 There's a huge divide in the world of ideas between two camps, rationalists on one end and empiricists on the other. This divide has to do with the nature of knowledge, and in particular the relationship between theory and data, between concepts and experience. I think that the two main camps, rationalists and empiricists, get it wrong. They both make the counterpoint's error in an interesting way. And I think the correct method for thinking about the relationship between theory and data is to blend both rationalism and empiricism. So let me give you an example of what I see as dogmatic rationalism. I'll give you an example of dogmatic empiricism and then how my theory I think blends the two. So an example of dogmatic rationalism would look something like this. I start from a theoretical understanding about what types of things exist in the world. And I know that there are physical things and everything that exists must be fundamentally physical because to think otherwise is nonsensical. Therefore, when anybody reports they had some transcendental experience or they try to say God exists because such and such, or there's a supernatural quality to such and such, they are necessarily wrong because their claimed experience does not fit into my theory. So they dismiss the data, the reporting of some of these experiences, so that they can preserve their theory. I would say that's an example of dogmatic rationalism. The counterpoint is dogmatic empiricism and it goes something like this. I experienced God, therefore, God exists. I had a nature of my experience in a particular way and I'm going to theorize about the nature of that experience. And all of my theories that I build on top of my experience must be true because the experience itself was true. Data or experience speaks for itself. It builds its own theory. This I think is dogmatic empiricism. With the dogmatic rationalist, a lot of time you see this as people who are biased in times towards religion or strict philosophy tend to lean towards dogmatic rationalism and scientists, physicists, tend to lean towards dogmatic empiricism thinking that data speaks for itself. Both of these things are completely wrong. I think there's a beautiful harmony between the two. There's a phrase that I like to use, which I'll be using in the next big book that I'm writing called The Mind and the World, which is this. It kind of puts in context what we're doing with philosophy and trying to understand the world. The purpose of philosophy is to best explain the phenomena that we experience. So we theorize, but what we theorize about, the starting fundamental in our theories are what we experience. So you don't start a theory talking about angels and leprechauns, if you have no experience of those things. You start with the nature of your experience, which is sense data. There are colors going on. There are color blobs in my visual field. What is the cause of the color blobs? And then you might develop a theory about the existence of objects in the physical world. So that might seem very abstract. Let me give you a concrete application of using theory to best explain the phenomena we experience and it has to do with physics and the nature of ordinary objects. So I think the dogmatic rationalist says the world, the physical world is filled with objects that act in accordance with physical laws. You can read about these laws in textbooks. You start with textbook knowledge, start with the theories first, and then you try to fit your experiences into the theory. So I read about objects, I've read about physics. And that must be what these things are, I've got a little SD card here. This is the object that I read about. This thing going on right now correlates with the theory that I read about. So that must be what it is. I think that's mistaken. Let me give you the dogmatic empiricist approach. It says there's no such things as objects in the world. That's just concepts in your head. All that exists is the experience that I'm having. There is just blackness in my visual field. There's just a tactile sensation. All objects are just bundles of sensations or bundles of perceptions. There's no object out there. I think that's also kind of silly. Let me give you what I think is a beautiful harmony between the two. We start with experience. We start with the fundamental. What is directly available to our consciousness? Our experience, my experience, is of a black and colored blob in my visual field. And I have some sensory, I have some feelings as well. They seem to be correlated by feelings seem to be over here, like with my tactile sensation. And I go, okay, the experience is happening. But what is the cause of the experience? I have lots of experiences like this. I have lots of different colors in my visual field. I have lots of different tactile sensations. Maybe it's the case that the cause of those experiences and the cause of the regularity of those experiences is because there's another world out there outside of my experience. And it's inhabited by, let's say, physical objects. There's a bunch of stuff. That stuff is clumped together, let's say, in ways that I've got sensory organs. And when my sensory organs interact with those clumps of matter, it gives me this experience. So now we're developing a theory out of the experience. We're not trying to fit the experience into a theory and we're not just trying to say, oh, the experience speaks for itself. Now when you do that, it also allows you to be wrong. This is what people don't seem to understand about theories, is that a lot of times they're wrong because the data doesn't speak for itself. I'll go back to the God examples, a great one. It very well may be the case that when you have religious experiences, spiritual experiences, I've had one, it forces you to expand your world view. As it did me, there's something else going on here when I experienced love, let's say, for the first time. But that doesn't mean that my first theoretical explanation is going to be correct, that doesn't, I can't say God exists because I had this experience. And what God is, is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being who loves me and sent his son to die, or whatever religious interpretation or religious text you're talking about. Just because your experience doesn't fit into your theory, so you now have to expand your theory to incorporate the experience, doesn't mean that any old theoretical explanation will do. It might be that when I have the sensory experience of the SD card, I could say to myself, the cause of that is because there's an evil demon that is implanting experiences in my visual field, and that's the cause. I think that's a pretty crummy theoretical explanation. It is a theory, but I don't think it's a correct theory. So, when you take this approach, and you go through field by field, physics, philosophy, economics, mathematics, whatever. When you start from the experience, and then you build the theory, I think you get a much more coherent and less dogmatic, rational worldview that incorporates the beauty of pure theoretical reasoning with the beauty of pure data gathering.