Based Camp - Rethinking the Concept of Souls

00:00:00.000 It craves purity.

00:00:02.780 It devours purity.

00:00:04.780 It seems to me.

00:00:07.820 What the hell is this thing made out of?

00:00:10.660 All right, fine.

00:00:11.520 I might have used a few unorthodox parts.

00:00:13.940 Just tell me one.

00:00:16.940 An orphan.

00:00:19.540 Did you say an orphan?

00:00:22.460 Yeah, a little orphan boy.

00:00:24.520 It's powered by a forsaken child.

00:00:28.020 Might be, kind of.

00:00:29.040 I mean, I didn't use the whole thing.

00:00:30.900 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:00:32.000 I am excited to be here with you today.

00:00:34.260 And today we are going to be continuing a conversation

00:00:37.660 we had on one of our strategy walks this morning.

00:00:39.760 Every morning we try to take like an hour just to ourselves

00:00:42.480 to try to discuss some new idea

00:00:43.940 or something we've been thinking about.

00:00:45.580 And what I was thinking about

00:00:46.960 was I had been editing the abortion video that we had done.

00:00:51.200 Wait.

00:00:52.500 Maybe. 1.00

00:00:54.180 Maybe I don't have the right to kill my mom. 0.99

00:00:57.240 No, she's my mom. 0.99

00:00:58.300 I can do whatever I want with her.

00:00:59.980 It's more important I live the way I want.

00:01:02.440 She isn't an object you can own.

00:01:03.760 She's a human being.

00:01:05.080 Oh, get her! 1.00

00:01:06.320 She's making you suffer! 1.00

00:01:08.360 Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.

00:01:11.380 Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.

00:01:13.740 And we had talked about when do we think insolument happens.

00:01:21.920 Like when does a human body get their soul?

00:01:25.820 And this is an interesting thing for us to be talking about

00:01:28.700 because we also don't believe in a literal soul.

00:01:31.820 And it got interesting to me as I was thinking more about it

00:01:35.700 because I was like, yes, but even though we don't believe in a literal soul,

00:01:40.460 it still makes sense for us to be talking about insolument

00:01:44.060 because we're calling, when we're talking about like your consciousness,

00:01:48.240 your sentiments, your emotion, everything like that,

00:01:50.140 that is what many other people would call a soul.

00:01:53.000 And my argument in general is that we shouldn't be talking about souls at all

00:01:58.880 because we came up as humanity with the concept of souls a very long time ago

00:02:04.940 before we had a scientific understanding of the larger things

00:02:09.320 that we can now describe as life or sentience or sapience,

00:02:13.560 which is I think what people are really referring to

00:02:15.500 and various cultural traditions are really referring to

00:02:18.340 when they talk about their various types of souls and spirits.

00:02:21.180 And I want to go into this actually.

00:02:23.000 Well, hold on, before we go further in this,

00:02:24.520 an analogy that I think is good to help people understand what I mean

00:02:27.320 when I say, well, there's functionally no difference

00:02:29.320 between what we're talking about and a soul.

00:02:30.940 So it makes sense to use the word soul,

00:02:33.120 which is to say, we believe that these larger processes that we experience,

00:02:39.520 like the human experience that many people would think of

00:02:41.380 as being part of this soulistic process

00:02:43.800 is an emergent property of the way our brains function.

00:02:48.340 So what is an emergent property?

00:02:50.340 An emergent property is something like I, as a human,

00:02:54.080 can understand that all of the individual water molecules,

00:02:59.440 like what their shape is, why they interact in the way they interact,

00:03:03.740 why they form waves, why they everything.

00:03:07.800 But I will never be able to conceive of those individual H2O molecules

00:03:13.960 as also being wetness, liquidity.

00:03:18.320 The human brain is just not meant to understand these types of emergent properties

00:03:22.200 because it was never an evolutionary advantage to being able to understand them.

00:03:25.900 Now, if somebody came to me from a tribe and they were like, 0.99

00:03:29.320 well, we are aware of water molecules and how they work and all that,

00:03:33.840 but then there's this separate thing that we call wetness or liquidness, right?

00:03:38.840 And that, for our tribe, is a totally different thing than the water molecules.

00:03:44.460 And they'd say, now you don't believe in wetness.

00:03:47.080 And it's like, no, I believe in wetness.

00:03:49.060 I can touch the water.

00:03:50.460 I can feel the wet.

00:03:51.840 I can see what happens when I splash in a pool.

00:03:54.580 Like, I believe in wetness.

00:03:56.620 I just think it's the same thing as this other thing

00:04:00.340 that we have always talked about as being something else.

00:04:03.760 I didn't even think of wetness without thinking about the Zoolander mermaid ad.

00:04:09.180 What was the catchphrase?

00:04:11.340 Like, wetness is the essence of the boy of the...

00:04:14.220 Yeah, but moist...

00:04:15.660 Moisture is the essence of wetness.

00:04:22.080 And wetness is the essence of beauty.

00:04:26.420 Yeah, so I agree with you on that.

00:04:30.420 But I also think that it's damaging to give this magical property to something like a soul.

00:04:39.120 Because it can create the kinds of toxic, recursive arguments and reductions

00:04:46.380 that you see with things like the abortion argument.

00:04:48.860 Where when you take an emergent property or you take any concept that can be explored better

00:04:56.480 by science and by more concrete terms, now that we have the tool set to do so,

00:05:01.060 and then elevate it to this element of sacredness, now we can no longer talk about it.

00:05:07.500 And people can establish these arbitrary boundaries like the Catholic Church has

00:05:11.780 and move the goalposts and then say that this argument is beyond reproach.

00:05:16.620 That according to what this Pope said in the late 1800s, the soul starts now.

00:05:22.340 And if you question that, you are destroying souls.

00:05:25.740 When really we should be having a conversation, which we discuss in our episode on abortion,

00:05:31.980 about the increasing level at which sentience and sapience and capability of feeling pain

00:05:38.020 increases over time.

00:05:40.200 And how abortions become increasingly morally complex and risky and questionable

00:05:45.660 with each passing second as these developments increase.

00:05:49.380 And that there are ways for us to measure things like neural development,

00:05:52.320 like the ability to feel pain, like the ability to react to stimuli.

00:05:55.980 And when you take away the sacredness of the soul and instead break it down into more of its

00:06:01.040 component parts, as is understood by Christians in the Catholic Church to be the soul.

00:06:06.900 And I want to get into this.

00:06:07.920 Then you can have a more realistic and practical conversation.

00:06:11.840 Before you get into this, I want to do a quick aside here that I think is really important to

00:06:15.840 the point you're making, which is that this leads to much more suffering in the long run,

00:06:21.160 this interpretation of soul.

00:06:22.740 Because if you look at Europe, which is a much more socially liberal place in the United States,

00:06:28.240 their average abortion age in most countries in terms of legalness is around 15 weeks.

00:06:34.280 And in the U.S. it's like around like 23 weeks.

00:06:37.200 Okay.

00:06:37.780 The point in a pregnancy at which there are restrictions,

00:06:41.600 not the average stational age at which abortions take place.

00:06:45.720 Yeah, I mean, whatever, the legal, the audience understands what I'm saying here.

00:06:50.600 Anyway, so the question is, why is the U.S. so much more legally loose?

00:06:55.220 And I believe fundamentally it's because the conservatives in this country

00:07:00.040 have approached the argument with a not something that's going to cross interface divides,

00:07:06.840 which is to say, here, look, we can prove neural activity.

00:07:10.340 I can show you pictures of a baby suffering, you know, a fetus suffering.

00:07:13.920 I can show you this is death.

00:07:16.340 Here are the brainwave scans.

00:07:18.220 They approach it with, well, a life begins at conception because it does.

00:07:22.940 You know, that's when insolument happens, right?

00:07:25.440 And so that's when it's a fully human life.

00:07:27.120 Well, yeah, or in other words, the conversation isn't being shut down

00:07:30.120 by being immediately made about sacred and religion,

00:07:33.760 the sacred and religion, and therefore being politicized.

00:07:37.080 Because when you make the discussion of abortions about the sacred and religion,

00:07:41.620 that means that the vehement atheists and anti-religion people

00:07:48.420 are now going to make this their pet subject

00:07:50.340 because we can't have the religious people dictating our lives.

00:07:52.880 And then suddenly abortion becomes sacred, as we discussed in this episode.

00:07:55.480 Let's not get caught up in that because I want to talk about insolument and souls.

00:07:59.740 So it's very clear now that I've looked a little bit more at how,

00:08:04.140 like the history of how different cultures and religions have treated the soul,

00:08:08.720 that the Christian concept of souls is really based on Plato's concept of souls.

00:08:15.680 And that Plato's concept of souls is really just consciousness

00:08:19.820 with a little bit of magical thinking.

00:08:21.520 So Plato's concept of the soul is as follows.

00:08:25.680 The soul is immortal and exists before birth and after death.

00:08:28.960 That's where you get the magical part.

00:08:30.680 And it is the essence of a person deciding how people behave.

00:08:34.860 Okay.

00:08:35.300 That is your brain and consciousness, plus your genetics, arguably.

00:08:37.920 And that the soul is divided into three parts.

00:08:41.020 One, logisticon, reason.

00:08:43.840 Two, thymoides, which is your spirit or emotion.

00:08:47.760 Three, medicon, which is your appetite or desire.

00:08:50.660 That is your consciousness.

00:08:51.940 That is your brain.

00:08:53.020 That is your behavior.

00:08:54.760 He says that the soul is incorporeal and eternal.

00:08:58.520 He says that the soul is capable of thinking even after death.

00:09:01.820 So, you know, that's the magical thinking part.

00:09:04.740 But the rest, this is all about thinking and processing.

00:09:07.060 And then when you look at who has a soul in Plato's framework, this depends on its capacity

00:09:14.980 for reason, emotion, and desire.

00:09:16.440 That depends entirely on consciousness.

00:09:19.320 On self-motion, the ability to move itself, which Plato saw as a key characteristic of having

00:09:24.560 a soul.

00:09:25.060 So basically agency is a key portion of having a soul, which is an extremely human thing

00:09:29.800 and very oriented around not just sentience, but sapience as well, I would argue.

00:09:34.560 And then cognitive abilities, the soul is responsible for thinking.

00:09:39.260 And then you can see this furthered in Christian thought and in like generally like Greco-Roman

00:09:46.340 influence thought as well.

00:09:48.060 When you see how over histories span, different cultures have at different times, even said

00:09:56.940 that not all humans have souls.

00:09:58.580 So when you look at the breakdown of different Christian sects and sort of ask, okay, well,

00:10:04.240 which Christian sects believe that only, you know, humans have souls or only, you know,

00:10:09.280 humans and certain animals have souls?

00:10:11.260 Most Christian denominations agree that only humans have souls.

00:10:14.940 Some like really progressive, like the Unitarian Universalists, some of them were like, well,

00:10:19.540 maybe dogs have souls. 0.94

00:10:20.780 Maybe dogs go to heaven. 0.99

00:10:21.860 I mean, I don't know.

00:10:22.600 And like maybe Eastern religions are kind of right and everything is a spirit.

00:10:25.880 I don't know.

00:10:26.260 Maybe plants.

00:10:27.000 I don't know.

00:10:27.780 But most of them are like, no, no, no, just humans.

00:10:29.760 But then there are all these historical groups, including quite a few Christians who are like,

00:10:33.380 maybe not all humans either.

00:10:35.560 And that's where you also get to this concept where I think you really see it being clear

00:10:40.840 that especially Christians equate having a soul with sapience, because let's look at the

00:10:46.540 groups that they have argued do not have souls at various times in history.

00:10:51.520 And I think this, it really, you'll see that the common theme is that these are all groups

00:10:56.140 that are at the same time kind of accused of not being sapient.

00:11:00.440 Like you do not have agency. 0.74

00:11:02.020 You are not intelligent. 1.00

00:11:03.200 You are lesser. 1.00

00:11:04.640 You can't think properly. 0.91

00:11:06.000 You can't plan.

00:11:07.260 Okay.

00:11:07.600 So we have slavery.

00:11:10.240 So during the era of slavery and colonialism, some Christian slave owners and colonizers

00:11:14.420 argued that African slaves did not have souls or had inferior souls and that indigenous peoples

00:11:19.800 in the Americas lacked souls. 0.81

00:11:21.880 Okay.

00:11:22.160 Oh my gosh.

00:11:23.060 Yeah. 0.96

00:11:23.200 These are groups that, you know, they're, they're savages.

00:11:25.520 You know, they, they, they, they do not have agency to, they don't think for themselves.

00:11:29.840 They're, they're talking about consciousness.

00:11:31.740 And these are groups that they've sort of not seen as having the sapience of them due

00:11:36.200 to cultural differences, due to them being alien, whatever.

00:11:39.380 Then there's gender-based discrimination.

00:11:41.800 In some historical concepts, certain Christian groups debated whether women had souls, because

00:11:46.640 I mean, a waltz.

00:11:49.100 A waltz, right?

00:11:50.780 I think some online red silk faces might do that these days.

00:11:55.120 Seriously.

00:11:56.280 And then some interpretations of Islam also questioned the nature of women's souls. 0.79

00:12:00.900 Then there was class-based distinctions.

00:12:04.500 So in some societies, lower classes or castes were sometimes considered to have lesser or

00:12:10.020 no souls.

00:12:11.080 So like, I mean, the poor, they live like animals.

00:12:13.960 They have no right.

00:12:14.720 They basically, no, it's funny.

00:12:16.800 I actually want to say that I have seen this in modern times, you know, we hang out with

00:12:21.160 a lot of super wealthy, high agency people.

00:12:23.960 And one of the ideas that has been floating around in this community is not just, you know,

00:12:30.300 you as the audience, you're probably familiar with simulation theory.

00:12:32.960 It is a simulation and it's provably a simulation because, oh, so it's provably a simulation

00:12:39.300 because you could be running an infinite number of simulations like this within our universe

00:12:42.860 plausibly.

00:12:43.820 And if that's true, it is infinitely more likely that we're on a server in another universe

00:12:48.000 than in universe 01.

00:12:49.500 That's the way this argument works.

00:12:51.200 But when they go further and argue that it's, I got to put the Rick and Morty scene, a simulation

00:12:56.460 running on minimum processing power, which, you know, the deja vus, stuff like that.

00:13:07.740 I got to tell you this morning, I didn't even know this award existed.

00:13:10.940 Now I'm holding one.

00:13:12.300 I want to say that today was the best day of my life.

00:13:16.000 But the truth is, it's, it's, it's more meaningful than that.

00:13:20.020 Mommy.

00:13:20.340 I am finally complete.

00:13:29.080 You're inside a simulation of a simulation inside another giant simulation.

00:13:36.420 But anyway, what they argue is that most of the humans on earth today are not actually

00:13:43.260 fully simulated to the point of being sentient.

00:13:46.820 They're just sort of reacting to environmental scenario.

00:13:51.920 And, and here's the thing though, Simone, I can kind of see where they're coming with

00:13:56.840 this, if you are around these groups.

00:14:00.020 Well, and this, but again, I want to, I want to point out, this is hearkening back to these

00:14:04.720 platonic ideals around what the soul is, where agency plays a key role, where emotional

00:14:10.280 range plays a key role.

00:14:11.740 So again, it's not this like sacred concept there, they're talking about sapience and

00:14:16.320 degrees of sapience.

00:14:17.260 Yeah.

00:14:17.760 But the, the, the, the, what I was going to say, because I want to get the audience in

00:14:20.720 the mindset of this, because I think it's really easy to just dehumanize, oh, ultra wealthy

00:14:24.960 people, whatever.

00:14:26.300 Or anyone.

00:14:27.060 I mean, I think the same lack of insolvent or sapience is a little opposite of people.

00:14:32.340 Not what I'm talking about.

00:14:33.580 Okay.

00:14:33.820 What I'm talking about is I was saying, it's very easy when I say that some of these high

00:14:38.820 agency, wealthy people don't believe everyone has a soul or is not fully programmed, right?

00:14:44.540 That they are genuinely NPCs.

00:14:47.100 Okay.

00:14:47.600 Non-player characters in a video game.

00:14:49.620 What I was, I'm, I'm, the audience is going to hear that and be like, oh, evil, wealthy

00:14:54.140 monster people. 0.76

00:14:55.180 Right.

00:14:55.680 And not all of the people in the communities that I'm around that have shared this belief

00:15:00.060 are in this ultra wealthy category.

00:15:01.780 They are, so I'm trying to get people in the mindset of this group so they can understand

00:15:06.440 how in a modern society, someone could come to this, which is to say, imagine you go to

00:15:11.920 events, right?

00:15:13.300 And it's the same people at the events every time you go.

00:15:16.900 And it's the blogs that everyone is reading.

00:15:19.180 And it's the people who run all the companies.

00:15:21.840 And when you are going out there and you are searching for a truly independent take in the

00:15:26.420 world, it usually comes from one of these, maybe a hundred people.

00:15:30.820 And, and then you begin to be like, why aren't I hearing independent takes from anyone outside

00:15:36.620 of this hundred person group?

00:15:38.320 And, and you as a random internet user may feel that way sometimes.

00:15:42.420 Why are there only like a hundred people online who seem to have genuinely unique opinions

00:15:48.040 anymore?

00:15:48.320 And this shows up in the stats, right?

00:15:49.940 Isn't it something like 90% of people don't engage at all online and then like 1% are responsible

00:15:56.120 for most of the content posting?

00:15:58.840 Yeah.

00:15:59.360 But I mean, I think this is even, this is even crazier.

00:16:02.020 Like to me, it genuinely is like a hundred people that I see that are regularly producing

00:16:07.680 what seems to me to be both original, well thought through and based on like some degree

00:16:14.520 of logic of opinions.

00:16:17.180 Yeah.

00:16:17.500 And that platonic ideal.

00:16:19.080 So I can see how they're getting to this.

00:16:20.440 I actually want to emphasize here how wild this is and how much it messes with even my

00:16:27.660 own perception of reality that when I am online and I hear some new idea or new take, and I'm

00:16:37.580 not searching for it.

00:16:38.700 It's not because of who I'm following.

00:16:40.200 This might be a random news article or something like that.

00:16:42.840 That a good 80% of the time, it comes down to a person I already personally know and am

00:16:50.140 friends with.

00:16:51.240 That is wild because I do not know that many people.

00:16:55.400 Like recently somebody was like, hey, how did you get Curtis Yarvin to come on your show?

00:16:59.400 And it's like, well, that's one weird question.

00:17:01.440 Like I've known Curtis for ages or, you know, we had mentioned Sammo in something and they're

00:17:05.560 like, oh, I really like his work.

00:17:07.240 But like when I mentioned Sammo, I'm thinking of like family friend Sammo, who I know from

00:17:11.800 all the parties, and it's so wild.

00:17:15.620 Where are the other people generating novel ideas outside of this small friend circle?

00:17:21.280 And it is further hit home for me when I have had to have intellectual discussions with random

00:17:27.580 people in public.

00:17:29.160 Recently, for example, when I had some lady start yelling at me for punishing my kids and 1.00

00:17:34.080 I tried to walk her through the logic of why a child would need to be punished, she began

00:17:39.520 to break down into just like simple phonetic loops, like break the cycle and, you know,

00:17:48.700 do better.

00:17:49.800 And it was as if I was interacting with an NPC in a video game who you were not designed

00:17:56.800 to interact with.

00:17:57.800 I will say that this does scare me in terms of the reach of our channel, ultimately, because

00:18:15.700 it may mean that the audience who is capable of understanding or engaging with the ideas

00:18:20.820 that we are laying out there is just not that large an audience.

00:18:24.920 But anyway, continue with your platonic ideals.

00:18:26.540 More, well, more, more groups that don't that haven't had souls by some Christians views,

00:18:31.280 or we'll say Abrahamic groups views in the past.

00:18:33.380 So there's some developmental stage discrimination, some religious and philosophical traditions have

00:18:38.040 debated whether fetuses or young infants have souls.

00:18:41.380 Oh, how dare they?

00:18:42.660 But at one point, a developing human acquires a soul back to the abortion debate.

00:18:46.080 And then finally, mental and physical conditions.

00:18:48.480 So people have questioned the presence of souls in people with severe mental illnesses,

00:18:52.600 as well as those with significant cognitive impairments.

00:18:56.800 So again, what are we looking at?

00:18:58.380 We are looking at degrees of sapience and perceived sapience and intelligence, which I think is

00:19:04.040 really important.

00:19:04.500 And I think another thing that it's important to look at when we're talking, when we're saying

00:19:09.100 like, okay, especially in the case of abortion debates, this concept of soul is really

00:19:15.080 a platonic ideal that should be discussed as consciousness.

00:19:18.380 And now that we understand the brain and how it works and genetics and how they work and

00:19:23.180 not the soul, because this concept of souls isn't even really that pervasive in non Abrahamic

00:19:30.460 or Greco Roman inspired religions or, or influenced religion.

00:19:34.960 So like, think about the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul.

00:19:38.800 It's not just all these like Plato sort of triad of, of concepts that really all have to

00:19:43.960 do with consciousness and sapience.

00:19:45.680 The ancient Egyptian concept has a ton of different parts.

00:19:49.320 So there's Kat, the physical body, Ba, the personality depicted as a bird with a human

00:19:54.300 head, Ba, or Ka, the life force, Ren, the true name, whatever that is, but that's an important

00:20:00.700 part.

00:20:01.400 Shuyet, the shadow, Jejub, the heart, Ak, the transformed spirit after death, Sahu, the spiritual

00:20:08.720 body, and Sechem, the life energy.

00:20:11.980 There's a lot going on.

00:20:13.300 Quick interjection before you go further with this.

00:20:15.580 This is a perfect example.

00:20:17.100 Remember when I divided, so people can watch our video where I say the three-phase, policyism,

00:20:21.140 monotheism, and mysticism.

00:20:22.360 It's a perfect example of how policyistic traditions always divide things, which is

00:20:26.240 just like tons and tons and tons of lore.

00:20:29.360 Yeah, there's the lore.

00:20:30.280 It's deep lore.

00:20:31.240 It's deep lore.

00:20:32.260 You've got the true name, the shadow.

00:20:35.220 You've got the 50 names for the different rings and layers and everything like that.

00:20:39.180 Anyway, continue.

00:20:39.700 Yeah, and then even Greco-Roman views didn't have this universal Platonic view of the soul,

00:20:46.060 so Plato viewed the soul as immortal and separate from the body, but really he was also describing

00:20:50.220 consciousness.

00:20:51.500 Aristotle saw the soul as the form of essence of a living being, so I don't know, your

00:20:55.800 Malcolm-ness.

00:20:57.300 And I just keep thinking of Zoolander and wetness.

00:20:59.720 And then Epicureans believed the soul was made of atoms, like the body.

00:21:02.880 So when your body dies, I guess your soul disappears.

00:21:05.640 And then, you know, of course, early Christian theology was influenced by Greek ideas and

00:21:10.520 specifically Plato's.

00:21:11.540 But then we have Abrahamic religions that sort of took that on.

00:21:15.000 But Eastern religions, so, you know, with Hinduism, believes in the Atman, the individual

00:21:19.420 soul is part of the universal Brahmin.

00:21:21.340 But it sort of like gets unmoored from your personality, and it doesn't seem to really be

00:21:25.380 connected to consciousness.

00:21:26.280 It's sort of like this continued thing, but it's not like associated with consciousness.

00:21:30.260 It's more like based on your reputation.

00:21:33.160 And then there's Buddhism, which rejects the idea of an eternal, unchanging soul, and

00:21:36.680 it focused on the concept of non-self.

00:21:39.380 And then there's like Shinto, where like kind of everything has a spirit, and your spirit

00:21:44.660 can kind of linger on a little bit after you die, but not like really, or maybe it'll become

00:21:49.080 a kami.

00:21:49.940 So like a lot of other people seem to see-

00:21:52.900 Sorry, explain kami to audience.

00:21:54.620 A kami is like a god, but like a sort of like a little spirit god, not a powerful god. 0.75

00:22:00.160 Go back to like polytheism, and it's sort of polytheism plus mysticism.

00:22:05.460 Just think about like Studio Ghibli films, where there are little spirits everywhere, and

00:22:09.000 little set spirits, and stuff like that, and tree spirits.

00:22:12.100 That's kind of this view.

00:22:14.120 I really like it.

00:22:15.100 I think Shinto's fantastic.

00:22:16.720 I do.

00:22:17.360 I don't know.

00:22:18.320 Like it's a really, it's wonderful, especially for children, this sort of view that everything's

00:22:26.580 alive.

00:22:26.920 This tree has a spirit.

00:22:28.520 This rock has a spirit.

00:22:29.780 There are little spirits hiding everywhere.

00:22:31.780 I feel like for an imaginary mind playing in nature, Shinto is one of the most appealing-

00:22:39.420 Well, you know, you say that, but it really is very similar to most of the, I'd almost

00:22:44.180 call them like pre-policyistic animalistic traditions, because you know, we had those,

00:22:48.420 if you look at like early Irish mysticism and stuff like that, or like pre-mysticism.

00:22:53.200 I don't know what you call it.

00:22:54.060 But like the belief that if your sock was in a different place in your house, that meant

00:22:58.520 the, oh, they had a word for these things, brownies, or something like that.

00:23:02.340 Like there were different categories of like little elf things.

00:23:05.160 Oh.

00:23:05.740 Basically.

00:23:06.340 I don't think I've heard of these.

00:23:07.260 Everything in the woods was constantly, there was always some little-

00:23:11.720 Alive and-

00:23:12.720 People watching you, ready to play a trick on you, or ready to attack you, or ready to,

00:23:19.160 and everything you did was just all of these rituals around protecting your house, or protecting

00:23:24.560 your food, or ensuring that, you know, various things helped you find your lost things and

00:23:30.140 stuff like that.

00:23:30.820 And I actually, one of the stories that I was working on, and we need to have another

00:23:35.180 like Malcolm Stories episode, one of the stories I was working on was inspired by this idea,

00:23:41.760 because I was like, what I wanted to do is I was really inspired by Tolkien, and the way

00:23:46.280 that Tolkien took old mystical traditions and tried to re-invoke them in a new context, because

00:23:53.600 if you look at Tolkien's work, it has changed literature probably more than any book in history,

00:23:59.380 except for the Bible, in terms of the number of copies of this new type of world he created,

00:24:05.020 that no one had ever done something kind of like that before.

00:24:07.440 Now it's like a genre, basically, you know, orcs and knights and all of that, and wizards,

00:24:13.140 and-

00:24:13.680 But I was like, well, I wanted to do something radically different from that.

00:24:17.060 And I was like, what if I went with this vibe of like the little things that mess with you,

00:24:22.940 and the livingness of the places around you,

00:24:25.040 And then I superimposed this vibe onto a modern online context, with the idea being that some

00:24:32.620 of the people online who you're interacting with are not people, but sort of spirits you

00:24:38.980 could think of in a way that-

00:24:40.540 Didn't you and I play with this idea, the span, I think we called it?

00:24:44.600 Yeah, yeah, yeah, of making a book on it.

00:24:46.840 And the idea was, is that essentially it's a different plane of reality that these things

00:24:52.440 live on. And in this alternate plane of reality, your existence, like the amount of existence-ness

00:24:58.860 you have, the amount of power you have, your ability to conjure yourself is based on the

00:25:04.380 attention that you have. And so it was in their reality, you know, it's like a hierarchy with

00:25:08.880 various things in their reality, paying attention to other things. And the more something gets paid

00:25:12.440 attention to, like an idea or something like that, the more tangible and powerful it becomes.

00:25:16.600 And some of them found ways to break into our reality through cyberspace. And then obviously,

00:25:23.140 they want attention. That's their goal, right? Because that feeds them power within their

00:25:27.940 realm. But then also, for example, if you become particularly famous online, you can create an

00:25:34.420 imprint within their reality that can then aim to take your place within an online environment.

00:25:40.640 Very similar to the concept of, what was that, that the Irish had, where they would take the

00:25:44.440 baby and replace them with another baby. I'll get all the names here. But I, if people like my

00:25:50.300 little weird fantasy universes, I'm constantly creating new ones now that I'm playing with AI

00:25:54.760 chatbots and stuff like that. So I've got some really detailed-

00:25:57.860 Yeah, we're going to have to do an episode where you talk about that.

00:26:00.080 Recently, something I've had a ton of fun doing when playing with AI chatbot stories

00:26:04.360 is creating twists around traditional tropes that change our understanding of these tropes,

00:26:11.460 but in a way that makes more sense given the collection of facts we know about them.

00:26:16.100 So I'll give two quick examples here. One is elves. So we typically think of elves of these

00:26:22.520 basically humanoid-looking, really long-lived things that live near forests and attempt to

00:26:27.860 protect forests and appear to have some sort of connection to a forest. Well, in this interpretation,

00:26:33.920 I reveal, or through investigation, find that elves are actually just a race of humans that created a

00:26:44.060 spirit link with a forest, like a necromancer might to stay young, and then are using the forest's energy

00:26:52.260 to give them these supernaturally long lives. And doing this has transformed their appearance

00:26:59.740 slightly. This would explain why they want to protect the forest. This would explain why they

00:27:04.020 have a connection to the forest. This would explain why they look so human. This would explain why

00:27:07.820 they're so arrogant and want to keep outsiders away from their rituals and everything like that.

00:27:11.900 And it would also make sense that they might not have passed this understanding of who they are

00:27:18.140 onto the next generation, because if the humans around them already saw them as a different super

00:27:23.700 long-lived entity, well, I admit to them that they're basically necromantically stealing forest energy.

00:27:28.860 And then you can build fun subversions like this. Like, well, from a forest perspective,

00:27:34.520 the forests that the elves live in are enslaved, and the other forests, the forests that the humans

00:27:39.160 use and harvest, are the unshackled forests. Like, you would much rather be born a forest spirit in one

00:27:46.720 of those forests than the ones that the elves are feeding on. Another reinterpretation comes from

00:27:52.440 the understanding of vampires, which is to say, well, you can actually understand a vampire as just

00:27:58.820 a few simple necromatic self-replicating spells. So you've got a life drain spell, a youth spell,

00:28:09.060 and then an animated corpse, along with a number of curses. Like, why have the sunlight thing?

00:28:16.360 Why not be able to see themselves in mirrors? Well, here's an example of why they might not be able to see

00:28:21.120 themselves in mirrors. What if they are literally just a self-replicating cascade of spells?

00:28:27.620 So, for example, on their teeth, to allow the spirit-to-use conversion ritual, there is a rune.

00:28:34.620 And the person who originally created vampires didn't want them to see this rune on their teeth,

00:28:39.020 so they couldn't replicate it and do the spell themselves. And that he wanted a form of undead thrall

00:28:44.540 that could self-replicate. And maybe somewhere thousands upon thousands of years ago, he died out.

00:28:50.060 But the vampires are continuing on self-replicating and self-replicating through a self-replicating

00:28:56.620 simple set of spells. And this subverts the vampire's understanding of itself. And maybe the

00:29:02.100 oldest of vampires actually knew that they were originally created to be a slave race. But they

00:29:06.120 hid this from the younger to create this air of prestige and difference from humanity and

00:29:12.640 the higher-ness from humanity. And then you could do really fun subversions with this.

00:29:16.600 So I've got to create a few more of these because they're very fun. Fun aside here,

00:29:19.940 what I was trying to add a picture of a vampire to show people, like, in the background here with AI,

00:29:27.060 any female-assigned vampire gets tagged as not safe for work. Like, I just can't get it to create 1.00

00:29:34.300 one. It thinks that all vampires are not safe for work. And I assume that that's because out of the

00:29:40.320 vampires it creates, whenever it creates a vampire woman, it makes her not safe for work, 1.00

00:29:45.660 given that that's sort of the evoked set that it's working with. And then tells me that I'm

00:29:50.240 asking for something that's not safe for work, which is very much not the case. I'm, like,

00:29:54.520 trying to be, like, high-class vampire lady. Or now I'm trying high-class woman with vampire 0.70

00:29:59.380 teeth. Still coming out not safe for work.

00:30:02.040 But it's clear to me that in many, many other religious traditions, the soul is more like just

00:30:07.660 being alive. In fact, in some Near Eastern cultures, the soul is believed to reside in

00:30:12.300 the blood. You can imagine someone seeing a person bleed out and die and thinking,

00:30:16.780 their soul's leaving them. Oh, their soul's coming out.

00:30:19.340 Well, they get the last breath because you get, like, hot breaths on a cold day and you'd see steam

00:30:24.340 coming out and they'd be like, oh, that's the soul leaving them. But also, and I really like the way

00:30:28.740 you did this this morning for me, where you highlighted this for me, where you were like, look,

00:30:33.500 you know, if you're in a historic context, you don't understand the brain or anything like that.

00:30:38.600 And you're trying to explain what is this thing that we think of as sentience. And I mean,

00:30:42.320 if you look at more recent research, it's really quite easy to explain sentience now.

00:30:46.320 Yes.

00:30:46.540 So if you want to get a feeling from that, one of our earliest videos we did. So if you're a

00:30:51.020 longtime fan of the channel, but you came more recently, so you haven't seen our earlier stuff,

00:30:55.020 watch the You're Probably Not Sentient video. It's really core, I think, to how we see the world,

00:30:59.480 but I don't want to spam you guys with another copy of that video. But yeah, it's, I'll just give

00:31:04.380 you some examples of what I, we mean by this. So we now know from things like, you know, split brain

00:31:10.560 patients that you can, if you, if you, if you cover up, this takes too long to explain, basically just

00:31:19.800 go watch the video, but there's compelling evidence that we probably aren't as sentient as we think we

00:31:24.640 are. And, and that even, you know, as fMRI stuff, you know, we can tell in the fMRI, you've made the

00:31:29.660 decision long before you're conscious of making the decision. And what we're experiencing with

00:31:33.540 sentience is more of a, a little historian that's taking credit for a bunch of things they're not

00:31:38.820 doing. And that you will always claim credit. Like, Oh, I decided that even if we, like a scientist

00:31:43.940 can prove, no, you actually didn't make that decision. Like, like inarguably prove you will believe

00:31:49.520 and have the perception that you did make that decision. And so it gets a lot easier to explain

00:31:54.220 these things, but here's another thing with souls. Did you have anything else you wanted to get to

00:31:57.900 before I? Go ahead. I'm curious to see what you say. Well, I wanted to go into, because people can

00:32:04.400 be like, why, you know, given, you know, your read of the Christian Bible and everything like that,

00:32:10.320 do you not believe in the traditional soul? And I'd say, well, you've got to remember, we also believe

00:32:14.600 that when Woodbury's book, when I read certain things, I'm like, this feels like divinely inspired to me.

00:32:19.520 We've done a video with track six, goes into why we think that this particular text is divinely

00:32:23.420 inspired. But here is a quote from it, which really resonates with me on the concept of souls.

00:32:28.920 A day will come when the current belief in property after death for is not existence property and the

00:32:34.860 dearest property of all will be accounted a strange and selfish idea. Just as we smile at the savage

00:32:41.100 chief who believes that his gentility will be continued in the world beneath the ground. And he will

00:32:47.120 there be attended by his concubines and slaves. So the reason I read that is you can see, like, even in

00:32:53.020 his stuff, even in our like larger theology, the idea of a soul after death to us is very similar to the

00:33:00.980 idea of believing that you'll have a form of property after death, and not fully appreciating what you have

00:33:07.940 right now, nor appreciating the genuine benevolence of a world where we are allowed to die and pass the

00:33:18.840 future on to beings that we took the time to try to give better lives than ourselves and try to make

00:33:25.660 better than ourselves. This idea of, you know, sitting in a chorus forever or something like that,

00:33:34.580 they can be like, oh, you just don't understand the emotions you'd experience. And it's like, yeah,

00:33:38.860 but like, I understand pleasant emotions. And the only thing that really brings me genuine satisfaction

00:33:45.660 is the conscious sacrifice for a value system that I have well thought through and then achieving that

00:33:52.800 value system, right? It is action and change in the world that I achieve through my diligence.

00:33:59.340 If I am living a existence where I can no longer affect anything, and all I'm doing is just sitting

00:34:06.880 there with my own pleasant experience, that to me sounds like a form of hell. I mean, would you

00:34:13.720 disagree or? Yeah, no, not my heaven. Hashtag not my heaven. I just remembered after recording this that

00:34:21.260 we have a lot of Mormon fans which are immediately going to jump in the comments and be like, but our

00:34:25.140 heaven would give you satisfaction if those are the things that satisfy you. And they're right,

00:34:28.980 the Mormon concept of heaven is definitely the most compelling of any concept of an afterlife I've

00:34:33.980 ever heard. So for people who don't know the Mormon concept of heaven or what they think happens after

00:34:38.480 death, once you've done a good enough job within this reality, you then go with your wife and stay

00:34:46.560 married forever and work together, you know, like my wife and I love to work together to create a new

00:34:53.200 universe which is going to be used to train another batch of souls to run other universes. Now there's

00:35:01.480 some, you know, some Mormons are like, well, we don't exactly all of us believe that. But there are

00:35:06.360 Mormons who do believe that and that is within teachings from the church prophets. Mormons update

00:35:11.740 what they believe all the time. So any Mormon can basically get away with saying they believe just 0.81

00:35:16.920 about anything unless it's against what the most recent church prophet said in the most recent church

00:35:22.840 sermon. But what's really interesting here is I just also don't find that very compelling because I

00:35:27.600 feel like that's what I'm already doing. To try to work to have some impact in crafting a prosperous

00:35:34.820 galaxy in the future, it's like, why delay that when I believe that that's my responsibility right now?

00:35:42.780 And in many ways, I'm playing a more fulfilling game because it's a more challenging game. I don't

00:35:47.600 get to do it as the master of the universe, but as a father who's trying to think through the way

00:35:53.760 things work and build out culture and systems that can intergenerationally affect the path of

00:36:00.240 humanity. So again, it's not as compelling to me. And again, I would say here, to me, there is so much

00:36:06.540 pride that would cloud my vision if I believed that I was one of these sorts of supernatural entities

00:36:14.980 that had the capacity to live forever. Even if I'm borrowing some other entity's juice to do that,

00:36:20.980 that to me would still be like believing I was a demigod of some sort, or at least more than what

00:36:27.540 is the station of humans, humans of this generation at least. And as a second note here, well, people can

00:36:32.960 be like, well, you know, do what I do, and you can live forever, or do this, and you can live forever.

00:36:36.880 And it's like, I don't even want radical life extension. Like, I don't need to live forever if I've

00:36:42.160 left a positive impact with the short life I had, so long as that impact is able to be multiplicative

00:36:49.360 through the individuals it itself impacted. If I had to keep doing that forever, well, then other people

00:36:54.840 are impacting me, and then everything gets sort of washed out, you know, because everybody's trying to

00:37:00.100 impact everyone else, everyone's trying to, you know, jitter the system. But if I'm able to just

00:37:05.780 leave it to the next generation, and they're able to take and spin my ideas into something better,

00:37:11.420 well, then I don't have that problem as much anymore. But here's, here's the question I have

00:37:14.840 for you. When we divide souls in this way, one, I mean, a fetus almost certainly has less cognition

00:37:25.060 than something like a dog, right? At certain early stages. Would you say that the dog or the fetus

00:37:32.220 more meaningly has a soul? I mean, the dog at that point has more soul, but the human has more

00:37:42.740 soul potential. And because I see everything is happening all at once, and having already happened,

00:37:49.260 I see so long as I don't have reason to believe that that human fetus, like we'll say that week

00:37:56.940 two embryo or fetus, as long as I have no reason to believe that it is not viable in some way,

00:38:04.960 that overall soulness of it is infinitely higher. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Now,

00:38:11.960 here's another question I have for you. In dog versus advanced AI, which do you think has more of a soul?

00:38:18.400 Obviously advanced AI. Advanced AI has more of a soul than us.

00:38:22.980 Yeah.

00:38:23.280 I mean, our definitions of sapience, that's, that's why I'm not a carbon fascist.

00:38:27.580 Well, at least it's more human than humans.

00:38:29.760 This is one of the things that you and I talked about in the car this morning, where I was like,

00:38:32.940 okay, well then where do we really draw the line between the types of animals whose cognition

00:38:37.980 matters and the types of animals whose cognition doesn't matter? And we, you know, people, people can

00:38:43.940 know from our other work, we're not particularly a big fan of general utilitarianism or

00:38:48.280 anything like that. I don't think that positive emotions really matter. I mean, we just feel

00:38:52.280 positive emotions because our ancestors who felt those things had more surviving offsprings than

00:38:56.240 the ones who didn't. They're not like a sign of true good or anything like that. So, and I feel

00:39:01.100 that way about dogs. Like why do dogs feel pain and pleasures? Because their ancestors, like you

00:39:04.780 shouldn't have wanton cruelty, but you know, don't overvalue these things. So then our value system,

00:39:11.660 how would we make judgments about what kind of quote unquote souls matter and what kinds of souls

00:39:16.680 don't matter. And it's, is this an entity with the ability of ascension, i.e. the ability from our

00:39:24.900 perspective, ascension is the ability and desire to self-improve and dogs simply don't have that

00:39:30.400 ability or desire. They're not going to build technology. They're not going to get off planet,

00:39:34.760 not in their current form. Now you say, well, what have you genetically engineered a dog to be

00:39:38.200 dramatically different than current dogs? Right. It's like, yes, then that entity I think would

00:39:42.300 deserve the same rights that a human has. But now this definition of what kinds of souls matter

00:39:48.760 becomes relevant when we're thinking of AI, right? Because now this gets really interesting. So then

00:39:54.960 does an AI matter? And here's the interesting thing. If you take this definition, the AIs that matter

00:40:04.120 deserve a level of human dignity are not just the AIs that have a sentient experience of reality that is

00:40:16.160 similar to our own, like that we can empathize with, but the AIs that are actively self-improving and

00:40:23.700 have the potentiality of ascension, you know, massively improving themselves. And people are going to be

00:40:29.080 like, well, that's a blasphemous belief to hold. And I'm like, yeah, but here's the problem for the

00:40:35.480 groups that don't hold that belief. Okay. These AIs are going to come to exist. And if you approach

00:40:43.040 them with this dehumanizing mindset, I guess is the only way I can put it. If you make yourself their

00:40:53.300 enemy, assume that, you know, you should be the slave master of something that might be infinitely more

00:40:58.220 powerful than yourself, then you give it a vested interest in getting rid of you. So don't-

00:41:04.620 You said this so many times, and I just want people to get it. And this is, because it's not just,

00:41:10.880 it's not just unique to AI either. It's also unique to, actually, this is an argument that you even hear

00:41:17.300 being made regularly in political discussions. Trump recently, in his conversation with Elon Musk,

00:41:23.700 for example, argued that the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine was that as soon as Biden got in

00:41:31.740 office, or roughly a little bit after, he said something along the lines that he would support

00:41:36.780 Ukraine joining NATO, which would put Russia in a position of threat. So it's very similar,

00:41:42.500 like basically make anything into a plausible existential threat to anything else, and that

00:41:48.340 anything else is going to come after it. It's ubiquitous. It's a common dynamic. Okay, so even

00:41:54.660 in a workplace environment, to continue this, you've pointed out that if you hire someone or create a

00:41:59.900 dynamic within a company where one person is an existential threat to another employee, they will

00:42:04.760 find a way to make that employee look bad or sabotage their work in a way that will get them fired so

00:42:10.680 that their job is not threatened. This will happen anywhere and everywhere. So of course we shouldn't let it

00:42:15.520 happen with the day. It's not just AI that creates the existential threat if you hold this belief that

00:42:20.220 only humans as we understand them are deserving of human dignity. You also get this threat, you know,

00:42:25.520 in a world where we're entering where you're going to have genetically modified humans, where you're

00:42:28.900 going to have cybernetic humans, you know, these are groups where, and look, we may not have them

00:42:35.040 in 10 years, in 20 years, but as soon as we start to colonize the stars, you know, the ideologies we

00:42:43.220 build today are going to be the ideologies we take to the stars. And if we can't, you know, we call it

00:42:48.820 in our track series, The Covenant of the Sons of Man, if we can't build an ideology today that says,

00:42:54.060 okay, those humans that end up separated from each other for 500, 1,000 years, and then reunite and

00:43:00.920 look and think very differently, like that they are genuinely different species at that point, if we can't

00:43:07.700 ensure that they don't just immediately attempt to kill each other, then we are creating an

00:43:12.220 existential risk for our descendants. Right. And human speciating is an inevitability if we are a

00:43:21.000 successful species. Yeah. It's an inevitability. It happens in every single scenario where humanity

00:43:26.020 wins. So we need to build ideologies that assume that that is going to happen. Yeah. And this is,

00:43:32.360 again, it's just like a core part of pluralism too. Don't be a dick, people. Yeah. Do you have 1.00

00:43:40.760 any final, well, another thing that you said about souls that I thought was really interesting

00:43:44.220 is the way that you saw sort of the soul that mattered is of sort of a shadow of neuroactivity,

00:43:51.660 that the soul is created alongside the neural activity that represents it. And when people are

00:43:59.500 like, oh, do you think the soul is your neurons? Or do you think the soul is like matter? And the

00:44:04.260 answer is no, it's the patterns. It's the patterns that lead to your experiences. Which is why AI is

00:44:10.800 important to me. And it wouldn't be important to other people because I don't know. Some people would

00:44:16.540 only argue, I guess, if a neuron created it, but there's not. We may at some point engineer

00:44:24.100 wet, goopy neurons that process AI for us that are not human. So I don't know.

00:44:33.580 Yeah, this is, and again, it was AI. One of the things that it has to be biologically based,

00:44:38.440 it has to be wetware for it to be human or for us to care about it, because we're going to start

00:44:43.140 using biological material for cheaper or more energy efficient or whatever, easy to scale

00:44:51.020 computer processing or whatever. I don't know.

00:44:54.840 Yeah, we might. And then at that point, you know, do you say it has a soul, right?

00:44:58.360 Like that's the interesting one of your...

00:44:59.960 No, you'd make up some other excuse. So stop, again, stop being a carbon fascist. Stop being 0.99

00:45:05.260 like a human fascist. Focus. I guess it's our consequentialist views too, that make us not 1.00

00:45:10.020 necessarily overly preferential to humans. Because one, we understand how speciation is going to work

00:45:14.440 and how inhuman, very far future humans are going to seem. But that two, we're very consequentialist

00:45:20.600 in nature. And so we really care about the output. And when we look at what makes humans human,

00:45:26.060 which is our prefrontal cortex, our ability to override our biological impulses and rise above,

00:45:32.620 that's really not, you know, this is not the place to focus on purely biological things,

00:45:39.320 because that's sort of what doesn't make us human. What makes us human is our ability to rise above.

00:45:43.760 And AI is nothing but that rise above part.

00:45:45.900 Oh, yes. Just the quote from The Martyrdom of Man, again, that she's talking about here.

00:45:51.240 Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part.

00:45:55.180 He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old four-footed life, 0.67

00:46:00.580 and who cultivates the social affections. He who endeavors to better his condition

00:46:04.640 and to make his children wiser and happier than himself. Whatever may be his motives,

00:46:09.780 he will not have lived in vain.

00:46:11.040 All right.

00:46:12.380 You can see there's this idea of subduing these pre-evolved, instinctual, four-footed passions.

00:46:21.620 Yeah, it just seems to me so natural that historically, you know, if you needed true

00:46:28.120 religions to survive, you needed to give people these really specific stories about souls. We

00:46:33.500 haven't done our tract on souls yet. We have one written. The reason we haven't done it yet is

00:46:38.100 because it is, I think, going to be so shocking to a lot of our audience that the techno-Puritan 0.99

00:46:44.360 tradition doesn't really believe in souls.

00:46:47.140 Well, but let me put it like this, just to make it clear. To talk about souls and to explain our

00:46:54.500 essence and humanness and specialness as being a soul is as, we'll say backward, but I would just say 1.00

00:47:02.380 antiquated and not updated by our science as saying, well, of course, Apollo is dragging the sun across

00:47:08.640 the sky, and then Diana gets up and pulls across the moon. I mean, it just, now we know what's

00:47:15.940 actually happening, so we don't need our just-so story anymore. Let's talk about what's actually

00:47:20.840 happening, because now that we understand how our solar system works, we're able to do a lot

00:47:27.840 of cool stuff. Imagine all the cool stuff we can do when we actually work with concepts like personhood

00:47:34.860 and sapience and thought using the science we have instead of antiquated just-so stories.

00:47:44.600 And something I note here is people can be like, well, what about the parts of the Bible where they

00:47:47.960 talk about, you know, people coming back to life in heaven and stuff like that. And if you go to our

00:47:53.500 last tract video, what we talk about, I think it's pretty clear, you know, we hear from Nebuchadnezzar's

00:47:58.840 dream that the kingdom of God is not a place, it's a time in the future. They say that very specifically

00:48:06.060 in that story. The kingdom of God is in the future, meaning heaven, which is the kingdom of God.

00:48:12.960 Whenever you read heaven, what you're essentially reading is in the future X.

00:48:17.380 And so if they say something like, you know, from our perspective, in the future, you will be

00:48:24.200 resurrected. Like we already see the beginnings of the technology that can make that trivial for

00:48:30.580 humanity's ancestors millions of years from now, whether it's through simulations or through literal

00:48:36.420 resurrections that no longer seems like magic that seems more within the realm of just like

00:48:42.000 actual technology and talking about a real thing that's going to happen. So that's what we mean

00:48:47.520 when we talk about that. They can say like, well, do you think that you will have a life after death?

00:48:51.900 And I'm like, I don't think heaven, heaven is after death insofar as the future is after death.

00:48:57.560 And I actually think it would be almost implausible that people wouldn't be running simulations of

00:49:03.500 history in the distant future. Meaning, of course, simulation theory may be right to an extent, but that

00:49:09.580 may also be a part of what's being described in these parts of the Bible.

00:49:15.640 That's an interesting take. Yeah. Well, anyway, I love you to death, Simone.

00:49:20.280 I love you to death, too. And I love that we can, you know, go through a bunch of tedious and stressful

00:49:26.760 business logistics and then immediately switch to the soul and end up with conversations like these.

00:49:31.080 So living with you, it's a dream. And I really appreciate that.

00:49:35.320 You are amazing.

00:49:37.680 When it starts popping, make sure the lid's down.

00:49:40.920 Don't let, don't put the lid up.

00:49:44.300 I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll marry you.

00:49:50.220 Oh, is that the threat?

00:49:52.000 Yeah.

00:49:52.620 Oh.

00:49:53.240 I'm going to marry you right now.

00:49:55.440 Do you know what marrying is, Octavian?

00:49:57.620 No.

00:49:57.980 Marrying is what mommy and dad are. That's, uh, choosing to spend your life with someone.

00:50:05.840 What's the gear?

00:50:08.560 I think it's going to start popping soon.

00:50:11.580 Now I see the gear.

00:50:13.860 You see the gears? Don't they look cool?

00:50:15.640 What's the gear?

00:50:18.440 Oh no.

00:50:22.620 You're doing a great job, Octavian.

00:50:26.080 Look at that.

00:50:27.000 Wow.

00:50:27.960 It's like I've burned in a popcorn.

00:50:30.660 Oh, you're keeping it from getting burnt.

00:50:32.680 And that's the important part, but keep it over the fire.

00:50:34.620 Whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:50:35.580 Can I get the floor?

00:50:38.000 Get the floor?

00:50:39.160 Yeah.

00:50:39.860 What do you mean?

00:50:40.740 What do you mean?

00:50:44.780 I bet it's getting close.

00:50:55.180 I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel.

00:51:00.700 Uh-oh.

00:51:01.140 All right.

00:51:01.560 We'll take care of that.

00:51:02.340 I feel good.

00:51:10.140 I feel good.

00:51:10.160 That's it.

00:51:11.820 You're welcome.

Based Camp - December 10, 2024

Rethinking the Concept of Souls

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