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[Auxiliary] Jordan Peterson interviews Curt Jaimungal on the Science of God and Consciousness
May 8, 2022
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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.
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Brief announcement. Some people wanted to talk to me either asking me questions or presenting their ideas to me slash others on a monthly one-hour group call, so a Patreon tier has been opened up for that purpose.
This is another auxiliary episode, this time with Jordan Peterson, where he posted an interview with me a few weeks ago on his YouTube channel linked in the description.
This is a technical dive into the nature of consciousness and analyzing God scientifically, as scientific and technical as one can be when exploring topics like this. We also reference various theories of everything and the role of perception in reality.
This episode is not sponsored by Brilliant, but I wanted to mention them regardless because many have started to understand the concepts in the Toe Channel more lucidly by engaging with their interactive material on math and physics. You can visit Brilliant.org slash Toe to get 20% off, and it helps the Toe Channel as well. If you'd like to hear more podcasts like this, then do consider going to Patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L
and supporting with a contribution of whatever you can as the only reason I'm able to do this is because of the patrons and the sponsor's support. A written review on whichever platform you're listening to this from also helps. Thank you and enjoy this supplementary episode where Jordan Peterson interviews Kurt Jaimungal. It should also be noted that I misremembered and mischaracterized Noam Chomsky's opinions of Jordan Peterson in the beginning of this podcast
If our perceptions evolved and we evolved to adapt to reality and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality, then what does that say about reality?
And that's not the answer to that question is not bloody obvious. Well, that's another question I hope that I can get to with with Dawkins, you know, and maybe he knows something that I don't. I hope so. Yeah, see, I want to make the claim that it sounds then
And I believe you've made this claim, perhaps even Viveki, that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily, the most quote unquote real it is. However, however, then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out. And then the closer we are to that, the closer our map is to that reality. Of course, we're not trying to mistake the map in the territory. Well, whether or not material objects exist, patterns exist,
Right? And it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are.
Hello everyone. I'm pleased today to have with me Kurt Jaimungal. He's a Toronto-based filmmaker with a background in mathematics and physics who directed and wrote the film Better Left Unsaid, which was released in April 2021. That film explores the question of, among other things, when does the left go too far?
On the physics side, you can find out more
by visiting youtube.com forward slash theories of everything or searching theories of everything on Spotify, iTunes or virtually any of the other audio platforms. So you've been podcasting and running this YouTube channel for how long? About a year? Yeah, slightly longer than a year. Now, the channel has been up for approximately three years in the sense that it was registered three years ago, but I've been going at it with force for about one year and a bit.
So who have you interviewed that's been most popular? Noam Chomsky. And you're one of the reasons why, because I was the first person, if not the only person, to ask him about you directly. Oh, so I don't know about that. So there's something we could talk about right away. So what did he have to say?
Well, essentially, you're Hitler, as you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that. And so why do you think he thinks that? I think that people who are on a certain side on the political spectrum believe their side stands for what's good and the opposite side is what's not good. One of the see, that's so tricky, man. Talking about better left and said, which we'll get to later, is how do you define the left and the right decidedly difficult? Almost everyone has a different definition.
Chomsky would say, well, the left is freedom. And so anything that's on the right is anti freedom. And the right people who are on the right are identified with being as such would perhaps categorize it as the opposite. Yeah, well, it's interesting, at least that they might circle around claims to some, let's say virtue that both of them would admire like freedom.
Right. So there's some agreement there despite the different difference. Did he point to anything particular about what I hypothetically thought that made me not an acceptable sort of creature? No, it's somewhat, it's somewhat hearsay in the sense that he read an article based on you. So he didn't watch you directly. He read Nathan Robinson's critique of you, which I'm sure you have. Well, that'll do it, man. Yeah. Yeah. Old Nathan. He's, he's quite the character. Yeah, I see. So
Well, that's too bad in many regards. Did you learn anything in particular from talking to Dr. Chomsky? Quite a significant amount. As for what I can point to, let me think, I spoke to him six times, six times on the channel. So the first time about you, I found it interesting that he said,
I asked each guest that I spoke to at the time, because now I've pivoted away from politics for reasons we can get to later. I asked him and every other guest, when does the left go too far? In some sense, it's a Petersonian question, because you've raised that quite a few times. When does the left go too far? He said, well, it's not a matter of going too far for the left. It's a matter of tactics. As for when does the right go too far? He said, well, the right is suicidal, I think was his words. Hmm.
So that's interesting because it's really not much of an answer. I mean, I've been always looking for a technical definition of that, right? It's like, well, we know the right can go too far and we know the left can go too far. And how do we point to? And I think this problem has actually become more complicated rather than less, because the more I've been thinking about it, the more I think that the errors on the left are
more in the nature of a vast number of small errors, mostly often of omission. So the more reasonable people on the left kowtow too rapidly to the more radical types on the left, especially at the philosophical level. And I think that really happened at the universities. So
Well, that's something we can explore. Well, it's actually a question I would have for you. Why do you think that is? I know that this is mainly you interviewing me, but I'm still perplexed when it comes to that. Why is it that the center left doesn't excoriate the extreme left? Is it because they're on the same side? So the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Or are they afraid because, well, they can get, you can lose even a tenured position.
Well, I think there's I think that fear and it isn't obvious to me that this is merely a problem that affects the left. But I'm most familiar with it in the university circumstance. And so what I saw happening in my 25 years as a faculty member, let's say, I think that's about right. It's more than that, actually. But anyway, it's quite a long time, three decades, let's say, was that whenever the administration pushed on the faculty,
so in our faculty meetings for example there would be administrative demands and they were often unreasonable they would increase the size of our our seminars say for our third and fourth year students ask us to do more work with fewer resources and that was a steady trend like if you look at spending say on faculty salaries versus spending on administrative salaries across universities in the west broadly speaking but certainly in north america
The amount spent on administration just skyrocketed upward whereas the amount spent on faculty pretty much stayed constant and so why well it was because the faculty just retreated continually every time they were challenged to say no when so i objected.
Repeatedly in faculty meetings whenever that happened and said well why don't we just say no they want to increase our seminar size you know like double it let's say in for third years it's not a seminar anymore once you get to a certain point we just say no we're not doing that why don't we just say no we won't do that.
Well, then they won't give us what we want. Well, they don't give you what you want anyways. So like what's to lose. And, but, but so it was a thousand tiny retreats. And then what happened after that was that the administration having grown too top heavy, um, was taken over by people within the administration, let's say who had this DEI philosophy and they couldn't say no to them. So,
Now, so when did the left go too far? Well, it was micro retreats, continual cowardly micro retreats at the university level. Now, sorry to be so long-winded about this, but there was something even more brutal underneath all that philosophically, which I'm trying to lay out in the new book that I'm writing, which is this postmodern problem. And the postmodern problem really emerged in the 1960s with the simultaneous realization across a number of disciplines
That there's almost an infinite number of ways of perceiving anything and i mean literally perceiving so when you look at the world you see these things you think are objects and they're sort of self-evident but where an object begins and where it ends is much more difficult to compute than any one ever realized which is partly why we don't have you know robots wandering around doing things like dishwashing which turns out to be insanely complex and it also emerged in literary criticism
with the realization that, well, just as there were an indefinite number of ways of looking at something, so actually acquiring the objective facts of perception, there was an even more vaguely indefinable way of way of potentially interpreting a text or a canon of texts, let's say. So how do we decide what's good and what's bad literature, what's deep and what's shallow, what's valid and invalid? And the answer is we don't know. That's the answer.
But a premature answer was generated by social critics on the left and the premature answer was well all our categories and the act of categorization itself serve the will to power.
And that's true to some degree, because we're all totalitarian and authoritarian and narcissistic to some degree. We also use deception to get what we want, so we can corrupt our category structure. But there's a huge difference between saying, well, we don't know the answer, but power may play a role, and saying the answer is that power always plays a role and that's all there is.
And that's what's happened on the left in the postmodern field. And that sort of fit in nicely with the, you know, the idea that capitalism was essentially oppressive and that the patriarchal structure is essentially oppressive, et cetera, et cetera. And it's, it's, it's a, it's an unbelievably corrosive and terrible philosophy. So, well, the left went too far there to claim that nothing but the will to power governance categorization
and the act of categorization, which is basically consciousness itself, that act of categorization, that you could not possibly formulate a more cynical, malevolent and careless, destructive philosophy. So see what makes this. So you interpreted the question as a time question, temporal one, when does the left go too far? And I guess that's within
that within when and for me what you also laid out ideologically what it is that they believe that makes them go too far i don't like to use the word ideological we don't have to get into the into the reasons there but for the sake of speaking right now just use that word why when do they go too far ideologically see some of the people i spoke to said the left goes too far when it comes to violence well there's something that leads to the violence some idea and you also mentioned
Power right that also doesn't distinguish the left going too far from the right going too far, right? so and and it's not a really good answer because sometimes we think Sometimes we think that violence is justified like in self-defense and often political violence is What would you say? rationalized and sometimes perhaps even functions as self-defense and sometimes it's rebellion against true oppression in which case
people on the left and the right might regard violence not only as necessary, but actually morally demanded, right, ethically demanded. So the mere use of violence and then of course what constitutes violence, that's the next problem with that. It's too shallow an argument to really get to the core of things. One has to be extremely careful about what counts as self-defense, especially preemptive self-defense, which is behind
much of what they do they'll say that well we have to take action now against the right or the extreme right which pretty much everyone who's on the right they would classify as being a part of the alt right or alt light yeah well that's that's another part yeah that's another yeah exactly well that's another part of this tit for tat process that we see i think perhaps accelerating it particularly in the united states with the
Return of Trump, let's say to the political arena and there's a tremendous amount of distrust growing distrust on both sides of the political spectrum driven. Well, that's the question driven by what certainly by the extreme views of a minority on both sides, laying out the exact causal process is extremely difficult because these things, they're not unidirectional.
They they they cause each causes the other, you know, I poke you you poke me I slap you you slap me a little harder I punch you you punch me, you know And and then we we have knives and we're at each other's throats and we say well, you know who started it Well, maybe you said something insulting before I poked you, you know who but but the one of the things of interest when observing something like that is I
the causal process that's involved in the tit-for-tat return and I've been thinking about that a lot because I'm for a whole variety of reasons that I can't go into but Jonathan Haidt also just wrote an article about positive feedback loop processes operating at a very rapid scale on Facebook and Twitter and exacerbating this political
Positive feedback loop right runaway positive feedback loop, you know You know if you if you're doing any recording and you bring your microphone too close to the speaker that That you're speaking through you'll get this howl of feedback and that can destroy the whole system the whole recording system and that's a good example of how positive feedback loop can get out of control and That's the real enemy like if we're thinking meta politically the real enemy is
the possibility that mutual distrust on both sides will accelerate our descent into a kind of melee. And so the enemy isn't necessarily the catastrophic ideology of the left or the right, but the manner in which extreme views can foster a spiral of violence that none of us know how to stop.
And it's stupid little things can trigger like one of my friends today sent me this article showing that I think it was in the Virginia governor's race that four people use Tiki lanterns and they were
hypothetically marching in support of the republican candidate and so they were posing as members of the conspiratorial alt-right but two of them were actually democrat operatives political operatives trying to discredit the republican campaign and that's so dangerous because they're basically acting out the proposition that it's nazis you know for all intents and purposes fascists that are supporting the republicans and to that's such a terrible lie right it's it's such a terrible lie to
to act that out to demonize your fellow citizens that way. It's unbelievably dangerous. And we got to stop doing things like that, you know, and all of us have to stop doing things like that. Right. That may be at the bottom of it, which you may say so many ways that this can be taken. And I think that one. Well, it's difficult to say what's at the bottom, but one of the predominant factors may be personalized, personal lies, not personalized.
Yes, I believe that I really do believe why Why do you say that? Right? See, if you watch the film toward the fourth section, I believe I split it up into chapters. And then the fourth section becomes much more philosophical, which is one of the reasons why I started it, because I happen to like puzzles and philosophy. It's one of the reasons I went into math, I like abstract thinking.
So I tried to make a case about lies and how lies spread. Now there's one obvious route to take that with memes. So you talk about memes and how memes spread. So you don't want to pollute that because that comes back to affect you if you care about yourself, first of all. So maybe you shouldn't care about yourself so much as for
Hmm see something I was exploring and I'm not quite sure is it possible to tell a lie without lying to yourself That seems on the face of it. Yes. I don't think so. Well Well, there's psychological evidence though that you you can't well here let's let's let's dig into that a little bit so you tell a lie to yourself and you think well, I know the difference it's like well I
Don't be so sure about that. So here's one experiment that's an example. So imagine that I give a group of people a scale that measures their political belief about a certain issue. Maybe the reality of climate change or the unreality of climate change for that matter. It doesn't matter. And then I get those same people to write an essay of 500 words outlining the contrary position.
And they know they're just doing it because it's part of the experiment, but then they come back a week later and I give them the same political belief scale. And what's happened is their beliefs will have shifted substantially towards the side that they argued for. Okay, so why? Well, first of all, a lot of your so-called beliefs are really low resolution.
They're just heuristics. They're like single pixel images. You haven't thought it through very carefully. Imagine maybe you know more than the average person because of your background, but imagine how much you know about how a helicopter works. You know, do you know what a helicopter is? Yes. No, you don't. If you had to draw one, it would look like a four year old drew it.
You can identify the shape in two dimensions, you know it flies, that's about it. You couldn't fix one, you certainly couldn't build one. So in a real sense, you don't know anything about a helicopter except what you need as someone who's never around helicopters to know. And most things are way more complicated than helicopters even though they're plenty complicated.
And so you think that you know something when you think you know it, but then you detail out a counter argument, and it turns out that you've provided more detail in the counter argument that you had in your argument to begin with. And so that shifts your cognition towards what you argued for. Well, if you think that doesn't happen to you when you're lying, well, you don't know anything about how you work. And then the other thing is, well,
virtually no one thinks that lying is acceptable morally when it comes right down to it. There might be specific exceptions to that now and then. And so if you lie, you're going to tilt what you believe towards the lie because that will lighten the ethical load that you carry. It'll reduce cognitive dissonance. That's one way of terming it.
And so, and then you can't keep track of your lives. And so that's a big problem. And they tangle up your thoughts. And then also, let's say a whole bunch of people really like your lie. Well, then, you know, most of us, all of us thrive on attention. I mean, children will misbehave to get attention, even if it's negative attention, if they can't get it any other way.
And so you lie and you put it out on Twitter and know 10,000 people like it. And then you think, well, wait a sec, probably I believe that because look at how positively it was received. And some of that's actually socially positive, right? I mean, if you say something, a lot of people respond to it positively.
That might be a good reason for you to think that way a bit more, right? Because the fact that you want social approval isn't only an index of your cowardice, it's also an index of your desire to be productive and to fit in and to have people like you and all of that. And so lies, they just warp things to a tremendous degree. And if you think you're smart enough to keep your lies separate from your truth. And then one final issue is
Well, doesn't that mean that you're practicing to become 20% a liar? And don't you think you're getting better at that? You become what you practice. And then don't you think that'll interfere with your ability to distinguish between what you think and what you don't think, first of all, and also your ability to tell the difference between truth and falsehood?
And so, Dan, don't you think it'll make you cynical about the nature of humankind to observe yourself lying? You're certainly going to think other people do it, at least as much as you. And if they're bad people, they do it way more. It's just a rat's nest. And, you know, I became convinced a long time ago, looking at the totalitarian problem on the left and the right, that the most effective way to deal with this fundamentally was psychological and that what we need to do, all of us, is to stop lying. Each of us in our own lives,
That's the solution. We have to stop and that partly that's because we're so damn powerful now. I mean, how many people have watched your podcasts? Do you think 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 $4.99 you'll spend this season. Prices and participation may vary while supplies last, taxes, tips and fees extra. In terms of views now, obviously there are multiple views for one video. Millions, almost seven or so, seven or eight million.
Okay. So how powerful might your lies be? Right. Right. And I mean, each of those million people is connected to a thousand other people. So that's a billion people that you're two steps away from at least. So you said, sorry, you said 7 million people. So it's 7 billion people, you know, I mean, obviously those circles are going to overlap, but you get my point.
Yeah, what I would object to is that you said most people would agree that telling lies is deleterious in some manner. Now I'd say that they say that they profess it, but they don't truly believe it. And the reason that may, in fact, be what unifies the extremes. I'll give you I'll give you an example. Sure, if you ask someone, I think that if you were to ask someone, is it OK to lie for the greater good, they would say,
Well, the majority of those people on the extremes would say yes. And then I wonder, well, perhaps that's an indication that you're on the extreme. Perhaps if you have a worldview, I talk about this concept called Veltan Shaung. That's a good idea, man. Yeah. Perhaps if you have a Veltan Shaung that says that there is no, that somehow there is no greater, somehow you can't tell a lie and before the greater good, because the truth and the good are tied.
Yeah, I think that's right. So that's a really smart idea, the idea that if you have a belief system politically that requires any lies to support, then that's an indication that you've gone too far. I think that's a good rule of thumb. Right. And what else is, as you mentioned, pestiferous because it's poisonous, is that
they they'll say power is one of the well they'll say power is the predominant perhaps only factor that underlies our social interactions and even truth claims and so on well the issue with the issue with that is that it's partly true and the reason is see this cup here
this cup comprises many elements there's an element of power in this cup there's an element of art as well by the way there's an element of physics you can look at it mathematically you can look at it through an engineering lens you can look at it through an architectural lens yeah well the power is the power in the cup is for example that you own it it's your cup right and so it's embedded within a hierarchy now the question so your claim is exactly right
But there's a huge difference between claiming that it's useful to investigate the role that arbitrary expression of power plays in conceptual systems, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and the premature answer that the
The solution to the problem of perception is will to power and nothing else and so i've been talking to some evolutionary biologists about that i talked to robert trivers this week he's getting old and it was interesting to talk to him but we talked about psychopaths. Okay so let's let's let's wander down that path just for a minute so imagine that the patriarchal structure is predicated on nothing but power.
okay and then imagine the psychopaths are particularly cunning uses of power users of power okay so then to the degree that the social system is an expression of power you'd expect psychopaths to be radically successful but they
In human population, well, they're also, they also never exceed their numbers vary between one and 5% in the population never gets higher than three is really the upper limit, but it can get up to five. So they're not that successful because 97% of people aren't psychopaths. So.
It just that fact alone indicates that there's something wrong with the power claim. Now, you might say, well, psychopaths aren't very good at utilizing power. It's like, no, no, wait a minute. Actually, psychopaths are better at utilizing pure power stripped completely of empathy than anyone else by definition. So they are literally the power users who lack compassion.
So why aren't they radically successful in human populations? And the answer to that is, well, because our hierarchies are not fundamentally built on power and our concepts and perceptions aren't fundamentally a consequence of power or its misuse. Now, that doesn't mean that our perceptions and our social structures can't be, and our intimate relationships, our relationships with ourselves for that matter, can't become contaminated by the excess desire for power.
and by the deceit that might be employed let's say in its service that obviously that happens and we have to keep our eyes open all the time about that but the central claim is not only is it unbelievably cynical and destructive and also extremely helpful if you want to demonize your enemies you know because if i believe that the entire basis of your perceptual structure is will to power and so is mine let's say
Well, if you don't believe the same things I do, so if you're trying to elevate yourself in a different hierarchy or you're trying to produce a different hierarchy altogether, we have nothing in common except our enmity. Because there's no ground outside what you're striving for and what I'm striving for selfishly where we can meet as reasonable people and have a, you know,
discussion. That's not even technically possible within that scheme. And so that means that if you and I are enemies, well, what am I supposed to do with you? Because all you are is will to power. I can't trust you. I can't reason with you. Reason doesn't even exist. You know, you see echoes of that in the claims that rational discussion or something like that is, you know, especially the dialectical forms is somehow a construction of white supremacy
You know implicit in our social structures. It's so it's so shallow that idea and the idea that our virtues first of all that there aren't any virtues but even if there are they're only derivable from power hierarchy structures. God that's so cynical and so destructive and so dangerous and imagine just living with that notion that that's what motivates everyone is nothing but like an untrammeled will to authoritarian power.
God, that's hell, man. Yeah, you mentioned the word use multiple times. And that is one of the reasons why I try to analyze it more philosophically toward the end. Because I don't think that this is see, some people would say what we need is dialogue. You'll see you'll hear this many of the times it would come from people who are on the center, center, right, center left, let's say we just need to speak to each other more. But I think what comes before what comes prior to speaking is we need to value the same
We need to be oriented in the same direction. Yeah, well, that's again what this new book that I'm writing is about, you know, because there has to be a
There has to be an initial framework, as you said, that makes even the possibility of dialogue a reality. So it's got to be something. Look, look what we're doing right now. You and me. Hopefully this is what we're doing right now is like, you know, some things and I know. Yeah, that's right, man. Hopefully. And let's bloody well pray that we are smart enough and wise enough and careful enough to do it. Right. So it's not easy.
You come to this discussion thinking maybe you don't know everything and that I might have something to say that would be useful and interesting to you that that might actually be crucial to you. And I come to this dialogue hoping for the same from you. Right. So first of all, we both come to the degree we're doing this properly in an attitude of humility. I want to hear from you.
And you know, I tend to be kind of dominant in conversations and I talk too much and so that probably interferes with it to some degree. But I really do try to listen and I really do hope that when I talk to someone, that's partly why I do the podcast, is that they'll tell me something that someone as stupid and potentially malevolent as me might really need to know. And so if I
You have to have this presumption of ignorance
And the belief that the person across from you, particularly if they differ from you, might have something useful to say, because they're different from you, they know things that you don't know. So isn't it so good that they're different? And then you have to believe that men of goodwill exist, let's say, and that they can exchange information that's mutually corrective and both can walk away better.
One of the reasons, and I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but one of the reasons this theories of everything podcast has taken off the way that it has is partly because I'm not averse to this
ambiguous contradictory thinking when it comes to metaphysical issues like whether or not there exists a god and to speak in terms of religious terms most scientists are as you know and as i know most scientists are they find that to be anathema and i i don't think i'm going to talk to richard dorkins oh well that's wonderful
Yeah, I saw your conversation with Lawrence Krauss and I was well, I did another one with Harris to just a week and a half ago and it went real well. I figured out how to do to talk to Sam better than I have before. I just asked mostly I just asked him questions and that's really useful to just ask questions rather than because I think I went sideways to some degree in my discussions with Sam, which I don't usually do. I was trying to prove something sideways. Well,
Well, like I said, I was trying to prove something instead of listening and asking questions. And I should, it would have been better had I not tried to do that and just tried harder and harder to understand what it was that he thought. Because one, you know, the more we talked, the more we found like real major points of agreement. You know, like Sam is oriented to a great degree, he's very much concerned about the human
and malevolence that drives him that terror of that and that's I would say that's my fundamental driver I hope it is at least and so that's our something that really unites us and he's hoping that he can find you know a genuine morality now he believes he can find it in scientific inquiry and I don't think that's true but whatever he might be right and and it's not like I don't think science can inform our moral choices and maybe has to but
I, you know, when I came out on the public sphere and first talked to Sam, I had this sort of axe to grind in some sense, which was my belief that the fundamental framework from within which we see the world isn't and can't be objective. And I still believe that's true. But I was hammering it home because I wanted to win that argument. And that was that was the most sophisticated way of going about it. Well, less and less, I think, as we talked.
so and this time i didn't do that at all i just asked him questions and we definitely had the best conversation we've ever had so and i'm really hoping to do that with Dawkins it's like i don't want to win an argument i don't want to have an argument i want to ask him questions i want to find out what he thinks because Dawkins is no fool great and his atheistic materialism grounded in his evolutionary thinking like
That's powerful. You know, it's a powerful system of thought and he's a master of it. And so I want to find out what led him to the conclusions that he came to. And I have questions for him. You know, I want to talk to him, for example, about the instinct to imitate because you were talking earlier about something that unites us, you know. So imagine this, for example. You know that the same person can be admired by a lot of different people, even people
And that, that admiration sort of captures them. That's charisma. That's part of charisma. The charisma is part of an instinct, right? Because if I think you're charismatic and then I'm going to watch you more and my eyes are going to point to you more, I'm going to be more likely to do the things you do. I'm more likely to imitate you. And so I would say there's something like a central spirit that we're all driven to imitate. And it is the thing that we see as admirable across people.
And that points to something that we experience as religious. So, like, the ultimate expression of that which compels imitation is indistinguishable from religious worship. It's not propositional. Yeah. Well, that's a Verveckian argument. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Well, and Vervecki is one of the people
Yeah and the director's cut.
So just for people who are watching, if you'd like to watch the film, it's best to go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there instead of iTunes and YouTube and so on, which you can also get it from if you'd like, if that's easier, but you can go to the URL betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there for the same price, you get access to the director's cut, which has Jonathan Peugeot. And I'm sure the listeners, the watchers of this are fans of Jonathan.
Yeah, well, I think Peugeot is super smart, man. He's deep. And the same with Vervecky. Those two, they've taken certain forms of thought farther than anybody I've ever met. Vervecky is so well read, it's terrifying. And Peugeot is this weird character because he really understands postmodern thinking.
yeah yeah yeah well you see well that's part of having an artistic temperament too you know people like that who are more open in trait terms they can they can see patterns in things now that can lead them astray because you can you can project patterns into you know the void let's say that aren't there that's conspiratorial thinking for
who are also capable of critical thinking pick up patterns long before anyone else does. I've had graduate students like that, you know, they would leap to a scientific conclusion.
that was dead on multiple times. And then when they were writing their papers, they'd have to fill in how they got there. Well, that wasn't how they got there. They leaped from mountaintop to mountaintop using Nietzsche's terminology. And they could see patterns. And then they had to construct a rational story to publish their ideas in scientific journals. It's so funny because it's a form of falsification, right? That isn't how they got there. But
But that's so that's one of the questions I want to ask Dawkins is like, well, what about this instinct to imitate? Do you think such a thing exists? You know, because I don't believe he's a blank slate theorist. And we're really good at
this for example when I was watching my kids play house so my son would act out the father you know he'd be the father but he wasn't imitating me exactly wasn't mimicking the exact right gestures of my body right like I do this well I'm imitating you right now
But if I was a comedian and I want to parody you, I would imitate your spirit in some sense, right? And then put a twist in it and everyone would laugh. So I can abstract out from you your pattern. Well, then imagine we're way better at it than that. Like if I watch 10 admirable men and was gripped by my admiration for them, let's say I was fortunate enough to have 10 admirable men in my family, I could abstract out the central spirit that makes them all admirable and I could imitate that.
So what occurs when you keep doing that over and over? That's exactly right across generations and so now partly what occurs is the imagination formulates the representation of the abstraction.
So I'll give you an example. So if you look and you often see this in Byzantine Cathedral, so you look up in a Byzantine Cathedral, it's a dome. So that's the sky. And maybe you'll see an image of Christ up there as Panto creator, great creator of the world. This is sort of tied with the idea that consciousness gives rise to reality. It's so it's an idealistic philosophy or experience. Well, the idea is something like
that the thing to be admired, it's the central phenomena and function of consciousness and in some sense it gives rise to the reality that is good itself. And the imagination gets there way before the propositional philosophers, way before the artists and the religious dreamers. You made an argument that that is partly at least what is a religious phenomenon. Now do you think that's only it?
no i have another definition that i'm working out okay so it these are things i'm going to talk about when i go to cambridge because i'm going there to oxford and cambridge at the end of november and in any case
Okay, some beliefs have more beliefs dependent on them than others and
The more beliefs that are dependent on a given belief, the deeper that belief is. The deepest of those beliefs, we hold sacred by definition. By definition, our deepest beliefs are sacred. They're primary. And you can tell that in part because if they're challenged,
You get unbelievably upset. And the reason you get upset is because while you're not just destabilizing that belief, you're destabilizing all the beliefs that depend on it. And so one sacred belief in a marriage is sexual fidelity, let's say faithfulness. Right. And you kind of take that on faith because while you take it's on faith that you think that's valuable in part, but it's also on faith that your partner is manifesting that because you, you know,
you can accumulate evidence that your partner isn't trustworthy and no one's perfectly trustworthy so you could see how right exactly so but it's a fundamental belief and then if you find out that your partners betrayed you well then the whole house of cards perhaps not the whole house of cards but a lot of the cards come tumbling down you know the past is no longer what you thought it was
your whole faith in humanity itself might be compromised, including your faith in yourself. Like it can really, it's a dagger in the depths, especially if you really love the person and really trusted them. So, so the more sacred a belief is, the deeper it is embedded in this, in this structure of beliefs. And I don't believe those are objective beliefs. That's another thing I want to talk to Dawkins about. I do not think the scientific evidence suggests that
our perceptions that what we perceive are material objects that are self-evident that we then derive our conceptual systems from. I don't think there's any evidence for that. I think it's wrong and it's been proven wrong. So, you know, that's some of the places I want to go. Yeah. Tell me what you think of this. Now I've only thought about this recently. I think when atheists
call the religious dogmatic. What they truly mean is that you're pantheistic for low level gods. What I mean is, what you've outlined is something like this. So let's say you have a hierarchy and hopefully it's monotheistic in the sense that you're integrated, which no one is, but hopefully it's you're pointing to one God, one source of good. Okay, then you're like, well, what makes me good? And you keep going down and down and down until you get to extremely micro level actions, such as
type this email. I'm typing this email. Why? So that I can get an approval for someone for an interview. Why? So that I can talk and hopefully so on and so on and so on. And I think, I think you've outlined, I'm pretty sure it was you that it depends on. So which level there's the disruption that is proportional to the anxiety that you experienced. Okay. Exactly right. So then I think we know the neurophysiology of that even. Okay. So then when someone like Sam Harris calls someone else dogmatic,
Essentially what they mean is that, why are you getting upset at this level? Why are you holding this to be sacred? So here's another example to people who are fundamental in their religious view. So they believe it's literal, what's in the Bible is literal. Something I think about is, and even people who think the Bible is entirely metaphorical,
If I say, well, what if, let's imagine I'm speaking to a fundamentalist, if I say, what if this aspect of the Bible is not meant to be literal, it's metaphorical? They get upset. Why do you get upset? Why is your belief in God contingent? Should your belief in God be contingent? Or should you have faith no matter what? Okay, so then they would say, well, well, so why does that undermine your belief? To me, faith should be
Well, it shouldn't be so easily undermined. And so in some sense, it's as if they're saying here's my God instead of at the top level. Well, here what? Oh, yeah, they are. Well here. Okay. Well, so let's dig into that a little bit. That's a very good observation. Well, one of their unrecognized gods is literal. Hear that sound.
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Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories. The phrase itself because literal means real and it means ultimately real but literal doesn't mean real or ultimately real necessarily like literals really like what does a Dostoevsky novel literally mean? Well nothing.
Well, none of it's true. It didn't happen or did it, or did it really happen like at a meta level? Well, that's where great novels happen is at a meta level. So truth is complicated. And this is see, so the fundamentalists, they're, they're tripped up philosophically to some degree because they, they, they can't see how something can be, Oh my God, it's so complicated. This is where Sam Harris and I kept going off on, you know, different tangents.
They don't know what they mean when they say literal. They equate literal with real. They equate real with material real. And so when you go after that and you say, well, it's not literally true. What you're saying, what you're essentially saying is that while your whole belief system is predicated on a misapprehension, even about the nature of God, let's say. I mean, you know, most religious traditions, many religious traditions insist that
representing God in a concrete manner is actually an error. The Taoists are not very happy with that idea. The Muslims certainly aren't. The Orthodox Christians really don't, many of them really don't like to represent God the Father in their iconography and part of the reason for that is that you shouldn't concretize the absolute. It's dangerous. Now it's a problem because if you don't concretize it you can't act it
People ask me if I believe in God, and I always think, well, there's a whole bunch of assumptions in that question that you want me to swallow so that you can categorize my answer according to your pre-existent schemas, and that isn't an answer they like. But it's an equation, right? Is God real? God real? Well, what do you mean by real? Well, you know what I mean. No, I don't. Do you mean real like a table? Well, do you mean real like the table? They don't know. They just think they know. It's just like the helicopter issue.
Do you mean the table you know? Do you mean your table? Do you mean tables in general as real? Do they have to have four legs? Do they have to have a hard top? Like, what are we talking about when we mean real? Do we mean objectively real, like a table? Well, God isn't like a table. Well, then he isn't real. It's like, okay, well, have it your way, if that's as far as your thinking goes. But I don't even think that sophisticated
One of the most impressive thinkers I ever encountered in the field of perception
wrote this book called an ecological approach to visual perception. And he would say that a table is a, um, I always forget his name. It's an ecological approach to visual perception. Gibson. Yes. Yes. Okay. So when you see a table, do you see an, a flat surface with four legs or do you see a sitting down to eat place?
And the answer is you see a sitting down to eat place and there are objects that slot into that category. That's the answer. It's not the other way around. You don't see the material object which is self-evident and infer the function. Now, it may be a combination of those two things as well, but it doesn't matter. The functional element of it has a certain perceptual primacy. And I'll give you a kind of a nifty example of this.
there is a neurological condition called utilization behavior which accompanies prefrontal damage and if someone has manifest utilization behavior if you give them an object they can't not use it so because what's happened
When they see a cop, they'll lift it up and drink from it because a cop is a lifting up and drinking thing. Perceptually, it grip, it grips their motor output. They can't inhibit it. So, but the fact that they have to inhibit it shows how low level the functional perception is. Right. And so, so, so, and that's part of what I was trying to lay out with Harris is that, you know, the idea that the most real is the objective.
Doesn't seem to be true for our perceptions and then that tangles is up scientifically right because if our perceptions evolved and we evolved to adapt to reality and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality, then what does that say about reality?
And that's not all the answer to that question is not bloody obvious. Well, that's another question. I hope that I can get to with with Dawkins, you know, and maybe he knows something that I don't. I hope so. Yeah, see, I want to make the claim that it sounds then
And I believe you've made this claim, perhaps even Viveki, that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily, the most quote unquote real it is. However, however, then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out. And then the closer we are to that, the closer our map is to that reality. Of course, we're not trying to mistake the map and the territory.
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Like it looks to me, and you can talk about archetypes in this wise, I would say to some degree, trees have been around a long time and the tree structure is pretty embedded in our perceptual systems. And so there is a relationship between how long something has been around in our environment and how deep that is within our perceptual structures. You know, like we assume a difference between up and down.
For example, that's really built into us and it's at the basis of a lot of our metaphors. Up is high, up is the sky, up is elevated, up is the mountaintop, up is the sage, up is God. Well, that's partly because we're up and down creatures because there's gravity and there's the ground and we're stuck to the ground and the ground is base and it's material and it's dirty and the sky is pure and
et cetera, et cetera. A lot of our metaphorical architecture is predicated on these underlying presumptions and they do have a depth. And that's also partly why the biological question in relationship to ethics becomes complex too, because some of these adaptations to permanent patterns are biological fundamentals, right? And so
evolution, God, what do you say, persistent patterns that we've encountered over our evolutionary history have shaped the axioms of our ethics. It's complicated, man, like all this stuff is. But okay, so where I was going, well, you said quite a, you said quite, quite a significant amount. Let me see. Hmm. Hmm.
Okay, so I'll just go down one route. I don't know if you're aware of Donald Hoffman. The name doesn't ring a bell. Okay, so Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who makes the claim that what we see is not reality. It almost certainly cannot be. And the reason is that
The amount of ways that reality could be versus the amount of ways you could perceive. There's a it. So let's say the amount of ways reality could be is at the bottom. And then you have on the numerator, the amount of ways that you perceive that tends to zero for anything that's even remotely complicated, which we are more than remotely complicated. Well, look, you've watched The Simpsons or South Park. South Park's even a better example. Well, it's barely animation at all, South Park.
You know, it's just icons moving. You don't care. That's good enough. And it doesn't matter that in fact it's kind of an interesting style and it doesn't clutter up the story. Right. And so what you see is an icon. Now look, if you see an icon and the pixels in the icon are random samples of the underlying reality, then
And the reality doesn't change during the act of perception, then you're still seeing reality, but you're seeing it at very low resolution. And I think that's a better way of thinking about it. It's low resolution. It's not, not real. And you don't, you actually don't want your representations to be any higher resolution than necessary. So imagine on a computer, sometimes you want a thumbnail because that's good enough. And sometimes you want a high resolution photo because you need detail.
And that's a really good way of thinking about our perceptions. They're low and then also are our heuristics. So I think that each of us has a complete map of the world. Now you might say, well, we can't because we're ignorant and the world's real complicated. It's like, yeah, but we just cover up what we don't.
are mapped in a very low resolution way. And that's good enough as long as when we use the representation, we don't encounter an error. Like so, so it works. And if it doesn't work, well, then you have to decompose the, you have an explanation for, in some sense, a representation of everything. It's just low resolution. Like, like think of the word sky.
Okay, that's an icon. The word is an icon. So you could think the word is a representation of an image of a representation of reality. So when you look at the sky, you don't see the sky. Like let's say you're looking up in the night sky. I mean, god alive, there's a hundred billion galaxies up there. You don't see them. You see a low-res representation and then you make it even lower res by saying sky.
What is that good enough what's good enough you don't get hit by a meteor when you're out there on the deck standing looking up at the sky cuz it it does the trick for the time. That's a pragmatic pragmatic that's a pragmatic approach to truth to some degree you know it works well enough for your current purposes.
complete enough for you to act in the manner that produces the result you want, not the result you predict, the one you actually want. It doesn't always occur like that. No, well, of course not, because it's partly because our low-res reps or representations are fallible, immensely fallible, but often they're good enough.
You know, when you were speaking to Harris, what I thought was underlying the disagreement between you two, and even with you and Bret Weinstein about truth, is that there's the implicit assumption that one should pursue truth. So I don't know if that's the case. But when you're referring to truth, and you're saying, well, here's the definition of truth, and if we were to just follow blindly scientific truth, we would build atom bombs, which we have, we could destroy us, there are many paths that can go that aren't salutary. So we should pick
Well, one is explanatory. Well, who cares about explanatory? We care about our life. To me, what was underneath it was that we should pursue truth. Is that, am I correct in my assessment or was there something else? So what if one made the claim that we don't always have to pursue truth? Well, we can't pursue it everywhere, right? There has to be a spirit that animates the pursuit of truth.
To give it some direction. Well, look, here's an example. I think I probably use this in my discussions with Harris. I read this book once about biological warfare research in the Soviet Union, and it's pretty damn relevant in the case of Wuhan, let's say, you know, and God only knows what happened there. But in any case, demonetized right now, there were Soviet scientists working on combining, trying to make a hybrid between smallpox and
Ebola. What's that? Ebola, right, right, right, right. And then to make it deliverable in aerosols. Well, how about maybe not? How about maybe we don't go there? You know, and scientists are making decisions like that all the time, because there's an infinite number of facts to study. See, this is the problem with pure science argument, follow the science. It's like, well, there's an infinite
problem so science is all about the facts yeah which facts and then that gets us into the postmodernist dilemma because the postmodernist say only those facts that serve the will to power and your particular will to power that's just very cynical way of looking at science so
But there's still the question there, right? Something is directing this, and something needs to be directing this. And I would think Harrison Weinstein and myself would all agree that the pursuit of truth is of exceptional importance. And also that there are methods for distinguishing, let's say, material facts, scientific facts, from ethical facts. Now that's where it gets trickier in the relationship between those two.
i don't think you can look at the facts except through an ethical framework i don't think it's possible the ethical framework is built into your perception i see you can't help it and the reason for that it's technically quite
We walk, we move. We're always moving from point A to point B. Always, no matter what, even when we're looking at something, it's in preparation for a movement to somewhere better. You know, unless we're trying actively to make things worse, but that's an exceptional case. We can't help but look at the world. What we see is a map. That's a good way of thinking about it.
We don't see the world, we see our map of the world. And we need a map because we have to walk through the world. And we don't want to have things fall on us, etc. We don't want to get lost. And then we might infer objects from the contents of our maps. And we might even say those objects are fundamentally real, but then that's a problem because the question arises, well, what do you mean by real? Exactly. And exactly why?
And you know, then Sam would say, well, you can derive what's real from science. And I would say, well, there's an infinite number of facts, Sam. How the hell do we decide which facts to pursue and which not to pursue and which we shouldn't pursue? And you think here's something interesting about the scientific literature. You write a research report about your experiment. You almost never tell the truth about why you got interested in that.
What you do is you lay out this rational argument that led to your hypothesis, which isn't what led to your hypothesis at all, by the way. It's just a summary statement that other people could follow. It's not an actual description of what happened. You're interested in something for some reason, and that shapes your hypothesis and the direction of your research. And that's tied in with your own personal narrative. So
it bedevils the scientific enterprise and it can be a real problem because your own narrative can you know cloud your judgment of the let's say the relevant fact so the epitome of that is this mathematician named ramanujan have you heard of ramanujan yes okay for those who haven't heard of him he would come up
through intuition or through what he would say would be dream encounters with gods or goddesses, he would come up with what are astounding formulas that I remember, I think it was Hardy, who was the supervisor said, you can't simply make these up, they're too baroque for you to make them up. And they turned out to be correct. And what you're saying is, well, okay, how do you justify that? Well,
That was one of the problems with him. What he would is that he would spit out these formulas, which in the end, most of the time turned out to be true, slight modifications of what's true. And I'll give an example. If someone wants to, if someone can keep this in their head. Okay. So how many ways can you partition a certain number? So let's say 26 can be written as one plus one plus 26 times, or it can be written as one plus two and then plus one, one, one. So there are many, many different partitions of a natural number. He came up with this formula that the number, the partitions of any number, something like one over
two pi square root six, then you take the derivative of what's happening here, which is exponential one over two pi over square root of six, square root of n minus one over 24, all over square root of n minus one over 24. And he couldn't mess. Now, I'm not sure about that particular one. Doesn't matter. This is an example. He couldn't prove them. And he would say that he just, they just occurred to him. So that to me is, well, I'm wondering, well, that's a mystery. There's no one else in mathematics that was like that.
And I'm not sure if that's because he was terribly open. You mentioned openness is a trait that allows you to have this these large leaps of insight. I'm not sure if that's exactly why it could be. But that's an example.
Yeah, well, you know, the depths of what inspires us, that's a great mystery, right? I mean, one of the mysteries of the scientific enterprise, for example, is hypothesis generation. You know, when we train graduate students, we spend a lot of time training them in method, let's say, and approach and in writing scientific papers and so on. But there's almost no strict
Pedagogy in relationship to hypothesis generation. Well, where do you come up with your research questions to begin with? Well, I'm interested in that. It's like, well, that's really not much of an answer. It's certainly not formalized very well. What is that interest exactly? And how does it guide you exactly? And what is that? And then you might say, well, and also how is that related to your morality? Like to what degree is your scientific
Curiosity motivated by your own personal desire for success or maybe the desire to serve others, you know on the virtuous side Etc. Etc. Well, that's just that's just often the domain of what we don't ask those questions when we're scientists and Fair enough in some sense, but not really because while you do run the kind of problems you just described You know, I work with this carver
Canadian tribe. No, it's Charles Joseph is his name and he's quite a remarkable person and he carves these traditional west coast native Canadian quack quack quackawak sculptures and he dreams in those images
and he consults with the spirits of his father and grandfather great-grandfather in particular in his dreams about his carvings and he doesn't talk about that with anyone because they think he's crazy but he's not he's definitely not and he's a great artist in my estimation unbelievably creative and that his creative process is so unique that
Yeah, you brought that up to Krauss, that the science, well, you said science is nested within what you would consider to be the religious domain. And you could give an example by motivation, what motivates you to pursue a certain direction. So sure, once you've gotten to that direction, it's then a scientific, and then he said, well, look, you can't, can you point to me any
fact, let's say that the religious has come up with something like that, he said, and or knowledge. And then the question was, well, what does one mean by knowledge? And to me, it's, it's a soulless way of looking at the world, they divided the world of soul to begin with, and then wonder, where's the soul? So it's like you've watched someone you take it right now, if I go there, and I open up the fridge,
And I, and I say to you, or you say, Hey, Kurt had, Kurt had some soul that made him get up and go to the fridge. And then they say, well, where, what pixel, where was that soul? At what point when his fingers touched the fridge, did the soul come in? Well, the soul was behind that. Sure. At the lowest level, it wasn't, but the soul is somewhere at the top. Well, what is the soul? Yeah. Well, they look, I mean, I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that there's no spirit in science in some sense.
Because we chased it out when we developed the scientific methodology, right? And there may be an equivalent there. Well, it is a related problem. I'm going to talk to Penrose, by the way, also, when I go to... Oh, wonderful! ...and about that, because Penrose thinks that consciousness is not computational, and I don't understand why he thinks that. I mean, I'm talking to computer engineers who are building AI brains fundamentally, and they're quite convinced that... Well, I can give you an answer to that if you like.
Hey, go right ahead. Sure, sure, sure. So I've studied Penrose and spoken to his partner, Stuart Hammeroff on the podcast. So the reason Penrose fundamentally thinks that it's not computational is because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. The fact that it's computational in some sense, that means it's a first order language. Now, because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, we can generate a proposition that we see as true, but the first order language cannot see that it's true.
And this can happen over and over. So you say, well, let me just... Oh, so they actually accept that interpretation of Goodell's incompleteness theorem? Because I proposed that in my book Maps of Meaning, and a number of philosophical critics have said that I misunderstood that incompleteness theorem and that it didn't have any application in the domain of philosophical inquiry. But I thought it was also an argument about first principles, that any internally coherent system had to be predicated on axioms that weren't provable from within the confines of the system.
And so that's part of Penrose's issue here, is it? It's the first principal issue. Yeah, now I'm unsure exactly what you said in Maps of Meaning that would make a philosopher raise alarm. Well, they just said it was inappropriate of me to, first of all, that I misunderstood Goodell's incompleteness theorem, which I might have because I'm not a mathematician, but that even if I did understand it, it wasn't appropriate to apply it to like systems of philosophical inquiry outside the strict domain of mathematics.
that was their criticism but and i've always been so leery about that because i was kind of outside my domain of expertise when i incorporated that argument but it did look to me like it it was this it was a statement i think what godel godel meant was that there you can't have a system of usable thought in some sense that isn't predicated on axioms that stand outside the system
See, I recall reading an article of yours about a year, two years, maybe even three years ago about girdles and completeness theorem and God, how girdles and completeness theorem in some sense proves God. And then when I was searching for it again, I couldn't find it. Do you recall writing an article about that? I don't think I made that argument. So,
So, but I could ask Penrose about that. Yeah. Well, the question if that interpretation is correct and if this is the issue that Penrose is trying to solve, I'd be very interested in that. So thank you for that because I'll ask him. But the fact that there have to see, I think there have to be axioms outside the system, say the propositional system, because something has to fill in the gaps
that our ignorance leaves because we have to map the world but we can't because we're ignorant and so what do we do well we have assumptions and even our perceptions are assumptions you know for example i'm i'm watching you and i'm acting as if what you're doing is telling me the truth but that's an assumption now it could be a generous assumption it could be a necessary assumption but
There are going to be times when that assumption, which is a perceptual act because I see you that way, right, in the broader sense of seeing, there's going to be times when that's wrong because I'm talking to someone who isn't telling me the truth because they don't know what they're talking about. Let's say that's ignorance or maybe they're being malevolent.
So we fill in the gaps between our propositional knowledge and the infinitely complex world with presumptions. And a lot of those presumptions are perception. So I think of perceptions as the axioms of propositional thought. That's part of it. Because thought is about something, right? Yeah, Penrose would come from
Maybe it's adjacent, but an alternate route that is about understanding the fact that we can understand a statement to be true. And it came from a first order language, but that first quarter language cannot see that it's true that we understand it implies that what we're doing is not computational. And the reason is that let's imagine we could find the computational
See, there's this guy named Stephen Wolfram who believes that what underlies reality is something like hypergraphs and then there's a system of rewriting. Now, that's akin to a first order language. However, let's imagine that's the case at the
at the fundament of physics is something like a rule generation process. That's like a first order language. Well, then we can find a rule, sorry, we can find a statement that this rule cannot see as being true, but then we see it as true. So how is it that we could be generated by this for if we're embedded in the first order language? How is it that we can see what how is it that we can understand that to be true when we're generated by it? Okay, so so let me Okay, so that was part of the reason that Jung hypothesized the existence of
so imagine that as you go through the different manifestations of your personality in your life you know you say I radically changed at some point you look at retrospectively and you say I radically changed well imagine that there's these map systems
You say that's me your ego identifies with them you say that's me but then that changes radically and maybe you fall into chaos when it changes because you lose your belief and then a new belief emerges out what emerges out of something underneath.
And so Jung posited that part of what the self was, was the thing that remained constant across transformations and actually guided them in some sense. Now, Jung also believed that Christ, technically speaking, psychologically speaking, was a symbol of the self.
Yep, and that's partly why the death and redemption idea rings true with us because we all go through partial deaths and dissents into sometimes into hell, you know, when everything falls apart around you, you know, to think about that as a descent into hell is perfectly reasonable metaphorical statement. It certainly feels like an eternity when you're there.
And in some sense that domain has always existed right across the span of humanity and it's a place you can go. It's also a place that deceit is very likely to take you because it makes your these presumption systems very fragile and much more likely to degenerate into a chaotic hell.
In any case, the self is the thing that's underneath that that remains constant, but also the thing that guides those transformations. And even more importantly, in some sense, it's the thing that gives us the intuitions that guides those transformations towards a higher order form of unity and completion.
And then you could say maybe that we're manifesting, you and I are trying to manifest that spirit in this dialogue because we're trying to modify each other's proximal constructions to move them towards a more accurate and valid position and that we're very engaged when that's happening because it's so vital.
When you know, we go away and we think that was a good conversation. That was a deep conversation. We really got somewhere, something like that, that metaphor. We can't simply use engagement as a barometer or as a marker of following this value system because some people can be engaged heavily. So when murdering people. Yeah. Well, one of the things I would, one of the things I warned people about in maps of meaning was if you lie enough,
You will warp the implicit structures that guide your interest and then you won't be able to rely on it and then you're lost. Because imagine if you couldn't rely on your instinct for meaning because you'd corrupted it. What are you going to do? I think that's the sin against the Holy Ghost, you know, fundamentally.
You're speaking my language. I'm liking what you're saying. It reminds me of, it's like we have a compass and every time every lie is a disequilibrium, it makes it not operate properly. And so that's one reason to not tell a lie. And what's interesting though, is that if you've corrupted your compass and your compass should hopefully lead you somewhere positive, and that depends on if you're aiming positively, then telling the truth recalibrates it.
Yes, well, look, psychotherapy, I kind of developed this idea when I went down, I did my first public talk at a Parknell University about a month ago. And one of the things that I've been writing about is that the psychotherapeutic presumption. So the first presumption is that there is such a thing as psychotherapy. The second presumption is that it can lead you to a state of increased psychophysiological well-being and health.
So why is that first assumption necessary? What do you mean that there is such a thing as psychotherapy? Well, you could just say that it's just rubbish.
Right. I mean, when Freud first came out and said, well, talking can cure people, you know, that was a pretty preposterous claim. No one believed it. How can just talking, you know, heal? It's like while talking is thinking, you don't think thinking has anything to do with your psychophysiology. And what Freud did was have people just talk. They could say anything. He didn't even like, that's why they laid on the couch and didn't see him. It was like, say anything that comes into your mind.
essentially what you doing is telling the truth to yourself in an untrammeled manner note now people think by talking most people think by talking.
You have to be a pretty good thinker before you can think without having to talk. And really what you have to do is talk to yourself in your head. You know, you have the revelatory part of thought which is your ideas and then you engage in dialectical criticism internally. It's internalized conversation. And you have to be pretty sophisticated to be really good at that. You have to be willing to divide yourself into at least two parts and you have to be able to do that. Most people do that by talking. So they reveal what they think to themselves by talking.
And then having said what they say, they can, you know, take it or leave it. Then they start to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff. And that can be, is psychotherapeutically curative. And certainly people like Carl Rogers placed a tremendous emphasis on both truth as the curative process in psychotherapy, but also the necessity for the psychotherapist, him or herself,
essentially act out something like the role of Christ. Rodgers was extremely influenced by Protestant thinking. I mean, he was going to evangelize the world when he was a kid, but he became agnostic or atheistic, but it all stuck. So the idea was, if I listen to you in the right spirit, you can reveal truth to yourself that will
reconstitute you and redeem you. That's basically the whole premise of psychotherapy. And it works, you know, and mostly what I saw in psychotherapy, I practiced for 20 years was we just, we got rid of a fair bit of ignorance. We did a fair bit of social skills development. Like I taught a lot of people how to shake hands and say hello and introduce themselves because they just didn't have those skills. But a lot of it was let's find out the lies man and get rid of them.
And it's up to you to figure out what the lies are. I'll listen. I'm not telling you. I don't know what your lies are. I don't know what lies you tangled up in. I don't want to presume. Yeah. And I know some people who would lie to their therapist because they're too ashamed or for whatever reason. And some people ask me, what am I advocating for with this film Blue, Better Left Unsaid? And for me, I'm not advocating for anything. I'm not like, well, it would be presumptuous for me to advocate. Would it mean that I found something that I'm trying to convince other people of?
truly better left than said was like a, an attempt for me to cohere and, and solidify my own thoughts developed. So what did it teach? What did it teach? What did it teach you? Well, Tommy, that's simply not easy. And you'll notice that I pause, I tend to pause before I think. And one of the reasons is that it's firstly, I'm trying to, if it's something that I've said before, I try to say it in a different manner and I'll give,
Well, one reason, even if it's synonyms, even if I'm simply replacing the words with synonyms. And the reason is that, the reason is that, well, first, it's great for cognitive flexibility. I think words are like patons. They allow you to reach farther places. Like when you're rock climbing, they're like patons. But secondly, because even if it's something that is the same phenomenon, when you view it from a slightly different angle, you get a better understanding of what it is.
Earlier, we were talking about idolatry, and I think it's almost idolatry is akin to mistaking the representation for what's trying to be represented. So imagine this, imagine that you have a- And then insisting that that, yeah, and insisting that that representation is in fact the totality. Yeah. Which means insisting that your interpretation is the totality, right? The satanic error. My interpretation is the totality. It's like, oh, really, is it? Hmm. Good luck with that.
I'm super excited to talk to you about the definitions of God and we'll get to that at some point. So it would be like, imagine if you have an upside down ice cream cone. So it looks like this. I did not expect you to say that. If you look at it from the bottom, it's a circle. If you look at it from the top, it's also a circle. If you look at it from the side, it's a triangle. If you look at it from, let's say over here or over here, it looks like a teardrop. And so people, when they're describing God, what I think they're trying to do
Is it's an extremely good maybe the most complicated people say the brain is the most complicated perhaps God is perhaps that's one of the definitions of God but maybe it's not that either way God is complicated and so to say that well if you look across religions it's contradictory therefore what's being described can't exist or only one of them can be correct perhaps
Now, I'm not ecumenical enough to say they're all correct in their own manner. I'm not under a tree meditating with flowers saying that everyone's correct, though that may actually be the case. I'm saying that just because something is contradictory doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore it. It may be akin to different perspectives on the same object. I don't know if you've heard of M theory. It's a form of string theory. String theory says this because there are five different flavors. There's type 2A, 2B, and so on. And it's actually posited that they're all
not adumbrations of the same phenomenon, but actually different perspectives of the same phenomenon. Like you touched out, this is obvious for people to understand where the old refrain of you touching an elephant's ear, touching an elephant's tail, touching an elephant, and they're all described. Okay, so this is obvious to some people. I'm wondering if, well, I'm not wondering, I have a
I have a distinct feeling the different descriptions of God, even there's so many contradictory statements between the East and the West about God. How are some of the East, look, they're suffering in life. There's also extreme grace and love in life, too. But one of the
One of the solutions is act right. So don't lie. And then let's say that's the West's answer. Then the other answer is to realize that the suffering is illusory. So to do away with the coin. So one is that the coin, look, there's a good side and a bad side. So choose the good, that's the West. And the East would say, well, realize that there is no coin.
And that's another solution. And perhaps somehow they're the same solution. I've heard you also I've heard you talk about stumbling uphill and what lies at the top of the hill is maximal responsibility. Is it is that all that lies at the top of the hill? Or is it also is it also warmth and forgiveness and grace? And are those the same? OK, how are those the same? OK, let's let's think about this. Yeah, I think, well, the responsibility in some sense is is to lift that load up the hill.
You know, that doesn't mean that it's responsibility that's at the top of the hill in the West. I mean, in some ways, Christ is represented as taking the responsibility for all the sins of mankind unto himself, right? Well, that's responsibility. And look, to the degree that each of us are trying to sort out in our own souls
Complex problems that be devil other people were doing that in a low resolution form right we're taking the fragility and errors and malevolence of mankind onto ourselves and trying to sort that out and that's meaningful those also extremely burdensome and you know it can kill you it can crush you and so the responsibility has to be tempered in a variety of ways to make it even bearable
You know, one of the things that's so interesting about the Christian story in my estimation is that that responsibility is so overwhelming that, you know, it was even daunting for God himself. So that's built into the story.
We can hit at it. Jung talked about that process that you described of viewing something from multiple different perspectives. He technically called that circumambulation. And it was the attempt to, yeah exactly, to view something very complicated, like take snapshots of it from a whole bunch of different perspectives. This is partly why very rationally minded people who like to walk through something logically find Jung hard to
Tolerate even because that isn't how he thinks he thinks in this circumambulatory manner well think of it this way and think of it this way and here is another viewpoint and this and and so forth and then you read that it's like having an Impressionist painting cohere in your mind into a hole. It's like all of a sudden you go whap Oh, I see what he's talking about and that's an overwhelming experience I mean, I really experienced that reading IO on which is an unbelievably terrifying
It's terrifying because... Well, Jung is the only thinker I've ever seen who, you know, we hypothesized earlier in some sense that that artistic intuition lays out the map for the development of propositional thinking. While Jung traced the development of that intuitive pattern seeking imagination back like 3000 years. That's partly why he talks about astrology. So
We looked up in the night sky, let's see, prior to the development of astronomy. What we saw, we didn't know what we were looking at, right? It filled us with awe, but we didn't know what we were looking at, so we populated the sky with figures of our imagination. That's the constellations, and it was a way of orienting ourselves. So if you look at astrology, psychologically, what you have is a vast storehouse of the contents of the human imagination.
Now in astrology there was the idea of a certain kind of progression through the eons. Well Jung believed that the fantasy that underlied astrology was so deep that it had sketched out the map for the trail that we're actually walking down. I don't understand that. Well the artists have intuitions about what's coming.
So they're the first, the first people in the unexplored territory. And then the more propositional philosophers and such, and the scientists, they fill in the details, but the, the trailblazing has already been done by the imaginative and the intuitive. Right. Right. So you in, I, on you, it was, I, on young tracks. Well, that's okay. And in, I, on young tracks, the contents of that imagination back,
Several thousand years and also lays out something like a scheme for the future. So for example, he believed that this is so strange man He believed that the idea that there were wise men who saw a star that signified Christ's birth was actually a reference to the astrological idea that Something new would be born at the dawn of the ancient age of Pisces Pisces like it's a wish or
Well, because they were interpreters of the stars. So Pisces.
Pisces is a constellation that's characterized by a fish going in one direction and a fish going in the other. Jung was very interested in the use of fish symbolism in Christianity. He associated that with the astrological imagination. He also believed that the 2000 year period from Christ's birth roughly to now was characterized by two ions, one which was explicitly Christian, that's the fish moving in one direction, and the other which led to the development of empirical science was an antithesis.
And that that had been foreshadowed by this symbolism which was part of the intuitive discovery of that which was yet to come. That's only part of the argument. It's an unbelievably profound book. And it's terrifying once you understand what he's talking about. And I've never seen anyone criticize it who actually understood it.
You know, almost all the criticisms I've seen of Jung and his thinking, it's like, no, you don't, you're not hitting the target there, buddy. He's asking questions that you don't even know need to be asked. So, you know, you're not in, you're not in the ballgame. So yeah, in any case, the more scientific minded people,
yeah well the more propositionally minded people see young had a problem with the propositional universe he said yeah well there's a gap between what we know and the unknown per se. What fills that gap well dreams dreams the imagination imagery.
It's at the boundary of propositional thought, and it's between us and what we absolutely don't know. And the visionary artists operate in the domain of imagination and pave the path for the propositional types. And think about the relationship, say, between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Nietzsche was much more propositional than Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky fundamentally is deeper. Now, he's not as clear, right? That's the trade-off.
Everything in Nietzsche is in Dostoevsky, and more is in Dostoevsky. And Nietzsche himself knew that. I mean, he was no piker when it came to appreciation, let's say, of works of the imagination. But that's a good way of thinking. And then you see this too. I saw this great lecture by Jonathan Pagio, which I'm going to put up on my YouTube channel, where he spent about 20 minutes explaining the meaning of an orthodox icon that showed a serpent.
There's so much in that image, you just can't believe it. And you think, well, how did it all get there? And it's akin to the question you asked about the mathematician. It's like, who has plumbed the depths of the human soul? No one. Where did these ideas come from? Well, they appear in my head. You think that's an explanation? The ideas appear where in your head? Exactly. What do you mean by your head? Do you mean physically? Like, what do you mean?
Yeah, it's like who built
Who built the Sistine Chapel? Was it Michelangelo? Not who built, who painted. And well, in some sense, yes, but also his, he came from a myriad of people before him. And not only that, but the Bible and also thousands and thousands of years before. To me, these scientists who like to, I'm not trying to demean scientists in any way. I mean, the rationally atheistic minded scientists, and I'm straw manning them when I'm saying that. So let me just pick someone, Krauss. So Krauss, to pick on Krauss, Krauss would
He looks at phenomenon in an extremely depthless manner. Now, obviously he doesn't. But what I mean is it's almost like someone who's at the top of the trees and they're so far up that they don't realize that there's roots beneath them, that they've forgotten that there's roots and they think that they don't need it. They dislike what doesn't make sense. Yeah, well, that's part of this. That's right. That's exactly the, that's part of this. See, Krauss is a great physicist and, and, um, but there's a lot of what he does that he regards as self-evident and
and is never questioned and it's sort of a precondition for what he does as a physicist because you know if you're a physicist you're off doing physics you're not questioning your presumptions except maybe in the domain of physics but a lot of what he regards as self-evident just simply isn't self-evident it's not and and that's a real problem when it comes to discussions about what's real and the you brought up an issue couple of issues earlier that are really worth returning to
You know one issue is what is the one that unites the many. And you might say well we don't need one that unites the many we can have a diverse range of values let's say it's well then you have the problem of conflict confusion and anxiety plus hopelessness because you don't really have a goal. It's not it's not like that polytheism let's say it's without a cost it's it's it's fragmentary.
And it causes social havoc because person A will pursue value A and person B will pursue value B. And that's okay if they're united under a higher order structure that unites them in some sense, but it's not okay at all. It's the situation in the desert when Moses is leading his people away from Egypt, right? It's the central organizing principle was the Egyptian totalitarian state had dissolved. And what happens is this descent into a fragmentation.
So the question is, well, what's the one that unites the many? That's the central religious question. Now, so then and but but and can't you say that the one that unites the many is the most real? Well, then you're in the domain of definition, right? At that point, it starts to become like a definition rather than Yeah, that's why when you when you ask people to define what is real, it just becomes tautological.
Not that, by the way, not that tautologies are trivial. So for example, there's Chris Langen, he has one of the highest IQs recorded, along with Savant, I believe. He builds his theory, he builds his theory of everything in some sense from a super tautology. That is, that is, it's, it's a, it's an apodictic formulation of existence. That's God's definition of himself, right?
That's God's definition of himself in the Bible. Yeah, okay, man, I think we should get to the definitions of God. This is extremely interesting. So you mentioned what states conflict. Well, we tried it to one part, right? Well, that's a good question. You know, I think it's the spirit that guides our sequential transformations upward to a higher and higher form of unity and maybe a higher and higher form of delight and love. Do you think that we're all God? I'm sure you've heard some people say that we're God, but we've forgotten that we're God.
I can't answer a question like that exactly. I mean, I believe that the idea that we have a divine spark within is an extraordinarily beautiful, poetic and necessary idea. And I think that if you act like that to yourself and other people, that things get radically interesting, interesting and deeply meaningful around you. And it seems to be a very good
a good proposition to guide your actions you know because what we're hoping you and me maybe to the degree that we're being good is that the spirit of truth in you is speaking to the spirit of truth in me and so and that is a reflection of the presumption upon which western civilization is based explicitly let's say not to say that it doesn't permeate other cultures
But it's that spirit of truth that animates us and that redeems us in our societies as well. And hopefully that's expressed in the quality of our speech when we're free to speak. And so is that divine? Well, is that divine? Well, I don't think it's separable from thought itself. In some sense, it might not be separable from consciousness itself. Is that divine? Well, you know, whenever you have that, is that this? It's an equation, right?
Is one plus one equal to two? Well, one of the answers to that is, well, each of those claims on both sides of the equation are equally dubious in relationship to one another. Because what you're trying to do is to say, is God real? Well, what you're not saying is we know what real is, and it's this.
And does God fit into that category? It's also, we know what God is in order to assess it. Well, because you could reverse it and say, is real God? It's the same question, right? It's the same question.
So here's one of this. This is something I heard from Tyler Goldstein, who has his own theory of everything. He said the ordinary ordinarily. Here's how it works. We look for we have a definition and then we look for evidence and then dismiss what we've just defined. If we don't find the evidence, he said, perhaps what we should do when it comes to God is instead of. Instead of looking for God and then not finding it and then saying God doesn't exist, you use the fact that you didn't find evidence of God as an indication that you should alter your definition of God.
Yeah, well, that's that's a perfectly reasonable approach to that problem. Right. Obviously, there's some this. Yeah. However, hmm. No, that's a good. That's a really good observation. Right. It shows you how tricky questions like that are. Right. It's like, well, maybe you're looking in the wrong place. Maybe you formulated your search incorrectly.
like you don't know because let's say you're aiming at the highest reality right it's like you're aiming at the highest reality well how do you know you have the question formulated properly because if you if you did well you've already found it and so you might say well does the highest reality exist yes we we're back to the problem of the one that unites the many
Yeah, yeah, see, I was downtown in Toronto and I talked to someone and his Jamaican guy. So if you've more probably won't happen now, it's too cold. He was cutting.
coconuts and selling it. And I said, Hey, by the way, what's your name? He said, Kurt. I'm like, Oh my God, I rarely meet people whose names name is Kurt. And he's from the Caribbean. And I walked away and I remember thinking, Oh, he has my name. And then I remember stopping thinking, No, no, he's much older. I have his name. Then I thought, probably what's better to say is we share the same name. And then I thought, Ah, okay, what is it that we all share? And is that somehow related? Is that not synonymous with God?
What is it that we all share? Now, here's something else that I was thinking about when we right now we're speaking to one another in podcast form. So in some sense, we're copying this even think of this archetypal in some sense, we're copying podcasts by doing so when one is playing rock music.
One is copying rock in some, because no one speaks with a twang. Where do you develop that? You're copying something. Then I thought, well, how far can you take that when you're doing art in general? What are you copying? Okay. How far can that be taken? How about if you're simply living, laying bare? What are you copying is by simply existing and living. Is that a reflection of that? What you're copying is God's essence in some manner. Hmm. Hmm.
That is abstracted completely. Well, I don't think there's any difference. I don't think there's any difference between imitation and worship. They're the same thing. That's why the Eastern Orthodox types inlay such emphasis on the imitation of Christ. Well, you should worship. Well, Peugeot, he says, well, that means enthusiastically celebrate, right? Raise to the highest position. Well, then you imitate that. You imitate that which is of most value.
You imitate, hopefully, right? What else would you want to do? Have you thought much about self-fulfilling beliefs? You'd have to be worse. Okay, here's the reason why I say that. Imagine. Now, I believe you've outlined this to we've talked plenty about maps. So let's imagine it's literally like a map just for simplicity. You construct the world. So you have a worldview, and it looks like a top down view of a
of when you're buying an apartment and you see the ground layout. So imagine that you're constructing a worldview. When it comes to self-fulfilling beliefs, that's extremely interesting to me because it means there are parts of reality on that map that whatever you project to be there will be there.
So let's say I think there's a toilet in there. You're right. If you don't think there's a toilet in there, there's not. So there are parts of your map that are always correct, no matter what you think about. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, okay. I would turn that a little bit. I would say this is something Kierkegaard talked about, at least to some degree. Imagine that there are only things that you can find out by doing them.
So you can't validate the hypothesis. You can't test the hypothesis without acting it out. So let's say you decide that you're going to tell the truth. Well, what evidence is there that you should do that? Well, who knows? There's evidence that you should lie. It works in the short term. It might be to your benefit in the short term. I mean, maybe if you deceive some girl, she'll sleep with you, you know? It's like, why not do that?
well you can't collect the facts you know in some sense not in a simple manner well let's say you decide to tell the truth just carefully as you can well then you're going to have a certain kind of life and you're not going to have that life unless you do that and so you won't even get access to the data unless you take the steps and that's partly why faith is necessary especially in an endeavor like that you have to decide it's some fundamental
level. You know, maybe you're scattered all over the place. It's interesting when Christ comes back in the book of Revelation, and he's the judge, so separating the damned from the saved, let's say. He says something very strange. He says, if you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. He actually says vomit. So it's a disgust reaction. And it's this idea that
What if you don't commit not because you believe that you know what's
What's correct and you'd like to lie but because you simply don't know. Yeah. Well, that's okay Yeah, yeah, that's that's a different that's psychologically. That's a whole different thing. I would say Well, the real damage comes when you know what you should do and then you decide not to do it anyways Yeah, you know violate your conscience. Yeah. Yes. It is the same thing and if you probably
I feel comfortable speculating because I don't mind. Sorry to interrupt. I'm so sorry that I keep interrupting. Oh man, it's my, you're not. Don't be sorry about it. Yeah. Let me say this. Fine. Let me say that. It's fine. I also, I don't know if it's true that you temporarily get what you want per se when you lie. And the reason is it depends on what you want. Now, obviously everything depends on everything. You can always say that depends on so and so, but the reason I say that is because I don't know if it's true.
that is that
Jam that they wanted and it glows and this guy's like, there's only one in the world. It's unique. I want this. He eventually goes through this whole journey. He finds it. And then he says, and then what? Then he's happy until he gets to this island where there's millions. It just as far as the eye can see, there are these gold gems and it just stops. He's like, why did I go through all this for that? And in some sense, I'm wondering, Hmm.
is the majority of religious texts telling us, you think you want so-and-so. What you actually want is this. And in that way, we can say that even the atheist, we can even say that the atheist ultimately wants God. Even the serial killer ultimately wants God. Well, that's it. Yeah, yeah. There are distractions. I can't wander down that road with you at the moment because I'm getting tired. But I'd like to say one thing about that deceit issue again, and maybe we could close.
Sure. Sure. If you could get away with raping them.
The sexual encounter you'd have in paradise, you know, you want love, you want companionship, you want a maternal embrace, you want eroticism, you want deep personal contact, you want eye-to-eye communication. That's all part of this fantasy, you know. Then you deceive to get it, and then you get it. Well, no, you don't, because you're a deceitful rapist.
And so what do you get well you get the corruption of your soul and the contamination of the thing that you want and need most desperately and that the entire human endeavor depends upon. And that's probably a good place to close.
It's really good talking to you, man. Yeah, yeah, it's great talking to you. Now, man, I wanted to talk about your film. Sure, sure, sure. Okay, I wanted to. Or maybe we did explain, you know what I mean? Yes, right. Exactly. That's another aspect we can talk about how much of reality is fractal like where
The examination of any element, if you pursue it far enough, is the examination of the whole. Now, I know Kantor believed that by studying infinity mathematically, he was studying the mind or studying God per se. And some people think, why are you wasting your time if you're someone who cares about the good? Why are you caring about mathematics or physics? Well, hey, man, maybe if you're truthfully exploring something, you're trying and I take question to your not question. I take exception to one of your rules, which is
Tell the truth. I like the, I like the codicil, which is, or at least not lie. But I would reverse that. I'd say, don't lie and try to tell the truth because it's much easier to feel like you're telling the truth when you're not. You can trick yourself. And I think the majority of the time we think we're telling the truth isn't. And that's another reason I pause because you start by stopping lying. Yeah. Yeah. I have to compare.
It's not easy to discern what is actually that what I think and what's a reflex that just comes to me. So I'm trying to make sure. Well, anyway, we can talk about free well another time. It was really good talking to you, man. Yeah, it was great talking to your continued endeavors and with your podcast and
I really liked your idea about not saying the same thing twice the same way. That's a real interesting mental habit, disciplinary habit. What's 4 to the power 4? 256. Okay, so how do you know that? You can memorize it. But another way is that you can go, well, what's 4 to the power 5? Well, that's 2 to the power 10. That's 1024. If you're a computer scientist, you know that because you deal with bits.
I never give the same lecture twice. Yeah. And that's not easy, man. No.
But it's, it's pretty damn entertaining. I'll tell you. Yeah. So before we go, I'm curious, why does that you, why is it that you do these podcasts? What are you trying to accomplish with them? So one is obviously you're trying to learn and obviously you've attained some level of fame and wealth. So it's not as if you want more, perhaps you do. I mean, we can't discount selfish motivations, but what is the reason that you hope the good reason in you is?
to have conversations like this and to share them with as many people as possible in the hopes that we'll build better people and not burn the world down. Yeah, yeah, some people say, well, why is it that I'm focusing on the left and you mentioned, it's not
It seems like perhaps what you're doing on the extreme left, even if you feel like the right is more damaging, you don't think you're provoking the right. Also, the left is more amenable to reason and at least colloquially, it's more amenable to reason. I thought perhaps I should pursue that and I'm more interested. The right is blatant in the racism. It's like, well, that's a five-minute film if I'm to analyze the right. I'll let people know about
If they'd like to see more about me, they can visit theories of everything. So you can just type that into YouTube. They're a conversation much like this Jordan, where I'm super, I'm so fascinated. No, I wouldn't say my motivations are pure. I'm fascinated by consciousness, physics, free will and God and exploring them with technical depth as much as I can and not just surprising like most people. I think that disparagement is what in many ways is holding us back.
So I'm trying to bring some rigor, some exactitude to it, because it's not that section. Well, we can talk about that. And then for Better Left Unsaid, if people want to see, you can go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com that I try to bring some of the same analytical framework to exploring the concept of exploring the question of when does the left go too far. And it's such an incomplete film. I disavow it in many ways because it's it's so incomplete. But it's almost like homework. I have to submit it at some point.
Yep. Jordan, absolutely. Thank you, man. Ciao, man. Really good talking to you. It flew by and you're very articulate and thoughtful and you're very careful with your words and so good for you, man. Yeah, I know. Thank you. That's a huge compliment coming from you. Good to talk to you. Take care, man.
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.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"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."
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"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."
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"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?"
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"text": " This is another auxiliary episode, this time with Jordan Peterson, where he posted an interview with me a few weeks ago on his YouTube channel linked in the description."
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"text": " This is a technical dive into the nature of consciousness and analyzing God scientifically, as scientific and technical as one can be when exploring topics like this. We also reference various theories of everything and the role of perception in reality."
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"text": " This episode is not sponsored by Brilliant, but I wanted to mention them regardless because many have started to understand the concepts in the Toe Channel more lucidly by engaging with their interactive material on math and physics. You can visit Brilliant.org slash Toe to get 20% off, and it helps the Toe Channel as well. If you'd like to hear more podcasts like this, then do consider going to Patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L"
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"text": " and supporting with a contribution of whatever you can as the only reason I'm able to do this is because of the patrons and the sponsor's support. A written review on whichever platform you're listening to this from also helps. Thank you and enjoy this supplementary episode where Jordan Peterson interviews Kurt Jaimungal. It should also be noted that I misremembered and mischaracterized Noam Chomsky's opinions of Jordan Peterson in the beginning of this podcast"
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"text": " If our perceptions evolved and we evolved to adapt to reality and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality, then what does that say about reality?"
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"text": " And that's not the answer to that question is not bloody obvious. Well, that's another question I hope that I can get to with with Dawkins, you know, and maybe he knows something that I don't. I hope so. Yeah, see, I want to make the claim that it sounds then"
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"text": " And I believe you've made this claim, perhaps even Viveki, that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily, the most quote unquote real it is. However, however, then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out. And then the closer we are to that, the closer our map is to that reality. Of course, we're not trying to mistake the map in the territory. Well, whether or not material objects exist, patterns exist,"
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"text": " Right? And it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are."
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"text": " Hello everyone. I'm pleased today to have with me Kurt Jaimungal. He's a Toronto-based filmmaker with a background in mathematics and physics who directed and wrote the film Better Left Unsaid, which was released in April 2021. That film explores the question of, among other things, when does the left go too far?"
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"text": " On the physics side, you can find out more"
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"text": " by visiting youtube.com forward slash theories of everything or searching theories of everything on Spotify, iTunes or virtually any of the other audio platforms. So you've been podcasting and running this YouTube channel for how long? About a year? Yeah, slightly longer than a year. Now, the channel has been up for approximately three years in the sense that it was registered three years ago, but I've been going at it with force for about one year and a bit."
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"text": " So who have you interviewed that's been most popular? Noam Chomsky. And you're one of the reasons why, because I was the first person, if not the only person, to ask him about you directly. Oh, so I don't know about that. So there's something we could talk about right away. So what did he have to say?"
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"text": " Well, essentially, you're Hitler, as you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that. And so why do you think he thinks that? I think that people who are on a certain side on the political spectrum believe their side stands for what's good and the opposite side is what's not good. One of the see, that's so tricky, man. Talking about better left and said, which we'll get to later, is how do you define the left and the right decidedly difficult? Almost everyone has a different definition."
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"text": " Chomsky would say, well, the left is freedom. And so anything that's on the right is anti freedom. And the right people who are on the right are identified with being as such would perhaps categorize it as the opposite. Yeah, well, it's interesting, at least that they might circle around claims to some, let's say virtue that both of them would admire like freedom."
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"text": " Right. So there's some agreement there despite the different difference. Did he point to anything particular about what I hypothetically thought that made me not an acceptable sort of creature? No, it's somewhat, it's somewhat hearsay in the sense that he read an article based on you. So he didn't watch you directly. He read Nathan Robinson's critique of you, which I'm sure you have. Well, that'll do it, man. Yeah. Yeah. Old Nathan. He's, he's quite the character. Yeah, I see. So"
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"text": " Well, that's too bad in many regards. Did you learn anything in particular from talking to Dr. Chomsky? Quite a significant amount. As for what I can point to, let me think, I spoke to him six times, six times on the channel. So the first time about you, I found it interesting that he said,"
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"text": " I asked each guest that I spoke to at the time, because now I've pivoted away from politics for reasons we can get to later. I asked him and every other guest, when does the left go too far? In some sense, it's a Petersonian question, because you've raised that quite a few times. When does the left go too far? He said, well, it's not a matter of going too far for the left. It's a matter of tactics. As for when does the right go too far? He said, well, the right is suicidal, I think was his words. Hmm."
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"text": " So that's interesting because it's really not much of an answer. I mean, I've been always looking for a technical definition of that, right? It's like, well, we know the right can go too far and we know the left can go too far. And how do we point to? And I think this problem has actually become more complicated rather than less, because the more I've been thinking about it, the more I think that the errors on the left are"
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"text": " more in the nature of a vast number of small errors, mostly often of omission. So the more reasonable people on the left kowtow too rapidly to the more radical types on the left, especially at the philosophical level. And I think that really happened at the universities. So"
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"text": " Well, that's something we can explore. Well, it's actually a question I would have for you. Why do you think that is? I know that this is mainly you interviewing me, but I'm still perplexed when it comes to that. Why is it that the center left doesn't excoriate the extreme left? Is it because they're on the same side? So the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Or are they afraid because, well, they can get, you can lose even a tenured position."
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"text": " Well, I think there's I think that fear and it isn't obvious to me that this is merely a problem that affects the left. But I'm most familiar with it in the university circumstance. And so what I saw happening in my 25 years as a faculty member, let's say, I think that's about right. It's more than that, actually. But anyway, it's quite a long time, three decades, let's say, was that whenever the administration pushed on the faculty,"
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"text": " so in our faculty meetings for example there would be administrative demands and they were often unreasonable they would increase the size of our our seminars say for our third and fourth year students ask us to do more work with fewer resources and that was a steady trend like if you look at spending say on faculty salaries versus spending on administrative salaries across universities in the west broadly speaking but certainly in north america"
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"text": " The amount spent on administration just skyrocketed upward whereas the amount spent on faculty pretty much stayed constant and so why well it was because the faculty just retreated continually every time they were challenged to say no when so i objected."
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"text": " Repeatedly in faculty meetings whenever that happened and said well why don't we just say no they want to increase our seminar size you know like double it let's say in for third years it's not a seminar anymore once you get to a certain point we just say no we're not doing that why don't we just say no we won't do that."
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"text": " Well, then they won't give us what we want. Well, they don't give you what you want anyways. So like what's to lose. And, but, but so it was a thousand tiny retreats. And then what happened after that was that the administration having grown too top heavy, um, was taken over by people within the administration, let's say who had this DEI philosophy and they couldn't say no to them. So,"
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"text": " Now, so when did the left go too far? Well, it was micro retreats, continual cowardly micro retreats at the university level. Now, sorry to be so long-winded about this, but there was something even more brutal underneath all that philosophically, which I'm trying to lay out in the new book that I'm writing, which is this postmodern problem. And the postmodern problem really emerged in the 1960s with the simultaneous realization across a number of disciplines"
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"text": " That there's almost an infinite number of ways of perceiving anything and i mean literally perceiving so when you look at the world you see these things you think are objects and they're sort of self-evident but where an object begins and where it ends is much more difficult to compute than any one ever realized which is partly why we don't have you know robots wandering around doing things like dishwashing which turns out to be insanely complex and it also emerged in literary criticism"
},
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"end_time": 803.865,
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"start_time": 773.882,
"text": " with the realization that, well, just as there were an indefinite number of ways of looking at something, so actually acquiring the objective facts of perception, there was an even more vaguely indefinable way of way of potentially interpreting a text or a canon of texts, let's say. So how do we decide what's good and what's bad literature, what's deep and what's shallow, what's valid and invalid? And the answer is we don't know. That's the answer."
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"text": " But a premature answer was generated by social critics on the left and the premature answer was well all our categories and the act of categorization itself serve the will to power."
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"text": " And that's true to some degree, because we're all totalitarian and authoritarian and narcissistic to some degree. We also use deception to get what we want, so we can corrupt our category structure. But there's a huge difference between saying, well, we don't know the answer, but power may play a role, and saying the answer is that power always plays a role and that's all there is."
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"text": " And that's what's happened on the left in the postmodern field. And that sort of fit in nicely with the, you know, the idea that capitalism was essentially oppressive and that the patriarchal structure is essentially oppressive, et cetera, et cetera. And it's, it's, it's a, it's an unbelievably corrosive and terrible philosophy. So, well, the left went too far there to claim that nothing but the will to power governance categorization"
},
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"end_time": 903.422,
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"start_time": 876.988,
"text": " and the act of categorization, which is basically consciousness itself, that act of categorization, that you could not possibly formulate a more cynical, malevolent and careless, destructive philosophy. So see what makes this. So you interpreted the question as a time question, temporal one, when does the left go too far? And I guess that's within"
},
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"start_time": 903.882,
"text": " that within when and for me what you also laid out ideologically what it is that they believe that makes them go too far i don't like to use the word ideological we don't have to get into the into the reasons there but for the sake of speaking right now just use that word why when do they go too far ideologically see some of the people i spoke to said the left goes too far when it comes to violence well there's something that leads to the violence some idea and you also mentioned"
},
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"end_time": 962.346,
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"start_time": 933.114,
"text": " Power right that also doesn't distinguish the left going too far from the right going too far, right? so and and it's not a really good answer because sometimes we think Sometimes we think that violence is justified like in self-defense and often political violence is What would you say? rationalized and sometimes perhaps even functions as self-defense and sometimes it's rebellion against true oppression in which case"
},
{
"end_time": 989.514,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 962.671,
"text": " people on the left and the right might regard violence not only as necessary, but actually morally demanded, right, ethically demanded. So the mere use of violence and then of course what constitutes violence, that's the next problem with that. It's too shallow an argument to really get to the core of things. One has to be extremely careful about what counts as self-defense, especially preemptive self-defense, which is behind"
},
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"end_time": 1013.183,
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"start_time": 990.469,
"text": " much of what they do they'll say that well we have to take action now against the right or the extreme right which pretty much everyone who's on the right they would classify as being a part of the alt right or alt light yeah well that's that's another part yeah that's another yeah exactly well that's another part of this tit for tat process that we see i think perhaps accelerating it particularly in the united states with the"
},
{
"end_time": 1036.493,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1013.626,
"text": " Return of Trump, let's say to the political arena and there's a tremendous amount of distrust growing distrust on both sides of the political spectrum driven. Well, that's the question driven by what certainly by the extreme views of a minority on both sides, laying out the exact causal process is extremely difficult because these things, they're not unidirectional."
},
{
"end_time": 1064.394,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1039.428,
"text": " They they they cause each causes the other, you know, I poke you you poke me I slap you you slap me a little harder I punch you you punch me, you know And and then we we have knives and we're at each other's throats and we say well, you know who started it Well, maybe you said something insulting before I poked you, you know who but but the one of the things of interest when observing something like that is I"
},
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"end_time": 1087.79,
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"start_time": 1064.906,
"text": " the causal process that's involved in the tit-for-tat return and I've been thinking about that a lot because I'm for a whole variety of reasons that I can't go into but Jonathan Haidt also just wrote an article about positive feedback loop processes operating at a very rapid scale on Facebook and Twitter and exacerbating this political"
},
{
"end_time": 1116.988,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1088.626,
"text": " Positive feedback loop right runaway positive feedback loop, you know You know if you if you're doing any recording and you bring your microphone too close to the speaker that That you're speaking through you'll get this howl of feedback and that can destroy the whole system the whole recording system and that's a good example of how positive feedback loop can get out of control and That's the real enemy like if we're thinking meta politically the real enemy is"
},
{
"end_time": 1144.991,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1117.824,
"text": " the possibility that mutual distrust on both sides will accelerate our descent into a kind of melee. And so the enemy isn't necessarily the catastrophic ideology of the left or the right, but the manner in which extreme views can foster a spiral of violence that none of us know how to stop."
},
{
"end_time": 1162.005,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1145.776,
"text": " And it's stupid little things can trigger like one of my friends today sent me this article showing that I think it was in the Virginia governor's race that four people use Tiki lanterns and they were"
},
{
"end_time": 1191.271,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1162.961,
"text": " hypothetically marching in support of the republican candidate and so they were posing as members of the conspiratorial alt-right but two of them were actually democrat operatives political operatives trying to discredit the republican campaign and that's so dangerous because they're basically acting out the proposition that it's nazis you know for all intents and purposes fascists that are supporting the republicans and to that's such a terrible lie right it's it's such a terrible lie to"
},
{
"end_time": 1221.374,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1191.647,
"text": " to act that out to demonize your fellow citizens that way. It's unbelievably dangerous. And we got to stop doing things like that, you know, and all of us have to stop doing things like that. Right. That may be at the bottom of it, which you may say so many ways that this can be taken. And I think that one. Well, it's difficult to say what's at the bottom, but one of the predominant factors may be personalized, personal lies, not personalized."
},
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"end_time": 1245.811,
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"text": " Yes, I believe that I really do believe why Why do you say that? Right? See, if you watch the film toward the fourth section, I believe I split it up into chapters. And then the fourth section becomes much more philosophical, which is one of the reasons why I started it, because I happen to like puzzles and philosophy. It's one of the reasons I went into math, I like abstract thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 1263.968,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1246.425,
"text": " So I tried to make a case about lies and how lies spread. Now there's one obvious route to take that with memes. So you talk about memes and how memes spread. So you don't want to pollute that because that comes back to affect you if you care about yourself, first of all. So maybe you shouldn't care about yourself so much as for"
},
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"end_time": 1289.514,
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"start_time": 1264.394,
"text": " Hmm see something I was exploring and I'm not quite sure is it possible to tell a lie without lying to yourself That seems on the face of it. Yes. I don't think so. Well Well, there's psychological evidence though that you you can't well here let's let's let's dig into that a little bit so you tell a lie to yourself and you think well, I know the difference it's like well I"
},
{
"end_time": 1315.213,
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"text": " Don't be so sure about that. So here's one experiment that's an example. So imagine that I give a group of people a scale that measures their political belief about a certain issue. Maybe the reality of climate change or the unreality of climate change for that matter. It doesn't matter. And then I get those same people to write an essay of 500 words outlining the contrary position."
},
{
"end_time": 1337.517,
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"start_time": 1316.596,
"text": " And they know they're just doing it because it's part of the experiment, but then they come back a week later and I give them the same political belief scale. And what's happened is their beliefs will have shifted substantially towards the side that they argued for. Okay, so why? Well, first of all, a lot of your so-called beliefs are really low resolution."
},
{
"end_time": 1357.176,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1338.37,
"text": " They're just heuristics. They're like single pixel images. You haven't thought it through very carefully. Imagine maybe you know more than the average person because of your background, but imagine how much you know about how a helicopter works. You know, do you know what a helicopter is? Yes. No, you don't. If you had to draw one, it would look like a four year old drew it."
},
{
"end_time": 1379.292,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1357.654,
"text": " You can identify the shape in two dimensions, you know it flies, that's about it. You couldn't fix one, you certainly couldn't build one. So in a real sense, you don't know anything about a helicopter except what you need as someone who's never around helicopters to know. And most things are way more complicated than helicopters even though they're plenty complicated."
},
{
"end_time": 1404.77,
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"start_time": 1379.292,
"text": " And so you think that you know something when you think you know it, but then you detail out a counter argument, and it turns out that you've provided more detail in the counter argument that you had in your argument to begin with. And so that shifts your cognition towards what you argued for. Well, if you think that doesn't happen to you when you're lying, well, you don't know anything about how you work. And then the other thing is, well,"
},
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"end_time": 1426.476,
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"text": " virtually no one thinks that lying is acceptable morally when it comes right down to it. There might be specific exceptions to that now and then. And so if you lie, you're going to tilt what you believe towards the lie because that will lighten the ethical load that you carry. It'll reduce cognitive dissonance. That's one way of terming it."
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"text": " And so, and then you can't keep track of your lives. And so that's a big problem. And they tangle up your thoughts. And then also, let's say a whole bunch of people really like your lie. Well, then, you know, most of us, all of us thrive on attention. I mean, children will misbehave to get attention, even if it's negative attention, if they can't get it any other way."
},
{
"end_time": 1468.456,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1450.179,
"text": " And so you lie and you put it out on Twitter and know 10,000 people like it. And then you think, well, wait a sec, probably I believe that because look at how positively it was received. And some of that's actually socially positive, right? I mean, if you say something, a lot of people respond to it positively."
},
{
"end_time": 1495.555,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1468.985,
"text": " That might be a good reason for you to think that way a bit more, right? Because the fact that you want social approval isn't only an index of your cowardice, it's also an index of your desire to be productive and to fit in and to have people like you and all of that. And so lies, they just warp things to a tremendous degree. And if you think you're smart enough to keep your lies separate from your truth. And then one final issue is"
},
{
"end_time": 1522.5,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1500.401,
"text": " Well, doesn't that mean that you're practicing to become 20% a liar? And don't you think you're getting better at that? You become what you practice. And then don't you think that'll interfere with your ability to distinguish between what you think and what you don't think, first of all, and also your ability to tell the difference between truth and falsehood?"
},
{
"end_time": 1552.995,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1523.729,
"text": " And so, Dan, don't you think it'll make you cynical about the nature of humankind to observe yourself lying? You're certainly going to think other people do it, at least as much as you. And if they're bad people, they do it way more. It's just a rat's nest. And, you know, I became convinced a long time ago, looking at the totalitarian problem on the left and the right, that the most effective way to deal with this fundamentally was psychological and that what we need to do, all of us, is to stop lying. Each of us in our own lives,"
},
{
"end_time": 1575.776,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1553.541,
"text": " That's the solution. We have to stop and that partly that's because we're so damn powerful now. I mean, how many people have watched your podcasts? Do you think 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1603.865,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1575.776,
"text": " 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 $4.99 you'll spend this season. Prices and participation may vary while supplies last, taxes, tips and fees extra. In terms of views now, obviously there are multiple views for one video. Millions, almost seven or so, seven or eight million."
},
{
"end_time": 1630.043,
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"start_time": 1605.196,
"text": " Okay. So how powerful might your lies be? Right. Right. And I mean, each of those million people is connected to a thousand other people. So that's a billion people that you're two steps away from at least. So you said, sorry, you said 7 million people. So it's 7 billion people, you know, I mean, obviously those circles are going to overlap, but you get my point."
},
{
"end_time": 1659.974,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1631.954,
"text": " Yeah, what I would object to is that you said most people would agree that telling lies is deleterious in some manner. Now I'd say that they say that they profess it, but they don't truly believe it. And the reason that may, in fact, be what unifies the extremes. I'll give you I'll give you an example. Sure, if you ask someone, I think that if you were to ask someone, is it OK to lie for the greater good, they would say,"
},
{
"end_time": 1686.442,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1660.128,
"text": " Well, the majority of those people on the extremes would say yes. And then I wonder, well, perhaps that's an indication that you're on the extreme. Perhaps if you have a worldview, I talk about this concept called Veltan Shaung. That's a good idea, man. Yeah. Perhaps if you have a Veltan Shaung that says that there is no, that somehow there is no greater, somehow you can't tell a lie and before the greater good, because the truth and the good are tied."
},
{
"end_time": 1711.834,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1687.398,
"text": " Yeah, I think that's right. So that's a really smart idea, the idea that if you have a belief system politically that requires any lies to support, then that's an indication that you've gone too far. I think that's a good rule of thumb. Right. And what else is, as you mentioned, pestiferous because it's poisonous, is that"
},
{
"end_time": 1731.049,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1712.193,
"text": " they they'll say power is one of the well they'll say power is the predominant perhaps only factor that underlies our social interactions and even truth claims and so on well the issue with the issue with that is that it's partly true and the reason is see this cup here"
},
{
"end_time": 1755.128,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1731.408,
"text": " this cup comprises many elements there's an element of power in this cup there's an element of art as well by the way there's an element of physics you can look at it mathematically you can look at it through an engineering lens you can look at it through an architectural lens yeah well the power is the power in the cup is for example that you own it it's your cup right and so it's embedded within a hierarchy now the question so your claim is exactly right"
},
{
"end_time": 1771.391,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1755.128,
"text": " But there's a huge difference between claiming that it's useful to investigate the role that arbitrary expression of power plays in conceptual systems, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and the premature answer that the"
},
{
"end_time": 1795.145,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1771.391,
"text": " The solution to the problem of perception is will to power and nothing else and so i've been talking to some evolutionary biologists about that i talked to robert trivers this week he's getting old and it was interesting to talk to him but we talked about psychopaths. Okay so let's let's let's wander down that path just for a minute so imagine that the patriarchal structure is predicated on nothing but power."
},
{
"end_time": 1811.869,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1796.323,
"text": " okay and then imagine the psychopaths are particularly cunning uses of power users of power okay so then to the degree that the social system is an expression of power you'd expect psychopaths to be radically successful but they"
},
{
"end_time": 1835.572,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1812.637,
"text": " In human population, well, they're also, they also never exceed their numbers vary between one and 5% in the population never gets higher than three is really the upper limit, but it can get up to five. So they're not that successful because 97% of people aren't psychopaths. So."
},
{
"end_time": 1862.261,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1835.862,
"text": " It just that fact alone indicates that there's something wrong with the power claim. Now, you might say, well, psychopaths aren't very good at utilizing power. It's like, no, no, wait a minute. Actually, psychopaths are better at utilizing pure power stripped completely of empathy than anyone else by definition. So they are literally the power users who lack compassion."
},
{
"end_time": 1893.456,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1863.558,
"text": " So why aren't they radically successful in human populations? And the answer to that is, well, because our hierarchies are not fundamentally built on power and our concepts and perceptions aren't fundamentally a consequence of power or its misuse. Now, that doesn't mean that our perceptions and our social structures can't be, and our intimate relationships, our relationships with ourselves for that matter, can't become contaminated by the excess desire for power."
},
{
"end_time": 1922.312,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1893.882,
"text": " and by the deceit that might be employed let's say in its service that obviously that happens and we have to keep our eyes open all the time about that but the central claim is not only is it unbelievably cynical and destructive and also extremely helpful if you want to demonize your enemies you know because if i believe that the entire basis of your perceptual structure is will to power and so is mine let's say"
},
{
"end_time": 1947.944,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1922.671,
"text": " Well, if you don't believe the same things I do, so if you're trying to elevate yourself in a different hierarchy or you're trying to produce a different hierarchy altogether, we have nothing in common except our enmity. Because there's no ground outside what you're striving for and what I'm striving for selfishly where we can meet as reasonable people and have a, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1977.671,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1949.172,
"text": " discussion. That's not even technically possible within that scheme. And so that means that if you and I are enemies, well, what am I supposed to do with you? Because all you are is will to power. I can't trust you. I can't reason with you. Reason doesn't even exist. You know, you see echoes of that in the claims that rational discussion or something like that is, you know, especially the dialectical forms is somehow a construction of white supremacy"
},
{
"end_time": 2007.193,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1978.387,
"text": " You know implicit in our social structures. It's so it's so shallow that idea and the idea that our virtues first of all that there aren't any virtues but even if there are they're only derivable from power hierarchy structures. God that's so cynical and so destructive and so dangerous and imagine just living with that notion that that's what motivates everyone is nothing but like an untrammeled will to authoritarian power."
},
{
"end_time": 2035.674,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2008.046,
"text": " God, that's hell, man. Yeah, you mentioned the word use multiple times. And that is one of the reasons why I try to analyze it more philosophically toward the end. Because I don't think that this is see, some people would say what we need is dialogue. You'll see you'll hear this many of the times it would come from people who are on the center, center, right, center left, let's say we just need to speak to each other more. But I think what comes before what comes prior to speaking is we need to value the same"
},
{
"end_time": 2045.674,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2036.169,
"text": " We need to be oriented in the same direction. Yeah, well, that's again what this new book that I'm writing is about, you know, because there has to be a"
},
{
"end_time": 2069.394,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2046.374,
"text": " There has to be an initial framework, as you said, that makes even the possibility of dialogue a reality. So it's got to be something. Look, look what we're doing right now. You and me. Hopefully this is what we're doing right now is like, you know, some things and I know. Yeah, that's right, man. Hopefully. And let's bloody well pray that we are smart enough and wise enough and careful enough to do it. Right. So it's not easy."
},
{
"end_time": 2092.756,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2070.572,
"text": " You come to this discussion thinking maybe you don't know everything and that I might have something to say that would be useful and interesting to you that that might actually be crucial to you. And I come to this dialogue hoping for the same from you. Right. So first of all, we both come to the degree we're doing this properly in an attitude of humility. I want to hear from you."
},
{
"end_time": 2113.66,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2093.592,
"text": " And you know, I tend to be kind of dominant in conversations and I talk too much and so that probably interferes with it to some degree. But I really do try to listen and I really do hope that when I talk to someone, that's partly why I do the podcast, is that they'll tell me something that someone as stupid and potentially malevolent as me might really need to know. And so if I"
},
{
"end_time": 2135.077,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2116.63,
"text": " You have to have this presumption of ignorance"
},
{
"end_time": 2161.408,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2135.572,
"text": " And the belief that the person across from you, particularly if they differ from you, might have something useful to say, because they're different from you, they know things that you don't know. So isn't it so good that they're different? And then you have to believe that men of goodwill exist, let's say, and that they can exchange information that's mutually corrective and both can walk away better."
},
{
"end_time": 2190.333,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2166.459,
"text": " One of the reasons, and I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but one of the reasons this theories of everything podcast has taken off the way that it has is partly because I'm not averse to this"
},
{
"end_time": 2210.145,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2191.169,
"text": " ambiguous contradictory thinking when it comes to metaphysical issues like whether or not there exists a god and to speak in terms of religious terms most scientists are as you know and as i know most scientists are they find that to be anathema and i i don't think i'm going to talk to richard dorkins oh well that's wonderful"
},
{
"end_time": 2237.346,
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"start_time": 2211.049,
"text": " Yeah, I saw your conversation with Lawrence Krauss and I was well, I did another one with Harris to just a week and a half ago and it went real well. I figured out how to do to talk to Sam better than I have before. I just asked mostly I just asked him questions and that's really useful to just ask questions rather than because I think I went sideways to some degree in my discussions with Sam, which I don't usually do. I was trying to prove something sideways. Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 2265.418,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2238.746,
"text": " Well, like I said, I was trying to prove something instead of listening and asking questions. And I should, it would have been better had I not tried to do that and just tried harder and harder to understand what it was that he thought. Because one, you know, the more we talked, the more we found like real major points of agreement. You know, like Sam is oriented to a great degree, he's very much concerned about the human"
},
{
"end_time": 2296.732,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2267.261,
"text": " and malevolence that drives him that terror of that and that's I would say that's my fundamental driver I hope it is at least and so that's our something that really unites us and he's hoping that he can find you know a genuine morality now he believes he can find it in scientific inquiry and I don't think that's true but whatever he might be right and and it's not like I don't think science can inform our moral choices and maybe has to but"
},
{
"end_time": 2323.148,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2297.073,
"text": " I, you know, when I came out on the public sphere and first talked to Sam, I had this sort of axe to grind in some sense, which was my belief that the fundamental framework from within which we see the world isn't and can't be objective. And I still believe that's true. But I was hammering it home because I wanted to win that argument. And that was that was the most sophisticated way of going about it. Well, less and less, I think, as we talked."
},
{
"end_time": 2346.561,
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"start_time": 2324.497,
"text": " so and this time i didn't do that at all i just asked him questions and we definitely had the best conversation we've ever had so and i'm really hoping to do that with Dawkins it's like i don't want to win an argument i don't want to have an argument i want to ask him questions i want to find out what he thinks because Dawkins is no fool great and his atheistic materialism grounded in his evolutionary thinking like"
},
{
"end_time": 2375.828,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2347.005,
"text": " That's powerful. You know, it's a powerful system of thought and he's a master of it. And so I want to find out what led him to the conclusions that he came to. And I have questions for him. You know, I want to talk to him, for example, about the instinct to imitate because you were talking earlier about something that unites us, you know. So imagine this, for example. You know that the same person can be admired by a lot of different people, even people"
},
{
"end_time": 2406.937,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2377.432,
"text": " And that, that admiration sort of captures them. That's charisma. That's part of charisma. The charisma is part of an instinct, right? Because if I think you're charismatic and then I'm going to watch you more and my eyes are going to point to you more, I'm going to be more likely to do the things you do. I'm more likely to imitate you. And so I would say there's something like a central spirit that we're all driven to imitate. And it is the thing that we see as admirable across people."
},
{
"end_time": 2433.302,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2407.602,
"text": " And that points to something that we experience as religious. So, like, the ultimate expression of that which compels imitation is indistinguishable from religious worship. It's not propositional. Yeah. Well, that's a Verveckian argument. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Well, and Vervecki is one of the people"
},
{
"end_time": 2443.848,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2435.111,
"text": " Yeah and the director's cut."
},
{
"end_time": 2468.012,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2444.48,
"text": " So just for people who are watching, if you'd like to watch the film, it's best to go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there instead of iTunes and YouTube and so on, which you can also get it from if you'd like, if that's easier, but you can go to the URL betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there for the same price, you get access to the director's cut, which has Jonathan Peugeot. And I'm sure the listeners, the watchers of this are fans of Jonathan."
},
{
"end_time": 2490.23,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2470.128,
"text": " Yeah, well, I think Peugeot is super smart, man. He's deep. And the same with Vervecky. Those two, they've taken certain forms of thought farther than anybody I've ever met. Vervecky is so well read, it's terrifying. And Peugeot is this weird character because he really understands postmodern thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 2512.654,
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"start_time": 2491.271,
"text": " yeah yeah yeah well you see well that's part of having an artistic temperament too you know people like that who are more open in trait terms they can they can see patterns in things now that can lead them astray because you can you can project patterns into you know the void let's say that aren't there that's conspiratorial thinking for"
},
{
"end_time": 2526.288,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2515.862,
"text": " who are also capable of critical thinking pick up patterns long before anyone else does. I've had graduate students like that, you know, they would leap to a scientific conclusion."
},
{
"end_time": 2551.834,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2526.578,
"text": " that was dead on multiple times. And then when they were writing their papers, they'd have to fill in how they got there. Well, that wasn't how they got there. They leaped from mountaintop to mountaintop using Nietzsche's terminology. And they could see patterns. And then they had to construct a rational story to publish their ideas in scientific journals. It's so funny because it's a form of falsification, right? That isn't how they got there. But"
},
{
"end_time": 2565.606,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2551.834,
"text": " But that's so that's one of the questions I want to ask Dawkins is like, well, what about this instinct to imitate? Do you think such a thing exists? You know, because I don't believe he's a blank slate theorist. And we're really good at"
},
{
"end_time": 2586.647,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2569.155,
"text": " this for example when I was watching my kids play house so my son would act out the father you know he'd be the father but he wasn't imitating me exactly wasn't mimicking the exact right gestures of my body right like I do this well I'm imitating you right now"
},
{
"end_time": 2616.715,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2587.602,
"text": " But if I was a comedian and I want to parody you, I would imitate your spirit in some sense, right? And then put a twist in it and everyone would laugh. So I can abstract out from you your pattern. Well, then imagine we're way better at it than that. Like if I watch 10 admirable men and was gripped by my admiration for them, let's say I was fortunate enough to have 10 admirable men in my family, I could abstract out the central spirit that makes them all admirable and I could imitate that."
},
{
"end_time": 2628.609,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2617.005,
"text": " So what occurs when you keep doing that over and over? That's exactly right across generations and so now partly what occurs is the imagination formulates the representation of the abstraction."
},
{
"end_time": 2654.326,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2629.224,
"text": " So I'll give you an example. So if you look and you often see this in Byzantine Cathedral, so you look up in a Byzantine Cathedral, it's a dome. So that's the sky. And maybe you'll see an image of Christ up there as Panto creator, great creator of the world. This is sort of tied with the idea that consciousness gives rise to reality. It's so it's an idealistic philosophy or experience. Well, the idea is something like"
},
{
"end_time": 2684.224,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2654.701,
"text": " that the thing to be admired, it's the central phenomena and function of consciousness and in some sense it gives rise to the reality that is good itself. And the imagination gets there way before the propositional philosophers, way before the artists and the religious dreamers. You made an argument that that is partly at least what is a religious phenomenon. Now do you think that's only it?"
},
{
"end_time": 2698.302,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2685.691,
"text": " no i have another definition that i'm working out okay so it these are things i'm going to talk about when i go to cambridge because i'm going there to oxford and cambridge at the end of november and in any case"
},
{
"end_time": 2732.039,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2706.561,
"text": " Okay, some beliefs have more beliefs dependent on them than others and"
},
{
"end_time": 2753.456,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2733.353,
"text": " The more beliefs that are dependent on a given belief, the deeper that belief is. The deepest of those beliefs, we hold sacred by definition. By definition, our deepest beliefs are sacred. They're primary. And you can tell that in part because if they're challenged,"
},
{
"end_time": 2782.961,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2753.865,
"text": " You get unbelievably upset. And the reason you get upset is because while you're not just destabilizing that belief, you're destabilizing all the beliefs that depend on it. And so one sacred belief in a marriage is sexual fidelity, let's say faithfulness. Right. And you kind of take that on faith because while you take it's on faith that you think that's valuable in part, but it's also on faith that your partner is manifesting that because you, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 2809.701,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2787.858,
"text": " you can accumulate evidence that your partner isn't trustworthy and no one's perfectly trustworthy so you could see how right exactly so but it's a fundamental belief and then if you find out that your partners betrayed you well then the whole house of cards perhaps not the whole house of cards but a lot of the cards come tumbling down you know the past is no longer what you thought it was"
},
{
"end_time": 2837.995,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2810.179,
"text": " your whole faith in humanity itself might be compromised, including your faith in yourself. Like it can really, it's a dagger in the depths, especially if you really love the person and really trusted them. So, so the more sacred a belief is, the deeper it is embedded in this, in this structure of beliefs. And I don't believe those are objective beliefs. That's another thing I want to talk to Dawkins about. I do not think the scientific evidence suggests that"
},
{
"end_time": 2863.046,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2838.763,
"text": " our perceptions that what we perceive are material objects that are self-evident that we then derive our conceptual systems from. I don't think there's any evidence for that. I think it's wrong and it's been proven wrong. So, you know, that's some of the places I want to go. Yeah. Tell me what you think of this. Now I've only thought about this recently. I think when atheists"
},
{
"end_time": 2887.91,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2863.524,
"text": " call the religious dogmatic. What they truly mean is that you're pantheistic for low level gods. What I mean is, what you've outlined is something like this. So let's say you have a hierarchy and hopefully it's monotheistic in the sense that you're integrated, which no one is, but hopefully it's you're pointing to one God, one source of good. Okay, then you're like, well, what makes me good? And you keep going down and down and down until you get to extremely micro level actions, such as"
},
{
"end_time": 2916.834,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2888.268,
"text": " type this email. I'm typing this email. Why? So that I can get an approval for someone for an interview. Why? So that I can talk and hopefully so on and so on and so on. And I think, I think you've outlined, I'm pretty sure it was you that it depends on. So which level there's the disruption that is proportional to the anxiety that you experienced. Okay. Exactly right. So then I think we know the neurophysiology of that even. Okay. So then when someone like Sam Harris calls someone else dogmatic,"
},
{
"end_time": 2934.309,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2917.227,
"text": " Essentially what they mean is that, why are you getting upset at this level? Why are you holding this to be sacred? So here's another example to people who are fundamental in their religious view. So they believe it's literal, what's in the Bible is literal. Something I think about is, and even people who think the Bible is entirely metaphorical,"
},
{
"end_time": 2957.722,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2934.616,
"text": " If I say, well, what if, let's imagine I'm speaking to a fundamentalist, if I say, what if this aspect of the Bible is not meant to be literal, it's metaphorical? They get upset. Why do you get upset? Why is your belief in God contingent? Should your belief in God be contingent? Or should you have faith no matter what? Okay, so then they would say, well, well, so why does that undermine your belief? To me, faith should be"
},
{
"end_time": 2978.302,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2958.439,
"text": " Well, it shouldn't be so easily undermined. And so in some sense, it's as if they're saying here's my God instead of at the top level. Well, here what? Oh, yeah, they are. Well here. Okay. Well, so let's dig into that a little bit. That's a very good observation. Well, one of their unrecognized gods is literal. Hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 3005.316,
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"start_time": 2979.189,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
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"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
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"text": " Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories. The phrase itself because literal means real and it means ultimately real but literal doesn't mean real or ultimately real necessarily like literals really like what does a Dostoevsky novel literally mean? Well nothing."
},
{
"end_time": 3115.606,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3087.466,
"text": " Well, none of it's true. It didn't happen or did it, or did it really happen like at a meta level? Well, that's where great novels happen is at a meta level. So truth is complicated. And this is see, so the fundamentalists, they're, they're tripped up philosophically to some degree because they, they, they can't see how something can be, Oh my God, it's so complicated. This is where Sam Harris and I kept going off on, you know, different tangents."
},
{
"end_time": 3144.889,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3119.258,
"text": " They don't know what they mean when they say literal. They equate literal with real. They equate real with material real. And so when you go after that and you say, well, it's not literally true. What you're saying, what you're essentially saying is that while your whole belief system is predicated on a misapprehension, even about the nature of God, let's say. I mean, you know, most religious traditions, many religious traditions insist that"
},
{
"end_time": 3171.527,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3145.486,
"text": " representing God in a concrete manner is actually an error. The Taoists are not very happy with that idea. The Muslims certainly aren't. The Orthodox Christians really don't, many of them really don't like to represent God the Father in their iconography and part of the reason for that is that you shouldn't concretize the absolute. It's dangerous. Now it's a problem because if you don't concretize it you can't act it"
},
{
"end_time": 3205.333,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3176.084,
"text": " People ask me if I believe in God, and I always think, well, there's a whole bunch of assumptions in that question that you want me to swallow so that you can categorize my answer according to your pre-existent schemas, and that isn't an answer they like. But it's an equation, right? Is God real? God real? Well, what do you mean by real? Well, you know what I mean. No, I don't. Do you mean real like a table? Well, do you mean real like the table? They don't know. They just think they know. It's just like the helicopter issue."
},
{
"end_time": 3232.278,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3206.288,
"text": " Do you mean the table you know? Do you mean your table? Do you mean tables in general as real? Do they have to have four legs? Do they have to have a hard top? Like, what are we talking about when we mean real? Do we mean objectively real, like a table? Well, God isn't like a table. Well, then he isn't real. It's like, okay, well, have it your way, if that's as far as your thinking goes. But I don't even think that sophisticated"
},
{
"end_time": 3260.725,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3234.275,
"text": " One of the most impressive thinkers I ever encountered in the field of perception"
},
{
"end_time": 3285.538,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3261.152,
"text": " wrote this book called an ecological approach to visual perception. And he would say that a table is a, um, I always forget his name. It's an ecological approach to visual perception. Gibson. Yes. Yes. Okay. So when you see a table, do you see an, a flat surface with four legs or do you see a sitting down to eat place?"
},
{
"end_time": 3312.688,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3286.664,
"text": " And the answer is you see a sitting down to eat place and there are objects that slot into that category. That's the answer. It's not the other way around. You don't see the material object which is self-evident and infer the function. Now, it may be a combination of those two things as well, but it doesn't matter. The functional element of it has a certain perceptual primacy. And I'll give you a kind of a nifty example of this."
},
{
"end_time": 3330.538,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3313.558,
"text": " there is a neurological condition called utilization behavior which accompanies prefrontal damage and if someone has manifest utilization behavior if you give them an object they can't not use it so because what's happened"
},
{
"end_time": 3361.459,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3331.544,
"text": " When they see a cop, they'll lift it up and drink from it because a cop is a lifting up and drinking thing. Perceptually, it grip, it grips their motor output. They can't inhibit it. So, but the fact that they have to inhibit it shows how low level the functional perception is. Right. And so, so, so, and that's part of what I was trying to lay out with Harris is that, you know, the idea that the most real is the objective."
},
{
"end_time": 3382.295,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3362.176,
"text": " Doesn't seem to be true for our perceptions and then that tangles is up scientifically right because if our perceptions evolved and we evolved to adapt to reality and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality, then what does that say about reality?"
},
{
"end_time": 3401.22,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3382.978,
"text": " And that's not all the answer to that question is not bloody obvious. Well, that's another question. I hope that I can get to with with Dawkins, you know, and maybe he knows something that I don't. I hope so. Yeah, see, I want to make the claim that it sounds then"
},
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"end_time": 3422.193,
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"start_time": 3401.903,
"text": " And I believe you've made this claim, perhaps even Viveki, that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily, the most quote unquote real it is. However, however, then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out. And then the closer we are to that, the closer our map is to that reality. Of course, we're not trying to mistake the map and the territory."
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
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"end_time": 3468.985,
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"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business. So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
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"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
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"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Well, whether or not material objects exist, patterns exist. Right. And it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are."
},
{
"end_time": 3545.196,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3515.538,
"text": " Like it looks to me, and you can talk about archetypes in this wise, I would say to some degree, trees have been around a long time and the tree structure is pretty embedded in our perceptual systems. And so there is a relationship between how long something has been around in our environment and how deep that is within our perceptual structures. You know, like we assume a difference between up and down."
},
{
"end_time": 3571.493,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3545.896,
"text": " For example, that's really built into us and it's at the basis of a lot of our metaphors. Up is high, up is the sky, up is elevated, up is the mountaintop, up is the sage, up is God. Well, that's partly because we're up and down creatures because there's gravity and there's the ground and we're stuck to the ground and the ground is base and it's material and it's dirty and the sky is pure and"
},
{
"end_time": 3597.739,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3571.954,
"text": " et cetera, et cetera. A lot of our metaphorical architecture is predicated on these underlying presumptions and they do have a depth. And that's also partly why the biological question in relationship to ethics becomes complex too, because some of these adaptations to permanent patterns are biological fundamentals, right? And so"
},
{
"end_time": 3630.486,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3602.944,
"text": " evolution, God, what do you say, persistent patterns that we've encountered over our evolutionary history have shaped the axioms of our ethics. It's complicated, man, like all this stuff is. But okay, so where I was going, well, you said quite a, you said quite, quite a significant amount. Let me see. Hmm. Hmm."
},
{
"end_time": 3651.203,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3633.387,
"text": " Okay, so I'll just go down one route. I don't know if you're aware of Donald Hoffman. The name doesn't ring a bell. Okay, so Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who makes the claim that what we see is not reality. It almost certainly cannot be. And the reason is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3680.145,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3651.783,
"text": " The amount of ways that reality could be versus the amount of ways you could perceive. There's a it. So let's say the amount of ways reality could be is at the bottom. And then you have on the numerator, the amount of ways that you perceive that tends to zero for anything that's even remotely complicated, which we are more than remotely complicated. Well, look, you've watched The Simpsons or South Park. South Park's even a better example. Well, it's barely animation at all, South Park."
},
{
"end_time": 3706.903,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3680.657,
"text": " You know, it's just icons moving. You don't care. That's good enough. And it doesn't matter that in fact it's kind of an interesting style and it doesn't clutter up the story. Right. And so what you see is an icon. Now look, if you see an icon and the pixels in the icon are random samples of the underlying reality, then"
},
{
"end_time": 3736.817,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3707.415,
"text": " And the reality doesn't change during the act of perception, then you're still seeing reality, but you're seeing it at very low resolution. And I think that's a better way of thinking about it. It's low resolution. It's not, not real. And you don't, you actually don't want your representations to be any higher resolution than necessary. So imagine on a computer, sometimes you want a thumbnail because that's good enough. And sometimes you want a high resolution photo because you need detail."
},
{
"end_time": 3755.555,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3737.415,
"text": " And that's a really good way of thinking about our perceptions. They're low and then also are our heuristics. So I think that each of us has a complete map of the world. Now you might say, well, we can't because we're ignorant and the world's real complicated. It's like, yeah, but we just cover up what we don't."
},
{
"end_time": 3791.493,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3764.019,
"text": " are mapped in a very low resolution way. And that's good enough as long as when we use the representation, we don't encounter an error. Like so, so it works. And if it doesn't work, well, then you have to decompose the, you have an explanation for, in some sense, a representation of everything. It's just low resolution. Like, like think of the word sky."
},
{
"end_time": 3817.125,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3792.637,
"text": " Okay, that's an icon. The word is an icon. So you could think the word is a representation of an image of a representation of reality. So when you look at the sky, you don't see the sky. Like let's say you're looking up in the night sky. I mean, god alive, there's a hundred billion galaxies up there. You don't see them. You see a low-res representation and then you make it even lower res by saying sky."
},
{
"end_time": 3835.555,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3817.995,
"text": " What is that good enough what's good enough you don't get hit by a meteor when you're out there on the deck standing looking up at the sky cuz it it does the trick for the time. That's a pragmatic pragmatic that's a pragmatic approach to truth to some degree you know it works well enough for your current purposes."
},
{
"end_time": 3856.596,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3836.459,
"text": " complete enough for you to act in the manner that produces the result you want, not the result you predict, the one you actually want. It doesn't always occur like that. No, well, of course not, because it's partly because our low-res reps or representations are fallible, immensely fallible, but often they're good enough."
},
{
"end_time": 3883.404,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3858.507,
"text": " You know, when you were speaking to Harris, what I thought was underlying the disagreement between you two, and even with you and Bret Weinstein about truth, is that there's the implicit assumption that one should pursue truth. So I don't know if that's the case. But when you're referring to truth, and you're saying, well, here's the definition of truth, and if we were to just follow blindly scientific truth, we would build atom bombs, which we have, we could destroy us, there are many paths that can go that aren't salutary. So we should pick"
},
{
"end_time": 3911.698,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3884.087,
"text": " Well, one is explanatory. Well, who cares about explanatory? We care about our life. To me, what was underneath it was that we should pursue truth. Is that, am I correct in my assessment or was there something else? So what if one made the claim that we don't always have to pursue truth? Well, we can't pursue it everywhere, right? There has to be a spirit that animates the pursuit of truth."
},
{
"end_time": 3943.473,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3914.206,
"text": " To give it some direction. Well, look, here's an example. I think I probably use this in my discussions with Harris. I read this book once about biological warfare research in the Soviet Union, and it's pretty damn relevant in the case of Wuhan, let's say, you know, and God only knows what happened there. But in any case, demonetized right now, there were Soviet scientists working on combining, trying to make a hybrid between smallpox and"
},
{
"end_time": 3971.92,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3945.145,
"text": " Ebola. What's that? Ebola, right, right, right, right. And then to make it deliverable in aerosols. Well, how about maybe not? How about maybe we don't go there? You know, and scientists are making decisions like that all the time, because there's an infinite number of facts to study. See, this is the problem with pure science argument, follow the science. It's like, well, there's an infinite"
},
{
"end_time": 3990.981,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3974.616,
"text": " problem so science is all about the facts yeah which facts and then that gets us into the postmodernist dilemma because the postmodernist say only those facts that serve the will to power and your particular will to power that's just very cynical way of looking at science so"
},
{
"end_time": 4016.544,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3991.886,
"text": " But there's still the question there, right? Something is directing this, and something needs to be directing this. And I would think Harrison Weinstein and myself would all agree that the pursuit of truth is of exceptional importance. And also that there are methods for distinguishing, let's say, material facts, scientific facts, from ethical facts. Now that's where it gets trickier in the relationship between those two."
},
{
"end_time": 4030.64,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4017.415,
"text": " i don't think you can look at the facts except through an ethical framework i don't think it's possible the ethical framework is built into your perception i see you can't help it and the reason for that it's technically quite"
},
{
"end_time": 4060.043,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4035.469,
"text": " We walk, we move. We're always moving from point A to point B. Always, no matter what, even when we're looking at something, it's in preparation for a movement to somewhere better. You know, unless we're trying actively to make things worse, but that's an exceptional case. We can't help but look at the world. What we see is a map. That's a good way of thinking about it."
},
{
"end_time": 4087.449,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4060.435,
"text": " We don't see the world, we see our map of the world. And we need a map because we have to walk through the world. And we don't want to have things fall on us, etc. We don't want to get lost. And then we might infer objects from the contents of our maps. And we might even say those objects are fundamentally real, but then that's a problem because the question arises, well, what do you mean by real? Exactly. And exactly why?"
},
{
"end_time": 4114.241,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4088.541,
"text": " And you know, then Sam would say, well, you can derive what's real from science. And I would say, well, there's an infinite number of facts, Sam. How the hell do we decide which facts to pursue and which not to pursue and which we shouldn't pursue? And you think here's something interesting about the scientific literature. You write a research report about your experiment. You almost never tell the truth about why you got interested in that."
},
{
"end_time": 4137.363,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4114.599,
"text": " What you do is you lay out this rational argument that led to your hypothesis, which isn't what led to your hypothesis at all, by the way. It's just a summary statement that other people could follow. It's not an actual description of what happened. You're interested in something for some reason, and that shapes your hypothesis and the direction of your research. And that's tied in with your own personal narrative. So"
},
{
"end_time": 4161.118,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4138.166,
"text": " it bedevils the scientific enterprise and it can be a real problem because your own narrative can you know cloud your judgment of the let's say the relevant fact so the epitome of that is this mathematician named ramanujan have you heard of ramanujan yes okay for those who haven't heard of him he would come up"
},
{
"end_time": 4186.237,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4161.391,
"text": " through intuition or through what he would say would be dream encounters with gods or goddesses, he would come up with what are astounding formulas that I remember, I think it was Hardy, who was the supervisor said, you can't simply make these up, they're too baroque for you to make them up. And they turned out to be correct. And what you're saying is, well, okay, how do you justify that? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 4214.241,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4186.578,
"text": " That was one of the problems with him. What he would is that he would spit out these formulas, which in the end, most of the time turned out to be true, slight modifications of what's true. And I'll give an example. If someone wants to, if someone can keep this in their head. Okay. So how many ways can you partition a certain number? So let's say 26 can be written as one plus one plus 26 times, or it can be written as one plus two and then plus one, one, one. So there are many, many different partitions of a natural number. He came up with this formula that the number, the partitions of any number, something like one over"
},
{
"end_time": 4244.77,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4214.889,
"text": " two pi square root six, then you take the derivative of what's happening here, which is exponential one over two pi over square root of six, square root of n minus one over 24, all over square root of n minus one over 24. And he couldn't mess. Now, I'm not sure about that particular one. Doesn't matter. This is an example. He couldn't prove them. And he would say that he just, they just occurred to him. So that to me is, well, I'm wondering, well, that's a mystery. There's no one else in mathematics that was like that."
},
{
"end_time": 4256.988,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4245.333,
"text": " And I'm not sure if that's because he was terribly open. You mentioned openness is a trait that allows you to have this these large leaps of insight. I'm not sure if that's exactly why it could be. But that's an example."
},
{
"end_time": 4286.51,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4259.394,
"text": " Yeah, well, you know, the depths of what inspires us, that's a great mystery, right? I mean, one of the mysteries of the scientific enterprise, for example, is hypothesis generation. You know, when we train graduate students, we spend a lot of time training them in method, let's say, and approach and in writing scientific papers and so on. But there's almost no strict"
},
{
"end_time": 4311.476,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4287.432,
"text": " Pedagogy in relationship to hypothesis generation. Well, where do you come up with your research questions to begin with? Well, I'm interested in that. It's like, well, that's really not much of an answer. It's certainly not formalized very well. What is that interest exactly? And how does it guide you exactly? And what is that? And then you might say, well, and also how is that related to your morality? Like to what degree is your scientific"
},
{
"end_time": 4335.64,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4311.92,
"text": " Curiosity motivated by your own personal desire for success or maybe the desire to serve others, you know on the virtuous side Etc. Etc. Well, that's just that's just often the domain of what we don't ask those questions when we're scientists and Fair enough in some sense, but not really because while you do run the kind of problems you just described You know, I work with this carver"
},
{
"end_time": 4356.92,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4339.241,
"text": " Canadian tribe. No, it's Charles Joseph is his name and he's quite a remarkable person and he carves these traditional west coast native Canadian quack quack quackawak sculptures and he dreams in those images"
},
{
"end_time": 4382.739,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4357.927,
"text": " and he consults with the spirits of his father and grandfather great-grandfather in particular in his dreams about his carvings and he doesn't talk about that with anyone because they think he's crazy but he's not he's definitely not and he's a great artist in my estimation unbelievably creative and that his creative process is so unique that"
},
{
"end_time": 4415.367,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4388.643,
"text": " Yeah, you brought that up to Krauss, that the science, well, you said science is nested within what you would consider to be the religious domain. And you could give an example by motivation, what motivates you to pursue a certain direction. So sure, once you've gotten to that direction, it's then a scientific, and then he said, well, look, you can't, can you point to me any"
},
{
"end_time": 4436.288,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4415.981,
"text": " fact, let's say that the religious has come up with something like that, he said, and or knowledge. And then the question was, well, what does one mean by knowledge? And to me, it's, it's a soulless way of looking at the world, they divided the world of soul to begin with, and then wonder, where's the soul? So it's like you've watched someone you take it right now, if I go there, and I open up the fridge,"
},
{
"end_time": 4464.701,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4436.288,
"text": " And I, and I say to you, or you say, Hey, Kurt had, Kurt had some soul that made him get up and go to the fridge. And then they say, well, where, what pixel, where was that soul? At what point when his fingers touched the fridge, did the soul come in? Well, the soul was behind that. Sure. At the lowest level, it wasn't, but the soul is somewhere at the top. Well, what is the soul? Yeah. Well, they look, I mean, I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that there's no spirit in science in some sense."
},
{
"end_time": 4494.002,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4465.196,
"text": " Because we chased it out when we developed the scientific methodology, right? And there may be an equivalent there. Well, it is a related problem. I'm going to talk to Penrose, by the way, also, when I go to... Oh, wonderful! ...and about that, because Penrose thinks that consciousness is not computational, and I don't understand why he thinks that. I mean, I'm talking to computer engineers who are building AI brains fundamentally, and they're quite convinced that... Well, I can give you an answer to that if you like."
},
{
"end_time": 4522.346,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4495.845,
"text": " Hey, go right ahead. Sure, sure, sure. So I've studied Penrose and spoken to his partner, Stuart Hammeroff on the podcast. So the reason Penrose fundamentally thinks that it's not computational is because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. The fact that it's computational in some sense, that means it's a first order language. Now, because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, we can generate a proposition that we see as true, but the first order language cannot see that it's true."
},
{
"end_time": 4550.862,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4522.346,
"text": " And this can happen over and over. So you say, well, let me just... Oh, so they actually accept that interpretation of Goodell's incompleteness theorem? Because I proposed that in my book Maps of Meaning, and a number of philosophical critics have said that I misunderstood that incompleteness theorem and that it didn't have any application in the domain of philosophical inquiry. But I thought it was also an argument about first principles, that any internally coherent system had to be predicated on axioms that weren't provable from within the confines of the system."
},
{
"end_time": 4579.974,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4551.63,
"text": " And so that's part of Penrose's issue here, is it? It's the first principal issue. Yeah, now I'm unsure exactly what you said in Maps of Meaning that would make a philosopher raise alarm. Well, they just said it was inappropriate of me to, first of all, that I misunderstood Goodell's incompleteness theorem, which I might have because I'm not a mathematician, but that even if I did understand it, it wasn't appropriate to apply it to like systems of philosophical inquiry outside the strict domain of mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 4603.78,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4580.418,
"text": " that was their criticism but and i've always been so leery about that because i was kind of outside my domain of expertise when i incorporated that argument but it did look to me like it it was this it was a statement i think what godel godel meant was that there you can't have a system of usable thought in some sense that isn't predicated on axioms that stand outside the system"
},
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"start_time": 4604.275,
"text": " See, I recall reading an article of yours about a year, two years, maybe even three years ago about girdles and completeness theorem and God, how girdles and completeness theorem in some sense proves God. And then when I was searching for it again, I couldn't find it. Do you recall writing an article about that? I don't think I made that argument. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 4653.166,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4624.804,
"text": " So, but I could ask Penrose about that. Yeah. Well, the question if that interpretation is correct and if this is the issue that Penrose is trying to solve, I'd be very interested in that. So thank you for that because I'll ask him. But the fact that there have to see, I think there have to be axioms outside the system, say the propositional system, because something has to fill in the gaps"
},
{
"end_time": 4678.848,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4653.592,
"text": " that our ignorance leaves because we have to map the world but we can't because we're ignorant and so what do we do well we have assumptions and even our perceptions are assumptions you know for example i'm i'm watching you and i'm acting as if what you're doing is telling me the truth but that's an assumption now it could be a generous assumption it could be a necessary assumption but"
},
{
"end_time": 4696.152,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4679.48,
"text": " There are going to be times when that assumption, which is a perceptual act because I see you that way, right, in the broader sense of seeing, there's going to be times when that's wrong because I'm talking to someone who isn't telling me the truth because they don't know what they're talking about. Let's say that's ignorance or maybe they're being malevolent."
},
{
"end_time": 4720.64,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4696.8,
"text": " So we fill in the gaps between our propositional knowledge and the infinitely complex world with presumptions. And a lot of those presumptions are perception. So I think of perceptions as the axioms of propositional thought. That's part of it. Because thought is about something, right? Yeah, Penrose would come from"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.862,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4721.681,
"text": " Maybe it's adjacent, but an alternate route that is about understanding the fact that we can understand a statement to be true. And it came from a first order language, but that first quarter language cannot see that it's true that we understand it implies that what we're doing is not computational. And the reason is that let's imagine we could find the computational"
},
{
"end_time": 4759.189,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4741.903,
"text": " See, there's this guy named Stephen Wolfram who believes that what underlies reality is something like hypergraphs and then there's a system of rewriting. Now, that's akin to a first order language. However, let's imagine that's the case at the"
},
{
"end_time": 4788.882,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4759.599,
"text": " at the fundament of physics is something like a rule generation process. That's like a first order language. Well, then we can find a rule, sorry, we can find a statement that this rule cannot see as being true, but then we see it as true. So how is it that we could be generated by this for if we're embedded in the first order language? How is it that we can see what how is it that we can understand that to be true when we're generated by it? Okay, so so let me Okay, so that was part of the reason that Jung hypothesized the existence of"
},
{
"end_time": 4812.961,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4790.265,
"text": " so imagine that as you go through the different manifestations of your personality in your life you know you say I radically changed at some point you look at retrospectively and you say I radically changed well imagine that there's these map systems"
},
{
"end_time": 4830.06,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4814.94,
"text": " You say that's me your ego identifies with them you say that's me but then that changes radically and maybe you fall into chaos when it changes because you lose your belief and then a new belief emerges out what emerges out of something underneath."
},
{
"end_time": 4847.671,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4830.401,
"text": " And so Jung posited that part of what the self was, was the thing that remained constant across transformations and actually guided them in some sense. Now, Jung also believed that Christ, technically speaking, psychologically speaking, was a symbol of the self."
},
{
"end_time": 4868.404,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4848.626,
"text": " Yep, and that's partly why the death and redemption idea rings true with us because we all go through partial deaths and dissents into sometimes into hell, you know, when everything falls apart around you, you know, to think about that as a descent into hell is perfectly reasonable metaphorical statement. It certainly feels like an eternity when you're there."
},
{
"end_time": 4889.531,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4868.968,
"text": " And in some sense that domain has always existed right across the span of humanity and it's a place you can go. It's also a place that deceit is very likely to take you because it makes your these presumption systems very fragile and much more likely to degenerate into a chaotic hell."
},
{
"end_time": 4905.845,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4890.23,
"text": " In any case, the self is the thing that's underneath that that remains constant, but also the thing that guides those transformations. And even more importantly, in some sense, it's the thing that gives us the intuitions that guides those transformations towards a higher order form of unity and completion."
},
{
"end_time": 4925.708,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4907.602,
"text": " And then you could say maybe that we're manifesting, you and I are trying to manifest that spirit in this dialogue because we're trying to modify each other's proximal constructions to move them towards a more accurate and valid position and that we're very engaged when that's happening because it's so vital."
},
{
"end_time": 4953.473,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4926.51,
"text": " When you know, we go away and we think that was a good conversation. That was a deep conversation. We really got somewhere, something like that, that metaphor. We can't simply use engagement as a barometer or as a marker of following this value system because some people can be engaged heavily. So when murdering people. Yeah. Well, one of the things I would, one of the things I warned people about in maps of meaning was if you lie enough,"
},
{
"end_time": 4971.288,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4954.155,
"text": " You will warp the implicit structures that guide your interest and then you won't be able to rely on it and then you're lost. Because imagine if you couldn't rely on your instinct for meaning because you'd corrupted it. What are you going to do? I think that's the sin against the Holy Ghost, you know, fundamentally."
},
{
"end_time": 5004.599,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4974.616,
"text": " You're speaking my language. I'm liking what you're saying. It reminds me of, it's like we have a compass and every time every lie is a disequilibrium, it makes it not operate properly. And so that's one reason to not tell a lie. And what's interesting though, is that if you've corrupted your compass and your compass should hopefully lead you somewhere positive, and that depends on if you're aiming positively, then telling the truth recalibrates it."
},
{
"end_time": 5033.439,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5006.63,
"text": " Yes, well, look, psychotherapy, I kind of developed this idea when I went down, I did my first public talk at a Parknell University about a month ago. And one of the things that I've been writing about is that the psychotherapeutic presumption. So the first presumption is that there is such a thing as psychotherapy. The second presumption is that it can lead you to a state of increased psychophysiological well-being and health."
},
{
"end_time": 5040.896,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5033.882,
"text": " So why is that first assumption necessary? What do you mean that there is such a thing as psychotherapy? Well, you could just say that it's just rubbish."
},
{
"end_time": 5067.927,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5041.766,
"text": " Right. I mean, when Freud first came out and said, well, talking can cure people, you know, that was a pretty preposterous claim. No one believed it. How can just talking, you know, heal? It's like while talking is thinking, you don't think thinking has anything to do with your psychophysiology. And what Freud did was have people just talk. They could say anything. He didn't even like, that's why they laid on the couch and didn't see him. It was like, say anything that comes into your mind."
},
{
"end_time": 5080.486,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5069.974,
"text": " essentially what you doing is telling the truth to yourself in an untrammeled manner note now people think by talking most people think by talking."
},
{
"end_time": 5110.111,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5080.691,
"text": " You have to be a pretty good thinker before you can think without having to talk. And really what you have to do is talk to yourself in your head. You know, you have the revelatory part of thought which is your ideas and then you engage in dialectical criticism internally. It's internalized conversation. And you have to be pretty sophisticated to be really good at that. You have to be willing to divide yourself into at least two parts and you have to be able to do that. Most people do that by talking. So they reveal what they think to themselves by talking."
},
{
"end_time": 5135.964,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5110.469,
"text": " And then having said what they say, they can, you know, take it or leave it. Then they start to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff. And that can be, is psychotherapeutically curative. And certainly people like Carl Rogers placed a tremendous emphasis on both truth as the curative process in psychotherapy, but also the necessity for the psychotherapist, him or herself,"
},
{
"end_time": 5157.432,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5136.493,
"text": " essentially act out something like the role of Christ. Rodgers was extremely influenced by Protestant thinking. I mean, he was going to evangelize the world when he was a kid, but he became agnostic or atheistic, but it all stuck. So the idea was, if I listen to you in the right spirit, you can reveal truth to yourself that will"
},
{
"end_time": 5187.432,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5158.08,
"text": " reconstitute you and redeem you. That's basically the whole premise of psychotherapy. And it works, you know, and mostly what I saw in psychotherapy, I practiced for 20 years was we just, we got rid of a fair bit of ignorance. We did a fair bit of social skills development. Like I taught a lot of people how to shake hands and say hello and introduce themselves because they just didn't have those skills. But a lot of it was let's find out the lies man and get rid of them."
},
{
"end_time": 5217.637,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5188.183,
"text": " And it's up to you to figure out what the lies are. I'll listen. I'm not telling you. I don't know what your lies are. I don't know what lies you tangled up in. I don't want to presume. Yeah. And I know some people who would lie to their therapist because they're too ashamed or for whatever reason. And some people ask me, what am I advocating for with this film Blue, Better Left Unsaid? And for me, I'm not advocating for anything. I'm not like, well, it would be presumptuous for me to advocate. Would it mean that I found something that I'm trying to convince other people of?"
},
{
"end_time": 5242.278,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5218.012,
"text": " truly better left than said was like a, an attempt for me to cohere and, and solidify my own thoughts developed. So what did it teach? What did it teach? What did it teach you? Well, Tommy, that's simply not easy. And you'll notice that I pause, I tend to pause before I think. And one of the reasons is that it's firstly, I'm trying to, if it's something that I've said before, I try to say it in a different manner and I'll give,"
},
{
"end_time": 5267.517,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5243.234,
"text": " Well, one reason, even if it's synonyms, even if I'm simply replacing the words with synonyms. And the reason is that, the reason is that, well, first, it's great for cognitive flexibility. I think words are like patons. They allow you to reach farther places. Like when you're rock climbing, they're like patons. But secondly, because even if it's something that is the same phenomenon, when you view it from a slightly different angle, you get a better understanding of what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 5296.561,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5268.029,
"text": " Earlier, we were talking about idolatry, and I think it's almost idolatry is akin to mistaking the representation for what's trying to be represented. So imagine this, imagine that you have a- And then insisting that that, yeah, and insisting that that representation is in fact the totality. Yeah. Which means insisting that your interpretation is the totality, right? The satanic error. My interpretation is the totality. It's like, oh, really, is it? Hmm. Good luck with that."
},
{
"end_time": 5325.52,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5297.056,
"text": " I'm super excited to talk to you about the definitions of God and we'll get to that at some point. So it would be like, imagine if you have an upside down ice cream cone. So it looks like this. I did not expect you to say that. If you look at it from the bottom, it's a circle. If you look at it from the top, it's also a circle. If you look at it from the side, it's a triangle. If you look at it from, let's say over here or over here, it looks like a teardrop. And so people, when they're describing God, what I think they're trying to do"
},
{
"end_time": 5344.701,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5325.52,
"text": " Is it's an extremely good maybe the most complicated people say the brain is the most complicated perhaps God is perhaps that's one of the definitions of God but maybe it's not that either way God is complicated and so to say that well if you look across religions it's contradictory therefore what's being described can't exist or only one of them can be correct perhaps"
},
{
"end_time": 5374.718,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5345.179,
"text": " Now, I'm not ecumenical enough to say they're all correct in their own manner. I'm not under a tree meditating with flowers saying that everyone's correct, though that may actually be the case. I'm saying that just because something is contradictory doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore it. It may be akin to different perspectives on the same object. I don't know if you've heard of M theory. It's a form of string theory. String theory says this because there are five different flavors. There's type 2A, 2B, and so on. And it's actually posited that they're all"
},
{
"end_time": 5393.643,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5375.657,
"text": " not adumbrations of the same phenomenon, but actually different perspectives of the same phenomenon. Like you touched out, this is obvious for people to understand where the old refrain of you touching an elephant's ear, touching an elephant's tail, touching an elephant, and they're all described. Okay, so this is obvious to some people. I'm wondering if, well, I'm not wondering, I have a"
},
{
"end_time": 5410.179,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5394.633,
"text": " I have a distinct feeling the different descriptions of God, even there's so many contradictory statements between the East and the West about God. How are some of the East, look, they're suffering in life. There's also extreme grace and love in life, too. But one of the"
},
{
"end_time": 5428.319,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5410.589,
"text": " One of the solutions is act right. So don't lie. And then let's say that's the West's answer. Then the other answer is to realize that the suffering is illusory. So to do away with the coin. So one is that the coin, look, there's a good side and a bad side. So choose the good, that's the West. And the East would say, well, realize that there is no coin."
},
{
"end_time": 5457.193,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5428.933,
"text": " And that's another solution. And perhaps somehow they're the same solution. I've heard you also I've heard you talk about stumbling uphill and what lies at the top of the hill is maximal responsibility. Is it is that all that lies at the top of the hill? Or is it also is it also warmth and forgiveness and grace? And are those the same? OK, how are those the same? OK, let's let's think about this. Yeah, I think, well, the responsibility in some sense is is to lift that load up the hill."
},
{
"end_time": 5482.927,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5457.875,
"text": " You know, that doesn't mean that it's responsibility that's at the top of the hill in the West. I mean, in some ways, Christ is represented as taking the responsibility for all the sins of mankind unto himself, right? Well, that's responsibility. And look, to the degree that each of us are trying to sort out in our own souls"
},
{
"end_time": 5507.585,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5482.927,
"text": " Complex problems that be devil other people were doing that in a low resolution form right we're taking the fragility and errors and malevolence of mankind onto ourselves and trying to sort that out and that's meaningful those also extremely burdensome and you know it can kill you it can crush you and so the responsibility has to be tempered in a variety of ways to make it even bearable"
},
{
"end_time": 5524.497,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5508.08,
"text": " You know, one of the things that's so interesting about the Christian story in my estimation is that that responsibility is so overwhelming that, you know, it was even daunting for God himself. So that's built into the story."
},
{
"end_time": 5559.275,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5533.097,
"text": " We can hit at it. Jung talked about that process that you described of viewing something from multiple different perspectives. He technically called that circumambulation. And it was the attempt to, yeah exactly, to view something very complicated, like take snapshots of it from a whole bunch of different perspectives. This is partly why very rationally minded people who like to walk through something logically find Jung hard to"
},
{
"end_time": 5586.63,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5559.275,
"text": " Tolerate even because that isn't how he thinks he thinks in this circumambulatory manner well think of it this way and think of it this way and here is another viewpoint and this and and so forth and then you read that it's like having an Impressionist painting cohere in your mind into a hole. It's like all of a sudden you go whap Oh, I see what he's talking about and that's an overwhelming experience I mean, I really experienced that reading IO on which is an unbelievably terrifying"
},
{
"end_time": 5620.469,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5591.101,
"text": " It's terrifying because... Well, Jung is the only thinker I've ever seen who, you know, we hypothesized earlier in some sense that that artistic intuition lays out the map for the development of propositional thinking. While Jung traced the development of that intuitive pattern seeking imagination back like 3000 years. That's partly why he talks about astrology. So"
},
{
"end_time": 5651.152,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5623.08,
"text": " We looked up in the night sky, let's see, prior to the development of astronomy. What we saw, we didn't know what we were looking at, right? It filled us with awe, but we didn't know what we were looking at, so we populated the sky with figures of our imagination. That's the constellations, and it was a way of orienting ourselves. So if you look at astrology, psychologically, what you have is a vast storehouse of the contents of the human imagination."
},
{
"end_time": 5675.64,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5651.886,
"text": " Now in astrology there was the idea of a certain kind of progression through the eons. Well Jung believed that the fantasy that underlied astrology was so deep that it had sketched out the map for the trail that we're actually walking down. I don't understand that. Well the artists have intuitions about what's coming."
},
{
"end_time": 5704.155,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5676.527,
"text": " So they're the first, the first people in the unexplored territory. And then the more propositional philosophers and such, and the scientists, they fill in the details, but the, the trailblazing has already been done by the imaginative and the intuitive. Right. Right. So you in, I, on you, it was, I, on young tracks. Well, that's okay. And in, I, on young tracks, the contents of that imagination back,"
},
{
"end_time": 5731.118,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5704.65,
"text": " Several thousand years and also lays out something like a scheme for the future. So for example, he believed that this is so strange man He believed that the idea that there were wise men who saw a star that signified Christ's birth was actually a reference to the astrological idea that Something new would be born at the dawn of the ancient age of Pisces Pisces like it's a wish or"
},
{
"end_time": 5738.37,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5733.183,
"text": " Well, because they were interpreters of the stars. So Pisces."
},
{
"end_time": 5765.23,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5738.746,
"text": " Pisces is a constellation that's characterized by a fish going in one direction and a fish going in the other. Jung was very interested in the use of fish symbolism in Christianity. He associated that with the astrological imagination. He also believed that the 2000 year period from Christ's birth roughly to now was characterized by two ions, one which was explicitly Christian, that's the fish moving in one direction, and the other which led to the development of empirical science was an antithesis."
},
{
"end_time": 5788.012,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5766.732,
"text": " And that that had been foreshadowed by this symbolism which was part of the intuitive discovery of that which was yet to come. That's only part of the argument. It's an unbelievably profound book. And it's terrifying once you understand what he's talking about. And I've never seen anyone criticize it who actually understood it."
},
{
"end_time": 5809.019,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5788.439,
"text": " You know, almost all the criticisms I've seen of Jung and his thinking, it's like, no, you don't, you're not hitting the target there, buddy. He's asking questions that you don't even know need to be asked. So, you know, you're not in, you're not in the ballgame. So yeah, in any case, the more scientific minded people,"
},
{
"end_time": 5827.637,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5810.247,
"text": " yeah well the more propositionally minded people see young had a problem with the propositional universe he said yeah well there's a gap between what we know and the unknown per se. What fills that gap well dreams dreams the imagination imagery."
},
{
"end_time": 5855.282,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5827.978,
"text": " It's at the boundary of propositional thought, and it's between us and what we absolutely don't know. And the visionary artists operate in the domain of imagination and pave the path for the propositional types. And think about the relationship, say, between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Nietzsche was much more propositional than Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky fundamentally is deeper. Now, he's not as clear, right? That's the trade-off."
},
{
"end_time": 5885.503,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5856.647,
"text": " Everything in Nietzsche is in Dostoevsky, and more is in Dostoevsky. And Nietzsche himself knew that. I mean, he was no piker when it came to appreciation, let's say, of works of the imagination. But that's a good way of thinking. And then you see this too. I saw this great lecture by Jonathan Pagio, which I'm going to put up on my YouTube channel, where he spent about 20 minutes explaining the meaning of an orthodox icon that showed a serpent."
},
{
"end_time": 5916.613,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5888.592,
"text": " There's so much in that image, you just can't believe it. And you think, well, how did it all get there? And it's akin to the question you asked about the mathematician. It's like, who has plumbed the depths of the human soul? No one. Where did these ideas come from? Well, they appear in my head. You think that's an explanation? The ideas appear where in your head? Exactly. What do you mean by your head? Do you mean physically? Like, what do you mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 5930.401,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5917.927,
"text": " Yeah, it's like who built"
},
{
"end_time": 5958.541,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5930.998,
"text": " Who built the Sistine Chapel? Was it Michelangelo? Not who built, who painted. And well, in some sense, yes, but also his, he came from a myriad of people before him. And not only that, but the Bible and also thousands and thousands of years before. To me, these scientists who like to, I'm not trying to demean scientists in any way. I mean, the rationally atheistic minded scientists, and I'm straw manning them when I'm saying that. So let me just pick someone, Krauss. So Krauss, to pick on Krauss, Krauss would"
},
{
"end_time": 5988.882,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5959.087,
"text": " He looks at phenomenon in an extremely depthless manner. Now, obviously he doesn't. But what I mean is it's almost like someone who's at the top of the trees and they're so far up that they don't realize that there's roots beneath them, that they've forgotten that there's roots and they think that they don't need it. They dislike what doesn't make sense. Yeah, well, that's part of this. That's right. That's exactly the, that's part of this. See, Krauss is a great physicist and, and, um, but there's a lot of what he does that he regards as self-evident and"
},
{
"end_time": 6017.21,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5990.794,
"text": " and is never questioned and it's sort of a precondition for what he does as a physicist because you know if you're a physicist you're off doing physics you're not questioning your presumptions except maybe in the domain of physics but a lot of what he regards as self-evident just simply isn't self-evident it's not and and that's a real problem when it comes to discussions about what's real and the you brought up an issue couple of issues earlier that are really worth returning to"
},
{
"end_time": 6041.8,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6017.568,
"text": " You know one issue is what is the one that unites the many. And you might say well we don't need one that unites the many we can have a diverse range of values let's say it's well then you have the problem of conflict confusion and anxiety plus hopelessness because you don't really have a goal. It's not it's not like that polytheism let's say it's without a cost it's it's it's fragmentary."
},
{
"end_time": 6068.251,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6042.466,
"text": " And it causes social havoc because person A will pursue value A and person B will pursue value B. And that's okay if they're united under a higher order structure that unites them in some sense, but it's not okay at all. It's the situation in the desert when Moses is leading his people away from Egypt, right? It's the central organizing principle was the Egyptian totalitarian state had dissolved. And what happens is this descent into a fragmentation."
},
{
"end_time": 6098.865,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6073.695,
"text": " So the question is, well, what's the one that unites the many? That's the central religious question. Now, so then and but but and can't you say that the one that unites the many is the most real? Well, then you're in the domain of definition, right? At that point, it starts to become like a definition rather than Yeah, that's why when you when you ask people to define what is real, it just becomes tautological."
},
{
"end_time": 6123.49,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6099.991,
"text": " Not that, by the way, not that tautologies are trivial. So for example, there's Chris Langen, he has one of the highest IQs recorded, along with Savant, I believe. He builds his theory, he builds his theory of everything in some sense from a super tautology. That is, that is, it's, it's a, it's an apodictic formulation of existence. That's God's definition of himself, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 6155.776,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6127.039,
"text": " That's God's definition of himself in the Bible. Yeah, okay, man, I think we should get to the definitions of God. This is extremely interesting. So you mentioned what states conflict. Well, we tried it to one part, right? Well, that's a good question. You know, I think it's the spirit that guides our sequential transformations upward to a higher and higher form of unity and maybe a higher and higher form of delight and love. Do you think that we're all God? I'm sure you've heard some people say that we're God, but we've forgotten that we're God."
},
{
"end_time": 6188.456,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6159.002,
"text": " I can't answer a question like that exactly. I mean, I believe that the idea that we have a divine spark within is an extraordinarily beautiful, poetic and necessary idea. And I think that if you act like that to yourself and other people, that things get radically interesting, interesting and deeply meaningful around you. And it seems to be a very good"
},
{
"end_time": 6219.002,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6189.019,
"text": " a good proposition to guide your actions you know because what we're hoping you and me maybe to the degree that we're being good is that the spirit of truth in you is speaking to the spirit of truth in me and so and that is a reflection of the presumption upon which western civilization is based explicitly let's say not to say that it doesn't permeate other cultures"
},
{
"end_time": 6249.189,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6219.394,
"text": " But it's that spirit of truth that animates us and that redeems us in our societies as well. And hopefully that's expressed in the quality of our speech when we're free to speak. And so is that divine? Well, is that divine? Well, I don't think it's separable from thought itself. In some sense, it might not be separable from consciousness itself. Is that divine? Well, you know, whenever you have that, is that this? It's an equation, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 6275.265,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6250.196,
"text": " Is one plus one equal to two? Well, one of the answers to that is, well, each of those claims on both sides of the equation are equally dubious in relationship to one another. Because what you're trying to do is to say, is God real? Well, what you're not saying is we know what real is, and it's this."
},
{
"end_time": 6289.002,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6275.691,
"text": " And does God fit into that category? It's also, we know what God is in order to assess it. Well, because you could reverse it and say, is real God? It's the same question, right? It's the same question."
},
{
"end_time": 6319.872,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6289.889,
"text": " So here's one of this. This is something I heard from Tyler Goldstein, who has his own theory of everything. He said the ordinary ordinarily. Here's how it works. We look for we have a definition and then we look for evidence and then dismiss what we've just defined. If we don't find the evidence, he said, perhaps what we should do when it comes to God is instead of. Instead of looking for God and then not finding it and then saying God doesn't exist, you use the fact that you didn't find evidence of God as an indication that you should alter your definition of God."
},
{
"end_time": 6344.292,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6320.35,
"text": " Yeah, well, that's that's a perfectly reasonable approach to that problem. Right. Obviously, there's some this. Yeah. However, hmm. No, that's a good. That's a really good observation. Right. It shows you how tricky questions like that are. Right. It's like, well, maybe you're looking in the wrong place. Maybe you formulated your search incorrectly."
},
{
"end_time": 6370.52,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6344.633,
"text": " like you don't know because let's say you're aiming at the highest reality right it's like you're aiming at the highest reality well how do you know you have the question formulated properly because if you if you did well you've already found it and so you might say well does the highest reality exist yes we we're back to the problem of the one that unites the many"
},
{
"end_time": 6379.377,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6370.998,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, see, I was downtown in Toronto and I talked to someone and his Jamaican guy. So if you've more probably won't happen now, it's too cold. He was cutting."
},
{
"end_time": 6405.725,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6380.742,
"text": " coconuts and selling it. And I said, Hey, by the way, what's your name? He said, Kurt. I'm like, Oh my God, I rarely meet people whose names name is Kurt. And he's from the Caribbean. And I walked away and I remember thinking, Oh, he has my name. And then I remember stopping thinking, No, no, he's much older. I have his name. Then I thought, probably what's better to say is we share the same name. And then I thought, Ah, okay, what is it that we all share? And is that somehow related? Is that not synonymous with God?"
},
{
"end_time": 6421.988,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6406.254,
"text": " What is it that we all share? Now, here's something else that I was thinking about when we right now we're speaking to one another in podcast form. So in some sense, we're copying this even think of this archetypal in some sense, we're copying podcasts by doing so when one is playing rock music."
},
{
"end_time": 6451.749,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6422.244,
"text": " One is copying rock in some, because no one speaks with a twang. Where do you develop that? You're copying something. Then I thought, well, how far can you take that when you're doing art in general? What are you copying? Okay. How far can that be taken? How about if you're simply living, laying bare? What are you copying is by simply existing and living. Is that a reflection of that? What you're copying is God's essence in some manner. Hmm. Hmm."
},
{
"end_time": 6479.309,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6452.329,
"text": " That is abstracted completely. Well, I don't think there's any difference. I don't think there's any difference between imitation and worship. They're the same thing. That's why the Eastern Orthodox types inlay such emphasis on the imitation of Christ. Well, you should worship. Well, Peugeot, he says, well, that means enthusiastically celebrate, right? Raise to the highest position. Well, then you imitate that. You imitate that which is of most value."
},
{
"end_time": 6506.391,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6480.776,
"text": " You imitate, hopefully, right? What else would you want to do? Have you thought much about self-fulfilling beliefs? You'd have to be worse. Okay, here's the reason why I say that. Imagine. Now, I believe you've outlined this to we've talked plenty about maps. So let's imagine it's literally like a map just for simplicity. You construct the world. So you have a worldview, and it looks like a top down view of a"
},
{
"end_time": 6526.22,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6506.852,
"text": " of when you're buying an apartment and you see the ground layout. So imagine that you're constructing a worldview. When it comes to self-fulfilling beliefs, that's extremely interesting to me because it means there are parts of reality on that map that whatever you project to be there will be there."
},
{
"end_time": 6551.135,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6526.971,
"text": " So let's say I think there's a toilet in there. You're right. If you don't think there's a toilet in there, there's not. So there are parts of your map that are always correct, no matter what you think about. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, okay. I would turn that a little bit. I would say this is something Kierkegaard talked about, at least to some degree. Imagine that there are only things that you can find out by doing them."
},
{
"end_time": 6579.104,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6552.79,
"text": " So you can't validate the hypothesis. You can't test the hypothesis without acting it out. So let's say you decide that you're going to tell the truth. Well, what evidence is there that you should do that? Well, who knows? There's evidence that you should lie. It works in the short term. It might be to your benefit in the short term. I mean, maybe if you deceive some girl, she'll sleep with you, you know? It's like, why not do that?"
},
{
"end_time": 6607.739,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6579.292,
"text": " well you can't collect the facts you know in some sense not in a simple manner well let's say you decide to tell the truth just carefully as you can well then you're going to have a certain kind of life and you're not going to have that life unless you do that and so you won't even get access to the data unless you take the steps and that's partly why faith is necessary especially in an endeavor like that you have to decide it's some fundamental"
},
{
"end_time": 6633.916,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6608.695,
"text": " level. You know, maybe you're scattered all over the place. It's interesting when Christ comes back in the book of Revelation, and he's the judge, so separating the damned from the saved, let's say. He says something very strange. He says, if you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. He actually says vomit. So it's a disgust reaction. And it's this idea that"
},
{
"end_time": 6662.278,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6640.179,
"text": " What if you don't commit not because you believe that you know what's"
},
{
"end_time": 6683.37,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6662.278,
"text": " What's correct and you'd like to lie but because you simply don't know. Yeah. Well, that's okay Yeah, yeah, that's that's a different that's psychologically. That's a whole different thing. I would say Well, the real damage comes when you know what you should do and then you decide not to do it anyways Yeah, you know violate your conscience. Yeah. Yes. It is the same thing and if you probably"
},
{
"end_time": 6713.37,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6683.37,
"text": " I feel comfortable speculating because I don't mind. Sorry to interrupt. I'm so sorry that I keep interrupting. Oh man, it's my, you're not. Don't be sorry about it. Yeah. Let me say this. Fine. Let me say that. It's fine. I also, I don't know if it's true that you temporarily get what you want per se when you lie. And the reason is it depends on what you want. Now, obviously everything depends on everything. You can always say that depends on so and so, but the reason I say that is because I don't know if it's true."
},
{
"end_time": 6729.77,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6713.37,
"text": " that is that"
},
{
"end_time": 6753.66,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6730.503,
"text": " Jam that they wanted and it glows and this guy's like, there's only one in the world. It's unique. I want this. He eventually goes through this whole journey. He finds it. And then he says, and then what? Then he's happy until he gets to this island where there's millions. It just as far as the eye can see, there are these gold gems and it just stops. He's like, why did I go through all this for that? And in some sense, I'm wondering, Hmm."
},
{
"end_time": 6781.527,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6754.974,
"text": " is the majority of religious texts telling us, you think you want so-and-so. What you actually want is this. And in that way, we can say that even the atheist, we can even say that the atheist ultimately wants God. Even the serial killer ultimately wants God. Well, that's it. Yeah, yeah. There are distractions. I can't wander down that road with you at the moment because I'm getting tired. But I'd like to say one thing about that deceit issue again, and maybe we could close."
},
{
"end_time": 6803.029,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6784.292,
"text": " Sure. Sure. If you could get away with raping them."
},
{
"end_time": 6829.565,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6806.527,
"text": " The sexual encounter you'd have in paradise, you know, you want love, you want companionship, you want a maternal embrace, you want eroticism, you want deep personal contact, you want eye-to-eye communication. That's all part of this fantasy, you know. Then you deceive to get it, and then you get it. Well, no, you don't, because you're a deceitful rapist."
},
{
"end_time": 6847.466,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6830.367,
"text": " And so what do you get well you get the corruption of your soul and the contamination of the thing that you want and need most desperately and that the entire human endeavor depends upon. And that's probably a good place to close."
},
{
"end_time": 6866.323,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6848.37,
"text": " It's really good talking to you, man. Yeah, yeah, it's great talking to you. Now, man, I wanted to talk about your film. Sure, sure, sure. Okay, I wanted to. Or maybe we did explain, you know what I mean? Yes, right. Exactly. That's another aspect we can talk about how much of reality is fractal like where"
},
{
"end_time": 6893.677,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6866.323,
"text": " The examination of any element, if you pursue it far enough, is the examination of the whole. Now, I know Kantor believed that by studying infinity mathematically, he was studying the mind or studying God per se. And some people think, why are you wasting your time if you're someone who cares about the good? Why are you caring about mathematics or physics? Well, hey, man, maybe if you're truthfully exploring something, you're trying and I take question to your not question. I take exception to one of your rules, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 6918.524,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6894.172,
"text": " Tell the truth. I like the, I like the codicil, which is, or at least not lie. But I would reverse that. I'd say, don't lie and try to tell the truth because it's much easier to feel like you're telling the truth when you're not. You can trick yourself. And I think the majority of the time we think we're telling the truth isn't. And that's another reason I pause because you start by stopping lying. Yeah. Yeah. I have to compare."
},
{
"end_time": 6938.558,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6919.48,
"text": " It's not easy to discern what is actually that what I think and what's a reflex that just comes to me. So I'm trying to make sure. Well, anyway, we can talk about free well another time. It was really good talking to you, man. Yeah, it was great talking to your continued endeavors and with your podcast and"
},
{
"end_time": 6961.51,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6938.916,
"text": " I really liked your idea about not saying the same thing twice the same way. That's a real interesting mental habit, disciplinary habit. What's 4 to the power 4? 256. Okay, so how do you know that? You can memorize it. But another way is that you can go, well, what's 4 to the power 5? Well, that's 2 to the power 10. That's 1024. If you're a computer scientist, you know that because you deal with bits."
},
{
"end_time": 6990.128,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6961.51,
"text": " I never give the same lecture twice. Yeah. And that's not easy, man. No."
},
{
"end_time": 7017.21,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6990.418,
"text": " But it's, it's pretty damn entertaining. I'll tell you. Yeah. So before we go, I'm curious, why does that you, why is it that you do these podcasts? What are you trying to accomplish with them? So one is obviously you're trying to learn and obviously you've attained some level of fame and wealth. So it's not as if you want more, perhaps you do. I mean, we can't discount selfish motivations, but what is the reason that you hope the good reason in you is?"
},
{
"end_time": 7034.002,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7018.012,
"text": " to have conversations like this and to share them with as many people as possible in the hopes that we'll build better people and not burn the world down. Yeah, yeah, some people say, well, why is it that I'm focusing on the left and you mentioned, it's not"
},
{
"end_time": 7064.121,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7034.514,
"text": " It seems like perhaps what you're doing on the extreme left, even if you feel like the right is more damaging, you don't think you're provoking the right. Also, the left is more amenable to reason and at least colloquially, it's more amenable to reason. I thought perhaps I should pursue that and I'm more interested. The right is blatant in the racism. It's like, well, that's a five-minute film if I'm to analyze the right. I'll let people know about"
},
{
"end_time": 7094.189,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7064.735,
"text": " If they'd like to see more about me, they can visit theories of everything. So you can just type that into YouTube. They're a conversation much like this Jordan, where I'm super, I'm so fascinated. No, I wouldn't say my motivations are pure. I'm fascinated by consciousness, physics, free will and God and exploring them with technical depth as much as I can and not just surprising like most people. I think that disparagement is what in many ways is holding us back."
},
{
"end_time": 7123.251,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7094.701,
"text": " So I'm trying to bring some rigor, some exactitude to it, because it's not that section. Well, we can talk about that. And then for Better Left Unsaid, if people want to see, you can go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com that I try to bring some of the same analytical framework to exploring the concept of exploring the question of when does the left go too far. And it's such an incomplete film. I disavow it in many ways because it's it's so incomplete. But it's almost like homework. I have to submit it at some point."
},
{
"end_time": 7148.831,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7125.128,
"text": " Yep. Jordan, absolutely. Thank you, man. Ciao, man. Really good talking to you. It flew by and you're very articulate and thoughtful and you're very careful with your words and so good for you, man. Yeah, I know. Thank you. That's a huge compliment coming from you. Good to talk to you. Take care, man."
},
{
"end_time": 7168.797,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7149.548,
"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."
}
]
}No transcript available.