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Today's episode is number five in a series on Sartre and Camu. I hope you love the show today. So consciousness is freedom.

What exactly was it that Sartre meant when he said that because it's not obvious. Right. I mean, it sounds like one of the things you'd say consciousness is freedom. And people would be like, yeah, no, I totally get where he's coming from there. But do you really do you.

Let's talk about it for an episode. Let's also talk about if Sartre is correct here that consciousness is freedom. How do human beings typically respond to that reality? And what does it mean for us personally when it comes to how we approach the world.

You know, we talked about a lot of stuff on the last episode, but I hope one of the major takeaways was that throughout the history of philosophy, we've had this pretty stubborn recurring problem that just doesn't seem to go away.

Turns out it's a little more difficult than you might initially think to actually prove the existence of the external physical world.

Tons of thinkers have taken a crack at it, but the problems all begin in the same place. The problem is once you make that distinction between consciousness and the world.

It becomes extremely difficult to say with any level of certainty that what you're perceiving is really the world and not just the world as it appears to you.

Remember day card talking about how our senses often deceive us the stick in the water looks bent. It's not actually bent.

We don't have a direct awareness of the objects of the world, just how they appeared to us. And this is created this dynamic throughout the history of philosophy, where philosophers are kind of like these prisoners in a cage trapped up inside of their own minds. I mean, imagine an actual prisoner in a cell.

Right outside of the cell are four walls you can never directly see what's going on outside of the cell.

But in the floor of the cell, there's a hatch that opens up once a day and it gives you a newspaper and this newspaper tells you everything that's going on in the world outside.

Well, solipsism would say, hey, wait a second. How do we know that this newspaper is fair and balanced?

How can we know that this is actually an accurate representation of what's going on outside and not just written by somebody that wants to try to deceive us into thinking what they want us to think is going on out there?

No, we can't know anything about what's going on outside of these four walls. Can we?

An idealist might say something like, all right, well, maybe we can't be certain about what's going on out there. But one thing we can be certain of is the fact that we have this newspaper.

Let's make sure we're careful. Let's make sure we understand the biases we're bringing to this paper as the prisoner reading it.

Let's make sure we try to understand the biases that people writing the paper. The ultimate point is, let's take this newspaper seriously.

Because at least we have a newspaper and it seems like the contents of it, maybe all that we ever have access to.

Hoostero, he'd be doing something psycho, maybe studying the structural integrity of the cell, what holds it together.

He'd be studying the hatch in the floor that delivers the newspaper. Well, Sarter would be the guy on the prison monitor looking at all them through a security camera, wondering how they don't all see the key that's hanging around their neck.

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