 Epistemology is a big word. So let's start there. It works too. Good. All right, so the standard definition, the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Things like, what is knowledge? Epistemology is really just the study of knowledge. What is knowledge? Well, I kind of like to answer that somewhat totalogically. Knowledge is knowledge of reality. It's not about reality. It's not knowledge. If it is something that you can count on, if it's existential with regard to reality, that's knowledge. And we're going to talk about a lot of stuff that you think is knowledge, but it's not knowledge at all. It's illusion. It's deception, right? How is knowledge acquired? How does knowledge get acquired in the very, very, very first place? As fundamentally as you can go. Well, you have senses. You have sense. Eyes, ears, nose, touch. But you also have a mind, right? So you take all of this data from your senses. You integrate it. Our minds are integrating. Our minds are not reality-creating organs. They're sensory data-integrating organs. You don't create reality. We perceive it through our senses, concepts. And then we use our mind to further build a house of knowledge. It's called a hierarchy. This comes together with this, and this comes together with this, and this comes together with this, right? To what extent is it possible for a subject or entity to be known? Well, that's kind of a continuum. Because the cool thing about knowledge is that usually there's always something more to know, right? So we know this. But we know that in a year's time or 10 years time, in your own life and society, technology, all these things that we know more and more. But what I like is right here. This is the way I really like to think of epistemology or the study of knowledge, the quality of the knowledge. So keep that in mind. When you're thinking about knowledge, think it's all about quality. It's quality. You've got everything from outright delusion to 1 plus 1 equals 2, right? And everything in between. And we're talking about quality when we're talking about that. All right, so yeah, all right. Sociology, everyone knows of this, study of humans in their social thing. The thing to really take home there is that we are social. Oops, misspelling, social. Oh, is it? OK, humans are social. We're social beings. We don't really fare well by ourselves. Robinson, Crusoe, we're not. That is an aberration, right? Now, we've put them together. Social epistemology. And I thought, how do I explain this? And I was digging through a bunch of stuff. And I went over to Stanford universities. They have an encyclopedia of philosophy. And I read that. And then I come to the very, very end. And I'm like, ah, that's what I want. All right. Social epistemology acknowledges that quests for truth, think, quality of knowledge, are commonly influenced, for better or worse, by institutional arrangements. And we're going to talk about that big time, that massively affect what duxastic, duxastic is just a fancy word for belief agent. So people who believe one thing or another, those are agents, duxastic agents, hear or fail to hear from others, or see or touch or smell or argue or whatever. To maximize prospects for successful pursuits of truth, this variable cannot sensibly be neglected. In other words, institutions lie and deceive. And it affects what everyone believes in great ways. And if you want to get quality knowledge, this has to be taken into account. Is that clear? All right. Paleo knowledge base. So now what we're going to deal with is we're going to take a look at how fucking stupid all those primitive people were. Are you ready? And how much far more enlightened we are. OK. Sunrise, sunset. These are, I'm going to show you some pictures to convey to you what paleo man with the guy in the caves, what they had to deal with in order to survive. And they were very successful. You know, they were very successful. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. Sunrise, animal tracks. Is it food? Where do they come from? Where are they going? If they're coming from somewhere, why are they coming there? Do they know something we don't know? Is there danger? Is it a signal of danger? Are they going to something? Are they going to water? We need water. All of these things in existential, they are dealing with reality here. Unequivocally, sunsets. What does it look like? In the, I was a Navy officer, drove ships for eight years. And we had a saying, red sky in the morning, sailors take warning, red sky at night, sailors delight. And you would not believe how well that holds true. That's dealing with reality. It's not 100%, but it does pretty well. I don't know if you can see that very well. That's footprint in the sand. So, you know, friend or foe? Where is he coming? Is it a new tribe in the area? Something we need to be concerned about? So on. Aliens. So that's a joke slide. Storm clouds. Does it look better or worse or different than the last one? What happened the last time? Is the last time, right after they saw this, they saw forest fires. Is that going to happen? These kind of things that they had to deal with to survive. And that's my favorite there. What do you think you can learn from that? And in fact, I would submit to you. I would submit to you that this is a great representation of the beginning of epistemology, and by what I mean of quality of knowledge, and integration, and forming a hierarchy. A very experienced tracker could probably sit and talk to you for 15 minutes about everything he knows about that animal based on that picture, right? And you've heard it before, you know, whether the snow is packed or the extent and there's debris in it and what the edges look like and on and on and on and on and on, that they built this entire hierarchy for their survival. They even know what kind of animal it is. They can tell whether it may be injured or something, or maybe it's a predator or something like that. So really think about that. I'm going to skip down here, quick. Okay, now. So what I've just gone through in all of these is really, I think, a pretty solid case that Pellowman, our ancestors, our way back ancestors, over a period of 200,000 years or so, how they dealt with reality and the knowledge. It wasn't a huge amount of knowledge. I mean, everybody has more knowledge than they did overall, but the knowledge that they did have pretty much all very high quality knowledge. Everyone with me?