The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth ｜ Dr. Stephen Hicks

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00:00:44.560 Today I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Stephen Hicks who's a philosopher

00:00:49.200 with a stellar academic career, very good author.

00:00:55.780 And we talked about, well, we talked about his contributions to Peterson Academy first.

00:01:00.980 He's taught five courses at this new online university that some of you may be aware of

00:01:05.220 and the rest of you should be as far as I'm concerned.

00:01:07.800 He's taught five courses there and we detailed out the structure of the courses.

00:01:14.080 And more importantly and more broadly, I would say,

00:01:17.780 describe the rationale for studying philosophy because he's a professional philosopher as an academic.

00:01:25.780 And so we discussed, well, the importance of a philosophical education.

00:01:30.100 We discussed the nature of the philosophical endeavor over the last three or four hundred years

00:01:35.620 as it shifted from modernism to post-modernism to whatever is dawning in this new age that's emerging.

00:01:43.580 And that constituted the bulk of our conversation.

00:01:48.620 And so if you're interested in that and you should be, and if you're not, you should ask yourself,

00:01:53.460 why then join us?

00:01:56.000 If the answer is no, it's because you're unconsciously under the sway of some skeptical philosopher

00:02:01.000 and maybe you shouldn't be.

00:02:02.480 So join us anyways for that discussion.

00:02:05.640 So, Dr. Hicks, it's good to see you again.

00:02:07.840 A pleasure.

00:02:09.020 Yeah, thank you for coming into Scottsdale today.

00:02:11.160 Oh, yeah.

00:02:11.660 Yeah, much appreciated.

00:02:13.000 So I thought we would start by talking practically a bit about, you've lectured,

00:02:18.720 you've done two lectures for Peterson Academy?

00:02:20.620 I've done five.

00:02:21.520 Two are out.

00:02:22.380 Okay, two are out.

00:02:23.340 You've done five.

00:02:24.140 Excellent.

00:02:24.680 Okay, so run through that a bit.

00:02:27.320 Tell people what you're teaching and what the experience was like

00:02:30.320 and how you understand the mission of this new enterprise,

00:02:35.140 why you got involved, all of that, if you would.

00:02:37.640 Right.

00:02:38.480 Well, I'm a philosopher by training.

00:02:40.460 So my intellectual interest is in what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like.

00:02:50.980 We've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in.

00:02:56.120 And education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries. 0.91

00:03:01.640 So in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies.

00:03:08.560 And obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial.

00:03:12.660 So I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing.

00:03:17.460 I had at my university a Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies as things came on,

00:03:28.660 asking what can be done.

00:03:31.320 Because in many cases, people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or and so forth.

00:03:38.840 So what I'm interested in, though, primarily, though, is the courses that I have taught over the course of many years.

00:03:45.960 Having them in a vehicle that's obviously going to be accessible to more people, but also with better production values and in a way that can't, in some cases, be done even in a good in-person classroom.

00:04:02.260 In philosophy, everything is controversial.

00:04:04.960 A big part of education in life is philosophical education.

00:04:12.460 How many beliefs do I have in my mind?

00:04:14.360 How did they get into my mind in the first place?

00:04:16.540 Where did they come from?

00:04:17.560 What's good for you?

00:04:18.440 What do you like?

00:04:19.240 What are your values?

00:04:20.160 What do you want your life to be?

00:04:22.480 Philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract.

00:04:25.340 Philosophers love their abstractions, their general principles.

00:04:28.320 What we want is to be much more careful.

00:04:31.120 But what happens in politics, economics, business, family, religion is because of philosophical ideas.

00:04:40.480 John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, they were the great geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world.

00:04:50.700 We're philosophers, for goodness sake.

00:04:52.820 What is philosophy all about?

00:04:54.080 It's about a quest for coming to know true reality.

00:04:57.000 Now, my areas of expertise have been modern philosophy and post-modern philosophy.

00:05:13.920 When philosophers and historians, we talk about the modern era, essentially we mean the last 500 years,

00:05:20.200 which has been extraordinarily revolutionary, not only in philosophy, but in how we do religion,

00:05:26.220 how we do science, how we treat women, getting rid of slavery, industrial, all of that stuff.

00:05:31.560 It's been amazing.

00:05:33.840 And philosophy has its fingers in all of those pies and is part of it.

00:05:37.440 So, partly what I'm interested in is the giant names in philosophy, right?

00:05:43.700 And they're all giants for a reason.

00:05:46.220 They're all over the map intellectually, from Descartes to Locke to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, on into the 20th century.

00:05:54.940 What role they have played in making the modern world and then the post-modern world happen,

00:06:01.900 and in some cases, of course, resisting what is going on in modernity and in post-modernity.

00:06:09.240 So, the first two courses that the Academy invited me to teach were on modern philosophy.

00:06:16.240 And essentially, that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the giants,

00:06:20.940 Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, laying a new foundation, overturning medieval philosophy.

00:06:28.920 Medieval philosophy, again, much sophistication there, had been a kind of dominant framework for a millennium.

00:06:37.540 And in very quick time, things transformed themselves in the 1500s, 1600s.

00:06:42.900 All of those intellectual, cultural transformations that we study when we do the history.

00:06:50.240 And that course ends with the death of Nietzsche in 1900.

00:06:54.320 So, essentially, 1500 to 1900, eight lectures, but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically.

00:07:03.220 Because in some cases, the philosophers are ones who make the historical revolution happen as their theoretical ideas are applied.

00:07:12.060 In other cases, the philosophers are responding to what's going on in the culture, what's going on historically,

00:07:19.240 trying to make sense of it and either urge it on or retard it. 0.94

00:07:23.360 The second course picks up in 1900, and it's called Postmodern Philosophy.

00:07:30.320 And the main point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers started to react against, in a very sophisticated way,

00:07:42.120 much of what had happened intellectually in the modern era.

00:07:46.260 And they, in some cases, were radicalizing it, in some cases wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually and culturally in the modern era.

00:07:56.340 And we started to see, in philosophy, a move to a more skeptical, relativized, even kind of the death of philosophy.

00:08:08.160 The sense that philosophy has for millennia tried to answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a culminating fashion.

00:08:15.980 But from their more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self-realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions.

00:08:30.180 So it should, in effect, disintegrate.

00:08:32.660 So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.

00:08:42.120 And here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase,

00:08:47.620 John Dewey and some of the pragmatists, to some extent, Martin Heidegger,

00:08:51.360 and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it.

00:08:58.640 But also, at the same time, since I don't agree with any of them, but I do give them a fair shot.

00:09:05.080 And we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are coming from

00:09:08.580 and why these arguments are so powerful and that we have to take them seriously.

00:09:13.740 Nonetheless, there have been many, as I think of them, philosophers who think the earlier traditions,

00:09:19.980 sometimes the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions still have some bite

00:09:26.220 and can be repackaged for this post-modern era.

00:09:30.000 Some who think the modern...

00:09:31.000 I've probably fallen into that camp as of late.

00:09:33.060 Well, I think to some extent, yes.

00:09:34.780 So you would be an example of that.

00:09:36.540 Others who think the Enlightenment project has been a great success,

00:09:39.900 even though it had some philosophical errors, those can be tweaked as an ongoing scientific project.

00:09:46.040 And so I'm interested in also thinkers like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Philippa Foote,

00:09:52.660 who are not so skeptical.

00:09:54.600 In fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.

00:09:57.800 Right, right, right, right.

00:09:58.540 And the idea at the end of that course is that we have a sense of what the philosophical

00:10:02.840 and philosophically informed intellectual landscape looks at in our time,

00:10:08.380 bringing it right up to current times and characterizing it as, in effect, a three-way debate

00:10:14.840 between the moderns, the pre-moderns, and the post-moderns.

00:10:18.980 And in one sense, we've never lived in better times philosophically

00:10:23.580 because we have self-conscious, articulate, and very able representatives

00:10:28.760 of all of those traditions operating in our generation.

00:10:33.580 So bringing all of that in an eight-lecture series to a hopefully large international audience

00:10:40.660 that can access them online.

00:10:42.620 So that's been my intellectual mission there.

00:10:45.900 Okay, so I'd like to make a case for everybody that's watching and listening

00:10:49.520 for the philosophical enterprise at a practical level.

00:10:54.720 Regardless, in a way, regardless of whether philosophy can address the larger questions of life,

00:11:00.820 and I think you have to be, in some ways, absurdly skeptical to assume axiomatically

00:11:06.060 that the answer to that is no, it's necessary, in my estimation, very necessary,

00:11:12.500 regardless of who you are, to understand the nuances of the thinkers that you describe

00:11:20.940 because unbeknown to you, the thoughts that you think are yours are actually theirs.

00:11:28.320 And so people might wonder what practical use it is to study history.

00:11:34.440 And one answer to that is, if you understand history, maybe you won't be doomed to repeat

00:11:39.080 the more catastrophic elements of it.

00:11:41.520 But with regards to philosophy, if you don't understand the thought of great philosophers,

00:11:47.880 you have no idea that you think the way you do, why you think the way you do,

00:11:53.880 or what the consequences of that might be, right?

00:11:56.540 What is the idea that we're all unconscious exponents of some dead philosopher

00:12:02.400 or some combination of dead philosophers?

00:12:04.800 And so, although we don't understand it, we live within not only the conceptual universe

00:12:10.540 these people have established, but the perceptual universe that they've established, right?

00:12:14.540 That they actually have shaped the way that we see the world at a very profound level.

00:12:19.460 And so, if you don't understand that, then you're a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension.

00:12:25.640 And that, unless you want to be a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension,

00:12:29.220 that's not a very good plan.

00:12:30.980 So, does that seem like a reasonable...

00:12:32.780 No, that's exactly on track.

00:12:34.800 I think a lot of people in our era are more active-minded than people were in previous eras.

00:12:41.740 We have more media, more freedom, more resources to be able to do so.

00:12:45.400 But even the more active-minded people, I think, as you are pointed out,

00:12:49.040 even if you are, to a large extent, independently coming up with ideas,

00:12:53.740 it nonetheless is illuminating, in many cases, to realize that there has been a smart person

00:12:58.080 who thought of that before you, in many cases, in a more sophisticated form

00:13:02.560 and integrated that with other ideas.

00:13:04.440 So, sometimes you can find a thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down.

00:13:10.260 And most of us don't have time to be active intellectuals.

00:13:13.240 We have our full lives.

00:13:15.580 So, anything that we can learn from the philosophers who've thought through these issues

00:13:20.680 can accelerate our process down that road.

00:13:23.760 And then, of course, the other thing is that,

00:13:25.920 to the extent that you don't think about these things,

00:13:28.400 what you are saying, I think, is exactly right.

00:13:30.740 In many cases, we are unconsciously guided in certain directions.

00:13:35.220 Sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure.

00:13:38.260 So, all of the roads and traffic lights and lighting systems and so forth,

00:13:42.820 and we grow up with them, and we're like the fish in the water.

00:13:45.620 We just take it for granted that we're surrounded by these things.

00:13:49.020 And we have automated operating inside a certain kind of infrastructure system.

00:13:53.500 But at the same time, it is illuminating to step back and think that somebody thought through

00:13:58.880 every aspect of that infrastructure system.

00:14:01.380 And in many cases, I'm being directed perhaps in ways that are not healthy.

00:14:06.760 And how can we make that infrastructure system better?

00:14:09.400 That's going to take people who are aware that in many cases,

00:14:12.940 they are being guided by that infrastructure.

00:14:15.880 So, that's a good thing to focus in, I think, too, at the moment.

00:14:20.060 And this is where we could have a discussion about postmodernism and modernism

00:14:25.680 and maybe what comes next.

00:14:27.940 So, let me lay out a couple of propositions for you and tell me what you think about this.

00:14:33.080 This is maybe the nexus of what I was hoping to discuss with you.

00:14:36.700 So, I'll give the postmodernist devils their due to begin with,

00:14:42.100 and you can tell me what your opinion is about that.

00:14:46.120 So, I think that we are on the cusp of a philosophical and maybe a theological revolution.

00:14:53.140 And I think it's in part because the postmodernists identified some of the flaws in enlightenment thinking.

00:15:02.040 And so, the fundamental postmodernist insistence, as far as I can discern,

00:15:10.200 is that we inevitably, we by necessity, see the world through a story.

00:15:16.500 And so, I've been trying to figure out what that means.

00:15:19.540 And the large language model, emergence of the large language models have helped out with that.

00:15:25.740 So, imagine that the, and I want you to correct me if I get any of this wrong,

00:15:32.420 the rationalist presumption is that we do see the world through a framework.

00:15:36.020 The empirist presumption is that we derive our knowledge of the world from a set of,

00:15:40.780 in a sense, self-evident facts that emerge in the domain of perception.

00:15:45.580 But there's a problem with both of those notions is the nature of the rationalist framework isn't

00:15:52.340 precisely specified.

00:15:53.620 And it isn't obvious at all that there's a level of self-evident fact.

00:15:58.580 In fact, I think the data, the scientific data on the neuroscience and the engineering side

00:16:04.720 indicate quite clearly that that's just not the case.

00:16:08.020 That you can't separate perception, let's say, from motivation.

00:16:12.220 You can't separate perception from action because all of your senses are active while they're

00:16:17.800 gathering so-called data.

00:16:19.280 There's no sense data.

00:16:21.740 And so, I've been trying to wrestle with what that means exactly because one possible

00:16:27.000 interpretation of the idea that there's no base level of sense data is a descent into a

00:16:34.460 nihilistic or relativistic morass.

00:16:37.680 And I don't think that's a tenable solution either, not least for motivational and emotional

00:16:43.680 reasons.

00:16:44.600 I think there's a clue to the manner in which this problem might be solved in the fact of

00:16:52.280 the large language models.

00:16:53.760 So, what they essentially do is establish a weighting system between conceptions.

00:17:00.820 So, in the large language models, every word, let's say, is associated with every other

00:17:06.880 word at a certain level of probability.

00:17:09.260 So, if word A appears, there's some probability that word B will come next.

00:17:14.100 And then, if phrase A appears, there's some probability that phrase B will appear.

00:17:19.200 And the same with sentences and the same with paragraphs.

00:17:22.140 And there's literally hundreds of billions of these parameters in those models.

00:17:26.160 And what they've done is map out the weight of data points.

00:17:31.720 So, you know, if there's five facts at hand, and I could, in principle, use those facts to

00:17:37.680 guide my perception and my action, I still have to solve the problem of how I would weight

00:17:42.120 the facts.

00:17:42.980 And you might say, well, you don't have to weight them.

00:17:45.480 And I would say, well, no, that just means you've all weighted them equivalently.

00:17:49.160 There's no, no, if you have more than one thing at hand and you have to combine them in

00:17:53.820 some manner, you have to weight them.

00:17:55.640 There's no option.

00:17:57.040 And you can weight them all one, but that's also a decision and it's arbitrary.

00:18:01.120 And so, instead, even to perceive, we have to weight the facts.

00:18:05.740 And as far as I can tell, a story is a description of the structure that we use to weight the facts.

00:18:13.660 And so, that doesn't mean that the facts, that doesn't mean that our perceptions have

00:18:20.100 no structure and that everything's subjective.

00:18:22.080 But it also doesn't mean that the facts speak for themselves, like the empiricists would

00:18:27.560 insist, or the behaviorists, for that matter, you know, that there's a stimulus and then

00:18:31.820 there's an automatic response or something of that nature.

00:18:34.720 So, I know that's a bit of a scattershot, but I hope you can see what I'm aiming at.

00:18:40.520 And I guess I'm wondering, what do you think of the proposition that we see the world through

00:18:44.920 a story, for example?

00:18:46.040 Hello, everybody.

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00:18:59.060 Now, the postmodern types and the neo-Marxists, they think the story is one of power, and that

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00:19:05.640 The fundamental rock upon which true civilization is built is encapsulated in the biblical stories.

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00:20:46.360 All right, already we're into heavy-duty epistemology, neuroscience, history, psychology,

00:20:54.460 value sets, including motivation issues, and so on.

00:20:57.580 Okay, so, right.

00:21:00.400 Just hold on to that for a moment.

00:21:02.740 All right, so I'm going to say you're right.

00:21:05.540 Traditional empiricism has had problems.

00:21:07.680 Traditional rationalism has had problems.

00:21:11.140 And that we cannot accept in post-analysis, sort out all of the elements, and that's a big part of what the scientific project goes on.

00:21:20.160 But let me start by defending the empiricist for a moment.

00:21:22.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:22.840 So, what I just did on the table.

00:21:24.240 Yeah.

00:21:24.660 Right, shocking.

00:21:26.220 Was that Johnson who kicked the stone?

00:21:28.320 Okay.

00:21:29.320 G.E. Moore.

00:21:30.400 Moore, okay.

00:21:31.000 Yeah, but also, yeah, earlier when he was talking about the idealism.

00:21:34.200 I refute you thus, isn't that?

00:21:35.820 Yeah, that's right.

00:21:36.420 Yeah.

00:21:36.620 Right, which is, it's in the right track, but still too naive.

00:21:40.320 Okay.

00:21:40.720 But just reflect on that experience if we start to try to defend the empiricist for a moment.

00:21:45.680 So, I smacked the table completely out of the blue.

00:21:48.140 But for anybody who's listening, right, or watching, that was sense data.

00:21:53.820 You had no motivational set.

00:21:55.580 You had no story in mind.

00:21:58.380 You had no behavioral preconditions to set for you.

00:22:02.660 There was an experience, and you were aware of the experience.

00:22:05.700 Now, what you then go on to do with that experience is going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing.

00:22:11.760 And all of the things that you are laying out are exactly right.

00:22:15.340 So, the empiricist commitment, I think, if it's going to be properly done, has to be that there are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that ultimately, when we get all of the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do this in laboratories where we have isolated all of the variables, there is a residual direct contact with empirical reality.

00:22:38.120 Right, something that's outside the subject.

00:22:39.560 No, but even there, the language becomes very important because we don't want to say that it's subjective, at least as philosophers use the term, because that then is to say it's not in relationship to what is out there.

00:22:53.360 So, again, we have to get into the technical epistemology very carefully.

00:22:59.080 When philosophers talk about the subjective, sometimes they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side.

00:23:04.880 But if we were doing epistemology or knowledge, then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is, is set by the subject.

00:23:15.960 And the external reality has nothing to do with it, the opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model, where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it, and said just reality smacks that person in the face, and as you put it, the story doesn't need to be told.

00:23:33.360 It wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is.

00:23:36.960 What I think is the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those.

00:23:44.400 So, we have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality.

00:23:49.440 It's an inherently relational phenomenon.

00:23:53.540 And you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality.

00:24:00.040 What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject is involved, then there's no way for us to be aware of reality.

00:24:10.040 They retreat to some sort of representationalist model or they start going internal, and then they start talking about motivations and theory laden and other beliefs that you have.

00:24:19.940 And once you make that divide, there is no way to get out of the subject and back to reality.

00:24:26.440 On the other hand, if you try to react to that and say the subject can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge, then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject, right?

00:24:38.020 To pretend the subject doesn't exist, to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject.

00:24:50.980 But that also is an impossible model.

00:24:53.280 So, what I want to say is the empiricist commitment, and historically, the empiricists have struggled to work this out.

00:25:00.760 This is the ongoing project.

00:25:03.860 In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem.

00:25:12.800 And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism, centuries later, is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models.

00:25:25.740 So, what I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else, no matter how sophisticated it starts.

00:25:44.780 But that, as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind.

00:25:50.760 You can't do the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to the other, to reality, rather.

00:26:07.760 And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon, and that's a philosophy of mind claim.

00:26:16.500 So, let's talk...

00:26:18.000 Let me just say, it's not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality.

00:26:21.440 It's not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself.

00:26:28.460 It's a response mechanism, and all of these other things have to come out of that.

00:26:32.400 Let me just say one more thing.

00:26:33.460 Yeah, I think we talk a lot about epistemology, and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project.

00:26:42.160 And I think that's fine to...

00:26:44.200 You should define that for people, epistemology.

00:26:46.100 The theory of knowledge.

00:26:47.600 So, we try to figure out...

00:26:49.140 So, the ology part is to give an account of something or an explanation of.

00:26:52.200 In this case, it's the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge.

00:26:56.000 When do I really know something?

00:26:57.580 We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around, but there's a difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and...

00:27:03.980 Falsehood.

00:27:04.600 That's right.

00:27:05.300 And just having been conditioned to do certain things.

00:27:07.440 So, how do I really know that I know something?

00:27:10.240 And when should I say that I don't really know something?

00:27:13.220 And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge.

00:27:18.000 And this involves some reflection on sense perception as we're starting to talk about now.

00:27:22.280 A good understanding of language and grammar, logic, and then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do, in some sense, inform us, and we can really learn about the world through story.

00:27:34.400 What's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework?

00:27:38.840 So, we've been thinking through those things very systematically.

00:27:42.380 Now, that, though, is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge, all of that language is epistemological.

00:27:56.020 But I think we can't do epistemology in isolation.

00:28:00.060 We always have to do it in context with metaphysics.

00:28:04.020 That is to say, we have to also be talking about the nature of reality.

00:28:08.180 So, we want to say...

00:28:08.820 So, that's an ontological question.

00:28:09.920 That's right. What's the furniture of the universe, so to speak?

00:28:12.880 What's real and what isn't real?

00:28:14.880 So, the question is, any time I want to say, you know, this is true or this is real or this is a fact, right, or whatever, that's to make a claim about reality.

00:28:24.500 And then the follow-up claim always is, well, how do you know that?

00:28:28.160 So, you're making the claim, but you're also making a justificatory claim.

00:28:31.380 So, reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics.

00:28:42.260 You know, the special sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology.

00:28:46.100 But if we can step back and say, are, for example, space and time features of the universe as a whole?

00:28:53.300 Is the universe eternal or infinite in various dimensions?

00:28:57.220 Does a god exist or not?

00:28:58.880 Those are all metaphysical questions.

00:29:02.960 So, to come back to, and this is just one more point that I wanted to make, is that all of the things that we talk about when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics,

00:29:14.020 all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind, that is to say, what is this thing that we call the mind?

00:29:24.360 And one of the things that early modern philosophy, now this is 1400s, 1500s, on into the 1600s, was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being.

00:29:36.320 And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries, let's say, a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body but also a soul or a physicality plus a spiritual element,

00:29:52.760 that these are two very different metaphysical things, right?

00:29:56.380 One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal.

00:30:00.460 And that they have, you know, different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate destinies.

00:30:07.300 Then, on the metaphysics side, you know, how do those two come together?

00:30:11.720 How do they work together?

00:30:12.860 How do they fit together?

00:30:14.620 What's the proper understanding of those two?

00:30:17.680 But that metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go.

00:30:26.340 So, if you are, say, an empiricist and you want to say, well, we start in, say, the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other.

00:30:39.940 But somehow, I have to get that across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind, which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various things that we think we're going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth.

00:31:03.020 And that metaphysical gulf, if you can't bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you problems epistemologically.

00:31:11.840 And so, one reason why we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later, I think, is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth.

00:31:30.060 It wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends, but at the same time, we were struggling with the metaphysical problem, as I'm thinking of it, the mind-body problem.

00:31:44.560 And once we said, or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are non-physical realities or stories are non-physical realities and they're in a mind and we're conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world, as a non-physical world,

00:32:02.780 it's very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world.

00:32:09.600 So, I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology, it's interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s.

00:32:19.860 And so, we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline, we have the early Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900.

00:32:30.960 And one of the things that they're both trying to do is to say, well, finally, we can start to study the mind scientifically.

00:32:38.560 We can have a science of the mind.

00:32:40.860 But what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the mind somehow didn't fit into nature.

00:32:49.680 It was an extra natural thing.

00:32:51.980 It was a ghost in the machine.

00:32:54.880 And the fitting of the ghost in the machine, we don't have a theory that works this out.

00:32:59.120 And both of them were, of course, reflecting on Darwin and Darwin's more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being,

00:33:08.960 that we're going to see the mind not as a ghost that's in the wet wear or in the biological wear,

00:33:15.300 but as some sort of emergent phenomenon or a bipodic.

00:33:19.000 But it's only when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a machine, to use that metaphor,

00:33:27.780 or a spirit plus a body as two different things, as much more of a naturalist integrit,

00:33:32.520 then we start to think that we can do psychology scientifically.

00:33:37.000 Now, the Freudians and the behaviorists, I think they were both disasters in various ways.

00:33:41.660 And usual.

00:33:42.780 They were genius, but this is, again, the early steps of science.

00:33:46.880 But what they are starting to do, though, is say, we're not going to study the human being.

00:33:53.500 We are going to study the human being as part of the natural world.

00:33:58.600 But notice that this is now into the 1900s, and psychology is a very new science.

00:34:04.540 And this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over, in a sense, by the epistemologists

00:34:11.400 and had worked their way into a very skeptical form.

00:34:14.820 So, my hope is, if we're talking about where the future has to go, psychology has been online for a century now,

00:34:23.600 a little more than a century now.

00:34:25.800 Extraordinarily complex stuff, as we all know, but we're making progress there.

00:34:30.880 But I think it's still early days.

00:34:32.840 And what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology.

00:34:39.380 It has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition, the best from the rationalist tradition, and so on.

00:34:47.020 So, that's my summary story of how we ended up where we are, and why I'm not a thoroughgoing skeptic on any of these issues.

00:34:56.900 I see it as an ongoing scientific project.

00:34:59.600 Well, I think the people that we've brought together on Peterson Academy, too, are at the forefront of that attempt to integrate.

00:35:08.740 And so, that's one of our, you might say, one of our educational themes as we move forward, is to continue that investigation.

00:35:16.220 John Verveke, I would say, is somebody who's on the forefront of that, on the psychological and neuroscience side.

00:35:21.840 So, let's go back to your demonstration of primary sensory input, right?

00:35:27.600 Just hitting the table.

00:35:29.060 So, I'll outline a neuroscience approach to that.

00:35:32.960 So, you know, you might think that you perceive, and then you evaluate, and then you think, and then you act.

00:35:43.580 And that's like the causal chain.

00:35:45.260 But none of that's exactly correct, because even when you're responding to a primary stimulus like that, so to speak, there's a hierarchy of neurological responses that are operating more or less simultaneously.

00:36:03.140 Now, I'd say more or less, because you do have reflexive action.

00:36:06.400 So, I think the simplest way to understand this is to assume that what you're detecting as a consequence of the slap that you delivered to the table is a patterned waveform.

00:36:19.400 Let me just interrupt.

00:36:20.620 Are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it?

00:36:23.860 Because I came in with a pre-intention in that case.

00:36:27.180 Yeah, I was.

00:36:27.640 And yours was a different passive surprise response, right?

00:36:31.840 Let's get to that.

00:36:32.880 Because, well, so, exactly.

00:36:35.160 So, at one level of analysis, it's the same stimulus, let's say, insofar as it's an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a phone recorder or something like that.

00:36:49.040 But then, as you said, the fact that you come to that experience with different expectations colors it.

00:36:55.700 And so, there is a way to think about that.

00:36:57.940 But I think the best way to start to understand it is to think about the pattern.

00:37:03.480 So, there's a waveform pattern that propagates in the air, which is the delivery system, obviously, for the stimulus.

00:37:12.280 And then there's an auditory pattern.

00:37:14.900 Now, when your nervous system receives that pattern, it doesn't go to one point place and then another place and then another place and then another place in a linear progression.

00:37:25.360 There's some of that, but what happens is that the pattern is assessed simultaneously by multiple different levels of the nervous system, right?

00:37:37.720 So, the most primary level would be spinal.

00:37:41.400 And there are very few connections between the auditory system and the spinal response system.

00:37:47.320 And so, for example, if I was on edge or uncertain about you or about this circumstance and you hit the table in that manner unexpectedly, one probable outcome is a startle reflex.

00:38:00.000 And a startle reflex is a variant of a predator response, of a response to predation.

00:38:09.060 And it's basically auditory signal onto spinal cord mapping.

00:38:14.180 And the initial phase of the startle response is, you could say, it's pre-conscious and it's pre-emotional.

00:38:22.900 And the reason it's pre is because the time it takes for the signal to propagate onto the spinal receptors is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to propagate even to the emotions.

00:38:35.420 And you need that.

00:38:36.580 So, for example, if you're walking down a pathway and out of the periphery of your eye, you detect a snake and you have really good snake detectors, especially in the periphery and the bottom part of your vision.

00:38:48.060 It's different in the top part, by the way, because there are more snakes on the ground than there are in trees.

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00:39:38.300 If you take the time to move your eyes, the center of your eyes, so that you can see the snake, and then you evaluate the snake emotionally, by the time you've done that, the snake's already bitten you.

00:39:58.280 It's too long a time, whereas if you use these peripheral receptors that map right onto your spine, you can jump before the snake strikes, hopefully.

00:40:08.420 Cats can do it, by the way, about 10 times as fast.

00:40:11.300 Well, we're pretty good, too, as it turns out.

00:40:13.260 Yeah, but not as fast as cats, but fast enough to often escape from snakes.

00:40:17.820 Nice.

00:40:18.200 And so you get this first-level response that's almost entirely reflexive.

00:40:22.760 That's what the early behaviors were discovering, too, when they were talking about stimulus response.

00:40:27.600 Like, there are somewhat automatic response systems that are very primordial and basic that do almost a one-to-one mapping of sensory pattern onto behavioral output.

00:40:38.480 Very few neural interconnections.

00:40:43.020 And the disadvantage to that is that it's a rather fixed response pattern, and the advantage of is it's super fast.

00:40:49.480 Okay, so now the same pattern propagates up.

00:40:53.780 So imagine the pattern propagates down on your spine, and you can react very quickly.

00:40:57.980 Another part of it propagates into the auditory cortex or the visual cortex, and that's what you see with.

00:41:04.940 And those are actually dissociable.

00:41:07.020 So there are people who have a phenomenon called, condition called blindsight.

00:41:11.480 So if you ask these people if they can see, they tell you no.

00:41:15.640 But they still respond.

00:41:16.660 Well, if you hold up your hand, for example, they can guess with more than 90% accuracy when your hand is up.

00:41:22.400 And it seems to be because it's their visual cortex that's damaged and not their retina.

00:41:29.420 And a lot of the vision pathways into the brain are still intact, but not the one that mediates conscious vision, which is dependent on the visual cortex.

00:41:38.940 Right.

00:41:39.140 But they still have kinetic perception with their eyes.

00:41:43.680 So one of the things I'm doing when I watch you is that I'm picking up where your body is located, and I'm mapping that onto my body.

00:41:51.460 And so if I'm seeing you with blindsight with your hand up like this, I'll have a sensation in my body that corresponds to your body position, and I can read off that.

00:42:02.140 So it's not exactly vision because I'm not seeing you, but it is a form of vision, and it's even more sophisticated than that.

00:42:07.720 So if you take these people with blindsight and you show them faces that are angry or afraid, and you assess their galvanic skin response, which is a change in sweating, basically, that's associated with emotional arousal, they'll respond differentially to emotional faces.

00:42:25.780 Even though they don't know that, that's blindsight, that's part of blindsight.

00:42:29.560 And so when you hear or see something, that pattern is being assessed at multiple levels of a very complex hierarchy, and it's not just bottom-up, because that hierarchy also feeds backwards.

00:42:44.040 So, for example, by the time you're an adult, most of what you see is memory.

00:42:49.660 You just use the sensory input as a hint to pull up the memory.

00:42:53.040 Right. That's also how you get habituated to things.

00:42:56.060 You know, when you see something for the first time, it's got this glow of novelty, this numinous glow of novelty.

00:43:02.340 And what happens is that you, and that's complex and difficult to process.

00:43:07.460 And then as you become accustomed to it, and you build an internal mental model, you replace the perception with memory, because that's faster.

00:43:15.460 The problem is, is that the memory that you see is only the fractional meaning of the phenomena that's relevant to the encounters that you had.

00:43:26.220 It shuts everything off.

00:43:27.740 And at D, what would you say, it takes the magic out of the world.

00:43:31.760 As you replace raw perception with memory, you take the magic out of the world.

00:43:37.320 That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

00:43:38.880 That's why there's a novelty kick, for example.

00:43:41.400 And so, the reason I'm bringing this up is because even that relatively straightforward demonstration that you made, that sound that seems self-evident,

00:43:55.280 it's, you said right off the bat that there was a level at which both of us experienced that quite differently.

00:44:02.800 You experienced it differently because you knew you were going to do it.

00:44:06.220 It came as a surprise to me.

00:44:08.240 That surprise was moderated by the fact that I know you.

00:44:12.800 I know your profession.

00:44:14.280 I know your professional status.

00:44:16.040 I know the purpose of what we're doing here.

00:44:18.340 I know the probability that what I know about you indicates that you would do something that was surprising or dangerous, which is very, very low.

00:44:27.080 So, even though it was unexpected, it's bounded in its significance by all of that knowledge.

00:44:31.560 Exactly.

00:44:31.900 And you might say, well, that's independent of the sense data.

00:44:35.900 But it's not, like, that's a very tricky thing to establish, right?

00:44:39.280 To get that independence, to figure out, well, what's the raw sense data and what's the interpretation?

00:44:45.180 It gets worse than this.

00:44:49.040 You can train dogs to wag their tail when they receive an electric shock.

00:44:53.940 They're happy about it.

00:44:55.680 And so you think electric shock, that's pretty basic sense data.

00:44:58.900 It's like, yeah, yes and no.

00:45:01.020 If you reliably pair a shock, now, it depends on the magnitude of the shock, obviously.

00:45:06.700 So, there are some boundaries around this.

00:45:09.100 But you can train a dog to be excited about the receipt of an electrical shock if you reliably pair it with a food reward.

00:45:16.260 Because the a priori significance of the electric shock might be pain response, right?

00:45:23.600 Indicative of the potential for physiological damage, because that's approximately what pain is.

00:45:28.160 But if you associate it with the receipt of a reward, then it takes on a dopaminergic cast, which means that the shock becomes indicative of the receipt of a reward.

00:45:39.840 And that's a positive emotion phenomena.

00:45:42.560 And it can override the shock.

00:45:44.520 It's also the case that if you take animals like rats that are pretty intelligent, you put them in a cage, they'll deliver electric shocks to themselves randomly just because they're bored.

00:45:54.480 And so they'll, and horses will do that as well.

00:45:56.620 Now, as I said, it's magnitude-dependent.

00:45:59.860 Humans, too.

00:46:00.880 Yeah.

00:46:01.360 Yes, well, of course, people do that.

00:46:03.780 Yeah.

00:46:04.240 People do that par excellence.

00:46:06.580 And so, all of these, it's very difficult to specify a level of analysis where there isn't an interpretive framework simultaneously active as the raw sense data makes itself manifest.

00:46:22.580 Now, I mean, your demonstration was very, what would you say, cut right to the chase, because a sound like that is, you might say, is not subject to an infinite number of interpretations, right?

00:46:37.380 There's something there, but it's always nested.

00:46:40.800 It seems to be that it's nested inside a hierarchy of interpretations, a very high-level hierarchy of interpretations.

00:46:46.760 Let me say, all of that is great.

00:46:48.820 All of it is beautiful.

00:46:50.020 All of that is directly relevant.

00:46:51.440 So, to tie that back into what our philosophical intellectual predicament is now, if we want to say postmodernism as a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project that we're learning more and more that's going to give us a better and better epistemology, all of that is great.

00:47:16.960 So, I'm a kind of empiricist, but what I would say is that everything that you have said was, in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the empiricists.

00:47:30.260 So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth.

00:47:39.560 And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level, but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing project.

00:48:06.860 Right. The other thing I would say, actually, there's two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say, out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves.

00:48:18.260 We are making realist claims. There really was a slap, there really are structured energy patterns, and we really do have in our ears or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy patterns.

00:48:35.860 And all of that, we are making reality claims, and we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being.

00:48:46.940 Some of them, as you say, are operating parallel, they have feedback loops, right, and so forth.

00:48:52.100 I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this, is to say that empiricism only insists that there really is a reality.

00:49:02.040 There's a nexus of contact.

00:49:03.040 Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns, that we are not making up those patterns, and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.

00:49:10.840 Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that, if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond.

00:49:21.500 But they're not making up those structures in reality.

00:49:25.540 So, my nose, for example, has no...

00:49:27.420 Or at least sometimes they're not making them up.

00:49:29.180 Well, okay, but the sometimes comes later.

00:49:32.060 Yeah.

00:49:32.280 Okay, and we can come to that.

00:49:34.320 So, my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there.

00:49:38.420 It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead, rotting things, right?

00:49:45.680 It's just that if I happen to encounter dead, rotting things, then certain chemicals will be laughing, and then my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way.

00:49:56.380 And that's important, whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality, and that takes you down the skeptical world versus...

00:50:08.540 Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example.

00:50:09.920 Right, versus saying that the structures are there, and what we have are just latent reception structures, that if those structures happen to be present, we'll be responsive.

00:50:20.920 And that is all that the empiricists are saying.

00:50:25.120 Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set.

00:50:30.700 I came to the slap with a background set.

00:50:32.600 You came to the slap with a different background set.

00:50:36.280 And we sort of say, what all goes into that background set?

00:50:39.260 That's where philosophy starts to become.

00:50:41.160 Well, no, I think that's where philosophy is important.

00:50:44.700 And we, as philosophers, I think, articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory, and there is something that physiologically goes on.

00:50:53.960 You know, I have a body, and it's all worked out.

00:50:57.360 And that it's going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties.

00:51:04.300 But I think at a very general level, and I think the philosophers have to work hand-in-hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists.

00:51:12.980 Yeah, that's clear.

00:51:13.120 Because, and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy, it's not a very strong complaint, but that they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience.

00:51:28.140 And 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology.

00:51:31.400 So, it's a lot of failed experiments, right, along the way, or failed theories along the way.

00:51:37.600 The other thing, though, I would want to say is, as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues into vices, as I think of it.

00:51:51.900 So, to say, for example, that we have, and then you talk about the base level, you know, the slap happens, or there's something moves low to the ground, and there's a direct, automated, something that you didn't think about, didn't feel about, connection to the spine, and your body reacts in a certain way.

00:52:12.860 I want to say, that's a good thing that has happened to human being, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice, right, or a bad thing.

00:52:29.900 And seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place, that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we're not really responding to reality, and so forth.

00:52:43.600 Or, if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think emotions are positive, they certainly have an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life.

00:52:57.980 And we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them.

00:53:05.540 So, emotions come with pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, it's said, well, we have emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things.

00:53:15.380 The enemy of reason.

00:53:16.320 That's right. And so, yeah, so they're irrational, and we turn something that is a very valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.

00:53:27.880 You know, you see that a little bit with the evolutionary psychologists who claim that because we evolved for a substantial period of time on the African plains,

00:53:43.340 that our emotional and motivational systems are no longer properly adapted to the modern world.

00:53:47.920 It's like, I find that that's a variant of the argument that you just laid out, and that it also has the echoes of that rationalist, some variants of rationalism, that proclamation that emotion is the enemy of reason.

00:54:07.920 It's like, emotions are unbelievably sophisticated.

00:54:10.360 They're low resolution, and they're quick.

00:54:12.320 They're not as quick as, say, spinal reflexes, but they're faster than thought, and they're also broader than thought, and they also enable us to evaluate when we don't have enough information to think.

00:54:24.420 And they have their pitfalls like everything human, because nothing human is omniscient, and so we're going to make errors.

00:54:31.680 But the idea that there's a fundamental antipathy between the emotional, the id, let's say, and the ego, because that's a variant of that psychoanalytic theory,

00:54:41.840 that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nervous system is integrated.

00:54:48.060 So, let me run something else by you.

00:54:51.280 Since we've laid out this, I want to run a proposition by you.

00:54:55.560 And it's sort of a variant of the meme theory, although it takes into account the idea that so-called memes, abstractions, compete across historical and evolutionary times.

00:55:09.900 So, imagine this.

00:55:10.620 This is memes in the Jordan, sorry, in the Dawkins sense.

00:55:13.960 Yeah, yeah.

00:55:14.420 So, imagine that there is this level of sensory input that is as close to corresponding with objective reality as we can manage.

00:55:23.900 And then imagine that that's interpreted within this hierarchical framework that we described.

00:55:29.400 Levels of abstraction that rise up to ineffability, essentially.

00:55:35.920 That would be something like the meaning of the fact that you hit the table in this particular context, right?

00:55:42.140 Okay, so now imagine you've got this.

00:55:44.480 Imagine that every level of that hierarchy and the totality of the hierarchy competes across evolutionary time.

00:55:52.420 So, one way of grounding our thinking in data is to assume that all of what we know emerges from raw sense data.

00:56:03.340 But there's another way of thinking about it, which is that the data is interpreted within a hierarchical framework that's full of feedback loops, right?

00:56:11.380 And there's variant forms of those, those upper level hierarchies.

00:56:15.720 But those forms compete across time and only, and the more successfully they compete across time, the more they become instantiated physiologically.

00:56:27.560 There's, that's a Baldwin effect selection mechanism.

00:56:30.720 The higher order interpretive structures that produce the best reproductive outcome across time are more likely to become automated at a instinctual level.

00:56:41.600 Emotions would be like that, like they're not as automatized as spinal reflexes, but they're quite automatized because the sets of emotions that human beings have are very similar.

00:56:53.100 Anger, fear, surprise, joy, etc.

00:56:56.140 Everyone feels those.

00:56:58.420 When and where is different, but the fact of the emotions is the same.

00:57:01.800 So, then imagine that this is something like the domain of iterable and playable games.

00:57:09.780 So, imagine that there's a variety of different interpretive frameworks that we lay upon more basic sensory data, but that a relatively small subset of those interpretive frameworks has the capacity for sustainable improvement.

00:57:27.800 So, you could think about this, think about this in the context, let's say, of a marital relationship, right?

00:57:32.760 There's a very large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong, like an indefinite number of ways that your marriage can go wrong.

00:57:40.900 But then there's a constrained number of ways that it will go right, and that's because it's a difficult target.

00:57:48.740 Imagine that the specifications are something like, for your marriage to be successful, the micro routines and the macro routines have to be such that.

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00:58:21.500 Anyway, you're voluntarily okay with them, and your wife is voluntarily okay with them, and they bond you more tightly together across time, and this would be the optimal situation.

00:58:35.660 As you lay them out together, they improve.

00:58:38.940 Okay, and so you can imagine that as the basis for an optimized contractual relationship of any form.

00:58:44.300 But then you could also imagine that the number of variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those conditions to be met would be low.

00:58:55.560 There's a very small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across large spans of time that improve as you play them.

00:59:03.980 Okay, so then you'd get an evolutionary pressure as well on the domains of possible philosophy, right, that they'd fill up something like a space.

00:59:14.780 And that seems to me to be reflective.

00:59:17.260 It's weird because that's also reflective of an empirical reality, but it's not the reality that's associated with basic sense data.

00:59:25.440 It's more the fact that there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary playable and that improve, and that's also a fact, right?

00:59:35.840 I mean, and that would be, I think that's partly why there are patterns of ethics that tend to emerge in many different cultures, even independently, right?

00:59:47.140 It's, it's, and that also makes a mockery in some ways of a really radical relativism.

00:59:52.720 It's like, it's not that the value space, the philosophical space isn't relativistic because there's a finite number of interpretive frameworks that actually have anything approximating productive staying power.

01:00:07.480 And that is reflective of something like the structure of reality.

01:00:11.300 It's more sophisticated reflection than the basic sense data.

01:00:14.620 And so, see, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm saying this because I'm trying to mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world through a narrative, which I think, I think that's true.

01:00:27.420 I think all the neuroscience data points in that direction.

01:00:30.420 And then you might say, well, any old story goes that it's like, no, just because we see the world through a story doesn't mean that the stories themselves aren't constrained by empirical reality in its most sophisticated sense.

01:00:43.500 And it also doesn't mean that the stories, even though their stories fail to correspond to reality.

01:00:50.500 Okay.

01:00:51.760 That's extraordinarily rich, everything that you're laying out there.

01:00:54.860 Let me just start with one thread to pull.

01:00:57.700 I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative.

01:01:05.480 I understand the attraction of it.

01:01:06.920 I can make a more technical description.

01:01:08.800 No, no, no, no, no.

01:01:09.640 If we just start with that formulation, I think that is, I think that's a dangerous formulation.

01:01:15.400 I do think the postmoderns are on board with that.

01:01:19.420 But notice what it says.

01:01:20.560 It says there's a we, there's a me, and then there's a narrative, and then there's reality out there.

01:01:26.760 And that I have to go through this narrative.

01:01:29.520 Yeah.

01:01:29.880 To get to reality.

01:01:30.260 Like a screen.

01:01:31.360 That's right.

01:01:31.940 And it might be, it might have some chinks in it, it might be opaque, right? 1.00

01:01:36.540 But also what this narrative is, it says it's got a huge amount of stuff built into it, right?

01:01:41.960 All kinds of background expectations and theories and slippery terms, right?

01:01:45.900 And so forth.

01:01:47.120 What I would say is, to use this language, is that narratives are things that we use to see reality if the narrative is true.

01:01:58.180 So sometimes narratives get reality right.

01:02:03.100 Sometimes narratives are wildly on the basis, right?

01:02:06.340 Yeah, that's in keeping with this idea of competition across time.

01:02:09.500 Okay, that's for sure.

01:02:11.260 But rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary, it itself is a tool.

01:02:19.520 It's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in when we are relating to reality.

01:02:27.360 Okay, so that's if we get it right.

01:02:29.380 Okay.

01:02:29.760 But if we mess it up, then it does become something that we try to see reality through and we are, we're in a problematic situation.

01:02:37.240 Okay, so let me reformulate the description.

01:02:40.360 Okay.

01:02:40.640 And then let's see if that rectifies that problem.

01:02:44.620 And then let's see where we can go with that problem because I'll object to your objection and see where that goes.

01:02:50.960 So I would say a narrative is a description of the structure through which we see the world, right?

01:02:57.820 That's a different claim.

01:02:59.700 So because it's not a narrative until I tell it to you.

01:03:03.100 But then you've dropped reality out of the picture.

01:03:05.280 Well, that's exactly why I want to have this discussion because I don't want it.

01:03:11.320 I think it's very dangerous.

01:03:12.860 It's kind of obvious to drop reality out of the situation.

01:03:16.180 But you're right that the danger of the postmodern formulation is, which is that we see the world through a narrative, let's say, is exactly that, is that the reality drops out of the equation.

01:03:27.660 There's nothing but the text, let's say.

01:03:30.040 There we go.

01:03:30.500 Like, if there's a competition between narratives for their functionality, let's say, reproductive and otherwise, that would go some way to addressing that problem because there'd be a Darwinian competition between narrative structures that would prioritize some over others.

01:03:45.960 And so, but the description part, the idea that it's a description is relevant.

01:03:50.400 So imagine that wolves in a pack, at a perceptual level, the wolves distinguish the rank order of the wolf that they're seeing.

01:04:01.100 And they do that extremely rapidly.

01:04:03.520 Highly social animals are unbelievably good at that.

01:04:06.120 And so the story of the dominance, the story of the hierarchy of the wolves is implicit in the perception of the wolves.

01:04:15.820 And if you describe that, it's a story, but it's not a story before it's described.

01:04:22.840 It's whatever a story is before it's described.

01:04:25.140 It seems to me like it's something like the weights in a neural network, returning to that idea, is that there are certain facts, let's say, that present themselves to us that are much more heavily weighted.

01:04:39.840 And that's axiomatic.

01:04:41.780 It's built into the system.

01:04:43.020 And those would be facts, imagine, that evoke emotional response very rapidly.

01:04:48.360 They're weighted, and that weighting has a biological element and a cultural element.

01:04:52.500 That's not a story.

01:04:54.740 But if you describe that, that's what a story is.

01:04:57.360 The scientist who's studying the wolves is creating a story.

01:05:01.620 That's right.

01:05:02.160 No, not creating, I want to say constructing a story.

01:05:04.960 Yes.

01:05:05.280 Or it's a story about something that's not happening, mediated through stories in the wolves.

01:05:09.860 Yes, right.

01:05:10.660 For the wolves, it's a pattern of behavior and a pattern of perception.

01:05:14.220 Yes.

01:05:14.360 It's not a, so imagine this, is when you go to see a movie, you take on the weighting, the value structure of the protagonist.

01:05:25.260 Now, human beings are very good at that.

01:05:26.700 Like, we look at each other's eyes, and we see what people are attending to, and we watch their patterns of attention, and we infer their valuation and their motivation.

01:05:36.740 We're unbelievably good at that.

01:05:38.780 And that's what you're doing when you're going to a movie.

01:05:41.960 We watch how the protagonist prioritizes his attention and his action, what his priorities are.

01:05:48.580 And you infer from that the perceptual structure that, well, that's the question.

01:05:54.940 Does it bring some facts to light and make others irrelevant?

01:05:59.020 And if so, is it a screen?

01:06:00.660 Like, most of the world we don't see.

01:06:03.560 Most of the world is screened out from our perception.

01:06:06.060 Some of that's biomechanical.

01:06:07.420 I can't see behind my head.

01:06:09.080 But some of it is, I'm looking at you, so I can't see the faces of the cameramen right now.

01:06:13.520 Right, so that's a choice that's dependent on my determination of how to focus my attention.

01:06:20.200 Now, the fact that I'm prioritizing you, I can see your face, I'm using the foveal center of my vision, and I can't see these guys because they're in my periphery.

01:06:29.360 That's kind of like a screen, right?

01:06:32.020 The place where it's most open is this central point of vision.

01:06:35.260 Over here, it's obscured, and over here, it's just gone completely.

01:06:38.160 So now, you objected to my characterization because you said, you know, observer, screen, reality, and you didn't like the proposition of the intermediary screen.

01:06:50.160 And I know the screening idea isn't exactly right, but on the counter side, we have this problem.

01:06:56.280 Some things are central to our perception, and other things are peripheral, and that's dependent on our values and our patterns of attention and our actions.

01:07:03.980 So, well, I'm curious about what you think about that.

01:07:06.400 Well, I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the table.

01:07:09.700 They're going to be related.

01:07:10.800 I think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say, an actor on a screen, putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sorts of things.

01:07:21.320 Reading the world.

01:07:22.020 I think that's very extraordinarily complicated.

01:07:24.380 And I think the interesting thing there is going to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how much of that is learned.

01:07:37.320 Because it doesn't seem to be a highly fallible process.

01:07:41.700 Because I know, I just don't want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I've been in social circumstances, and I think I'm pretty savvy about reading people.

01:07:50.700 But I'll be with my wife, and she will say, you know, after we've had a conversation with someone, boy, did you notice how upset that person was about blah, blah, blah.

01:08:00.400 Women and their interpersonal perception. 0.98

01:08:02.440 Well, okay, so there may be, you know, sex, gender differences that are going on, but also at the same time, it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that.

01:08:11.940 So when we say people are very good at that, I think that's true, but we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that.

01:08:23.620 And I think that's going to be a very, very sophisticated story.

01:08:26.820 But then the other example, it takes us back to perceptual cases where you're talking about, are you looking at me or me looking at you?

01:08:35.640 And we're also aware that we're in a room, that there are other people in the room who are filling and so on.

01:08:40.660 But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus on one thing, then it is true that everything else goes.

01:08:50.580 Pales by comparison.

01:08:51.780 Yeah, that's right.

01:08:52.600 And pales is metaphorical.

01:08:54.040 So if we're going to try to then unpack the metaphor, I think we would say we focus and unfocus.

01:09:02.080 And then we can give descriptors of what the state of unfocus is and what the state of focus is.

01:09:08.260 And I would prefer using that language to the language of screen, because screen really is something that is in the way.

01:09:16.880 It's a thing itself.

01:09:18.980 That's another obstacle.

01:09:21.140 So if there's a dressing screen between the two of us and I'm undressing for privacy, the whole idea of the screen is that it's blocking.

01:09:31.180 So the metaphor is too simple.

01:09:32.820 Sorry, that would be different from, and I think a better metaphor would be to say to filter.

01:09:38.740 And I think sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter.

01:09:42.080 They're just attending to some things and not attending to other things.

01:09:46.640 But a filter is different from a screen.

01:09:48.600 Okay, so I have a...

01:09:49.240 And also, but also just to stay on this one issue here, the issue of focus and unfocus, I think, is not, it's not a filter either.

01:09:57.140 I have a metaphor for you.

01:09:58.480 Tell me what you think about this.

01:09:59.940 Well, I've been thinking about this a lot, because I've been studying Old Testament stories.

01:10:04.920 And I think the tabernacle in the Old Testament is a model of perception.

01:10:15.380 Okay, so tell me what you think of this as an analogy.

01:10:19.480 Better than screen and better than filter.

01:10:21.160 Okay, remind me what element of the tabernacle...

01:10:23.520 I will, I will.

01:10:24.340 I'll lay it out.

01:10:25.060 Okay, so the tabernacle, at the center of the tabernacle is the Ark of the Covenant, right?

01:10:31.580 So there's a center point, and it's sacred, okay?

01:10:35.040 And if I remember correctly, in the early ceremonies that were associated with the tabernacle, the high priest was only allowed to go into the Holy of Holies, the center, once a year.

01:10:46.800 So there's a center.

01:10:48.460 Then there's a structure of veils around it.

01:10:51.900 Like, so that there's a center, and then it's veiled, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil.

01:11:01.120 And then outside of that is the community.

01:11:03.880 And so that's the sacred central point of the community, and the center is the, what would you say, the point of focus, the fundamental point of focus, and then the significance of the periphery is proportional to the distance from the center.

01:11:26.980 Now, the reason, there's a variety of reasons that I think this is the right metaphor.

01:11:32.320 It's partly because...

01:11:33.560 So this is a metaphor for what?

01:11:35.600 For object perception.

01:11:37.360 Okay.

01:11:37.840 For any perception, for any perception.

01:11:39.840 It's, so, and here's partly why.

01:11:42.260 So I was referring to the visual system, for example.

01:11:44.700 So the way your visual system is constructed is that at the very center, every cell in the center of your vision is connected to 10,000 neurons at the fundamental level of analysis.

01:11:58.540 Okay.

01:11:58.920 And then each of those 10,000 is associated with 10,000.

01:12:03.200 It spirals up exponentially very rapidly.

01:12:05.320 But the foveal tissue in the center of your vision is very high cost.

01:12:12.080 It takes a lot of neural tissue to process it, and it takes a lot of energy.

01:12:17.960 A lot.

01:12:19.060 If your whole retina was foveal, your head would be like alien sauce.

01:12:25.900 Eagles have two fovea, by the way.

01:12:27.900 They have extremely sharp vision.

01:12:29.280 And so now you're, because high resolution vision is expensive, you can move your eyes and you dart this very high resolution center around.

01:12:40.860 And so every time you move your eyes, and you do that unconsciously because they're always vibrating, and consciously because you can move them, and in consequence of emotion as well.

01:12:50.760 So if you hear a noise off to the side that startles you, you'll look, and that's unconscious.

01:12:54.700 Lots of things direct your visual attention, but everything you look at has a center, dead center, where everything is extremely high resolution.

01:13:03.460 And then it's surrounded by lesser and lesser spheres of resolution until at the periphery, there's nothing.

01:13:11.400 Right.

01:13:11.720 Okay.

01:13:12.040 So like out here, if I just hold my hand steady, I can't see it except as a blur.

01:13:18.860 If I move it, I can see the fingers.

01:13:20.760 So out here, I can detect movement.

01:13:22.440 That's how dinosaurs saw, by the way.

01:13:24.660 Dinosaurs, frogs still, they can't see anything that isn't moving.

01:13:28.040 They have vision like our periphery.

01:13:31.100 So out here, because the tissue in the periphery of my vision isn't very highly innervated, I prioritize movement because my assumption is if it isn't moving, I don't have to pay attention to it.

01:13:45.540 You know, it's a default assumption about what's ignored in the world.

01:13:48.500 And we live in a dynamical environment, yeah.

01:13:50.040 Right, exactly.

01:13:51.020 And so if you're going to prioritize peripheral vision, the priority is if it moves, look at it.

01:13:57.260 Otherwise, ignore it.

01:13:58.380 Yeah.

01:13:58.540 Okay, so every perception has a center and then a gradation of resolution until it fades out into nothing.

01:14:09.520 Yeah.

01:14:09.700 And that tabernacle, as far as I can tell, is a model of the perceptual center.

01:14:19.620 It's a model of the community center as well, but it's a model of perception as such.

01:14:23.640 So that's different than the screen, obviously.

01:14:27.420 Well, you do have these veils that you constructed.

01:14:29.420 That's true, that's true, that's true.

01:14:31.520 And it's, you see, and the veil idea is an interesting one because the perceptions we have in the periphery are nowhere near as intense as the perceptions that we have in the center.

01:14:44.840 And so these perceptions, one way of thinking about them is these perceptions, peripheral perceptions, are veiled out here behind me.

01:14:53.180 They're veiled so intensely you can't even see them, but the veils are graduated.

01:14:58.500 So it's, well, so tell me what you think about that.

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01:15:50.880 Let me try a different, I don't want to use the tabernacle example, I'm not as familiar with it, but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let's say you're walking through,

01:16:00.740 this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, right, at night, and you think it's a slightly dangerous neighborhood, right?

01:16:12.840 And so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can.

01:16:17.300 Yeah.

01:16:17.520 And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field, okay, it's like a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.

01:16:26.100 Yeah, the phenomenologists like that idea.

01:16:28.180 Yes, that's right.

01:16:29.240 And in that case, what I'm trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular, like I might when I'm reading, right, so then I'm using my visual attention and I'm focusing on this particular thing.

01:16:43.820 Or I'm an artist and I'm trying to catch the, do the glint on the eyeball.

01:16:48.440 Yeah.

01:16:48.720 For the finish you got.

01:16:49.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:50.100 So my eyes are wide open and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field.

01:16:57.300 But that I think is co-extensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works is if I am in the bad neighborhood at night and what I'm trying to do is just expand my attention to encompass this whole field.

01:17:13.240 So that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.

01:17:18.460 Okay, so that's a good objection.

01:17:19.760 That's a good objection.

01:17:21.500 I guess I could make that initial analogy more sophisticated because I would say then that the tabernacle structure, center and periphery is characteristic of explored and familiar territory.

01:17:35.660 You're making a case that there's a different perceptual mode in unexplored territory and there is.

01:17:42.060 So birds have a prey eye and a predator eye and the predator eye acts like the painter that you described who's focusing on one thing because you zero in on the thing you're after.

01:17:52.760 The I'm prey eye, so that would be the bird's, the other eye, is scanning in exactly the way that you described, deprioritizing the center, amplifying the input from the periphery.

01:18:07.060 Very interesting, yeah.

01:18:08.040 And that maps onto the hemispheres.

01:18:10.240 So the left hemisphere does the perceptual mapping that you just, this is in right-handed people, the left hemisphere does the focal perception that you describe that's detail-oriented and that deprioritizes the periphery.

01:18:24.120 And the right hemisphere does the opposite.

01:18:26.620 And, you know, that's, I suppose you could say at a biological level, that's because it's eat or be eaten, right, in the most primal possible way.

01:18:34.640 And so there's a perceptual system for things you're going to eat and there's a perceptual system for you might be on the menu.

01:18:41.360 Yeah, exactly.

01:18:41.780 Right, right, right.

01:18:43.100 And, yeah, so that's, see, the thing that's so curious about that and that you just highlighted is that the ceremonies for taking possession of a territory that are anthropologically specified,

01:18:56.440 it's usually driving a stake or a central point, a flag, a standard, a staff into the ground, that signifies camp, right, or it signifies the possession of that territory.

01:19:08.720 That establishes a center with a set of peripheries and with foreignness at the, you know, at the edge of the periphery.

01:19:17.340 And that does establish a certain kind of perception that's associated with security.

01:19:22.220 So the tabernacle style of perception would be the perception that's associated with explored territory.

01:19:26.920 That's exactly right.

01:19:28.620 That's the perception of order.

01:19:31.080 Like order is where the things you want are happening.

01:19:34.520 That's a good way of defining order.

01:19:36.460 And chaos is where you don't know what will happen when you act.

01:19:39.880 And there are two different perceptual mechanisms for those.

01:19:42.620 And so the second one, the danger one, the unexplained one, the foreign territory one, is there's less filtering and there's less specification of center.

01:19:55.620 Because you don't know what's important, right?

01:19:57.240 You're walking through that dangerous neighborhood.

01:19:58.960 It's like you're on alert and you don't know what's insignificant.

01:20:05.500 That's part of being on alert.

01:20:06.820 So there's no identifiable center.

01:20:10.060 And that's a high stress situation.

01:20:12.620 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:13.660 Okay, okay.

01:20:14.600 Now where I think it immediately gets more complicated, and you psychologists know more about this than I do, is even if we stay with those examples, the question about what happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is another dimension that has to cut across.

01:20:30.740 Even if we grant that in both cases, whether I'm focused or whether I'm diffused attention, I'm aware of reality in some direct sense.

01:20:39.440 It is true that if in either of those cases, if I'm the artist focusing on the particular dot, and my child suddenly screams, then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go to attend.

01:20:55.740 Yeah, that's been quite mapped out neurophysiologically, right?

01:20:58.960 The Russians did a very good job of that starting in about 1960.

01:21:03.600 Sokolov was one of them and a woman named Vinogradova, and they were students of a neuropsychologist named Luria.

01:21:10.040 They mapped out what they described as the orienting reflex, and that's exactly what that is.

01:21:14.800 It's like you're focused on a task, and something of pragmatic...

01:21:19.320 Import.

01:21:20.020 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:21.000 Of implicit significance distracts you from your goal, and you do.

01:21:28.260 So there's a hierarchy of gradated responses that are part of that orienting reflex.

01:21:32.660 But then even another interesting case would be you're the artist, and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams, but you've given yourself a signal.

01:21:42.940 I'm angry at my kid right now.

01:21:44.780 He's been a brat. 0.63

01:21:45.840 Yeah. 0.91

01:21:46.040 I'm going to ignore him when he screams.

01:21:47.920 So I'm focusing.

01:21:49.640 Exact same scenario.

01:21:50.860 Kid screams.

01:21:51.780 Yeah.

01:21:52.080 I register it, but my reaction is quite different.

01:21:55.000 I stay focused.

01:21:55.660 Well, that shows you how malleable, even those relatively low-level instinctual responses are.

01:22:01.040 That's right.

01:22:01.380 Because that's going to be a back-feed loop.

01:22:03.540 Yeah, exactly.

01:22:04.300 Exactly.

01:22:04.840 Well, and that's part of the consequence of the higher-order brain centers feeding. 0.87

01:22:09.480 Like, there isn't a primary level of perception that has no top-down modification.

01:22:15.220 It's even the primary visual cortex, say where your fovea meets the visual cortex for the first time, is tremendously innervated by multiple...

01:22:26.160 Well, so here's an example.

01:22:27.460 So when you look at an object, when you look at a pen, for example, let's say that constitutes a visual pattern, it's represented on the retina as a pattern, it's propagated along the nerves, then it branches out.

01:22:41.460 So one of the places that information ends up, quite quickly, is the motor cortex.

01:22:46.940 So when you see almost all the objects that you see in the world, you see because they're definable in terms of the action you take in their presence.

01:22:55.320 So, like, when you see this pen, the grip motion that you would use to use it is directly disinhibited by the sight of the pen.

01:23:06.240 And that's part of the perception.

01:23:07.720 It's not like you see the pen and think about its use.

01:23:10.660 That isn't how it works at all.

01:23:11.960 You see its use directly.

01:23:14.500 And so that's another thing that's very strange about object perception.

01:23:18.460 It's like, you don't actually see objects in the world.

01:23:21.420 What you see are tools and obstacles and, well, then there's all the things you don't see.

01:23:28.880 And the tools and obstacles are defined in relationship to your goal.

01:23:32.080 So, you know, your goal, for example, the example you used is you're not happy with your child.

01:23:38.200 So the goal there has shifted from respond to distress cries.

01:23:43.100 It's shifted from that, which might be the default, right, to certain probability that distress cry is false, right, or manipulative, therefore ignore.

01:23:55.200 Very different interpretive framework, very different social landscape, and capable of modifying even the, almost the base level perception.

01:24:06.400 You'll still hear the cry.

01:24:08.040 I mean, I guess that would be even curious.

01:24:09.840 It's like, if your child is, it's highly probable, if your child is likely to emit distress calls that are false,

01:24:20.500 my suspicions are you'd be less likely to hear that, to actually hear it, not only not to respond to it, right, because you'd have built an inhibitory structure that says,

01:24:32.280 well, despite the instinctual significance of that, it's irrelevant, right, right, highly likely.

01:24:39.240 Yeah, to come back to, like, your pen example and the issue of as sophisticated cognizers, when we are perceiving the world, that we have their use function kind of built into the…

01:24:54.600 The perception.

01:24:55.100 Yeah, I'm going to put that in quotation marks right now.

01:24:57.300 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:58.100 Right, and then the action that's going to be embodied in that use also, in many cases, seems to be built into the perception.

01:25:07.280 I think if we unpack that more, there's still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what is built into the physiological system and the psychological system, right, at birth and how much of it is learned.

01:25:22.500 Because I don't…

01:25:22.900 Definitely.

01:25:23.940 Yeah, because I don't think we want to say that, you know, even in the 21st century, where we come into the world born with kind of a pre-cognized understanding of pens.

01:25:36.740 Right.

01:25:37.540 And how to use pens.

01:25:38.260 We probably have a pre-cognized understanding of tool.

01:25:41.760 I don't even know if we have that.

01:25:43.680 Instead, I think we just, we have a certain physiological structure that, and a certain conceptual structure that's built on that, such that, and it's going to be very flexible and amenable to different environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things, whatever their intrinsic properties, as potential tools.

01:26:03.720 Yeah, well, a lot of that…

01:26:04.720 So, let me just try another example to get to, because I like the earlier movie example and the male-female difference.

01:26:12.060 One thing that comes up in couples is how they learn to be tuned to each other's voices and the sound of their own voice.

01:26:21.360 So, couples who, before they met each other, would go to a loud party and they would be talking to each other.

01:26:28.000 Yeah, that's a really good example.

01:26:28.980 Yeah, that's right.

01:26:29.520 And, you know, there's just noise, and it's a big decibel level, right?

01:26:33.360 But then once they become couples and they have heard each other say their name, say Jordan, Stephen, right, or whatever, they can be in a relatively loud party, separated across the room, right?

01:26:44.960 And the guy's wife says, Stephen, right?

01:26:47.860 And he can pick that out of that incredible…

01:26:50.360 Yeah, exactly.

01:26:51.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:26:51.600 …instrumental of sounds.

01:26:52.480 Yeah.

01:26:52.820 Well, that's what you do if you're in a restaurant that's bustling with conversations.

01:26:57.060 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:26:57.900 What's so remarkable is if you're sitting with someone and there's conversations everywhere, you can tune yourself so that you hear the person that you're sitting beside, you hear them, but then you can turn your attention to a conversation beside you, and it'll prioritize that.

01:27:14.900 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:15.220 Or you can turn your attention to your own thoughts, right?

01:27:17.880 And it is this, and I would say that's something like the imposition of that tabernacle-like structure on that plethora of potential interpretations.

01:27:30.180 That's what the postmodernists would point out.

01:27:32.680 There's an infinite number of potential interpretations in a restaurant that's bustling with conversation.

01:27:38.020 It's like, fair enough, but you prioritize one.

01:27:42.780 That's what it means to pay attention to it, right, is that you prioritize it.

01:27:46.200 You make something a center, you make everything else a periphery, and then you learn to do that automatically, right, with practice.

01:27:53.000 I think maybe the best example of that for literate people is the fact that you can't see a word without reading it, right?

01:27:59.960 Yeah, because you've automated certain…

01:28:01.700 That's right, you've automated it.

01:28:02.820 That's right.

01:28:03.180 Exactly.

01:28:03.640 So that centers now building into the perception.

01:28:05.860 Yeah, what the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right, that we can automate all of these things, and we can learn to detect various things and focus on this, that, and the other thing.

01:28:15.020 All of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives.

01:28:21.400 They turn them into vices.

01:28:22.420 So what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes, in their language, because they've already got an epistemological theory, a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective.

01:28:36.900 And the idea for them then is that somehow, if we were going to be actually aware of reality, and not through this interpretation, we would have to not have any interpretations at all, that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our minds without any intermediary actions.

01:28:55.280 Or what they will then do is to say, you know, I can choose to prioritize this, right, over that in my visual field, they will say, and they're right to say this, that's a value judgment.

01:29:07.600 I think this is more important now, and this is more important over that.

01:29:10.980 But then by the time they start using the words values, they're coming out of very sophisticated negative evaluative theories that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of external reality.

01:29:23.180 Well, maybe it's worse than that.

01:29:24.420 So for both of them, it's on the cognition side and on the evaluative side, that they're deep into subjective territory, and so those then become negative words for them.

01:29:34.580 Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project, just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition.

01:29:45.940 Right, there's all these metaphors of screens and filters and tabernacles and visual fields and so on.

01:29:52.320 And that's where we have to get that sorted out, because if we don't get those foundations correct, then we're going to be messed up.

01:29:58.700 Okay, well, so two things there.

01:30:01.600 So you pointed to the fact that the postmodernist description of the subjective, but tell me what you think about this.

01:30:10.520 See, the postmodern insistence, despite the fact that they claim that there's no uniting metanarrative, which is a specious claim in my estimation,

01:30:18.500 because I don't know where the uniting ends, if everything's a narrative, there's uniting narratives at every level of analysis.

01:30:25.820 But more than that, their proposition, at least implicitly, has been that the narratives that we do utilize are predicated on power.

01:30:35.580 That's part of the reflection of the subjective.

01:30:38.440 It's like, I'm prioritizing in keeping with my desire to exercise power.

01:30:44.940 And by power, I don't mean ability to maneuver in the world.

01:30:47.580 I mean force and compulsion.

01:30:49.040 And that what we have in the postmodern world is a battleground between different claims of power, and that's all there is.

01:30:55.640 I think the weakness in that, first, one weakness is that it's a confession rather than a description.

01:31:02.420 But the other one is that power games are not iterable and productive and improving across time.

01:31:09.660 They're self-defeating.

01:31:11.020 And so you can play a power game, and you can win short-term victories with a power game,

01:31:16.460 but it's not a sustainable, iterable, medium-to-long-term, viable strategy.

01:31:21.560 You know that Franz de Waal, for example, the primatologist, studied chimpanzees.

01:31:25.780 So, you know, we have this trope, and I think it's a consequence of Marxist influence on biologists,

01:31:32.220 that the hierarchies of chimpanzees, for example, which are masculine hierarchies in the main, are predicated on power.

01:31:40.480 You know, the alpha chimp is the most powerful tyrant, and he dominates all the others. 1.00

01:31:44.680 That's why he's reproductively successful.

01:31:47.080 De Waal showed very clearly that there are alphas who use power,

01:31:52.060 but they have short-range, fractious communities, and they're extremely likely to suffer a early, a premature, violent death.

01:32:03.100 Right, so it is a niche in that you can force compliance,

01:32:07.460 but the stable alphas that de Waal studied were the most reciprocal male chimpanzees of the troop.

01:32:17.160 Right.

01:32:17.260 They made the most lasting friendships.

01:32:19.280 And so that's a whole different model of the mediation of attention, let's say, than one that's predicated on power.

01:32:26.920 So do you think it's fair when you're assessing the postmodern corpus, philosophical corpus?

01:32:32.680 You talked about the subjective element.

01:32:34.940 Where do you think the claim that, the postmodern claim that power is essentially the dominant narrative,

01:32:42.080 where do you think that fits in with this claim with regards to subjectivity?

01:32:46.660 Yeah, that's a good question.

01:32:49.160 I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice.

01:32:55.040 I think power properly conceived could be co-extensive with our ability to get stuff done.

01:33:01.220 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:33:02.560 And our cognitive powers, right, if we have a good, healthy epistemology,

01:33:06.660 epistemology, right, should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world.

01:33:13.720 Even cooperatively.

01:33:15.340 That's, yeah, no, that's exactly right.

01:33:18.880 But then, if you, however, are skeptical, if you do start with the epistemology,

01:33:24.800 all of the postmoderns do come out of an epistemological training.

01:33:30.560 It's a striking fact, you know, the big name postmoderns.

01:33:34.980 So we mentioned Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty, right, and the others.

01:33:39.600 They are all PhDs in philosophy.

01:33:42.180 They're all doing heavy duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral level work.

01:33:48.740 And that does come to become the foundation.

01:33:51.920 And because of the time that they are working in, middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy.

01:34:00.760 The revealing theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time.

01:34:05.960 So they came of age.

01:34:07.760 Now, what that then is to say is if you don't think, right, that human beings can know the world as individuals, right,

01:34:15.700 then you don't think of developing your reason, developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for understanding,

01:34:23.580 is the most important thing about human beings.

01:34:26.720 So what then is it to be a human being?

01:34:29.600 And to the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we are going to become closer to chimps.

01:34:36.480 And then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world

01:34:41.440 are going to become more predominant or even lower than chimps, baboons. 1.00

01:34:47.940 Yeah.

01:34:48.260 Who are even less...

01:34:49.320 Yeah, it's more of a baboon model. 1.00

01:34:50.500 Yeah, it might be.

01:34:51.460 But the... 0.91

01:34:52.040 Fractious fascists.

01:34:53.280 So I think this, though, shows the absolute importance, though, of these cognitive issues 0.84

01:34:57.280 that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively.

01:35:00.880 Because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition, that it is efficacious, that

01:35:07.040 it is competent, that our brain, mind is an enormously powerful tool, and if we learn

01:35:12.440 to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as individuals, and socially, we'll

01:35:17.720 start to work out the win-win, positive, some social things.

01:35:21.380 Otherwise, we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kinds of 1.00

01:35:28.480 levels.

01:35:29.280 So then that regression becomes the use of power as the metanarrative that the postmodernists

01:35:37.220 hypothetically abandoned.

01:35:38.520 That's right. 0.87

01:35:38.860 They're all left with it.

01:35:40.700 That's right.

01:35:41.480 That's what they're left with.

01:35:42.180 You're getting rid of human cognitive power as a positive thing.

01:35:47.600 Then you ask, well, what's left?

01:35:49.180 If it's not the case that I think my human cognition, my mind, puts me in touch with reality, and

01:35:55.260 that I can work out reality, and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality, and

01:35:59.640 of course, maybe we're initially focusing on things, we have different frameworks, but

01:36:03.880 that we nonetheless have the cognitive tools to talk about these things, to do the experiments,

01:36:09.280 to, you know, I can visit what you've experienced.

01:36:11.440 To take each other's position.

01:36:12.960 That's right.

01:36:13.340 In service of some higher goal.

01:36:14.920 That's right.

01:36:15.400 And that we can work all of these things out to, in effect, have an agreed upon understanding

01:36:21.120 of the nature of reality.

01:36:23.480 Then, if that's not what's going on, that cognition is about trying to use our minds

01:36:30.100 to understand reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture.

01:36:34.280 And what the postmoderns then do is either say, well, I make up my own reality, that's

01:36:38.800 what's going on here, or some of them are more passive, all of the influences of more

01:36:45.280 environmental deterministic understandings of human beings.

01:36:49.020 What we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment, your

01:36:54.400 social upbringing, right, and so on.

01:36:56.480 So, again, we don't have an autonomous...

01:36:58.320 The dominant patriarchy.

01:36:59.140 Yeah, or there could be any sort of social structure from their perspective.

01:37:05.480 But that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships.

01:37:12.620 It's not me in relation to reality, and other people are part of reality, so I have to work

01:37:17.280 that out, but rather the assumption is that I am inextricably molded by and shaped by my

01:37:25.020 social reality.

01:37:26.960 And so, the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be...

01:37:31.520 And the word there that becomes most important is the power word.

01:37:35.500 It's a kind of social power.

01:37:37.560 So...

01:37:37.880 And that tilts them towards that social construction, isn't it?

01:37:40.140 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

01:37:40.720 Well, yeah, no, it's the social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding

01:37:45.800 of power.

01:37:47.800 But the power for them cannot be the positive sum kind of power that we're talking about,

01:37:54.940 because that understanding of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way

01:38:00.620 the world works and do science and technology and make the world a better place and empower

01:38:04.200 ourselves.

01:38:05.040 We can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful.

01:38:08.540 I can understand that you're a rational person, and you can understand that I'm a rational

01:38:13.240 person, so I have to treat you a certain way, conversationally, socially, and so forth.

01:38:18.720 So, all of the positive sum social stuff is going to come out of that, but the postmoderns

01:38:23.840 have cut all of that away.

01:38:25.600 All you're left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social

01:38:32.920 world that is totally social world.

01:38:34.880 And what they then call power just is the influence or tools, including the tools of language that

01:38:43.400 are now understood as to have nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as being socially

01:38:49.660 constructed themselves.

01:38:50.820 And tools of power.

01:38:52.140 That's right.

01:38:52.600 And so, it becomes then necessarily a zero-sum, socially influencing and controlling game,

01:38:59.840 and they reinterpret everything in terms of that.

01:39:02.060 Okay, so I think what we'll do is stop there.

01:39:07.280 We've come to the end of the time for the YouTube section.

01:39:10.940 I'd like to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side, but what I would like to talk

01:39:16.780 about with you there is power in service of what?

01:39:21.560 Yeah.

01:39:21.980 Right?

01:39:22.220 Because there has to be, unless you, I mean, you could hypothesize that power in itself

01:39:26.580 is a desirable good, but then you have to define power in a way that would make the

01:39:31.160 desirability of itself evident.

01:39:33.400 Alternatively, you have to say that you want power for a reason.

01:39:36.520 So, I want to talk to you about that and get your thoughts on that.

01:39:38.720 That can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses, too.

01:39:41.980 Okay.

01:39:42.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:39:43.180 Yeah.

01:39:43.420 Well, you, that, maybe we can close with that, too.

01:39:45.720 You had, you've taped three additional courses.

01:39:49.060 I've done five courses.

01:39:50.140 Yes, three are in post-production, two are live.

01:39:52.520 Okay, and what are the three that are coming up?

01:39:54.580 One is on modern ethics.

01:39:56.800 So, what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse, more global,

01:40:02.920 more multicultural, and more critical in some ways of traditional models that have come

01:40:07.820 down to us.

01:40:09.040 So, it's a much more wide open world.

01:40:11.880 What's interesting about the modern world is how little we have what I think of as kind

01:40:17.040 of a homogeneous cultures where everybody, by and large, on the same philosophical, religious

01:40:22.000 That's the collapse of that meta-narrative.

01:40:23.620 Yeah, that particular meta went away.

01:40:25.220 And so, we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good, what is bad, what's

01:40:31.000 right, what is wrong, what's the meaning of my life, how should we organize ourselves

01:40:34.920 socially?

01:40:35.400 So, what I did was chose eight completely different but extraordinarily influential modern moral

01:40:48.000 philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them.

01:40:51.680 Okay, okay.

01:40:52.400 So, it goes back to people like David Hume wrestling with the is-ought problem and Immanuel

01:40:59.260 Kant with his strong duty focus, John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, and so on in through

01:41:06.600 the 20th century up to very contemporary times.

01:41:09.680 So, that's one course, modern ethics.

01:41:12.020 And all of these people are giants.

01:41:13.760 They all disagree with each other, but that's the contemporary landscape within which people

01:41:18.060 who are doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves.

01:41:22.180 The other two courses are 16 lectures in total, but it's called The Philosophy of Politics.

01:41:31.180 And here, what I'm interested in is, obviously, we have political science, we have political

01:41:35.780 theory, political ideology, practical day-to-day understandings of politics.

01:41:41.360 But what I'm interested in is the philosophers' contributions to those debates.

01:41:47.180 And one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics,

01:41:53.380 they're not actually disagreeing about politics, they're disagreeing about something more fundamental.

01:41:58.580 I think that's become evident to everyone.

01:42:00.140 That's right.

01:42:00.640 And in many cases, right, it's not, it doesn't get brought to the core.

01:42:04.800 So, I don't want to talk about the recent election, but really it's about culture, right,

01:42:09.400 more fundamentally and not about many particular issues and underlying culture.

01:42:13.380 And both the other courses are dealing with that.

01:42:15.300 Right.

01:42:15.500 So, one, though, picks up with the French Revolution, which is perhaps the landmark event in European

01:42:22.180 or at least continental European history, why that political revolution happened.

01:42:28.500 And there's a lot of philosophy that matters there.

01:42:30.780 But then also an important theoretician, Edmund Burke, and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism

01:42:38.120 in response to that.

01:42:39.800 But then we go through all of the big name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics.

01:42:44.940 So, we go through Hegel and Marx.

01:42:48.000 And as we get into the 20th century, we talk about the fascists, Mussolini and Gentile, 0.55

01:42:53.200 who was a PhD in philosophy.

01:42:55.540 And Heidegger and the National Socialists, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes.

01:42:59.920 And that one ends with World War II.

01:43:03.440 So, French Revolution to the World War II.

01:43:05.840 The next course picks up at the end of World War II in the Cold War.

01:43:11.000 And it starts with Rand and Robert Nozick.

01:43:15.320 At the height of the Cold War, how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context?

01:43:21.860 So, it starts with them, goes on to John Rawls.

01:43:28.020 We also talk about James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for Public Choice Economics.

01:43:34.740 We also do some international, because we're living in a global society, that cliche and so on.

01:43:41.540 But the Islamist revolutions and the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher, Saeed Kutba,

01:43:48.860 whose brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden, extraordinarily influential.

01:43:54.960 Ayatollah Khomeini had Kutba's works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.

01:44:01.680 We go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugan in that framework as well.

01:44:10.180 And then we end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism, Roger Scruton's meaning of conservatism,

01:44:18.120 which came out a few years before he died.

01:44:20.900 So, the idea here is to say these are the big name political theories you need to know,

01:44:26.800 but they're all big name ones because they have a philosophical bite behind them by some very deep people

01:44:33.700 and integrating that with the history in each case, how some of them are urging history in a certain direction

01:44:39.940 or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the Cold War or the attacks in 9-11.

01:44:48.840 So, if people watch all the courses that you have offered, so all five of them,

01:44:57.880 they're going to get a pretty decent overview of the major thinkers of the last 500 years

01:45:04.460 in the philosophical, ethical, and political realms.

01:45:07.260 That's my ambition.

01:45:07.740 Yeah, that's a good deal. That's a good deal.

01:45:10.080 I want to watch those courses.

01:45:11.760 There's lots of things that you're lecturing about that I don't know about.

01:45:14.780 I'd like to know the nuances. I'd like to know the details.

01:45:17.400 Thanks.

01:45:17.840 So, yeah, so I'm very much looking forward to that.

01:45:20.520 So, well, thank you very much for coming to Scottsdale today.

01:45:22.980 A real pleasure.

01:45:24.080 Yeah, it's great. And it's great to have you on board on Peterson Academy, too.

01:45:27.440 So, it's good.

01:45:27.960 And I think we'll talk, too, on the Daily Wire side a little bit about the perils, pitfalls,

01:45:32.620 and opportunities of online, highly produced online education,

01:45:36.560 because I'd like to get some of your opinions about that, too.

01:45:38.760 Sure enough.

01:45:39.160 All right, so we'll do that. Thank you very much, sir.

01:45:41.040 Oh, I should give this to you, too.

01:45:42.940 Okay.

01:45:43.160 So, yeah, this is my new book, which is coming out on the 19th.

01:45:46.220 And so, we wrestle with God.

01:45:48.380 And so, I'm making a case in this book, fundamentally, that, well, we talked about the relationship

01:45:55.660 between story and perception.

01:45:57.000 But I'm trying to explain, in this book, why the notion of sacrifice is the central story

01:46:03.500 in the biblical corpus, making the case that sacrifice is equivalent to work,

01:46:10.000 and that sacrifice is, by necessity, the foundation of the community,

01:46:14.200 that those two things are so tightly associated that they're equivalent.

01:46:19.980 There's no difference between sacrifice and community.

01:46:22.280 They're the same thing.

01:46:23.020 So, anyways, I'd like to give that to you.

01:46:24.860 All right. I will dive into it. Thanks, man.

01:46:26.020 Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd certainly be interested in your thoughts on it, as well.

01:46:30.040 And so, it's coming out very soon.

01:46:31.660 And I tried to make sure that everything that I wrote in it was, hopefully, justifiably,

01:46:38.560 theologically, and traditionally, but also scientifically.

01:46:41.160 Like, I wanted the stories to make sense at both levels of analysis at the same time.

01:46:45.420 So, you know, that's a tight triangulation, so to speak, but, and who knows if it's successful,

01:46:52.080 but that was the rule of thumb.

01:46:54.080 So, anyways, very good to talk to you today.

01:46:56.120 Real pleasure.

01:46:56.620 So, yeah, and I'm looking forward to our continued collaboration on the Peterson Academy side.

01:47:01.260 Me too.

01:47:01.760 All right. So, all of you watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:47:05.300 We're going to talk about two things.

01:47:06.600 We're going to talk about the practical and hypothetical future of online education,

01:47:11.760 and we're going to talk about the relationship.

01:47:14.020 What would you say?

01:47:15.300 The value of power from the postmodern perspective.

01:47:19.420 Why would people be interested in power?

01:47:21.700 You might think that's self-evident, but lots of things that appear self-evident aren't at all

01:47:26.920 on more detailed analysis.

01:47:29.000 So, you can join us for another half an hour of that discussion, if you would.

01:47:33.120 Thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today and my producer, Joy Holm, for putting this together.

01:47:38.240 She's been working extremely hard on the set side and the production side,

01:47:42.480 and, you know, the podcast is improving in quality quite dramatically in consequence.

01:47:46.940 We've got all sorts of new things lined up for you in the very near future.

01:47:50.640 There'll be some announcements on that front very soon.

01:47:53.520 Thank you very much for your time and attention today.

01:47:55.460 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 25, 2024

501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth ｜ Dr. Stephen Hicks

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