Jeff, a frequent guest on The Allure of the Unknown, debates whether humans gravitate toward unexplained phenomena—like an apple peeler’s mechanics or magic—as intellectual laziness, noting its appeal fades with understanding. Spencer contrasts this with childhood wonder but admits adults cling to mystery in fringe beliefs, such as flat Earth theories or creationist narratives, where ignorance fuels control fantasies like telekinesis. Jeff counters that defiance and rebellion drive these groups, exposing a paradox: they reject objective reality yet construct elaborate, self-contradictory explanations. The episode leaves unresolved how mystery, misinformation, and oppositional identity intertwine in beliefs from anti-vaxxers to the Illuminati, underscoring humanity’s enduring fascination with the unknowable despite—or because of—its complexity. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your regular host.
I'm here tonight with Jeff.
Your regular guest.
That's right.
Quick reminder before we start.
Any feedback, any thoughts, any concerns?
Anything you think we're just dead wrong about, especially you think we're dead wrong about it?
Please send it to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
The topic we're going to talk about tonight is the unknowable.
More specifically, a question.
Is it that humans want to believe in unknowable things?
Do we steer towards things that are mysterious?
This is a thing I think about sometimes that I've even thought it sometimes that I put in my brain a level of romantic or perhaps romantic is the wrong word, but like fantastical or I think things are amazing when I have no idea how they work.
And I think that's common.
You know, when I first saw, it was so stupid.
Things like when I think of something that's so amazing and I have no idea how it works, I think of like an old tiny apple peeler.
Yeah.
It seems so stupid, right?
It's when I first saw it, it was this on a video or movie or whatever.
It was this weird device and you put your apple in it and it would just, you'd crank this little tring and it would turn it.
And I just thought, oh, that's so amazing.
That's so fantastic.
And of course, once you look really, really closely at it, it's not really even all that amazing.
It's just a couple of gears and a little knife and it's not that big a deal.
Of course, as soon as I understood how it worked, oh, this stupid thing.
Oh, I don't care about it anymore.
But that's a question I have about other things too, is that is a thing fascinating when its workings are mysterious?
And then is it mundane when how it works is well known to us?
First take.
What do you think, Jeff?
I reject your hypothesis.
I don't think that we as humans are, you know, attracted to the air of mystery of the unknowable and have like a subconscious desire to keep things mysterious so we can be more fascinated by them.
So much as I just think that we as a species have a tendency to be intellectually lazy.
And if someone tells us that it's that way because magic, oh, cool.
I don't have to think about that anymore.
So am I getting this right that in your view, magic is an explanation all unto itself that's a catch-all and that because we then have an explanation for it, we can set it aside.
Oh, it's magic.
Oh, that's no problem.
Yeah, I understand how magic works.
It's fine.
No one understands how magic works, right?
Because it's not really there.
It's just a word we use for things that we don't have another explanation for.
Well, I mean, like, let's call a spade a spade.
I mean, like most times we're discussing this, we're discussing like religion.
So saying that it's the work of God is a really easy way to not have to think too hard about how that thing is that way.
Right.
To say that it's the work of God is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as saying it's magic.
Yeah, exactly.
God's power must be magic, right?
If God can snap his fingers and things happen, that's magic.
Right.
Now, again, like there's, there's exceptions to every rule.
Like we all know at least one person who was fascinated about the workings of mechanical or electrical things and took things apart for fun just to see how they worked when they were a kid and grew up to be a technician or engineer or what have you.
There are people that are wired that way with that burning level of scientific curiosity, that need to understand how everything works and like rigorously explore and test until they get answers that satisfy them.
But those people, unfortunately, I believe, are in the minority in the human species.
Most of us just want to live comfortable lives where we don't have to work or think too hard.
And the more we can chalk up to the mystery of the unknowable, the better off we are, because the less we have to think for ourselves.
So what do you think is happening at a magic show?
You know, when we see a person and they on stage and they chop a woman in half and the woman's obviously alive, but she looks like she's been chopped in half.
And of course, some of us know how this trick works and we know it's a trick.
But the first time I saw it as a child, I didn't know it was a trick.
I didn't know how it worked.
It held an extra sense of mystique for me.
Yeah.
All right.
I see your point there for sure.
Like things that are like obviously fantastical and boggle the mind's ability to comprehend how they could be that piques one's interest.
There was a science fiction author who once very famously said that any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
The idea being that if a person with a cell phone went back in time 2000 years, their abilities would be like magic, their ability to compute things.
Of course, cell phone wouldn't work very well without the network of cell towers.
But if somehow you transported all those as well, you would be akin to a magician.
You would be Merlin.
You would be, you might even get burned to the stake.
Who knows?
Depending on what they think of magic in that particular space.
But this is an idea that I'm thinking about today.
This idea that I have that we might think, I wouldn't say better, when we don't know how something works, we think it has this sort of mysterious and sexy air to it.
Mysterious things to us, I think, are we're drawn a little more to them.
And of course, once we know how they work, we're less drawn to them.
This is one of the premises that I'm working with here.
And I think that's true, but it might not be true what I think follows from that.
So let's see if I can construct the logical steps here.
If you take something that you know and somehow you untether yourself from the knowledge and regress your knowledge of it, is it possible that it could regain a greater sense of this mystery for you?
What do you think of this idea?
Sorry, say that again.
If you could untether your knowledge of a thing, just dial it back a little bit.
And let's say that if you picture a concept and all of the things that led you to the conclusion that is that concept are like single strands of rope, like Lilliputians who tie Gulliver down.
If you snip some of those ropes that tie this concept together, is it possible that it could again regain its level of mystery that it maybe once had before you knew how it worked?
I suppose, like working within the premise that there was an air of mystery about it before you learned how it worked.
My personal experience with the knowable versus the unknowable is that when I don't understand how something works, it generally makes me anxious.
Fear of the unknown?
Possibly.
My most recent experience, as you know, I've transitioned from the electrical trade into the fire alarm technician trade.
So I'm learning how to program and write code for the first time at 45.
It's incredibly challenging.
Anytime I come across a new problem in programming or coding that I've never encountered before, or like a new spec that I have to write a line of code to meet, my initial response generally is panic because I don't know how it works.
I know I should know how it works.
I know I'm being paid to understand how it works.
And I feel a great deal of anxiety when, or, you know, when time comes for testing and an output doesn't behave the way you expect it to based on how you programmed it, something's wrong and it's probably something you did, but you don't know what.
It never works right the first time.
Not once for me has it ever worked right the first time.
But my sort of emotional journey, like you've put out a premise of, what would that be?
Like an inverse relationship between the knowability of something and how attracted we are to it.
The premise is like if it's unknowable and we don't understand it, it's got this sort of sexy air of mystique.
And as we learn the mechanics of how it works, it becomes mundane and everyday and it's no longer as sensational or mysterious.
I don't think that the entire population meets that premise psychologically, but I would concede that probably a very large portion of them do, or religion wouldn't be in business.
So yes, continuing with your premise.
Yeah.
Is it possible to re-ignite a sense of wonder about something by slowly de-educating you on how it works?
I suppose, but like, what would that look like?
To what end?
Well, but also, also, what would that look like?
Like, we're talking like a generational thing, right?
The only thing that can cause an individual to know less things is brain damage, alcohol, or senility.
Okay, let's get there.
But first, I want to address your counterexample.
In your counterexample, there's a few other factors.
The first being a level of expectation upon you and also a level of responsibility that you have in relation to the thing.
Fair.
So in one case, like I might talk about the magic show, the viewer of the magic show has some sense of the magician hopes wonder about it because that's what they're intending to project.
But the magician has a much different level of view on it.
It has no air of mystery to the magician.
All the magician has is a sense of responsibility and expectations placed upon them for what they're about to show everyone.
And in your case, what you're describing, your sense of mystery about it is probably much flattened by the responsibilities that you personally have for making the damn thing work.
Probably flatten every bit of mystery about it.
If it wasn't anything that you were personally attached to in that way, I suspect might have a different response if it wasn't a thing that you absolutely needed to go or you perhaps suffer some loss of reputation.
All very fair points.
But again, my personal experience has been I'm at a bare minimum annoyed by things that I don't understand the workings of.
Was there ever a point in your life where as a child, someone told you something about the moon that you now know is completely false?
Like it's made of green cheese, for example.
Of green cheese.
Yeah, yeah.
We all heard that one.
When you were told that as a child, did you ever wonder if it was true?
Oh, I'm sure I did.
And when you thought about that, did you look at the moon and kind of start thinking about what else might be true about it?
Because it's just so far away and you could never go there and view it close up.
Yeah.
Did you ever have any sense of wonder about the moon?
No, no, that's fair point.
Fair point.
So you're basically making the counter argument that my position is flawed because I'm a crotchety old man.
Well, I think we generally have a greater sense of wonder when we're very young.
Our minds do, they say, work slightly differently in that phase, but mostly we are hobbled by our lack of knowledge at that age.
And really, it's mentioned everywhere how children generally just have this what's called childlike wonder about the world.
Everything holds this extra sense of wonder.
And we don't usually feel a loss when we know how things work that the wonder goes away.
But we do look at the time in our life when we had a sense of wonder about everything.
And sometimes we think about how magical that time was.
And of course, no one's going to volunteer to not know anything just so they can have an eternal sense of wonder about the world.
But we did kind of like that.
And for a time, we didn't know that we had it at the time.
We didn't know what the world was going to be like when we knew all this other stuff that took that wonder away.
But that's a thing.
That's a thing that's noticed about humans and our experience in the world.
And that experience, by the way, isn't any different in Africa or Asia or Europe.
It doesn't matter which language you spoke when that happened.
It's not cultural.
It doesn't appear that children in China have less sense of wonder about the world than children in Ohio or Mexico or Peru.
Like it, it seems to be a universal human experience, this thing.
You make a sort of brushed up accidentally against a counterpoint there in the age of the people which we're discussing.
Okay.
Like you say, I don't experience as much wonder because I'm a crotchety old man.
And universally across cultural and racial boundaries, children experience a sense of wonder in the unknown that is unparalleled by any other age bracket.
So does our sense of wonder in something decrease as we come to know more about it?
Or does our sense of wonder in the unknown decrease generally as we get older?
I would think that, and there are far better educated people than myself who could probably back this up with statistics that I can't, but I'm rather positive that like there's definitely a biochemical imperative at play in the curiosity of children.
Possible.
The young brain is like a clean slate that needs to be filled up with data to survive because we as a species have surpassed the other species because of our brains and our opposable thumps.
And I have certainly experienced it attempting to learn things that are entirely new to me much later in life, a sort of cliché of old dogs and new tricks.
There's no wonder there, just a terribly uncomfortable slog trying to hard code new data onto this leathery old brain pan.
Well, my counter to your counter is that as we get old, it's still possible to feel a sense of wonder about things when they're mysterious to us.
The workings of the next iPhone that when it has new abilities that the current one doesn't have sometimes can still instill in us a sense of oh yeah, for sure.
Wow, that's really amazing that it can do that.
So it's still possible that we have a biological and part of our genetics as we grow is that we have a more natural curiosity.
And that's a thing that will drive us to learn new things and so that we can survive.
That's maybe possible.
And it's possible that it gets lessened as we get older, but it doesn't go away.
I think it's clear that it's not totally gone.
So it's difficult to say in that place which of those particular things is necessarily true or perhaps part of both.
But I'm going to work towards steer the car a little towards the bigger point I'm veering towards here.
Okay.
When we know how something works, its appearance in our mind, like you're making a model of the thing in your mind, even if it's not a thing that has a physical shape, you're still making some level of model of it in your mind.
Even if it's just the workings of the internet and it doesn't have a shape, you might think things about the internet when it's in your mind, even if it's just based on what you intend to get out of it, you know, what questions you might ask it and what it might lead you to.
When you know, hard fact know how these things work, their appearance in your mind is limited to exactly that, the way it works.
And when you don't know how something works, its appearance in your mind isn't limited to only that thing.
It's possible to think other things are possible because you don't know exactly how it works.
And in some cases, of course, just this just leads to you getting the wrong conclusion.
You might go to the internet to find something and it's just not possible for it to find it for you because you're just looking for it in the wrong way or you're doing the wrong thing with it.
But that doesn't change the fact that the way it works and its appearance is subject more to your imagination than to just the facts that are available in your mind.
And because of that, it can have all kinds of shapes that it wouldn't have if you knew how it worked.
So go ahead and counter me, sir.
I don't know if I can on that one, buddy.
Well, hit me again.
Explain that from another angle.
Okay.
So do you know much about engines?
Like internal combustion engines?
Very little.
Very little.
When I talk to you about how it works and what's possible because of it, we have a mutual friend who knows everything about how these engines work.
And he could tell based on its specs alone, something about how it's going to handle when he gets into it to drive it.
I mean, it's going to have a certain amount of torque and it's going to have RPM stats and it's going to have shifting stats and it's going to have a weight.
And he knows enough about these things that he'll know something about how it's likely to function in his brain when he drives it before he ever drives it.
And I'll climb into it and go, oh my God, this car goes so fast.
Yeah.
You will climb into it and your brain hasn't created any image or any model of what it's going to be like.
And you're going to step into that new truck and it will be amazing for you.
And you'll start wondering what else you could do with it because you don't have hard limits on its function based on your knowledge of the facts of how internal combustion engines work and how these trucks are.
And that's a really good example of what I'm talking about is that once you're not tied to the ground by the little appusions that are tying all the little facts of your body to the ground, the position of your body is more free.
There's more things that might be true about it because you don't know how it works.
Facts just get in the way of a good story, man.
Yeah, that's true.
That's a thing that storytellers sometimes say.
Yeah.
Well, okay, maybe I have a solid step there that I can move to the next thing and we'll see if this lands.
If we know less about a thing, it can take on a new and more fantastical existence in our minds.
If your knowledge of physics and astronomy and the earth are not tied very well to know exactly why the earth is an oblate spheroid that orbits the sun and rotates on an axis at a tilt and all of those factors, is it then possible for us to come to a greater understanding of how a person could then feel that they can look at this thing and say, the earth doesn't need to be a sphere in my mind.
It can be flat or bowl shaped or any other shape that a person imagines when they don't know how it really works.
Okay.
This might be an interesting thing for you.
You know some things about physics.
So sorry, just to put a finer point on your next premise there is there's a level of the human mind, conscious or subconscious, that prefers ignorance because it increases a level of wonder about a thing.
Like if we don't know, if we don't understand the basic level of physics and astronomy surrounding, you know, everything you just listed, then we're free to imagine the earth as whatever we want.
Yes.
And at some level, intellectually, we crave that.
Well, I'm not sure about that last part you added.
Okay.
But it is clear to me that once you don't know why the earth needs to be a sphere to explain all the things that we can see from our backyards, then you are free to think it's potentially some other shape or that the movements of the stars in the sky and the sun across the sky are moving that way because of some other thing.
And in that way, ignorance is a thing that can increase your sense of wonder about the world.
For sure.
The wonder of the child.
And when I was thinking about this, this led me to a different level of understanding about some of the people who believe things like a flat earth.
I've always disagreed with the idea that people who believe a flat earth are stupid somehow.
They're not right in the head.
They're stupid.
I've talked to some.
I've seen interviews with some.
To me, they're not stupid at all.
They're using their brains a lot.
They're just not using them the same way that I'm using mine.
And to me, this is one of the overall premises of all the podcast episodes is that people who come to the wrong conclusion are often not doing so because they're not thinking.
They're doing so because they are thinking and just not doing it quite right.
Thinking, but thinking badly.
Well, poorly or just with the wrong information or what have you.
They're not stupid.
I don't think you can come to the wrong conclusion by being fully stupid.
If you're fully stupid, you're not coming to any conclusions.
You're an ant.
Ants don't come to conclusions.
They're just ants.
They don't really think.
They just do what they're told and that's it.
So once you separate yourself from all the different observations that would lead you to know more about biology and human evolution and, well, evolution of all species, actually.
And of course, the geophysical structure of the earth and all of the wonders there, you are free, completely free to believe that the earth is not billions of years old, that we didn't evolve from any previous form, that we've always been this form and all of our ancestors were this form exactly, and that our existence was winked into existence in one moment, or perhaps over seven days instead of billions of years by an entity that we call God.
And of course, this game of unknowledge can be done with anything.
It can be done with vaccines.
It can be done with the Illuminati.
It can be done.
I mean, we don't know how it is that people really got so amazingly, blindingly rich that they essentially run the world.
So it might be that they all got together and agreed on how to do it and cooperated to do it.
Once you don't know how economics works and technology works, you can easily come to that conclusion.
So what do you think of this idea that this process of lack of knowledge combined with fascination or sense of wonder about things we think are unknowable is actually part of the mystery of why we have entire sections of humanity that are believing things that don't match objective reality.
So the pursuit of the wonder of the unknowable is part of what is driving the increased membership in these sort of fringe anti-intellectual groups like the flat earthers and everything else.
When I watch interviews with flat earthers, I hear in their voices an almost childlike sense of wonder about how things in their mind, quote unquote, really work.
Because to me, they've rejected the explanation that the people who aren't flat earthers have accepted about the shape of the earth and the movement of it around the sun and all of those things.
And to them, they've wiped the slate clean and they can rediscover all the things about the earth in this great sense of now that they've made it in this great new world where it's flat.
Yes.
I'll have to take your word on that with the specific flat earth example.
I've never seen any, you know, interviews or footage of flat earthers pontificating on their views where I've seen that level of childlike wonder that you alluded to.
You've seen religious zealots, though.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
They have a similar sense of wonder about the nature of God.
Yeah.
And it works in mysterious ways.
The example of vaccine and anti-vaxxers is potentially different because they don't seem to have a sense of wonder about vaccine-free life.
They're already living it, right?
Yeah, they've just turned it into a symbol of defiance against the state.
It's an act of rebellion.
Yeah.
And defiance among countercultures, defiance is a virtue.
Oh, 100%.
And among the people who are of that tribe, showing your defiance is highly celebrated and encouraged.
And of course, failing to show that defiance is a clear sign that you're not among them.
I've been not among them among people who are in that group can be uncomfortable socially.
I'm sure it can.
So a note here about ignorance.
I am sort of talking when I talk about the unknowable, the idea would then be that you're ignorant about a thing and you'll always be ignorant about it.
If it's truly unknowable, maybe I might even have used the wrong term there.
I'm not sure.
Maybe I got that wrong.
What do you mean?
Of all the things that I feel that I might have got right about this podcast, I'm now thinking that the term unknowable is maybe the wrong term to use in the whole thing.
The house of cards falls on itself.
Just the idea that the lack of knowledge of a thing gives it greater appeal is an interesting point.
But one thing that I think is often said of people who have a different explanation for things like the shape of the earth is that they're stupid and they're ignorant and they are ignorant of the actual physics and geometry that's happening here.
But we usually think of ignorance as a lack of knowledge or perhaps even a devoted drive to not know things.
But that's not really true in many of these cases.
It's more like an embrace of the wrong facts, like a substitution of objective reality with a highly detailed fantasy.
To me, I can see why it's alluring in that way, because you get to find the shape.
You get to solve the puzzle again.
I mean, these people are claiming to be, they're often, well, the ones who get interviewed anyway, are claiming to be highly knowledgeable about the thing.
And the things they're knowledgeable about are almost entirely fictitious, but they get to feel like they're really knowledgeable.
And they also get to have the thing be whatever shape they desire.
When you were a child, did you ever come to the even brief thought that you might have telekinesis?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a common experience for children, less so for adults.
And I think in some ways it shows something about this phenomenon because it's appealing to think that you can shape things with your mind.
You can change how things are really working with your mind.
I mean, I'm still, even as knowledgeable as I am about physical things, I'm still enamored with the idea that I can push clouds in a different direction or something, or I can pull them toward me to make it rain.
Like I can look at those clouds and it's possible for me to create a little corner of my mind that feels that that's true.
And that when the clouds go in the direction that I was hoping they go, that seriously confirms right down the line for confirmation bias, what I was hoping would happen.
And then when it doesn't, I just go, oh, well, I must not have had enough power to move the clouds that way or whatever.
And then, and then I still believe it.
Somewhere in my head, I have that.
And then, of course, the other part of my brain says, yeah, of course it's not that way.
Clouds move because the air is moving and there's changes in pressure.
And this is just how weather works.
But some part of my brain is still has this sense of wonder, like maybe, maybe it's possible, even though I know absolutely it's not.
And I think that's part of what happens for people that feel these other things are true.
I think especially powerful things like a belief in God.
For people who don't believe in God, it seems like some kind of a delusion.
But you can almost see, even if you don't believe it, you can almost see how someone could believe it because it's a powerful thing to believe that you can control the shape of how it comes out.
What do you think of that?
The idea that you might be able to control the shape of how the thing occurs.
And that's maybe part of the thing that causes people to think those things are true.
That's a bit of a stretch.
I don't know about that.
Like, I think one of the major attractions to a lot of these sort of intellectual counterculture movements, like let's use the flat earthers.
They're a good example.
Sure.
I imagine there's a good portion of them that are attracted to that almost cult of ignorance because of the same sort of counterculture desire that we talked about before, like the idea, the virtue of defiance, of looking decades, centuries of science in the face and saying, fuck you, you've got it wrong.
Yeah.
Right.
So that I think is a is a significant motivating factor for them, not just this embrace of wonder and ignorance.
But like the troll you find online who's just asking questions.
But the questions he's asking are incredibly simplistic questions that have been answered a hundred times over.
But I don't believe that the mystique and sexy allure of the unknowable or the unknown pairs well with the concept of, for example, flat earthers, where we actually embrace and memorize a great deal of very specific, albeit incorrect information about how something works.
They believe that they're learning.
They are embracing knowledge, just the wrong knowledge.
So they are on that journey of discovery, I guess, like that sort of exciting time you have, like first date with a new concept or a new idea or a new thing when everything's new and you're learning how it works and how it goes together.
That drive I could see.
But other than that, I'm sorry.
I think the premise falls a little flat.
Like you can't be excited and titillated by the allure of the mystery of something that you don't understand while also spouting a codified list of pseudo facts to support your argument on how you're intellectually arguing about how it does work.
Does that make sense?
Like it's a sort of a level of intellectual hypocrisy.
Well, I think it's true that they have a level of intellectual hypocrisy.
Their model of the earth changes monthly.
They would say that they're changing because they're discovering new things about it, but I don't really think that's true.
They would be fine with it just being flat with the four corners.
I looked it up.
It actually appears in the Bible.
That's the description in the Bible is a flat earth with four corners on pillars.
They would have been fine with that if not for all the people who are essentially then trolling them with real facts of how things really work.
And then they have to tweak the model to accommodate that fact and tweak the model again to accommodate that fact.
What about this?
What about this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mentioned that the other people are kind of trolling them.
And I think by the definition of trolling, they kind of are.
Whether they should or not, I don't know.
The flat earthers are not pushing the truth.
I think if the flat earthers just kept quiet about what they believed about the shape of the earth, no one would bother them in that way.
Which again begs the question of are they that way because of this desire to believe in the unknowable or are they counterculture zealots who want to throw a tantrum and get some airtime?
Well, it could go either way.
So we've come to no conclusions.
I love the ones where we wind up with more questions than we started with.
And we don't know for sure.
We don't know for sure which way anything works.
And everything is muddied by the other things that are also interweaving with them.
And yeah.
And all we've done is managed to confound things further.