Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Bret Speaks with Jonathan Pageau

i see wokism as a desire to create these types of [Music] desire to create a kind of structure which will supposedly bind us together right i see a lot of the covert measures as a desire to do that as well you know i see i see things of people trying to do that but because they are not grounded in the ancient stories they don't they don't understand they don't have a kind of mythical underpinning that is that has been developed for millennium millennia then they they're they're creating monsters they're frankenstein uh creations we're in total agreement about that but but so so i what i what i believe is that i i believe that let's say for me let's say being the best christian i can be and and living with my family and my neighbors and the people around me in the best way that's the first best thing i can do [Music] hey folks welcome to the dark horse podcast i have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting today with jonathan pajot who is an artist specializing in orthodox christian art he is also maybe more importantly to us a deep philosophical scholar on religious questions and the interface between religious thought and scientific and philosophical thought welcome jonathan it's great to to talk to you finally after these two years where we had that first conversation it's good to be back in the seat now wait a second two years i would have said based on you know just sort of a loose sense of how long it feels i would have said more like 17 years yeah it's only been two years no it was i did my memory serves me correct it was in 2017. 20 that's more than two years that's more than two years it's not quite the 17 it feels like but yeah it is more than two um yeah well we did have a very good brief conversation you and i met on a panel uh john uh our good friend jordan peterson was on that panel with us and we had an exchange at the uh what was it the students for liberty free speech like a free speech student association i think in vancouver yeah it was a an excellent little conversation and it did suggest that there was a whole lot more that needed to be discussed and we have come close to having that conversation several times in the intervening 17 years but have not gotten there until today so let's orient the audience a little bit my audience knows that i don't exactly do interviews that really what happens on dark horse are conversations between people who have something about which discussion is necessary and you and i very definitely do because i have been coming from an evolutionary perspective looking at religion and trying to understand it and as you know i've put put forward a model that explains how adaptive evolution would have created such a thing i believe the model is uh almost certain to be accurate in the broad brushstrokes the fine detail obviously um you know could take uh many lifetimes to sort out but in general what i've argued is that religion is literally false metaphorically true and that what metaphorically true means is that those who behave according to the wisdom in religious doctrine out-compete those who behave according to the falseness of that doctrine and that that explains why these things spread it's basically a counterpoint to the new atheist idea that that religion is effectively a mind virus that it is a parasite traveling at expense to to humans now that has had various impacts uh in science by and large darwinists are slow to accept that any such explanation might exist interestingly religious scholars have i would say none of them have embraced the notion but many have been willing to play ball and to talk about what its meaning might be and you're certainly one of them so what i'm hoping to do with you today is to talk about the question of what religion is whether or not the picture that you see coming from a religious perspective and the picture that i see coming from a scientific perspective are actually the same picture just viewed from a different angle i don't know the answer to that question i'm curious as to what what you will say and then the question the one that i think is really important is given the picture that we can agree on whatever the you know the overlap may be what is its implication for how we should view these questions that have historically been cast in religious terms what is it that we moderns should do in light of the information about what what we now seem to know yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah i'm that i mean i think that's a conversation i was hoping to have with you so that sounds great great um anywhere in particular you you want to start um i think that maybe i can because i've heard your your explanation about you know the function of religion that's there the the theory of religion and the way that i like to present religious pattern is is maybe a lot wider than the way it is presented socially i tend to think of i tend to actually not like the term religion as a very specific very narrow type of behavior that we have and i like to understand religion in general as the manner in which we bind together that is the things that we do as humans to to bind us together uh into into groups in general bind us together towards higher purposes is maybe the best way to understand it that is we organize our behavior in a certain manner which makes us able to exist as higher beings or higher units when i say higher beings i mean you know families countries uh higher but that is also analogous to the manner in which we cohere inside ourselves because a human being is also made of different parts and different aspects different thoughts different desires different there's all these things competing inside us for supremacy you could say or for attention and the manner in which we cohere those aspects together will be part of what we tend to call religion which is why religion has a individual aspect whether it's prayer worship meditation depending on the different religious practices but then that scales up to the social level well you'll have a type will have ritual behavior you'll have sacrifices you'll have a common worship uh you know uh circumambulation of important places or important things that we that bind us together so that is more so the way that i understand religious practice because it seems to to to encompass more clearly what it is like what what it is we're doing at all the different levels at which we do them so would it be all right if i put a couple tools on the table sure um first i want to start with the question of faith in science because i really think one of the one of the reasons that people misunderstand the status of religion however we describe it when it comes to scientific explanations is that we do not do a fair job of correcting for the way scientists work on other questions and i think the the more i think about this the more important i think it is when i talk to most scientists about the question of faith it turns out that most scientists have the belief that they are functioning without any faith at all and they you know there are exceptions to this there are scientists who very often have to be careful in their academic context not to speak too publicly about it there are scientists who do have a separate faith right they go to church or temple or whatever it might be but they tend to see faith as something absent from their scientific practice now to me this seems absurd i don't think you i literally think it is impossible to do scientific work without any faith and basically i would argue that you have to faith are things that you take without evidence the fact that you are a being that is capable of of observing a universe which it is necessary that you are in order to do scientific work is something you cannot prove and yes we can say well descartes proved it but i don't think he really did i think what he did is he took the first cheat and he said let's just assert that i exist and that i know because i'm thinking and go from there and my point would be if you really scrutinize descartes proof you will discover it's not a proof it's a leap of faith and if you don't make it then you will literally spend your entire career attempting to solve this unsolvable puzzle which will be a waste of time because you won't do it or you can make that leap of faith and you can say assuming that i am a being who can observe the universe then here is the science that i'm going to do and so to make a long story short scientists work to minimize the amount of faith necessary in the explanations of the universe that they come up with but you cannot bring it to zero and if we then move from there to this question of things that are literally false but metaphorically true these things are features of every scientific model that we have that is incomplete right and you know darwinism is extremely incomplete because it's so new and so complex our models get more complete as we go into chemistry and physics the simpler realms but the point is all of these things involve places where our explanations aren't very good and where we fill in some feature of the model that we cannot demonstrate but that functions well enough if we operate on the basis of it so what i'm getting at is religions may be largely based on literally false metaphorically true beliefs and science starts out based on those things and whittles them away but can never get to zero but really these two realms have the same characteristic which is that they depend on us being able to skip certain levels of explanation in order to to do the job of the whole all right so i'm going to put you a little on the faith thing or what faith is the way that i faith is the trust in things that are unseen that is at all levels of analysis the level which is be above it is unseen from that level okay so what i mean is that if you're analyzing something at a molecular level you can never see the apple you'll see its constituents if you go down same problem if you go up same problem if you're talking about the apple and an orchard if you're looking at the level of the apple you'll never see the orchard and so what faith is is that move between levels because from the level in which you are you if you only take the elements given to you at that level and you analyze them there's no jump to the higher identity that jump is always a leap of faith once you have it then you can analyze things at that level that is once you reach that higher level once you for example if you if you look at the people in in a in a mass you can't see the city you have to jump up until you see the city once you have the city then you can use that identity and compared to other cities and compared to other levels at this at the at the same level but you in the way that our mind or our experience tends to work is that we can see parts of things and we can see holes of things and we can notice that things are made of parts and also have unity but the jump from the parts to the unity is one which is which is not accessible at the level of the parts now i i'm not sure about this um because i think there are many places especially in biology where at one time we couldn't see the jump between levels but we figured it out and now we can and so what you're saying if i understand you correctly is that the jump between levels is always one of faith and i would argue that it tends to start as an article of faith it's faith from the level from that level that is it it's faith if you take the elements of that level within those elements it's always it's a jump it's a leap into another level of being and so that is the that is you could say something like the trust in things unseen which is that if you're if you're at a certain level you can't see you can't see above until you do that and once you're there then you see but you can't see until you're until you make that jump darkhorse has a new sponsor the spectator as the longest-running magazine in the world the 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got marvelous contributors including douglas murray lionel shriver julie bendel christopher buckley roger scrutin and dark horse's own heather heing the spectator is less political party more cocktail party whether you lean left or right you are guaranteed to be entertained informed and enlightened from cover to cover so sign up today and get three months of the spectator for free plus a hat subscribe today at spectatorworld.com special offer use offer code darkhorse at checkout to redeem the offer that's spectatorworld.com special offer and use the code darkhorse well i have i have a good example to to test this out depending upon how willing you are to step into the biology we'll see depends how complicated it is we once did not know how information was stored in a cell so darwin described the process by which information is refined by selection but he didn't know where the information was stored and there was of course a famous battle protein seemed a likely place where information could be stored dna seemed distinctly less likely because it had less variation to it it was a de popper alphabet but it turned out the dna was the primary repository for information we now know that the story is much more complex than this but uh to the extent that triplet codons described series of amino acids and those amino acids do the functional work of the cell they make effectively machines inside the cell enzymes that put together uh atoms that might not bind at normal energies otherwise for example we now know what brings the protein level and the informational level together right so at one time it would have been an article of faith but now it is not whereas the story that we tell evolutionarily about um most mutations are bad changes in spelling in the dna occasionally one results in a change in a protein that's good those protein changes that are good accumulate because selection favors them and that changes the form of organisms and can ultimately change something that has the form of a shrew into something that has the form of a bat right that story i would argue actually contains an article of faith that isn't true there's a missing layer of explanation that we scientists assume must be there but actually isn't we there there's something in the explanation of just simply missing so but i think you're misunderstanding what i mean by by faith or by the jump of level so let let's take let's take the the dna for example so you have you have a bunch of stuff right i'm not a scientist you have a bunch of stuff a bunch of acids you have a bunch of stuff that's there and then then all of a sudden you are able because we're conscious beings you're able to perceive a pattern that pattern is repeated in different cells but that pattern has an existence of its own because you can abstract it and you can model it and so it doesn't only exist in the cells it has it has an invisible existence a pattern a pattern existence and so that pattern is an unseen in the sense that it's not a bunch of stuff it's a pattern of a bunch of stuff now that that pattern like i said can be modeled but the jump between the bunch of stuff and the pattern that is what i talk about when i say faith that is because it's the same at every level of being like i'm using the lowest level but it's it's sometimes it's harder for people to see it at that level but it's a lot easier if you move up to things like cities and families and and and let's say troops of armies or all of these things where all of a sudden you see a structured cohesion of beings that come together into a pattern but that pattern like i said is it can is is invisible because it it can be modeled and then reproduced it has all this type of of has these types of qualities so basically i'm arguing for the existence of patterns and that's ultimately where i'm not i don't want to hide it from you that's why i'm bringing you to what religion is is that it's the patterning of being all right so we are clearly in the phase where we have to teach each other our language in order to have a conversation i fully agree that there are patterns in fact i have argued and will argue that the only thing that is amenable to study is patterns that's what we study um and that these patterns exist at different levels right i would call and i've heard you use the term so i i know we at least have a shared term here the jump between levels is emergence emergence can be one of these articles of faith that i described where we cannot explain why the properties of the higher level uh are viewed based on the properties of what exists at the levels below it right so yeah now we're on the same now we're in the same direction definitely now we're in the same direction so and i would understand and you know i'm not i'm very interested in the philosophy of science but i'm not a philosopher of science but i take it that there are two ways of understanding emergence there are those the strong emergentists who believe that there is no you cannot explain uh the jump in emergence between many different levels i would describe myself as a weak emergentist which is to say i believe that uh you we may never have the computing power to do it but that in principle everything at the higher levels ought to be explainable by the properties of things at the lower levels if you comprehend it well enough you know is there a discontinuity at the very bottom you know original cause something like that i think i have to leave that possibility open but in general there shouldn't be irreducible levels of emergence at higher higher stages of explanation but all right so let's let's try to figure out where we've landed let's take i can add maybe something to help you so just so that we're not so that i don't we don't lose ourselves so the manner in which i try to describe to describe it is a two-way process that is i understand why scientists and materialists they like to talk about emergence bottom up but i think that talking about emergence bottom up will always lead you into to some it will lead you into some problems and so let's say the t the normal religious point of view would be that there's there's something we use the word emanation we could use other words there's an emanation from the pattern and there's emergence from the constituents and so there's there's a causality of pattern that is patterns are causal they they they affect they affect order and so we can it's it's hard to see like i said in biological i think it's still true but it's easier to see in human structures whereas you have a military captain that orders and that order goes down the order of of causality and creates action in the men that are digging trenches or that are doing whatever they're doing and so but that wouldn't be possible without the emergent principle of these men together with a single with a common purpose that are bound by this hierarchy into into action and so there's a top-down there's a top-down causality which is different than the bottom-up causality but those two those two come together and that's what anyway it's important because when we get to rituals and when we get to to uh to uh let's say uh hygiene laws it's gonna be important to understand that because it it it feeds into why those things are important okay so let me use an example here which uh it does double duty um in my field i believe my colleagues have been slow to understand the darwinian nature of religious belief and religious faith because they have a missing level of analysis right in general we can talk about the evolution and divergence of species right we have a language for that and we can talk about the nature of individuals but uh it has been long contentious in my field what the status of groups is and interestingly the uh the by the evolutionary biologists who have focused on adaptation right which is understood to be a property of individuals right the individuals manifest the adaptations that level of analysis has been inconsistent with understanding religion because religion is not a property of the individual individuals manifest aspects of it but obviously catholicism is not an individual and so to the extent that your toolkit for adaptive evolution is built around properties of individuals or maybe tiny little kin groups you you don't see its nature the folks who have done the best with understanding religion in evolutionary terms are the group selectionists who i believe are actually um using an article of faith that is literally false in order to skip to the level at which you can look at a group and see its behavior as adaptive which it is now what they're looking at is not in fact a group they've misunderstood the mechanism but by allowing themselves the article of faith that maybe we can talk about adaptation of something smaller than a species and larger than an individual right they have uh they've built a bridge that allows them to walk into human cultural evolution and see that it often evolves over large numbers of people which they mistakenly describe as a group right so faith is playing a role in science there it's interesting because why do you why do you believe that a bunch of cells working together is has and and forms an individual has more reality than a bunch of individuals acting together in a group like why is it that one is more real than the other that's like i'm not even a scientist and i wonder why would anybody think that it's a great question and the answer is because we know exactly why the cluster of cells behaves in the way that it does because the genomes in each of those cells is identical and especially when we talk about something like an animal if effectively the cells in your eye have to collaborate with the cells in your liver in order to allow the your gonads to pass on your genes and so what there is in in a creature is perfect agreement on what the objective of the exercise is that does not exist in a cluster of individuals but the question is can you figure out to what extent it does exist and why and so we have several different uh i would now say that they are theories they started as hypotheses they are now well enough established to be theories about why cooperation exists when you don't have identical genes or disproportionately similar genes so we have uh kin selection which i just described similar genes driving collaboration we have reciprocal altruism i scratch your back if you scratch mine and we have indirect reciprocity where i participate in a collective in which my back gets scratched and your back gets scratched but it may not be an exchange right so we have those those theories of collaboration what we don't have is a theory of collaboration that scales up properly to things like um like catholicism or judaism or or islam right we don't have that and so what that what that results in is too much skepticism amongst evolutionary biologists that these things are in fact adaptive so i have a so my big question is this is that i think it seems that one of the problems which is making it difficult for people to to be able to bridge that is because they continue to understand survival at the individual level and then try to see how that survival could be maximized by a group but what they're not they're not doing is seeing it at the right level which is that you're not so you shouldn't look at the survivability of the individual you should look at the survivability of the group and how it perpetuates itself and then how it reproduces itself into other groups that's what you should be looking at because it's like you're skipping levels on one concept but you're not skipping levels on the other so here's the problem with that the problem is uh and i'm not faulting you for this but when you use the term group you artificially hobble your explanation right what do you mean um a group is an so again there's a long-standing battle in my field over this um but in the late 60s early 70s this got sorted out and then it has been unsorted out in more recent decades but what was sorted out um by by my intellectual ancestors was that although if you take two groups right just actual clusters of individuals um a group of altruists will out-compete a group of individuals who are selfishly motivated everybody agrees on this yeah the problem is that if you introduce a selfishly motivated individual into one of these groups of altruists that individual will out-compete other individuals within the group and so groups don't evolve because they are taken apart by a collective action conundrum inside the group right now what this leaves us with is a world full of things that look like groups that appear to collaborate for which we do not have an explanation and my argument would be and i think much of what you've said is quite accurate that these things that look like groups the ones that are evolutionarily robust are actually lineages okay and a lineage is not a group subject to that same uh tension between individual and collective well-being a lineage is actually something that selection can act on and so the point is selection there can turn the tables on the individual who would profit at the expense of the other members of the collective and it can produce larger level adaptive phenomena like religions so um in any case all i would argue is what you're calling a group is actually a lineage and because it's a lineage it has evolutionary it has an evolutionary nature that is not present in something that would actually be a group right i mean what i'm what i'm calling a group is any any let's say what we call individuals like any individuals that are acting together towards a common purpose that's what i call a group and so for me like my theory applies to google and and facebook as much as it applies to families that it applies to countries that is as it applies to any type of co any type of space where different individuals are aligned themselves towards a purpose and some groups are more functional than others obviously some groups are less and some groups will tend to devour its members you know and some groups will tend to make them flourish and that there are different ways in which ways to set that up so that it's the most coherent let's say and the purpose is the survivability of the group itself right but this is exactly the problem is that if you if you take a a hypothesis robust enough to explain something like uh catholicism and you say well google has a lot of the properties of you know a collective that uh engages you know of a congregation right and it does indeed it has many of those properties but it doesn't have all of them and what you will see is that they behave differently over time precisely because of this issue about the individual who behave selfishly in a group profiting at the expense of the group right so ultimately you would expect things like google uh to fail to function in a coherent fashion and in fact i would argue we are seeing that we are seeing the in the incentives of the individuals who decide what google does betraying google right they are actually hobbling the entity uh to enrich themselves which is exactly what you would expect and you don't see that in a a an ancient religion you may see it in a cult or something that has just emerged but something that has stood the test of time will have stood the test of time because it has structures in it that prevent that from happening yeah well the the way that i like to talk about that is that it has to do with purpose like this is difficult because obviously purpose isn't difficult in terms of directed action maybe is the best way to like a way to use a word that's more scientifically appropriate and so depending on the directed action it will also affect the structures that will set themselves up you know in the way what's going to happen in that group and so one of the things that religion has done in different religions is to try to identify the highest direction for action and so in terms of christianity the high or point of attention we can use the word point of attention because attention is what directs action and so in christianity the highest point of attention is something like the infinite source of the world which is also love and so that is our point of attention and so we bind ourselves together in that in the direction towards that point so what will happen is sometimes parasitical systems will set themselves up that's inevitable it's going to happen but because the the point of attention is something like the the infinite source of the world and and that it is bound in love then they'll be self self uh repairing mechanisms which will also be part of that group because at some point the there'll be a judgment right you'll notice that the leader is not in line with what the group is supposed to be and so there'll be some mechanism to eliminate the the parasite but in google there's none of that like in these massive corporations there it's only to make money it's only to to to grow your your your riches and so you don't you don't have those mechanisms set up but so my point is there's a reason you don't have those mechanisms set up and it's because evolution does not favor their emergence in the context of google whereas it does in the context of um of a of a religion or like an a a more coherent religion let's say right and so what i really what i really hope that you will be able to hear from me is that actually an evolutionary perspective and i know you take evolution seriously i've heard talks with other people that you've done in which you raised the issue yourself so i know you're aware uh of its relevance but my point to you would be a proper evolutionary understanding of religious phenomena not only explains the nature of religions things like mechanisms that frustrate uh individual profit at the expense of the collective right those are adaptive but it also predicts the failure of religions that do not successfully do this and it predicts the divergence of religions right so what i'm arguing is it's possible to overdraw this if you simply say oh religions are like species right and uh you know there's a speciation event at which uh you know christians depart from from jews and another one at which protestants depart from from catholics you know that's true at one level it is not perfectly analogous to genetic speciation but that if one follows the logic carefully there is actually a uh a tool kit that predicts all of these events and um describes why some work better than others that effectively one understanding what job is being accomplished by these structures tells you how they are likely to behave in the same way that looking at organisms and understanding their ecology predicts how they will respond to certain kinds of change and so and when you use a word better what is it that you're referring to uh well i would say um that evolution if we do the work properly what evolution what darwinian evolution favors is lodging a particular set of genes and i know that word will show up strangely here but i i will defend it if need be lodging a particular set of genetic spellings as deeply into the future as possible in other words what selection favors is the persistence of genetic spellings and that the measure of it is how you know the duration of that persistence ideally selection would favor um indefinite persistence indefinite persistence is an unattainable and so it it it basically shapes things like creatures and things like lineages such that they become durable okay so let's use a word that is maybe more general so you would say that the process favors the persistence of patterns right the persistence of patterns that persist right like that that that tend to persist longer and on on than others or have more more more capacity to self-perpetuate yeah except there's a there's a giant hazard in the way you've just described it okay so if you uh i uh had a conversation with with dawkins in chicago and what must have been 2018 um and it became clear in this conversation dawkins is the uh the inventor of the term meme and the idea of meme is i regard it as one of the most important innovations of the latter half of the 20th century it is the key to understanding humans but the way dawkins understands it memes are an analogous space to genes right that basically and he in fact in in chapter 11 of the selfish gene where he introduces the idea he says that memes are effectively a new primeval soup and he says it has similar rules to the rules that govern the evolution of genes now this is an error i don't fault him for the error you know everybody makes errors as they introduce an important new uh hypothesis but he never corrected it and nobody else did either the problem is memes do not have the same status as genes it's not a parallel realm memes cultural evolution is a mechanism by which genes solve a certain problem right cultural evolution because culture can flow horizontally it can evolve much more rapidly than genes right genes are setting up a mind in a creature like a human being that is amenable to cultural evolution because that solves a genetic problem and so the reason i raise all of this is when you say okay these patterns these are patterns that are trying to move or that selection is favoring their uh movement into the future my point is they are not of symmetrical standing right and this is i don't you know you will understand easily but other people will mishear i'm not arguing that this is positive in a normative sense but this is a an is and not an ought cultural evolution which is the thing that makes human beings special or at least one of a pair of things that make humans very special is superior to genes in the sense that it is much more rapidly evolving but it is inferior to genes in the sense that it is evolutionarily subservient to the objectives of the genomes so my point is genes are favored to move into the future right to lodge themselves as far in the future as possible that's what selection favors it is selection is willing to swap out and kill off memetic patterns that is cultural patterns in order to lodge genes into the future right so that is to say to take an example if you move to beijing right and you get married you have some children your children will speak mandarin right they will speak mandarin because it is in your genes interest for them to speak the local language fluently right the part of you that speaks english your your english speaking nature will not struggle to survive it will actually willingly vanish in your children and be replaced by mandarin so that they can be effective and this is a general pattern the um cultural traits that we have are means to a genetic end right so how so how it do you explain self-sacrifice in that in that uh in that structure like how do you explain a soldier that jumps on a grenade let's say beautiful and this is one of the places that uh group selection is is left spinning its wheels that lineage selection is not there are many many circumstances in history in fact i would argue probably most circumstances in which an individual's fitness is not a strong contributor to how deeply their genes will be lodged into the future right if i am a member of a population right and i let's say i'm a very sick evolutionarily successful individual right let's say i uh you know the normal expectation would be that a an individual who reaches a reproductive age would leave two surviving offspring each of which would have 50 percent of their genes right thereby they would replace themselves in the population that's the average let's say that i beat that by um 50 times okay so instead of leaving two surviving offspring each of which are fifty percent like me i leave a hundred uh offspring who are 50 like me i've done very very well right but my population has been rendered feeble by my behavior my selfish uh behavior within this population has made it vulnerable to its enemies and its enemies overwhelm it and destroy it well what's my fitness now it's zero yeah even though i beat the odds tremendously so what this means and then let's reverse that example and say okay what about a lineage in which individuals are willing to make sacrifices indeed some will make the ultimate sacrifice in order to make the lineage strong well maybe i don't come home from the battlefield and i never leave any offspring but the genes that i would have left are circulating in the population that is more robust for my self-sacrifice and the point is if we check in on that population 100 years later a thousand years later the likelihood that it still exists because of the self-sacrifice is higher right and so my point is if you tell that story in a world of groups it doesn't work because the individual who benefits from the self-sacrifice of another individual and does not engage in self-sacrifice himself that individual is actually best off and the group crumbles because of it but in a world of lineages that's not the case in a world how do you how do you account for that happening in what you call groups then because christianity is a good example where where christianity is not lineage based yeah it is and so so if you let's say someone who dies for their faith for example in christianity you know is is i don't know are they doing it for their lineage and they're not even they're how how would they be doing it for their lineage that's what i'm arguing that's that's exactly what i'm arguing right so if let's take uh a celibate clergy all right so a celibate clergy is in a marvelous position especially i mean you know catholicism makes this all too easy to see right if we take a celibate clergy that is uh empowered with certain tools right um you're supposed to confess your sins uh to a clergyman in in a box that makes it easier for you to do that you're you're facing them but you're not exactly facing them right well that uh priest now knows something about who is betraying whom within their congregation right and they're in a marvelous position to um give a sermon that's actually squarely on the money about what's going wrong and what's more if let's say we're talking about adultery right let's say you know somebody commits adultery with another member of the congregation they uh fear for their immortal soul they go into the box they explain to the priest and if i'm using any of these terms incorrectly feel free to correct me yeah i'm not catholic so it's okay well still you'll know the terms yeah i know it works there um but uh but okay they go in the box they confess you know father i've sinned i've committed adultery and then let's say the other person the person with whom they committed adultery doesn't confess all right well now this priest knows that we've got two problems we've got an adultery problem in the congregation and we've got a failure to adhere to the confession obligation problem so now this priest is in a great position to give a sermon to scare the hell out of people in the congregation hey things that threaten us are going wrong right all right so what this means is that the congregation which is composed of people who are going to be related to each other at various levels could there be anybody in the congregation who's unrelated sure um but in general this congregation is going to be something that is going to be you know passed down in a familial manner and you've got celibate members of the congregation that is to say people who cannot profit by leaving their own offspring and in fact people who cannot easily profit um by uh monetarily right who are in a great position to speak for the interests of the lineage going forward right so my point is that pattern is mirrored across the entire uh structure that people behave more collaboratively than they would otherwise that the priest is in a position to see the interests of the lineage and to speak for it and in fact to speak on behalf of god and to remind people of the literally false but metaphorically true idea that if they do not shape up they will dwell forever in a lake of fire after their death if they do adhere to the terms of the religion then they will uh live a marvelous uh heavenly existence after they are gone right these are very powerful incentives that cause the lineage to behave more like an organism than it would otherwise i mean i think that what you're the description you give is account for some aspects let's say but monasticism let's say monasticism isn't like that you know a monastery isn't what you're describing uh martyr isn't what you're describing that is there's a sense of self-sacrifice in christianity which which goes beyond the the one that you're describing and that it although your your explanation accounts for that very well like in terms of mechanical causes it there when you realize that for example self-sacrifice is a self let's say self-sacrifice is one of the pillars of christianity let's say it that way and the notion that if you sacrifice yourself that it is that it builds the world right it it holds the world together but that is true at at all the levels right it's not only true for the priest the example you gave is very good but there's a sense in which i feel like you know if you have let's say 12 monks that live in a monastery that no one ever sees that they're completely isolated or the notion of in the middle ages you would have people who would be walled in to to churches and would just be there praying and they people would just know that they're there and there would be no interaction with them no contact with them uh you know uh and so i can maybe sometimes see for example you can imagine like franciscans who help the poor like how helping the poor would do what you're saying but there seems like there's something there's something else because christianity itself which is based on the notion of someone who died uh creates a i guess what i'm get what i'm getting to is that i think that your your explanation it accounts for some parts of the pattern of christianity let's say or other religions but it doesn't account for it enough it can pick and choose within this within the the phenomena and say well i can account for that but it seems like it doesn't account for the totality of it it because because the totality has a coherence it's important to understand it's not an arbitrary bunch of stuff that that there's a there's a founding story that founding story let's say uh comes down into reality and has variations of it all through its its story the pattern has the same and so there's a there's a there's a real coherence let's say to the way it sets itself up which i don't think is accounted for it's not accounted for but this is the nature i mean you know i'm coming at this as a scientist and i recognize that what i've described to you is uh a cartoon at best yeah okay it's a cartoon which i think is accurate but it is far from precise and it is not fully explanatory but then the question is well what about the things that it doesn't explain and are there explanations for those things you know and it's very much like looking at uh you know the morphology and physiology of a body and realizing you know you know you start with the realization that uh darwinism is the explanation for the form in front of you but that doesn't necessarily explain to you how the work of the cells is done right that takes that takes a whole different set of explanations a different level of explanation so i would argue that the place to go next is to think developmentally right and if you take the structure that i just described right that's a structure of adults if you take that structure of adults and you now raise children in the context of that structure what they do is they actually take on the implied rules the threats and the rewards that are described around certain behaviors they they get written into that child's being in a way that the child does not even consider certain behaviors because they are antithetical to their nature right and you know you you and i are to be perfectly horrible about this right you and i are members of a species in which many of our male ancestors will have engaged in rape right that means you and i have picked up the genetic potential but neither you nor i would contemplate such a thing right that's because i'm a christian because i believe in a pattern which is beyond the the biological i don't think so i think it's because you're a christian but i think that's like the safety on the gun i think were you suddenly to lose your christian faith you would not become a rapist right you have other things there is decency in you right right because all those terms all those terms are are are let's say terms which i don't think are accounted for by simple persistence of the of of uh of the of uh genetic material well so let's say there was let's say there was a society that raped and a society that didn't do you think that it would make a difference in terms at the genetic level like would it make a difference it makes a huge difference unfortunately and i would argue that um while all decent societies drive the penalty for rape through the roof so that it becomes not rare enough but rare the tables are turned in warfare right that because warfare is almost always occurring between more distantly related people right people in generally in general fight alongside those with whom they are closely related against those to whom they are more distantly related that and the um harm to the lineage therefore of rape is reduced that there's an awful lot of rape that takes place during war and that is obviously uh better understood the farther back in history we go but nonetheless yes genes have gotten into the future that way yes you and i have inherited genes and you know it's not just men right it's not like these genes are transmitted on the y chromosome there's almost nothing on the y chromosome you know the genes of women are transmitted this way too by men who are closely related to them but the point is the prohibition the mental prohibition the normative prohibition in your mind is augmented by your faith but it is not dependent on it if i where does it come from it comes from uh a you acquired it developmentally from a population that has an agreement on this right but if it's not to the advantage of the genes where does it come from it is to the advantage of the genes a population in which women are in danger of being raped whenever they are uh when they find themselves in the world where uh they don't have uh a male protector let's say right that is not a very functional society for one thing it is a society that will squander the potential that exists in women because those women will not be able to uh to reach their potential in a world where they are constantly jeopardized by by rape right so the reduction in that threat is actually an advantage of the lineage and the point is that's not the terms that any of us think about it in right rape is abhorrent right the reason that you and i do not entertain the possibility of rape is that uh we don't want it which again yes religion will help you see that if you do not see it otherwise it will threaten you into not raping because uh you don't want to go to the lake of fire but it is not dependent on it right but there are some societies that do want rape well it depends what you mean um raping not your own people you always rape others you don't rape your own people because if you rape others then you you like like you said then you perpetuate your identity even if it's in a lesser level you perpetuate it out into out into other populations well not even identity what you do is you uh place genes into other populations right which is which then you know again i'm not defending any of this normatively but also explains why uh societies have a very uncomfortable relationship with their own women who have been raped yeah of course yeah that makes a lot of sense but what i mean is again i still have the issue of understanding because you you you you appeal to a common sense so like a common sense like of course we don't want this but i i want that's what i want to push you on which is that if if it can be to the advantage of a lineage to rape then where does it come from that we would we could you could imagine a world where you would say that rape is bad for others like we're going to stop rape for other other people raping for sure but we are rape as much as possible right well no rape others not not our own people but rape other other people so we've we've landed back at this issue of group okay because we can imagine right if our population uh doesn't want uh its members raped but it might get an advantage by raping members of another population but we could agree to a reciprocal uh treaty effectively we could say look let's take rape off the table right we will forego the opportunity to rape others if we will be protected from rape during warfare right you could come up with this and in fact the geneva convention um obviously forbids lots of behavior in warfare that an individual population would benefit from but the idea is we all would like to prevent we don't want our soldiers tortured so let's just take torture off the table but the problem is because it is not based on a lineage it is feeble and we have watched the geneva convention come apart as much as it may be in our interest to take torture off the table there's no mechanism to bind others to it and so basically everybody now cheats and we have you know we've we so my question is why do you hold to that like what is it in you that makes you hold to that if you can see the your argumentation is flawless in terms of what you're saying but i i still i struggle i mean you know why i'm pushing you there it's like this is this is the this is the crux of the difference between you and i i would say no it's not because so the punch line for my understanding of all of these things is actually because of the paradox you just raised we have to turn the tables on the genes the genes have been in charge they've been in charge of our cultural selves not directly right but the basic point is cultural features that do not advance the interest of the genes do not persist long term right the genes are in the driver's seat we have to turn the tables because the genes do not allow us to do what we need to do i've heard you say this many times and and and i think that this is where i i feel bewildered by what you're saying because your first point was that group meme level group level uh societal level serves the genes and now you're saying we need to flip the table but my question again is from where if that's true if that's scientifically true where do you even get the thought where do you even get the energy where do you get the possibility of flipping because i agree that we should not serve our genes but i don't unders i know where i know where mine comes from but i wonder where yours comes from beautiful um so the story is a funny one right so uh all evolved creatures have the identical purpose right their purpose is to lodge their genes into the future right everything from malaria plasmodium to uh you know a red panda they all have the same purpose which means it's not a very good purpose i should point out what they have using the hard words use the word good that's fine keep going no i mean i mean it in its absolutely normative sense and i'll tell you at the end of this i hope you'll see where it came from all right okay okay so all those creatures every creature and presumably every creature on every other planet where there are creatures and which i assume there are um has the same purpose to get their informational stuff lodged as deeply in the future as possible but the ways in which one can lodge one's informational stuff in our case our genes deeply into the future vary tremendously that's what biological diversity is right it's a diversity of tools for getting genes into the future the tool that we were awarded that made humans truly special is consciousness right what does consciousness do consciousness i believe allows us to take two minds and to pool their different understanding of the world their different kinds of expertise and to basically asymmetrically parallel process difficult puzzles that neither of us could solve together and then you can scale that up and you can have a whole campfire of people parallel processing difficult problems like how do we survive in this new habitat that our ancestors didn't know anything about right that's a tool it's a means to an end and the end is let's get our genes as deeply into the future as possible however that tool allows us to do something which is to understand the universe around us in abstract terms that we can transmit right so we can have conversations and what that means is that we are actually to my way of thinking we are effectively robots we are aqueous machines with aqueous computers on our shoulders that have discovered that we have a purpose we cannot defend right my purpose is to get my genes into the future sometimes one gets their genes into the future by putting some other population into gas chambers but i don't ever want to do that in fact i would rather not be than engage in that behavior so therefore i'm not necessarily the person i am is not on board with the program which is get your genes into the future uh by any means necessary and what's more i know that if i talk to other individuals and i say let me ask you a question your purpose is to get your genes deeply lodged into the future but there are circumstances in which that is done with a gas chamber are you on board with the gas chamber thing or are you not well i know that the people i value most highly will say of course i'm not and so the point is if we really mean that then what we are effectively we are like the terminator we have discovered that we have a purpose and the question is do we like that purpose and if not what if we say all right i'm chucking out the purpose and i'm going to replace it with one that's actually worthy of me all right so what if i told you that that purpose that you that you're describing the purpose of consciousness like that's actually the primary purpose and it honestly has been that from the moment that humans can speak and from the moments that humans have consciousness and that if you want to understand that then you will look at religious through that lens through the lens of people because you seem to think that that's happening now but i don't think it's happening now i think that what what people who what humans have realized a very long time ago is that we have a higher purpose and how that higher purpose is slowly forming itself and slowly kind of uh becoming clearer and clear i mean i think that we can see that happening through let's say the history of religion but i think that that's what's in religion and that it's something that has been there from the beginning and if you if you try to understand religion only through the perpetuation of genes but then you tell me we have to have another purpose which is this basically you're basically telling me we need to exist we need to exist together in love is what you're saying and so i would say that that's just that's really what let's say at least the the latest religions have been saying and they they they do argue about how to do it they argue about certain aspects of it but there's a sense in which that's how that's what religion has been from the beginning well yes and no i believe that religions are this looking inward but they are not this looking outward because of their lineage nature and so my real message is i have no i think you know you've heard me talk about it and you and i have talked about it i have no antipathy for religion right i think we have a problem which is that our religions because they are the product of evolution are not a good match for a world in which everything is novel but from the perspective of what these things are they are the key that allowed our ancestors to get us to the present right these things that allowed people to collaborate in these large lineages right are the key to our success but we have come to a point at which we now have a bunch of religions that are incompatible that you know we can pretend they all say the same thing but they don't they say some similar things which is not surprising there's effectively convergent evolution that has shaped many of the beliefs but in essence i think and you know this is the bitter pill when i talk to people who who come from the religious side of this discussion is that i think if we are to live up to the ideals that are contained in the religions that you're describing that we actually have to recognize mechanistically what these things are and say all right how do we do that over all of humanity and you know maybe maybe buddhism gets us there maybe or at least versions of buddhism have this sort of highest level of enlightenment in which we not only view our own religious perspective as uh viable but we recognize the unity of of of others but i don't think i i basically think jonathan that if we do not recognize the underlying evolutionary explanation for the nature of these belief systems and then abstract it so that we can have one for the entire human lineage that we will destroy ourselves as a result of the failure of groups to durably cohere right so let's say even only as an evolutionist let's say you would you apply that to any other level of reality a single coherent pattern like you wouldn't you don't think that that there's a need for diversity that there's a need for oh i didn't say that that if you create if you create single patterns that let's say it encompass all all then you're creating fragility no no no um first of all it may be again you know you start out with the cartoon level right so i've described that we need some sort of abstraction of all of the religious principles that can cover all of humanity and yes that could be some uh homogenization process in which uh we all become one not very interesting thing which is obviously not the world i want to see but it could be that um there are some movements in that direction by the way like in in in these world structures that people are trying to set up there is a strange flavor for a kind of homogeneity a weird universal homogeneity well look let me let me steal man it for a second i don't want it right i'm somebody who i the best parts of me were informed by travel to really far-flung places and the connection with people who had a very different experience than mine so believe me i do not want to see the world made homogeneous because i think it will be a tragic loss there's an argument though that we have to do some of that in other words what if we understood that the key to reaching an agreement that allows our descendants to be here a thousand years from now is that we must have a shared language right now i know there are obviously you know there's esperanto and people have made arguments along these lines before but um i wonder if it isn't true that we actually cannot afford the loss of meaning between languages like you know russian chinese english portuguese spanish that as we try to explain our position we get a loss of resolution as we move between these languages and that we can no longer afford it that yeah you know with the level of firepower we have the level of integration of our systems we just simply put ourselves in existential danger by allowing that to persist which doesn't mean anybody needs to stop speaking any of those languages but it might mean that we need to prioritize getting a common language for all of us so let me i mean let me give you because you said you seem to think that that the religions haven't thought of this or it's not part of their structure but in in christianity and in islam and in some ways in judaism and then i think in other traditions as well there's something which we call eschatological reality that is there is an image of an endpoint or an image of a point where all is together all is revealed and that has a structure it's not arbitrary there's a way in which it's represented and it's represented as usually as a as a mountain or a natural place which is surrounded by a technical place so the new jerusalem for example in revelation is described as a tree with water surrounded by a wall that is made of stones and and that is technical and that it says that the glories of all the nations are carried into the city right and it's this is what you you're describing so it doesn't mean that the nation cease to exist but it means that the best of all is carried into unity and that this is how unity exists unity exists through the unity doesn't destroy the levels this is what true unity doesn't do it doesn't it doesn't tend to it doesn't suck in all the levels of reality into it it tends to exist like a traditional world works with the existence of families communities villages the king the pope right all of these co-exist they don't have to they don't have to uh obliterate each other as they're manifesting themselves at the different levels so i think that this image is there it's there but it's there in understanding that there's a man in which it cannot be attained in the world and that trying to attain it creates another image which is something like the tower of babel which is a very fragile you know universal structure uh that that is 10th tries to be all-encompassing a good example of that is all these projects of digital identity that we're seeing like these these types of centralization of identity of of all your your elements into one giant world system is something which has been definitely warned about in christianity you know we talk about the number of the beast or the 666 all these things that people think are weird and just arbitrary but they're not at all they're really talking about the difference between a normal existence of all these levels of reality coexisting together and one which is this one system that tries to let's say permeate all aspects of reality and tries to colonize all the elements that which are below it um and so there is a vision for that you know we it's just that people aren't don't struggle to think imagistically and so because of that they don't see that it's there but it's definitely described in the in the bible itself well all right so evolutionarily speaking we have two general ways in which the same pattern can show up in two places right one is homology which means that you picked it up from a shared ancestor and the other is analogy which effectively means you evolved it separately for the same reason right both of these things exist for religion so the golden rule for example shows up in christianity from jesus and it shows up in judaism through rabbi hillel and we can discuss whether or not those two examples are both derived from a shared previous possibly uncaptured ancestor something that wasn't recorded by history or whether this is an analogous discovery but the other thing is that in the case of something like religion because it is housed in cultural information rather than genetic information it can also move horizontally and so um if you if you do this work carefully you realize that there was a something like a speciation event that christianity evolved from judaism right it basically that's a divergence and you know there are vastly more christians on earth today than there are jews but that's something that happens uh you know yeah well it's partly because christianity is universal in its in its structure it's not based on lineage actually which is what i one of the things that i'm trying to argue with you is that your pattern of christianity can reproduce itself all over the world where judaism has a national lineage-based uh reality which cannot in indefinitely reproduce no i i quite disagree with you i'm open to the possibility you know more than i do about christianity and that you'll compel me of this but basically what i see is a adaptive radiation of christian traditions right so there is uh roman catholicism and then there are various versions of catholicism that believe in the doctrine but abandon the obligation to the pope right um you know i mean they're yeah they're from the beginning there are many different traditions there's ethiopians there were nubians there were coptics armenians uh are these people that are not in any way connected to rome but i mean whatever that that's fine they picked up the tradition somewhere so my point is what we see are two patterns overlapping which i think are confusing right we see the ability of culture to move horizontally and that can result you know two people who were not related at all could both have heard jesus speaking and both have started versions of christianity right and those would be two separate lineages but the people those two separate lineages would have passed this belief system on to relatives to descendants and then it doesn't mean people can't join but basically my point is you can map the logic of lineage onto christianity and if you think in biological terms in some sense and i i think actually this is reasonably uncontroversial right we talk about judeo-christian beliefs right christians are descended christianity is descended from judaism and then it radiates into many different traditions right and it uh you know obviously protestants are christians right but they are not catholics right so these are all you know basically you could draw a phylogeny of these things and when you say but christianity is not a lineage i think what you're doing is you're looking you're not realizing that lineage is a fractal property right a lineage is an individual in all of their descendants and what that means is that you can have you know within a large lineage you have many smaller lineages and you can have the divergence of belief systems within these smaller lineages and you know at some level you would expect christians to be united uh against uh more distant uh human lineages but to be fractious when it comes to uh disagreements uh within christendom does that make sense no it makes sense so let's say because i think i think that i think that maybe it's just because the way that i you i view reality very differently maybe maybe from you to me it's like i feel like you always have to hold on to the genes which is which is fine like i i i get it but to me genes are patterns self-replicating patterns that exist at a certain level and that there are self-replicating patterns all through the different levels of being and that i don't feel like i have to prioritize one rather than the other like i don't understand what makes so so when i look so if when you what you're doing what you're doing it you you have to it seems like you have to run around a lot but if you let me just finish what i'm saying sure if you understand it for example you have a a pattern a being and that being is self-replicating to a certain extent or or creates children in the world then you can understand the spread let's say of christianity very easily it just makes sense you have the the reason why missionaries from greece would go from constantinople would go to work would go to russia or the reason why you know you would have uh christians in ethiopia or in all these different places you can understand how these these these patterns will reproduce um and why there's because for me what makes it difficult is that how do you account if you're talking about lineages then where where is is house the commonality between all these different living limit inline ages like where is it housed what is it well like where are those patterns like you know they're obviously not in the genes anymore now they're right right right they're housed at a higher level like these patterns at higher levels they exist they they're not just uh let's say i don't know what what else how else to say it well let me let me the simple answer to your question is they are definitely not housed in the genes there may be a predisposition towards a religious viewpoint in the genes but what is housed in the genes is extremely limited what you are talking about is housed in culture and here's the thing that people miss culture is special it evolves rapidly because it can move horizontally most culture moves vertically right the more durable a piece of culture is the more likely you are to have inherited it vertically and so yes you do have this very interesting pattern of people you know spreading the good word right to people who aren't related to them and then the point is it will move vertically down right to descendants wherever it takes hold and so that does create lots of seeds of the cultural belief that are not fundamentally connected lineage-wise but then the question is why why does a lineage engage in a expensive behavior of sending missionaries out into the world to spread the word and the answer is i believe because it creates a hospitable world for the home lineage right that actually there's an advantage to it but let me answer your basic question right i know i think i know that you're hearing my obsession with the genes right as like a a defect of perspective i don't think it is i think the point is we are unavoidably haunted by the genes and so i am vigilant about keeping track of what role they are playing because to lose track of that puts us in danger and i would just say by analogy if we look at twitter right and we say well twitter is a place where people exchange you know perspectives in small snippets and they develop an emergent understanding of the world right i have forgotten that twitter is also a business that programs opaque algorithms that decide who sees what and so it's not a place in which people develop an emergent perspective it is a place where people exchange concepts but the way they exchange them is regulated by an unseen force and any moment at which you forget and you think you're just around people you chose right expressing ideas as you see fit and them responding as they see fit any point you lose track of the role the algorithm is playing in what you see you've made an error and you're not going to understand where you are so my point is that's the genes i'm not in love with the genes i'm afraid of what they'll do and right i'm trying to keep track of their role in all of our interactions because i know what they're up to and it's not good all right okay so let me let me try to let me try to do something which which might surprise you a little bit or so my my what i try to posit is that we live in these bodies like we have these experiences and so we we have an experience of desire we have all these experiences we have this sense of the world we have a we have a you have this embodied reality in which we live okay and so my interpretation always starts from there because you don't experience your genes right right you experience them as desires you experience them as drives you experience them as judgments on others or as a critical eye on certain things or whatever and so for me the best way to to represent what you're saying would actually look more like a christian like ontology which is that we have certain like christians within something like you have desires you have passions and those passions are dangerous and if you if you give in to those passions then you will die right let's say spiritually our society will die all of these things will happen at higher levels and if you attach yourself if you attend to higher things like love if you attend to virtues then you will live and your society will live so to me that way of describing is comes it comes first and then like all the interpretation of genes will will come after because we don't you you it's this is this is the if you talk to people about genes you're not going to make them change the way they live oh right right if you tell them if you tell them don't rape then that does something oh like we are don't rape because you should love your neighbor and why do you love your neighbor because if you love your neighbor then we exist in harmony and peace you know in the image of the highest good which is a god of love let's say so that will do something but i don't know like talking to people about genes like if your purpose is to to let's say create the change that you want to create i don't know um i don't disagree with you yeah right and i do think that look i i want people to understand genes and biology because i think it's fascinating i think it makes for a richer life to understand what the layers below your experience are made of and how it accounts for your existence but i am not imagining that anybody is going to be sold on a new way of viewing themselves or the world on the basis of the genes i do want people to have a proper fear about the genes and the basic point would be look everything that is amazing about us was built by that genetic layer the things that we love most about ourselves our ability to be enlightened our ability to be decent our moral capacity all of these things are evolved right the genes at the very least set that in motion many of you say that we have to we have to topple them no it's not like that okay all of the best things about us evolved all of the worst things about us evolved too and we have to choose that's the point right i want us to look at the whole spectrum of what we can be right from extremely enlightened and decent to manning gas chambers and i want us to say you know what there's a bunch of this i'm just not on board with no matter what it does for my genes and there's a bunch of this other stuff that i'd like to see augmented and spread as wide as possible and so what that means is that the genes can't be in charge anymore because they will choose both right if we want the good stuff then what we have to do is actually say look not you have given us the tools to see that the way i have sometimes described it in is that the the cosmos is a gigantic spelling bee that ends in genocide right that's not where we want to be right and it doesn't have to be that way but in order not to be that way we have to look at that potential and we have to say no matter what that's off the table we effectively have to go geneva convention on the whole puzzle without violating the math of the situation right but that that that capacity what you're saying i mean i this is my understanding it doesn't seem to be housed in the genes it seems to be housed in consciousness right exactly consciousness the tool the genes gave us consciousness why to get our genes into the future and the point is we have to now say thank you very much we appreciate consciousness now we're going to use it for something that's actually worthwhile right right but that worthwhile doesn't come from the genes right it comes right it comes from a higher good let's say you can say it comes from a higher good i can say the genes screwed up and they awarded us a tool that allows us to understand what they're up to so we can reject it right but we need it we need a place to stand from which to reject it like we need a right but we're standing there you and me right now right you've got one perspective which is that there's some higher force that has allowed us to opt towards the good well the higher force thing is going to be a problem like maybe maybe because i like it i feel like this conversation would have to keep going for another 10 hours for us to really get to the thing it's patterns yes so are higher patterns that one of the reasons why i i'm really i emphasize the fact that patterns scale up is that these patterns they really do scale up and they're and as they scale up they manifest the good of that which they're patterning okay that's what a pattern is and that's what's pretty maybe a hard thing for a lot of people to understand is that patterns we need consciousness to recognize patterns right consciousness is what recognizes pattern but recognizing patterns is judging pattern it is always an act of seeing if something is good depending on the pattern which is which it is informing okay so like when i you know when i'm looking at a glass i'm always jud conscious here unconsciously i'm judging whether it's a good glass can it hold water can i drink from it and if it doesn't then it's not fully in line with its good which is what what i see it as doing okay from the point of view from the point of view of consciousness and so that is what scales up towards really the good that is the ultimate good and as we bind together in families we can perceive through consciousness we can perceive if we're attentive the good of our family but that good isn't enough like you said because that good can be now put in competition with the goods of others like a like a soccer team or you know baseball team or whatever where you you can see the good of your team but you're in competition with others so that continues to scale like i'm making like a i'm making a you know it's a this is a thomistic argument right this is like a medieval scholastic argument about the manner in which things exist which is that these goods scale up into the infinite good so it's not a higher force in the sense of some kind of weird physical thing that exists outside the universe it's not it's a pattern patterns are not the physical stuff they are that invisible aspect of things which drives them towards together which binds them together you could say the invisible patterning which makes you see that they exist and that's what scales up into ultimately a perception of something like the infinite love that is behind all things okay um let me try it from a different direction all right let's see okay can i believe i can derive from what you've said that you and i will agree that consciousness is good because it allows us to understand where we are and to act in our own interests and that our own interests involve something that you and i would agree is you know that love is good and that more love tends to improve a system and that we therefore ought to bias things in the direction of its propagation is that fair yeah i said anything that violates your no no good all right so and let us further agree that we don't really need to defend those things even if i can't ultimately defend the idea that consciousness is good i'm just going to say hey i think it's awesome and i want i want to use it okay it's the mechanism by which you even know something's good so to say that it's not good is it you're just going to be running around in circles at some point you know yep i know that you don't you would not see the good without consciousness right so i'm willing to call it good because for there to be a good you need the consciousness to even recognize that there is such a thing so uh let's just make it let's cheat and just say it's good let's hard code it as good okay now here's the point my consciousness is stuck in space and time okay it exists now and it can only see so far right and it's it's extended i have history books i can look backwards in time farther than i could otherwise without them i can project into the future by virtue of pooling my understanding with other people who have thought about where we're headed and what will happen but i'm still stuck in space and time when i say i i am talking about that consciousness stuck in time but i don't have to be when i say we right i could be talking about you and me or i could be talking about our lineage right we began farming 10 000 years ago right and the argument i want to make is morally speaking i believe if consciousness and love are good then in some sense i am obligated to do that which grants consciousness and love to the maximum number of individuals who can experience it okay so now i'm trying to step out of my stuckness in space and time would you go as far as to say something like love your enemy like would you go as far as that i'd say well i don't don't love your enemy naively right but yes work to a place where you and your enemy realize that you're not really enemies because you both would like to grant consciousness and love to as many future people as you can and that in order to do that we have to stop fighting in the way we've been fighting right and so my my point would be my consciousness is stuck in space and time because of the genes genes granted us consciousness as a tool and the point is my ability to affect events 10 000 years in the future is zero or presumably very close to it right i mean it depends 10 000 is long but at least some people some consciences have affected a few thousand years for sure sure sure and look i aspire to it i would i would love for this conversation to have an effect on people's viewpoints from now yeah i mean you know not as a matter of ego but i just think it would be cool if we woke people up enough that actually the conversation had some resonance but do i really expect this conversation or anything i ever do to have resonance ten thousand years down the line probably not um probably best not to yeah but uh but the point is because consciousness is a tool of the genes it is scaled to think uh at the level that would have been useful to the ancestors in which consciousness emerged in other words it makes sense to think a couple generations down the line but it doesn't make sense to think a hundred generations down the line not because that isn't important but because you have no ability to impact it right a hunter-gatherer who tried to think about how they could alter their behavior to benefit their descendants 100 generations later would have had no ability to make any useful change so it makes sense to be focused on things that are local to you in space and time until you reach modernity you and i are in a very different situation right our insane battling over modern stuff actually has strong implications for whether or not there are human beings here 10 000 years from now right in fact it's more likely than not that there won't be in order for there to be human beings here 10 000 years from now we are going to have to behave very carefully and we are going to have to figure out how to preserve the precious opportunity that we have wherever it came from so my point is that consciousness of mine is artificially stuck artificially locally right if selection had been built in creatures that had impacts 10 000 years in the future our consciousness would be scaled to be able to see ten thousand years in the future and care about it but we're not good at it because our ancestors were limited the power of their tools was small yeah and so there's i think that there are some consciousnesses human consciousness that are able to see not ten thousand years in the future in the in the granular sense but ten thousand years in the future in the pattern sense they're able to perceive higher patterns great and are able to to talk about cycles great cycles of being in great cycles of civilization like there is a i don't think that this is something which has not been available to to people and the same thing with consciousness i think that all let's say all religious practices believe that consciousness can increase and that you can increase uh let's say the the the the capacity of consciousness to perceive patterns and to engage in patterns and to transform patterns right which is why we have which is why we name things after people right which is why we have uh patrons of things like the consciousness can can become let's say the guarantors of aspects of reality you could say so i think that the way that religion talks about consciousness team seems to understand that consciousness is the point of where all of this comes together and that it and that it's working on consciousness which is more important than the technical stuff like like a good a good a good example is something you know like that there's a there's a saying which is in in judaism and in christianity too right the just the just holds the world together and the just is the foundation of the world and that the idea that making becoming a better person is the best thing you can do for that to happen like one of the reasons why we're in the mess we're in is because we stop just we started to perceive the world only materially and that the idea of gaining material power and gaining you know gaining power on the world was the the highest purpose that we could imagine so we created these massive technological systems which are driving us into madness which are driving us making us crazy we've we've actually moved away from the ideals which held religion together you know even if religions did bring about wars brought about some some horrible stuff you know religions that religious thinking would has never brought humanity to the precipice of destruction like the very existence of the world being held in the balance uh whereas as we move away from that and we we started to think technically scientifically only then we come to this point where we we unleash these golems on the world that we don't even understand they're we can't see the scope of what they're doing we don't see like i i'm even willing to give twitter for example the benefit of the doubt that they didn't understand the monster they were unleashing on the world when they did uh and now we see the golem turning against its master like in all the ancient traditions of mechanical beings that don't follow the will of their master let's say um anyways so so i so i'm not sure like so i'm not maybe continue on with what you think the solution is but i i don't know first let me say i don't disagree with what you said i'm sure religions have sometimes brought their own lineage to an end bad decision-making will have been the case but they will not have brought humanity there you're right um and the abandonment of religion and the embrace of full materialism i agree has clearly brought us there i will also say we are stuck in space and time our consciousness is which doesn't you know you and i are having a conversation about what will be 10 000 years from now right that is us trying to bring 10 000 years from now into our consciousness but we are in some sense like um [Music] we are using a tool that is not appropriately scaled right so if you think about how mount rushmore was carved right mount rushmore is a sculpture right a sculptor uses chisels and i'm sure there were chisels used in the making of mount rushmore but there was also like dynamite right and my point is that the chisel isn't sufficient to make mount rushmore and our consciousness is going to need some upgrading if we're going to pull off the trick of figuring out where our interests actually are with respect to the the future 10 000 years from now right and so we're basically stuck with chisels and we need to upgrade to dynamite in order to get there but the long and short of it is we do not think in terms of providing a world to our descendants ten thousand years from now because our ancestors didn't have an opportunity at that scale whereas we clearly do or more likely we have the opportunity to to rob our descendants of that future if we are not careful and so what i'm really arguing is if it is our obligation to provide the opportunity for consciousness and love to as many descendants as we can that means an indefinite future for humanity that means we have to put aside the lineage against lineage battling that has shaped humanity it has brought us this far but we have to get past it and so i don't want to see a um synonymizing of the people of the world i don't want to see us all be the same but we do have to reach an agreement in which the things that cause us to jeopardize the future are shelved permanently in favor of a world that does foster consciousness love insight beauty all of the things that we would agree are [Music] inherently or close to inherently good right and that we're not going to get there by accident and we're not going to get there this is the place where you and i may differ we are not going to get there by embracing the traditions that have arrived in the present but are not built for it yeah i mean obviously that's where there i i disagree uh because i don't see what i see in the like for example i see woke-ism as a desire to create these types of a desire to create a kind of structure which will supposedly bind us together right i see a lot of the coping measures as a desire to do that as well you know i see i see things of people trying to do that but because they are not grounded in the ancient stories they don't they don't understand they don't have a kind of mythical underpinning that is that has been developed for millennial millennia then they they're they're creating monsters they're frankenstein uh creations we're in total agreement about that by the way right but so so i what i what i believe is that i i believe that let's say for me that's like being the best christian i can be and and living with my family and my neighbors and the people around me in the best way that's the first best thing i can do right that's really the first best thing i can do and then obviously taking for taking seriously the teachings of christ which is you know to to to love your neighbor to love your enemy to to not you know to not to do unto others as as you would want them to do unto you that's also important but the the way it happens is fractal it's not it's not i don't think it's it's in creating a kind of tower of babel i think it happens it happens but let's say in a certain manner it happens kind of bottom up where as these communities come together and in truth and in love and in beauty then that creates new patterns patterns that other people can replicate and then those patterns get replicated uh it seems that that's what how it happened in the first place let's say if you think of even the way that christianity spread that's how it it happened you had people who exemplified patterned living and that at first people hated them for it were angry with them but then that ended up acting like seeds which replicated itself in other communities because they could see the good that it was bringing but it happened that way rather than like saying we're all going to get together and we're going to agree right we're going to consciously agree on a way forward towards the future that to me sounds like what people are trying to do now and what i see coming from it like the great reset and all that kind of stuff is frightening as hell oh it's a disaster it's a terrible disaster and you're not wrong about it and you're not wrong that what i'm arguing um loosely fits in that same category right but here's the here's the problem i know i now think i i can see i don't know if i can convey it but i think i can see what the important thing we have to get to is um and it it it's going to come in two forms the first thing i have to say is we are absolutely damned if we do and damned if we don't okay that is the fundamental nature of the predicament that i'm trying to describe um and i don't like it but that's where we are as far as i can tell and the other thing is the mechanism you just described for how we got here can not be the mechanism that we use to get out of here as much as that may sound like a paradox that got us this far if we continue to use it it'll be our undoing so i take the mechanism that got us here as the evolution of these religious traditions and my point is the evolution of those religious traditions will cross through extinction that mechanism if we continue to allow it to drive will drive us extinct the alternative is terrible which is what you're saying right i don't disagree with you about this but i think we have to confront it and the point is religions every adaptation right forget whether it's religion or an eye or a wing or a leaf every adaptation is useful relative to the environment in which it evolved right a fish may be beautifully evolved to swim on a reef it is terribly evolved in the bottom of the boat right in the bottom of the boat it's a catastrophe of inappropriate tools right so my point would be the religions that brought us here are adaptive or they were adaptive in the world in which they came about our world is now changing so rapidly and is composed of so many things that those religions did not foresee in any specific sense that we are i think they did though i really do think they did i really do think they did for see what's going on well they foresee certain things and you know you point out like you know twitter is the golem that we unleash on the world and they didn't know what they were doing and i agree at that level yes they foresaw something but they didn't foresee the splitting of the atom they didn't foresee the evolution of algorithms right not specifically enough to be instructive and so here's the problem we are stuck with an infinite regress of chesterton's fence right we know if i'm right about what religions are that they are adaptive compendiums of wisdom we are stuck with the fact that there is no you know when you program a computer you put comments next to the lines you say this this function is supposed to accomplish this thing that's why i put it here right here are the arguments you submit to this function you say that in english so that somebody else can come into your program and say ah that's the job this is doing religion doesn't come with that right you get the program in the bibles but you don't get the explanation of how you know i think i can explain why a belief in heaven is adaptive but it's not explained anywhere there's an entire tradition of theology and church fathers that do exactly that well they may be trying to reverse engineer it um and there was certainly a a tradition that attempted to reconcile you know modern scientific thought with religious thought you know i i take no position on that but my point is if we are if we are handed ancient compendiums of wisdom in a modern world in which some of the things in those compendiums are as relevant as ever some of the things in those compendiums are now irrelevant and some of the things in those compendiums are the opposite of useful right they have gone from useful to dangerous because of the change in the world we live in then we could try to figure out which pieces are in what category which is liable to be an error-prone exercise dangerous in its own right and very slow we could try to substitute something new which will not have the benefit of having passed the test of time and therefore we will end up with the problems of wokism or you know a covid health policy right we will make error after error so my point is neither of those is a survivable program so we have to do some third thing right where a friend of mine coined the term that what we have is we have to provide something that fits a religion-shaped whole that there is a hole in our being that needs something of this form that the ancient religions put us in danger because they're not up to speed on modern problems and novel religions are effectively cults until they pass the test of time and we don't have the luxury of exposing them to the test of time so it's that third thing that we need to find yeah i mean i i guess our disagreement is very fundamental like i think it's it's it's fundamental because i really do believe that uh religion has set let's say has described exactly what we're going through not in terms of the gritty detail but in terms of pattern that is this is what we're talking about from the outset we're talking about patterns so there are patterns in cells there are patterns in in dna there are patterns in human behavior and there are great patterns there are large large patterns of of uh let's say waxing and wanings of civilizations waxing wanings of different identities and when we look at both let's say the stories in scripture the prophetic text we see that they're describing these patterns and if you're if we have the wisdom to see them as patterns then we don't have to think even about the splitting of the atom because let's say a description of the pattern of excessive technical growth and excessive technical understanding the danger of secret understanding and how that unleashes destruction on the world is something which has been described in many many religious texts so then so then you're telling me that uh the wisdom that we already have points in a luddite direction no not necessarily because the ultimate vision of the end of of all things is like i said the heavenly jerusalem which is a perfect joining of technical reality and the garden you could say right it's all about it's all about hierarchy it's all about having it in the right order one of the issues we have is the issue of materialism being in the wrong order that is what we see material gain and technical gain as being the god itself that is we we we run after it without with abandon we don't have a sense in which we have to to judge on the value and the ultimate danger of these scientific discoveries we just like run amok and then all of a sudden we realize the chaos which it's bringing but that's that is because of a problem of hierarchy yeah because we because we're not turned towards infinite love as the source of all things and we don't see that the the tools we set out in the world have to be bound by that that that attention that we bound by that first direction and so that's something which is described everywhere like it's okay but it's described in it's not operationalizable okay so let's take the obvious example uh from the recent past okay gain of function research on viruses this is a clear danger which you i think will correctly describe as uh presaged by religious admonitions about technology okay well not just technology but also uh that's a mixture of identity you see that in in the old testament laws and you see it in descriptions of the developing of chimera that happened you know cool before the flood let's say that kind of description okay that kind of story there's a warning if you know how to read it in more than one religious text about something like gain of function research maybe that thing being encoded in our cultural identity is the reason that in 2015 the us congress sought to ban gain of function research and then anthony fauci and peter dasik figured out a way around this in which they offshored the work to wuhan wuhan somehow even if the right idea made it to the right place to make the law to forbid the behavior we still ended up happening yeah it happened anyways so my point is it's one thing when that happens with uh you know first century technologies it's another thing when it happens with you know 21st century technologies and it's the 20th 21st century technologies that are giving me the sense of urgency that we have what's more let me just put one more thing on the table let's take i i believe that it is true that fusion power based on uranium is a dead end i could argue why that is but let's put that for another time let's just say there are problems with uranium-based fission power that i believe are insurmountable in the foreseeable future whereas fusion power which is very difficult which we have not yet usefully generated electricity with right we haven't gotten a self-sustaining fusion reaction uh good enough to be scaled up but likely the salvation of humanity depends on us achieving that right and therefore freeing ourselves from battling over things like fossil fuels but we don't yet have the wisdom to deploy it if you deployed fusion power if we discovered it tomorrow and we just deployed it under current uh political regimes it would compound our problems yeah probably okay so let's say that those things are true they don't have to be true for the purposes of this argument but they could be true right if they are true we don't have the wisdom in the religious texts that you're talking about or the religious traditions from which they come to know how to navigate our way away from uranium fission and towards fusion power with an upgraded political modality that would allow us to deploy it safely yeah religion offers the reason it offers the reason why you'd want to do that religion offers the the the notion that if you attend to the highest good then the then you will make the right decisions downstream but if you all you care about is that everybody has two cards and and and and is materially comfortable if that's if that's the purpose then you're already not attending to the highest good right that's already the the problem is already there at the outset which is that one of the problems of the modern world is that we think that material comfort and i say that like i i live in a house like i you know i live with modern material comfort but that we believe that material comfort is is good itself and that and that's what is causing the biggest problem because it's a huge problem what you're saying but the bigger problem that the bigger problem is that if we continue to act as if material good is the only good then there's no way that billions of people in the world can all have two cars and a pool and uh air-conditioned house like we know that that's not that's not scalable and so there's actually a problem of of value it's there's a problem of value which will then downstream make us decide differently if we are aligned properly there's a great story about a about a chinese emperor who started to um create these fleets of boats that went out all around the world and started to trade in africa and all around the world and then one day the emperor you know walked out of his home and looked around and saw the force were being depleted and then he said stop stop all of it because the the the purpose of getting material wealth isn't enough to justify what i'm doing there is a higher good which is the very existence of my own my country my people you know my my my that's higher and so this is this is what i that's why i'm saying that i think that it's all there in in the religious story it's not gonna technically tell you how to master this or that this or that technology that's for sure but it's going to give you the direction yeah but here's here okay here's the problem uh let's let's coin a term the atheist's advantage the religious texts function when people accept them as true right so i will make the argument that if you behave so that a christian text tells you that your soul will get into heaven that there isn't actually literally a heaven but that the analog that you will achieve is that you will put your descendants in a better position where they are more likely to thrive right so that heaven is a stand-in for the thriving of your descendants okay now the problem is heaven is a reward right you're told if you behave in this way then you will experience this glorious transcendent uh existence yeah i mean i don't think at least at least initially that's not what heaven is and it's also not the way that religion the way religion works is that it's it's it's fractally structured which means that the way that it describes reality is available to the highest mystical thinker and and the lowest you know like illiterate peasant and so if you you'll say something like that probably to the illiterate peasant but that's not that's not how the great sages of christianity thought of what what heaven was well i will argue that that does not matter that the point is it will the story will function at whatever level is needed for each level of enlightenment and that's fine but it's not less true what you tell the peasant isn't less true right the point is it's true at each person at the level that they need it right so if the peasant believes if i behave well then i will experience this glorious existence after i die and if i behave badly it will be all pain every day forever right those are strong motivators they adjust behavior and the problem is an atheist who realizes that isn't exactly true right i can do bad things and the worst from the point of view of my actual self my suffering ends on my death right i may profit but even if i screw it up the suffer the suffering is finite right that individual has an advantage in terms of getting ahead the advantage comes at the expense of the lineage now my point is that advantage explains much of the way the world functions now because people have but that's because they don't have access to the they haven't accessed the higher part of the heaven story if they did then they would realize that it's not about doing good things and having let's say some afterlife or whatever what it is is that is in the manner in which you exist like it is your actual being being transformed into something more right that's going into heaven right which is this transformation of consciousness up the different levels and that if you do that you will have a better life now like it's not right which is actually right now which is actually a pretty good match for the way i would think most jews most religious jews view it right not so much about going to heaven but uh about the nature of your existence but never mind i think the point is the what you're describing is the more enlightened way of viewing the story of heaven is concordant with my way of viewing this as a non-religious person which is actually my obligation is to provide this opportunity in an undergraded form maybe even an enhanced form to distant descendants whose name i will never know right so the point is those things are compatible with each other but what they are not is packaged in a way that incentivizes people to behave so as to protect the well-being of their distant descendant right but you don't act i mean if you tell me that you act to protect your descendants to you know thousands of years from now i don't think that's true like i think you can abstractly think though i do but it's not true in your everyday experience according to these immediate desires like i i behave this way but i am inept at it right i am inept at it i'm like the sculptor trying to make mount rushmore with a chisel right i i don't have the tools because nothing evolution gave me tools that aren't good at this job and religions are adapted to an environment too early to be useful in this regard and so my attempt to protect my descendants 10 000 years from now are admittedly probably close to pointless because i don't have the wisdom to do it well but what if to protect your descendants 10 000 years from now you had to engage in a way of being that would also be the best way of being for you now like that would it would be objectively be the best way of existing you know which would be to live a life of of love of love of your neighbor a life of let's say uh true self sacrifice where you're able to render up your kind of immediate chaotic desires that kind of appear all over the place your desire to get this or to do this and to sacrifice them towards a higher purpose and if you did that you would actually be not only enlightened but you would also let's say open up the possibility of your descendants you know whatever thousands of years from now to to have the best life that you can afford them i think not only by perpetuating your your your genes but by perpetuating modes of being around you that will per that will also reproduce themselves in the future so it's not just about your genes like it it also is about the manner in which you live which ripples out around you and your family and your kids in your in your neighborhood and then creates new patterns of being that that reproduce themselves at their level as well i think so that's what religion that's what religion is religion is that i i don't disagree with you but but the place that we disagree is that i think the likelihood that living as a religious tradition would have me live um is the best thing i can do for my descendants ten thousand years from now chances of that being true are a million to one right but i i don't think you think about your descendants i'm thinking i'm sorry to say like thinking about him right now abstractly but when you're drinking water and when you're you know when you're taking a bath or when you're living your life like you're you're you're not living you know when you're hugging your kids you're you ha there's a level of experience which is more immediate and is more accessible of course than your descendants 10 000 years from now of course it can't help it can't help but be the case um don't you think there could be a way in which all of these could stack up like a way of being in which these would stack you don't think so no i mean look frankly i think the best thing i can do for my descendants ten thousand years from now is have conversations with people like you that hopefully will function as a bat signal for other people who see the same problem will cause people who see a flaw in my reasoning to make themselves known and pointed out the chances that it's sufficient to actually have the effect are pretty low i'm not arguing that i think i'm making headway on the puzzle but i do think that i am behaving with the intention of maximizing i think very little that we do in the present matters to 10 000 years from now because we are so clearly on a path to extinction right and so what about the the the strategy that has been given let's say in different traditional uh different religions of the building of an ark pattern which is that you see that the idea of the remnant you see that in scripture quite a bit where there are cycles of collapse and success in scripture and usually as you approach the collapse you have something like a a remnant which then continues on into the future and then let's say restarts the cycle this is yeah i mean obviously that noah's ark is the the biggest example of that but there are several examples of that uh in in history this is exactly the point um i am a believer that you build the ark under sunny skies and people think you're a fool and then it starts raining and they start building but it's too late okay um so i agree that that has been the pattern and while i don't believe in a literal uh flood story and noah and his arc i do believe that it's a metaphor for important things that are real on the other hand i also know that while nobody was looking or thinking about it in particularly religious terms we built 400 civilian nuclear reactors that require constant electrical vigilance in order to keep them cool enough not to turn into nuclear volcanoes and at the point that the collapse as you describe it comes which is effectively inevitable those things will severely degrade the planet if not render it uninhabitable and so the point is the idea i believe there have been collapse after collapse after collapse and that do you think this one is so big that it could actually completely destroy all life i think it's almost certain and not you know i've given you one mechanism by which the earth will be severely degraded and there will be no recovering it even if humanity survives it will be a very much lesser world right and that this is not the only one of these we have seen you know that none of them have been at the right scale to to properly shock us but we have seen you know fukushima we have seen the deepwater horizon accident the elizo canyon uh leak we have seen the financial collapse of 2008 and now we have seen uh kovid emerge very probably from a lab in wuhan all of these are the same pattern again and again where human beings are playing with a kind of power that we only understand the devastation that can come from it after the horses have left the barn right yeah now the problem is so far as i know i'm the only person who's writing that list that list says hey there's a meta problem right you know the financial collapse of 2008 and kovid 19 are the same problem they're the same problem as fukushima yeah no i totally agree and so the point is we don't have a religious text that deals with that level of hazard where a small number of individuals can make decisions for all of us at a scale that's almost impossible to imagine yeah but i do think that the flood story is exact is exactly that and especially the other traditions like you you might want to you're if you're interested that you might want to look into the enoki and tradition so the the traditions of enoch you had a sense that before the flood before noah these um these people got into contact with uh demons with fallen angels and the fallen angels taught them skills different skills skills to modify the world skill to make chimera skills to create weapons skills to create all these things but also let's say magical skills to transform reality obviously this is describing it in that in that sense and that these practices are what led to the flood itself um and so the the the the coming into so let me describe it in the secular way if it's struggling with the angels and the demons whatever it's like encountering in certain ways patterns which are higher but are too difficult and we don't understand the all the ramifications of those patterns and then we embody them in the world and so we create things like nuclear weapons we create we don't understand all the ramifications of the patterns that we're encountering we embody them and therefore they bring about calamity and collapse and that the only way to get out of that at once the ball is rolling like the only manner to do that is to have something like like an arc there's no other way because you know and i think that that's what's being described also at the notion of the end of times like this idea of the end of the world which is part of almost all religions have a sense in which at some point it's all going to collapse like it's all of this is going to break apart uh but that that it's almost like we're not going to reverse it by now it's not it's not like we're going to but we have to rather find ways to plant seeds and to or to gather seeds maybe is the best way to understand it rather than just plant them to gather them uh seeds of wisdom and also seeds of being all of these things together okay so i i think i i think i got it i don't disagree with you that the problem is anticipated right and that the place that the problem is anticipated is in religious texts i do not believe that it is anticipated with technically let's say the technical part of it i don't even care about the technical part i don't think it is sufficiently anticipated that those texts provide us a meaningful guide as to what to do in other words i think we just loaded the ark with nitrogen-based fertilizer and fireworks and we're smoking on the deck right that's what we did and i don't think we have the proper terror because at some level because religions are targeted at talking to individuals right we don't understand you know we all know we're gonna die and so the idea that we're behaving in a foolish way that may bring about our death early isn't sufficiently terrifying we don't have the architecture to be terrified enough that we may bring our lineage the human lineage to an end right that would be such a terrible tragedy to do any earlier than has to happen and yet we are recklessly playing with exactly the tools that we'll bring it about not only earlier than it has to happen but soon right and so the point is somehow we have those religious texts and they're not working and they're not working for a reason and i don't think a return to those texts is plausible i don't think were there a major return to those texts that it would cause people to awaken to the danger that we're putting humanity into but i do think that those who deeply understand those texts could be brought to a recognition that actually um they need to update them this is that moment yeah i mean i don't i'm not sure i understand what that means in the sense of or re reapply them is and it's not just text like i'm not i'm not protestant it's not a question of text it's a question of of ways of being and ways of existing and and manners of you know let's say hierarchies of attention and hierarchies of virtues these are the things which we live in you know texts are important i i love the bible i think it's great but i i don't think that that's what religions aren't texts they are their ways of being in ways of existing in ways of of of encountering others and i think that that i think that exactly in there that's where the solution is the solution is not a technical one the the only solution we can find is a wisdom one it is to engage better ways of being better ways of encountering each other like like what we're doing here right yep we are encountering each other in a manner which is is not confrontational it's not there to just to trick the other person or to to lead them into a corner or whatever and so i think that that's a that is an image of let's say love and practice right love and embodied and so these are the types of things you have to do but at every level like at every level that we can muster and that's the and so to me that's the only solution like there is the idea of like re-adapting religion you know i don't i can i can see why someone who's secular would would want that because like there's a kind of disdain towards religious practice and disdain there's a there's a sense in which i'll have a lot of it is superstitious or a lot of it doesn't make sense not from me not for me that's not how i feel i just think it's not up to the challenge believe me if i thought that the solution to the problem that we've described was uh a fundamentally religious approach or a dusting off of texts or a re-energizing of patterns of interaction that come from there i'd be all for it because i am concerned about you know i'm not really that concerned about my ancestors 10 000 years from now because i don't think we're gonna get anywhere close to that right i think we've got a problem on the scale of the next hundred years um but nonetheless if i thought that the solution involved some tool that we already have i would be all for it because i do think that this is the most important moral problem that we have and that people are not they are not properly frightened of the loss that comes from the destruction of lineage precisely because the destruction of lineage in the past didn't mean the end of your species it has never meant that until now and so you know i'm not rejecting anything on the basis of it being you know i know how scientists dismiss religion and i've never been about that um but believe me i'm i'm for whatever tool works in this case so that people you know a hundred years from now can look back on us and say here's what they got wrong and my fear is that there will be no one to look back but maybe maybe the the the mistake is the tool part like i think that that's the mistake the mistake is on is looking for tools because the the let's say the religious the wisdom and the religious point of view are the the mythical point of view in which we sit and we're capable of seeing that which is good it's not a tool right it's actually a way of being and the way of being is is the is the manner in which you're going to be able to even see that what's going on is a problem and so it's not it's not about a bunch of tools the tools will come adapted to the situation but what it requires first is a is a direction and a mode of being and the thing is i think that both of us agree on the direction and the mode of being it's just that i'm trying what i what i what i i'm trying to express is that that mode of being is already a religious mode of being like the the turning your eyes towards the good and to the notion of something like infinite love as the source of true being that's already a religious position and then downstream from that are different things for example a hierarchy of virtues a hierarchy of values than a manner in which we engage with others and then down scale from that even then you'll have specific things like the way we light candles or the way we you know we go to certain buildings to worship but there is a hierarchy in in those things and and i think that already at the outset is already a it's already a worshipful stance you're already standing in a place in which you're attending to and you're celebrating the highest good and you're saying everybody we need to look in that direction and then the tools will come after if we think about tools then we're going to scram we're going to be running around trying to put patch in all these different holes that are leaking but it's like that you first of all need to realize let's say what is it that we are what is it that we want ultimately what is the highest good and then we'll develop tools to to fix them but the problem i think now is mostly that we have we've lost even the bearing of what is good like we've even lost the bearing of what is the highest good what is it that we and honestly i don't think that it's the continuation of lineage that is we can't think that way human beings don't don't interact at that level even though i understand why you do we don't nobody lives at the level of of like the defense of lineage people live at a more immediate scale no no no this this is this is so first of all by tool i don't mean to limit what could fit in that category consciousness is a tool um but do people live in such a way as to defend their lineage they do it is religious that's what has done it right and so the point is for you when a religion tells maybe it's a peasant that if you behave to a certain standard then your soul will live forever in a glorious state right when you tell somebody that it is a mechanism to get them to correct their behavior so that their lineage will continue indefinitely that's what i'm arguing it is it is that tool in disguise right and it has been vitally important in getting our lineages to this point in history where it is now failing because the atheists are taking advantage of the fact that they don't have their behavior restricted in this way yeah i mean i understand why you see it at that level but i i think i would tend to see the the perpetuation of the lydia as something which is downstream from what it really is which is engaging the best mode of being for now and for your entire being and and then downstream from that is something like so let's say okay so how about this even in evolutionary terms wouldn't you say that the the preservation of self comes before the preservation of lineage i don't think so no no i i remember before my first child was born actually i think it literally may have been the night before my first child was born i obviously knew he was coming i remember my mind in some pattern of sleep and then wake i remember my mind reorganizing itself over the idea that someone was arriving in the world for whom i might have to trade my life right okay i understand in that sense yeah definitely no i totally agree with you i think i missed step there when i the way i said it what i mean is that there is let's say there is a manner in which a mode of being that that i have and let's say i could especially for a direct relationship of my child to willing to sacrifice myself for my child or for my neighbors or for something which is immediate in my experience my nation my but this is what i this is the level in which i live it this is the level of description in which story narrative ritual religious is described and i think that that's the truer and the first reality and downstream from that you would have something like a blessing will fall upon your children right you see that in scripture like a blessing will to the 10th within the thousands generation the blessing will will fall upon your children something like that but but that it's but that the way that you describe things i think there's an abstraction that's going on and you you move between an abstraction of let's say lineage protection and then a more immediate idea of a perception of that which is good because again like even because we talked about it before like what we think is the highest good for example and the idea that we need to let's say upend the genes to a certain extent and that's someone who's not thinking only about the preservation of his lineage there's something else going on like there's another virtue another value which is pulling you forward which is which is higher than the the one which says i want my genes to perpetuate themselves ten thousand years let's say and i think that that's at the religious level we are at a religious level when we're there when we're talking about that and so the idea of avoiding it or to try to reinterpret it or whatever i don't see how it's going to be helpful because it's there like that's the level we're at um and i agree that the atheist is a serious is a the atheist in the system like that is a problem or someone who someone who's cynical like is a is a problem in in a system like that uh but i it's i don't know like how long can i i mean you're right it could last long enough for us to destroy the destroy most life let's say on earth so yeah yeah you're right that that doesn't end up being a problem it's it's a problem so yeah two things one i i sort of see myself as somebody who has built up a toolkit for evolution for understanding evolution that i don't think is useful to most people might be sort of interesting at the level of a curiosity but it's not something most people will would have used for but i can use it and i can go look at there's a place i can go stand because of the religious religious because of the evolutionary toolkit i've built up and i can look back at humanity and i can say ah that's where we are got it and then i can come back and i can try to have conversation with people who have different toolkits from where they see humanity and so i'm trying to call attention to something i don't know if it's uniquely visible from that place i can go visit but you can see it from that point i can see it and it's really clear right we have a problem in the immediate present and that problem is couldn't be more philosophically profound if it tried it's it's the biggest problem anyone's ever had that's the thing right the extinction of humanity is almost by definition the biggest problem anyone ever had and we have it right and so anyway i'm trying to alert people to that thing and that you know yeah we've got to we've got to make a mount rushmore all we've got are chisels let's figure out do we have anything else that we could you know turn into something of the appropriate scale to be able to address our problem i don't know okay the final thing i want to say is i have an example of uh literally false metaphorically true that i think i like it because it there are no stakes to it um but i think it actually explains maybe you'll see in it the answer to the question that you you keep posing to me the example is the idea of follow-through for a person playing baseball when they're batting or a tennis player hitting the ball right we say it is very important that you follow through on the hit right now physically speaking it is not it actually has no impact on the ball right once the ball has left the racket the follow through is irrelevant but it is vitally important that you prepare to follow through and that you not stop following through right up through the moment that you hit the ball right so the easiest way to get somebody to do this is say follow through it's very important that you follow through it's not literally true but it's metaphorically true if you behave as if you if you behave in a way that you follow through then everything you do up to the point that it stops mattering will be right okay and so my point would be that the the issue you raise about having to live in the present and the issue i raise about what happens ten thousand years from now go through this example right my point is it is very important that we live in such a way that there is a future for our descendants 10 000 years from now and we don't have any influence directly over 10 000 years from now the influence we have is right up through where we hit the ball right and that's where religion functions well it has traditionally told people how to live in the present right that's the moment of hitting the ball right and it has by virtue of what it has by virtue of the danger that people have posed to their own lineages it has given pretty good guidance about how to live in that moment where you hit the ball but we are now dealing with a puzzle in which hitting the ball as we are presently empowered to do it means there will be no game ten thousand years from now maybe not even a hundred years from now and so that's that's why i'm uh i think challenging your notion that yes we we have the tools we need already and we just need to use them because i don't think the tools are up to that job yeah um so i'm trying to to to jump into your example like let's say you have the tennis player and you're saying you could you would say something else because you would say i don't know what is it you would say except follow through right you say follow through and then the the gesture happens and in the way that you're describing there are things looming on us like a great catastrophe let's say and so we're moving towards that catastrophe and in my opinion we are moving towards that catastrophe precisely because we stopped telling the tennis player to follow through that's why we're going in that direction because we said hey you know what it doesn't matter if you follow through or not it doesn't matter because it's not true it's false it's fake like it's it's a trick it's there to control you saying follow through is a superstition it's all of that stuff that we said and so we told the tennis player stop doing that and now we're losing the game and so now we're losing the game and you're saying well the game is in such a dire place that we have to now make up a new mechanism you know in order to win the game or to not lose the game uh and i'm thinking okay i mean you know good luck with that maybe i don't know i don't know what else to say except that like at least saying follow through was was was true and was going to make you win the game yeah no you're not wrong about that i i agree with this that we surrendered a lot of really useful stuff as something else happened and you know for the third time in this conversation i sort of think i think i now see it okay the problem is i look at religion as composed of various things right there are the descriptions of how one is to live that are the heart of the matter right that's the the adaptive part right and then there is a bunch of structure necessary to make that part work right so sort of the way a bicycle frame the only purpose of the bicycle frame is to hold the other parts in the right place to do the job of the bicycle right the trunk of a tree is not productive the trunk of a tree elevates the leaves to a place where they can compete for light so the trunk is a cost it's a cost you can't avoid but it is not itself productive right and there's a bunch of stuff in religious doctrine that has that role right so a description of where the universe came from and when is not necessary to know how to behave right but it got written in there and the problem is because it's easily shown to be literally false it causes a cynicism about the parts of the tradition that are useful right it causes people to reject the descriptions of the limits that they should have to their behavior for example and so my concern is okay we stopped telling people to follow through because follow through was not a literally true description of something that was necessary and that was a mistake because planning to follow through is as important as it ever was right but the problem is because so much of what sold people on religion was the fact that it answered ultimately unanswerable questions and then the payoff came in the fact that the same thing that told you where the universe came from also told you how to behave and if you behaved that way it was actually good even if you couldn't explain why the problem is that we are now in a position where to do science is to show that elements of these compendiums of wisdom are just wrong and that causes people to abandon the part that really matters which is the how am i to behave part right and so i'm not sure how you solve that problem in a scientific era well i don't think i don't find it difficult to solve at all because there's a difference between technical descriptions and narrative descriptions there just are right if i'm making a narrative description a technical description of a car i'm not doing the same thing as telling you you know to get in the car and go to the store and buy some milk like those two things are completely different they're just not in the same they just they're not in the same sphere right and so if if i understand that scripture is describing the reality in which you live the reality in which you act the reality in which you deal with others that's what it's describing it's not even trying to describe a scientific thing it's not trying to describe a technical thing so because of that i can take for example like you talked about the creation narrative the creation narrative of scripture is one of the most profound and powerful text that has ever been uh composed it's just that if you see it as a as a as the as the equivalent of describing the the biological makeup of this or that thing then you are then you're obviously going to not see it for what it is but if you see it as describing a pattern of being then then then we're good to go and we're good to go and if you read the text you'll notice that it's about it's about speaking and about seeing and about judging and deciding what is good like that's what the text is about it describes a pattern of being and then it talks about recognizing that which is good and and that's what it's that's what it's doing so there are ways in which we can go back into these texts and just represent them to people in a manner that says it's just not about what some people thought it was like it's not it's not it's not the same thing as describing you know i don't know like with the parts of like i said the parts of a car it's just not that well i i agree with you it's not that's not its use but it does describe certain things that it turns out we now know aren't right right and that this look you know i i'm not overly hung up on it but i do think it is not surprising that religion is only loosely adhered to by a small fraction of the population in an era where we have the ability to understand how species came to be through a process of evolution where the text tells us that actually each of these creatures was specially designed by a god right those two things are in conflict and i don't think they are at all but i i don't think they're in conflict because for the same reason that for the same reason that the patterns of of being let's say for the same reason that you're able to say that you want to upend the genes for that same reason that consciousness comes down upon identities and frames them and defines them so the idea that so the idea that species exist without consciousness is is a very iffy shady thing like the idea that there's a difference between this or that dog at a higher level than the individual is a very contentious thing if you don't understand that consciousness also notices identities and participates in their existence and so the idea that consciousness comes down on existence and forms identities i don't think it's something which is weird at all even for even for someone who's who's let's say just a little bit philosophically astute and understands that categories don't just exist materially that they also exist as this top-down noticing of patterns and distinction of patterns i don't i don't understand that perspective because it seems to me if i look back into the fossil record at creatures that no longer exist i can make an inference let me just let me just push you back on that right away so species are constantly evolving yep so when do you decide that something is a specie and something is no longer that specie oh and and and and and you'll you'll give me an answer yeah for sure you'll give me an answer but the idea that that answer that answer is metaphysically certain well yeah like the idea that the species that you found that doesn't exist anymore that that hasn't that it's not still the species now it's like when people when people say things like dinosaurs are related to birds or something i always think like what are you talking about birds are dinosaurs right that that saying something like that is is very very contentious in terms of understanding how identity works no no no no no that's the beauty of lineage right here's the thing you're a member of every lineage you've ever been a member of and the reason that i can say birds are dinosaurs and not worry that i'm just playing some definitional trick is that if you take the ancestor of all dinosaurs right the first dinosaur right and i'm not telling you you can know who that creature is but i am telling you there has to have been a dinosaur who gave rise to all of the other dinosaurs if you do that you will find that birds are in that lineage right just like you're in the lineage of things of like unicellular and if you're any cellular being at some point so are you a unicellular being so we can solve this problem if you want um let's take uh the lineage of tetrapods okay so tetrapods are um the four limbed descendants of um of vertebrates okay not all tetrapods have four limbs right the functional term is quadruped right so a snake is a tetrapod that's a phylogenetic designation it can't doesn't matter that it's lost its limbs because it's still a descendant of the initial tetrapod but it's not a quadruped right because it doesn't have any limbs so the point is are we are we unicellular organisms we are not one celled but we are the descendant of a lineage right that at its inception was one cell so that's not a that's not a terribly difficult problem to deal with it's a linguistically annoying problem that we keep tripping over what i mean is that if if species are constantly in flux yep and then you cut you cut into that flux right you say this is a distinction and this is not a distinction right right i agree and that's arbitrary so it's not arbitrary like no it is it's not arbitrary because it has causal effect it has a causal it then will causally affect the man in which you treat those beings and the man in which you you deal with them the man in which you everything about them is going to be real the man in which you deal with them it's not going to be just arbitrary no no those distinctions if we say well this was an osteopathicine right and that was uh in the genus homo right if the australopithecine is an ancestor of homo we are making an arbitrary distinction this is sufficiently different to call it a new genus and i'm not defending that right we can do it but we have to recognize we are making an arbitrary distinction when we do that we are not making an arbitrary distinction when we say this is a trilobite and that is an arachnid right when we say that we are actually describing two different lineages there's no judgment call to be made assuming we've done the work correctly we know that the trilobite is not an arachnid right so when i look back in the fossil record i'm not talking about the linear progression and drawing distinctions and claiming that they are real i'm talking about looking at distinct lineages and saying uh you know that the the ammonite and the nautilus are part of the same lineage and it is a distinct lineage uh from uh from the beetle right so but brett what i mean is that all beings all beings that exist that you can identify are both the same in some aspect and different in another every single being that you encounter has something in common with all the other beings and that is something different from all the other beings so there's a manner in which we cut into that we cut into that and we distinguish we consciousness is capable of discerning difference and and let's say joining patterns together in order to say that those patterns are sufficiently alike so that we recognize them as having being yep and then seeing that those patterns are not sufficiently like for us to recognize that they have being that they have different different natures you could say and so that's what if you want to understand what what scripture is talking about like that's what it's talking about ah that's what we that's why we we we talk about the notion that that that god differentiates and then judges whether something is good because you could you i'm sure you could tell me like the difference between a good member of one species from a not so good member of one species you know you could judge you could judge that for all the reasons that you can but that's what that's what scripture ultimately is talking about right so the idea that so when you think that god you think that if you struggle the idea that god let's say planned these identities and and created all these beings you have to realize that we do that to a certain extent ourselves at a limited level we do that that's true i think the the evolutionary toolkit allows us to define why things fall under a definition of a pattern right and the maybe one of the key insights is that there are multiple reasons why two things would fall into the same pattern one is that they share an ancestor from whom they inherited that pattern the other is that they have converged on a solution from two different starting points and we see both of these things intermingled they're both but that one is super interesting because focusing on lineage is one thing but noticing analogy between functions is another and now we're really closer to religious speaking now we're really closer to the notion that we can recognize identity and purpose and that identity and purpose can be recognized in different mechanical causes that i can see the things that have different mechanical origins or different let's say physical origins can share a common purpose and it's like value in religious language now you're in like the idea that god created things already like you're already in that world so i know maybe you don't don't totally follow where i'm bringing you no i think i do i think i do and uh you know i'm uh i hope it is fair to say um you know i feel you've taken me a bit down the road to see your perspective here i hope i have done the same for you and i feel certain that this is the first of several conversations we're gonna need to have we've been going we've been going for three hours i don't think i've ever had as long a conversation as this i don't think it's three hours but uh it's certainly gonna be two yeah um oh we started you started one and it was four well see now you must be in a different time zone because it's it's not four here all right um uh so how about we put it on pause here i would i would love i think that we're in an interesting place and i would love to continue the conversation because i i i think you're definitely put i know i knew that you would be the person that could push me in my mind in directions that i would be scrambling to find ground and so i love that like i love that feeling and i love the fact that we're able to do it without ill intent and not trying to to to squeeze the other or whatever so i appreciate it nothing but affection for you man i i really appreciate the way you approached this and i knew i knew it was going to be a great conversation and i should have seen that it was going to be an unfinished conversation coming that was all right i would love to i would love to set up another conversation like this great let's do it um in the meantime where can people find you all right so people are interested in what i'm doing you can go to the symbolicworld.com and that's usually where most of my stuff my stuff is my videos you also have people writing articles different people participating in this kind of community uh so that's the best place to go okay you're also on twitter yes i'm on twitter at jonathan i think it's pedro jonathan when i'm on twitter it's a bad sign it means i'm not oh okay well good we can watch you misbehave on twitter and uh you've done some really interesting conversations of late you want to name a couple of the ones you've done so people can go look at those yeah definitely if you're interested you can go on jordan peterson's channel we've had some very interesting conversations recently on that channel especially with john vervicky and bishop baron you know just there's been some very good some very good moments of kind of coming together and so i hope maybe i'm going to talk to sam harris i don't know it's it's being talked about that would be nice and so there are some also interesting conversations coming in the future all right cool all right well jonathan pajo it's been a real pleasure and i'm looking forward to picking up the conversation soon all right brett thanks thanks for the opportunity yep be well

Channel: Bret Weinstein

Views: 66,839

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Id: 9NYz1DJ4ByM

Length: 172min 25sec (10345 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022