Latest Rationalism Podcast Episodes
The Objectivity of Structure Outside our Concepts [Narration]
Patterson in Pursuit - May 06, 2023 20:58 - 6 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThe world outside our mind is actually glued together; relations are mind-independent; and patterns are objectively real. Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack at stevepatterson.substack.com/subscribe
Ep. 106 - Living with the Robots | Dr. RollerGator
Patterson in Pursuit - April 02, 2023 23:40 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsTrying to envision life alongside AI. How will our culture change? What will the norms be around beloved robots? Should we let the machines hijack our emotional circuitry? Will AI become the highest-level decision makers within governments? Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack ...
Ep. 105 - The Philosophy of AI (pt 1) | Alexandros Marinos
Patterson in Pursuit - March 24, 2023 23:10 - 2 hours ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThe world is ablaze with discussion about the risks and benefits of AI like ChatGPT I have not been persuaded by the doomsdayers concerns about rogue AI, but that doesn't mean the technology is actually safe. I investigate some philosophical concepts surrounding AI with Alexandros Marinos. ...
Ep. 104 - "No Longer a Christian" | Isaac Deitz
Patterson in Pursuit - November 26, 2021 04:36 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsWonderful conversation with my old friend Isaac Deitz who shares his personal religious journey. After decades of being a Christian, he no longer identifies with that label. In my opinion, that's only because "Christian" is a terrible term nowadays. By some metrics, Isaac is a raging Christian...
Our Present Dark Age
Patterson in Pursuit - July 06, 2021 01:44 - 20 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThe best explanation for the current madness of the world is that we're in a dark age and have been for at least a century. The epistemic standards of the 20th century were not high enough to overcome social, psychological, and political entropy. Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack a...
Ep. 103 - "Mad at Mathematicians" | Isaac Morehouse
Patterson in Pursuit - January 21, 2021 01:30 - 48 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsA couple of months ago, my friend Isaac Morehouse asked me to talk about the philosophy of mathematics and why I consider it so important. Appeals to mathematics are everywhere, from COVID lockdowns to NFL play calling, and if our concepts about math are flawed, we make the world a significant...
Ep. 102 - Scientific Progress and Intellectual Schelling Points | Dr. Geoff Anders
Patterson in Pursuit - April 19, 2020 17:54 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsWhat does scientific progress look like? Is it steady progress, getting ever closer to the truth? Or does it go through waves? What about cases where we seem to have lost knowledge or the foundations of a theory we’ve been building on turned out to be wrong? Can that still be useful? Is t...
Critical Thinking | Zooming In and Zooming Out
Patterson in Pursuit - March 31, 2020 21:49 - 8 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsA critical thinker must have the ability to zoom in and zoom out - to hyper-focus on cause and effect and to see how things interconnect in the big picture. It's a common and critical error to be too-zoomed-in or too-zoomed-out. The over-focused mind is like the mathematician who doesn't reali...
Ep. 101- Is a Ruling Class Inevitable? | Samo Burja
Patterson in Pursuit - March 08, 2020 10:30 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsLibertarians like myself tend to focus on the abuse of power hierarchies. The existence of a "ruling class" makes most of us uneasy. However, might these sociological structures serve a valuable purpose? Are they inevitable parts of human society? Samo Burja joins me to discuss. Get full acce...
Coming Around to Platonism
Patterson in Pursuit - January 10, 2020 10:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsFor years, I've been making anti-Platonist arguments. Now, I think I was wrong. The universe seems to be composed of both concrete and abstract stuff. Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack at stevepatterson.substack.com/subscribe
Ep. 100 - Trying to Solve Philosophy | Patterson in Pursuit
Patterson in Pursuit - November 19, 2019 01:49 - 45 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsEpisode 100 of Patterson in Pursuit! Wow, what a milestone. Thanks to everybody who has listened to and supported the show. I hope it's created value for you. In this episode, I share my personal thoughts about the show, some of my motivations, the conversations that were impactful to my own p...
Ep. 99 - Non-Rationality and Psychedelics | Dr. Bernardo Kastrup
Patterson in Pursuit - September 08, 2019 08:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsDo logic and rationality have limits? Are there ways to "get outside" of rational thinking? Do altered states caused by psychedelics provide true insight about the world, or are they illusory? These are the questions I discuss with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, who shares some of his personal experime...
Ep. 98 - "A Consciousness-Only Ontology" | Dr. Bernardo Kastrup
Patterson in Pursuit - September 01, 2019 08:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsIs everything ultimately mental? Do we need a theory of a physical world at all? Dr. Bernardo Kastrup joins me again to talk about idealism. This time, we go into great detail, both put our ideas to the test, and the result was one of my favorite interviews ever. I end up asking Bernardo some ...
Understanding God as Nature or the Universe
Patterson in Pursuit - August 22, 2019 09:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsFinally, after investigating for more than 20 years, I have a concept of God I can rationally grasp. The idea is one of the oldest in existence, and it turns baroque theological claims into true and important insights. Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack at stevepatterson.substack.co...
Solving the Interaction Problem
Patterson in Pursuit - August 02, 2019 01:28 - 25 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsDualism is an attractive philosophy with an Achilles' heel. Dualists since Descartes have never given a good answer to the problem of interaction. Finally, I think I've got one. I have a working resolution to the problem of interaction that I call a theory of indirect interaction, which allows...
There Are No Objective Definitions
Patterson in Pursuit - May 19, 2019 22:57 - 15 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsLots of confusion is caused by the nature of language. This is a narration of the article "There Are No Objective Definitions", which you can read here: http://steve-patterson.com/there-are-no-objective-definitions/ Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack at stevepatterson.substack.com...
Ep. 97 - Math Heresy: Ultrafinitism | Dr. Doron Zeilberger
Patterson in Pursuit - April 21, 2019 08:30 - 57 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsDr. Doron Zeilberger is the Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He's also a math heretic who thoroughly rejects the orthodox conceptions of infinity in modern mathematics. So we got along quite well. We had a fantastic conversation covering a wide range of topics, inc...
Ep. 96 - Truth and Postmodernism | Breakdown of Thaddeus Russell Interview
Patterson in Pursuit - April 07, 2019 18:16 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThe most requested interview breakdown ever - my conversation with Thaddeus Russell about the postmodern theory of truth. Fun episode! Can we know that experience is happening? If somebody denies that they know, is it possible to convince them? Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack ...
Ep. 95 - The Highest IQ in America | Christopher Langan
Patterson in Pursuit - March 24, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsChristopher Langan is an independent intellectual known for having the highest IQ in America - somewhere around 200, which is six standard deviations above the norm. His story is fascinating. Chris is not working within the academy. Instead, he's splitting his time between ranching and philoso...
Ep. 94 - A Satoshi Nakamoto Story | Phil "Scronty" Wilson
Patterson in Pursuit - September 02, 2018 18:04 - 7 hours ★★★★ - 105 ratingsWho is Satoshi Nakamoto? If you've been in the Bitcoin world for a while, you know that's the last question you should try to answer. However, I've recently come across a story that I find quite plausible, written by Phil Wilson (aka Scronty). Phil documents the thinking-process behind the Bit...
Ep. 93 - Abortion, Natural Rights, and Evictionism | Dr. Walter Block
Patterson in Pursuit - June 28, 2018 23:52 - 58 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsMy conversation with Dr. Walter Block about abortion and natural rights, which is one of the trickiest issues in any political philosophy, libertarianism included. He's the creator of a theory called "evictionism," which tries to take a middle ground between pro-life and pro-choice positions. ...
Ep. 92 - 6 Years of Mystery Illness: When Western Medicine Fails
Patterson in Pursuit - June 17, 2018 14:59 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsJulia and I have been dealing with a mystery illness for more than six years. It's progressively gotten worse, but finally, after seeing more than 50 doctors in multiple states and countries, we're finding answers. Our story is not unique. There are millions of people suffering with unknown il...
Ep. 91 - Tom Woods on Catholicism, Papal Authority, and Intellectual Entrepreneurship | Dr. Thomas Woods
Patterson in Pursuit - June 10, 2018 05:33 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 105 ratingsTom Woods joins me for a great discussion about Catholicism, papal authority, and his story of becoming an independent intellectual entrepreneur. Was the Catholic Church really an anti-intellectual, anti-science organization throughout history, or is that simply a myth? Does the tru...
The Abuse of Apriorism in Economics
Patterson in Pursuit - May 31, 2018 10:30 - 21 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThe purpose of this article is to point out where my fellow rationalists are being dogmatic, in particular, with regard to Austrian Economics. Philosophers like Hans-Hermann Hoppe tend to drop the "ceteris paribus" condition, turning true-but-neutered claims into false-and-dogmatic ones. Get fu...
Ep. 90 - The Overwhelming Beauty of Free Markets | Jeffrey Tucker
Patterson in Pursuit - May 27, 2018 10:30 - 52 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThis week's interview is with Jeff Tucker. We're talking about how capitalism fits into the bigger picture. Libertarians tend to assume that everybody values the creation of wealth, and therefore free markets are important. But why make this assumption? Perhaps free markets create wealth at the ...
Does Free Will Even Make Sense?
Patterson in Pursuit - May 24, 2018 10:30 - 18 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsFew things are as intuitively obvious, yet philosophically challenging, as the existence of free will. There’s a fashionable critique of free will that says, “The very concept of free will is incoherent; therefore, it obviously doesn’t exist.” This article does not make the case for or again...
The Crucifixion: A Unification of Love and Hate
Patterson in Pursuit - May 17, 2018 10:30 - 7 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThis article was inspired by a life-size replica of the crucifixion within a church in Bergen, Norway. The church service was pointless, but the replica sparked some valuable thoughts about love and hate. Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack at stevepatterson.substack.com/subscribe
How the Rubik's Cube Solves Any Paradox
Patterson in Pursuit - May 13, 2018 15:49 - 13 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsThis narrated article is about using the Rubik's Cube as an analogy for philosophic paradoxes and problem-solving. There are no unsolvable scrambles... Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack at stevepatterson.substack.com/subscribe
Ep. 89 - Is the Whole Greater than the Sum of Its Parts? | Dr. Andrew Brenner
Patterson in Pursuit - May 06, 2018 11:30 - 54 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsIs a “whole” really something greater than the sum of its parts? Or, is a “whole” identical to the sum of its parts? Dr. Andrew Brenner joins me for a fun conversation about mereology - the study of parts and wholes. While it might seem like an esoteric topic, it’s actually central to meta...
Defending Zeno's Paradox
Patterson in Pursuit - May 03, 2018 16:13 - 14 minutes ★★★★ - 105 ratingsZeno's paradoxes are some of the most famous. Most modern philosophers simply dismiss them as "resolved" because of calculus. However, that's a logical mistake. Calculus actually does not resolve Zeno's paradoxes. What resolves them is a base-unit of physical reality. Get full access to Steve P...