The Eric Metaxas Show - James Orr

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Why Technology Will Never Replace the Mind: James Orr

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Do you like your gravy sick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug, Chug, Chug, Chug, Chug. Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chugg himself, Eric Ma, Texas. Welcome back. This is that time where I get to talk about gold with the experts. Actually, with one expert, our friend Colin Plume, who's a CEO and founder of Noble Gold. Colin, welcome back. Eric, nice to be here. Always a pleasure to be on your show. Well, it's always fun to talk about gold.

It's sort of funny. Gold is just one of those things. Everybody likes gold for different reasons, I guess. But I have to ask you, just because it's so entertaining to me, that most people know that at Fort Knox, there is, I don't know, tons of gold, you know, literally tons of gold. Talk about that because President Trump and Elon Musk in the last weeks were talking about why. to see if it's all there or what you can you help us understand what that's about i just find that the painting well and this is something that since i've been in the business i've been doing this for 16 years people have always said they should do it on it they haven't done a full audit uh in 50 years

and you know people have a normal distrust of the government and why haven't they done an audit why haven't they shown if this is the country's assets which they are we should be able to see what they have. They did a partial audit in 1974 right after we got off the gold standard with Nixon, but they only did about 5%. What's interesting, too, there's multiple layers that are interesting, but one thing that's interesting is that when they did the last audit, partial audit in 1974, they valued the gold at $42 and $22, which was the value at that time. They've never revalued the gold to today's prices. So a lot of this conversation with Musk and Trump is, we're going to, we should redo an audit again, make sure we have the gold. Hopefully we do.

And then they should revalue it to closer to today's price. And now, what price they would value at is interesting because if they took the amount of tons of gold we have, which is 8,144, and if they did what I believe, which is $4,000 an ounce, which is higher than what it is today, but if they did that, we'd have a trillion dollars in value. And that would be a trillion dollars on our balance sheet that we didn't have before. Now, hang on a second. How much gold is there? 8,144 tons.

Tons of gold. And that's theoretically what's at Fort Knox. Not all at Fort Knox. Bank of New York. We have one more location, but between the three locations. It's actually the one thing that, and everybody says, like, why are we doing this? But it is kind of mysterious because we did an honest. it in 1941 and we had over 20,000 tons of gold. We had 80% of the world's gold at that time.

We do the Bretton Wars Exchange because the pound is struggling and we become the world's reserve currency. And part of that was because we had the most gold. People trusted us as a strong government, a strong currency. Great Britain was having a tailspin after World War II. They were just in financial problems. So we became the, you know, the big, the big dollar there. From that 20,000 that they audit in 1941 to 1974, we go from 20,000 to 8,144 tons. There's never been any explanation as to why we don't have those 12,000 tons. There's nowhere.

You can't find anything about it. So I think this general distrust is warranted in the fact that the government has sold gold without us knowing because they did it for that 30. year time period. Obviously, it would have been great if we kept that gold. It made no sense. Our country was booming after World War II. It made no sense to sell the gold, but we did. So, yeah, so the idea is they go and they audit, they revalue it to today, and then they could do a few different things. Maybe they do gold bonds that are backed by the gold, or maybe it just puts money on our balance sheet that we've never had to make our debt look a little bit smaller. And that's why I think

the trillion dollar value makes the most sense, because we're, first. $36 trillion in debt, and we're trying to chip away with Doge and everything that we're doing. So I think they're going to revalue the gold at some point in the next few weeks, few months to either that $4,000 or current market value. And also simply to determine how much is there. But that, again, that's sort of like saying, oh, we've spent billions of dollars, but we're not sure where it went. That's so unacceptable.

How is it even conceivable that we need to, like, you know, check on what we have? I'm just astonished to even hear such a thing. Well, because I think this is the first time that we've actually had a lot of transparency that we're trying to get to a more transparent government, right? I think, you know, what we're seeing with Doge and them going in and stripping things apart, finding all this money that we've lost and all this, you know, all these things that we spent money on that we didn't need. This is really the first time that people are saying, like, we don't, we want to see inside.

We want to see the balance sheets. We want to see the profit and loss statement, right? I mean, that's what's happening. And I think that's why it's. And Elon Musk brought this to people's attention. I mean, on his ex post, he did this meme that said, like, the gold's gone. Like, he actually doesn't know if the gold's there. President Trump doesn't know.

None of these two people, the two most powerful people in the world right now, don't actually know if we have the gold there. So I think people want to know if it's there. And whether it's there, you know, it'll show that gold is powerful and it's a big part of our economy and it makes sense. If it's not there, you know, it'll be interesting. interesting to see what happens to the price of gold, you know, because if the 8,144 tons, if maybe only half is there, then where's the gold in the world? You know, who has the most

gold? There's all these questions. And I think, I want to keep, I want to keep talking to you about this, but I want to everybody to hear me say, folks, if you want to get gold, we want you to go to noble gold. I would say go to ericmetaxis gold.com, ericmataxis gold.com. It is so beautiful. You probably know that, but it's so beautiful. Eric Mataxis gold.com, noble gold. We obviously trust them. It's why I have Colin Plum, who's a CEO founder of Noble Gold, and we're having fun, at least it's fun for me talking about these kinds of things.

There's something just undeniably fascinating about gold. I mean, there's a reason that, you know, people want gold. It has this value that it has. there's so much to say about it. But we've been talking about how much gold we have at Fort Knox and how this becomes a question and government transparency. And it's just, it's so fascinating to me that we're at a point where we have a president daring to ask questions like, hey, we like to know if how much is there and what it's worth. Now, I guess the question, Colin, is it, are they suggesting maybe you said that some of it had been sold, but we don't have a, a full accounting of how much?

Well, we know that when they did the audit in 1941, we had over 20,000 tons. And then they did an audit again in 1974, and we had 8,144. That's the last time we didn't do a full audit, but a partial audit. So there was about 12,000 tons that were sold or leased or something happened. There's no record of what happened there. But we know that there was, you know, gold that was no longer available to us in our audit. So I think what's happening is that this new administration is looking at all the assets they have. They're obviously selling or they're trying to sell a lot of the real estate that they don't need.

I don't know how well that's going to do. And there's a lot of empty real estate in the country. So I don't know if it's the greatest time, but that's something they're trying to move. They're trying to get that out, get it into private hands because we have too much office and too much real estate that that's not profitable for the government. And then the other question is like, what other assets do we own as a government that are, valuable. And that's why gold has become a very hot topic is that they want to know how much gold we have and put it on our balance sheet as something that we has as a positive. If you look at them valuing gold in 1974 at $44 and then today, let's say valuing at $3,000,000, you go from

you know, a few hundred million to almost a trillion dollars in value that we add to the balance sheet, which I think would be a good thing for our government to show that. So gold has really become something in the forefront. And I think a big reason is obviously gold last year to today has outperformed the S&P and the NASDAQ and all the big exchanges. Gold is up 46% from January last year to today. So it's skyrocketed. But I think that people know now that with inflation sitting around 3%, that's kind of the

new norm. 2% is really gone. I don't think we're going to get back there anytime. soon, that we're in a position where if inflation is 3, 4%, what assets can you hold that do well as your dollar is losing value? And that's why I think a lot of people are talking about gold is because it's a good asset. It's a limited supply asset. And so that's why not only the government's talking about it, but just overall the world is talking about gold. Numbers don't lie. The impact that balance in nature makes every single day is astounding.

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That's the larger question. As you know, most of my guests at Socrates in the city are just not that bright. Today, we depart from that cavalcade of dunderheads to talk to somebody who's really pretty sharp. Let me tell you about him. His name is Dr. James Orr. He's a professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge. formerly he was MacDonald postdoctoral fellow in theology, ethics, and public life at Christchurch, Oxford. He holds a PhD and M. Phil in Philosophy of Religion from St. John's College, Cambridge,

and has a double first in literary humanities from Balliol College, Oxford. It now falls to me to welcome Dr. James Orda Socrates in the city. Welcome. Good to be with you. All right. I said you have a double first. How do you say it? You earned a double first? It's a double first. Yeah, that's the degree classification that you can get in certain degrees at Oxford and Cambridge.

And so, yes, I mean, it's tri-partite. You know you first. You get a second. You got a third or two one or two. So it's a very rough kind of classification. It really doesn't mean much. It doesn't mean much. All right.

So what I wanted to ask you about, I was saying that the, the larger frame for these series of conversations we're doing here in London is what's the future of the West. And as I go over your resume, so to speak, I thought the question we can ask, the question we can try to answer in our conversation here is the famous question asked by Trutellian 16 centuries ago, I guess, what has asked? Athens to do with Jerusalem. When we talk about the West, we of course have to ask what is the West, and I would say, well, the West, I would say, and you can correct me, but it's a combination of, you know, the classical Greeks in that world of philosophy with the world of the Bible, Jerusalem, Israel. The two of them somehow come together and give us what we today call the West. And you have a degree in the philosophy of religion. So let's start there. Why? Why?

did you decide on the philosophy of religion? What was it in your life that led you to this moment? Well, it was quite a sort of personal journey, I suppose. I mean, I found faith or rediscovered faith in my mid-20s, and I got very immediately interested in the New Testament. Because I'd studied a lot of Greek at university and actually from a very young age, I just threw myself into the New Testament. I loved the fact that I had been, as it were, given this gift. I was able to read the original writings of the apostles and Paul and so on. And so I was very into New Testament for a long time. And then I had a lunch with an atheist friend here in the city in London.

And I was trying to convince him that the case for the historicity of the resurrection was far more powerful than I had realized. And I was trying to convince him that this was actually something to be taken seriously. And he said, I don't care. dead people stay dead and I said well what if I showed you a DVD if I showed you on my iPhone the rock being rolled away and Jesus sort of walking out in power would you believe me then he said absolutely not biology biological facts are biological facts I said what if we could get into a time machine and go back to the garden tomb on Easter morning and we saw it with our own eyes

Would you believe me then? Would you believe it then? And he said, no, dead people stay dead. And it was a very important moment for me because what I realized was that the biggest challenge for thinking about Christianity and making sense of it in a post-Christian secular age, skeptical age, was actually not history,

it wasn't theology, upstream of all of that was philosophy. What the challenge was introducing the idea that theism is at least somewhat probable. And if theism is probable as a hypothesis, if you can make it more credible that there is a God who might have left his authenticating signature on the processes of a history in some very dramatic public way,

then you'll start to develop skepticism about your skepticism in the historical case, towards the historical case for the resurrection. So I realized that actually there's this dominant orthodox that ruled out belief in what the New Testament says happened. And that dominant orthodoxy is roughly the view that's called naturalism or scientism, the idea that all truth are scientific truths or reducible to scientific truths. Now that seems to me immediately to be a superstition.

It seemed to me a self-evidently false idea. And yet it's the dominant view across all philosophy faculties pretty much in the West. So that's what set me on the path towards philosophy. religion, thinking what are the alternatives to this view that I take to be, at least intuitively, I take to be false? And so that pushed me from Jerusalem to Athens. But I've always had a foot in Jerusalem. And so now that I've ended up in Cambridge, you know, I get on very well with friends and the philosophy faculty very well with people in the divinity faculty. And I sometimes feel like I'm a diplomat shuttling on the road, the dusty road between Athens and Jerusalem, but sort of spending

most of my time in a kind of shack midway between those two, begging people to sort of come in and have come in for a conversation. And the Athenians think I've got far too much God in my thinking and the Jerusalemalites don't think I have enough. Well, that sounds good to me.

It's interesting because, again, when one thinks of the West, I don't know how it's possible to define the West any other way. And I'm open to to suggestions.

But that question, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? To me, that's the West. That's the summation of the West. You know, because what is the West, you know, if not the classical world of antiquity carried over into Western Christendom?

It's very plausible to think of the Hebrew and the Hellenic as the twin engines of Western civilization. I mean, I think that's a very good starting point. I think there's probably a lot more to it than that. But that lot more is downstream of the kind of explosive impact that the catalyzing effect of the Hibraic and the Hellenic had on civilization. I mean, the term the West and Western civilization, I mean, it's a difficult one. I'm not sure that for most of the

history of Western civilization and the West, anybody thought of themselves as being in the West, as being... Actually, that's a good question. When did the term, the concept of the West? Well, I looked into this the other day. I haven't done a kind of full deep dive, but I did a quick look. Actually, this was about a year ago.

And as far as I could tell, the phrase Western civilization does not really emerge until the beginning of the 20th century. Now, that doesn't mean there's no such thing as Western civilization. Of course, in fact, it might mean that Western civilization

is just the water we swam in for so long. Right. And that you don't really realize that it's what it is until it starts and still it starts collapsing. In fact, the first time that the West is

properly kind of theorized and conceptualized at length is I think in Spengler's decline of the West. De Ongaing this Abund lands. Ghe. Get the German right. But that, I don't think

it's really talked about much before that. So it's striking that the first time it's really, you know, you really get a big tone on it, really, you know, big theory. big thinker treating it, is in the context of its decline, in the context of its unraveling. When did Otto Spangler, Oswald Spangler, Wright? Decline of the West, I think it's 1990, 1919, 1920. So that's what I thought.

Post- First World War, he was writing it during the First World War. Because- Which seemed to him just a self-evidently catastrophic moment for a civilizationally catastrophic moment. Well, yeah, that's, gosh, that's so interesting in a number of ways. Because first of all, you know, when you look at a lot. look at history, the West was insulated enough, parochial almost, you know, so it was not aware of other civilizations. And then suddenly around, let's say, you know, 100 plus years ago, suddenly people begin thinking a little bit differently. But what is also interesting, and there's

another question that I wanted to ask as part of the larger conversation, it seems when we talk about the larger question of the future of the West, that there's a germ within the West, kind of suicide pill. And Tom Holland writes about it when he's writing about the nature of Christianity, leading to some of the crazy excesses that we've seen just in the last decade or so. And it's interesting, that kind of thing already appears around 1919 when Spengler was writing, this kind of leap into ultra-decedence that. it hardly existed before very, very much, but it seems to finally get some purchase in the larger

culture. And we're sort of dealing with that ever since. I mean, there are little moments in history, but it kind of catches on around, you know, the early part of the 20th century. And so, which leads me back to the question that whether there is something within what we call the West that has, as, you know, this, it's like a, that there's something that leads to its own destruction, something about the seeds of its own demise. Spengler has this theory, actually, that civilizations have a sort of natural life cycle.

And so on that view, there's nothing unusual. about the West, as it were, entering its twilight phase, just as Greece enters its twilight phase in the second century BC when Rome emerges, and Rome enters its twilight phase in the fifth century and so on and so forth. So it's not unusual to, you know, one can see these cyclical patterns in civilizational development. And I suppose the question is, you know, what made us think that Western civilization would endure forever. You know, I mean, I think does it carry within it, it sees of its own demise?

I mean, yes, but inasmuch as all human beings carry within them, that kind of predisposition to excess, to sin, to faulty thinking, to arrogance. And maybe that's true at the civilizational level, too, that we become too comfortable with our success, too comfortable with our victories. I mean, there's that... Or guilty about it.

Yes, perhaps. Guilty about one's success. And so when you think of the West, you know, we put a man on the moon. We have... Three weeks later, we had Woodstock. I forgot about that. I was very young. Honestly, it is fascinating just to think about the West in general and then to think about what we're dealing with.

Let's go back to, I want to go back to your study, the field of study, the philosophy. I mean, for someone just listening now, what is the philosophy of religion? Well, it's a strange phrase, really, the philosophy of religion. And I, you know, I'm not a very good philosopher of religion, at least in as much as I don't really believe there's such a thing as religion. And I don't think that what you're really doing when you're thinking about God is, or talking about God, is really doing philosophy. but it's a convenient disciplinary label, as it were. They're labels. They're labels.

And it gives you a handle. But really, I mean, a philosophy, I think we are all philosophers of religion in as much as we're all asking the fundamental questions. And those fundamental questions are the metaphysical questions, there are questions about the nature of ultimate reality. And any question about any inquiry into the nature of ultimate reality is at some point going to have to address the God question, either to reject it or to accept it and refine it. And so really, I mean, it's a wonderful area of philosophy, I think, because it really covers, though it seems to be balkanized into one little corner of the discipline of philosophy. In fact, studying philosophy religion opens up almost every other corner of philosophy. When you're thinking about God, you have to think about thinking. You have to think about what it is to have a mind, what it is to reason.

You have to think about what it is to know something versus just believing in it or having an opinion about it. That's what they call epistemology. You have to think about language. When we're applying language to God, how do we describe God? How does language hook onto God? Is it the same way that language hooks onto things in the world? And so on and so forth. And you have to think about human nature as well.

You have to think about science, the intelligibility of science, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, tightly intertwined, of course. So I love it. I find it just so intoxicating and wide-ranging. And it also gives you the tools to think about God once you accept that God exists or once you accept the Ristic a kind of God exists. So when you're thinking about the Trinity, when you're thinking about how Jesus could be, as it were, two natures in one person without confusion, change, division or separation, those are, yes, they're doctrinal formulations, but it requires a lot of philosophical firepower to really make sense of, well, what could it mean to? What is it to have a

nature anyway? What is it to have two? What is human nature anyway? And so the kind of the distinction between philosophical thinking and theological thinking is very, very blurred. And actually, nobody really thought there was much of a difference until the 16th century. Just to think deeply about ultimate reality just was to think theoretically, and it was to think philosophically too. Well, what happened in the 16th century, what names in the 16th century start having problems with this? Well, I mean, he gets a hard, he has a hard time, and he's given a hard time, perhaps too, too hard the time. Descartes, 19, 96 to 1650, he would probably be a convenient sort of marker,

a convenient divider between thinking for yourself, as it were, right? I've got a, you know, he gets, he gets haunted by this idea of doubt. He gets haunted by this idea of how he can, how you can actually be absolutely certain about something. And so he undertakes this skeptical experiment where he tries to doubt absolutely everything and then he gets right down to the bottom the skeptical pit and says, right, well, there's one thing I can't really doubt, and that is that I'm a thinking being. Because if I weren't thinking, then I couldn't even be deceived, right? This evil demon couldn't start fooling me. So I think that, the fact that there's an eye and that I am thinking is absolutely fundamental, and I can't doubt that. Now, he then tries to climb out

of the skeptical bog and get himself out of it, and he doesn't do it very successfully by, basically by appealing to God. And so that is, I mean, the textbooks, I think, make more of that turn in Western thought than perhaps they should. But there's definitely a sign there that we're moving from a more of a God-centered intellectual culture, God-centered intellectual universe to more of a self-centered, ego-centered intellectual universe. Okay, this is interesting. As you know, one of the friends of this program is the Herzog Foundation. If you're interested in homeschooling, education in general, quality K-12, Christ-centered education, we always say go to the Hertzog Foundation.com, herdsockfoundation.com. It's really important for people to understand that this is a phenomenon.

Now, some people are well aware of this, but there are a lot of people, they have no clue. It is amazing, folks. And that's why I keep saying the Herzog Foundation is a place to kind of acquaint yourself, Herdsog Foundation.com is the website. And read Lion, R-A-D-L-I-O-N, readlion.com. There are all kinds of resources. This is a world. If you're a parent, it's a wonderful thing. We will be an amazing country if we get education right. Not very long ago, had a conversation on uncommon knowledge with Peter Robinson, who's terrific. And part of the conversation, it was you, Stephen Meyer, whom I've had many times on Socrates in the City and he's a friend, and David Berlinski, whom I interviewed at Socrates and City about three years ago.

And the three of you were talking about things that touch on some of what you were just saying. And at some point, maybe we can get into this, because Berlinsky infuriates me, he takes coyness to the nth degree. because in the conversation, you were all talking about the question, the classic question of, you know, brain versus mind. Is there a mind behind things? And he retreats into this crazy solipsism that I know that I think, but I don't know anything else about that. And maybe can you reprise that? the thinking there that part of that conversation that you were having because it was fascinating. I can't, I remember enjoying the conversation and I remember the mischievous term that David took,

but I haven't actually watched or listened to it yet. So I can't remember the exact move that he made. I think Stephen and I at the time took it as just mischievous. He was trying to just spice the conversation up a little bit. But if he was, I mean, solipsism is about, I mean, there are very, very few theories in philosophy that, that sort of, you know, some philosopher at some point has not been mad enough to, you know, has been mad enough to kind of take up and a defense. Solipsism is very, very rarely defended. I mean, there's a joke. I think the first woman ever to get a PhD in America.

You mentioned this in that, in the podcast. You know, it's ever referred to, it's only ever referred to as a joke. The joke is, for those who haven't listened to the podcast. She was writing letters with Bertrand Russell. But Bertrand Russell, that's right. She said, Dear Russell, I've decided to become a solipsist. It's so much fun. I don't know why more people don't try it.

The joke being that if you're a solipsist, you don't think there are any other people. They're just figments of your imaginer, your fevered imagination. So I can't quite remember what David was talking about there. But, you know, it's the Cartesian approach to mind bodies, you know, gets short shrift. You know, the idea is that it doesn't make much sense to think of our bodies as just these sort of, you know, messy vehicles. and minds just sort of randomly attached to them. But I think, you know, the people, the naturalists, you know, the sort of scientific philosophers who want to just explain consciousness away.

I think it was Daniel Dennett wrote a book, Consciousness Explained. And a lot of people said that it should have been called Consciousness Explained Away. And the fact is what's called the hard problem of consciousness really is a hard problem. if you are a naturalist, if you take the view of the old truths of scientific interest. Putting it very kindly. I mean, you say it's a problem. It's a brick wall that they can pretend doesn't exist. Right.

But if you, I mean, let's just to sum it up, there are people, many intelligent, educated people who seem to think that the brain is the same as the mind, that it's, we have a computer. and they assume, and I think this was part of your conversation, that in fact, David Polinsky, I thought preposterously was saying, he always just wants to be mostly cheeky, but he's saying that, you know, chat GPT, that's, you know, there you have it. There's, there's, and it's an, it's an old question, but there's something different about consciousness. The greatest computer in the world, I can say, just as I can say flatly, one plus one will always equal to. The greatest computer in the world cannot make the leap.

It's an infinite leap to this thing we call consciousness. It's another thing. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. Computers compute. Persons think. Those are two qualitatively different activities. They're not quantitatively different. There's not a difference of degree there.

It's not as if we had a supercomputer, if we had a supercomputer, if we had but world enough in time, we could design a computer that could one day think. That's why intelligence can only and will only be and will only ever be artificial. I think part of the problem here is that, again, philosophy gets overawed by scientific progress. And that's been particularly true of just the last 20, 30 years,

but I think also true of the last 200 years. I was reading a history of the mind-body problem a few years ago, big one, big two volume history. I got to a bit in the middle of the 19th century where they discovered the telegram, the telegram technology. And it's amazing to think what it would have been like. We tend to think of the internet, the digital revolution,

is just this unprecedented technological revolution shrinking the world in an extraordinary networking the world in extraordinary ways. But just imagine going from one year, taking three weeks to get a letter from London to Delhi to five minutes or ten minutes. Actually, that's the kind of thing we forget about. I mean, the technology of the telegraph in the mid-19th century, it must have been...

And here's the point. Philosophers of mind at the time were saying, well, we don't really understand consciousness. We don't understand what the mind is. But what we do know is that whatever's going on in the mind and whatever's going on in consciousness, it must be, it must involve something like the technology of the telegram. Now, fast forward to the 1970s. huge advances in computational technology, huge advances, you know, post-turing,

breakthrough in computers, right? So again, we see the computer, just like they saw the telegram of the 19th century, I think, well, we don't really understand the mind. We don't understand consciousness. But what we do know is that whatever is really going on in that mind thing, it must be something like a computer. So this is the metaphor, this is the model we've got to work with.

And it's just, it's failed. I mean, it's that whole computational theory of mind. has been, I would say, widely discredited over the last two of 30 years. John Searle was, and not simply by, not simply by theists or people who were kind of with vested interest, but by philosophers who claim, claim to be naturalists. I wish, I didn't know we would be talking about this. I should have planned it. My Pillows excited to announce they're extending the mega sale on overstock clearance and brand new products.

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Oh, yes. Yes. Was it, were we discussing the Hawking Penrose singularity theme? Or were we talking about Penrose's critique of computational theories of mind? The latter. Yes, the latter. Yes, so Roger Penrose and John Lucas, a great Oxford philosopher and the great John Lucas and Roger Penrose, is the great sort of Oxford physicist, developed an, an, argument based on girdle's incompleteness theorems for why minds could not,

why the computational theory of mind couldn't, couldn't possibly work. It was a very technical argument, but it's broadly, I think it's, I don't think it's been overturned. I mean, it's not, it didn't really sort of do the rounds much in analytic philosophy of mind, but I remember reading and getting into it about 20 years ago and thinking that there's, there's really something there. that really when you dig deep into what a computer is, really sort of just, you know, ones and zeros, it just bears no resemblance at all to what we think of when we're reflecting on mind.

And I think, you know, it just, you know, one can engage in all sorts of complex philosophical arguments. But at the root of it all is just this, the commitment to mind does seem to be basic. It does seem to be abstract. Consciousness isn't like an add-on. consciousness is the condition of the possibility of any engagement with the world at all, any reflection upon the world, any experience. It's upstream of everything else, including the claim that all truths are scientific truths, all that the mind is the brain. The fact of the matter is that there are truth that the omniscient neuroscient scientist does not know.

Suppose we complete neuroscience. That is, suppose we get to the point, not inconceivable, where there are no facts about the human brain that eludus. Question, do we therefore know, can we read minds? Can the omniscient neuroscientists read minds? I think it's self-evident. No, of course not. Why?

Because to have a mind, to be a subject and not an object, to be a person, is to have private privileged access to the content of our own thoughts. And nobody else has access. That's just what it means to have a mind. So it's, you know, now that's a minority view in the philosophy profession. That's certainly true. I'm used to holding minority views. It's a lot of fun.

But certainly if you're a theist, you can be a materialist in a the theist. You can have a materialist theory of mind in principle. Somebody like Peter Mann-Nin-Wiguan would be a case of that, a great philosopher in Notre Dame. But generally speaking, if you think the ultimate constituent of reality is mind, mind rather than matter, then our little minds are not going to pose too much of a philosophical problem. Gosh, there's a lot here. I think about, you know, C.S. Lewis, I never remember the exact quote, but he was talking

about, you know, if our minds, you know, evolved out of the primordial soup via accidents and random mutations, why would we trust our brains? Yes. You know, that doesn't make sense. Yeah, this is an argument he puts forward in chapter five of his book on miracles from 1955, I think, mid-50s. And it's an argument that he revised in light of criticisms advanced by the great Elizabeth Anscombe at the meeting of the Oxford Socceratic Club in 1948.

And she was right in her criticisms, but he was right in the argument as said as it was refined. And it was picked up again by the great Alvin Plantinga in the early 1970s. It's sometimes called the evolutionary argument against naturalism. And the idea of Lewis's insight, which he gets, I think, from Chesterton gets it from Arthur Balfour, who was a British prime minister and also at no mean philosopher of religion. He read a book called Theism and Naturalism based on his Gifford lectures. Imagine the prime ministers we used to have in this country. Just imagine.

Barely scarcely more than 100 years ago. You had a prime minister who was. would, you know, who would write philosophy, religion, engage in very, develop very, very interesting arguments. And he developed something like that argument. You know, and the thought is that evolution doesn't, is not interested in the development of cognitive faculties that seek truth.