Public opinion surveys from every pollster have shown that Donald Trump’s political support has declined massively across the board. But one set of people that has been much more loyal (up until just very recently) has been the so-called “MAHA Movement” of former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
This is an interesting group to think about because as the Republican party has moved to the far right, it has kicked out the conservatives and moderates who once were welcomed. Instead of shrinking away, however, Republicans remained highly competitive by bringing in the MAHA crowd of hippies and naturalist obsessives who had long been associated with the far left.
But that perception was an inaccurate one. These people were always conservative/libertarian. The only thing that changed was the partisan label that they wanted to wear. The anti-science and anti-institutional rhetoric that’s the bedrock of today’s Trumpism, was actually very prominent from day one in the 1960s counterculture through figures like Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson.
Aaron Rabinowitz, my guest on today’s episode, grew up on all of this stuff, so he knows it from firsthand experience, but he also knows it through his academic career—and the fact that he’s the host of two philosophy podcasts, Embrace the Void, and Philosophers in Space.
The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
06:54 — High weirdness and libertarianism as a conservative liberalism
10:19 — The origins of the “counterculture”
17:15 — New Thought movement and mind over matter
27:24 — Quantum physics and a new generation of pseudoscience
36:02 — Alfred Korzybski and Robert Anton Wilson
48:38 — Ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism and high weirdness
58:30 — Balancing truth and skepticism
01:07:34 — Living with uncertainty and embracing the void
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Aaron Rabinowitz. Hey Aaron, welcome to Theory of Change.
AARON RABINOWITZ: Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me on.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so this is—we’re doing a double collaboration here. So if you like this episode on Theory of Change, we will be doing another one over on Embrace the Void very soon as well.
So, different topic though, so if and, and if we didn’t scare you away, that is.
RABINOWITZ: [00:03:00] Different, yet weirdly related.
SHEFFIELD: Yes. Yes. All right, well, so for today though, we’re talking about what some people, I mean, there’s a lot of words for what we’re talking about terms. So some people call it Pastel QAnon. Some people call it conspirituality, other people call it right wing hippieism, high weirdness. There’s many, many names for this.
But let’s start off first that I think a lot of people during the pandemic realized that many people who were kind of hippie coded suddenly became very—well suddenly, quote unquote—they were observed to be very anti-mask and anti-vaccine and then soon, eventually joined up with Donald Trump and RFK Jr.
But what the reality is, these ideas in many ways were fundamentally right-wing from the very beginning. It’s just that people didn’t really notice. I think.
RABINOWITZ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think there is an important history of ideas that we need to understand [00:04:00] that sort of starts in some conservative places. Like Lovecraft moves into what we think of as leftist, or they’re often leftist libertarian spaces like the hippies and high weirdness, you know, during the sixties and seventies and now has gone very broadly mainstream and I think is.
You know, driving our culture kind of across the political spectrum in various ways, but has on the right, kind of metastasized into sort of the worst parts of those traditions.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And essentially, Trump and RFK Jr. And Tulsi Gabbard, these people have kind of, they’ve sort of coalesced this, this conspiracy oriented epistemology that had kind of been in past decades, just been distributed kind of evenly across the political spectrum. And now it’s overwhelmingly gravitating toward the right and Republicans.
RABINOWITZ: You can get in trouble online for sort of jumping too [00:05:00] quickly into like a horseshoe theory of like, here’s how the left and the right come back together under authoritarianism, or something like that. But I’m pretty convinced these days that there is a kind of an overlap that happens. A connecting point in the realm of naturalness and fixation on naturalness.
And that combined with skepticism about mainstream narratives. So high weirdness. The term that I particularly interested in, which refers to the culture that I personally grew up in is really a culture of a counterculture in the, in the traditional sense of it is resistant to mainstream culture.
It sees it as suspect, it sees it as a legitimizing myth. Often it really was to try to preserve norms that were harmful to people. And it takes a pretty radical approach to, you know, challenging and, and exploring alternatives to those mainstream norms. And that is an idea that [00:06:00] wasn’t as popular, I think amongst like what we think of as conservatism when high weirdness was sort of at its peak during that hippie era.
But as you’ve seen mainstream culture trend towards neoliberalism with a little splash of progressivism, as you’ve seen conservatives come to view themselves as on the outs culturally, they have really adopted these kind of high weirdness skepticisms about mainstream narratives, which they identify with wokeness.
And, you know I, I just listened to your episode actually about fit with the person who wrote Fit Nation, which I thought was really excellent on talking about this problem that like there is a overlap of people who are distrustful of conventional wisdom and that creates a space for them to spiral in lots of interrelated directions.
But a lot of those spirals kind of funnel down into these far right spaces.
High weirdness and libertarianism as a conservative liberalism
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they do. And and, and it is, yeah, it does go back in a lot of ways to [00:07:00] natural the belief in the natural. But there’s, there’s some epistemic standpoints that we’ll talk about as well further on in the episode. But I, I, I guess, yeah, one of the key things to think about in this context is.
Libertarianism is kind of a rump liberalism, if you will rump from the political context, not used in America very, very much. But the idea that a party that sort of divides into and the, and there’s a smaller minority that claims to be the real, the real version and that is different from the main larger body.
And so that’s kind of what happened with liberalism in the 20th century. Beginning, you know, roughly, let’s say with the, the, i, the, the emergence of socialism as kind of a alternative between you know, communism and liberalism is, but, but it was very much rooted in liberalism and they could point very easily to John Stewart Mill and other people like that.
But there were people who had a more hierarchical viewpoint [00:08:00] a naturalist viewpoint, if you will, about truth and about politics, about poverty. And those are the people who became the libertarians later.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah.
Yeah. We don’t want to, like, it’s hard because these are such large milieus of concepts, you know, there’s no easy line to trace, like, here’s when things went this way or here’s when things went that way. You know, you have a lot of like broader cultural shifts happening. You have, you know, civil rights conflict, you have, you know, red scare, anti-socialist stuff.
You know, the increasing, I, you know, one would argue increasingly predatory nature of, of capitalism. Sort of just embodying the colonialism of the past and all of that sort of disillusions a lot of people, right? So a lot of these movements I do think start in a kind of disillusionment a, a break with the narratives that [00:09:00] were making.
One’s sense of purpose and meaning, feel sustained. And then in the absence of that, there are attempts to try to explain why this is happening and attempts to try to see if there’s a better alternative. And a lot of that ends up, you know, like we want to say, a lot of that is very valuable, right? A lot of this leads to.
Social progress that we now take for granted, sexual social progress and racial social progress. but it also leads to, you know, increases in conspiratorial beliefs or distrust of the government in ways like that aren’t actually constructive or valuable. Right? There are reasonable times to be distrustful of governments and then there is a kind of more all consuming version of that that can lead one astray, epistemically, so, yeah, I think, Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different threads here that we can kind of pull on and then you add, you know, then you add in like massive doses of psychedelics and you get, you know, [00:10:00] some really radical perspectives. You also get a lot of modern technology, a lot of modern science fiction and horror.
You know, it shapes all these different aspects of our world that I think now are so baked in that in a sense, sort of high weirdness won the culture wars, and now we’re just kind of living in that world.
The origins of the “counterculture”
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, in a lot of ways. And certainly we see that with. You know, now that you know marijuana is legalized in most American states and, and many other countries around the world as well and other drugs in other areas. So, but let’s maybe talk specifically about some specific people here.
So one of the things, you know, as I said, people oftentimes think of the, the sixties, seventies counterculture as this big left wing movement. And it’s certainly true that there were plenty of people in that worldview. And probably the majority of them seems like if you look at the, the voting trends of, of baby boomers, [00:11:00] generally speaking, they have been a, a, a democratic vote voting group.
So, but at the same time there was, there were always some very significant, prominent individuals in this culture that had kind of right. Libertarian viewpoints right wing anarchist viewpoints. And I think probably the, the earliest one who, who became I mean overtly, right, right wing later in life was Jack Kerouac the, the the founder, founder of the Beat Poet movement.
So for people who don’t know what, what that was or who he was, why don’t you give us a little overview please.
RABINOWITZ: Sure. And like when I say I was raised in, in this culture, I mean, my dad, a clinical psychologist, put on a one man show for many years where he played Alan Ginsburg and performed Alan Ginsburg’s poetry and looks very similar to Alan Ginsburg. It was a wonderful show. So like I saw, you know naked Lunch, William s [00:12:00] Burrows, the movie of William s Burrows book at a deeply inappropriate age.
These were poets of various backgrounds who kind of came together. again, in sort of resistance to what they saw as the norms around art and writing and culture. And so they were very famous for things like rejection of editing. This isn’t true of all of them, right? Ginsburg was like a compulsive editor, whereas folks like Kerouac would, you know, make fun of him for that, right?
They were very, you know, you are self-censoring, I think is the line that the Kerouac Standin gives in the Naked Lunch movie where they’re arguing about how to write. Whereas Burrough’s line in there is exterminate all rational thought. these guys were all really struggling with. Not fitting in with modern society, with thinking that it was very fake and hollow, which it was in a lot of ways.
And we’re looking for meaning elsewhere, and we’re looking forward in [00:13:00] drugs and promiscuous sex and homosexuality and like all these outside experiences. And so they, you know, they became these kind of outsider figures and they were very popular as a result of that. And then of course there was the irony of that.
You know, like you’re being an outside figure who inevitably gets, becomes commodified, right? As your ideas become more popular in mainstream, you become the thing that you have been resisting. And there’s a lot of like resistance to that within it. Yeah. And it’s not surprising. I think that to varying degrees, these individuals also had right wing coated ideas, Or became more right wing coated because a lot of this was reactionary.
You know, these were reactionary movements and reactionary movements. Whether they are left or right can produce good ideas, but they can also just produce reactionary ideas. And I think a lot of what is essential to conservatism is steeped in certain kind of reactionary [00:14:00] fear of progress away from what you perceive to be the ideal status quo.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Or people living differently than you. And whether they have the right to do that.
RABINOWITZ: And then there’s also like, you know, libertarianism is not a pure left or right thing either. I know left libertarians, you know, who really hate the way that people understand libertarianism today. But also I think libertarianism has, as a movement, there’s been a lot of problems because, you know, as a also somewhat reactionary movement, it, it tends to endorse and, and support some pretty isolationist, harmful ideas.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and I mean, that’s where I would kind of put it just as like a, a form of anarchism. I mean, ultimately to me, and some people don’t like it when I say this, but anarchism is operationally conservative because it’s saying. There should be no structures to stop [00:15:00] sociopaths. And, and that, and that ultimately is the problem that if you have a society that says we will have no rules against mistreating the society itself then ultimately you end up with the, the people who have the most money or the most guns, they’re the ones who win.
And that, you know, when you look at history, that kind of is what happens, seems like to
RABINOWITZ: Yeah.
I would argue that there are flavors of anarchism on the more social, communal, smaller scale level that. Sort of buck that trend. But I do think there’s a problem of scaling and a problem of, you know, in a, in a world of larger scale societies, how do you avoid it not turning into what we are seeing is this kind of very laissez-faire approach to like morality.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, you know, a, a, as you mentioned, drugs, obviously were a big, a big part of this culture.
And, and, and, and, and I think, you know, people now, decades after the fact, you know, it’s easy to, to think about, [00:16:00] well, these were people that were just, you know, trying to have fun or whatever, but that’s not what a lot of them really saw themselves as doing. Like, they literally. That they were re, you know, rewiring their brains and, and discovering, you know, untapped potential of the human mind.
And, and, and Timothy Leary, who was a Harvard professor that was became notorious for his advocacy for LSD really kind of the, the, the, the, the guy that was the centerpiece of this, this particular aspect of their ideology. And this dude was a straight up libertarian anarchist. and Larry had this phrase that really encapsulated this idea, which, which was a slogan. It was turn on, tune in, drop out.
And I think that last part drop out is where his libertarian anarchism really came into play because he was telling people do not participate in society. You need to get out of it because it’s all [00:17:00] bad. Everything sucks about it, and you need to get back to the land, et cetera, or, you know, go inside your mind and, you know, be on drugs all the time or whatever, because this is how we can reach the future of humanity, if you will.
New Thought movement and mind over matter
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. And here’s where I think it’s important to bring in another big movement that is a precursor to high weirdness, which is the new thought movement. I try to drop this in whenever possible because it’s fascinating to me. So this is a movement that arose in like the early 19th century. And it’s what we, what we now think of today as the mind over matter worldview, right?
Which has again, become very mainstream through the secret laws of attraction kind of stuff. This is the origination of the ideas of laws of attraction. They, these were often you know, not traditional scientists or something. These were people on the outs of. Scientific culture at that time who had sort of extreme views about [00:18:00] what was being discovered about science that suggested that there were connections between the mind and the body, right?
So you have your classic Cartesian. How do these things connect? What is the influence of the mind over the body? And these folks come along and say they sort of think of themselves as flipping the script the way that like mentalists do or idealists do over the materialists and saying, you know, mind is prior to body.
In some ways it is the defining force. It’s not that we are at the whims of our physical structures. We can reshape them with our wills essentially. So you get all of the, like a lot of positive psychology comes out of this. So many things are downstream of, of new thought and sort of poisoned by it. because these, these were.
Folks who lead to, you know, the ideas that if you will.
it, you can cure your own cancer. And that all disease is the result of bad mental thinking, which has the implicit victim blaming in it. Where if you’re suffering from something, you’re just not willing yourself not [00:19:00] to suffer from it hard enough. You know, manifestation, laws of attraction.
I often talk about how these things are just victim blaming at a cosmic scale, essentially, but they’re build, they’re sold, they’re commodified as empowering. Right. about mindfulness traditions, I’m, I’m a big fan of mindfulness traditions, but there are parts of the mindfulness tradition world. There are parts of positive psychology world that are really commodified, you know, wellness.
I mean, wellness is like the, I think the one we want to be most worried about. The wellness world is full of these kinds of mystical ideas. And a lot of that. Became popularized through high weirdness. So there was a phase of it being very popular during new thought. And then I think it’s brought back a lot by the psycho knots, by people like Timothy Leary, who, like you said, they see themselves exploring the mind, not just for fun, but for empowerment.
we’ll probably talk some about like science fiction. These guys heavily influenced science fiction and you can really see these ideas [00:20:00] in books like Hind Line, stranger in a Strange Land, where it’s all about if you learn Martian, you can physically reshape your body and mind in ways that give you superpowers.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And we will talk about Highline a bit here, but I did want to mention for anybody who is interested in the kind of the, I, we did a, a, a deep, much deeper dive just on that topic with Ajit here on a episode that will be, that comes out before this. So I’ll, I’ll link to it for anybody who wants to see that.
But yeah, I, this, and, and a lot of these ideas were religious in origin also. Like that’s the other thing about new, new thought. And one of them actually, there’s a connection to Donald Trump in new thought because his, his childhood pastor was Norman Vincent Peele, who was one of the biggest proponents of new thought.
And he wrote all kinds of books about, you know, trying, trying to tell people that yeah, if you if you have the right relationship with God and you have the right set of [00:21:00] mindset that, you know, literally anything is possible for you. So, so, yeah. And like
RABINOWITZ: There’s your origins of Prosperity Gospel right there too, right?
SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah, it is
RABINOWITZ: that’s where, that’s where it all comes from. Like, you know, if you will, it, it is No dream.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and so in a sense this is, you know, so the, the religious side, this is a, an act of faith. To have this you know, to have the blessings that God wants to give you if you have enough faith. But you know, the secular side, and I, I think, Carl Jung was also kind of in the mix in this regard as well.
That, you know, the, that this was the, the, the mid 20th century, it was finally a moment where a, I’d say probably, you know, most educated people outside of, of or in the US and other countries had come to the, the idea, well, there’s no such thing as a soul. And, but there is a mind. And so we are discovering how it really works.
And so like Leary, [00:22:00] his, his big thing as a, as a, I mean it’s not really a philosophy, but he had this idea of, he called it reality tunnels, that everybody lives in. And so with, if you took enough drugs, you could, you could go from the tunnel that you inhabited mentally to other ones and you could explore other realities.
And,
RABINOWITZ: Yep.
SHEFFIELD: this was, so, yeah, there was sort strong sci-fi connections to this. And, and, and, you know, this is people were, they were doing philosophy without a net, if you will.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. And if you, you know, if you look at the sense makers, speaking of thought tunnels, like people like Jordan Peterson folks, they, they talk about these ideas of thought tunnels and they, they often are being critical of, they’re using it to be critical of mainstream culture and saying, people get stuck in these mainstream thought tunnels, and they have to break out of those into, you know, novel ways of thinking.
There’s definitely a ton of religious stuff in this. The, you know, the co the folks that they were drawing [00:23:00] on, heavily steeped agnosticism as well as non-Western traditions. So a big impact was the translation starting at the beginning, you know, spreading of translations of non-Western Buddhist and, and Daoist writing into Western spaces.
And then you look at things like Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan. Often these are half-baked, you know, like fictionalized, very problematic colonialist accounts of, you know, various spiritual and wisdom traditions that are then co-opted into their attempts to kind of assemble an alternative worldview to what they saw as sort of dominating society.
And I think you see the modern right doing the exact same thing. And, and like the role of gnosticism is the same gnosticism, if you look at it as a religious tradition, is very conspirator conspiracy theory in nature. It basically says we are all trapped under the whims of [00:24:00] a creature that is preventing us from knowing the truth and that we can find our way to the truth by escaping that kind of mental prison.
You know, so the, what you can see as being the thing that would inspire folks like Philip k Dick, or Timothy Leary to try to break out through drug use or through exploration of other ideas is the same mindset that’s telling people, you know, you have to escape the woke mind virus.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and, and it’s notable with these, this, this tradition that they’re not that it is very experiential or
RABINOWITZ: Mm-hmm.
SHEFFIELD: So in other words, if I feel something. Then it’s true. And, and, and that’s, you know, so they’re not saying, well, I can prove that these other ideas are false.
No, they’re saying, well, no, I have this own experience. It’s, and it’s my own truth. And that’s, and I, and because I feel this then it is true. And which is, [00:25:00] and it’s so ironic though, because like they, they, especially Jordan Peterson, you know, is constantly railing against postmodernism. But his entire worldview is, is, is, you know, inflected through postmodern thought and the way he
RABINOWITZ: Deeply postmodern.
SHEFFIELD: But, but he can’t even see it. And neither can any of his fans which is funny.
RABINOWITZ: I would say there are like two. Sort of source materials for that. Part of this, this giant conceptual map on the like secular side is phenomenology. So you have your, your Fritz Pearl sort of phenomenal therapy folks. Talking about, you know, getting directly more in contact with our lived experiences, you know, not filtering everything as much through our sort of rational assessments of things.
And then evangelicalism, I just think American evangelicalism’s rejection of. Expertise in the form of rejection, of [00:26:00] mitigated access to God, right? Replacing that with the direct reading of, and the direct experience of God being the central part of the religious practice. Those two things kind of really come together to create this heavily individualist epistemology where you can only kind of trust your, you know, trust your own eyes and only your own eyes.
you know, they’ll, they’ll, the, the oral quote that always goes around, right? They’ll teach you to not to trust your own eyes kind of stuff. and that then, you know, immediately like leads to do your own research, right? Where do your own research becomes a co-opted idea for conspiracy theories? It’s very hard.
It’s very hard in the modern world where there are a lot of real conspiracies and there is a lot of inappropriate, harmful, powerful behavior going on to like ch. Yeah, Yeah.
You know, like we, we can’t be generalists as Denti would say about conspiracy theory [00:27:00] anymore. You can’t just dismiss people who believe in conspiracy theories as being epistemically flawed because there are very, like we we’re all conspiracy theorists.
Now it’s just a degree issue. And I think it, and I think that’s problematic because it, it does make it easier to then slide into, I think it makes it easier to then slide into believing certain other things like antisemitism.
Quantum physics and a new generation of pseudoscience
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, that is really kind of the, the, the paradox that is interwoven throughout all of these people, that some of their ideas are true. You know, and, and like, and I think one area where that was very common and I know you’re not into quantum physics stuff as much, so I will spare you with that, Aaron.
But you know, there,
RABINOWITZ: to making fun of it, if that counts.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, but like, so there, there, there was a, there was a quantum physicist named David Bom who he, he came up with it with a quantum theory, which, you know, has all kinds of [00:28:00] it’s mathematically sound. But it’s, it’s not a commonly believed one. It’s called the pilot wave, if anybody wants to look that up.
But basically this guy, essentially was trying to say but it, it wasn’t even just bone, like, you know, the the, the quantum physics really did also kind of mess with a lot of people’s interpretations of reality and they didn’t understand. Fully what it meant. so the, and, and, and, and you see that just over and over.
So, I mean, David Bo like, yeah, David Bowen was incredible mathematician. and he ended up getting all kinds of weird, you know, ideas about, mystical stuff in conspiracy theories. And so like, this literally can happen to anyone because there is some basis to these ideas. It’s just we don’t, unfortunately in this country, have enough philosophical training.
I think in our educational system and probably around the world, that’s a general problem. and the way that [00:29:00] people are. Trying to absorb ideas about reality as not being, you know, as being perceptively accessed is so these are, these are ideas that are common within Hinduism and Buddhism and, you know, other Eastern traditions.
But the way, as you said, you know, they’re kind of bastardized and dumbed down when they’re put into popular culture. And, you know, and then so like we see with this idea that, well if you, and like new thought really kind of goes into that, you know, that, if, if I just think hard enough, I can change reality through my, the power of my mind and like this another guy we should talk about is Robert Anton Wilson.
Like he wrote. That was his entire centerpiece of his ideas was quantum woo. He wrote a book called Quantum Psychology, and he described his political beliefs as non-Euclidean politics. And like the, like, mathematically, his ideas were [00:30:00] just ludicrous. Like the guy did not know what he was talking about.
But, you know, he, he was able to import a lot of the, the prestige of, of science and math into his idea. But of course he didn’t actually make any equations or anything like that. But it sounded profound.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. All of these traditions, this was a period of heavily attempting to. Use the trappings of science or cargo cult science to bring in anything that feels good or even feels commodifiable. Like a lot of this is grifter stuff, you know? A lot of the new thought movement is tied up with psychic mesmer.
Like Mesmer himself was a new thought guy. And, and Robert Anton Wilson is really fascinating. He writes things like the Illuminati Trilogy, which brings us, you know, a lot of discordian thought. It brings us a lot of counter-cultural ideas. And it also is at a really interesting, there’s an inflection point there about the concept, don’t, IM amenitize the [00:31:00] eschaton which is a phrase that was popular with William F.
Buckley Jr. In the i in the straightforward sense of he didn’t want a one world government that was gonna try to control everybody. And these folks were also not wanting that. So they were also talking about how, you know, the book is all about people trying to mize the eschaton, meaning. Trying to control people, trying to control the world.
And it’s all about, you know, the kind of anarchist counter control ideas. And quantum physics is, is really fundamental to a lot of this, I think because, the new thought movement didn’t, didn’t have the benefit of quantum physics to draw on, but they would’ve loved it so much. And it is now I think, the default scientific framework for a lot of new thought ideas around laws of attraction.
If you ask somebody how does manifestation work, I think nine times out of 10 they’re gonna tell you something quantum woo based. They’re gonna say that our minds can change the quantum states. And we then that in turn bubbles back up and impacts us. I’ve got another article coming [00:32:00] out at the UK skeptic Mag about all of the arguments for why we should, you know, why people think it’s okay to have legalized snake oil sales.
And one of the big ones is, is just quantum physics. They think, they think that quantum physics on some level. Proves all of this stuff when, when, like, it obviously, like it very much doesn’t, and a lot of, a lot of quantum physicists have done a lot of work trying to disprove that, but they’re fighting a losing battle a lot of the time because it’s, as you mentioned, such complicated stuff to understand, but the simplified versions of it are very appealing.
Just one other example that comes to mind in all of this is you were talking about different kind of quantum theories, the like multiverse theory, the like quantum wave breaking down into multiple realities. These are ideas that are very popular amongst the high weirdness folks. And, you know, you, you see people talking about going to different dimensions.
Philip k Dick, I think probably believed that he was just observing other dimensions directly at various [00:33:00] points. But it then, you know, becomes mainstream, right? You have the multi, you have the MCU multiverse, you’ve got Rick and Morty. Everybody is kind of on board with these things and they open up.
They open up a lot of spaces for what if. Right. And then people kind of, I think, take that what if to two serious? Like if if, if I can imagine it, then it must be real kind of places.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and that’s, and the irony with that regard is that you know, this is just another variation of the the ontological argument for the existence of God. That you know, which was resolved a, a long time ago through the ideas of the flying spaghetti monster
RABINOWITZ: and things like flying. Flag Spaghetti Monster, an internet manifestation of the kind of high weirdness new religions that you see, like the Church of the Sub Genius and Discordian. It’s interesting, maybe we talk a little bit about like there are different metaphysics running around in these cultures too, and I don’t want to paint this as one broad [00:34:00] brush.
So you have like on one end you’ve got like love crafty and metaphysics, which is the world is fundamentally uncaring and like there is no loving God that’s trying to help you and that’s why everything has fallen and terrible.
SHEFFIELD: gods actually.
RABINOWITZ: Or there’s evil gods right? There’s like actively, I mean like they’re not evil and so forth.
They don’t care enough to be evil, but Right. It, you perceive it as evil because of the uncaring nature of it. Right? But then you have like the gno gnosticism kind of views of there is a loving God, but there’s also this kind of manican evil guy, Demi urge, who’s preventing us from knowing the truth.
But then you have like the discordance and the discordian metaphysics is fascinating. If you ever read the Principia Discord, there’s a page on it where they explain their metaphysics as. When we experience the world, we perceive things as a mix of ordered things and disordered things, but the true nature of things is pure underlying chaos.
And all that’s happening is we have these frames, they call them [00:35:00] frames of perception that you put over the chaos and according to your frame, certain things appear ordered and other things appear disordered. Right? So you think of like Newtonian physics. You put the Newtonian physics frame over the world, certain data makes sense and other data doesn’t make sense.
They thought that was basically true and like disco accordions will argue that’s basically true of all knowledge of all ideas. So that’s a very radical kind of anti-real or skepticism about truth and knowledge. That I think then creeps in all over the place. You know, where people will say, well that’s just your truth, you know, I live my own truth.
SHEFFIELD: That’s just like your opinion, man.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah.
That’s just like your opinion, man.
Right. My dear sweet Lebowski, like again, I am a creature of high weirdness. I love this tradition for all of the horrible things that it has also brought into the world. So, like, I love Lebowski, I love that this Buddhism, I love all of those things. But like, it’s all, it is a, a recognition of the critique [00:36:00] of this, this kind of view.
Alfred Korzybski and Robert Anton Wilson
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and the idea of the, the, the framing or the reality tunnel or, you know, that also did. Strongly go into a linguistic conception as well. And, and that was, the, the, the first person to kind of really put this all down in some sense, was this guy named Alfred Korzybski, who nobody nowadays has ever heard of this guy.
But, you know, at the peak of his influence in the 1930s to 1950s, or 1950, I think is when he died, if I remember right. So he basically had this idea that he called general semantics and Korzybski, he had no training as a linguist. He had no training as a philosopher.
He did not engage with, with philosophy or with linguistics. And in fact, I read a, an article, contemporaneous article, which claimed that, his usage of the word semantics was actually [00:37:00] inserted at the last minute in his magnum opus, because he didn’t even it wasn’t even core to his ideas, but essentially what he was saying, and people at the time said he was a cult leader and seems to be some evidence for that.
But basically what he would tell people was that how you talk about things has a deep control over your mind and what you can know and, you know, and again, this is, there’s some, some truth to that but, you know, insisting that it’s absolute truth and that if I say I don’t have beliefs, then I don’t have beliefs.
Or if I say that a thing is not there, then it’s not there. You know, like, it, it, it was, it was, it
RABINOWITZ: Or if your
SHEFFIELD: of became a, huh.
RABINOWITZ: or if your language doesn’t have a word for something, you can’t experience that thing, for example.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so it was, it was like, you know, kind of one of the earliest self-help cults that was deeply, deeply influential on [00:38:00] other people as well. So including on sci-fi authors. So Robert Heinlein, who you mentioned was, was big into Korzybski and so was Robert Anton Wilson.
Like they would, both of them would cite him a lot, especially Wilson.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah, I think Korzybski’s a very interesting kind of bridging fossil between the new thought and the high weirdness space in that.
way. And it reminds me, he also reminds me a lot, the stuff that I was reading about him when you mentioned him is very similar to how I think a lot of people misappropriate the SPI wharf hypothesis in linguistic theory.
So this is most famously in most recently in the movie Arrival where the aliens show up who have. A different language and when you understand it, you experience time non-linearly. The sap, your war hypothesis is just, you know, in its weakest form how your language can shape your experiences of reality.
But in its strongest form, it’s things like, I don’t know if you remember the movie, what The Bleep Do We [00:39:00] Know Really Terrible Pseudoscience movie that was very popular for a second back when I was a, you know, back when I was a kid. And one of the claims, one of the famous claims in that movie is the Native Americans couldn’t see the boats when Christopher Columbus showed up because they didn’t have a word for it.
SHEFFIELD: Wow.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. Like, it’s a very extreme, like, again, mind over matter, right? If you don’t have it in a conceptual space for it, then you can’t experience it. You can’t learn anything about it.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I guess in the, there’s the common cliche, if a tree falls in a forest, no, it doesn’t make a sound. Like obviously that is a false idea. But if you come from this mindset, it can at least be true and, and maybe is true, if you have this, you know, like that everything is perceptively accessed, and so it doesn’t exist.
And yeah, and this is, is, is a form of, of idealism in, in, in many ways. And, [00:40:00] but it’s also, I mean, so the, the kind of paradoxical thing is that it expresses itself through post-structuralist language, but ultimately it is idealist modernism is if, I think we could say in a lot of ways that they believe that there is a objective reality and that they know what it is.
And even if they don’t, you know, can’t articulate it fully, it’s what I, what feels good to me. That’s reality. Not what feels good to you. No.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. And that’s often where it ties back to like conspiratorial thinking and, and distrust of experts that like I am breaking through to the direct phenomenal experience of the true logos, the true god or reality. And the experts either are incapable of doing so or know that this is possible and are actively trying to prevent people from doing so.
Either way, like everybody is trapped in this kind of conspiracy. The movie [00:41:00] The Matrix, I think for much, for all the ways that I love it and think it is a wonderful, brilliant movie, also has a lot to answer for on this front in terms of mainstreaming, essentially the idea of, you know, like pilling people, of helping people wake up from the world that they are being lied to about.
And I think that has just become, that’s just an incredibly powerful image for people when they are feeling. You know, disillusioned when they are feeling cut off, when they can tell that something is wrong, but can’t put their finger on what it is, it’s, a really vulnerable time for someone to come in and say, here’s what the problem actually is.
It’s experts or it’s, you know, the government.
SHEFFIELD: Or it’s women, or it’s Jews or you know, whatever. It’s anyone except for these right wing elites that are sucking the money out of the economy and making your life shit, not them.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. I mean, for their credit, the high weirdness folks did recognize that capitalism was the problem at the time. A lot [00:42:00] of them. I think, they just, there was no way to like COA towards an alternative because America was so radically anti-communist that, you know, they just, there was, there was nothing left but anarchism at that point, I feel like.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that’s the idea of dropout from Leary in a lot of ways. And Wilson, he kind of did exhibit this ongoing conflict in his own political ideas. And he did eventually kind of end up with anarchism after initially identifying as some sort of libertarian socialist.
And we saw that also with Robert Heinlein as well, who in many ways was, you could argue, kind of the, the progenitor of this worldview in terms of the chronology in that you know, because his book, Stranger In a Strange Land that came out in 1960, like there were, there was no counterculture by and large at that point in time.
And, and certainly people weren’t reading the beat poets. Like no one, no one reads poetry, guys. [00:43:00] Sorry!
RABINOWITZ: I mean, we still use the word gr, we still use the word grok today, completely derived of its stranger in a strange land meaning unfortunately. But yeah, I agree. He was hugely impactful and also a messy, complicated, like even like Stranger in a Strange Land is not a, as progressive a book as you would like it to be.
First of all, if you read it, it’s full of homophobia and sexism. It’s very, like much of the golden age of science fiction, it’s full of racism, homophobia, and sexism. Not as much racism, but the other ones of that time. Yeah, very much so. And I, yeah, I, go ahead.
SHEFFIELD: oh. But I was gonna say, but also, you know, the core kind of epistemic conceit of the book. Was that the, the protagonist who was a human that was raised by martians that came back to Earth. He had learned the language of Martian and it, it changed his interface with reality and it gave him a power to manipulate reality and to make people disappear and do other all sorts of [00:44:00] magical things.
You know, and, and it really does tie back to these, you know, these original mystical ideas of, you know, like the, if I know the true name of a magical being, then I will have power over that magical being. And, and you see that in a lot of, of ancient myths and medieval ones as well, that and so this is, you know, they really, they really do believe that, that there is some underlying reality in that if, through my my feelings, I can find it and I can have control.
And, and it’s a way of trying to find order in a, in an unjust world and that if I know it, what, you know, what the underlying reality is, then I and my friends and family, we can partake of it and restore the order.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. I do a lot of when I’m not. Obsessing about conspiracy theory stuff and high weirdness. I am interested in the philosophy of luck and how it relates to this thing [00:45:00] called the just world belief or just world illusion, which is just our felt need for the world to be just like we have a strong, deeply felt need for our worlds to be, just because it makes it feel fair and controllable and that illusion of control, I think that you’re talking about.
There is a big part of all of this is that these, all of these traditions are try, are wrestling with the loss of control that they experience in modernity and they’re trying to regain that sense of control, whether it’s through mind over matter approaches, whether it’s through drugs or some other kind of enlightenment mechanism.
At the same time through metaphysics that explain why things appear unjust, but really actually are just that if you really do learn the secret truths of the universe, the universe will treat you justly. That is really at the core, I think, the laws of attraction mindsets.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And there’s a religious component to this as well. When you look at and I, and I have a, [00:46:00] another episode on this, so I’ll link, which I will link about the, the, the emergence of Satan within Judaism. So Satan is not part of classical Judaism. There are multiple Satans, in fact, and, and they are the angels of God.
They are God’s employees. But it was only after the exile to the various exiles into the broader, you know, Iran, Iraq area, Babylon, that, that when they came into contact with Zoroastrianism, that a lot of Jews begin to think, aha, well maybe this explains why we keep getting taken over by all of these people.
And even though we have believe in the most powerful being in the world, in the universe, we always get our asses kicked. It’s because of the, of this bad guy, Satan.
RABINOWITZ: Or the demiurge. Yep.
SHEFFIELD: And that’s where you see the apocalypse tradition of, of Daniel which then of course is imported into [00:47:00] Christianity, that, but apocalypse isn’t the end of the world, it is the revealing of how the world really is. And it is this spiritual struggle between Satan and God. And, and so again, and you know, the, that fits very nicely, which is why you do see a lot of people once they do get into the QAnon, you know, beliefs, even if they weren’t religious, they become you know, fundamentalist Christians. Because it fits them so well,
RABINOWITZ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, there’s a lot of forces I think that push, that kind of convergence, the people you’re hanging around with is also a huge influence, I think in these scenarios. I think there’s a lot to the idea that a lot of the interactions between gurus in these in sense making spaces is about interpersonal connection and feeling, you know, seen by this other person, but not in a way that is really actually [00:48:00] conveying deep meaning or understanding.
So there’s, there’s a lot of, I think people trying to kind of. Make up for the loss of sense of meaning in the modern world by filling it with these things that are not actually helpful for it. They don’t actually fill that, that cup.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and if we wind back the clock even further chronologically, so, you know, I, I, we’ve mentioned the, the ideas of you know, kind of nothingness or, or skepticism within Hinduism and Buddhism. But within the European traditions, there was the, there, there were these ideas as well. And,
Ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism and high weirdness
RABINOWITZ: Sure. The
SHEFFIELD: I would say. Yeah, well that’s what, that’s what I was gonna talk about, like, so that you have the skeptic movement in ancient Greece which eventually kind of propagated into Rome as well. And it was divided between the, the well, I guess, I don’t know if you could say it was divided necessarily, but because it seems like the academic skeptics won.
But overall, like basically the [00:49:00] Pyrrhonian skeptics have this idea that, well, no truths about reality can be known, and so therefore we will just live by appearances and how things seem to us. And that right there is a very conservative epistemology, I think. And it’s, it, it shows why. So many of these people that have these high weirdness ideas that they come to that because they are modern day Pyrrhonian skeptics.
Like, like Robert Anton Wilson, where I read his stuff. I’m like, this dude, he’s never heard of the Pyrrhonian skeptic, skeptics. But he sounds just like them, except he likes drugs, you know? And those guys were a bit asetic, but you know, the academic skeptics, they grew out of the Pyrrhonian tradition.
But they realized, well, okay, yes, it’s true. We can’t really know anything, but we’re going to op, we’re going to say whatever seems to be the best tra, you know, explanation for something. We have to do something in this world. We have to act. And so we’re going to [00:50:00] go with the best proven explanation, but we won’t cling to it.
And that to me, you know, you can’t be a skeptic unless you are a skeptic about yourself. First and that’s the problem with this high weirdness and, and this, you know, modern day. It’s epistemic nihilism, I would say.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. So like the, the, the apocryphal story about pirro, the skeptic, the father of skeptic of Pyrrhonian skepticism is that people had to follow him around to make sure he wouldn’t run in, get run over by a cart because he wouldn’t believe that a cart was rolling towards Sam or something.
Now, I mean, if you read the Pyrrhonian skeptics. They’re, they’re more in the phenomenological tradition of saying, well, you can believe your direct experiences, but you shouldn’t believe any inferences from them logically, or any claims of knowledge that you haven’t directly experienced kind of approach.
So in that sense, it was kind of the earlier versions of do your own [00:51:00] research. Right? Don’t
SHEFFIELD: what I’m saying. Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, and then, Yeah.
you, you know, a lot of philosophy is struggling with, what do we mean by no, like, can I say I schmo it, I don’t know it, but I schmo it, which means I mostly know it enough to believe it.
Right. And then, you know, you have Cartesian skepticism that comes along and re, you know, like brings back these questions of what it means to be certain or to have this absolute knowledge that I do think also again opens the door for the kind of new thought stuff. That, that when you can create that little space for doubt lots of different kinds of anti-real can get in.
And you’ve mentioned a couple of times, and I think you’re quite right, anti-real in the sense of there are lots of different versions of anti-real. There’s a really good book I just interviewed the author of, of did the Science Wars Happen, where he lays out a bunch of different kinds of anti-real, from the most extreme disco accordion.
There is no objective truth because there is no objective reality. There’s just chaos to like, there’s objective truth [00:52:00] but we can’t have access to it. Or there are multiple kinds of non-competing truth, right? Non-overlapping magisterial as it were. And a lot of, and almost all of these kind of anti-real traditions end up reinforcing conservative ideas, end up reinforcing reactionary worldviews and are not, which is a problem because. you know, like we say, high weirdnesses across the spectrum. If you look over at the, like, social justice woke left side of the world that I, that I live in and strongly identify with, one of the big problems over there, I think right now is a kind of reactionary response to objective truth, to the idea that there is objective knowledge.
And that’s often it’s coded as rejection of objective truth as a tool of colonialism to oppress indigenous knowledge or non-traditional or non-scientific forms of knowledge. But it’s, it’s a real problem I think because it [00:53:00] does make people more susceptible to all of the kinds of woo and pseudoscience and medical misinformation that is running rampant right now.
It, it just makes an easy permission structure for all of it.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. And I mean, and I would say generally that, you know, post-structuralism, it is I mean if you look at what they based it on, you know, it’s, it’s based on the writings of nietzche ultimately. I mean, and, and that’s a serious problem. because Nietzsche was, you know, the father of fascism.
Like if you look at what he was actually intending to do, and you look at his final works, the guy loves slavery. The guy hated socialism, he hated communism, he hated women. Like pretty much anything that you you know, if you are a, a, a post-structuralist that you say you oppose. That’s your guy that you are, that you’re hearkening to [00:54:00] with your, your your arguments and, you know you got, you know, different French misinterprets of Nietzsche like Deus and you know, people like Michel Fuco these guys, they’ve created this fantasy version of Nietzsche.
And they don’t understand that you, you don’t need this, you don’t need Nietzsche to argue that you know, that politics is you know, about control by established groups. You don’t need Nietzsche to say that. And you don’t need him to say any of these things. And if you really want to go back to some ancient figures or like an older person to anchor your ideas on, like, you should read the Sophists of ancient Greece, that’s what you should do.
Or you should read, you know the, the cho tradition of India. You know, I mean, there’s, there’s plenty of people you can look at if you really want to have some, some older figures assigned to I would say.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. there’s, there’s plenty of skepticism out there in the world. You got your Daoist, you got your Zen Buddhists, you know, there’s lots of, but all of, I mean, it’s also I think, important [00:55:00] to recognize that all of these traditions come with problems and challenges and risks. one of the things that I think is valuable in Davies see’s book High Weirdness is that he really does portray the skeptical path as a tightrope.
And I think this is right, that it is so easy to to slip in one direction or the other in various kinds of reactionary ways as you walk this path. Even, you know, even approaches that are like, Well, just don’t have, you know, high confidence about anything. Right. Just be really uncertain about things.
Again, Pyrrhonian skeptics about suspending belief where you cannot know that that can lead to kinds of passivity, that can lead to an unwillingness to recognize what is in fact the reality. Because it, it just, you lose the ability, the willingness to, to commit to ideas or you see it as dangerous to believe things too strongly during a time when I think part of the problem [00:56:00] that people are experiencing with a loss of meaning is they don’t know what to hold to fairly strongly at this point.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and I would say, you know, to go back to quantum just a bit that, you know, Richard Feinman the physicist who was the, the, the guy who he got a Nobel Prize for quantizing electromagnetism. He, he was also a, a big science communicator and he had some problems as well, we should say.
He was a big sexual harasser of women. But one thing he said that was, was was right, was that you are the easiest person to fool. And that’s, you know, skepticism begins with yourself. And that’s, that to me is, is is the core problem of so much of this modern day woo and high weirdness is that they don’t understand you are the one you should be the most skeptical of-- not other people and not experts or whatever.
It’s, you should understand you don’t know what you’re talking about. And [00:57:00] if in areas where you haven’t done serious engagement with the literature and, and Alfred Korzybski, I think is the, is a really good example of this that, you know, he, he wrote thousands of pages of books, you know talking about semantics and philosophy, and he didn’t engage with, with these people at all.
You know, like he, he had a big he hated Aristotle and because he, he thought that Aristotle kind of invented Boolean logic, which is absurd because it’s, it is like literally we have the word.
RABINOWITZ: for.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I know, but that, that’s, he was obsessed with hating Aristotle. And because, you know, but it, it, it, and, you know, so, but, but he wasn’t engaging with Aristotle because in fact, Aristotle has ex, in multiple books, talks about the idea that there are multiple logical conclusions that you cannot say that everything is true or false.
That was the core idea of Korzybski. But Aristotle actually said that. [00:58:00] So it’s like he didn’t engage with, with the, the existing, you know, literature and the existing authors. And, and that’s really kind of, I think the through line also is with these people is that, you know, everything is about the first principles that, that I will deduce everything purely from first principles instead of, you know, empirical observation and disconfirmation of my own beliefs.
That’s, I think is their, is their approach to the world ultimately.
Balancing truth and skepticism
RABINOWITZ: I mean, to your point about the self being the hardest, the easiest one to fool since being my friends, the beats earlier, one of my favorite lines from the beats is from William s Burrow’s, naked Lunch, which is the hustlers of the world. There is one mark. You cannot beat the mark inside. You know, we are always marks in that sense.
And then to your point about, you know. Truth and falsity. One of the classic phrases of Discordian thought is every idea is [00:59:00] true in some sense, and false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense, and true and false in some sense. And they just go on and on like that. But you know, every conjunction of true, false and meaningless they would say is correct for all ideas.
Very radical, you know, trying to break down sort of binary approaches to epistemology.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and you know, and, and again, like there’s, there’s some truth to that idea. But it’s better for people to have read Coral Popper than to have read Discordian because Yeah. You know, like for
RABINOWITZ: Or do both.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. If you want, yeah. If you’re gonna read Discordian, you should read Popper for sure.
And, you know, and, and, and the core idea of his epistemology is that nothing is absolutely true. That, that everything that you know, we think is true is just only un falsified. And I think that that’s a better, a better axiology or epistemology that, you know, [01:00:00] if, if, if you hold to it in that way, it’s more healthy because you’re not, you’re not saying that your own ideas are true.
And I think that that’s the, the core, the core problem that we have here. Even though they say they, like I and I, the people that I’ve known who, who come out of these, you know, traditions, they claim not to have opinions. They claim not to have beliefs. But then when I say, okay, well here’s some things that show your beliefs are false.
They don’t want to hear it because they do have beliefs and they do have opinions but they just don’t want to say it.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah, I think I, I, I just put out a piece a little while ago about like skeptical epistemology or, or pessimistic epistemology where people feel like, because they’ve been convinced about. Confirmation bias and cognitive biases. They just shouldn’t strongly believe anything like I was saying earlier.
And I, you know, I think like I love Popper. I love like falsification. That’s great. I think we should say certain things are just [01:01:00] objectively true and we know that they are objectively true, past a reasonable standard. I think our fear of doing that is a lot of what is driving problems right now. And I, I, you know, like I worry that folks on the left and the right, but especially like, you know, because I live in the leftist spaces, I worry that they are increasingly afraid to do that and it.
makes it much harder for them to resist you know, arguments from the right.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well let’s, let’s talk about that a bit more. I mean, I, I think that I agree with that in general but I would say that Popper is saying that some things are objectively false. And that’s, and, and so that’s, so he gives you a access to a common reality through falseness rather than through truth.
RABINOWITZ: I feel like that’s a, that’s a word play game a little bit because like, let’s take a, let’s take a one example that I give in my article. You know, the Holocaust happened, like it’s objectively true that the Holocaust happened. I think. [01:02:00] I don’t think there’s any reason to be falsification is about, you know, like we just haven’t falsified that the Holocaust happened yet, or something like that.
Like we know it happened and we know that it was wrong. Like those are two claims, like one’s a, one’s a historical empirical claim, one’s a moral normative claim, and they’re both ones that we can know are objectively true and that we can know that there is not going to be evidence that will come along and falsify them right in the human kind of sense.
Any evidence that comes along that appears to falsify them, it doesn’t actually falsify them. It’s either fake made up or wrong.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s, yeah, I mean, I would agree with that, that there, and there is a difference. I think also people should distinguish between scientific claims and historical claims as well. And actually that is a point that the Pyrrhonians did because like they were talking, they, in their, in their own writing, they were primarily talking about scientific claims about the world.
They weren’t talking about the other stuff. [01:03:00] But,
RABINOWITZ: So even if we do scientific claims though, like think the claim evolution is true, right? I don’t think that’s falsifiable at this point. Right. I just think it’s the, like we might, we might find out that some of the details of how it happened are different, but the scientific claim that, you know, like species evolved on this planet seems like, and this is why, as I understand, again, I’m not a philosopher of science, but my understanding of philosopher of science is that they have moved a little bit beyond popper’s.
Falsification is because there are, it seems like certain claims for which there is such a sufficient body of evidence. Maybe this isn’t their reason, but in my mind it seems like a good reason there are. Certain empirical claims for which there is a sufficient body of evidence that we know it’s true, and that if we don’t ex, if we don’t believe it’s such a thing as possible, I. Worry that we end up in a place where, you know, we can’t ever get full consensus on climate change because people are like, well, some people think it’s true and some people don’t, [01:04:00] and maybe it just hasn’t been falsified yet, or something like that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, that’s a fair point. I think that’s a fair point and yeah, function functionally true. Perhaps is, is a way we can think about it. But you know, like in terms of the, the science though, there is this constant admixture and we’ve talked about it a bit, but you know, this idea of of, of the occult also like, and, and the occult is, was a very big thing for Wilson and a lot of these other people as well.
And, and you know, when you look at the history, there was this kind of intertwinement of personal experience and you know, mystical thought especially when you look at the early scientists so like you know, people some people might be familiar with the idea of I, Isaac Newton was very big into biblical numerology.
He was very big into you know, last days ideas and. Robert Boyle talked the, the, the kind of first [01:05:00] real chemist. He was obsessed with angels on talking about how they were how we, how we could
RABINOWITZ: Liveness was a staunch advocate of the best of all possible worlds theory.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, but, and so there, there is a certain, like the, the, the, the other paradox is that this experiential idea of reality in some sense, it, it, it has the, the ingredients to, to help people get out of conspiracy beliefs. Because you, you should be able to ex, you know, directly prove or things that you say are true.
And that is within their tradition as well. That is why science, you know, got out of and, and bifurcated. So chemistry, you know, left alchemy and physics, you know, came, came to be its own thing instead of arguing for God’s, you know, magically doing things. And we, you know, lost the idea of lum, lumous ether, and the ideas [01:06:00] of you know, that there was a secret ingredient of matter that is what caused fire.
Like these were, these were common beliefs that were believed by many early scientists. So, you know, there, there are ingredients that can help people not have these beliefs within these systems as well. So, yeah.
RABINOWITZ: I mean, I, I genuinely think high weirdness is a mixed bag, like a lot of traditions. I think what I see sometimes is a, a resistance to complex epistemologies, essentially, like the reality I think that is true is sometimes you need to trust your direct experiences. A lot of times you need to trust your direct experiences, but sometimes you shouldn’t.
A lot of times you need to trust experts except when you shouldn’t, you know, and, and like it’s very particularist about when you need to be doing those things and there isn’t an easy formula that you can apply to know what to do. A lot of times we are muddling through epistemically, and I don’t think folks like that a lot.
It feels [01:07:00] very unpleasant. It’s very nerve wracking. And so the appeal of these other views is often that they have fairly simplistic epistemologies once you shed all of the layers of gnosticism or whatever that they. Sort of fairly, it’s, you know, trust your direct experiences. Right. And, and that’s it, right?
Like that’s, and, and stop there. That can feel very easy and relaxing to people who don’t want to work through the complexities of is this a good expert or a bad expert?
Living with uncertainty and embracing the void
SHEFFIELD: And, and that is kind of the, the paradox is that, you know, science grew out of that idea actually. And that the rediscovery of the of the Pyrrhonian skeptics during the, the time of Descartes that, you know, they had a significant impact on early science. And so it was what enabled people to question religious dogma about, well, this is the nature of reality [01:08:00] because we say it is.
And, and, you know, and, and so people were like, no, I can, I can test things and, and, you know, through my own experience, I can see if there are, you know, spirits inside of animals or whatever, you know, like whatever, various flames, you know, spontaneous com, combustion and spontaneous. Like, people were able to test all of these ideas and find that they were not real.
So yeah, skepticism is both generative and also nihilistic at the same time. And as you were saying, it is a tight rope.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. I mean, so you got the pre-Socratics, right? They were doing a kind of science, trying to theorize about the physical nature of the world. Socrates himself then comes along and a lot of what Socrates is doing is, oh, you’re an expert in something. Let me ask you questions about it to prove that you don’t actually know what the hell you’re talking about.
So there was that skepticism of expertise and the direct inquiry built in from the beginnings of philosophy. And again, for [01:09:00] better and like I, I think it’s for better and worse in my opinion Because yeah, it, it opens people up to new ideas. It creates new spaces for ideas, but it also makes them resistant to certain ideas and it makes it harder for them to seed kind of epistemic authority to other individuals and trust other individuals.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Because other people’s experiences are also real. And I think that that’s, that’s the core thing that people who have this, you know, self-centered epistemology, that they, they don’t, you know, that’s the thing. We gotta get people to realize that other, other minds are real, other experiences are valid and other ways of thinking you know, they can be more right than yours. And that’s,
RABINOWITZ: Up to a point.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Up to a point. Well yeah, like, it, it, and these are, yeah, it’s uncomfortable. And, and, but at the same time, it can also be freeing, I think, as well. And that’s, you know, one of the things [01:10:00] that you talk about on your podcast a lot as well, and that’s why it’s called Embrace the Void.
Like what do you, what do you mean by that?
RABINOWITZ: Oh, I mean, many, many things by that, that’s a very high weirdness phrase. I, I, I later realized you know, embracing the void, the show originated as a way to cope with living in the worst of all possible timelines. We theorize that we are now stuck in. And it, you know, it’s about, so, so one of the, one of the ideas there would be abiding or attachment or non-attachment, right?
I don’t know if you can even see the tattoo. Oh, it’s weird. Oh, there we go. Abide. Right, which is Lebowski. It’s Daoism. And it’s the idea of like, yeah, you’re living in a terrible situation. You have to some extent accept that while also trying to change it. You know, non-attachment I think is a really meaningful approach to coping with reality.
but it has to go hand in hand with acting to try to improve things for people. [01:11:00] So, you know, it can be embracing the void between us. There are gaps between all of our minds that make it difficult for us to have direct interaction and direct understanding of each other. And so making peace with that you know, it means, it means lots of weird things to me.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and people can definitely check out what you mean by that on, on, on your podcast. I think we’ll we’ll leave it there for so it’s been a great discussion, Aaron. So, where do you want people to follow you on social media if, if they choose to do so?
RABINOWITZ: Yeah, sure. You can check out my podcasts, embrace the Void and Philosophers in space where we just talk about science fiction and philosophy a bunch. Very straightforward and you can find me on Blue Sky at ETV Pod. We’ve also got a philosophers in space Facebook group if people want to come hang out there.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right. Encourage everybody to do that. Thanks.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Matt. This was fun.
SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program. Thanks a lot for joining us for the discussion, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of [01:12:00] Change show where we have the video audio on transcript of all the episodes.
And if you would like to become a paid or free subscriber, you can do that. If you go to Theory of Change Show, you can subscribe on Substack and you can also stay in touch on Patreon at patreon.com/discover Flux. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode.
Thanks a lot, and I’ll see you next time.
