 with Socrates and Sextus Empiricus and that's a long time ago and what they meant by skepticism was very different than what we mean by skepticism. They meant that you can't know anything. You can't know that the universe exists. You can't trust your senses because our senses lie and we're on these little creatures on a planet we're not set up to know everything. The thing is that agnosticism which was made up by Huxley at the turn of the 20th century was based on a very narrow version of skepticism instead of that you can't know anything about the universe. Just pointing that skepticism at certain things for which we have no evidence specifically mostly the God idea but also all sorts of things that we have no evidence for that we that people continue to believe in that this idea that you can't you can't prove a negative you can't know a negative but that's really not the case while while it's philosophically sound to say that we can't know anything. It is not philosophically sound to say that you can know some things but that certain types of things that you want to believe in but you don't have any evidence for those things you're gonna say you can't know anything about. If I have a plate of chicken in front of me I can't say I can't know whether or not it's steak I can know I know certain things they're evident in front of me and the things that we have evidence and proof for it or the things that after a long look at we have no evidence or proof that we can begin to say that we know one doesn't have to be agnostic about everything so while we are skeptics we're trying to elicit skepticism in other people but it's certainly possible for us to know that some things are not the case. I've got time for only a couple of examples but my books doubt the happiness myth and the end of the soul all are chock full of examples of people who had who were skeptics all through history it's remarkable how long it goes back the ancient Carvaca in India went were in 600 BC and they didn't believe that we could know anything and they were skeptical certainly of astrology of an after life one of the examples that I want to talk about today is Thomas Edison he was a known skeptic and doubter of all sorts of things and William James the very famous Harvard philosopher had been one of the people who was involved in scientific study of the after life. Sanctis were very big in this period and they were very big even in scientific circles. People had just found out about radioactivity and about the periodic table and there were a lot of things that were so new that people thought well maybe this very foreign subject is also going to be something that turns out to be true and World War one certainly had so many deaths in it that it encouraged a lot of people to want very much to have this communication with the dead and these things were mostly about Sanctis small groups of people meeting not the arena kind of talking to the dead that we have today but they were amazingly people by scientific minds Marie Curie and her husband went to them Shaul Rache who was a Nobel Prize winning scientist is the one who made up ectoplasm I'm sorry my slide for that isn't here but it's the goo that mediums would produce on themselves and on others in order to have a parent proof that something had happened and you can see this in Ghostbusters they get slimed this was the mediums were mostly from Italy and Spain and they came up into France and England and tricked a lot of people with a lot of flim flam so when William James was one of the believers in the scientific study of the afterlife he was not an outlier on this and he promised very publicly that when he died he would do his best to come back and contact somebody so a little while after he died one of his secretaries announced that she had been contacted by William James and and it made a huge splash a lot of newspapers covered it and New York Times covered it and they decided to dispatch a reporter to Thomas Edison a well known skeptic to see if they could find out what he thought of it and I'll I'll read you a little quote this is 1910 in New York Times which is pretty bold no this is Edison no all this talk of an existence for us as individuals beyond the grave is wrong it is born of our tenacity of life our desire to go on living our dread of coming to an end as individuals I do not dread it though personally I cannot see any use of a future life and a later communique he wrote I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell of future life individuals or of a proof or a personal God I work on certain lines that might be called perhaps mechanical proof proof that is what I have always been after he got in a lot of trouble a lot of a lot of letters but there were many other debunkers around the time same time but starting earlier in France there was a group called the Society of Mutual Autopsy I went to France to study them and down in the right under the Eiffel Tower there's the Chocodero the in the Museum of Mankind is there and down these long winding steps in the dark with a little flashlight I found these old metal cabinets and in them was the archives of the Society of Mutual Autopsy these were people who had met as atheists before they became they started the Society of Mutual Autopsy and they were well a silk plate would say they were dicks about it they were brashly offensive whenever they got the chance they they were brashly offensive in the process of campaigning the government to kick out the nuns from a municipal building which they actually succeeded in doing they changed street signs that were religious to from like Saint-etienne to Diderot Diderot being a famous enlightenment atheists are close to they fought against seances as well against a whole range of superstitious ideas what they meant by the Society of Mutual Autopsy was this they were they were inspired by Broca's aphasia I had a great slide about that too Broca's aphasia is on the third left frontal convolution of the brain if you have a lesion there you'll have trouble speaking so it was the first time anyone had ever proved a relationship between brain morphology and personality brain shape weight size and personality abilities and traits so the Society of Mutual Autopsy Broca was one of the people who joined the earliest and he was also one of the earliest brains dissected they waited till after death but a lot of these were older people who joined they were also inspired along with Broca they were inspired by the french translation of the origin of the species which came a little late and was done by a woman named Clémence Royer who had been a longtime atheist and a longtime believer in evolution lamarckian evolution and she wrote a preface to the origin of the species that was it was so thick it was a book of its own arguing that the origin of the pre-species proved atheism and the french got the origin of the species that way through her Darwin actually repudiated that translation about 10 years later but that was all they had for a long time so inspired by both these people they decided to start the Society of Mutual Autopsy and they advertised in it in all the left-wing leading journals and hundreds of people all over France and some around the world joined the Society of Mutual Autopsy and they sent in their their life stories because you had to be able to make a relationship between the abilities and the personality the original people who had founded it knew each other very well so they could dissect a brain and they made pronouncements they said this area was thick and after all this person had great spatial relations so maybe this has something to do with the truth is they didn't find anything anywhere near as concrete as Broca's aphasia in the 30 years that they practiced this they were also when they were doing this making a statement about their belief in in there being no afterlife and they they did that partially through making fun of seances but partially just by they had materialist deathbed scenes at the time in France they were published an awful lot of Catholic deathbed scenes where the person would announce that they were giving themselves up to God and they would reiterate their faith and so they had these materialist deathbed scenes where they would talk about proof and science and how in dying and giving their brains to dissection they were they were forwarding science and therefore living on the and Clemos Roye by the way the translator she she joined she was one of the one of them there were men and women from all over France who were part of the Society of Mutual Autopsy the reason they thought that this would prove to the Catholic Church that there was no soul was because at the time the definition of soul was really the thinking part of you the whole idea was that you that the the meat was just a the seat of the brain and the brain the mind was the soul and so nowadays that's just not what soul means anymore they just keep swerving to fit the evidence a little bit but that's what it meant at the time and so the idea was that to prove that there was a relationship there between what the brain looked like and what the brain could what the mind could do would be a way of proving this and in a way they won that is how it didn't get rid of the idea of the soul but it entirely changed what it was and made it much less powerful an explanation of what was going on with human beings the actions that they took part in had a poetic side to them there was poetry that they wrote also there were poets amongst them as well as many doctors and other kinds of scientists but also just the whole way they carried out their business in terms of ritualizing science a little bit and making well like those materialist death bed scenes making there be a kind of way of marveling at the universe as well as describing it so it's not just a matter of science but a matter of being aware of the wonders of science and I think in the term of the future of secularism we might do even more in our blogs and articles to not just have all with science but to have all with the things that are beyond science but still scientific by that I mean something like the sheer billions billions of galaxies out there were incredibly small and then of course the billions of human beings that are on the planet if you had billions of ping-pong balls on a table and one fell off it wouldn't matter but each of us matters tremendously it's a paradox it's something that thinking about makes us more human and I think some of the people who believe in strange things that are flimflam do so because they're hungry for something that reflects the inner life but there are things that are not flimflam that reflect the inner life that we can talk about and can think about another of the paradoxes is just the simple fact that we're all in our heads right now in our skulls looking out at each other I mean it's an amazing thing the meat thinks the meat wrote paradise lost the meat wrote all the symphonies the meat made the ipad it's it's shocking and it's something that you can never fully take in and it makes sense to run over it in your mind you know the church had some things right that you go back once a week these are things that you contemplate more and more and you get more and more out of them meditating on the wonders and paradoxes another way that we could take care of ourselves is something that I talk about in the happiness myth what I've been talking about so far a lot of it is in doubt but in the happiness myth I look at the way we for instance the way we eat the way we take drugs today the way we think about sex the way we think about a whole range of things including exercise the the notion that we have about exercise today is uh very skewed in history the only time in history that you can find people being as concentrated in the body beautiful as we are is the ancient spartans that had a but they had population of slaves larger than the members of the community um and the fascists the next one and there was also a plantation culture in in the south there had been tournaments that were also about the body beautiful we're in terrible company with this um not just health but but the the body beautiful to the point of the gym body and if you think about gyms how what a strange thing they are look if you looked if you were in some other culture and you looked at this or if this was in another if we looked at another culture that was so interested in the body beautiful we would say this was a martial culture this was a culture that was trying to promote a kind of strength and militarism um but also and it reiterates the idea of having an underclass we let someone else rake our leaves and we go to the gym we take the escalator to the stair master and there's a reason that we do it it's the underclass that goes home in dirty clothes we go home from work in dirty clothes and then switch to a gym bag that has that's where we sweat it's a way of saying to the culture who we are and so if you like gyms go to the gym and of course there are health benefits to a certain amount of exercise but the idea of cleaning one's own house taking walks when you had to go go places raking your own leaves the idea that the gym is a very peculiar place um it might be another kind of thing that along with the other things I talk about in the happiness myth another kind of broad range things that we could be skeptical about it's not just the flim flam but also just our own cultures biases and the things that we think are true um there's one more thing that I'll mention about ways that we could take care of ourselves um in terms of skepticism and that is um the new book I'm writing is called stay and it's about uh the history and the history of suicide and philosophy against it and it's very much a secular book um the religious people have their own answers for this god says don't do it um and of course a lot of religious people do it anyway thinking god will forgive um so even they need a secular argument against suicide and there it there have been throughout history uh philosophers who have come up with beautiful arguments that in one way we owe it to each other to stay alive that human beings copy each other we have a tremendous influence on each other and suicide clusters show us that the idea of staying alive for each other is a sort of strange one and it seems in some ways taxing to the person and I'm not talking about euthanasia at the end of life that seems like disease management that's a different thing but despair suicide we have a kind of live and let die attitude in the secular community about it and I think it's a wrong turn that we took because religion was so adamantly against it to the point of punishing corpses um and and taking away the estate of the suicide um so the secular community before the enlightenment but then very much with the enlightenment hum and uh the baron dolbach both wrote uh what you could actually say are almost pro-suicide tracks that were very much against the church but in no way looking at the situation in terms of humanism um but what I was saying was that while it seems almost cruel to say to a person who's in that much despair you have to stay the truth is as soon as you start to think about things that way the community becomes a warmer place you realize that staying alive even even sitting on your bed and crying or thinking about crying and you don't even have the energy to cry even that is a gift to the community if you want your niece to stay alive through the dark times you have to and it becomes the community becomes a richer place a place that you have more of a connection to and so I think the one thing that we're missing is gratitude and so I'll say it here thank you for staying thank you for staying alive to anybody out there who's ever thought about it that's one of the things I want the book to do to express gratitude and to recognize that it's a gift to the community and it's it's a tremendous contribution by someone who thinks that they can make no contributions because they're at the end of their at the end of their rope I think I'm gonna stop there and just say that these looking at history we can see a whole range from the ancient times to to to now I mean when I was writing doubt I thought I was just going to be seeing people who said no no no to religion and to superstition and instead I found people making suggestions about how we should live in that situation and that's what I think the future of skepticism needs to have we need to know our history and knowing our history will enrich who we are today and who we can be thank you Jennifer Michael Jennifer Michael