The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 229. God, Consciousness, and the Theories of Everything

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:51.040 Welcome to episode 239 of the JVP podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson.

00:00:59.940 If it's loud, it's because I am backstage at Dad's show in Boston.

00:01:03.920 I love seeing everyone at these shows. They're super fun.

00:01:06.980 In this episode, Kurt Jai-Mungle and Dad discuss truth, God, science, and Kurt's documentary Better Left Unsaid,

00:01:15.080 which addresses what happens when the left goes too far and features people like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.

00:01:22.140 Kurt is a Torontonian filmmaker behind Islam and the future of tolerance.

00:01:27.700 He's also a YouTuber at Theories of Everything with Kurt Jai-Mungle,

00:01:31.200 where he explores topics like theoretical physics, consciousness, free will, and religion.

00:01:36.480 I also wanted to quickly mention that Dad is on Parler.

00:01:39.760 Parler is the world's premier free speech platform.

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00:01:46.600 There are now exclusive posts by Dad, so be sure to get the app and give him a follow

00:01:50.980 or check out the link in show notes.

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00:02:05.760 I hope you enjoy this conversation.

00:02:12.680 Hello, everyone.

00:02:26.960 I'm pleased today to have with me Kurt Jai-Mungle.

00:02:29.900 He's a Toronto-based filmmaker with a background in mathematics and physics

00:02:34.160 who directed and wrote the film Better Left Unsaid, which was released in April 2021.

00:02:40.060 That film explores the question of, among other things, when does the left go too far?

00:02:46.660 He's also the host of the Theories of Everything podcast and YouTube channel,

00:02:51.620 which explores consciousness, God, free will, theoretical physics,

00:02:56.240 and which just surpassed 100,000 subscribers in about one year's time.

00:03:01.720 He's interviewed people including Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and John Verveke,

00:03:06.460 on the cognitive science side, and Stephen Wolfe from Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hassenfelder.

00:03:13.680 On the physics side, you can find out more by visiting youtube.com forward slash theories of everything

00:03:21.480 or searching theories of everything on Spotify, iTunes, or virtually any of the other audio platforms.

00:03:27.740 So, you've been podcasting and running this YouTube channel for how long?

00:03:32.320 About a year?

00:03:32.820 Yeah, slightly longer than a year.

00:03:36.020 Now, the channel's been up for approximately three years in the sense that it was registered three years ago,

00:03:40.540 but I've been going at it with force for about one year and a bit.

00:03:46.460 So, who have you interviewed that's been most popular?

00:03:51.080 Noam Chomsky, and you're one of the reasons why, because I was the first person,

00:04:01.000 if not the only person, to ask him about you directly.

00:04:05.360 Uh-oh.

00:04:06.000 So, I don't know about that.

00:04:07.360 So, there's something we could talk about right away.

00:04:09.340 So, what did he have to say?

00:04:12.380 Well, essentially, you're Hitler, as you know.

00:04:15.660 Oh, yeah.

00:04:16.540 Yeah.

00:04:17.080 Yeah.

00:04:17.520 And that...

00:04:18.360 And so, why do you think he thinks that?

00:04:20.000 Yeah.

00:04:21.080 I think that people who are on a certain side on the political spectrum believe their side

00:04:27.820 stands for what's good, and the opposite side is what's not good.

00:04:32.060 One of the...

00:04:33.060 See, that's so tricky, man, talking about better left than said, which we'll get to later,

00:04:36.480 is how do you define the left and the right?

00:04:38.340 It's decidedly difficult.

00:04:40.020 Almost everyone has a different definition.

00:04:43.020 Chomsky would say, well, the left is freedom,

00:04:45.340 and so anything that's on the right is anti-freedom.

00:04:48.120 And the right people who are on the right or identify with being as such would perhaps categorize

00:04:53.460 it as the opposite.

00:04:57.120 Yeah.

00:04:57.640 Well, it's interesting, at least, that they might circle around claims to some, let's

00:05:03.180 say, virtue that both of them would admire, like freedom.

00:05:07.220 Right?

00:05:07.660 So there's some agreement there, despite the difference.

00:05:10.520 Did he point to anything particular about what I hypothetically thought that made me

00:05:15.260 not an acceptable sort of creature?

00:05:18.740 No.

00:05:20.040 It's somewhat hearsay in the sense that he read an article based on you.

00:05:24.480 So he didn't watch you directly.

00:05:26.240 He read Nathan Robinson's critique of you, which I'm sure...

00:05:29.680 Oh, yeah.

00:05:30.200 Well, that'll do it, man.

00:05:31.500 Yeah.

00:05:32.080 Yeah.

00:05:32.520 Old Nathan.

00:05:33.320 He's quite the character.

00:05:35.460 Yeah, I see.

00:05:36.240 So, well, that's too bad in many regards.

00:05:40.120 Did you learn anything in particular from talking to Dr. Chomsky?

00:05:45.140 Quite a significant amount.

00:05:46.620 As for what I can point to, let me think.

00:05:48.500 I spoke to him six times.

00:05:50.360 Six times on the channel.

00:05:51.560 So the first time about you, I found it interesting that he said, I asked each guest that I spoke

00:05:58.320 to at the time, because now I've pivoted away from politics for reasons we can get to

00:06:02.460 later.

00:06:03.040 I asked him and every other guest, when does the left go too far?

00:06:07.140 In some sense, it's a Petersonian question, because you've raised that quite a few times.

00:06:11.560 When does the left go too far?

00:06:12.940 He said, well, it's not a matter of going too far for the left.

00:06:15.640 It's a matter of tactics.

00:06:17.480 As for when does the right go too far?

00:06:19.060 While the right is suicidal, I think, was his words.

00:06:24.340 So that's interesting, because it's really not much of an answer.

00:06:28.240 I mean, I've been always looking for a technical definition of that, right?

00:06:31.980 It's like, well, we know the right can go too far, and we know the left can go too far.

00:06:35.780 And how do we point to?

00:06:38.060 And I think this problem has actually become more complicated rather than less, because

00:06:41.680 the more I've been thinking about it, the more I think that the errors on the left are

00:06:47.560 more in the nature of a vast number of small errors, mostly often of omission.

00:06:54.940 So the more reasonable people on the left kowtow too rapidly to the more radical types

00:07:03.560 on the left, especially at the philosophical level.

00:07:05.840 And I think that really happened at the universities.

00:07:09.580 So that's something we can explore.

00:07:12.900 Well, it's actually a question I would have for you.

00:07:14.440 Why do you think that is?

00:07:15.800 I know that this is mainly you interviewing me, but I'm still perplexed when it comes to

00:07:19.920 that.

00:07:20.160 Why is it that the center left doesn't excoriate the extreme left?

00:07:24.180 Is it because they're on the same side?

00:07:26.360 So the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

00:07:27.940 Or are they afraid because, well, they can get, you can lose even a tenured position.

00:07:34.780 Well, I think there's, I think that fear, and it isn't obvious to me that this is merely

00:07:39.480 a problem that affects the left, but I'm most familiar with it in the university circumstance.

00:07:45.680 And so what I saw happening in my 25 years as a faculty member, let's say, I think that's

00:07:52.060 about right, it's more than that, actually, but anyways, quite a long time, three decades,

00:07:58.060 let's say, was that whenever the administration pushed on the faculty, so in our faculty meetings,

00:08:06.900 for example, there would be administrative demands, and they were often unreasonable.

00:08:11.300 They would increase the size of our seminars, say, for our third and fourth year students,

00:08:16.900 ask us to do more work with fewer resources.

00:08:19.080 And that was a steady trend, like if you look at spending, say, on faculty salaries versus

00:08:25.100 spending on administrative salaries across universities in the West, broadly speaking,

00:08:29.620 but certainly in North America, the amount spent on administration just skyrocketed upward,

00:08:34.760 whereas the amount spent on faculty pretty much stayed constant.

00:08:38.520 And so why?

00:08:40.100 Well, it was because the faculty just retreated continually every time they were challenged to

00:08:45.920 say no.

00:08:46.740 And so I objected repeatedly in faculty meetings, whenever that happened and said, well, why

00:08:53.380 don't we just say no, they want to increase our seminar size, you know, like double it,

00:08:57.940 let's say in for third years, that's not a seminar anymore.

00:09:01.140 Once you get to a certain point, we just say no, we're not doing that.

00:09:05.460 Why don't we just say no, we won't do that.

00:09:09.080 Well, then they won't give us what we want.

00:09:11.360 Well, they don't give you what you want anyways.

00:09:14.660 So like, what's to lose?

00:09:16.940 And but but so it was a thousand tiny retreats.

00:09:20.220 And then what happened after that was that the administration, having grown too top heavy,

00:09:26.000 was taken over by people within the administration, let's say who had this DEI philosophy, and they

00:09:33.400 couldn't say no to them.

00:09:35.680 So now, so when did the left go too far?

00:09:38.940 Well, it was micro retreats, continual cowardly micro retreats at the university level.

00:09:45.080 Now, sorry to be so long winded about this, but there was something more brutal underneath

00:09:49.800 all that philosophically, which I'm trying to lay out in the new book that I'm writing,

00:09:55.040 which is this postmodern problem.

00:09:57.300 And the postmodern problem really emerged in the 1960s with the simultaneously simultaneous

00:10:03.060 realization across a number of disciplines, that there's almost an infinite number of

00:10:08.300 ways of perceiving anything.

00:10:11.040 And I mean, literally perceiving.

00:10:12.580 So when you look at the world, you see these things you think are objects, and they're sort

00:10:16.180 of self evident.

00:10:16.900 But where an object begins and where it ends is much more difficult to compute than any

00:10:23.320 one ever realized, which is partly why we don't have, you know, robots wandering around

00:10:28.520 doing things like dishwashing, which turns out to be insanely complex.

00:10:32.100 And it also emerged in literary criticism, with the realization that, well, just as there

00:10:38.000 were an indefinite number of ways of looking at something, so actually acquiring the objective

00:10:43.480 facts of perception, there was an even more vaguely indefinable way of potentially interpreting

00:10:51.440 a text, or a canon of texts, let's say.

00:10:55.260 So how do we decide what's good and what's bad literature?

00:10:58.540 What's deep and what's shallow?

00:10:59.900 What's valid and invalid?

00:11:01.580 And the answer is, we don't know.

00:11:04.440 That's the answer.

00:11:05.940 But a premature answer was generated by social critics on the left.

00:11:11.840 And the premature answer was, well, all our categorize, all our categories, and the act

00:11:18.080 of categorization itself, serve the will to power.

00:11:23.040 And that's true to some degree, because we're all totalitarian and authoritarian and narcissistic

00:11:29.780 to some degree, we're also we also use deception to get what we want.

00:11:33.460 So we can corrupt our category structure.

00:11:35.820 But there's a huge difference between saying, well, we don't know the answer, but power may

00:11:42.700 play a role, and saying, the answer is that power always plays a role, and that's all there

00:11:47.800 is.

00:11:48.600 And that's what's happened on the left in the postmodern field.

00:11:51.920 And that sort of fit in nicely with the, you know, the idea that capitalism was essentially

00:11:56.840 oppressive, and that the patriarchal structure is essentially oppressive, etc, etc.

00:12:02.560 And it's an unbelievably corrosive and terrible philosophy.

00:12:11.020 So, well, the left went too far there to claim that nothing but the will to power governs

00:12:17.080 categorization, and the act of categorization, which is basically consciousness itself, that

00:12:22.180 act of categorization, that you could not possibly formulate a more cynical, malevolent, and

00:12:29.880 careless, destructive philosophy.

00:12:34.040 So.

00:12:36.660 See, what makes this, so you interpreted the question as a time question, temporal one,

00:12:42.280 when does the left go too far?

00:12:43.440 And I guess that's within that within when, and for me, what you also laid out, ideologically,

00:12:51.100 what it is that they believe that makes them go too far.

00:12:53.500 I don't like to use the word ideological.

00:12:55.460 We don't have to get into the, into the reasons there.

00:12:59.100 But for the sake of speaking right now, I'll just use that word.

00:13:02.140 Why?

00:13:02.960 When do they go too far ideologically?

00:13:04.740 See, some of the people I spoke to said the left goes too far when it comes to violence.

00:13:08.460 Well, there's something that leads to the violence, some idea.

00:13:12.480 Hmm.

00:13:13.020 And you also mentioned power.

00:13:15.380 Right.

00:13:15.420 That also doesn't distinguish the left going too far from the right going too far.

00:13:19.780 So, and, and it's not a really good answer because sometimes we think, sometimes we think

00:13:25.940 that violence is justified, like in self-defense and often political violence is, what would

00:13:32.860 you say, rationalized and sometimes perhaps even functions as self-defense.

00:13:38.080 And sometimes it's a rebellion against true oppression, in which case people on the left and the right

00:13:45.820 might regard violence, not only as necessary, but actually morally demanded, right?

00:13:51.520 Ethically demanded.

00:13:52.500 So the, the mere use of violence, and then of course, what constitutes violence, that's

00:13:57.480 the next problem with that.

00:13:59.500 It's, it's, it's too shallow an argument to really get to the core of things.

00:14:03.680 And one has to be extremely careful about what counts as self-defense, especially preemptive

00:14:09.420 self-defense, which is behind much of what they do.

00:14:13.160 They'll say that, well, we have to take action now against the right or the extreme right,

00:14:17.640 which pretty much everyone who was on the right, they would classify as being a part of the

00:14:21.400 alt right or alt light.

00:14:23.880 Yeah.

00:14:23.980 Well, that's a, that's another part.

00:14:25.400 Yeah, that's another, yeah, exactly.

00:14:27.740 Well, that's another part of this tit for tat process that we see, I think perhaps accelerating

00:14:32.700 it, particularly in the United States with the return of Trump, let's say to the political

00:14:37.320 arena.

00:14:37.860 And there's a tremendous amount of distrust, growing distrust on both sides of the political

00:14:42.580 spectrum driven.

00:14:44.940 Well, that's the question driven by what?

00:14:47.300 Certainly by the extreme views of a minority on both sides, laying out the exact causal process

00:14:53.780 is extremely difficult because these things, they're not unidirectional, unidirectionally

00:14:59.380 causal, right?

00:15:00.340 They're, they, they, they cause each causes the other, you know, I poke you, you poke me,

00:15:07.020 I slap you, you slap me a little harder.

00:15:09.060 I punch you, you punch me, you know, and, and then we, we have knives and we're at each

00:15:13.380 other's throats and we say, well, you know, who started it?

00:15:16.120 Well, maybe you said something insulting before I poked you, you know, who, but, but the, one

00:15:22.760 of the things of interest when observing something like that is the causal process that's involved

00:15:28.960 in the tit for tat return.

00:15:31.460 And I've been thinking about that a lot because I'm for a whole variety of reasons that I can't

00:15:37.060 go into.

00:15:37.520 But Jonathan Haidt also just wrote an article about positive feedback loop processes operating

00:15:44.360 at a very rapid scale on Facebook and Twitter and exacerbating this political positive feedback

00:15:51.160 loop, right?

00:15:51.880 A runaway positive feedback loop.

00:15:53.800 You know, you know, if you, if you're doing any recording and you bring your microphone

00:15:57.620 too close to the speaker that, that you're speaking through, you'll get this howl of feedback

00:16:02.860 and that can destroy the whole system, the whole recording system.

00:16:07.760 And that's a good example of how a positive feedback loop can get out of control.

00:16:11.960 And that's the real enemy.

00:16:14.020 Like if we're thinking meta politically, the real enemy is the possibility that mutual distrust

00:16:23.240 on both sides will accelerate our descent into a kind of melee.

00:16:29.960 And so the enemy isn't necessarily the catastrophic ideology of the left or the right, but the manner

00:16:38.540 in which extreme views can foster a spiral of violence that none of us know how to stop.

00:16:47.540 And it's stupid little things can trigger it.

00:16:49.720 Like one of my friends today sent me this article showing that I think it was in the Virginia

00:16:54.780 governor's race that four people use ticky lanterns and they were hypothetically marching

00:17:05.680 in support of the Republican candidate.

00:17:07.940 And so they were posing as members of the conspiratorial outright, but two of them were actually Democrat

00:17:13.320 operatives, political operatives trying to discredit the Republican campaign.

00:17:17.860 And that's so dangerous because they're basically acting out the proposition that it's Nazis,

00:17:22.700 you know, for all intents and purposes, fascists that are supporting the Republicans.

00:17:27.160 And to, that's such a terrible lie, right?

00:17:30.700 It's, it's such a terrible lie to, to act that out, to demonize your, your fellow citizens

00:17:37.240 that way.

00:17:37.840 It's unbelievably dangerous.

00:17:39.240 And we got to stop doing things like that, you know, and all of us have to stop doing

00:17:45.020 things like that.

00:17:47.180 Right.

00:17:47.900 That may be at the bottom of it, which you may, there's so many ways that this can be taken.

00:17:52.660 And I think that what, well, it's difficult to say what's at the bottom, but one of the predominant

00:17:58.620 factors may be personalized, personal lies, not personalized.

00:18:03.400 Yes.

00:18:03.800 I believe that.

00:18:04.740 I really do believe.

00:18:05.900 Why, why do you say that?

00:18:09.060 Right.

00:18:10.100 See, if you watch the film toward the fourth section, I believe I split it up into chapters

00:18:17.860 and then the fourth section, it becomes much more philosophical, which was one of the reasons

00:18:21.760 why I started it because I happen to like puzzles and philosophy.

00:18:24.500 It's one of the reasons I went into math.

00:18:26.140 I like abstract thinking.

00:18:27.340 And so I tried to make a case about lies and how lies spread.

00:18:31.860 Now there's one obvious route to take that with the memes.

00:18:34.560 So you talk about memes and how memes spread.

00:18:36.320 So you don't want to pollute that because that comes back to affect you.

00:18:39.520 If you care about yourself, first of all, so maybe you shouldn't care about yourself

00:18:43.560 so much as for, see something I was exploring and I'm not quite sure.

00:18:49.400 Is it possible to tell a lie without lying to yourself?

00:18:52.300 Now it seems on the face of it.

00:18:54.200 Yes.

00:18:54.620 All right.

00:18:54.880 Well, I don't think so.

00:18:56.000 Well, well, there is psychological evidence.

00:18:59.440 Well, there's psychological evidence, though, that you can't.

00:19:04.340 Well, here, let's dig into that a little bit.

00:19:06.720 So you tell a lie to yourself and you think, well, I know the difference.

00:19:10.260 It's like, well, don't be so sure about that.

00:19:13.800 So here's one experiment that's an example.

00:19:16.900 So imagine that I give a group of people a scale that measures their political belief

00:19:22.980 about a certain issue, maybe the reality of climate change or the unreality of climate

00:19:28.020 change, for that matter.

00:19:28.860 It doesn't matter.

00:19:29.400 And then I get those same people to write an essay of 500 words outlining the contrary position.

00:19:36.720 And they know they're just doing it because it's part of the experiment.

00:19:41.240 But then they come back a week later and I give them the same political belief scale.

00:19:44.600 And what's happened is their beliefs will have shifted substantially towards the side that

00:19:50.420 they argued for.

00:19:52.440 OK, so why?

00:19:54.240 Well, first of all, a lot of your so-called beliefs are really low resolution.

00:19:59.960 They're just heuristics.

00:20:01.360 They're like single pixel images.

00:20:03.600 You haven't thought it through very carefully.

00:20:06.280 Imagine maybe you know more than the average person because of your background.

00:20:09.500 But imagine how much you know about how a helicopter works.

00:20:11.920 You know, do you know what a helicopter is?

00:20:14.320 Yes.

00:20:14.860 No, you don't.

00:20:16.220 If you had to draw one, it would look like a four-year-old drew it.

00:20:19.440 You know, you know what it you can identify the shape in two dimensions.

00:20:23.180 You know, it flies.

00:20:24.380 That's about it.

00:20:25.200 You couldn't fix one.

00:20:26.180 You certainly couldn't build one.

00:20:28.080 So in a real sense, you don't know anything about a helicopter, except what you need as

00:20:32.780 someone who's never around helicopters to know.

00:20:35.880 And and most things are way more complicated than helicopters, even though they're plenty

00:20:39.940 complicated.

00:20:40.560 And so you think that you know something when you think you know it, but then you detail

00:20:46.600 out a counter argument.

00:20:48.360 And it turns out that you've provided more detail in the counter argument that you had

00:20:52.520 in your argument to begin with.

00:20:54.580 And so that shifts your cognition towards what you argued for.

00:20:59.120 Well, if you think that doesn't happen to you when you're lying, well, you're you don't

00:21:02.860 know anything about how you work.

00:21:04.340 And then the other thing is, well, virtually no one thinks that lying is acceptable morally

00:21:11.520 when it comes right down to it.

00:21:12.900 There might be specific exceptions to that now and then.

00:21:15.880 And so if you lie, you're going to tilt what you believe towards the lie, because that will

00:21:21.100 lighten the ethical load that you carry.

00:21:24.640 It'll reduce cognitive dissonance.

00:21:26.420 That's one way of terming it.

00:21:28.420 And so and then you can't keep track of your lies.

00:21:31.560 And so that's a big problem.

00:21:32.880 And they tangle up your thoughts.

00:21:34.360 And then also, let's say a whole bunch of people really like your lie.

00:21:37.460 Well, then, you know, most of us, all of us thrive on attention.

00:21:45.660 I mean, children will misbehave to get attention, even if it's negative attention, if they can't

00:21:49.860 get it any other way.

00:21:51.680 And so you lie and you put it out on Twitter and, you know, 10,000 people like it.

00:21:57.780 And then you think, well, wait a sec.

00:22:00.020 Probably I believe that because look at how positively it was received.

00:22:03.160 And some of that's actually socially positive, right?

00:22:06.320 I mean, if you say something, a lot of people respond to it positively, that might be a good

00:22:11.620 reason for you to think that way a bit more, right?

00:22:14.320 Because the fact that you want social approval isn't only an index of your cowardice.

00:22:19.060 It's also an index of your desire to be productive and to fit in and to have people like you and

00:22:24.180 all of that.

00:22:25.740 And so lies, they just warp things to a tremendous degree.

00:22:31.180 And if you think you're smart enough to keep your lies separate from your truth, and then

00:22:35.160 one final issue is, well, let's say you lie 20% of the time.

00:22:41.680 Well, doesn't that mean that you're practicing to become 20% a liar?

00:22:47.520 And don't you think you're getting better at that?

00:22:50.020 You become what you practice.

00:22:52.600 And then don't you think that'll interfere with your ability to distinguish between what

00:22:58.100 you think and what you don't think, first of all, and also your ability to tell the

00:23:02.420 difference between truth and falsehood.

00:23:05.160 And so, and don't you think it'll make you cynical about the nature of humankind to observe

00:23:09.780 yourself lying?

00:23:10.860 You're certainly going to think other people do it, at least as much as you.

00:23:14.320 And if they're bad people, they do it way more.

00:23:17.200 It's just a rat's nest.

00:23:18.880 And, you know, I became convinced a long time ago, looking at the totalitarian problem on

00:23:24.040 the left and the right, that the most effective way to deal with this fundamentally was psychological,

00:23:28.900 and that what we need to do, all of us, is to stop lying, each of us, in our own lives.

00:23:35.240 That's the solution.

00:23:36.660 We have to stop.

00:23:37.660 And that partly, that's because we're so damn powerful now.

00:23:40.220 I mean, how many people have watched your podcasts, do you think?

00:23:43.420 There, in terms of views now, obviously, that's a, there are multiple views for one video.

00:23:52.500 Millions, almost seven or so, seven or eight million.

00:23:56.620 Okay, so how powerful might your lies be?

00:24:00.320 Right.

00:24:01.880 Right?

00:24:02.520 And I mean, each of those million people is connected to a thousand other people.

00:24:06.940 So that's a billion people that you're two steps away from, at least.

00:24:11.780 Right.

00:24:13.420 So you said, sorry, you said 7 million people.

00:24:15.880 So it's 7 billion people.

00:24:17.440 You know, I mean, obviously, those circles are going to overlap, but you get my point.

00:24:23.380 Yeah.

00:24:23.860 What I would object to is that you said most people would agree that telling lies is deleterious

00:24:30.020 in some manner.

00:24:30.800 Now, I'd say that they say that they profess it, but they don't truly believe it.

00:24:34.840 And the reason that may, in fact, be what unifies the extremes.

00:24:40.440 I'll tell, I'll give you, I'll give you an example.

00:24:44.240 Sure.

00:24:44.720 If you ask someone, I think that if you were to ask someone, is it okay to lie for the

00:24:49.460 greater good?

00:24:50.500 They would say, well, the majority of those people on the extremes would say yes.

00:24:55.060 And then I wonder, well, perhaps that's an indication that you're on the extreme.

00:24:59.040 Perhaps if you have a worldview, I talk about this concept called Veltan Shaung.

00:25:03.280 That's a good idea, man.

00:25:04.900 Yeah.

00:25:05.140 Perhaps if you have a Veltan Shaung that says that there is no, that somehow there is no

00:25:12.020 greater, somehow you can't tell a lie and be for the greater good because the truth and

00:25:17.080 the good are tied.

00:25:17.900 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:25:20.200 So that's a really smart idea.

00:25:22.100 The idea that if you have a belief system politically that requires any lies to support,

00:25:29.360 then that's an indication that you've gone too far.

00:25:32.680 I think that's a good rule of thumb.

00:25:35.500 Right.

00:25:37.300 And what else is, as you mentioned, it's pestiferous because it's poisonous, is that they'll say

00:25:44.940 power is one of the...

00:25:46.500 Well, they'll say power is the predominant, perhaps only factor that underlies our social

00:25:51.760 interactions and even truth claims and so on.

00:25:54.580 Well, the issue with that is that it's partly true.

00:25:59.840 And the reason is, see this cup here, this cup comprises many elements.

00:26:05.440 There's an element of power in this cup.

00:26:07.480 There's an element of art as well, by the way, there's an element of physics.

00:26:10.320 You can look at it mathematically.

00:26:11.700 You can look at it through an engineering lens.

00:26:13.720 You can look at it through an architectural lens.

00:26:15.400 Yeah, well, the power is, the power in the cup is, for example, that you own it.

00:26:19.680 It's your cup, right?

00:26:21.560 And so it's embedded within a hierarchy.

00:26:23.840 Now, so your claim is exactly right.

00:26:27.160 But there's a huge difference between claiming that it's useful to investigate the role that

00:26:33.640 arbitrary expression of power plays in conceptual systems, which is a perfectly reasonable thing

00:26:39.320 to say, and the premature answer that the solution to the problem of perception,

00:26:45.400 is will to power and nothing else.

00:26:47.780 And so I've been talking to some evolutionary biologists about that.

00:26:51.140 I talked to Robert Trivers this week.

00:26:53.040 He's getting old, and it was interesting to talk to him.

00:26:55.960 But we talked about psychopaths.

00:26:59.400 Okay, so let's wander down that path just for a minute.

00:27:02.640 So imagine that the patriarchal structure is predicated on nothing but power.

00:27:06.620 Okay, and then imagine that psychopaths are particularly cunning uses of power, users of power.

00:27:14.520 Okay, so then to the degree that the social system is an expression of power, you'd expect

00:27:19.240 psychopaths to be radically successful.

00:27:21.400 But they, in human population...

00:27:26.520 Temporarily successful.

00:27:27.740 Well, they're also, they also never exceed, they, their numbers vary between one and five

00:27:33.360 percent in the population, never gets higher than three is really the upper limit, but it

00:27:37.500 can get up to five.

00:27:38.860 So they're not that successful because 97% of people aren't psychopaths.

00:27:44.400 So, it, it, just that fact alone indicates that there's something wrong with the power claim.

00:27:53.540 Now, you might say, well, psychopaths aren't very good at utilizing power.

00:27:57.040 It's like, no, no, wait a minute.

00:27:58.700 Actually, psychopaths are better at utilizing pure power, stripped completely of empathy,

00:28:05.120 than anyone else by definition.

00:28:09.020 So they are literally the power users who lack compassion.

00:28:14.400 So, why aren't they radically successful in human populations?

00:28:19.320 And the answer to that is, well, because our hierarchies are not fundamentally built on

00:28:24.000 power, and our concepts and, and perceptions aren't fundamentally a consequence of power

00:28:30.020 or it's misuse.

00:28:31.020 Now, that doesn't mean that our perceptions and our social structures can't be, and our

00:28:36.680 intimate relationships, our relationships with ourselves, for that matter, can't become

00:28:40.740 contaminated by the excess desire for power, and by the deceit that might be employed, let's

00:28:48.160 say, in its service.

00:28:49.200 That, obviously, that happens, and we have to keep our eyes open all the time about that.

00:28:54.900 But the central claim is, not only is it unbelievably cynical and destructive, and also extremely

00:29:03.340 helpful if you want to demonize your enemies, you know, because if I believe that the entire

00:29:08.040 basis of your perceptual structure is will to power, and so is mine, let's say, well, I

00:29:15.140 don't, if you don't believe the same things I do, so if you're trying to elevate yourself

00:29:21.340 in a different hierarchy, or you're trying to produce a different hierarchy altogether,

00:29:25.060 we have nothing in common except our enmity.

00:29:30.680 Because there's no ground outside what you're striving for and what I'm striving for selfishly,

00:29:35.560 where we can meet as reasonable people and have a, you know, soul-to-soul discussion.

00:29:41.160 That's not even technically possible within that frame, within that scheme.

00:29:45.740 And so that means that if you and I are enemies, well, what am I supposed to do with you?

00:29:50.620 Because all you are is will to power.

00:29:53.160 I can't trust you.

00:29:54.760 I can't reason with you.

00:29:55.940 Reason doesn't even exist.

00:29:57.420 You know, you see echoes of that in the claims that rational discussion or something like that

00:30:02.620 is, you know, especially the dialectical forms, is somehow a construction of white supremacy,

00:30:08.860 you know, implicit in our social structures.

00:30:12.660 It's so, it's so shallow, that idea.

00:30:16.120 And the idea that our virtues, first of all, that there aren't any virtues, but even if there

00:30:20.660 are, they're only derivable from power hierarchy structures.

00:30:24.740 God, that's so cynical and so destructive and so dangerous.

00:30:29.920 And imagine just living with that notion that that's what motivates everyone is nothing but

00:30:35.760 like an untrammeled will to authoritarian power.

00:30:39.700 God, that's hell, man.

00:30:43.520 Yeah.

00:30:44.100 You mentioned the word use multiple times.

00:30:46.560 And that is one of the reasons why I try to analyze it more philosophically toward the

00:30:50.320 end, because I don't think that this is, see, some people would say what we need is dialogue.

00:30:54.820 You'll see, you'll hear this many of the times it would come from people who are on the

00:30:58.860 center, center, right, center, left.

00:31:00.400 We'll say, we just need to speak to each other more.

00:31:02.200 But I think what comes before, what comes prior to speaking is, we need to value the

00:31:06.840 same, we need to be oriented in the same direction.

00:31:12.120 Yeah, well, that's, again, what this new book that I'm writing is about, you know, because

00:31:16.180 there has to be a, there has to be an initial framework, as you said, that makes even the

00:31:22.820 possibility of dialogue a reality.

00:31:25.380 So it's got to be something, look, look what we're doing right now, you and me, hopefully

00:31:28.800 this is what we're doing, right, is like, you know, some things, and I know, yeah, that's

00:31:33.380 right, man, hopefully, and let's bloody well pray that we are smart enough and wise enough

00:31:37.580 and careful enough to do it, right?

00:31:39.860 So it's not easy.

00:31:42.060 You come to this discussion, thinking maybe you don't know everything, and that I might

00:31:47.540 have something to say that would be useful and interesting to you that that might actually

00:31:51.760 be crucial to you.

00:31:52.660 And I come to this dialogue, hoping for the same from you, right?

00:31:56.120 So first of all, we both come to the degree, we're doing this properly, in an attitude of

00:32:01.300 humility, I want to hear from you.

00:32:05.100 And, you know, I tend to be kind of dominant in conversations, and I talk too much.

00:32:09.300 And so that probably interferes with it to some degree, but I really do try to listen.

00:32:12.880 And I really do hope that when I talk to someone, that's partly why I do the podcast is that

00:32:17.800 they'll tell me something that someone as stupid and potentially malevolent as me might

00:32:22.960 really need to know.

00:32:24.760 And so if I listen real carefully, maybe they won't even know what it is that I need to know

00:32:30.160 that they know.

00:32:30.880 But if I listen very carefully, I can kind of call it out of them, and then I can use

00:32:34.300 that information to correct myself so I don't do something catastrophically stupid in the

00:32:39.340 future and hurt myself and the people I love.

00:32:41.500 And so you have to have this presumption of this presumption of ignorance, and the belief

00:32:49.300 that the person across from you, particularly if they differ from you, might have something

00:32:54.960 useful to say, because they're different from you, they know things that aren't that you

00:32:58.840 don't know.

00:32:59.460 So isn't it so good that they're different?

00:33:01.360 And then you have to believe that men of goodwill exist, let's say, and that they can exchange

00:33:08.080 information that's mutually corrective, and both can walk away better.

00:33:13.740 And that's something like faith.

00:33:15.380 It's faith.

00:33:15.940 Well, I think it's equivalent.

00:33:17.100 I think it's equivalent to in the Christian sphere.

00:33:19.920 It's equivalent to the faith in logos.

00:33:22.320 It's the same thing.

00:33:25.560 And logos is a very complicated concept.

00:33:29.640 One of the reasons, and I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but one of the reasons

00:33:33.920 this theories of everything podcast has taken off the way that it has, is partly because

00:33:40.220 I'm not averse to this ambiguous, contradictory thinking when it comes to metaphysical issues,

00:33:46.400 like whether or not there exists to God, and to speak in terms of religious terms, most

00:33:50.560 scientists are, as you know, and as I know, most scientists are, they find that to be anathema.

00:33:57.480 And I don't...

00:33:58.420 Yeah, I'm going to talk to Richard Dawkins.

00:34:00.540 Oh, well, that's wonderful.

00:34:01.460 Yeah, I saw your conversation with Lawrence Krauss, and I was, well, I have my...

00:34:06.540 Yeah, I did another one with Harris, too, just a week and a half ago, and it went real

00:34:09.520 well.

00:34:10.060 I figured out how to talk to Sam better than I have before.

00:34:14.040 I just asked, mostly, I just asked him questions, and that's really useful to just ask questions

00:34:19.200 rather than...

00:34:19.940 Because I think I went sideways to some degree in my discussions with Sam, which I don't

00:34:24.080 usually do.

00:34:25.420 I was trying to prove something.

00:34:27.680 Sideways.

00:34:28.080 Well, well, like I said, I was trying to prove something instead of listening and asking

00:34:35.060 questions.

00:34:36.140 And I should...

00:34:37.160 It would have been better had I not tried to do that and just tried harder and harder

00:34:40.940 to understand what it was that he thought.

00:34:44.440 Because, you know, the more we talked, the more we found, like, real major points of agreement.

00:34:49.920 You know, like, Sam is oriented to a great degree, he's very much concerned about the

00:34:56.340 human tendency for atrocity and malevolence.

00:35:00.820 That drives him, that terror of that.

00:35:04.120 And that's, I would say, that's my fundamental driver.

00:35:06.980 I hope it is, at least.

00:35:08.780 And so that's something that really unites us.

00:35:11.480 And he's hoping that he can find, you know, a genuine morality.

00:35:16.500 Now, he believes he can find it in scientific inquiry, and I don't think that's true.

00:35:20.820 But whatever, he might be right.

00:35:22.900 And it's not like I don't think science can inform our moral choices, and maybe has to.

00:35:28.020 But, you know, when I came out on the public sphere and first talked to Sam, I had this

00:35:33.120 sort of axe to grind in some sense, which was my belief that the fundamental framework

00:35:38.520 from within which we see the world isn't and can't be objective.

00:35:42.820 And I still believe that's true, but I was hammering it home because I wanted to win

00:35:47.580 that argument.

00:35:48.720 And that was the most sophisticated way of going about it.

00:35:52.540 Well, less and less, I think, as we talked.

00:35:56.480 So, and this time, I didn't do that at all.

00:35:58.820 I just asked him questions, and we definitely had the best conversation we've ever had.

00:36:03.020 So, and I'm really hoping to do that with Dawkins.

00:36:05.380 It's like, I don't want to win an argument.

00:36:07.220 I don't want to have an argument.

00:36:08.200 I want to ask him questions.

00:36:09.720 I want to find out what he thinks, because Dawkins is no fool.

00:36:12.360 And his atheistic materialism grounded in his evolutionary thinking, like, that's powerful.

00:36:20.080 You know, it's a powerful system of thought, and he's a master of it.

00:36:23.740 And so I want to find out what led him to the conclusions that he came to.

00:36:28.040 And I have questions for him.

00:36:29.660 You know, I want to talk to him, for example, about the instinct to imitate, because you

00:36:33.820 were talking earlier about something that unites us, you know?

00:36:36.640 So imagine this, for example.

00:36:40.720 You know that the same person can be admired by a lot of different people, even people who

00:36:47.560 differ in their political beliefs.

00:36:49.780 And that admiration sort of captures them.

00:36:53.120 That's charisma.

00:36:54.020 That's part of charisma.

00:36:55.860 The charisma is part of an instinct, right?

00:36:57.700 Because if I think you're charismatic, then I'm going to watch you more.

00:37:01.860 My eyes are going to point to you more.

00:37:03.480 I'm going to be more likely to do the things you do.

00:37:06.200 I'm more likely to imitate you.

00:37:08.680 And so I would say there's something like a central spirit that we're all driven to imitate.

00:37:14.580 And it's the thing that we see as admirable across people.

00:37:17.960 And that points to something that we experience as religious.

00:37:23.420 So like the ultimate expression of that, which is that, which compels imitation is indistinguishable

00:37:32.300 from religious worship.

00:37:34.240 It's not propositional.

00:37:37.180 Yeah.

00:37:38.000 Well, that's a Verveckian argument.

00:37:40.840 Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

00:37:42.780 Well, and Vervecki is one of the people who's thought this sort of thing through in most

00:37:48.140 detail.

00:37:49.340 Jonathan Paggio as well.

00:37:50.640 And I know you had him.

00:37:51.740 Did he make the cut of your film?

00:37:54.040 Yeah.

00:37:54.300 And the director's cut.

00:37:55.900 So just for people who are watching, if you'd like to watch the film, it's best to go to

00:38:00.360 betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there, instead of iTunes and YouTube and so on,

00:38:05.140 which you can also get it from if you'd like, if that's easier, but you can go to the URL

00:38:08.880 betterleftunsaidfilm.com because over there for the same price,

00:38:12.720 you get access to the director's cut, which has Jonathan Paggio.

00:38:15.500 And I'm sure the listeners, the watchers of this are fans of Jonathan.

00:38:21.600 Yeah.

00:38:22.100 Well, I think Paggio is super smart, man.

00:38:24.280 He's deep.

00:38:24.900 And the same with Vervecki.

00:38:26.060 Those two, they've taken certain forms of thought farther than anybody I've ever met.

00:38:31.940 Vervecki is so well read.

00:38:34.500 It's terrifying.

00:38:35.400 And Paggio is this weird character because he really understands postmodern thinking.

00:38:41.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:43.960 Well, you see, well, that's part of having an artistic temperament too.

00:38:47.500 You know, people like that who are more open in trait terms, they can, they can see patterns

00:38:53.020 in things.

00:38:54.080 Now that can lead them astray because you can, you can project patterns into, you know, the

00:39:00.520 void, let's say that aren't there.

00:39:02.600 That's conspiratorial thinking, for example.

00:39:04.720 But intuitive people who are also capable of critical thinking, pick up patterns long

00:39:11.340 before anyone else does.

00:39:13.100 I've had graduate students like that, you know, they would leap to a scientific conclusion

00:39:17.560 that was dead on multiple times.

00:39:20.580 And then they, when they were writing their papers, they'd have to fill in how they got

00:39:25.440 there.

00:39:25.880 Well, that wasn't how they got there.

00:39:27.160 They leaped from mountaintop to mountaintop using Nietzsche's terminology.

00:39:30.420 And they could see patterns and then they, they had to construct a rational story to

00:39:36.180 publish their ideas in scientific journals.

00:39:38.680 It's so funny because it's a form of falsification, right?

00:39:41.160 That isn't how they got there.

00:39:42.540 But, but that's, so that's one of the questions I want to ask Dawkins is like, well, what about

00:39:47.480 this instinct to imitate?

00:39:49.600 Do you think such a thing exists?

00:39:51.840 You know, because I don't believe he's a blank slate theorist.

00:39:54.980 And we're really good at abstracting out things to imitate.

00:39:59.440 And so I started thinking about this, for example, when I was watching my kids play house.

00:40:04.640 So my son would act out the father, you know, he'd be the father, but he wasn't imitating

00:40:09.920 me exactly.

00:40:10.700 He wasn't mimicking the exact gestures of my body, right?

00:40:15.520 Like I do this while I'm imitating you right now.

00:40:18.140 But if I was a comedian and I want to parody you, I would imitate your spirit in some sense,

00:40:24.940 right?

00:40:25.300 And then put a twist in it and everyone would laugh so I can abstract out from you your

00:40:30.260 pattern.

00:40:31.180 Well, then imagine we're way better at it than that.

00:40:33.920 Like if I watched 10 admirable men and was gripped by my admiration for them, let's say

00:40:39.940 I was fortunate enough to have 10 admirable men in my family.

00:40:42.660 I could abstract out the central spirit that makes them all admirable and I could imitate

00:40:47.560 that.

00:40:48.900 So what occurs when you keep doing that over and over?

00:40:51.380 That's exactly right.

00:40:52.360 Across generations.

00:40:53.320 And so now partly what occurs is the imagination formulates the representation of the abstraction.

00:41:00.640 So I'll give you an example.

00:41:02.180 So if you look and you often see this in Byzantine cathedral.

00:41:05.460 So you look up in a Byzantine cathedral, it's a dome.

00:41:08.580 So that's the sky.

00:41:10.020 And maybe you'll see an image of Christ up there as Panto creator, right?

00:41:14.580 Creator of the world.

00:41:15.520 And this is sort of tied with the idea that consciousness gives rise to reality.

00:41:19.480 It's it's so it's an idealistic philosophy or experience.

00:41:23.720 Well, the idea is something like that the thing to be admired, it's the central phenomena

00:41:32.200 and function of consciousness, and in some sense, it gives rise to to the reality that

00:41:38.000 it is good, that is good itself.

00:41:41.140 And the imagination gets there way before the propositional philosophers, way before the

00:41:47.320 artists and the religious dreamers.

00:41:49.580 You made an argument that that is partly at least what is a religious phenomenon.

00:41:54.520 Now, do you think that's only it?

00:41:55.660 No, I have another definition that I'm working out.

00:42:01.180 Okay, so it's these are things I'm going to talk about when I go to Cambridge, because

00:42:05.660 I'm going there to Oxford and Cambridge at the end of November.

00:42:08.280 And in any case, so I'm also really interested in the idea of depth.

00:42:14.020 So we all have an intuition of depth, DEPTH, like philosophical depth or literary depth or

00:42:20.860 the depth of a conversation.

00:42:23.200 You know, and if you have a deep conversation, you know, you're talking about weighty, serious,

00:42:28.920 yeah, fundamental things.

00:42:30.780 Okay, well, I have a technical definition for that.

00:42:35.400 We have a hierarchy of beliefs.

00:42:39.420 Okay, some beliefs have more beliefs dependent on them than others.

00:42:44.540 The more beliefs that are dependent on a given belief, the deeper that belief is.

00:42:50.080 The deepest of those beliefs, we hold sacred by definition, by definition, our deepest beliefs

00:42:59.520 are sacred, they're primary.

00:43:01.780 And you can tell that in part, because if they're challenged, you get unbelievably upset.

00:43:07.400 And the reason you get upset is because, well, you're not just destabilizing that belief,

00:43:11.660 you're destabilizing all the beliefs that depend on it.

00:43:14.700 And so one sacred belief in a marriage is sexual fidelity, let's say, faithfulness, right?

00:43:23.380 And you kind of take that on faith because, well, it's on faith that you think that's valuable

00:43:28.100 in part, but it's also on faith that your partner is manifesting that.

00:43:33.100 Because, you know, all you have to do is get paranoid, and then you can accumulate evidence

00:43:40.780 that your partner isn't trustworthy, and no one's perfectly trustworthy.

00:43:44.540 So you could see how, right, exactly.

00:43:47.080 So, but it's a fundamental belief.

00:43:49.320 And then if you find out that your partner's betrayed you, well, then the whole house of cards,

00:43:53.380 perhaps not the whole house of cards, but a lot of the cards come tumbling down.

00:43:57.040 You know, the past is no longer what you thought it was.

00:44:01.820 Your whole faith in humanity itself might be compromised, including your faith in yourself.

00:44:07.300 Like, it can really, it's a dagger in the depths, especially if you really loved the person

00:44:13.660 and really trusted them.

00:44:15.720 So, so the more sacred a belief is, the deeper it is embedded in this, in this structure of

00:44:21.700 beliefs.

00:44:21.960 And I don't believe those are objective beliefs.

00:44:23.980 That's another thing I want to talk to Dawkins about.

00:44:25.700 I do not think the scientific evidence suggests that our perceptions, that what we perceive

00:44:33.260 are material objects that are self-evident, that we then derive our conceptual systems

00:44:39.360 from.

00:44:39.680 I don't think there's any evidence for that.

00:44:41.860 I think it's wrong, and it's been proven wrong.

00:44:46.040 So, you know, that's some of the places I want to go.

00:44:48.920 Yeah.

00:44:49.420 Tell me what you think of this.

00:44:50.520 Now, I've only thought about this recently.

00:44:51.940 I think when atheists call the religious dogmatic, what they truly mean is that you're pantheistic

00:44:59.280 for low-level gods.

00:45:00.960 What I mean is, what you've outlined is something like this.

00:45:04.280 So let's say you have a hierarchy, and hopefully it's monotheistic in the sense that you're

00:45:07.620 integrated, which no one is.

00:45:09.180 But hopefully it's, you're pointing to one god, one source of good.

00:45:12.340 Okay.

00:45:12.600 Then you're like, well, what makes me good?

00:45:14.080 And you keep going down and down and down until you get to extremely micro-level actions,

00:45:18.340 such as type this email.

00:45:20.840 I'm typing this email.

00:45:21.600 Why?

00:45:21.900 So that I can get an approval for someone for an interview.

00:45:23.880 Why?

00:45:24.140 So that I can talk, and hopefully so on and so on and so on.

00:45:27.220 And I think, I think you've outlined, I'm pretty sure it was you, that it depends on

00:45:32.060 so which level there's the disruption that is proportional to the anxiety that you experience.

00:45:37.480 Okay.

00:45:38.020 That's exactly right.

00:45:38.880 Yeah.

00:45:38.980 So then.

00:45:39.360 I think we know the neurophysiology of that even.

00:45:42.700 Okay.

00:45:43.260 So then when someone like Sam Harris calls someone else dogmatic, essentially what they

00:45:49.780 mean is that, why are you getting upset at this level?

00:45:52.640 Why are you holding this to be sacred?

00:45:54.940 So here's another example to people who are fundamental in their religious views.

00:45:59.540 So they believe it's literal.

00:46:00.640 What's in the Bible is literal.

00:46:01.840 Something I think about is, and even people who think the Bible is entirely metaphorical.

00:46:06.080 If I say, well, what if, let's imagine I'm speaking to a fundamentalist.

00:46:09.680 If I say, what if this aspect of the Bible is not meant to be literal, it's metaphorical.

00:46:13.880 They get upset.

00:46:15.260 Why do you get upset?

00:46:16.400 Why is your belief in God contingent?

00:46:18.780 Should your belief in God be contingent or should you have faith no matter what?

00:46:23.280 Okay.

00:46:23.500 So then they would say, well, well, so why does that undermine your belief?

00:46:27.080 To me, faith should be, well, it shouldn't be so easily undermined.

00:46:31.880 And so in some sense, it's as if they're saying, here is my God, instead of at the top level.

00:46:37.220 Well, here, what?

00:46:37.880 Oh yeah, they are.

00:46:38.640 Well here.

00:46:39.080 Okay.

00:46:39.540 Well, so let's dig into that a little bit.

00:46:41.000 That's a very good observation.

00:46:42.380 Well, one of their unrecognized gods is literal.

00:46:47.320 The phrase itself, because literal means real and it means ultimately real, but literal doesn't

00:46:56.600 mean real or ultimately real necessarily.

00:47:00.320 Like literal is really like, what does a Dostoevsky novel literally mean?

00:47:06.820 Well, nothing.

00:47:07.880 Well, none of it's true.

00:47:09.820 It didn't happen or did it, or did it really happen like at a meta level?

00:47:16.240 Well, that's where great novels happen is at a meta level.

00:47:18.820 So truth is complicated.

00:47:20.580 And this is see.

00:47:22.000 So the fundamentalists, they're, they're tripped up philosophically to some degree because

00:47:26.240 they, they, they can't see how something can be, oh my God, it's so complicated.

00:47:32.440 This is where Sam Harris and I kept going off on, you know, different tangents.

00:47:36.200 They don't know what they mean when they say literal, they equate literal with real, they

00:47:43.720 equate real with material real, like, and so when you go after that and you say, well,

00:47:49.400 it's not literally true, what you're saying, what you're essentially saying is that while

00:47:53.840 your whole belief system is predicated on a misapprehension, even about the nature of

00:47:59.700 God, let's say, I mean, you know, most religious traditions, many religious traditions insist

00:48:05.020 that representing God in a concrete manner is actually an error.

00:48:11.720 The Taoists are not very happy with that idea.

00:48:15.000 The Muslims certainly aren't.

00:48:16.800 The Orthodox Christians really don't, many of them really don't like to represent God,

00:48:20.740 the father in their iconography.

00:48:22.740 And part of the reason for that is that you shouldn't concretize the absolute.

00:48:28.020 It's dangerous.

00:48:29.180 Now it's a problem because if you don't concretize it, you can't act it out.

00:48:32.480 So there's a tension, but you know, when people say, people ask me if I believe in God, and

00:48:38.400 I always think, well, there's a whole bunch of assumptions in that question that you want

00:48:41.660 me to swallow so that you can categorize my answer according to your preexistent schemas.

00:48:46.160 And that isn't an answer they like, but it's an equation, right?

00:48:51.420 Is God real?

00:48:53.240 God real?

00:48:54.100 Well, what do you mean by real?

00:48:55.840 Well, you know what I mean?

00:48:56.980 No, I don't.

00:48:57.800 No.

00:48:58.080 Do you mean real like a table?

00:48:59.600 Well, I don't think they know what they mean by real.

00:49:01.480 They don't know.

00:49:02.940 They just think they know.

00:49:04.000 It's just like the helicopter issue.

00:49:05.880 It's like, do you mean the table?

00:49:07.580 Do you mean the table you know?

00:49:08.840 Do you mean your table?

00:49:10.780 Do you mean tables in general as real?

00:49:13.580 Do they have to have four legs?

00:49:14.880 Do they have to have a hard top?

00:49:16.920 Like, what are we talking about when we mean real?

00:49:19.340 Do we mean objectively real like a table?

00:49:21.340 Well, God isn't like a table.

00:49:23.140 Well, then he isn't real.

00:49:26.480 It's like, okay, well, have it your way, if that's as far as your thinking goes.

00:49:30.940 But I don't even think that sophisticated religious people, whether they know it or not,

00:49:36.740 don't think that God is real like a table.

00:49:42.060 And as you already pointed out with your discussion about your cup,

00:49:45.760 even what exactly constitutes a table is subject to great.

00:49:52.120 It's not obvious.

00:49:52.980 Look, one of the most impressive thinkers I ever encountered in the field of perception

00:50:01.140 wrote this book called An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

00:50:05.640 And he would say that a table is a, I always forget his name.

00:50:11.960 It's an ecological approach to visual perception.

00:50:13.980 Gibson, yes, yes.

00:50:14.980 Okay, so when you see a table, do you see a flat surface with four legs?

00:50:22.100 Or do you see a sitting down to eat place?

00:50:27.060 And the answer is you see a sitting down to eat place,

00:50:30.660 and there are objects that slot into that category.

00:50:34.500 That's the answer.

00:50:35.540 It's not the other way around.

00:50:36.740 You don't see the material object, which is self-evident, and infer the function.

00:50:41.340 Now, it may be a combination of those two things as well.

00:50:44.380 But it doesn't matter.

00:50:45.800 The functional element of it has a certain perceptual primacy.

00:50:50.520 And I'll give you a kind of a nifty example of this.

00:50:54.060 There is a neurological condition called utilization behavior, which accompanies prefrontal damage.

00:51:00.580 And if someone has manifest utilization behavior, if you give them an object, they can't not use it.

00:51:08.820 So, because what's happened is when they see a cup, they'll lift it up and drink from it.

00:51:14.980 Because a cup is a lifting up and drinking thing, perceptually.

00:51:19.640 It grips their motor output.

00:51:22.100 They can't inhibit it.

00:51:23.100 So, but the fact that they have to inhibit it shows how low level the functional perception is.

00:51:29.440 Right?

00:51:30.160 And so, and that's part of what I was trying to lay out with Harris is that, you know,

00:51:37.020 the idea that the most real is the objective doesn't seem to be true for our perceptions.

00:51:45.320 And then that tangles us up scientifically, right?

00:51:48.340 Because if our perceptions evolved and we evolved to adapt to reality and we don't see objects

00:51:57.640 as the fundamental perceptual reality, then what does that say about reality?

00:52:03.640 And that's not, the answer to that question is not bloody obvious.

00:52:08.140 Well, that's another question I hope that I can get to with, with Dawkins, you know,

00:52:13.660 and maybe he knows something that I don't.

00:52:15.780 God, I hope so.

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00:55:03.100 Yeah, see, I want to make the claim that it sounds then, and I believe you've made this claim, perhaps even Vervecki, that the longer something has persisted evolutionarily, the most quote-unquote real it is.

00:55:17.120 However, however, then one would be acting as if there's something external that we're trying to map out.

00:55:23.900 And then the closer we are to that, the closer our map is to that reality.

00:55:27.680 Of course, we're not trying to mistake the map and the territory.

00:55:30.920 Well, whether or not material objects exist, patterns exist, right?

00:55:37.760 And it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are.

00:55:41.740 Like it looks to me, and you can talk about archetypes in this wise, I would say to some degree, trees have been around a long time.

00:55:50.640 And the tree structure is pretty embedded in our perceptual systems.

00:55:55.660 And so there is a relationship between how long something has been around in our environment and how deep that is within our perceptual structures.

00:56:08.360 You know, like we assume a difference between up and down, for example.

00:56:13.240 That's really built into us, and it's at the basis of a lot of our metaphors.

00:56:17.560 Up is, you know, high, up is the sky, up is elevated, up is the mountaintop, up is the sage, up is God.

00:56:27.780 Well, that's partly because we're up and down creatures, because there's gravity, and there's the ground, and we're stuck to the ground.

00:56:33.260 And the ground is base, and it's material, and it's dirty, and the sky is pure, and et cetera, et cetera.

00:56:39.980 A lot of our metaphorical architecture is predicated on these underlying presumptions.

00:56:45.940 And they do have a depth, and that's also partly why the biological question in relationship to ethics becomes complex, too.

00:56:53.520 Because some of these adaptations to permanent patterns are biological fundamentals, right?

00:57:03.640 And so, and if utilization is part of that, then evolution, oh God, what would you say?

00:57:12.260 Persistent patterns that we've encountered over our evolutionary history have shaped the axioms of our ethics.

00:57:21.060 It's complicated, man, like all this stuff is.

00:57:23.460 But, okay, so where I was going, well, you said quite a, you said quite, quite a significant amount.

00:57:33.140 Let me see.

00:57:39.920 Okay, so I'll just go down one route.

00:57:42.080 I don't know if you're aware of Donald Hoffman.

00:57:46.160 The name doesn't ring a bell.

00:57:47.600 Okay, so Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who makes the claim that what we see is not reality.

00:57:54.500 It almost certainly cannot be.

00:57:56.940 And the reason is that the amount of ways that reality could be versus the amount of ways you could perceive, there's a, it, so let's say the amount of ways reality could be is at the bottom, and then you have on the numerator the amount of ways that you perceive, that tends to zero.

00:58:11.440 For anything that's even remotely complicated, which we are more than remotely complicated.

00:58:17.000 Well, look, you've watched The Simpsons or South Park.

00:58:21.280 South Park's even a better example.

00:58:23.600 Well, it's barely animation at all, South Park.

00:58:27.360 You know, it's just icons moving.

00:58:30.420 You don't care.

00:58:32.120 That's good enough.

00:58:33.600 And it doesn't matter that, in fact, it's kind of an interesting style, and it doesn't clutter up the story, right?

00:58:39.260 And so what you see is an icon.

00:58:41.180 Now, look, if you see an icon, and the pixels in the icon are random samples of the underlying reality, then, and the reality doesn't change during the act of perception, then you're still seeing reality, but you're seeing it at very low resolution.

00:59:01.800 And I think that's a better way of thinking about it.

00:59:04.440 It's low resolution.

00:59:06.180 It's not not real.

00:59:07.540 Right?

00:59:09.260 And you don't, you actually don't want your representations to be any higher resolution than necessary.

00:59:15.020 So imagine on a computer, sometimes you want a thumbnail, because that's good enough.

00:59:19.840 And sometimes you want a high resolution photo, because you need detail.

00:59:23.880 And that's a really good way of thinking about our perceptions.

00:59:27.040 They're low, and then also our heuristics.

00:59:31.520 So I think that each of us has a complete map of the world.

00:59:35.600 Now, you might say, well, we can't, because we're ignorant, and the world's real complicated.

00:59:40.000 It's like, yeah, but we just cover up what we don't perceive in detail with a low resolution map.

00:59:45.540 And so things we haven't delved into in detail are mapped in a very low resolution way.

00:59:53.080 And that's good enough, as long as when we use the representation, we don't encounter an error.

00:59:57.760 Like, so, so the, it works.

01:00:02.500 And if it doesn't work, well, then you have to decompose the, you have an explanation for, in some sense, a representation of everything.

01:00:13.480 It's just low resolution.

01:00:14.840 Like, like, think of the word sky.

01:00:19.160 Okay, that's an, that's, that's, that's an icon.

01:00:21.720 The word is an icon.

01:00:22.980 So you could think the word is a representation of an image of a representation of reality.

01:00:28.740 So when you look at the sky, you don't see the sky.

01:00:32.540 Like, let's say you're looking up in the night sky.

01:00:34.320 I mean, God alive, there's a hundred billion galaxies up there.

01:00:37.260 You don't see them.

01:00:38.020 You see a low res representation, and then you make it even lower res by saying sky.

01:00:44.560 Well, is that good enough?

01:00:46.220 Well, it's good enough if you don't get hit by a meteor when you're out there on the deck standing, looking up at the sky.

01:00:50.980 Because it, it does the trick for the time.

01:00:53.820 That's a pragmatic, that's a pragmatic approach to truth, to some degree.

01:00:59.120 You know, it works well enough for your current purposes.

01:01:02.000 It's complete enough for you to act in the manner that produces the result you, you want, not the result you predict, the one you actually want.

01:01:11.080 It doesn't always occur like that.

01:01:12.300 Yeah, it's not.

01:01:13.320 No, well, of course not.

01:01:14.740 Because, because, it's partly because our, our low res reps, our representations are fallible.

01:01:20.200 Immensely fallible.

01:01:21.720 But often they're good enough.

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01:02:41.580 You know, when you were speaking to Harris, what I thought was underlying the disagreement between you two,

01:02:49.700 and even with you and Brett Weinstein about truth, is that there's the implicit assumption that one should pursue truth.

01:02:55.760 So I don't know if that's the case, but when you're referring to truth, and you're saying,

01:03:00.080 well, here's the definition of truth, and if we were to just follow blindly scientific truth,

01:03:04.120 we would build atom bombs, which we have.

01:03:05.760 We could destroy us.

01:03:06.620 There are many paths that can go that aren't salutary, so we should pick.

01:03:10.360 And Brett was saying, well, one is explanatory.

01:03:12.600 Well, who cares about explanatory?

01:03:13.960 We care about our life.

01:03:16.940 To me, what was underneath it was that we should pursue truth.

01:03:21.680 Is that, am I correct in my assessment, or was there something else?

01:03:25.940 So what if one made the claim that we don't always have to pursue truth?

01:03:32.180 Well, we can't pursue it everywhere, right?

01:03:34.660 There has to be a spirit that animates the pursuit of truth to give it some direction.

01:03:41.700 Well, look, here's an example.

01:03:43.040 I think I probably used this in my discussions with Harris.

01:03:45.760 I read this book once about biological warfare research in the Soviet Union,

01:03:51.280 and it's pretty damn relevant in the case of Wuhan, let's say, you know,

01:03:54.600 and God only knows what happened there, but in any case.

01:03:58.580 Demonetized right now.

01:03:59.900 There were Soviet scientists working on combining,

01:04:05.740 trying to make a hybrid between smallpox and...

01:04:11.280 Ebola.

01:04:12.140 What's that?

01:04:13.300 Ebola.

01:04:14.160 Right, right, right, right.

01:04:16.120 And then to make it deliverable in aerosols.

01:04:18.880 Well, how about maybe not?

01:04:22.840 How about maybe we don't go there?

01:04:25.660 You know?

01:04:26.500 And scientists are making decisions like that all the time,

01:04:29.060 because there's an infinite number of facts to study.

01:04:31.920 See, this is the problem with the pure science argument, follow the science.

01:04:36.820 It's like, well, there's an infinite number of facts.

01:04:40.240 This is a problem.

01:04:41.640 So science is all about the facts.

01:04:43.520 Yeah?

01:04:44.360 Which facts?

01:04:45.000 And then that gets us into the postmodernist dilemma,

01:04:47.320 because the postmodernists say only those facts that serve the will to power

01:04:51.300 and your particular will to power.

01:04:53.360 That's just a very cynical way of looking at science.

01:04:56.980 So, but there's still the question there, right?

01:05:00.780 Something is directing this.

01:05:03.060 And something needs to be directing this.

01:05:04.920 And I would think Harrison Weinstein and myself would all agree that the pursuit of truth

01:05:09.400 is of exceptional importance.

01:05:11.700 And also that there are methods for distinguishing, let's say, material facts, scientific facts,

01:05:18.440 from ethical facts.

01:05:19.540 Now, that's where it gets trickier, and the relationship between those two.

01:05:23.540 I don't think you can look at the facts except through an ethical framework.

01:05:27.660 I don't think it's possible.

01:05:28.760 The ethical framework is built into your perception.

01:05:32.680 I see.

01:05:33.500 You can't help it.

01:05:34.340 And the reason for that, it's technically quite straightforward, I believe,

01:05:38.160 is that we are fundamentally ambulatory and goal-directed creatures.

01:05:43.700 We walk.

01:05:44.780 We move.

01:05:45.460 We're always moving from point A to point B.

01:05:48.180 Always.

01:05:48.780 No matter what.

01:05:49.420 Even when we're looking at something, it's in preparation for a movement to somewhere better.

01:05:54.560 You know, unless we're trying actively to make things worse, but that's an exceptional case.

01:06:00.040 We can't help but look at the world.

01:06:02.500 What we see is a map.

01:06:04.420 That's a good way of thinking about it.

01:06:06.520 We don't see the world.

01:06:07.640 We see our map of the world.

01:06:09.260 And we need a map because we have to walk through the world.

01:06:12.140 And we don't want to have things fall on us, etc.

01:06:14.620 And we don't want to get lost.

01:06:16.920 And so, and then we might infer objects from the contents of our maps.

01:06:22.560 And we might even say those objects are fundamentally real.

01:06:26.620 But then, you know, that's a problem because the question then arises,

01:06:29.780 well, what do you mean by real exactly?

01:06:32.140 And exactly why?

01:06:34.620 And, you know, then Sam would say, well, you can derive what's real from science.

01:06:38.280 And I would say, well, there's an infinite number of facts, Sam.

01:06:41.400 How the hell do we decide which facts to pursue and which not to pursue

01:06:45.420 and which we shouldn't pursue?

01:06:47.980 And you think, here's something interesting about the scientific literature.

01:06:52.560 You write a research report about your experiment.

01:06:55.880 You almost never tell the truth about why you got interested in that.

01:07:00.880 What you do is you lay out this rational argument that led to your hypothesis,

01:07:04.540 which isn't what led to your hypothesis at all, by the way.

01:07:07.340 It's just a summary statement that other people could follow.

01:07:10.300 It's not an actual description of what happened.

01:07:12.760 You're interested in something for some reason.

01:07:15.180 And that shapes your hypothesis and the direction of your research.

01:07:19.100 And that's tied in with your own personal narrative.

01:07:22.900 So it bedevils the scientific enterprise.

01:07:26.480 And it can be a real problem because your own narrative can, you know,

01:07:30.020 cloud your judgment of the, let's say, the relevant fact.

01:07:34.920 So.

01:07:35.400 So the epitome of that is this mathematician named Ramanujan.

01:07:39.700 Have you heard of Ramanujan?

01:07:42.680 Yes.

01:07:44.080 Okay.

01:07:44.500 For those who haven't heard of him, he would come up through intuition or through

01:07:48.960 what he would say would be dream encounters with gods or goddesses.

01:07:52.140 He would come up with what are astounding formulas that I remember, I think it was Hardy,

01:08:01.500 who was his supervisor said, you can't simply make these up.

01:08:04.840 They're too Baroque for you to make them up.

01:08:07.020 And they turned out to be correct.

01:08:08.440 And what you're saying is, well, okay, how do you justify that?

01:08:12.040 Well, that was one of the problems with him.

01:08:14.340 What he would is that he would spit out these formulas, which in the end,

01:08:17.680 most of the time turned out to be true, slight modifications of what's true.

01:08:20.940 And I'll give an example.

01:08:21.660 So if someone wants to, if someone can keep this in their head, okay, so how many ways

01:08:25.160 can you partition a certain number?

01:08:26.580 So let's say 26 can be written as one plus one plus 26 times, or it can be written as

01:08:30.580 one plus two and then plus one, one, one.

01:08:32.600 So there are many, many different partitions of a natural number.

01:08:35.960 He came up with this formula that the number, the partitions of any number is something like

01:08:39.780 one over two pi square root six.

01:08:43.100 Then you take the derivative of what's happening here, which is exponential one over two pi over

01:08:47.920 a square root of six square root of N minus one over 24.

01:08:51.320 Or all over square root of N minus one over 24.

01:08:54.820 And he couldn't, now I'm not sure about that particular one, doesn't matter.

01:08:58.740 This is an example.

01:08:59.680 He couldn't prove them.

01:09:01.040 And he would say that he just, they just occurred to him.

01:09:04.040 And so that to me is, well, I'm wondering, well, that's a mystery.

01:09:08.980 There's no one else in mathematics that was like that.

01:09:11.460 And I'm not sure if that's because he was terribly open.

01:09:14.420 Like you mentioned, openness is a trait that allows you to have this, these large leaps

01:09:18.740 of insight.

01:09:19.540 I'm not sure if that's exactly why it could be, but that's an example.

01:09:23.000 Yeah, well, you know, the depths of what inspires us, that's a great mystery, right?

01:09:32.320 I mean, one of the mysteries of the scientific enterprise, for example, is hypothesis generation.

01:09:38.480 You know, when we train graduate students, we spend a lot of time training them in method,

01:09:44.680 let's say, and approach and in writing scientific papers and so on.

01:09:48.640 But there's almost no strict pedagogy in relationship to hypothesis generation.

01:09:57.160 Well, where do you come up with your research questions to begin with?

01:10:00.080 Well, I'm interested in that.

01:10:01.720 It's like, well, that's really not much of an answer.

01:10:03.660 It's certainly not formalized very well.

01:10:05.600 What is that interest exactly?

01:10:07.920 And how does it guide you exactly?

01:10:10.340 And what is that?

01:10:12.060 And then you might say, well, and also, how is that related to your morality?

01:10:15.780 Like, to what degree is your scientific curiosity motivated by your own personal desire for

01:10:21.520 success, or maybe the desire to serve others, you know, on the virtuous side, etc, etc?

01:10:27.860 Well, that's just, that's just often the domain of, well, we don't ask those questions when

01:10:32.440 we're scientists.

01:10:33.880 And fair enough, in some sense, but not really, because, well, you do run into the kind of problems

01:10:38.360 you just described.

01:10:39.280 You know, I work with this carver.

01:10:43.280 He's a member of a native Canadian tribe.

01:10:46.860 No, it's Charles Joseph is his name.

01:10:49.240 And he's quite a remarkable person.

01:10:50.900 And he carves these traditional West Coast native Canadian Quackawack sculptures.

01:10:58.380 And he dreams in those images.

01:11:03.900 And he consults with the spirits of his father and grandfather, great grandfather in particular,

01:11:10.720 in his dreams about his carvings.

01:11:13.600 And he doesn't talk about that with anyone, because they think he's crazy, but he's not.

01:11:18.520 He's definitely not.

01:11:20.000 And he's a great artist, in my estimation, unbelievably creative, and that his creative

01:11:26.060 process is so unique that, well, it's remarkable to listen to him.

01:11:32.780 You know, and he's the inheritor of an unbroken tradition that stems back perhaps 15,000 years.

01:11:39.460 Yeah, you brought that up to Krauss, that the science, well, you said science is nested

01:11:45.500 within what you would consider to be the religious domain.

01:11:48.800 And you could give an example by motivation.

01:11:51.020 What motivates you to pursue a certain direction?

01:11:54.120 So sure, once you've gotten to that direction, it's then a scientific.

01:11:57.080 And then he said, well, look, you can't, can you point to me any fact, let's say, that the

01:12:04.380 religious has come up with something like that, he said, and, or knowledge.

01:12:07.600 And then the question was, well, what does one mean by knowledge?

01:12:10.220 And to me, it's, it's a soulless way of looking at the world.

01:12:13.960 They devoid the world of soul to begin with, and then wonder, where's the soul?

01:12:17.960 So it's like, you've watched someone, you take a, take right now, if I go there and I

01:12:21.580 open up the fridge and I, and I say to you, or you say, Hey, Kurt had, Kurt had some

01:12:26.880 soul that made him get up and go to the fridge.

01:12:29.040 And then they say, well, where, what pixel, where was that soul?

01:12:31.880 At what point when his fingers touched the fridge, did the soul come in?

01:12:35.360 Well, the soul was behind that.

01:12:36.920 Sure.

01:12:37.260 At the lowest level, it wasn't, but the soul is somewhere at the top.

01:12:40.340 Well, what is the soul?

01:12:43.540 Yeah.

01:12:43.860 Well, look, I mean, I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that there's no spirit

01:12:48.760 in science in some sense, because we chased it out when we developed the scientific

01:12:53.780 methodology, right?

01:12:54.760 And there may be any, well, it's a related, it's a related, it is a related problem.

01:13:00.820 I'm going to talk to Penrose, by the way, also, when I go to Oxford and about that, because

01:13:05.700 Penrose thinks that consciousness is not computational.

01:13:09.260 And I don't understand why he thinks that.

01:13:11.560 I mean, I'm talking to computer engineers who are building AI brains fundamentally, and

01:13:18.300 they're quite convinced that if you like.

01:13:19.880 Hey, go right ahead.

01:13:23.800 Sure, sure, sure.

01:13:24.200 So I've studied Penrose and spoken to his partner, Stuart Hameroff, on the podcast.

01:13:30.240 Hameroff, yeah.

01:13:31.100 Yeah.

01:13:31.320 So the reason Penrose fundamentally thinks that it's not computational is because of

01:13:35.120 Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

01:13:36.660 The fact that, so if it's computational in some sense, that means it's a first order

01:13:39.780 language.

01:13:40.320 Now, because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, we can generate a proposition that we see as

01:13:45.480 true, but the first order language cannot see that it's true.

01:13:48.720 And this can happen over and over.

01:13:50.140 So you say, well, let me just say.

01:13:50.940 Oh, so they actually accept that interpretation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem?

01:13:54.560 Because I proposed that in my book, Maps of Meaning, and a number of philosophical critics

01:14:00.740 have said that I misunderstood that incompleteness theorem, and that it didn't have any application

01:14:06.200 in the domain of philosophical inquiry.

01:14:08.240 But I thought it was also an argument about first principles, that any internally coherent system

01:14:13.080 had to be predicated on axioms that weren't provable from within the confines of the system.

01:14:18.000 And so that's part of Penrose's issue here, is it?

01:14:20.900 It's the first principle issue.

01:14:24.440 Yeah.

01:14:24.960 Now, I'm unsure exactly what you said in Maps of Meaning, that would make a philosopher

01:14:29.260 raise alarm.

01:14:30.700 Well, they just said it was inappropriate of me to, first of all, that I misunderstood

01:14:34.300 Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which I might have because I'm not a mathematician,

01:14:37.780 but that even if I did understand it, it wasn't appropriate to apply it to, like, systems of

01:14:42.880 philosophical inquiry outside the strict domain of mathematics.

01:14:45.960 And that was their criticism.

01:14:48.300 But, and I've always been subtle leery about that, because I was kind of outside my domain

01:14:51.980 of expertise when I incorporated that argument.

01:14:54.460 But it did look to me like it was a statement.

01:14:58.180 I think what Gödel meant was that you can't have a system of usable thought, in some sense,

01:15:04.480 that isn't predicated on axioms that stand outside the system.

01:15:09.340 Uh-huh.

01:15:10.600 Uh-huh.

01:15:11.140 See, I recall reading an article of yours about a year, two years, maybe even three years

01:15:15.380 ago, about Gödel's incompleteness theorem and God, how Gödel's incompleteness theorem,

01:15:19.740 in some sense, proves God.

01:15:21.160 And then when I was searching for it again, I couldn't find it.

01:15:23.380 Do you recall writing an article about that?

01:15:25.080 I don't think, no, no, I don't think I made that.

01:15:27.660 No, I don't think I made that argument.

01:15:29.200 And so, but I could ask Penrose about that.

01:15:34.960 Yeah.

01:15:35.320 Sure, sure, sure.

01:15:35.880 Yeah, well, the question, if that interpretation is correct, and if this is the issue that Penrose

01:15:43.460 is trying to solve, I'd be very interested in that.

01:15:47.160 So thank you for that, because I'll ask him.

01:15:48.640 But the fact that there have to, see, I think there have to be axioms outside the system,

01:15:55.280 say the propositional system, because something has to fill in the gaps that our ignorance

01:16:00.720 leaves.

01:16:02.400 Because we have to map the world, but we can't, because we're ignorant.

01:16:05.320 And so what do we do?

01:16:06.100 Well, we have assumptions.

01:16:07.420 And even our perceptions are assumptions.

01:16:10.740 You know, for example, I'm watching you, and I'm acting as if what you're doing is telling

01:16:17.000 me the truth, but that's an assumption.

01:16:21.080 Now, it could be a generous assumption.

01:16:23.260 It could be a necessary assumption.

01:16:24.720 But there are going to be times when that assumption, which is a perceptual act, because

01:16:30.000 I see you that way, right, in the broader sense of seeing, there's going to be times

01:16:34.840 when that's wrong, because I'm talking to someone who isn't telling me the truth, because

01:16:38.440 they don't know what they're talking about, let's say, that's ignorance, or maybe they're

01:16:41.500 being malevolent.

01:16:42.320 And so we fill in the gaps between our propositional knowledge and the infinitely complex world with

01:16:49.340 presumptions.

01:16:50.460 And a lot of those presumptions are perception.

01:16:53.420 So I think of perceptions as the axioms of propositional thought.

01:16:58.500 That's part of it.

01:16:59.560 Because thought is about something, right?

01:17:04.520 Yeah, Penrose would come from, maybe it's adjacent, but an alternate route that is about

01:17:11.280 understanding.

01:17:12.020 The fact that we can understand a statement to be true, and it came from a first order

01:17:16.700 language, but that first order language cannot see that it's true, that we understand it implies

01:17:22.300 that what we're doing is not computational.

01:17:23.920 And the reason is that, let's imagine we could find the computational, see, there's a guy

01:17:29.600 named Stephen Wolfram, who believes that what underlies reality is something like hypergraphs,

01:17:34.160 and then there's a computation, there's a rule that, there's a rule of, there's a system

01:17:37.740 of rewriting.

01:17:39.760 Now, that's akin to a first order language.

01:17:42.620 However, there would be, let's imagine that's the case, at the, at the fundament of physics

01:17:47.280 is something like a rule generation process, that's like a first order language.

01:17:50.560 Well, then we can find a rule, sorry, we can find a statement that this rule cannot see

01:17:56.020 as being true, but then we see it as true.

01:17:59.220 So how is it that we could be generated by this?

01:18:01.260 If we're embedded in the first order language, how is it that we can see what, how is it that

01:18:05.280 we can understand that to be true when we're generated by it?

01:18:08.360 Okay, so, so let me, okay, so that was part of the reason that Jung hypothesized the existence

01:18:14.900 of a transcendent self.

01:18:17.700 So imagine that as you go through the different manifestations of your personality in your

01:18:24.900 life, you know, you say, I radically changed at some point.

01:18:29.860 You look at retrospectively and you say, I radically changed.

01:18:32.980 Well, imagine that there's these map systems that you identify with.

01:18:41.260 You say, that's me, your ego identifies with them.

01:18:44.400 You say, that's me, but then that changes radically.

01:18:46.820 And maybe you fall into chaos when it changes because you, you lose your belief.

01:18:51.820 And then a new belief emerges out.

01:18:53.880 Well, it emerges out of something underneath.

01:18:56.080 And so Jung posited that part of what the self was, was the thing that remained constant

01:19:02.600 across transformations and actually guided them in some sense.

01:19:07.160 Now, Jung also believed that Christ, technically speaking, psychologically speaking, was a symbol

01:19:12.860 of the self.

01:19:15.040 Yep.

01:19:15.440 And that's partly why the death and redemption idea rings true with us, because we all go

01:19:20.560 through partial deaths and descents into sometimes into hell.

01:19:24.500 You know, when everything falls apart around you, you know, to think about that as a descent

01:19:28.780 into hell, it's perfectly reasonable metaphorical statement.

01:19:31.780 It certainly feels like an eternity when you're there.

01:19:34.980 And in some sense, that domain has always existed right across the span of humanity.

01:19:40.120 And it's a place you can go.

01:19:41.960 It's also a place that deceit is very likely to take you because it makes your, these presumption

01:19:50.400 systems very fragile and much more likely to degenerate into a chaotic hell.

01:19:56.220 In any case, the self is the thing that's underneath that, that remains constant, but also the thing

01:20:01.560 that guides those transformations.

01:20:03.100 And even more importantly, in some sense, it's the thing that gives us the intuitions that

01:20:07.340 guides those transformations towards a higher order form of unity and completion.

01:20:11.840 And then you could say maybe that we're manifesting, you and I are trying to manifest that spirit

01:20:18.360 in this dialogue because we're trying to modify each other's proximal constructions to move them

01:20:24.240 towards a more accurate and valid position.

01:20:27.120 And that we're very engaged when that's happening because it's so vital.

01:20:32.480 When, you know, we go away and we think that was a good conversation.

01:20:35.640 That was a deep conversation.

01:20:36.840 We really got somewhere, something like that, that metaphor, we can't simply use engagement

01:20:43.240 as a barometer or as a marker of, of following this value system, because some people can

01:20:49.480 be engaged heavily.

01:20:50.260 So when murdering people.

01:20:51.980 Yeah.

01:20:52.480 Well, one of the things I would, one of the things I warn people about in maps of meaning

01:20:57.240 was if you lie enough, you will warp implicit structures that guide your interest, and then

01:21:04.720 you won't be able to rely on it.

01:21:06.300 And then you're lost because you imagine if you couldn't rely on your instinct for meaning

01:21:11.140 because you'd corrupted it, what are you going to do?

01:21:13.960 I think that's the sin against the Holy Ghost, you know, fundamentally, you can't recover from

01:21:19.300 that.

01:21:20.980 You're speaking my language.

01:21:23.080 I'm liking what you're saying.

01:21:24.640 It reminds me of, it's like we have a compass and every time, every lie is a disequilibrium.

01:21:29.800 And it just, it makes it not, and makes it not operate properly.

01:21:35.440 And so that's one reason to not tell a lie.

01:21:38.120 And what's interesting though, is that if you've, if you've corrupted your compass and

01:21:42.100 your compass should hopefully lead you somewhere positive, and that depends on if you're aiming

01:21:45.260 positively, then telling the truth recalibrates it.

01:21:50.740 Yes, I, well, look, psychotherapy, I kind of developed this idea when I went down, I did

01:21:58.640 my first public talk at a Pucknell University about a month ago.

01:22:01.980 And one of the things that I've been writing about is that the psychotherapeutic presumption.

01:22:09.640 So the first presumption is that there is such a thing as psychotherapy.

01:22:13.300 The second presumption is that it can lead you to a state of increased psychophysiological

01:22:18.480 well-being and health.

01:22:19.600 Wait, why is that a first assumption necessary?

01:22:22.880 What do you mean that there is such a thing as psychotherapy?

01:22:25.120 Well, you could just say that it's just rubbish, right?

01:22:28.220 I mean, when Freud first came out and said, well, talking can cure people, you know, that

01:22:32.700 was a pretty preposterous claim.

01:22:34.700 No one believed it.

01:22:35.680 How can just talking, you know, heal?

01:22:39.200 It's like, well, talking is thinking.

01:22:41.300 You don't think thinking has anything to do with your psychophysiology?

01:22:44.140 And what Freud did was have people just talk.

01:22:47.120 They could say anything.

01:22:47.920 He didn't even, like, that's why they laid on the couch and didn't see him.

01:22:50.880 It was like, say anything that comes into your mind.

01:22:54.860 Okay.

01:22:55.280 So, well, essentially what you're doing is telling the truth to yourself in an untrammeled

01:23:00.580 manner.

01:23:01.440 Now, people think by talking.

01:23:05.080 Most people think by talking.

01:23:06.500 You have to be a pretty good thinker before you can think without having to talk.

01:23:10.480 And really what you have to do is talk to yourself in your head.

01:23:14.360 You know, you have the revelatory part of thought, which is your ideas, and then you

01:23:18.740 engage in dialectical criticism internally.

01:23:21.700 It's an internalized conversation.

01:23:23.500 And you have to be pretty sophisticated to be really good at that.

01:23:26.920 You have to be willing to divide yourself into at least two parts.

01:23:30.340 And you have to be able to do that.

01:23:31.680 Most people do that by talking.

01:23:33.260 So they reveal what they think to themselves by talking.

01:23:36.760 And then having said what they say, they can, you know, take it or leave it.

01:23:41.120 Then they start to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff.

01:23:44.480 And that can be, is psychotherapeutically curative.

01:23:48.180 And certainly people like Carl Rogers placed a tremendous emphasis on both truth as the

01:23:54.860 curative process in psychotherapy, but also the necessity for the psychotherapist, him

01:24:01.320 or herself, to essentially act out something like the role of Christ.

01:24:06.220 I mean, Rogers was extremely influenced by Protestant thinking.

01:24:09.360 I mean, he was going to evangelize the world when he was a kid, but he became agnostic or

01:24:13.320 atheistic, but it all stuck.

01:24:15.560 So the idea was if, if I listened to you in the right spirit, you can reveal truths to

01:24:22.460 yourself that will reconstitute you and redeem you.

01:24:26.720 That's basically the whole premise of psychotherapy.

01:24:29.540 And it works, you know, and mostly what I saw in psychotherapy, I practiced for 20 years

01:24:36.100 was we just, we got rid of a fair bit of ignorance.

01:24:40.220 We did a fair bit of social skills development.

01:24:43.620 Like I taught a lot of people how to shake hands and say hello and introduce themselves

01:24:47.240 because they just didn't have those skills.

01:24:49.080 But a lot of it was, let's find out the lies, man, and get rid of them.

01:24:54.340 And it's up to you to figure out what the lies are.

01:24:56.500 Oh, listen, I'm not telling you.

01:24:57.940 I don't know what your lies are.

01:24:59.120 I don't know what lies you're tangled up in.

01:25:00.620 I don't want to presume.

01:25:01.580 Yeah.

01:25:02.920 And I know some people who would lie to their therapist because they're too ashamed or

01:25:06.780 for whatever reason.

01:25:07.800 And some people ask me, what am I advocating for with this film blue better left unsaid?

01:25:14.240 And for me, I'm not advocating for anything.

01:25:17.520 I'm not like, well, it'd be presumptuous for me to advocate.

01:25:20.920 Would it mean that I found something that I'm trying to convince other people of truly better

01:25:25.100 left unsaid was like a, an attempt for me to cohere and, and solidify my own thoughts,

01:25:30.240 develop them and present them.

01:25:31.820 So what did it teach?

01:25:32.620 What did it teach you?

01:25:34.680 Well, taught me that that's simply not easy.

01:25:37.820 And you'll notice that I pause, I tend to pause before I think.

01:25:41.220 And one of the reasons is that it's firstly, I'm trying to, if it's something that I've

01:25:45.280 said before, I try to say it in a different manner and I'll give, well, well, one reason,

01:25:50.700 even if it's synonyms, even if I'm simply replacing the words with synonyms.

01:25:53.780 And the reason is that the reason is that, well, first it's great for cognitive flexibility.

01:25:58.780 I think words are like patons.

01:26:00.620 They allow you to reach farther places.

01:26:02.120 Like when you're rock climbing, they're like patons.

01:26:04.240 But secondly, because even if it's something that is the same phenomenon, when you view it

01:26:09.260 from a slightly different angle, you get a better understanding of what it is.

01:26:14.260 Earlier, we were talking about idolatry.

01:26:15.920 And I think it's almost idolatry as akin to mistaking the representation for what's trying

01:26:21.120 to be represented.

01:26:22.480 So imagine this, imagine that you have a column.

01:26:24.380 And then insisting that that, yeah, and insisting that that representation is, in fact, the

01:26:28.540 totality.

01:26:29.440 Yeah.

01:26:30.820 Which means insisting that your interpretation is the totality, right?

01:26:35.440 The satanic error.

01:26:37.700 My interpretation is the totality.

01:26:39.940 It's like, oh, really?

01:26:40.840 Is it?

01:26:41.440 Hmm.

01:26:41.760 Good luck with that.

01:26:42.720 I'm super excited to talk to you about the definitions of God.

01:26:45.760 And we'll get to that at some point.

01:26:47.980 So it would be like, imagine if you have an upside down ice cream cone.

01:26:54.260 So it looks like this.

01:26:55.660 I did not expect you to say that.

01:26:58.280 All right.

01:26:58.760 If you look at it from the bottom, it's a circle.

01:27:00.640 If you look at it from the top, so so so.

01:27:02.300 So if you look at it from the side, it's a triangle.

01:27:04.080 If you look at it from, let's say over here or over here, it looks like a teardrop.

01:27:07.900 And so people, when they're describing God, what I think they're trying to do is it's

01:27:12.440 an extremely, it may be the most complicated, you know, people say the brain is the most

01:27:15.700 complicated, perhaps God is perhaps that's one of the definitions of God, but maybe it's

01:27:19.600 not that either way, God is complicated.

01:27:21.580 And so to say that, well, if you look across religions, it's contradictory, therefore what's

01:27:27.160 being described can't exist, or only one of them can be correct.

01:27:30.380 Perhaps now I'm not ecumenical enough to say they're all correct in their own manner.

01:27:34.420 I'm not under a tree meditating with, with, with flowers saying that everyone's correct,

01:27:39.100 though that may actually be the case.

01:27:41.220 I'm saying that just because something is contradictory doesn't mean that we shouldn't

01:27:45.200 explore it.

01:27:46.140 It may be akin to different perspectives on the same object.

01:27:49.480 I don't know if you've heard of M theory.

01:27:50.760 It's a, it's a form of string theory.

01:27:52.260 String theory says this because there are five different flavors.

01:27:55.100 There's type two, a, two, B, and so on.

01:27:58.580 And it's actually posited that they're all not adumbrations of the same phenomenon, but actually

01:28:04.240 different perspectives of the same phenomenon.

01:28:06.940 Like you touch that.

01:28:07.900 This is obvious for people to understand where the old refrain of you touch an elephant's

01:28:11.460 ear, touch an elephant's tail, touch an elephant, and they're all described.

01:28:14.440 Okay.

01:28:14.540 So this is obvious to some people.

01:28:17.520 I'm wondering if, well, I'm not wondering, I have a, I have a distinct feeling the different

01:28:22.360 descriptions of God.

01:28:23.460 Even there's so many contradictory statements between the East and the West about God.

01:28:28.440 How are some of the East?

01:28:30.040 So this look, there's suffering in life.

01:28:31.760 If there's also extreme grace and love in life too, but one of the, one of the solutions

01:28:37.740 is act right.

01:28:38.980 So don't, don't lie.

01:28:41.240 And then let's say that's the West's answer.

01:28:43.420 Then the other answer is to realize that the suffering is illusory.

01:28:45.820 So to do away with the coin.

01:28:47.260 So one is that the coin, look, there's a good side and a bad side.

01:28:49.740 So choose the good.

01:28:50.840 That's the West.

01:28:51.380 And the East would say, well, realize that there is no coin and that's another solution.

01:28:56.260 And perhaps somehow they're the same solution.

01:28:58.180 I've heard you also, I've heard you talk about stumbling uphill and what lies at the top

01:29:02.560 of the hills, maximal responsibility.

01:29:04.600 Is it, is that all that lies at the top of the hill?

01:29:07.220 Or is it also, is it also warmth and forgiveness and grace?

01:29:11.740 And are those the same?

01:29:13.620 Okay.

01:29:13.820 How are those the same?

01:29:15.200 Okay.

01:29:15.480 Let's, let's think about this.

01:29:17.640 Yeah, I think, well, the responsibility in some sense is, is to lift that load up the

01:29:22.980 hill.

01:29:23.740 You know, that doesn't mean that it's responsibility that's at the top of the hill.

01:29:28.640 Ah, okay.

01:29:30.040 In the, in the West.

01:29:31.580 I mean, in some ways, Christ is represented as taking the responsibility for all the sins

01:29:38.920 of mankind unto himself.

01:29:41.680 Right?

01:29:42.440 Well, that's responsibility.

01:29:43.820 And look, to the degree that each of us are trying to sort out in our own souls, complex

01:29:50.240 problems that bedevil other people, we're doing that in a low resolution form, right?

01:29:55.600 We're taking the fragility and errors and malevolence of mankind onto ourselves and trying to sort

01:30:02.480 that out.

01:30:03.000 And that's meaningful, although it's also extremely burdensome and, you know, it can kill you,

01:30:07.260 it can crush you.

01:30:08.060 And so the responsibility has to be tempered in a variety of ways to make it even bearable.

01:30:14.640 You know, one of the things that's so interesting about the Christian story, in my estimation,

01:30:18.240 is that that responsibility is so overwhelming that, you know, it, it was even daunting for

01:30:25.760 God himself.

01:30:26.600 So that's built into the story.

01:30:30.800 And that's certainly worth thinking about, you know, what's at the top?

01:30:35.100 Well, you, we, we can, we can, we can sort of, we can hit at it.

01:30:40.440 Jung talked about that process that you described of viewing something from multiple different

01:30:45.380 perspectives.

01:30:45.880 He, he technically called that circumambulation.

01:30:48.700 And it was the attempt to, yeah, exactly, to view something very complicated, like take

01:30:54.680 snapshots of it from a whole bunch of different perspectives.

01:30:57.020 And this is partly why very rationally minded people who like to walk through something logically

01:31:03.020 find Jung hard to, well, tolerate even, because that isn't how he thinks.

01:31:08.660 He thinks in this circumambulatory manner.

01:31:11.300 Well, think of it this way and think of it this way.

01:31:13.280 And here is another viewpoint and this and, and so forth.

01:31:16.220 And then you read that it's like having an impressionist painting cohere in your mind

01:31:21.220 into a hole.

01:31:22.240 It's like, all of a sudden you go, whap.

01:31:23.940 Oh, I see what he's talking about.

01:31:25.620 And that's an overwhelming experience.

01:31:28.100 I mean, I really experienced that reading Ion, which is an unbelievably terrifying book.

01:31:33.240 And it's so brilliant.

01:31:34.620 It's, it's just, it hasn't been unpacked at all into our culture.

01:31:38.380 It's terrifying because.

01:31:41.600 Well, Jung is the only thinker I've ever seen who, you know, we hypothesize.

01:31:46.220 He hypothesized earlier in some sense that that artistic intuition lays out the map for the development

01:31:53.880 of propositional thinking.

01:31:55.220 Well, you trace the development of that intuitive pattern seeking imagination back like 3000 years.

01:32:03.480 That's partly why he talks about astrology.

01:32:06.140 So if, if he, when we looked up in the night sky, let's see, prior to the development of, of astronomy, what we saw, we didn't know what we were looking at, right?

01:32:17.720 It filled us with awe, but we didn't know what we were looking at.

01:32:20.140 So we populated the sky with figures of our imagination.

01:32:24.760 The better that's the constellations.

01:32:26.420 And it was a way of orienting ourselves.

01:32:27.840 So if you look at astrology, psychologically, what you have is a vast storehouse of the contents of the human imagination.

01:32:37.940 Now in astrology, there was the idea of a certain kind of progression through the eons.

01:32:43.640 Well, Jung believed that the fantasy that underlined astrology was so deep that it had sketched out the map for the, for the trail that we're actually walking down.

01:32:53.540 And so reading it, well, so the artists have into, well, the artists have intuitions about what's coming.

01:33:02.600 So they're the first, the first people in the unexplored territory.

01:33:06.400 And then the more propositional philosophers and such, and the scientists, they fill in the details, but the, the trailblazing has already been done by the imaginative and the intuitive.

01:33:18.020 Right.

01:33:18.740 Right.

01:33:19.260 And so Jung, in eye on you.

01:33:21.980 Sorry, continue.

01:33:22.780 In eye on Jung tracks.

01:33:24.180 Well, that's okay.

01:33:25.080 In eye on Jung tracks, the contents of that imagination back several thousand years and also lays out something like a scheme for the future.

01:33:35.560 So, for example, he believed that this is so strange, man.

01:33:39.020 He believed that the idea that there were wise men who saw a star that signified Christ's birth was actually a reference to the astrological idea that something new would be born at the dawn of the age, age of Pisces.

01:33:54.120 How does that get to one star?

01:33:55.820 How does that get to one star?

01:33:59.300 Well, because they were interpreters of the stars.

01:34:01.600 So, Pisces, Pisces is a constellation that's characterized by a fish going in one direction and a fish going in the other.

01:34:10.240 And Jung was very interested in the use of fish symbolism in Christianity.

01:34:13.820 He associated that with the astrological imagination.

01:34:16.980 He also believed that the 2,000 year period from Christ's birth roughly to now was characterized by two ions, one which was explicitly Christian.

01:34:25.140 That's the fish moving in one direction and the other, which led to the development of empirical science, was an antithesis.

01:34:32.720 And that that had been foreshadowed by this symbolism, which was part of the intuitive discovery of that which was yet to come.

01:34:42.900 That's only part of the argument.

01:34:45.060 It's an unbelievably profound book.

01:34:47.320 And it's terrifying once you understand what he's talking about.

01:34:50.520 And I've never seen anyone criticize it who actually understood it.

01:34:54.180 You know, almost all the criticisms I've seen of Jung and his thinking, it's like, no, you don't, you're not hitting the target there, buddy.

01:35:01.200 He's asking questions that you don't even know need to be asked.

01:35:05.360 So, you know, you're not in, you're not in the ballgame.

01:35:09.300 So, yeah, in any case.

01:35:13.040 The more scientific minded people.

01:35:16.400 Yeah, well, the more propositionally minded people.

01:35:19.040 See, Jung had a problem with the propositional universe.

01:35:21.860 He said, yeah, well, there's a gap between what we know and the unknown per se.

01:35:27.460 Well, what fills that gap?

01:35:28.980 Well, dreams.

01:35:30.860 Dreams.

01:35:31.460 The imagination.

01:35:33.300 Imagery.

01:35:34.280 It's the, it's at the boundary of propositional thought.

01:35:37.580 And it, it's between us and what we absolutely don't know.

01:35:40.600 And the visionary artists operate in the domain of imagination and pave the path for the propositional types.

01:35:47.400 And think about the relationship, say, between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

01:35:50.960 Nietzsche was much more propositional than Dostoevsky.

01:35:54.560 But Dostoevsky fundamentally is deeper.

01:35:58.180 Now, he's not as clear.

01:35:59.800 Right?

01:36:00.300 That's the trade-off.

01:36:03.320 Everything in Nietzsche is in Dostoevsky.

01:36:05.300 And more is in Dostoevsky.

01:36:07.300 And Nietzsche himself knew that.

01:36:09.480 I mean, he was no piker when it came to appreciation, let's say, of works of the imagination.

01:36:15.140 But that's a good way of thinking.

01:36:16.400 And then, you see this too.

01:36:19.540 I saw this great lecture by Jonathan Pajot, which I'm going to put up on my YouTube channel,

01:36:24.100 where he spent about 20 minutes explaining the meaning of an orthodox icon that showed a serpent.

01:36:31.800 I don't want to get into it.

01:36:33.020 It's too complicated.

01:36:33.840 But there's so much in that image.

01:36:36.240 You just can't believe it.

01:36:38.080 And you think, well, how did it all get there?

01:36:39.740 And it's akin to the question you asked about the mathematician.

01:36:44.360 It's like, who has plumbed the depths of the human soul?

01:36:47.980 No one.

01:36:48.480 Where do these ideas come from?

01:36:50.280 Well, they appear in my head.

01:36:51.600 You think that's an explanation?

01:36:54.120 The ideas appear in your, where in your head, exactly?

01:36:58.040 What do you mean by your head?

01:37:00.240 Do you mean physically?

01:37:01.720 Like, what do you mean?

01:37:04.160 Well, you don't know what you mean.

01:37:06.160 And God only knows where ideas come from.

01:37:07.960 And to think that they just spring fully formed out of the void without a huge developmental history is naive in the extreme.

01:37:15.260 Yeah.

01:37:15.480 It's like, who built the Sistine Chapel?

01:37:18.940 Was it Michelangelo?

01:37:19.940 Not who built, who painted.

01:37:21.620 And, well, in some sense, yes.

01:37:23.180 But also, he came from a myriad of people before him.

01:37:26.900 And not only that, but the Bible and also thousands and thousands of years before.

01:37:30.180 To me, these scientists who like to, like, I'm not trying to demean scientists in any way.

01:37:34.800 I mean, the rationally atheistic-minded scientists, and I'm strawmanning them when I'm saying that.

01:37:38.640 So let me just pick someone, Krauss.

01:37:40.400 So Krauss, to pick on Krauss.

01:37:44.080 Krauss looks at phenomenon in an extremely deftless manner.

01:37:48.140 Now, obviously he doesn't.

01:37:49.300 But what I mean is, it's almost like someone who's at the top of the trees, and they're so far up that they don't realize that there's roots beneath them.

01:37:56.680 That they've forgotten that there's roots, and they think that they don't need it.

01:37:59.820 They dislike what doesn't make sense.

01:38:01.820 That's right, that's exactly, that's part of the sea.

01:38:06.120 Krauss is a great physicist, and, but there's a lot of what he does that he regards as self-evident, and is never questioned.

01:38:18.680 And it's sort of a precondition for what he does as a physicist, because, you know, if you're a physicist, you're off doing physics.

01:38:23.880 You're not questioning your presumptions, except maybe in the domain of physics.

01:38:28.200 But a lot of what he regards as self-evident just simply isn't self-evident.

01:38:33.240 It's not.

01:38:34.480 And that's a real problem when it comes to discussions about what's real.

01:38:38.440 And you brought up an issue, a couple of issues earlier, that are really worth returning to.

01:38:43.900 You know, one issue is, what is the one that unites the many?

01:38:48.680 And you might say, well, we don't need one that unites the many.

01:38:51.340 We can have a diverse range of values, let's say.

01:38:53.820 It's, well, then you have the problem of conflict, confusion, and anxiety, plus hopelessness, because you don't really have a goal.

01:39:00.480 It's not, it's not like that polytheism, let's say, is without a cost.

01:39:05.540 It's, it's, it's fragmentary.

01:39:08.480 And it causes social havoc, because person A will pursue value A, and person B will pursue value B.

01:39:14.620 And that's okay if they're united under a higher order structure that unites them in some sense, but it's not okay at all.

01:39:20.160 It's, it's the situation in the desert when Moses is leading his people away from, from Egypt, right?

01:39:26.920 It's the central organizing principle was the Egyptian totalitarian state had dissolved.

01:39:31.580 And what happens is this descent into a fragmentation.

01:39:35.300 And that's extremely dangerous.

01:39:37.400 It's not the promised land, that's for sure.

01:39:39.520 So the question is, well, what's the one that unites the many?

01:39:43.320 That's the central religious question.

01:39:46.060 Now, so then, and, but, but, and can't you say that the one that unites the many is the most real?

01:39:53.320 Well, then you're in the domain of definition, right?

01:39:55.600 At that point, it starts to become like a definition rather than a proposition.

01:39:59.260 That's why when you, when you ask people to define, well, what is real?

01:40:03.640 It just becomes tautological.

01:40:06.160 Not that, by the way, not that tautologies are trivial.

01:40:08.440 So, so for example, there's Chris Langan.

01:40:10.820 He has one of the highest IQs recorded along with Savant, I believe.

01:40:15.280 He builds his theory.

01:40:17.300 He builds his theory of everything in some sense from a super tautology.

01:40:21.700 That is, that is, it's, it's a, it's an apodictive formulation of existence.

01:40:28.160 Well, that's God's definition of himself, right?

01:40:29.820 I am that I am.

01:40:33.120 That's God's definition of himself in the Bible.

01:40:35.440 Yeah.

01:40:35.820 Okay, man.

01:40:36.600 I think we should get to the definitions of God.

01:40:38.640 This is extremely interesting.

01:40:40.300 So you mentioned what states conflict.

01:40:41.280 Well, we tried it one to one part, right?

01:40:43.620 Well, it's, well, that's a good question.

01:40:45.720 You know, I think it's the spirit that guides our sequential transformations upward to a higher

01:40:51.300 and higher form of unity and maybe a higher and higher form of delight and love.

01:40:55.720 Do you think that we're all God?

01:40:57.940 I'm sure you've heard some people say that we're God, but we've forgotten that we're God.

01:41:04.960 I can't answer a question like that exactly.

01:41:08.600 I mean, I believe that the idea that we have a divine spark within is an extraordinarily beautiful, poetic, and necessary idea.

01:41:17.540 And I think that if you act like that to yourself and other people that things get radically interesting, interesting and deeply meaningful around you.

01:41:32.320 And it seems to be a very good, a good proposition to guide your actions.

01:41:38.500 You know, because what we're hoping, you and me, maybe to the degree that we're being good, is that the spirit of truth in you is speaking to the spirit of truth in me.

01:41:51.020 And so, and that is a reflection of the presumption upon which Western civilization is based explicitly, let's say, not to say that it doesn't permeate other cultures,

01:42:05.000 but it's that spirit of truth that animates us and that redeems us in our societies as well.

01:42:10.960 And hopefully that's expressed in the quality of our speech when we're free to speak.

01:42:17.880 And so is that divine?

01:42:20.180 Well, is that divine?

01:42:22.600 Well, I don't think it's separable from thought itself.

01:42:24.840 In some sense, it might not be separable from consciousness itself.

01:42:28.800 Is that divine?

01:42:30.140 Well, you know, whenever you have that, is that this?

01:42:34.040 It's an equation, right?

01:42:36.440 Is one plus one equal to two?

01:42:38.760 Well, one of the answers to that is, well, each of, well, each of those claims on both, on both sides of the equation are equally dubious in relationship to one another.

01:42:51.920 Because what you're trying to do is to say, is God real?

01:42:55.620 Well, what you say, what you're not saying is, we know what real is, and it's this.

01:43:01.340 And God, does God fit into that category?

01:43:04.340 It's also, we know what God is in order to assess it.

01:43:07.240 Well, because you could reverse it and say, is real God?

01:43:11.880 It's the same question, right?

01:43:13.680 It's the same question.

01:43:15.060 So here's one of, this is something I heard from Tyler Goldstein, who has his own theory of everything.

01:43:21.540 He said, ordinarily, here's how it works.

01:43:24.160 We look for, we have a definition, and then we look for evidence, and then dismiss what we've just defined if we don't find the evidence.

01:43:29.680 He said, perhaps what we should do when it comes to God is, instead of, instead of looking for God, and then not finding it, and then saying God doesn't exist, you use the fact that you didn't find evidence of God as an indication that you should alter your definition of God.

01:43:46.380 Yeah, well, that's, that's, that's, that's a perfectly reasonable approach to that problem.

01:43:51.540 Right.

01:43:52.200 Obviously, there's some, there's, yeah, however, hmm.

01:43:56.340 Now, that's a good, that's a really good observation, right?

01:44:00.640 To me, it shows you how tricky questions like that are, right?

01:44:04.220 It's like, well, maybe you're looking in the wrong place.

01:44:06.960 Maybe you formulated your search incorrectly.

01:44:10.800 Like, you don't know, because let's say you're aiming at the highest reality, right?

01:44:14.960 It's like, you're aiming at the highest reality.

01:44:17.080 Well, how do you know you have the question formulated properly?

01:44:19.560 Because if you, if you did, well, you'd have already found it.

01:44:22.200 And so you might say, well, does the highest reality exist?

01:44:32.800 Yes.

01:44:33.660 We, we're back to the problem of the one that unites the many.

01:44:37.300 Yeah, yeah.

01:44:38.000 See, I was downtown in Toronto, and I, I just talked to someone, and he's, he's a Jamaican guy, so if you've, well, probably won't happen now, it's too cold.

01:44:44.980 He was cutting coconuts and selling it.

01:44:48.180 And I said, hey, by the way, what's your name?

01:44:49.440 He said, Kurt, I'm like, oh my God, I rarely meet people whose names, name is Kurt, and he's from the Caribbean.

01:44:55.580 And I walked away, and I remember thinking, oh, he has my name.

01:44:58.160 And then I remember stopping thinking, no, no, he's much older.

01:45:00.360 I have his name.

01:45:01.280 Then I thought, probably what's better to say is we share the same name.

01:45:06.040 And then I thought, ah, okay, what is it that we all share?

01:45:09.140 And is that somehow related?

01:45:10.440 Is that not synonymous with God?

01:45:12.340 And what is it that we all share?

01:45:14.500 Now, here's something else that I was thinking about.

01:45:16.400 When we, right now, we're speaking to one another in podcast form.

01:45:20.320 So in some sense, we're copying this.

01:45:22.340 You can think of this archetypally.

01:45:23.540 In some sense, we're copying podcasts by doing so.

01:45:25.800 When one is playing rock music, one is copying rock in some, because no one speaks with a twang.

01:45:32.000 Where do you develop that?

01:45:32.880 You're copying something.

01:45:34.120 Then I thought, well, how far can you take that?

01:45:35.680 When you're doing art in general, what are you copying?

01:45:38.040 Okay.

01:45:38.620 How far can that be taken?

01:45:39.980 How about if you're simply.

01:45:40.780 Man, now you're, that's exactly it.

01:45:42.740 Right.

01:45:43.160 How about if you're simply living and laying bare, what are you copying?

01:45:47.800 Is by simply existing and living, is that a reflection of that?

01:45:52.300 What you're copying is God's essence in some manner.

01:45:55.700 Hmm.

01:45:57.380 Hmm.

01:45:58.360 That is abstracted completely.

01:46:00.080 Well, I don't think there's any difference.

01:46:01.560 I don't think there's any difference between imitation and worship.

01:46:04.740 They're the same thing.

01:46:09.360 That's why the Eastern Orthodox types inlay such emphasis on the imitation of Christ.

01:46:14.460 Well, you should worship.

01:46:15.720 Well, Pajot, he says, well, that means enthusiastically celebrate.

01:46:20.280 Right.

01:46:20.880 Raise to the highest position.

01:46:22.380 Well, then you imitate that.

01:46:23.520 You imitate that, which is of most value.

01:46:26.860 You imitate, hopefully, right.

01:46:28.660 What else would you want to do?

01:46:32.000 Have you thought much about self-fulfilling beliefs?

01:46:34.740 You'd have to be more specific.

01:46:38.400 Okay.

01:46:38.620 Here's the reason why I say that.

01:46:39.800 Imagine, now, I believe you've outlined this too.

01:46:43.840 We've talked plenty about maps.

01:46:45.540 So let's imagine it's literally like a map, just for simplicity.

01:46:48.480 You construct the world.

01:46:49.720 So you have a worldview and it looks like a top-down view of when you're buying an apartment

01:46:54.460 and you see the ground layout.

01:46:56.200 So imagine that.

01:46:56.760 You're constructing a worldview.

01:46:58.380 When it comes to self-fulfilling beliefs, that's extremely interesting to me because

01:47:06.040 it means there are parts of reality on that map that whatever you project to be there

01:47:11.740 will be there.

01:47:13.080 So let's say I think there's a toilet in there.

01:47:14.980 You're right.

01:47:15.680 If you don't think there's a toilet in there, there's not.

01:47:18.380 So there are parts of your map that are always correct, no matter what you think about.

01:47:22.620 Yeah.

01:47:22.880 Well, okay.

01:47:23.900 Well, okay.

01:47:24.900 I would turn that a little bit.

01:47:26.620 I would say this is something Kierkegaard talked about, at least to some degree.

01:47:33.100 Imagine that there are only things that you can find out by doing them.

01:47:37.240 So you can't validate the hypothesis.

01:47:42.960 You can't test the hypothesis without acting it out.

01:47:46.280 So let's say you decide that you're going to tell the truth.

01:47:50.460 Well, what evidence is there that you should do that?

01:47:54.300 Well, who knows?

01:47:55.820 There's evidence that you should lie.

01:47:57.200 It works in the short term.

01:47:58.380 It might be to your benefit in the short term.

01:48:00.160 I mean, maybe if you deceive some girl, she'll sleep with you, you know?

01:48:03.700 It's like, why not do that?

01:48:05.160 Well, you can't collect the facts, you know, in some sense, not in a simple manner.

01:48:12.060 Well, let's say you decide to tell the truth as carefully as you can.

01:48:16.980 Well, then you're going to have a certain kind of life.

01:48:20.300 And you're not going to have that life unless you do that.

01:48:23.140 And so you won't even get access to the data unless you take the steps.

01:48:27.220 And that's partly why faith is necessary, especially in an endeavor like that.

01:48:31.660 You have to decide at some fundamental level, you know, maybe you're scattered all over the place.

01:48:38.080 It's interesting when Christ comes back in the book of Revelation and he's the judge.

01:48:43.320 So he's separating the damned from the saved, let's say.

01:48:47.620 He says something very strange.

01:48:49.300 He says, if you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.

01:48:53.580 He actually says vomit.

01:48:55.080 So it's a disgust reaction.

01:48:57.460 And it's this idea that it's the worst sin is to play both sides against the middle.

01:49:05.140 You know, that sometimes you'll lie and sometimes you'll tell the truth.

01:49:08.980 You know, you won't commit to something because you want it both ways.

01:49:12.420 And that's the worst possible.

01:49:14.080 Well, so let's say you commit to lies.

01:49:16.020 Well, maybe you'll find out pretty quickly that that's a hell of a thing to do and learn.

01:49:20.420 What if you don't commit?

01:49:22.040 Sorry.

01:49:22.900 Sorry.

01:49:23.280 Yeah.

01:49:23.640 Yeah.

01:49:23.980 Go ahead.

01:49:24.680 I was going to say, what if you don't commit?

01:49:25.920 Not because you believe that you know what's what's correct and you'd like to lie, but because you simply don't know.

01:49:31.700 Yeah.

01:49:31.980 Well, that's OK.

01:49:32.920 Yeah.

01:49:34.360 Yeah.

01:49:34.520 That's that's a different that's psychologically.

01:49:36.560 That's a whole different thing, I would say.

01:49:38.880 Well, the real damage comes when you know what you should do and then you decide not to do it anyways.

01:49:44.880 Yeah.

01:49:45.680 You violate your conscience.

01:49:47.460 Yes.

01:49:47.760 It's it is the same thing.

01:49:48.960 And if you practice that, you're you're going to be in hell and you're probably going to drag a fair number of people along with you if you have your druthers.

01:49:56.860 So I feel comfortable speculating because I don't mind.

01:50:00.020 Sorry.

01:50:00.400 I'm so sorry that I keep interrupting.

01:50:02.640 Oh, man.

01:50:03.180 It's my you're not.

01:50:04.340 Don't be sorry about it.

01:50:05.420 Yeah.

01:50:05.560 Let me say this.

01:50:06.320 Let me say this.

01:50:06.880 It's fine.

01:50:07.680 I also I don't know if it's true that you temporarily get what you want, per se, when you lie.

01:50:12.820 And the reason is it depends on what you want.

01:50:15.280 Now, obviously, everything depends on everything.

01:50:16.800 You can always say that depends on so and so.

01:50:18.560 But the reason I say that is that it's meretricious in some sense.

01:50:22.580 You think you want object X and then it turns out that you don't when you get it.

01:50:27.280 So I remember in Pirates of the Caribbean, I could be misremembering this, but there is some gold.

01:50:30.860 I think I'm completely generalizing this.

01:50:34.480 But let's imagine there is some gold gem that they wanted and it glows.

01:50:38.700 And this guy's like, there's only one in the world that's unique.

01:50:41.260 I want this.

01:50:42.160 He eventually goes through this whole journey.

01:50:44.140 He finds it.

01:50:45.160 And then he says, oh, no, then he's happy until he gets to this island where there's millions.

01:50:49.680 It just as far as the eye can see, there are these gold gems.

01:50:52.820 And it just stops.

01:50:54.080 He's like, why did I go through all this for that?

01:50:56.540 And in some sense, I'm wondering, hmm, is the majority of religious texts telling us, you think you want so and so.

01:51:06.000 What you actually want is this.

01:51:08.020 And in that way, we can say that even the atheist, we can even say that the atheist ultimately wants God.

01:51:13.420 Even the serial killer ultimately wants God.

01:51:15.560 Well, that's it.

01:51:16.440 Yeah, yeah.

01:51:17.460 They're distractions.

01:51:18.760 I can't wander down that road with you at the moment because I'm getting tired.

01:51:21.860 But I'd like to say one thing about that deceit issue again.

01:51:26.080 And then maybe we could close.

01:51:27.460 If you lie to a girl and she sleeps with you.

01:51:31.540 Sure.

01:51:32.240 Why aren't you a rapist?

01:51:34.600 And is that actually what you wanted?

01:51:38.000 Right.

01:51:38.480 Because you're you're it's false pretenses.

01:51:41.120 If you could get away with.

01:51:42.480 Yeah.

01:51:44.660 Well, so then all of a sudden you don't have.

01:51:46.360 Well, maybe what you want in your soul of souls is, you know.

01:51:52.520 This the sexual encounter you'd have in paradise.

01:51:55.640 You know, you want love.

01:51:56.940 You want companionship.

01:51:58.580 You want the maternal embrace.

01:52:00.800 You want eroticism.

01:52:02.480 You want deep personal contact.

01:52:04.440 You want eye to eye communication.

01:52:06.220 That's all part of this fantasy.

01:52:07.880 You know, then you deceive to get it.

01:52:11.300 And then you get it.

01:52:12.360 Well, no, you don't.

01:52:13.880 Because you're a deceitful rapist.

01:52:16.440 And so what do you get?

01:52:17.680 Well, you get the corruption of your soul and the contamination of the thing that you want and need most desperately.

01:52:24.180 And that the entire human endeavor depends upon.

01:52:27.960 And that's probably a good place to close.

01:52:34.640 It's really good talking to you, man.

01:52:36.180 Yeah.

01:52:36.360 Yeah.

01:52:36.520 It's great talking to you.

01:52:37.700 Now, man, I wanted to talk about your film.

01:52:41.540 Sure.

01:52:41.960 Sure.

01:52:42.200 Sure.

01:52:42.920 Okay.

01:52:43.360 I wanted to.

01:52:44.300 Or maybe we did.

01:52:45.400 Next point.

01:52:45.780 You know what I mean?

01:52:46.560 I want to talk.

01:52:47.080 Yes.

01:52:47.540 Right.

01:52:47.900 Exactly.

01:52:48.900 That's another aspect we can talk about.

01:52:50.480 How much of reality is fractal like where the examination of any element, if you pursue it far enough as the examination of the whole.

01:52:57.140 Now, I know Cantor believed that by studying infinity mathematically, he was studying the mind or studying God per se.

01:53:04.440 And some people think, why are you wasting your time if you're someone who cares about the good?

01:53:08.120 Why are you caring about mathematics or physics?

01:53:11.280 Well, hey, man, maybe if you're truthfully exploring something, you're trying.

01:53:14.740 And I take exception to one of your rules, which is tell the truth.

01:53:21.340 I like the codicil, which is, or at least not lie.

01:53:24.900 But I would reverse that.

01:53:25.680 I'd say, don't lie and try to tell the truth.

01:53:28.080 Because it's much easier to feel like you're telling the truth when you're not.

01:53:32.040 You can trick yourself.

01:53:33.100 And I think the majority of the time we think we're telling the truth isn't.

01:53:36.840 And that's another reason I paused.

01:53:38.220 Because there are thoughts that come to me.

01:53:39.880 You start by stopping lying.

01:53:42.160 There are thoughts that occur.

01:53:43.680 You start by.

01:53:44.080 You have to compare.

01:53:44.500 It's not easy to discern what is actually that what I think and what's a reflex that just comes to me.

01:53:51.340 So I'm trying to make sure.

01:53:53.480 Well, anyway, we can talk about free will another time.

01:53:56.080 It was really good talking to you, man.

01:54:00.620 Yeah, it was great talking to you as well.

01:54:01.800 Good luck with your continued endeavors and with your podcast.

01:54:04.600 And I really liked your idea about not saying the same thing twice the same way.

01:54:09.360 That's a real interesting mental habit, disciplinary habit.

01:54:13.060 That's smart.

01:54:13.700 Like, what's 4 to the power of 4?

01:54:17.880 256.

01:54:18.280 Okay, so how do you know that?

01:54:19.100 You can memorize it.

01:54:20.180 But another way is that you can go, well, what's 4 to the power of 5?

01:54:23.040 Well, that's 2 to the power of 10.

01:54:24.180 That's 1024 if you're a computer scientist.

01:54:26.260 You know that because you deal with bits.

01:54:28.120 And then you can say, well, what's 2 to the...

01:54:29.660 So what's 4 to the power of 364?

01:54:31.520 So you can bound it from each side.

01:54:33.460 4 to the power of 3, 4 to the power of 5.

01:54:34.920 And then you get a better understanding of what it means to be 4 to the power of 4.

01:54:38.160 So the more...

01:54:38.840 Even if it's slight alterations and you're saying the same phenomena of trying

01:54:43.580 to describe the same phenomenon, you get a better understanding of it.

01:54:46.720 And when you're talking about something so complex...

01:54:49.660 I never give the same lecture twice.

01:54:54.080 Yeah, and that's not easy, man.

01:54:55.780 No, but it's pretty damn entertaining, I'll tell you.

01:55:01.000 Yeah.

01:55:01.960 So before we go, I'm curious, why is it that you do these podcasts?

01:55:07.220 What are you trying to accomplish with them?

01:55:08.900 So one is obviously you're trying to learn.

01:55:10.300 And obviously, you've attained some level of fame and wealth.

01:55:13.800 So it's not as if you want more.

01:55:15.380 Perhaps you do.

01:55:16.280 I mean, we can't discount selfish motivations.

01:55:19.760 But what is the reason that you hope the good reason in you is?

01:55:24.400 To have conversations like this and to share them with as many people as possible

01:55:28.100 in the hopes that we'll build better people and not burn the world down.

01:55:31.480 Yeah.

01:55:35.720 Yeah.

01:55:36.320 Some people say, well, why is it that I'm focusing on the left?

01:55:38.820 And you mentioned it's not...

01:55:41.180 See, some people from the left call the right reactionary.

01:55:44.280 Well, so it seems like perhaps what you're doing on the extreme left,

01:55:47.820 you can...

01:55:48.260 Even if you feel like the right is more damaging,

01:55:50.760 you don't think you're provoking the right.

01:55:52.560 Also, the left is more amenable to reason,

01:55:54.660 and at least colloquially, it's more amenable to reason.

01:55:57.440 So I thought perhaps I should pursue that.

01:55:59.300 And I'm more interested.

01:56:00.480 The right is blatant in the racism.

01:56:02.580 So it's like, well, that's a five-minute film if I'm to analyze the right.

01:56:07.460 And yeah, so I'll just...

01:56:09.340 I'll let people know about...

01:56:10.880 If they'd like to see more about me,

01:56:13.300 they can visit theories of everything.

01:56:15.380 So you can just type that into YouTube.

01:56:17.100 They're a conversation much like this, Jordan,

01:56:19.080 where I'm super...

01:56:20.760 So fascinated.

01:56:22.600 No, I wouldn't say my motivations are pure.

01:56:25.040 I'm fascinated by consciousness, physics, free will, and God.

01:56:29.300 And exploring them with technical depth as much as I can,

01:56:33.420 and not despising like most people.

01:56:36.420 I think that disparagement is what,

01:56:38.640 well, in many ways, is holding us back.

01:56:40.900 So I'm trying to bring some rigor, some exactitude to it,

01:56:44.120 because it's not...

01:56:44.960 That's actually...

01:56:45.640 Well, we can talk about that.

01:56:48.320 And then for Better Left Unsaid,

01:56:49.600 if people want to see,

01:56:50.580 you can go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com.

01:56:52.820 I try to bring some of the same analytical framework

01:56:55.740 to exploring the concept of...

01:56:57.520 No, exploring the question of when does the left go too far.

01:56:59.980 And it's such an incomplete film.

01:57:01.920 I disavow it in many ways,

01:57:03.720 because it's so incomplete.

01:57:06.240 But it's almost like homework.

01:57:07.420 I have to submit it at some point.

01:57:11.220 Yep.

01:57:12.820 Jordan, thank you, man.

01:57:15.660 Ciao, man.

01:57:16.480 Really good talking to you.

01:57:18.360 It flew by.

01:57:19.760 And you're very articulate and thoughtful,

01:57:21.700 and you're very careful with your words.

01:57:23.600 And so, good for you, man.

01:57:26.260 Yeah.

01:57:27.060 Well, thank you.

01:57:27.980 That's a huge compliment coming from you.

01:57:32.720 Good to talk to you.

01:57:34.240 Take care, man.

01:57:34.960 Thank you.

01:57:35.500 Bye, baby.

01:57:42.760 Goodbye.

01:57:43.340 Okay, ma'am.

01:57:48.440 Goodbye.

01:57:58.060 Bye.

01:57:58.880 Bye.

01:57:59.800 Bye.

01:58:00.000 Bye.

01:58:00.460 Bye.

01:58:00.560 Bye.

01:58:01.240 Bye.

01:58:02.360 Bye.

01:58:03.220 Bye.

01:58:03.900 Bye.

01:58:04.160 Bye.

01:58:04.720 Bye.

01:58:04.920 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 24, 2022

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

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