Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpact this. I want you to join me
for a moment. Just do a little thought experiment with me.
Picture something completely mundane, a jar of pickles in your refrigerator.
Go ahead, open the door in your mind, peer into
the back and look at the expiration date. Let's say
it was last week, a full seven days ago. You
can vividly remember buying them, right bringing them home, and
you also vividly remember well everything else. The formation of galaxies,
the slow, agonizing crawl of evolution, the building of the pyramids,
your own high school graduation.
Speaker 2: Now just hold that image, because here is the terrifying,
logically unassailable thought we're plunging into today. What if the
entire cosmos, the thirteen point eight billion years of cosmic history,
the pickles expiration date, the evidence of your graduation, and
every single one of your most cherished, deeply personal memories.
What if all of it was actually created last Thursday.
Speaker 1: Thursday. That just sounds absurd on its face.
Speaker 2: It does, But this isn't just a flight of fancy
or some you know, a quirky Internet meme. It's found
philosophical challenge known as Last Thursdayism or LTA for short,
and it is the ultimate skeptical challenge. It forces us
to confront the very foundation of what we think we
know about the past.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads, where we take a stack of
challenging sources, articles on philosophy, theology, and even theoretical physics,
and we try to extract what you need to know
to be well informed. Our mission today is to really
exhaustively analyze this seemingly absurd hypothesis because, as you said,
its absurdity is that's its strength, right.
Speaker 2: We're going to be exploring what's called the theom of indistinguishability,
and simply put, it states that a real history and
an apparent forged history are well, they're empirically identical. You
can't separate them with science.
Speaker 1: So we are challenging the fundamental pillars of our knowledge,
our own memory, are trust in science and I mean
even the presumed character of a potential creator. We're going
to trace this concept from its nineteenth century theological roots
right through to modern unsettling challenges like the simulation hypothesis.
Speaker 2: And if there is one thrilling thread we follow today,
it is this the undeniable logical truth that you simply
cannot prove the universe wasn't created last Thursday with false
memories implanted. And once you truly grasp that, it changes
how you look at every single scientific fact you have
ever accepted.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's start with a really precise definition. We
can't afford to be sloppy here because less thursdayism is
so much more intricate than just saying, oh, the world is.
Speaker 2: Young, right, It's a concept built on deep, meticulous deception.
LTA posits that the universe was created last Thursday. But
and this is the key, it was meticulously designed to
look exactly as if it were billions of years old.
Philosophers call this apparent age, and our sources really emphasize
that this requires a painstakingly intricate tapestry of falsehoods woven
into the very fabric of space time.
Speaker 1: So this isn't a careless, sloppy job. This is this
is forensic level forgery.
Speaker 2: By a supremely powerful entity. Yes, the detail is what
makes the hypothesis so powerful and so difficult to refute.
It means the laws of physics weren't just suddenly turned on.
They were programmed specifically to coincide with what you would
expect to find if the universe had been aging naturally
for thirteen point eight billion years.
Speaker 1: Wow. So think about the data points that cosmologists rely on.
The cores of background radiation, right, this tiny temperature fluctuation,
all of.
Speaker 2: It, the cosmic background radiation, the precise geological strata showing
billions of years of sedimentation, the red shift of distant
galaxies that indicates an accelerating expansion.
Speaker 1: Even radioactive decay.
Speaker 2: Even the radioactive decay rates of elements, yeah and LTR.
All of that evidence which appears to point to deep
time was created, fully formed, last Thursday.
Speaker 1: And crucially, this cosmic forgery extends right down to us,
to our own subjective experience.
Speaker 2: Yes, our sources. Even the simple ELI five breakdowns of
this emphasized that you and everybody else were created, pre
programmed with a lifetime of memories that never actually happened,
but they seem lessly metch with everyone else's implanted memories.
It's not just the external world that's fake. The internal
landscape of your mind is also a complete fabrication, and that.
Speaker 1: Inherent absurdity is why it's so often used as satire. Right,
It's a critique exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a satirical critique that targets the logical weakness in
Young Earth creationism or YEC. The argument is simple. If
one accepts the premise that a creator made the world
six thousand years ago, but included the appearance of age.
Speaker 1: Like fossils already in the ground, or old looking rocks,
or light.
Speaker 2: From stars that supposedly took millions of years to reach us.
If you accept that, why place the creation moment six
thousand years ago? Once you allow a creator to forge
the evidential chain, the timeline becomes entirely arbitrary.
Speaker 1: Why not last Thursday?
Speaker 2: Why not last Thursday? Why not five minutes ago? The
satire just reveals that accepting the appearance of age makes
dating the past a matter of theological preference, not empirical certainty.
Speaker 1: And this concept is much older than modern internet satire.
You said it has deep roots, stemming from a mid
nineteenth century book called Umphalos.
Speaker 2: Correct. The term last Thursdayism is derived directly from the
Umphalos hypothesis. It was published by an English naturalist named
Philip Henry Goss in eighteen fifty seven, and the timing
here is absolutely critical. In the eighteen fifties, you have
this massive disagreement between mounting geological and biological evidence for deep.
Speaker 1: Time from people like Lyell and Darwin's ideas were just emerging.
Speaker 2: Right, and all of that was clashing with the traditional
scripturally derived timeline of a young Earth. It was reaching
a breaking point for intellectuals.
Speaker 1: And Goss was caught in the middle. He was a
devout Christian but also a competent scientist.
Speaker 2: He was, and he was deeply troubled by this divide.
He desperately needed a way to reconcile the empirical data
he was observing with his religious convictions. So he argues
for something he called prochronism, and this is the core
logical mechanism of Umphalos. Prochronism is the argument that for
any complex organic or ecological system to be fununctional at
the exact moment of creation, it must already bear the
marks of a prior, non existent history.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a pretty brilliant piece of theological reasoning.
Actually it acknowledges the facts while holding onto the faith.
Speaker 2: He used very concrete, relatable examples to illustrate this. He said,
look for Adam and Eve to be functional as created
mature adults, they must have had fully grown hair, fingernails,
and crucially, a navel Amphilus's Greek for naval, hence the title.
Speaker 1: Even though they were never born, they never met an
umbilical cord. So the navel is evidence of a past
that didn't happen exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a necessary fiction for a functional present. He said.
The first trees must have had growth rings. Without growth rings,
a tree isn't a mature tree capable of reproduction or
structural support.
Speaker 1: So Goss was arguing that this appearance of age wasn't
some malicious divine deception. It wasn't God trying to trick us.
Speaker 2: No, he saw it as a logical structural necessity for
the creation of a functional, mature, self sustaining universe. He
wasn't accusing God of lyne. He was arguing that evidence
of the past is simply part the design of a
mature present.
Speaker 1: He was trying to protect the creator's character. But the
philosophical community, they didn't really buy it, did they not really?
Speaker 2: They quickly recognized that this attempt to compromise ultimately failed
because it just opened the door to the ultimate skeptical critique,
the one that Russell would later formalize.
Speaker 1: Ah, okay. So here's where it gets really interesting. It
moves out of theology and into pure philosophy. In nineteen
twenty one, Bertrand Russell proposes his famous five minute hypothesis
Yes in his.
Speaker 2: Work The Analysis of Mind, and this fundamentally shifted the
debate from reconciling geology with scripture to purely analyzing the
nature of knowledge itself.
Speaker 1: He just stripped all the theological baggage away completely.
Speaker 2: He just positive that the entire world could have sprung
into being just five minutes ago, exactly as it was
at that moment, complete with a population that remembered a
wholly unreal past.
Speaker 1: And this thought experiment was designed specifically to dissect what
a memory even is. What was his conclusion? Why is
it so revolutionary?
Speaker 2: His core observation is it's radical and highly unsettling. He says,
everything that constitutes a memory belief, the neural patterns in
your brain, the feelings of familiarity, the words you use
to describe the event, All of that happens now in
the present moment.
Speaker 1: So my vivid memory of eating breakfast this morning, that's
just a complex configuration of neurons firing in my brain
right now. The memory itself is a present phenomenon exactly.
Speaker 2: The belief refers to the past, but the contents of
the belief are entirely present. So Russell concluded, there is
no logical necessity whatsoever that the event we remember actually occurred.
He argued, our knowledge of the past is wholly analyzable
into present contents.
Speaker 1: So the contents of our minds, the data, the neural
structure could exist identically even if no past that existed
before the last five minutes.
Speaker 2: That's it. He essentially stripped history of its logical anchor.
If we cannot prove that the things we remember actually happen,
becomes logically vulnerable to collapse at any moment.
Speaker 1: Wow. So Russell found the IDEO logically tenable, a perfectly
valid logical proposition.
Speaker 2: He did, he dismissed it as uninteresting as a serious
truth claim. I mean, nobody genuinely believes this in practice.
But he thought it was philosophically invaluable because it ruthlessly
clarifies the absolute logical limits of our empirical knowledge. It
tells us where logic stops and where practical assumption has
to begin.
Speaker 1: Okay, So If last thursdayism is logically tenable, we have
to grapple with what that means. The theorem of indistinguishability.
This seems to be the core verdict.
Speaker 2: It is the real past and the apparent forged past
are empirically identical. There is no scientific tests that can
separate them.
Speaker 1: They're indistinguishable.
Speaker 2: Sadly, yes, our sources encapsulate this logical verdict with this
great phrase recreation without remainders. Imagine for a moment that
our universe, or a previous version of it, let's call
it Hero it ends and a new one, Kiro is
created instantaneously. The critical verdict is that Kiro has absolutely
no links to Kuro, no links at all.
Speaker 1: What does that mean for artifacts for history?
Speaker 2: It means that whether the past history of our world
Kiro is simulated or re enacted, its accessible, verifiable history
belongs solely to this current run. Any monuments or artifacts
from the old world from Kiro, they only exist in
the creator's memory. Let's call that. If that memory isn't
explicitly shared with us, then for.
Speaker 1: Us it's as if those things never were.
Speaker 2: Exactly they left no empirical trace in our world.
Speaker 1: This brings us to a crucial point about evidence, the
reliability of physical evidence. Philosophers call it inanimate memory. Right,
This is where science really hits a philosophical wall.
Speaker 2: Inanimate memory, Yes, it refers to the physical traces of
past events. The growth rings on a tree, the strata
of a canyon, the wear and tear on an ancient road.
We generally interpret these physical facts as being caused by
a preceding causal chain.
Speaker 1: Let's use that forensic science example from our sources. It
makes this so terrifyingly clear. Imagine investigators are called to
a car collision. Red car hit a black one. They
use the paint flakes, the dents, the skid marks, the
inanimate memory to reconstruct what happened. They conclude the collision happened.
Speaker 2: Yesterday because the evidence points to a preceding causal chain
that must have happened to produce this result. Now consider
the LTA scenario. If the universe was created last Thursday,
it was simply created in the post collision state. The
paint flakes and dents exist now in the present, but
they don't prove the collision occurred. They only prove that
the universe was created last Thursday with paint flakes and
dents in those specific locations. The past event is an illusion.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just a quirky example. This applies to
every single historical science. When an archaeologist dates a Roman
ruin based on pottery, they assume that civilization actually made
the pottery previously.
Speaker 2: When a pealeontologist dates a fossil, they assumed the creature
actually lived and died millions of years ago, and that
the decay process was gradual. In the LTR reality, all
empirical data is merely a detailed, present snapshot of the
configuration of matter designed to look old. Any conclusion about
the past, an asteroid impact, the age of the Earth,
it's an inference that assumes the very continuity of nature
we are questioning. Without that assumption, the evidence is just
present data, not historical proof.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is the foundational crisis. This is what underpins
all of LTA at the problem of induction, and this
is where it moves from a thought experiment to a
genuine challenge to science itself.
Speaker 2: This is David Hume's great challenge. All the way back
in seventeen thirty nine, Hume observed that all our empirical
predictions in all historical reconstructions rely on one massive, unprovable
and essentially circular assumption that the future will be like
the past, or more formally, that nature is uniform.
Speaker 1: And we use induction constantly. We see the sun has
risen every day, so we induce the prediction that the
sun will rise tomorrow. It's essential for survival.
Speaker 2: But Hume pointed out that this belief isn't rationally justified
by logic. It's simply a habit of mind, an inductive
inference based on past uniformity. When we try to justify
induction rationally, we run into a circle. We say, well,
it has worked successfully in the past, which is itself
an inductive inference.
Speaker 1: Right, You can't use induction to prove induction.
Speaker 2: You can't. We cannot prove the laws of nature will
remain constant without assuming the very regularity we're trying to establish.
The principle of uniformity is logically insecure.
Speaker 1: And Last thursdayism exploits this gap perfectly. It drives a
cosmic truck right through that logical insecurity.
Speaker 2: Precisely, if we cannot prove that the laws of nature
were the same yesterday or even five minutes ago. We
cannot prove yesterday existed at all. LTA suggests the laws
of physics were created last Thursday, along with the universe,
and their apparent past action like the thirteen point eight
billion years of expansion, is merely an illusion.
Speaker 1: So if the laws of physics aren't guaranteed to be uniform,
then the whole edifice of science, which relies entirely on
that uniformity, it becomes vulnerable.
Speaker 2: It does, which brings us to the big takeaway for
scientific methodology, the unfalsifiability of last thursdayism. If science, following
Karl Pokers is about testing and falsifying theories, how do
you deal with a theory that's just immune to evidence.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the ultimate philosophical black box.
Speaker 2: It is scientifically unverifiable and unfalsifiable. It's impossible to conclude
its truth or falsehood. Because the hypothesis explicitly requires that
the data itself was created to look old. It's logically
designed to absorb any potential evidence that might contradict it.
Speaker 1: So if a scientist discovers definitive evidence of an event
from before last Thursdays, say a quantum decay, residue that's
demonstrably one hundred thousand years old. The Last Thursday is
just shrugs.
Speaker 2: They just say that decay residue was also created last Thursday.
The creator engineered it to look exactly one hundred thousand
years old.
Speaker 1: This is why LTA is often dismissed as sterile. It
offers no explanatory power and no testable predictions.
Speaker 2: And we have to just distinguished this from the method
science actually uses, which is uniformitarianism.
Speaker 1: Right. Uniformitarianism is the essential working assumption that physics has
been constant, that the processes we see now erosion, gravity,
thermodynamics have always operated at roughly the same rate. Our
sources argue there is no logically defensible, non arbitrary position
between provisionally accepting uniformitarianism, which is justified by interlocking lines
of evidence and collapsing entirely into Last thursdayism.
Speaker 2: We use it because it works, not because it's logically
certain exactly.
Speaker 1: And to make this philosophical mess even worse, we have
what's called the new riddle of induction from Nelson Goodman.
He uses this concept of grew grew.
Speaker 2: Spelled g r u E. That's the one The grew
riddle shows how the same finite present evidence can support
contradictory hypotheses about the future or past. Goodman defined grew
to mean an object is green until some arbitrary future
time delate. Let's say January first, twenty fifty, and it's
blue thereafter. Okay, Now, if all the emeralds you've ever
observed so far are green, that evidence also perfectly supports
the hypothesis that they are.
Speaker 1: Grow because up until now, a grew emerald and a
green emerald are visually identical, so induction doesn't help us
choose between.
Speaker 2: Them exactly the current evidence supports infinite possible future paths.
LT eight is precisely this kind of grew like theory,
but for time, the universe looks thirteen point eight billion
years old right up until the specific moment of creation
last Thursday. At that point it switches from the old
hypothesis to the new one, while remaining empirically identical in
the present. It just illustrates that our theories are fundamentally
underdetermined by the evidence we have right now.
Speaker 1: So last thursdayism is immune to Popper's falsification challenge because
it absorbs all evidence and It highlights the weakness in
Hume's problem of induction because it shows the uniformity of
nature is an assumption, not a proof. That is, that
is a formidable philosophical position. Last thursdayism is one vertex
in what we could call this the skeptical trend that
modern philosophers and physicists wrestle with. It sits alongside the
simulation hypothesis and the truly unsettling concept of the Boltzmann brain.
Let's look at how these compare.
Speaker 2: They all present a challenge to the reliability of our
perception and memory, for sure, but their mechanisms and implications
are very different. Let's start with the simulation hypothesis SH,
which posits that our reality is just a sophisticated computer
generated construct, probably run by some advanced post human civilization.
Speaker 1: And SH and LTA share that fundamental roadblock we talked
about the theorem of indistinguishability.
Speaker 2: Right if the simulation or the creation is perfect, if
the programmer or creator is infinitely detailed, there's no internal
test we can run that could reveal the underlying mechanism.
We can't run a diagnostic that points that the hardware
outside the system we're in.
Speaker 1: But the mechanisms are fundamentally different. LT eight posits a
divine or at least a powerful satirical act of instantaneous creation.
It's basically magic. SH, though is often framed as a
naturalistic possibility.
Speaker 2: That is the critical distinction. The simulation hypothesis doesn't require
a metaphysical jump. It rests on a probabilistic argument. The
argument is that one of three things must be true.
Either civilizations go extinct before they can run ancestor simulations,
or they choose not to. Or this is the key.
The number of simulated minds eventually vastly outnumbers the number
of minds in base reality.
Speaker 1: And if that last one is true, then statistically you
are overwhelmingly likely to be in a simulation.
Speaker 2: Exactly so, LTH is a philosophical thought experiment to critique theology,
whereas SH is a statistical extrapolation based on potential future
technology and another thing. SH doesn't necessarily imply an omnipotent, omniscient,
or singular creator, which is central to the theistic root
of LTH.
Speaker 1: Right, the simulation could be run by some I don't know,
some average Joe higher race for a class project.
Speaker 2: Or it could be paused and restarted without our knowledge,
or run on an infinite loop. It makes the creator
far less predictable than a classically defined god.
Speaker 1: You know, when we compare them. The simulation hypothesis almost
seems tame. It operates within a high tech version of physics.
But the third member of this trinity, the existential nightmare
known as the Boltzmann brain, that completely breaks physics.
Speaker 2: The Boltzmann Brain or BB, named after physicist Ludwig Boltzmann,
it's arguably the most deeply unsettling of the three. A
B B is a self aware entity, literally just a
brain that arises spontaneously from random thermodynamic fluctuations in a
high entropy universe, like in a vacuum or deep space.
And worst of all, it comes complete with fully formed
false memories of a past that never occurred.
Speaker 1: I understand the mechanism is just sheer random statistical chance.
How is this considered worse than LTA?
Speaker 2: Well, LTCH is a parody of divine action. It requires
a willful, external, deliberate deception a creator. The BB, however,
is a probabilistic thread that arises within the accepted framework
of naturalism and statistical mechanics. The core argument is based
on prop ability in an infinite universe.
Speaker 1: Run us through that probabilistic argument again. Why is just
a brain more likely than a whole ordered cosmos In.
Speaker 2: An infinite high entropy universe that lasts forever, like a
heat death scenario, there will be random fluctuations. It is
mathematically statistically more likely for a single, minimum viable conscious
brain to spontaneously pop into existence with false memories than
it is for an entire complex, low entropy universe like ours,
to evolve through orderly natural processes.
Speaker 1: That's horrifying. So the complexity we see, the stars, the planet,
this conversation, it's not seen as evidence of a thirteen
point eight billion year history, but rather as overwhelming proof
that this entire complex picture is less likely than a
single observer spontaneously hallucinating it.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The lt Gock observer is often programmed alongside others,
everyone shares the same false past. The Boltzmann brain, however,
is utterly alone. It is a completely solipsistic experience. The
BB is hallucinating its entire social and physical reality, and
this is why physicists find it so troublesome. If the
BB scenario is true, our observed reality is statistically highly unlikely,
and we have to abandon the statistical methods we use
to study cosmology.
Speaker 1: So this shared skeptical thrust, whether it's a divine trickery,
technological simulation, or statistical chaos, it brings us right back
to the problem of solypsism.
Speaker 2: Right. Sollpsism is the belief that only one's own mind
is certain to exist. Ltaight is sometimes viewed as temporal solypsism,
the denial of reality outside the immediate present moment. If
you take the satirical interpretation of LT, where the world
was created solely for you, then everyone else is just
an MPC, a non player character, a pre programmed part
of your environment.
Speaker 1: The beauty and the danger of this skeptical trinity is
that it isolates the self and asks one ruthless question,
what definitive proof do you have that anything external to
your present consciousness is real? When we circle back to
the theological roots of this, specifically the Enfhlowes hypothesis, the
philosophical critique turns into a profound ethical and theological crisis.
It's about the character of a supposed creator.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, if a creator went to this incredible trouble of
manufacturing a world that looks thirteen point eight billion years
old when it's only a week old. Then that creator is,
by any reasonable definition, an ultimate deceiver, and that directly
challenges the notion of a benevolent, honest, or truthful deity
that many traditions assume.
Speaker 1: This is often framed as the problem of the two books, right,
the idea that God writes two simultaneous conflicting narratives.
Speaker 2: Precisely, you have the Book of Nature, which is all
scientific evidence deep time, from geology, evolution, cosmic expansion. Then
you have the Book of Revelation, which scriptural interpretations often
use to claim a recent creation. If God is truthful,
these books have to reconcile somehow.
Speaker 1: But the crisis is that LTAH makes the Book of
Nature essentially a massive cosmic lie. Why would a truthful,
benevolent God provide physical evidence fossils, starlight, radioactive decay that
systematically and flawlessly leads to a scientific conclusion he knows
to be false? Why provide nature as a deceptive trail?
Speaker 2: The theological retort which our sources off in site, tries
to shift the moral burden It says, you are assuming
that God owes creatures the full story, and that is
an assumption, the idea being that God is transcendent and
we can't impose human moral categories like deception on divine action.
Speaker 1: But the powerful counter reply, also in our sources, brings
it back to the concept of love and parental duty.
It says, I am assuming that love has something to
do with not letting your children walk blind into the
same fire.
Speaker 2: If a second creation QO is given absolutely no hint
of the previous creation q no scars, no warnings, no
lessons learned, then the creator is essentially hiding history that
might be vital for the moral and spiritual development of
the new world.
Speaker 1: This whole dilemma then crystallizes into the question of trust,
which philosophers denote with the symbol for tao.
Speaker 2: Yes, if the new creation QIRO doesn't disclose the existence
of previous creations, then our belief about our own age
is not an empirical conclusion drawn from data. It becomes
an act of trust in the creator's character.
Speaker 1: In chow, and if that creator is demonstrably willing to
commit planetary skill fraud, that trust seems well immediately undermined.
Speaker 2: That is the crux of the moral objection. Our sources
point out that if a mortal human, say a master
art forger, when to this much trouble meticulously faking brushstrokes
and aging paper to deceive a museum, we would accuse
him of criminal fraud, malicious manipulation, profound dishonesty.
Speaker 1: So why does a deity who claims perfection and goodness
get a moral pass on this cosmic deception?
Speaker 2: Well, the counter argument is that benevolence can include deception.
Some argue that God might have to hide his presence
or deceive us about the universe's true age if the
full raw truth would do more harm than good, maybe.
Speaker 1: To ensure free will remains uncompromised, or to achieve some
higher good we can't comprehend exactly.
Speaker 2: But this defense immediately makes God's existence a less parsimonious claim,
a less probable claim, because LT eight requires that we
constantly pile on numerous unevidenced excuses free will higher ends
incomprehensible benevolence to make the physical evidence fit the claim
of recent creation.
Speaker 1: And this is where the philosophical tools we use to
dismantle LT eight overlap with how we assess any extraordinary
historical claim like claims of miracles or resurrection, which require
violations of the uniformity of nature.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we move from the theological crisis into pure epistemology
by using Beaesian reasoning to assess the probability of these claims.
The skepticism in lth is the exact same skepticism required
to analyze miracles.
Speaker 1: Let's break down the Beaesan argument slowly, because this is
a mathematically crucial point. It forces us to consider the
prior probability of an event before we even look at
the evidence.
Speaker 2: Right. Think of it like a crime. If we hear
a rumor a local baker stole a loaf of bread,
the prior probability is relatively high. Baker sometimes steel. If
we hear a rumor the local baker transformed into a
dragon and flew away with the bank vault, the prior
probability is astronomically low. The lower the prior, the higher
the burden of evidence.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now let's apply that to the resurrection. We
start with the prior probability pr what's the chance that
any arbitrary person in history resurrects.
Speaker 2: Our sources stressed that pr has to be calculated based
on the sheer overwhelming amount of data we have, and
the probability that any arbitrary person in history resurrected is
really really low, maybe one in a billion, because nearly
all dead people do not, in fact resurrect The laws
of biology are overwhelmingly uniform on.
Speaker 1: This point, So that initial extremely low prior probability is
our logical anchor. Now we factor in the historical evidence,
the testimony of witnesses, the written accounts.
Speaker 2: Even if we are absurdly generous and assume we have
extremely strong historical evidence, Let's say the probability of the
evidence given the resurrection is one. Even then the resulting
posterior probability, the probability of the resurreme direction actually happened,
given the evidence remains astronomically low, perhaps one in a million.
Speaker 1: Why does it stay so low even with perfect historical evidence.
Speaker 2: Because the claim is so extraordinary that the initial low
prior probability is almost impossible to overcome with evidence that is,
by its nature subject to error, bias, or hallucination. It's
just much more probable that the witnesses were mistaken or deceived.
Than it is that the laws of biology were fundamentally violated.
Speaker 1: So the conclusion is that extraordinary claims require much stronger
evidence than what you can get from historical records alone.
Speaker 2: Precisely, today, we demand DNA tests, continuous video footage, extensive
medical examination by multiple independent doctors. Those channels of evidence
aren't accessible in ancient history. So we have to choose
between the uniformity of nature a dead body stays dead,
and the veracity of the historical testimony.
Speaker 1: And this ties right back to physics and biology, which
lth also challenges. A resurrection isn't just a historical oddity,
it's a violation of physical law, an absolute violation.
Speaker 2: Our sources detail the process. Within twenty four to seventy
two hours after death, decomposition begins driven biotolysis, the rupture
of cell membranes by their own enzymes. The brain, which
is eighty percent water, rapidly liquefies. To reverse that after
three days requires what our sources call external mettling at
the molecular level, a massive, active violation of thermodynamics and biology.
Speaker 1: So, whether we're talking about ltaight or miracles, the philosophical
challenge is identical. Both require us to accept a massive,
unprovable and unfalsifiable violation of established physics, and uniformity both
expose our deep reliance on the assumption that nature just
operates consistently. This whole philosophical rabbit hole from last Thursdayism
to the Boltzmann brain and can quickly lead to global
skepticism where you doubt everything. But obviously we have to
find a way to live right to do science.
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate pragmatic dilemma. If we follow this
thread to its logical end, we just descend into a
philosophical stalemate that's useless. The paradox is stark to deny
we can know the past while using technology like computers
and telecommunications, all built on accurate historical modeling, and the
assumption of physical uniformity is fundamentally contradictory.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate logical trap. If you claim to know
you're being deceived by lts, you have to rely on
the premise that you're not being deceived, and the mechanism
you're using to judge that the whole thing collaxes it does.
Speaker 2: We need a foundation for our knowledge, even if that
foundation isn't logically secured by induction, and this is where
philosophers make the pragmatic pivot and embrace the concept of fallibilism.
Speaker 1: How does pragmatism save us from the logical onslaught of lts,
which we've established is logically tenable.
Speaker 2: Well, philosophers like Hans Reichenbach argued for what's called the
pragmatic justification, induction is simply a best bet. Rickenbox's argument
is basically a forced choice. If the world is orderly
in uniform then induction works. It's the only tool that
will let us predict things and build knowledge. But if
the world is unordered, chaotic, or governed by LT style deception,
then nothing will work and all knowledge fails anyway.
Speaker 1: So we have two possibilities. If the world is ordered,
we win by using induction. If the world is unordered,
we lose no matter what we do. So we should
rationally choose the orderly path because it's the only one
with a chance of success. Right.
Speaker 2: We are compelled to believe in the uniformity of nature,
as Hume argued, because of our cognitive structure, but Weickenbach
gives us a pragmatic reason for adopting that belief as
a working hypothesis. It's not proven, but it's necessary for progress.
Speaker 1: And Charles Pierce deepened this by arguing that knowledge is
what is faded to be ultimately agreed to by all
who investigate.
Speaker 2: Pierce argued the truth is fundamentally intersubjective and provisional. It
requires sufficient time and the research community to converge on
the most very similar theory, discarding rivals that are logically
equivalent but well explanatorily inferior.
Speaker 1: We see this in the history of science. For a time,
the fleagistan theory of combustion was empirically competitive with early
ideas about oxygen.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect example. The flogistin theory explained burning as
releasing a substance called phlogistin into the air. It worked
for centuries, but scientists observed anomalies like metals gaining weight
when burned, which would imply flogistint had negative weight. That's
a problem.
Speaker 1: And then Lavoisier and others came along isolated oxygen and
offered a superior theory. Burning was about combining with oxygen,
not releasing flogistin.
Speaker 2: Right, the oxygen theory eventually displaced flogiston not because flogistm
was illogical, but because technology better scales gas analysis allowed
researchers to perform crucial tests and see which theory had
more explanatory power. The two theories were transiently underdetermined by
the data at one point in time, but given more
time and investigation, the community converged on the better answer.
Speaker 1: So even if the last Thursday claims the world was
created last Thursday and we claim it's thirteen point eight
billion years old, given enough time, the thirteen point eight
billion US theory just keeps getting reinforced by convergence. In
every field geology, physics, biology, the lt theory produces nothing good,
only excuses, and this.
Speaker 2: Is the core of the fallibilist stance. We acknowledge that
mistakes in our scientific models are inevitable, but they're correctible
through testing and community consensus. The rejection of lts and
other hyper skeptical hypotheses is ultimately a pragmatic commitment, a
choice to move forward, not a logical certainty. Objective knowledge
for the fallibilist is still possible despite the absence of
an infallible foundation.
Speaker 1: So the ultimate lesson is that while LTCH is logically tenable,
as Russell concluded a century ago, it's ultimately uninteresting because
it leads to intellectual paralysis.
Speaker 2: It's completely unproductive whether the universe began thirteen point eight
billion years ago or last Thursday. The laws of physics
we observe today, the laws that let us build phones
and understand chemistry, remain the only reliable guide we have.
We are compelled to live as if the past is real,
because to do otherwise render science, technologlogy, and conscious life impossible.
We have to choose to rely on the uniformity of nature.
It's the only rope we have to climb.
Speaker 1: The stars are still there, you are still here, and
this present moment, with all its verifiable, interlocking evidence, it's
already more mystery than we know what to do with.
We have to trust our nature that compels us to
believe in that uniformity, even if we can't rationally prove it.
Speaker 2: The moment, we choose to trust the evidence, even while
recognizing we might be wrong, we step out of the
logical trap and into the realm of actionable knowledge.
Speaker 1: We began this thrilling deep dive into Last thursdaism by
analyzing the possibility that your most cherished, memories are forged,
and the universe is merely a week old.
Speaker 2: We trace the concept from Goss's nineteenth century theological dilemma
with Adam's naval and tree rings through Russell's purely skeptical
five minute hypothesis, and we concluded that the fear of
indistinguishability means a real history and an apparent history are
empirically identical.
Speaker 1: We explored how LTA is scientifically un falsifiable, exploiting David
Hume's problem of induction, and we noted how this philosophical
vulnerability is mirrored in the simulation hypothesis and the terrifying
naturalistic possibility of the Boltzmann brain.
Speaker 2: We saw that this skeptical trinity ultimately exposes the fragility
of our knowledge of history, memory, and even the trustworthiness
of reality itself. It forces us to make a choice.
We discussed the theological crisis and how Baesian analysis suggests
that accepting extraordinary claims like miracles requires overcoming impossibly low
prior probabilities.
Speaker 1: Our sources noted that the concept of a second creation
suggests a new world might be given no hint of
what came before, no scars, no warnings. And while the
logical door remains open to the idea that this world
is just an expendable experiment, the sheer richness and constancy
we observe compels us toward a pragmatic commitment to reality.
Speaker 2: So we leave you with this final provocative question them
all over. If you realize right now that your memory
of the past was entirely false and the world began
last Thursday, would you choose to believe the intricate, comforting
falsehood that upholds science and society, or would you try
to find the hidden, unknowable truth behind the cosmic curtain.
Is your belief in yesterday a logical certainty or an
essential act of trust? Leave us a comment and let
us know what you think.