The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:14.760 Today, I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who's a philosopher with a stellar academic career, a very good author.

00:00:39.220 And we talked about, well, we talked about his contributions to Peterson Academy first.

00:00:45.240 He's taught five courses at this new online university that some of you may be aware of, and the rest of you should be, as far as I'm concerned.

00:00:51.980 He's taught five courses there, and we detailed out the structure of the courses.

00:00:57.760 And, more importantly and more broadly, I would say, described the rationale for studying philosophy, because he's a professional philosopher as an academic.

00:01:09.620 And so, we discussed, well, the importance of a philosophical education.

00:01:14.700 We discussed the nature of the philosophical endeavor over the last three or four hundred years as it shifted from modernism to postmodernism to whatever is dawning in this new age that's emerging.

00:01:28.500 And that constituted the bulk of our conversation.

00:01:32.880 And so, if you're interested in that, and you should be, and if you're not, you should ask yourself, why, then join us.

00:01:40.580 If the answer is no, it's because you're unconsciously under the sway of some skeptical philosopher, and maybe you shouldn't be.

00:01:46.820 So, join us, anyways, for that discussion.

00:01:49.960 So, Dr. Hicks, it's good to see you again.

00:01:52.100 A pleasure.

00:01:53.300 Yeah, thank you for coming into Scottsdale today.

00:01:55.440 Oh, yeah.

00:01:55.840 Yeah, much appreciated.

00:01:56.960 So, I thought we would start by talking practically a bit about, you've lectured, you've done two lectures for Peterson Academy?

00:02:04.900 I've done five, two are out.

00:02:06.640 Okay, two are out, you've done five, excellent.

00:02:08.960 Okay, so, run through that a bit, tell people what you're teaching, and what the experience was like, and how you understand the mission of this new enterprise.

00:02:19.340 Why you got involved, all of that, if you would.

00:02:21.780 Right, well, I'm a philosopher by training, so my intellectual interest is in what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like.

00:02:35.240 Now, we've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in, and education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries.

00:02:45.620 So, in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies, and obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial.

00:02:56.940 So, I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing.

00:03:01.740 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, asking what can be done.

00:03:15.600 Because in many cases, people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or so forth.

00:03:22.980 So, what I'm interested in, though, primarily, though, is the courses that I have taught over the course of many years.

00:03:30.960 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.

00:03:45.740 In philosophy, everything is controversial.

00:03:52.400 A big part of education in life is philosophical education.

00:03:56.720 How many beliefs do I have in my mind?

00:03:58.640 How did they get into my mind in the first place?

00:04:00.800 Where did they come from?

00:04:01.840 What's good for you?

00:04:02.700 What do you like?

00:04:03.500 What are your values?

00:04:04.440 What do you want your life to be?

00:04:06.800 Philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract.

00:04:09.620 Philosophers love their abstractions, their general principles.

00:04:12.580 What we want is to be much more careful.

00:04:15.400 But what happens in politics, economics, business, family, religion is because of philosophical ideas.

00:04:24.760 John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, they were the great geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world.

00:04:34.980 We're philosophers, for goodness sake.

00:04:37.120 What is philosophy all about?

00:04:38.360 It's about a quest for coming to know true reality.

00:04:42.580 Now, my areas of expertise have been modern philosophy and post-modern philosophy.

00:04:57.940 When philosophers and historians, we talk about the modern era, essentially we mean the last 500 years, which has been extraordinarily revolutionary, not only in philosophy, but in how we do religion, how we do science, how we treat women.

00:05:12.560 rapidly established, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat people, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women with the women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women, how we treat women cell dealers to how we treat women, how we treat women.

00:05:29.800 a reason. They're all over the map intellectually, from Descartes to Locke to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche,

00:05:36.940 on into the 20th century. What role they have played in making the modern world and then the

00:05:44.820 postmodern world happen, and in some cases, of course, resisting what is going on in modernity

00:05:51.900 and in postmodernity. So, the first two courses that the academy invited me to teach were on

00:05:58.780 modern philosophy, and essentially that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with

00:06:04.240 the giants Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, laying a new foundation, overturning medieval

00:06:12.320 philosophy. Medieval philosophy, again, much sophistication there, had been a kind of

00:06:19.120 dominant framework for a millennium, and in very quick time, things transformed themselves in the

00:06:25.140 1500s, 1600s, all of those intellectual, cultural transformations that we study when we do the

00:06:33.980 history, and that course ends with the death of Nietzsche in 1900. So, essentially, 1500 to 1900,

00:06:41.540 eight lectures, but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically,

00:06:47.780 because in some cases, the philosophers are ones who make the historical revolution happen,

00:06:52.920 as their theoretical ideas are applied. In other cases, the philosophers are responding to what's

00:07:00.340 going on in the culture, what's going on historically, trying to make sense of it and either urge it on

00:07:06.160 or retard it. The second course picks up in 1900, and it's called Postmodern Philosophy, and the main

00:07:16.920 point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers started to react against, in a very

00:07:24.720 sophisticated way, much of what had happened intellectually in the modern era, and they, in some

00:07:32.860 cases, were radicalizing it, in some cases, wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually

00:07:38.800 and culturally in the modern era. And we started to see in philosophy a move to a more skeptical,

00:07:48.520 relativized, even kind of the death of philosophy, the sense that philosophy has for millennia tried to

00:07:55.700 answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a culminating fashion. But from their

00:08:02.420 more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become

00:08:09.440 impotent and self realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions, so it should, in effect,

00:08:16.220 disintegrate. So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.

00:08:25.800 Here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase, John Dewey and some of

00:08:33.140 the pragmatists, to some extent, Martin Heidegger, and various others, culminating then in thinkers like

00:08:39.960 Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it. But also, at the same time, since I don't agree with any of

00:08:46.640 them, but I do give them a fair shot, and we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are

00:08:52.220 coming from, and why these arguments are so, so powerful, and that we, that we have to take them

00:08:57.040 seriously. Nonetheless, there have been many, as I think of them, philosophers who think the earlier

00:09:03.660 traditions, sometimes the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions, still have some bite,

00:09:10.980 and can be repackaged for this postmodern era. Some who think the modern...

00:09:15.220 I've probably fallen into that camp as of late.

00:09:17.340 Well, I think to some extent, yes. Yeah, so you would be an example of that. Others who think the

00:09:21.560 Enlightenment project has been a great success, even though it had some philosophical errors,

00:09:26.640 those can be tweaked as an ongoing scientific project. And so, I'm interested in also thinkers

00:09:33.640 like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Philippa Foote, who are not so skeptical. In fact, they are carrying

00:09:40.100 on the modern Enlightenment tradition. Right, right, right, right. And the idea at the end of that course is

00:09:44.440 that we have a sense of what the philosophical and philosophically informed intellectual landscape

00:09:50.880 looks at in our time, right, bringing it right up to current times, and characterizing it as,

00:09:57.880 in effect, a three-way debate between the moderns, the pre-moderns, and the post-moderns. And

00:10:03.360 in one sense, we've never lived in better times philosophically, because we have self-conscious,

00:10:10.460 articulate, and very able representatives of all of those traditions operating in our generation.

00:10:17.840 So, bringing all of that in an eight-lecture series to a hopefully large international audience that

00:10:25.260 can access them online. So, that's been my intellectual mission there.

00:10:30.160 Okay, so, I'd like to make a case for everybody that's watching and listening for the philosophical

00:10:34.900 enterprise at a practical level. I mean, regardless, in a way, regardless of whether philosophy can

00:10:42.340 address the larger questions of life, and I think you have to be, in some ways, absurdly skeptical to

00:10:48.700 assume axiomatically that the answer to that is no. It's necessary, in my estimation, very necessary,

00:10:56.780 regardless of who you are, to understand the nuances of the thinkers that you describe, because

00:11:05.640 unbeknown to you, the thoughts that you think are yours are actually theirs. And so, people might

00:11:15.280 wonder, you know, what practical use it is to study history. And one answer to that is, if you

00:11:20.800 understand history, maybe you won't be doomed to repeat the more catastrophic elements of it. But

00:11:25.900 with regards to philosophy, if you don't understand the thought of great philosophers, you have no idea

00:11:33.260 why you, that you think the way you do, why you think the way you do, or what the consequences of

00:11:39.340 that might be, right? What is the idea that we're all unconscious exponents of some dead philosopher,

00:11:46.920 or some combination of dead philosophers? And so, we, although we don't understand it, we live within

00:11:52.660 not only the conceptual universe these people have established, but the perceptual universe that

00:11:57.880 they've established, right? That they actually have shaped the way that we see the world at a very

00:12:02.920 profound level. And so, if you don't understand that, then you're a puppet of forces that are beyond

00:12:08.900 your comprehension. And that, unless you want to be a puppet of forces that are beyond your

00:12:13.060 comprehension, that's not a very good plan. So, does that seem like a reasonable?

00:12:17.060 No, that's exactly on track. I think a lot of people in our era are more

00:12:22.520 active-minded than people were in previous eras. We have more media, more freedom, more resources to

00:12:28.600 be able to do so. But even the more active-minded people, I think, as you are pointed out, even if

00:12:33.640 you are, to a large extent, independently coming up with ideas, it nonetheless is illuminating many

00:12:39.840 cases to realize that there has been a smart person who thought of that before you, and in many

00:12:45.040 cases, in a more sophisticated form and integrated that with other ideas. So, sometimes you can find a

00:12:51.040 thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down. And most of us don't have time to be

00:12:56.300 active intellectuals. We have our full lives. So, anything that we can learn from the philosophers

00:13:03.360 who've thought through these issues can accelerate our process down that road. And then, of course,

00:13:08.720 the other thing is that to the extent that you don't think about these things, what you are saying,

00:13:13.960 I think, is exactly right. In many cases, we are unconsciously guided in certain directions.

00:13:19.360 Sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure. So, all of the roads and traffic lights and lighting

00:13:25.460 systems and so forth, and we grow up with them, and we're like the fish in the water. We just take

00:13:30.280 it for granted that we're surrounded by these things. And we have automated operating inside a

00:13:35.820 certain kind of infrastructure system. But at the same time, it is illuminating to step back and think

00:13:41.940 that somebody thought through every aspect of that infrastructure system. And in many cases,

00:13:46.820 I'm being directed, perhaps, in ways that are not healthy. And how can we make that infrastructure

00:13:52.320 system better? That's going to take people who are aware that in many cases, they are being guided

00:13:58.040 by that infrastructure.

00:14:00.160 So, that's a good thing to focus in, I think, too, at the moment. And this is where we could have a

00:14:05.980 discussion about postmodernism and modernism and maybe what comes next. So, let me lay out

00:14:13.360 a couple of propositions for you and tell me what you think about this. This is maybe the nexus of

00:14:19.020 what I was hoping to discuss with you. So, I'll give the postmodernist devils their due to begin

00:14:25.680 with, and you can tell me what your opinion is about that. So, I think that we are on the cusp of a

00:14:34.120 philosophical and maybe a theological revolution. And I think it's in part because the postmodernists

00:14:40.860 identified some of the flaws in enlightenment thinking. And so, the fundamental postmodernist

00:14:51.300 insistence, as far as I can discern, is that we inevitably, we by necessity, see the world

00:14:59.160 through a story. And so, I've been trying to figure out what that means. And the large language model,

00:15:07.120 emergence of the large language models have helped out with that. So, imagine that the, and I want

00:15:14.740 you to correct me if I get any of this wrong, the rationalist presumption is that we do see the world

00:15:19.080 through a framework. The empirist presumption is that we derive our knowledge of the world from a set

00:15:24.020 of, in a sense, self-evident facts that emerge in the domain of perception. But there's a problem with

00:15:31.580 both of those notions, is the nature of the rationalist framework isn't precisely specified.

00:15:37.920 And it isn't obvious at all that there's a level of self-evident fact. In fact, I think the data,

00:15:45.660 the scientific data on the neuroscience and the engineering side, indicate quite clearly that

00:15:50.680 that's just not the case. That you can't separate perception, let's say, from motivation. You can't

00:15:57.080 separate perception from action because all of your senses are active while they're gathering so-called

00:16:03.020 data. There's no sense data. And so, I've been trying to wrestle with what that means exactly

00:16:08.980 because one possible interpretation of the idea that there's no base level of sense data is a descent

00:16:18.260 into a nihilistic or relativistic morass. And I don't think that's a tenable solution either,

00:16:25.980 not least for motivational and emotional reasons. I think there's a clue to the manner in which this

00:16:33.880 problem might be solved in the fact of the large language models. So, what they essentially do

00:16:40.200 is establish a weighting system between conceptions. And so, in the large language models,

00:16:47.220 every word, let's say, is associated with every other word at a certain level of probability.

00:16:52.880 So, if word A appears, there's some probability that word B will come next. And then, if phrase A

00:16:59.540 appears, there's some probability that phrase B will appear. And the same with sentences and the

00:17:05.120 same with paragraphs. And there's literally hundreds of billions of these parameters in those models.

00:17:11.200 And what they've done is map out the weight of data points. So, you know, if there's five facts

00:17:18.480 at hand and I could, in principle, use those facts to guide my perception of my action,

00:17:23.740 I still have to solve the problem of how I would weight the facts. And you might say,

00:17:28.440 well, you don't have to weight them. And I would say, well, no, that just means you've all weighted

00:17:31.940 them equivalently. There's no, no, if you have more than one thing at hand and you have to combine

00:17:37.760 them in some manner, you have to weight them. There's no option. And you can weight them all one,

00:17:42.740 but that's also a decision and it's arbitrary. And so, instead, even to perceive, we have to weight

00:17:49.120 the facts. And as far as I can tell, a story is a description of the structure that we use to weight

00:17:56.580 the facts. And so, that doesn't mean that the facts, that doesn't mean that our perceptions have

00:18:04.380 no structure and that everything's subjective. But it also doesn't mean that the facts speak to

00:18:08.920 themselves, like the empiricists would insist, or the behaviorists, for that matter, you know,

00:18:14.280 that there's a stimulus and then there's an automatic response or something of that nature.

00:18:19.140 So, I know that's a bit of a scattershot, but I hope you can see what I'm aiming at. And I guess

00:18:25.480 I'm wondering, what do you think of the proposition that we see the world through a story, for example?

00:18:31.520 Hello, everybody. So, my wife and I are going back out on tour

00:18:35.740 from my new book, We Who Wrestle With God. I'm going to be walking through a variety of biblical

00:18:42.520 stories. Now, the postmodern types and the neo-Marxists, they think the story is one of

00:18:47.320 power. And that is a dangerous story. The fundamental rock upon which true civilization is built is

00:18:54.540 encapsulated in the biblical stories. And so, I've spent a lot of time trying to understand them.

00:19:00.240 And the point of the tour and the book is to bring whatever understanding I've managed to develop

00:19:05.840 to as wide an audience as possible.

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00:19:39.460 All right. Already we're into heavy-duty epistemology, right? Neuroscience, right? History,

00:19:45.080 psychology, value sets, including motivation issues, and so on. Okay. So, right. Just hold

00:19:53.060 on to that for a moment. All right. So, I'm going to say you're right. Traditional empiricism

00:19:58.420 has had problems. Traditional rationalism has had problems. And that we cannot, except in

00:20:05.480 post-analysis, sort out all of the elements, and that's a big part of what the scientific project

00:20:11.060 goes on. But let me start by defending the empiricist for a moment. Yeah, yeah. So, what I

00:20:15.100 just did on the table. Yeah. Right. Shocking. Was that Johnson who kicked the stone? Okay. G.E. Moore.

00:20:22.280 Moore. Okay. Yeah. But also, yeah, earlier when he was talking about the idea.

00:20:25.900 I refute you thus, isn't that? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Right. Which is, it's in the right

00:20:30.180 track, but still too naive. Okay. But just reflect on that experience if we start to try to defend

00:20:35.860 the empiricist for a moment. So, I smacked the table completely out of the blue. But for anybody

00:20:41.440 who's listening, right, or watching, that was sense data. You had no motivational set. You had no

00:20:48.060 story in mind. You had no behavioral preconditions to set for you. There was an experience.

00:20:55.900 And you were aware of the experience. Now, what you then go on to do with that experience is going

00:21:01.460 to be an extraordinarily complicated thing. And all of the things that you are laying out

00:21:05.580 are exactly right. So, the empiricist commitment, I think, if it's going to be properly done, has to be

00:21:11.940 that there are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that

00:21:17.240 ultimately, when we get all of the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do this in

00:21:21.640 laboratories where we have isolated all of the variables, there is a residual direct contact

00:21:27.760 with empirical reality. Right. Something that's outside this objective.

00:21:31.480 That we can put things to the test. No, but even there, the language becomes very important because

00:21:35.540 we don't want to say that it's subjective, at least as philosophers use the term, because that

00:21:40.080 then is to say it's not in relationship to what is out there. So, again, we have to get into the

00:21:48.400 technical epistemology very carefully. When philosophers talk about the subjective, sometimes

00:21:53.640 they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side. But if we were doing

00:21:57.460 epistemology or knowledge, then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a

00:22:03.840 belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is, is set by the subject. And the external reality has

00:22:10.080 nothing to do with it. The opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model where the subject

00:22:15.840 has absolutely nothing to do with it. Instead, just reality smacks that person in the face. And as you

00:22:22.340 put it, the story doesn't need to be told. It wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is.

00:22:28.820 What I think is the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of

00:22:35.880 those. So, we have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality. It's an inherently

00:22:42.420 relational phenomenon. And you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to

00:22:50.720 the reality. What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject

00:22:57.860 is involved, then there's no way for us to be aware of reality. They retreat to some sort of

00:23:03.220 representationalist model or they start going internal. And then they start talking about

00:23:08.180 motivations and theory ladens and other beliefs that you have. And once you make that divide,

00:23:13.920 there is no way to get out of the subject and back to reality. On the other hand, if you try to react

00:23:20.920 to that and say the subject can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing

00:23:25.080 as knowledge, then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject, right, to pretend the subject

00:23:30.660 doesn't exist, to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or

00:23:36.460 some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject. But that

00:23:43.360 also is an impossible model. So, what I want to say is the empiricist's commitment and historically,

00:23:49.440 the empiricists have struggled to work this out. This is the ongoing project. In the early modern era,

00:23:57.280 I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception. And that was part of the big problem.

00:24:04.860 And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out

00:24:11.520 the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models. So, what I would just say is the

00:24:20.260 first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as

00:24:31.280 the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else, no matter how sophisticated it starts. But that,

00:24:37.580 as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You

00:24:42.760 can't do the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of

00:24:50.200 understanding of the psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to the other,

00:24:57.940 to reality, rather. And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational

00:25:05.040 phenomenon. And that's a philosophy of mind claim. It's not just, let me just say, it's not a shiny

00:25:10.920 mirror that simply reflects reality. It's not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and

00:25:17.560 just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself. It's a response mechanism. And all of these other

00:25:22.700 things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more thing. I think we talk a lot about

00:25:27.140 epistemology and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology,

00:25:32.320 the modern scientific project. And I think that's fine to define that for people. The theory of

00:25:38.820 knowledge. So we try to figure out, so the ology part is to give an account of something or an

00:25:43.340 explanation of, in this case, it's the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge. When do I really

00:25:48.640 know something? We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around, but there's a difference between

00:25:52.320 imagination and fantasy and perception and falsehood. That's right. And just having been conditioned to do

00:25:58.700 certain things. So how do I really know that I know something? And when should I say that I don't

00:26:03.700 really know something? And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good

00:26:08.780 knowledge. And this involves some reflection on sense perception as we're starting to talk about

00:26:13.740 now. A good understanding of language and grammar, logic. And then when we start talking about

00:26:19.320 stories, and we say stories do in some sense inform us and we can really learn about the world through

00:26:25.320 stories, what's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework. So we've been thinking

00:26:31.980 through those things very systematically. Now that, though, is where the language of empiricism and

00:26:39.540 rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge, all of

00:26:45.380 that language is epistemological. But I think we can't do epistemology in isolation. We always have to do it in

00:26:53.040 context with metaphysics. That is to say, we have to also be talking about the nature of reality.

00:27:00.040 So we want to say...

00:27:00.700 So that's an ontological question.

00:27:01.800 That's right. Yeah. What's the furniture of the universe, so to speak? What's real and what isn't

00:27:06.180 real? And then the question... So the question is, anytime I want to say, you know, this is true or this

00:27:10.320 is real or this is a fact, right, or whatever, that's to make a claim about reality. And then the

00:27:16.760 follow-up claim always says, well, how do you know that? So you're making the claim, but you're also

00:27:21.520 making a justificatory claim. So reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about

00:27:29.420 what's true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics. So the special sciences say

00:27:35.280 we're studying physics or chemistry or biology. But if we can step back and say, are, for example,

00:27:41.460 space and time features of the universe as a whole? Is the universe eternal or infinite in various

00:27:48.460 dimensions? Does a god exist or not? Those are all metaphysical questions. So to come back to...

00:27:55.360 And this is just the one more point that I wanted to make is that all of the things that we talk about

00:28:00.460 when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories

00:28:05.160 and statistics, all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind.

00:28:12.260 That is to say, what is this thing that we call the mind? And one of the things that early modern

00:28:18.520 philosophy, now this is 1400s, 1500s, on into the 1600s, was simultaneously struggling with was

00:28:26.480 understanding the human being. And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries,

00:28:34.540 let's say a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body,

00:28:39.460 but also a soul or a physicality plus a spiritual element. And that these are two very different

00:28:46.380 metaphysical things, right? One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal.

00:28:53.140 And that they have, you know, different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate

00:28:58.080 destinies. Then on the metaphysics side, you know, how do those two come together? How do they work

00:29:04.260 together? How do they fit together? What's the proper understanding of those two? But that

00:29:10.120 metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about

00:29:15.780 epistemology right from the get go. So if you are, say, an empiricist, and you want to say, well,

00:29:23.420 we start in, say, the physical world, and I have a physical body with physical senses,

00:29:27.820 and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other. But somehow I have to get that

00:29:34.040 across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual, so that my mind, which I think of as

00:29:41.720 being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various

00:29:48.360 things that we think we're going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth.

00:29:54.900 And that metaphysical gulf, if you can't bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you

00:30:01.440 problems epistemologically. And so one reason why we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later,

00:30:09.740 I think, is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early

00:30:14.700 rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them, like Kant led to problems and so

00:30:21.600 forth. It wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves

00:30:27.000 out and led to dead ends. But at the same time, we were struggling with the metaphysical problem,

00:30:33.800 as I'm thinking of it, the mind-body problem. And once we said, or once we were starting from the

00:30:39.780 perspective that ideas are non-physical realities, or stories are non-physical realities, and they're in

00:30:46.580 a mind, and we're conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world, as a non-physical

00:30:54.120 world, it's very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world.

00:31:01.380 So I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology,

00:31:06.480 it's interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s.

00:31:11.720 And so we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline. We have the early

00:31:18.460 Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900. And one of the things that said

00:31:24.060 they're both trying to do is to say, well, finally, we can start to study the mind scientifically.

00:31:30.440 We can have a science of the mind. But what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the

00:31:38.060 idea that the mind somehow didn't fit into nature. It was an extra natural thing. It was a ghost in the

00:31:45.720 machine. And the fitting of the ghost in the machine, we don't have a theory that works this

00:31:50.640 out. And both of them were, of course, reflecting on Darwin, and Darwin's more robustly naturalistic

00:31:59.060 understanding of the human being that we're going to see the mind not as a ghost that's in the wet

00:32:05.080 where or in the biological where, but as a some sort of emergent phenomenon or a bipodic. But it's

00:32:11.520 only when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a machine, to use that metaphor,

00:32:19.660 or a spirit plus a body as two different things as much more of a naturalist integrit,

00:32:24.380 then we start to think that we can do psychology scientifically. Now, the Freudians and the

00:32:30.200 behaviorists, I think they were both disasters in various ways.

00:32:33.780 And useful.

00:32:34.640 Yeah, they were genius. But this is, again, the early steps of science. But what they are starting

00:32:40.560 to do, though, is say, we're not going to study the human being. We are going to study the human

00:32:46.860 being as part of the natural world. But notice that this is now into the 1900s. And psychology is a

00:32:54.540 very new science. And this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over,

00:33:01.760 in a sense, by the epistemologists and had worked their way into a very skeptical form.

00:33:07.100 So my hope is, if we're talking about where the future has to go, you know, psychology has been

00:33:13.360 online for a century now, a little more than a century now. Extraordinarily complex stuff,

00:33:19.240 as we all know. But we're making progress there. But I think it's still early days. And what the

00:33:25.200 psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology. It has to be an

00:33:31.860 epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition, the best from the rationalist

00:33:37.240 tradition, and so on. So that's my summary story of how we ended up where we are, and why I'm not a

00:33:45.960 thoroughgoing skeptic on any of these issues. I see it as an ongoing scientific project.

00:33:52.640 Well, I think the people that we've brought together on Peterson Academy, too, are at the

00:33:57.340 forefront of that attempt to integrate. And so that's one of our, you might say, one of our

00:34:03.620 educational themes as we move forward is to continue that investigation. John Verveke, I would say,

00:34:09.380 is somebody who's on the forefront of that, on the psychological and neuroscience side.

00:34:13.720 So let's go back to your demonstration of primary sensory input, right? Just hitting the table.

00:34:20.920 So I'll outline a neuroscience approach to that. So, you know, you might think that you perceive,

00:34:29.700 and then you evaluate, and then you think, and then you act. And that's like the causal chain. But

00:34:37.360 none of that's exactly correct. Because even when you're responding to a primary stimulus like that,

00:34:45.280 so to speak, there's a hierarchy of neurological responses that are operating more or less

00:34:53.600 simultaneously. Now, I'd say more or less because you do have reflexive action. So I think the simplest

00:35:00.200 way to understand this is to assume that what you're detecting as a consequence of the slap that

00:35:06.620 you delivered to the table is a patterned waveform. Okay. So let me just interrupt. Are you talking

00:35:12.840 about my experience of that or your experience of it? Because I came in with a pre-intention in that

00:35:18.420 case. Yeah, I was. And yours was a different passive surprise response. Right. Let's get to that.

00:35:24.760 Because, well, so exactly. So at one level of analysis, it's the same stimulus, let's say,

00:35:32.540 insofar as it's an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a phone recorder or

00:35:40.140 something like that. But then, as you said, the fact that you come to that experience with different

00:35:45.980 expectations colors it. And so there is a way to think about that. I think the best way to start to

00:35:52.660 understand it is to think about the pattern. So there's a waveform pattern that propagates

00:35:58.600 in the air, which is the delivery system, obviously, for the stimulus. And then there's an auditory

00:36:05.880 pattern. Now, when your nervous system receives that pattern, it doesn't go to one point place and

00:36:12.860 then another place and then another place and then another place in a linear progression. There's some

00:36:18.220 of that. But what happens is that the pattern is assessed simultaneously by multiple different levels

00:36:27.820 of the nervous system. Right. So the most primary level would be spinal. And there are very few

00:36:35.420 connections between the auditory system and the spinal response system. And so, for example,

00:36:39.960 if I was on edge or uncertain about you or about this circumstance and you hit the table in that

00:36:48.080 manner unexpectedly, one probable outcome is a startle reflex. And a startle reflex is a variant of a

00:36:56.020 predator response. It's of a response to predation. And it's basically auditory signal onto spinal cord

00:37:05.220 mapping. And the initial phase of the startle response is, you could say, it's pre-conscious and

00:37:13.920 it's pre-emotional. And the reason it's pre is because the time it takes for the signal to propagate onto

00:37:21.480 the spinal receptors is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to propagate even to the emotions. And you

00:37:27.760 need that. So, for example, if you're walking down a pathway and out of the periphery of your eye, you detect the

00:37:35.200 snake. And you have really good snake detectors, especially in the periphery and the bottom part

00:37:39.420 of your vision. It's different in the top part, by the way, because there are more snakes on the

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00:38:13.040 code DAILYWIRE at jackarcher.com for 20% off your entire order. If you take the time to move your eyes,

00:38:21.660 the center of your eyes, so that you can see the snake, and then you evaluate the snake emotionally,

00:38:26.580 by the time you've done that, the snake's already bitten you. It's too long a time. Whereas if

00:38:31.920 you use these peripheral receptors that map right onto your spine, you can jump before the snake

00:38:37.540 strikes, hopefully. Cats can do it, by the way, about 10 times as fast. Well, we're pretty good

00:38:42.760 too, as it turns out. Yeah, but not as fast as cats, but fast enough to often escape from snakes.

00:38:48.600 Nice. And so you get this first-level response that's almost entirely reflexive. That's what the

00:38:54.100 early behaviors were discovering too when they were talking about stimulus response. Like there are

00:38:58.980 somewhat automatic response systems that are very primordial and basic that do almost a one-to-one

00:39:06.000 mapping of sensory pattern onto behavioral output. Very few neural interconnections. And the

00:39:14.060 disadvantage to that is that it's a rather fixed response pattern. And the advantage of is it's

00:39:19.500 super fast. Okay, so now the same pattern propagates up. So imagine the pattern propagates down on your

00:39:26.440 spine and you can react very quickly. Another part of it propagates into the auditory cortex or the

00:39:32.340 visual cortex. And that's what you see with. And those are actually dissociable. So there are people

00:39:38.440 who have a phenomenon called, condition called blindsight. So if you ask these people if they can

00:39:44.340 see, they tell you no. But they still respond. Well, if you hold up your hand, for example, they can

00:39:50.360 guess with more than 90% accuracy, which hand is up. And it seems to be because there's, it's their

00:39:56.220 visual cortex that's damaged and not their retina. And a lot of the vision pathways into the brain are

00:40:04.600 still intact, but not the one that mediates conscious vision, which is dependent on the visual

00:40:09.040 cortex. Right. But they still have kinetic perception with their eyes. So one of the things I'm doing when I

00:40:16.040 watch you is that I'm picking up where your body is located and I'm mapping that onto my body. And so

00:40:22.620 if I'm seeing you with blindsight with your hand up like this, I'll have a sensation in my body that

00:40:29.840 corresponds to your body position and I can read off that. So it's not exactly vision because I'm not

00:40:34.620 seeing you, but it is a form of vision. And it's even more sophisticated than that. So if you take these

00:40:39.180 people with blindsight and you show them faces that are angry or afraid and you assess their

00:40:46.260 galvanic skin response, which is a change in sweating, basically, that's associated with

00:40:51.620 emotional arousal, they'll respond differentially to emotional faces, even though they don't know

00:40:57.840 that. That's blindsight. That's part of blindsight. And so when you hear or see something, that pattern

00:41:03.660 is being assessed at multiple levels of a very complex hierarchy. And it's not just bottom up

00:41:10.660 because that hierarchy also feeds backwards. So for example, by the time you're an adult,

00:41:17.180 most of what you see is memory. You just use the sensory input as a hint to pull up the memory.

00:41:24.180 That's also how you get habituated to things. You know, when you see something for the first time,

00:41:28.860 it's got this glow of novelty, this numinous glow of novelty. And what happens is that you,

00:41:35.540 and that's complex and difficult to process. And then as you become accustomed to it and you build

00:41:40.960 an internal mental model, you replace the perception with memory because that's faster.

00:41:46.500 The problem is, is that the memory that you see is only the fractional meaning of the phenomena

00:41:53.920 that's relevant to the encounters that you had. It shuts everything off. And it, what would you say?

00:42:00.600 It takes the magic out of the world. As you replace raw perception with memory, you take the magic out

00:42:07.560 of the world. That's a reasonable way of thinking about it. That's why there's a novelty kick, for example.

00:42:12.120 And so the reason I'm bringing this up is because even that relatively straightforward

00:42:20.480 demonstration that you made, that sound that seems self-evident, it's you said right off the bat that

00:42:29.060 there was a level at which both of us experienced that quite differently. You experienced it differently

00:42:35.180 because you knew you were going to do it. It came as a surprise to me. That surprise was moderated by the

00:42:41.000 fact that I know you. I know your profession. I know your professional status. I know the purpose of

00:42:48.080 what we're doing here. Yeah. I know the probability that what I know about you indicates that you would

00:42:54.540 do something that was surprising or dangerous, which is very, very low. So even though it was

00:42:58.700 unexpected, it's bounded in its significance by all of that knowledge. Exactly. And you might say,

00:43:03.240 well, that's independent of the sense data, but it's not like, that's a very tricky thing to

00:43:09.100 establish, right? To get that independence, to figure out, well, what's the raw sense data and

00:43:14.900 what's the interpretation? It gets worse than this. You can train dogs to wag their tail when

00:43:22.760 they receive an electric shock. They're happy about it. And so you think electric shock, that's

00:43:28.200 pretty basic sense data. It's like, yeah, yes and no. If you reliably pair a shock, now it depends on

00:43:35.420 the magnitude of the shock, obviously. So there are some boundaries around this, but you can train a dog

00:43:41.320 to be excited about the receipt of an electrical shock if you reliably pair it with a food reward.

00:43:47.080 Because the a priori significance of the electric shock might be pain response, right? Indicative of

00:43:55.100 the potential for physiological damage, because that's approximately what pain is. But if you associate

00:44:00.420 it with the receipt of a reward, then it takes on a dopaminergic cast, which means that the shock

00:44:07.720 becomes indicative of the receipt of a reward. And that's a positive emotion phenomena, and it can

00:44:13.840 override the shock. It's also the case that if you take animals like rats that are pretty intelligent,

00:44:19.280 you put them in a cage, they'll deliver electric shocks to themselves randomly just because they're

00:44:24.000 bored. And so they'll, and horses will do that as well. Now, as I said, it's magnitude dependent.

00:44:30.780 Humans too.

00:44:31.260 Yeah. Yes. Well, of course, people do that. People do that par excellence. And so all of

00:44:39.220 these, it's very difficult to specify a level of analysis where there isn't an interpretive

00:44:45.180 framework simultaneously active as the raw sense data makes itself manifest. Now, I mean, your

00:44:55.360 demonstration was very, what would you say? It cut right to the chase because a sound like

00:45:01.240 that is, you might say, is not subject to an infinite number of interpretations, right? There's

00:45:08.380 something there. But it's always nested. It seems to be that it's nested inside a hierarchy of

00:45:14.440 interpretations, a very high level hierarchy of interpretations.

00:45:17.080 Let me say, all of that is great. All of that is beautiful. All of that is directly relevant. So

00:45:22.580 to tie that back into what our philosophical, intellectual predicament is now, if we want to

00:45:30.200 say postmodernism as a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as

00:45:37.420 an active, ongoing project that we're learning more and more, that's going to give us a better

00:45:42.460 and better epistemology. All of that is great. So I'm a kind of empiricist. But what I would say is

00:45:51.340 that everything that you have said was in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the

00:46:00.200 empiricists. So in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be,

00:46:06.300 what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth. And so, so naturally,

00:46:12.840 then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality

00:46:17.420 at a basic level. But then very quickly, they are speculating about what's going on in all of these

00:46:23.900 other areas. And their theories are faulty. And it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead

00:46:30.120 people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing

00:46:36.680 project. The other thing I would say, or actually, there's two other things. One is, you know, as you

00:46:41.820 described the process, you know, you say out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves, we are

00:46:49.420 making realist claims. There really was a slap, there really are structured energy patterns. And we

00:46:55.960 really do have in our ears or in our hands, receptors that are in place that respond to some energy

00:47:03.160 patterns and don't respond to other energy, energy patterns. And all of that, we're making reality

00:47:09.960 claims. And we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system

00:47:16.680 of the human being. Some of them, as you say, are operating parallel, they have feedback loops, right,

00:47:21.880 and so forth. I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this is to say that empiricism only insists that

00:47:30.280 there really is a reality. There's a nexus of contact. Well, there is a reality, and it has these

00:47:35.860 patterns that we're not making up those patterns. And we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.

00:47:41.700 Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that if there are certain structures in

00:47:49.760 reality, they will respond. But they're not making up those structures in reality. So my nose, for example,

00:47:57.920 has no... Or at least sometimes they're not making them up. Well, okay, but the sometimes comes later.

00:48:02.760 Yeah. Okay, and we can come to that. So my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out

00:48:08.960 there. It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead rotting things,

00:48:15.660 right? It's just that if I happen to encounter dead rotting things, then certain chemicals will be

00:48:22.520 and then my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way. That's important. Whether you say

00:48:29.200 what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality, and that takes

00:48:37.840 you down the skeptical world versus... Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example. Right. Versus saying

00:48:41.880 that the structures are there, and what we have are just latent reception structures, that if those

00:48:49.400 structures happen to be present, we'll be responsive. And that thing is all of the empiricists are saying.

00:48:56.060 Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set. I came to the slab with a

00:49:02.640 background set. You came to the slab with a different background set. And we start to say,

00:49:07.520 what all goes into that background set? That's where philosophy starts to be coming from.

00:49:11.880 Well, no, I think that's where philosophy is important. And we, as philosophers, I think,

00:49:17.240 articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory, and there is something that

00:49:22.960 physiologically goes on. You know, I have a body and it's all worked out. And that it's going to

00:49:29.780 articulate the main capacities or the main faculties, but I think at a very general level. And I think

00:49:37.800 the philosophers have to work hand-in-hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists.

00:49:43.720 Yeah, that's clear.

00:49:43.800 Because, and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy, it's not a very strong complaint,

00:49:49.880 but that they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew

00:49:56.580 anything about neuroscience. And 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology. So it's a

00:50:03.240 lot of failed experiments, right, along the way, or failed theories along the way. But the other thing,

00:50:08.880 though, I would want to say is, as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding

00:50:13.360 of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues

00:50:19.860 into vices, as I think of it. So to say, for example, you know, that we have, and then you talk

00:50:27.700 about the base level, you know, there's the slap happens, or you there's something moves low to the

00:50:32.560 ground, and there's a direct, automated, something that you didn't think about, didn't feel about

00:50:39.100 connection to the spine, and your body reacts in a certain way. I want to say that's a good thing

00:50:46.700 that has happened to human being, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses

00:50:53.100 to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice, right, or a bad thing,

00:51:00.940 and seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place,

00:51:06.240 that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we're not really responding

00:51:11.760 to reality, and so forth. Or if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think

00:51:19.200 emotions are positive, they certainly have an important role in our evaluative structure,

00:51:25.660 figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life. And we also know that sometimes

00:51:31.360 we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them. So emotions come with

00:51:37.460 pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, and said, well, we have

00:51:42.580 emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things, so therefore... The enemy of reason.

00:51:47.040 That's right, and so, yeah, that's, so they're irrational, and we turn something that is a very

00:51:51.960 valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.

00:51:58.600 You know, you see that a little bit with the evolutionary psychologists who claim that because

00:52:07.820 we evolved for a substantial period of time on the African plains, that our emotional and

00:52:15.160 motivational systems are no longer properly adapted to the modern world. It's like, I find that,

00:52:21.120 that's a variant of the argument that you just laid out, and that it also has the echoes of that

00:52:30.540 rationalist, some variants of rationalism, that proclamation that emotion is the enemy of reason.

00:52:38.780 It's like, emotions are unbelievably sophisticated. They're low resolution, and they're quick.

00:52:43.020 They're not as quick as, say, spinal reflexes, but they're faster than thought, and they're also

00:52:48.860 broader than thought, and they also enable us to evaluate when we don't have enough information

00:52:54.480 to think, and they have their pitfalls like everything human, because nothing human is

00:53:00.160 omniscient, and so we're going to make errors, but the idea that there's a fundamental antipathy

00:53:06.020 between the emotional, the id, let's say, and the ego, because that's a variant of that psychoanalytic

00:53:12.240 theory, that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nervous system is integrated.

00:53:18.060 So, okay, so let me run something else by you. Since we've laid out this, I want to run a

00:53:24.740 proposition by you, and it's sort of a variant of the meme theory, although it takes into account

00:53:32.620 the idea that so-called memes, abstractions, compete across historical and evolutionary times.

00:53:40.620 So, imagine this.

00:53:41.640 This is memes in the Jordan, sorry, in the Dawkins.

00:53:44.060 Dawkins' sense, yeah. So, imagine that there is this level of sensory input that is as close

00:53:51.060 to corresponding with objective reality as we can manage, and then imagine that that's interpreted

00:53:56.560 within this hierarchical framework that we described. Levels of abstraction that rise up

00:54:04.080 to ineffability, essentially. That would be something like the meaning of the fact that you

00:54:09.720 hit the table in this particular context, right? Okay, so now imagine you've got this,

00:54:15.180 imagine that every level of that hierarchy and the totality of the hierarchy competes across

00:54:22.000 evolutionary time. So, one way of grounding our thinking in data is to assume that all of what we

00:54:31.900 know emerges from raw sense data, but there's another way of thinking about it, which is that

00:54:36.400 the data is interpreted within a hierarchical framework that's full of feedback loops, right?

00:54:42.080 And there's variant forms of those, those upper level hierarchies. But those forms compete across

00:54:48.780 time. And only, and the more successfully they compete across time, the more they become

00:54:55.200 instantiated physiologically. There's, that's a Baldwin effect selection mechanism. The higher order

00:55:02.660 interpretive structures that produce the best reproductive outcome across time are more likely

00:55:07.700 to become automated at a instinctual level. Emotions would be like that. Like, they're not as

00:55:15.020 automatized as spinal reflexes, but they're quite automatized because the sets of emotions that human

00:55:22.280 beings have are very similar. Anger, fear, surprise, joy, etc. Everyone feels those. When and where is

00:55:30.060 different, but the fact of the emotions is the same. So, then imagine that this is something like

00:55:35.260 the domain of iterable and playable games. So, imagine that there's a variety of different

00:55:42.700 interpretive frameworks that we lay upon more basic sensory data, but that a relatively small

00:55:51.760 subset of those interpretive frameworks has the capacity for sustainable improvement.

00:55:58.400 So, you could think about this. Think about this in the context, let's say, of a marital relationship,

00:56:03.200 right? There's a very large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong, like an indefinite number

00:56:09.920 of ways that your marriage can go wrong. But then there's a constrained number of ways that it will go

00:56:15.040 right. And that's because it's a difficult target. Imagine that the specifications are something like,

00:56:21.680 for your marriage to be successful, the micro routines and the macro routines have to be such

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00:57:24.600 You're voluntarily okay with them, and your wife is voluntarily okay with them,

00:57:29.120 and they bond you more tightly together across time, and this would be the optimal situation.

00:57:37.260 As you lay them out together, they improve. Okay, and so you can imagine that as the basis for

00:57:43.320 an optimized contractual relationship of any form. But then you could also imagine that the number of

00:57:49.800 variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those conditions to be met

00:57:54.780 would be low. There's a very small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across

00:58:02.860 large spans of time that improve as you play them. Right. Okay, so then you'd get an evolutionary

00:58:07.760 pressure as well on the domains of possible philosophy, right, that they'd fill up something

00:58:15.640 like a space. And that seems to me to be reflective. It's weird because that's also reflective of an

00:58:21.940 empirical reality, but it's not the reality that's associated with basic sense data.

00:58:27.820 It's more the fact that there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary playable and

00:58:35.660 that improve. And that's also a fact, right? I mean, and that would be, I think that's partly why

00:58:42.040 there are patterns of ethics that tend to emerge in many different cultures, even independently,

00:58:48.760 right? It's, it's, and that also makes a mockery in some ways of a really radical relativism. It's like,

00:58:55.500 it's not that the value space, the philosophical space isn't relativistic because there's a finite

00:59:02.280 number of interpretive frameworks that actually have anything approximating productive staying power.

00:59:09.220 And that is reflective of something like the structure of reality. It's more sophisticated

00:59:14.560 reflection than the basic sense data. And so, see, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm saying this because I'm trying to

00:59:21.780 mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world through a narrative, which I think,

00:59:28.320 I think that's true. I think all the neuroscience data points in that direction. And then you might say,

00:59:33.400 well, any old story goes then. It's like, no, just because we see the world through a story doesn't

00:59:39.160 mean that the stories themselves aren't constrained by empirical reality in its most sophisticated sense.

00:59:45.720 And it also doesn't mean that the stories, even though their stories fail to correspond to reality.

00:59:52.480 Okay. That's extraordinarily rich, everything that you're laying out there. Let me just start with

00:59:58.000 one thread to pull out. I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative.

01:00:07.500 I understand the attraction of it. I can make a more technical description.

01:00:10.980 No, no, no, no. If we just start with that formulation. I think that is, I think that's a

01:00:16.120 dangerous formulation. I do think the postmoderns are on board with that. But notice what it says.

01:00:22.560 It says there's a we, there's a me, and then there's a narrative, and then there's reality out there.

01:00:28.400 And that I have to go through this narrative. Yeah. Like a screen. That's right. And it might be,

01:00:35.200 it might have some chinks in it. It might be opaque. Right. But also what this narrative is,

01:00:40.980 this has got a huge amount of stuff built into it. Right. All kinds of background expectations and

01:00:45.700 theories and slippery terms. Right. And so forth. What I would say is, to use this language,

01:00:51.820 is that narratives are things that we use to see reality, if the narrative is true. So sometimes

01:01:01.800 narratives get reality right. Sometimes narratives are wildly on the basis.

01:01:07.940 Yeah. That's in keeping with this idea of competition across time.

01:01:11.480 Okay. That's for sure. But rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an

01:01:17.500 intermediary, it itself is a tool. It's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in

01:01:26.300 when we are relating to reality. Okay. So that's if we get it right. Okay. So if we mess it up,

01:01:32.680 then it does become something that we try to see reality through, and we are, we're in a problematic

01:01:38.460 situation. Okay. So let me reformulate the description. Okay. And then let's see if that

01:01:43.760 rectifies that problem. And then let's see where we can go with that problem, because I'll object to

01:01:50.720 your objection and see where that goes. So I would say a narrative is a description of the structure

01:01:57.720 through which we see the world. Right. That's a different claim. So, because it's not a narrative

01:02:04.040 until I tell it. But then you've dropped reality out of the picture. Well, that's exactly why I want

01:02:09.200 to have this discussion, because I don't, I don't want it. I think it's very dangerous. It's kind of

01:02:15.560 obvious to drop reality out of the situation. But you're, you're right that the danger of the

01:02:21.480 postmodern formulation is, which is that we see the world through a narrative, let's say, is exactly

01:02:26.000 that, is that the reality drops out of the equation. There's nothing but the text, let's say.

01:02:31.780 Now, like, if there's a competition between narratives for their functionality, let's say,

01:02:38.280 reproductive and otherwise, that would go some way to addressing that problem, because there'd be a

01:02:43.240 Darwinian competition between narrative structures that would prioritize some over others. And so,

01:02:48.280 but the description part, that the idea that it's a description is relevant. So imagine that wolves in

01:02:54.960 a pack, at a perceptual level, the wolves distinguish the rank order of the wolf that they're seeing.

01:03:02.780 And they do that extremely rapidly. Highly social animals are unbelievably good at that.

01:03:07.740 And so, the story of the dominance, the story of the hierarchy of the wolves is implicit in the

01:03:16.640 perception of the wolves. And if you describe that, it's a story, but it's not a story before it's

01:03:24.260 described. It's whatever a story is before it's described. It seems to me like it's something like

01:03:29.660 the weights in a neural network. Returning to that idea is that there are certain facts, let's say,

01:03:37.900 that present themselves to us that are much more heavily weighted. And that's axiomatic. It's built

01:03:44.180 into the system. And those would be facts for, imagine, that evoke emotional response very rapidly.

01:03:50.080 They're weighted. And that weighting has a biological element and a cultural element.

01:03:53.900 Right. Now, that's not a story. But if you describe that, that's what a story is.

01:03:59.340 The scientist who's studying the wolves is creating a story.

01:04:03.600 That's right.

01:04:04.100 No, not a story. I want to say constructing a story.

01:04:06.960 Yes.

01:04:07.260 Or it's a story about something that's not happening, mediated through stories in the wolves.

01:04:11.840 Yes, right. And for the wolves, it's a pattern of behavior and a pattern of perception.

01:04:15.940 Yes.

01:04:16.360 It's not a... So imagine this, is when you go to see a movie, you take on the weighting,

01:04:24.780 the value structure of the protagonist. Now, human beings are very good at that. Like,

01:04:29.160 we look at each other's eyes and we see what people are attending to, and we watch their patterns

01:04:34.400 of attention, and we infer their valuation and their motivation. We're unbelievably good at that.

01:04:40.240 And that's what you're doing when you're going to a movie. We watch how the protagonist prioritizes

01:04:47.260 his attention and his action, what his priorities are. And you infer from that the perceptual structure

01:04:54.080 that, well, that's the question. Does it bring some facts to light and make others irrelevant? And

01:05:01.140 if so, is it a screen? Like, most of the world we don't see. Most of the world is screened out from

01:05:06.960 our perception. Some of that's biomechanical. I can't see behind my head, but some of it is,

01:05:12.120 I'm looking at you, so I can't see the faces of the cameraman right now, right? So that's a choice

01:05:17.760 that's dependent on my determination of how to focus my attention. Now, the fact that I'm prioritizing

01:05:24.020 you, I can see your face, I'm using the foveal center of my vision, and I can't see these guys

01:05:29.360 because they're in my periphery. That's kind of like a screen, right? The place where it's most open

01:05:35.360 is this central point of vision. Over here, it's obscured, and over here, it's just gone completely.

01:05:40.140 So now, you objected to my characterization because you said, you know, observer, screen,

01:05:47.340 reality, and you didn't like the proposition of the intermediary screen. And I know the screening

01:05:53.520 idea isn't exactly right. But on the counter side, we have this problem. Some things are central to our

01:05:59.840 perception, and other things are peripheral. And that's dependent on our values and our patterns

01:06:04.260 of attention and our actions. So, well, I'm curious about what you think about that.

01:06:08.480 Well, I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the table. They're going to be related. I

01:06:12.900 think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say, an actor on a screen,

01:06:19.200 putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sorts of things.

01:06:23.300 Reading the world.

01:06:24.040 I think that's very extraordinarily complicated. And I think the interesting thing there is going

01:06:30.260 to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how

01:06:36.980 much of that is learned, because it does seem to be a highly fallible process. I know, I just don't

01:06:45.440 want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I've been in social circumstances,

01:06:49.840 and I think I'm pretty savvy about reading people. But I'll be with my wife, and she will say,

01:06:55.760 you know, after we've had a conversation with someone, boy, did you notice how upset that person

01:07:00.560 was about blah, blah, blah.

01:07:02.480 Women and their interpersonal perception.

01:07:04.440 Well, okay. So, there may be, you know, sex, gender differences that are going on,

01:07:10.520 but also at the same time, it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that.

01:07:13.980 So, when we say people are very good at that, I think that's true, but we still have to epistemologically

01:07:20.600 unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that. And I think that's

01:07:26.040 going to be a very, very sophisticated story. But then the other example, it takes us back to

01:07:32.300 perceptual cases, where you're talking about, are you looking at me, or me looking at you,

01:07:37.540 and we're also aware that we're in a room, that there are other people in the room who are filling,

01:07:41.560 and so on. But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus, right, on one thing,

01:07:49.540 then it is true that everything else goes...

01:07:52.560 Pales by comparison.

01:07:53.760 Yeah, that's right. And pales is metaphorical. So, if we're not, if we're going to try to then

01:07:59.600 unpack the metaphor, I think we would say, we focus and unfocus. And then we can give descriptors of

01:08:05.940 what the state of unfocus is, and what the state of focus is. And I would prefer using that language

01:08:12.440 to the language of screen, because screen really is something that is in the way. It's a thing

01:08:19.760 itself. That's another obstacle, right? So, if there's a dressing screen between the two of us,

01:08:27.860 and I'm undressing for privacy, right, the whole idea of the screen is that it's blocking.

01:08:33.140 Right, so the metaphor is too simple.

01:08:34.620 Sorry, that would be different from, and I think a better metaphor would be to say,

01:08:39.600 to filter. And I think sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter. They're

01:08:44.260 just attending to some things and not attending to other things. But a filter is different from

01:08:49.900 a screen. And also, but also just to stay on this one issue here, the issue of focus and

01:08:54.540 unfocus, I think, is not, it's not a filter either.

01:08:59.060 I have a metaphor for you. Tell me what you think about this. Well, I've been thinking about

01:09:02.940 this a lot, because I've been studying Old Testament stories. And I think the tabernacle

01:09:10.960 in the Old Testament is a model of perception.

01:09:16.220 Okay, so tell me what you think of this as an analogy. Better than screen and better than filter.

01:09:23.140 Okay, remind me what element of the tabernacle.

01:09:25.500 I will, I will. I'll lay it out. Okay, got it. Good.

01:09:27.140 Okay, so the tabernacle, at the center of the tabernacle is the Ark of the Covenant, right? So

01:09:33.720 there's a center point, and it's sacred. Okay, and if I remember correctly, in the early ceremonies

01:09:40.940 that were associated with the tabernacle, the high priest was only allowed to go into the Holy of

01:09:46.300 Holies, the center, once a year. So there's a center. Then there's a structure of veils around it,

01:09:53.560 like, so that there's a center, and then it's veiled, and then outside of that is another veil,

01:09:59.860 and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil,

01:10:03.300 and then outside of that is the community. And so that's the sacred central point of the community.

01:10:10.520 And the center is the, what would you say, the point of focus, the fundamental point of focus,

01:10:18.560 And then the significance of the periphery is proportional to the distance from the center.

01:10:29.400 Now, there's a variety of reasons that I think this is the right metaphor.

01:10:34.300 It's partly because...

01:10:35.540 So, is this a metaphor for what?

01:10:37.580 For object perception.

01:10:39.340 For any perception.

01:10:40.700 For any perception.

01:10:42.120 And here's partly why.

01:10:44.240 So, I was referring to the visual system, for example.

01:10:46.700 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.

01:11:00.520 Okay?

01:11:00.940 And then each of those 10,000 is associated with 10,000.

01:11:05.260 It spirals up exponentially very rapidly.

01:11:07.460 But the foveal tissue in the center of your vision is very high cost.

01:11:13.120 It takes a lot of neural tissue to process it, and it takes a lot of energy.

01:11:19.960 A lot.

01:11:21.020 If your whole retina was foveal, your head would be like alien sauce.

01:11:27.720 Eagles have two fovea, by the way.

01:11:29.880 They have extremely sharp vision.

01:11:31.260 And so, now, because high-resolution vision is expensive, you can move your eyes, and you dart this very high-resolution center around.

01:11:42.860 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.

01:11:52.660 So, if you hear a noise off to the side that startles you, you'll look, and that's unconscious.

01:11:57.280 Lots of things direct your visual attention, but everything you look at has a center, dead center, where everything is extremely high-resolution.

01:12:05.420 And then it's surrounded by lesser and lesser spheres of resolution, until at the periphery, there's nothing.

01:12:13.360 Right?

01:12:13.520 Okay, so, like, out here, if I just hold my hand steady, I can't see it except as a blur.

01:12:20.840 If I move it, I can see the fingers.

01:12:22.740 So, out here, I can detect movement.

01:12:24.840 That's how dinosaurs saw, by the way.

01:12:26.620 Dinosaurs, frogs still, they can't see anything that isn't moving.

01:12:30.020 They have vision like our periphery.

01:12:32.120 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.

01:12:47.520 You know, it's a default assumption about what's ignorable in the world.

01:12:50.080 You live in a dynamical environment, yeah.

01:12:52.160 Right, exactly.

01:12:52.840 And so, if you're going to prioritize peripheral vision, the priority is, if it moves, look at it.

01:12:59.240 Otherwise, ignore it.

01:13:00.380 Yeah.

01:13:00.440 Okay, so, every perception has a center, and then a gradation of resolution, until it fades out into nothing.

01:13:11.480 Yeah.

01:13:11.960 And that tabernacle, as far as I can tell, is a model of the perceptual center.

01:13:21.600 It's a model of the community center as well, but it's a model of perception as such.

01:13:25.600 So, that's different than the screen, obviously.

01:13:28.580 Well, you do have these veils that you constructed.

01:13:31.240 Yeah, that's true, that's true, that's true.

01:13:33.500 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.

01:13:46.820 And so, these perceptions, one way of thinking about them is these perceptions, peripheral perceptions, are veiled out here behind me.

01:13:55.160 They're veiled so intensely, you can't even see them, but the veils are graduated.

01:13:59.720 So, it's, well, so, tell me what you think about that.

01:14:04.960 Yeah.

01:14:05.100 Let's be real.

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01:14:50.620 Let me try a different, I don't want to use the tabernacle example, I'm not as familiar with it,

01:14:54.900 but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let's say you're walking through,

01:15:00.200 this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, right, at night,

01:15:07.000 and you think it's a slightly dangerous neighborhood, right, and so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can.

01:15:16.740 Yeah.

01:15:17.340 And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field, right, okay,

01:15:23.260 it's like a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.

01:15:25.640 Yeah, the phenomenologists like that idea.

01:15:27.640 Yes, that's right.

01:15:29.700 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.

01:15:38.440 So then I'm using my visual attention and I'm focusing on this particular thing.

01:15:43.300 Or I'm an artist and I'm trying to catch the, do the glint on the eyeball.

01:15:47.800 Yeah.

01:15:48.140 For the finishing touch.

01:15:49.360 Yeah, yeah.

01:15:49.740 So my eyes are wide open and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field.

01:15:56.740 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

01:16:06.980 and what I'm trying to do is just expand my attention to encompass this whole field so that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.

01:16:17.900 Okay, so that's a good objection.

01:16:19.200 Okay.

01:16:19.380 That's a good objection.

01:16:20.140 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.

01:16:36.000 You're making a case that there's a different perceptual mode in unexplored territory, and there is.

01:16:41.500 So birds have a prey eye and a predator eye.

01:16:44.400 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.

01:16:52.840 The I'm prey eye, so that would be the birds, the other eye, is scanning in exactly the way that you described, deprioritizing the center, amplifying the input from the periphery.

01:17:06.500 Very interesting, yeah.

01:17:07.480 And that maps onto the hemispheres.

01:17:09.700 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, and the right hemisphere does the opposite.

01:17:26.080 And 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.

01:17:34.100 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.

01:17:40.780 Yeah, exactly.

01:17:41.220 Right, right, right.

01:17:42.540 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,

01:17:55.900 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.

01:18:08.160 That establishes a center with a set of peripheries and with foreignness at the, you know, at the edge of the periphery.

01:18:16.760 And that does establish a certain kind of perception that's associated with security.

01:18:21.680 So the tabernacle style of perception would be the perception that's associated with explored territory.

01:18:26.380 That's exactly right.

01:18:28.080 That's the perception of order.

01:18:30.520 Like, order is where the things you want are happening.

01:18:33.960 That's a good way of defining order.

01:18:35.860 And chaos is where you don't know what will happen when you act.

01:18:39.340 And there are two different perceptual mechanisms for those.

01:18:42.060 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.

01:18:55.060 Because you don't know what's important, right?

01:18:56.700 You're walking through that dangerous neighborhood.

01:18:58.400 It's like you're on alert and you don't know what's insignificant.

01:19:04.980 That's part of being on alert.

01:19:06.260 So there's no identifiable center.

01:19:09.520 And that's a high stress situation.

01:19:12.060 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:13.100 Okay, okay.

01:19:14.060 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.

01:19:30.180 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.

01:19:39.380 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 attendance.

01:19:55.180 Yeah, that's been quite mapped out neurophysiologically, right?

01:19:58.640 The Russians did a very good job of that starting in about 1960.

01:20:03.060 Sokolov was one of them and a woman named Vinogradova.

01:20:05.940 And they were students of a neuropsychologist named Luria.

01:20:09.780 They mapped out what they described as the orienting reflex.

01:20:12.940 And that's exactly what that is.

01:20:14.240 It's like you're focused on a task and something of pragmatic...

01:20:18.780 Import.

01:20:19.220 Yeah, of implicit significance distracts you from your goal and you do.

01:20:27.720 So there's a hierarchy of gradated responses that are part of that orienting reflex.

01:20:32.420 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.

01:20:41.660 You know, I'm angry at my kid right now.

01:20:44.240 He's been a brat.

01:20:45.380 Yeah.

01:20:45.480 I'm going to ignore him when he screams.

01:20:47.400 So I'm focusing.

01:20:49.100 Exact same scenario.

01:20:50.300 Kid screams.

01:20:51.220 Yeah.

01:20:51.520 I register it.

01:20:53.000 But my reaction is quite different.

01:20:54.440 I stay focused.

01:20:55.100 Well, that shows you how malleable, even though it's relatively low level instinctual responses are.

01:21:00.500 That's right.

01:21:00.880 Yeah, they're more like...

01:21:01.200 That's going to be a back feed loop.

01:21:02.960 Yeah, exactly.

01:21:03.720 Exactly.

01:21:04.280 Well, that's...

01:21:04.740 And that's part of the consequence of the higher order brain centers feeding.

01:21:08.620 Like, there isn't a primary level of perception that has no top-down modification.

01:21:14.640 It's even the primary visual cortex, say where your fovea meets the visual cortex for the first time, is tremendously innervated by multiple...

01:21:25.520 Well, so here's an example.

01:21:27.100 So when you look at an object, when you look at a pen, for example, let's say that constitutes a visual pattern.

01:21:35.040 It's represented on the retina as a pattern.

01:21:38.200 It's propagated along the nerves.

01:21:39.900 Then it branches out.

01:21:41.320 One of the places that information ends up, quite quickly, is the motor cortex.

01:21:45.680 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.

01:21:55.040 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.

01:22:05.680 And that's part of the perception.

01:22:07.160 It's not like you see the pen and think about its use.

01:22:10.060 That isn't how it works at all.

01:22:11.420 You see its use directly.

01:22:13.960 And so that's another thing that's very strange about object perception.

01:22:17.900 It's like, you don't actually see objects in the world.

01:22:20.880 What you see are tools and obstacles.

01:22:25.600 And, well, then there's all the things you don't see.

01:22:28.360 And the tools and obstacles are defined in relationship to your goal.

01:22:32.240 So, you know, your goal, for example, the example you used is you're not happy with your child.

01:22:37.260 So the goal there has shifted from respond to distress cries.

01:22:42.520 It's shifted from that, which might be the default, right, to certain probability that distress cry is false, right, or manipulative.

01:22:53.200 Therefore, ignore very different interpretive framework, very different social landscape, and capable of modifying even the almost the base level perception.

01:23:05.840 You'll still hear the cry.

01:23:06.920 I mean, I guess that would be even curious.

01:23:09.320 It's like, if your child is highly probable, if your child is likely to emit distress calls that are false, my suspicions are you'd be less likely to hear that, to actually hear it.

01:23:25.580 Not only not to respond to it, right, because you'd have built an inhibitory structure that says, well, despite the instinctual significance of that, it's irrelevant.

01:23:36.160 Right, right, right, highly likely.

01:23:38.860 Yeah.

01:23:39.700 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…

01:23:54.040 The perception.

01:23:54.560 Yeah, I'm going to put that in quotation marks right now.

01:23:56.740 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:57.220 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.

01:24:07.400 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.

01:24:21.920 Because I don't…

01:24:22.380 Definitely.

01:24:23.380 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.

01:24:36.560 Right.

01:24:36.980 And how to use pens.

01:24:37.700 We probably have a pre-cognized understanding of tool.

01:24:40.740 I don't even know if we have that.

01:24:43.140 Instead, I think we just, we have a certain physiological structure that, right, 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.

01:25:03.180 Yeah, well, a lot of that…

01:25:04.180 So, let me just try another example to get to, because I like the earlier movie example and the male-female difference.

01:25:11.500 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.

01:25:20.800 So, couples who, before they met each other, would go to a loud party and they would be talking to each other.

01:25:27.560 Yeah, that's a really good example.

01:25:28.420 Yeah, that's right.

01:25:28.980 And, you know, there's just noise and it's a big decibel level, right?

01:25:33.040 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?

01:25:44.300 And the guy's wife says Stephen, right?

01:25:47.320 And he can pick that out of that incredible instrument of sounds.

01:25:51.960 Yeah, exactly.

01:25:52.320 Well, that's what you do if you're in a restaurant that's bustling with conversations.

01:25:56.480 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:25:57.380 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.

01:26:12.900 And it'll prioritize that, or you can turn your attention to your own thoughts, right?

01:26:17.480 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.

01:26:29.620 That's what the postmodernists would point out.

01:26:32.160 There's an infinite number of potential interpretations in a restaurant that's bustling with conversation.

01:26:37.100 It's like, fair enough, but you prioritize one.

01:26:42.240 That's what it means to pay attention to it, right?

01:26:44.520 Is that you prioritize it, you make something a center, you make everything else a periphery, and then you learn to do that automatically, right?

01:26:51.160 With practice.

01:26:52.440 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?

01:26:59.400 Yeah, because you've automated certain behaviors.

01:27:01.180 That's right, you've automated it, exactly.

01:27:03.180 So that centers now building the perception.

01:27:05.260 Yeah, what the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right?

01:27:09.220 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,

01:27:14.480 all of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives, they turn them into vices.

01:27:22.240 So, what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes, in their language, because they've already got an epistemological theory,

01:27:31.800 a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective.

01:27:36.360 And the idea for them then is that somehow, if we were going to be actually aware of reality, and not through this interpretation,

01:27:45.620 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.

01:27:55.200 Or, what they will then do is to say, you know, I can choose to prioritize this, right, over that in my visual field.

01:28:03.340 They will say, and they're right to say this, that's a value judgment.

01:28:07.060 I think this is more important now, and this is more important over that.

01:28:10.700 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,

01:28:20.640 and have nothing to do with any sort of external.

01:28:22.820 Well, maybe it's worse than that.

01:28:23.880 So, for both of them, it's on the cognition side, and on the evaluative side, that they're deep into subjective territory,

01:28:30.700 and so, those then become negative words for them.

01:28:34.020 Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project,

01:28:41.040 just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition, right?

01:28:45.780 There's all these metaphors of screens, and filters, and tabernacles, and visual fields, and so on.

01:28:51.760 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.

01:28:58.300 But yeah, come back.

01:28:58.780 Well, so two things there.

01:29:01.040 So, you pointed to the fact that the postmodernist description of the subjective, but tell me what you think about this.

01:29:09.960 See, the postmodern insistence, despite the fact that they claim that there's no uniting meta-narrative,

01:29:15.840 which is a specious claim in my estimation, because I don't know where the uniting ends.

01:29:20.540 If everything's a narrative, there's uniting narratives at every level of analysis.

01:29:25.260 But more than that, their proposition, at least implicitly, has been that the narratives that we do utilize are predicated on power.

01:29:35.040 That's part of the reflection of the subjective.

01:29:38.100 It's like, I'm prioritizing in keeping with my desire to exercise power.

01:29:43.860 And by power, I don't mean ability to maneuver in the world.

01:29:47.060 I mean force and compulsion, and that what we have in the postmodern world is a battleground between different claims of power, and that's all there is.

01:29:55.080 I think the weakness in that, first, one weakness is that it's a confession rather than a description.

01:30:02.200 But the other one is that power games are not iterable and productive and improving across time.

01:30:09.040 They're self-defeating.

01:30:09.980 And so you can play a power game, and you can win short-term victories with a power game, but it's not a sustainable, iterable, medium-to-long-term, viable strategy.

01:30:21.000 You know that Franz de Waal, for example, the primatologist, studied chimpanzees.

01:30:25.680 So, you know, we have this trope, and I think it's a consequence of Marxist influence on biologists,

01:30:31.420 that the hierarchies of chimpanzees, for example, which are masculine hierarchies in the main, are predicated on power.

01:30:39.560 You know, the alpha chimp is the most powerful tyrant, and he dominates all the others, and that's why he's reproductively successful.

01:30:46.520 De Waal showed very clearly that there are alphas who use power, but they have short-range, fractious communities,

01:30:55.040 and they're extremely likely to suffer a premature violent death, right?

01:31:02.960 So it is a niche in that you can force compliance, but the stable alphas that de Waal studied were the most reciprocal male chimpanzees of the troop.

01:31:16.440 They made the most lasting friendships, and so that's a whole different model of the mediation of attention, let's say, than one that's predicated on power.

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01:31:55.940 So do you think it's fair when you're assessing the postmodern corpus, philosophical corpus?

01:32:02.020 You talked about the subjective element.

01:32:04.480 Where do you think the claim that, the postmodern claim that power is essentially the dominant narrative?

01:32:11.620 Where do you think that fits in with this claim with regards to subjectivity?

01:32:16.580 Yeah, that's a good question.

01:32:18.680 I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice.

01:32:24.600 I think power properly conceived could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done.

01:32:30.700 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:32:32.120 And our cognitive powers, right, if we have a good healthy epistemology, right, should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world.

01:32:43.280 Even cooperatively.

01:32:44.880 That's, yeah, no, that's exactly right.

01:32:47.120 But then, if you, however, are skeptical, if you do start with the epistemology, all of the postmoderns do come out of an epistemological training.

01:32:58.920 It's a striking fact, you know, the big name postmoderns.

01:33:04.520 So, we mentioned Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty, right, and the others.

01:33:09.120 They are all PhDs in philosophy.

01:33:11.540 They're all doing heavy-duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral level work.

01:33:18.280 And that does come to become the foundation.

01:33:21.460 And because of the time that they are working in, middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy.

01:33:30.300 The revealing theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time.

01:33:35.500 So, they came of age.

01:33:36.620 Now, what that then is to say is, if you don't think that human beings can know the world as individuals, then you don't think of developing your reason, developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for understanding, is the most important thing about human beings.

01:33:56.280 So, what then is it to be a human being?

01:33:58.900 And to the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we are going to become closer to chimps.

01:34:05.580 And then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world are going to become more predominant.

01:34:14.100 Or even lower than chimps, baboons.

01:34:17.480 Yeah.

01:34:17.780 Who are even less...

01:34:18.760 Yeah, it's more of a baboon model.

01:34:20.060 Yeah, it might be.

01:34:21.000 But the...

01:34:21.580 Fractious fascists.

01:34:22.820 So, I think this, though, shows the absolute importance, though, of these cognitive issues that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively.

01:34:30.420 Because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition, that it is efficacious, that it is competent, that our brain, mind is an enormously powerful tool.

01:34:41.540 And if we learn to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as individuals.

01:34:45.920 And socially, we'll start to work out the win-win, positive, some social things.

01:34:50.740 Otherwise, we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kinds of levels.

01:34:59.700 So, then that regression becomes the use of power as the metanarrative that the postmodernists hypothetically abandoned.

01:35:08.060 That's right.

01:35:08.400 They're all left with it.

01:35:10.240 That's right.

01:35:11.020 That's what they're left with.

01:35:11.720 You're getting rid of human cognitive power as a positive thing.

01:35:17.200 Then you ask, well, what's left?

01:35:18.720 If it's not the case that I think my human cognition, my mind, puts me in touch with reality and that I can work out reality and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality.

01:35:28.960 And, of course, maybe we're initially focusing on things.

01:35:31.680 We have different frameworks.

01:35:32.640 But that we, nonetheless, have the cognitive tools to talk about these things, to do the experiments, to, you know, I can visit what you've experienced.

01:35:40.980 To take each other's position.

01:35:42.480 That's right.

01:35:42.880 In service of some higher goal.

01:35:44.460 That's right.

01:35:44.940 And that we can work all of these things out to, in effect, have an agreed upon understanding of the nature of reality.

01:35:53.020 Then, if that's not what's going on, that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture.

01:36:03.820 And what the postmoderns then do is either say, well, I make up my own reality.

01:36:08.200 That's what's going on here.

01:36:09.560 Or some of them are more passive, all of the influences of more environmental deterministic understandings of human beings.

01:36:18.560 What we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment, your social upbringing, right, and so on.

01:36:26.020 So, again, we don't have an autonomous.

01:36:27.260 The dominant patriarchy.

01:36:28.700 Yeah.

01:36:29.100 Or there could be any sort of social structure from their perspective.

01:36:35.020 But that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships.

01:36:41.880 It's not me in relation to reality and other people are part of reality, so I have to work that out.

01:36:47.420 But rather, the assumption is that I am inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality.

01:36:56.440 And so, the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be.

01:37:01.060 And the word there that becomes most important is the power word.

01:37:05.040 It's a kind of social power.

01:37:07.120 That tilts them towards that social constructionism.

01:37:09.660 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

01:37:10.260 Well, yeah.

01:37:10.780 No, it's the social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding of power.

01:37:17.380 But the power for them cannot be the positive sum kind of power that we're talking about.

01:37:24.480 Because that understanding of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way the world works and do science and technology and make the world a better place and empower ourselves.

01:37:34.580 We can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful.

01:37:38.080 I can understand that you're a rational person.

01:37:40.160 And you can understand that I'm a rational person.

01:37:43.100 So, I have to treat you a certain way conversationally, socially, and so forth.

01:37:48.260 So, all of the positive sum social stuff is going to come out of that.

01:37:52.520 But the postmoderns have cut all of that away.

01:37:54.780 All you're left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social world.

01:38:05.000 And what they then call power just is the influence or tools, including the tools of language, that are now understood as to have nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as being socially constructed themselves.

01:38:20.720 And tools of power.

01:38:21.680 That's right.

01:38:22.100 And so, it becomes then necessarily a zero-sum, socially influencing and controlling game.

01:38:29.380 And they reinterpret everything in terms of that.

01:38:31.980 Okay.

01:38:32.700 Okay.

01:38:33.040 So, I think what we'll do is stop there.

01:38:36.820 We've come to the end of the time for the YouTube section.

01:38:40.460 I'd like to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side.

01:38:44.540 But what I would like to talk about with you there is power in service of what?

01:38:51.520 Right?

01:38:51.680 Because there has to be—unless you—I mean, you could hypothesize that power in itself is a desirable good.

01:38:58.000 But then you have to define power in a way that would make the desirability of itself evident.

01:39:02.900 Alternatively, you have to say that you want power for a reason.

01:39:06.040 So, I want to talk to you about that and get your thoughts on that.

01:39:08.280 That can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses, too.

01:39:11.520 Okay.

01:39:11.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:39:12.640 Yeah, well, you—maybe we can close with that, too.

01:39:15.260 You had—you've taped three additional courses.

01:39:18.660 I've done five courses, yes.

01:39:20.100 Three are in post-production, two are live.

01:39:22.060 Okay, and what are the three that are coming up?

01:39:24.060 One is on modern ethics.

01:39:25.600 So, what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse, more global, more multicultural, and more critical in some ways of traditional models that have come down to us.

01:39:38.600 So, it's a much more wide-open world.

01:39:41.100 What's interesting about the modern world is how little we have what I think of as kind of a homogeneous culture where everybody is, by and large, on the same philosophical, religious.

01:39:51.440 That's the collapse of that meta-narrative.

01:39:53.160 Yeah, that particular meta went away.

01:39:54.760 And so, we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good, what is bad, what's right, what is wrong, what's the meaning of my life, how should we organize ourselves socially.

01:40:04.960 So, what I did was chose eight completely different but extraordinarily influential modern moral philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them.

01:40:21.240 Okay, okay.

01:40:21.760 So, it goes back to people like David Hume wrestling with the is-ought problem and Immanuel Kant with his strong duty focus, John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism and so on in through the 20th century up to very contemporary times.

01:40:39.200 So, that's one course, modern ethics.

01:40:40.780 And all of these people are giants.

01:40:43.300 They all disagree with each other but that's the contemporary landscape within which people who are doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves.

01:40:52.080 The other two courses are 16 lectures in total but it's called the philosophy of politics.

01:40:59.780 And here what I'm interested in is obviously we have political science, we have political theory, political ideology, practical day-to-day understandings of politics.

01:41:10.920 But what I'm interested in is the philosophers' contributions to those debates.

01:41:17.400 And one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics, they're not actually disagreeing about politics.

01:41:25.520 They're disagreeing about something more fundamental.

01:41:27.560 Yeah, yeah. I think that's become evident to everyone.

01:41:29.680 That's right. And in many cases, right, it's not, it doesn't get brought to the core.

01:41:34.340 So, I don't want to talk about the recent election but really it's about culture, right, more fundamentally and not about many particular issues and underlying culture.

01:41:42.920 And both the other courses are dealing with that.

01:41:44.660 Right. So, one though picks up with the French Revolution which is perhaps the landmark event in European or at least continental European history.

01:41:54.060 Why that political revolution happened and there's a lot of philosophy that matters there but then also an important theoretician, Edmund Burke and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism in response to that.

01:42:08.920 But then we go through all of the big name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics.

01:42:14.480 So, we go through Hegel and Marx and as we get into the 20th century, we talk about the fascists Mussolini and Gentile who was a PhD in philosophy and Heidegger and the National Socialists Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes.

01:42:29.420 And that one ends with World War II.

01:42:32.980 So, French Revolution to the World War II.

01:42:35.380 The next course picks up at the end of World War II in the Cold War and it starts with Rand and Robert Nozick.

01:42:44.880 At the height of the Cold War, how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context?

01:42:51.420 So, it starts with them, goes on to John Rawls.

01:42:57.560 We also talk about James Buchanan who won the Nobel Prize for Public Choice Economics.

01:43:04.240 We also do some international, because we're living in a global society, that cliche and so on.

01:43:11.080 But the Islamist revolutions and the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher Saeed Khutba, whose brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden, extraordinarily influential.

01:43:24.500 Ayatollah Khomeini had Khutba's works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.

01:43:31.420 We go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugan in that framework as well.

01:43:39.100 And then we end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism, Roger Scruton's meaning of conservatism, which came out a few years before he died.

01:43:50.440 So, the idea here is to say these are the big name political theories you need to know, but they're all big name ones because they have philosophical bite behind them by some very deep people.

01:44:03.240 And integrating that with the history in each case, how some of them are urging history in a certain direction or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the Cold War or the attacks.

01:44:17.480 Right. So, if people watch all the courses that you have offered, so all five of them, they're going to get a pretty decent overview of the major thinkers of the last 500 years in the philosophical, ethical, and political realms.

01:44:36.800 That's my ambition.

01:44:37.280 Yeah, that's a good deal. That's a good deal. I want to watch those courses.

01:44:41.020 There's lots of things that you're lecturing about that I don't know about. I'd like to know the nuances. I'd like to know the details.

01:44:47.280 Thanks.

01:44:47.560 So, yeah. So, I'm very much looking forward to that. So, well, thank you very much for coming to Scottsdale today.

01:44:52.520 A real pleasure.

01:44:53.620 Yeah, it's great. And it's great to have you on board on Peterson Academy too.

01:44:56.980 So, it's good.

01:44:57.480 And I think we'll talk too on the Daily Wire side a little bit about the perils, pitfalls, and opportunities of online, highly produced online education because I'd like to get some of your opinions about that too.

01:45:08.720 All right. So, we'll do that. Thank you very much, sir.

01:45:10.600 Oh, I should give this to you too.

01:45:12.540 Okay.

01:45:12.700 So, yeah, this is my new book which is coming out on the 19th and so we wrestle with God.

01:45:17.740 And so, I'm making a case in this book fundamentally that, well, we talked about the relationship between story and perception, but I'm trying to explain in this book why the notion of sacrifice is the central story in the biblical corpus, making the case that sacrifice is equivalent to work and that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of the community,

01:45:43.580 that those two things are so tightly associated that they're equivalent.

01:45:49.560 There's no difference between sacrifice and community. They're the same thing.

01:45:52.920 So, anyways, I'd like to give that to you.

01:45:54.400 All right. I will dive into it. Thanks.

01:45:55.560 Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd certainly be interested in your thoughts on it as well.

01:45:59.600 And so, it's coming out very soon.

01:46:01.200 And I tried to make sure that everything that I wrote in it was hopefully justifiably theologically and traditionally, but also scientifically.

01:46:10.500 Like, I wanted the stories to make sense at both levels of analysis at the same time.

01:46:15.560 So, you know, that's a tight triangulation, so to speak, but, and who knows if it's successful, but that was the rule of thumb.

01:46:23.560 So, anyways, very good to talk to you today.

01:46:25.680 Real pleasure.

01:46:26.140 So, yeah, and I'm looking forward to our continued collaboration on the Peterson Academy side.

01:46:30.780 Me too.

01:46:31.300 All right. So, all of you watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:46:34.840 We're going to talk about two things.

01:46:36.100 We're going to talk about the practical and hypothetical future of online education.

01:46:41.440 We're going to talk about the relationship.

01:46:43.560 What would you say?

01:46:44.840 The value of power from the postmodern perspective.

01:46:48.940 Why would people be interested in power?

01:46:51.240 You might think that's self-evident, but lots of things that appear self-evident aren't at all on more detailed analysis.

01:46:58.300 So, you can join us for another half an hour of that discussion, if you would.

01:47:02.660 Thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today and my producer, Joy Holm, for putting this together.

01:47:07.920 She's been working extremely hard on the set side and the production side, and, you know, the podcast is improving in quality quite dramatically in consequence.

01:47:16.480 We've got all sorts of new things lined up for you in the very near future.

01:47:20.180 There'll be some announcements on that front very soon.

01:47:23.060 Thank you very much for your time and attention today.

01:47:25.000 Thank you very much for your time and attention today.

Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth ｜ Dr. Stephen Hicks

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