The Impact of Andrew Galambos and The V-50 Lectures

Today, I'm going to tell you about the most important intellectual influence in my life and a series of books that just might continue to change my life.

When I was 21 years old, way back in the year 2009, I met a very old man named John Pugsley. He was about 75 when I met him, and it was only two years before he died. I learned that John was an economist and an author on economics, popular way back in the 1970s, like 10 years before I was even born.

Well, John turned out to be a very influential man on me and introduced me to a lot of ideas I had never considered about how the world worked. In particular, he introduced me to a recording of a lecture series he had taken when he was younger by Andrew Galambos called the V-50 Lectures.

Over the course of several hours, I learned to look at the history of scientific discovery very differently as a result of what I learned in that lecture series. I learned how to apply scientific methodology to everything in the world. It was like opening my mind to the idea that science isn't just an accumulation of facts you learn in school and things you have to memorize to pass a test. It's a way of seeing the world where you can verify, collaborate, and test everything you think is true. And if you have an accurate working worldview, everything should be consistent within it.

In a manner of speaking, listening to the V-50 Lectures gave me the confidence to trust in my own assessment of how things worked, even if virtually everyone around me disagreed with me or insisted that things have to work a certain way. I learned to trust that my mind was capable of determining through scientific methodology what actually made sense and was consistent with what was known to be true. I guess you could say that the V-50 lecture series was probably the most important intellectual influence on my young life then. It encouraged this burgeoning passion for science and understanding the world, which was certainly already there before, but that coalesced and integrated it into a much more potent force in my life.

So naturally, after I finished the V-50 lectures, I wanted to know what other courses Andrew Galambos had taken. He died in the 90s, but he was an active lecturer for at least ten years in the 60s. What I learned was that the vast majority of everything he ever lectured on was not published for very complicated reasons that I don't fully understand. It seemed to involve a lot of people who were in charge of his intellectual estate screwing up or blocking the publication of his work. So, virtually none of anything he ever did throughout his entire teaching career was made available to the public.

That was 15 years ago. I'm 36 now. Imagine my surprise when it came to my attention that just recently, not all of Andrew Galambos's work, but what is considered to be the continuation of the V-50 lecture series that I listened to and his most important work was published in a 15-volume book series called Sic Itur Ad Astra (Latin for "this is the way to the stars").

The subject of these books can be summarized as how to teach humanity how to build a civilization in line with universal scientific principles, which includes but is not limited to solving the problems pertaining to non-sustainable economics, government, and ecology - basically everything related to sustaining human life on this planet. This is all in line with the ambition of the lecturer, the creator Andrew Galambos, who worked in astrophysics, to create a society capable of becoming interplanetary and one day interstellar or intergalactic, basically a sustainable way of having a human civilization in line with scientific principles by understanding social causality.

As I dive into this this trove of information over the next few months at the very least, that's going to take me to read all 15 volumes, I would like to review and summarize what I learn and hopefully encourage other people who like me, never would have heard of this guy if it hadn't been for one person whose opinion I trusted. If John Pugsley had not endorsed the views covered in this course so strongly, I never would have had a reason to check it out. So, hopefully, I can pass on some of that endorsement now to other people like me who are struggling to make sense of the mess of the world that they live in.

I was always the kind of guy who needed things to make sense, and they didn't. I looked at the world around me, and nothing about how human beings had come to organize and establish the world on virtually any scale of operation made sense to me. And nobody whose opinion I trusted, no authority figure, no social leader could explain it to me in a way that made sense until I was exposed to the ideas of Andrew Galambos. If that sounds like you, I encourage you to take my endorsement and look into what has been published here as Sic Itur Ad Astra from Spaceland Publications.

Currently, the introductory lectures are available on Amazon as V-50: The Basic Course of the Volitional Sciences, 3-Session Introduction.

Volition in this context, of course, means the ability to choose. It's the creator's way of saying this is the science of how human beings make choices. That's what eventually leads to the development of everything we call civilization: billions of human beings independently making choices in a collective attempt to meet our best interests and create some kind of social structure that works out properly.

This is a subject I'm particularly passionate about, and it's incredibly difficult to find someone who can explain things in a way I consider adequate. The vast majority of people, even if they're experts on a subject, have something called the curse of knowledge bias, where it's very difficult for them to remember what it's like not to know all the specialized things they know.

So, most of their attempts, even those of people who write very successful books, just mostly come across as, "Well, here's how it works," as opposed to taking you step by step through the process of discovery, how we figured out that something works that way, what premises you have to know before these other conclusions make sense, and logically how every single piece of data in this this field fits together like a like a jigsaw puzzle.

You have to see how everything you know connects to everything else you know. And that's a very rare ability. It's the type of ability certainly that I try to home in my own writing, though I don't think I'm nearly as good at it as Andrew Galambos.

No matter what you're talking about, if you can define the key terms you're using, that will make you twice as smart as anyone else on that subject because the vast majority of people cannot define and elaborate exactly what they mean when they say certain things because they're just mostly unconsciously repeating things they've heard other people say without actually analyzing what these words mean. What do they have to do with reality and what is the actual question I'm asking here?

That's the kind of thing you learn in the V-50 lectures. This is how you actually learn things. This is how you actually put knowledge together in a competent structure. You don't have to just repeat words you heard someone else say. You have to come up with meaningful definitions for things or a way of demonstrating that they make sense and are consistent with scientific methodology. Can you do that with everything? Or are there some things that can't be scientifically thought of or tested?

A question Galambos asks throughout the lectures, and that you will probably find yourself asking a lot when you're done with them, is "How do you know you're right about that?" Whenever you make any kind of claim whatsoever about what's real about reality, can you work backward and figure out how you arrived at that conclusion? Where did those thoughts come from? Somebody must have told me that was true at some point, but how do I actually know that that's right?

It's epistemology: the origins of knowledge and discovery. And you find, of course, that many of the things that you think are right were just taken on faith. You read them in a book somewhere, or somebody taught you them in school, your parents told you, or somebody you respect told you. That's fine as a way to get introduced to knowledge, but it can't be the basis by which you accept something as a true conclusion and then use it to form other ideas about what's true.

And so, if you're willing to put in the work into obsessively investigating your own thoughts, your own worldview and paradigm, over time, you start to prune the leaves in your mind that aren't really going in a direction that makes any sense. Occasionally, you even need to cut down a whole tree, meaning that perhaps many of the things you think about a particular subject, your entire world, your paradigm about something, are fundamentally flawed. It sprouted out of something that someone convinced you was true without any real evidence or reason to accept it as true. And when that happens, you can't just be content with pruning some of the details, the leaves. You have to cut the whole tree down and replace it with something planted in good soil.

I think that kind of thinking scares a lot of people, particularly as they get older. I was fortunate that I was first exposed to this way of thinking when I was 21 because I was very hungry for knowledge. I was very unsatisfied with the sources of knowledge available to me. I think that's what John Pugsley saw in me when I met him. He immediately recognized that I'd get a lot from this lecture series because I seemed very frustrated with everyone's explanations of how the world works.

For a lot of people in their 30s or beyond, if you tried to convince them to reassess everything they've accepted as true or even not even necessarily say that it's wrong, but at least think about how you know that it's right, it would be a terrifying proposition. You've spent an entire life forming a belief system, a worldview, a sense of identity based on things that you might, if you were intellectually honest and really rationally inquired into, realize don't actually make that much sense. And maybe if you'd grown up in a completely different part of the world or a completely different time period, you'd have come to completely different conclusions.

That's a really scary thought for some people. They really want to believe that the way they see things is somehow permanent and ingrained and fundamental to who they are. And if instead it's just some random assortment of ideas that you happen to pick up through the act of living, it's like, well, who am I then? If all these things that I thought were true or I thought were important to me turn out not to be true when I really rationally delve into them, what's left? What's left is you and your ability to determine what's true. And there's still a "you" underneath all that, and now if you are an intellectually curious person and dedicated to understanding the truth as much as humanly possible, this lifelong journey you have to go on is figuring out how to piece together a rational and consistent worldview, even if you have to do it from scratch and throw away everything you once thought to be true.

That's the kind of impact these lectures and these books have on you. I don't know anything else that does that.