Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free shipping
- Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium
- Business Wars: https://wondery.com/business-wars/
- Cash App: https://cash.app/ and use code LexPodcast to get $10

"How many alien civilizations are out there?" video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTmxA2MvEqk

EPISODE LINKS:
Diana's Website: https://uncw.edu/par/faculty/faculty-pasulka.html
American Cosmic (book): https://amzn.to/3aK2kaj

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:03 - What is real?
7:32 - Can beliefs become reality?
12:34 - Donald Hoffman
16:33 - Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
20:02 - Ayn Rand
27:00 - How do religions start?
42:13 - Religion is an evolutionary advantage
47:34 - Religion used in propaganda
52:07 - What did Nietzsche mean by "God is Dead"?
57:34 - American Cosmic
1:01:20 - What do aliens look like?
1:10:03 - History of space programs
1:13:06 - Jacques Vallee
1:22:31 - Artificial intelligence
1:28:00 - Ufology community
1:39:13 - Psychedelics
1:43:10 - Tic Tac UFO
1:51:44 - Roswell UFO incident
2:02:49 - Bob Lazar
2:06:25 - Monoliths in the desert
2:17:14 - Humans will co-evolve with AI
2:20:33 - Neuralink
2:25:23 - Singularity
2:35:14 - Books: Nietzsche
2:40:20 - Books: Hannah Arendt
2:45:18 - Fear of death
2:49:46 - Meaning of life

CONNECT:
- Subscribe to this YouTube channel
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

The following is a conversation with Diana Walsh-Pasulka, a professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic, UFOs, Religion, and Technology.

This book is 1 of the most fascinating explorations of the interconnected nature of technology, belief, and the mystery of alien intelligence.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Element Electrolyte Drink, Grammarly Writing Plugin, Business Wars Podcast, and Cash App.

So the choice is health, grammar, knowledge, or money.

And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say, as I did in the recent video on how many intelligent alien civilizations are out there, that the nature of alien life intelligence and how they might communicate with us humans is likely stranger than we imagine and perhaps stranger than we can imagine.

What is most fascinating to me is how the belief in the communication with such civilizations changes people's understanding of the world.

And as Diana argues, the technology we create.

Technological innovation itself seems to manifest the mythology in our collective intelligence that turns the seemingly impossible into reality just a matter of years through the belief of individual humans that carry out that innovation.

The nature and power of this belief, in both technology and extraterrestrial intelligence, is mysterious and fascinating.

Perhaps holding the key to us humans understanding our own mind, our consciousness, and engineering versions of it in the machines we create.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Diana Walsh-Basulka.

You are a scholar of religious belief, or belief in general.

So the fascinating question, what do you think is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality?

So belief is generally, there are different definitions of belief just as There are different definitions of what is real, okay?

So for belief in my field, it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our actions, okay?

So we believe the sun is gonna rise tomorrow, therefore we act as if it will rise tomorrow, all right?

For a long time, people believed, and actually some still do, that the earth was flat.

Okay, well, that's obviously an erroneous belief.

Now, the bigger question that philosophers ask is, is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality?

I don't think we can actually obtain a correct understanding of what is real.

And in that sense, I have to refer to a philosopher again, and that would be Immanuel Kant.

So Immanuel Kant is 1 of the, he was basically in the 1750s, He wrote critiques of reason and things like that.

So he said, well, if you're a philosopher or have any kind of understanding of Western history, you know who he is.

He had this idea that we can actually never get to the thing in itself.

So and he called that the noumenal, the thing in itself.

He said, let's take this table, for instance, that you and I are talking across.

We believe in it because we put our water on it and then our water stays on it, okay.

However, can we know this thing in and of itself as a table?

So that would be what he then would call the phenomenal.

How do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is?

So we use our senses and things like that.

So I've been on committees just recently, this year, last year, for hiring professors in my department who are philosophers.

And we're hiring metaphysicians and people who are thinking about the nature of reality.

And basically what I've learned from them, yeah, they're very- I'd

What's funny is that for each 1 of them, I'm convinced each time.

They all say different things, but they're so convincing.

Is it like historical philosophy, like a particular topic?

So what they do is they come and they're usually excellent philosophers from Harvard or USC or whatever.

They come and they give what's called a job talk.

That's what philos, Every academic does a job talk in order to get it.

They talk to us about a department about what they do.

And so it so happens that we need a metaphysician and now we're hiring again for 1.

And so I've learned a lot about metaphysics in the last year, and this is what I've learned, that they use physics as a basis for understanding what we can know about what is real.

And what is real is really difficult to pin down.

Well, belief, does it correspond to reality?

And first, we don't even know what is real.

So the table, they would say, how do we know that the table even exists?

Well, how do we differentiate it from the floor, for example?

So these are the questions that philosophers are asking.

But philosophers are asking these questions, and they have different answers for it.

So I would say that it's very difficult to know what is real and in fact what I do usually is I paraphrase my friend and colleague, Brother Guy Consolmagno.

He's a Jesuit priest, he's also an astronomer, and he's the director of the Vatican Observatory.

And so he says this, he's a very smart person, he says, well, truth is a moving target.

So basically, to know what is real out there, like gravity or something like that, you've got to approximate it.

And as human beings, we have senses to tell us what, at least so we don't get hurt.

We're not going to fall off a building or something like that, we have eyes to see and things like that.

So we can approximate what reality is, but we're never gonna get to it unless we develop better senses, okay?

And I think that that is what we are in the process of doing.

We have telescopes, we have microscopes, we have, you know, extensions of ourselves, which are now called technology, and we can get to a better understanding of what reality is and what the objective world is.

So we can get better beliefs, more accurate beliefs, but can we get beliefs that actually correspond to reality?

Not in any precise way, but in approximate ways.

So I hope that's not too big an answer to your question.

What do you think beliefs in themselves can become reality?

I mean, so you've now adapted the, in this little bit of a conversation, adapted the metaphysician view of reality, which is the physics.

we humans kind of operate in the space of ideas, very much so.

Like we've kind of in the collective intelligence of human beings have come up with a set of ideas that persist in the minds of these many people and they become quite strong and powerful.

In terms of impact on our lives, they can have sometimes more impact than this table does, than the physics.

And in that sense, is there some sense in which our beliefs are reality, even if they're not connected to the physics?

So our beliefs are tremendously, they create social effects, absolutely.

There was a belief that, I'm gonna use this example.

There was a belief back in the day, and we're talking about, when I say back in the day, I'm a historian, so I'm talking about like a thousand years ago, right?

So look, I don't know if human beings have souls I can tell you this though that if human beings have souls probably animals do too.

That's my own personal belief That's not a professor belief there But there was this belief among the Catholic Magisterium which is runs Europe that women had no souls.

So they had to have this big meeting about it.

But that belief had consequences for women.

I mean, women were treated and have been treated as if they didn't have souls.

And the soul was really the essence of the human being.

It's what is the essence of what is eternal, you know, when women weren't eternal.

All right, so there in the Catholic tradition, there's this idea of purgatory, hell, and heaven.

And these are 3 destinations that people can go to when they die.

And if you're great, you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint.

If you're okay, you go to purgatory, right?

And you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven.

If you're terrible, you go to hell, right?

Well, there was a place that the Catholics determined, and this was a belief for a long time, like a thousand years or more, and it was called limbo, all right?

And limbo comes from the Latin, limbus, and it means edge.

And it was either on the edge of hell or on the edge of heaven.

No 1 really could determine which it was.

No historians are like, well, this person says it was on the edge of heaven.

Well, listen, this was a terrible, first of all, there is no limbo anymore.

In 2007, Benedict, the then Pope, got rid of the idea that there was limbo.

Okay, so Catholics kind of went crazy because they didn't really know, they forgot that limbo existed and they thought it was purgatory.

And they said, how could you get rid of purgatory?

But actually he just got rid of this idea of limbo.

Oh, so that's a distinct thing from purgatory.

way, people should know you, they have a book on purgatory that came before.

American Cosmic, yes, I wrote a book on purgatory, yeah.

Anyway, so limbo is a distinct thing from purgatory?

Yeah, and the types of people who go to limbo happen to be virtuous pagans, okay?

Think of for like more than a thousand years, mothers and fathers gave birth to babies who weren't baptized and couldn't be buried with their family in these burial, and then they couldn't be reunited with them in heaven.

Think of the pain and suffering that that caused.

Yet the belief in it caused untold suffering.

I mean, the effects were real, let's put it that way.

But the Families themselves, do you think they really believed it?

Yes, I've read, but listen, we have trigger warnings today, right?

So don't read this, it's gonna make you upset, okay?

History, primary sources, No trigger warnings, okay?

So you're going through somebody's diary from 1400 and you hear the suffering and pain that they went through.

There were times in my research where I'd have to put my primary source down and just basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific.

I knew it was true because they wouldn't write something, you know, they're not gonna write in their diary something that's not true and it was horrible.

So yes, these people went through untold suffering for nothing, because they had an erroneous belief.

So I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman.

He has this idea that in terms of the distance we are from being able to know the reality, which is there, the physics reality, is we're actually really, really, really, really far away from that.

So I think his idea is that we're basically completely detached

What's your sense, how close are we to the reality?

We'll talk about a bunch of ideas about our beliefs in technology and beyond, but in terms of what is actually real from a physical sense, how close are we to understanding that?

Pretty far, I'm gonna use examples from what I do.

Okay, so this idea that we're suspicious of what we actually think is real is not new, of course.

It goes back a long time, thousands of years, in fact.

And philosophers, I'm not actually technically a philosopher, but I was 1.

Yeah, what do you introduce yourself at, like at a bar, when the bartender asks, what do you do?

I never tell people what I do, especially on airplanes.

So generally if they push though, I say, I'm the chair of philosophy and religion, although I stepped down last year, so I'm no longer the chair.

But I have a master's degree in philosophy and I was a philosophy major and I've studied, I still study philosophy.

All right, so this idea that we can't know, we're suspicious of what we know, it's called external world skepticism.

That's the official philosophical name for it.

Our faculties and our senses don't give us accurate perceptions of what is there, okay?

Especially at a quantum level or a molecular level.

So yeah, so I think that the person you mentioned is correct in that.

I think you're talking about our direct senses, but you know, we have tools, measurement tools, from microscopes to all the tools of astronomy, cosmology, that gives us a sense of the big universe and also the sense of the very small.

Do you think there's some other things that are completely sort of other dimensions or there's ideas of panpsychism that consciousness permeates all matter, that there's like fundamental forces of physics we're not even aware of yet?

I do think, and this is why I write about technology, and I mean that's actually what I specialize in is belief in technology with respect to religion.

So in my opinion, thank goodness for technology because where would we be without it?

I mean, frankly, I think that it's like Marshall McLuhan was the person who said, technology is like an extension of our senses.

And I absolutely believe that to be true.

I think that we're lucky that we, you know, that Prometheus gave us technology, okay?

And that we use it and we're making it better and better and better and better.

And like my point is that I think that our instruments, I mean, I don't want to be a religious technologist, but our instruments will save us.

I mean, they're already making life better for us.

You think it's important that they also help us understand reality more directly, more deeply?

I think directly, more directly is probably a more accurate term for what you're trying to, I think, ask me.

You know, can we actually, I mean, I think you're asking me that question that Kant basically was trying to get at, was can we know the thing in itself?

Can we have like some kind of like intense knowing of it?

And I would say that that's where religion comes in.

Okay, that's where we talk about religion.

And if I may also go back to Immanuel Kant, this idea that He, just before he died, just as he died, he was working on, he did this critique of reason where basically he believed, he basically talks about, can we know what's real?

He basically has this long, you know, the question, can we know what's real?

And then, you know, a thousand pages later, no.

Then he does this other critique and, okay.

Well, judgment is this other thing altogether, and I think that that's what you're getting at.

How can we know things really intensely and intimately?

And I think that he thought that judgment was the idea that we can actually know the thing in itself.

And he was working on that as he died, and then he never finished it.

Hannah Arendt, another philosopher of the 20th century, took it up, took up the critique of judgment, and tried to finish it.

Because judgment, think about it, when you see a work of art, who judges that to be decent?

Okay, so there is a group of people who come to the decision that that's rotten or, you know, that's pretty good.

You know, like I noticed that you like to play guitar.

Well, you choose music that I happen to like too, okay?

So you and I both have a sense of judgment, just a sense.

So he said there's a sense that some people have.

Why do certain communities have a similar sense?

He thought it had something to do with the knowledge, the intimate knowledge of the thing in itself.

So another philosopher that philosophers actually don't like at all, but religious studies people do is Martin Heidegger.

So Martin Heidegger has some great essays.

And again, he gets to, you know, he talks about Van Gogh and Van Gogh's shoes, you know that picture, the painting Van Gogh's shoes, it's really a really intense picture.

And I think everybody can agree, That's a cool picture of shoes, right?

You know, the question is, why is that a cool picture of shoes?

You know, what kind of knowledge are we accessing to determine that indeed that works, right?

So basically the nature of knowledge and what does it represent?

It can operate in the space of, that's detached from reality or can it ultimately represent reality?

Yeah, so what can we know is actually called epistemology.

But metaphysics is basically what is the nature of reality.

Another non-philosopher that may be considered a philosopher, since we're talking about reality, is Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism.

What are your thoughts on her sense of taking this idea of reality, calling her philosophy objectivism, and kind of starting at the idea that you really could know everything, and it's pretty obvious, and then from that you can derive an ethics about how to live life.

Like what is the good ethical life and all the virtue of selfishness, all that kind of stuff.

So you talked to a lot of academic philosophers, so I'd be curious to see from the perspective of like, is she somebody that's taken seriously at all?

Why is she dismissed as I see from my distant perspective by serious philosophers and also like your own personal thoughts of like, is there some interesting bits that you find inspiring in her work or not?

Okay, so Ayn Rand, I've had so many exceedingly intelligent students basically give me her books and basically say, please, Dr.

I've read this book before and then want to engage in, you know, let me put it this way They're religious about Ayn Rand.

Okay, so to them Ayn Rand represents some type of way of life right her Objectivism, now why is she not taken seriously by philosophers in general?

Philosophers in general tend to get pretty, I guess you could call it they're kind of scientists but with words.

I always call philosophy, when I describe it to someone who's gonna take a philosophy class, I say, it's basically math problems, like word math problems, okay?

So they take words very seriously and they're very formal about

So they're not, so there is no confusion.

So for Ayn Rand to basically say you can know everything and establish ethics from that, I think philosophers automatically say no.

In fact we even we have at my university a wonderful business school and when you walk into the Dean of the business school's office.

So it's So I want to say that not all academics are anti Ayn Rand.

And in fact, I don't think philosophers are either, except that they don't teach Ayn Rand.

Okay, so in 1 sense you could say that because they don't teach her, they're being exclusive in what they teach.

Or very particular, perhaps, is another way to put it.

Yeah, it's hard to know where to place people like her because, you know, do you put Albert Camus as a philosopher?

So I guess, what's the good term for that?

Or whatever the term is, it's annoying to me that the academic philosophers get to own the word philosophy, because it's just like people who think deeply about life is what I think about as philosophy.

And to me, it's like, all right, so I know Nietzsche is another person that's probably not respected in the philosophy circles because he is full of contradictions, full of...

So he's definitely, you know, I love people that are full of ideas, even if they're full of contradictions, and Nietzsche is

I'm able to look past the obvious ego that's there on the page and the fact that she actually has, in my view, a lot of wrong ideas, but there's a lot of interesting tidbits to pick up and the same goes with Nietzsche.

I'm weirded out by the religious aspect here on both the people who like worship Ayn Rand and people who completely dismiss her.

I just kind of see it as, oh, can we just read a few interesting things and get inspired by it and move on as opposed to have a dogmatic binary thing.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion & the Nature of Belief | Lex Fridman Podcast #149