The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 277. Deeper Yet Into The Weeds

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00:00:57.420 So, hello everyone. I'm pleased here, pleased today, to have with me Jonathan Paggio and John Verveke.

00:01:17.780 People that most of you, many of you, not all of you, will be familiar with.

00:01:22.060 I've been working on a new book entitled We Who Wrestle with God, and it's been influenced by Jonathan's ideas and John's ideas.

00:01:35.840 And I developed an argument in part as a consequence of the public lectures I've been doing for the last three months, trying to push my ideas farther.

00:01:44.040 And I put forward a set of propositions that I'm basing one of the book chapters on.

00:01:52.420 I wrote it as an outline, and then I think it's solid.

00:01:55.860 I've been testing it when I've been speaking at universities as well to diverse audiences of specialists to see if they'll object to it, because I think it's actually quite radical.

00:02:04.740 And I sent this group of propositions, or this list of propositions, to Jonathan and John a month ago about, and we've been going back and forth, and I thought, I heard Jonathan was coming to town to do a talk with John, and I thought, hey, that's a good opportunity.

00:02:20.360 We could get together and walk through these propositions, because I'd like to see if they're solid, because if they're solid, well, that's good.

00:02:29.220 And if they're not, I'd like to find out.

00:02:30.620 And so, we're going to do this a little different, this is going to be a little different than many of the conversations I've had, because it'll have a bit more structure, and I want to read the propositions.

00:02:40.500 There's, I think, about 15 of them, and I want Jonathan and John to comment on them, to tell me where they agree, to tell me where they disagree, tell me what they don't understand, and to see if I can, well, learn something as a consequence.

00:02:57.920 That's kind of the hope, and so, we'll start with this first proposition.

00:03:04.280 To see the world, we must, must, prioritize our perceptions.

00:03:12.860 So, John, I'll ask you about that first, because that's a particular, I believe, a particular focus of yours.

00:03:20.700 I don't think that's an exaggeration.

00:03:21.920 No, it's not.

00:03:23.560 That's the core of my work.

00:03:27.180 And so, the main way I would respond to this is, I would say, I think the work that's coming out from artificial intelligence, and the work that's coming out from attention, lines up with this very well.

00:03:42.080 I don't have any significant disagreement with that proposition.

00:03:45.780 And the must part of it as well?

00:03:47.520 So, the must, I took, well, let me tell you how I took the must, and I took it as what's called constitutive necessity.

00:03:56.400 I took it to be, if you're going to be a cognitive agent, then you must do this.

00:04:02.080 I didn't take it to be a metaphysical necessity.

00:04:04.520 I took it to be that kind of constitutive necessity.

00:04:06.720 I think it's useful to start with what you describe as constituent necessities before you move into the realm of metaphysical necessity.

00:04:13.380 I think that's a good way to argue, you should, right?

00:04:16.500 And so, I think, and I'm not going to recapitulate all these arguments, but a lot of work, I think, zeroes in on the idea that the core of what makes us intelligent, and the thing that we're finding difficult to give to machines to make them artificially general intelligence, is a process I call relevance realization, which is exactly, I think, lines up with this very well.

00:04:40.900 The amount of information available to you in the world is astronomically vast, all the things you could pay attention to.

00:04:48.260 The amount of information in your long-term memory, especially if you think of all the ways it could be combined, is also astronomically vast.

00:04:55.940 The number of options of potential lines of behavior, I could move this finger, this finger, I could move them, I could lift, like, and the ways I could move them.

00:05:03.180 That's combinatorial explosion.

00:05:04.640 All of it, all of it. And then, right, and then you can also consider, you know, all of the options of different potential worlds you might want to consider trying to produce or moving into, right?

00:05:17.500 And so, the point is, in many different dimensions, we face combinatorial explosion, and what you can't do, and this is where it lines up with the must, because we're finite beings, there's finite resources and finite time, is you can't check all of that information.

00:05:33.540 So, you can't go and say, no, that's not relevant, that's not relevant, that memory's not relevant.

00:05:38.140 That will take, like, the rest of the history of the universe.

00:05:41.620 Right, right.

00:05:43.040 So, we don't know how we do it, in fact, because of that, in part.

00:05:46.060 Well, I mean, I think there's getting some clues towards it, but we can talk about that later, right?

00:05:53.420 So, the must and the prioritization, on the perception side, you're fine with.

00:05:57.840 It has to be, it has to be.

00:05:59.320 But here's the tricky thing, which is, the fact that we can't check it means, and this sounds almost like a Zen Cohen, is the prioritization is odd when you say it sort of, like, prima facie.

00:06:14.160 Yeah.

00:06:14.500 Because it means we intelligently ignore most of the information.

00:06:20.020 So, the prioritization, what I want to put.

00:06:21.960 Yeah, that's a good codicil.

00:06:23.580 So, you're saying that you don't want to misinterpret the necessity for prioritization as something like the necessity or our ability to make a numbered list of the number of possibilities that lay out in front of us, because that's actually impossible.

00:06:39.980 Right.

00:06:40.200 So, that isn't how we do it.

00:06:42.040 However we do it, isn't that.

00:06:43.580 Exactly.

00:06:44.240 So, if you're okay with that reading, and it sounds like you are, prioritization doesn't mean what we normally mean by prioritization, where we set things out, explicit and focal, and then choose between.

00:06:57.160 Right, right.

00:06:57.520 It's implicit.

00:06:58.260 It's implicit, and it's self-organizing, and our ability to think.

00:07:02.420 And it's unconscious.

00:07:03.520 Yes, emerges out of it.

00:07:05.100 We can influence it top down, but because it is an absolute requirement for our cognition, I would argue that our ability to do anything that we do consciously is ultimately dependent on it and presupposes it.

00:07:18.460 Okay, fine.

00:07:19.500 So, that's good.

00:07:20.200 Jonathan, do you want to add to that?

00:07:21.260 Well, I think the only thing that I would add is, you have to phrase it in a certain way.

00:07:26.060 There's no, you have to have a sentence.

00:07:28.460 But there's a sense in which perception, when we say we must prioritize our perceptions, I think the best way to understand it is that perception is already prioritization.

00:07:37.240 It is to, in order to perceive, there has to be a hierarchy in itself.

00:07:42.200 Perception is in and of itself an act of implicit prioritization.

00:07:49.000 Right, something like that.

00:07:49.320 And to use the word implicit would be a good idea, so to avoid the idea that we are consciously doing it, that in order to even perceive the world, there already has to be a given hierarchy that is making you able to focus on anything.

00:08:01.560 Because, or else we would be lost in a wave, you know, a sea of infinite details.

00:08:07.900 Okay, so I think that's a good codicil.

00:08:09.920 And so, we could also make a little technical case here quickly.

00:08:13.780 So, part of the problem that John referred to is that, in some sense, it's the problem of the finite confronting the infinite.

00:08:20.800 And so, we could make a neurological argument for that.

00:08:23.440 So, for example, when you move your eyes around, or when they move around as a consequence of being directed by unconscious structures of prioritization, because that happens all the time, you move your eyes around because you want to direct the high-resolution part of your visual system to whatever you're attending to.

00:08:42.200 That's the fovea.

00:08:43.360 And the fovea is a very small part of your retina.

00:08:45.640 And it's a very high-resolution part.

00:08:49.100 So, each cell in the fovea is connected at the level of the primary visual cortex to 10,000 cells.

00:08:56.260 And then each of those have 10,000 connections.

00:08:58.660 And so, if your whole vision was foveal in its resolution, you'd have to have a skull like an alien to contain that much brain.

00:09:08.540 And that's a real indication of that finitude, right, is that you do have limited cognitive resources.

00:09:15.820 And limited means practically and physically limited, but it also means metabolically limited.

00:09:22.000 The cost of running your brain is already extremely high.

00:09:25.000 And so, you're going to shepherd your available attentional resources because they are finite, and they're finite in no small part because they are technically metabolically costly.

00:09:39.780 That all seems okay?

00:09:42.140 So, I would add one thing to that, which is I would put an emphasis on how this process has to be self-organizing.

00:09:48.080 Because we want to avoid a perennial problem, which you and I both know shows up in psychology, which is to posit the internal homunculus that actually doesn't explain the problem, but just shifts it.

00:09:59.380 The central executive is an example of this, etc.

00:10:02.080 So, we don't want to say that there's someone that's doing the prioritization because that someone…

00:10:08.280 Is just as mysterious.

00:10:09.560 Right, and is facing the very problem that we're trying to explain.

00:10:13.600 So, the process has to be dynamically self-organizing.

00:10:16.540 Well, one of the ways I've realized how that problem works is in an attempt to solve the mind-body problem.

00:10:25.240 Because you can't solve the mind-body problem.

00:10:27.740 But you can say, let's say you want to explore an idea, and you decide to do that by writing an essay.

00:10:34.780 So, then you sit down in front of the computer, which is not an idea.

00:10:38.520 It's actually that you're sitting.

00:10:39.980 And then you move your fingers on the keyboard.

00:10:42.040 And so, there's a hierarchy of transformation from mind, which might be the abstract intent, to body.

00:10:48.740 And so, the spirit hits the body in the finger movements.

00:10:52.920 And then the spirit disappears, in some sense, under the finger movements.

00:10:56.860 Because you can move your fingers voluntarily, but you have no idea what muscles you're moving to do that.

00:11:02.180 And you can't control the cells or anything like that.

00:11:04.500 Oh, I did that with my students in the lecture this morning.

00:11:07.480 I was talking about this very fact that I said, put up your finger.

00:11:12.440 Okay.

00:11:13.100 Bend your finger.

00:11:14.320 What do you do to bend your finger?

00:11:15.840 Right.

00:11:16.300 Bend your finger.

00:11:17.020 Exactly.

00:11:17.160 It's so interesting.

00:11:18.720 It's so interesting that you have that level of consciousness at that level of detail, which is pretty detailed, but no more than that.

00:11:26.200 Yes, yes, yes.

00:11:27.020 Yeah, so that's a mystery, man.

00:11:28.660 That localization of consciousness between the body and part of the spirit, there's like a, what would you call it?

00:11:37.140 There's a bandwidth.

00:11:38.400 There's a bandwidth of resolution for consciousness.

00:11:40.900 Yes.

00:11:41.100 And why that band?

00:11:42.160 See, the social psychologists who studied language sort of cottoned on to this.

00:11:46.040 Because one of the things they realized was that short words, first of all, short words tend to be old words.

00:11:52.260 Yes.

00:11:52.600 So, because as language develops, words that are used a lot get more efficient.

00:11:56.800 But the short words also map extraordinarily well onto the self-evident level of perception.

00:12:03.940 And so, for example, a short word is cat.

00:12:06.660 Because a cat presents itself for some reason to our perception.

00:12:12.340 The species cat doesn't, and the fur of the cat, in some sense, doesn't.

00:12:17.920 It's the cat.

00:12:18.980 Yes.

00:12:19.320 And you can see that primary object level recognition.

00:12:23.500 Basic level.

00:12:23.940 Basic level.

00:12:24.740 That's right.

00:12:25.060 I would rush.

00:12:25.720 Yes, yes, yes.

00:12:27.140 And so, you see that with babies, because they get doggy pretty damn fast.

00:12:32.800 And that's because the language maps onto the primary domain of perception, that basic level perception, quite nicely.

00:12:39.060 And that is associated with something like the natural bandwidth of consciousness.

00:12:44.220 Yeah.

00:12:44.660 I would say that that lines up with, if you, if Rush's explanation is, you know, you're getting the best trade-off between differences between category and similarities within categories.

00:12:56.060 Right.

00:12:56.340 And then the question is, what does best trade-off mean?

00:12:59.140 Exactly.

00:12:59.820 And that's, and for me, that's, that's what, that would, that'd be a little bit of, I guess, a nuance I'd want to put onto the prioritization.

00:13:09.140 Because the prioritization sounds very, but sort of like an imposition.

00:13:14.820 Whereas, I think what we're talking about is something more like what Marl Ponti talked about when he talked about optimal gripping.

00:13:20.820 Right.

00:13:21.260 So, what's the correct, you know, distance to look at this?

00:13:26.120 Well, it depends.

00:13:26.940 Because if I zoom in, I lose the gestalt.

00:13:28.620 If I zoom out, I lose the detail.

00:13:30.100 It depends on what you want to do.

00:13:31.520 Exactly.

00:13:31.800 Yes.

00:13:32.120 Well, that's it.

00:13:33.100 That's why I'm kind of attracted to pragmatism.

00:13:35.480 It's like, well, to some degree, our theories of truth need to be embedded in the practicalities of action.

00:13:40.800 And so, is that a grippable object that I can drink from?

00:13:44.640 Well, I want my perception to match that problem.

00:13:46.880 Yeah, but it doesn't, I think that if you understand that the prioritization, let's say that you have heaven and earth.

00:13:53.900 I'm going to use, sorry, I'm going to use mythical categories.

00:13:55.560 But so, you have heaven and earth and that it's the way in which heaven meets earth is a mutual relationship, right?

00:14:04.700 We always see it as a relationship of lovers, you could say.

00:14:07.300 So, it's not, the prioritization isn't just about an imposition from above, but it's about the manner in which that which is above, let's say the hierarchy, is able to encounter the potential in which it's...

00:14:19.120 Well, we were talking about that last night.

00:14:21.000 So, Jonathan made this funny joke last night.

00:14:23.140 We were talking about Sam Harris, and Sam Harris has this line of argumentation where, and he used this on me, where I interpreted a biblical story and then he interpreted a recipe.

00:14:33.580 Yes, I've heard it.

00:15:03.580 That that's part of a kind of communion that you think that's a good thing that's worth spending time on, that serves your family and friends, that's maybe nested in something like an ethic of service to the community.

00:15:14.340 Like, there's a whole network of purpose.

00:15:17.240 I would add more to that.

00:15:18.260 There's all kinds of implicit assumptions that I can capture in a sequence of propositions, procedural skills that are not completely capturable in words, and that those procedures and skills can also map on through the particular virtues and skill that people are bringing to it.

00:15:34.560 Like, it's like, most things can't be solved by a recipe.

00:15:40.820 Right.

00:15:41.240 Right?

00:15:41.660 And yet, so a recipe is a significant cognitive cultural achievement.

00:15:47.060 And we don't recognize, like, and we tend to overgeneralize the things we think for which we can provide recipes.

00:15:55.120 This is one of the...

00:15:55.780 Right.

00:15:56.000 That's an algorithm issue.

00:15:57.260 Yes, exactly.

00:15:58.240 Exactly.

00:15:58.940 And so there's lots.

00:16:00.660 Yeah.

00:16:00.740 But even in the recipe itself, you will notice that the way in which we name things and the way in which we order things will be related to a normal prioritization, hierarchy prioritization.

00:16:10.080 But if you're making chicken, you'll have the chicken, and then you'll have the spices, and you'll understand that these elements that I'm adding are spices, and that they're, let's say, something like a marginalia that I'm adding to the central meal.

00:16:21.700 It's actually the very, like, it's the pattern of a church, actually, you know, where you have a movement towards the central identity that we understand, and then we have the way in which it's complemented to other things.

00:16:32.260 And so even the actual recipe itself is like a little microcosm.

00:16:35.760 And also the judgment you use is like, well, how much spice?

00:16:39.120 Well, the answer is, well, what function is the spice going to serve?

00:16:42.540 And you say, well, I want to add a little zest and interest to my cooking.

00:16:46.980 And so then you have a philosophy of zest and interest that's associated with that, because just predictable chicken isn't good enough.

00:16:53.220 And maybe you want to put a little more spice on, because you want to, what would you say, you want to challenge your guests a little bit in an interesting way, and you're thinking this all through.

00:17:02.660 For the same reason you'd wear funny socks or a tie that has just a little bit too much on it, you know?

00:17:07.600 Well, it's the same thing.

00:17:08.720 I mean, that's actually the future of general problem solving.

00:17:11.220 Like, when people are solving a problem, especially if they might get the wrong frame, moderately distracting you from the central concern is an optimal way.

00:17:21.180 Yeah, exactly.

00:17:21.940 You need to do that.

00:17:22.720 So what I'm hearing both of you say is the prioritization is really a multidimensional optimal gripping.

00:17:29.740 That's right.

00:17:30.660 We're constantly trading off.

00:17:32.220 Okay.

00:17:32.620 Well, then we can also expand on that to some degree, because multidimensional and optimal brings a lot of other concerns into it.

00:17:40.780 So imagine that one of the principles, and Kant moved towards this with his theory of universal ethic in some sense, although I think it, you know, I hesitate to criticize Kant, but I think that there's a deeper explanation for what he observed is, well, how should I treat you?

00:18:00.280 Well, that's a complex question, but one of the constraints is, well, what if we meet a hundred times?

00:18:07.840 So we're going to establish an actual relationship.

00:18:09.820 So however I conduct myself in the present moment has to be in accordance with a value hierarchy that takes into account the desirability of our mutual interrelationship into the future.

00:18:22.060 And that produces a very serious series of, I would say, often intrinsic constraints.

00:18:28.300 So I can't be too insulting.

00:18:29.800 I can't be too unwelcoming.

00:18:31.160 I have to offer you something approximating a true reciprocity for the thing not to degenerate.

00:18:36.640 And so, and all of that, and I would say that also governs how you cook for someone if you actually want to make friends.

00:18:42.720 So it's like treat other people as you would like them to treat you.

00:18:46.020 And it's pretty funny that that's the intrinsic ethic in a recipe.

00:18:49.740 And so that's a good, that's such a funny argument.

00:18:52.300 Thank you.

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00:20:19.600 Okay, so let's move to the second presupposition.

00:20:24.500 To act in the world, so it's kind of a correlator with the first or something equivalent.

00:20:29.520 To act in the world, we must prioritize our actions.

00:20:31.940 I don't think we probably have to cover that, right?

00:20:33.980 Because perception is an action already, because you have to move your eyes and orient your head.

00:20:39.340 And also, gripping is an action.

00:20:40.820 Yes, exactly.

00:20:41.520 So I think that goes with it.

00:20:42.780 Yeah, okay.

00:20:43.340 So we'll leave that.

00:20:44.500 Okay.

00:20:45.300 Now, this is the next.

00:20:46.700 This is a nice switch, I think.

00:20:48.140 Any system of priorities is a structure of values, and then I sneak something in, an ethic.

00:20:55.960 So I'm kind of defining ethic as a something approximating perhaps an internally, it's like a game.

00:21:02.560 It's an internally consistent hierarchy of value, but it's also, it's going to have to be iterable in the sense that we already discussed.

00:21:09.920 So that's kind of what I'm defining an ethic as.

00:21:12.120 And then you could also think of it as something that's embodied.

00:21:15.260 So when you're watching someone on a screen in a movie, say, a character, they embody an ethic.

00:21:20.840 That's what makes them interesting.

00:21:22.320 It's a whole structure of value, and they're acting it out.

00:21:26.980 And it's a system of priorities of perception and action.

00:21:31.360 And that's a value structure.

00:21:32.780 The reason it's a value structure is because, well, what's the difference between prioritization and value?

00:21:38.960 You prioritize what you value.

00:21:40.740 And so I think the difficulty I have is if you use the word ethic, because the word ethic is so charged with morality and also to the way that we're supposed to act between each other, then I think it can be a little bit misleading.

00:21:54.300 Because value is great.

00:21:55.060 Because it implies good.

00:21:55.800 It seems to, well, I think good is fine.

00:21:57.840 That is, the good in the sense that there's also a good glass, which has no moral bearing at all.

00:22:02.040 There's a good way to walk down the hall, which is not a moral question.

00:22:05.660 There's a, you know, the good way to fish, but these are not ethical.

00:22:09.240 Well, maybe they are.

00:22:10.540 Maybe, yeah, maybe.

00:22:11.720 But I think that that's maybe the little place where I would wonder about the word ethic.

00:22:15.140 Yeah, so that's a terminological problem in some sense, right?

00:22:17.620 Well, it is.

00:22:18.200 I don't know, what do you think that it seems to, as the word ethic seems to imply interpersonal relationships more.

00:22:23.340 Yeah, the word ethic has been reduced to the moral interactions.

00:22:26.840 Ethical.

00:22:26.980 Yes, yes.

00:22:28.240 Whereas, typically philosophers will use the term normativity to be a much more general term for the idea that there's a governing principle for your behavior.

00:22:38.840 Okay, so I'll have to make sure I clarify that when I read about this.

00:22:43.840 But I was also thinking about, you know, common fictional tropes in popular culture.

00:22:48.780 Sure.

00:22:49.380 So, if you're watching a mafia movie, one of the things that's interesting about a mafia criminal, as opposed to just your ordinary criminal, is that he's not entirely chaotic.

00:23:01.360 Right?

00:23:01.800 He abides by the mafia code, so he's loyal to his…

00:23:06.280 The certain code.

00:23:06.860 Yeah, he's loyal to a code, so it makes him a quasi-ethic actor.

00:23:10.360 And I would say, well, the mafia character does embody an ethic, and I'm kind of struggling for a word that isn't ethic.

00:23:18.640 You might disagree with the ethic, or that it's ethical.

00:23:20.800 No, but I think it's because, I mean, I think you can actually take this a lot further than just a mafia person.

00:23:25.300 I think there's a way that you can be a good mass murderer, in the sense that you can, you can, you have discovered the hierarchy of values, things you need to value in order to become a good mass murderer, and now you're engaging in them towards that hierarchy of values.

00:23:42.400 Right.

00:23:42.500 You could say, like, there are satanic hierarchies, like upside-down hierarchies.

00:23:45.960 Well, the Columbine killers, for example, were doing exactly that, and most of the mass shooters, there's a contest going on.

00:23:53.040 Yeah.

00:23:53.180 They know about each other, they're often, in fact, one of them, one kid who was planning to do this wrote me, like, six months ago.

00:24:00.460 He had a 50-page manifesto ready, and the weapons, and he watched this YouTube video discussion I did with Warren Farrell, and where we touched on this issue, and he decided that there was seriously something wrong with him, and that he should get some help and not do this.

00:24:17.440 But he was in contact with one of the people who went out and shot up a high school.

00:24:21.880 They had been in contact online, so he was, like, that far away from it.

00:24:25.520 Yeah, but, so, so there is this, it's not a, you can have a chaotic criminal who's completely unpredictable, but then you don't have much of a plot, right?

00:24:34.680 He's not an interesting character.

00:24:35.860 He's going to get caught really fast.

00:24:37.020 Well, there's that, too, right?

00:24:38.660 The far more interesting ones have a, they have a, well, I'd say they have an ethic.

00:24:43.260 Now, it's not an ethical ethic.

00:24:44.560 Right, so that's why the word ethic is difficult, because you could say that ultimately what you're going to, what's going to happen is that there will be a hierarchy of value systems.

00:24:53.160 Yeah.

00:24:53.360 That will be more related to the good in the classical sense.

00:24:56.460 This is Plato.

00:24:57.140 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:24:58.280 This is Plato.

00:24:58.580 Exactly.

00:24:58.900 And this is Plato's argument that nobody willingly does evil.

00:25:02.380 Everybody does what they conceive to be a good in some fashion.

00:25:05.400 Yeah, you see that in Dante, you see the same, his whole movement.

00:25:08.840 He even talks about how the people in hell, everybody is there because of…

00:25:12.040 I'm reading the Divine Comedy right now.

00:25:13.380 That's wonderful.

00:25:13.840 Yeah, that's great.

00:25:14.740 Everybody who is there is there because of love for a good, even though, even if they love the good too much, or they're mistaken about, let's say, the actual ultimate value of that good.

00:25:25.020 Everybody moves towards a good, even if you're doing something which is completely reprehensible.

00:25:29.140 Yeah, the proposal that sin is actually failing to love wisely.

00:25:33.360 Yeah, exactly.

00:25:34.000 That's the don't.

00:25:34.580 You see that in that book?

00:25:34.900 Yeah, I have some problem with that viewpoint, because I think that happens.

00:25:39.380 I do think that happens.

00:25:40.400 And I think many of the…

00:25:42.300 You know, I've talked to people like my friend Greg Hurwitz, who writes thrillers, and he crafts pretty evil characters, and we've talked about that a lot.

00:25:49.640 An evil character with an ethic, so like a misplaced love, is a very interesting character.

00:25:54.560 But then there's the other sorts of characters that are more Cain-like, because Cain, his spirit, the spirit that's expressed in that story,

00:26:03.160 his…

00:26:05.060 He isn't aiming at something that's good.

00:26:08.840 He's aiming at getting away with lying to God.

00:26:11.960 He's aiming at getting away with making insufficient sacrifices.

00:26:15.640 He's aiming at getting away, eventually, with murder.

00:26:18.800 It's not a perversion of the good.

00:26:20.480 And I think that we underestimate the problem of evil if we assume that it's merely a consequence of worshipping false idols, say.

00:26:27.880 Because the idol can be so…

00:26:29.780 It's like, I talked to you last night about the reports that Michel Foucault raped boys in graveyards.

00:26:35.400 It's like, okay, he argued even formally, culturally, to abolish or at least radically reduce the age of consent.

00:26:43.240 And a lot of intellectuals went along with him.

00:26:45.600 And maybe you can have a discussion about that and what the age of consent could be.

00:26:49.440 And maybe you can't.

00:26:50.420 There's room for differences in opinion there.

00:26:52.720 But when your pedophilia involves graveyard sex, then that's not a misplaced good.

00:27:01.340 Like, that's…

00:27:02.580 But why not, Jordan?

00:27:03.600 Why isn't that…

00:27:05.480 Pleasure is a good, right?

00:27:08.240 And you're…

00:27:08.520 Well, it's so specific.

00:27:10.700 You know, why the graveyard?

00:27:12.100 Like, there's something so dark.

00:27:14.000 I don't think there's…

00:27:15.040 I think that's a place that's so dark that you can't go there without knowing that it's dark.

00:27:18.860 And I do think that…

00:27:20.140 I really do believe, and, you know, I've done my best to study the thought of people who've done truly reprehensible things,

00:27:25.820 is that there's a level of reprehensibility where you are going there to cause the most trouble you can.

00:27:34.220 And I don't see if there's any good left in that.

00:27:37.860 It's such a tiny spark.

00:27:39.300 I'm really going to be the devil's advocate here, knowing that there are some that do it better than others, and some that don't do it as well.

00:27:47.020 Even recognizing that the good that they're aiming towards is not really transcendentally the good.

00:27:52.940 Their memory has to be working, their problem-solving has to be working.

00:27:55.200 That is that they…

00:27:55.960 It's like, if I…

00:27:57.100 Yeah, so they're still driven by a coherent spirit.

00:27:59.240 That's right.

00:27:59.540 Well, that's what I think the spirit of Lucifer and the spirit of Goethe's Mephistopheles, that's…

00:28:05.940 And the spirit of Cain, that's a description of that ethic.

00:28:09.280 It does unite…

00:28:10.040 It is a coherent personality.

00:28:12.180 Yeah.

00:28:12.280 And that's why there's so much…

00:28:13.520 Well, and Milton as well.

00:28:15.700 There's been an attempt to delineate the ethic of evil.

00:28:19.400 Yeah.

00:28:19.700 And it's not merely chaotic.

00:28:21.700 And one of the reasons why it's important, and maybe it's hard to see that right away, but one of the reasons why it's important, at least I find it important to formulate it this way, the way that Dante formulated it, or that Plato formulated it, is that if you don't go in this direction, you end up with a dualism, and then they end up acting as like two opposites.

00:28:40.680 Whereas, the more Platonic way of setting it up, what ends up happening is that the evil always ends up just being a perversion of the good.

00:28:50.140 Right.

00:28:50.460 It's parasitic.

00:28:51.280 Completely parasitic.

00:28:51.780 It's always parasitic.

00:28:52.940 And so, what it does is that it makes the good truly good, and it makes it all pervasive, and a way in which it can actually fill up the entire cosmos.

00:29:02.260 You know, this idea that even in the depth of hell, the love of God is there.

00:29:06.220 Like, you see that in a lot of the Christian mystics, that there is no place that is away from the good.

00:29:10.880 Okay, so let me ask you about that on the grounds of Christian theology.

00:29:16.520 So, and I'm probably going to mangle this, so correct me.

00:29:20.300 Well, there's an idea that, in the book of Revelation, that Christ is the eternal judge, but that he's also a judge who comes back at the end of days and separates the wheat from the chaff, the damned from the saved.

00:29:32.560 And the implication in that book is that many are called, but few are chosen.

00:29:39.460 The judgment's pretty damn harsh.

00:29:41.720 And most, most what?

00:29:44.780 Most spirits are damned?

00:29:46.520 Most people are damned?

00:29:48.460 And then is that eternal, or is there a reconciliation?

00:29:52.260 And so, I don't know the answer to that in the Christian theological sense.

00:29:56.700 I think that the best way, this is the type of thing that could actually get me in trouble, but the best way to formulate it, I think, that we're seeing in the Orthodox tradition right now, is to say that we live in the hope of a final restoration.

00:30:12.620 A universal redemption.

00:30:14.060 But we cannot posit it, because, like you said, there seem to be two traditions in the Christian world.

00:30:21.980 There is a tradition of final restoration, which you find in Revelation as well, by the way, because it says the last thing to die is death itself, right?

00:30:29.660 There's a sense in which death is thrown into the fire.

00:30:31.720 And so, the last, what exactly is that referring to?

00:30:34.420 There's a sense in which the heavenly Jerusalem descends and fills up the entire world.

00:30:39.080 So, you have these images, and then you also have an image of evil being completely, let's say, cast off.

00:30:46.100 And those two kind of exist in a kind of uneasy...

00:30:48.980 Well, I was thinking this about just the other day, when I was thinking about making a video address to the Islamic world, as preposterous as that might sound.

00:30:58.320 Because one of the things you want to do when you're talking to people is you want to distinguish between them as of intrinsic value and redeemable, in some final sense, just as you are, and ideas that might be possessing them that have either this misplaced good element to them or this vengeful element.

00:31:17.860 And so, you know, you don't want to throw, to use a horrible cliche, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:31:23.900 And so, maybe the separation of the wheat from the chaff is a spiritual discrimination that doesn't throw out the entire being along with the judgment.

00:31:34.260 If you understand it fractally, then I think that that makes sense.

00:31:37.240 If you read, like, for example, C.S. Lewis is a great example of someone who kind of was going in that direction, was hinting at some things.

00:31:44.160 He talked about how it's this notion that the key to hell is locked from the inside.

00:31:49.880 Right.

00:31:51.120 No matter, even, like, I think C.S. Lewis said, like, even in the depth of hell, if Satan wanted to repent, there's...

00:31:59.680 Well, that's what Milton said, too.

00:32:00.920 But that's not, it's like it's not happening because that's the role that's in the story.

00:32:05.120 This is the character that helped me to understand this part of the cosmos or the part of the way that the world is laying itself out.

00:32:12.520 And you see that in some of the Syrian fathers, for example, Sedef from the Syrian, he says things like that, where he says, the fire in hell is the same fire that was at Pentecost.

00:32:23.800 The fire in hell is the love of God.

00:32:25.800 And it's only that, to the extent that you refuse to be transformed, and you hold on to your, let's say, parasitic good, that is what the fire of hell is going on.

00:32:37.940 Well, right.

00:32:38.500 Well, part of that is that as you become more divorced from, let's say, what constitutes a sustainable and valid good, the farther you get away from that, whether it's merely by pursuing a misplaced good or it's by conscious design,

00:32:51.920 the more that elevates itself up as the harshest possible judge that will do the most damage to your current ethic and then destabilize your whole perceptions.

00:33:02.940 And so, that's so interesting because as you deviate, speaking spiritually, as you deviate from God, he becomes more tyrannical in some sense to you and more judgmental.

00:33:14.060 And it's also partly because this is why the Catholic idea of confession isn't what's often pilloried, because, you know, people laugh, well, you're a Catholic, you can sin your whole life, and on your deathbed, you can repent.

00:33:27.140 It's like, yeah, but you have to face the magnitude of everything you did wrong.

00:33:32.500 So, repentance isn't just, well, I'm sorry.

00:33:36.200 It's like, you're actually sorry.

00:33:38.540 And if you've stacked up a whole lifetime of sins, what makes you think that you're going to have the moral wherewithal on your deathbed to confront that without anything, well, it's just absolute existential terror.

00:33:52.760 So, there's no easy out from that.

00:33:55.860 So, so.

00:33:58.520 Sorry, we're going to hold other friends.

00:34:00.380 No, no, no, I mean, I thought the discussion was important, and what you just said, Jordan, is important.

00:34:08.680 I, for one, would not want immortality, because when I look back at the foolishness and the vices of my past, yeah, it's hard.

00:34:21.960 And so, people who think they could just sort of sin and mouth, I don't, mouth the repentance, I don't think that's.

00:34:28.860 Well, they also think they can, in some sense, pull one over God.

00:34:32.320 Yeah.

00:34:32.700 But, or we could, we'll abide by this rule that we'll never use religious language when we can use any other kind of language.

00:34:39.780 No, no, no, no.

00:34:40.280 I think it's a good rule.

00:34:40.720 But I know, I know you weren't objecting to that, but I think it's a good principle.

00:34:44.740 I'm happy, I'm happy to talk about it.

00:34:47.820 I, I'll, but I don't, well, let me say, there's, there's something underneath the religious discussion that is sort of a central concern to me at this point.

00:35:00.100 And, and I'll invoke Kant, Kant writes the three critiques, right, the critique of pure reason, practical reason, judgment, right, and Habermas makes a great point of this.

00:35:13.120 I'm coming to it, I'm coming to the point, which is, we don't seem, since Kant, we don't have an integrated normativity.

00:35:20.940 We have three autonomous spheres of normativity around the true, the epistemic, the good, and the beautiful.

00:35:29.440 And what, what, what Kant did, and one of the problems of modernity, and this is Habermas's point, is he made a very strong case for the autonomy of each, right, beauty is beauty.

00:35:39.700 So that's partly why you objected in the way you did when you emailed me back.

00:35:43.580 Exactly.

00:35:43.720 Because you, I was talking about an ethic that would unite, and you said, well, it's differentiated, true, beautiful, and good.

00:35:50.660 Right.

00:35:50.840 And my response to that would be something like, well, whatever God is, fundamentally ineffable, so we'll, we'll make that, we'll make that clear to begin with.

00:36:01.560 But I would say that one way of thinking about the way we think about God is that God is what's common to the good, the true, and the beautiful.

00:36:10.080 So this gets us into the, the, the, the discussion that I think is, for me, sort of the deepest levels of the phenomenology and the cognition, which is, I mean,

00:36:20.620 Jonathan would know, this is the classical doctrine, the classical way of putting this is the convertible of the, the transcendentals are convertible into each other.

00:36:28.860 So somehow the true and the good and the beautiful are one, but not mathematical identity.

00:36:35.300 This is really important.

00:36:36.420 It's not like you can, right?

00:36:38.520 And so, and it, you know, Aquinas wrestles with this, I've been reading Maximus, by the way.

00:36:43.240 I think you see a reflection of that in the idea of the Trinity, too.

00:36:46.120 Well, of course, right?

00:36:48.200 And, and, and, and, and so the issue there is, and I've been reading D.C. Schindler on the Catholicity of Reason, and he talks about this, he gets it from Balthazar.

00:36:58.280 He talks about the primacy of, the primacy of beauty, the centrality of goodness, and the ultimacy of truth, that, that they, they are superlative, but in different ways.

00:37:09.780 So what he means by that is, there's a primacy to beauty, and, and this is a classic platonic argument.

00:37:14.980 If you don't have beauty, all the other normativities are not available to you.

00:37:18.280 Right.

00:37:19.140 So why write?

00:37:20.340 That's not so, like, I, I, I, I wrote a chapter in my last book on the necessity of beauty, but, but I don't understand why that, why prime, why primary?

00:37:29.540 Because.

00:37:30.300 And what does that say about our perception that it's primary and so, right?

00:37:33.420 Because you don't have to think about it.

00:37:34.760 Is that part of it?

00:37:35.540 Is that, yeah, apprehend it.

00:37:37.300 I don't understand exactly.

00:37:38.540 Well, a way of thinking about it is, uh, Skari wrote a really beautiful book called Beauty and how it prepares us for truth and justice.

00:37:44.820 And the idea, so let, let, let's, let's, let's take something that's, that's very culturally relevant and something I've been talking about.

00:37:51.880 So we, we are, we are immersed in what Rekir called a hermeneutics of suspicion.

00:37:57.900 The hermeneutics of suspicion is that appearances are always distorting, distracting, deceiving us from reality.

00:38:04.620 That's the hermeneutics of suspicion.

00:38:06.000 And the moment of truth is when you reveal the hidden cabal, the conspiracy, right?

00:38:11.420 This is the hermeneutics of suspicion.

00:38:13.420 And it's, you know, and, and, and Rekir's point is we got this.

00:38:16.060 That's what Freud does.

00:38:17.180 Marx does.

00:38:17.660 Freud and Marx.

00:38:18.300 It's the uncovering.

00:38:19.320 And so the people.

00:38:20.200 Here's what's really going on.

00:38:21.360 The deconstruction is here's what's really going on.

00:38:23.820 Exactly.

00:38:23.900 And it's everywhere now.

00:38:24.800 Right.

00:38:25.080 Exactly.

00:38:25.280 Now here's Marloponti's point about this, right?

00:38:29.280 His point is, but wait, the hermeneutics of, of, of that, the hermeneutics of suspicion is always dependent on this.

00:38:37.620 If I say that's unreal, oh, look, I do that because I say that's real.

00:38:43.960 Realization is always a comparative judgment.

00:38:46.780 This is his point.

00:38:47.600 And so does he accept the notion that there is something, because one of the things you see in the postmodern types, and I was looking at Richard Rorty's work the other day, and he seems to buy the postmodern idea that everything is just a network of linguistic representation and that there is no real beyond that.

00:39:04.860 That's, that's, that's Dillon's critique of that being semi-logical reductionism.

00:39:08.560 All you do is transfer all the markers of reality onto properties of the text, and then you, you, you prevent the text from being subject to the very criticisms you're making of reality.

00:39:18.120 Yeah.

00:39:18.440 Well, that, that, that seems credible to me.

00:39:20.340 Okay.

00:39:20.660 So, so, so it was, Marloponti accepts the reality of beauty.

00:39:24.460 Right.

00:39:25.200 Exactly.

00:39:25.800 Because, think about, think about what this means.

00:39:27.820 If the hermeneutics of suspicion is, right, that appearances distract us, deceive us, distort.

00:39:33.780 Right.

00:39:33.980 There has to be something under that.

00:39:35.660 Right.

00:39:35.980 And beauty is when appearances disclose reality.

00:39:38.360 That's right.

00:39:39.360 Yeah.

00:39:39.980 Hmm.

00:39:40.500 That's the, that's what, I mean, that's what.

00:39:42.060 I believe that, man.

00:39:42.760 That's the artist, I mean, that's the artist's take, or that's the liturgical take, or it's the, the beauty of a church, or the beauty of an icon, or the, it's, it's the notion that, that, that God, or ultimate reality, or however you want to phrase it, is disclosing itself to us.

00:39:59.540 Right.

00:39:59.620 And that appears to us as the connection between that which we encounter, these, these patterned beings that we encounter, and what they reveal to us about the other transcendentals.

00:40:10.000 Mm-hmm.

00:40:10.380 And, uh.

00:40:10.840 Well, when I wrote this chapter, which is my favorite chapter in both books, it's try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.

00:40:16.720 And so it's this sort of step behind, well, order your room first, so that it's just not cluttered and, and idiotic, and, and running at counter purposes to whatever your purposes are, reflection of your internal chaos.

00:40:29.720 Get it orderly, but that's not good enough.

00:40:31.580 The next thing is, see if you can make a relationship with beauty, which is really, it's, it's really, uh, people are afraid of that, eh?

00:40:38.420 Because I've watched people try to buy art, and they're terrified of buying art, and the reason is, is because their choice puts their taste on display, and if their taste is undeveloped, then their inability to distinguish between a false appearance and the genuine reality of beauty is immediately revealed to people.

00:40:58.980 So they're terrified of it, but they're also equally terrified of beauty.

00:41:03.320 So let me tell you a story about this, if you don't mind.

00:41:05.540 I, I bought some Russian Impressionist paintings for my father, and, uh, I liked them a lot.

00:41:12.240 I, I, this particular artist, um, the Russian Impressionist style is like the French Impressionist style, except it's a lot rougher.

00:41:19.620 The brush strokes are, uh, thicker, and so it's lower resolution, but it's equally beautiful in terms of palette.

00:41:25.900 And I have a variety of paintings, if you get some distance from them, they just snap into representations, so lovely.

00:41:32.440 And so I sent my dad, like, eight of these paintings, and my mom took one look at them, and she said, those are not coming out of the basement.

00:41:39.700 And so, and my mom is, is a conservative person, so she's not high in openness, she's not that interested in ideas, and she's not, and her aesthetic sense isn't sophisticated.

00:41:50.220 Now, my mother has a lot of lovely attributes, but, but, and my dad and her differ in that.

00:41:55.280 And so I, he loved these paintings, and then he made these frames for them, and then he brought one up, and my mom tolerated that.

00:42:04.340 And then he brought another one up, and then she tolerated that, and then, like, all eight of them eventually made it upstairs.

00:42:09.880 And then a few years later, I was there, and she told me how much she loved the paintings.

00:42:14.460 But it really, they really set her off.

00:42:16.780 And I think it was partly because, well, if you're, imagine you have, you're, you're comfortable in your canonical perceptions of objects in some sense,

00:42:25.620 and then the Impressionists come along and say, you know, you could look at that whole landscape as if it was nothing but the interplay of color.

00:42:31.060 And that's, we forget how radical that is.

00:42:33.760 I mean, they, those paintings caused riots in Paris when they were first showed Impressionist paintings.

00:42:38.580 And that's what my mother was reacting to.

00:42:40.300 It's like, oh my God, there's a whole different way of looking at the world.

00:42:43.480 I don't want to see that.

00:42:44.560 And it's an invitation to that which is beyond the triviality of your perceptions, let's say.

00:42:50.320 But it's to think that there's nothing about that that's worth being frightened of or challenging.

00:42:56.880 You don't understand conservatives if you don't see that.

00:42:59.640 So, but in terms of beauty, one of the things that also that, especially now, you can, one of the problems or the way that beauty can kind of overwhelm us is that we feel as if, if we give ourselves, we're afraid of the suspicion, the hermeneutics of suspicion.

00:43:17.380 We're afraid that if we see reality discloses itself to us and we can see the connection between that which is appearing to me and some, something behind it,

00:43:27.180 then I'm afraid that if I jump, if I make that leap, then I'll be betrayed or that, or that it will.

00:43:33.520 Right, that it won't turn out to be real or, well, also I would say maybe.

00:43:37.140 Sometimes it's not.

00:43:38.020 Like there are, there is, it is possible to, to be tricked by, by appearances.

00:43:43.880 And this gets you to, to Hans, you know, saving beauty, his critique of what you see going on right now is he, he, he argues that if you read ancient texts, if you read Plotinus, one of the features they'll say about beauty is it's striking and disturbing and disrupting.

00:43:59.280 Right, I'll, I want to come back to that about the, the transformative aspect of truth, but, but, right, the transformative theory of truth.

00:44:07.020 But, and Han talks about, now what we've done, right, and he talks about it in other books too, is we've reduced, we try to reduce the beautiful to the smooth, which is the, the ease at which we can consume something.

00:44:19.460 Yeah, like the smooth outer cover of a car.

00:44:22.420 Exactly.

00:44:22.980 Right, one pixel resolution.

00:44:24.940 Yes, yes, and, and, and, and, and because, because what that does is it gives you, and I'll use this word deliberately, the veneer of beauty with, but while protecting you from the hermetic suspicion.

00:44:35.480 Oh, that's so smart.

00:44:36.940 Yeah.

00:44:37.120 Right, you see that?

00:44:38.180 So what we do is, and then he says, and pornography is the primary example of that, because what you do is you remove all threat, all mystery, all otherness from the person, so there's no way they can strike you or disturb you.

00:44:51.160 Or reject you.

00:44:52.180 Right, yes, exactly.

00:44:53.720 And the, and so pornography is an example of, of the smooth completely overtaking the beautiful and being misunderstood as the beautiful.

00:45:03.580 But if that's, if you, if you gentlemen are in agreement with it, what that means, that's my answer to why the primacy of beauty.

00:45:11.420 Because if you do not get that ability to, and I want to use this word in two sentences.

00:45:17.020 Sorry, please go ahead, then I'll ask.

00:45:19.440 Yeah, I want to say through the way I'm saying, like through my glasses, beyond and by means of, if we can't properly get a moment where we can see through appearance into reality, we are locked into solipsism and skepticism.

00:45:34.600 You need a primary, and if you do it, if you do it rather than it is called to you, then you are trapped, right?

00:45:42.960 You need, you need something that calls you from beyond appearances so that you can properly align appearances to reality and you realize that's why the primacy of beauty.

00:45:53.240 So is that the ontological calling you out of epistemology?

00:45:58.060 I would argue that that's Plato's argument for how beauty works.

00:46:02.900 Okay, so when you say, okay, so I've thought a lot about the relationship between love and truth, and I think love is primary, and the truth is the handmaiden of love in some sense.

00:46:12.360 But, but, so there's a primacy there, I would say the primacy of love, but you're making an argument for the primacy of beauty.

00:46:18.060 And so, are they contradictory arguments?

00:46:20.100 No, no, no, no, not at all, because Plato's view of love, and you have to be careful, because Plato is taking the Greek notion of eros, and he's trying to bend it.

00:46:29.820 And I think he's trying to bend it towards what the Christians are going to eventually talk about in Agape.

00:46:33.660 Right, right.

00:46:34.160 Okay, so take that as a caveat on what I'm saying.

00:46:36.680 But nevertheless, what's going on, right, is Plato says, no, no, no, what love is, is that you are called to beauty.

00:46:44.800 And let me, let me, let me, let me just try and show you, give me a sec, because there's a connection.

00:46:51.060 Okay, so a lot, this will sound like, where's he, out of left field, but, right, truth, rationality, most of the cognitive biases, in fact, there's a growing argument that a lot of the cognitive biases, confirmation bias, blah, blah, blah, blah, a lot of them are actually versions, aspects of the my side bias, egocentrism.

00:47:10.680 I won't make that argument here, I think it's a good argument, but let's say, even if it's only partially true, this is an important point.

00:47:17.380 And Spinoza got this, right, this orientation, self-relevance, how things are relevant to me, right, that sort of fundamental egocentrism, a fundamental way in which you're prioritizing your perception on the world, right?

00:47:31.780 You can't reason your way out of that.

00:47:35.040 Spinoza, the most logical of the philosophers, says, no, no, the only thing that will invert the arrow of relevance is love.

00:47:42.360 This is Murdoch's point.

00:47:44.220 Love is when you recognize something other than yourself as real.

00:47:47.260 Right.

00:47:47.840 Okay, so let's, okay, let me ask you about that, because I've been thinking about the idea of being selfish.

00:47:53.560 Yes.

00:47:53.820 Well, psychopaths are selfish, but they also betray themselves, because psychopaths don't learn from experience, and they doom their future selves.

00:48:02.340 And so I kind of wonder if that love that lifts you out of this self-orientation, what it does in some sense is that it's the way you see the world, if you see beyond this narrow selfishness.

00:48:18.160 Because I don't really think there's any difference, technically, in me taking care of the multitude of future selves that I will become, and me treating you properly.

00:48:28.260 I totally agree.

00:48:29.140 Okay, okay, fine.

00:48:29.820 I think your relationship to your future self is ultimately an agopic relationship, and I think that's the only way you can deal with a lot of empirical research.

00:48:37.720 Okay, you do, you do.

00:48:39.160 Yes.

00:48:39.960 Oh, why the empirical research?

00:48:41.820 Because I think the empirical research shows that, like, I mentioned it in the Cambridge talk that I sent you the link to, right, what, if you do this, this is one instance among many experiments.

00:48:53.380 You go into a bunch of academics at a university, the people who are supposed to be the best at taking data and processing it, you present them with all the evidence that they should start saving for their retirement right now.

00:49:03.480 Right.

00:49:03.820 And they won't do it.

00:49:05.280 You come back six months later, they will, they will, they, you ask them at the time, is this argument a solid, solid argument, great evidence.

00:49:11.640 Yeah.

00:49:11.960 Come back six months.

00:49:13.000 Have they changed?

00:49:13.740 Not at all.

00:49:14.260 Yeah, the behavioral therapists know that perfectly well.

00:49:17.360 Right.

00:49:17.860 Yeah.

00:49:18.040 But, so if you, but if you do the following, you say, I want you to imagine your future self as a family member that you love and care about.

00:49:27.800 Right, right.

00:49:28.580 And they will start to save and, more importantly, the vividness of that imagery predicts how well.

00:49:36.160 Oh, that's so cool.

00:49:37.140 Look, you know, this, this program that we worked on, future authoring program.

00:49:40.680 Yes.

00:49:41.180 Well, it's predicated on the idea of developing a love for your future self.

00:49:46.940 So, so it's an exercise.

00:49:48.780 Yes.

00:49:48.900 It's a real sense.

00:49:50.140 It's, it's like here, and it's the ethic that's underneath it, although this wasn't particularly conscious in my mind when I built it,

00:49:58.020 was knock and the door will open.

00:50:01.120 It's like, okay, let's play a game.

00:50:03.700 You get to have what you want and need.

00:50:07.400 But the rule is, first of all, you have to accept it, and second of all, you have to specify it.

00:50:12.180 And so, but let's just play it as a game.

00:50:13.840 Yeah.

00:50:14.260 If you could, if you could envision a future that would justify your suffering, that's a really good way of thinking about it, justify your suffering, what would that entail?

00:50:22.800 And then people, and then I make it practical.

00:50:25.120 It's like, well, what do you want for an intimate relationship?

00:50:27.820 How do you want to treat your family members?

00:50:29.640 What sort of job or career?

00:50:30.880 Like, I break it into seven practicalities, you know, to, to nail it down to the ground.

00:50:35.520 And I do believe that, see, one of the things we found, we thought, well, what predicts whether or not this works?

00:50:40.660 Because it really works.

00:50:41.580 We dropped the dropout rate of young men at Mohawk College, 50%.

00:50:45.500 It should.

00:50:46.360 It should work.

00:50:46.820 Well, it did.

00:50:47.400 And it had the biggest effect on those who were doing the worst, which is not very common for psychological interventions.

00:50:53.940 But one, the only thing we could find content-wise that predicted how well it would work was number of words written.

00:51:02.340 And so my sense was, well, that just was an index, a rough index of how much thought they put into it and how vividly, and then it would be, did they treat their future self with some love, like genuinely?

00:51:13.320 And then did they differentiate that so it wasn't just an abstract mountaintop conceptualization?

00:51:19.980 So, okay.

00:51:20.620 But let's add one wrinkle that brings the beauty thing back.

00:51:23.620 Because you go back and ask them, why didn't you pay attention to your future self?

00:51:27.960 Before.

00:51:28.700 Well, sometimes people don't think they could.

00:51:30.780 They have no idea that that's even a possibility.

00:51:33.020 That's, I don't deny that.

00:51:34.780 Yeah.

00:51:35.060 But overwhelmingly, people said, I don't want to look at that person because that's me old and ugly.

00:51:41.080 They're afraid of it.

00:51:42.080 Yeah, and it's an aesthetic judgment.

00:51:44.780 It's an aesthetic judgment.

00:51:46.840 And what you have to do is get them to reform it.

00:51:49.880 But what if that's an old thing?

00:51:50.920 It's a shallow aesthetic judgment.

00:51:52.620 Yes.

00:51:53.560 Right.

00:51:54.120 Exactly.

00:51:54.380 My wife, she does portraits.

00:51:57.220 And one of the things that's really interesting about my wife's art is she will look at, she's like Goya, although, you know, Goya is Goya, obviously.

00:52:04.740 But one of the things I really found striking about Tammy is she did a very detailed picture of my daughter's surgical wound.

00:52:12.240 And that's not an easy thing to look at.

00:52:15.180 Exactly.

00:52:15.580 Because you don't want to look at that.

00:52:17.020 But that also ties in with the ideas we've been discussing about the fact that, so in the story of Exodus, when God tells Moses how to stop the Israelites from being bitten by poisonous snakes, he insists that they have to look at what's poisoning them.

00:52:31.840 And, well, I think that's the crucifixion message, essentially.

00:52:35.260 Yeah, it's the mystery of the crucifixion, ultimately.

00:52:36.740 You bet, right.

00:52:37.600 All these images that we have, like the beauty of Christ's wounds, all these things which sound so completely…

00:52:43.460 Pathological?

00:52:44.300 Yeah, to many people, if you can understand them properly, you can understand that that's…

00:52:48.260 You have to gaze on that which most threatens you.

00:52:50.400 Yeah, there's a verse…

00:52:51.880 And then you say, well, this inadequacy of vulnerability that characterizes old age, there's a terror in that.

00:52:58.480 Yeah.

00:52:58.720 And so people won't go there.

00:52:59.940 Right, but what you do is you replace the shallow aesthetic, right?

00:53:04.840 Don't let the appearances, right, distract you.

00:53:08.420 Right.

00:53:08.720 Let the appearances disclose.

00:53:11.340 What if that was an old family member who's always looked through and see that those appearances are…

00:53:17.940 That's somebody who's been there, right, that you care about.

00:53:20.400 Someone you love.

00:53:21.220 Exactly.

00:53:21.840 Right, right, right.

00:53:22.180 And so you beautify them, so you love them, and the love and the beauty, they reinforce each other.

00:53:26.220 So for me, to answer your question, right, you're saying the primacy of love, and I think you ultimately mean agapic love, right?

00:53:34.960 That and beauty, if you're incapable of turning the arrow of relevance and saying, I want that to exist, rather than I want that to exist for me, right?

00:53:47.420 That's what beauty does, and that's also the central move, I would argue, in love.

00:53:52.520 Okay, so do we want to detour into the true and the…

00:53:55.900 It's beautiful, true, and beautiful, true, and…

00:53:58.240 The good.

00:53:58.640 The good.

00:53:59.000 But do you have something equally revealing to say about the good and the true?

00:54:05.640 Yeah, I do.

00:54:06.520 Okay, well, let's go there, and then we'll continue through this, because I thought that was really useful.

00:54:11.760 Well, and I would like us…

00:54:14.480 I would request that we return back to that whatever this discourse would…

00:54:18.240 I love following the logos.

00:54:20.500 That's the…

00:54:21.180 I aspire to be like Socrates.

00:54:23.820 Spoken like a true Christian.

00:54:25.060 Well, but spoken like a true follower of Socrates, too, right?

00:54:28.240 Fair enough.

00:54:29.000 Fair enough.

00:54:29.700 Right?

00:54:30.340 But I'm hoping that in this diologos, if we get into the depths of the true, the good, and the beautiful, that we can address my criticism of you.

00:54:40.180 Yep.

00:54:40.500 Which is, I'm making a criticism on behalf of the Enlightenment and Kant.

00:54:44.680 Yes, yes.

00:54:45.160 Which is the fracturing of the normativities into three autonomous spheres.

00:54:50.380 Yep.

00:54:50.760 And this argument, if it's going to go forward, needs something that would…

00:54:55.400 Yeah, I see, I see what you're doing.

00:54:58.060 Right, you bet.

00:54:58.400 If I can put it there.

00:54:58.900 Is that okay with you, Jonathan?

00:54:59.840 Yeah, that's fine.

00:55:00.520 Yeah, that's okay.

00:55:00.960 Right, okay.

00:55:01.580 So, for me, the thing I want to say first about the good is there's two readings to make about this.

00:55:13.800 And one is, and this is what the Enlightenment did, we can reduce, and Jonathan's already challenged this, but we can reduce the ethical, sorry, we can reduce the good to the ethical good.

00:55:24.220 So, that when we're talking about goodness, we're asking how moral a person is in the standard modern meaning, right?

00:55:30.640 Now, what Plato argues is that is actually a derivative form of goodness.

00:55:37.880 It's kind of an algorithmic form.

00:55:39.380 It's kind of an algorithmic form, but so here's the central sort of, at least I would argue.

00:55:45.480 Now, of course, there are going to be 10,000 Platonists who will disagree with everything I was saying because Plato's been around so long, right?

00:55:50.660 But I think I could make a good case, and I think this lines up with the best book I've ever read on Plato, D.C. Schindler's Plato's Critique of Impure Reason.

00:55:58.900 The best book, hands down, my whole life.

00:56:01.620 D.C. Schindler's Astonishing.

00:56:03.980 But here's a proposal, right?

00:56:06.660 Right.

00:56:09.380 We, and you can see Descartes wrestling with this in the Enlightenment and sort of failing.

00:56:14.180 We need intelligibility to be wedded to reality.

00:56:20.360 Right.

00:56:20.960 The structures of intelligibility have to be not identical to, because that's impossible.

00:56:26.480 You try idealism, and that failed.

00:56:28.600 I'm sorry, that was too fast for some people, but I'll just let that go.

00:56:31.800 But, so we...

00:56:33.780 The map has to correspond to the territory.

00:56:35.520 Whether correspond, there has to be a conformity.

00:56:37.660 There has to be a contact and a wedding for them together.

00:56:41.320 There can't be a space between them, like there is between map and territory, because as soon as there's a space, there's what guarantees and what manages the space.

00:56:48.720 And at some point, this is Taylor's point, you need a contact epistemology.

00:56:53.720 Not...

00:56:54.220 Right, right, right, right.

00:56:55.480 So, there's nothing you can do, right, that will show me or give me an argument for why intelligibility should conform that way to reality.

00:57:07.320 Because what you'll do is you'll get locked in, right?

00:57:10.440 And this is what Plato saw, right?

00:57:12.220 But what Plato's basically saying is, there is...

00:57:15.720 It's like, if I can put it this way, I'll try and put it in a way that's more narrative.

00:57:20.620 It's like there's a perpetual promise that intelligibility will track reality, and that we find that to be inexhaustibly the case.

00:57:29.080 But there's no argument we can give that will ultimately explain that, because every argument presupposes it.

00:57:35.380 Does that track as...

00:57:37.220 I'm not sure why the last part of that is true, although I agree that it's true.

00:57:42.420 So, and I...

00:57:43.600 And what's running around in the back of my head while you're laying that out is, I think, well, in some sense, that's the problem that evolution solves in a technical sense.

00:57:51.140 So, you know, let's say a mosquito lays a million eggs in its lifetime.

00:57:55.740 And so, that's a million mosquitoes whose epistemology better track ontology.

00:57:59.440 But almost none of them do.

00:58:01.800 So, they all die.

00:58:03.300 And so, that mapping, I think...

00:58:07.220 Because it's philosophically impossible in some sense, I think that the process of evolution is actually what solves that.

00:58:15.280 And then our cognitive architecture emerges out of that evolved base.

00:58:18.520 And so, it's taken 3.5 billion years to produce the solutions that we have to mapping intelligibility onto...

00:58:26.500 I totally agree with you about this.

00:58:28.560 So, let me agree and then tell you why I think it goes deeper.

00:58:31.540 Yeah.

00:58:31.720 Okay.

00:58:32.180 So, just very quickly, I think relevance realization basically does that same thing that evolution does.

00:58:39.040 It has this...

00:58:40.240 It's a self-organizing system in which you would introduce variation and then selection.

00:58:44.300 Your attention is doing it right now.

00:58:46.040 There's a drive to open up, mind, wander, vary.

00:58:49.260 Right.

00:58:49.980 And what you're doing is constantly evolving your fittedness, your optimal gripping.

00:58:54.720 Towards some end, which is the dialogue of the conversation.

00:58:57.460 Yes.

00:58:57.740 And whatever that's embedded in.

00:58:59.560 Exactly.

00:59:00.160 Right.

00:59:00.720 Yeah.

00:59:00.980 So, you're doing this.

00:59:02.500 Exactly.

00:59:03.160 And there's a space of associations beside what you're doing.

00:59:06.460 But what I'm saying is evolution actually presupposes an ontology in which that will work.

00:59:14.440 Right.

00:59:15.240 Right.

00:59:15.580 Right.

00:59:15.880 So, that's the deeper point.

00:59:17.160 Right.

00:59:17.300 Right.

00:59:17.640 Okay.

00:59:17.980 So, that you should have something to say about that.

00:59:19.940 But we've talked about that before.

00:59:21.520 Like when we did that thing on Genesis.

00:59:24.720 And you talk about how it's this idea of a psychic projection.

00:59:28.600 But the idea that, let's say, Jung, for example, could imagine that you could psychically project

00:59:33.340 patterns onto the world means that it presupposes the same problem.

00:59:39.520 Yeah.

00:59:39.640 It means that those patterns are presupposed in the manner in which the world exists for

00:59:43.260 that to even be possible.

00:59:44.300 Right.

00:59:44.860 And the historians of science I've read who attempt to embed the development of science

00:59:49.880 in a Judeo-Christian ethic by necessity, also, you know, giving obeisance, let's say, to

00:59:55.760 the influence of the Enlightenment, say that the notion that there was a logos, there's

01:00:03.420 an ontological logos as well as an epistemological logos, was a precondition for the development of

01:00:08.960 the scientific attitude.

01:00:10.380 And I think that's true.

01:00:11.600 Yes, and I think, and that's the cornerstone of ancient epistemology.

01:00:16.260 You don't ask the question, how from this, the workings of my mind, do I get to the ontology?

01:00:21.660 You ask the question, well, whatever knowledge there is presupposes intelligibility, right?

01:00:26.840 And then I have to ask, what must the world be like such that that intelligibility reliably

01:00:31.560 exists?

01:00:32.620 It's a very different orientation.

01:00:34.200 That's for sure.

01:00:35.260 Okay.

01:00:35.620 So, but let's take it that this is at least a plausible argument.

01:00:39.220 The promise that intelligibility is wedded to reality and that we can realize it through

01:00:48.240 something like relevance realization, cognitively or biologically, adaptivity through evolution,

01:00:53.940 right?

01:00:54.440 That promise is continually made, but we can give no explanation for it because given what

01:00:59.700 we've just said, every attempt to explain it presupposes it as a fundamental thing.

01:01:04.260 Okay, that seems just fine to me.

01:01:07.340 The fact that the promise is inexhaustibly kept is the good.

01:01:15.160 Is that the good that is referred to in Genesis when God uses the Logos to derive habitable

01:01:22.340 order out of chaos and says it is good?

01:01:25.720 Is that the same idea?

01:01:27.100 I hope so.

01:01:28.140 I mean, for me, that's what Plato means when he talks about how the good is even beyond

01:01:33.060 being because the good makes possible the intelligibility of reality.

01:01:38.220 Okay.

01:01:38.480 Well, that's kind of what I'm trying to also drive at in this system of propositions.

01:01:42.140 And that's what I meant.

01:01:43.080 And I hope you took it as a compliment when I said, I think this is a neoplatonic argument

01:01:46.400 you're making.

01:01:48.600 You're doing a lot of similar moves.

01:01:51.240 Now, the thing I have is, right, so that's the good, and then is there a way of, and

01:01:59.700 I think Jonathan will have some important things to say.

01:02:03.200 So, that's like the a priori structure of being.

01:02:05.720 Before there are, there's actually beings.

01:02:07.940 It's like there's a potential intelligibility even for the finite in relation to the infinite.

01:02:14.940 Exactly.

01:02:16.020 Because if, and what you can do is you can reject that fundamental goodness.

01:02:20.300 And notice, I can't give you an argument to get you back into it.

01:02:23.700 But if you reject that fundamental goodness, you will be, you will be, and you see Descartes

01:02:28.580 wrestling with this because he tries to, he gets sort of stuck inside the cogito, right?

01:02:35.240 And he's trying, and he-

01:02:36.840 I think, therefore, I am.

01:02:37.960 Right.

01:02:38.240 And he realizes, oh, oh, I could be trapped in solipsism and skepticism.

01:02:44.260 And what does he do?

01:02:45.440 He says, oh, no, no.

01:02:47.000 There must be a God that guarantees that the intelligibility, the clear and distinct ideas,

01:02:52.780 map onto reality.

01:02:53.880 He realizes he needs something outside of the argument in order to guarantee that fundamental

01:02:59.320 goodness that makes everything else possible.

01:03:01.940 But then what he does is he creates, famously, a circular argument for that God.

01:03:05.500 And so, he tries to make an argument for it, but he ends up presupposing the very thing

01:03:10.200 he's trying to prove.

01:03:11.380 This is what I mean by our apprehension of it is not something that is produced inferentially.

01:03:16.700 It is an apprehension of this fundamental goodness.

01:03:20.280 And I can't give you an argument or an evidence for it.

01:03:25.280 Now, I think ethical goodness is dependent on and reflective of, at times exemplary of,

01:03:32.860 that ontological of Yolalami goodness.

01:03:35.740 And don't you think that that's the reason why, in so many traditions, the infinite is

01:03:39.800 always referred to negatively?

01:03:41.420 Like, the whole notion of negative theology or-

01:03:43.880 Oh, that's interesting.

01:03:44.580 Say more.

01:03:44.880 Well, the idea that if you want to express that which is the source of being, you end

01:03:51.480 up having, it almost, it empties itself.

01:03:54.160 Yes.

01:03:54.400 It empties itself of all characteristics, while recognizing that it is, at the same time,

01:03:59.160 the summation of all characteristics.

01:04:00.680 It's like, the good, ultimately, is that which everything is culminating to, and then

01:04:05.020 it's a kind of giving away into something which is always more.

01:04:09.060 Do you think that's related to that a prior acceptance of the existence of the relationship

01:04:14.520 between intelligence and being?

01:04:17.820 Well, that this thing that guarantees that is being pointed at to by these processes.

01:04:24.080 I think so.

01:04:24.880 I've been thinking about, I've been thinking, I don't know, I can take you on this experiment

01:04:28.520 that I've talked about.

01:04:30.000 This idea that identity is canonic, that identity always kind of empties itself into more.

01:04:35.240 So, you always use the example of an object, like you have a, it's like, yeah,

01:04:39.060 you have a cup, and then you have, you have, at a certain level, you have different aspects

01:04:43.220 of the cup.

01:04:44.120 Yeah.

01:04:44.240 And so, in order for it to reach its good, all these elements, in order for them to reach

01:04:47.860 its good, they have to kind of, they have to give themselves into something which cannot

01:04:52.280 be found at the level of their elements.

01:04:54.560 Oh.

01:04:55.060 And so, what you end up having is you have hierarchies of beings that are moving towards

01:04:59.720 that identity, but as they reach their highest point, they actually empty themselves into

01:05:03.720 the higher identity.

01:05:04.900 And then you move up, and then you end up with something that is beyond being, ultimately.

01:05:08.400 Okay, so let me try something to you, because that might start to sew the good, and the

01:05:13.000 true, and the beautiful together.

01:05:14.460 I've been doing a lot on marrying Mauro Ponti with Plato, and John Rootson and other people

01:05:20.040 are doing this, so I won't.

01:05:21.140 But here, like, that thing you just pointed out.

01:05:23.540 So, Mauro Ponti's point is you never, you can never completely see any object.

01:05:27.900 So, let's just talk, because the number of, right, the number of just even perceptual aspects

01:05:34.560 is unlimited.

01:05:35.140 That is what Picasso was doing.

01:05:36.460 Right, right, right.

01:05:37.340 And then, of course, then there's the imaginal aspects.

01:05:39.680 I can also, all the functions that are implicit in this, all the use, like, right?

01:05:43.900 And then, so one of the things I've been arguing is that if you take a look at Plato, the Eidos

01:05:48.880 originally meant the look of a thing, but he didn't mean the look.

01:05:51.860 He meant something like the aspect.

01:05:53.540 And here's what the, like, so you have all of these aspects, and they're unfolding inexhaustibly.

01:06:01.240 There's a through, but they don't unfold chaotically.

01:06:03.400 There is a coherent through line that runs through them, right?

01:06:07.380 You get a sense of, as you said, the identity.

01:06:09.520 But here's the thing.

01:06:10.520 That through line is not itself an aspect.

01:06:13.220 No.

01:06:13.420 It can't be.

01:06:14.140 It can't be.

01:06:14.500 Because if you, you're making a fundamental, it's an a priori necessity.

01:06:18.420 Right, and it runs through it.

01:06:20.080 But notice how, right?

01:06:21.960 First of all, that's starting to get us into, right, a sense of the goodness, because that's

01:06:27.400 the promise being kept.

01:06:28.620 The through line is the promise being kept.

01:06:30.780 It's also a different notion of truth.

01:06:32.600 This is something I want to talk about later if we get a chance.

01:06:35.160 Truth is this, as aletheia, as disclosure, rather than as correspondence.

01:06:39.740 But notice, first of all, how that corresponds to beauty.

01:06:42.440 And think about what Tammy's doing with the paintings.

01:06:45.360 She's, right?

01:06:46.100 Because she's, don't stop at this one aspect as the appearance, but open it up.

01:06:53.620 Open up all and see and fulfill the promise.

01:06:57.600 The aspects.

01:06:58.160 Even in something horrible.

01:06:59.340 Yes.

01:07:00.160 Yes.

01:07:00.740 And maybe that's dependent on your willingness to gaze, which is the story of Exodus and the

01:07:05.420 bronze serpent.

01:07:06.260 Well, and I would say the crucifixion as well.

01:07:08.640 That's really interesting, because Han talks about we've lost the ability to linger with things.

01:07:13.860 And that's why we can no longer see the beautiful.

01:07:16.040 You know, if chimps are in the jungle and they come across a decent-sized snake, they'll

01:07:21.080 stand at a distance from it, but they will gaze at it for up to 24 hours.

01:07:25.980 And they have a particular cry, which is a snake, rah, that's the name of the cry, which

01:07:31.340 they utter that brings other chimps.

01:07:33.300 And so they hate snakes, right?

01:07:35.300 Innately.

01:07:36.100 If you show a rubber snake to a chimp that's never seen one, he'll hit the ceiling, but

01:07:39.680 then he'll look.

01:07:40.780 And so they're out there gazing on the snake.

01:07:42.920 It's part of, they're fascinated by it, despite the fact that it's also simultaneously

01:07:46.800 threatening.

01:07:47.720 Yes.

01:07:48.340 And so I think that there's increasing evidence for something like awe.

01:07:53.040 It's awe.

01:07:53.840 Definitely.

01:07:54.320 Well, that's manifest in piloerection in animals.

01:07:56.360 Okay, but think about what awe does.

01:07:58.100 Awe is a kind of love.

01:08:00.160 Right.

01:08:00.320 And one of the things awe does, which is really interesting, it's one of the few instances

01:08:04.260 where people reliably report a sense of the shrinkage of the self that is, nevertheless,

01:08:09.680 has a positive element to it.

01:08:11.220 Yeah.

01:08:11.360 Even though they're terrified, they want to follow it through.

01:08:15.020 They want to go into, right?

01:08:17.260 Well, I think that's partly.

01:08:18.480 So imagine this.

01:08:19.740 So imagine awe.

01:08:21.220 Imagine piloerection now.

01:08:22.780 So a cat puffs up, and you know, that's the hair standing up in the back of your neck.

01:08:26.400 Oh, it's the same instinct.

01:08:27.820 It is.

01:08:28.260 And I'm doing work on this with a student of mine right now, and how we've exacted the

01:08:33.860 piloerection into aesthetic experience.

01:08:37.280 Okay, so imagine this.

01:08:38.280 Now, you're out, you look at the night sky, and it's awe-inspiring.

01:08:42.320 And so there's also a call to imitate there.

01:08:44.520 So you see the image of Mary, for example, with her foot on the serpent and her head in

01:08:48.840 the stars.

01:08:49.640 Well, she's looking at the stars, and she's, so that's the cosmic realm.

01:08:52.560 It's the infinite.

01:08:53.080 And now she's awe-struck by that vision, and then she, in order to adapt to that vision

01:09:00.240 of the infinite, you have to imitate that which instills the awe, and that's represented

01:09:04.720 by her foot on the serpent.

01:09:06.060 Oh, that's cool.

01:09:07.040 Yes, that's for sure.

01:09:08.480 That's why, you know, there's literally hundreds of Renaissance images of that.

01:09:13.240 Mary, head in the stars, foot on the serpent.

01:09:16.480 And I've been thinking through this awe issue, and it has this interesting association with

01:09:20.880 beauty.

01:09:21.120 You can imagine that when a cat dances sideways and pilo-erects, it's trying to look larger.

01:09:27.340 It's trying to look as if it can overcome the predator.

01:09:30.140 Well, that's what awe does to us, is that when we've, historically, evolutionarily, what

01:09:34.780 we did when we felt awe in the face of a predator is we felt compelled to imitate the

01:09:41.760 predator so that we could become ferocious enough to overcome the predator.

01:09:46.080 That's interesting.

01:09:46.440 And so that's that call to an expanded being that Jung would associate, for example, with

01:09:50.780 development of the shadow.

01:09:52.320 It's like when you look at something brutal, you know, that really terrifies you, it has

01:09:57.200 to call that capacity for predatory behavior out of it, that monstrous capacity.

01:10:02.120 Now, it should be integrated into the kind of ethic that we're describing, but you're not

01:10:06.620 good if you're harmless.

01:10:08.500 It's way more than that.

01:10:09.780 And that awe in the face of what's catastrophic is a call to be more than the catastrophic thing,

01:10:15.880 which certainly makes you monstrous in a sense.

01:10:17.820 Well, that's really interesting because, I mean, it's also, it also produces sort of increased

01:10:26.900 seeking of others, which makes sense, is one of the ways we can make ourselves band together.

01:10:32.780 And then that seems to get exacted into, right, I don't have to be big, but I can connect or

01:10:40.920 participate in something.

01:10:42.320 Right.

01:10:42.620 And then you get reverence as opposed to just raw awe.

01:10:47.160 What's really interesting, just to supplement your argument, and this is work I'm doing

01:10:51.180 with Song Yuchun, if you, like, they have a device now that will actually cause people

01:10:57.480 to have chills, the chills up and down their spine, run cold water up and down in the right

01:11:01.980 way, what you do, and what you can do is you can really enhance people's aesthetic experience.

01:11:06.480 But even more basically, you get people to listen, like, to the same passage of music,

01:11:11.080 and you put one group of people in a slightly cooler room, they will have a more powerful

01:11:14.960 aesthetic experience of music.

01:11:16.280 Because it facilitates piloerection.

01:11:18.000 Exactly, exactly.

01:11:18.740 That's so cool.

01:11:19.540 Yeah, I was so thrilled about this notion of piloerection being associated with the instinct

01:11:23.760 to imitate, you know, to put those two things together.

01:11:26.400 It's like, well, what do you do in the face of the predator?

01:11:28.840 Well, one is run away.

01:11:30.480 The other is become superordinate to the predator.

01:11:34.180 And then you might say, well, what's the worst possible predator?

01:11:36.980 Which I think is part of the Judeo-Christian narrative, because we're trying to,

01:11:39.980 because the snake in the garden is Satan.

01:11:42.340 It's like, well, what's the worst predator?

01:11:43.920 It's not the snake.

01:11:45.080 Bad as snakes are.

01:11:46.920 It's like a super snake.

01:11:48.280 It's a meta snake.

01:11:49.220 It's the sum total of everything that threatens you.

01:11:51.920 And so that calls you to be more than that, whatever that is.

01:11:55.360 I don't know a lot about the biology, but do animals experience this piloerection with,

01:12:02.000 let's say, a member of their own species that is bigger or more dominating?

01:12:06.760 Sure.

01:12:07.200 Yes, they do.

01:12:07.860 Sure.

01:12:08.020 And we also have some preliminary, and it's ethnographic, so you have to be careful with

01:12:12.360 it, that they do something that looks like, oh, you'll get a monkey.

01:12:17.720 You've got the snake thing, but there's also a video of a macaque monkey, and it goes out

01:12:22.780 onto a precipice, which is a little bit dangerous, to watch a sunrise, not doing anything.

01:12:28.380 It just sits there.

01:12:29.120 Well, you know monkeys will look longer, if you show them photos of their troop, they

01:12:34.780 gaze longer at the high-status individuals as well.

01:12:37.740 Yes.

01:12:37.980 And if they are encountering a high-status individual who could take them out in some

01:12:41.480 sense, but not merely as an expression of power, as the primatologists insist, then

01:12:46.300 they do show piloerection in response to the threat from the superior.

01:12:50.340 But they're also fascinated by it, and you can imagine that part of that fascination is the

01:12:55.680 locking of their attention onto what they could become.

01:12:58.680 Right.

01:12:58.880 Because that's what, at least that interests me more, in the sense of beauty, right?

01:13:03.220 Yes.

01:13:03.500 Where it is this sense of shrinking in front of something, in the sense, feeling that you're

01:13:09.600 smaller than that, and then this desire to move into it.

01:13:13.020 Contact, imitation is a kind of internalization, a kind of being, wedding yourself to someone

01:13:17.900 in a profound way.

01:13:18.600 And it's a form of worship, a primary form of worship, right?

01:13:21.220 Because you worship what you, you imitate what you worship.

01:13:25.580 They're the same thing.

01:13:27.100 And so, okay, well, that was fun.

01:13:29.160 So shall we move to the next one?

01:13:30.860 I think so.

01:13:31.420 I mean, I'm getting a sense of how the true, the good, and the beautiful could be potentially

01:13:36.920 integrated, because I think that's a necessary requirement for this argument.

01:13:41.040 And notice how we are moving outside of, we didn't talk about true, we can talk about

01:13:45.040 that later at some point.

01:13:46.300 We're moving outside of sort of standard ways of talking about at least goodness and beauty

01:13:52.220 here.

01:13:52.860 And I think there's similar ways of doing it out of truth that could actually get us back

01:13:56.360 to something that...

01:13:57.780 Yeah, well, it's nice to put the biological twist on it, too.

01:14:01.720 I'd wanted to run one thing before we move on, which is that the way that I tend to think

01:14:06.240 about it, in terms of when we talked about the idea of the through line, let's say you

01:14:11.940 have...

01:14:12.120 Yes, I think that's the Eidos.

01:14:13.120 I think that's what the form is in Plato.

01:14:14.860 Well...

01:14:15.160 It isn't what Aristotle thought it was.

01:14:17.600 It isn't just a specificity...

01:14:19.280 Right.

01:14:19.440 ...of necessary and sufficient conditions.

01:14:21.180 So, would you feel comfortable with the notion that it's the manner in which the multiplicity

01:14:25.780 is gathered?

01:14:26.840 It's the Logos.

01:14:27.600 Right.

01:14:27.840 And so, it actually gathers...

01:14:29.400 Yes.

01:14:29.960 ...multiplicity...

01:14:30.520 Don't listen to my words.

01:14:31.660 Listen to the Logos that gathers them together.

01:14:33.720 All things are one.

01:14:34.840 Right?

01:14:35.120 Heraclitus.

01:14:36.060 Well, so then what we would presume provisionally is that the thing that unites the true, the

01:14:40.200 good, the beautiful is the Logos.

01:14:42.140 Now, we shouldn't make the presumption of knowing that we understand what that Logos is.

01:14:46.080 We've got some hints about what it is, but we can't characterize it entirely.

01:14:50.440 Is that a reasonable proposition in your estimation?

01:14:53.800 I think so.

01:14:54.540 I think in...

01:14:57.160 Especially if we're careful to do what you did before, which is we have...

01:15:01.840 We have a dipolar way of invoking the Logos.

01:15:06.680 The Logos is both the gathering, right?

01:15:10.380 The through-lining, if I can put it that way.

01:15:12.380 But it is also the ontological reality that affords that happening.

01:15:20.380 It's the fact that I can't exhaust it, right?

01:15:24.060 No matter how far I push it.

01:15:25.600 So, whatever through-line I have is at most a signification or a symbol of the fact that

01:15:32.540 it's inexhaustible.

01:15:34.300 Did that make sense, what I'm trying to say?

01:15:36.440 What do you...

01:15:36.780 No, I'm not sure I understand.

01:15:37.660 That the through-line is the significance that it's inexhaustible in the manner in which

01:15:44.540 it points up or in the manner in which it's inexhaustible like this or inexhaustible...

01:15:50.020 The manner in which it's the fact that that intelligibility between representation and

01:15:55.640 actuality remains regardless of how far you push it.

01:15:59.460 So, that would sort of be like the notion that the universe is logical, Logos-based, essentially.

01:16:04.860 But...

01:16:05.060 And that there's...

01:16:05.860 That we're not going to run out of that.

01:16:07.400 But it's not going to be logical in the modern sense of a complete system, even though Godel

01:16:11.820 tells us we can't.

01:16:11.940 You can't reduce it to an algorithm.

01:16:13.560 Exactly.

01:16:14.100 Exactly.

01:16:14.520 So, the...

01:16:15.020 See, this is what I mean by saying I don't think of the form as like a standard Aristotelian

01:16:21.540 essence, at least how it's been taught...

01:16:23.640 Yeah.

01:16:23.800 ...to me, which is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.

01:16:27.540 Like the Logos...

01:16:28.320 There's no becoming in that.

01:16:30.700 There's just being.

01:16:32.600 Well...

01:16:32.900 Right?

01:16:33.040 Because becoming implies transformation of something that's algorithmic, but in a manner

01:16:38.580 that's not...

01:16:40.040 That doesn't escape from the Logos.

01:16:41.740 And I mean, I think that's how reality constitutes itself.

01:16:44.080 And that's probably...

01:16:45.520 That's part of the solution to the scandal of induction.

01:16:48.220 It's like, no, you can't predict with 100% certainty what's going to happen next.

01:16:53.840 But what will happen next, despite its unpredictability, like the next note in a symphony, is still

01:16:59.260 predictable.

01:17:00.100 Exactly.

01:17:00.640 This is what I mean about the good.

01:17:02.960 The reason why Hume couldn't deal with the problem of induction is it requires the apprehension

01:17:07.500 of the good, which is the promise that this is not going to be logical identity, but nevertheless

01:17:13.080 it is going to be inexhaustibly coherent.

01:17:15.600 It's going to remain beautiful.

01:17:17.360 And in that sense, it's always going to be something to which you can conform.

01:17:21.400 It's not reducible to an algorithm, but that doesn't mean...

01:17:24.860 Well, you said it.

01:17:25.420 That doesn't mean it's not habitable.

01:17:27.020 It doesn't mean it's not good.

01:17:28.380 It doesn't mean it's not coherent.

01:17:30.080 Exactly.

01:17:30.720 Right, right.

01:17:31.540 And your example, the music, which John Russo used, the musicality of intelligibility is,

01:17:37.380 I think, the best way to think about it.

01:17:39.020 Yeah, I think so too.

01:17:39.960 I think that's actually...

01:17:41.320 I actually think that's why we like music.

01:17:43.400 Yes.

01:17:43.660 Because I think that music is actually the most representational art form.

01:17:47.660 Because for a variety of reasons, first of all, we don't see objects, we see patterns

01:17:52.020 and we interpret some patterns as objects.

01:17:54.120 So patterns are primary, then we're looking for the harmonious interplay of patterns, and

01:17:58.280 then it's not strictly a causal relationship, because the music is governed by principles,

01:18:03.960 but it's not formally predictable.

01:18:06.300 Otherwise, it gets boring.

01:18:07.400 Exactly.

01:18:07.740 So you see that, I think, most particularly, I've experienced that most particularly with

01:18:12.500 Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, which have this amazing continual unfolding that's so

01:18:19.000 logical, it almost appears mathematical, and yet it's unpredictable, and you don't

01:18:23.560 know where it's going to go.

01:18:24.560 Exactly.

01:18:24.740 And it goes there, and you think, man, that's just right.

01:18:28.560 Yeah, and so you could say that about pretty much everything that exists.

01:18:33.320 That is, I like the glass, because it's just easy.

01:18:36.780 So the idea is that there is a through line in this glass, but the through line goes through

01:18:42.320 potentiality, which is indefinite.

01:18:44.540 That is, I can encounter a million glasses in my life, and they will all be different.

01:18:48.500 That's like the realm of musical possibility.

01:18:50.340 Exactly.

01:18:51.020 But they all end up being predictable to a certain extent once I grasp it.

01:18:55.060 Like, when I see the glass, I recognize it, but I couldn't have predicted that this

01:18:58.980 is the glass that would exist.

01:19:00.140 There's a kind of potentiality which is maintained within the identity of the glass, but it's

01:19:06.700 inexhaustible.

01:19:08.060 Right, and when you see that, when you apprehend that, and this is Skari's point, this is

01:19:13.160 being struck by beauty.

01:19:14.920 You see the tree, and somehow it's like every other tree you've seen, and yet it's not.

01:19:19.720 It reminds you of the idols.

01:19:22.620 It reminds you of just what you said.

01:19:24.540 And that's love.

01:19:25.400 I think that that's love, too.

01:19:26.660 Like, in love in the sense that, I've often said love is the capacity for unity and multiplicity

01:19:32.140 to exist.

01:19:33.300 That's what love is.

01:19:34.440 Right?

01:19:34.900 That is, that I recognize something of you that we have in common, but I also recognize

01:19:42.660 you're completely separate from me.

01:19:44.560 And that is what love-

01:19:45.220 And that both are valued.

01:19:45.880 Those both have to coexist for love to be real.

01:19:48.180 It has to be separation and communion.

01:19:50.000 Well, that, to give the devil his due, you know, I would say that's the kernel of good

01:19:53.720 that the diversity types are pushing.

01:19:55.900 You know, we need to recognize the utility of multiplicity.

01:19:58.600 It's like, fair enough.

01:20:00.120 The problem with that, a problem with that is, well, yeah, but what's, where's the unity

01:20:04.940 here?

01:20:05.340 Where's the unity?

01:20:06.220 It's all diversity.

01:20:07.060 It can't be all diversity, because then all we do, we're in conflict.

01:20:09.680 So, and we tend to have a, we tend to be, the modern world tends towards radical.

01:20:15.340 They tend to want to radical, change unity to uniformity, and then have this kind of crazy

01:20:21.540 exploded multiplicity.

01:20:24.060 Whereas the real, this kind of natural relationship between otherness is exactly this, both recognizing

01:20:32.680 what we have in common, and at the same time being kind of fascinated and attracted to that

01:20:38.020 which we have.

01:20:38.640 Well, you think about the reason this conversation works is because we have grounds for commonality

01:20:44.120 in our understanding, but that would be sterile without the multiplicity, because we would

01:20:50.220 just run over the same territory.

01:20:51.780 And so, you know, we hope we aim towards the same thing enough so that we can communicate,

01:20:56.480 but I wouldn't like it at all if you didn't, each of you didn't bring something to bear

01:21:01.680 on the discussion that I'm incapable of bringing to bear on it.

01:21:04.520 So, the last thing I want to bring up is, of course, I mean, people are going to say I'm

01:21:09.340 Jesus smuggling, but that's one of the reasons or why we can understand that in Christianity,

01:21:16.500 the Trinity is seen as the infinite.

01:21:18.980 Is the image of the infinite that we have is a contradictory possibility of absolute unity

01:21:27.080 and absolute multiplicity.

01:21:28.820 And so, we just throw those two up at the same time and we say, the infinite is absolutely

01:21:33.860 multiple and absolutely one.

01:21:35.900 And you cannot, without contradiction, and you cannot totally, you can't reconcile that

01:21:41.520 completely, because that is ultimately, it's a problem which fractally appears everywhere

01:21:47.880 anyways, because everything is always, everything in the world has something in common with everything

01:21:53.060 else, whether, you know, if it's just being itself.

01:21:56.800 But it also necessarily must be different for the difference to...

01:22:00.180 There's stronger, there's Goodman argument, every object is infinitely similar and infinitely

01:22:04.780 similar to every other.

01:22:05.520 Right, which is a restatement of the problem of perception itself.

01:22:08.460 Yes.

01:22:08.880 Like, well, you've seen a glass, yes, but you haven't seen this glass.

01:22:11.980 Well, how much difference is there is?

01:22:13.360 Well, there's an infinite number of differences, as it turns out.

01:22:16.180 All right, so this is a, this is a, this is quite a switch here.

01:22:19.960 And I think this is a radical proposition.

01:22:24.280 The, maybe not, because once you hear it, you think, well, yes, and then you think, well,

01:22:29.220 that's self-evidence, like, yeah, well, not so, not so quick here.

01:22:32.800 The description of a structure of values or an ethic, subject to the codicils that we've

01:22:38.400 already added, or set of priorities, is a narrative.

01:22:42.440 So the description of a system of perceptual prioritizations and actions is a narrative.

01:22:51.400 What do you think?

01:22:52.520 The description, that could be, it could also be representation in image.

01:22:55.480 It wouldn't have to be a verbal description.

01:22:56.720 No, I agree with that.

01:22:57.160 Imagistic or verbal description.

01:22:58.880 That is what we regard as a narrative.

01:23:01.060 So this is what I wanted to, again, challenge you on.

01:23:05.520 And it sort of overlaps with the discussion we've having about the true and the good and

01:23:09.020 the beautiful, because I think there are three different dimensions by which we organize

01:23:17.280 intelligibility.

01:23:18.200 So there's a narrative.

01:23:22.420 The example I use is video games, and there's a reason why people are doing the virtual exodus.

01:23:27.360 They're preferring video games over the real world because of the dimensions that are found

01:23:31.420 in video games.

01:23:32.140 So one is a narrative, and the narrative they belong to.

01:23:34.740 Clearly, that's one of the things.

01:23:36.460 So I total agree with that.

01:23:37.940 There's two other features that are deeply meaningful to them.

01:23:42.880 Not semantic, but meaning in life meaningful to them.

01:23:45.700 One is a nomological order.

01:23:48.260 There's a set of rules that they understand that makes sense of that world, so that they

01:23:54.800 can move around in that world with confidence.

01:23:58.020 Because if they have a narrative, but it isn't undergirded by a nomological order.

01:24:01.440 Okay, is that a reflection in the video game of the same through line and mapping of intelligibility

01:24:08.700 onto ontology within the…

01:24:10.260 Yes, that's what I think the nomological order is.

01:24:11.600 But it's a simpler world.

01:24:13.080 Yes.

01:24:13.400 So they can establish that first.

01:24:15.220 Exactly.

01:24:15.520 And so you're saying, okay.

01:24:18.260 So it's a slightly different argument, perhaps, because I said, well, a narrative is a description

01:24:22.160 of an ethic.

01:24:23.140 And you say there's more ways that the world needs to be apprehended than the purely narrative.

01:24:29.680 Yes.

01:24:29.820 And I think that's fine.

01:24:30.880 But does that bear on the argument that the description of an ethic is a narrative?

01:24:35.960 No, because we also describe other ways in which we prioritize our perceptions in things

01:24:42.920 that aren't narratives that are nomological.

01:24:45.180 That's what we call a scientific theory.

01:24:46.860 Oh.

01:24:47.220 The theory of evolution, right, is not a narrative.

01:24:50.600 It's a description of the way things unfold.

01:24:53.860 Or let's say Newton's laws.

01:24:56.300 Newton's laws are not narrative in any fashion.

01:24:58.640 Do you think, okay, so let me push back on that.

01:25:00.680 Fair enough.

01:25:01.240 Fair enough.

01:25:02.080 And then you could say, well, a set of mathematical axioms and the operations that are derived from

01:25:07.820 the axioms is also not a narrative.

01:25:09.280 But so, and fair enough, so then I would say, and this will get us into discussion about

01:25:14.240 science later, is the intelligibility and the attraction of those non-narrative descriptions

01:25:20.580 of the world dependent on their being nested inside a narrative?

01:25:25.980 But see, and so here's where I'm going to answer you back.

01:25:28.640 I'm going to say they mutually, they reciprocally require each other.

01:25:31.880 Just like what we were doing with the true and the beautiful.

01:25:34.300 Okay, so that, then, okay, fine.

01:25:36.180 So, so is that the same thing as narrative and the scientific description mutually requiring

01:25:40.200 each other?

01:25:40.800 Right, but you can't reduce the one to the, either to the, you can't reduce one, you can't

01:25:45.920 reduce the nomological to the narrative or the narrative to the nomological.

01:25:49.300 That's why, that's what I was trying to get at three dimensions, almost like a Cartesian

01:25:52.580 graph with three dimensions, right?

01:25:54.580 Okay.

01:25:54.900 You can't reduce, if I remove.

01:25:56.960 Well, because I suppose if you do that too, you run into the postmodern trap, which is

01:26:00.160 that there's nothing but the narrative intelligibility.

01:26:02.340 There's nothing but the narrative.

01:26:03.660 There has to, yes.

01:26:04.520 And there also has to be something, there has to be a space within which we can compare

01:26:09.340 narratives, move between narratives, and learn narratives, right?

01:26:13.480 And there has to be something that allows us to override narrative bias.

01:26:16.840 You know the research on narrative bias, it's powerful.

01:26:19.260 It's one of our most powerful bias.

01:26:20.960 There has to be something that can kick us out of the narrative bias.

01:26:24.040 But I think the way that I would phrase it is, myself, is that the reason why we tend to

01:26:31.640 think, or like even the way that I present it, is that the priority of narrative is because

01:26:35.760 narrative is the embodied manner in which we engage with a structure of value.

01:26:40.740 That is, it's the way that we engage in a structure of value.

01:26:43.300 And so because, because we see a dis, and usually it has to be-

01:26:48.120 It's a narrative that embodied pattern is a description of the embodied pattern.

01:26:52.840 I think that it, I think that it's-

01:26:54.800 Because I don't know if it's a story if you act it out.

01:26:57.020 I don't know if it's a story until it's a representation of a pattern of action.

01:27:01.760 Because otherwise it's, it's more like a pattern of behavior, you know?

01:27:04.900 Like, so for example, imagine you watched wolves interact.

01:27:07.940 Yeah.

01:27:08.440 You could say, well, it's as if they're following the following narrative rules.

01:27:13.220 But they're not, because they don't have, it's not narrative, it's a pattern in their

01:27:17.600 behavior.

01:27:18.360 Right.

01:27:18.620 But for the same reason that, it's the through line.

01:27:22.260 Like, for the same reason that you can't see the glass from the elements of the glass,

01:27:26.580 it doesn't mean that the glassness, like the identity of the glass has a causal relationship

01:27:31.240 to its element.

01:27:32.440 It's just not a cause, it's not the mechanical causal relationship.

01:27:36.220 It's the causal of identity.

01:27:37.880 It's a, and so the narrative, or let's say the pattern of behavior is causal from above,

01:27:43.900 you could say, because it's that, the way in which you recognize that the behavior is

01:27:47.980 a pattern in the first place.

01:27:48.960 Right.

01:27:49.220 Okay.

01:27:49.520 I want to push back on you.

01:27:50.400 No, you have to.

01:27:51.300 You have to.

01:27:51.920 This is one of the areas where we-

01:27:53.320 We kind of don't totally agree.

01:27:54.760 Yeah.

01:27:54.860 But that's good.

01:27:55.760 Because I-

01:27:57.080 Well, this is a real mystery, this problem, because it is the relationship between science and

01:28:01.400 the narrative of meaning.

01:28:02.940 It's a relationship between ontology and epistemology, or between description and value.

01:28:08.440 I mean, so it's no wonder that this is causing, you know, a little bit of trouble.

01:28:11.880 I want to throw in one more dimension, which is, right, which is, you can also level up

01:28:17.700 in a game.

01:28:18.920 There's a way, there's a dimension-

01:28:20.840 Yes.

01:28:21.340 That's not a narrative, it's an act of self-transcendence, right?

01:28:25.700 I call that, I thought about it as a meta-narrative.

01:28:27.840 There's a clear hierarchy that you can scale in a game.

01:28:29.820 That has to be.

01:28:30.460 That's Quidditch, by the way.

01:28:31.860 That's what Rowling represented with Quidditch, because there's a game and a metagame.

01:28:35.860 Oh.

01:28:36.040 And if you win the metagame, you also win the game.

01:28:37.840 Right.

01:28:38.380 Okay.

01:28:38.660 But not vice versa, which is very, it's so smart.

01:28:42.260 So, sorry.

01:28:43.420 You do this, Jordan, you'll just throw out these observations that are like, I really

01:28:47.060 want-

01:28:47.100 Well, it's even worse than that, because the thing that the Quidditch players are chasing

01:28:51.860 is the round chaos of alchemy that contains all the potential of the world.

01:28:55.740 Right.

01:28:55.980 And it's also the spirit of Mercury.

01:28:58.080 Like, it's like, I don't know how she did that.

01:28:59.980 It's just beyond belief that she managed that.

01:29:02.540 I don't, I really don't know how she did that.

01:29:04.980 It's like, if you get, if you, the way to understand it, like, in terms of a glass would

01:29:08.620 be like, once you grasp the logos, this is a Saint Maximus way of speaking too.

01:29:12.200 Once you grasp the logos, then you, you are able to, you've captured all the rules and

01:29:17.860 everything else.

01:29:19.000 And once you understand what a glass is, then you don't have to, you can recognize every

01:29:23.040 glass in the entire world.

01:29:24.240 It's like, it's such a massive power.

01:29:25.880 You overcome the entire game through getting this one thing, which is like, which is often

01:29:30.800 imaged as a seed or as a golden ball or as something sparkling, which is, which you represent

01:29:36.120 like in the world, but is ultimately pointing above it.

01:29:39.760 Well, that's perhaps, that's reflected in the insistence that Adam is to name all the

01:29:47.360 animals, right, in the story of Adam and Eve, because that's obviously kept in the narrative

01:29:53.180 for a reason.

01:29:53.880 And it has to do with the power that naming and subduing, in the sense that you've described,

01:29:59.300 which is the also simultaneous imposition of a hierarchy of categorization that goes along

01:30:04.780 with naming, that gives you a grip on the world, and that that grip is associated with

01:30:08.880 a moral necessity and requirement in that story.

01:30:11.140 It's for me, the nomological dimension is the naming dimension.

01:30:15.580 That's what science does, broadly construed.

01:30:18.360 And that's different from telling a story.

01:30:21.100 Naming things is different from telling a story.

01:30:23.320 So, but ultimately, this is where, this is where I kind of come back again to the conscious.

01:30:27.900 We're going to, we'll keep doing this.

01:30:29.080 We have to not go too far into this because we've been through this from, down this path before.

01:30:32.540 But, so ultimately, because we are not disembodied beings, like this is, so science, this type

01:30:40.540 of nomological order is taken from a position where I am, as I see the nomological order,

01:30:47.620 I have to climb the ladder.

01:30:50.140 And so, and climb, especially most narratives always have a sense of.

01:30:53.820 This is Moses on the mountain again.

01:30:55.300 Yes.

01:30:55.620 Yes.

01:30:55.980 But there's also, there's, that's why the narrative is always this, like almost all narratives

01:30:59.660 are that it's, it's, you notice the difference.

01:31:02.200 And once you, you notice the distance, and when you notice the distance, then you have

01:31:06.080 to reestablish a connection with that, with, with which you're distant, because you don't

01:31:10.360 need an ethic unless you notice the difference.

01:31:13.480 You just, I mean, you don't need, at least you don't need an explicit ethic.

01:31:16.840 You don't have to spell it out.

01:31:18.120 Why not unless you notice the difference?

01:31:19.660 Because you don't have to tell someone how to go downstairs unless they can't do it.

01:31:24.280 You're going, you don't, you don't have a, you don't have an explicit set of rules.

01:31:29.820 Okay, so there has to be an object, there has to be an objection, there has to be a problem.

01:31:33.340 So St. Paul says something like, okay, the law is written on the human heart, which means

01:31:36.680 that it doesn't mean all the laws are written extensively in every detail on the human heart.

01:31:41.040 It's like, no, that is in the human heart, in that, in that little golden ball, in that

01:31:45.580 center, in that place where everything comes together, you have, contain all the potentiality,

01:31:50.420 everything that has the through line is contained in that.

01:31:53.320 But now if you notice the difference, then you have to formulate that difference.

01:31:57.740 And then that becomes the laws or just the ways of being.

01:32:01.880 So I can say something at first, like when you're driving a car, like there's specific

01:32:06.900 laws and then a problem comes up.

01:32:08.360 It's like, oh, well, actually there's a differentiation here, which we have to make

01:32:11.580 or else there's a problem.

01:32:12.540 Right.

01:32:12.700 So we create the ethic that's currently.

01:32:14.200 And it just keeps getting more and more detail and more and more.

01:32:16.560 So you start with the law, you end up with like this, let's say in Jewish tradition,

01:32:19.980 you end up with this huge compendium of exceptions and like details and everything.

01:32:24.800 But ultimately the idea is that all of that is ultimately contained in something which

01:32:29.280 gathers it all together into one, into this ineffable point that transcends.

01:32:33.880 I like all of this, but the space in which all the laws are being made and written, that's

01:32:39.320 not a narrative space, right?

01:32:41.600 Well, okay, so let me go after you on that for a minute.

01:32:45.040 The Ten Commandments is not a story.

01:32:46.060 Because, no, I don't think that's true.

01:32:48.320 You think that?

01:32:48.760 I think it is a story.

01:32:49.900 That's why Christ, when Christ, so he, okay, that's a good entry point.

01:32:54.160 That's a good entry point.

01:32:55.200 Well, there's a story which reveals the Ten Commandments.

01:32:57.420 Right.

01:32:57.760 Okay, but there's also a story in it.

01:32:59.400 The Ten Commandments aren't, I believe, yeah, there is a little bit.

01:33:02.360 But I think you're right.

01:33:04.020 But this is why we say that the Ten Commandments is embedded in a story.

01:33:07.760 Without the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt, finding themselves in a desert of nothingness, having to reconnect with the transcendent, that is why the law exists.

01:33:19.300 So, the nomological order is embedded in the story.

01:33:24.380 You wouldn't have to…

01:33:25.200 But the reverse is also the case.

01:33:27.120 Go ahead, go ahead.

01:33:27.720 If there isn't, if God doesn't offer us the nomological order, there's no point for the exodus in the story.

01:33:34.300 Right?

01:33:35.080 That's okay.

01:33:35.920 We could hypothesize that it comes up from the bottom and down from the top.

01:33:40.180 No?

01:33:40.720 This is even before that.

01:33:42.500 Right.

01:33:42.880 We're trying to talk about, like, I'm proposing that the narrative and the nomological and whatever we want to call this self-transcending dimension are irreducible to each other.

01:33:53.500 They're not, neither, none of them can exist independent.

01:33:56.260 That's why I'm using the three dimensions metaphor.

01:33:58.780 Yeah.

01:33:59.000 Right?

01:33:59.380 They are interdependent, but they're not, they're not reducible.

01:34:02.780 So, I'm resisting the hypothesis.

01:34:04.160 The ontology is not captured inside epistemology because epistemology cannot reach to the full extent of the multiplicity of ontology.

01:34:16.360 So, okay, so now why is that relevant to what you just said?

01:34:19.320 That's part of the irreducibility.

01:34:21.420 You're arguing, I think, in some sense that no matter what the story is, there's something that's real that's beyond that story.

01:34:28.520 Yes.

01:34:28.880 Okay, okay, so let me put a couple of twists in that.

01:34:31.840 Got it.

01:34:32.240 Is that okay for you, Jonathan, right now?

01:34:34.580 No, I think it's fine.

01:34:35.600 We'll keep going.

01:34:35.820 Okay, okay, so you said there's no story in the Ten Commandments, right?

01:34:40.540 And Jonathan had one objection.

01:34:42.020 I have a different take on that that he may appreciate.

01:34:45.480 Maybe you too.

01:34:47.340 When the Pharisees, so the Pharisees and the scribes are always trying to trap Christ in the Gospels into making a heretical statement or doing something that clearly violates the law.

01:34:57.000 So, they call him on healing on the Sabbath, for example.

01:34:59.700 And there's like ten stories like that where smart people who run on algorithms try to trap him.

01:35:06.260 And it never works because he does the thing you described, which is he just refers to a higher order principle or even three levels up and says, like, no.

01:35:14.820 Yes.

01:35:15.720 But one of the things that happens is the Pharisees come and say, well, here's the Decalogue, which is the most important law?

01:35:24.200 And the trick there is no matter what he says, he says the others are less important and so now he's a heretic and they get to take him away.

01:35:31.820 And he says, put God above all else and love your neighbor as yourself.

01:35:41.920 It's all of the laws are derived from that spirit.

01:35:46.500 And that spirit is that spirit is a story.

01:35:49.780 And that story is the Logos.

01:35:51.820 And so, that's the move that I don't like.

01:35:55.340 Slow it down, Jordan.

01:35:56.260 Okay.

01:35:56.700 I get that's the spirit.

01:35:58.820 I totally get that.

01:35:59.920 Well, then the question is, what is the spirit?

01:36:01.900 But why is the spirit necessarily a story?

01:36:05.000 Well, I don't know why it's necessarily a story.

01:36:07.500 But I know that it's necessarily a story in that context because the spirit that Christ is referring to that unites the Decalogue is the Logos.

01:36:17.280 And the whole biblical corpus, the narrative that spans the entire biblical corpus, is the account of the elaboration of that spirit across time and its embodied incarnation.

01:36:30.600 And that presents itself as a story.

01:36:33.020 And so, and I think the reason for that is that it is, okay, so, I mean, I understand your point.

01:36:40.140 I understand the point that you're making now.

01:36:41.720 And so, I'm actually understanding your point better than I've ever understood it before.

01:36:46.360 Well, you're talking about that which transcends the current narrative.

01:36:49.800 And that has to be there.

01:36:50.920 There's no reality.

01:36:52.440 So, okay, let's leave that for a moment.

01:36:56.560 I just want to give you one more thing because I think it's important.

01:36:58.860 Sorry.

01:36:59.320 No, no, that's fine.

01:37:00.240 I think we're at a key moment.

01:37:01.720 We are.

01:37:02.060 So, one of the things that we've been discussing, and this has been coming back over and over, is that, so, let's say that we understand that there is a certain type of equivalence and two functions for a nomological order, like a hierarchy that's presented, you know, like just a series of categories which are related in embedded structure, right?

01:37:20.780 And I see science committed to that.

01:37:22.400 Right.

01:37:22.700 Okay?

01:37:22.920 And that this, and that this, and that this also coexists, for sure, in scripture, that's

01:37:27.460 what we're seeing, is like, it actually, it coexists together.

01:37:29.800 It's like, you have the story of the Israelites in the Bible, and then you have these series

01:37:32.880 of laws, which is actually not just 10.

01:37:35.060 It's a lot, a lot, a lot of laws, right?

01:37:37.220 So, you have all these laws.

01:37:38.400 And so, but one of the things that you've said several times is that you want to, you feel

01:37:43.900 like, the solution to the meaning crisis doesn't need narrative, or that narrative shouldn't

01:37:50.320 be part of the solution.

01:37:51.700 And so, I think that if those two are, both have their function, let's say, why is it that

01:37:58.160 you want to remove one and keep the other?

01:38:00.300 Oh, okay.

01:38:01.220 That's an excellent question.

01:38:02.660 This is something Sam Harris struggles with, too, by the way.

01:38:05.060 No, I'm dead serious about that.

01:38:06.700 I'm dead serious about that.

01:38:07.880 So, let me answer this really carefully, and tell me if we're getting too far afield from

01:38:14.320 the main discussion, okay?

01:38:15.880 I'm going to depend on both of you.

01:38:17.760 My argument is the nomological order that, one of the problems of the meaning crisis is

01:38:22.280 the nomological order that we have is no longer in any way relatable to, or can be wedded to

01:38:28.860 a narrative.

01:38:29.660 Because the nomological order we have, right, is that there, it, it, it, so what used to

01:38:35.100 bridge between the nomological order and the narrative order is teleology.

01:38:39.540 So, teleology says the nomological order is ordered, but it's ordered in this way, and

01:38:44.920 the teleology has this structure.

01:38:47.280 And then narrative says, oh, I can glom onto, I can conform to a teleological order because

01:38:54.160 stories are inherently teleological.

01:38:56.420 But they're different from just a teleology.

01:38:58.260 Just telling a teleology isn't a story, but stories can attach to teleology.

01:39:02.880 Is that, yeah.

01:39:03.500 Why is, why is describing a teleology not a story?

01:39:09.300 Because you could describe the, I think that's, you could describe the cup, but then the problem

01:39:14.440 is, is, well, can you describe the top cup in the absence of a narrative?

01:39:18.840 And, I mean, I think part of the argument I'm trying to make in this, so this is our key

01:39:22.840 disagreement in some senses, I don't think you can.

01:39:26.040 Okay.

01:39:26.280 And so.

01:39:26.780 Well, let's be really careful because we might, we might also be engaged in semantic drift.

01:39:30.860 Mm-hmm.

01:39:31.440 So, I, I'm trying to limit, like, like, we can trivialize what we mean by narrative.

01:39:36.360 It means, oh, they need a description of a series of events as a narrative.

01:39:39.480 Okay.

01:39:39.900 Yeah, yeah.

01:39:40.260 No, no.

01:39:40.620 I don't want to do that.

01:39:41.380 I get your point.

01:39:42.160 No, no.

01:39:42.460 We don't want to, we don't want to widen the words so much that the argument becomes.

01:39:46.860 Wait a minute, though, but.

01:39:47.880 Wait a minute.

01:39:48.620 No, no.

01:39:48.940 I would, I would actually object to that because any descriptions of events that I can conceive

01:39:53.720 as being one is, has to have some kind of narrative structure.

01:39:57.760 Otherwise, we have the problem of infinite perception.

01:39:59.400 Otherwise, we have the same problem of multiplicity and, and, and, and combinatorial exposure.

01:40:04.460 If I can recognize that events connect together.

01:40:06.540 But that, that opens up, that means that you would, you have to, not metaphorically.

01:40:10.520 I actually, no, I agree with that.

01:40:11.860 But not, but, well, let me challenge it, though.

01:40:13.640 Unfortunately.

01:40:14.000 Unfortunately.

01:40:14.160 But, and I'm not speaking metaphorically here, because if I'm speaking metaphorically,

01:40:17.960 we'll just go off into another thing.

01:40:19.260 That means that music has a narrative.

01:40:22.940 Because it has a melody.

01:40:24.340 You're saying a melody is a narrative.

01:40:26.140 And that strikes me as a very improper thing to say.

01:40:29.880 That, okay, that's a tough one, man.

01:40:31.560 Yeah, yeah.

01:40:31.980 Because then you have to start to wrestle with, well, what do you mean by music?

01:40:37.960 Because you could say that the, the sequence of the notes in and of itself may not have

01:40:44.540 a narrative, although I'm not certain of that.

01:40:46.360 But you could say that because, but then the question is, when you're listening to the

01:40:52.200 music and it has the effect that you regard as music on you, how much of that effect, including

01:40:59.300 the aesthetic, is a consequence of a narrative?

01:41:02.100 So I would say, well, when you say music, how sure are you that what you're saying is,

01:41:06.340 that's nothing but the relationship of the notes to one another.

01:41:09.380 I agree.

01:41:10.100 That's a good point.

01:41:11.140 Because there's no embodiment in that, right?

01:41:12.820 Right.

01:41:13.120 And there's a sense in which music is neither subjective or objective, but transjective.

01:41:16.360 Right, right.

01:41:16.960 Like beauty.

01:41:17.700 Yes, yes.

01:41:18.280 It has to have something that is at least analogous to narrative, because in order for you to

01:41:25.000 recognize, and it's funny because the moderns tried to go away from it, you can understand.

01:41:28.780 The moderns really tried to break it, but there was, in any traditional society, there are

01:41:33.400 tropes of music, which help you understand when something's beginning, when something's

01:41:37.940 ending.

01:41:38.780 And you can map them onto narrative very directly, because that's what happens.

01:41:42.120 Okay, but then I slide you, because if you give me the, you say, oh, I'm going to send

01:41:46.460 narrative to melody, then I'll say, here's a logical argument, and there's a progression

01:41:51.500 and a through line from the premises to the conclusion.

01:41:53.620 Is that a narrative?

01:41:54.480 Mm-hmm.

01:41:55.780 Well, that's a tough one, right?

01:41:57.660 Because the fact that you selected out those, okay, here's something I've been thinking

01:42:05.040 about.

01:42:05.740 I'm going to take a slight detour, but go right back to the point.

01:42:08.840 So, I thought about this more when I was talking to Richard Dawkins, because I think

01:42:12.880 Dawkins is a good faith player, and I think he believes, he's a real scientist, and he

01:42:16.860 believes that the truth will set you free, which scientists have to believe to be scientists,

01:42:20.740 because they cannot be scientists if they're not pursuing the truth.

01:42:23.420 The truth is sacred to Dawkins.

01:42:24.800 Absolutely, absolutely.

01:42:25.860 You won't admit that, but it is.

01:42:27.400 Okay, so I was thinking about the scientific endeavor, and I thought a lot about this when

01:42:32.840 I was reading Jung's work on alchemy, because Jung attempted to situate the development of

01:42:37.200 science in this alchemical fantasy, and it's a very interesting piece of work.

01:42:40.220 So, he believes that there was this immense, motivated narrative that provided the historical

01:42:45.420 precondition in the realm of unconscious fantasy for the flourishing of science.

01:42:50.260 So, it's an amazing argument.

01:42:52.720 In any case, thinking about that, I thought, well, there's a set of facts.

01:42:57.400 And that's kind of the argument you're making.

01:42:58.780 There's a set of facts independent of the narrative.

01:43:01.080 And that's kind of the scientific viewpoint.

01:43:03.160 There's a set of facts independent of the narrative.

01:43:05.040 And even more importantly, we should identify the set of facts that's maximally independent

01:43:09.800 of any narrative, because why should your facts prevail?

01:43:13.660 And we want a universal set of facts.

01:43:15.800 And fine, look what we've got with that.

01:43:18.860 But then I think, wait a second, when you're practically engaged in the processes of science,

01:43:24.680 the sort of things that Kuhn tried to lay out, is it not the case that you're always engaged

01:43:30.220 within a system of practice and perception that's defined by at least an implicit if-then

01:43:37.100 statement?

01:43:37.600 And so, I would say, if this is your aim, then that's the set of relevant and true facts.

01:43:45.560 Conditional implications.

01:43:46.440 Well, yeah.

01:43:46.900 Well, so if you're a medical researcher, it's like, well, here's what the cancer cell is

01:43:52.160 doing.

01:43:53.020 Well, what do you mean doing?

01:43:54.000 Because it's doing an infinite number of things.

01:43:55.940 Oh, well, if we want to understand the cancer cell so that we can eradicate cancer, then this

01:44:01.720 is what the cancer cell is doing.

01:44:03.080 Now, it's also doing something that's independent of that narrative.

01:44:07.300 But the weird thing about that is that it's doing such a plethora of things independent

01:44:12.040 of that narrative that you drown in the complexity.

01:44:14.920 Of course.

01:44:15.280 So then we have a problem here, right?

01:44:18.200 Is that they have the facts of the cancer cell, which are multiplicitous.

01:44:22.220 Then you have the set of relevant facts, which hopefully are still facts.

01:44:26.580 But those aren't derivable without the narrative that we should save lives, that saving lives

01:44:30.880 is good, that we can pay careful attention to the horrors of disease in the attempt to

01:44:35.560 ameliorate suffering.

01:44:37.060 All of that framework seems to be a precondition for the abstraction of the relevant facts.

01:44:41.660 I agree with everything you said.

01:44:43.060 Okay.

01:44:43.440 What I disagreed with was the identity statement you slipped in, which is the ethic is a narrative.

01:44:48.260 That's exactly what's in dispute here.

01:44:50.500 The dispute isn't that we don't need these normative structures.

01:44:53.340 I'm not disputing that at all.

01:44:54.660 What I'm disputing is that they're all reducible to the narrative ethic.

01:45:00.000 Right.

01:45:00.440 That there's also a normological ethic.

01:45:02.460 Right.

01:45:02.760 Well, that's also why I wanted to get to the last three parts of this.

01:45:06.120 I think that I'm coming closer to you than ever because-

01:45:08.560 Oh, wow.

01:45:09.060 This is wonderful.

01:45:09.500 In a sense that because I need to work it out.

01:45:11.940 But because I see that in, like let's say, that there is clearly a distinction in the story.

01:45:18.780 Like in the story, there is a story and then there's the laws.

01:45:21.480 And they're related, but they're different.

01:45:23.080 And so I need to think about how they're, why they're related.

01:45:27.020 Well, one of the things-

01:45:27.860 Or why they have to be related.

01:45:28.720 Well, one of the, there's an interesting weirdness there that's also associated with the scientific

01:45:32.980 enterprise because one of the things you're trying to do, imagine if you impose a strict

01:45:36.640 narrative that there's a very limited set of facts that make themselves manifest.

01:45:41.020 Well, what you want to do scientifically is say, well, let's abstract out the set of relevant

01:45:44.880 facts in a manner that's relevant to a multitude of redemptive narratives simultaneously.

01:45:50.580 Okay.

01:45:50.920 So let me pick up on that.

01:45:52.120 So let me try and using what we've just said, specify the difference, how I would put it.

01:45:56.680 I think what science does is it picks up on normological relations, which are supposed

01:46:02.220 to be, as you say, causal invariants for the universe, right?

01:46:06.340 Force equals mass times acceleration.

01:46:08.000 We'll forget Einstein.

01:46:08.780 Right.

01:46:09.080 Across narratives.

01:46:10.320 Right, right.

01:46:10.780 A narrative is not about causal laws.

01:46:13.840 A narrative is about an irrepeatable causal pathway.

01:46:19.480 When I ask, why did Napoleon lose at Waterloo?

01:46:22.300 I don't give you a law.

01:46:24.160 I give you a narrative.

01:46:25.560 I give you a- narratives are, this event leads to this event.

01:46:28.880 It's a through line, like you said.

01:46:30.040 But it's a through line that explains the specific occurrence of specific events.

01:46:35.140 It's exactly the opposite, in my mind, of what science does.

01:46:39.420 Science is trying to explain the universality that is not captured in the specifics of a

01:46:44.760 specific causal pathway.

01:46:46.280 That's why I can't see-

01:46:47.600 Okay, so then, okay, so imagine this, imagine this.

01:46:50.140 You have a, so there's this notion in the Old Testament, there's a sequence of stories,

01:46:54.700 so it's an aggregation of stories, and there's an idea that the meta-narrative of Christ

01:46:58.920 is implicit in that set of narratives.

01:47:01.360 Yes.

01:47:01.680 And so then I have this idea, well, and Jung talked about this as well, said, imagine you

01:47:06.880 take any random sample of narratives, comprehensive random sample of narratives, and you attempt

01:47:12.340 to extract out the common story, it's going to be an image of something like Christ.

01:47:15.960 You could even say that that's what Christ is, in some sense.

01:47:19.320 So, and we can argue about that, but it's a, it's, it's like saying that the hero narrative

01:47:24.500 is archetypal.

01:47:25.240 It's the same idea.

01:47:26.360 If you have 25 narratives, and you see what makes them interesting adventure stories,

01:47:31.200 it's the hero archetype.

01:47:32.360 So the reason why you can recognize it as a through line in the first place is because

01:47:35.400 it has a pattern.

01:47:36.560 But that's my point.

01:47:37.520 My point is, just like the through line of all the aspects is not an aspect, the through

01:47:42.600 line of all the stories is not itself a story.

01:47:44.860 Yeah, but that, see, I'm, I'm not so sure.

01:47:47.220 That's, that is definitely what we're arguing about.

01:47:49.240 And I'm not, I'm not saying I know this.

01:47:51.400 There may be a distinction between a story and the pattern of all stories.

01:47:57.300 And maybe that's something we can think about too, because in my work in Maps of Meaning,

01:48:01.380 I called just a narrative, a story.

01:48:04.360 But the, the story that unites all narratives is a meta story.

01:48:07.980 It's, and Piaget cottoned onto this too, in some sense, because he started to try to find

01:48:13.020 out what kids regarded as true.

01:48:15.520 And then by the end of his career, he said, well, what we really want to know if we're

01:48:20.220 studying truth, isn't the nature of any contingent truths.

01:48:23.080 So any representations within a system, narrative or otherwise, but the process, we need to specify

01:48:28.600 the process by which all truths come to be as the ultimate truth.

01:48:32.300 And then I would say that the meta narrative that constitutes Christ from the symbolic perspective

01:48:37.800 is the story of the process by which, what would we say?

01:48:42.880 The, it's the story, it's certainly the story of the process by which narratives transform.

01:48:47.080 It's not exactly a story because it's a meta story.

01:48:50.420 It's, but it's a problem of, it's the problem of the, this kind of apophatic move is canonic

01:48:55.320 reality, which is true also of the nomological order as well.

01:48:59.340 It is the origin of the nomological order is not a nomological order.

01:49:03.400 Exactly.

01:49:03.760 In the same way that the origin of a narrative is not a narrative, it's not a detailed narrative

01:49:07.820 per se.

01:49:08.340 The patterns all move into the manner in which they transcend themselves and ultimately

01:49:13.000 give up to this apophatic, like this, this negative space or negative reality.

01:49:17.960 And I think the nomological and the narrative and what this self-transcending dimension, they

01:49:23.500 all converge.

01:49:24.700 Right.

01:49:25.120 No, but I totally agree with that.

01:49:26.960 So imagine, imagine.

01:49:28.360 But that's not to say they're identical.

01:49:29.900 No, of course they're not, because that's why they converge, right?

01:49:32.560 Right, right.

01:49:33.020 And I think if they were so obviously identical, we wouldn't have a conflict between science

01:49:37.800 and religion, which we apparently have.

01:49:39.460 So, so it's an important distinction.

01:49:41.460 So imagine you have this set of narratives that are particularized, and out of that you

01:49:44.680 extract a general pattern, and the pattern is something akin to the process of adaptation

01:49:50.260 itself, which is the manifestation of the divine word, let's say, and its ability to call

01:49:55.300 order out of chaos.

01:49:56.200 It's got this hierarchy of narratives, and there's something at the pinnacle.

01:49:59.680 And so then imagine that you have a set of corresponding facts, and each specific narrative would give

01:50:05.300 you a set of proximal facts.

01:50:07.220 But there's an abstraction from the facts that approximates universal scientific truths.

01:50:12.160 But I would say that maybe they exist in relationship to the application of that metanarrative, because

01:50:18.300 isn't it the case—now, I don't know, I can't figure this out—isn't it the case that

01:50:23.120 we abstract out commonalities, like force equals mass times acceleration, because we

01:50:29.180 want to further our adaptation to the world?

01:50:31.440 Yeah.

01:50:31.580 As simultaneously, we're exploring the intrinsic logos of ontology, but we've already agreed

01:50:38.440 to some degree that there's a similitude between that ontology and the epistemology.

01:50:44.420 And so maybe as we abstract out from scientific truths towards the universal, not only must

01:50:50.300 we simultaneously move up the abstraction level in a narrative sense, Jung's point would

01:50:55.260 be we better, or we'll misuse the nomological to destroy ourselves.

01:51:00.360 Wouldn't that also be the case if we abstracted up the narrative without also going up the

01:51:05.380 nomological?

01:51:05.900 Well, he believed that the problem with the first millennia of Christianity was that we

01:51:13.220 did exactly that, was that we emphasized spiritual redemption to such a degree, try to reduce

01:51:21.260 redemption itself to the spiritual, then the world was still crying out because of its ontological

01:51:27.240 suffering.

01:51:27.780 It's like, well, if we're all redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, it's like, what's

01:51:30.860 with all the poor and diseased people?

01:51:32.880 And that call for the unredeemed material was part of what he saw as the motivational

01:51:38.740 foundation for the systematic investigation, say, that led to the development of medicine.

01:51:44.280 Yeah, yeah.

01:51:44.660 Yeah.

01:51:45.000 So there was an insufficiency.

01:51:47.740 There was an insufficiency.

01:51:50.100 Maybe it's the insufficiency of getting lost in epistemology.

01:51:53.080 If it's just a narrative, it's just a narrative.

01:51:54.940 Well, it's not.

01:51:55.520 It has to refer to the world.

01:51:58.000 Okay.

01:51:58.340 So, well, that complicates things, right?

01:52:01.740 Because part of what we're stuck on here to some degree is in that ontological realm

01:52:06.980 that's outside any given narrative, there is also a logos.

01:52:10.760 And then the question is, is that ontological logos, the nature of the world itself, somehow

01:52:15.860 a narrative?

01:52:16.420 And the Christian idea to answer that would be, well, that, I don't know, because creation

01:52:21.940 is separate in God.

01:52:23.500 Creation, I, I, I, sorry, speaking on behalf of Christianity, but I think Christianity makes

01:52:28.260 the claim that the logos is ultimately a person, not a narrative.

01:52:31.160 A person is not a story.

01:52:32.020 Yeah.

01:52:32.260 Yeah.

01:52:32.420 That's very important.

01:52:33.360 Right.

01:52:33.600 The logos is not a story.

01:52:35.460 Everything culminates into, into, into the, into the person.

01:52:39.820 And person literally means, originally means hypostasis, that which stands under.

01:52:44.840 Yes.

01:52:45.240 Yes.

01:52:45.680 Well, it has to be a person, right?

01:52:47.200 Right.

01:52:47.860 Well, that's why I also said, though, that it's the description of a structure of values

01:52:51.460 is a narrative.

01:52:52.500 So, as an embodied ideal, Christ isn't a story.

01:52:56.340 No.

01:52:56.840 Right.

01:52:57.100 But the description of his embodiment, that's a story.

01:52:59.640 And the images are a story.

01:53:01.040 And the reason we want the story is because the story calls us to the, to the ethic.

01:53:06.560 That's why we value the stories, is, right?

01:53:08.420 I would like to see the world the way you see it, because you have a whole set of tools that

01:53:12.540 I don't have.

01:53:13.160 And so, if you can tell me a story and I can enter into your world, then that is truly redemptive,

01:53:17.960 because the facts now array themselves in a slightly different way that might be very

01:53:21.460 valuable to me if I run into one of these objects that you described.

01:53:25.160 You know, I'm running an algorithm and something objects.

01:53:28.120 I don't know what to do.

01:53:29.140 What would you do?

01:53:30.280 Tell me what you did in the similar situation.

01:53:34.140 And so, I don't think the story, the story isn't the, yeah, God, that gets so tricky.

01:53:39.700 The, the, the Christian emphasis certainly is, is that the embodied reality is the fundamental

01:53:45.840 reality.

01:53:46.720 Yeah, but the story isn't nothing, that's for sure.

01:53:49.080 I'm not saying that.

01:53:49.700 I know you're not.

01:53:50.320 I know you're not.

01:53:50.960 I know you're not.

01:53:51.480 I'm not saying that at all.

01:53:52.060 I was trying to answer Jonathan's question, right?

01:53:54.760 And we're running into the difficulty that I see.

01:53:57.960 Whether or not I'm right or wrong, we're, there's a difficulty here.

01:54:01.020 Oh, definitely.

01:54:01.780 And that's the difficulty I'm putting my finger on.

01:54:04.100 I'm trying to put my finger on in the meeting process.

01:54:05.360 Well, it's also the difficulty that I'm trying to address with this set of propositions.

01:54:08.320 It's definitely a difficulty.

01:54:10.580 Okay, but we got somewhere, we got somewhere in that, I would say.

01:54:13.360 I think it was very valuable.

01:54:14.600 Okay, so I'm going to skip to number five here.

01:54:17.140 Every set of values is hierarchical.

01:54:19.200 Otherwise, there's no prioritization.

01:54:20.720 I think we agree on that because we've already agreed that there has to be a prioritization.

01:54:25.560 And there has to be.

01:54:26.320 That implies a hierarchy.

01:54:27.380 So, the one thing I wanted to ask there, sorry, I seem to be the devil's advocate here.

01:54:31.020 No, no.

01:54:31.300 But it is, again, let's go back to embodied living.

01:54:35.180 And this is actually something you see in narratives.

01:54:37.160 And I would also say that it's something that some of the parables of Jesus point to.

01:54:41.780 Because parables, I think McFagg is right, parables are narratives that destroy themselves

01:54:45.540 as narrative structures.

01:54:47.040 They're kind of like the way Coens destroy themselves as questions.

01:54:50.100 And so, what I want to say is, let's say that there is, we seem to have like there's the

01:54:57.740 true, the good, and the beautiful, or we have the narrative, the nomological, and I'll call

01:55:01.640 it the normative in terms of betterment or something.

01:55:04.460 Like, let's say, is it the case?

01:55:07.700 The thing, is the hierarchy stable?

01:55:09.940 What I mean by that is you get narratives, you get stories, you get works of art, great

01:55:15.160 works of art, in which it looks like they're picking up on something that is true to our

01:55:19.840 embodied experiences.

01:55:21.040 Sometimes we sacrifice the true for the good, or the good for the beautiful, or the beautiful

01:55:25.560 for the true.

01:55:26.620 Like, we seem to be making trade-off.

01:55:28.440 We don't seem to have a stable what's on top.

01:55:31.440 We shift the prioritizations around.

01:55:34.080 There's a lot of great art, at least proposing that.

01:55:37.060 So, I think it's a reasonable thing to consider.

01:55:39.260 Well, I think that's partly a consequence of the confusion about what constitutes the unification.

01:55:44.140 So, part of the project I have here is that I'm beginning to view all the narratives that

01:55:50.500 are laid out in the biblical corpus as they're snapshots of a different idea of what should

01:55:55.780 be at the top.

01:55:56.640 They're like the through line.

01:55:57.800 Well, they're representations of the through line.

01:56:00.560 We still don't know what the through line is, so to speak, right?

01:56:02.720 But they're snapshots.

01:56:03.780 So, for example, in the opening lines of Genesis, God, so we'll say, by definition, God is what

01:56:10.540 is at the top.

01:56:11.380 We'll just start with that.

01:56:12.840 And I'm not going to make an ontological claim about that, just an epistemological claim.

01:56:17.500 God is what's at the top of your value structure.

01:56:19.900 Okay, so what should that be?

01:56:22.940 Well, let's say that's a mystery.

01:56:24.320 Okay, so the Bible is an attempt to represent that mystery from a variety of different narrative

01:56:31.040 perspectives.

01:56:32.000 And so, I'll give you a couple of examples.

01:56:33.480 So, in the earliest chapter, the beginning of Genesis, God is the word that derives the

01:56:42.860 habitable order that is good out of chaos and potential.

01:56:46.480 Okay, so whatever God is, that's part of it.

01:56:50.420 Okay, so that's...

01:56:52.620 And God is a creative force.

01:56:54.140 And then there's...

01:56:56.080 The next thing is that God is whatever it is that human beings are made in the image

01:57:02.340 of.

01:57:03.480 That also provides them with a worth that transcends the merely material, in some sense.

01:57:09.080 Because God is outside creation.

01:57:11.100 And if man is made in the image of God, then there's something about man that's valuable,

01:57:16.300 that's outside of the mere materiality.

01:57:19.420 Okay, so that's the next proposition.

01:57:20.980 And then God is rapidly that which forbids and allows.

01:57:25.580 So that happens in the garden.

01:57:26.660 And then God is that spirit that you walk with when you're unselfconscious and not ashamed.

01:57:34.580 So that's the story of Adam in the garden.

01:57:37.720 And then in Noah, God is that which calls you to batten down the hatches and prepare when,

01:57:46.100 if you're wise in your generations, you see that chaos is coming.

01:57:49.160 And then in the Abrahamic story, God is that which calls you out of the comfort of your

01:57:54.440 family into adventure.

01:57:55.980 And so it's like, click, click, click, click, click.

01:57:58.740 And who knows what the union of all those things are, right?

01:58:01.580 Because they're quite multiplicitous.

01:58:03.800 Very.

01:58:04.060 But I think they're very sophisticated.

01:58:07.380 And you might say, well, is that God?

01:58:08.880 It's like, well, do you follow the call of adventure?

01:58:12.000 Do you take your own intuition seriously when you think that the flood is coming?

01:58:17.520 The answer to that generally is, well, you either follow that or you're in trouble.

01:58:21.520 People, you sure know that.

01:58:23.160 And is God the divine word that generates habitable order, the habitable order that is good out

01:58:28.600 of chaos?

01:58:29.460 Well, do you believe that truth has that power?

01:58:32.280 So I think, okay, so these are all ways of pointing to that which might unify the disunity

01:58:39.400 that you see.

01:58:40.240 Now, you can't boil it down in some way, the same way that you boil down beauty.

01:58:45.700 You know, it's harder to specify.

01:58:47.860 And I think what the Bible is attempting to do, and I think this is true of religious writings

01:58:53.120 of many sorts, is to, what is it?

01:58:58.620 It's a characterization of this.

01:59:00.240 It's, first of all, it's an insistence that the thing at the top is a spirit, right?

01:59:04.400 It's not an idea.

01:59:05.580 It's not even like beauty.

01:59:06.680 It's not an abstraction.

01:59:07.660 It's a spirit that can inhabit, which is kind of the incarnation idea.

01:59:11.960 So it's a spirit that you can embody, or that can seize and possess you.

01:59:16.400 So it's really something that's living.

01:59:19.280 And so it's not merely an abstract idea, and it's not just a nomological construct.

01:59:24.060 It's something you enact.

01:59:25.220 And it's something, in principle, you might think, well, if you're, and this leads to

01:59:29.620 the next point, any hierarchy that is not unified produces confusion, anxiety, anomie,

01:59:36.320 aimlessness, and conflict, psychological and social.

01:59:39.240 Well, why?

01:59:40.060 Well, if it's not unified, you don't know your priorities.

01:59:41.980 And if it isn't pointing to something valuable, there's no hope, because hope is to be found

01:59:49.540 in the movement towards something of value.

01:59:53.120 So, okay, well, sorry, that's a lot.

01:59:54.900 No, no, no, but that's helpful.

01:59:56.760 So let me say something, and it's not really a pushback, but it's sliding over here, and

02:00:02.080 if we can make the connection, then maybe we can come to an agreement around it.

02:00:05.600 So, right, adaptivity.

02:00:09.360 Adaptivity is a thing, and it's really important, and it's not an abstraction.

02:00:12.620 Define it.

02:00:13.660 Adaptivity is that you are fitted to your environment in a way that allows you to successfully live

02:00:20.320 long enough to reproduce, right?

02:00:21.880 Yeah, okay, okay.

02:00:22.740 So that's kind of an iterated game idea, too.

02:00:24.940 You have to live long enough to propagate.

02:00:27.680 Totally, totally.

02:00:28.720 And I'm not here to defend, you know, a gene version or a group selection version.

02:00:34.720 Yep, yep, yep, yep.

02:00:35.260 That's not what I want to...

02:00:36.440 Yep.

02:00:36.580 Okay, so, adaptivity.

02:00:38.760 And you want to, you know, how does this arise?

02:00:43.040 And one of the things you can do is you can say, here's all these snapshots of adaptivity,

02:00:47.360 and what I can do is I can try and find what do they all share in common.

02:00:52.400 The capacity to elicit awe.

02:00:54.460 Well, wait a second.

02:00:55.460 Wait, wait a second.

02:00:56.060 So, like, the problem is, right, this, and this is what you see the naturalists before

02:01:01.840 Darwin doing.

02:01:02.480 They're trying to find the shared perfection.

02:01:05.380 Yep.

02:01:05.640 And then Darwin breaks the mold.

02:01:07.620 He says, no, no, no, no, you're making the mistake.

02:01:09.880 There is no, right?

02:01:11.740 Right.

02:01:12.160 Right?

02:01:12.740 There isn't.

02:01:13.500 What there is, right, is some things are adaptive because they're small, some are adaptive because

02:01:18.220 they're large, some are fast, some are slow, some are hard, some are soft, some are

02:01:21.740 unicellular, some are multicellular.

02:01:23.480 Where adaptivity doesn't have, but what he finds is, but there's a universal process

02:01:28.960 that is, right, that can explain how all of these different snapshots emerge.

02:01:35.080 But there is a perfection, and the perfection is being itself.

02:01:39.220 It's the continuation of existence.

02:01:41.100 Okay, but what you've just did, you've played, you're not playing with my analogy, though.

02:01:45.100 You've said, I can meta that, and I'm not denying that you can do that, Jonathan.

02:01:49.360 I'm trying to use a meta, I'm trying to use an analogy.

02:01:51.800 Okay, okay.

02:01:52.600 I don't deny that, okay?

02:01:54.700 I'm not making that claim.

02:01:55.780 I'm just trying to use this as an analogy, and I'm trying to say.

02:01:57.940 Well, it's a powerful objection, because certainly the biologists do that.

02:02:01.300 They say, well, there's no teleology in evolution.

02:02:04.000 And I know that you object to that, because you say, well, there has to be, because you

02:02:07.460 can't even, there's no unity there in any of the organisms, and there's certainly no

02:02:11.600 way of perceiving them.

02:02:12.620 But they also have a point, which is...

02:02:14.560 There's a nomological unity, even though there's no narrative.

02:02:17.780 That's how they argue it.

02:02:18.960 There is a universal process that can be understood scientifically that explains adaptivity.

02:02:24.740 Because if you get the theory of evolution, you say, right, all the organisms should be

02:02:30.080 different.

02:02:30.360 But then you have the problem that every organism that survives plays out a pattern, which is

02:02:36.660 variation on the horizon of potentiality.

02:02:39.380 And so then you might say, well, there is a directionality, because if the organism can't

02:02:45.020 vary creatively on the horizon of potentiality, it can't exist or multiply.

02:02:49.620 And so then, so there's a teleology that emerges out of the necessity for survival and reproduction.

02:02:58.560 And so, and I would say, so think about, sorry, I just got to, I got to get this out.

02:03:03.940 I got to get this out.

02:03:04.860 I'll shut up.

02:03:05.180 I'll shut up.

02:03:05.440 The abstractions you generate in your prefrontal cortex are avatars of the process of adaptation

02:03:11.740 to the horizon of the future.

02:03:13.560 And so, and so the flowering of the human spirit in its highest sense is an embodiment of the

02:03:18.820 process by which the biologists attribute the, the adaptivity.

02:03:23.780 It's the process that utilizes adaptivity.

02:03:25.620 And so maybe those things dovetail.

02:03:27.580 Well, that's what I'm going to say.

02:03:28.300 So there is a narrative though.

02:03:29.540 No, no, no.

02:03:30.020 That's what I, there's where I want to challenge you.

02:03:31.500 You gave me a model of the logos that I would say is not narrative, except for a trivial

02:03:34.760 definition of narrative, which is variation and selection.

02:03:38.180 And look, instead, look, let's put it back in the psychological.

02:03:42.240 It's like with humans, it's the willingness to do that though.

02:03:45.380 So it's not just the fact that it can, can happen and does happen.

02:03:48.620 And that's partly what brings in the narrative element is you do not have to abide by that.

02:03:53.040 Like you, you, that can happen to you.

02:03:56.160 You can, you can have this creative variation and this selection in relationship to adaptivity,

02:04:02.100 let's say, to keep it biological, but you can, you do not have to do that.

02:04:06.720 And so I think it's the struggle with that that constitutes the narrative.

02:04:10.680 I want to push back on you on that because I think there's all kinds of stuff at the relevance

02:04:15.940 realization, doing that variation and selection that you cannot exercise authority over because

02:04:21.660 your authority actually depends on, on the, right.

02:04:24.000 So it's different than the level at which you have narrative access to your own being.

02:04:31.280 And look, I think that that's related to Jonathan's objection earlier that the law

02:04:36.500 is inscribed on the human heart.

02:04:38.260 It's like, yes, I agree.

02:04:39.900 But, but let me say, if I claim that human evolution builds a material embodiment that

02:04:48.040 strives towards manifestation of the logos, and then there's an abstraction and that meets

02:04:53.340 in the middle, the fact that you can't control the manifestations of your prioritization structure

02:05:02.480 doesn't mean the logos isn't built into the a priori systems that structure that perception

02:05:07.940 for you.

02:05:08.560 I'm not denying that.

02:05:09.440 What I'm denying is that, that logos is ultimately operating as a narrative.

02:05:13.120 I think the low, and look at, look at, look at, look at even, look at even psychologically.

02:05:18.160 Narrative doesn't emerge until a certain age and it is pre, it depends on dialogos.

02:05:23.500 It depends on dialogue.

02:05:24.820 It depends on joint attention.

02:05:26.740 It depends on the ability to take turns in conversation.

02:05:29.740 You have to have all this dialogical machinery in place before narrative is possible.

02:05:33.520 Right.

02:05:33.960 Well, the way I would object to that, fine, that's a perfectly reasonable objection.

02:05:37.280 But the problem with that is, is that a lot of that's scaffolded by quasi-narrative precursors.

02:05:43.600 So, for example, one of the things you do with a baby before it can engage in the dialogos

02:05:48.720 mediated semantically is you do a dance-like play.

02:05:54.160 And the spirit of the logos is, and I would say a narrative spirit is deeply embodied in

02:05:58.540 that.

02:05:58.720 Because if that isn't taking place within the spirit of love and play and truth, then

02:06:03.960 it isn't going to give rise to the pasty later for the dialogos.

02:06:07.640 So, that's kind of the embeddedment, in some sense, of the embeddedment, embeddedment?

02:06:13.220 Embedding.

02:06:13.960 There's the word.

02:06:14.800 Embedding.

02:06:14.960 Of the logos in the material, right, prior to its manifestation.

02:06:19.440 And I do think, in some sense, that's not a story, you know?

02:06:22.460 Because if you watch a wolf pack, what they're doing isn't a story.

02:06:27.140 But if you describe it, it becomes a story.

02:06:29.920 Yes.

02:06:30.300 Right?

02:06:30.700 So, there is an embodied pattern that's not a story.

02:06:34.100 I think we're agreeing now, then.

02:06:36.420 Okay, okay, okay.

02:06:37.460 Well, there's a lot of...

02:06:40.100 So, I guess we go back to where you said the description of a structure of values.

02:06:43.300 That's right.

02:06:43.860 I said the description is a story.

02:06:45.900 Now, that doesn't mean that the description doesn't match the underlying behavioral pattern.

02:06:50.360 You know, I think one of the things I sort of thought through in Maps of Meaning with

02:06:54.460 the Moses story is, well, why those laws?

02:06:58.820 So, you see, in the story, it's so bloody cool.

02:07:01.580 Before Moses goes up to the mountain, he spends decades, we don't know, forever, morning

02:07:09.340 to night, judging objections.

02:07:12.560 So, the Israelites are out in the desert.

02:07:14.000 There's no structure.

02:07:14.780 And they fight with each other all the time.

02:07:16.320 And then they come to Moses and say, well, we're fighting.

02:07:18.880 What do we do about it?

02:07:19.820 And he, like, judges them.

02:07:21.880 And his father-in-law actually says to him, you have to stop doing this because it is

02:07:25.480 absolutely exhausting you.

02:07:27.760 And it isn't until after that that...

02:07:29.380 So, then you think, what's he doing?

02:07:31.340 Well, he's seeing all these micro-narratives, right?

02:07:33.600 And then he has to discriminate between them, which means he's turning them into a hierarchy

02:07:36.920 of value because that's what the discrimination is.

02:07:39.320 This is what's right in this conflict.

02:07:41.800 So, conflict, hierarchy.

02:07:44.040 And then he's doing that just constantly.

02:07:46.040 So, you can imagine that within him, this hierarchy of value is starting to be built

02:07:51.560 explicitly.

02:07:52.840 Then he goes up on the mountain and it's like, bang!

02:07:55.760 Oh!

02:07:57.020 This is what all our striving is oriented to.

02:08:00.960 And then he comes down.

02:08:01.800 The first time, it doesn't map, as you said.

02:08:03.680 The second time, it maps.

02:08:05.220 So, the deliverance of the message from on high has to map onto this.

02:08:09.220 And some of this conflict and its agreement would emerge from biological acceptability

02:08:15.480 because the people would say, oh, I feel as though that was just.

02:08:21.120 It solves the problem.

02:08:22.900 And so, the material is in communication, then, with the abstraction.

02:08:26.260 I think we're close to agreement.

02:08:28.460 I guess, to circle back, I don't sort of deny that.

02:08:33.440 I'm really not denying that narrative is a powerful way for disclosing intelligibility,

02:08:39.220 and the logos, right?

02:08:41.420 What I'm saying is, there's a privileging of it here.

02:08:45.900 Okay, so, is it important?

02:08:49.500 Is the distinction that I just made between an embodied pattern and a narrative enough

02:08:56.840 to dispense with your objection?

02:09:00.760 Or is there more to it?

02:09:01.840 Well, let me see.

02:09:03.140 Because I think that theories and poems and music, things that I'm treating as non-narrative,

02:09:09.960 can disclose depths of reality that I can't disclose with a story.

02:09:14.560 Okay, so, why is it important to you or necessary to make that distinction, do you think?

02:09:20.420 Just out of curiosity.

02:09:21.880 Why it's important for me is that I'm concerned about a privileging of narrative.

02:09:29.100 I'll use biblical language.

02:09:30.120 An inappropriate privileging of narrative.

02:09:31.660 That will border on idolatry, right?

02:09:34.480 In that we are...

02:09:36.260 Well, that's kind of what the postmodernists do.

02:09:38.180 So, there's definitely a danger there, right?

02:09:40.240 If you overprivilege narrative to the point where the ontology itself disappears...

02:09:43.640 But I think what John is saying is that he's afraid that if we embody, if we embrace a narrative,

02:09:47.980 then the solution to the meaning crisis won't be universal enough.

02:09:51.580 Is that something like that?

02:09:52.720 So, that's a practical implication because I would propose to you, it's a proposal, okay,

02:09:58.940 that whatever is going to resolve the meaning crisis has to reintegrate science and spirituality.

02:10:05.640 If it does not do that in some...

02:10:07.420 Well, so, that's partly also what you're insisting on is that there is this domain of scientific knowledge

02:10:12.120 that should be regarded as, in some sense, independent of narrative.

02:10:15.700 And that's...

02:10:16.260 I'm still having very much trouble with that because we still have the problem of if-then, right?

02:10:21.600 It's like...

02:10:22.440 And I don't see how we escape from that.

02:10:25.480 But that's where I push on back on the trivialization.

02:10:28.120 If-then constitutes a narrative.

02:10:30.340 No, no, it doesn't.

02:10:31.280 Okay.

02:10:31.640 If constitutes a narrative.

02:10:33.900 If constitutes a narrative?

02:10:34.480 Yeah, if does.

02:10:35.380 Because if has to be, well, if we want to cure disease, if we want to...

02:10:39.580 So, Jung believed that the spirit of science grew out of the alchemical fantasy.

02:10:43.960 And so, the alchemical fantasy was, we will find in material the solution to ill health, death, and privation.

02:10:54.740 Well, yeah, ill health, death, and privation.

02:10:57.020 That's exactly it.

02:10:57.800 And so, Jung's point was, without that impulse, which he regarded as a compensation to the hyper-spiritualization

02:11:05.300 that Christianity imposed on the world in the first Christian ion,

02:11:08.640 without that fantasy, deeply, like, deeply embodied, manifesting itself out of embodied behavior,

02:11:15.060 and then out of image, we wouldn't have been...

02:11:17.260 Because Jung said, well, how do you get someone to look down a microscope at an amoeba for 10 hours?

02:11:22.060 Because, like, no animal will do that.

02:11:25.260 And his notion was, well, we had to be gripped by something of a dream of intense motivational significance.

02:11:31.780 And it was the dream that redemption could be found in analysis of the transformations of the material world.

02:11:38.400 Right.

02:11:38.700 But, like, the motivating structure is not the same thing as the referent of what I'm talking about.

02:11:48.080 Right, right, right, right.

02:11:49.700 So, I might need narrative to do science, but we don't want to make the genetic fallacy

02:11:54.120 that that means that everything that science is referring to is a narrative, right?

02:11:58.820 Yeah, right, right.

02:11:59.360 The fact that, right, that'd be like, that's like saying everything I talk about, I have to speak in English,

02:12:05.360 so reality is made out of English.

02:12:06.520 Well, that does bring us to the postmodern conundrum,

02:12:08.760 because they would insist that, no, all the sets of, all the facts that science derives

02:12:12.980 are, in some simple sense, a narrative, right?

02:12:15.880 And then that narrative is associated with the drive to power and domination.

02:12:19.700 And so, yeah, we do have to be careful of that, because we'll fall right into that trap.

02:12:22.680 Right.

02:12:23.260 So, that's what, so, if you think…

02:12:26.080 You want to comment?

02:12:26.960 No, but I…

02:12:27.440 Sorry.

02:12:28.500 Can I say this?

02:12:29.180 I do think that a great manner in which modern science got developed does, is, I think it

02:12:39.200 is, narrative, that is, there is, on the one hand, the desire to deliver, but on the other

02:12:44.440 hand, the desire to dominate is there, right?

02:12:46.560 You've talked about this before with Bacon and…

02:12:48.440 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:12:48.820 I don't deny that.

02:12:50.080 Yeah.

02:12:50.720 And so, there is a, there is, and so it doesn't take away the…

02:12:54.160 But the same motivation can drive people in doing mathematics.

02:12:57.360 Yeah.

02:12:57.540 Right?

02:12:58.000 It's the same motivation can drive people doing music.

02:13:00.640 So, we don't want to say that's the essence of science or music or mathematics, because

02:13:04.820 then we're doing, we're removing the important differences.

02:13:07.500 You're afraid that we're collapsing everything.

02:13:09.080 Yes.

02:13:09.540 But I think, yeah, I think that it's mostly about, it's about hierarchy in the sense of,

02:13:15.240 in the sense that because we are embodied beings that are living, that are living in the

02:13:19.500 world, that are living lives, then all that we do, all that we care about is part of

02:13:24.460 that reality.

02:13:25.600 And so, even the nominological order, although I think I agree with you now, it's definitely

02:13:30.180 not a narrative.

02:13:31.440 Right.

02:13:31.820 But it is embedded, that's why Jordan used the expression, embedded in narrative.

02:13:38.120 Yes.

02:13:38.400 That is, that it has to…

02:13:39.820 But isn't the reverse the case?

02:13:41.500 Narrative depends on the presupposition that there is an ordered world in which it can take

02:13:46.400 place.

02:13:46.580 Right.

02:13:46.840 But that, the question is then, is that logos that constitutes the order, so to speak,

02:13:51.840 if when you represent that, do you necessarily represent it as a narrative?

02:13:55.540 And this is a deep question.

02:13:56.800 I mean…

02:13:57.180 I'm proposing to you that the logos is that which allows the narrative order and the

02:14:03.140 nominological order…

02:14:04.220 To unite.

02:14:05.180 …to what they're doing.

02:14:06.040 That's what I'm saying.

02:14:06.680 Right, okay, but that's fine.

02:14:08.340 But then I might wonder, does it extend to the narrative order and to the underlying

02:14:14.200 ontological order as well?

02:14:15.980 The logos is both in the story and in the logic.

02:14:19.880 Think about, just even follow the history of the word logos and watch how it goes in

02:14:25.740 these two different directions with good reason.

02:14:29.220 Yeah, yeah.

02:14:30.020 Well, so, okay, so then the question, so you're objecting that the logos isn't a story, and

02:14:36.180 that's so strange and so weird because we could say that the West is kind of split on that

02:14:42.040 because in some sense, if you think of the development of the idea of the logos from the

02:14:47.220 Greek and Enlightenment side, the answer would be, there's no immediate insistence there

02:14:53.980 that it's a narrative.

02:14:54.940 That's right.

02:14:55.220 But on the Judeo-Christian side, there's a pronounced insistence that it's a narrative.

02:14:59.440 Yes.

02:14:59.760 And our modern culture is actually a union of those two, right?

02:15:02.800 You just described a couple episodes of the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

02:15:06.260 That's exactly the argument I try to trace out.

02:15:08.680 And, well, and certainly the argument we're having right now because Jonathan and I, in

02:15:12.400 some sense, are making a case for the logos as narrative and embody narrative, although

02:15:16.420 you also point to the importance of embodiment.

02:15:18.780 I'm not rejecting that.

02:15:19.560 I know, I know, I know.

02:15:20.580 Well, it's very difficult to differentiate this, right?

02:15:22.920 Yes, yes.

02:15:23.100 And I do like the idea that there's a hierarchy of narrative with the ideal at the top and

02:15:28.780 then a hierarchy of normological description and that there's a correspondence between

02:15:33.960 the hierarchies because it does seem to me that, and I want to puzzle that out, one of

02:15:38.860 the things Jung warned about, he thought there was an ethos in the religious story and to

02:15:46.040 some degree in the alchemical story.

02:15:47.380 And then when the scientific revolution hit, we blew up the normological into this massively

02:15:54.060 powerful thing, but our ethic was left in the same primitive form.

02:15:58.680 So now we're in danger because of that.

02:16:00.680 I think that's exactly right.

02:16:02.360 I think one of, I talk about this in terms of propositional tyranny and algorithmic tyranny.

02:16:09.060 Right, right.

02:16:09.280 And what we've done is we've reduced the logos inappropriately to logic.

02:16:14.660 I strongly resist that move too.

02:16:16.960 Right.

02:16:17.140 So you're, okay, okay, okay.

02:16:18.780 Well, I get your caution because I do believe that devolving everything down to the narrative

02:16:25.800 per se does put us in the postmodern trap, which is, well, it's all, in some sense, well,

02:16:31.660 it's all narrative, which is kind of what they claimed.

02:16:33.500 And that's a problem because then you can dispense with the corrective reality.

02:16:38.740 Exactly, exactly.

02:16:40.100 So I use a stereoscopic metaphor.

02:16:42.680 I think of the logos as epitomized in logic, as in story, and then I try to look through

02:16:48.500 both to a depth.

02:16:50.260 That's what I try to think of as the logos.

02:16:52.060 Okay, go, sorry, tell me that again.

02:16:53.920 So you know how I have the left and right visual field and then I look through them to

02:16:58.200 depth perception.

02:16:59.320 Yeah.

02:16:59.540 But here's logos as logic, here's logos as story, and I try to look through them to

02:17:05.120 the depth behind it.

02:17:06.300 Yeah, yeah.

02:17:06.600 Well, that seems on the face of it quite fine.

02:17:08.760 I mean, I'm still in a conundrum because we already agreed that the selection of the

02:17:14.440 facts and even the manifestation of the facts as perceptual objects is dependent on the imposition

02:17:18.700 of a hierarchy of value.

02:17:20.180 And so that tangles the damn narrative into it again.

02:17:22.760 But there's something that's key to the idea of parallel hierarchies that I think is a conceptual

02:17:31.340 way out of this.

02:17:32.340 And that's one of the key moves in Neoplatonism, exactly what you're puzzling over.

02:17:36.840 How do these things, what explains their parallel and what explains beyond the parallel,

02:17:42.560 what I was trying to do with the stereoscopic, what explains their convergence?

02:17:46.660 Okay, so what if it is something like, let's say I'm using the word person, but let's use

02:17:53.860 the word consciousness.

02:17:55.840 Okay.

02:17:56.300 Right?

02:17:56.600 Or that, so St. Maximus has, this is why I like St. Maximus so much, right?

02:18:02.120 Because St. Maximus, he has exactly what you're talking about in terms of this non-malodical

02:18:07.560 order, this hierarchy of order.

02:18:09.260 And he has a sense in which the laboratory for that is man, right?

02:18:15.100 Man with a capital M.

02:18:17.160 And so doesn't it, doesn't it kind of, one of the solutions to this, wouldn't it be this

02:18:23.320 relevance realization that you're talking about?

02:18:25.680 But the relevance realization happens, ultimately happens in consciousness or something like

02:18:31.800 consciousness or, I mean, I think it happens in intelligence because we have a lot of relevance

02:18:36.780 realization going on below consciousness.

02:18:38.540 You and I have talked about this before.

02:18:39.800 Right, okay.

02:18:40.080 I think consciousness is a kind of intelligence for specific kinds of problems, ill-defined,

02:18:44.280 normal, novel, complex.

02:18:45.480 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:18:45.860 Complexity.

02:18:46.420 That's the horizon, unpredictable horizon of the future.

02:18:48.400 Right, right, right, right.

02:18:49.620 So, but let's say, and I think the issue is, yes, and what I'm here, what I'm sort of

02:18:56.660 proposing is intelligibility is something like the way reality is realizing itself and relevance

02:19:04.120 realization is intelligence.

02:19:05.380 And the good is the fact that we trust that the intelligence can track the intelligibility.

02:19:13.740 And by doing that, it puts us in touch with the world.

02:19:16.060 That's what I would say.

02:19:16.580 Is that a presupposition of faith?

02:19:19.260 Is that a presupposition of the faith that was necessary before the manifestation of a real

02:19:24.160 science?

02:19:25.000 Yes.

02:19:25.560 The willingness to act on that basis?

02:19:27.620 I think if you do not, okay, so I'm not going to deny the importance of the Judeo-Christian

02:19:33.860 story, okay?

02:19:35.800 But I would also say that without Plato's argument about the good as the ongoing fulfillment of

02:19:43.360 the promise that intelligibility tracks realness, you can't do science.

02:19:47.060 And there's a reason why the scientific revolution is a return to Plato.

02:19:50.640 Galileo rejects Aristotle and goes to Plato and says, Plato is right.

02:19:57.180 Mathematics, listen to the words, mathematics is the language of reality.

02:20:01.240 There's no math in Aristotelian science for 1,200 years.

02:20:05.500 He turns to Plato, and that's what brings in the core of modern science.

02:20:10.160 Okay, so why is that a turn to Plato particularly?

02:20:12.540 Because Plato, in the Republic, Plato makes the argument that he had it over the academy.

02:20:20.400 You can't come into the academy unless you can do mathematics, because until you do mathematics,

02:20:25.420 you can't grasp the kind of intelligibility needed to get at the deepest realities of

02:20:31.280 things.

02:20:31.920 And science-

02:20:32.340 So you thought that math was the cardinal example of that?

02:20:35.340 Yes.

02:20:36.280 And all of our science is dependent on mathematics.

02:20:38.360 Right, and his attitude towards myth and narrative is, right, that's Heidegger's claim about science,

02:20:46.060 is that myths and narratives are, right, that they are indispensable, but they do not have

02:20:53.980 the same degree of revelation of the promise of the good that math does.

02:21:00.940 I'm not saying I'm agreeing with that.

02:21:02.280 Isn't that why also Neoplatonism could never land, right?

02:21:07.280 It could never land and become a mode of being for a society.

02:21:13.800 That's why we've talked about this before a little bit, where what Christianity does is

02:21:18.340 it provides the body for that which was good of the Neoplatonic tradition-

02:21:25.200 And it provides something more.

02:21:26.540 To be embodied in a communion of love and a communion of participation.

02:21:31.880 See, what you can't get in Neoplatonism, and although I'm not a Christian, I prefer Christian

02:21:38.120 Neoplatonism over pagan Neoplatonism, because Plato is striving towards the agape, and Christianity

02:21:44.880 makes this astonishing.

02:21:46.040 The two identity claims, both made by John, God is Logos and God is agape, right?

02:21:52.260 And then that's an identity claim between Logos and agape, right?

02:21:58.120 It's not to say they're the same, but it's also to say, right, and you're going to say

02:22:03.160 the Trinity, and I get that, right?

02:22:04.680 That's fine, and I don't object to that.

02:22:06.400 But the point I'm making is, for me, that's the crucial move.

02:22:10.440 Here's what I say in response to that, and this is what I mean when I say about Neoplatonism

02:22:14.600 is the core-

02:22:15.320 Interesting that you would use the word crucial.

02:22:17.640 Yeah, no, I think it is.

02:22:19.220 I think it is.

02:22:20.100 Because, go back to my point, you can't follow the Logos unless agape takes you out of egocentrism.

02:22:26.860 Great, great.

02:22:27.560 I, that's right, yeah.

02:22:28.920 Okay, but also, agape can't unfold to you unless there's an order and an intelligibility

02:22:33.760 to it.

02:22:34.260 It makes no sense to say, I love something, and there's no intelligibility to it.

02:22:38.360 That doesn't make any sense, right?

02:22:39.980 Yeah.

02:22:40.480 Okay, now, but you see, the thing is, and this is what I'm trying to get at with my idea of

02:22:46.820 the intellectual Silk Road, right?

02:22:49.040 That right now, our culture, the hermeneutics of suspicion, we're locked into the courtroom of

02:22:54.280 debate.

02:22:54.600 I propose that we go back and do what we had with the Silk Road, which is the courtyard of

02:23:01.020 discussion.

02:23:02.180 Neoplatonism has this terrific ability to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity.

02:23:08.940 Clearly.

02:23:09.320 It does it with Islam.

02:23:10.700 Which is what we're doing right now.

02:23:12.100 Yes.

02:23:12.620 But it does it with Islam, and that's how you get Sufism.

02:23:15.100 It does it with science.

02:23:17.380 If you take a look, read John Spencer's book, The Eternal Law, if you look at what's happening

02:23:22.140 around Einstein and that, they're all invoking Neoplatonic or similar ideas to Neoplatonism.

02:23:27.080 Neoplatonism with Galileo, it's capable of entering into reciprocal reconstruction with

02:23:33.220 science, with Islam, with Christianity.

02:23:35.640 There seems to be evidence that it can do this with Buddhism, Taoism.

02:23:39.080 That's what Thomas Plant is arguing was happening on the Silk Road.

02:23:41.980 So, what you see as a potential defect, I see as a benefit, which is it doesn't land because

02:23:50.420 it's designed to land in many different ways and allow people-

02:23:54.020 Okay, so that's very much related to this idea of a parallel hierarchy.

02:23:57.300 If you're abstracting out the set of universal facts, then those facts are useful in relationship

02:24:04.160 to the higher order narratives that unite narratives.

02:24:06.980 But that's exactly-

02:24:08.900 Which is, I think that's the claim you just made.

02:24:10.940 I think so.

02:24:11.920 Let me see.

02:24:13.140 So, what I'm saying is that Neoplatonism gives us a way to dispose the furniture of thought

02:24:17.700 that we can come into deep dialogue and it would allow a Sufi and it would allow a Christian

02:24:24.760 to have deep discussion.

02:24:26.440 They don't have to agree.

02:24:28.100 The Silk Road wasn't dependent on one person running the Silk Road.

02:24:31.840 It was dependent on the fact that all of these civilizations found a way to deeply talk to

02:24:37.000 each other.

02:24:37.280 Why the Silk Road metaphor?

02:24:38.680 I'm not- I'm too historically- I know what the Silk Road was, but why use that?

02:24:42.900 Because the Silk Road binds the East and the West together, literally.

02:24:46.280 Oh, I see.

02:24:46.620 Right?

02:24:46.780 It's like the golden thread.

02:24:47.940 Yes.

02:24:48.320 It's the through line between civilizations, literally.

02:24:51.300 But not just the physical road.

02:24:53.140 There is a philosophical Silk Road and Thomas Plant, by the way, who is a Christian, argues that

02:24:58.720 that was Neoplatonism.

02:25:01.860 So, I think in one deep sense, Neoplatonism-

02:25:05.560 Well, it certainly is the case that to some degree, if science is a derivation of Neoplatonism

02:25:11.740 in the way that you described, science has also been a uniting methodology and system

02:25:17.280 of apprehension.

02:25:17.960 Because many different cultures are willing, with different degrees of ability, to utilize

02:25:22.960 the scientific method.

02:25:24.000 I agree.

02:25:24.600 And I would say that's ultimately exactly for the reasons you just gave, because science

02:25:29.500 has sort of made implicit within itself many Neoplatonic moves.

02:25:36.900 I mean, I think it's interesting.

02:25:38.800 I would say- I mean, it doesn't bother me so much in the sense that-

02:25:43.100 To the extent that that which Neoplatonism presents as true, I don't have that much of

02:25:48.060 a problem.

02:25:48.320 When I read St. Maximus, I don't even ask myself.

02:25:52.240 Neoplatonism?

02:25:52.840 Was this Christianity?

02:25:53.520 And I'm not saying you should.

02:25:55.180 Yeah.

02:25:55.500 What I'm saying is-

02:25:56.760 And when I read a Sufi, I don't ask myself that question either.

02:25:59.340 Like, if I read Ibn Arabi, I would say, yeah, he's saying some pretty powerful, true things,

02:26:04.280 you know?

02:26:04.620 And I can also recognize the place to which we disagree, but he says some definitely powerful

02:26:10.240 things about the nature of reality, which are-

02:26:12.220 They think about the imaginal without Ibn Arabi.

02:26:15.560 You won't get it.

02:26:16.200 And if you want to turn to some very good places to talk about agapic love, read some

02:26:22.360 of the Sufi.

02:26:23.120 You want- right?

02:26:23.920 Like, I want to-

02:26:27.300 So, you're emphasizing this in large part because- or I don't want to put words in

02:26:31.900 your mouth, but because you also see- see, I think that belief in the logos is a precondition

02:26:38.420 for dialogue, right?

02:26:39.500 Yes.

02:26:39.680 And- but you're making a case for- in some sense, it's not a binary definition of logos.

02:26:47.000 It's one that's informed, perhaps properly, in equal parts from the tradition of Greece

02:26:54.800 and the-

02:26:55.440 It's dipolar.

02:26:56.460 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:26:58.040 But there's- but there's also- there's no reason to assume that there isn't a deeper unity

02:27:02.880 that- that both are pointing to.

02:27:05.800 I mean, we've been acting out that presupposition in some sense in the West since- since the

02:27:11.180 time of the Renaissance, because that was Rome and Greece meeting Jerusalem in a real

02:27:16.260 sense.

02:27:17.160 Rome- sorry, Rome and Athens, say, meeting Jerusalem in a real sense.

02:27:20.100 But it was true way before that.

02:27:21.700 I mean, the- one of the precursors to the Renaissance is the- the intellectual reality of Constantinople.

02:27:27.140 Like, Neu-Platonism was just-

02:27:28.800 Yeah.

02:27:28.900 ...present- was- was present there the whole time.

02:27:31.340 It just was there.

02:27:32.260 And so, we know- we don't know much about it because the city was destroyed and everything

02:27:36.200 got scattered.

02:27:37.300 But the- the- the- let's say the traditional Neu-Platonism, the manner in which- the- one

02:27:42.780 of the important matters in which it reached the West was- was through these- these Christian

02:27:47.380 scholars that got chased away from the city, basically, because it was in danger and brought

02:27:51.700 the- the text and the- the tradition to-

02:27:53.420 And then there's another-

02:27:54.580 And then there's the way through Spain.

02:27:55.780 It comes through the Arab world, too.

02:27:57.320 Mm-hm.

02:27:58.320 There's sort of multiple times.

02:27:59.320 See, what I'm trying to do- what I'm proposing is, I'm trying to do- I'm trying to do like

02:28:03.500 a historical thing where I'm trying to look at all of the ways in which- it's like the

02:28:07.900 glass.

02:28:08.900 We can get the multi-espectuality of Neu-Platonism by seeing all the ways it was able to re- reciprocally

02:28:14.000 reconstruct itself- like reciprocally reconstruct with- with Christ- with Aristotle or with Christianity

02:28:21.540 or with science or with-

02:28:22.320 Right.

02:28:23.320 So you're taking snapshots of that in some sense in the same way I'm trying to do that

02:28:26.960 with the notion of-

02:28:27.960 Right.

02:28:28.960 What's at the top in the narrative sense using the Biblical corpus.

02:28:30.960 Exactly.

02:28:31.960 And I'm trying to find the through-line, the historical through-line for Neu-Platonism because

02:28:36.120 I don't- this is maybe where Jonathan and I disagree, but I think we do it in at least

02:28:40.920 a loving manner.

02:28:41.920 Hmm.

02:28:42.920 Which-

02:28:43.920 Well, or don't understand each other fully, which is-

02:28:44.920 It's possible.

02:28:45.920 It's possible.

02:28:46.920 I guess what I wanted to state is your metagame, me participating in the dialogue is more important

02:28:54.900 to me than- continuing the right relationship is more valuable to me than coming to the

02:28:59.720 right conclusion.

02:29:00.720 Right.

02:29:01.720 Definitely.

02:29:02.720 Definitely.

02:29:03.720 At least end, I think.

02:29:04.720 Okay.

02:29:05.720 I mean, we got a long ways through this.

02:29:08.720 We'll try to figure out, perhaps, after we think about this for a good while, what we

02:29:14.200 might do to continue it because there's a few propositions here that I think are relevant.

02:29:19.520 I just might share them with people that we didn't get to.

02:29:22.460 Any hierarchy that is unified is made so by the dominion of a superordinate principle.

02:29:28.160 So something has to bring everything together and has to be at the top to unite.

02:29:32.340 That principle is most effectively what is common to all that is deemed of comparative

02:29:36.380 or relative value within the hierarchy.

02:29:38.160 So we talked about the commonality between the good, the beautiful, and the true.

02:29:42.060 The common principle of value must necessarily be elevated to the highest place in the hierarchy.

02:29:48.800 Well, that's the abstraction of the good.

02:29:51.720 Maybe it wouldn't matter if it was neoplatonic or the more Christian notion of the logos.

02:29:55.660 And then, this is something that you really influenced me in relationship, that bringing to the

02:30:00.560 highest place is personal subordination.

02:30:04.320 So that's above me and I serve it.

02:30:06.380 Imitation.

02:30:07.380 I want to become that.

02:30:08.380 Faith.

02:30:09.380 I believe that that principle prevails.

02:30:11.380 Celebration, which is it's worthy of, what would you say?

02:30:16.560 There's joy in relationship to the recognition of its superordinate place.

02:30:21.800 Adulation, a variant of that.

02:30:23.560 And worship, which is sort of maybe…

02:30:25.560 Worship is what combines all of those.

02:30:27.620 And so, those are propositions, which I would like to unpack with you guys.

02:30:31.620 And then there's something that's more specifically Judeo-Christian after that, which I won't

02:30:35.580 get into now because I think it would be a distraction.

02:30:38.300 So, well…

02:30:39.620 That was a great conversation.

02:30:42.620 I'll come to Toronto any time for this.

02:30:44.620 That's great.

02:30:45.620 Well, I think we should think about doing it again.

02:30:50.620 Well, we'll start halfway through and see if we can get to the end.

02:30:53.440 I think that would be very good.

02:30:54.620 Yeah.

02:30:55.620 Well, it's really…

02:30:56.620 See, a lot of what we're doing is we're differentiating the propositions, right?

02:31:01.440 It's like, well, here's the proposition.

02:31:03.440 Here's its complexity.

02:31:04.440 And there's some real utility in just seeing the full complexity, walking through it.

02:31:10.440 I mean, this is also, right, this is also, I think, a genuine act of fellowship or even

02:31:17.100 friendship because the more you do that, the more responsive you can make your argument

02:31:22.940 to people who want to engage with it.

02:31:24.680 Of course.

02:31:25.680 Of course.

02:31:26.680 That's exactly…

02:31:27.680 I mean, we're trying to get to a diverse range of tools that are grounded on something

02:31:32.520 as rock-solid as we can manage.

02:31:34.940 Yeah.

02:31:35.940 Yeah.

02:31:36.940 Thanks for inviting us.

02:31:37.940 Then we don't need a hermeneutics of suspicion.

02:31:39.940 Yeah, that's right.

02:31:40.940 Thank you.

02:31:41.940 That was…

02:31:42.940 Hey, my pleasure, man.

02:31:43.940 I'm so glad you guys could come and that we could be together finally in person.

02:31:46.940 And I think the conversation was a lot more dynamic and deeper than we would have managed

02:31:51.940 on Zoom.

02:31:52.940 On Zoom.

02:31:53.940 Totally.

02:31:54.940 Yeah.

02:31:55.940 I totally agree with that.

02:31:56.940 Yeah.

02:31:57.940 I totally agree.

02:31:58.940 All right.

02:31:59.940 Great.

02:32:00.940 Thanks, Eric.

02:32:01.940 Thank you for all you who are watching and listening and more to follow on many fronts with any luck.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 08, 2022

277. Deeper Yet Into The Weeds ｜ Pageau & Vervaeke

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