A (0:00)

Coming up, I'm going to offer some thoughts about the big election in Chile and a very favorable result. And then the rest of this podcast. Today is a special episode. I'm going to talk in detail about the issue of life after death, drawing from my book of that title. And so buckle up. Hey, if you're watching on x rumble or YouTube, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe. Subscribe. I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh d' Souza podcast.

B (0:39)

America needs this voice.

A (0:42)

The times are crazy.

B (0:43)

In a time of confusion, division and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.

A (0:50)

This is the Dinesh d' Souza podcast. Today is a special episode of the podcast focused on themes out of my book called Life After Death the Evidence. We're going to really kind of get into it because I've got the full podcast to do it. And some of this will seem a little bit mind bending, but I think in a very good way, it'll stretch your mind, it'll put some new thoughts in there, it'll give you a fresh perspective. Some of it may seem a little outrageous, but in a provocative and interesting way. And this also may be a podcast you want to, at some point, listen to a second time. Just to get a full grasp of some of the themes that I'm going to be covering. Before I dive into it, I want to say a few words about the recent election result in Chile. Very good result. The people of Chile rejected the leftist, the socialist candidate. Some people are calling her a communist, but let's just go with socialist and that's good enough. She was decisively voted down, basically a 60, 40 election. So a big win for Cast Kast. This is the guy who is the conservative. Now, I notice in the BBC and some other places, far right candidate wins in Chile, basically, if you defeat the communists, the BBC calls you far right. And what does it mean to use these idiotic terms? I mean, the Chilean people decide who they want to represent them. If 60% of them pick this guy caste, he's by definition mainstream. How can he be, quote, far right? Are you using some kind of objective definition of far right that is detached from the actual values and aspirations of the Chilean people? That makes absolutely no sense. This candidate who gets 60% of the vote of his country is by definition someone who is close to the center. He represents the mainstream, which is to say the center of the body politic. Now what's going on in Latin America, by the way, and this can be almost directly traced back to Javier Milei's astounding and landmark win in Argentina is that the whole southern part of the continent has turned our way. Now, Milei himself put out a post in which he really shows a map with the red and the blue. And he shows a blue tide sweeping across the bottom of South America. The top of South America looks red, mainly because Brazil, the largest country in the continent, is leftist. It's run by Lula da Silva. But notice that for Milei, blue is actually the right wing and red is the left, which makes more sense. Right, because red is a color associated with communism. But somehow in our twisted upside down nomenclature, we consider the red states to be right wing. So we got to keep these things in mind. It's a little bit like with the word liberal. Liberal to us means the left, but in other parts of Europe, Australia, Canada, liberal means the right. And the Labour Party or the left is different from the, from the, from the liberals. In any event, with Bukele now in El Salvador cast in Chile, and Milei of course in Argentina doing by the way, very well there. And there's a big election coming up in Argentina next year. Now Chile used to be a very prosperous country, kind of the way Venezuela used to be in at one time. And Chile's prosperity goes back rather surprisingly to the days of Pinochet. Pinochet, although he was an autocratic thug and a military man, realized I need some good ideas which I don't have, about how to run my country. And he brought in the students of Milton Friedman, if you can believe it, and he said, set up a system for me here, a free market system which will bring prosperity to my country. And not only did the so called Friedman boys go down to Chile, they devised an economic free market apparatus. They also devised a Social Security system for Chile based upon putting money in private accounts, in other words, in retirement accounts and stock markets, kind of like an expanded IRA system. But they did this instead of a Social Security system run by the government. And it worked. And it worked across the board, not just in the retirement accounts, but for the Chilean economy. And then I think Chile got a little bit fat and happy and decided, well, you know, maybe we should try some redistribution, maybe we should try some socialism. And so they pivoted away from the conservative candidates who had been winning by the way. The Pinochet dictatorship gave way to democracy. So you've had right wing governments in Chile until they decided to experiment with socialism. But no surprise, that experiment turned out to be a total disaster. And so Chile has seen the light and swung back to the right. I don't know. That's a hopeful sign for places like Massachusetts and California and Mamdani's New York. Is it possible that people in this country would be like, look, socialism or socialist type policies are a complete disaster and we need to resoundingly vote them out? We haven't seen really that happen in this country yet, but maybe the example of Chile is a reason for some hope. Imagine exploring Israel where thousands of years of history are on display and embarking on a journey that changes the way you see the world. I'm Dinesh d' Souza inviting you to join me and New York Times best selling author Jonathan Cahn for our Dragon's Prophecy Tour December 7th through 16th, 2026. So it's a year away, but it's time to move on it now. Early for 10 unforgettable days, you'll discover the best of Israel. You'll walk the stone streets of Jerusalem, pray at the Western Wall, sail the Sea of Galilee, stand on the Mount of Olives and visit ancient sites that confirm the biblical prophecies and the Jewish people's deep history in this land. Jonathan Cahn and I will open the scriptures in the very places you've read about for years and connecting the archaeological record with biblical prophecy and also what's happening in our world today. Come see for yourself what history, archaeology and prophecy reveal in Israel. It's the trip of a lifetime. Join us call 800-247-1899 that's 800-247-1899 or visit inspirationtravel.com Dinesh inspirationtravel.com Dinesh to get information about the Dragon's Prophecy Tour today. Incorporating a wide variety of whole food ingredients into my daily routine. That's key for me and I get it from these guys. This is Balance of Nature Fruits and Veggies in a capsule really easy to take. These fruit and veggie supplements make it simple. They give me the fruits and veggies I need and that I just simply don't have the time or energy to eat. These harvested ingredients are freeze dried into a fine powder using an advanced vacuum cold process to better preserve nutritional value. I can say with total confidence I'm getting 31 ingredients from fruits and veggies and hey, if you don't like taking pills, no problem. Open the fruit and veggie supplements, mix the powder into a smoothie, sprinkle it over food. You're good. Join me in taking Balance of nature every day. 50% off the whole health system for life with this Limited time offer. Go to balanceofnature.com to claim the offer. New and existing customers can lock in the whole health system at $79.99 per order for life. If they cancel in the future, they will lose this price. Again, go to balanceofnature.com that said, we're going to pick it up where I left off and talk about life after death. We're going to talk first about a topic that we are already in the middle of, which is the the mind and the brain. And we're going to talk about those in some detail. Why is this important or relevant to life after death? Well, for the simple reason that the mind is immaterial. The brain is physical. The physical part of you dies. We know that. But does the mental part of you? Does consciousness live on? That's the question we're kind of exploring here. And we're getting to my first real proof of life after death. I'm going to try in the book to give three or four, like rock solid proofs. And my point being that even if you don't accept all of them, I think you will. But even if you don't, any one of the four is enough to establish good reason to believe in life after death. You don't need all four to work, you only need one to work. But taken together, they are, in my view, a very persuasive or convincing case for, for the proposition I'm trying to establish here. Now, when we left off last time, we were talking about the difference between the mind and the brain, and I was answering the argument from functionalism. Functionalism is simply this idea that the mind is the function of the brain. The mind is what the brain does. The mind is just a term for the actions carried out by the brain. In the same way that a mousetrap is simply what a mousetrap does. If a mousetrap catches mice, well, that's what you call a mousetrap. And this functional problem, or this functional argument I want to suggest, can be refuted by really showing that the inner quality of the mind, the internal experience of the mind, is totally different than the physical state of the brain. And even if you describe the activities that are carried out by the brain or by the human person at the direction of the brain, those do not capture at all this inner mental state. That is what the mind is. The mind is ultimately a collection of these inner mental states. So let's look at how this works by examining what philosopher Frank Jackson, this is now going back to the 1980s. He envisions a scenario that he calls the Mary Problem, involving a hypothetical person called Mary. And here's the point. Mary is, like, locked in a room, and it's a black and white room, and she investigates the world through a black and white TV monitor. And she has been doing this for her whole life. She has never been outside the room. And she's a specialist in neurophysiology. And so she knows a lot about color. She knows about wavelength. She knows about light. She knows about how the retina gets stimulated by light. She knows how those stimuli are channeled at different parts of the brain. She knows how the. How certain parts of the brain light up and cause people to say things like the sky is blue, tomatoes are red, my pants are green, and so on. And here's the question that Jackson is asking. So Mary knows everything that there is to know about color. However, she has never actually seen these colors. She lives in a black and white world. That's the only world that she has actually experienced. Now, let's say Mary is, for the first time in her life, taken out of this room, the black and white room, and she's put into the normal world, the outside world. And now she sees a blue sky, and now she sees a red tomato. And now she sees Dinesh wearing his green pants. And philosopher Frank Jackson asked this question, does Mary now learn something new about color that she previously didn't know? Now, what are we getting at here? What we're getting at is this. Yes, Mary experiences something new. She experiences what it is like to see the color red, what it is like to see the color blue in the sky, what it is like to see green pants. Before that, she could have all the knowledge in the world about red, about blue, about green, about color. And yet it is that all of that would not prepare her in any way, would give her no preparation, no experience of what it is actually like to see red and see blue and see green. So this is a way of saying that the inner quality of an experience, the way that you experience it on the inside, is completely different from the mental states that seem to correlate with or even produce this inner quality. We're talking about two different things. Now. Faced with all of this, these refutations of I identity theory, which I referred to earlier, or functionalism, which I've referred to now, the refuge of the materialist, the refuge of the Daniel Dennets of the world, is always to point to computers and to say, in effect, hey, listen, if you're saying that material objects cannot function Like a mind? Well, what about a computer? What about a supercomputer? What about AI? Isn't AI functioning like a human mind? And I want to talk a little bit about this because it's interesting in its own right, but it also has a certain bearing on life after death. And the question I want to ask, which we're going to get into, is, can computers think? Or to put somewhat differently, can AI think? Is AI doing any kind of thinking at all? I'm going to argue, believe it or not, no. No. But this is not to deny that AI produces valuable information. It's not to deny that AI can generate results that even the human mind is incapable of doing. But let's notice that this is not unique to AI. Calculators can do thinking that you and I couldn't possibly do. They can multiply giant numbers with nine digits apiece and give you the result in two seconds. But does that mean that the calculator is thinking? No, it isn't. The calculator is performing a certain type of operation, and we'll get into what that is. But thinking is one thing that the calculator is not doing. But this idea that computers can think, AI can think. It all started, really, when a computer, Deep Blue, was able to beat the world champion Garry Kasparov chess. And that suddenly created this whole issue about, yes, computers can think and computers can pass the Turing Test. What's the Frank Turing Test? Well, it goes back to the. Not Frank Turing, but, sorry, Alan Turing. The. The test proposed many, many years ago, where Alan Turing basically said, listen, here's a way to figure out if a computer is thinking or not. Let's give a bunch of questions to human beings, and the human beings will give their answers, and those answers can be recorded. Let's pose the same questions to a bunch of computers. And if the computers can give answers that are indistinguishable from the human answers, well, then, there you go. The computer is obviously doing what humans do. The computer is obviously thinking. Now, notice that what Alan Turing is doing here is he's giving a functional definition of what it means to think. To me, thinking is something that occurs in your mind. Thinking is something that occurs behind a screen. Thinking is something that occurs inside of me. But Turing is saying, no, well, let's not look at it that way. Let's look at thinking that makes you answer a question a certain way. If I give you an equation, Dinesh, you're going to solve the equation. That's your thinking. And if the computer can solve the equation the same way. Well, the computer is obviously doing what you do. And so looked at through function, you can see that there's a kind of similarity, if not identity, between what the computer is doing and what you're doing. So I don't want to deny that computers can pass the Turing Test. I agree that artificial intelligence, for example, cannot only pass a Turing Test in which you can't tell if it's a human being or artificial intelligence. In fact, some people would say artificial intelligence is so good that it synthesizes so much information, it's better than humans. You can identify it as not only similar to human thinking, but superior to human thinking, and we're likely to see the superiority increase. I saw an interesting report recently that the IQ of AI, very good AI today is something like 120. And since there are many human beings who have IQs higher than that, they're smarter than AI. As of now, they don't have more information than AI, but they're smarter than AI in terms of the cogency of their reasoning and the creativity of it. But I will keep getting better, and I will, at some point become better, smarter, if you will, in this sense, than any human being, in the same way that a calculator can do calculations far better than any human being can do. So let's take it for granted that a computer or AI, working at its best, can replicate human discussions, write book reviews, come up with movie plots, and play chess, and in that sense, do all the results of what human beings can do in, quote, thinking. And therefore it appears to be that the computer, like AI, is, in fact, quite thinking. Now, how do we evaluate this to see if computers can actually think? I think it's one way to do this. A very interesting way comes from a philosopher named John Searle, who many years ago came up with what he calls the Chinese Room, the Chinese room experiment. We're going to do the Chinese room experiment, a thought experiment. We don't need to construct the actual room. I will describe to you the experiment, and you can perform it kind of in your head. So here you are. There's a Chinese room, and you, a single individual, let's say Debbie, is sitting in the middle of this room, and she has a whole bunch of these big note cards, big sheets of paper. Each one has a note card, and each note card has a big Chinese ideogram, a kind of Chinese drawing on it. And Debbie doesn't know a word of Chinese, and so she's sitting there with these Chinese ideograms. And she looks through them, and they're totally incomprehensible. They make absolutely no sense to her. She cannot make head nor tail of it. But the people doing the experiments supply Debbie with a code book. And what does this code book do? This code book is actually written in English, and it gives you very detailed instructions which basically say, if you see this kind of symbol, it correlates with this kind of symbol. And when you are given this symbol, look for that symbol. So in other words, the codebook gives you a map for which symbols correlate with other symbols. And what Debbie doesn't know is that the first set of symbols are quote the questions. And the other set of symbols that she's supposed to correlate with using the codebook, those are quote the answers. So it's kind of like I'm asking you a question, ideogram A, and you, using the code book, realize that. That the answer is ideogram F. And so, since you have the code book, you can always correlate symbol to symbol and produce, quote the correct answer because the code book shows you how to do that. So you become so good at this. Debbie becomes so facile, that basically what goes on is that the questioners point to one ideogram. Boom. And Debbie knows, using the code book, boom, boom, boom. She goes, that's the answer. Here you go. And she's so good at this that she is just as good as a Chinese speaker, because the Chinese speaker knows what the questions are, knows what the answers are. Debbie doesn't. But Debbie has the code book, and using the code book, she can go from question here to answer there. And so the question that the philosopher John Searle is asking is, can Debbie speak Chinese? Does she know Chinese? And the answer is no. She has no understanding of Chinese at all. She simply performs a set of programmed operations given from the codebook so she can get the correct answer, but without understanding Chinese at all. And if you think about it, isn't this exactly what a computer does? Isn't this exactly what AI Does? AI Is programmed. Computers are programmed. They perform mechanical operations. The mechanical operations of varying degrees of complexity. They may involve dots and dashes. They may involve ones and zeros. They may involve foraging the entire Internet and scooping up information and synthesizing it again according to programmatic rules. But the computer doesn't have any idea what it's doing. It has no comprehension of the English language. It has no comprehension of history. It has no comprehension of mathematics. It is simply doing what it is programmed to do, and however sophisticated those programs are. And let's remember that. Where does the information in these programs come from? Well, it comes from the ocean of information generated by human beings. So what the computer is doing is ultimately rearranging, synthesizing, pulling out from this body of human generated information using rules that human beings have programmed into the computer and producing the ideogram. Ideogram and going, that's the correct answer. But it takes you and me to know it's the correct answer. The computer is just doing what it's told. So. So the computer isn't thinking. You're thinking, and I'm thinking, and the computer programmers are thinking. But the thinking is being done by us, not by the computer. Now, John Serlin trying to explain this Chinese room experiment, which is admittedly a little complex. It takes you a moment to really get it. He makes a key distinction that's kind of helpful, I think, to understanding. And that is, he says that in language, we have to distinguish between syntax and semantics. So what is syntax? Well, syntax is grammar. It's functional rules. And what is semantics? Semantics actually is content or meaning. So if I were to say, talk about where the vowel or the consonant or the indefinite article goes in a sentence, that's syntax. That's how to arrange the sentence. But if I use the word elephant, it's not the same kind of thing because I'm now referring to something outside the sentence. I'm referring to an actual elephant. And I'm saying that this word elephant designates that thing out there with a big snout and big ears that we call an elephant. So syntax is the grammatical rules and the semantics is the actual content. And then John Searle tells you why he's telling you this. He goes, by and large, what's going on is that a computer or even AI can do syntax, but it can't do semantics. Calculators do not think mathematically. We think mathematically with the aid of calculators. Similarly, computers don't understand anything. They don't think. In that sense, we think, we, with the help of the symbol manipulation that computers and AI can perform. And even the symbol manipulation, as I said a moment ago, is programmed into the computer by human beings. If the computer seems really smart, that's because really smart human beings created it. So in that sense, when you say, let's come back to Deep Blue, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. Do you realize that Deep Blue was programmed by hundreds of chess grandmasters working together? Many of the best chess players in the world helped to create Deep blue. Their combined knowledge is of course stronger than one guy Kasparov and they were able to program that knowledge into a machine like calculating system. So it's not really, quote, a machine playing against Kasparov. It is all the programmed information, the deep archive of data plus the calculating skill that is also programmed into the computer. That's really what defeated Garry Kasparov. Mike Lindell wants you to know this year has been actually one of the hardest in MyPillow's history. But it's because of you that they are making it through. They want to thank you for your continued support by passing on some Christmas specials to my listeners and viewers. Get the Children's Bible Story Pillow 5 pack for $29.98 My slippers with a free bottle of leather protectant spray for $39.98, blankets, comforters and duvets for as low as $25 and a blowout sale on the standard MyPillows for just $14.98. Call 800-876-0227, that's 800-876-0227 or go to mypillow.com use promo code Dinesh to take advantage of these wholesale prices including the standard size MyPillow originally 49.98, now only 1498 queen size 1899 kings only a dollar more. We know MyPillow products come with a 10 year warranty, but MyPillow has announced they're extending their 60 day money back guarantee. That's right. Orders placed between now and December 25th will have their 60 day money back guarantee extended through March 1st, 2026. Call 800-876-0227 or go to mypillow.com and don't forget the promo code which is D I N E S H Dinesh.