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

“Yes. And I didn't think that, first of all, I knew that the government was part of the situation. I just didn't know how much. And so I learned that quickly and acclimated to it, accepted it, and noted that. Indeed Horatio, the world is much more mysterious than we think it is. It's more mysterious. There are more mysteries in this life than your philosophy provides for.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Just like with my book on purgatory, I went into the research thinking that it would be something that it was entirely not. It ended up being something completely different. And I think that's good. I think that people who do research need to are very excited actually when their research surprises them. So I was happily surprised. By my purgatory book to learn that it was a place. And so I went into American cosmic being a non-believer in UFOs entirely. And I came out being agnostic. Kind of believer”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because it would bring up this idea of external intelligences that are not human, which is basically a lot of religions talk about that, right? There are bodhisattvas, there are angels, there are demons. You know, there are all these types of non-human intelligences that religion makes space for. So what I'm basically saying in American cosmic is these new things are within the realm of UFOs and UAPs. So I think that, well, I think Nietzsche would say that that's a progressive adaptation of religion is what I would hope you would say. Nietzsche, however, is unpredictable, I think. I couldn't predict him. So I would say that it would be my hope that he would say this is an accurate representation of a move into a new type of religion. And it's adaptive, therefore progressive.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what's happening now, and look what it has done. He says now everything is possible, all manner of terrible evil, because no one has the belief in God anymore. The belief that there is an afterlife, you asked about an afterlife. So with this kind of belief in immorality comes this belief. You can have morals without God, okay? People do. But what Christianity is this idea that you will reap what you sow so if people don't believe that anymore, what will happen? And so that's what he's basically saying is that the basic anchor for Western society is now gone.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eddie's basically says with that comes the Ubermensch, okay, which is the superhuman. And he says there aren't many of them. He says, but they're going to come. And he also talks about the philosophers of the future. And he's speaking and writing to them is my belief. So he's basically telling you and me, because we're now the philosophers of his future. Yeah, he's basically telling us.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She absolutely did. Yeah, he did. And Nietzsche basically was making a historical statement about God is dead. And he was right. He was basically saying that in the century in which he lived and he died, I think, in 1900. Again, I could be wrong about that. So I just want to say that. I believe he died in 1900. Okay, so he's writing in the 1800s. And he's basically saying God is dead and we killed him. Okay. So he's making a historical statement that at that point in time with science just kind of getting better and industrialization happening. The idea Of this thing beyond what we know as material reality is dead. So the substrate of Western civilization is dead. That's what Nietzsche is saying. That makes sense”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, yeah. But again, he believed in Jesus and he believed Jesus was he didn't believe he was a divinity. He believed Jesus was a good man and he died on the cross. Okay.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love him, but yeah, he's really hard to read. So Nietzsche basically said God is dead. And let me give you the context for him saying that. He also said this. He said there was only one Christian. He died on the cross.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, good. I love this question. No one asks me about Nietzsche. And I love Nietzsche. Okay, so first, actually, I do think, and I could be corrected and probably will be in all the comments. Well, first, Nietzsche, it's true, wasn't the first to say God is dead. I think Hegel said it. Okay. No one reads Hegel. He's like, so difficult to read that it's impossible.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, it's powerful too because behind it is a force of, you know, what people contend to be sacred, a sacred force, right? So, you know, it's up to God to, you know, decide who's, you know, so you have to go along with what God says, of course. Well, that's basically not the contact event. You know, the contact event is usually some type of very specific, legitimate event that a person has with something that is non-human or considered divine. But when religions become narrativized, I would call it by a different institutions, that's when you're in danger of getting propaganda.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jefferson, I mean, they couldn't vote, yet they had, they have their names on the Constitution. Is that not a strange contradiction? So here you can see how propaganda works. There was anti-Catholic propaganda. There was anti-Jewish propaganda. And a lot of it was that these people weren't human. They weren't human beings. Another thing I'd like to say is that when the Irish did come here, they were indentured a lot of times indentured servants. But that's terminology. What is an indentured servant? Pretty much.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Genocide, we just have to say it of the Irish, it was called famine, but it wasn't one. It was a staged thing. And so millions of Irish left Ireland on coffin ships is what they called them because they usually wouldn't get here. Mine happened to get here. Okay. So that's the context that I'm coming from. So in each case, for one thing, Irish weren't considered, you know, there was Catholics weren't considered, they were considered to be terrible and there was a lot of anti-Catholic rhetoric here in the United States, which is kind of strange because one of the, in fact, the most wealthy colonial family were the Carrolls in Maryland, and they were Catholic. So when you look at the United States, our history, and you see the separation of church and state, do you want to know where that came from? That came from those guys. They convinced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.”
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 not outside of my framework, absolutely not. I think that it's done routinely propaganda is done routinely. Especially there's nothing more powerful than religion to get people to act, I think. My mother's Jewish and my father was Roman Catholic, okay, from Irish extraction. And so both members, both great-grandparents came here under duress because they were being, what would you call it, there was an act of genocide on both sides, being done by other cultures, okay? So on the one hand, obviously we know about the Holocaust. Okay, so they came, the great-grandparents came here to avoid that and they made it. On the other hand, there was an English.”
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 this kind of built in capacity for belief in something that we don't have evidence for yet. And that's a sort of faith. So I would say yes to that question. Absolutely. I think it's adaptive in that way. We're moving into a new, I mean, heck, we've already moved into this culture. Most people have not caught up with it yet. I see that in the school systems, you know. And I think that I'm hoping we can catch up fast because really it's moving faster than we are.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see what you're saying. That's a great question. When you say religion, I would use the word religiosity because I think that we're moving out of the dogmatic types of religions into more of a, I hate to put it this way, but an ex-files type religion where we can say, I want to believe, or the truth is out there. But we don't know that it's out there or we don't know yet what it is. But we know it's out there.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Religions being adaptive. I think that Christianity probably helped us. Become better people to each other as we moved into a more global society and also it goes along with my book, which is basically making the argument that belief in non-human intelligence or ETs or UFOs, UAPs, whatever you want to call them, is a new form of religion.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A colonial power. That means we're going into other countries, we're conquering them, we are, you know, how do we survive together as cultures that don't clash? Well, we have to have a belief structure that allows us to, and I think religions function that way, frankly.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Empire called the Roman Empire, which litters its roads with crucified bodies to let you know don't mess with us, okay? All right. Here all of a sudden you have this guy saying, God is love. All right. Well, that's weird. Okay. So why? Why does this take off? Well, it takes off because we're becoming a...”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking that. Most people don't ask that. And I think it's the question to ask. Why do we still have religion? That's the question, right? Because scientists and others scholars, humanists even thought that there's this thing called the secularization thesis. And it's this idea that the more we progress rationally and we have better instruments for understanding our reality, the less religious we will be. But that's been found to be untrue. We're still very religious, okay? So why? Why is it around? Well, it's adaptive in some way, in my opinion. Many people would not agree with me, but I kind of see it as an evolutionary adaptation. Now, think about religions, okay? Think about Christianity again for one. Here comes this idea when you have this ruthless.”
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, religion is a set of if it's not just belief, it's also practices, it's both belief and practices because you won't have the practices without the belief. So you have those together, okay? And it's inspired by what is perceived because we don't know if it's real or not, what is perceived to be of sacred and transforming power.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, okay. So in my field, we have a few different definitions of religion, as you can imagine, just like philosophers have different definitions of what is real. So I take this definition and it comes from John Livingston. And religion is that set of beliefs and practices that is inspired by a transformative, what is perceived actually to be a transformative and sacred power.”
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 fairly radical, actually. In some monasteries, I don't know if they still do this, but they'll whack you on the head if you appear to be not focusing and that kind of thing. You know, they do things to basically take you away from your conceptions of reality and bring you into a state of all that is, which is what they call Satori. And that has nothing to do with God.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The definitions that we in the West. Judaism, you know, monotheistic religions. And there are, that's not, I mean, those are just some religions. There are so many different types of religions. Some religions have no God at all. Zen Buddhism, for example, is a religion that asks you to take away your belief structures, like to kind of like, in fact, I would call that a Kantian type religion, right? And that's basically telling you to get rid of your concepts of what you think about things so that you can actually have the experience like you were talking about earlier of the thing in itself. And they call that Satori. So there are people who believe, you know, they try to, they call it meditations and meditation.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Is there a pattern to them? I think that for each era, it's different. And people have, first, let's talk about the definition of religion, if that's okay, because most people assume”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for the most part there are legitimate experiences that people have. Why would someone want to put themselves through what they go through? Like, why would Jesus want to get crucified? I mean, that's a pretty nasty way to die, you know, why would Faustina bring this upon herself? The people that I meet who've said that they've seen UFOs, that most of them don't want to be known because of the ridicule that goes along with it. So I honestly think that, you know, there are people who. Are maybe not stable and would like the attention. But for the most part, normal people don't want this attention.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Influence, which was growing and growing and growing and growing, okay. And so they were very successful in trying to keep her quiet. And she died, okay. Years later, John Paul II, Polish, sainted her and created the divine mercy devotion, which is worldwide now, and millions and millions of people. But do you see how they... They completely control”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, how did they deal with that fire somehow? And so they narrativized it. They decided, how do we interpret this? And they interpreted it as they wished, but that wasn't the only interpretation of Christianity. I have another example. I'm in the Catholic Church. A lot of times, and I'm going to use the example of Faustina, she's a nun, and she's Polish. And I think it was in the early 20th century, if not the 1800s, that she had a very powerful many experiences actually of Jesus. And she saw Jesus with rays coming out of his heart. And basically, she called his divine mercy. And it became a devotion in Poland and it spread. The Catholic Church was not into this at all. And so they did everything they could to try to support. Faust Faustina's”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Constantine, who was an elite. Had an experience and made Christianity a state religion. By that time, there were different forms of Christianity, probably hundreds of them, well, most likely. And Constantine and the people who were powerful with him decided that their idea, this is the Council of Nicaea now, decided that there was one form, and they called it universal, the one form of Christianity, and this should be it. And so they kind of took out all the other denominations of Christianity and different forms of it. So you can see that a very, very powerful set of beliefs put a culture on fire, right?”
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 usually, yeah. So I have a couple examples. I use the example of the Christian church in my book because I'm most familiar with the history of Christianity. And, you know, Christianity, you know, was started by this Jewish man. And it was a movement that, you know, he was a very powerful charismatic person. Other people believed in him. And then his followers talked about him. And then usually early Christians before the 300s were generally people who were disenfranchised because he had a pretty radical idea that, you know, humans should have dignity. And this was pretty radical during that time. So women who didn't have dignity and, you know, slaves who didn't have dignity at the time converted to Christianity and droves. And so what happened was that all of a sudden it became this belief system that was undercurrent.”
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, excuse your audience who are religious. I'm actually practicing Catholic. So, this is how religion starts, they start with, first off, a contact experience. I mean, not all of them, but a good portion of them. Some person has an experience that's transcendent, sacred to them. And they go and they tell other people. And then those people tell other people. And then something gets written about it, okay? And then it becomes, because it's a charismatic movement, people become affected by it. And if too many people are affected by it, an institution steps in and tries to control the narrative. So this is what you'd call the beginning of a religion or a myth, a very powerful myth. And so it's almost like a star, right? A star is born. A star. Yeah.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And you start, and because people believe you, and because you are a person of, you know, credibility. People believe you, and so all of a sudden a movement starts, okay? And it's the Hendrix movement, it's Hendrix 2 or something like that. You know, we call it something, the next iteration of Hendrix, right? Hendrix lives, but he lives is this vibration. And only Lex can like, you know, can manifest this vibration, okay? So this is how religion starts.”
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 show up. And all of a sudden, boom, just like Elvis does for people. Hendricks shows up, all right? And then you're amazed, and he tells you something that's very, very significant. And he says, you need to tell other people this, okay? So then like, okay.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was like doing the electric church. It was through his mission of music that he was actually impacting people spiritually. And I think you have to agree that his music is really spiritual. Yeah.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, what happens is this a person generally has a very intense experience. It could be with something that they see in the sky, a being, you know, that they see, you know, like Moses in the burning bush or something like that. They tell other people and those other people believe them because they say that guy, let's take you, okay? Jimi Hendrix shows up out of the blue. So, Jimi Hendrix, who does electric church stuff, right? The electric church movement. So he shows up.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, how does it happen? Okay, so there are different ways that religions work. So a lot of people would call the UFO narrative today like, and this is what I talk about in my book, like a myth, right? The UFO myth. But a lot of people believe in it. Okay. So how do these things work? Well, what I did was I took, there's a Antaves at UC Santa Barbara. She's a pretty well-known academic who studies religion and she has this building block definition of religion like it builds, okay? And so she says there are no religious experiences or mythic experiences. There are experiences. And then they get interpreted as religious or mythic. And so I use that with the UFO narrative. So I take and I compare it to the religious narrative.”
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, but where does it exist? So he says that tables, so he was also talking about things that, you know, he says are real, making a distinction between the people, and by the way, he got this from Socrates, his mentor, who was killed by Athens because he would say such things. People don't like to be told that what they believe in is not real, right?”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, even he would make that distinction again. He would say the population is not too bright. So they believe in these gods and goddesses, but he himself is talking to his students and he's basically talking about forms. So, you know, that live and seem to live in these other dimensions, like this table, let's go back to this table that we're talking around right now. He would say that this table is the instantiation of the form table and that there's this table that actually exists somewhere. It's where this place where numbers exist, like the number two. Okay, so we use the number two mathematically, therefore it exists. But have you ever seen a real one? Have you ever seen the real two? No.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not true. Somehow real. Now, what's interesting is that people like Plato who lived thousands of years ago, 2,500 about basically made this distinction himself within his own culture, which was Greek, right? So Plato is a very famous Greek philosopher. And he would say things like this. He would say that he would make a distinction between the reality of the one God or the one. He would call it he didn't use the word God, but he's referencing a divinity. Okay. And he believes in the soul. Okay. But he would also say that the gods and goddesses of the Greeks are just myths.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. Okay, so that brings us to terminology again in my field, we definitely, I think, try not to distinguish between religion, this is going to be controversial, I think, between religion and myth because We call other cultures, religions, myths, right? And then we call our myths religions.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His books are amazing, and Nietzsche's philosophy is incredible. And I think that I think that's what you're saying about Rant too. And I agree. I mean, I think that we get caught up. I mean, likely we should, and we should contextualize these thinkers in the time period within which they are, we should not forgive their, you know, because there were people during Nietzsche's time that were feminist and not racist and things like that. And, you know, so, but each has. Merit. I mean, I would say Nietzsche is, you did ask me to talk about some of the books that made the largest impact on me. And Nietzsche's gay science is one of them. It's one of the best books ever, in my opinion”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think she's fascinating. I don't dismiss her. She was a woman who reached a level of success with her mind at a time when that was difficult. So, I mean, she's definitely worth looking at for even that reason. But also her idea, I guess part of the situation with Rand, first of all, I think that her work is you have to It's misinterpreted, okay? And I think that's the same with Nietzsche. Like a lot of people think that I'm in fact it is the case that Nietzsche's writing before the 20th century, so he's got somewhat his rhetoric is sexist and racist and, you know, of the time period, right? He was a educated philosopher of that time period. However,”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And definitions very seriously. Yeah. So they all want to get on the same page. So they're not, so there is no confusion. So for Ayn Rand to basically say you can know everything and, you know, and establish ethics from that, I think philosophers automatically say no. Now, that doesn't mean I say no. In fact, we have at my university a wonderful business goal. And when you walk into the dean of the business school's office, Ayn Rand is everywhere. So I want to say that not all academics are anti-In Rand. And in fact, I don't think philosophers are either, except that they don't teach Ayn Rand. Okay. So in one sense, you could say that because they don't teach or they're being exclusive in what they teach or very particular perhaps is another way to put 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 Ayn Rand, I've had so many Exceedingly intelligent students basically Give me her books and basically say, please, Dr. Basulka, read this book, and I'll tell them yes, thank you. I've read this book before. And then want to engage in, you know, let me put it this way, they're religious about Ayn Rand. Okay, so to them, Ayn Rand represents some type of way of life, right? Her objectivism. Now, why is she not taken seriously by philosophers in general? Well, let me put it this way. Philosophers in general tend to get pretty... I guess you could call it Kind of scientists, but with words, I always call philosophy when I describe it to someone who's going to take a philosophy class. I say, it's basically math problems like word math problems. Okay. So that's basically what it is”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classical picture of shoes, right? And so why? You know, the question is why is that a cool picture of shoes? You know, what kind of knowledge are we accessing to determine that indeed that works, right? And in fact, we still like it.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he said, There's a sense that some people have why do certain communities have a similar sense? What dictates that? And so he was working on that. He thought it had something to do with the knowledge, the intimate knowledge of the thing in itself. Yeah. So another philosopher, that philosophers actually don't like it all, but religious studies people do is Martin Heidegger. So Martin Heidegger has some great essays. One is called What Is a Work of Art. And again, he gets to, you know, he talks about Van Gogh and Van Gogh's shoes, you know, that picture, the painting Van Gogh shoes. It's really a really intense picture. It's just shoes. It's, you know, but it's an amazing painting of shoes. And I think everybody can agree.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because judgment, think about it when you see a work of art who judges that to be decent. Okay, so there's a group of people who come to the decision that that's rotten or, you know, that's pretty good. You know, like I noticed that you like to play guitar. Well, you choose music that I happen to like too. Okay. So you and I both have a, you know, sense of judgment, just a sense.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the thing in itself, and he was working on that as he died, and then he never finished it. Hana rent another philosopher of the 20th century took it up, took up the critique of judgment, and tried to finish it.”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where religion comes in. Okay, that's where we talk about religion. And if I may also go back to Emanuel Kant, this idea that just before he died, just as he died, he was working on, he did this critique of reason where basically he believed he basically has this long, you know, that question, can we know what's real? And then, you know, a thousand pages later, no. I'll just give you the rundown, okay? So, okay. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then he does this other critique. And, okay, so he does like three critiques. Then he does this critique of judgment, okay? Well, judgment is this other thing altogether. And I think that that's what you're getting at. So how do we know things? How can we know things really intensely and intimately? And I think that he thought that judgment was the idea that we can. Actually,”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think directly is better than deeply. I think directly, more directly is probably a more accurate term for what you're trying to, I think, ask me, you know, can we actually, I mean, I think you're asking me Knowing of it, it's almost mystical. And I would say that”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I do think, and this is why I write about technology, and I mean, that's actually what I specialize in is belief in technology with respect to religion. So in my opinion, thank goodness for technology because where would we be without it? I mean, frankly, I think that it's like Marshall McLuhan was the person who said technology is like an extension of our senses. And I absolutely believe that to be true. I think that we're lucky that we, you know, that Prometheus gave us technology, okay? And that we use it and we're making it better and better and better and better. And that makes us more efficient. It makes us more efficient as a species and like. My point is that I think that our instruments, I mean, I don't want to be a religious technologist, you know, but uh,”
2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source