Stephen Mather’s Cult Hackers podcast explores magical thinking with Spencer Watson, a former Jehovah’s Witness and host of Truth Unrestricted, dissecting its roots in cults like his own—where rigid frameworks (e.g., biblical prophecies) replaced evidence-based reality. Watson ties it to evolutionary psychology, critiquing untested alternatives (astrology, déjà vu) while defending science’s falsifiable, progressive nature, though questioning if it fully explains consciousness or qualia. Their debate reveals the tension between observable facts and subjective experience, mirroring cult exits: stepping beyond the "blank wall" of insulated belief into a chaotic yet liberating world. Ultimately, the episode probes how former cult members—and skeptics—navigate the gap between dogma and reality without losing their footing. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
Very recently, I was a guest on the Cult Hackers podcast to discuss magical thinking.
Stephen Mather, the host of Cult Hackers, was kind enough to allow me to rebroadcast that episode here on my podcast.
It's a much longer episode than I usually post, but I don't want to break this up into pieces.
So you'll just have to deal with an episode that is nearly two hours long this time around.
If anyone has any comments, complaints, concerns, or feedback, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And without further ado, here is my conversation with Stephen Mather.
Okay, welcome to Call Hackers.
My name is Stephen Mather.
I'm an organizational psychologist and I was raised in a cult.
So I'm on my own today, but I've got a very interesting guest.
So I'd like to, first of all, straight away welcome Spencer Watson to the podcast.
Welcome, Spencer.
Thank you.
Very glad to be here.
So Spencer has his own podcast.
And I was very lucky enough to be a guest on his podcast about a year ago or so called Truth Unrestricted.
And I think we're quite sympathetic to each other's topics and ways of thinking.
So I had a topic in mind that I thought I need somebody to help me talk and think about this.
And Spencer was the man.
So yeah, do you want to tell people a little bit about your podcast before we start?
And then that might give people a bit of an understanding of why I wanted to talk to you.
Yeah, I have a podcast called Truth Unrestricted.
It has a strange name on purpose.
It's mostly we review individual concepts one at a time.
So for people who are listening to this that used to listen to your podcast, that would be very familiar.
And we like to question things about them, things that we accept about them without complaint that maybe we should complain about.
So in that way, it's a little bit of perhaps societal protest, but also trying to take a fresh view because as I explained in an early episode of the podcast, I think differently.
I do.
And it's not a thing that I can hide.
I've tried at some points in my life to fit in with people, to think the way other people are thinking about a lot of things.
And it works for a bit.
And then it stops working because I'm just not wired that way.
I think in a different fashion than other people.
And it doesn't make me better at thinking.
It doesn't make me, you know, faster or slower or anything like that.
It's just I see things differently.
So I've always had this and I've had some friends who've been at times frustrated or, you know, delighted sometimes by it.
So I thought that I should finally do a podcast and we should dive into some of those things because, yeah.
That's interesting.
The way I would describe your approach on your podcast is you're incredibly analytical.
So you, you know, you very carefully, very methodically approach a topic.
So the thing that's prompted me to want to talk to you is, I suppose there's a phrase, there's a phrase called magical thinking that I've come across a few times.
For me, the idea of magical thinking is, and I think that's one of the tricky bits, is to define what that means.
But for me, it's related to things that don't have any particular sort of scientific evidence for them, and neither do they need them for those people that hold these beliefs.
There's something other than a scientific, rational explanation to the world.
There's another explanation, something else that's going on.
And there's acts that then create other things that happen in the world that don't seem to have any direct causal relation.
So these things like superstitions, things like astrology, things like that would be examples of magical thinking.
And when you leave a high control group, I suppose when you leave a religious group like a cult, a lot of what you've been taught actually relates to magical thinking.
This thing that you must say in order to get the blessing, this thing that you must do in order for your life to go better, this way of thinking that means that you're going to receive blessings from God or from the leader or whatever it is.
And so you're very much conditioned into that.
When you leave that sort of way of thinking, when you leave that organization, you're then in this situation where you have to decide, okay, well, how am I going to work out what is true?
How am I going to make decisions?
And I think you've got a bit of a crossroads there in front of you.
I think some people tend to gravitate towards scientific types of thinking and other people are very attracted to some of these magical thinking models.
And so I wanted to sort of explore that.
And I've also noticed some people who have left, people who are former members of my group and others, who kind of get really interested in some of these ways of thinking like astrology or tarot cards and things like that.
And I thought, well, that's interesting.
I wonder why that is and what's happening there.
So that's the background around the topic.
That's why I wanted to talk about it.
And I suppose I'm coming from the position that I think I'm going to put my cards on the table.
I think that it's important to look for evidence-based thinking.
So I think rational thinking, scientific way of thinking is the much more preferred way of thinking.
But then the question is, well, okay, let's defend that then.
Let's defend that position or can I defend that position?
And so that's kind of where I'm coming from.
So a long introduction, Spencer, sorry, about that.
But I wondered what your sort of initial thoughts are around that.
I found in preparing this podcast, this is the bit that I found most difficult.
How do we get into the topic?
So I don't know whether you've got any way you can help me from that little introduction or that long introduction.
Well, in thinking about the topic, I wrapped it around a neuroscientific concept.
And I think that as far as the nuts and bolts go, I think there is sort of a way to view this that gives us at least a working hypothesis to, you know, compare against the world maybe to see something of whether or not it's true.
If you don't mind, I'll take a few minutes here and take off with that.
So I mentioned neuroscience.
There is a concept in neuroscience that's generally just kind of called the models in the mind.
So everything that your senses take in isn't directly connected to the conscious part of your mind.
There's sort of an interpretive buffer that's happening there with, you know, perception is part of this and all of that.
So that part of your brain is then interpreting all of your senses and then choosing which ones to, you know, and the order in which to tell your conscious mind.
And so this is like the first level where we understand that there is the in the present moment, you're viewing things in front of you and you're hearing things and you're, you know, all of this put together.
Your brain is sort of lying to you in very small ways to try to make the picture make sense to you, to make it fit.
And this is the model.
Everything in your brain is just a virtual representation of everything, just like a computer virtually represents things.
It's, you're not really on my screen.
You're a, you're a, you know, replica of yourself on my screen.
And the same thing's happening inside your mind, inside my mind, everyone's mind.
So that's like the first view is that, is that we have this.
And then we also have, of course, as soon as you leave a moment, you leave a thing.
You also have a memory of a previous thing.
And then you have, so already you get the concept that you have object permanence, you have a model of what was previously the world.
And because you understand something about cause and effect, you have some idea of what the future world will look like.
And it's never perfect because evolution is not trying to make anything perfect.
It's trying to make everything good enough.
We get the Goldilocks version of this.
If you tried to have a brain that was making everything perfect, it would take way too many resources.
So with this, we have the idea of a model, but this is a model when we first describe it.
It's a model for representing tangible things, the objects in your world, the things that other people could also view.
And so in this, we get, I mean, this is like objective reality.
This is kind of what we describe.
You and I are both looking at a table that we're in a room with.
We're not really in a room, but if we were, there was a table.
We could both describe the table.
We could both touch it, look at it.
We both confirm that it's there.
And this becomes something like shared reality because it's a tangible thing.
But as soon as you move into the next step, which is like trying to describe intangible things, your brain still has a model of this.
But when I describe the model in a mind, this is just a metaphor because it's not really quite exactly how the brain is doing everything.
It's just sort of how I arrange words to describe it so that you can understand it.
And as soon as we get to talking about intangible things and how a person makes a model of the intangible world around us, the social relationships, concepts like hope and trust, this gets fuzzy in a hurry because it's possible then for two people to have a conversation about the same concept and each of them to have completely different models of it.
And neither one can notice because they're not both taking in something from the objective world to describe it.
So that's my introduction where we look at this as what the brain's actually doing.
But your model, how you think the world works, there's no way to know that another person is thinking that world works that same way.
We have to make some assumptions in order to live with each other.
And those assumptions are not at all.
I mean, even what you know of the world isn't necessarily absolutely correct.
But the assumptions you have of what another person thinks the world is is definitely going to be more incorrect.
So that's my intro to this.
What's your first take on?
Yeah, I think that's so I obviously with my psychology training that I definitely recognize and agree with with all of that.
Sometimes we talk about sense making as a shorthand way of describing that.
So we're kind of trying to, and it's a bit of a catchphrase for our podcast, really, is trying to make sense of the world when you leave a high control group.
You know, how can you make sense of it?
And of course, that's something that if you think about those mental models, you've had a mental model that is all-encompassing, a lens through which you have made sense of everything.
And that is whatever that belief system was that you were indoctrinated into.
So there's a war.
And this is an example of the last days.
This is an example of prophecy coming true.
There's a famine somewhere.
And again, this is an example of prophecy coming true.
There's a terrible disease that seems to afflict a group of people practicing something that you were told was wrong, like the AIDS example in the 90s, for instance.
And that was an example in our mind as Jehovah's Witnesses that this was, you know, an example of what happens when you don't follow God's rules.
And so, yeah, that's the mental model that you've had.
Now, when you leave that, you're now unpicking all of those things.
And I think it's very attractive to still be attached to some of those ways of thinking.
It seems to me that a lot of magical thinking is essentially a misunderstanding of correlations.
And that would sit in line with your description.
So we have to spot correlations in the world.
And this is an evolutionary benefit.
You know, we very even primitive animals notice movement.
And that's important to be able to notice movement because if you see movement, that movement is either going to come to eat you or you might want to eat it, I suppose.
So there's a correlation there between the inputs that you are getting.
I agree they're not necessarily an exact representation of what's really happening in the world, but they are an approximation of what's happening.
That is the way that your brain is giving information about the world.
You've noticed a correlation between that and something else.
Movement correlates with food or correlates with an enemy or correlates with a threat.
Therefore, we are very good as human beings.
In fact, all animals are very good at spotting danger because that's an ancient skill that we've all gained.
But basically, it's a correlation.
You know, that sound is scary.
I need to run.
Or that sound equals I need to run.
And there's something there that's happened in our evolutionary past that gives us this sensation of fear or hunger or whatever that then helps us to take some action, to behave in some way.
And it feels to me like what's going on with things like superstitions or different practices around foretelling the future or like astrology and so on, is that we are spotting correlations when there actually aren't any mathematical correlations that are significant.
But we are seeing them anyway.
We are thinking that, you know, the traditional one where the footballer, the sports player has to put his left boot on before he puts his right boot on.
This is a correlation that he's noticed.
He won a match, you know, in his early career and he noticed that he always seemed to win when he put his left boot on before he put his right boot on.
And now he would always do that.
This is a performance now that he has to do.
And that's because he has spotted a correlation that he now believes either he believes it in a very positive sense that if he does this, then he's got a better chance of winning, or he's just scared of not doing it because why would you take the chance?
You might as well do it because you're not losing anything.
The fact that if you were to do the proper mathematical calculations, you could demonstrate that actually there is no correlation between these two things.
And after, you know, 100 matches, you'd be able to tell that there wasn't actually a correlation.
That doesn't matter.
He will continue to do that thing because he spotted what he thinks is a correlation.
So that's what I think is going on a lot of the time with magical thinking.
And that very much maps onto what you said.
I think it's like that sits with that model of the brain.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I consider superstition to be like clumsy cause and effect, right?
It's an attempt to work out something that happened in the past and correlated to something that will happen in the future.
But you're just sort of cobbling together two things.
And like I say, it's clumsy.
It doesn't give very much predictive power.
Yeah.
And this is actually, when it comes down to it, this is how a lot of these belief systems seem to work.
That, you know, you in a room, one part of the world, by saying something or by even thinking something can have an impact on somewhere else in the world.
And when you try to challenge that, I suppose, if you were to challenge that, if you were to say, well, you know, there isn't any evidence for that or what's the mechanism for that?
You know, what is the mechanism that you making?
Watching a sports match is an even better example, you know.
So you'll see team supporters watching on television while their favorite striker is about to take a penalty at the World Cup or something.
And there'll be people there making the sign of the cross on themselves or, you know, saying something that they think is going to help this person to score that goal.
And the idea that you could have some impact upon the result of that match by you sitting in a room watching a TV clearly is there's no scientific basis for that.
You could just about say there might be some, if you're in the stadium, if you're part of a crowd that is cheering somebody, okay, there is some possibility that you could be influencing the events.
But if you're just sitting watching a television on the other side of the world, there's clearly nothing that you can do.
And yet people will imagine that they can have an impact.
And then I would, I suppose I would also say that perhaps even the most scientific minded of us would will still get caught up in that moment.
And there's a part of us that might still suspend that understanding that actually we can't have any control over it.
So we're almost praying to some imaginary football deity that that can make that happen.
So it feels quite a human thing to do.
And it's a mistake, I think, in terms of rational thinking.
But it's also quite a natural thing to do.
So yeah, that's, but it is the way that a lot of these Systems of belief seem to work.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's a greater demonstration for how to show that that's a real thing, real in that it's a thing people experience, yeah, than to record the game and watch it later.
And you're still just as excited as you would be.
Like you imagine that it's still happening in real time right in front of you when you might really know that this happened earlier.
I avoided all the you know, yeah, all the scores that I'm just watching it now, but I'm just as excited as I would have been if it were happening right, you know, in real time on the other side of the planet.
And right.
Yeah, and you're still shouting, come on, come on.
Yeah, no, we can do this.
Yeah, right.
We did do this, maybe.
I'm finding out what the roll of dice means.
Exactly.
You know, it's already happened.
It's a very strange thing.
You know, there's horse racing examples of this.
You know, you can go to certain establishments, I believe, and you can bet on horse races that have already happened.
They're just recorded and you can still bet on them.
And so on.
So, yeah.
And you'll still see people doing their, again, their same sort of whatever it is.
You know, they have to lick their finger or they have to whatever, do this strange little action that gives them the rituals.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So yeah, there's something there that I think is quite interesting.
I suppose from a psychology perspective, reading a little bit of stuff on this, I'm certainly not an expert in this area, but there's a guy called Eugene Sobotsky who seems to be, I suppose, one of the leading voices in this in terms of the psychology of it all.
And I was just reading his an article that he's written in the British Psychological Society magazine.
And I suppose he makes the point that it is actually quite natural because children, as children, we tend to sort of start with magical thinking.
So all children, most children anyway, believe.
You might be different if you think differently, Spencer, maybe you're different.
But for most children, they tend to have a, you know, quite a strong sense of magic and they will believe in magical creatures or, you know, Santa Claus and so on.
And experimentally, we can see that there's some quite really interesting experiments around four to six year olds who are told about a magic table or something that can bring little plastic animals to life.
But they're first asked, do they believe in magic?
Do they think that magic can happen?
And they say no, they don't think that magic is real.
But when the experimenter leaves the room, you'll see the children there trying to make the magic happen.
So there's something there that which is kind of sweet and also really interesting.
There's something there that although they verbally will say no, I don't think magic is true or real, they actually, you know, they're very quick.
They're very willing to suspend that belief and imagine.
So it's something that's there as a child.
And then I think the received wisdom is that we grow out of that.
By the time we're nine, then we're becoming much more rational and we don't really believe that anymore.
But I think Sobotsky is challenging that.
He actually says that, or his work seems to suggest that whilst we're probably a bit harder in our or a bit stronger in our willingness to count against magic, still when the chips are down, people do respond back to magical thinking.
So especially when the stakes are high.
So he makes the point when perhaps people have not very many opportunities or are very ill, for instance.
In those cases, then they start to look for alternative medicines that have no scientific evidence or they start to think about magical ways that they could be healed and things like that.
So actually, perhaps we never lose this sense.
Possible reasons for that, but I think that's quite interesting.
In the case of uh, people who are have a loved one who suffers from an illness that uh, medical science says they can't cure or something, the thing that leads them to want to believe other things is hope.
It's um, we generally think of hope as a positive thing.
It generally is, has a lot of positive aspects but it can also mislead us.
It is just as irrational as everything that is irrational uh, I mean, we talk about.
Uh, fear and hatred are irrational.
Hope is also irrational, just like fear and hatred.
Um, that's not, and that's not a.
You know, I don't want to come away from this thing.
Oh, this guy says we shouldn't hope for things.
That's not it either.
Uh um, fear and hate and hope and love and uh, I can't think of any others right now, but they are all part of what it is to be human.
And yeah, it can mislead us doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, you know.
No one says we shouldn't love either.
It's very irrational, but no one's advocating for you know what.
We should get rid of this love thing because, you know, it's led to so many heartbreaks look at how many divorces there've been and all those people thought they were in love.
That's ridiculous, uh.
But when you talk about children, children haven't formed like when I go back to um neuroscience, children haven't formed their full model of the world yet.
Right, they have a very, a much smaller world.
It has many more possibilities, almost because they haven't built up all of the parts of the world yet.
Um, when I when I think about what you did Stephen, when I listened to your podcast and you mentioned quite a lot about um, how you left and you were I think you were roughly 30, if I do the math right um, and you, up until that point, had lived your whole life as a Jehovah's Witness and you had a model of the world in your mind,
using the parlance i've introduced now.
And when you left, I mean you didn't flick a switch and leave.
It must have happened over some time.
You had to essentially remove parts of the model that were in your mind.
I mean that's, that's what everyone who does this has to do, this is how they have to do it.
And I mean you couldn't leave Jehovah's, Jehovah's, Witness and still believe all the things that they believed.
Otherwise, first of all, why would you leave?
But also, once you remove those things, you had to replace them with something else.
Because if, for example, and I'm not totally sure all the various beliefs that happen in Jehovah's Witness, so please forgive if this is actually one or not.
This is just an example.
If, for example, you held a belief in your life that demons were active in the world and they were making things happen.
And you saw certain things and you knew that those things were happening because demons were at play.
And then you wanted to leave whatever group that was and you wanted to, you know, join the real world.
And then you had to remove the belief in demons.
Well, suddenly, not only can you just, I mean, you have to remove the demons, but you had certain things that you were sure the demons were causing.
There was a cause and effect thing going on there.
And you have to find out what was really causing those things.
It's also possible that when you do that, you don't find the real cause.
You know, there's no guarantee.
There isn't like unreality and reality.
There's many, unrealities and only one really real thing.
Objective reality is just one thing.
And all the things you can imagine are all the other things.
And so it's possible when you replace the belief in demons, you replace it with something else that's also just as unreal.
Because unless you, I mean, how far you go in removing the things that you're sure are not real is also, you know, difficult to determine because you don't even know where to start with that, right?
I mean, that's, I think, is a reason why I'm very interested in your story, because it tells me a lot about, I mean, you have a really good understanding of what process you went through.
Even if you don't use the same words I would use, you do describe it very well of the process you went through.
And I think it's interesting that you called your podcast, What Should I Think About? when you first started it, because you were looking to examine each of the things to see how I should view them.
You were, I think, even now, still taking parts of your previous world and, you know, questioning them again, maybe even thinking about removing them because you're not sure which ones are real or not.
And that process is incredibly valuable.
I think it's a thing that led you to much success.
The willingness to question things that might someone else might have never questioned is really the strength that I think you have.
And I admire it.
I'm not sure how well I would have done if I had to do that.
And so, yeah, like, what was that like for you?
Like, maybe if you could describe a little bit more of and try to couch it in the terms I have with the model, trying to tear down a model and put something else in its place, hoping only in some cases that that was still real, that what you were replacing, it was more real than the thing you were removing.
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Yeah, that's interesting.
Thanks for those comments, Spencer.
really appreciate that um yeah i think um so using your your metaphor there of a kind of model i i think for me and i'm not sure everybody goes through this and it is a very individualistic experience so So we can only sort of talk about our own experience.
And so for me, the model, it wasn't that the model was beautifully structured and really sound.
Then I left and then I had to dismantle it.
Actually, part of what the leaving experience was about for me.
And I think I'm hearing that in other people's experiences, is that your model is already falling to bits.
I mean, we've noticed a lot of interesting metaphors like a bookshelf that's about to break, you know, but holes in bags and all these sort of interesting metaphors that at one point we said we need to collect all these because they're so interesting.
But I think what this is, and the model is another metaphor that we can use.
And what's happened, what happened for me was that I'd been working really, really hard to shore up my model.
So, you know, think of a model with scaffolding all over it and with lots of things to try and prop it up.
You know, maybe it has a back of the house that you don't ever invite anyone to because it's unfinished, maybe.
You know, it has a weird colour.
That's right.
It was a hodgepodge of ways of me trying to hold that thought or hold that way of thinking.
So I suppose one of the obvious examples was the idea of man being created as Adam and Eve and all humanity being a result of this pair that had been created in the Garden of Eden.
So forget everything else, but just that particular Bible story about Adam and Eve.
And then on the other hand, you've got the evidence of evolution and the explanations about how evolution works.
And nobody ever says we know everything about anything.
So that includes evolution.
We're still learning about the processes involved there.
But there's a lot more answers around how we evolved than how we were created.
You know, God created the heavens and the earth and he created mankind.
That's it.
That's the explanation.
So there's no depth to that.
It's just a statement.
Whereas with evolution, okay, so there must be a mechanism there.
Let's learn about the mechanism.
Okay, that's the mechanism.
So you get these fluctuations in the genetic materials and then you get selection through natural selection and so on.
And okay, that makes sense.
And so that was something that I thought, well, that makes a lot more sense, actually, than this idea of two people suddenly being thrust into existence by a God.
So that was a bit of the model falls down, you know, so I now have to and I have to find a way of propping that up for a bit.
And then, you know, there's thing.
And again, it's really reading the Bible was the best way for me to realize it wasn't true, you know, so the flood, you know, actually the flood, you know, that's a bit hard to believe, really.
And yet you get the odd person writing a book, you know, who's found the arc or they've worked out that, you know, how many, how much room you'd need to have two of every representative kind.
And then you think, well.
Okay, representative kind, then that means that the whole mechanism of animals developing and actually changing over time, that actually supports the idea that um, you can boil it down to actually quite a few animals and that actually that again, that sounds more like the the, the selection theories or natural selection and evolution than it does.
And there's special creation.
Oh, that's another one.
There you go.
The models collapsed a bit more and I need to shore it up a bit more.
So that's that's the way it happened for me and I.
So I managed to to keep that, that model together for years, probably for a decade actually um, and kept patching it up.
I like this metaphor.
I like this is good um, kept patching it up and um, and eventually it became too difficult, you know, it became too difficult to keep it, it um patched up, and and I had to.
I had to once and for all say look, I either need to really believe this, which meant me doing the unthinkable, which was asking those questions, what should I think about this and this, or I just leave.
And so I decided to do the first and I wanted to.
I wanted to really understand it, I wanted to really believe it, and so the my my, uh.
Motivation for taking a bit of time out from actively doing stuff was to get my faith stronger, to rebuild that model, basically to get the builders in and to get it all nice and strong um, and I wouldn't have this agony anymore.
But of course, you know the the rest is history, as they say, and it it.
It was clear that yeah, I didn't, I didn't believe that.
So that process was was half.
A lot of it happened during those years of doubt.
Then, when I actually made the decision you're right, though of course there was still, there's still, lots of questions hanging there around.
Okay well, and I now know that the bible isn't the place I go to to tell me uh, the truth about science, or about where we came from, or about medicine, or about dietary requirements, or about how to get on with people or the best ways to live my life.
So I know the bible isn't isn't the right place.
So how am I now going to make those decisions?
And I suppose that's, I don't want to get to the end of this conversation without putting the case forward for this scientific way of thinking.
Because I hear quite a lot of dismissal of science in some of these quarters where people have left cultic groups or religious, highly religious, fundamentalist sort of groups.
And then they seem to think that science is just some sort of another version of this belief, of a belief.
belief system and that they've left one belief system where they were told what to think.
And so they're now going to decide for themselves what to think.
And in some respects, of course, you have to applaud that.
And that's great that we now have the opportunity to make our own decisions.
And of course, I support that for everybody.
But I feel a sort of sadness when I see people just tarring science with that brush and actually saying, yeah, well, you know, I'm going to believe what I want to believe.
I don't have to believe anything anymore because I now have the power to make my own decisions.
Therefore, I'm going to believe in astrology.
And if I was to say, oh, you know, don't you realize that astrology, there's no basis for believing that astrology is true or has any insights into the world whatsoever.
There's no evidence for it at all.
I then start to sound like one of the Jehovah's Witnesses telling you that you must believe this because this is the right, this is the truth, you know?
So it puts me in an uncomfortable position.
But I suppose I want to say that I think that evidence-based reason and logic, scientific thinking, is the best way to make decisions about what's happening in the world.
That doesn't mean that it has the answers to everything.
And that there are some interesting potential gaps that maybe we can talk about if we get time that I think is interesting.
But I think to answer the questions like, you know, what's the best way to look after ourselves physically or in health matters?
What's the best way to get on with each other?
What's the best way to understand how we got here and what's going on in the physical world?
I think science is the way, you know, because it has a method that says, well, we'll have a hypothesis.
We think this might be it.
We've got good reason to believe that this might be the truth.
This is what's going to happen when this happens and then this happens.
We think we know.
Let's test it or let's observe it in the real world.
And then we can see whether our hypothesis is true, whether what we thought was going to happen does happen.
And if it doesn't, then we're back to the drawing board.
If it does happen, then we've got evidence for it.
Now, that doesn't mean it's always going to, you know, we know everything about it.
No, there'll still be more to learn.
But at least we've got some evidence.
And then you have other people that do other types of experiment with similar hypotheses or something slightly different that builds upon the last one.
And that's how we learn more about the world.
And I want to put the case forward for that being the best way to understand what's going on in the world.
Yeah.
I think what you said there is very spot on.
I think that the part that I would underline only is about the testing because the thing that's the greatest strength about science is the repeatability of the experiments.
Without that, science would be just a religion.
It would be just a cobbled together series of superstitions.
But because you can do the same experiments that were previously done, and if you do them in the same way, you have Symmetry of a testing environment, you will get the same results.
And if you do have the same environment and you get a different result, then you've already discovered something better.
People think that this happens all the time.
I think some people think this happens all the time, and that a gang of thugs or something comes by and destroys the lab where the tests happen or something.
That's not true at all.
There are some grifters who will try to insinuate that they've had their results or they've had their interpretations buried or silenced in some way.
But that's not how science works.
It just really isn't how science works.
If they were able to convince people around them that they were right because of the reasoning that they used, then they would be on top.
Everyone points to, I've said it before on my podcast, but everyone points to, you know, the man that changed everything in the world once upon a time.
And in our more recent memory, that's Albert Einstein.
He took a result that, you know, it wasn't even his experiment.
Someone else 40 years before had already done.
And he explained it in a way that made it make sense because they just had something that just didn't make sense.
They didn't know what it meant.
They just said, I don't know what this means, but we find this.
And it got replicated.
It would, you know, everyone knew this happened, but they didn't know why.
And then he explained it.
And yeah, there was no one in the world thought that his thing was true until he said it.
And then everyone else kind of, you know, all the people who were, you know, very educated and thinking hard about this all give a collective face palm essentially and said, oh, oh, of course.
Very few people said, well, it's Einstein kid.
He's stupid.
No one should listen to him.
And the people who did say that either didn't read what he said or they had something else to sell because he convinced first all the people who knew all the intricate details and were on the same level as he was as far as physics went.
And then after he convinced them, the news came out to the world.
Like there were, you know, there weren't radio shows when he was, but if he went first to a radio show and said, hey, look, I found this thing, how ridiculous a world would that have been?
Because that's not how he did it.
He convinced all of his peers first.
And if you can't convince your scientific peers of a thing, then you're not, your scientific finding isn't good enough.
You need more evidence at the very least.
So go find it instead of just complaining on a podcast about it.
That's what they do, though.
That's what they do.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think physics is a fairly tricky one in some respects because where we're up to now with physics is a world that is so far removed from, I think, what a lay person can understand.
So it's based around very advanced mathematics.
And essentially, a lot of what is predicted is really on the basis of mathematics.
But, you know, so if somebody shows you a mathematical proof, you know, unless you understand that language, then it just doesn't mean anything.
But I think what then happens, so Einstein's calculations and his theories that he published were then used as the basis for predictions about all sorts of things, you know, including quantum physics.
And, you know, over and over again, those predictions are seen to be accurate.
So these are tested.
Now, that doesn't mean that as a paradigm that there's not a greater one that sort of sits over the top of that and can explain more, you know, and I think that is where modern physics is.
There's a kind of search for that, whether that will ever be found or not is a different question.
But I think, yeah, as you say, it's the fact that these things can be tested.
So, you know, Einstein's theories essentially predicted things like black holes, which now we have actually observed a black hole.
When Einstein's theories predicted that, you know, it was seen, it was thought that was theoretically okay.
It's in the maths, but it's unlikely to be true, you know.
But now we've actually got a sort of representation.
We actually have, I put it in air quotes, seen a black hole.
We have a picture of one.
Things like gravitational waves, you know, another good example of something that was theoretically worked out.
And then you build the instruments to see if you can measure that.
And yeah, lo and behold, we have measured those things.
So yeah, that's so if you were to apply the same test to something like astrology, let's say, and I am picking on astrology in a way.
And, you know, I think that's perhaps a bit unfair because there's lots of these belief systems, but everybody kind of knows a bit about astrology, I suppose.
But if you were to apply the same tests on that, you would say, okay, well, that's great.
That's actually quite easy these days to be able to find evidence for this.
So, you know, astrology is going to give us some predictions or an astrologist will use their maps or however they do it.
They will make predictions.
And then we're going to statistically test whether those predictions have come true.
They would have to be predictions that were tight enough for us to be able to either say, yes, that happened or it didn't.
You know, having a funny feeling about isn't good enough.
So it would have to be, you know, something tangible that you could test.
And we've talked about this in our podcast before with Chris French from Goldsmiths University or Goldsmiths College at University of London.
And, you know, you could, things like the supernatural, if you want to test whether there are ghosts or whether there's extrasensory perception, these sorts of things, then you need to test it.
And you can.
There is no reason why you can't test some of these things.
And over and over again, we see that there is no evidence for them.
But that seems to be much less convincing than an individual's experience who says, I was thinking about this person last night and then I met them in town.
That must be a sign.
And that's another good example of magical thinking.
Now, if I was to say to that person, okay, well, can you thinking about somebody actually predict whether you are going to see them or not?
Let's do a scientific experiment about that.
I could imagine a, you know, a set of experiments that you could do for that.
Every time you think about something, somebody, you'd write it down and then you'd record whether you actually saw them.
And you'd soon find that 99.9% of the time when you think about somebody, you don't see them.
And also all the millions of people in the world thinking about people from time to time, it's inevitable that you are going to see some cases of them bumping into each other.
So, you know, but that just doesn't seem to hold water if somebody really believes that me thinking about them last night meant that I had some sort of premonition, you know, it's so difficult.
Yeah.
Other times where this weird effect comes into play, thinking about a song and then shortly after it plays on the radio.
Yeah.
The playlist on the radio was determined well before you ever thought.
If anything, it's working the other way.
You get a premonition of what was about to play, maybe, if that was really the case, because their decision happened way before the vision in your head or your mind.
These things, a dream, you have a dream, and then later on, sometime later in life, you have a moment in your life that reminds you of that dream.
I believe we call this generally deja vu.
The idea that you've been someplace before, but that place was kind of like a dream sense.
I've had this sensation a lot.
I don't know about you.
And I can't.
It has, it's kind of like, even if it were a superpower of some kind, even if we're supernatural, it would be kind of a stupid supernatural thing to have, right?
Because it's not like I can, it's not like I can, I mean, by the time I knew it happened, it was already gone.
You know, I could never use this.
Oh, I can see the future.
No, it never was.
Yeah.
No, it's, it's, yeah, I suppose, um, but, but then this is, I think, coming back to your, your original point about it's this making sense or my interpretation of what you said.
And so, so, what's happening with that is if you already have a belief system that says that there's this other world that's unseen that is going on, then you're going to fit that experience into that.
So, if you happen to believe in previous lives, for instance, you know, you believe that we are on this kind of reincarnation cycle, and then actually deja vu is evidence to you that you have been there before, but just as somebody else, you know, so this is this must be a previous life that I'm now remembering.
So, um, your pre-existing beliefs about the world then color what you're seeing.
So, rather than the noticing something and saying, oh, that's interesting.
I don't understand what that is.
Let's do some research to try and understand it.
You straight away feel like you have to interpret it.
Or you do, we do.
We interpret it in light of what we think we already know about the world.
And so, that's that for me is to encourage people to have that kind of skeptical voice in our head that says, Okay, well, this is kind of interesting.
But before I jump to the conclusion that this is, you know, my old grandma talking to me, or this proves reincarnation, or this shows I've got pre-sight, you know, I need to understand it a bit more and actually just take it away from whatever preconceptions I might have.
So, yeah, I'd like to, I suppose, I'd like to, I don't want to be that guy who I think a lot of people who leave religious groups often become perhaps a little bit tiresome and dare I say, a bit arrogant sometimes when they talk to people of faith.
And, you know, because we've, we've feel like we've been trapped in it for so long, you know, you think you're Christopher Hitchens all of a sudden and you want to destroy other people.
And I actually try to avoid that I don't actually worship at the feet of Christopher Hitchen.
You know, Douglas Adams is my hero, if you like, because he does what he did with such grace and humor.
I really like that.
I don't want to try to destroy people.
However, I really would like to encourage people to actually look at things with that slightly objective or as objective as we can be and say, right, okay, what's the evidence for it?
And is this evidence strong enough for me to actually come down on this as a strong belief?
And I think if we all did that, then we'd get rid of a lot of these superstitions.
And there is a danger.
So when I was Jehovah's Witness, these things were dangerous.
So they were dangerous because it was the demons.
So yes, we did believe in demons and things like astrology was from the demons and fortune telling demons.
It's all that and it's scary.
So you are encouraged to avoid it because it's dangerous.
And actually just showing an interest in it alerts the demons that you might be interested.
And that's when you get all sorts of scary things happening in your house because you show an interest in demonic things itself.
This is magical thinking, of course.
But so I think there is a natural aversion when you leave to listen to people who say, well, there is danger in this sort of stuff to just say, no, I've been told it was dangerous all my life and I'm going to look into it.
I don't think there's any danger of the demons, but I think that the danger is, is that we end up making decisions based on erroneous data or erroneous information.
And that seems to me like it's much better to make decisions in our lives based on things that are actually true, not on things that we kind of find interesting or spooky.
Yeah, I mean, the way I see it is that the brain is remarkable.
It can believe in anything.
It can conjure a model of anything that could potentially, you know, in the context of just your mind be true because it's only limited by its imagination.
And so you can believe in a flat earth.
You can believe that ghosts roam dark hallways.
You can believe that the sun has curative powers and that you should try to be in the sun as much as possible.
But and some of these beliefs don't have any kind of directly negative effect.
People point out that there's no harm in believing the earth is flat and it doesn't cause anyone to avoid medicines that would save them or anything like that.
But it does affect your predictive powers.
It does affect your ability to properly navigate the world.
It was only by having our beliefs be guided solely by objective reality that we were able to create all the technologies that we've created.
Believing in a flat earth and all the things that come with it would never have allowed us to make the internet and cell phones and cars and all of this.
That wouldn't be possible.
I think that's right.
And yeah, just medicine was the obvious one.
I think, you know, so before we had medicine that was developed through objective research, we've always, you know, I suppose as long as history and prehistory has been recorded, there's been people who prepared potions and lotions.
Attempts to save lives.
These are attempts to do good things by saving lives.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
So and medical procedures and so on.
So yeah, there's always been that.
It's only fairly recently in the last sort of hundred years or so, 150 years, that we've we developed medicines based upon proper um evidence-based research where you test something and then you see what happens.
And of course, there's been some incredibly unethical behavior in some of these scientific breakthroughs.
So there's something there, of course, that you can level at scientific progress.
You know, the cost to some to some creatures and people in terms of testing.
But the method is the scientific method.
Okay, we think this might have a positive effect on somebody.
So let's test it.
And so yeah, antibiotics is a good example of that.
Okay, that we stumbled upon perhaps this thing.
And then we thought, okay, well, let's test it.
Let's test it in control conditions and see whether it works.
And yet, you know, we're still having to bat off snake oils, salesmen, and women who have beliefs that this thing can save you from cancer or can help you with this thing or that thing.
And there's absolutely no scientific evidence for that.
And so this is another example of why I think it does matter if we are basing our beliefs upon evidence as opposed to just a feeling or the assertion of somebody that's telling us something.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, medical, you know, this is the ultimate gamble when you're going to gamble with your life.
Yeah.
If you're going to say that it's going to be surgery with a doctor that's that's gone to school for, I'm not even sure how many years they go to school for, but it's a lot.
And they've studied the anatomy and they know exactly where to put the knife and at what times.
And then, or you're going to take colloidal silver.
And I don't take the colloidal silver.
That's all I got to say.
It doesn't have a cause-infect relationship that can save you from anything.
And this is why, you know, it can matter a lot.
And so we're coming to our sort of hour, but I don't know if you're okay for time.
I'm okay for time.
We did this last time on my podcast.
We did go all day.
I was so grateful that you gave me so much time.
Yeah.
I have a whole thought experiment I could go through if you'd like.
But, you know, we don't have to.
We can do that.
Oh, yeah.
This is fun.
I love this.
Let's do that.
Before we do, maybe this mustn't forget that your thought experiment.
But I did want to raise, I suppose, the not the antithesis of what I've said, what we've said, but the thing that I suppose, you know, you said some very nice things about or some very, I feel, complimentary things about my thinking processes.
And one of the things that I do think is true is that I'm still asking the question, what should I think about?
And so this is one of them.
And I think perhaps my field of study, psychology is particularly interesting in this regard because psychology actually spans on the one hand, a very positivist sort of scientific rooted in science type of approach.
And, on the other extreme, of people who will still be called psychologists and can still belong to the Psychological Society, who reject positivism pretty much entirely and have a very different way of thinking about uh that, the mind and um and thinking, if you like.
So on the one hand, you've got a belief that actually consciousness and thinking is essentially all down to the neurons firing in our gray matter or in our, this wet wear we've got in our head.
And it emerges, consciousness emerges from this very physical process that's happening.
And we just need to learn more and more and more about it.
And ultimately we'll understand everything there is to know about psychology and the human brain.
thinking.
And then, on the other extreme, you've got people who would completely deny that and say it's a completely different thing.
You know it's, it's like it's on a different dimension, if you like, of understanding that actually you can't understand thinking by just imagining.
It's just a um, it's the physical stuff, it's the wetware it's, it's actually something else and so this I think this is partly why i'm fascinated by this question and this might be where there's a chink of light for magical thinking, I suppose um, so um, there's uh.
You've probably probably heard that the word qualia before, and this is a um qualia yeah no okay, so qualia is essentially the the, I suppose the qualitative experience that we have about whatever so it's.
I suppose it's linked to phenomenology a little bit as well, but but essentially, you're what?
What a good way of thinking about this is to say um, I mean, you talked about it yourself really, with some of these emotional um constructs that we use, like love and empathy uh, happiness and um so on, these are, these are not tangible things, these are, these are states of mind, these are feelings emotions, and my experience of uh,
falling in love might be very different to your experience of falling in love.
Um, it might, it might feel very different, it might actually, but what is it anyway?
You know and, and so this is a qualitative uh experience, it's this, this is qualia, and this thing exists in the world because I, I have this qualitative experience of happiness or disappointment, or envy, or love, these words that we've given that approximate feelings that we think each other has in the same way, but we're not quite sure.
But what we do know is we have them, I have them, I have this feeling of contentment or happiness, or frustration or whatever those things are, but they don't exist in the physical world, you know.
So you might be able to, you might be able to put me in a brain scanner and scan which bits of my brain light up.
In fact we can do that and we have.
You know, neuroscience has given us lots of pretty pictures that show which areas of the brain sort of lights up, doing different things and thinking about different things.
But what have you got?
At the end of the day, you know, you've just got a two-dimensional slice of neurons firing.
You know yeah, but that doesn't really tell you the qualitative experience of that thing.
But that thing does still exist in the world.
I know it does for me, I can assume it does for you um, and that, I think, is where this, this world of the ethereal, of the spiritual can, can seem to exist, and I don't know how I feel about it.
And very sort of scientific positivism would just dismiss that.
But I don't quite know how to dismiss that.
So I don't know, I don't know where, what you think about that Spencer oh, all right um, off the cuff.
So the first is, I think I I I mean part of what you're brushing up against.
Here is what Descartes came to when he said I think therefore, I am he was attempting to sort of think about how you know that anything at all is real, or perhaps everything is real, but the, in the end, the only thing he could be sure of was that he himself was real, and the only way that he knew that was because he was thinking the thoughts that led to him being real.
And so when you talk about the emotions that you feel and that you can't be certain that other people feel, or at least you might think they feel something, but you're not sure if they feel the same thing or the same way, and no one can know that um, you're right next to you know, you're sitting on that rock right next to Descartes thinking of those things right, I mean, you know you're in conversation with him.
Um, but when you talk about this, this idea that that there's something ethereal, this seems to be the idea of a soul right, that I mean, this is the, the idea of dualism, that there's, there's the mind and then there's a soul and there's two separate things, and that uh, this is the a thing that leads to a lot of religious beliefs and concepts,
certainly people who believe in uh, reincarnation will believe this, that your, your mind and your body get left behind when you die and that your soul moves on and inhabits a new mind and body at some future point down the line and that they're separate entities and that, you know, science has worked to find a soul.
It hasn't found one.
Um, in the same way that science has worked to find god and hasn't found god.
Uh, that's all science can say is that it hasn't seen evidence of this thing.
And that's all science ever says.
I mean, everyone says science says these things don't exist.
That's never what science says.
Science says that it can't find evidence for a thing it can't find evidence for uh, telekinesis.
It never, you know it.
It's found people who claimed to telekinetically move things, but once they examined those people and they found the right conditions, they they found that those people couldn't actually move anything with their mind.
And the same thing was true for a host of other ethereal things ghosts, for example.
We haven't found evidence of ghosts.
We, you know, science hasn't really said that ghosts don't exist.
We have to assume they don't exist until we find evidence for them.
That's as close as we can come as far as science goes, but the soul is decidedly different.
It's possible that the soul is an illusion of consciousness that, along with there being a self inside you that thinks and experiences emotions, etc.
That in order to explain all of those things, a soul is mentioned and then, in mentioning to other people is, you know, the idea gains uh, a place in the model of your world?
Uh, and of course, it's intangible.
Obviously there's there's, I think.
When I was a kid, there were some people who shared a story about the idea that, as soon as the human body uh moves from a living state to a non-living state, there was a very small amount of mass that was unaccounted for.
And this was the soul.
This has since been debunked.
It was never found to be true.
It was just a story.
Because why would it be?
Even if you believe in a soul, why would you believe it had mass?
It doesn't make any sense.
So even that being debunked doesn't debunk the idea of a soul.
In my mind, a soul is a form of magical thinking, mostly just because there's no proof that it exists.
But of all the magical thoughts, it's the one that I find I least want to destroy or remove, right?
Like I want to get rid of the idea of a flat earth.
I want to get rid of the idea of ghosts.
I want to get rid of because all of these things are attempting to explain things that are better explained by real phenomenon.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But I don't find the exact same thing to be true about a soul.
And so, I mean, maybe it is that we learn more and we find that there's phenomenon that better explain the things that we put into the explanation of a soul.
But I don't know.
Like, what it's very interesting.
Yeah, I think, I suppose two things on that.
Firstly, I think, yes, the question of a soul, I suppose, is natural.
I mean, it comes to this.
I've been trying to think how to talk about this topic as well, which is, I suppose, tangential to it a bit, but this whole way of talking about our self, which is relevant in the field of cult studies or cultic studies or cult recovery, because this is a topic that is often talked about.
And I think we obsess over a little bit when we leave a cult, because we have this sense of a self that has been, if we've joined a cult, then we have this sense that our authentic self was kind of overlaid by some other type of self, some sometimes called a pseudo-self or a pseudo-identity.
But for us who were raised in these groups, I personally find that idea quite problematic because it suggests that I don't have an authentic self because that was constructed for me.
And I think that's, that's actually quite a damaging idea.
So I've been quite vocal in trying to challenge some of the experts in this area because I think it was fine when most cult survivors were people who joined groups, you know, when they were sort of in their 20s or so on.
You know, I think that, okay, there's a utility in that model because you can say, well, you know, you need to return to the person you were.
But that doesn't hold very much water either because, of course, we are constantly changing.
And also the person you were is the person that joined a cult.
So exactly.
I'm a whole new person that you really want to do that again.
You're now, yeah.
Exactly.
But when we talk about these things, we tend to talk about it as though we've got this kind of homunculus inside us that is driving the bus that is the real self.
And yet we are somehow when we talk about ourselves, it's like we are trying to take a third-person objective view of something that is, we are ourselves.
It's almost impossible to talk about.
It's something that William James struggled with and talked about.
And I mean, yes, sure, a lot of the philosophers as well.
But it is kind of related to that.
And that again, you end up with this, what sounds quite a lot like a soul.
But I think even if you don't accept a soul, so my second point is, even if you don't think, let's say I don't actually agree in the dualism theory, and I say, no, you know, we are not, we don't have this soul, this essential part of us that exists separate to our physical body.
It's still a question that I don't know the answer to.
This question, which is, we have this experience.
That experience is real.
So, you know, reality is an important question to important word to bring up here.
So what is real?
You know, my mouse is real.
This on my desk, my computer is real.
I'm real.
Okay, these things are real, true.
Is a song real?
So is a song real?
Well, yeah, the recordings are real, but is the song real?
Yeah.
Is an idea real?
And then right, getting right down to this, is my experience of happiness real?
Is my experience of frustration real?
If it's not real, then, okay, fine, it's an illusion, which in a way that it can just puff into smoke then.
But if it is real, then I want to explain that reality.
And I suppose the question is, is the scientific method ever going to be able to explain that reality for us?
Or is there another way, a better way of understanding that reality?
Which is where the people in psychology who are not scientific positivists, that's their position, is that actually we're never going to find the answer by getting better scans of the brain.
Our experience of the world is something that is a different type of reality altogether.
And we need to find different ways of explaining that.
And that isn't then subject to the same rigors of experimentation, of, you know, and we do see this difficulty in psychology.
You know, it's the behaviorists sort of went down the, we're not going to worry about pretending we can understand what's going on in the brain.
All we can think about, all we're interested in is behavior.
Therefore, they measured behavior and physical things that were happening to the animal.
So saliva in a dog's jowls or, you know, the amount of adrenaline running through a system.
So that's what they were measuring.
And then we went back as psychologists, we started to think about psychology a bit like a computer program.
And so when computers were invented, then we had a new model to think.
And so we started to talk about cognitive psychology and flowcharts and so on.
And I think we're still trying to struggle with how to really explain our thinking, how to explain thinking and suppose consciousness.
And I think the jury's out, actually, whether the scientific method is actually up to the job to really explain that stuff or is there something else.
So I suppose that's where I'm most interested.
I don't actually think there is a soul that is separate.
It could be an illusion, but it's still, because it exists in the world, in the universe, in the universe, there is such a thing as Stevens happiness.
However you want to describe that, I know there is.
Yeah.
And yes, Descartes agreed that's kind of, but in a way, that's kind of a red herring because I can still assume that you also experience something.
And I'm willing to do that.
I'm willing to believe, Spencer, that you do exist and that you are experiencing the world.
So I'm willing to take that leap.
Thank you.
But it still, in a way, doesn't matter.
Even if I was the only existed person in the world and everything else was an illusion, I still know, as Descartes pointed out, that that thing is there.
Therefore, we have to account for it somehow.
And that's the bit that science so far has not been able to do.
And that's what leaves that little sliver open to all sorts of wacky ideas that don't actually have any evidence for them.
Right.
Or predictive power.
Right.
Yeah.
Because Descartes' view that he came to, he left it right where it lay.
The extension of that would be that if you assume, I believe that the actual term is something like solipsism, where you believe that you're the only being that exists, you can quickly come to problems because you quickly soon realize that despite the fact that you're the only being that exists, the other beings still affect you.
Unless you live in a place where no other conscious being exists, then their conscious decisions won't affect you.
But that's not true for almost everyone.
So assuming that other people really exist and that their consciousnesses exist and that they do so because they think leads you to a better ability to predict and navigate through the environment that you're in, which is undoubtedly a social environment in which many of your outcomes are actually heavily affected by the decisions of other people.
So that's the part that has to be added in, I think, as an asterisk right behind what Descartes said was that, yes, the only thing you can be certain of is that you exist.
But assuming then after that, that other people exist will lead you to a better outcome in life.
But I did, I remembered the thing that I was mentioned before that I want to talk about because it actually works in nicely right here, which is that part of this makes this messy is that we have inside us a drive to explain everything.
It takes a fair amount of restraint to not attempt to just explain everything.
And this is a thing that scientists sort of have to learn as they go.
And like I say, I admire your ability to have restraint in this and not just, you know, put a new coat of paint on it and drive it down the street.
And this is where I come to as my thinking for a lot of things that are in the realm of conspiracy belief, which is that many people who have these beliefs, they are engaging in magical thinking.
And in order to construct the model in their mind of that works, because you mentioned that you were building a world and then you had to hold it up a scaffolding and you had to leave some parts unfinished.
And I mean, it didn't quite fit.
In the conspiracist mindset, these things are, all the things that don't fit are all pushed to one spot in their house.
It's like one room where all the things that don't fit go.
And that's the conspiracy.
The conspiracy is the, it's sort of a fudge factor.
In engineering, you might have a fudge factor that helps everything fit.
And that's, that's the, the, the collection of things that don't quite fit.
And they all go into one spot in their house.
Only with a lot of these conspiracy beliefs, it leads to them having only one room in the house that works and all the other rooms are filled with the grand conspiracy of the entire world is fake except for the one little part that they live in.
And this is sort of where we are with thinking about, because you were talking about the soul.
And what you mentioned about the soul led me back to this and reminded me of this exact fact is that the soul is again an attempt to explain something that we experience.
And it's the need to explain it that leads us to this idea, this idea of the soul, that there is a thing inside me.
And that it comforts me to think that perhaps when a loved one dies, that they, you know, a piece of them carries on and that their energy is, you know, in some way, their essence is continuing in the universe.
And that's a very comforting thought.
The need to explain how this works is the thing that leads us to a soul.
It's like conspiracy belief is to a conspiracist because it's the thing that explains away this thing nicely.
We put it in this magical box and it's a black box.
We don't know what's inside it.
We don't know how it works.
We don't know where everything's going with that.
But, you know, in essence, it's a placeholder for a future day when we will know more about what's going on with the box, how we move things in and out of it.
There's an input, there's an output, how this black box device is going to work.
For now, we just know that all those things fit inside that box and it's a soul.
That's where my soul is moving on because we don't have time to figure that out right now.
We have to work our cell phone.
No, you're right.
It's a label, isn't it?
And we do that with all sorts of things.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yeah.
Right.
Tell us about the thought experiment.
Oh, right.
Okay.
So I was thinking about magical thinking and I was thinking about these models that a person would experience when they're trying to leave a cult and put myself in that mindset.
So I came up with this thought experiment that would help me, I think anyway, try to understand what it's like to kind of be in a cult and to try to leave one.
So I'm going to put this, you know, I'll explain the thought experiment and then you can tell me if it relates to how, you know, you think this is working because obviously you're much more experienced with this stuff.
So imagine that you live in a town.
It's a community.
You know everyone that lives in the community and you know all about them.
You've been to their houses for dinner and they've been to your house for dinner.
It's not a very large community, really, but it's comfortable.
You, you know, you have a high level of high level of comfortability with the interactions you have with everyone.
You know their quirks.
You know what to avoid when you talk to certain people, all of those things.
And most importantly, you know what, you know, you have a strongest sense of what they're like when you're not there, which is part of building a world in your mind.
You can imagine them when they're not in front of you.
So the unique thing about this community is that it's completely surrounded by a blank wall.
Right.
So a little science fiction, but that's why we're in a thought experiment.
So everything you need in your life, in your modern life, isn't produced inside your community.
You get some things that are made there, but some things you still need from the outside world.
So you need access.
So every day, or perhaps only a few times a week, you go to this blank wall and you perform some activity, some task for a time.
And it doesn't matter what the task is.
It could be running on the spot.
It could be lifting boxes over and over again.
It could be writing things down on little bits of paper.
Because the reason why it doesn't matter what the task is is because all of the tasks collectively have the same level of importance, which is none, because they're not part of your community at all.
And your community being the only thing that's real to you is the only thing that has importance.
So whenever you go to the wall and you do this stuff, it really doesn't matter what it is you're doing.
Although I will put an asterisk there, it's important that none of them directly offend your dignity.
Like if someone's going to ask you to, you know, do some lewd behavior, you're going to say no.
But all your interactions with the wall aren't even really with people.
They're not even really with things you recognize as people.
They're just at the wall and you do things.
And then you come back to your community and that's your life.
And some part of your life you have to spend at the wall.
And that's just time you have to spend because you need a, you know, a car or gas for your car or something, right?
Electricity.
So one day you find out that the wall isn't actually made of a hard surface that's impossible to move past.
You learn that it's just a very thick fog.
So you've heard that some people have moved into the fog, but you don't know what it's like.
It's like a supernatural thing.
And one day you try it.
You just sort of step into the fog a little bit and it completely blinds you.
It's very disorienting because you suddenly are cut off from your main source of sensory feedback, which is your sight.
You can't tell which direction is which.
Every direction looks the same.
You can't even tell exactly what the level of the ground is with each new step.
You're worried that you might trip.
And some are maybe a little bit different and look like you would have tripped.
So that just puts more on your mind that you might trip the next step.
And the further you move away from your community as you walk through the wall, the more you get a fear that you won't be able to get back to it.
And so everyone who does this makes a choice and they say, okay, well, I can go back to the community I was from where everything's comfortable and I know everything.
Everything isn't perfect, but I know what's wrong.
I know the quirks.
I know if there's any dangers.
I know where they would be coming from and maybe something about how to avoid them.
When you're in this fog, you have, you know, it's much scarier because there could be dangers anywhere and you have no idea how to navigate them, how to avoid them, how anything behind that wall works.
And you don't even know which direction you're headed.
So what do you think?
Is this something that helps to bring us to another understanding for people who, you know, as I've said, I don't know that I've ever been in a cult, but if I was, it wasn't a cult that I noticed.
So the cult experience is completely foreign to me.
Is this a thing that's something like what it's like to be in a cult where you're in a place, there's a place outside of it.
It seems scary and unknowable.
If you ever go there, you don't know how anything works.
Does this map onto your experience at all?
I think there's lots of parallels there.
I think particularly for a born-in member like me, probably the illustration probably breaks down if you're somebody that was recruited because you know what's on the other side of that wall or fog, at least to some degree.
But if you're raised in it, then yeah, I mean, the village or the community sounded very much like the congregation to me.
So I was raised in a congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses.
I know, I knew them all.
We called them uncles and aunties.
You know, so all of the characters there were almost like family in certainly how we addressed them.
And yes, they came around for dinner and we played sports with them and socialized and so on.
So yeah, very much.
And yeah, I think there's a lot of that there.
I suppose that the one bit that I would say oversimplifies, of course, it is another model.
So this is what it will exaggerate some things and ignore others.
It's needed to simplify.
But I suppose that there is a fog, but there's also, and it depends to some degree on the cult.
So for some cults, they are so isolated.
You know, they are living.
I mean, we've interviewed some people who've lived on a compound, you know, were raised in the children of God or, you know, some other groups like that.
And they were raised in a very isolated way.
They didn't know how other people, I mean, here's a good example.
There's a book that Janya Lalich, a really well-known cult expert, wrote.
And she gives the example of this person who she left the group when she was like in her 20s, I think.
But when she was just before that, she'd gone to town.
I can't remember the detail, but she'd gone into town to get some provisions.
And she heard somebody talking about something and having her own thoughts.
And she said to her, this young woman said to this girl, how did you do that?
How did you, how did you have, how did you think that?
She couldn't understand how you could have your own thoughts, how you could think something and just come up with it yourself.
She just didn't understand that.
And she even asked the person how she did it.
Of course, she was laughed at and assumed she was some, I don't know, somebody that has some sort of disability, I suppose.
It was just purely because of her, the way she'd been raised.
So, yeah, I think there is, I suppose for some people, it must be like that fog.
For me, it was more like instead of walking through a foggy wall, it was more like stepping into a fair ground or a sort of festival that was confusing and exciting, but scary.
And you wanted to taste some of it.
You didn't understand it.
You might take some make some decisions that are a bit risky because you don't really understand the risks.
And so, for me, that it would be almost like that.
So, you're walking into a from that lovely, comfortable, safe environment into a exciting but dangerous and confusing environment.
So, for me, that I think that that would be when I first left Jehovah's Witnesses, I sort of it's almost like the you know, when the World War, Second World War started for the in the UK anyway, for the first sort of six months to a year, it was called the Phony War because nothing happened.
Um, you know, it's like yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Um, but but it was called the phony war in the UK because there was no the attacks hadn't happened, there was no bombing or anything like that.
Um, and that was a bit like when I left, it was like a phony sort of leaving in a way because I still worked for my dad, um, I had my own business with him.
Um, I, you know, my wife still carried on going to the meetings for a year or so, um, and I didn't do anything different, I just carried on.
Um, the only thing I didn't do was go to the meetings or go preaching.
So, that, so other than that, I didn't find it that confusing or difficult.
And then I left that job and I got a job with a small computer training center.
Um, and this was like they were all young people, and um, that's when I they introduced me to clubbing, nightclubbing, and pubs, and um, uh, you know, just a life that I just had no idea of.
So, that was the moment really where I walked through that, um, that fog and into a sort of festival of, you know, there was this banquet I could, I could take if I wanted to, but I'd also got my, I'd got my responsibilities.
So, I was a married man, I had a child, um, I couldn't just go and try everything that the world had to offer because I had responsibilities, or I could, but I would have had to have given all that side of my life.
Yeah, so it was, I think that was a, that was, I talk about that a little bit in my story as a really important but very, very difficult time in my life.
It was just a year, um, but it felt like it was a pivotal, a pivotal moment where I could have done, I could have been anything really.
I could have, I could have gone down some roads that would probably not be particularly good for me.
Um, I'm glad about the decisions I made, but I think there are dangers when you leave a group because you, you, you know, you can, you can find yourself getting into some difficulties and not understanding yourself or what you want.
Or, um, you know, so yeah, that, so yeah, I think I like the illustration.
I think it's good.
I think maybe on the other side of that foggy wall, I'd put a festival.
Well, I mean, that's, I think the first steps you take seem to be just blinding disorientation is what I kind of get from when I listen to stories of most people on your podcast who talk about this.
I think you're, you know, what you say, you were raised in this and so that was all you knew was this life.
I think some people, you know, in the way that we can rearrange everything in our minds, for some people who were who were recruited to these situations, they still come to this place, I think, where they believe less that the people who are outside of the cult are important or even perhaps real.
So it amounts to, in some ways, the same thing, that they go to a job somewhere, but the job isn't important.
The only important thing is the life when they get home and all the other things that they're doing.
And as you say, there are some people who have cult scenarios where they are completely removed from society.
They're in a compound of some kind.
Yeah, the real life is actually a phrase that we used.
So this is the real life.
The world outside, that's not the real life.
So that's very apt.
And yes, the going to work.
So we went to work.
Lots of Jehovah's Witnesses have their own businesses, but even then, they're doing things like cleaning windows or washing cleaning offices or those sorts of things.
So they're jobs that don't have a great deal of kind of intellectual stimulation.
No disrespect to people that do cleaning for a living because it's very important jobs.
And listen to the podcast a lot where you clean windows.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But it doesn't really, it's not the sort of thing you think, I want a career in that.
And that gives me intellectual stimulation.
So yeah, very much like that.
And if you did have a job, it had to be really just to pay the bills.
It was really just to earn enough money to be able to pay the bills and to then dedicate your life to serving Jehovah.
So yeah, that is very apt.
So yeah, I think that's very evocative.
And I wonder how much of it, like when I talk about conspiracists who have to put everything that they can't account for into the conspiracist room.
When I think about a cult and it's sort of at least intellectually cut the members off from society, how much the people in that society look at the world, the entire world, as like a black box device that just has a set sequence of inputs that they give and a given sort of set of outputs that they'll get.
And it's just transactional only.
Is that when I hear you describe it, that's kind of what I hear is that it's just a great big black box device that surrounds them.
And that all they do is they walk to that wall, they do their activity, they get their little tokens, they walk back and wait for the day when they have to spend the tokens on whatever they save their money for.
Yeah, I think that is that is accurate.
But as with many things around psychology, there are complications because we are able to hold more than one thing as being real at the same time.
So on the one hand, yes, that is exactly right.
But on the other, you are encouraged to save people's lives by preaching to them and trying to bring them into scare quotes, the truth.
So you, again, the different cults are different, but Jehovah's Witnesses, they are very evangelical.
So that certainly were.
I mean, there are signs that, although they would deny this, but there are signs that that might be slightly changing, at least in nature, but probably for another discussion.
But that is still very much, I mean, they're called Jehovah's Witnesses because they are supposed to be testifying and bearing testimony witness.
And the idea is that they want to recruit people.
Therefore, you can't, you have to be able to look at them as individuals and try to, you know, engage with them as individuals.
The idea that everyone is not real and that they also are real because you have to save them is directly competitive things in your mind.
And it is.
And yeah, you know, that is a good explanation of how they can, on the one hand, talk about love and how, and the sheer horror that they see in the world, you know, people killing each other in war and the diseases.
And it's just, it breaks their hearts, you know, to see this such terrible things happening to people.
And we really, you know, that people are desperate for the truth.
They need to know the wonderful good news about the truth.
So that's on one hand.
But on the other, they're looking forward to Armageddon when God is going to literally destroy 8 billion people, leaving their bodies, carcasses to rot and birds feed on the dead bodies.
There was also speculation about the fact that us, the people who survived Armageddon, pretty much only Jehovah's Witnesses, will be responsible for burying and getting rid of all the dead bodies.
So this is these two things are just so different.
The one hand, there's this emotional appeal to empathy.
But on the other, it's, you know, let's can't wait for God to get rid of all of this.
But the way he's going to get rid of it is by doing much worse than any of the wars that have happened on the earth ever.
So it's, yeah, contradictory.
Right.
Well, I think we're going to have to end it there.
Spencer, thank you so much for giving so much of your time.
What a really interesting conversation.
I'll be thinking about this now tonight and mulling it all over because I've really enjoyed it.
And I hope our listeners enjoy us mulling it over too.
So thank you so much, Spencer, for coming on the show.