TrueLife - Graham Priest - Honestly, This Statement is False

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://grahampriest.net/Graham Priest grew up as a working class kid in South London. He read mathematics and (and a little bit of of logic) at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He obtained his doctorate in mathematics at the London School of Economics. By that time, he had come to the conclusion that philosophy was more fun than mathematics. So, luckily, he got his first job (in 1974) in a philosophy department, as a  temporary lecturer in the Department of Logic and Metaphysics  at the University of St Andrews.The first permanent job he was offered was at the University of Western Australia. He moved to Australia when he took up the position, and has spent most of his working life there. After 12 years at the University of Western Australia, he moved to take up the chair of philosophy at the University of Queensland, and after 12 years there, he moved again to take up the Boyce Gibson Chair of Philosophy at  Melbourne University, where he is now emeritus.  While he was there, he was a Fellow of  Ormond College.  During the Melbourne years, he was also an Arché Professorial Fellow at the University of St Andrews. He is a past president of the Australasian Association for Logic external-01, and the Australasian Association of Philosophy external-01, of which he was Chair of Council  for 13 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities external-01 in 1995, and awarded a Doctor of Letters by the University of Melbourne in 2002. In 2009 he took up the position of Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center external-01, City University of New York, where he now lives and works.Graham has published in nearly every leading logic and philosophy journal. At the last count, he had published about 240 papers external-01. He has also published six monographs external-01 (mostly with Oxford University Press), as well as a number of edited collections external-01. Much of his work has been in logic, especially non-classical logic, and related areas. He is perhaps best know for his work on dialetheism external-01, the view that  some contradictions are true. However, he has also published widely in many other areas, such as metaphysics, Buddhist philosophy, and the history of philosophy, both East and West.Graham has travelled widely external-01, lecturing and addressing conferences in every continent except Antarctica.  For many years, he practiced karatedo. He is a third dan in Shobukai external-01, and a fourth dan in Shitoryu (awarded by the head of style, Sensei Mabuni Kenei external-01 in Osaka, when he was training there). Before he left Australia he was an Australian National kumite referee external-01 and kata judge external-01. Nowadays, he swims and practices taichi. He loves (good external-01) opera, jazz external-01, and 60s rock external-01… and East Asian art. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope the week that you had was better than you imagine. I have an incredible show and an incredible guest for you today. My pleasure to introduce the one and only, Professor Graham Priest,

one of the most philosophical philosophers. He's sharper than Occam's razor. His good nature charm is as undeniable as a well-structured syllogism. Professor Priest, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate it. Thanks, George. Thank you for that quite undeserved introduction. Please call me Graham.

Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. Perhaps maybe to build a bit of a foundation. You can tell people about your defense of dialectism and pericistency. Let's start with the notion of a contradiction. That word gets used in many different ways. But when philosophers and logicians use it, they use it with a very particular use. It's not the others are wrong.

It's just that that's how philosophers use the word. And by contradiction, they mean things of the form, something is and is not the case. The sun is shining and it's not shining. Donald Trump is corrupt and not corrupt. Two and two is four, two and two is not for. Things like that, right? You can mean other things by the word contradiction, but that's how philosophers and logic. That's what they mean by it.

Okay. Now, in Western philosophy, really since Aristotle, there's been a principle called the law of non-contradiction, which says that contradictions can't possibly be true. And moreover, they're obviously not true, and it's irrational to believe them. for this. And we can talk about how good his arguments were if you like. They weren't very good, but as a matter of fact, he was very successful in that he launched the Prince of Lone Conjection into high orthodoxy in Western philosophy. So much so that nearly every Western philosopher since Aristotle has taken it for granted. There are some exceptions we can talk about if you like, but generally speaking that's true. The situation in the Eastern

philosophical traditions is slightly different. We can talk about that too if you want, but let's just concentrate on Western philosophy for the moment. So most Western philosophers have assumed that people who believe contradictions, knowing their contradictions, are thinking that they're true, are pretty crazy. All right, That's a bit of history. Now, me. In a moment ago you used this word di-leithism. It's a made-up word, it's a neologism. And di-alithia is a, I mean, it has a, it's a neologism, but we made it up using Greek roots, of course, die to alethea truth. So it's a two-alithia. and a dialythia is something that is true and false.

So it's precisely something of the form it is and is not the case that is true. So it's one of these things that philosophers mean by contradictions and the sort of thing that Aristotle said you couldn't possibly have. All right. And dialythism is the view that there are such things. In other words, if you're a dialetheist, someone who thinks that dialythism is true, then you think that the principle of my contradiction is not correct. Aristotle was just wrong. And I and some other philosophers have been defending dialectism now for 30 or 40 years.

And as you can infer from what I just said, it's a highly unorthodox view. And at least at the start of what we were doing, most people thought that this was crazy. So we've had an argument going against philosophers in the Anglo profession for a long time. And, you know, most people now think the view is not true, but they don't think we're quite so crazy because they'd have to argue with this for 30 or 40 years,

and, you know, you can't argue with crazy people. It's interesting. Before the show, I had mentioned that. It seems to me that maybe the defense has been a lot like the idea of first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. And it seems to me that the argument you guys are doing is moving down that stream because it opens up, it just opens up so much more. What is your thoughts on your position? maturing through the years? Oh, well, I mean, you're certainly right about the reaction against Yeah. Hedroxes. Of course, I mean, the phenomenon you're describing is one about how heterodox views are first of all completely rejected and then people come to thinking, well, maybe if they're good arguments for them, then

there's something to be said for them. And perhaps in the end, people come to agree with them. And you've got to remember how many ideas in the history of ideas started off life as regards as crazy. You know, theory of evolution, theory of relativity, continental drift. And of course, the same as true in philosophy. You know, Cantonism, Marxism, Dviganchinianism, Derryism, all these were heresies at first. Yet people are, came to see that they, whether or not they believe these views. They had some philosophical or scientific virtues. Of course, sometimes these heterox views aren't really very good or they're shown to be bad and they die.

Whether that will happen to die leithism, we wait to see. At the moment, you know, we're still at the stage where the profession doesn't really accept the view but they can't write it off as lonely tune stuff anymore. So your question was about me and when I started thinking about this view I thought it was crazy too because I was trained in your private but in the end I've come around to the view that it's not there very good arguments for it that it helps solve a lot of problems and so on. Of course, my thinking about it has, I hope, matured, but it certainly changed over 40 years.

I understand the view a lot better now than I did at the beginning. I see more in it. I see where its strengths of weaknesses are better now. So my thinking has changed, as I say, I hope it's matured. But I believe the view much more firmly now than I did 40 years ago. Let me just say one other thing that I'll love. Yeah, please. You know, as I said 40 years ago, I thought the view was obviously crazy stuff.

And when I was talking about the view for the soccer conferences and whatever as philosophers do, I expected someone to put their hand up at the back of the audience and say, yeah but that can't be right because I'd have to say oh shit it never happened and after this failed to happen for 10 years I thought well maybe this principle of non-contradiction isn't really as you know solid as the history of Western philosophy has taken it to me so I say that to show why my confidence in the view has kind of increased over the is. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It seems to me that if it became more mainstream,

it could have incredible power over communications. So much of how we communicate is this either or. And if we could begin to embrace the idea that, yeah, we're both right. Like that would that could clear up a lot of problems, right? It could do. Um, I mean, let me just sound a word of warning. I mean, the view that some contradictions are true doesn't mean that all contradictions are true. And when you meet someone who has contradictory views, that usually is a sign that something has gone wrong. So some politician says, well, I didn't give the money to these people, but I did give the money to these people. but I did give them money to these people.

I mean, they're probably lying and they're corrupt and so on. Because that's not the kind of contradiction that is plausibly true. So if you're a dilethyst, you're not going to suppose that whenever someone contradicts themselves, they might be right. Okay, that raises the question of when you might want to believe that a contradiction that someone subscribes to as true. And that's a tough philosophical question. We can come back to that if you want. But that important caveat aside, the fact that you can countenance some inconsistencies, usually in the form of inconsistent theories, does open a whole new person.

perspective on a number of debates and you might just want to say that people who've been trying to resolve some of these problems for a long time getting nowhere have failed precisely because they were trying to go with one side of a contradiction where only one side of a contradiction where in fact both are right. So it opens that up that perspective on some issues. So that's one thing it certainly does. I like the term perspective, because it seems to me that some of the paradoxes we see

are at the limit of our understanding. And so, in your opinion, do the paradoxes that we see like the Liars paradoxes, do these show us a limit of our language, a limit of our understanding, or a limit of both? Yes. Maybe we should

just say a little bit about the liar paradox. Yes, please. Some of your audience will not have met this before. Please do. It's not what it is. So it's a very old

paradox. It was invented or discovered as far as we know by Eubulides. It's a rough contemporary Plato-Arisodosol. So it's about

full century BC is in Greece somewhere, or the Greek Empire. And the paradox goes like this. And it sounds a bit strange, but bear with me. Suppose I say to you, 2 plus 2 is 4. That's true, right? Yeah. Okay, how about Beijing is the capital of Greece? That's false, right? Yeah. Now, look, I want you to listen very carefully because this very sentence that I'm telling you now is not true. Is that true or is it not? Well, think about it for a moment.

Suppose it's true. Well, it says it's not true. So if it's true, well, what it says is the case, so it's not true. Okay, suppose it's not true. that's what it says. So what it says is the case. So it's true. So if it's true, it's not true. If it's not true, it's true. So it appears to you both true and not true. And that's a philosopher's contradiction, a logician's contradiction. And that's the liar paradox. Now, this sounds like a logician or a philosopher's party game, right? There's no idea why you should find this anything but a curiosity. But in fact, one of the things that happened at the beginning of the 20th century is that there was a revolution in logic and a revolution in mathematics. And it turned out that the Lyos Paradox is just one of a family. And other members of the family turned up in the very foundations of mathematics.

at the beginning of the 20th century. So this is no logicians party game. How you handle this actually runs through the whole fabric of mathematics and of course mathematics is fundamental to so much of what goes on in our intellectual life, especially in the sciences. So you cannot write this off as a logician's party piece. This caused a crisis in the foundations of mathematics. And in some sense, it hasn't really been resolved here.

And it engaged with the greatest mathematical minds in the 20th century, such as Russell, such as Hilbert, such as Goodell, such as Alan Turing. So we're not dealing with just cutesy stuff, we're dealing with very serious issues. Now, having said that, of course, philosophers and logicians, have known about these paradoxes for 10,500 years. And they've tried to solve them. And the solution is an explanation of what's wrong with this argument so that its conclusion isn't the case. The conclusion is that it's true and not true, right?

So you've got to explain what's wrong with the argument. So you don't have to accept this contradiction. And we failed, we meaning the collective community, if consensus is a mark of success. Because after 2,500 years, there's still no consensus amongst philosophers and auditions how you solve many of this kind of paradox. So some people, including myself,

have argued that trying to solve the paradoxes is just barking up the wrong tree. That these arguments are what they appear to be, solid arguments for contradictions. So this is, in other words, an argument for diluthism. And so the paradoxes are, I mean there are many kinds of paradoxes, but what we've been talking about are paradoxes a self-reference. And the paradox of self-reference had been one of the most popular kinds of arguments.

arguments for dialethism. So, sorry, I've gone on for a long time, but I wanted to try to make these things clear. Yeah, I think all the time you need. I think it's fascinating. I'm stoked to be able to hear someone talk exactly what it's about. It seems to have profound, it seems to me that if we are barking up the wrong tree and we accept this, it might have profound changes for the way we think. I'm wondering if you also think that and what are some of the changes that could come of it if this changed the way we are perspective on things Yeah, well The sort of fundamental fact here is that if you can accept the fact that some contradictions are true

You might come to endorse a contradictory theory about some matter or other Now, there are various domains in which this might happen. So, let's talk some philosophy for a moment, because that's what it will probably start. There are many famous philosophical conundrums. One, for example, is whether there's a real world out there, which is minding dependent, or whether there's a real world out there, which is minding independent, or whether there. or reality is mind dependent. So these go by philosophical names,

realism and idealism. So this has nothing to do with realism and idealism in the kind of way that they're often used. Realism is the view that there's a material world out there which would be there even if there'd never been any consciousness, had consciousness not evolved. And many philosophers over the years,

over the centuries have been realists. And idealism is the view that there is no such independent, mind-independent reality, that reality is thoroughly soaked in mental construction. And these guys are called idealists. And there are very famous philosophers on both sides of this debate. And this debate has been going on for a couple of hundred, couple of thousand years now. Now, no one has actually argued this in contemporary philosophy yet, But one possible approach you might have to this is that we've, there's been no consensus achieved on this debate.

Precisely because this is a dialetheia. They both is and is not a mind-independent reality. Now, what does that mean? Well, that's something that's got to be thought through, considered its ramifications and so on. So this is not a solution to the problem, but it's saying, hey, Let's suppose that someone came up with this view, you can't dismiss it out of hand. You've got to think through its merits and its demerits. So that could change a lot of thinking about that particular problem

and about a lot of the philosophical conundrums that philosophers have wrestled with for 2,000 years. Okay, so that's one area of philosophy. Let's switch to a very different area, mathematics and science, because it's a feature of mathematics, nowadays, that it's heavily dependent on mathematics. So you can't do physics or biology or economics or something without using mathematical tools. Now most of the mathematical tools that have been deployed in science are consistent. There are exceptions in the history of physics, we can talk about those if you like, but generally speaking, most of the mathematical tools that have been deployed are consistent.

Because most mathematics has been consistent. Again, there are some exceptions, but most of the mathematics that's been developed over the last 2,000 years has been consistent. What we're now starting to see is the development of inconsistent mathematics. So some of the mathematical structures, theories that are being investigated are contradictory. So there's this branch of Paraconsistent mathematics is called, where we understand now what an inconsistent set theory or topology or geometry or linear algebra might be like. This is very early days, but we are developing these inconsistent

mathematical theories and it's these are going to be put on the table for scientists to employ in the next 50 hundred years will they use them well they will if they find a good application because physicists and biologists will use any mathematics as long as it seems to give the right kind of empirical answers now willing consistent mathematics do that well, who knows? But once the mathematics is developed, it becomes an option. And whether it happens to be taken up, depends on all kinds of contingent features, we have to wait and see. So those are just two areas where it could affect the way that certain kinds of intellectual

inquiries think, philosophers and mathematics, and doubtless there are others as well. But those are two major intellectual traditions in the history. history of ideas. It's fascinating to me. I don't often think of, I have a very limited background in both. However, I don't often think of philosophy and mathematics being of two separate vehicles that take you to a similar spot, but it seems to me that sometimes the philosophical arguments are backed up by mathematics.

Is that accurate? Yeah, it's accurate. You should remember that many of the great philosophers have also been mathematicians, Degnaert, Leibniz, Russell, Kripke, so they naturally employ the tools of mathematics and their thinking. Now, many great philosophers have not been mathematicians, so this is not a necessary condition. But the tools of mathematics are actually very powerful, so on those occasions where they are appropriate to get deployed. they can be very, very powerful towards. And they have been deployed by many great philosophers

with very interesting philosophical consequences. It's almost like mathematics is another part of our language. And if you can speak well and you understand the trivium, perhaps if you put mathematics on there, maybe that's how we really begin to communicate and have effective communication, is if we could use all those together and everybody could use them back.

That would be a beautiful world, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, there is literally a language of mathematics. I mean, in the sense that if you listen to mathematicians, if you are a non-mathematician, listeners to a professional mathematician speak, you won't understand a word they're saying. Because they use a word, right?

Right. But it's a language in a slightly more profound sense, namely it gives you a set of conceptual tools to deploy. And they've been deployed with great success in science, really in the last 300 years. Had science not been mathematicised, as it was, you know, in the 17th century and subsequently, so science wouldn't have had the success it's had.

So learning these tools does give you an intellectual arrow in your quiver, so to speak, a whole set of tools which can be profitably employed sometimes. That doesn't mean to say that they're always appropriate, they're always going to help, but sometimes they do, and where they do, they're really powerful tools. So, yeah, mathematics is really important in life, or at least in some areas of life, and where it is, it should be used. It's an interesting point. And it seems to me that sometimes mathematics is used in statistics or in language or often in conjunction with philosophy for the masses and it works its way into social conditioning, which is a nice segue for me into the idea of maybe some of your work in paradoxes and propaganda.

And I got a question for you in that in the realm of paradoxes and non-classical logic. How do you view the role of language in shaping and conveying propaganda? Well, the role that language plays in propaganda is really, really important. Because when people want to propagate ideas, which is the meaning of the word propaganda, essentially they want to persuade people. And you can persuade people with images, you can persuade people with words. You can persuade people with violence. But if you use language, then putting things in a way that people find intellectually attractive or emotionally attractive is a really important tool.

You only got to watch how adverts work to see this. See the words that advertisers use to propagate their ideas and of course politicians and of course religions. So language is really important. Understanding how language functions in this regard is important if you want to understand the success and the pitfalls of propaganda. Okay. The relation of paradox to propaganda, I think, is a lot more tenuous. It's not very common that you use paradox. use paradox seen in propaganda.

Maybe can you give me an example of the sort of thing you had in mind? I think maybe just the ability, the inconsistency. So maybe, you know, how can these particular group of people be our enemies, but yet we trade with them? How can this group of people be animals, but yet we just a little wild. ago we were on great terms with them. I don't know not sure that's an actual paradox, but it seems to me to at least be inconsistent. And that's what you see in a lot of the propaganda is the first part of propaganda is to dehumanize people. And we often use horrendous means of

dehumanizing people with images or language in that way. No, that's certainly true. I'm not sure that that's the kind of contradiction that anyone would argue is a true contradiction. Good point. That is, I mean, propaganda is used to push power structures, sell things and so on. And you will tell people whatever you will find efficient or effective to make them believe what you want. Okay. And it's often power structures that do this, whether it's power structures of capital or race or gender or religion and it's quite possible for people in power to tell people they want to persuade one thing one day and something else the next hoping if these two

things are inconsistent that the people don't notice which we often don't okay so often propaganda works because it's kind of hides over pernicious contradictions So that's less to do with good contradictions as they're covering over bad contradictions, as it were. In the context of political or ideological propaganda, how might the recognition of contradictions be used to both deceive and enlighten the audience? Well, how it's used to deceive the audience is something we've already talked about. And if that's how it's being used, then the audience is enlightened by realizing. that they've been told inconsistent things on different occasions.

I mean, the kind of contradiction that you're pointing to is very frequent. So, you know, for example, just a hypothetical example, someone might tell you that all life is sanct, sacred, right? You shouldn't kill people, right? The person the next day will turn around and tell you that they believe in capital punishment. Now, obviously those two ideas are contradictory. I don't think anyone is going to tell you that that's a true contradiction. It's just an incoherence in someone's thinking that someone hasn't thought about. Or maybe, you know, the person will tell you one thing on one day because they want to push

a political line and then the other thing on another day to choose, to push a political line. So in that, to enlighten people, you really need to understand that they, or they perhaps need to understand that their views are conflicting. How might contradictions be used to enlighten you? That's a much harder question. It takes us into certain religious views. because religion often sails very close to the contradictory wind. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism. Now let me give you just one example.

Let me make it clear that I'm not a Christian, and I'm not. So this is the content of Christianity. But then Christianity there. in many paradoxical views. One is that Christ was holy God and holy man. One is that God is one and God is three. These are well-recognized paradoxes in Christian theology. And of course, Christian philosophers who were heavily influenced by Aristotle, like Aquinas, most medieval who are heavily influenced by Aristotle, have tried to get out of these problems, these contradictions by, you know, drawing various dissentions. Whether they succeed are not,

well, you know, theologians argue about. But one line that you might hold now is that when these paradoxes arise, it's because these contradictions really are are diolithic, so that, for example, God, Jesus really was holy God and holy man. Now, if you'd said that in the 13th century, you'd probably been burnt at the stave. However, there are quite well-known philosophers of religion nowadays who are actually arguing for this view. It's an unorthodox view because it depends on dialethism. But there's a I mean, if you really believe the dogma, the belief, which was sort of put in various of the councils of the early church,

then this strikes me as a very sensible view. Again, I'm not a Christian, I don't believe this, if you're a Christian and you believe the dogma, the bits of belief. This strikes me as a very sensible interpretation. Okay. Christianity is just one example of the paradox is frequent. You get it in all the major religions I'm aware of. And if you think that the religion itself is enlightening, and of course we might argue

about these things, then understanding it properly is an element of enlightenment. And so understanding the paradoxical nature of the religion could then be seen as a form of enlightenment. It takes me a while to think about that. Maybe you could unpack that a little bit more. Maybe it just takes me a moment to wrap my brain around it a little bit.

Well, okay. Let me give you another example. Okay, please do. Because this really does run across most religions I know. Let's start with Christianity again. Okay. it's pretty standard Christianity that God is a completely different kind of thing from God's creatures,

so different that the language we use to describe God's creatures, you know, the film of the world we live in, really doesn't apply to God. God is just such a different kind of thing that you can't use human language to describe it. That's almost a sort of an act of... It will be an act of impiety to think that you could describe God with the concepts that apply to mere morals. So most great theologians have held that in a certain sense that God is ineffable. Okay. And they give you arguments why this is the case. I mean, I've described a view, but it's not just a view.

People, theologians have argued for this. And of course, if you give an argument that God is ineffable, then you've got to use human concepts to make the argument and so in mounting the case that God is ineffable you're describing God okay that's a contradiction right how do you respond to that contradiction well many Christian theologians have addressed this in some way whether they've been able to resolve the contradiction we could argue about. Some Christian theologians have accepted the contradiction. Often theologians who are more mystically inclined like Meister Eckert. So some theologians in the history of Christianity have been inclined to endorse this kind of contradiction. Now I mean this is this is Christianity but it's

equally true of most theistic religions. You find it in the Sufi tradition in Islam, you find it in Advaita Badanta in Hinduism. And in Buddhism, there is no God. It's not a theory. It's not a theistic religion. However, there is an ultimate reality. It's not divine. But it's the ultimate nature. of the world. And this is held to be ineffable in Mahayana Buddhism. But of course, the Mahayana Buddhists give reasons as to why this is the case. So whether the religions are atheistic or atheistic, this phenomenon of telling you that something is ineffable and telling you why it is, is very, very common. Right. Okay.

How do you respond to that? Well, one way is to try to wiggle out of the contradiction, as people are trying to wiggle out of the lie paradox, and another is to say, well, you know, we're dealing with very deep, very profound issues here. And in the end, the thing is so strange that it has really strange properties, and some of these strange properties are really contradictory. It's a line that you might... Is this like, it seems to be, it seems to me when we talk about contradictions or the ineffable or trying to describe these things. It almost seems like that's the beginning of the birth of new knowledge.

It's like something we don't quite yet have the ability to comprehend, but we're touching around it. Like it seems like these divine contradictions or this idea of God or the ineffable is what leads to poetry or what leads the wiggling is what leads us to. come up with ways to describe something we never have before, which ultimately kind of leads to new language, doesn't it? If we use the concept of the metaphor, where we use the old to describe the new. No, that's absolutely true. I mean, when you discover something new, you don't just stop there. You always pursue it and see where it goes. And that's true of your views about God or reality, whatever you think there's are. So yes, of course, you don't just sit on that contradiction, you'll take it and see where it goes.

And maybe it's worth mentioning one of the great German philosophers here, Hegel, who had a whole very sophisticated theory of the evolution of our ideas. And he thought that when we examine our ideas, we find contradictions. this prompts us to generate new concepts which are in some sense more adequate. But it's important that this doesn't make the old contradictions disappear. It just gives you new concepts in which to manage the contradictory situation that you've discovered. Okay, that's the idiot's guide to Hegel. But you know what you just suggested is is sort of a neo-Higalian.

you, namely that you realize that you're dealing with something contradictory, and then that forces you to develop new responses to theorize, cognize, co-employ this contradiction. Do you, if I take us back one step to this, move us back into the propaganda a little bit. Do you see any ethical implications in the intersection of paradoxes and propaganda? There are a lot of ethical implications about lying. A good point. Sorry, I don't know that I have anything much more to say about that question. Okay.

Let me ask you this. If you could step into one of your paraconsistent worlds for a day, what would you hope to discover or experience that defies classical logic? Well, I don't have to step into a paraconsistent world. I think I'm in one. You know, I think the lie of paradox is both through and false. I think that we've discovered a lot about logic by thinking through the consequence of this view.

We've discovered things about logical consequence, about truth, about meaning. And that's just one dialythea. I think there are others. I actually do think there are contradictions at the limits of thought. Not necessarily religious ones, but any philosophy that tells you there are limits to language and then tells you there are things that you can't describe or cognise is going to cross those limits. And this happens a lot in philosophy. You find it not just in the philosophy religion, you find it in Kant or Hegel and Wittgenstein and Plato, And I am inclined to think that there are limits to thought, and those limits of thought are going to have to be dilethic.

So, I mean, one thing we're thinking through, we, some of us are thinking through, is precisely what kind of applications dilethism has in philosophy. Those are two of the most interesting, I think. So I do think I don't have to step into a dialectic world. I think I'm in one. And let me use a geographical metaphor. We're now examining bits of the world that we didn't know or maybe we didn't know very well. seeing to what extent they have dilethic parts. That's a relatively new game in philosophical town, not philosophical game in town,

but it's where a number of things are going. It's interesting to me to, I speak English and a little bit of Spanish. However, it seems to me that what you can learn by learning other, languages gives you a vastly superior understanding of logic. It helps you see the world through the culture of another group of people. And I'm wondering what are some of the, are there different paradoxes in different cultures and different languages that are much different than the ones we have in the Western culture? Well, in the sense you're asking the wrong person. I speak one language that badly. I mean, I have a passing acquaintance of some other cultures.

And I think you've got to remember that the cultures that contemporary philosophy deals with are not necessarily our own. I mean, the culture of ancient Greece is just as alien to me, as the culture of contemporary Japan. So it's not as though it's on us. you know, Western culture and the others. I mean, cultures are a motley, and Western culture is itself a motley. Okay, that was a way of avoiding your question. Well, your question was, if you study other cultures, do they have paradoxes that you don't find in the West? Well, yes, maybe. I think there are perhaps some paradoxes. in Buddhist thought, which no one has yet discovered in the West.

But of course, now that we recognise that, they are Western paradoxes. As far as well as to think about it. Some paradoxes like the paradoxes concern the limits of thought, you find in most cultures that I'm aware of. But so just to answer your question straight, it may well be that if you, if someone from culture A, say mine, just thinks about another culture, say that of medieval Japan in the 12th century, 13th century, they find some paradoxes they're familiar with and some paradoxes are not familiar.

So that's the straight answer, but we're arriving at a very interesting time in philosophy where a lot of philosophical divisions are being crossed. So, very few Western philosophers have taken the Eastern philosophical traditions very seriously and engaged with them. That is now changing big time. So Western philosophers are coming to engage with the Asian philosophical traditions like Buddhism, like Taoism, like Confucianism, in a way that they really haven't done before much in the pastoral. What we're seeing is the emergence of global philosophy for the first time in a way that, which means that philosophers can now draw on ideas not just from ancient Greece or

18th century Germany or medieval Christianity and the Arabic kingdom, but also of medieval China and Buddhism before the common era. So I mean, philosophy I think is becoming much richer just because philosophers who try to understand the different traditions have a whole new set of ideas and tools to draw on. That doesn't mean you've got to describe to any of them. But philosophy has a toolbox. The toolbox is ideas and the more tools you've got, the richer, the better your, the more tools you've got, the more you can do with them. And you can do things you didn't know you could do before. That's a situation I think we're starting to get into in philosophy where a truly global philosophical culture is a morning for the first. time. It's a beautiful thought to think about. I've been reading a lot of Marshall McLuhan lately, and specifically the Gutenberg Galaxy, when he begins to talk about the way in which the printing press

and typography changed our sense ratios. He harkens back to a time when most of the philosophical ideas or teachings in general were done by a lecture or people speaking to each other. And then the printing press gave us the ideas of things like exact repeatability. And I'm wondering, do you think maybe the evolution of philosophy, this richness that we are now beginning to encounter a little bit, has to do with, again, the changing of sense ratios? Maybe the way we're consuming multiple forms of media now is changing the ratio of our senses and allowing us to understand more? No, because the engagement with the East was happening a long time before contemporary media.

It really goes back 50 or 8 years. And you've got to remember that the people in the East have been engaging with Western ideas for a long time, just because of imperialism. Okay, so, you know, the people in most Asian cultures know a lot about Western philosophy. Kant, Marx, Aristotle, and that has been going off for a long time, you know, 150 years, in the case of British Raj, 200 years. So it's not so much the engagement with the east or between the east and the west that is changing things. However, things are changing and it's to do with the medium.

I mean, since you mentioned, the media was the message. Well, I'm not sure that's true. The meeting is changing big time. I mean, you know, the printing press had an enormous impact on the way that ideas were produced, transmitted, talked, and the contemporary developments in computation, IT, the net, are doing the same in a much more, much faster time, much shorter timescale in the printing press. So it's changing the way that people communicate, express their ideas, sometimes I think for the better, sometimes for the worse, but it's suddenly changing the medium. And that's, is that going to change the message? Well, maybe, maybe not, but it's certainly going to have a profound impact on the way that people are thinking and communicating.

And then once you add to the new developments in AI and chatbots, then what's going to happen in the future, I think is very, very, one can only speculate. There's some interesting speculations to happen there. Do you have any particular thoughts on AI and speculations on that? Well, look, I started working before computers. I'm that old, right? I remember the first time that I saw a computer on someone's desk. When I started doing philosophy, I would write out my papers by hand, give them to the deep-up mental typist who would type them up.

There was no internet. Things have changed completely. And over the years, I've seen many people say, well, computers will never do X. They will never beat people at chess. They will never translate. They will never write music. They will never, you know, and within 10 years,

that prediction was wrong. So I think very soon computers will be able to do what people do. But they'll do it better than people because computers have an ability that humans will never have, namely a computational power. To remember and analyze complex combinatorial situations. So potentially computers will be much more intelligent than people. This ain't going to happen until computers are embodied. before we have AI in robots, but that's very close to happening now. And once that happens, I think things really are unpredictable.

We're actually not so far away from AI, which, AI machines which will make very good philosophical teachers. I suspect that most philosophical classes could already be taught by machines. Now, will they be able to have the kind of originality that goes on in not just philosophical teaching, but philosophical research? Well, some people have said that, of course, computers won't be able to come up with new philosophical ideas. I've already said that I'm very skeptical about predictions about what computers can't do, right? people can't do, right?

And once that happens, then computers will be able to anything we do, we being humans, and doing a lot better. And then, well, what happens, anything could happen. It's kind of scary. It is. It's fascinating to think about, I think about what we can create with it together. In some ways when I see people, I'm very fortunate to speak to a lot of different people. You can speak to a lot of different people on my podcast. And a lot of the times when I ask a question like this, a lot of the people have more fearful answers than hopeful answers.

I always try to lean towards the glass being half full. And I think it's a, I think it's two things. One, I think it's a mirror for us to see ourselves in. And that's why people react so crazy to it. It's like, oh my gosh, look at this. What they're really doing is seeing a version of themselves, and it's hard to see yourself in the mirror. And the second part that I like to see is it's such a beautiful tool for us to enhance the possibilities for us.

You think those are too optimistic? Look, technology is just a tool. Technology allows us to do things and it can be used for benefit or for harm. And of course, to the moment, we've controlled technology and some people have used it for good and some people have used it for bad. The same is true of AI. While people have control of it, it will be deployed for good and for bad. But we may well get to the point where we lose control of AI. We're not very good at controlling ourselves, let alone the things are great, okay?

And if we create machines that have all our abilities and more, then we're not very good at controlling ourselves, let alone the things are great, okay? then we may lose total of control of it and who knows what it's going to do. I mean, this is sci-fi stuff, okay? 30 years ago,

you'd have read about this in sci-fi novels and thought, oh, yeah, okay. We're verging on the point where this is starting to become a real possibility. Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I was reading

there's a really cool book called the fourth turning, they talk about generational change and cycles of life and how when the instrument becomes institutionalized, that's when you begin to see the breakdown of the community or whatever the instrument is. I'm wondering as someone with a philosophical background, do you see like mankind is like a, like a giant wheel and we're on this progression forward, and there's rise and falls of civilizations and that maybe we are on, where in the book I read, it spoke about us being on the cusp of like another great revolution. And with the revolution comes a lot of destruction.

Do you give any credence to that sort of cyclical structure? Well, humanity has been changing, of course. We've invented all kinds of technology to do with agriculture and machinery, power. And that's led to significant changes in the way that society is organized. Contemporary United States is organized in a very different way from a European community in the Bronze Age for example. Power structures have risen, power structures have fallen. As long as there are people, I guess change is inevitable.

If we don't wipe ourselves out, which was a singular possibility in the next 80 years. it's very hard to predict what the world will be like. It's pretty safe to suppose the world won't be anything like it is now. You know, think about the world a hundred years ago, say in 1900, 130, 120 years ago, and then the world now, there's no comparison. Yet change is speeding up because of technological innovation. And so the world a hundred years hence won't be anything like it is now. That's pretty certain.

certain. How will it be? Well, if you'd ask someone what the world would be like in 1900, you might have had a few people like HG Wells who'd have had interesting predictions, but most of us, including Wells, wouldn't have had a clue. It's just speculation. So, I really don't know the answer. But I do think that there's a serious possibility of to wipe ourselves out. I think there's a serious possibility of wipe ourselves out. I think there's a a serious possibility of a nuclear war. There's certainly going to be climate change, which will

put all kinds of stress on migration, on economies, on clean water, which of course leads to tension between societies and when so many nations in the world have atomic weapons now,

God, I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect only have time before someone uses them. So these are significant dangers. will the human race overcome them and prosper? I hope so. I'm not terribly confident.

One of the... We've taken the discussion around a rather pessimistic. Well, it's all right. It's a real conversation, right? I mean, these are the... I think that a lot of people are thinking down this avenue. Sometimes it's only out of necessity that we come up with the ideas necessary to make our lives better.

And maybe something that we're on the cusp of seeing is like parallel economies. I'm beginning to, when I talk to a lot of these tech entrepreneurs, I'm beginning to see ways in which they are starting up sort of new economies. And they'll start it by, you know, start with like a crypto group. And then they have this new philosophy about, you know, how money, what money is, how it should be distributed, how we exchange energy, how we can exchange goods and services. And I know there's nothing new under the sun,

but on some level, I think it's incredibly inspiring to see groups of young people beginning to manipulate the ideas of how to live in a world that's different than today. And they have as the foundation, the ideas of limited resources and the anti-extraction motives.

And so I think that that's something positive that's moving forward in the world today, but it is unfortunate that it may take calamity for us to really breathe life into those. That's true. You know, maybe there'd be some horrible calamity and the human race will come to its senses. It'll be nice if it came to its senses before the calamity. Yes.

But, you know, new ideas happen, do happen. And often they happen in response to crises. That's certainly true. But if the human race manages to survive from another 1,000, years, again, you can be sure that the economic structure of society then will not be anything like a reason. Someone who said in the year 1000, well, the world's economy, socio-economy in the year 2000 will be much same as soon as now. They might have been forgiven because there wasn't a lot of change in those days. Somebody said that the world's economy in year 3000 will be the same as it's in

2000 is just doesn't for the history. Okay. And we all of us think that capitalism is kind of God-given, permanent, fixed. You know, you've got to have a capitalist society because after all that's the end of history. Oh, that's just cool. Okay. The economic structure of society in the year 3000 will be as different from it is what it is now as now from a thousand years ago. and I sincerely hope it won't be as pernicious as capitalism. Yeah, Thomas Pickety wrote a pretty good book on the state of capital, and he wrote that what we see now is but a blip on the screen, and capital tends to coagulate the very top, and there'd be nothing but really, really wealthy and really, really poor people. I hope that that book, I hope that these times are a blip on the radar. I have another question that kind of comes into my mind.

The idea is that how much does the language that we use shape our ability to mold the potential future? You know, when I think about the Western alphabet, I think about this linear pattern of a letter gets a word, a word gets a sentence, a sentence gets a paragraph, a paragraph gets a page, a page, it's a book, a book, and so on and so on. But it seems to be that our language teaches us to think just linear. but some of the people that have the best ideas think exponentially. But in my opinion, I think that the language we speak teaches us the way we think. Maybe if we change the language in some ways, and maybe it's happening now, if we have a living language, but might that be a way to change people's perception about the world and how to live in it?

Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, language just changed, and the way we describe things has an enormous effect on how people think. So what we've seen in the last 50 years is the language of capitalism being used to describe things. So this is impacted on universities enormously. So there's a sort of managerial cast of universities nowadays who talk about investment and profit making and value adding and synergy and leveraging. These are all terms from capitalism, right? And most of them do not work in an educational situation. You know, the students I teach and I try to help,

the managerial cast describes that as value-adding. So the input, the economic input, I take kind of widgets who have a little of students and I value out by sending them out with more skills than they came in with. You know, if I conceptualise what I'm doing like that, then I solve my students completely short. That's not what I'm doing. That's not what your education consistent. But it's the way that the manager of Kastogne University is thinking now.

And if you hear, if you read the documents, they produce the way they describe things, it's just saturated with capitalist business speak. And so that's how they think in the institution. And you can guess from what I'm saying that I find it malicious. But if we change the language to a non-capitalist framework, then this framework, would it affect the way that people think? Almost certainly. Yeah, I think so too. And it's the managerial system.

It's saturated everything from the education system to multiple. Obviously multinational corporations where I worked, the first thing you do is get an employee number. And it just eviscerate your humanity. Like you're no longer George whose kid might have died on a Thursday and you're having some problems. Now you're just 0572 that's not as productive or efficient as you were. And you're easily replaced. And it permeates everything. All you need to do is look outside and look at the stress on the people around you to see how it's affecting on it.

That's true. No, once you lose touch with the fact that you're dealing with people, with the emotions and problems, it's exactly the same as yours and mine, then you've opened the gate for them to be treated in a dehumanized way. You don't need to look very deep to the history of this to see it in action. Yeah. It's mind-blowing to me. I am, grandma, I'm so thankful to get to talk to you. This has been really, really fun, and I really appreciate your time.

This is a great time, man. Thank you very much for this. Well, you're welcome. I mean, we've strayed a long way from dialethism, but that's fine, too. Yeah, it is. It's amazing to me. And it's really fun to get to see the people who, in my opinion, are making huge strides in changing the conscience of people.

I think that if we can change the language, change the way we think about things, then we have a real opportunity to become more authentic, change ourselves and in doing so, change the world around us. What are you excited about coming up for the future? Do you have anything that you're really excited for? Excitement, no. I don't get excited much nowadays. Close, certainly. I hope the human race comes to its senses. gets itself the socioeconomic system,

which isn't as pernicious as the present one, in terms of exploiting other people, ruining the environment, threatening us with major warfare. That's certainly my hope. Do you see the level of propaganda that's been being thrust upon people as accelerating over like the last year, year and a half?

You mean in America, of the whole world? I would say America. It seems to me that that's all I can speak to, really. I mean, I'm only here. Look, there's always been propaganda. Right. In any country, modern IT and the web has made it, has given it a sort of penetration and a speed that it didn't have before.

So it's ramped up. its effectiveness, I think. And there's another phenomenon that has now happened, which is a sign of people. People get the kind of news feed that the algorithms feed them. And the algorithms feed them what's going to sell their product, so they give people what they want to hear. So people really only hear the kind of news that they want to hear.

So sometimes this is called siloing. Right. And it's producing, in the United States, two countries where each can't understand the other. Call them Democrats and Republicans, if you like. On some level, they seem like the same people to me. You know, they seem to both overlook the very people that need them the most. How do you mean? I'm not following you.

Tell me what. Well, it seems to me whether someone is a Democrat or Republican, they're still influenced by the donor class. Oh, absolutely. Right? Right? Yeah. I mean, what drives the United States is money.

Actually, you know about that. And the people who really control this society are not the people in Washington who fund them because the same goes, who pays the Parker calls the tune? So, I mean, this country is a plutocracy. Yeah. I have another question. What do I do with it? In a world saturated with information and persuasion, how might our philosophy

empower individuals to discern between reasoned arguments and manipulative propaganda. Well, the first thing you would do is to recognize how you're being manipulated. Right. Okay. And that's important. But the question is about philosophy specifically. Okay. So nowadays I teach only graduate students. But, I mean, I've been around for a long time. I've taught every level of philosophy from go to wire, right? And I actually enjoy teaching first-year students. Most of first-year students are never going to be philosophers. They're probably not even going to take more than one course in philosophy.

But this is one chance you have to try to encourage good habits of thought. Don't take what you're told, what you had been told for granted. Most people have the ideas they do because that's what they've been told when they're growing up by their parents, the media, their church, whoever. And the first thing that you've got to realize is that those ideas might be wrong. They might be right, but they might well be wrong. And you've got to start thinking for yourself. So one thing that a good first year philosophy course does or should do is to get people

step back and think for themselves and think what they've been told, what they've been told, whether there are good reasons for, where there are good reasons against. And I do think that that's something a first year student can get a great value out of a philosophy because habits of thought, which with luck they will take out and employ in the rest of life after they've done philosophy 100. A great question to always ask. Is that true? Is this true?

Right? It really helps you, at least it helps me stop for a minute and be like, wait a minute. Is that true? And then it kind of changes the way I react to it in some ways. Yeah, then the second question is, why do you think that? What would the third question be? At that point, you have the person going to ask you a question. Because dialogue is important, right?

Right. Absolutely. Not even Descartes thinks all his ideas and produces them on his own. We all improve our thinking and in dialogue with other people. So we all learn from discussion about other people. You've got to have an open mind. You've got to be prepared to question your own ideas. Have a critical spirit to other people's ideas as well. And then you progress collectively.

wouldn't it be amazing if instead of if we had more oxford style debates where we could take the ideas of today whatever they be whatever however controversial they be and have a town hall where two people get up and they can accommodate and understand the rules of debate and they got up and they let both sides speak in front of people or even made the side switch out to any other and argue the other side's argument wouldn't that be a beautiful system Look, I wouldn't look to an Oxford-style debate. Okay. Because Oxford-style debates, and I was a student in Cambridge, right? They have the same thing, you know, Cambridge Union, Oxford Union. They're all about point scoring. They're not about both. These debating clubs are training grounds for lawyers.

Ah. Okay. I'm politicians, of course. Right. It's certainly illuminating to hear people express their views and give their reasons, of course. But really fruitful dialogue is when you engage in question communally. You show your views, you may have different views, but you don't do it in a point-scoring fashion.

You work together to try and get at the truth. Philosophy, at its best, it should be like that. It isn't always at its best, but it should be. Yeah. maybe in the future we find a way to do that. I guess if you started be teaching that, if that was sort of the curriculum at a young age, it could become a habit for people to work into. I'm sure on some level it used to be in a classical education, but it seems to avoid now.

Yeah. Well, there is a movement nowadays to get philosophy taught in schools. And some high schools teach it as a subject, both in this country and in Australia and the UK. Probably other countries too that I don't know that. And there are some places where this sort of kind of critical thinking is even talked to kids in primary school, elementary school you've got it here on. I think there's an interesting question of where this kind of encouragement of, critical thinking becomes really effective at one age. That's a psychological question that I don't know the answer to.

But certainly by the time that kids are in high school, they have the kind of criticality to respond to this kind of encouragement to think for themselves. So on the topic of dialectism, in this world that's emerging, where we're becoming like this, where we are becoming more of a global community. And we're beginning to see different cultures permeate different parts of the world. And we're learning or doing our best to understand people, hopefully. Isn't the idea of history falling apart?

Like not so much in the end of history, like the gentleman from Singapore thought, but the end of history in that it's all a construct. Like my history is definitely different than the history of someone who grew up in Japan, who is different than the history that grew up in China. At some point, don't we have to get to the end of history for us to accept each other? And doesn't that mean that both things are true? Your history is true and my history is true. Your history is false and my history is false.

Well, you know, what's happened to you is different from what's happened to me. It's what happens is different from what's happened to someone currently in Gabon or Eritrea. That's always going to be true. Right. Because we all, we have different culture. different societies, different lives. But in a sense, we're all human.

We're all, well, as Shakespeare said, if you cut me, do I not bleed? If you wrong me, do I not seek revenge? You know, this is, we're a single species and we work in the same way.

We'll have the same biological needs, desires. And that, I think, is a commonality that undergirds the much more superficial differences that times and societies place on people. And one of my favorite people that I've been reading lately is Merci Eliat. And he talks about this concept of sacred time versus profane time. And I thought it was really interesting. And the sacred time would be if my father, got married and then I got married, we wouldn't since be sharing that time. And that would be a

sacred time because both of us have experienced it versus a profane time where you just kind of get up and you go to work. And I think that the sacred time speaks to the idea of rituals and ceremonies and rights of passage. And I'm wondering, in your opinion, do you think that the absence of this sacred time, the absence of these rituals and ceremonies and rights of passage, are common in a society that is decaying? No, I don't think rituals are disappearing at all. You don't think so. Around the world.

Rituals, you know, sports, watch on TV. Rituals are everywhere. I mean, you know, we're creatures of habit, and ritual plays an enormous role in structuring habits. So I don't think that's going to disappear. I'm not quite sure what sacred means in this context. But I do know that if you share experiences with people, you come to understand them and yourself better. A very simple example of this.

I have kids, I have grown up kids, and my relationship with my kids has made me understand my relationship with my own parents in a way that I could have not imagined when I was 20, precisely because I now know the experiences that they've had in raising me and all the things that they struggled with in their life. So even though my parents are dead now, in some sense, I feel closer to them than I did when I was 20. I often speak to a lot of people that are working with trauma patients, specifically like PTSD or coming.

back from different wars and things like this or different addiction sometimes. And the idea of generational trauma comes up quite a bit. I'm wondering if, do you have any thoughts on the idea of generational trauma? To the people with whom I'm spoken, it seems to me that they have found a lot of clarity in becoming aware that the situation they have may not, maybe a similar situation that their parent have, but just realizing that there's that pattern of generational trauma there that allows them to break that pattern. Do you have any thoughts on generational trauma? I'm not entirely sure what it is. What do you mean? Well, say, for example, my father was in

Vietnam and he was in situations where he was forced to do things he never wanted to do. Maybe he had to. Maybe he killed some people. He went through things that he didn't want to. He carries that trauma with him and unknowingly passes it on to me. through habits, through behavior. And then when I get older, I am scared of loud sounds or, you know, the trauma that happens in my father's life is carried on to me and carried on to my daughter unless I understand what happened to him and then I'm allowed to break that trauma. I guess maybe cyclical patterns of behavior, but the way they were describing it is generational trauma. Well, there's certainly such a thing. I mean, if you look at the statistics about people who abuse children, they've almost always been abused themselves, or very frequently been abused themselves.

So this is a pattern which repeats herself. And I'm sure, you know, that's a very obvious example, but I'm sure there are a lot so just because we learn to behave many from our parents and people are good mimics. In the first instance, they do what their parents do, think what their parents think what their parents think. I'm not saying this is set in concrete, but it certainly happens. Do you think it's fractal? Do you think that the way the trauma, the way the trauma is passed on from my father to me is the same way the trauma is passed on from one generation to the next? which is the same way it's passed on from, you know, epoch to epoch.

Is it similar in that transmission? I'm not entirely sure what you have in mind. I don't either. I guess I just, I'm trying to see, establish if there's a pattern. You know, often you hear that saying, as above so below. So the changes that happen in my relationship between my parents and me, might there be similar changes that happen on a bigger scale between the planet and the people of the planet? Well, there's obviously a similarity of a certain kind because just as my parents encultured me in a certain way,

so the culture of one generation incultures the succeeding generation. Cultures don't come from now where people don't. come from nowhere. We're all encultured by our family, our society, all the other things that formed us as people when we were growing up and continue to change. Do you think that the changes can happen the opposite way? So if I as an individual break the patterns or the cycles that happened to my family, could it be that the answer to the society getting better is just all of us becoming better individuals. I guess it goes back to that idea of be the change you want to see in the world.

But maybe it's sort of like a bounce effect where we've had all these critical problems and it seems like all this devastation has been falling upon us. Maybe the answer isn't to go and tell other people what to do or try to reach out to other parts of the world. Maybe the answer is just for each one of us to become the very best version of ourselves. Well, that's something desirable. Of course, we don't disagree about what the best person is, but that's, you know, for example, an ethical discussion that's worth having. But certainly, you know, people do, don't necessarily reproduce their parents' behaviour.

Often they react against it. So, for example, my father grew up in a family of a dozen in Sheffield. his father was a violent man he would come home drunk on a Friday night and strap his kids take his belt off and strap his kids because my father had welts on his back the rest of his life

my father never touched me he was so convinced that this was terrible that he never laid a finger on me I'm going to have to go soon I know I was keeping you as long as I because I really enjoyed the conversation, but you've been really, really gracious with your time,

and I'm really thankful for this. So before I let you go, where can people find you, and do you have any new books coming out? Well, my website is grahampriest.net. Grandpriest is all one stream. I don't know if I'm much of interest there, it's mainly white papers. Do I have any books coming out?

well, I've got to finish up a book on the philosophy of mathematics. That's nearly done. Then the one I'm really writing at the moment is a book on nothingness. It's fantastic. I would point everybody that's listening to this, check out Graham's website. Check out the books that he's already written. He's an amazing human being and an incredible person to talk to,

a gracious, kind human being who's helping at least me and I think a lot of humanity understand paradoxes and how to think more critically about the information that's been given to you. So, Graham, thanks again very much for all your time today. I truly appreciate everything you're doing. Thank you for being on the True Life podcast. Hang on one second. I'll talk to you briefly afterwards, but I'm going to hang up with the people. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for spending time with us today.

I hope you have a beautiful weekend. And I hope that a small miracle happens in your life because you deserve it. a look.