Truth Unrestricted

Send us Fan Mail Episode 33 - Cults Creating a definition of what exactly is a cult is very difficult because they have so many incarnations in the world. But there is a way to define some of their properties. Four of these properties are present in all cults and there are some additional properties are only present in some cults. 1) The primary property of a cult is that of an additional influenc...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 32 - Belief Belief: confidence in the truth of an idea without the need for evidence Fundamental question: can we believe in something with enough force to cause it to be manifest in our world? At first those who are rational must say that of course we can't and that thinking that way is ridiculous. But we must remember that many people *do* believe that they can infl...

Send us Fan Mail We can think of individual communities as though they are individuals. The characteristics of the community would be their culture (what we might reasonably expect them to be doing or acting). A community can decide among themselves to have any culture at all, any set of rules to live by and any level of tolerance or strictness of behaviour. But when you have competing communities...

Send us Fan Mail Brent Lee is a former conspiracist who has since rejected the collection of conspiracy notions he once believed and now talks about the dangers of such beliefs. He has a podcast with Neil Sanders called "Some Dare Call It A Conspiracy" wherein they describe what each conspiracy is and why it is untrue. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.w...

Send us Fan Mail David Bloomberg has a podcast called Why Blank Lost which methodically examines why contestants on Survivor and Big Brother have lost. His latest episode is available here: https://robhasawebsite.com/survivor43-episode5-why-lost/ Define dishonesty. Consciously withholding information. Sometimes substituting the withheld information with other information (lies by omission vs spoke...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 28 - Trust Define Trust - Trust is a two-gate process. First, a belief that you know something about the decisions of the person being trusted. Second, that the decisions of the person being trusted will be useful for you. Trust imbalance. Two entities that trust each other but to differing degrees. This describes all pairs of entities that trust each other, in fact. Some...

Send us Fan Mail Free will is the idea that you might be able to make a decision that is not determined by your genetics, biology and situation. Determinism is the idea that all decisions are determined by the current physical state of the body and therefore we don't have the freedom to decide things any way other than the way we decided (i.e. free will is an illusion). Free Choice is the abi...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 26 - The model in the brain All the things you experience appear to be feeding directly into your brain. What is actually happening is that the brain is receiving all the signals and then interpreting them into a model of the world, then projecting an image of that model into the conscious part of your mind. This is why you are conscious of some sensations and not others....

Send us Fan Mail Episode 25 - Are people naturally good? We would like to think of humans as being at some sort of moral pinnacle. This assumption generally underlies a LOT of conversations that are being had in a LOT of spaces (though almost no one mentions it). We might well ask: is this really true? Are humans naturally "good"? The area of our brain (frontal lobe) that contributes mos...

Send us Fan Mail Lydia Greene describes her journey to become an antivaxer and her subsequent journey back to science-based decisions. Along the way she describes moments of unreality brought on by cognitive dissonance and some of the emotional decisions that lead her to begin making the wrong decisions. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPT_vaccine#Combination_vaccines_with_acellular_pertussis...

Send us Fan Mail What is this episode about? Listen and find out! Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecos_Bill

Send us Fan Mail What is propaganda? An organized effort to distort reality or the accepted truth of society at large. The idea of propaganda carries with it the idea that the set of things that the public generally believes both exists and matters to the entity producing the propaganda. For some, this set of ideas is the "zeitgeist". The spirit of the age. In this context, propaganda is...

Send us Fan Mail Callback to most recent episode about "the two selves". Vladimir Putin has his "finger on the button" right now. He wants to be seen as a leader of a powerful nation. If the current excursion in the Ukraine doesn't support that image he holds of himself this will cause (in my prediction) the worst version of Vladimir Putin to be shown to us. He may take mo...

Send us Fan Mail What is the meaning of death? Can we come to understand it in a way that makes grief easier to manage? Why do we attach ourselves to otherwise unimportant things once someone dies? These are the sorts of questions I ponder when I think about death.

Send us Fan Mail Episode X - The Two Selves We each have two versions of ourselves. The first is the one known only to oneself. It is on the inside and it can only really be known by oneself. The second is the version of us that we want the world to see. It is based on our inner self but it is modified by our social influences. Is this the "ego and superego" that is taught in psychology?...

Send us Fan Mail Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Send us Fan Mail Notes Why do we consider corruption to be a byproduct of being powerful? Is it possible that most people would become corrupt if we achieved positions of power? Would the process of becoming powerful change us in such a way that we began to appear (or become) corrupt? Are all powerful people corrupt or are some powerful people using their positions to benefit society? If you were...

Send us Fan Mail Excerpt: If this world changes it will be because *I* worked to change it. Slowly. Little by little. With words and ideas. Join me. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion

Send us Fan Mail Our daydreams are often unrealistic but usually not so fantastical as to be outside the realm of possibility. They usually include situations we might actually find ourselves in and they probably include us doing things we wouldn't normally do. They will definitely include other people reacting to us in an unrealistic way. Are daydreams part of our mental software that is mea...

Send us Fan Mail Were the Nazis really fanatics? Can you change the minds of people through violence? Should you if you could? Links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMgctAIeL8c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials https://www.historyhit.com/hitlers-inner-circle/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is...

Send us Fan Mail Excerpt: Game theory scenarios are structured around "rational agents". We assume that humans in these scenarios will act rationally, that they will act in a manner consistent with continuing their own life unimpeded by injury and with as much gain as possible. But as soon as they are irrational everything about the mathematics is worthless. Links https://en.wikipedia.or...

Send us Fan Mail Excerpt - There is a popular lie being told to us: that compassion and logic are incompatible. It is usually said that being logical (or "too logical") means that you're not being compassionate or compassionate enough. The corollary to that is often not said out loud but is carried on those same shoulders: in order to be compassionate you must abandon all logic. Lin...

Send us Fan Mail Do we (as humans) have a predilection for things that are unknowable? Do we lose some interest in a thing once we find out how it works? Is it "fascinating" when its workings are mysterious and is it "mundane" when its workings are well known to us? As we learn about something, it loses its mystique. As we come to see new things that we don't know about th...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 10 - Technology and Current Benevolent Overlords The state of our current social media technology.  What is Artificial Intelligence? A computer that mimics the pattern recognition features of a human. Early types of this attempted to do this by rote.  What is a machine learning computer? A machine that takes AI to another level. It is capable of writing its own code based...

Send us Fan Mail Intuition is the ability of the brain to recognize processes and patterns without consciously studying them. It is a very powerful tool but cannot be relied upon. It is the source of many false conclusions. We commonly mistake intuition for instinct. Both are happening outside our conscious perception. Instinct is the collection of decisions granted by genetics that are meant to g...