Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion & the Nature of Belief | Lex Fridman Podcast #149

The following is a conversation with Diana Walsh Pasulka, a professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW, and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. This book is one of the most fascinating explorations of the interconnected nature of technology, belief, and the mystery of alien intelligence. Quick mention of our sponsors: LMNT Electrolyte drink, Grammarly writing plug-in, Business Wars Podcast, and Cash App. So the choice is health, grammar, knowledge, or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say, as I did in the recent video on how many intelligent alien civilizations are out there, that the nature of alien life, intelligence, and how they might communicate with us humans, is likely stranger than we imagine, and perhaps stranger than we can imagine. What is most fascinating to me is how the belief in the communication with such civilizations changes people's understanding of the world, and, as Diana argues, the technology we create. Technological innovation itself seems to manifest the mythology in our collective intelligence that turns the seemingly impossible into reality in just a matter of years through the belief of individual humans that carry out that innovation. The nature and power of this belief in both technology and extraterrestrial intelligence is mysterious and fascinating, perhaps holding the key to us humans understanding our own mind, our consciousness, and engineering versions of it in the machines we create. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFridman. And now, here's my conversation with Diana Walsh Pasulka. You are a scholar of religious belief, or belief in general. So the fascinating question, uh, what do you think is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality? What is real, period?

Sure. What is real? Easy question. (laughs) So first, let me start with belief. So belief is generally ... There are different definitions of belief, just, just as there are different definitions of what is real. Okay? So for belief in my field, it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our actions. Okay? So we believe the sun is gonna rise tomorrow, therefore we act as if it will rise tomorrow. All right. Beliefs can be wrong. For a long time, people believed, and actually some still do, that the Earth was flat. Okay? Well, that's obviously an erroneous belief. So beliefs can be wrong. Uh, now the, the bigger question that philosophers ask is, um, does ... Is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality? So now let me go to objective reality. So what is real? I don't think we can actually obtain a correct understanding of what is real. And in that sense, I have to refer to a philosopher again, and that would be Immanuel Kant. So Immanuel Kant is one of the ... He was a, a ... Basically in the 1750s, he wrote Critiques of Reason and things like that. So he's a ... Well, if you're a philosopher or have any kind of understanding of Western history, you know who he is. Um, he had this idea that we can actually never get to the thing in i- in itself. Okay? So, and he called that the noumenal, the thing in itself. He said, "This ... Let's take this table, for instance, that you and I are talking across. So this thing is a table. You and I both know that. We assume it's real. We believe in it because we put our water on it and then our water stays on it." Okay. Um, "However, can we know this thing, um, in and of itself as a table?" Um, so that would be what he then would call, um, the phenomenal. How do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is? Okay? How, how do we know? Uh, we use our faculties. So we use our senses and things like that. But again, even our senses can be wrong. So I've been on committees just recently, this year, last year, for hiring professors in my department who are philosophers. And every ... And we're hiring metaphysicians and, you know, people who are thinking about the nature of reality.