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Be well and I hope you love the show today.
So a couple weeks ago we had an episode on belief and in many ways this episode is a continuation of that episode and I say
that
because many of the thought lines that are being explored here were originally talked about on the belief episode and they're going to be expanded upon here so I guess what I'm saying is
if you haven't listened to the belief episode yet do yourself a favor go back listen to it absorb it let's be honest you guys have all heard
that episode before probably multiple times and
if you haven't I have nothing to say to you leave this podcast right now uh well I have nothing to say to you except for this very short episode recap I'm about to give you the belief episode was kind of like an awareness campaign right but instead of spreading awareness about some terrible disease like prostate cancer or Lou Gehrig's disease or something that affects millions of people a year the belief episode was talking about it was sort of an ice bucket challenge for a horrible disease that affects seven plus billion people a year
because as long as you're a human being with senses intuitions or an ability to reason
that can deceive you like all of us are you are living with this condition every day of your life and the condition that I'm talking about is the problem that arises because of the very flawed human tools that we have at our disposal
for acquiring knowledge about anything for all intents and purposes certainty is impossible and that starts to become a very dangerous recipe when it's combined with the fact
that there are absolutely zero limits to what we can allow ourselves to believe
if we're gullible enough right we can literally believe anything
that we want to believe what I'm saying there is what you believe has absolutely nothing to do with how true it is necessarily now every single one of us realizes this right we've all been children before we all know what it's like to believe in things for bad reasons you don't kind of look too far back to remember a time when you believed something then it ended up not being true based on a false pretense all right I believed in a ventriloquist dummy that was evil that was constantly stalking me and was going to come into my room in the middle of the night and kill me right I remember I remember reading these goose bumps books it's like a like a horror book genre by rl stein when I was a kid I really thought this evil ventriloquist doll was going to come and choke me out with his wooden hands I believe
that it's it's crazy looking back on it but now I wonder what I believe in that's just as unfounded like many kids believe in santa claus they believe
that santa claus is always watching them and making a determination as to whether he's going to give you presents or coal he has a hard time pulling the trigger on the coal I think it's mostly used as like an incentive campaign
like we've all heard the song right he sees you when you're sleeping he knows when you're awake like for some reason kids aren't supposed to question why santa became an omniscient being it's like this fat dude that lives at the north anyway and my point is we've held beliefs in the past for reasons that have nothing to do with how true they are necessarily whether it's
because we want them to be true or because it would be convenient or nice
if they were true but that doesn't make them true okay so