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What Exists? · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday, we asked whether reality is real.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: We saw that our senses render the world from the blind spot to the mirror box.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: We looked at the case against reality and we saw that using science to deny reality undercuts the science itself.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we named three things science has to assume.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Something is there, it behaves consistently, and we can know it.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Today we go underneath all of that.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: What actually exists?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Philosophers have a name for this question.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Ontology.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: It comes from two Greek words, ontos, being, and logos, study or word.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Ontology is the study of what is.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: On Monday, I said every question we ask stands on things we've already decided.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: The first one was what is real?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday we asked whether reality is real at all.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Today we ask what's in it.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Why does this matter?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because what we believe exists decides what we look for and what we treat.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: If only matter exists, then healing is only chemistry and mechanics.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: If persons exist with minds and spirits, then healing involves the whole person.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us never chose our answer to this.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: We absorbed it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Today you get to look at it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Let me start with a story about a young soldier and a warm room.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: In November of 1619, a 23-year-old Frenchman named Rene Descartes was serving as a soldier in Germany.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Winter set in and he was stuck near the town of Newburgh on the Danube River.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: He later wrote that he spent whole days alone, shut in a room heated by a stove, no one to talk to, nothing to distract him, just time to think.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he decided to do something radical.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: He would doubt everything he possibly could.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Everything he'd been taught, everything his senses told him, even whether he was awake or dreaming.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted to find one thing that could not be doubted, one solid stone to build on.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Years later, in 1637, he published what he found.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: In French, it's je pense dans je suis.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: In Latin, it becomes famous as cagito ergo sum.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Quote, I think, therefore I am, unquote.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what he meant.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: I can doubt my senses, I can doubt the world, I can even doubt my own body, but I can't doubt that I'm doubting.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And doubting is a kind of experience.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: So something is here experiencing it.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: And here's something many people don't know.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Descartes wasn't the first.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: More than twelve hundred years earlier, around the year 420, Augustine of Hippo, the North African bishop, whose writing shaped so much of Christian thought, made almost the same point.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Answering the skeptics of his day, he wrote, quote, if I am mistaken, I exist, unquote.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: See Faller Sum, because someone who doesn't exist can't be mistaken.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: A soldier in a warm room and a bishop in North Africa, twelve centuries apart, found the same solid stone.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: That brings us back to yesterday.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Every thinker we met who doubted reality kept one thing.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: George Berkeley doubted that matter exists on its own, but he never doubted minds.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: For him, minds and their perceptions were what's real, and all of it was held in the mind of God.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Donald Hoffman doubts that space and objects are what they seem, but he calls his view quote unquote conscious realism.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: For him, consciousness is the most real thing there is.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Descartes doubted everything he could, and the one thing left standing was experience itself.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: So here's something worth noticing.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: The people who argue against reality don't argue against consciousness.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: They can't, because the arguing is itself an experience.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Consciousness is the one thing each of us knows directly.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Everything else we know through it.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the last thing we discover, it's the first thing we have.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And remember what we said on Wednesday?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Science can map which parts of the brain light up when we see, feel, and think.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's real, it's measurable, and it's valuable.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: But how any of that becomes the experience of being you is still an open question.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Some call it the hard problem of consciousness.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the one thing we know most directly is also the one thing science understands the least.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: That should make all of us a little more humble and a lot more curious.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Across history, there have been three big answers to the questions of what exists.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: The first answer is only matter.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Everything, including our thoughts and feelings, is particles in motion.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: This view is called materialism.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's common in modern science and medicine, often without being said out loud.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Let's be fair to it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Looking closely at matter has given us a great deal.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Things like antibiotics, anesthesia, surgery that saves lives every day.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: When something in the body is broken, a materialist's eye can find it.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: The trouble comes only when we say matter is all there is.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Then the person who is suffering starts to disappear behind the part.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: The second answer is only mind.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Matter is something minds experience, not something that exists on its own.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's called idealism.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Berkeley held it, Hoffman holds a version of it.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Idealism takes experience seriously, and that's its gift.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: But if matter is not real on its own, it is hard to explain why the lead balls fall the same way for everyone, or why a broken bone needs setting no matter what we believe about it.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: The third answer is both.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Matter is real and mind is real.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Many traditions hold some version of this, and so does scripture.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: In Bereshit, the second chapter, God forms the man from the dust of the ground.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's the physical.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Then God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the man becomes a living being.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Dust and breath, body and life.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Neither one alone makes a living being.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Both together do.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what I want us to see.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: All three answers are commitments.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Science can't decide between them because science starts after the commitment is made.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So the honest question isn't which one has science proven, it's which one best fits everything we actually experience.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where a powerful way of thinking comes in.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: We can try to prove everything from scratch.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Descartes tried, it's very hard, and most philosophers agree he didn't fully succeed.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or we can start somewhere else.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: We can start with what is undeniably happening and ask what must be true for this to be possible.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's called a transcendental argument.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: The German philosopher Immanuel Kant made it famous in the 1780s.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Later, Christian thinkers like Cornelius van Till, a Dutch American theologian, used the same approach to argue that a rational, knowable world points to a God who made it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: So let's try it together.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start with four things none of us can deny and ask what must be true.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: First, experience is happening.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're hearing these words right now.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: So what must be true?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: There must be someone who experiences a subject, a self, not just a brain doing chemistry, but a me for whom it is happening.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Second, our experience is ordered.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: When Steven dropped the lead balls, they fell the same way again and again.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: When a heart cell beats in a dish, it beats in rhythm.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: So what must be true?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: There must be a world with order in it, a world that behaves consistently, whether we're watching or not.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Third, we can know that order and share it.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Two people can measure the same line and agree.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: A scientist in Delft and a scientist in London can see the same tiny creatures.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: So what must be true?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Our minds must fit the world well enough to know it, and other minds must exist so that knowledge can be shared.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Fourth, we care whether things are true.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: We ask, is it true?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we feel it matters.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: So what must be true?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Truth must be real, not just useful, but real.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Notice what we found, not by proving it from scratch, but by looking at what is a self who experiences an ordered world, minds that fit it, and truth worth seeking.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's ontology, and it's the one every scientist, every doctor, and every one of us lives with, whether we say it out loud or not.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now let's bring this home to our bodies and to our health.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: In 1994, researchers published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: They took 98 adults who had no back pain at all and gave them MRI scans of the lower back.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Only about one in three had completely normal discs.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: More than half had a bulging disc.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: More than a quarter had a disc protrusion.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: No pain, but abnormal scans.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it works the other way too.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Remember the mirror box from yesterday?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: People who have lost an arm can feel severe pain in a hand that isn't there.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing on a scan, but they have real pain.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Matter and experience don't always line up.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Both are real and both need to be heard.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: So what is real?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: The disc on the scan is real, matter exists, and the pain or the absence of pain is real too.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's experience.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: The scan shows the body, it doesn't show the person.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: If only matter exists, we'd treat the picture.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: But many of us have felt what that's like being treated as a scan, a number, a diagnosis.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: When we remember that persons exist, we treat the person who lives in the body.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: We ask what they experience and we listen.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: So here's something we can carry into our own care.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: When we sit with a doctor, a therapist, or any kind of practitioner, we can bring both kinds of evidence, the scan and the story, the lab number and the lived experience.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: We can say, here's what the test shows, and here's what I notice in my body day by day.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: The notebook from Tuesday's blog is exactly that kind of evidence.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's not less real because it comes from inside of us, it's the part of the evidence that only we can bring.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's why ontology isn't just for philosophers, it's in every exam room.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is the end of our week together, so let's look back at the path we've walked.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: On Monday, we asked what makes a question meaningful and named the ground we stand on when we ask.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: On Tuesday, we looked at science, what it is and what it can answer, and the difference between data and models.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: On Wednesday, we stood in wonder at a single cell and saw that it's all connected, literally.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: On Thursday, we asked whether reality is real and found that science has to assume that it is.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And today we asked what exists.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: We found that experience is the one thing none of us can doubt, and that by starting from what is, we can see what must be true.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Today let's question from the ground up.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Once today, stop and notice one simple experience.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: The warmth of a cup in your hands, the sound of a voice that you love, your own breath, and quietly say, this is happening.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm experiencing it.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Then ask one question, what must be true for this to be happening?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Let your answers be simple.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's a me, there's a world, they meet.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's not small.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's the foundation of everything.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Today we asked what exists.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: We met Descartes in his warm room and Augustine 12 centuries before him, doubting until one thing was left.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Experience itself.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: We saw that even those who doubt reality never doubt consciousness.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: We looked at three answers to what exists and saw that all of them are commitments.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: We started from what is and found a self, an ordered world, minds that fit it, and truth worth seeking.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we saw why it matters in every exam room.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: The scan shows the body, but it doesn't show the person.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Next week we take the next step on the ground we're standing on.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: How do we know what we know?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: We'll look at the different ways people come to know things, from our senses and reason to the testimony of others, and what many of us call revelation, and how each one earns our trust.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you there.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in Notes from a Fellow Traveler, my blog.