The JYLP EP081 with philosophical contemplator John Lee - Pondering The Beautiful Mysteries Of Being

[00:00:00] Intro: Knowledge is power

[00:00:18] John: Just tell me maybe more about your show like maybe what's the vision of your show what's it about and then we can just dive in to whatever you want to talk about

[00:00:18] Jacob: Kind of started as basically a mental health podcast and by that i mean just kind of listening to people tell their story listening to people kind of give their perspective on life and what they've gone through or what they know And trying to Kind of provide little useful pieces of information for listeners because i was watching a lot of podcasts and listening to a lot of interviews and finding that random sentences you know 58 minutes into a podcast would just be profound to me personally so um it's been that and then kind of expanded and grown and i interviewed a lot of uh you know Just different types of artists you know metal bands lead singer metal band rappers carpenters professional bodybuilders Authors just all different types of people um so yeah just basically everybody has you know a unique interesting perspective or view and we could all kind of learn from it's kind of the premise

[00:00:18] John: That's good yeah yeah

[00:01:13] Jacob: Let's start with just kind of like a bio from you just uh maybe kind of how you got into um a lot of these subjects as well

[00:01:13] John: Yeah so those philosophical subjects are things that i'd like to think about um i think i started my Philosophy hobby i was thinking about philosophy maybe 10 years ago it's just you know on the side i love thinking about it i love thinking through these questions but my day job is as a Software product manager i work now at a fintech company um just started a contract two weeks ago so that's my day job i like i work with developers to build software and then i've got a side project or side business where i make mobile apps for podcasters and content creators so i reach out to podcasters see if they want to have a conversation but also tell them about my business um yeah that's what i do for my job for my profession and on the side i love having deep conversations i don't have enough of them my wife is not too keen on having them with me so whoever wants to have conversations on these topics i am always ready and willing

[00:01:13] Jacob: Yeah i mean you definitely went the brave route by just doing let's do podcasts together like that's pretty cool that you did that yeah it doesn't have to be a podcast but i mean i figured i'll reach out to podcasters who are also my target customers so you kill two birds with one stone just have a conversation get to know uh you folks and see where the conversation goes yeah that's brilliant okay so what is it what is it to you about philosophy and kind of questioning um you know our existence why we're here consciousness any of these things like what is it really about that triggers you that i love the fact well i think when i went to grad school for whatever reason um i it opened up to me the fact that there are so many hidden assumptions we have so many beliefs that are just underneath

[00:03:21] John: Everything and they're unexamined so that was like the peak into it maybe 10 years ago now like i said um but i love thinking through the what we call presuppositions or underlying assumptions that hold everything else up and i don't think people think about them enough but they're really important and really interesting when you think through what's the basis the foundation or the ground of a lot of our beliefs and so we can dive into any of any of the ones that you want to

[00:03:21] Jacob: Yeah any and all of them um so what do what do you think like do we have is consciousness built through evolution um do you think it's more um is it part of part of matter itself Like what is what and why is consciousness a thing

[00:03:21] John: Yeah so consciousness is really interesting that ties into i think the free will thing As i think about free will and i think as people live their lives the assumption is and the working assumption is that it's a real thing we do have free will we make real decisions on our own that's like the common sense assumption and um working definition i think people just assume i also believe that we have genuine free Will we're making real decisions here we're not robots we're not determined by our physical laws right going on in our brains we're making real choices and the choices therefore matter we're responsible for those decisions

[00:04:54] John: And we can go into morality as a consequence but sticking with free will i think uh freedom when i think about it in the way that we just talked about it like genuine free will it's not a part of nature when i think about physics the laws of physics and the laws of chemistry there's no freedom involved there's cause and effect we have the laws of nature right these are these are descriptions of the way physical reality behaves you can't break the laws of nature they break you it's like the word law is kind of a misnomer there but it's just the way things are And that leads me to believe like if we do have genuine free will we're making real decisions real choices And that's something that's outside of physical reality it's something different Um one step further as i think about freedom is i think freedom is necessary For rationality so when we say we believe something

[00:06:01] John: Um on rational grounds or like you know let's say i believe in something based on the evidence i see i'm making a choice there i'm choosing to believe something because of good reasons and the evidence that i've gathered that's a choice and that's what makes it reasonable that's what makes it rational so if i didn't have a choice if free will was an illusion or It's just like a useful fiction or something then all of my beliefs by definition Wouldn't be rational even the belief that i don't have free genuine free will

[00:06:46] John: I don't know if you followed that last step but it's like circular when i think about that it's the belief that you're free your free will the belief that you don't have free will and your free will is irrational your free will is not um not genuine that belief in itself is irrational and therefore i think that belief you can't hold that belief uh you can't justify holding that belief logically all right okay so okay so when it as far as our pool to pull from uh like the series of choices that we have so sam harris kind of has um A practice or something that he's done on podcasts or conversations where um he Basically asks the person say like think of um think of a mammal the first

[00:07:40] John: Thing that pops in your head whatever it is and then he's like so why didn't you think of say a giraffe why didn't you think of a gorilla or whatever it is um just thinking of the bank of animals that we happen to know of because of our experience because of what we've seen because of what we've heard we only we only have like a pool to pull From we only have like a box of Experiences up into this point to uh you know a grab Bag of prior experiences so i didn't Have if you were to say um say you Chose giraffe for example and you had never heard of a gorilla you'd never seen a gorilla you didn't know it existed you didn't have the free will to pull gorilla if you didn't know that it existed what do you think about that You don't have the free will well i guess i mean that makes sense to me yeah you don't have the freedom to choose an option you're not aware of that seems fine to me like

[00:08:38] John: Yeah we don't know everything we only know a little bit of what's out there and but we can choose so that's interesting so the first thought that comes to your head yeah i don't think there's a choice involved there i don't think everything we do is free um So the first thought that i got was dolphin i didn't choose that it just came up so i don't think there's choice involved there and yeah i agree like you don't have the choice to choose something you're not even aware of it's not even in the pool of your experience or content so right yeah sam harris kind of talks like that and it makes me think because i hadn't thought about it until he said something um it does make me think it is kind of a You know it's kind of a zooming in unnecessarily in a weird way because it's like okay of course we weren't talking about the things that we haven't experienced you know so it almost is when i feel like the way that you talk about free will is just based off of our

[00:09:33] Jacob: It's of course only based off of our experiences because that's what we're trying to answer right you know we're not we're talking about our lived experience and if we have free will within our own

[00:09:46] John: Limits which of course we're in our own limits that's how we're even to the point of the conversation but i think what's fascinating about that example is there are so many things in our lives that we have no control over so many thoughts like just think about uh your interests i think Jordan Peterson talks about this all the time did you choose your interests i don't think so i mean we have an affinity toward things and activities topics right i don't think i had a choice in that and he says like do you choose your interests or do your interests choose ooh i like that i think i think they choose us in a way like yeah anyway i did i didn't control you can't choose to love anybody um or like fall in love with anybody i think that just happens to you and they're so i feel like probably most of

[00:10:35] Jacob: Our experiences are not you know they're not rational choices decisions they're just happening to us right yeah and then we're trying to piece together the puzzle you know our ego is just trying to form like here's why it happened and yes of course i love this i made this decision um yeah it kind of kind of is interesting because it's not say you fall in love with dancing at a young age and you're seven years old it's not like when you were six you were saying to yourself i'm going to fall in love with dancing next year you know it's you don't you don't plan it you just have an experience one whole day of you just seeing someone dancing or you watched it on tv or you heard about it whatever something that makes you kind of attached to the thing that like that you're interested in you know that is that is very um that it's very intriguing because yeah really thinking if our interests choose us you know it is it does kind of see because so okay so

[00:10:35] Jacob: What do you think about um determinism so along with you know kind of the contrast of free will because maybe there's a little bit of a mix of both of that are possible what do you think I mean i think um the physical reality

[00:11:47] John: Is determined if you're just talking about molecules in motion that seems to me determined by the laws of physics and the laws of nature the interesting thing is like we human beings are in nature and um if we have free will like genuine free will then we're like this we're an element of indeterminism within a determined universe that seems to me to jive with what i hear is going on in Quantum physics i think there are elements of indeterminism within Um physical reality or descriptions of physical reality so it's probably a combination right in quantum physics like physical laws seem to be determined but there are elements of indeterminism within it so the reality is probably both and we just don't understand how to put them together but they seem to be together like human beings are in a physically determined universe if we have free will then we're yeah agents of indeterminism

[00:12:57] John: And yet um we're embedded and uh what's the word yeah we're living inside of a physical physically determined universe yeah so what is it we have free will within a box or something yeah and that seems to be uh like it's not unusual like we have games right we play chess that's there's freedom within the confines of the rules of the game like that seems to be a common thing across different domains yeah i mean maybe it is uh we're always kind of looking for structure amongst chaos we're looking for and we're innately looking for patterns um and we can kind of exist and live within those patterns so the patterns are the rules on the chessboard you can or cannot yes or no hardline do or do not these things and it creates a structure that we can actually play the game within and maybe we're kind of doing that same thing with life i think so yeah cause like the laws of nature you can't go outside the laws of nature you can't break them they're gonna break you right yeah so those are the restraints of the game but there's a lot of choice yeah do you think we will ever um just as a thought experiment do you think we'll ever break outside of any of our laws do you think we'll ever have any sort of because i think um like with the quantum physics the quantum physics stuff is so fascinating and um and i know this is a

[00:14:25] John: Kind of a ridiculous jump but like the marvel um universe they talk about all this different dimension stuff it really kind of like pokes where we're at with science anyway and it does kind of make me think that maybe there is a way in which humans Could jump whatever that means you know forward in consciousness or evolution or some sort of jump from whatever it was that went from monkeys to us maybe there could be another thing like that some sort of jump and it's something to do um uh with our with our with our current reality kind of changing have you have you thought about any of that i think um Uh there are More dimensions than we are capable of perceiving uh i think that's just a fact right like we can't hear above or beyond certain frequencies we can't see right above or beyond certain um of the The visual spectrum so our physical uh organs just by the nature of what they are we're seeing only a slice of reality there's a lot more that we're just not perceiving there's so much going on that we're just not aware of so yeah i can see us um

[00:15:46] John: Like expanding our senses sense capabilities to perceive beyond what we can now whether that happens through technology or some other mechanism like you said evolution maybe our brains will evolve or change in a way that we can perceive more than we can now i think that's yeah i mean that's happened right like with microscopes we can see and telescopes we see far more than we could within with the naked eye maybe and that's an analogy of what can happen in the future right yeah like our tools do kind of just become extensions of us they're kind of like you know they're just a way of reaching our arms to be a little bit longer into what humans are capable of doing yeah that's super interesting it's also very interesting thing about the contrast with zooming in really far and then we zoom out really far to see and it just continuously expands right no matter which way we go it just continues to uh

[00:16:49] John: To expand or like as the technology gets better the more the deeper we can go the farther out we can we can look it's so interesting yeah it's amazing it seems like there's no limit To um what there is to discover Um i mean yeah from the very small to the to the sides of the universe i still can't get my head around the fact that i mean the universe has a size and you There you know it is expanding Um yeah so it's that's kind of beyond what i can comprehend right because our brain you know we hear a billion or hear a trillion or we hear infinity and we're like yeah and that's a lot and but really our brain doesn't of course we can't comprehend that you know we don't really think of wow what is a billion of something or what is a you know what does infinity really mean for something to go on forever like our brains don't really have a experiential understanding of it so yeah so that's that kind of um leads me to To this thought um So assuming that we've evolved right um

[00:18:03] John: Our brains our bodies are adapted for survival in a particular environment let's just say like the uh the plains of africa like we all human beings let's say originated from africa and so our bodies haven't changed in the however many thousands of years that we've uh become human beings so we're like evolve for a particular environment it seems to me so strange and fascinating that the brain of a primate the body and brain number primate that's involved in this particular environment Is able to comprehend The size of the universe quantum physics um very advanced mathematics that i have no idea like there's so creativity making music and businesses like It seems unreal that Um Yeah that the brain evolved for that particular natural environment could do all this and I feel like um why trust the brain why trust let's just say you know the primate brain why would you trust the primate brain Um so outside of its natural element exploring abstract concepts that are so far removed from what it was

[00:19:36] John: Adapted for which is survival within that particular national environment why trust any of these things that we have we're thinking of right so for me i feel like Uh you might call it the naturalistic Um explanation for consciousness maybe um there's something like it undermines it somehow i feel like there's less justification to trust Um the deliverances of our cognitive faculties On that evolutionary view Um i don't know if that made sense like yeah so why yeah basically why would you know it seems obvious why it's important to uh give time and effort Into not getting eaten by a lion or finding food to eat you know keeping alive survival so like the jump from survival to you know looking up at the stars wondering where you are in comparison to that and wondering what that is and wondering what you are like what would that um What is that awareness i guess like where does awareness come from and why does it come you know it's a have you ever heard of

[00:21:03] Jacob: The uh stoned ape theory

[00:21:03] John: Oh is that something to do with like taking psychedelic uh substances yeah Yeah i don't know the full thing

[00:21:03] Jacob: Yeah so um Terence McKenna talks about it uh essentially we're apes living in Trees um surviving that way and then After a while we end up getting out of the trees or something brings us out of the trees for whatever reason and we start looking for food on the ground hunting more whatever we're away from the trees and we start following um cows Flipping over cow pies looking for food start noticing that's where you know in manure is where psychedelics grow

[00:21:39] Jacob: And then we realize because of survival there's different there's certain little subtle things that psychedelics like magic mushrooms for example would give you better uh visual acuity so this makes you better at hunting it would potentially connect your tribe more in different ways they probably had some sort of like orgy situation when it came to these apes when they were doing all these psychedelics um so basically it kind of like had all these positive effects as far as keeping a group of apes together and so over you know hundreds of thousands of years or whatever it is um they continue to follow behind bowls and bowls and um cows and flip Over the manure and take psychedelics and that's kind of how consciousness started to form they started realizing things started having language started Noticing that when they would eat food here and throw it on throw the seeds on the ground when they come back a year later in season there'd be crops growing yeah and then they start having a memory bank to kind of build those things on so that's kind of the stone deep theory of sorts i mean when i hear that it's a nice story

[00:22:46] John: I don't buy it huh i don't feel like that's at all plausible it's an i mean it's a story

[00:22:46] Jacob: Well so what do you what do you think it is like what do you think what is the birth of consciousness to you then do you have any let me think about language for a little bit i thought a little bit about language um When i think about what language is and i have a son like a six-year-old boy now Wow just the work it takes to teach A language to a child it's an enormous amount of effort and time to teach language to someone Who doesn't have a language Um so to imagine a situation where a language could somehow evolve from Nothing i think is an is an insurmountable gap For one so given the implausibility of a language coming from nothing um and just another example of that is like when we look at the animal kingdom there are communication systems like birds Have chirping systems signals and all

[00:23:55] John: This but i think when people analyze the way animals communicate compared to the way human beings communicate through language i think there's a fundamental difference between a language and these signal signaling systems so when i think about what a language is and the fact that new languages are always born out of existing languages Um i think that Um i think language needs to pre-exist there has to be a language Before any new languages can come to be And that language whatever that new language is it has to be taught like parents have to teach their kids how to speak the language of their society and so there's like an enormous amount like i said of investment time effort patience that goes into

[00:24:54] John: Anyone acquiring a language so like I'm a christian so when i think about like the bible and god being described as In the beginning was the word i was like whoa that's interesting in the beginning was language and he's described as like our father Wow i wonder if adam and eve were like these apes or primates humans homo sapiens And god had to adopt them and teach them language like The enormous amount of investment and time and love it takes to teach language To a primate maybe the primate had the cognitive capabilities i'm sure like you and i do right we have the cognitive capability to pick up language um the fact that the faculties are there But language acquisition doesn't just happen it takes it picks a relationship and it takes a loving relationship for that to happen and so yeah that's my position is um yeah in the beginning was language In the beginning was the word and um that's prob that's the

[00:26:07] John: Beginning of consciousness and once you have language then you have consciousness because i don't think you can be self-aware without the word i If you don't have the word i in whatever language you've acquired i don't think you can You have self-consciousness you have self-awareness like they're tied together right the word and um the self-awareness i think are tied together so i kind of i kind of think that The eye was formed from still this same survival Technique i think that when there's some sort of apes hunting um uh or whatever you know We're essentially we're going to do things that are going to increase our chances of survival right we're going to do things like i was saying you know how the psychedelics would increase the chances of people working together you know apes working together and whatnot uh their visual acuity i think after a while we

[00:27:10] John: Would probably have to start pointing if you're on a hunt you're hunting a boar you're a group of eight apes and you're hunting a boar i have no idea if they actually hunt for how this works but uh eventually hundreds and hundreds of years you would start to notice and pick up i think when you do this with your finger you take your hand this thing is called a hand they wouldn't know it they haven't labeled it yet but they are moving a part of their limbs and pointing over there or they're gesturing or they're indicating you know we're using our body's verbal language and then that after a while after a long time starts to form words because we start to label things we start to point we start to say uh you know like something that indicates good or bad danger food there's a lion or there's a bore whatever it is so we're pointing over more and more years we start uh pointing this is a banana we start making different mouth noises to indicate the survival thing has now gone on to long-term survival in this scenario i'm not sure uh but oh and then eventually what had to happen if we're labeling things we're labeling things for survival this is good or this is bad here's where the water is here's where you put the seeds you go over here eventually we have to start doing you we point at each other

[00:28:25] John: Now we have a name now we have a when i point at you're uh you're a thing and that's kind of the birth of the ego that's kind of the birth of the eye in a lot of ways what do you think about that i think again that's it's a it's a story yeah i don't think there are any examples we can point to validate that story yeah um there are it's like they were they were writing that down at that point obviously i mean there were still like this there are so many animals in the world right and

[00:28:54] John: We're the only ones why should it be that we are the only ones if that story is plausible if that progression is plausible why are human beings the only ones that have developed language um the guerrillas have been around for as long as we have right every other animal has been around as long as human beings have if that's a if that process you've just described is a natural process then i would expect to see other animals having gone that route yes but um at least similar you know because we're because we're so far we really are so far away from all other animals you know we're not just at the top of the food chain we've like we've left the food chain we're not like we have power over all the all the other animals so it is it is very interesting right like why would humans or the thing after apes be chosen in such a way biologically We're not very different from we're very similar right 99 what percent of our dna is exactly the same as a chimpanzee

[00:29:55] John: Right so there's nothing really biologically That different from us to other animals other life but yeah we've left orbit like we've left um the orbit of the animal kingdom and i think language is like the primary uh differentiator Um so you believe that so you believe that there was so Like you said there was the word so what would you say um like How did god learn the word like how Does he know the word not maybe not who taught it to him but like what is that like why does that exist why would god exist with the word to give it to us even though yeah i feel like The definition of god that i'm working with is he is this Pre-existent consciousness so he is the origin of consciousness the origin of language he is the word He is language it's yeah it's pretty abstract at that point but like there's nothing before him right he is god he's the ultimate reality and if and the ultimate reality if our view if my view is correct the ultimate reality is conscious the ultimate reality is personal the ultimate reality is loving like all these attributes of god um describe ultimate reality whereas other world views like let's say buddhism ultimate reality is unconscious

[00:31:26] John: And impersonal right so it's a very clear distinction between world views um that i hold yeah i find that i'm pretty fascinated by really all of the different religious beliefs and how we came to all of our different beliefs how different cultures had for so long believed in so many different things and then they shifted or whatever it's all just so fascinating i always try to wonder what are they all kind of pointing at you know like maybe we have different language maybe we have different words for it um but like what is this thing within humans that We have some sort of desire for a higher power for meaning for purpose for um

[00:32:08] John: Direction or um you know and then also the fact that for whatever strange reason you know love and kindness and joy and uh you know all these like good positive emotions seem to connect us closer to that feeling of meaning of purpose you know it is it there's no denial that you know love and god are so intertwined you know i think in our western uh societies we tie god and love together because of the christian tradition and heritage in the west i don't think that's true in other and in other geographies other traditions But um but i yeah when you talk about purpose And meaning i think that is universal i think it's Proven i just finished a book um called man Search for meaning by Viktor Frankl have you heard of this one it's a pretty famous one i think um Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist Who was in auschwitz and he lived through that and he wrote a book about that just right after he got out of it but that's just one book

[00:33:23] John: No one can live without a purpose without a sense of purpose you will die you will kill yourself if you don't have a sense of purpose people don't think about it very much but um i think that's a fact like without hope uh everything becomes meaningless and We die so it's not a Hope it seems to be like a survival Mechanism it's an adaptation that If it is an adaptation it's it helps us survive i think it's fascinating to realize that we all think of ourselves as the hero of our own story we live inside a story we just do we are the main character in our own stories everyone else has their own stories we fit everything into like a meta story So i think story is something also really embedded within our human being So thinking narratively thinking ourselves as heroes you know Within our own stories um I think all pointing to the fact that there is an ultimate story and our lives do

[00:34:36] John: Matter within that big story and it is like even the word history has the word story in it his story yeah um we can't help it's it's the way we are we structure these things into stories but i mean i think that points to the fact that there is an ultimate story there is a meta-narrative and we are living into it but that only makes sense i think from a theistic worldview where there is a god he is the author the creator He has a plan for not just our lives individually but a plan for the entire human race there is a structure a story structure to this whole thing Yeah i like that i like that so uh thinking along the lines of like Jordan Peterson's lectures he talks about um he kind of gives us the examples of how we live through a um a hero's journey uh And he gives examples i think through like lion king and peter pan um i'm not

[00:35:38] John: Sure if you've if you've listened to those lectures um if not oh yeah awesome cool yeah it's been a while since i've touched on those but i remember really liking those um and i like to think about you know what is the reason what is the reason why you know the marvel movies are so popular right now what is the reason why we do love disney so much i think it's because they really are speaking to something within each of us you know it's hard it's hard to quantify and explain it with a capital t truth of like this is something that is Is 100 true amongst all humans um when It comes to like us needing some sort of purpose or story that we're following or following some sort of hero's journey

[00:36:20] John: But it's man it really does seem to be true you know people's lives are a lot more fulfilling when they feel as if they have some sort of sense of purpose or meaning within their own scope do you think that a lot of what we're going through you know our depression rates are crazy high right now um there's a lot of you know there's a lot of like kind of madness going on in some ways um Right now do you think a lot of people are kind of living without purpose right now yeah i think so and so the book i'm reading was written in like 1947 and the author was saying even back then he there was a survey i think it said like maybe 60 or 70 of the people that were surveyed back then felt like there was no one or nothing that they would die for Um so like the meaning problem was a problem back then it's i'm sure it's even worse now people um people need meaning they need a purpose But um it's hard to find one to hold on to

[00:37:28] John: Uh for your entire life and i think as we get older and we pursue we you know i think naturally we do have short-term purposes like when we're young we're going after different things but as we pursue those things over the years as we get older and older um those things tend to lose their grip on us and we begin to question or we've you know climbing up the wrong ladder are you pursuing the wrong things and then when you get to that point of your thinking then a lot of people feel lost like okay then what am i what should i be living for what is my purpose and the more questions you ask at that point i think uh the more confusing things can get Um but i think for most people that they're they grow up within a tradition

[00:38:16] John: So if you grow up within a muslim tradition for example or a hindu tradition or it's religion for the most part right if you grow up within a christian tradition those questions tend to be answered for you from your tradition you can adopt them more readily you want to question them and make them your own but there's a set of answers there for you to consider i think a lot of people um as they become atheist or lose their religion and like break away from their traditions it becomes a lot harder because there isn't some ready set of Values and purposes you can kind of consider if you're an atheist

[00:38:58] John: Then there really is no long-term purpose that's just a brute fact there is no purpose to your life ultimately um there's no purpose to the human race ultimately the universe itself is going to experience a heat death right nothing matters on that worldview so it can be very depressing if you think if you think about that um for too long and so i don't think people tend to want to think about that Yeah i mean it's i do find when there is this innate feeling of nihilism that kind of takes over when you when you really you just have this everything's meaningless my life's meaningless we're all going to die it's like there's like a flip side of it that really can bring your life it makes you see the joy and beauty that you already have you know and it is kind of like Okay yeah maybe this is a short sliver of life but that is it like what a gift then what a gift it is that you know this infinite universe this infinite um uh solar system you know all

[00:40:09] John: This crazy time that we're alive within all of times is we're just a blip on the radar as far as we know but isn't that awesome isn't that amazing like what it what a gift to be able to be just a blip on the radar um do you think uh you had mentioned morality at the at the beginning as well what do you gain out of out of Um having a sense of morality values I feel like i didn't i kind of had like a spiritual awakening you know basically just being able to admit to myself that there's something bigger than my own dang ego you know um so i kind of Had this i don't think that i had as many stern values or morals or realized when like

[00:40:53] John: You know like if you lie or you say something dishonest or you say something hurtful it actually hurts you later on it's kind of that hell that's inside of you know the reactions to living without values and morals that sort of thing when that kind of sparked within me it gave me oh yeah values and morals are actually important it is kind of good to have bumpers up on your life and give yourself a little bit of a direction at what you're facing how do you john um like how do values and morals and these sorts of things help you in your life

[00:41:27] John: I think the moral laws are uh objective and i think they're normative so meaning we are obligated to obey them so i thought about this actually last weekend i was thinking about the different kinds of laws there are in the universe so at the top i thought of stuff like logical laws there are laws of logic and laws of mathematics two plus two equals four it's a law of arithmetic um these laws are uh rules for proper thinking so that they're like they're within the abstract realm you can break them but you can Only break them by accident so i think of the example like if you don't know that two plus two equals four you can make a math error you can put five there but once you understand that two plus two equals four Um and you believe that to be true it is impossible from that point forward for you to believe anything else like you can't break that law of logic once you understand it like knowing it pretty much binds you to it

[00:42:40] John: You can try as much as you like to believe that two plus two equals two thousand you're not going to be able to break that law so that was one area of law i was thinking about Um they exist um you can't you can break them but only by accident and then at the bottom i was thinking about like the laws of nature and i don't like the word law but like these are descriptions of physical uh the behavior of the physical world they're just descriptive um you can't break them You're never gonna break the law of gravity right if you try to you're gonna It's gonna break you so there's no um breaking the laws of nature And in the middle it's funny like we live in the space between the heavens and the earth like we live in that middle space and i was thinking about the laws of morality are so interesting because they connect the abstract realm with the Physical realm because their law the laws of morality are both Rules for proper thinking and rules for proper acting they're like both and they

[00:43:51] John: Live in like this middle space where we live we live in the middle space between Our abstract thinking World and the world of acting and behavior so i was thinking about that and um yeah like the rules of morality The laws of morality are unique in that You can know what the right thing is to do and you can consciously disobey you can Break that you can know you can know Something is true and then you can also disobey it you can break it so it's unlike the laws of logic it's unlike the laws of physics it's pretty special it's there in the middle it's where we live um and then going back to like think about free will since we do have free will assuming we do have free will genuine The genuine capacity to make choices Um when we disobey a moral law when we break it we become guilty and i think that word Guilt i think again it kind of all ties back to freedom guilt is only real

[00:45:01] John: When you when you have the freedom to break a moral law and so this whole concept of guilt Um is only possible because we have genuine freedom and then guilt leads to punishment right if you break the laws of america you are then liable to being arrested judged sentenced right punished for that So all these concepts around Being guilty and then receiving some kind of punishment or reward for our behavior all kind of ties back to freedom as well um how does it help me in my life So again i think world view plays A big part here um i think a lot of different world views view the moral law of their tradition as laws of proper behavior right and like You if you do these things and follow these laws at the end of your life god will weigh you in the skills of his righteousness and if your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds then you get to go to heaven if your bad deeds that way you're a good deeds then you go to

[00:46:16] Jacob: Hell so um and that's kind of also related to what you just said like you said you've discovered that following these moral laws in the end come back to reward me come back to help me it's almost like an adaptive thing it's self-serving to be a good person

[00:46:37] John: Also helps me live a better life maybe a more successful more happy life so i find within that view it still kind of turns around and ends in self-interest like to do a good thing because it helps me in the end is still in the end self-interested it's still kind of selfish if i were to walk an old lady across the street because i thought you know what in the end god's gonna give me brownie points or in the end this is gonna come back to me in some good way it's you're doing that kind of for self-interested reasons And so there's something off-putting about that for me i think um what the christian worldview says is we do good not because it's gonna buy us Some reward or come back to us in some positive way we obey these laws of morality We obey god's law because

[00:47:37] John: It's like an expression of thanksgiving almost it's an expression of the fact that he loves us and he's already forgiven us of all our guilt we don't have to earn our way to being right with him it's just we're doing these things for purely for others now i can walk that lady across the street not because it's going to come back to me in some good way or not because i'm going to get brownie points or go to heaven because i do that i can walk that person across the street or do any good deed because um i want to help that person it's completely other focused it's not self-interested but those are some thoughts around morality maybe you can respond to any of those yeah those are all nice man um yeah there really is something special about stepping outside of ourselves and our own um you know our we all have our own level of constant neuroticism of some sorts i think you know um so when we step outside of ourselves and we could be of service to someone else service to others not to our own um ends

[00:48:36] Jacob: Um you know the if things do happen you Know you do this nice thing and ends up having something else come back to you that's a plus that's not you don't think about the reward right that's the that's just something that if it happens it happens that's awesome but you're not doing it to score those browning points like you said um john we are getting kind of up here in time and i feel like we could talk for hours honestly but um i do have to uh Get going to work here and not too long so i do want to round the corner a little bit uh i was just kind of thinking of a good question um to ask you know you contemplate a lot of these things it seems like you said you enjoy philosophy you like thinking about these things you like um only contemplating them but you're also you know you're a father you're a businessman if you had to maybe talk back to your 18 Year old self your 20 year old self um

[00:49:30] Jacob: Or even just someone like him you know if any of the listeners maybe are that age you know they're younger if you had some like blanket statement advice of how to see the world how to live um what to do what not to do you have anything that pops to mind Yeah i mean what pops to mind is um Don't do things because you think It's the thing everyone else is doing like i went to college right after high school i probably shouldn't have gone to college right out of high school i probably should have worked um grown emotionally socially Made money like been more independent just grown as a person before i decided to commit to a Four-year education somewhere in a major

[00:50:18] John: That um was going to be relevant to my career so i think if i were to talk to talk to myself at 18 i'd say don't go right into school work for a couple of years figure yourself out discover what your interests are like your real interests explore those and then if you decide to go back to school choose something that you really want to study so you don't waste your time and money in school studying something that you're not really interested in and yeah also i didn't have a work ethic so like going to school without a work ethic you're trying to build a work ethic while being in school it's difficult right you don't know why you're there like

[00:51:04] John: So i guess take the time to discover your purpose discover your interests and try to make decisions in your life that get you closer to your purpose and then you'll save a lot of time and a lot of money like floundering yeah i took a lot of my 20s just yeah just kind of floating um not knowing what i wanted to do with my life i don't regret i don't regret a lot of that but if i were to go back i'd want to get clarity earlier on So i can make more progress in the time that i've had

[00:51:38] Jacob: Yeah i think that's a pretty good answer man it's basically just yeah find yourself see what you want even before you just decide on something that's so you know put you into so much debt too for sure uh i think it would have been kind of cool to as soon as i turned 18 to just you know sell everything that's too big to fit into a van and just go travel around for a few years you know i mean obviously that's the that's the pipe dream daydream it's a little bit more complicated than that but it really would i mean being a young age and just learning about the world through that lens and just being humble enough to sleep in your car or whatever it is for a little while you probably learn a lot about yourself and what you want and what you don't want you know i think so yeah i mean people can get to

[00:52:28] John: These insights i think in a lot of different ways there's no like yeah no one right way to discover yourself um but yeah taking the time and being intentional about it i think is worth it when you're young Yeah and like don't feel pressured to live up to uh the expectations and get the expectations of your parents or family or friend group or whatever culture like we're living inside expectations all the time but i think that can be oppressive and so just yeah i mean it helps me even Though it's kind of morbid to realize that Life is really short and there just isn't enough time to be worrying about living up to other people's expectations you want to find well i want to find my purpose and i think i have now and i want to live into my purpose as fully as i can every day and i mean And that's it brings a lot of just simplicity to my thought life

[00:53:36] John: And just my regular my normal life my day to day and um yeah life is short we don't know how much time we have left and it's going to be shorter than you expect it's going to be shorter than i expect it's always the case whether i'm 60 or 70 or 80 or 90 it's always going to be shorter than i expect i think

[00:53:58] Jacob: Yeah man beautifully said beautifully said I appreciate your time and i appreciate all of your answers and uh in your inquiries you know i like i like that we're able to kind of both kind of think through some thoughts and have an unstructured good conversation man so really thank you again for being willing to do this

[00:53:59] John: Thanks jacob Thank you for the opportunity and let's do it again anytime

[00:53:59] Outro: Yeah sounds good man we'll uh We'll be in touch via email and whatnot and we'll uh we'll get together again okay sounds good take care yeah take care Listeners take care of yourself Drink some water stretch love yourself and we'll see you later have a good one At what age do we learn how to have better conversations At what age do we learn to have better conversations with ourselves Knowledge is power