Coming up, I'll say a word about the strange death and murder of Hollywood actor Rob Reiner.
I'm going to examine some bombshell new information about Ilhan Omar and the allegation she married her brother to subvert the immigration laws.
And I'm going to ask how Western societies can deal with Islamic terrorism in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack in Australia.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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I just saw an hour or two ago the tragic news of Rob Reiner, aka meathead, the famous actor, and later, by the way, director.
I first encountered Reiner in All in the Family, such a classic role, and actually a role in which you had to, he was supposed to be kind of the hero, I think, of that sitcom.
Archie Bunker was kind of like the villain, or at least the Archie Bunker was like the idiot, and Rob Reiner was supposed to be the sophisticated guy.
Although, part of what made that show so ingenious and watchable is, and I don't even know if this was Norman Lear's intention, very often Archie Bunker came out as the smart guy or the witty guy, and Rob Reiner came up as a kind of over-educated buffoon.
But he went on to a very illustrious career, and it turned out that this guy was not only a really good actor, but he was also a really good director.
But he was also a major unrepentant leftist.
And tragically, he and his wife were killed, killed in what initially appeared to be kind of some sort of a home invasion.
Reiner and his wife found their throat slashed in their posh Hollywood home.
And when Debbie and I heard about this last night, we were talking about it.
We were like, well, what kind of a Hollywood home did he live in?
Because generally, big-name actors, if you've ever been to LA and Hollywood, they live behind these massive walls and tall gates.
And they often have private security inside those gates.
And there's just no way to be able to get sometimes you can't even see their house.
How easy can it be to do a home invasion on one of those kinds of Hollywood mansions?
Not easy at all.
And so, Debbie and I are like, something else seems to be going on here.
And sure enough, today, their own Rob Reiner's son is arrested.
He's apparently, he was apparently a very dubious character.
He was homeless for a while.
He's also a drug addict.
And evidently, according to reports, apparently from another family member, they got into a shouting match of some sort of a massive argument, probably over drugs, maybe over money.
I don't know.
And in a rage, the son whips out the knife or takes a knife from the home, we don't know yet, and kills his own parents.
Wow.
And now, Debbie and I were discussing just a few moments ago whether this is planned or not, because think about it.
You can say, oh, yeah, I lost my head.
It was in the middle of an argument.
Well, where'd the knife come from?
Did you bring it with you?
If so, you obviously may have had some malign intention when you got there.
It's not just a matter that you flew off the handle.
Now, obviously, if you got into a rage and ran and grabbed one of the kitchen knives, it could be more impulsive.
We don't know.
But we were commenting about the sheer horror of people who murder their own parents and how that is in a level of evil that's really different, even from, you know, you're a mafia guy and you carry out a hit or you go rob a grocery store and you end up shooting the clerk.
Your goal there is to grab the stuff and the clerk is in the way and the clerk is nothing to you.
At least you're indifferent to the clerk.
But to murder people who have raised you and taken care of you and you were helpless and when you were a child, it's quite, you know, unconscionable is perhaps the right word here because it's difficult for the conscience to grasp that kind of thing.
I also want to point out that in contrast with Charlie Kirk, when Charlie Kirk died and you had all these liberals cheering and I remember the one guy, you know, singing the song, We Got Charlie in the Neck, in the Neck, We Got Charlie in the Neck.
And that's emblematic of how these the jubilation that attended Charlie's death.
I was looking to see if we would see any of that, but I've seen none of it.
I mean, literally zero.
I'm not saying none of it exists because I'm incapable of surfing the entire web by myself, but I haven't seen it.
Let's put it that way, which tells me that there's that conservatives are responding quite differently to this than liberals did to Charlie Kirk.
Now, let's talk a little bit about Ilhan Omar.
I saw that Ilhan Omar was on television firing back at reports, including an insinuation, not an insinuation, an outright statement by Trump, that she married her own brother.
And Ilhan Omar claims that this is obviously wrong and ignorant.
I'm going to quote her now.
Everybody knows I came to the United States at the age of 12, gained my citizenship at the age of 17.
She goes on to say, and now I'm elected to Congress.
And so she goes, this is pure ignorance.
And she says, quote, it's a national embarrassment that he continues to say those kinds of things.
Now, Ilhan Omar's team has pointed out she came as a refugee.
She became a naturalized citizen as a teen.
She divorced her husband, Ahmed Elmi, in 2017.
And she claims that this guy is not her brother.
Apparently, this Elmi guy now lives, they claim at least in South Africa.
So Ilhan Omar is basically saying not even that she didn't violate the immigration laws, but she couldn't have because, hey, she got a citizenship way before that, and she married this guy, Elmi, but he's not.
She's saying he's not her brother.
Now, I now turn to a detailed article in the Free Beacon published by a lawyer and a very credible guy, Scott Johnson, who has been covering this issue for a long time.
And so, by the way, have many others.
I want to get into what Scott Johnson is talking about here.
And that is that genetic testing evidently shows that there is a, or there reportedly is, a very close connection, genetic connection between Ilhan Omar and this guy, Elmi.
They are, in fact, quite likely, if not definitively, brother and sister.
That actually does not seem to be at issue here.
Apparently, what happened is that the family, the Omar family, had applied for asylum in America, and part of the family came here, and part of the family went to Great Britain, including this guy, Ahmed Noor Elmi.
So Elmi, the brother, the alleged brother, goes to Great Britain, and Ilhan Omar comes here.
Now, evidently, what's going on here is that Ilhan Omar is married to another guy, Ahmed Hersi.
He's the father of her children.
And then she marries her brother.
She divorces that guy and marries Ahmed Elmi in 2009.
Now, the point here, and I understand it, this is a little bit of a labyrinth, but as I understand, this is the key point.
The point is that she doesn't do it to get citizenship for her.
She does it for him.
In other words, she's looking for a way to get around the immigration laws and get Elmi, the other guy, into the country and establish his legal status.
Now, interestingly, when you look at Ilhan Omar's website, there's no mention of this Elmi guy.
They refer to the other guy, the first guy, and Elmi has just basically disappeared.
And Scott Johnson also reports that even her marriage to the other guy, which is Ahmed Hersi, they applied for a marriage license, but it doesn't sound like they ever followed up with a legal marriage.
So all of this is sort of dubious.
And now, here's the point.
The point is that there's quite clearly an effort here to subvert the immigration laws.
And it's done so blatantly that it's done in the secure knowledge that nothing can be done about it.
And if anyone looks into it, they're racist.
A number of journalists over the years have tried to explore this.
By the way, not just conservatives, even people with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the local newspapers in the area have tried to send journalists to find out about this.
They're always led up and down the track and round and round, and it gets nowhere.
And then they're accused of being racist, and then they back off, and the whole topic drops.
So everything is left with a kind of a shrugging of the shoulders, and this looks like it, but we don't really know.
And I don't understand.
Look, if this was a conservative, let alone a high-profile conservative, the Biden Justice Department would be all over it.
There would be a special counsel, they'd be investigating all the facts.
Because these are major crimes being committed here: defrauding the immigration laws, doing it deliberately, not to mention incest is not legal in this country.
So there's all kinds of ways that you could get at this, which will create massive legal exposure, criminal exposure potentially, and certainly public exposure, which is to say major embarrassment.
And yet, as conservatives, somehow, this never really gets pursued.
I keep seeing insinuations from these guys, the Oversight Committee, insinuations from the Justice Department, but not the kind of ruthless, systematic investigation that simply asks: A, is Ilhan Omar's legality in this country firmly established?
B, did she, in fact, marry her brother?
Yes or no?
C, did that marriage subvert the immigration laws?
Was that a marriage created to get around the immigration laws and defraud the U.S. government?
And D, why isn't she being arrested?
Why isn't there a bid to arrest the other guy, even if he's not living in the country right now?
And why isn't there a process already underway to get this woman removed from Congress?
So I think these are the things that need to happen in order to put our minds to rest on this issue.
Too many of these kinds of issues are raised.
They kind of hang out there.
Now, again, conversely, if there is nothing to them, then we need to know that also.
Let's say it could be that somehow he is perhaps a relative, but not her brother.
Let's say, for example, that he is her brother, and this is some extremely perverse marriage, but it had nothing to do with the immigration laws.
That guy's status had been independently established, let's say, hypothetically, before that.
So he didn't need to marry her to get his legal status.
He got his legal status some other way.
In that case, you have a sordid, incestuous marriage for whatever reason, but it's not an effort to get around the immigration laws.
All of these I'm laying out because they are possibilities.
And if we're wrong about it, we need to know that also.
But this is where, as conservatives, as Republicans, we need to up the ante, we need to up our game, we need to get to the bottom of the matter.
And that's how you put public concern, one way or the other, to rest.
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We have seen really just in the last 24 to 48 hours two terror attacks.
One, a bigger one in Australia.
This is the Bondi Beach terrorist attack.
And the other one, a mass shooting at Brown University, where the facts are, at least to this date, a little more unclear.
I'll start by talking a little bit about the Brown case because some people thought, and particularly on the heels of the Bondi Beach attack, that this was going to be like an Islamic guy.
And there was even a report that someone shouted Allahu Akbar, but it turns out it's not.
It's not an Islamic guy.
It's a white guy.
And from what I have seen, which is very scattershot, this is a guy who appears to be, even though of military background, on the left.
This appears to be a guy who, and it makes sense, doesn't it, that he would be on the left because he's targeting, or he seems to be targeting, a Jewish course.
You have a professor of Jewish studies who's teaching a class on essentially economic history and the Jews.
And that's where the attack takes place.
So it seems reasonable to surmise at this very early stage that there's a Palestinian, kind of a free Palestine type of connection.
I do see that a vice president of college Republicans at Brown is one of the students who was killed in the attack.
And some are speculating: well, was she targeted?
Was this an attack against right-wingers?
I don't think that that's likely or makes a lot of sense because A, if you wanted to target right-wingers, you're not going to go to Brown University where right-wingers exist but are very scarce.
You'd rather go to Hillsdale College or Liberty University.
I mean, you go the places where you're likely to find right-wingers.
It seems more likely that this is an ideological, perhaps, yes, but if ideological, directed against Jews or directed against Israel.
We'll get more facts as those come out.
But when we turn to Bondi Beach, we know fully what the motives are because The attackers have been identified.
It's a father and son.
The father was killed.
The son has been captured.
And these were two guys up on a sort of ramp or bridge, and they were firing and reloading against people on the beach.
Amazingly, one of the attackers, I'm assuming the son, but I'm not positive.
I think the son was taken down by another guy who jumped on the attacker.
And that guy was initially identified as a Muslim.
And there were a lot of people saying, well, see, this shows you there are good Muslims and bad Muslims.
And the guy had a Muslim name.
But it's now being reported that he is not a Muslim at all.
He is, in fact, an Eastern right Christian.
And so that's interesting because that would show you that this was maybe someone of Arab descent, but a Christian Arab, apparently a shopkeeper of some sort.
And this is the guy who did the intervention.
This is, in fact, a hero because he put himself in danger.
Apparently, he himself was injured and is now in the hospital, but expected to survive.
Now, when I think of Australia and I think about the fact that these guys, this father and son, were let in to Australia.
They were given sanctuary.
They were there in the country legally.
This is not a case where these are illegals who sneak into the country.
It's not that this is like a Biden operation where the borders are porous and people just kind of came through.
No, they've been let in.
And think about how just was it a couple of years ago, Novak Djokovic was denied entry to Australia.
Why?
Because, well, he didn't take his COVID shot.
So, Djokovic, no.
These guys, the shooters, yes.
This is Australia.
And in fact, I would say this is the West.
This is the absolute blindness.
And it's not entirely blindness because the left is doing this deliberately.
They're doing it because they actually agree with the radical Muslims that Western civilization needs to be subverted and undermined.
This is what they've been teaching in their classrooms.
This is what they promulgate through the media.
This is the actual ideology of the left: that the white man's civilization is evil.
It has polluted the world.
It needs to be curtailed.
It needs to be pulled down a notch.
It needs to be undermined from within.
We need a kind of recolonization to undo the effects of the original colonization.
All of this is now very familiar.
Most of us, many of us, have gone through college listening to this kind of rhetoric.
And notice that this is pretty much in sync with what the radical Muslims say.
And so we see here, even in Australia, how the red-green alliance, the alliance, in other words, what I'm saying between radical Islam and the Albanese regime in Australia has kind of come together to produce this kind of atrocious result.
And you know this because I just saw Albanese talking in an interview and he's like, well, we have to be careful about these threats that were coming from different directions, including right-wing extremism.
So he doesn't say one word, at least not in this statement, about radical Islam.
Instead, he deflects to right-wing extremism, as if right-wing extremism had anything to do with the Bondi Beach attacks.
So the left, even now, protects their shooters.
They protect their radical allies.
The Red Green Alliance needs people like this, like these shooters in the country, and so imports them, brings people like that.
I'm not saying that they approve of the results of this particular action.
I'm simply saying that there's a political alliance between radical Islam, which has a violent and jihadi element to it, undeniably, and the political aspirations of the left.
By the way, not just in Australia, not just in Canada, not just in Europe, but also quite clearly in this country.
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Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians the revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible?
The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
What if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Mary Thoreau.
She's chairman and CEO of the Independent Institute.
By the way, an institution with which I've had a pretty long connection.
I've done events in California with the Institute.
Mary and I have crossed paths over the years.
By the way, her articles have appeared everywhere: Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and she is the editor of a new book.
This is a topic we're going to talk about beyond homeless: good intentions, bad outcomes, transformative solutions.
The website, by the way, is just independent.org.
That's the website for the Institute.
Mary, good to see you again, if only remotely.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let me ask you about the problem of the homeless, because I remember first hearing about this going way back in the Reagan years, you know, and homelessness was a big problem.
And then I noticed that when after Reagan left office and Clinton came in in 1992, no more media talk about homelessness.
Suddenly, the topic appeared to vanish.
In other words, it gave me the idea it was being used as a political cudgel against Reagan.
And I've noticed over the years that the topic seems to come back, but the problem itself doesn't seem to go away.
Why is that?
What's going on here?
And for those of us who are not like really close to it, what is the nub of the issue?
Thank you, Dinesh.
I really appreciate your having me here.
Yes, homelessness has been exploding in the 21st century, especially.
And in the last 10 or 15 years, it's just gotten completely out of control.
Basically, people experiencing homelessness have a lot of potential.
And government policies will never help them realize the potential.
Government policies, as they are currently, seek to make them permanent wards of the state or leave them in the streets.
And it's really a tragedy, and it's just getting worse every day.
So, Mary, let's go through how this happens.
I mean, how does someone become homeless, right?
Someone because we hear that many of these people are addicts or they're alcoholics, and a fair proportion of them are just nuts.
And yet you said a moment ago, which I think is very interesting, that some of them or maybe many of them have potential and could in fact be living productive lives.
And so which is it?
Who are these people?
And how do they get to be where they are?
I think almost all of them have potential to live full lives.
How they get there in the first place is very unique.
It's a highly individualized problem.
I've talked to countless people experiencing homelessness.
And a lot of it is just terrible childhoods.
And I have learned there before the grace of God go I. If I'd had a childhood like that, I'd probably be in the streets self-medicating as well.
Others have just had maybe hospitalization as an adult, either get addicted to painkillers or when they're released, they don't have any place to go.
There's economic problems.
There's a lot of problems.
Yes, the expense of housing, which has been driven by government policies, has been a large part of it.
The destruction of cheap places for people to live in the name of erasing blight.
So just a whole slew of things contribute to it.
There is a lot of addiction because even though people who will become homeless for great many different reasons, once you're living in the streets, it's a terrible, miserable existence.
And often people will start using either alcohol or drugs to kind of dull the reality.
And within a few weeks, they may very well be addicted.
There's also a lot of mental illness, and we do not have a good functioning mental health system in this country.
Famously, JFK abolished state mental hospitals in 1963, shortly before his assassination, and nothing came up to replace them.
So people who are mentally ill, families who have a mentally ill member of their family in their home and find that they just, they can't get them help and they certainly can't have them living with them.
They're just too destructive and they end up out on the street with no one to help them.
And then the drugs will exacerbate that.
Today's marijuana is so strong, it will induce psychosis.
So it's very much an insidious problem, the tie between mental illness and addiction.
So it's complicated to solve, but it is solvable.
You know, it seems to me, Mary, it's such a hard problem, just the way you describe it, for the simple reason that our government doesn't even know how to take people who don't have addiction, who don't have mental illness, and, for example, get them off welfare and into productive work.
So, what I'm getting at is our government has a terrible record, even with people who are, in general, able-bodied and on their feet.
And what you're saying is, we're now talking about people who have become cut off from their families, so they don't have that support structure.
They are often dealing with these addictions and perhaps mental illness, one or the other, or both.
And it's going to take some pretty enlightened government policy to deal with this.
Now, is it also a fact that from the point of view of the Democrats and particularly in these blue states, that they cynically view the homeless as not only a mechanism for not only a mechanism for delivering votes to the Democratic Party,
but maybe also a mechanism for delivering large amounts of money to a network of nonprofits, a so-called homeless industry that intercepts most of the money allocated to the homeless?
In other words, this isn't just well-meaning government policy going awry.
It's a bit of a racket, don't you think?
Well, the subtitle of our book is very deliberate.
It's Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes, Transformative Solutions.
I like to think that everybody who's involved in homelessness does so out of good intentions.
But unfortunately, they have a very mistaken hypothesis as to what will help people who are experiencing homelessness.
And so the outcomes of the policies that they've enacted and the money that they're spending is very bad.
We have terrible outcomes for people experiencing homelessness.
Federal policy drives a lot of the spending on the state and local level.
Even though it's not the lion's share of the spending, the narrative has permeated every level of government pretty much.
And they're directing all of their money into what's called permanent supportive housing or housing first, which is designed originally for a very small portion of the population, but it's now being applied to the entire population as if it's just a homogenous glob of people.
It's very expensive.
It's very ineffective.
And as we can see from the numbers since this became federal policy, it's exacerbating the problem badly.
Homelessness is exploding everywhere as spending is exploding everywhere.
Right.
But if I can push you on this a little bit, it seems to me that when you have a problem, you throw a lot of money at it, it doesn't get solved, the number of homeless multiplies, you throw more money at it.
You've got to assume that the people who are doing this can see the result.
In other words, they recognize that the problem is metastasizing, and it's not that hard to see how they gain from that politically.
And so if you take the approach that they are well-meaning, but well-meaning bunglers, then the solution becomes: well, we need to give them arguments and persuasion and show them that they're going down the wrong road.
But think of it differently.
If this was not a problem of ignorance, but this was a kind of a political gang operation, let's say similar, for example, to the Tammany Hall racket of the 19th century.
Think of it.
There's no point calling in the bosses in the 19th century, telling them, hey, listen, you're not achieving the results you really aim for because they're like, we're running a racket around here.
It calls for a different kind of strategy to bust the racket.
And so I guess what I'm asking you is, I mean, I'm all in favor, by the way, of making good arguments and using the tools of persuasion.
But are there other tools that are also needed ultimately to dismantle what some people have been just calling like the homeless industry?
Dinesh, you're exactly right.
The incentives in government are perverse.
As the problem gets worse, people are rewarded with larger budgets and larger staffs and more power.
So government is not going to be the solution here.
What we've been working on is applying a wonderful large-scale solution that we found in the course of our research, which is in San Antonio, Texas, which was the result of the entire community coming together, every sector of the community, and designing a very well-functioning system that deals with all of the individualized aspects of homelessness.
And we've been working with especially private sector leaders here in the San Francisco Bay Area to replicate that kind of a community organization, a private sector-led response to the crisis.
And we're seeing good progress.
It's going to take more work, but absolutely.
We have to set up competing infrastructures for dealing with this and hope that the voters and the citizens of the community can see and realize, and they really are.
I mean, that's what happened here in San Francisco.
People have really rebelled after 40 years of being told, pay your taxes and we're going to solve the problem.
You know, pass this bond measure.
We'll solve the problem.
People finally have figured it out.
Well, we've given you billions and billions and billions of dollars.
There was an audit earlier this year by the state showing that California has spent just the state, not including localities, has spent $24 billion over five years on homelessness and cannot account for where it went or what it achieved.
So the citizens are not stupid.
They've risen up, formed grassroots organizations, and have really rebelled against the status quo.
It resulted in the election of a moderate mayor in San Francisco last year for the first time in decades.
It's really an expression of the will of the people, and people are getting involved.
And that's what has to happen: people have to get involved and understand that this is an issue that the community needs to get together and resolve.
Government is never going to, and it just can't.
I think what you're saying, also, Mary, here, is that you need an alternative path that works.
And you mentioned San Antonio.
Can you sketch out just briefly, give me an idea of what that looks like?
All right.
So let's say, for example, I'm a guy who's, let's even not say mentally ill, although my critics might disagree.
Let's just say I've got some addictions.
I take some painkillers.
I'm out in the street.
I live in San Antonio.
How do you help me?
So San Antonio, again, every sector of the community came together.
They created something called Haven for Hope.
It's a 22-acre campus right next to downtown.
And it has both resources for people who are not yet experiencing homelessness or in danger of experiencing homelessness.
They have 80 nonprofits on site so you can go in and access the services that you need.
If you need short-term rental assistance, they'll give you a check to cover this month while you get back on your feet, et cetera.
And then it goes up to there's an emergency shelter where if you just need a safe place to sleep, a warm shower, a hot meal, you can come in and get that.
And you can also then have access to all of the services.
And then the larger part of the campus is called the transformational campus.
And that's for people who really want to commit to getting back on their feet.
And it's a secure residential facility.
You commit to sobriety.
You commit to working your plan.
Again, there are 80 nonprofits on campus right there to come alongside you and create the support system that you need to meet your housing plan, your employment plan, your life skills plan, perhaps your reunification with your family.
Whatever it is that you need to work on to achieve your full potential, they will provide you the resources that help you do that.
And it's just marvelous.
So, if, for example, the police come across somebody in the streets who's having a psychotic incident or whatever, they can drop them off at Haven and know that they'll be taken care of right away.
If it's temporary and they get stabilized, they can come in for more treatment or they can leave if they want to.
Again, if somebody is severely under the influence, the police can drop them off at the sobering facility at Haven.
And then the police are just back on the street.
They're not sitting in the emergency room for hours waiting for somebody to be admitted.
They can do the job that they need to do and know that the professionals at Haven are taking care of that individual who needs care.
Wow.
I mean, this is fascinating and actually reminds me a little bit, at least of what I've read about the way things used to be in the private sector, both in the United States and even in England.
I'm thinking here of Gertrude Himmelfarb's work on marriage and morals among the Victorians, how the Victorians would set up through the apparatus of churches, these volunteer societies, sobriety societies, temperance societies, ways of kind of getting you back on your feet and getting you into the productive workforce.
And I think what you're saying is that this kind of private sector solution is exactly what we need to revive, perhaps in a new form in the 21st century.
Guys, I've been talking to Mary Thoreau.
The book is Beyond Homeless: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes, Transformative Solutions.
The website for the Independent Institute, very simple, independent.org.
Mary, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh.
Good to see you again.
Good to see you.
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We are in the section of my book, Life After Death: The Evidence, where we are talking about the mind and the brain.
And we are considering the philosophy of reductive materialism, according to which all mental states are kind of reducible to material physical states, like motions of neurons inside your physical brain.
And I mentioned the last time two theories that I want to answer one by one.
The first one is, you can call it the identity theory.
The mind is the brain.
And when we say the mind, we mean nothing other than the brain.
They're just two words for the same thing, the same way that the morning star and the evening star both refer to Venus.
The second theory is called the functional theory.
And that is basically that the mind is what the brain does.
The mind is what exercises the function of the brain.
And so while the two aren't identical, the one is merely describing the actions of the other.
We can understand the mind as the functioning or functional aspect of the physical brain.
Now, the philosopher Leibniz taught us a way to figure out if two things are identical.
We're considering the first theory, the mind is the brain.
So think of it in algebraic terms, mind equals sign brain.
Now, Leibniz says that if A equals B, then the way you can test that is to say everything that is true about A has got to be true about B.
And if you find something that is true about A or B that is not true about the other, then A is not always equal to B.
The identity theory just doesn't really work.
So think of it this way.
If a guy comes to my door, I open the door, and the guy goes, I'm Barack Obama.
And let's just say he looks exactly like Obama.
Now I have to say, if he is Obama, then everything that's true about Obama has to be true about this guy.
If I can find something that's true about this guy that I know is not true about Obama, he's not Obama.
It's very simple.
So that's the Leibnizian test.
And we want to apply this test to see if mental states are the same as brain states.
So imagine now that I have a mental state right now, and I'm thinking in my mind that George Washington was our greatest president.
That's a thought in my mind right now.
Now, according to identity theory, this mental state is the same as my current brain state, the physical state of my brain.
But this can't be true.
Why?
Well, first of all, because my mental state is private.
It's known only to me.
Only I know what is going on right now in my own mind.
But my brain state is not private.
A neuroscientist or a neurologist could a PET scan, look at my brain, see what my brain state is.
So one is private, the other is public.
Second of all, my mental state cannot be physically located.
You can say it's in my head, but you can never find it in my head.
And my brain state can be found.
It's right there.
It's where my physical brain is.
Moreover, my mental state is about something.
In other words, it's about George Washington.
It refers to something outside of itself.
It has a pointer built into it.
I am speaking about this or that.
But that's not true of my brain state.
My brain state isn't about something.
My brain state simply is.
It's just the way it is.
Not only that, but I am infallible about my own mental state, but I can't be infallible about my own brain state.
In other words, if I'm thinking that George Washington was the greatest president, I might be wrong whether he was or not, but I'm infallible in thinking that that's what I'm thinking right now.
I know for sure what my mental state is.
But I could easily be mistaken about my brain state.
I may think I have only 12 neurons in my brain.
In fact, I have millions of neurons.
I think that my language ability is over here.
In fact, it's over there.
So I've just identified a whole bunch of things, four things, four separate things that tell you that mental states are not brain states.
Why?
Because I've shown you things that are true of the one that are not true of the other.
So identity theory has just miserably failed the Leibniz test.
Now, we move to the second theory, which is called functionalism.
And as I mentioned, functionalism basically means that you can give a descriptive account of the functions of the brain, and that is what we call the mental.
So the best way to understand functionalism is like this: what is a mousetrap?
Is a mousetrap a wooden apparatus that has a little window and a trapdoor?
Is that what a mousetrap is?
Well, sort of, but you can make a mousetrap another way.
A mousetrap is just simply a contraption that catches mice.
Whatever catches mice is a mousetrap.
So a mousetrap can be defined by its function, not just by what it looks like or what its dimensions are.
So the functional credo is that the mind is basically what the brain makes you do.
Now, I think that this functional theory doesn't work any better than the identity theory for this reason.
And that is that a mental state and behavior are two completely different things.
So let's consider, for example, the feeling of being in love.
That is a mental state.
Now, that may lead you to do some things, like you might decide to write love letters, you might decide to send flowers, you might decide to plan a date or plan a wedding.
So those are the actions.
But even though those are the actions that may be predictably or sometimes unpredictably flow from this mental state, nobody can say that those things are the mental state because there is an inner quality to the mental state that these actions simply cannot reflect.
The inner quality, sometimes it's the term for this is qualia.
Qualia is the inner sense of what it is like to experience something.
And that is not something that can be captured in any kind of an action.
One good way to test this, by the way, is: I want to refer to a famous philosophical essay written now about 50 years ago by a philosopher called Thomas Nagel.
And it was called, What is it like to be a bat?
Now, you might think this is like typical philosophical mumbo jumbo.
This guy, Thomas Nagel, is sitting around, oh, what's it like for me, Thomas Nagel, to, you know, I wonder what life would be like if I had bat wings and I flew around.
No, that's actually not what Thomas Nagel is getting at.
He's not asking what it is like for him, Thomas Nagel, to try to imaginatively put himself in the place of a bat.
He's asking what is it like for a bat to be a bat.
In other words, what is the inner experience of being a bat as experienced by the bat?
And this is, of course, not exclusive to bats.
You could ask the same thing: what is it like to be a dog?
There must be something that it's like to be a dog.
And here's Nagel's point: that you can understand everything about a bat, the way it moves around, echolocation, the physical structure of the bat.
Same with the dog.
You can understand everything about the dog.
It's got four legs.
It's got this is how it functions.
This is what the dog does.
This is where the dog goes.
This is what the dog eats.
And he goes, and you're going to have no idea at the end what it is like to be a dog.
In fact, Debbie and I were just talking today on the way to the podcast about whether dogs can, this may seem like a really weird conversation, but about dogs have morality.
And Debbie's like, oh, you'll be amazed.
Dogs are so kind and they can protect their masters.
And I was saying, well, that's not really morality at all because morality is not simply doing the actions that reflect one's own self-interest.
I got a master, he feeds me, he looks after me, I like him, so I'm going to protect him.
Morality is actually acting, by and large, against self-interest.
You ought to do this.
You must not do that.
And those commands would be meaningless if you didn't feel like doing it.
If you weren't even inclined to do it in the first place, why would you need the instruction?
Don't do that.
Now, the point here with coming back to Thomas Nagel is that he's basically saying that the inner mental state of the bat cannot be understood by what bats do.
So the functional theory fails.
You can understand all the functions of a bat.
Oh, it's evolutionary place and its biological role in the ecosystem and how it feeds the young and all of this.
And it will get you no closer at all to understanding what it is like to be a bat.
And when I pick this up again tomorrow, and by the way, tomorrow I'm going to do kind of a special issue on life after death because I want to move things along.
And there's so much rich material in this book.
By the way, I hope you get it as a reference book.
This is like a mini education here in itself.
We're going to cover a lot of ground.
I'm going to devote much of tomorrow to like a special edition of this topic.
I'll have a short monologue up front, but then the rest of it.
Oh, I'm sorry, Debbie's reminding me.
I'm talking not about tomorrow, but about Wednesday.
I'm traveling on Wednesday, and so I'm going to pre-record a show for you.
And it's going to be a kind of special life after death edition.
So more to come on Wednesday.
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