God, Consciousness, and the Theories of Everything | Curt Jaimungal | EP 229

if our perceptions evolved and we evolved to adapt to reality and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality then what does that say about reality and that's not the answer to that question is not bloody obvious well that's another question i hope that i can get to with with dawkins you know and maybe he knows something that i don't god i hope so yeah see i want to make the claim that it sounds then and i believe you've made this claim perhaps even for reiki that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily the most quote unquote real it is however however then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out and then the closer we are to that the closer our map is to that reality of course we're not trying to mistake the map in the territory well the whether or not material objects exist patterns exist right and it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased today to have with me kurt jaimungle he's a toronto-based filmmaker with a background in mathematics and physics who directed and wrote the film better left unsaid which was released in april 2021 that film explores the question of among other things when does the left go too far he's also the host of the theories of everything podcast and youtube channel which explores consciousness god free will theoretical physics and which just surpassed a hundred thousand subscribers in about one year about one year's time he's interviewed people including stephen pinker noam chomsky and john vervicky on the cognitive science side and stephen wolfe from eric weinstein and sabine haasenfelder on the physics side you can find out more by visiting youtube.com forward slash theories of everything or searching theories of everything on spotify itunes or virtually any of the other audio platforms so you've been podcasting and running this youtube channel for how long about a year yeah slightly longer than a year now the channel's been up for approximately three years in the sense that it was registered three years ago but i've been going at it with force for about one year and a bit so who who has who have you interviewed that's been most popular and you're you're you're one of the reasons why because i was the first person if not the only person to ask him about you directly oh so i don't know about that so there's something we could talk about right away so what did he have to say well essentially you're hitler as you know oh yeah yeah yeah and that and so why do you think he thinks that i think that people who are on a certain side on the political spectrum believe their side stands for what's good and the opposite side is what's not good one of the see that's so tricky man talking about better left and said which we'll get to later is how do you define the left and the right it's decidedly difficult almost everyone has a different definition chomsky would say well the left is freedom and so anything that's on the right is anti-freedom and the rights people who are on the right or identify with being as such would perhaps categorize it as the opposite yeah well it's interesting at least that they might circle around claims to some uh let's say virtue that both of them would admire like freedom right so there's some agreement there despite the different difference did he point to anything particular about what i hypothetically thought that made me not an acceptable sort of creature no it's somewhat it's somewhat hearsay in the sense that he read an article based on you so he didn't watch you directly he read nathan robinson's critique of you which i'm sure oh yeah well that'll do it man yeah yeah old nathan he's he's quite the character yeah i see so well that's too bad in many regards did you learn anything in particular from talking to dr chomsky quite a significant amount as for what i can point to let me think i spoke to him six times six times on the channel so the first time about you i found it interesting that he said i asked each guest that i spoke to at the time because now i've pivoted away from politics for reason four reasons we can get to later i asked him and every other guest when does the left go too far in some sense it's a peter sony in question because you've raised that quite a few times when does the left go too far he said well it's not a matter of going too far for the left it's a matter of tactics as for when does the right go too far so while the right is suicidal i think was his words so that's that's interesting because it's really not much of an answer i mean i've been always looking for a technical definition of that right it's like well we know the right can go too far and we know the left can go too far and how do we point to and i think this problem has actually become more complicated rather than less because the more i've been thinking about it the more i think that the errors on the left are more in the nature of a vast number of small errors mostly of often of omission so the more um reasonable people on the left kowtow too rapidly to the more radical types on the left especially at the philosophical level and i think that really happened at the universities so one that's a one like that's something we can explore well it's actually a question i would have for you why do you think that is i know that this is mainly you interviewing me but i'm still perplexed when it comes to that why is it that the center left doesn't excoriate the extreme lift is it because they're on the same side so the enemy of my enemy is my friend or are they afraid because well they can get you can lose even a tenured position well i think there's i think that fear and it isn't obvious to me that this is merely a problem that affects the left but i'm most familiar with it in the university's circumstance and so what i saw happening in my 25 years as a faculty member let's say i think that's about right it's more than that actually but anyways quite a long time three decades let's say um was that whenever the administration pushed on the faculty so in our faculty meetings for example there would be administrative demands and they were often unreasonable they would increase the size of our our seminars say for our third and fourth year students ask us to do more work with fewer resources and that was a steady trend like if you look at spending say on faculty salaries versus spending on administrative salaries across universities in the west broadly speaking but certainly in north america the amount spent on administration just skyrocketed upward whereas the amount spent on faculty pretty much stayed constant and so why well it was because the faculty just retreated continually every time they were challenged to say no and so i objected repeatedly in faculty meetings whenever that happened and said well why don't we just say no they want to increase our seminar size you know like double it let's say in for third years that's not a seminar anymore once you get to a certain point we just say no we're not doing that why don't we just say no we won't do that well then they won't give us what we want well they don't give you what you want anyways so like what's to lose and but but so it was a thousand tiny retreats and then what happened after that was that the administration having grown too top-heavy um was taken over by people within the administration let's say who had this dei philosophy and they couldn't say no to them so now so when did the left go too far well it was micro retreats continual cowardly micro retreats at the university level now sorry to be so long-winded about this but there was something even more brutal underneath all that philosophically which i'm trying to lay out in the new book that i'm writing which is this post-modern problem and the post-modern problem really emerged in the 1960s with the simultaneously simultaneous realization across a number of disciplines that there's almost an infinite number of ways of perceiving anything and i mean literally perceiving so when you look at the world you see these things you think are objects and they're sort of self-evident but where an object begins and where it ends is much more difficult to compute than any one ever realized which is partly why we don't have you know robots wandering around doing things like dishwashing which turns out to be insanely complex and it also emerged in literary criticism with the realization that well just as there were an indefinite number of ways of looking at something so actually acquiring the objective facts of perception there was an even more vaguely indefinable way of in way of potentially interpreting a text or a canon of texts let's say so how do we decide what's good and what's bad literature what's deep and what's shallow what's valid and invalid and the answer is we don't know that's the answer but a premature answer was generated by social critics on the left and the premature answer was well all our categorize all our categories and the active categorization itself serve the will to power and that's true to some degree because we're all totalitarian and authoritarian and narcissistic to some degree we're also we also use deception to get what we want so we can corrupt our category structure but there's a huge difference between saying well we don't know the answer but power may play a role and saying the answer is that power always plays a role and that's all there is and that's what's happened on the left in the post-modern field and that sort of fit in nicely with the you know the idea that capitalism was essentially uh oppressive and that the patriarchal structure is essentially oppressive etc etc and it's it's it's a it's an unbelievably corrosive and terrible philosophy so well the left went too far there to claim that nothing but the will-to-power governance categorization and the act of categorization which is basically consciousness itself that act of categorization that you could not possibly formulate a more cynical malevolent and careless destructive philosophy so see what makes this so you interpreted the question as a as a time question temporal one when does the left go too far and i guess that's within that within when and for me what you also laid out ideologically what it is that they believe that makes them go too far i don't like to use the word ideological we don't have to get into the into the reasons there but for the sake of speaking right now just use that word why when do they go too far ideologically see some of the people i spoke to said the left goes too far when it comes to violence well there's something that leads to the violence some idea and you also mentioned power right that also doesn't distinguish the left going too far from the right going too far right so and and it's not a really good answer because sometimes we think sometimes we think that violence is justified like in self-defense and so often political violence is uh what would you say rationalized and sometimes perhaps even functions as self-defense and sometimes it's rebellion against true oppression in which case people on the left and the right might regard violence not only as necessary but actually morally demanded right ethically demanded so the the mere use of violence and then of course what constitutes violence that's the next problem without or it's it's it's too shallow an argument to really get to the core of things and one has to be extremely careful about what counts as self-defense especially preemptive self-defense which is behind much of what they do they'll say that well we have to take action now against the right or the extreme right which pretty much everyone who is on the right they would classify as being a part of the alt-right or alt light yeah well that's that's another part yeah that's another yeah exactly well that's another part of this tit for tat process that we see i think perhaps accelerating it particularly in the united states with the return of trump let's say to the political arena there's a tremendous amount of distrust growing distrust on both sides of the political spectrum driven well that's the question driven by what certainly by the extreme views of a minority on both sides laying out the exact causal process is extremely difficult because these things they're not unidirectional unidirectionally causal right they're they they they cause each causes the other you know i poke you you poke me i slap you you slap me a little harder i punch you you punch me you know and and then we we have knives and we're at each other's throats and we say well you know who started it well maybe you said something insulting before i poked you you know who but but the one of the things of interest when observing something like that is the causal process that's involved in the tit for tat return and i've been thinking about that a lot because i'm for a whole variety of reasons that i can't go into but jonathan height also just wrote an article about positive feedback loop processes operating at a very rapid scale on facebook and twitter and exacerbating this political positive feedback loop right runaway positive feedback loop you know you know if you if you're doing any recording and you bring your microphone too close to the speaker that that you're speaking through you'll get this howl of feedback and that can destroy the whole system the whole recording system um and that's a good example of how a positive feedback loop can get out of control and that's the real enemy like if we're thinking metapolitically the real enemy is the possibility that mutual distrust on both sides will accelerate uh our descent into a kind of melee and so the enemy isn't necessarily the catastrophic ideology of the left or the right but the manner in which extreme views can foster a spiral of violence that none of us know how to stop and it's stupid little things can trigger like one of my friends today sent me this article showing that i think it was in the virginia governor's race that four people used ticky lanterns and they were hypothetically marching in support of the republican candidate and so they were posing as members of the conspiratorial alt-right but two of them were actually democrat operatives political operatives trying to discredit the republican campaign and that's so dangerous because they're basically acting out the proposition that it's nazis you know for all intents and purposes fascists that are supporting the republicans and to that's such a terrible lie right it's it's such a terrible lie to to act that out to demonize your fellow citizens that way it's unbelievably dangerous and we got to stop doing things like that you know and all of us have to stop doing things like that right that may be at the bottom of it what you mean there's so many ways that this can be taken and i think that what well it's difficult to say what's at the bottom but one of the predominant factors may be personalized personal lies not personal lies yes i believe that i i really do believe why why do you say that right see if you watch the film toward the fourth section i believe i split it up into chapters and then the fourth section it becomes much more philosophical which was one of the reasons why i started it because i happen to like puzzles and philosophy it's one of the reasons i went into math i like abstract thinking so i tried to make a case about lies and how lies spread now there's one obvious route to take that with memes so you talk about memes and how memes spread so you don't want to pollute that because that comes back to affect you if you care about yourself first of all so maybe you shouldn't care about yourself so much as for see something i was exploring and i'm not quite sure is it possible to tell a lie without lying to yourself that seems on the face of it yes all right well i don't think so well it seems like psychological well there's psychological evidence though that you you can't well here let's let's dig into that a little bit so you tell a lie to yourself and you think well i know the difference it's like well don't be so sure about that so here's one experiment that and that's an example so imagine that i gave a group of people a scale that measures their political belief about a certain issue maybe the reality of climate change or or the unreality of climate change for that matter it doesn't matter and then i get those same people to write an essay of 500 words outlining the contrary position and they know they're just doing it because it's part of the experiment but then they come back a week later and i give them the same political belief scale and what's happened is their beliefs will have shifted substantially towards the side that they argued for okay so why well first of all a lot of your so-called beliefs are really low resolution they're just heuristics they're like single pixel images you haven't thought it through very carefully imagine maybe you know more than the average person because of your background but imagine how much you know about how a helicopter works you know do you know what a helicopter is yes no you don't if you had to draw one it would look like a four-year-old druid you know you know what it you can identify the shape in two dimensions you know it flies that's about it you couldn't fix one you certainly couldn't build one so in a real sense you don't know anything about a helicopter except what you need as someone who's never around helicopters to know and and most things are way more complicated than helicopters even though they're plenty complicated and so you think that you know something when you think you know it but then you detail out a counter argument and it turns out that you've provided more detail in the counter argument that you had in your argument to begin with and so that shifts your cognition towards what you argued for well if you think that doesn't happen to you when you're lying well you're you don't know anything about how you work and then the other thing is well virtually no one thinks that lying is acceptable morally when it comes right down to it there might be specific exceptions to that now and then and so if you lie you're going to tilt what you believe towards the lie because that will lighten the ethical load that you carry it'll reduce cognitive dissonance that's one way of terming it and so and then you can't keep track of your lies and so that's a big problem and they tangle up your thoughts and then also let's say a whole bunch of people really like your lie well then you know most of us all of us thrive on attention i mean children will misbehave to get attention even if it's negative attention if they can't get it any other way and so you lie and you you put it out on twitter and you know 10 000 people like it and then you think well wait a sec probably i believe that because look at how positively it was received and some of that's actually socially positive right i mean if you say something a lot of people respond to it positively that might be a good reason for you to think that way a bit more right because the fact that you want social approval isn't only an index of your cowardice it's also an index of your desire to be productive and to fit in and to have people like you and all of that and so lies they just warp things to a tremendous degree and if you think you're smart enough to keep your lies separate from your truth and then one final issue is well let's say you lie 20 of the time well doesn't that mean that you're practicing to become 20 percent a liar and don't you think you're getting better at that you you become what you practice and then don't you think that'll interfere with your ability to distinguish between what you think and what you don't think first of all and also your ability to tell the difference between truth and falsehood and so and don't you think it'll make you cynical about the nature of humankind to observe yourself lying you're certainly going to think other people do it at least as much as you and if they're bad people they do it way more it's just a rat's nest and you know i became convinced a long time ago looking at the totalitarian problem on the left and the right that the most effective way to deal with this fundamentally was psychological and that what we need to do all of us is to stop lying each of us in our own lives that's the solution we have to stop and that partly that's because we're so damn powerful now i mean how many people have watched your podcasts do you think they're in terms of views now obviously that's a there are multiple views for one video millions almost seven or so seven or eight okay so how powerful might your lies be right right and i mean each of those million people is connected to a thousand other people so that's a billion people that you're two steps away from at least see you said sorry you said seven million people so it's seven billion people you know i mean obviously those circles are going to overlap but you get my point yeah what i would object to is that he said most people would agree that telling lies is deleterious in some manner now i'd say that they say that they profess it but they don't truly believe it and the reason that may in fact be what unifies the extremes i'll give you i'll give you an example sure if you ask someone i think that if you were to ask someone is it okay to lie for the greater good they would say well the majority of those people on the extremes would say yes and then i wonder well perhaps that's an indication that you're on the extreme perhaps if you have a world view i talk about this concept called belton that's a good idea man yeah perhaps if you have a veltan xiaomi that says that there is no that somehow there is no greater somehow you can't tell a lie and before the greater good because the truth and the good are tied yeah i think that's right so i think that's a really smart idea the idea that if you have a belief system politically that requires any lies to support then that's an indication that you've gone too far i think that's a good rule of thumb right and what else is as you mentioned it's pestiferous because it's poisonous is that they they'll say power is one of the well they'll say power is the predominant perhaps only vector that underlies our social interactions and even truth claims and so on well the issue with the issue with that is that it's partly true and the reason is see this cup here this cup comprises many elements there's an element of power in this cup there's an element of art as well by the way there's an element of physics you can look at it mathematically you can look at it through an engineering lens you can look at it through an architectural lens yeah well the power is the power in the cup is for example that you own it it's your cup right and so it's embedded within a hierarchy now the quest so your claim is exactly right um but there's a huge difference between claiming that it's useful to investigate the role that arbitrary expression of power plays in conceptual systems which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say and the premature answer that the solution to the problem of perception is will to power and nothing else and so i've been talking to some evolutionary biologists about that i talked to robert trivers this week he's getting old and it was interesting to talk to him but we talked about psychopaths okay so let let's let's wander down that path just for a minute so imagine that the patriarchal structure is predicated on nothing but power okay and then imagine that psychopaths are particularly cunning uses of power users of power okay so then to the degree that the social system is an expression of power you'd expect psychopaths to be radically successful but they in in human temporarily successful well they're also they also never exceed they their numbers vary between one and five percent in the population never gets higher than three is really the upper limit but it can get up to five so they're not that successful because 97 of people aren't psychopaths so it just that fact alone indicates that there's something wrong with the power claim now you might say well psychopaths aren't very good at utilizing power it's like no no wait a minute actually psychopaths are better at utilizing pure power stripped completely of empathy than anyone else by definition so they are literally the power users who lack compassion so why aren't they radically successful in human populations and the answer to that is well because our hierarchies are not fundamentally built on power and our concepts and and perceptions aren't fundamentally a consequence of power or it's misused now that doesn't mean that our perceptions and our social structures can't be and our intimate relationships our relationships with ourselves for that matter can't become contaminated by the excess desire for power and by the deceit that might be employed let's say in its service that obviously that happens and we have to keep our eyes open all the time about that but the central claim is not only is it unbelievably cynical and destructive and also extremely helpful if you want to demonize your enemies you know because if i believe that the entire basis of your perceptual structure is will to power and so is mine let's say well i don't if you don't believe the same things i do so if you're trying to elevate yourself in a different hierarchy or you're trying to produce a different hierarchy altogether we have nothing in common except our enmity because there's no ground outside what you're striving for and what i'm striving for selfishly where we can meet as reasonable people and have a you know soul-to-soul discussion that's not even technically possible within that freight within that scheme and so that means that if you and i are enemies well what am i supposed to do with you because all you are is will to power i can't trust you i can't reason with you reason doesn't even exist you know you see echoes of that in the claims that rational discussion or something like that is you know especially the dialectical forms is somehow a construction of white supremacy you know implicit in our social structures it's so it's so shallow at that idea and the idea that our virtues first of all that there aren't any virtues but even if there are they're only derivable from power hierarchy structures god that's so cynical and so destructive and so dangerous and imagine just living with that notion that that's what motivates everyone is nothing but like an untrammeled will to authoritarian power god that's hell man yeah you mentioned the word use multiple times and that is one of the reasons why i try to analyze it more philosophically toward the end because i don't think that this is see some people would say what we need is dialogue you'll see you'll hear this many of the times it would come from people who are on the center center right center left they'll say we just need to speak to each other more but i think what comes before what comes prior to speaking is we need to value the same we need to be oriented in the same direction yeah well that's again what this new book that i'm writing is about you know because there has to be a there has to be an initial framework as you said that makes even the possibility of dialogue a reality so it's got to be something look look what we're doing right now you and me hopefully this is what we're doing right he's like you know some things and and i know yeah that's right man hopefully and let's bloody well pray that we are smart enough and wise enough and careful enough to do it right so it's not easy you you come to this discussion thinking maybe you don't know everything and that i might have something to say that would be useful and interesting to you that that might actually be crucial to you and i come to this dialogue hoping for the same from you right so first of all we both come to the degree we're doing this properly in an attitude of humility i want to hear from you and you know i tend to be kind of dominant in conversations and i talk too much and so that probably interferes with it to some degree but i really do try to listen and i really do hope that when i talk to someone that's partly why i do the podcast is that they'll tell me something that someone is stupid and potentially malevolent as me might really need to know and so if i listen real carefully maybe they won't even know what it is that i need to know that they know but if i listen very carefully i kind of call it out of them and then i can use that information to correct myself so i don't do something catastrophically stupid in the future and hurt myself and the people i love and so you have to have this presumption of this presumption of ignorance and the the belief that the person across from you particularly if they differ from you might have something useful to say because they're different from you they know things that aren't that you don't know so isn't it so good that they're different and then you have to believe that men of good will exist let's say and that they can exchange information that's mutually corrective and both can walk away better and that's something like faith it's faith well i think it's equivalent i think it's equivalent to in the christian sphere it's equivalent to the faith in logos it's it's the same thing and logos is a very complicated concept one of the reasons and i'm not quite sure why this is the case but one of the reasons this theories of everything podcast has taken off the way that it has is partly because i'm not averse to this ambiguous contradictory thinking when it comes to metaphysical issues like whether or not there exists a god and to speak in terms of religious terms most scientists are as you know and as i know most scientists are they find that to be anathema and i i don't think i'm gonna talk to richard dawkins oh well that's wonderful yeah i saw your conversation with lawrence krauss and i was well i have yeah i did another one with harris too just a week and a half ago and it went real well i figured out how to do to talk to sam better than i have before i just asked mostly i just asked him questions and that's really useful to just to ask questions rather than because i think i went sideways to some degree in my discussions with sam which i don't usually do i was trying to prove something sideways well well i like i said i was trying to prove something instead of listening and asking questions and i should it would have been better had i not tried to do that and just tried harder and harder to understand what it was that he thought because one you know the more we talked the more we found like real major points of of agreement you know like sam is oriented to a great degree he's very much concerned about the human tendency for atrocity and malevolence that drives him that terror of that and that's i would say that's my fundamental driver i hope it is at least and so that's something that really unites us and he's hoping that he can find you know a genuine morality now he believes he can find it in scientific inquiry and and i don't think that's true but whatever he might be right and and it's not like i don't think science can inform our moral choices and maybe has to but i turn you know when i came out on the public sphere and first talked to sam i had this axe to grind in some sense which was my belief that the fundamental framework from within which we see the world isn't and can't be objective and i still believe that's true but i i was hammering at home because i wanted to win that argument and that was that wasn't the most sophisticated way of going about it why less and less i think as we talked so and this time i didn't do that at all i just asked him questions and we definitely had the best conversation we've ever had so and i'm really hoping to do that with dawkins it's like i don't want to win an argument i don't want to have an argument i want to ask him questions i want to find out what he thinks because dawkins is no fool and his atheistic materialism grounded in his evolutionary thinking like that's powerful you know it's it's a powerful system of thought and he's a master of it and so i want to find out what led him to the conclusions that he came to and i have questions for him you know i want to talk to him for example about the instinct to imitate because you were talking earlier about something that unites us you know so imagine this for example you know that the same person can be admired by a lot of different people even people who differ in their political beliefs and that that admiration sort of captures them that's charisma that's part of charisma the charisma is part of an instinct right because if i think you're charismatic and then i'm going to watch you more my eyes are going to point to you more i'm going to be more likely to do the things you do i'm more likely to imitate you and so i would say there's something like a central spirit that we're all driven to imitate and it's the thing that we see as admirable across people and that points to something that we experience as religious so like the ultimate expression of that which is that which compels imitation is indistinguishable from religious worship it's not propositional yeah well that's a ver vacant argument yeah yes yes yes absolutely well and verveiki's one of the people who've who's thought this sort of thing through mo in most detail jonathan pagio as well and i know you had him did he make the cut of your film yeah in the director's cut so just watching if you'd like to watch the film it's best to go to betterleftonsetfilm.com because over there instead of itunes and youtube and so on which you can also get it from if you like if that's easier but you can go to the url better left unsaidfilm.com because over there for the same price you get access to the director's cut which has jonathan pajot and i'm sure the listeners the watchers of this are fans of jonathan yeah well i think peugeot is super smart man he's deep and the same with verveiki those two they they've taken certain forms of thought farther than anybody i've ever met verveiki is so well read it's terrifying and pagoda is this weird character because he's he's he really understands what he knows thinking yeah yeah yeah well you see well that's part of having an artistic temperament too you know people like that who are more open in trait terms they can they can see patterns in things now that can lead them astray because you can you can project patterns into you know the void let's say that aren't there that's conspiratorial thinking for example but intuitive people who are also capable of critical thinking pick up patterns long before anyone else does i've had graduate students like that you know they would leap to a scientific conclusion that was dead on multiple times and then they'd when they were writing their papers they'd have to fill in how they got there well that wasn't how they got there they leaped from mountaintop to mountaintop using nietzsche's terminology and they could see patterns and then they they had to construct a rational story to publish their ideas in scientific journals it's so funny because it's a form of falsification right that isn't how they got there but but that's so that's one of the questions i want to ask dawkins is like well what about this instinct to imitate do you think such a thing exists you know because i don't believe he's a blank slate theorist and we're really good at abstracting out things to imitate and so i started thinking about this for example when i was watching my kids play house so my son would act out the father you know he'd be the father but he wasn't imitating me exactly he wasn't mimicking the exact gestures of my body right like i do this while i'm imitating you right now but if i was a comedian and i want to parody you i would imitate your spirit in some sense right and then put a twist in it and everyone would laugh so i can abstract out from you your pattern well then imagine we're way better at it than that like if i watched 10 admirable men and was gripped by my admiration for them let's say i was fortunate enough to have 10 admirable men in my family i could abstract out the central spirit that makes them all admirable and i could imitate that so what occurs when you keep doing that over and over that's exactly right across generations and so now partly what occurs is the imagination formulates the representation of the abstraction so i'll give you an example so if you look and you often see this in byzantine cathedral so you look up in a byzantine cathedral it's a dome so that's the sky and maybe you'll see an image of christ up there as panto crater great creator of the world this is sort of tied with the idea that consciousness gives rise to reality it's it's so it's an idealistic philosophy or experience well the idea is something like that the thing to be admired it's the central phenomena and function of consciousness and in some sense it gives rise to re to the reality that it is good that is good itself and the imagination gets their way before the propositional philosophers way before the artists and the religious streamers you made an argument that that is partly at least what is a religious phenomenon now do you think that's only it no i have another definition that i'm working out okay so it these are things i'm going to talk about when i go to cambridge because i'm going there to oxford and cambridge at the end of november and in any case so i'm also really interested in the idea of depth so we all have an intuition of yeah depth d-e-p-p pth like philosophical depth or literary depth or or the depth of a conversation you know and if you have a deep conversation you know you're talking about weighty serious yeah fundamental things okay well i have a technical definition for that we we have a hierarchy of beliefs okay some beliefs have more beliefs dependent on them than others the more beliefs that are dependent on a given belief the deeper that belief is the deepest of those beliefs we hold sacred by definition by definition our deepest beliefs are sacred their their primary and you can tell that in part because if they're challenged you get unbelievably upset and the reason you get upset is because well you're not just destabilizing that belief you're destabilizing all the beliefs that depend on it and so one sacred belief in a marriage is uh sexual fidelity let's say faithfulness right and you kind of take that on faith because while you take it's own faith that you think that's valuable in part but it's also on faith that your partner is manifesting that because you you know all you have to do is get paranoid and then you've you can accumulate evidence that your partner isn't trustworthy and no one's perfectly trustworthy so you could see how right exactly so but it's a fundamental belief and then if you find out that your partner's betrayed you well then the whole house of cards perhaps not the whole house of cards but a lot of the cards come tumbling down you know the past is no longer what you thought it was your whole faith in humanity itself might be compromised including your faith in yourself like it can really it's a dagger in the depths especially if you really loved the person and really trusted them so so say the more sacred i believe is the deeper it is embedded in this in this structure of beliefs and i don't believe those are objective beliefs so that's another thing i want to talk to talkings about i do not think the scientific evidence suggests that our perceptions that what we perceive are material objects that are self-evident that we then derive our conceptual systems from i don't think there's any evidence for that i think it's wrong and it's been proven wrong so you know that's some of the places i want to go yeah tell me what you think of this now i've only thought about this recently i think when atheists call the religious dogmedic what they truly mean is that you're pantheistic for low-level gods what i mean is you what you've outlined is something like this so let's say you have a hierarchy and hopefully it's monotheistic in the sense that you're integrated which no one is but hopefully it's you're pointing to one god one source of good okay then you're like well what makes me good and you keep going down and down and down until you get to extremely micro level actions such as type this email i'm typing this email why so that i can get an approval for someone for an interview why so that i can talk and hopefully so on and so on and so on and i think i think you've outlined i'm pretty sure it was you that it depends on so which level there's the disruption that is proportional to the anxiety that you experience okay that's exactly right so then i think we know the neurophysiology of that even okay so then when someone like sam harris calls someone else dogmatic essentially what they mean is that why are you getting upset at this level why are you holding this to be sacred so here's another example to people who are fundamental in their religious views so they believe it's literal what's in the bible's literal something i think about is and even people who think the bible is entirely metaphorical if i say well what if let's imagine i'm speaking to a fundamentalist if i say what if this aspect of the bible is not meant to be literal it's metaphorical they get upset why do you get upset why is your belief in god contingent should your belief in god be contingent or should you have faith no matter what okay so then they would say well well so why does that undermine your belief to me faith should be well it shouldn't be so easily undermined and so in some sense it's as if they're saying here is my god instead of at the top level well here what oh yeah they are well here okay well so let's dig into that a little bit that's a very good observation well one of their unrecognized gods is literally the the phrase itself because literal means real and it means ultimately real but literal doesn't mean real or ultimately real necessarily like literals really like what does a dostoevsky novel literally mean well nothing well none of it's true it didn't happen or did it or did it really happen like at a meta level well that's where great novels happen is at a meta level so truth is complicated and this is see so the fundamentalists they're they're tripped up philosophically to some degree because they they they can't see how something can be oh my god it's so complicated this is where sam harris and i kept going off on you know different tangents they don't know what they mean when they say literal they equate literal with real they create real with material real like and so when you go after that and you say well it's not literally true what you're saying what you're essentially saying is that well your whole belief system is predicated on a misapprehension even about the nature of god let's say i mean you know most religious traditions many religious traditions insist that representing god in a concrete manner is actually an error the are not very happy with that idea the muslims certainly aren't uh the orthodox christians really don't many of them really don't like to represent god the father in their iconography and part of the reason for that is that you shouldn't concretize the absolute it's it's dangerous now it's a problem because if you don't concretize it you can't act it out so there's a tension but you know when people say people ask me if i believe in god and i always think well there's a whole bunch of assumptions in that question that you want me to swallow so that you can categorize my answer according to your pre-existing schemas and that isn't an answer they like but it's an equation right is god real god real well what do you mean by real right you know what i mean no i don't know do you mean real like a table real like the table you they don't know they just think they know it's just like the helicopter issue it's like do you mean the table do you mean the table you know do you mean your table do you mean tables in general as real do they have to have four legs do they have to have a hard top like what are we talking about when we mean real do we mean objectively real like a table well god isn't like a table well then he isn't real it's like okay well to have it your way if that's as far as your thinking goes but i don't even think that sophisticated sophisticated religious people whether they know it or not don't think that god is a is real like a table and and as you already pointed out when you with your discussion about your cup even what exactly constitutes a table is subject to great so it's not obvious look one of the most one of the most one of the most impressive thinkers i ever encountered in the field of perception wrote this book called an ecological approach to visual perception and he would say that a table is a um i always forget his name it's an ecological approach to visual perception gibson yes yes okay so when you see a table do you see an a flat surface with four legs or do you see a sitting down to eat place and the answer is you see a sitting down to eat place and there are objects that slot into that category that's the answer it's not the other way around you don't see the material object which is self-evident and infer the function now it might be a combination of those two things as well but it doesn't matter the the functional element of it has a certain perceptual primacy and i'll give you a kind of a nifty example of this uh there is a neurological condition called utilization behavior which accompanies prefrontal damage and if someone has manifest utilization behavior if you give them an object they can't not use it so because what's happened is when they see a cup they'll lift it up and drink from it because a cup is a lifting up and drinking thing perceptually it grip it grips their motor output they can't inhibit it so but the fact that they have to inhibit it shows how low level the functional perception is right and so so so and that's part of what i was trying to lay out with harris is that you know the idea that the most real is the objective doesn't seem to be true for our perceptions and then that tangles us up scientifically right because if our perceptions evolved and we evolved to adapt to reality and we don't see objects as the fundamental perceptual reality then what does that say about reality and that's not the answer to that question is not bloody obvious well that's another question i hope that i can get to with with dawkins you know and maybe he knows something that i don't god i hope so yeah see i want to make the claim that it sounds then and i believe you've made this claim perhaps even viveki that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily the most quote unquote real it is however however then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out and then the closer we are to that the closer our map is to that reality of course we're not trying to mistake the map in the territory well the whether or not material objects exist patterns exist right and it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are like it looks to me and you can talk about archetypes in this wise i would say to some degree trees have been around a long time and the tree structure is pretty embedded in our perceptual perceptual systems and so there there is a relationship between how long something has been around in our environment and how deep that is within our perceptual structures you know like we as we assume a difference between up and down for example that's really built into us and it's it's at the basis of a lot of our metaphors up is you know high up is the sky up is uh elevated up is the mountaintop up is the sage up is god well that's partly because we're up and down creatures because there's gravity and there's the ground and we're stuck to the ground and the ground is base and it's material and it's dirty and the sky is pure and etc etc a lot of our metaphorical architecture is predicated on these underlying presumptions and they do have a depth and that's also partly why the biological question in relationship to ethics becomes complex too because some of these adaptations to permanent patterns are biological fundamentals right and so and if utilization is part of that then evolution oh god what do you say persistent patterns that we've encountered over our evolutionary history have shaped the axioms of our ethics it's complicated man like all this stuff is but okay so where i was going well you said quite a you said quite quite a significant amount let me see okay so i'll just go down one route i don't know if you're aware of donald hoffman the name doesn't ring a bell okay so donald hoffman is a cognitive scientist who makes the claim that what we see is not reality it almost certainly cannot be and the reason is that the amount of ways that reality could be versus the amount of ways you could perceive there's a it so let's say the amount of ways reality could be is at the bottom and then you have on the the numerator the amount of weights that you perceive that tends to zero for anything that's even remotely complicated which we are more than remotely complicated well look you've watched um the simpsons or south park south park's even a better example well it's barely animation at all south park you know it's just icons moving you don't care that's good enough and it doesn't matter that in fact it's kind of an interesting style and it doesn't clutter up the story right and so what you see is an icon now look if you see an icon and the pixels in the icon are random samples of the underlying reality then and the reality doesn't change during the act of perception then you're still seeing reality but you're seeing it at very low resolution and i think that's a better way of thinking about it it's low resolution it's not not real and you don't you actually don't want your representations to be any higher resolution than necessary so imagine on a computer sometimes you want a thumbnail because that's good enough and sometimes you want a high resolution photo because you need detail and that's a really good way of thinking about our perceptions they're low and then also our our heuristics so i think that each of us has a complete map of the world now you might say well we can't because we're ignorant and the world's real complicated it's like yeah but we just cover up what we don't perceive in detail with a low resolution map and so things we haven't delved into in detail are mapped in a very low resolution way and that's good enough as long as when we use the representation we don't encounter an error like so so it works and if it doesn't work well then you have to decompose the you have an explanation for in some sense a representation of everything it's just low resolution like like think of the word sky okay that's an e that's that's that's an icon the word is an icon so you could think the word is a representation of an image of a representation of reality so when you look at the sky you don't see the sky like let's say you're looking up in the night sky i mean god live there's a hundred billion galaxies up there you don't see them you see a low res representation and then you make that even lower res by saying sky well is that good enough well it's good enough you don't get hit by a meteor when you're out there on the deck standing looking up at the sky because it it does the trick for the time that's a pragmatic preg that's a pragmatic approach to truth to some degree you know so it works well enough for your current purposes complete enough for you to act in the manner that produces the result you you want not the result you predict the one you actually want it doesn't always hurt like that yeah it's not no well of course not because because it's partly because our our low res reps our representations are fallible immensely fallible but often they're good enough you know when you were speaking to harris what i thought was underlying the disagreement between you two and even with you and brett weinstein about truth is that there's the implicit assumption that one should pursue true so i don't know if that's the case but when you're referring to truth and you're saying well here's the definition of truth and if we were to just follow blindly scientific truth we would build animals which we have we could destroy us there are many paths that can go that aren't salutary so we should pick and write we're saying well one is explanatory well who cares about explanatory we care about our life uh to me what was at the un to me what was underneath it was that we should pursue truth is that am i correct in my assessment or was there something else so what if one made the claim that we don't always have to pursue truth well we can't pursue it everywhere right there has to be a spirit that animates the pursuit of truth to give it some direction well look here's an example i think i probably used this in my discussions with harris i read this book once about um biological warfare research in the soviet union and it's pretty damn relevant in the case of wuhan let's say you know and god only knows what happened there but in any case demonetized right now there were soviet scientists working on combining trying to make a hybrid between smallpox and ebola what's that that does the ebola right right right right and then to make it deliverable in aerosols well how about maybe not how about maybe we don't go there you know and and scientists are making decisions like that all the time because there's an infinite number of facts to study see this is the problem with the pure science argument follow the science it's like well there's an infinite number of facts this is a problem so science is all about the facts yeah which facts and then that gets us into the post-modernist dilemma because the post-modernists say only those facts that serve the will to power and your particular will to power that's just very cynical way of looking at science so but but but there's still the question there right something is directing this some and something needs to be directing this and and i would think harrison weinstein and myself would all agree that the pursuit of truth is of exceptional importance and also that there are methods for distinguishing let's say material facts scientific facts from ethical facts now that's where it gets trickier and the relationship between those two i don't think you can look at the facts except through an ethical framework i don't think it's possible the ethical framework is built into your perception i see you can't help it and the reason for that it's it's technically quite straightforward i believe is that we are fundamentally ambulatory and goal-directed creatures we walk we move we're always moving from point a to point b always no matter what even when we're looking at something it's in preparation for a movement to someone bet somewhere better you know unless we're trying actively to make things worse but that's an exceptional case we can't help but look at the world what we see is a map that's a that's a good way of thinking about it we don't see the world we see our map of the world and we need a map because we have to walk through the world and we don't want to have things fall on us etc we don't want to get lost and so and then we we might infer objects from the contents of our maps and we might even say those objects are fundamentally real but then you know that's a problem because the question then arises well what do you mean by real exactly and exactly why and you know then sam would say well you can derive what's real from science and i would say well there's an infinite number of facts sam how the hell do we decide which facts to pursue and which not to pursue and which we shouldn't pursue and you think here's something interesting about the scientific literature you write a research report about your experiment you almost never tell the truth about why you got interested in that what you do is you lay out this rational argument that led to your hypothesis which isn't what led to your hypothesis at all by the way it's just a summary statement that other people could follow it's not an actual description of what happened you're interested in something for some reason and that shapes your hypothesis and the direction of your research and that's tied in with your own personal narrative so it bedevils the scientific enterprise and it can be a real problem because your own narrative can you know cloud your judgment of the let's say the relevant fact so the epitome of that is this mathematician named romano jan have you heard of roman again yes okay for those who haven't heard of him he would come up through intuition or through what he would say would be dream encounters with gods or god it says he would come up with what are astounding formulas that i remember i think it was hardy who was the supervisor said you can't simply make these up they're too baroque for you to make them up and they turned out to be correct and what you're saying is well okay how do you justify that well that was one of the problems with him what he would is that he would spit out these formulas which in the end most of the time turned out to be true slight modifications of what's true and i'll give an example if someone wants to if someone can keep this in their head okay so how many ways can you partition a certain number so let's say 26 can be written as 1 plus 1 plus 26 times or it can be written as 1 plus 2 and then plus 1 1. so there are many many different partitions of a natural number he came up with this formula that the number the partitions of any number something like 1 over 2 pi square root 6 then you take the derivative of what's happening here which is exponential 1 over 2 pi over a square root of 6. square root of n minus 1 over 24 all over square root of n minus 1 over 24. and he couldn't neces now i'm not sure about that particular one doesn't matter this is an example he couldn't prove them and he would say that he just they just occurred to him so that to me is well i'm wondering well that's a mystery there's no one else in mathematics that was like that and i'm not sure if that's because he was terribly open like you mentioned openness is a trait that allows you to have this these large leaps of insight i'm not sure if that's exactly why it could be but that's an example yeah well you know the the the the depths of what inspires us are that's a great mystery right i mean one of the mysteries of the scientific enterprise for example is hypothesis generation you know when we train graduate students we we spend a lot of time training them in method let's say and approach and then writing scientific papers and so on but there's almost no strict pedagogy in relationship to hypothesis generation well where do you come up with your research questions to begin with well i'm interested in that it's like well that's really not much of an answer it's certainly not formalized very well what what is that interest exactly and how does it guide you exactly and what is that and then you might say well and also how is that related to your morality like to what degree is your scientific curiosity motivated by your own personal desire for success or maybe the desire to serve others you know on the virtuous side etc etc well that's just that's just often the domain of well we don't ask those questions when we're scientists and fair enough in some sense but not really because well you do run the kind of problems you just described you know i work with this carver um he's a member of an arpeggio native canadian tribe no it's charles joseph is his name and he's quite a remarkable person and he carves these traditional west coast native canadian quack quack sculptures and he dreams in those images and he consults with the spirits of his father and grandfather great grandfather in particular in his dreams about his carvings and he doesn't talk about that with anyone because they think he's crazy but he's not he's definitely not and he's a great artist in my estimation unbelievably creative and that his creative process is so unique that well it's remarkable to listen to him you know he's the inheritor of an unbroken tradition that stems back perhaps 15 000 years yep you brought that up to kraus that the science well you said science is nested within what you would consider to be the religious domain and you could give an example by motivation what do you what motivates you to pursue a certain direction so sure once you've gotten to that direction it's then a scientific and then he said well look you can't can you point to me any fact let's say that the religious has come up with something like that he said and or knowledge and then the question was well what does one mean by knowledge and to me it's it's a soulless way of looking at the world they devoided the world of soul to begin with and then wonder where is the soul so it's like you've watched someone you take it take right now if i go there and i open up the fridge and i and i say to you or you say hey kurt had kurt had some soul that made him get up and go to the fridge and then they say well where what pixel where was that soul at what point when his fingers touched the fridge did the soul come in well the soul was behind that sure at the lowest level it wasn't but the soul is somewhere at the top well what is the soul yeah well they do look i mean i think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that there's no spirit in science in some sense because we chased it out when we developed a psychological methodology right and there may be an equal well it's a relate it's a related it is a related problem i'm going to talk to penrose by the way also when i go to oh wonderful and about that because penrose thinks that consciousness is not computational and i don't understand why he thinks that i mean i'm talking to computer engineers who are building ai brains fundamentally and they're quite confident hey go right ahead sure sure so i've studied penrose and spoken to his partner stuart hameroff on the podcast hammer off yeah yep so the reason penrose fundamentally thinks that it's not computational it's because of girdles and completeness theorem the fact that so if it's computational in some sense that means it's a first order language now because of girdles and completeness theorem we can generate a proposition that we see as true but the force first order language cannot see that it's true and this can happen over and over and see something so they actually accept that interpretation of goodell's incompleteness theorem because i proposed that in my book maps of meaning and a number of philosophical critics have said that i misunderstood that that incompleteness theorem that didn't have any application in the domain of philosophical inquiry but i thought it was also an argument about first principles that any internally coherent system had to be predicated on axioms that weren't provable from within the confines of the system and so that's part of penrose's issue here is it it's the first principle issue yeah now i'm unsure exactly what you said in maps of meaning that would make a philosopher raise alarm well they just said it was inappropriate of me to imp first of all that i misunderstood goodell's incompleteness theorem which i might have because i'm not a mathematician but that even if i did understand it it wasn't appropriate to apply it to like systems of philosophical inquiry outside the strict domain of mathematics and that was their criticism but and i've always been so leery about that because i was kind of outside my domain of expertise when i incorporated that argument but it did look to me like it it was a it was a statement i think what godel goodell meant was that there you can't have a system of usable thought in some sense that isn't predicated on axioms that stand outside the system uh-huh uh-huh you see i recall reading an article of yours about a year or two years maybe even three years ago about girdles and completeness theorem and god how girdles and completeness there in some sense proves god and then when i was searching for it again i couldn't find it do you recall writing an article about it i don't think no no i don't think i made that no i don't think i made that argument so so but i could ask penrose about that yeah very sure yeah well it it the uh the uh the question if that interpretation is correct and and if this is the issue that that penrose is trying to uh uh solve i'd be very interested in that so thank you for that because i'll ask him but the the fact that there have to see i think there have to be axioms outside the system say the propositional system because something has to fill in the gaps that our ignorance leaves because we have to map the world but we can't because we're ignorant and so what do we do well we have assumptions and even our perceptions our assumptions you know for example i'm i'm watching you and i'm acting as if what you're doing is telling me the truth but that's an assumption now it could be a generous assumption it could be a necessary assumption but a lot there are going to be times when that assumption which is a perceptual act because i see you that way right in the broader sense of seeing there's going to be times when that's wrong because i'm talking to someone who isn't telling me the truth because they don't know what they're talking about let's say that's ignorance or maybe they're being malevolent so we fill in the gaps between our propositional knowledge and the infinitely complex world with presumptions and a lot of those presumptions are perception so i think of perceptions as the axioms of propositional thought that's part of it because thought is about something right yeah penrose's would penrose would come from maybe it's adjacent but an alternate route that is about understanding the fact that we can understand a statement to be true and it came from a first order language but that first order language cannot see that it's true that we understand it implies that what we're doing is not computational and the reason is that let's imagine we could find the computational see this guy named stephen wolfram who believes that what underlies reality is something like hypergraphs and then there's a computation there's a rule that there's rule of there's a system of rewriting now that's akin to a first order language however there would be let's imagine that's the case at the at the fundamental of physics is something like a rule generation process that's like a first order language well then we can find a rule sorry we can find a statement that this rule cannot see as being true but then we see it as true so how is it that we could be generated by this for if we're embedded in the first order language how is it that we can see what how is it that we can understand that to be true when we're generated by it okay so so let me okay so that was part of the reason that jung hypothesized the existence of a transcendent self so imagine that as you go through the different manifestations of your personality in your life you know you say i radically changed at some point you look at retrospectively and you say radically changed well imagine that there's these map systems that you identify with you say that's me your ego identifies with them you say that's me but then that changes radically and maybe you fall into chaos when it changes because you you lose your belief and then a new belief emerges out well it emerges out of something underneath and so jung posted that part of what the self was was the thing that remained constant across transformations and actually guided them in some sense now young also believed that christ technically speaking psychologically speaking was a symbol of the self and that's partly why the death and redemption idea rings true with us because we all go through partial deaths and descents into sometimes into hell you know when everything falls apart around you you know to think about that as a descent into hell it's perfectly reasonable metaphorical statement it certainly feels like an eternity when you're there and in some sense that domain has always existed right across the span of humanity and it's a place you can go it's also a place that deceit is very likely to take you because it makes your these presumption systems very fragile and much more likely to degenerate into a chaotic hell in any case the self is the thing that's underneath that that remains constant but also the thing that guides those transformations and even more importantly in some sense it's the thing that gives us the intuitions that guides those transformations towards a higher order form of unity and completion and then you could say maybe that we're manifesting you and i are trying to manifest that spirit in this dialogue because we're trying to modify each other's proximal constructions to move them towards a more accurate and valid position and that we're very engaged when that's happening because it's so vital when you know we go away and we think that was a good conversation that was a deep conversation we really got somewhere something like that that metaphor we can't simply use engagement as a barometer or as a marker of of following this value system because some people can be engaged heavily so when murdering people yeah well one of the things i would one of the things i warned people about in maps of meaning was if you lie enough you will implicit structures that guide your interest and then you won't be able to rely on it and then you're lost because you imagine if you couldn't rely on your instinct for meaning because you'd corrupted it what are you going to do i think that's the sin against the holy ghost you know fundamentally you can't recover from that you're speaking my language i'm i'm liking what you're saying it reminds me of it's like we have a compass and every time every lie is a dis equilibrium it dis it makes it not fr and makes it not operate properly and so that's one reason to not tell a line what's interesting though is that if you if you've corrupted your compass and your compass should hopefully lead you somewhere positive and that depends on if you're aiming positively then telling the truth recalibrates it yes i well look psychotherapy i kind of developed this idea when i went down i did my first public talk at a bucknell university about a month ago and one of the things that i've been writing about is that the psychotherapeutic presumption so the first presumption is that there is such a thing as psychotherapy the second presumption is that it can lead you to a state of increased psychophysiological well-being and health so wait why is there any first might first assumption necessary what do you mean that there is such a thing as psychotherapy well you could just say that it's just rubbish right i mean when freud first came out and said well talking can cure people you know that was a pretty preposterous claim no one believed it how can just talking you know heal it's like well talking is thinking you don't think thinking has anything to do with your psychophysiology and what freud did was have people just talk they could say anything he didn't even like that's why they laid on the couch and didn't see him it was like say anything that comes into your mind okay so well essentially what you're doing is telling the truth to yourself in an untremed manner now now people think by talking most people think by talking you have to be a pretty good thinker before you can think without having to talk and really what you have to do is talk to yourself in your head you know you have the revelatory part of thought which is your ideas and then you engage in dialectical criticism internally it's an internalized conversation and you have to be pretty sophisticated to be really good at that you have to be willing to divide yourself into at least two parts and you have to be able to do that most people do that by talking so they reveal what they think to themselves by talking and then having said what they say they can you know take it or leave it and then they start to just distinguish between the wheat and the chaff and that can be so is psychotherapeutically curative and certainly people like carl rogers placed a tremendous emphasis on both truth as the curative process in psychotherapy but also the necessity for the psychotherapist him or herself to essentially act out something like the role of christ i mean rogers was extremely influenced by protestant thinking i mean he was going to evangelize the world when he was a kid but he became agnostic or atheistic but it all stuck so the idea was if if i listen to you in the right spirit you can reveal truth to yourself that will reconstitute you and redeem you that's basically the whole premise of psychotherapy and it works you know and mostly what i saw in psychotherapy i practiced for 20 years was we just we got rid of a fair bit of ignorance we did a fair bit of social skills development like i taught a lot of people how to shake hands and say hello and introduce themselves because they just didn't have those skills but a lot of it was let's find out the lies man and get rid of them and it's up to you to figure out what the lies are all listen i'm not telling you i don't know what your lies are i don't know what lies you're tangled up in i don't want to presume yeah and i know some people who would lie to their therapist because they're too ashamed or for whatever reason and some people ask me what am i advocating for with this film blue better left unsaid and for me if i'm not advocating for anything i'm not like well to be presumptuous for me to advocate would mean that i found something that i'm trying to convince other people of truly better leftman said was like an attempt for me to cohere and and solidify my own thoughts development so what did you teach what did it teach what did it teach you well tommy that's simply not easy and you'll notice that i pause i tend to pause before i think and one of the reasons is that it's firstly i'm trying to if it's something that i've said before i try to say it in a different manner and i'll give well well one reason even if it's synonyms even if i'm simply replacing the words with synonyms and the reason is that the reason is that well first it's great for cognitive flexibility i think words are like batons they allow you to reach farther places like when you're rock climbing they're like batons but secondly because even if it's something that is the same phenomenon when you view it from a slightly different angle you get a better understanding of what it is earlier we were talking about idolatry and i think it's almost idolatry as akin to mistaking the representation for what's trying to be represented so imagine this imagine that you have a and then insisting that that yeah and insisting that that representation is in fact the totality yeah which means insisting that your interpretation is the totality right the satanic error my interpretation is the totality it's like oh really is it hmm good luck with that i'm super excited to talk to you about the definitions of god and we'll get to that at some point so it would be like imagine if you have an and an upside down ice cream cone so it looks like this i did not expect you to say that all right if you look at it from the bottom it's a circle if you look at it from the tops also so if you look at it from the side it's a triangle if you look at it from let's say over here or over here it looks like a teardrop and so people when they're describing god what i think they're trying to do is it's an extremely it may be the most common you know people say the brain is the most complicated perhaps god is perhaps that's one of the definitions of god but maybe it's not that either way god is complicated and so to say that well if you look across religions it's contradictory therefore what's being described can't exist or only one of them can be correct perhaps no i'm not ecumenical enough to say they're all correct in their own manner i'm not under a tree meditating with with flowers saying that everyone's correct though that may actually be the case i'm saying that just because something is contradictory doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore it it may be akin to different perspectives on the same object i don't know if you've heard of m theory it's a form of string theory string theory says this because there are five different flavors there's type two a two b and so on and it's actually posited that they're all not admirations of the same phenomenon but actually different perspectives of the same phenomenon like you touch that this is obvious for people to understand where the old refrain if you touch an elephant's ear touch an elephant's tail touch an elephant and they're all described okay so this is obvious to some people i'm wondering if well i'm not wondering i have a i have a distinct feeling the different descriptions of god even there's so many contradictory statements between the east and the west about god and how are so the east so this is look they're suffering in life there's also extreme grace and love in life too but one of the one of the solutions is act right so don't don't lie and then let's say that's the west's answer then the other answer is to realize that the suffering is illusory so to do away with the coin so one is that the coin look there's a good side and a bad side so choose the good that's the west and the east would say well realize that there is no coin and that's another solution and perhaps somehow they're the same solution i've heard you also i've heard you talk about stumbling uphill and what lies at the top of the hills maximal responsibility is it is that all that lies at the top of the hill or is it also is it also warmth and forgiveness and grace and are those the same okay how are those the same okay let's let's think about this yeah i think well the responsibility in some sense is is to lift that load up the hill you know that doesn't mean that it's responsibility that's at the top of the hill ah okay in the in the west i mean in some ways christ is represented as taking the responsibility for all the sins of mankind unto himself right well that's responsibility and look to the degree that each of us are trying to sort out in our own souls complex problems that bedevil other people we're doing that in a low resolution form right we're taking the fragility and errors and malevolence of mankind onto ourselves and trying to sort that out and that's meaningful although it's also extremely burdensome and you know it can kill you it can crush you and so the responsibility has to be tempered in a variety of ways to make it even bearable um you know one of the things that's so interesting about the christian story in my estimation is that that responsibility is so overwhelming that you know it it was even daunting for god himself so that's built into the story and that's certainly worth thinking about you know what's at the top well you did we we can we can we can sort of we can hit at it jung talked about that process that you described of viewing something from multiple different perspectives he he technically called that circumambulation it was the attempt to yeah exactly to view something very complicated like take snapshots of it from a whole bunch of different perspectives and this is partly why very rationally minded people who like to walk through something logically find jung hard to well tolerate even because that isn't how he thinks he thinks in this circumambulatory manner well think of it this way and think of it this way and here's another viewpoint and this and and so forth and then you read that it's like having an impressionist painting cohere in your mind into a hole it's like all of a sudden you go whap oh i see what he's talking about and that's an overwhelming experience i mean i really experienced that reading ion which is an unbelievably terrifying book and it's so brilliant it's it's just it hasn't been unpacked at all into our culture it's terrifying because well young is the only thinker i've ever seen who you know we hypothesized earlier in some sense that that artistic intuition lays out the map for the development of propositional thinking well you'll trace the development of that intuitive pattern seeking imagination back like 3 000 years that's partly why he talks about astrology so if if when we looked up in the night sky let's see prior to the development of of astronomy what we saw we didn't know what we were looking at right it filled us with awe but we didn't know what we were looking at so we populated the sky with figures of our imagination the better that's the constellations and it was a way of orienting ourselves so if you look at astrology um psychologically what you have is a vast storehouse of the contents of the human imagination now in astrology there was the idea of a certain kind of progression through the eons well jung believed that the fantasy that underlied astrology was so deep that it had sketched out the map for the for the trail that we're actually walking down no well so the artists have into well the artists have intuitions about what's coming so they're the first the first people in the unexplored territory and then the more propositional philosophers and such and the scientists they fill in the details but the the trailblazing has already been done by the imaginative and the intuitive right right an eye on you it was sorry young tracks the contents of that imagination back several thousand years and also lays out something like a scheme for the future so for example he believed that this is so strange man he believed that the idea that there were wise men who saw a star that signified christ's birth was actually a reference to the astrological idea that something new would be born at the dawn of the ancient age of pisces pisces well because they were interpreters of the stars so pisces pisces is a constellation that's characterized by a fish going in one direction and a fish going in the other jung was very interested in the use of fish symbolism in christianity he associated that with the astrological imagination he also believed that the 2000 year period from christ's birth roughly to now was characterized by two ions one which was explicitly christian that's the fish moving in one direction and the other which led to the development of empirical science was an antithesis and that that had been foreshadowed by the by this by this symbolism which was part of the intuitive discovery of the of that which was yet to come that's only part of the argument and it's an unbelievably profound book and it's terrifying once you understand what he's talking about and i've never seen anyone criticize it who actually understood it you know almost all the criticisms i've seen of jung and his thinking it's like no you don't you're not hitting the target there buddy he's asking questions that you don't even know need to be asked so you know where you're not in you're not in the ball game so yeah in any case um the more scientific minded people yeah well the more propositionally minded people see jung had a problem with the propositional universe he said yeah well there's a gap between what we know and the unknown per se well what fills that gap well dreams dreams the imagination imagery it's the it's at the boundary of propositional thought and it it's between us and what we absolutely don't know and the visionary artists operate in the domain of imagination and pave the path for the propositional types and think about the relationship say between dostoevsky and nietzsche nietzsche was much more propositional than dostoevsky but dostoevsky fundamentally is deeper now he's not as clear right that's the trade-off everything in nietzsche is in dostoyevsky and moore is in dostoyevsky and nietzsche himself knew that i mean he he was no when it came to appreciation let's say of works of the imagination but that's a good way of thinking and then you see this too i saw this great lecture by jonathan pajot which i'm going to put up on my youtube channel where he spent about 20 minutes explaining the meaning of an orthodox icon that showed a serpent it i don't want to get into it's too complicated but there's so much in that image you just can't believe it and you think well how did it all get there and it's it's akin to the question you asked about the mathematician it's like who who has plumbed the depths of the human souls no one where do these ideas come from well they appear in my head you think that's an explanation the ideas appear in where in your head exactly what do you mean by your head do you mean physically like what do you mean well you don't know what you mean and god only knows where ideas come from and to think that they just spring fully formed out of the void without a huge developmental history is naive in the extreme yeah it's like who built who built the sistine chapel was it michelangelo not who built who painted and well in some sense yes but also his he came from a myriad of people before him and not only that but the bible and also thousands and thousands of years before to meet these scientists who like to like i'm not trying to demean scientists in any way i mean they're rationally atheistic-minded scientists and i'm strong-manning them when i'm saying that so let me just pick someone kraus so kraus to to pick on krauss krauss would he looks a phenomenon an extremely deathless manner now obviously he doesn't but what i mean is it's almost like someone who's at the top of the trees and they're so far up that they don't realize that there's roots beneath them that they've forgotten that there's roots and they think that that they don't need it they dislike what well that's part of this that's right that's exactly that's part of the see kraus is a great physicist and and um but there's a lot of what he does that he regards as self-evident and and is never questioned and it's sort of a precondition for what he he does as a physicist because you know if you're a physicist you're off doing physics you're not questioning your presumptions except maybe in the domain of physics but a lot of what he regards as self-evident just simply isn't self-evident it's not and and that's a real problem when it comes to discussions about what's real and the you brought up an issue a couple of issues earlier that that are really worth returning to you know one issue is what is the one that unites the many and you might say well we don't need one that unites the many we can have a diverse range of values let's say it's well then you have the problem of conflict confusion and anxiety plus hopelessness because you don't really have a goal it's not it's not like that polytheism let's say is without a cost it's it's it's fragmentary and it causes social havoc because person a will pursue value a and person b will pursue value b and that's okay if they're united under a higher order structure that unites them in some sense but it's not okay at all it's it's the situation in the desert when moses is leading his people away from from egypt right it's the central organizing principle was the egyptian totalitarian state it dissolved and what happens is this descent into a fragmentation and that's extremely dangerous it's not the promised land that's for sure so the question is well what's the one that unites the many that's the central religious question now so then and but and can't you say that the one that unites the many is the most real well then you're in the domain of definition right at that point it starts to become like a definition rather than yeah that's why when you when you ask people to define well what is real it just becomes tautological not that by the way not the tautologies are trivial so for example there's chris langan he has one of the highest iqs recorded along with savant i believe he builds his theory he builds his theory of everything in some sense from a super tautology that is that is it's it's a it's an appetite that's god's definition of himself right i am that i am that's god's definition of himself in the bible yeah okay i think should talk about the definitions of god this is extremely interesting so you mentioned what we tried at one to one part right well it's well that's a good question you know i think it's the spirit that guides our sequential transformations upward to a higher and higher form of unity and maybe a higher and higher form of delight and love do you think that we're all god i'm sure you've heard some people say that we're god but we've forgotten that we're god i i can't answer a question like that exactly i mean i believe that the idea that we have a divine spark within is an extraordinarily beautiful poetic and necessary idea and i think that if you act like that to yourself and other people that things get radically interesting interesting and deeply meaningful around you and it seems to be a very good a good proposition to guide your actions you know because what we're hoping you and me may be to the degree that we're being good is that the spirit of truth in you is speaking to the spirit of truth in me and so and that is a reflection of the presumption upon which western civilization is based explicitly let's say not to say that it doesn't permeate other cultures but it's that spirit of truth that animates us and that redeems us and our societies as well and hopefully that's expressed in the quality of our speech when we're free to speak and so is that divine well is that divine well i don't think it's separable from thought itself in some sense it might not be separable from consciousness itself is that divine well you know whenever you have that is that this it's an equation right is one plus one equal to two well one of the answers i know each of each of those claims on both on both sides of the equation are equally dubious in relationship to one another because what you're trying to do is to say is god real well what you say what you're not saying is we know what real is and it's this and god does god fit into that category yes also we know what god is in order to assess it well because you could reverse it and say is real god it's the same question right it's the same question so here's one of this this is something i heard from tyler goldstein who has his own theory of everything he said the ordinary ordinarily here's how it works we look for we have a definition and then we look for evidence and then dismiss what we've just defined if we don't find the evidence he said perhaps what we should do when it comes to god is instead of instead of looking for god and then not finding it and then saying god doesn't exist you use the fact that you didn't find evidence of god as an indication that you should alter your definition of god yeah well that's that's sure that that's a perfectly approach to that problem right obviously there's some this yeah however now that's a good that's a really good observation right to me it shows you how tricky questions like that are right it's like well maybe you're looking in the wrong place maybe you formulated your search incorrectly like you don't know because let's say you're aiming at the highest reality right it's like you're aiming at the highest reality well how do you know you have the question formulated properly because if you if you did well you'd have already found it and so you might say well does the highest reality exist yes we we're back to the problem of the one that unites the many yeah yeah i see i was downtown in toronto and i i just talked to someone and he's he's this jamaican guy so if you've well probably won't happen now it's too cold he was cutting coconuts and selling it and i said hey by the way what's your name he said kurt i'm like oh my god i rarely meet people whose name's name is kurt and he's from the caribbean and i walked away and i remember thinking uh he has my name and then i remember stopping thinking no he's much older i have his name then i thought probably what's better to say is we share the same name and then i thought ah okay what is it that we all share and is that somehow related is that not synonymous with god what is it that we all share now here's something else that i was thinking about when we right now we're speaking to one another in podcast form so in some sense we're copying this you can think of this archetypically in some sense we're copying podcasts by doing so when one is playing rock music one is copying rock in some because no one speaks with a twang where do you develop that you're copying something then i thought well how far can you take that when you're doing art in general what are you copying okay how far can that be taken how about right man now you've got exactly it right how about if you're simply living laying there what are you copying is by simply existing and living is that a reflection of that what you're copying is god's essence in some manner that is abstracted completely i don't think there's any difference i don't think there's any difference between imitation and worship they're the same thing that's why the eastern orthodox types lay such emphasis on the imitation of christ well you should worship well pajo he says well that means enthusiastically celebrate right raised to the highest position well then you imitate that you imitate that which is of most value you imitate hopefully right what else would you want to do have you thought much about self-fulfilling beliefs you'd have to be worse okay here's the reason why i say that imagine now i i believe you outlined this too we've talked plenty about maps so let's imagine it's literally like a map just for simplicity you you construct the world so you have a world view and it looks like a top-down view of a of when you're buying an apartment and you see the ground layout so imagine that you're constructing a world view when it comes to self-fulfilling beliefs that's extremely interesting to me because it means there are parts of reality on that map that whatever you project to be there will be there so let's say i think there's a toilet in there you're right if you don't think there's a toilet in there there's there's not so there are parts of your map that are always correct no matter what you think about yeah well okay oh well okay i would i would turn that a little bit i would say this is something kierkegaard talked about at least to some degree imagine that there are only things that you can find out by doing them so there are there you can't validate the hypothesis you can't test the hypothesis without acting it out so let's say you decide that you're going to tell the truth well how what evidence is there that you should do that well who knows there's evidence that you should lie it works in the short term it might be to your benefit in the short term i mean maybe if you deceive some girl she'll sleep with you you know it's like why not do that well you can't collect the facts you know in some sense no not in this simple manner well let's say you decide to tell the truth as carefully as you can well then you're going to have a certain kind of life and you're not going to have that life unless you do that and so you won't even get access to the data unless you take the steps and that's partly why faith is necessary especially in an endeavor like that you have to decide at some fundamental level right you know maybe you're scattered all over the place it's interesting when christ comes back in the book of revelation and he's the judge so separating the damned from the saved let's say um he says something very strange he says uh if you are neither hot nor cold i will spit you out of my mouth he actually says vomit it's so it's a disgust reaction and it's it's it's this idea that it's the worst thing is to play both sides against the middle you know that sometimes you'll lie and sometimes you'll tell the truth you know you won't commit to something because you want it both ways and that's the worst possible well so let's say you commit to lies well maybe you'll find out pretty quickly that that's a hell of a thing to do and learn what if you don't commit not sorry sorry yeah yeah go ahead i was gonna say what if you don't commit not because you believe that you know what's what's correct and you'd like to lie about because you simply don't know yeah well that's what you want yeah yeah yeah that's that's a different that's psychologically that's a whole different thing i would say uh the real damage comes when you know what you should do and then you just decide not to do it anyways yeah you know evaluate your conscience yeah yes it is the same thing and if you practice that you're you're going to be in hell and you're probably going to drag a fair number of people along with you if you have your druthers so i feel comfortable speculating because i don't mind sorry to enter i'm so sorry that i keep interrupting oh man it's my you're not don't be sorry about it okay let me say that's fine let me say that it's fine i i also i don't know if it's true that you temporarily get what you want per se when you lie and the reason is it depends on what you want now obviously everything depends on everything you can always say that it depends on so and so but the reason i say that is that it's maritricious in some sense you think you want object x and then it turns out that you don't when you get it so i remember in pirates of the caribbean i could be misremembering this but there are some gold i think i'm completely [Music] generalizing this but let's imagine there's some gold gem that they wanted and it glows and this guy's like there's only one in the world that's unique i want this he eventually goes through this whole journey he finds it and then he says oh you know what then he's happy until he gets to this island where there's millions it just as far as the eye can see there are these gold gems and it just stops he's like why did i go through all this for that and in some sense i'm wondering hmm this is the majority of religious texts telling us you think you want so and so what you actually want is this and in that way we can say that even the atheist we can even say that the atheist ultimately wants god even the serial killer ultimately wants god well that's it that's yeah yeah they're distractions i can't wander down that road with you at the moment because i'm getting tired but um i'd like to say one thing about that deceit issue again and maybe we could close if you lie to a girl and she sleeps with you sure why aren't you a rapist and is that actually what you wanted right because you're you're it's false pretenses like if you could get away with it yeah well so then all of a sudden you don't have well maybe what you want in your soul of souls is you know this the sexual encounter you'd have in paradise you know you want love you want companionship you want the maternal embrace you want eroticism you want deep personal contact you want eye to eye communication that's all part of this fantasy you know then you deceive to get it and then you get it well no you don't because you're a deceitful rapist and so what do you get well you get the corruption of your soul and the the contamination of the thing that you want and need most desperately and that the entire human endeavor depends upon and that's probably a good place to close it's really good talking to you man yeah yeah it's great talking to you now man i wanted to talk about your film sure sure okay i wanted to or maybe we do next point you know what i mean yes right exactly that's another aspect we can talk about how much of reality is fractal like where the examination of any element if you pursue it far enough is the examination of the whole now i know cantor believed that by studying infinity mathematically he was studying the mind or studying god per se and some people think why are you wasting your time if you're someone who cares about the good why are you caring about mathematics or physics or well hey man maybe if you're truthfully exploring something you're trying and i i take questions to your not questions i take exception to one of your rules which is tell the truth i like the i like the the codicil which is or at least not lie but i would reverse that i'd say don't lie and try to tell the truth because it's much easier to feel like you're telling the truth when you're not you can trick yourself and i think the majority of the time we think we're telling the truth isn't and that's another reason i pause because yeah well you just don't start the course you start by stopping lying yeah yeah you're right it's not easy to discern what is actually that what i think and what's a reflex that just comes to me so i'm trying to make sure well anyway we can talk about free well another time it was really good talking to you man yeah it was great talking to you with your continued endeavors and and with your podcast and i i really liked your idea about not saying the same thing twice the same way that's that's a really interesting mental habit disciplinary habit that's smart like what's what's 4 to the power 4 256 okay so how do you know that you can memorize it but another way is that you can go well what's 4 to the power 5. well that's 2 to the power 10 that's 10 24 if you're a computer scientist you know that because you deal with bits and then you can say well what's 2 to the so what's 4 to the power of 3 64. so you can bound it from each side 4 to the power 3 4 to the power 5 and then you get a better understanding of what it means to be four to the power four so the more even if it's slight alterations and you're of saying the same phenomenon of sorry of trying to describe the same phenomenon you get a better understanding of it and when you're talking about something so complex i never give the same lecture twice yeah and that's not easy man no but it's uh it's pretty damn entertaining i'll tell you yeah so before we go i'm curious why it is that you why is it that you do these podcasts what are you trying to accomplish with them so one is obviously you're trying to learn and obviously you've attained some level of fame and wealth so it's not as if you want more perhaps you do i mean we can't discount selfish motivations but what is the reason that you hope the good reason in you is to have conversations like this and to share them with as many people as possible in the hopes that we'll build better people and not burn the world down yeah yeah some people say well why is it that i'm focusing on the left and you mentioned it's not see some people caught from the left called the right reactionary well so it seems like perhaps what you're doing on the extreme left you can even if you feel like the right is more damaging you don't think you're provoking the right also the left is more amenable to reason and at least colloquially it's more amenable to reasons so i thought perhaps i should pursue that and i'm more interested the right is blatant in the racism so it's like well that's a five minute film if i'm to analyze the right and yeah so i'll just i'll let people know about if they'd like to see more about me they can visit theories of everything so you can just type that into youtube there are conversations much like this jordan where i'm super so fascinated no i wouldn't say my motivations are are pure i'm fascinated by consciousness physics free will and god and and exploring them with technical depth as much as i can and not desprising like most people i think that disparagement is what well in many ways is holding us back so i'm trying to bring some rigor some exactitude to it because not that's actually well we can talk about that and then for better left unsaid if people want to see you can go to better left and said film.com that i try to bring some of the same analytical framework to exploring the concept of not exploring the question of when does the left go too far and it's such an incomplete film i disavow it in many ways because it's it's so incomplete but it's almost like homework i have to submit it at some point yep jordan absolutely thank you man ciao man really good talking to you it flew by and uh you're very articulate thoughtful and you're very careful with your words and so good for you man yeah i oh thank you that's a huge compliment coming from you good to talk to you take care man [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 609,749

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, antifa jordan peterson, jordan peterson far left, far left jordan peterson, athiesm jordan peterson, atheism jordan peterson, Jordan Peterson Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky Jordan Peterson, Far left ideologues, Far left ideologies

Id: LbZ9OxrLTVM

Length: 112min 44sec (6764 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/leifericm]

Hi u/Curtdbz! Great interview. I would like you to consider an interview with progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann. He’s written about 20 books, most on politics but the first several on ADD/ADHD.
I think since he’s a progressive, he would have many interesting perspectives and answers to the questions you asked Jordan. I would have him watch your doc, which I still need to watch as well. Thank you!

[u/curtdbz]

Woah.

[u/Aristox]

What an amazing conversation. Really hope they do another one soon

[u/-not-my-account-]

♥️

[u/Drokk88]

Wait. Is this sub not about debunking so-called "gurus" like JPB?

Edit, I actually thought I was in a different sub my bad.

[u/[deleted]]

I haven’t met with this drew peterson guy now have I