Jordan B Peterson on Confronting Value, Meaning, & More | Jordan Peterson on The Origins Podcast

[Laughter] [Music] hi welcome to the origins podcast i'm your host lawrence krauss i'm extremely excited about this episode with jordan peterson jordan and i did an episode of his podcast some time ago during which he peppered me with questions and we decided we'd do a second podcast where i could return the favor for the most part and in this discussion that we had i was able to probe a lot of aspects that i've tried to understand about jordan's writing and his thinking some of which i found difficult to appreciate and we talked about his own background as interest in becoming a psychologist and also studies in addiction and personality and then we moved to a topic that we both decided we wanted to focus on which was that in some sense the nature of meaning based on his book maps of meaning and i wanted to parse some of the ideas that he he talks about there a little more carefully which we did and talked about things from existential threats to values and what you mean by values to the nature of narrative and life as storytelling uh it was a wide-ranging discussion including also discussing such things as how to do research in a time era of pc commandments that make that research difficult i particularly enjoyed the discussion and i think many of you who might have listened to jordan before we'll find a new side of jordan here as we try to explore uh in depth the ideas behind what he's somewhat he talks about and and where he's coming from so uh i hope you enjoy this as much as i did for those of you who are watching this on youtube please uh consider subscribing to our youtube channel because most the people who watch it on youtube actually don't subscribe it helps us but it also helps you because you can get notices of upcoming podcasts as well and as you may know the podcast is produced by the origins project foundation which is a non-profit foundation designed to encourage communication about science and important ideas so if you want to support the podcast in another way please consider becoming a subscriber on patreon which which will support the foundation directly and you'll also be able to see uh and watch all of the episodes without any uh advertisements as well either way i hope you enjoy the podcast and i hope you enjoy in particular this podcast with jordan peterson well welcome jordan it's great to have you now on my podcast after i was on yours it's really great to have a chance to talk to you again well thank you i'm really looking forward to it and i hope you are i i should say that this has perhaps been for me one of the most difficult and exasperating infuriating uh preparations for podcast i've had to do i have enough notes here for about 21 hours we won't go more than two but i know i have a lot because i there's so much to parse and so what was what made it difficult and exhausted well it's kind of a compliment it is it is and it well there's you know i wanna i i wanna give a preface because i wanna be in in in in uh full disclosure about how i've come to understand you uh but both before and after and after our last meeting um i i i'm often certain i know for a long time when i've read you that i'm not sure i understand what you're saying just in the reading i've had a hard time understanding what you're saying release whether it's me or that or the or the work and before i met you there's a line from the dick van dyke show from carl reiner that i always remember where he said one on the surface seems vague is in reality meaningless yeah yeah and i and i i've and when i read read a lot of the stuff i thought well this is vague i don't exactly know where it's coming from and as i read you and now i've been reading in preparation for this i've been reading you in depth i've read i read you before i alternate between this sense of some things i think are just clearly true but they kind of seem like truisms like i often wonder whether when i first my first reaction of 12 rules for life was maybe it should be 12 pages i mean the 10 commandments was one tablet and and and and whether one you know it's a long book and you talk you you know you write and you write you write a lot it's just the property of the way right and that and and and um and then sometimes there were illusions and discussions that i really couldn't comprehend or or i thought were vague sometimes there were insights and there are insights that seem incredibly deep and profound and true that that you're reaching towards and i find them fascinating and sometimes there are statements that i disagree with completely so i alternate between all of that and it's been and it's and it's a fascinating way to go i was naturally skeptical before i before we had our dialogue i want to tell you a skeptical physicist yes really exactly but i was skeptical of you because i couldn't understand a lot of it and and and and um there were lots of there were lots of reasons but i but primarily was that carl reiner quote that kept me in the back of my head but after our last dialogue i totally changed my view because you your questions were deep and interesting and curious and what i became convinced of uh was that you are a man who seriously wants to understand the world and engage in conversation and i and it switched and my respect for you just went through the roof as a result because that that conversation demonstrated to me that you're earnest and serious in your desire to understand the world and then i decided to look at what you wrote in a different way and try and seriously understand it so that's um uh you know i hadn't expected that and the strong connection that i do feel uh as an academic and as a human being towards you which is which is a wonderful thing because i love i love being wrong and or at least i love having my viewpoints change and they certainly did after our discussion so i wanted to in full disclosure i want to say i came into our first discussion as a complete skeptic and more so maybe maybe even uh suspicious and then um and then um then it changed but um i'm very glad to hear that and and it is good to it is good to be wrong and find that out unless everything in your life is so perfect that it's clear that you know everything and you know yeah yeah well we now the other thing i want to do i want to give you a chance to ask some questions too because i enjoy your questions and i know in some of our email dialogues back and forth between there's some i know there's some things you've been reading that you wanna about cosmology they wanna talk about so i wanna i'll give you a chance to to ask some of those after uh in the latter part or maybe if there's a relevant point in the middle you can bring it up and feel free to ask the question in the middle as far as i'm concerned i know the things about fine tuning and yeah and and and our universe before our universe there's a number of things also i want to for the listeners i want to preface this because what what we discussed you asked me really the said the thing you want to discuss with me was mostly maps of meaning and that's what i have now focused on and in particular what you suggested i i really parsed carefully was uh from the new book beyond order rule 11. and so that's what i've done just so you're aware i've tried to try so the discussion i want to have and you've written a lot of different things will be primarily about those things but of course it'll it'll overlap with other other things but that's where the the discussion's going to focus on and can you remind me what rule 11 was i'm having some memory troubles so that's all right um i can never remember what i write the day after i do either and the thing is about rule 11 like many things in that when i read you is that the title of rule 11 it only by the end of it i kind of vaguely understood where the title came from rule 11 really seems to me to be a summary of maps of meaning in fact but it's do not allow yourself to become resentful deceitful or arrogant oh yes yes and really that and those and as you and as i now understand understanding from having read you that the sources of those of those three ills are really related to the sources of the problems of dealing with the the the meaning the map of meaning in a sense and so that's why it was a good place i think for you to direct me to uh yes i remember why now yep okay um but before before we get to those because it is an origins podcast i want to go into your origins because uh i know some of the things but i have some questions about this so you know i know you're very interested in fact in some sense in my mind origins i mean uh i mean maps of meaning is really about the origins of the psyche in some sense but i want to understand the origins of your psyche first so that's where i want to go born in edmonton yes okay and um what what what what influence did what did your parents do my dad was a teacher of one and my mother was a nurse trained as a nurse and then she worked as a librarian in that was mostly her career was the librarian at the local college and my dad was a teacher for most of the time i was at home uh a high school teacher or a junior high teacher or elementary school teacher grade six he was the vice principal of our local elementary school and he taught me when i was in grade six some classes oh that must have been an interesting experience himself it was extremely interesting both for good and not good yeah i know i can imagine it's difficult i i once taught my daughter took a summer course in physics uh um and and i taught her and it was really fascinating for me because i saw a very different side of her in class she was very different as a student than she was as a daughter i imagine your father was a very different teacher than he was as a father or maybe no no he was pretty much well i'll tell you a story about my dad in grade six and so you know by grade six kids are pretty noisy and horrible and yeah they get really bad in grade seven but by grade six they're already pretty bad and my homeroom teacher was not my dad um he was the prince my homeroom teacher was the principal my dad taught math and for for at least 10 minutes before he walked in to teach our math class no one said anything they were quiet yeah my dad was not someone you messed around with and so and he was like that at home too like he's a tough guy my dad and and and he's a good teacher he's a very good teacher he taught me to read when i was very young and spent a tremendous amount of time with me but he was not someone you you trifled with lightly and all the kids knew that he had that kind of authority that's rare actually but necessary for teachers and he didn't really have to ever resort to any kind of discipline other than that underlying threat of absolute mayhem that was there all the time and so and so that that had some trouble for me because some of this kids didn't really like him even though they respected him and now and then they took that out on me but you know whatever there's all sorts of things that happen when you're a kid yeah character it's all character building and as we'll talk about both you and i agree that you know some bad things happening is an important part of your life and and uh and that you shouldn't be shielded from it did did so was did your dad sort of practice tough love i mean because i kind of you know that sort of in some sense one gets a sense that he didn't suffer fools gladly okay and so so yes i would say he did do that he had very high high standards and um although he's also extremely good with little kids my dad was really had a great hand with kids from say well two to twelve he was he wasn't so fond of teenagers and you know we understand why well yes yes but he's great with little kids he was he's still alive and he's great with mike he was great with my kids too oh that's great so so um he i don't know he has this genuine unbelievably genuine love for little kids you know and and it's a cool thing to see in someone who's so fundamentally tough you know my dad's a hunter and a trapper and and uh sharpshooter and uh wow uh canoer and yeah so he's he's the sort of guy did he take you hunting yeah i was too soft-hearted really to hunt i did trap with him but even that because i'm temperamentally i'm very high in compassion and so that sort of thing was hard on me we didn't see exactly eye to eye temperamentally there he taught me to shoot i can shoot pretty well not as well as him he he was a provincial level uh shooter and our house was full of guns it's like 400 rifles and yeah my wife's father was like that he taught her how he had she had guns from the time she was young he taught her how to shoot and how to take care of them responsibly and and i guess she she went shooting with him for ducks but she drew the line she didn't want to do dear eventually couldn't do that did did do you think you know i'm that influence of that tough love i mean when when i hear in some sense one even before i knew much about you i knew of in some sense you were preaching tough love in a way you know man up you know basically get over it get over it get over it and just move on well you know it's not really true what i was pointing out more was the danger of regarding yourself as a victim and exactly a lot of that was it a lot of that was influenced by my reading of freud in particular because freud was very concerned about the pathology of the devouring mother and you see that in jung as well but but freud really came up with that insight to begin with and that an excess of compassion is destructive and i see that manifesting itself in victim mentality and what that does to people and i also see it as a manifestation of the female proclivity towards authoritarianism now it's funny to think of that as a manifestation of compassion but we don't know much about female political pathology right because females haven't been involved in in the political sphere for that long and but democracy in the ancient world yes yes yes but to think that there's no tilt towards pathology that's specifically feminine is well that's naive it's foolish and to not think that an excess of compassion can be a catastrophe is to be blind and so and the freudians were very i think it's a quote from freud or at least one of his astute followers that the good mother necessarily fails and so what i see so it's not so much tough love i would say is that to the proper balance for a child is something like an embrace right that's the maternal embrace and that's absolutely necessary and encouragement to transform and that's more the paternal territory now both parents can play a role in those two territories i'm speaking more symbolically in some sense but you know women are tilted towards compassion temperamentally they're higher in trait compassion than men on average um there's individual variability that's quite substantial variability my wife is more more encourages uh encouraging of of transformation and i'm well she's also probably more compassionate too than me and she probably has both traits more than me yeah well i'm i at least in terms of agreeableness and probably negative emotion i have quite a feminine temperament and so i'm probably more agreeable than my wife i think when we took my personality test that was the case and so we're a bit mixed on that front uh when my when kids used to come over and visit my kids um we used to have a talk with the kids when they come over teenagers is like we're really happy you're here and and you're welcome here but if you do anything stupid and we never see you again that would be just fine so and that worked pretty well and when they first came to my house they were always more scared of me but after they came about five times they were more scared of my wife so there you go you can see that now let me let me the other question you know that comes to mind when i hear about your father and i then blend honestly go this way and i'm certainly not blind trying to psychoanalyze you because i couldn't but um did he affect did he did his teaching style affect your teaching style you've been a teacher for a long time did do you my understanding is that you're not a teacher that that your students are afraid of rather they they think you're rather compassionate but but uh do you think they were quiet before they came into your classroom that's a good question i don't know if my dad's teaching style overtly affected me i think all the interactions he had with me when he was teaching me to read did and i think his attitude towards learning did and his and his fundamental sense of encouragement like i always knew and this made me very rare among my friends by the way because most of them have pretty pathological relationships with their fathers where i grew up in northern alberta my dad i knew he always had my back even when we were at odds with one another fundamentally and even when he was displeased with me it was almost always you know barring human frailty because he was disappointed that i wasn't living up to the high standards he expected of me and they were high and and sometimes i think they were perhaps unreasonably high it's very hard to say because it's not that easy to figure out how to balance that embracing compassion with that the compliment that high standards truly are right i mean that's a tough thing to get right and now my mom i really i always got along really well with my mom and i could make her laugh she's a lovely person she's very easy to be around and so so i was fortunate my parents because the toughness of my father was quite nicely counterbalanced by the warmth of my mother and so you know i was fortunate in that regard and many others but certainly that now you eventually became an academic and a practicing psychologist a clinical psychologist did they encourage did they have well did they encourage your reading your academics oh yes okay oh yes books were very important in my family and i learned when i was four like books were at the top of the list and i used to virtually every night when i was 10 9 10 11 i read a book a day science fiction my neighbor across the alley had a huge science fiction collection and he used to just let me go in there and take like 15 books and then i'd bring them back in two weeks and take 15 more and so i was reading a book a day up until i think all the way through high school i started reading more literature in junior high a librarian there who was a pretty educated woman by the standards of our our hometown sort of tilted me towards genuine literature and that's when i started reading i would say seriously and so i was 13 when that happened so but yes books were very important in our household you read science fiction literature did you read any much non-fiction or was primarily fiction when you were younger it was mostly fiction when i was younger yeah yeah no i didn't switch to non-fiction until i well i after i read dostoevsky when i was in my early 20s almost all fiction seemed sort of bloodless and but also by that time i was starting my research career and i got a lot more interest in non-fiction i also think that's a maturation issue and i'm not saying that in like in a negative sense towards fiction is that at some point it just didn't have the same attraction for me um as non-fiction started to and so yeah no i know the feeling i mean i i'm trying to relate it because i i think it's incredibly important and useful i i mean i read well i had more time it seemed to me then but i read that's all i just read an incredible amount when i was younger all the time that's what i did during the summer even during just reading it was a way to get away from the family too i just would immerse myself in reading and you're right it was mostly um well there was some science fiction and and and literature but i i the one of the reasons i asked you this is because it's not surprising to me that because in some sense you you're arguing that that all of understanding comes from stories in a way yeah yeah well that's the thing about surprising that you were you know that your own understanding began with stories i think psychologically it seems it makes sense yeah well and also that switch to non-fiction let's say did dovetail with my i started to be much more analytic in relationship to fiction at some point especially when i started thinking as a psycho clinical psychologist and a research psychologist i got more interested in well oh yeah these are stories well stories are a particular kind of information okay well what are they exactly what's going on there psychologically and i was doing a lot of reading at that point too at the neurophysiology level and and and animal behavioral biology essentially a lot of it about perception and i came to realize that the most advanced uh researchers into perception were essentially making the argument that we actually look at the world through a story and that really that was really quite the key insight i really developed that inside what i was reading jeffrey gray's book the neuropsychology of anxiety and he doesn't ever say that we perceive through a story but the frame that he used to describe perception was a narrative frame and so that was extremely interesting to me it was a key insight well yeah no well that's i wonder where you got them i mean that's again that seems to be essential one of your central thesis is that the world is seeing we see the world of stories and that's what determines their meaning and we'll get into that but but i i it's interesting that it came that realization came later but your own interest in stories was really generic i mean it was not by nature you were interested in stories as a young person yeah well and it's so interesting how powerful that interest is among young people i mean it's easy to teach a kid anything if you embed it in a story and then even later when i was writing like when i was writing my more popular books i also knew by that time technically that facts inside stories were much more effective and so the story well partly i think because we also remember in stories and and stories are about action and we're really interested in action yeah well now the um it's interesting because it's kind of sad in a way that people get my i remember my daughter stopped being interested in reading because she was forced to read books that she went in in i guess probably middle school but read books that she hated in school and and and and yeah taught by people who hated books yeah and and and her own love of therefore own love of of reading is something you do as a or stories of something you do for pleasure you know went away and that was that was uh that's sad i remember in grade 8 this just drove me crazy this i usually read the whole language arts curriculum for the year in the first day oh really wow and so yeah yeah it was i was very fast reader and i remember we had a teacher in grade eight and i said i told her i think two days in i said already read all these books what should i do she said read them again oh god i thought yeah oh god is right like in a major way it's really that's your bloody attitude you can't give me another book so i used to put books behind the books i was supposed to be reading and just read them and [Laughter] yeah there's a delinquent reading that was my specialty yes right there's i remember that reminds me of a famous um uh uh i don't know whether it was from a movie or whatever about a kid who you know normally they're they've got playboy behind their their math book but he bet basically he had his his serious books in behind playboy so yeah right right exactly um okay you went interestingly so your parents who encourage they did they encourage you to consider being an academic or they just you know you just go wherever you want it to yes follow whatever was yes yes now i was interested that you went to what looked like a community college before you went to university is that yes was that i'm surprised unless that was a normal trajectory where you're from it was well the normal trajectory where i was from was to drop out of school in grade nine and go work on oil rigs and so you know going to college it was expected in my family it was an implicit expectation that i would go to college university the the level that was different my dad and my mom both had bachelor's degrees and i don't think there was anybody in either of their family that had ever advanced past that and so that wasn't part of the landscape right and that wasn't for me even until i was through my degree i never considered going further i didn't really even in some sense i didn't really even understand the distinction between bachelor's master's and phd you know because i hadn't met anybody i don't think by that point that had a master's degree not not in fairview there might have been some but there weren't very many so fairview is a small town outside of edmonton is it 400 miles north yeah way outside oh it's i i thought you lived in edmonton so i okay yeah no no that makes much more sense then i was wondering why in a big city your father would be your teacher but if you're in a small town that often happens it was just scraped out of the prairie 50 years beforehand it was the end of the railway it was the northeast northernmost reach of the prairies and the last place settled likely really settled in north america okay so that makes more sense than that you would have gone to a community college first and and but both your parents had were obviously not from there they both had my neither my parents happened as it worked out have either got graduated high school um so but but your parents had both gone to university in alberta where they were from okay saskatchewan saskatchewan and then they moved up there to work they were yes okay um now so okay so they they said go what you want to do and then you took um but your interest psychology wasn't originally a case you studied political science in literature and um and there's a and you've you fell out of love with with political science i'm um i um i uh there's a there's a there's a discussion here somewhere in um in in in fact maps of meaning as you talk about losing interest in political science yeah well the thing is i was really interested in well i was interested in politics to begin with i ran for the vice presidency of the socialist party ndp in alberta when i was 14. oh really and yeah yeah i was quite quite engaged in politics when i was a kid and i was i've always considered in the back of my mind a political career but it all has always fought against i would say my more aesthetic and psychological interests and they've always won and with political science i when i went to that community college where i got a great education by the way the teachers were really good the profs were really good and they really we had little tiny seminars five or six people in the first year and oh they all love to teach i had like six great professors so it was wonderful it was wonderful man and i like political science to begin with because we were reading philosophical classics you know and but then as i advanced in political science there was this implicit assumption that people's values essentially that we were motivated by economic interest and i thought yeah but why are we motivated by economic interest i was interested in something under that that was never discussed by the political scientists their axiomatic presupposition was pseudo-marxist in some sense you know that our fundamental motivations are economic and that's true because we don't want to starve to death but but it's not wasn't true enough for me for the questions i was interested in and what i was really started to dominate my interest was war and atrocity and i just became obsessed by that now listen to me because what by the way what i'm going to do throughout this discussion if i can is i'm going to refer i'm not going to quote you on uh because then i will go on don't do that i am because then i'm going to ask you to explain to me what it means sometimes okay but but but but um but this early on in massive meaning you actually discussed this in a way that i think is relevant to understanding the importance of meaning for you said i could not believe this resonates with what you just said i could not believe and still do not believe that commodities natural resources for example had intrinsic and self-evident value in the absence of such value the worth of things had to be socially or culturally or even individually determined this act of determination appeared to me moral appeared to me to be a consequence of the moral philosophy adopted by the society culture or person in question what people valued economically merely reflected what they believed to be important this meant that my real that real motivation had to lie in the domain of value of morality the political scientists i studied did not see this and did not think was relevant well that when i read that of course that's a way better answer than what i gave you well sometimes when one writes things one thinks about them a little more carefully but but i find it enlightening because it's it not just because it reflects your view of political science but it clearly reflects the underlying view you're trying to get across in what you're saying in in what you're saying throughout master meaning as far as i can tell throughout everything that that that there is that that objects themselves have no meaning but we ascribe meaning to things and it's based on a variety of things which we're getting into some of which are cultural in in in in basis and so i was surprised i was interested to see that your your uh your disillusionment with with political science was due to the sum in some sense an emerging idea which probably wasn't even yet conscious in your mind that you eventually produced in maps of meaning and some of the other things you've been writing about yeah well i mean people obviously fight in wars sometimes over economic issues but they also fight wars over religious issues and they do that a lot more i think of course right and right now our political trouble in the west i believe is religious fundamentally and we can get into that what i mean by that because i mean that psychologically i i try not to actually speak religiously because i think it muddies the water most of the time i'd rather speak psychologically and we could get into that distinction too and anyways i had the sense that no there's something much deeper here underneath the surface which which the political scientists are treating as an axiomatic fact and not investigating so and then i well that's what led me into psychology really i was going to say eventually so you first but the first degree you did was political science right you did i did a three-year degree that was political science and literature then i worked for a year then i took nothing but psychology you decided yeah you came back i was impressed so you have two bas as it is yes yes rather than two bs's i guess yeah i probably have 10 of those um well yeah so i want to get to your emerging interest in psychology but you interested you said you were fascinated by war yet at the same time you said you're you you was more atrocity it was more of the nazi thing was really and yeah and then later that what happened in the soviet union in china but it was the it was the nazi concentration camp issue that really it just wouldn't go away from me it just and i don't know why like that happened at 13. though i wrote i remember i wrote an essay in grade 7 on the concentration camps and there was a jewish dentist in our town who had a tattoo from from the camps and he was my dentist and i had seen the tattoo and i asked him if i could talk to him about it he said no and you know fair enough but that interest was there at 13. wow so yeah and that's weird eh i mean who knows what what hooks you way down deep and where that comes from i mean part of it was you should know more than me yeah well our deepest intuitions they guide us rather than being under our control and they're deeply rooted in our temperament our biology and in things we certainly don't understand part of it was kind of an obsession about the cold war and thermonuclear catastrophe you know and that was pretty typical of my generation how old are you i'm a little older than you i'm 67 so i guess i'm five years older than you or something yeah same same thing though right and then and so that was always lurking in the background and my friends and i used to talk about that a fair bit and so but but and then i guess when i started thinking about that more deeply that led me into what had happened in world war ii and and then it was what happened in the camps essentia especially that tendency that proclivity to eradicate and i was interested in that psychologically not not politically precisely at the level of the individual and that's always been that's i think why i never did go after a political career i just got way more interested in the individual level of analysis now but you but interestingly of course you made as a number of people do um uh that you were and you you were sort of socialist and then moved away and you said you're conservative by nature interestingly you said that orwell influenced you in that regard but orwell also was fascinated by atrocity and yes and impacted so is that what attracted you orwell in the first place or or or not well part of i think what attracted me to orwell was that he's just such a great writer yeah he is he's such a great writer especially as an essayist non-fiction writer road to wig and pair is just a deadly book and it's the sort of book that's very attractive to intelligent socialists because like those working class people man you think your life is rough you should read those people had to like crawl to work underground in the coal mines in tunnels that they couldn't stand up straight in for two miles before they got to work yeah right so it's a it's an amazing book but orwell was a very astute critic of socialist thinking as well although he was also very sympathetic to it so i loved reading orwell and well interestingly i want to pick up on one thing which i read because i want you to have a chance to in some sense respond but um so you had said somewhere that orwell basically got you thinking about turned you off from socialism because he he became convinced he he basically convinced you that socialists themselves didn't care about poor people they just didn't like rich well look i i went to a lot of these ndp conventions new democratic party conventions and i had like a front row seat because the librarian was the wife of our mla our legislative assembly member he was the only socialist in alberta and the only person who was in opposition for like 15 years and he was voted in by the people in my constituency not because they were socialists but because he was really a good man okay and so i met the premier of saskatchewan i met ed broadbent who was the leader of the ndp in canada and labor leaders and and i got to sit and listen to them talk and sometimes sing old you know union songs and a lot of them were they were admirable people a lot of them and they really cared about the working class it wasn't it wasn't a facade and they were honest and i don't remember any of those discussions where i thought something was off but at the conventions they're often demonstrations and there are a lot of low-level activists of the sort who became woke the woke crowd later and i just kind of recoiled from them psychologically and then at the same time and i talk about this in maps of meaning a bit i was sitting on the board of governors at that local community community college and there was all these self-made guys there most of them were immigrants because there was an immigrant place and they were all conservative uh politically and temperamentally and i really respected them and so that really put a lot of existential angst into me because on the one hand you know intellectually i was attracted to the socialist ideas and maybe on compassionate grounds too who knows but then i had this countervailing tendency which was well yeah but i don't really like the activist types they really drive me crazy and i respect these guys so that was hard on me i didn't know exactly what to do and then well then what i did do is i realized that i didn't know anything that's what happened and that was my roommate who taught me that you know he he was he kicked around a lot he was a little older than me still a really good friend of mine he's tough guy came from an even smaller town than me rough upbringing real cowboy type tough as a boat he came back to college and got literate and we had some good talks continually and one of the things he said to me was you know that ideology of yours that just doesn't explain the world and i thought by then i kind of knew that but that really crystallized it for me and then i also realized that i thought i knew way more than i actually did because i had imbued that ideology and it gave me a map right of everything yeah but then i realized well look you haven't had a family i had worked a lot by then because i started working very young but there was just i just didn't know anything to speak of and that so then i thought well i'm never going to consider a political career until i'm a competent person because i could have had a political career i know it when i was like 17. so no i can see it yeah i can see you you've so you certainly have a you you went yeah you i could see it your way of capturing people into in in your in your discussions and and uh um but okay so that it was more the people there because you know there was there's a uh you you probably know of this rather scathing review of you by nathan robinson and oh yes he's fun and um but he he his argument was well you you didn't understand or or well because he said yeah right you orwell turned you off from and orwell's whole point was you shouldn't not like socialism just because you don't like socialists and oh no that wasn't orwell's whole point or one of orwell's points was you should be skeptical of people who say they're acting in the best interests of others and they're also simultaneously un after power yeah so yeah i don't think i misunderstood or well and i you know and robinson can think that if he wants if that's comforting but i don't think so let me give you a chance to respond to that okay yeah so but but but so um look it's not like i'm not sensitive to left-wing concerns no of course like i understand look part of the reason i really don't like left-wing ideologues is because they don't take the issue of inequality seriously enough yeah they think it's a consequence of capitalism it's like no it's way worse than that it's way deeper than that and that's a big problem because it is a problem inequality yeah and if it's so deep that even getting rid of capitalism won't solve it like it's a real existential problem and it's threatened many societies with with complete chaos so but that's not the solution like it's capitalism that causes inequalities like no that's stupid yeah no i'm sorry it's too able to label things uh and we'll get in it we'll let people yeah well lawrence you might know you might know do you know about the work of the econophysicists uh i know of some of it i i have been like many things skeptical yeah well fair enough you know but but there are physicists who've modeled such things as the distribution of money into a society using the same equations that they use to describe the distribution of gas into an atmosphere diffusion yeah yeah yeah so it's really well it points to something way deep down right and that's something like the proclivity to get more more easily once you already have and the proclivity to lose more more easily when you don't have it's not linear there's a non-linear function there and it's way under things you know like many things it's model easier to deal with large groups of people than individuals that's one of the reasons psychology itself is probably so hard people as groups behave in ways that just like particles just like just like galaxies on the large scales it's easier to understand if you have many things we can you can argue statistically and that's one of the reasons why i've always sort of like to look at you know in some sense at large-scale structures by the way i do one a number of my colleagues i remember when i was at harvard one of my uh a really good physicist and cosmologist that later on we actually ended up going into neuroscience but for a while he decided he would be going to economics because the simple thing was he looked and he said well you know physics is getting really hard but if you look at economics these people win economics nobel prizes for for studying equations that we study in first year physics and so all i have to do is look at the equations from second year physics and try and apply them and i can become a big person in that field but but i have a great um i will tell you my i have a huge uh skepticism about economics i i i yeah well fair enough the calling it calling it as science is is is really um really generous in my mind because it doesn't make predictions that are accurate so yeah well you get real rich if you're an economist who could make predictions that were accurate wouldn't you yeah and i mean econometrics studying the data is really important but but but uh general theories of right now i'm very anyway i'm very skeptical of it and all right that will undoubtedly bring yet more hate mail but anyway um the um okay we're almost to the point where i want to get to maps of meaning but i wanted i i'm really interested in your own progression there and i'm already beginning to see things which i think are interesting and i hope maybe others will be interested in in your own background that led you to this these ideas yeah well i what i got obsessed when i was about i kind of have an obsessive mind in some ways and yeah and it runs away with me and i got obsessed about i think it was thermonuclear war to begin with it's like what the hell's going why do we want to blow all this up why do we want to blow this up what's going on exactly and then and then that dovetailed with the atrocity issues like what what's going on with the concentration camp guard exactly and that that desire to annihilate and burn and when i mean obsessed like i do i really didn't think of anything else in some sense for like 20 years and i probably thought about that manically for 15 hours a day wow and so you know i had a life and all that but man it was just there as soon as i woke up in the morning it was just running through my head non-stop and i wrote maps of meaning three hours a day for 15 years so okay well but you know that well and it's i have to ask you again in all due respect it's interesting you say you get your mind runs away with things with you and i i can't help but when i read it think that somehow you i don't know if you were edited but sometimes it seems to me you get obsessed with an idea and you run away with it well in maps of meaning in particular see i didn't write that really for people to read i wrote that to figure something out okay right and so i was thinking thinking thinking thinking the later books they i wrote those for audiences that's right it's clear there's a difference oh yeah maps of meeting it goes on and it yeah i really feel like it's it's it's you talking to yourself and getting wrapped up in ideas and that's why it was hard for me because you got to distill from all of that what you're talking about at times i had a hard time oh well it's yeah well yeah fair enough and i'm sure it's a flawed book but i don't think i could make it any better now even i read it i read the audio version recorded it last year when i was like three quarters dead and i i've thought about editing it but i don't think i've got the brain power to to dive into it and do it it wasn't certainly something you it was core dump and yeah it would be hard to core dump again i think um but okay so you got interested in psychology and well before that i gotta ask this i know i know a little bit about this but were your parents religious um that's a hard question but no not really my mother attended church united church protestant church and she went every sunday and we went when we were little kids but i stopped going when i was 13 because the the pastor well because i didn't like it but also because the pastor the the minister he didn't couldn't answer my questions about reconciling evolutionary theory with with biblical stories and and i thought well you don't believe what you're saying which is something i've often thought while sitting in church and i was looking for an excuse anyways and my dad didn't go to church and so so i bailed out then and and my mom didn't like that um but it wasn't like she was she wasn't overtly religious my mom is a a very in the best sense a very normal sort of person you know she she's not extreme in any ways and she went to church because that's what people did she liked to sing and she liked the community and you know she had her beliefs in some sense but not really because it was just part of the culture and that's what she did and so in a small town that's what people do i mean i know my my first wife's mother came from a small town her mother went to you know church and it was a social thing as much as also for better or worse if you didn't go if it reflected badly on you which is one of my problems with religion i met a lot of people you know if there is a lot of social pressure in a small town especially to conform religiously what you know just because if you don't go it it gives the impression that somehow you're a bad person and that's one of the problems i've had with at least organized relief yeah well we could talk about that in some detail too i think because there's there you know with situation situations like that are always really complicated because one of the things people are doing when they go to church is indicating that they're willing to sacrifice an hour a week in a disciplined manner to the community as such you know and then so you don't go well maybe it's because you're a conscientious objector let's say and that's a moral reason but maybe it's just because you're lazy bastard and you don't care about the community and you know i'm not saying that's the case but i'm saying these rituals are complex i think i was more influenced by babbitt and sinclair lewis the notion that you don't that if you don't go it means that you're somehow slapping the community expects you to go if you don't go it means you're not respecting the community yeah right there's a lot of social pressure and and you have to go to keep to i'm better words to keep up appearances because it's not yeah so i that and that part well we'll get there i want to i want to get if we'll see if we get there yep um because i have some where we're at the beginning but um you i but i i'm intrigued as much by you as well i'm intrigued equally by you and what you say so i want to i want to get the you part done you moved you you did you decide to your go back to school and do psychology and then you decide to go to graduate school which as you say was a new thing um you know i i i don't know why i guess i decided i wanted to be a professor or i wanted to be an academic and i don't know in my case and i've said this often in our podcast it was just that my mother wanted me to be a doctor and i she convinced me doctors were scientists which was her mistake and then i got interested in science um yeah so and then i looked yeah i really wanted to go and be a clinical psychologist and and but i didn't really get into research interested in the research and until i got to mcgill and that was under the influence of my supervisor who was a clinician but mostly a researcher and he sort of opened up the research world to me and and then that got really fascinating to me and so i got to do both because i was a clinical and mcgill was a real research school you know i had 15 publications by the time yes exactly exactly the montreal neuro was a major place and and a lot of fundamental discoveries about the brain were made at mcgill and at the douglas and or at the montreal neuro and so i had great advisors there robert peale and maurice dongier man they were top rate uh frank irvin i got to know he had a monkey farm on saint kitts where he raised alcoholic monkeys which is quite funny and so mcgill was great man it was wonderful and i got really interested in being a scientist there and then i found out i could do both that so that's where that switch came i wondered about that yeah no i mean i i have a good friend of mine's a neurologist and he actually you know was a resident out in down at mcgill and and i get to see the impact of that on him he's now a professor actually in the west coast um but uh okay so that's what got you interested in research but i was interested so you wanted to be a clinical psychologist why i mean early on i was going to ask you why well i like to help i like trying to help people you know and i was interested in what made people tick and you know i had some friends and whose problems i tried to straighten out and i was interested in in what it meant to live a i suppose a psychologically healthy life if you know to speak well i guess that's a reasonable way to put it yeah so and i'm i'm i'm well i i'm high in compassion that's part of it high in openness and high and compassion so that's good good uh root for clinical psychology is good root for someone like that because people are endlessly fascinating so you know it's it's actually interesting you know i actually you are it's another thing that surprised me you are open high in openness which is something maybe because you've been interviewed publicly in a very aggressive and antagonistic way i got the sense that you were much more defensive than you are and yeah well some of those interviews you know that especially the gq interview which is like 40 million views is like i was exhausted at that point and uh and it was a very unfriendly environment i mean it was hostile this second i set foot in there which was like an hour before the interview started and so hostile in that sort of cold underlying subtle way that permeates everything and so by the time the interview started i was sort of like a cat that was too close to the you know the dog house and and so i didn't handle myself with as much humor humor as i would have liked to you know because if you're really on top of something you can do it with a light touch and yeah i wasn't really light touch in that interview but i was also partly because i was i knew perfectly well at that point that if i said anything wrong or that could be twisted to be wrong i was dead in the water so that that's not that's that automatically yeah if you're up yeah if you feel you can't open up then that really makes it yeah yeah anyway um you remained the question that intrigued me before i even heard any of this so now but early on was why you remained a clinician um uh why during your academic career i mean i guess oh it was great for teaching is great for teaching because you can use examples i noticed in the book there are lots of time and in all your books i think but or at least i i'm voluminously ready well and it kept the theory tied to the reality eh because i was very interested in psychological theories of all sorts yeah i mean the taught personality theory and that's basically a walk through great psychological thinkers in the clinical domain and but practicing continually meant that you know i was always where the tire was hitting the road and that was unbelievably useful because i could test out these ideas in their practical application and see where they were useful and where they weren't and they were useful unbelievably useful you you got into personality eventually your first interest was more a sort of addictive things alcohol is yeah right and yeah is that because of was that a personal interest or was it because your professor was had alcoholic monkeys or oh well it was it was it was a little bit of one little bit of the other it probably wouldn't have been my first choice but i was really interested in why it was that certain substances were so attractive to people and that was tied with an underlying interest in neurobiology and so when robert peale offered me this position at mcgill it was like oh good i get to go to montreal because i always wanted to do that and yeah i could i could do that i could look into that and alcohol use turned out to be a great field of study because alcohol crosses the blood-brain barrier like water unlike say cocaine and and the and and heroin and so forth and benzodiazepines they're much more specific in their action but alcohol affects everything so to understand the pharmacology of alcohol you have to study the whole nervous system and that was really really that was great because i did a lot of neuroscience work at mcgill okay and then do you i i should know this but do you still continue to do clinical work no i i stopped in when all when everything exploded around me partly because look when you do clinical work nothing can should be on your mind except that person right there and then and i couldn't do that i was so distracted by everything that was happening and and you have to be around and you have to be on call you have to be available you have to have some leftover emotional space and none of that was possible and so i just had to stop and and it's too bad because i love doing it but the podcasts are a good substitute so yeah yeah it gives you a chance to connect and then um okay and um then you and then you did a postdoc there and then and then went to harvard well i was on the academic academic job market during that post doc so i went to a few places and generally got mixed reviews for my for my approach because i was i had a hard scientific research uh what would you say cv at that point i think i published more papers when i was at mcgill than any graduate student ever had and and uh you know that that was attractive to many of the places that were hiring but i also had these weird side interests that people were less you know more skeptical about and i wouldn't shut up about them even though people told me to but that worked really well when i went to interview at harvard why well because see one of the things you see in people who are educated is they think that if they don't know something then it's probably not worth knowing they don't just know that they just don't know yeah well lesser lesser academics are like that yeah well when i went to harvard the professors were so damn smart there that i couldn't say anything that they didn't know about and so there was nothing about what i was interested in that bothered them in fact they were interested in it oh wait wait so oh i thought i see you surprise me again i thought you're going to tell me they didn't mind hearing from you things they didn't understand or didn't know about because it intrigued them but you tell me they already knew i thought well they knew at least enough to know that there was something there they weren't they wouldn't just like say well no anybody who's interested in that like jung for example there are a lot of them are skeptical of jung and fair enough you know i can see why but yeah well fair enough but um but that didn't mean that they didn't understand that there was such a thing as the psychology of literature and narrative and so yeah that worked when you went there you you expressed early on that that was what you were interested in the psychology of literature and narrative i i talked about everything i did i talked about the alcohol research by that time the the ethics committees had made the sort of research i was doing basically impossible and so i had to switch and i interesting yeah yeah well because you know let's pick up on that i mean i like to go place that in plan but i suspect that impacted on some of the things you're talking about later on yeah you did it definitely i hate ethics communities they're they're terrible and i understand why why don't you elaborate on a little bit because well first of all you know they'll come back and say well why don't you do this experiment this way it's like do your own goddamn experiment part of the reason i'm doing this is because that's what i'm interested in you want to do a different experiment get your phd set up your lab do the goddamn experiment and don't come in and fix mine who the hell are you anyways that just irritated me to death and then oh so irritating because i love doing it you know and scientists you got to leave them alone because they're weird people it's like they got these strange obsessions don't interfere with that well that's i mean you know one of the things that sort of made you at least more famous publicly was the response to being told what to say or do in some ways which i don't like is well that's clearly pushes your buttons there's zero doubt about it but but i i can see it at the origin in the in the ethics community well here's what happened at mcgill i was studying we had a very specific population we were studying they're very very hard to find these people non-alcoholic men 18 to 23 so they had but they had to drink they couldn't be alcoholic but they had to drink they had to have an alcoholic father an alcoholic paternal grandfather and an alcoholic paternal first or second degree relative in addition very hard to find so we were studying the psychophysiology psychophysiological responses of people who had males who had a genetic predisposition to alcoholism very specific population we couldn't study women because if your mother was alcoholic you might have fetal alcohol syndrome and so that just that muddies the waters too much and so well when i went to harvard to try to do this research by that time the ni trip oh and so what would happen we'd bring these guys into the lab and we'd give them three shots of alcohol in 20 minutes and get their blood alcohol level up to about .10 above legal intoxication and that's where the interesting psychophysiological responses manifested themselves lower doses which almost all other labs used didn't produce that effect so then i went down to harvard ni aaa had got all ethical by that point and they wouldn't let us let our research subjects leave until their blood alcohol level was at .02 we used to leave them go at 0.04 or 0.06 something like that and usually we'd make sure they got a taxi home and all that we were sensible but that meant that these guys had to sober up in the lab awake for like 10 hours well no one was going to do that it was torturous and then we had to include half women it's like well we can't and first of all male alcoholism is primarily a male disorder although not entirely and and the reasons for female alcoholism are probably different and so i couldn't give the doses i couldn't use the research population and basically what happened is every single research psychologist stopped studying the response to alcohol because it became impossible and you know how ethical is that it's just alcoholism right it's like the fifth leading cause of death or some damn thing it's it's not important yeah so the end of that so then i know i just couldn't do it so well that's yeah and that's something we both are i mean where we where we began to converge you and i at least intellectually it seemed to me is our concerns whenever i see research being interfered with i get upset well here's an example do you know that 70 percent of this research applicants to the uc system this year were dispensed with at hiring because of their diversity statements i've read 70 i just wrote an article about it actually 76 oh okay well that's better no no i've i just i've actually have a piece coming out in the wall street journal which will probably come out by before this appears uh yeah that's not bad that's devastating right it's devastating devastating i'll send you my piece i'm totally angry about it but that's that kind of interference with academia is something that we'll we'll we may get to i'd like i'd like to explore your thoughts more than that maybe in another time we can because it's something we both relate to let me ask you just to close off this because yeah this is a great concern to both of us but has that has research and alcoholism has it died has has researched in that area died or has it ever come back in terms of uh um looking at well the research of the sort we were doing that's you can't do it so yes it's dead it's just not possible to do that you can't get funds for it for example plus they made it we we'd like to get these guys back three or four times you know because they were hard to find and and we were on to something we found that a substantial proportion showed a pronounced heart rate increase to alcohol administration that looked like it was associated with opiate release it could be blocked by naltrexone it was deadly deadly research but you know whatever wow done so that really irritated the hell out of me so you well you know that's true it dick and i can understand irritate the hell out of you but sometimes when one door closes another one opens and and and that's clearly what happened i mean you might have gone on to be a wonderful researcher in alcoholism but instead you shifted gears a little bit and um yeah well i was hired to teach person i was hired to teach personality i was in personality and psychopathology uh subsection there and and so i started to turn my research towards personality although i kept a bunch of other research lines going until i was up for promotion i think it was to a full professor at the u of t and they basically said we can't put your research record forward because you haven't specialized in any single area enough and i thought well i've published in like seven areas you know there's something to be said for that but then i i thought well it's way easier actually only to publish in one area so if that's what you want me to do so that was also annoying to say the least but anyways i did it and it worked and i i focused more on personality for for a bunch of reasons why were you hired in personality if your work had been on a dick uh sort of alcoholism you said you were hired to teach personality was that just the available slot at harvard or what was what was that well i was a clinical psychologist and i knew the personality theorists well and so that was a big part of that and they liked the fact that i had a hard research edge because well because psychology at least when it's done right is a hard you know it's a research discipline and harvard was certainly it was a great place i loved being there it was great miguel was great too yeah i enjoyed i was at harvard well i was in the boston area for 10 years and did my phd at mit and then moved to harvard yeah i loved the faculty man i loved our faculty meetings they were so funny because no one wanted to be there and they were all really funny and so if anybody ever objected to something the chair would say ah you're head the subcommittee to discuss that somewhere else which is perfect right it's like that'll teach you to make the meeting longer yeah that's what happily i didn't have to i had a position this is something called the society of fellows and where i had where i was allowed to totally avoid anything related to anything but what i wanted to do so i didn't teach i didn't have to i didn't have to i was supposed to just think so i happily didn't i didn't learn of the of the tdm of faculty meetings till later on actually the interesting thing is i went to yale to become an assistant professor and yale has the policy that assistant professors aren't worth worthy of faculty meetings they don't even allow them in the faculty meetings oh oh so that was good for you yeah yeah and then i yeah and then only later on when i became when i got promoted and then i quickly became chair of a department and then i had to run faculty meetings it's a lot easier well it's a lot easier to be in a meeting when you run it than what someone else is true yeah true and i love teaching so that was that was never an impediment to me yeah yeah and i hear you were incredibly popular teacher at least that's what the word on the street or at least word in the literature i've read is yeah it was fun i loved teaching it was especially personality psych it's so fun to teach that to people it's so engaging that as a subject especially you had a big following at harvard did that continue when you moved to u of t yes well again let me ask a question and it in you know i don't know whether it's you free not to answer it or we can cut it out or whatever but um why do you move back to canada well um the probability of being promoted to full tenure from an associate position at the ivy leagues is basically zero it's zero yeah yeah that's why i left and i knew i knew that and i had this attitude i i got my attitude right because i saw some of the people there the assistant professors who were or associates who were on the verge of leaving and they were all annoyed not all of them but mad that they weren't going to be make it you know and i thought i thought look if you could be promoted to full professor these slots that you occupied would have never been open so you can't be unhappy about what brought you here and then i thought i'll just accept that it's like okay i got to come here let's say i'm not the way i looked at it was hey i got to go to harvard for six years and i got paid for it like that's a deal man it was a great deal and i was really sad to leave and you know i wanted to fight for promotion on the basis of maps of meaning and i think you know i think i had a shot at it you know because some of the professors there really liked what i had done but i got sick then and i didn't have the bloody spirit to put up the proper fight and so and then this and then this position came up at the u of toronto and it was perfect for me it was tailor-made for me in some sense and so then that's what we did and yeah it was hard to leave though because i loved harvard i loved boston when i left boston for yale it was very hard in fact i kept one day a week i went back to harvard and bu you know just it's hard to break that umbilical cord right away and uh i really like my colleagues too and they're a lot of them are still my friends and okay so that was cool that's great oh that's wonderful uh yeah well i but i understand the again the psychology of it uh i i left yale again before i had already been promoted to like you i guess associate professor but i i i saw that there was no there was you know the opportunities at yale were going to be minimal especially my own field and so when when when when the opportunity came along in this case to build a department to become chair of another department and have 12 faculty positions to hire was it was so attractive to me that i couldn't i couldn't resist but i wondered why i left and i i know if it was a yearning you know as a canadian who moved to the states i moved much earlier than you because i i went to graduate school down there um you know the question of whether i'd return to canada was always on my mind i didn't until after i retired and but but uh but i always thought about it i often off considered coming back and there were a few times actually to toronto but anyway let's now sp now having i i hope that this has been interesting for you it's been interesting for me but and i think it'll i hope it'll be interesting for people who who are interested in what you have to say because understanding you as a person i think is important and i never have heard much about it but now i want to move to what you've written about and um in particular maps of meaning and in in in and as i say in in rule 11 at least what i surmise from it and the best way i can do it as i say for better or worse uh jordan is to is to read quotes from you and ask you about them so i'm going to do that and we'll we'll just skip through and we'll see how far we get and then i want to give you some chance hopefully for for us to discuss some of those issues i know that you were still interested in following up with me some of the things i'm going to talk about we'll follow up on for people listening we'll follow up on our discussion i didn't realize actually i hadn't done my preparation which is fine i was i was being our dialogue was you asking me questions i realized that i forced myself to watch our our podcast only i hate it because i had to listen to myself for a lot of it but um but i didn't realize how many of the ideas and things you were bringing up if i'd known about it from your books would have meshed perfectly and so i we can follow up on some of that discussion because now i understand where you were coming from but let me let's talk about how right at the early on in maps of meaning by the way you basically say beliefs make the world and let me let me read this quote i discovered that beliefs make the world in a very real way the beliefs are the world in a more than metaphysical sense this discovery has not turned me into a moral relativist however quite the contrary i've become convinced that the would world that is belief is orderly that there are universal moral absolutes although there are they are struck these are structured such that a diverse range of human opinion remains both possible and beneficial i learned um let's see okay i believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes in ignorance or in willful opposition are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution and i learned that the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems could be rendered explicitly comprehensible let's get to that later let's let's talk about the first thing i believe that individual societies who flout these absolutes in ignorance or willful opposition are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution do you want to elaborate on that because i'm shocked it's interesting to me to hear you say that because again it goes against the grain for me so i want to hear i want to understand where you came from in writing that well i first started to understand that what we perceive in some real sense isn't exactly material reality and partly that's because that's actually impossible and i mean that technically and that's something we could go into in great depth because that realization paralyzed a number of fields it really started to come to the forefront many fields in about in the early 1960s especially in ai when the ai types started to try to make machines that could see the world in some sense like we do and then act in the world and what they instantly realized was that oh there isn't just something there that we see this is way harder than we ever possibly imagined in fact it's so hard that it looks like it might be impossible in some sense so how the hell do we do it and like we still don't have robots that can move around the world like we do you know endless generations i'm not maybe it's improved the last time i looked at this great detail we didn't have robots that could fold laundry very efficiently either so yeah well a lot of these so-called simple things like seeing well it's half your brain it takes you half your brain to see and most animals like we see way better than almost all animals say eagles raptors really because we have two bald eagles in my back yeah they can see they they their eyes are the same size as yours and they have two foveal spots eagles uh falcons they're the animals that can see better than us but other than that it's us and it's half our brain just to see well so why well you're a physicist you understand that reality is composed of levels of being right from the subatomic up to the cosmic it's like well first of all how do you specify the proper level of analysis well one of the things that's quite interesting psychologically is that we have short words are generally used to describe things that manifest themselves to us at our level of analysis cat we see a cat we don't see a species we don't see cat sub parts we see this cat well why well that's that's the level that's most biologically relevant to us given our embodiment that's an evolutionary answer and so we see what we see first of all what we see a lot of is memory but we see something that's overlaid on the world we actually see the overlay and hopefully it reflects what's underneath and generally it does and it's a hell of a shock to us when when we make a perceptual error but i see i and then i started to learn especially from reading jeffrey gray that we we also see the world within a motivated frame and he was influenced by norbert weiner who was one of the world's first cybernetics scientists essentially a great influence on iei and and gray never talked about narrative but the frame that he described that we see and in animals as well basically has a point a and a point b so we're always moving towards a goal if we're mobile animals and i thought oh well the description of the movement from point a to point b that's the simplest unit of meaning that's a story and then i learned that a better story is a story about how stories transform and so those are actually perceptual frames of reference that transform and then i understood that if you don't have respect for the transformation process above all else then you can't transform your perceptual frames when necessary and then you can't adapt to error and that destroys you and so that's that's all part of that when you okay there's two bits of this i want to parse more carefully first the statement the beliefs are the world i mean yeah as a psychologist look i accept that statement if you're talking about a psychologist namely the human psyche i won't accept that statement as a science as a physicist yeah well that's where we could really have a good conversation well let's have that good yeah yeah okay yeah yeah okay okay so so look it has been very difficult for scientists to describe the world in a way that isn't like that narrative right and so the idea that there's a tension between science and religion in some senses is just a statement that it's been very hard for scientists to pull out an objective description of the world given the way we perceive well it's been easy for phys not easy but it's worked for physicists oh it's i didn't say it didn't work i i'm not making that claim at all i'm saying we didn't manage it until 400 years ago exactly and i think we talked this is something we talked about before actually that we both agree about that science is hard and i don't mean hard in the mathematical sense no in the sense that it goes against the grain that's right it's unnatural it's very unnatural yes and if we didn't we wouldn't need science if it wasn't unnatural i mean everyone would be a scientist if it wasn't and instead we and so that okay so that's that's that's an insight into that issue so then the question is well what is it that science as a as a technique struggles against well it struggles against the fact that we see everything through a value-laden lens and i mean see well here here's an example like look when i'm looking at you on this screen there are almost an infinite number of ways things i could be looking at so first of all there's each pixel in so far as i can see pixels but then there's all the combinations of pixels right and there are a lot of combinations of pixels and i could concentrate on one hair on your beard or i could concentrate on the blurry cupboard behind you or that book or like it's endless but i don't i look at your eyes and you look at my eyes yeah and you look at my eyes because you've made a value judgment that there's nothing more valuable during the course of this perceptual exercise than looking at my eyes and that's a biological judgment well uh yeah well when you say a value judgment yeah that's interesting let me take care again i'm i'm a neophyte so well i mean i've written a lot but i i wouldn't describe the value my understanding is that infants are hardwired that's okay guys and there's an evolutionary problem right there's values that are hardwired that's no problem why why do you call them values because look to to segregate out a particular element from a background of elements i have to make that primary have to make it most important and the other things less important okay so that's what you mean by value yes yeah it's technical idea it's like you have to look through the world you have to look at the world through a hierarchy of value there's no way to look at the world without doing that okay you could take an economic attitude which you look at the world which what's what's more what's most what's most effective what that's fine the results most quickly certainly if you're dealing with humans looking at eyes gets you where you want to go well here here's here's why it's like our eyes have evolved the whites and the reason for that is because the fact of the whites make make it much easier for us to see where eyes are pointing and what that implies is that all of our ancestors who had eyes that weren't easy to see either got killed or didn't mate and the reason that we want to see where people point their eyes is because foveal tissue is extremely expensive and you're not going to waste it looking at something useless and so that if i can see what you're looking at then i know what you're interested in then i know your value structure for that moment i can understand you plus i've been directed to the valuable part of the visual landscape and we're unbelievably good at that it's part of a shared reference and kids have that extraordinarily early as you already pointed out like unbelievably early and so it works so evolutionist picked that out okay so when i say value structure i mean a decision about the hierarchy of importance okay okay and i mean it in some sense both economically and evolutionarily like there's nothing about this that's that's not nailed down especially into evolutionary theory it's like there's a reason we oh yeah no i'll buy that yeah we we okay okay so i think so that's the value hierarchy issue so when you but then when okay the value of our key and when you say that okay so when you say beliefs of the world you're talking about psyche that namely beliefs are related to values and some i mean when you say beliefs are the world i still want to go back to that okay you're saying as a human being yeah well it's partly because the world is could we can be wrong what was that well it's partly because we can be wrong like i may think that something's important and look at it but i might be so wrong like i'm driving down the highway and i focus on something and some car hits me and i'm dead well that's kind of why it's a belief it's like well i believe that that was the best thing to look at and there was evidence to support that but man it was really wrong it was wrong and so part of its fallibility the part that's partly why i refer to it's not only that there's there's more to it than that my i guess my way of phrasing it would be thinking about is that beliefs that the world conditions our beliefs namely we continually to we continually reappraise our beliefs and the world tells us whether those which beliefs are if you want to call beliefs which beliefs are reasonable and which aren't by you know i i i might be killing i can walk out yeah i can walk out this window but the world pretty well tells me no that that doesn't work and and then i don't reproduce but but uh although it's too late i already have but um uh uh so so you can see this is the greatest conditioning beliefs rather than the other way around no no it did oh yeah that's fine and it does and and that's that's a very what would you say an eternal philosophical dilemma because you can look at it both ways so the existential psychologist for example taking a page from heidegger one of them was one of them one of them made the presumption that you know we lay values on the world and the other made the presumption that values reveal themselves to us through the world and that's they're both right they're both equally right you can look at it either way and it works so and and for the reasons that you pointed out so but you see it's it's not so it's not so clear always where the objective reality is so for example you can train rats to produce a dopamine surge to an electric shock okay so the shock is punishing right generally punishment will bring behavior to a to a halt yes but if you pair the shock with a reward but now that's you know intensity of shock matters but it can be a pretty good shock if you pair the shock with a reward frequently then the shock becomes positive and so there's a good example even in a rat where yeah yeah it's a shock and that's an objective reality it's electricity but the valence of that can be shifted by learning so there is this interaction between the psyche and the and the objective well in the la in the domain of value and the thing is so for an astute perceptual psychologist um the best one now is uh an ecological approach to visual perceptions great book hard-nosed book doesn't really go into narrative ins in any direct sense but is very much akin he was one of the founders of modern perceptual psychology person who wrote that book and he said for with children for we don't see a cliff we see a falling off place and even six months old six month old see a falling off place they also see beauty they see symmetry a lot of this is deeply wired right but still malleable right it's still malleable by learning so and that's partly why there are these archetypal values because they're built into us biologically and then if you flout them well i can give you a quick example of how floating this is catastrophic well so you know part of the strange question i suppose is what exactly are we interacting with and you you might say well it's the material world and i would say no not exactly we interact more what we interact with is more like a field of potential now we resolve that pretty quickly into perceptual objects but it really is a field of potential because it could go one way or another and somewhat unpredictably yeah can you talk about that yeah well and consciousness well it's strange consciousness consciousness snaps that into well the being that we perceive anyways and so it's a field of potential and so you can kind of experience that you wake up in the morning and you think what am i going to do today and what you're saying is well i've got these degrees of freedom weirdly enough and if i act a certain way i hope these things will happen as opposed to these things and so what presents itself to you in the morning you've already seen your damn room you don't even look at it really because you've memorized it well what you perceive in the deepest sense is this field of potential that you can interact with yes okay now now the issue is what's the best way of interacting with that field of potential well think about it collectively okay you and i are having a discussion right now because you you can think and i can think but we think differently now we're hoping that if we exchange thoughts that we'll be able to master what's coming at us better and hopefully we will be able to now imagine we shut that down well then we can't interact with that with what's coming at us better and it'll kill us and so that's partly why free dis free discourse isn't an option it's not different than thinking and thinking isn't different than dying so that's that's one example of why the west has elevated free speech to the highest place even religiously that's the divine word essentially and that's the idea lurking underneath that it's like everything else is dependent on that well you know that's intriguing to me because yeah we both are have been speaking out about free speech in various ways and lately but one of the things that was intriguing to me that never hit me and you just sort of it relates to what you said um and i was talking about this recently to actually stephen fry but but the it came to me from watching a a uh uh speech by my friend christopher hitchens who um who said that the problem of censorship the problem of cutting down free speech doesn't just it the saddest part isn't that you're infringing on the rights of the speaker no that's not it's that's that's it's but but you're infringing on your own rights because you lose the opportunity to learn that you might be wrong yeah well and that's fine if you're if you're already in paradise and you already know everything that you need to know to make your life just how it should be that's no problem but if you've got some problems well maybe you should listen a bit because well even if you don't the point is if you shut down others you really lose that opportunity to learn even if they're what they're saying is reprehensible you are at least forced to ask why do i believe what i believe why do i know they're wrong and maybe they're not wrong and that is a right in some sense your friendship fringe upon your own rights more than others because you lose that opportunity to to learn absolutely yeah absolutely there's no doubt about that look one of the things i really learned from carl rogers even though i talked so much um was the importance of listening the vital vital vital importance of listening and it's i've met many many people in my life who who no one has ever listened to not even once and you know if you listen to people they unfold that's that's the secret to rogerian psychotherapy and freudian to some degree because he let his people free associate it's like if you just let so you listen because then they watch while they're talking how your face changes and then maybe you ask them well i didn't understand that and so they're thinking and and they're on that edge and they're putting themselves together not metaphorically man this is they are they're reorganizing the internal chaos right in front of you and that's part of what's so fascinating about being a clinical psychologist because you get in that groove and it's so remarkable it's what's so fascinating for me as some but doing these podcasts which is a which is different for me i'm used to expounding for most of my life and and um learning how to listen effectively and and and get people to it's real for me it's been a fascinating thing to do and that's one of the things i'm enjoying right now at this very instant um uh by asking you questions that you can associate about a free associate about okay i think we've we've we've beaten that horse about belief and and where you come from to death i'll probably i may come back to it last one but the second part of that is what i find fascinating that you become that you believe that this that this that you've convinced that the world that is belief has universal moral absolutes and that and that if you ignore them and individuals or societies ignore them are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution it's interesting how much we'll get through here because we're just at the beginning but but i find that um again it's something that i that doesn't resonate with me at all so so uh why don't you expound on it a little bit well i could give you some examples i i guess so um and these these are these are like pointing to narrative substructures let's say well when i look at what's happening on the far left edge what i see is an existential issue so here's the existential issues there's the tyrannical father there's the benevolent father there's the tyrannical mother there's the benevolent mother that's four and we can easily become obsessed with any one of those well you get obsessed with the tyrannical father well that's an existential absolute in some sense and the reason for that is that well we're historical creatures right so we have a culture it's often viewed as a patriarchy and that's one way of looking at it and it definitely has its evil edge i mean and everyone to some degree suffers from the guilt of history that's privilege right it's like well do you really deserve what you have i mean you didn't invent all of it and there's people who maybe are just as worthy as you who don't have the same stuff and you know what about european invasion of north america let's say and etc etc right and so that's an existential absolute we always have to contend with the tyrannical father well fair enough but what there's another half to that and if you just get obsessed with this one thing you're so off balance that you're gonna you're not gonna you're not gonna fix the problem you're just gonna make it worse because you just don't you don't have a sufficiently in some sense even a sufficiently random view of the world randomized let's look at it that way your sampling is off in a major way and so then well and that tyrannical father let's say that's also something really easy to identify with that's what happens when people become authoritarian and there's a shadow to that and so that's part of and if you ignore that well then your society becomes totalitarian and it's like well good luck to you it's like we've seen what happens when that happens and there's a difference between a totalitarian society and a free society and the difference isn't trivial and it's associated with value and what's at the top at the highest place well you said more it didn't use values the word moral which is intriguing to me what do you mean by morality well morality basically is the difference between good and evil fundamentally and so if you push if you that's how i'm defining it okay so okay that's right and you know you might say well is there evil or is there good and and i know that's a complicated question but at some point there's an answer to that so here's how i answered it for me well you can be dubious all you want about an ultimate good but there are things that have happened in the recent past 100 last hundred years that are so terrible that i defy you to look at them and say they're not evil and then you have to think very carefully if you say that they're not evil just exactly what are you saying and so so then i invert that and say well i don't know what good is but it's the opposite of that right and that's a good starting point right it's like i don't know it's whatever takes me farthest away from that and i this was a personal thing for me to some degree because when i was wrestling with the issue of atrocity and this is what i think i think this is one of the things that made me different from most people who think about these things i didn't think of myself as concentration camp victim and i didn't think of myself as you know schindler yeah or or the dutch family that hid anne frank because that's pretty bloody unlikely it's like let's do some stats here i thought of myself as a resentful concentration camp camp guard okay and that was quite shocking to do that yeah well it's like are you a victim or a perpetrator are you a hero or a perpetrator well i can tell you for sure that you are at least in part a perpetrator and if you don't understand that then if the temptation to become a perpetrator arises you won't know how to withstand it and you may even want it and you think well i wouldn't want that it's like oh yeah really is that right you really know yourself that well do you and you actually know what happened in germany do you and the steps that people took read ordinary men that's a great book talk about step by step that's a great book man and those were ordinary guys and they weren't particularly reprehensible but what they did it's like they were taking pregnant women out into fields stripping them naked and shooting them in the back of the head you think i couldn't do that it's like yeah okay maybe and you think you would enjoy it it's like yeah maybe you there's a lot more in there than you think unfortunately so well well yeah so so let's go back to the hierarchy of value like that is embedded inside a framework of good and evil there's no way around it it's part and parcel of it it's way out at the fringes and so when i talk about what's religious so imagine there's a hierarchy of value and here's how this hierarchy works the deeper the value the more other values are dependent on it so that's the definition of deep when you look at the deepest values you are in the religious domain psychologically speaking well okay again explain that you obviously and that's we got to think about this experientially and not i'm not talking about propositional description yeah i'm talking about something different oh you equate religion biology throughout at least in many many places yes and to me and and mythology which i find yeah i know and and it's something i have to get over because it's hard well it's not just hard i find it sort of i guess for me it diminishes the argument i mean you you say oh i i i i you really say i learned that the meanings of the most profound substrate of belief systems can be rendered explicitly comprehensible even to the skeptical rational thinker and then you just and then you say and to me this is sort of naturally turns me off because yeah you say the world as a forum for action is composed essentially of three constituent elements which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric metamorphic metaphoric representation first is the unexplored territory and i say fine but then you automatically go to mythology as if it's as if it has some you say the great mother nature creative destructive sources of final resting place of all determinate things sep second is the explored territory the great father culture protective interior tyrannical cumulative ancestral wisdom third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory the divine sun the archetypical individual creative exploratory world we're adapted to this world of divine characters as much as the objective world you are and i see that you've found i mean the whole point as far as i can see of a lot of what you're saying is something that on the surface seems straightforward it would be horrible if you didn't object to all that well i should but i object to it one of the reasons i object to it by nature is to say well it seems obvious that myth to the extent that it's there's any universality of various myths and the fact that it goes back a long way is is intimately intimately reveals aspects of the way humans thinking evolve you know evolutionary psychology right and myth are related okay that seems obvious and but i don't know whether why one needs to make more of it than that i guess the question is why i don't think you need to make more more of it than that that's quite a lot right there's a lot of it right here there's a whole bunch yeah i'm trying to i'm trying to unpack it so well i'll give you an example this is okay i mean the examples are quite nice so the egyptians viewed horus now remember they're trying to figure things out they're trying to figure out how to assemble a very large state and they're trying to figure out what should be sovereign so they're trying to figure out well who is this pharaoh and what should he embody and how should he act if things are going to work and they're they're doing this for like thousands of years they're trying to puzzle this out and they're using their imagination and so they parse out their patriarchal god into two forms there's osiris and he's the old state he was once a hero he was pretty good but he got archaic and ossified turned to stone in some sense so and he has a son horus now horus is that egyptian eye and everyone knows that eye it's the eye why the eye well that's a falcon because falcons can really see and so horus was also a falcon okay so the what the egyptians were doing was worshiping attention okay so now what what does that mean well attention isn't the same as thought so when you're listening in these podcasts you know when a podcast going real well you you get into it and time yeah disappears okay it's because you're attending right and what you're attending to fundamentally you're on that edge where you're willing to let the things that are ossified about your cognitive structures flex and and you're expanding yourself out into unexplored territory and that's way better than being right it's way more fun than being right although being right protects you from being anxious not eventually it doesn't work eventually but being on that edge well we're we're adapted to that itch i mean i mean seriously adapted to it yeah i'm i certainly am well everyone is although the this the let's say the breadth and intensity of that edge is much different between different people and where they find it for them differs with their temperament but you need everything about your beliefs needs to be subordinate to the process of transforming those beliefs unless you already know everything and so that's just one and so and that's played out to some degree you see that to some degree in christian symbolism let's say with it where there's a tension between the son and the father and the father is more this is what is it's already established and the sun is more well wait a sec yeah but there's this horizon of possibility that we have to contend with so this needs to be updated and that's a very it's a tough thing for human beings because well it's a lot easier just to go with what you know but we just don't know enough so we have to subordinate that to this process of exploration that creative and that i believe that's encapsulated fundamentally in the hero mythology hero mythology is about transforming ideas that's essentially what it's about i i'll buy that but why i guess if i'm one if one's trying to explain something which i which you're talking about now which i find fascinating and and can relate to why can i why what utility in is there in in reverting to the myth well um that's a good question i mean partly it's the same utility that there is in me using an example to describe what i meant but but yeah but but but you're right and the example and i find when you write well that was sort of more compelling more compelling when you talk about say and i say you used to find the same thing about oliver sacks and other but more compelling when you talk about your experience as a clinical psychologist which something can relate to then then when you talk to me about the great father or the tyrannical mother or the hero or yeah well it should be more compelling because the problem with those say low-level abstractions is they lack concrete embodiment so i'll give you an example of that this is a weird example but it'll work merce eliade he's a great historian of religions and he was cognizant of nietzsche's proclamation that god had died and eliata knew what that meant and what the consequences would be but he went back when he was doing his pioneering work into the history of religion he said this has happened many times this is not the first time why well what happens is p a community comes together and forms some representation of the summon bonum right the thing that should be on top the ultimate good but it's so damn gets so damn abstract that it doesn't connect to life it's like well that's god but what does it have to do with me like interacting with my wife or doing something embodied and practical it gets so abstract it floats away no one has any relationship to it anymore and it dies but that's not good for a variety of reasons which we can get into well part of the way that the christian imagination addressed that problem speaking psychologically is to take that abstraction and make it incarnate in a particular time and place and it pulls the story down to earth and it makes it much more compelling a student once asked me look if there's all these archetypal structures why don't we just tell the archetype over and over i thought oh it has to be particularized it has to be optimally particularized for imitation that's why and so if i get too abstract you don't know what it means for perception or action and loses all significance and you drift away a good storyteller he knows his audience and he can he can put the story on the edge of their cognitive transformation and then it's absolutely captivating but it means the archetype has to be particularized constantly and re-particularized constantly well it's another way i mean yeah i guess it's a that's often you frame things in a way that i think is a fancy way of something saying something that maybe i'm just too pedestrian um i would just say you know that that i said before teaching is seducing car salesmen and seducing if you want to get to people you have to go ask where they're coming from and you have to tell your arguments to where they're coming from so that they can emotionally relate isn't that just the case isn't that what you're saying well i'm trying to explain why those things are seductive okay so why why okay they are because that's the thing that it's the experiential issue and that's also relevant with regard to the notion of religious depth which we should just take a quick side step yeah no i was we're going to go there eventually anyway so yeah because it's a technical issue as far as i'm concerned because i'm trying to speak psychologically so when you start to toy with the deepest values upon which all these other values depend that has an embodied consequence one is it's deeply upsetting so it's anxiety provoking the other is it's deeply wonder provoking and those things those are both there and the reason they're both there is because well you blow apart that base level map and all sorts of things fly out of pandora's box and some of those things might kill you but some of those things might be just what you need to solve your current problem so it's very it's very it's tense when you speak at religious depth there's an embodied consequence of that that is it's independent of any discussion about you know religious propositions as logical statements about the structure of reality for me most of that's beside the point it's like no no you don't it's but for me most of it's only beside the point most of it's irrelevant yeah well it's it's irrelevant to to what we're discussing because there are deaths most of it's silly yes yes and there are depths and if you get deep enough you have religious experiences now what that means about this yeah is a good one well okay so that's the einstein's goddess but you know spinoza's god the i'm the fact that the universe is comprehensible all of the universities yeah those you can call that a religious experience yeah i think aw i'm defining this in some sense no okay okay right i'm defining okay okay so yeah yeah yeah so so aw let's take the the emotion of all it's a mixture of emotions it's both positive and negative emotions and it's predicated on a prey response to a predator that's the biological underpinning so for example your hair will stand on end well why well it's because that's pilot erection it's what happens when a prey animal sees a predator he's like poof well that's part of awe it's like you're in you've you've something greater than you and potentially dangerous has come into view that's the embodied part of that of course it's way more if i look at the night sky yeah i'd buy it yeah yeah that's actually something greater than me yeah it's certainly something greater than me i don't know whether it's potentially dangerous because it sort of seems to be out there and separate i mean unless unless you have astrology or some bit of nonsense well it's inspiring even though it's completely at least on the surface unrelated to me well it's it's also a place though where you do in some real sense confront the infinite unknown oh yes right there it is the infinite unknown will swallow you it swallows me every day well it'll swallow you when you die it will do that you're surrounded by it well i when i die it won't swallow it i mean yeah when you know when you what do you mean when you say things like that i don't know what you mean well you dissolve into it because it's a harassment just to end you just well it's yeah i know but you don't get you don't dissolve into some mystical i understand infinite unknown i'm not i'm not trying to say new age i know you're not but then when you say it look it's it's natural for people to then jump into this new age nonsense yes right absolutely i want to hold your feet to the fire only because i can you should you absolutely should absolutely look here what is one thing you experience at a funeral you know i've seen this many times is people will stand by the body of the person they loved and they cannot speak there's nothing to say and it's because they're on the horizon now i'm not saying that you dissolve into anything particularly i'm saying it's a limit experience and when you look up into the sky it's a it's an analogy of that experience you're on the you're on the frontier in some sense when you look up into this guy and you're faced with in some sense you're faced with what you are in relationship to that and now that's also okay now i'm going to go sideways here for a second tell you a bit about historic okay so i have no agenda i've been looking at this image with my wife and and this friend of mine and it's of mary the mother of god okay it's a very interesting image and renaissance painters were all over this so you can google merry serpent stars and you'll see like these beautiful paintings okay so there's mary her head's in the stars 12 of them there's a reason for that and her foots on the world and on a serpent yeah yeah that's right well it's the seasons it's a bunch of things man it's about things it's a bunch but it's it's the cosmos but but okay so there's that image and many many painters spent much time on that image it's like it's very weird image your head's in the stars or foots on the serpent the earth is down there what the hell is going on well here's part of it so when you face something that's deeply unknown it calls to you in some sense to be more than you are now how is that related to the prey predator relationship well if you're a prey you should be a little more than you are in relationship to that predator and so there's a call to adaptation in the ah response to a predator it's like be more or die and look at us man we've done a pretty good job of doing exactly that for like little skinny naked apes it's like look the hell out man wolves run away from us okay and so in some sense we imitated the predator as a consequence of that all response and we're good at imitating and god only knows what we're imitating when we look up at the stars but this image of mary is an attempt to puzzle that out so that serpent that she has her foot on that's the snake well okay mary's a mother it's like don't eat my kids snakes for 60 million years right this is a deep image but it's deeper than that too because there's this line of thinking and jewish thinking and christian thinking that associates the serpent in the garden with malevolence itself so that's the weird association between the snake and satan which is not in that original story it's part of the after story in some sense and i puzzled over that for a tremendous long it's like what's going on there why is that association exists well the worst snake is not a snake the worst snake is like a meta snake it's like it's like the essence of snake and then that becomes something psychological and the good mother doesn't just protect you from snakes it protects you from the snake in your heart and that's a real snake man and if you're going to protect your kids one more thing if you're going to protect your kids from the snake in their hearts and and in your heart too you better bloody well have your head in the stars that's a nice analogy i have i'll give you that that's one of the ones that i can sort of well that's what those artists were trying to puzzle out hey i i guess so but but at the same time um why do i i can and what's so important about why for you is important to puzzle that story about that specific myth that makes it worth that makes it worth analyzing and and and and perseverating over what why people paint mary that way or why why that myth of the garden of eden is what it is well i mean i guess because because again is it just simply because you think you think let me make it i can understand one aspect and the other i can't so keeping the answer is what i my hoping the answer is because you think it tells you something about the human psyche not because you think it tells you something about about the world beyond the human psyche the first claim is plenty for me okay that's fine i buy that then i understand that the only thing that i worry about is sometimes the one gets the impression that the in in well this is where i get to get trouble because yeah there is a fundamental problem here that we could talk about as scientists it's like yeah people parody me because people will ask me questions like do you think that's real and so that's an equation is a b it's like well you think a is self-evident when you ask me that question but it's not and so then you might say well is this real and so you might ask me well does this mean anything about the structure of reality and my answer would be what do you mean by reality and why are you so sure that your presumption about what reality is is the right presumption so because i could say well reality pretty clearly has a narrative edge and i don't know what that means when you say real i guess yeah but that's the issue that's the quest well look you come in as you say you rea no no i understand i think i understand that and i'm trying to i'm trying to get into your head here a little bit so you're when you say reality you mean human reality because you're so tied to being here's the psyche here's a question humans are relevant here's a question for a physicist for a scientist good okay what if darwin and einstein are in conflict they are they're in conflict because okay the fundamental presupposition of darwinism in some sense is that there's nothing more real than that which select whoa hold on i think you're posing more on it than that fundamental let me rephrase that to me are we adapting are we adapted to reality are we adapted to reality we were are adapted to our own reality yes no no no no no wait a minute wait a sec remember earlier in our discussion when you said that you won't walk through the window okay so we're not just adapted to our reality okay we are fine-tuned for the world around us to survive right okay and the world around us is reality okay that fine-tuning has a narrative structure go on why well because we have to i know i know i know look i do too i do too because we have to act out we have to act and our descriptions of actions because the question for us isn't what is the question is how to act how to act how to act and what might be yeah now scientists okay by definition i believe this by definition the objective materialist types cannot answer the question how to act in fact if they do they're not doing what they should be doing but that leaves us with this question which is which is the question how to act and so here we could have a discussion what's the more fundamental question what is that's the scientific uh uh presumption or how should we act now you might think it's obvious that it's what is but it is not obvious it's tough that now we're great in fact the next question i was going to ask you actually i was going to i was going to take a digression into something you wrote about reason and hell we'll get back to that but but but at the very beginning of maps and experience you you have these you say the world as a form for action is a place of value a place where all things have meaning this meaning which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction is implication for action or at a higher level of analysis implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action that's a long winded way yeah yeah no comparable i know you tend to be long-winded it's just the way you are but that's okay i'm working through that um but it's a definition of meaning that sentence is a definition of meaning if it means something to you it means either it's relevant for you to change your action or it's relevant for you to change your perception and the meaning signals that okay but let me look so you can say the world's a place of things or a place of action but no complete world view can be generated without using both modes of construal the fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated adherents of the mythological worldview tend to regard the statement of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical fact even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged those who by contrast accept the scientific perspective who assume that it is or might become complete forget that an impassable golf currently divides what is from what should be yep again i i mean this you know i am not taking any offense to your your questions there's no offense intended i'm really uh what's different in that long discussion from hume's statement that you can't get ought from is well what's different is that the world of of art is structured near narrative and it's evolutionarily determined and and since it's evolutionarily determined well that gives us a scientific conundrum which no one's addressed well you know you often this is the other thing that interested me as a psychologist i don't know where and somewhere i have a quote and i was going to get to it but we're certainly not going to get to all the quotes obviously not in this discussion anyway um but you basically say science has a problem oh yeah with the fact that it can't it can't really appreciate that there's a there's narrative and meaning and it doesn't embody that but what about the science of psychology i mean you're yeah well it's a weird hybrid purpose it's a weird hybrid and and isn't that the whole purpose of psychology is to understand well it's got two purposes psychology is a weird hybrid because it's half medicine and half research you know it's it's truly a hybrid because the clinicians they're all these weird characters like freud and rogers and the existential psychologists and jung and then there's this the straight research psychologists and they're more like the cognitive behaviorists on the on the uh let's say on the clinical front yeah and so it's facing both ways and and in principle could bring those things together but you see that the scientific the scientific this is a terrible problem because one of the things that the scientific perspective has done is made things look quite bleak existentially now i know there's wonderment in scientific investigation i understand that but because but it's strange because science attempts to push subjective meaning out of the way right i mean as part of its process sure and it should do that but it should but there's a but there's an existential problem there that that leaves us adrift and look one of the things i concluded from reading milton's paradise lost in his figure of satan satan for him was that really the tyrannical and authoritarian rational mind the mind that presumes that his assumptions are final satan so much not reason so much not reason exactly although the reason that the uh the reason that the french revolutionaries tried to make a deity in in in the great cathedral in paris that reason that's milton milton satan why because it falls in love with its own productions and raises them to the highest point and for milton he was a poet right he's imagining this yeah he doesn't know what's coming but for me that's a warning from an artist about the dawn of totalitarian reason in the aftermath of the scientific revolution okay yeah but you know but you actually say it i think um the adoption of god's place by reason is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell yes well what do you mean by that okay i mean that's a really quite a dramatic statement about that doesn't seem to suggest that reason is a good thing really it i no it's just not a good thing when it's elevated to the highest position it's a really good thing look even even in milton's work satan is god's highest angel and he falls the farthest it's not like this is not a good everything in its proper place in genesis man is instructed to subdue things properly put them in order put them in order that's what it means sub do make everything give everything it's due where does reason fit not at the top attention do you think there's intrinsic wisdom to something like genesis why do you think there isn't because it's 5 000 years old and probably way older than that yeah i know but why are things that ain't that are things that are ancient give me insight into human psyche but they don't necessarily give me insight into into profound under to profound understandings of the world around me i think not in the scientific way they don't not not in the way that modern science does they're not that isn't what they are at all they're not that there's something complete look here here's what they are in some senses look we have an idea that we can rank order literature by depth right because you read a shallow book someone tells you a shallow story you read a deep book and you have a sense of depth i have a dude yeah okay so the deepest stories are religious why that's a definition oh hold on it's a definition i'm allowed to make that definition because i disagree with it it's because it's because religious emotions start to be aroused when stories are told at that level this has nothing to do with with propositional belief it's a definition so you're saying if you're saying okay you use the word religion you tell me that i should use the word ah which i like better if you're saying the stories that that that are deepest or ones that relate to awe i can understand that if that's if it let me translate what you're saying yes is that yes and then this is experiential right and then i would also say aw is a biological instinct and part of the manifestation of that instinct is the impulse to imitate it's the impulse to because yeah okay so then the question here's another question what do we imitate well we don't just copy each other we don't literally move the same way as the person we're imitating we see someone that we are in awe of that we respect and admire we're gripped by the instinct to imitate what are we imitating well imagine that we can see that in five people and then the person those people they do some bad things but we ignore those okay we're imitating something central about all of them that's a spirit that this is a definition this is it's a definition because it's disembodied abstraction it's a disembodied abstraction of action it's a spirit for all intents and purposes we're really smart we abstract out the admirable and imitate it that's also part of the religious process exactly that what is it that's admirable across instances of admirable behavior and we imitate that and when your child look here's an example this is a good example your kid goes out on the field hey and he can zip down and score a goal in soccer and he's got a pretty good shot at it but a teammate and maybe not one that's so good is really open and so he passes and the other kids scores and you're happier about your damn kid doing that than you would if you have any sense then you would be whether if he scored a goal because he is embodying the spirit of being a good sport that's way better than scoring a goal okay so that that's a good example of because if you're smart and i see parents who do this badly all the time when i go to school or go to any soccer i do exactly i hate them watching the parents yeah it's terrible because they don't do this they they subordinate the they subordinate the local victory to the character development yeah yeah no they sort of the other way around they subordinate the character development to the local victory yeah i was wondering what you were going to get yeah exactly so they're imitating their worst yeah it's terrible sportsmen oh yeah i can't stand going yeah and then you look underneath that it's like oh you have a lot of under unrealized dreams a lot of resentment you're projecting that all in your child and that has to do with your unresolved shadow and to the pathology that you had with your parents and it's like just an endless nightmare going down into that sort of stuff and you go way down you find some things down there and they are really ugly and that's why you don't like going to those soccer games and no wonder so no so a lot of this is definition right rather than an argument in favor of in some sense i guess i guess for me yeah but the well so yes and i think you know i'm gonna try and segue slowly here because we could go on for another two hours and i'm not gonna i know we've gone no you're gonna i can't because i'll die before so i know and we're gonna go we're gonna go on for about another 20 minutes okay because i've got tickets i've got tickets to a movie it's even more serious okay okay yeah but um but uh so i i tend to put reason up at the top i i still maintain that that that that even that reason ultimately even though you can't get off from is without is and a reason applies to is you can't get out and and and so i think okay i want to quibble myself okay i want to quibble with that sure sure okay to some degree this is going to hinge on how we define reason right because it's kind of an expandable word and yeah but but i think it's useful to draw a distinction between reason and attention and attention should be higher because attention feeds reason right you're so when you're in these podcasts and you're attending new information is flooding in now that's reasonable but i wouldn't say that's reason reason is more like it's it's imperial no i agree with you there in fact actually i think you said something i did desperately disagreed with it the idea you say somewhere that the person who is truthful is then going to naturally do the right thing or something like that and i think eventually well yeah but but that really reads that really graded on me okay because it because it missed the attention part namely revel you don't get knowledge by revelation you only get knowledge by attention and what i would call attention being empirical being experiment and testing the world around you no you get it no you get knowledge from revelation all the time sure i'll give you an example you get wisdom maybe no i'll give you an example man this happens to you all the time but maybe it's an issue of definition right okay so you're trying to solve a scientific problem so you ask yourself the question well what happens is that answers pop up now you have to use reason to differentiate the quality of the answers but the fact that those answers manifest themselves in the field of your consciousness that's revelation oh no no it isn't it's based on my previous empirical observations the world i say oh not just way more than that it's way more what would happen no no no no sure it's based on the entire history of your biology if you locked theoretical physicists in a room yeah for 40 years and asked them to come up with a theory the theories they come up with would have no relation to the world around us because they constantly have to be prodded and changed by by observation and extension of course of course and the brilliant insight i've had you know gosh i used i've there are times in my life i've had brilliant insights and i wrote them down as papers nature didn't happen to agree with them of course in the sense and so that's what i mean i didn't say revelation i didn't say that that kind of revelation was um in infallible by any stretch of the imagination it's not and that's partly why you have to discuss it with other people i guess i think of no well it defines it once again and it's all epistemologized but yeah that's why i'm a that's why i'm a physicist and not a philosopher or a psychologist i guess but you know when you say that what do you mean by knowledge to me knowledge is an understanding of the way the world works that's what do you mean by words the way it functions so you make predictions and and you if you understand the way the world works if i say if this happens now that will happen then yeah to me you know that's just a very pedestrian thing it's why i'm a physicist but that's i guess how i would define knowledge what how would you define it i think that knowledge is basically experienced in relationship to action and predictions about the outcomes of actions so sorry agrees oh yes yes yes yes and then that kind of knowledge can only come from experience then no because you can't definitely you can't say how the world's going to work if you haven't next if you haven't watched at how the world has worked up to now but you know that that's not true because well because the apparatus that you're using to acquire that knowledge of the world is like three and a half billion years old and and all of that had to come for you to draw those conclusions from the experience that presents itself so revelation is definitely a consequence of your experience with the world but think about the platform that's doing that it's revelation i think it's just reason applied to observation right that you could call that revelation if you want it's my reasonable irrational mind yeah but where's laying over where did i see fair enough well where does thought come from where does thought come from you're supposed to tell me you're the psychologist i am telling you no no no no but i'm saying that bubbles up from the depths there's no doubt look and i'm not i'm not being naive i you know again we've talked about this before and and you made this other wonderful statement about reason being the slave of the passions and i'll buy that so i'll understand that there are all sorts of human reasons why i do what i do and i pretend afterwards it's rational thinking but the not but the knowledge ultimately comes when all of that is is is filtered by the results of experiments that so so that so that yeah there may be all sorts of things reasons i do things i don't understand why i'm doing them but the knowledge that comes out of it doesn't come from any of those reasons or any of that internal machinations it comes from a from a process that eventually i can compare to reality and test it and then it's knowledge but it doesn't come from just sitting there and saying the world works this way because who the hell knows how the world works unless you unless you observe them yes constantly look most of that i'm in complete agreement with but but we think about the scientific process i mean one of the things that we don't teach young researchers is how to generate hypotheses yes like hypotheses hypothesis testing okay so now you want to generate hypotheses well here's something you can do that will help read a lot widely a lot right and then ask yourself some questions and hypotheses will come bubbling up okay are they knowledge no they're proto knowledge but they're absolutely in fact i wanted to read you not only read a lot but that's one of the problems you may not get this as a say oh you may because people are fascinated with consciousness so you may get some of this but as a physicist i get this all the time i get every day people writing me five times a day with their theories of of the of everything and well-intentioned people i don't want to put them down they thought hard they've done that but what they don't realize is that you the the hypotheses to get good hypotheses to which is really asking good questions which is something we talked about earlier which is really what it's all about requires a lot of baggage you have to have read a lot you have to in order to know what the good questions are you have to know where the current state of knowledge is and so the problem with all of these letters i get is they're well-intentioned but they don't know they don't have all the baggage that goes along with it and it's hard to tell people oh you really have to well you can't yeah but i mean it's it's it's sad to say to people this is nice but you really haven't you don't understand all the precursors that are necessary to get to the point where your question makes sense yes you don't also don't understand how ruthless you have to be in killing off your own beloved hypothesis oh absolutely and right and yeah yeah that's right but but again to be fair to them these people they haven't had the opportunity to do that yet yeah they're just at the early stages of their curses but you but you have to have the bill as you say to get to the right hypotheses you have to have read a lot or or either that or experienced a lot i mean that's the other way you can do it and or you know if you're richard feynman instead of reasoning by experiencing i mean you you know you write 60 000 pages of of of of equations and you've figured out a lot so you now know how to address any situation because you have a lot of intellectual you have a lot of this baggage you have a lot of intellectual armor with you so you know how to address situation a b c and d because you've prepared for that and some of what you're saying when i when i read you and and i'm being generous um is is you're saying look as an adult you have to get that intellectual armor as well you have had to have the bad experiences you've had to have these things so you know that the world can be a bad place as well as a good place and you're prepared for it and you have you have the armor so when someone is mean to you you know that you know you can respond two different ways you can become resentful which is the purp you know in that particular happy you can become bitter and resentful and all the rest or you can say let you know let me let me take it an attitude that makes my life better rather than worse and that's part of the armor that i think you're trying to provide people with and so yeah so part of it is sure i'm trying to to ask broadly speaking do and we actually want things to be worse exactly and that's why both of you react so both you and i react the same way so bitterly to these people who not only feel victimized but these people who want to make sure that no one the makes the impossible happen which is that no one ever has anything bad happen to them because because you you you do poignantly say at one point i i wrote down this is the point where he's really getting something deep and it's where you talk about the fact that i think the example of the young girl who never has any who's protected her whole life and never has any anything bad happened to her and oh it's a maleficent it's the example yeah again usually you always have to use these stories which to me don't add anything but to others they might but but um the notion that that's going to come back and bite you in the butt literally or the finger if if you if you if you've been protected from the recognition that bad things can happen and how to deal with them that and that they never should happen and if they happen to you that's unfair then you don't understand that the world is unfair and you better be prepared for a world that's unfair yes and if that's if you've protected your children from all snakes then you're the snake yeah okay well i think there we agree let me let me the last thing i'm going to do i mean we could there's so many ways with tangents and maybe we'll have a whole bunch more i would also say lawrence there's something we should think about temperamentally too you know so people like you speaking broadly and respectfully because i know lots of people like you they're more thing oriented in their thinking right that's what makes you interested in physics and engineering that's a real temperamental difference and you would be less inclined to stories no i love i love stories in fact when i write i write stories but i i guess i think of them as a hook to understand something else rather than something deep within themselves i guess that's the difference between you i love stories because i think they're a useful way of explaining a useful way of getting people interested and and but but for me the underlying what i would call the underlying reality is more interesting than the story well think of a map map is an interesting thing so because there's not you know the maps of meaning there are no maps in your book well stories are messed up i know but you're looking for them to see if they're already mapped well think about a map though because a map in some sense is an objective representation of the territory but in some sense it's not because the only thing that's on the map are things that people find valuable and so even in that you see this weird interplay of narrative and reality right of course it's a map it's it's it if it isn't accurately laid on the world you don't get to where you want to go yeah but it only shows you where you want to go let it go right you might want yeah the map thinks you might want to go which is always frustrating for me when i look at maps because they often or where the consensus has and look at a map most of it's like really vague why well because you don't want to go there and so and that is really in some sense how we look at the world is we we we put a map on it and it's a narrative we filter out where we uh absolutely yeah and and i defer to you in that sense because you're i mean because yeah because you you you're interested in the psyche and you know much more about it than i do but i guess i don't give it a higher priority i say yes that is the way humans interact with the world but to me that's that's of some interest but it's not of key interest to me right what's interesting is the world right not so much not not so much the way that humans well that that's fair that's fair and and look at how where it's got us i mean we can't underplay the power of of that kind of thinking but one question that haunts me continually is well what does the fact that that's the way we look at the world say about the world itself and then that gets tough because it start because you start to have to have conversations like well what do you mean the world exactly well no but that you really need to hit it that what that question you ask what is how we the way we look you said it very well the way you look the world's what does it say about the world itself yes and to me i think that is a dangerous path it represents it says a lot about how how how we learn as human beings to understand the world and deal with the world evolutionarily and successfully or unsuccessfully which as a psychologist i think you know you're trying to help people avoid the latter but i think it's i i'm wary about the claim that you can use that to understand the world itself no i didn't i didn't claim that i didn't claim that you could i claimed that it was an interesting question but i'm going to put an interesting question i'm going to put a knot in your tail in one way i think hopefully okay well one of the things that's happened in biology and i think i probably have to stop after this because i'm getting one okay i have one question i have do one just one question after this sure okay okay okay so one of the key insights of darwin that was underplayed by biologists for decades but has recently come back more into favor is the fact that a lot of our being and that of many other creatures was a consequence not of natural selection per se but of sexual selection okay now sexual selection is mediated by consciousness certainly i'll buy that consciousness shaped evolution okay we evolved to adapt to what's real what does that say about consciousness and its reality now the the the religious stories one of the things that's interesting about them is they claim a kind of primacy for consciousness that isn't in keeping generally speaking with the scientific viewpoint but if consciousness is so deeply structured into reality that it selected us then it's real man now but what do you mean real well that's that's the rub and it's not an invasion it's like no no wait a second here like is consciousness just epiphenomenal well it seems pretty similar across animal species so that's interesting and maybe it's epiphenomenal maybe it's not i mean i don't know because i don't understand consciousness at all i don't know what consciousness is right i don't even know if we have other there's big debate so i thought about whether other species have consciousness um per se in the in at least uh in the way that you know humans well they don't seem to have this elaborated self-consciousness for sure right right and some of them can recognize themselves in the mirror but they don't have they don't have an elaborated self-concept as i say yeah i mean that's and you're right and that's a deep question and one that's one of the i said to you the last time we talked that's one of the reasons i became a physicist because it's too complicated for me i still i've talked to many people and no one's given me a definition of consciousness that i can yet understand and uh and and and yeah well i think i think the i don't think the problem of the question of what consciousness is i don't think that's an epic epistemological question i think it's an ontological question it's like way down there it's certainly way down there i i you know what someone once said to me i don't know if we i said the last time it was interesting observation that you could tell how little we know about something by the number of books that are written about it more book the more books written the less we know and there's tons of books about consciousness there are a few books about quantum mechanics because we you know once dirac wrote down quantum mechanics you don't have to write another book about it um let me let me read you two quotes it's the last thing i want to do and maybe i'll just we may not even be a question to me this illustrates in some sense the difference of our psyches um there's a quote here in in in beyond order first a question what is the world made of to answer this we will need to consider reality the world as it is fully experienced by someone alive and awake with all the richness of subjective being left intact dreams sensory experiences feelings drives and fantasies this is the world that manifests itself to or better that you need that you meet head-on with your unique individual consciousness i think that encapsulates a lot of what you've just been saying but it reminded me of a quote from one of the people i admire most as a science popularizer and maybe as a scientist jacob branowski who who who more than carl sagan i think did a wonderful i just hold him in the highest regard and his here's the quote from him dream or nightmare we have to live our experience as it is and we have to live it awake we live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real we cannot turn it into a game simply by taking sides and so i think that is the that maybe maybe that's a good place to end because i think it's a great beginning point of a further dialogue between you and me because i view his view and the two are very closely related the two statements but they have very different perspectives i think and i and and and look i really like the questions you know and and i know you were apprehensive to some degree about peppering me with them but i'm perfectly happy although it's difficult to be questioned in that manner like i i know that many of these things are seem obscure and they were bloody obscure to me when i was first starting to figure them out but the questions that you threw at me are questions that people have all the time about what i'm trying to talk about and what people like jung were trying to talk about i mean he's even more impenetrable than me so that's why i don't read philosophy but very much but i'd have i gotta admit i pretend i don't but i have but um uh but no look look i wanted look if i didn't think it was worth parsing what you're saying i wouldn't have i understood i absolutely understand that and um and i'm sorry because i agree with you i love the questions and i told myself when i was praying this let me just let jordan ask me questions because it's so much more interesting for me than than than the other way around but i thought i owed it to you to ask you those questions but there's a whole bunch of questions that i know you still had for me which i'd hoped to have in the last hour half hour of this talk we of this discussion we haven't we'll do it again well let's do it again yeah let's let's agree to do it again and i hope you've enjoyed it and i hope it's in some of the things were new and i hope that for people listening that they'll that this will provide additional insights into both you and the things you're saying and and for me it's always i was going to say a revelation but i won't use that word but it's but it's but it's it's fascinating for me to learn so i've really enjoyed it and i really do appreciate your time and uh and um yeah this is uh just the beginning i hope of of more thank you thank you yes well it's a great compliment to be taken seriously like and i i understand that you know yeah no in fact i i i think that's maybe what charmed me about when we first talked to me is the questions you had you know it took it's good people react a lot better when they're taken seriously but i do and and and and i'm glad that you feel that way [Music] i hope you enjoyed today's conversation you can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through patreon this podcast is produced by the origins project foundation a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world to learn more please visit originsprojectfoundation.org

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 404,616

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics

Id: YU8ktM80BCw

Length: 141min 24sec (8484 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021