Steve Patterson Philosophizes About The Nature Of The Universe | Hn 279

Adam Haman (0:07)

Hello, and welcome to Haman Nature. I am Adam Haman, and I'm very pleased to be joined by one, Steve Patterson, very smart person and host of, what would you call it, the Patterson In Pursuit podcast. Yes, sir.

Thank you very much for joining me, Steve. Welcome to the show.

Steve Patterson (0:25)

It's a pleasure.

Adam Haman (0:25)

Thanks for having me. When did you start that podcast?

Steve Patterson (0:31)

I'd have to check the timestamps on that. I want to say it was 2016, something like that. So just over a decade ago, I think, yeah.

Adam Haman (0:39)

Ten years. All right. Well, you've been pursuing something for 10 years. A, what was it? And B, did you catch anything?

Steve Patterson (0:48)

Yeah, it's Patterson In Pursuit of Truth. And I've been on a rather quixotic quest to try to figure out the truth, how the world works. And very interested in ideas and interested in many different subjects and domains and have had success in learning. And I sort of developed a general theory of learning that I've been applying to a bunch of different areas of thought and practice.

And well, I guess, long story short, I was very disappointed with my college experience and then very disappointed with the nonprofit experience and decided maybe I'll just around this time 2015 or so, maybe I'll just do my own thing, start my own show, do my own writing. And I started Patterson In Pursuit for a few reasons, but it was in part because I was going to go around and travel to different universities and talk with different professors on some of the subjects that I'm interested in. I also was able to have the stereotypical cool conversations with like Buddhist, monks in Japan and in Thailand, because I'm also interested in religion.

So that was a success. I think I learned a ton over the past decade. I've written a few books since then. And yeah, I have definitely made progress, I would say, in getting closer to truth. I've learned a lot of things. I have a clear understanding of what is false, which is another way of saying a clear understanding of what's true. You can get closer to truth by negation.

Adam Haman (2:26)

With an eraser, yeah, that helps.

Steve Patterson (2:28)

Yeah. And yeah, I have made some limited inroads in different domains.

It's all a work in progress, but things go in the right direction.

Adam Haman (2:40)

I first came across you one of your appearances on the Bob Murphy show. Yeah. And I thought, this is an interesting fellow. I like the way his mind works.

I think he's saying some smart things and also some incredibly wrong things. And I would just love to love to talk with you. Thanks. Yeah. Let me start with an area that I agree with you a lot. I think like you do that we have a epistemology problem. The map is not the territory problem, and it shows up everywhere in our intellectual life. But the root of it is the mathification of everything we think about.

I think we think about math the wrong way, and I think you agree. So maybe tell us a little bit about how you started to think about that and where you ended up.

Steve Patterson (3:35)

Well, that's a long story. I'm happy to talk about it, but to do it justice, it would take a little bit. Let me try to give a little bit of the personal side, because I think that will make the ideas a little bit more interesting. So I became convinced pretty early on that logic is the fundamental tool for getting at the nature of reality. We could know some things that are logically necessary. It's a limited number of things, but they're still there. You can know that things are the way that they are, for example. You could know that things are not the way that they're not.

So that's another way of stating the laws of identity and non-contradiction in logic. However, something is, that's definitely the way that it is, it would be wrong to say otherwise.

So it's interesting that logic gets us to some truth. And I wrote a little book back around, it was 2016, called Square One, the Foundations of Knowledge. And it's this examination of the relationship between logic and existence. And in the book, I make the claim that logic and existence are inseparable, that existence by its own nature must necessarily be the way that it is, which is to say it is operating within logic.

Adam Haman (4:59)

And that's an interesting statement right there. It clearly is the way it is, and it clearly is operating, if you want to use that word for existence. But to say it's operating within logic, I'm not sure follows. It is certainly operating according to its nature.