Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophized this. No sponsor this week.

Patreon.com slash philosophized this as well as the Amazon banner on the

front page of philosophizes.org. By the way, keep your eyes peeled in the

middle of the week this week for an extra special episode of the show. I think

you're all going to really enjoy trying a little something different. Don't

worry. Completely additional. Thank you for anything you can do. Let's get on to

the program. So it seems clear we live in an age of empiricism in today's world.

What I mean by that is science at its core is an empirical realm. Ultimately, any

experiment you're going to be doing if you're a scientist is done by a person. A

person looking through a microscope with their eyes, a person listening to

wavelengths with their ears, a person organizing all of this data and

information through a very feeble and really completely arbitrary set of

mental faculties that they have, the hope being at the end of it that having

done this science experiment with our senses will be just a little bit closer

to knowing the way that things are in the universe. The truth, right? We think

about the truth that way. The truth is this objective thing out there exterior to

human beings that we're trying to come into contact with. The way that things

actually are. For example, if every human and every animal was eradicated from

the planet tomorrow and no sentient being was even attempting to try to find out

what the truth was, it makes sense that in that universe there'd still be a way

that things are. We're just not around at that point to try to access it. But

that's the thing. Even if we were around to try to access it, the chips are stacked

...