Get your mind out of the gutter right now. Dick is not what you're thinking. Dick is DIQ, disinformation quotient. The measure of the magnitude and the extent of nonsense spewed online by self-styled experts throngs and hoards of them solo and in cahoots with or without academic degrees. And there's a new gimmick in town for these self-styled experts. They borrow clinical terms and phrases from psychology. And because they are not educated at all in the field or educated in the wrong parts of psychology, they misuse these terms and phrases. They abuse them, mutilate them, molest them, trample on them in order to self-aggrandize and to project false authority. This is not nice. They mislead millions of people. They miseducate. So I have bad news for you, self-styled experts. Daddy is back. There is an adult in the room. Sit down, take out your notepads and scribble your new education. Use these words and phrases correctly from now on. Go and sin no more. Today we are going to focus on three such words, projection, rationalization and splitting. In a previous video, I noted how virtually no one online uses the phrase dark triad personality correctly. I explained there that dark triad personalities are a combination of traits, but not a combination of diagnosis. In other words, dark triad personalities are not narcissists. They are not psychopaths. They are subclinical. They cannot be diagnosed as narcissists and psychopaths. The same problem occurs when these online YouTubers, coaches, self-styled experts and so on and so forth use words such as splitting, projection, rationalization and so on and so forth. And today I will try to set the record straight and educate them and you as to what constitutes the appropriate usage. Let's start with projection. First of all, there is a confusion between internalization, introjection, identification and incorporation. These are not the same processes. They are not the same psychological processes. They are all involved in projection and so it is critical to know the difference between each and every one of them. There is a video in which I have analyzed the differences between these four processes and there is a link in the description. As usual, the description is still under the video.  Something in you, your qualities. You attribute these to other people. You ignore them in yourself. You deny them in yourself. And you say, this is not happening inside me. This is happening outside me in other people's minds. I'm not the one with these traits. They are. I'm not the one with these cognitions or emotions. They are. And I'm not the one misbehaving. They are.  Parts that you feel guilty about. Parts that you reject in yourself. Parts that you consider to be vulnerabilities or weaknesses or shortcomings. So you cannot project positive elements of yourself onto other people, only negative ones. So when you see self-styled experts, old and new, suggesting that they have projected their positive qualities onto others, they have no idea what they're talking about.  When you attribute these to other people or when you exaggerate them in other people. This is not projection. This is idealization. So there's a difference between these two. Do not confuse projection with idealization.  The negative part of you. The parts you're ashamed of. Feel guilty about. Reject. Everything else is not projection. When you assign attributes, thoughts, emotions, cognitions and traits to other people and their positive, you're idealizing these other people. You're not projecting. What about rationalization? Rationalization exactly like projection is what is known as an ego defense. It's when you do something unacceptable, socially unacceptable. Or when you do something that contradicts your own conscience. Something that makes you feel guilty or ashamed. And then you rush to justify it using logical reasons. Usually your behaviors are instinctual. Some of them may have unconscious motivations. They are the outcomes of urges and drives. These kind of behaviors are reckless and impulsive. And usually you regret your behavior or misbehavior a minute later. But it's too late. You have already done what you've done and you are liable to bear the consequences of your actions. In order to avoid this dissonance, in order to avoid this discomfort, this unease of having done something that you shouldn't have. You rationalize. You justify your behavior. You analyze it and you assign to it logical reasons and motivations. You embed the behavior or the misbehavior, the misconduct. You embed it in circumstances that somehow render your behavior socially acceptable or at the very least unavoidable. Your instinctual impulses operated correctly because what you've done is logical and anyone else would have done the same thing. So this is rationalization.  So when you cheat, you would say, doesn't everybody cheat? Or when you spank your children, which you shouldn't do, it's a no-no.  This is tough love. Rationalizations are used to defend against feelings of shame and guilt, to maintain your self-perception and self-image as a good person, to allow you to continue to respect yourself and to protect yourself from criticism, external but mainly internal, known as the harsh inner critic or sadistic super ego.  And so you defend against this by saying, I've acted appropriately. There was no other way. This is rationalization. And of course, as usual, it's confused with another defense mechanism known as intellectualization. Rationalization and intellectualization are not the same. Intellectualization is when you distance yourself from your own psychological processes by over-investing emotionally, over-investing emotionally in your own intellect, by over-valuing your intellect, by superimposing your intellect on all other forms of internal process, including your emotions. So you would tend to suppress emotions, especially negative emotions, such as shame and guilt and so on and so forth. And you would tend to say, I am an intellectual person. I adhere only to the intellect, only to logic.  So it has nothing to do or little to do with rationalization, and these two should not be confused. Intellectualization in psychoanalysis is a defense mechanism in which conflicts, dissonances or emotional problems are dealt with abstractly or concealed by excessive intellectual activity. So rationalization does find support in systems of thought, representations and beliefs, but these beliefs that underlie rationalization, these thoughts that give rise to rationalization, these values and representations that collude with rationalization and make it possible, make it happen, they're all socially acceptable. So in rationalization, what we do is we convert socially unacceptable behavior into socially acceptable behavior in our mind. We lie to ourselves that our behavior is socially acceptable because it's rational, because it's logical. This is rationalization. And the last one in this trio is splitting. Splitting including self-splitting. Now there's a huge confusion between splitting and cognitive dissonance. First of all to make clear, when you receive conflicting messages or mixed signals from authority figures, from role models, even if you're a defenseless child, even if you're a very young child, and you receive conflicting messages or mixed signals, this does not result in splitting. Splitting is not about conflicting messages. Splitting is not about mixed signals. Conflicting messages, conflicting information, mutually exclusive signals, they produce dissonance, not splitting. Do not confuse dissonance with splitting. Dissonance is conscious. Splitting is unconscious. Dissonance is lifelong.  We'll come to it a bit later in this video. So as you can see, there's a lot of mayhem and chaos and confusion online. And unfortunately, the overwhelming vast majority of information, maybe 95%, is completely wrong, completely erroneous. And this creates a major problem because it corrupts the very language that we use in order to communicate. Literally nothing online is true or accurate, clinically speaking. And this applies also to people with academic degrees. Because having an academic degree in psychology doesn't make you an expert on any specific field of psychology. And pretending otherwise is charlatanism. So there is a huge need for an educational campaign to simply reintroduce the proper language and teach people who is who and what is what. Okay, let's delve a bit deeper into these three defense mechanisms. Projection, splitting and rationalization. Not necessarily in this order, but we start with projection. In psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories, projection is simply the process by which one attributes one's own individual positive or negative characteristics, effects and impulses to another person. Now you notice that I use the word positive. While earlier I said that projection is only of negative parts, not positive parts. Indeed, today in the wake of work in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories and so on and so forth, we have narrowed the definition of projection. And the accepted definition today is projection is a defense mechanism and I'm quoting from the American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association dictionary. Projection is a defense mechanism in which unpleasant or unacceptable impulses, stressors, ideas, effects or responsibilities are attributed to other people. So only negative things.  That's projection. The hate is attributed to others. And such defensive patterns often used to justify prejudice or avoid responsibility. In more severe cases, says the dictionary, they may develop into paranoid delusions in which, for example, an individual who blames others for their problems may come to believe that those others are plotting against them. In classical psychoanalytic theory concludes the dictionary. Projection permits the individual to avoid seeing their own faults. But modern usage has largely abandoned the requirement that the projected trade remain unknown to the self. In other words, sometimes we project parts of ourselves that we are fully aware of. But we are ashamed of or we resent or we reject or we feel guilty about. So we are fully aware of these parts. And then we would attribute them to others. We would say, maybe I'm unpleasant, but they are much more unpleasant. Maybe I'm angry at them, but they hate me. So that's a form of projection where there is awareness of the part of you that you wish to bury, that you wish to deny and ignore, but you still attribute it to others. In any case, today's usage of projection is limited 100% to negative dimensions and aspects and elements and components and ingredients of who you are.  You tend to project and only these things. You cannot project positive aspects of yourself. A little history of projection. Freud defined projection as a part of paranoia actually. The first time Freud described projection was when he dealt with the issue of paranoia. He wrote and I'm quoting, the purpose of paranoia is thus to fend off an idea that is incompatible with the ego by projecting its substance onto the external world. Freud distinguished two mechanisms. He said there is normal projection and there is pathological projection. He defined normal projection this way in the famous essay Totem and Taboo. Under conditions whose nature has not yet been sufficiently established, internal perceptions of emotional and thought processes can be projected outwards. In the same way as sense perceptions, they are thus employed for building up the external world, although they should by rights remain part of the internal world. So normal projection is a kind of outwardly directed perception, constructing yourself, constructing a self-image or a self-perception.  It is by mapping these external elements, by attributing to them traits and qualities and so on and so forth, that you get to realize what you are not. This is called negative identity formation. And this is healthy projection. We need to project in order to make a difference between ourselves and others, ourselves and the environment, so that we are able to form gradually a sense of self, a sense of unitary, core identity. A process known in Jungian psychology as constellation and in other schools of psychology, it's known as integration. Constellation of the self, integration of the self, the emergence of the self, require projection, so critical process, psychological process and mechanism. But like everything else in psychology, projection which is healthy can become pathological. It's when the process gets carried away as a result of the construction of a self that is so distorted that mental functioning becomes pathologized. For example in phobias, we see it in phobia. In phobia, we attribute to the outside world hostility, a malevolent intent, catastrophize the outside world. So there is projection here, but it is pathological. It leads to phobia and I refer you to Freud's essay in his Anus Mirabilis 1915, an essay titled Instincts and their vicissitudes. The most famous case, Freud's most famous case of paranoia or paranoid ideation was known as the Schreber case. It's the name of a guy, Schreber. Schreber was a latent homosexual. He denied his own own homosexuality. And because he denied this part in himself, he projected it onto others.  Converted the sentence, I love men, into the sentence, men love me. So he projected his own homosexuality onto other men. And then he said, men love me, but I don't love men, I'm not homosexual, they are.   My very hate for them proves that I'm not homosexual. This process is known as reaction formation. And then he proceeded further and he said, I hate them because they persecute me. I hate them because they conspire against me. I hate them because they impose on me. They're malevolent. They want to abuse me sexually also. So this is a progression from projection to reaction formation and to paranoia. That's why projection is very dangerous. And that's why projection is an integral part, a very critical part of pathological narcissism. Paranoia, as I keep telling you, is a form of pathological narcissism. The paranoid person is a dissenter of a conspiracy. He is the life of the party, so to speak. Everyone revolves around the paranoid. Everyone conspire against him. Everyone is thinking of him. This is known as referential ideation. The paranoid places himself at the center of the world, the world's attention, malign attention, but still attention. Paranoia, therefore, is a form of self-supply. And it involves, as we've just seen, it starts with projection. So projection is a critical element in most forms of narcissism, especially the paranoid manifestations. And so this is a distinction that Freud made. We no longer make this distinction nowadays in clinical psychology. We think that projection is always pathological. I would be hard-pressed to come up with a single example where projection is actually healthy. But I'm giving you the history of the concept. Another thing with Freud, when he came up with the idea of projection, as he did with dozens of other ideas, another thing is projection, by implication, says that there is something internal, something that does the projecting. And that is an internal agent. And there is the external world. We project onto other people, so there is us and other people. We are an internal, we experience ourselves internally, and we experience other people as external objects. They are external. So projection automatically divides the psychological universe, the mental universe, into internal, also known as intracyclic, and external, the outside world. This is a major contribution of Freud's that is often overlooked and that informs even the most modern theories of psychology, for example, social learning theory, and even neuroscience. Even in modern neuroscience, we make this distinction between internal and external in terms of psychological effects. And this is Freud's contribution. He was the first to suggest this difference, this boundary between inside and outside. So because he made this distinction between internal and external, he said, when we project the parts in ourselves that we are uncomfortable with, when we project our traits and our emotions and our instincts and our behaviors that we are ashamed of, that we reject, that we feel guilty about, when we project these parts, someone out there must accept these parts, must absorb them. We project and the person we project on must interject. He must absorb these, this stream of information. Now, interjection doesn't mean compliance or agreement. We often interject voices which are critical of us, voices which hate us, voices which act against us, voices which are enemies. We often interject such voices, actually. And when we interject these voices, it leads to mental illness of one kind or another. Similarly, when someone projects something onto you, you automatically interject the projection. It doesn't mean that you agree with the projection, but you interject it. So when you're with someone and that person projects onto you shameful traits, characteristics and behaviors which are unacceptable socially or individually, morally. When you're flooded with this negative messaging, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, shortcomings, failures and so on. When you are subject to this negative entraining or negative brainwashing, you tend to absorb it. You internalize it, then you interject it.  Remember, projection is always negative. So if you're weak, if you're vulnerable, you will identify yourself with this negative information. And finally, you will incorporate it. It will become part of you. That is the huge danger of projection in projection. The complete process is known as projection in projection, precisely because the victims of projection, the targets of projection. The people who are at the receiving end of projection sometimes come to agree with the projection. They say, I am bad. I am unworthy. I ought to be ashamed of myself. I ought to feel guilty. I misbehave. These self-appraisal is not real. It is the outcome of having been exposed to projection by someone else. But people are weak sometimes. People don't have defenses sometimes. And so they are susceptible to adopt the projection and make it their own identity, incorporate it in their own identity, which is really, really bad. Freud said, and I'm quoting, Insofar as the objects which are presented to the ego are sources of pleasure, it takes them into itself. It introjects them. And on the other hand, it attempts to expel whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure. And that's the mechanism of projection. But the opposite happens with the recipient of projection. So there's a big risk here. There's a very big risk. And that is the secret source of the narcissist. This is the power of the narcissist. The narcissist projects all the time, 100% of the time. Because the narcissist has a very powerful bed object.  In order to overcome these voices, the narcissist projects them. He hands these voices over to you. He makes you the guardian of these voices. But he doesn't tell you, listen, I have voices inside me that are very uncomfortable. Can you please hold these voices for me? That's not what the narcissist says. What the narcissist says is, these voices are not my voices at all. They are your voices. These voices are not talking about me. They're talking about you. These voices are right. Because you, you are really bad. You are unworthy.   You are ugly. So the narcissist hands over the bed object to you and forces you to identify with the bed object, to incorporate it, to take it away from him. He makes you the new container and receptacle and repository of the bed object. Or to put it less fancifully, he poisons you. It's a process of poisoning. This is the narcissist toxicity. That's why he's a toxic person. And projection is the main tool. And training actually goes hand in hand with projection. It's when the narcissist uses mantras, repeated words, for a form of verbal abuse, in order to convey to you the projected content and make you incorporate it in your mind, pollute you. This is kind of pollution, ambient pollution, make you become the bed elements. And the narcissist then feels cleansed, purged. It's a process of catharsis. So this is in a nutshell Freud's view of projection. It's a lot more complex. He made distinctions between elaborative function and other functions. I'm not going into all this. This is not a lesson in psychoanalysis. But that's in a nutshell. Now, there were, of course, other scholars who have dealt with projection and have made major contributions to the concept of projection. I would mention, in this case, Melanie Klein, for example. I would mention Wilfred Beyond. He, beyond, for example, distinguished between excessive projection and regular projection, projective identification, and so on and so forth. Those of you who are interested can delve deeper into the literature. Most of it is available freely online. And it makes for a fascinating read. On to rationalization. To remind you, rationalization is a logical or moral justification for an action or for an attitude that are considered widely unacceptable, frowned upon, condemned, mainly by society. So an individual may have conscious or unconscious motivations, instincts, urges, drives, and impulses, and then wish to act on them. And it is the role of the ego and the part of the ego known as a super ego to inform the individual that these are socially unacceptable ways of behaving and they might have adverse consequences. That's Freud's three-part type model. Of course, it's all a metaphor. No one has ever captured a super ego. No one has had a conversation with the ego. These are all kind of imaginary, abstract entities that describe dynamic processes, dynamic psychological processes. So rationalization is when the individual tries to fit into the expectations of society as communicated in the process of socialization. Individuals are aware of the rules and the norms and the mores of society, how you should and should not behave. What is permissible and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, what is appropriate and what is definitely beyond the pale, and they try to adapt to this. They try to adapt to this either by modifying behaviors, impulse control, delaying gratification, empathy, taking into account the existence of others and their needs and wishes, hopes and dreams and so on. That's one way. It's a behavioral choice.  Rewrite, reframe, falsify, confabulate in order to feel good with yourself. And to try to convince others, the representatives and agents of society, that you have done nothing wrong, that your actions were fully justified given the circumstances, that you could not have acted differently. And this is rationalization. It's not a symptom. It's a way to deny or to mask a pathological process. It's a cover up for a pathological process. It's not what is known as compromise formation. It is not also, strictly speaking, it is not a defense mechanism because rationalization is not intended to somehow generate libidinal satisfaction.  It's a way to keep from recognizing inner conflicts, inner dissonance, what used to be called neurotic conflicts, a way of avoiding self-blame, guilt, shame, avoiding all these uncomfortable emotions. It is the conscious secondary thought process of covering symptoms with some kind of facade, some kind of pretension. One could say that rationalization is fake it till you make it, fake it until at some point you convince others and yourself that you've done nothing wrong. So rationalization is a relatively simple psychological process or mechanism, but it can give rise to much more complex phenomena, one of which is known as grandiosity. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion. Grandiosity used to be called megalomania in the writings of the early sages of psychology. And rationalization often gives rise to grandiosity because if you explain and justify yourself all the time, you can end up in one of two positions. If you're always right, if you're never wrong, if all your actions are fully justified, if you are incapable in principle of making a mistake, you're infallible. These are the hallmarks of rationalization. Then you end up in one or two of two positions. Either you are God-like because God doesn't make mistakes. Everything God does is a good reason.  Victims commit no mistakes. Other people misbehave. Other people molest them. Other people violate their rights and breach their boundaries. Victims are passive. Victims are just there. They are self-objectified. So rationalization leads either to narcissism. I can do no wrong. I'm always right. Or to victimhood, I did nothing wrong. I was always right. I've been always right. And then I've been victimized. These are the two outcomes of rationalization. And of course, rationalization, because it leads to these outcomes, triggers and provokes huge constructs and processes, secondary processes, within the mind. Again, I will not go into all this in this video because it's the totality of psychoanalytic theory and so on. So finally, we come to splitting. And splitting is by far the most misunderstood concept, defense mechanism online. I have yet to come across anyone who knew what splitting is, anyone who got it right. And I mean anyone with or without academic degree. And I've seen them all. And this is a really serious problem. Splitting is by far the most important defense mechanism in a variety of mental health disorders, not the list of which is pathological narcissism. The logical narcissism is literally constructed on splitting. If you get splitting wrong, if you don't know what you're talking about, if you weave an imaginary web of fantasy about splitting, because you can't admit that you're ignorant, then you're misleading yourself and others into territory that is very problematic.   It starts as early as six months old. It was first described by Melanie Klein and it is a key feature of Kleinian analysis and the theory of the object relations theories and especially the work by Fair Baron. Fair Baron, F-A-I-R-P-A-I-R-N, one of the key figures in object relations. It is a primitive defense mechanism because it's infantile. And it is used to protect oneself from conflict. All defense mechanisms, most defense mechanisms, are intended to avoid conflict. Because conflict creates internal conflict, creates dissonance and dissonance leads to anxiety and anxiety paralyzes and paralysis is bad for survival. So defense mechanisms are the way we avoid internal conflict by lying to ourselves, by lying to the environment, by falsifying the environment, by a variety of ways, denial, repression, you name it. All in order to avoid conflict, to protect ourselves against conflict, objects that provoke anxiety or ambivalence inside ourselves, internal objects, representations, even memories. They are tackled immediately by defense mechanisms. You could say that defense mechanisms are the immunological system of the psyche. Defense mechanisms are like antibodies. They attack dissonance and conflict and anxiety provoking angiogenic objects and ambivalent objects. They attack them the way antibodies and bacteriophages attack bacteria in the body. So it's an immunological system. Now, splitting is one such antibody. What splitting does, it decotomizes, it breaks down, it splits. That's why it's called splitting, of course. It creates what is known as part objects. Part objects are extreme representations of the same object. Two extreme representations of the same object. So we have one object. For example, mother. Mother is an object. Mother is an external object.  There is an introject. There is a voice in our heads that corresponds to mother's real voice in the outside world. There is an internal object that represents mother in our mind. So splitting creates two representations of mother. One representation is all good and one representation is all bad. These are extreme, radical, uncompromising representations. All good. All good, there's no hint of bad. All bad. There's no trace of shred of good.  Externally, there's only one mother. Internally, there's only one mother. But then when you split mother, there is one mother externally and two mothers internally.  There is this mother when you are baby and she is one. But inside your mind, having engaged in splitting, having split mother, you have two mothers.  These are known as part objects. So it's a polarized way of apprehending mother and there is a problem now. Now that you have two mothers, you have to make a decision.  And then if mother is all good, what does it make you?  Mother ignores you. Mother leaves the room. If mother is all good, it must mean that you are all bad. You deserve this mistreatment. You deserve this frustration. You had it coming. You made it happen. It's known as magical thinking.  So the minute the baby, the minute the child splits mother in his mind into all good and all bad, that minute the child splits itself into all bad and all good. And now we have two dyads. We have an all good mother with an all bad baby and we have an all bad mother with an all good baby. There's a multiplication of entities. So all splitting, all splitting involves self-splitting. It's very important to understand. You can never split anyone. You can never regard someone as all bad or all good without automatically splitting yourself. Indeed, self-splitting is a crucial mechanism in narcissism. We'll come to it in a few minutes. So splitting involves dissociation. When you're focused on all good mother, you dissociate all bad mother. When you consider mother as all good, you forget that she could be also bad. When you consider mother as all bad, you forget her good sides. So splitting involves dissociation. Dissociation is very important because it's also a key factor in narcissism and in borderline personality organization. So this ability to divide oneself is very crucial, not only when it comes to external objects, but also when it comes to internal objects. Indeed, we could even say that the split between consciousness and the unconscious is a result of splitting. Think about it for a minute. What is the unconscious? It is a repository of things we don't remember. It is the outcome of dissociation and it is split from the conscious. Why? Why is the unconscious split from consciousness? Because the unconscious contains all bad things, things that we cannot tolerate, things that are unbearable, things that are unacceptable, our shame, our guilt, our trauma. They're all in the unconscious. So the unconscious is the seat and receptacle and container and repository of everything that is bad. That is splitting. Unconscious, all bad. Consciousness, all good. Unconscious forgotten things. Consciousness remembered things. So we see that self-directed splitting leads, in collaboration with the mechanism of dissociation, self-directed splitting, self-splitting leads to the emergence of consciousness and the unconscious. When we take into account Lacan's view that the unconscious is the sum total of other people's minds, then it becomes very clear that splitting is at play because we tend to split mostly other people. Now Freud and actually Breuer before Freud, Freud borrowed a lot and I'm being charitable and gentle, Freud borrowed a lot from Breuer. And so Breuer suggested that we split ourselves and we split others. Not only do we split ourselves but we split others. It was the first to observe that we can split other people. And this is known as object splitting, object splitting. There's been a lot of work done on object splitting. I mentioned Lacan. He has a concept called foreclosure or foreclosure. I will not go into all this. It's very complex. Suffice it to say that when you split, when people split, they split not only external objects like other people but they automatically split themselves. Internal, external, conscious, unconscious, these are outcomes of splitting. So while it is true that object splitting, splitting other people, considering other people as all good or all bad, all right or all wrong, this is known as dichotomous thinking. While it is true that splitting other people is primitive, infantile and pathological, self-splitting is actually a condition for mental health. Because when you self-split, only then do you become aware of internal, external, inside, outside, conscious, unconscious.  Splitting others is pathological and unhelpful and an integral part of narcissism. And that is why splitting the object has nothing to do with mixed signals or mixed messaging. When you get conflicting information from two people, your mother says one thing, your father says another thing.  This kind of dual messaging, mutually exclusive, contradictory, does not lead to splitting. It leads to dissonance, to cognitive dissonance. And we should not confuse the two issues. Internal splitting is healthy, not unhealthy. It is external splitting, object splitting, that is unhealthy. And obviously when you split other people, what you have been told as a child about yourself has nothing to do with it. You split other people as a defense. Usually splitting goes hand in hand with projection. Because when you project, you devalue. Projection is a form of devaluation.   You take these parts and you attribute them to another person, so you are devaluing that other person. You are saying that that other person is all bad. And you are all good. In other words, projection is a sophisticated form of splitting. This is the linkage between all these phenomena and this is why they are all co-present, co-extant in narcissism. Now Klein described the process of how splitting comes about. There is a famous good breast thing. I would also recommend that you go deep into the work of Anna Freud and Edward Glover. They both have dealt with this. I will not go deeper in this video. I would just like to conclude by describing the work of Fairburn. Fairburn suggested that there is a schizoid core in everyone. And this schizoid core is based on splitting. The schizoid core usually reflects or is mobilized or is created by childhood trauma, abuse, frustration. When we are abused or traumatized or frustrated as children, we withdraw. We avoid. We withdraw inward. We reject reality. We escape into a fantastic space. And the first thing we do is to project. We project the bed parts. We project our bed object. We cleanse and purge ourselves. We hand over the parts of ourselves that we find unacceptable. We hand them over to someone else. We project and then we disengage. We say goodbye. And we develop what is known as a schizoid posture. We become self-contained, self-sufficient, self-isolated. Fairburn suggested that when the frustration is seriously bedded, when the trauma and abuse are overpowering, the child can't cope with it anymore. A child that is neglected or even parentified, instrumentalized, objectified, pampered.  So when the child is exposed to this kind of what is known as adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, what happens is the ego of the child splits into three parts. That is Fairburn's work. Fairburn says there's the central ego. The central ego is the eye. Central ego is preoccupied with introspection, self-observation, getting to know oneself, self-awareness, consciousness. The second part of the ego is the libidinal ego. That's the ego with the force of life. That's the ego that later develops a sex drive and so on. But not only the sex drive. When the sex drive is sublimated, we become creative. So this is the part of the ego, the second part, the libidinal ego is in charge of creativity. That's the ego that goes forth, explores the world, goes out, public-facing ego, so to speak. It leads us to create life, to create love, to create art, to create everything, science, you name it. That's a libidinal ego. But in really, really traumatized, abused children.  There is a third part of the ego. The third part of the ego is the anti-libidinal ego. That's an internal terrorist, an internal saboteur. It's an internal enemy. It's not the inner critic. It's not the superego. Everyone has a superego. Everyone has an inner critic. Many people have a harsh inner critic and a sadistic superego. That's not the same. This, the anti-libidinal ego, the third part of the ego, because the ego breaks down under the force, the blunt force of trauma. And the third fragment, the third shard, is the internal enemy. The anti-libidinal ego attacks the libidinal ego. The anti-libidinal ego is the force of death. It is the antonym of libidinal. It is known as destudo or mortido in psychoanalysis. Each of these three parts of the ego, the I, the libidinal and the anti-libidinal, is paired, goes together with internal objects. Each one of these three parts has its own cult, its own following of internal objects. And these internal objects are like voices, and they encourage this particular part of the ego to fulfill its functions.  These voices, collectively known as the bad objects, these voices collaborate, they collude.   These voices collaborate with the libidinal ego, and there's a group of voices that are self-referential. These are voices that talk about you. These voices say, listen, you did this because of that. You should be aware of who you are and what you're doing. This was your motivation, think about it. This is an ongoing kind of monologue inside you that keeps you on your toes, keeps you aware of yourself, self-conscious, introspective. They ask questions, did you do this because you were sad? Did you do this because you were mad? So they talk, these voices talk and constantly, there's a constant hubbub, monologue between the internal objects and these internal objects and the eye. So here are the three camps and the three constellations. And they have the outcome of splitting, which in itself is the outcome of trauma and abuse. And again, there is no school in psychology that says that conflicting messages or mixed signals lead to splitting. That's not the case. Splitting is a defense against externally unacceptable circumstances such as trauma and abuse or internally unacceptable conflicts.  Dissonance, especially cognitive dissonance is very common when we cannot reconcile the information or data that is coming from the outside. But it never leads to splitting. And one of the reasons, of course, by the time you have acquired language, by the time you are capable of understanding mixed signals and messaging, your splitting defense is long gone.  But it is exclusively, or shall we put it this way, mostly, object splitting. Narcissism borderlines split objects. The self-splitting in narcissism borderlines, which is pathological, has been completed long, long before the narcissist attempts or the borderline attempt to make contact with other people and to have a semblance of object relations through the shared fantasy. I hope I've succeeded somehow to throw light on the amazing confusion out there. It's very disheartening and discouraging because ignorance of this magnitude that is compensated for narcissistically by pretending to know. These people don't say we don't know. They say we know. And they created such a chaotic landscape that dialogue is no longer possible. And where communication is rendered impossible by ignorance pretending to be knowledge, then no further breakthroughs or erudition or learning are possible. And that's where we are right now. That's why the whole field is stuck. And definitely that's why online you can't get two people to agree because they're using the same words. But they define them as they wish on the fly. They improvise. There's no substitute to learning. No substitute to hard work. No substitute to deep study. The laziness of the younger generations, the indolence, the entitlement are leading us to the precipice. The clinical psychology is not exempt. It's no exception.


Okay, so hello, I'm JJ Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Our topic for today is truth making. Now, it's true that two and two make four. It's also true that we are now in a philosophy interview. But what makes these things true? Now, according to Australian philosopher David Armstrong, truths are made true by truth makers. But what are these truth makers and why do they matter? Now, in today's episode, we are privileged to have James Franklin, one of David Armstrong's most brilliant students. Professor Franklin is an honorary professor at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales. So hello, Jim. Welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hi. Thanks for the invitation. Glad to be here. Okay, so before we get into Armstrong's main theory, I'd like to know your personal impressions of him. So what were your first impressions of David Armstrong? What was he like as a philosopher? You can almost see this in the picture that he's a rather tall and dominating sort of personality. So you certainly sat up and listened when he lectured, which he did in a rather slow and deliberative form. But immediately you realised that there was a powerful mind behind it and one very concentrating on arguments for and against positions in a very fair way. He wasn't polemical in the sense of disparaging other views. He thought that philosophy was really about putting the views for and against a position and just reaching a balance. I didn't always agree with what he said. The first topic he lectured on us was Descartes Cogito. And I thought, look, he's got that all completely wrong. And that, of course, as I was a mathematics student at the same time, I wasn't used to that because in mathematics you don't say, look, people have got it wrong. It doesn't work like that. Philosophy, I realised, was different. But nevertheless, Armstrong was a great introduction. So yeah, you have a personal connection with David Armstrong. But what's the history behind this picture? Why was Armstrong called the Beast here? Yeah, the Beast. This is the famous Beast photo. This was the early 1970s when University of Sydney, like many other Western universities, was convulsed by the wash-up of the 60s in left versus right fights. And Armstrong, as head of department, was very much to the right. In this photo, he was, he'd invited a representative from the South Vietnamese consulate to talk about the Vietnam War, of course, from a right-wing perspective. And a radical student seized the microphone and started abusing the speaker. And here Armstrong attempted to seize it back unsuccessfully. But a photographer caught exactly the right moment. And this photograph, Armstrong called the Beast by everyone to the left of centre. It was commonly used to wallpaper left-wingers' walls around the Sydney in the 1970s. And shortly after that, a left-wing member of department, Mike Devon, who is now a distinguished philosopher in the style actually rather like Armstrong, wrote a strategy document called Strategies to Isolate the Beast. And due to the efforts of the departmental secretary, it fell into the wrong hands and was read out in New South Wales State Parliament. So that really fixed the nickname, the Beast. Okay, so let me get it straight. There's a division in the University of Sydney philosophy department during that time, right? So do you have the right-wing people and the left-wing people or the conservative people and the liberal people? So what cost that division? Well, it went back to, well, there was always left versus right. I mean, it's part of the human condition, left versus right. But it had got worse in these days. And what was left in those days didn't mean post-modernist like it means now it meant pretty much Marxist-Leninist. And there were divisions in Australia, especially over the Vietnam War. Australia sent troops to the Vietnam War and there was angst about that, especially among students who were liable for conscription to actually feelings ran high about that. So there were issues that were, well, off-campus about war. But then on campus, there were issues about course content. So there was a very hard-loan Marxist-Leninist in Armstrong's department, Walt Suchty, who wanted to introduce courses on Stalin and Mao. And Armstrong and his side of things naturally dug in against that. So that was the issue at that time. And you have the feminists as well, right? Yeah, the feminist issue came a little later than that, about a year after this talk. Strangely, feminism was hardly invented up to about 1972. And then all, well, I mean, it was known in popular culture, but it wasn't seen much in academic circles until all of a sudden in 1973. There was a demand that a feminist course be taught, of course, from a Marxist perspective, at the University of Sydney Philosophy Department. And there was a strike and tents on the quadrangle lawn, that sort of thing. And eventually it did happen against the opposition of Armstrong and others. Okay, so Armstrong was more of the traditional philosopher than Mao. Yeah, the traditional philosopher. So he thought that if you intruded, allowed political content to take over philosophy, that real philosophy would no longer be able to be done. Of course, this is 45 years ago, and we've seen what happened. To some extent that has happened, and to other extent the traditional philosophy has found a place for itself and hasn't disappeared completely.  So you're also a historian of ideas and of Australian philosophy in particular, and a social advocate. So in what way did Armstrong influence your views on these matters? Well, he influenced my views in some of those matters and not others. Naturally, not on mathematics, which he knew nothing about to put it bluntly. And not on social and ethical things either. Armstrong had a very naturalist view similar to his colleague and friend John Mackey. And there was really no such thing as ethics. And because in fact, there's no truth makers for ethical truths. There's nothing out there that would make ethical things true. Well, I don't accept that position. My background is Catholic. And I think there are things that provide truth makers for ethical truth, in particular the worth of persons, which is a serious and real aspect of persons. But where Armstrong did influence me positively was on Aristotelian realism about universals. So Armstrong thinks that reality includes not only individual things, but their properties like mass and charge. And that those are the things that science talks about. So Newton's laws link mass and gravitational force, for example. And that these are about the real properties of things. Well, I was influenced by that and wrote an Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics, which extended that theory to a philosophy of mathematics. Yeah, so you will discuss that later. But for now, let's go to Armstrong's main idea. So what is truth making all about? So as I understand it, truth making theory has three phases. So you have truth maker maximalism. Every truth has a truth maker. Truth maker necessitarianism. Necessarily if a truth maker exists, then some proposition is true. And finally, the entailment principle. If some truth maker makes through a proposition, then if that proposition entails another proposition, then that truth maker is the truth maker for the entail proposition. So let's try to understand these things one by one. What does he mean by truth making in the first place? Yeah, so let's get back to something more simpler and more simple and maybe understand what this kind of theory contrasts with. So yeah, the phrase truth supervenes on being is a good one. The idea is being first, what's out there and truth beliefs, anything to do with language and the mental comes second and has to agree with that. So out there there's so many elephants and in the world of propositions or thought or beliefs, there's the statement that there are so many elephants and the elephants come first and even if there'd been no people, no thinking, no statements, no language, the elephants being the way they are being is solid and the truth has to agree with that. And that's what the idea is truth supervenes on being. It contrasts with theories that you might call linguistic idealism like those of Derrida famously who seem to think of languages freestanding but not pinned down somehow by being. They're inclined to say that language exists by itself and you can't get beyond it or see through it to being. Well, that's not, that's got things, that's got the wrong end of the stick, you know, being first. Okay, so what does it mean by the idea that every truth has a truth maker? Yeah, it means that if there's a truth, a proposition or individual belief, that's true for it to be true. There's got to be something out there that makes it true. Well, of course, it could if the proposition itself is about India, like what I'm thinking that the truth maker is in here as well. But normally, if you're talking about a truth like there are seven, there are eight billion people on earth. Well, what makes that true is the eight billion people out there. And that comes first, the truth and the knowledge of it or anything to do with the mental or linguistic world super veins on it, that it sits on top of it, is caused, is quite not necessarily the right word, comes second and is dependent on it, ontologically dependent on it. Is that the idea of the decisitarianism? So necessarily if there's a truth maker, you have some proposition that's made true by that truth maker. Is that the thing going on? Yeah, so that depends a bit on your view of propositions. It could be that there are facts about the distant universe that nobody's ever thought of. And if you think propositions are somehow mentally dependent, then you would think there is no such proposition. In that case, there's no proposition to do the supervening on the beam. On the other hand, if you think of propositions as a kind of plate and a standard that must exist, then for every truth, then for every aspect of being, if that's the word, there will be a proposition expressing it. Well, that's a, as you and I have discussed, the theory of propositions is itself very difficult. And the truth maker theory tries to leave those things aside and look, concentrate on the being aspect. And thinks, of course, there's got to be a philosophy of propositions and what the kind of things that are true. But we will kind of leave that for the moment. Actually, there is in Armstrong's book Truth and Truth Makers, there is a serious chapter about propositions and the nature of them. Which reviewers thought was the least successful, I think. Difficult questions, but they're not quite what truth maker theory is about. They must be solved really. Okay. So how about this entailment principle? So I'll give you an example. So, Jim is a philosopher and it's made to by your existence. But that entails that someone is a philosopher. So your existence also makes that true, that someone is a philosopher? Yes, that's right. So to take existential propositions, the proposition there is an elephant is made, has lots of truth makers. Any elephant being what it is, is enough to make that true. And if some of the elephants disappeared, but not all of them, it would still be true, there'd still be a truth maker for it. So we shouldn't take the singular in truth makers as too literally. And we shouldn't think perhaps that there's a one-to-one relation. It's only between truths and truth makers. So, yeah, in that case, an existential proposition, anything being that true, anything being an elephant, is enough to make there is an elephant true. Okay, so what are these truth makers? Are they facts or states of affairs or abstract objects? According to Armstrong and I think rightly states of affairs is the right answer. So what makes the table, the proposition, this table is round true, is the actual tables being round, which is a state of affairs.  The word facts is sometimes used to mean the same as states of affairs. But it's unfortunately ambiguous, I think. Sometimes when you say facts, you mean truths and sometimes I mean states of affairs. So it's just better to leave that word aside. And there's certainly not abstract objects either. Well, according to Armstrong, there aren't any abstract objects. It's anti-platedness. But if there were, they wouldn't be the right kind of things to be truth makers of something like there is an elephant. For the truth makers of there is an elephant, what you want is elephants, not abstract, abstractions. No, that's right. Okay, so why do these truth makers matter in our thinking, in our metaphysics? In our thinking. Well, why does it matter? Because you need to understand in each case what it is. If you're doing science, well, you've got theories. You need to understand what it is for those to be true, what counts, what you've got to go and look for, to observe perhaps to make it true. If you think your proposition is that God exists, well, you need to know what it is. You've got to explain what kind of thing God is that would make a truth maker. And yeah, especially you may be with ethics, whether it's quite hard to say. If you think your obligation is to help the poor or something, what is it that makes that true? If you don't have an answer to that, you might be unmotivated to do it. It's the philosopher's job to say why it does matter to help the poor or whatever. Okay, so we're touching on some of the problems with Armstrong's suitmaking theory. So let's go there. So one problem is about general truth. So how does Armstrong hunt for a suit like all dogs are mammals? Well, that one is probably a necessary truth. And it's about the universal dog, about what it is to be a dog. But when he talks about universal truth, I think he's thinking more of what he calls a universal state of affairs or nothing. So the statement that there are only, well, that eight billion people on Earth, all the people that there are, that's the kind of statement that is thought to be a problem. What is it that makes that true that there aren't any more people? But that's all there are. Well, that's not so easy to describe exactly, but it has to be a fact about the whole universe that you go around the universe and you'll see where the people are. They're on Earth, they're on the whole, you look at all the people, they're all on Earth and they add up to eight billion. Well, we've described the way the world is and I think that's sufficient to say what the truth maker of that truth is, is the truth that all the people there are are those eight billion. Yeah, but that implies a kind of negative fact, right? That's right. Yeah. It's a negative fact like there aren't any people except on Earth. And that is a very sort of ambit or big claim and it's a claim about the whole universe, the same as there aren't any unicorns. There are no unicorns. So that is, in a sense, not a fact about unicorns. It's a fact about the whole universe and it's whole lot of contents. It says if you got the whole, if you got the whole universe in front of you, counted all the arcades and classified them, well, for each one, it's not a unicorn, it's something else. So it's a very diffuse sort of truth maker and Armstrong admits that he says it looks a bit more up in the air or you might say abstract but harder to grasp than a statement like this is an elephant, the elephant's there, it's got its properties and you'll observe it. You're really in touch with that. But a statement like there are no unicorns is very different. It's a statement about the whole universe. Well, that's how it is. You still have a good grasp of this that would make that true and false. What would make it true is that for all the elements, things in the universe, there's something other than a unicorn and what would make it false is a unicorn. Okay, how about... You still grasp how truth supervenes on being even though it's a rather... not so close a relationship as we first thought of. Okay, so how about temporal sentences? How are they true? I had breakfast this morning and I will go to the studio. Yes, the past world. In one sense it's not the business of truth maker theory to solve all problems in other areas of philosophy like the philosophy of time. However, you could perhaps give a sketch. One possibility, and I don't necessarily agree with this, is the growing block theory like Peter Forrest defends. According to that, the past exists, but the future doesn't. So the past, it's kind of like... as it says, a growing block, that's kind of etched to it that moves forward like weaving a carpet. So the past is left behind and it's solidly existing in some sense. It's for the philosophy of time to say exactly what sense. And that makes truth makers of past things. But the future doesn't exist at all and strictly speaking there aren't truth makers of future contingent statements like the sun will rise tomorrow. They're not statements, they're predictions which are not strictly true or false. Todd will have some suggestions, something like that. Predictions about them can be reliable or unreliable. There's reasons to think that this prediction that the sun will rise tomorrow is reliable. But it's still strictly speaking not a truth and there's no truth maker for it. Well, it's a theory, but it's not really for truth maker theory to evaluate that. So you're talking about moral facts as well. So there's some moral truths and according to a truth making theory if those are true then there should be a truth maker. Are you going for that position as well? Yes, and Armstrong I think thought that there was no possible truth maker for that. So although he didn't really go on about it in public very much he really thought there's no ethical truths. So he was certainly capable of being very dogmatic about political ethical truths about what the left should do with itself. Nevertheless, I would say that there are solid truth makers for ethical truths and most of them are the worth of persons that the way people are with consciousness, rationality, emotions and so on means that they are worthwhile, their importance, moral significance absolutely speaking, supervenes on that. That just being that way, a rational conscious person means that it matters absolutely what happens to you and hence obligations to not to murder you for example or to assist your education follow from that supervene on it in the ordinary sense. Okay, so I reckon that a robust truth maker theory implies some metaphysics that is a complete picture of reality. I think that Armstrong's philosophical views are informed by this commitment as well, the truth makers. So is this a right assessment of the relationship between truth making and metaphysics a complete picture of reality? It is, but it doesn't imply any very definite philosophical position. It certainly rules out the linguistic idealism in the style of Derrida as I was saying but it would be compatible for example Platonism. So if your theory was that there are a lot of abstract objects like propositions and numbers and sets you could think in as a truth maker theorist that the truth is about meaning and mathematics supervene on those. Armstrong didn't think that but because he was anti-Platonist and all he is a much more naturalist theory theorist. So his idea of what the truth makers are is much more naturalist. So in that sense, truth maker theory implies a realist attitude or truth supervene on being, the being is first but what view you have of being could vary quite a lot. Okay, let's go to your view. So in the philosophy of mathematics you defend a view called, as she called it a while ago an Aristotelian yieldist philosophy of mathematics. Now according to your view, mathematics is about the structure of reality. Is your view somehow influenced by Armstrong's truth making theory here? Yes and perhaps more definitely by his truth making theory as realized in an Aristotelian realist theory of universals. So he thinks science is about universals like mass, charge and length and my view is that mathematics is also about universals which are realized in the real world like shape, size, length but perhaps the central example is ratio. So for example you're a certain height and I'm a certain height which is slightly different and that means that what supervades on that is the ratio of our heights and if you and I were standing next to each other instead of thousands of kilometers apart the views would be able to see immediately the ratio of our heights approximately. So ratio is very typically studied by mathematics and it's out there. It's observable, it affects our senses. In fact, our senses, especially vision and I guess hearing as well, are very set up to register to complexes of universals complex patterns of ratios. But that's assuming that these universals are real things in the world, right? That's right. Well it isn't assuming it.  You can see ratio. So if for example you have a tall thin person next to a short fat person you can immediately see. Your vision is set up to immediately see the ratio of height to width is different. Okay so there's a good reason. So I'm trying to make sense of that. So there are patterns and structures in reality that make some mathematical truths true. For example, the ratio that you have been talking about geometric truths as well and perhaps some truths and calculus for example are made true by things in the world, right? How about some other truths like truths about infinities, about higher-order mathematics, modular forms. Yes, well I would say that is certainly the most difficult problem for Aristotelian realist philosophies of mathematics. You need some theory of unstantiated universals and Armstrong worked hard on that and I think was never totally happy with his answer. It would help I think if we, instead of thinking about infinities that are beyond our ken somewhat, we thought about the simple example, the one of Hume, about a missing shade of blue. Suppose that there are lots of shades of blue but there is one shade of blue that by complete coincidence is not realised in the real world. Now, what about the science of colour? Does it deal with that shade of blue? Doesn't it? Well, I think you would say yes, that it's the business of science to deal with universals and their necessary relations like it's a necessary truth about colours, for example, the oranges between red and yellow. Well, you can study that without having to worry about whether some particular shade of blue or orange happens to be not realised. You need some input from the real world to get the idea of colour but having done that you realise that colour comes on a spectrum and that spectrum is in principle continuous and that it's just a matter for the real world to decide which things are realised. But I wonder if we could think instead of infinities about much, what if the world was a lot smaller? Suppose that there are only six things in the world like, say, God and five angels. Now, what about the truth 7 plus 5 is 12? Is it true in that world or isn't it? Well, I would say yes and it's an unrealised possibility. It says that if that world did expand like some more things were created like atoms, they must conform to 7 plus 5 is 12 even though at the moment there aren't any 7 or 12 realised. So actually I would defend that what I call a semi-platinous Aristotelian realism of uninstantiated real... uninstantiated universals such as an uninstantiated shade of blue or something that says that unlike platinism, they're the kind of things that could be realised in the world though it may happen by coincidence that they're not. So are these uninstantiated universals merely possible or... Well, it's merely possible. It's mere. I don't like the phrase merely. It's possible and it's possible by a constraint on the way the world could expand. It's just the way colours are that the space of colours meaning the space of possible colours is the way it is and has a certain structure. And you can learn about that to some extent from observing the colours that happen to be realised. But the statements about it are not contingent. A statement like oranges between red and yellow is not contingent. It's a necessity. And that world of necessities imposes its will, so to speak, on the actual world and the business of mathematics and the science of colours to understand those necessities. Okay, so yeah, I think you have an idea about perceiving necessities in the world as well, right? So what is that about? Yes, that's right. And I would say you can sometimes perceive necessities. It would be better if we had a picture but I think I can ask people to do it in their mind's eyes. Suppose you have a row of three dots and below that align with them another row of three dots. So you have two threes, two threes, which is six. Now, mentally rearrange them so that there's three columns of two. There's the left-hand column, the middle column of two, the right-hand column of two. But it's the same six objects. So you can actually see that two multiplied by three equals three multiplied by two. And you can see that it must be that because it's the same six objects. So your visual facility meaning the eyes themselves and the intellectual processing behind it can see that necessity. Okay, so... On a more personal note, you were a student of some of the best philosophers we have in the 20th century. You have Armstrong, David Stove, who was your main teacher, John Mackey, et cetera. So why did you pursue philosophy as your academician here? Why mathematics? To some extent it was because I had talent in it and to make sure I got a job. So I... At the beginning of my mathematics... At the beginning of my undergraduate career at the end of school, I did very well at mathematics. And my motivation for mathematics was not quite 100%. In fact, not quite enough for a really serious career in it. And at that stage, I knew nothing about philosophy. I thought to myself, I don't understand where philosophy fits into the scheme of things. I know what biology is about. The animals and mathematics is about numbers.  To pick up an extra subject, I just enrolled in philosophy. I wanted to see, well, it's abstract. I thought I love abstract things. I'll find out what it's about. So it turned out to be good. And to have... And I was motivated to do it. I could have attempted a career just in that. It was dangerous to do that. And perhaps largely to get a job. But also, I did enjoy the pure mathematics. I gained a PhD in algebra and did a little work further in certain areas of mathematics. Mathematics is very interesting. Yeah, it is. And part of the reason is that it... As Plato says, it keeps you in touch with necessities.  You're not going to be sucked into linguistic idealism in no way. And I also became interested in mathematical model, which is how mathematics applies to, for example, climate science. What it is about the surface of the earth and the motions of the currents that mathematical science gets a hold of. And what does it tell you about the world over and above what just the science tells in physics? But I'm still hearing the Armstrong Toothmaking theory in your way of doing mathematics. You would say that, yes. Although I specialized in pure mathematics, I always felt that pure mathematicians weren't telling me what it was for. And that there should be a path that the student could take back to seeing what in the real world it connected with. So, for example, group theory is at the core of abstract algebra, but also it's the correct classification of symmetry. And symmetry is, like ratio, one of the basic mathematical properties of the real world. You can see whether my face is symmetrical or not. And if it isn't, you will say that guy shouldn't become a politician because it looks bad on television. Your symmetry is very visually prominent, which is why it's such a big thing in art. But at the same time, it's a mathematical property and the core of modern abstract algebra. Yeah, but the philosophy still is about the real world. So maths is about the real world. Well, some art will be part of the real world. Yes, that's right. And the history of ideas, I've found it very hard to settle down and do one thing. And I don't recommend that to the young people of today because it's hard to make a career doing lots of different things. I'm sorry, but specialization, at least in early years, seems to be what's called for a career. Okay, so speaking of a lot of interest, one of the main things that influenced me to pursue this really is your book, Corrupting the Youth. For those who don't know, Jim here authored or written an opinionated history of Australian philosophy corrupting the youth. So what inspired you to write that? I was inspired by remembering at school when we studied Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War. And he said, unlike other philosophers, other historians, I'm going to write the history of my own time. So I was there on the front line at the philosophy strike and Armstrong versus the anti-beast people and Marxists. And it was an exciting time. But the philosophy as well was exciting and had an interesting history. So I knew some of those people. I put them to the foreground, but there were plenty of other philosophers as well. Philosophy makes for good history, unlike mathematics. You can't, I think, write an exciting story about the history of mathematics in Australia. But philosophers well, shall we say, the point of philosophy has conflict. Which mathematics doesn't. Like in sitcoms and thrillers, conflict makes for a good story. And the human mind is not quite well adapted to getting the truth in philosophy. So people have crazy views and opposite crazy views. And they're at each other's throats. Of course it makes a good story. So I wrote it. Well, purchase the book, corrupting the youth, it's a really fun read. So finally, I had a privilege of learning from you and learning how to really excel in academic work. To many interactions throughout many years. What's your advice to people who are starting their careers in academia or in philosophy? Yeah, that's not easy to say. I'm glad I'm not trying to do it myself today because I would feel under pressure to write technical and complicated articles to get citation profile and so on. So philosophy really needs to be more of a vocation as well, even though you have to do those things. So you don't ask it's crazy to think of going back and asking Socrates how his citation profile was going. That wasn't what it was about. It wasn't in that for the career. But still, as we say in moral philosophy, you've got to eat. And at the moment, you have the way to do it is to concentrate on something. You've got to find something that's interesting to yourself and that's not just an off cut from what your supervisor has got in his bottom drawer or something like that. You have got to find something that you're passionate about deciding. And then when you just have to imitate how to do it and get published. What much more I can say about that. You could consider like I did getting a job somewhere else like teaching mathematics or something and doing philosophy as well. That might work for some, depending on your skills and talents. Okay, so is this career worth it? For some it is. For some it isn't. It worked for me. I had some luck from time to time. Well, I had some luck in having mathematical skills that would get me a job teaching mathematics pretty much no matter what because it's a good career prospect because there's a shortage of people in mathematics with mathematical skills. So I was lucky that I could do that and then do what I felt like. So the first thing I felt like was a book about the history of probability before Pascal. So it has mathematical connections but really it's about things like the law of evidence. Well, I just got into that. This is an interesting copy. I wrote the book. It was quite successful. Who knows whether anybody is going to have that luck. Well, it worked for me but I don't necessarily advise everybody else to do the same. You have to look at the situation and see what the prospects are. Okay. So I think that's enough for now. Thanks Jim for sharing your time with us and join me again. Thanks. Join me again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we talk about things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Thanks. Thanks.


You're gonna bring your water to a boil and we'll leave it on it so it'll come to a boil. You got your low-main noodles and you don't need salt or oil to boil these and they only boil for about six minutes. Okay, now we're gonna put together a sauce for our low-main noodles, okay? So we're gonna start out with two tablespoons of soy. Now you really need to use light soy if you want to use that many tablespoons. So I may just use a tablespoon and a half. We're gonna start out with a tablespoon and a half of soy sauce. If you have light soy sauce, you can do the full two tablespoons. We're gonna put in a half teaspoon of ginger. This is a quarter, so we'll put two, okay? There we go, brown ginger, soy sauce. Next, sesame oil, a teaspoon. Two teaspoons of sugar. And we're gonna put in a teaspoon of this sweet chili sauce and mix this up well. I'm gonna add a little olive oil. All right, we're gonna add our veggies for our low-main. Now you can julienne those carrots. It would be prettier if you would do that, but I would do the thinking. I just stand them. I just slice them thin, like I normally do. Add just a little salt and pepper to these. We're gonna cook these until they're a little bit tender. Then we're gonna add our meat, and lastly, we'll add the noodles. All right, we're gonna drop our noodles. It takes them six minutes. I'm gonna open this up. It's nice and boiling. And I've got 10 ounces of low-main noodles. They're wrapped in little serving sizes. There you go. Put your timer on. Veggies over here. It's great you have everything prepped and ready when you do this dish so that it comes together at the right time.  I have got one breast and a half cut up in very thin slices and pieces to add once I get these vegetables where I want them. We're gonna go ahead and add our chicken. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna scoop these veggies over a little bit, and we're gonna put our chicken in here. I'm gonna go ahead and salt it and pepper it. Now this chicken is really thin, so it shouldn't take a long time to cook. I'm keeping it on this side so I can kind of keep an eye on how pink it is before it gets mixed in with all these veggies. Just continue to turn it until it all looks like... Alright, it's been in here a couple of minutes, so I'm gonna start mixing it together with some of that butter on the chicken. Almost time for the noodles to be done. Okay, at this point if you see some pieces that are still raw, like this one right here, pick them up and flip them down on the bottom of the skillet so that the chicken gets done. The timer has gone off for the noodles. This is our low-main. It smells good, just by itself. It smells really good, y'all. Now we're gonna add it to our skillet and add our sauce. I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the eye and we're going to pour our sauce on here and start mixing this up. We're gonna make the plate, y'all. I didn't have mushrooms or several things I didn't have when I normally would make this, but sometimes in these days and times you just gotta use what you got.  Noodles look yummy, don't they? Okay, let me get me a fork. Let's check this out. When I make Asian food at home, most of the time my kids don't think it has enough flavor. And I think it does. But they always want stronger flavors and I think it's because they're used to eating at Panda Express and places like that where they do load it down with sauce. But I like just the flavors, the Asian flavors. I don't have to have tons of thick sauce on mine. Now this is green onion and I'm gonna take and take out the outer layer of them. I usually just grab the outside leaf and pull it off.  Alright, so I'm gonna line them up, snip off the ends. I also snip off the ends on this side and this is going to go in our stir fry. That was a bad leaf. So I typically, if they're really fat, I slice them in half. I'm just gonna slice these two in half, the other one I want. And then I cut them on a diagonal stir fry. We've got a pepper right here that we got out of the garden.  I'll touch a heat. And remember, low man's not supposed to have a lot of sauce in it. Thanks for watching Colored Belly Cooks, where we cook like mama did. Good supper.


Hello everyone and welcome to our lecture on human pedigrees. If you've ever put together a family tree, in a sense you've put together a pedigree. The purpose of a pedigree is to show who's related to who. In genetics this can go one step further and you can use a pedigree to show how genetic diseases are inherited from one generation to the next. Today we're going to be focusing on a famous example of a genetic disease known as hemophilia. Hemophilia is a blood disease and those who exhibit this disease have blood that is unable to clot. So something like a simple scratch, a simple cut, or even a small bruise can be lethal. Hemophilia is also known as the royal disease because it was carried throughout Queen Victoria of England's bloodline. In fact through her bloodline this disease was spread to Russia, Germany and even Spain. Now in a human pedigree, squares are used to represent men and circles are used to represent women. Those who actually exhibit a disease will have either their square or their circle completely filled in. Those who are known as being carriers, meaning they don't exhibit the disease but they do have one copy of the gene for it, will be shown with half of their circle or their square filled in. Queen Victoria was known as being a carrier of hemophilia. She married Prince Albert and through their marriage, as you can see, they had one, two, three, four, five girls and then they had one, two, three, four boys and of the boys, one Leopold was a hemophiliac. He exhibited the disease of hemophilia. Now of the girls Alice was known to be a carrier of the disease. The reason we know this is because when she was married she had one, two, three, four, five girls and she had one, two boys and of her boys, one of them was a hemophiliac. Of the girls, Alexandra who would marry the Tsar of Russia was a carrier and she had one, two, three, four girls and one boy with her husband. Interestingly, there was a lot of pressure at the time for her to give birth to a boy and it was a real worry for their family when they found out that their son, whose name was Alexi, had hemophilia. If people had known that she had given a son who had hemophilia the public would have become upset because there would have been no one to inherit the royal crown. Unfortunately then Alexandra and her husband decided to hide the fact that their son had hemophilia so they became withdrawn from the public. Eventually this led to the public becoming very discontent with their leadership because many of the people were suffering in poor and eventually there was a Russian revolution. Unfortunately for the family Alexandra, her husband and all of their children were executed all because they became withdrawn and were trying to actually hide the fact that their son had hemophilia. Now Alice's other child Irene was also found to be a carrier and she married into German royalty. She and her husband had three boys and fortunately two of the three were hemophiliacs. So far Queen Victoria's blood disease has gone through Russia and now Germany. Now, Leopold did live long enough to get married and have children. One of his children, Alice, was found to be a carrier because when she became married to her husband they had one girl and two boys and one of the boys was a hemophiliac. Lastly, Beatrice was also a carrier. We know this because when she became married she had one girl and one, two, three boys. Of them two of the three boys were hemophiliacs and later on it was discovered that the girl was a carrier. The girl's name was Victoria and she married into Spanish royalty. She and her husband had one, two, three, four, five boys two of which were hemophiliacs. Now, she also had one, two girls and none of their children happened to have hemophilia. As you can see Queen Victoria's genetic disease which started out in England spread to Russia, Germany, and Spain. Pretty interesting how a story like this can actually lead to a Russian revolution, isn't it?


Welcome to this presentation on Viper Plus, your plus one in SMPS design. Viper, which stands for Vertical Intelligent Power Enhanced Regulator, is a family of ICs that is suitable for switched mode AC to DC power supplies. These ICs feature a leading edge PWM controller and an 800 volt Avalanche rugged power MOSFET. They also come with a small size package and a small system component count and support high efficiency topologies. Viper converters are very widely used in devices such as metering, home appliances, industrial, lighting, and adapters. Today, new energy saving regulations, either voluntary or mandatory, require further improvements in power supply efficiency. Viper Plus takes on this challenge by providing an SMPS design that is efficient, reliable, flexible, and cost effective. Directly connected to the rectified mains, Viper Plus ICs are the perfect solution to make an SMPS with few components and a simple feedback. The generated DC bus can be used to feed a microcontroller unit, a driver, or a relay. A different mix of features in the control sections identifies each Viper Plus series. Viper Zero P is characterized by its unique zero power mode and it is ideal for all SMPS up to 7 watts with a wide input voltage range. The Viper Plus Series 1 integrates a logic level MOSFET and an error amplifier that makes it possible to build a simple and ultra low consumption SMPS with a 5 volt output range. The Viper Plus Series 5 provides the highest efficiency using a quasi-resonant topology. Then the Viper Plus Series 6 integrates an error amplifier to meet the most advanced energy saving requirements, reducing the part count. The Viper Plus Series 7 features brownout and overvoltage protection for improved reliability. Finally, the Viper Plus Series 8 offers peak power capability to sustain 1-2 second overloads for enhanced robustness. The portfolio offers a wide choice of products with different sizes of the power stage section. The products in each Viper Series meet the requirements of different applications. You can find the best fit for the most popular topologies including quasi-resonant, flyback and buck configurations with either isolated or non-isolated implementations. The Viper Plus Series offers a comprehensive set of features. These include robustness and reliability that ensure an improved lifetime of the SMPS. Since they are designed to save energy, the Viper Plus Series are characterized by low consumption at any load and by best in class standby. Another feature is high integration that reduces the overall system size and cost. Moreover, they share the benefit of flexibility, allowing them to support the most popular topologies and power ranges. The applications targeted by the Viper Plus family cover practically all devices that are connected to the mains, including home appliances, consumer and adapters, lighting, metering as well as building and home control. All of these applications differ in power range and isolation requirements. The Viper Plus Series 1 and Viper Zero P dramatically reduce standby consumption. Viper Zero P is ideal for home appliances as its zero milliwatts standby consumption make it compliant with the European Lot 6 and with other energy-saving regulations. In smaller home appliances, the Viper Plus Series 6 can be used as a far more efficient replacement for capacitive power supplies with zero standby power, high efficiency at a light load, small EMI input filter and ultra-wide input voltage. Viper Plus Series 5, 7 and 8 are the recommended choices for applications supporting an isolated flyback topology. They feature low standby consumption, high efficiency as well as minimized size and weight. In lighting applications up to 15 watts, several Viper Plus Series are suitable for isolated and non-isolated topologies depending on the architecture. They have the requirements of low standby consumption, high efficiency, small size SMPS as well as robustness and long life. Meeting the requirements for power metering applications up to 15 watts such as high immunity to electrical discharge, reduced noise in the communication band and peak power for data transfer, the Viper Plus Series 6 is the ideal solution for non-isolated topologies and the Viper Plus Series 8 for isolated ones. Thanks to the features of low standby consumption, standby remote control, high efficiency at a light load and minimized size, these two series are ideal to supply microcontrollers used in building and home control applications. To make your design work easier, the Viper Plus product family is available with a number of tools and evaluation boards. These boards are fully operational power supplies with various power ranges and converter topologies. For further information and design support, please visit ST.com slash Viper Plus. Thank you very much for your attention.


I hate it. I used to. Hey Micah. What's your shirt say? Show it to camera. Hey! That's pretty good. That's a pretty good shirt. Nice. Welcome back to my YouTube direction. Corbin. Hi there. What's this? You guys are? I've blanked on my knee for a second. Videos are... Where am I at now? It's on Instagram. It's on Instagram. It's on Instagram. It's on Instagram. It's on Instagram. It's on Instagram. You are not being reasonable on pikes. Your own photos are just really now. I am from O. Today. We were driving to a trailer. It's a, I believe a Tamal. Ah often. A trailer. Used to call it Tamal. Somebody says, we have yet to be introduced to the director, Micah. Go for it. I can't see her from over here. Manny... Manor Adam. Manor Adam. No. Manera sanam. Manura ASSIR. Manirat Naam. Manirat Naam. Manirat Naam. They say he's the director of Bombay, which we have the vinyl of. It's one of the vinyls I have up there. But he is the director of that, Dill C, and Chaya, the Chaya Chaya song. He is a legendary director, famous for making movies across all industries. He and he introduced A.R. Raman in Roja. So for all of his movies after 19 and music, it's only A.R. Raman. This is the last film, this is his last film before he started his epic historical film. Until he started his epic journey into the woods. Which is under Shoot. This is a song or a trailer? You say trailer. Say the name of the film for me please. How did you see that, Rick? So I'm guessing, like you said, A.R. Raman is going to be the music behind it. I wonder if it'll be any good. Yeah, probably. Here we go. Oh, okay. I'm going to put the song in the middle of the song. I'm going to put the song in the middle of the song. I'm going to put the song in the middle of the song. Correct? I'm going to put the song in the middle of the song. It's done. We're dealing with war very much. The war is at the end. I love that. What did you all think? You might go like this. I think Michael liked it. What is that from? That's really what we just watched. Anyways, what did you all think? Actually, it sounds a little bit like Terminator. It did sound like the music from Terminator.  Gotcha. It looks like it could be a good shoot-em-up, bang-em-up, blow-em-up movie. Apparently, this director is, like he said, Is this the correct one? Is that what he said his name was? Yeah. You haven't been introduced to director... Money? There's supposed to be a gap right there. That's his first name. I thought it was one name. It's two names. Gotcha. See ya. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. And then the composer is Ramon. Yeah, that was him. It was VJ Sarapathy. I saw him in there. What? Yeah, VJ Sarapathy. Oh, I thought you said Tripartage. Actually, I don't know. How do you pronounce that? Sarapathy. Sarapathy. I think you might be right. VJ. Okay. Yeah, I thought I recognized him. The others, I wasn't sure. Yeah, I'm not totally sure. You're going to have to let us know if it's a good film. It's a lot of... Looks just like an action film? Right. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Slap, slap, slap. So you're going to have to let us know if it's one of those action films that's worth a watch. I know there's a lot of Tamal films. There it went. Tamal films that we're supposed to watch. Especially with VJ Sarapathy, which is like the biggest star in Tamal. Let's say. Tamal. So you're going to have to let us know if this one is going to be with a watch or not. Yeah. I think Alexis will watch it because there's nothing she likes better in the middle of the night than to turn on something bloody, violent, and scary. What if the woman starts slapping men? Oh, harsh life. Just a movie full of women. Oh, harsh life. I want a full hour, 30 minutes of just...   That's just a compilation of men getting slapped. Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap. Stupid. There's plenty of men getting slapped in Indian cinema, that's for sure. That's true. We need a compilation. Actually, sometimes they just need to be slapped. I need a compilation. I need a compilation of the best Indian slaps. You can do it to that music. Yeah.