Truth Still Matters (And Here's Why)

Hey everyone, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. Today it's Tuesday, January 27th, pub date for my new book. Here it is, just came out today. It's called Truth. What it is, how to find it, and why it still matters. Okay, so today's episode is going to be devoted to this. I'm going to just read a few excerpts here and there, make some just off-the-cuff unscripted commentary about the different chapters in the book and what my goal is of the book. And the reason to do this is to get you to go buy the book. Okay, there are a lot of books. There's a lot of content. There's just a lot out there, I know. It's a crowded field, and we're all kind of scrambling by we, I mean us, authors, to get a little bit of toehold on the public attention, which is very crowded with endless content. So I would appreciate it if you just hit pause right now, go straight to Amazon and order Truth. Just type in Truth, Shermer, it'll pop right up. Or you can go to your local bookstore. Some will carry it. Some will order it for you, which is also good. Or if you would like a personalized autographed copy, go to skeptic.com and just click under Shop. And then my name will come up, Shermer Books. You'll see all my books there, and you'll see the truth book. And just when you order it, there'll just be a little window of what you can say, what you would like me to, if you'd like me to personalize it, who you would like it dedicated to, and so on. Okay, speaking of dedications, my book, Truth, What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Still Matters, dedicated to Daniel Dennett. Yes, the great Dan Dennett, the late, sadly, great Dan Dennett, friend, colleague, and fellow traveler on the journey in search of truth. And I provide, this is the epigram for the book, actually, as well as the dedication. Here's from Dan. This is from his essay called Postmodernism and Truth. We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy. Better truth-seeking methods. Yeah. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, of asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring and arithmetic and maps and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with built-in ideal, truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers. The point of measuring is to measure accurately. The point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. Okay, so the truth still really very much matters. And so I start there with the why truth matters. And I start off with just a little thought experiment. Imagine your home and somebody calls and says, oh, there's something suspicious looking at happening at your house. Looks like somebody is going to rob the place. And so you call the police and they go there and they report back. Well, we didn't see anything. Then your neighbor calls again and says, oh, my God, they're backing a truck up to your house. Looks like they're going to take all your furniture and stuff. So the police aren't going to do anything. You rush over there to see what's going on. OK, so the thought experiment is to imagine what the people were thinking on January 6th when they stormed the Capitol. Most of them, and we now know this from interviews, they really believe the election was stolen. And it wasn't, but that's what they believed. And if you believe it, there's a kind of rationality behind wanting to do something about it. Now, not all of them, of course, were violent. There were some, but a lot of them were just in there taking selfies and just sort of enjoying the tour of the Capitol. But clearly, the point is that if you really believe it, or just to pull something off the headlines that's just happened, so it's not in my book, of the protests in Minneapolis about the activities by ICE. You know, if you really believe that ICE is the equivalent of the Gestapo and that, you know, Trump is Hitler and that the entire immigration and homeland security is the equivalent of Nazis, then it's not completely irrational or crazy to go out there in the street and protest. And that's why I think some of these shifts in from peaceful protesting to less than peaceful protesting and the unfortunate response that sometimes happens. That's what happens when people really believe something. So it really matters what the truth is about something so that you don't end up with those kinds of situations. Here's how I end that the prologue with a quote from Stephen Jay Gould from his forward to my first book, which is Why People Believe Weird Things. Here's what Steve wrote. Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities, the side that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For unless we rigorously use human reason, both to discover and acknowledge nature's factuality, and to follow the logical implications for efficacious human action that such knowledge entails, we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising true belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action. Yeah. Reason is our potential salvation from the vicious and precipitous mass action that rule by emotionalism always seems to entail. Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. Close quote from Stephen Jay Gould, to which I said, Amen, brother. Okay, so part one is called Known Knowns, and I talk about why we are not living in a post-truth, truthiness world. That word, of course, truthiness, comes from Stephen Colbert. I was on his show several times, the old show, The Colbert Report, in which he defined the word truthiness as the truth we want to exist. Well, this is actually a pretty deep thought because, in fact, that's what most of us do. We believe things we would like to be true. And the whole point of reason, rationality, and science is to find out what's actually true, not just what we want to be true. That is, I want to believe things that don't have to be believed in to be true. And I want to believe things that are actually true, not just what I think is true because I want it to be so. I do have a little story about Richard Feynman. There he is, the great Dick Feynman, from his stint on the commission looking into the space shuttle disaster, in which he then wrote personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle. This is part of the Rogers Commission report that Reagan ordered to find out what actually happened. Well, we now know what happened thanks to, in part, to Feynman's demonstration of the frozen O-rings that were not expanding to close the gap between the stages in the rocket that then blew up. Here's Feynman. NASA owes to its citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative so that these citizens can make the wisest decision for the use of their limited resources. And here's the kicker. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. I call this in the book Feynman's Principle. Reality must take precedence, for nature cannot be fooled. Think about that with anything you hear about current events. Nature is a certain way, regardless of what you think about it, and nature cannot be fooled. Okay. I define truth as a claim for which the evidence is so substantial that it is rational to offer one's provisional assent. Okay. Okay, so provisional is the key there. It could change. If the evidence changes, you might, it's okay. Not only okay, it's a virtue to change your mind. So here I write, scientific truths are temporary and could change with changing evidence. Provisional truths differ from proofs, as in mathematics, for example, in Euclidean geometry. The sum of the internal angles of a triangle is always equal to 180 degrees. Nor are scientific truths the same as logical inferences or analytic truths. As in the famous syllogism, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal. Does a proposition have to be proven before we can believe it? Here, if by proof one means an analytic truth claim, such as cardiologists are doctors, then yes, one should believe it. You only need to know what the words mean. You don't have to look out the window to see if they actually are. but if by proof one means a synthetic truth claim, as it's called, such as cardiologists are rich, then you have to check. Income and wealth data need to be checked to be determined if it's true, and the more the information gathered supports that claim, the more one should believe it and vice versa. Okay, what if one has no evidence or there's no way to test for it? Okay, so I call this little thought experiment I present in the book Sagan's Dragon. I got this, of course, from Carl's 1996 book, The Demon Haunted World. There he is over my left shoulder up on the wall there. We put Carl on the cover of Skeptic Magazine after he died. So the thought experiment goes like this. I don't need to read it from the book. So I have a dragon in my garage. Would you like to see it? Well, of course you would. I mean, dragons are so popular in literature and fiction and mythology. Wouldn't it be amazing if they were real? Okay, let's go. So you come with me to my garage. I open the garage. You look around. You see a ladder and some old paint cans, a bunch of bicycles, and a bunch of other stuff that, you know, doesn't have anything to do with dragons. You go, where's the dragon? I said, well, you see, this is an invisible dragon. An invisible dragon? Huh, okay. And then you suggest, what if we sprinkle some flour on the floor and then we'll see the footprints of the invisible dragon when it walks around? Well, I counter this invisible dragon hovers about a foot off the ground. It's a levitating invisible dragon. And you're getting a little more skeptical thinking, OK, all right, I got it. We'll take one of those little handheld thermometers that they use during the COVID pandemic, point it at people's foreheads to get their temperature. We'll point it around the garage, and then we'll see the heat signature of the dragon. Well, I counter, see, this is a cold-blooded dragon. It doesn't give off any body heat at all. What about the fire, you say? Fire-breathing dragon. You know, fire's hot. Well, no, this is a cold-fire-breathing, cold-blooded dragon who levitates and is invisible. At some point, you're going to say, okay, what's the difference between a cold-blooded, cold fire, breathing, levitating, invisible dragon, and no dragon at all? And the answer is none. So whenever anybody has some claim that they make, if in principle there's no way to know if it's true or not, then you don't have to believe it. You can just say what Hitchens said. I quote Hitchens in the book about his, I call it Hitchens' dictum, that which can be asserted, that which can be claimed without it, asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. All right? You don't have to be mean about it. You don't have to make it a hitch slap video, but you can certainly challenge it by just saying, I don't believe it. But go ahead and prove me otherwise. Okay, this is what I do with the aliens. I have a whole chapter on UFOs and UAPs and aliens and all that. You know, we're told that the government has the aliens. Okay, could we see them? No, They're classified. Well, where are they? I know where they are. I've seen them myself, but I can't tell you. Okay. At some point, I'm not going to believe them until they show us. Why would I? I mean, this guy could just be making it up. All right. And it doesn't help to say, well, like the case of the dragon that you often hear with religious claims, I feel the presence of the dragon, or I feel the love of the dragon, or the belief in the dragon affects my life and changes it. Okay, all that may be true for you personally, and I call these subjective truths or internal truths or just preferences or just what you feel is true inside. That's all fine and good for you, but that doesn't help anybody else know what's actually true about what's in the real world. And so with that, I then shift into talking about What are some of the values or principles of rationality in science that can help us not be fooled into believing in invisible levitating dragons. Okay, so I start with practicing active open-mindedness. That is to say, in a particular approach to a claim, there's certain things that you should take into consideration. Some of this comes from the work of Philip Teclocke and Dan Gardner's book, Superforecasting, super important book, Superforecasting, The Art and Science of Prediction. Basically, they showed that virtually any of these pundits you see on television or read in the newspapers and the op-ed, where they make predictions, they're mostly wrong, but no one ever keeps track of the misses, only the hits, and no one holds their feet to the fire when they're wrong. Okay, so the rest of his book is about what it takes to actually be a super forecaster. You can actually train people to be more Bayesian and more rational. I'll come to Bayesian in a moment, but more rational in their forecasting. For example, they say these super forecasters were people should take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. Yes. Okay. This is a little survey that they did. Superforecasters were more likely to agree that people should take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. It is more useful to pay attention to those who disagree with you than to pay attention to those who agree. Even major events like World War II or 9-11 could have turned out very differently. Randomness is often a factor in our personal lives. These are all things that superforecasters, who were actually better than the pundits, agreed with. Superforecasters are also more likely to disagree that changing your mind is a sign of weakness. Intuition is the best guide in making decisions. It is important to persevere in your beliefs, even when evidence is brought to bear against them. Everything happens for a reason. There are no accidents or coincidences. These are not ways to think and be rational. In fact, most of those I just read is what goes into conspiracy, conspiracism and conspiracy theorizing that turns out to be nonsense. And then I quote the work of the psychologist Gordon Pennycock, who also did surveys in which they found, asked people whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements. The more open-minded answer is indicated in the parentheses. So I'll just read them. Beliefs should always be revised in response to new information or evidence. Yes, that's a good thing. People should always take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. Yes, that's good. I believe that loyalty to one's ideals and principles is more important than open-mindedness. No, you should disagree with that. No one can talk me out of something I know is right. Okay, no, that's not a good value to have. You should be willing to be talked out of something. Certain beliefs are just too important to abandon no matter how good a case could be made against them. No, disagree with that. Anything should be challenged. No sacred cows. Okay. So from there, I then talk about the kind of many tools, the long chapter, many tools in science of how we determine causality, you know, correlation and causation, randomized controlled trials, signal detection theory, Bayesian reasoning, and so on. I'll just give you one example that I used, because I tried this out in my class on critical thinking at Chapman University, because it's relevant to what they're doing there. These students are in college paying, what were they paying the last time I was there? About $60,000 a year for a four-year college degree. So I asked, does it pay to go to college? Okay, is it worth it? Well, okay, so first of all, we have to define, what do you mean by worth it? Operational define it. Okay. Well, you make more money in your lifetime if you have a college degree than if you don't. All right. So you look up the numbers. You could do this on Grok now or Gemini or any of the AI programs. And the answer is yes. Yes. People that attend college make a lot more money than those that don't, that is, with college degrees versus not. I forget what the number is, but it's millions more in the course of a lifetime. So it's worth it. Yeah, absolutely. But is it the college degree? Is it the education? That actually is the cause of the increase in lifetime earnings. There are many confounding variables in between education and income that complicate the causal relationship between the two. For example, smarter parents are more likely to send their kids to college. And we know that intelligence is highly heritable and that there's a positive correlation between intelligence and income. So maybe it was the genetic inheritance of a high IQ that led to greater lifetime earnings for those students and not the education. As well, parental income is a predictor of offspring income. So maybe it isn't IQ or education, but some other factor that leads to children having higher incomes like guidance on investing or connections to good investors or parental loans or family inheritance. We also know that healthier people earn more money in a lifetime. So maybe some combination of genetics and environment that makes some people healthier also makes them wealthier, such that education, IQ, parental guidance, or parental income may not be what matters so much. Okay, in all likelihood, all of these factors, and probably more besides, not the least of which is luck, factor into one's lifetime earnings. So the point of this exercise, and I give other examples like longevity, how long will you live? What are the factors? What are the various contributing factors to leading along? It's hard to answer the question. In other words, because there's many confounding variables. So the rest of this chapter explains, well, how can we control for these confounding variables? How could we tell which ones are most likely to be the cause of what we're interested in studying, which are less likely and so on? And that leads me to talking about Bayesian reasoning as a viable tool that in our toolkit. which comes from Reverend Thomas Bayes' in short brief, again, read the book to get the details, that in short, when should you change your mind when the evidence changes? Well, you have priors. Your priors are your prior knowledge. That is, this is what I know about this particular subject and based on that, this is what I believe now. So what if that evidence changes? What if my priors are updated, as we say? Well, then you should change your creeds if the evidence changes. That is, you should update your confidence in the belief that you have in X, whatever it is, based on that. Then we have in Bayesian reasoning what's called Cromwell's rule. Oliver Cromwell famously said, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, you might be mistaken. Since none of us are omniscient deities, we all may be mistaken about anything. and therefore never assign a zero or a one, 100% probability, 0% probability to anything just in case. So I find that a very useful strategy to take to anything. Okay, I'll give it a one, I'll give it a 10, I'll give it a 60%, a 90%, whatever, because it allows you to change your mind without feeling like you're an idiot or you're foolish for changing your mind or you're a flip-flopper or you're wishy-washy, manby-pamby. Okay, none of that. Dump all that. Forget that. It's okay to change your mind. It's a virtue to change your mind if the evidence changes. You don't have to if the evidence doesn't change, but just keep that in mind when evaluating any particular propositions. Okay, so from there I then start to apply these tools to different things that we're all interested in, coincidences and miracles. How do you know that miracles happen? I have a whole chapter on this, how to evaluate things that happen that are highly unlikely, highly improbable. I talk about the law of large numbers. If you have enough things going on, highly unusual things will absolutely happen. In fact, in a country the size of ours with 340 million Americans and a gazillion things happening every day and interactions between all these people and events that are going on, an unusual day would be one in which nothing unusual happened. And, of course, the way the mind works and the media works is we focus on the really unusual things and just ignore all the usual ones. Here's another day at this school without a school shooting. Who cares? you know yeah you go to the phone to call your friend and your phone friend calls at that moment oh my god i was just thinking about you whoa must be some psychic thing or or some synchronicity or some force the secret in the universe you know well how about all the times you were thinking about your friend and they didn't call or you called the friend and they weren't thinking about you or whatever you know in other words the sum of all possibilities equal certainty we're only focused on the ones that really matter. Okay. I also deal with some of the really, really highly unusual miracles where things just seem so unlikely that it just feels like something is the case. Let me find the one example from Anthony Hopkins that I used also with Martin Gardner about these highly unusual coincidences. This was a case where, you know, Martin Gardner, who had the Scientific American column before I did. One day, Martin was perusing a used bookstore. When he came across a familiar title, his father had given him a copy of that book when he was a child, but he had lost it during the move many years prior. As he considered purchasing this replacement copy, Gardner flipped through the pages and found his own handwritten notes in the margins. It was the very book that Gardner had lost. Okay, that's pretty spooky. Even spookier was when the actor Anthony Hopkins, who in 1972 was signed to star in the film adaptation of George Pfeiffer's novel, The Girl from Petrovka. Hopkins went to several London booksellers to purchase a copy, but none had it in stock. Heading for home, he chanced upon a book on a bench at the Leicester Square tube station. Unbelievably, it was The Girl from Petrovka. Two years later, when Hopkins met Pfeiffer and mentioned the coincidence to him, the author noted that he had lent his last copy to a friend with handwritten edits in it for the American edition, changing labor, L-A-B-O-U-R, the British spelling, to labor, L-A-B-O-R, for example. When Hopkins flipped open his copy of that book, he saw Pfeiffer's annotations. It was the very same book. Okay, that really feels like something spooky is going on there. yeah so here's how i think about it um there are several laws of probability at work here uh okay oh yeah this is from percy diaconis's work on probabilities and in the law of large numbers for example um the truly the law of truly large numbers means that with a large enough number of opportunities any outrageous thing is likely to happen evelyn marie adams for example won the new Jersey lottery in 1985 and again in 1986. The odds of this occurrence were about one in a trillion, but they note someone had to win the lottery. And when we look at the number of lotteries there are around the world, the number of people who play lotteries, the numbers, the number of tickets that they buy, and the number of weeks that they play, we rapidly approach a truly large number. In fact, they cite three more people who won lotteries twice, and many more still have won second prizes of lotteries multiple times, in which he calls it the law of near enough, close enough, in which if they're close enough, then you count them as a hit. So here's a back of the envelope calculation I did. So example, for example, no one else but Gardner Hopkins would have thought anything about finding those particular books. And no one asked why Anthony Hopkins did not find a copy of The Silence on the Lambs on a subway when he landed that role. Again, no one keeps track of such non-coincidences. Okay, here's my back of the envelope calculation. According to Google Books, there are about 130 million book titles in the world. If the average print run was around 5,000 copies each, that totals 650 billion books. With a world literacy rate of 84.1%, that means around 5.9 billion people are reading some of those 650 billion books. It would be miraculous if someone, somewhere, sometime, did not find a surprising connection of some sort with one of those books. Okay, all right, then I also dive into religious and mythic truths, and so here I'll just briefly say I put these in a different bin than empirical scientific truths, and I take to task both theists and atheists who insist that stories in the Bible be literally true, and as I say, we get articles submitted to Skeptic all the time about, I have a natural explanation here for whatever biblical story, the parting of the Red Sea was caused by an earthquake or the plague of locusts was caused by some ecological event sunspot activity or whatever or this volcano erupted and that accounts for this particular Bible story and miracles Okay, to them, these atheists who think they're debunking the Bible, I say, well, but what if they just made the story up? There is no, there's nothing that needs explaining, because it didn't happen. I mean, for example, there's no evidence at all that Moses even existed, much less took his people into the desert for 40 years and a huge population living in a desert for 40 years. They must have left behind some artifacts. No, there's no archaeological evidence that any of this happened. So maybe the stories are made up because they carry a deeper kind of truth. Okay, so here's what I've been trying out with this book is think of biblical literature like great literature, like a Dostoevsky novel or a Jane Austen novel or like The Lord of the Rings. I mean, is there really a Middle Earth somewhere that J.R.R. Tolkien is writing about? No. What are you talking about? He just made that up. You know, there are really four brothers Karamazov. No, these are made-up stories and people that carry different, deeper truths from which we can glean some kind of meaning or purpose. Well, this is what I mean by mythic truths or religious truths. They're true in some other way than just empirically true. This allows us, then, I think, to consider biblical stories with some seriousness and respect. Now, how far does this go? I can get some Christians to go along with me, like, was Jonah really swallowed by a whale or a great fish? And did he really, how did he survive three days inside the belly of a, okay. Most of them will go, yeah, okay, that one's probably an allegory, allegorical story. It represents something else. But what about the resurrection? Okay, here, most of the Christians I've tried this out on are not going that far with me. They insist it literally happened. Okay, so I have a whole section on why I think it probably didn't happen, you know, just based on kind of a Bayesian approach of the, you know, in the Sagan's principle of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. You know, this would be how many people have ever lived, about 100 billion in all of history, and how many have come back from the dead? Not one, but maybe one, the carpenter from Nazareth. is the evidence for it at the same level of his extraordinariness 100 billion to what no not even close but again even my own analysis is suggesting something else may be at work maybe i'm missing the point the resurrection story means something else it has to do with starting over being born again resurrection forgiveness you know try you know throwing overthrowing your oppressors or overcoming obstacles in your life. I think it could have deeper meanings like that. And I read passages from the Gospels, from Jesus himself, which suggests that, you know, that heaven is within you. Some of you standing here will not taste death before you see the Son of Man come again. And that, you know, heaven is not here, it's not there, it's within you, he tells his disciples. I think what he is saying, okay, I spend much more time on this in the book, so So please read that section carefully if you disagree with me. But I think what he's saying is that we live in the here and now, and we need to overthrow our oppressors, the Romans in this case. We need to build our own community. We need to create a heaven on earth here. We need justice here and now, not in the hereafter. And as I wrote in heavens on earth, whether there's an afterlife or not, it doesn't matter because that's not where we live. We live in the here and now, not the hereafter. If there is, okay, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Anyway, okay, continuing. I then talk about, well, I do have a chapter on historical truths. I'm not going to go into that. We do know what happened. We can know what happened in the past in the same way geologists know what happened in the Earth's past. Paleontologists know what happened in the history of life. And archaeologists know what happened in the deep history of human societies. and so we can know I am disturbed and I write about this in a in in a Quillette article that comes out the same day as this book about Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and they're just asking questions about the Holocaust okay this is nonsense I've been hearing this stuff since the 90s from David Irving just asking questions about the about Auschwitz and so on I debunk all that in my book Denying History so I go over some of that the print deeper principles behind that and then I Then let's talk about, okay, so these are much harder questions for scientists to answer. That is to say, morals and morality, free will and determinism, consciousness, and then the God question and why there is something rather than nothing. So I go through all the big ones here and just how to think about the truth behind those. Okay, so in terms of moral truths, I think there is objective moral values. This is called moral realism. I think there really is a right and wrong. I think slavery really was wrong and not just a cultural thing that, you know, today we're against it before they used to be in favor of it. Maybe it'll come back or whatever. However, you know, I take my starting point, Lincoln's famous line, as I would not be a slave, I would not be a slave owner. Okay, this is the principle of interchangeable perspectives. From there we can build a model, a moral ethical system, which I do, that moral truths really exist and we can discover them. Here's how I, well, I'll give you a little bit of background before I read my own words there on. well okay this is called the is-ought problem you know you can't derive an ought from an is to which I say baloney that we do this all the time you know we you know we ought to do certain things because this is the way the world really is okay and so here's how Steven Pinker put it in terms of like discovering certain moral values might be like discovering certain platonic truths. Here I'm reading from Pinker. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four, and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that two plus two equals four. Perhaps we're born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others. Moral reality. So if I appeal to you to do anything that affects me, here I'm continuing with Pinker, to get off my foot or tell me the time or not run me over with your car, then I can't do it in a way that privileges my interest over yours, say retaining my right to run you over with my car if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I'm a galactic overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can't act as if my interests are special just because I'm me and you're not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I'm standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it. Right? Okay, so from there we can derive many ethical systems we already have. Spinoza's viewpoint from eternity, the social contract of Thomas Hobbes, the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, Kant's categorical imperative, and Rawls's veil of ignorance. The principle of interchangeable perspectives is also another way to formulate the golden rule, is I would not want someone else to make me a slave, so I would not want, I would not make someone else be a slave. Okay, so that's the principle of reciprocal altruism and so on, and then I'll conclude with what I wrote here at the end of the chapter. It is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist, just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover the planets have elliptical orbits, given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else. Scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry. For example, that democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries, and most poignantly here, that blacks do not like being enslaved and that Jews do not want to be exterminated. Okay, why? Why do blacks not want to be enslaved? Why do Jews not want to be exterminated? The answer is in my moral starting point of the survival and flourishing of sentient beings, individual sentient beings, not groups. Any organism subject to natural selection will, by necessity, have this drive to survive and flourish. If it didn't, it would not live long enough to reproduce. It would no longer be subject to natural selection. Okay. So then I end by saying, finally, intellectual humility, applying my own Bayesian principles to myself, requires me to acknowledge that it is possible that my theory of moral relativism may be, and here I'm citing one of my critics, a physicist named Ellis, let me get him right, George Ellis, I think it was, that my theory is sociologically based. That is, it's of a weird people, W-E-I-R-D, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. I suppose it's possible that one day scientists may discover that humans do not have an instinct to survive and flourish, that most people do not want freedom, autonomy, and prosperity, that they don't mind starving and being disease-ridden and in pain, that they prefer ignorance to education, they prefer illiteracy to literacy, that women want to be lorded over by men, that some people like being enslaved, and that large populations of people don't object to being liquidated in gas chambers. But I doubt it. Okay? Just ask yourself, where would you rather live? North Korea or South Korea? Okay? I have a picture in here in the book. I'll show you of the difference between North Korea. I'll say, where's my picture of North Korea and South Korea? Here it is. Look at that. There's North Korea at the top, dark, and there's South Korea at the bottom, lit up and prosperous. Okay? Everybody knows the answer to that question. This is not a cultural relativism phenomenon. It's moral realism. Okay, then I have a chapter on aliens, which I've already mentioned. I'll just say briefly here. I think they're probably out there somewhere in the cosmos, you know, hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars, each of which has dozens of planets, maybe, but all of them have planets. So you're going to get trillions and trillions and trillions of planets. No matter how improbable it is that you'll get a planet in the right zone, the right temperature with the water and the right chemicals to give the primordial soup to create the basic building blocks of proteins and then cells and so on. No matter how improbable it is, the law of large numbers, it's going to happen. But that's not what people are interested in in the subjects. I mean, the SETI scientists are. But the UFO people, they think the answer is already, we have the answer. They're here. Okay. So I go through the evidence for that, which is pretty thin. and I address all the new claims about UAPs that has replaced the topic of UFOs. I go through the whole, all the prosaic explanations that even ufologists agree are true. Like I'll just read my favorite list of this from Leslie Keen's book, UFOs, generals, pilots, and government officials go on the record that 90 to 95% of all the sightings can be explained as weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk satellites, swamp gas spinning, Eddie, sun dogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off the clouds, lights on the ground, lights reflecting the cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole punch clouds, and so on. This is a pro-ufologist saying almost all of the sightings we have can be explained in that list. All right. So really just talking about, you know, just a handful of anomalies. Okay. What would it take to turn one of those anomalies into actual aliens here? Okay. The Chinese spy balloon is my answer. We all saw it floated over U.S. airspace in spring of 23 2023 Everybody saw it Everybody I mean you know all the TV stations are out there with their cameras people with their telescopes the Air Force scramble jets to go up and photograph it and eventually shoot it down It was covered in all the news media The Secretary of State, the President, the Pentagon, everybody said, there it is, it's real. They shot it down. We have the debris. End of story. Nobody cares about the credentials of the pilot that shot it down because it doesn't matter. Who cares? We have the debris. Something like that. Show us the evidence and we will believe. I would love to believe, you know, I have a thousand dollar bet with Avi Loeb at Harvard that by December 31st, 2030, we will not have alien disclosure that they're here. Avi thinks we will. OK, well, I hope he wins. He can have my thousand bucks. Well, my 500 bucks. We put 500 bucks into the end of the pot because it would be spectacular. But is it in fact true? Well, let's see. OK, until then, I'm withholding judgment. I'm being skeptical. All right, then I have chapters on the really hard problems, the hard problem of consciousness. I'm not going to go into a lot of details on these final chapters here, but just in brief, the hard problem of the easy problem of consciousness is explaining how the brain processes information like perception. How does it see the color red? Here's where it happens, you know, in the retina. Here's where it happens, you know, back in the different areas of the brain, all the way back to the visual cortex at the back of the skull. So, you know, you can do all that. This is what neuroscientists do. It's actually a pretty hard problem to do, but it's doable. So, in other words, the easy problem of consciousness is how does the wiring work? The hard problem of consciousness is what's it like to be the wiring? Okay, this to me is a conceptual problem that could never be solved. That is, I'm saying the hard problem of consciousness is insoluble. It's a known unknowable, not just unknown, but unknowable the way it's phrased. What's it like to be a bat? How should I know? I'm not a bat. And people imagine, well, I can, you know, I could just imagine having, you know, a sonar system and the little blips out there. And then the sound comes back and I have big ears or in my analogy in the book, you know, what's it like to be a dolphin? where I could put on a wetsuit and I can put on one of those big monofins and swim through the water, maybe eat some sushi. Maybe I'd get some sense of what it's like to be a dolphin. But to actually be a dolphin, to actually know, I'd actually just have to be a dolphin or a bat. It would not be the little homunculus of Shermer is in the brain of the dolphin going, oh, so this is what it's like. That's dualism. Okay, there is no ghost in the machine. There's no little mini-me up there floating around. There's no homunculus that can, you know, transport over to the dolphin's brain and go in there and look around. This is a flawed idea. It's not going to happen. Okay, I go through all the different theories. There's 22 different theories to solve the hard problem of consciousness. There's no agreement of which of the 22 is the right one. There's sort of four clusters that may be right. I go through all that in there. But I ultimately just conclude there's just no way to know, short of just being that other person. What's it like to be is how this hard problem is defined. I think we need to completely restructure the whole thing or else we're never going to answer that question. I should note that Christophe Koch, the great neuroscientist, been on the show before, and David Chalmers, a great philosopher, coined the expression the hard problem of consciousness, also been on the show. They made a bet 25 years ago last year. They made a bet that it would be solved by 2024. Yeah, that's right. And it wasn't. So Christoph had to pay Chalmers off. I think it was a case of wine. I like bets like that. It's kind of fun to make you focus on that. Okay, next hard problem, free will and determinism. Let me just give my standing on one leg version of this. I have a whole chapter why I think the determinants are wrong and mistaken, but also why I don't think there's any such thing as libertarian free will as it's called. It has nothing to do with the political party, that there's a little homunculus up there making the decisions or something like that, those different versions of libertarian free will. But that one is something like a dualistic, there's a little ghost in the machine. But as Dan Dennett has pointed out, that doesn't give you free will. That just means the ghost or the soul or the mini-me is making the decisions, not you. Okay, because you are your mind. It's not like my mind. Even that phrase, my mind. There's no my in mine. I am my mind. Just me. Okay, so, but this is the problem that we're natural-born doulas, as Paul Bloom calls us. We just feel like there's something floating around up there. Our intuitions just go that direction for various cognitive and neuroscience reasons that I won't go into. But in short, here's my argument for what's called compatibilism. Yes, the universe is determined. There is cause and effect. We can figure out what it is and so on. In that literature, the question is often asked, could you have done otherwise? Okay, so just take like Steve Gould's idea of rewind the tape of life and play it back. Would we be here again? You know, he says life is very contingent. You know, the dinosaurs were wiped out. What if they hadn't been? Maybe we wouldn't be here. Okay, the whole point of that is let's play the tape back and rerun it again. The problem with that thought experiment is that if it's a read-only memory tape, then no, you could not have done differently. Life would have turned out exactly like it did because it's just a recording of what already happened. So the past is determined, but the future isn't. The future is not predetermined. It was not determined 13.8 billion years ago at the Big Bang that I would be sitting here at this desk talking to you. Okay. That is a highly contingent sequence of events that could have unfolded differently. Okay. So with that premise, that is the past is determined, the future is not predetermined, you could have done otherwise in this sense, that no matter what the future scenario is, it cannot be exactly like the past. that is to say here I quote Heraclitus to the point of elevating it to a principle you cannot a man cannot step into the same river twice because it's not the same river and he's not the same man right so going forward you can alter the conditions of the future as you see and choose to make your future self act differently than your present self so here I developed the whole idea that there is no fixed self. There's you in the past. There's you right now. There's you, future you. And that, like, so my fun examples are, let's say, I know future Shermer at, let's say, around 7 or 8 o'clock tonight. After dinner, I'm going to have this craving for sweets. So I'm just not going to have anything in the house to tempt me. Or I know getting up at 6 in the morning tomorrow to go out on my early morning bike ride to meet the guys. I'm not going to want to do it, so I'm going to put out all my bike clothes ready to go, have my bike in the car, the water bottle filled and ready to go with ice in it in the fridge. You know, I've got everything set up. The tires are pumped up. Minimize the number of obstacles that I know future swimmer is going to use as an excuse to not do it. All right, so that very idea means I can choose to do certain things now to make my future different than it was in the past. That's freedom. That's volition. That's choice. That's free will. It's as good as it gets. So all the determinists, they're wrong. They're just simply wrong. They're assuming we live in a universe that we don't live in, a predetermined universe. But the second law of thermodynamics and entropy tells us that there's an arrow of time that moves one direction only. and you can't rewind the tape and play it back exactly going forward and play it exactly as it happened. It can't be. That is not possible. So in the real universe, determinists don't exist. In any case, I've never met a determinist who actually believes it. They write books about it and take great pride in the books that they wrote. Why? Why would you take pride? You didn't do anything. It was all determined at the Big Bang. Okay, anyway, now I'm getting kind of snarky. Okay, and then finally I kind of wrap up with the God question. How do you know if there's a God or not? I go through all the arguments. Here's the philosophical arguments, Aquinas' five proofs, all the intelligent design creationist arguments, the current model, current theist arguments for God's existence. Here's their argument. Here's my rebuttal. Not just my rebuttal. I mean, this is what people that have studied this stuff since the time of David Hume. And so on. These are their counters. Here's their argument. Here's the counter. Here's the argument. Here's the counter. And so on. I've debated all these people, so I know their arguments. I used to make these arguments when I was a Christian at Pepperdine. And here's the rebuttals. In the end, here's my take. If you already believe in God and you're looking for some extra added reasons above faith, these are good reasons. The prime move or the first cause, what was there before the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the universe for life, and so on. All these, yeah, we have answers to them. But if you want to believe and you want some extra arguments for it, go ahead. These are pretty good. All right? I don't think they're enough to convince professionals, scientists and philosophers and so on, to flip from skepticism of God's existence to belief in God. And, of course, you can always just be an agnostic, which technically I guess I am. It's not knowable in any scientific sense. What experiment are we going to run to prove God's existence? And so I end the book with what I call my gambit, my God gambit. It's really the epilogue is it. And it starts with the idea of going back to where we began of think of science as an expanding sphere of knowledge. As the sphere of the known expands into the ether of the unknown, the proportion of ignorance seems to grow. The more you know, the more you know how much you don't know. But in this mathematical metaphor, note what happens when the radius of a sphere increases. The expansion of the surface area is squared, while the increase in the volume is cubed. So as the sphere of scientific knowledge expands, the volume of the known increases by a ratio of 3 to 2 over the surface area of the unknown. The more you know, the more of the unknown becomes known. It is at this boundary where we can stake a claim of true progress in the search for truth. Yet it is also at the horizon where the known meets the unknown that so many of us are tempted to inject supernatural or paranormal forces to explain hitherto unsolved mysteries. We must resist the temptation, for such efforts can never succeed, not even in principle. So I end this journey on the search for truth by returning to the definition of God as omnipotent and omniscient, and the proposition that none of us are God, so absolute truth about anything will forever be beyond our reach, or will it? Okay, you're going to have to read the book to find out the conclusion to that, because I do have an answer that I call my God gambit. All right, thanks for listening, everybody. Here it is again, truth, what it is, how to find it, and why it still matters. Please do me a favor. Go straight to Amazon.com and type in truth, shirmer. Order that book. Order a bunch of copies and give them as friends if you want. go to skeptic.com and click on shop shop books shirmer that book will pop up if you want to get it from us it's not any special discount really it's just if you want it personalized signed I've signed all those books over there on the deck those are all signed but I'll personalize it to you if you like with your name or any inscription that you like or just go to your local bookstore go to Barnes and Noble or or whatever your local chain or independent bookstore is. See if they have it. If they don't have it, then order it. And that'll encourage them to order more copies. So if you do this now, the sooner the better, like today, the 27th, this is how best-selling lists work. Okay, and I actually talk about this in a different book called The Matthew Effect. To those who have more shall be given. So there's like a best-seller effect where the books that are on the best-seller list sell more books, which causes them to be on the bestseller list. You have to get, you got to get a toehold though. You got to get some momentum going. So that momentum comes from you. So do me a favor, go straight to amazon.com or skeptic.com or the local bookstore and order truth, what it is, how to find it, why it still matters. I think the subject is important, which is why I wrote the book. All right. Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening. And thanks for your support over all these decades of doing skepticism and science and rationality. Until next time.