A Belief Does Not Have to Be True to Remake the World

Lex Fridman opens with the question every philosopher hopes nobody asks before coffee: what is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality? Pasulka, a professor of religious studies and former chair of philosophy and religion, starts with a working definition from her field. Beliefs are attitudes toward something that dictate action. People believe the sun will rise, so they plan as if it will. Beliefs can be wrong. For a long time, and in some circles still, people believed the Earth was flat.

The harder problem is whether any belief maps onto what is actually there. She reaches for Immanuel Kant. We never get the thing in itself, the noumenon; we get the phenomenon. The table between them holds their water glasses, so they treat it as real and solid, but everything they know about it arrives through faculties that can fail. She has sat through job talks by metaphysicians who each sound wholly convincing and each contradict the last. Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Jesuit astronomer who directs the Vatican Observatory, gave her the line she repeats: “Truth is a moving target.” Gravity, tables, the lot — you approximate.

Fridman presses on distance. The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that humans are much farther from physical reality than they like to admit. Pasulka agrees they are “pretty far,” especially once you drop below the scale the senses were built for. What she will not grant is despair. Eyes keep you from walking off a roof. Telescopes, microscopes, and the rest of what we now call technology are extensions of those senses, in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. Better instruments hone better beliefs. They still only approximate. The mystical hope of knowing the thing intensely, she says, is where religion comes in, and it is the problem Kant was still working at the end of his life, in the unfinished critique of judgment.

Fridman asks the sharper follow-up. If we never reach the thing in itself, can beliefs themselves become reality? Pasulka says yes, and the consequences are concrete. Ideas that live in many minds can outweigh a table. Medieval Catholic authorities once convened to decide whether women had souls. She does not claim to know whether anyone has a soul — if humans do, she suspects animals do too — but she knows what the belief did. The soul, the *anima*, was treated as the eternal essence of a person. A woman without one was not, in that scheme, a full human being. The meeting was about metaphysics. The result was written into law and into ordinary cruelty.

Her own research supplies a cleaner specimen. Catholic tradition mapped three destinations after death: heaven for saints, purgatory for the rest of the salvageable, hell for the rest. For more than a thousand years there was a fourth, limbo, from the Latin *limbus*, “edge.” No one could agree whether it clung to heaven or to hell. The residents were virtuous pagans such as Socrates, and children who died unbaptized. Parents buried those children believing they would never be reunited in heaven. In 2007 Benedict XVI quietly retired the idea. Many Catholics, having forgotten limbo, thought he had abolished purgatory and protested the wrong doctrine.

Pasulka wrote a book on purgatory before *American Cosmic*. Primary sources from around 1400 carry no trigger warnings. She would have to put a diary down, walk outside, and wait, because the pain on the page was too specific to be theater. “They’re not going to write in their diary something that’s not true,” she tells Fridman. The geography was erroneous. The suffering was not. That is the distinction she wants held in place for the rest of the conversation: a belief’s truth and a belief’s power are different facts.

How is a myth born? Pasulka warns that her field tries not to draw a clean line between myth and religion, because each culture tends to call the other culture’s religion a myth. Plato already made that move inside Greece, dismissing the gods and goddesses as stories for a dull population while teaching the Forms — a real table somewhere, a real two, a place where numbers live. People, she notes, do not like being told that what they believe is not real. Socrates was killed for a version of that insult.

She borrows a building-block definition from Ann Taves at UC Santa Barbara. There are no religious experiences as a natural kind. There are experiences, later interpreted as religious. Someone has an intense encounter — a light in the sky, a being, Moses and a bush. They tell people who already trust them. Those people tell more people. Someone writes it down. Charisma spreads. If too many people catch it, an institution, usually a government, steps in to control the narrative. “This is what you’d call the beginning of a religion or a myth, a very powerful myth,” she says. “It’s almost like a star. A star is born.”

Christianity is the history she knows best. A Jewish man preached a radical idea, that humans should have dignity, and women and slaves in the Roman Empire converted in droves. Constantine had an experience and made the movement a state religion. By then there were perhaps hundreds of Christianities. At Nicaea the powerful kept one, called it universal, and cleared the rest. A later Catholic case is Faustina, a Polish nun whose visions of Jesus with rays from his heart became the Divine Mercy devotion. The Church suppressed her. After she died, a Polish pope, John Paul II, canonized her, and the devotion went worldwide. Same institution, opposite verdicts. For the most part she thinks the original experiences are genuine. People who report them usually want anonymity, not a franchise. Why would someone volunteer for crucifixion, or for ridicule?

God and the afterlife are not required. Zen Buddhism, which she half-jokingly calls a Kantian religion, asks you to drop your concepts so you can meet the thing in itself; some monasteries used to strike inattentive meditators. The definition she uses comes from John Livingston: religion is a set of beliefs and practices inspired by what is *perceived* to be a sacred and transforming power. Perceived is the load-bearing word. The power need not exist. The followers need only take it as real, and as something they can connect to beyond their own capacities.

Why does any of this survive? Twentieth-century scholars expected the secularization thesis to win: better instruments, less religion. It did not. Pasulka reads the persistence as evolutionary adaptation. The Roman Empire lined its roads with crucified bodies as a warning. Into that world walked a man saying God is love. The idea spread, she thinks, because expanding, colonial societies needed a shared belief structure that let unlike cultures stop killing one another. If you believe men have souls, then in the social world they do. “We’re trying to figure that out.”

That is also the argument of *American Cosmic*: belief in non-human intelligences, UFOs, UAPs, is a new religious form, a complement to empirical method rather than a rival that will be argued out of existence. She prefers the word religiosity to dogma. The culture is already living an *X-Files* faith — “I want to believe,” “the truth is out there” — a built-in capacity to credit something for which the evidence is not yet in. School systems, she says, have not caught up, and the thing is moving faster than the people. Religion is also, she adds, the most powerful propaganda on the shelf. Her family history runs through both the Holocaust and the Irish famine she refuses to call a famine. Once a sacred story names the other as less than human, ordinary politics inherits a cosmic warrant.

Nietzsche is her favorite philosopher, a taste she knows sits oddly with academic philosophy’s formality and with her own life as a practicing Catholic. Fridman asks what “God is dead” meant, and whether he was right. She notes that Hegel probably said it first, then puts Nietzsche’s version back in the 1800s. He also said there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. He despised the later church, believed Jesus was a good man rather than a divinity, and still took the morality seriously. “God is dead, and we killed him” is, on her reading, a historical statement. Science was improving, industrialization was spreading, and the Western substrate — the sense that something stands beyond material reality — had collapsed.

With the substrate gone, he said, everything became possible, including terrible evil, because the Christian grammar of reaping what you sow had lost its public force. You can have morals without God, she grants; what you may not have is that particular anchor. He pointed ahead to the Übermensch and to “philosophers of the future.” She thinks he was writing to people like her and Fridman. Was he right? “Absolutely.”

Fridman wonders what Nietzsche would make of *American Cosmic*, with its larger religiosity of external intelligences. Would that reverse the death of God? She hopes he would call the book a progressive adaptation of religion. Angels, demons, and other non-human beings have always had a place in religious history; UFOs, in her telling, relocate that furniture in a contemporary room. She also admits he is unpredictable, and that he wrote nasty things about short women, of which she is one. She asks that he not be cancelled. Assholes, she says, are people too.

She went into *American Cosmic* the way she had gone into the purgatory book: sure she knew the destination. Research that surprises you, she says, is the kind worth doing. She began as an entire nonbeliever in UFOs and came out agnostic, open to the mysteries of the world. She had known the government was “part of the situation.” She had not known how much. She learned quickly, acclimated, and accepted it. Horatio was right: there are more mysteries in this life than a philosophy provides for.

Off the professorial record, she thinks humans have had some inkling of non-human intelligence for as long as there have been humans, whether it arrives from another planet or another dimension. Anything that powerful will get the attention of institutions of power. It can rewrite the belief structures of a civilization the way older religious beliefs did, which is exactly why the powerful treat it as a problem. Little green men, she says, are the least interesting picture available.

Catholic primary sources on angels are her exhibit. Paintings have taught everyone a winged humanoid. Hebrew, Greek, and Latin reports from people who claimed the encounter describe something else: spinning things, things covered in eyes, things that talk telepathically, often not humanoid at all. If we are in contact with non-human intelligence, the first contact is likely with its technology. We have not sent people to Mars; we have sent rovers. Fridman fills in the gag she likes to tell. Earth may be building a whole mythology around a crappy drone from a crappy startup, while the actual intelligence is weirder and larger than the object in the frame.

Fridman offers the humbler possibility that alien communication may already be running through consciousness, through love and fear, through memes, through whatever we still cannot say about the mind. Pasulka says that is how she thinks. Having made full professor, she wrote the book she wanted. It opens with Nietzsche and David Bowie. Bowie’s line, from an interview she tells people to watch, is that the internet is an alien life form. She took him at his word.

Early in the research she met Jacques Vallée: French, a Northwestern computer-science Ph.D. from the 1960s, a veteran of ARPANET, an astronomer who mapped Mars, and a UFO researcher. Most people file those as separate hobbies. At a small conference she realized they were one project. His 1970s peer-reviewed essays on the infant internet talk about neural connection, even psychic connection, through the network. A brain is a biological neural net; ideas leave it, enter other brains via the net, and return changed. Call the outer net autonomous AI if you want. It is non-human intelligence that still has humans inside it.

The Greek Muses are her other model: treated as metaphor, possibly non-human intelligences speaking in symbols — music, mathematics — to the few people whose receivers work. That frame, she says, also fits the strange religious history of the space programs. Jack Parsons, a founder of what became JPL, was in the desert with L. Ron Hubbard doing rituals he believed opened a stargate. On the Russian side, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and others worked inside a non-dogmatic Christianity and believed they were dealing with angels. People now in government space programs, she says, report the same structure: contact, “downloaded” information, then hardware. Tyler, the central figure in her book, belongs to that lineage. He builds technologies, sells them on Nasdaq for undisclosed sums she illustrates as on the order of a hundred million dollars, and she has met people those products helped. She does not know if the encounters were real. The people believed they were. The scientific method, she says, does not reach that part.

Vallée once drove her through Silicon Valley toward San Francisco, talking the whole way, and pressed several of his books on her with instructions to read one first. The same gathering included the visionary artist Alex Grey, who described entering a shared space with his wife on ayahuasca or LSD, two bodies, one experience, like having the same dream. Religious-studies people, Pasulka says, already live in that archive; visionary experience is the job. UFOs, those states, and digital technology stopped looking like three subjects. When Vallée dropped her with her brother, a strait-laced Army man, his first sentence in the car was that he had taken ayahuasca and it was going to save humanity.

Public ufologists, she found, tend to be honest people using the tools they have. They split into nuts-and-bolts researchers — To The Stars Academy trying to reverse-engineer propulsion — and people who think the phenomenon is consciousness-based. Then she found another population. Vallée and Allen Hynek had borrowed Francis Bacon’s “invisible college,” the early-modern scientists who had to hide from church and state. What she met was starker. The most powerful people doing this work are not online, or they are online as members of a bowling league. Their actual research leaves no search result. They do not even talk to one another. She named them the Invisibles, and named one of them Tyler after Tyler Durden, because the first rule of Fight Club is the operating system.

Why the dark? She thinks there is something real enough to be dangerous if it is used carelessly — not necessarily “alien technology,” she is careful to say, but ideas about it, in the hands of a military that every government keeps for a reason. Belief and possession are not the same. Belief can get you a 5:40 mile; it will not get you a one-minute mile. Still, visionary places, with or without drugs, sometimes yield information you can hold. Thousands at Fátima saw *something* when the sun spun, even if they did not see the same thing. Parsons’s rituals had physical results. Tyler’s downloads become products. Psychedelics, she thinks, can open those places and can also wreck people. She notes as historical fact that the United States used them militarily from around the 1950s, after the late-1940s crash stories, and she will not pretend to know what the correlation is.

Fridman brings up David Fravor and the 2004 Nimitz “Tic Tac”: a white, capsule-shaped object with no visible propulsion, maneuvers no human aircraft makes, grainy videos, and a 2017 *New York Times* story that reopened the public square. Pasulka likes Fravor as a person and believes the people who were there, including radar operators she knows. She does not think they are inventing it. The videos are another matter. They had circulated since the mid-2000s. When they surged, she was still in touch with the UFO Fight Club. Their first reaction was that satellites can read the news on your phone. The footage is too poor. They took it as authentic material that had been doctored. Why, she does not know.

She calls it spin, probably in the service of money. Plenty of people who control government budgets do not believe UFOs are real, so programs that want to study them have to find other ways to get funded. Attention is a method. The *Times* piece landed just before her book, which helped the conversation and did not, despite Fridman’s congratulations, make her rich. Oxford University Press is an academic house. There are no royalties. What she wanted was recognition that the research was more than a curiosity. Money, in her mouth, is like food: enough to nourish a life of the mind, including the universal health care and basic income she thinks a wealthy species can afford; too much, a drug that helps you forget mortality.

Bob Lazar, who has said he saw captured craft being reverse-engineered, sits in the same awkward light. She cannot adjudicate the claim. Friends who know him believe him, and what they have pressed on her is his regret: maybe the public is not ready. She finds the emphasis creepy. This, she says, is what happens to experiencers. They are questioned, and sometimes their reputations are altered on purpose so they will not be believed. Fridman cares less about whether a hangar exists than about the spark the story puts in an engineer. Even an untrue myth, they agree, can inspire someone to build a true machine.

Roswell, in her vocabulary, is a hierophany: a place where non-human intelligence is believed to have met the human. Once a site is bound to that meeting, it becomes a pilgrimage. People go, there is a festival, you can buy the same kitsch you buy at a religious fair. Mecca has this structure. So does Roswell. In the American imagination it is ground zero for a new UFO religion, even if Annie Jacobsen is right that a lot of what is fenced off is classified military work with no extraterrestrial payload.

The crash site in her book is not the public one. Tyler, still trying to convert a skeptic with physical evidence, offered to take her onto government land in a no-fly zone, blindfolded. She refused to go alone and brought “James,” a well-known university scientist with instruments. Tyler looked James up and folded. About forty minutes from a town in New Mexico they used specially configured metal detectors and found material. Tyler told her there had been about seven crashes in 1940s New Mexico. Material scientists have since studied what they collected. There were no anomalies. The stuff occurs naturally on Earth. She is not a scientist. She believes the scientists because they are known for being good at this.

The last chapter returns to New Mexico without going there in a body. At the Vatican Observatory, in the scholars’ quarters with Tyler, she was reading canonization records of two seventeenth-century saints: Joseph of Cupertino, said to levitate — a motif that also shows up in abduction reports — and María de Ágreda, said to bilocate. A billionaire interested in both phenomena had sent them; Brother Guy handed her the keys and told her to look at anything, including a section of Carl Sagan’s files on the search for extraterrestrial life. After two weeks he called in a panic about an original Kepler she had misplaced. María had written of a spinning Earth and claimed that angels carried her to the New World, where she taught the faith. Later Franciscans found local people who already knew Catholic things, taught by a lady in blue who looked like a younger nun. Pasulka does not know what to make of it. She files it as a coincidence too strange to sand down.

When metal monoliths appeared in the Utah desert and then elsewhere in late 2020, Fridman’s inbox filled up. Pasulka does not enjoy Kubrick — the films are too weird — and still thinks *2001: A Space Odyssey* is visionary enough to be almost a character in her book. The timing of the copycat art, if that is what it was, struck her as exact: a pandemic that forced everyone into screens, a material life suddenly conducted inside rectangles. If the job of art is to show you the life you are already in, somebody did an awesome job. The best reading she knows is Rob Ager’s, on the YouTube channel Collative Learning. She agrees with it completely. Pick up your phone. That is the monolith. Kubrick’s slab was technology, especially the screen — cinema then, phones and laptops now.

Ager himself does not believe in visiting aliens. She still uses the theory, because a screen can be many things at once, including the alien Bowie named. Perception is already a screen between world and mind; virtual reality will be another; the subject is interfaces opening onto worlds of ideas. People talk about augmented reality as a future. She says we already live in one. This is not our grandparents’ existence. Wikipedia offloaded factual memory. Social media changed the space of thought. We have been in the new materiality long enough to forget it is new.

Asked whether other intelligent civilizations excite or terrify her, she is not keen to meet them as we are. Human history with less aggressive cultures has gone badly for the less aggressive, and she will not assume the visitors have evolved past that. What she does trust is the relationship with technology, if we can “up our game.” Existential risk is not a single object: pollution, pandemic, a meteor, take your pick. The usual sentence is that we will *use* technology to get out of it. She thinks the verb is wrong.

The term she uses, coined by someone else, is technogenesis. Heidegger had the thought without the word. Humans and technology shape each other; the tool talks back. Hammers are not the issue. Digital infrastructure now conditions the material environment. She does not see a Frankenstein. She sees a Promethean child we created, now in its teenage years, the way aging parents come to depend on the children they raised. As AI becomes more autonomous, she expects it to need us as we need it, if the co-evolution holds. Ted Chiang’s Nature story about metahumans who biohack themselves out of mutual intelligibility is, for her, a horizon to hope for rather than a tragedy. How we are now, she says, is already a tragedy for most people alive.

Brain-computer interfaces and Neuralink look, to her, like a continuation. Before the UFO work she consulted as a historian on *The Conjuring*. The revelation was not the script. It was the edit. Test audiences, flicker rates, a protocol at UC Irvine she calls cognitive consumerism: people wired to EKGs so the cut can keep the scenes that produce the most arousal and throw the rest away. Going to the movies or playing a game is already a physiological interface with a machine. Musk should go as fast as he can. J.C.R. Licklider was writing toward this in the 1960s; ARPANET sat inside a project of augmenting the human intellect. Earlier still, the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a soldier before he was a priest, described a noosphere above atmosphere and stratosphere, a mental layer in which humans would be hooked together. When she assigned students Ray Kurzweil’s *The Singularity Is Near*, it read as Revelation. He wrote that he felt it before he understood it.

She does not think a singularity will slough off material life. Technology needs a host; there is no view from nowhere. David Chalmers’s essay “The Matrix as Metaphysics,” which she teaches, treats the film as a new Book of Genesis and answers external-world skepticism the only way she thinks it can be answered: we will not know for certain, so what is real is what is real to us. Even a brain in a vat is still a brain. Information rides on some material, even if that material would not look like matter to us. Philosophers and theologians have wanted to escape the body forever. She thinks we are already living through a singularity, riding a wave that is both exciting and, because the tools of self-destruction improve too, terrifying.

Asked for books that marked her, she starts with Nietzsche’s *The Gay Science*, which she hated in her early twenties. Friends would not drop it. On a New Year’s Eve she stayed home, introverted, was woken, and opened the book to the aphorism “Sanctus Januarius,” which is about New Year’s, resolutions, and saying yes. The next page was about coincidences. “I felt like the book was alive and Nietzsche was speaking.” She has not put him down since. Truth, in one of his lines, is a woman: attractive, and not going to tell you the truth — another way of saying Consolmagno’s moving target. A lie told enough times becomes the truth; Foucault’s genealogy, she says, is Nietzsche in another key. He also wrote about elevated states of consciousness, which she thinks the books can induce.

The second recommendation is Hannah Arendt. Pasulka describes her as a Jewish philosopher who escaped internment, later taught at Columbia, and sat in on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man who scheduled the trains. In *Eichmann in Jerusalem* Arendt found not a monster but a thoughtless, even pleasant man who spoke in stereotypes — memes, Pasulka says, before the internet, the sort of thing that now has a military cousin in meme warfare. *The Life of the Mind* asks why people do evil. Arendt’s suspicion is that bad people sleep well. Good people have a conscience, a fight with themselves about consequences, and that is why they ask how anyone sleeps at night. The controversy around Arendt, herself a survivor, is that she was called anti-Jewish for arguing that ordinary rule-followers can do the work. That, Pasulka says, is among the most pernicious forms of evil we have.

Death is not an afterthought in her department; she spent years as co-chair of its “death panel.” An older brother with no apparent fear of it — rock climbing, parachutes, Green Berets — pushed her outside her comfort zone, stunts she hopes her children skip. She thinks about dying often, and she presents as almost too happy, and she suspects those facts are one fact. Thinking about death makes the days you have feel like days. Hinduism’s ancient goal, she reminds students, was to get off the wheel of samsara and not come back, because for most people alive then, life was terrible. Fridman, Pasulka, and his audience are the lucky ones who want to live most of the time.

The meaning of life, her undergraduate training objects, smuggles in the assumption that there is one. Maybe it is random. She does not think so. Meaning, for her, is intrinsic: she enjoys living, and when she does not, she changes her circumstances. That is not hedonism. Love of children is often unfun; discipline is the worst part of parenthood, and she does it anyway. Love is the inner sense that this is good, even when you are tired and do not want to. She has a red fluffy cat named Trump and a dog named Putin. If other intelligences exist, she thinks they have some version of that inward pull, the way gravity makes things stick and charism — light and love — makes a person attract others like a sun. The property is like a force. It will not look the same in every form of life.