Atheist philosopher invited me to question his beliefs...

Question About Arguments for God and the Laws of Logic

You mentioned William Lane Craig. There are developed areas in the realm of reason that people have given to argue for the existence of God. So how do you take any of those arguments? I think we're running into an issue that I see from my vantage point.

If the laws of logic and logic and reason itself is a feature of the mind, can the laws of logic change at all?

That's a great question. Yeah, that's a terrific question. Hey everybody, thanks for coming. Welcome Nate. Sala, that's how you pronounce it? Sala? Yes sir. Yes sir. Conversations with Peter Boghossian.

Thanks for coming on and talking to me today. For those of us who don't know about your work, tell us about yourself and what you do.

Yeah, thank you for having me. My name is Nate. I'm a Christian, I'm a former pastor, former high school teacher, a lot of formers apparently. I have a YouTube channel where I help Christians live their lives the way that Jesus intended.

And my concern is that, man, over time, a lot of us in the church have lost what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and we've lost it for the same reason that others in society are struggling as well.

We're all making the same mistakes. We've grown accustomed to living shallow lifestyles. So in practice, I think a lot of us disagree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. And that has led to us forgetting how to be in relationship with each other.

I think that maybe explains why you got heckled recently. And that's why I reacted to it. And I think that also explains a lot of the disputation that we see in our culture right now.

So that's what I'm up to. Cool, and on your website, it says that you are into apologetics and debate. Is that right, or did I?

I was a debate teacher when I was a high school educator. Okay, cool, cool.

So in that clip, someone heckled me from the audience and didn't let me finish a response. And a lot of people have asked me to finish that response, and I think that's not only reasonable but important.

And the question was, what would it take me to believe in God? And I started, instead of just telling people, I started with the opposite, what it wouldn't take. And then I was going through those reasons and someone heckled me.

But before I do that, two questions. So what do you wanna get out of today or do today beside, and we'll play that clip, beside me explaining that? And I'll put it on myself first. So one of the things that I wanna get is like a reason check to see if the reasons that I give for not believing and believing are sufficient to warrant my confidence in the claim.

So that's one of the things that I'd like to get. And what would you like to get out of today? And would you be willing to subject your own beliefs to that same scrutiny?

Perhaps, I think I'm here, well, you graciously invited me to come with and be with you here. And so I don't know if I have a lot of, like an agenda. I think I'll just kind of go with the flow and let you lead and we'll see what happens.

Maybe we'll have an interesting conversation. I think overall, I would really love, I imagine you and I disagree. I think one of the things that I would like is for everybody to recognize that we can disagree with each other and still genuinely enjoy each other's company.

Correct, 100%.

What Would It Take to Believe in God?

So why don't we start with this? So I'll, Travis will play the clip. Al, I'll go over the reasons that would be insufficient to warrant my belief. You tell me, you kind of interrogate those reasons. And don't be afraid to, big boy, don't be afraid to just go at those reasons.

And then we'll just take it from there. How's that? Sure, yeah, sounds good. Okay, here's the clip. Hopefully. Hopefully, here's the clip. No empirical phenomenon would change my mind. So Lawrence Krauss, the physicist who's a buddy of mine, has this thing.

So you walk outside and you look in the sky and it says, I am God, believe in me. Would that be enough? And literally everybody sees it and you haven't been dropping acid. For me, the answer to that would be no.

And it would be no because you'd have to have, you'd have to be able to rule out other alternative possibilities. Time travelers, trickster alien cultures, et cetera. And because we can't do that, we can't, so it couldn't be phenomenon.

It couldn't be anything internal, right? It couldn't be a feeling state. Why couldn't it be a feeling state? Because people who have different God beliefs have different feeling states, or claim to feel the presence of something, their God that has very different moral pronouncements and pronouncements.

Yes, sir. What'd he say? A fool says in his heart, there is no God. Well, I think it didn't happen. I think it's nonsense. Well, that's interesting because look what you just did. Okay, Travis, pause it, pause it.

Okay, that's the basic idea. Okay, so let me run down the list of what it would not take me to believe. So let's go with that first one. So it couldn't be an empirical phenomenon. So like it couldn't be, oh, and then just, you know, as I mentioned before, I have a heart out.

I got a friend of mine dealing with some stuff. I have to help him. Of course. And at three, which is 55 minutes now. So it couldn't be an empirical phenomenon. And so, you know, you walk outside, you look at the stars, they're organized.

I am God, believe in me. You haven't been on drugs. Everybody else sees it. That wouldn't be enough because you'd have to rule out other things. Now, you want to take that one or do you want to go to the next one?

Maybe I'll hear you out. And then if we could circle back around on some of the pieces.

Okay, well, so I'm going to argue against my own point. So I asked, because I want to figure out what's true, right? So I asked Krauss about that. And he said to me, he's been a friend of mine for years.

He said to me, I don't know, that might be enough for me. And I said, why? And he said, because I know things that you don't know. And I said, well, what do you know? And he said that it would take more.

And again, I'm not a physicist. So I'm just accept whatever he says is the case. Because I couldn't possibly tell you the way. It would take more energy in the universe to align the stars like that than it is in the universe.

And then I said to him, well, if there's an artificially intelligent entity, how do you know it doesn't draw from other universes? In other words, you can always kind of manufacture conditions. And if you start looking at quantum computing and stuff, then it gets like super weird.

But anyway, but that's one thing. It wouldn't be an empirical phenomenon. But we can have a conversation about if physicists tell us that that's not possible, that it has to be some kind of supernatural thing.

Would that be sufficient? But anyway, bracketing that caveat. Okay, so then the second thing is it couldn't be a feeling state. It couldn't be a feeling of the transcendent. It couldn't be anything internal to myself.

And the reason for that is we know that different people have different feeling states that they've claimed with certainty. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, we have the unequivocal testimony of yogins who claim to have died and reentered the human womb consciously.

And we have other pretty extraordinary claims from other religious traditions. And those internal feeling states, they can't contribute to things. Just as a parenthetical, this guy, I was telling you, I was right.

I wrote the, he wants me to blurb his book in the psychedelic community. He was telling me, he's a, I'm pretty sure he's a Christian. He said he's a devout believer. And he was telling me over dinner that anybody who does DMT, he finds it hard to believe that they could come back from that experience and not be a believer and not have a kind of a sense of the transcendent or of something bigger than themselves.

Not LSD or psilocybin, but he specifically said DMT. And there's this one type of DMT that you get from a toad, which is what he was telling me about. Okay, so feeling states are out. No, they basically milk the toad to get this, I don't know, whatever.

I haven't done it, so I can't say. Okay. So that's where these conversations always get kind of weird because you want to really try to include all various possibilities to change your mind. So it wouldn't be that.

It wouldn't be that I could take some psychedelic or hallucinogen because it wouldn't be, I wouldn't be sure in the case of that hallucinogen that that was actually mapping on to an external reality that was true.

It could just be my feeling states or things in my culture. I remember reading once a while ago, and if I'm talking too much, I don't mean to, you can interrupt me at any time. There's this thing called a god helmet.

Then this guy, Persinger, it stimulates different parts of the brain. It basically looks like a, it's just like a hockey helmet or, no, no, no, one of those things, a downhill skiing helmet. And a friend of mine went in it and he's an atheist and his girlfriend is Christian.

And when she's like serious, like hardcore Christian, he's just, you know, doesn't care about anything either way. And he was telling me that when he went in, he saw nothing. My friend Michael Shermer went in, he saw nothing.

Dawkins has been in it. And when she went in, she had feelings of Jesus. And this guy said that he's a Muslim. When he went in, well, this is the report from the researcher, he had those kind of experiences from his religious tradition.

I say that as opposed to faith tradition. So that, like if everybody went in the god helmet and it was a kind of univocal, like everybody spoke in one voice about, you know, Zeus or something, I'd be like, holy moly, like maybe there's like something there in the brain about Zeus or something.

Okay, so it can't be, shit, it can't be any feeling state and it can't be any like, you know, drug induced. I have this vision from some kind of a drug. Okay, so empirical phenomenon is down, feeling states are down.

What about testimony? Well, it can't be testimony because we have different testimonies from people who testify about different things. So we know it can't be that. There's a book, Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, about these missionaries who go, this missionary who goes into some, this like village and nobody can penetrate this language.

And basically he penetrates this language and long story short, you know, they asked him like, have you ever seen Jesus? Have you ever? And he's like, no, I haven't. In their society, linguistically, the way that they engage is testimony is only good if you know the person giving the testimony.

So I'm just saying like, that's one way to think about it. But so nobody's testimony could be, because, you know, we have testimonies online from people of all different faith traditions, religious traditions, and they have different, both moral pronouncements and, you know, like don't eat pork, face this way, testimony of a woman is less than a man, accord, inheritance, like whatever it is.

Okay, so it can't be testimony. So that's empirical phenomena down, internal states down, testimony down. So what does that leave? Well, that leaves the thing that would convince me. And I think it was either my first or my second public fireside chat with Richard, Richard Dawkins.

I asked him that question. And so it leaves a few other obscure things like the fine tuning argument. Again, I don't think about this stuff at all anymore because metaphysics just, I find it increasingly irrelevant in my life and to the preservation of Western civilization.

But we have more immediate and pernicious, pernicious concerns at the moment. So like, you know, I don't think it's the fine tuning argument. So what would it be? Well, it would be what the thing that really smart apologists know.

Like the best apologist, you know, we can disagree on who's the best apologist, but like William Lane Craig, for example, in his conversation with Alex Rosenberg, he does a wonderful job of just laying out in syllogistic format those, you know, seven arguments.

So I think it would have to be something with reason. So it would have to be, ideally that reason would have to be tethered to some empirical phenomenon to justify it. So it'd have to be like, he uses the Kalam cosmological argument.

That's his kind of darling. People have spent a ton of time. I've never understood why that holds so much sway, but it would have to be something like that. Like some reason that I would have to have to make me say, okay, and then I'm gonna import one more concept.

It's Walter Kaufman's idea, not what a reasonable person believe this, but what every reasonable person believe this. Like, is there a kind of unanimity to the argument that rational people independently would consent?

Oh yeah, like that's a thing. So that's the way that I'm thinking about it. And if my reasoning is error, I've made a mistake, let me know. But that's just the way of my thinking, like what it would take me to believe.

Well, that's good. I mean, if we could press into the details a little bit. Yeah, of course.

Would that be okay? Yeah, 100%, that's why you're here. Give it to me.

So you said something, and I think I understand what you mean, but when you say reason tethered to, did you say empirical?

Yes, something like that. Could you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, sure, sure. So in that conversation I had with Richard, he said that if the decimal places at some point in pi contained a hidden message, like 3 .141592654, whatever it is, if there was a kind of code within that, that that would be a kind of something you could figure out independently to then use that as a premise for your argument.

So it would be something demonstrable, empirical in the world that you could then use as a premise, but something that's not, something that can be independently, he was McIntyre who says that every single person could look at it and come and say, this really is in pi, when we divide it up to whatever decimal place, yep, it's there.

Something like that. Okay.

Because when you said that, my first thought was, I can't think of an example where reason is not tethered to some kind of experience that we have, or some kind of reason is embodied.

Would you agree with that statement or not? Yeah, I think so, pretty much. I mean, I'm thinking about this as it spills into the moral domain. Everybody wants to be treated fairly, thinking of John Rawls.

Everybody wants to be treated fairly. We all have the experience of being treated unfairly. And so some kind of experience, some kind of experience would be there. I'm kind of thinking about moral propositions about how to treat other people, how to treat them justly, fairly, lovingly, with care, something like that.

So I have so many questions that are gonna divert, I think, from what we're doing. Sure, sure, sure, go ahead. I get the sense I should not divert just yet. Because I just wanna know, as an aside, what was the lead up to the discussion, what was the demographic of the audience like?

Like I had so many questions from that video. Before we do that, if that's okay. No, anything you want. Yeah, go ahead, this is your. Well, I appreciate it. You say that reason, so I think I'm tracking you because I think that is probably the way that I would do it.

By the way, I was an atheist until I was 30, and I'm 45 now. So it makes sense to me what you're saying. And if I were in your position, that's what I would say. But, so then, and you mentioned William Lane Craig.

There are developed areas in the realm of reason that people have given to argue for the existence of God, and then I suppose, specifically, the existence of the God of the Bible. So how do you take any of those arguments?

Deism, the Kalam Argument, and the Infinite Regress Question

Yeah. I mean, we're speaking in the abstract, but what specifically is your reaction?

Yeah, that's a good question. So you got two things going on there. The more claims one makes, and one would have to change one's Bayesian priors, et cetera, for the theological stuff. But in terms of deism, that's a far easier sell, obviously, because you're not, it's just a far easier, and I could go into that, the universe came from nothing, the universe was always here, the universe was created by God.

Okay, so those things are, and as the likelihood of one decreases, the likelihood of the other two would have to go up. And we can just, I know that people are gonna be watching this, and it's like, well, you know, what if we were a brain of that, or an image, okay, so whatever.

Like, we'll just bracket those for the moment. So the claims of deism, those are easier claims to make, but any time you talk about a specific phenomenon, and every time, you know, it's like, you add a conclusion, the thing becomes less and less likely.

Unless it's actually true, and then the whole thing comports together. So I hope that answers your question, but deism is a much easier pill to swallow for me, even though I'm not a deist. Okay, because I was gonna ask you, you're not a deist, though.

No, no, I don't, I don't. I think we can, and it's not an Occam's razor thing, I think we can just do away with the whole thing, but you know, I think it was Victor Stein who said that the amazing thing about the universe is not how it is, but that it is.

You know, that there is, I think maybe the best argument I've heard is that there is something rather than nothing. And I don't even think that's an argument, that's just kind of an interesting thought.

Like, why is there something rather than nothing? Well, I mean, I don't know, just because you put a question word in front of a bunch of other words doesn't make a legitimate question. I mean, maybe it was always here, you know?

I don't know, I don't know. I don't know how anybody could know that, which is the reason for my answer. Like, how could you not, how could you know that? I don't know.

But for the, I think you mentioned the Kalam, right? Yeah, that's the big one. What specifically breaks down for you in the argument?

Yeah, so I'll answer the question directly, but I will say, you know, I used to teach at a university, I will not name, and I taught an atheism class there, and I used to spend time on arguments, and I used to do less of the, you know, I did the Anselm and ontological arguments and Aquinas, and then when I would put in the new stuff, people, my colleagues were not very happy about it, the ones who would speak to me, and I can't tell you how I'd know this, but I would always tell them, like, if you look at the best apologists, they think that these arguments are convincing.

So if they think these arguments are convincing, I mean, how many people are really, you know, convinced anymore by Aquinas' five proofs? I mean, I don't know, maybe somebody, but anyway, I used to get griefed by that.

Okay, what breaks down, let's see. Let's see what breaks down from that for me. The idea that, well, okay,.

You give me the syllogistic form of it. Yeah, I was gonna say, if I can help you along, because it's kind of short, it's like, everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist,.

Therefore the universe has a cause. Yeah, and Craig uses the Lincoln and the Big Bang, et cetera, for that. I guess what doesn't convince me about that is it's not clear to me that the universe began to exist.

It's possible, I'm not a physicist, but it's possible, maybe even likely, that this instantiation in which we currently find ourselves began to exist, but we could be one of an infinite number in four-dimensional or even n-dimensional space, as my friend Eric Weinstein says, or we could be, it just could have popped into existence from nothing.

I can tell you Craig's response to that argument, but basically, you'd have to rule out other possibilities that it always existed or kind of multiverse, and I know Craig has a pathological hatred of the multiverse argument.

Oh, do we have a, I'm not sure what we're looking at.

Well, that's just people, he's just popping up, William Lane Craig. Yeah, so my friend, my late friend, Victor Schneider, who was kind of a mentor to me, wrote God and the Multiverse, which is a very profound book, and he told me he thinks that there's an infinite number of the universe.

Not only is it turtles all the way down, and that's a kind of infinite regress argument. I've never understood, I actually had a philosophy professor of mine who yelled at me about this and basically told me how it's stupid.

I've never understood why there can't be an infinite regress. Like, why does something have to have a beginning? It only has a beginning when you live in what Dawkins calls the Middle Kingdom, when we are subject to evolutionary forces and our ancestors evolved to like, you know, throw spears and whack gazelles, and if you couldn't do that, then you didn't get to procreate, and so like, it didn't confer an evolutionary advantage to understand what happens inside black holes or in the realm of the very, very small.

So I'm never really sure I understood the argument, and it certainly breaks down with like, Ramanujan's math inside of black holes or quantum theory. I've never understood why something had to have a beginning.

Yeah, I mean, you're running up against things that I don't understand either, so fair enough. Yeah, they're tricky, they're tricky, because neither one of us are like, mathematicians or physicists, so.

Right. I'm trying to imagine what Dr. Craig would say. I've heard that Vilenkin, the theory there, also applies to multiverses. So to propose a multiverse is not necessarily to get out of the problem of a beginning.

Vilenkin probably says something along the lines of you can't, something like past eternal inflation without a beginning is impossible.

So what would you say to that? I would say two things. I would say two things that, and again, you know, I'm, I just have to be, I'm no physicist whatsoever. I'd be completely talking out my nose. So I would say that one would need to know in that situation, and since we have this, just this universe, I would need to know why many of the models that, for example, Stenger puts out of universes existing in four-dimensional space, how that inflationary principle would act to rule out those possibilities.

I actually asked Krauss that possibility. I actually, and I asked Brian Keating, the physicist about that, and those guys told me that it all depends on the starting assumptions. You know, roughly, roughly, that's what they told me.

Right, well, so, I mean, that's interesting because that's kind of, that was my first thought when you said that reason would essentially be the thing for you, because I guess my concern is our starting assumptions with regard to reason.

And so for the fact that we're even using reason in the first place, not to be too pedantic about this, but what is, and I apologize, it's probably an elementary question for your audience, but I'm talking to you for the first time.

What is your explanation for logic?

What do you mean, the fact that it exists?

Yes, well, let me back up. You're, I don't think we said this, you're not a deist, are you an atheist?

Yeah, I think that's, again, I don't think you're being pedantic at all. I think we need to define those. A lot of these mistakes in conversations comes because people, they mean different things by the terms.

I consider myself, yeah, if you had asked me a few years ago, I probably would have said I was an infidel, but I consider myself. I'd mellow it out, I guess. I consider myself somebody who does not think that there's sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a god of gods, but if I were given that evidence, I would believe, evidence or reason.

Okay. So I'm certainly open to the possibility.

Sure, and so I would try to categorize this philosophically. Are you then a, would you then be a materialist, or how would that work out?

Yeah, pretty much. I try to eschew those classifications, but I think I'm pretty much a materialist. I mean, the problem with positing a supernatural realm would be like, how would you know it was, how would one even know there was a supernatural realm?

That's my problem, because any evidence of that would fall into the naturalistic phenomenon.

And I suppose that was the original question restated. Yeah. That caused you to get up there and give your reasoning. You know, well, so, okay. But for all intents and purposes, you would say you're a materialist.

So then I guess that just informs the question, like, where does, how would you account for logic then? Or what would be your definition?

Okay, yeah, that's good. Let's just get to Justin Chillait's question for 10 bucks here. So then why can't God be the infinite regress? I don't know, is that a question for you or me?

I don't, I would not say that God is an infinite regress. I don't.

You think Aristotelian, kind of the first cause, the prime mover. Is that your take? Sure. Okay, yeah, okay, okay. So yeah, so there is no infinite regress. God is kind of the first, okay. All right, so what did you, oh, how do I account for logic?

So I have a kind of a, I actually wrote a little piece about this. I'll send it to you if you want. Okay. I think Max Tegmark and others are wrong. Now we get like 5 ,000 Max Tegmark fans yelling at me.

I don't, he's the math magician. I don't think that you need to posit any kind of platonic realm for math. I think math is just, and James Lindsay and I completely agree on this. His actually is his view in infinity.

I can't remember the name of the book. I think, I can't remember if I wrote the forwards or not, but in the conversations with him that have helped me clarify this, that it's just counting. It's like, it's an empirical experiment that can be done over and over again.

Like one cup of coffee with oat milk, another copy of coffee with oat milk, that's two coffees with oat milk. And so every time you add one to that, it's a kind of experiment at which you know the outcome.

So from there, you can derive certain principles, certain axiomatic principles about mathematics, about like subtraction or division or what have you. But I believe those phenomenon are all empirical.

And I think the idea of positing another realm, like a platonic realm of the form of a number seven or something, I just don't think that we need to do that at all. In fact, I think even thinking that you need to do that is a mistake in reasoning.

It sounds, correct me if I'm wrong. It sounds like then, because if there is no platonic realm, and there is no, so then would logic just be a feature of our own minds?

It's a feature, and I'm not fooling around because everyone says I'm fooling around, it's sort of defensive. I have a shoulder injury. I'm trying to keep exacerbating it from jujitsu. So I keep folding my arms here because it's just comfortable for my shoulder, my left shoulder.

Anyway, it's a feature of our own minds as we engage the world, as we interact with objects and things in the world.

Okay, because an uncharitable, I suppose, way of characterizing that would be that logic would then just be a human convention. But that's not, you would not.

Yeah, I wouldn't say a convention because you could get someone who's like three foot tall from Japan who doesn't speak a lick of English who lived 500 years ago, and you could make, you know, you could get them to add objects up, and you know, what's it, ich, ni, san, chi, go, broke, I don't even know what it is.

Like whatever the number for five is in Japanese, that there'd be, everybody would see that that's what they meant by five. And you say, well, we'll take away one object. And by the way, all these postmodernists who argue with that notion, they're never arguing at that when they're getting the wrong change that's not in their favor from the fact.

Right. Well, and I, so again, not wanting to divert, I'm not sure. Well, go ahead, do whatever you want. In grad school for education, I was confronted with woke ideology, and there was no term for that back then, but it was quite jarring, to say the least.

Well, yeah, because it's total nonsense. I mean, it's dangerous nonsense, yeah.

It's predicated on assumptions that are never questioned.

Yeah, and can't be questioned because then you're a bad person for questioning them. That's true.

Which I found funny, and maybe you wouldn't think it's funny, but I originally went to, I guess we are changing the subject, sorry.

No, this is, you could spend your half hour everywhere you want, I'm all yours.

Okay. I originally went from my theology degree to then going to grad school and getting my education degree. And as I look back now, I realized that it was my training in theology that actually safeguarded against some of the, like I said, the assumptions that were sort of embedded within the lessons and the content in the education program that I was going to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a little bit of philosophy in my theology, but also like biblical exegesis, which is basically Mortimer Adler's way of reading a book, you know, which is anti-postmodern. But I, yeah, it's incredibly frustrating to see the unquestioned assumptions just sit.

Yeah, sit and fester. And now we see the Oboros, you know, the snake that eats stonetail, they're starting to have, you know, camps up on universities and it's shocking to me. So yeah, I think it's really important like having you come on and interrogating my reasoning.

And I really, I honestly, I have no ax to grind. Like if I, I don't want to be wrong about any of this stuff. So I've also 57, so most of my life is behind me rather than in front of me. So I don't wanna, I would like to go to the grave with as few false beliefs as possible.

So yeah, man, so if I've made any mistake in my reasoning, let me know.

Transhumanism, Death, and the Limits of Human Life

So we're not gonna upload ourselves like Kurtzweil and live forever in transhumanist utopia or something? Yeah, I don't know.

I don't think so. I have a buddy of mine who pays this company. I think it's like, I can't remember how much is, they're gonna chop off his head. Timothy Leary wanted to do that and they're gonna store it.

But you know, when you listen to the arguments of Bostrom, et cetera, the singularity is much closer than we think. And I don't just mean with these large language models, AI, but yeah, I don't know. Everybody thinks that.

And then I think it's a version of the Methuselah effect. Everybody will live for one year longer than a year. So we're always slowly extending our lifetime. But as Shermer says, you know, isn't it funny how this is always in our lifetime?

Like we are the chosen. We are gonna like see something. So I don't know. I doubt it, but I would definitely be very cool with like choosing the date and time of my own death. Because I don't think 80 or whatever is long enough.

Yeah, well, so we're getting into morbid territory. So a moment ago, I swerved away from the ditch there because I think just full transparency, I think we're running into an issue that I see from my vantage point.

And maybe there is no issue. So I'll go ahead and acknowledge that too. If the laws of logic, and correct me if I'm wrong, and logic and reason itself is a feature of the mind, can like the laws of logic change at all?

Like I suppose if we evolve differently. That's a great question.

Yeah, that's a terrific question. So the logic itself, it's not, so you have a bunch of things going on. So I'll give you my answer. You don't have to, obviously, you don't have to agree with this. You can push back or what have you.

So is it, it's kind of the euthyphro dilemma, right? Is it that it's always there, and we just happen to stumble across it? Do we discover it? Do we invent it? Do we create it? So modus ponens, for example, if P then therefore Q, P therefore Q, that's an independent feature of reason.

And any being with any epistemology, any subject to any evolutionary mechanism should accede to that. I don't think that that's, that we have written that rule. Like putting two objects together, we have linguistic placeholders for those objects.

And you could easily imagine a pre-linguistic culture that Victor Stein, I think it was in the blue book, talks about a slab as the first word. I have a slab. But if you put one object and then you put another object, that's not a feature of the mind.

Now the grouping or the classification, the categorization of those features as being quote unquote together is the classification. And then we develop a language and then we develop symbols. You don't have to have symbols if it's not written, but plus, minus, et cetera.

But those are features of the mind. But those features of the mind participate in a reality that is independent of the mind itself. Now you could be a phenomenologist or someone who says, well, it's just all phenomenon, but okay, whatever.

But that's how I view the problem. Okay.

I hear you. You know, it's, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to discuss. And I think, you know, a lot of people probably don't have the stamina to continue to press, which is why a lot of people Press me on anything you want.

I mean, not you and I, I just mean, you know, in normal conversation. But I think where, with my experience and I suppose the ways that I've thought about this, I would want to go further. Okay. And so, you know, to suggest that logic, especially the laws of logic, because I recognize that you're using something probably in a way to express the universality of logic.

And so you reference counting. The laws of logic though are a little bit more complex. And so, you know, when I hear you say certain words like independent and it's almost like there's a standard that we sort of align ourselves to that then causes a problem.