it wasn't relevant to like how our machinery got got set up, right? And so that, that machinery, because choices were made by evolution as to what we were perceived, left more behind probably than it included. That's the point, is to sort, right? So there's things, like how many things are in this room right now that I don't perceive just because it was irrelevant to my evolutionary ancestors.

Whoa, isn't that a freaky thought, right? Right. And then if one of those things just has enough to be relevant-ish to my sensory apparatus, it's going to show up in like very strange ways, right? Yeah, no, it makes me think of, I mean, a great example is like all the electromagnetism that's in this room right now from all the technology in this room. You know, and that was a point that Sheldrick made in that paper about, you know, is this unconscious.

Exactly. And, you know, in terms of electromagnetism, that if a being, like, what if a being was an electromagnetically based being as opposed to a carbon-based life form, we wouldn't know about those, probably. Wouldn't know about it. And now we can detect electromagnetism or something like that, but there'd be things even further out from our oombelt that we can't even detect

them like that. And I think we have no reason to think that there aren't. I think good reason to think that there are, just because the way evolution, works is to like narrow our perceptual field within like practical bounds, right? Right. Well, and like you were talking about before, a lot of this gives us the ability to potentially go back and resurrect some of those, the older wisdom, because, you know,

we, we tend to think, well, of course, we're the only people here. You know, humans are the only intelligence on this planet. But that has not been the predominant belief of humans throughout time. And so you have to wonder, like, what are the fairies? What are the gyms? What are the gods? And this is why I think this notion of the umwelt versus the Uber umveld I see as like a friendly recommendation

to like the Krypo research program. It's like what's he trying to do? Because like he's not saying and I'm not saying there's nothing magical about this like small and magical, right? We're not saying there's something mysterious. But what I'm saying is like once you realize this, the nature's super nature distinction just broke down. It doesn't mean there's only nature.

It doesn't mean there's only super nature. it means nature is super, right? You know what you mean? It's like, it doesn't mean that there's the normal and the paranormal. It means like the normal is paranormal. Because because it's, I'm not saying there's another realm, but I'm not saying the realm we're in isn't full of things that are absolutely foreign to our boring cave reality, right?

We'll be right back after this quick break. That makes a lot of sense to me. Especially, I mean, something really cool that's happening in the UFO community right now and across kind of these weird groups, weird, weirdo groups is, you know, I think that people are starting to, we're starting to reach out to, you know, Bigfoot researchers and, you know, paranormal investigators and all of that and these things we used to be in our own little camps. But as you start, it's something that, like, I've suddenly gotten fascinated with Bigfoot, the reason being that I see all the way. in which that phenomenon maps almost perfectly to the UFO phenomenon in terms of, you know, there's the, there's the, there's the nuts and bolts and there's the consciousness. Like there's, it all maps. It all maps and all maps and the construction of humorous grants come up again and again and again.

Yeah. And so it's these things happen. So what I like about it is this idea that if we start to look at these different things, like you're saying that these things from like our, you know, kind of outside of the Oom Belt that happen from time to time, it seems like there are similarities into, like, the ways in which that manifests itself, when it manifests itself, how it manifests itself. And so it makes you wonder, like, there might be rules or something. Like, there might be a way, we might one day understand why we see things that we're not supposed to say. Yeah, that's exactly, to my understanding,

that is Jeffrey Crapele's research program. Yeah. You can tell I read a lot of Crapell. Yeah, no, good. And so, like, Crable is an interesting guy for me. And, uh, I, like, okay, for me, I was, okay, I was into the UFO thing, but it had to, it was like very nuts and bolts and then like, oh, no, that's, it doesn't seem like it's nuts and bolts. And then it's like, okay, I'm into the UFO thing, but I'm not going for the abduction thing, right? And then I read, uh, the book that Crippel wrote with Whitney Streber. I'm like, oh, dang, I didn't want to go there, but here I am.

It's, it's very hard to deny that something happened to that man. Right. Right. You know, you know what I mean? Um, and so, like, like, so I have, like, so I have. Criple the thing, like really pulling me into this, right? But he's brilliant because he, he, and you can see his influence on my less influential work. I'm not comparing myself to Cripo, right? But you can see his influence on my thinking here because in his saying that notion

of super space nature as opposed to supernatural, he found a way, I think, to really diffuse a lot of the hands-off feeling that academics have about this. Right. Right. I think, I think what he's done there is I think philosophically very well grounded, but also rhetorically brilliant, right? Yeah. No, he's something else. I was lucky enough to meet him in New York. And on top of just being brilliant, he's like one of the nicest human beings you could ever meet in your life. And a sparkling conversationalist.

That's great. I'm not surprised based on his writings. Yeah. Yeah. Sitting next to him at dinner is like a treat. Yeah. And so I think he's important to know, like, okay, so for instance, if you go with like this, this nature, this super space nature that like a

crypole has in mind or like this umwelt versus Uber um belt that I have in mind and I think the distinctions kind of map on each other. Like to say I don't see this as like anything unfriendly to a religious believer. Right? Because if people weren't saying this stuff isn't real. It's just we're trying to come up with model. Right. That like pulls it under under a single coherent like approach to the world. Right. If you're, do you know what I mean? But also I think it does show how like a non-relist believer, a materialist could like actually entertain some of this stuff in a way, which I think is very helpful, right?

Right. Well, what I think it's interesting about it too is that I don't think it's at all. It doesn't, there's nothing about it that's like a direct challenge to the religious believer. But at the same time, there is something that I think changes the nature of religious belief for a lot of people. You know, I think what was really interesting, I've gone back and listened to my interview with Diana a few times. this, you know, she's just so brilliant and I share new things each time. And, you know, really when I asked her about like what, how is this changed? Because she's a, she's a practicing Catholic and, you know, a believer. Yeah. And so like in, but there's something that changes.

You can believe all of those things and like truly believe them. But there's something about this that changes even the nature of that belief because it, it seems like it opens it up. It makes it bigger than it was before. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I'm, I'll be interesting to talk to Diana about this someday, right? Bring us both on it. I'll have a thing. Yeah.

But it's going to be harder to see, I think, like religious exclusivism is, is going to be harder. Okay, because you're going to say, no, it looks like this. What I thought was supernatural stuff is a feature of a super nature. Okay. it's going to be hard. So you're going to rule in super nature for your particular tradition, but it looks like the other traditions are going to be on much the same footing in terms of my evidence for it.

So it looks like you're going to have to bring in more than a lot of like very traditional believers want to. That doesn't trouble. Right. But I can see some religious believers. I'm not saying Diane, I don't think this would trouble Diane either. But I think some religious believe that's going to trouble them, right? But you're right.

It changes because I think what's going to work, people more about this kind of like approach to the paranormal or you know the the phenomenon is it's going to let a lot in it's not going to exclude a lot right like like i find this like okay i took the UFO seriously i went all in a sudden now wait i got to take abduction seriously because the evidence i have the UFO is kind of on par now with the abduction thing and now look i'm taking like ghosts and fairies seriously right because the evidence like we have this parody of evidence thing going across there and like now gin you I'm going for the genie thing now, too, right? And all this stuff, right? And so I think it's, it is, it is like ontologically very, I had an advisor in grad school who liked to talk about ontological permiscuity, right? It's like a lot of beans into your ontology, right? It's ontologically periscuous, right?

Which means it's going to force you to be kind of more pluralistic, I think, in your overall view of it's, right? But one could do worse than to be that way. No, I think that's great. say I will use that. I feel like I'm very ontologically promiscuous. Yeah. My master's thesis advisor was a man. He's deceased now. Quonsei Lee was his name. It's just a wonderful guy, hilarious guy. He talked about ontologically promiscuous people and ontologically prudish people, right? And Plato was promiscuous, right? You know, like

Huckum was prudish. Yeah. That makes a lot of sun. That makes a lot of sense. Well, let me ask you one last question before we tell everybody where they can find your stuff. This is a question I've actually asked Diana because it's something I'm very intrigued by. I may never get an answer that fully satisfies me. But so I was raised Catholic. I'm not a practicing Catholic, but also Catholicism is kind of like the mob and you never really get out. It's true.

You're always kind of, well, it's like being Jewish. You're like culturally Catholic even if you're not practicing, right? So anyways, so Diana. is a practicing Catholic, you know, you're a practicing Catholic, Jeffrey Crabble is a practicing Catholic. There's an enormous, it seems to me that there's a lot, and Diana's even said that among the invisible college,

that there is a very large percentage of practicing Catholics, Tyler becomes converts to a Catholic in American Cosmic. And I don't think that Diana, and I'm sure you wouldn't, like, are necessarily suggesting that, like, that means that Catholicism is the ultimate religion. But what do you think about, it is, or do you have an opinion on what it might be about Catholicism that sets people up to kind of think in this way? Well, Catholicism is very ontologically promiscuous.

That's true. Right? That's a lot of complaint of the Protestants, right? Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, we, man, well, first of all, like Catholics, man, we love our lore, right? Like we've got all sorts of myths and stories and, you know, like everybody, you know, everybody's seeing, you know, the Blessed Mother in a, you know, bowl of, you know, cornflakes.

or something like that. And as you know, you were raised Catholic in some circles. That's taken fairly seriously, right? Maybe too seriously, okay? So one, I think there's just is a kind of mythic, ontological permiscuity to Catholicism, which I think fulfills a legit human need, true or not.

It fulfills a legit human need, right? Okay. So I think that's part of it is just that maybe Catholics should be a little more, but maybe we're really quick to believe in the paranormal, right? Because we've been raised in paranormal. in a lot of ways, right? So I think that might be part of it, right? Also, I think, too, if you, okay, thinking, like,

reading American Cosmic, okay, I wasn't too surprised when Tyler converted, okay, because of the protocol thing, okay? Like, Catholics were procedurals, right? You know, we've got our, like, you know, like, you were raised Catholic, you know, but, like, we're very, it's a very procedural religion, right? I can see a guy who's like really into these like protocol approaches to things, right?

Would like something like being a monk would really, really resonate with that guy. He says she, she describes them almost as a monk before he even converts, right? Yeah. So I think that makes sense, right? Do you see that? Yeah. Yeah. And so that that's probably why I would think it would stray, stray towards Catholic, right?

But that's bad like armchair sociology, right? Yeah, exactly. I don't think I'll ever come to a great answer. But I do find it really interesting to think about. I mean, do you think that there's an aspect of Protestantism that like strips the mystical out of Christianity in a way? Yeah.

And definitely the ritual. Like not all of it, but a lot of it. Right. You know, which is not to, I'm in no way making a comment on like the value of any religion over another. It's just like, but I'm just, I'm interested in what it is about Catholicism that seems to make it easier to make people to get people to make this late. Wasn't a Streber or a lapsed Catholic?

Wasn't that the idea? You may be right about that. I'm not 100%. I think you're right. Are you what I mean? So yeah. And also, you know, I just think that is, is like Catholics do have kind of mythological mindset that I think it leaves us sort of receptive to the sort of thing. Right.

And I'm not saying that doesn't get out of hand with Catholics too, right? Oh, sure. Okay, but I do think, I do think that, I mean, just think of it like, so, you know, my children grew up with December 6 is the Feast of St. Nicholas and like, I know like other Christians do this too, but like, so they had no problem with like, and not just Santa Claus, but an extra elf coming to the house, right? And like leaving things, right? Like they, you know, they've, they grew up in a very enchanted world, right? And, you know, so I think any Catholic, anyone raised Catholic or yourself too is like,

probably got a pretty good hangover for the mystical from their, from their youth. That makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, this has been such a fun conversation. I can't believe how fast it went. I've been really having a great time.

Yeah. For anybody who's listening, anything that, any, any references that were made, I'm going to have all of that in the episode description. So there's anything that sounded interesting to you. Please go follow up. Do the reading. Exactly. This is such a fun, rattleable to go down.

reason. You know, we decided to come back and do this again. But Jim, thank you so much. And tell everybody where they can find you and how they can find your work. Okay, you can find, probably your best for finding me is on Twitter in terms of, you know, if you want to say nasty things to be great. I said, what am I on Twitter? I'm JD Madden 3 on Twitter or I think I'm following you in Twitter as they can find

me that way too. Yeah, absolutely. That's a link.com is my website. And I have a lot of my papers and lectures about other stuff up there. and I have a substack, I think it's just Jim Madden's newsletter, but maybe we can put a link up to that. Absolutely. It'll be a description for sure.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Absolutely. It's been an absolute honor, Kelly, really has. And so anytime you want to talk about, if you want to have a conversation with an ontologically promiscuous philosopher, I am available. I love that so much. I absolutely will take you up on that.

Thanks, Jim.