Lee McIntyre (leemcintyrebooks.com & @LeeCMcIntyre) is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy & History of Science at Boston University & an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. Lee is the author of How to Talk to a Science Denier as well as many other books, essays & papers. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, the Boston Globe, the New Statesman & the Humanist.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:30 Lee's Intro
- Philosophy of science to public philosophy ("it's supposed to be about making life better")
- "Science denial & misinformation are the scourges of our age... there's an epistemic crisis"
- Clarity & 2-way public engagement "philosophers can't just be talking to each other"
06:00 What's Real?
- Ontology (being) & epistemology (knowing)
- "It's possible there are things that are real... that we cannot know"
- Naturalistic ontology (only the natural exists) & epistemology (evidence & reason)
- Growing up in Portland
- Questioning: "My mom didn't treat me like a kid... That made me a philosopher early on"
- Dad & grandmother kicked out of church
- Raised non-religious
- "It was good to wonder, but it wasn't good to pretend that you were certain of things that you couldn't know or that you didn't know"
- Socrates: the real enemy isn't ignorance (because we can learn) it's false knowledge
- "Don't let the charlatans take that sense of wonder away from you"
- Norm MacDonald: Faith as a choice, a leap?
- Experiencing cancer & considering mortality
- How does Dawkins know there's nothing after death? Could there be a naturalistic afterlife?
- "The fact that there are questions we can't answer is not an excuse for pretending we have an answer"
- Faith is often a response to the discomfort of uncertainty
- David Hume & empiricism
- Skepticism, humility, hubris
- Karl Popper, fallibilism
- Pretend naturalism vs. good faith naturalism
- Science denial/conspiracism: Gullibility about what you want to believe & extreme skepticism about any alternative
- Arbitrariness
- Hugh Mellor's "The warrant of induction" https://youtu.be/0__p0iVUi2M &  bayesianism
38:00 What (& Who) Matters? 
- Teaching ethics for a decade but "I've never really made up my mind"

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.
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Thanks Graham.