YouSaid · the spoken record

Diana Walsh Pasulka

lines on the record: 165
first: 2020-12-28
most recent: 2020-12-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In my opinion, and this is just my opinion, I do think that it is, but I also think that it could take different forms. So if there is like think of gravity, right? Gravity kind of like makes stuff stick to it, right? It tracks stuff. Well, what has loved you that does that too, right? So people who are, we call them charismatic charism. It means love. Charism means light and love. So a charismatic person is a person who attracts people to them like the sun does, right? Like, you know, so I think that whatever this property is that's intrinsic is like gravity and most likely takes different forms in different.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I share their names, I will share their names. Okay. So we have a cat and it has red fluffy hair. And so we called it Trump. Well, when we got our dog, we figured that it needed a companion, so we called it Putin. So we have Trump and Putin.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so basically, love of your children, by the way, is not always easy because they do things that they shouldn't do. You have to discipline them. That's one of the worst things about parenthood to me is disciplining my children. I don't like to do that. I love them. So a lot of things that I do that I feel are good are not easy. So there's an intrinsic sense that like, okay, let's take animals. Okay, so we have dogs and cats. Okay. So you might not, but I do. I told you about them.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By life. You define the terms? No, no, but listen. Okay, I'll answer your question. I'm just going to say that there's this assumption that we should have meaning to life. Okay. Well, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe it's just all random. Okay. However, I believe that it's not. And in my opinion, on the meaning of life, in my opinion, is intrinsic. I enjoy living. I want to live. Sometimes I don't enjoy living. And when I don't enjoy living, I change my circumstances. So it's intrinsic. And I think that certain things are intrinsic and like love, love of your children is kind of, well, it's actually physiological, but it's also intrinsic. It's beautiful. You know, there's something about it that is intrinsically desirable. So I think the meaning of life is like that, intrinsically desirable.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, okay. So, all right. Well, of course, I have to my philosophical training as an undergrad always makes me think about like, what's the assumption in your question? There's an assumption there. It's like there is a meaning. Okay, that's the assumption.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Can think of that. Conditions are so different that you and I and my students are happy to be alive. But they're back in the day, you know. Thousands of years ago when they actually didn't write it, they spoke the Vedas, which were the sacred traditions of India. They want it off. They didn't want to come back. Life was terrible. That's what people don't have the adequate understanding of history that for the majority of people, life is really hard, right? And you and I and your audience among the lucky. We actually like life. We want to live.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's interesting, Lex, and I do point this out to my students because we cover a lot of the basic studies courses I teach. We cover all religions or as many as we can, like the major religions. And so take Hinduism, for example. Now, this is an ancient religion, okay? So you and I are here talking about how we enjoy living and life and things like that. Well, the goal of Hinduism is basically never to get reincarnated again. It's basically to not live, okay? And to get off samsara, which is the wheel of life and death.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's see. I think that people are a little too confident, I think, about life in general, that they're going to kind of live all the time and not die. I happen to, I mean, I hate to say it. I'm super positive and most people would consider me to be too happy almost, right? And so it's odd then that I spend a lot of time thinking about death. But I wonder if there's a connection there Happy to be alive”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single time. Wow. Okay I so happen to have benefited perhaps from living with an older brother who seemingly had no fear of death while growing up. And he did everything. So he climbed mountains. He was a rock climber. He jumped out of airplanes. Of course, he had to be a green beret and go into the special forces where that type of thing is a requirement, right? And so because of that, I did a lot of things outside of my comfort zone, which probably I shouldn't have done and hope to goodness my kids don't do them. Okay, so do I fear death? I think about death a lot, actually. You may not know this about me, but in my field, I was the co-chair of the death panel. It's called the death panel. That was like, it's the panel to think about death in religious studies. And I was that for many years.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it is. Yes, they think it's controversial. This is the reason I believe. I've heard of the controversy. The controversy is that she didn't, first of all, she is Jewish and she did escape a concentration camp. And yet she's called She's been called anti-Jewish. And I think part of that was that she basically was saying something. That I believe that a lot of normal people are like Eichmann and evil things are done by people who just follow the rules and they don't think about what they're doing. And that's one of the most pernicious forms of evil of our time.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're thinking the impossible. There's a great one he's written called Mutants and Mystics where he talks about the comic strips, the, gosh, I can't remember the name of the person. He just died, Stan Lee. He talks about the history of the comics by Stan Lee. And they're all paranormal. They all start off super paranormal and it's fascinating.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I know I recommended two, but just from the same philosopher. My friend Jeffrey Kriepel, he's at Rice University and he's in my fields, religious studies. He's written several books. I mean, he's written a heck of a lot of books, let's put it that way. But I think his best book or the one that impacted me the most is called Authors of the Impossible. And his book, his writing is very much like Nietzsche's writing in the sense that it's almost as if he reaches out of the pages and he grabs you and he kind of slaps you around and says, think about this, you know, and you can't help but be changed after you've read it. And he's got a great chapter in there about Jacques Vallet.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of you fight with yourself about the consequences of your actions. And she says, bad people don't seem to have a conscience. So they actually sleep well at night. And so she goes through a whole history of philosophy about evil. And that's really a good one too. But I also have to recommend this one too. There's one more”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Against us, even. There's even segments of warfare called memetic warfare, all right? So memes are something that can sway a whole population of people. So she wrote about memes before they were even in existence. And that's Eichmann in Jerusalem. And I think she also has some really amazing things to say about evil is that when people remain thoughtless, she has another book called The Life of the Mind, which is gigantic. And I don't think anybody will read it. Frankly, it's one of the best books I've ever read. And I've read it many times. And basically the life of the mind and the life of the mind, she asks a very simple question. She says, why do people do bad things? Why are they evil? And what she says is she wonders if it's, she says that bad people sleep well at night, contrary to how the saying, how do you sleep at night? Well, that's only because you're a good person that you're asking that question because you actually have a conscience. And a conscience is this dual.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She came to the United States and she had worked with Heidegger, even though he's supposed to be anti Semitic and a Nazi and everything. But they were lovers, okay? So she comes out and she's at Columbia University and she teaches philosophy there. And she writes this, she writes two books, which I'll recommend. One's called Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she attends the Nuremberg trials. And she basically makes this really astute observation about evil. And she says, Eichmann is one of the people who sent the Jews to the concentration camps who ran the trains, okay? And she said, the thing about Eichmann was that he didn't seem particularly evil. Actually, he seemed to be quite a nice guy. She said, what was interesting about him was he seemed incredibly thoughtless and stupid. And she said, and he used a lot of stereotypes like memes. So she actually wrote about memes before we had them. And now people just use memes and they're actually used to.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay. So Hanna Rent. She is a philosopher that not a lot of people know about, but she's a Jewish woman during the Holocaust, and she was interred at Bergen-Belsen, which was basically Auschwitz for women, and she escaped.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework called genealogy from it. So the genealogy of morals so that we only believe certain things and we sentimentum them into truth. So we say it, you know, truth told who said that was it Lenin or Stalin? A truth told enough times. I mean, a lie told enough times becomes the truth. So that's basically Nietzschean, right there, okay? See, that's Nietzsche. So Nietzsche also is a huge critic of Christianity, which I'm actually Catholic. I'm a practicing Catholic. So I appreciated his critique. I thought it was actually quite accurate. He's a critique of religion in general. And he's fascinating. And also, I find that he talks about altered states of consciousness. He calls them elevated states. And I think through his book, you can actually experience elevated states. So, yeah, Nietzsche. Thumbs up.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so truth is woman. All right, so that, and also, and you know, Foucault, this other philosopher, French philosopher, actually takes up this idea and creates his own.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some ideas that the idea is basically that truth. He's got awesome one-liners. So truth is a woman So, okay, what does he mean by that? Truth is a woman. Basically, she's going to lie to you. She looks real attractive. She's not going to tell you the truth. So, okay, so basically I'm not saying that that's true about women. I'm obviously a woman. So basically what he's saying is that truth is like what I said Brother Guy said. It's a Okay, we started this whole conversation with what's real, right? So I should have just gone straight to Nietzsche. Haven't not you heard Truth is a woman? You know.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be like Saint January, and Saint January is actually the saint whose blood is in this place in Italy, I think it's in Italy. And every year it turns to blood again. So it's like desiccated. So it's this miracle. It says my blood is now, it flows again. And I was like, wow, that's really beautiful. And I said, and a strange coincidence because it just turned 12. So it's like New Year's Eve. I pick up the book. I read this aphorism. I said, strange coincidence that. And then I turn the page. And the page is about coincidences. And I was like, I shed it. And I thought, this is weird. And I felt like there was alive. I felt like the book was alive and Nietzsche was speaking to me. I had a experience and engagement with Nietzsche. And so after that, I couldn't put his stuff down. It was engaging, fascinating, everything. So yeah.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And New Year's Eve hit, and everybody went out, and I was asleep, and they woke me up. And I was like, darn, they woke me up. Might as well read this book by Nietzsche. Okay. So I picked it up. And lo and behold, I turned to a page that was exactly about, it was called Sanctus Januarius, which is basically Saint January. And it was about New Year's Eve. And I thought, whoa, what a weird coincidence. And it was a really, it was also super Catholic. And it was a really beautiful little aphorism. It's actually a book of aphorisms, which are kind of religious, right? And so it's religious, the genre's religious. Let's put it that way, but he's not. So basically he says, today is the day when people are supposed to make these resolutions, right? And he says, from here on out, I will never say no. I will only say yes. Okay. I look away. If something's horrible, I'll just look away from it. I won't get angry at it. And then he also says, I will.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It happened in one night. So let me just describe it because it's kind of funny. It happened on New Year's. So I had friends when I was in my 20s and they kept telling me, you have to read Niji, you have to read Nietzsche. And I tried, okay? But again, you know, No, I didn't like, I was not into how he described the philosophical concepts he was trying to get across. But they weren't giving up very persistent friends. So one of them gave me the gay science and I had it on my bookstand. And it was New Year's Eve. And I'm actually not a big part. I'm actually an introvert. I'm a geeky introvert, okay? So I don't go out and party a lot. It was New Year's Eve. Even that couldn't get me out to go party. So I just wanted to go to bed.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I really enjoy Nietzsche. Okay, so anything by Nietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche, he's a philosopher. I actually hated him when I first read him in my early 20s.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think the singularity is basically like sluffing off our material existence? Well, I don't know. Because I can tell you that. This has been the hope of philosophers and theologians forever.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These scenarios and within philosophy is called this is different from that, but it's like this brain in a vat, right? If you're a brain in a vat and some not so kind scientist is like recreating this world for you just to see, you know, and you think you're this awesome rock star, right? And you're living this awesome existence, but you're actually just this brain in this vat. Okay, but there's still a brain in a vat. Okay, so his idea in the matrix as metaphysics kind of takes out the brain in a vat, like this, I don't know if this is possible. So I've read critiques of this that, you know, what you're talking about is a non-dualism like there's like, you know, or it's not necessarily a non-dualism. Just, I mean, information in and of itself. Has to have some kind of material component to it.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so he wrote this article, which I use a lot. I love it because it's accessible to undergraduates. And it's called Matrix as Metaphysics. And basically, it's an answer to external world skepticism, which is basically how do we know there's an external world, right? How do we know that we're not in a matrix right now? And so basically he's using he's also He even references He uses a religious reference even. He says you could think of the matrix of the movie as the new book of Genesis for our new world, right? And I thought, yeah, that's absolutely correct because, you know, we don't know and we don't, we won't know for sure or for certain. Therefore, what we know is what is real to us. And so he goes through.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a great, again, I always return to something for your audience to read or you, there's a great, very short article online for free by David Chalmers. Do you know him? He's the philosopher of consciousness”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, platonic forms, I think, is about as close to what we're talking about as possible, like this place where these things exist. And then there's like a physical instantiation of it.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lucy, that's because there are none, because there's no place, there's no view from nowhere. There's no non material. Like, we have thoughts, but they're connected to us, right? They're in our, you know, they're somehow, okay.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, okay, so right, and then it was this was characterized in various movies like Lucy and stuff like that, you know, Lucy being the first human that we so kind of replicating. This is going to be the next iteration of humans is the singularity. I actually don't believe that, frankly. However, and the reason I don't believe it is because we're material beings and technology has to have a host. So we're not going to become something super abstract. Like there's, it's just impossible to do. There's nothing like that.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's going to be this biosphere, and we're all going to be hooked into it mentally. So we'll be able to communicate in a way in which we don't communicate now. So, you know, that sounds so similar to the singularity. So after I'd read him many, many years ago, but when I read the Curtis Weil's book about the singularity to me, it read just like religious language, like it read like, you know, because he, in fact, it's so much like Revelation to me when I read it that I even assign it to my students in my classes. I'm like, this is, this is it. You know, this is like a really great book of the singularity, you know, the coming singularity. And this religious event, because it seems like it, when he writes about it, he says, I felt it before I even understood it.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was called augmentation of the human intellect. So we've been doing this for a while. Props to Elon Musk, but we've been thinking about this for a good time. We've even been visioning it, okay? So there was a really interesting Jesuit priest. He was French, Tellier des Chardon. I don't know if you know who he is. If not, he's fascinating. He was actually a soldier before he became a priest. And so he believed, he also saw what he called a biosphere. Now, this guy is talking in the early 20th century, like the 1917, you know, that time period. And so basically he said and wrote about this thing called the newosphere. And he basically said there will be a point when we merge with our technology and it's going to be somewhat like some kind of a biosphere. We have this atmosphere and then we have the stratosphere.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah And so they cut out all the other scenes. Okay, so what we're getting is we're getting like this drug when we go to the movies or when we do video games or when we watch, we're literally physiologically responding to. are technologies, so we're already there, we're already interfacing with them physiologically. So that's my example. Now, the kind of thing that he's doing, Musk is doing with Neuralink, I say go for it. That's awesome. I hope he does it, you know. I'm fascinated. I want it to happen. Why do I want it to happen? Because I think that, well, first, it's inevitable that it's going to happen. I also want to point out that Jacques”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I work closely with the screenwriters who I work with now all the time. I work with them all the time now. And what I found was this. I found that as the most interesting part of the creation of this movie was the editing process because they would use it, it would go through editing and they would use test audiences. And a lot of the test audiences would be like, you know, there's like these things where they test their flicker rates and things like that, the i flicker rates. And so, and when it goes really intense, they go to UC Irvine and they do this thing called cognitive consumption, which is basically, or I'm sorry, cognitive consumerism, where they basically hook test audiences up to EKGs and they read their brains. And they figure out which scenes create the most.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are really trivial examples, but they do make the point. And this is one of them so. Before he started this research on UFOs and UOPs and technology, I actually was looking at the effects of technology and in particular media on religion. And what I did was I was lucky to be asked to be a consultant for various movies. And one in particular I learned a lot from, and that was the conjuring. So I was a history consultant for the conjuring. It happens to be my field. It's Catholic studies, right? And you've got these people who are real people and they're, you know, exercising demons and things like that. Okay, so I thought, wow, this is a great example for me. You know, I didn't do it for the money. It doesn't pay well, but I did it to learn, right?”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, okay, I've listened to your podcast with Alan. I've listened to Elon before very intelligent, obviously super smart guy. I think this is already, I mean, not in the specific ways that he is doing it, but I think we are already doing that, okay? And I can give you some examples.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now conditioned by our technology and the infrastructure we live within, the material structure, I think that it's going to, I don't think it's going to be a Frankenstein. I think it's actually going, you know, like a Mary Shelley type idea of technology. I think it's actually going to be more Promethean in the sense of, you know, think about it. We create children and then we get old and we rely upon our children to help us. Okay. Well, I feel like that about technology. We've created, well, we've created it, right? And so it's kind of growing up now.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it engages back with us, and we engage with it. So it's this coevolution that's happening. And in that sense, I think that As we create more autonomous, intelligent AI, it will help us survive because if we co-evolve with it, it will need us as much as we need it, is my opinion, how that happens or if that bears out to be true, we'll see, but I don't think the idea that we use technology is a correct way to put it. I think that technology is something so strange, the way it is today, like digital technology. I'm not talking about hammers or things like that, those kinds of tools, okay, is technology is so far removed from that and our environment is so”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that You can choose anything actually. And it could destroy us. Okay, so pollution. Here we're in a pandemic, a meteor, okay? So we can use technology. Or the thing is that we say we use technology, but actually that's not a correct way of putting it, in my opinion. So there is a term used by others coined by somebody I don't know, and I'm sorry to not give credit where credit's due, but it's called technogenesis. And it's this idea Heidegger actually had this idea, but he didn't use that term. And it's this idea that we co-evolve with technology, that we don't actually use it. Most people think it's like a tool we use. Okay, let's use technology to do this. Well, actually, when we engage with technology, we actually engage with it.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. So basically, I would say I'm not so keen on it. I think that our relationship with technology as it is and as I hope it will go will help us survive. I don't think we're equipped to do it as we stand now, but I think that if we can up our game or let's just put it this way, if technology is an extension of ourselves, which it actually is, it will help us because it'll probably be smarter than us, okay? It'll help us survive in the ways in which it determines best. That said, if there are non-human intelligences out there and they have more advanced, you know, obviously technologies than us and they actually come, the history of human engagement with other cultures has not gone well for cultures that are less aggressive. So, you see what I'm saying? Like, it's not a good idea.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, oh, yeah. So he is a non believer in alien intelligence and UFOs, but he, and that's fine, but I still agree with him that the meaning of the monolith was the screen. But that doesn't mean the screen isn't. Like what David Bowie said, right? So it's not exclusive. So I could still use his theory, but differ from the conclusions.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of corresponded with him, yes. So over the years, he and I have corresponded, and I told him, I said, look, I'm going to be using this in my book. So I think you should read what I say. And he, of course, wanted to see it.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also a material change Change in our material. I mean, when people talk about augmented reality, I say we already live in augmented reality. Don't we? Because this isn't our grandparents' existence.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so basically that's what he was saying Kubrick was basically the monolith was technology or the screen in particular and he was basically was saying that the cinema screen we were being you know completely and if you think about it look at all this we live in a screen culture we have computer screens, iPhone screens or you know phone screens, we have TV screens. Everything is something and now that COVID has come we're forced to go into these screens and we're forced to live a different material existence than we have lived before so in my sense I think that if it's an art project it's a really good one for that”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want a space Odyssey. I was fascinated. Okay, so what is this about? I accepted as soon as I listened to it and watched it. So basically he says that the monolith is, okay, can you pick up your phone here? What does that look like?”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely now invaded by the screen, or we're invading the screen, like we're living, our infrastructure now has completely changed. So the monolith basically, if art is supposed to show us life, it certainly has. If that's an art project, somebody did an awesome job with it. But apparently that monolith was there for a long time, right? I mean, that's the thing. It's been there for a couple years. So they said, okay, all right. That said, If your audience is interested, I think the best theory about the meaning of the monolith is Robert Ager or Robert Ayer. I think it's Robert Ager. He's got a website where he does analyses of films and it's called Collative Learning or Collative Learning. And he does the meaning of the monolith. Everyone should go look at that because I fully agree with him. I studied different meetings of the monolith in 2000.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, first of all, Kubrick's films are not ever easy for me because they're so weird, right? And I don't actually enjoy watching them, but... Yeah, it doesn't take away from their incredible brilliance, though, and their visionary merit. So a 2001 Space Odyssey is incredibly visionary. And of course, all those things that people say, I don't have to restate them. In terms of what it's a subtext to my book, by the way, I didn't mean it to be, but it's almost a character in my book, 2001, a Space Odyssey. And when the monoliths started to appear again, everything went crazy with my internet, social media phone. What's up? What's going on, right? Is this disclosure? And I thought, well, you know, I'll tell you one thing, is it's, let's look at the timing of it. It's a cool, if it is an art, you know, and then copy art and things like that. It's actually happening at a really interesting time when all of us are forced to go online, when all of us are forced because of COVID.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the public, you know, I regret making it public. Maybe the public isn't ready for this kind of information. And basically they emphasize that to me. And they emphasized it so much that they wanted me to know, right? So that is somewhat creepy to me. So I think, okay, this poor guy, Bob Lazar, so many people, you know, this is what happens to people who have experiences like this. questioned their reputations are put on the line. In some instances, their reputations are manipulated on purpose to make them look uncredible.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so regarding Bob L With respect to his claims, again, I have no way to adjudicate whether or not he actually encountered this. I do have friends who are. And the people that I know who Know his story, some know him believe him. And they have said to me that the most important thing that they think he has said, in fact, one of them I think made a meme out of it or something like that was basically he said.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, how did you know all this stuff? And they said, This lady in blue came and told us. And they said, did it look like this? And they showed them, they obviously didn't have a photograph, but they had a picture of a sister, a nun, and they said, yeah, she wore similar clothes, but she was much younger, right? And these guys were, you know, thought that was weird. But when they went back to Spain, they found that this woman had been doing that in her mind, had been traveling.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source