Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Bret Speaks with Jonathan Pageau
Bret speaks with Jonathan Pageau a symbolic thinker, YouTuber, and carver of orthodox icons.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtCTSf3UwRU14nYWr_xm-dQhttps://thesymbolicworld.com/http://www.pageaucarvings.com/https://twitter.com/PageauJonathan*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon.https://www.patreon.com/bretweinsteinPlease subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @DarkHorse Podcast Clips for short clips of a...
I see wokeism as a desire to create a kind of structure which will supposedly bind us together.
I see a lot of the COVID measures as a desire to do that as well.
I see things of people trying to do that, but because they are not grounded in the ancient stories.
They don't understand.
They don't have a kind of mythical underpinning that has been developed for millennia and millennia.
Then they're creating monsters.
They're Frankenstein creations.
We are in total agreement about that.
So what I believe is that I believe that, let's say for me, let's say being the best Christian I can be and living with my family and my neighbors and the people around me in the best way, that's the first best thing I can do. - Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting today with Jonathan Paggio, who is an artist specializing in Orthodox Christian art.
He is also, maybe more importantly to us, a deep philosophical scholar on religious questions and the interface between religious thought and scientific and philosophical thought.
Welcome, Jonathan.
It's great to talk to you finally after these two years where we had that first conversation.
It's good to be back in the seat.
Now, wait a second.
Two years.
I would have said based on, you know, just sort of a loose sense of how long it feels, I would have said more like 17 years.
Yeah.
It's only been two years?
No, it was, if my memory serves me correct, it was in 2017.
That's more than two years.
That's more than two years!
It's not quite the 17 it feels like, but it is more than two.
Yeah, well, we did have a very good brief conversation.
You and I met on a panel.
Our good friend Jordan Peterson was on that panel with us and we had an exchange at the, what was it, the Students for Liberty Free speech, like a free speech student association, I think, in Vancouver.
Yeah, it was an excellent little conversation, and it did suggest that there was a whole lot more that needed to be discussed, and we have come close to having that conversation several times in the intervening 17 years, but have not gotten there until today.
So, let's Orient the audience a little bit.
My audience knows that I don't exactly do interviews, that really what happens on Dark Horse are conversations between people who have something about which discussion is necessary.
And you and I very definitely do, because I have been Coming from an evolutionary perspective, looking at religion and trying to understand it.
And as you know, I've put forward a model that explains how adaptive evolution would have created such a thing.
I believe the model is Almost certain to be accurate in the broad brushstrokes the fine detail obviously You know could take many lifetimes to sort out but in general what I've argued is that religion is literally false metaphorically true and that what metaphorically true means is that those who behave according to
That the wisdom in religious doctrine outcompete those who behave according to the falseness of that doctrine, and that that explains why these things spread.
It's basically a counterpoint to the new atheist idea that religion is effectively a mind virus, that it is a parasite traveling at expense to humans.
Now, that has had various impacts in science by and large.
Darwinists are slow to accept that any such explanation might exist.
Interestingly, religious scholars have, I would say none of them have embraced the notion, but many have been willing to play ball and to talk about What its meaning might be, and you're certainly one of them.
So, what I'm hoping to do with you today is to talk about the question of what religion is, whether or not the picture that you see coming from a religious perspective and the picture that I see coming from a scientific perspective are actually the same picture, just viewed from a different angle.
I don't know the answer to that question.
I'm curious as to what you will say.
And then the question, the one that I think is really important, is given the picture that we can agree on, whatever the, you know, the overlap may be, what is its implication for how we should view these questions that have historically been cast in religious terms?
What is it that we moderns should do in light of the information about what we now seem to know?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, yeah.
I mean, I think that's the conversation I was hoping to have with you, so that sounds great.
Great.
Anywhere in particular you want to start?
I think that maybe I can, because I've heard your explanation about, you know, the function of religion, the theory of religion.
The way that I like to present religious pattern is maybe a lot wider than the way it is presented socially.
I tend to think of... I tend to actually not like the term religion as a very specific, very narrow type of behavior that we have.
And I like to understand religion in general as the manner in which we bind together.
That is, the things that we do as humans to bind us together into groups in general, bind us together towards higher purposes, is maybe the best way to understand it.
That is, we organize our behavior in a certain manner, which makes us able to exist as higher beings or higher units.
When I say higher beings, I mean, you know, families, countries.
But that is also analogous to the manner in which we cohere inside ourselves, because a human being is also made of different parts and different aspects, different thoughts, different desires, different.
There's all these things competing inside us for supremacy, you could say, or for attention.
And the manner in which we cohere those aspects together will be part of what we tend to call religion, which is why religion has a individual aspect, whether it's prayer, worship, meditation, depending on the different religious practices.
But then that scales up to the social level, where you'll have ritual behavior, you'll have sacrifices, you'll have common worship, you know, circumambulation of important places or important things that bind us together.
So that is more so the way that I understand religious practice, because it seems to encompass more clearly what it is.
Like, what it is we're doing at all the different levels at which we do them.
So, would it be alright if I put a couple tools on the table?
Sure!
First, I want to start with the question of faith in science, because I really think one of the reasons that people misunderstand the status of Religion, however we describe it, when it comes to scientific explanations, is that we do not do a fair job of correcting for the way scientists work on other questions.
And I think the more I think about this, the more important I think it is.
When I talk to most scientists about the question of faith, It turns out that most scientists have the belief that they are functioning without any faith at all.
And there are exceptions to this.
There are scientists who Very often have to be careful in their academic context not to speak too publicly about it.
There are scientists who do have a separate faith, right?
They go to church or temple or whatever it might be, but they tend to see Faith is something absent from their scientific practice.
Now, to me, this seems absurd.
I don't think you... I literally think it is impossible to do scientific work without any faith.
And basically, I would argue that You have to... Faith are things that you take without evidence.
The fact that you are a being that is capable of observing a universe, which it is necessary that you are in order to do scientific work, is something you cannot prove.
And yes, we can say, well, Descartes proved it.
But I don't think he really did.
I think what he did is he took the first cheat and he said, let's just assert that I exist and that I know because I'm thinking.
And go from there.
And my point would be, if you really scrutinize Descartes' proof, you will discover it's not a proof, it's a leap of faith.
And if you don't make it, then you will literally spend your entire career attempting to solve this unsolvable puzzle, which will be a waste of time because you won't do it.
Or you can make that leap of faith and you can say, assuming that I am a being who can observe the universe, then here is the science that I'm going to do.
And so, to make a long story short, scientists work to minimize the amount of faith necessary in the explanations of the universe that they come up with, but you cannot bring it to zero.
And If we then move from there to this question of things that are literally false but metaphorically true, these things are features of every scientific model that we have that is incomplete, right?
And, you know...
Darwinism is extremely incomplete because it's so new and so complex our models get more complete as we go into chemistry and physics the simpler Realms, but the point is all of these things involve Places where our explanations aren't very good and where we fill in some feature of the model that we cannot demonstrate But that functions well enough if we operate on the basis of it.
So what I'm getting at is Religions may be largely based on literally false metaphorically true beliefs, and science starts out based on those things and whittles them away but can never get to zero.
But really, these two realms have the same characteristic, which is that they depend on us being able to skip certain levels of explanation in order to do the job of the whole.
Alright, so I'm going to put you a little on the faith thing, or what faith is.
The way that I... faith is the trust in things that are unseen.
That is, at all levels of analysis, the level which is above it is unseen from that level.
Okay, so what I mean is that if you're analyzing something at a molecular level, you can never see the apple.
You'll see its constituents.
If you go down, same problem.
If you go up, same problem.
If you're talking about the apple and an orchard, if you're looking at the level of the apple, you'll never see the orchard.
And so, what faith is, is that move between levels.
Because from the level in which you are, if you only take the elements given to you at that level, and you analyze them, There's no jump to the higher identity.
That jump is always a leap of faith.
Once you have it, then you can analyze things at that level.
That is, once you reach that higher level, once you, for example, if you look at the people in a In a mass, you can't see the city.
You have to jump up until you see the city.
Once you have the city, then you can use that identity and compare it to other cities and compare it to other levels at the same level.
But the way that our mind or our experience tends to work is that we can see parts of things, and we can see wholes of things, and we can notice that things are made of parts and also have unity.
But the jump from the parts to the unity is one which is not accessible at the level of the parts.
Now, I'm not sure about this because I think there are many places, especially in biology, where at one time we couldn't see the jump between levels, but we figured it out and now we can.
And so what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is that the jump between levels is always one of faith.
And I would argue that it tends to start as an article of faith.
It's faith from that level.
That is, it's faith if you take the elements of that level.
Within those elements, it's always, it's a jump, it's a leap into another level of being.
And so that is, you could say, something like the trust in things unseen, which is that if you're at a certain level, you can't see.
You can't see above until you do that.
And once you're there, then you see.
But you can't see until you make that jump.
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Well, I have a good example to test this out, depending upon how willing you are to step into the biology.
We'll see.
It depends how complicated it is.
We once did not know how information was stored in a cell.
So Darwin described the process by which information is refined by selection, but he didn't know where the information was stored.
And there was, of course, a famous battle.
Protein seemed a likely place where information could be stored.
DNA seemed distinctly less likely because it had less variation to it.
It was a depopulate alphabet.
But it turned out the DNA was the primary repository for information.
We now know that the story is much more complex than this, but to the extent that triplet codons described series of amino acids and those amino acids do the functional work of the cell, they make effectively machines inside the cell, enzymes that put together atoms that might not be Bind at normal energies.
Otherwise, for example, we now know what brings the protein level and the informational level together, right?
So at one time it would have been an article of faith, but now It is not whereas the story that we tell evolutionarily about Most mutations are bad changes in spelling in the DNA Occasionally one results in a change in a protein.
That's good those protein changes that are good accumulate because selection favors them and that changes the form of organisms and can ultimately Change something that has the form of a shrew into something that has the form of a bat, right?
That story, I would argue, actually contains an article of faith that isn't true.
There's a missing layer of explanation that we scientists assume must be there, but actually isn't.
There's something in the explanation that's just simply missing.
But I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by faith or by the jump of level.
So, let's take the DNA, for example.
So, you have a bunch of stuff, right?
I'm not a scientist.
You have a bunch of stuff.
You have a bunch of acids.
You have a bunch of stuff that's there.
And then, all of a sudden, you are able, because we're conscious beings, you're able to perceive a pattern.
That pattern is repeated in different cells.
But that pattern has an existence of its own.
Because you can abstract it.
And you can model it.
And so it doesn't only exist in the cells.
It has an invisible existence.
A pattern existence.
And so that pattern is an unseen in the sense that it's not a bunch of stuff.
It's a pattern of a bunch of stuff.
Now that pattern, like I said, can be modeled, but the jump between the bunch of stuff and the pattern, that is what I talk about when I say faith.
That is, because It's the same at every level of being, like I'm using the lowest level, but it's sometimes it's harder for people to see it at that level, but it's a lot easier if you move up to things like cities and families and it's a troops of armies or all of these things where all of a sudden you see a structured cohesion of beings that come together into a pattern.
But that pattern, like I said, is invisible because it can be modeled and then reproduced.
It has all these types of qualities.
So basically I'm arguing for the existence of patterns and that's ultimately where I'm not, I don't want to hide it from you.
That's where I'm bringing you to what religion is, is that it's the patterning of being.
All right.
So we are clearly in the phase where we have to teach each other our language in order to have a conversation.
I fully agree that there are patterns.
In fact, I have argued and will argue that the only thing that is amenable to study is patterns.
That's what we study.
And that these patterns exist at different levels, right?
I would call, and I've heard you use the term, so I know we at least have a shared term here.
The jump between levels is emergence.
Emergence can be one of these articles of faith that I describe where we cannot explain why the properties of the higher level are viewed based on the properties of what exists at the levels below it.
Right?
Yeah, now we're in the same direction, definitely.
Now we're in the same direction.
So, and I would understand, and you know, I'm very interested in the philosophy of science, but I'm not a philosopher of science.
But I take it that there are two ways of understanding emergence.
There are those, the strong emergentists who believe that there is no, you cannot explain the jump in emergence between many different levels.
I would describe myself as a weak emergentist, which is to say I believe that we may never have the computing power to do it, but that in principle everything at the higher levels ought to be explainable by the properties of things at the lower levels if you comprehend it well enough.
You know, is there a discontinuity at the very bottom, you know, original cause, something like that?
I think I have to leave that possibility open, but in general there shouldn't be Irreducible levels of emergence at higher stages of explanation.
But alright, so let's try to figure out where we've landed.
Let's take an example.
I can add maybe something to help you, just so that we don't lose ourselves.
So the manner in which I try to describe it is a two-way process.
That is, I understand why scientists and materialists, they like to talk about emergence bottom-up.
But I think that talking about emergence bottom up will always lead you into to some it'll lead you into some problems.
And so let's say that the normal religious point of view would be that there's there's something.
Are you we use the word emanation?
We could use other words.
There's an emanation from the pattern and there's emergence from the constituents.
And so there's a causality of pattern.
That is, patterns are causal.
They affect order.
And so it's hard to see, like I said, in biology, I think it's still true, but it's easier to see in human structures.
Whereas you have a military captain that orders and that order goes down the order of causality and creates action in the men that are digging trenches or that are doing whatever they're doing.
But that wouldn't be possible without the emergent principle of these men together with a common purpose that are bound by this hierarchy into action.
And so there's a top-down causality, which is different than the bottom-up causality.
But those two, those two come together.
It's important because when we get to rituals and when we get to, let's say, hygiene laws, it's going to be important to understand that because it feeds into why those things are important.
Okay, so let me use an example here, which it does double duty.
In my field, I believe my colleagues have been slow to understand the Darwinian nature of religious belief and religious faith.
Because they have a missing level of analysis, right?
In general, we can talk about the evolution and divergence of species, right?
We have a language for that.
And we can talk about the nature of individuals.
But it has been long contentious in my field what the status of groups is.
And interestingly, the evolutionary biologists who have focused on adaptation, right?
Which is understood to be a property of individuals, right?
The individuals manifest the adaptations.
That level of analysis has been inconsistent with understanding religion, because religion is not a property of the individual.
Individuals manifest aspects of it, but obviously Catholicism is not an individual, and so to the extent that your toolkit for adaptive evolution is built around properties of individuals or maybe tiny little kin groups, you don't see its nature.
The folks who have done the best with Understanding religion in evolutionary terms are the group selectionists who I believe are actually using an article of faith that is literally false in order to skip to the level at which you can look at a group and see its behavior as adaptive, which it is.
Now, what they're looking at is not, in fact, a group.
They've misunderstood the mechanism.
But by allowing themselves the article of faith that maybe we can talk about adaptation of something smaller than a species and larger than an individual, right?
They have built a bridge that allows them to walk into human cultural evolution and see that it often evolves over large numbers of people, which they mistakenly describe as a group.
Right, so faith is playing a role in science there.
It's interesting because why do you believe that a bunch of cells working together and forms an individual has more reality than a bunch of individuals Acting together in a group, like why is it that one is more real than the other?
Like I'm not even a scientist and I wonder why would anybody think that?
It's a great question and the answer is because we know exactly why the cluster of cells behaves in the way that it does because the genomes in each of those cells is identical and especially when we talk about something like an animal.
Effectively, the cells in your eye have to collaborate with the cells in your liver in order to allow your gonads to pass on your genes.
And so, what there is in a creature is perfect agreement on what the objective of the exercise.
Yes, that does not exist in a cluster of individuals.
But the question is, can you figure out to what extent it does exist and why?
And so we have several different, I would now say that they are theories.
They started as hypotheses.
They are now well enough established to be theories about why cooperation exists when you don't have identical genes or disproportionately similar genes.
So, we have kin selection, which I just described, similar genes driving collaboration, we have reciprocal altruism, I scratch your back if you scratch mine, and we have indirect reciprocity, where I participate in a collective in which my back gets scratched and your back gets scratched, but it may not be an exchange, right?
So, we have those theories of collaboration.
What we don't have is a theory of collaboration that scales up properly to things like Catholicism or Judaism or Islam, right?
We don't have that.
And so, what that results in is too much skepticism amongst evolutionary biologists that these things are in fact adaptive.
So my big question is this, is that I think it seems that one of the problems which is making it difficult for people to be able to bridge that is because they continue to understand survival at the individual level and then try to see how that survival could be maximized by a group.
But what they're not doing is seeing it at the right level.
Which is that, you shouldn't look at the survivability of the individual, you should look at the survivability of the group, and how it perpetuates itself, and then how it reproduces itself into other groups.
That's what you should be looking at, because it's like you're skipping levels on one concept, but you're not skipping levels on the other.
So here's the problem with that.
The problem is, and I'm not faulting you for this, but when you use the term group, you artificially hobble your explanation.
Right.
What do you mean?
A group isn't.
So, again, there's a longstanding battle in my field over this.
But in the late 60s, early 70s, this got sorted out and then it has been unsorted out in more recent decades.
But what was sorted out by.
By my intellectual ancestors was that although if you take two groups, right, just actual clusters of individuals.
A group of altruists will out-compete a group of individuals who are selfishly motivated.
Everybody agrees on this.
The problem is that if you introduce a selfishly motivated individual into one of these groups of altruists, that individual will out-compete other individuals within the group.
And so groups don't evolve because they are taken apart by a collective action conundrum inside the group, right?
Now, what this leaves us with is a world full of things that look like groups that appear to collaborate, for which we do not have an explanation.
And my argument would be, and I think much of what you've said is quite accurate, that these things that look like groups, the ones that are evolutionarily robust, are actually lineages.
Okay, and a lineage is not a group subject to that same tension between individual and collective well-being.
A lineage is actually something that selection can act on.
And so the point is, selection there can turn the tables on the individual who would profit at the expense of the other members of the collective.
And it can produce larger-level adaptive phenomena, like religions.
So, in any case, all I would argue is what you're calling a group is actually a lineage.
And because it's a lineage, it has an evolutionary nature that is not present in something that would actually be a group, right?
I mean, what I'm calling a group is any, let's say what we call individuals, like any individuals that are acting together towards a common purpose.
That's what I call a group.
And so for me, like my theory applies to Google and Facebook as much as it applies to families, as it applies to countries, as it applies to any type of space where different individuals are aligned themselves towards a purpose.
And some groups are more functional than others.
Obviously, some groups are less and some groups will tend to devour its members, you know, and some groups will tend to make them flourish.
And that there are different ways in which ways to set that up so that it's the most coherent, let's say.
And the purpose is the survivability of the group itself.
Right, but this is exactly the problem, is that if you take a hypothesis robust enough to explain something like Catholicism, And you say, well, Google has a lot of the properties of, you know, a collective that engages, you know, of a congregation, right?
And it does.
Indeed, it has many of those properties, but it doesn't have all of them.
And what you will see is that they behave differently over time, precisely because of this issue about the individual who behaves selfishly in a group, profiting at the expense of the group.
Right, so ultimately you would expect things like Google to fail to function in a coherent fashion.
And in fact, I would argue we are seeing that.
We are seeing the incentives of the individuals who decide what Google does betraying Google, right?
They are actually hobbling the entity to enrich themselves, which is exactly what you would expect.
And you don't see that.
in a a an ancient religion you may see it in a cult or something that has just emerged but something that has stood the test of time will have stood the test of time because it has structures in it that prevent that from happening yeah well the the way that i like to talk about that is that it has to do with purpose
Like, this is difficult, because obviously, purpose is difficult in terms of directed action, maybe, is the best way to, like, a way to use a word that's more scientifically appropriate.
And so, depending on the directed action, it will also affect the structures that will set themselves up, you know, in the way, what's going to happen in that group.
And so, one of the things that religion has done, or different religions, is to try to identify the highest Direction for action.
And so, in terms of Christianity, the high- or point of attention.
We can use the word point of attention because attention is what directs action.
And so, in Christianity, the highest point of attention is something like the infinite source of the world, which is also love.
And so that is our point of attention.
And so we bind ourselves together in the direction towards that point.
So what will happen is sometimes parasitical systems will set themselves up.
That's inevitable.
It's going to happen.
But because the point of attention is something like the infinite source of the world and that it is bound in love, then there'll be self Repairing mechanisms, which will also be part of that group, because at some point there'll be a judgment, right?
You'll notice that the leader is not in line with what the group is supposed to be.
And so there'll be some mechanism to eliminate the parasite.
But in Google, there's none of that.
Like in these massive corporations, it's only to make money.
It's only to grow your riches.
And so you don't have those mechanisms set up.
Well, but so my point is there's a reason you don't have those mechanisms set up.
And it's because evolution does not favor their emergence in the context of Google, whereas it does in the context of a religion.
It's like a more coherent religion, I'd say.
Right.
And so what I really What I really hope that you will be able to hear from me is that actually an evolutionary perspective, and I know you take evolution seriously.
I've heard talks with other people that you've done in which you raise the issue yourself, so I know you're aware of its relevance.
But my point to you would be a proper evolutionary understanding of religious phenomena not only explains the nature of religions, Things like mechanisms that frustrate individual profit at the expense of the collective.
Right?
Those are adaptive.
But it also predicts the failure of religions that do not successfully do this, and it predicts the divergence of religions.
Right.
So what I'm arguing is it's possible to overdraw this if you simply say, oh, religions are like species.
Right.
And, you know, there's a speciation event at which, you know, Christians depart from from Jews and another one at which Protestants depart from from Catholics.
You know, that's true at one level.
It is not perfectly analogous to genetic speciation.
But, that if one follows the logic carefully, there is actually a toolkit that predicts all of these events and describes why some work better than others.
That effectively, understanding what Your job is being accomplished by these structures tells you how they are likely to behave in the same way that looking at organisms and understanding their ecology predicts how they will respond to certain kinds of change.
And when you use the word better, what is it that you're referring to?
Well, I would say...
That evolution, if we do the work properly, what evolution, what Darwinian evolution favors is lodging a particular set of genes.
And I know that word will show up strangely here, but I will defend it if need be.
Lodging a particular set of genetic spellings as deeply into the future as possible.
In other words, what selection favors is the persistence of genetic spellings and that the measure of it is how, you know, the duration of that persistence.
Ideally, selection Would favor indefinite persistence.
Indefinite persistence is unattainable and so it basically shapes things like creatures and things like lineages such that they become durable.
Okay, so let's use a word that is maybe more general.
So, you would say that the process favors the persistence of patterns.
The persistence of patterns that persist, that tend to persist longer than others, or have more capacity to self-perpetuate.
Yeah, except there's a giant hazard in the way you've just described it.
I had a conversation with Dawkins in Chicago in what must have been 2018.
And it became clear in this conversation, Dawkins is the inventor of the term meme.
And the idea of meme is, I regard it as one of the most important innovations of the latter half of the 20th century.
It is the key to understanding humans.
But the way Dawkins understands it Memes are an analogous space to genes, right?
That basically, and he, in fact, in chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, where he introduces the idea, he says that memes are effectively a new primeval soup.
And he says it has similar rules to the rules that govern the evolution of genes.
Now, this is an error.
I don't fault him for the error.
You know, everybody makes errors as they introduce an important new hypothesis.
But he never corrected it, and nobody else did either.
The problem is memes do not have the same status as genes.
It's not a parallel realm.
Memes, cultural evolution, is a mechanism by which genes solve a certain problem.
All right, cultural evolution, because culture can flow horizontally, it can evolve much more rapidly than genes, right?
Genes are setting up a mind in a creature like a human being that is amenable to cultural evolution because that solves a genetic problem.
And so the reason I raise all of this is when you say, okay, these patterns, these are patterns that are trying to move or that selection is favoring their movement into the future.
My point is they are not of symmetrical standing, right?
And this is, I don't, you know, you will understand easily, but other people will mishear.
I'm not arguing that this is positive in a normative sense, but this is an is and not an ought.
Cultural evolution, which is the thing that makes human beings special, or at least one of a pair of things that make humans very special, is superior to genes in the sense that it is much more rapidly evolving, but it is inferior to genes in the sense that it is evolutionarily but it is inferior to genes in the sense that it is evolutionarily subservient to the objectives So my point is genes are favored to move into the future, right?
To lodge themselves as far in the future as possible.
That's what selection favors.
It is selection is willing to swap out and kill off.
Mimetic patterns that is cultural patterns in order to lodge genes into the future, right?
So that is to say take an example if you move to Beijing, right?
And you get married, you have some children.
Your children will speak Mandarin, right?
They will speak Mandarin because it is in your genes interest for them to speak the local language fluently, right?
The part of you that speaks English, your English-speaking nature will not struggle to survive.
It will actually willingly vanish in your children and be replaced by Mandarin so that they can be effective.
And this is a general pattern.
The cultural traits that we have are means to a genetic end.
Right.
So, how do you explain self-sacrifice in that structure?
Like, how do you explain a soldier that jumps on a grenade, let's say?
Beautiful.
And this is one of the places that group selection is left spinning its wheels, that lineage selection is not.
There are many, many circumstances in history, in fact I would argue probably most circumstances, in which an individual's fitness is not a strong contributor to how deeply their genes will be lodged into the future.
Right?
If I am a member of A population, right?
And I, let's say I'm a very evolutionarily successful individual, right?
Let's say I, you know, the normal expectation would be that an individual who reaches reproductive age would leave two surviving offspring, each of which would have 50% of their genes, right?
Thereby, they would replace themselves in the population.
That's the average.
Let's say that I beat that by 50 times, okay?
So instead of leaving two surviving offspring, each of which are 50% like me, I leave 100 offspring who are 50% like me.
I've done very, very well, right?
But my population has been rendered feeble by my behavior.
My selfish behavior within this population has made it vulnerable to its enemies, and its enemies overwhelm it and destroy it.
Yeah.
Well, what's my fitness now?
It's zero.
Yeah.
Even though I beat the odds tremendously.
So what this means, and then let's reverse that example and say, okay, what about a lineage in which individuals are willing to make sacrifices?
Indeed, some will make the ultimate sacrifice in order to make the lineage strong.
Well, maybe I don't come home from the battlefield and I never leave any offspring, but the genes that I would have left are circulating in the population that is more robust for my self-sacrifice.
And the point is, if we check in on that population a hundred years later, a thousand years later, the likelihood that it still exists because of the self-sacrifice is higher.
Right.
And so my point is, if you tell that story in a world of groups, it doesn't work because the individual who benefits from the self-sacrifice of another individual and does not engage in self-sacrifice himself, that individual is actually best off and the group crumbles because of it.
But in a world of lineages, that's not the case.
How do you account for that happening in what you call groups then?
Because Christianity is a good example where Christianity is not lineage-based.
Yeah, it is.
Someone who dies for their faith, for example, in Christianity, you know, is, I don't know, are they doing it for their lineage?
How would they be doing it for their lineage?
That's what I'm arguing.
That's exactly what I'm arguing, right?
So, let's take a celibate clergy.
All right.
So a celibate clergy is in a marvelous position, especially I mean, you know, Catholicism makes this all too easy to see, right?
If we take a celibate clergy that is empowered with certain tools, right?
You're supposed to confess your sins.
To a clergyman in a box that makes it easier for you to do that.
You're facing them, but you're not exactly facing them, right?
Well, that priest now knows something about who is betraying whom within their congregation, right?
And they're in a marvelous position.
To give a sermon that's actually squarely on the money about what's going wrong.
And what's more, if, let's say we're talking about adultery, right?
Let's say, you know, somebody commits adultery with another member of the congregation.
They fear for their immortal soul.
They go into the box, they explain to the priest, and if I'm using any of these terms incorrectly, feel free to correct me.
Yeah, I'm not Catholic, so it's okay.
Well, still, you'll know the terms.
Yeah, I'll know it works.
But, but okay, they go in the box, they confess, you know, Father, I've sinned, I've committed adultery.
And then let's say the other person, the person with whom they committed adultery, doesn't confess.
Yeah, all right.
Well now this priest knows that we've got two problems.
We've got an adultery problem in the congregation and we've got a failure to adhere to the confession obligation problem.
So now this priest is in a great position to give a sermon to scare the hell out of people in the congregation.
Hey things that threaten us are going wrong, right?
All right, so What this means is that the congregation, which is composed of people who are going to be related to each other at various levels, could there be anybody in the congregation who's unrelated?
Sure.
But in general, this congregation is going to be something that is going to be, you know, passed down in a familial manner.
And you've got celibate members of the congregation, that is to say people who cannot profit by leaving their own offspring, and in fact people who cannot easily profit monetarily, right?
Who are in a great position to speak for the interests of the lineage going forward.
Right?
So my point is that pattern is mirrored across the entire structure that people behave more collaboratively than they would otherwise that the priest is in a position to see the interests of the lineage and to speak for it and in fact to speak on behalf of God and to remind people of the literally false but metaphorically true
The idea that if they do not shape up, they will dwell forever in a lake of fire after their death.
If they do adhere to the terms of the religion, then they will live a marvelous heavenly existence after they are gone, right?
These are very powerful incentives that cause the lineage to behave more like an organism than it would otherwise.
I mean, I think that the description you give accounts for some aspects, let's say.
But monasticism, let's say, monasticism isn't like that.
You know, a monastery isn't what you're describing.
A martyr isn't what you're describing.
That is, there's a sense of self-sacrifice in Christianity which goes beyond the one that you're describing.
And that, although your explanation accounts for that very well, like in terms of mechanical causes, When you realize that, for example, self-sacrifice is a... let's say self-sacrifice is one of the pillars of Christianity, let's say it that way.
And the notion that if you sacrifice yourself, that it is... that it builds the world, right?
It holds the world together.
But that is true at all the levels, right?
It's not only true for the priest.
The example you gave is very good, but there's a sense in which I feel like You know, if you have, let's say, 12 monks that live in a monastery that no one ever sees, that they're completely isolated, or the notion of, in the Middle Ages, you would have people who would be walled in to churches and would just be there praying, and people would just know that they're there, and there would be no interaction with them, no contact with them, you know.
And so I can maybe sometimes see, for example, you can imagine like Franciscans who help the poor, like how helping the poor would do what you're saying, but there seems like there's something, there's something else because Christianity itself, which is based on the notion of someone who died, creates a, I guess what I'm getting to is that I think that your explanation, it accounts for some parts of the pattern.
of Christianity, let's say, or other religions, but it doesn't account for it enough.
It can pick and choose within the phenomena and say, well, I can account for that, but it seems like it doesn't account for the totality of it because the totality has a coherence.
It's important to understand.
It's not an arbitrary bunch of stuff that there's a founding story.
That founding story, let's say, comes down into reality and has variations of it all through its story.
The pattern has the same.
And so there's a real coherence, let's say, to the way it sets itself up, which I don't think is accounted for.
It's not accounted for.
But this is the nature.
I mean, you know, I'm coming at this as a scientist, and I recognize that what I've described to you is a cartoon at best.
Yeah.
It's a cartoon, which I think is accurate, but it is far from precise and it is not fully explanatory.
But then the question is, well, what about the things that it doesn't explain?
And are there explanations for those things?
You know, and it's very much like looking at You know, the morphology and physiology of a body and realizing, you know, you start with the realization that Darwinism is the explanation for the form in front of you, but that doesn't necessarily explain to you how the work of the cells is done, right?
That takes a whole different set of explanations, a different level of explanation.
So, I would argue that the place to go next is to think developmentally.
Right.
And if you take the structure that I just described, right, that's a structure of adults.
If you take that structure of adults, And you now raise children in the context of that structure.
What they do is they actually take on the implied rules, the threats and the rewards that are described around certain behaviors.
They get written into that child's being in a way that the child is not Even consider certain behaviors because they're antithetical to their nature, right?
And, you know, you and I are to be perfectly horrible about this, right?
You and I are members of a species in which many of our male ancestors will have engaged in rape.
Right?
That means you and I have picked up the genetic potential, but neither you nor I would contemplate such a thing, right?
That's because I'm a Christian.
Is that because I believe in a pattern which is beyond the biological?
I don't think so.
I think it's because you're a Christian, but I think that's like the safety on the gun.
I think were you suddenly to lose your Christian faith, you would not become a rapist, right?
You have other things.
There is decency in you.
Right.
All those terms, all those terms are, let's say, terms which I don't think are accounted for by simple persistence of genetic material.
Let's say there was a society that raped and a society that didn't.
Do you think that it would make a difference in terms at the genetic level?
Like, would it make a difference?
It makes a huge difference, unfortunately.
And I would argue that while all decent societies drive the penalty for rape through the roof so that it becomes not rare enough, but rare, The tables are turned in warfare, right?
That because warfare is almost always occurring between more distantly related people, right?
People in general fight alongside those with whom they are closely related against those to whom they are more distantly related.
And the harm to the lineage, therefore, of rape is reduced.
There's an awful lot of rape that takes place during war, and that is obviously better understood the farther back in history we go.
Nonetheless, yes, genes have gotten into the future that way.
Yes, you and I have inherited genes.
And you know, it's not just men, right?
It's not like these genes are transmitted on the Y-chromosome.
There's almost nothing on the Y-chromosome.
You know, the genes of women are transmitted this way too by men who are closely related to them.
But the point is, the prohibition, the mental prohibition The normative prohibition in your mind is augmented by your faith, but it is not dependent on it.
Where does it come from?
It comes from a, you acquired it developmentally from a population that has an agreement on this.
Right, but if it's not to the advantage of the genes, where does it come from?
It is to the advantage of the genes.
A population in which women are in danger of being raped whenever they find themselves in the world where they don't have a male protector, let's say.
Right.
That is not a very functional society.
For one thing, it is a society that will squander the potential that exists in women because those women will not be able to to reach their potential in a world where they are constantly jeopardized by by rape.
Right.
So the reduction in that threat is actually an advantage of the lineage, and the point is that's not the terms that any of us think about it in, right?
Rape is abhorrent, right?
The reason that you and I do not entertain the possibility of rape is that we don't want it, which again, yes, religion will help you see that.
If you do not see it otherwise, it will threaten you into not raping because you don't want to go to the lake of fire, but it is not dependent on it.
Right, but there are some societies that do want rape.
Well, it depends what you mean.
That raping not your own people.
You always rape others.
You don't rape your own people.
Because if you rape others, then you, like you said, then you perpetuate your identity.
Even if it's in a lesser level, you perpetuate it out into other populations.
Well, not even identity.
What you do is you Uh, place genes into other populations, right?
Which, which then, you know, again, I'm not defending any of this normatively, but also explains why societies have a very uncomfortable relationship with their own women who have been raped.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
But what I mean is, again, I still have the issue of understanding Because you appeal to a common sense, like, of course we don't want this, but that's what I want to push you on, which is that if it can be to the advantage of a lineage to rape, then where does it come from?
You could imagine a world where you would say that rape is bad for others, like, we're going to stop rape for other people raping for sure, but we'll rape as much as possible, right?
Well, no.
Rape others, not our own people, but rape other people.
So, we've landed back at this issue of group, okay?
Because we can imagine, right, if our population doesn't want its members raped, but it might get an advantage by raping members of another population.
But we could agree to a reciprocal treaty, effectively.
We could say, look, let's take rape off the table, right?
We will forego the opportunity to rape others if we will be protected from rape during warfare, right?
You could come up with this.
And in fact, the Geneva Convention obviously forbids lots of behavior in warfare that an individual population would benefit from.
But the idea is we all would like to prevent.
We don't want our soldiers tortured.
So let's just take torture off the table.
But the problem is because it is not based on a lineage.
It is feeble.
And we have watched the Geneva Convention come apart.
As much as it may be in our interest to take torture off the table, there's no mechanism to bind others to it.
And so, basically, everybody now cheats.
And we have, you know, we've... So, my question is, why do you hold to that?
Like, what is it in you that makes you Hold to that, if you can see, your argumentation is flawless in terms of what you're saying, but I still, I struggle.
I mean, you know why I'm pushing you there.
I do.
This is the crux of the difference between you and I, I would say.
No, it's not.
Because, the punchline for my understanding of all of these things is actually because of the paradox you just raised, we have to turn the tables on the genes.
The genes have been in charge.
They've been in charge of our cultural selves.
Not directly, right?
But the basic point is cultural features that do not advance the interest of the genes do not persist long-term, right?
The genes are in the driver's seat.
We have to turn the tables because the genes do not allow us to do what we need to do.
I've heard you say this many times, and I think that this is where I feel bewildered by what you're saying.
Because your first point was that group meme level, group level, societal level serves the genes.
And now you're saying we need to flip the table, but my question again is, if that's true, if that's scientifically true, where do you even get the thought?
Where do you even get the energy?
Where do you get the possibility of flipping?
Because I agree that we should not serve our genes, but I know where mine comes from, but I wonder where yours comes from.
Beautiful.
So, the story is a funny one, right?
So, all evolved creatures have the identical purpose, right?
Their purpose is to lodge their genes into the future, right?
Everything from malaria, plasmodium to, you know, a red panda, they all have the same purpose.
Which means it's not a very good purpose, I should point out.
Using hard words.
Use the word good.
That's fine.
Keep going.
No, I mean it.
I mean it in its absolutely normative sense.
And at the end of this, I hope you'll see where it came from.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
So, all those creatures, every creature, and presumably every creature on every other planet where there are creatures, which I assume there are, have the same purpose.
To get their informational stuff lodged as deeply in the future as possible.
The ways in which one can lodge one's informational stuff, in our case our genes, deeply into the future vary tremendously.
That's what biological diversity is, right?
It's a diversity of tools for getting genes into the future.
The tool that we were awarded that made humans truly special is consciousness, right?
What does consciousness do?
Consciousness, I believe, Allows us to take two minds and to pool their different understanding of the world, their different kinds of expertise, and to basically asymmetrically parallel process difficult puzzles that neither of us could solve together.
And then you can scale that up and you can have a whole campfire of people parallel processing difficult problems, like how do we survive in this new habitat that our ancestors didn't know anything about?
Right?
That's a tool.
It's a means to an end.
And the end is, let's get our genes as deeply into the future as possible.
However, that tool allows us to do something, which is to understand the universe around us in abstract terms that we can transmit.
Right?
So we can have conversations.
And what that means is that we are actually To my way of thinking, we are effectively robots.
We are aqueous machines with aqueous computers on our shoulders that have discovered that we have a purpose we cannot defend.
Right?
My purpose is to get my genes into the future.
Sometimes one gets their genes into the future by putting some other population into gas chambers.
But I don't ever want to do that.
In fact, I would rather not be than engage in that behavior.
So therefore, I'm not necessarily the person I am is not on board with the program, which is get your genes into the future by any means necessary.
And what's more, I know that if I talk to other individuals and I say, let me ask you a question, your purpose is to get your genes deeply lodged into the future, but there are circumstances in which that is done with a gas chamber.
Are you on board with the gas chamber thing or are you not?
Well, I know that the people I value most highly will say, of course I'm not.
And so the point is, if we really mean that, Then what we are effectively, we are like the Terminator.
We have discovered that we have a purpose.
And the question is, do we like that purpose?
And if not, what if we say, all right, I'm chucking out the purpose and I'm going to replace it with one that's actually worthy of me.
Alright, so what if I told you that that purpose that you're describing, the purpose of consciousness, like, that's actually the primary purpose.
And it honestly has been that from the moment that humans can speak and from the moment that humans have consciousness.
And that if you want to understand that, then you will look at religious through that lens, through the lens of people, because you seem to think that that's happening now.
But I don't think it's happening now.
I think that What humans have realized a very long time ago is that we have a higher purpose, and how that higher purpose is slowly forming itself and slowly kind of becoming clearer and clearer.
I mean, I think that we can see that happening through, let's say, the history of religion, but I think that that's what's in religion, and that it's something that has been there from the beginning.
And if you try to understand religion only through the perpetuation, of genes but then you tell me we have to have another purpose which is this basically you're basically telling me we need to exist we need to exist together in love is what you're saying and so I would say that that's just that's really what let's say
At least the latest religions have been saying, and they do argue about how to do it, they argue about certain aspects of it, but there's a sense in which that's how, that's what religion has been from the beginning.
Well, yes and no.
I believe that religions are this looking inward, but they are not this looking outward, because of their lineage nature.
And so, my real message is, I have no, I think you know, you've heard me talk about it and you and I have talked about it.
I have no antipathy for religion, right?
I think we have a problem, which is that our religions, because they are the product of evolution, are not a good match for a world in which everything is novel.
But from the perspective of what these things are, they are the key that allowed our ancestors to get us to the present, right?
These things that allowed people to collaborate in these large lineages, right, are the key to our success.
But we have come to a point at which we now have a bunch of religions that are incompatible, that, you know, we can pretend they all say the same thing, but they don't.
They say some similar things, which is not surprising.
There's effectively convergent evolution that has shaped many of the beliefs, but In essence, I think, and this is the bitter pill when I talk to people who come from the religious side of this discussion, is that I think if we are to live up to the ideals that are contained in the religions that you're describing, That we actually have to recognize mechanistically what these things are and say, all right, how do we do that over all of humanity?
And you know, maybe, maybe Buddhism gets us there, maybe, or at least versions of Buddhism have this sort of highest level of enlightenment in which we not only view our own religious perspective as
uh viable but we recognize the unity of uh of of others but i don't think i i basically think jonathan that if we do not recognize the underlying evolutionary explanation for the nature of these belief systems and then abstract it so that we can have one for the entire human lineage that we will destroy ourselves as a result of
The failure of groups to durably cohere.
Right, so, let's say, even only as an evolutionist, let's say, would you apply that to any other level of reality?
A single coherent pattern.
Like, you don't think that there's a need for diversity?
That there's a need for... Oh, I didn't say that.
That if you create single patterns that, let's say, encompass all, then you're creating fragility.
No, no, no.
First of all, it may be, again, you know, you start out with the cartoon level, right?
So I've described that we need some sort of abstraction of all of the religious principles that can cover all of humanity.
And yes, that could be some homogenization process in which we all become one not very interesting thing, which is obviously not the world I want to see.
But it could be that There are some movements in that direction, by the way, like in these world structures that people are trying to set up.
There is a strange flavor for a kind of homogeneity, a weird universal homogeneity.
Well, look, let me steel man it for a second.
I don't want it, right?
I'm somebody who I, the best parts of me, Were informed by travel to really far flung places and the connection with people who had a very different experience than mine.
So believe me, I do not want to see the world made homogeneous, uh, because I think it will be a tragic loss.
There's an argument though, that we have to do some of that.
In other words, what if we understood that the key to reaching an agreement that allows our descendants to be here a thousand years from now is that we must have a shared language?
Right now, I know there are obviously, you know, there's Esperanto and people have made arguments along these lines before, but I wonder if it isn't true that we actually cannot afford the loss of meaning between languages like, you know, Russian, Chinese, English, Portuguese, Spanish,
That as we try to explain our position, we get a loss of resolution as we move between these languages, and that we can no longer afford it.
That, you know, with the level of firepower we have, the level of integration of our systems, we just simply put ourselves in existential danger by allowing that to persist.
Which doesn't mean anybody needs to stop speaking any of those languages, but it might mean that we need to prioritize getting a common language for all of us.
Let me give you, because you seem to think that the religions haven't thought of this, or it's not part of their structure, but in Christianity, and in Islam, and in some ways in Judaism, and in, I think, in other traditions as well, there's something which we call eschatological reality.
That is, there is an image of an end point or an image of a point where all is together, all is revealed, and that has a structure.
It's not arbitrary.
There's a way in which it's represented, and it's represented as usually as a mountain or a natural place, which is surrounded by a technical place.
So, the New Jerusalem, for example, in Revelation, is described as a tree with water surrounded by a wall that is made of stones and that is technical, and that it says that The glories of all the nations are carried into the city, right?
And this is what you're describing.
So, it doesn't mean that the nation ceased to exist, but it means that the best of all is carried into unity, and that this is how unity exists.
Unity exists through the Unity doesn't destroy the levels.
This is what true unity doesn't do.
It doesn't suck in all the levels of reality into it.
It tends to exist like a traditional world works with the existence of families, Communities, villages, the king, the pope, right?
All of these coexist.
They don't have to obliterate each other as they're manifesting themselves at the different levels.
So I think that this image is there.
It's there, but it's there in understanding that there's a manner in which it cannot be attained.
In the world, and that trying to attain it creates another image, which is something like the Tower of Babel, which is a very fragile, universal structure that tries to be all-encompassing.
A good example of that is all these projects of digital identity that we're seeing, like these types of centralization of identity of all your elements into one giant world system, is something which has been definitely warned about.
in Christianity.
You know, we talk about the number of the beast or the 666, all these things that people think are weird and just arbitrary, but they're not at all.
They're really talking about the difference between a normal existence of all these levels of reality coexisting together, and one which is this one system that tries to, let's say, permeate all aspects of reality and tries to colonize all the elements that are which permeate all aspects of reality and tries to colonize all the elements that And so, there is a vision for that.
You know, it's just that people don't struggle to think imagistically, and so, because of it, they don't see that it's there, but it's definitely described in the Bible itself.
Well, all right.
So, yeah.
Evolutionarily speaking, we have two general ways in which the same pattern can show up in two places, right?
One is homology, which means that you picked it up from a shared ancestor, and the other is analogy, which effectively means you evolved it separately for the same reason.
Right?
Both of these things exist for religion.
So the Golden Rule, for example, shows up in Christianity from Jesus, and it shows up in Judaism through Rabbi Hillel.
And we can discuss whether or not those two examples are both derived from a shared previous, possibly uncaptured ancestor, something that wasn't recorded by history, or whether this is an analogous discovery.
But the other thing is that in the case of something like religion because it is housed in Cultural information rather than genetic information.
It can also move horizontally.
And so If you if you do this work carefully you realize that there was a something like a speciation event that Christianity evolved from Judaism Right it basically that's a divergence And, you know, there are vastly more Christians on earth today than there are Jews, but that's something that happens, you know,
Yeah, well, it's partly because Christianity is universal in its structure.
It's not based on lineage, actually.
Which is one of the things that I'm trying to argue with you, is that the pattern of Christianity can reproduce itself all over the world, where Judaism has a national lineage-based reality, which cannot indefinitely reproduce.
No, I quite disagree with you.
I'm open to the possibility you know more than I do about Christianity and that you'll compel me of this, but basically what I see is an adaptive radiation of Christian traditions, right?
So, there is Roman Catholicism and then there are various versions of Catholicism They picked up the tradition somewhere.
but abandon the obligation to the Pope, right?
You know. - I mean, yeah, from the beginning, there are many different traditions.
There were Ethiopians, there were Nubians, there were Coptics, Armenians, or these people that are not in any way connected to Rome, but I mean, whatever, that's fine. - Yeah, they picked up the tradition somewhere.
So my point is what we see are two patterns overlapping, which I think are confusing, right?
We see the ability of culture to move horizontally and that can result, you know, two people who were not related at all could both have heard Jesus speaking and both have started versions of Christianity, right?
And those would be two separate lineages, but the people, those two separate lineages would have passed this belief system on to relatives.
To descendants and then it doesn't mean people can't join but basically my point is you can map the logic of lineage on to Christianity and if you think in biological terms in some sense, and I think actually This is reasonably uncontroversial, right?
We talked about Judeo-christian beliefs, right?
Christians are Uh, descended.
Christianity is descended from Judaism, and then it radiates into many different traditions, right?
And it, uh, you know, obviously Protestants are Christians, right?
But they are not Catholics, right?
So these are all, you know, basically you could draw a phylogeny of these things.
And when you say, but Christianity is not a lineage, I think what you're doing is you're looking, you're not realizing that lineage is a fractal property, right?
A lineage is an individual and all of their descendants.
And what that means is that you can have, you know, within a large lineage, you have many smaller lineages, and you can have the divergence of belief systems.
Within these smaller lineages and you know at some level you would expect Christians to be united against more distant human lineages, but to be fractious when it comes to disagreements within Christendom.
Does that make sense?
No, it makes sense.
So let's say Because I think that maybe it's just because the way that I view reality very differently maybe from you to me.
I feel like you always have to hold on to the genes, which is fine.
I get it.
But to me, genes are self-replicating patterns that exist at a certain level, and that there are self-replicating patterns all through the different levels of being, and that I don't feel like I have to prioritize one rather than the other.
Like, I don't understand what makes… So, when you're doing what you're doing, it seems like you have to run around a lot.
Let me just finish what I'm saying.
If you understand that, for example, you have a pattern, a being, and that being is self-replicating to a certain extent, or it creates children in the world, then You can understand the spread, let's say, of Christianity very easily.
It just makes sense.
You have the reason why missionaries from Greece would go, from Constantinople, would go to Russia, or the reason why, you know, you would have Christians in Ethiopia, or in all these different places.
You can understand how these patterns will reproduce, and why there's, because For me, what makes it difficult is that if you're talking about lineages, then where is housed the commonality between all these different lineages?
Where is it housed?
What is it?
Where are those patterns?
They're obviously not in the genes anymore now.
They're housed at a higher level.
These patterns at higher levels, they exist.
They're not just, let's say, I don't know what else, how else to say it.
Well, let me, the simple answer to your question is they're definitely not housed in the genes.
There may be a predisposition towards a religious viewpoint in the genes, but what is housed in the genes is extremely limited.
What you are talking about is housed in culture.
And here's the thing that people miss.
Culture is special.
It evolves rapidly because it can move horizontally.
Most culture moves vertically, right?
The more durable a piece of culture is, the more likely you are to have inherited it vertically.
Yes, you do have this very interesting pattern of people, you know Spreading the good word right to people who aren't related to them And then the point is it will move vertically down right to descendants wherever it takes hold And so that does create lots of seeds of the cultural belief that are not Fundamentally connected lineage wise but then the question is why?
Why does a lineage engage in a expensive behavior of sending missionaries out into the world to spread the word?
And the answer is, I believe, because it creates a hospitable world for the home lineage, right?
That actually there's an advantage to it.
But let me answer your basic question, right?
I know, I think I know that you're hearing my obsession with the genes, right, as like a defect of perspective.
I don't think it is.
I think the point is we are unavoidably haunted by the genes.
And so I am vigilant about keeping track of what role they are playing, because to lose track of that puts us in danger.
And I would just say, by analogy, if we look at Twitter, right?
And we say, well, Twitter is a place where people exchange, you know, perspectives in small snippets, and they develop an emergent understanding of the world, right?
I have forgotten that Twitter is also a business that programs opaque algorithms that decide who sees what.
And so it's not a place in which people develop an emergent perspective.
It is a place where people exchange concepts, but the way they exchange them is regulated by an unseen force.
And any moment at which you forget and you think you're just around people you chose, right?
Expressing ideas as you see fit and them responding as they see fit.
Any point you lose track of the role the algorithm is playing in what you see, you've made an error and you're not going to understand where you are.
So my point is that's the genes.
I'm not in love with the genes.
I'm afraid of what they'll do and I'm trying to keep track of their role in all of our interactions because I know what they're up to and it's not good.
Alright, okay.
So, let me try to do something which might surprise you a little bit.
So, what I try to posit is that We live in these bodies.
We have these experiences.
We have an experience of desire.
We have all these experiences.
We have this sense of the world.
We have this embodied reality in which we live.
My interpretation always starts from there.
Because you don't experience your genes, right?
You experience them as desires.
You experience them as drives.
You experience them as judgments on others or as a critical eye on certain things or whatever.
For me, the best way to represent what you're saying would actually look more like a Christian ontology, which is that Christians would say something like, you have desires, you have passions, and those passions are dangerous.
And if you give in to those passions, then you will die, right?
That's a spiritually, our society will die.
All of these things will happen at higher levels.
And if you attach yourself, if you attend to higher things like love, if you attend to virtues, then you will live and your society will live.
So to me, that way of describing, is comes it comes first and then like all the interpretation of genes will will come after because we don't you you it's this is this is the if you talk to people about genes you're not going to make them change the way they live oh right If you tell them don't rape, then that does something.
Don't rate because you should love your neighbor.
And why do you love your neighbor?
Because if you love your neighbor, then we exist in harmony and peace, you know, in the image of the highest good, which is a God of love, let's say.
So that will do something.
But I don't know, like talking to people about genes, like if your purpose is to, let's say, create the change that you want to create.
I don't know.
I don't disagree with you.
Yeah.
Right?
And I do think that, look, I want people to understand genes and biology because I think it's Fascinating.
I think it makes for a richer life to understand what the layers below your experience are made of and how it accounts for your existence.
But I am not imagining that anybody is going to be sold on a new way of viewing themselves or the world on the basis of the genes.
I do want people to have a proper fear about the genes and the basic point would be look, Everything that is amazing about us was built by that genetic layer.
The things that we love most about ourselves, our ability to be enlightened, our ability to be decent, our moral capacity, all of these things are evolved, right?
The genes, at the very least, set that in motion.
You say that we have to topple them.
No.
It's not like that.
Okay, all of the best things about us evolved.
All of the worst things about us evolved too.
And we have to choose.
That's the point.
Right?
I want us to look at the whole spectrum of what we can be.
Right?
From extremely enlightened and decent to manning gas chambers.
And I want us to say, you know what?
There's a bunch of this I'm just not on board with, no matter what it does for my genes.
And there's a bunch of this other stuff that I'd like to see augmented and spread as wide as possible.
And so what that means is that the genes can't be in charge anymore because they will choose both.
Right?
If we want the good stuff, then what we have to do is actually say, look, you have given us the tools to see that the way I have sometimes described it is that the cosmos is a gigantic spelling bee that ends in genocide.
Right?
That's not where we want to be, right?
And it doesn't have to be that way.
But in order not to be that way, we have to look at that potential and we have to say, no matter what, that's off the table.
We effectively have to go Geneva Convention on the whole puzzle without violating the math of the situation, right?
But that capacity, what you're saying, I mean, this is my understanding, doesn't seem to be housed in the genes.
It seems to be housed in consciousness.
Right, exactly.
Consciousness, the tool, the genes gave us consciousness.
Why?
To get our genes into the future.
And the point is, we have to now say, thank you very much, we appreciate consciousness, now we're going to use it for something that's actually worthwhile.
Right?
Right, but that worthwhile doesn't come from the genes.
Right.
We have to tell the genes to go screw themselves.
Right, it comes from A higher good, let's say.
You can say it comes from a higher good.
I can say the genes screwed up and they awarded us a tool that allows us to understand what they're up to so we can reject it, right?
Right, but we need a place to stand from which to reject it.
Like we need a... Right, but we're standing there, you and me, right now, right?
You've got one perspective, which is that there's some higher force that has allowed us to opt towards the good.
Well, the higher force thing is going to be a problem.
Maybe because I feel like this conversation would have to keep going for another 10 hours for us to really get to the thing.
It's patterns.
Yes.
So, there are higher patterns.
One of the reasons why I really emphasize the fact that patterns scale up is that these patterns, they really do scale up.
And as they scale up, they manifest the good of that which they're patterning.
Okay, that's what a pattern is, and that's what's maybe a hard thing for a lot of people to understand, is that patterns, we need consciousness to recognize patterns, right?
Consciousness is what recognizes patterns, but recognizing patterns is judging patterns.
It is always an act of seeing if something is good, depending on the pattern which it is informing.
So, when I'm looking at a glass, consciously or unconsciously, I'm judging whether it's a good glass.
Can it hold water?
Can I drink from it?
And if it doesn't, then it's not fully in line with its good, which is what I see it as doing, from the point of view of consciousness.
from the point of view of consciousness.
And so that is what scales up towards really the good.
That is the ultimate good.
And as we bind together in families, we can perceive through consciousness.
We can perceive, if we're attentive, the good of our family, but that good isn't enough, like you said, because that good can be now put in competition with the goods of others, like a soccer team or a baseball team or whatever, where you can see the good of your team, but you're in competition with others.
So, that continues to scale.
You know, this is a Thomistic argument, right?
This is like a medieval scholastic argument about the manner in which things exist, which is that these goods scale up into the infinite good.
So, it's not a higher force in the sense of some kind of weird physical thing that exists outside the universe.
It's not.
It's a pattern.
Patterns are not the physical stuff.
They are that invisible aspect of things Which drives them towards together, which binds them together, you could say.
Invisible patterning which makes you see that they exist.
And that's what scales up into ultimately a perception of something like the infinite love that is behind all things.
Okay, let me try it from a different direction.
All right, let's see.
Okay.
I believe I can derive from what you've said that you and I will agree that consciousness is good because it allows us to understand where we are and to act in our own interests and that our own interests involve something that you and I would agree is, you know, that love is good.
And that more love tends to improve a system and that we therefore ought to bias things in the direction of its propagation.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
Have I said anything that violates your understanding?
No, no, no.
For now, you're good.
Good.
All right.
So, and let us further agree that we don't really need to defend those things.
Even if I can't ultimately defend the idea that consciousness is good, I'm just going to say, hey, I think it's awesome and I want to use it.
Okay?
It's the mechanism by which we even know something's good.
So, to say that it's not good, you're just going to be running around in circles at some point, you know.
Yep.
You would not see the good without consciousness.
Right.
So I'm willing to call it good because for there to be a good, you need the consciousness to even recognize that there is such a thing.
So let's just make it, let's cheat and just say it's good.
Let's hard code it as good.
Okay.
Now here's the point.
My consciousness is stuck in space and time.
Okay?
It exists now, and it can only see so far.
Right?
And it's extended.
I have history books.
I can look backwards in time, farther than I could otherwise without them.
I can project into the future by virtue of pooling my understanding with other people who have thought about where we're headed and what will happen.
But I'm still stuck in space and time.
When I say I, I am talking about that consciousness stuck in time, but I don't have to be.
When I say we, right?
I could be talking about you and me, or I could be talking about our lineage, right?
We began farming 10,000 years ago, right?
And the argument I want to make is, Morally speaking, I believe if consciousness and love are good, then in some sense I am obligated to do that which grants consciousness and love to the maximum number of individuals who can experience it.
Okay?
So now I'm trying to step out of my stuckness in space and time.
And would you go as far as to say something like love your enemy?
Like would you go as far as that?
Well, don't love your enemy naively.
Right?
But yes, work to a place where you and your enemy realize that you're not really enemies because you both would like to grant consciousness and love to as many future people as you can.
And that in order to do that, we have to stop fighting in the way we've been fighting.
Right?
And so my point would be, My consciousness is stuck in space and time because of the genes.
Genes granted us consciousness as a tool, and the point is my ability to affect events 10,000 years in the future is zero, or presumably very close to it, right?
I mean, it depends.
10,000 is long, but at least some people, some consciousnesses have affected a few thousand years for sure.
Sure, sure.
And look, I aspire to it.
I would love for this conversation to have an effect on people's viewpoint.
10,000 years from now.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, not as a matter of ego, but I just think it would be cool if we woke people up enough that actually the conversation had some resonance.
But do I really expect this conversation or anything I ever do to have resonance 10,000 years down the line?
Probably not.
Probably best not to think that.
But the point is, Because consciousness is a tool of the genes, it is scaled to think at the level that would have been useful to the ancestors in which consciousness emerged.
In other words, it makes sense to think a couple generations down the line, but it doesn't make sense to think a hundred generations down the line.
Not because that isn't important, but because you have no ability to impact it.
A hunter-gatherer who tried to think about how they could alter their behavior to benefit their descendants a hundred generations later would have had no ability to make any useful change.
So it makes sense to be focused on things that are local to you in space and time until you reach modernity.
You and I are in a very different situation, right?
Insane battling over modern stuff actually has strong implications for whether or not there are human beings here 10,000 years from now, right?
In fact, it's more likely than not that there won't be.
In order for there to be human beings here 10,000 years from now, we are going to have to behave very carefully and we're going to have to figure out how to preserve the precious opportunity that we have wherever it came from.
So my point is, That consciousness of mine is artificially stuck artificially locally, right?
If selection had been built in creatures that had impact 10,000 years in the future, our consciousness would be scaled to be able to see 10,000 years in the future and care about it.
But we're not good at it because our ancestors were limited, the power of their tools was small, and so… I think that there are some human consciousnesses that are able to see, not 10,000 years in the future in the granular sense, but 10,000 years in the future in the pattern sense.
They're able to perceive higher patterns and are able to talk about cycles, great cycles of being and great cycles of civilization.
I don't think that this is something which has not been available to people.
And the same thing with consciousness.
I think that all, let's say, all religious practices believe that consciousness can increase and that you can increase, let's say, the capacity of consciousness to perceive patterns and to engage in patterns and to transform patterns, which is why we have Which is why we name things after people, right?
Which is why we have patrons of things.
Like, consciousness can become, let's say, the guarantors of aspects of reality, you could say.
So, I think that the way that religion talks about consciousness seems to understand that consciousness is the point of where all of this comes together, and that it's working on consciousness, which is more important than the technical stuff.
Like a good example is something, you know, like there's a saying, which is in Judaism and in Christianity too, right?
The just holds the world together.
The just is the foundation of the world.
And that the idea that Becoming a better person is the best thing you can do for that to happen.
One of the reasons why we're in the mess we're in is because we started to perceive the world only materially, and that the idea of gaining material power and gaining power on the world was the highest purpose that we could imagine.
So, we created these massive technological systems which are driving us into madness, which are driving us, making us crazy.
We've actually moved away from the ideals which held religion together.
Even if religions did bring about wars, brought about some horrible stuff, religious thinking has never brought humanity to the precipice of destruction, like the very existence of the world being held in the balance.
Whereas, as we move away from that and we started to think technically, scientifically only, then we come to this point where We unleash these golems on the world that we don't even understand.
We can't see the scope of what they're doing.
I'm even willing to give Twitter, for example, the benefit of the doubt that they didn't understand the monster they were unleashing on the world when they did.
And now we see the golem turning against its master, like in all the ancient traditions of mechanical beings that don't follow the will of their master, let's say.
Anyways, so I'm not sure.
So I'm not maybe continue on with what you think the solution is, but I don't know.
First, let me say, I don't disagree with what you say.
I'm sure religions have sometimes brought their own lineage to an end.
Bad decision making will have been the case, but they will not have brought humanity there.
You're right.
And the abandonment of religion and the embrace of full materialism, I agree, has clearly brought us there.
I will also say we are stuck in space and time.
Our consciousness is, which doesn't, you know, you and I are having a conversation about What will be 10,000 years from now, right?
That is us trying to bring 10,000 years from now into our consciousness, but we are in some sense like we are using a tool that is not appropriately scaled, right?
So if you think about how Mount Rushmore was carved, Right?
Mount Rushmore is a sculpture, right?
A sculptor uses chisels, and I'm sure there were chisels used in the making of Mount Rushmore, but there was also like dynamite, right?
And my point is that a chisel isn't sufficient to make Mount Rushmore, and our consciousness is going to need some upgrading if we're going to pull off the trick of figuring out where Our interests actually are with respect to the future 10,000 years from now, right?
And so we're basically stuck with chisels and we need to upgrade to dynamite in order to get there.
But the long and short of it is we do not think In terms of providing a world to our descendants 10,000 years from now, because our ancestors didn't have an opportunity at that scale, whereas we clearly do.
We're more likely we have the opportunity to rob our descendants of that future if we are not careful.
And so, what I'm really arguing is If it is our obligation to provide the opportunity for consciousness and love to as many descendants as we can, that means an indefinite future for humanity.
That means we have to put aside the lineage against lineage battling that has shaped humanity.
It has brought us this far, but we have to get past it.
And so I don't want to see a synonymizing of the people of the world.
I don't want to see us all be the same, but we do have to reach an agreement in which the things that cause us to jeopardize the future are shelved permanently in favor of a world that does foster consciousness, love, insight, beauty, all of the things that we would agree are Inherently or close to inherently good, right?
And that we're not going to get there by accident.
And we're not going to get there.
This is the place where you and I may differ.
We are not going to get there by embracing the traditions that have arrived in the present, but are not built for it.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, that's where there I disagree, because I don't see what I see in the like, for example, I see wokeism as a desire to create these types of A desire to create a kind of structure which will supposedly bind us together.
I see a lot of the COVID measures as a desire to do that as well.
I see things of people trying to do that, but because they are Not grounded in the ancient stories.
They don't have a kind of mythical underpinning that has been developed for millennia and millennia.
Then they're creating monsters.
They're Frankenstein creations.
We are in total agreement about that, by the way.
So, what I believe is that I believe that, let's say for me, being the best Christian I can be and living with my family and my neighbors and the people around me in the best way, that's the first best thing I can do.
That's really the first best thing I can do.
And then, obviously, taking seriously the teachings of Christ, which is to love your neighbor, to love your enemy, to not, you know.
To do unto others as you would want them to do unto you, that's also important.
But the way it happens is fractal.
I don't think it's in creating a kind of Tower of Babel.
In a certain manner, it happens kind of bottom-up.
Communities come together in truth and in love and in beauty, then that creates new patterns.
Patterns that other people can replicate.
And then those patterns get replicated.
It seems that that's how it happened in the first place.
Let's say, if you think of even the way that Christianity spread, that's how it happened.
You had people who Exemplified patterned living and that at first people hated them for it, were angry with them, but then that ended up acting like seeds which replicated itself in other communities because they could see the good that it was bringing.
But it happened that way rather than Like saying we're all going to get together and we're going to agree, right?
We're going to consciously agree on a way forward towards the future.
That to me sounds like what people are trying to do now.
And what I see coming from it, like the Great Reset and all that kind of stuff is frightening as hell.
Oh, it's a disaster.
It's a terrible disaster.
And you're not wrong about it.
And you're not wrong that what I'm arguing loosely fits in that same category.
Right?
But here's the problem.
I now think I can see, I don't know if I can convey it, but I think I can see what the important thing we have to get to is.
And it's going to come in two forms.
The first thing I have to say is we are absolutely damned if we do and damned if we don't.
Okay?
That is the fundamental nature of the predicament that I'm trying to describe.
And I don't like it, but that's where we are as far as I can tell.
And the other thing is the mechanism you just described for how we got here.
Cannot be the mechanism that we use to get out of here as much as that may sound like a paradox It got us this far if we continue to use it.
It'll be our undoing So I take the mechanism that got us here as the evolution of these religious Traditions and my point is the evolution of those religious traditions will cross through extinction that mechanism if we continue to allow it to drive will drive us extinct and The alternative is terrible, which is what you're saying, right?
I don't disagree with you about this, but I think we have to confront it.
And the point is religions, every adaptation, right?
Forget whether it's religion or an eye or a wing or a leaf.
Every adaptation is useful relative to the environment in which it evolved, right?
A fish may be beautifully evolved to swim on a reef.
It is terribly evolved in the bottom of the boat, right?
In the bottom of the boat, it's a catastrophe of inappropriate tools.
Right?
So my point would be the religions that brought us here are adaptive or they were adaptive in the world in which they came about.
Our world is now changing so rapidly and is composed of so many things that those religions did not foresee in any specific sense that I think they did, though.
I really do think they did.
I really do think they did foresee what's going on.
Well, they foresee certain things, and you know, you point out, like, you know, Twitter is the golem that we unleash on the world, and they didn't know what they were doing.
And I agree, at that level, yes, they foresaw something, but they didn't foresee the splitting of the atom.
They didn't foresee the evolution of algorithms, right?
Not specifically enough to be instructive.
And so, here's the problem.
We are stuck with an infinite regress of Chesterton's fence, right?
We know, if I'm right about what religions are, that they are adaptive compendiums of wisdom.
We are stuck with the fact that there is no, you know, when you program a computer, you put comments next to the lines.
You say, this function is supposed to accomplish this thing.
That's why I put it here, right?
Here are the arguments you submit to this function.
You say that in English so that somebody else can come into your program and say, ah, that's the job this is doing.
Religion doesn't come with that, right?
You get the program in the Bibles, but you don't get the explanation of how, you know, I think I can explain why a belief in heaven is adaptive, but it's not explained anywhere.
There's an entire tradition of theology and church fathers that do exactly that.
Well, they may be trying to reverse-engineer it, and there was certainly a tradition that attempted to reconcile modern scientific thought with religious thought.
I take no position on that, but my point is, if we are handed ancient compendiums of wisdom In a modern world in which some of the things in those compendiums are as relevant as ever, some of the things in those compendiums are now irrelevant, and some of the things in those compendiums are the opposite of useful, right?
They have gone from useful to dangerous because of the change in the world we live in, then we could Try to figure out which pieces are in what category, which is liable to be an error-prone exercise, dangerous in its own right, and very slow.
We could try to substitute something new, which will not have the benefit of having passed the test of time, and therefore we will end up with the problems of wokeism or, you know, a COVID health policy, right?
We will make error after error.
So my point is, neither of those is a survivable program.
So we have to do some third thing, right?
Where a friend of mine coined the term that what we have is we have to provide something that fits a religion-shaped hole.
That there is a hole in our being That needs something of this form, that the ancient religions put us in danger because they're not up to speed on modern problems, and novel religions are effectively cults until they pass the test of time, and we don't have the luxury of exposing them to the test of time.
So, it's that third thing that we need to find.
Yeah, I mean, I guess our disagreement is very fundamental.
Like, I think it's fundamental because I really do believe that Religion has described exactly what we're going through.
Not in terms of the gritty detail, but in terms of pattern.
This is what we're talking about from the outset.
We're talking about patterns.
There are patterns in cells, there are patterns in DNA, there are patterns in human behavior, and there are great patterns.
There are large, large patterns of, let's say, waxing and wanings of civilizations, waxing and wanings of different identities.
And when we look at both, let's say, the stories in scripture, the prophetic text, we see that they're describing these patterns.
And if we have the wisdom to see them as patterns, then we don't have to think even about the splitting of the atom.
Because let's say a description of the pattern of excessive technical growth and excessive technical understanding, the danger of secret understanding and how that unleashes destruction on the world is something which has been described in many, many religious texts.
So then...
So then you're telling me that the wisdom that we already have points in a Luddite direction?
No, not necessarily, because the ultimate vision of the end of all things is, like I said, the heavenly Jerusalem, which is a perfect joining of technical reality and the garden, you could say.
It's all about hierarchy.
It's all about having it in the right order.
One of the issues we have is the issue of materialism being in the wrong order.
We see material gain and technical gain as being the God itself.
That is, we run after it with abandon.
We don't have a sense in which we have to judge on the value and the ultimate danger of these scientific discoveries.
We just run amok, and then all of a sudden we realize the chaos which it's bringing.
That is because of a problem of hierarchy.
Because we're not turned towards infinite love as the source of all things, and we don't see that the tools we set out in the world have to be bound by that attention.
They have to be bound by that first direction.
And so that's something which is described everywhere.
It's not operationalizable.
Okay, so let's take the obvious example from the recent past, okay?
Gain-of-function research on viruses.
This is a clear danger, which you, I think, will correctly describe as presaged by religious admonitions about technology, okay?
Well, not just technology, but also, let's say, mixture of identity.
You see that in the Old Testament laws and you see it in descriptions of the developing of Chimera that happened, you know, before the flood, let's say, that kind of description.
Okay.
That kind of story.
There's a warning, if you know how to read it, in more than one religious text about something like gain-of-function research.
Maybe that thing being encoded in our cultural identity is the reason that in 2015 the U.S.
Congress sought to ban gain-of-function research.
And then Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak figured out a way around this in which they offshored the work to Wuhan.
Yeah.
Wuhan.
Somehow, even if the right idea made it to the right place to make the law to forbid the behavior, we still ended up having it anyways.
Yeah, it happened anyways.
So, my point is, it's one thing when that happens with, you know, first century technologies.
It's another thing when it happens with, you know, 21st century technologies.
And it's the 20th, 21st century technologies that are giving me the sense of urgency that we have.
What's more let me just put one more thing on the table.
Let's take I believe that it is true that Fusion power based on uranium is a dead end.
I Could argue why that is but let's put that for another time Let's just say there are problems with uranium based fission power that I believe are insurmountable in the foreseeable future whereas Fusion power, which is very difficult, which we have not yet usefully generated electricity with.
Right?
We haven't gotten a self-sustaining fusion reaction good enough to be scaled up, but likely The salvation of humanity depends on us achieving that, right?
And therefore freeing ourselves from battling over things like fossil fuels.
But we don't yet have the wisdom to deploy it.
If you deployed fusion power, if we discovered it tomorrow and we just deployed it under current political regimes, it would compound our problem rather than solve it.
Yeah, probably.
Okay, so let's say that those things are true.
They don't have to be true for the purposes of this argument, but they could be true.
Right.
If they are true, we don't have the wisdom in the religious texts that you're talking about or the religious traditions from which they come to know how to navigate our way away from uranium fission and towards fusion power with an upgraded political modality that would allow us to deploy it safely.
Yeah, religion offers the reason.
It offers the reason why you'd want to do that.
Religion offers the notion that if you attend to the highest good, then you will make the right decisions downstream.
But if all you care about is that everybody has two cars and And is materially comfortable, if that's the purpose, then you're already not attending to the highest good.
The problem is already there at the outset, which is that one of the problems of the modern world is that we think that material comfort, and I say that, I live in a house, I live with modern material comfort, but we believe that material comfort is good itself.
And that's what is causing the biggest problem.
Because it's a huge problem, what you're saying.
But the bigger problem is that if we continue to act as if material good is the only good, then there's no way that billions of people in the world can all have two cars and a pool and an air-conditioned house.
We know that that's not scalable.
There's actually a problem of value.
It's a problem of value which will then downstream make us decide differently if we are aligned properly.
There's a great story about a Chinese emperor who started to Stop.
create these fleets of boats that went out all around the world and started to trade in Africa and all around the world.
And then one day the emperor, you know, walked out of his home and looked around and saw the forests were being depleted.
And then he said, stop, stop all of it.
Because the purpose of getting material wealth isn't enough to justify what I'm doing.
There is a higher good, which is the very existence of my own country, my people.
That's higher.
And so, That's why I'm saying that I think that it's all there in the religious story.
It's not going to technically tell you how to master this or that technology, that's for sure, but it's going to give you the direction.
Yeah, but here's the problem.
Let's coin a term, the atheist's advantage.
The religious texts function when people accept them as true.
Right, so I will make the argument that if you behave so that a Christian text tells you that your soul will get into heaven, that there isn't actually literally a heaven, but that the analog that you will achieve is that you will put your descendants in a better position where they are more likely to thrive, right?
So that heaven is a stand-in for the thriving of your descendants, okay?
Now, the problem is, heaven is a reward, right?
You're told if you behave in this way, then you will experience this glorious transcendent existence.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think, at least initially, that's not what heaven is, and it's also not the way that The way religion works is that it's fractally structured, which means that the way that it describes reality is available to the highest mystical thinker and the lowest, you know, like, illiterate peasant.
And so, you'll say something like that, probably, to the illiterate peasant, but that's not how the great sages of Christianity thought of what Well, I will argue that that does not matter.
The point is, the story will function at whatever level is needed for each level of enlightenment.
And that's fine.
But it's not less true.
What you tell the peasant isn't less true.
Right.
The point is it's true at each person at the level that they need it.
Right?
So if the peasant believes if I behave well, then I will experience this glorious existence after I die.
And if I behave badly, it will be all pain every day forever.
Right?
Those are strong motivators.
They adjust behavior.
And the problem is, An atheist who realizes that isn't exactly true, right?
I can do bad things and the worst, from the point of view of my actual self, my suffering ends on my death.
I may profit, but even if I screw it up, the suffering is finite.
That individual has an advantage in terms of getting ahead.
The advantage comes at the expense of the lineage.
Now my point is, that advantage explains much of the way the world functions now.
Because people have... That's because they don't have access to the, they haven't accessed the higher part of the heaven story.
If they did, then they would realize that it's not about doing good things and having, let's say, Some afterlife or whatever.
What it is, is the manner in which you exist.
It is your actual being being transformed into something more.
That's going into heaven, which is this transformation of consciousness up the different levels, and that if you do that, you will have a better life now.
You'll be transformed right now.
Which is actually a pretty good match for the way I would think most Jews, most religious Jews view it, right?
Not so much about going to heaven, but about the nature of your existence.
But never mind.
I think the point is the what you're describing is the more enlightened way of viewing the story of heaven is concordant with my way of viewing this as a non-religious person.
Which is, actually, my obligation is to provide this opportunity in an undegraded form, maybe even an enhanced form, to distant descendants whose name I will never know.
Right?
So the point is, those things are compatible with each other, but what they are not is packaged in a way that incentivizes people to behave so as to protect the well-being of their distant descendant.
Right, but you don't act, I mean, if you tell me that you act to protect your descendants, you know, thousands of years from now, I don't think that's true.
Like, I think you can abstractly think that.
No, no, I do.
But it's not true in your everyday experience, right?
No, no, it is true.
You act according to these immediate desires.
I behave this way, but I am inept at it.
Right?
I am inept at it.
I'm like the sculptor trying to make Mount Rushmore with a chisel.
Right?
I don't have the tools because nothing, evolution gave me tools that aren't good at this job and religions are adapted to an environment too early to be useful in this regard.
And so, my attempts to protect my descendants 10,000 years from now are admittedly probably close to pointless because I don't have the wisdom to do it well.
But what if, to protect your descendants 10,000 years from now, you had to engage in a way of being that would also be the best way of being for you now?
Like, that would objectively be the best way of existing.
You know, which would be to live a life of love, of love of your neighbor, a life of, let's say, true self-sacrifice, where you're able to render up your kind of immediate chaotic desires that kind of appear all over the place, your desire to get this or to do this, and to sacrifice them towards a higher purpose.
And if you did that, you would actually be not only enlightened, but you would also, let's say, Open up the possibility of your descendants, you know, whatever thousands of years from now, to have the best life that you can afford them.
Not only by perpetuating your genes, but by perpetuating modes of being around you that will also reproduce themselves.
In the future.
So, it's not just about your genes.
It also is about the manner in which you live, which ripples out around you and your family and your kids in your neighborhood, and then creates new patterns of being that reproduce themselves at their level as well.
So, that's what religion is.
Religion is that.
I don't disagree with you, but the place that we disagree is that I think the likelihood that living as a religious tradition would have me live is the best thing I can do for my descendants 10,000 years from now.
Chances of that being true are a million to one.
Right, but I don't think you think about your descendants.
I'm thinking about them right now.
I'm sorry to say, like, abstractly, but when you're drinking water and when you're, you know, when you're taking a bath or when you're living your life, like you're not living, you know, when you're hugging your kids, there's a level of experience which is more immediate and is more accessible than your descendants 10,000 years from now.
Of course.
It can't help but be the case.
Don't you think there could be a way in which all of these could stack up?
Like a way of being in which these would stack?
You don't think so?
No.
I mean, look, frankly, I think the best thing I can do for my descendants 10,000 years from now is have conversations with people like you that hopefully will function as a bat signal for other people who see the same problem, will cause people who see a flaw in my reasoning To make themselves known and pointed out the chances that it's sufficient to actually have the effect are pretty low.
I'm not arguing that I think I'm making headway on the puzzle, but I do think that I am behaving.
With the intention of maximizing, I think very little that we do in the present matters to 10,000 years from now, because we are so clearly on a path to extinction.
Right.
What about the strategy that has been given, let's say, in different religions of the building of an arc pattern?
Which is that you see that, the idea of the remnant, you see that in Scripture quite a bit, where there are cycles of collapse and success in Scripture.
And usually, as you approach the collapse, you have something like a remnant, which then continues on into the future, and then, let's say, restarts the cycle.
I mean, obviously, Noah's Ark is the biggest example of that, but there are several examples of that in history.
This is exactly the point.
I am a believer that you build the ark under sunny skies and people think you're a fool and then it starts raining and they start building but it's too late.
Okay?
So, I agree that that has been the pattern and while I don't believe in a literal flood story and Noah and his ark, I do believe that it's a metaphor for important things that are real.
On the other hand, I also know that while nobody was looking or thinking about it in particularly religious terms, we built 400 civilian nuclear reactors that require constant electrical vigilance in order to keep them cool enough not to turn into nuclear volcanoes.
Yeah.
That the collapse as you describe it comes, which is effectively inevitable, those things will severely degrade the planet, if not render it uninhabitable.
And so the point is, the idea, I believe there have been collapse after collapse after collapse.
Do you think this one is so big that it could actually completely destroy all life?
I think it's almost certain and not, you know, I've given you one mechanism by which the earth will be severely degraded and there will be no recovering it.
Even if humanity survives, it will be a very much lesser world, right?
And that this is not the only one of these.
We have seen, you know, that none of them have been at the right scale to properly shock us.
But we have seen You know, Fukushima, we have seen the Deepwater Horizon accident, the Aliso Canyon leak, we have seen the financial collapse of 2008, and now we have seen COVID emerge very probably from a lab in Wuhan.
All of these are the same pattern again and again, where human beings are playing with a kind of power that we only understand the devastation that can come from it after the horses have left the barn.
Right?
Now the problem is, so far as I know, I'm the only person who's writing that list.
That list says, hey, there's a meta problem, right?
You know, the financial collapse of 2008 and COVID-19 are the same problem.
They're the same problem as Fukushima.
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you.
And so the point is we don't have a religious text that deals with that level of hazard where a small number of individuals can make decisions for all of us at a scale that's almost impossible to imagine.
Yeah, but I do think that the flood story is exactly that, and especially the other traditions.
You might want to, if you're interested, you might want to look into the Enochian tradition.
So, in the traditions of Enoch, you had a sense that before the flood, before Noah, these people got into contact with demons, with fallen angels.
And the fallen angels taught them skills, different skills, skills to modify the world, skills to make chimera, skills to create weapons, skills to create all these things, but also, let's say, magical skills to transform reality.
Obviously, this is describing it in that sense, and that these practices are what led to the flood itself.
So, let me describe it in a secular way, if it's struggling with the angels and the demons, whatever.
It's like encountering, in certain ways, patterns.
Which are higher, but are too difficult, and we don't understand all the ramifications of those patterns.
And then we embody them in the world, and so we create things like nuclear weapons.
We don't understand all the ramifications of the patterns that we're encountering.
We embody them, and therefore they bring about calamity and collapse.
And that the only way to get out of that, once the ball is rolling, the only manner to do that is to have something like an arc.
There's no other way.
You know, and I think that that's what's being described also at the notion of the end of times, like this idea of the end of the world, which is part of almost all religions have a sense in which at some point it's all going to collapse, like it's all of this is going to break apart.
But that it's almost like we're not going to reverse it by now.
It's not like we're going to, but we have to rather find ways to plant seeds and to gather seeds, maybe is the best way to understand it, rather than just plant them, to gather them.
Seeds of wisdom and also seeds of being, all of these things together.
Okay, so I think I got it.
I don't disagree with you that the problem is anticipated, right?
And that the place that the problem is anticipated is in religious texts.
I do not believe that it is anticipated with... Technically, let's say.
The technical part of it.
I don't even care about the technical part of it.
I don't think it is sufficiently anticipated that those texts provide us a meaningful guide as to what to do.
In other words, I think we just loaded the ark with nitrogen-based fertilizer and fireworks and we're smoking on the deck, right?
That's what we did.
And I don't think we have the proper terror because at some level, because religions are targeted at talking to individuals, right?
We don't understand, you know, we all know we're going to die.
And so the idea that we're behaving in a foolish way that may bring about our death early isn't sufficiently terrifying.
We don't have the architecture to be terrified enough that we may bring our lineage, the human lineage to an end.
Right?
That would be such a terrible tragedy to do any earlier than has to happen.
And yet we are recklessly playing With exactly the tools that will bring it about, not only earlier than it has to happen, but soon.
Right?
And so, the point is, somehow, we have those religious texts, and they're not working.
And they're not working for a reason.
And I don't think a return to those texts is plausible.
I don't think were there a major return to those texts that it would cause people to awaken to the danger that we're putting humanity into.
But I do think that those who deeply understand those texts could be brought to a recognition that actually they need to update them.
This is that moment.
Yeah, I mean, I don't, I'm not sure I understand what that means in the sense of, or reapply them, and it's not just text, like I'm not Protestant, it's not a question of text, it's a question of ways of being, and ways of existing, and manners of You know, I'd say hierarchies of attention and hierarchies of virtues.
These are the things which we live in.
You know, texts are important.
I love the Bible.
I think it's great, but I don't think that that's what religions aren't texts.
They are ways of being and ways of existing and ways of encountering others.
And I think that exactly that's where the solution is.
The solution is not a technical one.
The only solution we can find is a wisdom one.
It is to engage better ways of being, better ways of encountering each other, like what we're doing here, right?
We are encountering each other in a manner which is not confrontational.
It's not there to just to trick the other person or to lead them into a corner or whatever.
And so I think that is an image of, let's say, love in practice, right?
Embodied.
And so these are the types of things we have to do, but at every level, like at every level that we can muster.
And that's the, and so to me, that's the only solution.
Like there is the idea of like readapting religion.
You know, I don't, I can, I can see why someone who's secular would, would want that because like, there's a kind of disdain towards Religious practice and disdain.
There's a sense in which a lot of it is superstitious or a lot of it doesn't make sense.
Not for me.
Not for me.
That's not how I feel.
I just think it's not up to the challenge.
Believe me, if I thought that the solution to the problem that we've described was a fundamentally religious approach or a Dusting off of texts or a reenergizing of patterns of interaction that come from there.
I'd be all for it because I am concerned about you know, I'm not really that concerned about my ancestors 10,000 years from now because I don't think we're going to get anywhere close to that.
Right?
I think we've got a problem on the scale of the next hundred years.
But nonetheless, if I thought that the solution involved some tool that we already have, I would be all for it, because I do think that this is the most important moral problem that we have, and that people are not properly frightened of the loss that comes from the destruction of lineage precisely because Destruction of lineage in the past didn't mean the end of your species.
It has never meant that until now.
And so, you know, I'm not rejecting anything on the basis of it being, you know, I know how scientists dismiss religion and I've never been about that.
But believe me, I'm for whatever tool works in this case, so that people, you know, a hundred years from now can look back on us and say, here's what they got wrong.
And my fear is that there will be no one to look back.
But maybe the mistake is the tool part.
Like, I think that that's the mistake.
The mistake is looking for tools.
Because let's say the religious, the wisdom and the religious point of view are the The mythical point of view in which we sit and we're capable of seeing that which is good is not a tool.
It's actually a way of being, and a way of being is the manner in which you're going to be able to even see that what's going on is a problem.
It's not about a bunch of tools.
The tools will come adapted to the situation, but what it requires first is a direction and a mode of being.
The thing is, I think that both of us agree On the direction and the mode of being, it's just that I'm trying to express that that mode of being is already A religious mode of being, like the turning your eyes towards the good and to the notion of something like infinite love as the source of true being, that's already a religious position.
And then downstream from that are different things.
For example, a hierarchy of virtues, a hierarchy of values, then a manner in which we engage with others.
And then downscale from that even, then you'll have specific things like the way we light candles or the way we, you know, we go to certain buildings to worship.
But there is a hierarchy in those things.
And I think that already at the outset is already a It's already a worshipful stance.
You're already standing in a place in which you're attending to and you're celebrating the highest good.
And you're saying, everybody, we need to look in that direction.
And then the tools will come after.
If we think about tools, then we're going to scram.
We're going to be running around trying to put patch in all these different holes that are leaking.
But you first of all need to realize, let's say, what is it that we are?
What is it that we want, ultimately?
What is the highest good?
And then we'll develop tools to fix them.
But the problem, I think, now is mostly that we've lost even the bearing of what is good.
We've even lost the bearing of what is the highest good?
What is it that we… And honestly, I don't think that it's the continuation of lineage.
That is, we can't think that way.
Human beings don't interact at that level, even though I understand why you do.
Nobody lives at the level of the defensive lineage.
People live at a more immediate scale.
No, no, no.
So, first of all, by tool, I don't mean to limit what could fit in that category.
Consciousness is a tool.
But do people live in such a way as to defend their lineage?
They do.
It is religious.
That's what has done it.
Right?
And so the point is, for you, when a religion tells, maybe it's a peasant, that if you behave to a certain standard, then your soul will live forever in a glorious state.
Right?
When you tell somebody that, it is a mechanism to get them to correct their behavior so that their lineage will continue indefinitely.
That's what I'm arguing it is.
It is that tool in disguise.
Right?
And it has been vitally important in getting our lineages to this point in history, where it is now failing because the atheists are taking advantage of the fact that they don't have their behavior restricted in this way.
Yeah.
I mean, I understand why you see it at that level, but I think I would tend to see the perpetuation of the Lydian as something which is downstream from what it really is, which is engaging the best mode of being for now and for your entire being.
And then downstream from that is something like, so let's say, okay, so how about this?
Even in evolutionary terms, wouldn't you say that the preservation of self comes before the preservation of lineage?
I don't think so.
No?
No, I remember before my first child was born.
Actually, I think it literally may have been the night before my first child was born.
I obviously knew he was coming.
I remember my mind in some pattern of sleep and then wake.
I remember my mind reorganizing itself over the idea that someone was arriving in the world for whom I might have to trade my life.
Right, okay.
I understand in that sense.
Yeah, definitely.
No, I totally agree with you.
I think I misstepped there when I the way I said it.
What I mean is that There is, let's say, there is a manner in which, a mode of being that I have, and let's say I could, especially for a direct relationship of my child, to willing to sacrifice myself for my child, or for my neighbors, or for something which is immediate in my experience, my nation, my, but this is what I, this is the level in which I live in.
This is the level of description In which story, narrative, ritual, religious is described.
And I think that that's the truer and the first reality.
And downstream from that, you would have something like, a blessing will fall upon your children, right?
You see that in Scripture.
Like a blessing will, to the 10th, to the 1000th generation, a blessing will fall upon your children, something like that.
But that it's, The way that you describe things, I think there's an abstraction that's going on.
You move between an abstraction of, let's say, lineage protection, and then a more immediate idea of a perception of that which is good.
Because, again, we talked about it before, what we think is The high is good, for example, and the idea that we need to, let's say, upend the genes to a certain extent.
Now, that's someone who's not thinking only about the preservation of his lineage.
There's something else going on.
There's another virtue, another value, which is pulling you forward, which is higher than the one which says, I want my genes to perpetuate themselves 10,000 years, let's say.
And I think that that's at the religious level.
We are at a religious level when we're there, when we're talking about that.
And so, the idea of avoiding it or to try to reinterpret it or whatever, I don't see how it's going to be helpful, because it's there.
That's the level we're at.
And I agree that the atheist in a system like that is a problem, or someone who Someone who's cynical, like, is a problem in a system like that.
But it's, I don't know, like, how long can, I mean, you're right, it could last long enough for us to destroy most life, let's say, on Earth.
So, yeah, yeah, you're right, that does end up being a problem.
It's a problem.
So, yeah, two things.
I sort of see myself as somebody who has built up a toolkit for evolution, for understanding evolution, that I don't think is useful to most people.
Might be sort of interesting at the level of a curiosity, but it's not something most people would have use for.
But I can use it, and I can go There's a place I can go stand because of the evolutionary toolkit I've built up.
And I can look back at humanity and I can say, ah, that's where we are.
Got it.
And then I can come back and I can try to have a conversation with people who have different toolkits from where they see humanity.
And so, I'm trying to call attention to something.
I don't know if it's uniquely visible from that.
But you can see it from that point.
I can see it, and it's really clear, right?
We have a problem in the immediate present, and that problem couldn't be more philosophically profound if it tried.
It's the biggest problem anyone's ever had.
That's the thing, right?
The extinction of humanity is almost by definition the biggest problem anyone ever had, and we have it, right?
And so, anyway, I'm trying to alert people to that thing and that, you know, yeah, we've got to make a Mount Rushmore.
All we've got are chisels.
Let's figure out, do we have anything else that we could, you know, turn into something of the appropriate scale to be able to address our problem?
I don't know.
Okay, the final thing I want to say is, I have an example of literally false metaphorically true that I think I like it because there are no stakes to it.
But I think it actually explains maybe you'll see in it the answer to the question that you keep posing to me.
The example is the idea of follow-through for a person playing baseball when they're batting or a tennis player hitting the ball, right?
We say it is very important that you follow through on the hit, right?
Now, physically speaking, it is not.
It actually has no impact on the ball, right?
Once the ball has left the racket, the follow-through is irrelevant.
But it is vitally important that you prepare to follow through and that you not stop following through right up through the moment that you hit the ball.
Right?
So the easiest way to get somebody to do this is say, follow through.
It's very important that you follow through.
It's not literally true, but it's metaphorically true.
If you behave as if you if you behave in a way that you follow through, then everything you do up to the point that it stops mattering will be right.
Okay.
And so my point would be that the the issue you raise about having to live in the present and the issue I raise about what happens 10,000 years from now.
Go through this example, right?
My point is it is very important that we live in such a way that there is a future for our descendants 10,000 years from now.
And we don't have any influence directly over 10,000 years from now.
The influence we have is right up through where we hit the ball, right?
And that's where religion functions well.
It has traditionally told people how to live in the present, right?
That's the moment of hitting the ball.
Right?
And it has, by virtue of what it has, by virtue of the danger that people have posed to their own lineages, it has given pretty good guidance about how to live in that moment where you hit the ball.
But we are now dealing with a puzzle in which hitting the ball as we are presently empowered to do it means there will be no game 10,000 years from now, maybe not even 100 years from now.
And so that's, that's why I'm I think challenging your notion that yes, we have the tools we need already and we just need to use them because I don't think the tools are up to that job.
Yeah.
So, I'm trying to jump into your example.
Let's say you have the tennis player and you're saying, you could, you would say something else because you would say, I don't know what is it you would say, except follow through, right?
You say follow through.
And then the gesture happens.
And in the way that you're describing, there are things looming on us, like a great catastrophe, let's say.
And so we're moving towards that catastrophe.
And in my opinion, we are moving towards that catastrophe precisely because we stopped telling the tennis player to follow through.
That's why we're going in that direction.
Because we said, hey, you know what?
It doesn't matter if you follow through or not.
It doesn't matter because it's not true.
It's false.
It's fake.
Like it's a trick.
It's there to control you.
Saying follow through is a superstition.
It's all of that stuff that we said.
And so we told the tennis player, stop doing that.
And now we're losing the game.
And so now we're losing the game and you're saying, well, the game is in such a dire place.
That we have to now make up a new mechanism, you know, in order to win the game or to not lose the game.
And I'm thinking, OK, I mean, you know, good luck with that, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know what else to say, except that, like, at least Saying follow through was was was true and was going to make you win the game.
Yeah.
No, you're not wrong about that.
I agree with this, that we surrendered a lot of really useful stuff as something else happened.
And, you know, for the third time in this conversation, I sort of think I think I now see it.
OK, the problem is I look at religion as composed of various things, right?
There are the descriptions of how one is to live that are the heart of the matter, right?
That's the adaptive part.
Right?
And then there is a bunch of structure necessary to make that part work.
Right?
So sort of the way a bicycle frame, the only purpose of the bicycle frame is to hold the other parts in the right place to do the job of the bicycle.
Right?
The trunk of a tree is not productive.
The trunk of a tree elevates the leaves to a place where they can compete for light.
So the trunk is a cost.
It's a cost you can't avoid, but it is not itself productive, right?
And there's a bunch of stuff in religious doctrine that has that role, right?
So a description of where the universe came from and when is not necessary to know how to behave, right?
But it got written in there.
And the problem is because it's easily shown to be literally false, it causes A cynicism about the parts of the tradition that are useful, right?
It causes people to reject the descriptions of the limits that they should have to their behavior, for example.
And so my concern is, okay, we stopped telling people to follow through because follow through was not a literally true description of something that was necessary.
And that was a mistake because planning to follow through is as important as it ever was.
Right?
But the problem is, because so much of what sold people on religion was the fact that it answered ultimately unanswerable questions, and then the payoff came in the fact that the same thing that told you where the universe came from also told you how to behave.
And if you behaved that way, it was actually good, even if you couldn't explain why.
The problem is that we are now in a position where to do science is to show that elements of these compendiums of wisdom are just wrong.
And that causes people to abandon the part that really matters, which is the how am I to behave part.
Right?
And so I'm not sure how you solve that problem in a scientific era.
Well, I don't think, I don't find it difficult to solve at all because there's a difference between technical descriptions and narrative descriptions.
There just are.
Right?
If I'm making a narrative description, a technical description of a car, I'm not doing the same thing as telling you, you know, to get in the car and go to the store and buy some milk.
Those two things are completely different.
They're just not in the same, they just, they're not in the same sphere.
Right.
And so if, if I understand that scripture, Is describing the reality in which you live, the reality in which you act, the reality in which you deal with others.
That's what it's describing.
It's not even trying to describe a scientific thing.
It's not trying to describe a technical thing.
So because of that, I can take, for example, like you talked about the creation narrative.
The creation narrative in scripture is one of the most profound and powerful texts that has ever been It's just that if you see it as the equivalent of describing the biological makeup of this or that thing, then you're obviously going to not see it for what it is.
But if you see it as describing a pattern of being, Then we're good to go, and we're good to go.
And if you read the text, you'll notice that it's about speaking, and about seeing, and about judging, and deciding what is good.
That's what the text is about.
It describes a pattern of being, and then it talks about recognizing that which is good, and that's what it's doing.
So, there are ways in which we can go back into these texts and just represent them to people in a manner that says it's just not about Some people thought it was.
It's not the same thing as describing the parts of a car.
It's just not that.
Well, I agree with you.
of a, like I said, the parts of a car.
It's just not that.
Well, I agree with you.
It's not-- that's not its use.
But it does describe certain things that it turns out we now know aren't right, right?
And that this look, you know, I'm not overly hung up on it, but I do think it is not surprising
That religion is only loosely adhered to by a small fraction of the population in an era where we have the ability to understand how species came to be through a process of evolution where the text tells us that actually each of these creatures was specially designed
By a god, right?
Those two things are in conflict.
I don't think they are at all, but I don't think they're in conflict because for the same reason that the patterns of being, let's say, for the same reason that you're able to say that you want to upend the genes, for that same reason, that consciousness comes down upon identities and frames them and defines them.
So, the idea that So the idea that species exist without consciousness is a very iffy, shady thing.
The idea that there's a difference between this or that dog at a higher level than the individual is a very contentious thing if you don't understand that consciousness also notices identities and participates in their existence.
And so, the idea that consciousness comes down on existence and forms identities, I don't think is something which is weird at all, even for someone who's, let's say, just a little bit philosophically astute and understands that Categories don't just exist materially, that they also exist as this top-down noticing of patterns and distinction of patterns.
I don't, I don't understand that perspective because it seems to me, if I look back into the fossil record at creatures that no longer exist, I can make an inference.
Wait, let me just, let me just push you back on that right away.
So species are constantly evolving.
Yep.
So when do you decide that something is a species and something is no longer that species?
Oh.
And you'll give me an answer.
Yeah.
For sure you'll give me an answer.
But the idea that that answer is metaphysically certain.
Well, I'm going to give you a better answer than you're expecting.
Like the idea that the species that you found that doesn't exist anymore.
That it's not still the species now.
It's like when people say things like dinosaurs are related to birds or something, I always think like, what are you talking about?
Birds are dinosaurs.
Right.
Saying something like that is very, very contentious in terms of understanding how identity works.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's the beauty of lineage, right?
Here's the thing.
You're a member of every lineage you've ever been a member of.
And the reason that I can say birds are dinosaurs and not worry that I'm just playing some definitional trick is that if you take the ancestor of all dinosaurs, right?
The first dinosaur, right?
And I'm not telling you, you can know who that creature is, but I am telling you there has to have been a dinosaur who gave rise to all of the other dinosaurs.
If you do that, You will find that birds are in that lineage, right?
But you're in the lineage of things of like unicellular, unicellular being at some point.
So, are you a unicellular being?
So, we can solve this problem if you want.
Let's take the lineage of tetrapods, okay?
So, tetrapods are… The four-limbed descendants of vertebrates, okay?
Not all tetrapods have four limbs, right?
The functional term is quadruped, right?
So, a snake is a tetrapod.
That's a phylogenetic designation.
It doesn't matter that it's lost its limbs because it's still a descendant of the initial tetrapod.
But it's not a quadruped, right?
Because it doesn't have any limbs.
The point is, are we unicellular organisms?
We are not one-celled, but we are the descendant of a lineage that at its inception was one-celled.
So that's not a terribly difficult problem to deal with.
It's a linguistically annoying problem that we keep tripping over.
But what I mean is that if species are constantly in flux, and then you cut into that flux, you say, this is a distinction, and this is not a distinction.
Right, right.
I agree.
And that's arbitrary.
But it's not arbitrary.
No, it is arbitrary.
It's not arbitrary because it has causal effect.
It then will causally affect the manner in which you Treat those beings in the manner in which you deal with them, the manner in which everything about them is going to be real, the manner in which you deal with them.
It's not going to be just arbitrary.
No, no, no.
Those distinctions, if we say, well, this was an Australopithecine, right?
And that was in the genus Homo, right?
If the Australopithecine is an ancestor of Homo, we are making an arbitrary distinction.
This is sufficiently different To call it a new genus, and I'm not defending that, right?
We can do it, but we have to recognize we are making an arbitrary distinction when we do that.
We are not making an arbitrary distinction when we say, this is a trilobite and that is an arachnid, right?
When we say that, we are actually describing two different lineages.
There's no judgment call to be made.
Assuming we've done the work correctly, we know that the trilobite is not an arachnid.
Right?
So when I look back in the fossil record, I'm not talking about the linear progression and drawing distinctions and claiming that they are real.
I'm talking about looking at distinct lineages and saying, uh, you know, that, um, the, uh, the ammonite and the Nautilus are part of the same lineage and it is a distinct lineage, uh, from, uh, from the beetle.
Right.
But Brett, what I mean is that all beings, all beings that exist that you can identify, are both the same in some aspect and different in another.
Every single being that you encounter has something in common with all the other beings and has something different from all the other beings.
So there's a manner in which we cut into that.
We cut into that and we distinguish.
Consciousness is capable of discerning difference and, let's say, joining patterns together.
In order to say that those patterns are sufficiently alike so that we recognize them as having being.
And then seeing that those patterns are not sufficiently alike for us to recognize that they have being.
That they have different natures, you could say.
And so, that's what, if you want to understand what Scripture is talking about, that's what it's talking about.
That's why we talk about the notion that God differentiates And then judges whether something is good.
Because I'm sure you could tell me, like, the difference between a good member of one species from a not-so-good member of one species.
You know, you could judge that for all the reasons that you can, but that's what Scripture ultimately is talking about, right?
So, the idea that, so when you think that God You think that if you struggle with the idea that God, let's say, planned these identities and created all these beings, you have to realize that we do that to a certain extent ourselves.
At a limited level, we do that.
That's true.
I think the evolutionary toolkit allows us to define why things fall under a definition of a pattern, right?
And maybe one of the key insights is that there are multiple reasons why two things would fall into the same pattern.
One is that they share an ancestor from whom they inherited that pattern.
The other is that they have converged on a solution from two different starting points.
And we see both of these things intermingled.
They're both.
But that one is super interesting because focusing on lineage is one thing, but noticing analogy between functions is another.
And now we're really closer to religious speaking.
Now we're really closer to the notion that we can recognize identity and purpose and that identity and purpose can be recognized in different mechanical causes, that I can see that things that have different mechanical origins or different, let's say, physical origins can share a common purpose.
And it's like now you're in religious language.
Now you're in like the idea that God created things already, like you're already in that world.
So I know maybe you don't totally follow where I'm bringing No, I think I do.
I think I do and you know, I'm I hope it is fair to say You know, I feel You've taken me a bit down the road to see your perspective here.
I hope I have done the same for you, and I feel certain that this is the first of several conversations we're going to need to have.
Yeah, we've been going for three hours.
I don't think I've ever had as long a conversation as this.
I don't think it's three hours, but it's certainly going to be two.
Yeah.
We started at one, and it's four.
Well, see now you must be in a different time zone because it's not for here.
All right, okay.
So, how about we put it on pause here?
I would love, I think that we're in an interesting place and I would love to continue the conversation because I think you're definitely put, I knew that you would be the person that could push me in my mind in directions that I would be scrambling to find ground and so I love that, like I love that feeling and I love the fact that we're able to do it without No, nothing but affection for you, man.
I really appreciate the way you approached this, and I knew it was going to be a great conversation, and I should have seen that it was going to be an unfinished conversation coming.
All right, I would love to set up another conversation like this.
Great, let's do it!
In the meantime, where can people find you?
Alright, so if you're interested in what I'm doing, you can go to thesymbolicworld.com and that's usually where most of my stuff is, my videos.
We also have people writing articles, different people participating in this kind of community, so that's the best place to go.
Okay, you're also on Twitter?
Yes, I'm on Twitter at Jonathan.
I think it's Pedro Jonathan.
When I'm on Twitter, it's a bad sign.
It means I'm not doing well.
Oh, okay.
Well, good.
We can watch you misbehave on Twitter.
And you've done some really interesting conversations of late.
You want to name a couple of the ones you've done so people can go look at those?
Yeah, definitely.
If you're interested, you can go on Jordan Peterson's channel.
We've had some very interesting conversations recently on that channel, especially with John Verbeke and Bishop Barron.
There's been some very good moments of kind of coming together.
And so I hope maybe I'm going to talk to Sam Harris.
I don't know.
It's being talked about.
That would be nice.
And so there are some also interesting conversations coming in the future.
All right, cool.
All right, well, Jonathan Paggio, it's been a real pleasure, and I'm looking forward to picking up the conversation soon.
