Jordan Peterson: Truth, God, Science, and Curt’s Documentary ‘Better Left Unsaid’

If our perceptions evolved And we evolve to adapt to reality And we don't see objects As the fundamental perceptual reality Then what does that say about reality And that's not the answer to that question is not bloody obvious Well that's another Question I hope that I can get to with Dawkins You know And maybe he knows something that I don't God I hope so Yeah See I want to make the claim that it sounds then And I believe you've made this claim perhaps even reggae The longer something is persis

ted evolutionarily the most Kournikova real it is However However Then one would be acting as if there's something external That were trying to map out And then the closer we are to that Closer our map is to that reality of course we're not trying to mistake her map in the territory Whether or not material objects exist Patterns exist Right and it's not obvious what the most persistent patterns are Hello everyone 9 please today to have with me Kurt Jai Mangal He's a toronto-based filmmaker The b

ackground in mathematics and physics Who directed and wrote The film better left unsaid which was released in April 2021 That film explores the question of Bangladesh things When does the left Go to far He's also the host of The series of everything podcast and YouTube channel Explorers consciousness Scarred free will Theoretical physics and Was just surpassed 100,000 Subscribers in about 10 But one year's time He's interviewed people including Steven Pinker Noam John vervaeke On the cognitive s

ide side Stephen Wolfram Eric Weinstein in Sabine hossenfelder The physics side You can find out more I just didn't youtube.com forward slash series of everything or searching theories of everything on Spotify My iTunes are virtually Any of the other Audio platforms You've been podcasting and running this YouTube channel for how long body year Slightly longer than a year another channels the number for approximately three years in the sense that it was registered through years But I've been goin

g at it Force for about 1 year and a bit Who who has Cliff you interviewed that's been most popular Noam Chomsky And your Your You're one of the reasons why because I was the first person that's not the only person to ask him about you directly So I don't know about that so there's something we could talk about right away so What did he have to say Essentially your Hitler Do I do now Oh yeah And that I think that people who are on a certain Sign on the political Spectrum believe their side Stand

s for what's good An opposite side is what's not good One of the Tina told Ricky man talking about better left unsaid this will get to later Is how do you define the left and the right Decidedly difficult Almost everyone has a different definition Chomsky would say while the left is freedom And so anything that's On the right is anti freedom and the rights People who are on the writer identify with being the such Perhaps categorize it as the opposite Yeah well it's interesting at least they migh

t Circle around claims to some Let's say virtue that both of them would admire like freedom Some agreement Theory despite the different different Did he point to anything Particular about what I hypothetically thoughts at made me not Unacceptable sort of creature Ate someone It's somewhat hearsay in the sense that he read an article He didn't watch you directly Arab Nathan Robinson's critique of you which I'm sure. Yeah He's quite the character Yeah I see so Well that's too bad Many regards Did

you learn anything in particular from talking too dark Chomsky Quite a significant amount As for what I can point to let me think I spoken six times 6 * on the channel So the first time About you I found it interesting that he said Each guest But I spoke to at the time cuz now I've pivoted away from politics for reason for reasons we can get to later I asked him Every other guests when does the left go too far In something stupid or Sony in question because you erase that quite a few times When

does the last go to Far East Well it's not a matter of going too far for the left at the matter of tactics As for Windows raikoti Fraser while their rights Suicidal I think was his words So that's That's interesting because it's not much of a dancer Midnight blade always looking for a technical Definition of the it brightest like Well we know the right Go to far as we know the left can go to Safari How do we point to And I think this problem is actually become more complicated route isn't last b

ecause The more I've been thinking about it the more I think that The errors on the left AR More in the nature of a vast number of small errors mostly of Often of omission So the more Reasonable People on the left Kowtow to rapidly to the more radical Types on the left especially at the philosophical level and I think that really What happened at the universities Soul That's something we can explore what was actually question for you why do you think that is I know that this is what made me you

interviewing me but I'm still perplexed when it comes to that why is it that the center-left Dominic's creative extreme lamp Is it because They're on the same side so the enemy of my enemy is my friend Were they afraid because You can lose even a tenured position Well I think there's I think that sphere and it isn't obvious to me that this is merely a problem that affects the laugh I'm most familiar with it in the University circumstance And so what I saw happening in my 25 years as a faculty me

mber let's say That's about right It's more than that actually But anyways quite a long time three decades that's a What's that Whenever the administration pushed on the faculty So in our faculty meetings for example that would be administratively demands and they were often unreasonable They would increase the size of our Bar seminar c4r third and fourth-year students Baskets to do more work with fewer resources That was a steady Trend like if you look at spending say on faculty salaries Versus

spending on administrative salaries across universities in the West Broadly speaking but certainly in North America The amount spent on a ministration just skyrocketed upward where is the amount spent on faculty pretty much stayed calm And soul Why Well it was because the faculty just Retreated continually everytime they were Challenge To say no when so I objected Repeatedly intoxi meanings whenever that happened instead Why don't we just say no They want to increase our seminar size so you kno

w like double it let's say it for 30 years That's not a seminar anymore once you get to a certain point We just say no we're not doing that Why don't we just say no We won't do that Well then they won't give us what We want Well They don't give you what you want anyways And it was 1,000 tiny Retreats and then What happened after that was that the administration having growing too top-heavy Was taken over by people within the administration let's say who had this Dei philosophy And they couldn't

say no to them So when did the left go to Farwell It was micro Retreats continual cowardly micro Retreats at the University level now Sorry to be so long-winded about this but there was something More brutal underneath all that Philosophically which I'm trying to Layout in the new books that I'm writing Which is this postmodern problemen The postmodern problem really emerged in the 1960s with the symbol taneous Lee Simultaneous realization across a number of disciplines That there is almost an i

nfinite number of ways of Perceiving anything And I mean literally proceeding so when you look at the world you see these Things you think are objects and they're sort of self-evident Where an object begins and where it ends Is much more difficult To compute than any one ever realize which is partly why we don't have Dino robots wandering around doing things like dishwashing which turns out to be insanely complex Emerged literary criticism With the realization that What is the word an indefinite

number of ways of looking at something so actually acquiring the object Active socks of perception There was An even more vaguely indefinable way oven Potentially interpreting a text Or a cannon of cat Text lights I so how do we decide What's good and what's bad literature what's deep and what's shallow what's valid it invalid And the answer is we don't know That's the answer Premature answer was generated by social Critics on the left And the premature answer was Well all are categories All ar

e categories And the active categorization is cell Serve the will to power And that's true to some degree cuz we're all totalitarian then and authoritarian and narcissist Stick to some degree we are also we also use deception to get what we want We can corrupt or category structure But there's a huge difference Between What we don't know the answer What power may play a role And saying the answer is the power always plays a role in that's older is And that's what happened on the left in the post

modern field end That sort of fit in nicely with c You know what the idea that capitalism was essentially Oppressive another patriarchal structures essentially oppressive etc etc It's an unbelievably corrosive And terrible Philosophy The left went too far there with the claim that Nothing but the will to power governs categorization And the active categorization which is basically Consciousness itself that active cutting categorization You could not possibly formulate a more Cynical Malevolent a

nd Perilous Destructive philosophy What makes Are you interpreted the question as well as a time question 401 when does the left go too far and I guess that's Within And when And for me What you also laid out Ideologically what it is But they believe that makes them go too far I don't like to use the word Audiological We don't have to get And Teresa's are but for the sake of speaking right now just use that word Why When do they go to for ideologically see some of the people I spoke to said too

far when it comes to violence Well there's something that needs to the Violet some idea And you also mentioned Power metal doesn't distinguish to laugh Going too far from the right going too far right And it's not a really good answer because sometimes we think Sometimes we think that violence is Justified like in self-defense and often political violence What would you say rationalize And sometimes perhaps even functions As self-defense And sometimes it's a rebellion against True oppression In

which case People on the left and the right might regard Violets not only as necessary but actually morally Demanded right ethically demanded so The mere use of violence and then of course what constitutes violence that's the next problem without It's too shallow an argument To really get to the core of things One has to be extremely careful about what Council self-defense Especially preemptive self-defense Which is behind Much of what they do they'll say that well we have to Take action now aga

inst the right or the extreme right switch Pretty much everyone who was on the right side which classifies being part of an altar We're all just like yeah well that's another part yeah that's another Yeah Exactly what is another part of this tit-for-tat process that we see I think Perhaps accelerating Particularly in the United States with the Return of trump let's say to the political Arena There's a tremendous amount of distrust Growing distrust on both sides of the political Spectrum Driven W

ell that's The question driven by what certainly by the extreme views of a minority on both sides Laying out the exact causal Process is extremely difficult These things They're not unidirectional Any directionally causal right there They cars Each causes the other I poke you you poke me I slap you you slap me a little harder I punch you you punch me You knowing and then we we have knives and read each other's throats and we say why You know who started it well maybe you said something insulting

before I poked you You-know-who But One of the things of interest win Observing something like that is The causal process is involved in the tit-for-tat Return And I've been thinking about that a lot Because I'm For a whole variety of reasons that I can't go into but Jonathan haidt also just wrote an article How about Positive feedback loop process is operating at a very rapid scale on Facebook and Twitter and exacerbate This political Positive feedback loop rain runaway positive feedback loop

You know you know with you If you're doing any recording and you bring your microphone too close to the speaker that That you're speaking through you'll get this howl of feedback in that can destroy the whole system the whole recording system And that's a good example of how poised the feedback loop can get out of control That's the real enemy they like If we're thinking meta politically the real enemy is The possibility that Mutual distrust on both sides will accelerate Our descent into a kind

of melee So the enemy isn't necessarily The catastrophic etiology of the left or the right but The manner in which Extreme views Foster a spiral of violence that none of us know how to stop Stupid little things can triggered like one of my friends today sent me this Article Showing that I think it was in the Virginia Governor's race 4 People Picky Lanterns And they were Hypothetically marching in support of the Republican candidate Until they were posing as members of the conspiratorial alright

But two of the were actually Democrat offered his political operatives trying to discredit the Republican campaign That's so dangerous because they're basically acting out the proposition that it's Nazis you know for all intents and Purposes fascists there Supporting the Republicans 2 Text such a terribly rated It's such a terrible lie to To act out to demonize Your fellow citizens that way it's unbelievably dangerous and We got to stop doing things like that to knowing All of us have to start d

oing things like that Right That may be at the bottom of it What you message so many ways to be taken But I think that one Well it's difficult to say what's at the bottom 41 Predominant factors may be personalized Personalized not personalized Yes I believe that I really do believe wine why do you say that Cfu watch The film Toward the Fourth section I believe I split it up into chapters in the fourth section of becomes much more Phyllis off Which is one of the reasons why I started it because I

happen to like Puzzles and philosophy Abstract thinking I tried to make a case about Lies and how widespread know there's one obvious Take out memes straight talk about memes and I'll need spreadsheet want to pollute that because that comes back To affect you If you care about yourself first of also Maybe you should care about yourself As for I was exploring and I'm not quite sure is it possible to tell a lie without lying to yourself On the face of it yes, I don't think so Well the reason why

it seems like Well there's psychological evidence though that you can't while here let's let's let's dig into that little bit so Tell a lie to yourself and you think while I know the difference it's like well Don't be so sure about that so here's one experiment that That's an example Sebastian that I give a group of people Scale that measures their political beliefs about a certain issue Maybe the reality of climate change or or the unreality of climate change for that matter doesn't matter And

then I get those same people to write an essay of 500 Words Outlining the contrary position And they know they're just doing it because It's part of the experiment but then they come back a week later and I give them the same political beliefs scale And what's happened is Police will have shifted substantially towards the side that they argued for Okay so why well first of all A lot of your So-called beliefs are really low resolution Picture of terroristic they're like Single-pixel images You ha

ven't thought it through Very carefully Imagine Maybe you know more than the average person because of your background but imagine how much you know about how a helicopter works Do you know what a helicopter is No you don't He had to draw when it would look like a four-year-old druitt Do you know what it is You can identify the shape into Dimensions you know it flies that's about it he couldn't fix when you curse her Couldn't build one Sew-in real fancy don't know anything about a helicopter Exc

ept what you need at someone who's never around helicopters to know And most things are way more complicated than helicopters even though they're plenty complicated So you think that you know something when you think you know it But then you detail out a counter argument And it turns out that you've provided more detail in the counter-argument that you had in your argument to begin with So that shift your cognition towards what you argued for Well if you think that doesn't happen to when you're

lying while you're You don't know anything about how you work And then the other thing is well Virtually no one thinks that lying is acceptable morally when it comes right down to it there might be stupid Pacific exceptions to that now and then If you lie you're going to tell what you believe towards the LIE Because that will lighten the Ethical load that you carry it'll reduce cognitive dissonance that's one way of termagant I'm so and then you can't keep track of your lies and so that's a big

problem and they tangle up your thoughts and then Also lets a whole bunch of people really like your lie Well then Most of us All of us Thrive on attention I mean children will misbehave to get attention even if it's negative attention if they can't get it any other way And so You lie and you Put it out on Twitter and no 10,000 people like it and then you think we'll wait a sec Probably I believe that because look at how possibly it was received in some of that's actually Socially positive right

I mean If you say something a lot of people respond to it positively That might be a good reason for you to think that way a bit more right cuz The fact that you want social approval isn't only an index of your cowardice it's also an index of your desire to Be productive in to fit in and to have people like you and all of that Insole Lies They just wore Things To a tremendous degree and if you think you're smart enough to keep your lies separate from your truth One final issue is Melissa you li

ed 20% of the time Well doesn't that mean that You're practicing To become 20% a liar And don't you think you're getting better at that You become what you practice And then don't you think that'll Interfere with your ability to distinguish between what you think and what you don't think first of all And also your ability to tell the difference between truth and falsehood Do you think it'll make you cynical about the nature of humankind to observe yourself lying you're certainly going to say Oth

er people do it At least as much as you and if they're bad people they do it way more Just A Rat's Nest and You know I became convinced a long time ago looking at the totalitarian problem on the left and the right that The most effective way to deal with this fundamental it was psychological and that What we need to do all of us is to stop lying Each of us in our own lives That's the solution We have to stop and that party that's because we're so damned powerful now How many people have watched

your podcast They're in terms of use now obviously that too There multiple fuse 41 Video Millions It's almost 7 or so Seven or eight million Okay so how powerful might your lies be Great and I mean each of those million people is connected to a thousand other people So That's a billion people that you're two steps away from at least Cheez-Its or you said 7 million people so it's 7 billion people you know I mean obviously those circles are going to overlap You get my point What I would have guess

ed who is that you said most people would agree that telling lies Is deleterious in some manner Not say that they say that they profess it but they don't truly believe it And the reason that may in fact me what unifies the extreme I'll give you an example Sure if you ask someone I think that if you were to ask someone is it okay to lie for the greater good They would say While the majority of those people on the extreme What's a yes And then I wonder why Perhaps that's an indication that you're

on the extreme Perhaps if you have a worldview I talked about this concept called There is no Somehow there is no greater Somehow you can't tell Ally and before the greater good because the truth and a good are tied Yeah I think that's right so that's a really smart idea the idea that If you have a belief system politically That requires Any lies to support Then that's an indication that you've gone too far I think that's a good rule of thumb Right What else is As you mentioned Pestiferous becau

se it's poisonous Is that They Nelson power Is one of us Powers the predominant perhaps only Factor Turn on your lights are social interaction even truth claims and so on Well The issue with The issue with that is that it Partly true And the reason is Thinker sculpture This, comprises many elements There's an element of power in this cup is an element of art is well by the way there's an element of physics you can look at it mathematically You can look at it through engineering lens Architectura

l engineer with the power is the power in the cup is for example that you own it It's your cop Insult embedded within the hierarchy now The quite so what you your claim is exactly right There's a huge difference between Claiming that it's useful to investigate the role that arbitrary expression of power Plays in conceptual systems which is Perfectly reasonable thing to say And The premature answer that the Best solution to the problem of perception is Will To Power and nothing else So I've been

talking to some evolutionary biologists about. I talked to Robert Rivers this week He's getting old and it was interesting to talk to him but Talk about Psychopaths Okay so let's let's let's wander down that path just for a minute so imagine that the patriarchal structure is predicated on Nothing but Power Okay and then imagine the psychopaths are particularly cunning uses of power Users of power Okay so then to the degree that the social system is an expression of power you'd expect Psychopaths

to be radically success But they End in human Park temporarily successful Well they're also they also never received Their numbers vary between 1 and 5% in the population never gets higher than 3 is really the upper limit buddy can get up to 5 They're not that successful because 97% of people aren't Psychopaths Just that fact alone Indicates that there's something wrong with the power claim Now you might say while Psychopaths aren't very good at That utilizing powers like no no wait a minute Ac

tually psychopaths are better at utilizing purepower stripped completely of empathy Then anyone else By definition So they are literally the Power users who lack compassion Show Why aren't they radically successful in human populations and the answer to that is Walt because our hierarchies are not Not fundamentally build on power And our Concepts and And perceptions aren't fundamentally a consequence of power or its misuse now that doesn't mean that Our perceptions and our social structures can'

t be Tanner intimate relationships are relationships with ourselves for that matter Can't become contaminated by The excess desire for power And by the deceit that might be employed let's say that service. Obviously that happens and we have to keep our eyes open all the time about that But the central claim is Not only is it Unbelievably cynical and destructive and also extremely helpful if you want to demonize your animes I believe that The entire basis of your Perceptual structure is willpower

And so is mine let's say I don't if you don't Believe the same things I do So if you're trying to elevate yourself in a different hierarchy or you're trying to produce A different hierarchy altogether We have nothing in common except Or enmity Because there's no ground outside what you're striving for and what I'm striving for selfishly where we can meet as People And have a You know soul2soul discussion That's not even technically possible within that prank within that scheme And so that means

that if you and I are enemies Well what am I supposed to do with you Cuz all you are is Will To Power I can't trust you I can't reason with you reason doesn't even exist You know you see Echoes of that in the claims that Rational discussion or something like that is Dialectical forms is somehow a construction of white supremacy Implicit in our social structures It's so It's so shallow is that idea and the idea that are virtues First of all that there aren't any virtues but even if there are the

re only derivable from Power hierarchy structures God that's so cynical It's so destructive It's so dangerous and Imagine just living with that notion that That's what it motivates everyone is nothing but like an untrammeled will to authoritarian power God That's hell man You mentioned the word use multiple times And that is one of the reasons why I try to analyze it more philosophically toward the end Because I don't think that this is See some people would say what we need is dialog You feel s

hare this Many of the times it would come from people who are on the center center right center left Okay we just need to speak to each other more But I think what comes before what comes Prior to speaking of We need to Value the same We need to be oriented in the same direction Yeah well that's again with this new book that I'm writing is about You know because there has to be a There has to be an initial framework as you said that makes Even the possibility of dialogue our reality So it's got

to be something look like what we're doing right now you and me hopefully this is what we're doing right now is like you know something And I know yeah that's right man hopefully it lets bloody well pray that we are smart enough and wise enough and careful in Enough to do what's right So what's not easy You you come to this Discussion Thinking maybe you don't know everything and that I might have something to say that would be useful and interesting to you that that Might actually be crucial to

you and I come to this dialogue hoping for the same from you Right so first of all we both come To the degree we're doing this properly In-N-Out attitude of Humility I want to hear from you And you know I tend to be kind of dominant conversations and I talk too much So that probably interferes with it to some degree but I really do try to listen then I really do hope that when I talk to someone This partly why do the podcast is that Tell tell me something that someone that's stupid and potential

ly malevolent is me might really need to know If I listen real carefully Maybe they won't even know what it is that I need to know that they know but if I listen very carefully I can kind of call it out of them and then I I can use that information to Correct myself so I don't do something catastrophically stupid in the future and hurt myself and the people I love So you have to have this presumption of Presumption of ignorance The belief that The person across from you Particularly if they diff

er from you Might have something useful to say because they're different from you they know things that aren't But you don't know so isn't it so good that they're different Then you have to believe that Men of Goodwill exist let's say and that they can exchange information that's mutually correct Both can walk away Better And not something like faith is Faith while I think it's equivalent I think it's Equivalent to In the Christian Spirits the equivalent to the face in logos It exists the same t

hing The logos is a very complicated concept One of the reasons and I'm not quite sure Why this is the case one of the reasons this Theories of everything podcast has taken off the way that it has Partly because I'm not A versatile Ambiguous contradictory thinking when it comes to Metaphysical issues like whether or not there existed. To speak in terms of religious terms most Find to start As you know Amazon Most scientists are They find that to be anathema I don't think I'm going to talk to Ric

hard Dawkins Oh that's wonderful Yeah I saw your conversation with Lawrence Krauss Another one with Harrows to just a week and a half ago and it went real well I figured out how to do To talk to Sam better than I have before I just asked mostly I just asked him questions and that's really useful Just ask questions rather than Can I think I went sideways to some degree in my discussions with Sam which I don't usually do I was trying to prove something Sideways Like I said I was trying to prove so

mething instead of listening and asking questions And I should It would have been better had I not tried to do that and just tried harder and harder to understand What was that he thought Because once you know the more we talk to where we found Like real major Points of Agreement You know like Sam is oriented To a great degree He's very much concerned about the human Tennessee For atrocity And malevolence Best drives him Is that Terror of that and that that's I would say that's my fundamental dr

iver I hope it is at least And so that's something that really unites us And he's hoping that he can Find You know I genuine morality now he believes he can find it in in scientific inquiry and I don't think that's true but what He might be right And it's not like I don't think science can inform our moral choices and maybe has to But You know when I came out on the public sphere and first talk to Sam I had this son axe to grind in some sense which was My belief that The fundamental framework Fr

om within which we see the world Isn't and can't be objective And I still believe that's true but I I was hammering at home because I wanted to win that argument and That was a most sophisticated way of going about it Wide less unless I think as we talked And this time I didn't do that at all I just asked him questions and we definitely had the best conversation we've ever had So and I'm really hoping to do that with Dawkins is like I don't want to win an argument I don't want to have an argumen

t I want to ask him Questions I want to find out what he thinks cuz dark is is no fool Great steak materialism grounded in his Evolutionary thinking like That's powerful you know it's it's a powerful system of thought and he's a master of it and so I want to find out what led them to the conclusions that he came to Questions for you know I want to talk to him for example about the Instinct imitate Cuz you were talking earlier boat something that unites us you know Imagine this for example You kn

ow that The same person can be Admired by a lot of different people Even people who differ in their political beliefs And that's that admiration shorter captures them Charisma That part of charisma The Christmas part of an instinct right because if I think you're charismatic Then I'm going to watch you more my eyes are going to point to where I'm going to be more likely to do the things you do I'm more like Imitate you So I would say there's something like a central spirit that we're all driven

to imitate And it is the thing that we see is admirable And that points to something that we experience as religious Shows like the ultimate Expression Of that which is That which compels imitation Is indistinguishable from religious worship It's not propositional Well that's a vacation argument Yes yes yes absolutely while I'm verdict he's one of the people Who's thought this sort of thing through Moulton most detail Jonathan pageau as well and I know you had him did he make the cut of your fil

m Yeah in the director's cut So just remember watching asked if you'd like to watch the film It's best to go to better left unsaid film.com Because over there instead of iTunes in YouTube and song what you can also get it from if you'd like if that's easier But you can go to the URL better left unsaid film.com Because over there for the same price to get access to the director's cut which has Jonathan pageau and I'm sure Listeners the Watchers of this Our fans Jonathan Yeah well I think how's yo

ur super smart man he's deep in the same with her baking those two Certain forms of thought Farther than anybody I've ever met Vicky is so well Read it's terrifying and how's your house He's he really I'm just thinking Yeah yeah yeah well you see That's part of having an artistic temperament to you know people like that who are more open Trait terms They can stick and see patterns In things now That can lead them astray because you can You can project Patterns Into You know the void let's say Th

at aren't are conspiratorial thinking for example Intuitive people Who are also capable of critical thinking pickup patterns long before anyone else does How to draw do students like that you know They would lead to a scientific conclusion That was dead on multiple times Animated when they were writing their papers they have to Killian how they got there well that wasn't how they got there they leave from Mountaintop to Mountaintop using nitsches terminal They can see patterns And then they had

to construct a rational story to publish their ideas in scientific journals it's So funny cuz it's a form of falsification right that isn't how they got there So that's one of the questions I want to ask Dawkins is like what what about this instinct to Imitate Do you think such a thing exists It all because I don't believe he's a blank slate serious And we're really good at abstracting out Things to imitate And so I started thinking about this for example when I was watching my kids Playhouse My

son would act out the father you know he beat the father but he wasn't imitating me exactly what Exact right all right Like I do this while I'm imitating you right now If I was a comedian and I want to parody you I would imitate your spirit in some sense right And then put in Winston and everyone would laugh So I can abstract out from you your pattern Open imagine we're way better at it tonight Like if I watch 10 admirable men Can was gripped by my admiration for the mullet I was fortunate enou

gh to have 10 admirable men in my family I could abstract out the central spirit that makes them all admirable and I could imitate that So what occurs when you keep doing that over and over that's exactly right across Generations insulting help partly what Fluker's V Imagination formulates the representation of the abstraction Give an example so if you looking The often see this in Byzantine Cathedral so you look up in the Byzantine Cathedral It's a dome so that's the sky And maybe you'll see an

image of Christ up there as pantocrator great creator of the world This is sort of tied with the idea that Consciousness gives rise to reality It's as idealistic Philosophy Or experience Weld ideas something like That Nothing to be a dryer. It's the central Phenomena and function of consciousness And in some sense it gives rise to To the reality that is that is good Itself And the imagination gets there way before the propositional philosophers Way before the artists in their religion are dream

ers You made an argument that that is Partly Anthony's What is a religious phenomenon that do you think that's only it No I have another definition that I'm working out till queso These are things I'm going to talk about when I go to Cambridge cuz I'm going there to Oxford and Cambridge at the end of November In any case So I'm also really interested in the idea of deaths So we all have an intuition of effete pattah like philosophical dancer literary down Or the depth of a conversation You know

and if you have a nice conversation you know you're talkin about waiting Furious Fundamental things okay well I have a technical definition for the We we have a hierarchy of beliefs Play some believes have more beliefs dependent on them than others The more beliefs that are dependent on a given belief to deeper that belief is The deepest of those beliefs We hold Sacred By definition My definition Our deepest beliefs are sacred there their primary end You can tell that in part because if they're

challenged You get unbelievably upset And the reason you get upset is because Well you're not just destabilizing. Belief your Destabilizing all the beliefs that depend on it so 1 Sacred belief in a marriage is Sexual fidelity Faithfulness Right and you kind of take that on faith because But you take it on faith that you think that's valuable Impart But it's only one face up Your partner is manifesting. Because you know All you have to do is get paranoid And then you You can accumulate evidence t

hat your partner isn't trustworthy and no one's perfectly trustworthy so you could see how Right exactly But It's a fundamental belief and then if you find out that your partner's betrayed you will then the whole house of cards Perhaps not the whole house of cards but a lot of the cards come tumbling down You know The past is no longer What you thought it was Your whole faith in humanity itself might be compromised including your faith in yourself Look at it can reread the dagger in the depth Es

pecially if you really Love the person and really trusted them So the more secretive belief is the deeper it is embedded in this In this structure of beliefs and I don't believe those are objective beliefs that's another thing I want to talk to Dawkins about I do not take The scientific evidence suggests Our perceptions That what we perceive our material object Better self-evident that we've then drive our conceptual systems from I don't think there's any evidence for that I think it's wrong and

it's been proven wrong So you know that some of the places I want to go Yeah tell me what you think of this now I've only thought about this recently I think when Atheist Call the religious dogmatic What they truly mean is that your pantheistic for low-level gods What I mean is You know what you've outlined is something like this Alesso you have a hierarchy and hopefully it's monotheistic in the sense that you're integrated You're pointing to one God one source of good Okay then you're like wel

l what makes me good and you keep going down and down and down Until you get to extremely micro-level action I could email I'm taking to see my why so that I can get an approval for someone for an interview why so that I can talk and hopefully No one is so on and so on And I think I think you've outlined I'm pretty sure it was you that it depends on which level there's the destruction Is proportional to the anxiety that you experienced Okay it's exactly right now then physiology of that even Oka

y so then When Someone like Sam Harris call someone else Dogmatic Essentially what they mean is that Why are you getting upset at this level Why are you holding this to be sacred So here's another example to people who are Fundamental in their religious views so they believe that the literal what's in the Bible's literally I think about it And even people who think the Bible's entirely metaphorical If I say But imagine of speaking to a Fundamentalist It's not meant to be literal and metaphorical

Pick it up Sarah Why do you get upset why is your belief in God contingent Should you believe in God be contentious Or should you have faith no matter what Okay so then they would walk Why does that undermine your belief Should be Motion be so easily undermine It's as if they're saying here is my God instead of at the top level Okay well so let's take into that deliver that's a very good observation well One of their unrecognized gods Is Literal Did the phrase itself Kid literally means real An

d it means ultimately real but a literal doesn't mean real or ultimately real necessarily Like literal is really like What does a dustyesky novel Literally mean Well nothing None of it Crew It didn't happen Or did it Or did it really happen Like in a meadow level well that's where great novel happened is that a meta-level The truth is complicated This is Seesaw the Fundamentalist They're tripped up philosophically to some degree because V I can't see how something can be Oh my God it's so compli

cated this is where Sam Harris and I kept going off on you know different tangent They don't know what they mean when they say literally quite literal with real their crate real with material real Answer when you go after that and you say well it's not literally true What you're saying What you're essentially saying is that while your whole belief system is predicated on a Misapprehension Even about the nature of god let's say Most religious Traditions Many religious Traditions insist that Repre

senting God in a concrete manner is actually An error The Dow is right right right Happy without idea that Muslim certainly aren't The Orthodox Christians really don't many of them really don't like to represent God the father in their iconography And part of the reason for that is that You shouldn't concretize the absolute No it's a problem cuz if you don't call cuz it you can't act it out So there's a tension but You know when people say People ask me if I believe in God and I always think wel

l there's a whole bunch of assumptions and that question that you want me to swallow so the You can categorize my answer according to your pre-existing schemas And that isn't an answer they like 10 equation right Is God real quadrille what what do you mean by real You know what I need to know I don't know you mean real like a table I think they know what they mean by real What do you mean the table Give me the table you know do you mean your table Human tables in general as real Do they have to

have four legs to they have to have a hardtop What are we talkin about when we mean real Remain objective Leary like a table but God isn't like a table Well then he isn't real Like okay well I have it your way if that's as far as your thinking goes But I don't even think of sophisticated Sophisticated religious people whether they know it or not Think that God is at Is real like a table And it's damned as you already boarded out when you with your discussion about your cop Even what exactly cons

titutes a table is subject Great One of the most What are the most Impressive Tinkers I ever encountered In the field of perception Wrote this book called an ecologically approach to visual perceptions And he would say that a table is I always forget his name it's an ecologically approach to visual perceptions and yes yes Okay so When you see a table do you see an Surface with four legs Do you see a sitting down to eat Place And the answer is you see a sitting down to eat place And there are obj

ects that slide into that category That's the answer It's not the other way around you don't see the material object which is self-evident And infer the function Might be a combination of those two things as well but It doesn't matter the the functional album until B Has a certain perceptual Primacy I'll give you a kind of a Nifty example of this There is a Neurological condition called utilisation Behavior which accompanies prefrontal damage If someone has Manifest utilisation Behavior if you g

ive them an object they can't Not use it Because what's happened is When they see a cop They'll lift it up and drink from it because a cop is a lifting up and drinking thing Perceptually It's ribbetts grips their motor output they can't inhibited But the fact that they have to inhibit it Shows how low-level the function of perception is Right And that's part of what I was trying to lay out With Harris is that The idea that the most real is the Adjectives Doesn't seem to be true for our perceptio

ns and then That Tangles is up scientifically right because If our perceptions evolved And we evolve to adapt to reality And we don't see object As the fundamental perceptual reality then what does that say about reality And that's not what the answer to that question is not bloody obvious That's another question I hope that I can get to with Dawkins And maybe he knows something that I don't God I hope so Yeah be able to make the claim that And I believe you've made this claim perhaps even break

it But the longer something is persisted evolutionarily the mobile phone and Cole real it is However However Then one would be acting as if there's something external That we're trying to map out And then the closer we are to that Pulsar map is to that reality of course we're not trying to miss echomap in the territories Whether or not material objects exist Patterns exist And it's not obvious what the most Persistent patterns are Like it looks to me then and you can talk about archetypes in th

is wise I would say to some degree Trees of being around A long time end The tree structures pretty embedded in our perceptual Perceptual system There is a relationship between how long something as being around in our environment and how Deep that is within our perceptual structures You know what like we we assume the difference between up and down For example that's really built into us and it's it's at the basis of a lot of are metaphors Appease You know how high up is neskaya please Elevated

optic The Mountaintop is the sage Appease God Well that's partly cuz we're up and down creatures because there's gravity and there's the ground and we're stuck to the ground and the ground is bae They said it's Material in its dirty in disguise. Etc etc A lot of our metaphorical architecture is Predicated on these Underlying Presumptions and they do have a dachshund That's also partly why the biological question In relationship to ethics becomes complex to because Some of these Adaptations to P

ermanent patterns AR Biological Fundamentals right So And if Utilisation is part of that then Evolution Persistent patterns that we've encountered over evolutionary history have shaped Axiom's of our Ethics Complicated man like all this stuff Okay So where I was going well Quite a significant amount Let me see it Okay so I'll just go down one route I don't know if you're aware of Donald Hoffman The name doesn't ring a bell So Donald Hoffman Cognitive scientist who makes the claim that what we se

e is not reality it almost certainly cannot be And the reason is that The amount of ways that reality could be Versus the amount of waste you could perceive There's a So what's reality could be is at the bottom and then you have the numerator the amount of weight that you perceive that Temp 20 Or anything that even remotely complicated Which we are more than remotely complicated Well look You've watched The Simpsons or South Park South Park season 2 better example It's barely animation at all So

uth Park You know it's just icons Move it You don't care That's good enough And it doesn't matter that In fact it's kind of an interesting style and it doesn't clutter up the story right So what you see is an icon now If you see an icon And the Pixels in the icon are random samples of the underlying reality Then And the reality doesn't change during the active perception then You're still seeing reality but you seeing it at very low resolution and I think that's a better way of thinking about It

's low resolution It's not not real You don't glassy don't want your representations to be any higher resolution than necessary to imagine on a computer Sometimes you want a thumbnail Because that's good enough It sometimes you want a high-resolution photo because you need detail And that's a really good way of thinking about our perceptions They're lohanthony Also are Heuristic I think that each of us has a complete map of the world Now you might say while we can't because We're ignorant in the

worlds will complicate it's like yeah but we just cover up what we do Perceive in detail with a low-resolution map And soul Things we haven't delved into In detail AR map In a very low resolution way And that's good enough as long as when we use the representation we don't encounter an error It works And if it doesn't look like when you have to decompose the You have an explanation for In some sense a representation of everything It's just low resolution Think of the word sky Okay that's that's

Condo-world is an icon So you can think the word is a representation of it Image of a representation of reality So when you look at the sky you don't see the sky Like my two you're looking up in the night sky I mean in Colorado life there's a hundred billion galaxies out there you don't see them You see a low-res representation and then you make it even lower-res by saying sky What is that good enough Good enough you don't get hit by a meteor when you're out there on the deck standing looking u

p at the sky It does the trick for the time That's a pragmatic approach to truth to some degree You know what's your current purposes Complete enough for you to act in the manner that produces the result you You want and not the result you predict the one you actually want doesn't always like that Normal of course not because of because Are low-res reps or representations are fallible Immensely fallible But often they're good enough You don't when you were speaking to Harris What I thought was u

nderlying the disagreement between you two and even with you and Brett Weinstein about truth Is that Implicit assumption that one should pursue true But I don't know if that's the case But when you're referring to truth and Usain Bolt ears and definition truth If we were to just follow blindly scientific truth we would build animals which we have We could destroy us there many past I can go that on salutary so we should pick it And brightness Explanatory To me what was Tonit to me was underneath

it was that we should pursue true Am I correct in my assessment or was there something else What if we don't always have to pursue truth Well we can't pursue it everywhere right There has to be a spirit that animates The Pursuit Of Truth Give it some direction while look is here's an example I think I probably use this My discussions with Harris I read this book once about Biological warfare research in the Soviet Union and the pretty damn relevant in the case of Wu headlights Really knows what

happened there but in any case Demonetize right now There were Soviet scientist working on Combining Trying to make a hybrid Between Smallpox and Ebola What's that Right right And intimated it Deliverable in aerosol How about maybe not How about maybe we don't go there And charges for making decisions like that all the time because Disney Infinity number of socks To study see this is the problem with the Pure science argument follow the science It's like well There's an infinite number of fact

This is a problem So science is all about the facts yeah Which box and then that gets us into the postmodernist Dilemma cuz the postmodern to say Only those facts that serve the will to power and your particular Will To Power This is very cynical way of looking at science So But but Superficial the questionnaire right something is directing this Summon something needs to be directing this in And I would take Harrison Weinstein of myself at all agreed that the pursuit of truth is Of exceptional i

mportance And also that there are methods for Distinguishing let's say Material facts scientific facts from ethical fox now that's where it gets tricky or in the relationship between those two I don't think you could look at the facts except through an ethical framework I don't think it's possible The ethical framework is built into your perception You can't help it and the reason for that It's it's technically quite straightforward I believed is it We are fundamentally Ambulatory and goal-direc

ted creatures We walk we move Always moving from point A to point B always no matter what we even when we're looking at something it's in preparation For a movement to someone bet somewhere better Actively to make things worse but that's an exceptional case We can't help but look at the world What we see is a map That's it that's a good way of thinking about it We don't see the world we see our map of the world And we need them out because we have to walk through the world And we don't want to h

ave Things fall on us etcetera and we don't want to get lost And so We might infer objects from the contents of our Maps And we might even say those objects are fundamentally real but then About the problem because the question then arises what what do you mean by real exactly And exactly why And you know they would say what you could derive what's real from science and I would say wow There's an infinite number of fact Sam how the hell did we decide which facts to pursue and which not to pursue

Which we shouldn't pursue How do you think Here's something interesting about the scientific literature You write a research report about your Experiment You almost never Tell the truth about why you got interested in that What you do is you lay out this rational argument that led to your hypothesis which is what led to your hypothesis are all by the way It's just a summary statement that other people could follow it's not an actual description of what happened You're interested in something fo

r some reason And that shapes your hypothesis and the direction of your research and that's tied in with your own personal narrative So It'd be Devil's the scientific Enterprise and it can be a real problem because your own narrative You know Cloud your judgment of the let's say the relevant facts The epitome of that is this mathematician named ramanujan have you heard of ramanujan Yes Okay for those who haven't heard of him He would come up Through Intuition or through what he would say would b

e dream encounters with gods or goddesses He would Come up with What are us Bounding Formulas I remember I think it's Hardy it was a supervisor said you can't Simply make these out there too broke for you can make them up And they turned out to be correct and what you're saying is How do you justify that That was one of the problems with him but she would Is that he would spit out these formulas which in the end most of the time turn out to be true slight modifications of what's true If someone

wants to know if someone can keep listen to head Okay so how many ways can you partition a certain number so that they 2016 uintas 1 + 1 + 26 * Or can you bring this one plus two and then plus 11 the many many different partitions of a natural number He came up with this formula that the number The partitions of any number something like one over 2 pi Square Root 6 Then you take the derivative of what's Happening Here which is exponential 1/2 Pi / √ 6 Square root of an - 1/24 all / √ 10 - 1 / 24

Message now I'm not sure about that particular one doesn't matter this is an example you could improve them And you would say that he just Occurred to him Bethel Music Well I'm wondering what that's a mystery there's no one else in mathematics that was like that And I'm not sure if that's because he was terribly open If you mention open this is a trait that allows you to have this Beast Large maps of inside I'm not sure if that's exactly why I could be But that's an example Yeah well you don't

The dab Avoidance Spires us That's a great mystery right I mean one of the Mysteries Of the scientific Enterprise for example is hypothesis generation You know when we train Graduate students We we spend a lot of time Training them in method Let's say And approaching and writing scientific papers and so on but there's almost no Strick Pedagogy in relationship to hypothesis generation will where do you come up with your research questions to begin with Well I'm interested in that That's really no

t much of an answer certainly not formalized very well what What is that interest exactly in How does it guide you exactly an What is that And then you might say well and also how is that related to your morality like to what degree is your scientific Curiosity motivated by your own personal desire for success Or maybe the desire to serve others you know on The Virtuous side Etcetera etcetera Well that's just That's just off in the domain of what we don't ask those questions when were scientists

Turn off in some sense but not really because well you do runs The kind of problems you just described You know I work with this Carver He's member of an arpeggio native Canadian tribe Nordstrom's Joseph is his name And it was quite a remarkable person in He carves these Traditional West Coast native Canadian car Quack Quack Car Wash Sculptures And She dreams In those images And he consults with The spirits of his father and grandfather Great grandfather in particular in his dreams about his ca

rvings Any doesn't talk about that Was anyone cuz they think he's crazy but he's not He's definitely not And he's a great artist in my estimation unbelievably create event that His creative process his soul Unique set Why some remarkable to listen to him In on his the inheritor of an unbroken tradition that strength stems back perhaps 15000 years Yep you brought that up the crowd But you said science and that do it in What you would consider to be religious domain And you could give an example b

y motivation what are you what motivates you Temperature Western directions I'm sure once you gotten to that direction It's been a scientific She said wall looks You can't can you point to me Any Facts website The religious is come up with something like that he said And or knowledge and then the question was what what does one mean by knowledge It's a fullest way of looking at the world leader avoided The World Cup scheduled to begin with and then wonder where is the salt If I can watch someone

you take it if I go there and they open up the fridge And I say to you Are you say hey Credit from school that made him get up And go to the fridge and then they say well where What pixel where was that Soul at what point when his fingers touched the fridge Commence What was told was behind that Sure at the lowest level it wasn't but the soul is somewhere at the top What is the Yeah well they do Look I mean I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that there is no spirit in science In som

e sense Because we chased it out when we develop a 100 methodology right And there may be any related It is a related problem going to talk to Penrose by the way also when I go to Wonderful about that because Penrose thinks that Consciousness is not computational and I don't understand why he thinks that I mean I Talking to computer Engineers who are building ARA brains fundamentally Hey score Harris Insurance study Penrose and spoken to his Partner Stuart hameroff On the Podcasts Mysterio The p

ractice It's computation on some sense that neither the first nor the language Now because of girdles incompleteness theorem We can generate A proposition that we see as true but the force first order language cannot see that it's true I was going to happen over and over to do something Incompleteness theorem because I got my book maps of meaning and a number of Phyllis Phyllis Esophageal critics have said that I misunderstood that Incompleteness theorem that didn't have any application in the d

omain and philosophical inquiry but I thought it was also an argument about first principles that any internally coherent system had to be predicated on axioms that work Provable from within the confines of the system Cancel that party 10 roses Yeah and I'm unsure exactly what you said in Mensa meetings I would make interesting philosopher raised alarm They just said it was inappropriate of me doing first of all that I misunderstood godel's incompleteness theorem which I might have been Because

I'm not a mathematician but that even if I did understand it it wasn't appropriate to apply at 2 Like systems and philosophical inquiry outside District domain of mathematics in That was their criticism And I've always been suddenly read about that because I was kind of outside my domain of expertise when I Incorporated that argument It didn't look to me like it It was a It was a statement I think 42 Adele Adele men twisted You can't have a system of usable thought in some sense that this isn't

predicated on axioms that stand outside the sea Lucy I recall reading an article of yours About a year 2 years maybe even three years ago About girdles incompleteness theorem and God How girdles incompleteness theorem in some sense Scott and then when I was searching for it again I couldn't find it do you recall writing an article about Don't think I made that no I don't think I made that argument So But I can ask Henry was about to Yeah Usher The question if that interpretation is correct and t

hen if this is the issue that Penrose is trying to Solve I'd be very interested not so thank you for that cuz all asking about The fact that they're have to see I think there have to be axioms outside the system say the prophecy National system Because something has to fill in the gaps That are ignorant sleeves Can we have to map the world but we can't because we're ignorant so what do we do what we have is options Even our perceptions are assumptions Ilford sample I I'm watching you and I'm act

ing as if what you're doing is telling me the truth But that's an assumption It could be a generous assumption could be a necessary assumption but There are going to be times when that assumption which is a perceptual liar cuz I see you that way right in in the Broader sense of seeing There's going to be times when that's wrong because I'm talking to someone who Isn't telling me the truth cuz they don't know what they're talkin about let's say that's ignorance or maybe they're being malevolent S

o we fill in the gaps between our propositional knowledge and the infinitely complex world with Presumption A lot of those presumptions are perception so I think of perceptions as the axioms of propositional thought Apartemen Authorities about something right Yep and Roses wood and Rosewood come from Maybe it's adjacent but an alternate route It's about understanding the fact that we can understand a statement to be true And it came from a first-order language with that first-quarter language Ca

nnot see that it's true That we understand it Implies that what we're doing is not computational and the reason is that with imagine we could find the computational Stephen Wolfram Believe that What underlies reality something like hypergraphs and then there's a competent there's a rule that rule of System of rewriting No I came to a first-order language However the repeat let's imagine that's the case that the At the fundamental physics is something like a rule generation process that's like a

first-order language Well then We can Find a rule sorry we can find a statement that this rule cannot see as being true But then we see it as So how is it that we can be generated by this work if we're embedded in the first order language How is it that we can see what are we going to understand that to be true when were generated by a Okay so so let me know okay That was part of the reason that young hypothesize The existence of a Transcendent self Imagine that as you go through The difference

Manifestations of your Personality in your life you know you say I radically changed At some point You look at retrospectively and you say are radically changed while maginet Thursdays Map systems That you identify with You say that to me Arrigo identifies with him you say that to me but then that changes radically Maybe you fall into chaos When it changes because you you lose your belief And then a new belief emerges out What emerges out of something underneath And so young posited that part of

What the self was was the thing that remained constant across transformations And actually guided them in some sense You'll also believe that Christ Technically speaking psychologically speaking was a symbol of the cell Yep And that's partly why the death in Redemption idea Rings true with us because We all go through partial deaths And descents into sometimes into hell you know when everything falls apart around you you know To think about that as a descent into hell perfectly reasonable metap

horical statement it certainly feels like an eternity See when you're there 10 and some cents. Domain has always existed right across the span of humanity And it's a place you can go talk to a place that deceit is very likely to take you cuz it makes your Presumption systems very fragile and much more likely to degenerate into a chaotic hell In any case The self is the thing that underneath South it remains constant but also the thing that guides those Transformations and even More importantly i

n some sense it's the thing that gives us the intuitions that Guides those Transformations towards a higher order form of unity and completion And then you could say maybe that we're manifesting you and I are trying to manifest at Spirit in this dialogue because we're trying to To modify each other's proximal constructions To move them towards a more accurate invalid position And that worried Very engaged would not happening because it's so vital That was a good conversation that was a deep conv

ersation we really thought somewhere Something like that that metaphor We can't simply use engagement as a barometer or as a marker of The following this value system because some people can be engaged probably still when murdering people Yeah well I'm one of the things I would What are the things I warn people about an option meeting was If you lie enough You will Warcraft structures that guide your interest and then you won't be able to rely on it and then Then you're lost Can you imagine if y

ou couldn't rely on your instinct for meaning because you'd corrupted it What you going to do cuz I think that's the sin against the Holy Ghost Tito fundamentally You can't recover from that You're speaking my language I'm liking what you're saying it reminds me of It's like we have a compass and every time every lie is a disc Equilibrium Makes it Not mixing not operating properly That's one reason to not tell a lime what's interesting though is that if you If you've corrupted your compass somew

here positive That depends on if you're aiming positively Telling the truth Recalibrate it Yes I did well look Psychotherapy I kind of developed this idea when I went down I did my first public talk at Bucknell Thirsty about a month ago What are the things that I Writing about Psychotherapeutic presumption So the first presumption is that there is such a thing as psychotherapy The second presumption is that it can lead you to a state of increase Psychophysiological well-being and health Subway S

urfers Just rubbish Freud first came out and said while talking can cure people You know that was a pretty Preposterous claim no one believed this how can Talking You know he'll Quikwall talking is thinking You don't think taking has anything to do with your psychophysiology and what Freud did was have people just talk Ticket say anything he didn't Like that's where they laid on the couch and didn't see him it was like Say anything that comes into your mind Okay so Essentially what you doing is

telling the truth to yourself and untrammeled Manor Now people Thanks by talking most people think by talking You have to be a pretty good thinker before you can think without having to talk And really what you have to do is talk to yourself in your head You have The revelatory part of thought which is your ideas and then you'd engage and dialectical criticism internally Internalized conversation And you have to be pretty sophisticated to be really good at. DFD willing to divide yourself into at

least two parts and you have to be able to do that most people do that by talking so they They reveal what they think to themselves by talking Heading to having said what they say they can You know what take-it-or-leave-it did then he started Distinguish between the week the child I'm about to be site is psychotherapeutic leakira Devin certainly people like Carl Rogers Place to tremendous emphasis on Post truth Has the Curative process in psychotherapy but also Necessity for the psychotherapy H

im or herself To essentially act out Something like the role of Christ on Rogers was extremely influenced by Protestant thinking I mean he was going to eventually Why is the world when he was a kid but he became agnostic or atheistic but they'd also Two idea was if If I listen to you in the right spirit You can reveal truth To yourself that will Reconstitute you and redeem you That's basically the whole premise of psychotherapy and it it works you know Mostly What I saw in Psychotherapy I practi

ced For twenty years was We just We got rid of a fair bit of ignorance We did a fair bit of social skills development like I taught a lot of people how to shake hands and say hello and introduce themselves They just didn't have those skills But a lot of it was Let's find out the lies Madden get rid of them You talk to you to figure out what the lines are all listen I'm not telling you I don't know what your lies are done or what lies you Tangled Up In I don't want to presume Yeah I know some peo

ple who would lie to their therapist Cuz they're too ashamed or for whatever reason Some people ask me what am I advocating for with this film blue better left unsaid And for me If I'm not advocating for anything I'm not fake AC be presumptuous for me to Advocate would mean that I found something that I'm trying to convince other people up Truly better left unsaid was like a a temp for me to cohere And And solidify my own crops development I forgot them What time is it on You'll notice that I pa

use identifies before thinking one of the reasons is that If it's something that I've said before I tried to say to me different manner Well one reason even if it's spinning and even if I'm simply replacing the words of synonyms And the reason is that The reason is that it's great for cognitive flexibility I think words are like pecans Allow you to reach farther places like when your rock climb they like the con But secondly Even if it's something that is supposed same phenomenon when you view i

t from a slightly different angle You get a better understanding of what it is Earlier we were talking about idolatry and I think it's almost idolatry is akin to mistaking the representation What's trying to be represented Which means insisting that your interpretation is the totality Write the satanic error My interpretation is the totality so I told really is it good luck with that I'm super excited to talk to you about the definitions of God we'll get to that Sandpoint It would be like imagin

e if you have a An upside-down ice-cream-cone I did not expect you to say that If you look at it from the top socialserve you looking from the side of triangle If you look at it from let's say over here or over here looks like a teardrop And some people when they're describing God what I think they're trying to do Is it's an extremely good maybe demos compliment people say the brain is the most complicated forever God is Definition of God but Maybe it's not that Either way God is complicated Jus

t say that Well if you look across Religions it's contradictory therefore was being described can't exist Only one of them to be correct Now I'm not acumenical enough to say they're all correct in their own manner I'm not under a tree meditating with Flower saying everyone's correct That may actually be the case I'm saying that just because something is contradictory doesn't mean that we shouldn't It may be akin to different perspectives on the same object I don't know if you've heard of em. For

m of string theory String Theory says this Five different flavors of type 2A 2B in Solon Infection positive after all Not adumbration to the same phenomenon but actually different perspectives of the same phenomenon This is obvious for people to understand the old refrain of you touching elephant ear Catching elephants They're all this racket so this is obvious to some people I'm wondering if while I'm not wondering I have a Have a distinct feeling the different Descriptions of God even there's

so many contradictory statement East and West about God So the east You're suffering in life Extreme Grace and love and Life 2 But one of the One of the solutions attacks right Don't lie Faster than the other answer is to realize that this suffering is illusory so to do way with the point Everyone is at the coin look there's a good side in the bad side Choose the good Eastwood Realize that there is no coin And that's another solution and perhaps somehow they're the same solution I've heard you a

lso hard to talk about gambling uphill and what lies at the top of the hill submaximal responsibility Is it Is that all that lies at the top of the hill Where's it also Is it also warmth in forgiveness and Grace And are those the same How are those the same Okay Let's think about this Yeah I think while the responsibility in some senses Is to lift out load up the hill That doesn't mean that it's responsibility that's at the top of the hill Okay Didn't they win the World Cup In some ways Christ i

s represented as Taking The responsibility for all the sins of mankind Unto himself right Well that's responsibility I look to the degree that Each of us are trying to sort out in our own Souls Complex Problems that bedevil other people were doing that in a low-resolution form right we're taking the Fragility and errors and malevolence of mankind On to ourselves in trying to sort that out and that's meaningful although it's also extremely burdensome one You know what can tell you it's an cross y

ou and so The responsibility has to be tempered didn't ever it ways to make it even better bearable You know one of the things that's so interesting about the Christian story in my estimation is that that responsibility is so Overwhelming that You know it it was even Daunting for God himself That's built into the story in That certainly were thinking about You know WhatsApp to talk while you Give me we can We can we can sort of We can hit that it so you talked about that Process that you describ

e the viewing something from multiple different perspectives he technically called that circumambulation Walking around Yeah exactly to view something very complicated like take snapshots of it from a whole bunch of different perspectives This is partly why very rationally minded People who like to walk through something logically find Young Hard to I'll tolerate even That is how he thinks he thinks in this circumambulate Tori Manor well think of it this way and think of this win Here is another

Viewpoint distance And so forth and then You read that it's like having an impressionist painting Co here in your mind into a hole Like all the sudden I see what he's talkin about him That's an overwhelming experience mean I really experienced that reading ion which is it Unbelievably terrifying bookend is so brilliant It's just hasn't been unpacked it all into our culture It's terrifying because Well young is the only Tinker I've ever seen who You know we hypothesized earlier in some sense tha

t That artistic intuition Lays out of map for The development of propositional thinking while you write phrase Development of that intuitive pattern-seeking imagination back like 3000 years that's partly why he Talks about astrology so When we looked up in the night sky let's see Prior to The development Astronomy What we saw we didn't know what we were looking at right it filled us with all but we didn't know what we were looking at so we popular Plated the sky with singers of our imagination T

he commander that's the constellations and it was a way of orienting ourselves So if you look at astrology Psychologically what you have is a vast Storehouse of the contents of the human imagination Now in astrology there was The idea of a certain kind of progression through the eons What you believe that the fantasy that underlies astrology was so deep that it had Sketched out the map for the For the trail that we're actually walking down I don't understand reading it Well So the artist having

to all the artists have intuitions about what's coming So they're the first The first people in the unexplored territory and then D'Amore Propositional Philosophers and Sachin the scientist Filling the details The trailblazing has already been done by the imaginative than the intuitive Right Write a reminder That's okay and I on young tracks The contents of that imagination Back Several thousand years And also lays out something like asking for the future so He believed that This is so strange m

an He believed that The idea that there were wise man who saw a star that signified Christ Spurs was actually a reference to the astrological idea that Something new would be born at the dawn of the ancient age of Pisces Pisces I get to WinStar Why because they were interpreters of the Stars Pisces Pisces is a constellation that's characterized by a fish going in One Direction and The Fish going in the other and you was very interested The news of fish symbolism in Christianity The associated th

at was yesterday logical imagination You also believe that 2000 Year. From Christ's birth roughly two now was characterized by two ions one which was explicitly Play Christian that's the fish moving in One Direction And the other which led to the development of empirical science was an antithesis And if that had been foreshadowed by the by this By the symbolism which was part of the intuitive discovery of The about which was yet to come That's only part of the argument That it's an unbelievably

profound book And terrifying once you understand what he's talking about I've never seen anyone criticizes who actually understood that And I'm almost all the criticism but I've seen of young and his thinking It's like no you don't you're not Hitting the target there buddy he's asking questions That you don't even know need to be at So you know where you're not until you're not in the ballgame So Yeah in any case The more scientific minded people Yeah well the more proposition we minded people s

ee You don't have a problem with the propositional universe he said yeah well there's a gap between what we know and the unknown purse What fills that Gap Well dreams The imagination Imagery It's the pits at the boundary of propositional thought and it It's between us and what we absolutely don't know And the Visionary artist operating the domain of imagination And pave the path for the propositional types Think about the relationships between Dostoevsky and Nicha Nutraburst Much more propositio

nal then Dusty Esky Petoskey Fundamentally is deeper Now he's not as clear Right that's the trade-off Everything in Nietzsche's and Dusty Esky and Moore is in. The Esky Anthony Jim self knew that He was no piker when it came to Appreciation but say of works of the imagination That's a good way of thinking You see this too I saw this great lecture by Jonathan pageau Which I'm going to put on my YouTube channel where he spent about 20 minutes Explaining The meaning of a Orthodox icon that showed S

erpent I don't want to get into it too complicated but There's so much in that it but you just can't Believer You think we'll how did it'll get there and it's it's akin to the question you asked about the mathematician Who is Plumb the depths of the human Souls no one where these ideas come from while they appear in my head You think that's an explanation The ideas appear in where in your head What do you mean by your head Human physically Like what do you mean But you don't know what you mean A

nd God only knows where I come from and to think that they just sprang fully formed out of the Void without a huge developmental history 3 is not even the extreme Yeah it's like who built Who built the Sistine Chapel was Michelangelo Snuffle Delta painted Until all on some sense yes But also his He came from a myriad of people before him And not only that but the Bible and also thousands and thousands of years before Define justified I'm not trying to demean scientist anyway me the rascally athe

istic minded scientist 10mm strawmanning than what I'm saying that Funny just pick someone house Lacrosse Pecan crust Crossword Look up a nominal extremely decals matter now obviously he doesn't What I mean is it's almost like someone who's at the top of the trees Solbar But they don't realize that there's Roots beneath them But they forgotten that there's routing they think that they don't need it They just like what exactly Closest a great physicist and But there's a lot of What he does that h

e regards as self-evident and I've never questioned and it started a precondition for what he does is a physicist because you do with your physicists you're off Physics Questioning your presumptions Except maybe in the domain of physics A lot of what he regards as self-evident Just simply isn't self-evident And that's a real problem when it comes to discussions about what's real and You brought up an issue Couple issues earlier that that are really worth returning to You know one issue is What i

s the one that unites the many And you might say well we don't need one that unites the many we can have a diverse range of values let sites while then you have the pro , conflict confusion and anxiety plus hopelessness because you don't really have a goal Snot snot like that polytheism let's say Is Without a Cause It's fragmentary And it causes social have are because A person a will Pursue valuation Person B will pursue value be if that's okay if they're United under a higher-order structure t

hat unites them in some sense but it's not Not okay at all It's the Situation in the desert when Moses leading his people away from From Egypt It's the central organizing principle was the Egyptian totalitarian stated dissolved in what happens is this descent Tandoor fragmentation And that's extremely dangerous It's not the promised land that's for sure So the question is what's the one that unites the many That's the central religion question So then and football and can you say that the one th

at unites the many is the most real Well then you're in the domain of definition right at that point it starts to become like a definition rather than When you ask people to definable What is real it just becomes tautological Not that by the way not that citologia the trivial For example there's Chris Langan Yes one of the highest IQs Recorded Along with Savannah Built his theory he built his theory of everything and some sense from a supertoy ecology That is Is it apodictic formulation I am tha

t I am That's God's definition of himself in the bar had a I think we should This is extremely interesting so you mention what Well that's a good question you know I think it's the spirit that guides our sequential transformations To a higher and higher form of unity and maybe a higher and higher form of delight in love Do you think That we are all God I'm sure you've heard some people say that we're gone but we forgotten that were God I can't answer a question like that exactly I mean I believe

that the idea that We have a Divine spark within is an extraordinary Beautiful poetic and necessary idea And I think that if you act like that Kill yourself another people that Things gif Radically Interesting hahaha interesting and deeply meaningful around you and it it seems to be a A good Proposition To guide your actions You know what we're hoping you and me maybe to the degree that were Being good Is that The spirit of Truth in you is speaking to the spirit of Truth in me And so and that i

s A reflection of the Presumption Upon which Western Civilization is based Explicitly let's say Not to say that it doesn't Permeate other cultures But it's that Spirit of truth that animates Us in that redeems us in our societies as well and hopefully that's it Preston The quality of our speech When were free to speak And so is that Divine well I don't think it's a bowl from thought itself in some sense it might not be separable from Consciousness it's Is that Divine well You know whenever you h

ave that is that this it's an equation right Is 1 + 1 equal to 2 What is the answers of radical What each of those Claims on Bose On both sides of the equation are equally dubious in relationship to one another Cuz what you're trying to do is to say is God real What what you say what you're not saying is We know what real is and it's this And what does God fit into that category So we know what Goddess In order to assess it Could you can reverse and say is real God The same question it's the sam

e question 1 Miss something I heard from Tyler Goldstein has his own Theory of Everything The ordinary so you look for every have a definition and we look for evidence and then dismiss what we've Justified And if we don't find evidence Perhaps we should do When it comes to God Instead of Instead of looking for God God doesn't exist You use the fact that you didn't find evidence of God As an indication that you should alter your definition of God Obviously there's something Yeah However Now that'

s a good that's a really good observation Brittany choose.you house Tricky questions like that are right Cycle maybe you're looking in the wrong place Maybe you formulated your search incorrectly Like you don't know Cuz it looks like you're aiming at the highest reality right is like You're even at the highest reality will how do you know you have the question formulated properly If you if you did well you've already found it And so you might say well does the highest reality exists We're back t

o the problem of the one that unites the many Yeah yeah I see I was downtown in Toronto and I just talked to someone and his uses Jamaican guy Sophie While probably won't happen now is to call Tina's cutting Coconuts Oh my gosh I rarely meet people whose name name is Kurt From the Caribbean Remember thinking I guess my name and then I remember stopping taking I have his name But I thought Probably what's better to say as we share the same name America What is it that we all share Is that somehow

related What is it that we all share You're something else I was thinking about When we Right now we're speaking to one another in podcast form In some sense we're copying this even think of this archetypal in something for copying podcast by doing so When one is playing Rock music Copying rocking someone develop extra copying something How far can you take that when your doing art in general what are you copying okay How far can I be taken how about it right man now you got exactly is how abou

t if you're simply living Laimbeer What are you copying Is by simply existing and living Is that a reflection of that what you're copying is God's Essence The Manor That is abstracted completely out there's any difference I don't think there's any difference between imitation and worship They're the same thing That's why the Eastern Orthodox types Nice such a cyst on the imitation of Christ We should worship ball Joey says what that means enthusiastically celebrate Right raised to the highest po

sition while then you imitate that you imitate that which is of most value You imitate hopefully right what else would you want to do Have you thought much about self-fulfilling beliefs Okay here's the reason why I say that imagine I believe you Outlanders to we talk Printable Maps literally like a matches for Simplicity About When you're buying an apartment and you see the ground layout Imaginate A worldview When it comes to self fulfilling beliefs That's extremely interesting to me because I'm

used our hearts Of reality on that map Whatever you projected to be there will be there So it's a I think there's a toilet in that you're right If you don't think there's a toilet in there there's There's not There parts of your map that are always correct no matter what you think about Well okay I would I would turn that a little bit I would say This is something Kierkegaard talks about at least to some degree Imagine that there are only things that you can find out by doing them You can't val

idate the hypothesis you can't test the hypothesis without acting it out So let's say You decide that you're going to tell the truth What evidence is there that you should do that Well who knows there's evidence that you should lie works in the short-term it might be to your benefit in the short term I mean Maybe if you deceive some girl she'll sleep with you you know Like why not do that. Well You can't collect the facts you know in some sense Northern is simple matter what let's say you decide

to Tell the truth Carefully as you can Well then you're going to have a certain kind of life You're not going to have that life unless you do that So you won't even get access to the data unless you Take the steps and that's partly why Space is necessary Endeavor like that You have to decide it's some fundamental Maybe your scattered all over the place It's interesting when Christ comes back In the Book of Revelation And he's the judge so Separating the damn from the saved let's say He said som

ething very strange he says If you are neither hot nor cold I will spit you out of my mouth he actually says vomit So what's the disgust reaction And it's It's this idea that The worst thing is to play Both Sides Against the middle Look sometimes you lying sometimes he'll tell the truth you know you won't commit to something because you wanted both ways and The worst possible Well so let's say you commit to lies well maybe you'll find out pretty quickly to Tessa Helluva thing to do And learn if

you don't commit Sorry Yep go ahead What if you don't commit not because you Believe I do know what's What's crackin you like to lie about because you simply don't know. Got two different that's psychologically like a whole different thing I would say The real damage comes when you Know what you should do and then you decide not to do it anyways Yeah. Yes and say this is the same thing and if you practice that you're going to be in hell and You're probably going to drag a number of people along

with you If you have your druthers So I feel comfortable speculating Because I don't mind Sorry didn't I'm so sorry that I keep interrupting Oh man it's my You're not don't be sorry about it But I also I don't know if it's true that you temporarily get what you want Crochet when you lie And the reason is it depends on what you want Everything depends on if you can always say that 10 so it sucks but The reason I say that is that It's meretricious and sunsets You think you want object text And the

n It turns out that you don't when you get it Timer in Pirates of the Caribbean I could be misremembering this but there is some gold I think I'm completely A generalizing disability imagine there's some gold Damn that they wanted and it glows And the only one in the world is unique I want it eventually goes through this whole journey find it Until we get to the island where there's a million Far as I can see there the school gym Did you stop Why did I go through all this for that And it's some

sense I'm wondering Is the majority of Religious text telling us you think you want Stone so What you actually want is this And in that way We can say that even the atheist we can even say that the 80s alternative wants got even the serial killer ultimately wants. Yeah yeah they're distractions I can't wander down that road with you at the moment cuz I'm getting tired but I'd like to say one thing about that To see issue again and maybe we could close If you lie To a girl and she sleeps with you

Why are you a rapist And is that actually what you wanted Right because your your is false pretenses give you could get away with rape Yeah well so then all of a sudden you don't have Well maybe what you want in your soul of souls his You know The sexual encounter you'd have in Paradise you know you want love you want Companionship you want The maternal embrace you want Eroticism you want deep Personal contact what eye-to-eye communication that's all part of this fantasy you know Then you decei

ve Get it and then you get it I know you don't Cuz you're deceitful rapist So what do you get what you get the corruption of your soul and The the contamination of the thing that you want and need most desperately and that The entire human Endeavour depends upon And that's probably good place to close She's talking to m.j. I was great talking to you Snow Men I want to talk about Okay I wanted to Or maybe Wednesday explained Yes it's right exactly That's another aspect we can talk about how much

of reality is fractal like work Examination of any element if you pursue it for enough his examination of the whole Now I know can't believe that by studying Infinity mathematical he was setting The mind or studying God Some people think why are you wasting your time if your Someone who cares about the good why are you Caring about mathematics or physics or Well hey man maybe if you're truthful lyrics Exploring something High-tech question to your question Take exception to one of your rules whi

ch is Tell the truth I like the Lakota sandwiches Or at least my lab but I would have reached that I say don't lie Try to tell the truth It's much easier to Feel like you're telling the truth when you're not Trick yourself into I think I'm a Geordie of the time we think we're telling Isn't it That's another reason I pause because by stopping lying Yeah yeah It's not easy to discern what is actually What I think And what's a reflex that just comes to me I'm trying to make sure Anyway we can talk

another time It was really good talking to you man Yeah great talking to you as well continue to Deborah's and end with your podcast end I I really liked your idea about not saying the same thing Twice the same way that's all that's really interesting metal habitat Disciplinary What's 4 ^ 4 256 okay so how do you know that you can memorize it Another ways that you can go explore what's 4 ^ 5 Bartendaz 10.4 if your computer science You know that because you do a bit And then you can say what what

's 2 / 36 4 ^ 3 for the power 5 and then you get a better understanding what it means to be 4 ^ 4 Memorial Even if it's white alterations in your I'm staying the same trying to describe the same phenomena get a better understanding of it And when you talk about something so complex I never give the same lecture twice Yeah that's not easy man No But it's a A damn entertaining Hotel you Before we go I'm curious why it is that you do why is it that you do these podcasts What are you trying to accom

plish with them someone is obviously you're trying to learn And obviously you retain some level of Fame and wealth so it's not as if you want more crap to do Discount Selfish motivations What is the reason that you Hope the good reason in u.s. Don't have conversations like this and to share that with as many people as possible In the hopes that will build better people and not burn the world down Some people say what why is it going to focusing on the last thing you mentioned It's not Seen some

people from the left called the right reactionary it seems like perhaps what you're doing on the extreme Even if you feel like the right is more damaging You don't think you're provoking the right Selective more amenable to reason Elise colloquially It's more amenable to reason so I thought Translation Anna more interested the right is blatant And the racism Mike Wallace I'll let people know about If they'd like to see it More about me they can Visit theories of everything so you can just type t

hat into YouTube's their conversation much like this Jordan Where I'm stupid So fascinated know I want to see my motivations are Rqr I'm fascinated by Consciousness physics Free Will and God Exploring them with technical depth as much as I can. This Rising like most people I think that disparagement is what Well in many ways is holding us back So I'm trying to bring some rigor some exact tattoo to it Is not exact We can talk about that and then for better left unsaid if people want to see Go to

better left unsaid film.com I try to bring some Of the same analytical framework to explain the concept of not explain the question of Windows left And it's that Spartan incomplete anyways because it's It's so incomplete Is submitted at some point Jordan solutely thank you man Chow mein Really good talking to you Which flew by Anda You're very articulate You're very careful with your words until good for you man Yeah I know I'll spank you that's a huge compliment Coming from you Good to talk to

you Anchorman