 Part two of our Charleston studio setup is now complete as you can see by the wall behind me and I want to celebrate in the most exciting of ways by talking about Bigfoot and alien abductions. Is there any reasonable intelligent way to respond to people who claim that they've seen Bigfoot or seen alien abductions without being dismissive and without mocking them? Is there anything we can learn or any careful way about thinking about Joe who was abducted and probed by aliens? I think there is. It is tempting to dismiss and to mock and to laugh at. But I think we can actually learn something about philosophy and the thing I keep talking about, the relationship between the mind and the world. I can say something like this. If somebody were to claim that they were abducted by aliens, that claim doesn't fit into my belief system. I don't have the metaphysical belief in aliens or at the very least not aliens that abduct people. Maybe they do, but I just don't have reason to believe that right now. But I do have a positive belief in the existence of experiences that people report as being abducted by aliens. So if somebody says they're abducted by aliens, I don't immediately have to say, Hi, you're crazy. I can rationally understand that by saying, Okay, you've had an experience whereby in your language and in your metaphysical worldview, you think the most reasonable interpretation of the experiences is to say that you were abducted by these people that probed you and so on. Now, I can find some common ground with that. I might even say I believe that you have had an experience which you interpret as being abducted by aliens. Just like I could say with people with religious beliefs, I don't believe. I can say yes, I think you have had an experience where you report being one with the creator of the universe. Sure, I believe you have that experience. I'm not so arrogant as to say no, that experience didn't happen or that's not the way to put it in that person's language and metaphysics. That's the way they report it, so I believe them. However, extending that kind of courtesy to say, Okay, you are trying to report your experiences, I don't have to believe the theoretical baggage that comes with those particular claims. So just because somebody says, for example, they've seen ghosts in a graveyard, I can agree, yes, you've seen things that you think are ghosts in a graveyard. Okay, and then we can talk about that. I could say, you've saw shapes and you saw colors in a graveyard which you interpreted as these particular entities. Is there a way we can explain that experience without positing a large expansion of our metaphysics to believe in the existence of ghosts and angels and alien abductors? I think that there is. Same with alien abduction or really vivid dreams or angels talking to people. It might be the case that angels talk to people when they sleep, it's possible. There might be another explanation though. It might be the case that the dream state is particularly vivid and your subconscious brain is trying to tell you something that is very important for your own sake of healing or because it's kind of a personification of your own value system which you interpret as being external to yourself as if it were an angel talking to you. So all kinds of ways we can try to explain a particular experience without expanding our world view if we think we don't believe in the existence of those types of entities. Here's some of the benefit that comes from doing things this way. Take Bigfoot. When people keep denying the existence of Bigfoot it fuels a conspiratorial mind, not necessarily a wrong way just in a straightforward way. Let's say I've experienced X and X is this remarkable experience and everybody says, no, no, no, that's impossible. You're crazy, but you still hang on to that experience. You're not going to be persuaded by other people mocking you. You're not going to be persuaded by other people calling you names. No, you've had that experience. That's kind of a certain fact. Contrasted to somebody with my own approach saying I'm not going to deny the experiences that you report. That would be incredibly arrogant and short-sighted to think I know all of the potential experiences that any human being can have. That's ludicrous. If somebody says they've experienced X, I can interpret that in a particular way and work with it. However, where the philosophy of mind comes into play is understanding exactly what is being experienced. So take somebody that has seen a green Martian. I definitely saw a green Martian talk to me. What he's actually communicating is, Steve, I saw a green blob in my visual field that inside of this green blob it had two little black blobs. And I heard sounds and I interpreted, I conceptually interpreted those shapes as an alien head and I conceptually interpreted those sounds as alien vocalizations. So when somebody says an alien spoke to me, I can say, okay, they had some experience whereby they had a particular sensory data, they interpreted it a particular way, and then their most sensible way of understanding that is to unify those color blobs as an independently existing entity that spoke to them and so on. Exact same thing with Bigfoot. When somebody says, I know I saw Bigfoot, I can say, well, you know that you saw colors in your visual field that were arranged a particular way in a particular circumstance. And what you thought was the forest, which is actually just color blobs in your visual field that you conceptually interpreted as being a forest, it might be that there are big bear-like creatures that could be interpreted as ape-like creatures from a distance. So I can explain the phenomena that you've experienced coherently and respectfully in a theory that can be more reasonable or perhaps less radical. Now we have to be really careful here because this way of approaching language, really, is wonderful and opens up a lot of avenues for hearing people's experiences, which when you hear people's experiences, wow, there's lots of experiences out there that I guarantee you've not had that are really interesting, but we also have to be careful because it's tempting to say, I can explain everybody's experiences in all circumstances in terms of my current metaphysical and theoretical worldview that I don't think is the case. For example, if somebody reported they were in a group of 15 people and one person started levitating and vomiting blue goo and there are other 15 people that report the same thing, now it's hard for me to say, okay, well, I know exactly what was going on. It was a collective hallucination or whatever. I mean, I haven't heard an actual story like that that I think is incredible, but if something like that were to happen, I'd be like, pfft, I mean, I probably have to expand my worldview to believe that these people are all lying for some particular reason. And this is especially true in space when we're talking about religion. So this directly, I'll just tell you what happened to me, I had a theory about the way the world works, about the objects and entities which existed in the world prior to 2011, prior to October 2011, and then I had an experience which did not fit into my worldview. I had an experience, I say, of love that forced me to expand my worldview. I thought, okay, the qualities of this experience, as if somebody is talking to me, as if I just learned the meaning of life and felt it in a really powerful way, makes me think there is some other intelligence in the world. There's some structure, there's some intentional loving structure in the fabric of existence or something like that, which I realize if you've not had that experience probably sounds crazy, that's okay, I'm not trying to convince you by telling you about my experience. But I bring it up as to say you have to be open to expanding your theory based on your own experiences, most radically, most powerfully, or at certain times the experiences of others. There's a great quote from a pragmatist philosopher ironically enough, which is a philosophy very far away from my own. But I forget who it was, I think it was William James, this is a loose quote and I don't want to look it up right now. He says essentially, my theory has to leave room for your experience. I think that is beautiful. Of course it's a double-edged sword, I'm not just going to accept theoretical interpretations that people give me of their experiences, but I also have to be willing to say, hey look, I haven't sorted out exactly how everything in the universe works for certainty and I'm not going to just dismiss your claims because for some reason they don't fit into my particular theory. I think that's a wonderful and open-minded approach to balancing rational theoretical reasoning with empirical inquiry and this beautiful harmony between the two.