Audio Player
✓ Using synced audio (timestamps accurate)
Starting at:
Chris Langan Λ Bernardo Kastrup on Consciousness, Metaphysics, Computation, and God
August 15, 2022
•
2:15:52
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
✓ Synced audio available: Click any timestamp to play from that point. Timestamps are accurate because we're using the original ad-free audio.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
311 sentences
19,921 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 133m 57s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?
Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.
Recently, a contest was launched for those interested in making physics and or consciousness explainer videos. It's essentially the physics slash consciousness version of 3Blue1Brown's contest, and Brilliant has come on board to Divi 5000 USD, equally among the top five. The details are linked below.
If you'd like to submit your understanding or explanation of some CTMU concept or how Bernardo's analytical idealism works, then feel free. Chris Langen is an autodidact who has the highest reported IQ in America, and he's conceived of an extremely inventive theory of everything
Based in language or meta-language and logic or meta-logic, called the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or the CTMU for short. The link to Chris's CTMU YouTube channel as well as other links are in the description. Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of the Essencia Foundation. Bernardo is one of the most cogent champions of metaphysical idealism.
That is the notion that reality is essentially mental, and he puts this forward with analytical precision. The link to Bernardo's YouTube page and other links are in the description as well. In this podcast, Bernardo and Christ both expound on their views on consciousness, on computation, and whether materialism or idealism is most coherent. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics, dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrains of
theories of everything, that is, primarily from a physics perspective, but as well as exploring the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us. If you'd like to hear more podcasts like these, then do consider going to patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal and supporting with whatever you can as support from the patrons and the sponsors are the only reason I'm able to do this full time. So thank you. And now thanks to the sponsors, the first of which is brilliant.
Brilliant is a place to learn math, science, and engineering through bite-sized interactive learning experiences. If you're interested in theories of everything from a physics perspective, then you've likely heard of constructor theory, which is a toe that's heavily predicated in information theory. So I decided to take Brilliant's course on random variable distributions and knowledge slash uncertainty
And after taking that course, I can finally see why the formula for entropy is defined the way that it is. It's actually an extremely natural formula. You can also learn group theory. If you're interested in the standard model, then you'll need to know what u1 cross su2 cross su3 is. Visit brilliant.org slash toe to get 20% off the annual subscription. I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons, keep pushing until you've done at least four. And I think you'll be greatly surprised
Nice to meet you, Chris. Nice to meet you too, Bernardo.
Plenty of people are
Why don't we start? Just so you know, we'll talk about metaphysics, consciousness and computation. Those are the general themes for today. We'll start with the substrate independence of consciousness, quote unquote. So Lambda, I'm sure you've heard of this computer or this algorithm or this AI called Lambda. Some people claim is indeed conscious. Why or why not? And we'll start with you, Bernardo, if you don't mind. Certainly not.
When we say something is conscious, what we normally mean is that something has private conscious inner life that is separate from yours, from mine and from the rest of nature. So to be conscious is to have private experience, private phenomenality, another way to put it. And I think we have absolutely no reason to think that a silicon mechanism has private inner life of its own.
Is it in consciousness? Absolutely. Everything is in consciousness. Everything begins, unfolds and ends in a field of subjectivity that underlies all nature in my view. So lambda is in consciousness. That doesn't mean that it is conscious in and of itself. I think what nature is telling us empirically all the time is that private conscious in your life correlates with
Well, life, metabolism, protein folding, DNA transcription, ATP burning, all that good stuff. This is a far from trivial process, metabolism. It uniquely separates biology from everything else in the universe. And it ties all biology together, despite the tremendous differences between, say, an amoeba swimming in my toilet and me.
We are completely different, yet if you look down a microscope to the details of metabolism, we are identical. We all do protein folding, ATP burning, transcription and all that stuff. So nature is screaming to us that what private conscious inner life looks like is warm, moist biology, metabolism. And lambda is a silicon computer. Now, can it
Emulate or simulate human cognitive processing very well. Well, I have little doubt that it does, but the simulation of a phenomenon is not the phenomenon. I mean, I can simulate kidney function on my computer accurately down to the molecular level.
And yet my computer will not be on my desk because a simulation of kidney function is not kidney function. So lambda is simulating human intelligence. That doesn't mean that it is conscious because a simulation is not the thing simulated. It's a primary logical mistake that unfortunately has been rendered seemingly plausible.
Chris, what's your opinion on the same question? If you want, I can reread the question. Read the question again.
I agree with everything that Brown said, but go ahead and you begin. So whether we basically want to know whether or not Lambda is indeed conscious, why or why not? Are you talking about the Lambda calculus of a program? Recently in the news, there was this AI from Google, which was much like a like a talk, like a bot, a talk bot. Yeah.
I will probably explain incorrectly. So Bernardo, do you mind explaining what lambda is? It's a chat bot. That's what it is. Yeah. And it probably will pass the Turing test. Well, for what that means, I mean, as Bernardo pointed out, the Turing test isn't the end all be all. You've still got a machine simulator. Even if it stimulates very, very well and convinces you that it's human. Nevertheless, it is not human.
So basically you're asking well the lambda calculus is a construct, it's a computer program, it's a mathematical construct which exists in something that can be likened to the syntax, the accepting syntax of something in computation theory that's called an acceptor. You've got acceptors and processors, they transduce information, they accept input and output from the external world and then they process it internally. So we're talking about consciousness being the internal phase of that process and the idea is
Metaphysics, as far as metaphysics is concerned, as far as I'm concerned anyway, in my opinion, metaphysics is about putting the mental side of your existence in contact with the physical side. We understand the physical side quite well, thanks to the empirical sciences, and the mental side, we don't have such a firm grasp on it. Kant, you know, came up and started talking about mental categories in terms of which we perceive phenomenal reality.
and that gives us a clue as to what we're talking about. We are talking about something very much like accepting syntax with a computational acceptable. Okay, the idea of putting those two things together requires something called, all we have to do is we, it's a very simple operation, we basically say that cognition is akin to a cognitive identity language, it allows us to identify things, so it's a language. Then we say the physical universe is a manifold,
The idea, then, is to connect these two things. That takes a kind of metal language that spans both of these two object languages that we have, one of which deals with values, coordinate systems, and things like that. That's the manifold. And then you've got the other side, which is qualitative, more attributed. That's the metal side. So we're uniting those two things in one metaphorical language that has to be quantized in a certain way.
and those identity operators that I was just talking about, that are a little bit like computational acceptors, those are the quanta. Okay, they're active signs. If you look at the linguistic aspect of what I'm talking about, they are active signs in the language, but they are also the points of the manifold or the universe that contains the content to which you refer with the language. Follow me? This is a mathematical, this is a, this is something that I, you know,
You said that there's a mental world and then there's something like the physical world which you said is like a manifold? If you take a state, it consists of attributes and values for the attributes. You can't take those two things apart.
What I'm saying is they're metaphorically coupled. You can deal with pure attributes, but you can't do that without instances or, at any rate, a cognitive identity operator to actually perform the mental functions involved. As far as the values are concerned, you take an object without attributes, that's an oxymoron.
There is no object that is totally without attributes. You've pinned an attribute on it by calling it an object. So you can't take those two things apart. There's simply no way to do it. So this dualism between the mental and physical sides of reality, what I say, is nonsense. It takes this metaphorical approach and this metaphorical mentality, which is what I'm talking about. Bernardo, do you have any thoughts on that or questions? Chris jumped into
Probably more details of his theory, which I'm not acquainted with. So if I start asking questions now, you'll probably speak for the next two hours just for me to understand something I should have understood by reading a paper, which I haven't read. So I'm not going to tax you with this, Chris. Yeah. Well, what I was trying to answer more or less was the idea of what metaphysics is and how consciousness relates to metaphysics.
So what I'm saying is that metaphysics has to be this metaphorical metal language and consciousness relates to it as a distributed property thereof. That would be your particular usage of the word metaphysics. Metaphysics is a word that has been used since the pre-Socratic, so there is a sort of a
Common meaning for the word in philosophy, metaphysics, that which stands behind physics or the essence or the beingness of things as opposed to appearances and behavior. Precisely. I'm saying that has to take the form of a metaphorical metal language, of the metal and physical sides of reality. In other words, span between both of those things, building a bridge between them. That's the purpose of metaphysics. And I understand that many different people have defined it in many different ways.
And the long and short of it is, although I respect people having their own ideas about things, I don't find that especially useful. You can go and look at everybody's definition and not come out with anything very stable that you can work with. So I settled on a mathematical structure that I can work with to make sense of these concepts, these metaphysical concepts. So how about we talk about computation? So what does computation mean?
What is reality's relationship to computation? Obviously, that depends on one's definition of reality. Let me tell you the reason why I'm asking this question. It's because some people think that our conscious experience is generated by an algorithmic process. And then some people don't think that. So, for example, Penrose, famously. And secondly, some people think reality is understood as or is equivalent to computation. So Wolfram, for example. Again, the question is,
What is computation and what is its relationship to reality? Bernardo. In its most generic definition, computation just means changes of state. When future states depend on previous states, then you have a computation. It's the function by means of which you create future states based on past states. That's the most generic possible definition of computation. Some of the other things you brought up
Attach more qualifications to the word computation. Wolfram considers the laws of physics to be emergent from cellular automata like computation. In other words, local computations based on simple rules. So now you're not seeing only computation. Now you're specifying more what kind of computation is involved. Then you have digital physics.
in which the idea is that the laws of physics should be reducible to digital computations. So you're specifying what kind of computation there are analog. There has been analog computers in our history and less than 100 years ago. So computation is not only digital. So most people, when they say, well, nature is a computer, usually they mean something more than to just say computations happen.
Because, yes, computations happen. The state of the universe is changing, so it's computing, by definition. There is nothing metaphysically polemical or complicated about it. It is when you add more qualifications to what you mean, that's where it gets tricky. When you say, for instance, that consciousness does not have a nontic reality of its own,
but is the result of a computation and therefore epiphenomenal in some sense. Now you're saying more than just that the universe computes. Now you're saying not only does the universe compute, sometimes it structures its computations in such a way that it produces an epiphenomenal result that we know as consciousness. Now you're saying something distinct and absolutely wrong and internally contradictory and incoherent and explanatory powerless.
But at least you are saying something. Penrose would say that in orchestrated reduction together with Hameroff, they would say that it's when mass crosses a certain threshold that you have collapse and the moment of collapse is an experience. So they are saying a lot more than to just say the universe computes.
So if you stick to the general thing, the universe computes, I would say, of course, because computational computation, generically speaking, just means that there are state transitions.
And future states are based on prior states, which we know empirically is what's happening in the universe. The universe doesn't begin at every moment independently of what the state was before, otherwise it would be completely random. And it's not, it's predictable. So yes, there are computations, but that's a very generic and non-polemical thing to say. Chris, again, so the question is,
What is computation and what's reality's relationship to computation? And again, what's behind the question is some people think that the mind has to be non-algorithmic, like Penrose, and then some people think that reality itself is algorithmic or computational, like Wolfram.
Okay, the problem with, you know, computations with a Turing machine does. A Turing machine can do its computations in one of two ways. It's got a, you know, recursive process, and it can either do things deterministically, like Bernardo was talking about, something in the past happens, then you've got causal efficacy within the machine, and then something else happens, or it can do it non-deterministically, which means that it's making random choices. In either case, those don't describe consciousness, because those random junctures, they're disconnects.
Consciousness is something that we understand as a pretty much continuous process. Whereas if you take non-deterministic computation, there is this disconnect there. Whereas if it's deterministic, then consciousness is completely trivial. In other words, a deterministic process gives you no room for free will, doesn't allow you to make choices, doesn't allow you to realize your
your will as Schopenhauer might put it. You see what I mean? So that's the main limitation of computation theory. The fact that you've got this pseudo causal dichotomy between determinacy and randomness. Now there's a third way to look at things and that is called self-determinacy. That is what occurs in the metaphorical system, which is why instead of using computation to model this whole thing, I use something called proto-computation.
Because quantum Turing machine is a little bit like a classical Turing machine. Still got the tape, it's still got the processor. That tape, by the way, that's like a typographical array in formal systems. And this is, once again, inadequate. The reality is generative. It actually has a way of putting itself together from scratch. It originates things rather than causing them.
So, that would be my answer to the shortfalls of computation modeling consciousness. If I if I can just comment on something.
When I said the universe certainly computes, I didn't mean to restrict it to deterministic computation. I know that. There is indeterministic or non-deterministic computation. Quantum computers are not deterministic and yet they produce precise solutions to very complicated problems, solutions that you can test and see while they are really solutions. They do so mechanistically, right.
Well, there has to be structure to computation. We may call that mechanistic if we want. There has to be structure. Otherwise, it's just randomness. The universe doesn't seem to be completely random. There is order and there are regularities in nature. We model them in the form that we call the laws of physics. So there is at least emergent order, even if it's not there from the beginning, which I think is a tough case to make. But I'm sensitive to the possibility.
there is at least emergent order. And even with a fundamentally non-deterministic substrate at the bottom level, you can still perform meaningful computations by playing with the emergent statistical rules. Like quantum physics is indeterministic on a case-by-case basis, but because of the law of large numbers, the statistics are very nicely predictable.
and that's what quantum computers will leverage. They will leverage that emerging order that comes with the law of large and large numbers and produce very precise and accurate solutions to problems. So computations can be meaningful and computations and non-deterministic. Probability theory, you can't get the randomness out of
You take all the randomness out of probability theory and it ceases to be probability theory, then it becomes a classical mechanistic system, right? And in order to accommodate that, we change from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. We need something more than that, something that is pre-real, what John Wheeler called pre-geometry. We need something that actually precedes mechanisms, that precedes computation, that even precedes cognition. And that is what I refer to as, what Schopenhauer referred to as will, what I refer to as
Schopenhauer, you could make a case that he was against determinism or you could make a case that he was a complete determinist. I am with the latter camp. I think Schopenhauer was a total determinist. He believed in determinism.
famous statement that you can act according to your will, but you cannot will what you will. In other words, what you will is already determined. So that you can follow your choices doesn't mean that there is no determinism because your willing is already determined. What I was referring to is the title of this magnum opus, the word is will and representation. Basically, the will has to somehow proceed
the representation or is totally useless and trivial. I don't think that Schopenhauer was saying something trivial. I think that he actually felt that the will had something to do with reality above and beyond simple representation. The will was the essence of the world for Schopenhauer. That's correct. Now, but how can it be deterministic? How can it be deterministic without idea or representation?
If the flow and movements and dynamics of the wheel fits with describable patterns, then it's not free. Actually, I like to make the case that there is no semantic space between determinism and total randomness without structure. And we try to fit free will somewhere in between, but I think it's incoherent. So for Schopenhauer, the essence of the world is will,
The essence of us is will. Everything is will. And by the way, there is only one will, the one eye of the world that looks out from every creature as he wrote it. But that will, the patterns of behavior of that will are archetypal. He even made a comparison to Plato's ideal forms, which was his way to say the will is not arbitrary. It's not random.
It fits according to certain templates that he, and then in the second edition of the world as will and representation, he added something to say, well, I actually misrepresented Plato. And then he tried to correct that, but he still insisted on the main point, which is the wheel unfolds according to predictable templates. And in that sense, the unfolding of the wheel is not random or. Well, the way I interpret what
Schopenhauer was saying, I know you're an expert on Schopenhauer, but the way I interpret what he was saying was basically there was a combination of will and representation and it's the combination that's important. So that's what I mean, but when I use the term metaphor, I mean you're putting those two things together, right? But there is something else, there is a higher form of determinacy
I call it meta causation sometimes that actually is determining what happens. It's not just the representation. It's not just the will. It's the two things intended.
Brief aside for today's sponsor NordVPN, please continue watching as doing so supports toe. For me, privacy is a large deal. I'm not a fan of the tech giants or ISPs having such huge amount of information on my IP, my location. NordVPN keeps my information encrypted so I don't have to worry about the immense data that I have that's being put out there being sold or even known.
NordVPN also has the added benefit that if you're jaded from the US Netflix, for example, then you can switch to the UK Netflix and it's as simple as a click of a button. You know I like referencing Dragon Ball Z and Miyazaki. Well, no need to travel to Japan for your favorite anime when NordVPN brings it directly to you. They even protect your phone's internet usage, all with one click of their software. Use the link nordvpn.com slash theories.
So for Schopenhauer, the will is the inner essence of everything. It's what really exists. He equates that to Kant's numena, the collection of numenoms, the numenom that forms existence, that forms the universe.
And the representation is just the outside appearance of the will. If I can quote him, the representation is how the will presents itself. He can be an analogy or an example. Combustion presents itself as flames.
Combustion is the thing in itself, an oxidation process that releases energy, forms ions leading to a plasma, and what we call flames is how it looks like. It's what combustion looks like. So for Schopenhauer, all there is is will. In other words, endogenous conscious states. That's what he means. By using the word will, he means endogenous experiences.
In other words, experiences that are not perceptual in nature, they are endogenous, they arise from within. And representation is how those experiences present themselves to external observation. So the world is will.
And the world presents itself to us as the physical world, which is pure representation. And for Schopenhauer, causality as a concept applies only to representation. So only when you're talking about the language of representation can you talk about causality. The will behind it as the thing in itself precedes causality, but it is not random.
because it follows certain archetypal templates and he goes on and compares that with Plato's ideal forms and so on. So, in essence, Schopenhauer, I think, well, in spirit, Schopenhauer was a determinist with the important caveat that he was a subtle determinist. He wouldn't say that causality is the whole thing. He would say causality is emergent. Causality is something
that applies to the language of appearances, not of the things in themselves. But the things in themselves are not purely random, they also unfold according to certain templates. So in that sense, the spirit of determinism is preserved in Schopenhauer, if not the latter. Yes, I would say that Schopenhauer was a metaphorical meta-determinist, and I would say that basically he was a semiotician.
as well. I would say that he had this idea that there was something called will from which a semiotic representation emerged. Emergence is of course a concept that you've already mentioned. So in my system, in my system of metaphysics, telus is primary. Will is primary and then it factorizes itself. It actually fractionates or factors itself into
two sides of representation, which is the sign and the thing signified by it, plus something called thirdness, which of course is the interpreter of the sign. And all these three things are combined in the CTMU, in the Metaformal System, by something called Triality, which means that any object can be regarded as a relation or an operation or a process. You can take all of those things and everywhere combine them.
So that's very good. Yes, I think that this is something that Schopenhauer was trying to formulate, but he didn't have the mathematics at the time. He lived a long time ago and they didn't have most of these concepts out there, so he was unable to marshal them all and scrape them together and build the system. So that's what I'm trying to make up for, is lost time due to insufficient mathematical understanding of what was going on.
a kfc tale in the pursuit of flavor the holidays were tricky for the colonel he loved people but he also loved peace and quiet so he cooked up kfc's 499 chicken pot pie warm flaky with savory sauce and vegetables it's a tender chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls whatever that means the colonel lived so we could chicken kfc's chicken pot pie the best 499 you'll spend this season prices and participation may vary while supplies last taxes tips and fees extra
The reference to semiotics. Well, semiotics is language related. It's something that has to do with language. That's the word semiotics. That's what it means. Actually, they're separated. Language and semiotics. Semiotics is the pure science, the pure representational information mappings that mediate between science and the reference. Whereas language is something that takes those signs and puts them together.
So I think for Schopenhauer, the will in itself would not be related to signs or language. Signs and language would be the paradigm of the appearances, of the representations, the Vorstellung, not anything inherent in the will itself. The will for Schopenhauer was beyond time and space.
and therefore the distinctions that are presupposed by semiotics wouldn't be there in the will in itself. Those distinctions would only appear in the appearances in the representations and then language could be applied or semiotics at first. And in Schopenhauer you would even have to get to what he called abstract representations
which was his old-fashioned word for what we today would call meta-cognition. It's when you take a sign, in other words, an appearance, and then you cognitively process that sign. You think about the thought or you think about the perception. And that would be an abstract representation in Schopenhauer's language.
language would require that first. It would require not only representations, but abstract representations. In other words, representations of representations. And now we are talking about the world of semantics, you know, signs and their meanings and how those meanings are put together in a linguistic structure. So I'm not contradicting what you said, Chris, but we are talking about Schopenhauer and I feel
a responsibility for adding more color and nuance to Schopenhauer? Yeah, no problem whatsoever. Yeah, I'm just saying that basically I do think that Schopenhauer was, although he may not have realized it completely, he was a, he was a monist. He believed in a monarch theory in which, in which it's not, tell us this or will and representation are not just dualistically linked and separate.
I say that on some level he understood that the representations have to be coming from the will. Will has some kind of metacausal privacy and that's more or less what I'm talking about. I'm saying that that representation is a binary mapping or a binary relation and I'm saying that it's like cellular mitosis. I'm saying that telus has to split into those two things.
while meanwhile forming itself from the bottom up by two things coming together in a physical event, two particles whacking to each other or something of this nature. And that's basically the metaphorical concept I'm getting at. And Schopenhauer is useful in this regard because that's what I think he was trying to get at too.
People today who think that Schopenhauer was in some sense a dualist or a dual aspect monist, I can only say they haven't read Schopenhauer. They didn't even begin to read Schopenhauer because the man couldn't have been more unambiguous, more explicit than he was. In the world as well in representation, particularly from the second edition on when he added twice the material, he kept the original but then doubled it.
He repeats himself so many times. He says the same thing in so many different ways, as though to make sure that he couldn't be misunderstood. Other than he was being paid by the word. Yeah, it's just it's surreal. In Wikipedia, the other day, it was still listing Schopenhauer as a dual aspect theorist. And even the world's supposed greatest scholar in Schopenhauer,
character from the UK called Christopher Janeway. The man just doesn't understand Schopenhauer. I mean, I'm sure he has studied Schopenhauer a lot, but, you know, intensity of study does not guarantee understanding. And the guy doesn't even begin to understand Schopenhauer. He thinks Schopenhauer is a crass materialist, and it's absurd. I think I read some of your comments on Janeway in an essay you wrote about, I know you wrote a book on Schopenhauer.
Okay, let's talk about free will. It seems like that's what is at the core here. So I'll do so by reading a question which is directed toward Chris.
But then, obviously, if you pull something out even though it has some terminology that's specific to the CTMU, Bernardo, please comment on it as well, okay? Hey Kurt, I'm reposting this from YouTube. It's for Chris on the topic of free will derived from the CTMU. If you can ask this, you'll forever be my hero. You once said, I believe he's referring to you, Chris, Chris, you said that the universe, that because the universe has only itself to define itself, everything in it must exemplify its elementary freedom.
I think I understand from your defining reality as all real influence that reality cannot be abbreviated, because if you were able to simplify it with no loss, whatever was removed could not logically have been real. I understand where to take this to imply that reality could not have come from anything simpler than its full definition, and what can't be simplified must be contributory throughout.
That said, you've still maintained a strong distinction between tertiary syntactors, objects, and secondary syntactors slash tellers, life forms, read life forms, in terms of the amount that they are determinative. Considering that you've shown that reality is a mind, could we liken the distinction to the difference between ideas of objects and ideas of self, where just like ideas, all objects have some significance specific to them, however, seemingly banal, but only tellers
as ideas of self would be self-modeling and therefore truly take on self-awareness. That's why they're called tellers. That's why self-type identity operators are called tellers, whereas tertiary identity operators are fermionic, more or less, and they are inanimate, or at least usually considered to be inanimate. But basically, they're embedded in secondary tellers and therefore they take that higher-order meta-causation, that ability to self-model from the secondary tellers.
So I assume you're answering the question right now, but Chris, I didn't understand the question. So can you explain the question back to myself and then answer it? Well, states, you know, there's no such thing as a state in isolation. States are always relatively defined. That's why we have theories of relativity and things like that. But what must a state be defined relative to? Well, to completely define any state in the universe, you need to refer to every other state in the universe because it parameterizes
that state. Okay, and you don't get a complete parameterization unless you have the full matter distribution and the full metric. Okay, so that's what it takes. Can I see if I can I make an analogy? There's a duality between a set and the complement of a set, assuming that the set is within some other large set that you can call. So let's say the large set is S, you have a subset U, then there's a duality between you and you with a C, which is a complement of it, the tell or and the environment, right, exactly, self and non-self.
The environment, of course, is just the medium minus the tellur. In other words, it's external to the medium, but it's outside the boundary of the tellur. You get basically the self-dual construct, which is a tellur-environment coupling.
Okay, and this Taylor environment coupling is very important to the CTME because that's kind of a metaphorical quantum. It's one way of expressing CTME quantization. Okay, you have to put the medium together with the object. The object is its own medium through this process called expansion, which is the operation through which the universe evolves on the global level. Now, in order to get semantic meaning out of that, basically, it's called cosmic expansion.
to get meaning out of that, then you need another process called telerecursion, which then specifies that semantic structure to the syntactic structure that's built up by construction. Chris, it's been almost a year since I studied the CTMU. And when I did, I didn't go back to it, which means I've forgotten so much of it. So much of the terminology as I would have done myself. So much of the terminology, it goes through me. So telerecursion, I have a vague recollection that it's where
the universe exercises free will, it looks at some generalized utility state and then makes a decision. That's where TELOR is self-configured. That's where secondary identity operators or TELOR is self-configured. They actually become the medium. And I know that Bernardo actually embraces something like this in his analytic idealism, I think is what he calls it. Basically, you've got to have that going.
Okay, so let me be blunt. So free will in your theory, in your model, Chris exists. And Bernardo, if I'm correct, you're against the idea of free will, at least currently. Well, let me tell you what free will is first before Bernardo gets going. Okay. Yes. As I said, there is no typographical array in the metaphorical system. Okay. You can't use the parameter as a state, you cannot just use a
Fixed array, fixed array. The array has to be changing geometric, geometric dynamically is the term that the followers of Einstein came up with to describe what must be going on. It's happening behind the scenes. Okay. Free will happens because things are determined metacausally, you know, and metiformally, which means that things have to be coupled or factorized.
Right. In other words, it's just not this linear process, this causal process, but it's this higher order process called meta medicalization that is a curve. And this is free will. If we look at a conspensive cycle in the CTMU, it's an alpha omega cycle. In other words, it starts at an origin and ends with the boundary. And those two things are in advanced and retarded communication with each other. Right.
Free will is in determining one of those conspensive cycles, regardless of what its size is. So in other words, there is a way to define free will that gets out of this pseudo causal dichotomy between determinacy and indeterminacy that we were talking about earlier. In other words, you're creating the medium. You're actually creating space-time as you create a new state. When you bring that new mental state into your head, you've actually done it by creating space-time.
This is kind of a very profound, very weird way of looking at it. I understand that it sounds weird, but it's the only way, in my opinion, things can work. I will comment more generically because I'm not familiar with Chris's terminology, so it's impossible for me to go into the details of that. But you offered, Kurt, that I am currently against free will. There's a lot of nuance to this, so let me try to clarify this.
The question of free will is linked to a materialist metaphysics, like people worrying that if my choices are determined by the patterns of brain activity in my brain, then I don't have free will. Well, on that account, I think people need not be afraid because I don't think physiological patterns of brain activity cause your choices. I think they are what your choices look like.
In Schopenhauer's terminology, they are appearances, representations. The thing in itself is your choice. So no, your choices are not determined by your brain activity. Your brain activity is what the process of making choices look like. And then you would say, well, then I am endorsing free will. But now we have now to understand what people mean by free will. What people mean by it is that their choices are determined by that which they identify themselves with.
as opposed to being determined by something that they don't identify with and most people don't identify with their brain activity they never get to see it they don't identify with it that's why when when a physicalist says well your choices are determined by your brain activity people feel that as a violation of their free will because they identify with their own mental processes the the flow of their consciousness not with
physical patterns of brain activity inside their skull, which they never saw in their lives. Now let's think about the mind of nature. The mind of nature is the only thing there is. So need and will are the same thing. There is nothing. I mean, I have to work, right? I'm forced by my society to work. So my choice to work is not freely determined by me.
It's a need imposed on me by the society and I don't identify with the rest of the society. So my free will has been cut short in that regard. But if you are the mind of nature, there is no society. There is no world outside of you. There's nothing beyond you. So whatever choices you make as the mind of nature are free in the sense that they are determined, but they are determined by you.
The need and the choice are one and the same. There is no semantic difference between determinism and free will at the level of the mind of nature. Because yes, the choices are determined. Even people who believe in free will, they are not saying that their choices are random. They are saying that their choices are determined by their preferences, their tastes. They are determined by them.
At the level of the mind of nature, every choice is determined by the mind of nature because there is nothing beyond the universal mind, the universal consciousness. So even the question of free will disappears. There is a semantic space for it. It doesn't make sense to talk about it, but the choices are still determined in the sense that they are not random. The choices of the mind of nature are determined by what the mind of nature is.
its characteristics, its properties, determine the choices it makes. It cannot abstract of itself, otherwise the choices would be completely random and that's incoherent to say that. Right, I would merely add that what we have to do is we have to distinguish free will what's happening there from determinacy and non-determinacy.
Okay, so it is useful to talk about free will just to distinguish it from what we usually mean by causation. And once we do that, then we find out that we can describe it in a certain way, right, in terms of this expansion and telepercursion thing that I was talking about earlier. I think ultimately, everything is determined. Even your choices are determined by your tastes, by your dispositions, your opinions. Can I ask you a question? Imagine
Just imagine the origin of reality. What determined the structure of reality? In other words, there was nothing outside. According to general relativity, basically, reality is optically and geometrically closed. So there's nothing outside. There's no extrinsic causation that could have caused the universe to take any particular form. So aren't we talking about the universe taking its own form, somehow deciding within itself what form it should take?
Deciding within itself can only happen if that decision is determined by what it is. Yes, but who decides what it is? At the end of the day, at the bottom level of nature, something exists that cannot be explained in terms of anything else.
We cannot explain one thing in terms of another forever. It doesn't matter what metaphysics one subscribes to, one cannot keep on reducing forever. Otherwise, eventually you will go back to the beginning and it will be circular reasoning. Unless it's idempotent. Unless it's idempotent. That actually applies to themselves. You don't get to the top of the ladder, you just keep on going from run to rung and each rung is identical to the last rung. Right? Then it's some form of infinite regress. No, idempotent says that it stays the same.
You're going the other way around now. I'm thinking about the reduction. I'm going down to the bottom. There has to be something at the bottom that simply is. It simply is what it is. Now earlier you said,
For something to exist, it needs to have properties. To say that something is an object means that it has properties. So to be is to have properties. I agree with you there. To be is to have properties. Whatever it is that you are, you are one thing and not another. In other words, there are properties associated to your beingness. Now, whatever there is at the end of the chain of reduction, the bottom line of nature, it just is, and therefore it has properties.
everything that it does is then determined by its properties. It's determined by what it is, as opposed to what it is not or to what it could have been. So even the mind of nature is a mind that has properties. That's awfully inspecific, though. I mean, you're not attaching any properties to this ultimate reduction that you're talking about.
so and that but you're saying and yet everything that the universe is is somehow determined by it i don't think that's you know quite kosher i think that we have to actually try to attach some properties to it in order to do i am attaching i just said to be is to have properties so whatever there is at the bottom level of the chain of reduction it has properties now we may not know directly self-assigned properties right
Not self-assigned. It's intrinsic to the beingness of the thing. To be is to have properties. But against what background are we distinguishing those properties? The background of what could have been. So the laws of nature are what they are. So gravity makes objects fall. We could live in a universe in which gravity pulls objects up. It's a repellent as opposed to an attractor. Now, that's not what is.
The laws of nature are what they are, as opposed to what they could have been in our imagination. So whatever nature is, it has properties, and that's why objects fall and static electricity is produced when you rub amber to a cloth. So the stuff that is
I understand everything that you're saying, but if it had properties then those properties had negations and something had to distinguish those properties from their negations. Otherwise it is useless to talk about them having properties at all. There's got to be the property, there's got to be the logical complement of that property and something has to be doing the logic of it all for us to, for reality itself, for ultimate reality to perceive what its properties are or to act as though those properties exist. You follow me?
That something is us and our ability to conceive of nature being different than what it is. And we are parts of reality, where sense or control is for reality as a whole. So that's our function. To conceive of what could have been in theory or in principle. And then after conceiving of that, to conceive of what is. Yeah, yeah, but I'm trying to speak of something even much simpler than we are getting to right now. What I'm trying to say is the following.
wherever there is at the chain of reduction, it has properties, and its behavior is determined by the properties it has. In other words, the behavior of nature is determined by what nature is, as opposed to anything else we could conceive nature to be. So ultimately, everything is determined, it ought to be determined. Otherwise, we just throw science down the toilet. Right, but that's a tautology.
We're looking for something when you say determined, I'm looking for a causal dependency. I'm looking for a cause and an effect of some kind. That's what we usually mean. What we're talking about, however, is a tautology. Everything is intrinsic because reality is optically closed. There is nothing outside of reality that is real enough to affect reality.
It's a logical contradiction to disagree with. What I said is not a tautology. It's not a tautology. What I'm saying is that of all things that nature could conceivably have been, it is what it is and not anything else.
and what it is entails properties and those properties determine what happens. So the universe expands as opposed to collapsing because the properties of the universe are such that they cause the universe to expand. I agree. So you can speak of causation in the language of representation in that sense without being tautological.
And if we speak of minds, then we have to abandon, well, we have to set aside the language. Yes, I'm trying to get down to the properties that you are ascribing to ultimate reality. Reality is what it is, as you say, you're 100% right about that. But what are its properties and how do things happen because of those properties? So I'm trying to get to that. So we've been speaking with the language of Schopenhauer's representations, the physical world and science and causation,
But you and I agree that at the end of the day, there is only one mind, one consciousness. So what is the language of the will? How do we describe what I'm saying in the language of the will of the thing in itself? Well, Jung gave us the language. Jung talked about the archetypes, which are these intrinsic primordial templates of mental behavior. And those templates are intrinsic. They are there because mind is what it is.
And if nature is a mind, then the archetypes of nature are those properties. You don't think the mind is conditioned to have those properties? You don't think there's any capital? No. Okay, you think the mind just is what it is? To be is to have properties, and I'm saying those properties are the archetypes in Jungian psychology applied to the collective unconscious, applied to a mind that is not an individual mind. Okay, so you realize you are assigning a property
But that's what I'm saying, Chris. I'm saying that to be is to have properties. Yes, I would agree with that. And it's also to have values or instances. So that way, it's self-dual. You don't have to separate the instances from the properties. And you can call reality an instance of itself. And that's the tautology that I'm talking about.
Okay, so I call it a super tautology. I don't know why you're saying this. I don't know what you're talking about, to be honest. I don't know what you're talking about. Instances of itself. Reality is what it is to be, to have properties. Those properties are what we could call archetypes, templates of behavior of mind, and that's why nature behaves the way it does, because it has whatever archetypes it does have by virtue of existing. Nature instantiates those properties. You're assigning or distributing properties to nature, and then nature is instantiating the properties. Am I right?
If you want to speak the language of mathematics, you can speak that way. I'm not sure how helpful it is to the audience. It's very helpful because that's what a super tautology is. It's something that is its own properties and its own instances. Why do we speak of instances if there is only one thing? I don't think this language is helpful at all. It's obscurantism. Well, with all due respect, it's not just obscurantism. There are instances of properties out there.
You are an instance of the properties that make up Bernardo. An instance of the properties that make up Chris and likewise for Kurt. Yeah, but Chris and Bernardo exist in a broader context, but the mind of nature is what there is. There is nothing else. So why to speak of instances? I'm not arguing against you there. I'd be the last person in the world to argue with you about that. I'm just trying to pin down some of these properties that we're ascribing to ultimate or basic reality.
once you get all the way down to the bottom of the reduction as you said then there's got to be something there what is it so now we are we're stuck you see we have to say okay well whatever it is it's part of reality therefore reality goes in a circle it's this big self-defined loop right that's so that's my point you follow that fair enough okay fair enough now do we know what those properties are directly of course not we know
What results from those properties, the behavior of the universe results from those properties or those archetypes, whatever those intrinsic properties are.
It turns out that the behavior of nature is regular, fairly predictable. So I would say that they are determined by those properties, which we don't know directly, but we can infer that they exist because nature behaves in a fairly regular and predictable way. Do you think that we have anything to do with determining any of those properties?
the properties are what they are by virtue of the fact that the universe is what it is and we are part of the universe so we don't determine them we are determined by them well could there be reciprocity there i mean could there be they determine us and then we determine them back i don't think so i think if you're talking about the most innate properties then they are the properties of what there is they are what they are because the universe is what it is now we could
We could determine matter properties, or we could play a role in the causal unfolding that derives from those properties. Yes, that we could do, but I don't think... There we go. And by participating in that unfold, you mean we're just like passive things that allow properties to emerge through us, but have nothing to do with creating properties themselves?
I'm talking about the fundamental properties. Now you could talk about properties at many levels that are not fundamental. Of course. Like human beings have properties, but those are not the fundamental properties of the universe. Or black holes have properties, but those are not the fundamental properties of the universe at the bottom of the chain of causation. And you don't see yourself as implicated at all in actually configuring those larger properties.
Yes, those secondary derivative properties. Yes, of course, we are part of the unfolding dynamics of the universe. So now if you detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon, we will change the properties of the moon. Yeah, we can influence that. That's trivial, trivially so. But I was talking about the bottom level fundamental properties of existence.
I don't think we can change those for the same reason that a human being can't change his or her own mental archetypes. Those are inherent to the beingness of the universe. I agree. I agree with almost everything you said, except for you seem to be saying, okay, it just is that's it. And I'm saying, maybe we can actually reach in there and induce some properties, some actual specific properties that lead to this whole thing being structured the way it is.
I commented on that already, so I think it's clear, hopefully. Okay, well, you seem to be saying the universe is meta-deterministic, or super-deterministic. I don't know what you mean by that, so I cannot say yes or no, but maybe... Will you say that the structure of the universe is determined by what it is and what its properties are? Am I right? What it is and what its properties are, are the same thing.
Well, yes, but there's also an extension with the intention. The intention is the properties, and then we need the instances as well. Those are the things that the properties intersect. If you could talk about a red heavy object, and then you could take a cannonball and paint it red, that's an instance instantiating both of those properties. The properties don't refer to each other. Heavy isn't red and red isn't heavy, but if we have instances, then we can make the properties interact.
So we need both of those things, and I'm just saying that they're metaphorically coupled, and that's what we do in the CTMU. I think you're very insightful, and I think we agree on almost everything, but there are a couple of sticking points here. Otherwise, it wouldn't really be a theolocution, would it?
Last brief aside for today's sponsor, Manscaped. You may have noticed that I'm brown, and what's concomitant with being brown is being hairy. That's why I'm happy that support for theories of everything is brought to you by Manscaped, who's number one in men's grooming below the waist. There's also an ear and nose trimmer, which I use and happily sew, as you can see. The package I have is the Performance Package 4.0. It comes with Crop Preserver and Crop Reviver, which are male genitalia
If you thought condoms were difficult to ask for, well try asking the 65 year old lady behind the counter for what will improve your gonads texture. Luckily you don't have to since Manscaped is online. This package even comes with this shirt which I wear pretty much exclusively to the gym. I may not be able to bench the most
But I can pretty much guarantee that I'm the most testicularly hygienic. Unlock your confidence and always use the right tools for the job with Manscaped. Let's get to this with a more mythological question.
Are Jesus and Buddha attempting to answer the same problem but from different perspectives? Are they answering different problems? Are their answers, their teachings, whatever they may be, are they commensurate? Though on the surface, at least to me, they contradict. There's quite a few questions there. Bernardo, if you don't mind starting that off. I'm not a religious studies specialist, so you have to take
Anything and everything I'm about to say with an enormous grain of salt, maybe a whole bag of it. I have a good friend who is a specialist, Jeffrey Kripal. If Jeff is listening to this, I hope he will not cringe with what I'm about to say. I think they are, they were trying to answer the same question. And I think if you penetrate beyond the surface of appearances and different
metaphors and symbols and the different languages they spoke. And there is a difference of 500 years between them and the difference in geographies as well. So if you can penetrate beyond all that and look at the essence of their answers, I think it was essentially the same answer. Actually, there are serious studies and there's a serious academic opinion that Christianity, in fact, may be derived from Buddhism.
There is even speculation about where Jesus might have been during that time, between his 12th year and his 30th year when the Bible says...
I think the fundamental question they were both trying to answer is, what is the relation between us as human beings and the universe at large? What is that relationship? Jung put it in the following words. Are we related to something transcendent, to something infinite or not? That is the gazillion dollar question. Are we related to something infinite or not?
And I think they both were trying to answer this question, that relationship between us as individuals and the universe at large, existence at large. What is that relationship? Because we take the cue for our behavior from our tentative answer to that question, our inner narrative about what that relation is. And I would even go as far and to say that they gave the same answer.
When Jesus talked of himself as the son of God, he was talking about a fundamental kinship between a human being and the divinity, a fundamental kinship. Now, the son of a father is of the same kind as the father, bare force, because it's something that came from the father. And he also emphasized the need to surrender the direction of our lives to a greater power.
And if that's not Buddhism, what is it? Buddhism is the surrender of the ego is seen through the illusion of personal identity, individual identity. It is connecting to a greater mental context, a greater cognitive context. So I think in essence, yes, they were both saying the same thing. And then 600 years later, a little bit more, there came the prophet.
and said the same thing. And that's why Muslims bow to a greater power five times a day, which I think is a fantastic ritual. It's a daily reminder that our lives are not about us. Our lives are about something much bigger than us. They're in line, the meaning of our lives.
And the kinship in Christianity between Jesus and us is also very explicit when when the Holy Ghost descends into every righteous man, woman and child. And remember, the Holy Ghost is Jesus. So when the Holy Ghost descends not only into the apostles, but every righteous human being.
What is being said is that there is a direct kinship between you and the Son of God and of course a direct kinship between the Son of God and the Godhead. It's a hierarchy of kinships, so to say, of identical kinds, which basically tell us that we are leaves in a great tree and existence is about the tree, not about the leaves. Imagine if
The blossom of my apple tree in my backyard in the spring would say, my life's about me.
I should take the reins of my life as a blossom because my life's about me. Well, we would laugh at the little flower because no, it's not about the flower. It's about the tree. It's about the fruit that will come after the flower is gone and the tree that will come from the fruit after the fruit is gone. It's about a much bigger context. And I think that's the message of Christianity and Buddhism. We need to surrender ourselves
to the greater directions of existence and understand that it's not about us, has never been and will never be. And we do not need to invest ourselves with this crushing responsibility of manufacturing meaning for our lives. It's unnecessary. Meaning is intrinsic. As long as you are in touch with the movements of the impersonal within us, we are in touch with meaning. It's just that we've become blind to it because of the crazy narratives of our current civilization.
Chris? Well, I agree with a lot of that. Very poetic. Thank you, Bernardo. The primary issue is the relationship between man and reality, the ultimate reality, which is God, and to Christians anyway. And I think that it's productive to formulate this question in terms of the goal of life. Now, in Buddhism, the goal of life is nirvana. For the Vedic, it was moksha.
Okay, and for the Christians, it is salvation. Those are distinct concepts. All right? The two of them have to do with completely extricating yourself from samsara, you know, the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. You extricate yourself completely from that and totally free yourself from the world that exists. What Christ was trying to tell people is that you cannot extricate yourself from God, from the world that exists. You have moral responsibility.
You know, here are your moral responsibilities. They're enumerated in the Ten Commandments, etc, etc. And here's the golden rule. So now you've got a mathematical law of moral symmetry that you can apply to the whole thing. So they're really, in some respects, the answers are the same. They give an answer for what is the relationship between man and reality, but in other respects, they're very different. Okay, we have a moral responsibility to our fellow human beings and to reality and to God.
in Christianity, whereas in Buddhism, it's not quite the same thing. There is a sum of that, of course. There is an equivalent to morality in Buddhism and Vedism. Now, that being said, I'm going to shove Buddhism aside for a second and just talk about Vedism. If you take a look at Vedism and then you take a look at Christian Neoplatonism,
as set forth by Plotinus, for example, and other people like him, you find that they're very, very similar. You've got this Vedic model where you've got Brahman, and then from Brahman you come down to mind, and then from mind you go down to the world. This is basically what Neoplatonism is. Neoplatonism, of course, was very popular among these scholastics, medieval Christians. Basically, what they were doing was they were embracing something very much like Vedism.
So these are things that we have to observe when we're trying to compare these separate religions and what they're all talking about. A Christian says that, well, our job is to achieve salvation. We do that by moral goodness. OK, Vedism says much the same thing.
You've got Dharma, which is righteousness, and then you go from righteousness into moksha. Buddha was a little bit less prescriptive about these things. There are degrees of freedom in Buddhism. It's very, very popular because it seems to limit your moral responsibility, whereas
This is something that Jesus and the Hindus were not necessarily interested in doing. There is this moral responsibility, it's inescapable, and that's that. Bernardo, are you champing at the bit? I just have a small quirk. I'm not sure it's even worthwhile to mention it, but I agree with Chris that medieval scholars from before
Well, there are nevertheless similar Aristotle didn't really have anything comparable to what we're talking about.
So it was the neoplatonics or else, you know, there's this idea of the one and then you go down from the one to NUS, right? N-O-U-S, I don't know how it's pronounced. And then you come down from there into the world. Now, what I have, what I've found is that you can liken this whole thing to a reality self-simulation, which can actually be mathematically and scientifically described. Okay.
Here's a set of questions that comes from Charlie Ifrah.
Where did the assumption that consciousness is good come from? Where did the assumption that consciousness matters come from? Where did the assumption that consciousness makes us special come from? Why don't we assume that consciousness is just something we do and it's no more special than eyesight or scent? So I'm going to send this in the chat because it's a set of questions that are similar, but it's probably useful to refer to. Okay, well, consciousness is basically primitive. Okay, it's a primitive property. Bernardo was talking earlier about the properties of what reality is.
Consciousness is a primitive property of reality. It has to be conscious. There's got to be this feedback that I was talking about, this tele-feedback between past and future. That's what allows us to get out of this pseudo-cosmic dichotomy that we're talking about. Consciousness is primitive. It is there. It is what it is. Nobody has to say anything about it. Nobody has to pronounce it this or make assumptions about it.
It is what it is. It's there. It distributes over reality in different forms that are appropriate to the circumstances under which it emerges. A tiny little particle, an electron, has consciousness in a certain way. And then a telor, a secondary, an organism, has consciousness in another way.
Okay, then we get up to big brain human beings, we have a higher kind of self modeling consciousness still, then we get all the way up to God that has all of these forms of consciousness at once. Right? So consciousness is absolutely intrinsic to the nature of the universe. And we needn't make any assumptions about its importance, or its primacy or anything else. Bernard, do you want to tackle?
Let me tackle them one by one. Where did the assumption that consciousness is important come from? I don't know. I don't make that assumption. I know that consciousness is that is all I have ultimately. So if that's not important, then probably nothing is, which may be a valid answer. But I don't make that assumption. Where did the assumption that consciousness is good come from? I don't know. I don't make that assumption. Consciousness is.
Whether it's good or bad. I'm not determined on a case by case basis. I think there is as many good reasons to think that consciousness has bad in it as there are reasons to think that it has good in it. Where did the assumption that consciousness matters come from?
He's framing everything as if it were an assumption. Well, I don't know. But if consciousness doesn't matter, then what does? Because we are cooped up in consciousness at all times. So if that doesn't matter, then nothing does. Four, where did the assumption that consciousness makes a special come from?
I don't know, I don't make that assumption. I don't think it makes it special. I think consciousness permeates the whole of existence. So we are not special on that account because it's just something that permeates the whole of existence, not only us. And five, why don't we assume that consciousness is just something we do
Because it's not a question of assumption. It's a question of theorizing coherently. So our theories stand up to reason and to the evidence. So you can assume that, I don't know, that your consciousness is the sun. Good luck with that. But that's not the game we are playing. We are not playing the game
of arbitrary assumptions. We are playing the game of trying to find the most coherent, empirically tenable, internally consistent, most explanatory powerful narrative or model or theory about what's going on and the most
And the source of that and the source and medium of that line of reasoning we should have everything you said is 100% right but but it's it's not just the consequence okay it is the origin
Sorry, Bernardo, why is it that you call your theory analytical idealism? What's the difference between some other account of idealism and yours?
There is nothing new in this. This stuff has been put forward by many people for thousands of years. I think there is a perfectly good word in history called idealism. That's what I'm talking about. So why will I use another word? But under pressure to differentiate what I'm talking about from, say, Barclays idealism, which I think is flawed, I needed to add a qualifier. And because I arrived at idealism from
a rational investigation that holds up to the values of analytic philosophy, the philosophy that was stated by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s.
I espouse all that. I espouse the values of analytic philosophy, not to the detriment of continental philosophy, but next to those, I espouse the values of analytic philosophy, and I defend my idealism in a way
that can only be characterized as analytical based on the values of the analytic philosophy school. That's why I call it analytic idealism. It's my very best effort to not come up with new words, but to stick to old words so people know that I'm not saying anything new at all here. Okay. Can I ask a question? I mean, analytic basically means having to do with concepts and language.
So somehow, in other words, you're talking about the language you use is just more careful than it is an ordinary dialogue. You're actually theorizing very carefully, and that's how language enters into this. Would that be accurate? That's fair enough. That would be the reason why Russell chose the word analytic philosophy back then. So I'm just using the word he used. If he had used another word, I would be using that word instead. Well, then we have the Kantian meaning too, which refers to tautology.
My usage of analytic in analytic philosophy is a reference, sorry, my use of analytic in analytic idealism is a reference to analytic in analytic philosophy. So I'm basically linking it to analytic philosophy because I make my argument according to the style and value system of analytic philosophy. If they had chosen the word X philosophy, I would be saying X idealism.
So we talked about this but didn't use the word non-dualism and many people in the non-dualist community would say that love is fundamental, that consciousness is fundamental, but love is too and somehow those are the same or somehow love is more fundamental than consciousness. Okay, explain to someone as confused as myself what you make of that. How does that make sense? How can love be fundamental? What is love? Bernardo, if you don't mind.
Well, I never said that love is fundamental. I'm not saying you did. I apologize if I said that. I'm saying some non-dualists. I'm sure you've heard. You didn't say that. I'm just emphasizing it for clarity and lack of ambiguity. I think love is a particular pattern of excitation of consciousness. Fear is another. So if love is fundamental, so is fear. And so is, I don't know, delight and any other emotion.
So from that perspective, I think it is subjectivity that is fundamental, not to the particular excitation of subjectivity that we describe with words such as love, fear and all the other emotions. So I think empirically, if I if I look at nature. I don't see compelling reason to think that love is somehow more. Primordial or more fundamental,
than fear, than evil, because you see this stuff all around the nature. I mean, animals are killing each other slowly and painfully so they can survive. It's a bloodbath. Volcanoes erupt and millions of animals are killed in very painful circumstances. It's not a pretty picture. So I don't particularly see a reason to prioritize
love over anything else. Dante wrote about the love that moves the sun and the other stars, suggesting that what we see as stars is the representation of love, the external appearance of love, and that stars in and of themselves experience themselves as an outpouring of love. That may be, but then black holes are the opposite.
Right. Because instead of irradiating, they suck everything in. And I see no reason to say that stars are more fundamental than black holes. As a matter of fact, we know black holes form when stars collapse into themselves. So, no, I know I'm afraid I don't see love as as fundamental. I see subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness as fundamental. And I would love if love were fundamental. I would love it.
But I don't see good reasons to think that it is now. Why would you love it if it was fundamental? Well, because now we would feel all fuzzy and warm and protected and safe. But I don't think there is a good reason to think that. I think. What? And now I'm speculating and I'm speculating without authority here, so take it with a with a bag of salt.
I think what some spiritual teachers, I think what motivates them to say that love is fundamental is that there is a phase during meditation or during a psychedelic experience. You passed through a threshold right around the ego dissolution phase when you sort of shed personal identity. There's a lot of fear with that.
But then you tend to land in a place for a little while where you sort of remember. And what you remember, I can't put in English, I can't put in any, there are no words for what you remember, so I can't say, but you remember. And that remembrance feel like a reconnection with your own umbilical cord, with your own home, your own source.
And it feels very warm and loving, that remembrance, that reconnection with your roots. But it's a transitory phase. If you persist in that, then even that is shed, even that feeling of love, fuzzy coziness, you know, remembrance back home, even that is shed away as just one more phase of experience, but nothing fundamental. And then you go somewhere else.
And I'm not going to talk about that somewhere else, but I can imagine that if you have not visited the deeper levels in the palace of mind, you just went one level lower, one or two level lowers, then you would say, well, I found love there. So love is fundamental. I can clearly see that happening. But then I would think arrogantly, maybe that, well, we just haven't gone deep enough because below that there is stuff that you wouldn't call love.
Chris, would it be alright if I ask Bernardo one more question and then if you want, if there's anything that comes to your mind, just take a note and then... That's fine. Okay, great. So Bernardo, in some of the conferences I'm sure that you've attended on spirituality and non-dualism, there seems to be a special place for love and there seems to be a special place for fear, namely that one is to shed fear and that almost all of suffering, if not all of suffering, comes from fear. And for me, just to get my
point of view across it doesn't seem completely correct unless they're using a different definition of fear because there are people who have a part of their brain that's that they lack there's a there's a disconnection in some part of their brain they don't actually experience fear and it's deleterious it's not good for them they stand too close to people they are more likely to get into fights they have to be watched over there's also sociopathy which is related to a lack of fear but social fear
So it doesn't seem to me that one should just shed all of one's fear in order to live more peaceably. Well, maybe in order to live more peaceably, but that existence doesn't persist for a while and it also doesn't seem to be good for the other people around you. Either way, that's my thoughts on it. Do you see the same distinction between love and fear? Like there's a special place for fear, namely we should shed it. And what are your thoughts on that?
So I'll give you a personal opinion. This is not grounded on my work as a philosopher or my previous work as a scientist. So I'm not sure my opinion should count more than anybody else's opinion. But I sympathize with what you said. I think there is a place for fear. There is a reason we've evolved to feel fearful in certain circumstances. It is healthy. It helps preserve your own safety. I think what may be
is trying to be expressed in those conferences is that you shouldn't be in the grip of fear. Fear shouldn't control your life. And unfortunately, that's what happens a lot in our civilization, that fear instead of being just one more ingredient in this great melting pot of emotions that we carry along through life,
that fear becomes the dominating force. And I have experienced with that. I have suffered from anxiety and fear can make your world very small. It can make you blind to everything else. It can destroy your ability to empathize. It can destroy your ability to tune into what's happening around you, destroys your ability to enjoy the present moment because your mind is always in that narrative making of what might happen that could be very bad for you.
So not surrendering control to fear i think is important but eliminating fear altogether i think that's like
cutting a limb, it's taking away a part of your own humanity. If you become unable to feel fear, how will you empathize with the Ukrainians now? So, you know, surrendering to fear eliminates empathy, but destroying fear completely eliminates empathy as well, because you become unable to relate to what other people are going through and you become less human.
And I don't think that's the game to play. I think the game to play is to mature our own humanity to its full. And fear is certainly an ingredient of that. There is nothing, I think, a priori bad about fear. The only bad thing is when you have an imbalance and that imbalance can be an excess of fear or even a lack of fear. I think the point is balance and
I understand these conferences when they put emphasis on reducing fear, because in our civilization, in our society today, most of the times we are not in balance, and the imbalance is precisely an excess of fear. So that's where you put the emphasis. You try to reduce that which is excessive.
But I don't think it should be extrapolated to the point of rooting out fear altogether. Then you're not human. You will be a mutilated human being. That's not something to desire. At least I don't desire that. OK, so, Chris, there's plenty that was said. And if you want to comment on any of it, please do. I'll restate the original question, which is essentially, well, what is love and what's its relationship to what's fundamental? Well, love
It's all about identification and identity. Obviously, reality identifies with itself. There's not necessarily any emotion attached to that, but in order to make this work in the world, reality configures itself as syntax. There's a kind of syntax in the Metaformal System called the ETS for Emotelic Syntax. Emotions like fear and love inform you of a need. That's basically what they do. They're telling you there's a deficit.
of utility in your life and that you need to fill it. This is what causes you to configure yourself as a telon and then affect causation. Telon brings together causation in certain ways by certain mechanisms and this is actually what happens. There is no way to do without things like fear and love. As far as love is concerned, the love between two human beings is concerned. They love each other and they feel that wonderful emotion because of the ETS. Those feelings, the moods,
They come out
is an extremely fundamental property of reality, then creates the ETS, which then causes us to behave in certain ways that cause us to unite our destinies and do things like marry and have children, which reality needs in order to renew the cycle of life. What's the ETS? The Emo-Telek syntax. Emo standing for emotion and Telek of course meaning basically
Emotion, you experience emotions because they are usually most emotions because they are informing you of some kind of need. You have a need that their fear means the need to fight or flee. Okay. Love means the need to, you know, to care for, nurture and appropriate.
Okay? And you can attach this to virtually anything. Basically, this is the part of our minds that tells us what we need. And then we configure ourselves telegly by means of telecrecursion or telecausation, configure ourselves to fulfill those needs. And it's like a charge system. On the one hand, you've got negative charge, filling that need amounts to a positive charge. So you've got this duality of charges. And that's the way things work in CTN, right?
There's utility deficit, and then there's utility. So that's what the ETS is just that part of your mind, that that syntactic module that tells you what you should be doing. I mean, it makes you feel very, you know, fight, flee, you know, go up and ask that girl for a date. You know, this is the kind of thing that's that it's that it's telling you a pain, I've got to jerk my hand away from the flame.
Okay. All right. And then you've got you've got fulfillment, you've got emotions of fulfillment, which then tell you where they reinforce this cycle of charge and you know, deficit and fulfillment. Okay. When you feel happy, it means that you've just performed that that that thing properly, you've actually just closed that loop. Okay, and it reinforces you to do the same thing in the future. And that's how reality more or less conditions itself.
With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last-second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn. Extra large popcorn. TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes Payday unexpectedly human.
Chris, can you give me an example of a time when you felt fear for weeks? So not just momentary fear, particularly with regard to something existential. So this is a personal question. I want to know, how is it that you overcame some dread? And then Bernardo, similarly, you mentioned that you had problems with anxiety in the past. Probably still do, but a specific problem is likely in your mind. Well, I can't say that I have felt prolonged dread.
past doubts of dread, of course we all do. But in terms of prolonged dread, I've been, you know, most mercifully free of that kind. I have felt, you know, things protracted, uncomfortable feelings like loneliness, for example. You know, I mean, you know, I feel lonely. You know, I cope with those things by basically turning my mind in another direction.
Bernardo,
I have experienced dread for over a decade, pretty much continuously. A lot of my philosophy work has been a sort of an alchemy of translating that undesired, undesirable energy of dread into something positive. Nietzsche talked about this being the job of philosophers.
turning everything we are, everything we fear, into love and flame, as he put it. That was the job of philosophy, and I think he was right. For me, it started in my mid-30s. When I was 34, I had achieved everything that I set myself to achieve when I was 12. And when I was 12, my father died, and I made a list of everything I wanted to achieve in my life.
One day I woke up at 34 and I realized that everything is ticked. It's all there. And I thought I've arrived. I'm in control. I have control of the world because I had external control of the world. I had a good job. I had sufficient money. I had the house I always wanted to have. I was married to my youth sweetheart. And then in life has a funny way to
Confront you with your own bullshit very, very quickly. So it didn't take weeks of that feeling. I am in control for me to find a nodule in my wife's breast, which took doctors two weeks to rule out as cancer. And in those two weeks, I thought, shit, I'm not in control at all.
My wife can get sick and die. I can get sick and die. Everything that I find important. All those people can. No, I have no control over my own body, let alone the world. And that realization was terrible to me. I internalized that into health anxiety for myself, health anxiety for everybody that I cared about. And it took well over 10 years for that
claustrophobic feeling to sort of dissipate. And I wish I would have, you know, the seven steps to getting rid of that. Two things happened to me prior to it dissipating. One, I accepted that it would never go away. Which is amazing when you truly accept in your heart of hearts
That's OK. This is not something I can fight. This is not a problem I can solve. I've tried everything for over 10 years, every recipe in the book, everything, and didn't solve it. So I might have to live with it. And I truly accepted that in the core of my being that I will live with anxiety. That was one precursor. The other precursor was reconnecting with my child self, my child self from before my father died and I suddenly
instantly turned into an adult, reconnecting with that way of being in the world that when you are not trying to control the world, when you are in full communion with the world, you're not trying to control your destiny, you're not thinking about the future, you don't have lists about things that need to be achieved, you're just there for the world enjoying the moment and you're taken by the wind with the flow of life.
and reconnecting with that, which to me had to do with my passion for computers. And I started designing my own computers, what I always wanted to do when I was a kid. And I went to university at 17, and I designed computers for others, but never designed my own computers. So I started doing that. And somewhere in the course of two years, that conjunction of accepting fear
accepting that it would never go away, that it's not a problem to be solved and reconnecting with my child self. Somehow, don't tell me I cannot tell you how or when one day I woke up and I looked back over the previous two years and I realized, well, I haven't been anxious. I still have some crisis here and there, but I tuned into what I like to call the movements of the impersonal in my mind.
Sometimes I personalize it and I call it the diamond. And I say, you know, my life now is about doing the diamonds bidding. My life's not about me anymore. And that's sort of that acceptance that my life is not about me, that I'm just here riding a wave. Nature's trying to do something through me. And my only choice is do I resist that or do I not?
And naturally and very spontaneously making the choice to not resist it means that you surrender control. So if you ask me where do I want to be in five years, I would just laugh at your face. I have no idea and I have no need to know. I will be where I will be in five years, so long as I keep in tune with the movements of the impersonal within me. And I'm completely relaxed with that. And that surrender of control was a surrender of fear.
because if you don't feel that you need to be in control, fear does not have fertile ground to grow and take hold because you're not trying to be in control. There is a kind of an acceptance of the impersonal, an acceptance that you're just a part of nature. It's like that blossom of my apple tree telling itself, where do I want to be in five days? It's ridiculous. It's not about the blossom.
It's not even about the tree, it's about the whole flow of nature. And when you internalize that insight, at least for me, when I internalize that insight, not because I tried, not because I had a plan to internalize it, it just happened. I realized it with hindsight. You know, just by looking back, I realized this dynamic played out. It happened. I somehow let go of the need to control, of the need to plan. I surrendered into the movements of the impersonal.
And I'm fine. I'm surprisingly fine. I still have horrible tinnitus in both ears. I hear a dentist's drill in both my ears, very loud, constantly, 24 hours a day. Thought about suicide twice, three and a half years ago. I'm in peace with that even. How did this happen? I have no idea how this happened. I have no recipes. I can't tell you, follow these steps. I can only tell you what the precursors for me were.
And I still experience fear and dread occasionally, but it's nowhere near that right I used to have. Now, the bad news is I feel a lot less energy to write. I feel a lot less need to write. It's like the diamond used my dread to corral me into doing its bidding. And now that it can't use it anymore,
I am much more in the now. If you ask me what my intuition points to, my intuition is that I will still play with computers, old computers and designing my own computers for another year or two to exhaust that childhood need and to be really in communion with my child self. And after that, I sense, I see it coming on the horizon. A whole new phase of writing will come, but much more mature writing.
much more centered writing, not writing driven by dread, driven by the diamond, but more centered, more mature, more adult writing, which will be a lot less conceptual because it's more adult. That's what I sense. So knock on wood, let's hope that that's how things will play out. But I don't need to know if that's what will happen. What will happen is what will happen. That's how I live now.
Chris, do you have any thoughts on that? Does anything occur to you or any stories come to mind after you hear that? Well, of course, there's value in Bernardo's advice and his anecdote. I tend to have a much more focused view of the future. That's not to say that I plan everything in advance.
But I strive to see the possibilities and then strive to make out the one that best that is optimal for my purposes and constantly just, you know, I'm more of a driven person. I don't have these these emotions that plague me all, you know, all the time the way some people do. God bless them. I mean, it's difficult to have to put up with that, but I'm more of a purpose driven animal.
I'm the kind of person who can instantly let go of that kind of thing. I feel anger. Sometimes if the anger is too intense, bad things can happen.
If I can get through that, if I can stop from becoming enraged, then 10 minutes later I'm just fine. Unless it was such a serious thing that I can't afford to be fine, if you know what I mean. Okay? But I can let go of things very easily and then divert myself onto what I consider to be a more productive track. This is something that, you know, if I have the energy, and as Bernardo was talking about, sometimes you just don't feel the energy because it's like there's a diamond sucking the energy out of you.
for its own purposes and trying to turn you in a certain direction or whatnot. And that is something that I very much try to avoid. If I realize, well, there seems to be something beyond me that is using me in some way, I curtail it unless I discern that it's good for me. So I'm constantly making these judgments about purpose and about what I should be doing and about my impulses, subjecting them to cognition. And cognition is not primary.
It's basically not a primary function. It comes out of will, out of telesis, which is what we've been talking about here. Just like access consciousness, for example, as opposed to phenomenal consciousness. That all is post-telec to me. So although I do use cognition for purposes of reflection, all of this takes place with me on an emotional level beneath the surface.
Okay, in other words, I realize, okay, it's not good. This is going to lead to bad feelings. I'm not going to be satisfied doing this immediately. I change directions and try to get myself on a track that is going to be more productive for me and not going to subject me to any kind of bad feelings or ill will or anything like that. Let me be personal for a couple minutes, maybe three minutes.
I've spoken about this issue on the podcast before. You can see either the Carl Friston Part 2 podcast or the Diana Posilka podcast for more information. You can also skip forward five minutes. I didn't know what it meant to take that seriously until I felt it. It's different to feel something than it is to analyze it. Anyway, so I felt it terrified, terrified out of my mind. And I remember something calling me to the center, something calling me saying, Kurt, you have you've been keeping your mind
far too open. There is such a thing as when people say, keep your mind open, but not so open that your head falls out. I remember saying, Hey, yeah, that's just to justify your own closed mindedness. Something was saying there's truth to that. Come back to the center. Come back. Not to say that it's not real. Like you have to decide there is a reality to it, but you have to decide this. And so from like, like, I feel like my, for the past few months, almost all of my thoughts, like it's abating. My anxiety is abating.
but I feel like I'm constantly preventing myself from a nervous breakdown. And what's helped is a middle ground between you both, which is to retain a sense of control. So something called act therapy acceptance and commitment therapy. So you accept that's where Bernardo you come in where it's like, okay, you accept that, you know, these thoughts are simply thoughts and they may occur just like
Thoughts occur to everyone. Don't think you're ever going to get rid of them. And maybe they will become zero, but don't think that. And then also to accept the thoughts, but not merge with them, not fuse with them. Accept simply means acknowledge softly, gently. I see you thought interesting that you're there. I don't need to take you seriously. And then just go to where your values are and you commit to where your values are, which is where the control comes in.
So you have to have some values. So my values are my wife and love and this world and seeing behind my eyes and actually feeling like I'm behind my eyes, which was not there for two months or so, like depersonalized. Anyway, I've come to the decision now that what matters is
It's not a toll is like I used to love toll like doing everything speaking to and learning great theories and I still love that I still do that actually gives me some same some sanity if it's not consciousness related this math and physics because dispassionate but what's primary is my relationship with my wife and love
And so if I have to sacrifice a toe day of studying to go spend time with my wife, I do almost invariably. That was never there before. Work comes first before. Now it's like, no, no, no, Kurt, almost everything may fade in some manner. All of what I'm putting out on YouTube may fit. People may take it out of context. People may shape it just like the Nirvana logo. Kids wear it. It used to be from Nirvana, the band. Kids have no idea who Nirvana is, but they wear the shirt.
the term Nirvana used to mean something Buddhist but Nirvana took that and so constantly something will get taken away from you and change that's out of your hand love is primary just follow that so that's what I guide myself by now and that's given me some sanity the way I imagine it is almost like a pendulum instead of now swinging it to the other side which was me before trying to avoid no I don't want to think I don't want to think that that makes it come back it's a gentle nudge to the center I try not to
run from it. But it's not the same as facing it, which is what I thought I had to do. It's more the same as just interesting. Okay, let me move toward what I what I value. I want to put warning signs on all my interviews now because of that because like some people just advice should be advice should be taken slowly. Anyway, they're saying that this is some awakening and there's this quote from
HP Lovecraft, which I agree with, which is, hey, one of the greatest mercies of the world is our inability to correlate its contents, the whole reality's contents. And as soon as you do, you may go mad from the revelation or beg for the ignorance of the past and flee into the darkness from the light. And Jacobi, last quote, Jacobi had a quote, don't know which Jacobi, there's like 12 of them, that humans have one choice, but a single choice, either God or nothingness.
By choosing nothingness, man makes himself into a god, because it means everything around you is an apparition. I don't follow that logic. But regardless, I like the the poetics behind it. He said, so there's only one choice. God exists outside of me as a living being in and of himself, or I am God, there is no third. I think that's true. That's that. All right. So now you have like great insight into Kurt the past few months. The reason I tell you all this is because, well, hey,
I don't think it's quite accurate to say there are only these two alternatives. Either I have to be God or God has to exist entirely outside of me. There is a middle ground there. As a matter of fact, I would affirm that middle ground and say that if you make this false dichotomy
either I have to be God, totally solipsistic universe. That is a mistake. Basically you're dissociating yourself from your true highest level of identity.
You can't afford to do that. You have to try to take in the whole structure and understand it's very, very difficult. I mean, Lovecraft may have thought that this is something that drives you into the arms of Fulu or whatever. Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary for you to maintain your psychological equilibrium. It's homeostatic. You mentioned God a lot during this disquisition here, and God is a fixture now.
in your awareness. And that's a very, very good thing. Okay, when you talk about God says, you know, your Philippians, it says, you know, throw your, your cares on to God. Okay, you can't hand your cares off to God unless you're close to God, unless you're actually within standing distance, you can hand them off. And that's the whole point of that. Basically, you know, to hand things off to God is the same as handing them off to your own highest level of identity. It's not outside you, you're a part of it, you're a lower stratum,
Bernardo, man,
Who am I to render advice? I'm younger than Chris. If I can share something with you is that this is life. It's the process of life. Life buffets us and brings us to the edge. And it should, if it's not bringing you to the edge, you're not living fully.
The artist navigates the edge without falling down the precipice, but navigating the edge, because that's the path of maturation. That's the path of change. Otherwise, you will always remain with the same narratives, the same illusions, such as the illusion of identity, the illusion of control. These things don't go away if you're not tested by life.
So, hey, hooray to what's happening to you. It may feel extremely uncomfortable, but that's the point. That's the point. If you're always in your comfort zone, you're not going anywhere. And one day you will wake up in your death bed and think, what was this all about? What was this for? I wasted the whole thing. Now, that's not going to be your destiny, my friend. You're not going to that dark place.
There was something else I wanted to share with you, but it just escaped my mind. You just used a phrase, you know, not interjecting. You basically said the illusion of identity. Now, I understand that you have that in analytic idealism, you've got the idea that this is something like some kind of identity disorder, you know, this dissociative identity disorder in which everybody is an altar
of this one primary, primal identity, right? Is that what you're referring to? That it is illusory to think of you? Is that what the illusion of identity is? If you force me down the conceptual path, I would have to say yes. But I was not trying to speak conceptually. I'm not trying to speak theory to Kurt. Theory is here. And Kurt, oh, I remember now.
What you're suffering from is something that the vast majority of people have the opposite problem. You internalize a narrative, you internalize a worldview, you're capable of internalizing it. It comes from your head, purely conceptual, it sinks into the body and you can live from the perspective of that worldview and that's what you experience as
Testing your balance, testing your centeredness or threatening to make you lose yourself because you can embody what for most people is purely a conceptual narrative. Most people have the opposite problem. They cannot embody.
a narrative. They are incapable of making that translation. And what that means is that even if they understand certain things and they make progress cognitively in understanding, it doesn't change their lives. It doesn't touch their emotions. They continue to live according to old patterns, to old references, because there is a level in which they don't actually believe the conceptual narratives. You have your gates open.
Um, that is a tremendous advantage compared to most people, but also a liability because you have to watch that gate carefully. Um, you can, you can put yourself in a place from which it's very hard to emerge again. Um, but, uh, everything you said, uh, to me, I would just say, you know, hooray, cheers to life. You're living. Congratulations, man.
I'm going to comment on the illusory aspect because here's one aspect that gave me groundedness was when I was speaking to this
Professor of religion named Diana Pasolka. She was saying, Kurt, don't worry that half of the world thinks that I am God and so on because you don't know what they mean by that. I don't have the like I have an idea of what they mean. Could be misinterpreting what they mean. They could be wrong at the same time. Millions and billions of people have been wrong. All of these practices, meditation and psychedelics, they're meant to be done with the community and all these insights.
She said she would imagine if you went to some leader and you told them this insight, they'd be like, oh, no, no, like, that's what that that's completely wrong. Like you're not you are not God. Like you are an aspect of God or whatever it may be. And then she also said the Plato's cave journey is what's what's happening or the dark night of the soul. She is that phrase. She said the actual full story of that. You think this is reality, the wall.
You come out, you feel like that's an illusion. Then the end of the story is to somehow realize that what you thought was real in the beginning is indeed real, it's just real in another manner, like somehow more real. And then I remember something, Bernardo, that you said, look at this, this we think of as solid, we feel it, there's solidity to it, yet we look at it through a microscope and we say, yeah, the atoms are far apart, the solidity is an illusion.
That's if you take materialism as primary. What if you take your conscious experience? No, no, this is solid. This actually is solid. There's something real about that. There's something real about this table. There's something real about me inhabiting this world. I can go through this process where I feel like, oh, that's all an illusion. But then there's this quote about T.S. Eliot that the point of the journey is to come back where you started and know the place for the first time. I feel like that I'm slowly starting where I feel the reality of this more. I feel it.
But then there's a nagging part of me that's like, yeah, you're tricking yourself, Kurt, you're tricking yourself. We let our theories hijack the reality of our experiences. And that's a tragedy. Experiences are not nothing.
They're the only thing that is really real. That's not just abstraction. So it doesn't matter that you know there are atoms here and then the distance between the electron orbitals and the nucleus is enormous relative to the diameter of the particles themselves. Yeah, it's all true. But you experience this. You hold this. It has weight. It has texture. It feels moist and it satiates my thirst. This is all real stuff.
Now, a conceptual understanding and conceptual narrative behind that may be true or not, but it doesn't take away from the experience. Whatever this is, it is an experience and it is real as such. The problem is that we are in a society which implicitly tells us experiences in themselves are nothing. It's the thing that lies behind the experience that counts.
That's absolutely nonsensical. All we have is experience. The narrative behind it can help us develop a certain understanding, but not by robbing us of the immediacy of experience, which ultimately is all we have. We can add understanding to that, but that understanding is a layer on top of the immediacy of experience. And look, the ego exists. It's a tool.
Without it, I wouldn't know which mouth to bring the fork. So there is something there that we call the ego. Now, is it your subjectivity in and of itself or not? That's a valid question. I would answer that the ego is not your subjectivity. It's a certain configuration of experiences or a narrative within your subjectivity. And yes, idealism ultimately is a form of cosmic solipsism. And you can
dip your toes in those waters and you recoil from it. I call it the vertigo of eternity. It's a place that is very hard to visit, very hard to confront, which may be a clue to why we are here, you know, in this form. But maturing has always to do with
poking you out of your comfort zone and buffeting you a little. And you just have to hold the boat together so it can continue to navigate and not sink. But I don't think there is anything intrinsically bad about the fact that the waters are trying. It's trying stuff. And that's how we progress.
I'm not a prophet. I'm not going to predict your future and you come from a different place than me. Your life has a different context. What holds to me may not hold to you. It doesn't hold to you. But now I'm going to do exactly what I said I wouldn't do, which is make a prediction. So forgive me for that. Okay. But there will moment there will come a moment when you realize that
your problems will dissipate not because you answered your questions, but because you no longer feel the need to ask them. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Okay, so Chris, whatever thoughts come to you, and then we can move on to another couple of questions. I'm sorry to go on this side. You were just communicating with your own highest level of identity. So, okay, that's basically God. And the reason that you are able to communicate with God is that you are an aspect of God.
God is reality. It's the ultimate reality. It almost has to be that way, otherwise it makes no sense to call something God. Okay, you are a part of God, and you are a stratum of God's identity. It's as simple as that. And you give rise to things. Your experiences, they are identities. Your experience is not something that
It's one unary coherent thing and yet it can be teased apart into this idea of form and substance. It's basically an experience as an interface. It's an interface between you and reality. It's you accepting input from the outside world or internal input from yourself and transducing it and then turning that into a thought or into behavior. This is what it's doing for you.
So your experiences, even your purely mental experiences, are of utmost value to you. They are identities that are a part of your identity, and you are a part of a greater identity. So you've got this continuum of identities, and it's nested, it's a Russian doll.
This Marshawn beast mode lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks whether
football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from
any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,
Well, hey man, any compliment from you is an honor. So let's just end this with
What do you all value? What do you value most? Chris? What do I value most? God. In other words, the identity of reality. And of course, supporting and aiding the fulfillment of reality. I believe that reality actually has a goal, a teleological purpose, that it is determined by its structure. Basically, it's built into what it is.
and that it is my job to help reality fulfill its goals, its teleological impetus, which derives from its structure. Because I'm a part of it, and it's my own highest level of identity, and it's my job to help it just as it helps me. Okay? I'm carried within it, I exist within it, so I'm going to return the favor, and I'm going to try to reinforce it as much as I can. That's what's valuable to me. And then, of course, we have all the things that are valuable to everybody.
The idea of love, I have a wife, I have a home, I have pets, I have dogs that love me, the taste of a good meal or a good drink, having fun with your friends, going out and enjoying nature, all of those things are valuable to me. But the one basic imperative that I feel is to integrate with reality perfectly, help reality reinforce itself.
because that's all there is. There is nothing outside of that. You try to extricate yourself from reality like the Buddhists are trying to do and you end up in nirvana and you're nothing. Your identity has at that point fused with that of the entire universe and you no longer have an individual identity at all. Your identity is a self-distributed thing that covers everything and you have lost your identity as you know. Okay, you're here and you feel your individual identity and that's very, very important.
Okay? Your job, your job, the job of your identity is not only to enjoy life as you were put here to do, but also to help life and to help reality reinforce itself. All right? That's what I consider value. Bernardo. The answer I will give you is not the answer I would like to give you. I would like to tell you I value love the most.
Relationships the most, human decency and justice. Nietzsche struggled with this question and he answered power. Power is what he considered the most important, the will to power, in contrast to Freud's will to pleasure. But the truth is, and you know,
Part of maturing is accepting your own truths and the truth is about yourself even when you don't like it. The truth is that for me the most important thing is truth and that how to probably surrender everything else to stare the truth in the face, whatever the price, whatever the cost. That for me is the highest calling. It's how I'm put together. It's not how I
wish I was put together to prioritize truth above all else is not trivial. Again, Nietzsche, he was very explicit about that. He said, why do we want to know the truth? What's the point? He thought it was ridiculous. It was a knee jerk reflex that if we thought it through, we would abandon. It's not about what is true.
And I meditated on that for years. I went to the extreme of visiting the places where Nietzsche had those thoughts, which, thank goodness, are recorded. We know where he was. And I probably stood within a meter of where he stood. But at the end of all that struggle,
It's it's the truth that shines through and the truth is my highest commitment is the truth. That's that's how I am. I yeah, I hate it in a sense, but that's how I am. Thank you all so much for coming out. This was thank you. Thank you all. This was well enlightening in many ways. OK, I would just.
Once again, repeat after that inspiring comment by Bernardo that truth and reality are basically two ways of looking at the same thing. When you say that's real or something is real, you are saying that it is true. And when you say that something is true, you're saying that it's real. So in dedicating yourself to truth, you also dedicate yourself to reality.
and both of our comments, both what both of us said combined in this one truth, this one real truth, the same thing. Thank you all. I hope you have fun. More than that. And thank you for being so open, for being so truthful and so out there.
with the rest of us.
The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you. And a special thank you to Jeannie Langan, whose diligence made this all possible. Thank you, Jeannie.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 9720,
"audio_duration_seconds": 8036.75,
"completed_at": "2025-12-01T01:31:32Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 20.896,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
},
{
"end_time": 36.067,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 20.896,
"text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
},
{
"end_time": 64.514,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 36.34,
"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
{
"end_time": 78.114,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 66.203,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 96.288,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 78.609,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 114.036,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 96.698,
"text": " Recently, a contest was launched for those interested in making physics and or consciousness explainer videos. It's essentially the physics slash consciousness version of 3Blue1Brown's contest, and Brilliant has come on board to Divi 5000 USD, equally among the top five. The details are linked below."
},
{
"end_time": 130.35,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 114.036,
"text": " If you'd like to submit your understanding or explanation of some CTMU concept or how Bernardo's analytical idealism works, then feel free. Chris Langen is an autodidact who has the highest reported IQ in America, and he's conceived of an extremely inventive theory of everything"
},
{
"end_time": 150.111,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 130.35,
"text": " Based in language or meta-language and logic or meta-logic, called the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or the CTMU for short. The link to Chris's CTMU YouTube channel as well as other links are in the description. Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of the Essencia Foundation. Bernardo is one of the most cogent champions of metaphysical idealism."
},
{
"end_time": 177.312,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 150.111,
"text": " That is the notion that reality is essentially mental, and he puts this forward with analytical precision. The link to Bernardo's YouTube page and other links are in the description as well. In this podcast, Bernardo and Christ both expound on their views on consciousness, on computation, and whether materialism or idealism is most coherent. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics, dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrains of"
},
{
"end_time": 204.753,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 177.534,
"text": " theories of everything, that is, primarily from a physics perspective, but as well as exploring the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us. If you'd like to hear more podcasts like these, then do consider going to patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal and supporting with whatever you can as support from the patrons and the sponsors are the only reason I'm able to do this full time. So thank you. And now thanks to the sponsors, the first of which is brilliant."
},
{
"end_time": 223.592,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 204.753,
"text": " Brilliant is a place to learn math, science, and engineering through bite-sized interactive learning experiences. If you're interested in theories of everything from a physics perspective, then you've likely heard of constructor theory, which is a toe that's heavily predicated in information theory. So I decided to take Brilliant's course on random variable distributions and knowledge slash uncertainty"
},
{
"end_time": 248.899,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 223.592,
"text": " And after taking that course, I can finally see why the formula for entropy is defined the way that it is. It's actually an extremely natural formula. You can also learn group theory. If you're interested in the standard model, then you'll need to know what u1 cross su2 cross su3 is. Visit brilliant.org slash toe to get 20% off the annual subscription. I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons, keep pushing until you've done at least four. And I think you'll be greatly surprised"
},
{
"end_time": 271.647,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 248.899,
"text": " Nice to meet you, Chris. Nice to meet you too, Bernardo."
},
{
"end_time": 297.142,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 272.449,
"text": " Plenty of people are"
},
{
"end_time": 323.746,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 298.353,
"text": " Why don't we start? Just so you know, we'll talk about metaphysics, consciousness and computation. Those are the general themes for today. We'll start with the substrate independence of consciousness, quote unquote. So Lambda, I'm sure you've heard of this computer or this algorithm or this AI called Lambda. Some people claim is indeed conscious. Why or why not? And we'll start with you, Bernardo, if you don't mind. Certainly not."
},
{
"end_time": 353.746,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 324.121,
"text": " When we say something is conscious, what we normally mean is that something has private conscious inner life that is separate from yours, from mine and from the rest of nature. So to be conscious is to have private experience, private phenomenality, another way to put it. And I think we have absolutely no reason to think that a silicon mechanism has private inner life of its own."
},
{
"end_time": 383.643,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 354.053,
"text": " Is it in consciousness? Absolutely. Everything is in consciousness. Everything begins, unfolds and ends in a field of subjectivity that underlies all nature in my view. So lambda is in consciousness. That doesn't mean that it is conscious in and of itself. I think what nature is telling us empirically all the time is that private conscious in your life correlates with"
},
{
"end_time": 412.261,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 383.933,
"text": " Well, life, metabolism, protein folding, DNA transcription, ATP burning, all that good stuff. This is a far from trivial process, metabolism. It uniquely separates biology from everything else in the universe. And it ties all biology together, despite the tremendous differences between, say, an amoeba swimming in my toilet and me."
},
{
"end_time": 439.514,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 412.619,
"text": " We are completely different, yet if you look down a microscope to the details of metabolism, we are identical. We all do protein folding, ATP burning, transcription and all that stuff. So nature is screaming to us that what private conscious inner life looks like is warm, moist biology, metabolism. And lambda is a silicon computer. Now, can it"
},
{
"end_time": 458.524,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 440.009,
"text": " Emulate or simulate human cognitive processing very well. Well, I have little doubt that it does, but the simulation of a phenomenon is not the phenomenon. I mean, I can simulate kidney function on my computer accurately down to the molecular level."
},
{
"end_time": 481.237,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 458.985,
"text": " And yet my computer will not be on my desk because a simulation of kidney function is not kidney function. So lambda is simulating human intelligence. That doesn't mean that it is conscious because a simulation is not the thing simulated. It's a primary logical mistake that unfortunately has been rendered seemingly plausible."
},
{
"end_time": 511.305,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 481.527,
"text": " Chris, what's your opinion on the same question? If you want, I can reread the question. Read the question again."
},
{
"end_time": 534.036,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 511.988,
"text": " I agree with everything that Brown said, but go ahead and you begin. So whether we basically want to know whether or not Lambda is indeed conscious, why or why not? Are you talking about the Lambda calculus of a program? Recently in the news, there was this AI from Google, which was much like a like a talk, like a bot, a talk bot. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 556.681,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 535.196,
"text": " I will probably explain incorrectly. So Bernardo, do you mind explaining what lambda is? It's a chat bot. That's what it is. Yeah. And it probably will pass the Turing test. Well, for what that means, I mean, as Bernardo pointed out, the Turing test isn't the end all be all. You've still got a machine simulator. Even if it stimulates very, very well and convinces you that it's human. Nevertheless, it is not human."
},
{
"end_time": 587.022,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 557.039,
"text": " So basically you're asking well the lambda calculus is a construct, it's a computer program, it's a mathematical construct which exists in something that can be likened to the syntax, the accepting syntax of something in computation theory that's called an acceptor. You've got acceptors and processors, they transduce information, they accept input and output from the external world and then they process it internally. So we're talking about consciousness being the internal phase of that process and the idea is"
},
{
"end_time": 617.466,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 589.019,
"text": " Metaphysics, as far as metaphysics is concerned, as far as I'm concerned anyway, in my opinion, metaphysics is about putting the mental side of your existence in contact with the physical side. We understand the physical side quite well, thanks to the empirical sciences, and the mental side, we don't have such a firm grasp on it. Kant, you know, came up and started talking about mental categories in terms of which we perceive phenomenal reality."
},
{
"end_time": 646.186,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 617.927,
"text": " and that gives us a clue as to what we're talking about. We are talking about something very much like accepting syntax with a computational acceptable. Okay, the idea of putting those two things together requires something called, all we have to do is we, it's a very simple operation, we basically say that cognition is akin to a cognitive identity language, it allows us to identify things, so it's a language. Then we say the physical universe is a manifold,"
},
{
"end_time": 675.794,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 646.783,
"text": " The idea, then, is to connect these two things. That takes a kind of metal language that spans both of these two object languages that we have, one of which deals with values, coordinate systems, and things like that. That's the manifold. And then you've got the other side, which is qualitative, more attributed. That's the metal side. So we're uniting those two things in one metaphorical language that has to be quantized in a certain way."
},
{
"end_time": 702.568,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 676.459,
"text": " and those identity operators that I was just talking about, that are a little bit like computational acceptors, those are the quanta. Okay, they're active signs. If you look at the linguistic aspect of what I'm talking about, they are active signs in the language, but they are also the points of the manifold or the universe that contains the content to which you refer with the language. Follow me? This is a mathematical, this is a, this is something that I, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 731.323,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 703.012,
"text": " You said that there's a mental world and then there's something like the physical world which you said is like a manifold? If you take a state, it consists of attributes and values for the attributes. You can't take those two things apart."
},
{
"end_time": 758.114,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 732.312,
"text": " What I'm saying is they're metaphorically coupled. You can deal with pure attributes, but you can't do that without instances or, at any rate, a cognitive identity operator to actually perform the mental functions involved. As far as the values are concerned, you take an object without attributes, that's an oxymoron."
},
{
"end_time": 783.933,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 758.524,
"text": " There is no object that is totally without attributes. You've pinned an attribute on it by calling it an object. So you can't take those two things apart. There's simply no way to do it. So this dualism between the mental and physical sides of reality, what I say, is nonsense. It takes this metaphorical approach and this metaphorical mentality, which is what I'm talking about. Bernardo, do you have any thoughts on that or questions? Chris jumped into"
},
{
"end_time": 809.121,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 784.206,
"text": " Probably more details of his theory, which I'm not acquainted with. So if I start asking questions now, you'll probably speak for the next two hours just for me to understand something I should have understood by reading a paper, which I haven't read. So I'm not going to tax you with this, Chris. Yeah. Well, what I was trying to answer more or less was the idea of what metaphysics is and how consciousness relates to metaphysics."
},
{
"end_time": 831.425,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 809.957,
"text": " So what I'm saying is that metaphysics has to be this metaphorical metal language and consciousness relates to it as a distributed property thereof. That would be your particular usage of the word metaphysics. Metaphysics is a word that has been used since the pre-Socratic, so there is a sort of a"
},
{
"end_time": 861.698,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 832.381,
"text": " Common meaning for the word in philosophy, metaphysics, that which stands behind physics or the essence or the beingness of things as opposed to appearances and behavior. Precisely. I'm saying that has to take the form of a metaphorical metal language, of the metal and physical sides of reality. In other words, span between both of those things, building a bridge between them. That's the purpose of metaphysics. And I understand that many different people have defined it in many different ways."
},
{
"end_time": 888.677,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 862.108,
"text": " And the long and short of it is, although I respect people having their own ideas about things, I don't find that especially useful. You can go and look at everybody's definition and not come out with anything very stable that you can work with. So I settled on a mathematical structure that I can work with to make sense of these concepts, these metaphysical concepts. So how about we talk about computation? So what does computation mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 918.712,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 889.07,
"text": " What is reality's relationship to computation? Obviously, that depends on one's definition of reality. Let me tell you the reason why I'm asking this question. It's because some people think that our conscious experience is generated by an algorithmic process. And then some people don't think that. So, for example, Penrose, famously. And secondly, some people think reality is understood as or is equivalent to computation. So Wolfram, for example. Again, the question is,"
},
{
"end_time": 949.462,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 920.179,
"text": " What is computation and what is its relationship to reality? Bernardo. In its most generic definition, computation just means changes of state. When future states depend on previous states, then you have a computation. It's the function by means of which you create future states based on past states. That's the most generic possible definition of computation. Some of the other things you brought up"
},
{
"end_time": 975.026,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 949.838,
"text": " Attach more qualifications to the word computation. Wolfram considers the laws of physics to be emergent from cellular automata like computation. In other words, local computations based on simple rules. So now you're not seeing only computation. Now you're specifying more what kind of computation is involved. Then you have digital physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1001.305,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 975.503,
"text": " in which the idea is that the laws of physics should be reducible to digital computations. So you're specifying what kind of computation there are analog. There has been analog computers in our history and less than 100 years ago. So computation is not only digital. So most people, when they say, well, nature is a computer, usually they mean something more than to just say computations happen."
},
{
"end_time": 1027.722,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1001.305,
"text": " Because, yes, computations happen. The state of the universe is changing, so it's computing, by definition. There is nothing metaphysically polemical or complicated about it. It is when you add more qualifications to what you mean, that's where it gets tricky. When you say, for instance, that consciousness does not have a nontic reality of its own,"
},
{
"end_time": 1057.295,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1028.063,
"text": " but is the result of a computation and therefore epiphenomenal in some sense. Now you're saying more than just that the universe computes. Now you're saying not only does the universe compute, sometimes it structures its computations in such a way that it produces an epiphenomenal result that we know as consciousness. Now you're saying something distinct and absolutely wrong and internally contradictory and incoherent and explanatory powerless."
},
{
"end_time": 1079.121,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1057.568,
"text": " But at least you are saying something. Penrose would say that in orchestrated reduction together with Hameroff, they would say that it's when mass crosses a certain threshold that you have collapse and the moment of collapse is an experience. So they are saying a lot more than to just say the universe computes."
},
{
"end_time": 1092.073,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1079.548,
"text": " So if you stick to the general thing, the universe computes, I would say, of course, because computational computation, generically speaking, just means that there are state transitions."
},
{
"end_time": 1116.374,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1092.688,
"text": " And future states are based on prior states, which we know empirically is what's happening in the universe. The universe doesn't begin at every moment independently of what the state was before, otherwise it would be completely random. And it's not, it's predictable. So yes, there are computations, but that's a very generic and non-polemical thing to say. Chris, again, so the question is,"
},
{
"end_time": 1133.831,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1117.466,
"text": " What is computation and what's reality's relationship to computation? And again, what's behind the question is some people think that the mind has to be non-algorithmic, like Penrose, and then some people think that reality itself is algorithmic or computational, like Wolfram."
},
{
"end_time": 1164.121,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1135.998,
"text": " Okay, the problem with, you know, computations with a Turing machine does. A Turing machine can do its computations in one of two ways. It's got a, you know, recursive process, and it can either do things deterministically, like Bernardo was talking about, something in the past happens, then you've got causal efficacy within the machine, and then something else happens, or it can do it non-deterministically, which means that it's making random choices. In either case, those don't describe consciousness, because those random junctures, they're disconnects."
},
{
"end_time": 1192.381,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1164.497,
"text": " Consciousness is something that we understand as a pretty much continuous process. Whereas if you take non-deterministic computation, there is this disconnect there. Whereas if it's deterministic, then consciousness is completely trivial. In other words, a deterministic process gives you no room for free will, doesn't allow you to make choices, doesn't allow you to realize your"
},
{
"end_time": 1219.753,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1192.705,
"text": " your will as Schopenhauer might put it. You see what I mean? So that's the main limitation of computation theory. The fact that you've got this pseudo causal dichotomy between determinacy and randomness. Now there's a third way to look at things and that is called self-determinacy. That is what occurs in the metaphorical system, which is why instead of using computation to model this whole thing, I use something called proto-computation."
},
{
"end_time": 1246.203,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1220.486,
"text": " Because quantum Turing machine is a little bit like a classical Turing machine. Still got the tape, it's still got the processor. That tape, by the way, that's like a typographical array in formal systems. And this is, once again, inadequate. The reality is generative. It actually has a way of putting itself together from scratch. It originates things rather than causing them."
},
{
"end_time": 1257.568,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1246.903,
"text": " So, that would be my answer to the shortfalls of computation modeling consciousness. If I if I can just comment on something."
},
{
"end_time": 1280.23,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1258.746,
"text": " When I said the universe certainly computes, I didn't mean to restrict it to deterministic computation. I know that. There is indeterministic or non-deterministic computation. Quantum computers are not deterministic and yet they produce precise solutions to very complicated problems, solutions that you can test and see while they are really solutions. They do so mechanistically, right."
},
{
"end_time": 1313.353,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1283.507,
"text": " Well, there has to be structure to computation. We may call that mechanistic if we want. There has to be structure. Otherwise, it's just randomness. The universe doesn't seem to be completely random. There is order and there are regularities in nature. We model them in the form that we call the laws of physics. So there is at least emergent order, even if it's not there from the beginning, which I think is a tough case to make. But I'm sensitive to the possibility."
},
{
"end_time": 1341.442,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1313.541,
"text": " there is at least emergent order. And even with a fundamentally non-deterministic substrate at the bottom level, you can still perform meaningful computations by playing with the emergent statistical rules. Like quantum physics is indeterministic on a case-by-case basis, but because of the law of large numbers, the statistics are very nicely predictable."
},
{
"end_time": 1365.06,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1341.954,
"text": " and that's what quantum computers will leverage. They will leverage that emerging order that comes with the law of large and large numbers and produce very precise and accurate solutions to problems. So computations can be meaningful and computations and non-deterministic. Probability theory, you can't get the randomness out of"
},
{
"end_time": 1394.991,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1365.606,
"text": " You take all the randomness out of probability theory and it ceases to be probability theory, then it becomes a classical mechanistic system, right? And in order to accommodate that, we change from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. We need something more than that, something that is pre-real, what John Wheeler called pre-geometry. We need something that actually precedes mechanisms, that precedes computation, that even precedes cognition. And that is what I refer to as, what Schopenhauer referred to as will, what I refer to as"
},
{
"end_time": 1422.295,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1395.64,
"text": " Schopenhauer, you could make a case that he was against determinism or you could make a case that he was a complete determinist. I am with the latter camp. I think Schopenhauer was a total determinist. He believed in determinism."
},
{
"end_time": 1450.299,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1422.739,
"text": " famous statement that you can act according to your will, but you cannot will what you will. In other words, what you will is already determined. So that you can follow your choices doesn't mean that there is no determinism because your willing is already determined. What I was referring to is the title of this magnum opus, the word is will and representation. Basically, the will has to somehow proceed"
},
{
"end_time": 1477.159,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1450.742,
"text": " the representation or is totally useless and trivial. I don't think that Schopenhauer was saying something trivial. I think that he actually felt that the will had something to do with reality above and beyond simple representation. The will was the essence of the world for Schopenhauer. That's correct. Now, but how can it be deterministic? How can it be deterministic without idea or representation?"
},
{
"end_time": 1504.497,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1477.824,
"text": " If the flow and movements and dynamics of the wheel fits with describable patterns, then it's not free. Actually, I like to make the case that there is no semantic space between determinism and total randomness without structure. And we try to fit free will somewhere in between, but I think it's incoherent. So for Schopenhauer, the essence of the world is will,"
},
{
"end_time": 1534.189,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1504.804,
"text": " The essence of us is will. Everything is will. And by the way, there is only one will, the one eye of the world that looks out from every creature as he wrote it. But that will, the patterns of behavior of that will are archetypal. He even made a comparison to Plato's ideal forms, which was his way to say the will is not arbitrary. It's not random."
},
{
"end_time": 1562.688,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1534.616,
"text": " It fits according to certain templates that he, and then in the second edition of the world as will and representation, he added something to say, well, I actually misrepresented Plato. And then he tried to correct that, but he still insisted on the main point, which is the wheel unfolds according to predictable templates. And in that sense, the unfolding of the wheel is not random or. Well, the way I interpret what"
},
{
"end_time": 1584.36,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1563.114,
"text": " Schopenhauer was saying, I know you're an expert on Schopenhauer, but the way I interpret what he was saying was basically there was a combination of will and representation and it's the combination that's important. So that's what I mean, but when I use the term metaphor, I mean you're putting those two things together, right? But there is something else, there is a higher form of determinacy"
},
{
"end_time": 1593.387,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1584.497,
"text": " I call it meta causation sometimes that actually is determining what happens. It's not just the representation. It's not just the will. It's the two things intended."
},
{
"end_time": 1617.773,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1594.889,
"text": " Brief aside for today's sponsor NordVPN, please continue watching as doing so supports toe. For me, privacy is a large deal. I'm not a fan of the tech giants or ISPs having such huge amount of information on my IP, my location. NordVPN keeps my information encrypted so I don't have to worry about the immense data that I have that's being put out there being sold or even known."
},
{
"end_time": 1644.428,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1617.773,
"text": " NordVPN also has the added benefit that if you're jaded from the US Netflix, for example, then you can switch to the UK Netflix and it's as simple as a click of a button. You know I like referencing Dragon Ball Z and Miyazaki. Well, no need to travel to Japan for your favorite anime when NordVPN brings it directly to you. They even protect your phone's internet usage, all with one click of their software. Use the link nordvpn.com slash theories."
},
{
"end_time": 1669.889,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1644.428,
"text": " So for Schopenhauer, the will is the inner essence of everything. It's what really exists. He equates that to Kant's numena, the collection of numenoms, the numenom that forms existence, that forms the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 1688.66,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1670.333,
"text": " And the representation is just the outside appearance of the will. If I can quote him, the representation is how the will presents itself. He can be an analogy or an example. Combustion presents itself as flames."
},
{
"end_time": 1713.677,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1689.889,
"text": " Combustion is the thing in itself, an oxidation process that releases energy, forms ions leading to a plasma, and what we call flames is how it looks like. It's what combustion looks like. So for Schopenhauer, all there is is will. In other words, endogenous conscious states. That's what he means. By using the word will, he means endogenous experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 1730.469,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1713.985,
"text": " In other words, experiences that are not perceptual in nature, they are endogenous, they arise from within. And representation is how those experiences present themselves to external observation. So the world is will."
},
{
"end_time": 1759.121,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1731.101,
"text": " And the world presents itself to us as the physical world, which is pure representation. And for Schopenhauer, causality as a concept applies only to representation. So only when you're talking about the language of representation can you talk about causality. The will behind it as the thing in itself precedes causality, but it is not random."
},
{
"end_time": 1785.828,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1759.65,
"text": " because it follows certain archetypal templates and he goes on and compares that with Plato's ideal forms and so on. So, in essence, Schopenhauer, I think, well, in spirit, Schopenhauer was a determinist with the important caveat that he was a subtle determinist. He wouldn't say that causality is the whole thing. He would say causality is emergent. Causality is something"
},
{
"end_time": 1813.302,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1786.049,
"text": " that applies to the language of appearances, not of the things in themselves. But the things in themselves are not purely random, they also unfold according to certain templates. So in that sense, the spirit of determinism is preserved in Schopenhauer, if not the latter. Yes, I would say that Schopenhauer was a metaphorical meta-determinist, and I would say that basically he was a semiotician."
},
{
"end_time": 1838.268,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1813.712,
"text": " as well. I would say that he had this idea that there was something called will from which a semiotic representation emerged. Emergence is of course a concept that you've already mentioned. So in my system, in my system of metaphysics, telus is primary. Will is primary and then it factorizes itself. It actually fractionates or factors itself into"
},
{
"end_time": 1868.592,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1838.626,
"text": " two sides of representation, which is the sign and the thing signified by it, plus something called thirdness, which of course is the interpreter of the sign. And all these three things are combined in the CTMU, in the Metaformal System, by something called Triality, which means that any object can be regarded as a relation or an operation or a process. You can take all of those things and everywhere combine them."
},
{
"end_time": 1895.794,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1869.07,
"text": " So that's very good. Yes, I think that this is something that Schopenhauer was trying to formulate, but he didn't have the mathematics at the time. He lived a long time ago and they didn't have most of these concepts out there, so he was unable to marshal them all and scrape them together and build the system. So that's what I'm trying to make up for, is lost time due to insufficient mathematical understanding of what was going on."
},
{
"end_time": 1926.834,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1896.834,
"text": " a kfc tale in the pursuit of flavor the holidays were tricky for the colonel he loved people but he also loved peace and quiet so he cooked up kfc's 499 chicken pot pie warm flaky with savory sauce and vegetables it's a tender chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls whatever that means the colonel lived so we could chicken kfc's chicken pot pie the best 499 you'll spend this season prices and participation may vary while supplies last taxes tips and fees extra"
},
{
"end_time": 1956.254,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1926.834,
"text": " The reference to semiotics. Well, semiotics is language related. It's something that has to do with language. That's the word semiotics. That's what it means. Actually, they're separated. Language and semiotics. Semiotics is the pure science, the pure representational information mappings that mediate between science and the reference. Whereas language is something that takes those signs and puts them together."
},
{
"end_time": 1986.118,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1956.63,
"text": " So I think for Schopenhauer, the will in itself would not be related to signs or language. Signs and language would be the paradigm of the appearances, of the representations, the Vorstellung, not anything inherent in the will itself. The will for Schopenhauer was beyond time and space."
},
{
"end_time": 2014.445,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1986.391,
"text": " and therefore the distinctions that are presupposed by semiotics wouldn't be there in the will in itself. Those distinctions would only appear in the appearances in the representations and then language could be applied or semiotics at first. And in Schopenhauer you would even have to get to what he called abstract representations"
},
{
"end_time": 2038.78,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2015.06,
"text": " which was his old-fashioned word for what we today would call meta-cognition. It's when you take a sign, in other words, an appearance, and then you cognitively process that sign. You think about the thought or you think about the perception. And that would be an abstract representation in Schopenhauer's language."
},
{
"end_time": 2068.626,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2039.36,
"text": " language would require that first. It would require not only representations, but abstract representations. In other words, representations of representations. And now we are talking about the world of semantics, you know, signs and their meanings and how those meanings are put together in a linguistic structure. So I'm not contradicting what you said, Chris, but we are talking about Schopenhauer and I feel"
},
{
"end_time": 2097.602,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2069.275,
"text": " a responsibility for adding more color and nuance to Schopenhauer? Yeah, no problem whatsoever. Yeah, I'm just saying that basically I do think that Schopenhauer was, although he may not have realized it completely, he was a, he was a monist. He believed in a monarch theory in which, in which it's not, tell us this or will and representation are not just dualistically linked and separate."
},
{
"end_time": 2125.486,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2098.217,
"text": " I say that on some level he understood that the representations have to be coming from the will. Will has some kind of metacausal privacy and that's more or less what I'm talking about. I'm saying that that representation is a binary mapping or a binary relation and I'm saying that it's like cellular mitosis. I'm saying that telus has to split into those two things."
},
{
"end_time": 2143.285,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2126.101,
"text": " while meanwhile forming itself from the bottom up by two things coming together in a physical event, two particles whacking to each other or something of this nature. And that's basically the metaphorical concept I'm getting at. And Schopenhauer is useful in this regard because that's what I think he was trying to get at too."
},
{
"end_time": 2170.998,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2144.394,
"text": " People today who think that Schopenhauer was in some sense a dualist or a dual aspect monist, I can only say they haven't read Schopenhauer. They didn't even begin to read Schopenhauer because the man couldn't have been more unambiguous, more explicit than he was. In the world as well in representation, particularly from the second edition on when he added twice the material, he kept the original but then doubled it."
},
{
"end_time": 2201.118,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2171.374,
"text": " He repeats himself so many times. He says the same thing in so many different ways, as though to make sure that he couldn't be misunderstood. Other than he was being paid by the word. Yeah, it's just it's surreal. In Wikipedia, the other day, it was still listing Schopenhauer as a dual aspect theorist. And even the world's supposed greatest scholar in Schopenhauer,"
},
{
"end_time": 2229.582,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2201.408,
"text": " character from the UK called Christopher Janeway. The man just doesn't understand Schopenhauer. I mean, I'm sure he has studied Schopenhauer a lot, but, you know, intensity of study does not guarantee understanding. And the guy doesn't even begin to understand Schopenhauer. He thinks Schopenhauer is a crass materialist, and it's absurd. I think I read some of your comments on Janeway in an essay you wrote about, I know you wrote a book on Schopenhauer."
},
{
"end_time": 2259.804,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2230.384,
"text": " Okay, let's talk about free will. It seems like that's what is at the core here. So I'll do so by reading a question which is directed toward Chris."
},
{
"end_time": 2289.104,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2260.213,
"text": " But then, obviously, if you pull something out even though it has some terminology that's specific to the CTMU, Bernardo, please comment on it as well, okay? Hey Kurt, I'm reposting this from YouTube. It's for Chris on the topic of free will derived from the CTMU. If you can ask this, you'll forever be my hero. You once said, I believe he's referring to you, Chris, Chris, you said that the universe, that because the universe has only itself to define itself, everything in it must exemplify its elementary freedom."
},
{
"end_time": 2315.162,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2289.616,
"text": " I think I understand from your defining reality as all real influence that reality cannot be abbreviated, because if you were able to simplify it with no loss, whatever was removed could not logically have been real. I understand where to take this to imply that reality could not have come from anything simpler than its full definition, and what can't be simplified must be contributory throughout."
},
{
"end_time": 2344.838,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2315.469,
"text": " That said, you've still maintained a strong distinction between tertiary syntactors, objects, and secondary syntactors slash tellers, life forms, read life forms, in terms of the amount that they are determinative. Considering that you've shown that reality is a mind, could we liken the distinction to the difference between ideas of objects and ideas of self, where just like ideas, all objects have some significance specific to them, however, seemingly banal, but only tellers"
},
{
"end_time": 2373.729,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2345.162,
"text": " as ideas of self would be self-modeling and therefore truly take on self-awareness. That's why they're called tellers. That's why self-type identity operators are called tellers, whereas tertiary identity operators are fermionic, more or less, and they are inanimate, or at least usually considered to be inanimate. But basically, they're embedded in secondary tellers and therefore they take that higher-order meta-causation, that ability to self-model from the secondary tellers."
},
{
"end_time": 2403.763,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2374.292,
"text": " So I assume you're answering the question right now, but Chris, I didn't understand the question. So can you explain the question back to myself and then answer it? Well, states, you know, there's no such thing as a state in isolation. States are always relatively defined. That's why we have theories of relativity and things like that. But what must a state be defined relative to? Well, to completely define any state in the universe, you need to refer to every other state in the universe because it parameterizes"
},
{
"end_time": 2433.49,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2404.258,
"text": " that state. Okay, and you don't get a complete parameterization unless you have the full matter distribution and the full metric. Okay, so that's what it takes. Can I see if I can I make an analogy? There's a duality between a set and the complement of a set, assuming that the set is within some other large set that you can call. So let's say the large set is S, you have a subset U, then there's a duality between you and you with a C, which is a complement of it, the tell or and the environment, right, exactly, self and non-self."
},
{
"end_time": 2453.285,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2434.309,
"text": " The environment, of course, is just the medium minus the tellur. In other words, it's external to the medium, but it's outside the boundary of the tellur. You get basically the self-dual construct, which is a tellur-environment coupling."
},
{
"end_time": 2482.227,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2454.189,
"text": " Okay, and this Taylor environment coupling is very important to the CTME because that's kind of a metaphorical quantum. It's one way of expressing CTME quantization. Okay, you have to put the medium together with the object. The object is its own medium through this process called expansion, which is the operation through which the universe evolves on the global level. Now, in order to get semantic meaning out of that, basically, it's called cosmic expansion."
},
{
"end_time": 2509.616,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2483.268,
"text": " to get meaning out of that, then you need another process called telerecursion, which then specifies that semantic structure to the syntactic structure that's built up by construction. Chris, it's been almost a year since I studied the CTMU. And when I did, I didn't go back to it, which means I've forgotten so much of it. So much of the terminology as I would have done myself. So much of the terminology, it goes through me. So telerecursion, I have a vague recollection that it's where"
},
{
"end_time": 2538.558,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2509.855,
"text": " the universe exercises free will, it looks at some generalized utility state and then makes a decision. That's where TELOR is self-configured. That's where secondary identity operators or TELOR is self-configured. They actually become the medium. And I know that Bernardo actually embraces something like this in his analytic idealism, I think is what he calls it. Basically, you've got to have that going."
},
{
"end_time": 2566.169,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2540.009,
"text": " Okay, so let me be blunt. So free will in your theory, in your model, Chris exists. And Bernardo, if I'm correct, you're against the idea of free will, at least currently. Well, let me tell you what free will is first before Bernardo gets going. Okay. Yes. As I said, there is no typographical array in the metaphorical system. Okay. You can't use the parameter as a state, you cannot just use a"
},
{
"end_time": 2593.302,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2566.596,
"text": " Fixed array, fixed array. The array has to be changing geometric, geometric dynamically is the term that the followers of Einstein came up with to describe what must be going on. It's happening behind the scenes. Okay. Free will happens because things are determined metacausally, you know, and metiformally, which means that things have to be coupled or factorized."
},
{
"end_time": 2620.179,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2594.514,
"text": " Right. In other words, it's just not this linear process, this causal process, but it's this higher order process called meta medicalization that is a curve. And this is free will. If we look at a conspensive cycle in the CTMU, it's an alpha omega cycle. In other words, it starts at an origin and ends with the boundary. And those two things are in advanced and retarded communication with each other. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 2649.599,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2620.623,
"text": " Free will is in determining one of those conspensive cycles, regardless of what its size is. So in other words, there is a way to define free will that gets out of this pseudo causal dichotomy between determinacy and indeterminacy that we were talking about earlier. In other words, you're creating the medium. You're actually creating space-time as you create a new state. When you bring that new mental state into your head, you've actually done it by creating space-time."
},
{
"end_time": 2680.077,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2651.271,
"text": " This is kind of a very profound, very weird way of looking at it. I understand that it sounds weird, but it's the only way, in my opinion, things can work. I will comment more generically because I'm not familiar with Chris's terminology, so it's impossible for me to go into the details of that. But you offered, Kurt, that I am currently against free will. There's a lot of nuance to this, so let me try to clarify this."
},
{
"end_time": 2708.746,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2680.35,
"text": " The question of free will is linked to a materialist metaphysics, like people worrying that if my choices are determined by the patterns of brain activity in my brain, then I don't have free will. Well, on that account, I think people need not be afraid because I don't think physiological patterns of brain activity cause your choices. I think they are what your choices look like."
},
{
"end_time": 2738.814,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2709.292,
"text": " In Schopenhauer's terminology, they are appearances, representations. The thing in itself is your choice. So no, your choices are not determined by your brain activity. Your brain activity is what the process of making choices look like. And then you would say, well, then I am endorsing free will. But now we have now to understand what people mean by free will. What people mean by it is that their choices are determined by that which they identify themselves with."
},
{
"end_time": 2765.35,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2739.514,
"text": " as opposed to being determined by something that they don't identify with and most people don't identify with their brain activity they never get to see it they don't identify with it that's why when when a physicalist says well your choices are determined by your brain activity people feel that as a violation of their free will because they identify with their own mental processes the the flow of their consciousness not with"
},
{
"end_time": 2792.449,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2765.811,
"text": " physical patterns of brain activity inside their skull, which they never saw in their lives. Now let's think about the mind of nature. The mind of nature is the only thing there is. So need and will are the same thing. There is nothing. I mean, I have to work, right? I'm forced by my society to work. So my choice to work is not freely determined by me."
},
{
"end_time": 2818.183,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2792.756,
"text": " It's a need imposed on me by the society and I don't identify with the rest of the society. So my free will has been cut short in that regard. But if you are the mind of nature, there is no society. There is no world outside of you. There's nothing beyond you. So whatever choices you make as the mind of nature are free in the sense that they are determined, but they are determined by you."
},
{
"end_time": 2846.852,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2818.797,
"text": " The need and the choice are one and the same. There is no semantic difference between determinism and free will at the level of the mind of nature. Because yes, the choices are determined. Even people who believe in free will, they are not saying that their choices are random. They are saying that their choices are determined by their preferences, their tastes. They are determined by them."
},
{
"end_time": 2875.589,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2847.449,
"text": " At the level of the mind of nature, every choice is determined by the mind of nature because there is nothing beyond the universal mind, the universal consciousness. So even the question of free will disappears. There is a semantic space for it. It doesn't make sense to talk about it, but the choices are still determined in the sense that they are not random. The choices of the mind of nature are determined by what the mind of nature is."
},
{
"end_time": 2896.698,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2876.254,
"text": " its characteristics, its properties, determine the choices it makes. It cannot abstract of itself, otherwise the choices would be completely random and that's incoherent to say that. Right, I would merely add that what we have to do is we have to distinguish free will what's happening there from determinacy and non-determinacy."
},
{
"end_time": 2926.715,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2897.159,
"text": " Okay, so it is useful to talk about free will just to distinguish it from what we usually mean by causation. And once we do that, then we find out that we can describe it in a certain way, right, in terms of this expansion and telepercursion thing that I was talking about earlier. I think ultimately, everything is determined. Even your choices are determined by your tastes, by your dispositions, your opinions. Can I ask you a question? Imagine"
},
{
"end_time": 2954.872,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2927.073,
"text": " Just imagine the origin of reality. What determined the structure of reality? In other words, there was nothing outside. According to general relativity, basically, reality is optically and geometrically closed. So there's nothing outside. There's no extrinsic causation that could have caused the universe to take any particular form. So aren't we talking about the universe taking its own form, somehow deciding within itself what form it should take?"
},
{
"end_time": 2976.032,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2955.879,
"text": " Deciding within itself can only happen if that decision is determined by what it is. Yes, but who decides what it is? At the end of the day, at the bottom level of nature, something exists that cannot be explained in terms of anything else."
},
{
"end_time": 3003.626,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2976.22,
"text": " We cannot explain one thing in terms of another forever. It doesn't matter what metaphysics one subscribes to, one cannot keep on reducing forever. Otherwise, eventually you will go back to the beginning and it will be circular reasoning. Unless it's idempotent. Unless it's idempotent. That actually applies to themselves. You don't get to the top of the ladder, you just keep on going from run to rung and each rung is identical to the last rung. Right? Then it's some form of infinite regress. No, idempotent says that it stays the same."
},
{
"end_time": 3027.466,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3004.189,
"text": " You're going the other way around now. I'm thinking about the reduction. I'm going down to the bottom. There has to be something at the bottom that simply is. It simply is what it is. Now earlier you said,"
},
{
"end_time": 3056.766,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3027.756,
"text": " For something to exist, it needs to have properties. To say that something is an object means that it has properties. So to be is to have properties. I agree with you there. To be is to have properties. Whatever it is that you are, you are one thing and not another. In other words, there are properties associated to your beingness. Now, whatever there is at the end of the chain of reduction, the bottom line of nature, it just is, and therefore it has properties."
},
{
"end_time": 3079.053,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3057.466,
"text": " everything that it does is then determined by its properties. It's determined by what it is, as opposed to what it is not or to what it could have been. So even the mind of nature is a mind that has properties. That's awfully inspecific, though. I mean, you're not attaching any properties to this ultimate reduction that you're talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 3105.162,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3079.582,
"text": " so and that but you're saying and yet everything that the universe is is somehow determined by it i don't think that's you know quite kosher i think that we have to actually try to attach some properties to it in order to do i am attaching i just said to be is to have properties so whatever there is at the bottom level of the chain of reduction it has properties now we may not know directly self-assigned properties right"
},
{
"end_time": 3131.766,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3106.084,
"text": " Not self-assigned. It's intrinsic to the beingness of the thing. To be is to have properties. But against what background are we distinguishing those properties? The background of what could have been. So the laws of nature are what they are. So gravity makes objects fall. We could live in a universe in which gravity pulls objects up. It's a repellent as opposed to an attractor. Now, that's not what is."
},
{
"end_time": 3154.804,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3132.176,
"text": " The laws of nature are what they are, as opposed to what they could have been in our imagination. So whatever nature is, it has properties, and that's why objects fall and static electricity is produced when you rub amber to a cloth. So the stuff that is"
},
{
"end_time": 3184.019,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3154.991,
"text": " I understand everything that you're saying, but if it had properties then those properties had negations and something had to distinguish those properties from their negations. Otherwise it is useless to talk about them having properties at all. There's got to be the property, there's got to be the logical complement of that property and something has to be doing the logic of it all for us to, for reality itself, for ultimate reality to perceive what its properties are or to act as though those properties exist. You follow me?"
},
{
"end_time": 3210.657,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3184.428,
"text": " That something is us and our ability to conceive of nature being different than what it is. And we are parts of reality, where sense or control is for reality as a whole. So that's our function. To conceive of what could have been in theory or in principle. And then after conceiving of that, to conceive of what is. Yeah, yeah, but I'm trying to speak of something even much simpler than we are getting to right now. What I'm trying to say is the following."
},
{
"end_time": 3239.172,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3211.032,
"text": " wherever there is at the chain of reduction, it has properties, and its behavior is determined by the properties it has. In other words, the behavior of nature is determined by what nature is, as opposed to anything else we could conceive nature to be. So ultimately, everything is determined, it ought to be determined. Otherwise, we just throw science down the toilet. Right, but that's a tautology."
},
{
"end_time": 3266.749,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3239.565,
"text": " We're looking for something when you say determined, I'm looking for a causal dependency. I'm looking for a cause and an effect of some kind. That's what we usually mean. What we're talking about, however, is a tautology. Everything is intrinsic because reality is optically closed. There is nothing outside of reality that is real enough to affect reality."
},
{
"end_time": 3281.374,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3267.654,
"text": " It's a logical contradiction to disagree with. What I said is not a tautology. It's not a tautology. What I'm saying is that of all things that nature could conceivably have been, it is what it is and not anything else."
},
{
"end_time": 3301.937,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3281.732,
"text": " and what it is entails properties and those properties determine what happens. So the universe expands as opposed to collapsing because the properties of the universe are such that they cause the universe to expand. I agree. So you can speak of causation in the language of representation in that sense without being tautological."
},
{
"end_time": 3331.323,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3301.937,
"text": " And if we speak of minds, then we have to abandon, well, we have to set aside the language. Yes, I'm trying to get down to the properties that you are ascribing to ultimate reality. Reality is what it is, as you say, you're 100% right about that. But what are its properties and how do things happen because of those properties? So I'm trying to get to that. So we've been speaking with the language of Schopenhauer's representations, the physical world and science and causation,"
},
{
"end_time": 3358.029,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3331.681,
"text": " But you and I agree that at the end of the day, there is only one mind, one consciousness. So what is the language of the will? How do we describe what I'm saying in the language of the will of the thing in itself? Well, Jung gave us the language. Jung talked about the archetypes, which are these intrinsic primordial templates of mental behavior. And those templates are intrinsic. They are there because mind is what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3387.91,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3358.387,
"text": " And if nature is a mind, then the archetypes of nature are those properties. You don't think the mind is conditioned to have those properties? You don't think there's any capital? No. Okay, you think the mind just is what it is? To be is to have properties, and I'm saying those properties are the archetypes in Jungian psychology applied to the collective unconscious, applied to a mind that is not an individual mind. Okay, so you realize you are assigning a property"
},
{
"end_time": 3410.009,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3389.36,
"text": " But that's what I'm saying, Chris. I'm saying that to be is to have properties. Yes, I would agree with that. And it's also to have values or instances. So that way, it's self-dual. You don't have to separate the instances from the properties. And you can call reality an instance of itself. And that's the tautology that I'm talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 3440.538,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3410.981,
"text": " Okay, so I call it a super tautology. I don't know why you're saying this. I don't know what you're talking about, to be honest. I don't know what you're talking about. Instances of itself. Reality is what it is to be, to have properties. Those properties are what we could call archetypes, templates of behavior of mind, and that's why nature behaves the way it does, because it has whatever archetypes it does have by virtue of existing. Nature instantiates those properties. You're assigning or distributing properties to nature, and then nature is instantiating the properties. Am I right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3470.538,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3441.561,
"text": " If you want to speak the language of mathematics, you can speak that way. I'm not sure how helpful it is to the audience. It's very helpful because that's what a super tautology is. It's something that is its own properties and its own instances. Why do we speak of instances if there is only one thing? I don't think this language is helpful at all. It's obscurantism. Well, with all due respect, it's not just obscurantism. There are instances of properties out there."
},
{
"end_time": 3497.637,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3471.391,
"text": " You are an instance of the properties that make up Bernardo. An instance of the properties that make up Chris and likewise for Kurt. Yeah, but Chris and Bernardo exist in a broader context, but the mind of nature is what there is. There is nothing else. So why to speak of instances? I'm not arguing against you there. I'd be the last person in the world to argue with you about that. I'm just trying to pin down some of these properties that we're ascribing to ultimate or basic reality."
},
{
"end_time": 3526.169,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3497.637,
"text": " once you get all the way down to the bottom of the reduction as you said then there's got to be something there what is it so now we are we're stuck you see we have to say okay well whatever it is it's part of reality therefore reality goes in a circle it's this big self-defined loop right that's so that's my point you follow that fair enough okay fair enough now do we know what those properties are directly of course not we know"
},
{
"end_time": 3538.66,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3526.749,
"text": " What results from those properties, the behavior of the universe results from those properties or those archetypes, whatever those intrinsic properties are."
},
{
"end_time": 3559.582,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3539.155,
"text": " It turns out that the behavior of nature is regular, fairly predictable. So I would say that they are determined by those properties, which we don't know directly, but we can infer that they exist because nature behaves in a fairly regular and predictable way. Do you think that we have anything to do with determining any of those properties?"
},
{
"end_time": 3590.299,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3561.067,
"text": " the properties are what they are by virtue of the fact that the universe is what it is and we are part of the universe so we don't determine them we are determined by them well could there be reciprocity there i mean could there be they determine us and then we determine them back i don't think so i think if you're talking about the most innate properties then they are the properties of what there is they are what they are because the universe is what it is now we could"
},
{
"end_time": 3613.985,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3590.896,
"text": " We could determine matter properties, or we could play a role in the causal unfolding that derives from those properties. Yes, that we could do, but I don't think... There we go. And by participating in that unfold, you mean we're just like passive things that allow properties to emerge through us, but have nothing to do with creating properties themselves?"
},
{
"end_time": 3638.695,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3614.462,
"text": " I'm talking about the fundamental properties. Now you could talk about properties at many levels that are not fundamental. Of course. Like human beings have properties, but those are not the fundamental properties of the universe. Or black holes have properties, but those are not the fundamental properties of the universe at the bottom of the chain of causation. And you don't see yourself as implicated at all in actually configuring those larger properties."
},
{
"end_time": 3660.879,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3638.695,
"text": " Yes, those secondary derivative properties. Yes, of course, we are part of the unfolding dynamics of the universe. So now if you detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon, we will change the properties of the moon. Yeah, we can influence that. That's trivial, trivially so. But I was talking about the bottom level fundamental properties of existence."
},
{
"end_time": 3688.66,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3661.152,
"text": " I don't think we can change those for the same reason that a human being can't change his or her own mental archetypes. Those are inherent to the beingness of the universe. I agree. I agree with almost everything you said, except for you seem to be saying, okay, it just is that's it. And I'm saying, maybe we can actually reach in there and induce some properties, some actual specific properties that lead to this whole thing being structured the way it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3714.855,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3689.838,
"text": " I commented on that already, so I think it's clear, hopefully. Okay, well, you seem to be saying the universe is meta-deterministic, or super-deterministic. I don't know what you mean by that, so I cannot say yes or no, but maybe... Will you say that the structure of the universe is determined by what it is and what its properties are? Am I right? What it is and what its properties are, are the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3744.411,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3715.077,
"text": " Well, yes, but there's also an extension with the intention. The intention is the properties, and then we need the instances as well. Those are the things that the properties intersect. If you could talk about a red heavy object, and then you could take a cannonball and paint it red, that's an instance instantiating both of those properties. The properties don't refer to each other. Heavy isn't red and red isn't heavy, but if we have instances, then we can make the properties interact."
},
{
"end_time": 3762.312,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3745.179,
"text": " So we need both of those things, and I'm just saying that they're metaphorically coupled, and that's what we do in the CTMU. I think you're very insightful, and I think we agree on almost everything, but there are a couple of sticking points here. Otherwise, it wouldn't really be a theolocution, would it?"
},
{
"end_time": 3791.613,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3763.114,
"text": " Last brief aside for today's sponsor, Manscaped. You may have noticed that I'm brown, and what's concomitant with being brown is being hairy. That's why I'm happy that support for theories of everything is brought to you by Manscaped, who's number one in men's grooming below the waist. There's also an ear and nose trimmer, which I use and happily sew, as you can see. The package I have is the Performance Package 4.0. It comes with Crop Preserver and Crop Reviver, which are male genitalia"
},
{
"end_time": 3811.152,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3791.613,
"text": " If you thought condoms were difficult to ask for, well try asking the 65 year old lady behind the counter for what will improve your gonads texture. Luckily you don't have to since Manscaped is online. This package even comes with this shirt which I wear pretty much exclusively to the gym. I may not be able to bench the most"
},
{
"end_time": 3833.985,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3811.152,
"text": " But I can pretty much guarantee that I'm the most testicularly hygienic. Unlock your confidence and always use the right tools for the job with Manscaped. Let's get to this with a more mythological question."
},
{
"end_time": 3858.575,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3834.48,
"text": " Are Jesus and Buddha attempting to answer the same problem but from different perspectives? Are they answering different problems? Are their answers, their teachings, whatever they may be, are they commensurate? Though on the surface, at least to me, they contradict. There's quite a few questions there. Bernardo, if you don't mind starting that off. I'm not a religious studies specialist, so you have to take"
},
{
"end_time": 3888.797,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3859.155,
"text": " Anything and everything I'm about to say with an enormous grain of salt, maybe a whole bag of it. I have a good friend who is a specialist, Jeffrey Kripal. If Jeff is listening to this, I hope he will not cringe with what I'm about to say. I think they are, they were trying to answer the same question. And I think if you penetrate beyond the surface of appearances and different"
},
{
"end_time": 3915.23,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3889.241,
"text": " metaphors and symbols and the different languages they spoke. And there is a difference of 500 years between them and the difference in geographies as well. So if you can penetrate beyond all that and look at the essence of their answers, I think it was essentially the same answer. Actually, there are serious studies and there's a serious academic opinion that Christianity, in fact, may be derived from Buddhism."
},
{
"end_time": 3945.674,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3915.691,
"text": " There is even speculation about where Jesus might have been during that time, between his 12th year and his 30th year when the Bible says..."
},
{
"end_time": 3972.995,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3946.169,
"text": " I think the fundamental question they were both trying to answer is, what is the relation between us as human beings and the universe at large? What is that relationship? Jung put it in the following words. Are we related to something transcendent, to something infinite or not? That is the gazillion dollar question. Are we related to something infinite or not?"
},
{
"end_time": 4001.288,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3973.473,
"text": " And I think they both were trying to answer this question, that relationship between us as individuals and the universe at large, existence at large. What is that relationship? Because we take the cue for our behavior from our tentative answer to that question, our inner narrative about what that relation is. And I would even go as far and to say that they gave the same answer."
},
{
"end_time": 4032.142,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4002.142,
"text": " When Jesus talked of himself as the son of God, he was talking about a fundamental kinship between a human being and the divinity, a fundamental kinship. Now, the son of a father is of the same kind as the father, bare force, because it's something that came from the father. And he also emphasized the need to surrender the direction of our lives to a greater power."
},
{
"end_time": 4060.93,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4033.848,
"text": " And if that's not Buddhism, what is it? Buddhism is the surrender of the ego is seen through the illusion of personal identity, individual identity. It is connecting to a greater mental context, a greater cognitive context. So I think in essence, yes, they were both saying the same thing. And then 600 years later, a little bit more, there came the prophet."
},
{
"end_time": 4084.838,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4061.613,
"text": " and said the same thing. And that's why Muslims bow to a greater power five times a day, which I think is a fantastic ritual. It's a daily reminder that our lives are not about us. Our lives are about something much bigger than us. They're in line, the meaning of our lives."
},
{
"end_time": 4107.517,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4085.196,
"text": " And the kinship in Christianity between Jesus and us is also very explicit when when the Holy Ghost descends into every righteous man, woman and child. And remember, the Holy Ghost is Jesus. So when the Holy Ghost descends not only into the apostles, but every righteous human being."
},
{
"end_time": 4133.78,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4107.927,
"text": " What is being said is that there is a direct kinship between you and the Son of God and of course a direct kinship between the Son of God and the Godhead. It's a hierarchy of kinships, so to say, of identical kinds, which basically tell us that we are leaves in a great tree and existence is about the tree, not about the leaves. Imagine if"
},
{
"end_time": 4139.804,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4134.121,
"text": " The blossom of my apple tree in my backyard in the spring would say, my life's about me."
},
{
"end_time": 4167.654,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4140.247,
"text": " I should take the reins of my life as a blossom because my life's about me. Well, we would laugh at the little flower because no, it's not about the flower. It's about the tree. It's about the fruit that will come after the flower is gone and the tree that will come from the fruit after the fruit is gone. It's about a much bigger context. And I think that's the message of Christianity and Buddhism. We need to surrender ourselves"
},
{
"end_time": 4196.852,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4168.08,
"text": " to the greater directions of existence and understand that it's not about us, has never been and will never be. And we do not need to invest ourselves with this crushing responsibility of manufacturing meaning for our lives. It's unnecessary. Meaning is intrinsic. As long as you are in touch with the movements of the impersonal within us, we are in touch with meaning. It's just that we've become blind to it because of the crazy narratives of our current civilization."
},
{
"end_time": 4228.78,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4198.848,
"text": " Chris? Well, I agree with a lot of that. Very poetic. Thank you, Bernardo. The primary issue is the relationship between man and reality, the ultimate reality, which is God, and to Christians anyway. And I think that it's productive to formulate this question in terms of the goal of life. Now, in Buddhism, the goal of life is nirvana. For the Vedic, it was moksha."
},
{
"end_time": 4259.019,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4229.241,
"text": " Okay, and for the Christians, it is salvation. Those are distinct concepts. All right? The two of them have to do with completely extricating yourself from samsara, you know, the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. You extricate yourself completely from that and totally free yourself from the world that exists. What Christ was trying to tell people is that you cannot extricate yourself from God, from the world that exists. You have moral responsibility."
},
{
"end_time": 4286.049,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4259.599,
"text": " You know, here are your moral responsibilities. They're enumerated in the Ten Commandments, etc, etc. And here's the golden rule. So now you've got a mathematical law of moral symmetry that you can apply to the whole thing. So they're really, in some respects, the answers are the same. They give an answer for what is the relationship between man and reality, but in other respects, they're very different. Okay, we have a moral responsibility to our fellow human beings and to reality and to God."
},
{
"end_time": 4308.695,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4286.442,
"text": " in Christianity, whereas in Buddhism, it's not quite the same thing. There is a sum of that, of course. There is an equivalent to morality in Buddhism and Vedism. Now, that being said, I'm going to shove Buddhism aside for a second and just talk about Vedism. If you take a look at Vedism and then you take a look at Christian Neoplatonism,"
},
{
"end_time": 4338.37,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4309.258,
"text": " as set forth by Plotinus, for example, and other people like him, you find that they're very, very similar. You've got this Vedic model where you've got Brahman, and then from Brahman you come down to mind, and then from mind you go down to the world. This is basically what Neoplatonism is. Neoplatonism, of course, was very popular among these scholastics, medieval Christians. Basically, what they were doing was they were embracing something very much like Vedism."
},
{
"end_time": 4357.483,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4339.326,
"text": " So these are things that we have to observe when we're trying to compare these separate religions and what they're all talking about. A Christian says that, well, our job is to achieve salvation. We do that by moral goodness. OK, Vedism says much the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 4383.473,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4357.961,
"text": " You've got Dharma, which is righteousness, and then you go from righteousness into moksha. Buddha was a little bit less prescriptive about these things. There are degrees of freedom in Buddhism. It's very, very popular because it seems to limit your moral responsibility, whereas"
},
{
"end_time": 4409.735,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4384.002,
"text": " This is something that Jesus and the Hindus were not necessarily interested in doing. There is this moral responsibility, it's inescapable, and that's that. Bernardo, are you champing at the bit? I just have a small quirk. I'm not sure it's even worthwhile to mention it, but I agree with Chris that medieval scholars from before"
},
{
"end_time": 4433.729,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4410.316,
"text": " Well, there are nevertheless similar Aristotle didn't really have anything comparable to what we're talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 4460.64,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4434.087,
"text": " So it was the neoplatonics or else, you know, there's this idea of the one and then you go down from the one to NUS, right? N-O-U-S, I don't know how it's pronounced. And then you come down from there into the world. Now, what I have, what I've found is that you can liken this whole thing to a reality self-simulation, which can actually be mathematically and scientifically described. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 4487.807,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4461.22,
"text": " Here's a set of questions that comes from Charlie Ifrah."
},
{
"end_time": 4517.773,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4488.097,
"text": " Where did the assumption that consciousness is good come from? Where did the assumption that consciousness matters come from? Where did the assumption that consciousness makes us special come from? Why don't we assume that consciousness is just something we do and it's no more special than eyesight or scent? So I'm going to send this in the chat because it's a set of questions that are similar, but it's probably useful to refer to. Okay, well, consciousness is basically primitive. Okay, it's a primitive property. Bernardo was talking earlier about the properties of what reality is."
},
{
"end_time": 4541.51,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4517.978,
"text": " Consciousness is a primitive property of reality. It has to be conscious. There's got to be this feedback that I was talking about, this tele-feedback between past and future. That's what allows us to get out of this pseudo-cosmic dichotomy that we're talking about. Consciousness is primitive. It is there. It is what it is. Nobody has to say anything about it. Nobody has to pronounce it this or make assumptions about it."
},
{
"end_time": 4562.193,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4541.903,
"text": " It is what it is. It's there. It distributes over reality in different forms that are appropriate to the circumstances under which it emerges. A tiny little particle, an electron, has consciousness in a certain way. And then a telor, a secondary, an organism, has consciousness in another way."
},
{
"end_time": 4584.94,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4562.756,
"text": " Okay, then we get up to big brain human beings, we have a higher kind of self modeling consciousness still, then we get all the way up to God that has all of these forms of consciousness at once. Right? So consciousness is absolutely intrinsic to the nature of the universe. And we needn't make any assumptions about its importance, or its primacy or anything else. Bernard, do you want to tackle?"
},
{
"end_time": 4609.531,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4585.06,
"text": " Let me tackle them one by one. Where did the assumption that consciousness is important come from? I don't know. I don't make that assumption. I know that consciousness is that is all I have ultimately. So if that's not important, then probably nothing is, which may be a valid answer. But I don't make that assumption. Where did the assumption that consciousness is good come from? I don't know. I don't make that assumption. Consciousness is."
},
{
"end_time": 4627.125,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4610.026,
"text": " Whether it's good or bad. I'm not determined on a case by case basis. I think there is as many good reasons to think that consciousness has bad in it as there are reasons to think that it has good in it. Where did the assumption that consciousness matters come from?"
},
{
"end_time": 4645.282,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4627.466,
"text": " He's framing everything as if it were an assumption. Well, I don't know. But if consciousness doesn't matter, then what does? Because we are cooped up in consciousness at all times. So if that doesn't matter, then nothing does. Four, where did the assumption that consciousness makes a special come from?"
},
{
"end_time": 4664.377,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4645.623,
"text": " I don't know, I don't make that assumption. I don't think it makes it special. I think consciousness permeates the whole of existence. So we are not special on that account because it's just something that permeates the whole of existence, not only us. And five, why don't we assume that consciousness is just something we do"
},
{
"end_time": 4682.858,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4665.282,
"text": " Because it's not a question of assumption. It's a question of theorizing coherently. So our theories stand up to reason and to the evidence. So you can assume that, I don't know, that your consciousness is the sun. Good luck with that. But that's not the game we are playing. We are not playing the game"
},
{
"end_time": 4699.514,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4682.858,
"text": " of arbitrary assumptions. We are playing the game of trying to find the most coherent, empirically tenable, internally consistent, most explanatory powerful narrative or model or theory about what's going on and the most"
},
{
"end_time": 4729.206,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4699.855,
"text": " And the source of that and the source and medium of that line of reasoning we should have everything you said is 100% right but but it's it's not just the consequence okay it is the origin"
},
{
"end_time": 4747.381,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4729.616,
"text": " Sorry, Bernardo, why is it that you call your theory analytical idealism? What's the difference between some other account of idealism and yours?"
},
{
"end_time": 4777.534,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4747.91,
"text": " There is nothing new in this. This stuff has been put forward by many people for thousands of years. I think there is a perfectly good word in history called idealism. That's what I'm talking about. So why will I use another word? But under pressure to differentiate what I'm talking about from, say, Barclays idealism, which I think is flawed, I needed to add a qualifier. And because I arrived at idealism from"
},
{
"end_time": 4790.452,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4778.49,
"text": " a rational investigation that holds up to the values of analytic philosophy, the philosophy that was stated by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s."
},
{
"end_time": 4820.247,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4790.828,
"text": " I espouse all that. I espouse the values of analytic philosophy, not to the detriment of continental philosophy, but next to those, I espouse the values of analytic philosophy, and I defend my idealism in a way"
},
{
"end_time": 4845.742,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4820.555,
"text": " that can only be characterized as analytical based on the values of the analytic philosophy school. That's why I call it analytic idealism. It's my very best effort to not come up with new words, but to stick to old words so people know that I'm not saying anything new at all here. Okay. Can I ask a question? I mean, analytic basically means having to do with concepts and language."
},
{
"end_time": 4873.592,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4846.22,
"text": " So somehow, in other words, you're talking about the language you use is just more careful than it is an ordinary dialogue. You're actually theorizing very carefully, and that's how language enters into this. Would that be accurate? That's fair enough. That would be the reason why Russell chose the word analytic philosophy back then. So I'm just using the word he used. If he had used another word, I would be using that word instead. Well, then we have the Kantian meaning too, which refers to tautology."
},
{
"end_time": 4904.616,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4874.65,
"text": " My usage of analytic in analytic philosophy is a reference, sorry, my use of analytic in analytic idealism is a reference to analytic in analytic philosophy. So I'm basically linking it to analytic philosophy because I make my argument according to the style and value system of analytic philosophy. If they had chosen the word X philosophy, I would be saying X idealism."
},
{
"end_time": 4934.258,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4906.305,
"text": " So we talked about this but didn't use the word non-dualism and many people in the non-dualist community would say that love is fundamental, that consciousness is fundamental, but love is too and somehow those are the same or somehow love is more fundamental than consciousness. Okay, explain to someone as confused as myself what you make of that. How does that make sense? How can love be fundamental? What is love? Bernardo, if you don't mind."
},
{
"end_time": 4963.507,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4934.531,
"text": " Well, I never said that love is fundamental. I'm not saying you did. I apologize if I said that. I'm saying some non-dualists. I'm sure you've heard. You didn't say that. I'm just emphasizing it for clarity and lack of ambiguity. I think love is a particular pattern of excitation of consciousness. Fear is another. So if love is fundamental, so is fear. And so is, I don't know, delight and any other emotion."
},
{
"end_time": 4992.91,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4963.968,
"text": " So from that perspective, I think it is subjectivity that is fundamental, not to the particular excitation of subjectivity that we describe with words such as love, fear and all the other emotions. So I think empirically, if I if I look at nature. I don't see compelling reason to think that love is somehow more. Primordial or more fundamental,"
},
{
"end_time": 5019.616,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4993.404,
"text": " than fear, than evil, because you see this stuff all around the nature. I mean, animals are killing each other slowly and painfully so they can survive. It's a bloodbath. Volcanoes erupt and millions of animals are killed in very painful circumstances. It's not a pretty picture. So I don't particularly see a reason to prioritize"
},
{
"end_time": 5044.684,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5020.503,
"text": " love over anything else. Dante wrote about the love that moves the sun and the other stars, suggesting that what we see as stars is the representation of love, the external appearance of love, and that stars in and of themselves experience themselves as an outpouring of love. That may be, but then black holes are the opposite."
},
{
"end_time": 5074.991,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5045.128,
"text": " Right. Because instead of irradiating, they suck everything in. And I see no reason to say that stars are more fundamental than black holes. As a matter of fact, we know black holes form when stars collapse into themselves. So, no, I know I'm afraid I don't see love as as fundamental. I see subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness as fundamental. And I would love if love were fundamental. I would love it."
},
{
"end_time": 5103.643,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5075.384,
"text": " But I don't see good reasons to think that it is now. Why would you love it if it was fundamental? Well, because now we would feel all fuzzy and warm and protected and safe. But I don't think there is a good reason to think that. I think. What? And now I'm speculating and I'm speculating without authority here, so take it with a with a bag of salt."
},
{
"end_time": 5131.254,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5103.882,
"text": " I think what some spiritual teachers, I think what motivates them to say that love is fundamental is that there is a phase during meditation or during a psychedelic experience. You passed through a threshold right around the ego dissolution phase when you sort of shed personal identity. There's a lot of fear with that."
},
{
"end_time": 5156.664,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5131.749,
"text": " But then you tend to land in a place for a little while where you sort of remember. And what you remember, I can't put in English, I can't put in any, there are no words for what you remember, so I can't say, but you remember. And that remembrance feel like a reconnection with your own umbilical cord, with your own home, your own source."
},
{
"end_time": 5183.677,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5157.176,
"text": " And it feels very warm and loving, that remembrance, that reconnection with your roots. But it's a transitory phase. If you persist in that, then even that is shed, even that feeling of love, fuzzy coziness, you know, remembrance back home, even that is shed away as just one more phase of experience, but nothing fundamental. And then you go somewhere else."
},
{
"end_time": 5213.677,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5184.241,
"text": " And I'm not going to talk about that somewhere else, but I can imagine that if you have not visited the deeper levels in the palace of mind, you just went one level lower, one or two level lowers, then you would say, well, I found love there. So love is fundamental. I can clearly see that happening. But then I would think arrogantly, maybe that, well, we just haven't gone deep enough because below that there is stuff that you wouldn't call love."
},
{
"end_time": 5244.36,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5215.435,
"text": " Chris, would it be alright if I ask Bernardo one more question and then if you want, if there's anything that comes to your mind, just take a note and then... That's fine. Okay, great. So Bernardo, in some of the conferences I'm sure that you've attended on spirituality and non-dualism, there seems to be a special place for love and there seems to be a special place for fear, namely that one is to shed fear and that almost all of suffering, if not all of suffering, comes from fear. And for me, just to get my"
},
{
"end_time": 5271.357,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5244.718,
"text": " point of view across it doesn't seem completely correct unless they're using a different definition of fear because there are people who have a part of their brain that's that they lack there's a there's a disconnection in some part of their brain they don't actually experience fear and it's deleterious it's not good for them they stand too close to people they are more likely to get into fights they have to be watched over there's also sociopathy which is related to a lack of fear but social fear"
},
{
"end_time": 5296.869,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5271.886,
"text": " So it doesn't seem to me that one should just shed all of one's fear in order to live more peaceably. Well, maybe in order to live more peaceably, but that existence doesn't persist for a while and it also doesn't seem to be good for the other people around you. Either way, that's my thoughts on it. Do you see the same distinction between love and fear? Like there's a special place for fear, namely we should shed it. And what are your thoughts on that?"
},
{
"end_time": 5325.674,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5297.654,
"text": " So I'll give you a personal opinion. This is not grounded on my work as a philosopher or my previous work as a scientist. So I'm not sure my opinion should count more than anybody else's opinion. But I sympathize with what you said. I think there is a place for fear. There is a reason we've evolved to feel fearful in certain circumstances. It is healthy. It helps preserve your own safety. I think what may be"
},
{
"end_time": 5349.138,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5326.254,
"text": " is trying to be expressed in those conferences is that you shouldn't be in the grip of fear. Fear shouldn't control your life. And unfortunately, that's what happens a lot in our civilization, that fear instead of being just one more ingredient in this great melting pot of emotions that we carry along through life,"
},
{
"end_time": 5376.681,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5349.582,
"text": " that fear becomes the dominating force. And I have experienced with that. I have suffered from anxiety and fear can make your world very small. It can make you blind to everything else. It can destroy your ability to empathize. It can destroy your ability to tune into what's happening around you, destroys your ability to enjoy the present moment because your mind is always in that narrative making of what might happen that could be very bad for you."
},
{
"end_time": 5386.527,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5377.056,
"text": " So not surrendering control to fear i think is important but eliminating fear altogether i think that's like"
},
{
"end_time": 5411.169,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5386.954,
"text": " cutting a limb, it's taking away a part of your own humanity. If you become unable to feel fear, how will you empathize with the Ukrainians now? So, you know, surrendering to fear eliminates empathy, but destroying fear completely eliminates empathy as well, because you become unable to relate to what other people are going through and you become less human."
},
{
"end_time": 5439.292,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5411.374,
"text": " And I don't think that's the game to play. I think the game to play is to mature our own humanity to its full. And fear is certainly an ingredient of that. There is nothing, I think, a priori bad about fear. The only bad thing is when you have an imbalance and that imbalance can be an excess of fear or even a lack of fear. I think the point is balance and"
},
{
"end_time": 5459.275,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5439.753,
"text": " I understand these conferences when they put emphasis on reducing fear, because in our civilization, in our society today, most of the times we are not in balance, and the imbalance is precisely an excess of fear. So that's where you put the emphasis. You try to reduce that which is excessive."
},
{
"end_time": 5488.319,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5459.394,
"text": " But I don't think it should be extrapolated to the point of rooting out fear altogether. Then you're not human. You will be a mutilated human being. That's not something to desire. At least I don't desire that. OK, so, Chris, there's plenty that was said. And if you want to comment on any of it, please do. I'll restate the original question, which is essentially, well, what is love and what's its relationship to what's fundamental? Well, love"
},
{
"end_time": 5517.807,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5488.763,
"text": " It's all about identification and identity. Obviously, reality identifies with itself. There's not necessarily any emotion attached to that, but in order to make this work in the world, reality configures itself as syntax. There's a kind of syntax in the Metaformal System called the ETS for Emotelic Syntax. Emotions like fear and love inform you of a need. That's basically what they do. They're telling you there's a deficit."
},
{
"end_time": 5547.346,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5518.251,
"text": " of utility in your life and that you need to fill it. This is what causes you to configure yourself as a telon and then affect causation. Telon brings together causation in certain ways by certain mechanisms and this is actually what happens. There is no way to do without things like fear and love. As far as love is concerned, the love between two human beings is concerned. They love each other and they feel that wonderful emotion because of the ETS. Those feelings, the moods,"
},
{
"end_time": 5569.104,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5547.671,
"text": " They come out"
},
{
"end_time": 5595.691,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5569.309,
"text": " is an extremely fundamental property of reality, then creates the ETS, which then causes us to behave in certain ways that cause us to unite our destinies and do things like marry and have children, which reality needs in order to renew the cycle of life. What's the ETS? The Emo-Telek syntax. Emo standing for emotion and Telek of course meaning basically"
},
{
"end_time": 5612.551,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5596.118,
"text": " Emotion, you experience emotions because they are usually most emotions because they are informing you of some kind of need. You have a need that their fear means the need to fight or flee. Okay. Love means the need to, you know, to care for, nurture and appropriate."
},
{
"end_time": 5641.715,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5612.944,
"text": " Okay? And you can attach this to virtually anything. Basically, this is the part of our minds that tells us what we need. And then we configure ourselves telegly by means of telecrecursion or telecausation, configure ourselves to fulfill those needs. And it's like a charge system. On the one hand, you've got negative charge, filling that need amounts to a positive charge. So you've got this duality of charges. And that's the way things work in CTN, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5668.763,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5641.715,
"text": " There's utility deficit, and then there's utility. So that's what the ETS is just that part of your mind, that that syntactic module that tells you what you should be doing. I mean, it makes you feel very, you know, fight, flee, you know, go up and ask that girl for a date. You know, this is the kind of thing that's that it's that it's telling you a pain, I've got to jerk my hand away from the flame."
},
{
"end_time": 5697.056,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5669.309,
"text": " Okay. All right. And then you've got you've got fulfillment, you've got emotions of fulfillment, which then tell you where they reinforce this cycle of charge and you know, deficit and fulfillment. Okay. When you feel happy, it means that you've just performed that that that thing properly, you've actually just closed that loop. Okay, and it reinforces you to do the same thing in the future. And that's how reality more or less conditions itself."
},
{
"end_time": 5727.278,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5697.927,
"text": " With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last-second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn. Extra large popcorn. TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes Payday unexpectedly human."
},
{
"end_time": 5760.896,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5731.63,
"text": " Chris, can you give me an example of a time when you felt fear for weeks? So not just momentary fear, particularly with regard to something existential. So this is a personal question. I want to know, how is it that you overcame some dread? And then Bernardo, similarly, you mentioned that you had problems with anxiety in the past. Probably still do, but a specific problem is likely in your mind. Well, I can't say that I have felt prolonged dread."
},
{
"end_time": 5782.466,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5761.101,
"text": " past doubts of dread, of course we all do. But in terms of prolonged dread, I've been, you know, most mercifully free of that kind. I have felt, you know, things protracted, uncomfortable feelings like loneliness, for example. You know, I mean, you know, I feel lonely. You know, I cope with those things by basically turning my mind in another direction."
},
{
"end_time": 5812.125,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5782.961,
"text": " Bernardo,"
},
{
"end_time": 5838.063,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5814.172,
"text": " I have experienced dread for over a decade, pretty much continuously. A lot of my philosophy work has been a sort of an alchemy of translating that undesired, undesirable energy of dread into something positive. Nietzsche talked about this being the job of philosophers."
},
{
"end_time": 5865.913,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5838.524,
"text": " turning everything we are, everything we fear, into love and flame, as he put it. That was the job of philosophy, and I think he was right. For me, it started in my mid-30s. When I was 34, I had achieved everything that I set myself to achieve when I was 12. And when I was 12, my father died, and I made a list of everything I wanted to achieve in my life."
},
{
"end_time": 5891.92,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5866.459,
"text": " One day I woke up at 34 and I realized that everything is ticked. It's all there. And I thought I've arrived. I'm in control. I have control of the world because I had external control of the world. I had a good job. I had sufficient money. I had the house I always wanted to have. I was married to my youth sweetheart. And then in life has a funny way to"
},
{
"end_time": 5912.944,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5892.278,
"text": " Confront you with your own bullshit very, very quickly. So it didn't take weeks of that feeling. I am in control for me to find a nodule in my wife's breast, which took doctors two weeks to rule out as cancer. And in those two weeks, I thought, shit, I'm not in control at all."
},
{
"end_time": 5942.978,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5913.404,
"text": " My wife can get sick and die. I can get sick and die. Everything that I find important. All those people can. No, I have no control over my own body, let alone the world. And that realization was terrible to me. I internalized that into health anxiety for myself, health anxiety for everybody that I cared about. And it took well over 10 years for that"
},
{
"end_time": 5967.329,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5943.302,
"text": " claustrophobic feeling to sort of dissipate. And I wish I would have, you know, the seven steps to getting rid of that. Two things happened to me prior to it dissipating. One, I accepted that it would never go away. Which is amazing when you truly accept in your heart of hearts"
},
{
"end_time": 5996.118,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5967.637,
"text": " That's OK. This is not something I can fight. This is not a problem I can solve. I've tried everything for over 10 years, every recipe in the book, everything, and didn't solve it. So I might have to live with it. And I truly accepted that in the core of my being that I will live with anxiety. That was one precursor. The other precursor was reconnecting with my child self, my child self from before my father died and I suddenly"
},
{
"end_time": 6025.486,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5996.63,
"text": " instantly turned into an adult, reconnecting with that way of being in the world that when you are not trying to control the world, when you are in full communion with the world, you're not trying to control your destiny, you're not thinking about the future, you don't have lists about things that need to be achieved, you're just there for the world enjoying the moment and you're taken by the wind with the flow of life."
},
{
"end_time": 6052.142,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6025.794,
"text": " and reconnecting with that, which to me had to do with my passion for computers. And I started designing my own computers, what I always wanted to do when I was a kid. And I went to university at 17, and I designed computers for others, but never designed my own computers. So I started doing that. And somewhere in the course of two years, that conjunction of accepting fear"
},
{
"end_time": 6081.8,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6052.773,
"text": " accepting that it would never go away, that it's not a problem to be solved and reconnecting with my child self. Somehow, don't tell me I cannot tell you how or when one day I woke up and I looked back over the previous two years and I realized, well, I haven't been anxious. I still have some crisis here and there, but I tuned into what I like to call the movements of the impersonal in my mind."
},
{
"end_time": 6106.903,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6082.415,
"text": " Sometimes I personalize it and I call it the diamond. And I say, you know, my life now is about doing the diamonds bidding. My life's not about me anymore. And that's sort of that acceptance that my life is not about me, that I'm just here riding a wave. Nature's trying to do something through me. And my only choice is do I resist that or do I not?"
},
{
"end_time": 6137.176,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6107.927,
"text": " And naturally and very spontaneously making the choice to not resist it means that you surrender control. So if you ask me where do I want to be in five years, I would just laugh at your face. I have no idea and I have no need to know. I will be where I will be in five years, so long as I keep in tune with the movements of the impersonal within me. And I'm completely relaxed with that. And that surrender of control was a surrender of fear."
},
{
"end_time": 6164.411,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6138.148,
"text": " because if you don't feel that you need to be in control, fear does not have fertile ground to grow and take hold because you're not trying to be in control. There is a kind of an acceptance of the impersonal, an acceptance that you're just a part of nature. It's like that blossom of my apple tree telling itself, where do I want to be in five days? It's ridiculous. It's not about the blossom."
},
{
"end_time": 6194.77,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6164.804,
"text": " It's not even about the tree, it's about the whole flow of nature. And when you internalize that insight, at least for me, when I internalize that insight, not because I tried, not because I had a plan to internalize it, it just happened. I realized it with hindsight. You know, just by looking back, I realized this dynamic played out. It happened. I somehow let go of the need to control, of the need to plan. I surrendered into the movements of the impersonal."
},
{
"end_time": 6221.323,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6195.93,
"text": " And I'm fine. I'm surprisingly fine. I still have horrible tinnitus in both ears. I hear a dentist's drill in both my ears, very loud, constantly, 24 hours a day. Thought about suicide twice, three and a half years ago. I'm in peace with that even. How did this happen? I have no idea how this happened. I have no recipes. I can't tell you, follow these steps. I can only tell you what the precursors for me were."
},
{
"end_time": 6249.428,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6221.971,
"text": " And I still experience fear and dread occasionally, but it's nowhere near that right I used to have. Now, the bad news is I feel a lot less energy to write. I feel a lot less need to write. It's like the diamond used my dread to corral me into doing its bidding. And now that it can't use it anymore,"
},
{
"end_time": 6278.592,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6249.77,
"text": " I am much more in the now. If you ask me what my intuition points to, my intuition is that I will still play with computers, old computers and designing my own computers for another year or two to exhaust that childhood need and to be really in communion with my child self. And after that, I sense, I see it coming on the horizon. A whole new phase of writing will come, but much more mature writing."
},
{
"end_time": 6307.039,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6279.189,
"text": " much more centered writing, not writing driven by dread, driven by the diamond, but more centered, more mature, more adult writing, which will be a lot less conceptual because it's more adult. That's what I sense. So knock on wood, let's hope that that's how things will play out. But I don't need to know if that's what will happen. What will happen is what will happen. That's how I live now."
},
{
"end_time": 6334.889,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6309.019,
"text": " Chris, do you have any thoughts on that? Does anything occur to you or any stories come to mind after you hear that? Well, of course, there's value in Bernardo's advice and his anecdote. I tend to have a much more focused view of the future. That's not to say that I plan everything in advance."
},
{
"end_time": 6361.715,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6335.23,
"text": " But I strive to see the possibilities and then strive to make out the one that best that is optimal for my purposes and constantly just, you know, I'm more of a driven person. I don't have these these emotions that plague me all, you know, all the time the way some people do. God bless them. I mean, it's difficult to have to put up with that, but I'm more of a purpose driven animal."
},
{
"end_time": 6391.647,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6362.227,
"text": " I'm the kind of person who can instantly let go of that kind of thing. I feel anger. Sometimes if the anger is too intense, bad things can happen."
},
{
"end_time": 6421.783,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6392.09,
"text": " If I can get through that, if I can stop from becoming enraged, then 10 minutes later I'm just fine. Unless it was such a serious thing that I can't afford to be fine, if you know what I mean. Okay? But I can let go of things very easily and then divert myself onto what I consider to be a more productive track. This is something that, you know, if I have the energy, and as Bernardo was talking about, sometimes you just don't feel the energy because it's like there's a diamond sucking the energy out of you."
},
{
"end_time": 6450.35,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6422.022,
"text": " for its own purposes and trying to turn you in a certain direction or whatnot. And that is something that I very much try to avoid. If I realize, well, there seems to be something beyond me that is using me in some way, I curtail it unless I discern that it's good for me. So I'm constantly making these judgments about purpose and about what I should be doing and about my impulses, subjecting them to cognition. And cognition is not primary."
},
{
"end_time": 6479.582,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6450.555,
"text": " It's basically not a primary function. It comes out of will, out of telesis, which is what we've been talking about here. Just like access consciousness, for example, as opposed to phenomenal consciousness. That all is post-telec to me. So although I do use cognition for purposes of reflection, all of this takes place with me on an emotional level beneath the surface."
},
{
"end_time": 6503.507,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6480.196,
"text": " Okay, in other words, I realize, okay, it's not good. This is going to lead to bad feelings. I'm not going to be satisfied doing this immediately. I change directions and try to get myself on a track that is going to be more productive for me and not going to subject me to any kind of bad feelings or ill will or anything like that. Let me be personal for a couple minutes, maybe three minutes."
},
{
"end_time": 6533.473,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6504.275,
"text": " I've spoken about this issue on the podcast before. You can see either the Carl Friston Part 2 podcast or the Diana Posilka podcast for more information. You can also skip forward five minutes. I didn't know what it meant to take that seriously until I felt it. It's different to feel something than it is to analyze it. Anyway, so I felt it terrified, terrified out of my mind. And I remember something calling me to the center, something calling me saying, Kurt, you have you've been keeping your mind"
},
{
"end_time": 6562.363,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6533.951,
"text": " far too open. There is such a thing as when people say, keep your mind open, but not so open that your head falls out. I remember saying, Hey, yeah, that's just to justify your own closed mindedness. Something was saying there's truth to that. Come back to the center. Come back. Not to say that it's not real. Like you have to decide there is a reality to it, but you have to decide this. And so from like, like, I feel like my, for the past few months, almost all of my thoughts, like it's abating. My anxiety is abating."
},
{
"end_time": 6584.155,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6562.773,
"text": " but I feel like I'm constantly preventing myself from a nervous breakdown. And what's helped is a middle ground between you both, which is to retain a sense of control. So something called act therapy acceptance and commitment therapy. So you accept that's where Bernardo you come in where it's like, okay, you accept that, you know, these thoughts are simply thoughts and they may occur just like"
},
{
"end_time": 6608.114,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6584.548,
"text": " Thoughts occur to everyone. Don't think you're ever going to get rid of them. And maybe they will become zero, but don't think that. And then also to accept the thoughts, but not merge with them, not fuse with them. Accept simply means acknowledge softly, gently. I see you thought interesting that you're there. I don't need to take you seriously. And then just go to where your values are and you commit to where your values are, which is where the control comes in."
},
{
"end_time": 6626.049,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6608.114,
"text": " So you have to have some values. So my values are my wife and love and this world and seeing behind my eyes and actually feeling like I'm behind my eyes, which was not there for two months or so, like depersonalized. Anyway, I've come to the decision now that what matters is"
},
{
"end_time": 6646.22,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6629.036,
"text": " It's not a toll is like I used to love toll like doing everything speaking to and learning great theories and I still love that I still do that actually gives me some same some sanity if it's not consciousness related this math and physics because dispassionate but what's primary is my relationship with my wife and love"
},
{
"end_time": 6671.049,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6646.8,
"text": " And so if I have to sacrifice a toe day of studying to go spend time with my wife, I do almost invariably. That was never there before. Work comes first before. Now it's like, no, no, no, Kurt, almost everything may fade in some manner. All of what I'm putting out on YouTube may fit. People may take it out of context. People may shape it just like the Nirvana logo. Kids wear it. It used to be from Nirvana, the band. Kids have no idea who Nirvana is, but they wear the shirt."
},
{
"end_time": 6700.981,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6671.22,
"text": " the term Nirvana used to mean something Buddhist but Nirvana took that and so constantly something will get taken away from you and change that's out of your hand love is primary just follow that so that's what I guide myself by now and that's given me some sanity the way I imagine it is almost like a pendulum instead of now swinging it to the other side which was me before trying to avoid no I don't want to think I don't want to think that that makes it come back it's a gentle nudge to the center I try not to"
},
{
"end_time": 6730.111,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6701.51,
"text": " run from it. But it's not the same as facing it, which is what I thought I had to do. It's more the same as just interesting. Okay, let me move toward what I what I value. I want to put warning signs on all my interviews now because of that because like some people just advice should be advice should be taken slowly. Anyway, they're saying that this is some awakening and there's this quote from"
},
{
"end_time": 6758.848,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6730.367,
"text": " HP Lovecraft, which I agree with, which is, hey, one of the greatest mercies of the world is our inability to correlate its contents, the whole reality's contents. And as soon as you do, you may go mad from the revelation or beg for the ignorance of the past and flee into the darkness from the light. And Jacobi, last quote, Jacobi had a quote, don't know which Jacobi, there's like 12 of them, that humans have one choice, but a single choice, either God or nothingness."
},
{
"end_time": 6786.118,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6759.309,
"text": " By choosing nothingness, man makes himself into a god, because it means everything around you is an apparition. I don't follow that logic. But regardless, I like the the poetics behind it. He said, so there's only one choice. God exists outside of me as a living being in and of himself, or I am God, there is no third. I think that's true. That's that. All right. So now you have like great insight into Kurt the past few months. The reason I tell you all this is because, well, hey,"
},
{
"end_time": 6811.732,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6786.681,
"text": " I don't think it's quite accurate to say there are only these two alternatives. Either I have to be God or God has to exist entirely outside of me. There is a middle ground there. As a matter of fact, I would affirm that middle ground and say that if you make this false dichotomy"
},
{
"end_time": 6822.79,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6812.056,
"text": " either I have to be God, totally solipsistic universe. That is a mistake. Basically you're dissociating yourself from your true highest level of identity."
},
{
"end_time": 6852.705,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6823.234,
"text": " You can't afford to do that. You have to try to take in the whole structure and understand it's very, very difficult. I mean, Lovecraft may have thought that this is something that drives you into the arms of Fulu or whatever. Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary for you to maintain your psychological equilibrium. It's homeostatic. You mentioned God a lot during this disquisition here, and God is a fixture now."
},
{
"end_time": 6881.288,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6853.046,
"text": " in your awareness. And that's a very, very good thing. Okay, when you talk about God says, you know, your Philippians, it says, you know, throw your, your cares on to God. Okay, you can't hand your cares off to God unless you're close to God, unless you're actually within standing distance, you can hand them off. And that's the whole point of that. Basically, you know, to hand things off to God is the same as handing them off to your own highest level of identity. It's not outside you, you're a part of it, you're a lower stratum,"
},
{
"end_time": 6911.647,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6882.09,
"text": " Bernardo, man,"
},
{
"end_time": 6936.374,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6912.927,
"text": " Who am I to render advice? I'm younger than Chris. If I can share something with you is that this is life. It's the process of life. Life buffets us and brings us to the edge. And it should, if it's not bringing you to the edge, you're not living fully."
},
{
"end_time": 6963.951,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6936.886,
"text": " The artist navigates the edge without falling down the precipice, but navigating the edge, because that's the path of maturation. That's the path of change. Otherwise, you will always remain with the same narratives, the same illusions, such as the illusion of identity, the illusion of control. These things don't go away if you're not tested by life."
},
{
"end_time": 6989.787,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6964.36,
"text": " So, hey, hooray to what's happening to you. It may feel extremely uncomfortable, but that's the point. That's the point. If you're always in your comfort zone, you're not going anywhere. And one day you will wake up in your death bed and think, what was this all about? What was this for? I wasted the whole thing. Now, that's not going to be your destiny, my friend. You're not going to that dark place."
},
{
"end_time": 7020.435,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6991.374,
"text": " There was something else I wanted to share with you, but it just escaped my mind. You just used a phrase, you know, not interjecting. You basically said the illusion of identity. Now, I understand that you have that in analytic idealism, you've got the idea that this is something like some kind of identity disorder, you know, this dissociative identity disorder in which everybody is an altar"
},
{
"end_time": 7048.609,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7021.22,
"text": " of this one primary, primal identity, right? Is that what you're referring to? That it is illusory to think of you? Is that what the illusion of identity is? If you force me down the conceptual path, I would have to say yes. But I was not trying to speak conceptually. I'm not trying to speak theory to Kurt. Theory is here. And Kurt, oh, I remember now."
},
{
"end_time": 7074.718,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7049.428,
"text": " What you're suffering from is something that the vast majority of people have the opposite problem. You internalize a narrative, you internalize a worldview, you're capable of internalizing it. It comes from your head, purely conceptual, it sinks into the body and you can live from the perspective of that worldview and that's what you experience as"
},
{
"end_time": 7090.469,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7075.247,
"text": " Testing your balance, testing your centeredness or threatening to make you lose yourself because you can embody what for most people is purely a conceptual narrative. Most people have the opposite problem. They cannot embody."
},
{
"end_time": 7118.217,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7090.794,
"text": " a narrative. They are incapable of making that translation. And what that means is that even if they understand certain things and they make progress cognitively in understanding, it doesn't change their lives. It doesn't touch their emotions. They continue to live according to old patterns, to old references, because there is a level in which they don't actually believe the conceptual narratives. You have your gates open."
},
{
"end_time": 7145.93,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7118.592,
"text": " Um, that is a tremendous advantage compared to most people, but also a liability because you have to watch that gate carefully. Um, you can, you can put yourself in a place from which it's very hard to emerge again. Um, but, uh, everything you said, uh, to me, I would just say, you know, hooray, cheers to life. You're living. Congratulations, man."
},
{
"end_time": 7158.524,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7147.824,
"text": " I'm going to comment on the illusory aspect because here's one aspect that gave me groundedness was when I was speaking to this"
},
{
"end_time": 7181.357,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7158.882,
"text": " Professor of religion named Diana Pasolka. She was saying, Kurt, don't worry that half of the world thinks that I am God and so on because you don't know what they mean by that. I don't have the like I have an idea of what they mean. Could be misinterpreting what they mean. They could be wrong at the same time. Millions and billions of people have been wrong. All of these practices, meditation and psychedelics, they're meant to be done with the community and all these insights."
},
{
"end_time": 7206.749,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7182.483,
"text": " She said she would imagine if you went to some leader and you told them this insight, they'd be like, oh, no, no, like, that's what that that's completely wrong. Like you're not you are not God. Like you are an aspect of God or whatever it may be. And then she also said the Plato's cave journey is what's what's happening or the dark night of the soul. She is that phrase. She said the actual full story of that. You think this is reality, the wall."
},
{
"end_time": 7229.582,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7207.125,
"text": " You come out, you feel like that's an illusion. Then the end of the story is to somehow realize that what you thought was real in the beginning is indeed real, it's just real in another manner, like somehow more real. And then I remember something, Bernardo, that you said, look at this, this we think of as solid, we feel it, there's solidity to it, yet we look at it through a microscope and we say, yeah, the atoms are far apart, the solidity is an illusion."
},
{
"end_time": 7258.78,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7231.186,
"text": " That's if you take materialism as primary. What if you take your conscious experience? No, no, this is solid. This actually is solid. There's something real about that. There's something real about this table. There's something real about me inhabiting this world. I can go through this process where I feel like, oh, that's all an illusion. But then there's this quote about T.S. Eliot that the point of the journey is to come back where you started and know the place for the first time. I feel like that I'm slowly starting where I feel the reality of this more. I feel it."
},
{
"end_time": 7272.824,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7259.241,
"text": " But then there's a nagging part of me that's like, yeah, you're tricking yourself, Kurt, you're tricking yourself. We let our theories hijack the reality of our experiences. And that's a tragedy. Experiences are not nothing."
},
{
"end_time": 7302.278,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7273.114,
"text": " They're the only thing that is really real. That's not just abstraction. So it doesn't matter that you know there are atoms here and then the distance between the electron orbitals and the nucleus is enormous relative to the diameter of the particles themselves. Yeah, it's all true. But you experience this. You hold this. It has weight. It has texture. It feels moist and it satiates my thirst. This is all real stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 7332.09,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7302.892,
"text": " Now, a conceptual understanding and conceptual narrative behind that may be true or not, but it doesn't take away from the experience. Whatever this is, it is an experience and it is real as such. The problem is that we are in a society which implicitly tells us experiences in themselves are nothing. It's the thing that lies behind the experience that counts."
},
{
"end_time": 7362.449,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7332.534,
"text": " That's absolutely nonsensical. All we have is experience. The narrative behind it can help us develop a certain understanding, but not by robbing us of the immediacy of experience, which ultimately is all we have. We can add understanding to that, but that understanding is a layer on top of the immediacy of experience. And look, the ego exists. It's a tool."
},
{
"end_time": 7390.896,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7363.148,
"text": " Without it, I wouldn't know which mouth to bring the fork. So there is something there that we call the ego. Now, is it your subjectivity in and of itself or not? That's a valid question. I would answer that the ego is not your subjectivity. It's a certain configuration of experiences or a narrative within your subjectivity. And yes, idealism ultimately is a form of cosmic solipsism. And you can"
},
{
"end_time": 7415.52,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7391.647,
"text": " dip your toes in those waters and you recoil from it. I call it the vertigo of eternity. It's a place that is very hard to visit, very hard to confront, which may be a clue to why we are here, you know, in this form. But maturing has always to do with"
},
{
"end_time": 7441.169,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7415.896,
"text": " poking you out of your comfort zone and buffeting you a little. And you just have to hold the boat together so it can continue to navigate and not sink. But I don't think there is anything intrinsically bad about the fact that the waters are trying. It's trying stuff. And that's how we progress."
},
{
"end_time": 7468.387,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7441.681,
"text": " I'm not a prophet. I'm not going to predict your future and you come from a different place than me. Your life has a different context. What holds to me may not hold to you. It doesn't hold to you. But now I'm going to do exactly what I said I wouldn't do, which is make a prediction. So forgive me for that. Okay. But there will moment there will come a moment when you realize that"
},
{
"end_time": 7498.49,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7468.831,
"text": " your problems will dissipate not because you answered your questions, but because you no longer feel the need to ask them. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Okay, so Chris, whatever thoughts come to you, and then we can move on to another couple of questions. I'm sorry to go on this side. You were just communicating with your own highest level of identity. So, okay, that's basically God. And the reason that you are able to communicate with God is that you are an aspect of God."
},
{
"end_time": 7520.538,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7499.292,
"text": " God is reality. It's the ultimate reality. It almost has to be that way, otherwise it makes no sense to call something God. Okay, you are a part of God, and you are a stratum of God's identity. It's as simple as that. And you give rise to things. Your experiences, they are identities. Your experience is not something that"
},
{
"end_time": 7549.189,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7521.032,
"text": " It's one unary coherent thing and yet it can be teased apart into this idea of form and substance. It's basically an experience as an interface. It's an interface between you and reality. It's you accepting input from the outside world or internal input from yourself and transducing it and then turning that into a thought or into behavior. This is what it's doing for you."
},
{
"end_time": 7572.073,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7549.667,
"text": " So your experiences, even your purely mental experiences, are of utmost value to you. They are identities that are a part of your identity, and you are a part of a greater identity. So you've got this continuum of identities, and it's nested, it's a Russian doll."
},
{
"end_time": 7601.988,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7572.995,
"text": " This Marshawn beast mode lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks whether"
},
{
"end_time": 7624.633,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7602.363,
"text": " football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
},
{
"end_time": 7634.462,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7624.633,
"text": " any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 7663.916,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7634.701,
"text": " Well, hey man, any compliment from you is an honor. So let's just end this with"
},
{
"end_time": 7693.626,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7664.735,
"text": " What do you all value? What do you value most? Chris? What do I value most? God. In other words, the identity of reality. And of course, supporting and aiding the fulfillment of reality. I believe that reality actually has a goal, a teleological purpose, that it is determined by its structure. Basically, it's built into what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 7723.456,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7693.951,
"text": " and that it is my job to help reality fulfill its goals, its teleological impetus, which derives from its structure. Because I'm a part of it, and it's my own highest level of identity, and it's my job to help it just as it helps me. Okay? I'm carried within it, I exist within it, so I'm going to return the favor, and I'm going to try to reinforce it as much as I can. That's what's valuable to me. And then, of course, we have all the things that are valuable to everybody."
},
{
"end_time": 7750.435,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7723.831,
"text": " The idea of love, I have a wife, I have a home, I have pets, I have dogs that love me, the taste of a good meal or a good drink, having fun with your friends, going out and enjoying nature, all of those things are valuable to me. But the one basic imperative that I feel is to integrate with reality perfectly, help reality reinforce itself."
},
{
"end_time": 7777.927,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7751.152,
"text": " because that's all there is. There is nothing outside of that. You try to extricate yourself from reality like the Buddhists are trying to do and you end up in nirvana and you're nothing. Your identity has at that point fused with that of the entire universe and you no longer have an individual identity at all. Your identity is a self-distributed thing that covers everything and you have lost your identity as you know. Okay, you're here and you feel your individual identity and that's very, very important."
},
{
"end_time": 7807.159,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7778.439,
"text": " Okay? Your job, your job, the job of your identity is not only to enjoy life as you were put here to do, but also to help life and to help reality reinforce itself. All right? That's what I consider value. Bernardo. The answer I will give you is not the answer I would like to give you. I would like to tell you I value love the most."
},
{
"end_time": 7832.841,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7808.302,
"text": " Relationships the most, human decency and justice. Nietzsche struggled with this question and he answered power. Power is what he considered the most important, the will to power, in contrast to Freud's will to pleasure. But the truth is, and you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7861.544,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7833.524,
"text": " Part of maturing is accepting your own truths and the truth is about yourself even when you don't like it. The truth is that for me the most important thing is truth and that how to probably surrender everything else to stare the truth in the face, whatever the price, whatever the cost. That for me is the highest calling. It's how I'm put together. It's not how I"
},
{
"end_time": 7889.428,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7862.5,
"text": " wish I was put together to prioritize truth above all else is not trivial. Again, Nietzsche, he was very explicit about that. He said, why do we want to know the truth? What's the point? He thought it was ridiculous. It was a knee jerk reflex that if we thought it through, we would abandon. It's not about what is true."
},
{
"end_time": 7915.725,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7890.111,
"text": " And I meditated on that for years. I went to the extreme of visiting the places where Nietzsche had those thoughts, which, thank goodness, are recorded. We know where he was. And I probably stood within a meter of where he stood. But at the end of all that struggle,"
},
{
"end_time": 7945.606,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7917.415,
"text": " It's it's the truth that shines through and the truth is my highest commitment is the truth. That's that's how I am. I yeah, I hate it in a sense, but that's how I am. Thank you all so much for coming out. This was thank you. Thank you all. This was well enlightening in many ways. OK, I would just."
},
{
"end_time": 7970.503,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7945.913,
"text": " Once again, repeat after that inspiring comment by Bernardo that truth and reality are basically two ways of looking at the same thing. When you say that's real or something is real, you are saying that it is true. And when you say that something is true, you're saying that it's real. So in dedicating yourself to truth, you also dedicate yourself to reality."
},
{
"end_time": 7997.449,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7970.794,
"text": " and both of our comments, both what both of us said combined in this one truth, this one real truth, the same thing. Thank you all. I hope you have fun. More than that. And thank you for being so open, for being so truthful and so out there."
},
{
"end_time": 8008.439,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7998.012,
"text": " with the rest of us."
},
{
"end_time": 8036.749,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8010.691,
"text": " The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you. And a special thank you to Jeannie Langan, whose diligence made this all possible. Thank you, Jeannie."
}
]
}No transcript available.