Transcriber: Peter van de Ven
Reviewer: Tanya Cushman So I'm going to talk to you today about a different way
of looking at what real is. It's not easy to figure out what real is, because we don't really have
infinite knowledge, and so we're always making
some sets of presuppositions about what's most real. And it really matters
what you assume is most real because you base
the decisions that you make that run the entire course of your life on those assumptions, whether you recognize it or not. And if you get the assumptions wrong, or even if you leave them incomplete, you're going to pay a big price for it. And the assumptions
that we use in our culture, although they've enabled us to develop
a tremendously potent technology, are incomplete in ways
that have also cost us and that are extremely dangerous. Since the scientific age began, we've lived in a universe where the bottom strata of reality is considered to be
something that's dead - like dirt. It's like it's matter. It's objective. It's external. And there isn't any element of it that lends any reality to phenomena
like meaning or purpose - that's all being relegated
to the subjective and in some ways to the illusory. But it's by no means self-evident that that set of
presuppositions is correct, because we lack infinite knowledge and there's many things
about the structure of being that we don't understand - the main one being consciousness. We can't account for it at all, and we can't account
for the role it appears to play in the transformation
of potential into actuality, which is a role that's been
recognized by physicists for almost a hundred years now and which remains one of the biggest
unsolved mysteries in science. There are other ways
of looking at what's real, and these other ways have some advantages, and one of the advantages they have
is that they protect us: knowing these other ways of operating
within reality or defining reality protect us from certain kinds
of pathologies. And modern people are prone
to a fair number of pathologies that stem from the assumptions
of the systems they use to define reality. And one of those pathologies
is a kind of a nihilistic hopelessness which is a consequence of the recognition that in the final analysis
nothing really has any meaning. And because life is difficult - and that's a meaning
that you can't escape - being forced to abandon your belief
in a positive or a transcendent meaning can leave you weak at times when you really
can least afford to be weak. And there's more important pathologies
that it's opened us up to too: pathologies of belief. And I think we saw the most
horrifying examples of that - hopefully the most horrifying examples - in the 20th century, where people whose belief systems
were shattered, at least in part, by the competition between religious
and scientific viewpoints turned in large numbers to mass movements that were
in every way a substitute, a more rational, in some sense, substitute for religious beliefs
that appeared no longer tenable. And the consequence of that was -
it was just about annihilation because we came close
to annihilation twice, once in the '60s and once in the '80s. And even without
the totality of annihilation, we lost hundreds of millions of people as a consequence of pathological
belief systems in the 20th century. So if belief systems become pathological, that pathology can pose
the biggest threat, possibly, to our very existence. And if you're a Darwinian in any sense, you have to understand that the things that pose
the biggest threats to your survival are the most real things. They have to be dealt with. Now, here's another way
of looking at things. [Phainesthai] I'll start with
the definition of this word. This word "phainesthai" is the root word
of phenomena, phenomenon. Phenomena are the things
that appear to you, and phainesthai means to shine forth. And the phenomenologists, who were interested
in the shining forth of things, made the presumption that the things that manifested
themselves to you as most meaningful were the most real things. And I think you can make a strong case that that's actually
how your brain's wired because your brain is wired
to react to things that have meaning before they construct the perceptions
that you think of as objects. And the reason for that is because the meaning of things
is more real, in some sense, but more important than
the view of things as objects. And so, for example, a famous
philosopher-psychologist division said that when you approach a cliff,
you don't see a cliff: you see a falling-off place. It isn't that it's an object - cliff - to which you attribute
the meaning of falling-off place to; it's the falling-off-place
perception comes first, and the abstraction
of the objective cliff, if it ever happens at all,
comes much later - much later conceptually,
because even babies can detect cliffs, and much later historically. Poets have noticed this phenomena,
shining-forth reality, and they've often associated it
with childhood, and I think for good reasons. I think your brain is not so much
of an inhibitory structure when you're a child,
before it's fully developed, and so there's neurological
reasons for noting it, but there's also reasons that stem
from the level of lived experience. You can tell when you're around children that they're open to things
in a way that adults aren't. They're wide-eyed with wonder. And adults like being around children for that reason. Because although the child
takes an awful lot of care and is a terrifying object,
in some ways, to behold, if you have a relationship with the child,
because they're so vulnerable, part of the way they pay you back
is they open up your eyes - your eyes that have been closed
by your experience and that have learned to shield out
the things that shine forth. And when you have a child,
you can look through its eyes again, and, to me, it's like
they're on fire, in a sense - they're like a candle
or something burning brightly. I think that's partly because
we actually don't screen out fire - we actually see fire - and that's why we can't
not look at it when it's around. I think the same thing happens
when you're in love with someone - if it's genuine love. Because genuine love gives you a hint
of what could be in the future if you could just set yourself right - you get a glimpse
of what could be in the future if you fall in love. You don't get that without work,
but you get a glimpse, and I think it's because
when you fall in love - and I believe this is likely
a biochemical transformation - is the perceptual structures that
normally stop you from seeing people - because you really don't see people;
you just see shadows - the barriers are lifted temporarily, and what's really there shines through,
and it's overwhelming. But to stay in that state, well, it requires a tremendous
amount of moral effort - is really the right way
of thinking about it. Wordsworth said about children: "There was a time
when meadow, grove and stream, The earth, and every common sight To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore; Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen
I now can see no more. Earth fills her lap
with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath
in her own natural kind, and even with something
of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster child, her inmate, Man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came." And what Wordsworth means by this is that as you develop
as a competent adult - which is precisely the direction
towards which you should develop - much of what you're doing
is actually closing in and narrowing. You're closing in and narrowing towards a particular goal
and a particular way of being. And that's necessary, because as you develop, you have to develop
towards a particular way of being or you don't develop at all, and you can't stay a child forever. That goes sour of its own accord. And so human beings are destined
to close their perceptions in, to sharpen themselves
and to focus on very little so that they can at least do that. But the price we pay for that is that we start to replace the relationship we have
with untrammeled reality with the shadows that are only complex enough to let us do what we need
to do and no more. And although we've become more competent,
in other ways we've become more blind. And we kind of know how this happens. It happens from the bottom up. This is a Magritte painting, and the painting has
an obvious meaning, in a sense, which is that we're blinded,
even to what's right in front of us, by the objects that we see. And we think that seeing
is letting in the light, but it's only letting in
a very small fraction of the light because we're only capable of contemplating
a small fraction of everything whenever we're doing any particular thing. Very much of what we're doing
is screening things out. Very much of your cortex is inhibitory. And Magritte is trying
to get at that with that idea. There's a businessman there,
dressed in his uniform. He can't see beyond the immediate thing
that's in front of his eyes. How does that happen? Let's say you're a baby.
The first thing you learn. You learn - you build your body
from the bottom up. You build your perceptual
and action structures from the bottom up. You learn to move your arm.
You learn to close your hand. Then you learn to do things
that are practical with those abilities. You lift a spoon. Well, you have to do that
to feed yourself. You learn to move a plate. You learn to set the table - that's starting to become social now because you can set the table
for you and for other people. You learn to make a meal - that's a more complex sequencing of
motor activities and perceptual abilities that's very focused. As you continue to develop, the things you chain together
become more and more complex but also more specific - you have to care for your family, which means there's all sorts
of other things you're not doing. You have to find a good job, which almost everyone, when they're young, experiences as the contemplation
of a limitation. Well, not everyone, but many people
think, "Oh no," you know, "I'm going to have to settle
for this role. I don't want to only be that role," but it's better to be that role
than no role at all. And maybe the way
through the role to the other side is through the role, not around it. There's no avoiding the responsibility
of narrowing and shaping and specializing. Be a good parent. Well, that's a sacrifice you make
for the next generation. Be a good partner - the same thing. Be a good citizen. It's easy for young people,
in particular, to be skeptical of that because the old society
is always corrupt and archaic and blind, and to become a member of that seems to be in part to allow yourself
to adopt that same aged blindness. But that thing also educates you;
it shapes every word you speak. It's something that you
have to be grateful to, even in its aged and archaic form. And it's part of the necessities
of human responsibility that you become a good citizen. And that means, in some sense,
giving up more of what could be - at least to sustain what is. There's a satirical song
from the late 1890s, English: "I am the very model
of a modern Major-General, I've information, vegetable,
animal and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical..." And the satire is, well, he has the knowledge, he's an official functionary, and it's very difficult to do that, but in the same way
it's very limited and categorical, and of course an artist
would object to that. But it's better than nothing at all,
and that's the alternative. Well, maybe what's above good citizen - sometimes good citizen is not so good. If you are a good citizen
of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union or of Mao's China, you were narrowed in a particular way, and then maybe in a necessary way,
but also in a very pathological way, and so it seems to be
that there has to be something, even though adopting
that restricted viewpoint is necessary, there has to be something above it. And I think that's also the thing
that can restore the sense you have of a true entanglement with the deepest
and most meaningful realities of life. And that's the issue
of being a good person. It's above being a citizen;
it's something else. It has to do with the development
of individuality. And I think we're also wired for that. So it looks like we're wired
to lose what we had, to specialize, but then once we're
specialized, to reopen. Once we've got the skills
built into our body and then can handle reality because we're more adapted
and more fluid and more flexible, then we can start opening the doors again. And I believe that your nervous system
is set up to help you do that if you don't interfere with it, if you notice. And you notice that by paying attention to the things
that manifest themselves to you, that shine forth as interesting - they grab you. And where you're grabbed
is where the obscuring map you live in isn't obscuring the reality
that's underneath. It's like there's a hole in the map, and the light shines through that
and you're attracted to that. And that will pull you along. That's when your interest
is seized by something. That's your nervous system
doing that; you don't do that. It's an unconscious force. You could even say it was
the world itself talking to you. And the phenomenologists
did feel that way. And it's a real phenomenon,
not a secondary thing, and you know that because you can't live without it. You die, you stultify, you get cynical, you get nihilistic or you adopt
some wild belief system if you don't have the attachment to some genuine life-giving
meaning in your own life. And it's a hard thing to follow that because it doesn't necessarily put you
into perfect juxtaposition with society, because it's not society. It's not being a good citizen;
it's something else. It's also the thing that rebuilds
how you would be a good citizen. The Egyptians knew about this
a long time ago. They didn't really know they knew, because they acted things out in drama
and portrayed them mythologically because they didn't have the capacity
to articulate the ideas fully. But the Egyptians worshiped the human eye. They worshiped the eye because they knew
the eye was what paid attention - like, we're really visual creatures - and your eye is automatically attracted to the things that manifest themselves,
or shine forth, in front of you, and you have to look at them. If you pay attention
to the things that shine forth, because what you're seeing
is the reality instead of the map, you're gaining access to
the real information that's in the world. It's not prepackaged information. Because that can be false. It's the real information flowing out
from the ground of being, and if you pay attention to that, it will help you move towards the goals that you've already established
for yourself as a good citizen, that are part of the inbuilt
value structure that you've adopted, but at the same time,
it will do something else. It will lead you to transform
the nature of those goals. Because as you pursue the thing
that guides your interest and more and more information is revealed, then by absorbing that information -
which is learning, essentially - you build yourself
into a different person, a stronger and more informed person, and a more intact person, a person with more integrity
and with more strength and with more direction. And at the same time,
you differentiate your map. So you're living more and more
in the real world. So as you approach your specific goal, even if it's a culturally
conditioned goal, the learning that you do
along the way transforms you and it transforms the nature of your goal. Things shine forth. There's a reason for that. And you know that because
when you're attending to something you're interested in
and you're engaged in, that's when you're alive, that's when life is worthwhile. It's so worthwhile that in those moments,
you don't even ask the question about it. The question itself goes away because the meaning
that you're united with is so powerful that it can push back the adversity
that would otherwise characterize life. Nietzsche said the person
who has a why can bear any how. And that's a really useful thing to know because you think, well,
we're very vulnerable creatures and our life ends catastrophically and terrible things happen
and how can we bear that? And the answer to that is,
and always has been, that you have to be in sync
with something that's beyond you because that synchrony
gives you the strength that you need to bear your terrible limitations. You see this played out; people know this. Everyone knows this. It's just our culture
isn't good at articulating it. We've lost a lot of this. We haven't developed
our knowledge about this as much as we've developed
knowledge of the objective world. And we're paying for it. You see it in weird places. On the right here,
there's an old symbol at the bottom. It's called the round chaos, and the alchemists believed
that the round chaos was the thing that held
what the world was ultimately made of, the thing that was most real. And they conceptualized it
as something like information. They thought about it
as a combination of spirit and matter. It was a combination of spirit and matter, which is what information is, in a sense, because when you interacted with it, you took some of the information
and you built yourself out of it - that was the spiritual element - and took some information
and built the world out of it - the material element. And they thought of the reality itself as something that preceded
the spiritual and the material and that that reality
was what shone forth. And that's been dramatized in tales,
modern tales of transformation. The most interesting place it's popped up
is in the Harry Potter stories, where central to the Harry Potter theme
is a game called Quidditch. And in Quidditch, which is a game, the way you win the game is by playing a game that's
sort of outside the Quidditch game. You win the Quidditch game by finding, following
this thing that beckons, this golden thing that glimmers
and moves around. If you catch that, then you win the game and so does your whole team. And inside that is the resurrection stone: it's a diamond, it's a jewel. The idea is that if you follow the thing that manifests
itself to you as interesting, it will lead you through adversity, lead you to do difficult things, and as that happens - but not beyond your capacity,
because it's tempered for that - what will happen is
as you hit yourself against the world, pursuing what you're interested in, you'll tap yourself into alignment. Your molecules, your structure,
internal structure, will become non-contradictory - like the internal structure of a jewel,
which is something that reflects light - that makes you hard and durable and able to bear the terrible conditions
of existence without becoming corrupt. T.S. Eliot said something about this: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time." And that's a five-line summary of the most remarkable elaboration of the nature of the relationship
between the individual human consciousness and reality itself that's ever been penned and the culmination of a system of thought that's been developing
over thousands and thousands of years, which we have lost
and cannot properly articulate. Follow what you're interested in. It'll take you to adversity
and then through it; it'll transform you
from a citizen into an individual, and then the doors will open again, and at that point, you're
strong enough to have your life. And at that point, you're strong enough not to fall prey
to pathological belief systems and work towards
the destruction of things. Thank you.
Interesting, but TED talks aren't lectures and belong in r/TED
I'm always wary when someone tries to distill philosophy down into a 20 minute talk. Doubly so when it is hosted by TED.
Very interesting talk!
One error @8:27-8:44 suggesting that it is 'necessary' to narrow; that keeping an open mind is impractical and that no progress is made from not narrowing, is wrong.. that perhaps reflects the 'normal' that is encouraged by the duller end of academic clinical psychology.. and also by the comments he makes to the end of the presentation following the TS Elliot quote.. suggesting that staying true to what you are interested in, is best. Perhaps he senses something lost.. avoiding "pathological belief systems" is a most important point; our world is suffering from the overzealous actions of the likes of religion; psychiatry; banking; politics; military; spooks.. all types of belief systems where people find themselves compromised and narrowed to a point that they are not helping progress but compounding the normal and creating new challenges for the rest of us. Contrary then to that error suggested, we need more people who do not compromise and narrow their perception.. and in tune with his comments at the end.. we need people to stay true to what they are interested in. It's always been a wonder to me that people are so quick to compromise themselves..