The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 136. Maps of Meaning 08： Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation

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00:01:50.920 So one of the propositions that I set forth for you last week was that the most real things are

00:02:19.080 the things that are the things that are most permanent across time and that manifest themselves in the

00:02:26.420 largest number of situations. And those are the things that you have to map successfully in order

00:02:31.240 to survive. Survive as individuals, but survive as a species over a very long period of time. And so

00:02:37.400 the question is, one question is, what are the constants of experience? If you are a follower of the

00:02:49.240 evolutionary psychologists, and to some degree the evolutionary biologists, but I would say more

00:02:54.040 the psychologists like Tubi and Cosmedes, they have a very Afro-centric view of human evolution.

00:03:06.220 And the idea basically is that after we diverged from the common ancestor between chimpanzees,

00:03:15.560 bonobos, and human beings, we spent a tremendous amount of time in the African environment,

00:03:23.280 mostly on the veld, although we're not absolutely certain about that. We're also very good in water,

00:03:29.120 human beings, and we have some of the features of aquatic mammals. So, well, hairlessness being one of

00:03:36.760 them. Women have a subcutaneous layer of fat, our feet are quite nicely adapted for swimming.

00:03:43.420 And so Buckminster Fuller, who I wouldn't call a mainstream evolutionary psychologist, hypothesized

00:03:48.880 back in the 70s that we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history living on beaches near

00:03:54.400 the ocean. That idea really echoes for me, because we like beaches a lot, and it's a great place if

00:04:03.040 you want to get easy food. And we're pretty damn good at swimming for terrestrial mammals, and we are

00:04:08.580 hairless, and we do cry salt tears, and there's a lot of evidence that we... And our feet, if you think

00:04:13.620 about our feet, they're quite flipper-like. I know we stand up and all that and walk, so that's part of

00:04:18.600 the adaptation. But we're pretty good at swimming. So, anyways, the classical evolutionary psychology

00:04:25.980 view is that we spent most of our time on the African belt in the critical period of our evolutionary

00:04:31.540 development, let's say, after we diverged from this common ancestor, and that we're adapted for

00:04:37.080 that environment. And one of the consequences of that is the idea that we're... That things have

00:04:43.080 changed so much around us that we're really not adapted to the environment that we're in anymore.

00:04:47.860 And I don't really believe that, because I think that the idea that the primary forces that shaped

00:04:54.040 our evolution shaped them during that period of time, call it roughly a 7 million year period of

00:05:02.040 time, something like that, and that that was somehow a special time for human evolution that set our

00:05:09.880 nature. I don't believe that. I mean, it's true to some degree, but it's more useful to view the

00:05:19.880 evolution of human cognitive processes over the entire span of evolutionary history, and not necessarily

00:05:25.060 give preference to any particular epoch. And I certainly believe that the idea that we're no longer

00:05:31.440 adapted to the environment because of our rapid technological transformations is simply not true.

00:05:35.940 And the reason I think that it's not true is because the fundamental constants of the environment,

00:05:41.680 let's say, or it's more of the fundamental constituent elements of being, I think that's the right way

00:05:46.740 to think about it, they're the same. They haven't changed a bit, and there's no way of changing them,

00:05:52.420 as far as I can tell, without us being radically and incomprehensibly different than we are.

00:05:58.360 And, you know, with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and robotics and all of that,

00:06:03.680 it's certainly possible that in 500 years we'll be completely, we'll be so like, unlike the way we

00:06:10.000 are now that we won't even be the same creatures. I don't think that's a particularly great outcome,

00:06:14.280 but it's certainly possible. So what are the fundamental constituent elements? Well,

00:06:20.920 they're expressed in mythology, but they're not merely symbolic. I think it's the wrong way to think

00:06:25.720 about it. They're symbolic, but they reflect a very deep reality, and they actually reflect a

00:06:30.320 reality that's not easily apprehensible directly by the senses. Now, your senses are tuned for a

00:06:37.160 particular duration. That's roughly, excuse me, that's roughly the duration that you live,

00:06:47.560 let's say, but more importantly, it's the duration, whatever that duration is, across which meaningful

00:06:52.940 actions take place. And we kind of have some idea of what that duration is. You know, if you look at

00:06:57.560 a computer screen, if it has a refresh rate of less than 60 hertz, you can see it flickering. But above

00:07:04.160 60 hertz, you can't. It's uniform. And with movies, anywhere between 20 and 50 frames a second is enough

00:07:11.200 to give you the illusion of continual motion. So, you know, we live in a universe that's above the

00:07:17.580 10th of a second domain, or maybe the hundredth of a second, somewhere in there anyways. And I mean,

00:07:22.340 it's not like time isn't almost infinitely subdivisable at higher levels of resolution than that.

00:07:28.380 But we don't operate, generally speaking, at higher temporal resolution than that. And then,

00:07:34.980 you know, we're... our feeling of the felt moment seems to be, I would say, something approximating

00:07:42.700 half a second to a second. You know, I mean, it's an estimate, obviously, but a second is a

00:07:47.920 meaningful unit of time for a person, and a hundredth of a second really isn't, and certainly

00:07:52.080 a billionth of a second isn't. And then, you know, we can think across hours and days and weeks and

00:07:57.680 months, but we really can't... once you start getting out into years, it gets kind of sketchy,

00:08:01.960 and it's hard to think more than five years down the road. And the reason for that is that

00:08:05.660 the particulars upon which you're basing your predictions are likely to change sufficiently

00:08:10.940 over a five-year period, so that extending out your vision past that just exposes you

00:08:16.280 to accelerating error, right? And that... and of course, that's the problem with predicting

00:08:20.120 the future period. So we live in a time range that's about, say, a tenth of a second to three

00:08:25.380 years, something like that. Now, I know it can expand beyond that, but that's kind of where

00:08:30.300 we're set. And our senses seem to be tuned to those durations, and to be operative so that

00:08:36.060 we make proper decisions within those durations, and... and also from... from a particular spatial

00:08:42.500 position, and so forth, you know? Your eyes see what's roughly... maybe we could say a walkable

00:08:50.180 distance in front of you, something like that. And so... and you detect things in... in the

00:08:56.040 locale that enables you to immediately interact with things. But it isn't necessarily the case

00:09:01.340 that senses that... senses that are tuned to do that are also tuned to inform you directly

00:09:06.560 about what the most permanent things about being itself are. I think that those things

00:09:11.620 have to be inferred. And there's some... there's some supporting evidence for that kind of thing

00:09:16.480 from... from psycholinguistics. There... there is a level of... of categorization that we seem

00:09:24.120 to manifest more or less automatically or implicitly. So, for example, when children perceive animals,

00:09:32.340 they... they... they perceive at the level of cat or dog. They don't... they don't perceive at the

00:09:38.420 level of subspecies like Siamese cat or... or... or... or... or... let's say Samoid, you know? There's...

00:09:45.520 there's this... there's a natural... I can't remember what they call that... base category, something like

00:09:49.860 that. It's usually specified by very short words that are easily learnable. And so the linguistic

00:09:54.220 system seems to map right on to the... to the object recognition... characteristics of the sensory

00:10:00.860 systems that are built right into it. And... and if they weren't built into it, we couldn't communicate

00:10:05.580 easily because our natural categories... I think that's it, but it's probably wrong. Our natural

00:10:09.780 categories, they have to be the same for everyone or it would be very difficult for us to communicate.

00:10:14.840 Okay. Okay. So, having said all that, then the question is, well, what are the most... what

00:10:22.160 are the most real categories? And... I think there's... there's a real division in ways to think

00:10:27.920 about this because there's a scientific way of thinking about it. And... and in... in that

00:10:32.820 case, the most real categories are... well, mathematical equations certainly seem to be in... in the

00:10:38.540 top category there, the equations that describe the physical universe. But then... then the... the...

00:10:44.820 hypothesis of... of the existence of such things as protons and... and electrons and... you know,

00:10:50.860 the... the... the... the material elements that make up everything that's... every element of being... with the

00:10:57.180 possible exception of empty space. Um... but in the... in the mythological world, the categories, I think,

00:11:05.140 are more derived from Darwinian... by the effect of Darwinian processes on cognitive and perceptual

00:11:12.320 function. So, which is to say that... we have learned to perceive... and then to infer... those things...

00:11:18.360 that are most necessary for us in order to continue... our existence... propagate... live well... all of those things.

00:11:24.200 And... that would be true at the level of individual survival... and maybe it's also true... at the level of group survival...

00:11:29.160 although... you know, the... there's a tremendous debate... among evolutionary biologists... about whether or not...

00:11:34.680 selection can take place at the level of the group.

00:11:38.520 Anyways... there are these basic level categories... that manifest themselves to you... and then there's categories of the imagination...

00:11:44.640 that you have to infer... up from the sensory domain... and... we do that partly in science by...

00:11:50.640 comparing our sensory representations... across people... but we also do it by thinking abstractly... conceptualizing abstractly... and...

00:11:58.680 you know, one of the things that's interesting about abstractions... is it's not clear...

00:12:02.520 whether they're more or less real... than the things they're abstracted from...

00:12:05.640 you know, this is a perennial debate...

00:12:08.640 among... let's call them ontologists... who are...

00:12:11.640 interested in the fundamental... fundamental nature of reality itself...

00:12:15.640 in some sense independent of conceptual structures...

00:12:18.640 are numbers more or less real than the things they represent?

00:12:21.640 it's a really hard question to answer...

00:12:23.600 because...

00:12:25.480 knowing... like... using numbers as a representational system... gives you unbelievable power...

00:12:30.600 and there are mathematicians that believe that there isn't anything more real than mathematical representations...

00:12:35.600 now, it depends to some degree, of course, on how you classify reality...

00:12:38.600 that's the problem with a question like...

00:12:40.600 is A...

00:12:42.600 uh... equivalent to B...

00:12:44.600 the answer to that always is... well, it depends on how you define A... and it depends on how you define B...

00:12:48.600 so... generally, it's not a very useful question...

00:12:51.560 but... you can still get the point that...

00:12:53.560 there's something very real about abstractions...

00:12:55.560 incredibly real...

00:12:57.560 because otherwise, why would you bother with them?

00:12:59.560 they wouldn't give you any handle on the world...

00:13:01.560 so what's the... what's the most useful... or what's the most...

00:13:05.560 what's the broadest possible level of abstraction...

00:13:08.560 and is there any use of... any utility in thinking in that manner?

00:13:12.560 and... I tried to... make the case last time that...

00:13:15.560 that... in the mythological world, there are...

00:13:18.520 three categories... or four... depending on what you do with the strange fourth category...

00:13:22.520 because the fourth category is sort of...

00:13:24.520 the category of uncategorizable... entities...

00:13:28.520 and so it's sort of the category of everything that...

00:13:30.520 not only do you not know, but you don't know, you don't know it...

00:13:33.520 it's... it's... or you could think about it as the category of potential...

00:13:36.520 I actually think that's the best way to think about it...

00:13:38.520 is that... it's... the dragon of chaos is the category of potential...

00:13:42.520 and I do...

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00:17:30.200 So one of the propositions that I set forth for you last week...

00:17:52.660 Was that the most real things are the things that are most permanent across time...

00:18:00.120 And that manifest themselves in the largest number of situations...

00:18:05.160 And those are the things that you have to map successfully in order to survive...

00:18:09.300 Survive as individuals...

00:18:11.560 But survive as a species over a very long period of time...

00:18:14.200 So the question is...

00:18:16.560 One question is...

00:18:18.060 What are the constants of experience?

00:18:22.340 If you are a follower of the evolutionary psychologists...

00:18:28.540 And to some degree the evolutionary biologists...

00:18:30.440 But I would say more the psychologists...

00:18:32.740 Like Tubi and Cosmedes...

00:18:36.200 They have a very Afro-centric view of human evolution...

00:18:43.660 And the idea basically is that...

00:18:46.660 After we diverged from the common ancestor between chimpanzees, bonobos, and human beings...

00:18:54.660 We spent a tremendous amount of time in the African environment...

00:19:00.340 Mostly on the veld...

00:19:01.660 Although we're not absolutely certain about that...

00:19:04.660 We're also very good in water, human beings...

00:19:07.020 And we have some of the features of aquatic mammals...

00:19:11.120 So...

00:19:11.900 Well, hairlessness being one of them...

00:19:15.000 Women have a subcutaneous layer of fat...

00:19:17.720 Our feet are quite nicely adapted for swimming...

00:19:20.400 And so Buckminster Fuller...

00:19:21.800 Who I wouldn't call a mainstream evolutionary psychologist...

00:19:25.120 Hypothesized back in the 70s...

00:19:26.860 That we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history...

00:19:30.320 Living on beaches near the ocean...

00:19:32.460 That idea really echoes for me...

00:19:36.600 Because we like beaches a lot...

00:19:38.920 And it's a great place if you want to get easy food...

00:19:41.520 And we're pretty damn good at swimming...

00:19:43.600 For terrestrial mammals...

00:19:45.220 And we are hairless...

00:19:46.200 And we do cry salt tears...

00:19:47.820 And there's a lot of evidence that we...

00:19:49.700 And our feet...

00:19:50.320 If you think about our feet...

00:19:51.260 They're quite flipper-like...

00:19:52.700 I know we stand up and all that and walk...

00:19:54.920 So that's part of the adaptation...

00:19:56.420 But we're pretty good at swimming...

00:19:58.300 So...

00:19:59.640 Anyways...

00:20:00.840 The classical evolutionary psychology view...

00:20:03.440 Is that we spent most of our time on the African belt...

00:20:06.440 In the critical period of our evolutionary development...

00:20:09.260 Let's say...

00:20:09.700 After we diverged from this common ancestor...

00:20:12.440 And that we're adapted for that environment...

00:20:14.440 And one of the consequences of that...

00:20:17.700 Is the idea that we're...

00:20:19.300 That things have changed so much around us...

00:20:21.400 That we're really not adapted to the...

00:20:23.500 Environment that we're in anymore...

00:20:25.280 And I don't really believe that...

00:20:26.500 Because I think that...

00:20:27.780 The idea that...

00:20:29.500 The primary forces that shaped our evolution...

00:20:32.580 Shaped them during that period of time...

00:20:35.440 Call it a...

00:20:36.780 Roughly a 7 million period...

00:20:38.440 Year period of time...

00:20:39.380 Something like that...

00:20:40.440 And that that was somehow a special...

00:20:44.780 Time for human evolution...

00:20:46.200 That set our nature...

00:20:48.000 I don't believe that...

00:20:50.780 I mean...

00:20:52.400 It's true to some degree...

00:20:53.540 But...

00:20:54.780 It's more useful to view...

00:20:56.780 The evolution of human cognitive processes...

00:20:59.000 Over the entire span of evolutionary history...

00:21:01.180 And not necessarily give preference...

00:21:03.380 To any particular...

00:21:04.700 Epoch...

00:21:05.780 And I certainly believe...

00:21:07.080 That the idea that we're no longer adapted...

00:21:09.100 To the environment...

00:21:09.960 Because of our rapid technological transformations...

00:21:12.100 Is simply not true...

00:21:13.360 And the reason I think that it's not true...

00:21:15.160 Is because the fundamental constants...

00:21:17.360 Of the environment...

00:21:18.700 Let's say...

00:21:19.200 Or it's more of the fundamental constitute...

00:21:21.560 Constituent elements of being...

00:21:22.960 I think that's the right way to think about it...

00:21:24.560 They're the same...

00:21:25.440 They haven't changed a bit...

00:21:27.440 And there's no way of changing them...

00:21:29.540 As far as I can tell...

00:21:30.440 Without us being radically...

00:21:32.440 And incomprehensibly different than we are...

00:21:35.640 And you know...

00:21:36.260 With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence...

00:21:39.200 And robotics and all of that...

00:21:40.740 It's certainly possible...

00:21:41.820 That in 500 years...

00:21:42.900 We'll be completely...

00:21:44.900 We'll be so like...

00:21:46.060 Unlike the way we are now...

00:21:47.480 That we won't even be the same creatures...

00:21:49.280 I don't think that's a particularly great outcome...

00:21:51.320 But it's certainly possible...

00:21:52.900 So what are the fundamental...

00:21:54.640 Constituent elements?

00:21:57.500 Well they're expressed in mythology...

00:21:59.200 But they're not merely symbolic...

00:22:01.520 I think it's the wrong way to think about it...

00:22:03.520 They're symbolic...

00:22:04.560 But they reflect a very deep reality...

00:22:06.400 And they actually reflect a reality...

00:22:07.840 That's not easily apprehensible...

00:22:10.260 Directly by the senses...

00:22:11.940 Now...

00:22:12.560 Your senses are tuned for a particular...

00:22:15.460 Duration...

00:22:16.620 That's roughly...

00:22:17.880 Excuse me...

00:22:18.880 That's roughly the duration that...

00:22:23.520 You live...

00:22:24.620 Let's say...

00:22:25.040 But more importantly...

00:22:26.200 It's the duration...

00:22:27.320 Whatever that duration is...

00:22:28.840 Across which meaningful actions take place...

00:22:31.140 And we kind of have some idea...

00:22:32.820 Of what that duration is...

00:22:33.860 You know...

00:22:34.100 If you look at a computer screen...

00:22:36.700 If it has a refresh rate...

00:22:38.420 Of less than 60 hertz...

00:22:39.780 You can see it flickering...

00:22:40.840 But above 60 hertz...

00:22:41.880 You can't...

00:22:42.340 It's uniform...

00:22:43.060 And with movies...

00:22:45.180 Anywhere between 20 and 50 frames a second...

00:22:47.880 Is enough to give you the illusion...

00:22:49.320 Of continual motion...

00:22:50.900 So...

00:22:51.600 You know...

00:22:52.160 We live in a universe...

00:22:53.720 That's above the 10th of a second domain...

00:22:56.360 Or maybe the 100th of a second...

00:22:57.820 Somewhere in there anyways...

00:22:58.960 And I mean...

00:22:59.420 It's not like time isn't...

00:23:00.700 Almost infinitely sub-divisable...

00:23:03.080 At higher levels of resolution than that...

00:23:05.580 But we don't operate...

00:23:06.920 Generally speaking...

00:23:08.260 At higher temporal resolution than that...

00:23:11.220 And then...

00:23:12.060 You know...

00:23:12.420 We're...

00:23:13.880 Our...

00:23:14.460 Our feeling of the...

00:23:16.000 Of the felt moment...

00:23:17.260 Seems to be...

00:23:18.080 I would say...

00:23:18.680 Something approximating...

00:23:19.840 Half a second to a second...

00:23:21.840 You know...

00:23:22.160 I mean...

00:23:22.560 It's an estimate obviously...

00:23:23.780 But...

00:23:24.220 A second is a meaningful unit of time...

00:23:26.140 For a person...

00:23:27.020 And a hundredth of a second really isn't...

00:23:28.780 And certainly a billionth of a second isn't...

00:23:30.540 And then...

00:23:31.400 You know...

00:23:31.680 We can think across...

00:23:33.120 Hours and days and weeks and months...

00:23:35.240 But we really can't...

00:23:36.240 Once you start getting out into years...

00:23:37.860 It gets kind of sketchy...

00:23:39.000 And it's hard to think more than five years down the road...

00:23:41.580 And the reason for that is that...

00:23:43.540 The particulars upon which you're basing your predictions...

00:23:46.260 Are likely to change sufficiently...

00:23:48.420 Over a five year period...

00:23:49.660 So that extending out your vision past that...

00:23:52.280 Just exposes you to accelerating error...

00:23:55.140 Right...

00:23:55.380 And that...

00:23:55.720 And of course...

00:23:56.260 That's the problem with predicting the future period...

00:23:58.140 So...

00:23:58.600 We live in a time range...

00:23:59.720 That's about...

00:24:00.480 Say...

00:24:01.120 A tenth of a second to three years...

00:24:03.480 Something like that...

00:24:04.280 Now I know it can expand beyond that...

00:24:05.960 But that's...

00:24:06.680 That's kind of where we're set...

00:24:08.600 And our senses seem to be tuned to those durations...

00:24:11.460 And to be operative...

00:24:12.860 So that we make proper...

00:24:14.440 Decisions within those durations...

00:24:16.820 And also from...

00:24:18.380 From a particular spatial position...

00:24:20.180 And so forth...

00:24:21.100 You know...

00:24:21.560 Your eyes see...

00:24:23.000 What's roughly...

00:24:25.440 Maybe we could say...

00:24:26.680 A walkable distance in front of you...

00:24:28.440 Something like that...

00:24:29.600 So...

00:24:30.760 And you detect things...

00:24:32.280 In the locale that...

00:24:34.080 Enables you to immediately interact with things...

00:24:36.820 But it isn't necessarily the case that...

00:24:38.960 Senses that are tuned to do that...

00:24:41.140 Are also tuned to inform you directly...

00:24:43.740 About what the most permanent things about...

00:24:46.340 Being itself are...

00:24:47.680 I think that those things have to be inferred...

00:24:49.960 And there's some...

00:24:51.000 There's some supporting evidence for that kind of thing...

00:24:53.640 From...

00:24:54.460 From psycholinguistics...

00:24:56.460 There is a level of...

00:24:59.320 Of categorization that we seem to...

00:25:02.080 Manifest...

00:25:03.240 More or less...

00:25:04.020 Automatically or implicitly...

00:25:05.420 So for example...

00:25:06.620 When children...

00:25:07.680 Perceive...

00:25:08.020 Animals...

00:25:09.320 They...

00:25:09.620 They...

00:25:10.320 They perceive at the level of cat...

00:25:12.240 Or dog...

00:25:13.540 They don't...

00:25:14.400 They don't perceive at the level of subspecies...

00:25:16.640 Like Siamese cat...

00:25:17.920 Or...

00:25:18.420 Or...

00:25:19.020 Or...

00:25:19.740 Or...

00:25:20.380 Let's say...

00:25:20.960 Samoid...

00:25:21.740 You know...

00:25:22.300 There's...

00:25:22.620 There's this...

00:25:23.400 There's a natural...

00:25:24.260 I can't remember what they call that...

00:25:25.620 Base category...

00:25:26.520 Something like that...

00:25:27.100 That's usually specified by very short words...

00:25:29.140 That are easily learnable...

00:25:30.420 And so the linguistic system seems to map right on to the...

00:25:33.300 To the object recognition...

00:25:35.860 Characteristics of the sensory systems...

00:25:38.700 That are built right into it...

00:25:40.240 And...

00:25:40.600 And if they weren't built into it...

00:25:41.880 We couldn't communicate easily...

00:25:43.100 Because our natural categories...

00:25:44.380 I think that's it...

00:25:45.180 But it's probably wrong...

00:25:46.380 Our natural categories...

00:25:47.960 They have to be the same for everyone...

00:25:50.100 Or it would be very difficult for us to communicate...

00:25:52.480 Okay...

00:25:52.880 So...

00:25:53.440 Having said all that...

00:25:54.620 Then the question is...

00:25:56.320 Well...

00:25:56.640 What are the most...

00:25:57.960 What are the most real categories?

00:26:01.120 And...

00:26:01.760 I think there's...

00:26:02.860 There's a real division in ways to think about this...

00:26:05.440 Because there's a scientific way of thinking about it...

00:26:08.080 And...

00:26:08.520 And...

00:26:09.240 In that case...

00:26:10.200 The most real categories are...

00:26:12.200 Well...

00:26:12.640 Mathematical equations certainly seem to be...

00:26:15.080 In the top category there...

00:26:16.880 The equations that describe...

00:26:18.680 The physical universe...

00:26:19.760 But then...

00:26:20.300 Then...

00:26:21.160 The hypothesis...

00:26:22.880 Of the existence of such things as protons...

00:26:25.920 And...

00:26:26.560 Electrons...

00:26:27.320 And...

00:26:27.720 You know...

00:26:28.000 The material elements that make up everything that's...

00:26:32.080 Every element of being...

00:26:33.960 With the possible exception of empty space...

00:26:36.680 Um...

00:26:37.240 But in the...

00:26:39.140 In the mythological world...

00:26:40.680 The categories...

00:26:41.700 I think are more...

00:26:43.020 Derived from...

00:26:44.100 Darwinian...

00:26:45.560 By the effect of Darwinian processes on cognitive and perceptual function...

00:26:50.560 So...

00:26:50.840 Which is to say that...

00:26:52.040 We have learned to perceive...

00:26:53.840 And then to infer those things that are most necessary for us...

00:26:56.920 In order to continue our existence...

00:26:58.940 Propagate...

00:26:59.800 Live well...

00:27:00.460 All of those things...

00:27:01.300 And...

00:27:01.700 That would be true at the level of individual survival...

00:27:04.180 And maybe it's also true at the level of group survival...

00:27:06.240 Although...

00:27:07.060 You know...

00:27:07.380 The...

00:27:08.020 There's a tremendous debate among evolutionary biologists...

00:27:10.600 About whether or not...

00:27:11.740 Selection can take place at the level of the group...

00:27:13.640 Anyways...

00:27:16.500 There are these basic level categories...

00:27:18.280 That manifest themselves to you...

00:27:19.700 And then there's categories of the imagination...

00:27:21.720 That you have to infer...

00:27:23.160 Up from the sensory domain...

00:27:24.940 And...

00:27:25.400 We do that partly in science by...

00:27:27.820 Comparing our sensory representations across people...

00:27:31.320 But we also do it by thinking abstractly...

00:27:33.560 Conceptualizing abstractly...

00:27:35.380 And...

00:27:35.860 You know...

00:27:36.280 One of the things that's interesting about abstractions...

00:27:38.700 Is it's not clear whether they're more or less real...

00:27:41.160 Than the things they're abstracted from...

00:27:42.640 You know...

00:27:43.760 This is a perennial debate...

00:27:45.540 Among...

00:27:46.180 Let's call them ontologists...

00:27:47.540 Who are...

00:27:48.340 Interested in the fundamental...

00:27:50.000 Fundamental nature of reality itself...

00:27:52.400 In some sense...

00:27:53.400 Independent of conceptual structures...

00:27:55.380 Are numbers more or less real...

00:27:56.940 Than the things they represent?

00:27:58.740 It's a really hard question to answer...

00:28:01.260 Because...

00:28:02.580 Knowing...

00:28:03.440 Like...

00:28:03.840 Using numbers as a representational system...

00:28:06.520 Gives you unbelievable power...

00:28:08.420 And there are mathematicians that believe...

00:28:09.960 That there isn't anything more real...

00:28:11.280 Than mathematical representation...

00:28:12.500 Now it depends to some degree of course...

00:28:14.380 On how you classify reality...

00:28:16.300 That's the problem with a question like...

00:28:18.360 Is A...

00:28:19.860 Equivalent to B?

00:28:21.800 The answer to that always is...

00:28:23.040 Well it depends on how you define A...

00:28:24.420 And it depends on how you define B...

00:28:26.060 So generally it's not a very useful question...

00:28:28.400 But you can still get the point...

00:28:30.120 That there's something very real...

00:28:31.620 About abstractions...

00:28:33.580 Incredibly real...

00:28:34.460 Because otherwise...

00:28:35.320 Why would you bother with them?

00:28:36.300 They wouldn't give you any handle on the world...

00:28:38.400 So what's the...

00:28:39.200 What's the most useful...

00:28:41.080 Or what's the most...

00:28:42.200 What's the broadest possible level of abstraction...

00:28:45.260 And is there any use of...

00:28:47.420 Any utility in thinking in that manner?

00:28:49.420 And I tried to make the case last time...

00:28:52.280 That in the mythological world...

00:28:54.940 There are three categories...

00:28:56.460 Or four...

00:28:57.100 Depending on what you do with the strange fourth category...

00:28:59.140 Because the fourth category is sort of...

00:29:01.580 The category of uncategorizable entities...

00:29:05.140 And so it's sort of the category of everything...

00:29:07.640 That not only do you not know...

00:29:09.080 But you don't know you don't know it...

00:29:10.520 It's...

00:29:11.020 Or you can think about it as the category of potential...

00:29:13.840 I actually think that's the best way to think about it...

00:29:16.140 Is that it's...

00:29:17.420 The dragon of chaos is the category of potential...

00:29:20.100 And I do believe that...

00:29:22.040 Where our materialist view is essentially wrong...

00:29:24.940 I think that the proper way of looking at being...

00:29:27.740 Is that being is potential...

00:29:29.920 And from that potential...

00:29:31.440 Whatever consciousness is...

00:29:32.660 Extracts out the reality that we inhabit...

00:29:35.760 Anyways, that's certainly the mythological viewpoint...

00:29:38.180 And...

00:29:39.180 But it's not just a mythological viewpoint...

00:29:41.180 It's a sequence of ideas, for example...

00:29:44.500 That deeply underlies the thinking of Jean Piaget...

00:29:47.220 And Piaget, by the way...

00:29:48.620 Was very interested in reconciling the gap...

00:29:50.740 Between religion and science...

00:29:52.220 That's really what he devoted his life to doing...

00:29:54.580 And so...

00:29:55.260 And there are other streams of philosophy...

00:29:56.780 And I would say Heidegger...

00:29:57.840 The phenomenologists...

00:29:59.340 Are...

00:30:00.100 Are thinking along lines that are similar to this as well...

00:30:03.180 Because Heidegger was concerned...

00:30:04.520 Not with the nature of material reality...

00:30:06.240 But with being as such...

00:30:08.340 And...

00:30:08.700 And...

00:30:09.200 And...

00:30:10.020 So...

00:30:11.140 You can extract out the viewpoint...

00:30:12.960 That I just described from...

00:30:14.180 From mythology...

00:30:15.060 But it isn't the only source of such...

00:30:17.740 Um...

00:30:18.540 What would you call it?

00:30:19.280 Uh...

00:30:20.240 Hyp...

00:30:21.040 Hypothesis is probably...

00:30:24.560 The right idea...

00:30:25.180 So...

00:30:25.420 So the idea...

00:30:26.600 You can think about this as a bootstrapping process...

00:30:28.880 In some sense...

00:30:29.560 Is...

00:30:30.060 In order for anything to get going...

00:30:31.960 It has to bootstrap itself up...

00:30:33.940 And become more and more complex...

00:30:35.320 As it does that...

00:30:36.040 So it's...

00:30:36.460 It's like...

00:30:37.020 This is the answer to the chicken and egg problem...

00:30:39.440 Right?

00:30:39.840 Which was first...

00:30:40.520 The chicken or the egg?

00:30:41.620 Well, neither...

00:30:42.600 Something from which both the chicken and egg were derived...

00:30:45.160 Right?

00:30:45.620 Because the ultimate...

00:30:46.600 The ultimate answer to that is...

00:30:48.120 The answer to how there are things at all...

00:30:49.880 Who knows?

00:30:50.380 But at some point...

00:30:51.740 There were neither chickens nor eggs...

00:30:53.240 But there were the things that were the precursors to those things...

00:30:56.180 And so...

00:30:57.080 They...

00:30:58.080 Spiraled upwards in some sense...

00:31:00.180 And those...

00:31:00.500 Those...

00:31:00.880 Initial...

00:31:02.760 Proto-entities...

00:31:04.560 Single-celled animals for...

00:31:06.760 I mean, you can go back farther than that...

00:31:08.120 But we could say...

00:31:08.720 Well, single-celled animals differentiated...

00:31:10.880 Over time...

00:31:11.720 Right?

00:31:12.060 And there's this...

00:31:13.140 Looping process...

00:31:15.280 That...

00:31:15.760 That differentiates out into both the chicken and the egg...

00:31:18.840 So...

00:31:19.760 But what the question is...

00:31:20.880 What do you need in order for that process to begin?

00:31:23.880 And that's really the question of what the fundamental constituent elements of reality are...

00:31:28.280 And the mythological hypothesis is that there's three or four...

00:31:32.380 One is the fact that there has to be something that...

00:31:35.540 That...

00:31:35.980 That...

00:31:36.600 That manifests itself as an observer...

00:31:38.880 It's something like that...

00:31:40.160 Some kind of observer...

00:31:41.780 Now, where that process of observation starts in the phylogenetic chain...

00:31:46.240 Is very, very difficult to tell...

00:31:48.700 You know, we might say...

00:31:49.540 Well, there's certainly no possibility of a conscious observer...

00:31:52.520 Until there's a differentiated nervous system...

00:31:54.780 But then, prior to the emergence of differentiated nervous systems...

00:31:57.960 There were animals that were complex enough...

00:32:00.420 To react with the environment...

00:32:02.220 In a manner that...

00:32:03.160 Well, single-celled animals...

00:32:04.360 They're quite complex...

00:32:05.400 I mean...

00:32:05.900 Some of them are unbelievably complicated...

00:32:07.620 You know...

00:32:07.840 They can move themselves through space...

00:32:09.680 They can orient...

00:32:10.320 They can follow chemical trails...

00:32:12.020 They're not stupid by any stretch of the imagination...

00:32:15.400 Now...

00:32:16.120 To what degree...

00:32:17.480 They have being...

00:32:19.420 You know...

00:32:19.840 As something they can represent...

00:32:21.340 Well, we don't have to speculate on that...

00:32:23.020 But...

00:32:23.600 The proto-elements of...

00:32:25.260 Of conscious being are there...

00:32:27.480 So you need...

00:32:28.600 You need...

00:32:29.340 A being...

00:32:30.140 You need...

00:32:31.600 The structure of that being...

00:32:33.640 Through which the...

00:32:35.340 The entirety of being itself is interpreted...

00:32:38.480 And you need...

00:32:39.480 The surround...

00:32:41.120 It's something like that...

00:32:42.120 And so I conceptualize that as...

00:32:44.240 Something that knows...

00:32:45.660 That's the knower...

00:32:47.260 What it knows...

00:32:48.480 That's the interpretive structure...

00:32:50.160 And that which needs to be known...

00:32:53.020 Or you could...

00:32:53.780 You could conceptualize that as the...

00:32:56.140 Individual...

00:32:57.760 In...

00:32:58.600 Explored territory...

00:33:00.160 Nested inside unexplored territory...

00:33:02.840 That's another way of thinking about it...

00:33:04.120 Or you can think about it as...

00:33:05.480 The individual...

00:33:06.720 Inside culture...

00:33:08.320 And the individual culture...

00:33:09.580 Has nested inside nature...

00:33:11.080 That's another way of looking at it...

00:33:12.440 Or you can think of it as...

00:33:14.220 The knower...

00:33:15.220 And in order...

00:33:16.620 Surrounded by chaos...

00:33:18.000 That's another way of thinking about it...

00:33:19.440 But all these things...

00:33:20.640 You know...

00:33:20.860 They're all attempts to...

00:33:22.260 Articulate the same...

00:33:23.880 Underlying structure...

00:33:25.600 You see that in...

00:33:27.000 Narratives continually...

00:33:28.200 And I think Pinocchio...

00:33:29.080 Is a very good example of that...

00:33:30.240 Because in Pinocchio...

00:33:31.120 You have...

00:33:32.320 The culture...

00:33:33.400 That's Geppetto...

00:33:34.320 And...

00:33:35.320 Geppetto is obviously creative...

00:33:36.920 But also...

00:33:37.320 Insufficient and dead...

00:33:39.120 Which is why he ends up in the belly of the whale...

00:33:41.220 You have the blue fairy...

00:33:42.840 Whose mother nature...

00:33:44.160 For all intents and purposes...

00:33:45.380 The negative feminine...

00:33:46.880 Doesn't manifest itself much...

00:33:48.300 In the Pinocchio story...

00:33:49.580 Except implicitly...

00:33:50.580 In the form of the whale...

00:33:51.960 The thing at the bottom...

00:33:52.980 Which is more like the dragon of chaos...

00:33:55.100 Than something feminine...

00:33:56.300 That swallows up the...

00:33:57.940 That swallows up culture...

00:33:59.660 But you have...

00:34:00.660 Nature...

00:34:01.040 Or culture...

00:34:02.240 Geppetto...

00:34:02.760 Nature...

00:34:03.240 The blue fairy...

00:34:04.160 And then the puppet...

00:34:05.460 Pinocchio...

00:34:06.440 And...

00:34:07.320 You know...

00:34:07.640 From a...

00:34:08.560 Strictly scientific perspective...

00:34:10.100 We think of human beings...

00:34:11.200 As nothing but the children...

00:34:12.420 Of nature and culture...

00:34:13.520 And that...

00:34:14.900 Pushes you towards...

00:34:15.980 A kind of deterministic view...

00:34:17.360 What causes your behavior...

00:34:18.500 Well it's either nature or culture...

00:34:19.840 Because there isn't anything else...

00:34:21.260 But that isn't how the mythological story...

00:34:23.340 Lays itself out...

00:34:24.160 Because it says there is something else...

00:34:25.900 And that's whatever your consciousness is...

00:34:27.900 And that consciousness seems to be able to work with nature and culture...

00:34:31.940 In a non-deterministic manner...

00:34:34.400 In order to bring...

00:34:36.500 Well...

00:34:36.940 In order for what?

00:34:40.360 In order to bring itself forward...

00:34:42.560 I mean...

00:34:42.860 And that's really...

00:34:43.820 And what's interesting about that...

00:34:45.600 I think is that...

00:34:46.420 It isn't obviously just the plot of Pinocchio...

00:34:48.820 It's virtually the plot of any story...

00:34:50.880 Is the story of the development of the individual...

00:34:53.060 Now...

00:34:54.060 The story...

00:34:55.220 Is order...

00:34:56.560 Chaos...

00:34:57.640 Higher order...

00:34:58.740 Roughly speaking...

00:34:59.740 So you can get variants of that...

00:35:01.160 You can get...

00:35:01.900 Order collapses into disorder...

00:35:03.640 And nothing...

00:35:05.520 Is resolved...

00:35:06.560 That's a tragedy...

00:35:07.740 Right?

00:35:08.860 And you can get...

00:35:10.780 So you don't have to have the entire story...

00:35:13.900 Represented in the story...

00:35:15.160 But you get fragments of it...

00:35:16.260 It's a classic U-shaped story...

00:35:18.180 And what it is...

00:35:18.880 Is the story of the development of the individual...

00:35:21.020 Across time...

00:35:22.080 As a consequence of his or her adventures...

00:35:24.080 In time and space...

00:35:25.120 And every...

00:35:26.040 Story is exactly that...

00:35:28.140 And those are representations of the manner in which you come to be in the world...

00:35:34.720 For better or for worse...

00:35:35.760 And it's differentiated...

00:35:37.060 So the individual has a negative and a positive element...

00:35:39.560 And culture has a negative and a positive element...

00:35:41.940 And nature does as well...

00:35:43.140 And that makes the potential for plots much broader...

00:35:48.020 But...

00:35:48.900 And I think it's also very useful to know that entire story...

00:35:51.820 Because I think it's one of the things that protects you against ideology...

00:35:54.820 It's like...

00:35:55.260 Okay...

00:35:55.600 Where's...

00:35:56.120 If someone tells you a political story...

00:35:58.440 Or a story of any sort...

00:35:59.800 You can always ask...

00:36:00.600 Well, where are the missing characters?

00:36:02.280 Human beings are terrible...

00:36:03.540 They've erected a culture that's destroying the planet...

00:36:05.640 And nature is...

00:36:07.220 You know...

00:36:08.220 Benevolent and...

00:36:09.260 And pristine...

00:36:10.060 It's like...

00:36:10.420 Yeah, fair enough...

00:36:11.340 Accurate...

00:36:11.860 But you're missing half the characters...

00:36:13.260 Because humans are not just terrible...

00:36:16.220 Rapacious creatures...

00:36:17.220 And culture is not just a destructive force...

00:36:19.560 And nature is by no means on our side...

00:36:21.640 So...

00:36:22.640 Where's the missing characters?

00:36:24.480 You need all the characters in the representation to get it right...

00:36:28.480 And I really believe this to be true...

00:36:30.300 So, for example...

00:36:31.980 If you want to protect yourself against trauma as you move forward in life...

00:36:35.700 You have to be very aware of the three negative characters...

00:36:39.280 You have to know that the human individual has an adversarial element...

00:36:42.980 That's malevolent right to the core...

00:36:44.940 And if you don't know that...

00:36:46.120 And you run across someone who's malevolent...

00:36:48.380 You will end up damaged...

00:36:50.580 So, because first, you won't be able to defend yourself...

00:36:52.920 You'll just be like a ripe fruit tree for the plucking...

00:36:55.620 And second, the mere existence of someone like that...

00:36:58.560 Will pose such a threat to the way that you've organized the world...

00:37:01.560 That it might collapse on you...

00:37:02.960 That happens to people all the time...

00:37:05.200 So, it really matters whether you know these categories...

00:37:07.540 And it matters that you know that culture can become tyrannical...

00:37:10.480 But that it's also the father that's given you everything...

00:37:13.580 And it matters that everything good comes from nature...

00:37:16.960 And that we need to live in harmony with nature to some degree...

00:37:19.360 But that it's also hell-bent on our destruction...

00:37:22.280 Every second...

00:37:23.640 And it's very paradoxical...

00:37:25.420 It's a hard thing to reconcile with a thought structure like modern science...

00:37:31.240 That's based on a strict logic...

00:37:32.820 That always says something can't be itself and its opposite at the same time...

00:37:36.540 But, you know, human beings can certainly be...

00:37:38.980 Something and its opposite at the same time...

00:37:42.180 And anything truly complex can have that...

00:37:44.840 And does have that nature...

00:37:46.220 If someone offers you a new job...

00:37:47.740 You think, well, that's positive...

00:37:49.280 It's like, no, it's not...

00:37:50.420 It's positive and negative and complex...

00:37:53.740 It might be the solution to your problem...

00:37:55.560 But at the same time, it's going to generate a whole host of other problems...

00:37:59.240 So, lots of times, we're encountering entities in some sense that have an internally paradoxical structure...

00:38:06.420 And we have to deal with that entire set of paradoxes...

00:38:09.660 Or we don't survive...

00:38:11.080 It's really a matter of survival...

00:38:12.880 Okay, so...

00:38:14.960 So, I'm...

00:38:15.880 And then, you know, there's this overarching symbol...

00:38:18.560 Which is the dragon of chaos...

00:38:19.880 Which is potential itself...

00:38:21.280 And it's the potential from which all of these categories emerge...

00:38:23.820 And so, the most abstract category of our imagination...

00:38:30.520 Is that which is beyond our understanding...

00:38:32.740 The category of that which is beyond our understanding...

00:38:35.560 And that seems to me to be represented...

00:38:38.380 Because we can only use the representational structures that we evolved...

00:38:42.280 Is that it's represented in our paradoxical representation of the predator...

00:38:47.640 And the treasure that lies beyond the perimeters of our safe societies...

00:38:54.640 So, what's out there beyond?

00:38:56.520 Well, we don't know...

00:38:57.560 But we need to know...

00:38:58.380 Because we need always to deal with what we don't know...

00:39:01.060 So, weirdly enough, we have to come up with a category of what we don't know...

00:39:04.420 In order to start formalizing a theory about how we might...

00:39:07.980 Progress towards it and interact with it...

00:39:10.700 It's a very paradoxical idea...

00:39:12.660 And there's a paradoxical answer, right?

00:39:14.740 It's the terrible predator that lurks in the unknown...

00:39:17.440 That also harbors something of great value...

00:39:20.100 Perfect...

00:39:21.100 Perfect...

00:39:21.600 That's exactly right...

00:39:22.580 That's exactly right...

00:39:23.660 And I think that that is a reflection of the fact that human beings are...

00:39:27.320 Predator animals and prey animals at the same time...

00:39:30.820 So, what's out there in the terrible darkness?

00:39:33.960 Something that can destroy you...

00:39:35.800 But also something that you absolutely need...

00:39:38.240 So, how do you prepare yourself for that?

00:39:41.860 And that's the ultimate question of life...

00:39:43.860 It's not how do you deal with death...

00:39:45.440 Although death is a sub-component of the terrible unknown, I would say...

00:39:48.860 It's how do you deal with that which is beyond your understanding...

00:39:51.780 Which is constantly manifesting itself in the world...

00:39:55.000 And that manifests itself every time you categorize something...

00:39:58.840 And the thing escapes from the category...

00:40:00.100 And that happens most in interpersonal relationships...

00:40:03.520 Because people are so damn complicated...

00:40:05.200 You get them figured out and boxed in...

00:40:06.440 You even make a contract that neither of you will jump outside the box...

00:40:10.440 But you jump outside the box continually...

00:40:12.940 And that's why a relationship requires constant negotiation and reconceptualization...

00:40:17.440 Because you do not exhaust the person with your perceptual categories...

00:40:22.780 And of course, you don't exhaust the world with your perceptual categories ever...

00:40:26.860 This is partly why the existentialists...

00:40:29.100 They have this concept called alienation...

00:40:31.660 And the idea was that human beings become alienated from their creative products...

00:40:34.780 So, and that is...

00:40:37.320 And here's why it happens...

00:40:38.460 So, imagine...

00:40:40.620 Henry Ford makes the assembly line, right?

00:40:42.880 So Ford has no idea what's going to happen when he makes the assembly line...

00:40:46.340 Because he's just trying to figure out a fast way to make cars...

00:40:49.340 Or he thinks that what he's making is cars...

00:40:51.280 So he thinks he's making an assembly line for cars...

00:40:53.600 And he thinks he's making cars...

00:40:56.120 And you think, well, what's wrong with that?

00:40:57.840 Well, first of all, the assembly line absolutely transformed the entire planet...

00:41:02.180 Right? Because it brought in the era of mass, cheap manufacturing...

00:41:07.100 It's like it just...

00:41:08.220 It was way more than he thought it was...

00:41:10.980 And then, did he make a car?

00:41:13.620 Well, a car is something that hypothetically takes you relatively effectively from point A to point B...

00:41:18.980 It was really a replacement for the horse and buggy...

00:41:22.100 I mean, the first cars looked like that...

00:41:23.980 They were horseless carriages...

00:41:25.440 Well, did he make a car?

00:41:27.300 Well, God, it's hard to tell what Henry Ford made...

00:41:30.660 He made a very effective way for transforming the atmosphere...

00:41:34.500 Right?

00:41:34.800 And the fact that it also happened to take you from point A to point B...

00:41:37.500 Might be just completely irrelevant compared to the fact that...

00:41:40.540 It was the internal combustion engine and its rapid distribution...

00:41:44.200 Completely changed the constituent...

00:41:46.580 You know, the fundamental chemical structure of the atmosphere itself...

00:41:50.880 It completely transformed cities...

00:41:53.080 It blew out the rural community...

00:41:55.040 Everyone moved to the cities, right?

00:41:56.460 It made all the cities built around the automobile...

00:42:00.120 But then it had this tremendous political and economic significance, too...

00:42:04.060 So, I mean, part of the reason that...

00:42:05.700 Because you think, well...

00:42:07.020 A car is a way to get from point A to point B...

00:42:10.260 But no, no.

00:42:10.920 It's not a machine.

00:42:12.360 It's also the embodiment of an idea.

00:42:14.500 And it's a very strange idea.

00:42:15.700 A collectivist society would have never invented the car.

00:42:19.220 Because the car is predicated on the idea that you could own a conveyance...

00:42:23.760 That would get only you and only you from somewhere to somewhere else...

00:42:27.660 Without ever asking anybody for any permission.

00:42:31.260 And so the funny thing is, is when you build something like that...

00:42:33.860 Those presuppositions are built into it.

00:42:36.100 And then when you export that, say, to Soviet Russia...

00:42:39.340 You don't get to...

00:42:40.180 They can't just take the car and leave the political implications behind.

00:42:44.060 The car, the mere fact that you step into one and drive it...

00:42:48.060 Is an indication that you're accepting the political, ideological presuppositions...

00:42:53.740 That are part of the fact that that thing even exists.

00:42:57.280 And so, well, that's alienation.

00:42:59.060 It's like...

00:43:00.220 Even something you make...

00:43:01.840 You think, well, you have control over what you make.

00:43:04.380 Because you've made it.

00:43:05.500 You understand it.

00:43:06.500 It's like, no, you don't.

00:43:07.480 You understand a tiny fraction of it.

00:43:09.220 You launch it out in the world, man.

00:43:10.400 And the snakes inside of it...

00:43:12.280 The hydras inside of it...

00:43:14.040 Multiply their heads massively, constantly.

00:43:17.260 And you can't really keep track of it.

00:43:20.220 And so...

00:43:21.360 So even in your relationship with created entities...

00:43:24.960 You still see the re-emergence of this underlying fundamental substructure.

00:43:29.560 Right?

00:43:29.780 Even inside...

00:43:30.820 It's the Garden of Eden.

00:43:32.240 There's always a snake inside the thing that's walled in.

00:43:35.000 Always, always, always.

00:43:36.320 Even God himself cannot get rid of the snakes in the garden.

00:43:40.000 And partly what that means is that...

00:43:41.900 You know, the garden is a conceptual system.

00:43:44.020 It's the conceptual system within which people exist.

00:43:47.040 That's Eden is a walled garden.

00:43:49.840 Paradise means walled garden.

00:43:51.620 And it's walled because a walled garden is where people live.

00:43:54.660 Because the wall is culture and the garden is nature.

00:43:56.760 And we always live in a structure that's an amalgam of nature and culture.

00:44:00.880 So we set it up so it's paradisal.

00:44:03.020 As long as we're unconscious.

00:44:04.680 But we can't manage it because there's always something chaotic that's coming in that we will interact with.

00:44:09.720 That's human beings.

00:44:11.040 You put a snake in the garden, it's the first bloody thing we're going to talk to.

00:44:13.780 And for better or worse, it makes us conscious and awake.

00:44:17.400 It makes us aware of our mortality.

00:44:19.440 It does all sorts of terrible things to us.

00:44:21.560 But it doesn't matter because that's the path that human beings have, what, chosen?

00:44:27.100 Because that's the implication in that story.

00:44:29.600 And it's a very difficult thing to answer.

00:44:33.000 Because we certainly choose each other for self-awareness and consciousness and intelligence.

00:44:39.300 And I don't, you know, if you're choosing a mate, there's an arms race in human beings.

00:44:45.660 We're choosing intelligent mates.

00:44:47.480 Especially, that's especially the case for women in relationship to men.

00:44:51.000 So, the idea that that's a choice, well, that's partly why it's Eve that makes Adam self-conscious in the Garden of Eden.

00:44:58.900 She offers him the apple.

00:45:00.420 She's the one that makes him self-conscious.

00:45:02.360 And I think that's actually accurate.

00:45:03.720 Because the evidence from the evolutionary biologists is that human sexuals, female sexual selection was one of the driving factors that differentiated us from chimpanzees.

00:45:12.680 It's a major factor.

00:45:14.780 Chimpanzee females are not selective maters.

00:45:17.780 They go into estrus.

00:45:18.860 They'll mate with anything.

00:45:20.200 What happens is the dominant males chase the subordinate males away.

00:45:23.800 And so, they end up leaving more offspring.

00:45:25.860 But it's not a consequence of selection on the part of the females.

00:45:28.500 In human beings, it's completely different.

00:45:30.260 In fact, concealed ovulation and intense selection pressure from women on men.

00:45:35.020 You have twice as many female ancestors as you have male ancestors.

00:45:38.880 And people can never have a hard time working that out arithmetically.

00:45:42.100 But it's not that problematic.

00:45:44.120 You just think, on average, every woman had one child.

00:45:48.080 Half of men had none, and the other half had two.

00:45:51.140 And that's approximately correct if you average across the entire history of human sexuality.

00:45:56.800 So, males in particular are subject to vicious selection pressure on the part of females.

00:46:02.800 And I also think that's partly why nature is represented symbolically as female among human beings.

00:46:10.220 Because, after all, nature is what selects.

00:46:13.080 There's no better definition of nature than that which selects.

00:46:17.280 So, now, so here's why I want to talk to you about the brain a little bit.

00:46:22.920 Because, if you make the radical case, let's say, that these are actually the categories of reality.

00:46:28.900 And we're going to say, well, reality is what selects for the sake of argument.

00:46:34.140 Then, then our neurological structures and our physical structures should be adapted to that reality.

00:46:42.520 It's a necessary conclusion from that.

00:46:45.800 So, then the question is, well, are they?

00:46:48.080 And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is yes.

00:46:50.840 And so, we'll go through the neuropsychological evidence quite rapidly.

00:46:56.440 The first bit of evidence is that you have two hemispheres.

00:47:00.100 Why?

00:47:01.780 One deals with the unknown and the other deals with the known.

00:47:04.820 That's Alcon and Goldberg.

00:47:06.240 That's hypothesized completely independently of any of this underlying mythological substructure.

00:47:10.920 Which is a really important thing to note.

00:47:12.680 Because, if you're trying to determine whether or not something is true, valid.

00:47:17.880 If the constructs upon which you base your thinking are valid and true.

00:47:22.680 There's rules for doing that.

00:47:24.060 And one of the rules is you have to be able to detect the existence of the categories using multiple methods of, of, of, of, using multiple methods.

00:47:34.460 It's the multi-method, multi-trait matrix, technically speaking.

00:47:38.240 It was established as a technique by two psychologists named Cronbach, C-R-O-N-B-A-C-H, and Meehl, M-E-E-H-L, Paul Meehl, back in the 1950s.

00:47:48.360 When psychologists were trying to figure out, how do you determine if something actually has an existence, like anger or anxiety, as something that you could study scientifically?

00:47:56.940 And the answer is, well, you have to be able to measure it multiple ways.

00:48:00.600 And all those measurements have to read the same way.

00:48:03.880 And then the question is, well, what do you mean by multiple ways?

00:48:08.080 Because is sight and vision, is sight and hearing different?

00:48:11.540 Well, somewhat, and somewhat the same.

00:48:13.720 But, you know, you make them as different as you can manage, let's say.

00:48:17.860 And our sensory systems are quite different.

00:48:20.140 Smell, molecular signature, sound is auditory, you know, auditory pressure.

00:48:25.960 You need a gas around you or some liquid in order for that to occur.

00:48:30.100 Sight uses light.

00:48:31.020 You know, we're using different inputs that converge and allow us to say, well, if we get convergent information across these multiple measurements,

00:48:38.360 then we'll assume that the thing we're perceiving is real.

00:48:41.500 We even extend that in science because we say, if you take your multiple measurement system and you take your multiple measurement system,

00:48:49.380 and then you compare them, we'll only allow what's constant across both those comparisons to be real.

00:48:55.140 And so that's the multi-method, multi-trait matrix process, essentially.

00:48:59.220 And my sense is that, so I think that the pattern that I'm describing to you has manifested itself evolutionarily.

00:49:07.780 It manifests itself in the neurological space, and it manifests itself in the conceptual space.

00:49:13.180 And the probability of all three of those things happening at the same time, without there being something valid there,

00:49:19.980 is lessons with each level of interpretation you manage to stack on top of one another.

00:49:25.940 So that's the method.

00:49:27.700 Well, so let's think about the brain a little bit, and I'll tell you a little bit about how the brain works.

00:49:32.880 And, you know, a lot of the stuff I'm telling you right now is quite old, actually.

00:49:41.100 Most of it was worked out in the 1980s, but it's been remarkably stable, as far as I can tell.

00:49:47.140 In some sense, we're filling in the details, and not in every sense, but in some sense, we're filling in the details.

00:49:52.480 Okay, so you take, this is from Alexander Luria, who was the greatest, perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived.

00:50:00.500 He was a Russian, worked mostly after the Second World War, mostly on people who had brain damage.

00:50:06.060 And he was interested in trying to outline the overarching picture of brain function.

00:50:14.300 And so he did that partly by looking at its function, but also partly by looking at its structure, trying to get both of those things working simultaneously.

00:50:22.720 And so we'll go through a brief picture of how the brain works.

00:50:26.100 And so one of the ways of, so you can look at the brain from front to back, and you can divide it roughly into two sections.

00:50:33.400 And one section has to do with sensory processing, and that's roughly the back half.

00:50:37.060 And one section has to do with motor output.

00:50:39.900 Now, those things aren't as clearly differentiated as you might think, because there's very little sensation without motor output.

00:50:48.360 Maybe the part that closest to an exception is smell, I would say, but you at least have to breathe in.

00:50:54.800 You know, and when an animal is actively searching on a scent trail, it's breathing in.

00:50:58.500 So it's using its motor output constantly to modify the sensory stream.

00:51:02.500 It's really difficult to dissociate the two.

00:51:04.460 When you're looking at something, you know, it kind of feels to you like you're a passive recipient of sense data.

00:51:10.560 But you're no such thing.

00:51:12.100 Your eyes are moving back and forth in multiple ways all the time, including the ways that you can control voluntarily.

00:51:19.580 So there's multiple involuntary systems that are moving your eyes in multiple ways.

00:51:23.100 And really what you're doing is feeling the array of the electromagnetic spectrum with your eyes.

00:51:30.920 You're feeling it, and you're actively exploring if you're not a passive recipient at all.

00:51:35.860 So even in sensation, you can't purely pull sensation out from motor processing and say,

00:51:42.840 I'm getting untrammeled, unbiased sense data, because you can't look at something without focusing.

00:51:50.100 And you can't focus without wanting to look at something.

00:51:53.540 You know, you can't just lie there with your, well, you could, with your eyes half-crossed, but, you know,

00:51:58.060 that's sort of like, imagine you dropped a video recorder from an airplane and it just spun around in an unfocused manner.

00:52:05.420 Well, that's the world sampled randomly, you know.

00:52:08.460 What are you going to do with that?

00:52:10.000 Nothing.

00:52:10.300 And, you know, you're concentrating on the auditory stream constantly and segregating out some things and suppressing others.

00:52:19.820 Like, if you listen in the classroom, you can hear probably four or five different types of mechanical noise going on at the same time.

00:52:31.920 Most of the time in the classroom, that's silent.

00:52:34.920 You don't hear it, like, you don't hear your fridge except when it turns on or off, right?

00:52:38.480 You zero that out.

00:52:39.700 And so, you're very selective in your perception.

00:52:43.180 So, you can't really technically separate out motor output from sensory input.

00:52:48.200 And that's really useful to know, because it destroys the idea that you're just a, you know,

00:52:53.460 that there's a world of sensation out there that's imprinting itself on you,

00:52:57.220 and that's how you get your information, which is really the, that's the fundamental presupposition of the empiricists,

00:53:02.880 empiricists, of the raw empiricists.

00:53:05.040 There's a world of sense data out there.

00:53:06.940 You sample it randomly, and that's what informs you.

00:53:09.260 It's like, yes, except that you're always an active harvester of the information.

00:53:14.480 So, you can't get rid of the interpretive structure a priori.

00:53:17.320 That was Immanuel Kant, by the way, who first established that in his critique of pure reason.

00:53:21.860 You can't get away from the fact that you're actively harvesting the data.

00:53:26.140 So, you can say, well, where does human structure come from?

00:53:28.740 The sense data.

00:53:29.860 That's sort of the blank slate idea.

00:53:31.220 It's like, no, wrong, because a blank slate cannot process information.

00:53:35.880 You're actively engaged right at the beginning.

00:53:38.500 So, that's another example of the knower and the unknown, you know, working in a cyclical manner,

00:53:45.400 because you interact with something.

00:53:47.340 You divide it up into you and the world, roughly speaking.

00:53:52.360 And, I mean, you really make it that way, because you build yourself out of the information.

00:53:56.140 And then, of course, that makes you a more differentiated processor with a broader range of skills.

00:54:00.980 Then you interact with the unknown again.

00:54:02.840 You gather more information.

00:54:04.240 It differentiates the world.

00:54:05.720 It makes you a more differentiated harvester.

00:54:08.760 And then, so it's just continually cycling.

00:54:10.940 And that consciousness, the logos, the knower, is that thing that's doing that harvesting.

00:54:16.620 And you can never say it's not there.

00:54:19.600 Now, what happens is that it's in its nascent form to begin with.

00:54:22.880 Low-resolution nascent form.

00:54:25.260 Low-resolution knower, low-resolution category system, low-resolution world.

00:54:30.580 But that's enough to kick-start it and to start it differentiating.

00:54:34.260 And that happens as you develop as an individual, because you start out as a single-celled organism for all intents and purposes.

00:54:42.780 A very low-resolution thing in a very low-resolution world, and that differentiates itself across time.

00:54:48.620 But exactly the same thing happened over evolutionary time.

00:54:51.900 So, so there isn't a time when those three elements aren't there for all intents and purposes.

00:54:58.480 They're always there.

00:54:59.540 They're permanent.

00:55:00.040 Okay, so anyways, back to the brain.

00:55:02.580 Sense, sensory unit, that's the, that's the, uh, the back half, roughly speaking.

00:55:08.100 Huge chunk of that is devoted to visual processing in human beings.

00:55:11.600 Right?

00:55:11.880 Most animals organized around smell, not us.

00:55:15.040 Somewhat, still, because smell is a very powerful evoker of memories.

00:55:19.620 And it, it has a direct relationship with emotional systems, because you need to know if something is edible or inedible, terrible or, or good.

00:55:27.500 Very, very rapidly.

00:55:28.880 But human beings are organized around vision.

00:55:31.120 So we have a massive, massive amounts of our cortex devoted to differentiated visual processing.

00:55:37.220 Now, the motor unit, so what you have is each of these little zones here.

00:55:41.400 So, for example, look at the back here.

00:55:44.880 That's the primary visual area and the secondary visual area.

00:55:49.060 And then this is the primary auditory area in the middle of the brain here on the outside.

00:55:53.400 And the secondary auditory area.

00:55:55.880 And then the, uh, the, the, uh, this is for body representation.

00:56:01.040 The primary area and the secondary area.

00:56:03.340 And you can think about those, those areas of primary, primary, secondary, and then tertiary.

00:56:09.260 Primary does the base level processing.

00:56:11.920 Tertiary expands that up into more abstract representation, or secondary, expands that up into more abstract representations.

00:56:18.540 And tertiary are the areas where the senses come together.

00:56:22.320 And that's really what, what you seem to be most conscious of, right?

00:56:26.140 It's, it's action in the tertiary areas.

00:56:28.200 Because you don't really see the world as a separate, you can think about the auditory stream separate from the visual stream and all of that.

00:56:35.460 And you can think about touch separately.

00:56:36.840 But you tend to consciously experience things as a unity.

00:56:40.080 As a comprehensive unity of all the senses simultaneously.

00:56:46.160 So consciousness seems to occur only at the, most of the time at the highest level of integration.

00:56:50.960 And Euleria would have associated consciousness more with the tertiary areas where the, where the senses are talking to one another.

00:56:57.900 Now, it's more complicated than that because there's obviously subcortical structures all the way down to the spine that are involved heavily in what consciousness is.

00:57:06.240 It's not merely a consequence of cortical activity.

00:57:11.020 You know, we tend to think that because human beings have massively expanded cortical structures.

00:57:16.200 And we think of ourselves as the most conscious creatures.

00:57:18.980 And that's reasonable.

00:57:20.120 But you can take an awful lot of cortex off someone and they're still conscious.

00:57:24.240 In fact, you can leave them with almost no brain at all and they're still conscious.

00:57:27.440 So we really have a rough time trying to figure out what consciousness is and how it's related to brain structure.

00:57:34.760 So, anyways, so that's the sensory unit.

00:57:39.360 And then the motor unit, you have the primary unit, the secondary unit, and the pre-motor, or the prefrontal cortex.

00:57:47.360 And the prefrontal cortex is particularly huge in human beings.

00:57:50.240 So, imagine that it's this primary and secondary areas that allow you to, first of all, to act voluntarily and then to play around in some sense with your actions.

00:58:02.340 You know, like, imagine that you're a child building with Legos.

00:58:07.440 And you can think with the Legos without really having to think abstractly, right?

00:58:12.060 Because you can play around and build different sorts of structures.

00:58:15.240 And so you can think at the level, at a level of motor output without having to depend on abstraction.

00:58:21.280 But if you develop the prefrontal cortex here, which emerged out of the motor and pre-motor areas over the course of evolution.

00:58:28.980 So it's a differentiation of those structures.

00:58:31.580 So this is dealing with the real world.

00:58:33.720 This is dealing mostly with the real world, but starting to abstract and experiment a little bit.

00:58:38.960 And then this part deals with abstractions, pure and simple.

00:58:42.980 So, you know, I can lift this, and then I can play with lifting it.

00:58:49.220 And then I can put it aside and think about it abstractly.

00:58:54.080 I can think about all the different things that I might do with it.

00:58:56.140 I say, well, I could throw it.

00:58:57.260 I could take it apart.

00:58:58.380 I could toss it in the air.

00:58:59.760 I could juggle it.

00:59:00.620 I could use it as a doorstop, right?

00:59:02.260 I could kick it across the room.

00:59:03.900 And so basically what I'm doing there is I'm using my prefrontal cortex to generate an abstract representation of the world.

00:59:10.880 And then to plot out motor strategies before implementing them.

00:59:14.880 And that's basically what abstract thought is, very, very fundamentally.

00:59:19.400 It's the hypothesis of abstract action, and then the analysis of the outcome, and then the implementation into action.

00:59:28.460 And I think that there's something about that that actually defines the difference between intelligence and conscientiousness.

00:59:36.240 Because weirdly enough, you know, the correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero.

00:59:42.380 No relationship whatsoever.

00:59:44.420 Which is quite strange, because conscientious people plan and so forth.

00:59:48.260 But I think what it is, is that intelligence is an indicator of the effectiveness of abstraction.

00:59:54.540 And conscientiousness is an indicator of the probability of implementation.

00:59:58.660 And those are very, very different problems.

01:00:01.160 And you don't just go from abstraction to implementation.

01:00:03.680 Because if you did, you wouldn't be able to think, right?

01:00:06.400 The thinking has to be torn away from the implementation.

01:00:10.340 Or what you're doing isn't thinking.

01:00:12.380 It's just acting.

01:00:13.500 So, and so I think that accounts for the psychometric independence of those two phenomena.

01:00:21.120 It's annoying, because you can think up something that you should do, and you won't do it.

01:00:25.160 Because there's no deterministic causal pathway from the conception to the action.

01:00:30.180 So that's kind of annoying.

01:00:31.260 It seems to take something like willpower in order to transform the abstraction into an implementation.

01:00:37.880 And we don't understand that very well.

01:00:40.460 It's easy to understand the resistance to doing it, because the default position of your body should be something like,

01:00:47.880 never do anything, except eat.

01:00:51.160 You know, because doing something requires the expenditure of energy and resources.

01:00:56.020 And so unless you have a really good rationale for it, you should probably not do it.

01:01:00.240 And so the body is sort of intransigent by nature.

01:01:04.040 It's an oversimplification.

01:01:05.880 You have to come up with a good reason to impel it into motion.

01:01:08.420 And you should, because you have to pay for action.

01:01:12.680 You have to pay for it with energy and resources.

01:01:14.680 So there should be resistance against it, but it's still annoying.

01:01:18.360 So, okay, so that's one way of thinking about the world.

01:01:21.180 The world's something to sense, and the world's something to act upon.

01:01:25.040 And so the brain has fundamental divisions of sensing and acting upon.

01:01:29.840 But it's a constantly interacting loop.

01:01:32.200 You can't separate them, really, any more than we are separating them conceptually.

01:01:38.680 Now, on the motor strip, here, the body is represented.

01:01:51.140 And this was discovered at the Montreal Neurological Institute when brain surgery was being done on people, generally, who had epilepsy or some other terrible brain illness.

01:02:06.220 You have brain surgery when you're awake, which is a rather horrifying thing to know about.

01:02:11.220 But the reason for that, generally speaking, is so that something isn't taken out that you need.

01:02:18.380 Now, one of the things that happened while people were having brain surgery done, and this would have been, I believe, I don't remember the exact time, between the 30s and the 50s, I believe.

01:02:29.280 And I think it was Hebb, if I remember properly, who was one of Canada's great neuropsychologists, would do brain stimulation while people were having brain surgery.

01:02:40.680 And they could map out the way the body was represented on the cortical surface.

01:02:45.120 And so you imagine there's two representations.

01:02:47.220 There's a sensory representation of your body on the cortical surface, and there's a motor representation of your body on the cortical surface.

01:02:56.040 Notice those are both called, the representations are called homunculi.

01:02:59.240 They're like the body has been laid out on this strange strip, or this strip of tissue.

01:03:04.240 You can look up the homunculi online and see what they're like, but I'll show you a...

01:03:08.540 They're sort of stretched out, weirdly.

01:03:13.500 Along here, that would be the motor one, and then along here, that would be the sensory one.

01:03:18.620 And you can kind of detect with your own consciousness how your body is represented in your brain.

01:03:27.180 So, for example, can I get you to stand up, if you would?

01:03:31.840 Let's turn around.

01:03:34.320 Okay, so how many fingers on your back?

01:03:39.140 Okay.

01:03:41.140 All right, why?

01:03:42.160 Low resolution.

01:03:43.000 He's like a...

01:03:44.140 On his back is like a low-resolution array of pixels, right?

01:03:49.160 And so it's virtually impossible.

01:03:50.740 You just don't have enough sensory tissue on your back to make that...

01:03:54.620 You could tell I was pushing, but it could have been a bat, it could have been five fingers, it doesn't matter.

01:03:59.920 Maybe your pixel is this big, or something like that, right?

01:04:03.540 And so, but, if I put a finger on your lip, like that, man, you've got it right now.

01:04:10.000 Or on your tongue.

01:04:11.340 Because your tongue, there's more sensory representation of your tongue than your entire trunk.

01:04:16.320 And, well, why?

01:04:17.560 Well, you don't want to bite your tongue.

01:04:19.140 That's a big problem.

01:04:20.600 You have to be able to talk.

01:04:22.700 You want to really differentiate what you're eating.

01:04:25.620 If you're eating fish, you don't want to eat the bones.

01:04:27.480 So, and, you know, and your tongue is unbelievably, crazily sensitive.

01:04:32.980 And you know that, too, that if you have a tooth pulled, your tongue will investigate that area for, like, six months.

01:04:40.480 You're sitting there, your attention wanes, and your tongue is in there, like mapping.

01:04:45.260 Like mad, mapping that little hole to update your body representation, right?

01:04:49.020 And it's just this crazy thing that is unbelievably well represented from the sensory perspective,

01:04:55.840 and also from the motor perspective.

01:04:57.480 Because you can manipulate your tongue like crazy.

01:05:00.460 It's like a quarter of your motor output system is devoted to tongue manipulation, right?

01:05:08.220 And so here's a picture of the homunculus.

01:05:11.920 This is a motor homunculus.

01:05:14.200 So that's what your brain thinks of your body.

01:05:16.620 That's a good way of thinking about it.

01:05:18.140 And so that's what a human being is like in terms of his or her output.

01:05:21.520 And so what you see, if you look at a sensory homunculus, it's quite similar,

01:05:26.120 except the feet are bigger, the genitalia are bigger, logically.

01:05:29.660 They don't have much motor utility, but they have a lot of sensory utility.

01:05:32.940 But the rest of it's quite similar.

01:05:34.920 So there's, you know, the motor and the sensory homunculus are quite similar.

01:05:38.060 But I'm going to talk about the motor homunculus because it's sort of the action representation.

01:05:42.100 Well, so what are human beings like?

01:05:44.640 Well, we're all hands.

01:05:48.360 That's the first thing.

01:05:49.700 You know, and if you do that, there's no...

01:05:52.620 It's unbelievably high resolution, your fingertips, and that's sensory.

01:05:57.700 But we can manipulate our hands like crazy.

01:06:00.460 Like they're unbelievably articulated, right?

01:06:03.220 And that's the thing that makes us able to change the world.

01:06:05.680 It makes us what dolphins aren't.

01:06:08.220 And so a huge part of our brain is devoted towards being able to move our hands.

01:06:12.620 That enables us to take things apart, put them together.

01:06:16.100 And then once we learn to take things apart and put them together,

01:06:19.380 we can talk about how we do that.

01:06:21.280 And that's a lot of what we're doing.

01:06:22.680 And that's the hands and the mouth and the tongue, roughly speaking.

01:06:25.800 Here's how I took something apart.

01:06:28.580 Chaos.

01:06:29.500 Here's what I made out of it.

01:06:30.980 Order.

01:06:31.260 Here's how I did it.

01:06:33.160 And then you receive that, and you're happy about it.

01:06:36.120 And then you can do the same thing.

01:06:37.960 That's imitation facilitated by language.

01:06:41.340 It's like, here's what I did with my body.

01:06:43.540 I'm propagating it across space.

01:06:46.360 You're taking it, mapping it onto your body.

01:06:49.060 Now you can do the same thing.

01:06:50.720 Yeah, and that's...

01:06:51.640 You know, it might be simple.

01:06:52.600 Like, this is how you pick up a rock.

01:06:54.440 But it might be complicated.

01:06:55.760 Like, here's how you go after the dragon of chaos.

01:06:59.140 Right?

01:06:59.580 And so that's...

01:07:00.580 It sort of maps onto that hierarchy, this thing, that we've talked about in some detail.

01:07:07.260 This.

01:07:08.140 When you're telling a story to people, when you're informing them about something, you

01:07:11.580 can talk to them at a very high level of resolution, which you do with your child.

01:07:15.460 Here's how you slice up some broccoli.

01:07:18.400 Right?

01:07:19.060 But then you move up the abstraction and say, here's how you act like a civilized person

01:07:22.920 at the dinner table.

01:07:24.420 Right?

01:07:24.820 And that's part of being a good person.

01:07:26.400 And so you can tell stories about...

01:07:28.400 I just went and saw Logan, which I really like, by the way.

01:07:31.360 It's super violent, but I really did like it.

01:07:33.720 It's got a very elegant mythological structure, which is not surprising.

01:07:37.920 But there's a scene in this Logan movie.

01:07:41.140 He...

01:07:41.500 It's not a spoiler.

01:07:43.720 He has this child with him who has not been...

01:07:47.700 Who's been raised roughly in a laboratory.

01:07:49.380 And she has absolutely no table manners.

01:07:52.380 And so they're sitting at a dinner with some people that they've run into.

01:07:56.420 And she's, you know, eating like a total barbarian.

01:07:58.660 And of course, everybody's eyebrows are raised.

01:08:01.000 Like, where did this person come from?

01:08:03.260 So the fact that that high order behavior isn't there is something that's of extraordinary

01:08:09.300 interest to everyone.

01:08:10.760 And so, you know, you teach your children micro strategies and you teach them macro strategies.

01:08:15.860 Some of the macro strategies you're teaching them, you don't even understand.

01:08:20.420 Because you know the strategies.

01:08:22.300 They're built into you because of an evolutionary process, roughly speaking.

01:08:26.380 And you say things like, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose.

01:08:29.460 It matters how you play the game.

01:08:30.820 And you don't understand what that means, although you know it's right.

01:08:34.080 And you try to act that out for your children.

01:08:36.180 And they incorporate it in their action, even though they can't represent it.

01:08:40.220 They cannot come up with a fully articulated representation of what that means.

01:08:44.780 And so they're like children, the Piagetian children.

01:08:48.320 Children can only play by themselves to begin with, while they're integrating themselves

01:08:52.100 internally.

01:08:53.120 Then they start to play in parallel with other children.

01:08:56.040 So you're two.

01:08:57.820 You play your game.

01:08:58.780 That child plays his or her game.

01:09:00.820 A little interaction.

01:09:01.720 But you can't unite the games.

01:09:04.000 Then you're between two and four.

01:09:05.840 You start to be able to unite the games.

01:09:08.040 And you can either do that by acting them out.

01:09:10.060 You can do this even with a younger child.

01:09:11.960 They can catch peekaboo very rapidly.

01:09:13.620 But once you're between two and four and you start getting linguistic, you can start

01:09:18.580 saying, well, let's play this game.

01:09:21.400 And that means we're going to unite our attention towards a particular goal.

01:09:24.780 We're going to unite our motor activity and maybe cooperate and compete towards that goal.

01:09:29.480 It's the beginning of the social structure.

01:09:32.600 It's the beginning of the social structure.

01:09:34.040 And you get really good at that between two and four.

01:09:36.920 But you don't necessarily know what you're doing.

01:09:39.640 You can't say it.

01:09:40.640 So Piaget's experiments indicated that if you take children, maybe they've got to the

01:09:45.760 point where they can play quite a social game.

01:09:47.440 Maybe they're five or six.

01:09:48.580 They're playing marbles.

01:09:49.820 You take them out of the game and you say, okay, tell me the rules of the game of marbles.

01:09:54.040 They give incoherent representations.

01:09:56.600 Why?

01:09:57.340 Because their behavior is more sophisticated than their representation.

01:10:00.620 You see, as soon as you understand that, that is a wild thing to understand.

01:10:05.060 Because it answers the question, for example, how can you have dreams that tell you things

01:10:10.420 you don't know?

01:10:11.820 You think, well, how the hell can that possibly be?

01:10:14.180 You're coming up with the damn dream.

01:10:16.360 How can the dream tell you things you don't know?

01:10:18.600 Or, analogously, how can people tell stories that contain information that they don't understand?

01:10:24.000 And the answer is, the information is coded in our behavior.

01:10:28.300 Okay, so we'll go back to a chimpanzee troop.

01:10:31.460 All the chimpanzees in the troop know the dominance hierarchy structure.

01:10:35.700 But if you take a chimpanzee out from the troop and say, what's the dominance structure?

01:10:42.260 The chimpanzee is going to do whatever a chimpanzee does.

01:10:45.820 It's not going to have a little conversation with you about the nature of the dominance hierarchy.

01:10:50.760 So it can act out its knowledge, and it might even be able to represent it in an image.

01:10:56.740 But it can't articulate it.

01:11:00.140 Well, why would we be any different?

01:11:02.280 We aren't, obviously, because we're more complex than we understand.

01:11:06.020 So the fact that we're more complex than we understand means that we contain information that we cannot articulate.

01:11:11.860 Why can't that reveal itself?

01:11:13.580 It does all the time.

01:11:14.760 You have a revelation.

01:11:16.980 It's, aha!

01:11:18.140 I get it.

01:11:19.620 Well, what is that?

01:11:20.940 Maybe you're in psychotherapy, and we talk about some things about your past.

01:11:24.420 And we say, well, this happened, then this happened, then this happened.

01:11:27.120 We say, look, there's a pattern.

01:11:28.480 Whap!

01:11:29.320 And it's overwhelming.

01:11:30.520 It's like, now there's a concordance between your knowledge and the things that you're acting out.

01:11:34.780 And that's what comes as a revelation.

01:11:37.360 So one of the things that happens in Exodus, Moses is leading his people through the desert.

01:11:41.860 It's a classic U-shaped story.

01:11:43.760 They're in a tyranny to begin with, right?

01:11:45.680 So that's the insufficient present.

01:11:48.280 That's the old order.

01:11:49.920 Then they cross the water, the destructive water.

01:11:52.720 That's chaos, like the flood.

01:11:54.180 Then they're out in the desert, wandering without direction.

01:11:57.240 They start worshipping idols.

01:11:58.960 They're wandering without direction.

01:12:01.500 And then Moses goes up on the mountain, which is, by the way, what happens in Logan, just

01:12:07.580 because if you're going to go see it, you might as well know that, because it's a journey up

01:12:11.140 a mountain.

01:12:11.540 And he goes up the mountain, and he gets rules revealed to him.

01:12:16.260 Well, the way the story is structured is extraordinarily interesting, because Moses takes his people away

01:12:22.520 from this tyrannical structure.

01:12:24.640 But they don't go from tyranny to paradise, to the promised land, in one move.

01:12:30.260 That isn't how it works.

01:12:31.220 They have to, they go from a tyranny to absolute chaos, where everyone is fighting and killing

01:12:35.880 each other, and having a terrible time of it, and half starving, and having to pass through

01:12:41.240 the Red Sea.

01:12:41.980 Like it's, they go from tyranny to catastrophe, before they go to higher order.

01:12:47.540 And Moses doesn't even make it to the place of higher order.

01:12:50.740 He dies before he gets there.

01:12:52.420 So it's quite the catastrophe.

01:12:54.020 And the Israelites are all confused when they're out in the desert, because even though they

01:12:57.740 were in a tyranny and they were slaves, now they're nowhere, and they don't know

01:13:00.760 anything.

01:13:01.300 It's not good.

01:13:02.520 And so a lot of them actually start thinking about how good the damn tyranny was, compared

01:13:07.360 to wandering around in the desert, which is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union,

01:13:10.620 right?

01:13:10.860 In Russia now, there's huge nostalgia for the Stalinist era.

01:13:15.720 So these stories, they're always true.

01:13:18.300 They're always happening.

01:13:19.920 So anyways, what happens to Moses is that the story is quite interesting.

01:13:24.260 So the Israelites start to fight amongst themselves, which of course they do, because there's no

01:13:29.100 higher order authority.

01:13:31.160 And so then Moses sits and judges them, like literally like a judge.

01:13:35.540 He sits for hours every day, and the squabbling Israelites come up and say, you know, he did

01:13:40.480 this to me, and oh, you did this to me.

01:13:42.440 And so then Moses has to figure out who's right and who's wrong.

01:13:45.640 And he's doing this for like hours and hours, for days and days, for weeks and weeks, for

01:13:49.960 months.

01:13:50.980 It's like the origin of English common law.

01:13:52.960 It's exactly what happened with common law, because in common law, what happens is that

01:13:57.520 you have all the rights there are.

01:13:59.800 If you two have a dispute, you go before the judiciary, you sort out the dispute, that

01:14:04.000 becomes a precedent.

01:14:05.040 Now that's part of the body of laws.

01:14:07.720 The body of laws is what you act out.

01:14:10.080 That's why it's a body.

01:14:11.540 Well, that's what Moses does.

01:14:12.700 So he's sitting there making judgments, very, very finely tuned, discreet moral judgments.

01:14:20.100 You know how difficult that is when two people have a dispute to try to figure out how to

01:14:23.900 mediate between that.

01:14:24.880 You don't know who's lying, who's telling the truth.

01:14:27.420 You don't know exactly what an acceptable solution would be.

01:14:29.980 Like, it's really ridiculously hard work.

01:14:32.620 So he walks through this entire process of continual judicial intermediation.

01:14:38.160 Then he goes up the mountain, and what does he get?

01:14:40.300 Tablet of rules.

01:14:41.300 Well, why?

01:14:42.980 Well, he spent his 10,000 hours investigating the structure of morality in a practical way,

01:14:50.580 and it goes, bang!

01:14:52.180 This is what we've been doing.

01:14:54.300 These are the rules.

01:14:55.860 It's not like there's no rules to begin with, and those are imposed, because that wouldn't

01:15:00.900 work.

01:15:01.580 It doesn't work that way.

01:15:03.380 You have to take how people are, extract out what the pattern of what they are is, reflect

01:15:09.780 that back to them.

01:15:10.780 Well, that's the story of Moses, and it's a myth.

01:15:14.200 It's a meta story.

01:15:15.340 It's a story about how rules come to be.

01:15:18.580 We act a certain way.

01:15:19.820 We have certain kinds of expectations.

01:15:21.500 We have certain kinds of disputes.

01:15:23.000 Out of that, a patterned way of being emerges.

01:15:27.240 Then we map the patterned way of being.

01:15:29.300 We say, well, look, here's the rules.

01:15:30.640 There's 10 of them.

01:15:32.380 Or however many you want to extract, right?

01:15:34.680 I mean, it's a moving target in some sense.

01:15:37.320 Don't kill other people.

01:15:38.600 That's a bad idea.

01:15:39.820 Don't steal what other people have.

01:15:42.160 Honor your parents, etc., etc.

01:15:44.100 I mean, these are, you could come up with a different basic set of rules, but there'd

01:15:48.620 be some overlap, and those aren't bad to begin with.

01:15:51.180 Of course, there were far more rules than that, but those were the central ones.

01:15:53.960 And so then you might say, hey, if you took all 10 of those rules, and you tried to extract

01:16:00.640 out one rule from them that would be at the top of the hierarchy, what would that be?

01:16:06.360 And in Western culture, the idea there is that do unto others as you would have them do unto

01:16:10.820 you is the rule that, it's the meta rule that guides all other rules, sort of like the

01:16:15.200 one ring in the Lord of the Rings.

01:16:17.800 And so it's this consistent pattern of abstraction of ethical guidelines.

01:16:22.220 So, okay, so, well, and so that maps on to, well, there's a, there's a micro, there's

01:16:29.040 a micro level that you instruct people at, and that, then there's a more abstract level

01:16:35.120 that you instruct them at, and then there's a more abstract level, well, maybe at that

01:16:39.140 point you can't exactly directly instruct them.

01:16:42.600 Remember in the Pinocchio story, Geppetto sits, Pinocchio, or the cricket, Jiminy sits

01:16:47.840 Pinocchio down and tries to lecture to him about what the highest level of moral virtue

01:16:52.220 is.

01:16:52.820 He sounds like a complete fraud.

01:16:55.720 He sounds like a propaganda artist.

01:16:57.480 He's a soapbox preacher.

01:16:59.720 And Pinocchio doesn't understand him at all.

01:17:02.080 Why?

01:17:02.840 Has to be acted out.

01:17:04.980 Now, maybe as a parent, you can be a model for emulation, which is, so you're a model for

01:17:10.280 imitation.

01:17:11.140 What you say matters, but it doesn't say as much, matter as much as what you do.

01:17:15.600 Maybe it would if what you said and what you did were the same.

01:17:18.780 That's the ideal situation, right?

01:17:20.580 That's what you want to do if you're a parent.

01:17:22.760 If you say one thing and act differently, your kids will torture you to death, and they're

01:17:27.100 right to do it, too.

01:17:28.240 Because you're confused, and confusing them makes them anxious and aggressive, and they

01:17:32.440 will go after you.

01:17:33.300 Consistency, consistency, consistency.

01:17:36.140 And if you can't provide it, you'll drive them crazy.

01:17:39.100 So you want to bring your words and your actions into alignment, right?

01:17:43.440 And that's part of the development of wisdom.

01:17:45.620 So, okay.

01:17:46.800 So, back to the brain.

01:17:48.800 All right.

01:17:55.260 So there's the motor homunculus.

01:17:57.520 So, now, what I want to tell you about that is, you just think about what this thing is

01:18:02.200 like.

01:18:02.680 It's taking the world apart, and it's talking about it.

01:18:07.180 So that's what a human being is like.

01:18:09.480 And that, to me, that's kind of an image of the mythological hero.

01:18:13.140 It's the thing that can speak magic words and take the world apart.

01:18:16.480 Take the world apart.

01:18:17.380 Now, in one of the stories I'm going to tell you today, which is the story of the Enuma

01:18:22.000 Elish, which is the oldest written story that we have.

01:18:24.940 It's a Mesopotamian story, and it's from the same pool of stories that the creation account

01:18:30.560 in Genesis was extracted.

01:18:32.240 It isn't obvious what the temporal sequence was, but imagine there was a pool of stories

01:18:36.080 in the Middle East that were of indefinite age, tens of thousands of years.

01:18:40.860 And each of them were developed in a slightly different way, although the themes underneath

01:18:45.060 were similar.

01:18:46.760 There are great parallels between the Mesopotamian creation account and the first part of the

01:18:51.380 creation account in Genesis.

01:18:53.040 So, it was discovered in the late 1900s.

01:18:57.140 And ISIS just destroyed a huge treasure trove of that sort of manuscripts.

01:19:03.440 So, just so you know.

01:19:05.120 So, at Nineveh.

01:19:05.960 So, we can thank the war in the Middle East for the destruction of a huge treasure house

01:19:13.000 of irreplaceable human knowledge.

01:19:15.100 And a lot of that's happening.

01:19:16.180 That's happening very, very frequently.

01:19:17.760 It's an absolute bloody, disgraceful catastrophe.

01:19:21.740 So, anyway.

01:19:24.380 So, you know, that's the human being.

01:19:26.680 Lips, tongues, hands, and the face.

01:19:29.140 Your face is also extraordinarily amenable to voluntary manipulation.

01:19:35.200 So, you can learn to move single neurons in the tissue underneath your eyes.

01:19:39.780 That's how high resolution your face is.

01:19:42.240 And that's partly because it's a broadcast screen.

01:19:45.120 Which is why people are always looking at it, right?

01:19:47.140 And that's why if you watch a movie, it's always concentrating on people's faces.

01:19:50.640 It's because they're just broadcasting what?

01:19:53.980 They're broadcasting their stories constantly.

01:19:57.560 And we're looking at their faces.

01:19:59.160 What are you looking at?

01:20:00.120 What are your eyes pointing at?

01:20:01.160 What are you up to?

01:20:01.940 What's your emotional expression?

01:20:03.160 What are you going to do next?

01:20:04.120 What do you think about me?

01:20:05.120 Where are you going?

01:20:06.360 And you're broad...

01:20:07.900 Like, you find someone who has had too much plastic surgery uncanny.

01:20:12.220 Because their face is dead.

01:20:13.540 Because you cannot tell what they're up to.

01:20:15.080 They've got this zombie-like aspect that's terrifying.

01:20:18.340 And people like that...

01:20:19.640 Look, people like that got killed.

01:20:22.120 That's why we're not like that.

01:20:23.580 Or they didn't mate.

01:20:24.580 It's like, you want to know what that other person is up to.

01:20:26.840 And I told you already, that's how the whites of our eyes evolved, right?

01:20:30.140 I don't...

01:20:30.540 Do you remember that story?

01:20:31.980 Gorillas don't have that distinction between the iris and the whites.

01:20:34.820 Not like human beings.

01:20:36.220 And our eyes are very sharp.

01:20:37.780 And one thing we really want to know is...

01:20:39.880 What are you looking at and why?

01:20:41.800 What are you up to?

01:20:42.620 And if I can tell what you're looking at, I can infer what you're going to do.

01:20:47.260 And you want to broadcast that.

01:20:48.880 Well, except when you don't want to broadcast it.

01:20:51.140 But, you know, most of the time, you want to be pretty transparent to other people.

01:20:54.640 Because otherwise, they won't trust you.

01:20:56.060 And if they don't trust you, they won't cooperate with you.

01:20:58.760 They won't compete with you.

01:20:59.960 And the probability that they'll come after you is extraordinarily high.

01:21:02.860 Because you'll be evil predator in no time flat.

01:21:07.440 So, okay.

01:21:11.200 So, we'll take a look at the brain from another perspective.

01:21:15.600 Now, a lot of this I got from Alcon and Goldberg.

01:21:22.640 Well, that's not exactly right.

01:21:24.180 I had laid this out before that.

01:21:26.460 But I found Alcon and Goldberg's writings afterwards.

01:21:29.200 And he was a student of Lurias.

01:21:30.540 And he was trying to account for why we had different hemispheres, roughly speaking.

01:21:35.860 Because it's not self-evident that we should.

01:21:38.080 They're actually somewhat separate consciousnesses.

01:21:40.800 And they communicate, but the communication isn't complete.

01:21:44.980 It's like our brain is modularized and unified at the same time.

01:21:49.000 And you can think about it like a meeting of people.

01:21:52.020 Why do you want it modularized?

01:21:54.720 Well, so if one person goes down, all of them don't.

01:21:57.800 That's one reason.

01:22:00.400 So, it's some separation of function.

01:22:02.700 Why else?

01:22:03.580 Well, each little module can do its own creative thing independently of the others.

01:22:09.380 And that's useful.

01:22:10.180 And then there can be communication between them.

01:22:12.660 And so, there's utility in modularity.

01:22:16.200 And there's utility in integration.

01:22:17.860 And part of what we're trying to work out on the global political scene right now is

01:22:21.220 how modular things should be and how integrated they should be.

01:22:24.300 And the European community rushed into integration.

01:22:27.740 And that's bothering people dreadfully.

01:22:30.120 Because they feel that the advantages of modularization have been washed away.

01:22:34.960 You saw that.

01:22:35.440 And maybe they're right.

01:22:36.180 Because you saw what happened when Greece collapsed.

01:22:39.000 Right?

01:22:39.440 And Greece is very, very corrupt.

01:22:41.240 Incredibly corrupt.

01:22:42.280 And Germany, whatever else you might think about Germany, is not corrupt.

01:22:45.520 And so, the EEC tried to bring Greece and Germany together.

01:22:50.320 That didn't work.

01:22:51.440 There was no unity there.

01:22:52.960 The modularity was actually useful.

01:22:55.080 And the fact that Greece was so destabilized, and Italy, also very corrupt, and Spain, also

01:23:00.180 very corrupt, was very shaky.

01:23:02.500 Just about brought the whole thing down.

01:23:03.960 The argument is the modularity would have been better conserved.

01:23:08.760 Well, who knows, right?

01:23:10.380 Because modularity is useful, and so is integration.

01:23:13.620 But full integration seems to be a mistake, and so does full modularity.

01:23:18.140 How do you get that right?

01:23:19.100 We don't know.

01:23:20.100 That's why we're arguing about it.

01:23:21.700 And right now, there's a backlash.

01:23:23.440 We're pulling away from the integration.

01:23:25.820 And you can see why, too.

01:23:27.540 Because in 2008, when the American economy collapsed, the world economy just about collapsed.

01:23:32.880 That seems like a bad idea.

01:23:34.620 You know, you might want some separateness, so that if one system malfunctions and goes

01:23:40.160 down, the whole bloody thing doesn't go into flames.

01:23:43.280 And so, we don't know how to manage that.

01:23:46.040 It's a really, really complicated problem.

01:23:49.400 So, anyways, okay.

01:23:51.340 So, how does the brain work?

01:23:53.480 Well, the left, roughly speaking, in right-handed males, and the reason that I'm concentrating

01:23:59.320 on right-handed males is because they're simpler in their neurological structure.

01:24:03.580 Women have a more complicated neurological structure, and left-handed people tend to

01:24:08.080 have a more complicated neurological structure.

01:24:10.540 So, we'll just say that, we'll just go with the standard model to begin with, and you can

01:24:15.360 assume that the same systems are there in every person, but they're not laid out on the

01:24:20.280 hemispheric structure quite as neatly.

01:24:22.060 But they're still there.

01:24:23.480 So, it's sort of like, these are tendencies.

01:24:25.900 So, for example, if you're a...

01:24:28.520 So, there's a tendency for the right hemisphere to specialize for what's relatively unknown,

01:24:32.820 and the left hemisphere to specialize for what's relatively mastered.

01:24:37.600 And you can think about it this way, too.

01:24:42.180 Left, right.

01:24:45.420 It's something like that.

01:24:46.960 Okay.

01:24:47.200 So, large-scale, low-resolution abstractions tend to be the province of the right.

01:24:52.860 High-resolution, detailed knowledge structures tend to be the province of the left.

01:24:57.060 The left is linguistic.

01:24:58.500 That's where the detailed structures manifest themselves in articulation.

01:25:02.400 But the fundamental difference between the left and right isn't language versus non-language.

01:25:08.620 The fundamental distinction is relatively explored and mastered versus relatively unexplored and

01:25:14.880 not mastered.

01:25:16.020 And that's both in terms of structure.

01:25:17.880 The right hemisphere has a less granular structure.

01:25:20.400 It's less differentiated.

01:25:21.840 It's also responsible mostly for negative emotion, especially in the prefrontal part.

01:25:25.860 And the reason for that is, well, how do you encounter what's absolutely unknown?

01:25:31.540 Imagination and emotion, right?

01:25:34.520 I told you that little experiment that you could do if you're alone in a house and you

01:25:37.940 hear a strange noise at night in a room.

01:25:41.140 Just turn off the lights and put your hand in the room.

01:25:43.340 It's like your brain will just flash off monsters like mad.

01:25:46.140 You know, you'll be nervous.

01:25:47.600 Because that...

01:25:48.680 What's in that room?

01:25:49.840 Something to make you nervous.

01:25:51.620 That's a very low-resolution category, right?

01:25:53.740 It's like, it's some indeterminate manifestation of the category of things that might hurt you.

01:26:01.320 Very low-resolution, but a very smart category.

01:26:03.840 It's like, don't put your hand in there.

01:26:05.540 You put your hand in there and you watch your imagination.

01:26:07.460 It's like monsters.

01:26:08.600 It'll generate monsters like mad.

01:26:10.300 And that's what the right hemisphere is doing.

01:26:12.000 It's saying, what's in there is an exemplar of the category of things that are dangerous.

01:26:16.440 Here's a bunch of images of those things.

01:26:18.720 And that thing in there is going to partake of that essence.

01:26:21.940 And that's a very low-resolution hypothesis.

01:26:25.300 That's kind of what horror movies do with people.

01:26:27.720 You know, they sort of lead them through that initial process.

01:26:30.700 And so that's what the right...

01:26:32.900 The right hemisphere seems to me to be dominated by subcortical processes.

01:26:38.620 Whereas the left hemisphere is reversed.

01:26:40.220 The cortex has more or less got dominion.

01:26:42.280 And so the right hemisphere...

01:26:45.020 Well, we'll walk through this neurologically.

01:26:46.700 But the right hemisphere responds rapidly to what's unknown.

01:26:51.360 And that's subcorticals.

01:26:53.260 The hippocampus is doing an awful lot of that.

01:26:55.900 Noting a mismatch.

01:26:57.560 And then it's using the right hemisphere to abstractly represent what the possibility space is

01:27:04.120 in relationship to unexpected things.

01:27:07.200 And then the right hemisphere is tracking that continually, what those unexpected things are,

01:27:13.040 and coming up with models of what you haven't yet mastered.

01:27:16.980 And that's kept separate from the left hemisphere, which already has functional models.

01:27:21.760 And you don't want to blast the left hemisphere continually with anomalous information,

01:27:25.680 because you blow out its structure, and then you don't know what to do.

01:27:28.700 So the right hemisphere generates new models, in some sense, out of nothing.

01:27:35.200 And then when the time is right, taps information into the left hemisphere slowly,

01:27:39.360 so that it doesn't disrupt its function too much.

01:27:41.800 And a lot of that seems to happen when you're dreaming, by the way.

01:27:45.080 It happens at night.

01:27:46.780 So, and what happens with the dreams, you think about how dreams work.

01:27:50.020 Because you might think of dreams as part of that process where ideas come to be.

01:27:54.200 So they're low resolution to begin with, mostly imagistic, really highly emotional.

01:27:58.240 And incoherent.

01:28:00.680 Less coherent.

01:28:02.000 Why?

01:28:03.500 You can't be coherent unless you know what to do.

01:28:05.920 A, B, C, D, E, F.

01:28:07.700 If that's working, you've got coherence.

01:28:09.840 But if you're dealing with something you don't know,

01:28:11.840 you have to muck about with your category structures.

01:28:14.420 And that's what dreams do.

01:28:16.000 And, you know, when you're interpreting a dream,

01:28:18.440 one of the things you watch for is the dream presents this and then this.

01:28:22.500 That's called metonymy, by the way, from a literary perspective.

01:28:25.220 And what that implies is this is related to this in some way.

01:28:29.120 Why else would they be co-activated?

01:28:31.580 You know, people say, well, dreams are random.

01:28:33.440 That's the stupidest theory I've ever heard.

01:28:35.240 Like, white noise is random.

01:28:37.280 Dreams are not random.

01:28:38.880 They're hard to understand.

01:28:40.040 But they're anything but random.

01:28:42.480 They're more random than real life.

01:28:45.000 Well, that's because what you don't understand is really random.

01:28:48.780 And you're organized.

01:28:50.060 And there has to be an intermediary that's sort of quasi-random between them.

01:28:53.600 Or you never get from one to the other.

01:28:55.860 And dreams and fantasies, myths, all of that,

01:28:58.940 is part of that process that stretches you out beyond what you know into the absolute unknown.

01:29:04.360 And so, and your hemispheres are differentially specialized for that.

01:29:11.400 So, roughly speaking, right hemisphere.

01:29:17.280 Operation in unexplored territory.

01:29:19.200 That's a really good way of thinking about it.

01:29:21.160 You need a system that tells you what to do when you don't know what to do.

01:29:24.280 A huge part of the subcortical structures are doing that, too.

01:29:27.520 Unknown, freeze.

01:29:29.100 Then what?

01:29:30.240 Imagine.

01:29:31.340 Right?

01:29:31.820 Freeze, emotion, imagine.

01:29:33.540 Then explore.

01:29:35.440 Then differentiate.

01:29:36.760 Then master.

01:29:38.100 That's the process.

01:29:39.120 That's the process of learning.

01:29:40.840 And what you're doing is you're transforming low-resolution representations of what's frightening

01:29:45.520 into high-resolution representations that enable you to master it,

01:29:50.380 to take the world apart, and to make ingenious things out of it.

01:29:54.160 So there's this very cool part of the Mesopotamian creation myth.

01:29:58.360 So the major hero, whose name is Marduk,

01:30:00.580 confronts the dragon of chaos, Tiamat, who's feminine.

01:30:04.120 And he cuts her into pieces.

01:30:05.840 And he makes the world out of her pieces.

01:30:08.200 And one of his names, he had 50, 60 names.

01:30:11.380 And I think those were amalgams of tribal gods.

01:30:14.020 And one of the names was, he who makes ingenious things out of the conflict with Tiamat.

01:30:20.480 It's absolutely perfect.

01:30:22.040 That's exactly what human beings do.

01:30:24.120 Right?

01:30:24.620 We confront that terrible predatory potential that lies outside our domain of experience,

01:30:31.400 and we make ingenious things out of it.

01:30:33.500 And then we talk about how we did it.

01:30:35.100 And then we model how we did it.

01:30:37.320 And that's the basis of our ethics and our morality.

01:30:39.360 And the way that that ties into, think about,

01:30:41.740 one of the things we talked about was that the mythological hero was a representation,

01:30:45.900 not of the being that was at the top of the dominance hierarchy,

01:30:49.140 but of the being that was at the top of the set of all possible dominance hierarchies.

01:30:52.820 Okay, so here's a cool equation.

01:30:55.700 The hero who goes out into the unknown to make contact with the dragon and to bring back the treasure

01:31:00.800 is the same thing that wins the battle across sets of dominance hierarchies.

01:31:05.460 And that's how the two things come together.

01:31:07.620 Right?

01:31:08.060 It's so brilliant.

01:31:09.460 It's so absolutely brilliant.

01:31:11.440 And so it's the mythological hero.

01:31:13.500 The mythological hero is the representation of what's, again,

01:31:17.040 not at the top of one dominance hierarchy,

01:31:18.900 but at the top of all of them.

01:31:20.320 That's the eye that's above the pyramid.

01:31:21.880 Why the eye?

01:31:23.340 Because it pays attention.

01:31:25.340 And that's what you do.

01:31:26.620 None of this is, this is not fiction.

01:31:30.240 It's meta-truth.

01:31:31.500 It's the right way to think about it.

01:31:33.020 Look.

01:31:34.420 Let's say you're socially anxious.

01:31:36.720 Okay, so what happens when you're socially anxious?

01:31:41.020 You go to a party, your heart's beating.

01:31:43.340 Why?

01:31:43.960 The party is a monster.

01:31:45.740 Why?

01:31:46.320 Because it's judging you.

01:31:47.780 And it's judging you, it's putting you low down the dominance hierarchy,

01:31:51.140 because that's what a negative judgment is.

01:31:53.060 And that interferes with your sexual success.

01:31:56.260 And that means that you're being harshly evaluated by nature itself.

01:32:01.000 Right?

01:32:01.480 So you are confronting the dragon of chaos when you go into the social situation.

01:32:06.520 And so what do you do?

01:32:07.920 You're like this.

01:32:08.980 Right?

01:32:09.180 You hunch over, and that's low dominance.

01:32:11.300 I'm no threat.

01:32:12.160 It's like, oh, that's not going to get you very far.

01:32:14.280 You know, but that's a logical thing to do in the face of a tyrant.

01:32:18.960 So I'm no threat.

01:32:20.100 You know, you look at the king and you're dead.

01:32:22.080 I'm no threat.

01:32:23.100 I'm hunched over.

01:32:24.440 And then what's happening internally?

01:32:26.220 What are people thinking about me?

01:32:27.620 What are people thinking about me?

01:32:29.000 Am I looking stupid?

01:32:30.340 Am I looking foolish?

01:32:31.360 Jeez, I'm awkward.

01:32:32.060 I hate being here.

01:32:32.840 Man, I'm sweating too much.

01:32:34.100 It's all internalized.

01:32:36.060 Right?

01:32:36.280 It's all self-focused.

01:32:38.060 The I isn't working.

01:32:42.440 What do you tell people?

01:32:44.280 Stop.

01:32:45.140 Don't stop thinking about yourself.

01:32:47.800 Because you can't.

01:32:48.960 It's like, don't think of a white elephant.

01:32:51.280 White elephant, white elephant, white elephant.

01:32:53.100 You can't tell someone to stop thinking about something because they get caught in a loop.

01:32:57.100 What you do with socially anxious people is you say, look at other people.

01:33:02.120 Look at them.

01:33:03.720 Right?

01:33:04.400 Why?

01:33:04.880 Why?

01:33:05.300 Because if you look at them, you can tell what they're thinking.

01:33:07.960 And then you're, unless you're terribly socialized, and some people are.

01:33:12.340 Some people have no social skills.

01:33:13.960 And so the reason they can't go to a party is because they don't even know how to introduce themselves.

01:33:18.000 Like they're just, no one ever taught them how to behave.

01:33:21.200 And so they're really good candidates for behavior therapy.

01:33:25.460 Because you walk them through the process of how you actually manifest the procedures that are associated with social acceptability.

01:33:33.520 But most people aren't like that.

01:33:35.060 They have the ability.

01:33:36.220 So if they're really introverted and high in neuroticism, they can usually talk quite well to someone one-on-one.

01:33:42.060 Why?

01:33:42.940 Because they look at them.

01:33:44.400 Well, if I look at you, it's another thing to do if you're ever speaking to a group of people.

01:33:48.440 Never speak to the group of people.

01:33:51.100 It doesn't exist.

01:33:52.240 You talk to individuals.

01:33:54.860 And then they reflect for you the entire group.

01:33:58.000 Because they're all entrained.

01:33:59.640 So you look at one person.

01:34:01.200 They broadcast to you what everyone's thinking.

01:34:03.380 And you know how to talk to one person.

01:34:05.460 So it's easy.

01:34:06.300 And so as soon as you focus on the person, not you, you push your attention outward.

01:34:12.980 Use your eye.

01:34:13.680 You push your attention outward.

01:34:14.940 And you start watching.

01:34:16.160 Well, then all your automatic mechanisms kick in.

01:34:18.380 And you stop being awkward.

01:34:19.700 Because if we're talking, and I'm looking here, I don't know what you're going to do next.

01:34:25.420 And I'm going to put disjunctions into the, like, they're like bad chords in the melody of our conversation.

01:34:33.060 And the reason is I'm not paying attention.

01:34:35.960 So that's why the eye is the thing at the top of the pyramid.

01:34:38.720 It's like the thing that enables you to win the set of all possible dominance hierarchies is the eye.

01:34:43.900 Pay attention.

01:34:45.240 Pay attention.

01:34:46.320 That's the critical issue.

01:34:47.760 That's why the Egyptians worshipped Horus.

01:34:50.200 That's why Horus was the thing that rescued Osiris from the depths.

01:34:54.460 It's the capacity to pay attention.

01:34:56.320 What do you pay attention to most?

01:34:58.820 What your right hemisphere signals as anomalous.

01:35:01.780 It attracts your attention.

01:35:03.520 It's like, this isn't going quite right.

01:35:05.260 I'm not looking at that.

01:35:07.060 Wrong!

01:35:09.000 That's what you look at.

01:35:10.560 That's what you look at.

01:35:11.820 What's not going right.

01:35:13.060 Because that's, see, that's the terrible monster that might eat you.

01:35:16.120 But it's also the place you get all the information.

01:35:19.340 So, that's why it's useful to have discussions with your enemies.

01:35:23.360 Because they will tell you things you do not know.

01:35:25.840 And that's such a great thing.

01:35:27.420 Because if you don't know them, well, you're not very smart, are you?

01:35:31.080 You know, there may be a time when you go somewhere that that's the thing you need to know.

01:35:34.640 And maybe your enemy will tell you why you're such a fool.

01:35:38.040 You know, and a bunch of other things that aren't true, too.

01:35:40.960 But even one thing that's accurate, it's like, yeah, thanks very much.

01:35:44.640 Man, maybe I'll do some work on that.

01:35:46.140 And I won't have to carry that forward.

01:35:48.660 So, and then that's part of the reason, again, why the terrible predator...

01:35:52.400 It's always the terrible predator that has the gold.

01:35:54.780 It's like, it's the person who delivers the message you do not want to hear.

01:35:58.020 So it's rough.

01:35:59.100 It's rough.

01:36:00.160 But it doesn't matter.

01:36:01.540 Life is rough.

01:36:02.440 Okay, so, how are these specialized?

01:36:08.580 The right hemisphere, operation in unexplored territory.

01:36:11.780 And that unexplored territory emerges whenever what you're doing doesn't work.

01:36:17.140 You know, you can conceptualize it as that which is beyond the walls of the city.

01:36:21.980 But the city is a category structure.

01:36:24.460 Abstractly...

01:36:25.380 Abstractly put.

01:36:27.280 There's no difference between the barbarians that invade the walled city

01:36:32.420 and the things that happen in the world that damage your category structure.

01:36:36.620 They're the same thing from a practical perspective.

01:36:44.280 Okay, right hemisphere.

01:36:46.120 Operation in unexplored territory.

01:36:48.200 Negative emotion.

01:36:49.560 Inhibition of behavior.

01:36:51.120 That's this.

01:36:52.020 That's anxiety.

01:36:53.120 That's what happens when the Medusa looks at you.

01:36:55.260 You turn to stone, right?

01:36:56.360 That's the basilisk in Harry Potter.

01:36:58.220 It freezes you.

01:36:59.380 Why?

01:37:00.200 You're moving forward according to a schema.

01:37:02.780 If you're moving forward properly, you're getting to where you want to go

01:37:06.460 and the schema is being validated simultaneously.

01:37:09.380 I'm moving forward and the map is correct.

01:37:12.080 Something happens that's unexpected.

01:37:13.560 What should you do?

01:37:15.260 Stop.

01:37:16.720 What else are you going to do?

01:37:18.040 You stop first.

01:37:19.160 Then the predator can't see you.

01:37:21.020 Right?

01:37:21.340 That's the freezing reaction of a prey animal.

01:37:23.600 So it's built very, very deeply into you.

01:37:27.660 Very, very old circuits do that.

01:37:29.760 In fact, if it's a real orienting reflex to something that's normal,

01:37:32.820 so you'll go like this.

01:37:34.000 And that's to stop the thing that will jump on your back from tearing out your throat.

01:37:37.420 And that's really, really fast.

01:37:39.420 It's almost as fast as spinal snake reflex circuitry.

01:37:43.800 Extraordinarily fast.

01:37:45.200 And, you know, that's conserved over an evolutionary span.

01:37:48.640 That predator defense system is at the bottom of your cognitive apparatus.

01:37:53.680 Everything's been built on that, like...

01:37:56.560 It's a low-resolution pattern.

01:38:00.540 A higher-resolution pattern that's the same pattern is built on top of that.

01:38:04.780 Then a higher-resolution pattern that's the same pattern is built on top of that, and so on.

01:38:09.560 But that initial architecture is duplicated across the levels of differentiation of the nervous system.

01:38:15.820 And that's partly why these symbols can be so archaic and still be accurate.

01:38:19.720 It's still the way the world works.

01:38:22.200 Negative emotion, inhibition of behavior, image processing.

01:38:25.800 Right.

01:38:26.380 Because image...

01:38:27.080 The thing about images is they're fast.

01:38:29.560 You know, a picture is worth a thousand words.

01:38:32.380 Okay, you get the picture.

01:38:34.060 You know, get the picture is actually something you say to someone if you say,

01:38:37.460 do you understand?

01:38:39.060 Right?

01:38:39.480 To get the picture is very, very fast.

01:38:41.560 So the right hemisphere manages that.

01:38:43.920 Holistic thinking.

01:38:44.780 That's that low-resolution thinking that generalizes across instances.

01:38:48.580 Pattern recognition, pattern generation, and gross motor action.

01:38:52.200 Yeah.

01:38:53.160 Freeze and get the hell out of there.

01:38:55.420 That's gross motor action.

01:38:56.800 The right hemisphere is very good at that.

01:38:58.420 That's why if you're right-handed, use your...

01:39:02.040 If you're right-handed, you use your left hemisphere to manage the really fine motor details.

01:39:08.820 Right?

01:39:09.000 You write with it.

01:39:10.280 You write with it.

01:39:11.260 And because that's very, very...

01:39:13.260 If you're right-handed, you tend to use your left hand to open the top of jars.

01:39:19.480 Right?

01:39:20.960 You use your left hand.

01:39:21.900 That's a gross motor action.

01:39:23.300 I mean, sometimes people are more lateralized than that.

01:39:25.700 But the left hemisphere is specialized for the fine-grained things that you know very well.

01:39:29.840 That's exactly it.

01:39:31.380 Okay, the left hemisphere.

01:39:32.500 Well, the left hemisphere, which is associated with positive emotion, by the way, that's specialized for operation in explored territory.

01:39:41.100 So now what we might say is that you spend your whole life trying not to have your right hemisphere turn on.

01:39:46.960 Because why would you want that?

01:39:48.860 That's where the monsters pop up.

01:39:50.660 So you stay in explored territory, but maybe you also tentatively expand its borders.

01:39:56.960 And the left hemisphere seems to be involved in that, too.

01:39:59.380 So if you're curious about something, it's usually something usually.

01:40:03.820 Something minor enough so that it won't blow your entire category structure if you explore it.

01:40:08.060 Now, sometimes you get unlucky, and you're like Eve in the Garden of Eden.

01:40:12.660 You go have a little chat with this little snake that seems to be of no significance whatsoever, and it feeds you something, the apple.

01:40:21.400 It feeds you something, and bang, everything falls apart.

01:40:24.800 Right?

01:40:25.060 You collapse, and you're out there in history.

01:40:27.660 You're no longer in your old paradise.

01:40:30.180 So activation of behavior.

01:40:33.340 Yeah, well, that's because positive emotion is associated with movement forward.

01:40:37.060 Like, if you're where you want to be, and things are going well, then your behavior should be activated so that you go and get things.

01:40:44.060 Now, one of the negative consequences of that is that if you're really in a good mood, really happy, you're going to be impulsive and make mistakes.

01:40:51.880 You know, because you hear these dough-headed...

01:40:54.060 That's a very minor word.

01:40:56.480 People who are always pushing happiness as the key measure for successful existence.

01:41:01.720 It's so ill-informed that it's embarrassing that that even happens.

01:41:09.300 Positive emotion makes people impulsive.

01:41:11.940 Maniacs, for example.

01:41:13.440 Which is really if you...

01:41:14.380 That's mania, right?

01:41:15.800 Bipolar disorder.

01:41:17.020 If you're manic, you're one happy person.

01:41:19.720 Way too happy.

01:41:21.180 Everything is great.

01:41:22.420 Nothing but wonderful things that are beyond your imagination are going to happen to you.

01:41:27.440 And they're going to happen fast.

01:41:29.240 And so you're down to the mall to buy everything you can possibly get your hands on, because you have 100 uses for everything.

01:41:35.640 And then a week later, you know, you crash into your depressive episode, and you realize that you're $150,000 in debt, and you've alienated everyone that you know.

01:41:45.180 It's like, that's untrammeled positive emotion.

01:41:47.780 So, how about no...

01:41:51.180 A pure index of positive emotion is no way of determining whether or not a system is working properly.

01:41:56.620 Even your own system.

01:41:58.020 You need a balance between positive and negative emotions.

01:42:01.060 Plus, positive emotions are absolutely exhausting.

01:42:04.500 Because if you're in a manic episode, it's like, it's time to get everything good right now.

01:42:09.240 Fine, but you won't sleep for a week, and then you die.

01:42:12.080 Because you just burned yourself to a crisp.

01:42:14.140 And so, to be overwhelmingly enthusiastic about everything sounds like a real blast.

01:42:20.340 And I've seen full-blown manics, and they're having plenty of fun.

01:42:22.940 But it is not a pleasant thing to behold.

01:42:25.620 They're just all over the place.

01:42:28.120 And, you know, yeah, it's really not good.

01:42:31.900 It's really not good.

01:42:32.900 You need a balance between these two systems, because the whole world isn't explored territory bursting with nothing but promise.

01:42:41.340 That's not the world.

01:42:42.360 The world is that, in a bounded space, a little bit, with an absolute horror show going out around the periphery.

01:42:50.780 And both of your, both systems need to be active in order to keep you balanced.

01:42:56.480 People do, unfortunately, sustain damage sometimes to the left prefrontal cortex responsible for positive emotion.

01:43:03.080 Or the right prefrontal cortex responsible for negative emotion.

01:43:06.740 And if you sustain right hemisphere of prefrontal damage, it makes you inappropriately happy and impulsive.

01:43:12.260 And your life just goes, you just spiral downhill.

01:43:15.580 Because you make nothing but impulsive decisions.

01:43:18.640 And you know what the real-world consequence of that is.

01:43:20.920 You know, get drunk and be impulsive for one night, you can learn what the bloody consequences of that are.

01:43:27.400 You try living like that for a month, independently of IQ.

01:43:31.380 That's the other thing that's so interesting.

01:43:33.360 You can blow out your left prefrontal cortex and not suffer much of a decrease, especially in crystallized intelligence.

01:43:39.120 But the fact that you're running on nothing but, sorry, your right hemisphere, you're running on nothing but positive emotion is going to auger you right into the ground.

01:43:47.200 And then if you're perhaps even more unlucky, and you lose the left prefrontal cortex, then you're permanently depressed.

01:43:56.820 Because there's nothing but the unexplored manifesting itself.

01:44:03.140 We know that if you take depressed people and you do EEG analysis, that they have predominant resting right hemisphere EEG activation.

01:44:14.700 And so, that's roughly, so why is this?

01:44:19.040 Well, unknown territory, known territory.

01:44:22.400 You think, well, is that real?

01:44:23.720 Well, it's real enough, so that's how your brain evolved.

01:44:26.340 That seems pretty damn real.

01:44:28.260 So, then we can think about it subcortically, and we might as well do that.

01:44:33.140 So, this is mapped out on the hippocampus, most particularly by Jeffrey Gray, who was influenced by Sokolov and Vina Gradova, who were also students of Luria.

01:44:43.960 Jeffrey Gray used cybernetic theory that was developed by Norbert Wiener, which is an AI.

01:44:51.560 He was the father of artificial intelligence.

01:44:53.740 And some of that was actually integrated as well into Piagetian thought, because Piaget and Weiner, Norbert Wiener, and Luria, if I remember correctly, all went to the same conference back in the early 1920s, mid-1920s, and heard Norbert Wiener speak.

01:45:09.900 So, that's how cybernetic theory got built into some of these underlying theories and sort of manifested itself everywhere.

01:45:17.180 So, Gray uses a model very much like this, derived from cybernetic theory.

01:45:21.800 And so, here's the idea.

01:45:22.860 How does the brain work?

01:45:24.220 You have a target in mind.

01:45:27.320 Then you act to manifest the target.

01:45:30.860 You act to transform the world into the target.

01:45:32.800 And then you compare the consequence of your actions to the target.

01:45:36.620 And if they match, then that's a good thing.

01:45:38.220 And if they don't match, then that's where negative emotion comes from.

01:45:41.420 Okay, so how does that work?

01:45:42.680 The hippocampus seems to be central to that.

01:45:44.920 So, it detects mismatch.

01:45:46.840 So, in the classic behavioral theory, so this would be Gray's theory, you have your expectations of the world.

01:45:54.700 So, that would be your model.

01:45:56.160 And you have your sensory input, which is the real world.

01:45:59.580 And then the hippocampus is mapping one on to the other.

01:46:02.800 One from a top downstream, one from a bottom upstream.

01:46:06.340 And saying, match, match, match, match.

01:46:09.000 And as long as everything matches, then the hippocampus, this is an oversimplification,

01:46:13.780 keeps the subcortical emotional systems inhibited.

01:46:17.480 Because you don't need them.

01:46:18.840 Except for maybe mild positive emotion to keep you moving forward.

01:46:23.080 If there's a mismatch, that's anxiety.

01:46:26.480 The anxiety system gets disinhibited.

01:46:28.500 Because it's on, it doesn't get activated, it gets disinhibited.

01:46:31.200 That freezes you.

01:46:32.080 And all the other motivational systems are primed, because God only knows what you're going to have to do next.

01:46:37.100 Okay, so, then, if you make a mistake, given that scheme, you have to modify the world in order to rectify the mistake.

01:46:44.900 You have to modify your motor output so that you put the world back in order.

01:46:48.660 And that's basically Gray's model.

01:46:50.340 But Gray's model is insufficient, because Gray presumes that what you're comparing your expectation with is the real world.

01:47:01.700 But you don't have access to the real world.

01:47:03.760 What really happens is that your brain compares the model of the world that you want to have happen,

01:47:10.300 so it's desired and not expected, with the model of the world that you think is happening.

01:47:15.520 They're both models.

01:47:16.620 There's no direct contact with the truth.

01:47:19.900 And so, what that means, and this is what's horrible about this, is that if your model fails,

01:47:25.440 it doesn't only mean that you have to adjust your expectation and change your motor activity.

01:47:30.780 It means you might have to bloody well retool your perceptions.

01:47:33.960 Well, that's a lot more horrifying than just having to change your motor output.

01:47:38.560 If you betray me, then I have to see you differently.

01:47:43.780 And, you know, if we've interacted a long time, I've built up a hell of a model of you.

01:47:48.460 You know, it's taken a tremendous amount of effort to generate.

01:47:51.340 And I may have used that model as a predicate for all sorts of other plans,

01:47:55.920 which is what you do with an intimate relationship.

01:47:58.140 And so then, if you do something that indicates a true mismatch,

01:48:02.640 it isn't only that I have to adjust my actions.

01:48:06.180 God only knows what I'm going to have to retool.

01:48:08.300 I may even have to retool my perceptions of myself.

01:48:11.360 I'm a lot more gullible than I thought I was, for example.

01:48:14.180 And God only knows what the implications of that are.

01:48:16.720 If you're close to me and you could do this to me, is that my flaw?

01:48:22.880 And am I carrying that into other relationships?

01:48:25.400 It's an absolute catastrophe.

01:48:26.960 And so, Gray actually underestimated the degree of severity of mismatch

01:48:31.620 because he only said, well, it was motor output and re-world adjusting

01:48:37.760 that would have to be repaired, not perception.

01:48:40.380 Because like most behaviorists, see, the behaviorists had this idea of stimulus, right?

01:48:44.620 The stimulus produces the response.

01:48:47.060 It's like, okay, what stimulus?

01:48:49.580 Well, they never went there.

01:48:51.000 They just assumed that the stimulus spoke for itself.

01:48:53.720 But it doesn't.

01:48:54.640 That's the fundamental weakness of behavioral theory,

01:48:57.760 is that the reason they could get rid of the mind

01:48:59.520 was because they hid it invisibly inside the idea of the stimulus,

01:49:03.180 which was all of a sudden not just something that was a sense,

01:49:06.660 like a piece of sense data, but that had motivation built into it.

01:49:10.400 Well, no.

01:49:12.400 No, you can't do that.

01:49:14.480 The motivation...

01:49:15.920 You can put the motivation in the object, but then it's no longer an object.

01:49:19.080 It's something completely different.

01:49:20.320 Okay, good.

01:49:24.140 Let's stop there.

01:49:24.980 When you come back, I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories, okay?

01:49:27.460 So we'll break for 15 minutes.

01:49:30.960 So imagine what happens when a civilization develops.

01:49:34.300 And it develops out of an amalgam of tribal organizations.

01:49:38.860 And so each of those tribes has their own god,

01:49:41.680 which is their own sort of imaginative universe,

01:49:43.860 and their attempt to make sense out of the moral landscape of being.

01:49:47.060 And underneath all of those representations is a pattern.

01:49:52.440 And the reason there's a pattern there

01:49:53.920 is because all of those tribes are made up of people.

01:49:56.720 And so there's going to be...

01:49:57.920 It's like there's a domain within which variation is going to occur.

01:50:01.520 So if we're going to set up a structure that works across time,

01:50:05.960 it's going to at least be roughly predicated on the same structures

01:50:09.680 that a dominance hierarchy is predicated on.

01:50:12.020 It's going to be predicated on the same patterns of interactions

01:50:14.860 that would characterize a chimpanzee troop.

01:50:17.420 You know, there's this basic biological...

01:50:20.240 What would you call it?

01:50:23.140 There's a realm of biological necessity

01:50:25.240 that constitutes the boundary space

01:50:27.460 within which human interactions have to take place.

01:50:30.140 I mean, I can't be so violent that I kill everyone in my tribe.

01:50:34.040 That's not going to be very helpful,

01:50:35.400 because I'm a tribal creature.

01:50:37.100 So without the tribe, what am I going to do?

01:50:39.240 And so I have to be vaguely acceptable to other people,

01:50:43.020 because otherwise they'll kill me.

01:50:44.520 Even if I'm really, really powerful, they'll take me down.

01:50:47.740 And so because I have to deal with you and you and you and you and you,

01:50:51.980 we're going to modify each other continually and within parameters.

01:50:55.680 Now, the parameters are wide, but they're not non-existent.

01:50:58.640 And, you know, you can see what those parameters are genuinely

01:51:01.740 if you look at something like a wolf pack or a chimpanzee troop,

01:51:05.240 because those are stable across...

01:51:07.520 Really, the structure itself is stable across

01:51:10.620 at least hundreds of thousands of years,

01:51:12.760 if not millions of years.

01:51:14.400 And so there's a...

01:51:16.560 So, Franz De Waal shows, for example,

01:51:19.400 that with the chimpanzee troops,

01:51:22.680 if you have a...

01:51:23.920 He studied them mostly at the Arnhem Zoo,

01:51:26.600 and I would recommend his writings highly.

01:51:28.820 De Waal, D-E-W-A-A-L.

01:51:32.700 He's interested in prototypical moral behavior among chimpanzees.

01:51:36.800 It's a very interesting study.

01:51:38.800 And what he's showed, for example,

01:51:40.960 is that if you have a particularly...

01:51:42.800 The dominant dominance hierarchy in chimpanzees is male.

01:51:46.240 There's a female dominance hierarchy, too, that overlaps the male.

01:51:49.080 And some of the females are more dominant than many of the males.

01:51:52.380 But the fundamental structure looks like it's patriarchal,

01:51:55.980 roughly speaking, among chimpanzees.

01:51:57.600 If you put a really rough, tough, barbaric, brutal, dictator chimpanzee at the top,

01:52:03.080 his reign tends to be unstable and violent,

01:52:06.540 because he isn't good at negotiating social support.

01:52:11.340 And so he doesn't have any.

01:52:13.460 And so that means two chimpanzees that are friends can take him out.

01:52:17.600 And so that's what happens.

01:52:18.640 And so the despot chimp is an unstable leader.

01:52:23.980 And De Waal has shown that the more stable chimp leaders are more chimpanitarian,

01:52:29.660 I guess would be the right word.

01:52:31.320 It's not humanitarian.

01:52:32.220 They have friends.

01:52:36.220 And, you know, friendship is predicated on reciprocity, even among chimpanzees.

01:52:41.400 And so if a predicate of power is reciprocity,

01:52:45.900 then that's one of the things that alleviates the dictatorial tendency.

01:52:49.660 So anyways, so my point is,

01:52:53.120 when a great civilization emerges,

01:52:55.360 it emerges from the amalgam of tribal groups.

01:52:57.480 But, and each of the tribal groups has their own ethic,

01:53:00.760 but that ethic isn't,

01:53:02.460 the ethics aren't entirely separate from one another.

01:53:05.100 That's why tribes can trade.

01:53:07.320 Because they do trade.

01:53:08.600 They interact with one another.

01:53:10.940 It's kind of half, I remember,

01:53:13.640 here's how heretofore separated tribes begin to trade.

01:53:18.920 Because you don't know,

01:53:20.260 you meet each other across the river,

01:53:22.520 and it's like you got your bows and arrows,

01:53:24.480 and someone makes a mistake,

01:53:25.800 and it's like warfare.

01:53:27.480 And so, but you don't want to start the damn war,

01:53:30.420 because maybe you'll die.

01:53:31.560 So you're sitting there with your bow and arrows,

01:53:33.160 watching these guys,

01:53:34.200 and now you know they're there.

01:53:36.020 And so then, you go back to your tribe,

01:53:38.300 and you think,

01:53:38.700 oh man, what the hell are we going to do about this?

01:53:40.600 And one solution is,

01:53:41.880 well, let's find out where they are,

01:53:43.080 and then we'll go in there at night,

01:53:43.980 and we'll, like, we'll kill a bunch of them,

01:53:45.420 or we'll wipe them out, or something like that.

01:53:46.960 Or another solution might be,

01:53:48.340 did you see all the neat stuff they had?

01:53:50.800 And so then what do you do?

01:53:51.900 Is you find a border area,

01:53:54.320 and you go and you put some things out there that are valuable,

01:53:57.240 and you run away,

01:53:58.360 and then you watch from the trees,

01:53:59.960 and you see what happens when these other people

01:54:02.340 discover these valuable things that you left there.

01:54:05.300 And if they're, like,

01:54:06.660 a little on the psychopathic side,

01:54:08.000 they pick it all up and giggle and run away,

01:54:10.160 and that's the end of that.

01:54:11.300 But if they have any sense,

01:54:12.980 what they do is,

01:54:13.740 they leave some cool stuff on the ground, too.

01:54:15.940 And then they run off.

01:54:17.240 And then you can go pick up their cool stuff and leave.

01:54:19.480 And then it's, like,

01:54:20.340 step one in the trust process.

01:54:22.980 And then maybe you do that, you know,

01:54:24.420 for a year,

01:54:25.600 and it starts to fall into a cadence,

01:54:27.720 and then maybe, you know,

01:54:29.340 you get a little closer

01:54:30.480 when you're watching in the bush,

01:54:32.360 and then maybe one day

01:54:33.300 you have enough courage to kind of come,

01:54:34.740 you send your biggest,

01:54:35.540 ugliest guy out there,

01:54:36.600 and, you know,

01:54:37.320 they do the same,

01:54:38.200 and, you know,

01:54:38.860 they look at each other,

01:54:39.760 and finally they shake hands

01:54:40.940 or something like that and trade.

01:54:42.280 And then, well,

01:54:42.840 then you've got a trading relationship established.

01:54:44.880 And so you can see in that

01:54:46.720 the emergence of a,

01:54:48.940 what would you call it,

01:54:50.220 negotiated consensual moral structure

01:54:53.300 that allows trading to take place.

01:54:55.760 And there's going to be rules emerge right away,

01:54:58.480 which is, well,

01:54:59.280 you better leave me something

01:55:01.000 that's of approximately equal value,

01:55:03.620 or I'm not going to play the game again.

01:55:06.180 That's the thing that's so cool,

01:55:07.680 is that if we only play a game once,

01:55:09.820 I can do whatever I want.

01:55:12.420 And so that's what psychopaths do.

01:55:14.560 They play a game once,

01:55:15.780 and then they go play with someone else.

01:55:17.500 But if we're going to play the same game

01:55:19.260 over and over and over,

01:55:21.120 it's like the dominance hierarchy across time.

01:55:24.360 There's a different rule for playing a game once

01:55:26.720 than there is for playing a game a thousand times.

01:55:29.940 And if we're in a relationship,

01:55:32.420 the game we want to play

01:55:33.380 is one that can be duplicated a thousand times.

01:55:35.220 And there's really tight constraints on that.

01:55:37.540 And so that's the origin

01:55:39.060 that you could consider that

01:55:40.460 the biological...

01:55:42.540 It's not even biological exactly.

01:55:44.280 It's predicated in biology,

01:55:46.140 but it's a consequence of continual interaction.

01:55:48.640 The ethic emerges.

01:55:49.760 It's like the rats that I told you about,

01:55:51.740 that, you know,

01:55:52.860 the rats that play with each other.

01:55:54.720 The big rat has to let the little rat win

01:55:56.440 30% of the time,

01:55:57.740 or the little rat won't play anymore.

01:55:59.040 And so because the little rat,

01:56:01.100 that's the biological...

01:56:02.880 The biological framing,

01:56:04.740 the limitation is

01:56:05.440 the little rat doesn't want to lose all the time.

01:56:07.680 That just produces negative emotion.

01:56:09.440 It's not fun.

01:56:10.480 It's not motivating.

01:56:11.380 So why would the little rat go play again?

01:56:13.780 So the constraints on our interactions

01:56:17.080 are our biological constraints,

01:56:19.420 and they manifest themselves

01:56:20.840 in a patterned way across time.

01:56:22.200 And there isn't any difference

01:56:23.780 between you and me

01:56:24.780 interacting across time

01:56:26.320 than there is between you and me

01:56:28.360 acting, say, in the next hour or so

01:56:30.640 with everyone in this room.

01:56:32.200 It's the same thing.

01:56:33.360 It's just continual human interactions.

01:56:35.420 An ethic emerges from that.

01:56:37.060 Now, different groups

01:56:38.480 are going to code that ethic differently.

01:56:40.500 So they're going to come up

01:56:41.200 with different imagistic representations

01:56:43.160 and different stories.

01:56:45.640 Now, one of the things

01:56:46.900 they're trying to figure out is...

01:56:49.560 Well, let's do it in the tribal way.

01:56:52.200 You have to do this inside a tribe, too.

01:56:56.100 You have 100 people,

01:56:57.800 and 10 of them are leaders

01:56:59.840 in one way or another.

01:57:01.500 And then out of that 10,

01:57:02.760 you think, well, who's the best person?

01:57:05.220 So you have to have a hierarchy of value

01:57:07.180 to determine what the most important aspect

01:57:09.360 of the ethic is.

01:57:10.760 And it's going to be something like trust,

01:57:12.320 because that's the predicate

01:57:13.780 for continued interaction.

01:57:16.520 Trustworthiness.

01:57:17.460 It's not really any different than honesty.

01:57:20.680 It's not really any different

01:57:21.780 from telling the truth.

01:57:23.180 So there's a really powerful necessity

01:57:26.280 for honesty to emerge

01:57:28.420 as a canonical value.

01:57:30.600 Caring might emerge.

01:57:34.300 Power might emerge.

01:57:35.760 Right?

01:57:35.940 The ability to exert physical power,

01:57:38.360 especially in places

01:57:39.300 where war is a continual...

01:57:41.340 is continually likely.

01:57:43.000 And in lots of tribal landscapes,

01:57:44.200 it's just non-stop tribal trade and warfare.

01:57:47.940 So...

01:57:48.460 But you can see how different ethics

01:57:50.120 would emerge as canonical,

01:57:52.060 depending to some degree on the situation.

01:57:54.100 But trust is a really crucial one,

01:57:56.360 because without that,

01:57:57.120 there's no relationships.

01:57:58.740 Okay, so you've got tribe A,

01:58:00.000 and it's got its tribal gods,

01:58:01.580 and its traditions,

01:58:02.920 and all of that.

01:58:03.840 It's representation of being

01:58:06.100 in its images and stories,

01:58:08.380 and then you've got tribe B,

01:58:09.540 and you've got tribe C,

01:58:10.440 and you've got tribe D,

01:58:11.660 and now they're all coming together.

01:58:14.240 So what happens exactly?

01:58:17.280 Well,

01:58:18.340 the tribes can go to war,

01:58:21.500 or they can talk.

01:58:23.500 And we're thinking about a communication

01:58:25.320 that might be extending across

01:58:26.820 a thousand years.

01:58:28.460 You have your beliefs,

01:58:29.620 I have my beliefs.

01:58:30.960 I can overwhelm you,

01:58:32.460 I can subsume you,

01:58:33.760 but even then,

01:58:34.760 I'm likely just to get indigestion

01:58:36.640 from doing it.

01:58:37.520 It's very, very difficult

01:58:38.600 to wipe out a set of beliefs

01:58:40.540 without wiping out all of the people,

01:58:42.480 and that kind of nullifies

01:58:44.180 the utility of unification.

01:58:46.500 The more there are of you,

01:58:48.380 the better you can defend yourself

01:58:49.880 against other organizations

01:58:52.680 that are trying to be larger.

01:58:54.400 So there's a powerful

01:58:56.100 self-preservation impetus

01:58:57.940 to cooperation.

01:58:59.400 and so one of the things

01:59:01.240 you see happening

01:59:01.940 in the development of the stories

01:59:03.240 in the Old Testament,

01:59:04.160 for example,

01:59:04.640 we know this about Genesis

01:59:05.740 in particular,

01:59:06.560 that there were at least,

01:59:08.540 this is relatively recently,

01:59:10.720 so say for 3,000 years ago,

01:59:13.160 not 50,000 years ago.

01:59:15.100 There were two different stories.

01:59:16.880 There's two different stories

01:59:17.940 in the Genesis account

01:59:19.580 told by two different storytellers,

01:59:22.740 and people who are very good

01:59:24.300 at textual analysis

01:59:25.260 have been able to separate them,

01:59:26.700 and they were put together.

01:59:29.540 I don't remember when.

01:59:31.120 Again, it's probably about

01:59:32.280 something between 2,000

01:59:34.320 and 3,000 years ago.

01:59:35.600 They were put together

01:59:36.340 by what appeared to be

01:59:37.300 a single editor.

01:59:38.500 And so he took these

01:59:39.240 disparate accounts

01:59:40.540 and tried to organize them

01:59:42.200 into something that looked

01:59:43.080 like a logical narrative.

01:59:44.500 And that was part of the process

01:59:46.360 by which different

01:59:47.460 tribal representations

01:59:49.660 of the world

01:59:50.480 were brought into something

01:59:51.660 under which the tribes

01:59:53.820 as a unit could

01:59:55.300 simultaneously exist.

01:59:57.240 So you can think about it

01:59:58.360 as a competition

01:59:59.340 between imagistic representations

02:00:01.140 across time,

02:00:02.380 and then the emergence

02:00:03.280 of some unifying narrative

02:00:04.660 that captures the key elements

02:00:07.600 of all of them

02:00:08.340 well enough to bring them

02:00:09.480 into some sort of union.

02:00:10.940 And it has to be a story

02:00:12.460 with motivational power

02:00:13.860 because otherwise

02:00:15.060 no one will cotton on to it.

02:00:16.980 And it has to be a story

02:00:18.140 that keeps uncertainty at bay

02:00:19.880 because otherwise

02:00:20.740 it doesn't have any utility.

02:00:22.180 So it has to be

02:00:22.760 a functional story.

02:00:24.000 So I'm going to tell you

02:00:25.000 a story like that

02:00:25.800 and it's the story of Marduk

02:00:27.000 and it's the Mesopotamian story.

02:00:29.140 And Mesopotamia

02:00:29.880 is one of the earliest

02:00:30.740 civilizations

02:00:31.940 and it emerged

02:00:33.100 as a consequence

02:00:33.900 of the amalgam

02:00:34.840 of Middle Eastern tribes.

02:00:37.200 So over a very long

02:00:38.740 period of time.

02:00:39.400 you could think

02:00:40.420 the gods of all

02:00:42.180 of these tribes

02:00:42.820 were warring

02:00:43.640 in an abstract space

02:00:45.080 in a conceptual space

02:00:46.360 and that would be

02:00:46.840 the space of argumentation

02:00:48.480 and conflict.

02:00:49.660 And out of that

02:00:50.200 a meta story emerged.

02:00:51.860 And this is the meta story

02:00:53.240 and it's one of

02:00:54.080 a host of similar meta stories

02:00:56.440 that came out

02:00:57.060 of the Middle East

02:00:57.680 one of which is

02:00:58.360 the account in Genesis.

02:00:59.820 Okay, so here's the story.

02:01:02.380 So there are two

02:01:04.620 primary deities

02:01:06.540 to begin with.

02:01:07.380 Apsu

02:01:08.200 and Tiamat.

02:01:10.460 Now in order

02:01:10.960 to understand that

02:01:12.100 well

02:01:13.000 here's how the Mesopotamians

02:01:15.160 conceptualized the world.

02:01:18.780 There was a

02:01:19.780 let's call it a disk.

02:01:22.080 That's salt water.

02:01:24.160 Well why?

02:01:25.460 Well what happens

02:01:26.140 when you go to the end

02:01:26.820 of the continent?

02:01:28.140 Salt water.

02:01:29.220 Everywhere.

02:01:29.860 Right?

02:01:30.040 So wherever you go

02:01:30.740 you run into salt water.

02:01:32.080 So that's the disk

02:01:33.120 that surrounds everything.

02:01:35.040 Now why is it a disk?

02:01:36.500 The world is a dome

02:01:37.680 on a disk.

02:01:39.080 Why?

02:01:40.560 Well, say you're standing

02:01:41.660 in the middle of a field.

02:01:43.180 What does the world look like?

02:01:45.600 A dome

02:01:46.160 on a disk.

02:01:48.760 So it's a

02:01:50.040 phenomenological representation.

02:01:52.580 So the bottom

02:01:53.600 of the dome

02:01:54.160 is the ground

02:01:54.760 on which you stand.

02:01:55.840 What happens

02:01:56.300 if you dig?

02:01:57.760 You hit water.

02:01:59.460 Fresh water.

02:02:01.200 So

02:02:01.440 the dome of the land

02:02:03.320 is on a disk

02:02:04.160 of fresh water.

02:02:05.580 What happens

02:02:06.340 if you go

02:02:06.660 to the edge

02:02:07.040 of the land?

02:02:07.680 You run into salt water.

02:02:09.080 The dome of the land

02:02:10.020 is on a disk

02:02:10.680 of fresh water

02:02:11.380 on a disk

02:02:11.960 of salt water.

02:02:13.740 Okay?

02:02:14.300 Those are the two gods.

02:02:15.820 Tiamat is god

02:02:16.620 of salt water

02:02:17.380 and Absu

02:02:18.400 is god

02:02:18.760 of fresh water.

02:02:20.000 And it's

02:02:20.580 happenstance

02:02:21.680 in some sense

02:02:22.340 because that's

02:02:23.000 the masculine

02:02:23.740 and the feminine

02:02:24.380 and they could be

02:02:25.400 attributed all sorts

02:02:26.380 of different

02:02:27.220 geographical areas.

02:02:29.220 So for example

02:02:29.920 see if I can think

02:02:34.480 of a good example.

02:02:39.500 It doesn't matter.

02:02:40.580 I'll just leave

02:02:41.040 that for now.

02:02:42.760 Okay,

02:02:44.240 so the two primary gods

02:02:45.620 are Absu and Tiamat.

02:02:46.820 Tiamat is female

02:02:48.300 and Absu is male.

02:02:50.500 And they're locked

02:02:51.660 together

02:02:52.280 in an inseparable embrace.

02:02:55.380 Okay,

02:02:55.700 so how do you

02:02:56.040 understand that?

02:02:56.960 Easy.

02:02:57.800 Yin and yang.

02:02:59.140 It's the same idea.

02:03:00.620 Here's another representation.

02:03:02.200 This is a cool one.

02:03:03.620 I've got a couple

02:03:04.320 of them here

02:03:04.740 that are really cool.

02:03:06.300 This is from China.

02:03:09.380 So this is

02:03:10.500 so this is

02:03:12.140 Foxy and

02:03:13.480 Nua.

02:03:14.840 I think I've got

02:03:15.440 that right.

02:03:16.100 But I just love

02:03:17.020 that representation.

02:03:17.660 It's so insanely cool

02:03:19.020 this representation.

02:03:20.480 So you see

02:03:21.180 the sort of

02:03:22.440 the primary

02:03:23.560 mother and father

02:03:25.280 of humanity

02:03:25.940 emerging from

02:03:26.700 this underlying

02:03:27.240 snake-like

02:03:28.140 entity

02:03:29.360 with its tails

02:03:30.220 tangled together.

02:03:31.840 I think that's

02:03:32.820 I really do

02:03:33.680 believe this

02:03:34.200 although it's

02:03:34.560 very complicated

02:03:35.160 to explain why.

02:03:36.200 I really believe

02:03:36.860 that's a representation

02:03:37.580 of DNA.

02:03:39.960 So

02:03:40.160 and that

02:03:41.320 representation

02:03:42.040 that entwined

02:03:43.240 double helix

02:03:44.520 that is everywhere.

02:03:46.000 You can see it

02:03:46.520 in Australian

02:03:47.560 Aboriginal art

02:03:48.360 and I'm using

02:03:49.180 the Australians

02:03:49.760 as an example

02:03:50.440 because they were

02:03:51.400 isolated in Australia

02:03:52.920 for like 50,000 years.

02:03:54.320 They're the most

02:03:54.700 archaic people

02:03:55.400 that were ever

02:03:55.880 discovered

02:03:56.280 and they have

02:03:57.120 clear representations

02:03:58.100 of these double helix

02:03:59.200 structures in their art.

02:04:00.820 So

02:04:00.960 and those are the

02:04:01.640 two giant serpents

02:04:02.840 out of which

02:04:03.300 the world is made

02:04:04.200 roughly speaking.

02:04:05.600 It's the same thing

02:04:06.340 you see that

02:04:06.820 in the staff of Asclepius

02:04:08.060 which is the healing

02:04:08.820 symbol that

02:04:09.380 physicians use

02:04:10.400 although usually

02:04:10.900 that's only one snake

02:04:11.860 but sometimes

02:04:12.860 it's two.

02:04:14.000 So

02:04:14.140 so

02:04:14.640 so that's a

02:04:16.240 that's a Chinese

02:04:17.020 representation

02:04:17.640 and then

02:04:18.240 there's a

02:04:19.320 there's this

02:04:20.620 that's the

02:04:22.280 Egyptian representation.

02:04:24.540 We talked about

02:04:25.480 the Egyptian story

02:04:26.180 the other day

02:04:26.780 right?

02:04:27.240 We talked about

02:04:27.920 Isis and Osiris

02:04:29.740 so there they are

02:04:32.380 cobras

02:04:33.020 their tails are

02:04:33.800 twined together

02:04:34.320 see they emerge

02:04:35.140 out of that

02:04:35.680 that's the dragon

02:04:36.780 of chaos

02:04:37.500 that manifests itself

02:04:39.800 as culture and nature

02:04:40.840 that's the representation

02:04:42.180 that's unbelievably cool

02:04:44.240 so

02:04:45.200 okay

02:04:46.380 so anyways

02:04:46.840 back to

02:04:47.380 back to

02:04:48.400 to the Mesopotamian story

02:04:50.560 so

02:04:51.520 Apsu and Tiamat

02:04:53.020 are their primordial

02:04:54.080 deities

02:04:54.760 nature and culture

02:04:56.100 they're entwined

02:04:57.000 they're entwined together

02:04:57.380 and they give rise

02:04:58.660 to the

02:04:59.020 to the

02:04:59.600 to their first

02:05:00.620 category of children

02:05:02.160 and those are the

02:05:03.220 I think you could think

02:05:04.640 about them as the

02:05:05.260 elder gods

02:05:06.000 now

02:05:06.880 I

02:05:08.260 what do they represent?

02:05:10.060 well the question is

02:05:10.820 what do the gods represent?

02:05:11.880 and they represent

02:05:12.860 they represent sort of like

02:05:14.520 primary modes of being

02:05:16.240 it's something like that

02:05:17.240 so

02:05:17.420 think about

02:05:18.220 Aries

02:05:18.880 or Mars

02:05:19.900 the god of war

02:05:20.740 well that's

02:05:21.280 that's a representation

02:05:22.420 of single-minded aggression

02:05:23.940 and then you can think about

02:05:25.640 Eros or Venus

02:05:26.640 which is a

02:05:27.340 primary representation

02:05:28.560 of sexuality

02:05:29.420 and you might say

02:05:30.780 well why are those deities?

02:05:32.500 well that's simple

02:05:33.320 they live forever

02:05:34.740 and they control you

02:05:36.920 and their personalities

02:05:38.460 so

02:05:39.500 that's that

02:05:40.300 for that

02:05:40.840 it's like

02:05:41.360 yes

02:05:41.820 obviously

02:05:42.520 you know

02:05:43.200 and you know that

02:05:43.800 you're under the sway of anger

02:05:44.960 you're not in control of yourself

02:05:46.440 if you're under the sway of

02:05:47.700 of erotic possession

02:05:49.280 you make a fool out of yourself

02:05:50.680 you're a tool of the

02:05:51.840 power that drives the

02:05:53.340 the continuation of the species forward

02:05:55.900 hunger

02:05:56.540 is the same thing

02:05:57.660 any primordial

02:05:58.680 motivational drive

02:06:00.480 we've conceptualized

02:06:01.920 in this class

02:06:02.700 as a personality

02:06:03.500 but those are transcendent personalities

02:06:05.740 and they're eternal

02:06:06.620 they're forever

02:06:07.740 and so that's why the Greeks

02:06:09.380 for example

02:06:09.900 thought that

02:06:10.460 human beings were just

02:06:11.440 the playthings of the gods

02:06:12.580 and this idea is

02:06:13.700 echoed in the Mesopotamian story

02:06:15.300 so

02:06:15.540 then you can think about it

02:06:16.780 sort of neurodevelopmentally

02:06:18.120 as well

02:06:18.520 is that

02:06:18.880 out of

02:06:19.760 out of nothing

02:06:21.540 out of culture and nature

02:06:23.220 emerges say

02:06:24.400 the two-year-old

02:06:25.180 the two-year-old is a battleground

02:06:26.760 of primary motivational forces

02:06:28.520 and something like that

02:06:29.960 is being hinted at

02:06:31.380 in the Mesopotamian

02:06:32.480 creation story

02:06:34.140 the first

02:06:35.020 the first

02:06:36.880 progeny of

02:06:38.140 the fundamental

02:06:39.080 union of chaos and order

02:06:41.100 Apsu and Tiamat

02:06:42.140 is the proliferation of these

02:06:43.940 primary motivational forces

02:06:46.100 they're sort of like

02:06:46.880 the titans

02:06:47.580 or the

02:06:48.500 or the

02:06:49.480 what it was

02:06:50.720 the Greek gods

02:06:51.660 kept in the

02:06:52.560 underneath the mountain

02:06:54.660 that's Zeus

02:06:55.240 what's the name of that

02:06:57.380 they're like

02:06:58.820 they're earthquakes

02:06:59.660 and fires

02:07:00.980 and that sort of thing

02:07:01.920 they're primordial forces

02:07:03.420 okay anyways

02:07:04.220 so

02:07:04.680 these children are produced

02:07:06.820 and what happens

02:07:07.680 they're very noisy

02:07:09.360 they run around doing all sorts of things

02:07:10.800 you can think about them as

02:07:11.720 grown-up two-year-olds

02:07:13.080 causing all sorts of trouble

02:07:14.200 the first thing they do

02:07:15.320 is kill Apsu

02:07:16.600 and

02:07:18.100 and make their home

02:07:19.440 on his corpse

02:07:20.200 it's brilliant

02:07:21.520 now the story doesn't say much about Apsu

02:07:23.640 other than that

02:07:24.240 the

02:07:24.920 the culture

02:07:25.820 deity

02:07:26.460 the

02:07:27.040 primary culture deity

02:07:29.200 is not elaborated up that much

02:07:30.840 in the Mesopotamian story

02:07:31.860 and I think that's probably because

02:07:33.700 at the time of the Mesopotamian

02:07:35.920 civilization was new enough

02:07:37.720 so that we really hadn't mapped

02:07:39.680 the mythology of culture

02:07:42.220 the Egyptians did that much more

02:07:43.820 and I know I told you that story first

02:07:45.360 but

02:07:45.600 that's just how it goes

02:07:46.800 so

02:07:47.520 the

02:07:48.460 the elder gods make their

02:07:50.140 their home

02:07:51.360 on the corpse of Apsu

02:07:52.760 well what does that mean?

02:07:54.180 well

02:07:54.520 that's

02:07:55.020 that's sort of how it is

02:07:56.280 you

02:07:56.860 inhabit the corpse of culture

02:07:59.140 right

02:07:59.580 it's the dead past

02:08:00.940 and

02:08:01.740 but

02:08:02.520 but it's not just the dead past

02:08:04.920 one of the things that's very cool

02:08:06.440 about the Mesopotamian story

02:08:07.640 is that

02:08:08.060 the elder gods are foolish enough

02:08:10.220 to kill it

02:08:11.060 it's the death of God by the way

02:08:13.180 it's no different

02:08:14.060 from what Nietzsche

02:08:14.940 pronounced

02:08:15.840 this has been going on

02:08:17.100 for a very very long time

02:08:18.600 this collapse of belief systems

02:08:20.680 they kill it carelessly

02:08:23.220 because they don't understand

02:08:25.000 what it is that they need to survive

02:08:26.500 they kill it carelessly

02:08:27.560 and then they try to live on the corpse

02:08:29.820 I think that's what the postmodernists do

02:08:33.560 by the way

02:08:34.020 because they assume

02:08:35.760 we have this

02:08:36.400 this tremendous system of value

02:08:38.400 that's been built up across time

02:08:39.960 and

02:08:41.000 it sustains us

02:08:42.840 and

02:08:43.460 everyone is criticizing it

02:08:45.460 and criticizing it

02:08:46.340 and trying to destroy it

02:08:47.940 and it's well

02:08:48.600 we live

02:08:49.560 in its corpse

02:08:51.140 and that won't nourish us forever

02:08:53.180 it has to be replenished

02:08:54.840 and there's nothing in the postmodernist philosophy

02:08:57.220 that can act

02:08:57.960 to replenish

02:08:59.020 anyways

02:08:59.720 they kill Apsu

02:09:03.060 what happens when you kill order?

02:09:06.920 chaos comes back

02:09:08.160 tie a mat

02:09:09.000 now this is tie a mat

02:09:10.780 here

02:09:14.380 feminine

02:09:15.720 but also the dragon

02:09:17.260 so it's

02:09:18.420 you think

02:09:20.560 out of

02:09:21.600 this fundamental

02:09:22.980 reptilian

02:09:24.160 treasure bearer

02:09:25.500 culture and nature emerge

02:09:27.260 and they can pull back into that

02:09:29.000 very rapidly

02:09:29.640 so here's an example

02:09:30.600 you've all seen sleeping beauty

02:09:31.940 I presume

02:09:32.640 how many of you have seen sleeping beauty

02:09:34.360 the Disney film

02:09:35.340 how many of you haven't?

02:09:37.040 okay so there's a couple that haven't

02:09:38.640 there's a scene in sleeping beauty

02:09:40.640 where the evil queen

02:09:42.100 has

02:09:42.780 has imprisoned the prince

02:09:44.520 who's going to wake sleeping beauty up

02:09:46.140 so he's the logos

02:09:47.100 or he's the heroic individual

02:09:49.000 or he's that element of her consciousness

02:09:50.900 that wakes her up

02:09:51.760 you can read it either way

02:09:52.720 she's got him trapped in a dungeon

02:09:55.500 so she's the kind of ultimate

02:09:56.820 ultimate eatable mother

02:09:58.540 you know

02:09:59.180 she's the mother that has her 40 year old son

02:10:01.720 in the basement

02:10:02.240 who's like

02:10:02.820 overweight and unhealthy

02:10:04.060 and watching video games

02:10:05.580 and being covered with Cheeto dust

02:10:07.020 and she always like

02:10:07.760 feeds him sandwiches

02:10:08.500 so he won't leave

02:10:09.460 you know

02:10:10.200 and she says

02:10:10.840 oh it's a good thing

02:10:11.820 you didn't go out in the world

02:10:12.660 and make some poor woman miserable

02:10:14.020 so anyway

02:10:15.520 so that's the evil queen

02:10:16.800 he's got the hero trapped in the dungeon

02:10:18.640 so he goes out

02:10:19.840 he escapes

02:10:20.760 and then

02:10:22.100 she goes after him

02:10:23.900 to try to bring him back

02:10:24.780 and turns into the dragon

02:10:25.820 that's what happens in sleeping beauty

02:10:27.140 so that's that reversion of the

02:10:28.940 of the archetype

02:10:29.920 into its even more primordial force

02:10:31.740 so

02:10:32.580 anyway

02:10:33.460 so Tiamat is kind of an amalgam

02:10:35.120 of feminine

02:10:35.720 nature

02:10:36.580 and also this more underlying

02:10:38.080 primordial symbol

02:10:38.980 so anyway

02:10:39.640 she is not happy

02:10:40.680 she is not happy

02:10:42.060 that these

02:10:42.580 her children killed

02:10:43.820 her husband

02:10:44.460 and so she thinks

02:10:45.760 oh well

02:10:46.080 enough of these creatures

02:10:47.440 we're gonna

02:10:47.900 we're gonna do them in

02:10:48.980 it's a flood myth

02:10:50.080 it's the same idea

02:10:51.300 so what happens

02:10:52.400 in the story of Noah

02:10:53.420 this happens worldwide

02:10:54.400 is that

02:10:54.880 human beings get all corrupt

02:10:56.540 and make a lot of racket

02:10:57.700 and break all sorts of rules

02:10:59.140 and God thinks

02:10:59.800 oh well

02:11:00.180 you know

02:11:00.560 enough of you

02:11:01.900 we'll just bring in a flood

02:11:03.020 and wipe you all out

02:11:03.800 that's chaos returning

02:11:05.140 you destabilize order

02:11:07.320 too badly

02:11:08.060 there's a flood

02:11:09.500 and that brings with it

02:11:10.780 all sorts of new things

02:11:11.740 because it's water

02:11:12.440 but it just drowns you

02:11:13.660 it drowns you

02:11:14.780 now Noah

02:11:15.300 is a good man

02:11:16.220 so he can ride out the flood

02:11:17.600 he's the hero

02:11:18.540 that can go down

02:11:19.500 into the chaos

02:11:20.480 and then back up

02:11:21.960 because he hasn't let go

02:11:23.960 of his morality

02:11:25.400 despite the fact

02:11:26.280 that the entire society

02:11:27.300 has disintegrated

02:11:28.240 so

02:11:28.900 he saves everything

02:11:30.240 so it's

02:11:30.920 it's like Moses

02:11:31.900 crossing the Red Sea

02:11:32.860 and then coming out

02:11:33.500 the other side

02:11:34.120 same

02:11:34.500 same sort of idea

02:11:35.760 anyway

02:11:36.960 so

02:11:37.360 Tiamat

02:11:38.240 she's

02:11:39.160 she's not happy

02:11:40.440 and these gods

02:11:41.320 are careless too

02:11:42.100 and impulsive

02:11:42.640 they're making a lot of noise

02:11:43.740 and their activity

02:11:44.960 disturbs her

02:11:46.180 you know

02:11:46.860 and you can see echoes

02:11:47.720 of that fear

02:11:48.880 that mythological fear

02:11:51.360 in modern consciousness

02:11:52.940 because

02:11:53.340 we tell ourselves

02:11:54.500 the same story

02:11:55.400 right

02:11:56.500 the story is

02:11:57.800 if we keep

02:11:58.700 running around

02:11:59.460 making enough racket

02:12:00.600 Mother Nature

02:12:01.600 is going to take offense

02:12:02.820 and wipe us out

02:12:03.720 and that's the story

02:12:04.500 that's at the bottom

02:12:05.180 of the sort of

02:12:06.100 apocalyptic element

02:12:07.180 of the global warming

02:12:08.740 apocalypse

02:12:12.120 it's like

02:12:12.940 if we

02:12:13.660 if we muck about

02:12:14.340 badly enough

02:12:14.960 nature will take

02:12:15.660 its revenge

02:12:16.280 okay fine

02:12:17.100 it's true

02:12:17.600 it's true

02:12:18.080 it's a story

02:12:19.120 that's always been true

02:12:20.040 so

02:12:20.740 anyways

02:12:21.660 the gods are making

02:12:23.600 a lot of noise

02:12:24.240 they're being impulsive

02:12:25.040 and then they make

02:12:25.960 the fatal error

02:12:26.520 of killing Apsu

02:12:27.380 and that's a big mistake

02:12:28.760 and so Tiamat

02:12:29.740 thinks

02:12:30.300 alright

02:12:30.560 enough of this

02:12:31.120 she wakes up

02:12:31.960 and she thinks

02:12:33.020 I'm going to wipe them all out

02:12:34.160 now these gods

02:12:35.320 they're gods

02:12:36.040 eh

02:12:36.280 I mean

02:12:36.540 they're not trivial

02:12:37.340 characters

02:12:39.000 but they're pretty worried

02:12:40.040 because

02:12:40.420 they're gods

02:12:41.320 but Tiamat

02:12:42.020 is their mother

02:12:42.760 she gave birth to them

02:12:43.860 she's Mother Nature

02:12:44.720 and if she's

02:12:45.860 angry

02:12:46.500 about it

02:12:47.840 then

02:12:48.600 the jig's up

02:12:49.680 and so what

02:12:50.260 Tiamat does

02:12:51.100 is she prepares

02:12:51.820 this army

02:12:52.520 of monsters

02:12:53.240 and they're described

02:12:54.860 there's I think

02:12:55.640 13 different kinds

02:12:56.660 of monsters

02:12:57.120 and they're

02:12:57.700 chimeric

02:12:58.620 images

02:12:59.420 they're images

02:13:00.580 of you know

02:13:01.220 they're like dragons

02:13:02.840 they're half snake

02:13:03.800 and half bird

02:13:05.120 and half animal

02:13:06.000 and they're monstrous images

02:13:07.420 and they're sort of

02:13:08.460 the

02:13:08.840 Mesopotamians

02:13:10.620 attempt to

02:13:11.400 imagistically represent

02:13:12.700 those things

02:13:13.480 that might come forward

02:13:14.400 as an onslaught

02:13:15.360 and so he generates

02:13:16.620 a whole

02:13:17.080 13 major

02:13:18.740 monsters

02:13:20.000 and then puts

02:13:20.580 a whole army

02:13:21.100 behind them

02:13:21.620 and she elects

02:13:22.620 one of them

02:13:23.140 Kingu is his name

02:13:24.380 as head monster

02:13:26.260 so he's

02:13:27.180 for all intents

02:13:28.200 and purposes

02:13:28.660 he's an early

02:13:29.460 representation of Satan

02:13:30.920 he's like

02:13:31.380 king of the bad guys

02:13:32.520 and it's important

02:13:33.700 to know about him

02:13:34.440 because something

02:13:35.120 happens later

02:13:35.720 in the story

02:13:36.280 so

02:13:37.000 so

02:13:38.140 Tiamat's preparing

02:13:39.480 her army of monsters

02:13:41.000 to

02:13:42.060 chimeras

02:13:43.000 to

02:13:44.080 wipe out

02:13:46.100 the

02:13:46.380 the gods

02:13:47.460 and so

02:13:48.080 they're like

02:13:49.000 shorting out about this

02:13:50.040 but while they're doing it

02:13:51.200 they're still making a lot of racket

02:13:52.600 and living the high life

02:13:53.960 in Apsu's corpse

02:13:55.040 and

02:13:55.300 and propagating

02:13:56.460 and while they're doing that

02:13:58.020 they send out

02:13:58.760 one

02:13:59.220 god

02:14:00.080 after another

02:14:00.920 to combat

02:14:02.020 Tiamat

02:14:02.660 and they all come back

02:14:04.000 failed

02:14:04.380 so

02:14:05.060 whatever these elder gods are

02:14:06.820 whatever they represent

02:14:07.720 they're not

02:14:08.960 whatever it is

02:14:10.380 that can

02:14:10.840 confront chaos

02:14:12.080 successfully

02:14:12.780 and prevail

02:14:13.440 they're powers

02:14:14.660 but they're not

02:14:15.420 whatever that is

02:14:16.500 that ultimate power

02:14:17.500 and that's what the Mesopotamians

02:14:18.960 are trying to figure out

02:14:19.780 who

02:14:20.420 or what

02:14:21.200 is king of the gods

02:14:22.300 and king of the gods

02:14:23.880 is the thing

02:14:24.340 that confront chaos

02:14:25.460 and regenerate order

02:14:27.000 so

02:14:27.960 so they keep

02:14:30.260 producing new gods

02:14:31.480 and one day

02:14:32.020 they produce

02:14:32.940 Marduk

02:14:33.600 he's born

02:14:34.680 and Marduk

02:14:35.120 is a whole new

02:14:35.700 category of god

02:14:36.740 and every one of the gods

02:14:38.200 knows it

02:14:38.680 and he's got some

02:14:39.320 very strange attributes

02:14:40.380 one of them is

02:14:41.180 he can speak magic words

02:14:43.020 and so when Marduk speaks

02:14:44.840 the night sky

02:14:45.520 transforms into the day sky

02:14:47.060 and vice versa

02:14:47.740 so he's

02:14:48.200 he's the verbal capacity

02:14:49.740 it's a massive discovery

02:14:51.400 it's a massive discovery

02:14:52.600 by the

02:14:53.160 Mesopotamians

02:14:54.380 because

02:14:54.660 it's the first time

02:14:55.860 we know of

02:14:56.500 that the idea

02:14:57.260 that it's the capacity

02:14:58.360 for communicative speech

02:14:59.640 as the primary deity

02:15:01.140 should be at the top

02:15:02.660 of the dominance hierarchy

02:15:03.720 it's one of the most

02:15:04.700 remarkable discoveries

02:15:05.740 of the ages

02:15:06.680 and he also has eyes

02:15:08.220 all the way around his head

02:15:09.140 so Marduk is the thing

02:15:11.320 that can speak

02:15:12.380 and see

02:15:13.240 and it's the thing

02:15:14.340 that's

02:15:14.660 so all the gods think

02:15:15.860 wow

02:15:16.060 well this is a whole new thing

02:15:17.380 man

02:15:17.660 how about you go out

02:15:18.980 and combat

02:15:20.320 Tiamat

02:15:21.400 well it doesn't sound

02:15:22.620 like much of a picnic

02:15:23.460 you know

02:15:23.820 the logical thing

02:15:24.600 for any sensible god

02:15:25.660 to say is

02:15:26.140 how about no

02:15:26.860 but Marduk doesn't say that

02:15:28.560 he says

02:15:29.000 look I'll make you guys a deal

02:15:30.380 you get yourself together

02:15:32.760 in a hall

02:15:33.500 you know

02:15:34.240 and you have a vote

02:15:35.620 for all intents and purposes

02:15:37.140 and you vote me

02:15:38.420 king of the gods

02:15:39.540 and allow me

02:15:41.340 from here on in

02:15:42.200 to determine destinies

02:15:43.500 that's exactly

02:15:44.100 what the Mesopotamians say

02:15:45.080 he gets the tablet

02:15:46.280 of destiny

02:15:47.020 and he's now

02:15:47.940 in control of it

02:15:48.640 so the Mesopotamians

02:15:49.560 are working out

02:15:50.100 this idea

02:15:50.660 that it's the thing

02:15:51.800 that can see

02:15:52.420 and that can talk

02:15:53.320 that should be the thing

02:15:54.500 that guides destiny

02:15:55.560 especially if destiny

02:15:57.020 involves having to

02:15:58.100 go into combat

02:15:59.420 with chaos itself

02:16:00.820 and restructure the world

02:16:02.540 and so Marduk says

02:16:03.880 those are the terms

02:16:05.380 I'll do it

02:16:06.240 but I'm king of the gods

02:16:07.480 and they all think

02:16:08.500 well the fool's

02:16:09.660 going to go out there

02:16:10.200 and get killed anyway

02:16:10.920 so you know

02:16:11.480 what do we have to lose

02:16:12.380 and so they agree

02:16:13.520 and so Marduk goes out

02:16:15.040 to combat Tiamat

02:16:16.100 and he takes a net

02:16:17.160 and a sword

02:16:18.780 and he

02:16:20.680 if I remember correctly

02:16:22.160 he fills her with a wind

02:16:23.440 which is I believe

02:16:24.360 part of the manifestation

02:16:25.500 of this voice

02:16:26.500 this voice idea

02:16:28.220 he fills her with a wind

02:16:29.480 he encapsulates her in a net

02:16:31.420 now think about what that means

02:16:33.140 you know psychologists

02:16:34.400 even use this word

02:16:35.720 phrase

02:16:36.460 nomological net

02:16:38.080 and a nomological net

02:16:40.000 is the

02:16:40.400 network of concepts

02:16:42.920 that you use

02:16:43.760 to encapsulate something new

02:16:45.500 in an ideational structure

02:16:47.060 and so the idea

02:16:48.140 of putting something

02:16:48.780 in a net

02:16:49.360 is to

02:16:49.840 put boundaries around it

02:16:51.660 right

02:16:51.880 and to constrain it

02:16:53.420 and so

02:16:53.760 some of that's actually

02:16:55.000 well you can capture

02:16:56.380 a predator in a net

02:16:57.440 and then cut it up

02:16:58.560 but there's no difference

02:16:59.900 between that

02:17:00.620 there's a

02:17:02.500 there's a tight

02:17:03.060 analogy between that

02:17:04.460 and encapsulating

02:17:05.480 something novel

02:17:06.540 in a conceptual network

02:17:08.340 which then enables you

02:17:09.480 to cut it up

02:17:10.000 into something useful

02:17:10.920 okay so that's what happens

02:17:12.400 Marduk goes out

02:17:13.720 he

02:17:13.980 he

02:17:14.340 confronts Tiamat

02:17:15.520 he overcomes the monsters

02:17:17.220 and he kills

02:17:18.400 Kingu

02:17:18.900 and so

02:17:20.300 and then he makes

02:17:21.680 he cuts Tiamat

02:17:22.520 into pieces

02:17:23.080 and he makes the world

02:17:24.440 and that's the world

02:17:25.820 that human beings

02:17:26.520 live

02:17:27.780 on

02:17:28.700 and he makes

02:17:29.260 the human beings

02:17:29.980 to serve the gods

02:17:31.000 okay so that's the first

02:17:32.760 part of the story

02:17:33.260 now he also kills

02:17:34.180 Kingu

02:17:34.640 and he makes human beings

02:17:35.920 out of the blood

02:17:36.580 of Kingu

02:17:37.240 now that's a hell

02:17:38.520 of a story right

02:17:39.260 because Kingu

02:17:39.820 is king of the demons

02:17:40.800 and human beings

02:17:41.940 are the creature

02:17:43.240 that's made

02:17:44.180 out of the blood

02:17:44.880 of the king

02:17:45.380 of the demons

02:17:45.980 and it's a very

02:17:46.820 similar idea

02:17:47.600 to the idea

02:17:48.300 the later sort of

02:17:49.500 Egyptian

02:17:50.340 and Judeo-Christian ideas

02:17:52.120 that there's a satanic

02:17:53.440 element to being

02:17:54.360 that's also characteristic

02:17:55.560 of human beings

02:17:56.380 and part of that is

02:17:57.500 well what's the difference

02:17:58.880 between human beings

02:17:59.840 and every other element

02:18:00.800 of being

02:18:01.480 and the answer to that is

02:18:03.000 human beings

02:18:03.880 can deceive you

02:18:04.760 right

02:18:06.340 we're the only creatures

02:18:07.420 that can do that

02:18:08.200 we're capable of

02:18:09.480 deception

02:18:10.320 voluntary deception

02:18:11.400 we're capable of malevolence

02:18:12.980 and so

02:18:14.040 that's echoed as well

02:18:15.480 in the story

02:18:16.480 in Genesis

02:18:17.040 because when Adam and Eve

02:18:18.300 eat the apple

02:18:19.120 they wake up

02:18:20.640 the scales fall

02:18:21.440 from their eyes

02:18:21.980 they recognize

02:18:22.580 that they're naked

02:18:23.260 and they know

02:18:23.820 the difference

02:18:24.360 between good and evil

02:18:25.260 which means

02:18:26.160 they can do evil

02:18:27.060 and it took me

02:18:28.000 a long time

02:18:28.480 to figure that out

02:18:29.180 what that meant

02:18:30.180 so imagine

02:18:30.780 because there's

02:18:31.240 a causal sequence

02:18:32.200 the snake offers you

02:18:34.220 something that you ingest

02:18:35.180 it wakes you up

02:18:36.100 scales fall from your eyes

02:18:37.800 so now you can see

02:18:38.600 the first thing you do

02:18:39.840 is you realize

02:18:40.380 that you're naked

02:18:41.020 what does that mean

02:18:42.340 well human beings

02:18:43.540 stand upright

02:18:44.300 the most vulnerable

02:18:45.780 part of us

02:18:46.420 is front and center

02:18:47.960 to be hurt

02:18:49.020 but also to be judged

02:18:50.280 right

02:18:50.620 to be naked

02:18:51.280 is to be

02:18:51.820 that's terrifying

02:18:52.920 you want to not die

02:18:54.760 you want to cover

02:18:56.060 yourself up

02:18:56.980 and so that's

02:18:58.140 the recognition

02:18:58.700 of nakedness

02:18:59.480 but then you might say

02:19:00.360 well why does the knowledge

02:19:01.300 of good and evil

02:19:01.920 emerge from that

02:19:02.740 as soon as you know

02:19:04.000 you're naked

02:19:04.540 and vulnerable

02:19:05.260 you know how to hurt

02:19:06.460 other people

02:19:07.000 you're not a predator

02:19:08.480 anymore

02:19:09.000 because they'll just

02:19:09.700 tear you apart

02:19:10.360 and eat you

02:19:10.820 like they don't want

02:19:11.760 you to suffer

02:19:12.240 although they don't care

02:19:13.320 they don't want

02:19:14.500 you to suffer

02:19:15.100 they just want to eat you

02:19:16.260 but once I know

02:19:17.540 what hurts me

02:19:18.300 I know what hurts you

02:19:20.440 and then I can turn

02:19:21.560 that into an art

02:19:22.340 and people have done that

02:19:23.800 and so that's

02:19:24.640 that's why the knowledge

02:19:25.700 of evil comes

02:19:26.480 immediately as a consequence

02:19:28.120 of the knowledge

02:19:28.780 of nakedness

02:19:30.000 and that's associated

02:19:31.220 with the same idea

02:19:32.160 that human beings

02:19:33.200 are made out of

02:19:33.740 the blood of Kingu

02:19:34.580 nasty stories

02:19:35.880 but very

02:19:36.580 you know

02:19:36.940 they're messing with

02:19:38.140 the fundamental structure

02:19:39.560 of reality

02:19:40.060 they want to get this right

02:19:41.160 okay

02:19:41.900 so one of the cool things

02:19:43.000 about this story

02:19:43.820 so okay

02:19:44.440 so that's Marduk

02:19:45.220 now

02:19:45.520 here's what's

02:19:47.320 so interesting

02:19:48.180 about that

02:19:48.840 the Mesopotamians

02:19:51.060 they've got this

02:19:51.720 story about the deities

02:19:53.100 and how they

02:19:53.600 organize themselves

02:19:54.500 to respond

02:19:56.060 to the emergence

02:19:56.740 of chaos

02:19:57.240 and how to master it

02:19:58.220 you go after it

02:19:59.620 you declare yourself

02:20:01.180 the thing at the top

02:20:01.980 of the dominance hierarchy

02:20:02.860 your eyes and speech

02:20:04.760 you go out there

02:20:05.700 voluntarily

02:20:06.280 you encapsulate

02:20:08.160 the chaos

02:20:08.840 you cut it into pieces

02:20:09.940 and you make the world

02:20:10.780 that makes you top god

02:20:12.140 brilliant

02:20:12.980 bloody

02:20:13.460 absolutely

02:20:14.280 phenomenally brilliant

02:20:15.880 so what happens

02:20:17.120 that's what's happening

02:20:18.280 in the heavenly domain

02:20:19.380 let's say

02:20:19.820 what happens

02:20:20.380 in the earthly domain

02:20:21.340 the emperor

02:20:22.940 of the Mesopotamians

02:20:23.880 is Marduk

02:20:24.740 he's the manifestation

02:20:26.100 of Marduk on earth

02:20:27.200 and he has to be

02:20:28.320 a good Marduk

02:20:29.100 that's the

02:20:29.740 because he might say

02:20:30.740 well why should you

02:20:31.460 be king

02:20:31.960 well the answer to that

02:20:34.120 is well you're most powerful

02:20:35.260 no that's not going to work

02:20:36.240 some other weasels

02:20:37.300 will take you out

02:20:38.000 why should you be king

02:20:39.840 well because you pay attention

02:20:41.440 and you speak properly

02:20:42.320 and you keep chaos at bay

02:20:43.540 and you make ingenious

02:20:44.680 things happen

02:20:45.240 as a consequence

02:20:45.920 so that's what

02:20:47.140 the bloody Mesopotamians

02:20:48.140 were trying to work out

02:20:48.960 what should be sovereign

02:20:50.460 and why

02:20:51.360 okay so what did they do

02:20:53.220 in the new year's ceremony

02:20:54.740 so imagine that

02:20:56.280 the king is in a walled city

02:20:59.100 right so that's

02:21:00.100 the king's at the top

02:21:01.660 of the dominance hierarchy

02:21:02.480 he's the eye

02:21:03.180 at the top of the pyramid

02:21:04.160 in a walled city

02:21:05.120 with chaos outside

02:21:06.400 chaos is outside

02:21:07.700 that's the domain

02:21:08.620 of time at

02:21:09.240 at the new year's ceremony

02:21:10.880 the old year

02:21:12.560 we know about that

02:21:13.540 we still have this idea

02:21:14.460 the old year is an old man

02:21:16.020 the new year is about

02:21:17.280 to be born

02:21:17.900 there's an intermediary

02:21:19.180 period of chaos

02:21:20.140 that's new year's eve

02:21:21.360 right

02:21:21.720 that's the intermediary

02:21:22.860 period of chaos

02:21:23.680 where all the rules

02:21:24.440 are temporarily suspended

02:21:25.960 which is why you can go out

02:21:27.140 and party like there's

02:21:28.360 no tomorrow

02:21:28.960 new year's eve

02:21:29.820 and before the new year

02:21:31.120 is born

02:21:31.560 the Mesopotamian emperor

02:21:33.660 and all of his retinue

02:21:35.120 and the people

02:21:35.560 go outside the city

02:21:36.720 on new year's eve

02:21:37.640 and they take statues

02:21:38.620 that represent the gods

02:21:39.940 and they act out

02:21:41.280 the

02:21:41.680 the

02:21:42.500 the

02:21:43.980 the story

02:21:45.080 that I just told you

02:21:45.920 with the statues

02:21:46.620 and as part of that

02:21:48.420 the

02:21:49.840 emperor

02:21:50.940 has to take off

02:21:52.040 all his

02:21:52.540 garbs

02:21:53.360 his garments

02:21:53.900 that make him king

02:21:54.720 and kneel in front

02:21:55.800 of the priest

02:21:56.320 and the priest

02:21:56.880 if I remember correctly

02:21:58.080 slaps him with a glove

02:21:59.360 it's something like that

02:22:00.340 and tells him

02:22:01.380 that he has to tell everyone

02:22:02.860 why in the last year

02:22:03.980 he wasn't a very good Marduk

02:22:05.140 and how he's going to do better

02:22:06.140 in the future

02:22:06.680 which is exactly

02:22:07.720 by the way

02:22:08.240 what you do

02:22:08.980 when you make your new years

02:22:10.060 what do you call those

02:22:11.860 yes

02:22:13.260 the ones you immediately break

02:22:14.600 the next day

02:22:15.260 but it's the same

02:22:15.940 it's this renewal idea

02:22:17.180 and it happens at

02:22:17.920 it happens in the depth of darkness

02:22:19.740 in the middle of the winter

02:22:20.860 before the light comes back

02:22:22.900 right

02:22:23.280 that's why it's set up that way

02:22:24.520 so

02:22:25.260 so anyways

02:22:26.740 and

02:22:27.020 so that

02:22:27.720 so as long as

02:22:28.960 the emperor is a good Marduk

02:22:31.180 then that's why he gets to be emperor

02:22:32.600 and if he's not a good Marduk

02:22:33.700 then well

02:22:34.140 someone else should be emperor

02:22:35.160 so

02:22:35.920 so that's how that works

02:22:37.620 and there's some representations of it

02:22:45.420 so there's

02:22:46.360 there's

02:22:48.060 Tiamat there

02:22:49.880 sort of a spirit matter combination

02:22:52.920 winged dragon

02:22:53.880 right

02:22:54.160 the thing that we've seen so many times

02:22:55.680 and there's Marduk

02:22:56.760 he's got angel wings

02:22:57.820 now why the wings?

02:23:00.240 I don't know exactly why the wings

02:23:02.100 I mean he's obviously being

02:23:03.380 assimilated to the idea of a bird

02:23:05.440 I don't know if the idea of

02:23:07.720 the far-seeing capacity of the bird

02:23:10.420 was there for the Mesopotamians

02:23:12.360 it's highly probable

02:23:13.320 but also the bird is something

02:23:15.160 that flies up above everything else

02:23:16.760 and that can see for long distances

02:23:18.320 so it's an aerial spirit

02:23:19.600 it's close to God

02:23:20.480 and all of that

02:23:21.100 so

02:23:21.320 so there's a very

02:23:22.560 primordial representation

02:23:23.980 of the same thing

02:23:24.900 look

02:23:25.360 how much imagination

02:23:26.340 does it take

02:23:27.280 to see

02:23:28.280 that that's the story

02:23:30.120 of human beings

02:23:30.920 encountering the unknown

02:23:32.080 you know

02:23:35.300 when you know the code

02:23:36.260 it just seems self-evident

02:23:37.440 yes

02:23:37.880 well

02:23:38.220 there is

02:23:38.620 he's got his bow and arrow

02:23:39.640 you know

02:23:40.360 and he's out there

02:23:41.360 fighting the monsters

02:23:42.140 of the unknown

02:23:42.780 and that's part

02:23:43.800 that's how human beings

02:23:44.800 have survived

02:23:45.460 you see

02:23:45.840 yeah

02:23:46.220 yeah

02:23:47.280 that's

02:23:47.640 and then you see

02:23:48.200 here he's riding

02:23:49.120 this great big snake

02:23:50.100 so

02:23:50.400 that's another representation

02:23:52.280 of the same

02:23:53.100 kind of thing

02:23:54.000 okay

02:23:55.980 so let me just think

02:23:56.820 for a minute

02:23:57.260 figure out what I want to do

02:23:58.880 next

02:23:59.640 if I want to go somewhere next

02:24:00.940 I guess what I'll do right now

02:24:02.180 is I'll just show you

02:24:02.900 some additional pictures

02:24:03.860 so

02:24:04.800 we've laid out

02:24:05.880 the conceptual world

02:24:06.860 to some degree

02:24:07.540 right

02:24:07.820 and I mentioned that

02:24:09.180 you can think about it as

02:24:10.580 the

02:24:11.180 the potential itself

02:24:13.040 that's the dragon of chaos

02:24:14.140 and then nature

02:24:14.960 which has a positive

02:24:15.920 and a negative element

02:24:17.300 creation and destruction

02:24:18.900 and culture

02:24:19.920 which has a positive

02:24:20.780 and negative emotion

02:24:21.620 element

02:24:22.380 they're reversed

02:24:23.280 because it's the positive element

02:24:24.880 of culture

02:24:25.440 that protects you

02:24:26.160 against the negative element

02:24:27.240 of nature

02:24:27.760 and the negative element

02:24:29.160 of culture

02:24:31.000 can be destroyed

02:24:31.920 by the new

02:24:32.920 coming in from the

02:24:33.940 from the natural world

02:24:35.240 and then the archetypal individual

02:24:37.140 positive and negative

02:24:38.140 as well

02:24:38.580 that's the

02:24:39.240 that's the entire story

02:24:41.060 roughly speaking

02:24:42.200 and I showed you

02:24:43.240 its manifestations

02:24:44.100 in figures like this

02:24:45.320 so you have

02:24:46.840 this is called

02:24:47.300 the open virgin

02:24:48.140 or the opening virgin

02:24:50.520 because that

02:24:51.880 those two halves

02:24:53.100 can be closed

02:24:53.720 so there's

02:24:54.260 mother nature

02:24:55.100 roughly speaking

02:24:56.000 or the mother of

02:24:56.820 of god

02:24:57.760 depending on how you look at it

02:24:59.200 and inside her

02:25:01.240 nature

02:25:01.820 culture

02:25:02.740 the patriarchy

02:25:03.660 the culture supports

02:25:05.340 the suffering individual

02:25:06.420 who

02:25:06.840 voluntarily accepts

02:25:08.540 death

02:25:09.520 and mortality

02:25:10.300 as the price

02:25:11.340 to be paid for being

02:25:12.240 that's what that image represents

02:25:13.820 it's a

02:25:14.420 it's absolutely

02:25:15.380 unbelievable

02:25:16.460 and then you see

02:25:17.400 all these people

02:25:18.000 at the side here

02:25:18.720 are gazing uncontrollably

02:25:20.300 at this image

02:25:20.960 which is of course

02:25:21.660 exactly what's happened

02:25:22.580 over the last 2,000 years

02:25:23.940 at least in part of the world

02:25:25.360 because there's

02:25:26.700 there's a tremendous idea

02:25:28.300 encapsulated inside that image

02:25:30.340 and the idea is something like

02:25:32.280 the voluntary acceptance

02:25:33.620 of suffering

02:25:34.900 is key to its transcendence

02:25:36.500 and that's

02:25:37.100 that's a

02:25:37.660 that's a crucial

02:25:38.740 psychotherapeutic truth

02:25:40.520 right

02:25:40.960 things that bother you

02:25:42.380 need to be confronted

02:25:43.160 voluntarily

02:25:43.700 you have to accept them

02:25:45.040 you have to accept them

02:25:46.120 you think

02:25:46.460 well how far does that go

02:25:47.620 well we don't know

02:25:48.800 it works in small things

02:25:50.860 it works with phobias

02:25:51.840 it works with traumas

02:25:52.980 traumas are usually

02:25:54.080 associated with

02:25:55.000 death or disease

02:25:56.020 or malevolence

02:25:56.920 so that's pushing it

02:25:58.060 pretty far

02:25:58.680 there doesn't seem to be

02:25:59.800 a limit to the

02:26:00.820 to the idea that

02:26:02.500 the voluntary confrontation

02:26:04.140 with the things that are

02:26:05.280 terrifying is curative

02:26:06.420 there doesn't seem to be

02:26:07.460 a limit to that

02:26:08.200 there's an example

02:26:09.160 in the story of Exodus

02:26:10.260 when Moses is leading

02:26:11.400 the Israelites through

02:26:12.180 the desert

02:26:12.640 they fragment

02:26:14.880 because

02:26:15.780 well they're out of tyranny

02:26:17.140 so they don't know

02:26:17.680 what to do

02:26:18.060 it's all chaotic

02:26:18.840 and you know

02:26:19.620 this Moses character

02:26:20.880 yeah he got them

02:26:21.840 out of Egypt

02:26:22.280 but now they're in the desert

02:26:23.260 and there's nothing to eat

02:26:24.360 and like why should

02:26:25.260 they listen to him

02:26:26.060 and so they start

02:26:27.080 worshipping all sorts

02:26:28.000 of idols

02:26:28.460 and that's kind of

02:26:29.580 like the fragmentation

02:26:30.440 of what holds them

02:26:31.540 centrally together

02:26:32.420 and so what does God do

02:26:34.140 he's not very happy

02:26:35.340 about that

02:26:35.940 so he sends a bunch

02:26:37.860 of poisonous snakes

02:26:38.560 into the desert

02:26:39.200 to bite them all

02:26:40.060 he thinks

02:26:41.240 enough of these people

02:26:42.020 and that's chaos

02:26:42.720 returning right

02:26:43.440 in the form of

02:26:44.000 these poisonous snakes

02:26:45.020 and so

02:26:45.940 the Israelites

02:26:47.940 are kind of sick

02:26:48.640 and tired of being

02:26:49.200 bitten by poisonous snakes

02:26:50.340 so they go back

02:26:51.140 to Moses

02:26:51.540 and they say

02:26:52.060 well you know

02:26:52.620 I know we've wandered

02:26:54.120 off the path here

02:26:54.920 and we didn't think

02:26:55.580 you were the greatest

02:26:56.120 guy there for a while

02:26:56.920 but you know

02:26:57.680 maybe you could

02:26:58.320 have a little chat

02:26:59.200 with God

02:26:59.620 and see what he could

02:27:00.220 do about these

02:27:00.700 poisonous snakes

02:27:01.480 and so

02:27:01.880 Moses entreats God

02:27:04.220 to do something

02:27:04.880 about the snakes

02:27:05.480 and what God

02:27:06.120 tells people to do

02:27:07.120 is the strangest thing

02:27:08.340 he says

02:27:08.720 make a snake

02:27:10.800 in the image

02:27:11.360 make a bronze snake

02:27:12.580 and put it on a post

02:27:14.400 and have everyone

02:27:15.920 look at it

02:27:16.580 and everyone

02:27:17.160 who goes to look

02:27:17.800 at the snake

02:27:18.240 won't be bitten

02:27:18.960 by the poisonous snakes

02:27:19.880 anymore

02:27:20.300 so it's

02:27:22.820 it's

02:27:23.760 it's crazy

02:27:25.040 that idea

02:27:25.600 it's crazy

02:27:26.300 so and I'll tell you

02:27:27.600 something else

02:27:28.220 that's very interesting

02:27:29.480 so in the

02:27:30.580 in the Christian story

02:27:31.840 Christ assimilates

02:27:33.480 himself to that snake

02:27:35.080 that was put on the post

02:27:36.280 in the desert

02:27:36.840 it says exactly

02:27:37.700 the same thing

02:27:38.380 that that has to be

02:27:40.020 looked at

02:27:40.860 because that's

02:27:41.620 the pathway to salvation

02:27:43.300 roughly speaking

02:27:44.540 it's exactly the same idea

02:27:45.840 it's the worst thing

02:27:47.160 that can possibly happen

02:27:48.600 so you look upon it

02:27:50.800 and meditate upon it

02:27:52.000 and that's the key

02:27:52.720 to transcending it

02:27:53.680 well so that's the idea

02:27:55.060 that's encapsulated

02:27:55.900 in that image

02:27:56.620 so

02:27:57.700 it's you know

02:27:58.740 it's no wonder that

02:27:59.680 these ideas had to be

02:28:01.360 expressed in images

02:28:02.220 because they're so

02:28:02.960 unbelievably complicated

02:28:04.700 that they're almost

02:28:05.740 incomprehensible

02:28:06.660 so they come out first

02:28:08.120 in the image

02:28:08.780 they come out first

02:28:09.680 in the story

02:28:10.360 because they're just

02:28:11.580 and plus

02:28:12.240 they're so difficult

02:28:12.900 to believe

02:28:13.520 what the last thing

02:28:15.260 you would think

02:28:15.880 if you were being bitten

02:28:16.760 by poisonous snakes

02:28:17.780 was that you should

02:28:18.600 make a bronze image

02:28:19.840 of one and put it

02:28:20.580 on a stick

02:28:21.100 so that you could

02:28:21.660 go look at it

02:28:22.400 I mean there's a

02:28:22.900 magical element to that

02:28:24.000 but it's

02:28:24.760 psychotherapeutically

02:28:25.960 exactly right

02:28:27.800 so I had this client

02:28:28.860 and she had a dream

02:28:30.520 about what

02:28:31.300 she was having

02:28:32.480 a really rough time

02:28:33.220 and she was

02:28:34.360 a pretty good dreamer

02:28:35.140 she had this dream

02:28:36.280 that she was walking

02:28:37.060 down a road

02:28:38.220 by there was an ocean

02:28:39.900 on one side

02:28:40.500 and there was

02:28:40.880 sort of sand dunes

02:28:42.160 on the other side

02:28:42.860 and she looked up

02:28:44.680 and there was this guy

02:28:45.700 with a huge python

02:28:47.500 that had been out there

02:28:50.280 showing it to everyone

02:28:51.280 and she took a look

02:28:53.280 and he invited her

02:28:54.420 to come take a look

02:28:55.160 at the snake

02:28:55.620 but she refused

02:28:56.500 and walked on

02:28:57.580 and so she told me

02:28:59.200 that dream

02:28:59.660 she was also

02:29:00.280 quite imaginative

02:29:01.080 so I said

02:29:01.680 look let's

02:29:02.220 let's try something

02:29:03.480 first of all

02:29:06.120 tell me about

02:29:06.740 the snake handler

02:29:07.840 and she said

02:29:08.920 well he's kind of

02:29:09.560 a charlatan

02:29:10.220 he's a show off

02:29:11.180 he's a fake

02:29:12.300 and I'm afraid

02:29:13.540 that if I went up

02:29:14.760 to the crowd

02:29:15.800 and where the snake was

02:29:17.440 that they would

02:29:17.880 force me to touch it

02:29:18.860 and so I thought

02:29:20.140 okay so that's why

02:29:21.140 you walked by

02:29:21.760 I said okay

02:29:22.140 so let's play a game

02:29:23.000 so you sit there

02:29:24.920 and bring that dream

02:29:25.800 image to mind

02:29:26.440 close your eyes

02:29:27.080 bring the dream image

02:29:27.880 to mind

02:29:28.220 but let's play with it

02:29:29.100 a little bit

02:29:29.420 it's like Jung's

02:29:30.140 technique of active

02:29:31.220 imagination

02:29:31.660 let's play with it

02:29:32.460 a little bit

02:29:32.920 so go up there

02:29:34.100 you know

02:29:35.020 imagine that you go up there

02:29:36.480 and you kind of have to do this

02:29:37.920 like you're daydreaming

02:29:38.840 you know

02:29:39.380 you can't force it

02:29:40.600 you have to play with it

02:29:41.700 like you would

02:29:42.280 when you're daydreaming

02:29:43.420 which is

02:29:43.840 you're kind of half

02:29:44.700 doing it voluntarily

02:29:45.580 and it's half

02:29:46.340 manifesting itself

02:29:47.880 it's kind of a gateway

02:29:49.120 between you

02:29:49.840 and the collective unconscious

02:29:50.900 that's another way

02:29:51.700 of thinking about it

02:29:52.460 and anyways

02:29:53.980 I said okay

02:29:54.560 so go up there

02:29:55.240 and the first thing

02:29:56.720 we're going to do

02:29:57.160 is figure out

02:29:57.720 what are you going to do

02:29:58.600 if the crowd

02:29:59.160 tells you that you have

02:30:00.260 to touch the snake

02:30:01.060 or get close to it

02:30:02.200 because she needed a defense

02:30:03.920 because it isn't up to other people

02:30:05.460 to force her to do that

02:30:06.540 so we practiced

02:30:07.520 what she might say

02:30:08.760 it's like

02:30:09.080 no I'm comfortable here

02:30:10.600 I'm just going to stand

02:30:11.360 in the background

02:30:11.900 just going to look at it

02:30:13.000 and get accustomed to it

02:30:13.920 I don't need you

02:30:14.740 to push me forward

02:30:15.620 so she felt pretty good

02:30:16.660 about that

02:30:17.140 so that kind of armed her

02:30:18.420 with a defense

02:30:19.060 so then she could

02:30:19.820 pretend to go up

02:30:20.900 and take a look at the snake

02:30:21.840 and I said

02:30:22.200 well the first thing

02:30:22.860 you should do

02:30:23.380 is take a look

02:30:24.300 at the snake handler

02:30:25.140 and see if he's

02:30:26.340 who you think he is

02:30:27.380 and so she did that

02:30:28.620 in her imagination

02:30:29.220 she said

02:30:29.800 no he doesn't seem

02:30:30.860 to be able to sharpen

02:30:31.540 at all

02:30:32.000 he's got this snake

02:30:32.880 that is his

02:30:33.700 you know

02:30:34.180 something he takes care of

02:30:35.320 and he just has come out here

02:30:36.640 to show the people

02:30:38.300 let people look at this snake

02:30:40.140 and so she said

02:30:40.920 so I said

02:30:41.920 well is he someone

02:30:43.200 that you could trust

02:30:44.580 or someone you shouldn't trust

02:30:45.740 you have to ask

02:30:47.020 both those questions

02:30:47.960 because otherwise

02:30:48.680 you're leading the witness

02:30:49.920 right

02:30:50.380 you don't want to tell people

02:30:52.220 what to think

02:30:52.740 you have to let them

02:30:53.460 figure it out for themselves

02:30:54.440 so and she said

02:30:56.020 no I think he's somebody

02:30:56.900 that could be trusted

02:30:58.220 and I said

02:30:58.660 okay well

02:30:59.120 so what do you think

02:31:00.460 that you could go up there

02:31:01.340 and you know

02:31:02.580 maybe lay your hands

02:31:03.480 on the snake

02:31:03.900 and touch the snake

02:31:04.660 and she said

02:31:05.120 she wasn't sure about it

02:31:06.000 but we went through it

02:31:07.060 and she was able to do it

02:31:08.500 and so

02:31:09.280 it's the same

02:31:10.880 so she had to

02:31:13.280 she had to make contact

02:31:14.640 she had to voluntarily

02:31:15.720 make contact

02:31:16.440 with this terrible snake

02:31:18.480 that's at the bottom of being

02:31:19.840 that's at the bottom

02:31:20.920 of the tree of existence

02:31:22.400 right

02:31:23.500 that's where the snake is

02:31:24.500 it's wrapped around the tree

02:31:25.600 well why

02:31:26.320 well partly because

02:31:27.220 we lived in trees

02:31:28.020 and that's where the damn snakes were

02:31:29.740 down there

02:31:30.320 on the ground

02:31:31.380 where we didn't know

02:31:32.600 right

02:31:33.460 and that's the divine tree

02:31:34.660 of being that

02:31:35.620 and so

02:31:36.680 well

02:31:37.780 you have to get the hell

02:31:38.600 out of the tree

02:31:39.040 and go

02:31:39.420 confront the snakes

02:31:40.920 and then

02:31:41.440 that's the

02:31:42.160 that's the way out

02:31:43.420 at least in principle

02:31:44.340 so that's kind of

02:31:45.560 what that means

02:31:46.300 um

02:31:47.740 show you

02:31:51.300 here's another image

02:31:52.460 of the same thing

02:31:53.300 what I like about this

02:31:57.180 you see

02:31:57.860 the fact that

02:31:59.120 the

02:31:59.840 the culture

02:32:01.020 the patriarchy

02:32:01.880 god the father

02:32:02.720 will say here

02:32:03.420 is holding

02:32:04.380 the

02:32:05.300 the suffering individual

02:32:06.800 in his arms

02:32:07.660 and that's encapsulated

02:32:08.660 by nature

02:32:09.180 it's

02:32:09.440 it's very much like

02:32:10.700 the story in Pinocchio

02:32:12.100 where

02:32:12.820 Geppetto

02:32:13.680 Pinocchio wasn't able

02:32:15.140 to go down

02:32:15.900 into the depths

02:32:17.100 to confront

02:32:17.700 the terrible monster

02:32:18.780 at the bottom of being

02:32:19.820 without having support

02:32:20.740 from his father

02:32:21.400 even though his father

02:32:22.160 ended up trapped

02:32:22.900 inside the whale

02:32:23.560 if he wouldn't have been

02:32:24.260 supported to begin with

02:32:25.780 he wouldn't have been

02:32:26.780 able to do it

02:32:27.360 and you know

02:32:27.980 I've really seen this

02:32:28.900 and I've really seen this

02:32:29.940 in people

02:32:30.280 it's a hell of a thing

02:32:31.520 not to have the confidence

02:32:32.540 of your father

02:32:33.300 it's really really hard

02:32:35.220 on people

02:32:35.720 you know

02:32:36.260 if your father

02:32:36.960 is someone who says to you

02:32:38.300 you can do it

02:32:39.200 I really believe

02:32:40.080 that you can do it

02:32:40.780 I'll support you

02:32:41.540 in what you're doing

02:32:42.200 I think that you can

02:32:43.380 sort it out

02:32:44.080 and then act towards you

02:32:45.340 in that way

02:32:45.820 that's a gift

02:32:46.660 that really almost

02:32:47.580 no one else

02:32:48.060 can provide you with

02:32:48.740 mothers obviously provide

02:32:50.100 I think they provide

02:32:51.140 the same kind of gift

02:32:52.060 but earlier

02:32:52.700 you know

02:32:53.480 because the mother

02:32:54.000 has to take care

02:32:54.680 of the infant

02:32:55.120 when the infant

02:32:55.680 is just

02:32:56.180 completely dependent

02:32:57.620 and so

02:32:58.480 and this is Erickson's

02:32:59.580 idea too

02:33:00.140 Eric Erickson

02:33:00.780 is the mother

02:33:01.280 is the person

02:33:02.980 who establishes

02:33:03.680 the relationship

02:33:04.260 that allows

02:33:05.420 the developing person

02:33:06.760 to manifest trust

02:33:07.920 real trust

02:33:08.520 while you're being carried

02:33:09.700 for crying out loud

02:33:10.720 you know

02:33:10.980 you can be dropped

02:33:11.960 and the mother

02:33:12.840 is also the source of food

02:33:14.060 but the father

02:33:14.900 seems to be something

02:33:15.700 like the

02:33:16.140 and I'm being

02:33:17.460 I'm obviously parsing

02:33:19.100 these things farther apart

02:33:20.120 than they can

02:33:20.680 need to be

02:33:21.360 because the father

02:33:22.460 can play a nurturing role

02:33:23.540 and the mother

02:33:23.960 can play an encouraging role

02:33:25.240 but we'll keep it simple

02:33:26.880 for now

02:33:27.300 the father seems to be

02:33:28.820 the thing that supports

02:33:29.760 and encourages

02:33:30.380 and says

02:33:30.840 well yeah

02:33:31.280 you know

02:33:31.540 you're little and small

02:33:32.460 and all of that

02:33:33.160 and you're subject to

02:33:34.520 destruction

02:33:35.420 and bullying

02:33:37.160 and social pressure

02:33:38.480 and all that

02:33:38.860 but I know you can do it

02:33:39.920 I know you can do it

02:33:41.020 and there's a force in that

02:33:42.400 that's unbelievable

02:33:43.200 and people who don't have that

02:33:44.440 have a hell of a time

02:33:46.040 it's actually one of the things

02:33:47.500 that's quite fun

02:33:48.120 about doing psychotherapy

02:33:49.120 because you get people

02:33:50.580 who have damaged

02:33:51.640 father figures

02:33:52.760 it's harder with the damaged

02:33:54.060 mother figure

02:33:55.060 because it's so bloody deep

02:33:56.900 you know

02:33:57.480 I had a client

02:33:58.160 who I just

02:33:58.760 I just thought she was

02:33:59.780 a remarkable person

02:34:00.860 but her relationship

02:34:02.000 with her mother

02:34:02.480 was really disruptive

02:34:03.480 and it was really

02:34:04.180 really hard to

02:34:04.940 she said

02:34:06.000 she would

02:34:06.360 she told me

02:34:07.420 it was like

02:34:07.740 something had been

02:34:08.320 torn out of her

02:34:09.160 at an early age

02:34:09.840 that couldn't be replaced

02:34:10.820 it's really

02:34:11.540 because you just can't

02:34:12.660 be someone's mother

02:34:13.640 you know

02:34:14.020 it's really hard

02:34:15.420 you're just not there

02:34:16.760 enough for that

02:34:17.540 but you can sort of

02:34:18.680 be someone's

02:34:19.260 surrogate father

02:34:19.940 that's a

02:34:20.460 that's a role

02:34:21.800 you can play later

02:34:22.620 and that's what educators

02:34:23.600 do at least

02:34:24.200 to some degree

02:34:24.840 although now

02:34:25.300 they're trying to be

02:34:25.920 mothers

02:34:26.220 and providing safe spaces

02:34:27.640 and all of that

02:34:28.240 which is not really

02:34:28.980 all that appropriate

02:34:29.740 so

02:34:30.780 so the father

02:34:32.020 is an encouraging figure

02:34:33.240 and allows the individual

02:34:35.140 at least in principle

02:34:36.120 to support the catastrophe

02:34:37.680 of being

02:34:38.380 voluntarily

02:34:39.300 and so

02:34:40.720 anyway

02:34:42.020 so those

02:34:42.540 you know

02:34:42.800 those images

02:34:43.340 they're just

02:34:43.820 brilliant beyond belief

02:34:45.600 absolutely brilliant

02:34:46.700 beyond belief

02:34:47.460 okay

02:34:48.960 well that's probably

02:34:49.820 a good place to stop

02:34:50.800 and so

02:34:52.200 so we've got through

02:34:53.860 the

02:34:54.160 the two

02:34:55.280 these two fundamental stories

02:34:56.920 remember in the Egyptian story

02:34:58.380 you have much more development

02:35:00.160 of the figure of Osiris

02:35:01.820 who's equivalent to Apsu

02:35:03.400 and the Egyptians

02:35:04.460 sort of walk through

02:35:05.520 how the state

02:35:06.840 becomes corrupt

02:35:07.620 and deteriorates

02:35:08.640 and what the individual

02:35:09.940 has to do

02:35:10.440 in relationship

02:35:11.060 to the state

02:35:11.880 as well as

02:35:12.700 in relationship

02:35:13.300 to the

02:35:13.880 to chaos itself

02:35:15.260 so in the Mesopotamian story

02:35:17.000 it's mostly

02:35:17.580 Apsu's dead

02:35:19.280 and Marduk

02:35:20.740 makes a new society

02:35:22.120 out of the pieces

02:35:22.740 but it's pretty damn implicit

02:35:24.260 you know

02:35:24.720 it's not detailed

02:35:25.700 whereas by the time

02:35:26.480 the Egyptians come along

02:35:27.440 they say well

02:35:27.940 Osiris was great

02:35:29.880 he's corrupted by

02:35:31.340 Seth

02:35:31.880 he has an evil brother

02:35:33.000 so that's the tyrannical element

02:35:34.460 of the state

02:35:35.060 he's overcome by the evil brother

02:35:37.200 which is the tendency

02:35:38.220 of every bureaucratic system

02:35:39.580 everywhere

02:35:40.180 things fall apart

02:35:42.100 chaos comes back up

02:35:43.360 the hero is born

02:35:44.280 takes on the

02:35:45.480 corruption of the state

02:35:46.600 and

02:35:47.140 goes into the underworld

02:35:48.300 which is like

02:35:48.940 confronting Tiamat

02:35:49.880 but there

02:35:50.480 I like to have the stories

02:35:51.780 in parallel

02:35:52.320 because one of them

02:35:53.100 is the confrontation

02:35:54.080 with the absolute unknown

02:35:55.420 Tiamat

02:35:56.220 and the other

02:35:56.920 is the revivification

02:35:57.860 of the state

02:35:58.620 even though the stories

02:35:59.520 also overlap

02:36:00.300 and so

02:36:01.220 in the Egyptian story

02:36:02.640 so just like Marduk

02:36:05.140 was

02:36:05.440 the

02:36:06.440 model for the

02:36:07.900 emperor

02:36:08.520 the combination

02:36:09.880 of Osiris and Horus

02:36:11.080 was the model

02:36:11.680 for the pharaoh

02:36:12.360 and then there was an idea

02:36:13.840 that emerged

02:36:14.640 out of Egypt

02:36:15.240 this was called

02:36:15.860 the democratization

02:36:16.880 of Osiris

02:36:17.680 and it's

02:36:18.480 I think part of

02:36:19.360 what gave rise

02:36:20.720 to the entire

02:36:21.360 Judeo-Christian

02:36:22.240 set of ideas

02:36:24.280 because the Jews

02:36:24.980 hypothetically

02:36:25.900 came out of Egypt

02:36:27.160 right

02:36:27.540 so that thinking

02:36:28.620 is very deeply

02:36:29.340 influenced by Egyptian ideas

02:36:30.780 the pharaoh

02:36:32.800 was the amalgam

02:36:34.680 of Osiris and Horus

02:36:36.100 and the amalgam

02:36:37.360 of Osiris and Horus

02:36:38.440 was his

02:36:38.960 immortal soul

02:36:39.860 the pharaoh's

02:36:40.420 immortal soul

02:36:41.100 and the pharaoh

02:36:41.900 was allowed to use

02:36:42.660 the symbolism

02:36:43.240 of the conjunction

02:36:44.200 of Osiris and Horus

02:36:45.380 but as the Egyptian

02:36:46.520 societies developed

02:36:47.620 the aristocracy

02:36:48.840 started to get

02:36:49.600 to use that symbol

02:36:50.660 so it started

02:36:51.960 moving down

02:36:52.700 the hierarchy

02:36:53.440 the idea that

02:36:54.260 it wasn't only

02:36:55.840 that the pharaoh

02:36:56.640 was Osiris and Horus

02:36:58.040 it was then

02:36:58.980 it was the aristocracy

02:37:00.080 and then by the time

02:37:01.480 the Greeks came along

02:37:02.340 it was all men

02:37:03.840 who were part

02:37:04.440 of the political structure

02:37:05.540 and then

02:37:06.600 by the time

02:37:07.680 the Christians

02:37:08.320 came along

02:37:08.880 it was no no

02:37:09.520 wait a minute

02:37:09.980 this applies to everyone

02:37:11.120 men, women

02:37:12.480 and not only

02:37:13.340 male and female alike

02:37:15.080 but also

02:37:15.940 not just

02:37:17.120 stalwart

02:37:18.800 upholders

02:37:19.420 of the state

02:37:20.200 but

02:37:20.900 criminals

02:37:21.880 tax collectors

02:37:22.860 prostitutes

02:37:23.720 outcasts

02:37:24.660 everyone

02:37:25.100 had this

02:37:25.980 Osiris

02:37:27.040 Horus

02:37:27.940 soul

02:37:28.800 inside of them

02:37:30.060 and were entitled

02:37:31.260 to be treated

02:37:32.000 as if they were

02:37:34.580 intrinsically valuable

02:37:35.700 as a consequence

02:37:36.820 of that

02:37:37.300 and that's the bedrock

02:37:38.740 as far as I'm concerned

02:37:39.820 that's the bedrock

02:37:40.800 idea upon which

02:37:41.660 western civilization

02:37:42.480 is predicated

02:37:43.320 it's the sovereignty

02:37:44.700 of the individual

02:37:46.280 and the individual

02:37:47.640 sovereign

02:37:48.200 why?

02:37:49.720 the individual

02:37:50.240 is the eye

02:37:50.840 that's up above

02:37:51.580 the pyramid

02:37:52.100 the individual

02:37:53.200 is the thing

02:37:53.920 that can dominate

02:37:54.860 sets of dominance

02:37:55.960 hierarchies

02:37:56.380 the individual

02:37:56.960 is the thing

02:37:57.560 that plays

02:37:58.280 not the game

02:37:58.940 but the metagame

02:37:59.880 the individual

02:38:01.200 the individual

02:38:01.220 is the thing

02:38:01.720 that revivifies

02:38:02.640 the dead culture

02:38:03.600 the individual

02:38:04.560 is the thing

02:38:05.100 that goes out

02:38:06.560 to combat

02:38:07.500 chaos

02:38:08.020 and generate

02:38:08.760 something valuable

02:38:09.560 as a consequence

02:38:10.520 and that's why

02:38:11.800 it's sovereign

02:38:12.360 and valuable

02:38:13.040 that's the

02:38:13.680 foundation

02:38:14.520 of our

02:38:15.140 legal system

02:38:15.980 and our culture

02:38:16.560 so

02:38:17.700 so

02:38:18.860 so

02:38:18.960 to think about it

02:38:19.680 as the

02:38:20.100 as an emergence

02:38:21.260 as an emergent property

02:38:22.580 of enlightenment ideals

02:38:23.640 is dangerous

02:38:24.440 because

02:38:25.340 that's 400 years

02:38:27.000 who cares about 400 years

02:38:29.240 this is forever

02:38:30.760 and forever is a lot

02:38:32.420 more firm grounding

02:38:33.480 than 400 years

02:38:34.500 it's not a set

02:38:35.740 of rational ideas

02:38:36.660 it's way

02:38:37.920 way deeper than that

02:38:39.360 so

02:38:40.520 okay

02:38:42.320 good enough

02:38:45.220 we'll see you

02:38:46.400 in a week

02:38:46.960 when a woman

02:39:06.700 experiences

02:39:07.340 an unplanned

02:39:08.100 pregnancy

02:39:08.560 she often

02:39:09.260 feels alone

02:39:10.060 and afraid

02:39:10.600 too often

02:39:11.660 her first response

02:39:12.620 is to seek out

02:39:13.320 an abortion

02:39:13.800 because

02:39:14.360 that's what

02:39:15.080 left-leaning institutions

02:39:16.160 have conditioned

02:39:16.980 her to do

02:39:17.640 but because

02:39:18.520 of the generosity

02:39:19.420 of listeners like you

02:39:20.560 that search

02:39:21.300 may lead her

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02:39:27.140 but for herself

02:39:28.400 pre-born offers

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02:39:35.660 this combination

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02:40:18.540 you

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02:40:23.240 as

02:40:23.320 as

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 13, 2020

136. Maps of Meaning 08： Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation

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