In this 95th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we take on culture and consciousness. Beginning with an excerpt from the penultimate chapter of our forthcoming book, we define the terms somewhat differently from how others define them, and discuss how human history can be understood as a tension between culture—received wisdom, orthodoxy, that which works...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 94.
Is it 94?
Is it 94?
It's 95.
It's 95.
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast number 95.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
We are your Dark Horses and Chiefs.
No, that doesn't work.
Sorry.
I thought it did and then it turned out that it didn't.
It doesn't.
No, it doesn't work.
Right.
Yeah.
Today we are going to be talking about culture and consciousness.
That is the subject of the Penultimate chapter of our forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and we have been walking through these chapters a little bit every week in the run-up to the publication date, which is now only a week and a half away.
We're going to be talking about collective joy, and dancing in the streets, and taboo, and the sacred and the shamanistic, and hallucinogens a little bit.
Hell yeah.
This is where the rubber meets the road.
Is it?
It's one of the places that the rubber meets the road.
I'm not sure that I'm even sure what it is, if that's a metaphor.
I'm not sure that applies, but maybe.
All right.
No, I'm pretty sure, metaphorically, we're right there.
Although... I think you may have just given someone a very bad trip, frankly.
Well, I hope they were sitting down.
Or lying down.
Okay, so we're going to be spending our time with you on that today, and then we'll do the Q&A afterwards, where all topics are possible, but we never get to all the questions, and we pick and choose the questions that you send in.
You can write in questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, which again we will get to.
We'll do this for an hour, hour and a half, take a 15-minute break or so, and then come back for an hour or so of Q&A afterwards.
We are streaming on both YouTube and on Odyssey.
The chat is live on Odyssey.
It is not live on YouTube just because keeping track of two chats was a little much for our awesome moderators.
Yeah.
Consider joining our Patreons to help support us, especially since we are still demonetized here on YouTube.
Brett had an amazing conversation this morning with one of his Patreon groups, and you'll be having another one tomorrow.
Yes, it was an excellent conversation.
Thank you for it, guys.
Excellent.
For those of you watching, as I guess at the moment everyone who's paying attention right now is watching, you just saw the back of Fairfax's head, so we will be having occasional cameos from Fairfax the cat, hopefully.
Goliath t-shirts and other Dark Horse wares are available at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Please consider coming over to naturalselections.substack.com to see weekly writings from me.
This week I was writing about flow and various manifestations of how it is that humans find flow and therefore meaning.
And today we have, before we get into the bulk of the show, two ads for you.
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I was just going to ask.
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You do not have to.
Although that can be fun.
I do it anyway.
Right, of course.
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Are we still are we still streaming?
We are live.
We are having a technical difficulty.
Hey Zach, wiggle the cable.
Are we still streaming?
We are live.
We are having a technical difficulty.
Hey, Zach, wiggle the cable.
I've done that.
I need...
So what is it that you need?
Your monitoring screen that has passengers messing with the signal.
And I need your HDMI, Gmail, Gmail.
You continue on.
I think I know how to fix this.
Maybe I should begin by reading an excerpt, since I honestly have no idea what it is that Zach is asking for from us.
I am not currently in the possession of cables, therefore I have no cables to offer.
While we are working on our technical problems, I am going to read one of three excerpts this week from - we have it here - we actually just yesterday got a copy of the actual book in hand: A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
And man, this just feels really, really good to have this after, depending on how you count, months of waiting, years of waiting, well over a decade in the making.
Like we said, the penultimate chapter of the book is Culture and Consciousness, and we are going to share three excerpts from it today.
I basically wanted to read all of it, but we're not doing that, so let us begin with definitions.
These will not precisely match others' definitions, but it is important on this topic to have stated what we are talking about.
For our purposes, culture we define as beliefs and practices that are shared and passed between members of a population.
These beliefs are often literally false, metaphorically true, implying that they result in increased fitness if one acts as if they are true despite the fact that they are either inaccurate or unfalsifiable.
Culture is a special mode of transmission because it can be passed horizontally, rendering cultural evolution immensely faster and more nimble than genetic evolution.
This also renders culture noisy in the short term, before new ideas have endured the test of time.
Long-standing features of culture, by contrast, constitute an efficient packaging of proven patterns.
Culture can spread horizontally, but its consequential parts are ultimately passed vertically from generation to generation.
Culture has received wisdom, generally handed to you by ancestors and officially transmitted.
Consciousness, we define, as we laid out in the very first chapter of the book, as that portion of cognition that is newly packaged for exchange, meaning that conscious thoughts are ones that could be delivered if someone asked you what you were thinking about.
It is emergent cognition, where innovation and rapid refinement occur.
Conscious thoughts may never be conveyed, but they can be, and the most important...
And the most important ones are, is consciousness is most fundamentally a collective process in which many individuals pool insights and skills to discover what was previously not understood.
The products of consciousness are, if they prove useful, ultimately packaged into highly transmissible culture.
We have said before in the book that the human niche is niche-switching.
More specifically, we argue that the human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness.
As an example, let us consider the Nez Perce people, who have lived in the Pacific Northwest for many thousands of years.
Since they arrived, they have inhabited a rich land, and they now have well-established cultural rules that keep them safe and thriving.
Their diet has long included bulbs, the storage organs of plants, which do not want to be eaten.
On these lands where the Nez Perce came to live, both camas, with highly nutritious bulbs, and death camas, with bulbs that are toxic, grow.
When not in flower, these bulbs are incredibly difficult to tell apart.
The Nez Perce may not have been the first on this land, but someone was, and those first people could not benefit from names that would make the danger clear.
Yet they learned the distinction, presumably through trial and error.
It was likely a messy, tragic process.
By the 19th century, however, when Spaniards were documenting what they saw among the Nez Perce, the system of distinguishing nutritious camas from their deadly relatives was nearly perfect.
This is culture.
When humans are exploiting a well-understood opportunity, like 19th century Nez Perce distinguishing Camus from Death Camus, culture is king.
But when novelty renders ancestral wisdom inadequate, as it was for the more ancient ancestral Nez Perce upon arrival in the Pacific Northwest, we need to shift to consciousness.
Through parallel processing of multiple human minds, our consciousness can become collective, and we can solve problems that neither we could solve as individuals nor our ancestors could have even imagined.
Put another way, in times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes, culture reigns.
But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation and communication of new ideas are critical, consciousness reigns.
That said, novel levels of novelty, such as we are experiencing now, are a special danger.
This means that what is needed today, and urgently, is a call to consciousness on a scale that we have not seen before.
So that's our first excerpt for today.
And we are back in business here, tech-wise.
Well, let's treat it as if it works, and if not, we will resort to other cameras.
Indeed.
Yeah, so I'm really excited that this model is in the world.
We have talked about it at least once publicly before.
We talked about it on a discussion with Robbie George at a talk for Princeton.
In the spring of last year.
But I do think that humans are, as my advisor Dick Alexander famously said, the uniquely unique species.
And the question really is what is it about humans that allows us to be uniquely unique?
And I believe that this model is a strong contributor to the difference.
So just to flesh it out a little bit.
Yeah.
People will recognize that when we say, you know, something like, what is a tufted titmouse, right?
We're talking about a particular species.
As people remarkably do occasionally say to us.
Well, sure.
Yes.
I mean, why wouldn't you?
What is a tufted titmouse?
What is a tufted titmouse?
We're not going to answer that question here today.
A tufted titmouse is just a stand-in for any species.
And in general, if you ask what a species is, it comes with a description of a niche.
Each species has some set of things that it does, and it can be a very broad generalist niche.
You know, a raccoon has a very generalist niche.
It does a lot of different things, and it does them all a little poorly.
Mountain lion is a little different.
Mountain lion, different populations will exploit different kinds of prey, and so depending upon the habitat, they may look very different.
But for human beings, it's very hard to specify what the niche is, because if you look at all of the various things that people do, it's tremendously variable.
And if you look at all of the things that people have done while we have been fully modern people, it's even more variable.
It's even more variable.
In some ways, in many ways, we're becoming a more homogeneous species.
Right, in some ways we are becoming more homogeneous.
But, obviously, if a modern human, that is to say the physical being, can be teleported into any one of those niches and can function well so long as it develops there and picks up the correct programming to function, that suggests something very bizarre about us, which is that we are somehow a creature that upgrades our own software.
And that does not mean improves it.
It means radically swaps out one set of software at the point that you change what it is that you're eating and what sorts of hostile forces you're facing, switches out the software en masse in order to replace it with a software package that has been bootstrapped for the new local circumstances.
That is an amazing capacity.
So how the hell do we do it?
How do we do it?
And Dick Alexander had a somewhat different, although not in conflict with, I would say, this model of oscillating forces, oscillating selective forces, right?
That we were striving against, effectively, ecology, so-called Darwin's hostile forces.
Things like weather and climate and predators and parasites.
And obviously we still have to contend with those things.
Those things are in the news now, right?
And then there was also the effectively social competition that we became our biggest competitors.
We became our most dominant competitor.
Sorry, we became our own most dominant.
Our own most dominant.
So yeah, these things aren't in conflict at all.
So that's Dick's model, and then our model is?
Is this culture and consciousness.
But I should just say, Dick's model has to precede ours.
Because Dick's model is really an explanation for why the human brain got so disproportionately large.
And it had to do with an arms race between human lineages that caused Lineages that could outthink their competitors to win, and basically we all inherited this greatly enlarged thinking apparatus.
But not only is it an enlarged thinking apparatus, it is a thinking apparatus that is not heavily pre-programmed.
It is somewhat pre-programmed, we are not playing slates, but it is not fully pre-programmed, and that means there's room to swap in an agriculturalist, high-altitude agriculturalist program if you're, you know, farming corn in the Andes.
Or you could swap in a marine mammal hunting program if you were, you know, hunting whales in the Arctic.
And that's a radically different way of being, and it requires very different programming.
Exactly.
And so, you know, we are, and as we say in the book, we are not blank slates, but we are, of all the species on the planet, the blankest slates.
And we are blanker even than our two closest extant relatives, that is the two species on the planet to which we are most closely related.
We are equally related to chimps and bonobos, and they are interestingly quite different from one another.
I don't think it's ever been tried, but a prediction behind which I would stand and put a lot of money is that if you try to cross foster a bonobo with a chimp family or a chimp with a bonobo family, The chimpiness will persist in the chimp raised with bonobos and the bonoboness, bonobowishness, will persist in the bonobo raised with chimps.
Whereas, if you cross foster any human being in any other human culture, so long as you start at infancy, basically all of the things of the family in which the baby has been cross fostered will come on board.
Obviously, melanin isn't going to change.
And, you know, facial shape.
Although, you know, even some things like face shape will change as a result of diet, as we've talked about before.
Diet and different, you know, you could at least have different facial expressions.
Obviously, there's huge overlap.
But the language will be different and the cultural, you know, the memes and the expressions and the expectations.
And therefore, to some degree, the periodicity and the timing of events.
Babies who are raised with a lot of love, but in very restrained physical situations, among the Tajik, for instance, which we talked about a couple weeks ago, walk really late compared to weird babies.
Western-educated, industrialized, rich, democratic society bred weird babies, whereas some babies in Kenya, where the encouragement is to move a lot very early, they walk earlier.
You could take a Tajik baby and raise it in that Kenyan village and that Tajik baby would walk earlier.
This is not in the genetic layer, it's in the software layer.
It's in the software layer, and it is both the fact of the software layer, which, you know, a lot of this will be familiar in one regard or another to people who've been watching and listening to us, but the software layer is every bit as biological.
It is a different way of transmitting information.
It is transmitted outside of the genome, but it is not less biological, and we argue I think persuasively in the book that it is subject to the objectives of the genome.
And so the question is, how does a genome that is trying to get into the future and doesn't really care about how, it doesn't care about in what form or through what behaviors, upgrade its software program so that it can take advantage of whatever opportunities it encounters along the way?
And so we argue for this oscillating uh set of modes one which you use when you figured out how to behave in a particular habitat and one which you use when you have to figure out how to behave in a new habitat whether that's because your old habitat changed or because you've moved or because you live at the edge of a habitat where your ancestral population developed its insight and it is this ability which you know the key thing is that human beings can do something that no other creature can do we can
Actually faithfully transmit an abstract idea across open air from one mind to another, and that allows us to do something that no other creature can do, which is to pool insight and get an emergent conclusion that is superior to the sum of the individual conclusions that different people would have if forced to calculate independently.
So let's just forestall an objection I see, which is that there are at least proto-linguistic things, proto-linguistic communications in some other organisms in which information is being conveyed.
But in no other species is information being conveyed with the level of both accuracy and precision that we can convey.
Language is several steps beyond what anyone else has.
When we were in college, I remember learning about actually Cheney and Seyfarth's early work with, boy, is it vervets?
I think it's vervet monkeys, who have three different vocalizations for the three broad types of predators that they are at risk from.
So they have a different vocalization for an aerial predator, that is to say a predatory bird that might be coming, or a terrestrial, basically a mammal like a big cat.
And then also for snakes.
Snakes and cats, which are both a risk for vervet monkeys, come differently.
They can move differently.
They really do require a different kind of response if you are going to maximize the likelihood that you escape from it.
And so they have Three very different vocalizations, suggesting an understanding of their environment that is rich, and involved, and detailed, and accurate, and they can convey that information.
But they don't seem to be conveying much beyond, this thing is here.
You know, danger of one of three sorts.
Pre-existing agreement on the meaning of an arbitrary signal which is very different from an abstraction and just if you haven't been through the logic before the fact that one can say something that one can be reasonably sure is
Novel right if I say potato bearing conifer right probably that's not a useful enough thought that anyone will have bothered to try it out but if I say it and then I was to ask you to draw a picture we could establish that I had successfully conveyed it over open air.
Because you draw a pine tree with a potato growing off it or something like that, right?
I'm not sure to what end, but I could do it.
To no useful end except that we have established that in fact we are not kidding ourselves that we are transmitting abstract thoughts between our minds, that we are actually succeeding in doing it.
Well, and not just transmitting, right?
This is one of the frequent concerns about the many ape language studies that have gone on, where many apes seem to be able to demonstrate receptive language and to be able to some degree to use combinatorics to convey somewhat new ideas.
But that, you know, that second thing is what is often called into question.
The idea that you can understand that, you know, another species of ape, as we are, could understand language.
And, you know, of course they're working at a disadvantage, not just linguistic, but because we are, you know, we are framing things in the world that makes the most sense to us.
They're working with the handicap that we have handed to them, assuming that they are like us.
And of course they are in many ways, but they will not be in some others.
But how capable are they actually of innovating new combinations with the pieces that we have handed them?
Unclear, and certainly not as capable as we are.
Right, by far not.
There is a famous example, and the problem is any single example could be explained as dumb luck.
I think the example is from Coco the Gorilla, who knew a symbol for bird, and knew a symbol for water, and described duck as water bird, right?
That suggests the combinatorics, but it doesn't nail it down.
But in our case, the point is, transmitting an abstract idea is the first step to something that is really the whole point of the exercise.
If I can transmit an abstract idea about a problem I have seen or a solution I have imagined, and then you can run it through your separate mind with your separate skills and without my blind spots, then we can recombine what we have both come up with, and that's where the emergent value comes from.
And that also reveals that the first individual to be expressing a new idea maybe doesn't need this, but it will be helped and there will be a greater chance that they will make the attempt to convey something in the first place if they have theory of mind.
So I would say theory of mind, which we know to be already present in apes and baboons, which are not apes but are old world monkeys.
To a large degree.
If you don't have theory of mind, and you therefore imagine that everything else sees the world exactly as you do, to what end conveying new things, right?
The fact that you have an idea in your head may feel like, okay, so I assume she knows that as well.
So theory of mind would seem to be a sort of implicit base layer as well.
Well, yeah, I mean, at some level, I think even a shared language makes theory of mind so utterly inherent, right?
If I'm talking to you, and I say, you know, grocery store, right, I know exactly what you put together.
Maybe I can't paint the exact, the identical picture, but whether you imagine, you know, a bodega or a supermarket, It doesn't matter.
I know that it lands in a certain quadrant.
And if I speak to somebody who speaks Mandarin and I say, you know, grocery store, I don't know that they pick up anything, right?
Because I just don't know whether that word will even register as a familiar one.
Now maybe it does.
Maybe that's one of the words that is crossed over.
But the point is, theory of mind, a shared language is a It's an almost impossibly complex shared theory of mind inherently.
Indeed.
And anyway, it creates the basis for overcoming obstacles extremely rapidly.
Think about what evolution has to overcome if it functions at a genetic level in order to innovate the tools necessary to hunt a new kind of prey, right?
Unless it's very like an old kind of prey.
It's going to take a long time for the program to be modified at a genetic level, whereas it can be modified in hours if people get into conversation about, here's what we're doing, here's why it doesn't work, and here's what we might do that would fix it, right?
That's a very rich conversation, and basically it turns evolution onto an extreme form of fast forward, which is the reason that human beings don't have a niche, is that we're actually better off without one, because it means if we happen onto a niche, we can figure out what to do with it.
So, we're constantly happening upon new niches through spatial exploration and creating new niches through technological innovation and the like, and therefore over time we find new niches as well.
So, you know, and you already invoked this, but you know, traveling across space and time, we are able to deal with the new niches that we are either finding ourselves in or creating for ourselves.
Better than any other species on the planet, but not quite good enough to deal with the rapid change that we are creating on the planet today.
I think this is a good segue to the next very short excerpt.
We're skipping over consciousness and other animals and going to innovation at the margins of the ancestors' wisdom.
This again from Undergather's Guide to the 21st Century.
During the peopling of the New World, when was relying on consciousness more effective than relying on culture?
Under what circumstances are cultural rules more trustworthy?
As the Nez Perce or their ancestors moved into the range of Khamis and Death Khamis, they were looking for food in an increasingly unfamiliar landscape.
The stables they had come to know were their cultural standbys.
As those familiar foods became harder to source, innovation became ever more necessary.
They were reaching the limits of their ancestors' wisdom, and confronting a puzzle for which the best tool was consciousness.
As the people move across space, it is relatively easy to notice as the ancestors' wisdom becomes less applicable.
As the people move through time, however, as we all do, elders may not recognize their wisdom becoming out of date.
The young see it.
It is no accident that those who are coming of age in times of change push boundaries, and that language and norms change somewhat with each generation.
Throughout history, the Ancestor's Wisdom has generally remained relevant long enough for new generations to get their footing, to know what needs to be pushed against.
As a people move through time that is changing extremely rapidly, however, as our world is now, it is more difficult to know what to do with the increasing irrelevancy of the Ancestor's Wisdom, and with what to replace it.
The margins of the Ancestor's Wisdom are rarely hard and fast.
At those margins, wherever they are, it is time to niche switch.
Consider three broad contexts in which humans have learned and innovated in times past.
The first is the utterly new idea, the idea that springs to mind often unbidden and without explanation.
This was the territory that the first Mayan, Mesopotamian, and Chinese people were in when they innovated farming.
Similarly, the innovation of the wheel, metallurgy, and pottery.
Before those things existed, nobody knew they were possible.
The second context in which innovation occurs is when you know that something is possible, on the basis that it's been done before, but you have no idea how to make it happen.
The Wright Brothers saw flight in other organisms, and felt confident that it could be accomplished by machine.
Third and finally, you might have instruction.
You know what you're shooting for, and have someone or some set of rules or instructions telling you how.
Between school and YouTube, we often conflate this third kind of learning for the only kind of learning that is possible.
The third type of learning is the most cultural.
It is the learning of perceived wisdom.
In contrast, humans are at our most conscious, and therefore our most innovative, in the first two contexts.
When the status quo is no longer sufficient, we must seek to innovate, to push beyond how it's always been done.
The status quo is in inherent tension with our unique insights.
Those ideas that we have deep at night are often syntheses, reflecting the pulling together of common threads into uncommon meanings.
So, these three contexts, and you know, everything in this book does tie together as diverse and broad as the book is, but you're talking about the three, broadly three different ways that humans can learn, and just making explicit that school, and now YouTube, and many people will be surprised to find us lumping YouTube with school, but YouTube and school, especially the YouTube videos that provide direct instruction for, you know, how to do a thing,
are a very explicit, modern, cultural mode of conveying information that allows for very little freedom and innovation and consciousness.
Well actually, you know, I think it's important to realize that school is necessary in some sense, but it is inherently, if done right, a supplement to the majority of learning which is not best done in school.
So for example, and I think the example that makes this clearest, is nobody needs to put you in school to teach you how to talk.
Teaching you how to talk is something that happens automatically.
If your ears and your mind are healthy at birth, we can't even stop you from learning to talk.
You will pick it up out of the air and very probably your parents are programmed to be unable to resist the things that will help you do it, like babbling back at a child.
It's very hard not to babble back at a child what you heard them say, right?
Now, think about it.
The way you sound to yourself inside your head is very different from what other people hear, so how useful is it to have somebody tell you, oh, here's what I heard you just say, right?
It's a feedback, right?
So anyway, the point is, we... Yeah, it's a way to allow the child to error correct.
Right, exactly.
It's not mockery.
It's a route into... I mean, it is training theory of mind.
It again requires theory of mind.
I heard you say this.
I heard you say this, right.
And, oh my god, it meant this to me.
You said ball.
Now, maybe I didn't mean to say ball, but if you then break out a ball and you're all excited, I get the sense that this object and what I just said and your reaction are all somehow tied together.
Maybe I'll try to trigger that cool thing again, you know?
So, anyway, we don't have to put you in school to teach you to talk, right?
Or walk.
Right.
Well, right, because again, the parent-offspring system is built to make this happen.
We do need to put you in school or something very like it.
At least we need formal training to teach you to read and write.
And the reason for this is pretty obvious, at least in retrospect.
It's that speaking are very, very ancient.
They're going to go back at least several hundred thousand years and more likely a million or more.
What are?
Speaking.
Oh.
Reading and writing.
That's a lot.
Speaking R, that's all.
Speaking R, yeah.
Okay.
Speaking R. Reading and writing go back a maximum of something like 8,000 years, and for most people they would have been a non-issue until very late, like the recent several hundred years.
And so the point is, evolution hasn't had the chance to build the mechanism that you automatically acquire this just by looking at the symbols in your world.
So, I mean, we have this argument in the book, and I agree with it, and yet, you know, maybe for the first time hearing you talk about it here, I had this thought of, like, I don't know how much formal schooling I needed.
I was so driven to the written world, and you and I have such different brains in this regard.
I chalked late, you know, more completely rather than in single words, and I read early, and that was just where I was driven to go.
And sure, I had the same kind of parental feedback as you were talking about with regard to walking and talking, but that happened before school.
And for many people, it is a matter of direct instruction, although frankly, so much of how direct instruction takes place is destructive of the desire to keep learning.
Right.
I'm not arguing that school itself is necessary, but the formalism of this is an alphabet, right?
These are the letters in it.
This is the sequence in which they come.
These are the… Yeah, actually I'm not sure.
I think that that is the way it is taught, and that's not the way that some of us learned it.
We were walking around picking symbols out of our universe, going like, oh, I see that other people look at that and are making meaning from it, just like you're talking about with regard to spoken language.
I believe the motivation Would be there, but I don't believe that you would.
The amount of arbitrariness in an alphabet and the way alphabetic symbols are put together into words and the... At least in English.
Right.
The variation of the pronunciation of those phonemes and all of that.
You need somebody to be the one to clue you into the underlying arbitrary associations before you can begin to put them together with the stuff that you already have on board, which is the spoken word.
So you know that there is a word for duck, right?
And then the arbitrary symbols have sounds, and then those sounds come together, and it's like, ah, that's the overarching symbol for duck.
This is interesting.
I actually really do think you have a model in your head that's not a match for what some of us experience.
The idea of pieces that come together, it's like, not necessarily.
I don't think this is the place to get mired down, but I do think that Those of us who are very driven and seek out and always want to have sort of written word in front of us are probably likely, and at least anecdotally in my case, were not people who were doing like, you know, phoneme, let's see what it sounds like when you put it together.
It was much more like, and we're in, and we're doing like... Yeah, but...
It's interesting to me that we have a disagreement here.
You have to be able to say, Daddy, what's this symbol?
Right?
Oh, that's a D, right?
In order to get to the word, in order to get to the meaning of the word.
And so the idea, I think what the upshot of what you're arguing is that some people would learn to read even if nobody clued them into the meaning of The arbitrary symbols in the alphabet and I don't, I don't believe that anybody would pick it up from exposure to those things that effectively literacy requires formalism, whereas the ability to speak does not.
And it's, you know, it's a little bit like, you know, it's almost exactly like reading music too, right?
Musicality does not require reading music, but if you're going to go If you're going to be musically literate in that same sense, then somebody has to clue you into the schema in order to pick it up.
That is a better match for my experience with music, having been introduced to both playing music and reading music both very young and almost simultaneously.
They were both highly formalized processes.
But anyway, the point is, a hunter-gatherer child does not go to school and it does not mean that they are uneducated.
It means that they are built such that their environment educates them without the need for the formalism.
And the farther you get from an environment that educates you naturally, I mean even think about Walking down the street, right?
The fact that there is a line at the edge of the sidewalk where things go from very safe to extremely dangerous, that's a very arbitrary, odd thing.
And you're not, so it sounds like you're talking about a line drawn and sometimes it is, but really you're talking about a… Yeah, it can be either, but I think the point is the 6-inch drop at the curb does not begin to tell you about the hazard that starts there.
That's a tall curb.
I think that's a really tall curb.
In our neighborhood there are lots of places where there isn't even a curve.
Yeah.
But just the idea that you're paying attention to some line and that the, you know, the forces generated on one side of that line are so many thousands of times greater than the forces generated on the other side that it's a whole different model that applies, right?
That's a kind of, you know, that's not the natural world being logically deducible.
That's arbitrary stuff.
Right.
And, you know, some formalism is necessary in all those cases.
Yeah.
Um, but, uh, so anyway, so yeah, school is necessary, but it's a supplement and we tend to, as you were reading, we tend to think of school as the way in which learning is done.
And in fact, this becomes perfectly absurd if you, if you think about watching, uh, an expert rock climber, right?
And you think about learning how it is that they ascend something like El Capitan.
You can know a hell of a lot about how you climb El Capitan without knowing the first thing about doing it.
Learn better rock climbing.
Right.
Yeah, you can learn all sorts of things as a spectator.
I don't remember who said it, but you know, this famous advice to people trying to learn tennis from a tennis pro, you know, play better tennis.
Right, where in fact what you really need is somebody who plays better tennis than you to keep returning the ball and putting it at different corners of the court.
Challenging you in unexpected ways, right?
You don't learn when you're super comfortable.
You're not going to learn maximally when you're super comfortable.
And frankly, a lot of modern schooling, as much as it feels ridiculous and deeply uncomfortable to people, is effectively a dulling experience.
Like we're just going to sit down, you don't have to move too much, you don't have to go outside of your expected bounds.
You know when you sit here, today it's history.
And that's not where you're going to learn the most.
You're going to learn the most where it's like, oh, we're out playing Frisbee and now we're going to start talking about history or we're in the rainforest and we're going to start talking about the history of the rubber industry in the Amazon or whatever it is.
This is going to come, the The lessons that come at the unexpected moments and throw you are where you are likely to learn the most.
Yeah, absolutely.
I do want to share one more excerpt from
From the book, but I also wanted to, because this chapter is about this tension between culture and consciousness we've talked about, and we also talk about, and I think this is maybe in the final excerpt, that being analogous to the tension between the sacred and the shamanistic, the sacred being a sort of a reification of the orthodoxy of the received wisdom of therefore the culture, and the shamanistic being
An analogy for that which is chaotic, that which is unexpected, that which is where innovation happens, most of which is going to be probably useless, some of which might even be dangerous, but that's where the innovation is going to happen.
It's by analogy to what goes on in the genome where some things are extremely resistant to mutation and therefore very slow to change.
And there's a very good reason that you would do that.
There are certain things that if you upend them, cancel the whole project, and so they get special protection from change.
So sacred in cultural space is that which is heavily protected from change because change tends to be very disruptive.
And then there are other things that are prone to change, things like the immune system needs to be able to update its model of hazards, you know, even within a lifetime.
And so there's a sort of overdrive for mutation.
So our point is that you've got these two things, both within, you know, we deliberately describe them in this religious framework, but the idea is it's not that religion is this stodgy force.
Religion has both of these components because, of course, religions are compendiums of wisdom that lineages need, and so they need, in order to be compendiums of wisdom, they have to be able to bootstrap new wisdom.
How do you do that?
Well, it starts out in the shamanistic, and then that which works gets driven into the sacred and gets protected from change.
And, you know, it's not that the sacred doesn't change, but the point is it changes slowly because of the hazard of unintended consequences.
Yeah.
So I want to read an excerpt from a different book, but first just to talk about exactly where you were just going.
Yeah.
The tension within society between the sacred and the shamanistic and sometimes it's within a religion and sometimes it's as a religion is trying to move in and displace the old ways.
So I'm reminded of actually a description of it's a fantasy novel that I recently reread, but it describes some accuracies from history.
The Mists of Avalon, which is a retelling of Arthurian legend from the perspective of the women involved.
And it portrays the tension between the old ways, like the Druids and the fairies and such, and the new ways, the Christians, and portrays Arthur as exactly at this nexus between them, feeling this tension, feeling the value in the old and also The pull of the new, and frankly the order of the new, the organization of the new and everything that organization promises, and also the chaos and the unexpected and the passion and the fury of the old, right?
So for all of us, we can imagine, we can recognize that there is tension between order and chaos, right?
And similarly, it was episode 67 on February 13th of this year, we talked about Carnival, which is in the U.S.
It manifests as Mardi Gras, but we have attended a Carnival together, and I've been at a couple more in Latin America, and we spoke some about what a former professor of mine who works on Carnival in the Atlantic coast of Brazil
Describes as some of the really necessary parts of this, you know, these three or four, I can't remember, three or four days of just freedom before the 40 days of very careful attention to your religion of Lent before Good Friday and then Easter.
And so my professor, Dan Linger, anthropology professor at UC Santa Cruz, talked about symbolic reversals of power being important in Carnival.
And, you know, that can manifest as men dressing up as women and vice versa, and young people acting as if they're old and have power, and employers acting as employees and vice versa.
And of course, in the old days, that even manifested Um, with regard to slave relationships.
So, you know, during Carnival, sort of all of the expected rules were on hold.
Like, everyone knew that they were coming back, but they were on hold for a little bit.
So, it's a little bit analogous to what we were talking about with respect to babbling back at a baby.
Yeah.
Right?
Interesting.
If you, from the other side of the power relationship, say, yeah, here's what that's like.
Yeah.
Here's what that seems to be like.
Here's how it seems like you're acting when you do this.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't know how new a thought it is, but, you know, one of the things at the carnival that we experienced in Ecuador in 2016 was, you know, one of the sort of games that gets played has to do with this canned foam that people are shooting at each other.
The Spuma de Carnaval.
Right, exactly.
And I was remembering, we maybe even showed a picture of it.
This police marching band being sprayed with foam by onlookers.
And the thing is, it's actually, you know, if in the US context, you know, the tension between police and others is such that it's almost hard to imagine such a thing.
But the idea that, you know, this band is just playing on as people that, you know, They would have had a very different power relationship with under any other circumstances were freed in some very non-lethal way to, you know, to blow off steam at them.
How much better are those relations between one party and the next when there is this sort of recurring pressure relief?
It does suggest that we could all use some carnival, some regular, you know, knowing that it's coming, being able to prepare for it, knowing that it's finite, knowing that it will end.
But that I think some of what happened last summer in the US and to some degree large cities around the world with the prior to the protests that became riots.
It was, as we said then, a response to lockdowns, but it was in part precisely a response not just to lockdowns of, you know, being away from one another, but there were no concerts, there were no festivals, you know, the bars were closed, and it's easy to dismiss such things, festivals and concerts and bars and, you know, large parties.
as unimportant, but they're not.
They're not.
They are necessary for humans, and you know, different people enjoy them differently.
Some people have none of them in their lives and do just fine, and some of them live for these things and maybe could do with a little bit less and would be more productive, but the idea that they are frivolous and can just be dismissed with no cost is absurd.
So there are symbolic reversals of power in Carnival, there are rituals of rebellion and critiques of the status quo, And inviting in of the liminal.
So specifically, this professor of mine almost 30 years ago was talking about working at the edge of consciousness, specifically at Carnaval, that this is a place for conscious exploration and play.
And I'm reminded of that too in this terrific book.
This is a 2006 book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets.
I don't even know where my camera is.
There we go.
Dancing in the Streets, A History of Collective Joy, which is a book that I read actually as part of one of the programs I taught.
The linguist I was teaching with recommended it, and we read this.
And I have just a short section from chapter two that she's called Civilization and Backlash to share.
Almost as soon as ecstatic rituals appear in the historical, that is, written record, a note of ambivalence enters into the story, a suggestion of social tensions surrounding these rituals and even violent hostility towards their participants.
Euripides' play, the Bacchae, for example, both records these tensions and expresses what seems to be a tormented ambivalence on the part of the playwright.
In the play, Pentheus, the king of Thebes, greets the god with derision and determines to suppress him by force.
Go at once to the Electron Gate, he commands his officers.
Tell all my men who bear shields, heavy or light, all who ride fast horses or twang the bowstring, to meet me there in readiness for an assault on the Bacchae.
This is past all bearing if we are to let women so defy us.
At first, the play seems to take the god's side, mocking the uptight Pentheus and showing the community elders piously joining the Meneds in their revelry.
After all, if the beautiful young stranger is indeed a god, it is incumbent on good citizens to observe his rights.
But things end badly for both sides.
Pentheus is killed and dismembered by his own mother, who, in her god-given ecstasy, mistakes him for a lion.
We've all been there.
The ambivalence and hostility, that was not Aaron Reich, that was my editorializing, in case you guys were wondering.
To continue with Aaron Reich's words.
Actually, this is all fabulous, but I'm just going to skip to this paragraph here.
We have some evidence from a very different part of the ancient world of the dampening effect of civilization and social hierarchy on traditional rituals.
Recent carbon-14 dating of an archaeological site in Oaxaca suggests that the earliest residents, who were hunter-gatherers living about 9,000 years ago, met on a cleared dance ground for rituals that included the entire community.
Later, with the rise of agriculture, rituals appear to have been enacted solely by initiates who were social achievers, or members of an elite, and most likely men.
Finally, with the emergence of organized and militarized states 2,000 years ago, the archaeologists deduced that, quote, many important rituals were performed only by trained full-time priests using religious calendars and occupying temples built by corvée labor.
In the Oaxacan case, only a few thousand years appear to have elapsed between the archaic dance rituals of Paleolithic bands and their refinement into the formal rituals of the civilized state.
The whole book I recommend, but it really is both an exploration of the history of ecstasis, of ecstasy, of finding ecstasy through movement, through dance, through She doesn't go, I think, if I remember, too much into the use of exogenous substances, although those are certainly present in almost all of these cases, at least by some.
And the orthodoxy, the controlling part of society that says, actually, no, you shan't do that, because, well, you'll be less productive.
And you know, the pushback comes with lots of words, and some of them are true, and some of them is just a cover story.
You'll be more productive if you don't do that.
We're going to restrict that just to say carnival.
But really, it's about control.
And people experiencing ecstasis, experiencing these kinds of hyperconscious, perhaps entheogen inflamed states, are hard to control.
They're hard to predict, and it's hard to know what they're going to do next and what they're going to think next, too.
Well, it's a high noise, high creativity state.
Yes.
And the point, noise isn't good.
Noise in this case, I'm talking about statistical noise and I guess the short version of this would be in a complex system there are a huge number of influences and you may be interested in one particular parameter and everything else that affects it is noise with respect to the change in that one parameter.
So there's lots of noise in the cognition that comes along with things like entheogens.
And that is not a positive thing, but it is part and parcel of the process that generates creativity.
In other words, if you're thinking day to day is high quality, it is also limited in order to be high quality and low noise.
It has to bar possibilities that could be but aren't worth investigation.
And so In sort of, in one sense, it's like cognitive carnival, right?
You take some period of time and you choose to reverse the normal priority.
The normal priority is in perceiving the world accurately and behaving reasonably with respect to it.
But if you suspend those rules for a day and you say, actually I'd prefer to tune into things that ordinarily I would dismiss because some small fraction of them are actually useful and I can't see them because my highly functioning mind blocks them from me.
Tune in, explore, cross boundaries, know that those kinds of explorations, within reason, will be forgiven later.
Yeah, it's a little bit, yeah, so that's the thing, is you don't want to assume that it's insight, because most of it's nonsense.
Right.
If you have murderous instincts, you're not allowed to act on those.
There will be repercussions.
If you have rapey instincts, no.
It's a matter of pushing boundaries and seeing where the boundaries could be sometimes, but are still within the realm that we can all get along with one another.
Yeah, or I would say, if you're the kind of person who doesn't have those things sufficiently locked down that you can't be sure they will not rear their ugly head, then that's not an experiment for you.
Right.
But if you are the kind of person who can handle relaxing the mental controls that usually keep madness at bay, and you can say, well, I would like to try madness for a brief period of time and see if anything comes of it, then it is an experiment with Turing.
I would also, this may seem like a weird segue, it's a segue certainly to an earlier chapter in the book, but we are faced with very difficult challenges.
We ultramoderns, right?
Hypernovelty has thrown us, for example, A puzzle about what to do with the relationships between the sexes, how to build a relationship when the stuff that used to make relationships coherent and necessary has evaporated, and how do you bootstrap the new version of this?
And one thing that's true is when you are trying to solve a problem that is outside the range of the toolkit you've got, you have no choice but to engage a higher mode of creativity, right?
Some way or other you're going to have to experiment beyond the comfortable and one way That is available is certainly to, you know, I mean, I like better and better Huxley's idea of the doors of perception, because maybe doors is a little too binary, but the idea that one can actually adjust the permeability of consciousness
In order to see whether there are tools that are nearby, but not immediately available to the normally regulated conscious mind, that's as useful in the context of relationships as anywhere else, maybe even more useful.
And the risk of saying too much, you and I had plenty of formative experiences together.
And, you know, how powerful is that, to be able to, you know, step out of the normal world together with somebody and explore, it's really It's an amazing tool.
No, it's completely extraordinary.
One of the corrective lens items from this chapter is, consider engaging with psychedelics carefully.
If there is anything in you that is curious, they are now legal in some places, but consider engaging them as the powerful cognitive tools that they are, not as a form of recreation.
That doesn't mean you can't have fun.
You know, we've had a lot of fun with them, and we've had some times that were not fun, and they were some more formative than others, but they were all impactful in a way that is It's impossible to describe.
It's maybe a little bit analogous to the idea of trying to tell someone what parenthood is like if you don't have children.
Like, oh, it's a different kind of love.
Well, that just falls flat.
Everyone knows that that doesn't communicate, that doesn't convey it, and yet it's true.
The parent's love for a child is unlike anything else.
And, you know, an experience with exogenous hallucinogens or entheogens that are strong enough that you really do have something, you know, the language used is ego death, and I'm not sure I totally agree.
I totally like that language, but something strong enough such that you lose your desire to control your situation, or you lose- you know that you've just lost the ability to do so, and so you just are there, is extraordinary with regard to opening up, you know, as you say, the doors, you know, the doors of perception.
And I will say, I don't know that I have a particular excerpt to share, but just another book, and we'll put these in the show notes as well, this book on drugs.
This book is on drugs.
I think that's just it, there's no subtitle.
By David Lentz, and it's old at this point, it's from 1995, which is, you know, it's fascinating to read a book that is so current and so modern that exists before, practically before the internet.
It's not before the internet, but certainly before social media, you know, before even, you know, 1998, before the dot-com bubble.
But his descriptions, he explores just so much of what it is, what drugs are, what they do, how drugs are described in society by the orthodoxy as an uncivilizing influence, especially on children.
And, you know, he specifically, if memory serves, talks about differences between what he calls drugs of desire, cocaine crack speed, and drugs of pleasure, which is a strange word, but by which he is including marijuana and psychedelics, and the first category being sort of short-term pretty uninteresting and pretty much not valuable.
I'm editorializing here, but if memory serves, it's been a while since I've read this.
That's his conclusion as well.
Whereas the latter ones allow for an opening of the doors of perception that you can get other ways, right?
People can get through extreme sport, through some kinds of sexual engagement, through meditation, Through long periods alone without talking to anyone.
Sweat lodge.
Sweat lodge.
A lot of the things that are rituals from other societies also do involve, though, some additional exogenous molecule that you're smoking or imbibing or whatever it is.
Right, I mean, you know, in some sense, it's all endogenous.
You're triggering circuits that are there and you're triggering them in some way that's novel enough that your conscious mind gets to tune in on it or however it works.
But the real point is, it's all trade-offs, right?
It's not like that state doesn't come with downside.
In fact, that state is mostly downside.
You couldn't run your life that way.
Borrowing from it a little, you know, diminishing returns being what they are, are you better off living your entire life this side of that boundary?
Or would, you know, a tiny periodic adventure across that boundary be worth a tremendous amount in terms of what you got to understand about Even with your own mind, you know, I mean, one of the things is sort of inadvertent lessons that I got from it is how little direct perception is really just you seeing the outside world.
It's colored by numbers and it's done very, very well so that you do get a real sense of where the objects are and what they're made of and all of that, right?
But, you know, the simple fact of what happens when you look in a mirror, right, tells you that it's not just a report of where the photons are going.
It's an interpolation.
Right.
No, and it brings some of your disparate… it can.
It has the potential to bring some of the disparate parts of you into… awareness of one another such that you can become more lighthearted about your own self and observe yourself with more mirth at some level.
I remember an experience of knowing very well that it was not incumbent upon me to stand in a particular way to hold up the building that I was leaning up against, but I had the very distinct sense.
And in fact, someone walked past me, I was like, I'm holding up this building.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
You're safe.
Knowing that that's patently untrue, there's no way that this building that existed before I ever showed up and would continue to exist after I left was in need of me leaning up against it the way I was.
But something in my subjective experience, as helped by, in that case, ayahuasca, led me to believe, even though I knew logically it couldn't be the case, that I was necessary there at that moment.
And what's the lesson there?
I don't know.
Are there lessons to be had that are explicit or that can become conscious and then usable from any one of these stories?
Probably not.
It's a little bit like sharing dreams.
Probably mostly the particular instances from particular trips are just going to fall flat for people, but the fact is that you can learn from the tensions that are revealed.
All right.
This leads me to something that's going to sound like a non sequitur, but I'm sure it's the right place to go.
Okay.
Okay.
You and I have been talking about the predicament that young people find themselves in with respect to finding a partner, and the fact that a lot of what passes for current wisdom about this is actually nonsense, and some of it's actually just downright pernicious.
I think I know where you're going.
You want someone who can hold up a building for you.
And I found just the person.
As you have demonstrated.
I didn't get it right, did I?
No, you did not get it right.
Alright, we have been talking about The fact that in terms, in the context of mating and dating, humanity cannot go backwards, right?
There's not, there are places in the past where it worked, but you couldn't restore the conditions that made it coherent in the first place.
You can't go back and we can't stay here, you know, a free for all in which there are no rules and we just dismiss everything as, you know, everything that involves any sort of limit as stodgy.
That doesn't work at all.
It makes people miserable.
It does not result in lasting partnerships that matter.
So we have to design something new and that designing something new I So far believe and will argue is going to involve people opting out of the current wisdom But they have to opt into something else where two people who don't know each other who might be interested in being together Can say yeah, actually I subscribe to those rules too because those rules make sense, right?
All right, I think I think the name for the opt-out movement is Carbon dating.
Now the reason it should be carbon dating is because carbon leads in all the right directions.
It's the alternative to silicon dating, which hasn't worked out real well for people, right?
Carbon dating is the organic version.
It's new, it's up to date, right?
But carbon dating also involves things like Real experiences it could involve, if it's your sort of thing, using entheogens to change which, you know, sets of neurons are prone to fire in a given circumstance.
So experimentation could generate the rules of carbon dating, but carbon dating seems to me like a good shorthand for, yeah, I'm in on the idea that we're trying to find some new set of rules that make sense, because no rules isn't working out.
Yeah, I like it.
I like it very much.
Okay, let's go to our final excerpt from today.
Literally false, metaphorically true.
Again, there's just a lot in this chapter.
Have you shown that book yet?
I did.
I was doing it while you were working on the text stuff.
It makes me very, very happy.
We got it yesterday.
Apparently, they have sold enough of them in advance that the copies that we were supposed to end up with got sent to other people.
So anyway, we have just seen it.
We're kind of excited to hold it in our hands.
Very much so.
So we're not going to read on conformity or religion and ritual or sex, drugs and rock and roll on the sacred versus the shamanistic.
We're saving that for those of you who actually get the book, but we are going to read literally false metaphorically true.
I am going to share that here.
It's three pages.
Cultural beliefs are often literally false but metaphorically true.
Consider farmers in highland Guatemala who have a long-standing tradition to both plant and harvest crops only when the moon is full.
This, they say, allows the plants to grow stronger and resist insect damage.
What possible protective capacity could the phase of the moon have on crop health?
Presumably none.
But the phase of the moon can synchronize the farmers.
A full moon is effectively a giant sky clock, a keeper of time that everyone in the region can see.
If all farmers in the region believe that a full moon has salutary effects on their individual crops, they will likely restrict planting and harvesting to the full moon, and this will, in fact, benefit everyone's crops, just not for the reason the farmers believe.
A belief in the power of the moon to directly affect crops effectively satiates predators by concentrating the harvest into brief periods, during which time crop predators cannot eat all of everyone's crops.
It is easy to dismiss many myths and beliefs of old precisely because they are literally false.
Indeed, doing so is almost a sport among some hard-headed people.
Take astrology.
It is clearly beyond reason to imagine that the stars that we see, many of which are thousands of light-years away, are having a direct impact on human behavior.
Similarly, it is beyond reason to believe that a passel of angry gods is the reason for tsunamis.
Yet among the Moken, those who believe in those gods survive at higher rates than those who don't.
And it is surely beyond reason to believe that a full moon is protective of crop health, yet among Guatemalan farmers, precisely that belief results in more productive farming.
In each case, the belief is literally false, but metaphorically true.
This means that the cover story isn't true, but when people behave as if it were, they prosper.
This is how religion and other belief structures spread.
Even if such things are not literally true, acting as if they are benefits people.
Sometimes it even benefits the biodiversity and sustainability of the land in which they live.
In its modern tabloid form, astrology is bunk.
But astrology has probably not been so everywhere and for all time.
If, and this is a big if, you control for where a person was born, might not the time of year that they were born have effects on how they develop, and therefore who they become?
And aren't astrological signs just an ancient way of keeping track of the months, more or less?
If we look at astrology this way, rather than as a modern indulgence that is too free of context and history to have meaning, it begins to look promising.
Is a newborn in a Minnesota winter exposed to the same pathogens and activities as a newborn in a Minnesota summer?
Surely not.
And sure enough, there has been work done to bear out this idea.
Culling data from over 1.75 million records at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center for people born between 1900 and 2000, researchers found clear correlations between birth month and lifetime disease risk for more than 55 different conditions.
With affected systems ranging from cardiovascular to respiratory, from neurological to sensory, the sheer number and breadth of medical conditions that vary in lifetime risk by birth month should be enough to make a thoughtful person rethink a wholesale rejection of careful astrological thinking.
For if there are demonstrable differences in disease risk by birth month, why should we imagine that there are no differences in personality?
As an aside, one prediction of this approach to astrology is that if you include both birthplace and date, astrology will have less power to predict lifetime disease risk the closer you get to the equator, where seasonality is much reduced from that in the temperate zones.
Another prediction is that the more a person moves around as a child, the less predictive astrology will be for them.
And if you don't include birthplace, astrology should have no predictive power at all.
Distortions that help you survive and thrive are adaptive.
Myths and taboos often make little sense to outsiders, and some of them are surely misguided, even counterproductive for those who honor them.
Some surprisingly precise taboos are likely overgeneralizations from an actual event.
Among the Kamaura of the Brazilian Amazon, the eating of scaleless fish is forbidden for both pregnant women and their husbands.
It may well be that, long ago, a terrible fate befell a woman, her unborn child, or her entire family, after eating a fish without scales, and that the fish was the only explanation that stuck.
Similarly, on the Oat Plateau of Madagascar, in the village of Mahatsinjo, there is a taboo against eating hammercops, a close relative of pelicans.
This taboo is directly tied to villagers having seen one fly over just as a man died.
Elsewhere in Madagascar, it is taboo for young men to eat mutton before wooing, taboo for pregnant women to eat the meat of hedgehogs or to walk through fields of pumpkin, taboo for a son to build his home to the north or east of his father's house.
To our Western sensibilities, this seems like superstition, pure and simple.
The word for taboo in Malagasy, fadi, has a complex meaning as well.
In Betsa Masaraka, the language of the people of northeastern Madagascar, fadi means both taboo and sacred.
That which is fadi is mandated by the ancestors, be it mandated that you don't do it, or that you do.
Despite the preceding examples, many beliefs, myths, and taboos are literally false, metaphorically true.
Malagasy fadis come cloaked in the language of gods and ancestors, but it is still easy to see the wisdom in many of them if you simply look at the prohibition.
Do not build a house over or against a new landslide.
Do not step on a dead dog, as you might get hydrophobia.
Rabies.
Do not divorce your wife while she is pregnant.
We predict that those taboos that have lasted the longest are most likely to be hiding an important cultural truth in plain sight.
Beware Chesterton's faddies.
The old ideas may have hidden truths, and those truths may be difficult to recover once they have been dismissed.
Joseph Campbell observed that mythology is a function of biology.
He was correct.
As an evolved creature, you are built to succeed, and sometimes that involves telling yourself stories.
Finding yourself in a raft near the top of a dangerously tall waterfall, you might be about to die.
If you believe that the shore is within reach and paddle like hell, you just might make it.
Those deflated by long odds will leave no trace.
Belief can be the difference between life and death.
I believe you have angered both the old gods and the new with that reading.
Yes, I'm sure that will anger at least some proponents of both the old gods and the new.
But precisely because, as is true of everything in the book, we are trying to weave our way carefully down a road That understands the reality and importance of history and reveals a path forward, or at least the beginning of a path forward, that has the potential to reveal great things which we can't even yet imagine.
Yep!
I mean, in fact, you know, as we present this in the book, and as we have mentioned periodically here, this activity, whether it's writing the book and having people read it and discuss it, or us talking about ideas from it and other things, is effectively a modern version of the campfire around which consciousness would have been practiced.
And I think maybe we did not say up front That one of the implications of the model of consciousness and culture that we present is that it reverses the natural expectation about why consciousness emerged.
So while consciousness has been famously resistant to explanation, if you think of it primarily As, and we argue that it would initially have evolved as a mechanism for individuals to pull their cognitive strengths and come up with an emergent sum that is greater than, or an emergent whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.
Then individual consciousness, which we all take to be primary because we experience individual consciousness, and intersubjective consciousness is something that we only have indirect access to.
The idea that we may share a thought is not as vivid as any thought that either of us would have.
It's much more powerful because there are two minds involved in creating it.
But it is much less visceral, and so our argument is that we have studied consciousness incorrectly in science, and in fact this is reinforced just by the practicality.
You can put an individual into an fMRI machine, you cannot put a group of people into an fMRI machine and see what is shared in their cognition, at least not simply.
One of the big drumbeats of the book, of course, is a recognition of the value of the reductionism in modern science and medicine, and also a rejection of its ubiquity, of mistaking that which can be easily measured for that which is the most important thing in a system.
Absolutely.
So in this case, it's not that we deny the existence and the importance of individual consciousness, but we argue that it is likely to have come second.
That you build a model that allows people to pool their consciousness together, and then once you have the tool that involves knowing what is likely in someone else's mind, maybe because you placed it there, You now have a tool in which you can have an argument with yourself.
You can hold two ideas and compare them as if you were two different minds comparing notes.
And in any case, we regard this as likely a solution to many of the most difficult issues surrounding consciousness, just simply by getting the evolutionary order of operations correct.
That's right.
Well, that's what I've got for today.
Do you have anything else that you want to wrap up with?
No, I think we've more or less covered the territory.
All right, so we will be back next week for those of you listening or watching and wanting to go outside or to sleep, depending on where you're watching from or whatever it is else that you might want to do.
For those of you who are watching live, we will be taking a break, hopefully just 15 minutes depending on the technical stuff, and then be back with our Q&A.
And you can ask questions at the Q&A at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And we enjoin you to join our Patreons.
Brett is having another conversation on his tomorrow.
You can get some stuff that has Dark Horse branding on it at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
You can email logistical questions like, how did I do that again?
Not, I want them to address this in the Q&A, but logistical questions to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
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What he views as the most salient things from each week's episodes and puts them on the clips channel So if you have any suggestions that you think would be particularly Make particularly good clips this week things that you would like to share in a smaller form than the whole podcast You can email those suggestions as well to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com
Have you suggested that maybe, given that the book is going to emerge on the 14th of September, that it would be a great time for people who haven't already ordered it to order their own copy so that it arrives and they can get in on the discussion?
That's right.
It is available for pre-order now everywhere.
Apparently it's at Powell's.
One of our neighbors just pre-ordered it at Powell's, so that's our local amazing independent bookstore.
But it's, you know, it's available at all the usual, all the usual suspects, and will be available in audiobook as well.
UK and UK, like, colonial territories, I guess.
It'll be available maybe two days later, I think.
Publication date is September 16th.
But yes, please, please consider doing that.
And before we see you again next week, there will be, we will be talking to some other people about the book.
Some other podcasts will be beginning to emerge.
Is the title in the UK a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century, or is it a warm beer drinker's guide?
I know they considered that briefly.
They sure did, but we pushed right back.
It does have a different cover, but it's the same title.
All right, until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
