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Diana Walsh Pasulka

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165
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2020-12-28
most recent
2020-12-28
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1
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  1. “So generally, if they push, though, I say, you know, I'm the chair of philosophy and religion, although I step down last year. So I'm no longer the chair. But I have like a master's degree in philosophy and I was a philosophy major and I've studied. I still study philosophy. So I integrate it into my research. All right. So this idea that we can't know, we're suspicious of what we know. It's called external world skepticism. That's the official philosophical name for it. Our faculties and our senses don't give us accurate perceptions of what is there, okay, especially at a quantum level or a molecular level. I mean, that's just obvious. So, yeah, so I think that the person you mentioned is correct in that. I think we're far away from it.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'm going to use examples from what I do. Okay, so this idea that Were suspicious of what we actually think is real is not new. Of course, it goes back a long time, thousands of years, in fact. And philosophers, I'm not actually technically a philosopher, but Was one. I'm a professor of religious studies.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yes, I've read but listen, we have trigger warnings today, right? So don't read this. It's going to make you upset. Okay. History, primary sources, no trigger warnings, okay? So you're going through like, you know, somebody's diary from 1400 and you hear the suffering and pain that they went through, there were times in my research where I'd have to put my primary source down, you know, and just basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific. I knew it was true because they wouldn't write something. You know, they're not going to write in their diary something that's not true. And it was horrible. So yes, these people went through untold suffering for nothing. For, you know, because they had an erroneous belief. But they didn't know it was erroneous.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, and the types of people who go to limbo happen to be virtuous pagans, okay, like Socrates or somebody like that. And children who weren't baptized. So think of this. Think of for like more than a thousand years, mothers and fathers gave birth to babies who weren't baptized and couldn't be buried with their family in these burial. And, you know, then they couldn't be reunited with them in heaven. Think of the pain and suffering that that caused. And that was nothing. Limbo's nothing. Yet the belief in it caused untold suffering. And that's just a small example.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Catholics determined, and this was a belief for a long time, like a thousand years or more. And it was called limbo, all right. And limbo comes from the Latin limbus, and it means edge. And it was either on the edge of hell or on the edge of heaven. No one really could determine which it was. No historians are like, well, this person says it was on the edge of heaven. Well, listen, this was a terrible, first of all, there is no limbo anymore. In 2007, Benedict, the then pope, got rid of the idea that there was limbo. Okay, so Catholics kind of went crazy because they didn't really know, they forgot that limbo existed and they thought it was purgatory. And they said, how could you get rid of purgatory? But actually he just got rid of this idea of limbo.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It was called the Animus, right? It's what is the essence of what is eternal. Women weren't eternal. Here's another example. Okay, this is an example from my own research. All right. So they're in the Catholic tradition. There's this idea of purgatory, hell, and heaven. And these are three destinations that people can go to when they die. If you're great, you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint. If you're okay, you go to purgatory, right? And you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven. If you're terrible, you go to hell, right? Okay. Well, there was a place that.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “There was a belief back in the day, and we're talking about when I say back in the day, I'm a historian, so I'm talking about like a thousand years ago, right? That women had no souls. Okay, so look, I don't know if human beings have souls. I can tell you this, though, that if human beings have souls, probably animals do too. That's my own personal belief. That's not a professor belief there. But there was this belief among the Catholic magisterium, which runs Europe, that women had no Had consequences for women. I mean, women were treated and have been treated. As if they didn't have souls. Okay, so there's”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Our beliefs are tremendously, they create social effects, absolutely. There was a belief that I'm going to use this example.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “What reality is, but we're never going to get to it unless we develop better senses. And I think that that is what we are in the process of doing. We're developing better senses. We have telescopes. We have microscopes. We have, you know, extensions of ourselves, which are now called technology. And we can get to a better understanding of what reality is and what the objective world is. And therefore, our beliefs can be honed. So we can get better beliefs, more accurate beliefs, but can we get beliefs that actually correspond to reality? Not in any precise way, but in approximate ways. So I hope that's not like too big an answer to your question.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Differentiate it from the floor, for example. So these are the questions that philosophers are asking no one else is, of course, but philosophers are asking these questions and they have different answers for it. So I would say that it's very difficult to know what is real. And in fact, what I do usually is I paraphrase my friend and colleague, brother Guy Consulmano. He's a Jesuit priest. He's also an astronomer, and he's the director of the Vatican Observatory. And so he says this. He's a very smart person. He says, well, truth is a moving target. So basically to know what is real out there, like gravity or something like that, you've got to approximate it. And as human beings, you know, we have senses to tell us what, at least so we don't get hurt, you know, we're not going to fall off a building or something like that. We have eyes to see and things like that. So we can approximate.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Particular topic Metaphysicians, yes. So, what they do is they come and they're usually excellent philosophers from Harvard or USC or whatever. You know, they come and they give what's called a job talk. That's what every academic does a job talk in order to get it. They talk to us about a department about what they do. And so it so happens that we need a metaphysician and now we're hiring again for one. And so I've learned a lot about metaphysics in the last year. And this is what I've learned, that they use physics as a basis for understanding what we can know about what is real and what is real is really difficult to pin down. And so your question is, what is belief? Well, belief, does it correspond to reality? That's the question I would ask. And first, we don't even know what is real. So the table, they would say, how do we know that the table even exists? Well, how do we?”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Physics professors. What's funny is that for each one of them, I'm convinced each time they all say different things, but they're so convincing. I'm like, yes, hire that one, right?”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “How do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is? How do we know? We use our faculties. So we use our senses and things like that. But again, even our senses can be wrong. So I've been on committees just recently this year, last year for hiring professors in my department who are philosophers. And we're hiring metaphysicians and people who are thinking about the nature of reality. And basically what I've learned from them, yeah, they're very...”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “A correct understanding of what is real. And in that sense, I have to refer to a philosopher again. And that would be Emmanuel Kant. So Emanuel Kant is one of the, he was basically in the 1750s, he wrote critiques of reason and things like that. So he's a well, if you're a philosopher or have any kind of understanding of Western history, you know who he is. He had this idea that we can actually never get to the thing in itself. Okay, so he called that the noumonal, the thing in itself. He said, let's take this table, for instance, that you and I are talking across. So this thing is a table. You and I both know that. We assume it's real. We believe in it because we put our water on it and our water stays on it. Okay. However, can we know this thing in and of itself as a table? So that would be what he then would call the phenomenal.”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Sure, what is real? Easy question. So, first, let me start with belief. So belief is generally there are different definitions of belief just as there are different definitions of what is real. So for belief in my field, it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our actions. Okay. So we believe the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Therefore, we act as if it will rise tomorrow. All right. Beliefs can be wrong. For a long time, people believed and actually some still do that the earth was flat. Okay, well, that's obviously an erroneous belief. So beliefs can be wrong. Now, the bigger question that philosophers ask is, is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality? So now let me go to objective reality. So what is real? I don't think we can actually obtain”

    2020-12-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source