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hey this is Leo for actualize org and in this episode I'm going to talk about the dirty secret behind all human knowledge in 10th grade in high school I bumped into a person who would forever change the trajectory of my entire life and his name was Thiago Thiago was kind of a friend of mine and he was in some of the similar classes that I was in 10th grade and basically Thiago was the most religious person in the entire school and I grew up in Southern California so as a pretty liberal area wasn't highly religious area but this guy was extremely devoutly religious like he would do the whole Christian thing the whole missionary Christian thing he was all into that in fact he would walk around with a big fat book under his arm and for the longest time I thought this was a dictionary and one time I asked him hey what are you doing walking out of the dictionary all the time he's like no dude this is a Bible not a dictionary and it kind of blew my mind but anyways we were in a lot of similar classes and we started having kind of discussions about religion and I was just curious about why he's so devoutly Christian and he was telling me about stuff he did anyways so what happened though was that this completely opened my eyes to a whole new world to like a whole new intellectual domain because I grew up and I wasn't like adamantly atheistic but basically I was just very pragmatic about it and my views on God and how the universe works was basically that what I see before me is pretty much what there is and there's nothing really hidden there's nothing to find out there's no gods out there sitting in the clouds judging me Ernie this kind of stuff so that was my perspective but then I talked to him and he has a very different perspective and also debated with his friends and when I started debating with him and his friends I immediately noticed there was something odd going on because there was a strange emotional reaction that I saw in them and also I saw in myself and this what today I would call being dogmatic it's the emotional reaction of being dogmatic of being set in your own beliefs of trying to prove your beliefs as correct and so I was debating with them about many things and many things that just seemed factually indisputable for example the history of the earth how old is the earth is the earth five thousand years old how can someone seriously be in a science class learning biology and chemistry and physics and at the same time also believe that the earth is only five thousand years old what about dinosaur bones what about radiocarbon dating what about what physics tells us about the Big Bang Theory and all this kind of stuff so debating with them made me realize that there's something deeper going on here that I don't quite understand about the human psyche and about reality because I'm really I thought I would have an easy time convincing them of my points of view but then I realized it was a lot harder than I thought in addition to this I was also in some rigorous history classes at this point in my life and I was into rigorous science classes biology and chemistry and physics and all this kind of stuff and so what I started to see is I started to see that from a history point of view if you take a look at what history is basically you can describe it as cultures being blind to other cultures and so it's one culture trying to dominate another culture or one tribe or one group trying to dominate another tribe starting wars or waging political rivalries or whatever but that's basically the way history has unfolded and we need to look at that you start to look at and study all these different cultures what you start to notice is that man a lot of these cultures sure did hold some crazy beliefs at least from my perspective now from our culture it looks like all those are crazy beliefs so how is it that my beliefs are different how is it that I can be sure of my beliefs from my culture when all these people like really smart intelligent people scientists and Nobel Prize winners and so forth held all these other different beliefs how do we reconcile and arbitrate between different cultures and decide who's right and who's wrong so that started to create another avenue of doubt in my mind about my worldview and also as I was studying the history of science I saw the amount of intellectual blunders that have been committed by humanity in the last three thousand years many many blunders by again very intelligent scientifically rationally minded people and these blunders just make you wonder like well if 2,000 years ago the majority of mankind believed that the earth was flat or just 500 years ago people believe that the earth is the center of the universe and that the Sun orbits around the earth then how can we be sure that we're not committing these same kind of intellectual blunders today in the modern time why don't we take these doubts more seriously and so in general I started wondering about this deeper question of why do you intelligent people believe crazy things at least from my perspective it seems like there are a lot of people out there who believe crazy things and certainly from a historical perspective we know this is true and they have been proven wrong you know centuries later so we know that now they're wrong but they didn't know that at a time and if you try to convince them at that time that they were wrong then probably they would not believe you and they'd be very dogmatic and then the other question I had is how do I justify how do I really justify my belief that there is no God because the core contention I had with Thiago is that he was saying there is a God I was saying there's not a God and I really feel like I was right and that he was wrong but I wasn't quite sure how to really prove it because there's there's like different avenues I could take for proving that and they all didn't seem very conclusive which struck me as odd created doubts in my mind and then I had my major epiphany and my major epiphany was wait a minute what if I'm the one who's wrong here I'm assuming he's wrong and that he's being dogmatic and he's being deluded about his worldview but could it be the case if he could be so deluded that I could also potentially be so deluded how could I really honestly assess if I wasn't bullshitting myself and so here I got the real a serious doubt that came up of self-deception it became a real possibility in my mind that I could be deceiving myself and so this I took very serious I didn't just take it as some abstract philosophical concern I really thought like well if I can't be sure about my own self-deception then what can I be sure of at all in life how can I be certain of anything how can I know what's actually true and I was interested in knowing what's true I wanted to know what actually exists in the world do gods exist do molecules exist do forces exist do principles of mathematics exist what about good and evil - those exist how about moral laws do they exist do logical laws exist does even external reality exist how can we know for sure how can we know that we're not wrong how can we know that we're not deceiving ourselves so what I started to do is I started to study something called epistemology pista mala G is the field of philosophy which is concerned with the theory of knowledge metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that's concerned with what's true what's actually physically real epistemology is more concerned about how do we know what's true and in a sense before you can even answer the question of what's true you have to first answer the the more fundamental question of how can I even know what's true we're just kind of assuming that I can know what if I can't have we considered that possibility so I started looking off into all these issues and started reading about it but more importantly actually sat down contemplating it really introspecting to see what's really going on here with my own beliefs and also with the beliefs of people that I'm bumping into how can I be certain of my own beliefs and my core question was really how do I explain why intelligent people hold wrong beliefs and they do it very passionately and could I be one of these I really took that as a serious possibility that I could be one of these people even though it feels like I'm not maybe I could so what I did is I sat down one day and I decided to really examine my beliefs totally objectively from Ground Zero and so what I did is I just pulled up a belief like well God does not exist and then I would ask myself okay so why is that true and then I would come up with some kind of justification in epistemology they call it a justification you have a belief how do you then know that it's actually a valid piece of knowledge well you justify it somehow you have some sort of explanation or evidence or proof to back it up so what I would do is I'd say well okay so how do I know God does not exist well I can't see him okay and how do I know that that's true and then how do I know that the next thing is true and the next thing is true actually so what you do is you just sit down and you can actually do this I encourage you to try this take any belief you have that you're really certain about and just ask yourself why is that true and then whatever answer your mind comes up with just ask yourself again and why is that true and why is that true and why is that true it's basically the old kids game right you just keep asking and asking the asking except you take it seriously and what I discovered is that if I really boil it down and I do this very objectively very self honestly then I always just arrive at under belief the justification itself is just another belief and then if I boil back down it's just another belief and another belief and another belief and ultimately what happens if you go through it maybe takes you five or ten steps you finally get to some kind of ultimate rock bottom and this is what we would call an assumption and usually these assumptions are so basic and fundamental that it's inconceivable to us that they could be false they're kind of like self-evident assumptions we call them but I started questioning even those how do I really know what is self-evident and what's not after all I don't really see a difference between the original starting belief such as there is no God and the more basic more primitive assumption that justifies it why don't I just take the belief that there is no God and have it justify itself I mean what's really going on here I have to be very careful that I'm not deceiving myself because I want to do this very objectively so what I did is I sat down and I started ask myself okay honestly why do I actually believe this why do I believe it and because I was able to be very self honest what I discovered is that the reason I believe it is not because there is a good piece of evidence the reason I believe it is because it feels right intuitively makes sense because it fits into other things that I know about the world if this wasn't the case then other things in my worldview wouldn't make sense and so this feels like it's the right puzzle piece that should fit into this hole that I've constructed but basically that's a feeling how can I know that I can trust my feeling how can I know that I'm not deluded about my intuition what if my intuition is misguided what if the universe is not intuitive what if human intuition is not the only intuition that's out there after all different people have different intuitions about these kinds of things right so how do we arbitrate between which intuition is the correct one and perhaps even more damning how could I really trust myself to be a fair judge in my own trial because in a sense that's what I'm doing I'm putting myself and my beliefs on trial but also who's actually doing the judging Here I am I'm judging myself I'm judging my own deepest beliefs but how could I take the bias out of that if this was an actual criminal trial and let's say I committed a murder and then I had to sit down and judge myself as the judge in the trial we would say that that's a complete conflict of interest you can't judge your own muhrtelle murder trial you need someone else a third party to judge for you but in this case how do I get a third party to judge for me if I get a third party he comes in there and he looks at my beliefs how do I know that his beliefs are not also biased by his preferences and that he can trust himself so no matter how many people you get into this party in the end there's no ultimate arbiter so this really started to bring a lot of doubts and skepticism into my worldview and I sat down I didn't just do this with the belief in God or no God I also did it with other beliefs that I hold more fundamental I mean more uh more practical mundane beliefs you can even take the beliefs such as that the Sun will rise tomorrow how can you be sure that the Sun will rise tomorrow well it's risen every single day of my life and supposedly humankind says the Sun has risen every single day for as long as humankind has existed okay that might all be true but how do we know that it will continue to do that how do we know that tomorrow the Sun will not just decide to not do that you can say well you know physics and gravitational laws tell us that the Sun will keep orbiting or appear to keep orbiting around the earth for for hundreds of thousands of years to come but how do we know there's not an error in those gravitational laws well because they've been proven by many other experiments and other verifiable studies well how do we know there's still not a higher law after all Newtonian mechanics was replaced by Einstein Ian's theories and so technically Newtonian mechanics is flawed and it's wrong even though it's a nice approximation how do we know that Einsteins laws are also not a nice approximation how do we know that the laws the universe won't change tomorrow how do we know they're going to stay consistent well you could say well they've been consistent or eternity well how do you know they've been consistent for eternity I mean you haven't been alive for eternity plus just because they were consistent up till now it doesn't mean they gonna be consistent forever so it's like these kind of doubts just like these existential really deep doubt started to creep into my mind and ultimately I came to the conclusion that if I really honestly assess all my beliefs through this process I can see that all the justifications are just a game all the justifications are ultimately groundless because it all boils down to some fundamental belief that is never justifiable it's just accepted on faith and when I realize that I have to admit to myself that my belief in no God that God doesn't exist is ultimately no more justified than my friends believe that God does exist but it didn't just apply to God this had a ramifications for all the other beliefs I had including all the scientific beliefs that I thought were really true because what I start to realize is that every belief system has a personal bias in it because basically I'm using my own intuition to judge whether this belief deserves to be valid or doesn't that's how you do it if you take a look at what you're doing with your belief system that's how you're judging your judging using your intuition does it feel right to you you're not actually going based on evidence you think you're going based on evidence and the mind likes to say that I'm going based on evidence it likes to say something like no leo leo my theories are really based on solid scientific evidence but that's not really what's going on you're not being objective enough in assessing what you're really doing in your mind when you're saying that if you drill it down you look very very carefully I promise you that eventually you'll get to a personal bias and you can actually see your own personal bias at play it's not just an intellectual thing it's an emotional thing you're going to see that your emotions come into play and in fact when you try to debate with other people at the dinner table or at at a meeting with your friends or in some conference room with a bunch of scientists you sort of have a debate you start to see that this is prevalent everywhere people disagree about these kinds of things everywhere how do we explain that that's what I really wanted to get to the bottom of how do we explain it this is a phenomenon of human beings of human societies and what I ultimately kind of discovered for myself is that the reason it happens is because we're all just using our intuitions and of course our intuitions are highly fallible and they're highly self biased and so that's the game that's being played it's very interesting that justifications are created by the mind because if you create a a string of five or ten justifications the mind gets tired after a while and then what it says is it says something like okay this is solid enough and I don't need hunters that prove this is good enough I'll just believe it so that's really what's going on inside your mind no matter what kind of beliefs you hold whether they are religious ones or scientific ones or philosophical ones or anything else even practical mundane beliefs like the Sun will rise tomorrow so this was all going on in my mind creating a lot of doubt for me and I got really interested in philosophy at this point so I actually became a philosophy major I started studying philosophy kind of like in a professional manner I actually wanted to come up philosophy professor and as I was doing this I stumbled upon a really brilliant model that helped me to validate some of these plugging doubts that I had cuz see these doubts I was kind of just trying to figure all this stuff out on my own and one of my problems was that I wasn't seeing anybody else in society or anybody around me really questioning their beliefs this deeply it seemed like they just assumed that their beliefs are solid and they didn't really think about self-deception didn't really think about that they could have personal biases they didn't really care to know why people disagree with each other or why intelligent people believe crazy things like it's like nobody cared about this stuff and when I saw that no beliefs are ultimately justified it seems like this is a really big discovery at least it was in my worldview but yet nobody takes this seriously when you talk to them about it so this kind of started getting me to doubt my own self and wondering am I even on the right track here could I still be deluding myself even with all this theorizing and that was a real possibility but then I stumbled upon a model clines model willard van orman quine was a analytical philosopher from the early 1900's he did a lot of philosophy based around logic in mathematics and science this was a hardcore guy he wasn't just some fruity meta physician and he wrote a really seminal paper that shook philosophy circles at the time and it was called two dogmas of empiricism it's a paper it's like a 20-page paper but I don't recommend you go read it because it's extremely dense and if you read it you probably won't understand almost anything he's saying but the main takeaway from this paper for me was that it validated a lot of the things that I was already suspecting namely he described human knowledge as a field a field picture it this way imagine that you have a graph a knowledge graph in your mind with a bunch of nodes and it looks kind of like an amoeba it's got this kind of irregular but circular shape and it's got a bunch of nodes that are all interconnected together and so you've got this kind of like lattice work this framework in your mind and each node in this graph represents a belief of yours every single belief you've got fits into this knowledge graph so the grass is green snow is white dogs have four legs and tail and that the Earth orbits around the Sun and the Sun is in the Milky Way and e equals MC square so every single belief you could possibly imagine fits into this knowledge graph and the way client described it he said that what's really going on is you have this knowledge graph but then it only contacts direct experience at the periphery here so actual raw data the empirical stuff the hard facts are only along the edges and the stuff that's on the inside is all the beliefs there that don't really contact reality directly so for example maybe you have a belief such as e equals mc-squared okay you might think that that's actually an empirical truth well not exactly not fully because that sits as a belief more inside towards the center rather than at the very periphery of the knowledge graph why is that because you don't actually see e equals mc-squared as a as an observable fact that's something you have to prove and demonstrate through uh through modeling and various mathematical you know functions and you have to combine all that stuff together and then you get a end result from that a conclusion called a equals MC square and then you can take that on as a belief by the way a belief is simply a statement about reality that you think is true or it's a statement about reality that you think is false either one of those is a belief technically speaking so what Klein said is that human knowledge is this graph and what I want to do is I want to point out some interesting features that he himself pointed out about this graph and I'll do that by reading you some really eloquent quotes from client because he does really good job describing this so here we go he says quote the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs from the most casual matters of geography and he three to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even the pure mathematics and logic is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges and quote so that's a really important statement so basically what he's saying is that no matter what belief you hold whether it's abstract logical and mathematical beliefs or just simple scientific beliefs or historical beliefs or Geographic facts this is still part of a man-made fabric your knowledge graph and that this knowledge graph only loosely fits with empirical data the knowledge graph itself is much deeper and wider than the data itself the data is just on the periphery it's just the rim it's like the envelope right the envelope is very thin and it's very scanty and then you've got all this stuff in the middle which is kind of up to you you can fudge it however you want next he goes on to say quote a conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field truth values have to be redistributed over some statements re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others because of their logical interconnections the logical laws themselves being in turn simply certain further statements in the system certain further elements of the field but the total field is so under determined by its boundary conditions that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in light of any single contrary experience and quote this here is extremely important so imagine that you have your knowledge graph and you think that it fits nicely with experience now what happens is you get a new piece of experience come in right because we're always seeing new hard experience coming in if we see a new brute fact come in now our knowledge graph has to account for it somehow so now what's gonna have to happen is that a ripple will Kaskade through the knowledge graph starting from the point where the knowledge graph meets the hard fact so there there'll have to be some adjustment and also the rest of the knowledge graph can adjust itself to accommodate and explain away this brute fact in various ways there's not just one way to do it that's the key here he uses the word underdetermined the whole system is under determined what does that mean that means that there could be many configurations of the system that will account for all the Roth acts and that right there to me was the key that showed me that this model must be correct because this is exactly what's happening with human beings is it seems like we have world views lots of different world views but basically the same facts we're all living in the same world basically I mean my experience of reality is not that much different than yours and we agree on many things but also we disagree on some stuff and we disagree with a lot of different people why is this their disagreement well because there's this underdetermined element not every single belief is pinned down by hard facts this gives you wiggle room so to speak next he goes on to say quote if this view is right it is misleading to speak of empirical content of individual statement especially if it is a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field and code so what this means is that you can't just take a single belief and really verify if it's true or if it's false you can't just take a belief like God exists or he doesn't exist or you can't just take a belief such as the Earth orbits around the Sun and just say if it's true or false because it depends on other beliefs and other facts within your worldview the whole thing is interconnected in a very deep way which means that if you change one part of the model you probably have to make adjustments else in the system he goes on to say quote any statement can be held true come what may if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of yeah in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements called logical laws and quote so this is huge this right here explains why it's impossible to argue with a fundamentalist because of fundamentalists what he does is he takes a certain fact or a certain belief and holds it us so true that he's able to then readjust his entire knowledge graph to then somehow support or buffer that one belief that one statement from contact with direct experience so even something as obvious as the sun is shining in the morning if you really wanted to you could deny this fact and the way you can deny it is you could say well yeah it appears that the sun is shining on my face in the morning but that's just an appearance actually I'm hallucinating or actually I'm in the matrix and outside the matrix there's no Sun at all you see so now this this kind of goes into far-fetched territory and you might be thinking well yeah that's that's really far-fetched olio but if yet take a look at what's going on when you argue politics or religion or environment or some other Hot Topic issue with an average human being what you discover this is exactly what happens you present them with some kind of fact which you think will convince them that oh they're wrong and you're right but what you discover is actually no what they do is they take that fact they acknowledge the fact but then they reconfigure their whole scheme so that it explains that fact away in a nice convenient way without them having to admit that this fact somehow breaks their model you see and what's really profound here is that even the logical laws themselves are a part of this model there is nothing that's outside of this model everything you think is right is a belief in this model everything even the most fundamental unquestionable things are just additional beliefs and what's crazy is that things like the logical laws these are not actually hard empirical facts these are things that sit in the middle of the knowledge graph the stuff that sits in the middle of the knowledge graph that's the stuff that's the most unassailable that's also the stuff that allows you to hold on to no matter what evidence is presented so this is where people get into really lots of trouble is when they try to maintain a position or a theory or belief that is really really far from the periphery of the field because then no amount of evidence can get and pierce through into the middle to get that belief to change right because it has to ripple through all the other beliefs which is exactly what happens if you try to argue with a fundamentalist religious person is that they have layer after layer after layer and layer of beliefs that protect the core belief that you're trying to attack of course this is not just true of religious people it's also true of scientific people it's true of every person so this is not just being used as an attack on religion just actually the opposite what this does is this levels the playing field a lot because in science what we like to say is we like to say well no but you know scientific truths are much more accurate and verifiable than religious claims it certainly feels like scientific claims have a certain higher standing in our mind they seem more empirical well what Klein demonstrated with this paper is that actually they're not any more empirical the logical laws are not any more empirical and you can actually sit down and question in your own mind why you believe in the logical laws and what you'll discover is that actually it's an intuition that you have the logical laws are not some carved in stone absolutely given by God commandment to us the logical laws are part of this man-made fabric and you believe in them because ultimately after all the rationalizations are cut down and boiled away you believe in them because it feels right and it makes sense in your worldview and if they stopped being believed in then your worldview would not feel as cohesive and as integrated Cline went on to say quote revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics end quote and quantum mechanics was a field that was just coming into its own while Quine was was writing this stuff and coming up with his theories and in quantum mechanics a lot of weird stuff happens a lot of very counterintuitive stuff happens about reality that scientists and mathematicians who study this stuff will admit that it functions in such a weird way that all your intuitions have to fly out the window which of course is a really interesting clue which shows us that reality could be structured in such a way that your mind is not able to intuit anymore what's correct and what's not correct which is exactly the doubt that I had in my mind how do I know if my intuition is right or wrong about this issue how can I trust myself kuan goes on to say quote for my part I believe in physical objects and not in homer's gods and I considered a scientific error to believe otherwise but in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind both sorts of entities enter into our conceptions only as cultural posits the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most and that it has proved more effective than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience and quote so this is some heavy heavy stuff right here he's basically putting all beliefs on the same level playing field so your belief if you can imagine in physical objects is no more or less justified than your belief in God or your belief in what other or other thing you think is very very certain and true right you have to recognize that these are conceptual entities that we create whether it's gods or physical objects or physical forces or atoms or Clark's or whatever these are not things you directly encounter in experience these are not brute hard facts these are actually things that exist within the center of your knowledge graph because they're useful for explaining the raw hard facts you see and a lot of people get this wrong about science science is not brute hard facts what science is is a lot of modeling and conceptualizing and those concepts and models are then buttress and supported by experiments and brute hard facts but still there's a lot of interpretation that goes on a lot of wiggle room for what kind of models you can create and this is something that most people fail to acknowledge about science Klein goes on to say quote physical objects small and large are not the only posits forces are another example and indeed we are told today that the boundary between energy and matter is obsolete moreover abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics are another posit in the same spirit epistemological II these are myths on the same footing with physical objects and gauze neither better nor worse except for differences in the degree to which the expedite our dealings with sons experiences and quote so he's continuing on and he's even strengthening the claim here right even mathematics is not excluded from this discussion even logic is not excluded from this discussion all of these things are man-made creations you understand it's really important understanding is that these are man-made creations and the only reason we care about them or feel that they're true is because in some sense they help us to deal with sense experiences with the raw data the indisputable raw data but actually most of us completely ignore the raw data and what we do is we get lost in the theories and the models and these abstract entities and we don't acknowledge to ourselves that these are abstract entities and so we get lost in this kind of fairytale land and then what we do is we go and we start debating and arguing with people without understanding what we're really doing here and lastly Klein said and this is a famous quote of his he says quote our statements of the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body and quote which means that you're never evaluating any one individual statement it's not like you're just going to go and say well does God exist let me go check it doesn't work that way all of your statements all of your beliefs come into play all at the same time they all reinforce each other you're dragging everything you're basically dragging the person's entire worldview into the argument when you're questioning God which is exactly what you get when you're questioning someone's religious beliefs you don't just question a little intellectual fact or a little single statement their entire worldview gets dragged in there and what you notice is the person gets very defensive very quickly and they get very emotional and then you get very defensive and you get very emotional and then there's a heated debate why is that because you have a literal clashing of two knowledge graphs that don't fit together so that's Klein's model now this validate a lot of my own kind of discoveries and research and what this led me to is just just the some of the following takeaways some of the following conclusions that I had basically what I saw was that there's a ton of leeway for personal preference within how we construct our knowledge graphs our knowledge graphs are mostly arbitrary they're not nearly a set in stone and fixed as we think and as we like to believe there's so much wiggle room so much wiggle room that you could almost say that these are complete fictions of the mind that's how much wiggle room there is here and yet this is almost never acknowledged everyone whether they're scientific or religious or spiritual or philosophical everyone creates fictional entities in their own minds a fictional entity could be God or it could be a corporation or it could be atoms and molecules or it could be energy or dark matter right scientists have come up with tons of fictional entities even more than religious people have God is one of these entities and it's no different fundamentally from the entity such as an atom or a molecule not if you really look at it objectively another takeaway for me was that worldviews work in a holistic way like I just described right the entire worldview gets questions simultaneously and this makes the worldview very difficult to question it be easy for the other person to weasel out of any argument you create because this knowledge graph has a certain integrity a certain structure to it and it's got a lot of it's got a lot of ways that it can just kind of like grow and morph itself and do some mental gymnastics and accommodate any kind of fact that you present to it and this is extremely damaging and dangerous because it creates a massive blind spot possibility it creates this possibility where you can feel like you're certain and you're right and your knowledge graph is correct but actually what's happening is that your knowledge graph is morphing around all the all the facts and you're just excusing them away or denying them and then of course other takeaway for me was that argumentation and justification is just a game it's a tool that the knowledge graph uses to maintain its structural integrity that's what you're doing when you're actually arguing or justifying something in your own mind and of course I'm not just talking about all the people you disagree with I'm talking about you most importantly I'm talking about you so when you are arguing and you feel like you're right and when you're justifying in your mind something even when you're justifying some like oh that kind of such an idiot he shouldn't have called me that he's so wrong for doing that thing that he did to me just a very you know Monday an example from ordinary life not philosophical at all but in that situation you're justifying to yourself why you're right and he's wrong and that is all part of your knowledge graph you see your knowledge graph is not just vague abstract philosophical concepts such as does God exist do molecules exist in this kind of scientific stuff it's all the practical stuff - what are your beliefs about women what are your beliefs about men what are your beliefs about politics what are your beliefs about how you should raise children what are your beliefs about sex what are your beliefs about what's right and what's wrong what's moral what immoral what are you beliefs about terrorism what are your beliefs about rape and murder and theft what are your beliefs about personal development what are your personal beliefs about what you can accomplish in life what are your beliefs about your spouse your girlfriend your boyfriend and your family members what are your ideological beliefs about how the world works what's your cosmology your personal cosmology how do you think the universe is structured and functions all of this stuff is part of the knowledge graph everything even when you think that you're going to walk out tomorrow and see the sun shining in your face in the morning that's party a knowledge graph and even a statement such as grass is green or snow is white is all part of your knowledge graph so I hope you can see that this is not just something or like philosophical debates this here is something that directly speaks to what's happening in your life and the problem is is that nobody wants to admit that this is actually happening nobody wants to admit that we're all playing a justification game in our mind and really in a sense this knowledge graph is controlling us more than we control it what people care about actually is practicality they don't really care about truth they don't care about what's ultimately true they care about what's convenient to them in their life if you really look honestly that's what you care about you don't care about anything else even if you're a philosopher you don't really care about anything else even if you're a scientist you don't really care about anything if you care about practicality do your beliefs explain away the world in such a way that you feel confident and certain and safe and as soon as they don't you are in emotional reaction against it and that right there pretty much explains what's going on with why people disagree so much and hold crazy beliefs despite being otherwise intelligent the only thing that we could claim as being true really is not this knowledge graph but the experience itself that lies at the edge of the knowledge graph that's the truest thing we have access to and even that you have to understand is still extremely limited because basically what we're saying is that we're reducing everything down to our sense organs sight sound vision well that sight also smell taste touch right those are all our senses so that is what we're actually receiving as hard factual data well what's crazy about that is that that's just unique to human beings right a human being happens to have vision a bat does not a human being happens to have smell a bacterium might not I don't know if bacterium's have smell probably not a human being has hearing some other creatures might not so what can we really know for sure what can we really know for certain and what I concluded was that well we can't really know what's absolutely true because we have this knowledge graph and this knowledge graph is always biased it's always operating towards itself it's always trying to serve its own self agenda and then we have our sense organs and our sense organs are just limited to us as human beings so what happened for me at this point this happened kind of late in college is I just basically kind of sort of started to give up the search for absolute truth because that's what was driving me is how do I find absolute truth and what I basically discovered is that I can't find absolute truth and at that point I just said well if I can't find absolute truth then I have to give up philosophy and so I did I actually decided not to become a philosophy professor because of this and yet still there was something nagging in my mind about this whole thing you know I told myself ah I'm just gonna go work on my career and work on my relationships you know just do the ordinary mundane life kind of stuff this philosophy stuff is just too philosophical it's not very practical but something in my mind told me that there must be something practical here because there's something very deeply true about how human beings interact and this model really fits I just couldn't figure out you know how do I connect it all together and also I couldn't understand you know science is so effective technology has advanced humanity so much and we've accomplished so much I mean we've landed a man on the moon how is it that fictitious entities that science has created has allowed us to do this whereas you know some other kind of fictitious entities are not able to accomplish any work in the real world how is that possible so there are still questions that didn't quite click for me but I just put them all aside and went and live my ordinary practical life and I did that for six years until one day I read about enlightenment and when I read about enlightenment I read about the master stroke the whole clincher to this thing and the master stroke is this and this is something that I had not considered before in all my theorizing and in all my ruminations about this issue and the master stroke is this what if it was possible to get rid of the self this boundary that I feel exists between me as a creature standing here as a human being standing here and the external world that I'm interacting with what if that's a conceptual boundary and not a physical boundary what if that this self is actually a node within the knowledge graph that's the master stroke because think about what this really means what this really means is that if there's a self that means this self has a personal agenda and a bias so that's one thing also what it means is that the self doesn't have direct access to reality so how can I know reality directly well I can't I have to do it through my senses and I have to do it through my mind because I'm separate from reality see but what if I'm not separate from reality what if the self is an illusion and I can get rid of that and then what happens is that I have a possibility of direct access to empirical reality that blew my mind that piqued my curiosity to the highest that it's ever been on this issue because for the first time I saw the solution to the whole problem here and this is what I was I was looking for the whole time but I didn't really know how to get to it because I didn't consider that something so radical could be possible it's so obvious you dismiss it but this really allows us to get rid of the personal bias problem this allows us to access truth directly without using the knowledge graph at all you see you don't need to construct entities or models about truth you can get truth straight from the source so to speak at least that becomes a possibility if you allow for the possibility of getting rid of the self now that's not proven for us yet we have to demonstrate that is that true can we actually do that well at least there is a possibility intellectually that maybe we can and then what truth becomes is truth becomes not a model of truth not a concept not an entity explaining truth but truth actually what truth is is its what remains after the knowledge graph has been completely destroyed right because truth is what's at the root at the rock bottom of everything truth is what we're trying to explain the explanations are not truth the explanations are just explanations and that's what got me really interested in enlightenment really interested now at this point you might say well leo all this sounds like just more theory so how did you solve any problems here because all you're doing is doing more philosophy and you just gave us another theory here and isn't Klein's model just another theory isn't just another model and of course the answer is yes Klein's model is just on their model and everything I told you here is just more models and more theories and more concepts it's just beliefs right I'm just giving you more beliefs to believe and of course that's silly yes that's silly because what you're trying to do is you're trying to take my beliefs here and you're trying to add them to your knowledge graph and of course nothing changes because you just added one more note to the knowledge graph nothing changes even if you believe me if you don't believe me that's another knowledge graph a node that you've added which says leo is wrong doesn't change anything if you want to change something here's where something can really change is if you decide instead of adding stuff to your knowledge graph to destroy the graph entirely that's when you can get a real change but you can't destroy the knowledge graph just by listening to me you can't destroy it by thinking more stuff you can't think your way into enlightenment you can't think your way into truth in fact your thoughts and your models and your beliefs about reality is the only thing that separates you from truth and enlightenment if you're smart and you see the ramifications of what I'm saying here then these are very serious ramifications in fact you should I hope see that everything you hear from me with actual eyes drug videos every single video I've talked about including all my enlightening videos that all of this is just adding more [ __ ] to your knowledge graph that's all it's doing all the personal development material you've studied in red in your entire life and will read is just adding more to your knowledge path that's what it's doing it can't do anything else you see because this is how human knowledge works this is what human knowledge is it's a game it's a [ __ ] game what people are doing in life is they're rearranging a web of [ __ ] that's what they're doing and this is exactly what explains why people disagree so much about so many things and that they're impossible to convince and it's almost impossible to get them to change their perspectives this is why because people are so busy rearranging their [ __ ] web of beliefs that they don't recognize that they're just beliefs and that there's something actually deeper going on and even if they do recognize that they still don't have enough wisdom to see that what's required is not to add this to their graph but to take this as a hint that they have to destroy their graph so you might wonder well Leah what's the use of listening to you then if all you're doing is adding more to our graph and the answer that is very paradoxical in a sense there is no use in listening to me but also in a sense there is because what doing here is we're fighting illusion with illusion most illusion that you hear from society and for other people and from personal valid books what they give you is they give you illusion that doesn't call itself out as illusion the difference with me is that in this video for example I'm telling you that what I'm telling you is an illusion and you can be intelligent and wise enough to actually register that to read between the lines of what I said and to put yourself on track with perhaps deciding to question your knowledge graph and to finally stop the process of adding more [ __ ] to your knowledge graph and rearrange your knowledge graph to defend your ego and to defend all your personal biases because that is what you've been doing your whole life all your beliefs about men women children family religion politics signs it's all just rearranging [ __ ] that's what it is that's what it is and you can sit down you can actually discover this for yourself you don't need to believe me for on this point in fact he won't really help you to believe me because a belief is just an addition to the knowledge graph what you need to do is destroy your knowledge graph and that really is the direction in which actualize that work will be going in the future is that my chief concern will be to help you to destroy systematically destroy your entire knowledge graph and why are we doing this because when you destroy your knowledge graph what you remain with is truth and truth as it turns out is a very paradoxical thing and a very counterintuitive thing and it is actually the thing that you've been searching for your whole life it is ultimately the reason that you started doing personal development you didn't do personal development to get a girlfriend you didn't do personal development to improve your marriage you don't do personal development because you want money those are all [ __ ] reasons the ultimate reason why you're doing personal develop it without even being conscious of it yet is you're doing it to discover truth the truth of your own being who you really are and what reality really is because let me tell you when you discover truth it is not the truth of philosophy it is not the truth of science those are not truths that is beliefs that's fiction in the knowledge graph actual truth outside the knowledge graph is something vastly different it's a profound life-changing truth it's a very practical thing it's not something that's just like oh yeah I know something it's not that kind of knowing it's a being you have to become the truth you have to remove the barrier between you and the world and when you remove the barrier between you and the world then all of your problems in life dissolve everything you thought was bothering you everything you thought was wrong with the world dissolves because guess what your problems they're all nodes in the knowledge graph that's it I'm done I'm signing off click the link button for me please share this video with a friend post your comments down below and come check out actualized Auto right here this is my newsletter sign up to the newsletter so you can stay tuned stay tuned on this journey of self actualization it's a deep rabbit hole we're going down deep deep deep deep stuff all of this stuff I promise you is extremely practical I don't just come up here to spout philosophy and [ __ ] I'm interested in getting you the most profound transformation possible in your life and this is how it's going to get done and I don't just talk about it but I also do it in my own life so if you keep watching me you'll see that I'm doing this in my life as well I'm going to systematically destroy my knowledge graph and you will see the result of what I become from doing that that will be pretty cool so that's what's in store sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon with more you