Stuff You Should KnowPhilosophers have been wondering whether we experience reality as it is for millennia now. They’ve pretty much settled on no, no we don’t. Now science has taken up the investigation and it’s proving the philosophers correct. So what is reality then?
Hey, everybody, Josh and I are going on tour again to basically wrap up twenty twenty three on the road in Orlando, Florida first, then Nashville, Tennessee, and then wrapping it up here in Atlanta, Georgia.
Yeah, and you can listen to the next Tuesday's episode for details on when we'll be there and where to get tickets and all that stuff. But we just wanted to give you guys a heads up, And if you don't feel like listening to Tuesday's episode, you can still get all of your info at linktree, slash, sysk, or our website Stuff youshould Know dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w. Tchuck Bryant, and here too is Jerry Roland. If Jerry Roland exists and this is Stuff.
You Should Know?
Can I make a just a quick thank you? Yeah, make a thank you? I met Baker, Thank you?
Sorry, Sure, build a thank you.
I you know, I mentioned in that one episode that I was going to put pictures of my new podcast studio up, and then that episode came out thank you. And I put it up and everyone was just so nice and sweet, and I just want to say thanks. And also I want to say sorry to you because that post now just supplanted a picture of you and I as my most popular ever post on Instagram.
Really, I'm sick of that post.
It just passed it today.
That picture when we did our secret mission out to the desert in January was my previous most popular post ever.
Okay, but you should have probably taken down this new post just before it topped it. I'm not sure why you didn't.
No, I had a counter. I was like, here it comes, here it.
Comes, and then you had like a confetti and the little noise maker.
That's right, and then the picture of us just dissolved.
No, we just aged and turned into mummies in the picture.
That's right, because it's not reality.
Right, it isn't reality. That. That's a great segue, Chuck, because I have a question to kick this one off. Sure, Chuck, are you hallucinating right now?
Unfortunately no, but philosophers might say that. I am.
Yeah, not just philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists, biologists, maybe evolutionary biologists in particular, especially ones that are hipped to this whole thing, would say, yeah, you're hallucinating right now, and so are you, Josh, and so are you Jerry. If you do exist, you're hallucinating every single thing you're looking at, smelling, hearing, touching. That none of this is real. And we're talking today about whether reality is real or not, and there's a very deep, like mind blowing aspect to it. And I feel like that's where a lot of people leave. But it's just like, in this the craziest stuff these people are talking about, but there's more to it than that. And like, I've realized that in investigating the nature of reality, we end up learning more about ourselves than we do about reality. And I just find that endlessly fascinating.
Welcome to Jurassic Park. I know what you mean because this article. And by the way, big shout out to Dave Ruse, because you threw him this topic as if it was just like, hey, do one on elephants, and it was tough, and Dave even had to take a rare second stab at it, because it's just really hard to nail something like this down, this sort of it's hard to not delve into philosophical navel gazing with stuff like this. And we've covered some philosophy stuff here and there. Sure, and it's always kind of fun. But you know, my deal with philosophy was I did pretty I took one class in college and did pretty well, and I think it made an aar b. But the same thing happened in that class, as it happens every time we tackle it, is I'm lost and then annoyed, and then eventually he kind of come around and think it's cool and understand it a little bit.
So that's where you are with this.
Yeah.
I think it's like the fifth or sixth time I went through it, I was like, all right, this is actually kind of cool, whereas before I was like.
I hate all this stuff.
Of course everything is that apple is real and see it, I can taste it.
But now I kind of get it.
Now you know that you're dead wrong?
Yeah? Maybe?
Yeah. And I want to point out Dave didn't have to do a second attempt of this. We didn't ask him to, but we had taken so long to get her getting around to doing it. He's like, here I revised this. Maybe you can say is that how went down? Yeah? For sure?
Yeah, gotcha.
We definitely didn't say like I know. I was just like, okay, this is you know, thanks for doing this, Dave, and we'll do it when we can.
And he's like, I've noticed you haven't red that.
Very much, very much, So thank you to Dave for sure. So people have been thinking about whether what we think and see and feel is real for a really long time. It's probably one of the first things we ever thought of that was you know, kind of deep, since we started eating mushrooms and developed the consciousness.
Yeah, And as we go through this, you know, it's it makes sense that as we go through it, it's it's kind of been a timeline of different philosophers and as we learned more about science, things were tweaked and changed all the way up and then eventually we end up with some modern day like Ted Talkers or one in particular. So it kind of makes sense that things would morph and change philosophically over time as we talk about things like ohay, is time even real?
Yeah, but if you really look at it, and especially if you're paying attention later on, as we get more into modern interpretations, they very striking resemblance to some of the first cracks at explaining whether reality is real to us. And one of the first people that we know of who really tried to tackle this was Plato, and he came up with a very famous allegory of the cave where people are he calls them prisoners. They're situated in a cave, they're chained up, they're not able to turn around, so all they can do is face the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a fire, and then on the other side of the fire. No, I already messed it up, sorry, Plato. Behind them is a fire, and then between them and the fire are people who can move around their puppeteers. They can cast shadows from the campfire onto the wall, and all the prisoners have ever experienced are the shadows on the wall. So to them, that's real. But in reality, what's actually real are the puppets that the people are showing behind them that they can't see. So what they think is real is actually just a similacrum like kind of a distilled version of the actual reality. And that was Plato's take on the whole thing.
Yeah, like, here's a bunny, this is Richard Nixon. H what else?
That? But that? But yeah, that that what we think of as Richard Nixon is a distilled form of what actually is Richard Nixon.
Yeah. And the key to doing Richard Nixon is and the knuckles.
I used to do his knuckles a lot.
No, no, talking about shadow puppets.
The trick is a man's knuckle.
I can oh, man, I can actually do a few shadow puppets pretty well.
Oh which ones? Which ones?
I can do.
A I just well, one's kind of a rabbity gargoyle. And then I can do like an alligator, and I can do a some some other long snouted animal with an ear, I mean dog.
Sure, I can do a few things.
That's really great, man.
I used to mucky around with it.
And then a few you're ago, when Ruby was little, there was a light casting and I was like, hey, check this out, and her mind was blown.
I was like, still got it.
Yeah, she's where you like Plato would have loved you, kid.
Yeah, And she was like who.
So anyway, Plato basically is saying that the material world around us and how we perceive it is not a reliable thing. And what he believed in as the truth is something he called forms or maybe ideas. But we're going to use the word form. As we move forward into Aristotle.
Yeah, as Dave puts it, that our perceived reality, according to Plato, is just the shadow of an objective higher truth makes sense, Yes, But what he's saying is what we said, what you're like, what's in front of you, Richard Nixon, your apple? It's not actually real. It's just a version of that. And along came Aristotle, who was a contemporary of Plato. I think he learned directly from Plato, if I'm not mistaken, But in this case he disagreed with Plato. He's said, Plato kind of on the right track. But these things are not totally separate. And the way that a shadow is not truly related to the object that's casting the shadow, it's something detached from it. These things are attached, like, yes, there's an actual objective, real form, but the thing that we perceive is somehow tied to it, and it's tied to it through what Aristotle called forms. So forms were in a human, our soul, whereas the organic body is the matter matter in forms.
Yeah, and you know, eventually science would come to the picture slowly. So if we go, you know a few centuries ahead in time, the nature of reality and truth as people knew it started to change once science started saying you're kind of wrong about a lot of stuff. And a good example Dave gives here is, you know, we thought the Earth was the center of the universe for a long time. Astronomy comes along and math comes along and says, no, that's actually not true. So now there's actually a basis for saying, hey, what you think is true and what you think is reality might not actually be the case. And we're starting to prove that a little bit. And Galileo steps in and this is in the I guess the seventeenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And he comes along basically and says, and this is an actual quote, I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them as concerned that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence, if we live in creatures were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. Meaning in other words, and this is something we're going to kind of repeat here and there. It's kind of like if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound. What Galileo's saying is it's only because we've assigned these things color and odor and taste that they have color and odor and taste.
Right, They don't inherently possess these objects. Something exists, but it doesn't exist in the form that we perceive it as. It's probably far more complex or at the very least different. What's interesting is that quote could have been written by anyone today researching that, Like, that's a very contemporary understanding of what's going on, and that was Galileo back in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It's pretty cool. John Locke was the next one to really kind of contribute to it, and what he came up with was similar to Plato and Aristotle's take. He said that there are everything has two types of qualities primary qualities, which is the actual objective reality of the thing, and apples just for some reason keeps it's the easiest example for some reason. But in apple has it has a form, it has like size, it has shape, it has bulk to it. It cannot move. That's a big primary characteristic of it. Like the apple itself isn't inherently red. There's a certain arrangement of electrons inside the apple skin or that make up the apple skin, that absorb some kinds of wavelengths of light and reflect back the red wavelength of light. And that's what we see that hits our eye. But that doesn't mean that the apple itself is red in any way whatsoever. It's just that's what we perceive.
Yeah, it doesn't even hit our eye. It hits the receptors in our eye, those rods and cones, yep. And it just sends dumb data messages to our smart brain, right right.
But then there's secondary qualities, things like it's taste, it's color, shininess, and that the secondary qualities are the things that we lay on top of it. That that's our perception. But that if you took away our perception, what would be left are the size, the bulk, the inability of the apple to move. Those things are objective and unchanging.
Yeah, and he labeled those was called extension. And that's the fact that it just takes up physical space in a place. And then permanence, it does that at a specific time, so it exists in time. And then the last one is that it interacts with other objects. And he called that causal powers, and that can be anything from just the air around it to the desk that it's sitting on or whatever, sure, which are also constructs.
Yes, we'll get to that, and then I think the last contributor to the historical understanding of reality, at least one of the big name, big shot ones, was Emmanuel Kant. He was a German mathematician philosopher from the Enlightenment era. I believe, yeah, And he basically he wasn't so much after like, okay, what is the nature of reality? His question was even more basic than that. It was can we even possibly perceive actual reality? And after thinking about it, thinking about it, really kind of humming on it for a little bit, he said no, no, I don't believe we ever possibly can, and that forms the basis for the modern exploration of reality.
Yeah.
He was one of those that pushed it even further and said, all right, so I'm digging what you're saying that that red apple, that color isn't really real and the shape isn't really real. So lock what you were saying about these primary qualities, even that it exists in time and space, like dude, that is in your head as well, like those don't even exist. They exist in our minds, and so we can't even conceive of anything.
We can't know really anything.
Yeah, he went so so far as to say, like science and math, which describes the basic laws of the universe quite accurately, these are constructs themselves, Like what we're actually describing are hallucinations that we all share in common m hm.
Or he called them appearances, yeah.
He And in fact, he called science and math appearances of appearances. And he was saying, like, there's we're never going to be able to figure this out. And luckily Kant was wrong, because we do seem to be kind of on a track of figuring things out a little more.
All right, Man, that was a robust, like thirteen minutes.
I think I think so too.
So let's take a break and we'll be right back.
Stuff you should know, Josh, and show stuff you should know? Okay, So, uh, we've been kind of teasing it, and I think she was probably saying it outright too. Some of these early philosophers really kind of hit the nail on the head as far as our current understanding goes. And one of the big contributions or one of the big contributors of the twentieth and especially twenty first century to exploring what the basis of reality is was neuroscience. Neuroscience has said, okay, well wait a minute, there's a there's something that we all need to kind of explore. If all of this is just in our minds, which is what's suggested, we have ways of looking into the mind, so let's figure out what's actually going on.
Yeah, and this, you know, I realized that as I have had problems with some deep philosophical things like this, listeners to some of this stuff might like, it's not for everyone, you know what I mean? Sure, So, like I get it if some people are listening and being like, wait a minute, what have you been talking about When we say things like our eyes don't see and our ears don't hear. But we're going to explain it in a science y way that I think grounds it as others have before us. This is not like our ideas, right, but it is true that our don't actually really see and our tongues don't actually taste. What we have is a system, which is our body and our brain working together. So we have all these receptors that capture this data basically, and we send it to the brain, which is and we're going to reiterate this too. The brain does great work. But the brain is inside the skull. It's trapped in there. The brain isn't eyes and ears and tongue and stuff like that. It just works with whatever sensory data is sent to it from those receptors, from those organs and says, all right, here's what I think is going on in a way that will make sense to you walking around in the world.
Yeah, And that's what produces our conscious experience, that translation of electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves just hitting like our raw. The way that I got this finally was to start thinking of eyes and ears and tongues like antenna on a bog same thing, right, and that the brain just puts all that sensory information together. And one of the ways that we've we've shown like indisputably that this happens are through optical illusions. There's so many optical illusions out there. One of the most famous are is the checkerboard, where there's a cylinder casting a shadow across the checkerboard and there's like gray, gray squares and white squares, and if you link these two squares together, you realize they're actually the same color. It's just the brain sees a shadow being cast, so it's darkening one of those squares where really it's the exact same color. And so what neuroscience did was to step up and say, okay, let's investigate exactly where this weird illusion is happening. And what they found that in cases of visual illusions optical illusions, the eyes are sending the correct data. There's seeing the illusion for what it is. They can see that those checkerboards are the same color. It's when it gets transferred to the frontal lobe and the frontal lobe starts putting together a picture of reality based on past experience and physical laws and things like that, it says, no, that's not possible. This is actually two different colors and produces the illusion in our conscious experience.
Yeah, and they've shown this with the Wonder machine, with the fMRI machine and experiments. It's literally just the brain saying, well, that ain't right. So I'm gonna tell you that it's this based on everything that you've ever seen in your life that really makes sense.
Right, And so the upshot of all that is we see, we can demonstrate that the brain does not give us any sort of accurate picture of reality. It gives us a rough sketch, a good enough sketch of reality to allow us to navigate the universe. So we know for a fact that what we see and perceive is not actual reality. The question then becomes is just how removed from actual reality is our conscious experience as human beings.
Yeah, and you know what, I haven't gone through it yet, but we have an upcoming episode at some point that I've been avoiding on stereograms, hm, the hidden eye pictures that were such a big deal in the nineties. So, and I'm sure that all of this stuff is in there, because that's kind of what you're talking about, or what we're talking about here.
Right, Yeah, Yeah, the frontal lobe taking perfectly good, legitimate information and putting it together in wacky ways. And yeah, I would guess that would be the basis of a stereogram too.
Yeah, there's a sailboat there. You don't see it, look harder.
Yeah, there's the Tasmanian Devil.
Did you ever see a Tasmin?
I don't know if I'm just imagining that because he was huge at the same time. But I'm sure there was a Tasmanian devil stereogram.
Or was it a mud flap of the Tasmanian devil and it said back off.
That was just somebody saying, oh, that's right, I've had the two guns.
I even had him in my brain. But you know, is that is that even real?
Very nice?
Chuck, Okay, okay.
So here's to me where it gets really really interesting. We've sort of laid the groundwork. It all makes sense to me, hopefully, hopefully it's making sense to to listeners.
I feel like, yeah, we've been laying it down pretty clearly.
Yeah, I think so.
But here's where it gets interesting to me, because why is this happening? And the reason is, like what you have to do is you have to You don't have to, but it's very beneficial, I think, to look at almost everything that we are able to do through a lens of evolution and natural selection, so like there has to be because in that lies a fundamental reason why your brain is doing this. There has to be a reason why this is happening. And it turns out when you look at it through that lens, it makes sense. And like I don't know if this is a I mean, this is still philosophical stuff, but like it all makes total sense to me.
Yeah, the basis of any time you bring evolution or natural selection into the picture, you're basically saying, Okay, whatever's going on actually improves our chances of survival. So there's a psychologist from I think you see Berkeley. Don't quote me on that. His name's Donald Hoffman, and he is one of the I guess leading researchers into the nature of reality right now. His hypotheses seem to be pretty ocorront right.
I bet it's Berkeley.
It's gotta be, it's gotta be. The basis of his interpretation is that we see a rough sketch of the world around us, because that's the version of reality that is most likely to allow us to survive, or was over the millions of years of our evolution to this point.
By the way, he's from uc Ermine, so close not it seemed very much like a Berkeley kind of thing to do, for Surevine, who knew?
At least I didn't say Davis.
Or sand burdu.
I didn't even want to bring that up.
What was the last thing you said?
I'm sorry, I said that. He was saying, like, the reason that we have a rough sketch of reality is because natural selection has said that's the that is the version of reality that will keep humans alive most likely.
Right, Okay, so you have to remember what we said earlier, because this all you know ties together is that we got to reiterate. The brain is in its skull. It is only receiving these messages that it's given from these receptors. Evolution is the same thing. Evolution is also blind in a sense. Natural selection isn't favoring one thing over another to try to get what's accurate as far as reality goes.
It's UnBias.
This natural selection is only going to favor the reality that's going to give you that chance to survive. And this is the point where I got it fairly confused. But then it all came back around with the desktop analogy. But I do have to admit this, before the desktop thing, I was pretty lost right here and still sort of am Okay.
So one of the examples that I've seen Hoffmann use to describe what he's talking about at this point is, let's say we had developed the ability to see oxygen or levels of concentrations of oxygen in the air. Right, Okay, we need oxygen to breathe. So in his example, the greener the air, the more oxygen there is. The redder the air, the less oxygen there is. Right. So, if we had just been gifted with a view of the actual reality, so we saw the gradient that was present in any given parcel of air that we were standing around, that doesn't mean that we know what gradient we want or that will help us survive. Instead, what we were gifted with in this analogy was the ability to see red and stay away from that because it will kill us, or green and go to that because that was the kind of that was the amount of oxygen that we know we need to survive. Right, We don't know how much oxygen is in the air, and as far as natural selection is concerned, it doesn't matter if we know how much oxygen is the air. We just need to know that that green air is where we want to be, the red air is where we want to stay away from. Or back to the apple example, we know that the red apple is the one we want to eat, the black rotted apple is the one we want to stay away from. But then you have to take it back to the beginning. That apple's not actually red. So somewhere along the way, our brains and natural selection got together to allow us to see colors. And because we could see colors, that was the way we began to interact with the world. Because we can taste things, that's the way we interact with the world. There are plenty of other ways to interact with the world. There are plenty of things that were missing about the world because we only have these particular five senses. But that's all humans needed to survive as a species. That's why we don't see the full picture of reality. You did it, thank god, because that is the hardest part for sure.
That's the part that kept breaking my brain. You were you had that oxygen thing in your hip pocket. You didn't let me know about that, so I.
Did my friend, I sent it to you. You did, yeah, But it was a flurry of emails, for sure, so I did.
It was behind the curtain everyone.
There's there's always a few things leading up to an episode here and there that we try to lock in early as possible. But this one was just like, h and I think this and probably this will help. It was kind of like akin to like, as someone is shoving his out on stage, they're like, and just remember, guys, this is the key to it.
All right. They shove us out on stage, but they make sure to flash that Shepherd took that they've gotten already if we screw it right.
All right, So I guess that now, now we're going to talk about what I mentioned before, which really brings it home in a very understandable way, is the desktop analogy. I'm having a hard time saying that for some reason. And this is Hoffman again from Irvine and by way of Berkeley, and here's the analogy. All you have to do is look at your laptop and your desktop screen, and you've got icons all over it. You've got those those blue folders that have all the the things that might have like a word document or a or an MP three file or whatever's on your desktiny.
O an MP three file? Did you get it off Napster?
They did? Or MP three is not even anything anymore, I don't think so.
I don't think they call them MP three.
I don't even know what are they now.
I think they just call them songs.
Okay, just listen to music. Oh boy, So here's the deal. You see all that stuff, You know that you're supposed to click on that blue folder and click on that word document if you want to get your.
Word file up.
But all that stuff is just a user and interface, a graphical user interface that we know how to interact with. What's really going on is there's a system in the guts of that computer that is hard at work with ones and zeros.
But we wouldn't know.
How to make heads or tails of that stuff if we didn't have these icons that represented the things that we want to interact with on that desktop. And those icons, my friends, is the same thing is that apple on the desks. The apple is an icon, the same way as that blue folder on your desktop is an icon. It's just something that we have assigned so that we can interact with it.
Yeah, because we couldn't possibly get done what we want to get done by interacting with real reality. It's not how we see things. We see things as like shadows on the cave wall. Right. I love the desktop analogy, man. There's another part of the desktop icon analogy too, that's a consequence of this whole hypothesis. Right, That is, when you turn your computer off that folder icon ceases to exist. It doesn't keep running in the background. It's gone. It does not exist. The circuitry, the software, the operating system that produces that desktop icon that continues to exist, and when you turn the computer back on, the icon exists again, but in the meantime it ceases to exist. And that is analogous to this interpretation of reality that when you stop looking at an apple, that apple ceases to exist. The thing that produces that apple, whether it's some grand circuitry that we're unaware of that actually that's actually base reality, or it's some data combined with a simple algorithm that produces our experience of reality. Whatever produces it is still there, just like the circuitry and the operating system in the computers still there. But the apple doesn't exist any longer because there's no human around to experience it. Because apples only exist the way we see them in the reality that humans experience. That's the only place they exist.
By the way, you said operating system, I think we call that an OS now.
Sorry, mister MP three.
By the way, we should totally have t shirts that say stuff you should know on the front and on the back. It just says everything is an icon. I think that's a great idea, but not well, that might confusing though they might think they mean icon is in an iconoclast.
Well, we could put in parentheses. Listen to the reality episode and you'll know what we're talking about. Yeah, exactly, and then we'll put okay question mark because we don't want to boss anybody around.
So if you were confused by what you were Josh was just talking about, we have to look at it again through that lens of natural selection and evolution because our brains have you know, let's talk about the apple again. Our brains evolved to see that color, like you said, as something that is ripe and delicious and that will give us nutrition to a certain degree. But our brains, like weren't evolving in isolation. Everything else was evolving along with it, including that apple, and that apple evolved to be read so we would eat it and eventually spread those seeds so it could survive as well and grow more apples.
So evolution itself is that desktop.
Right, That's what created that desktop. It's not our brains just like we just came up with this kind of thing. It was like working in conjunction with evolution, that's just what we evolved to experience. And so in that sense, this to me was super reassuring when I realized this, Yeah, that means that there's no big mysy, there's no there's no purposeful veil that like God or the universe or somebody cast over us to prevent us from seeing real reality. The reason we don't see real reality is because we just didn't evolve to see reality that way. We evolved to see reality in a different way. And that that even though we know that there's other aspects of reality we don't sense like, that doesn't mean that there's something forever beyond our grasp. Like Emmanual Kant suggested.
I agree, all right, uh neo, I think you go take the red pill the blue pill.
I always say, why not both exactly.
We'll be right back.
Stuff you should know and shock stuff you should know.
All right, So quick recap of Hoffman from Irvine basically saying that, like everything that we're perceiving around us is a construct from a combined process of these evolutionary forces that are blind working in cooperation with the brain. And this, you know, this can be hard to swallow to some people that might sound kind of goofy and ridiculous. People have come along, certainly, and this was pre Hoffman, of course, but people have come along through the years to poopoo all this great thinkers, even someone like Samuel Johnson, he was an essayist in the eighteenth century and a great writer. He had it out with a contemporary of his philosopher named Bishop Barclay not Berkeley from UC Berkeley, and he was basically like, dude, you can't tell him that these things don't exist outside of the mine, Like look at this rock right here. And he went and kicked it and said, I refute it thusly. In other words, how can you tell me that rock is just a construct of my mind when I just went and kicked it and it made a sound, and it was heavy and it hurt my toe.
That's where we come back to, like John Locke and Plato and Aristotle and Galileo especially getting it right, like basically out of the gate that yes, these these objects that we interact with in the universe, they have bulk, they have mass, They move or they don't move. They have primary characteristics, right, So yes, if you kick a rock, apparently mass is part of the rock's primary characteristic, right, Yeah, but say the color of the rock, or the shape of the rock, or the shininess of the rock, that is not necessarily part of reality. Yeah, Okay, I think we've got it. Is mind blowing for sure, But at the same time, it's just there's more to reality than we see. But it doesn't mean that there's some great mystery necessarily. I feel like we solve that the mystery doesn't actually exist. It's just there's other parts of the universe we just don't sense and there's nothing to it other than we didn't evolve to sense it that way.
Yeah, And well, we have great concrete examples of that, and that is the fact that we when we see things, what we're seeing is just a small portion of what there is. Yeah, we see what a visible light on the on the spectrum, like, it's pretty narrow in comparison to the entire spectrum. But there are also gamma rays, and there are X rays, and there are radio waves, and there are all these things that we can't see and detect with our human eyeballs, but we still know they're there because we have built machines and systems to allow us to enter act with those things like X ray machines or radios that allow you to hear what's happening on those radio waves, but you can't actually see that stuff. So it's a good way of illustrating, like what you know is just a very small portion of what there really is out there.
Yeah, But also one of the other cool things about it is we know that they're out there, and we've learned to like build machines that can detect things that we can't perceive with our senses pretty amazing, and then we've built more machines to figure out how to interact with those parts of reality that we can't since. So, if you see an image from a James Web telescope picture right, and what you're seeing is there is a radio telescope picture. So the James Web telescope sees in radio waves. We can't see radio waves, but part of its software converts radio waves into visible light spectrum, which we can see. So for all intents and purposes, when you're looking at a picture of a star that the James Webb telescope took, you're seeing that star in the same way we would see it if we could see radio waves. Right, So it's not like reality is forever out of our grasp. Were becoming smart enough to learn ways to sense it in other ways, to convert it into things that we can sense.
Yeah, and you know this is when I thought of and it sounds kind of silly, but I actually got a more a deeper appreciation of the movie Predator, right, Yeah, from this, because when I was a kid, I saw it and I was like, Oh, that's cool. The Predator thing can see heat or thermo whatever would it be, Thermo thermo properties. You can see heat, let's just say that, and cool and stuff like that, can see temperature. I was trying to be all fancy, which is true, and when you kid is like, oh cool, that thing can see temperature. But this made me think of it in like a more philosophical way, that this thing is so advanced that it has gained a new maybe not consciousness, but a new ability to see the unseen, or.
It evolved in a different type of pressure that favored being able to see infrared, so you can see temperature of things.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, it doesn't necessarily make it more advanced in the same way that you know, butterflies can see UV. We can't see UV. But that doesn't necessarily mean the butterflies more advanced than we are. It's just it evolved to sense the world differently, right. Yeah, it's as simple as that. But it also kind of brings back a certain amount of humility to us that we like, we just can't interact with parts of reality because we didn't evolve that way, and it just kind of, I don't know, it knocks us down a peg. I think in my estimation, it kind of reminds us like, hey, yeah, we're pretty great. We do a lot of really neat stuff, but we're still animals. Don't forget that part. Yeah, I like that, And then I think, to me, Chuck, the fact of the podcast, oh, is that if you take Hoffman's argument, there's an answer to that zen question of if if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, like you mentioned, does it make a sound? The answer is no, it does not make a sound. And then even further, there's not even a tree if there's no human around to see it or hear it.
Yeah, oh boy, I love that.
Like this, it's like, you know, it's like Bart Simpsons saying, what's the sound of one hand clapping. M right, you know they figured it out. I love it.
Oh boy, I tell you what.
Man, every time we and we haven't done these many times, but every time we tackle something philosophical like this, I'm upset for a little while, and I always come out on the other side I think better for it.
So same here.
I'm glad you think of these things because I certain wouldn't ass on these topics.
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.
Yeah, i'd be like, hey, what about elephants?
That was a good one. Remember baby elephants suck their trunk like baby humans suck their thumbs.
They have no trunk, Yeah, they do. Trunk. Trunks don't exist.
Man, you keep getting me with that one. I know you got anything else. No, I don't either. So since we have nothing else about this, it's time for listener mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this Smell of Vision. This is a pretty good one.
Hey, guys, couldn't help it, but I just finished the Smell Vision episode, and I think you've missed a real opportunity there, or they did rather by calling it Centemah.
Yeah, I saw that. That was a great idea.
That was a good one.
I love the show, the wide range of topics you cover, the fun jokes in the banter, and even the occasional Chucker's reference. Obviously, the learning beneficial component is a huge plus. But I cannot find a term that I heard in one of your previous shows, and I need your help. Essentially, Josh mentioned a term that spoke to humans or any life form will take themselves after a certain period of time. What if humans don't take ourselves out of the event, take ourselves out?
Oh?
Okay, Oh yeah, I miss the word take themselves out. So, in other words, if humans don't take ourselves out in X term, we will see a greater opportunity for long term human existence.
It's driving me crazy. I hope you have a reply. Do you know what that is?
Yeah? I think what they're talking about is technological maturity. If we if we make it through what's considered the great filter, which is all like all the ways that we could possibly wipe ourselves out using technology before we learn to use it wisely. If we can make it through that, then we'll emerge on technological maturity and we'll be basically will this live forever as a species?
Okay? I bet you. That's it.
It's gotta be and he finishes off. My wife is seven months pregnant with our first child. You can spare a moment for a shout out to Stephanie and baby Coorra coming in August to make a great birthday present. But Darren, we don't do shout outs on the show. We get so many requests for shout outs that we just can't.
Get to them all. So we are certainly not going to.
Shout out Stephanie and your amazing baby Coorra that's coming in August. We're just not going to mention them. No, not at all, so don't ask. Thanks for all the positivity, joy and laughter that you spread in the world.
That's much needed. Your Floridian friend, Darren Nutting.
Very nice, Darren, Thank you, and thank you also to Stephanie and Cora, who are not going to mention. And if you want to get in touch with us, like Darren did, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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