The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 256. Psychedelics, Consciousness, and AI ｜ Richard Dawkins

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00:00:53.780 Hello everyone.

00:00:54.940 A while back, and that would be November of 2021,

00:00:59.760 I had the distinct pleasure of having a discussion with Dr. Richard Dawkins,

00:01:03.960 who, apart from being an esteemed evolutionary biologist and theorist,

00:01:08.060 is also one of the world's foremost atheists.

00:01:11.040 We danced back and forth for quite a while on Gmail before agreeing to meet,

00:01:15.700 and our meeting, I think, was really productive.

00:01:18.160 So, I have a recording of it, audio only, as was the agreement.

00:01:23.120 And it starts rather abruptly, as we entered right into a discussion,

00:01:27.180 and it ends abruptly, in a sense, too, because we ran out of our time without running out of topics.

00:01:32.100 And so, I walked over to, as it turned out, a chapel on the Oxford campus,

00:01:37.300 and that wasn't a place that Dr. Dawkins wanted to go with me, so that's where it ended.

00:01:41.640 In any case, we had a wide-ranging conversation.

00:01:44.220 I found him charming and erudite and intelligent and a man of goodwill,

00:01:49.400 and I really enjoyed the conversation.

00:01:51.760 So, I hope you enjoy it, too.

00:01:54.480 And I hope that there's more of it, because we have a lot more to talk about.

00:01:57.720 I feel that way, and I think perhaps he did by the end of our conversation.

00:02:02.640 So, enjoy!

00:02:20.560 Almost 100% of the conversations that I have with people on the street are very, very positive.

00:02:27.720 I would say it's one in 5,000 that isn't.

00:02:31.120 Yes.

00:02:31.820 But, but...

00:02:33.800 It's only a sixth one.

00:02:35.200 Yes, and there's no shortage of...

00:02:37.740 Yeah.

00:02:39.240 Trouble.

00:02:39.860 What's the motivation of the few who are hostile?

00:02:44.380 That's a good question, isn't it?

00:02:46.340 Because you could think about that as sort of a general metaphysical question.

00:02:50.160 You know, what's the motivation of the few who are truly hostile?

00:02:53.420 I think often they have me confused with a figment of their imagination.

00:02:58.440 Sure.

00:02:59.200 You know, so when I...

00:03:01.820 You sent me one of your papers on biological sex.

00:03:07.120 Well, stating what you stated in that paper is already enough in the current world to make you

00:03:13.420 very unpopular with a certain class of people, regardless of why you think what you think

00:03:19.960 or what your reasons are.

00:03:23.180 When I...

00:03:24.700 When all this first exploded around me, I had released a couple of YouTube videos,

00:03:30.000 three of them, I think, decrying a bill, C-16, that was passed by the Canadian Parliament,

00:03:37.800 which mandated pronoun use.

00:03:43.400 And...

00:03:43.880 For me, it had nothing to do with the transgender issue, or maybe it did peripherally,

00:03:48.320 as a political issue, you know, and maybe as a psychological issue, because

00:03:52.100 the transgender issue is very complicated if you're a psychopathologist.

00:03:56.960 But, for me, it was just compelled speech.

00:04:00.300 It's like, I don't care what your reason is, I am not saying the words I am legally obligated

00:04:06.920 to say.

00:04:07.780 And the case I made on YouTube was, well, first, the American Supreme Court had made compelled

00:04:13.760 voluntary speech, they declared it unconstitutional in 1942, and second, there was never a common

00:04:20.000 law jurisdiction in the entire world that ever compelled speech for any reason.

00:04:26.280 Is Canada the only country that does this?

00:04:30.300 That's a good question.

00:04:33.120 I don't know.

00:04:34.060 I don't know of any other.

00:04:35.120 I know the United States doesn't.

00:04:36.560 Yes.

00:04:37.020 We've also had this, in Canada, this proliferation of these so-called human rights commissions,

00:04:42.340 which are like a quasi-judicial inquisition system that have been taken over completely

00:04:47.520 by the woke types.

00:04:48.560 And so, there was a restaurant in Vancouver quite recently where the man who owned it,

00:04:54.340 although he seemed to have done backflips to satisfy this angry, hypothetically transgender 0.99

00:05:00.560 individual he'd employed, he was fined something like $35,000 and forced to take this, you know,

00:05:07.100 these mandatory sensitivity training programs.

00:05:09.480 Is this in Canada?

00:05:10.640 That's in Canada, yeah, Vancouver's major city on the West Coast.

00:05:14.280 And so, you know, I was assured when I voiced my opposition, I said, well, this is illegal.

00:05:20.280 And he said, well, nothing will happen if you don't comply.

00:05:22.720 And I thought, what the hell with that?

00:05:24.120 Well, what do you mean nothing will happen?

00:05:25.360 It's illegal.

00:05:26.320 Yes, quite.

00:05:27.240 You know, nothing will happen.

00:05:28.080 So, how can you possibly say nothing will happen?

00:05:31.820 But that wasn't the point for me either.

00:05:33.560 Well, I made these videos at the same time I made a video because the University of Toronto

00:05:39.360 was implementing mandatory racial sensitivity training.

00:05:45.460 And I know the literature pertaining to the implicit association test, let's say, which

00:05:50.260 is the test that all these half-wit HR types use to diagnose your implicit bias.

00:05:56.200 And then they want to train you with explicit training techniques to reduce your bias, which

00:06:02.280 can't work if their theory is correct, because it takes mass practice to change or eliminate

00:06:07.760 implicit bias.

00:06:08.920 And then there's no evidence whatsoever that the training programs work, and some evidence

00:06:13.520 that they're actually counterproductive.

00:06:15.400 And the implicit association test, which is essentially used as a diagnostic instrument,

00:06:21.640 has neither the predictive validity nor the test-retest reliability.

00:06:26.200 to be used in an ethical manner as a diagnostic test, which I also said in these videos.

00:06:32.680 And so, that caused a lot of trouble.

00:06:35.160 And I didn't really expect it, you know.

00:06:36.800 I mean...

00:06:37.340 Well, why should you?

00:06:38.160 It's perfectly reasonable.

00:06:39.100 I just want to say I admire your courage in speaking out about this because a huge number

00:06:44.920 of people, including me, totally agree with you, and many, many of them are just too frightened

00:06:51.340 to say so, because they have been intimidated.

00:06:54.220 There's massive intimidation going on, especially in the academic world.

00:06:59.800 Yeah.

00:07:00.400 And you're one of the few people who's actually stood up to this intimidation, and I wish to

00:07:04.700 salute you for that.

00:07:05.400 Well, thank you for that.

00:07:06.320 That's very much appreciated.

00:07:07.920 Well, I understand, because I've studied it a lot, why people are intimidated.

00:07:15.140 You know, I've talked to conservative politicians all over Canada and the United States, although

00:07:19.760 I also talk to, particularly in the States, moderate Democrat types a lot.

00:07:24.060 But the conservatives, especially in Canada, they're absolutely terrified that if they

00:07:32.380 make any conservative pronouncements, that they'll be singled out and mobbed.

00:07:38.340 And it's unbelievably unpleasant.

00:07:40.660 I mean, not to mention potentially dangerous.

00:07:43.760 I mean, I was careful in what I did.

00:07:48.040 See, I worked as a clinician for 20 years, and I helped people negotiate unbelievably stress.

00:07:54.060 Successful situations, you know, where their careers were on the line, where their families

00:07:58.640 were on the line, their sanity was on the line.

00:08:02.240 And I got very good at figuring out how to step through such minefields, you know, strategically

00:08:08.220 and carefully.

00:08:09.020 And so, by the time I said something, I had three sources of independent income.

00:08:15.800 So, I had a clinical practice, and I had a company that was generating a certain amount

00:08:20.020 of money, and I had my university position.

00:08:22.280 And so, I didn't think that, you know, I was fairly well insulated.

00:08:27.100 I thought, because when I said I wouldn't do this, I meant there is no bloody way you're

00:08:32.360 going to make me do this, no matter what you do.

00:08:35.020 And I'd thought that through all the way to the bottom, you know.

00:08:37.540 Could lose my job.

00:08:38.900 Yeah, I can live with that.

00:08:40.260 Could lose my clinical practice.

00:08:42.380 Yeah, I could live with that.

00:08:43.960 What about jail?

00:08:45.040 Well, probably won't come to that.

00:08:46.240 But put me in jail and see what happens.

00:08:50.460 And so, I meant no.

00:08:53.140 And I meant no more than they meant yes.

00:08:55.860 And that's part of the reason it caused such a stir, I would say.

00:09:00.920 So, but many of the clients I dealt with, you know, they'd be under pressure to conform

00:09:05.580 ideologically in the workplace and be pressured badly.

00:09:09.840 And, you know, they had families to support, mortgages to pay, and it was, I wouldn't say

00:09:16.700 easier for them exactly to go along, you know, step by step or even micro step by micro

00:09:23.160 step than to stand up and risk being taken out.

00:09:27.120 And so, if I was in my clinical practice, if someone needed to stand up in the workplace

00:09:31.480 to a bullying boss, say, or to an ideological cadre, which was very frequently the case in

00:09:37.640 the corporate world, we'd get their CV or resume in order and make sure it was polished up.

00:09:45.100 And if they had any educational faults that needed to be rectified to make them marketable,

00:09:50.000 we'd address that.

00:09:50.980 And then they'd apply for different jobs, and they'd go on a few interviews, so they were

00:09:54.740 ready, and then they could go in.

00:09:56.860 And we did that often, too, when I was helping people negotiate for a raise.

00:10:00.280 It's like, get yourself ready, you know.

00:10:04.320 So, you can go in there and tell your boss why you're valuable.

00:10:06.520 Or you can go in there and tell your boss why they better get the hell off your case,

00:10:10.300 or they're either going to lose you, or there's going to be trouble.

00:10:12.480 But man, you have to prepare for that.

00:10:15.220 And so, you see in the academia, and in the corporate workplace, and in the entertainment

00:10:21.240 industry now, which is absolutely corrupted by this sort of thing, 300,000 micro retreats. 0.99

00:10:28.980 And here we are.

00:10:31.640 What's a micro retreat?

00:10:32.860 What's a micro retreat?

00:10:34.800 Okay.

00:10:35.760 So, I'm sitting in a faculty meeting at the University of Toronto.

00:10:40.080 And the administration announces that they're going to increase the size of our fourth-year

00:10:45.680 seminars by a factor of two.

00:10:49.480 We don't have enough faculty.

00:10:51.180 We actually don't have enough money to hire more faculty.

00:10:53.580 Well, that's because you spent all the money on administrators over the last 20 years.

00:10:57.340 And here's the data that pertained to that, but that's beside the point.

00:11:01.140 So, would it be okay if you just, you know, had twice as many people in your fourth-year

00:11:05.140 seminar?

00:11:05.940 Well, that's a crowning seminar for the students.

00:11:09.820 And a seminar with 40 people in it isn't a seminar.

00:11:13.120 It's another class.

00:11:14.100 And so, I tell my faculty confreres, why don't you just say no?

00:11:20.800 Like, no, we're not doing this.

00:11:23.880 Well, we won't get what we want.

00:11:27.240 Well, you may have noticed that when you've been dealing with the administration for the

00:11:31.000 last 20 years, they make all sorts of plans and often you're consulted and then none of

00:11:35.660 the plans come to fruition.

00:11:36.960 And then they implement something that has nothing to do with what you want all the time.

00:11:41.020 And all of you know that because it's happened to you.

00:11:43.640 Yeah, well, you know, we have to go along with them.

00:11:48.600 Okay.

00:11:50.520 Well, so then what happened?

00:11:52.080 You know what happened.

00:11:52.940 I don't know if it happened here at Oxford, but in North American universities, the administrative

00:11:59.200 load, like a parasite load, and I think the biological metaphor is exactly apt, by the

00:12:06.520 way, exploded over the last 40 years.

00:12:11.160 Universities have eaten up 70 cents of every dollar that the American federal government

00:12:15.360 pumped into student aid.

00:12:17.020 It's almost all gone into the hands of administrators.

00:12:19.860 The faculty numbers haven't grown in a commensurate manner with the student numbers.

00:12:24.600 And so, the administration took over.

00:12:26.800 Well, and then because they were composed of the same sort of people that the faculty were

00:12:31.400 who did all these micro-retreats, when the diversity, equity, and inclusivity people

00:12:36.560 started to invade the administration, they just did the same thing.

00:12:40.040 And so, here we are.

00:12:43.180 Well, I think we agree about this.

00:12:44.940 So, we ought to get on to whatever it says you want to talk about.

00:12:47.300 Yes, yes, yes.

00:12:48.480 Well, I'd like to talk to you about your paper, the one you sent me about the organism as a

00:12:54.940 model.

00:12:55.420 Yes, okay.

00:12:56.200 Yeah, if you don't mind, because I'd like to, I guess what I was curious about, because

00:13:02.980 I didn't find anything in that paper that I disagreed with at all.

00:13:06.360 I thought, yeah, that's, and I know a little bit about the engineering literature that suggests

00:13:10.940 that, and even the computational literature that suggests that, in some sense, an organism

00:13:15.700 that operates within the world has to be a model of that world in order for it to be,

00:13:21.000 in order for it to be able to operate in the world.

00:13:23.660 Yes.

00:13:23.960 And you detailed out all sorts of real-world examples, including, well, let's say, stick

00:13:29.120 insects, where, you know, not only are they a model of the world, but they look just like

00:13:33.320 the world.

00:13:33.900 Yes.

00:13:34.260 And animals in winter versus summer, changing their coats.

00:13:37.700 And birds, of course, you said you could derive the structure of the atmosphere, and

00:13:43.100 probably the Earth's gravitational field, and probably the strength of the gravitational

00:13:47.680 field by a sufficiently detailed analysis of the bird.

00:13:50.560 Very good.

00:13:50.940 I hadn't heard of that one.

00:13:51.840 That's very good.

00:13:52.480 Yeah.

00:13:52.700 Oh, well, you did mention, you did mention the, the, the air aspect of birds anyways,

00:13:57.360 but, but I'm sure you could, I'm sure you could.

00:13:59.760 Oh, I could generalize that.

00:14:00.860 Yes.

00:14:01.380 Well, good.

00:14:02.120 I'm glad you like that.

00:14:04.180 It's, it's a book I'm now working on called the genetic book of the dead, which is all 0.99

00:14:10.580 about the idea that, that the animal is a model of not the present, but the past ancestral worlds.

00:14:17.640 Yes.

00:14:17.980 Because the animal's genes have been filtered through a long series of environments.

00:14:24.700 So the genome is a palimpsest of ancient environments, more recent, more recent, more recent, more recent,

00:14:33.140 until very, very recent, including extremely recent.

00:14:37.980 And then we go out of the genome and the nervous system becomes part of the palimpsest of recent experience.

00:14:43.860 Right.

00:14:44.300 So you could say that, so correct me, correct me if I ever put words in your mouth, because

00:14:49.300 I want to get what you think.

00:14:50.480 Yes.

00:14:50.660 Exactly right.

00:14:51.480 The genetic code is a repository of information that generates ever, perhaps ever more complex

00:15:00.400 or ever more fine grained.

00:15:02.380 I'm not trying to say that.

00:15:03.880 All I wanted to say is that, is that the genetic code is a, in principle, decodable description

00:15:11.520 of ancient, of ancient environments.

00:15:13.900 Right.

00:15:14.220 Right.

00:15:14.440 Okay.

00:15:14.820 Fair, fair enough.

00:15:15.620 So, so the question then I suppose would be, at what level of resolution, right?

00:15:21.840 Yes.

00:15:22.300 So there's this idea, I think I mentioned it in my talk the other day.

00:15:25.860 I really like this idea.

00:15:27.580 And when I talk about religious matters, by the way, I, I try to speak metaphorically and

00:15:33.160 psychologically and to tread on ground that might be theological only when that's absolutely

00:15:38.940 necessary and never if I can possibly manage it.

00:15:41.540 So I like to think about things in psychological and biological terms and physical terms for

00:15:48.600 that matter, wherever possible.

00:15:49.900 It keeps things clearer and simpler.

00:15:53.000 And so, but there is this idea in relationship to the idea of the incarnation that Christ could

00:16:00.220 embody God through a process of kenosis and, and the, the, the scholastic theoreticians who

00:16:07.700 made this case because they were trying to account for how the entire cosmos, you might

00:16:13.100 say, could fit in one body.

00:16:15.200 And the idea was, well, there was an emptying of God.

00:16:20.000 And when I was reading that in relationship to heuristic processing and also to the idea

00:16:26.680 of, of low resolution representations in, in computational simulation and in relationship

00:16:33.240 to this idea that an animal has to be the model of the world.

00:16:36.480 I thought, well, you kind of, you want to also be an unbiased model of the world, right?

00:16:41.340 So if you make a thumbnail, this is a good way of thinking about it.

00:16:44.760 I think a computer thumbnail is a good model of, uh, essentially a two dimensional slice of

00:16:53.660 the world, right?

00:16:54.380 So it's a low resolution image.

00:16:56.300 And if it's an, the interesting thing about a low resolution image is that it's an unbiased

00:17:03.980 sample of the color space of the, of the image, right?

00:17:09.500 It's not, it doesn't have an ideological bent.

00:17:12.540 Part of the reason it's an accurate representation is, and this has to do with that idea of redundancy

00:17:17.580 that you developed in your paper.

00:17:19.320 So if I took a picture of that wall, which is basically white, the picture is going to

00:17:25.640 be white.

00:17:26.300 It's not going to be as varied in its whiteness as the actual wall, but it's going to be an 0.71

00:17:30.900 unbiased random, essentially random sample of the whiteness of that wall.

00:17:35.600 And so it can stand in for it in a manner that's unbiased.

00:17:38.960 And a lot of, I think our internal representations are, I like to use the terminology low resolution

00:17:45.480 because it's, it implies this, it is also associated in some sense with the idea of a

00:17:51.120 compression algorithm in computation, because what a compression algorithm does is reduces

00:17:56.160 redundancy and all that's stored as information is the non-redundant information.

00:18:03.020 And you can usually take something quite complex.

00:18:05.080 And if it has regularities in it, as you pointed out in the paper, then you can, you can abstract

00:18:12.720 the regularities and just represent them.

00:18:15.920 And it's interesting.

00:18:17.120 It's really interesting, actually, because with some compression algorithms, some get rid

00:18:24.700 of data, but some, and they don't compress quite as tightly.

00:18:30.060 Some allow you to recreate the entire original from the compression because there is genuine

00:18:34.960 redundancy in the, in the external world.

00:18:38.720 So the kenosis idea, part of the reason I'm interested in this, and I was extremely interested

00:18:45.260 in the fact that when we first had our emails back and forth before we decided to meet, I

00:18:52.500 suggested that we meet and that I would like that.

00:18:56.100 And you sent me an email and you said, I suspect you want to talk about this.

00:19:01.100 And I thought, it was remarkable to me that you picked that particular paragraph because

00:19:06.660 that was exactly why I wanted to talk to you.

00:19:09.120 And it was, I think, probably the most clearly I'd ever stated that particular idea.

00:19:13.700 And so that was quite...

00:19:15.160 I've forgotten what that was.

00:19:16.400 Well, it has to do with what we're talking about to some degree.

00:19:20.540 The question is, if the human being is a model of the environment, what exactly is being modeled?

00:19:31.080 So, because you might ask, well, what exactly is the environment?

00:19:35.060 And so, and that's where I think we could have a very fruitful exchange of views.

00:19:40.080 Now, the stick insect has obviously been shaped to a massive degree by natural selection, because

00:19:50.360 it looks like a stick.

00:19:52.700 But I'm very curious about the role of sexual selection, because that makes things weirdly

00:20:00.400 complicated, especially among human beings.

00:20:03.320 Because, first of all, sexual selection can result in runaway processes.

00:20:10.760 Like, I think, I might have read this in your book, The Irish Elk Story.

00:20:15.800 Yes.

00:20:16.740 Yes.

00:20:17.380 Yeah.

00:20:17.820 So, and some people have suggested, maybe it was you, because I read your books, it was

00:20:23.260 a long time ago.

00:20:24.120 But, you know, they stuck.

00:20:25.700 Many people have suggested that at least one of the mechanisms that drove our rapid cortical

00:20:32.200 evolution was stringent sexual selection, primarily applied by females to males. 0.62

00:20:38.300 I think that might be Geoffrey Miller who suggested that.

00:20:41.700 Okay.

00:20:42.660 And so, what do you, what, if sexual selection is one of the processes that really drove our

00:20:52.000 rapid divergence away from our chimpanzee-human shared relative, then part of what we modeled

00:21:02.400 as a consequence of that sexual selection is whatever women wanted. 1.00

00:21:10.380 And so then the question is, what exactly is it that's driving human-female sexual selection?

00:21:16.960 And that's really what I wanted to talk to you about, because that would be incorporated

00:21:22.220 in us as a model.

00:21:24.240 You know, if women are looking for a kind of ideal, let's say, in a mate, then as they exercise 1.00

00:21:32.100 their hypergamous choice, the male is going to come to ever more closely approximate that

00:21:39.320 ideal, whatever it is.

00:21:40.600 And that's going to be an implicit ideal, because none of that's conscious, obviously.

00:21:44.360 Yes.

00:21:45.420 It seems to me you keep wandering from one subject to another without sticking to one

00:21:50.280 at a time.

00:21:51.160 I mean, we went to kenosis, and I kind of wondered what that had got to do with anything.

00:21:56.400 And then...

00:21:56.860 It's probably some difference in our thinking style, you know.

00:22:00.540 I think...

00:22:01.460 Well, one of the...

00:22:04.360 Would you say you're more interested in ideas or aesthetics?

00:22:09.160 Ideas.

00:22:10.040 Okay.

00:22:10.620 That's what I would have guessed.

00:22:11.980 Yes.

00:22:12.260 I'm probably more, somewhat more interested in aesthetics, although it's close.

00:22:17.960 And part of the way that would be reflected in our thinking styles is that I would think

00:22:23.340 in a more, in a style that has a more loose associational structure.

00:22:27.920 That's right.

00:22:28.760 I mean, let me take one example of something that I've seen of yours, which is nothing to

00:22:34.380 do with sexual selection.

00:22:36.260 You once showed in a lecture a picture of snakes spiraling around each other, snakes.

00:22:42.960 Oh, yes.

00:22:43.500 And you said something like, I think positively, you know, that is a representation of DNA.

00:22:50.860 Yes.

00:22:51.400 We could...

00:22:51.920 Let's leave that one.

00:22:52.880 But I promise I will return to that.

00:22:55.300 Well, there's a lot of time, because that seems to me to go to the heart of what may

00:22:59.080 be a difference between us, this aesthetic...

00:23:01.200 I mean, that idea that that, in some sense, represents DNA seems to me to be complete nonsense.

00:23:07.020 Okay.

00:23:07.340 I will absolutely address that.

00:23:09.300 Okay.

00:23:10.180 God.

00:23:11.160 Well, this is something I did want to talk to you about.

00:23:13.080 Okay.

00:23:13.260 It does take us rather far down the rabbit hole, though, I would say.

00:23:17.640 Okay.

00:23:18.620 Well, I think it may be fundamental to our difference.

00:23:20.780 That's fine.

00:23:21.420 That's fine.

00:23:21.900 I'm more than happy to address it.

00:23:23.380 And people have called me out on that a lot.

00:23:25.180 You know, and I...

00:23:25.440 Oh, good.

00:23:25.680 I actually threw that in a lecture, because I was thinking in a loosely associative way about

00:23:31.440 some very complicated things.

00:23:32.820 And I was struck by this recurrence of the double helix pattern in cultural representations

00:23:40.740 all over the place.

00:23:42.040 You love symbols.

00:23:43.160 I mean, you're obsessed with symbols.

00:23:45.080 Yes.

00:23:46.020 You're almost drunk on symbols.

00:23:48.820 You could say that.

00:23:51.260 I think you've got to stop and say, what does it actually mean to say...

00:23:56.340 Absolutely.

00:23:57.140 And the snake's twining is one thing.

00:23:59.340 There are others.

00:24:00.080 But that would be a very good one to try to nail down.

00:24:02.820 Yeah.

00:24:03.180 Well, you know, part of the...

00:24:04.500 We could talk about technically for a moment, you know, because I think it is a difference

00:24:08.580 in thinking style.

00:24:09.520 And I think one of the reasons that your writing is so appealing to people, including me, is

00:24:15.580 that your language is very precise.

00:24:18.880 It's very obvious what you mean when you say a given word, you know.

00:24:23.580 And some of the psychologists that I've really admired, like Geoffrey Gray, who wrote a great

00:24:28.400 book on the neuropsychology of anxiety.

00:24:30.400 Like, if you're interested in the idea of modeling, that's...

00:24:34.340 I think that's the most profound neuroscience text that's ever been written.

00:24:38.140 I haven't read that.

00:24:38.840 I confess.

00:24:39.260 I used to know Geoffrey Gray, but I haven't read that book.

00:24:41.520 It's a great book.

00:24:43.780 Yes.

00:24:44.180 And it integrates cybernetic theory and animal experimental work and neurophysiology and

00:24:48.920 the function of emotion.

00:24:50.400 Like, it's a really good book.

00:24:51.720 And it does...

00:24:53.480 It is centrally concerned with the idea of modeling because...

00:24:56.480 Good.

00:24:56.900 Because Gray worked... 0.63

00:24:58.920 See, in your paper, and I'll get to the DNA thing, I promise.

00:25:02.220 Okay.

00:25:02.520 In your paper, you talk about the response of a single cell to the repeated...

00:25:07.160 To a repeated identical stimulus?

00:25:09.260 Sure.

00:25:09.420 Okay.

00:25:11.280 Sokolov, who was one of the great Russian neuropsychologists, identified the orienting

00:25:17.880 reflex as the manifestation of the habituation phenomenon at the highest level of nervous

00:25:27.480 system organization.

00:25:28.540 So, for example, if I put headphones on you, and then I hook you to a galvanometer, and

00:25:35.560 I play...

00:25:36.320 Say, I play a middle C at exactly the same volume, one second apart, 40 times.

00:25:42.080 Okay.

00:25:42.260 So what'll happen is, when you first hear it, there'll be a change in skin response.

00:25:47.880 And then the second time you hear it, a slightly smaller change, until it will habituate completely.

00:25:54.840 Zero response.

00:25:56.220 But then if you change the volume, or the pitch, or the space between the tones, or, interestingly

00:26:04.320 enough, if you skip a tone, where the tone should have been, and there's silence, you'll

00:26:11.000 get an orientation.

00:26:11.400 I like that.

00:26:11.780 Great.

00:26:12.100 Okay.

00:26:12.420 Now, out of that, the Russians hypothesized that you build an internal model, which is

00:26:19.580 exactly what you say in that paper, and then your nervous system searches for deviations

00:26:25.240 from the model.

00:26:25.900 And so, and then your consciousness is oriented towards the deviation.

00:26:32.440 And it's oriented by a deep instinct, like, literally an instinct.

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00:29:27.160 When a woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, she often feels alone and afraid.

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00:30:39.800 For example, if you're walking down the road, you have a map of the environment.

00:30:47.960 Imagine that there's a loud clattering noise behind you.

00:30:51.480 You'll stop, and this is all involuntary.

00:30:54.680 It's driven by extremely low-level nervous system mechanism.

00:30:58.760 So you orient towards the place of maximal novelty, and then you do rapid visual exploration

00:31:05.200 to try to rehabituate yourself to the environment.

00:31:10.360 And then if it's, you know, a tradesman's truck bumped, you map that onto regularities you

00:31:16.080 already know, and you continue onward.

00:31:18.880 But all of that's mediated by emotion.

00:31:22.060 So anxiety, literally, we wrote a paper on this, was one of the papers I'm most happy

00:31:28.820 with, that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy.

00:31:33.980 That's what it does.

00:31:34.960 So you can map anxiety right down to, well, you can map it right down to the level of entropy.

00:31:40.600 Yes.

00:31:40.720 So anyways, Gray also mapped the emotions neuropharmacologically and neurophysiologically

00:31:48.500 onto the orienting reflex.

00:31:51.460 And then he identified the brain areas.

00:31:53.400 So the hippocampus, the hippocampus is extremely metabolically active.

00:31:58.800 It's extremely expensive to operate psychophysiologically.

00:32:02.260 It's very susceptible to oxygen deprivation and brain damage.

00:32:05.660 The hippocampus moves information from short-term attention to long-term memory, and it's crucially

00:32:14.920 involved in the analysis and inhibition of that orienting response.

00:32:21.000 And you could also think, too, that this movement of orientation, in some sense, your

00:32:26.260 whole brain is set up to inhibit that.

00:32:29.800 And so here's an interesting corollary of that.

00:32:32.440 One of the things that psychedelics seem to do is to disinhibit.

00:32:37.620 You called it lateral inhibition.

00:32:39.060 There's also a phenomenon called latent inhibition, which is the inhibiting effect of the memory

00:32:44.320 of the regularities on your current perception.

00:32:47.240 And so when you look at the world, mostly what you see is memory.

00:32:50.180 And that's been tracked in the visual system.

00:32:52.380 So, you know, there are these visual primitives like line detection.

00:32:55.380 But if you look at the layers of the visual system, and you look at the bottom layer where the retinal

00:33:02.340 cells first make contact with the visual cortex, there are more top-down inputs from the cortex

00:33:08.220 into that low level than there are retinal inputs.

00:33:11.820 So even at the level of initial detection, most of what you see is memory.

00:33:17.620 And that memory inhibits the novelty response.

00:33:20.360 And the novelty response, this is part of the reason I got interested in mystical experience.

00:33:26.400 The novelty response is twofold.

00:33:29.120 It's not just anxiety.

00:33:31.760 It's also exploratory curiosity.

00:33:35.660 And that's because when there's something novel, well, you have to be careful because God only knows what it might be.

00:33:42.020 Like it might be the thing that kills you.

00:33:43.840 It might be nothing.

00:33:44.620 So anxiety freezes you, but the hypothalamus, which sits right on top of the spinal cord and is the highest

00:33:52.960 integrating center of the instinctual responses of the motor system, it's way precortical.

00:33:59.340 It's divided into two parts.

00:34:01.580 And one part of it governs the dopaminergic system that mediates incentive reward.

00:34:09.160 So all positive emotion, but more importantly, active exploration.

00:34:12.220 And so what happens if you hit something that's novel in relationship to the notions of preconceived

00:34:20.440 regularities, positive emotion is disinhibited.

00:34:24.000 That's exploration.

00:34:25.880 And negative emotion is disinhibited simultaneously.

00:34:29.760 And there's a man named Rudolf Otto who wrote a book called, well, I can't remember the name of the book,

00:34:34.760 but it's not Varieties of Religious Experience because that's James.

00:34:39.360 Anyways, he described the primordial act of perception as numinous, mysterium tremendum.

00:34:47.220 And it's a combination of positive and negative emotion.

00:34:50.580 And I thought, that's pre-latent inhibition perception.

00:34:58.920 Psychedelics disinhibit latent inhibition of perception.

00:35:02.540 And that's why they produce a mystical experience.

00:35:06.280 But the mystical experience, I mean, there's three aspects to it, let's say.

00:35:09.580 There's an overwhelming positive emotion.

00:35:13.240 Simultaneously, there's overwhelming negative emotion.

00:35:15.700 So, and that's like an awe experience.

00:35:19.200 And then there's the disinhibition of fantasy simultaneously, which is something like the

00:35:24.560 attempt to map that.

00:35:25.580 And so, people find that, well, absolutely overwhelming.

00:35:28.900 But by definition, you know, it is overwhelming, literally.

00:35:34.940 Now, you might say, so I'm going to answer that snake question.

00:35:39.800 That's what I'm trying to do, you know.

00:35:42.400 I studied one symbol, which was the Scandinavian world tree symbol.

00:35:49.300 And so, the Scandinavians thought that there was a tree at the center of the cosmos.

00:35:52.800 They called that Yggdrasil.

00:35:54.320 And on the outside of the tree, there's a snake that eats its own tail.

00:35:58.480 Now, the Amazonian jungle dwellers who discovered ayahuasca have the same image.

00:36:09.840 It's exactly the same.

00:36:11.120 It's a tree at the center of the cosmos with a snake that eats its own tail.

00:36:15.080 Now, ayahuasca is a very bizarre chemical.

00:36:19.200 And no one has any idea how the natives synthesized it.

00:36:26.560 Ayahuasca is a combination of DMT, which is an extremely powerful hallucinogenic that only lasts 10 minutes.

00:36:33.320 And a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which makes the DMT experience last eight hours.

00:36:41.500 Because monoamine oxidase inhibitors stop the breakdown of DMT, which is a monoamine.

00:36:48.840 The Amazonians had to find these two plants that were widely separated geographically out of, like, hundreds of thousands of plants.

00:37:01.160 And they had to mix them together.

00:37:02.920 And they had to boil them properly for a certain amount of time to make ayahuasca.

00:37:07.240 Well, they've been using ayahuasca probably for, like, 15,000 years.

00:37:11.560 Now, the Scandinavians didn't use ayahuasca, the ones who came up with the world tree. 0.96

00:37:19.120 This is for 15,000 years.

00:37:20.840 For 15,000 years, yeah.

00:37:22.980 In Amazonia?

00:37:25.680 In the jungles.

00:37:26.820 Well, they got there about 15,000 years ago.

00:37:29.060 Now, maybe, you know, we don't know how long it took them to discover it.

00:37:32.820 But, you know, in most of those relatively primordial and small tribal groups, the pattern is unbroken oral tradition.

00:37:43.960 Like, they're not transformative societies.

00:37:46.500 They do pretty much what their ancestors did.

00:37:49.620 Okay, so you have a phenomenon which is something in common between Scandinavian and Amazonian.

00:37:57.020 Yes.

00:37:57.340 Do you have an explanation for that?

00:38:00.440 Yes.

00:38:01.360 I mean, is...

00:38:02.160 Well, I would say the explanation...

00:38:03.160 Are you talking archetypes now?

00:38:04.480 Well, we won't get to that yet.

00:38:07.120 Because, like I said, and I'm sure you would appreciate this, we want to keep things as much on the ground as possible.

00:38:13.820 Yes, certainly, yes.

00:38:14.860 Yes, okay.

00:38:15.640 Well, so, it's not unreasonable to note that a particular chemical might have the same effect on widely distributed people.

00:38:24.700 Right, so, okay.

00:38:25.460 So, you'd expect constancy of response to a pharmacological agent rather than variants.

00:38:30.520 Yes.

00:38:30.860 And that's even true with the psychedelics.

00:38:33.440 And psilocybin, for example, almost all the psychedelics have a very similar chemical structure.

00:38:39.580 It's a peculiar ring structure, but it's similar to LSD, psilocybin, DMT, the classic hallucinogens.

00:38:50.480 Psilocybin tends to produce a type of vision that has a fair bit of commonality across cultures.

00:38:55.640 And you can think about that as, well, it's the psychophysiological effect of the drug.

00:39:00.600 Now, it's weird because it has this emotional effect.

00:39:05.080 And this disinhibition of emotion can go two ways.

00:39:07.480 Because people can have heavenly experiences.

00:39:09.960 Say, that's almost complete disinhibition of positive emotion.

00:39:12.700 Or they can have bad trips.

00:39:14.580 That's hell, essentially.

00:39:16.300 That's complete disinhibition of negative emotion.

00:39:18.520 And a lot of that seems to depend on the context within which they have the experience.

00:39:24.280 So, if there's a lot of negative things happening in that context, that can be magnified by the experience.

00:39:30.420 And things can go, like, horribly sideways.

00:39:32.920 That accounted for a lot of what happened badly in the psychedelic explosion in the U.S. in the 60s.

00:39:39.580 And that was precipitated by the discovery of LSD.

00:39:42.920 And also, there was a man, a mycologist, who was a banker, who went into Mexico and found a woman practicing shaman who used psilocybin mushrooms.

00:39:55.860 And she agreed to let them try them.

00:39:58.920 And that was one of the Soma. 1.00

00:40:01.580 He wrote Soma, a very famous book on Amanita muscaria.

00:40:05.340 I can't remember his name at the moment.

00:40:07.900 Wausau.

00:40:08.560 That was Wausau.

00:40:09.740 He was the first person.

00:40:10.820 He introduced psilocybin mushrooms into Western culture.

00:40:14.420 And, like, we weren't ready for any of that.

00:40:16.420 And certainly, we weren't ready for LSD.

00:40:18.300 These are unbelievably powerful pharmacological...

00:40:21.440 LSD, I think, is the most psychoactive chemical ever found by an order of magnitude.

00:40:28.460 It just takes a few million molecules to produce an intense psychedelic experience.

00:40:33.760 In any case...

00:40:35.820 Sorry, this is complicated.

00:40:37.560 The ancient Scandinavians either used Amanita muscaria, those red mushrooms with the white dots that you see in fairy tales all the time.

00:40:53.120 Same color as Santa Claus and his flying reindeer.

00:40:57.860 And reindeer like Amanita muscaria mushrooms, by the way.

00:41:02.320 And so do flies, even, weirdly enough.

00:41:06.520 But I think the Scandinavians also used psilocybin.

00:41:09.520 Now, the question is, what the hell is that tree?

00:41:12.580 If you take it seriously.

00:41:13.880 And you should take it seriously.

00:41:15.060 I mean, these images were used for a very, very long time.

00:41:19.000 And people thought about them very hard.

00:41:20.860 So imagine that...

00:41:25.860 Well, first of all, you can imagine that the tree has this resonance as a sacred item.

00:41:32.780 Partly because we've had a relationship with trees for maybe 60 million years.

00:41:39.000 You know, our ancestors lived in trees for a long time.

00:41:43.100 And, you know, you hear these psychologists talk about the African veldt as our, like, uber environment, you know, that we're adapted to.

00:41:52.320 It's like, well, it kind of depends on your time frame.

00:41:55.580 You know, that's 5 million years.

00:42:00.000 Trees, that's like 50 million years.

00:42:02.320 So the notion of the tree, that's in there.

00:42:07.640 And all of our cathedrals have a tree-like architecture.

00:42:11.840 And the light through the stained glass windows, that's sunlight through the glass.

00:42:16.760 There are trees all over the world.

00:42:18.340 It's not surprising that they would come into people's art and symbolism.

00:42:22.700 Yes, but there's a conceptual reason, see, because I think, and this is speculation.

00:42:29.140 I know it's speculation.

00:42:30.260 I understand this perfectly well.

00:42:32.320 It's clear that our consciousness can move up and down levels of analysis to some degree.

00:42:40.300 And levels of nervous system creation and repair.

00:42:44.500 So imagine when you're writing, you can attend to a letter or a word or a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph.

00:42:51.460 You can move your level of apprehension up and down from the micro level to the more macro level.

00:42:58.000 And, you know, at the highest level of your consciousness, you can apprehend the most general ideas.

00:43:04.100 And at the lowest level, very specific, well, actually very specific motor movements.

00:43:11.160 So if you're typing a word and you make a mistake, you don't fix it conceptually.

00:43:18.260 You move your finger and fix it.

00:43:20.000 And so that's kind of where it grounds out.

00:43:22.060 And so our consciousness sort of grounds out at the bodily level, at the level of adjustable, voluntarily adjustable micromusculature, and then at the high level, at the highest level of abstract concept.

00:43:34.280 So it can move, this consciousness.

00:43:36.500 Well, the world tree is a vision of the microcosm to the macrocosm.

00:43:43.060 The tree is used as a metaphor for that.

00:43:44.940 It's sort of a proto-scientific idea, intuition, of the idea that there's a kind of dimension that constitutes zooming in on things right to the smallest possible level of apprehension and zooming out to the most general level of apprehension.

00:44:06.040 Dust particles to cosmos, let's say.

00:44:08.580 Well, psychedelics seem to expand that capacity so that consciousness can move up and down layers of apprehension that aren't available to consciousness under its normal conditions.

00:44:19.340 And there are good accounts of shamanic experiences, and they're very strange.

00:44:24.240 They're very well documented.

00:44:26.980 The shamanic experience involves a death.

00:44:30.120 And then, past the death, the capacity to move up and down this microcosmic to macrocosmic realm in a way that doesn't seem possible under conditions of normal consciousness.

00:44:45.680 And so...

00:44:46.800 We're rambling around again.

00:44:48.300 Yeah.

00:44:49.560 Well, the question is, how far down the levels of analysis can consciousness go under extreme conditions?

00:44:56.060 And so, and I said this was speculation, but I've seen these dual, they're often dual-entwined serpents.

00:45:05.880 They're very common.

00:45:07.300 In fact, I have one made by an Indian carver, Canadian native carver, in my...

00:45:12.060 It's so cool.

00:45:13.940 It's called a sea suit.

00:45:15.000 I have it up in my third floor.

00:45:16.820 It's set on two totem poles.

00:45:18.400 There's a man in the middle.

00:45:19.920 There's a serpent on both sides of him.

00:45:21.660 And I asked him what this image meant to his people, because he's still part of an unbroken tradition.

00:45:29.560 He said they had a myth that something alien landed on the earth.

00:45:35.240 It was this sea suit object.

00:45:37.500 And that when it was rolling down the mountain that it landed on, it took the form of all the things that it encountered.

00:45:45.120 And so, well, like I said, this is in the realm of wild speculation.

00:45:49.680 But I know what Crick thought about the origin of DNA.

00:45:56.200 Well, he thought it was too complex to have evolved.

00:45:59.240 Oh, I see what you mean.

00:46:00.000 You mean the idea of it coming from that?

00:46:02.120 No, I mean, I know that's an infinite regress.

00:46:04.640 Okay, that's what was...

00:46:05.780 Okay, so that was all that was behind that, you know, bit of speculation, which I normally wouldn't have ever done.

00:46:10.780 What's it got to do with these coiling serpents?

00:46:12.180 I think that under some conditions, people can, vision can expand to the point where they can see down into the micro level.

00:46:19.020 They can apprehend the micro level consciously.

00:46:21.360 You think that our consciousness can extend down to the micro level, to the level of...

00:46:25.740 I do.

00:46:26.600 The micro, micro, micro level of DNA.

00:46:30.540 Okay.

00:46:30.640 Well, since we're on this topic, I have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin.

00:46:36.400 Like four doses is enough basically to knock you out of your body.

00:46:40.840 I wouldn't recommend it casually.

00:46:43.420 I took seven grams three times.

00:46:46.260 And I had this shamanic experience.

00:46:49.480 It was unbelievable.

00:46:50.740 And I don't even know how...

00:46:51.740 I have no idea how to make sense out of it.

00:46:53.740 Well, I believe that.

00:46:54.680 I can quite understand you have the most extraordinary experience.

00:46:57.060 I've never taken such a drug, but I could imagine you have the most remarkable experience.

00:47:00.880 But you've just said that you think that your consciousness can see into your cells and see the structure of DNA.

00:47:08.500 That has got to be utter nonsense.

00:47:10.400 I'm sorry.

00:47:10.780 Well, like I said, I'm perfectly reasonable, willing to admit forthrightly that that is a highly speculative idea.

00:47:21.120 Well, it is speculative, but it's also got to be false.

00:47:24.420 Why?

00:47:24.720 Well, no, no, and Ferret, look, in all probability, you're right, right?

00:47:33.280 I mean, we're both wise enough to use Occam's razor, right?

00:47:38.720 And so, and I said that, it's funny that that particular statement got picked up because I think that was the most, what would you say?

00:47:49.180 Speculative.

00:47:49.740 Intuit, speculative idea that I'd ever uttered to my students.

00:47:53.100 Yeah, well, fair enough.

00:47:54.120 I mean, I understand that.

00:47:55.960 And so, it's strange to be in a position to defend it.

00:47:58.820 I understand that.

00:47:59.560 I get that.

00:47:59.880 I'm telling you why I made that, but there was more to it than that, you know,

00:48:03.520 because in this visionary experience, I could feel my consciousness go down these levels of analysis.

00:48:11.200 And I could see things that they appeared to me in my field of imagination.

00:48:17.920 And I looked at them and I thought, that looks a lot like DNA.

00:48:21.740 But you're an educated man who already knows about DNA.

00:48:25.960 Yes.

00:48:26.300 These people didn't know it was DNA.

00:48:27.920 These people didn't know about it.

00:48:28.440 That's what's so...

00:48:29.080 Oh, no, they didn't know.

00:48:29.880 It doesn't surprise me in the least that you could have a visionary experience and think you see your DNA in your own cells.

00:48:35.180 That, of course, is highly plausible.

00:48:36.960 Yes, because I already know about it.

00:48:38.600 Yes.

00:48:39.000 What is not plausible is that somebody who does not know about it, an ancient Chinese sculptor, whatever it was,

00:48:44.460 Yes.

00:48:44.900 who, working long before Watson and Crip discovered the structure of DNA,

00:48:50.080 Could possibly apprehend that.

00:48:51.240 Could possibly apprehend it.

00:48:51.920 That just isn't wrong.

00:48:52.800 Fair enough.

00:48:53.860 And...

00:48:54.300 I guess I would only say in defense of that idea is that it is the case that consciousness can travel up and down levels of analysis in a real sense.

00:49:05.760 Yes.

00:49:06.160 It isn't absolutely inconceivable that that's not an expandable capacity under some circumstances.

00:49:13.280 You know, because you've got to ask yourself, like,

00:49:16.120 I do yoga in the morning.

00:49:20.700 A kundalini yoga exercise.

00:49:22.080 And I've done it for about 20 years.

00:49:25.320 And I learned a long while back that when yogis are practicing their asanas, these positions, that's not yoga.

00:49:32.500 They practice the asanas because they're postures that stretch you.

00:49:39.620 And then once they get to master them, they basically do an exploration of their body for places of discomfort and use the asanas to heal.

00:49:49.280 And you might say, well, what do you mean heal?

00:49:52.120 Well, my experience is that if I move my head, for example, down like this, I'll have a pain manifest itself in my back where I'm tight.

00:50:02.620 And then I can pay attention to that and loosen the musculature and then the pain will disappear.

00:50:10.460 And as I've been recovering from my last illness, I've been doing this quite a bit because my body is full of knots and pain of all sorts.

00:50:17.660 And I can explore them and do something with them.

00:50:22.100 And I actually think we can also do that to each other.

00:50:26.100 To some degree, we do that.

00:50:27.900 Massage therapists are very good at that. 0.63

00:50:29.780 And I think it's part of an elaborated grooming knowledge.

00:50:32.740 But what that means is that internally, at least, whatever my consciousness is, can apprehend these places of trouble that are physiological.

00:50:42.340 Yes.

00:50:42.700 And that I can explore them.

00:50:44.200 And the question is, well, how deep, first of all, what is that exploratory capacity and then how far down can you go?

00:50:51.300 That is perfectly plausible.

00:50:52.420 Yes.

00:50:52.700 I wouldn't object to that.

00:50:55.100 Also, I wouldn't wish to pin you down on what was a sort of throwaway speculation on the DNA.

00:51:02.300 But it does seem to me that that's kind of representative of what I mean by being drunk on symbols.

00:51:07.420 Yes.

00:51:07.720 It's, well, you are rightly hostile to postmodernism.

00:51:16.020 I'm not hostile to the postmodernist claim that there's a terrible problem that arises when you understand that there's an indefinite number of interpretations of things.

00:51:29.240 Yes.

00:51:29.700 They got that right.

00:51:31.120 But what I'm really hostile to is the answer.

00:51:33.960 Okay.

00:51:34.340 And that, I think that's...

00:51:36.680 Okay.

00:51:37.300 Look, I want to put you, I've got one of my books here.

00:51:45.240 Now, I've talked too much during this discussion so far.

00:51:49.280 There's something I really want to ask you about, if you don't mind.

00:51:52.420 Well, yes, but before that, I just need to pursue this matter a little bit.

00:51:56.940 Okay.

00:51:57.200 I can read this out.

00:51:58.400 Okay.

00:51:58.760 Okay.

00:51:59.020 Because we're on audio anyway.

00:52:02.480 This is one of my, it's my only written attack on postmodernism.

00:52:06.400 And this is from Lacan, who says, by calculating that signification, according to the algebraic method used here, namely S, capital S signify, over little s signified, equals little s, the statement, with S equals minus one, produces a square root of minus one.

00:52:35.160 Lacan then goes on to conclude that the erectile organ, the penis, is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier, minus one.

00:52:53.720 Then another quote from a feminist thinker. 1.00

00:52:58.520 Well, this is actually an interpreter of hers, her expositor, Catherine Hales, talking about why fluid mechanics is difficult to understand.

00:53:11.700 And she says, the privilege of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with the turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity.

00:53:26.120 Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. 1.00

00:53:35.540 From this perspective, it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence.

00:53:42.260 The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conception of fluids and of women have been formulated so as necessary to leave unarticulated remainders.

00:53:52.620 So, okay, okay, so I'm going to play devil's advocate.

00:53:55.160 This is drunk old symbolism.

00:53:56.300 Okay, so let's take that apart two ways.

00:53:59.160 Okay.

00:53:59.640 Okay, the first is let's deal with Lacan.

00:54:01.540 Okay.

00:54:02.040 Okay. 0.93

00:54:02.660 Lacan is a fraud as far as I'm concerned. 0.94

00:54:05.720 Glad you say that.

00:54:06.540 Well, I've tried to read Lacan.

00:54:08.240 Yeah.

00:54:08.600 And I cannot make heads or tails of him.

00:54:11.240 Good. 1.00

00:54:11.600 And it may be because I'm stupid. 0.99

00:54:15.860 It's not. 0.99

00:54:16.260 But I don't think so.

00:54:17.500 Now, people have accused Jung of the same sort of mysticism that Lacan engages in.

00:54:23.200 But I can understand Jung.

00:54:25.260 I don't think he's a mystic at all.

00:54:28.400 What Jung was doing is very complicated and it maps very nicely onto evolutionary biology.

00:54:34.100 Of all the French intellectuals that I've read, I think Lacan is the most fraudulent.

00:54:40.320 Okay.

00:54:40.760 Okay, so we'll just put him aside.

00:54:43.360 Good.

00:54:43.540 And you know, I haven't read that much Lacan, partly because I can't.

00:54:49.860 Now, I've read a lot of Foucault and I'm rereading The Order of Things.

00:54:53.900 And The Order of Things, I would say if you're writing a book about modeling as well as reading

00:54:58.800 The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, The Order of Things is very much worth reading.

00:55:02.680 Okay.

00:55:03.080 And he doesn't wander off into ideological...

00:55:05.440 I've only found that he made one mistake in the first half of the book.

00:55:08.980 Because Foucault is a social constructionist to a large degree.

00:55:12.720 But he does talk about its categories of the imagination.

00:55:17.140 That's not exactly the phrase he uses.

00:55:19.000 But he does make reference at one point to the fact that our conceptual structures are grounded

00:55:24.060 in an underlying imagination, which to me is a nod to biology.

00:55:29.120 And so...

00:55:29.520 But I like The Order of Things.

00:55:31.220 I read it a long time ago.

00:55:32.560 I'm just rereading it now.

00:55:33.620 Now, so forget about Lacan.

00:55:36.560 Yeah.

00:55:37.420 The feminist.

00:55:39.120 Now, I'm going to argue from the perspective of a biologist here, I would say.

00:55:44.320 I'm going to give the devil her due in this case. 1.00

00:55:46.780 Okay, fine.

00:55:47.120 There are...

00:55:49.540 There are...

00:55:50.540 We do have a proclivity to map sexual relationship onto the world.

00:55:58.120 And the degree...

00:55:59.620 For obvious reasons.

00:56:00.540 Because we have to perceive sexual relationship at a very deep level.

00:56:04.420 We do have a tendency to animate things or to perceive them as if they're animated.

00:56:08.360 And the degree to which those a priori perceptual proclivities might bias what would otherwise

00:56:17.460 be objective thinking is open for valid discussion.

00:56:21.800 Now, that doesn't mean that...

00:56:23.640 Look, my daughter last night was engaged in a debate at the Oxford Union.

00:56:29.360 And that...

00:56:29.980 I was there.

00:56:30.800 You were there?

00:56:31.360 Yeah, I was there.

00:56:31.920 Yeah.

00:56:32.980 Well, you heard Carol.

00:56:35.380 Yeah.

00:56:35.640 Well, that was a mind-boggling performance, as far as I was concerned.

00:56:43.520 It was exactly the example of the sort of thing that you're tossing out.

00:56:46.440 It was absolutely beyond comprehension.

00:56:48.920 I was so happy to be there because I thought I had never heard all of that expressed and

00:56:55.080 simultaneously invalidated so effectively.

00:56:58.380 But, you know, the side she argued for won by the vote.

00:57:02.360 I didn't know who...

00:57:03.240 Which side won?

00:57:03.980 The side...

00:57:05.600 The we should move beyond me side.

00:57:08.380 And now, independent of the merits of the underlying argument, except for Carol's, the fact

00:57:13.420 that that feminist scholar who attributed meat-eating to white supremacist patriarchal oppression,

00:57:21.180 that argument was so appalling at so many levels.

00:57:24.220 I must have missed that.

00:57:24.880 Was that the final one?

00:57:26.860 Right at the end?

00:57:27.680 Oh, you missed it?

00:57:28.700 Yeah.

00:57:29.080 Oh, that's too bad.

00:57:30.480 It's too bad.

00:57:31.180 You really needed to be there for that.

00:57:32.800 I left...

00:57:33.300 We left when the president said a student should start talking.

00:57:38.400 I see.

00:57:38.960 So...

00:57:39.300 Okay.

00:57:39.800 You must have left just before that happened.

00:57:42.560 Yes.

00:57:42.860 Well, you...

00:57:43.240 So tell me then.

00:57:43.980 Oh, my God.

00:57:44.460 Well, that was essentially it.

00:57:46.600 That was her argument, that meat-eating was a consequence of the imposition of a patriarchal,

00:57:55.080 racist, oppressive, white supremacist narrative on essentially a feminine background. 0.89

00:58:01.960 Yes. 0.90

00:58:02.260 It's the same thing.

00:58:03.100 Okay.

00:58:03.780 Well...

00:58:04.660 Now, you're saying that you don't know how much of that character is my thinking,

00:58:11.980 despite my opposition to postmodernism.

00:58:14.160 That's right.

00:58:14.640 Yes, absolutely.

00:58:15.480 Well, that's an absolutely reasonable question.

00:58:20.600 And given that doubt, which I can certainly understand why you would hold,

00:58:25.920 it's perfectly reasonable of you, and I think perspicacious, to have pointed to my attempt

00:58:33.140 to speculate about how these images of intertwined helixes happen to propagate themselves all

00:58:41.240 over the world.

00:58:42.140 Because I have a...

00:58:43.600 See, I have a problem with that, because I can't understand why that's the case.

00:58:47.760 So, for example, there's a really interesting Chinese image, which is one of the ones that

00:58:52.400 I referred to in that particular lecture, that shows...

00:58:58.280 I hope I can remember this exactly right.

00:59:00.840 So, it's this intertwined underlying serpentine structure giving rise to a female and male form.

00:59:06.160 Yes.

00:59:06.440 And it's portrayed that way in the cosmogonic myth, that these forms emerge out of this

00:59:12.540 underlying helical structure.

00:59:14.480 But there are stories like that everywhere.

00:59:16.700 And so, you might say, well, it's a case of false pattern recognition.

00:59:19.900 And that's really a problem, right?

00:59:21.480 That's the problem of misperception.

00:59:23.000 Okay, no, wait.

00:59:23.820 I have no problem with...

00:59:27.360 My big problem is equating it with DNA.

00:59:31.260 Yes. 1.00

00:59:31.680 That's bullshit. 0.99

00:59:32.820 However... 1.00

00:59:33.260 Yes.

00:59:34.280 However, what might be interesting would be a commonality between myths all around the

00:59:42.740 world and then anthropologists have argued about whether this is because of cross-infection

00:59:51.200 of ideas or whether there's something Jungian about the...

00:59:54.520 Right.

00:59:55.020 And I think that's a genuinely interesting question.

00:59:58.500 Of course it is.

00:59:59.880 And it may be...

01:00:00.700 Most of the affective neuroscientists that I've met, the good ones, are tilted pretty

01:00:05.040 hard towards the biological primitive argument that there are forms of perception.

01:00:09.800 Yes.

01:00:10.100 Well, colour is one of them.

01:00:11.280 Well, I think that's interesting.

01:00:12.600 And, of course, the coincidence of an image or a statue in this part of the world and that

01:00:18.900 part of the world, you should think about how improbable it is that two people might have

01:00:24.700 hit upon the same design.

01:00:26.600 I mean, the idea of snakes spiraling around each other, it's not that difficult to think

01:00:32.380 of.

01:00:32.560 It wouldn't be ridiculously improbable that two tribes on opposite sides of the world would

01:00:39.800 independently come upon that.

01:00:42.680 No, no.

01:00:43.500 And it might not point to anything particular except that it is the use of snakes.

01:00:49.400 I would say, though, you know, the idea of that coiled snake or the dual coiled snake

01:00:54.400 is also a powerful symbol of healing.

01:00:58.900 And so that's partly why it's used as a symbol for physicians.

01:01:02.200 Yes, exactly.

01:01:02.980 And so, and there is the idea that's part and parcel of that.

01:01:06.660 And this would be, let's say, separate from the DNA idea.

01:01:10.180 And the snakes shed their skin and they're reborn.

01:01:13.840 And so that's part of the reason why they're symbols of transformation.

01:01:17.400 Exactly.

01:01:17.680 And that notion of death and regeneration is obviously central to the idea of healing.

01:01:22.920 And so that's another explanation for the use of the snake.

01:01:25.560 Okay.

01:01:26.180 So I'm interested in the improbability of coincidence in this case.

01:01:30.000 Now, if, say, people in Scandinavia and people in the Amazonian jungle had independently developed

01:01:38.100 an alphabet, which was the same alphabet, now that would be impressive.

01:01:43.560 I mean, that would be, my goodness.

01:01:45.120 Yes, yes, well, but, but, but it's also equally impressive that separated people did develop

01:01:51.000 alphabets.

01:01:51.960 Yeah, but not the same alphabet.

01:01:52.720 No, I know they didn't use, but, but there's a level at which it's the same, right?

01:01:56.340 Because they are alphabetic and they are the use of written forms to represent sounds.

01:02:02.140 Well, that's a sensible thing to have.

01:02:04.060 And it is such a good idea that it wouldn't be improbable that two tribes would have the

01:02:10.020 same idea.

01:02:11.140 That's true.

01:02:11.860 But, well, but it gets complicated too.

01:02:14.700 Well, it gets complicated in the context of this argument because one of the debates that

01:02:19.340 Foucault had that was famous was a debate with Chomsky.

01:02:23.020 Yes.

01:02:23.920 And Foucault, of course, is a radical social constructionist, except when he isn't now

01:02:28.100 and then, right?

01:02:29.080 And I'm not being smart about that.

01:02:30.840 The Order of Things is quite a careful book.

01:02:32.980 But Chomsky was laying out a more archetypal argument in some sense.

01:02:37.620 And Chomsky thinks that there is something like an underlying language grammar.

01:02:41.660 And so the fact that an alphabetic structure might be discovered by two separate peoples

01:02:47.540 would be partly a reflective of an underlying biological commonality.

01:02:51.820 And so it is very difficult to draw a border between these.

01:02:55.340 And I would also say, I agree with you completely that associative thinking of the kind that you

01:03:01.380 just read to me can go far astray.

01:03:03.860 What that is, is false pattern recognition.

01:03:05.980 You know, so it's the apperception or perhaps the projection of a pattern onto a background,

01:03:14.080 let's say an underlying reality, that actually isn't characterized by that pattern.

01:03:17.860 But that's actually part of the dilemma of thought, though, too, isn't it?

01:03:21.300 Because I think thought is usefully parceled out into a revelatory element and a dialogical element.

01:03:30.220 And so the revelatory element is, well, you're sitting there and thoughts enter the theater

01:03:35.680 of your imagination.

01:03:37.920 And so it's, in a sense, phenomenologically, like they sort of spring up from the void.

01:03:45.160 And you can be struck by a thought, which is really interesting, right?

01:03:48.600 It's like, well, it's your thought.

01:03:50.700 Why are you struck by it?

01:03:51.700 Where does it come from?

01:03:52.880 Yes, that's it.

01:03:54.140 No kidding.

01:03:54.760 Where does it come from?

01:03:56.000 But then there's another element, which is, well, not all intuitions are valid.

01:04:01.900 The things that strike you, even though being struck is often a pretty good indication that

01:04:07.000 there's something there, but it's not always an indication.

01:04:10.000 And there are certain forms of psychopathology, schizophrenia in particular.

01:04:15.720 Schizophrenia is characterized by the misfiring of that intuition system.

01:04:19.280 So, for example, partly what happens to people who have ideas of reference, they'll be watching

01:04:28.780 television, and the latent inhibition will get stripped away from their perception of

01:04:35.660 the voices.

01:04:36.980 And so now the voices become magnified in significance.

01:04:40.780 And to account for the magnification of emotional significance, they start thinking, the television

01:04:47.240 has a special message for me.

01:04:49.340 It's like the receipt of a religious revelation, and it's often accompanied by religious ideation.

01:04:55.140 So it's not that uncommon, although it's somewhat uncommon, for people who are floridly

01:05:00.180 schizophrenic to identify with Christ.

01:05:01.900 It sounds to me very like religious revelation.

01:05:03.300 It is very, it is.

01:05:04.600 It is very like.

01:05:05.660 But I wanted to come to, because you characterize yourself as religious sometimes, and you don't

01:05:10.420 seem to believe in a supernatural creator.

01:05:12.920 Well, people ask me all the time.

01:05:14.860 I know they do.

01:05:15.480 Whether I believe in God, and I say, well, I act as though God exists.

01:05:19.240 Yes.

01:05:19.940 Which is a reference to this model idea.

01:05:22.400 Last night, you seem to be, we come to the idea of truth.

01:05:26.120 You seem to be saying that that which is beneficial to humanity, or to reduce your anxiety, or makes

01:05:33.600 you feel good, or reduces stress, is true.

01:05:36.480 No, no, no, no, it's more, it's more than that.

01:05:41.640 And good, I'm glad that we're on to this part of this discussion.

01:05:44.200 When Darwin first published his biological treatise, The Origin of Species, the New England

01:05:58.820 pragmatists got a hold of his manuscript, William James and C.S.

01:06:03.380 Peirce.

01:06:03.680 And William James founded experimental psychology, and C.S.

01:06:08.800 Peirce was probably the most profound philosopher the Americans ever produced.

01:06:13.480 And they had a club, the psychological, the philosophical, I think it was the psychological

01:06:20.020 club.

01:06:20.420 It was either that or the philosophical club.

01:06:21.980 But I believe it was the psychological club.

01:06:24.540 And they believed that Darwin's theorizing required a new epistemology.

01:06:33.440 It was so revolutionary.

01:06:35.340 And they, Peirce in particular, developed pragmatism.

01:06:39.340 And pragmatism is like an engineering truth claim.

01:06:43.040 And I don't think you can be an evolutionary biologist without being a pragmatist.

01:06:46.740 I don't think it's possible.

01:06:47.800 I don't think it's coherent conceptually.

01:06:49.480 And so Peirce was trying to solve the problem of, well, how can something be true when we're

01:06:57.160 fundamentally ignorant about everything in the final analysis?

01:07:01.040 And the answer was, well, we have truths that are true enough.

01:07:05.680 And you might say, well, what do you mean true enough?

01:07:08.480 And the answer would be, they're true enough to be used as tools to achieve a certain end

01:07:14.260 in a certain space over a certain time period.

01:07:17.400 And so your truth is true enough if it gets you from point A to B when you're using it.

01:07:22.640 The tool is adequate for the job if it performs the task intended.

01:07:26.200 And for Peirce and the pragmatist, that was it.

01:07:31.460 There is no true superordinate to that.

01:07:34.440 Now, it's complicated because some pragmatic truths are functional across broader spans of

01:07:42.120 time and space than others, so they're more like ultimate truths.

01:07:45.920 But this was not a grounding of truth in a Newtonian idea or Cartesian idea or even in

01:07:52.020 an idea of objective truth because they derived their concept of truth from their analysis of

01:07:59.380 the evolutionary process.

01:08:00.580 And they said, and so, and I really want to know what you think about this.

01:08:04.060 It's like, say, there's truth in the human form.

01:08:09.080 Well, I'll speak metaphorically.

01:08:11.160 But biologically, that truth only suffices for like 90 years, right?

01:08:16.300 We're good enough.

01:08:17.300 We're good enough as a model.

01:08:18.620 It may be that our knowledge of truth is incomplete and we can never be sure of anything.

01:08:30.060 But that doesn't mean there isn't truth out there.

01:08:32.020 Well, truth is a slippery concept because it can be used very many ways.

01:08:36.960 And I'm not trying to, believe me, I'm not trying to bandy words about.

01:08:40.800 I do not believe that the Newtonian conception of truth and the evolutionary conception of

01:08:48.080 truth are commensurate.

01:08:50.160 And I think the evolutionary, because, well, it's tough, right?

01:08:54.480 Because you might think, well, when you're talking about truth, are you talking about

01:08:59.460 the nature of ultimate reality or are you talking about the relationship of your models

01:09:05.160 to that reality?

01:09:06.240 I don't know that I care too much about that because I mean, let me tell you something

01:09:13.080 that is true.

01:09:14.280 Okay.

01:09:14.880 We are cousins of chimpanzees.

01:09:20.340 Yes.

01:09:21.140 That is objectively true.

01:09:23.480 It's another thing that's true is that the earth orbits the sun.

01:09:26.840 Yes.

01:09:27.060 These are not...

01:09:31.060 One can argue about the epistemology of that.

01:09:36.240 But I want to be a realist about this and say that there may be kinds of truth which

01:09:46.340 are somehow filtered through our Darwinian past and which influence the way we see truth.

01:09:54.260 And we may be deceived by all sorts of things.

01:09:56.160 We may be self-deceived.

01:09:57.540 But there are objective truths.

01:10:01.140 It is the business of science to find them.

01:10:03.500 And science has tools for stripping off subjective bias, for stripping off self-deception.

01:10:10.640 Yes.

01:10:11.140 And that's why we do double blind trials in medicine and so on.

01:10:15.000 It's why we use random assignation groups as well.

01:10:18.060 Yes.

01:10:18.180 Absolutely.

01:10:19.200 Okay.

01:10:20.360 Right.

01:10:21.800 And who can argue with the power of the scientific process?

01:10:26.340 But I would also say that the religious people that you've debated, they lose before they open 1.00

01:10:33.640 their mouths because they don't notice that you impose this realist metaphysics on the argument

01:10:41.460 before it starts.

01:10:42.640 Now, I'm not saying that you're not justified in doing that.

01:10:46.060 I'm not saying that because that's open to question.

01:10:49.160 But I am saying they don't notice that that's what's happened.

01:10:51.980 But there's a problem here.

01:10:53.380 It's a real problem.

01:10:55.260 And this is the postmodern conundrum, I would say.

01:11:01.060 There are...

01:11:02.640 It's useful and true to say that there are objective facts.

01:11:07.420 But the problem is there's an infinite number of them.

01:11:11.180 True.

01:11:11.500 Okay, so now the question is, as a scientist, how do you decide which facts to attend to?

01:11:20.040 And the answer to that is, you cannot do that using the scientific process.

01:11:25.180 No, that's true.

01:11:26.120 Okay, so then the question is, look, I've done a lot of statistical analysis of data sets

01:11:35.100 in my time.

01:11:36.060 You know, and when I was a naive undergraduate, and I'm not particularly mathematically gifted,

01:11:41.000 by the way, statistics was quite a slog for me, until I started to understand it conceptually,

01:11:45.160 and then I started to enjoy it.

01:11:46.760 But I kind of imagined that the data contained the information.

01:11:51.960 The statistical process was an algorithm to reduce the data to the information.

01:11:56.420 And it was kind of a mechanistic process.

01:11:59.240 I didn't realize at all that a data set is...

01:12:03.040 You know, imagine I've had data sets that had, you know, 5,000 participants and 200 rows

01:12:08.860 of variables.

01:12:10.440 It's like, there's a lot of information in that data set.

01:12:13.120 And so then the question is, how the hell do you derive a valid conclusion from that plethora

01:12:18.260 of information?

01:12:19.680 Because you could report all sorts of meaningless correlations, right?

01:12:23.800 They would be spurious, but also practically useless.

01:12:29.500 And there's just endless numbers of those in the data set.

01:12:32.800 You know, how do you judiciously use a statistical process to extract out the information that is

01:12:41.800 what, true?

01:12:43.320 Yes, but it's not just true.

01:12:45.880 You want it to be useful.

01:12:47.800 I agree.

01:12:48.480 Right.

01:12:49.120 And so that's where the pragmatism issue comes in, right?

01:12:51.780 Because then we might say, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because

01:12:56.780 I know you care deeply about truth, and I know that you're motivated by it.

01:13:00.980 And so then I would say that that's a metaphysical relationship in some sense.

01:13:06.420 It's an a priori metaphysical relationship, because you made a commitment to truth.

01:13:11.800 And I would also say that that's an act of faith, because you might ask yourself, in

01:13:18.600 science, is it truth or untruth that serves the world?

01:13:23.880 Well, that's where we came back.

01:13:26.340 That's where we came in, because there are all sorts of truths which do not serve the

01:13:31.460 world.

01:13:31.700 There are all sorts of truths which are very unpleasant.

01:13:34.300 Yes.

01:13:34.620 An analogy might be, as a doctor, you have a patient who has incurable cancer, and you

01:13:44.420 have to decide whether to tell that patient the truth or not.

01:13:47.340 Right.

01:13:47.880 Well, you might debate this with your colleagues.

01:13:51.280 You might, yes.

01:13:52.040 Your colleagues might say, well, it's better off not telling him.

01:13:54.620 It's better not knowing.

01:13:56.400 So the truth, in this case, is not beneficial.

01:13:59.260 What would you, what would you, would you want to know?

01:14:02.520 That's irrelevant.

01:14:03.420 No, no.

01:14:03.980 I would want to know.

01:14:04.860 You would want to know.

01:14:05.820 I would want to know.

01:14:06.700 Well, but I agree that there are dangerous truths, let's say, and there are truths that,

01:14:12.720 under some circumstances, might be harmful and that could be used as weapons.

01:14:17.760 But I would still say, I don't believe that you can be a scientist and discover objective

01:14:25.720 truth, say, in a useful manner, without being committed to a metaphysical vision of the

01:14:34.340 redeeming power of the truth.

01:14:37.080 Because I don't even think you can make the micro decisions that you're making while you're

01:14:41.100 reading a book and sifting through it, right, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff,

01:14:44.420 without, I don't want to impose this view on this conversation, right?

01:14:49.100 I'm trying to explore it because it's, I'm very, I've dealt with plenty of bad scientists

01:14:54.840 in my time.

01:14:56.580 You know, psychology is rife with what they call P-hacking, where you just run in repeated

01:15:02.580 correlations until you find one that.

01:15:05.120 Yeah.

01:15:05.620 Oh, that's bad science.

01:15:07.100 Yes.

01:15:07.660 But it's also bad, but it's bad ethics.

01:15:10.020 It's like, well, why not?

01:15:11.280 Look, why not do that if it advances your career?

01:15:13.540 Yes, quite.

01:15:14.840 I mean, that's bad.

01:15:15.900 And that's not, I think, what we're talking about.

01:15:18.380 I thought you were saying that truth is that which is beneficial.

01:15:25.080 In my analogy, when you're arguing with your colleagues whether to tell this patient the

01:15:30.640 truth, you could very well argue, shall we tell him or shall we not?

01:15:34.720 It would be beneficial not to or beneficial to.

01:15:36.740 But everybody should agree that it is true that this man has cancer.

01:15:40.940 That is true.

01:15:42.180 Yes.

01:15:42.680 Well, this is partly why this issue is so unbelievably complicated, because what you just said is

01:15:49.880 true.

01:15:50.300 But it's also the case that you have to apply an ethical framework onto that infinity of truths

01:16:00.420 in order to focus on and communicate those.

01:16:04.140 See, you've picked topics that you communicate to people.

01:16:07.740 And there are other topics you didn't pick.

01:16:09.980 Yes.

01:16:10.120 And there's most of the other topics you didn't pick.

01:16:14.460 And so the question to me is, and this is partly why I got interested in Jung, by the

01:16:18.280 way, because he was very interested in the unconscious direction of attention.

01:16:22.360 The psychoanalysts were fascinated by that.

01:16:24.640 That's partly why they were interested in Freudian slips.

01:16:27.300 But you...

01:16:29.900 Okay.

01:16:30.360 One thing we could ask.

01:16:31.980 Do you think that you picked your field of study or did it pick you?

01:16:36.160 I...

01:16:38.160 I'm not sure.

01:16:41.580 But I don't think that's not relevant.

01:16:44.100 It doesn't...

01:16:44.600 Well, it is...

01:16:45.480 No, but it is...

01:16:46.380 It has to be relevant, because it's actually the question of relevance.

01:16:49.700 And so there's a whole branch of cognitive science now.

01:16:52.540 I'd like to have you talk to this colleague of mine named John Verveke.

01:16:56.760 John Verveke is unbelievably smart.

01:16:59.200 And the problem he spent his whole career focusing on is, how in the world do you decide what you

01:17:06.060 attend to when there's an almost infinite number of things to attend to?

01:17:10.660 That's a big question.

01:17:11.540 It's a huge question.

01:17:12.700 It's a question that applies to science when you decide what to work on.

01:17:16.900 As you say, there's an infinite number of things you could attend to, work on, and you

01:17:21.620 choose some of them.

01:17:22.780 And that's a decision which people take, and that biases your view of the world and everything.

01:17:27.660 But nevertheless, there is objective truth.

01:17:29.800 It doesn't affect the fact that there's objective truth.

01:17:32.340 The mere fact that there's a very large number of things you could attend to, and you have

01:17:38.120 to choose one of them, doesn't affect the fact that there are lots of truths out there.

01:17:45.120 Right.

01:17:45.740 But it definitely...

01:17:46.960 Yes.

01:17:48.400 But it definitely does affect the way that science is...

01:17:52.200 See, this is also why the postmodern critics have been so effective in what they've done.

01:17:56.800 It's because they're pushing the notion that a narrative necessarily drives the process

01:18:03.760 of inquiry, even in relationship to objective facts.

01:18:06.980 And I think that's true.

01:18:09.920 And that's partly what we're discussing.

01:18:12.000 Now, I also think...

01:18:13.000 And I don't know how to reconcile these things.

01:18:14.900 Like, the fact that you're making a case for the existence of the objective facts, it's

01:18:20.080 like, I'm not going to argue about that.

01:18:22.280 That doesn't mean I understand it fully, because I can't quite understand the relationship

01:18:26.780 between the objective fact and the necessity for utility.

01:18:31.640 And partly, I can't understand that on biological grounds.

01:18:35.260 You know, because fundamentally, when you look at things, I would say that the description

01:18:41.380 of truth that you're purveying right now in this argument, I'm not trying to make it

01:18:46.340 any more general than that, is not one that's well-nested inside the epistemology that you would

01:18:52.440 derive from evolutionary biology.

01:18:54.380 Because you would say, in some sense, that we're tilted in a very fundamental manner to

01:19:01.620 only apprehend those things that will aid survival and reproduction.

01:19:06.440 And so, to hell with the objective facts.

01:19:08.880 Well, that's probably true, that our sense organs are biased towards that which helps us to

01:19:15.760 survive.

01:19:16.220 And our internal sense, so to speak, our attention mechanisms inside the world, our thought mechanisms.

01:19:22.660 So, we are creatures who evolved on the African savannah and from forests earlier on.

01:19:31.200 And our ability to understand the world, let alone what we attend to, is limited by that.

01:19:37.720 We are blinkered by the fact that our bodies and our brains were designed to survive in Africa. 0.97

01:19:46.380 Right, well, and that's what that feminist critic was pointing to in a very, well, let's look, 1.00

01:19:52.180 in an awkward and tendentious manner, and an overstated manner, absolutely.

01:19:57.660 Not as bad as Lacan, though.

01:19:59.140 Well, then, we are living, I don't understand quantum theory.

01:20:04.320 And the reason I don't understand quantum theory from an evolutionary point of view is that

01:20:09.260 I'm not evolved to understand it.

01:20:10.200 It doesn't map onto our bodies well.

01:20:11.720 Exactly.

01:20:12.120 And I don't, so, there are, what I think is remarkable, actually, that there are people

01:20:17.940 who understand quantum theory.

01:20:19.640 I agree.

01:20:20.580 I mean, that, that, that's an animal.

01:20:23.780 Well, that also points to, to your point, that also points to our capacity to apprehend truths

01:20:29.940 that, in some sense, appear to be outside the pure confines of the evolutionary struggle.

01:20:35.480 Yes.

01:20:35.880 But then, that's also a problem, in some ways, for evolutionary theory.

01:20:40.480 I mean, you can, you know, wave that off as a spandrel, but I think that's a big mistake

01:20:45.340 when, when we're talking about something as profound as the capacity to understand quantum

01:20:49.600 theory, for example.

01:20:49.880 I wouldn't wave it off at all.

01:20:50.900 I mean, I, I think I accept, I mean, Stephen Pinker says, why should you be so presumptuous

01:20:56.680 as to think you can understand all, all these things when you're only an animal, which is,

01:21:00.800 which has evolved to survive and reproduce?

01:21:03.640 Right.

01:21:03.900 But, but, but the thing that's so horrible about that, in some sense, is that's also at

01:21:07.940 the core of the postmodern critique of science, that claim.

01:21:10.880 Now, the human, humanities types, when they make a claim like that, often sound like the

01:21:15.960 woman that you just described.

01:21:17.200 But, you know, I try to give the devil his due, and I'm trying to do that with postmodernism

01:21:21.880 because, you know, I, I think the conclusions that were drawn from the postmodernist canon,

01:21:27.640 you know, the, the fundamental conclusion, as far as I'm concerned, of the, the French 0.87

01:21:33.780 postmodernist process, allied with a certain kind of Marxism, is that the entire process

01:21:43.100 of categorization, all our categories, plus the process of categorization, are attributable

01:21:50.040 to the expression of will to power.

01:21:53.600 That's it.

01:21:55.080 Oppression, tyranny, dominance.

01:21:56.880 And there's actually, I would say that the evolutionary biologists are in part responsible

01:22:02.700 for that, weirdly enough.

01:22:04.180 I am not trying to throw stones, you know.

01:22:05.900 I'm like to think of myself, to the degree that I can manage it, as an evolutionary psychologist.

01:22:12.060 I accept the tenets of evolutionary biology.

01:22:15.080 I don't think you can understand anything about biology without doing that.

01:22:18.980 But here's the argument from the biological perspective.

01:22:23.020 We ratchet ourselves up hierarchies of power to attain positions of status, particularly

01:22:30.660 as males, to give us preferential access to mating resources.

01:22:35.240 And that contaminates everything we do.

01:22:38.040 It's like, hey, oh, now, I want to ask you one final question.

01:22:43.800 I know we're running out of time, but I don't, I don't care.

01:22:45.900 I want to ask you this question.

01:22:47.400 Okay.

01:22:48.600 I talked to Sam Harris.

01:22:50.080 I've talked to Sam Harris five times, and the first time I talked to him, I was extremely

01:22:54.820 ill, and we got bogged down in a discussion of truth, pragmatism versus objective, something.

01:23:01.920 We've been bandying that back and forth, and it's a tough, it's a tough nut to crack.

01:23:06.520 And then we had four more discussions that were all public, and there was a tremendous

01:23:11.840 amount of interest in them, which was quite stunning.

01:23:14.160 It was staggering.

01:23:14.880 We had 10,000 people in Dublin to one, and about the same to the O in London.

01:23:20.520 And we were discussing issues just like this, you know.

01:23:23.340 And I made some mistakes dealing with Sam, because I had a point I wanted to make, you

01:23:30.140 know.

01:23:30.680 And it was, I suppose, the point of this pragmatism in some sense in its relationship to evolutionary

01:23:34.840 biology.

01:23:35.680 And so I was trying to sort of win the argument.

01:23:37.580 And I have found, as a consequence, let's say, of a baptism by fire, that that's not

01:23:43.740 a good way to approach.

01:23:44.780 Like one of the things I really wanted to do with you, I hope we managed this today, was

01:23:48.440 to ask you questions and find out more about what you thought, like in a real genuine manner,

01:23:54.020 not to win any of that, none of that.

01:23:56.540 The last time I talked to Sam, all I did was ask him questions.

01:24:00.140 And we had by far the best discussion we've ever had.

01:24:03.960 And so he, through that discussion, I was alerted to reasons why he was so antipathetic

01:24:12.440 to the idea of religion.

01:24:14.120 And so I thought I would, so Sam is very obsessed with the idea of totalitarian atrocity.

01:24:23.220 I would say evil, fundamentally, if you wanted to make it metaphysical.

01:24:26.740 But you could say restrictive dogmatic tribalism of the sort that makes us demonize and destroy.

01:24:34.360 People, ideas, institutions.

01:24:35.620 My alarm, by the way, for six o'clock.

01:24:37.660 So what is it you want to ask me?

01:24:39.920 Because we have run out of time.

01:24:42.100 I want to ask you, when you talk about religion, do you identify the religious impulse, let's

01:24:55.220 say, or even the religious phenomenon, with the totalitarian proclivity for dogmatic certainty

01:25:02.300 and the potential acceleration of aggression and atrocity as a consequence?

01:25:10.860 No.

01:25:12.100 I care first and foremost about scientific truth.

01:25:16.780 And so to me, it is a scientific question whether there is a supernatural power, creative power

01:25:24.720 intelligence in the universe.

01:25:26.580 I think that's a very fascinating question.

01:25:29.120 I think that if that were true, it would be the most important scientific truth, if there

01:25:35.440 is.

01:25:35.920 It would be a fundamentally different kind of universe that we live in if there is a creative

01:25:41.600 intelligence.

01:25:42.240 So although I have a secondary interest in negative consequences of religion and so on,

01:25:47.420 especially in Islam, my fundamental interest is in the scientific truth, which I believe

01:25:55.660 it is a scientific question, even if it can't be answered by scientific means.

01:26:00.720 There either is a God or there isn't.

01:26:03.440 There either is a creator or not at the base of the universe, an intelligence.

01:26:07.980 I think there's not.

01:26:09.660 I think that intelligence is something that comes late into the universe as a consequence

01:26:14.060 of a long evolutionary process.

01:26:15.780 It happened here.

01:26:17.040 No doubt happened, but probably happened in other parts of the universe.

01:26:20.780 And do you distinguish between intelligence and consciousness?

01:26:25.440 For this purpose, no.

01:26:27.060 Okay.

01:26:27.360 For this purpose, no.

01:26:28.180 Okay, so let me ask you this question, then.

01:26:33.360 Do you think that sexual selection is mediated by consciousness slash intelligence?

01:26:39.540 In those species that have consciousness, yes.

01:26:42.780 I mean, then I would ask you, to what degree do you think that consciousness operates as

01:26:52.360 a fundamental mechanism of selection and shaping?

01:26:57.740 Because that, I mean, that is a very profoundly interesting question.

01:27:02.680 And I mean, sexual selection happens in insects, which I do not think are conscious.

01:27:07.700 Yeah, well, that's a tough one.

01:27:10.520 I mean, I know butterflies can detect a deviation from symmetry in their part of one in a million.

01:27:16.160 So, yes, there is sexual selection throughout the animal kingdom.

01:27:21.800 And consciousness can happen without consciousness.

01:27:24.540 I think so, yes.

01:27:25.580 But let's look at it.

01:27:27.620 In humans, yes, I should think so.

01:27:29.420 Okay, so when I look at religious epistemology cross-culturally, I see a bipartite structure

01:27:40.120 at the bottom of the hypothesizing.

01:27:42.540 There's an idea that there's a material substrate that consists of a kind of latent potential.

01:27:48.340 That might be one way of looking at it.

01:27:50.360 And that there's the action of a forming process on top of that.

01:27:54.820 And it looks to me like it's something like, what would you call it, an intuitive apprehension

01:28:03.000 of the relationship between consciousness and the rise to complexity of living forms.

01:28:09.600 And the reason that I'm curious about that from an evolutionary perspective is that I can't

01:28:15.980 see how sex, forget about unconscious sexual selection for a minute. 1.00

01:28:19.960 We'll just parse that off.

01:28:21.420 Because maybe there are gradations of consciousness.

01:28:23.900 I don't know. 0.97

01:28:24.340 Insects do some damn complex things. 0.98

01:28:27.360 And have you ever seen that BBC clip of the pufferfish making a sculpture? 0.97

01:28:32.320 Oh, yes, I think I have.

01:28:33.640 Yes.

01:28:33.840 I mean, that's quite something.

01:28:35.940 Because that pufferfish is...

01:28:37.140 We should talk on the way to the chapel.

01:28:38.300 We can do that.

01:28:38.860 Okay, okay.

01:28:40.000 Well, it's a hard day to talk to Penrose and you at the same day.

01:28:47.460 I know.

01:28:48.220 Yes.

01:28:48.460 So, I don't think it's completely out of the realm of question that part of the apprehension

01:28:58.220 that there's a spirit that gives rise to material order is a metaphysical reflection of the idea

01:29:06.260 that consciousness shapes biological being through sexual selection.

01:29:10.480 But that spirit would have to have been around before evolution got started.

01:29:14.760 And so you've got to...

01:29:15.600 Well, that...

01:29:16.220 Okay.

01:29:16.800 Fair enough.

01:29:17.500 That's a big thing.

01:29:18.600 That's a...

01:29:19.240 Yes, that's a big problem.

01:29:21.140 But then, I guess a rejoinder to that in some sense would be...

01:29:26.320 Do you think it's a nonsensical proposition to...

01:29:30.760 I mean, one of the things I was talking to Dr. Penrose today about was...

01:29:34.500 He believes that consciousness in some sense stands outside the domain of algorithmic computation.

01:29:42.900 I know he does, yes.

01:29:43.960 And we discussed in some detail why he believes that.

01:29:48.480 And I'm very curious about that.

01:29:50.560 My brother-in-law is probably the world's foremost computer chip designer.

01:29:56.700 Okay.

01:29:57.060 And he's currently designing a chip that he thinks will have the computational power of a human brain.

01:30:05.200 And he was the first person to build a 64-bit chip.

01:30:08.360 And he did that in 1985.

01:30:09.860 Okay.

01:30:10.360 And so we've had a lot of discussions about the limits of AI.

01:30:15.220 So this is an AI-optimized chip, by the way.

01:30:17.380 Yes.

01:30:18.360 And my brother-in-law thinks that computation is algorithmic.

01:30:24.060 And so it's compute, or that thought is computation and algorithmic.

01:30:29.820 And that can be replicated in AI systems.

01:30:32.160 Yes.

01:30:32.200 Yeah.

01:30:32.840 Penrose thinks that Goodell's theorem precludes that.

01:30:37.400 That there has to be something standing outside.

01:30:39.780 Yes.

01:30:39.940 Now, I tried to push him on what he regarded as the metaphysical significance of consciousness.

01:30:45.660 Yes.

01:30:45.860 And he's a very careful thinker.

01:30:47.280 He's a lot like you, except he's more associational in his thinking, I would say.

01:30:51.680 And he thinks in images.

01:30:53.340 He does.

01:30:54.100 Fundamentally.

01:30:54.640 Do you think in words?

01:30:55.720 Yes.

01:30:56.500 Yes.

01:30:56.880 And I think in words mostly.

01:30:59.160 Yes.

01:31:00.060 But images have quite a hold on me as well, as you pointed out.

01:31:05.160 Do you think that the proposition that consciousness is implicit in matter is a useful and non-nonsensical statement?

01:31:15.000 I think it's nonsensical.

01:31:16.140 And I don't think that's what Roger says.

01:31:17.960 No, no, it isn't.

01:31:19.720 No.

01:31:20.080 No, it isn't.

01:31:20.920 And he didn't say that.

01:31:22.160 No.

01:31:22.300 But I suppose it depends to some degree on what you mean by implicit, right?

01:31:29.140 But obviously, matter can give rise to consciousness.

01:31:32.440 With sufficient complexity.

01:31:33.860 Yes.

01:31:34.360 But not, I mean, people are saying things like every, you know, consciousness even in stones.

01:31:42.240 Yes, I know, I know.

01:31:43.360 I've talked to them.

01:31:43.940 That is nonsense.

01:31:44.520 Well, it just strikes me that it doesn't really help answer the question.

01:31:47.740 Yes.

01:31:48.440 So, hello, hello.

01:31:49.540 How did it go?

01:31:50.700 I think very well.

01:31:51.600 You both.

01:31:52.320 You need to take our microphone.

01:31:53.280 May I just, I'll just.

01:31:54.620 Friends.

01:31:54.860 Yes.

01:31:54.920 Thank you.

01:31:55.300 Thank you.

01:31:55.960 To be left's response.

01:31:56.180 Thank you.

01:31:56.600 Thank you.

01:31:57.360 Thank you.

01:31:58.020 Thank you.

01:31:58.320 Thank you.

01:31:58.500 Thank you.

01:31:58.800 Thank you.

01:31:59.040 Thank you.

01:31:59.320 Thank you.

01:31:59.860 Thank you.

01:32:00.260 Thank you.

01:32:00.700 Thank you.

01:32:01.040 Thank you.

01:32:02.000 Thank you.

01:32:02.120 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 26, 2022

256. Psychedelics, Consciousness, and AI ｜ Richard Dawkins

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