2017 Maps of Meaning 08: Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation

So one of the propositions that I? Set forth for you last week was that the most real Things are the things that are most permanent across time and and that Manifests themselves in the largest number of situations and those are the things that you have to map successfully in order to survive survive of individuals that survive as a species over a very long period Of time and so the question is one question is what are the constants of experience if you are a follower of the Evolutionary Psychologists and to some degree the evolutionary biologist, but I would say more the psychologists like to be in close Metis They have a very afro centric view of Human evolution and the idea basically is that After we diverged from the common ancestor between Chimpanzees Bonobos and human beings We spent a tremendous amount of time in the african environment Mostly on the veldt although. We're not absolutely certain about that We're also very good in water human beings and we have some of the features of aquatic mammals so while hairlessness being one of them Women have a subcutaneously They are fat or feeder quite nicely adapted for swimming and so buckminster fuller who I wouldn't call a mainstream evolutionary psychologist Hypothesized back in the 70s that we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history living on beaches near the ocean That idea really Echoes for me because we like beaches a lot, and it's a great place if you want to get easy food And we're pretty damn good at swimming for for Terrestrial mammals And we are hairless And we do cry salt tears and there's a lot of evidence that we and our feet if you think about our feet They're quite flipper like I know we are stand up and all that and walk, so that's part of the adaptation But we're pretty good at swimming so anyways The classical evolutionary psychology view is that we spent most of our time on the African veldt? It in the critical period of our evolutionary development let's say after we diverged from this common ancestor, and that were adapted for that environment and one of the consequences of that is the idea that we're that things have changed so much around us that we're really not adapted to the environment that we're in anymore, and I really believe that because I think that the idea that the primary Forces that shaped our evolution shaped them during that period of time call it A Roughly a seven million period Year period of time something like that and That that was somehow a special time for human evolution that set our nature. I don't believe that I mean, it's true to some degree, but it's more useful to view the evolution of human cognitive processes over the entire span of Evolutionary history and not necessarily give preference to any particular Epoch and I certainly believe that the idea that we're no longer adapted to the environment because of our rapid technological Transformations is simply not true and the reason. I think that it's not true is because the fundamental constants of the Environment let's say or it's more of the fundamental constants constituent elements of being I think that's the right way to think about it They're the same they haven't changed a bit and there is no way of changing them as far as I can tell without us being radically and Incomprehensibly different than we are and you know with with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and robotics and all of that It's certainly possible then in five hundred years will be completely Will be so like unlike the way we are now that we won't even be the same creatures I don't think that's a particularly great outcome, but it's certainly possible. So what are the fundamental? constituent Elements Well, they're expressed in mythology, but they're not merely symbolic. I think it's the wrong way to think about it They're symbolic, but they reflect a very deep reality and they actually reflect a reality that's not easily apprehensible Directly by the senses now your senses are tuned for a particular duration That's roughly excuse me That's roughly the duration that you live let's say But more importantly it's the duration whatever that duration is across which meaningful actions take place And we kind of have some idea of what that duration is. You know if you look at a computer screen if it has a Refresh rate of less than 60 Hertz you can see it's liquor abut above 60 Hertz you can't its uniform and with movies Anywhere between 20 and 50 frames a second is enough to give you the illusion of continual motion so you know we live in a universe that's Above the tenth of a second domain or maybe the hundredth of a second somewhere in there anyways And I mean it's not like time isn't almost infinitely subdivide At higher levels of resolution than that, but we don't operate generally speaking at higher temporary A something approximating 1/2 a second to a second you know I mean, it's an estimate obviously but a second is a meaningful unit of time for a person and a hundredth of a second really isn't and certainly a billionth of a second isn't and then You know we can think across hours and days and weeks and months But we really can't once you start getting out in two years it gets kind of sketchy and it's hard to think more than five Years down the road and the reason for that is that the particulars upon which you're basing your predictions are likely to change Sufficiently over a five year period So that extending out your vision past that just exposes you to accelerating error Right and that and of course that's the problem with predicting the future period So we live in a time range That's about say a tenth of a second to three three years something like that now I know it can expand Beyond up But that's that's kind of where we're set and our senses seem to be tuned to those durations and and to be Operative so that we make proper Decisions within those durations and and also from from a particular spatial position and so forth you know Your eyes see what's roughly Maybe we could say a walkable distance in front of you something like that, so Then you get detect things and in the locale that enables you to immediately interact with things But it isn't necessarily the case that senses that are tuned to do that are Also tuned to inform you directly about what the most permanent things about being itself are I think that those things have to be? Inferred and there's some there's some supporting evidence for that kind of thing from from pSycholinguistics there's a level of categorization that we seem to Manifest more or less automatically or implicitly so for example when children perceive? Animals they they perceive at the level of cat or dog They don't they don't perceive at the level of subspecies like siamese cat or or? Or or let's say samoyed you know there's this. There's a natural I can't remember what they call that base category something like that it's usually specified by very short words that are easily learn about and so the Linguistic system seems to map right on to the to the object recognition Characteristics of the Sensory systems that are built right into it and and if they weren't built into it We couldn't communicate easily because our natural categories. I think that's it, but it's probably wrong our natural categories They have to be the same for every one or it would be very difficult for us to communicate, okay? So having said all that then the question is Well, what are the most? What are the most real categories? and I think there's there's a real division in ways to think about this because there's a scientific way of thinking about it and And in in that case the most real categories are well mathematical equations certainly seem to be and in the top category there that equations that describe the physical universe, but then then the hypothesis of the existence of such things as protons and and electrons, and you know that the material elements that make up everything that's every element of being the possible exception of empty space But in the in the mythological world the categories, I think are more derived from Darwinian by the effect of Darwinian processes on cognitive and perceptual function So which is to say that we have learned to perceive and then to infer those things that are most necessary? For us in order to continue our existence Propagate live well all of those things and that would be true at the level of individual survival And maybe it's also true at the level of Growth survival although You know the there's a tremendous debate among evolutionary biologists about whether or not selection can take place at the level of the group Anyways there are these basic level categories that manifest themselves to you and then there's categories of the imagination that you have to infer up from the sensory domain and we do that partly in Science by Comparing our sensory representations across people But we also do it by thinking abstractly conceptualizing abstractly And you know one of the things that's interesting about Abstractions is it's not clear whether they're more or less real than the things they're abstracted from you know that this is a perennial debate among let's call them ontology who are interested in that fundamental fundamental nature of reality itself in some sense independent of Conceptual structures are numbers more or less real than the things they represent it's a really hard question to answer because Knowing like using numbers as a representational system gives you unbelievable power And there are mathematicians that believe that there isn't anything more real than mathematical Representations now it depends to some degree of course on how you classify reality. That's the problem with the question like is a Equivalent to be the answer that always is well it depends on how you define a and it depends on how you define b So generally it's not a very useful question, but you can still get the point that there's something very real about abstraction Incredibly real because otherwise why would you bother with them they wouldn't give you any handle on the world? So what's the what's the most useful or what's the most? What's the broadest possible level of abstraction and is there any use of? any utility in thinking in that manner and I tried to make the case last time that that in the Mythological world there are three categories or four depending on what you do with the strange fourth Category? There's a fourth category sort of the category of on categories able entities and So it's sort of the category of everything that not only do you not know but you don't know you don't know it's it's or You can think about it as the category of potential. I actually think that's the best way to think about it Is that it's the dragon of Chaos is the category of potential, and I do believe that Where our materialist view is essentially wrong? I think that the proper way of looking at the at being is that being is? Potential and from that potential whatever consciousness is extracts out the reality that we inhabit anyways that's certainly the mythological Viewpoint and and But it's not just a mythological Viewpoint. It's a it's a sequence of ideas for example that deeply underlies the thinking of young piaget and piaget by the way it was very interested in reconciling the gap between religion and science that's really what he devoted his life to doing and So and there are other streams of philosophy and I would say heidegger the phenomenologist are are Thinking along lines that are similar to this as well because heidegger was concerned not with the nature of material reality but with being as such and and and so You can extract out the viewpoint that I just described from from Mythology, but it isn't the only source of such What would you call it? Hi hypotheses is probably the right idea so the idea you can think about this as a bootstrapping process in some senses in order for anything to get going it has to bootstrap itself up and Become more and more complex as it does that so it's it's like This is the answer to the chicken and egg problem Right which was first the chicken or the egg well neither Something from which both the chicken and egg were derived right because the the ultimate The ultimate answer to that is the answer to how there are things at all who knows but at some point there were neither chickens nor eggs, but there were the things that were the precursors to those things and so they spiraled upwards in some sense and those in the initial proto anta tease single celled animals for I Mean you can go back farther than that, but we could say well, single-cell animal is differentiated over time right, and there's this Looping process that that differentiates out into both the chicken and the egg so but what the question is what do you need in order for that process to begin and That's really the question of what the fundamental constituent elements of reality are and the mythological hypothesis. Is that there's or three or four? One is the fact that there has to be something that that that that manifests itself as an observer It's something like that some kind of observer now where that process of observation Starts in the Phylogenetic chain is very very difficult to tell you know we might say well. There's certainly nothing Of a conscious observer until there's a differentiated nervous system But then prior to the emergence of differentiated nervous systems there were Animals that were complex enough to react with the environment in a manner that well single-celled animals. They're quite complex I mean some of them are unbelievably complicated. You know they can move themselves through space they can orient they can follow chemical trails They're not they're not stupid by any stretch of the imagination now to what degree They have being you know as something they could represent well. We don't have to speculate on that, but the proto elements of Conscious being are there so you need you need a being you need? that the structure of that being through which the The entirety of being itself is interpreted and you need The surround it's something like that and so I conceptualize that as something that knows that's the knower what it knows that's the interpretive structure and that which needs to be known or you could could conceptualize that as the individual in explored territory nested inside unexplored territory That's another way of thinking about it or you can think about it as the individual Inside culture and the individual culture has nested inside nature that's another way of looking at it, or you can think of it but as the knower and in order surrounded by Chaos That's another way of thinking about it, but all these things you know, they're all attempts to Articulate the same underlying structure you see that in narratives continually And I think pinocchio is a very good example of that because in pinocchio you have the culture, that's Geppetto and Geppetto is obviously creative, but also insufficient and dead Which is why he ends up in the belly of the whale you have the blue fairy whose mother Nature for all intents and purposes the Negative feminine doesn't manifest itself much in the pinocchio story except implicitly in the form of the whale the thing at the bottom that which is more like the dragon of Chaos than something feminine that swallows up the swallows Up culture, but you have Nature or culture Geppetto Nature the blue Fairy and then the puppet pinocchio and You know from a strictly scientific perspective. We think of human beings as nothing, but the children of nature and culture and that Pushes You Towards a kind of deterministic view what causes your behavior? Well, it's either nature or culture because there isn't anything else But that isn't how the mythological story lays itself out because it says there is something else And that's whatever your consciousness is and that consciousness seems to be able to work with nature and culture in a non deterministic Manner in order to bring Well in order for what? In order to bring itself forward I mean and that's really and what's interesting about that I think is that it isn't obviously just the plot of pinocchio It's virtually the plot of any story is the story of the development of the individual now the Story is order Chaos Higher order Roughly speaking so you can get variants of that you can get order collapses into disorder and nothing is Resolved that's a tragedy right and and you can get so so you don't have to have the entire story Represented in this story, but you get fragments of it It's a classic u-shaped story And what it is is the story of the development of the individual across time as a consequence of his or her? adventures in time and space and every story is exactly that and Those are representations of the manner in which you come to be in the world for better or for worse It's differentiated so the individual has a negative and a pause development and culture has a negative and a positive Element the Nature does as well and that makes the potential for plots much broader but and I think it's also very useful to know that entire story because I think it's one of the things that protects you against Ideology it's like okay Where if someone tells you a political story or a story of any sort you can always ask well? Where are the missing characters human beings are terrible? They directed a culture that's destroying the planet and nature is been if you know benevolent and and pristine It's like yeah fair enough accurate, but you missing half the characters Because humans are not just terrible rapacious creatures and culture is not just a destructive force and nature is by no means on our side, so Where's the missing characters you need all the characters in the representation to get it right? And I really believe this to be true. So for example If you want to protect yourself against trauma as you move forward in life You have to be very aware of the three three negative characters you have to know that the human individual has an adversarial element That's malevolent right to the core and if you don't know that and you run across someone who's malevolent you will end up damaged So because first you won't be able to defend yourself You'll just be like a ripe fruit tree for the plucking and second the mere existence of someone like that will pose such a threat to the way that you've organized the world that it might collapse on you that happens to people all the Time so it really matters whether you know these categories and it matters that you know that culture can become Tyrannical it really But that it's also you're the father that's given you everything and it matters that you know Everything good comes from nature and that we need to live in harmony with Nature to some degree But that it's also hell bent on our destruction Every second and it's very paradoxical It's a hard thing to reconcile with with with a with a thought structure like modern science That's based on a strict logic that always says something can't be itself and it's opposite at the same time But you know human beings can certainly be something and it's opposite at the same time and anything truly complex can have the And does have that nature if someone offers you a new job you think well? That's positive. It's like no, it's not It's positive and negative and complex it might be the solution to your problem, but at the same set time It's going to generate a whole host of other problems so lots of times We're encountering entities in some sense that have an internally paradoxical structure and we have to deal with that entire set of Paradoxes or or we don't survive it's really a matter of survival okay, so So on and then you know there's this overarching symbol which is the dragon of Chaos which is potential itself and it's the potential from which all of these categories Emerge and so the The most abstract category of our imagination is that which is beyond our understanding the category of that which is Beyond our understanding? and that seems to me to be represented because we can only use the representational structures that we evolved is that it's represented in our paradoxical representation of the predator and the treasure that lies Beyond the perimeter is the perimeters of our safe Societies, so what's out there Beyond well? We don't know, but we need to know because we need always to deal with what we don't know so weirdly enough We have to come up with a category of what we don't know in order to start formalizing a theory about how we might Progress towards it and interact with it. It's a very paradoxical idea, and there's a paradoxical answer, right? It's the terrible predator that lurks in the unknown that also harbors something of great value perfect Perfect that's exactly right that's exactly right and and I think that that is a reflection of the fact that human beings are Predator animal and prey animals at the same time so what's out there in the terrible darkness something that can destroy you? But also something that you absolutely need so how do you how do you? Prepare yourself for that, and that's the ultimate question of life It's not how do you deal with death although death is a sub component of the terrible unknown I would say it's how do you Deal with that which is Beyond your understanding which is constantly Manifesting itself in the world and that and that manifests itself every time you categorize something and the thing escapes from the category and that happens most interpersonal relationships because people are so damn complicated you get them figured out boxed in you can make a Contract that neither of you will jump outside the box, but you jump outside the box continually And that's why a relationship requires constant negotiation and reconceptualize ation because you do not exhaust the person with your perceptual categories and Of course you don't exhaust the world with your perceptual categories ever This is partly. Why the Existentialist, or they have this concept called alienation and the idea was that human beings become alienated from their creative products? so and that is and here's why it happens, so Imagine Henry Ford makes the assembly line right so ford has no idea what's going to happen when he makes the assembly line like because he's Just trying to figure out a fast way to make cars or he thinks that what he's making his cars So he thinks he's making an assembly line for cars, and he thinks he's making cars, and you think well What's wrong with that? Well first of all the assembly line absolutely? Transformed the entire planet right because it Brought in that the era of mass cheap manufacturing. It's like It's just it was way more than he thought it was and then did he make a car well a car is something that Hypothetically takes you relatively effectively from point a to point b. It was really a replacement for the horse and buggy I mean if the first cars looked like that they were horseless carriages well Did he make a car well God it's God it's hard to tell what Henry ford made He made a very effective way for transforming the atmosphere, right? And the fact that it also happened to take you from point a to point B might be just completely irrelevant compared to the fact that it was the internal combustion engine and its rapid distribution completely changed the Constituent that you know the fundamental Chemical structure of the atmosphere itself it Completely transformed cities it Blew out the rural community everyone moved to the cities right it made all the cities built around the automobile But then it had this tremendous political and economic significance, too So I mean part of the reason that because you think well is A car is a way to get from point a to point B. But no no it's not a machine It's also the embodiment of an idea. It's a very strange idea a collectivist society would have never invented the car because the car is predicated on the idea that you could own a Conveyance that would get only you and only you from somewhere to somewhere else without ever asking anybody for any permission and So the funny thing is is when you build something like that those presuppositions are built into it and then when you export that say to soviet Russia You don't get to they can't just take the car and leave the political implications behind The car the foot Mere fact that you stepped into one and drive it is an indication that you're accepting the political ideological Presuppositions that are part of the fact that that thing even exists and so well that's alienation, it's like Even something you make you think well you have control over what you make because you've made it you understand It's like no, you don't you understand a tiny fraction of it you launch it out in the world man And the snakes inside of it the hydra Xinhai inside of it multiply their heads massively Constantly and you can you can't really keep track of it and so So even even in your relationship with create identities. You still see the re-emergence of this underlying Fundamental sub structure right even inside it's the it's the garden of eden there's always a snake inside the thing this wall did always Always all even God himself could not get rid of the snakes in the garden and partly what that means is that? You know the garden is a conceptual system. It's the conceptual system within which people Exist that Eden is a is a walled Garden Paradise means walled Garden And it's walls because a walled garden is where people live because the wall is culture and the garden is nature And we always live in a structure that's an amalgam of nature and culture so we set it up So it's paradisal as long as we're unconscious But we can't manage it because there's always something Chaotic that's coming in that we will interact with that's human beings you put a snake in the garden. It's the first bloody thing We're going to talk to and for better, or worse. It makes us conscious and awake It makes us aware of our mortality It does all sorts of terrible things to us, but it doesn't matter because that's that's the path that human beings have what chosen? Because that's the implication in that story and and it's very difficult. It's a very difficult thing to answer because We certainly choose each other for self-awareness and consciousness and intelligence, and I don't you know if you're if you're choosing a mate There's an arms race in human beings. We're choosing intelligent mate, especially that's especially the case for women in relationship to men, so So that the idea is that that's a choice Well, that's partly why it's Eva that makes Adam self-conscious in the garden of Eden right she offers him the apple She's the one that makes him self-conscious. I think that's actually accurate because the evidence from the evolutionary biologist Is that human sexual females sexual selection was one of the driving factors that differentiated us for Chimpanzees? It's a major factor Chimpanzee females are not selective Mater's they go into Estrus. They'll mate with anything What happens is the dominant Males Chase the Subordinate males away? And so they end up leaving more offspring but it's not a consequence of selection on the part of the females and human beings it's completely different concealed ovulation and Intense selection pressure from women on men you have twice as many female ancestors as you have male ancestors People can never have a hard time working that oh, there is medically, but it's not that Problematic you just think on average every woman had one child half of men had none and the other half had two and That's approximately correct if you average across the entire history of human sexuality So human males in particular are subject to vicious selection pressure on the part of females And I also think that's partly why nature is represented Symbolically as female among human beings because after all nature is what selects There's no better definition of Nature than that which selects so now so so here's here's what I want to talk to you about the brain a little bit because if you make the radical case let's say that these are actually the categories of reality and We're going to say well reality is what select for the for the sake of for this for the sake of argument? then the then are our neurological struck our physical structure should be adapted to that reality it's it's a necessary conclusion from that So then the question is well are they and as far as I can tell the answer to that is yes? and so we'll go through the What would Neuro psychological evidence quite rapidly the first bit of evidence? Is that you have two hemispheres? Why? One deals with unknown and the other deals with the known that's Alcona and goldberg. That's that hypothesize completely independently of any of this underlying mythological substructure which is really important thing to note because if You're trying to determine whether or not something is true valid if it's the construct upon. Which you base your thinking are valid and true There's rules for doing that and one of the rules is you have to be able to detect the existence of the categories? using multiple methods of of What using multiple methods, it's the Multi method Multi trait Matrix, technically speaking It was established as a technique by two psychologists named cronbach, cro Nb a ch, and me'll Ma eh L Paul Mele back in the 1950s which pSychologists were trying to figure out? How do you determine if something actually has an existence like anger or anxiety that's something that you could study? Scientifically, and the answer is well you have to be able to measure it Multiple ways and all those measurements have to read the same way and then the question is well what do you mean by multiple ways because it's sight and vision in sight and hearing different or Somewhat and somewhat to say, but you know you make them as different as you can manage Let's say and our sensory systems are quite different smell molecular signature sound is auditory print or you know auditory pressure you need a gas around you or some liquid in order for that to occur sight uses light you know we're using different inputs that converge and Allow us to say well if we get convergence information across these multiple measurements, then we'll assume that the thing we're perceiving is real We even extend that in science because we say if you take your multiple measurement system And you take your multiple multiple measurement system and then you compare them will only allow what's corn to cross both those comparisons to be real and so that's the Multi method multi trait Matrix process essentially and My sense is that you know I think that the pattern that I'm describing to you is manifested itself evolutionarily it manifests itself at the neural in the neurological space and it manifests itself in the conceptual space and the probabilities of all three of those things happening at the same time without there being something valid there is Lessons with each level of interpretation you managed to stack on top of one another So that's that's the method well, so Let's think about the brain a little bit, and I'll tell you a little bit about how the brain works and and You know a lot of the stuff. I'm telling you right now is quite Old actually most of it was worked out in the nineteen in the 1980s But it's been remarkably stable as far as I can tell in some sense We're filling in the details and not in every sense, but in some sense, we're filling in the details, okay So you take this is from Alexander, Luria who was the the greatest perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived? He was a russian What worked mostly up to the second world war mostly on people who had brain damage and he was interested in? trying to outline the the Overarching picture of brain function, and so he did that partly by looking at its function But also partly by looking at its structure trying to get both of those things working simultaneously And so we'll go through a brief picture of how the brain works and so one of the ways of so You can you can look at the brain from front to back and you can divide it roughly into two? Sections in one section has to do with sensory processing and that's roughly the back half and one section has to do with motor Output now those things aren't as clearly Differentiated as you might think because you there's very little sensation without motor output. Maybe the The part that closest to an exception is smell I would say but you at least have to breathe in You know and when an animal is actively searching on a scent trail its breathing in so it's using its motor output constantly to modify the Sensory Stream It's really difficult to dissociate the two it when you're looking at some you know it kind of feels to you like you're a passive recipient of sense data But you're no such thing your eyes are moving back and forth in Multiple ways all the time including the ways that you can control voluntarily so there's multiple involuntary systems that are moving your eyes in multiple ways and really what you're doing is feeling the the array of Electro-Magnetic of the electromagnetic spectrum with your eyes you're feeling it you're actively exploring if you're not a passive recipient at all so even in Sensation you can't purely pull sensation out for motor Processing and say I'm getting untrammeled unbiased sense data because you can't Look at something without focusing and you can't focus without wanting to look at something You know you can't just lie there with it. Well you could with your eyes have cross, but you know that's sort of like Imagine you dropped a video recorder from an airplane, and it just spun around in an unfocused Manner. Well, that's the world Sampled randomly, you know what are you going to do with that nothing? and you know you're you're concentrating on the on on the auditory stream constantly and Segregating out some things and suppressing others like if you listen in the classroom you can hear Probably four or five different types of mechanical noise going on at the same time most of the time in the classroom That's silent You don't hear it like you don't hear your fridge except when it turns on or off right you zero that out And so you're very selective in your perception So you can't really technically separate out motor output from Sensory input And that's really useful to know because it destroys the idea that you're just a pet you know that there's a world of Sensation out there, that's imprinting itself on you, and that's how you get your information. Which is really the that's the fundamental Presupposition of the empiricists of the raw empiricists there's a world of sense data out there you sample it randomly And that's what informs like yes Except that you're always an active harvester of the information so you can't get rid of the interpretive structure a priori that was a manual cat by the Who first established out in his critique of pure reason you can't get away from the fact that you're actively harvesting the data So you can say well where is human structure come from defense data. That's sort of the blank slate idea It's like no wrong because a blank slate cannot process information You're actively engaged right at the beginning. So that's another example of the knower and the unknown you know Working in the cyclical Manner because you interact with something you divide it up into You you and the world Roughly speaking, and I mean you really make it that way because you build yourself out of the information And then of course that makes you a more Differentiated processor with a broader range of skills then you interact with the unknown again you Gather more information It differentiates the world it makes you a more differentiated Harvester, and then so it's just continually cycling and that consciousness the logos the knower is that thing that's doing that Harvesting and you can never say it's not there now what happens is that it's in its nascent form to begin with Low resolution nascent form Low resolution or Low resolution Category system Low resolution world But that's enough to kick started and to started differentiating and that happens as you develop as an individual Because you start out as a single-celled organism for all intents and purposes a very low resolution Thing in a very low resolution world and that differentiates itself across time, but exactly the same thing happened over evolutionary time so So there isn't a time when those three elements aren't there for all intents and purposes. They're always there They're permanent okay, so anyways back to the brain since sensory unit. That's the that's the Back half Roughly speaking huge chunk of that is devoted to visual processing in human beings right most animals Organized around smells not us some what still can smell is a very powerful evoker of memories And it has a direct relationship with Emotional systems because you need to know if something is edible or inedible terrible or or good very very rapidly But human beings are organized around vision so we have a map of massive amounts of our Cortex devoted to Differentiated visual processing now the motor unit so what you have is each of these little zones here, so for example Look at the back here that's the Primary visual area and the Secondary visual area and then this is the primary auditory area in the middle of the brain here on the outside and the secondary auditory area and then the the This is for body representation the primary area in the secondary area and you can think about those those areas of primary primary Secondary and then tertiary primary does the base level processing tertiary expands that up into more abstract represent a Secondary expands it up into more abstract representations and tertiary are the areas where the senses come together? And that's really what what you seem to be most conscious of right? it's action in the tertiary areas because you don't really see the world as a Separate you can think about the auditory streams separate from the visual stream and all of that And you can think about touch separately, but you tend to consciously experience things as a unity As a comprehensive unity of all the senses simultaneously So consciousness seems to occur only at that most of the time at the highest level of integration And you'll area would have associated consciousness more with the tertiary areas where this where the senses are talking to one another now It's more complicated than that because there's obviously subcortical structures all the way down to the spine that are involved heavily in what consciousness is it's not merely a consequence of cortical Activity you know we tend to think that because human beings have massively expanded Cortical structures, and we think of ourselves as the most conscious creatures, and that's reasonable But you can take an awful lot of cortex off someone and they're still conscious In fact you can leave them with almost no brain at all, and they're still conscious So we really have a rough time trying to figure out what consciousness is and how it's related to brain structure so Anyway, so that's the sensory and then the motor unit you have the primary Unit the secondary unit and the primo or the prefrontal Cortex and prefrontal Cortex is particularly a huge and human being so imagine that It's this primary and secondary areas that allow you to - first of all to Act voluntarily, and then - and then to play around in some sense with your actions you know like Imagine that imagine that you're a child building with legos and you can sync with the legos without without really having to think abstractly right because you can play around and build different sorts of structures until you can think at the level at A Level of motor output without having to depend on abstraction but if you develop the Prefrontal Cortex here which emerged out of the motor and premotor areas over the course of evolution so it's a Differentiation of those structures, so this is dealing with the real world This is dealing mostly with the real world But starting to abstract and experiment a little bit and then this what this part deals with abstractions pure and simple so you know I can I can I can lift this and then I can play with lifting it and then I can put it aside and Think about it Abstractly I can think about all the different things that I might do with it. I say well, I could throw it I could take it apart. I could throw I could toss it in the air. I could juggle it I could use it as a doorstop right I could kick it across the room and so basically what I'm doing there is I'm Using my prefrontal Cortex to generate an abstract Representation of the world and then to plot out motor strategies before implementing them and that's basically what abstract thought is very very fundamentally, it's it's it's the hypothesis of abstract action and then the analysis of the outcome and then the implementation into action and I think that there's something about that that actually defines the difference between intelligence and conscientiousness Because weirdly enough you know the correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero No relationship whatsoever. It's quite strange because conscientious people plan and and so forth but I think what it is is that? intelligence is an indicator of the effectiveness of abstraction and Conscientiousness is an indicator of the probability of implementation, and those are very very different problems And you don't just go from abstraction to implementation because if you did you wouldn't be able to think right the thinking has to be Torn away from the implementation, or what you're doing isn't thinking it's just acting So and so I think that accounts for the psychometric independence of those two phenomena It's annoying because you can think of something that you should do, and you won't do it because there's no deterministic causal pathway from the conception to the action so that's kind of annoying it seems to take something like willpower in order to Transform the abstraction into an implementation and We don't understand that very well it's easy to understand the resistance to doing it because Moke the default position of your body should be something like no it never do anything except eat, you know because Doing something requires the expenditure of energy and resources and so unless you have a really good rationale for it You should probably not do it and so the body is sort of Intransigent by Nature it's an oversimplification. You have to come up with a good reason to impel it into motion and you should because You have to pay for action you have to pay for it with energy and resources, so there should be resistance against it but it's still annoying so ok so that's one way of thinking about the world the world something to sense and the world something to act upon and so the brain has fundamental divisions of Sensing and acting upon, but there, it's a constantly interacting loop. You. Can't separate them really Any more than we are separating them conceptually now on the Motor strip here The body is represented and this was discovered at the Montreal neurological institute When when when brain surgery was been doing was being done on on on people generally who had epilepsy or some other? Terrible Brain illness You have brain surgery when you're awake Which is a rather horrifying thing to know about but the reason for that generally speaking is so that? Something isn't taken out that you need Now one of the things that happened while people were having brain surgery done, and this would have been I believe I Don't remember the exact time between the 30s and the 50s, I believe And I think it was hab if I remember properly who was one of Canada's great neuropsychologist? We do brain stimulation while people were having brain surgery and they could map out the way the body was Represented on the cortical surface, and so you imagine. There's two representations. There's there's a Sensory representation of your body on the cortical Surface, and there's a motor Representation of your body on the cortical surface those are both called the representations are called homunculus They're like the body has been laid out on this strange strip, or this strip of tissue you can look up the homunculi and see what they're like, but I'll show you uh They're sort of stretched out weirdly along here That would be the motor one and then along here that would be the sensory one and you can kind of you can kind of detect with your own consciousness how your body is represented in your brain, so For example can I get you to stand up if you would? Let's turn around Okay, so how many fingers on your back? Okay, all right. Why low resolution. He's like a rope on the honor. His back is like a low resolution Array of pixels right and so it's virtually impossible. You just don't have enough Sensory tissue on your back to make that you could tell I was pushing But it could have been a bath it could have been five fingers. It doesn't matter maybe your pixel is this big or something like that right and so, but if I put a Finger on your lip like that man. You've got it right now or on your tongue because your tongue there's more representative representation of your tongue than your entire trunk and Well, why well you don't to bite your tongue? That's a big problem. You have to be able to talk you You want to really differentiate what you're eating if you're eating fish? You don't want to eat the bone so and you know when your tongue is unbelievably crazily sensitive, and you know that to that if you have a tooth pulled Your tongue will investigate that area for like six months what you're sitting there your attention Wanes and your tongue is in there like mapping like mad mapping that little hole to update your body representation, right? And it's just this crazy thing that is unbelievably well Represented set from the sensory perspective and also from the motor perspective because you could manipulate your tongue like crazy. It's it's like a quarter of your motor output system is devoted to tongue manipulation, right and so here's a Here's a picture of the homunculus, this is a motor homunculus So that's how that's what your brain thinks of your body that that's a good way of thinking about it And so that's what a human being is like in terms of his or her Output and so what you see if you look at a sensory homunculus, it's quite similar except the feet are bigger the genitalia are bigger Logically they don't have much motor utility but they have a lot of sensory utility, but the rest of its quite similar So there's you know the motor and the sensory homunculus are quite similar But I'm going to talk about the motor homunculus because it's sort of the action Representation well so what are human beings like? well We're all hands that's the first thing you know and if you do that There's no, it's unbelievably high resolution your fingertips and and and the and the that sensory But we can manipulate our hands like crazy like they're unbelievably articulated, right? And that's the thing that makes us able to change the world it makes us What dolphins aren't and so a huge part of our brain is devoted? Towards being able to move our hands that enables us to take things apart put them together And then once we learn to take things apart and put them together We can talk about how we do that And that's a lot of what we're doing and that's the hands and the mouth and the tongue Roughly speaking Here's how I took something to get apart Chaos here's what I made out of it order Here's how I did it, and then you receive that and you're happy about it, and then you can do the same thing that's invitation Facilitated by language like here's what I did with my body. I'm propagating the cross space You're taking it mapping it onto your body now You can do the same thing. Yeah And that's you know it might be simple like this is how you pick up a rock? But it might be complicated like here's how you go after the dragon of Chaos Right and so that's it sort of maps on to that hierarchy this thing That we talked about in some detail this when you're telling a story to people when you're informing them about something you can talk to them at a very high level of Resolution what you do with your child Here's, how you slice up some broccoli right, but then you move up the obstruction So here's how you act like a civilized person at the dinner table Right and that's part of being a good person so you can tell stories about I just went and saw logan I really like by the way, it's super violent, but I really did like it. It's Got a very elegant mythological structure. Which is not surprising, but There's a scene in this logan movie. He It's not a spoiler he has this child with him who has not been I was being raised Roughly in a laboratory and She has absolutely no table Manners and so they're sitting at The dinner with some people that they run into and she's you know eating like a total barbarian and of course everybody's Eyebrows are raised like where did this person come from so the fact that that high order behavior isn't there is Something that's of extraordinary interest to everyone and so you know you teach your children Microstrategy's, and you teach the macro strategies some of the macro strategies you're teaching them you don't even understand Because you know you know the strategies. They're built into you Because of an evolutionary process roughly speaking, and you say things like it doesn't matter whether you win Or lose it matters you play the game And you don't understand what that means although you know it's right And you try to act that out for your children and they incorporate it in their action even though they can't represent it They cannot come up with a fully articulated Representation of what that means and so they're like children piagetian children Children can only play by themselves to begin with while they're integrating themselves internally then they start to play in parallel with other children So you'll your - you play your game that child plays his or her game a little interaction, but you can't unite the games then you're Between 2 & 4 you start to be able to unite the games and you can either do that by acting them out you can Do this even with the younger child they can catch Peekaboo very rapidly? But once you're between 2 & 4 and you start getting linguistic You can start saying well, let's play this game, and that means we're going to unite our attention towards a particular goal We're going to unite our motor activity and maybe cooperate and compete towards that goal the beginning of the social structure The beginning of the social structure and you get really good at that between 2 & 4 but you don't necessarily? Know what you're doing, you can't say it so PJs experiments indicated that if you take children Maybe they've got to the point where they can play quite a social game Maybe they're 5 or 6 they're playing marbles you take them out of the game and you say okay? Tell me the rules of the game of marbles they give incoherent representations Why because their behavior is more sophisticated than their? Representation you see as soon as you understand that that is a wild thing to understand because it answers the question for example How can you have dreams that tell you things you don't know? You think well how the hell can that possibly be you're coming up with the damn dream? How can the dream tell you things you don't know or? analogously, how can people tell stories that contain information that they don't understand an Answer is the information is coded in our behavior okay, so we'll go back to a chimpanzee troop All the chimpanzees in the troop know the dominant Hierarchy structure, but if you take a chimpanzee out From the troop and say what's the dominant structure the chimpanzee is going to? Do whatever a chimpanzee does it's not going to have a little conversation with you about the nature of the dominant Hierarchy So it can act out its knowledge, and it might even be able to represent it an image but it can't articulate it well, why would we be any different we aren't obviously because we're more complex than we understand so the fact that we're more complex than We understand means that we contain information that we cannot articulate. Why can't that reveal itself? It does all the time you have a revelation Aha, I get it. Well. What is that? It's maybe you're in psychotherapy, and we talk about some things about your past We say well this happened then this hop and then this happened look there's a pattern wow and it's overwhelming. It's like now There's a concordance between your knowledge and the things that you're acting out, and that's what comes as a revelation So one of the things that happens in Exodus moses is leading his people through the desert classic u-shaped story They're in eternity to begin with right, so that's the that's the insufficient present That's the old order then they cross the water the destructive water. That's Chaos like the flood then they're out in the desert Wandering without direction they start worshipping idols. They're wandering without direction and then Moses goes up on the mountain Which is by the way, what happens in Logan? Just because if you're going to go see it, you might as well know that because it's a journey up a mountain he goes up the mountain and he gets rules revealed to them well the way the story is structured is just ordinary interesting because moses takes his people away from this peer net tyrannical structure, but they don't go from Tyranny to Paradise to the promised land in one move that isn't how it works they have to they go from eternity to Absolute Chaos where everyone is fighting and killing each other and having a terrible time of it in half starving and and having to pass Through the red sea like it's they go from Tyranny to catastrophe Before they go to higher order and moses doesn't even make it to the place of higher order He dies before he gets there so it's quite the catastrophe and the israelites are all confused when they're out in the desert because Even though they were in a tyranny and they were slaves now. They're nowhere, and they don't know anything It's not good and so a lot of them actually start thinking about how good the damn tyranny was Compared to wandering around in the desert. Which is exactly what happened in the soviet union right in Russia now. There's huge Nostalgia for the Stalinist, Era So these stories. They're always true. They're always happening So anyways what happens to moses is that the story is quite interesting so the israelites start to fight amongst themselves which of course they do because there's no higher order authority and so then moses sits and Judges the like literally like a judge He sits for hours every day and the squabbling israelites come up, and say you know he did this to me And oh you did this to me and and so then moses has to figure out who's right and who's wrong And he's doing this for like hours and hours for days and days for weeks and weeks for months It's like the origin of English common law it's exactly what happened with common law because in common law what happens is that? you have all the rights there are if you to have a dispute you go before the Judiciary you sort out the dispute that becomes the precedent now That's part of the body of laws the body of laws is what you act out. That's why it's a body well That's what moses does so he's sitting there making judgments very very finely tuned discreet Moral judgments You know how difficult that is when two people have a dispute to try to figure out how to mediate between that you don't know? Who's lying who's telling the truth? You don't know exactly what an acceptable solution would be like it's really ridiculously hard work So he walks through this entire process of continual judicial intermediation then he goes up the mountain and what does he get? tablet a rule well, why Well he spent his ten thousand hours Investigating the structure of morality in a practical way, and it goes bang This is what we've been doing these are the rules It's not like there's no rules to begin with and those those are opposed because that wouldn't work It doesn't work that way you have to take how people are extract out what the pattern of what they are is Reflect that back to the well. That's that's the story of moses, and it's it's it's a myth. It's a meta story It's a story about how rules come to be We act a certain way we have certain kinds of expectations We have certain kinds of disputes out of that a pattern a pattern way of being Emerges then we map the pattern way of being we say well look here's the rules. There's ten of them Or however many you want to extract right? I mean, it's a moving target in some sense don't kill other people. That's a bad idea Don't steal what other people have order your parents, ETc, Etc I mean either you could come up with a different basic set of rules But there'd be some overlap and those aren't bad to begin with course there were far more rules than that but those were the central ones and so then you might say Hey, if you took all ten of those rules, and you try to extract out one rule from them That would be at the top of the hierarchy what would that be and in western Culture the idea there? Is that do you want others as you would have them do unto you is the rule that it's the meta rule that guides all other rules sort of like the one ring in the in the lord of the rings and so it's this consistent Pattern of abstraction of ethical Guidelines, so okay, so Well until that maps on - well. There's a there's a micro There's a micro level That you instruct people at and that then there's a more abstract level that you would struck them out And then there's a more abstract level well. Maybe at that point you can't exactly Directly instruct them remember in the pinocchio story Geppetto sits pinoke or the cricket Jiminy sits Pinocchio down and tries to lecture to him about what the highest level of Moral virtue is he sounds like a complete Fraud he sounds like a propaganda artist. He's a Soapbox preacher and Pinocchio doesn't understand them at all why has to be acted out? now maybe as a parent you can be a model for Emulation which is so you're a model for imitation what you say matters But it doesn't say as much matter as much as what you do Maybe it would if what you said and what you did were the same that's the ideal situation like that's what you want to do if you're a parent if you say one act differently your kids will torture you to death and their right to do it - Because you're confused and confusing them makes them anxious and aggressive, and they will go after you Consistency consistency consistency and if you can't provide it, you'll drive them crazy So you want to bring your words and your actions into alignment right? And that's part of the development of wisdom so okay, so back to the Brain All right, so this is there it's the motor homunculus So now what I want to tell you about that is you just just think about what this thing is like It's taking the world apart And it's talking about it So that's what a human being is like and that to me that's kind of an image of the mythological hero It's the thing that can speak Magic words and take the worlds apart take the world apart now in one of the stories I'm going to tell you today Which is the story of the anu Mulisch which is the oldest written story that we have it's a mesopotamian story And it's from the same pool of stories that the creation account in Genesis was extracted It isn't obvious what the temporal sequence was but imagine there was a pool of stories in the middle east that were of indefinite age Tens of thousands of years and and each of them were developed in a slightly different way although the themes underneath were were similar There are great parallels between the mesopotamian creation account and the first part of the creation account in Genesis So it was discovered in the late 1900s and isis just destroyed a huge Treasure trove of that sort of manuscripts, so just so you know so at Nineveh so we can we can thank the war in the middle east for the destruction of huge a huge treasure house of irreplaceable Human knowledge and a lot of that's happening that's happening very very frequently it's an absolute bloody disgraceful Catastrophe, so Anyway, so you know that that's the human being lips tongues hands and the face your face is also extraordinarily amenable to Voluntary manipulation so you can learn to move Neurons in the tissue underneath your eyes that's how that's how high-resolution your face is and that's part because it's a broadcast Screen, which is why people are always looking at it right? And that's why if you watch a movie It's always concentrating on people's faces because they're just broadcasting what? They're broadcasting their stories Constantly and we're looking at their faces. What are you looking at? What are your eyes pointing at? What are you up to? What's your emotional expression? What are you going to do next? What do you think about me? Where are you going? And you're? Brought like you find someone who has had too much plastic surgery uncanny Because their face is dead because you cannot tell what they're up to there. They've got this is aam. Be like aspect That's terrifying and people like that. Look people like that got killed That's why we're not like that or they didn't make like you want to know what that other person is up to I told you? Already that's how the whites of our eyes evolve right I don't you remember that story? gorillas don't have that distinction between the Iris and the white not like human beings and our eyes are very sharp and One thing we really want to know is What are you looking at? And why what are you up to? And if I can tell what you're looking at I can infer? What you're going to do, and you want a broadcast dot well except when you don't want to broadcast it But you know most of the time you want to be pretty Transparent to other people because otherwise they won't trust you and if they don't trust you they won't cooperate with you they won't compete with you and the probability that they'll come after you is extraordinarily high because you'll be Evil predator in no time flat so okay, so We'll take a look at the brain from another perspective Now a lot of this I got from Alcone and Goldberg Well, that's not exactly right I had laid I laid this out before that but I found Alcone and Goldberg's writings afterwards and he was a student of larious, and he was trying to account for The why we had different hemispheres roughly speaking because it's not self-evident that we should they're actually somewhat two separate consciousnesses and they Communicate but the communication isn't complete. It's like our brain is modularized and Unified at the same time and you can think about it like a me of people. Why do you want it mod your Modularized well, so if one person goes down all of them. Don't that's one One reason so it's some separation of function Why else well? each little module can do its own creative thing independently of the others and that's useful and then there can be communication between them and so There's there's utility and modularity and there's utility and integration and part of what we're trying to work out on the global political scene right now is how modular things should be and how integrated they should be and the European community rushed into integration and That's bothering people dreadfully because they feel that the advantages of modularization have been washed away You saw that maybe they're right because you saw what happened with Greece collapsed right and Greece is very very corrupt incredibly corrupt and germany whatever else you might think about Germany is not corrupt and So the EEC tried to bring Greece and Germany together that didn't work there was no unity there the modularity was actually Useful and the fact that Greece was so destabilized and Italy also very corrupt and spain also very corrupt Was very shaky just about brought the whole thing down it the argument is the modularity would have been better conserved well who knows right because modularity is useful and so is integration, but Full integration seems to be a mistake and so does full modularity, how do you get that right? We don't know that's why we're arguing about it and right now. There's a backlash. We're pulling away from the integration and you you can see why - because in 2008 was the American economy collapsed the world economy just about collapsed that seems like a bad idea. You know you might want some some separateness so that if one system malfunctions and goes down the whole bloody thing doesn't go into flames and So we don't know we don't know how to manage that it's a really really complicated problem, so Anyways ok so how does the how does the brain work? Well the left? Roughly speaking in right handed mail and the reason that I'm concentrating on Right-handed males is because they're simpler in their neurological structure when have a more complicated neurological structure and Left-Handed People tend to have a more complicated neurological structure So we'll just say that we'll just go with the standard model to begin with and you can assume that the same systems are there in every person But they're not laid out on the hemispheric structure quite as neatly but they're still there so it's sort of like these are tendencies so for example if you're a so there's a tendency for the right hemisphere to specialize for what's relatively unknown and the left hemisphere to specialize for what's Relatively mastered and you could think about it this way, too left right it's something like that okay, so large-scale Low-resolution abstractions tend to be the province of the right high Resolution Detailed knowledge structures tend to be the province of the left the left is linguistic That's where the detailed structures manifest themselves in articulation But the fundamental difference between the left and right isn't language versus non language the fundamental distinction is Relatively explored and mastered versus relatively unexplored and not mastered And that's both in terms of structure the right hemisphere has a less granular structure. It's less differentiated It's also responsible mostly for negative emotion especially in the prefrontal part and the reason for that is well. How do you encounter? What's absolutely unknown? Imagination and emotion right I told you that little experiment that you could do if you're alone in a house And you hear a strange noise at night? in A room Turn off the lights and put your hand in the room like your brain will just flash off monsters like mad You know you'll be nervous Because that what's in that room something to make you nervous. That's a very low resolution category, right? It's like it's a it's some indeterminate Manifestation of the Category of things that might hurt you very low resolution, but a very smart category It's like don't put your hand in there you put your hand in there, and you watch your imagination. It's like monsters It'll generate monsters like mat and that's what the right hemisphere is doing it's saying What's in there is an exemplar of the category of things that are dangerous? Here's a bunch of images of those things and that thing in there is going to partake of that essence That's and that's a very low resolution Hypothesis that's kind of what horror movies do with people you know they sort of lead them through that initial process and so and so that's what the right the right hemisphere seems to me to be dominated by Dominated by subcortical processes or the left hemisphere is reversed the Cortex is more or less got dominion and so The right hemisphere well we'll walk through this neurologically, but the right hemisphere is Responds Rapidly to what's unknown, and that's that subcortical the hippocampus is doing an awful lot of that noting a Mismatch, and then it's using the right hemisphere to to abstractly represent what the possibility space is In relationship to unexpected things and then the right hemisphere is tracking that Continually what those unexpected things are and coming up with models of what you haven't yet, Mastered and That's kept separate from the left hemisphere which already has functional models And you don't want to blast the left hemisphere continually with anomalous information because you blow out its structure And then you don't know what to do so the right hemisphere generates New models in some sense out of nothing and then when the time is right taps Information into the left hemisphere slowly so that it doesn't disrupt its function too much And that's a lot of that seems to happen when you're dreaming by the way it happens at night So and what happens with the dreams you think about how dreams work you might think of dreams as part of that process where? ideas come to be so they're low resolution to begin with mostly a majestic really highly emotional and Incoherent less Coherent, why You can't be coherent unless you know what to do Abcdef if that's working you've got coherent, but if you're dealing with something You don't know you have to muck about with your category structures And that's what dreams do and you know when you're interpreting a dream one of the things you watch for is the dream the dream presents this and then this that's called metonymy by the way from a literary perspective and What that implies is this is related to this in some way why else would they be co activated? You know people say well dreams are random. That's the stupidest theory I've ever heard like white noise is random dreams are not random They're hard to understand, but they're anything but random. They're more random than real-life Well, that's because what you don't understand is really random and You're organized and there has to be an intermediary that sort of quasi random between them or you never get from one to the other and Dreams and fantasies myths all of that is part of that process that That stretches you out beyond what you know into the absolute unknown and so And your hemispheres are differentially specialized for that, so roughly speaking right hemisphere Operation and unexplored territory. That's a really good way of thinking about it you need a system that tells you what to do when you don't know what to do a huge part of the subcortical structure is doing that too unknown freeze then what Imagine right freeze emotions imagine Then explore then differentiate then Master That's the process that's the process of learning and what you're doing is you're you're transforming low resolution representations of what's frightening into high resolution representations that Enable you to master it to take the world apart and to make ingenious things out of it So there's this very cool part of the mesopotamian creation myth. So that the major hero whose name is Marduk Confronts the dragon of Chaos Tiamat whose feminine and he cuts her into pieces And he makes the world out of her pieces and one of his name's there's he had 50 60 names and I think that was those were amalgams of tribal gods and one of the names was he who makes ingenious things out of the conflict with Tiamat Absolutely perfect because that's exactly what human beings do right we confront that terrible predatory Potential that lies outside our domain of experience, and we make ingenious things out of it And then we talk about how we did it and then we model How we did it and that's the basis of our ethics and our morality and the way that that ties in to think about one of the things we talked about was that the mythological hero was a Representation not of the being that was at the top of the dominance hierarchy But of the being that was at the top of the set of all possible dominance hierarchies okay, so here's a cool equation the Hero who goes out into the unknown to make contact with the dragon and to bring back the treasure is the same thing that wins the battle across sets of dominance hierarchies and That's how the two things come together right? It's so brilliant it's so absolutely brilliant and so it's the mythological hero the mythological Hero is the Representation of what's again not at the top of one dominance hierarchy, but at the top of all of them. That's the eye That's above the pyramid why the eye because it pays attention, and that's what you do none of this is this is not fiction It's meta truth. It's the right way to think about it look Let's say you're socially anxious okay? So what happens when you're socially anxious? You go to a party your heart's beating. Why the party is a monster Why because it's judging you and it's judging you? It's putting you low down the dominance hierarchy because that's what a negative judgement is and that interferes with your sexual success and that means that you're being harshly evaluated by Nature itself Right so you are confronting that the dragon of Chaos when you go into the social situation and so What do you do? You like this like you hunched over and that's low dominance. I'm no threat. It's like well That's not going to get you very far You know, but that's a logical thing to do in the in the face of a tyrant so I'm no threat You know you look at the king, and you're dead I'm no threat. I'm hunched over and then what's happening internally How are what are people thinking about me? What are people thinking about me or am I looking stupid am I looking foolish jeez I'm awkward. I hate being here man I'm sweating too much, it's all Internalized right, it's all self focused the the eye isn't worked the eye isn't working. What do you tell people? Stop don't stop thinking about yourself because you can't it's like don't think of a white elephant White elephant white elephant white elephant you can't tell someone to stop thinking about something because they get caught in a loop What you do with socially anxious people is you say look at other people Look at them right why because if you look at them, you can tell what they're thinking and then you Unless you're unless you're terribly socialized and some people are some people have no social skills and so the reason they can't go to a party is because they don't even know how to introduce themselves like they're just No one ever taught them how to behave and so they're really good Candidates for Behavior therapy because you walk them through the process of how you actually Manifest the procedures that are associated with social acceptability, but most people aren't like that They have the ability so if they're really introverted and high in neuroticism. They can usually talk quite well to someone one-on-one Why because they look at them well if I look at you? It's another thing to do if you're ever speaking to a group of people never speak to the group of people that doesn't exist you talk to Individuals and then they reflect for you the entire group because they're all entrained. If you look at one person They've broadcast to you what everyone's thinking and you know how to talk to one person, so it's easy So as soon as you focus on the person (not you) you push your attention outward use your eye push your attention Outward And you start watching well Then all your automatic mechanisms kick in and you stop being awkward because if we're talking, and I'm looking here I don't know what you're going to do next and I'm going to put Disjunctions into the like they're like bad chords in the melody of our of our conversation because the reason is I'm not paying attention So that's why the eye is the thing at the top of the pyramid it's like The thing that enables you to win the set of all possible dominance hierarchies is the eye. Pay attention. Pay attention. That's the critical issue. That's why the Egyptians worshiped Horus That's why Horus was the thing that rescued Osiris from the from the depths. It's the capacity to pay attention What do you pay attention to most? What your right hemisphere signals as anomalous. It attracts your attention it's like this isn't going quite right? I'm not looking at that. Wrong! That's what you look at. That's what you look at. What not going right because that's see that's the terrible monster that might eat you but it's also the place you get all the information, so That's why it's useful to have discussions with your enemies Because they will tell you things you do not know and that's such a great thing because if you don't know them well You're not very smart are you you know there may be a time when you go somewhere. That's the thing you need to know and maybe your enemy will tell you why you're such a fool You know and a bunch of other things that aren't true, too But even one thing that's accurate it's like yeah, thanks very much man. Maybe I'll do some work on that I won't have to carry that forward so and that's part of the reason again. Why the terrible predator, It's always the terrible predator that has the gold it's like the person who delivers the message you do not want to hear So it's rough, it's rough But it doesn't matter who life is rough okay, so How are these specialized? The right hemisphere operation and unexplored territory and that unexplored territory Emerges when ever what you're doing doesn't work you know you can conceptualize it as that which is Beyond the walls of the city But the City is a category structure abstractly... abstractly put. There's no difference between the barbarians that invade the walled city and the things that happen in the world that damage your category structure They're, they're the same thing from up from a practical perspective Okay, right hemisphere operation and unexplored territory negative emotion inhibition of Behavior That's this that's anxiety that's what happens when the Medusa looks at you you turn the stone, right? That's the basilisk in Harry Potter. It freezes you why you're moving forward according to a schema. If you're moving forward properly you're getting to where you want to go and the schema is being validated. Simultaneously, I'm moving for it and the map is correct something happens that's unexpected. What should you do? Stop. What else you going to do? You stop first then the predator can't see you, right? That's the freezing reaction of a prey animal So it's it's it built very very deeply into very very old circuits do that. Fact if it's a real orienting reflex to something that's a anomalous you'll go like this And that's to stop the thing that will jump on your back from carrying out your throat, and that's really really fast It's almost as fast as spinal sneak Reflex circuitry extraordinarily fast and but you know that's conserved over an evolutionary span that predator Defense system is at the bottom of your cognitive apparatus everything be built on that like it's a low-resolution pattern a Higher-resolution pattern that's the same pattern is built on top of that. Then a higher-resolution pattern that's the same pattern is built on top of that so on. But that initial architecture is duplicated across the levels of differentiation of the nervous system That's partly why these symbols can be so archaic and still be accurate it's still the way the world works. Negative emotion inhibition of behavior image processing right because image thing about images is they're fast You know a picture is worth a thousand words. Okay, you get the picture You know get the picture is actually something you say to someone if you say; Do you understand? Right if you get the picture is very very fast so the right hemisphere manages that Holistic thinking that's that low resolution thinking that generalizes across instances. Pattern recognition, pattern generation, and gross motor action. yeah. Freeze and get the hell out of there that's gross motor action right hemispheres very good at that. That's why if you're Right-Handed User if you're right-handed you use your left hemisphere to manage the really fine motor details Right you write with it you write with it and because that's very very If you're right-handed you tend to use your left hand to open the top of jars Right you're use your left hand. That's a gross motor action I mean sometimes people are more lateralized than that, but the left hemisphere is specialized for the fine-grain things that you know very well That's that's exactly it. Okay the left hemisphere while the left hemisphere which is associated with positive emotion by the way that's specialized for operation in explored territory. So now what we might say is that you spend your whole life try not to have your right hemisphere turn on Because why would you want that that's where the monsters pop up. So you stay in explored territory, but maybe you also tentatively expand its borders and the left hemisphere seems to be involved in that too. So if you're curious about something It's usually something usually Something minor enough so that it won't blow your entire Category structure if you explore it now sometimes you get unlucky and you're like Eve in the garden of Eden. You go have a little chat with this little snake that seems to be of no significance whatsoever and it feeds you something the apple, it feeds you something and bang Everything falls apart. Right. You collapse and you're out there in history. You're no longer in your old paradise so activation of behavior yeah, well that's because Positive emotion is associated with movement forward like if you're where you want to be and things are going well then your behavior should be activated so that you go and get things now one of the Negative consequences of that is that if you're really in a good mood really happy you're going to be impulsive and make mistakes You know because you hear these doe headed That's a very minor word People who are always pushing happiness as the as the key measure for for successful existence. It's so Ill informed that it's embarrassing that that even happens Positive emotion makes people impulsive. Maniacs for example. Which is really if you that's mania, right? Bipolar disorder if you're manic you're one happy person Way to happy everything is great nothing But wonderful things that are beyond your imagination are going to happen to you And they're going to happen fast and so you're down to the mall to buy everything You can possibly get your hands on because you have a hundred uses for everything and then a week later You know you crash into your depressive Episode and you realize that you're 150 thousand dollars in debt And you've alienated everyone that you know it's like that's untrammeled positive emotion. So how about no. a peer index of positive emotion is no way of determining whether or not a system is working properly even your own system You need a balance between positive and negative emotions plus positive emotions are absolutely exhausting Because if you're in a manic episode, it's like, it's time to get everything good right now fine But you won't sleep for a week, and then you die because you just burned yourself to a crisp and so to be overwhelmingly Enthusiastic about everything sounds like a real blast and I've seen full-blown manic, so they're having plenty of fun But it is not a pleasant thing to behold. They're just all over the place and ya know Yeah, it's really not to it. It's really not good, it's really not good you need a balance between these two systems because the whole world isn't Explored territory bursting with nothing but promise that's not the world. The world is that in the bounded space a little bit with that absolute horror show going out around the periphery and both of your both systems need to be active in order to keep you balanced people do unfortunately sustained damage sometimes to the left Prefrontal Cortex responsible for positive emotion or the right Prefrontal Cortex responsible for negative emotion and if you sustained right hemisphere prefrontal damage It makes you inappropriately happy and impulsive and you and your life Just goes you just spiral Downhill because you make nothing but impulsive decisions And you know what the real world consequence of that is you know? Get drunk and be impulsive for one night You can learn what the bloody consequences of that are you try living like that for a month? Independently of IQ that's the other thing that's so interesting you can blow out your left prefrontal Cortex and not suffer much of a decrease especially in crystallized intelligence but the fact that you're running on nothing but Sorry, you're right hemisphere you're running on nothing, but positive emotion. It's going to order you right into the ground and then if you're Perhaps even more unlucky and you lose the left prefrontal Cortex, then you're permanently depressed because there's nothing but the unexplored manifesting itself we know that if you take depressive depressed people and you Do EEG analysis that they have predominant lefting predominant resting right hemisphere EEG activation and so So that's roughly. So why is this? Well, unknown territory known territory you think well is that real? Well, It's real enough So that's how your brain evolved that seems pretty damn real So then we could think about it subcortically and we might as well do that This is mapped out on the hippocampus more most particularly by Jeffrey Gray who is influenced by? Sokolov and vinegared Ova who are also students of Luria. Jeffrey Gray used cybernetic theory that was developed by Norbert Wiener and which is an AI which he is the father of artificial intelligence and Some of that was actually integrated as well in to Piagetian thought because Piaget and Wiener, Er Norbert Wiener and Luria if I remember correctly all went to the same conference back in the early 1920s Mid 1920s and heard Norbert Wiener speak so that's how cybernetics theory got built into some of these underlying Theories and sort of manifested itself everywhere so Gray Gray uses a model very much like this derived from cybernetic theory and so here's the idea How does the brain work you have a target in mind? and you act to to manifest the target you act to transform the world into the target and Then you compare the consequence of your actions to the target and if they matched and that's a good thing and if they don't match Then that's what where negative emotion comes from. Okay, So how does that work the hippocampus seems to be central to that, so it detects Mismatch so so in the classic Behavioral theory, so this would be Gray's theory you have your expectations of the world that would be your model And you have your sensory input which is the real world and then the hippocampus is mapping one on to the other One from a top-down stream one from the bottom up stream and saying Match Match Match match And as long as everything matches then the hippocampus (this is an oversimplification) keeps the subcortical emotional systems inhibited because you don't need them except for maybe mi mild positive emotion to keep you moving forward if there's a mismatch That's anxiety the anxiety system gets Disinhibited because it's so on it doesn't get activated gets disinhibited that freezes you and all the other motivational systems are primed because God only knows what you're going to have to do next okay, so then if You make a mistake Given that scheme you have to modify the world in order to rectify the mistake you have to modify your motor output so that you Put the world back in order, and that's basically Gray's model But Gray's model is insufficient because Gray presumes that what you're comparing Your expectation with is the real world but you don't have access to the real world what really happens is that your brain compares the model of the World That you want to have happen so it's desired and not expected with the model of the world that you think is happening They're both models There's no direct contact with the truth And so what that means and this is what's horrible about this is that if your model fails.. it doesn't only mean that you have to adjust your expectation and change your motor activity it means you might have to bloody well retool your perceptions. Well that's a lot more horrifying than just having to change your motor output if you betray me Then I have to see you differently, and you know if we've interacted a long time I've built up a hell of a model of you You know it's taken a tremendous amount of effort to generate And I may have used that model as a predicate for all sorts of other plans Which is what you do with an intimate relationship, and so then if you do something that indicates a true mismatch It isn't only that I have to adjust my actions God only knows what I'm going to have to retool. I may even have to retool my perceptions of myself I'm a lot more gullible than I thought I was for example And God only knows what the implications of that are if you're close to me, and you could do this to me Is that my flaw and environment am I carrying that into other relationships? It's an absolute catastrophe, and so Gray actually underestimated the degree of severity of Mismatch because he only said well it was motor output and and re re-world adjusting that would have to be Repaired not perception because like most behavior see the behaviorist had this idea of stimulus, right? The stimulus produces the response it's like okay What stimulus well they never went there? They just assumed that the stimulus spoke for itself But it doesn't that's the fundamental weakness of behavioral Theory is that the reason they could get rid of the mind was because they hid it Invisibly inside the idea of the stimulus which is all of a sudden not just something that was a sense Like a piece of sense data, but that had motivations built into it well no. No. You can't do that. The Motivation you can put the motivation in the object, but then it's no longer an object. It's something completely different Ok good. Let's stop there when you come back I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories ok so it will break for 15 minutes so imagine what happens when a civilization develops and it develops out of an amalgam of tribal organizations and so each of those tribes has their own god which is their own sort of imaginative universe and their attempt to make sense out of the Moral landscape of being and underneath all of those representations is a pattern and the reason there's a pattern there is because all of those tribes are made up of people and so there's going to be it's like there's a domain within which variation is going to occur so if we're going to set up a Structure that works across time it's going to at least be roughly Predicated on the same structures that a dominance hierarchy is predicated on it's going to be Predicated on the same patterns of interactions that would characterize a chimpanzee troop you know. There's this basic biological What would you call it? There's a realm of biological necessity that constitutes the boundary space within which human interactions that have to take place I mean, I can't be so violent that I kill everyone in my tribe That's not to be very helpful because I'm a tribal creature so without the tribe what am I going to do and? So I have to be vaguely Acceptable to other people because otherwise they'll kill me even if I'm really really powerful. They'll take me down and so Because I have to deal with you and you and you and you and you? we're going to modify each other continually and and within parameters now the parameters are wide but they're not non-existent and You know you can see what those parameters are Genuinely if you look at a something like a wolf pack or a chimpanzee troop because those are stable across really The structure itself is stable across at least hundreds of thousands of years if not millions of years And so there's a there's a so Frans De Waal shows for example that with the chimpanzee troops if you have a He studied them mostly at the Arnhem Zoo, and I would recommend his writings. Highly De Waal. De Waal He's interested in the in prototypical Moral, behavior among Chimpanzees. It's a very interesting study and what he showed for example is that if you have a particularly the Dominant dominance Hierarchy in Chimpanzees is male there's a female dominance Hierarchy to that overlaps the male and some of the females are more dominant than many of the males But the fundamental structure looks like it's patriarchal roughly speaking among chimpanzees if you put a really rough tough Barbaric Brutal dictator Chimpanzee at the top his his reign tends to be unstable and violent because he isn't good at negotiating Social support and so he doesn't have any and so that means two chimpanzees that are friends can take him out and so that's what happens and so the Despot Chimp is an unstable leader and De Waal has shown that the more stable chimp leaders are more Chimpanitarian? I guess would be the right word. It's not humanitarian. They they do They have friends and you know Friendship is predicated on reciprocity even among Chimpanzees, and so if a Predicate of power is reciprocity then that's one of the things that alleviates the dictatorial tendency so anyways so my point is when a great civilization Emerges Emerges from the amalgam of tribal groups, but and each of the tribal groups has their ethic, but that ethic Isn't the ethics aren't entirely separate from one another that's why tribes can trade because they do trade They interact with one another. It's kind of half... I remember here's how heretofore Separated tribes begin to trade because you don't know you meet each other across the river It's like you got your bows and arrows and someone makes a mistake And it's like warfare and so but you don't want to start the damn war because maybe you'll die so you're sitting there with your bow and arrows watching these guys and now you know they're there and So then you go back to your tribe And you think oh man what the hell are we going to do about this and one solution is well Let's find out where they are and then we'll go in there at night Well like well kill a bunch of them or we'll wipe them out or something like that another solution might be did you see all the neat stuff they had and so then what do you do is you find a border area and You go, and you put some things out there that are valuable and you run away And then you watch from the trees And you see what happens when these other people discover these valuable things that you left there And if they're like little on the psychopathic side they pick it all up and giggle and run away And that's the end of that, but if they have any sense what they do is They leave some cool stuff on the ground, too And then they run off and then you can go pick up their cool stuff and leave And then it's like step one in the trust process And then maybe you do that you know for a year and it starts to fall into a cadence And then maybe you know you get a little closer when you're watching watching in the bush And then maybe one day you have enough courage to kind of come you send your biggest ugliest guy out there And you know they'd do the same And you know they look at each other and finally they shake hands or something like that and trade? And then well then you've got a trading relationship established and so you can see in that The emergence of a what would you call it negotiated? Consensual Moral structure that allows trading to take place, and there's going to be rules Emerge right away Which is well, you better leave me Something that's of approximately equal value, or are not going to play the game again. That's the thing. That's so cool is that if we only play a game once I can do whatever I want and So that's that's what psychopaths do they play with game once and then they go play with someone else But if we're going to play the same game over and over and over it's like the dominance hierarchy across time there's a different rule for playing a game once than there is for playing a game a thousand times and if we're in a relationship The game we want to play is one that can be duplicated a thousand times, and there's really tight constraints on that And so that's the origin that you could consider that the Biological It's not even biological exactly. It's predicated in biology, but it's a consequence of continual interaction the ethic emerges it's like the rats that I told you about that you know the Rats that play with each other the big rat has to let the little rat win Thirty percent of the time or the little rat won't play anymore and so because the little that that's the biological The biological framing the limitation is the little rat doesn't want to lose all the time that just produces negative emotion. It's not fun It's not motivating. So why would the little rats go play again? So the the constraint on our interactions are our biological? Constraints, and they manifest themselves in the patterns way across time and there isn't any difference between you and me interacting across time Then there is between you and me acting say in the next hour so with everyone in this room. It's the same thing It's just continual human interactions, and ethic emerges from that. Now different groups are going to code that ethic differently So they're going to come up with different imagistic representations and different stories Now one of the things they're trying to figure out is Well, let's do it. Let's do it in the tribal way you have to do this inside the tribe, too You have a hundred people and 10 of them are Leaders in one way or another and then out of that 10 you think well Who's the who's the best person? So you have to have a hierarchy of value to determine what the most important aspect of the ethic is it's going to be something like trust because that's the predicate for continued interaction Trustworthiness, it's not any really really any different than honesty. It's not really any different from telling the truth. So there's a really powerful Necessity for honesty to merge as a as a canonical value caring might Emerge Power might Emerge right the ability to Exert physical power especially in places Where war is a continual is continually likely and in lots of tribal landscapes? It's just non-stop Tribal trade and warfare so but but you can see how different ethics would emerge as canonical Depending to some degree on the situation, but trust is a really crucial one because without that there's no relationships Ok so you've got tribe A, and it's got its tribal gods, and it's and its traditions and all of that It's representation of the being in its images and stories And then you've got tribe B and you've got tried C and you've got tribe D and now they're all coming together So what happens? Exactly well the tribes can go to war or they can talk and we're we're thinking about a communication that might be extending across a Thousand years you have your beliefs I have my beliefs I can overwhelm you I can subsume you but even then I'm likely just to get indigestion from doing it it's very very difficult to wipe out a set of beliefs without wiping out all of the people and that kind of Nullifies the utility of unification the More there are of you the better you can defend yourself against other organizations that are trying to be larger so there's a powerful self preservation impetus to Cooperation and So one of the things you see happening in the development of the stories in the old testament for example we know this about genesis in particular that there were at least this is this is relatively recently so say for 3,000 years ago Not 50,000 years ago there were two different stories. There's two different stories in the genesis account told by two different Storytellers and people who are very good at textual analysis of being able to separate them and they were put together... I don't remember when. Again it's probably about Something between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago they were put together by what appeared to be a single editor and so he took these disparate accounts and Try to organize them into something that looked like a logical narrative, and that was part of the process by which different tribal Representations of the world were brought into something under which the tribes as you as a unit could Simultaneously exist so you can think about it as a competition between imagistic representations across time and then the emergence of some unifying narratives that that Captures the key elements of all of them well enough to bring them into some sort of union And it has to be a story with motivational power Because otherwise no one will caught on to it and it has to be a story that keeps Uncertainty at Bay because otherwise it doesn't have any utility it has to be a functional story so I'm going to tell you a story like that in the story of Marduk, and it's the mesopotamian story and Mesopotamia is one of the earliest Civilizations, and it emerged as a consequence of the amalgam of of Middle Eastern tribes so that over a very long period of time You could think that the gods of all of these tribes were warring in an abstract space in a conceptual space and that would be the space of argumentation and conflict and out of that a meta story emerged and This is the Meta story And it's one of a host of similar meta stories that came out of the Middle East one of which is the account in Genesis Okay, so here's the story So there are two primary deities to begin with Apsu and Tiamat now in order to understand that well here's how the mesopotamians conceptualized the world there was a let's call it a disc that's saltwater Why? Well what happens when you go to the end of the continent and saw water everywhere, right? So wherever you go you run into saltwater, so that's the disc that surrounds everything now Why is it a disc the world is a dome on a disc. Why? Well say you're standing in the middle of the field what does the world look like? dome On a disc so it's a phenomenological Representation so the bottom of the dome is the ground which you stand what happens if you dig You hit water fresh water So the dome of the land is on a disk of fresh water What happens if you go to the edge of the land you run into salt water? The dome of the land is on a disk of fresh water on a disk of salt water Okay, those are the two gods Tiamat is God of salt water and Apsu fresh water And it's it's happenstance in some sense because that's the masculine and the feminine and they could be attributed all sorts of different geographical areas so for example see if I can think of a good example Doesn't matter. I'll just leave that for now Okay, so the two primary gods are Apsu and Tiamat. Tiamat is female and Apsu is male and they're locked Together in an inseparable embrace Okay, so how do you understand that? Easy. Yin and Yang? It's the same idea here's here's another representation. This is a cool one. I've got a couple of them here. That are really cool this is from China, so this is so this is fuxi and You I think I've got that right, but I just love that reference. It's so insanely cool this representation, so you see the sort of the primary mother and father of humanity emerging from this underlying Snake-like entity with its tails tangled together. I think that's a rep.. I really do believe this although. It's very complicated to explain why I really believe that's a representation of DNA So and that that representation that entwined Double helix that is everywhere you can see it in Australian Aboriginal art and I'm using the Australians as an example because they were isolated in Australia for like 50,000 years There's the most archaic people that were ever discovered and they have clear representations of these double helix structures in their art So and those are the two giant serpents out of which the world is made roughly speaking It's the same thing you see that in the Staff of Asclepius Which is the healing symbol that the physicians use although usually that's only one snake but sometimes it's two so so So that's a that's a Chinese representation, and then there's a there's this That's the Egyptian representation We talked about the Egyptian story the other day right we talked about Isis and Osiris So there they are cobras their tails are twined together see they emerge out of that. That's the dragon of Chaos That manifests itself as culture in nature. That's the representation That's unbelievably cool So okay so anyways back to back to to the mesopotamian story, so Apsu and Tiamat are their primordial deities nature and culture. They're entwined together and they give rise to the to their first Category of children and those are the I think you could think about them as the elder gods now I What do they represent well the question is what did the gods represent and they represent? They represent sort of like primary modes of being it's something like that So think about Ares or Mars the god of war well, that's that's a representation of single-Minded aggression And then you can think about Eros or Venus which is a primary Representation of sexuality and you might say well, why are those deities? Well that's simple. They live forever and They control you and their personalities, so that's that for that. It's like yes, obviously you know and you know that you're under the sway of anger you're not in control of yourself if you're under the sway of Erotic possession you make a fool out of yourself. You're a tool of the power that drives the Continuation of the species forward. Hunger is the same thing. Any primordial motivational drive. We've conceptualized in this class as a personality. But those are transcendent personalities and their eternal their forever And so that's why the Greeks for example thought that human beings were just the playthings of the gods this idea is echoed in the mesopotamian story, so then you can think about it, sort of neural developmentally as well is that out of out of nothing of culture nature emerges say the two-year-old the two-year-old is a battleground of primary motivational forces and something like that is being hinted at in the mesopotamian creation story the first the first Progeny of the fundamental union of chaos and order Apsu and Tiamat is the proliferation of these primary motivational forces, they're sort of like the Titans or the or the what it wasn't the Greek gods kept in the Underneath the Mountain that's Zeus What's the name of that? They're like prime.. they're earthquakes and fires and that sort of thing. They're primordial forces. Okay anyways, so these children are produced and what happens.? They're very noisy. They run around doing all sorts of things you can think about them as grown-up two-year-olds causing all sorts of trouble the first thing they do is kill Apsu and And make their homeowners corpse that's brilliant now the Story doesn't say much about Apsu other than that the the culture deity the Primary Culture deity is not elaborated up that much in the mesopotamian story And I think that's probably because at the time of the mesopotamian civilization was new enough so that we really hadn't mapped The mythology of culture the Egyptians did that much more and I know I told you that story first. But that's just how it goes. So the the elder gods make their their home on the corpse of Apsu. Well, what does that mean? Well, that's that's sort of how it is. You inhabit the corpse of culture, right? it's the dead past and but But it's not just the dead past one of the things that's very cool about the mesopotamian story Is that the elder gods are foolish enough to kill it. It's the death of God by the way. It's no different from what Nietzsche pronounced. This has been going on for a very very long time. This collapse of belief systems They kill it carelessly. Because they don't understand what it is that they need to survive. They kill it careless carelessly, and then they try to live on the corpse. I think that's what the postmodernists is do by the way. Because they assume we have this tremendous system of value that's being built up across time and it sustains us and Everyone is criticizing it and criticizing it and trying to destroy it. Well we live in its corpse and that will nourish us forever it has to be replenished. And there's nothing in the postmodernist philosophy that can act to replenish. Anyways They kill Apsu. What happens when you kill order? Chaos comes back. Tiamat. Now this Tiamat. Here. Feminine, but also the dragon, so it's it's it's... You think out of this fundamental reptilian treasure bearer Culture and Nature emerge and they can pull back into that very rapidly. So here's an example, You've all seen Sleeping Beauty. I presumed. How many of you have seen Sleeping Beauty? The Disney film. How many of you haven't? Okay, so there's a couple that haven't. There's a scene in Sleeping Beauty where the evil queen has has imprisoned the prince who's going to wake sleeping beauty up So he's the logos or he's that he's the heroic individual or he's that element of her consciousness that wakes her up. You can read it either way. She's got him trapped in a dungeon So she's the kind of ultable ultimate Oedipal mother you know. She's the mother that has her 40 year-old son in the basement who is like Overweight and unhealthy and watched and watching video games and being covered with cheeto dust and she always like feeds him sandwiches so he won't leave you know. And she says oh, it's good thing You didn't go out the world make some poor woman miserable. So anyway So that's the evil queen he's got the hero trapped in the dungeon. So he goes out he escapes and then She goes after him to try to bring him back and turns into the dragon that's what happens in Sleeping Beauty, so that's that reversion of the of the archetype into it's even more primordial force. So anyway, so Tiamat kind of an amalgam of feminine, nature, and also this more underlying primordial symbol. So anyway She is not happy She is not happy that these her children killed her husband and so she thinks oh well enough of these creatures we're gonna we're gonna do them in. It's the flood myth. The same idea. So what happens in the story of Noah this happens worldwide is that Human beings get all corrupt and make a lot of racket and break all sorts of rules and God thinks oh, well, you know Enough of you, we'll just bring in a flood and wipe y'all out. That's chaos returning you destabilize order too badly. There's a flood and that brings with it all Sorts of new things because it's water, but it just drowns you it drowns you. Now Noah is a good man so he can ride out the flood. He's the hero that can go down into the Chaos and then back up because he hasn't let go of his Morality despite the fact that the entire society has disintegrated. So he saves everything so it's it's like Moses crossing the Red Sea and then coming out the other side same same sort of idea. Anyways, so Tiamat she's uh she's not happy and these gods are careless too and impulsive. They're making a lot of noise and their activity disturbs her. You know and you can see echoes of that fear that mythological fear in modern consciousness because we tell ourselves the same story. Right? The story is if we keep running around making enough racket mother Nature is going to take offense and wipe us out, and that's the story that's at the bottom of the Sort of Apocalyptic element of the Global warming Apocalypse it's like if we if we mock about badly enough nature will take its revenge, okay fine. It's true. It's true It's so it's a story that's always been true. So anyways The Gods are making a lot of noise They're being impulsive, and then they make the fatal error of killing Apsu And that's a big mistake, and so Tiamat thinks alright enough of this. She wakes up and she thinks I'm going to wipe them all out. Now that these gods their gods eh I mean, they're not trivial Characters, but they're pretty worried because their gods, but Tiamat is their mother she gave birth to them she's mother nature, and if she's angry About it then the Jig's up so what Timat does is she prepares this army of monsters and That they're described there's I think 13 different kinds of Monsters, and they're chimeric Images, they're images of you know They're like dragons. They're half snake and half bird and half animal and they're monstrous images, and they're sort of the Mesopotamians attempt to imagisticly represent those things that might come forward as an onslaught and so generates a whole 13 major Monsters and then puts a whole army behind them and she elects one of them Qingu is his name as head Monster so he's for all intents and purposes. He's an early representation of Satan he's Like King of the bad guys and it's important to know about him because if something happens later in the story, so so Tiamat's preparing her army of monsters to chimeras to wipe out, the Gods, and so they're like shorting out about this but while they're doing it, they're still making a lot of racket and living the highlife in Apsu's corpse and and Propagating and while they're doing that they send out one God after another to combat Tiamat and they all come back failed. So whatever these elder gods are whatever they represent. They're not Whatever it is that can confront Chaos successfully and prevail their powers But they're not whatever that is that ultimate power and that's what the mesopotamians are trying to figure out who or what is king of the gods and king of the gods is the thing that confront Chaos and regenerate order, so So they keep producing new gods and one day they produce Marduk He's born, and marduk he he's a whole new Category of God and every one of the gods knows it and he's got some very strange attributes one of them is He could speak Magic words and so when Marduk speaks the night sky transforms into the day sky and vice versa. So he's he's the verbal capacity it's a massive discovery. It's a massive discovery by the mesopotamians because it's the first time we know of that the idea that it's the capacity for communicative speech as the Primary deity should be at the top of the dominance hierarchy. It's one of the most remarkable discoveries of the ages and he also has eyes all the way around his head So Marduk is the thing that can speak and see and it's the thing that's so all the gods Think wow well this is a whole new thing man. How about you go out and combat Tiamat. Well it doesn't sound like much of a picnic. You know the logical thing for any sensible god to say is how about no, but Marduk doesn't say that he says look. I'll make you guys a deal You get yourself together in a whole you know and you have a vote for all intents and purposes and you vote me king of the gods and Allow me from here on in to Determine destinies That's exactly what the mesopotamian say he gets the tablet of destiny and he's now in control of it So the mesopotamians are working out this idea that It's the thing that can see and that can talk that should be the thing that guides destiny especially if destiny involves having to go into combat with Chaos itself and Restructure the world and so Marduk says those are the terms. I'll do it but I'm king of the gods, and they all think well at the fools can quote didn't get killed anyway so you know what do we have to lose and so they agreed and so Marduk goes out to combat Tiamat and he takes a net and a sword and he if I remember correctly he fills her with a wind which is I believe part of the Manifestation of this voice this voice idea he fills her with a wind he encapsulate her in a net now think about what that means you know psychologists even used this word phrase nomological net and a nomological net is this is the Network of concepts that you use to encapsulate Something new in an ideational structure and so the idea of putting something in a net is to Put boundaries around it right and to constrain it and so some of that's actually well You can capture a predator in a net and then cut it up, but there's no difference between that There's a there's a tight analogy between that and cat encapsulating something novel in a conceptual Network which then enables you to cut it up into something useful okay, so that's what happens Marduk goes out. He confronts Tiamat he overcomes the monsters and he kills Qingu and So and then he makes he cuts Tiamat into pieces and he makes the world and that's the world that human beings live On and he makes the human beings to serve the gods okay, so that's the first part of the story now he also kills Qingu and he makes human beings out of the blood of Qingu now That's a hell of a story right because Qingu is king of the demons and human beings are the creature That's made out of the blood of the king of the demons it's a very similar idea to the idea the later sort of egyptian and Judeo-Christian ideas that there's a Satanic element to being that's also characteristic of human beings and part of that is well What's the difference between human beings and every other element of being and the answer that is human beings can deceive you? Right, we're the only creatures that can do that We're capable of deception. Voluntary deception, we're capable of malevolence. And so that's echoed as well in the story in genesis because when Adam and Eve eat the apple They wake up the scales fall from their eyes they recognize that they're naked and they know the difference between good and evil which means they can do evil and it took me a long time to figure that out what that meant so imagine because there's a Causal sequence eh. The snake offers you something that you ingest it wakes you up the scales fall from your eyes So now you can see the first thing you do is you realize that you're naked what does that mean well human being stand upright? The most vulnerable part of us is front and center to be hurt But also to be judged right to be naked is to be that's terrifying you want to not die You want to cover yourself up, and so that's the recognition of nakedness, but then you might say well Why does the knowledge of good and evil emerge from that? As soon as you know you're naked and vulnerable you know how to hurt other people. You're not a predator anymore, because they'll just tear you apart and eat you like they don't want you to suffer although They don't care they don't want you to suffer. They just want to eat you but once I know what hurts me. I know what hurts you and then I can turn that into an art and people have done that and so that's that's why the knowledge of evil comes immediately as a consequence of the knowledge of of Nakedness, and that's associated with the same idea that human beings are made out of the blood of Qingu. Nasty stories, but very you know they're messing with the fundamental structure reality they want to get this right. Ok so one of the cool things about this story, so okay, so that's Marduk. Now here's what's so interesting about that. The mesopotamians they've got this story about the deities and how they organize themselves to Respond to the emergence of Chaos and how to master it. You you go after it you you declare yourself the thing at the top Of the dominance hierarchy, your eyes and speech you, go out there voluntarily, you encapsulate the Chaos, you cut it into pieces and you make the world. That makes you top god. Brilliant bloody absolutely Phenomenally brilliant, so what happens that's what's happening in the heavenly domain. Let's say what happens in the earthly domain The emperor of the mesopotamians is Marduk. He's a manifestation of Marduk on Earth, and he has to be a good Marduk That's because you might say well, why should you be king? Well the answer to that is while you're most powerful. No, that's not going to work some other weasels will take you out Why should you be king well because you pay attention? And you speak properly and you keep Chaos at bay, and you make ingenious things happen as a consequence So that's what the bloody mesopotamians were trying to work out. What should be sovereign and why. Okay, so what did they do in the new year ceremony, so Imagine that they're there. They're the king is in a walled city, right? So that's the kings at the top of the dominance hierarchy He's the eye at the top of the pyramid in a walled city with Chaos outside. Chaos is outside That's the domain of Tiamat at the New Year ceremony The old year we know about that We still have this idea the old year is an old man The New Year is about to be born there's an intermediary period of Chaos that's New Year's Eve right that's the intermediate period of Chaos where all the rules are temporarily suspended which is why you can go out and Party like there's no tomorrow New Year's Eve and before the New Year is born The mesopotamian emperor and all of his retinue and the people go outside the city on New Year's Eve And they take statues that represent the gods and they act out the Story that I just told you with the statues and as part of that the Emperor has to take off all his Garb his garments that make him king and me in front of the priest and the priest If I remember correctly slaps him with a glove it's something like that and Tells him that he has to tell everyone why in the last year he wasn't a very good Marduk And how he's going to do better in the future Which is exactly by the way, what do you do when you make your New Year's? What do you call those? Yes, the ones you immediately break the next day But it's the same it's this renewal idea that happens that it happens in the depth of darkness in the middle of the winter before the light comes back right that's why it's set up that way, so so anyways and so that so as long as The emperor is a good Marduk then that's why he gets to be emperor, and if he's not a good Marduk Then well someone else should the emperor so so that's how that works and there's some representations of it, so there's There's Tiamat there Sort of spirit matter combination winged dragon right the thing that we've seen so many times and there is Marduk. He's got angel wings Why the wings I don't know exactly why the wings I mean he's obviously being assimilated to the idea of a bird I don't know if the idea of the far-seeing capacity of the bird was there for the mesopotamians highly probable But also the bird is something that flies up above everything else and that can see for long distances, so it's an aerial spirit It's close to God and all of that So so there's a very primordial representation of the same thing look how much imagination does it take to see That that's the story of human beings encountering the unknown You know when you know the code it just seems self-evident. Yes well there is he's got his bow and arrow you know and he's out there fighting the monsters of the unknown and that's Part that how human beings have survived yeah, yeah, that's and then here He's riding this great big snake. So that's another representation of the same kind of thing Okay, so let me just think for a minute you'll figure out what I want to do next if I want to go somewhere next I guess what I'll do right. Now is I'll just show you some additional pictures So we've laid out the conceptual world to some degree, right? mentioned that you can think about it as the Potential itself, that's the dragon of Chaos and then nature which has a positive and a negative element Creation and destruction and culture which has a positive and negative emotion element there reverse day because it's the positive element of culture that protects you against the negative element of nature and the negative element of Culture can be destroyed by the new coming in from the from the natural world and then the archetypal individual Positive and negative as well. That's the that's the entire story roughly speaking, and I showed you its manifestations and figures like this So you have this is called the open virgin The opening virgin because that those two halves can be closed So there's mother nature roughly speaking or the mother of God depending on how you look at it and inside her nature Culture the Patriarchy the culture supports the suffering individual who? Voluntarily accepts death and mortality as the price to be paid for being that's what that image represents It's absolutely Unbelievable, and then you see all these people that decide here are gazing uncontrollably at this image which is of course exactly what's happened over the last two thousand years at least in part of the world because There's there's a tremendous idea encapsulated inside that image and the image the idea is something like the voluntary acceptance of Suffering is key to its transcendence, and that's that's a that's a crucial psychotherapeutic truth, right Things that bother you need to be confronted voluntarily you have to accept them you have to accept them you think well how far does? That go well we don't know It works in small things it works with phobias It works with traumas traumas are usually associated with death or disease or malevolence. So that's pushing it pretty far There doesn't seem to be a limit to the to the idea that the voluntary Confrontation with the things that are terrifying is curative there doesn't seem to be a limit to that There's an example in the story of Exodus when Moses is leading the Israelites through the desert They fragment because while they're out of tyranny so they don't know what to do. It's all chaotic, and you know this Moses character Yeah, you got them out of Egypt but now They're in the desert And there's nothing to eat and like why should they listen to him and so they start worshipping all sorts of idols and that's kind Of like the fragmentation of what holds them centrally together and so what does God do he's not very happy about that Whoo so he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes into the desert to bite them all He thinks enough of these people. And that's chaos returning right in the form of these poisonous snakes and so The Israelites are kind of sick and tired of being bitten by poisonous snakes so they go back to Moses And they say well, you know I know we've wandered off the path here And we didn't think you were the greatest guy there for a while but you know maybe who could have a little chat with God and see what he could do about these poisonous snakes and so so Moses entreats God to do something about the snakes and what God tells people to do the strangest thing he says make a snake in the image make a bronze snake and put it on a post and Have everyone look at it. And everyone who goes to look at the snake won't be bitten by the poisonous snakes anymore I just saw this it's it just Crazy that idea. It's crazy so and I'll tell you something else else. That's very interesting so in that in the Christian story Christ assimilates himself to that snake that was put on the post in the desert says exactly the same thing that That that has to be looked at because that's the pathway to salvation Roughly speaking. It's exactly the same idea. It's the worst thing that can possibly happen So you look upon it and meditate upon it, and that's the key to transcending it well So that's the idea that's encapsulated in that image So it's you know. It's no wonder that these ideas had to be expressed in images because they're so unbelievably Complicated that they're almost incomprehensible So they come out first in the image they come out first in the story because they're just and plus They're so difficult to believe What the last thing you would think if you were being bitten by poisonous snakes was that you should make a bronze image of one And put it on a stick so that you could go look at it I mean, there's a magical element to that, but it's psycho therapeutically exactly, right so I had this client and She had a dream about what what she was she was having a really rough time, and she she was a pretty good dreamer. She had this dream that she was walking down a road by there was a ocean on one side and there was a sort of sand dunes on the other side and She looked up, and there's this guy with a huge python that had that had been out there showing it to everyone and she took a look and he invited her to come take a look at the snake, but she refused and walked on and So she told me that dream. She was also quite imaginative, so I said look let's let's try something First of all tell me about the snake handler, and she said well. He's kind of a Charlatan. He's a show-off he's a he's a fake and I'm afraid that if I went up to the crowd and Where the snake was that they would force me to touch it and so I thought okay? So that's why you walked by I said okay, so let's play a game. So you Sit there and bring that dream image to mind close your eyes bring the dream image to mind But let's play with a little bit like Jung's technique of active imagination. Let's play with it a little bit so go up There you know imagine that you go up there, and you kind of have to do this like you're daydreaming You know you can't force it. You have to play with it like you would when you're daydreaming Which is you're kind of half doing it voluntarily and it's half Manifesting itself. It's kind of a gateway between you and the collective unconscious. That's another way of thinking about it and Anyways, I said okay, so go up there and the first thing we're going to do is figure out What are you going to do if the crowd tells you that you have to touch the snake or get close to it? Because she needed a defense because it isn't up to other people to force her to do that So we we practiced what she might say like no, I'm I'm comfortable here I'm just going to stand in the background. Just going to look at it and get accustomed to it I don't need you to push me forward so she felt pretty good about that So I kind of armed her with a defense so then she could Pretend to go up and take a look at the snake and I said well the first thing You should do is take a look at the snake handler and see if he's who you think he is and so she did that? In her imagination she said no, he doesn't seem to be the Charlatan at all He's got this snake that is his you know something he takes care of and he just has come out here to show The people and let people look at the snake and so she said yes I said was he someone that you could trust or someone you shouldn't trust you have to ask both those questions because otherwise you're leading Witness right you don't want to tell people what to think you have to let them figure it out for themselves So and she said no, I think he's somebody that should be trusted, and I said, okay well so what do you think that you could go up there and and and you know maybe lay your hands on the snake and touch the Snake and she said she wasn't sure about it, but we went through it and she was able to do it and so It's the same So she had to she had to make contact she had to voluntarily make Contact with with the this terrible snake that's at the bottom of being that's at the bottom of the tree of existence Right that's where the snake is it's wrapped around the tree Well, why well partly because we lived in trees, and that's where the damn snakes were down there on the ground where we didn't know Right and that's the divine tree of being that and so Well you have to get the hell out of the tree and go Confront the snakes and then that's the that's the way out at least in principle. So that's kind of what that means um Show you here's another image of the same thing what I like about this you see the fact that the culture the Patriarchy God the father will say here is holding the Suffering individual in his arms, and that's encapsulated by nature it's it's very much like the story in Pinocchio, where Geppetto Pinocchio wasn't able to go down Into the depths and confront the terrible monster at the bottom of being without having support from his father even though his father ended up Trapped inside the whale if he wouldn't have been supported to begin with he wouldn't have been able to do it And you know I've really seen this and I really seen this in people It's a hell of a thing not to have the confidence of your father. It's really really hard on people You know if your father is someone who says to you you can do it. I really believe that you can do it I'll support you in what you're doing I think that you can sort it out and then acts towards you in that way That's a gift that really almost no one else can provide you with mothers obviously provide I think they provide the same kind of gift but earlier you know because the mother has to take care of the infant when the Infant has just completely dependent and so and this is Erickson's idea too Eric Erickson is the mother is is The person establishes the relationship that allows the developing person to manifest trust real trust while you're being carried for crying out loud You know you can be dropped and the mother is also the source of food But the father seems to be something like the and I'm being I'm obviously parsing these things farther apart than they can be need to be because The Father can play a nurturing role and the mother can play an encouraging role But we'll keep it simple for now the father seems to be the thing that supports and encourages it says well Yeah, you know your little as small and all of that And you're subject to destruction and and and bullying and social pressure and all that but I know you can do it I know you can do it and there's a force in that that's Unbelievable and people who don't have that have a have a hell of a time It's actually one of the things that's quite fun about doing psychotherapy because you get people who have damaged father figures It's harder with the damaged mother Figure a because it's so bloody deep you know I had a client who I just I just thought she was a remarkable person But her relationship with her mother was really disrupted It was really really hard to she says she would she Told me it was like something had been torn out of her at an early age that couldn't be replaced It's real because he just can't be someone's mother you know it's really hard you're just not there enough for that, but you can sort of be someone's surrogate father that's a That's a role. You can play later, and that's what educators do at least to some degree although now They're trying to be mothers and providing safe spaces and all of that Which is not really all that appropriate so that so the father is an encouraging figure and allows the individual at least in principle to support the Catastrophe of being Voluntarily and so Anyway, so those you know those images are just be a brilliant beyond belief absolutely brilliant beyond belief ok well, that's probably a good place to stop and so So we've got through the the two front these two fundamental stories remember in the Egyptian story you have much more development of the figure of Osiris whose equivalent to Apsu and the Egyptians sort of walked through how this state becomes corrupt and deteriorates and what the individual has to do in relationship to the state as well as in relationship to the Chaos itself, so in the mesopotamians story. It's mostly Apsu's dead and Marduk makes a new society out of the pieces, but it's pretty damn implicit You know it's not detailed whereas by the time the Egyptians come along they say well. Osiris was great He's corrupted by Seth he has an evil brother. So that's the tyrannical element of the state He's overcome by the evil brother. Which is the tendency of every bureaucratic system everywhere. Things fall apart chaos comes back up the hero is born takes on the corruption of the state and Goes into the underworld which is like confronting Tiamat, but there I like to have the stories in parallel because one of it is The confrontation with absolute unknown Tiamat and the other is the revivification of the state even though the stories also overlap and so in the Egyptian story the and so just like Marduk was the the model for the Emperor the combination of Osiris and Horus was the model for the pharaoh and then there was an Idea that emerged out of Egypt this was called the democratization of Osiris, and it's I think part of what gave rise to the entire Judeo-Christian idea set of ideas because the Jews Hypothetically came out of Egypt right so their thinking is very deeply influenced by Egyptian ideas the Pharaoh Was the amalgam of Osiris and Horus and the amalgam of Osiris and Horus was his Immortal soul the pharaohs immortal soul and the Pharaoh was allowed to use the symbolism of the conjunction of Osiris and Horus But as the Egyptian societies developed the aristocracy started to get to use that symbol So it started moving down the hierarchy the idea that it wasn't only that the pharaoh was Osiris and Horus It was been it with the aristocracy and then by the time the Greeks came along it was all Men who were part of the political structure and Then by the time the Christians came along it was no no wait a minute this applies to everyone men women and not only male and female alike, but also not just stalwart upholders of the State but criminals, tax collectors, prostitutes, outcasts, everyone had this Osiris/Horus soul inside of them and were entitled to be treated as If they were intrinsically valuable as a consequence of that, and that's the bedrock as far as I'm concerned That's the bedrock idea upon which western civilization is predicated It's the sovereignty of the individual and the individual sovereign. Why? The individual is the eye that's up above the pyramid. The individual is the thing that can dominate sets of dominance hierarchies. The individual is the thing that play is not the game but the metagame. The individual is the thing that revivify the dead culture. The individuals the thing that that goes out to combat chaos and generate something valuable as a consequence, and that's why it's sovereign and valuable. That's the foundation of our legal system and our culture, so so think about it as the Emergence as an emergent property of enlightenment ideals is dangerous because that's four hundred years Who cares about four hundred years? This is forever and forever is a lot more firm grounding than four hundred years. It's not a set of rational ideas It's way way deeper than that so Okay Good enough. We'll see you in a week

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 781,419

Rating: 4.8584971 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, hypothalamus, neuropsychology, Maps of Meaning, personality, psychology, lectures, course, toronto, jordanbpeterson, psy, existentialism, information, mythology, archetypes, phenomenology, the architecture of belief

Id: Nb5cBkbQpGY

Length: 141min 21sec (8481 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/DanWebster]

Neomarxist postmodernists are ruining the university! They're brainwashing students! They don't teach facts! They are anti-Science! They aren't teaching the classics! Not teaching ways to live a better life!.....

And here we see students getting fucking college credits listening to this guy ramble.

[u/Celestina_]

He’s clueless. The only other place you see this sort of broad-strokes global comparison of ancient art and architecture is when you get people claiming that Aztec and Egyptian pyramids were made by aliens.

The worst thing he says though just demonstrates how far up his own ass he is: ‘I really believe this - Although it’s too complicated to explain why!!’ Oh Peterson... with his great unfathomable mind - show us the light

[u/bedsorts]

Did he really just misrepresent/conflate the Staff of Asclepius as/with the Caduceus of Hermes?

Comical that on Wikipedia it says: Rod of Asclepius Not to be confused with Caduceus.

[u/Snugglerific]

So an easy to draw shape couldn't have been independently invented and diffused across wide areas. Apparently agriculture is an archetype too... or it was invented by aliens.

Apparently the symbol is also associated with commerce. If the snake is the devil, maybe it means that money is the root of all evil? Bam, archetyp'd.

[u/seeking-abyss]

I don’t think that he’s saying that the Chinese intuitively knew about DNA. He’s probably saying something like “as below, so above”. That there are certain structures that repeat themselves at certain levels of reality. And since he thinks that mythologies are a level of reality, then certain structures are repeated there as well.

It’s very mystical, but he’s not saying that knowledge about DNA and genetics are embedded in myths—he doesn’t go that far. Just the double helix structure.

[u/popartsnewthrowaway]

"The older it is, the gooder it is...ah, but by the same token, the older it is, the realer it is also..."

[u/[deleted]]

Out of the millions works of art produced by the chinese, what are the chances that one will kinda look like a double helix, and thus DNA?

[u/DagoFisherman]

Has Peterson ever explained this?

[u/Buffalo__Buffalo]

Did he really just say that Aboriginal Australians are the most archaic people?

I guess they just forgot to level up their culture and advance their tech-tree for 50,000 years...